There's a very big difference between a pistol round and a high velocity rifle round. The rifle could easily penetrate a several typical suburban houses and still kill someone down the block in another house. A pistol (or shotgun or sub machine gun) isn't nearly as likely to do that and is just as effective for killing folks that need killing at close range.

I assume the officer is trained on it and knows that, but if folks start shooting, things tend to go wrong.

I'm very big on religious freedom, but the depths of emotional exploitation, deceit and manipulation of this entire program should be criminal. We recognize other kinds of con jobs and convict for it, this crew should be too.

Religious freedom should start getting cut off when you preach the necessity of giving the speaker your money in exchange for what they will do for you. Giving to a charity that will go on to help others is one thing, it's another to pay money to get someone to promise you their 'blessing', prayers, or even financial rewards that will metaphysically be manifest in return.

When I was 10 I got to meet him very briefly at the Dorval Airport in Montreal. Picture an airport hallway, they are very big to accommodate all the people. Now imagine a man taking up the better part of said hallway. It was awe-inspiring to have shook his hand. Also George the Animal Steel was there and he stuck out his green tongue at my sister and I.

It depends on who the potential winning candidates are. If neither poses an apparent threat to democracy, the US, or the rest of the world, I have no problem with it.

When one candidate is a Trump or worse, I think it is completely irresponsible not to do everything you can to stop that candidate from winning, even if it's an epic nose holding if you really hate the other candidate.

And Trump is that bad. I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton. I trashed her on the email thing. And she doesn't take strong stands on things she absolutely should, like against big banks and what not. But she absolutely would not have emboldened racists and neo-nazis. She would not encourage hatred of the press and opponents to the point of dog whistling potential violence. I know that's a really low bar, but you can't have a functioning democracy without opposition that can feel free to oppose, a media that can resport basic facts without threats and being disbelieved simply because they report info contrary to what the President wants to be true, etc.

This was one of those elections that voting third party was simply not an ethical choice. Trump never hid what he was before he got elected. He was all these things in a very apparent way.

I am a moderate with no allegiance to any party. And I can say voting wise I did everything I could to stop Trump. I voted for the best chance against Trump in the primaries for my state, and I voted for Clinton in the general. I just wish more people did the same, because I think a year from now we are going to realize in a very big way how we really should have done everything we could to have stopped him from becoming president.

I appreciate reading everyone's responses here. It's a very big part of what makes Videosift such a special place.

Here's a link to, imho, a thoughtful and nuanced look at this issue...at least from one side.

A Critique of Politically Correct Language
By Ben O'Neill

http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_16_02_8_oneill.pdf

As good as this game looks, I can't figure out who on earth would pay top dollar just to get teabagged by some Saudi oil baron's son who had the requisite 3 million dollars to get the best stuff..

In all seriousness though - I don't understand how the real money investment is going to be justified in terms of gameplay. If you pay top top money then you expect the game to work, be good fun, and have a big advantage over all the people who can't afford all the good stuff (AKA "pwning newbs" in the parlance of our time). But if they don't keep the newbs playing the game, the game world will be empty, no economy or trade, it'll be a dead game - who wants to keep playing a game where some pay2win kid runs circles round you all day? So how do you keep newbies interested and keep them playing, whilst also still ensuring people who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars will have their huge advantage over everyone else? How will an economy work within that system too?

I feel like it's a recipe for either a dead game, or some seriously pissed off rich people. If the rich people don't mind dropping 100k on a game, will they mind dropping 100k on suing the developers? The frankly ridiculous buy-ins may have given them some very big headaches before the game has even started, in terms of economy and relative strength of the players. Starting to get no man's sky vibes.

Cenk is about to be a very big target of the new authoritarian regime's aspiration to criminalize the free press.

Very good points.

I agree that good firearm regulations should make it harder for suicidal people to get a weapon. Also, I agree that the unanticipated drop in firearm suicides is definite good outcome in Australia.

