Y'know what... as much as I hate to admit it, you are right. Why let them get to me? That is what they are wanting to happen & I can't let them win like that. You are a good person... I just wish there were more people like you on this forum... hell in the world as well.

Okay... Robert... One... No... "People like them" are not who causes school shootings. That's an absurdly hyperbolic claim that attributes far too much simplicity to far too complex a problem. And as problems go, it isn't even a terribly important one because school shootings are statistically irrelevant. They are aberrant occurrences which are indeed tragic, but which create knee jerk emotional responses and far reaching over-reaction.

But I agree that bullying is problem. I think your overall response is far more emotionally charged than the topic at hand deserves, and your claim that we'd all be better off if we could all just get along ignores exactly the very hardwired psychology of the human animal which is exactly why we can't. It also ignores the million or so other complex reasons for why we do in fact seem to act like a species at each others throats.

But that said, you are brimming over with what I think is honest compassion, and I'll be damned if I'm ever gonna let a guy be ridiculed for so essential a trait as that. Hats off brother... compassion is in short supply and while it won't solve the problems of the world, it does create cash and food and clothes and shelter for hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, tornado, fire, meteor strike, zombie outbreak, and alien abduction relief. Compassion rescues children from the third floor of burning buildings. Compassion cause good men and women to run into danger when others are running away.

But compassion must be tempered with reason if only because it isn't the solitary trait that will heal all sickness and strife and cause rainbows and unicorns to appear... and because that same temperament keeps one from throwing gasoline on a fire by accusing others of being the cause of senseless tragic violence, like school shootings.

And Gameranger... two... no... the woman in question was not wearing a ripped lace mini-skirt and a Hulk Hogan tank top, like the intended victims of that site typically do. She was a normal blue-collar lower middle class Midwesterner in a coat, probably because it was damn cold outside. And her daughter was asking only the the picture be removed... and why not... it was embarrassing to her and her mom, and its inclusion on the site was uncalled for.

And she didn't go to Fox News... she went to her local Fox network affiliate, which is not the same as the fake news channel that has Glen Beck crying about socialist Kenyans and Bill O'Reilly taking cheap shots at teachers and steelworkers while sucking at the teats of his corporate billionaire puppetmasters.

And you are not just "telling it like it is." You're telling like you subjectively believe it might be and you are doing it with inflammatory language and there just isn't a good reason to do that because you are a smart person with legitimate points of view who could win people over to those points if you'd communicate them with... Oh, I don't know... an ounce of fucking compassion?

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You know... the anonymous basement people in their pajamas who haunt the Internet with their scorn and derision spend almost all their waking hours being wrong and being dicks. They start websites like People Of Wal Mart, 4Chan, Stormfront, NewsMax, and Justin Beiber's Never Say Never Dot Com.

Let this shit slide.

Humans do bad stuff. Despite being bad, if you look at it from the top down, it's pretty damn funny. I have to remember, every day, that there are 6 billion people on Earth and when the herd is thinned a little bit, its okay... because otherwise I'd sink so deep into the bowels of depression that I'd just want to kill myself. Whatever. There but for the grace and all that... but the dude wearing a trash bag to Wal Mart is funny...

What else is funny?

There is a governor in Wisconsin who is trying to convince me that teachers are living in the lap of luxury with their 50K plus beni's salary. That's funny.

There is a dictator in Libya who insists his people love him, while the people are burning the country down. That's hysterical.

And in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually criticizing Muammar Gaddafi for human rights violation and being a despot... Dudes, if that shit isn't funny, then I don't know what funny it.

And you are all fighting about pictures of people who shop at Wal mart in (usually) inappropriate clothes.

You know, if you look hard enough, there's a fake Baptist Church which just won a Supreme Court case allowing them to go to the funerals of fallen soldiers and shit on their graves while grieving parents just look on in pain. I mean, if you wanna burn up some moral outrage, there is a venue...

/rant off

I'd like to add to that list of things that are funny.

* Kids I patch up after having been pulled out of a wreck.
* A wreck they were driving drunkenly home from a party.
* A party where they were "mourning" the loss of a friend who had just died in a drunk driving "accident".
* People who insist on calling wrecks "accidents".


* Federal agents arresting my 22-year-old brother for "piracy" of a cheap-ass, direct-to-home video movie (which might have actually been a made-for-TV movie first), when there's REAL piracy, with hostage taking and murdering taking place right now.
* Ironically, I'm descended from the pirates of the Barbary Coast, who had kidnapped American Colonial sailors and demanded ransom. Robert Goodloe Harper with something that eventually became famously paraphrased as "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!"

