I said if I was the judge I would have read his entire filing, since I was not the judge I did not have that opportunity. I said that if his rant didn't go where it looks like it went from that short snipet then my judgment wouldn't be as cut and dry. It just sounds to me like his rant about appropriate violence and a culture of manhood, in a filing responding to a domestic violence charge, was just an attempt to justify domestic violence. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I wasn't the poster who said that if someone did that while I was on the jury I'd vote to convict. If I was the judge or on the jury I'd have more information anyways so this point is moot. It looks like he was guilty to me, but I didn't have the power to do anything about that opinion and if I did, my opinion would be based on different facts. I don't see why people have to flame me for this.
Why would someone go off on a weird tangent instead of stating what happened?
Is it because what they did was wrong but they want to give their weird, twisted logic first? That's what it sounds like to me. If it looped back around to self-defense, that's one thing, but instead it looped back around into a "culture of manhood". Granted, if I haven't read the whole thing and if was the judge I would have, so it might be different from what it sounds, but it sounds like he believes hitting his wife is ok, and he's trying to convince the court of that. If you think you know better what he's talking about feel free to share, but if you don't see why this raises huge red flags to some people then you're the idiot.
"Violence against your wife is inappropriate and illegal (unless of course it's to protect yourself from her)"
Bondage. S&M. You are wrong. I didn't mention BDSM because I don't think it's confusable with domestic violence. With BDSM, you and your partner(s) agree to it and enjoy it, while domestic violence is abusing your spouse (or your children, but we're talking about spouses) because you're an asshole who thinks its ok.
If you're engaging in BDSM and you in anyway think what you are doing is comparable to domestic violence, then you really need to stop until you are clear on the differences, ok?
As to the rest of your moronic reply, YOU JUDGE A CASE ON THE FACTS, not on your imbecilic preconceived notions.
Do you have a problem with adhering to the Constitution? It's not preconceived notions. It's logic. If a person starts of their side of domestic not with saying it didn't happen, or it was self-defense, or any other legit defense, but instead starts talking about "appropriate" or "inappropriate" violence, it's pretty obvious they're saying they did it, but they just don't think it was wrong. Now, if I was on a jury I'd listen to the whole thing and see if his point gets around to appropriate violence being self-defense or BDSM or whatever, and if he's saying that was the case then I'd look at the other evidence before making a judgment, but if it goes the way it looks then he's basically admitting his guilt and should go to jail. What would you think if someone accused of stealing a TV started ranting about "appropriate" and "inappropriate" robbery when asked for his side instead of just saying he didn't do it?
People know what appropriate violence is. If you feel the need to explain it, that means your ideas on violence are messed up. If you won't plead innocence, and you can't claim a legal exception, like self-defense, then you're stating you're guilty. There's nothing in the Constitution that has a problem with declaring someone guilty after they've admitted it.
If you ever serve jury duty. That way they can dismiss you and choose jurors who can do the job correctly. Violence against your wife is inappropriate and illegal (unless of course it's to protect yourself from her). If it was self-defense or didn't happen or was an accident then you'd expect someone to start out saying that. A rant about inappropriate and appropriate violence in this context is only going to end in him trying to explain that it was somehow appropriate to hit his wife outside of self-defense, which means he's guilty and should go to jail.
Do you have a problem with domestic abusers going to jail?
The XBox's strength is in implementation, not innovation. Online gaming was old-hat by the time the original XBox came out, and it wasn't even really new for consoles. What Microsoft did was make a good online gaming system for consoles. By the same token, the 360 doesn't have anything completely new and different, in the same way the wiimote is, but it implemented a lot of old ideas in good ways. When it works.
A lot of people have problems with condemned prisoners being organ donors starting with Amnesty International. I should have made myself more clear, though, that I meant executed prisoners. We purposefully spoil the meat of prisoners via lethal injection. The PRC purposefully preserves as much as possible, sometimes even prepping prisoners for post-mortem donation by injecting drugs to facilitate the process right before they shoot them.
