I love this idea. It gives an incentive for people to give, because they might give to someone that gives back in spades......
....now I made myself sad, thinking that most people need that kind of self serving incentive to be altruistic. Helping others in need IS the reward, not a reason to be rewarded.

YT:
After diagnosis with hemangiosarcoma, Wallace was given 2 weeks to 3 months without chemo. Here Wallace is celebrating his 11th birthday 7 months post diagnosis chemo free! These were all toys mailed to Wallace by people around the country who loved him. To help us help other dogs in need, Wallace's book can be purchased here - www.WallaceThePitBull.com This true story, written by Jim Gorant, takes you on Wallace's journey from unwanted shelter dog to Champion Frisbee Dog! Wallace passed away a year after diagnosis on 8/23/2013. Long Live Wallace the Pit Bull!

The RNLI are a worthy cause for donations, while the actions in this video may seem a trivial task to observers it's just another example of volunteers putting their well-being at risk to help others. I've seen some of the footage of rescue operations out at sea and these men and women will brave insane conditions when called upon.

What an incredibly vapid clip. There was a clip of some firefighters near the end, otherwise if you have a dream of helping others, reuniting nations, eliminating poverty, reforming government, or anything that's not an individual thrill-sport, you're dreams aren't making the cut!

Given it's Wisconsin, these people really should have known better. Generally, they're pretty good about driving in these conditions here. They're kind of breaking the fundamental rule though, which is however fast the car in front of you is going, you drive no faster than that and leave plenty of room to stop. You don't change lanes except when it's necessary for navigational purposes.

I'm also wondering about the lights thing. I don't see a lot. My new car has an "automatic" setting, but it doesn't really work properly and the lights are off a lot of the time when they should be on (the most important times, dusk and dawn). As a rule, I leave my lights on all the time anyways. That said, there are still a lot of people who seem to think the lights on the car are there to help you see rather than to help others see you.

(disclaimer: atheist)

The whole video makes me sad:
- That CNN did this drive-by-outing, putting this woman's life in more turmoil than literally (correct use for once) a tornado ever could. Yeah, she says she is happy it happened but still.
- That she speaks of coming outing as atheist without seemingly any irony.
- Also: That despite her involvement with these secular organizations and doug stanhope's tip, her descriptions show that when it comes to helping other people religious groups have got it together and us non-believers are mostly just talk :-(

Is mittens seriously contemplating another run?

Yeah! Go mittens! Guarantee the Presidency is with the lesser of the two evils for another 4 years. Helping Obama get elected is probably the only time in his life he actually helped other people en masse.

M Malevolent
O Oligarchic
N Nazified
S Succubal
A Anti-Neutraceutical
N Nonvegetarian
T Treachetourial
O Organo-assassins

The following address should be on every death to eco-terroristists' organization's, "Raze This Motherfucker", hit list:

World Headquarters Monsanto Company 800 North Lindbergh Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63167. Phone: 314/694-1000

Everyone who works for this corporation should be considered complicit in the undoing of species-

Monsanto is the reason bees are disappearing worldwide-
Monsanto is the reason heath care is unaffordable-
Monsanto is the reason gasoline no longer lubricates rubber and composites in combustion engines-
Monsanto is responsible for the disappearance of heirloom variety seed banks the world over-(hybrids notwithstanding, their originating variants tucked-away in bunkers)
Monsanto is a poisonous cabal of eugenicists, working to help other cunts reduce the world population through systematic, experimental means, with the world's sentients as her guinea pigs.

Someone needs to mail them some anthrax powder mixed with ricin, to get that full effect.

Please...study and protest something that matters. Quit focussing attention on something that sooo fucking doesn't. You have an opportunity to help others, use that opportunity.

Well, as far as I know, I don't have any corporate sponsors that are financing the dissemination of my opinion for their own interests ... that I know of?

Hold on, you're twisting my words. I'm making a statement of social science, not of ethics. I'm not in the mood to argue ethics, generally have a mixed opinion, and don't like discussing it since it becomes purely an emotional argument.

On a theoretical basis, you would say in the market for labour, competition pushes labour costs down to their equilibrium demand/supply level. If there are a shortage of skilled workers for an X industry or skill set, the price or wage goes up, or vice versa. That's why you typically see union structures in less skilled or more standardised rather than specialised job types. Those, with a high quantity of people possessing said skills for the job.

But as always it's a trade-off. If firms in a particular industry or skill subset start paying too little for their workers, less people will decide to study it, and they will miss out on the talent and skill pool of those who were incentivised into other industries. On that basis unions aren't necessarily good or bad for industries.

On a personal level, I'd say that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with unions and they make perfect sense. Firms organise themselves into trade associations and it would be naive to say that they don't share information on wage levels, or for that matter that this kind of information is not freely available. Why shouldn't the counterparty in the so-called market for labour not be able to organise themselves equally?

As for your last comment on whether competing is always necessary, I tend to have a pretty cynical view of the world and believe that people are generally consciously or subconsciously acting in their own interests. You may point out altruism and I will say people are satisfying a innate biological need to help others, a characteristic that would have come about in our cavemen days when co-operating distinguished your survival ability from other tribes, but ultimately something motivated in you by the evolutionary survival advantage that it conferred to you rather than any pure form of altruism.

