Backintothesky

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Posts posted by Backintothesky

  2. More terrifying are the Christians that claim that without God they would have no morality.

    If the only thing holding them back from acts of unspeakable cruelty is their belief in an invisible sky fairy then I don't want to be around them.



    The111

    ***Do you believe it is the basic innate fear of being caught?



    The biggest irony here is that the video in the OP promotes this idea. The video purported that religious people choose to obey the law because they are "accountable to god." What this literally means is that they are afraid they will have to pay (settle the account) if they don't follow the law. And settling your account with god is presumably much more difficult than settling your account with city hall.

    This is IMO a very weak reason to do the right thing. Do it because you know it to be right, not because you feel accountable for it.

  4. As a believer why bother?

    I thought you'd be excited about dying? You get to see your God no?

    I see religious people crying when their loved ones die. Why? Only a matter of time before they see them again according to their beliefs...and apparently they are in a better place....?


    RonD1120

    Don't waste too much energy on them. Work on your survival plan for combating ISIS related attacks on your home turf. My wife and I have moved to the mountains in north GA. In addition, we have purchased a nine acre plot in a secretive secluded location that the entire family can use if evacuation becomes necessary. It is suitable for hunting and farming.

    Trust in the Lord and be prepared.

  5. The ignorance displayed in this quote is simply shocking.

    Learn your history. America didn't "liberate" Europe alone, it REQUIRED a concerted effort from Allies around the world.

    In fact there's a good argument to be made that Russia was the key to defeating the Nazis by 1945. God knows how long the war would have gone on for without the Eastern front pressure on Hitler.

    I'm not going to compare you to Hitler directly but you do realise that this is the same logic he used. "It's ours".

    By that logic Putin is well within rights to roll up Eastern Europe up to Berlin.

    Thinking and acting like that just leads to continous and never ending violence.

    catfishhunter

    Japan should be ours Germany Should be ours Hell France should be ours.

  6. In which case the acts of Muslims who behead non believers are right on because their Prophet did it......

    You can use religion to justify anything. I bet I could find something in the Christian bible to justify ANY crime including child molestation.

    That's what happens when your morality is based on a book written by goatherders thousands of years ago.

    RonD1120

    Here is an excellent venture into Christian torture. Doug Giles points out that, following baptism, Jesus made wine and then beat the crap out of vendors selling religious trinkets. This is an example of righteous indignation. Yeah, I think Jesus could be made angry regarding al Qaeda's plans to kill innocents. Later Jesus stated that a child molester should have a mill stone tied around their neck and thrown into the sea. In case you did not get the analogy, actual drowning is worse than the fear of drowning. There are some other enjoyable references.

    BTW, I learned the other day that rectal feeding was to combat the detainees attempt to starve themselves.

    Merry Christmas from another Christmas redneck. The one you love to hate. :D:)



    http://clashdaily.com/2014/12/wwjt-jesus-torture/

  7. False.

    There are still a lot of guns in the UK and Australia mate. There's still a lot of hunting as well as gun ranges.

    The UK is not a "gun free" place. Nor should it be. Shooting is a legit sport and it's shameful that our national pistol shooting team must train abroad. Shameful.

    Did you know you can buy an AR-15 in the UK.......it's straight pull sure, but still lethal. Semi automatic shotguns and bolt action high powered hunting rifles (what the media would call "sniper rifles") are available to be purchased.

    In France I can pick up Glocks, AK-47's, shotguns, AR-15s and all sorts of weaponary relatively easily.

    Nearly every Swiss home has an assualt rifle in it.

    Now of course there can never be a like for like comparison between countries - particularly given the size of the US BUT I've said it before and I'll say it again it's a CULTURE thing.

    Why can other countries be awash with weapons and yet not have the same massacres?

    CornishChris

    You keep the guns, we (and Oz) don't want them.

  8. Incredibly brave man. One can only hope we have the same sense of courage if ever put in such a situation.

    According to reports the other hostage who died was shielding her pregnant friend from gunfire.

