and someone should forget to reduce the amount of frosting in proportion which means it tastes of nothing but sugar and diabetus

@newtboy.

I don't see the word fat as anything other than descriptive. That dancer was fat. I am fat. It is just a word. No "calling out" was intended.

What I meant by I wouldn't complain "as much" if men's bodies started being as constrained in the media was my inarticulate attempt to bring a sense of equality to my rant. I agree with you that there are more average looking women on TV. But "more" isn't many. What I was trying to say was -- right now, average looking men are everywhere in the media, way out of proportion to average looking women. That pisses me off. When there comes a time when average looking men start disappearing, my anger over the gender inequality of numbers will fade.

My anger over the under-representation of average-looking won't fade, though. I'll be equally as pissed on behalf of both genders.

I'm glad that you are engaging with me, and much more respectfully than I have engaged with you. I knew I shouldn't use the term "willfully blind." I was peeved and that wasn't fair nor kind. I apologize.

I will stick to "blind," though. The studies are there. Any casual watching of movies and TVs supports my position. So why are you blind, then? The facts don't support your position. Your claim to research is a puzzle to me. What research, when all the research supports my points? I concede your point that it is better than it used to be, but "by far"? No, my friend. Not "by far." Not even close to "by far."

Every little bit helps, though. Thank god for Gabourey and Melissa and Amy Schumer who proudly weighs a stupendous 160 pounds and makes fun of Comedy Central for trying to make her starve herself into stickness.

I remember weighing 160 pounds, when I was in my late 20s. I thought I was fat. Hell, I thought I was fat when I weighed 140 pounds. Now I weigh 240 pounds, and I really am fat. I wish I had Amy back then. Of course, she is a product of the latest wave of feminists who are calling bullshit on... well, the list is long. I'm so proud of her.

And I'm proud of my contribution that made it possible for her to do what she is doing. Yippee for us!

Thanks for such a respectful exchange. My apologies again for my ill-chosen, ill-mannered words.

Thanks for the info. I kind of felt like the outrage over water bottles may have been blown out of proportion.

Turns out the big guy wasn't a football player. He was the choreographer.

Explains his own sexualization.

I get your point, @artician, about women being able to claim their own sexuality -- and their own bodies. I have become a huge fan of Amy Schumer for that very reason.

This kind of crap though -- they aren't claiming their sexuality for themselves, it feels to me. It's some weird "selling" thing where they are the commodity. Besides -- if we are going for equality -- when men sell their sexuality like this, when the only thing we get to see in the media are perfect beautiful men wearing tight clothing and makeup that extenuates their manliness, I won't complain as much.

I think it will be a horribly sad state of affairs that plain men, and fat men, and downright ugly men will no longer be seen on TV. My preference would be that we see plain, and fat, and ugly women in equal proportion to men's roles, and that women have more roles than men's children, wives, mothers, girlfriends.

When the fat guy came out, I sure enjoyed him. And at one point thought -- dang, I'm looking forward to the day a fat woman dancing gets whoops and hollers. (Bless you Melissa McCarthy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I just seen this video for the first time because a friend told me about it being that I suffer from chronic lymphedema which has swelled my penis and scrotum to giant proportions which is basically ruined my life certainly has made sex not possible . What this idiot could possibly thinking to do that on purpose WTF!!

In my non-expert opinion the only way to really help Greece at this point is to release a significant amout of debt and set the interest of the rest to zero. (Instead of trying to keep on profiting on their misfortune)

And I fear a Grexit will inevitably lead to the worst case scenario for both Greece and the EU, hyperinflation in an european country.

Edit:
After having read some more stuff about Greece and monetary shell games aka economics I've come to the conclusion that zero interest debt would not actually help. Interest for goverment bonds has been declining worldwide over the last decades, yet government debt has increased proportionally.
Why is that? Well, if you, as a politician, can borrow more money for the same amount of effective interest to fulfill your election promises in order to stay in office for as long as possible then why the hell not? Some day you won't be in office anymore and the higher government debt isn't your problem anymore.
So in the end, lower interest rates may not be 'helpful' for the greek government to balance their budget.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

Hmmm. Well, the old adage is that only a fool in a ship attacks a land fort. A static target, with big, obvious radars and refueling tanks?
Sounds like a missile target to me.
Geez, if a hot war ever breaks out there, it would a screw up of the most massive proportion by both sides.

The issue for you is not "change", but that society would "capitulate" for "such an insignificant demographic group" of "less than 4% of the population", correct?

You cited this Gallup poll (http://www.gallup.com/poll/182837/estimated-780-000-americans-sex-marriages.aspx?utm_source=SAME_SEX_RELATIONS&utm_medium=topic&utm_campaign=tiles) of how many Americans were in same sex marriages.

Another Gallup poll shows the historical trend of religious self-identification in America from 1948 to 2014: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx

In 1948, the proportion of respondents who self-identify as either Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Jewish, is 95%. ~5% said "None" or didn't answer (less than 0.5% said "Other").

In following years, they tracked more detailed responses and grouped some as "Christian (nonspecific)" and Mormon, and changed the Roman Catholic grouping to just Catholic.

