masonman

So you believe you would be justified in impeding upon that parent's right to teach their child as the parent sees fit?

How would you respond to a parent that says "I love my child with all my heart, and the force I have deemed necessary to aid my childs mental growth is to spank them with a rod until blood is drawn."?

Moncaloono what is your dividing line between "parenting" and "abuse"? What is the threshold between the two? How hard does the parent have to hit for it to become abuse?

I think its a combination of laziness and being taught by their family that this sort of violence is the right way to do things. If somebody here introduced these ideas to a spanking parent they would get frustrated and lash out, because we'd be telling them they are not in the moral high ground that they were convinced they were in. When it comes to something this big in somebody's life, losing the moral high ground is not something most people can handle rationally. Especially people who have convinced themselves that hitting people is a very very bad way to solve problems except when they are still small, young, and defenseless.

How is the argument that being the parent of the victim reverses morality when it comes to hitting children any different from the argument that putting on a blue costume reverses morality when it comes to kidnapping and assaulting innocent people? Also why is it more ok for somebody whom you love and trust implicitly to hit you - somebody you would expect to be even more kind to you than most people - than somebody who you barely know?

I guess how does one really know if they're hitting a child the "right way"? What amount of force is the dividing line between "parenting" and "abuse"?

I think this stems from the fact that people have this idea of what they want to "shape" their child into, and they get upset when the child doesn't act in accordance with that idea.

I second this very good question

Not to sound too misogynist but I've noticed a tendency for women (as a result of being more social and more in need of social acceptance) to be more susceptible to group-think and irrational beliefs. There are plenty of women in very simplistic movements like the OWS movement and the standard left-right stuff thats been around forever, but if its not really popular the split is going to be like it is here: a good 1 to 10,000 hahaha.

Atheism is not asking wether or not a God COULD exist. The theism question in a binary one. There is no middle ground. You either believe there is a god or you do not. If I told you about the invisible unicorn standing next to us, whether or not a unicorn could POSSIBLY exist is a different question, the question we're dealing with here is "do you believe this unicorn exists." Any rational human would say "no." And if such a unicorn was found on some planet a billion miles away, the unicorn I brought up would still not exist, because I created that from my imagination based upon no direct evidence. What was found was something completely different. However, all ideas of god that are inherently contradictory are immediately false.

Well, I frequent a few sites that use the terms alpha and beta, and an alpha is essentially a very masculine male that shows a lot of fearlessness and is highly confident. An alpha is highly attractive to women. Some alphas are very nice people, some are not. The guys on Jersey Shore are all alphas essentially. However I think those are people who are "alpha by accident." That is, they are alpha but they act like that in every facet of their life, they are just kind of douchy and tend to get in fights a lot. The other kind of alpha usually is doing it by choice, and they tend to be nicer, but they are still very confident and masculine and all that. I guess you could say an alpha is somebody who is confident and has a decent balance of tenderness and aggression; they aren't so nice and kind that they are perceived by others as weak and frail, but they also aren't so aggressive that they are perceived as abusive and violent and dangerous. I've also seen the idea put out that a "true" alpha acts this way not strictly just to seek out women, but to improve himself as a person, to make himself more of what he is supposed to be: a man. In this context its a highly subjective and unscientific term, but I'm just describing how it is commonly used in discussions.

Legally speaking yes, however a pedophile is a person who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. A 19 year old should not feel guilt for feeling sexual attraction to a 16 year old. Them having sex would be illegal, however I think most on this forum would agree that the government does not dictate morality. A sexual attraction to prepubescent children is usually a sign of a physical brain defect of some kind that needs to be treated. Humans aren't built to be attracted to prepubescent children.

This is a fascinating discussion, a big part of my social anxiety comes from fears about being labeled as "creepy." I always feel pity for the guys who clearly have a lot of issues from their past that they haven't dealt with who are labeled creepy and then just kind of tossed aside. Also Metric what you said about Chinese women may explain why now that I go to a school with a ton of Chinese people I kind of forgot American girls exist.

Ouch my brain

Personally I think it IS harmful because it sets them up to believe than spirits and wizards and all that do exist. I guess why would you give her a conclusion instead of doing some socratic questioning and having her make her own conclusions?

Its a passenger aircraft flying towards a tower, about to slam into it

"The only evidence that I can verify myself are the videos and photographs, but they appear to be fake to me" You're proving my point.

I mean no amount of physical objects, witness testimony, photographs, videos, scientific reports, etc. would change your mind. Its quite easy to just claim all that was faked as well.