    Tragic loss of two young and courageous individuals.

    Thoughts go out to their familys.

    Stumpy

    My colleagues in the Sydney office are just round the corner from there. Word on the street is that the gunman was struggling to stay awake so the store manager tried to get his gun. That kicked off the altercation and apparently the soldiers hit the door 6 seconds after they heard the first shot. That's all hearsay at the moment however.

  9. If it works then surely the police should be allowed to use waterboarding and rectal feeding to interrogate suspects?

    Where is the line?

    If you say "terrorists" then define terrorists because meanings can be changed.

    When I was in America earlier this year the media had a habit of calling all violent or disturbing acts "terroristic" even though a lot of them were criminal acts and not acts of "terror".

    It could get to the point where any criminal act that causes people to be "scared" will be a "terror" act and the suspects will be tortured...

    I'm not accusing or beating your point of view down here - I'd genuinely like to hear your viewpoint on this and your opinions.


    RonD1120

    If if didn't/doesn't work, why did/do we use it?

    When lives are at stake, why should we be polite? What is a polite war?

    Do the survivors/relatives of those killed on 9/11 have tortured memories?

  10. Do you see how this logic ends up in a never ending cycle of increasing violence?

    It's PART of the reason why Israel and Palastine will never resolve their issues.

    It's why in thousands of year SOME members of the black community will continue to justify their criminal actions because of slavery.

    RonD1120

    Did you read the report? I did not. Does it state that we did all those things?

    John McCain was tortured. The North Vietnamese had a justified reason for doing it.

    We used enhanced interrogation following 9/11. We were justified in doing so.

    I am a hard liner, you know that.

  11. If you love this stuff then do check out "Guns, germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.

    My mother in law gave it to me the other week and it's fascinating reading - it's a study into why certain cultures and countries have ended up the "top dogs" in the world and others, such as Africa, despite having a "head-start" are still languishing in third world status.

    It sounds like the beginning of an incredibly racist book but it's actually are very, very nuanced and intelligent look at how and more crucially WHY things like guns and steel were created in some cultures and not others. And obviously how that gave those countries the advantage.

    Fascinating stuff if you enjoy that kind of thing (which I do!). Check it out if you haven't already.

    wmw999

    In the whole cultural-context thing, I found this NY Times article to be fascinating. People are so complex and interesting. I'm posting here instead of Bonfire because if it actually gets discussed, it'll end up here anyway :ph34r::ph34r::ph34r:

    He's not saying that it's the reason people are the way they are; just that this is yet another contributing factor to people being "the only right way, the way they've always been." If nothing else, it doesn't consider places like India or Africa. But, well, any complex system has a lot of influences (just like people, or the environment, do).

    NY Times requires a log-in after you've seen 10 articles, so I've copied and pasted the article in here as well.

    Quote

    AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.

    People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

    These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about the seaweed and other objects in the scene.

    Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus, asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the others.

    Dr. Markus and her colleagues found that these differences could affect health. Negative affect — feeling bad about yourself — has big, persistent consequences for your body if you are a Westerner. Those effects are less powerful if you are Japanese, possibly because the Japanese are more likely to attribute the feelings to their larger situation and not to blame themselves.

    There’s some truth to the modernization hypothesis — that as social worlds become wealthier, they also become more individualistic — but it does not explain the persistent interdependent style of Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

    In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways.

    Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.

    The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”

    Their test case was China, where the Yangtze River divides northern wheat growers from southern rice growers. The researchers gave Han Chinese from these different regions a series of tasks. They asked, for example, which two of these three belonged together: a bus, a train and train tracks? More analytical, context-insensitive thinkers (the wheat growers) paired the bus and train, because they belong to the same abstract category. More holistic, context-sensitive thinkers (the rice growers) paired the train and train tracks, because they work together.

