At some point, this amount of disagreement does nothing but push us all down collectively to a level that is enough evidence that none of us are worthy of choosing what is right and good for the collective of the human race, versus what is wrong and should be avoidable.

That says more for those of us who supposedly represent the authority than it does for citizens reacting to these crimes, but it still goes for all of us.

There is so much blindness in this thread on every side, and that does not exclude my own. Ultimately we're all swayed by our personal experiences. The sum of all arguments is nearly impossible to calculate, but it's there.
I don't care much for "law" as it's practiced today, and there is plenty of evidence online to support any orderly or bigoted perspective if you care to weigh it that subjectively, but pertaining to videos such as these, here is what you cannot deny regardless of your position:

Minorities will always have the lesser voice, and be exploited, intentionally or unintentionally, by the authority.

Around the world, at all times, though perhaps more now than the last few decades, the majority of government authority is responding to the fear that has been shown prevalently in media and culture for at least a generation.

The proper solution for all of our kind is a way for authoritative powers to understand that when there is a diplomatic minority large enough to warrant force as a response, force is no longer the appropriate answer. Otherwise, at this point, you have to allow voice to this community or you are a verifiable dictatorship/tyrant/oppressor or despot, and no longer the best representation of your collective people.

In the end, the discussions that all forums ultimately fall into is one that simply tries to snuff the other out. Lantern53 is a a verifiable, uneducated menace, ass, and an example of the ignorance that is readily welcomed by an all-to-eager agency whose present desire is to employ thugs more than representatives of the people.

However we, collectively, need that voice. We need to know who in our society has such widely disparate views in order to regulate and balance our own perspectives. It is healthy to encounter perspectives that are not your own, and it's up to everyone and each individual to temperate our reactions, despite how offensive they might be. In that sense, people such as Lantern, BobKnight, Shiny, Choggie, and all the other "assholes" who've sifted through the sift, possess a little more bravery than most of us. (Or they're trolls, but in communities such as the sift, they're more likely just angry people with a drastically alternate perspective from the majority).

The next time you encounter someone like Lantern, just take their perspective and defeat them with logic and reason. If you don't have the knowledge to do so, research factual evidence to do it. If you cannot find factual evidence to do so, you may well be in the wrong.

I have; everyone has. It just comes down to trying to shout into submission those with different views - or - converting them to an understanding perspective with reason and evidence. It's not a one-side versus the other, either. It must go back and forth to a certain extent, because that is how you reach mutual understanding.

If all else fails, y'know, find out their address and bring a tire-iron.

I think the cops would feel that it is 'us v. the bad guys' versus 'us v. everyone else'.

Much of it depends on where a cop trains. If all the other cops have a kick-ass first, ask questions later attitude, the new people will take up that same attitude.

So again, a lot comes from the top.

Small town cops usually are much easier to get along with, but the big town cops are dealing with more stress, more danger, more bullshit....eventually it gets to EVERYONE.

Which is why I say, walk in their shoes for a while and your attitude will be adjusted.

Number seems to vary where you look and how much is controlled for in the study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#United_States

Getting a bit off topic, but at least here in Australia for lower skilled jobs (say fast food) there is generally standard bonus pay for holidays and overtime standards via unions.

For professional jobs, it's largely factored into wages. People know for example, that investment bankers work weekends and long nights and this factors into their high default wage versus other finance jobs. There's a tacit understanding of the work commitment required for various professions whether it's for men or women.

There are many reasons it might not even be possible to vote in representatives for these people. Gerrymandering, fixed elections, etc. Negligence and apathy are valid, but I doubt they're the primary reasons. And all people are equal, just as all people are fallible.

Cops are just like anyone else, with the exception that they have an institution that will protect them from their personal decisions, such as shooting unarmed, or racially segregated people out of spite. I have more personal experience than I like with white police officers openly practicing racism and physical abuse, when the only minority around is their victim.

You cite how Brown allegedly tried to take the mans gun. He also allegedly did not. Unfortunately it comes down to the eye-witness account versus the officers. In cases like this, I can find 999 instances out of a thousand that reflect police organizations that promote racism and abuse, in a scenario where the minority suspect did everything expected of them in a confrontation, and was still victimized. Having the gall to support the officers in this case, a case where we as the observers have nothing to go on other than heresay, is ignoring decades of historical experience with exactly these scenarios.

Lastly, you're not a boyscout. I'm not a boyscout. Fuck boyscouts; they don't even exist in realistic contexts. I don't give a good god damn fucking shit what he did prior to being murdered. It is so irrelevant it's laughable. In this particular instance where we're judging a man for deserving life or death, it doesn't matter if he skullfucked a litter of puppies and raped the kindly mother of everyone on earth collectively. If the man who shot him had no idea of the crime, as has already been shown he did not, he had absolutely no right to fire on an unarmed man. Even if he *did* know of these crimes: he still has no right to take the mans life.

If Brown tried to grab the mans gun, he failed, and therefore he was still unarmed. We have multiple witness accounts that he was shot while surrendering. At that point, crimes, robberies, past events, whatever: none of that matters, because one man killed another while the latter was no threat. No other argument you can make has any validity.

