I think that is precisely the point. It wasn't written for *us*, so why do so many treat it as if it was? It may as well be written in latin, given that to get the "true" meaning you need scholars to provide you with context, to steer you must past imperfect translation and to point out which side of the contradictions to fall on. One might wonder why it is so nebulous, and who it serves by being so.

I mean, Christians can't even agree on which day to go to Church. Not sure why I'd pay too much credence when there doesn't seem to be much consensus on what The Word actually is.

What are you talking about? The people who argued that tobacco was safe are the exact same people that now argue climate change isn't real, isn't caused by humans. They are in the small minority of scientists that say it isn't happening, and they can all be ignored as they aren't climate scientists. When it comes to discussions on climate, you only pay attention to what research comes from those who's job it is to study it. If you had 90 brain surgeons saying to remove a tumor from your brain, but a podiatrist said, don't worry, you wouldn't listen to the podiatrist. Science is the same. Now among those climate scientists you have a 97% consensus that the primary cause in the uptick (uptick being a keyword, as it is not from baseline, but up from the expected natural rise, and that uptick is HUGE) in the undeniable warming of the planet, is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. There is no denying that climate change is real, there's no denying it is primarily caused by humans, there's no denying it will have a huge impact on billions of people. It is the idiot who doesn't believe that it is real.

Now I'd agree that some of the comments may seem extreme, and said suggestions may not be the best. That is an argument best left for a show like Utopia, a rather great show that sadly didn't make it to a second season. However, there a billions of lives at risk if we don't act soon on halting climate change. Perhaps not billions of lives conservatives care about, as they are poor, third and second world lives, but lives none the less. Droughts will get worse, deserts will expand, hurricanes will increase, tornadoes will increase, hotter hots, and colder colds, there are a ton of changes coming that will make it harder on the poorest of people, people who can't adapt as quickly as the top few percent in the US.

Should people have concern about wars, and the conservative powers that be that love them? Yes, and those issues have been raised by many scientists, especially the big name ones who appear on TV. However, you can't ignore the wars that will start if we don't fight climate change either. Resources will become scarce, and this will cause conflicts that may eventually embroil the US, a concern that the US military has over climate change... this may be why conservatives ignore it, because nothing makes conservatives more happy than murdering people via war. You want to stop war, then stooping climate change has to be a huge priority.

Despite the wars, we are still at the most peaceful time in all history. Yes, we need to do more. Moving off fossil fuels alone would stop a lot of the wars, as that's why the US has an interest in the region. If we could stop giving a fuck about oil, and the US oil market, then we'd have less reason to pick a side on which form of Islam is best for US interests... which of course is why the US was targeted in the first place (that, and our unwavering support of Israel's illegal actions).

Also, it's not like anyone has said climate change should be our only concern. As I already said, all the wars has been brought up many times, as has the conservatives love of giving weapons to those most responsible for the 9/11 attacks, while blaming others for stuff they never did. And, as I've said, those concerns have been repeated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and others who appear on TV, and are well known with the public. Other issues that many scientists in the public eye have been brought up beyond wars: the potential for global pandemics; the idiots not getting vaccinations for their children, for unfounded fears that were proven false; the need for clean drinking water in poor regions; the lack of concern for real science education, and many many other subjects are brought to the public's attention via their social channels, books, talks, or other means. When they are on TV, that is the subject the media pretends there's a debate about though, so if the media at large is all that one pays attention to, then yes, that would seem to be the only subject of concern. The TLDR of this is that they have brought up many concerns beyond just climate change, blame the media for not spreading their other concerns.

Agree on the "SLAMS" title, it still irks me every time I see one.

At this point though, the general consensus is that Russia did have direct involvement in a campaign to influence the US election. The NSA, FBI, and CIA all have confirmed as such. The investigation is is to determine the extent of the influence.

What kind of balance are you speaking of? For the sake of argument, I'll assume that you mean spending somewhat equal time and effort on different sides of an argument.

That kind of balance can be expected from a news outlet. Many of them, especially American ones, overcook is massively by refusing to make judgements on the validity of opposing arguments. If argument A is backed by empirical evidence and argument B is smoke and mirrors, argument B should receive ridicule, not the same kind of respect that A receives.

Now, applying this kind of balance to individuals strikes me as wierd. They are not obliged to give a balanced view: they are obliged, as journalists, to present facts, and offer interpretations. The issues we're talking about here are not disputes between neighbours. We are talking about the war on terror, macroeconomics, propaganda, things of the utmost importance. And the media is doing a woeful job at presenting any dissenting view.

Thing is, you can get the major consensus narrative from countless news outlets out there. Want to here about the supposed benefits of multinational trade agreements? The NYT and the WaPo have dozens upon dozens of articles with praise of TTIP and TPP. If, however, you would like to hear about the consequences of previous trade agreements, or just some hard math on the numbers they like to throw in there, you won't find any. You'll have to go to Dean Baker at the CEPR, to Yves Smith at NakedCapitalism, you'll read Rick Wolff's take on it.