    Asked to draw their social networks, wheat-region subjects drew themselves larger than they drew their friends; subjects from rice-growing regions drew their friends larger than themselves. Asked to describe how they’d behave if a friend caused them to lose money in a business, subjects from the rice region punished their friends less than subjects from the wheat region did. Those in the wheat provinces held more patents; those in the rice provinces had a lower rate of divorce.

    I write this from Silicon Valley, where there is little rice. The local wisdom is that all you need is a garage, a good idea and energy, and you can found a company that will change the world. The bold visions presented by entrepreneurs are breathtaking in their optimism, but they hold little space for elders, for longstanding institutions, and for the deep roots of community and interconnection.

    Nor is there much rice within the Tea Party. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, declared recently that all a man needed was a horse, a gun and the open land, and he could conquer the world.

    Wheat doesn’t grow everywhere. Start-ups won’t solve all our problems. A lone cowboy isn’t much good in the aftermath of a Hurricane Katrina. As we enter a season in which the values of do-it-yourself individualism are likely to dominate our Congress, it is worth remembering that this way of thinking might just be the product of the way our forefathers grew their food and not a fundamental truth about the way that all humans flourish.



    Wendy P.

  12. There are gangs in the UK. SO19 (the firearms division - British "SWAT" if you will) deal with firearms incidents every day.

    BUT, the average cop in the UK (or other countries) doing a vehicle stop for example does NOT expect a firearms to be in the vehicle. It is a rare occasion when that is the case.

    When SO19 had information that Jean de Menezes had a bomb and was about to detonate it in the metro they shot him several times in the head to stop him. It turns out the information was wrong. But they did what they needed to do with the information they had. I.E. dangerous threat, need to use lethal force to stop him.

    Mark Duggan - UK "gangster", SO19 told he had a weapon and they needed to do a vehicle stop and arrest. They believed he had a weapon and so acted accordingly. He made some suspicious moves when they pulled his vehicle over and so they shot him. He died. It appears the intelligence was wrong (at least partially).

    Point is, when the police believe you might well have a weapon on you and you act in a way that might suggest you will use a weapon they will shoot you to make sure you don't use it on them. Quite rightfully so.

    In the USA the police know that ANYONE can have a weapon on them because of the prevalance of legally available weapons.

    In the UK (for example) there are a lot of firearms but they tend to be in the hands of country farmers and skeet shoot enthusiast. No-one has the legal right to carry a handgun on the streets.

    If the UK police dealt with a similar environment to US police you can GUARANTEE that the number of police killings would be a lot higher.


    kallend

    ***The differences I mentioned were all statistical facts obtained from the Internet concerning population, gun availability, police armament, and crime. It's not my impression I did not come up with the numbers. The only opinion I stated was about gangs and I provided supporting evidence on its impact in my community via a link.



    And I provided evidence of gangs in Britain via a link. The USA is NOT the only western nation to have gangs or minority communities. It is, however, WAY out of line in the total number of murders and in the number of killings by LEOs.

  14. Frankly I think the public will only be satisfied when police officers only return fire when they are already shot multiple times.

    Fucking retards the lot of them. I've been reading people calling for "warning shots" before shooting at the suspect. And then only shooting in the leg or hand!

    Seriously there needs to be public announcements explaining the reality of close range armed confrontation.

    Alongside that they should show videos of the final moments of many officers who hesitated too long and paid with their lives.

    Warning shots! In an urban space! Fucking hell.

    GeorgiaDon

    How many times do we have to learn the lesson that guns are not toys? Is there any valid reason why toy guns, or BB guns, have to be made visually indistinguishable from real guns? An orange bit that can scratch or break off doesn't cut it. Why can't there be a requirement that toys be made of yellow/red/green material, anything but black. Something immediately visible, and that can't wear off or easily be altered, apart from intentionally painting the thing black.

