Did you skip your history class?

Dark Ages referred to the period of time ushered in by the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

The decline of the Roman Empire refers to the societal collapse encompassing both the gradual disintegration of the political, economic, military, and other social institutions of Rome.

To be sure Christians have done their good part in making a mockery out of religion. This doesn't make the Bible wrong. Just piss poor examples that do more harm than good.

The irony of this is that our 21st Century world is no less dark. It is an individual darkness, which multiplies and grows as those who reject Gods walk. Our age is characterized by every intellectual and technological advance but our morals have turned backwards.

From 2 Timothy 3
1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

The Book of 2 Timothy was written in approximately A.D. 67 which is interesting that for something written so long ago appear so timely today.

I guess that if Nostradamus wrote it more would probably give it more credit.

>> ^TheGenk:

Didn't we have a christian dictatorship on this planet already? What was it called...? Ah yes, the fucking DARK AGE!

The first sentence containing the lack of sufficient space between "like" and "Usher" was an immediate upvote.

I heard a solid two pings on my Gaydar!

Take that Siftbot! Vote 10! >> ^siftbot:

Moving this video to Payback's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'beatboxing, idol' to 'idol, michael jackson, kenny muhammad, usher, anita ward, yoshimoto' - edited by xxovercastxx

>> ^silvercord:

http://videosift.com/video/DJ-Got-Us-Fallin-In-Love-USHER
I put this one up a month ago. Not as epic as 50 cent showing up in your bedroom, but the kid does a great job with Usher.


I think the USHER video is more enjoyable!

Thanksgiving.

The time we give thanks for bringing syphilis to the natives, and then proceeding to usher in an age of doom for them.

http://videosift.com/video/DJ-Got-Us-Fallin-In-Love-USHER

I put this one up a month ago. Not as epic as 50 cent showing up in your bedroom, but the kid does a great job with Usher.

>> ^Quantumwormtongue:

The Eye of God. B!tches!


Where's Mr. Frodo when you need someone to distract the eye of Sauron... err, the eye of God, sorry. I get the two mixed up -- they're both fictional villains with armies of fanatics that can't wait to usher in the destruction of the world.

I guess Usher had to start somewhere...

I realize one can't read the tone of my post, but I was being facetious about hating him. I hate him as much as I hate the Nissan Cube - I would never pay for one, I don't understand why anyone likes them and I think the person who designed it should be smacked upside the head but I wouldn't have them all dumped into the middle of the ocean.

That said, worked hard and earned his fame?

He is a mass marketed tool of the recording industry. He won a genetic lottery that makes him physically appealing to preteen girls and has a decent voice. He had the luck to be accidentally seen on YouTube by a marketing executive who arranged for him to sing with Usher one week later. He is a naive teenager being blindly led down a path of fame and riches by people who know how to sell things much more than they know music.

He doesn't deserve to be in the same sentence as The Barenaked Ladies, who seriously worked hard as independent musicians, or Jim Carey, who was/is a comic genius. They are great Canadian entertainers, Justin Bieber is not.>> ^doogle:

>> ^Skeeve:
"I don't know if you seen it but..."
There are so many reasons to hate Justin Bieber - I'm choosing to hate him for his bad grammar and for giving a bad name to us Canadians.

Canadians' extreme modesty pushes us to dislike success and fame of Canadians on top. So they go elsewhere for their fame & success, while Canada pushes them out. Barenaked Ladies, Alanis Morrissette, Jim Carrey, etc.
I'm not at all into Bieber's music, but the kid's got a good head on his shoulders and he's worked hard and earned his fame.
You don't have to like him. But you don't have to hate him either. Or listen to his music. Or watch a video aptly titled "Justin Bieber Walks Into Glass Door"

It's amazing to me how ensconsed in the bubble the right is these days.

Let's break it down:

1. Ideological subversion propagation - Radical conservatives begin pushing their ideology to all members of society through churches, schools, and supposedly independent policy research "think tanks". This begins in the early 30's, and is a systematic campaign aimed at chipping away at the credibility of embedded liberalism, America's original ideology. The "threat of communism" is conflated with traditional American values like empathy, solidarity, and equality.
   
   
2. Destabilization - The 1960's reads literally like a textbook example of a country in crisis. A presidential assassination, two proxy wars, a mexican standoff with nuclear weapons, a counterculture protest movement, race relations getting strained with protests and violence, and the then-dominant Democratic party coming apart at its seams over disagreements about the war and civil rights.
   