...But I'm still hesitant to use suicide rates as any sort of primary motivation for new gun control in the US. Statistically tracked, sure. But to me there is a very big difference between using a gun for violent crime against others, and a suicidal person using a gun to off themselves. A difference that needs to be clearly delineated in any statistics shown to promote (or disparage) any sort of gun control legislation.

I think Cenk is getting a little bit overexcited at around the 5:30 mark, when he thinks that these polls show that America is center-left, as opposed to the long-standing belief of Fox News that America is center-right.

What I think they show is that America is much more radically anti-"sleazy politician" than ever before.

Trump has the biggest portion of the republican side of things, because he is clearly NOT a normal politician, and however you feel about him you must admit that he is not an "establishment" kind of figure. Sleazy? Sure. But not "sleazy politician". Cruz doesn't appeal to the republicans that like Trump, because he is closer to being a "sleazy politician".

On the Democrat side of things, it is a similar picture if you just go by opinion polls rather than delegate count. Hillary is another "sleazy politician". Even among Democrat-leaning respondents, a high percentage of people polled prefer straight-shooter NOT establishment-friendly Sanders to Hillary, precisely because of that. Democrats are tired of sleazy politicians too.

To be fair, the Democrat side is less divided, because a lot (possibly most) of the real pro-Sanders people will hold their nose and vote for Hillary over any of the opposition, if she is the nominee, even though they would (greatly) prefer Sanders.

Trump supporters will *never* vote for Cruz, especially now that Colorado and Wyoming just gave all their delegates to Cruz without even bothering to allow their residents to vote. Cruz doesn't actually *have* any supporters -- the GOP is only trying to persuade Republicans to vote for him so they can deny Trump the delegates needed to lock up the nomination and go to a contested convention -- at which point the GOP will have no further need for Cruz and ditch him like a used condom. The few registered Republicans that want Kasich are very likely to NOT vote for Trump if he is the nominee, and will likely be similarly displeased with whichever asshole the GOP tries to shoehorn in in the event of a contested convention.

So yeah, the Republican side of things is a real clusterfuck. But the likely nomination of Hillary for the Democrats seems like a very big mistake to me, mitigated only slightly by the dog and pony show that is their opposition in the GOP.

No and yes. Its the violent and warmongering western policy in that region. We have always destabilized it, yet have learned nothing from it. We just keep going and then wonder why its getting worse. Its a neocon policy. Easy to stop, many people have already said what the solution would be, yet there are always the powerful neocons who live from fear mongering, suffering and wars. And of course from blind following people like you who support them.

2003 was just another puzzle piece. The support of extremists in Syria too, the support of them in Libya aswell. The support of Saudi Arabia is a very big puzzle piece. The CIA operations in that region just as much.
The support of Saddam Hussein also is another small puzzle piece, just as much as we made him think that he can attack Kuwait and we wont interfere. He thought that because we allowed him and instigated him to attack Iran, then supported both sides, because we wanted to destabilize that region once again. Did I mention the coup detat in Iran yet?
And its not that we werent warned about it. Lots of smart people said that giving the Jews Israel would end in disaster. The signs were easy to spot. Lots of people warned about an Iraq war in 2003. Even the neocons own people warned about the IS in documents, yet they ignored it and kept going, strengthening it even more. People warned about what would happen to Libya after Ghaddafi was gone. Again they did not care. Lots of people warned about what was going on in Syria, that Assad was confronted with an extremists group long before the "revolution" that is now known as Al Nusra, a branch of Al Kaida. What did they do? They weakened Assad. Lots of people warned about the refugee crisis and extremists flooding into Europe among those refugees. What do they do? They open the borders and let everyone in without any checks at all, even inviting the whole world to come, ignoring actual laws.

