What you're essentially asking for is to have a job where you're expected to get rocks and garbage thrown at you (yes, this is common at occupy events) and for you to just stand there and take it. That is exactly what happens prior to these incidents.

Cops are humans, and as such they don't want to have to be denigrated like that any more than you do.

Think about this: If you deliberately provoke a reaction, do you think it's possible that you just might succeed in getting one?

If that was really the case, then there are a lot more dangerous things in that crowd than a motorcycle cop that is essentially walking. Besides, he didn't seem to grab the only area of his body that contacted the bike, rather he just dropped straight to the ground and started acting like a 5 year old who you just denied desert. In fact after he hit the ground, he pushed his foot under the bike to make it look worse than it was.

His entire motive was to get attention from somebody like you. Maybe you should go pick him up and breastfeed him.

It's kind of obvious when that's happening because the person's eyes will appear to swell. In this case the guy just had a rather blank stare on his face.

The guy in the picture had no shirt on, yet he also had no visible scratches either. If he was treated roughly on bare concrete, there would be signs of it. In fact given that he resisted, I'm surprised there are none at all anyways.

Isn't that what they did? The police commissioner said he welcomes the attention, so it doesn't seem like NYPD is objecting to it.

One of these shows a police officer pinning a guy to the ground with his knee so that he can cuff him (presumably after the guy already did something wrong and tried to resist arrest.) That is hardly what I'd call brutality.

Also another one of these shows a guy laying on the ground screaming near a police motorcycle. I remember hearing about that, the motorcycle barely nudged him on accident and he deliberately dropped on the ground screaming like a 5 year old, way over-reacting to the incident. The guy (looked to be in his 50's or 60's) was acting like a baby trying to get attention and it was so cringe worthy that if I was there I would have been tempted to slap him and tell him to grow up for once in his life.

I understand that the police can go too far, but protesters and rioters certainly can and do go too far as well.

And a reminder of this:

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/...

Obama did eventually capitulate. He signed the ACTA treaty without anybody else having any say in it, because he (and Hollywood) knew full well that it would get shot down like SOPA did if the public was aware of it. The constitution requires a vote in the senate for any treaty to be ratified, but NOBODY (not even the public) was allowed to read it until Obama himself ratified it. His argument was that since our laws already comply with it, he can ratify it by himself.

There is no precedent for that as it has never been done before (given the Constitution forbids it, it makes sense too.)

Anyways, Obama HAS been purchased, and he IS a Manchurian candidate if there ever was one.

Honestly this is a really bullshit line of thinking. Even if Romney wouldn't have been, then why on earth would you vote for either of them? Who cares if he would have been elected if Obama didn't? Look at the result: Instead of getting an unknown, you got the incumbent who you already know is bad.

We don't have a two party system because the "system" or any laws dictate it. The reason we havee a two party system is because our culture as a whole thinks exactly as you just did.

Voting for the lesser of two evils means you give that lesser evil your endorsement. There is no escaping that fact; you effectively went on the record as saying "I want this guy in office."

Honestly I've never found a good reason for any of the third party candidates either (no fucking way I'd ever want Nader or Paul in office either.) My solution is just to not even vote on an office where I have no preferred candidate. That's right, I left the presidential box empty. Instead I just voted on a referendum (legalizing medicinal marijuana) and a few other things and left the rest of the ballot empty.

I think voting for the wrong candidate, or not educating yourself on any of them first, is more harmful than not voting at all. This common message of "get out the vote" is bullshit and is the reason we're in the mess we are in today. People vote for shit they know nothing about.

Actually no that's not it. The main thing is that, at least in the broader context, jobs like these ultimately don't go anywhere for either yourself or those you're supposedly trying to help.

To put it into perspective: If everybody in the world picked careers in academia, then effectively everybody in the world would specialize in teaching, and no actual work would get done. You prefer to rent a flat instead of buy one...great, that's fine, nothing wrong with that at all. However if everybody did that, then nobody would build the flat to begin with, and you'd be living in a cave documenting your wonderful academic findings with finger paints (and given that the number of caves in the world is somewhat never changing, you presumably would have to fight for it too.)

Ultimately, academia serves no useful purpose if you don't get anything productive out of it, which goes back to my first point: Learning a profession that is only useful for teaching itself to other people doesn't help anybody.