I never really thought about condemned prisoners being organ donors. I believe, though, most executed prisoners in the US receive the electric chair instead of lethal injection, which might not prevent them from being organ donors. I don't really see what the problem is with being an organ donor. Once you're dead you're dead.
There is a medical condition that prevents some people from feeling pain. They can accidentally cut off a finger and just not notice. I think that such people have rights (as does the law) but you seem not to. Maybe you ought to rethink that.
I didn't say that not being able to feel pain makes you not human, I meant that feeling and thinking are distinctive parts of being a person. My chair does not feel or think, and unlike even say, a coma patient, it didn't feel and think before and it doesn't have the smallest glimmer of hope that it might gain it with the right medical treatment. If I throw out my chair, no one will cry.
My skin cells, also, do not feel or think, and while they could potentially be cloned into a new human being (that looks just like me) I'm not going to save them on that hope. A few days old embryo in a lab is about the size of a skin cell and also doesn't feel and think. It could be implanted in a woman and grown into a baby, but with so many embryos being thrown away it seems that is not much more likely than my skin cells will be cloned into a human being. Embryos are not people because they don't have any of the defining charactoristics that really make people people. Embryos who do not have the potential to become people should at least have the potential to do something.
As for technological progress shifting rights, does that mean that when the artificial womb is developed, abortion should be outlawed? And if we regress technologically and can no longer produce such marvels, should it be relegalized? I think not.
I'd concede that artificial wombs could replace abortion only if the procedure to transport an embryo or fetus from a woman (to an artificial womb) was no more dangerous, invasive, or painful, than a standard abortion, which I doubt will be possible unless medical science and childbirth get some really great advances. You'd also have to allow women to have a fetus transferred at any time (within medical possibility) for any reason for it to replace abortion. I support abortion as a woman's right to control her own body. If artificial wombs can do that just as well, great. But if they can't (and I doubt they will for a long time) then fuck no.
Not that stem cell research is the same as abortion, because abortion is about not having something (or someone, if you prefer) physically impose itself (himself or herself) on you and damage your body while it forces you to support it, and stem cell research is about cells that could potentially save people's lives. Both are important, but they're rather different, but I'm not surprised you confused the two, since most pro-lifers like to ignore women, when they're not vilifying them, when they talk about abortion and the cute wittle fetuses.
As for pro-lifers and fertility clinics, you just haven't been listening much. The Catholic Church has been anti-fertility clinics from the beginning for exactly this reason among others. No doubt other pro-life sub-groups have similar histories.
The Catholics are against a lot of things (including stopping the spread of AIDS in Af
Well, yeah. The Hot Coffee stuff was pretty stupid. But a lot of people were upset by it, and it put the ESRB in an awkward position when people (who didn't have a clue about anything) started asking how they could have let that slip by. Personally, I think they should have just said fuck it, we wouldn't have rated Hot Coffee AO even if we had seen it, but they've taken enough of a beating in the media. Maybe they're still mad at Rockstar for putting them in that position, or maybe they're just overzealous in preventing it again, or maybe they've just hit a bout of temporary insanity. I really don't know.
I supported the ESRB for taking a stand and rating Manhunt 2 AO, and I've defended them on this and other issues here. But this? Is nuts. The point of a rating system is to rate, not ban. Even demanding age gates is a little excessive, because every 13 year old knows how to subtract 5 years from his/her birthdate, and how do they make all the other sites that host trailers?
Nice way to make "taking a stand" look like "just being assholes". Are they still mad at Rockstar for making them look bad with the Hot Coffee scandal, or are they just giddy from rediscovering their AO rating and don't know where to stop?
That's the point though, after fifteen years of technological innovations, surely they should be able to come up with something better? Otherwise they may as well just re-release the megadrive.
