*ban

*ban

The best way to explain it is that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. basically predicted that someday there could be an outcome like the most recent election, where people voted based on their emotions (fear, anger, hatred--all the Dark Side stuff) and not on logic or reason.

The Founding Fathers didn't trust the common man to be educated enough to always make reasonable decisions and wanted to ensure that there was a brake in place to prevent "mob rule." That "brake" is the Electoral College, a collection of (ostensibly) politically-educated individuals who could prevent demagogues (like Trump) from taking power.

I think this is the first time in history where the Electoral College can do the job it was intended to do. If the Electors put aside political partisanship, they'll recognize how putting a completely inexperienced, hate-inducing liar into the White House is a terrible idea and ensure Trump doesn't get the Presidency.

Of course, Electors not voting along party lines is in actuality highly unlikely to happen as, in the end, Electors are all long-standing and high-ranking Democrat or Republican Party members. I mean, if you were a Republican Elector whose party had spent the last eight years without a Presidential win, watching time and again as legislation in a Republican controlled congress gets vetoed down by a Democratic president, even a man like Trump is going to start to look tempting. So the safe bet is that Trump gets elected anyway and the Elector College proves itself again to be a pointless institution for this and all the other reasons explained in the video.

The card tricks were good, but *wtf is up with that last trick? How in the hell did he do that?!?

Japanese people don't care that the actress is not Japanese. The original creators don't care that the actress is not Japanese. Does no one else see the terrible irony that the people complaining loudest about Scarlett Johansson being cast in this role are mostly privileged white people?

I'd be curious if these same people complained about Tom Cruise being the lead in Edge of Tomorrow or Justin Chatwin playing Goku in the 2009 Dragonball movie. And I'd be more curious to hear what Asian box office star should have been cast in these roles to attract the audiences these movies needed to recoup their production costs.

Sure, Mr. and Ms. educated liberal-progressive might go to see these movies even if they are cast with relatively unknown Asian actors but would that be enough to justify production of the movie in the first place?

This movie is an ADAPTATION. Adaptations are not supposed to be literal translations of the source material. What would be the point in that? I don't think a lot of people who watched the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, could have stomached being bombarded for minutes at a time with bad poetry by Tom Bombadil.

They made the right decision on this film. In this case, people who know nothing about anime are going to show up for this movie just to watch Johansson kick ass. And if they like it a lot they are going to be interested in learning more about the original source material, in which case they'll obtain a lot more Japanese cultural knowledge than they would if some "Asian-looking" person had been cast in the role in the first place.

Whether this movie will actually be any good or not... it's really impossible to tell from this trailer.

@gorillaman

The only thing I see failing completely is your absurd attempt at rationalizing your bigotry--more aptly labelled in this case by its proper name: Islamophobia. I don't for a second believe what I'm about to post will change your mind about Islam or Muslims in general but I do believe that this kind of bigotry needs to be called out when it rears its ugly head. And my, you went full ugly there, didn't you... comparing Muslims to rats and seriel killers? Classy.

Despite your protestations to the contrary, there are in fact Muslims who do not believe in God but for a variety of reasons (keeping peace with religious family members, maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage, networking, etc.) continue to attend services and identify as Muslims. This is true of many believers in all the major religions, including Christianity and Judaism.

You see, as much as you'd like Muslims to all be boogeymen coming to bring Sharia law down on the rest of world, anyone who has actually met and talked with a Muslim (and god-forbid actually visited one of the countries StukaFox listed) realizes that Muslims, like all people, are extremely diverse (again, despite your protestations to the contrary).

Indeed there are Sharia zealots. But there are also moderates and reformers and even liberal radicals. Mostly, though its just a lot of people trying to get on with their lives the best way they know how.

