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xcore posted:What's the obvious retort to this attitude? I come across it often and I find it very hard to rebut. The big thing when people take this attitude is that they're assuming that the government/whoever is somehow only tracking things which are illegal, rather than literally everything. There is a huge gray area of things which are perfectly legal, but embarrassing, which is the whole reason privacy laws exist in the first place. One problem is that a lot of people also tend to take a very moralistic stance on things like porn and other embarrassing habits and claim (read: lie) that they don't do it themselves, but no matter how "moral" they claim to be, everyone has some moment in their daily life when they want privacy. Do they want people watching them while they bathe? They've got nothing to hide, why not? That's why the "dick pics" argument is able to reach people when more abstract and important arguments don't. It makes the issue something that affects them, personally, rather than something that affects society, globally. Just going by voter turnout alone, your average American is NOT politically conscious enough to give a poo poo about the latter, so if you want to get them to care about important issues, you have to make it something that affects them.
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Apr 7, 2015 16:54
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Naylenas posted:This is my least favorite part of the show, for sure. It's fortunately very minor, though. Those annoy me too, but I guess the writers feel like that's the easiest way to work in jokes about issues which are otherwise pretty serious and kind of hard to actually make topical jokes about without just being pure satire (which is good, but also depends a lot on a previous understanding of the issue that is being satirized to really be funny).
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Apr 8, 2015 00:28
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzGzB-yYKcc I do this with most of my passwords and it really has made them a hell of a lot easier to remember (if slower to type in). One thing that really annoys me though is that my BANK of all places has a 12 character MAXIMUM for passwords, and apparently that's fairly common for banks. Literally the one place where I'd want my best, most secure password, and it's one of my worst.
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Apr 9, 2015 18:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Incidentally, John Oliver makes the point that the IRS isn't cool, but that's not the case in other countries. In the Phillipines, they try to make their equivalent of the IRS seem tough by posing with guns in order to spook people into paying their taxes. In Pakistan they employ transvestites to dance around in front of the businesses of people who don't pay their taxes.
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Apr 14, 2015 22:47
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:It was several years ago when I read this, but Congress knows that if they gave the IRS another ~$200 million, there'd be close to a fifty-fold return on collected revenue. I would imagine that these two statements are probably related. The kinds of people who actually SHOULD be concerned about what the IRS might find are the ones that have invested quite a lot in creating the perception of the "evil tax man going after the little guy".
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Apr 14, 2015 23:17
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I'm fairly sure I've eaten every one of those foods at some point.
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Apr 27, 2015 16:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't care how fancy shrimp and salmon are, $46 for a plate of food is not cheap. The rest of the other foods weren't that cheap either ($7.99 is middle of the road for a rotisserie chicken, and dumplings can go way cheaper than 74￠ a pop), and the hazard of cheap foods isn't that they've had balls on them, it's that they may be rotten or disease infested or use sand as a filler. The whole end of that bit was just shaming people who eat inexpensively. Or maybe New York just has really skewed food prices. It was kind of mentioned quickly with the shrimp and salmon, but that was $46 for a dinner for five. So it was actually more like $9 per plate.
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Apr 28, 2015 04:29
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readingatwork posted:Both A and D sound right to me. D is probably the answer they want but two animals sharing a unique characteristics IS evidence that they share a species in my mind unless I'm missing something obvious. It might be evidence that they share a genus, but not a species. Species is more specific than that (example: Crows and Ravens are both in the corvid genus, but they are different species). For that second question I feel like it's missing some kind of crucial context because yeah, I have no idea how you're supposed to guess that just from the graph provided. I feel like the years are probably meaningful, but without a location I don't know how you're supposed to infer anything from them (ex: Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, which might suggest A, but since that graph could be from anywhere, it might be totally irrelevant).
