Caltrops - Troll Police





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]1. I listened to about 10 1/2 minutes of the TEDx talk until he got to the point of saying that we have five years to make the world change or it will collapse and we need to change now, made me realize how stupid he was. First, any person who has sense should know that making changes to people's habits or their opinions is a long, drawn-out process that takes a long time due to inertia. By definition he's saying that he thinks the problem is insoluble and we're going to hell in a handbasket. Well, in that case the 90% of the world that is dependent upon the existence of technology in order to stay alive - which includes yours truly and probably everyone else who connects to this website (unless you're a prepper or a survivalist) - dies, and the remaining 500 million go back to subsistence farming and the technological level of about 1840. Those who are left, and their descendants will grow up in that world and live with the conditions that wxist based on what is left to them. Whether or not society continues to exist, as long as the world is habitable, the human race will go on. Those who survive may be reduced to a level of existence we would find intolerable, but those who grow up "after the end times" will presume the world was always as it is during their lifespan, because they have no reference to anything else. There was a time when traveling on an airplane was equivalent to getting on a Greyhound bus, you got on, there were no security guards or metal detectors, and if it was a regional airlinefor a short flight, say, Houston to Dallas or Los Angeles to Las Vegas you paid the stewardess on the plane in cash. If you had to carry a handgun you just carried it in your briefcase or bag, and you could just order guns by mail order as easy as you can buy a book on eBay today. The security requirements changed and many of you, now, never knew about those simpler and less distrustful times. Another guy I happened to know, he was a really funny guy, who used the handle "Psyberzombie," said something else to show how times were in the past, "Do you know how much condoms cost in the 1960s and 1970s? Neither did we! Nobody used them." As the world changes, people change and the way things were in the past - whether it was better or worse - gets forgotten. I taught myself back in the 1970s how to use a slide rule; a wooden or plastic device where a rod with numbered marks slides against another one and you could do calculations. Electronic calculators destroyed the market for them the way computers destroyed the market for calculators. Chances are most technical professionals knew how to use a slide rule just as most bookkeepers know how to use a spreadsheet program today. But the movement to electronic calculations improved the speed and accuracy of calculations even as most people lost the ability to do these caculations manually. 2. In the second video the guy spoke about homosexuality and prison rape. He pointed out that it can't just be that the problem is lack of access to women, there are lots of guys in regular society who masturbate because they don't have girlfriends, so it has something to do with the mindset of homosexuals in prison that they do that sort of thing. Or that's what I got out of his story. His shtick was neither accurate nor funny. The vast majority of men in prison are not homosexuals, and the vast majority of men in prison are probably heterosexual men who are already prone to using acts of violence and have no problem doing so in order to get what they want, which in this case, is power over others. He also failed to note - or did not realize - that rape isn't a crime of sex, it's a crime of power. This is why kids who like to do sadistic things sometimes like to pull the wings off flies, never, ever practice their trade on hornets and yellow jackets. The Supreme Court of California had this to say about rape, "By its very nature, rape... [a]long with other forms of sexual assault... belongs to that class of indignities against the person that cannot ever be fully righted, and that diminishes all humanity." <i>Mary M. v. City of Los Angeles</i>, 54 Cal.3d 202,222 [/quote]