Ice hockey and football are wayyyyy better to watch than baseball and basketball.

Crocquet is more fun to play than golf.

Curling fucking rules...I will someday play on the US Olympic Curling Team.

There is a logical explanation for everything; some are known, others are yet to be known, most will never be known. Everything we have accomplished, the sum of our collective knowledge, occupies an imperceptibly thin slice of data on the surface of an unimaginably vast mystery.

Nonetheless, this is the best data we have, and we should cherish it, and use it to our advantage in every situation. Also, we should be ready to cast it aside, without reservation, when it does us a disservice. A small bit of the great mystery may be revealed to us, at any moment, in a way we never imagined. However, we aren't really designed to make the distinction between good and bad data, we must make an extreme effort.

Finally, we should always fight, tooth and nail, against those who wish us to surrender to ignorance. As ignorant and insignificant as we are (and we most certainly are, to a degree our minds are incapable of comprehending) we have carved out a small niche of organized data, the qualities of which need constant protection from deliberate obfuscation. Knowledge is our most valuable resource, and attacks upon it are the most heinous crime.

Flint, your post reminded me of this fine piece of work from Donald Rumsfeld:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

:)

That quote has been utilized at many scientific conferences; The Skeptic in Scientific American did a piece on it.

There should be European historical societies for Gaelics, Celtics, Irish, Scots, Welsh, etc, to show their pride and network.

We need to bring back men's clubs.

There should be a men's only gym like Curves and it needs to be announced up front that if anyone goes after it Curves will be attacked immediately.

If someone feels guns should be outlawed, they also must agree that all fattening foods should be monitored by law and no car should be produced that can drive over the speed limit and tobacco should be outlawed as well as anything else that kills. These people do not believe in freedom. I also wonder what they feel should be done with overpopulated animal populations and for farmers that need side-arms for protection from snakes and other animals?

Capitol punishment is murder, period.

Telling a child that if they sin they will go to hell is child abuse.

It is not the state's place to tell someone who owns a store or restaurant that they cannot let people smoke or drink on their private property. If you don't like it, don't shop/eat there. If it hurts their business, they will stop allowing it, but allowing it is their constitutional right. That is their property. Life is not about you and what you like.
Freedom means being free to be around others who express their freedoms as well. The freedom to be offended or go somewhere else.

American and European farm subsidies should be abolished because they do nothing more than perpetuate inefficient farming practices and shut out cheaper products produced elsewhere.

Corporate welfare should be abolished. If a corporation wants money from a government, the funds should be in exchange for a stake in the corporation, just like the real world.

People should be encouraged or discouraged from having children in accordance to their degree of natural resistance to common diseases.

Unpaid overtime is slavery.

Steam powered vehicles - direct-drive and steam-electric hybrids - are viable transportation options for the future. Many governments suppress them because they can run well on various untaxed fuels.

Nuclear power creates some of the most dangerous industrial waste known. Anyone that misrepresents it as clean should volunteer to keep some high-level radioactive waste in their own homes and find out for themselves just how unclean it can be.

Global warming from carbon dioxide is real and we should take measures to combat it. Many people who dismiss it do so because they have connections to the fossil fuel industry.

Action taken to combat global warming should be seen as an insurance policy for the planet. Even if we do not collect on the insurance, it would be money well spent because we would be developing renewable energy technologies that we would still be using when all the fossil fuels run out.

That counts more as a popular opinion--wrong thread!

I don't hold any unpopular opinions. :angel:

I dont disagree with cannibalism.

I would prefer to kill a (bad) human than a nice animal.

I prefer 2 min noodles to a steak.

i enjoy stress and drama and think that all relationships should have a time limit of 12 months to keep things interesting.

If you marry/select a life-partner in the ceremony of your choice, you are committing to a lifetime partnership. All your assets should be merged and shared, your voice and your input should be equal. There should be no secrets. If you find you've made a mistake later on, fine, dissolve the partnership, split the assets, but preparing for that moment with prenups/separate bank accounts etc before you even make the commitment is proof that the commitment isn't heartfelt.

Graffiti is art.

Hybrids pollute much more from production to end than an equivalent gasoline-only vehicle.

Religion is the easy way out of asking difficult questions and being confronted by complicated issues.

Consumer culture is an addiction and a destructive disease.

We are afraid only because the news tells us to be.

We would be experiencing population growth if 48,589,993 abortions had not been performed since 1973.

Radar has a sense of humor.

Your neighborhood doesn't have an Ancient Order of Hibernians?