Economics as a theory of study is pretty much predicated on this notion. What is the extent of the truth of this in reality? Who knows. I have little ability if any to truly glance into the mind of what anyone else is thinking or what motivates them.

I seriously hope ayn rand gets brought up in the debates. I think most people don't know who ayn rand is or what objectivism is and how it legitimizes greed and selfishness.

Cenk summarized it pretty good though.

Obviously you gotta help yourself first, but if you think helping others is an essential part of a good society, then Ayn Rand is not your friend.

We don't live in a vacuum, we all got where we're at through the help and support of others and that includes gov't as well.

If you hate gov't so much, you shouldn't be running for elected office. period.

Hey @shinyblurry,

I've had this bookmarked since it came out and finally watched it today. Thanks for this video. I found it quite interesting, and it brought me face-to-face with something I've been kinda half thinking about lately -- the meaninglessness of life.

I read some of the comments, but skipped most, so I may be repeating. Lemme know if that's the case.

About the video itself. To get this out of the way, many of Keller's individual arguments were made in intellectually dishonest ways, like using two meanings of the same word (e.g. "meaningless") to create false logic, and using philosophers' quotes as fact without challenging their validity or pertinence to the argument at hand. Keller isn't the topic though, so that's all I'm going to say about that.

About all the meaninglessness. I agree with the overall point, that if there's no god, then there's really no meaning to life in the grand scheme of things since we're here for a meaningless slice of infinite time. That's hard to face sometimes. That discomfort tends to drive me towards other people. Sharing that feeling with others feels really good. Helping them feel better about it makes me feel good. I might even say it gives me a purpose, gives my life meaning.

I don't see any contradictions in my philosophy yet though. Or, at least, I didn't agree with any of the ones that Keller brought up. For example, about love and about evil. I found those arguments fatuous. I believe there's love because I feel it, just like I feel pain. Also, I don't believe that evil exists as part of reality. There are certainly actions I've done, seen and heard of that I judge as horrible things to do, and which some would see as "evil", but that's my judgement or someone else's, a label, something external both to myself and the person who did the action. Conceiving of it as "evil" is either a metaphysical statement, or an internal reaction to the thought of you doing that action yourself. Good and bad? Yes. Virtue and Evil? No.

So let's go with good and bad. You and I have already spent many screenfulls talking about morality, but to reiterate my belief, I think that people have an instinct for which actions are good and which are bad based on how they affect other people. We instinctively know that torturing babies is bad. We also instinctively know that doing something to ease another's problems or enhance their life is good. The more we try and connect with those feelings of what's good and what's bad, the better we feel about our actions and the happier we are overall. I believe that following that sheer bliss wherever it leads us is the best thing we can do. Specifically, anything the Bible promotes against following your bliss and knowingly causing pain in others should be snipped out.

When I think of my own depression, how it might relate to a lack of reason for my life, and how I might feel better if I were able to believe in God, it makes me feel better when I think of other people I know who are genuinely happy people without a whiff of religion in their lives, and I ask myself what makes them happy, and try and emulate that. The answer is always following their bliss, which is always helping other people find their bliss. Wonderful how that works. FWIW, I don't know any happy, fulfilled people who actively judge any other people as right or wrong, good or bad.

What the police officer did was against the law. What the other guy did isn't.

Saying that I was the type of person you were talking about isn't an attack on me? You ignoring half of what I said is commenting on my statement?

The beginning of your third paragraph could just as easily apply to police officers. The last part misses the fact that he is helping people by doing this. Even you are helped by this. Whether you like it or not the country is better off if cops don't have carte blanche to bully whomever they want. Even police officers decent or not are safer because of people who assert their rights. Crazy as it seems this guy and his actions will make people less threatened by the police which will make it safer for the police along with everyone else.

>> ^spoco2:

@swedishfriend sigh I was commenting on your statement, not you. Also, you branding this policeman a 'criminal' is exactly the sort of shit that helps fricken no-one.
This cop was SUPER professional. Handled this REALLY well. Was reacting to people being concerned that there was a man walking along their street with a fucking gun on his hip.
What about this? Rather than being an enormous dickhead and walking around with a loaded fricken gun for whatever self righteous reason is in this guy's head, what about he does some fucking good for the community? What about he helps other people rather than making everyone around there feel endangered? What about he helps those in need?
He has done NOTHING to deserve any sort of respect AT ALL.
Good day to you sir.
Door slams, footsteps fade to distance

@swedishfriend *sigh* I was commenting on your statement, not you. Also, you branding this policeman a 'criminal' is exactly the sort of shit that helps fricken no-one.

This cop was SUPER professional. Handled this REALLY well. Was reacting to people being concerned that there was a man walking along their street with a fucking gun on his hip.

What about this? Rather than being an enormous dickhead and walking around with a loaded fricken gun for whatever self righteous reason is in this guy's head, what about he does some fucking good for the community? What about he helps other people rather than making everyone around there feel endangered? What about he helps those in need?

He has done NOTHING to deserve any sort of respect AT ALL.

Good day to you sir.

*Door slams, footsteps fade to distance*

Any of us can be next. Be thankful and help others.