First of all, it wasn't discrimination. He didn't refuse to serve them because they are gay. He refused to make them a gay wedding cake. Little bit of a difference there. The nastiness that comes out of people when they think they have an excuse to attack Christians is the real story. Immediately after the chick-fil-a controversy you had so much vile filth posted in comments and message boards, even celebrity tweets, viciously maligning Christians. That's just fine with people, but it's not okay that a man will only bake heterosexual wedding cakes. It's a hypocritical double-standard.



>> ^Yogi:

>> ^shinyblurry:
In the name of tolerance, people are coming out of the woodwork to bash Christian businesses like Chick-fil-a on the basis of their beliefs about homosexuality being a sin. A lot of these are setups; the gay community gets wind of a Christian business who has strong convictions, and then they send someone in to get refused so they can go to the media and create a bunch of hype and drama and generate sympathy. In the end, the hatred and intolerance seems to be entirely one sided. Christians don't hate gays; Jesus died as much for them as He did for the rest of us. Christians who do hate gays are simply ignorant and wrong and they should be chastised. That doesn't mean you should indict Christianity as a whole, because true Christians recognize that we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
>> ^UsesProzac:
Business has doubled since the incident? I really don't understand why religious people glorify in the hatred of others. I've seen it firsthand in extended family members and it chills me. How can Christians ignore the gospel of loving thy neighbor and judge not and all those other fancy things their prophet said in their own religious text?
@shinyblurry, how do you reconcile that hypocrisy within yourself? You're the only person I know to ask here, seeing as you called me a harlot and all that. When you judge another person and go directly against the words set down in your bible, do you immediately ask your god to forgive you or what?
Edit: I'll throw in one of my favorite quotes to further illustrate the rampant hypocrisy.
“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.” - Stephen Colbert


Rosa Parks was a set up as well. So would me saying right now, "So you're against Rosa Park's fight for equality you fucking racist." Either it's right or it's wrong, discrimination is wrong doesn't matter what tool you use to shine a light on it, just that it's represented fairly. Chick fil A was a situation where the president said that shit himself, that's not a set up, that's putting your face out their and people bitch slapping the shit out of you.

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

>> ^Payback:
I've had someone try to do that to me. Had a similar reaction too, only I also shoved her away.
There's a second or two of "WTF? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" that kicks in. Then afterwards you feel like such a shmuck, but in those first couple seconds, you really don't know if they are gonna, like, knife you or they have kooties or Ebola or something.
It also doesn't help if you're like me and that sort of nice, cute stuff never happens to you.

Also, if the sexes were reversed, the guy would likely be in prison by now.


Uh, no. If a guy playfully tried to kiss a reporter on-air, he wouldn't be very popular but it's very unlikely that the police would be involved. Double standards, yes, but not that extreme.

>> ^budzos:

No, I'm not afraid I'm going to lose control and shove someone unnecessarily. I haven't "assaulted" anyone since I was twelve.
What I'm afraid of is being in the proximity of people who would "absolutely file assault charges" for something where nobody was really hurt and the guy has already paid the price of looking like a complete asshole in front of the whole world. You would "absoultely" press the issue and try to sic the government on him. Why? Justice? Get fucked.
>> ^Porksandwich:
>> ^budzos:
People like you make me afraid to go out into the world.
>> ^Porksandwich:
Plus, Im guessing his shirt, shorts, shoes, and possibly his underwear. And anything else he dons on his way to the run and after the run will have a big corporate logo on it. So...... yeah. Hopefully some assault charges are in his future to go along with all that ill will he's generated. I don't see how the time frame that happened in could be a misunderstanding, and if he can't deal with the situation of corporate sponsorship of the events....he should stop going.


Is the fear of being sued for shoving people or the choice of not attending things where you may be offended/irritated/whatever and not being able to shove someone?
Hell you can't even put your hands on someone like that when they are on your own property for something as simple as wearing a mascot outfit and trying to hand you something...well NORMAL people can't get away with it at least.
I'd absolutely file assault charges against him if he put his hands on me or my kid (if I had kids) like that. He wouldn't put up with me going out and shoving his teenage kids....double standards are fun.



So he looked like an asshole in front of the world, he chose to do what he did. Him looking like an asshole doesn't negate the fact that he shoved someone, specifically a kid for approaching him and trying to hand him something who wouldn't have been on the track if they didn't have permission from the event.

He doesn't suddenly become a victim because now he looks like an asshole in front of the whole world, the victim is still the person in the mascot outfit being shoved...on camera in front of the same audience.

I think you'd feel differently if he were shoving you on camera and not just shrugging your shoulders and thinking aww shucks the poor runner man looks like an asshole. You have the expectation to not be assaulted by little known people AND well known people. Entitled to your own opinion, even if it does let grown men shove kids around. All intentional, nothing accidental happening in that video.

