Our legal system up here already has codified that 'idiocy', and it's been in place quite awhile.

The women's only clothing optional spa that tried to say 'no penises allowed' is legally at odds with the provincial human rights code:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/male-genitalia-policy-spurs-backlash-at-toronto-women-s-spa-1.3456844

The Canadian charter of human rights also lists freedom from discrimination as being no different for choice/behaviour things like religion, alongside birth traits like race or gender. So legally our system doesn't think rejecting a clergy application for being atheist as any different to rejecting it because of race.

And I kind of hate using a 'trivial' and much trumpeted example from America but a bakery not wanting to make a cake based on people's sexual preferences was declared illegal:
http://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminated-against-gay-couple/

I'll try to summarise my last paragraph better.

The Democratic party needs to reach out to people that didn't vote Hillary. They are instead choosing to condemn those that didn't vote Hillary as racists or friends of racists. They need to be doing the exact opposite. They need to find things to compromise on and reach out to the people that didn't vote Hillary. That doesn't have to necessarily be on any of the ideas I've tossed out above, but they've gotta do something.

A last point, the moral relativism or correctness of the cause here isn't the only thing that matters. If you can't convince a majority of the population that you are on the side of their self interest and liberties and freedoms, then you are going to lose. The things I've listed are examples of the left taking away freedoms that many on the right consider important or even fundamental to them. If no compromises can be made, the Democrats haven't got much reason for optimism about the next election looking any better.

In an effort to spur dialogue, I'm not afraid to tell you that I sometimes swing wildly between high and low moods. On that account, it can be quite terrifying. But I now realize that I wouldn't be the person I am today if I was not so afflicted. To be "normal" or "right" or "sane" as many close well-wishers so often hope for me would be just a much a form of dying as death itself, and I just can't allow that into my life. For the places said swings have taken me, I don't think any "normal" or "right" or "sane" person could really ever understand. Intellectually, they might. We all know what the words mean. But the way it all feels? No. That's just for me. But I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts on the matter.

If humans didn't eat and use animals, we would eradicate them as competitors for resources and hazards to our safety. That is the way of man, always has been.
No attempt to instill guilt will change that, it's more likely to spur it on out of spite for those dispensing the guilt.

Umm. By far the biggest reason for the shift is the specialization factor, mainly spurred by NOT playing both sides of the ball (offense and defense). Which to be fair, the video did point out.

The video didn't come right out and directly say that was a bad thing, but heavily implied it. I disagree, and think that it is one of the coolest things about American Football. Different positions require (or at least reward) different skillsets and physical attributes. So at the highest level of play, yes, O linemen are going to be huge and stable on their feet. D linemen are going to be slightly less huge, but faster and more aggressive. D backs and receivers are going to be tall and fast. Running backs can excel by being smallish, elusive, and quick, OR large and resilient. And so on.

That specialization makes the game fascinating -- seeing how teams with different balances of specialists can compete with each other and be more or less effective in different situations or against different teams.

Are NFL linemen going to be more at-risk for conditions like heart disease? Of course -- any sample group made up of people that weigh as much as NFL linemen is going to have greater occurrence of heart disease. But that isn't something unique to football players / the NFL. In fact, if you compared rates of heart disease in current / former NFL linemen to a sample group with the same average weight who were NOT football players, they'd probably have a lower rate, because like the video said, those linemen generally still had to be in very good physical shape -- just heavy.

I guess what I'm saying is that it seems weird to insinuate that it is a bad thing for the NFL / football in general to "encourage" health issues directly or indirectly because they select for large / huge players. If you want to point out unique risks of playing in the NFL, there are way more pressing and direct issues -- like RBs having LOTS of mobility problems after they retire due to all the bone / joint damage from getting tackled all the time, or increased risk of chemical dependency in football players in general due to all of the pain and other meds that teams pump into players to keep them going.

Yep. Just like Jesus said. Love your neighbor, and treat others as you would like to be treated yourself....unless they don't believe exactly what you do, then screw 'em and hope they die.

Sorry, Pat. It seems this was about a disturbed self hating homosexual, spurred on by people like you to hate himself and those he's attracted to.

One sample "weird chicken behavior" is psychotically aggressive bantam (miniature) roosters.

Too small and ill equipped (not much spur, etc.) to do any damage to a human, but they *act* like they think they are velociraptors or something. Bring food in, fill their water, get vaguely close to them ... they attack your feet. My dad taught me to put my shoe between their legs and lift/kick them into a wall -- pretty hard. Stuns / dazes them for a minute or so -- long enough to fill their feed or whatever. But stay longer than that and they'll be right back to attacking your feet.


