Believe it or not, I do understand the problem with the "thin blue line" mentality. I'm quite sure I've spoken out about it more than once here on the sift. But I strongly object to painting everyone in any group with a single brush. Hell, I even know some decent Republicans.

Claims that one case, or a hundred cases, prove that there are no good cops are absurd and unsupportable. Just as absurd and unsupportable as those claims made here and there that there are no bad cops.

Well, this fellow is very white, frisbee golf just seems like a very white thing to do, and partly I'm channeling Bill Burr's rant walking throughout Newport as he spouts hyperbolically about white privilege and then there's a motorhome driving through that he refers to as white trash. This fellow definitely isn't white trash, but there's a certain blissful socio-economically absurd trashyness/kitsch to a black and orange painted motorhome driving around with a frisbee golf cage on it, like the world's things are but toys in this man's sway. There's just this feel that pervades the short films, like we're seeing another of the Winkelvoss twins at play. He reminds me of a friend in university who learned to play Mario Tennis on the N64 against himself, each hand with a separate controller.

He's just so absurdly (yet innocently) white, in such a way as to be deserving of light ribbing. There's clearly an ineffable quality that I'm struggling to describe but do you know what I mean, even partly?

It's a valid point, but obviously completely objective and does not validly apply to everyone.

Whilst some people enjoy navigating VideoSift with fiery debate or insulting discourse, for others VideoSift is an escape and a place to mellow out by watching videos and chatting with online friends/acquaintances.

There have been many such people in the past who were great participating members just couldn't stand feeling miserable every time they came here, so they stopped coming.

Instead of weeding out members who want to avoid being provoked while chilling out here and focusing on preserving only members who enjoy or can tolerate aggressive, abrasive, and/or insulting comment-based attacks, the ability to completely ignore someone is a very acceptable compromise.

In real life if someone in your workplace or school or wherever was constantly getting in your face spouting off arguments or attacks and you kept turning around to get away, it would be absurd for your teacher or boss to demand that you listen to what they attacker had to say.

Likewise, it'd be absurd for us here to force members to teach themselves to be unaffected by everyone else, especially considering some people by design are simply incapable of that. It's not selfish and entitled for someone to want to avoid being stressed out and anxious after a hard, stressful day at work when they just want to kick back and mellow on some sift.

Could you explain why you thought my previous post proposed a false dichotomy? It seems sound to me, even after looking at it a second time.

I don't disagree with your analyses of the underlying causes for the current version of the Palestinian conflict. History has shat on them and they're still stuck in it. Although I will nitpick that the tactic of suicide bombing is probably employed on account of specific Islamic beliefs, as relatively few such attacks are carried out by non-Muslims.

The IRA comparison is an interesting one with some meat on it, and I may meander a bit here as I explore my thoughts on it. The Northern Irish conflict, at its core, was not about religion, it was about sovereignty and independence. I don't doubt that both sides attempted to use the bible as a weapon. The very fact that the attempt was unable to create a sect that spread like wildfire across Christendom is a form of evidence that is it less applicable as a weapon. Certainly not proof, but I would count it a point in my favour, not yours.

Note that I'm not saying that there's nothing awful in the Bible, only that it is acknowledged that we don't take most of those parts of it seriously. Any attempt to do so would generate a chorus of condemnation throughout Christian majority countries the world over. Just look at how the we view the Westboro Baptists; they're a farce. Until the Muslim world is willing and able to do the same thing to it's fundamentals and fundamentalists it is not only fair to criticize it, it is important to do so. And when I say criticize 'it' I mean those beliefs that lead to bad shit.

If every terrorist act is predicated on worldly concerns, how do you rationalize the perpetrators of the Charlie hebdo massacre? How do you rationalize the absurd reactions to the shitty anti-Muslim movie that was made? How about the Danish cartoonist incident? The list goes on and on. These are acts that didn't significantly affect the 'injured' parties in any but a religious way. Their responses are explicitly and overtly for religious reasons, while being completely in line with a straightforward and insufficiently fringe interpretation of their religion.

@Payback

Yeah, like RFlagg said, people are communicating him through the text-to-voice thing. In the beginning, they're trying to help him use the lighter by giving him pointers. Once the fire starts, they warn him that another fire has erupted behind him and later on beg for him to call 119 (Japan's emergency line).

I hate to say it, but I was laughing my ass off the whole time. The sheer absurdity of this cute anime-style voice calmly telling him to turn around or dial 119 as the flames continue to grow around him just forced me to laugh out loud.

Kotaku has an article about the incident which includes a Japanese newspaper clipping that says he burned out the 2nd floor of the house and he, his mom, and dad all sustained mild burns trying to put out the fire.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the Japanese newspaper clipping Kotaku provides specifically mentions the 40 year old son was playing with an oil lighter and dropped it in the trash by accident, which is exactly what we see in the video.

This is absurd. Current pollution could wipe out our speices and maybe all the animals... but the planet would survive and could replenish. Cover the place in radiation for 500 million years and its screwed.

I'm not against new forms like the end of the video talks about but sticking the nuke drug into the problem with the hopes that maybe someday we will have a treatment is a stupid crack pipe dream.

How is that in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM "Aggressive"?

Holy shit... he was practically laughing at the absurd question...

I like the original title, "Tom Hardy gets asked about his sexuality for the film Legend and the whole thing is AWKWARD."

Completely factual.

That whole "Matrix" concept makes so much more sense when you consider that the original story was that human brains were used as processors. The whole "body heat for energy" concept is absurd, and derails much of the story's logic.