These people do everything in their power to restore the balance that the media drowned in buckets of party-line puff pieces. People recognise RT for propaganda, but somehow think propaganda stops when ownership is private.

Try to find proper articles about the global assassination program (drone warfare) and its effect on sovereign people abroad -- won't find anything in the media, you'll have to go to Jeremy Scahill.

Try to find proper articles about the desolation brought to communities in the developed world by (the current form of) capitalism, the epidemic of loniliness, the breaking apart of the social fabric, the monetarisation of every aspect of life -- silence. What about the slavery-like conditions it creates through indebtedness? The absurd inequality? Nothing.

What about the massive atrocities in Jemen? There was plenty about the atrocities committed by Russia in Syria, but when Saudis use US weapons to destroy an entire country, mum's word.

There is no balance in the media. They are the gatekeepers of knowledge, and anything outside the establishment's agreed upon consensus is ignored, marginalised, ridiculed, or straight up demonized.

CJ Hopkins had a great piece at Counterpunch the other day, titled Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works. He puts it more succinctly than I ever could. Reality doesn't matter, not for the mainstream media. The narrative matters.

And that's why I listen to dissenting voices like Chris Hedges, Abby Martin or Thom Hartmann, even when they are employed by a state propaganda outlet.

That if is a mighty big if.

And the lessons you think they "need to learn" from this election are probably different from the lessons that the professional class (credit to Thomas Frank) thinks the Democrats need to learn. To them, it's not about getting a candidate that has a higher favorability rating than a meteor strike, but to find a candidate that maintains their status in society. They are the winners of "free trade" (see Rigged by Dean Baker) and globalisation, while a vast number of people have been thrown into debt peonage, wage slavery or worse.

Unless the Democratic Party emancipates itself from the donors and the professional class, I don't see them becoming a home to champions of the people. Look at how the DNC conspired with the Clinton campaign to crush the Sanders candidacy -- lots of juicy bits about that in the Podesta emails. Look at Corbyn, who is basically caught up in a civil war within Labour, despite overwhelming support by the party base.

The Third Way (Social-)Democrats have bought into neoliberalism at such a fundamental level that I just cannot see anyone turning them into a vessel for social equality without getting utterly corrupted or even crushed along the way.

The lesson they learn might be to not nominate a member of a dynasty with so much baggage attached to them. Yet even that depends on them actually recognising the baggage in the first place, which they seemed unwilling to during this election cycle. Everything was brushed off.

And then you're still stuck with a representative of a system that doesn't work for a lot of people. The situation of the rust belt is not a result of anything particular to the current or previous candidates, but of the Washington Consensus and the widespread acceptance of neoliberalism as gospel.

Without major outside pressure, I don't see the party changing its ways sufficiently enough to become a representative of the people again. Maybe a Trump presidency is enough to create such movements, maybe not. Occupy was promising, yet crushed by the establishment in bipartisan consensus.

Mamma grizzlies will take on, defeat, and send scurrying away full grown male grizzlies, who, by unanimous consensus fucking scare the shit out of every other animal.

Your arguments are the same kind used by black lung / coal miner or cancer / smoking skeptics. Sure, it seems like when we control for every other factor in longitudinal studies that these factors are strong predictors. But you can't guarantee that all coal miner will get black lung or a smoker will get cancer. So it must be some other lifestyle factor.

Same with climate change. Your right wing blogs / websites argue that just because you can't create a model with perfect certainty, the inexorable trend isn't obvious. No thanks, I'd rather go with a 97% scientific consensus that has convinced most scientific organisations, large multinational companies (without a countervailing interest) and national governments from America to China.

If you're so certain that the science is wrong, why not publish a countervailing journal article? Oh wait, no, you almost certainly don't have training in the field or actual understanding of the science, and are just copy pasting fancy phrases like "decadal scale oscillations" because it makes you sound more credible.

I agree it's fair to argue there is an incentive in science, fudge statistical methods so your findings are more significant and warrant publishing in a scientific journal. But this is an incentive across science, and it hasn't stopped scientific progress as by nature, the process is self correcting when contradictory studies come out especially in a busy area such as climate science. The cost of falsifying studies or having your study contradicted is also significant however.

If you want to talk incentives though, consider the benefits to spreading doubt about climate change by the fossil fuel industry. 7 out of 10 of the largest revenue generating companies in the world are in oil. The industry stands to lose some $30 trillion from climate change in the next 25 years. Paying a PR firm to promote an agenda, paying researchers to dummy up research with a pre-determined anti-climate change conclusion is chump change to them. The cost to them are negligible if they disguise the source of funding sufficiently (e.g. funnel it through a business lobby).