No, I'm not afraid I'm going to lose control and shove someone unnecessarily. I haven't "assaulted" anyone since I was twelve.

What I'm afraid of is being in the proximity of people who would "absolutely file assault charges" for something where nobody was really hurt and the guy has already paid the price of looking like a complete asshole in front of the whole world. You would "absoultely" press the issue and try to sic the government on him. Why? Justice? Get fucked.

>> ^Porksandwich:

>> ^budzos:
People like you make me afraid to go out into the world.
>> ^Porksandwich:
Plus, Im guessing his shirt, shorts, shoes, and possibly his underwear. And anything else he dons on his way to the run and after the run will have a big corporate logo on it. So...... yeah. Hopefully some assault charges are in his future to go along with all that ill will he's generated. I don't see how the time frame that happened in could be a misunderstanding, and if he can't deal with the situation of corporate sponsorship of the events....he should stop going.


Is the fear of being sued for shoving people or the choice of not attending things where you may be offended/irritated/whatever and not being able to shove someone?
Hell you can't even put your hands on someone like that when they are on your own property for something as simple as wearing a mascot outfit and trying to hand you something...well NORMAL people can't get away with it at least.
I'd absolutely file assault charges against him if he put his hands on me or my kid (if I had kids) like that. He wouldn't put up with me going out and shoving his teenage kids....double standards are fun.

>> ^budzos:

People like you make me afraid to go out into the world.
>> ^Porksandwich:
Plus, Im guessing his shirt, shorts, shoes, and possibly his underwear. And anything else he dons on his way to the run and after the run will have a big corporate logo on it. So...... yeah. Hopefully some assault charges are in his future to go along with all that ill will he's generated. I don't see how the time frame that happened in could be a misunderstanding, and if he can't deal with the situation of corporate sponsorship of the events....he should stop going.



Is the fear of being sued for shoving people or the choice of not attending things where you may be offended/irritated/whatever and not being able to shove someone?

Hell you can't even put your hands on someone like that when they are on your own property for something as simple as wearing a mascot outfit and trying to hand you something...well NORMAL people can't get away with it at least.

I'd absolutely file assault charges against him if he put his hands on me or my kid (if I had kids) like that. He wouldn't put up with me going out and shoving his teenage kids....double standards are fun.

love how they "censor" that scene in glee, even though you can clearly tell what it is. I see that double standard a lot in censorship. They hide certain bits of it, but you see enough of it so instead of saying "whew glad I missed those parts" its "hrm...what was I missing out on? I wish to know more"

And that's where censoring fails. You give power to that which makes you uncomfortable. It's so bad...YOU MUST CENSOR IT!! Which just encourages people further to view the censorship. It has the opposite effect. Same goes for boycotting. If you boycott something, odds are you're just going to make it more popular as it's just free press.

Here's a pro tip:

1. You don't have a right to not be offended.

2. If something bothers you, don't give it power over you. Seeing these things that bother you does not validate or endorse them any way. Announcing that you're offended and that you MUST remove the offending bits just announces to the world what honks you off and gives people power over you as they now know how to manipulate you.

3. If you're teaching your kids, step up and do your fucking job as a parent and educate your kids instead of hiding it from them. If this "education" has any merits to it, it will stick on it's own.

F* you. I can't watch this *snuff.

Double standard here on the 'sift.

@Porksandwich all good points. There is corruption and a lot of collusion between government and corporations. Can we consider the possibility that this collusion happens mostly because the role of government is not well defined, because the economy is a grey area, because businesses covet the power politicians have?

I don't see churches fighting over privileges with politicians, not since a clear separation of church and state was established.

I don't see big media networks fighting over censorship rights with politicians, because freedom of speech mostly outlaws censorship by the government.

Do you see where I'm getting at?

The businesses that hold a monopoly, most of the time, hold it because of regulation. If you remove the regulation, you remove the obstacles for competition. The business might still hold the monopoly even for a long while, maybe decades, but any dissatisfaction by consumers is an opportunity for competitors to step in, slowly pushing the monopoly to be more efficient or risk being toppled.

If we dial back regulation, that doesn't mean there won't be any regulation, that the industry will only answer to itself. Regulation will come from consumers, clients, advertisers, consumer groups, unions, shareholders, and competitors. Didn't GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? That's a great example of society punishing a business for an unpopular decision.

Besides, we can't consider it unfair for a business to establish a monopoly or a cartel, if we're ok with workers forming a union. That's a double standard because, in essence, they're basically the same thing. I don't judge either to be good or bad, fair or unfair, it's all part of the market and the right for people to freely associate.

