It's a little difficult, but speaking as an introvert myself, it's not that hard, I just have to do it in limited doses to avoid overtaxing myself. I've had no trouble going on social outings, using dating websites, etc. I even managed to get married. But I certainly never managed to bed loads of women in my younger years like other men could.
I think it's more that just "putting yourself out there". There's various social cues that the successful men innately understand, which introverted men just plain don't. So we come off as "awkward", and don't understand why successful men can walk up to pretty women, strike up a conversation, and take her home to bed, and when the introverts try the exact same thing, they get nowhere (or worse, denigrated as "creepy").
I'd guess that most rapes do not occur around bystanders, so I don't know what "bystander intervention training" would accomplish. Most rapes (in the US at least) are done by friends, relatives, and acquaintances of the victims. If you want to do something about it, it'd be more productive to provide training to women on how to avoid it, because it happens when they get into a situation with a rapist where he has the opportunity to do it. Since telling rapists to not rape isn't going to help that much, it'd be more productive to train women to recognize potential rapists (big hint: don't trust family members blindly, they're most likely to rape you, esp. when you're young), and to help them avoid situations where they're alone with these men. For young women (children mainly), we could also use training for parents, so they stop trusting the victim's uncle or whoever, and stop intentionally putting the victim in situations with untrustworthy men. Parents are frequently to blame for their daughters being raped/molested, because they trust their relatives. For older women, the biggest problem is probably date-rape. Again, training would help here to help women avoid these situations. Some self-defense training is also helpful, so she can fight back.
On top of that, you've completely missed the point that most of the women I've read are making -- that the alpha male culture that encourages misogyny is the cause of this, not the misogyny itself. We raise men to be narcissistic and misogynistic and to be "alpha males," and then we're surprised when they shoot people or rape women or beat the shit out of the gay kid in class. There's a reason the vast, vast majority of mass shooters are men, and it's not that women don't know how to shoot straight.
I'm sorry, but unless I'm missing something, there's a big problem here. Guys like this shooter are not "alpha males". They're generally not that sociable, are introverted, and not very skilled at seducing women. The "alpha males", stereotypically, are the opposite of all these traits. The people over on/r/RedPill would call these guys "betas".
I'm not saying many "alphas" aren't misogynistic; they frequently are, but they're also good at using (and abusing) women. But being misogynist doesn't automatically make you an "alpha".
Apathy is what happens when the cynical person gets old enough to realize they have no power to change things for the better. The root of the problem is the non-cynical people who support the corruption in society, causing the cynical people to be cynical in the first place and eventually give up.
They probably believe silly things like "the US government is the 'good guys'", "the police are good guys with just a few bad apples and don't violate peoples' rights on a regular basis", "corporations are run by good people who want to improve society", etc.
Some internet moron made it up, and it's stupid. The original maxim is true, which is why it's been repeated since the 4th century BC. This doesn't mean that the enemy of your enemy is automatically some great, close friend of yours, but they are your friend for the purpose of working against your common enemy, if the two of you choose to cooperate. Yes, Putin sucks, but at this point in time, he's a useful ally for Snowden if he wants to avoid Bradley Manning's fate and the inhuman, torturous, worse-than-3rd-world conditions of the US prison system. Putin is of course only cooperating because he likes thumbing his nose at the US.
The "progressive" states in the northeast aren't progressive at all, they're backwards places with third-world infrastructure and worse corruption than Mexico. If you want "progressive", the best you'll find in the USA is the pacific northwest.
Here in NJ and NYC, corruption is the norm. New Yorkers like to go on and on about how this is "the greatest city in the world", but it's really no better than a typical third-world cesspool, and probably even more corrupt.
Yeah, that was a little odd. It's probably because it was the first movie made and Lucas hadn't really thought all this stuff through at that point. It's already well-known that Lucas isn't the greatest scriptwriter, to put it mildly.
