Lurker > _AdjI_

SunWuKung420 posted...

My favorite people are those that claim praying is pointless and then wish something would happen.

The key difference being that people who hope things work out don't have any expectations in that regard, or feel like they're playing any role in whatever comes. I hope Irma doesn't devastate Florida as badly as it very much looks like it can. Any decent person would hope that. But I don't expect that hope to change anything, and I know that I'm not going to make anything better unless I actually do something to make it better.

Zeus posted...

Which is an intentionally deceptive definition

Using the literal definition of each word in a term to define the term is a deceptive definition? News to me. No wonder you struggle so much with "Neo-Nazi."

Zeus posted...

Which would actually do nothing to prevent most of things you're trying to define as school shootings. It might help out with the actual crazies going on a rampage, but an angry guy who wants to kill his ex isn't exactly going to be flagged for a psych eval because he doesn't seem far enough gone yet.

Except for the part where "mental health services" goes far, far beyond psych evals and subsequent treatment. Nobody snaps without warning signs or prior exacerbating factors. Having the public education needed to recognize warning signs and the society-level supports needed to mitigate those exacerbating factors all fall under the broad umbrella of "mental health services," because mental health is far, far broader than what happens after somebody is diagnosed with a mental disorder.

Zeus posted...

And what's worse is using murders to prop up and perpetuate a false agenda.

What false agenda, that people shouldn't shoot people at schools? I think that's a pretty reasonable agenda. Working toward that is a good idea, and anyone who disagrees should sodomize themselves with a cactus made of flaming thermite. Could broaden that to "people shouldn't shoot people," but school shootings are a specific enough subset of shootings that you can probably find more specific remedial efforts to focus on than if you look at the broader problem.

Rasmoh posted...

Patently untrue in the eyes of a religious person.

Unless it's a rational religious person that understands how to empirically observe cause and effect relationships. The notion of prayer alone having an impact on the world is profoundly arrogant (presuming God does control such events, praying to change them is believing that one's opinion is somehow better than whatever plan God has and that he should change it) and demonstrably false. A person who's rationally incorporated religion into their lives in an effort to actually make the world a better place doesn't treat prayer as a magic cure-all, they treat it as an introspective opportunity to weigh their own thoughts against the will and spirit of God, and use the insight from that introspection to guide their actions.

People that announce a token prayer for suffering people on Facebook are just paying lip service. It's nothing they've put any serious emotion or thought into, it's just a vague hope that maybe this time something will happen and that prayer might help. It's absolutely an example of slacktivism, no more meaningful than putting a Puerto Rican flag filter on their profile picture.

Rasmoh posted...

Again, many of these people don't have the means to aid in any other way,

Everyone can do more than type a dozen words on Facebook. Everyone.

dedbus posted...

I'm sure it helps immensely especially for morale, that someone is thinking of you.

It does, provided that's actually done personally. Nobody cares that some stranger wrote "My thoughts and prayers are with the victims of *disaster of the week*" on Facebook, because that's completely impersonal and effortless. If you want to express sympathy, do it personally.

WhiskeyDisk posted...

I just don't believe widespread panic is the answer.

Well, obviously not, but staunchly refusing to do anything about it certainly isn't either.

CedarPointcp posted...

but what about the theory that the fossils were put into the earth purposely? what is the best rebuttal to that? Is one needed?

Can always present it as an irreconcilable dichotomy: Either they're saying that the Devil can create and is therefore as powerful as God (not something they're likely to accept), or they're saying that God is lying to us and is therefore not benevolent.

mooreandrew58 posted...

i'd just call it a murder.

Which doesn't capture the aggravating factor of child victims, or of making a school an unsafe place. Those are both bad things, just as having multiple victims is bad enough to warrant adding "mass" to "murder."

mooreandrew58 posted...

I blame people who only read headlines and act like they know all the facts though.

Screw those guys. If they want to be confused because they don't actually read past the headline, let them. That's their own fault, and I'm not going to compromise effective communication to make their lives easier.

Lightning Bolt posted...

St_Kevin posted...

And you would give up every memory for that? O. O

Yes? By definition it's better.

Pretty much. It's going to take a lot of better to make up for having no past memories, but by the parameters of the exchange, the future is going to be better than it would be if I had memories, so that's not going to be a problem.

mooreandrew58 posted...

and i'm not saying murder isn't bad, but I just dislike it when things are mislabeled as it gives people the wrong idea, and i'm sorry murdering 20+ people is way worse than a single person.

