I think every kid needs to go through something like that.

I used to shoot pest rabbits around our house (in the country, far from any neighbors) with a BB rifle. Went through safety training, was always very careful, etc. etc.

One day I saw a rabbit hiding under a row of trees between myself and the back side of my house. I never shot towards the house / people / whatever, always away from. But, the rabbit was there. I could have walked around the trees, but the rabbit probably wouldn't have been visible from the other side. Plus, the land sloped up so there was a bit of a hill/grade between me and the house, not to mention the thick tree branches and underbrush. BBs almost never went clean through a rabbit, they'd get lodged in the body.

So, I rationalized all that. Five pumps instead of ten, make sure I hit the rabbit so the BB doesn't go through, plus I'm aiming down into the ground so even if I miss the BB will probably lodge in the ground or hit a tree or brush. Should be fine. Do it.

I pull the trigger, rabbit runs away, and I hear a really loud "thump". The BB had ricocheted off the ground and hit right in the dead center of a huge sliding glass door on the back of the house. Safety glass, so I saw it spread out in little spiderweb patterns from the impact point in the center over the course of about 30 seconds or so, and then all fall into a pile of glass bits.


So of course I run to my dad and said "no, I was totally aiming *away* from the house -- must have had a really unlucky ricochet off of the flagpole or something!" He just smiled and said "really?" and then explained that I'd be doing chores and mowing the lawn to help pay to replace the glass door -- which ended up being about $800.

But you can bet your ass that I never aimed even remotely in the direction of a house, car, or anything else that I didn't want to shoot after that...

I think that the noise being picked up by the recorder makes it sound a lot worse than what it is. In my opinion, he's only really patting next to the baby.

Would it not be fair to say that clapping is a roughly equivalent action? And i see people doing that near babies all the time without someone worrying about affecting the kid's mental state as it grows up, or worrying if the kid perceives the clapping of hands as a threat or worry.

If babies are too young to understand, then they may misunderstand clapping? Or alternatively how are they to understand the waving of someone's hand nearby to be aggressive? Especially given that it appears to be a comfortable family unit.

Most importantly, can we please consider that the baby was slapping its own leg? Perhaps one day the baby slapped its hand about, the father did the same thing, and the baby got enjoyment out of it? It slaps its hand about again at the end too. We don't know, we can't know, and it's very unfair to make so many casual assumptions - not just about his actions, but about what is normal for different people.

I'm concerned about the amount of assumptions being made in chastising this man. Especially when drawing a parallel to an anecdote about someone "growing up skittish" because of "teasing". Correlation, not necessarily causation.. and again, what evidence is this of teasing, and how is it fair to speculatively compare it to something stated so vaguely?

I'm sorry to be combative about it, but i feel this is a huge leap of imagination based on 30 seconds of video. A great many of us (if not all) could be made to look all kinds of contrary ways based on 30 second snippets, and it's an indelible brush that he's being hurriedly tarred with. I stand to be corrected, but i don't see any signs of distress either from the baby or the person recording, and the baby looks otherwise healthy and well provisioned. It was not placed in that seating with those accoutrements without care and attention. I think more harm than good can come of judging things like this, considering the subtlety of most *actual* abusers.

Only fake plant

Plastic bowl, no soil, just some gravel to make noise

Leaves on plant didn't move when cat supposedly brushed by it.

Plastic bowl didn't fall far enough to really hurt that bad.

He never really did anything that awful to the cat. Grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and pushed with his foot rather than kicked it.

Fake. Funny, but fake.

Or you could just eat first then brush your teeth. Didn't your dentist tell you to brush your teeth after eating?

In my experience, it's usually the adhesive that goes rather than the tooth, but I have caps rather than implants and one did crack once. Since it costs me about $1000 to get a cap replaced, I'd say anything that makes them stronger is worth paying for. Anyways, the moral of the story is brush your teeth at least twice a day and get hit by car at most zero times a day.

Ask the engineers whether religion influenced their lives or not - you don't speak for them.

"Religion" doesn't claim anything (it's not an entity). People who have religious beliefs sometimes have. I've never seen it claimed except in movies. Perhaps you live in an area where it is often claimed (and I feel sorry for you if that is the case). Either way - don't paint religious people the world over with the same brush because of your limited experience (note: everyone has limited experience one way or another - it's just the way it is).

Science doesn't do anything by itself. People use the scientific method to achieve things. In a device like this, it is a biomedical engineer doing most of the work. Funnily enough this happens to be my field (I moved over to it from health science a few years back - just a few years study left....).

Meanwhile, religious people built much of what you enjoy today which utilises the scientific method as a starting point.

Your idea of religion, while sometimes true in a very limited sense, is maligned and doesn't correspond with anything but the current anti-religion zeitgeist. Which is a pity because you seem like a smart person and could do much good for other people (and in general hating on people doesn't achieve that). Perhaps in time you'll reconsider people with religious beliefs in a better light.

When he came upon him in the brush I expected the ram to be taking liberties with the bag.

Don't be too sure. I once saw a mature bald eagle chased off by a cat. The eagle was low in a tree and suddenly this cat charged it from a nearby brush, hissing, back up and claws swinging. The eagle took off in complete panic.
Pound for pound few animals can match a cat for sheer ferocity. There are youtube vids of them taking on alligators, cobras, bears... There are even some vids of cats stalking hawks and even though the hawks down bluff easily, they are almost always the ones to exit first.

