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jojoinnit posted:Sir, are you implying that unborn children could grow up to be criminals, evildoers and warlocks? Maybe this will change your mind: What if Jesus had been aborted? No crusades.
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# ? May 11, 2011 18:27 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 14:58 |
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Slaan posted:No crusades. Or Christmas
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# ? May 11, 2011 18:30 |
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crime fighting hog posted:Or Christmas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Aq00yJSxo
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# ? May 11, 2011 18:51 |
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crime fighting hog posted:Or Christmas You joke but i've heard this in a serious manner. I then reminded them that Jesus was believed to be born in like... June but Constantine used the winter solstice to integrate Christianity into the empire. (what ever it was. I was alot more accurate with this poo poo 7 years ago when I read about it all the time) They were just like "So?" and I :facepalm: and walked away.
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# ? May 11, 2011 19:06 |
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Tigntink posted:You joke but i've heard this in a serious manner. I then reminded them that Jesus was believed to be born in like... June but Constantine used the winter solstice to integrate Christianity into the empire. (what ever it was. I was alot more accurate with this poo poo 7 years ago when I read about it all the time) "So?" is the correct answer. They're still celebrating the birth of Christ. Ever had a party on a Saturday because your birthday fell on Wednesday? Same thing.
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# ? May 11, 2011 19:28 |
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:"So?" is the correct answer. They're still celebrating the birth of Christ. Ever had a party on a Saturday because your birthday fell on Wednesday? Same thing. Not quite. It's more like if you were born on Wednesday, but these people you wanted to hang out with already celebrated something else on Saturdays, so you told them you were born on Saturday so they would like you more and you could claim their awesome party was "for your birthday".
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# ? May 11, 2011 19:30 |
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:"So?" is the correct answer. They're still celebrating the birth of Christ. Ever had a party on a Saturday because your birthday fell on Wednesday? Same thing. It's more like having your birthday on June 13 because some rear end in a top hat you hate has his birthday on June 13 and you want to overshadow his stupid birthday party by appropriating the day for yourself. I guess your analogy would work if December 25 was already a holiday and people were just searching for a time close to the real birthday that everyone would already have off from work.
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# ? May 11, 2011 19:32 |
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jojoinnit posted:What if Jesus had been aborted? Good Friday?
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:00 |
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Not a political email but I can see them coming very soon, can anyone help me out with this "Waterboarding led to finding and killing Osama Bin Laden" thing? I can't find anything on Snopes about it because their search engine is terrible, and I'm seeing conflicting information online. How did this get started and what's the reality?
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:03 |
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Mo_Steel posted:Not a political email but I can see them coming very soon, can anyone help me out with this "Waterboarding led to finding and killing Osama Bin Laden" thing? I can't find anything on Snopes about it because their search engine is terrible, and I'm seeing conflicting information online. How did this get started and what's the reality?
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:06 |
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Mo_Steel posted:Not a political email but I can see them coming very soon, can anyone help me out with this "Waterboarding led to finding and killing Osama Bin Laden" thing? I can't find anything on Snopes about it because their search engine is terrible, and I'm seeing conflicting information online. How did this get started and what's the reality? Leon Paneta and like 3 other people have come out to say that "enhanced interrogation" played no role in finding OBL. Donald Rumsfeld himself has agreed multiple times on television that "enhanced interrogation" played no role. Republicans are bringing it up because they want to make their stupid point, but it doesn't hold at all since the information came from normal interrogations and straight up detective work. Anyone close to the situation or in a position to be able to comment on the matter has agreed that "enhanced interrogation" played no role.
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:07 |
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Mo_Steel posted:Not a political email but I can see them coming very soon, can anyone help me out with this "Waterboarding led to finding and killing Osama Bin Laden" thing? I can't find anything on Snopes about it because their search engine is terrible, and I'm seeing conflicting information online. How did this get started and what's the reality? It got started because some pundits starting claiming it, I believe. The thought process basically goes "We waterboarded people, and we later caught Osama, so some of the information we got must have been useful". I believe someone high up (possibly Panetta?) publically stated that the waterboarding info did NOT lead to the actual discovery of the Abbattabad compound, but I am fuzzy on the details there. In reality, there is no possible way we will ever know whether the waterboarding was useful, or whether we would have caught him without it. quote:It does make sense that the far right would like to think some Muslim terrist was waterboarded (justly, for being a terrist), until he goes "enough, enough, I'll tell you where he is!". That's because this is a pretty common misconception about how torture works.
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:09 |
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The "torture worked!" theme of the day is basically another attempt by the right to create a lot of noise and confusion to somehow distract attention from the fact that the Obama administration succeeded in doing something that their president failed miserably at, and in fact did not try very hard to do. All the business about whether or not photos should be released and whether it was a mistake to deep six the body, Fox News having a handful of 9/11 family survivors who hate Obama on the air continuously is a way of generating a lot of noise and kind of bringing things back to the Bush era and pretending as if Obama had never been elected or done anything right.
