Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I don't think the Republican Party can easily divorce its lunatic fringe. There are a hell of a lot of them in Southern red states - and they need their votes.

Nurses are underpaid? It's easy to make six figures a year with some overtime, and all that for a just a BA degree is pretty good. Not to mention you can make even more if you specialize or become a nurse practitioner. And while there percentage of male nurses is small, it is significant; saying that nursing is a sign of gender pay inequality is just pure bull shit.

And the "rape culture" and slut walk is pretty ridiculous too. Yes, women absolutely have the right to dress in whatever fashion they want to without fear of harassment. But the world is not some ideal utopia, and there are people at the fringes of society who do not abide by civilized rules. It's fucking useless to lecture them about gender equality and tell them that rape is bad mmmmkay? What the policeman said was crass, but it's common sense that if you dress provocatively, you're going to get a lot of attention, both good and bad.

Too long for me - but read the first 1/3 and agreed.

I don't see a difference between the far right and the far left. Fringe is fringe.

And.

It is the outliers who move the middle with their passion. There is a place for them.

Although I have trouble seeing the point of the far right.... they do have a place in the mix. Just don't put them in charge, please!

>> ^Fletch:

>> ^SDGundamX:
You've been registered since 2007, so surely you must know that there exists a segment of Sifters who are hardened Islamophobes (though they hate being called that).
"Islamophobe" is a word the reality-challenged use so they can more easily compartmentalize and parse a confusing world. I am no more islamophobe than I am a cilantrophobe, Romneyphobe, or panflutophobe.
I've been registered since 2006, but that has nothing to do with recognizing there are some hardened ignoramuses here (although I'm sure you don't like to be called that). There will be Islamic "extremists" and "fundamentalists" (or, as @gorillaman correctly stated, Muslims) as long as the Koran exists, because they are simply following what it tells them to do. Moderate or peaceful Muslims are not (at least, on the whole). They ignore much of the cornerstone of their religion, choosing to cherry-pick from it those tenets that suit them and the kind of life they wish to lead, just as all the various Christian "sects and factions" selectively follow the Bible.
Now, I'm all for muslims who choose to live peaceful, tolerant, and inclusive lives. If you're going to believe in magic and ancient fairy tales, I'd much rather your delusions lead you to First World, socially acceptable life choices. But portraying them as true Muslims is just ignorant, and denies what Islam is. Islamic "fundamentalists" are far, far from a fringe group.


Just for the record, I wasn't implying you specifically were an Islamophobe. Certainly there are lots of Sifters who have submitted anti-<insert pretty much any religion name here> vids to the Sift because they know they'll get a little traction and probably get Sifted. Congrats on getting Sifted, by the way.

Also for the record, Islamophobe is a word used to describe an irrational fear of Muslims that usually leads to discrimination in some form, whether that be people calling for the prevention of the building of a proposed mosque or spying on the entire population of Muslims without cause across multiple states and trying to pass it off as "anti-terrorism tactics" (i.e. the NYPD).

So the view that Islamophobia is "reality-challenged" seems itself to be "reality-challenged" as the above real-world examples indicate.

P.S. Calling someone who disagrees with you an ignoramus says tons more about you and your argumentation skills than it does about your opponent.

>> ^SDGundamX:

You've been registered since 2007, so surely you must know that there exists a segment of Sifters who are hardened Islamophobes (though they hate being called that).

"Islamophobe" is a word the reality-challenged use so they can more easily compartmentalize and parse a confusing world. I am no more islamophobe than I am a cilantrophobe, Romneyphobe, or panflutophobe.

I've been registered since 2006, but that has nothing to do with recognizing there are some hardened ignoramuses here (although I'm sure you don't like to be called that). There will be Islamic "extremists" and "fundamentalists" (or, as @gorillaman correctly stated, Muslims) as long as the Koran exists, because they are simply following what it tells them to do. Moderate or peaceful Muslims are not (at least, on the whole). They ignore much of the cornerstone of their religion, choosing to cherry-pick from it those tenets that suit them and the kind of life they wish to lead, just as all the various Christian "sects and factions" selectively follow the Bible.

Now, I'm all for muslims who choose to live peaceful, tolerant, and inclusive lives. If you're going to believe in magic and ancient fairy tales, I'd much rather your delusions lead you to First World, socially acceptable life choices. But portraying them as true Muslims is just ignorant, and denies what Islam is. Islamic "fundamentalists" are far, far from a fringe group.

I feel like the Sift has a very vibrant liberal / left base; so we know that we need just a smidgen of the lunatic fringe to keep it balanced and remember that these lunatics have a gigantic grip on the mainstream populous.

>> ^alcom:

I don't consider people living on < $20,000/y "entitled" or "moochers." I think Mitt needs to look in the mirror and see how his privileged life is simply unattainable by people in these circumstances. They're just getting by. By taxing the most vulnerable segment of society, he is inviting increased crime and fraud in the future. All
If he was serious about paying his "fair share" he'd disclose all those years of tax returns. And his Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts while he's at it. He's probably avoided much more total tax revenue personally than the Reps stand to get out of that 47%.


You'll never get that kind of perspective out of Mitt. He's one of those people who believes he is one of the chosen few. He seems to honestly believe he was chosen by god. He seems to honestly believe that we all live in a vacuum and he got to where he is on his own merits alone and he had zero assistance.

These things are provably wrong. you can demonstrate that he's just like everyone else, you can demonstrate that he had help from his parents, you can demonstrate that he lives in a nation that has the government-created environment to allow people to succeed.

Mitt lost this election before he even won the primary. Even most republicans know this. They spent 4 years trying to obstruct Obama and hinder American growth just to make him a one term president and they're going to fail. So two things:

1. Obama better be awesome to his Secret Service people because I'm predicting an assassination attempt during the 2nd term.