Well, there's only so much they can change while keeping the classic gameplay and feel, which the original posters were calling for, bunt, IMHO, they have changed a lot since their megadrive days. I haven't played Sonic Rush, but I think the 3 Sonic Advance are great, and they mixed things up with different characters and gameplay styles, and a lot more secrets to find than the original Sonics, so unless you're saying "2D is OLD" I don't see how you can say they're the same games. I'd compare them to Mario, but I haven't played New Super Mario Bros. (Couldn't they name it Super Mario Bros. 4?) and while Sega was making Sonic Advance 1, 2, and 3, Nintendo was making... ports of the original Marios. If you don't like 2D platformers, continue to ignore the Sonic Advances, but otherwise they're some of the best to come out in recent years. I'm not sure if you're arguing against 2D platformers or if you're arguing against bad 2D platformers, but if it's the former that argument doesn't really fit in this discussion, and if it's the latter then I strongly disagree with you.
I would love a 24/7 library. I can't tell you how many times I've stopped by the library and it's been closed. So annoying. It would be expensive, but I'd love to see it.
As for LAN parties, most libraries have conference rooms that different groups can rent out. Why can't they rent them for LAN parties?
Not to get all grammar nazi, but where would you have put the comma? The title is a simple sentence noun+verb+noun, and while the words are ambiguous, there's no room for a comma, and there's no way to make a reasonably compact title to express the same concept. Blame Take Two for having an odd name.
BEFORE NOW, VIOLENCE HAS NEVER BEEN A REASON FOR AN AO RATING
Well, I for one am glad that violence is now a reason for an AO rating. I think images of people being blown up is more offensive than watching two charactors have sex, and I'm glad that the ESRB is taking a stand and saying that exreme violence is just as bad as explicit sex.
Well, I don't think anyone has a problem with condemned prisoners being organ donors...
The diffence between prisoners and street urchins and whoever (PVS patients are a whole different issue that I really don't want to go into) and a embryo is that people have thoughts and feelings (and can feel pain) while embryos do not. An embryo at the stage where they can harvest stem cells is about as sentient as a skin cell. It also doesn't even have the potential of growing into a baby, because we don't have the technology to grow an embryo into a baby without implanting them in a woman, and since the fertility clinics are throwing out plenty of embryos it seems that there are more than enough embryos available to women, and since we don't go around implating unsuspecting women with embryos it seems there is nothing we can do for the extra. I guess we could try not creating too many in the first place, but I never hear pro-lifers going for fertility clinic reform, they only seem to to prevent people from doing something with the waste.
I can see Nintendo with the kid friendly Wii not wanting AO games but the PS3 and the 360? what about Dead or alive volley ball or BMX-XXX I for one have a Wii and would love to play this game on it, but I guess big brothers "Nintendo, Sony, and MS" know whats best for me.
DOA Volleyball and BMX-XXX are rated M, not AO, and for DOA at least the rating was too high. There was no nudity, no sex, just volleyball. And gambling, but I don't think fake gambling needs to be restricted to those 17 and older.
The only thing I really see wrong with it is that it seems that video games get rated more harshly than movies, and there's no reason for it. You press buttons for one and you don't for the other. I'd like to compare Manhunt 2 to Hostel 2 and see which is worse, because I imagine the answer is Hostel 2. Maybe the same board should rate video games and movies?
Hostel 2 should be rated NC-17, but for some reason the MPAA has decided that movies should only get NC-17 ratings for sexuality. Because seeing two people have sex is worse than watching people get tortured with chainsaws in their eyes. I don't get it at all, but I'm happy the ESRB has decided that extreme violence should be rated as harshly as explicit sex. Hopefully the MPAA will follow there lead.
They will go to back-alley abortion clinics to harvest embryonic cells from themselves.
Embryonic stem cells don't come from abortions, let alone back-alley ones. Scientists harvest them from a few day old zygotes, and you can't perform an abortion only a couple of days after conception. Stem cells come from embryos made in a lab, either specifically for that purpose or excess from fertility treatments that would otherwise be thrown away.
Embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with abortion. They're not from embryos that are in a woman and could happily grow into a baby if not for the mean scientists. No one has a abortion for the stem cells. Why don't you learn some facts before spewing off wild speculation?
Men are frequently inconvenienced by a woman leaving the toilet seat down -- if you show up in the middle of the night, and it's dark, and you really have to go, it's a bit of a pain to always have to feel to see if the seat is up or down before you let it all out.