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:35 |
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:Sometimes when people post pictures, like the one quoted, I see them with a thin red border, and they can't be clicked on for enlargement, even though it's obvious they're not at full size in the thread. What's up with that, and how can I see the image at its proper size?
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:41 |
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This was a local newspaper op/ed, and a subtler version of crazy, but still: quote:To the Editor: the author is not only a noted hater of education but one of the parents behind a local book banning movement as well
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:44 |
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Cwapface posted:I have a totally unrelated question, but I figure here is as good a place on the forums as any to ask it. I'm guessing you're using Chrome. I find if you right click it, and say "Open image in new tab" it'll be full size. Dunno otherwise, not a techy.
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:45 |
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Cwapface posted:I have a totally unrelated question, but I figure here is as good a place on the forums as any to ask it. Known bug with Chrome. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3372818
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:48 |
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Habibi posted:Well, a miscarriage is often (when it occurs without external stimuli) an abortion that your body naturally undertakes because there's something wrong with the way the fetus is developing, so...are human bodies the world over committing Eugenics? you think you're being clever, but they're already pushing for this legislation http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110225/ts_yblog_thelookout/georgia-lawmaker-proposes-classifying-miscarriages-as-prenatal-murder
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# ? May 11, 2011 20:49 |
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Habibi posted:Or you could ask something like, "So if a 2-months-pregnant woman rear-ends another car and the trauma from the impact / airbag leads to a miscarriage - should she be arrested for vehicular manslaughter?" I was told that if a pregnant woman is killed in a car crash, it can be considered a double homicide. Is there any truth to this? (The person who told me has some insane views, so I figured I may as well ask.)
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# ? May 11, 2011 21:10 |
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I was told that if a pregnant woman is killed in a car crash, it can be considered a double homicide. Is there any truth to this? (The person who told me has some insane views, so I figured I may as well ask.) I believe a precedent was set in the Peters (?) case that it can be done. A husband killed his 8.5mo pregnant wife and I think he got charged with a double homicide but I think that is the only time it has been done. Not in a car crash though. It can only be done if the killer had intent to kill the mother AND child.
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# ? May 11, 2011 21:15 |
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X-Ray Pecs posted:I was told that if a pregnant woman is killed in a car crash, it can be considered a double homicide. Is there any truth to this? (The person who told me has some insane views, so I figured I may as well ask.) Some states have laws on "fetal homicide" but they're not enforced very often, and car crashes generally don't draw charges of homicide as a rule
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# ? May 11, 2011 21:16 |
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Hyosho posted:you think you're being clever, but they're already pushing for this legislation Oh and there's always this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/15/woman-attempted-suicide-pregnant-accused quote:Bei Bei Shuai, 34, a restaurant owner who moved to the US from China 10 years ago, was pregnant and planning to marry her boyfriend until she learned late last year that he was already married and he would be abandoning her.
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# ? May 11, 2011 21:18 |
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Dominion posted:In reality, there is no possible way we will ever know whether the waterboarding was useful, or whether we would have caught him without it. Of course torture works, you can easily get people to confess to things they never even did.
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# ? May 11, 2011 22:07 |
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Petey posted:This was a local newspaper op/ed, and a subtler version of crazy, but still:
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# ? May 11, 2011 23:28 |
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Strawman posted:Of course torture works, you can easily get people to confess to things they never even did. If torture is good enough for Jack Bauer then torture is good enough for America.
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# ? May 12, 2011 00:05 |
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Dameius posted:If torture is good enough for Jack Bauer then torture is good enough for America. It's interesting to note how often torture completely fails in 24. The first guy Jack tortures dies of heart failure without giving up the information he needs, Jack and several other CTU agents resist torture quite effectively (Jack actually dies under torture), he tortures a little blond girl in series 2 and she gives him false information (he figures out she's lying, but not by torturing her). Sometimes it works, as on Roger Stanton in series 2 (he gives up the information too late for it to be any use and in any case can't act on his confession because he's cut contact with his agents) or when Jack pretends to shoot the family of a terrorist (note here the threat of violence is more effective than violence itself). The myth that 24 promotes torture is an interesting one, because the overwhelming impression both from watching the show and reading about it (check the first page of google results for "torture in 24" to see the overwhelming consensus) is that it does, and yet even a cursory analysis of the actual plot shows it doesn't.
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# ? May 12, 2011 00:40 |
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Hyosho posted:It's interesting to note how often torture completely fails in 24. The first guy Jack tortures dies of heart failure without giving up the information he needs, Jack and several other CTU agents resist torture quite effectively (Jack actually dies under torture), he tortures a little blond girl in series 2 and she gives him false information (he figures out she's lying, but not by torturing her). It isn't a myth when Scalia cites 24 in defense of torture.
