Bob, the people you're trying to either defend or deflect attention from are fucking cunts, end of story. I understand that people are being driven to the far right (leftist violence and impingement on free speech predated Trump and the rise of the alt right, and has a lot to do as a causal factor for both), and that certainly not everyone heading to that end of spectrum are awful, but anyone preaching racial purity, resisting the white genocide etc have lost the fucking plot. There is no right side apart from condemning all illegal violence and upholding free speech.

Newt, you pontificate about how even handed you've been, but where are the hosts of videos showing antifa violence? Where are the upvotes for this video? I've been considering putting some of them up not as a mitigation for the actions of the right, but to show that polarisation and extremism is no good for anyone, but I was almost entirely sure they wouldn't sift in the slightest. Given this vid has been up for 9 hours and has 1 vote (mine), the theory seems to hold water...

Meanwhile, Arnold's tirade against nazi's is top sift of the week. Not that he was wrong of course, but anyone with five minutes and a willingness to be open minded can find endless unbiased documentation of leftist violence, something he completely omits to mention. He talks about the nazi's rotting in hell, how about Stalin's communists (which antifa models itself off...)?

Sift is leftward leaning and that's cool, I generally agree with a lot of sensible ideas that people around here are for. But it has it's own bigotry against people expressing views that aren't in lockstep with the majority view, and members certainly aren't afraid to punish people for not toeing the line.

And one of my favourite quotes as an advocate for free speech no matter how awful or confronting it might be...

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

H. L. Mencken

Ugh - how to I start this:

First, not many Republicans are "right wing" any more. Many vote against free markets and Capitalism and vote for social engineering, wealth redistribution, and growing the size of the Government.

There are a few true right wingers left, but the establishment Republicans are not right wing at all if you test their voting habits against what it means to be on the right side of the political spectrum.

Also, I patently reject that notion that all racists are Republican. If you think racism only happens in the white community I suggest you open Youtube and simply search the term "kill whites".

Not too long ago, David Duke, a major KKK leader of some sort, was a Democrat in Congress.

My point is the only reason these people are voting Republican right now is because the social engineering of the left is seen as anti-white, which I am certain makes it untenable for a white racist to vote for that candidate/party.

Total BS answer.

WHAT shared beliefs? There is no color requirements or religious prerequisites to being on the right hand side of the political spectrum. I know the media and lefty fanbois try to paint it that way, but that is complete drivel.

Goals? What 'goals' do these white idiot racists have that black idiot racists or hispanic idiot racists don't ALSO have ? What makes one group's racism leftist and therefor tolerable/understandable/justifiable in the media and the other group's racism "right wing" and abhorrent? And yes, there ARE black and hispanic racist groups...

Nothing but political bullsh*t. Racism is racism and it ALL should be abhorrent.

At it's core today, the right-wing political ideal maintains that free markets and capitalism is the best economic system for a free people because it promotes the MOST interchange between classes of people (poor, rich, powerful, etc). As such, a true right wing government would be small and not so powerful in an individual's everyday life.

At it's core, the left-wing political ideal is that capitalism is not "fair" and that the Government should step in to make everyone "equal", trading away freedom to social engineer equality and redistribute wealth. Of course, this means the more power that can be consolidated into the government, the better and more "equal" we can all be. (Don't even get me started on how this path leads to the shores of Venezuela or every other failed socialist country before it)

Back on my point though, racism doesn't rely on free markets or capitalism. Racism CAN and I would argue DOES benefit from leftist ideas of social engineered equality though.

So if these white racists voted as a majority for Republicans this election cycle, I would suggest that they did NOT do it because the are "right wing" at all. I suggest they did it because the other side of the ticket represents nothing but more and more "social engineering" that would NOT benefit their preferred race. Further, I would suggest that had the "social engineering" over the time period of the last Presidency been skewed towards pro-white, that these same white racists would have voted Democrat.

i think you are onto something there about the reasons for the political extremes gaining traction.

people are far more isolated in today's world,which ironic considering how open everything is.

but now they have the option to:ignore,block or defriend.

creating a nice,warm and comfy bubble in which to reside in and never have to deal with those who may disagree,criticize or challenge anything in their pretty little head.

during the presidential election i had liberals defriend me because i was critical of hillary.