Congress should pass a law preventing the FBI from hiring these people. If they're flouting the drug laws, then they have no business working for the government which enforces those laws and refuses to rescind them. If the FBI can't fill their staffing needs as a result, and cybercrime goes unpunished, then that's the price they need to pay for their bad policies.
Bah. I'm in the top 1%, and I've invented artificial gravity, designed and constructed FTL starships, and also invented time-travel machines. I just like to post in Slashdot of the past to amuse myself.
They never stopped to explain the actual science behind ANYTHING. How do light sabers work? No one cares, they're laser swords.
Sci-fi doesn't have to stop and explain the science behind anything. Those things are all plot devices; they just need to seem plausible. If we already knew how to build such things, they wouldn't be sci-fi, they'd be "modern technology". Besides, how often does a movie containing modern technology stop to explain the science behind it. How many movies stop to explain how cellphones work? Lots of people don't understand those too well. How many movies stop to explain how cars work? You'd be surprised how many people don't understand the inner workings of ICEs. How many movies stop to explain how the internet works? (Lots of movies have hilariously bad depictions of computers and networking, and they're set in the present day.) Those technologies would all be sci-fi to someone from the past.
BTW, if lightsabers are possible at all, they're likely implemented with plasma. We already use plasma for cutting metal.
Why did that guy just vanish when he died? And how is the dead guy talking?
This stuff actually is explained, sorta: it's mysticism. The vanishing dead guys were Jedis, who obviously have some special mystical powers, so they don't just leave a corpse when they die. And then their spirits are able to talk to the living. This is one reason why so many fans were pissed at the Prequels: George invented "midichlorians" to try to explain the Force scientifically, when it worked much better left as something entirely metaphysical. Trying to invent microbes to explain it largely removed the mystical quality.
The Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12-parsecs
Unfortunately, SW wasn't the only sci-fi movie written by someone who really didn't understand basic scientific terminology, such as the difference between units of distance and units of time.
Most other countries realize that in certain things where you have to create a local monopoly, it almost NEVER makes sense to give that to a private company which is not strictly regulated. And they also realize that you don't have to create a local monopoly with vertical integration but only that one layer where it is needed. I think what you are seeing is the stupid ways we have regulated markets in the US giving fuel to the fire on both sides.
This is all correct IMO. What we need is municipally-owned last-mile connections, which are then leased to ISPs. But the problem is we have too much corruption, resulting in laws that prevent municipalities from owning infrastructure.
I hope you're not insinuating that Star Wars was a masterpiece of screenwriting, because it definitely wasn't. ANH was rather campy, ESB was good but still not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, and RoTJ was actually a step down from ESB. Of course, all three were far better than the Prequels, but Star Wars' strength was never magnificent screenwriting, it was the visual effects: the droids, the ships, the Death Star, with a bit of mysticism thrown in. So it wasn't really that much different from what you complain about with modern sci-fi spending all its money on special effects. To be honest, there haven't been very many sci-fi movies with both huge effects budgets, and really excellent screenwriting. Alien and Aliens come to mind. Star Trek II does as well.
Luke was probably an older teenager in the original series (17-18), I'll grant you that, though it's entirely plausible he was a little older (18-21) and had been staying home to help with the moisture farm, and with his poor background wasn't in a position to rush off to something better. Han was an adult, probably supposed to be 25-30 or maybe more. He repeatedly called Luke "kid", and was a well-known smuggler. You don't get to be a well-known criminal like that as a teenager. I don't think Leia was supposed to be younger than 25 at the very least; she already had some kind of high diplomatic position in the first scene of the first movie.
Maybe, but considering how badly JJ screwed up Star Trek with his space-time rift (Vulcan destroyed, "red matter", teenage Kirk, Scotty inventing a transporter that renders starships obsolete, etc.), I'm not so sure the result will be any better than Lucas's spew. I guess at least JJ's take would have decent dialog, even if everything else about it is ridiculous and implausible (a really bad accusation for a sci-fi movie).
If they handed it all over to Ronald Moore, however, or maybe Joss Whedon, I think the results would be great.
