My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

For a muxh more interesting and detailed talk on how it will all work, see Flon Musks talk on how we can achieve this and much much more http://videosift.com/video/Elon-Musk-Making-Humans-a-Multiplanetary-Species

wut the chicago cubs .....won

man the end of the world must be really coming.

I'm sick of the 'save our planet' crap...it's 'save our species'.
We think we are just luckier than the dinosaurs...it might be our time.

I agree with you and don't hate Nazis. I hate murderers though, so I hate many of the Nazis but not all of them. Some Nazis helped Jews escape their fate and if it were not for them, some of those people would not be alive today. Disagree with me all you want, I couldn't believe otherwise.

In fact, even some of the mass murderers, the Einsatzgruppen, the meticulous destroyers of entire populations throughout Eastern Europe showed signs of their shame and guilt. When someone feels shame and guilt, that is a sign of their humanity which begs for love and forgiveness.

That doesn't excuse the horrors that they contributed to, but it also shows that they were not merely bogeymen and were themselves victims.

Now, it's very human for you to disagree with my sentiments on this topic out of love and honor for those who were unjustly murdered in this life -- we are a passionate species and it is very right to feel anger towards murderers -- but if an actual loving god (not a torturing one) were to exist, it would forgive and love for the same reasons. That's my belief and I sleep well at night for having it. Otherwise, I would simply be filled with anger and hate for the people who have caused me pain in MY actual life.

Nazis never did a goddamn thing to me directly so it's only conceptual hate that I can feel towards them. But there are people who existed side by side with me who have done me great harm -- and I even forgive and love those people who directly violated my trust. People MUST forgive those that have harmed them in order to move forward with their lives, by accepting their humanity, which although flawed, is still a mammalian emotional being, neocortex enabled and desiring compassion.

Another interesting conceptual form of love is when the family of murder victims forgive the convicted killers who harmed their own family. Isn't that interesting that some people are willing to not hate murderers of their own family members? Or when George Wallace forgave the man who attempted to assassinate him? Sure, he was a born againer and the pro-segregationist who tried to deny black people from signing up for school with white kids, but he still had it in him to forgive and to love, and that to me says he too must be forgiven and loved, because a change occurred in him and his empathy manifested in new ways as his perceptions of mankind changed over time.

I believe it's a 'monkey' joke.

Because some primate species (barring exceptional individuals) won't go into the water.

-scheherazade

These methane clathrate (methane hydrate/hydromethane) deposits have been releasing both under the ocean and from permafrost melt for years now...with the rate of their melt release increasing exponentially.
Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is more than 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.
For those of you who are religious....this is the 'burning seas' you would expect from the apocalypse, because the pockets of gas coming from the ocean are highly flammable, even explosive.
This is why I have said for over a decade that there's absolutely no chance to avoid human extinction along with a world wide extinction of most of life. Once the methane started bubbling up from the sea floor, any chance of stopping the change was gone, and that was a while ago and we've done absolutely nothing but increase the amount of greenhouse gasses we produce. The ocean responds quite slowly to climate change, so there's nothing that can be done now that it's warm enough to release the methane, even if we stopped producing all greenhouse gasses today.

This is game over, people, game over. A massive methane release will have almost immediate effects and could double the entire temperature rise since the industrial revolution almost overnight. When (not if) that happens, say goodbye to nature both on land and in the seas.
The above number, 80% of life on earth vanished, is misleading. 80% of species were lost completely forever, 98% of all biomass died, so of the 20% of species that were left, only 10% of their population survived. Humanity won't.
*doublepromote
*quality

Are you sure about that?
I thought I saw a program about studying the migration of humans through DNA studies that said aboriginal people in Australia both came from a separate group of humans that left Africa earlier than the main migration, and also had evolved into a separate sub species after arriving, meaning that, as they exist today, they are native and also distinct genetically from any other group of humans....lucky them.

It's not fully a joke.
I honestly think people not willing to examine their beliefs in the face of new contradictory evidence need to be removed from those actually willing to learn in order for us to evolve as a species/civilization...but that evolution is probably over now. I don't actually advocate killing, sterilizing, or even removing them, I do advocate teaching them, by force if necessary, or removing some privileges. Lucky for everyone (including me) I'm not in charge.
I do wish there was a way to identify them and bar them from teaching, voting, or governing, or any other activity where their solidified beliefs might tend to negatively impact others, but they are not easily identified.
I think it's a mental disorder to believe something so strongly that you can't even try to consider new information or even consider that your belief is possibly wrong. I would like to see that disorder eradicated in my lifetime. I'm willing to change my opinion if presented with incontrovertible evidence that I'm wrong, though. ;-)
I'm not angry with ignorance, ignorance is forgivable and curable...I'm angry with ignorance masquerading as certitude, which is what people who say truthfully that nothing could ever change their mind (about any topic) are displaying.

As for your above example of torture, what if you were shown incontrovertible proof that it's not only effective, but is (somehow, this is hypothetical) MORAL, and is suddenly found to be acceptable to 99.999% of society due to this new evidence? Would you at least CONSIDER that your position might be wrong? If so, you can stay in society and you don't have to be fixed. ;-)

If you wanna get technical, not a single human is native to Australia. We all get traced back to sub-Saharan Africa. All the whites could be classified as invasive species, too.

Yeah, and I think they realize that, but it's still irritating to hear them try to justify their goals as "introducing the public to <x-species>".

I guess that's where we differ.

I find it funny precisely because such things really happen.

In a world where no such cruelty exists, I think this kind of material would then become empty and pointless. Comedy thrives on the defiance of our misery.

I dare say it would get less of a laugh in Sweden for this very reason.

I'm clearly in the minority here, but then I suspect few people have developed the same sense of cynical detachment I have (working with the severely mentally I'll and dieing will do that to you).

