Double edged sword, both sides are firmly gripping on to their beliefs. I can't speak for the other side, but I am willing to change my views IF the other side ceases to actively ridicule or insult me and those opposed, and IF the other said also approached the subject with an open mind and is willing to change their views if one makes more sense than the other. Else, we all should just agree to disagree and move on.

Me, I try not to grip my sword, as you say, too hard but I do hold it firmly against the world. But when it comes to a meeting of two parties, myself included, personally I try a slow and steady approach to appease the other first. Usually only then, once they open up and reciprocate, I go for it and take them on their turf. It's the basics of how *I* handle the situation. Things can get out of hand, true, but you have be level headed, ease your way to the other's position and try to conclude amicably.

It's an estimate given by someone who put electrodes on my skull and had me read things in front of an eye tracker. I don't know how accurate it is, and I don't have a measured retention rate. However, regardless of specificity, I am a proficient reader.

It's really impressive how you were able to type all of this on a keyboard so saturated with your own drool.

I approach every subject with an open mind. Open-mindedness means you prize new information, even if it contradicts your beliefs. It doesn't mean playing softball with an unread imbecile.

You like cops because their are heros and brave mans. Good for you. Now go back to your happy meal so the grown-ups can talk.

Wait, you want him posting here so he won't spread that hate elsewhere, remember? But, seriously, wrt your rapid reading and compression, is that a natural skill, a technique you've learned and perfected, or some combination of the two? Do you have any advice for those that want to improve their reading speed?

By the way, SF_GoldG_01, it's stupid obvious that some form of police force is necessary. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't have one, and hopefully you aren't such an illiterate nonce that your strawman here was accidental. Note, however, that saying that some level of policing is essential is very different from saying that our current police force is effective, composed of responsible, capable people, or even that the police we have today are more effective than having none at all (all of which is demonstrably false for certain classes, most notably poor blacks throughout the United States).

There are many occupations more dangerous than policing.

For perspective, 100 American LEOs died while performing their duty in 2013. Out of 900,000 officers, that gives a fatality rate of just 11.1 in 100,000 - or 0.011%. Most of those deaths are due to automobile accidents. According to the CDC, the age-adjusted mortality rate for white male Americans is 869.3 in 100,000, which means an average police officer is about 78 times more likely to die of natural causes than from doing his so-called "dangerous" job.

Loggers are 12 times more likely to be smoked by a falling tree than a cop by a criminal, and they make half as much, and lumber has done a lot more to improve your life than any cop ever has. Fishermen? 10 times. Airline pilots? 5 times. None of these people volunteered to risk their lives to earn a living, they volunteered to cut down trees, find you food, and safely transport you. Police officers don't deserve any more respect than these folks.

Yes, but just how many of those loggers were under-educated? Er, nevermind. Sorry, couldn't help myself (obviously).

This is a great approach, one that I will try adopting because it sounds like a reasonable way to approach anything.



Another unprovoked, personal insult. How does this help me become "educated" or take you serious on any level. You've become a troll.



Being open minded also infers considering the possibility that held views can become invalidated, and may require modification. You are close minded when it comes to what the issue is.



Further unprovoked insults, but I will not accomodate you by retorting in a likewise fashion. I don't like cops because I have some naive view of them as heroes. I respect cops because I respect authority and recognize the need for cooperation with authority. I also recognize that cops are human beings and imperfect, and have sympathy for them because they are constantly under attack from people who discriminate against them for the same reasons you do, people who are always trying to provoke them into confrontations, rejoice when one of their own are killed or injured, always seek new ways to undermine them, go out of their way to take any incident and pin it on any man or woman in uniform, and many other actions that they are victims of and simple accept it as the reality of growingly ungrateful society that is dominated by a persistant mob mentality.

First, sorry, this will be short as I'm on the phone.

Gold, you are really missing it. Anything relatively rational you post will be ignored and/or twisted. The mistakes you make in your posts will likely be thrown back at you, and poorly worded portions such as respect and cooperation with authority seized upon. Jon has a particular way he deals with those he classifies such as us.

It is sad because he has so many talents and gifts. I don't know if he believes that there are so many things I admire and respect about him but my hope that personal issues can be resolved is consistently fading.

Now I really have to get back to spreading hate on Facebook and then sleep.

It is the fact that he has so many talents and gifts that I continue, maybe because I assign more value to him than I should.



