I'm just going to go through this point for point.

There is no gulf between the result, there is no gulf for the family of the victim. It doesn't matter if he's dead, there is no going back from that.

Argument from consequences. As sad as the result is, that isn't on the police.

If you have ever been choked you would know that you can't help yourself but resist. Your body spasm, it's trying to get air and you'll do everything you can to survive. What this tactic does is insure that a person will fight back so you can keep harming that person.

That is simply untrue, and I can tell you that from experience (10 years of martial arts and been in a few fights in my time). If you're getting choked, you stop resisting, because you've already lost and you're just making it worse.

The police are absolutely in the wrong, this man is not a danger to anyone, even himself. They either talk him down, or use non lethal means to bring him under control. If they can't do that they leave him be, and if they need to follow him until they get backup. There is no reason to immediately attack him, it just makes this worse.

Again, we have no idea why the police are arresting this guy, because the video doesn't provide any context.

So no it is not unreasonable to call it murder at all. It is by definition a Murder because it is the Unlawful Killing of a Human Being.

Two problems with that:
1: Unlawful. It wasn't unlawful, they were arresting him which they have a legal right to do.
2: You're deliberately leaving out a crucial part of the definition: with malice aforethought. Again, are you saying the cops deliberatly set out to kill him?

They may have the legal right under this Nations laws to murder people with impunity but the laws are wrong.

The use of deadly force by police is governed by laws, and any use of said force results in an investigation. In fact, deadly force "may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others." ( Tennessee v. Garner)

I completely agree that there have been cases of unjustified killing by police where they have escaped sanction (Diallo is the one that springs to mind), but to say that they can "murder people with impunity" is hyperbole and nonsense.

What you are doing is defending them using their Laws. Why would anyone ever accept that? If I could make the laws for myself I would and then I would never be guilty.

Because it's not "their laws". The police enforce the law, they don't make it. The laws are made by elected representatives.

There are huge problems with the justice system in the US (see john Olivers video on prisons for a start) and part of that is the police, but what you're doing is not helping.

It's akin to arguing that we should take action on climate change (a very real problem), because if we don't fairies will go extinct.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/06/16/2035230/humans-not-solely-to-blame-for-passenger-pigeon-extinction

I feel like most if not all of these are rhetorical, and you don't really want answers to your queries, but I'll offer some anyway....
I'm not attacking you, but will attack your position that AGW is a fraud.
I have done the MOST impactful thing one can do to minimize one's footprint, I didn't have children. I also grow most of my own food (but I do still eat meat, mostly chickens), I have solar power and water, and I drive far less than 5K miles per year. All that said, I am still probably contributing to the CO2 rise when all the math is done, but far less than most first worlders, and not at all when I'm gone.
You can't really be asking for a physics class here in the comment section, can you? Put simply, CO2 reflects more heat back towards the earth, trapping it in our 'system', making it hotter. It's not the only gas that does this, but it seems to be the most prevalent. The models prove to be imperfect because most of them don't take everything into account, for instance global dimming is rarely included in the math. While CO2 fluctuates naturally, the amount and rate of change due to human production is faster and greater than seen in nature, exponentially so. That means there's no time to adapt to the new environment and greater rate of species failure than in a natural extinction event.
I'll just point out that these articles still try to claim that warmer temperatures will create better growing conditions for crops, a claim that has already been proven wrong, as the problems with extreme weather and drought far outweigh the minimal benefits. That's enough right there for me to discount them, as is the fact that they come from sites dedicated to 'denying'. I didn't need to read any farther.
I, for one, do read the data and interpret it myself...and I come to the conclusion that most climate scientists are minimizing the issues, not exaggerating them, and that 'deniers' consistently ignore any data that doesn't fit their pre-conceived self-serving result.
It seems odd to me that the same people that want to rely on the slippery slope argument when dealing with social issues can't understand how far we've gone down that slope with our climate and deny there's a slope at all, no matter what the evidence shows.

Looks like it's an old Google Video embed, but those are now extinct. Maybe someone can find a replacement: *dead

I don't think anyone's advocating forced population control here.

I only think that people are advocating that a greater emphasis on family planning be incorporated into your prescription for everyone to "control his own activities and teach his neighbor the virtues of his infinitely sustainable choices."

Doing this too fast would be demographic suicide for a lot of complicated reasons, I don't think anyone is denying that, but a very significant organic reduction over the course of a few centuries would be beneficial for humanity and could be reasonably attained. It's certainly less far-fetched than mass colonization of Mars or Venus in the same timeframe.

And that's an important distinction here. We aren't really concerned about the environment here. We're concerned about what's best for us.

