Officially a Christmas Cake

I think my ribs are bruised and I have a mild concussion. ama

I don't mean the good dank either. Half the lights were off and the glass was filled with shitty proxies. They didn't have anything worth buying either. One star, but only because it wasn't a long drive.

Chally x Azumarill
Das x Lemmy
Psy x Tru

What should the post say?

I am doing a statistics project for a class, and I need more data. Sep7agon seems like a large enough community to get results from.

Any answer besides Chinese Mecha Batman is probably wrong

Type 1 Diabeetus is a bitch. The tribe lost a great member.

I've been thinking lately on Descartes' Meditations and attempting to formulate my own response to his arguments, primary of these being the Dream Argument and the Evil Demon Scenario.


Descartes refutes the latter argument himself by attempting to prove the ontological existence of God. For obvious reasons, I don't hold much favor for it. He again refutes both arguments with his infamous Cogito Ergo Sum:


Disregarding the assumption of an I, appears to be sound. This, however, holds that the only means through which we can know are through base rationality, such as "some being experiences something, therefore some being exists." I still harbor my own doubts toward the assumption that nothing, besides the knowledge that something exists which can experience things, so I started searching for alternative arguments besides Cogito. My favorite of which is Gilbert Ryle's Counterfeit Coinage Argument against Skepticism.
Essentially, a false experience presupposes the existence of true experiences; we can state with certainty that some experience is definitely true. Therefore, since we have knowledge that some of our experiences are true (regardless of the number of experiences, or knowledge of our knowledge), we can state that we can be certain of knowledge besides that of existence.

Definitions and terminology aside, are there any other substantial arguments to be made against Universal Doubt?

He's the boxer in your briefs

After reading through Turkey's thread, I realized just how fractured the definition of "hate speech" really is between the Libertarian and Commutarian perspectives. So I went digging and found this article on the ABA website. I've chopped it down slightly for easier reading:

Debating Hate Speech

Hate speech is speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Should hate speech be discouraged? The answer is easy—of course! However, developing such policies runs the risk of limiting an individual’s ability to exercise free speech. When a conflict arises about which is more important—protecting community interests or safeguarding the rights of the individual—a balance must be found that protects the civil rights of all without limiting the civil liberties of the speaker.

In this country there is no right to speak fighting words—those words without social value, directed to a specific individual, that would provoke a reasonable member of the group about whom the words are spoken. For example, a person cannot utter a racial or ethnic epithet to another if those words are likely to cause the listener to react violently. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful.

Acts Speak Louder than Words
One way to deal effectively with hate speech is to create laws and policies that discourage bad behavior but do not punish bad beliefs. Another way of saying this is to create laws and policies that do not attempt to define hate speech as hate crimes, or “acts.” In two recent hate crime cases, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that acts, but not speech, may be regulated by law.

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992), involved the juvenile court proceeding of a white 14-year-old who burned a cross on the front lawn of the only black family in a St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood. Burning a cross is a very hateful thing to do: it is one of the symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has spread hatred and harm throughout this country. The burning cross clearly demonstrated to this family that at least this youth did not welcome them in the neighborhood. The family brought charges, and the boy was prosecuted under a Minnesota criminal law that made it illegal to place, on public or private property, a burning cross, swastika, or other symbol likely to arouse “anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Minnesota law was unconstitutional because it violated the youth’s First Amendment free speech rights.

Note that the Court did not rule that the act itself—burning a cross on the family’s front lawn—was legal. In fact, the youth could have been held criminally responsible for damaging property or for threatening or intimidating the family. Instead, the law was defective because it improperly focused on the motivation for—the thinking that results in—criminal behavior rather than on criminal behavior itself. It attempted to punish the youth for the content of his message, not for his actions.

In the second case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476 (1993), Mitchell and several black youth were outside a movie theater after viewing Mississippi Burning, in which several blacks are beaten. A white youth happened to walk by, and Mitchell yelled, “There goes a white boy; go get him!” Mitchell and the others attacked and beat the boy.

In criminal law, penalties are usually based on factors such as the seriousness of the act, whether it was accidental or intentional, and the harm it caused to the victim. It is also not unusual to have crimes treated more harshly depending upon who the victim is. For example, in most states battery (beating someone) is punished more harshly if the victim is a senior citizen, a young child, a police officer, or a teacher.

Under Wisconsin law, the penalty for battery is increased if the offender intentionally selects the victim “because of the race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation and national origin or ancestry of that person.” The Supreme Court ruled in Wisconsin v. Mitchell that this increased penalty did not violate the free speech rights of the accused. The Court reasoned that the penalty was increased because the act itself was directed at a particular victim, not because of Mitchell’s thoughts.

Success on Campus
Here’s how one community recently approached an incidence of hate speech by calling attention to it rather than attempting to suppress it—by encouraging speech that pointed out how out of place the hate speech was in a community that values the dignity of all.

Matt Hale, a notorious racist, was recently asked to speak at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Hale is the leader of the World of the Creator, a white supremacist group. His presence on campus was controversial. Several students, faculty, and community members thought that the university should cancel his appearance. Instead, he was allowed to speak. Hale’s audience was not impressed. He came across as having a confusing set of beliefs that were out of place in a democratic, multicultural society. Several faculty and students spoke out against his message of hatred.

By allowing Hale to speak, the university recognized free speech rights but also provided a means for community members to respond. Communitarian and libertarian goals were both met.

How do the members of this community define hate speech? Under what circumstances is it right to limit speech?

AMA me anything

Now that I've grabbed your attention, I demand that my alt unlock the Bungle thread so that Psy's alt can lock it

The article is a little too long to quote, but the bulk of the piece is below:

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who is a leading Republican presidential contender, has intensified his defense of gun rights in response to last week’s Oregon campus massacre, arguing that the Second Amendment is more sacred than spilled blood.

He also suggested that the victims should have had the courage to attack their assailant and accused President Obama of politicizing the tragedy by embracing the families of the dead.

In a Facebook question-and-answer session Monday night, Mr. Carson tried to show empathy with victims by recalling that two of his cousins were killed in the streets and that, as a doctor, he had removed many bullets from the bodies of gunshot victims. But he said the right to bear arms was paramount.

“I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away,” Mr. Carson wrote.

And on Tuesday, Mr. Carson’s suggestion that he would have fought back in the face of an attack like the one in Roseburg, Ore., went viral, drawing widespread rebuke from his critics and reviving questions about his candidacy.

“I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” Mr. Carson, who has been surging in recent polls, said on Fox News. “I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’ ”

Offering a prescription that echoed the National Rifle Association’s view that arming “good guys” is the answer, Mr. Carson also suggested to USA Today that kindergarten instructors should have weapons training. “If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t,” Mr. Carson said.

Like many Republican presidential candidates who have sought to express sympathy for victims while maintaining support for gun rights, Mr. Carson has struggled to address the issue with sensitivity. Belief in limited government is central to the Republican Party, and those running for office have found it challenging to offer solutions to an epidemic of violence that do not involve more federal oversight.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/10/06/ben-carson-says-he-would-have-been-more-aggressive-against-oregon-gunman/

Thoughts?