No one knows what the clown is going to do on Monday. He will most certainly drop the sanctions at some point and let Putin keep Crimea. Ukraine is likely to stalemate long-term. If they can make a "good deal" he will hand Putin "eastern europe" on a plate. Never mind that he buys his brides there. RT just provides the philosophical sauce. These are whole countries full of human beings that are on the line, not some semantic details.

Rachel is a Hillary fan? What else is new?

The troops in Poland are purely symbolic. Troops are not necessary at this point. Commitment is important, but the clown is committed only to making himself look good.
What would be the point of getting Russian troops out of Eastern Europe if they could come back at will? How can you argue against NATO at the very time when Russia thinks it can take over any part of Europe that is not protected by NATO?

In any case you only want to publish stolen e-mails if there is something criminal in them. If not you are the criminal for stealing them.

If Hedges works for RT then he is a russian propagandist by definition. That does not mean that some of what he says cant be true.

You need an @ if you actually want him to know you called him out. Otherwise calling someone out without them knowing is seriously weak imo. @bobknight33 you have been summoned(if you're interested).

-edit- looking back at your comments i see you are aware of using the @ symbol to notify someone. Why call someone out when you KNOW they won't get your message?

I never get tired of this movie. Back in high school in the 70s my film class teacher let us watch this, it was unheard of. He said if he heard any sniggering during any of it he would shut it off right then so we kept quiet.

He pointed out some symbolism that I didn't get at first, about Callahan and Scorpio on the 50 yard line in the stadium. And the processing plant representing the justice system during the final chase, with Scorpio escaping. He also pointed out that even without a search warrant they would have charged Scorpio for shooting Chico and beating Callahan.

One thing I noticed, the violence in this 1971 movie was unheard of a year earlier. I can't think of any movie from 1969 or 1970 that had anything close to it.

The rest of the franchise got progressively worse for me, although Magnum Force made an effort. ("Me and Smith and Wesson", oh brother. He would have been shot 10 times over before getting to that line)

@ChaosEngine
agreed.
context matters and i think being a decent human being plays a large role in that dynamic.

people tend to attempt to break down complex ideas and/or ideologies into more easily digestible morsels.this "twitter speak",in my opinion,is largely responsible for the decay of human interactions.

we all are biased.
we all hold prejudices,and preconceptions based on our learned experiences.
which are subjective.

we see the world through the lens of our own subjectivity and even the most open minded and non-judgemental person,when trying to sympathize/empathize with another person, will use their own subjective understandings in order to understand that person.

this tactic,which we all employ,will almost always fall short of true understanding.

so we rely on words,metaphors,allegory etc etc in order to communicate fairly complex emotions and experiences.

what brendon o'neill is pointing out,is that when we start to restrict words as acceptable and unacceptable,we infantilize our interactions.

words are inert.
they are simply symbols representing a thing,action or emotion.
it is WE who apply the deeper meanings by way of our subjective lens.

i am not trying to make something simple complicated,but bear with me.
a rock will always be a rock,but a cunt has a totally different meaning here in the states than in britain.(love you brits,and cunt is a brilliant word).

the problems of culture,region,nationality or race all play a role in not only how we communicate but how that communication is received ...and interpreted.

so misunderstandings can happen quite easily,and then when we consider that the persons intent is by far the greatest metric to judge the veracity of the words being spoken,and just how difficult it is to discern that intent....this is where nuance and context play such a major role,but we need to have as many tools in our language box to express oftentimes very difficult concepts,multi-layered emotions and complicated ideologies.

and,unfortunately,there are attempts to legislate speech.

of course well intentioned,and reasonable sounding,but like any legislation dealing with the subjective nature of humans,has the possibility of abuse.

case in point:http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-criminalizing-pronoun-misuse/

a new canadian addendum to their human rights statute.on the surface this is a fairly benign addition to canadas already existing human rights laws,but there is the possibility of abuse.

a psychology professor from university of toronto was critical of this new addendum,and has created a flurry of controversy in regards to his criticism.

which you can check out here:
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/301661-this-canadian-prof-defied-sjw-on-gender-pronouns-and-has-a

now he was protested,received death threats,there was even violence and a new internet star was born affectionately labeled "smugglypuff".

see:http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugglypuff

i agree that free speech cannot be viewed with an absolutist mindset.absolutist thinking leads to stagnation and a self-righteous fundamentalism,so we NEED the free flow of ideas...even BAD ideas..even offensive and racist..because this brings all those feelings/thoughts/ideologies into the market of ideas to be either absorbed or ridiculed and ultimately ostracized for the shit philosophy they represent.

