...this is parody.. right?


No, it's an honest thought pretending to be parody. They want to make the point that Romney is rich, and that that's good (as being rich means you're smart and hard working, obviously), but they would feel dirty coming out and saying that "straight" so they pretend it's a parody.

The hint is that if this was a parody, then its producer would effectively be a supporter of Newt Gingrich. Nobody who supports Newt Gingrich would be allowed this close to children.

To be in the top 1% you have to make (according to random Googling) $343,927. You don't have private jets and your own security detachment on $350k. This is kind of orthogonal to the overall discussion, and certainly $350k is still a lot of money, but I do think it's worth clarifying that the 1% are not the ultra-rich. That's more like the .08% or something.

It's also worth noting that, absolutely contrary to some of the very stupid propositions in this video (I've mentioned before how I hate this disingenuous, melodramatic prick), these "ultra-rich" are hardly unified in their political outlook. Sure there are hard-nosed laissez-faire capitalists who think the poor are lazy and don't care about anyone but themselves as long as they have moustache wax (or something), but there's also tons of them (probably the majority) who are progressives/socialists/whatever.

Rich people are no different than any other group in that it's tempting to try to summarize them - and politicians especially love to try. They earned their money, and they deserve it. They stole it. They exploit. They only care about money. They're not in touch with the real world. They're smarter. They're less ethical. They lean right. They lean left.

Those things are all true, and are all not true. And none of those generalizations are helpful.

It's not a war between rich and poor, it's a war between ideas. How should society work? What are society's responsibilities to the poor, needy, or sick? When it comes to distributing wealth, what's fair and right?

And people DO NOT just vote for what they think would benefit them now. Many rich people believe things should be more equitable and that it's not fair that some should have so much while others have so little. Conversely, many poor people firmly believe in a kind of personal responsibility where it's wrong to take money from someone to help out someone else.

But US politics is dominated -- dominated -- by this "us vs. them" mentality; people buy into it with their souls. They pick a team, and just stick with it. Individually, most people (rich or poor, Republican/Democrat/whatever) are good. But on these teams they make horrible decisions - and it's destroying the bloody world.

There isn't really much to say - there's a chasm between people who get it and people who don't.

Unless you've spent some time on the Internet, you don't understand how it works. When people guess, or look at bits of information out of context, they come up with ideas that are nonsensical. These people think there's some finite number of "rogue sites" that pirate things, and once they're slightly harder to reach piracy will stop. That idea is just catastrophically wrong.

So how to deal with piracy? One: you accept that some of it is going to happen. Two: you make it easy and rewarding for people to give you money.

There's a whole parade of companies and people who've demonstrated how to make money on the Internet with digital goods: iTunes, Steam, very recently Louis CK. Make your products easy to buy and easy to use. Focus on rewarding people who pay and you'll end up with a success.

Maybe I can say that clearer: it doesn't matter how many people pirate your stuff, forget trying to minimize that. Instead, focus on maximizing the number of people who buy - and you can do that by making buying easy and rewarding.

He's supposedly a consistent libertarian, which by definition is someone who "holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society" and yet he wants to take away the ability for woman to exercise this liberty.


Holding individual liberty highly doesn't mean you think people should be free to hurt others, or trample their rights and freedoms. He sees a fetus as a person of equal value as the mother, and thus it makes sense to curtail her rights to the extent that her actions would harm that other person.

I think he's wrong; I don't think that, for example, a 1 week fetus should be thought of as a human. And based on that disagreement I come down the other way on the abortion issue. But his position is still consistent, and consistent with being a libertarian.

I disagree with Ron Paul on so very many things (including on abortion, and pretty much everything else other than foreign policy), and I can't help but like the guy. He's consistent, he believes what he's saying, and he acts like he speaks. I can't think of another politician like him - I just wish he was somewhere else on the political spectrum.

By contrast, Santorum is a horrible person; here, and everywhere else I've seen him, he's been a disingenuous, loathsome, pandering prick - and I'd happily say that even if he agreed with me on anything.

I will note that Arnold was right - having nice abs is 5% having nice abs and 95% not having a bunch of fat over them. Get back on the carrots, Zach.

I'll agree with another person earlier up: I understand how someone doesn't like Modern Warfare, but it seems silly to say it's a bad game let alone "the worst". To be clear: I don't like Modern Warfare. I got 5 minutes into this recent one before I was too bored to keep going. I've just played too many FPS games in my life, I guess.