I think its partly about attention, and once it took off it became about the community itself. From what I have seen it is much a gathering of people with a lot of anxieties (so I would probably fit right in). Also stuff like this saddens me:

I think no amount of evidence would change what you believe about these events

I had to do it A Royal Military Academy think tank has issued a paper warning England about “far right” groups such as the “Patriot” movement, which supports “civil activism, individual freedoms and self-government.”The report issued this week by the American Colony Center at the Royal Military Academy is titled “Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right.”The center — part of the institution where men are molded into British Army officers — posted the report Tuesday. It lumps limited government activists with three movements it identifies as “a Patriot movement and a fundamentalist movement.”. . .It says Patriots “espouse strong convictions regarding the British government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the Patriot movement direct most their violence against the British government and its proxies in law enforcement and tax collection.”The report also draws a link between the mainstream independence movement and the violent “far right,” and describes Loyalists as “future oriented” and Patriots as living in the past.“While Loyalist worldviews are future- or progressive -oriented, independence perspectives are more past-oriented, and in general, are interested in preserving the status quo.” the report says. “The far right represents a more extreme version of the independence movement, as its political vision is usually justified by the aspiration to restore or preserve values and practices that are part of the idealized historical heritage of free peoples.”The report adds: “While far-right groups’ ideology is designed to exclude minorities and foreigners, the British system is designed to emphasize civil rights, minority rights and the balance of power.”

Do you have anything that doesn't rely on Judy Wood's interpretation of 9/11? If you want to, go right ahead, the problem is that most conspiracy theorists just jump to conclusions. They take what information they know and just try quite hard to make it fit their theory. Its quite irresponsible. They just REALLY REALLY want their theory to be true. This is on the same intellectual level as believing God MUST exist because your toast had Jesus' face on it this morning. I sometimes think that the reason the theorists want all these terrible events to be top-secret, pre-planned, and brought on through months of discussion in dark, smoky rooms, is because they just don't want to accept the idea that such a terrible thing could happen for no rational reason It goes something like "oh God.... all those children.... why would somebody do such a thing.... there must be a reason...... oh, look, these people crying in interviews don't look very genuine, they might be faking it. I've never used a firearm before but I think somebody would need 5 years of Navy SEALS tactical training to be able to shoot 20 six-year-olds in such a short amount of time. Clearly its a top-secret plot." They should do their investigation, but they should do it correctly, not jump to conclusions, and if they don't produce any real solid evidence that isn't just making massive assumptions from news footage, there really isn't a reason to believe the hypothesis being brought forth. Have you ever used a weapon before? Shooting defenseless people at close range hardly requires top notch shooting skills. This post just screams to me "this is my evidence for the conclusions I already made" You say body armor but no official inventory has been released yet. He may have been wearing body armor, or not, but thus far its only some news outlets telling us that he wore it. Furthermore, these shootings remind me just how uneducated people are about weapons and tactical equipment. People have also been throwing around the "assault weapons" term without knowing what it means at all. Newspeople call pretty much any rifle (like an AR-15 or an SKS) an "assault weapon." Which is completely wrong. So its not entirely crazy to think that MAYBE they were confusing a load bearing vest with bullet proof vest. I'm not saying they did, however they do tend to misreport these things on a regular basis because they are completely incompetent when it comes to weapons and equipment relating to weapons.This is a bullet proof vest, that can stop small caliber low velocity bullets at longer ranges: This is a load-bearing cross draw vest, which doesn't protect you from anything: At a distance, with all your equipment expertise, would you be able to tell the difference? Also, body armor doesn't make you invincible. A rifle will pierce through most body armor like its a t-shirt, and at close range a pistol will also pierce most kinds.

Its fine to look into these events and try to find out what happened, but right off the bat this thread was doing what often frustrates me about stuff like this - people make a hypothesis and then take anything they find to mean that their hypothesis is right. People don't look to be crying the "correct way"? Clearly paid actors. Not exactly scientific or objective.

Everything is a bloody conspiracy around here.....

Everybody is either talking about banning guns or discussing the psycological issues of killers, and one person participating in this nation-wide debate dies in a car accident, so it must be "mysterious"? Until more is heard about the details of the accident, it seems like a bold statement to make. And (this is an honest question, not a criticism, some people are trying to get me on SSRI's so this sort of information is quite important to me) where is the research showing that the drugs actually led to the violence these people caused? How certain are people that the situation couldn't have just been that these shooters were on drugs because they were exhibiting violent/depressive behaviours, and, along with many other people who exhibit those behaviours but don't kill people, are prescribed the medication?