Seriously, this isn't going to turn out well. For one thing, they got JJ "Lensflare" Abrams to do it, and he'll probably have the protagonists all be teenagers.
But even if they had a good director, they can't just undo the Prequels. They're already out there, and they've already ruined Star Wars. The only conceivable way to fix this is to not do Episode VII yet, but to go backwards and redo the Prequels, and pretend the old ones didn't happen. They're obviously not going to do that.
What's more, even if you ignore the crappy Prequels, Episodes IV-VI are quite old now, and are a product of a different time, and being sci-fi, would not ever pass as modern sci-fi movies.
No, free markets really are good, the problem is that they very rarely exist in reality. Dumb libertarians try to apply naive "free market" thinking to everything, including roads, showing why their philosophy doesn't work.
Free markets work great when you have high availability of information, so consumers can make intelligent choices, and when there's lots of competitors and the barriers to entry are very low. So, for instance, you don't really need much regulation for things like landscaping or housekeeping; consumers can make their own choices here, there's no shortage of competition, there's almost nothing keeping someone from entering business as a landscaper or housekeeper, etc. Even better, large companies don't have any real advantages here or any way of keeping smaller competitors out of the market (instead, larger companies end up just having higher prices due to their higher overhead). But internet service, electricity service, water/sewer service is totally different because of the natural monopolies in those markets, and the very high barriers to entry, so regulation in these markets is essential. Libertarians simply cannot understand this due to their simplistic thinking, and just cling to the mantra of "free markets will solve everything!".
Sure, ISPs. Anyone is free to install new wires or fiber, they just need to pay off the right people to do it. It's a free market! Obviously, Comcast and Verizon are the only companies that are successful in this market.
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It's a little difficult, but speaking as an introvert myself, it's not that hard, I just have to do it in limited doses to avoid overtaxing myself. I've had no trouble going on social outings, using dating websites, etc. I even managed to get married. But I certainly never managed to bed loads of women in my younger years like other men could.
I think it's more that just "putting yourself out there". There's various social cues that the successful men innately understand, which introverted men just plain don't. So we come off as "awkward", and don't understand why successful men can walk up to pretty women, strike up a conversation, and take her home to bed, and when the introverts try the exact same thing, they get nowhere (or worse, denigrated as "creepy").
I'd guess that most rapes do not occur around bystanders, so I don't know what "bystander intervention training" would accomplish. Most rapes (in the US at least) are done by friends, relatives, and acquaintances of the victims. If you want to do something about it, it'd be more productive to provide training to women on how to avoid it, because it happens when they get into a situation with a rapist where he has the opportunity to do it. Since telling rapists to not rape isn't going to help that much, it'd be more productive to train women to recognize potential rapists (big hint: don't trust family members blindly, they're most likely to rape you, esp. when you're young), and to help them avoid situations where they're alone with these men. For young women (children mainly), we could also use training for parents, so they stop trusting the victim's uncle or whoever, and stop intentionally putting the victim in situations with untrustworthy men. Parents are frequently to blame for their daughters being raped/molested, because they trust their relatives. For older women, the biggest problem is probably date-rape. Again, training would help here to help women avoid these situations. Some self-defense training is also helpful, so she can fight back.
On top of that, you've completely missed the point that most of the women I've read are making -- that the alpha male culture that encourages misogyny is the cause of this, not the misogyny itself. We raise men to be narcissistic and misogynistic and to be "alpha males," and then we're surprised when they shoot people or rape women or beat the shit out of the gay kid in class. There's a reason the vast, vast majority of mass shooters are men, and it's not that women don't know how to shoot straight.
I'm sorry, but unless I'm missing something, there's a big problem here. Guys like this shooter are not "alpha males". They're generally not that sociable, are introverted, and not very skilled at seducing women. The "alpha males", stereotypically, are the opposite of all these traits. The people over on /r/RedPill would call these guys "betas".
