>> ^lantern53:

I think you're over-reacting a bit.
Your comments are easily as offensive as you think this video is.


There is wisdom in that comment lantern. However, the culture is so screwed up I have reason.

First, I am not selling myself and am pretending to be clean. They are.

Second, I know I take the low road here. They do not know they are taking the low road and they do it all for the money.

Third, until you have been threatened with someone taking your children for not trying a product, then I don't think you have a right to judge. You could note that the Doctor in my comment would have had nothing to stand on, but think, his 'medical expertise' against my being Mad Dad. Who would the state pick? And even if it was temporary, I don't really care. The culture is acid, pure and simple acid. These casters contribute to the acid.

Fourth, hypocrisy I have never had much use for--this lady has it in bundles.

Fifth, I am responding to the bullies, not the other way around.

Now, with that said, the worst comment I made was 'Cunt.' I reserve that for only the most hypocritical of people. No one on the Sift has come close to this word. No one in school. A few in politics, and a few in my unit back in the army... But this woman equates buying this doll to directly teaching your teenagers to have sex. She might not have said it straight out, but she said it through implication. I believe John Stewart says it pretty well when he mocks something like, "Well, I'm not saying he's a child molester, but if you wear that shirt?"

So yeah, not overreacting, and I am not worse than these people. I have taken the low road, I admit that freely. Either way, I have taken out the word cunt because I can tone down the hyperbole a bit...

(Also, I never mock anyone first. I think only the lowest, weakest, fragile, dumbest people do that. And I mean--I never mock anyone first.)

Rhetoric employs pathos, ethos, and logos and logos is the weakest length of three when it comes to persuasion.

Just for fun, and at random, you pick the weakest and most ambiguous quote..but funnily enough you have haven't helped your case in the least. The quote itself stands as a critique on the poor evidence of the fossil record..and if you read the rest of it carefully, which you clearly haven't, you can see that he is saying that if you boil the entire idea of evolution down to change..the fossil record still doesn't neccsarily bear out the mechanism of natural selection. Nice try though..

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
Just for fun, I picked a random quote out from @<A rel="nofollow" class=profilelink title="member since January 21st, 2011" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry">shinyblurry's collection, and did a quick search on it. Ever tried this, @<A rel="nofollow" class=profilelink title="member since January 21st, 2011" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry">shinyblurry?
@<A rel="nofollow" class=profilelink title="member since January 21st, 2011" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry">shinyblurry quotes Raup:
... by the fossil record and we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much.
The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."
David M. Raup,
Curator of Geology. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology". Field Museum of Natural History. Vol. 50, No. 1, p. 25
That was page 25, lets pick a quote from page 26 of the same paper, shall we?
Now with regard to the fossil record, we certainly see change. If any of us were to be put down in the Cretaceous landscape we would immediately recognize the difference. Some of the plants and animals would be familiar but most would have changed and some of the types would be totally different from those living today. . . This record of change pretty clearly demonstrates that evolution has occurred if we define evolution simply as change; but it does not tell us how this change too place, and that is really the question. If we allow that natural selection works, as we almost have to do, the fossil record doesn't tell us whether it was responsible for 90 percent of the change we see or 9 percent, or .9 percent.

That had to be the weakest protest I've ever seen. It was like being struck with a cotton ball. "Thank you?" "Thank you?!!!!!!!!!!"

I'm not sure you guys are being fair. My guess is that most of you are using your personal data in the way they describe. So instead of having a secure repository for it, you've sprinkled it all over the internet with online shopping, banking, or what have you. I mean, how many companies' websites do you think you've trusted with your credit-card number alone? Even if you haven't, it doesn't mean that most internet users don't.

I agree, a central repository like that would have to be extremely secure, as would the credentials they hand out. After things like the epsilon hack, it's hard to trust that is possible. However, the alternative doesn't exactly seem any more secure. Besides, the system is opt-in. Feel free to continue doing whatever you usually do and trust.

When all you need to worry about is the weakest link, I'd rather have fewer links. Also, as the video explains, this wouldn't necessarily be implemented by government alone. This will most likely be implemented by all those private companies that know how to do "hardcore IT."

I'm 100% on board with @MaxWilder. @Yogi, and @ghark seem to be falling into the same trap the tea party is falling in. By using your ideological base to hold your party hostage, you make your party less electable with the centrists. Right now, the centrists run this country, and Obama is our CEO.

To paraphrase Obama, "if we were to start from scratch, single-payer is the way to go, but we aren't starting from scratch." I agree, and in fact almost everybody agrees, there is little in this bill to effectively control costs. This bill is more about the moral imperative, not the financial one. It makes healthcare obtainable for more people, and it ensures that the people paying for coverage receive it. That is, it focuses more on the "quality and availability of care" problem, than the "cost of care" problem.

There is a very good reason for this. The cost issue is trickier to deal with.

On one hand you have the single payer direction. How do you do that? Presumably you just start offering medicare for everybody, which in effect means raising taxes substantially to pay for it. Remember, we just got out of a recession. Politically, nobody can stomach more taxes. Granted, in theory, everyone should receive a commensurate pay raise for the insurance they were previously receiving. If you thought that was going to happen... well... I think I've got a bridge that can get over that ocean for you...