In 2014, those who specified a religion (which is everyone except those who said their religion was "None" or didn't answer) represented 80%.

The full statistics are in that link -- these two years are endpoints in the polls, but not outliers.

Thus, over 66 years Americans who identified as religious (not all of whom follow the Bible, but most do so I'll be generous to you) lost 15 percentage points. That's a rate of 0.227272 percentage points per year.

If Americans keep leaving religion behind at this same rate, in 2348 all religious people will represent less than 4% of the population.

Then we get to trample your rights, right Bob?

The sad thing, people like her are educated in colleges that slavery is exclusive to white people, racism is exclusive to white people, and all white people are racist.

Stop 1: This ended in 1962 per her comments. So in the time since, over half a CENTURY, people who were affected have not been able to make it out of their situation. This includes their children and grandchildren, all kept down by 'the man'.

Stop 2: Let's totally ignore the facts that the government subsidizes schools in poor districts and in many states there is a robin hood clause for school funds. Again, in the half century plus time period, there have been no changes to the system that were supposed to improve it. Let's also ignore that ALL of our schools that are not private tend to be having lower education quality. Additionally, let's ignore completely the numerous grants and special loans that are given to people of non-white and non-male status. This includes the special restrictions in place that specifically force schools to give spots in contested classes to minorities.

Stop 3: True, regrettably. You can't stop people from making assumptions.

Stop 4: Yes, but this isn't due to color, it's due to the war on drugs. Yes, crack sentences were harder because it was of epidemic proportions and the effects of crack are wildly different from regular cocaine. Rethink our war on drugs and we could easily solve this disparity.

Stop 5: True, but this goes to the heart of another issue, the failure of our police force.

Stop 6: Same as stop 5.

I understand your discomfort with my phrasing. My beef is with the electoral college system.

While I was getting my degree, I took some really good American History and Government classes at college. The prof in the Govt. class really went into depth explaining the electoral college to us, and to me the shittiness of that system was just shocking. For example: (none of this is news to a truly informed voter or an interested person with an internet connection, but it WAS news to me when I was ~20 years old, and I think it still would be news to a really high percentage of US voters)

* First is the very idea of an electoral college. The only way to become president of the US is to win the most electoral votes. But voters don't cast electoral votes, the people of the electoral college do. OK, the electoral college is supposed to follow the votes/will of their state/constituents (more on that next), but the fact remains that literally/practically, our votes as citizens don't matter. Only the electoral votes count. So yes, in the most literal sense ... NONE of our votes "matter".

* In general, the "electors" (the people on the electoral college) are supposed to cast their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state / district. I think 2 states (Nebraska and Maine?) divide up their suggested electoral votes to be as close as possible to the actual proportions of the popular vote, but that's a whole other issue. Anyway, in general the electors are supposed to cast their vote for the popular vote winner in their state. BUT, that process isn't automatic. The votes that actually matter, the electoral votes, are cast by fallible human beings -- and they might "go rogue" and vote against what they are "supposed to" do. That is called a "faithless elector". That would be bad enough if it was just some weird loophole that technically exists but has never actually happened in practice, but actually faithless electors happen fairly frequently. The only upside is that they haven't ever changed the outcome of an election. Yet.

* When we're young and in civics type classes in school, we're brainwashedtaught about Democracy as a very simple, will of the public, one man one vote system. The electoral college shits all over that. One can win the popular vote but lose on electoral votes, and that actually has happened multiple times (not just to Al Gore). In my opinion, the electoral college creates a laundry list of problems (swing states are the only ones that matter, so campaign there and ignore everybody else, etc. etc. etc.), has very few benefits (any supposed benefits of the system are tenuous at best), and is completely contrary to the core concepts of Democracy.


Without the electoral college, a blue vote in Kansas would matter, as would a red vote in Massachusetts. Or a vote for a 3rd party or independent, anywhere. With the electoral college, edge cases like any of those can be safely and easily ignored by candidates.

I think it is unlikely that Kansas would turn blue, even if all of the democrats voted. That being said, we're not a complete LOCK for red; heck, out of the 10 most recent Governors we've had before we turned into Brownbackistan it is an even split between Democrats and Republicans with 5 each. And actually the Democrats had significantly longer total number of years in the office.

So basically, I don't actually think that a vote cast on a losing candidate is "pointless", I just think that the electoral college system does a really good job of making sure that some votes are more pointless than others. It amazes me that there wasn't a MUCH bigger stink made about it when Gore "lost" in 2000, but I guess voter apathy can overcome any challenge to the system.

Your video, Second Graders React to Lammily Doll (realistic proportions), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Second Graders React to Lammily Doll (realistic proportions) has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.

I seem to recall seeing another video on how kids (inclusive of little girls) given the choice between a Barbie and more realistically proportioned and made up doll, prefer the more realistic one.

Notice how the duchebaggery increased in proportion with the price of the cars.

Some cheap cars tried to make it through, but quickly backed off and even apologized. The luxury model cars all stopped to argue, threaten, and/or tried to run people over. (although the male/female divide was even greater)