    This whole situation just sucks, for the kid (obviously) and for the cop. Even if the cop was told everything that was told to the 911 operator, how would that have changed things? There is someone pointing a gun at people; the "someone" might or might not be a juvenile, and the gun might or might not be real. If the cop assumes the gun is not real, and is wrong, the result could be that a bystander or the cop ends up dead. Heck of a way to find out the gun was real. 12-year-olds can look like little kids, and they can look 20, it all depends on if they hit that adolescent growth spurt a bit early or a bit late and how they are dressed. It's easy to see how a kid, or anybody, might jump the wrong way when someone screams "hand's up"; if their instinct is to throw the source of the problem (the toy gun) away or take it out to show it's just a toy then it's game over.

    Sign of the times maybe, but playing with a realistic looking gun in a public place is a great recipe for disaster. Every parent must know this.

    Better than giving your kid a toy gun, get them an appropriate real one and teach them how to use it responsibly.

    Don

  15. If the caller thought it "was probably fake" then perhaps he should have gone up to the kid himself.

    It's very easy to call a gun a fake if it's not your life you are risking to find out.

    I don't get some people's reactions to this stuff.

    "Should have shot him in the legs" etc.

    There needs to be public announcements on how and why police are trained to shoot center mass and that when someone pulls a gun on them they aren't going to wait until they get shot at before they neutralise the threat.

    normiss

    12 years old should tell us something.

    People making false or inaccurate 911 calls are part of this problem.

  16. Walk around with a gun in a public place and point it at people (fake or not) then expect problems.

    Here's CCTV footage of a young kid in the UK nearly getting shot in the chest for nearly the same scenario. Listen to how he says the officer was squeezing on second pressure by the time the weapon hit the floor.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwFu0wZ6Igg




    Anvilbrother

    Nice try leaving out all the story. The cop was called there for a person with a gun. Although the caller stated the thought the gun was fake, the caller's doubt was never relayed to the responding officers.

    The rookie officer saw the boy at a park bench pick up what looked like a gun and placed it in his waistband, Follmer said.

    The officer ordered the boy to put his hands in the air. Instead, police said, the boy reached for his gun. Deputy Chief Edward Tomba said the boy made no verbal threats to the officer and there was no physical confrontation.

    TLDR Cop called for a person waving a gun at people. Cops show up on scene and see person hiding a gun in wasteband. When told to put hands up the person went for the gun, cops shoot person. Clean shooting, kid got what was coming....

  17. No, it's a personal attack against the leader of your church.

    Your beliefs have nothing to do with it.

    People use that reasoning to justify "blasphemy" laws.

    People are allowed to criticize whomever they wish - certainly an organization that has taken it upon themselves to dictate to other people how they should live their lives based on the orders of their "God".

    Thunderbow


    I consider calling the leader of my Church a "cunt" as a personal attack against what I believe.

  18. Depends where you are. 1961 Suicide Act in UK decriminalized suicide attempts.

    I personally think it's led to more people just not doing it properly. At least before you had to make sure you finished the job...ah the good old days :S

    stayhigh

    In all countries suicide is not a crime.

    An attempted suicide is a crime.

    That has to be the shittiest feeling in the world. You failed at killing yourself and now you get punished for it. Almost sounds like the law encouraging them to try harder next time.

  19. Nothing is stopping anyone from killing themselves - in most countries these days suicide is not a crime.

    No-one is saying that people shouldn't be able to kill themselves if they want to. It's sad but people have that option if they want to.

    It becomes a delicate problem when you involve third parties - particularly the state, in suicide.

    It becomes open to corruption.

    Check out the case of Harold Shipman in the UK - a doctor who was discovered to have killed over 200 people, making him one of the most "effective" serial killers in the UK.

    He was able to escape detection for a long time because he killed them using morphine (for the most part) and used his position to cover up the real cause of death.

    Yes, it would be lovely if people who had terminal illness were able to end their lives as and when they wished with the help of others. BUT, you are opening the doors to people such as Shipman to take advantage.

    Unfortunately there are people in this world who would push their own mothers towards assisted suicide if it meant they could get their hands on their wills quicker.