Wouldn't you want to feel around anyways so you make sure you're actually aiming for the toilet? I wouldn't just go into a dark room and sit down, I'd wind up falling in the bathtub or something. Which is another reason for my personal insistence, that the toilet lid be down. Feeling around for a fuzzy seat is much better than feeling around for the seat or the cold, seatless bowl, and you can't accidentally stick your hand in the toilet (or knock things into it) when the lid is down. It also evens out the effort required for both men and women. Really, I don't understand why everyone doesn't leave the lid down and stop fighting about it.
The problem with that idea is that it is not universal that the door is open when the toilet seat should be up and the door is closed when the toilet seat should be down. Many bathrooms have the toilet on the side wall, so a male would be fully visible from the side when looking through the open door, so it would be rather rude to guests walking past the bathroom to have the door open. On the other end, you have women who, when home alone, will never close the bathroom door, despite always needing the seat down. Considering as well that there are dogs who would drink toilet water, cats who will jump into it, toilets that are too dirty to look into beyond necessity, klutzes who will drop things in the toilet, etc, I think the most appropriate solution is to leave the lid down and have the people move the lid and seat into the appropriate position while using it.
There's this commandment about stealing though. Thou shalt not steal. Stealing is taking from a person against his will. Getting the government to steal (tax) for you breaks this commandment.
Jesus also said to give to Caesar what is Caesar's. He was referring to taxes. He didn't believe that taxes were stealing, nor did he reserve the right to have a hissy fit because he didn't like what Caesar did with the money.
1/10th of 1% is, in fact, 0.1%. However, even if I granted you your crazy powers of 10, I'd still argue that it's wrong. Nobody _needs_ welfare. People put themselves in situations where they are either unwilling or incapable of caring for themselves, but they don't _need_ welfare, they _need_ to a.) stop making babies, and b.) get a fucking job. It's _all_ wasted. Every single dime of my hard-earned money that goes to someone that doesn't work for it is a fucking waste. They don't have a right to my money simply because they exist.
The stereotype of the welfare queen who makes baby after baby for bigger and bigger checks is pretty much a myth. After Clinton, they can't be on welfare for more than 2 years. That's it. Then they need to find a job or stay with family or whatever, the government doesn't care. It's not a perpetual system of dependence. Most people are only on it for about 6 months, literally using it as a hand up, not a permanent hand out, while they're between jobs or while setting up stable childcare (so they can work) or whatever. The people on welfare paid taxes before and they will again, so it's just as much their money as yours, and it will be there if calamity strikes you.
Also, with consumers footing the bill, opportunity cost calculations are made, and people say things like "Hrm... do I _really_ need to go to the doctor for this cold, or should I save the money and use it somewhere else".
Actually, that doesn't happen now, in America. For most Americans, the insurance company pays for the doctor, or at least most of the cost, so people don't feel the price when they go in for something they might not need to. For other Americans who don't have insurance, going to the doctor might be a luxury they can't afford when they do need to. And for the bottom of the income ladder, the price of medical care means absolutely nothing, because they can go to the emergency room whenever and the bill gets added to the never-ending debt that they'll never even be able to attempt to pay off, so it doesn't matter. The American health care system doesn't work. Socialized medicine has worked in every other industrialized country in the world. Maybe we could try that, or someone can come up with a different system, but we can't keep the status quo.
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I said if I was the judge I would have read his entire filing, since I was not the judge I did not have that opportunity. I said that if his rant didn't go where it looks like it went from that short snipet then my judgment wouldn't be as cut and dry. It just sounds to me like his rant about appropriate violence and a culture of manhood, in a filing responding to a domestic violence charge, was just an attempt to justify domestic violence. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I wasn't the poster who said that if someone did that while I was on the jury I'd vote to convict. If I was the judge or on the jury I'd have more information anyways so this point is moot. It looks like he was guilty to me, but I didn't have the power to do anything about that opinion and if I did, my opinion would be based on different facts. I don't see why people have to flame me for this.
I'm not having an emotional reaction - though it appears you are.
I am looking at what he said rationally and saying it looks like he was guilty. You don't have to agree with me.