He acted like a tool, fishing for a reaction in order to make a non toolish point. I think the real take away from this is that we are making unrealistic demands of police officers.

Since 9/11 cops have been at the forefront of institutional paranoia. They're asked to look into people filming public places. And that is what he did. Initially in the most reasonable and civil way anyone could expect. The guy chose to be rude and escalate the situation. Sure it's within his rights, but it's obviously just trolling. Furthermore he's got his hand in his pocket playing with something while wearing an empty holster. I'm not sure when they realized he was wearing the holster, but it begs the question: what has he trying to get them to do?

Either way the right call was made in the end. I'm hoping the officers aren't seriously reprimanded for this, but rather the absurd combination of instituation paranoia, trolling, and gun culture are kept far apart.

Analogies of filming children and the cops attacking him are unnecessarily inflammatory and not really relevant.

That sounds a whole lot like some kind of absurd "Reefer Madness" kind of "thinking."

On what are you basing that "feeling?" Leaving aside that serotonin is involved with mood (and not meaning or motivation) and that LSD's binding to the receptor sites increases not decreases the amount of serotonin available in the synaptic cleft (performing the same effect as any other SSRI like Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac), there is actually no reason why any of the hundreds of successful professionals that I know who have taken LSD multiple times would express such a feeling on the basis of taking LSD.

If anything, your comment reveals a fear of your own mind and, having read your comments, I can't say I blame you.

Greece accumulated debt in a foreign currency (Euro). Had they been using a free-floating currency with Greece as the sovereign issuer, it would have been much less of a problem. But that's a different discussion.

You brought up retirement benefits. These benefits have been a major talking point over here in mercantilistic Germany. Unfortunatly, a lot of inaccuracies crept into the debate over time. A closer look reveals that it's not as black and white as it is made out to be. One point at a time...

The effective retirement age, if we look at OECD stats, is basically the same for men in Greece and Germany. The age of 56 is often thrown around as the expected average retirement age for workers in Greece, but that's only for the totally messed up public sector. The average for the private sector is significantly higher, as the OECD numbers indicate.

Yet the size of retirement benefits is even more controversial. There are, in fact, some very dubious practices going on in Greece, which result in rediculous retirement benefits for a select group of people, even at very young ages. Decades of nepotism, that's what it produces. But even so, pension expenditure as a % of GDP was not significantly higher in Greece before the GFC than in Germany. When Greek GDP collapsed, expenditures as a % increased, naturally. Some have gotten absurd benefits, but the majority got a pittance. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Greece doesn't have a social safety net, unlike Germany. There is no welfare. Many people have to take early retirement at reduced benefits to have any income at all.
So I'll say it's bad in Germany. Last decade's changes to our retirement system have a metric fuckton of people (~40% of workers) heading straight into poverty when they retire. It's social security for them, and nothing else. Still, it's bliss compared to what the plebs in Greece now ended up with.

However, even all those beautiful OECD stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. Germany has a working bureaucracy. Everything is documented. Greece is a mess. Therefore, all comparisons are guesstimates at best.

Finally, as long as the Greek economy produces enough goods and services, it is for them to decide how to distribute their wealth. If they want a lavish retirement system, so be it. Our governments opted to create a true underclass of the working poor, and gutted a retirement system that made it through two world wars unscathed. If German retirees want to bitch about their benefits, it should be aimed squarely at our governments and their intentional deconstruction of our social welfare state.

As he goes on to explain, just like the "Hispanic men are rapists" joke and the "Muslims blow shit up" joke, this joke relies on exaggerating either the facts or our perception of reality. Case in point, Jenner was biologically born a man and decided he felt more like a woman. Now he literally needs to learn how to "act like a woman" because--let's face it--the majority of what we perceive as "feminine" is learned, acculturated behavior (how to dress, how to move, how to talk, etc.).

And yeah, all of those jokes are offensive--but so what? Why are we so worried about being offensive when telling jokes? If you honestly believe that all Hispanic men are racists or all Muslims are terrorists or all transgender individuals are "just acting" then clearly there's a problem. But how is there any harm in joking about these things?

The humor lies in exaggerating to an absurd level facts that are taken out of context (or put into an entirely new context). Every great comedian does this , which is why apparently great comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock don't do college shows anymore.

I'm going to contribute to it just because I believe in the research & science of the compound. I have no idea of how they are going to test it considering they never actually go into any detail. It needs to be studied. It's hilarious that these days the other psychedelics are being studied more intensely than ever by medical firms, Universities etc, all over the world for their positive attributes considering science has come a long way enough and the BULLSHIT stigma that was placed on those substances still remains but has somewhat subsided to a large degree.

As for people that have never experienced this substance - that is 100000% beyond the other psychedelics (probably since it's actually endogenous) - what you can take away from such an absurd idea like this (and even I think it's a pretty ridiculous experiment for a few reasons) is that - oh shit, this stuff is beyond anything that you could imagine and that alone is a reason to research.

I love steampunk! This made me laugh out loud at it's absurdity, especially when he spilled the water [... gotta keep it legal] Hahahaha

The very notion that a right can be granted by society is absurd. Either you have the right, or you don't. Society has nothing to do with it.

The reason sodomites insist on receiving extrinsic, public sympathy and support is because their lifestyle has no intrisic virtue. Every sodomite is by definition an evolutionary dead-end, and that community struggles with suicide and depression far more than the general populace - for a reason. Change is possible, but the world would have them believe they are "born that way and should never change". Horse hockey.