You see, good knowledge of history is mandatory to understand cause and effect. You dont have that knowledge, as you have proved already, because you try to marginalize it by including things from centuries ago and try to solve those with the same solutions from centuries ago. But I dont blame you, since youre probably American. American history teaching is as messed up as their foreign policy.
You cant see coherences in all that. Lots of people dont. Thats why we are doomed to repeat history.

I mean just look at the policy since 9/11. It was meant to bring us all more security from terrorist attacks like that. Yet it has only become worse. Extremists are stronger than ever before and keep getting stronger with everything we do to "weaken" them. And yet people like you dont ask themselves why, actually attack people like me who have realized whats wrong.
Intelligent species my ass.

I know there's a lot of technique in arm wrestling, and a lot of very specific training, but I'm still surprised quite how easy the arm wrestler makes this look. The mountain is very big and very strong, even if he's not specifically trained for this event!

You might like this one. MAN Diesel and Turbo Factories, featuring very big engines:

Wasn't surprised to see "Malaysia" on the shirt, it's a very big sport over there.

Not surprised that it isn't well known as a competitive sport, there are plenty of obscure sports that are regionally popular but don't garner much attention on the world stage.

One more thought that I had:

Before Tesla, electric cars were niche marketed as adequate. In the sense that if you were a person very highly motivated to be "green", you could get one, drive around short distances, and in general enjoy a small subset of the versatility of an internal combustion gas guzzling car. You could get by, but in general life with an electric car was a step back from life with a gas car.

The reason Tesla is amazing is that it flipped that on its head. You're not sacrificing anything, you don't need an attitude of "I can use a bit less and take one for the team" for a Tesla to appeal to you. Everything I watch about the Model S says it is a fast, high-performance, fun to drive, luxurious car -- objectively BETTER than a similarly priced gas-powered car to most users (who can afford one, but that will include more and more people over time).


Same thing goes for home solar and other "green energy". Adoption rates are NEVER going to soar when solar is "adequate". And then only adequate if you make very big lifestyle changes like cutting back on heating and cooling, using low-draw appliances, etc. etc.

But as Tesla is doing to cars, maybe this can do to energy. Musk is saying NO, you don't have to cut back. You don't have to settle for less. You don't have to take one for the team. Install some (currently fairly expensive) solar panels and 1, 2, or however many of our power packs, and you can have a BETTER experience than being on the grid, paying high bills every month and dealing with the occasional outage, etc.

I guarantee that pitch will do more to push the adoption of green energy than 10 years of Al Gore living in a mansion and flying around constantly on a private jet to give $100,000 lectures explaining why everybody else needs to cut back or we're all going to melt...

@newtboy @ChaosEngine --

I think there are a LOT of political/geographical influences that exacerbate underlying problems, like ChaosEngine is saying. But, a lot of the underlying problems can be traced to the religions themselves too. And while extremists / fundamentalists in Christianity and Islam are both very very bad, I don't necessarily think that both religions are "indistinguishable" in terms of generating those extremists.

Bill thinks that Islam is worse about generating those people than Christianity and other religions. That's where the "motherlode of bad ideas" thing comes from. I tend to think he's at least partially right -- but social/political/economic/geographic issues are certainly a very big influence that he doesn't usually touch on. And in the video Fareed makes a very good point about many Muslim countries NOT having high rates of extremist incidents that tends to support the importance of those other factors that aren't directly tied to religion.

Bill might come across as anti-Islam more frequently (especially of late), but I think he's really quite equal opportunity anti-religion in general. But one of the ways that he perceives Islam being worse than Christianity is that if you make fun of the pope, or suggest that he's a pedophile or something, you're a lot less likely to end up dead than if you say something critical about Mohammed.

As shitty as Christianity is / may be, in the west we've progressed far enough that at least we can criticize its faults without (too much) fear of being killed for pointing them out. And THAT has been very helpful in the rapid diminishing of Christianity in Europe and the UK, even though we haven't caught up in the US yet. I think that is where Bill makes a fair point, and something that potentially counters Fareed's seemingly more rational / steady Eddie take on the issue.