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May 5, 2015 07:44
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See the problem with the pineapple story is that it's not just a classical fable that's meant to be read straight - it's a PARODY of a classical fable and there's outside context necessary to understand that. A high schooler would probably get that, but a 3rd grader? Probably not. The issue is that it's presented as a straight reading comprehension test when you can't gleam the required information from a straight reading because of that context. To us it's just a funny surreal little story, but to a kid whose grades depend on it, it's some kind of kafkaesque nightmare where you're the only person who seems to think there's anything strange about the test you've been given and you're terrified to speak up about it. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 01:59 on May 6, 2015 |
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May 6, 2015 00:46
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Even if it doesn't affect their marks directly, there's still a ton of pressure on kids to do well on the tests from their teachers because of how it will affect them and the school, so it's a highly stressful situation and not really one where you want to be presenting surrealism as material for basic reading comprehension. Basic reading comprehension questions should be like "Who was the main character in that story?", not "Which character was the most wise?" If they want to use tests as a metric to judge overall literacy rates, that's fine, but don't link them to funding and pay incentives for teachers. Use them to identify students that need extra attention because they're struggling with the material. Negative reinforcement is a terrible tactic to use when it comes to education.
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May 6, 2015 02:05
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Irish Joe posted:I'd love to hear the premise for a segment about elections that doesn't come off as sour grapes. It's pretty easy to talk about the problems with elections without politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mky11UJb9AY
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May 9, 2015 01:48
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OhYeah posted:Is there anyone who believes that a country should be run like a corporation? Were you not paying attention to basically every Republican nominee in the last presidential election?
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May 11, 2015 21:10
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Earlier today I saw a clip from a Japanese game show of a woman dragging a piece of meat tied to a rope around her waist being chased by a Komodo Dragon. I'm fairly certain that they don't actually have safety regulations.
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May 11, 2015 22:08
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Slamhound posted:Once I was having sex and the condom broke and 9 months later I had a Porsche and I tried to return it, but there was a 72 hour waiting period and the only dealership was halfway across the state and when I got there it was being picketed by religious fanatics and I didn't have $1,000 to pay for it anyway. You should have just taken it to one of those Mexican chop shops.
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May 12, 2015 03:27
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Freaquency posted:John even could have covered this in the show last night by touching on the bird flu outbreak that took out millions of birds this year, and that was just a case of a strain migrating from one portion of the country to another. I don't blame Australia for wanting to keep as tight a grip on what comes in as they do. It's also a country where that kind of control is actually viable, because the entire landmass is under a single government. For other continents, if even one country decides they just don't care, then the whole continent is basically hosed because you aren't going to stop animal migration across land borders. Diseases are also a big issue because like you said, even just a strain going somewhere new can have a devastating effect on the population, and Australia's ecosystem is a lot more isolated than most, so there are probably a ton of things out there that the local wildlife has literally no immunity against because it's just never been encountered.
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May 19, 2015 03:01
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It would certainly be nice to see one of these big sporting organizations get taken down a peg. Has Oliver done anything about the IOC? They aren't quite as ridiculously corrupt as FIFA but their requirements for host countries are just as draconian. Basically anyone who hosts the Olympics has to turn the host city into a police state for the duration, suppressing any protests against the Olympics or their sponsors.
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May 27, 2015 17:16
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The thing I find so ridiculous about all that is the fact that there's basically no benefit for the nation actually hosting the games, so the fact that the organizations act like the country should be grateful to even be graced with the organization's attention makes no sense at all. In Oliver's segment on FIFA he mentioned that generally the country loses money, and basically any other big sporting event is the same - they have to spend so much just building all the poo poo the event requires that they can't possibly make it back in the short amount of time the event actually sticks around. In some cases you could argue that the stadiums and such are still useful to the city afterwards, and that's sometimes true, but not always. Like the Brazilian world cup had that stadium that was going to be used for all of two games and then rot because the city it was built in was so small and remote that they had no team that would actually use it and probably never will. Montreal is still paying off their Olympic stadium from 1976 and it's in such lovely condition that it's just too dangerous to actually use.
