No, I'm all in favor of Morons--

However, I'm not in favor of the amazing people in SAR putting their lives on the line to recover the smears lefts on rocks that used to be these people. Living in WA, we have a lot of "really wants to kill you" wilderness here, including North Cascades Nat'l Park and Olympic Nat'l Park. Every single year, someone's predated body needs to be pulled out of the middle of one of these places by either a helo crew or the poor bastards who have to hike a bazillion miles to pack out what's left of Chuckles.

The number of SAR people who've died here is sobering. Every single one of them could have just walked away, but they went into danger's way to save people too stupid to save themselves. Sometimes their reward is to be spit on, like the ranger at Yellowstone who was berated by the father of a kid who dived into a hot spring after his dog (by "kid", I mean adult kid, not Timmy). The father wanted his kid's body recovered, no matter what. The ranger had to explain that the kid completely dissolved about five minutes after he fell in. The father then refused to speak to the ranger any further.

This shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. Someone's going to have to look at these human bird droppings and see that shit in their sleep for the rest of their lives.

Yeah, you laugh, but this is pretty much a real thing. I didn't know you're not supposed to make eye contact with fellow riders on the Tube. Being the happy American sort, I did exactly that, including a smile and a nod to the poor bastard who looked up at exactly the wrong moment. The look of disgust and British disapproval on his face would done a New Yorker proud.

I've never wished I had a fart in the chamber so bad in my entire life.

People devoted to god over family and friends make me tremendously sad. When the cults get them so young, the poor bastards don't have a chance.

and no one gave a shit about the snake...... poor bastard.

If I wasn't a poor bastard I would buy one. I like that they built something unique

It's an extreme solution certainly, but not without merit. I doubt there'd ever be a willing acceptance of such a plan though, so a slightly more realistic solution would need to be moderated some. How's this for dystopian-but-not-quite-genocidal:
Worldwide lottery, a small percentage (total of 500M - 1B maybe) wins the right to live in what will be the new model of the world: something like what we have now, but with drastically reduced usage of non-renewable resources (until they can be replaced completely) and a target of zero negative impact on the environment as a whole. Still some version of democratic (generally at least), freedom of whatnot and such, open travel to the degree that sustainable transportation options allow, all the (again, sustainable) mod cons. I suppose different countries / regions could still run things according to their preferences, as long as the net-zero goal remains.
The other lottery entrants, the non-winners, don't need to die, hooray! They will however live on something akin to reservations, as serfs, without the right to further reproduce. These poor bastards, in exchange for not being outright murdered to save civilization, are to be consolidated into agricultural communes to do whatever they can to regrow the world's flora and fauna until they all eventually die. Their goal is not net-zero, but as far into the positive as possible. It would all be overseen according to some grand scheme(s) to be as beneficial for the overall future of humanity and life on Earth in general as possible.

Probably also unworkable, but preferable to megamurder?

I can just imagine the poor machine learning algorithm to detect dicks.

Some poor bastard will have to spend hours looking at dick photos to help the system learn.

lol the poor bastards that had to attend the Davita conference. If I saw that idiot come out in the Musketeer outfit, I would've tendered my resignation on the spot.

I feel a bit sorry for the poor bastard in a way, I mean look what he has to work with. A President who's a pathological liar and is so disconnected from reality that if he started hallucinating it might be an improvement. A sane person would have simply resigned from his position.
I think it would be awesome if someday the Press all decided to stop showing up to these things, the ultimate vote of no confidence, every thing you say is so devoid of meaning that we no longer need to hear it.

Poor bastards are going to get screwed.
Everyone in this video will die as a result of their Trump vote.
Clinton, for all her faults, desperately tried to put through real healthcare reform in the 90's. Bill told her to stop because it was haemmoraging them votes.
Why didn't she run on that, at least in these places?

Mutually assured destruction I think is often woefully overlooked as a stabilising force in the world.

I don't think it's at all a co-incidence that since nuclear proliferation we have only seen wars vs non nuclear nations. You can never really win meaningfully vs a nation that has the thermo-nuclear trump card in their back pocket.

When superpowers come to blows now, proxy wars are the only realistic option. That may still suck for the poor bastards that get caught up with it, but it does mean a world war is somewhat off the table (even if they like to rattle the sabres from time to time).

Also Starship troopers is an oft misunderstood book I think. Some people get so hung up on the underlying idea of a Military dictatorship that they miss much of the nuance and wisdom woven into it.
I'm not even sure Heinlein was even necessarily advocating such a world, but rather using it as a narrative device to explore how our societies really work once you drop the wishful pretences (especially the stable ones).

It seems like there is perhaps some intrinsic relationship between peace and the capacity for effective and controlled violence. There are few people as calm and non aggressive as the ones who truly know they have nothing to fear from you in a fight.

My father was a firefighter, so I always got this point hammered home.

Unfortunately shock is the only thing that gets the point across for most people. We have so little experience of what real fires are like that a dangerous kind of complacency tends to be pervasive.

Same with RTA's. It's usually only the victims and the poor bastards who have to clean up after that really appreciate the knives edge we live on.

The occasional kick to the gut like this is entirely justified IMHO.

Even if you did just make me weep like a lost child.

Your statement that other forms of preventable death have no bearing on the argument may be correct for your interpretation of that argument, but you are clearly missing the point of the comparison. Nobody is saying that we shouldn't regulate guns because people smoke. The comparison is that if society can sit by and watch people die from totally preventable deaths due to cigarettes and alcohol, at a rate 35x higher than gun related deaths, then why not start there, or even include guns, alcohol and cigs in the same crackdown? In the hands of responsible people, who are the majority of owners, guns are a very low threat and can serve a purpose other than killing people. Cigarettes, in contrast, are perfect killing machines, and 100% of the time are harmful to anyone who sticks them in their mouth and serve one purpose and one purpose only - to degrade your health. If you're fortunate enough to be stuck near someone who smokes, they are harming your health as well. If those who wish to start imposing limits or controls on peoples personal freedoms by controlling access to things that kill people, why not start with something that affects 35x more people than guns do? And if anyone tells you death by gunshot is a gruesome horrible death that nobody should have to endure (and hyped to be so by media and anti-gun activists), go spend some time in a cancer ward to experience what these poor bastards go through during a prolonged death from lung cancer. Give me a bullet any time over that.

This is truly bad, because the violence seems so transparently pointless, almost as though the dog cop thought "Pyro here" ("Fluffy" and "Blitzkrieg" must have been taken) "Pyro seems kind of listless, he needs some exercise, like ripping this poor bastard's face off."
And the little chat they have with him afterwards is almost as bad, in a "come here honey and give your abuser a nice kiss" kind of way.

Sure, the cops are responsible for their violence, and for their part in holding up the blue wall, but complicity does not end there. There's the busybody, either hateful or clueless, that called the cops in the first place. There are the legion of lawyers and judges that have carved out a gaping officer safety exception to the constitution. And, finally, because even a police state can't operate without the consent of most of the governed, there is the rest of us, anyone who has supported a candidate, or voted for one, because he promises lawn order uber alles.

We got your lawn order right here.

Those poor bastards -- they didn't know they had only 14 years left before everything went to hell.