The Return of Testing Chat Thread

[Oxymoron]

Estimates say that Assad's forces have killed around 25000-30000 since the start of the uprisings. This doesn't include all the injured, imprisoned, or tortured, which together may very well be an order of magnitude higher for all I (don't) know.

[RogueIce]

anyone here watch burn notice

remember when michael wasn't a cold blooded murderer?

Well he was a spy, so he's probably done it before. "Sanctioning" a threat and all that.

But overall I think it's been an intentional arc on the part of the writers, the whole "becoming that which you fight" type of thing. Fi and Sam have called him out on it before, and is (one of) the reasons Fi especially keeps trying to make him quit the spy business. She can see what it's doing to him.

[RogueIce]

30 000 kids die every day from starvation.

It would cost a few stealth bombers to prevent. Seems negligent.

I've heard before that the problem is not simply "well let's throw money at it" because apparently there is enough food production to prevent most (if not all) of the world hunger. The issue lies in ensuring it is distributed properly.

Which in functioning countries should be easy-ish to fix. But in all the war-torn shitholes where the problem is corruption and/or warlords hijacking aid shipments for themselves, the only solution will probably be the use of the military forces people like to mock for the "spend on food not war" thing.

Unless all those dictators and warring factions suddenly decide to be nice to everyone out of the goodness of their hearts. Which I don't see happening so...

[evilsoup]

That's commie talk.

Funny you should say that...

[RyanThunder]

The news today was bad.

I'm confronted by three things:

First, the way that the United States mourns and laments each shooting as an event but how nearly all sides of the political discourse do nothing to deal with violence as a cultural phenomenon. We lament the deaths of these shooting victims, and the ones before them, and the ones before them, but most people go out of their way not to see the connections between them and to try to fix the systemic problem. Even those that do bury their heads in the sand when it comes to how our tolerance of violent crime in places like Detroit and Newark (or drone strikes in Afghanistan) helps to elide the true causes of violence in schools. To try and address violence in schools without similarly addressing the tolerance the country has for violence so long as it is situated in proper geographic locales (read: poor and/or black) strikes me as a sisyphean task.

Second, the apathy which many politically active people approach the question of violence in culture/schools. The way people who will flier, campaign, run workshops, or more will simply shrug their shoulders and say "Oh dear" to this. (I include myself in this mess of people.) It depresses me and makes me even more apathetic.

Yeah, really.

Third, how twenty children dying is a catastrophe that will dominate the news cycle for days to come, but ten billion animals being slaughtered every year for food in the United States is something buried and ignored by almost everyone. Odds are that more animals have died in the last ten years than there will be humans in existence, ever.

Wait, what? I don't see a problem.

(yeah, yeah, "but we're all just animals, and what if a smarter alien did it to you, blah blah blah", whatever)

[adr]

But overall I think it's been an intentional arc on the part of the writers, the whole "becoming that which you fight" type of thing.

aye, its just kinda like 'wow he's crossed the line' watching the newer episodes

[Civil War Man]

In a rather odd coincidence, Netflix delivered Kindergarten Cop yesterday.

Seems the universe has Flagg's sense of humour.

[Oxymoron]

I'm going to hell.

[evilsoup]

[RogueIce]

I'm going to hell.

[evilsoup]

I assume he's going to hell for something other than general frenchness though
I did imagine him writing that leaning over a coffee

[Dooey Jo]

I've heard before that the problem is not simply "well let's throw money at it" because apparently there is enough food production to prevent most (if not all) of the world hunger. The issue lies in ensuring it is distributed properly.

Which in functioning countries should be easy-ish to fix. But in all the war-torn shitholes where the problem is corruption and/or warlords hijacking aid shipments for themselves, the only solution will probably be the use of the military forces people like to mock for the "spend on food not war" thing.

Unless all those dictators and warring factions suddenly decide to be nice to everyone out of the goodness of their hearts. Which I don't see happening so...

Somehow I don't think that what such wartorn shitholes would need is more war

But more importantly, the reason foreign aid hasn't fixed world hunger isn't that someone stole the aid, but that the total aid sent was simply not enough to do so. Most aid goes where it's supposed to, without B-2 bombers. The US alone could easily have prevented millions of deaths per year, but instead choose to build weapons and kill some additional dudes.

That's negligence to an absurd degree. In a future when these things can be discussed openly, that's exactly how it will be described.

[Straha]

Third, how twenty children dying is a catastrophe that will dominate the news cycle for days to come, but ten billion animals being slaughtered every year for food in the United States is something buried and ignored by almost everyone. Odds are that more animals have died in the last ten years than there will be humans in existence, ever.

Wait, what? I don't see a problem.

Why is this process good?

Why is this good:


http://youtube.com/watch?v=THIODWTqx5E
?