    It has absolutely nothing to do with telling people what to do with their own bodies and everything to do with protecting people from being murdered under the guise of "assisted suicide".

    grue

    ***Thin end of the wedge argument works here. There's a danger that it will start off as just for the "terminally ill" and then transition to anyone who wants to kill themselves can.



    It's their body, and their choice. I don't see how anyone thinks they should have the right to tell a consenting adult what he or she can do with his or her own meat.

  20. Thin end of the wedge argument works here. There's a danger that it will start off as just for the "terminally ill" and then transition to anyone who wants to kill themselves can.

    We saw the same with legalized abortion (not that I'm against that) - now anyone can do it. It's a typical pattern for most laws/rules.

    It's not quite as simple as either side of the debate makes out. I remember this being a hot topic in my philosophy classes in the late 90s - nothing has changed, there are still the same moral and logistical problems.

    stayhigh

    CDC reports that at 2012, over 40000 suicide were recorded. Half of them by firearm, the other majority being suffocation.

    When Brittany Maynard took her own life due to her illness, it has sparked arguments.

    Is it right or wrong?

    I feel that this should be an available option for everyone regardless of medical condition. Even to those who are suffering from chronic depression/suicidal ideation. Why let these people suffer and only to prolong their life and make others miserable?

    Many don't commit suicide due to the failure ratio. Even with the shotgun in the mouth, the method is not guaranteed to end. Many suicidal people actually do care about what they look like after their death, or what kind of impact would they give to their family and friends.

    I'd say let people die on their own term.

    I'm not talking about the IAD student progression either. :D

  21. If you really want to desensitize yourself to it:

    Bunjee jumps. Holy shit roller coasters have nothing on those things. Pure unadulterated freefall in dead air.

    The most intense sensation of falling I've ever experienced. Not sure I liked it to be honest but crank out several of those one after the other and I'm sure you'll start to get used to it.

    I've never experienced the falling feeling on exit from an aircraft but I'm 99.9% sure that what you are feeling will be dwarfed by a true dead air exit. A skydive exit will feel like nothing after that.


    DrDom

    OK all, in my constant spirit of disclosing my various fears on here I was hoping to ask a question.

    Some background: I did 7 jumps last year, 1 tandem, 6 AFF jumps. Also spent nearly an hour in the tunnel. I'm afraid of heights. Like really REALLY afraid of heights.

    Well, maybe I should say "was" afraid of heights.

    I took up skydiving to deal with my fear of heights but in the end overcame the view and sensation of flight and discovered I have a bigger problem. The fear of "falling". Or even more specifically: the fear of the sensation of falling. I just can't get past it.

    I took up paramotoring (or powered paragliding depending on where you're from) and have become even more accustomed to flight and really LOVE being in the sky. Being up there under a paraglider is the same bliss as flying my student Nav260!

    But I can't get over that drop sensation and it is why I have not made another jump. This upsets me.

    I'm exposing myself to flight when possible (flight lessons, paramotoring, etc) but is there any advice anyone has to acclimate them to the falling sensation and make it... less terrifying? I know that "just jump" is one piece of advice, but I'm wondering if anyone else has/had this issue and if anyone knows anything that can help expose me to this on a more regular basis.

    I've been looking at building a "pendulator" on my property as one option but I have no rope experience and would need major assistance to do this safely (open to anyone who wants to help!)

    ok... so aside from "just jump"... can anyone help me out with this one? Thanks everyone! I hope I can get the nerve to get back up there sooner than later.

  22. Fucking bingo.

    We're all proud of stuff that we've had no choice in being.

    One could argue that your entire personality, beliefs, morals, religious views are not really a choice you've made in the first place thanks to a variety of genetic and environmental factors that made you that way.

    kallend

    Are you proud to be American?

  25. Surely you can make a moral distinction between putting a round into another human being (regardless of if they deserve it or not) versus providing humanitarian aid to innocent victims of conflict??!

    Andy9o8

    The distinction between individual humanitarian help and individual military help is more a legal one than a moral one. Again, compare to individual volunteers in the 1930s & 40s in European and Asian conflict areas.