Why would someone go off on a weird tangent instead of stating what happened?
Is it because what they did was wrong but they want to give their weird, twisted logic first? That's what it sounds like to me. If it looped back around to self-defense, that's one thing, but instead it looped back around into a "culture of manhood". Granted, if I haven't read the whole thing and if was the judge I would have, so it might be different from what it sounds, but it sounds like he believes hitting his wife is ok, and he's trying to convince the court of that. If you think you know better what he's talking about feel free to share, but if you don't see why this raises huge red flags to some people then you're the idiot.
If you're engaging in BDSM and you in anyway think what you are doing is comparable to domestic violence, then you really need to stop until you are clear on the differences, ok?
As to the rest of your moronic reply, YOU JUDGE A CASE ON THE FACTS, not on your imbecilic preconceived notions. Do you have a problem with adhering to the Constitution? It's not preconceived notions. It's logic. If a person starts of their side of domestic not with saying it didn't happen, or it was self-defense, or any other legit defense, but instead starts talking about "appropriate" or "inappropriate" violence, it's pretty obvious they're saying they did it, but they just don't think it was wrong. Now, if I was on a jury I'd listen to the whole thing and see if his point gets around to appropriate violence being self-defense or BDSM or whatever, and if he's saying that was the case then I'd look at the other evidence before making a judgment, but if it goes the way it looks then he's basically admitting his guilt and should go to jail. What would you think if someone accused of stealing a TV started ranting about "appropriate" and "inappropriate" robbery when asked for his side instead of just saying he didn't do it?
People know what appropriate violence is. If you feel the need to explain it, that means your ideas on violence are messed up. If you won't plead innocence, and you can't claim a legal exception, like self-defense, then you're stating you're guilty. There's nothing in the Constitution that has a problem with declaring someone guilty after they've admitted it.
Do you have a problem with domestic abusers going to jail?
The XBox's strength is in implementation, not innovation. Online gaming was old-hat by the time the original XBox came out, and it wasn't even really new for consoles. What Microsoft did was make a good online gaming system for consoles. By the same token, the 360 doesn't have anything completely new and different, in the same way the wiimote is, but it implemented a lot of old ideas in good ways. When it works.
I never really thought about condemned prisoners being organ donors. I believe, though, most executed prisoners in the US receive the electric chair instead of lethal injection, which might not prevent them from being organ donors. I don't really see what the problem is with being an organ donor. Once you're dead you're dead.
I didn't say that not being able to feel pain makes you not human, I meant that feeling and thinking are distinctive parts of being a person. My chair does not feel or think, and unlike even say, a coma patient, it didn't feel and think before and it doesn't have the smallest glimmer of hope that it might gain it with the right medical treatment. If I throw out my chair, no one will cry.
My skin cells, also, do not feel or think, and while they could potentially be cloned into a new human being (that looks just like me) I'm not going to save them on that hope. A few days old embryo in a lab is about the size of a skin cell and also doesn't feel and think. It could be implanted in a woman and grown into a baby, but with so many embryos being thrown away it seems that is not much more likely than my skin cells will be cloned into a human being. Embryos are not people because they don't have any of the defining charactoristics that really make people people. Embryos who do not have the potential to become people should at least have the potential to do something.
I'd concede that artificial wombs could replace abortion only if the procedure to transport an embryo or fetus from a woman (to an artificial womb) was no more dangerous, invasive, or painful, than a standard abortion, which I doubt will be possible unless medical science and childbirth get some really great advances. You'd also have to allow women to have a fetus transferred at any time (within medical possibility) for any reason for it to replace abortion. I support abortion as a woman's right to control her own body. If artificial wombs can do that just as well, great. But if they can't (and I doubt they will for a long time) then fuck no.
Not that stem cell research is the same as abortion, because abortion is about not having something (or someone, if you prefer) physically impose itself (himself or herself) on you and damage your body while it forces you to support it, and stem cell research is about cells that could potentially save people's lives. Both are important, but they're rather different, but I'm not surprised you confused the two, since most pro-lifers like to ignore women, when they're not vilifying them, when they talk about abortion and the cute wittle fetuses.