oh they LOVED me when i was telling them that sanders was going be exposed to the "ron paul" treatment.the fact that the primary was obviously rigged made no difference to them.

but when i continued to be critical of their golden child?

misogynist traitor (actual quote).

the trump supporters adored me when i was breaking down the reasons why some people may vote for trump,and that people should not simply dismiss trump out of hand.

my liberal friends despised me for this,thinking that somehow me pointing to the political climate of my country translated to support for trump.

but i was just a cis gender white privileged male who did not deserve and opinion (another actual quote).

and those trump supporters turned on me in an instant when i began pointing out the more disturbing aspects of trump,his history and politics.oh..they didn't like that.

fucking commie fucking libtard.i thought you were on "our" side! (another quote).

all in all...over 400 people,from both sides of the political spectrum,called me some impressive names..and defriended me.

all because what i was posting conflicted or challenged their cult of personality,which they had attached their ideology.

so now they all sit in their little circles and smell each others farts and call them good and righteous.

i think charlottesville,virginia,seattle are just the beginning.....i fear things are going to get much MUCH worse.

I don't have privileges to promote this but man, you made me think back to the olden days. For years, I had only a PC speaker, and all my friends had an AdLib or Sound Blaster. The day I got a ProAudio Spectrum 16 was the day I discovered just how much I'd been missing out on all those years. King's Quest and Commander Keen never sounded so good.

I hear ya. Similar thing with people who proudly announce they are OCD because they clean up.

but... is it hurting anybody? Is it such a bad thing that people apparently seek some sort of commonality with those on the spectrum where previously they might have tried to distance themselves from any comparison? That isn't rhetorical btw. I genuinely don't know whether that kind of appropriation is just annoying, or damaging, or even perhaps beneficial.

Good video. What irritates me is seeing instances where Aspergers is treated like it's the designer diagnosis of the decade. Seeing someone like Jerry Seinfeld or David Byrne comment about how they feel they have a "touch of Aspergers" and are on the "spectrum". Or the legions of Big Bang Theory fans who now "identify" as "Aspies" because Sheldon and what's her name have made it into a fun pop culture caricature. SMH on many levels.

Agree. Can't stand all the superfluous fetch quests - at this point I'm even sick of inventory management. In games like Fallout, or Elder Scrolls, Witcher - these days I hardly even loot the corpses because I'm so sick of it after 25+ years.

One of the best games I've played recently was - What Remains of Edith Finch - a linear, "walking simulator" which implements innovative/interesting design solutions to drive the story forward, very detailed and very tightly designed - kind of on the opposite spectrum of open-world RPGs - but very awesome.

Chomsky\s position doesn't surprise me in the least and I think is much more easily explainable than you want to make it. Chomsky is taking the default most anti-American position that he can. Part of that includes not letting Russia be painted any more black or dark than America. There's nothing new, surprising or different in his opinion here, he's just expressing it in a way that goes against the democrats which throws people that hadn't seen Chomsky that way before when he was mostly condemning right leaning America. It's pretty much the exact same thing as the shift in opinion towards wikileaks before and after they ran a freight train over Hillary. When they were releasing secrets damaging to the right end of the spectrum they were doing the lord's work. The explicit and sole focus on western evils was ok until suddenly the left end of the west got included. Now suddenly a pro-Russian conspiracy was visible to left leaning folks. You know, the now that it's affecting me it's a problem viewpoint.

Monsanto is like Microsoft... they are these hulking titans of their respective industries, who work as hard as they can to stay ahead of the game, sometimes through questionable activities. However, their contributions on the whole are incredible, driving generations of progress in their respective fields through investment, research, and release of progressively more useful tools (on the whole).

There is a similar debate regarding pharmaceutical companies and their profiteering from the invention of life saving drugs... its easy to paint a company as a 'bad guy' for charging large amounts of money for medicine that a person needs to live. But is it the company's responsibility to forgo shareholder profits in order to maximally help more people with their drug, or is it the spectrum of regulations imposed by a representative government that should be entrusted with that responsibility?

GMO agriculture products that are drought tolerant, flood tolerant, self pollenating, etc etc, will likely save our buns in the next 100 years. If anything we should be doubling down on how much effort we put into GMO production and selection, to help drive a technological boom in that industry before we've mismanaged ourselves into a crisis.