   
3. Crisis - This one is clear. The oil crisis of the 1970's was our key takeover crisis moment. It basically ushered in an end to embedded liberalism as the American way of life. So many aspects of our political life and the way our economy was run was radically changed in the aftermath of that crisis, even though it was a walk in the park compared to today's economic problems.
   
   
4. Normalization - Conservative Republicans won 3 terms in a row, from 1980 until 1992, followed by a conservative, Southern Democrat who won in part because a third party candidate split Republican support. Party-line economists have treated the works of John Maynard Keynes the way their forebears treated the work of Karl Heinrich Marx -- they pretended it had nothing worthwhile to say, and tried their best to erase it from academic discourse. The Democrats of today consider reforms Republicans proposed in 1992 massive ideological win for the left.
   

Take the bananas out of your ears, morons.

Anyways, this is actually a pretty astute observation about how radical political and economic change happens. It's not necessarily planned like our conservative takeover was, but the framework for all ideological revolutions start with an ideology becoming commonly known, then during a period of destabilization and crisis, people may turn to the new ideology.

This is literally what more than a few libertarian bloggers say is their raison d'etre -- to make sure the ideology is lying around for when a crisis hits.

However, anyone who thinks some Russian-led infiltration of "Marxist-Lenninist" ideology happened or is happening is fucking deluded. It would've been a real trick considering your average American doesn't have a fucking clue what Marxism is...because the right stigmatized knowledge of it!

Jazz; blues; rock and roll. This phenom has been around in a while: white american and world culture embracing black american music.

Hip Hop is everywhere. I visited a large and not well known city in china a few years ago. While walking through a mall, I randomly ran into a performing b-boy group. I am not even sure that these folks knew about the origins of hip hop. For all they know; it could be a chinese creation. That's all right, though.

>> ^enoch:

they are also called yo-yos.
ok..lets put aside for a moment that the classification of "whiteness" is a fabricated term.
let us instead look at the history of american culture.
over the past century and a half there has been a few waves of immigration to america and each of those waves took approximately 2 generations to assimilate.
the italians assimilated,the irish assimilated.polish and dutch.the ONLY culture that was having trouble assimilating was the black culture and they had been here for almost two hundred years longer.the reasons for this is a far longer discussion but i use this point as a perspective tool.
blacks had been here for hundreds of years and generation after generation remained socially stagnant UNTIL...the advent and consequent popularity of hip-hop.
it was this genre of music which was so uniquely tied to black culture which ushered in the assimilation of black culture.now i do not propose that this has been a smooth transition nor has it been complete but rather pointing out the immense impact of this musical genre.what civil rights and basic decency could not do over the years hip-hop managed in only a few.
so is it any wonder that we now find other cultures participating in the creation of hip-hop?
not at all.music is the greatest form of sharing cultures' and styles and genres will bleed into each other.if you look at the history of music this is played out over and over and over.
there is poetry in that my friends.
music will always traverse stereotypes and cultural divisions.
so we should not be surprised to see white kids,latin kids and even the odd asian kids paying homage to hip-hop in the ways that humans always do.
either by copying or mocking.
in either case it means that hip-hop has reached global status.

they are also called yo-yos.
ok..lets put aside for a moment that the classification of "whiteness" is a fabricated term.
let us instead look at the history of american culture.
over the past century and a half there has been a few waves of immigration to america and each of those waves took approximately 2 generations to assimilate.

the italians assimilated,the irish assimilated.polish and dutch.the ONLY culture that was having trouble assimilating was the black culture and they had been here for almost two hundred years longer.the reasons for this is a far longer discussion but i use this point as a perspective tool.
blacks had been here for hundreds of years and generation after generation remained socially stagnant UNTIL...the advent and consequent popularity of hip-hop.

it was this genre of music which was so uniquely tied to black culture which ushered in the assimilation of black culture.now i do not propose that this has been a smooth transition nor has it been complete but rather pointing out the immense impact of this musical genre.what civil rights and basic decency could not do over the years hip-hop managed in only a few.

so is it any wonder that we now find other cultures participating in the creation of hip-hop?
not at all.music is the greatest form of sharing cultures' and styles and genres will bleed into each other.if you look at the history of music this is played out over and over and over.
there is poetry in that my friends.
music will always traverse stereotypes and cultural divisions.
so we should not be surprised to see white kids,latin kids and even the odd asian kids paying homage to hip-hop in the ways that humans always do.
either by copying or mocking.
in either case it means that hip-hop has reached global status.