I agree. The EU currently pays farmers millions to NOT produce food. The Common Agricultural Policy needs revising.

Affirmative action levels the playing field, it does not give minorities an edge.

people are too quick to take what authorities say as the truth and not question other motives.

europe and america desperately need people power (protests, marches etc.) to demonstrate a world-wide display of displeasure at the way things are being handled.

That is why someone who had half my GPA, with no community service or student government involvement received a scholarship to Yale instead of me? Level playing field?
Not even close.
You should have heard the distain the woman had when she told me about it, something she was not supposed to do.
At my office if someone was promoted with less education, less experience and less training they received how much respect? I bet you can guess.
It harms the minorities it does not help them.
It furthers the idea that they cannot do it on their own.
The club that I was involved in in college that is, predominantly, about helping blacks in school and after they get out of school feels this way as well. Affirmative action is harmful and degrading.

In admissions, affirmative action was really "improve the predictive validity of GPA, SAT, and other scoring systems used in the admissions process". The idea was not that colleges needed to correct racial percentages (although it was noted to be a positive side affect), but that the standardized testing methods used prior to college, when viewed statistically, held a bias that created errors and did not correctly predict university performance for certain populations of students. Your GPA and SAT scores predict how well you will do at a university and the concept is that, statistically, someone from a specific population set will perform better than you in equal classes despite having the exact same GPA and SAT score thanks to those predictive errors. The awarding of scholarships followed the same logic.

Is there evidence to support this is true? Well...

The study could easily be done, so there might be. Students that were enrolled under affirmative action test score correction had to take the same courses in college that their classmates did. If affirmative action at universities was truly flawed, then graduation and dropout rates should be very telling.

Am I too late?

Marriage should not exist. The government should be in the business of enforcing contract law, not what people do in their bedrooms or with whom they choose to affiliate.

There is no god and man should stop deluding himself.

No amount of nurture can make up for a lousy nature.

Interstellar space travel will never be accomplished by live, grown human beings.

We should all sign up here. [vhemt.org]

We should re-introduce wolves into urban environments. :elkgrin:

Affirmative action is racism, and it's worse than the racism it was created to make up for. It harms those it was intended to help, and it perpetuates racism and even attempts to legitimize it by giving it a government sanction.

All who support affirmative action are white supremacists.

They believe minorities aren't as intelligent, strong, or as good as white people and they can't make it on the same measured performance and merits as white people.

Damn those black white supremacists.

Tea is better than coffee

Strange, but true.

One's opinion on non work matters should be stifled in corporate America because it may offend someone. In addition to the challenges associated with performing the tasks of the position you hold, you must always speak and think through a filter that completely sanitizes every idea and action so as not to actually express a true belief of society, current events and politics.

Once someone becomes very good at this process they seem uninteresting and robotic. They are perceived as an appliance of the company and not a human.

After you leave your company owned working environment you are then free to drink Victory gin and express some emotion. You may then also imagine what it's like to be free.

Not just supremacists but supremacists of the worst variety: racists who have convinced themselves and others that they are not racists. This enables their racist behaviour to perpetuate and propogate under the guise of compassion.

To me, this is much more damaging than unrepentant and flagrant racism because in this case, the victim is participating in his own discrimination.

In addition, affirmative action takes the focus off the source of the problem and therefore, removes the pressure to solve it at its source by addressing the consequences of the root problem instead of the source of the root problem. This is not unlike the doctor opting to treat a disease rather than innoculate you for it.

Its time to stop treating the symptoms and cure the disease. If the medical community thought like this we'd all be catching smallpox.

I also hold this unpopular opinion ;)

me too.

coffee houses are pretentious and smell bad.

"life" didn't begin at birth and doesn't end with death.

Current funeral practices are ridiculous. Societal norms emotionally blackmail people into spending way too much money and being environmentally wasteful. This is not ancient Egypt. Even if you believe there is a spirit to live on, you know it doesn't need an embalmed corpse and it certainly doesn't need a mahogany casket with crown-jewel handles. But even if you admit that, society makes you feel bad if you don't provide it.

totally agree. we're dealing with this right now (father in law funeral tomorrow) and the costs and waste involved are outrageous! you dont even get time to grieve with all the notifications of death, registering, clearing a home etc.
its a despicable practice.

Without civil rights laws and programs like affirmative action, those who control wealth and power (white males) would only share wealth and power with those like themselves (white males).

Those who want to repress minorities by doing away with affirmative action are the worst kind of racists. They refuse to acknowledge the racism in our country.