Sure, but calling a shooting at a school a "school shooting" is not mislabelling it. Calling a shooting with one victim a "mass shooting" would be, but that's not what's being said. If people want to misinterpret it and be confused when there's only one victim, that's their prerogative, but their confusion is not a reason to downplay the significance of school shootings, no matter how many victims there are.

green dragon posted...

_AdjI_ posted...

It's mostly just self-gratification

No it isnt, at least not more so than sending supplies. People that are praying believe that they are helping. It's no more self-gratifying than sending supplies down. You could argue that people helping in any way is self-gratifying

If I sent supplies to Bermuda because I believed it would help, should I be lauded for trying to make a difference, or criticized for not caring enough about the issue to learn that Barbuda and Bermuda are not the same place? There is no reason to believe that prayer alone will make a difference. Anyone that actually cares about disaster victims has paid enough attention to realize this, just as anyone who actually cares about the victims would pay enough attention to make sure they sent supplies to the right island. The only ones that don't are the ones for whom "k I prayed for them back to other stuff" is the full extent of their attention to the suffering, and that's not caring about it. That's briefly acknowledging that it sucks, which is the barest minimum standard for human decency.

Again, kudos to them for meeting the minimum standards for basic human decency, since having even minimally decent people improves the world, but praying for disaster victims (especially publicly) and doing nothing beyond that is pretty much the humanitarian version of masturbation.

Rasmoh posted...

Does intent count for nothing?

It counts for "you're not an incomparable scumbag who doesn't even feel bad that people are suffering," but that's about it. Intent's not going to rebuild any houses, and the victims knowing that there are people out there who aren't completely apathetic about their plight is only the barest minimum of human decency, not anything that's actually going to help. Might as well use a profile picture filter for all the good it'll do.

Why does DC have so many different figures of Batman? Because collectors like having a variety of options to choose from.

Are you really suggesting that the US government should be looking at Mexico's as a role model?

SunWuKung420 posted...

Clench281 posted...

mipond posted...

It's a nice gesture.

It's a selfish gesture

Praying for another's suffering to end is selfish? <insert jlawok.gif>

It's mostly just self-gratification. The value of prayer is introspective, not actual power to make a difference on its own. Praying in regards to disaster victims should end with an answer to the question of "what can I do to help?", not "okay I've done enough back to watching my soaps."

mooreandrew58 posted...

think his point is, its more of a murder than a school shooting. school shooting gives the implication of mass murder.

Which is a fairly silly implication because school shootings are still really bad even when they don't have a sizable body count.

mooreandrew58 posted...

also there was a story of a guy going into a school with a compound bow and shooting a dude in the head, should we restrict access to bows as well? hell they are easy enough to make if you know what the hell you are doing.

It should be more restricted than access to mental health services, at least. Which is to say mental health services need to be vastly improved, since as you pointed out, completely restricting access to weaponry is pretty much impossible.

I don't know why, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Something about it just seems not awful, as much as it deviates from the original and rustles nostalgic jimmies everywhere.

BeerOnTap posted...

TheOrangeMisfit posted...

I wonder if it will explore some of that SJW "Science" that's been going around

It will have a political agenda. Mark my words.

It'll be just like Bill Nye's new garbage show.
And spoiler alert, he doesn't save the world.

Odds are it'll touch on some science that differs from what you were taught in elementary school, yes. That's not really a bad thing, though. Science has changed in the past 20 years. It's still changing.

Zeus posted...

May 4 2017 - Stalker killed his crush and then himself. Not really a school shooting.

April 10 2017 - Man goes to school to kill his ex-wife and then himself, also killing a student in the process. Again, not really a school shooting. (Which, by the way, is the incident alluded to in my previous post.)

Jan 20 2017 - Student tries to shoot other student in bathroom. Again, not really what comes to mind when somebody thinks "school shooting."

And that's EVERYTHING that happened in 2017. Unlike what people think about when they hear "school shooting" -- ie, an indiscriminate rampage going for a body count (Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, etc) -- all of these were targeted attacks which merely happened to take place at a school

I mean, they're still bad for the same reason that school shootings are bad. You've got somebody with more access to guns than to mental health services killing children at school. That's really not something you should be trying to downplay.

Zeus posted...

They also describe hypnoxxing as offensive so we have to use a ridiculous word for it.

That dates from a time when "masturbate" and "fap" were autoflagged, which is no longer the case. Now, unless you're being particularly explicit about it, you can generally talk about bashing the bishop without needing to resort to obscure euphemisms.

Questionmarktarius posted...