The environment is going to shrug us off and incorporate all our plastic, CO2, and evidence of narrowing biodiversity into a few more strata and continue doing its thing. It has survived mass extinctions before.

It's ridiculous to think that we can even destroy the environment. Our population size and its destructive effects would be reduced to insignificance long before we hit a point of no return and the biosphere's existence is even slightly threatened.

We should be framing the argument in terms of how to achieve an environmental equilibrium in which humanity can live in a comfortable and humane manner.

I think we're a lot closer to a point of no return with regards to achieving that goal.

For my money I'd say that exponential population growth isn't pointing us in that direction, and living - as I do - in a rapidly modernizing "second world" country tells me that bringing all eight billion of us to affluence too quickly poses its own significant dangers.

Let's not forget that this videos two main points are that we are demonstrably in a period of exponential growth, and that exponential growth from the limited perspective of the inside can be deceptive. Points of no return that seem far away are in fact very close.

Hi A10ANIS,

Could you please address the heart of my argument, that the principle of parsimony (occams razor) states that we should consider the theory of a Creator over the multiverse theory? Thanks.

To address some of your points:

Regarding your "fine tuner" argument; Such is the fine tuning of your "creator" that 98% of all life that has existed, is extinct. Which, apart from being incredibly incompetent and wasteful, points logically to random
selection/evolution.

It also points to a global flood which wiped out nearly all life on Earth around 4400 years ago. The speciation which occurred up until that time was lost, but new species have been created since then. The mass extinctions going on today have everything to do with human development and bad stewardship rather than any design flaw.

Also, your "a painting therefore a painter" point is a non-sequitur for if there were a "fine tuner," there would, by your own argument, have to be a creator of the fine tuner and so an inevitable regression.

We as Christians do not believe in created gods which are a delusion by definition; we believe in an eternal God who was not created. The infinite regression stops at the feet of the eternal God who has always existed. This line of reasoning is a problem not for Christians but for those who believe in the multiverse theory, because whatever the mechanism is which generates all of these Universes would be yet another Goldilocks zone, and so precisely finetuned as to be statistically impossible. You may as well posit a Creator at that point. I mean just ask yourself the same questions; what created the multiverse, what created it, etc.

No, Science has thrown off the shackles of myths and gods. Had they not, our lives would be controlled by theocratic dictators and we would still believe earth was the centre of the universe.

Interesting you would say this considering that in its infancy, pretty much all of the important discoveries were made by professing Christians. It was actually the environment of Christian Europe which nurtured science into what it is today.

Another point is, Christians don't believe in myths; Jesus Christ is not a myth, He is a real person who died for our sins and rose from the dead. He told us about who God is, because He was with God and He is God.

We no longer use the god of the gaps argument. We may never know all the answers but, just because we don't, we no longer lazily, ignorantly, insist that; "Hallelujah, God must have done it."

It is not a God of the gaps argument when the theory has greater explanatory power than what is being proposed. When even apparent fine tuning as been observed, which it has, the principle of parsimony would prefer the theory of a Creator to multiple unobserved universes.

Actually, the number of Planets discovered currently stands at over 700 (and counting) Also, they have identified some which are in fact, like ours, in the "comfort zone." Sadly the closest found so far is 21 light years away which, at approx. 147 trillion miles, is at the moment rather a problem.
Regarding your "fine tuner" argument; Such is the fine tuning of your "creator" that 98% of all life that has existed, is extinct. Which, apart from being incredibly incompetent and wasteful, points logically to random
selection/evolution. Also, your "a painting therefore a painter" point is a non-sequitur for if there were a "fine tuner," there would, by your own argument, have to be a creator of the fine tuner and so an inevitable regression. No, Science has thrown off the shackles of myths and gods. Had they not, our lives would be controlled by theocratic dictators and we would still believe earth was the centre of the universe. We no longer use the god of the gaps argument. We may never know all the answers but, just because we don't, we no longer lazily, ignorantly, insist that; "Hallelujah, God must have done it."

People that give a fuck about the true direction of the planet who like to blabber-on ad-naseum about which news corp is their favorite and which one is full of morons, and if you like them well then you must be a moron, or (insert meaningless label here) are the most gullible, the most extremely out-of-touch with what's truly going on. They have let their minds become a sponge for distraction and illusion by the very machine that rapes the planet of human and natural resources for personal gain and consolidation of power.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste on feeding the very machine that enslaves us all.

As a simple example of just how secondary oil would be as a universal commodity you need only to look at who controls the access. If we'd gone the direction of the Bucky Fullers and Teslas that pop-into the grid in every epoch, and shared collectively in a similar mind and vision, people who pick winners and losers would be non-existent or self-aware, and the real criminals on the planet posing as so-called leaders would be raving in asylums or extinct by now.