People are fucking stupid, plain and simple. It's absurd the way everyone has their priorities in order.

Well... I actually think the Muammar Gaddafi thing is funny, in that, damn isn't that funny about the world kind of way...

But off topic, I think that if anyone gets into a car under the influence of alcohol and drives, that person should be stopped and charged with attempted murder... unless the wreck has already happened and the innocent victim is already dead, at which point the charge is murder.

I have a real zero tolerance attitude about drinking and driving...

(Probably because of shit I am guilty off that I did 25 years ago... that I never caused anyone an injury in nothing short of incredible)

Quoted for truth.

I try my best to be a realistic altruist -- people will be assholes. I let them be assholes until someone's day is going to get demolished.

When I said "things that are funny", I meant "things that aren't funny in the most remotely feasible interpretation of the word".

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers is probably the most mismanaged and corrupt organization I have ever worked for. This is only one disagreement I had with the core team.

If public safety was really their concern, they would realize that lobbying for heavier punishment is only one prong of an effective campaign. How much effort do you think they contribute to developing alternative strategies like improving the public transportation infrastructure or partnering with city planners to engineer human scale neighbourhoods or proposing incentives to increase the number of taxis? (You can probably guess where I am going with this.) It's not even on their radar.

They are only interested in perpetually punishing the innocent for the deaths of their loved ones. It's not that I don't understand their grief; I do, and that's why it's so heartbreaking they don't realize they are in a position to save lives and make a difference if they only choose it.

Not unlike the proponents of the Brady bill. You can slap on all the restrictions and regulations you want, but if you don't actually TEACH kids that shooting people with the intent of anything other than self defense is wrong, you're half-assing the battle. I say bring back the gory traffic safety films of yore, and boo on all the hippies who claim "OMG! UR GUNNA TROMATYZ AUL DA KIDDZ!" They're all desensitized from GTA anyway.

Canadian PSAs is all we need then.

Do you think I am a member of MADD?

And who is innocent if they were operating a car while drunk?

And should this get it's own thread?

I'm no thread Nazi, but we've really hijacked the Wal Mart thing here.

Huh? This thread was about Walmart?

On a more serious note though, people here need to chill out a bit. Discussions have been going into the fireplace of late.

I have always said if I believe in free speech than I have to defend peoples' right to be assholes. This one is personally hard for me to defend (but I will anyway, even for these scum). These people are the epitome of assholes. When I look at them I understand one of the reasons why some people believe in god, they're hoping for some justice against people like this (I'm not saying every believer believes for this reason, but I have heard this sentiment expressed).

Anyway, I refrained from commenting last night as I already got on my soap box in another thread.

I'm glad to see people trying to be calm and reasonable, it's why I like you all.
I hear otherwise really reasonable people get way bent out of shape on this issue. If you do some independent research you'll find most of these people don't cause accidents (and that most of the stuff you've heard is blown way out of proportion). Courts are ruining peoples' lives when no one actually was harmed and that's wrong. We already have Violation of the Basic Rule and Reckless Driving charges available, they both carry pretty stiff penalties, these are sufficient for anyone but serial offenders and people who do end up injuring someone.

The testing equipment is actually really bad and the cops using it almost always knowingly violate its use parameters because the machine skews in favor of making you look guilty if they do.

I don't know what you did in the past or how bad it was. Perhaps you did need a wake up call, I hope you found it without getting your life ruined or too harsh a lesson.
The founder of MADD left her own organization in disgust. This should tell you something about what it's become.

My dad was a co-founder of the first MADD group in Maryland, and he left too because he had problems with it.

Back in my senior year of high school, my school tried the scare tactics approach towards drunk driving. They brough in some paramedics who showed clips of what happened. A large portion of people laughed. Then they showed a dead black man, and thanks to my school having a large group of racist rednecks, some people laughed even more.

One girl was bragging to everyone how she would have no problem looking at the pictures because she watched a lot of violent anime. And what happened? She passed out and peed herself and the paramedics had to stop the presentation to take care of her.

The main problem with the presentation was that for those students who don't believe in driving drunk, they had to lose class time for something they weren't planning to do in the first place. For the other portion, well they were a bunch of dumb hicks who constantly bragged about the dumb things they did so the presentation most likely did not get through any of their thick heads.

No, what's asinine is this sort of statement. You can't put together a cogent response so you flame me. Perhaps if you'd put some actual thought into your argument people wouldn't think that you're posts were asinine.