TheWorstPoster posted...

I thought it was due to marketing.

Vita died before it started, for several reasons. Marketing wasn't really one of them

Grossly-overpriced memory cards.
PSP "compatibility" is download-only, but only some PSP games can even be downloaded.
3G locked to AT&T.
Content Manager sucks.
Remote Play never really panned out, and ended up mostly abandoned and litigated.
The mystery port that was going to be video-out, but never was.
PS2 Classics support was incredibly obvious, but Sony never bothered.

Not to mention being fundamentally at odds with the handheld niche. Handheld development has traditionally been lower-budget, courtesy of greatly reduced specs, which has allowed developers to try more creative, higher-risk ideas because they don't stand to lose as much. The DS was a prime example of this. By making a handheld with console-grade specs, though, Sony eliminated that advantage. When developers had a choice between developing for a system with an install base of 2 million or spending the same budget developing for the 80 million PS3 owners (to say nothing of how readily they could port that game to the 360 and PC to tap even more of the market), it's not surprising it got ignored.

How broadly are we defining "location"? You mentioned having to change cities, but there are lots of places to live that aren't cities.

Action53 posted...

Muffinz0rz posted...

Buy 12 houses in 12 cities, furnish them to your liking, and move once a month. Go north in the summer and south in the winter.

Sounds like an amazing setup. I'd love it.

Ogurisama posted...

You also cant own

You could buy them and immediately set them up as time shares.

streamofthesky posted...

But just going by the title, other than "suggesting masturbation is always a no-no" puritanical mindset that dominates America, I don't see what's so bad here? Doesn't sound like they're blaming the victims, and even if potential predators jerking off doesn't do anything to lower the amount of assaults, it's not like it's going to make it worse, either... Seems like a pointless thing to have a controversy over.

The biggest complaint is that it's treating a very serious issue very lightly. In context, that wasn't the case, but taken on its own, "just whack it instead of raping somebody" is grossly oversimplifying the complex cultural issues that contribute to people not recognizing how or why sexual assault is bad. It's fine in a joking context, but as part of a presentation on sexual assault, which is supposed to be taking the matter seriously and providing useful information? I can see why it'd rub (tee hee) some people the wrong way.

myghostisdead posted...

What is weird is more and more parents are giving their girls boys names.

Ariel and Ashley were both typically-male names not that long ago. Girls being given boy names is nothing new.

That... all sounds really good. Who is this and what have they done with Allen?

Part of that's a perceptual bias stemming from the fact that you're more likely to notice the inconvenience than you are to notice them talking to you when your mouth isn't full, and the other part is that your mouth is going to be full more often than not while you're in the middle of a meal.

Looks more coppery than bronze, but it definitely does have an orange tint to it. Maybe it is the lighting, as you claim, but that's an orange-looking picture.

You've made this topic several times before, and it's not getting any more intelligent.

Sarcasthma posted...

This.

Syntheticon posted...

SunWuKung420 posted...

Don't ask me if our sauces are gluten free while drinking a beer made with malt. You're drinking gluten.

Gluten free ppl are annoying in general. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone that's actually gluten intolerant because now they sound like one of the gluten free morons every time they order food.

It's almost as bad as people that tell servers they're allergic to something when they just don't like it.

wwinterj25 posted...

SunWuKung420 posted...

Don't ask me if our sauces are gluten free while drinking a beer made with malt. You're drinking gluten.

Perhaps they want to limit their intake. That or they are unaware of what actually is in beer save for alcohol.

If they care about the amount in the sauce, that's a matter of trying to avoid it altogether, not limit their intake. Even a gluten-rich sauce isn't going to have much.

Serras posted...

At the end, don't make them too long, and write an awesome song to listen to while they scroll.

I'm fine with having them at the beginning if they similarly aren't too long and have a good soundtrack. Opening credits should be shorter than ending credits, by virtue of standing between the player and starting the game, but provided they're done in an appropriately cinematic fashion (or better yet, overlay them while playing), I'm cool with them.

Firewood18 posted...

The idea that an eclipse is evil or an ill omen was probably started when people wear going blind looking at it in ancient civilizations.

Probably more ""HOLY **** THE SUN'S GONE WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE," but I can't imagine that helped.

Just got back in from checking it out. We only got like 50% coverage here at the peak, so it wasn't particularly spectacular, but it was kinda cool.

This is a fantasy, which means that "both" is an option.

