As a child I played with matches up in the attic of our house. The matches were book matches from a funeral home my father worked for as a part time job when he was off duty as a cop. The cover of the matches had a black glossy finish.

Dad found the matches while cleaning out the attic. Dad called my name from upstairs and I headed that way.

His first question to me was, "Were you playing with matches up here?"

His second question was, "Are you lying?"

His third question was, "Are you lying?"

His last question was, "I'm only going to ask you one more time. If you lie to me I'm taking you down to city hall and lock you up. Were you playing with matches up here?"

He grabbed my hand and turned it palm up. He pulled out the pack of matches and picked up some floor sweepings then sprinkled it on the black glossy cover. And DAMN! wouldn't you know it. There stood a perfectly proud little fingerprint. It matched the one on my hand. (I guess. I never brought a lawyer.)

Out to the car we went. I was on my way to jail which gave me about five minutes to rethink my answer. The closer we got, the bigger my fears grew. He made the last turn onto the street for city hall.

I cracked! "I did it. I was playing with the matches." I confessed.

My answer was my Get Out of Jail Free card.

Many years later I brought up that day with my dad. He confessed that he had no idea what he was going to do if I didn't crack.

My only reply to him was, "You bastard!" We both laughed together.

I'll probably vote for Biden, but the rest of my votes have to go Republican for one reason only.

Guns. I am OK with some gun control. But it is clear that no matter what, Democrats will make every attempt they can if they sweep the election to re-do the assault weapon ban, apply punitive taxes to ammo (and possibly guns), and remove the right to private sale.

Bedo was the only one to fully admit it, but Biden has been harsh on guns as well going by comments alone. I don't want Trump back, but I want the Senate to stay Republican to counter gun measures.

I know it's unpopular, but I am one of those people that will never give up my rifles, my pistols, my shotguns, my large capacity clips, and my right to buy as much ammo as I wish without paying another government tax. I also feel I should be able to give or sell my firearms to someone I trust, be it a family member or close friend.

@JiggaJonson,

When you say:
...I'm against promoting the idea that torture works...

I can see where you are coming from on this. In the sense that it might then encourage people to accept using it, because it works.

My problem with that line of reasoning though is that torture actually is effective. The simplest proof being that we wouldn't have every single national intelligence agency using it(directly or indirectly by a less squeamish ally as we 'civilized' nations prefer to do it).

Your links to the ineffectiveness of torture only look at the narrowest possible goals from it. Somebody like Saddam Hussein usually didn't care about Jack Bauer style, minutes count specific intel. Getting the names of everyone you knew or 'conspired' with mattered, and torture IS effective at getting people to talk. The trouble your links note is that torture victims will say literally anything to get you to stop. When looking for information though, victims can't name real people unless they know them. Better still for guys like Saddam, if you get yourself 3 victims in the same movement, you can cross reference things and build a list of suspects. To more ethical nations like us that's unactionable intelligence, but if you don't care if you sweep up 5 innocents along with the 5 people that really were a threat to you, it still 'worked'.

Torture also is widely used simply as a tool to instill fear. When your citizens have seen the broken shells of people who's loyalty was deemed questionable, fear keeps them in step. It worked for Saddam until external forces stopped him, and it's helped keep 3 generations in power in North Korea.

Getting back closer to the video, things we don't like don't go away just because we refuse to talk about them. Rape, torture, and violence aren't like the boogeyman that will go away if we just stop talking and thinking about them so much. We need to accept that there are terrible things in our world that people do and benefit from doing them. These are things that people use to gain a feeling of power, or to truly gain real tangible power over other people.

Of course we have to discuss them responsibly, and the danger of shaming victims is an equally real thing to be aware of. At the same time though, humor is one of the ways of bridging the gap to people dealing with trauma, so jokes about things that cause trauma like rape, violence and torture have an honest place in making things better as well.

I'm sure they will gain more overall customers because they are owned by Proctor & Gamble. As I mentioned originally, there will be plenty of women and white knights who jump at the chance to support a company who decided to tag along onto the #metoo movement.

To me, that is part of the reason why I dislike this commercial so much. Not just because of it's huge and sweeping generalizations (practically every scene has one), but because their ad department had to know that an edgy commercial would do the same thing for them as it did for Nike. Does anyone think that the majority of actual corporate level people at Gillette/P&G give two fucks about #metoo? I know I don't.

It's just an ad targeted at a huge group of people that are easy to take potshots at currently. I find it little different than attack ads run by fucktards that want to condemn all Muslims for the act of terrorists or fundamentalist jihadists. The most screwed up thing about that analogy is that, realistically, there are largish groups of Islamic people that actually will cheer and throw celebrations when there is a terrorist attack. Yet you would be hard put to find large swaths of men out in the streets cheering on the effects of so called Toxic Masculinity.

Yes, we as men need to speak out. We need to support the evolution of mankind away from barbarism. But we don't need to succumb to propaganda that tries to purport that a man seeing a pretty lady walk past shouldn't attempt to say hi or introduce himself to her because that is bad. This ad, with one of the sweeping generalizations I mentioned earlier, would have you think that it is HORRIBLE for a man to do that and that a 'responsible' man would body check that guy. Because men should never try to meet women, only remain passive and allow the woman to come to them. I say fuck that, it is wrong to catcall women, but there is nothing wrong with going up and saying hi. This ad (and some other internet videos) would have you think it's the equivalent of throwing the lady down in the middle of a crowded walkway and having your way with her.

