Meh.

Something I want to see change is this "your true power triggers when you lose your shit". If anything, humans have more power with their self-control, don't they?

Well then yes, we respectfully disagree.
As I saw it, she had already aggressively touched him with his back turned, and then raised her fists as if to hit him again, so he could easily think he had to strike to keep from being hit again.
I wouldn't say it's the 'right' thing to do, I would say it's an acceptable thing, but I certainly agree it's on the 'wrong' end of that spectrum of acceptability.
Mr Miaggi was right, the best way to win a fight is to not be in one....but that's not within everyone's capability. No training coupled with lack of self control makes that impossible for some. They are not bad people because they lack those skills, IMO, and they have a right to their imperfect reactions up to a clearly legally defined point without being told that, because they didn't do the best thing, they did the wrong thing.
You are free to think differently, I don't need to agree with you 100% to like you.

Well, that's what happens when you have weak internet skills.

Adblock, RSS feeds, realizing that Facebook is not a news site and self-control really go a long way towards avoiding this downward spiral.

Yes. If you grab a person 1/2 or less your size by the neck, hurl them to the ground while flipping them over backwards, still arm baring them by the neck, then you toss them across the room and jump on them, throwing them as hard as possible across the room into the wall head first, severe injury and/or death are totally foreseeable consequences. (If you look, her head nearly hits the desk behind her, and does hit the ground HARD).
As I clearly said, I 100% believe they would absolutely have charged any person doing this to an officer with attempted murder, and turnabout's fair play. It would have been wholly unsurprising if her neck had broken from that treatment.

It is totally proper to expect that, if one officer can't remove a child (or adult, for that matter) without resorting to violence (and god damn it, a high school girl is a child, so that attempted excusing of the attack falls completely flat), they call a second officer. If 2 officers can't remove a child without injury, call 3. Much better idea, call mom.
Perhaps we've failed as a society when we put actual cops (who have a serious issue with self control and violence lately) rather than trained security guards (EDIT: who don't have immunity or a blue wall to protect them from their own bad action) in schools, or when we resort to the most violent way of dealing with every issue rather than having a little common sense and calling a calm and quiet child's parent.
The reason teacher's can't touch them is to prevent the kind of actions the cop took. It's a protection system for the school and the teacher, to prevent them from being closed/fired by a lawsuit. In fact, it's illegal for a private citizen to touch another person without permission, so why would you want them to take the chance of losing their career and the school?

The fact that both the school system and the police force agree with me give me hope....but not much. The fact that so many people want to either blame the victim or excuse the outrageous, clearly over the top actions of the cop erases that hope.

You opened your comment criticising someone for assuming that everyone was a certain way, and then finish your comment by telling everyone else how they would react in the face of provocation. So either you take back your criticism of the act of assuming things about people, or you can take back your assumption about other people. I've highlighted it in the quotes to demonstrate just how much of a contradictory statement it was. You can't have it both ways.

If i had that kind of temperament, i wouldn't work in law enforcement. That's generally a good rule for all kinds of work - if you don't have the temperament to do the job professionally, don't do it.

By the way, your way of dealing with the face-slapping scenario demonstrates only your poor approach to conflict resolution. Why does it have to be ignore, ignore, ignore, ignore, ok flip out. That's the way an ape goes about learning. Humans try to learn better ways of handling problems so that they don't allow themselves to get pushed to the point of losing their self control.

America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Where to start, Lawdeedaw?
First, your comment was not limited to American colleges, so your admonition to @bareboards2 is a misstep.
Second, I must guess from the grammar and your estimations that you were visiting these colleges, not enrolled, because my experience was far different. I was a struggling full time, minimum wager earner while I went to college on my own dime for YEARS, because I wanted to learn things, not for a 'degree' to get a good paying career. I knew many others there that may have hoped to better their earning potential, but also wanted to better themselves, and so took many elective classes that didn't further an academic career, as did I. I also knew some of those at Stanford, but fewer.
EDIT:The poor not caring about education is not only wrong, it's extremely insulting. Because attaining good education is more difficult does not make it less important to them, in fact it's likely MORE important, and many sacrifice to a degree inconceivable to the 'rich' to educate themselves and their children.
And not all Americans are overt consumerists ruled by their base emotions and without any self control. Many are, but not all by a long shot.

Traffic accidents would be virtually eliminated. The insurance industry probably has the most to lose when it comes to self driving cars, without a risk to insure against they can't make any money.

Regarding features like this, I've just got a new Golf with adaptive cruise control. This measures the distance between you and the car in front and maintains a pre set gap up to a set speed. They have a lane assist option too, like the video here but I don't have that and I'm really glad. The cruise control is teaching me to not react when a car slows down in front of me or pulls into the lane in front of me because the car is doing it for me.

I've noticed I'm letting my eyes wander for longer when looking at the radio, or flicking through options on the display. It's not intentional, taking my eyes off the road is dangerous. I know that. But I can steer between white lines using my peripheral vision so as long as nothing really bad happens the car will save me, so the temptation to look at something just a little longer creeps in subliminally. I don't want to be doing it, and I try not to. Thing is, if you're driving a long way it's pretty certain you're not going to have the self control to be 100% focussed on the road every millisecond.

