There is a bunch of controversy up here in Alaska right now because it's now legal to bait grizzly bears to stations and then shoot them. It might be fun to set up bait stations with pools instead, like a bear spa kind of idea.

Glad I'm not the only one surprised by that surprising thought (which felt a lot like troll bait). It's not stand-up comedy where a comedian should be ripped to shreds for stealing someone else's material. If every funny video could only be funny with a totally original thought there wouldn't be many funny videos at all.

And I totally found a lot of humor in it personally on both sides of the equation that relate to me (Westerner) and my wife (Easterner).

According to Herodotus, the way to catch a crocodile is this. First you bait a hook with pork and float it in the water. Then you get a live pig and beat it with sticks. The pig's squealing will attract the crocodile, which will gulp down the pork as an appetiser. Then you simply haul it onto land, slap mud in its eyes to disable it and it's easily enough dispatched.

Glad to see the rhetoric of victimhood is "alive and well" among the elites in their treatment of minorities.

I doubt Ms. Obama recognizes the irony of her speech that uses the very type of race-baiting that the founder of Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington, railed against. Even back then, a former slave could see how such instigation such as the kind displayed here results in little more than sewing the seeds of discord in the black community. So much for "higher education." It's too bad Michelle wasn't booed off the stage, protested, or that the students didn't walk out on this self-serving, victimizing tripe.

I came back when I saw @speechless's comment. She is exactly right. Ignore does not work. It is a poor substitute for moderation.

Ignoring only works if everyone does it...and possibly not even then. It only takes one person to take the bait to make a troll thrive. If everyone actually did ignore, then it's no different from booting the troublemaker so quit beating around the bush and just boot the troublemaker. One method shifts the burden on the community members who many have given up after seeing how ineffectual ignore is and left, the other method shifts the burden where it should be, on those who run the site.

This site has been going downhill for a long while now because problem members have not been kicked out. It has been noted that the #1 video now only requires 40-ish upvotes where in years past it needed over double that.

I think I even recall @lucky760 voicing his concerns about the continued existence of this site in Sift Talk a while back.

All it takes is a short glance at comment histories to see who is here to contribute to the community and who is here only to incite and rile up and do not contribute to civilized discourse. Most people who read this will know who I am referring to. Dissenting opinions are still required to back their points up. Simply dissent by itself doesn't make the viewpoint valid or else you've just lowered yourself to the level of youtube comments, at a minimum, ad hom attacks and the bigger more well known logical fallacies should not be tolerated.

A good community requires moderation. All the strong forum communities out there depend on moderation to lay down the law on a regular basis...not just when one feels like showing up on the site once every month or so.

You want to see racism still in full force, check out the difference in punishment between usage of crack cocaine vs powder cocaine and the work of Prof Carl Hart on how they are basically the same thing...

Drug addiction has been proven to be exacerbated by poor socio economic conditions.

Drug punishment is more punitive for black people.

More black people live in poor socioeconomic circumstances.

To try and rise above that, a decent portion turn to crime. Surprise surprise, you're dirt poor with no job opportunity so you run with the gang.

Meanwhile, the republican party works as hard as possible to keep socialist policy (at least, socialist policy that helps black people, you can keep farm subsidies and corp bailouts to the whites) a demonised concept that might actually help reform these areas.

Fix the inequality, fix the socio economic problems, job discrimination etc, you fix most of the drug and crime problems. Less crime = less spending on cops, less spending on healthcare, less spending on incarceration etc = more money for more social inequality fixing...

Amazing right?

And yeah Genji, Lantern and co are bigots and racists (who will play the "oh I'm being ad hom'ed" card when you realistically describe them) who go out of their way to bait people. Keep giving them shit, they don't deserve (and probably wouldn't comprehend or even condescend to rationally respond to) legitimate discourse.

It's sad but the best thing to hope for imo is generational change, eventually Lantern and co. will be the last fossils hanging on to an era we should move on from. Then they'll die and the world will be a better place... ; )

So basically, his entire first video was nothing but a big click-bait headline. Cherry-picked claims to make himself seem really special, regardless of whether they were true or not.

@lantern53

What is your opinion of the way in which the officer handled this situation?

I'm not attempting to bait you into an argument.

Sincerely would like to know your opinion.

Have you ever acted or seen fellow officers act this way?

@dannym3141

It just felt like a bait and switch. They feed you in with in fact very plausible concepts of time dilation and black holes as we best know it, then hit you with a deux ex machinima so implausible that it makes my brain hurt.

I mean, we're meant to believe that future humans, in order to effect their continued existence create an eloborate, highly risky and convoluted system like this 'tesseract library' thing, with the completely unfounded apparent knowledge that Mcconaughey's character will both willingly jump into it and somehow know how to use it to communicate with his daughter, who will pick up on highly cryptic and unlikely signals, and know how to interpret them?

And then Mcconaughey's character also gets saved. Obviously. Why not just convey the information in a far more direct way? And by the way, I will say that the argument that there is a paradox (future humans save themselves in the past) that the video makes is not strictly true given Hathaway's team survives and it's plausible that while Earth perishes, their team eventually redevelops human society.

To me the way that the story suddenly becomes ridiculous at the end when the first half is so rooted in real actual science makes it pretty clear what happened. Some producer decided to overule the script writers and insert in an ending that is happy, sees the characters reunited lest they offend the crucial female demographic.

Yep, I understand and agree with your comment.

I think part of the problem is that people aren't going to the source for their information regarding the outcomes of studies, etc. I think many people see click-bait and end up getting linked to sites that seem legit but almost invariably tout homeopathic remedies, have a "flu beating" supplement or book to sell you or harbour some other ulterior agenda. These sites often quote studies but fail to provide citations.

I'd further argue that since many people have a distrust of corporations/government and most have an instinct to protect themselves and their children, there is a tendency towards confirmation bias when they are doing their research.

With that said, we still need to be aware that new information from studies is surfacing all the time and questions about safety or efficacy should not be ignored.

This is so bang on in every way. I can think of a few occasions that it might be worthwhile - for example when serious discussions are going on it'd be nice to be able to post figures (graphs, plots) from literature, but that's only ever happened to me once and to be honest it might even be more beneficial to the discussion if people have to be invested to the degree of opening other links and skimming to relevant bits.

The memes would be a plague. I've no problem with memes, or even using memes to get a point across. But the kind of ridiculous crap that sits in top rated comments on facebook would just kill any desire i have for conversation. They're click-bait, so anyone can instantly take a like or dislike to it because you can take it on different levels - ironic, satirical, or just flat out face value. So a harmless joke could turn into something other people see as abhorrent, perhaps even forever there with 15 comment votes, under their own video and nothing they can do about it.

We can link memes. People just have to click first - and that's a really introductory level of commitment to reading a comment i think i snobbishly encourage.

LOOK! Another cry of racism from someone who has never actually encountered true racism or would even know how to identify 'racism' should they actually ever encounter it! Can you say, "duped by an overdose of mass-media histrionics?" That's right consumers of mass-media, take the race-bait and feed your own delusions!

Hey, this is click-baiting^^

I'm at the point where anything that begins with a number can go fuck itself.

Click bait "listicles" need to die. Click here to see 10 reasons why. The tenth one will shock you!

Show me some proof that it was a retired cop singing this song. Otherwise, Newtboy, you are just as skewed as Al Sharpton or any other race-baiting lowlife. Nowhere on the youtube description does it state that it is a retired cop, only that some retired cops may have been in the audience.