The humour is definitely there, I guess you just need a suitably fucked up perspective to appreciate it.

Out of curiosity, did you find Jim's old bit about the child getting shot when he was in Iraq funny? I might suggest that is an even more cruel and fucked up situation than the subject matter being discussed here.

Would that only become funny when children are no longer victims of wars? Or is it funny precisely because of the incomprehensible cruelty and misfortune underlying it?

Perhaps you have an easier time detaching yourself from something that isn't as likely to happen to you? This seems reasonable, but I don't see how it precludes such material from being funny, only more challenging for one to engage with. (and thus more powerful if one can do so)

To bring in a thread from another reply "And this is the brilliance of Louis -- that he lays bare the humanity of even pedophiles. The truth of pedophiles."

In what sense is Jim not doing the same thing here? He is flippantly exploring Cosby's desire to victimise women, we all have desires and sometimes act on those impulses when we shouldn't.
Rape is an extreme example, but the thought process is ultimately the same thing writ large. "I want a thing I can't have, but I'm doing it anyway".
I might argue he is laying bare the universal human condition in just the same way, albeit with something closer to home for most people than paedophilia.

Presumably it's the other thread that's proving challenging, i.e. the masochistic idea of enjoying ones abuse? And again, there is something deeply fucked up at the heat of the human condition here. Deriving pleasure from victim hood, or having messed up priorities about fame and opportunity.
Stockholm syndrome, abused partners loving their spouses, groupies allowing themselves to be abused just to be near their idols.

We are really that fucked up as a species sometimes, cognitive dissonance is almost a way of life for most of us in our own little ways. It's clearly a deeply risque subject, but there is something dark at the core of the human condition there none the less.

The actual victims don't need to have the kind of mixed up priorities Jim is alluding to, we only have to recognise that we posses the capacity for that dissonance ourselves. (The joke being at the expense of our own inherent hypocrisies, not specific victims)

The only big difference I can really see is that child rape is much rarer than the kind being discussed here. (and thus I suppose easier for most to detach themselves from)

Is it really any less horrific? Surely if anything it is far more terrible for most victims and usually seems to cause more damage to their lives.

How does Louis's material on Child rape remain funny in a world where children are raped, yet Jim's material about women being raped only become funny in a world where they do not get raped?

Paedophiles have a culture too. They form groups, exchange materials, praise each others work etc. etc. Not to mention grooming rings and other such reprehensible things.

I understand that a particular subject can strike too close to home, but for me that was my failing to rise above my own fears and traumas. When I finally got to a place where I could laugh at my own victim hood, it was one of the most liberating experiences of my life. (Don't get me wrong, that shit never completely goes away)

"precision"? like stating a belief system can somehow change your species?

The truth is one of the reasons I'm vegan is because I'm very worried about our own species. We only have one planet to live on, and and worrying about what we eat, and the methods to produce it have far reaching consequences, one of which is the death of a large amount of humans via global warming and the various environmental issues it sets off.

On a more personal scale I'm worried about peoples health. It's no secret that meat causes and encourages cancer, and all animal products cause a range of health issues which lead to death. There are around a million completely preventable deaths each year in the US alone. Not to mention quality of life issues. All of which could have been prevented, treated and even reversed on a proper plant based diet.

That's the beautiful thing that I have found with veganism, is that everybody wins. The people are thinner and healthier, the environment thrives, and no animals are harmed unnecessarily.

Here is a question for you. How will you explain to your son's children that there are no more fish in the ocean, why we have no jungles left? Because "you really like bacon" doesn't seem like a good answer all of a sudden

When you see what horrible things people did in the past, such as whaling, or seal beating, don't you think to yourself, why were they so blind, so greedy and selfish? They could have done things a lot differently. Perhaps they didn't know better, but we don't have that excuse anymore, because we are aware of what impact our choices have for everyone and everything on this planet.

The warplane is designed to kill, but who is it killing - is it killing an evil dictator in order to save innocents? It might be on a peace keeping mission to discourage any killing. If it the warplane is killing only people who would otherwise be killing the innocent, then it's a tool used for good, it's saving more lives than it's taking, and more importantly it's saving lives that are more important to maintaining a civilized society.
I'd even say that it would be less moral to not build the warplane and let innocents die through inaction, when the consequences are well known.

Even further down the chain, killing isn't inherently bad, there are plenty justifiable reasons to kill someone.

It's the same with veganism -making choices which are less harmful, not necessarily perfect.


Non smokers are definitely way better people than smokers. Especially given that 2nd and even 3rd hand smoke causes cancer. Even if smoking only harmed the smoker, it's still a strange idea to be harming yourself. Perhaps they lack the appreciation of how lucky they are to be alive. I mean the odds of being born are like winning the lotto, let alone being born healthy, being born in this day and age, in a civilized country, being born to the dominate species, being born on the only planet that seems to have developed life. Some people have rough starts to life, but harming themselves isn't going to make it better, just shorter.


I agree that everyone is capable of making good moral stances, you've obviously drawn the line somewhere (otherwise you'd be going all Genghis Khan on everyone). But where the line is drawn is tends to be influenced a lot by misleading information and lack of information. And that makes it very hard to make logically sound choices. It's even harder when in order to understand the real impact means having to watch footage of animal cruelty. Most people find it confronting and uncomfortable at best, so it's easier to put it away, not think about it and continue consuming.

I know most people are moral, but if they don't act on it, it doesn't mean much to the puppies being strayed in the eyes with chemicals, or to the piglets being slammed into the concrete floor for the crime of being born male.


Regardless of how you categorize it, analyze it, or philosophize it, this always remains true: Animals feel and respond to pain, they will do their best to avoid suffering, and they have a will to live.