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May 27, 2015 18:37
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JT Jag posted:I mean I don't want to sound insensitive here but maybe countries who can't afford the Olympics shouldn't build Olympic facilities, especially in cities that don't need them long-term. That's the trouble with the spell the Olympics has cast over everyone. It's just so "prestigious" to be an Olympic host that countries just don't think about how little they will actually benefit from hosting them. Even big rich countries tend to lose money hosting the Olympics - the only difference is that they can afford to eat the loss. FIFA has the same problem, although in their case it seems to be catching up to them, at least. *edit* Samopsa posted:I hate to break it to you, but sometimes governments don't have the best interest of the country or the population at heart. See: China, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, Qatar, etc Yeah there's also this. If it personally benefits the people in power then who gives a poo poo how much it's actually going to cost the country?
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May 27, 2015 21:06
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Astro Nut posted:Pretty much. Especially in Europe, which of course got the direct end of Hitler's ambition stick, there is very much the cultural recognition of how horrible that was and why you can't touch it without very clearly intending to vilify or belittle the Nazis as a result. I guess as a point of comparison you could look at how they talk about Pol Pot. He might not have gone around conquering people like Hitler but he was still horrible and much more local to SE Asia. I don't actually know how he's treated there but that might be a good barometer on their attitudes towards genocide in general. Also see how he's talked about in the west (or rather, see how he's basically just "a dictator" to us and that's about it).
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Jun 2, 2015 16:53
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sbaldrick posted:It hasn't done it since the end of Reconstitution, but yes it's legal according to scholars. Basically the Federal government would declare that Kansas no longer has a government as a state and needs intervention. Maybe take the opportunity to give Puerto Rico the statehood it deserves. One in - one out.
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Jun 11, 2015 22:32
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I'm surprised he didn't bring up the fact that Kiefer Sutherland himself actually went around the country doing presentations against torture and asked the writers of the show to cut down on it after he found out that the show's popularity was being used to justify actual real world torture.
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Jun 16, 2015 00:18
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Jun 22, 2015 17:50
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Thankfully, I suspect it'll be a cold day in hell before John kowtows to these man-children. The idea that they can change his mind about something him and his staff researched for hours for the purpose making a show that costs thousands (possibly millions, I have no idea what the show's budget is) to make with a few well placed e-mails or a petition or whatever these fucksticks have planned would be funny, if it weren't so sad. See the thing is the whole idea of "redpill" tells you everything you need to know about their mentality. They think they're privvy to some kind of secret truth that the rest of the world is blinded to and that all they need to do is to reveal that truth and everyone will naturally take their side. It's conspiracy nut 101. People don't disagree with you because you're wrong; it's because they don't know the TRUTH.
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Jun 23, 2015 00:09
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Astro Nut posted:Though, from what I've been able to piece together, apparently some history courses for schools in the USA just sorta... skip events after the end of the civil war. I apologise, being an outside observer looking in and all, but it seems like a weird omission given the relative cultural significance, compared to say, learning about the Tudors. High school history is pretty lacking in a lot of areas. I literally knew nothing about the history of Islam or the middle east until I started playing Crusader Kings 2 and actually researching the topic more. Basically a video game prompted me to learn about the Sunni/Shia divide rather than my own education system. Even tough said history is kind of extremely relevant to the things that are happening there right now, as far as western education is concerned nothing important actually happened outside of Europe until the mid 19th century (you might get a mention of ancient China if you're lucky).
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Jun 25, 2015 08:12
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Mr. Fowl posted:To be fair, Paradox games are pretty educational. Well, they're educational in the sense that they inspire you to learn more about the eras themselves. In terms of what actually happened they tend to diverge pretty wildly from history. Which I guess to be fair is what good education should do - make you want to learn more on your own. The thing is that this stuff isn't even MENTIONED in high school and it's not nearly as complicated as a lot of people believe. They just think it is because nobody ever explained it to them and when the middle east gets brought up in the news they tend to just kind of throw out a bunch of words that won't mean anything to you if you don't already understand the issues which isn't really a good way to get people to look into it. This particular issue annoys me just because it's something that much like post Civil War reconstruction and racial tensions, it's something that's incredibly relevant to current events yet gets passed over for poo poo like ancient Greece and Rome. Yes, they might be the foundation of western civilization, but the thing is that you're already going to learn plenty about western civilization just by like, living in it.
