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Is @ant too cute? (User Poll by BSR)

Meanwhile at a Democratic Socialists Convention...

bcglorf says...

I'm Canadian, so as much as American politics and media is pervasive up here, some of it still foreign to me.

That said, it feels like I'm observing a not undeserved observation that white-national and anti-immigrant ideologies are dominating mass shootings in the US. I guess where I get wary is with the sources most adamant about demanding that leadership on the 'right' acknowledge and address it as their own problem. Those same sources when discussing terrorism dominated by those claiming Islamic ideologies are adamant that Islam not be unfairly tarred by bad actors.

I'd have an easier time swallowing the line if either side were consistent in their approach. Either you blame BOTH Islam AND the 'right' for terrorist acts claiming common cause, or you reject BOTH Islam AND the 'right' being blamed for a few bad actors...

newtboy said:

I mostly agree, however when talking about political terrorism (edit :in the U.S.) there's little choice. Either ignore there are two different main camps and just call it domestic terrorism (something the right would never do with left wing extremist terrorism, and they shouldn't imo), or note it so you can better identify and target the problem.
We're all Americans, so there really is no "other guy"...but I take your point.

If you heard some of the ridiculous reasons I've heard for not voting Democrat, you would know your example is perfectly reasonable and logical by comparison. One spouted hatred for John Kerry because they preferred Hunts over Heinz ketchup so hated his wife. Seriously.

Baby Elephant Stampeed

Payback says...

Actually, right after I hit submit, I noticed I missed the "breakfast time!" Scenario.

That would also fit with Mystic's observation.

BSR said:

I like how you injected suspense into the video thereby making the woman an unsuspecting innocent casualty.

Well played.

Students Support Socialism. Until It's Applied To Their GPA

newtboy says...

Asinine.
Assessment of ability is not the same as having your needs met. Also, it's like he doesn't know public colleges are socialist concepts, paid for with tax money for everyone's benefit because it's good for everyone to help people be educated.

Like many rich people, Trump was given his money by daddy....do right wingers believe they get to add their parent's GPA to theirs, and add points based on who they know and how unethical they can be? That's how they "earn" money, so that must be the argument.

This is just dumb, the right wing version of Jaywalking....ask a loaded, ridiculous question then edit your footage down to make your targets look dumb....it's a stupid comedy bit that's not funny, not a thoughtful political observation.

Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs

bcglorf says...

Saddam took control of an oil rich nation of 30+ million people using violence and torture. He had them record his clinching moment on video, where you can still watch him drag out a visibly broken man(well agreed to have been broken through torture, Saddam deliberately flaunted this), and has the man read out a list of names of co-conspirators. Sure, Saddam undoubtedly wrote the list himself, but he was already powerful and feared enough it didn't matter and this evidence was enough. The co-conspirators were hauled out for execution, and the others in the room were fearful/relieved enough that when they were ordered to perform the executions themselves they did.

Saddam then ruled Iraq for another 24 years before he was forcibly removed by foreign powers, not any manner of domestic uprising.

Don't tell me that nobody else in Iraq wanted the job for that quarter century, instead Saddam's brutal methods were successful in keeping his hold on power throughout that time. None of that makes his methods 'right', but to declare that the methods are ineffective is just silly. Doubly so if you observe his hold on power wasn't removed by crowds of peaceful protesters rising up removing him in a bloodless coup, but rather through the use of more force and violence than Saddam could muster in return.

newtboy said:

Torture is good for getting someone to name any person they know. It is not good for getting useful information....so it's only barely useful if you torture someone weak who knows the name of others you are looking for, and gives them up. That's useless information, even to a monster like Saddam. He would never know if the important names were withheld and only acquaintances named, so would be forced to murder the entire country eventually. Only unknown hermits would be "safe".

Your example assumes dissidents with families would be allowed to have sensitive information.
Clearly it didn't work, too. There was a strong opposition to Saddam he utterly failed to destroy even though he tortured without pause. You create more enemies than you could ever catch by torture. Smart leaders start to wonder if torture for information is worth the cost. (Hint, it's not)

Torture for coercion, a different topic, that often works, but only until the tortured decide death is preferable and try to revolt, which requires you to keep them in N Korea conditions to keep any revolt from winning. Hardly a net gain for even third world nations.

The Mystery at the Bottom of Physics

vil says...

Of course the universe has apparent structure, in any other universe we would not be here to observe, the existence of our universe in its current state is both extremely unlikely as theoretical possibilities are endless and absolutely inevitable - it obviously does exist as we can observe it.

So if we can observe the universe and assign rules to what we observe and math symbols to those rules, constants will pop up somewhere between those math symbols.

Do the numbers actually mean anything? They are relationships between concepts that we can observe. So to ask if PI could be a different number is weird. You would have to be in a universe where the relationship between a circle and a line is a different number, and that number would then be PI by definition and you would be stuck in exactly the same spot as here.