But it's still a good game, and it came out in a year with a fantastic number of really bad games, many of which he reviewed.

I think you have to really already not like Mitt in order to get too worked up about this. Even out of context it's not that offensive or entertaining, and I think "government firing people" is actually what a lot of the Republican base wants anyways.

In general, it baffles me that the Republicans can't find better candidates; but then again look at the hoops you have to jump through. Romney is a perfect example; as NetRunner says above, it's clear he supports a health plan substantively the same as Obama's - but he HAS TO say he hates it to have any hope. They have to walk a tightrope on social issues and toe a very narrow line on economics. Pander, pander, pander, never be candid, never just say what you think.

Well, except Ron Paul. That guy doesn't pander. He just is. Unfortunately for him, I don't think what he is is what quite enough people want for him to actually be elected. I wish there was Ron Paul equivalents at a few different places on the political spectrum. How refreshing it would be for people to be picking the candidate who actually agreed with them, rather than whoever pretends the best (or presents themselves the best, like this is bloody American Idol).

Holy cow this guy is annoying. Ridiculous strawmen, stupid vocal affectations, equivocation, eye-rolling hyperbole, some stuff that's so stupid it has to be at least disingenuous, and not even a vague pretense of balance.

To be clear: I think the pipeline will probably end up on a different route, and for valid reasons. And there's clearly downsides. But this decision doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not like moving oil other ways is safe either, and it's not like building out production facilities somewhere closer to Alberta is environmentally neutral. There's a lot of factors to be balanced, and building this pipeline is, at very least, not crazy.

Yeah, it's big, but mostly it's special because it came at the wrong time; it's just the right time to get rolled up in the "we hate corporations"/"corporations are burning the planet" zeitgeist so it's getting a level of attention that would make much simpler decisions hard to sell.

Luckily for the people building this, people have short attention spans and this will (I think) get lost in the next Republican talking points battle.

minor injuries Build Character


Yeah - you could get a whole level in light armor and restoration out of a crash like that.

I meant exactly what I wrote; I was evoking the image of a priest being ordained in his robes.


Yeah, that sentence above doesn't parse right either. You can be ordained, and you can be in robes, but you don't really "ordain something in robes". You just don't. Maybe "shrouded in vestments"? Feel free to disagree with me on this, it obviously doesn't matter.

My point, continuing a previous conversation with gwiz, is that people put faith in science much as religious people put faith in religion.


I'd say they put way, way more faith in science than religion. And they're right to: science brings us all kinds of amazing things every day. When I get on a plane, I'm relying on all sorts of science and engineering that I don't fully understand. My three year old knows to put chocolate milk in the fridge or it will go bad. People have long histories of relying on science and things working out. They have long histories of seeing something amazing, having no idea how it works, but later using that science and technology in their own lives.

If people got anywhere near that level of positive feedback from their religions, religion wouldn't be slowly dying in the developed world.

There are no legitimate demonstrations of quantum levitation that highlighted some of the features present here...


Well, yes, there's more stuff happening here than in previous demonstrations - but that's what people are used to with science; a progression of more features.

If it steps over the line, even a micron, it becomes pseudo-science. Yet you are willing to suspend your disbelief based on other past results you may not understand.


Very few people are going to understand all of the science and technology they use. I don't know how my anti-lock brakes work, or fully understand even the (what I assume is simple) tech in an airbag (what's the gas it inflates with? I don't know). And I may one day rely on those things to save my life. Almost anyone getting medical treatment is relying on very, very shakey knowledge of how the medicine or procedure actually works, or why things are done a specific way.

And they're not fools to do so. With science and technology, you can build a web of trust based on demonstrable results in the past. I know that there's standards bodies that test airbags, and medical associations that understand and approve procedures; I don't have to confirm this kind of thing personally on a case-by-case basis, nor could any one person fully understand all the technology in their lives. Hawking has to hire some tech guy to fix his voice box.

But that doesn't mean that things aren't tested or that there's "blind faith" involved. There's faith backed by reason.