On the other hand, you have the public option. In effect, that's making medicare optional for everyone. Well, if you talk to anyone in the medical industry, they'll tell you that medicare under-compensates. They don't cover the cost of care, and doctors are forced to subsidize that care by over charging patients with private insurance. Many doctors stop accepting medicare for exactly this reason. This puts you in a pickle. You can either A) force doctors to accept medicare, or B) reduce the availability of care to medicare subscribers. Of course, this is a false choice. Option A causes doctors to operate at a loss, which discourages entry into the medical profession more generally, and results in consequence B. Government price controls result in supply-demand imbalances. This is well documented.

If you really want to control costs, the best (maybe only) way is to lower the barriers to entry to the medical profession. Becoming a doctor should be a less costly endeavor, and doctors shouldn't be the only ones providing care. Nurses and technicians can do much of what is currently on the doctor's plate. Routine prescription renewals, diagnoses of common illnesses, and basic preventative tests could all be handled by people that didn't spend ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars becoming a practicing doctor. Also, the creation of medical schools should be heavily subsidized. If you increase the number of care providers, the costs will come down.

The other aspects of costs are lawsuits, and medical technology (e.g. pharma, medtronic, etc). Dealing with lawsuits is hard, but one way to do it is to push liability to the people actually providing the care (like those nurses and techs, not the deep pockets), and make sure that the person getting the care understands the risks involved and signs waivers. That is where the dems are weakest because of their close ties to the ABA. With medical technology, we've got bigger problems that really have to do with overhauling our deeply flawed system of intellectual property in this country (and protectionist tendencies surrounding it). I agree, it's ridiculous that titanium screws cost 8k just because they go in your spine, or that 10 cents worth of pills can cost $600, but dealing with that is another whole TL;DR.

>> ^sanderbos:

Can someone speak to the validity of this video? I am amazed by it, but don't understand it.
I never heard the ground would keep moving after a quake completed (but living in the Netherlands means I know nothing of earth-quakes)? I also wouldn't think that with the amazing forces at work below the surface, on the surface it would manifest at points where one kind of man made street would meet another kind of man made street (why is the movement among the seams of the pavement, instead of just a new crack at a random point in the street)?


Because the seams are the weakest parts. I haven't seen it firsthand, but there are other videos out there of the same phenomena. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the video was taken on the Tokyo Bay Landfill.

That's all well and good, @Yogi, but it can't be done overnight. In the meantime, kids are still killing themselves. This "It Gets Better" campaign is at -least- as important as any gay rights campaign I've ever heard of.

And frankly, publicizing these efforts to help the youngest and weakest victims of hatred may well be the most effective means of making things better. Even most bigots don't actually want kids dieing...driving home the fact that they are, and -why- they are, can't help but make some of the hateful reconsider.

Why not ? Since when was the dictionary sacred text ?

Seriously, pick another premise; the 'argument from dictionary sanctity' is easily the weakest and stupidest.

>> ^bcglorf:

Oh, right. The existing definition of marriage meaning a union between a man and a woman. Changing definitions is NOT a right in my book, sorry.


I wouldn't call it a "right" either -- I would say that's just the way language works. The definitions of words change all the time; it's why dictionaries have new editions every year and why words are added and removed from them. As Aniatario pointed out, the definition of marriage was changed very recently (in 1967) to allow interracial marriage, so there certainly isn't anything inherently untouchable about it. As such, "preserving the definition" is probably the single *weakest* argument against gay marriage.

>> ^bcglorf:

I'll go for even more down votes here by noting my belief that one's sexual behavior is a choice, not a genetic predisposition. Flame me all you want, but if you can explain to me where I'm being illogical or prejudiced in any of this I'd like to hear it.


So when did you choose to be heterosexual?

"Alex, I'll take your mamma for $400"

I was thinking that category was the weakest until that point.

Did he just equate sending a picture of your penis with supporting the political right? Jesus, is there an award for the weakest political point of the year? This has to be up there.

A government that presumes to instruct its citizens on the depth of the holes they dig at the beach is showing an absolute disregard and contempt for the humanity of the people it claims to represent. The fact is every country in the world is a police state, save the few with the weakest governments, which nevertheless aspire to the same condition. All of our popular political models are shaped around an immutable core of fascism, democracy most of all, cannot be redeemed and ought to be discarded.

He's been doing this bit for at least 2 years now. Not old enough?

If anything, I'm disappointed to see him still doing the same bit. He usually doesn't use material for very long.

>> ^NinjaInHeat:

That was the weakest performance I've ever seen Louis give... his older stuff kills me though

My performance doing what? comedy? I never claimed I was a comedian...
These "who are you to criticize, you're not half as good as him, spoiled brat" replies are elementary school material. He's a performer, I felt his performance wasn't good, I said so, kill me.

>> ^rottenseed:

>> ^NinjaInHeat:
I may be spoiled, and white, doesn't change the fact that was a weak performance

Funny how his weakest performance is by far better than your best performance could ever be. I do agree though, I've seen better, but this was still great.