>> ^hawkinson:
Yes, most of the dead are Hamas militants, and those militants have situated themselves to ensure some level of civilian casualties if they are assaulted, but there are still far more PEOPLE dead today than if Isreal had not started this offensive (like Iraq, but at a far smaller scale).

The thing about this position is that we're too far away from it to really know what it's like.

Most countries don't have the possibility of missiles coming into their cities every day, or have suicide bombers wandering their streets, or feel they require armed guards with machine guns on many street corners. Most countries aren't surrounded by other countries that would very cheerfully completely smear them off the map if they could.

I'm not saying the Israelis are right in this action, and I can't judge its effectiveness either. But I'm not saying they're wrong - they live in a different and threatened environment and think differently because of it. I can't judge their actions because I don't know how I'd react if I lived in their circumstances.

But I can tell you I'd be pretty strongly motivated to do something to minimize or neutralize the threat to my children if I were empowered to, and I don't think I'd care much about the so-called "butcher's bill" if I thought it was an us-or-them scenario.

THAT is why I find these celebrity spokespeople crying into the camera offensive. They're completely biased and this short little clip shows no attempt to think from the other direction, which is what a responsible political entity should do if it's going to raise awareness. Further, they're getting a boatload of attention for doing it. Their hearts might be in the right place, but their minds and their histories aren't best suited to deal with the situation.

"I guess there's bad blood between Affleck and Olbermann."

No, not really. Olbermann liked the skit... never complained about it once.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYbI1zS2Pmk

They talked about the skit for much of the show, but that clip shows the general attitude he had towards it.

short reclip compilations are meaningless. Dont post them thinking they prove the world, they are noise, distracting form the signal, of vids actually doing that. thye dont make McCains camp look good and they dont make Obama's either.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Charlie-Brooker-Reality-TV-Editing

Clips edited like this are meaningless. The full clip showing them in context, thats meaningful. or at least, a bit more so.

>> ^Hive13:
This isn't how it was supposed to end AT ALL...

I didn't mean to say that this clip shows how the story ended, but that it highlights a main theme of the original story, which was then lost when the scene was removed from the film adaptation (where this scene would have appeared at the end). But alas, your suspicions are correct--I haven't actually read the original story. Thanks for the recommendation (Lithic too), I'll try to check it out.

It pretty much goes without saying that movie adaptations are almost always weak compared to the originals. Even one of my favorites, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", is a movie that I like basically as much as the book, but still does not replace the book. The book, for example, is told from the point of view of the mute Indian--a pretty central concept that the movie dispenses of entirely.

Anybody else have a favorite screen adaptation? (poor adaptions are simply too numerous to name...)

I hate how the majority of these video clip shows sub in canned, fake-ass sound effects.

I'm well aware of the Fox News bias and I hate it but to be fair most of these clips show the opinions of contributors or guests and not of the network.

>> ^conan:
that´s propagandistic. i think he still works for the cia, maybe "fake-reasons-for-war marketing", we already know that department for weapons of mass destruction in iraq ;-)


Just because the clip shows fundamentalists and their regimes in a bad light doesn't make it propaganda. Even a majority of Iranian youth view Ayatollah Khomeini with disdain. This clip only talks about the movement Khomeini started, and yes, it is a bloody and despicable movement. That's not propaganda, it's just the way it is.

Yeah. They did the same thing for the who shot Mr. Burns mystery on the Simpsons -- I'm pretty sure they showed all the other versions on a later clip show.

I'm not a scientist...but I do play one on TV.

I do agree that there was some over simplification, however, they have to make things accessible so that some cheezit eating chodle can ingest this, if he/she so happens to veer from watching Nascar for a couple of minutes.

While some things this clip shows may be misleading or oversimplified, the ideas look like feasible concepts to mull over philosophically. I do challenge and welcome absolute refute as to why this is impossible (if there is any). If there is not empirical data that can refute these theories I will toss the whole debate into the same box as I put the "proof of god" arguments: until we know more, we shouldn't treat this idea as something palpable.

dupe, sorry:
http://www.videosift.com/video/clip-showing-FA-18-F-5-and-Mirage-for-those-of-you-who-are-interested-in-jet-fighters

*kill

Though i want to kill myself for saying this but Condi totally made this work in her favor. She owned this shit, keep talking so they dont get to question you further, seem confident in your response and make the the accuser look like an asshole. Again to an outside person who doesnt know all the facts (like majority of the American people) she comes off as knowing exactly what she is talking about and her excuse sounds not only plausible but very likely. Now I dont like saying it because I do think she is full of shit here im just saying out of all the masters of the game this clip shows that she is one of the best.
*Edit* Get a better more aggressive person to ask the questions next time, like Osidianstorm just said he left the whole other half of the point slip buy giving her the opportunity to win this round

no upvote as it's one long teaser with no fact in it.