I'm not saying many "alphas" aren't misogynistic; they frequently are, but they're also good at using (and abusing) women. But being misogynist doesn't automatically make you an "alpha".
Apathy is what happens when the cynical person gets old enough to realize they have no power to change things for the better. The root of the problem is the non-cynical people who support the corruption in society, causing the cynical people to be cynical in the first place and eventually give up.
Non-cynical people are also known as "gullible".
They probably believe silly things like "the US government is the 'good guys'", "the police are good guys with just a few bad apples and don't violate peoples' rights on a regular basis", "corporations are run by good people who want to improve society", etc.
Some internet moron made it up, and it's stupid. The original maxim is true, which is why it's been repeated since the 4th century BC. This doesn't mean that the enemy of your enemy is automatically some great, close friend of yours, but they are your friend for the purpose of working against your common enemy, if the two of you choose to cooperate. Yes, Putin sucks, but at this point in time, he's a useful ally for Snowden if he wants to avoid Bradley Manning's fate and the inhuman, torturous, worse-than-3rd-world conditions of the US prison system. Putin is of course only cooperating because he likes thumbing his nose at the US.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Nice try, Obamabot.
Exactly; most of our elected officials, at both the federal and state levels, have committed similar crimes.
How about hiring people who actually understand sanitation, instead of people who don't?
The "progressive" states in the northeast aren't progressive at all, they're backwards places with third-world infrastructure and worse corruption than Mexico. If you want "progressive", the best you'll find in the USA is the pacific northwest.
Here in NJ and NYC, corruption is the norm. New Yorkers like to go on and on about how this is "the greatest city in the world", but it's really no better than a typical third-world cesspool, and probably even more corrupt.
Actually, it stands for Control Data Corporation.
Yeah, that was a little odd. It's probably because it was the first movie made and Lucas hadn't really thought all this stuff through at that point. It's already well-known that Lucas isn't the greatest scriptwriter, to put it mildly.
Congress should pass a law preventing the FBI from hiring these people. If they're flouting the drug laws, then they have no business working for the government which enforces those laws and refuses to rescind them. If the FBI can't fill their staffing needs as a result, and cybercrime goes unpunished, then that's the price they need to pay for their bad policies.
Bah. I'm in the top 1%, and I've invented artificial gravity, designed and constructed FTL starships, and also invented time-travel machines. I just like to post in Slashdot of the past to amuse myself.
They never stopped to explain the actual science behind ANYTHING. How do light sabers work? No one cares, they're laser swords.
Sci-fi doesn't have to stop and explain the science behind anything. Those things are all plot devices; they just need to seem plausible. If we already knew how to build such things, they wouldn't be sci-fi, they'd be "modern technology". Besides, how often does a movie containing modern technology stop to explain the science behind it. How many movies stop to explain how cellphones work? Lots of people don't understand those too well. How many movies stop to explain how cars work? You'd be surprised how many people don't understand the inner workings of ICEs. How many movies stop to explain how the internet works? (Lots of movies have hilariously bad depictions of computers and networking, and they're set in the present day.) Those technologies would all be sci-fi to someone from the past.
BTW, if lightsabers are possible at all, they're likely implemented with plasma. We already use plasma for cutting metal.
Why did that guy just vanish when he died? And how is the dead guy talking?
This stuff actually is explained, sorta: it's mysticism. The vanishing dead guys were Jedis, who obviously have some special mystical powers, so they don't just leave a corpse when they die. And then their spirits are able to talk to the living. This is one reason why so many fans were pissed at the Prequels: George invented "midichlorians" to try to explain the Force scientifically, when it worked much better left as something entirely metaphysical. Trying to invent microbes to explain it largely removed the mystical quality.
The Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12-parsecs
Unfortunately, SW wasn't the only sci-fi movie written by someone who really didn't understand basic scientific terminology, such as the difference between units of distance and units of time.