I doubt it was intentional either but that's not really the point. The things we unconsciously say can often be just as important as the things we consciously, intentionally say. When we're talking about whether or not specific groups of people are acceptable to a broader culture, so much of how people interpret such a discussion is through the lens of their own inculturation and unconscious assumptions.

Take a look at the black community's response to the Ferguson situation on social media. One of the memes that cropped up was a comparison of headlines between stories where a white person commits murder versus when a black person is a murder victim. In the former, the headlines express a sense of disbelief such as "Theatre shooting perpetrator was 'brilliant scientist', says graduate advisor". In the latter case, the headlines tend to imply the victim got what was coming to him or her, i.e. "Shooting victim had history of drug addiction, multiple arrests." Does that mean the news media hates black people and is hopelessly racist? No, of course not. I bet none of the editors who ran those headlines thought for a moment that they were imposing racial biases upon their stories. But, the biases are definitely there -- it's a shock that a white person would kill, but it's expected and probably just that a black person was killed -- and that shapes how other people perceive the affected groups without it even entering their conscious consideration.

In the case of this video, I doubt the comedians in question considered what I've brought up, but again the note on which it ends is definitely one of "if gay people just acted normal then they wouldn't have any problems in society." I find that problematic, whether it was intentional or not.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by eric3579.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Will-it-blend-Large-ship-versus-a-docked-marina

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by shagen454. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

No need to apologize.

I just wanted to get that little bit out there.

There is so much misinformation about the nature of this shite.

I didn't want to put my little comment on the comment stream, because I didn't want to distract from the TOTALLY COOL story you shared.

So I snuck it over here, for those folks who read all comments.

I was sharing my bit for my own purposes, sneaky devil that I am. Sorry you thought I was sending a different message -- I totally DID NOT think that you were saying she deserved it.

I think there is something different for men being sexually harassed than there is for women, since you brought it up.

Speaking from experience, I am -- I keep saying that my first reaction was to slough off the assault against me as funny. It was amazing to watch myself descend into this ... quagmire... of sexual objectification within 15 minutes. To be seen as nothing other than a piece of female meat available for this tiny guy to rub against. To feel so invisible as a person was a double violation. Or something.

Women aren't praised for what we do, mostly -- we are praised for what we look like. And when you look at the variety of men and male body shapes that are presented on TV and in the movies, compared to women -- and the active nature of the men versus the passive nature of women presented -- and this is the toxic soup that all young girls grow up in.... To be reduced like that was just horrifying. I was surprised at my reaction.

Men have their own issues, of course. It is not for nothing that men tend to die sooner than women -- the pressures on them are terrible in their own way and it is literally killing them, in my opinion.

So it doesn't surprise me that you could laugh it off and let it stay laughed off. You are used to seeing yourself as active. While I laughed it off, and then got mired in this crappy sexual objectification that is so toxic.

It's all so ugly.

I'm so proud of your beautiful strong friend. She didn't deserve what happened to her, no woman does, and I know you know that. And dang if she didn't fight back with everything she had. That is how this shite stops. Make the bastards accountable. Right now they aren't.

Great story you told. Really great.

@bareboards2 and ChaosEngine -

I actually spent a fair amount of time thinking about this after watching the video. The conclusion that I came to is that in bareboards2's situation, I agree that probably the "best" response would be make a scene / speak up / shame the guy. For a couple of key reasons:

First, there are two possible goals / longterm objectives to any response here. One, and the most important, is for the woman/person being harassed to get out of the situation as quickly as possible and suffer as little physical or psychological damage as possible. Second, ideally the person doing the harassing/assault ought to be discouraged from behaving the same way in the future.

Calling the assaulter out is probably, in most situations, the best way to optimize both of those outcomes. A physical response like taking the guy down / kicking him in the balls might do an OK job of accomplishing both goals also, but it is probably more risky in general. Also, the specifics of the situation might not play out in favor of it -- it might easily happen with a huge strong dude versus a woman with NO self defense training.

BUT, I also agree with ChaosEngine. Bareboards2, I'm not a psychologist or anything, but it seems like a lot of your regret and lingering bad feelings about your situation come as a result of deciding not to speak up OR respond physically with violence. While I agree that speaking up would probably have been the best response, I'd wager that you'd have felt better if you had socked the creep; or at least incapacitated him enough to fully get out of the situation. And he would (probably) have been less likely to do it again in the future if that had happened; but that is a far lesser concern than your physical and emotional state after the incident.

I guess what I mean to say is that sometimes when we are in a real-life situation, under pressure and caught unprepared, it might be the case that a less-than-ideal solution to the situation might be better than holding back and doing nothing. Maybe.

I hope I don't cause any offense with any of that, I just found this whole comment thread very interesting and find myself agreeing with different aspects of many of the differing opinions.

So the wholesale killing of children is okay depending on the circumstances?

Thousands of rockets which rarely hit anything versus massive bombing of a populated area that results in 80% civilian casualties...how about we agree that both are terrorism--and that Israel is much better at it than Hamas?