The Catholics are against a lot of things (including stopping the spread of AIDS in Af
Well, yeah. The Hot Coffee stuff was pretty stupid. But a lot of people were upset by it, and it put the ESRB in an awkward position when people (who didn't have a clue about anything) started asking how they could have let that slip by. Personally, I think they should have just said fuck it, we wouldn't have rated Hot Coffee AO even if we had seen it, but they've taken enough of a beating in the media. Maybe they're still mad at Rockstar for putting them in that position, or maybe they're just overzealous in preventing it again, or maybe they've just hit a bout of temporary insanity. I really don't know.
I supported the ESRB for taking a stand and rating Manhunt 2 AO, and I've defended them on this and other issues here. But this? Is nuts. The point of a rating system is to rate, not ban. Even demanding age gates is a little excessive, because every 13 year old knows how to subtract 5 years from his/her birthdate, and how do they make all the other sites that host trailers?
Nice way to make "taking a stand" look like "just being assholes". Are they still mad at Rockstar for making them look bad with the Hot Coffee scandal, or are they just giddy from rediscovering their AO rating and don't know where to stop?
I would love a 24/7 library. I can't tell you how many times I've stopped by the library and it's been closed. So annoying. It would be expensive, but I'd love to see it.
As for LAN parties, most libraries have conference rooms that different groups can rent out. Why can't they rent them for LAN parties?
This is a great conversation. "Sega doesn't make games like the old ones anymore" "Yes, they do" "Who wants to play that old shit?"
BEFORE NOW, VIOLENCE HAS NEVER BEEN A REASON FOR AN AO RATING Well, I for one am glad that violence is now a reason for an AO rating. I think images of people being blown up is more offensive than watching two charactors have sex, and I'm glad that the ESRB is taking a stand and saying that exreme violence is just as bad as explicit sex.
The diffence between prisoners and street urchins and whoever (PVS patients are a whole different issue that I really don't want to go into) and a embryo is that people have thoughts and feelings (and can feel pain) while embryos do not. An embryo at the stage where they can harvest stem cells is about as sentient as a skin cell. It also doesn't even have the potential of growing into a baby, because we don't have the technology to grow an embryo into a baby without implanting them in a woman, and since the fertility clinics are throwing out plenty of embryos it seems that there are more than enough embryos available to women, and since we don't go around implating unsuspecting women with embryos it seems there is nothing we can do for the extra. I guess we could try not creating too many in the first place, but I never hear pro-lifers going for fertility clinic reform, they only seem to to prevent people from doing something with the waste.
Embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with abortion. They're not from embryos that are in a woman and could happily grow into a baby if not for the mean scientists. No one has a abortion for the stem cells. Why don't you learn some facts before spewing off wild speculation?
The problem with that idea is that it is not universal that the door is open when the toilet seat should be up and the door is closed when the toilet seat should be down. Many bathrooms have the toilet on the side wall, so a male would be fully visible from the side when looking through the open door, so it would be rather rude to guests walking past the bathroom to have the door open. On the other end, you have women who, when home alone, will never close the bathroom door, despite always needing the seat down. Considering as well that there are dogs who would drink toilet water, cats who will jump into it, toilets that are too dirty to look into beyond necessity, klutzes who will drop things in the toilet, etc, I think the most appropriate solution is to leave the lid down and have the people move the lid and seat into the appropriate position while using it.
Actually, that doesn't happen now, in America. For most Americans, the insurance company pays for the doctor, or at least most of the cost, so people don't feel the price when they go in for something they might not need to. For other Americans who don't have insurance, going to the doctor might be a luxury they can't afford when they do need to. And for the bottom of the income ladder, the price of medical care means absolutely nothing, because they can go to the emergency room whenever and the bill gets added to the never-ending debt that they'll never even be able to attempt to pay off, so it doesn't matter. The American health care system doesn't work. Socialized medicine has worked in every other industrialized country in the world. Maybe we could try that, or someone can come up with a different system, but we can't keep the status quo.