Now, I find most religious beliefs to be repugnant. However, I don't find the ideas expressed in the Koran to be much more repugnant than, say, the Bible. In fact, I'm less concerned about what is written in supposedly holy books and more concerned with how believers attempt to implement those ideas in reality. I do indeed find particular forms of this implementation, such as forcing women to wear a bhurka, disturbing (just as I find Christians' attacks on LGBT rights disturbing). It's important to note, though, that such practices are NOT universal. For example, in some Islamic countries like Malaysia it's enough to simply cover your hair with a colorful scarf.

On the other hand, other practices that you mentioned such as Female Genital Mutilation and virginity tests ARE NOT Islamic. FGM predates Islam and is still practiced in the locales where it originated (places such as Mali, for instance) that now happen to be Islamic majority areas. The Indonesian virginity tests as well do not stem from some universal commandment in Islam but from Indonesian culture which sees women as "the symbol of the nations moral guardians".

Again, I don't suppose any of this makes any difference to you. You want to see the world in black and white, us versus them, "rats" and "serial killers" versus you, the white knight who is just trying to save us all from our cultural relativistic blindness. And so the shades of grey I am describing to you will likely go overlooked. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but I suspect the reality is I'll receive some lengthy reply that can be distilled down to, "Islam bad, hur." Or perhaps, "All religions bad, but Islam worst, hur." To which I can only reply, that demonizing the practitioners of any particular religion is unlikely to bring about the reforms you seek.

I tried their free weekend, and it was fun for a bit but even after two days I found it repetitive. It certainly is very pretty and polished but I felt no need to play it again after the free weekend was over.

Battlefield 1 on the other hand... I've purposely avoided buying it because I know once I do it'll be the only game I play for months on end.

BBC is already showing it. This was from the first episode. I don't think the rest of the world gets it for another couple of months (word is that it will be run in the U.S. in late January on BBC America).

@gorillaman

It's almost as if some countries have different cultural values than the United States. For example:

Japan:
--Distributing pornography is illegal and punishable by up to two years in prison and a $25,000 fine (under Article 175 of the Penal Code, which defines pornography as showing the naughty parts of a man or woman, hence mosaics on all Japanese porn)
--Domestic violence and rape laws are often unenforceable
--LGBT community has almost no legal recourse in the face of discrimination of virtually any kind (housing, work, banking, etc.)

America itself has its share of bat-shit insane laws (from the rest of the world's perspective at least) such as legalized death penalty, and "well-intentioned" Christians are still fighting to deny gay people the right to marry in court at this very moment.

Should we come to the conclusion that Americans and Japanese people are "bad people" because these laws exist? Or maybe, as Ahmed Ahmed suggested, we should stop lumping huge groups of people (in the case of Muslims literally millions of people from an extremely culturally diverse group of countries) together and assuming they're all alike and believe exactly the same things?

Meh, I'll upvote if only so that we can have some variety here on the Sift. Sure, the arguments made in the video are painfully absurd but I'd rather seem them ripped to shreds in the comments then disappear from the Sift entirely due to downvotes.

I dunno man, this guy comes of as too conspiracy-theorish without enough hard facts. A China nuclear first-strike would be utterly suicidal. China has a nuclear arsenal of around 300 nuclear warheads compared to America's 7000. America alone could nuke the entirety of the country to dust and that's not even considering U.S. allies like the U.K. who would probably launch in retaliation as well.

For a much better fact-based analysis of China's nuclear policies see here.

That is without a doubt the best chase scene ever filmed in a nature documentary. Props to BBC and the Planet Earth 2 team for capturing it.

*doublepromote

So, some sad news about this guy--he was in a major car accident and in a coma for a while. He's currently in rehab but there's no telling if he's ever going to play the piano again (source: this reddit post).

*promote his amazing music

So, some sad news about this guy--he was in a major car accident and in a coma for a while. He's currently in rehab but there's no telling if he's ever going to play the piano again (source: this reddit post).

*promote his amazing music

So, some sad news about this guy--he was in a major car accident and in a coma for a while. He's currently in rehab but there's no telling if he's ever going to play the piano again (source: this reddit post).

*promote his amazing music