Nice editing there. Tons of audio missing and multiple skips....what did they edit out? Discussions of how to frame them? Bribes?

We've seen multiple instances of stops exactly like this that ended in police gunfire....just as cordial and friendly until the citizen tells police they have a gun, or a camera, then the police lose their shit and start shooting.
The Press at protest marches were all 100% friendly, cordial, had open dialog asking politely where police wanted them to move to, totally legal, and complied with every request FROM officers, and still got shot point blank in the eyes with rubber bullets, tear gas canisters fired so close they can kill, pepper sprayed, were beaten, and arrested. Multiple times, on camera, over and over and over and over and over and over.
You claim 'look, it worked once, that means it will work every time, just put your life and freedom on the line and check, and don't consider the hundreds of times it ended in prison or death.'

He didn't actually comply legally, legally if you have a concealed firearm in your glove compartment, you MUST inform officers IMMEDIATELY....They didn't, and tried to hide it by bringing up his registration on his phone instead of retrieving the paper copy from his glove compartment. Many MANY cases just like this end in tragedy. This one just ended in a full vehicle search without a warrant.

Comply with officers requests, eh? So let them violate your rights and you'll be fine....except when you aren't. So American, comrade. Perhaps, since you likely live where you have no rights, you don't understand them. If you don't exercise your rights, you don't have any.

This isn't the narrative because it's not the norm, and even if it was, that's besides the point. The daily violations and murders of unarmed, mostly black men, is the point you wish to ignore. Pablo Escobar was a nice guy if you did what he said, were polite and compliant, and never hinted at crossing him. He's not a good guy or good apple, he was a violent criminal thug...just like police.

When Trump called for the death penalty for the innocent Central Park 5, were all those times they didn't rape women (including the time they were falsely accused) the point, or was the singular, false accusation about the one time they did rape someone his only point? Hint-it's the second one.
*facepalm

Edit : Now, are you ever going to produce these "known instances" of massive democratic voter fraud, or can you admit that was just one more thing you made up? It's not going away, I plan on asking until you have the testicular fortitude to answer.

Because it's tragedy.

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The tragedy of that "charge" in World War I wasn't that the Newfoundland soldiers died in epic combat, man-on-man, but that they got hung up on their own barbed wire and were simply machine-gunned to death by the Germans as they struggled to get through. Those that did manage to stagger into No Man's Land were picked off because they were the only soldiers crossing the open gap between the lines.

In a war marked by human wastage, the charge of the Newfoundland Regiment on the Somme was an appalling low point.

The frequency of police using unnecessary force pretty much shot up, more so when it involves black people. It's got to the point where it seemed like it's "shoot first, ask questions later." Granted, this is not indicative and representative of the entirety of the US police force. It's just that there are enough tragedies being reported in local/national news that I question whether the officers are really qualified at all. Are the ones who pulled the trigger really made the right decision? Were they really in danger? Can any of these tragedies be prevented had the officers de-escalated the situation? Or used different method? Or had better training? It's a concern when your trust in local law enforcement slips little by little each time these things happen.

I'm pretty sure that if the tables were turned and somehow Hillary ran as a Republican, the Democrats would have voted for Trump as well. We tend to overlook things like reason and sanity in the USA when it comes to people/teams/etc that we hate.

Plus Trump was selling a message that a lot of people bought into, that they were somehow going to go back to a time when factory and coal jobs were a thing for middle class union type people. People who didn't work in those fields knew it was bogus from the get go, but when you live in a shitty area and desperately want to scroll back progress so that you can get your guaranteed 30+ an hour job/lifetime pension without a college education, you tend to overlook small things like guys grabbing pussies.

You are right, in a sane country Hillary probably would have been elected. She also probably wouldn't have been eligible to run because she would have beaten out Obama in 2008. She didn't because people were so desperate for something, anything to change in our fucked up government that they went with Obama. Hell, I even voted for him the first time. But, we lost our sanity sometime around the period when elected an actor over a generally 'nice guy' kind of president. Said actor/governor then instituted the following amazing things:

* The War on Drugs - utter failure
* Reaganomics - depends on who you ask, but it pretty much fucked us for years to come.
* Wonderful changes and cuts to education - See previous. They are still trying to undo the fuckery that was done to education in the 80's.
* Increased military spending to astronomical levels - pretty much fucked anyone not working for defense contractors.
* Destabilized Nicaragua and pissed off Iran worse at us - yeah, that didn't work out for us.
* Largely ignored the AIDs epidemic - tragedy on multiple levels.
* Etc

That fucker is still viewed as one of the best presidents and Carter as one of the worst.

Mostly the trouble depends on where you work and how publicly you make your statement. I'd mostly get called a racist, but working for a partially publicly funded place if I was vocal enough losing your job or being told to apologise and be quiet are real possibilities.

The not allowed to talk about it applies much more heavily to anyone in the media. A recent example would be an aboriginal man that was recently shot by a white farmer. The narrative on the national CBC media made a big deal about rampant racism in the region against aboriginals. In their coverage of local opinion it was even more one sided, as they described two sides, the grieving family of the deceased and their supporters, and then the racists who sided with the farmer because they hated aboriginal people. They very slowly, reluctantly and buried deep under a lot of disclaimers released more information on the case.

