Thank you for sharing this in that awful thread. I have someone very close to me that has paranoid schizophrenia and a lot of the problem was that they were born in a time where the culture just wanted to lock them up and call them crazy. Luckily now, it's much better but still not ideal. There is still a negative stigma attached to mental illnesses.

Anyway, I'm trying to avoid the thread for now as I don't want to get too personal on VS these days. I just thought I should let you know that your comments meant something to some stranger on the internet.

Have a good day!

Nice vibe in the comments!

Better lock all these "Crazies" away so they aint no danger to us normal folks.

Yeah. Ok, I'm hyperbolising. (its an actual word apparently!) but I do get a little tired of people equating sufferers of a mental illness to potential murderers. Many thousands manage to struggle through their lives with these or similar disabilities without killing anybody. Try not to add this stigma to the list of their troubles. Ty.

more taxation = theft BS. By living here you are agreeing to be taxed to pay for things we all need. Like that pesky police force we all agree is necessary to a just state.

if you live here, you agree with these terms, thus no theft. If you don't like taxation, get out.

yet again we have this hypocrisy. when we agree to the terms of a contract when dealing with private business, no one complains when a business holds you to your end of the bargain. but when gov't tries to collect taxes you agree to pay and tries to hold you to your end of the bargain, suddenly it's this horrible thing.

If you want something, you have to pay for it and Libertarianism is just a way of saying "I want to get away with doing something that I know harms people" or "I want something but I don't want to have to pay for it" wrapped in delusion of freedom.

people throw around the word freedom but in reality, as @ChaosEngine pointed out. you give people freedom and they use it to fuck over other people. We haven't evolved to the point where we can realiably count on people not to fuck each other over. Someday maybe that will happen, but it certainly isn't today.

Voluntaryism is just Objectiveism and Meritocracy trying to divorce itself from the negative stigma of Ayn Rand. rebranding a failed idea to get gullible people to fall for it again. Legitimized avarice.

boy I sure didn't miss blankfist's one note charlie obsession with statism.

Did the people who come up with these ideas completely ignore the lessons they learned when they first became adults? When we're growing up, we hated our parents for imposing rules on us, when we first become adults and we have a first taste of freedom, we go nuts, we do extremely stupid things, harmful things. most adults do eventually learn that these things are harmful and *shock* learn to impose limits on themselves. Eventually they come to realize that their parents weren't jerks after all and they generally did have a good reason to impose rules on us. Sure there some shitty parents out there and the children of those shitty parents throw out the rules that didn't work when they become adults, but guess what, they don't throw out the system, they just come up with different rules. hopefully those rules are better, if not, we just try again.

There is this false notion of an adversarial relation between gov't and the people. PEOPLE CREATED GOV'T!!! gov't is just the current method by which we impose limits on ourselves. just like we do as we grow up. Sure, we don't have a perfect system. get used to it. If gov't truly wasn't necessary, we would have ditched it a long time ago. someday we will have the ability to self limit ourselves without a self-created third party, but that isn't today.

Probably isn't ever going to change until we evolve genetic memory of our parents/ancestors or we develop a way to download knowledge/experience Matrix-style so that instead of learning the hard way to not touch a stove because it's hot, we just already know it at birth or an earlier age.

@gorillaman

1. Morbid curiosity.

2. I think being able to distinguish ethnic backgrounds makes me a more complete individual.

Still thnk it sucks that asking a question like this has developed a racist stigma.

This may run long, so bear with me.

Law Enforcement employees tend to come from two specific groups of people. The first group is going to consist of people who actually joined up to try to protect people and make things safer for them. They are idealists who may grow jaded over time; because realistically if your only input on what being a LEO is the internet and reality TV, you are not prepared for the type of mental assault you will endure day in and day out. I'm not talking about angry people, but stuff like drawing circles around little chunks of brains on the highway from a teenage girl that went through a windshield.

As an officer at any level (except maybe a small town), you are going to see the absolute worst side of humanity on a daily basis and you aren't on a tour of duty like the military. You don't get to 'rotate' home and put it behind you. This will wear on anybody who is not a sociopath, it will grind you down to a nub. You could see professional help for this, but I will go into that later.

The second type of person who goes into law enforcement is someone who likes authority, a sense of power over someone else, a bully. This person is in the job because it gives them power over others and the law will protect them because it is vaguely worded in SO many cases. This person will shrug off the effects that cripple the first type over time, because they feel in charge of every situation. After a while, if they don't tone it down, they will get caught. Thankfully the cell camera and the internet tends to be helping clean them out due to their own incapability to see they can't ALWAYS be in charge, but it will be a long road because this group is the BULK of the ones that join LE organizations.