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# ? May 12, 2011 01:08 |
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The whole torture thing is insidious for a number of reasons. First, it feels right. It feels like you should be able to threaten to hurt someone for not giving information thus increasing the likelihood of getting information. However, by doing so you throw out your own ability to actually evaluate the information because you're incentivizing the person to say almost anything to get the pain or torture to stop. So paradoxically torture probably ends up providing far worse information than ordinary interrogation techniques. Second, there's a punitive component that does not require due process that racist people really have a hard-on for. It doesn't matter that these people haven't been convicted of a crime! We should still be able to punch them in the face a number of times, and if they turn out to be innocent well then good for them. We'll apologize for giving them life-long PTSD. Although, they are muslim, so whether or not they're innocent is up for debate. I mean, they obviously hate America otherwise they wouldn't be muslim. Third, can you put a price on the safety of an American? I don't think you can. America is a special snow flake that can do no wrong, and if 300 people of other nationalities have to die for our "safety" then so be it. We deserve it. We are an exceptional Christian nation that is the moral compass of this earth...and we should torture to protect that moral compass. Fourth, well our enemies in the past have at times done it to us so therefore it is appropriate for us to sink to their level by carrying out a behavior that the nazis were convicted for. Two wrongs obviously make a right, and they might torture us so we should proactively torture them just in case. These are the serious arguments in favor of torture. I wish these were straw men, but they really aren't. I have been told each of these arguments in person during discussions of torture. The insidious thing is that they all make sense in a really self-serving horribly jingoistic demagogic way. If you're a certain kind of person that tends to vote Tea Party then these statements ring very true, and "are just common sense." That's the insidious part of it. It feels right...just like black people being fundamentally inferior felt right to a bunch of these people's ancestors. ErIog fucked around with this message at 01:21 on May 12, 2011 |
# ? May 12, 2011 01:19 |
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This scene from The Siege was posted over on Reddit today but it's been on my mind ever since the "torture debate" first got going. How on Earth has the dialogue in our country changed so much that, whereas before Willis was portrayed as noble but ultimately and disastrously misguided while Washington was the principled hero, now Willis is the cool-headed pragmatist and Washington is a civil libertarian nut and a menace to national security?
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# ? May 12, 2011 02:03 |
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I remember watching that movie not to long ago and thinking 'they thought this was wild extreme stuff back then, but now we've just plain exceeded what they could think of'
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# ? May 12, 2011 02:50 |
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So, basically, now that they've killed Bin Laden, suddenly the 8 Bush years did happen? I'm having a hard time keeping the "facts" straight, help me out.
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# ? May 12, 2011 05:17 |
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ErIog posted:Fourth, well our enemies in the past have at times done it to us so therefore it is appropriate for us to sink to their level by carrying out a behavior that the nazis were convicted for. Two wrongs obviously make a right, and they might torture us so we should proactively torture them just in case. This last point I've seen wrapped in more American Exceptionalism arguing that it was wrong and heinous when the Nazis did it but the US are the good guys and are doing it for the good reasons and so, while it's not a good thing, there's no real moral taint. Basically boils down to it's not wrong when we do it because we're the good guys and if we were doing something really wrong we wouldn't be so it can't be that bad. Or I guess they think that the Nazis or Iranians do this kind of thing for shits and giggles but when the US does it those involved have a professional distaste for the act and it's only done in the full awareness that they're definitely saving lives. Of course the fact that torture pretty obviously encourages suspects to tell you what they think you want to hear doesn't really seem to impact them. The only time torture can really be 'useful' is when you pretty much know the answer already and the I also think part of the reason for the 'torture works!' thing is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was cited as one of the sources of information, although that information was garnered after they had stopped waterboarding him. So really it goes to show that torture is less effective at obtaining actionable intelligence than regular interrogations, which in Fox land means that Bush was right to torture.
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# ? May 12, 2011 10:19 |
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Hyosho posted:It's interesting to note how often torture completely fails in 24. The first guy Jack tortures dies of heart failure without giving up the information he needs, Jack and several other CTU agents resist torture quite effectively (Jack actually dies under torture), he tortures a little blond girl in series 2 and she gives him false information (he figures out she's lying, but not by torturing her). This is a really interesting point. I only watched the first three seasons of 24 (I can only watch so much rape and torture before I get sick), but does poo poo get worse from there? All of the examples you give are from the first two seasons. I'm to understand the creator or producer for 24 regularly attends neocon meetings or whatever. With the right-ward push in America, I wonder if he dragged 24 even further to the right in subsequent seasons.