Most other countries realize that in certain things where you have to create a local monopoly, it almost NEVER makes sense to give that to a private company which is not strictly regulated. And they also realize that you don't have to create a local monopoly with vertical integration but only that one layer where it is needed. I think what you are seeing is the stupid ways we have regulated markets in the US giving fuel to the fire on both sides.
This is all correct IMO. What we need is municipally-owned last-mile connections, which are then leased to ISPs. But the problem is we have too much corruption, resulting in laws that prevent municipalities from owning infrastructure.
I hope you're not insinuating that Star Wars was a masterpiece of screenwriting, because it definitely wasn't. ANH was rather campy, ESB was good but still not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, and RoTJ was actually a step down from ESB. Of course, all three were far better than the Prequels, but Star Wars' strength was never magnificent screenwriting, it was the visual effects: the droids, the ships, the Death Star, with a bit of mysticism thrown in. So it wasn't really that much different from what you complain about with modern sci-fi spending all its money on special effects. To be honest, there haven't been very many sci-fi movies with both huge effects budgets, and really excellent screenwriting. Alien and Aliens come to mind. Star Trek II does as well.
Luke was probably an older teenager in the original series (17-18), I'll grant you that, though it's entirely plausible he was a little older (18-21) and had been staying home to help with the moisture farm, and with his poor background wasn't in a position to rush off to something better. Han was an adult, probably supposed to be 25-30 or maybe more. He repeatedly called Luke "kid", and was a well-known smuggler. You don't get to be a well-known criminal like that as a teenager. I don't think Leia was supposed to be younger than 25 at the very least; she already had some kind of high diplomatic position in the first scene of the first movie.
Maybe, but considering how badly JJ screwed up Star Trek with his space-time rift (Vulcan destroyed, "red matter", teenage Kirk, Scotty inventing a transporter that renders starships obsolete, etc.), I'm not so sure the result will be any better than Lucas's spew. I guess at least JJ's take would have decent dialog, even if everything else about it is ridiculous and implausible (a really bad accusation for a sci-fi movie).
If they handed it all over to Ronald Moore, however, or maybe Joss Whedon, I think the results would be great.
The war on drugs has turned large areas of the US into war zones
and that is not a good thing.
It is for the companies that are profiting by it.
Stick a fork in it, it's done.
Seriously, this isn't going to turn out well. For one thing, they got JJ "Lensflare" Abrams to do it, and he'll probably have the protagonists all be teenagers.
But even if they had a good director, they can't just undo the Prequels. They're already out there, and they've already ruined Star Wars. The only conceivable way to fix this is to not do Episode VII yet, but to go backwards and redo the Prequels, and pretend the old ones didn't happen. They're obviously not going to do that.
What's more, even if you ignore the crappy Prequels, Episodes IV-VI are quite old now, and are a product of a different time, and being sci-fi, would not ever pass as modern sci-fi movies.
I think that's pretty easy to prove simply by looking at countries where prostitution is legalized.
No, free markets really are good, the problem is that they very rarely exist in reality. Dumb libertarians try to apply naive "free market" thinking to everything, including roads, showing why their philosophy doesn't work.
Free markets work great when you have high availability of information, so consumers can make intelligent choices, and when there's lots of competitors and the barriers to entry are very low. So, for instance, you don't really need much regulation for things like landscaping or housekeeping; consumers can make their own choices here, there's no shortage of competition, there's almost nothing keeping someone from entering business as a landscaper or housekeeper, etc. Even better, large companies don't have any real advantages here or any way of keeping smaller competitors out of the market (instead, larger companies end up just having higher prices due to their higher overhead). But internet service, electricity service, water/sewer service is totally different because of the natural monopolies in those markets, and the very high barriers to entry, so regulation in these markets is essential. Libertarians simply cannot understand this due to their simplistic thinking, and just cling to the mantra of "free markets will solve everything!".
Sure, ISPs. Anyone is free to install new wires or fiber, they just need to pay off the right people to do it. It's a free market! Obviously, Comcast and Verizon are the only companies that are successful in this market.