+ Race is an artificial construct. The apparent distinctions between races are due to genetic isolation and large scale inbreeding of a limited population. The factors used to draw distinctions between races are artificial.

+ At a distance, it's difficult to distinguish between the smell of coffee and the smell of a skunk.

HLJ, you've been drinking at Starf*cks again, eh?

I am a god. And not one of the minor ones. I'm Wotan, Optimus Maxiumus, Zeus, Lemmy, and Harvey Keitel all rolled into one god.

I'm also the world's greatest lover. A title I stole from Gene Wilder during a game of no-limit beer cricket.

We're called "The Aristocrats":p

"The Aristocrats" joke is the worst joke in the world.

tom cruise beats himself off to pictures of himself in magazines.

some people in this world are beyond help and there needs to be an accurate way to determine this so they can be erradicated

It is on my letter of intent in my will that no funeral home is to get a red cent when I die. I am to be cremated by the county and my wake is to be held at a pub, restaurant or home.
Funeral homes are corrupt and my family is not to be ripped-off because I died and my husk needs to be disposed of.
I do not want religion to be part of it, but they may have it as long as the pastor, preacher, etc, does not ask or hint at a "donation" or payment for their participation and my ashes are not to be prayed over.

If I don't want to treat other minorities like they are children and stupid, that they cannot achieve the same things as others on their own and must have things given to them instead. If I want to show that they are the same as I and deserve the dignity that comes with being treated the same as I makes me a bigot... fine, I prefer that to whatever you would call someone who treats them like they are less.
Name it what you will, but that is not what I would ever want to be.
In my world, those are the true bigots and racists. Sugar-coat an insult and it is still an insult.

I agree with the funeral thing. I really don't care what happens to me when I die, they can throw me out in the woods for the birds if they want too. I'll be dead, why would I care. Don't want to put that kind of stress on my family when I did.

I think wedding rings are a rip off too.

I think the reason AA is justified is because there is an assumption that minorities are already at a disadvantage and by giving them an advantage in this regard, they are evening out the playing field. I think this is a horrible way of fixing the problem and will only make it worse, we have to go to the source of the problem if we want to fix it.

They are if you pay more than the $30. wholesale that they cost.

+ If you don't eat, you will die. If you eat, you will live. Therefore, any food, provided it isn't poisoned and hasn't gone bad, is good for you.

I don't believe that everyone has the right to freedom of speech.
If you want to tell people that whites are better than anyone else, that gays are an abomination, that women belong in the home, that 6 million jews were not killed in concentration camps or any other nonsense like that, you should have your mouth welded shut and your hands cut off.

I don't know so much about the ring; jewelry usually appreciates in value, and it's something you keep.

Big fancy shmancy show off weddings are totally stupid. 25 grand: the food is eaten, the flowers die, the booze wears off, and 10 years later you're divorced anyway. Hopefully they'll have some decent jewelry to sell. :p

Yes, your ass looks big in that.

i think clone user id's are a freaking riot if they're used responsibly.

PS, i've changed the tipjar link to go directly to lumberjim's offshore account. please give if you can.

Not a chance. I hate cities.

Not feeling guilty about having been born white is not racism.

The two "not"s cancel, leaving:
"Feeling guilty about having been born white is racism."

Interesting. And true

Having pride in the abundance/lack of melanin in your skin is as stupid and pointless as having pride in being blond, having brown eyes, the [in]ability to curl your tongue, or any other genetic trait.

Curling the tongue is a major skill. :p

That's not an unpopular opinion. ;)

It isn't stupid when everyone else is doing it... :haha:

I have never understood why anyone would feel pride in their skin colour....pride in their culture, pride in the town they were born in, pride in their ancestry, I can understand.

I can kind of get my head around someone who has been treated with outright prejudice all their life, based solely on the colour of their skin, taking a perverse pride in their colour as a reaction to that. So, I totally get the whole 'black is beautiful' sentiment as a part of the civil rights movement: after all, that was a response to vicious, legally sanctioned racism (Jim Crow). But pride in being white? What are you kicking against?

You've got your scope wrong...the first not is a negation of the subject, the second not is a negation of the object.

If it was a joke, it was almost funny.

It's funny they used to make us go to pep rallies to celebrate school pride as a kid, I never got that. Yay! We're better than the other horrifying public school down the road because our basketball team is better...

I hate Griff...he's an asshole.

:)

Thanks brother, I'm a lot like you.:)

Gentlemen please! This is supposed to be UNpopular opinions, and everyone agrees with what the two of you have said.