[Losonti Tokash]

isn't it more honest for a person who eats meat to admit they're fine with factory farms

i try to buy from local farms that have good reputations of treating their livestock humanely and so on

but at the end of the day they're still being killed so i can eat them so does it even matter

[Straha]

isn't it more honest for a person who eats meat to admit they're fine with factory farms

Yeah, but that begs the question as to why they are alright with factory farms?

CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, the industry term for Factory Farms) are one of the few truly and completely evil things in the world. Leaving aside the eternal Treblinka that lies inside, they breed all sorts of drug resistant bacteria in a location where they are guaranteed to have other hosts to transfer to and human contact (to put this into perspective, more anti-biotics are used on animals in North Carolina than are used on humans in the rest of the United States), they destroy rivers and water sources, they ruin land values, they abuse and mistreat their workers, they release massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and they consume inordinate amounts of food and water helping to lead to droughts and rising food prices around the country.

Only the solipsist can be alright with this system.

i try to buy from local farms that have good reputations of treating their livestock humanely and so on

but at the end of the day they're still being killed so i can eat them so does it even matter

In my book, at the end of the day no. But I respect the effort and wish more people felt the same way.

[Oxymoron]

>Shooting in a school

In a rather odd coincidence, Netflix delivered Kindergarten Cop yesterday.

Seems the universe has Flagg's sense of humour.

I'm going to hell.

I let you piece that together.

[RyanThunder]

@Straha: Maybe you just thought I was being brief, but you should notice that I actually snipped out the part about factory farm conditions.

Which I do have a problem with for the reasons you mentioned. What I do not have any problem with whatsoever is any number of animals being slaughtered for food, as long as its sustainable.

(Yes I would keep a pet, take good care of it, and empathize with it. Call me a hypocrite if you like.)

[The Spartan]

Straha, have you considered that taking that tack is going to turn off, what?, 90% of a given audience? (not here specifically, in general)

Leave aside the specifics of factory farming for a moment (yeah, I know they're ultimately relevant, but humor me) you're, in essence, comparing the brutal murder of 26 people with the harvesting of food. On this board, we may be able to have a rational discussion about it and stay civil, even if we disagree on the specifics, but if you say that in front of a different audience you've turned them against you and they're not listening to/dismissing whatever else you say.

Yes, they're committing a logical fallacy in doing so, but, well, that's what people do...

[evilsoup]

well then it's a good thing he's saying it on this board, rather than to a more general audience

[The Spartan]

And he could just as easily said it elsewhere. Sort of why I asked the question.

[Straha]

Straha, have you considered that taking that tack is going to turn off, what?, 90% of a given audience? (not here specifically, in general)

Leave aside the specifics of factory farming for a moment (yeah, I know they're ultimately relevant, but humor me) you're, in essence, comparing the brutal murder of 26 people with the harvesting of food. On this board, we may be able to have a rational discussion about it and stay civil, even if we disagree on the specifics, but if you say that in front of a different audience you've turned them against you and they're not listening to/dismissing whatever else you say.

And that's why I don't say this in front of different audiences. There are different tools for every situation, the one here is straight up and honest. Most people here have at least a casual understanding of critical reasoning and applied logic, and tend to defer to those skills when they approach new situations. So I make the comparisons here that appeal to those skills along with emotional hooks to draw people in.

When I post like this it's not for me to change anyone's mind myself (I'm not nearly so egotistical), it's to offer a line of argument and lay a seed of thought inside people's minds. Five, ten, thirty days from now people will keep thinking it through and their minds will change. I also know that here people will listen and not reject the argument out of hand.



And yes, I am comparing tertially the brutal murder of 26 people to 'food'. I actually think the analogy is horrible unapt, but in the exact opposite way you're suggesting. My original point is not so much comparing the two situations, but asking why people who take a stance that violence, at all times, is something that should be eschewed and prevented are willing support the most brutal systemic violence the world has ever seen on a truly continental scale. Even if you do support the eating of flesh it's a question you should probably have an answer to that isn't just "They're animals and lesser than us." because money-down that's the justification of about half of these school shootings inside the shooter's mind.

[Aaron]

Well you've got me thinking about where I get my meat. So thanks for that.

[RyanThunder]

Well you've got me thinking about where I get my meat. So thanks for that.

Yeah, me too. Thanks for that, Straha.

[Straha]

@Straha: Maybe you just thought I was being brief, but you should notice that I actually snipped out the part about factory farm conditions.

Which I do have a problem with for the reasons you mentioned. What I do not have any problem with whatsoever is any number of animals being slaughtered for food, as long as its sustainable.

You're not answering the question. Why is it good to murder 10 Billion living beings every year?

[Civil War Man]

So I saw this one review for the Hobbit where the critic panned it because it "had too many goblins".

I'm sure there are going to be plenty of things that one can criticize about the Hobbit, but that one just sounded stupid.

It's like criticizing a Tom Clancy movie for having too many Russians. Or Transformers for having too many robots. Or Star Trek for having too many Klingons.