When you forget to strap in your hang gliding passenger

Rape charge dropped against USC student after video surfaces

eric3579 says...

Just MY opinion regarding Universities

Although the law doesn't always provide justice it does it far better then Universities do. It's been my personal observation that University almost always make their decisions based on potential liability and also how it makes them look. I think truth, fairness and justice weighs in far below those two things somewhere. Unless they are willing to lay out the evidence of why they did, what they did, i wouldn't consider their action having any meaning regarding this situation.

The Kind of Story We Need Right Now: Server Bodyslams Jerk!

bcglorf says...

Wow, I really must be getting old. Why is society becoming so horrified by physical violence? If you grab someone like this, getting punched out is not an escalation of violence, but an appropriate deterrent.

As for between men and women, I think this is a situation where you have to be willing to offend the extreme feminists by observing that men and women although equal, are also different. A 115lb women assaulted by a 170lb man warrants a different response than a 170lb man assaulted by a 115lb woman. IMO, the larger stronger man can more easily afford to warn the woman to not repeat the offence prior to a physical response. It also seems to me that society disagrees and thinks they should be considered and handled identically, but I think society has that wrong.

Digitalfiend said:

Sexual harassment is definitely something that needs to be shamed and taken seriously but her physical response didn't really fit the crime. This wasn't a fearing-for-your-life situation and if the roles were reversed - say a drunk woman grab a male server's ass and he threw her to the floor - would the outcome be the same? Unlikely. The guy is a douche bag for sure for what he did and, personally, I think he deserved the toss, but it does raise the question whether a man reacting this way to a woman would see the same positive media attention.

Drama

Digitalfiend says...

As a parent of only one kid, I've been lucky because my daughter never threw tantrums, probably due to the lack of an antagonistic sibling. Watching this though makes me wonder what sort of parent(s) these kids have. Parents should shut that shit down quickly and decisively - children learn what is appropriate, socially, by observation and being corrected by adults; this really isn't good conflict resolution. Yeah, siblings will fight over stupid stuff, but this sort of behaviour, if not corrected, will also probably extend to school and lead to negative interactions with their peers.

People See the Double-slit Experiment for the First Time

vil says...

Was hoping for an actual experiment.

You cannot both "detect" a photon/electron before it "enters a slit" and have it go through and "detect" it again at the back. That part is (probably) hogwash.

Detection at this scale really means fatal crash or at least deflection.

From what has been observed it would appear that in such an experiment an individual electron takes all the possible paths through both slits and the "waves" that "interfere" are waves of probability of the particle passing through detection points.

While it might as well be magic, really, QED does have observable rules, and this video might make it appear as though one could change the outcome by blinking an eye, which is not the case.

To make any headway stop thinking about tiny marbles. Think about tiny cartoon characters moving so fast they are smudged to invisibility whirring their tiny appendages around - you can only tell which particle and where it is if you swat it or it hits a wall and stops moving. There is no "detect but keep going as if nothing happened".

Life Hack: Breaking off security tag...

eric3579 says...

This is all my understanding of these things and personal observations.

As someone who worked in loss prevention once upon a time, this looks like a standard magnetic Sensormatic tag(no ink) https://www.sensormatic.com/products/hard-tags/ultra-gator-tags

@ChaosEngine It's actually used more as a deterrent than anything. People tend not to steal stuff if they think it will set off some sort of alarm.

Most of the time when a cashier forgets to remove it a small alarm sound will go off when exiting the store. Most people stop look around and then just continue on their way as they usually have no idea why something was just beeping. It happens within seconds so customers are usually way out the door before anyone could react even if they wanted to. Employees tend to just ignore it when it happens. Most big businesses don't want employees chasing or stopping people. You stop someone and they may rightfully feel as if you are accusing them of something in front of all who may be looking. Leading to defamation lawsuits which are often won by plaintiffs.

AeroMechanical said:

There is ink in there? The last time that happened to me, with a very similar tag, I just snipped it with some bolt cutters. Maybe that wasn't such a great idea in retrospect.

Mic'd up ump dealing with a pissed off manager

eric3579 says...

It was thrown at him or behind him in retaliation. I'm sure it was no surprise to anyone involved this might be coming.

"The background for the explosive moment was an incident in the 2015 playoffs, when the Dodgers’ Chase Utley broke the leg of the Mets’ Ruben Tejada on a slide into second base that many observers, and not just in the New York dugout, thought was dirty. Utley was initially suspended two games, but he appealed and was able to stay active for the rest of the series, won in five games by a Mets team that chose to save retribution for a less meaningful time." -Washington Post

In context, makes more sense how pissed off the manager was and how understanding the umpire was to what the manager was saying and angry about.