Back to this video in specific: people may have thought this video was real, but very few would have sent off a cheque to buy one without knowing a lot more, without seeing it reported on by someone they have some trust in. And look at how fast it was brought down. How many people still believed after reading all the comments? Similarly, when scientists emerge trumpeting some new unlikely discovery, they're treated by other scientists with very appropriate and high levels of skepticism until their results are independently validated.

Could you benefit from a medium-term, important scientific hoax? Yes, with some real effort. But history has a lot more examples of people seeing big success using science for their religious hoaxes (from Greek temples on down to scientology). Even if people have the "amazing science" in hand with which to try to trick, they recognize where people's real blindspots are and aim for those.

Ordain something in the raiment of science and people will believe.


Do you perhaps mean "adorn" rather than "ordain"? Or do you mean that after you put the raiment of science on something you should confer upon it some sort of priesthood? If so, that's a fairly well-mixed metaphor.

And it makes sense people would believe this. The makers here are clearly imitating previous legitimate demonstrations showing reasonably similar behavior. People weren't stupid for believing those videos (which were real) and to the extent people believed in this I don't think they're stupid or even gullible. The video doesn't hold up to any kind of scrutiny, but it's reasonably well made.

And of course people would have been much less likely to believe this if the makers here had credited magic or religion with powering the cars (rather than sciencey stuff). Why? Because magic and religion don't, every day, bring us cool stuff like this. Science does, and there's no reason to believe it won't deliver a real version of something similar to this in the very near future.

I've walked a lot of trails like that.. but I can't imagine biking it. I mean, I didn't see anything hard about the ride and the path's pretty clean. You could do the trail without doing anything physically hard, and without any real mountain bike experience.

But I think you also die or get seriously injured about 1/200 times you try that. I've biked a fair bit, and sometimes stuff happens just going down a road. You misjudge something and catch your arm on a rear-view mirror. Oops, that meant I swerved out a bit while I got my balance.

On this trail, you don't have that margin for error. Whoops, my pedal caught on a rock (on the left side) at an awkward time while I was looking up and I swerved out a bit. Then I died. And the "death by falling" section isn't just a little ways where you can be extra careful. You'd have to have that level of vigilance for a long period.

I mean, lots of activities have risks - but this trail, on a bike, is way above my threshold. This is doubly the case because you could get most of the fun (it is nice scenery) by walking. If I'm going to mountain bike, it's going to be somewhere where the biking is the good part.

Even worse are the retards who justify it with such idiotic mental diarrhea statements as, "Hey - it's OK because they're the 'majority'.


Lol. If Americans are more ready to make fun of Christians it's because:

1. They understand them more. They likely are Christians themselves or know many of them, and are familiar with their culture and beliefs. It's easier to do humor about stuff you know and people you're familiar with.

2. Their audience is likely Christians and know more about Christian beliefs. It's easier to laugh at stuff you know. Most Americans know dick all about Muslim beliefs; there's only so many jokes you can do about turbans and suicide bombing.

3. They respect Christians and know that most of them won't be offended or "can take it". It's often a sign of disrespect to someone or something if you won't joke about it. It's patronizing. Feeling like Christians can take a joke means that you respect them as adults. If I were Muslim I'd feel sad that so few people will make jokes (or even talk about) Muslims; it says something very negative about how they're perceived.

All of these reasons are perfectly positive, and the Jesus in this video was a pretty cool guy. If anything is "offensive" about it, it's the notion that Jesus interferes in football games - it trivializes God. And that is exactly what they're parodying - this earnest, offensive belief.

Myself I consider life to begin at implantation of the fertilized egg.


OK, sorry, you did give your position. But what rational reason do you have for your position? Why implantation instead of fertilization? I mean, if it's just floating around in there and would "without interference" find it's way to the uterine wall, why is it OK to stop it or kill it? Suppose I have a kind of contraceptive that blocks an implanted egg from growing... why is that different than a contraceptive that prevents an egg from fully implanting, or why is it different than one that prevents an egg from implanting at all, or kills it on it's way?

You're making a magic touchdown line, and you could have drawn it 100 other places with exactly the same amount of reason. Sure it's kind of easy to define, but that's like saying that people should go to jail for 10 years because that's a round number. Ease of definition is a sad way to make this kind of judgement.

I think if you want to be rational you have to say humanity is a sliding scale. But, again, the consequences of that are messy and not acceptable to most humans. So we muddle through, trying to come up with arbitrary rules we can live with.