Dude, haven't you learned anything from history?
If you go and kill all the rich, powerful, queens, kings, presidents and top managers, somebody else will just take their place. Everything might be nice and polite in the beginning but in the end there's always one asshole more powerhungry than his peers, there will always be greed and corruption.
You can not escape human nature.
You want to end this, end mankind. Suck it down or kill'em all. I choose not to become the Bond villian.

Although I'd have the laugh for the part.

*brain

charliem - you've exactly hit on the problem with this "moral question", though in a way I believe most folks would never think of.

I remember the first time this I heard this about twenty years ago. My immediate reaction was yes on 1, no on 2, because if I flip the track switch there is an overwhelming likelihood the train will follow the secondary track and kill one person, but in the second scenario, there is no such guarantee. Every time I've pointed this out to the questioner, they try some hand-waving physics to convince me that it will work, but ultimately fail. And I'm convinced that the vast majority of people also understand this - that there really is no guarantee of derailing the train by pushing a fat person onto the tracks - and that is why most people respond the same way.

This is a very old "moral dilemma" question designed to elucidate human nature, but as charliem points out, it is completely false and thus completely invalid.

The questions are invalid in terms of interpreting the answers of respondents. On the other hand, using it as a means of probing the neurological basis of morality with fMRI is probably useful, since the relevant systems will likely be engaged regardless of the physical anomalies.

Well before reading all the comments, i went off to look into 3 or 4 of these that i didn't already know about.

Now i come back and find out i was enjoying snuff all along. I'm so confused.

What i think this shows is the kind of risks our race was willing to take to push further and harder, i think it's a testament to human nature.

Didn't exactly learn anything about human nature, but kinda fun.
She certainly said, "yes, I'm serious" enough that I believed it...

But he didn't kill himself. He's discussing what causes one to pursue such a thing. He knows it's a despicable weakness in human nature, and admits to succumbing to it himself.

If he were truly a weak person, he'd be dead. A strong person understands their shortcomings, failures and weaknesses, and can discuss them openly without feeling vulnerable or insecure.

An insecure or weak person will attest to having no weakness or flaws, and often dismiss or disrespect those who do because they feel better about themselves.

The especially insecure often do that on public discussion forums where they're safely anonymous.

So what? Rich people screw over poor people, how's that news? It's always been that way and it'll always stay that way. From time to time the 99% rise up against those in power and then form a new leaders club that simply repeats the cycle.
The system slowly improves, we're much better off today than people 200 or 2000 years ago were, but we won't be here long enough for seeing it go away. It's human nature. Get used to it.

@dalumberjack - Very well stated.

"I really wish we were appreciated like firemen or military but I know we never will be."

Law enforcement will never be appreciated like firemen or military because unlike the latter two, on the whole, officers overall spend a lot of their job targeting the people they're supposed to be protecting.

Firefighters attack fires to save innocent people.

Soldiers attack bad guys for the sake of innocent people (often at the expense of the lives of foreign innocent people, but that's another topic).

Law enforcement officers instead of just protecting innocent people from bad guys also attack innocent people (and rape their wallets).

There are no honest taxpayers who become fearful when a fire truck is on the road, but many get scared whenever there's an officer on the road even though they aren't doing anything wrong.

Part of it is policy (how local governments push to "earn" income by squeezing every cent they can out of taxpayers [because it costs money catching bad guys who often don't pay taxes nor have a wallet to rape]) and the other part is just human nature, which is obvious when you consider generally the type of personality that would seek to wield power over all the sniveling pissants that make up society.

People should feel safe and protected when officers are around.

Yes the narrative is tailored towards Americans and it is very very persuasive. I believe parts of it are true. I'd be interested in hearing what an Australian thinks about the NRA perspective. All you have to do is visit the NRA web site and look in the archives. I'm sure you can find many different news reports and videos covering the Australia and Mexico situation from their perspective. There will be more coverage of the Australia situation because it is considered a better analogue for what can happen with legislation. In general, there isn't much regard for whatever Mexico does legislatively. Mexico is only brought up as proof of a cultural phenomenon or confirmation of human nature from their perspective.