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Jun 25, 2015 15:18
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emanresu tnuocca posted:Please, you know as well as I do that inheritance laws make up about 30% of the discussion in all game of thrones threads. I imagine it also comes up more if you're British.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:15
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Dreylad posted:(Some) Historians are starting to take games seriously and critically. They can be useful teaching tools, but it`s important to understand how the game systems are set up and how they might distort students`view of how history develops and changes. Civilization, for example, is pretty Whiggish in that technological is a straightforward line towards The Future. EU4 obviously is kind hosed because the end goal for any non-western civilization is to Westernize. CK2 is fun but it emphasizes individuals over communities and societies etc. I think the important point if you're using games as educational tools is to emphasize their role as a jumping off point rather than the main source of information, and also to point out the biases built into the gameplay, either intentionally like the EU4 example (of course it's got a Eurocentric worldview - it's called Europa Universalis), or where historical accuracy has been cut for the purpose of streamlining gameplay, as with Civilization's tech tree and the end goal of the game essentially being some form of world domination (whether it's conquest, diplomatic, or cultural, the Civ games main conceit is that every civilization is in competition with each other, which is great for video games but not a very nuanced view of real life). The main goal really is to get people to see history as something that's interesting and engaging; see how the pieces fit together as events and consequences rather than just a list of names and dates when important things happened. A big issue with the "names and dates" approach is that while accuracy of information is obviously important to any kind of historical analysis, by putting so much emphasis on it you end up kind of obscuring why the stuff being discussed is actually interesting as a study of humans and their behaviour. I think one of the reasons why historical games end up being interesting is because by their very nature they aren't going to accurately reflect how history played out, but give off a vibe of "this didn't really happen, but it COULD have", which gets people interested in the period itself, or at least the basic idea that stories from history can be as interesting as any fictional story, and are often a hell of a lot crazier. I like the crash course series too - the broad strokes approach is another thing where it works really well to give people enough of a taste of the ideas that they'll be interested in learning more about them.
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Jun 27, 2015 03:56
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The fundamental issue is that guys like Mike Huckabee don't believe that "gender identity" is a thing separate from sex at birth because they don't understand it and it's easier to just assume it's some pervert poo poo than to actually try to learn something about other human beings. Also they apparently believe that if someone is the kind of person to assault a child in the bathroom, being told to go to the other bathroom is going to be enough to stop them. "Oh, I was GOING to rape your daughter, but I'm not allowed in the women's bathroom. Foiled again!"
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Jun 30, 2015 17:14
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thehustler posted:This is totally the point, however when I talk to my trans friend about sex vs gender she seems to never ever agree that she was male biologically to start with and I don't get that. Am I missing something? It's probably best not to push it if it bothers them (and it's a fairly personal topic anyway), but it's entirely possible for someone to have been born intersexed and been assigned a sex by doctors that ends up being the opposite of their gender. I think this is actually a lot more common than you'd think since sex is really just a spectrum of hormone balance and it's very rare that someone is actually 100% male or 100% female and while people do usually lean one way or the other, a fair number of people fall closer to the middle and aren't really biologically male OR female. *edit* oh god why did I even think reading the comments on the YouTube upload of the main segment would be a good idea 
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Jun 30, 2015 17:22
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pentyne posted:This is one of those points where the anti group has lost their loving mind and anyone discussing it at all will screamed down with some seriously invective language. During 2012 I was still reading Andrew Sullivan from time to time, because there were some interesting things he said, but after his loving tirade against circumcision I gave up. It came down to him responding to a woman who was upset that she let herself get pressured into having her son circumcised with something along the lines of "I hope you die you loving whore you mutilated your son's genitals damaging him for life and he should be taken away from you" I get the feeling that a lot of the anti-circumcision people are uncircumcised themselves. Because I have heard some crazy poo poo that people would know was absolutely not true if they asked even one circumcised man. I mean the original logic behind circumcision being a common practice is fairly stupid (It'll stop them from masturbating!), so there's not really any point to getting it done, but going beyond "it's actually pointless" as a reason not to get it done is just getting into insane hyperbole and if someone does have it done it really doesn't matter.