Meanwhile any impropriety on the part of some climate scientists has not shaken the 97% consensus on climate change.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

*facepalm The current scientific consensus places their origin between 231 and 243 million years ago. lol

Mea Culpa Notarobot and @dannym3141 ... I'd clicked on a 'suggested' video link to the right of a watched one because it looked interesting [and it was]. I hadn't seen any of this guys videos before and had no idea this was one of "those" channels. I too shun this type of rip-off. My apologies for not noticing the ruse as I was rushed and didn't look closely at the channel itself. I'd be happy to kill this if that's the consensus ... lemme know

I think perhaps you are more forgiving and willing to give them more of a benefit of a doubt and a pass for not being devout than I. I think, if one claims a book contains the incontrovertible word of god, then ignores many of the clear instructions in that book, they are not really believers but must be just 'fans' of the religion, because if they were true believers, they would follow all the instructions without fail and without excuse, knowing if they don't they'll end up in hell for eternity.

I grew up in Texas....I knew literally thousands who thought (and probably still think) the way I described...and they told me so often as I was the only known atheist in my school, and one of the few in my family. More than once they (the kids, not my family) actually threw the stones, but never hard enough to take me out, to their chagrin.

Agreed, looking for any consensus about religion is a fools errand. ;-)

What? Januari pretty much said the same thing as most others in this thread - that you have to make a real effort to tie this to feminism, which is indicative of the video creator reaching pretty hard. It doesn't seem to me that the thread consensus is that critical perspectives on feminism are bad, but that the video really didn't address feminism, and didn't offer a critical perspective on much of anything. Where are you getting this ad hominem vibe from (except for my comment on 'Douchey McShitbeard' which I will happily own as ad hominem. Just look at that beard)?

Well said @Asmo - and as you say audience makes a difference, if he was shouting this out in the street it would be offensive.

People are allowed to not find the jokes funny, the only contentious issue is whether we're ok with him saying them.

Happily I think the general consensus is that we more or less always have been.

Theoretically, science works great. However, as has already been noted, in the real world in certain fields, the pressure to publish something "substantial" combined with the inability to get grants for certain experiments because they aren't "trendy" right now causes scientists to self-limit the kinds of research they undertake, which is not at all great for increasing human knowledge.

Another problem is the "expert opinion" problem--when someone with little reputation in the field finds something that directly contradicts the "experts" in the field, they often face ridicule. The most famous recent case of this was 2011 Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman, who discovered a new type of crystal structure that was theoretically impossible in 1982 and was roundly criticized and ridiculed for it until a separate group of researchers many years later actually replicated his experiment and realized he had been right all along. This web page lists several more examples of scientists whose breakthrough research was ignored because it didn't match the "expert consensus" of the period.

Finally, in the humanities at least, one of the biggest problems in research that uses a quantitative approach (i.e. statistics) is that researchers apply a statistical method to their data, such a as a t-test, without actually demonstrating that whatever being studied follows a normal distribution (i.e bell curve). Many statistical tests are only accurate if what is being studied is normally distributed, yet I've seen a fair share of papers published in respected journals that apply these tests to objects of study that are quite unlikely to be normally distributed, which makes their claims of being "statistically significant" quite suspect.

There are other statistical methods (non-parametric) that you can use on data that is not normally distributed but generally speaking a test of significance on data taken from a normally distributed pool is going to be more reliable. As is noted in this video, the reason these kinds of mistakes slip through into the peer-reviewed journals is that sometimes the reviewers are not nearly as well-trained in statistical analysis as they are in other methodologies.

(I edited, and some stuff pertains to your reply)

Regarding well regulated, here's the sauce :
http://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm

Keep in mind that the 2nd amendment is 2 part.
1st the motivation for why the rule exists, 2nd the rule.

The rule exists, whether or not the motivation is provided (and it's nice of them to provide context - but not necessary).

Even if regulation was meant in the modern sense, it would not change the fact that the rule does not depend on the motivating factors.

But if you insist on motivational prerequisite, here's Hamilton regarding individual right to bear :

"The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year. "
[etc]

(That last sentence - there's your training requirement, tee hee. Not only that, but that they should assemble people 1-2 times a year to make sure that everyone is armed and equipped. That's more than an individual right to bear, that's an individual requirement to bear. Let's just be happy with it being a right.)


Laws are supposed to be updated by new laws via representative legislators (who may need to be coerced via protest facilitated by freedom of assembly).
Or challenged by juries (i.e. citizens, i.e. members of the state) via jury nullification (i.e. direct state democracy). That's why there are juries. You need direct state involvement so that the legal system can not run amok independent of state sanction. It's not just for some group consensus.
The system was architected to give the state influence, so that government can't run off and act in an independent non-democratic manner.

-scheherazade