i WANT to know who the racists are.
i want to know who is bigoted or prejudiced.
i want to know who is holding on to stupid ideas,or promoting fascism dressed up as nationalistic pride.

and the only way to shine a light on these horrendous and detrimental ideas is to allow those who hold them openly state who and what they are...so we can criticize/challenge and in some cases..ridicule.

we should be free to say whatever we wish,but we are not free from challenge or criticism.
we can say whatever pops into our pretty little head,but we are not free from consequences.
we are also not free from offense.

i know this is long,and i hope you stayed with me,and if you did,thanks man.i know i tend to ramble.

but we can use the banning of gorillaman as a small microcosm of what we are talking about here.

i felt that we,as a community,could take gorilla to task for his poor choice in verbiage "nigger prince" and i attempted to make the case by using his history,dark humor and bad taste to add context to his poor choice of wording.

bareboards felt it was a matter for the administrators to deal with.i am not saying her choice was wrong.just that we approached the problem from different perspectives.

now gorilla decided to become the human torch and flame out.which threw my approach right out the window.

but the point i am making in that case,is that bad ideas,bad philosophies,bigotry and racism will ALWAYS reveal themselves if we allow that process to ultimately expose bad ideas/shit person.

the free flow of ideas is the proverbial rope that ultimately hangs all shit ideas.

thanks for hanging kids.
love you all!

Considering the kids oxygen setup I just figured a Darth Vader helmet would have made more sense. The juxtaposition of cute kid/symbol of galactic oppression does make for an odd commercial.

@gorillaman

The only thing I see failing completely is your absurd attempt at rationalizing your bigotry--more aptly labelled in this case by its proper name: Islamophobia. I don't for a second believe what I'm about to post will change your mind about Islam or Muslims in general but I do believe that this kind of bigotry needs to be called out when it rears its ugly head. And my, you went full ugly there, didn't you... comparing Muslims to rats and seriel killers? Classy.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, there are in fact Muslims who do not believe in God but for a variety of reasons (keeping peace with religious family members, maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage, networking, etc.) continue to attend services and identify as Muslims. This is true of many believers in all the major religions, including Christianity and Judaism.

You see, as much as you'd like Muslims to all be boogeymen coming to bring Sharia law down on the rest of world, anyone who has actually met and talked with a Muslim (and god-forbid actually visited one of the countries StukaFox listed) realizes that Muslims, like all people, are extremely diverse (again, despite your protestations to the contrary).

Indeed there are Sharia zealots. But there are also moderates and reformers and even liberal radicals. Mostly, though its just a lot of people trying to get on with their lives the best way they know how.

Now, I find most religious beliefs to be repugnant. However, I don't find the ideas expressed in the Koran to be much more repugnant than, say, the Bible. In fact, I'm less concerned about what is written in supposedly holy books and more concerned with how believers attempt to implement those ideas in reality. I do indeed find particular forms of this implementation, such as forcing women to wear a bhurka, disturbing (just as I find Christians' attacks on LGBT rights disturbing). It's important to note, though, that such practices are NOT universal. For example, in some Islamic countries like Malaysia it's enough to simply cover your hair with a colorful scarf.

On the other hand, other practices that you mentioned such as Female Genital Mutilation and virginity tests ARE NOT Islamic. FGM predates Islam and is still practiced in the locales where it originated (places such as Mali, for instance) that now happen to be Islamic majority areas. The Indonesian virginity tests as well do not stem from some universal commandment in Islam but from Indonesian culture which sees women as "the symbol of the nations moral guardians".

Again, I don't suppose any of this makes any difference to you. You want to see the world in black and white, us versus them, "rats" and "serial killers" versus you, the white knight who is just trying to save us all from our cultural relativistic blindness. And so the shades of grey I am describing to you will likely go overlooked. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect the reality is I'll receive some lengthy reply that can be distilled down to, "Islam bad, hur." Or perhaps, "All religions bad, but Islam worst, hur." To which I can only reply, that demonizing the practitioners of any particular religion is unlikely to bring about the reforms you seek.

So, a Reddit user named gTechIII gave a pretty good breakdown of one plausible interpretation of the video:

"I'm pretty sure the point was that all parties are having intense reactions to ideas which are at their core completely inconsequential and empty.

The men were responding to base desires with very little modern point.

The women were reacting to what they thought was symbolism, but in reality was just a mash of common symbols in an incoherent mass.

The director was having an existential crisis about his art's reception in youtube comments.

In the end, we're all responding to caricatures instead of communicating effectively with each other."

It's really an interesting video. Apparently the director's other vids are worth a watch as well.