I blame the ills of choggie on choggie. Not the ills of the site. This was inevitable with his attitude and his tone. He was a troll with a cloak and for some reason people treat him like the fucking savior. He said he he was "waking people up" by calling them all idiots and spouting obscenities at them. Pfft, I grew tired of that quickly and ignored. Too much ego, too much self-righteousness. And I don't want to say much about his attitude to women (mostly because I do some of the same things) but if you think I was bad, he's worse.

I think the sift will be better for his ban in the end.


@enoch "go to posts two years ago.go ahead..i'll wait.
now..
go check the current top videos on this site.
see anything? notice anything?
it is becoming one big ball of sameness.
as if a giant vanilla cookie cutter was punching out the exact same material.
those people didnt leave because of choggie!
they left because this place started looking like a cheap version of the stepford wives."

People revere obscurity, but it's a hollow praise when they don't vote that way. We have a silent majority that wants what's at the top of the sift right now - who are you, or anyone of the taste-judges who have left,
to say they are wrong in their opinions and tastes?

I was there 2 years ago, it was the same. The people who have quit are the drama queens, the ego maniacs, the people who put their taste above everyone else's. I don't miss them. The rose-tinted glasses of yesteryear colors a lot, but in actuality there was very little difference between then and now.

New egos will rise, new originality will blossom. It's only natural.

If my memory serves, certain prominent members tried to make a video cult site devoted to eclectic and obscure tastes. it's not around anymore, and I didn't expect it to either, because they actively discouraged popularity and that's a recipe for failure.

"because here is the cold hard truth kids.
this place was once a vibrant mecca for the most unique,obscure,challenging and original sites to visit.
populated by interesting people with interesting ideas and to watch the disagreements fly put a smile on my face that lasted for HOURS.
now it is slowly becoming an exercise in banality..
un-interesting and un-original.
so clap your hands together for that kids!
you just succeeded in killing originality!
the drama is even boring!
and that my friends..is the fucking cold hard truth..and you helped usher it in."

Rose tinted glasses again. This was always a liberal, atheist site with a few outliers with different opinions. There are still very interesting discussions and interesting disagreements, but they are stifled with dramaah which someone like choggie was good at making. He had a knack for walking in on a thread and basically killing any hope of a meaningful discussion. I feel just fine that he got himself ousted. I thought it would take less than 6 months, but it was a nice try to give him a second chance - worth a shot, but, for me anyway, it's over now.

Originality is an antithesis to popularity, usually, and the site is based on popularity. This is not a new discussion, it's always been like this.

You just have to look closer for originality. Compare with youtube, you can't find quality there without drowning in a sea of shit - I prefer the sift any day.

People who say this is about racism are missing the point entirely. This is all about people getting their knickers in a twist and overreacting. But that seems to be the way things have turned out on this site, which is a shame for the sift in general.

I feel enoch summed it up nicely:
>> ^enoch:

god i love this place.
but i have to say with choggie gone a bit of color just bleached out.
this is some tired ass bullshit.
this site when it first came out had a plethora of different people,ideas,emotions.
i mean talk about DIVERSE..i was mesmerized by this place...and choggie was a huge reason.
now look at it...
feels like twilight..the burnished sun fading over a bland landscape.
you think choggie is the reason so many left?
christ on a fucking stick...
are you serious? is that a serious statement?
ok..
try this.
go to posts two years ago.go ahead..i'll wait.
now..
go check the current top videos on this site.
see anything? notice anything?
it is becoming one big ball of sameness.
as if a giant vanilla cookie cutter was punching out the exact same material.
those people didnt leave because of choggie!
they left because this place started looking like a cheap version of the stepford wives.
they left because of the very thing we are talking about on this very post.
stupid and inane drama based on the most fragile and flimsy of all reasons:
"someone called me a name"
/facepalm...somebody just shoot me in the face.
because here is the cold hard truth kids.
this place was once a vibrant mecca for the most unique,obscure,challenging and original sites to visit.
populated by interesting people with interesting ideas and to watch the disagreements fly put a smile on my face that lasted for HOURS.
now it is slowly becoming an exercise in banality..
un-interesting and un-original.
so clap your hands together for that kids!
you just succeeded in killing originality!
the drama is even boring!
and that my friends..is the fucking cold hard truth..and you helped usher it in.