Now why do these two groups tend to be the ones that you are going to run into on a consistent basis? The simple, hard answer is that we pay our front line LEO's very little compared to other services that risk their life or experience the mental grind. Your average patrol officer is going to pull a median salary of about 35k with comparable benefits to someone working in a office job. A firefighter is going to pull around 45k and scales up much quicker, not to mention their benefits are beyond good. EMT's make about the same as patrol officers, but their benefits are also very good and they don't have the same stressors. I know that ranges will vary and State LEO's are very well paid on average, but we are talking about the people you are going to encounter most often.

If you have to choose between a job where you are going to be considered a 'hero' or a job where everyone is going to be biased towards you being a 'villain, and the hero jobs pay better, which would you logically choose? Assuming of course that you are not sorted into one of the two groups I described, most are going to run away from serving in LE. In fact, this is why more of the 'bullies' tend towards LE and the 'idealists' don't. So you already have created a situation where the 'stormtrooper' mindset is going to prefer this job and haven't considered options to rectify it. The people you don't run into that much are going to be the people that took college and got pushed through the ranks quickly. If you didn't take college or just took an Associates Degree, you have to beat these people out. It is extremely hard to do that, even if you do your job much better than they did.

The final factor that runs into this is the mental issues I mentioned earlier. If you seek help from your employers for mental stress, they are going to handle it differently if you are a LEO. You are going to find out quickly that you are expendable. If you seek help and get classified as PTSD, you set a chain of events in motion that is inexorable. You will be rotated to a desk. You will see a Psychiatrist who will prescribe anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. This person will meet with you for around 15 minutes 3-4 times a week, ask you questions, and ask if the medication is helping. If you return to functional status in a month or two, you get put back on duty. If you don't, they put you on short term disability for up to one year. Your visits drop to once a week, then once a month. One year later, your employment is terminated. They hire a new recruit and start the cycle again about the same time that you start your short term disability. You get to try to salvage your career in anyway possible, hopefully you paid through the nose for long term disability, or you can try to find a smaller department that doesn't bother to dig too deep on background checks.

Other related fields like firefighters/emts comprehend PTSD and work with their people much harder. They have better benefits so you they can see outside therapists as much as needed. There is less stigma if you have a problem, because they understand. You go on the fritz as an LEO and you will overhear people who used to respect you call you weak or a pussy. Sadly this type of thing happens at all levels of LE, even as a State Trooper you are expendable.

In any case, the point to this essay is that the system is flawed and is going to drive out the good LEOs and save the bad ones to protect itself from litigation. Protect yourself at all times with video, be advised of the laws and loopholes in them that bad LEos will exploit, and don't force confrontation with a LEO if there is a loophole. If the man had stepped outside and talked calmly, the incident would not have escalated as it did. In this case he did not inform himself of the loopholes correctly and got tasered (which was improper, they didn't warn him correctly or anything), and the LEOs look like villains again.

Let me start out by saying I work for a county Sheriff’s Office and will give you some insight or an idea what goes on in an officers/deputies head with any situation (which could pertain to this one)

First, I am a big nerd and have been around computers all my life and the internet so I have seen many police videos online. So let me say first that I agree that there are bad officers out there. Are we all bad? No, but the few ruin it for the many and I’m sorry to see such hate and distrust because of it. The only thing I or any law enforcement can do about that is do our job correctly and wipe the stigma away one person at a time.

Second, when it comes to responding to a 911 call (A call for service), 9 times out of 10 you do not know what you are going to. Dispatch (radio or control whatever moniker you want to use) can only give you the info that the person calling 911 gives them. Say this video instance, that someone from inside the home or a neighbor called 911 because of possible domestic violence going on inside the home. This is usually all the info an officer will get before showing up on scene. Now if the officer approaches the house and tries to make contact and is confronted by a man who has locked his door and is shouting at you, this is going to cause alarm with the office. Not only can he not make contact inside the house to verify if someone is actually hurt or to clear the call as it was made on accident by a neighbor, he has a male subject who is disobeying his commands to answer the door. I’m assuming this officer made a few attempts to make contact before he called for backup (fill units). Now with multiple officers, they will attempt to make contact a few more times. These officers broke down the front door to make contact inside the house. The only reason they would do that is because they saw danger or possible harm to someone inside, or the call made to 911 dictated that there was someone inside the house who was injured or in fear of their life.