2. What's going to be interesting to see is the 2016 election. If the rational republicans cannot reclaim their party back from the religious nutbags and the teabaggers and lose the 2016 election as well, then I'm going to say Republicans as a serious party are done. They're going to be relegated to the fringe. I still think a 2nd Civil War in our lifetimes is a serious possibility. And if Republicans are unable to persuade people with words anymore, I suspect elements will resort to other ways of persuading people. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

if you can't bend a little, you'll never get people to bend for you.
if you can't at least try to see things from other people's perspectives, no one will try to see from yours.
what norway seems to grasp is that to create change within islam, you have to work with the whole, not the fringe radical. and it will be from internal change that real change occurs.

>> ^kymbos:

Spoiler alert
Am I the only one who is just a tad let down by this season? Breaking Bad is the best TV since Deadwood in my opinion, but previous series have had me constantly on the edge of my seat. This one, I'm just kind of watching play out. I mean, season 4 - come on. That was gripping.
The last two episodes where Walter just becomes the kingpin and makes piles of money just left me a little empty...


I'm impressed that they like to be different. Working for Fring and the eventual high stakes is actually the kind of plot which they could have ended the entire show with the implication that White takes over, completing his ascent (or descent if you like).

If they didn't take chances they would still be stuck in that RV and we might never have had a Fring.

Season [edit] 5 [/edit] was impressive because it was about getting back into the saddle and the writers engineering the plot developments logically from what went before. I've always loved that about the show and the way they still get to focus on these characters and also extract great acting performances. Jonathan Banks was outstanding. And Dean Norris' awkward face when Walter visited his office was priceless.

As for pure gripping tension I think Dead Freight delivered in spades.

I know what you mean by "empty". I suspect this is how Walter feels after all his accomplishments, most of which seem to be about staying below DEA radar. Could they have moved him to a new location and allow him to develop into a Fring-style respected businessman with a dark secret? But then that would be close to repetition.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

>> ^gwiz665:

Loved this show! The overarching story was bullshit though, only the monster of the week episodes were fantastic.


Agreed. Also, I started to lose interest in it once the phenomenon could only be explained by paranormal means. For quite some time you could explain what happened in each episode by scientific means... but then they just started getting silly and no basis in possibility anymore.

I've enjoyed Fringe also, but that's a show that started out silly and stayed that way.

So that makes him a hipster elitist because he's not a Jerry Springer fan? Count me as one of them too because I watched that Springer element go from fringe to prime-time mainstream over the past 15 years and there's no escaping it. The in-your-face booger-eating shock value that at one time you only saw in the mentally-challenged kid in your school.

And now this instant powdered fame has become a bankable commodity, if you're a pretty girl who eats her own earwax or admits to liking the smell of farts you can become a star. Or you don't mind pranking your mother on-camera by telling her that you're pregnant with your high-school art teacher's baby, just to "push the envelope" of reality TV.

Like the guy in the movie my workplace is full of college grads who were weaned on this crap, it's all they know. They talk like they think they are some sitcom sidekick, spitting out this stream of snarky, hip, pop-culture references and this week's memes and reality show updates. With a smug grin because the studio audience in their head is cheering them on.

So you can have it. Call it a hipster pose but I am too good for this crap. I don't care if there are 32 million of them, this crap is for morons and it will only get worse.
>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

So you're including yourself in that group, yes?
Or are you too hipster for that? "I was counter-culture before counter-culture was a culture."
>> ^gorillaman:
I hope we all understand that you can nod your head along to the sentiments in this video and still be a part of the problem.

>> ^shinyblurry:

I love that this is your reasoning as to why they shouldn't send death threats, not that it's wrong, but that they may interpret it in a particular way you don't like.
>> ^TheJehosephat:
Gotta say it, if you are a supporter of gay rights, don't call in death threats to those who are against it. They are (likely) all religious and therefore will take it as "persecution" for their beliefs.



You really want to go down this road? Are you incapable of making any real arguments? fringe elements on both sides make death threats and they're universally reviled and not accepted.

Try again

>> ^spoco2:

>> ^Porksandwich:
Chuck and the Subway stuff was because Subway basically kept that show on the air through at least one and maybe two cancellations.

Oh, I know that Subway saved Chuck, and for characters to eat the product is fine... but when they stop to list the ingredients, or have whole scenes set in a subway restaurant... it really lessons the show and makes you think it might have been better letting it die.
The Google Wallet product placement in Fringe was completely out of place, didn't fit in with the story, made you think there'd be some plot point to do with using that form of payment... but no, just a big old close up of a guy paying using Google Wallet and then a couple of characters talking about it later, trying to suggest 'it's how people pay for things now'... urgh, so painful


Yeah the stuff in Fringe really bugs me, especially since it's a good show and they keep threatening to cancel the good shows. So the story line is all screwed up and confusing because they keep having to come back from these "the end of series........maybe" shows.

Chuck......I knew the story behind it..so them giving Subway time didn't bug me as much. It was a goofy show.

Community did a much better job of putting Subway in the show and making it funny with the "Subway" character.

>> ^Porksandwich:

Chuck and the Subway stuff was because Subway basically kept that show on the air through at least one and maybe two cancellations.


Oh, I know that Subway saved Chuck, and for characters to eat the product is fine... but when they stop to list the ingredients, or have whole scenes set in a subway restaurant... it really lessons the show and makes you think it might have been better letting it die.

The Google Wallet product placement in Fringe was completely out of place, didn't fit in with the story, made you think there'd be some plot point to do with using that form of payment... but no, just a big old close up of a guy paying using Google Wallet and then a couple of characters talking about it later, trying to suggest 'it's how people pay for things now'... urgh, so painful