The young man that was killed was in a truck with 4 of his friends, and their story was that they got a flat tire and pulled into the yard to seek help with repairs. The CBC ran that much right away. They were much more reluctant to include that the RCMP had been called BEFORE the truck got onto that farm because they had been trying to steal a truck from a neighbouring farm already beforehand. It wasn't until during the trial that even more came out, and CBC again reluctantly included details from the friends that where with the victim. All the occupants of the vehicle had been drinking very heavily all afternoon. They admitted to 'checking cars' at the earlier neighbouring farm. They admitted to using the butt end of a rifle to try and break the windows of the truck at the neighbouring farm, but the stock broke off the gun. It was found at the neighbouring farm by police. Upon arriving at the final farm, they admitted trying to start up an ATV and going through and unlocked vehicle there as well, but disagreed on who was doing which. The trial even included text messages from the night before wondering if one of the friends would be able to "go on missions" tomorrow because they were hiding from police after a liquor store robbery. The farmer also mentioned being scared about what could happen the day of the shooting because he thought back to a story he'd been told about 2 farmers being killed on their yards a few years before he'd moved into the area. Only 1 media outlet in the country, and in 1 article checked out that the identity of one of those killers back then turned out to be the victims uncle. I had to go back looking for the original article from when those murders took place to be sure that the current news article wasn't just sensationalising things.

Now of course none of that means you want to see somebody getting killed over property theft. None of that means racism in any way shape or form is justified. However, when there was a rampant run of rural crime across the area and farmers were getting more and more fed up and nervous about their safety something bad was eventually going to happen. It's a tragedy, but our media was absolutely terrified of covering the full story because listing the facts I just laid out is considered racist. Your blaming the victim. My listing of the above facts is not supposed to be done without including many times more explanations and reasons that this was the white man's fault.

Ultimately, the absolute failure to talk openly about things in Canada is getting people killed. We absolutely need to be clear that stealing doesn't deserve a death penalty. We ALSO need to tell a group of young adults that were going farm to farm, with a loaded rifle, raging drunk, stealing and breaking into vehicles that doing that was a BAD idea and one of the reasons is that doing so might get you shot by someone that doesn't know if your going to hurt them or not. I really believe if the kids had been white that would have been the narrative, but because of race it wasn't. It just makes things worse and inspires more risky and dangerous decisions from people in the future and more people will continue to get hurt.

The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

To be fair, correlation of gun ownership to gun violence isn't exactly clear cut either. No country has quite as many guns per capita as America, but there are countries with relatively high gun ownership that don't have the same problem with gun violence. Clearly it's a complex issue...

but maybe media is to blame somewhat. The news media. I wonder if the reporting was minimised - i.e. no images of the killer, no details about the killer, just reporting of the incident, the victims etc and then, as callous as this perhaps sounds, on to the next story. The families of the victims aren't helped by the frenzy or speculation and I really think it only encourages the next would-be murderer. It gives an opportunity to have a discussion about gun control (except it comes across as opportunistic...) but America's gun violence problem is larger than mass shootings. To me, it's as much about the stickups that go wrong, the fact every police officer can make a poor decision and end up killing somebody, its about lil timmy accidentally shooting his best friend, its about suicides... not just about tragedies that dominate the news. Oh, and games have fuck all to do with any of it

...And I would have run at the guy, and he's all like "BLAM BLAM BLAM" shooting all over the place, but I would have done a flip over his bullets and landed behind him. He would be all like "woah!" and then I would do a spinning kick to knock the gun out of his hands and I would catch it and point it at him, and then, get this, I'd say "you're fired" and I'd shoot him right between the eyes with his own gun. It would have been tremendous. Really, just amazing, great stuff. It really was lucky that I was there to save all those people and we avoided a tragedy. It was tremendous.

Excellent.

"The problem is that very dangerous people have very easy access to very dangerous weapons."

So, there's 3 issues there. Address any ONE of the three, and things would get better. Maybe not "job done" better, but better. Take moderate, corrective steps on all three, and we'd be MUCH better off.

1) Dangerous people. How could we take dangerous people out of the equation? Background checks. Licensing. Revoking gun ownership privileges for convicts and people diagnosed with mental health problems.

2) Easy access. What could we do better to sensibly and fairly restrict access to firearms? Well, lets see ... fucking anything stands a better chance of working than the nothing that we're doing now. So again, background checks, licensing, registration. Enforcement of said requirements.

3) Dangerous weapons. I think a legitimate criticism of "the left"s typical stance on gun control is that they might be a bit TOO focused on this one.
There is some core truth to the NRA harping "guns don't kill people, people kill people." If a murderous psycho decides that they want to kill a bunch of people, they can find ways of doing it that don't necessarily require guns.
However, it is also true that easy access to weapons designed for war can escalate the degree of tragedy quickly.

Basically, this one and #2 are a trade-off. Bolt action rifles and shotguns might be OK with fewer restrictions. Semi-automatic? High capacity? Doesn't it make sense at some point to at least be a bit careful about who we allow unfettered access to these things?


Trump's parroting of the NRA plan to put MORE guns in schools would be laugh out loud stupid if it wasn't guaranteed to end in tragedy rather than comedy. I can't fathom how anyone, even the nuttiest of gun nuts, could think that is a good idea. And I'm actually rather pro-gun. But, c'mon ... some limitations and restrictions just make obvious sense.

A car is a much better and more legitimate general-purpose "tool" than a firearm. But improper use is dangerous and potentially deadly, so we take some common sense steps to try to limit that. Want to drive? Get a license. Pass a safety test. Pass physical and medical tests to show that you are capable of controlling the vehicle. Periodically re-test to stay current. And, expect to LOSE your license if you drive irresponsibly (drunk, moving violations, etc.).

I don't think those are unfair requirements to be granted the privilege of a license to drive a motor vehicle. To me anybody that has a proper respect for the utility of a firearm, and also a respect for the damage that improper use of firearms can do, should be in favor of sensible restrictions and limitations placed on the privilege of being allowed to own and use a firearm, just like we accept for cars.

I remember back when this was the worst national tragedy ever broadcast nation wide on live TV.