To be honest, there are many reasons why responding authorities would break down that door. Maybe the 911 call was from a family member inside the home stating that their brother etc… was off his medications and was threating to hurt himself or others. Maybe he was acting erratic because he was off his meds and police broke down the door due to this individual having a violent past when he stops taking his medications. Maybe there were no meds involved at all and this individual has a violent past so the officers chose to act based on past experiences with said individual.

See, that’s the problem with almost 98% of these videos, WE DON’T KNOW. There are so many possible scenarios that without full disclosure on what went on, what info did the police have, and what were they witnessing on scene. We cannot “Monday night quarterback” these videos. I know videos prior to this have shown officer’s acting in the wrong with all the info available, but that doesn’t give us the right to assume this or others videos are showing officers acting in the wrong. I do not go to work every day planning on hurting people or making false arrests. I have said this many times to people who I have arrested or deal with when they ask “why are you arresting me”, “are you taking that money out of my pocket and stealing it?”, “this is a false arrest!”, my response is your few dollars or property or the statistic of making one more arrest if false is not worth my job. I am not going to make false allegations or take someone’s property that would cause me to lose my job and most importantly my pension. My family relies on me to bring money home so I can provide food and shelter. I would like to think almost every officer/deputy thinks and believes the same. We do what is right, even if during the situation it may seem wrong to others (civilians), we do what we think is right so at the end of the day we can go home to our families and the city/county stays a little safer. That’s my whole day, trying to make the city a better place one call for service at a time, and then get home safe to my family.

I really wish we were appreciated like firemen or military but I know we never will be. Law enforcement only show up when things have gone bad to worse. Nobody ever wants to go to jail. Try having a job where everyone hates you no matter what good you do. Yet we still go to work and put our lives on the line everyday (many of us die each year) so people can sit at home or in there office cubicle and judge videos of our actions. So please try to remember we are not all bad.

Just my .02

I'm not sure where this stigma on martial arts comes from. It's called an art for a reason, its as much a form of expression as any other art, especially when you look at styles like capoeira and wushu.

I think this article sums up what Penn is trying to say here:

Mentally ill doesn't equal evil

"One in five Canadians will deal with some form of mental illness in any given year in Canada. And most of these periods of suffering, whether it's a bout of acute anxiety or depression or an eating disorder, goes untreated. One in five Canadians equates to roughly 400,000 Vancouverites, or almost seven million Canadians nationally.

To think of all of these people as dangerous or homeless, or to see them as incapable of employment or a relationship, is ridiculous.

These numbers tell us that the vast majority of Canadians afflicted with a mental illness are wonderful, functioning people. They are our teachers, lawyers, waitresses, bus drivers; they are us, not "them."

My concern is how we dismantle the stigma that surrounds mental illness so the Canadians who are affected can feel no shame in getting the help they may need and deserve.

I am concerned about the layperson who reads the sensationalistic headlines after incidents such as the Connecticut shooting and then thinks of mental illness as a lifelong sentence of being feared and ostracized."

http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/story.html?id=7730704

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

One of the things mentioned in the video doesn't ring true with my experience. I know many people with very outgoing extrovert-seeming personalities who claim to be introverts.

I think there is some social cachet in claiming the "misunderstood, enigmatic loner" title.

Actually, in my experience there is a bit of stigma in claiming to be an extrovert - mainly because they're played as chatterbox busy bodies or "relationship managers" in popular media.

And folks wonder why there is this whole stigma that southern people are stupid. Watching Mitt Romney cater to this misinformation and bullshit when he himself doesn't hold the same belief, makes him a despicable human being.

In my opinion only a handful of these people are stupid. The rest are victims of a piss poor education system, religious brainwashing and a lack of critical thinking. But what can you expect when you have southern states actively trying to downplay scientific fact and instill religious fundamentalism and removal of critical thinking in southern schools.

I am just beyond thankful I was born in a largely democratic, north-eastern state.

You are pretty quick to claim this as BS.. Cannabis has those same effects when smoked but the pain relieve is so much stronger. The plant is only now been studied seriously and i believe that it is going to change our lives, it's so tuned to our current life-style. But the psycho-activeness needs to be removed and used as a separate drug. There are other drugs that are actually helpful when used correctly by a licensed medical professional but can't be studied because of the stigma: it's illegal therefore it's a sin.

I am not stating that this particular video is totally legit, haven't done any background checks on that organization. It might be total BS. But it has been proven now on multiple studies that it has health benefits, we really need to keep studying. It's one of the oldest medicines in the world, that can't be co-incidence.