I love how such a narrow clip provokes such wide-ranging discussion here on the Sift. I think the clip itself raises two central questions:
1) Is Islam - in this point in history - more dangerous a religious ideology than the others, and
2) Is such a question/comparison even relevant? Or perhaps "promotes Islamic hatred" as the douchebag facing Maher seems to think?

To 1), I've argued above that yes, it is. as for 2), raised mostly by the commenters here, I would have to say "no, but" to both. Religious (and non-religious) ideologies should be strongly and non-violently denounced whenever/wherever they do harm. In the US, for example, Christianity does way more harm (to women's/gay's/atheist's rights, to education, etc.) than Islam does, but neither excuses/diminishes the evil done by the other. The "but" would be for when people get accused of discrimination and "islamophobia" when calling out the evils of Islam.
The necessity of the second "but" is illustrated by @shinyblurry's comment: there is always the danger of right-wing and/or Christian fundamentalists taking criticism of Islam to be a defense/validation of their own strain of wrong/dangerous BS and/or racisms (to be fair, sb only exhibits the former). This is inevitable, and should not stop people from criticising/denouncing unethical ideologies, nor should it prompt amalgamation of "criticising Islam" with "hating the for'ners/ragheads/Muslims".

Beyond the subject of the video itself, the correlation between poor socio-politico-economico-etc. status and the adherence to extremes, a point well-made by @Babymech, @Yogi and others is an important factor in the higher numbers of "Islamist evil" worldwide, one that I am well aware of. There is no better way of turning whole populations to fundamentalist extremes (or at least worse ones than they had before; let's not fall into the "noble savage" fallacy) than by meddling with their politics and then bombing the hell out of them. The danger is to go to the extreme of excluding the very nature of those fundamentals from the picture, which is just as simplistic and false as is blaming them exclusively.

Moreover, I always shudder at the left-wing strain of argumentation which puts ALL the blame on the Western invaders, (edit: 19-20th c.) colonisation and co. This view relies heavily on the "noble savage" form of racism, which assumes that only "White people/Westerners/Judeo-Christians" can wreak political/social havoc in the lands of those poor, innocent "Brown people/Muslims" (those two often being conflated). Having lived in Africa for 5 years I have a knee-jerk reaction to this kind of self-centered guilt-tripping, which deprives the "Brown/Black people" of one aspect of human nature: the ability to be evil, to fuck themselves up without any help from the "West". They can, and they do.

This tangent may seem irrelevant here, but the reason I bring it up is because that it is this sentiment that is behind much of this "Islamophobe" name-calling in the US and Europe, and behind the difficulty many "Westerners" have in bare-facedly criticising Islam, when they often have no such difficulty with their "home"-religion, Christianity.

@aaronfr raises the problem of how to go about denouncing an unethical set of beliefs, and gives several good examples of how not to (it is noteworthy that the only example of violent action is one taken by other religious people; I have yet to hear of atheists using anything other than words and pictures to make their point). Hitchens’ endorsement of the Iraq war lowered my esteem for him greatly (somewhat saved by the fact that his stance on this was of no influence to anyone, contrary to his huge effort against the evils of religion), but it is noteworthy that he and Harris are the most criticised (and the least influential) when they hold such positions.
On the side of the religious, however, it is often the crazy fundies who are the loudest and, in certain areas (with the aid of socio-etc factors of course) the most influential. And they have, especially in the Quran and the life of M., a reliable and divine source of hate/violence-mongering.

As you say, peace and prosperity are some of the best deterrents to religious extremism and unethical behaviour (but not solely; cf: the US, Saudi Arabia and co.) This does not render unnecessary denouncing the unethical nature of Islam, Christianity, etc. As noted above, the negative effects of religion are still felt in relatively peaceful and prosperous nations today (in France, for example, homophobes of Christian, Muslim and possibly Jewish faiths are causing a significant rise in homophobic violence ever since the gay-marriage hearings).

So long as the distinction between "Islam(/religious ideology)" and "Muslim(/person)" remains clear, we should be free to criticise and denounce the former to our hearts content. (Note how "Islamophobia" shits all over that distinction; one of the many reasons that term should never be uttered unironically).

