It's a difficult thing to really justify or demonize because sex is a head game, a dance but also a match of submissiveness versus dominance; it can become violent and abusive through the ebb and flow of permission and denial. One moment I'm smacking her ass during sex, after a year of smacking her ass, she needs to be spanked before sex even begins, and now 10 years later there's whips and clamps and shackles. It all started with a mildly amusing smack to the ass that over time became a mutual fetish.

All of that extreme abuse porn is a matter of course, just like the secret fetish in a relationship starts with something innocent then leads to something semi-professional. This is the end result of a fetish that started with Deep Throat in the '70s opening the world to oral sex. Now it's facial abuse. She doesn't need a deep throat, now she just needs to undergo a hazing.

Will regulation change an industry piloted entirely by desire and sex starved user demand? Or would the culture simply evolve around the regulations?

Japan blurs out genitals, so what happens? The culture evolves around the restrictions and now we have a thriving bukkake subgenre. You want cum in eyes? Niche. Cum in hair? Niche. Cum on teeth? For real though, the focus is on teeth. We don't even need genitals now! Just pick a spot on the body and then ejaculate in mass! What a phenomenon.

Niches form and when they trend, that's when you end up with a popular site like facial abuse.

But hazing porn exists in the reverse and is also quite popular. Pegging? Come on, where's my face sitting fans? Hey now, there's also a lesbian variety of big assed Brazilian women who abuse skinny blond girls. I don't know what they're saying, but clearly it means something along the lines of dig that white caucausian nose further up my brown latin pussy. One woman is empowered, the other not so much, but she likes it, so... empowered? But who watches it? Men? Surely not women. Well, I know several women who watch the shit out of lesbian domination porn.

I had the absolute pleasure to sit with some really open lesbians and watch lesbian domination porn where the women wrestle each other, and the winner gets to fuck the loser in humiliating and abusive ways. I mean... the topic of empowerment is tough here. If you do porn just own it. Damn. Come on, it's just sex. People just like giving each other a hard time and they're always worrying about the next generation, even though they know humans are all dirty, filthy, sex craved fiends.

I think the most abusive porn I've watched (was sort of forced to watch) was a man having his penis hit with a hammer by a very mean woman. He liked having his penis hit with a hammer for some odd reason.

The cucumbers scaring cats phenomenon has been my favorite thing to happen on the internet this year.

I agree with everything you said brycewi. And it would apply here too IF Adam was providing information that wasn't well known by nearly everyone today. Most people believe lie detectors are pseudo science. It is not even comparable to global warming, and even less than anti-vaccines (Or if this is somehow untrue, then Adam doesn't provide how truly well believed this phenomenon is as he prattles on.) So that is where we would vary significantly on, not that the service of providing debunking of something taken as true is important/unimportant.

Yes, some people believe it works. Others watch it on talk shows and such for entertainment and even some law enforcement use it for confessional purposes. We get that. But then again some Africans believe raping a virgin will cure AIDs...does that mean their country is a bunch of degenerates? No, because only a few do.

Adam goes off on this rant based on information in what, the 90s? When everyone had this unshakable faith in the lie detector? My family's entire life rested on one of these machines at one time, so I know. (It didn't turn out good, lets leave it at that.)

Further, we differentiate three "uses" of the lie detector.
1-Entertainment:
A-Nobody believes it works, just like nobody believes Jerry Springer or Wrestling isn't fake.
B-Lumping those people in with those who do believe is disingenuous at best, manipulative at worst.
2-Law Enforcement:
A-They really don't care as long as they obtain guilty confessions. In other words, they already know (think) they have the bad guy and use it as an interrogation techniques.
B-You can argue with this practice as shady and deceptive (ironic isn't it?) but we shouldn't confuse belief with reliance.
3-Excluding the examples above, since they DON'T believe, those in the ultra fringe don't constitute "widely accepted."

Nice to see a lack of verbal abuse in a discussion like this. I appreciate it as I know I'm probably treading on thin ice in a lot of minds.

I disagree that texts are devoid of meaning until we give them some. The text itself if a collection of ideas and some of those ideas are horrendous. It generally is not an individual's qualities that determine the violence of the religion as much as the history of that religion's practice in the area they were raised. A peaceful and loving Aztec that was faithful would still have supported sacrificing slaves for all the same reasons, because they would have believed the underlying superstitions that made it a rational act given the premises.

I'm not sure Maher & co. view is as a strictly religious phenomenon. You really have to do a case by case analysis. Some make no sense but for religion, while other are very easy for my to sympathize with, even as an atheist. I have to admit I'm more familiar with Harris' views than Maher's, mind you, as I find Maher's presentation of his ideas can at times be half baked.

The reason why they specifically strap bombs to their chests is largely religious. Everyone else prefers living to kill another day. There's a religious reason why they are willing to sacrifice their children in this way. The reason that they behead people instead of other forms of killing them is because that form of murder is enshrined in their texts. All of these religious justifications lower the barrier for action. They make it that much easier for someone to accept that it's a reasonable course of action. And that's because of specific words in specific books.

I agree that is smells like apologist BS when Harris talks about western intervention having good intentions. I don't think the west has good intentions most of the time. However you have to acknowledge that there is something less reprehensible about trying to kill even a likely dangerous person (with the likelihood of innocent collateral damage) as compared with deliberately targeting exclusively innocent people. Yes the wedding party massacre was horrible. That was the worst case possible from our point of view, and some efforts will be made to avoid it happening again. If think that is morally significant. If you don't think intentions are relevant to morality, we will simply disagree.