You are absolutely right when you say people are held to more standards than just making money, but who establishes those standards? Are there laws dictating that we shouldn't be dicks, that we should never take advantage of others or "negatively impact people"? Those aren't laws, it's social pressure and your reputation that ****regulate**** you to act as a better person.

Let society and people hold businesses to better standards, not laws and politicians.

>> ^Shepppard:

>> ^silverpoint16:
I am still of two minds about whether I want to anything to do with this site any more. We have been harassed and our characters assaulted. Most of you appear to now believe we are who we say we are. Some of you do not. That's fine. You are entitled to your opinion; however, the harassment and personal character assaults need to stop.
Thank you to all of you who looked at the evidence and drew their own conclusions.

I've been pretty level headed about this entire thread until I read this. For some reason, the way you worded that just set something off in me.
Let me make something clear to you from the start:
You're going to take some flak.
Videosift is a fantastic place full of MANY different opinions on many different things. We come from all over the world and generally are considered a community rather than an outright forum. Since there's less people than youtube, we can basically actually talk TO one another. You'll see the same names leaving comments and upvoting on many different videos, joking around, etc. And as such, you're eventually going to do or say something someone doesn't like.
We have Winstonfield_pennypacker and Quantummushroom as die-hard republicans that on basically any political video you'll see them say something (at least I consider to be) stupid and that'll spark an argument, and then two videos later you'll see QM say something that'll actually make you laugh out loud.
On religious videos we have many heated debates, the sift as a whole is generally considered Atheist, and will argue til they're blue in the face about certain topics.
On police videos there's a few of us (myself included) that don't instantly hop on the "COP IS IN THE WRONG, FUCK DA PO PO" bandwagon, and will generally be caught in a debate or argument about it.
Essentially what i'm trying to say is.. We're not youtube. You're not going to be a blank face in the crowd, you have a personality, you have ideals, you have your own mindset, and here you'll get to express it amongst others. But be prepared to have others not always agree with them.
So, if you want to just blend in, say what you want, and make sure your feelings don't get hurt, go ahead and leave.
If you want to be a part of something that with the bad, also comes a world of good, then stay. Enjoy our little community. Just be prepared for what that entails if you do.


I like much of what you posted here. If I read correctly, you and I seem to have many things in common: Not a Republican? [check] Atheist? [check] Maligning Cops? [my Mom was the very first female police radio dispatcher in this major metropolitan area and my Dad was the booking sergeant in the city jail ... let's just say I agree that *they* aren't all bad and leave it at that] Couldn't wait to move out of the house when I turned 18? [check] though your mileage may vary, I just had to toss that in there.

Regarding your generalized description of YouTube I can only relay to you MY experience with it. I joined in July 2006. It was the only social network I belonged to up until this past year. In January 2011 I submitted two videos for a contest and to my delight, one was selected for the project. It was then that I discovered how much I enjoyed the experience of making videos so started from scratch with a little Kodak PlaySport camera. I eventually bought some software and began to teach myself editing. I may not be one of the big players on the tube, but I did find out that there are some truly wonderful, REAL people there. I was steadily attracting viewers and subscribers worldwide and that morphed into an actual online community for me. I've experienced many gratifying interactions through collaborations, comments and banter and have found a good number of folks that I've come to admire and respect. Some have become very good friends. I never once felt like a blank face in the crowd and found great joy in supporting and encouraging those that impressed me. My goal was and is to tailor my comments to relate to the subject matter at hand and, more often than not, attempt to infuse a bit of humor as well. Rarely will you see anything generic from me [unless I'm really, really tired]. That being said, I certainly would never expect ANYONE to BE like me ... I fully appreciate and embrace diversity. However, I don't engage in bullying, deliberate rudeness or intimidation because, like most folks, I have a lot of stress in my life and the time I get to spend away from it on the interwebs is my coveted escape.

All of the above came crashing down for me personally when Google took over YT and changed everything to the dreaded NewTube. Seemingly overnight my progression of new subscribers simply ceased. Views diminished and everything has basically ground to a halt. I still have and treasure most of my core supporters but much of the community aspect has diminished to the point where Ive found myself searching for something more rewarding on the side. VS was recommended to me and in the first couple of days after signing up I was duly impressed. It is by far the best community site I've experienced yet.

Is it a double standard for me to support the friends who have also joined and are currently the only people I know here? I sure hope not. My goal was and is to earn the respect of others already established in this community through my participation and conduct. Not a one of us intended to take over what you have here ... at first blush it appeared to be an exceptional place to be. Time will tell. I have hope.

Thanks for the doublepromote.
In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
double standard *doublepromote ;

double standard *doublepromote

Double Standards!

