That's legit. It's all about whether or not you had a choice in the matter. The idiot that I was responding to was suggesting that he feels that it's okay to get hammered drunk on a work night and call in sick because of the hangover. That's a choice that he made, and if you are going to make that irresponsible choice you should have to live with the consequences, rather than leaving all of your co-workers to pick up your slack.

This strikes me almost as the employer being a dick just for the sake of being a dick. Even if you are a sociopath (which it seems that many in American business are, but that is a side point), it doesn't make sense to have sick people come in! Their productivity is going to be reduced, and then they get everyone else in the office sick, which reduces productivity for everyone. Just let the poor bastard stay home, and you will end up making more money, you evil fuck!

Well when you have a family and they have been looking forward to that vacation all year, it's not really fair to ask someone to give it up just because they are sick...

I have a better idea; how about you don't drink so much on a work night that you will be unable to come in to work the next day! That way, you will have sick days left for when you have communicable diseases, and I won't have to catch them!

Telling your children that if they misbehave you will throw them in a furnace: Abuse
Telling your children that if they misbehave God will throw them in a furnace: Not Abuse?

So? Most crimes are committed behind closed doors. Should we mandate that people must leave their doors unlocked at all times, so that the police can just barge in and do random crime spot checks?

This. A thousand times, this. Right around the dawn of GPS, I had a job that required me to drive around to unfamiliar places all the time. I can't even tell you how many near misses I had while fucking around trying to read a map. One day, my boss gave me this new fancy-schmancy thing to put on my dash that would tell me where to go. My navigation became immeasurably safer overnight. That these fucking idiots are now talking about "safety concerns" with GPS nav systems is absolutely mind-boggling to me; the GPS nav system is one of the BEST safety features that you can have if you have to take long, complicated routes with many turns. This is like the NHTSA getting upset about other drivers being blinded by headlights, so they mandate that all car headlights must shut off when there is another car in the vicinity.

I agree. Also, we clearly don't need cars, as horses have been perfectly usable transportation devices for thousands of years.

I don't think Metallica needs help from a shitty mastering engineer to suck...

No, that's how you be the government.

How about this for a new standard:

If an average citizen would be convicted of a crime (trespassing, harrassment, stalking, etc.) for doing it, the police need a warrant if they want to do it. I mean, for fuck's sake, they have special courts made specifically for the purposes of rubber-stamping warrants, now these fucking assholes feel like they should be able to spy on us without even having to go through the trouble of getting the bullshit warrant in the first place? What a Fucking Bunch of Idiots.

You must not have seen that festering pile of shit if you think that the only reason that it compares unfavorably to the rest of the movies is because of the nostalgia factor. I mean, the fourth movie had Shia LaBeouf in it. And they had him swinging through the forest with magical monkeys on vines. Your argument is invalid.

PETA would, however, be totally fine with that experiment being performed on a human.

Disbelief can only be suspended so far. The first and third items on your list were attributed to supernatural events, and the second, while implausible, was nowhere near as insane as the nuked fridge stunt. Granted, suspension of disbelief is an entirely personal thing, but for me, the other three movies only pushed the boundaries of reality enough to be entertaining, whereas the fourth movie completely obliterated it.

Dude, Lincoln didn't even start pushing abolition very hard until the war had already begun. It is thought by many, in fact, that making the war about slavery was a PR move by the North to keep the British from siding with the South. While the outcome was obviously a good one, I think you give the North a bit too much credit -- racism was every bit as virulent and rampant as it was in the South, but they did not happen to have an economy that relied so heavily upon it.