I can't wait for driverless cars. I can't help but think that features like this being drip fed us are not really that helpful. It's just teaching us to pay less attention when actually the cars aren't that clever yet.

And to anyone who's going to say 'if you take your eyes off the road you're a bad driver, you should be able to keep concentrating, blah blah blah', you don't understand how the mind works. Your body adapts to the situation you're in. When I drive an auto I don't go for the clutch all the time, my body adjusts. It's not a conscious thing, it's automatic. it's the same with these driver aids, your body learns to take advantage of them.

This scene is pretty close to how it goes down in the book, save a little variation in how the final blow is administered.

I also completely disagree, I think the director completely nailed it. It plays up to a lifetime of predictable cliché's only to turn them right around and give us a dose of cold hard reality.

Hero's frequently loose, villains frequently win, overconfidence is a weakness and having a just cause is no guarantee of victory.

Oberyn wins the fight but allows his need for vengeance to cloud his judgement. He starts calm and works himself into more and more of a frenzy over a neurosis he has carried for many years. IMHO this was portrayed pretty authentically, he starts calm (as he has learned to be) but as the fight progresses he allows the guard to drop and the raging emotions to manifest properly.

Now he can afford to let these bottled up feeling out properly, the mountain is right there and soon he will kill him! Throw in some adrenaline and the anticipation of that moment overwhelms the self control that earned him the title red viper.

I also don't see how you can describe the mountain as a "super ninja" here. Everything he does at the end is an exercise in brute strength, let's not forget he's wearing mailed fists, the blow to the mouth need not be especially strong or quick to do the damage. All he does after that is roll on top of him with the last bit of strength and rage he has (spurred on by his "beetle crushing" fuck everything mindset). Subsequently crushing the skull has more to do with his upper body weight as his hands alone.

A massive strong man yanks someone's legs out from under them, punches them in the mouth and then climbs on top (while they are stunned) to finish the job.

Being run through doesn't necessarily stop one's muscles from working until the blood loss kicks in. Doubly so with the adrenaline of a life or death fight (and the anaesthetic effect massive trauma has on the nervous system). There are countless stories of soldiers and criminals being mortally wounded by multiple shots to the chest who continued attacking till the blood loss overcame them. Gregor Clegane is exactly the sort of psycho who might exhibit such bloody minded behaviour.

I might also remind you that the Mountain has one more than one occasion been described as "swifter than might be expected for a man of such stature" i.e. not a lumbering hulk. He gets several blows in on Oberyn during the fight. Many of the swings are extremely heavy but they are calculated moves from an expert fighter who is more than capable of moving quickly when needed.

Oberyn is quicker, but the Mountain is not exactly slow (that's one of the reasons why the Mountain is/was formerly undefeated, he's big but can still move relatively quickly for his size).

It's racist against both people of color AND Irish in my eyes.
You don't have to be offended for something to be racist. It only requires a differentiation by race (and not even necessarily a negative differentiation as I understand the term). You having the self control to not be upset by other people's racism (or in this case 'nationalism') is a good thing, but does not erase the racism, it only lessens it's effect.
In my opinion, calling anyone a 'nigger' (even yourself) is racist, no matter the intent and no matter the race of the speaker. The word itself is a racial insult.
I feel like calling an entire nationality any derogatory word is technically nationalist, but is intended to be racist as (in this instance) it's intention is to separate all Irish from other Europeans as a separate race in order to degrade the entire 'race' (nation).

@RedSky

20 billion was just an arbitrarily large number I chose to demonstrate that I think that the world would survive significant population growth beyond what we'll be dealing with in the near future.

The point of no return I was referring to is simply a point where we won't be able to get back to a place where we can sustain human population levels without significant environmental degradation and territorial disputes, among other challenges I'd prefer not to experience.

I do consider things like global warming, the fact that China is buying up land in Africa to feed its population, US foreign policy's competitive focus on securing cheap oil and the large scale destruction of rainforest to make way for single crop agriculture in Brasil to be symptoms of an imbalance in population vs. resources.

I'm not drawing the line at "everyone and stock up at the grocery store/pumps" type destruction before I take notice and preach caution. I think that defining that as a deadline would be irresponsible.

Again, I agree that we could theoretically mechanize the whole world in a way that grows the supply of resources and shares them equitably amongst an enormous human population, but that goes against the type of world I'd want to live in (excessive mechanization of natural resources) and the way human social systems typically work (equitable sharing).

There are various estimates on how much longer exponential human population growth will last, but it has certainly happened on a scale of centuries or decades - blips like baby boomers are just expected outliers within that trend.

But what's more important is that even if population levels peter off, it is consumption - which is the only statistic that really matters because it is the only negative effect of population increase - that will continue to increase exponentially as a greater proportion of the world's population begins to achieve first world living standards.