Here is the Utley slide.
https://www.mlb.com/video/must-c-tejada-injured-on-slide/c-521658783Also
As a side note due to this play MLB changed the rules of what is an acceptable slide.

RFlagg said:

Okay, so many questions as I don't do baseball much.

First, why would he throw the ball so far behind the batter? Just to walk him? Whenever I've seen them walk a batter, the catcher just stands and they just throw high and over to the side. Why would he be ejected for walking a batter? Batters are walked all the time. What is the situation where you can't walk a batter? Is it the way he's walking the batter being far off normal?

Can I have my rims back?

bcglorf says...

Your talking about it historically though. Historical abuse and mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Canada has been acceptable to discuss for at least a generation or two now, up to formal apologies and enormous numbers of court cases and cash settlements around the myriad past injustices.

The trouble is, even while addressing all the historical problems, there still exist new ones right now.

Typical conditions on Aboriginal reserves in Canada are unacceptably awful. You can have a thriving municipality right neighbouring an aboriginal reserve that is a mess of dilapidated homes, boiled water and grossly increased rates of unemployment, substance abuse and suicide. Small wonder then that increased crime rates also come along with all that.

Even that you can talk about, though the increased crime rate will get you in trouble for flirting with being racist against aboriginals.

What you can't talk about is many of the causes of the disparity.

Aboriginal reserves operate under a different legal framework than the neighbouring municipality. They operate under a different framework of governance. They operate under a different system of taxation. Organisation of all related government services like education, healthcare, policing and civil works like roads, water and sanitation are ALL different if you're on a reserve.

Talking about all that you need to be very careful how you say it, because if your not careful my above observations are a statement that coloniser systems are superior to aboriginal ones.

Private property rights are IMO an even hotter topic. The dilapidated housing on a reserve 10 minutes away from the municipality with everything in order is a direct result of who is responsible for maintaining them. In the municipality if a roof is missing shingles, the owner replaces them. If a window is broken, the owner replaces it. On the reserve though, the community is the owner. Unsurprisingly, that abstraction means maintenance on the homes is worse. If the mayor was responsible for using tax dollars to maintain all the homes in the neighbouring municipality it'd be a mess too. This leads to the poor aboriginal family stuck in a destroyed and overcrowded home and a chief saying sorry, the Canadian colonisers didn't give us enough money to fix your place, go yell at them. This just stirs up the Winnipeg citizens I mentioned earlier to respond with wonderment at why you don't fix your own home up yourself instead of protesting hopelessly for the government to hand out the money to do it for you.

The differential treatment still in place now, today is a cancer and needs to be fixed but calling it out like that would get me in trouble.

Drachen_Jager said:

People in Canada ARE talking about it for the first time.

First Nations people had their entire culture turned upside-down by the government of Canada and the Catholic Church. They were torn from their homes, raised in abusive conditions in institutions that expected them to conform to European norms, and even when they met those norms they were mentally and physically abused.

Now people are surprised that a generation of abused children makes for poor parents? The criminal problem with First Nations people is one that European Canadians created. It is a problem that's been ignored for far too long.

People like this need help. They do not need to see the inside of yet another cell.

Turkish T129 ATAK helicopters conducting a drill

bcglorf says...

On the chance your 'jokingly' isn't obvious, MLK, Ghandi and Mandela's causes ALL had support from those willing to use violence, aka better weapons would help.

Malcolm X would be the next most prominent figure beside MLK. Indian independence wasn't won with peaceful hunger strikes alone, and again lots of violence in South Africa.

Ghandi even bridged the gap to working alongside the effective army fighting for India's independence:
" I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment, forgiveness adorns a soldier."

Speaking more to the point of America today, pretty much no civil war has been fought exclusively with civilians on one side, and the government, police, army and all other branches of the state united on the other. The reason being that if that kind of unity within the government against the civilian population exists, you ALREADY have tyranny.

In America, the example would be if a president or a particular political party decided to try for tyrannical over reach, would the American public be better equipped to resist that with or without guns? In civil war, guns give power to the majority of public opinion that would need to be there otherwise. In a nation with an unarmed public, whatever the majority of soldiers side with is likely gonna win. With an armed populace, the civilian opinion matters more.

I think it's an overall modest observation, and one that really doesn't in anyway make it obvious that the modest benefit is worth the costs. That is another matter, but you can't factually claim that there isn't a meaningful difference between an armed and unarmed population when facing civil war.

newtboy said:

You mean like MLK, Ghandi, or Mandela did?

Perhaps an extremely well armed fanatical populace with little to lose paired with impossible terrain and nearly zero resources to steal has that chance against some less advanced enemies....but again, I'm talking about Americans.
Americans have zero chance to win or draw against the U.S. military. None. Nada. Zilch. A temporary standoff with disastrous consequences is the best I've ever heard of, that's a loss.



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