@Jerykk

I'll address by paragraph.

(1)

Wait, so I'm confused. Not enough research on my claim yet the death penalty apparently offers guaranteed results despite evidence to the contrary that I suggested?

Firstly I think you might be trying to make a bit of a straw man. I'm not saying that there should be no penalty. Some penalty obviously discourages some crime. But the argument is more over whether harsher sentences and mandatory minimums as this video discusses are helping, which I would argue they are not for the reasons outlined previously.

As for evidence of rehabilitation reducing recidivism, take for example:

http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/12/1/9.refs (see PDF)

Page 1
Finland, Norway and Sweden all have ~50-70 locked up per 100K, among the lowest. US has 716.

Page 2-3
Norway recidivism - 20%
US recidivism - 52%

I await your evidence to the contrary.

(2)

I'm talking per capita. Per capita the US certainly does have the highest among first world countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country

Sort by per capita and find me a developed country higher than the US please.

Russia is not a first-world country (that's actually a Cold War term, more correctly not a a developed country). I'm Russian, I assure you, I would know

Russia's GDP/capita is $14K USD, versus the US's $52K. Not even a close comparison.

(3)

But do criminals proportionalise justice? Like I asked, do you think anything but a small minority (likely white collar criminals) accurately know the likely sentence of a crime before they commit it? If they don't what's the purpose of making them more severe?

Nobody is proposing there be no penalty. Even Scandanavian prisons are a penalty. The question is, does the threat of 30 over 15 years locked up (should they even be able to decipher legal code to know this) actually make a difference? I would argue not, hence the argument for harsher sentences is illogical.

People are generally good at gauging the likelihood of being caught (ie your pirating example) but that's not what I was talking about (the scale of punishment being a deterrent).

(4)

I don't think what you're proposing is practical or logical. No society is going to accept the death penalty as a punishment for speeding. It's an irrelevant argument to make.

Again, why the need for elaborate ideas never before attempted? Why not just adopt a model that has already worked, such as the Scandinavian one? It seems like you're trying to wrap your mind around a solution that fits your preconceived notion of incentives and no government assistance like I suggested in my first post.

(5)

Venezuela is a developing country. Crime is largely a result of economic mismanagement by Chavez leading to joblessness and civil unrest.

There are plenty of countries with which to compare the US with. Obvious choices would be Australia or the UK. Anglo-Saxon countries, similar culture, comparative income/capita. Or really any European country. Your comparison would suggest tp me you're trying to stretch your argument to fit.

Good points, Redsky.

However, there hasn't been nearly enough research on the effects of rehabilitation to claim that it consistently reduces recidivism. You mention Scandinavian countries in particular. How many of those rehabilitated prisoners were guilty of violent crimes? If you want to reduce recidivism, the death penalty will offer guaranteed results.

As for the U.S.'s murder rates, they aren't the highest among first-world countries. Higher than European countries, sure, but Europe is tiny. Russia is more comparable to the size of the U.S. and it has almost double the murder rate. China claims to have a 1.0 but I'd question the reliability of any data provided by that government.

I'm also pretty sure that most criminals recognize the severity of their crimes. If they aren't insane, they'll know that jaywalking will result in a far lesser penalty than murder. What it comes down to is risk versus reward. If breaking the law is the most convenient way of getting what they want and the likelihood of them getting caught is low, they'll break the law. That's rational behavior. It's the reason why people people slow down when they see a cop on the freeway instead of speeding like they would normally do. It's the reason why people won't hesitate to download a pirated movie but would think twice before trying to steal a movie from Best Buy. If someone wants to rob a liquor store and they see a cop inside, they will most likely not rob that particular liquor store. Not all criminals are psychotic murderers. On the contrary, most criminals are perfectly sane and break the law on a regular basis. They just make sure that the risks are low enough so they don't get caught.

Severe penalties mean nothing if they aren't enforced and increasing surveillance increases the likelihood of enforcement. Increasing surveillance wouldn't be cheap but then, rehabilitating criminals isn't cheap either. Getting rid of the prison system entirely and replacing it with efficient executions (nothing overly elaborate like lethal injections) would cut costs dramatically and allow for greatly expanded surveillance and enforcement, in addition to dramatically increasing the risk for any given crime. If the penalty for speeding was death and there were more cops patrolling the roads and freeways, I guarantee 99.9% of drivers would stop speeding. There's no hard data for this, of course, but that's because no country has ever attempted it.

Venezuela currently has over ten times the murder rate of the U.S. It was the first country in the world to abolish the death penalty. Now, the country is riddled with corruption. Laws have no meaning because they are not enforced so criminals do whatever they want without fear of reprisal.

The distinction here is that you're talking about showing compassion, which I'm all for, versus feeling compassionate.

One cannot choose to feel compassion for someone. It either is or it isn't a person's natural reaction. If someone's visceral response to something does not include the feeling of compassion, how could they manipulate themselves into feeling it?

That's like trying to force someone to love you, except it's more complicated because you'd be trying to force yourself to love yourself. (That'd be a form of sexual assault in some municipalities.)

This needed a few more versus.