Ok so, Judge me with your opinions here...
But, I knew all this, intuitively.

I knew what was happening. I understood the persistence of vision as a given phenomenon. I can actually induce this persistence of vision on things as I look at them. Slowing down and increasing this persistence. Not a great amount, but I can do it enough to observe it. This means I can look at any normal object and move my head slowly to the side and watch the image degrade on my retina as I move my direction of vision to the side.

Now Destin, immediately saw this as a trick that fooled the mind into believing the image was a solid. But I wasn't fooled. Why wasn't I fooled? HAve I just been exposed to this before, and my mind is telling me the truth, thus negating the illusion?

I've seen similar tricks like this before, like on a wheel, to create an image, but if I concentrate I can see and immediately comprehend what is happening. I can stare long enough to break up the image and loose the illusion, and then have it come back.

I hope I'm making sense here.
So what I want to know, is, "does everyone have or not have, see or not see as I do?" I assumed we all did. So much so, that I've never had a question in my mind as to how this worked or that it was a trick.

Tell me I'm crazy, that's fine. But I'm interested in what other people are perceiving.

The suffragettes weren't feminists. If you want to honour the beginnings of the modern push for sex equality, then you owe your allegiance to such thinkers as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and JS Mill - none of whom was a feminist. The entire first wave of feminism is a revisionist fiction.

This is on a par with the hideous christian impulse to annex and purloin all good behaviour into itself - "christian driver", "do the christian thing", "christian decency". So too, feminism appropriates every historical social advance in order to declare that, axiomatically, all female freedom ultimately derives from its doctrine, without which women would be slaves of the constantly threatening patriarchy.

In reality feminism is a phenomenon of the sixties - that's the nineteen sixties - with roots stretching back no more than a decade or two; which did a substantial amount of useful work in spite of its many aesthetic and ideological flaws, and which has now essentially petered out to be supplanted by, god help us, the advent of the filthy third wave and its hordes of ranting SJWs.

There is a similar phenomenon in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. Around dusk every day in the springtime, a 'tidal wave' of fog flowing eastward from the coast would hit the western foothills of the peninsula, and arc gracefully over the 280 freeway like a massive, slow-motion crash of water. From 20 miles away it looks like a tidal wave, capable of wiping out all of silicon valley, is just frozen in place at the edge of civilization. Up close, it's like surfing your car through the barrel of an enormous wave.
It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, and it happens almost daily there.

I'll keep this fairly brief for once but, why is everyone so hung up on the idea that the theoretical "simulation" is somehow distinct from "reality"?

To put it another way, what are the laws of physics themselves?

We do appear to inhabit a reality defined by laws we can describe mathematically. The mathematical models may be abstracted, but whatever they describe is presumably in some sense analogous in its "true" nature right? (even if we can't get at it directly)

If you take the leap into thinking that reality may be more mathematical than physical in nature (or rather that "physical" is a property of what we could think of as mathematical phenomena interacting in the right way), then questions about who's computer were in kind of become moot.

If reality itself is fundamentally mathematical in nature, we don't need a computer in which to run it, so much as reality itself is the computer.

I really don't think it's an either or thing, more like a shift in how we think about the concept of "reality" itself. Even if an experiment could prove that the universe is holographic in nature, it needn't change anything about it's validity as a "real" thing.

The "simulation" and "reality" needn't be mutually exclusive, merely different ways of understanding the same phenomenon i.e. that we exist and experience things.

It's a real phenomenon for vortices measuring hundreds of miles in diameter, yes. At that size, the coriolis effect (the difference in rotational speed of the northern and southern extremes) is a huge factor.

For a vortex measuring a few inches in diameter, not so much. It takes rather extreme measures to make the coriolis effect the largest factor.

Dude. It's a real phenomenon. It's physics. Try to find examples of cyclones or hurricanes that don't follow this rule.

I moved to a new town on the East Coast late last year, not really near Baltimore, but close enough that we were introduced to this phenomenon. It's annoying.

Absolutely fascinating that he could pinpoint a very distinct threshold between "nope, can't do it" and "oh yeah, that's how that works". I bet behavioral psychologists / neurologists would love to develop experiments that test to see if other people notice the same phenomenon...

There's some debate on the exact phenomenons at play and their extents, but the gist of it is correct, it's not like they have "no idea" how it works. An airfoil moving through air (or any other fluid, same principles work in water as well) generates a higher pressure below it and a lower pressure above it, which results in lift. This can be done even with simple flat plank by using angle of attack, or more effectively if you shape it like a good airfoil. Similarly the wings in racing cars do the same thing but flipped upside down, pushing the car down to the ground (though exploiting underbody aerodynamics can be much more effective if regulations allow it).

The only thing that really bothered me in the video was the insistence on the angle of attack being required for lift. Some planes are so light and have wings that produce so much lift (due to size and shape), that at high speeds they actually need to have negative angle of attack to fly level. If the plane didn't point down a bit it'd just keep climbing higher and higher.

This is the most confusing explanation of this phenomenon I've seen in a while.

Seriously, too many jump cuts & wordy script.

1 min Explanation - youtube.com/watch?v=oOL2d-5-pJ8

5 min Animation - youtube.com/watch?v=8lh9AEP_e20

See, here's the thing, it's a phenomenon: you can't play a classic AC/DC song to a crowd of coed, drinking, rock n roll festival goers; the people that stand outside for 16+ hours waiting in lines and standing on their feet drunk and high, dancing, jumping, nodding their heads. They're like the sherpas of rock. I know because I joined the order long ago. Hail satan!