EDIT: The director's web page has a whole treatment for the video describing what he was thinking. Check it out.

I would never down vote a video like this simply because it offends my knowledge of math and logic and irritates the hell out of me. These kind of problems have been coming my way on facebook repeatedly and they do get huge numbers of comments with wildly different solutions. Actually out of the 500,000 comments claimed for this one probably half of them give 42 as the answer. My problem comes from the assumption that an algebraic variable represented by a symbol (an image of a boot) bears some inherent relationship to a different symbol (two boots). Even if you make that leap that two boots is two separate variables, if there is no operand between them they should be multiplied, not added. In algebra a term such as 3AB equals 3 times A times B not 3+A+B. Unfortunately in this problem with two horseshoes equaling 4 it works either way but if two boots equals 2 then one should equal the square root of two and the correct solution would be 21.414.

I can't believe you posted this. This problem and all others like it are unsolvable unless you make at least one not very logical assumption about the use of graphical symbols as variables and this guys solution makes an even worse assumption that side by side variables with no operand between them should be added rather than multiplied.

I fail to see how the depiction of the luna dance is offensive to Hawaiians. I wonder if she would be offended by my DVD copy of Lilo & Stitch? Or my wife's Lilo bobblehead.

Some history: Protestants banned hula in the 19th century, so the celebration of this traditional dance seems to me to be empowering versus the censorship of what the Protestants called "heathen". Sure, the introduction of the Portuguese ukulele and other Western aesthetics changed the art form, but it's practiced in both modern and traditional forms today.

You also can't simply demonize the cross-pollination of cultures, because cultural values are always changing. Hawaiian and Polynesian culture went through many changes and forms long before anyone from the West showed up on their shores. The luau itself is partly symbolic of women's rights (as well as lower class rights) in Hawaiian culture, as before the luau, women were not allowed to eat the same food as men, and commoners could not eat with royalty or eat their royal Hawaiian food.

This change didn't happen until the 1800s, so it's likely that this level of equality within the Hawaiian culture is due in part to European contact, including the the King who himself became a Christian -- and yet also encouraged the luna dance.

When cultures make contact with each other, they become entangled. They influenced us and we influenced them -- and they're Americans now so deal with it. I once had pictures of Italian Americans on my wall (Godfather/Scarface posters) and my grandma has a Jew on her crucifix. Neither of us are Italian or Jewish. LOL

Thus it was passed down to me...
It's believable.
Although I think there's really only been two golf moments like that in my life; the other being Tiger's hovering put at the 16th (?) at Augusta, that posed with its little Nike symbol for a good, long while before finally tumbling in---what was that---2001? 2000?

That's basically it.

Folks that don't have guns also view guns through a utilitarian lens. No need to have them unless you need to kill something. With that mentality, they're bound to see guns and killing as a combined issue. When they look at a modern rifle that has the same ergonomics as a war rifle, they think of killing people.

For gun owners, harming other folks is real far down the totem pole. They have other uses for guns, uses that aren't killing people.

Many non gun owners look at pistols and think 'oh, well, maybe one day I'd buy one to have just in case, just for protection'. They think of them as defensive arms, and not as the firearm category with the most kills associated.

So, yeah, it boils down to imagery and symbolism.

-scheherazade

i think they're focusing on the AR-15 because it's so symbolic of the gun problem.

Two things....

This is an old story. Did any high school take them up on their offer?

And...

I was really grooving on the USA chant. What I heard was "United States of America" -- which is what we are supposed to be. In addition to being a symbol of racism, that flag was also a symbol of traitors to the concept of United States. Flying that flag over a State Capitol is not exactly a statement of being an American citizen.

So I was grooving on that chant!

@Asmo
i hear ya,and i felt i kinda addressed that issue.

guess i didn't,or at least not very well.

you and i have disagreed before and after some further discussion and/or clarification it became clear we were arguing two totally separate points,but our assumptions led us to believe we were in conflict.

but we were not.

i have had the exact same thing happen with BB,but because she was willing to slug it out and respected me enough to listen.we came to a much richer understanding of each other.

same goes for newtboy.

seewhatimsayin?
i am not choosing sides here,nor am i applying my own moral metric to the discussion.i am simply pointing out that assumptions,based on our own subjective understandings,can corrupt the conversation.

which can lead to unnecessary ugliness.

and that is depressing.

words are inert.just symbols on a page until they are observed and interpreted.that interpretation is predicated upon our own understandings,which are highly subjective.this can lead to misunderstandings of a persons intent and motivation and the only way to combat this is to actually talk with one another with respect...even if we disagree.