Wasn't easy being a planet hunter back in the day *promote

I'm looking for
1 tug
The pull of a planet
1 tell
A wobbling sun
I've searched for years
Haven't found a one
But they're out there

1 jump
In radial redshift
1 slip
Of spectral lines
They'll see if I can show them the sines

Pish tosh
Green men
Take five
Take ten

Just a little cash guys

Budget's tight
Don't fund this trash guys

I can take a hint
Better face the facts
Second-hand'll have to do

Eww
All you planet hunters at the bottom
You've got fact & fantasy entwined
Finding planets except they haven't got one

Well they gotta be forming readily
When you think about it given we've got nine

1 jump
A blip in the spectrum
1 shift of meters per second
1 graph of period power
They laugh but I'm not sour

Here goes
18 months of data
Cross & correlate it
All I gotta do is run

Pish tosh
Green men
Ah don't mind them
If only they'd look closer
Would they see a pure void
No sirree
They'd find out
There's worlds galore
To see

Make way for Pegasi
51 Pegasi

First was a world
Round an old pulsar
That's true
But the news
Is a sun-like star
With wobble
Too quick & precise
To be designed
No fluke not a spot
If you like it hot
You're gonna love this find

Pegasi 51b
Planet discovered
Orbit traced
Every 4 days
Hot as can be
Its order-Jupiter size
Was something of a surprise
Especially given its star's proximity

Pegasi 51b
It's a new era
To detect
Exoplanets
Soon there'll be three
As planet pulls on its Sun
It shifts the stellar spectrum
That's how we found 51b Pegasi

How'd a planet get so close in orbit
Cause I thought you needed ice to form it
Did it later undergo some strange migration
Star too small to be so long-pulsating
And too old to be so quick rotating
Is there any other good interpretation

This will certainly help with our funding

We got your funding
We got your funding

Got a surface of 1200 C

It's treacherous
So treacherous

If in time this new breakthrough feels mundane
Planets are common

That's proof
Of the truth
I've been telling you
This is no mean anomaly

Pegasi 51b
Planet uncovered
Round a far
Main sequence star
Spectral type G
We know its mass to be high
Half Jupiter by sine i

It's 15.61 pc from home
And it shakes our faith in how planets are formed
And its star is in Pegasus
Give it an A and thus
Label the planet as b
51 Pegasi

Plotting Doppler shifts is glacial-pace
And that astrometry never prevails
But baby you're in luck cause
Up in space
You got a planet-finder never fails

You got the power of statistics now
You got a view without an atmosphere
So no more nights spent locked up in your tower
All you gotta do is wait right here
And I say

Kepler the planet-searcher
Got a dip, no 2, no 3
We just measure brightness
Plot it out & that's transiting photometry

When your stars do this
And your curves displace
Then your star's got this
Transiting its face

Then you hit compute
And lookie here

You get good diameter data
From that dip
And orbit distance from the length of year

Well now we need this tale supported by
A ground observer with a good Échelle
We got 2000 planets certified
2000 more that only time will tell

But let's take em all, plot em out
And find out if we're really all alone
Is there a rocky world we've found no doubt
That orbits in the habitable zone
Like home?

Kepler the planet searcher
Got an Earth 452b
Part of a throng
40 billion strong

There ain't never been a field
Clever as the field
There ain't never been a field
Better than the field they call
Exoplanetology

I can show you a world
A shining shimmering planet
Found concealed in the band-shifts
Of the closest star in sight

I've found hope in the skies
And facing wonder I wonder
Could the sine wave discovered be
A planet fit for life

A whole new world
A new fantastic point of blue
Placed in that narrow zone
Where water flows
Midway tween cold & steaming

A whole new world
Its sun a faint, reddish hue
Could there be waiting here
A biosphere
Evolving in this whole new world to view

Fathoming a whole new world to view

Unbelievable find
Indescribable feeling
Earthlings someday revealing
Through directly captured light
A whole new world

Don't just stare from a far

Though nigh impossible to see

Wouldn't close up be bolder

Next to its parent's flair
If life is there
We'll know through atmosphere spectroscopy

A whole new world

Block the glare of the star

A laser starshot to pursue

With a star-shaped occulter

Chasing that crazy dream
That's always been
Of walking in a whole new world with you

a whole new world
That's where we'll be
A thrilling chase
A home in space
For you and me

I'd be willing to bet that kid was on the autism spectrum. Agree totally.