_{My apologies for the dissertation-length comment}

God is clearly not a static foundation on which humanity bases their morals. Any cursory examination of Christian history shows that interpretations of what a Godly foundation for a life advicates have varied wildly at least from era to era, if not person to person.

There has not only overriding agreement of right and wrong between Christians throughout the ages, but also between cultures regardless of religion. Every culture has basically the same laws; don't lie, don't cheat, don't kill, don't steal etc. This is pointing to the fact that God didn't just tell us what is moral and immoral in the bible, He wrote it on our hearts. However, you are right in that actions speak louder than words. If you want to look at Christian history, it's very plain that calling yourself a Christian doesn't make you a moral person. Jesus said you will know a tree by its fruits, and a lot of Christian fruit in history has been rotten. There has also been quite a bit of good fruit as well. However, you can't pin down whether God gave a moral law to the actions of sinful human beings when the bible actually predicts the massive apostasy and moral inconsistency that you are describing. Take a look at Matthew 24, for instance.

Is there a foundation for static morality without a God to give it to you? Of course there isn't. And again I'll ask where or when we were guaranteed any such thing.

Well, it seems you agree with Ravi after all. This is exactly his point, and mine. There is no foundation for morality (or meaning, etc) without God and therefore atheism is incoherent. Atheism leads to nihilism which is inconsistent with your own experience.

But lets say that we do deserve such certainty, it still begs the question of why this foundation for morality of yours seems to have a curiously diverse array of outcomes in terms of moral norms over the millennia.

It has a diverse array of outcomes because human nature is corrupt and we can only imperfectly follow Gods laws. It also has nothing to do with what we deserve, but what is true.

Oh wait, I forgot. Your take on this whole thing is actually the only correct one, because of a personal relevation from God - of course. I guess we can now ignore all those other people who felt they had the same thing, because they just weren't lucky enough to benefit from the secure foundation of morality you have found.

It's not my take, it's what Jesus taught us:

John 14:6

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So your argument is with Jesus and not with me. You ask Him whether this is true or not.

And yes, spending 20 minutes detailing how Hitler and Stalin may have used certain limited aspects of atheistic thought processes to reach conclusions that are clearly not necessary outcomes of such premises, not by a long shot, and then using that to discredit an entire world view - is indeed Reducto ad Hitlerum in every possible sense of the term.

As TheGenk said, that's weak man.

Hitler is debatable but Stalins regime was atheistic at its core and that isn't debatable. Atheism wasn't peripheral to it, it was the foundation. Stalin brutally imposed atheism on the populace, and killed millions of Christians who refused to deny Christ. Don't take my word for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union

The history of Christianity in the Soviet Union was not limited to repression and secularization. Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made atheism the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and the elimination of religion.[1]

The state was committed to the destruction of religion,[2][3] and destroyed churches, mosques and temples, ridiculed, harassed and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools and media with atheistic propaganda, and generally promoted 'scientific atheism' as the truth that society should accept.[4][5]

Religious beliefs and practices persisted among the majority of the population,[4] in the domestic and private spheres but also in the scattered public spaces allowed by a state that recognised its failure to eradicate religion and the political dangers of an unrelenting culture war.[2][6]

What part don't you see as human nature?

Specifically, what I had in mind were the officer's wielding of power, his road rage, and the investigating officer's finding that the offending officer was not at fault.

I'm curious what part of this video do you see as human nature?

Sickening, but not surprising.

That's human nature.

1) In a perfect world, there'd be no drug use...or pain from which to seek escape. But because this is a world with pain, a trade-off should be preferred where there is no solution (and never will be due to human nature).

2) If two (or three) million out of 142 million people are illegal drug addicts, it's a problem but hardly a crisis.

3) If heroin were cheap and legal, this "new" drug would hardly be bothered with, plus there would be access to clean needles.

I'm an advocate of Sortition, sadly I don't think we'll ever see it in any large country. It seems that the bigger the population or the greater the wealth sequestering and inequality, it will remain a fantasie because of human nature to follow those "Destined to Lead" or whatever other nonsense.

I think the answer will ultimately be smaller nations.