You know what? I believe him. I buy it. I want to hear more from him. What convinced me? It's the little specks of humour from him in this video. It's like a rational mind has been buried beneath apocalyptic rightist bullshit for so long. Maybe his self-awareness only brings him so far to "my side" but it's undeniable that his is a unique perspective, and while time will tell, I will have an open ear for him for the next 4 years at least.

Ya well, his delivery sucked because he's a humourless self-important idiot-sans-savant with the self awareness of a particularly dull rock. His place in comedy is _in_ the joke, not in the telling of them. I mean christ, even Bush made me laugh a few times and he was practically a chimp, so really there is no excuse for an orangutan.

The only redeemable part of that shitfest was Kate McKinnon, and probably because her character was so self-aware and 'not-giving-a-fuck' that it made it worth watching for her.

Could also be because I have such a raging crush on her it borders on obsession.

it's like blink 182 but even less interesting or self aware.

I agree with this. It's very important that people come together to fight for equality or whatever else they believe is right, but a movement has got to be self aware and self critical otherwise it will end up undermining itself.

Movements that become huge can have little groups forming within them and the outside world sees the actions of what might be an extreme faction for the actions of the whole. And things can become insular, where the members mostly talk to each other and reconfirm each other's worries and problems and things that weren't acceptable to you in a vacuum are ok because it seems like those problems are dominating yours and your friends' entire lives.

But that works regardless of the politics of the movement - from the left or right. So on the one hand you get die-hard gender rights campaigners using inherently sexist terms when arguing with the opposite sex, but you also get kind, considerate people rallying behind a right wing group or message because it starts with phrases like "we've got to look after our own first," but end up with racism and bigotry.

The answer is obviously no because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Also, for a terrible moment I thought your comment was an ironic jab at my apparently awful grammar, with which several people obviously agreed. Please tell me this isn't so because truly it would devastate me to be a) so bad at grammar it is notorious b) so lacking in self awareness.

ps. teehee the apostrophe broke the link.

I miss Letterman from the 80s, although this clip looks to be from the mid 90s if I had to guess. He was a genuine antidote to the TV establishment back then but now TV is as stale and manic and self-aware as the Internet so I stopped watching him 20 years ago. I have VHS tapes of his shows from the 80s, still worth watching.

Star Mangled Banner.

Off key and totally lacking in self-awareness. Oh, and the song as well. How fitting.

I don't consider the chemical reactions of plants to be the same. I said that 'even' plants have a response to negative stimuli. Animals have instinct, a response coded into their DNA, that allows them to respond to negative stimuli. Does that make them a fully sentient being, capable of self-awareness and logical thought? No, it doesn't.

Do insects have rational thought? Do clams or lobster have rational thought? If your entire goal is to avoid (formerly) living matter that can respond to negative stimuli, then why draw the line at plants? Do you really believe that a sea urchin has more capability of self-awareness than a head of lettuce?

This is the fallacy of logic that lies at the core of vegan ideology. Vegans say "I will eat this item because it doesn't understand pain!" when there are, in fact, many life forms that do not understand pain beyond a stimulus reaction.

Let's be realistic, most of the work our war planes do has collateral damage. We don't simply use them on 'the bad guys', but again that is a simplification to allow you moral latitude.

Non-smokers are no better than smokers, I know since I used to be a smoker. Just because I decided that I no longer wanted to smoke doesn't mean I feel the need to go up to someone smoking and start telling them how much better I am that I quit. Again, I'm not any better of a person than they are, I just chose to do something different. That is one of the things you can't seem to grasp, because you continue to say that morally you are more good than someone who does not practice a vegan lifestyle. You aren't.

As far as the functional capacity for feelings, of course animals feel pain, it is a stimuli that helps in their survival instinct. That instinct is what drives them to avoid pain because it means they might not survive. It doesn't mean that they have the logical thought capacity to relate pain to more than an instinctual response. I am pretty sure that no pig ever felt pain and said to itself, I feel pain therefore I exist as a being, they felt the pain and instinct told them to get away from it. Plants even have stimuli that they will respond to in order to grow or try to avoid damaging forces, but they aren't self-aware. Neither are animals until you get to a certain level of intelligence, like dolphins or great apes.

I grew up in the country, I have seen first hand and used my hands in regards to the butchery you speak of. Never once have I had a pig who had seen another be slaughtered do anything that would give me the belief that they were responding in any other fashion than a "shit, flight time since I might be next" natural instinct that is in all prey animals. Factory farms may not be totally humane, and that should be reformed, but all they are doing in the end is killing prey animals on a much larger scale than I did growing up.

@ahimsa

seriously?
quoting to rebutt an obvious sarcastic comment?
is it that hard to even attempt to be even a tad original?
do you REALLY think i am promoting actual violence?
really?
and you respond with a level of pretentious twattery that you should be ashamed of.

are you even remotely aware you literally made my point on how some vegans lack the basic self-awareness to realize they are being massive hypocrites and tools?

you trot out those tired,and boring,self-effacing morality/ethics tropes as if they were written on mount sinai,and then have the audacity to not even own your own egocentric bullshit.

jesus..vegans are such intolerable pussies.

because YOUR vegan philosophy is egocentricism on narcissistic steroids,and you lack the basic self-awareness to even have the skills to acknowledge that you are literally smelling your own farts,and calling it wisdom.

there is another vegan on this site that i really wish would put his two cents in,because he at least is aware of the hypocrisy and is an absolute delight to engage with.