To be fair, the whole issue with the eclipse is that the normal squint+look away reflex we have to protect us isn't there, so people might feel it's not bright enough to be damaging. When it doesn't hurt to look at it, the general sentiment is going to be that it isn't dangerous, so people need an explicit reminder of the danger.

ZiggiStardust posted...

That's going to be stuck in my head until the heat death of the universe.

Nomak-54 posted...

I typed the f***ing password why the f*** do I need to verify it?

Because anyone with a basic password cracker can get in if all you need is the password.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

adjl posted...

Is there a magic man in the sky ruling over everything? Probably not. Are there omnipresent forces that govern the world? Demonstrably so. Is there reason to believe that such forces exist in capacities that can't easily be measured or predicted, such as governing human interactions? I'd say so, and I look at most religions as attempting to describe those less-measurable forces and advise people on how to work their lives around them. In an abstractly spiritual sense, I believe in a god, but my general sense is that personifying those forces just makes it easier for people to explore them, rather than actually having some divine being governing us.

please get a dictionary

What, never heard of Universal Gravitation?

Largely because people playing games is really boring to watch, most of the time. Even for those of us that are interested in watching it, we want to watch the game itself, and that relies on an understanding of the game that the majority of a TV audience isn't going to have. Therefore, when people act like they're playing video games, they don't behave like they're actually playing the games, and instead ham it up to the point where they're actually doing something.

Zeus posted...

adjl posted...

More accurately, she successfully countersued him for one dollar after he tried to sue her for ruining his career after he grabbed her butt, which wasn't about her own damages so much as it was saying "no, you don't get to complain about this, because you're a perverted creep who shouldn't have done this."

Yes, which also goes into the fact that it's not just about the dollar but also the fact he lost his job as a result and, thanks to the outcome of the case, may not be able to find work in his industry.

Pretty much. She wasn't interested in draining him dry, just in cementing that he absolutely deserved everything he got after assaulting her.

Gentlemen, he's found the toothpick. Abort plan Q9-Alpha, and transition to R6-Delta immediately.

40-50%, in Halifax.

I wouldn't expect anything from the Jurassic franchise to provide an accurate answer regarding dinosaur behaviour. They aren't exactly known for being scientifically accurate, despite having been responsible for a great many people's understanding of them.

TheCyborgNinja posted...

Lol yup. I hate the fakers. My great grandfather got it after WWI (it wasn't a diagnosis because it wasn't an acknowledged condition yet, but he had the symptoms). He was also mustard gassed. It led to his alcoholism later in life, apparently. I know a guy who was a soldier sent over to Kosovo during the Yugoslav wars, and now he has a work dog and medical marijuana because of all the f***ed up stuff he saw. I lose my s*** at posers.

People can have real PTSD without experiencing wartime. What qualifies as traumatic varies from person to person, which is why you get plenty of people coming back from war with no problems, and others who develop it because of a particularly nasty bit of spilled milk. A whole lot of people definitely do confuse "I'm uncomfortable discussing this subject" or "I find this offensive" with actually being traumatized by whatever it is, and most "trigger warnings" amount more to "somebody might find this upsetting," but you shouldn't downplay perfectly legitimate PTSD cases just because you don't think the root of the case is traumatic enough.

SmokeMassTree posted...

The way you just described it definitely sounds like a racist rally.

But even so, just attending shouldn't be grounds for ostracizing them.

Sure it should. It's very easy to not go to a Nazi rally, because everyone knows Nazis are jackasses. Ergo, you really shouldn't complain about being treated like a jackass for attending a Nazi rally.

They're pretty lame, overused quotes, but calling them offensive is just petty homophobia. Silly school.

Depends where we're going.

OhhhJa posted...

Television will be that much better for 17 days

Not really. A show you don't like not being on doesn't change the quality of the stuff you do like, and presumably you don't watch the show you don't like (unless you're a very odd sort of masochist), so it's not like your TV watching will be any different.

dioxxys posted...

and the violence only began because other groups came to counter protest,

And WWII only started because other groups decided to fight against the Nazis. "They were only violent because there was somebody to attack" isn't really a valid argument.

green dragon posted...

-your family knows why you weren't at the child birth

In that case, the money. I'd like to be there, but that kind of money would do a whole lot more for raising the kid than being there for the birth would, and I think everyone will understand that. If I couldn't tell anyone, though, that would not only put indirect limitations on my ability to spend the money, but it'd create a lot of strain over my apparent flippancy.

HillChange posted...

Yet they do nothing about all the black-on-black crime in Chicago.

That's a rather markedly different issue, and a much more complex one. "Don't be a Nazi" is pretty simple.