While they say it has all these optical illusions in it, this clip shows none of them.

*sigh*

Big tease.

OK, I'm not going to spend my night going around and around in my head on this. I'm going to say a few things without composing a nice piece:

1. This is my opinion. No, I don't think my opinion is somehow better than yours, but it's strongly felt, as apparently yours is. I did not say you are a sick fuck. I said I had a hard time reconciling that opinion with that of someone I like. I probably shouldn't have said that. I apologize.

2. There are people of good conscience who believe in aspects of the war in iraq. I've heard very convincing arguments about not abandoning the kurds, for instance. Politics is complex. I have no trouble believing people seeing what I see will come to a different conclusion. If I showed someone a 3 minute clip of war atrocities in some unnamed country, without any other context, I would indeed be apalled that, absent any other context, someone would think that film was valuable. This suicide video was THREE MINUTES alone: very easy to draw conclusions. An entire history with more input than one human could even process: not so easy to make black and white.

3. I did not call anyone a megalomaniacal war criminal. I believe the name calling is all in your corner.

4. There is a lot of evidence that viewing suicide increases suicide probability and I know of no evidence for the contrary. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_and_methodology_of_suicide, just for instance. In any case, this clip does NOT talk about the complexity of this victim's mental health. See the whole movie and things may be different. This short clip shows NONE of that. I see no value in it. What you point out as good points in it require significant information from outside the film.

5. I said I was hasty before about condemning people who liked this clip, and I was. However, you've gone out of your way to make sure you and I are on opposite sides. Sure, I pushed you, though I wasn't speaking to you personally (unlike you who are condemning me personally), and I shouldn't have, but I'm not going to edit my words after the fact, so they have to stay. I find it unlikely that I upset you more than this video upset me, but we are not in the same room, so I can't tell.

6. You can fix this. You can make sure your view triumphs: drum up the votes for this video: there is a much larger population of potential up-voters than down-voters so it should be easy. Get other people to show me how judgemental and out-of-touch I am. Get this video into the sift. I mean, clearly this is a crusade for high quality, meaningful videos. You think it is. I think it isn't. I voted, with my one vote, indicating how I saw it. I opined that I hoped many people would vote it down once, and I explained further the depth of my loathing for it later. You, no doubt others, took it personally. That's fine. I'm done here. I doubt I could say any more that would make it better.

Fun! I think, if I were to level a criticism, perhaps the clip misses out on a beautiful bit of evolution and something that many people misunderstand about it. While each clip shows gradual change in a single figure, that figure actually represents thousands and millions of generations of a species. The driving force of evolution comes from selective pressure through predation, changes in environment, and many other factors affecting survival and reproduction. In these clips, the sharp-eyed viewer might see mountains rising or some such, but it's not really shown to any deep extent. In reality, that kind of thing is what caused the changes - development of legs to walk on the newly formed land, where predators didn't exist, increases in size to allow for better predation on land where the new land animals live, development of leg muscles or standing erect for better types of certain mobility on land to escape said predators...these changes came about not because a single organism simply decided it needed them and grew them, but because many, many generations experienced selection in which the ones without the beginnings of those changes died off gradually.

Anyways, if you think this is cool, go get the NAS's free booklet on evolution.

I don't understand how people can believe in a god and thus be religious, but I don't understand either why anyone would put any effort in trying to convert religious people, to fight against them, even waste the time on being upset about it. Don't even know why anone would vote for this video. It's nothing more than (really bad) propaganda, not better than anything distributed in islamic countries, obviously done by total morons and I don't even care enough to watch the whole clip. That something written thousands of years ago over a course of hundreds of years is contradictory and antiquated does not really surprise, does it? It's like a clip showing that Grimm's fairy tales are *not* realistic.