Sam Harris is sharp as ever. Cenk loses damn near every point. I can genuinely not see how anyone can think Cenk "won" this debate.

@enoch I must say that I'm disappointed if that's what you're walking away with from this clip. Cenk seems to misunderstand most of what Harris is trying to say, and when he explains further Cenk brushes it off and changes the subject in, to use the wording from the video, a scatter shot way. Grabbing parallels or examples from seemingly random and unrelated ways. It feels like Harris is fighting an uphill battle which is tiring him, so there's a lot of repetitions to try and hammer the points home. Sadly they seem to fall on deaf ears.

I don't see any arrogance in the video, granted I'm missing the last 30 minutes or so.

You're right about one thing, I definitely did close my mind more to those idiots.

I like how they brush "anecdotal evidence" off as some cop out answer but then in their bio they claim they're promoters of "good science".

I suppose what the random mum attributes the death of her child must be taken as credible. The rest is irrelevant because the stupid in the first few paragraphs invalidates me taking seriously the rest of the content.

This is absolutely 100% not possible at this time. Not in this format at least. I fly quads. I manufacture quads on a mass production basis. If this was a single technological step away from where we are currently, then maybe it could happen, but this is at least 5 technologies that do not currently exist or are in very early development. Just to start out with having a flexible frame that can support flight is quite a concept. Don't even get me started on the wrist watch size. The smallest quads out there measure about 2" square using 5mm brushed motors, and a 100MAh lipo battery. The best flight time you can get with it is about 5-7 minutes and takes about 15 minutes to charge(from a USB port). that doesn't leave anything for powering a camera, or GPS.
Anyways, the technology doesn't exist to make this thing close to feasible. Closest thing like this on the market right now is this:
https://www.airdog.com/

I'm only about 9 minutes in, but I don't agree with how Cenk took Maher and Harris' comments...

He said that Maher (and Harris) are suggesting that ALL Muslims hold the radical, fundamentalist beliefs. But I didn't interpret Maher's statement that way, and whether you do or not they both later suggest that a significant portion, sometimes even a majority in some countries, are the ones that hold those radical beliefs. A significant portion or "sometimes" a majority is NOT all.

I don't take that as painting ALL Muslims with the same brush, and I don't believe that either Harris or Maher intended it that way. They are, however, suggesting that if Islam is promoting these radical ideas such that they are present at (much) higher rates in Muslims than in other people... Well, maybe there is something wrong with Islam.

Cenk's argument about fundie Christians believing in the rapture is a good one. Christians believe that crazy messed up shit at a higher rate than other people of the world, so... Well, maybe something is wrong with Christianity. True.

BUT, Harris saying that Islam is "the mother lode of bad ideas" is still not necessarily meant in a racist/bigoted way (I believe it is not); OK, yes, the rapture is pretty fucked up, and people that buy into it wholeheartedly are capable of some causing a lot of fucked up damage. But I think that Harris would argue that Islam has MORE stuff like that than Christianity (death to those that leave the religion, homosexual hate, violence as a solution to many many "offences" against the religion, etc. etc.), and that unfortunately a greater percentage of Muslims buy into that extreme/damaging stuff than the percentage of Christians that buy into their extreme/damaging stuff.

I don't know that I fully agree with Harris on that point -- watch Fox News polls and you'll see that a LOT of people do unfortunately buy in to a lot of that way -out-there right-wing fundie nonsense. But, I think that Harris and Maher are correct to suggest that the best way to combat that stuff is to bring it out into the open and openly and logically criticize it for the dangerous nonsense that it is.

So, I may be jumping the gun by posting before watching the whole clip here, but I really feel like Cenk is misinterpreting what Maher and Harris were going for.

All I see is Affleck almost instantly demonstrating what Harris is talking about. Dismissive, sneering, disgusted that the topic is even brought up, and determined not to hear it, only responding with sarcastic nonsense. Liberal PC police in overdrive, using his own broad brush after claiming its use by the other side.

Affleck had been hyper\manic throughout the episode already.

What is Islam? Who or what are Muslims?

It seems every single debate over whether Islam is a religion of peace or of violence comes down to this same argument over who or what defines those terms and there is never an agreement. Indeed, much of the conflict in the middle east is due to followers of Islam arguing over who's particular interpretation is correct. Meanwhile in the western world religion is something that, as the late Hitchens put it, we take "a la carte". It seems you can no more describe a person by revealing their particular faith than you could describe what food you had last night by giving somebody the whole menu to the restaurant. You might ascertain that it was perhaps Thai food... but little else.

Still though, when we go the texts we do find quite unequivocally immoral preachings. I think the religious really have to find an answer for this. We aren't buying the alternate interpretations or the lost in translation theories. When you describe yourself as a Muslim or as a Christian, or as any other faith, it seems to me you don't really have much of a right to get upset when we call you on the evil shit in your holy books. You might protest that you are not that "kind" of Christian, but the speed at which you dismiss any given passage is only matched by the speed at which you declare divine truth for another. We understand the vast plurality of beliefs, which is why it baffles us that you subscribe to a particularly narrow set of ideals whilst simultaneously admonishing us for tarring you all with the same brush.