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# ? May 12, 2011 14:09 |
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XyloJW posted:This is a really interesting point. I only watched the first three seasons of 24 (I can only watch so much rape and torture before I get sick), but does poo poo get worse from there? All of the examples you give are from the first two seasons. I'm to understand the creator or producer for 24 regularly attends neocon meetings or whatever. With the right-ward push in America, I wonder if he dragged 24 even further to the right in subsequent seasons. Joel Surnow is a right wing poo poo, but he didn't have much to do with 24 past season 2 or 3. The problem with calling out 24 as a right wing fantasy is that it seems to have fully internalised the fundamental paradox at the heart of paranoid right-wing thought. On the one hand, you need an enemy that is terrifying and all-powerful and could destroy you utterly. On the other hand, you need to believe that you're invincible and competent enough to best any threat. This means the show's philosophy is schizophrenic at best. The world of 24 is one in which government agencies are simultaneously superhumanly competent and at the same time riddled with corruption and treason, in which the president is sometimes a stalwart protector of the american people and sometimes literally working with terrorists to nuke the US (gaping plot holes opening up from season to season don't exactly help either). If it represents a mindset, it's a childish one that wants its worst fears realised and banished in the same 1 hour time slot. This would all be harmless enough if people didn't take it so seriously. It's one thing to have lazy op-ed writers dashing off pieces about the glorification or normalisation of torture based on whatever happens to be on their Tivo that morning; it's quite another when a supreme court judge cites Jack Bauer as evidence for the need to exempt federal agents from criminal law.
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# ? May 12, 2011 14:29 |
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Going back to the abortion thing, all I can think in response to the Facebook post is, "Why would you kill a human you'd already invested plenty of money and energy in when the easier and more cost-effective killing would be the developing one?" I suppose I'm thinking about it too hard. And I realized in thinking about the "What if Jesus had been aborted?" question that that particular conception was probably the most pro-choice thing in history, since God explicitly had someone go up to Mary, explain what would happen, and then made sure she agreed with going through the whole thing. So the entire question is fallacious because it's not like Mary got accidentally knocked up or had no idea what she was getting into.
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# ? May 12, 2011 16:23 |
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Hyosho posted:Joel Surnow is a right wing poo poo, but he didn't have much to do with 24 past season 2 or 3. The problem with calling out 24 as a right wing fantasy is that it seems to have fully internalised the fundamental paradox at the heart of paranoid right-wing thought. On the one hand, you need an enemy that is terrifying and all-powerful and could destroy you utterly. On the other hand, you need to believe that you're invincible and competent enough to best any threat. This means the show's philosophy is schizophrenic at best. The other problem is that the viewer knows there's a bomb somewhere, because they'll put a bright red countdown timer on the screen at the same time Jack is torturing someone. So the audience gets drawn into "this is horrible, but justified because look, here's a bomb." If the show was just following Jack around, with no visual proof given to the audience, the viewer would think he's a lunatic, torturing people for a bomb that might not exist. Also, if you had a hardline jihadist in custody, and you knew there was a bomb somewhere in the city, that guy would clam the hell up. He would endure whatever torture you threw at him for 12, 24, 48 hours, whatever. Because he just has to wait for the bomb to go off, and whatever he knows about its location is useless. Physical torture tends to strengthen people's resolve. I think it was the same article that 'outed' the show's producer as a Republican, but actual military interrogators commented on how torture doesn't work at all, even in the Inquisition times. But there's a new generation of 18 year old boots coming through interrogator school, thinking that Jack Bauer's methods are the most effective.
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# ? May 12, 2011 16:48 |
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Furikku posted:And I realized in thinking about the "What if Jesus had been aborted?" question that that particular conception was probably the most pro-choice thing in history, since God explicitly had someone go up to Mary, explain what would happen, and then made sure she agreed with going through the whole thing. So the entire question is fallacious because it's not like Mary got accidentally knocked up or had no idea what she was getting into. "What if Jesus had been aborted?" "You and I wouldn't be having a discussion about the morality of abortion based on what would be non-existent religious views."
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# ? May 12, 2011 16:59 |
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red19fire posted:If the show was just following Jack around, with no visual proof given to the audience, the viewer would think he's a lunatic, torturing people for a bomb that might not exist. Oh man, has someone done that yet? I bet that show would like loving ridiculous if they only included Jack's parts. "Wait, he's just going to shoot that guy?!"
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# ? May 12, 2011 16:59 |
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Strawman posted:Of course torture works, you can easily get people to confess to things they never even did. This right here is why the US was/is torturing Manning. They needed him to roll on Assange and Wikileaks and it didn't matter if it was factually true or not. In a situation like that, torture can 'work'. Ofcourse the outcome isn't desirable. Yeah didn't everyone see the Dark Knight? Torture didn't even work for Batman. \/\/\/ Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 17:03 on May 12, 2011 |
# ? May 12, 2011 17:01 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 14:58 |
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red19fire posted:
Or if they are getting tortured give a wrong location.
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# ? May 12, 2011 17:01 |