On the female side, hens sometimes choose very bizarre locations to lay their eggs. We had a metal cylindrical feeder thing with a tray at the bottom -- fill cracked corn or whatever into the cylinder (open on top), and it will gravity flow down as they eat some out of the bottom tray. We had one hen that liked to jump in the top of that cylinder (maybe 10 inch diameter) and then lay eggs on top of the food in there. Extremely tight fit, no room to move -- like putting your arm in a Pringles can. Sometimes she got stuck if the surface of the food was too far down.

I've even seen a hen that sat on the surface of a bough in a cedar tree. Enough branch and cedar foliage to hold up the hen's body, but then we found an egg right under her on the ground -- not dense enough material to actually keep the egg from falling through. The egg was broken, but the hen just stubbornly sat in that tree for a day or two, not realizing what had happened.

Yes, but subway systems have spur tracks and track switches built in so a single broken train doesn't stop the line....usually. They aren't all really 'single lined' because you can often put a north bound train on the south bound track for a bit to get around a broken train/track/switch....not so on monorails.
Still, it seems like those problems can be solved if they wanted to. A triple tracked monorail would have been insanely cheaper and simpler than the Big Dig.

Well it was good spur of the moment stuff, but let's be realistic, there was a Russian/US war. It just wasn't fought head to head, but through other countries, like Vietnam and Afghanistan.

The cop was justified... Did it go too far- yep but the student caused this to happen.


Looks justified when intellectually competent persons analyze this.


Ignorant people ( well lest face it we are talking about the left) will see something different and the Black lives matter with Al Sharpton will be showing up soon. This will spur on the Anti cop / Cop killing is good propaganda causing a more downward spiral of society.



Justified !

Just like the cop that justifiably killed Michael Brown of Ferguson this cop will also loose job as a sacrificial lamb for the Left.

That was absolutely fascinating -- great sift!

A few random thoughts:
-If any video has ever better demonstrated the idiom "necessity is the mother of invention", I don't know what it is.
-Castro was very very clever to anticipate the technological needs of his people and have the army print that "field guide" book that spurred on greater independent development.
-Some of the things they came up with remind me of working on my family farm. Every day is an exercise in problem solving -- how to solve problem A given a set of tools/resources B. And often the things in B don't really lend themselves towards A... So you end up hammering in a nail with a brick, or patching a friction hole in a metal pipe with a few layers of plastic from a 2 liter bottle and duct tape.
-That artist Oroza is a great combination of artist, historian, archeologist, and storyteller.
-We (the US) still have sanctions against Cuba, but I can't really say why that is warranted...

That makes this worse to me, that means it was a planned 'fuck it', not a spur of the moment slip of the tongue. Not a good look.

Your "refutations" are, for the most part, self-defeating, so I will allow others to do their own research and come to their own conclusions rather than addressing each one. Suffice it to say that gun-control, in the U.S. at least, starts as an anti-minority measure (not unlike the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty") and spurs on a "dark economy" (or "underground economy"), not unlike what (eventually) felled the Soviet Union. It's not dissimilar to what's going on in Puerto Rico and, to some extent, the Bay Area (except NorCal doesn't have the feds all over them like Puerto Rico does, so violent crime is high in PR and low in Mendocino).

Is it purely a "coincidence" that Puerto Rico has a higher murder rate than almost anywhere else in the U.S, while citing as many as 50%+ of the people on "public assistance," is an epicenter on the "war on drugs" and has about the strictest gun control laws of anywhere in the U.S.?

But don't worry! Here's some good news!
"They found that a country like Luxembourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. . . . The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find."

I guess they didn't account for the fact that outlaws don't really care about laws! The nerve of some people...

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).

Thanks Silvercord, I do believe you've articulated yourself here better than I have. I don't take much issue with anything you've said above and I think we agree more than we disagree.

You're right, I'm from Canada. I have a unique perspective of American culture at the same time as living in the most culturally diverse city in the world. Here, multiculturalism is enshrined in law. We see ourselves as a mosaic instead of a melting pot. Something I'm quite proud of. (but not all Canadians feel the same way) There are plenty of conflicts of culture to choose from around here.