The ad could have been better, there were moments like the Terry Crews scene that I agree with, but they took the easy way out and just slammed men in general.

Sweep the leg!

Politico has a long piece on Boehner. It includes this little gem:

On Sunday, July 17, it appeared they had a deal. Boehner and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor—whom the speaker had reluctantly brought into the negotiations, knowing the majority leader’s distrust of Obama could poison the talks—worked out some final details that morning at the White House. When the president returned from church, Boehner says, he invited them both into the Oval Office and shook their hands. Some fine-tuning remained, but in Boehner’s mind the so-called grand bargain was done. The framework included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” Boehner tells me.

The next 48 hours changed everything. On Tuesday morning, the so-called Gang of Six—three senators from each party who had been discussing their own sweeping fiscal agreement—announced a briefing for their colleagues at the Capitol. They unveiled a separate framework, totally unaware of what Obama and Boehner had agreed to. This deal included significantly more revenue. Chambliss, by then a senator, was one of the GOP Gang members and had no idea—because Boehner had been negotiating with the president in private—that their announcement would kill the speaker’s deal with the White House. Obama saw that Republican senators were endorsing a deal that included far more revenue, and knew there was no way he could sell the grand bargain to his liberal base. When he came back with a counteroffer, seeking a higher revenue number, it validated Cantor’s warnings about not trusting the president. And by that point Boehner’s members had heard enough about the grand bargain to know they didn’t like it—with the $800 billion revenue figure, much less something higher.

So the deal fell apart, and the two sides peddled their competing versions of events: Boehner’s team said the White House moved the goal posts, while Obama’s allies said the speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal.

Your video, The Sweeping Shadow - Total Solar Eclipse, Nov 14 2012,, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Great performance!

But I do feel a little bad for the folks that need to sweep up that crap that showered down on the stage.

Pretty sure this is exactly what's supposed to be happening. Otherwise she'd just sweep the leaves under the door and collect them on the other side.

The nasty thing about pools is even if you're not actually over the edge, when it bursts, the water will sweep you over anyway...

Viruses? The only alarm it set off for me was my bullshit alarm. Did your AV software say what kind? Dammit, now I gotta run a sweep. Although I am running Firefox with Adblock and NoScript, so maybe that made the difference.

Agreed (Stormsinger), and agreed (ChaosEngine) - it is a stupid statement and that was his point. A sweeping statement that "Catholics don't believe in Hell..." is stupid and incorrect. Likewise, saying "Police are biased against people of color" is also a stupid statement - many are people of color - doesn't really address the problem or lead to a cogent discussion of how to reduce the threat to suspects or the threat to the police officers who are also killed in the line of duty.

His point is absolutely correct: there is too much empty rhetoric intended to divide public opinion and not enough real interest interest in addressing the underlying cause of the problem.

Ok, if we are talking formal boolean logic, then yes, that's a valid response, but human language is not a formal boolean logical system. This is why applying rigid logic to discussion of human beliefs and experiences is such a bad idea.

Most people are able to use life experience and simple human intuition to understand that the statement "Catholics don't believe in hell" does not mean "there are absolutely no Catholics that believe in hell" and instead is closer to "most Catholics (as a general rule) don't believe in hell".

A sweeping generalisation like "catholics don't believe in hell" is a pretty stupid statement to make in the first place.

It's a beautiful place that's given us some amazing science, culture, and social advances.

All those things happened because we're the beautiful, figurative melting pot. Unfortunately, Trump is in the process of turning the US into a pot of homogenized white shit.

Sports is a perfect microcosm. We're good at so many sports because we choose people from the countries that excel at that particular sport. Kenyans for running. Eastern European or Canadian hockey players. Dominican baseball players.

I really dislike making sweeping generalizations, but I think the simple folks that voted for Trump never have and never will contribute anything culturally, scientifically, or socially.

Unless that culture is backwards and hate-filled.

Different cultural values. Alright then, @SDGundamX

The claim is that these places are examples of islamic countries 'filled with nice people'. I'm suggesting that @StukaFox's list of vicious police-states is perhaps not best chosen to illustrate this view.

There's a difference in category, isn't there, between being muslim and being japanese or american. It would be absurd to say, "I am japanese because I believe..." just as it would, "I am a muslim because I happened to be born..."

Now, we can actually make sweeping and not the less factual statements about people on the basis of their shared characteristics. Japanese people are born within such a set of geographical coordinates, or to parents who hold citizenship with the state of japan, or have naturalised following a particular procedure. Millions of people lumped together in a single sentence, and without assuming they're all alike.

Muslims, like rats or serial killers, aren't all alike and they don't all believe exactly the same things. Nevertheless by definition there really are certain specific beliefs to which they must all hew. Or show me the muslim who doesn't believe that there's a god, or that muhammed received its doctrine.

If you find basic, universal islamic beliefs repugnant (as every decent person must) then it is correct, objectively correct, to generalise your antipathy to all muslims, however many millions there may be, however widely spread. The apology from number and diversity fails completely.