This is why free trade alone is not enough to solve problems. While it is likely to bring people out of poverty, raise education levels and increase human rights (all very good things), it will also continue to push our overall imprint on the planet in a more exponential direction than I'm comfortable with (one reason being the argument detailed in this video).

But of course I'm also uncomfortable with the prospect of any sort of forced population reduction mechanism, and I'm also uncomfortable with the notion of not raising people out of poverty.

So as I see it the only thing left to mitigate my fears is to place a primary emphasis on Education.

There's a million and one ways to do this: Everything from broad, effectual efforts like getting the Pope to get with the program and endorse contraceptives, to nearly insignificant efforts like arguing with people on the internet in hopes that you contribute some small part to a culture that places some significant emphasis on educating people about the importance of self control and restraint in every type of consumption - family size included.

That's all fine but you can use a smart phone in moderation. I suppose if he doesn't feel he has the self control, that's a perfectly good reason.

You also don't have to buy the latest and greatest model, you can buy a very cheap one? They're still very capable and if you leave it at the default install, you're really just looking at improving your interaction with your phone.

Don't get a data plan and well, you're truly going to just have a nicer to use phone. I think modern UIs are objectively better than those keypad based interfaces.

Of course, do as you please, it's just a bit weird to here "smart phones" put under one category like this, there's thousands and thousands of different models to suit different use cases. You don't need to limit yourself to "dumb phones" to put barriers on your usage.

@Trancecoach

I think Jigga's making the argument on the collective level. Yes, we can all use self control to limit portion sizes.

But collectively, where the multimillion dollar funding of fast food marketing departments is geared towards incentivising larger portions as a method of eking out more profit from their saturated (excuse the pun) market size, it's quite likely that average calorie consumption goes up on the whole.

That doesn't excuse taking responsibility for your actions, and certainly you could tackle it with education campaigns rather than regulation or bans, but there's certainly a relationship here between incentives and national health.

@JiggaJonson

You may not have said that people lack self-control, but the article you posted indicated as much; that when it comes to food portions, people have difficulty curbing their appetites, and it's simply not true -- and it's seems like a facile excuse for not taking responsibility for oneself.

No one I know who actually wants to lose weight "eats less and exercises" (and I would add "eat healthfully" to that, as well). In fact, I don't know anyone who eats healthfully and exercises regularly and appropriately who is "overweight." (If you know anyone, feel free to put them in touch with me.)

I don't want to get all technical here, but obviously someone who has moldy intestines, "leaky gut," fatty liver, and the resulting blood sugar imbalances may have a difficult time losing weight. And, by no means do I think eating McDonald's is a good idea for any health-conscious person, but individuals need to take some responsibility for educating themselves about their own health. This isn't McDonalds' responsibility.

And yeah, the low fat craze was a bad idea (as I frequently pointed out to many in the 90's), but that's what you get when you trust certain "authorities" to tell you what to do and how to live (especially when it comes from the government and its cronies at the AMA).

If you eat healthfully, your body will tell you when to eat and when to stop. Only a messed up metabolism encourages overeating. For example, the insulin-adrenailne roller-coaster will, of course, have an effect on a person's capacities for immediate self-control. This is why people who binge tend to do so on sweets, wheat, and other no-so-great "foods." Do you know anyone who binges on broccoli? I do not.

So I agree that you need knowledge of what to eat, and this is something that often varies from person to person as we all have different biochemistries, but there are common elements to what more likely agrees with most everyone's health.

(Disclaimer: I am not giving medical advice here, as I have not been licensed by the medical "authorities" to misinform you, but in case you want to know more about the reasons for obesity, I encourage you to check this out for more information: http://www.majidali.com/the1.htm)

@Trancecoach

I never said people don't have self control, but if it were as simple as "eat less and exercise," no one would be unhealthy or obese. Instead, we're looking at a majority of the population that's overweight.

http://www.nourishinteractive.com/system/assets/general/images/nutrition-facts/portion-control-larger-portions.png

I'm not saying that it's the only reason for weight problems, but as the original article I posted points out "No one eats one and one quarter of an apple." Portion size increases provide correlative data that coincide with weight problems in developed countries. I've yet to see any data that suggests that people in the world, collectively, suddenly have less self control.

I'm no dietician, but I'd say that the low-fat food crazes of the 1980s and 90s played a role as well: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/low-fat/

Typical low-fat options replace the fat (and protein in some cases) with sugar which is burned quicker by the body.

I could go on and on, but I stand on the position that it's NOT just a simple matter of self control. AND even if it is, people have varying levels of self control that need to be accounted for: http://cess.nyu.edu/caplin/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Measuring-Self-Control-Problems.pdf

Surely, you don't think everyone has the same level of self control as you?


Edit: One last thing, sometimes people rely on food labels to restrict their diet and come up short because nutrition facts are often unreliable: http://nutritionovereasy.com/2011/04/can-you-trust-the-nutrition-facts/ Self control without good information is a bad mix.