Awesome to have real concrete information presented in a way that seems very distinct from what you'd get from sources on the far ends of the spectrum, like High Times or the DEA.

I'm quite surprised that smoking pot seems to carry an increased risk of bronchitis, like tobacco, but apparently NOT lung cancer (unlike tobacco). Are the carcinogens in tobacco cigarettes all from additional ingredients? Could people be growing their own tobacco and rolling their own cigarettes and avoiding one of the biggest health consequences? If so, shouldn't there be a market for tobacco cigarettes without any added ingredients?


I have never smoked pot OR tobacco. A lot of my reasons for avoiding either come down to a hatred of and pretty real sensitivity to / negative reactions to exposure to smoke. Some of my bias against that transfers into bias against pot in general, since smoking it is the default method.

At the same time, it seems ridiculous to me that pot is double-secret schedule 1 illegal while alcohol and tobacco are both perfectly legal. Especially when it seems apparent (although I don't really know what I'm talking about since I've never used it myself) that the intoxicating effects of pot are comparable to but generally LESS dangerous than alcohol, and the negative health consequences of pot are FAR LESS than either alcohol OR tobacco.

Getting real facts and knowledge out there like this video is doing has to have a positive effect on that very questionable policy.

@Jinx
my main point is the the fringe of both ends of the political spectrum dominate the discussion,and BOTH are fucking horrible,ill-thought,narrow-minded and petulant.

they are part of the disease.

not every person who identifies as left is a snowflake,nor is everyone who identifies as right a bed wetter.

i wrote extensively on why trump won,and would happy to share if you would like me to,but to answer your question:no.snowflakes are not to blame (and i am struggling how you conflated that to be honest).

i have been:pepper sprayed,maced and beaten by three cops.
i have been thrown in solitary for days without food or water,and no working toilet.
i have been punched in the face by a supposedly devout christian,and i have been publicly harrassed for mistaking a young woman for a man at a gay bar.

is there anything else you would like to know to assuage the MASSIVE presumptions you made in your comment?

look dude,if you can't see that both the ultra left and ultra right are fucking bonkers and have lost their way.they co not even come close to representing the majority,and by their behavior..i do not think they really care.

so why should we?
the people who recognize that shit has gone sideways.that the politicians are purchased corporate whores,and this binary politics is just a device to keep us divided.

i am an anarchist,but i am not stupid,and refuse to be coddled or manipulated into buying into shitty philosophies and even worse politics.

the ultra left are fucking cry-babies,and the ultra right neo-fascists are bed wetters.

and both have lost their way.

Please expand, because while I can see that he's picking and choosing some easy targets for criticism (over the top SJW stuff) that may not be representative of the at-large "Progressive" agenda, nothing really jumped out at me as a "straw man" argument.

I'm a somewhat conservative-leaning person (at least on issues that I think should be in the realm of government), but I feel like I have a legitimate beef with some of what the party that is "supposed" to cater to conservatives actually does in government; what the GOP seems to present as its "platform".

This guy is a liberal-leaning person who feels like he has a legitimate beef with some of what his party thinks their platform should be. And I tend to agree with a lot of what he's saying.

And I would hope that even if I didn't agree with anything that he was saying, I'd be all for protecting his right to say his piece. Some people/groups test our patience for that, like the Westboro Baptist Church -- ostensibly a crazy right-wing organization that just wants to get their message (of hate and bigotry) out there. But in reality they are just a bunch of con men who stir up trouble in order to provoke violent or other responses that they can start litigation over. The point is, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with idiots like that.

Threats to free speech from the other side of spectrum are much more subtle, and therefore perhaps more insidious and dangerous. For example, at about 3:00 in the video where he lists "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia" as "meaningless buzzwords". For many people, those words are NOT meaningless, but real, concrete problems that they actually have to face in their lives. Problems many orders of magnitude more significant and weighty than any of the minutia that can make or ruin our average day. Unfortunately, those words do tend to carry a lot less weight when they are bandied about willy-nilly every time we disagree with someone for any reason.

I guess, we all really do have more things in common with each other than things that separate us from each other. The frequent and extreme factionalizing and partisanship today seems very counter productive. And there's plenty of blame for that to go around.