but YOU...
self-awareness may be too tall an order it seems.
as you rant and rail against the inhumanity and suffering of the agri-animal on a fucking machine that 10 yr olds assembled to put together in a country where they dont even have the most basic of necessities met.

sitting at a desk dressed in clothes that ANOTHER 8 yr old sewed together,working 18 hr days at 23 cents an hr and is beaten if she slacks,is late..or complains.

the list of human oppression,slave labor and human trafficking that YOU benefit from is legion,and your lack of your own hubris,privilege and hypocrisy is,quite frankly,offensive.

so you can sit there in your own little smug fart cloud and self-righteously condemn the rest of us for choosing to enjoy bacon and convince yourself of your own superior morality and purity of ethics,but the reality is this:

you don't give two fucks.
you are an over-privileged,over indulged little shit and is no better nor worse than the rest of who travel through this life..making our own choices and being responsible for them.

the ONLY thing you truly care about is your little habitat and how others behavior affects your tiny,precious little world.so you go ahead an be a vegan for "moral" and "ethical" reasons,because it gives you the "feel goods".

and i say this with all humanity and honesty:
if you are vegan for moral and ethical reasons,then good for you mate.you made a conscious choice and have stuck to it.bravo my friend.

but don't try to push your own little inane philosophy on the rest of us.we may be assholes for eating meat,but at least we are not hypocritical,contradictory assholes.

now if you want to discuss the benefits of a vegan diet.
great...i am down.
if you wish to share why being a vegan for YOU is a philosophy that works for YOU and is a choice YOU made...then great.i love understanding why people chose to do what they do.

but if you keep attempting to make this purely a morality and ethical dilemma,while ignoring YOUR own philosophical and moral inconsistencies.

well..then we have nothing more to speak about.
enjoy the smell of your own farts.

/cockpunched

Making choices of a higher morality and ethical value definitely makes anyone superior. You yourself are more superior than anyone that has made the choice to beat a woman, are you not? You are physically capable of it, perhaps there might even be a life threatening or survival situation where it's necessary, but you don't do it simply because "you can" or because it makes you feel good. That is what makes you superior.
You're also superior to anyone that has decided to drive drunk too. You are superior to people who take slaves, you are superior to people that run or knowingly buy from sweatshops, etc etc.

Churches and cults are different story because they are based on flawed traditions instead of logical and consequence based choices, and demonstrable fact. Becoming vegan is a rational decision (funnily enough "spiritual" people are the ones that tend to be most aggressive when approached about veganism).

Even non vegans like Sam Harris will agree that it's the ethically superior thing to do.

Three year olds aren't necessarily self-aware either, and I hear that with a bit of south-west sauce they cook up real nice. But wait, you know that's wrong, because being self-aware isn't the only thing we measure this situation by. There are a lot of factors that go into this and in our current time and state of civilization we know it's wrong, however there have been cannibals in the past after all. Sentient or not we know that animals feel pain, they get sad, they can be happy etc. Yet we inflict pain onto them for our pleasure, that is wrong. When you see a street dog all messed up you feel sad for it. Compassion is built into us.

Well yelling at a stranger without provocation is a pretty shitty thing to do. Like I said vegans are a varied group of people, so naturally some of them are rude c***ts that forget that they weren't always vegan lol. I make no excuses for them. But as with any demographic unfortunately the obnoxious ones are the ones that get noticed. To give you an example of nice vegans, there is always someone like John Venus on youtube or the Light Twins.

The simple point is that you are not superior. You have made a lifestyle choice because you wanted to. You have no solid scientific evidence that food animals are fully sentient. Both dogs and pigs routinely fail self-awareness tests, they may be intelligent and able to learn, but they ARE NOT PEOPLE. Vegans want us to believe that eating a pig is tantamount to eating a 3 year old baby, and simply isn't. You are certainly welcome to your opinion on the subject, but that is all.

Now to address your issue with how people treat vegans. I know that I have never went out of my way to lambaste a vegan for choosing to be vegan. I will, and have, severely castigate vegans who start telling me that they are superior to other people because they choose to not eat meat. How can you not see that having the attitude that you are better than someone else because of your choices is not the same manner of thinking that leads to church people condemning people for not following their ethos?

So, let me ask you, how many people have given you shit for being vegan out of the blue? For instance, you were minding your own business and eating a salad, then a person jumped in your face and said "How dare you eat that salad next to me?" I'm willing to bet you might have gotten some gentle ribbing if you went to a friend's barbecue and asked for a vegan option, but I doubt anyone got in your face about it. On the other hand, I have absolutely had more than one vegan get in my face and tell me that I am a murderer and a beast because I ate a hamburger at a desk across from them or sat down at a table with some brisket without making sure it wasn't a 'meat-free' zone.

The sheer chutzpah that most vegans have towards non-vegans is what makes them a target for ridicule. I get it, you think you are better than us, but we wouldn't care if you didn't feel the need to trot it out every five seconds.

I dunno... as much as I dislike Bill O'Reilly, that showed a pretty encouraging amount of self-awareness and savvy comprehension of some of the root issues that are tearing the Republican party apart.

And the Democrat party establishment better be taking notes, because plenty of their base are upset about the same sorts of problems with the system. Next time, the "nightmare candidate" that the status-quo-loving party elites just can't shake off might be on the Democrat side...

Although it had a bit of a propaganda sort of vibe to it at the end, that was pretty funny and self-aware / self-deprecating.

If it *was* something put together / sponsored by Mormons, they were Mormons with a sense of humor, at least...