Actually bob, the most dangerous womb to be in is in a religious person's womb

Who's having abortions (religion)?
Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain 37.4% of all abortions in the U.S.; Catholic women account for 31.3%, Jewish women account for 1.3%, and women with no religious affiliation obtain 23.7% of all abortions. 18% of all abortions are performed on women who identify themselves as "Born-again/Evangelical".

Source

And it's even a pro-life website. So even by their own admission, religious people are having the most abortions. Why should religious influence be taken seriously AT ALL when you guys can't even follow your own rules? It's the same old religious double standard. It's OK for ME to have an abortion, but not YOU!

@hastix you've got a point, but I think the problem is that if you look at their recent track record, there's a clear double standard.

Obama says something completely, unambiguously true, and they call it half-true because they think he was implying something that, in their opinion, isn't true.

A Republican says something that's not factually true, no matter how you slice the numbers, and they rate it "mostly true" because if you substitute the incorrect word he used with the factually accurate word he should have used, it wouldn't (in their opinion) undermine the opinion he was expressing.

Essentially they've gotten into this weird sort of state where they've stopped rating things based on factual accuracy, and have instead started trying to play referee on whether the arguments of the right or the left are correct in their opinion. Problem is, they're still issuing true/false ratings on specific quoted statements, rather than saying "we agree with the right/left on this one."

Here's the original PolitiFact article on this. The first two paragraphs read:

Liberals may want to argue with Sen. Marco Rubio’s remarks at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

But they don’t have the evidence to argue with this statement: "The majority of Americans are conservatives."

First, he said a majority of Americans are conservatives. In Gallup’s poll, the number has never crossed the 50 percent threshold. Technically, he would be more accurate if he said a plurality of Americans are conservative.

Second, we should note that while more Americans identify as conservative, that has not redounded to the good fortune of the Republican Party.

More Americans than ever identify as political independents, at 40 percent. Republicans don’t even come in at second -- that would be the Democratic Party, claiming the allegiance of 31 percent of Americans. Republicans get third place, with 27 percent claiming the GOP label.

Why the double standard with climate change?

Surely you don't consider those the same thing?

Toxicity is pretty simple. You run a test feeding creatures cyanide, and they always die if you give them enough.

By comparison, climate change involves interdependent processes that span virtually every branch of known science. I work in an academic environment and have seen what frequently comes out of inter-disciplinary studies. It comes out with stuff like the first link I gave above. Some climate guys who aren't very good with math go ahead and use a misapply a statistical method. That misuse is KNOWN and EXPECTED to give a falsely zero-biased result in the situation the climatologists misapplied. The climatologists then unknowingly went ahead and declared the zero-biased results they received as unique and important evidence that past climate change had little variance from zero. The reality, as evidenced in the article I linked, shows that the truth of the matter is that much better statistical methods exist for the application, and when they were applied by the climatologists, low and behold the historic variation leapt up, so much so as to make the last 100 years no longer look anything like the anomaly they did before.

With climate change there are a million variations and possibilities. The most important question to answer is just how imminent and severe are the effects we are facing. The most straight forward test is the one that Mann et al wowed the IPCC and the world with, showing that the temperature change over the last 100 years was unlike anything in the last 2 thousand. It turns out though that in truth, Mann's original results were an artifact not of human emissions, but of human error in math. Mann's new results show that the earth has been as warm as today multiple times over the last 2k years, and that in that time temperature has previously dropped just as fast as it rose in the last hundred.


As to what to do with unknowns, it still depends on the assumptions you come in with. What percentage do you want to lower emissions by? How much of a difference will that make to future temperature? What is the cost of lowering emissions by that much? What are the costs of dealing the increased temperature instead?

It's not a simply problem with some easy logical answer that is independent of those questions. What's worse, is now those questions not only span scientific fields, but they bleed over into economics and political science as well.

Your assessment before marks the cost of lowering CO2 emissions as moderate and the costs of not lowering them as potential huge. If the cost of lowering CO2 emissions is to be kept moderate, it means not lowering them by very much or not lowering them very quickly. Either way, it means if the effects of CO2 are drastic, we are STILL going to have to adapt significantly in addition to the money spent on reducing emissions. It sounds to me like just a variation on my own suggestion to be honest. A modest investment in battery and nuclear infrastructure, and adapt accordingly with the impacts that doesn't cover or accommodate. The most dire and immediate adaptations are ones that need to be made anyways, so I again don't see the risk as severe as others claim. It's not as though New Orleans was all peachy and good until things got warmer. A city on the coast below sea level, or islands a few feet above sea level could use a lot of dollars spent on adaptation even if we lowered emissions to the point of lowering sea levels by a foot.