But when I'm speaking about an individuals 'fundamental human rights', I'm not speaking as a Canadian, or Torontonian or North American, I'm speaking as a human. And when I stated that religious/cultural rights were trumped by physical ones I didn't mean to suggest they were non-existent. The Klu Klux Klan for example is a religious organization (or at least that's what they call them selves) as is the Westboro Baptist Church and it's because their rights "extend to the tips of their noses" that they can't impose their will over people they believe are lesser than themselves. They are free to carry hateful ideas around in their heads, (as is their "right") but if it causes them to commit hateful actions, they are breaking the law.

The same can be said of the baker and the photographer. Albeit of varying degrees. The reason the baker and photographer have a sacred idea of marriage being only between a man and a woman is because of an intolerance of homosexuality. You say they're not intolerant because they serve the gay community in every other aspect outside of marriage and I say if there is any way they treat the gay community differently than that is the very definition of discrimination. Again, it's just in varying degrees.

What if I held a religious belief that marriage was only between a white man and a white woman and refused to supply services to anyone outside of that definition? "Sorry we can't in good conscience go there. Oh, it's not you, it's me." I would be running my business in a discriminatory fashion and I would pay a fine. As it should be.

Might I suggest if you want to be selective as to who you will serve and who you won't based on the physical attributes someone was born with, that you keep those reasons to yourself and politely refuse service to those people citing a scheduling conflict or artistic differences. Because to stand up proudly saying you don't recognize gay marriage or mixed race coupling as your 'fundamental human right' is offensive. By all means, carry your intolerant ideas in your head, just don't carry out intolerant actions and think the rest of the community has to respect you for them.

"Let me ask you, have you ever seen a law change someone's heart? I haven't."

Um, no, you're right. It doesn't work that way. But laws do create culture if not for this generation, than for the next. As Yogi stated above; "Eventually these people will die, and the old husks and their followers left behind will spur further movements towards greater equality." A little harsh perhaps, but when you you think back to the '40s, '50s and '60s and the how attitudes and culture have changed for the Black community you can't deny that civil rights laws have made the world a better place, for equality and for everyone.

I'm advocating passivity because I don't recognise overpopulation as a threat, more an inconvenience, and one that we couldn't really prevent even if we wanted to.

I don't see what's preposterous or optimistic about taking widely accepted birth rate data and projecting based off that. Birth rates are predictable and stable sampled over a large population. The data consistently shows that as societies come out of poverty, their birth rates fall. The only assumption here is that there isn't another GFC event that hinders growth which at this point is not particularly likely.

All taken into account we already know it's plateauing, and have known for decades. This isn't a hypothesis, it's happening right now. Unless you can show me why this trend will suddenly and irrevocably reverse, despite population data being incredibly stable and predictable historically, it seems the onus is on you to explain why you're so pessimistic.

Again, I think you're still conflating (1) what I want / whether it's bad versus (2) whether it could plausibly be stopped. I would also rather live in a less populated world. At current rates of technology and resource utilisation, things would be cheaper, there'd be more to go around. Reality is not like that. But as I said before, every policy focus has an opportunity cost. I don't see a plateauing population as a threat and I would rather see that effort devoted to poverty which will help reduce it anyway.

We're nowhere near an economic bubble. Maybe a short term stock market valuation bubble right now, but there's plenty of economic under-utilisation in the US and Europe, and China and other developing countries have decades to grow.

The term technological bubble is a bit nonsensical. You can have a technology sector bubble but actual physical technology which works now, will not magically stop working tomorrow based on inflated expectations. If you're saying instead we'll reach some cusp of innovation, well people have predicting that for decades.

We're nowhere near a peak oil event. Every time people say current known reserves are dwindling, they either (1) discover a huge reserve in under developed countries that were previously not surveyed (Africa and parts of SE Asia at the moment), or (2) something like fraking comes along which unlocks new supply. The US is forecast to be the largest oil exporter by 2020 based on that second point.

Hell, I'll play devil's advocate with you. Suppose we do reach a glut. We'll know this at least a decade ahead based on dwindling new reserve discoveries. The price of energy will leap up far, far ahead of us running out. That will spur innovation in more efficient sources of energy and will incentivise both individuals and businesses to be more energy efficient. A gradual adjustment like I've talked about endlessly here. Why am I wrong?

Environmental damage is a different issue and something that I agree needs to actually be addressed. I'm sure if you search back through my posts you'll see me talking about the economic rationale of addressing this directly when corporations who pollute aren't subject to the negative externalities that they impose in our current capitalist system and that will inherently create issues. Hopefully countries will take note of the smog clouds in China's big cities.