Now, I'm not passing judgement mind you. The nice thing about capitalism (which by the way, I love capitalism, in spite of its faults) is that you can make choices like the one you've made so long as somebody is willing to pay you to do it (i.e. no party official tells you that you have to do something else.) You've obviously found somebody who is willing to pay you, so you are actually doing something that SOMEBODY wants, so you are in fact useful in spite of anything I've said above. In fact, the only true judge of the usefulness of your profession in capitalism is your customer.

Hmm...So it seems that if she was a white male, she never would have been appointed to SCOTUS because she never would have qualified as the standards are higher for them.

Hey I'm not the one saying this...it's just you know...common knowledge in this Affirmative Action world we live in.

Here's a question though: Who would you say is disadvantaged?

I ask because Princeton did a study and found that if they ended Affirmative Action, the number of black and latino students would drop significantly while the white students wouldn't materially increase. They did however estimate that four out of every five black and latino students would be replaced with an Asian student.

Aren't Asian's supposed to be among those disadvantaged? Because presently Affirmative Action seems to disadvantage them even further.

Honestly I'm really not sure how somebody like her gets appointed there to begin with. When you look at her opinions, she always votes in favor of any action that is about minority empowerment, regardless of whether or not it is fair. If not racism, that is at the very least a pretty clear indication of bias. Her background explains it too, she has the upbringing of a classic feminazi (though admittedly she doesn't act the part most of the time.)

That's the thing, at least in the case of college admissions anyways, is that this doesn't do what it claims it does.

It's been found that Affirmative Action doesn't hinder white students from gaining admissions. Instead, it mostly just hinders Asian students by replacing them with Black and Latino. Not by a little, but by a LOT. The root cause has to do with the percent of those applying doesn't match the percent of those members of the overall population. So they feel they need to correct it by dumping off a few perfectly qualified Asian students in favor of some potentially less qualified Black or Latino ones.

Somebody speak out if I'm wrong here, but in this age of "white privilege," how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos? Historically, Asians have been every bit as downtrodden in western countries, and blacks aren't the only ones who can claim being victims of slavery in western countries either (few people seem to know that Irish slaves were also common in the Americas at one point; in fact during the mid 1600's, Ireland's population dropped by almost half due to slave exports.)

The only explanation I can come up with is that since Asians are culturally very disciplined, they tend to excel academically. Likewise, you see more of them apply, and thus see more of them do well. I think whites are only slightly less disciplined than Asians, so they come at a close second. I'm generalizing of course, but when you look at the kinds of values that black culture has, it does fit the narrative (Bill Cosby once lamented this, how he hears of other blacks who often describe being successful as "acting white," as if it was a bad thing.)

But what do I know, I'm just one of those white guys who deserves to have the word "privileged" written across my face in permanent marker and therefore I can't possibly see racism due to my color.

Because often times compiling things like this, especially what is essentially an entire fucking Linux distribution, and ESPECIALLY AGAIN one that requires cross compiling this, is rather a pain in the ass. Unless somebody has pre-built the toolchain for you, preconfigured it, etc, you're looking at at least 45 minutes of work, not counting the time for the compiler to do its actual work. That's also working under the assumption that you know how to operate the compiler (I'm assuming GCC) fairly well.

I don't know about you, but in spite of using Linux for over 10 years, unless an application I've downloaded in source form already has the build scripts configured, I'll never get the damn thing to compile. (Well, in cases where it's a single .c file with few dependencies it's not a huge deal, but even then cross compiling requires yet more work.)

Configuring make scripts and all of that crap are just not my thing. I've never been into programming anything beyond interpreted languages to be honest. Stuff like writing Bash scripts is easy for me, but I don't like to mess with C mainly because when compilers throw errors I often don't know jack shit about how to solve them, and asking for help on them usually results in me getting trolled or somebody pointing me to one of those god awful man pages.

What? That's an absurd argument. There's no need to speak their language when you can just hire one single person to translate your product labeling for you. Besides, Chinese really isn't much of a language; in fact even within Cantonese or Mandarin, they have so many wildly varying and unintelligible dialects that they can't even understand one another even though they technically speak the same language.

To give you an idea, see if you can understand this video very well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That's technically English. Or at least, it very closely resembles what was once called English.

Here's a comparison of the two: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...