>> ^mxxcon:

>> ^entr0py:
>> ^deathcow:
I am venturing a guess that they only show the one persons face because he is the only white person involved and they are not looking for a stigma of "foreign labor".

Italy is like 92% white, I kind of doubt he's the only white guy working there. I wouldn't be surprised if this genuinely is a proper workshop with proper wages, and not a sweatshop. But I don't blame you for being skeptical. Apple has proven that just because a product carries a crazy luxury price, it doesn't mean it isn't made by wage slaves.
Louis Vuitton is a French brand/company. What does Italy have to do with this?


It's a French company but this was filmed at a workshop in Italy. So, deathcow is totally right, they use foreign labor.

http://www.martincmusicblog.com/home/2012/3/5/louis-vuittons-italian-bespoke-workshop-fiesso-dartico.html

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^deathcow:
I am venturing a guess that they only show the one persons face because he is the only white person involved and they are not looking for a stigma of "foreign labor".

Italy is like 92% white, I kind of doubt he's the only white guy working there. I wouldn't be surprised if this genuinely is a proper workshop with proper wages, and not a sweatshop. But I don't blame you for being skeptical. Apple has proven that just because a product carries a crazy luxury price, it doesn't mean it isn't made by wage slaves.
Louis Vuitton is a French brand/company. What does Italy have to do with this?

>> ^deathcow:

I am venturing a guess that they only show the one persons face because he is the only white person involved and they are not looking for a stigma of "foreign labor".


Italy is like 92% white, I kind of doubt he's the only white guy working there. I wouldn't be surprised if this genuinely is a proper workshop with proper wages, and not a sweatshop. But I don't blame you for being skeptical. Apple has proven that just because a product carries a crazy luxury price, it doesn't mean it isn't made by wage slaves.

@hpqp
Sadly, I think you're spot-on about the other failing of the firearm analogy; some people are just itching for an opportunity to shoot someone. And yes, some of those people will try to raise children in their image.

In my view, my answer to "The Big Question" is "Only before implantation, if at all. Because I know that a child is demonstrably human well prior to delivery, and tracing back I cannot rationally distinguish a point where the line is crossed after implantation. I would rather err on the side of caution when human life is involved." In light of this, it should be obvious why I am opposed to even early abortion. I'm curious about your almost offhand dismissal of adoption as a non-solution and "worse". It sounds like this is a topic you have discussed previously at length. To me, even a grievously flawed system of adoption is preferable to abortion.
I do think you raise a potent point with respect to sex through coercion as distinguished from rape.
Even so, I do not see carrying and delivering a child to be "punishment". It is a substantial burden, to be sure, but in my perspective the alternative is abhorrent to the point as to be unacceptable.

I think analogies in general fail when discussing abortion because it is such a unique situation.
Note: In discussing your analogies, I'm going to use the term "kill" with respect to abortion. Going back to "the Big Question", whether or not this is an accurate term is probably going to depend on your perspective relative to the wad of cells we term a fetus. (Which I see you're searching for.)
The helmet analogy fails because efforts to save the life of the helmet-shunner do not necessarily harm someone else as directly as in abortion. You can find harm, sure: saving feckless may divert resources from saving the life of burning-nun-bus-rescue-hero, but you aren't necessarily killing someone else to save him.
Same for the STDs. Treating an STD kills bacteria, or uses up anti-viral medication, but there's no direct harm to another individual in the process. For me, living with the consequences of getting an STD means living with one of the incurable ones or living with a curable one until it gets managed, and dealing with the social stigma of informing other partners of your status.

I disagree with the assessment that the procedure is "punishment enough", primarily because I don't think that punishment is due. Again, it's not a woman's "fault" that she's pregnant, and sex is not some grievous crime to be prosecuted. Sex is a wonderful experience that can be a carnal pleasure, an act of intimacy, or both, but one that carries consequences. The initiation of a new human life is a possible outcome. (Yes, the procedure is unpleasant, often painful, and some women will experience regret or other emotional disturbances afterwards, but those are, again, possible consequences of a choice.)

I agree wholeheartedly that more education is essential. Increased access to contraceptives (and hopefully more effective contraceptives) will (almost) certainly lessen the incidence of unwanted pregnancies. I appreciate that "don't have sex if you can't accept being pregnant" is not a magical incantation that makes people not have sex, but it has to be a part of it, because no method of contraception is 100% effective, even if used correctly.

I look forward to your followup on the "ball of cells" issue.