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Jul 1, 2015 03:14
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tarlibone posted:Talk about your underrated movies! Hell, even if you don't appreciate the humor, this actually makes for a good historical film that shines a light on a time when beliefs were widely held that look so preposterously insane to our eyes that I bet many people watching it simply think, "there is no way this is even close to being how things were back then." You say that as if there aren't just as many batshit insane beliefs that are fairly widely held about health (and many other topics) today. Homeopathy is magic water vibrations that will cure whatever you can come up with and is a multi-billion dollar industry.
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Jul 2, 2015 04:37
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Although if you bring up your own personal fetishes unprompted then you forfeit your right to complain when people mock you for it.
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Jul 3, 2015 19:47
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Philip Rivers posted:And this is why I like queer. Some authors tried to make pomosexual (for postmodern) a thing but it never really caught on. "pomosexual" looks too much like it says "pornosexual" with bad kerning.
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Jul 5, 2015 07:46
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The trouble with any sports thing is that it's all very tribal and every team essentially has a little monopoly - people don't want to watch any team, they want to watch THEIR team (even though any team is basically just a collection of interchangeable players that happen to wear the same outfit for a season). So despite there being tons of sports available at any time, threats to move a franchise elsewhere carry way more weight than they should because to the people that care, that one team is 100% of sports. If the Yankees left New York it's not like their fans would be happy to just switch over to watching the Mets. Or rather, they probably would be if they were forced to but they THINK they won't be and that's where all the power is. Sports fandom is all about convincing yourself that your team of choice is somehow intrinsically better or more important than any other team, but the specific one you pick doesn't actually matter, just that the choice is made. The owners know that and know that they can get away with basically whatever they want by pressing on their fans to demand concessions from the municipality to support their team, because "supporting your team" is how fans feel like they're contributing to their teams success.
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Jul 13, 2015 21:19
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It's all bread and circuses. The problem is that in the US there seems to be a lot more emphasis on the circuses part than the bread part.
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Jul 15, 2015 01:38
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swickles posted:Noted fair and balanced news channel Fox News was mad because a show on Comedy Central wasn't fair and balanced. That's the entire story. Stewart himself has been more than happy to demonstrate the multitude of times that Fox News is willing to criticize someone for something that they themselves will happily engage in without questioning. Basically any "controversy" backed by Fox News should be understood to not actually be about the thing they're supposedly mad about and rather more about an attempt to weaken an entity they believe holds political views that differ from their own.
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Jul 21, 2015 08:05
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Technogeek posted:And now, I know, lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality. It's been like that ever since "politician" became something you do your entire life. Ancient Greek democracy was basically something you did as a side job before you went back to your normal life, kind of like jury duty. Somehow we took that idea and figured the best thing to do with it was create a class of people who spend their entire lives as politicians. Then those people have kids and those kids become politicians themselves. Politics is out of touch with reality because the only people politicians ever meet are other politicians.
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Jul 24, 2015 07:03
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It seems like basically anything based on "tough on crime" rhetoric has been proven to just make things worse, yet if you even think about trying to fix some of it you get nutjobs accusing you of being soft on crime and crazy attack ads like the ones from the elected judges segment a while ago. It does seem like there's been at least some turnaround on mandatory minimums, but the fact that the new laws haven't been applied retroactively is pretty lovely. Hell if anything that should be a universal aspect of the justice system; if the sentencing laws change, people sentenced under the old laws should at least be granted a hearing with a judge. It makes absolutely no sense that people continue to serve full sentences for crimes that don't carry those sentences anymore.
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Jul 28, 2015 09:30
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Jonas Albrecht posted:So the asparagus water was just seeing how far they could take the whole thing? They were probably just experimenting with homeopathic food. *edit* actually "homeopathic food" seems like it would be a good way to cull a certain amount of stupid from the population.
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Aug 10, 2015 23:17
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Cerepol posted:More Canadian here, I was fully explained how pregnancy occurs ex sperm into egg. So it was clear. My school didn't do anything but abstinence though because it was a catholic school but they did cover how condoms worked as just in case. Including getting condoms from the chaplain. You know you have a problem if American public schools are giving worse sex education than the Catholic church.
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Aug 12, 2015 04:03
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