Why won't the planet use nuclear energy correctly and righteously for example...SAFE power from the atomic components that make up the experiential world?? Because assholes and criminals run the show. Period.

Same with oil. Same with slavery through economic monopoly, same with the mind-control apparatus that force-feeds the gullible their world views based on their insidious, contrived models.

There are way better drugs out there than politics kids......Use your fucking brains?!

Amongst the diversity of extinct australian megafauna is the Propleopus oscillans, a carnivorous kangaroo. Perhaps this one is just reverting to type. Evolution in progress. Take that, creationists!

Fluctuations in the magnetosphere are most likely to disrupt telecommunications, not cause mass extinction from cancer. At least, in the past, magnetic minimums have not correlated with mass extinctions, that I know of. I've been watching that for over a decade, it has not failed as quickly as expected, yet.
You lost me in the second paragraph. "Need" is subjective. Do you mean need to live, need to live well, or need to have anything we want? I agree, we should limit the third and try to limit the second, but some of your examples are required to keep the (over) population alive and somewhat productive. There simply isn't enough energy produced without fossil fuels to produce enough food to feed the planet, and not enough farmable land to grow enough naturally to feed everyone at this point. At least that's how it seems from here.

I'm back Chingalera...I took you off ignore. It didn't seem to work anyway.
And actually yes, I can deny that... you accidentally proved the point that climate change is possibly the MOST important thing to cop to (or deny). Contrary to popular belief, the dinosaurs seem to NOT have gone extinct due to the impact, they were already in MAJOR decline and mostly extinct when it hit. The proof of that is that, in the KT boundary layer, there is not an abundance of dinosaur fossils, they are conspicuously absent. In fact, the fossil records show they had been in decline for centuries (eons?) before the impact and were mostly already gone. Climate study indicates that a climate change was likely happening to them long before the asteroid hit, this was apparently the same thing that caused the first mass extinction as well. I wish more people knew this.
To me, that means that it's not so important if you think climate change IS man driven now, one should think it's happening, it's dangerous, and it's controllable to a point, and we should probably work towards either preparing for it's effects or minimizing them, or both.

I've never caught crabs before, but I hear now with pubic shaving they are going extinct - Just sayin'

@artician

Even if the models for the decline of empires are inexact, poorly sourced or even exaggerated, they are doing so to combat the overwhelming force of the status quo that feeds us a constant stream of comforting, mind-numbing bliss through mass media, mostly delivered though TV news, advertising and cleverly veiled in the actual entertainment that the audience enjoys.

It's hard to mount a comeback against a presupposed cultural truth supported by any form of economic interest. The tobacco industry, for example, mounted powerful misinformation and doubt as scientific evidence slowly leaked out that smoking was harmful. People just don't want to hear that the way they live and what they "know" to be true is going to change and that personal choice is going to have to be limited to some extent.

The same is true for global warming, deforestation, species extinction, pollution, etc., etc. You can resist the "ineffectual mumblings" of Hitchens, Chomsky and the like, but you do so to at your own peril. People like you are the do-do bird in this scenario. People like you are the 2 pack-a-day smoker who thinks they've been smoking for 20 years and feeling fine so why quit now. "Screw the scientists, they're all out to make themselves rich so they concoct these cackamamy experiments to 'prove' they need more research funding." Okay, it's your right to dismiss the advice of people smarter than you.

This video follows the same vein as Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist series (which I suggest you watch or rewatch for shits and giggles.) The idea of consumption tax seems a lot easier for our system to adopt than Joseph's idea of a "Resource-Based Economy." It just sounds more fair that those consuming resources pay back into the system and less airy-fairy than some socialist "to-each as to his need" idea. And let's face it, it's right on a social level. It's just too hard to get there based on our current economic and political structure.

Our wasteful way of life is just unsustainable. I don't think anyone can deny that the ponzi scheme of FIAT money is eventually going to collapse because the balance of wealth is way out of whack AND ONLY GETTING WORSE. And the USA is at the top, and yet owes trillions in funny money that they can only pay back if they stop building missiles and tanks. But I think we all know that when the shit hits the fan, we're going to want to get behind those tanks to ride out the storm of resistance from the 99%. Not the privileged 99% in the west, the 99% of destitute, impoverished poor that build the toys, sew and clothes, glue the plastic Walmart crap, and GROW THE FOOD that we want.to have cheap. We're doing this all on the backs of the "free slaves" in undeveloped countries: Columbia, Bangladesh and on and on.

Search your feelings, Luke. You know it to be true.

Maybe you should understand something better then before declaring the experts in it are wrong and nuclear will render us all extinct.