Perhaps my perspective is what makes me see things somewhat differently, I live in a country where the police force is absolutely ineffective for all but corrupt government officials, and I assume that the number of countries with similiar or worse conditions is far larger than countries with better police forces than the US currently has. I doubt US police forces rank low on a global scale, and the current police force can be improved to meet higher expectations.



Line of Duty Deaths of 2013: 105

Bomb / GunFire / Accidental GunFire / Stabbed / Pursuit / Assault: 44
Aircraft / Automobile / Motorcycle / Struck by Vehicle Accident: 39

9/11 related illness : 1
Drowned : 2
Duty related illness : 1
Electrocuted : 1
Fall : 4
Fire : 1
Heart attack : 10
Training accident : 2
I decided to simplify the list on odmp, to contrast vehicle accidents versus violent causes and pursuit accidents, other causes are in their own categories. Officers are more likely to die from violent causes or vehicular accidents (and vehicle accidents are obviously due to the fact that a person who spends far more time driving or patrolling on foot is far more likely to get into an accident than your average person who only commutes to his/her job or shopping centers, etc). Also, we are only considering officer who died in 2013, we also need to consider officers who were wounded, but I can't find a good site that can give me categorized results of how many officers were wounded by similiar categories.

It is also false to assume that anyone going into those lines of work have no notion of the risks and dangers involved in them, so they are in effect volunteering to risk their lives, and while police officers may not deserve more respect than any of those people, they certainly don't deserve any less respect.
Signing off for the night, good night everyone.

Please stop suggesting that police have authority. They're an instrument wielded by people who have actual authority.

Wow, didn't see that one coming.

Well, let's not forget that you spent 20 years as an instrument wielded by people with actual authority.

a little hint

What the **** are we all still arguing about?

700 words is fast, but certainly not off the spectrum. The average professor reads ~600 wpm, and I read around 500-600wpm depending on the subject. I certainly don't read difficult textbooks that fast, but novels and light nonfiction, it's absolutely possible. As a benchmark, it took about ~1hr 20min to read Animal Farm at my reading speed. Of course, it's very hard to maintain a fast reading speed for much longer than that.

SF_Gold must be of the mentality that "if I can't do it, surely no one else can". He's probably also a believer of the foolish idea that reading isn't something that gets better with practice and that there are no techniques to reading faster with more retention...

Read "How to Read A Book" by M.J. Adler, and learn how to control your mind and set up the dominoes so you can read for 3-4 hours with no consequences. There also quite a few resources on reading more quickly.

In my experience, it's not hard to speed read, it's hard to speed read and not get distracted.

One last suggestion, spend less time on the internet. Clicking around on the internet makes us impatient, easily distracted babies. Reading well involved deep, near-meditative focus on one thing, which is not easy to fall into.

It's your responsibility to educate yourself, not mine. Seriously, is there even one single thing in this world that you don't believe you're automatically entitled to?


implies


consideration of


closed-minded

I've given you and your opinion every careful consideration to which they are entitled.

accommodate

"I respect cops because they told me to."

"People dislike them because they're violent psychopaths, so I feel sorry for them."

actions of which they are victims.

simply

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

persistent

"Compared to black, dark grey is basically white."

"I assume American police are great because I have never been there and I am stupid."


similar

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any large country, possibly even surpassing North Korea. Despite having less than 5% of the world's population, the United States houses 25% of the world's prisoners. Much of this incarceration rate is caused by police actions undertaken for personal profit; this includes for-profit prosecution, the operation of for-profit prisons by small constabularies, for-profit debtors' prisons, police harassment for the extraction of rents, the illegal seizure of money and civilian equipment for police use, and the entrapment and radicalization of vulnerable peoples for personal prestige and to justify budget growth. This is all in addition to an across-the-board escalation of violence due to police militarization and extremism in the wakes of the Wars on Drugs and Terror. The police culture in America is irreparably defective. You can't improve the current police force to meet higher expectations because the current police force is 20% violent lunacy and 80% apathetic about it. The only answer is to purge the whole system.

Ahahahaha, you just activated my trap card.

Okay, 44 police officers died due to homicide in 2013. That's 4.9 per 100,000.

According to the CDC, the age-adjusted rate of mortality by homicide is 6 per 100,000 among the general public. Police officers are actually LESS likely to die due to crime than an average person.

owned

Jon`C acts like a dick most of the time, so therefore he is wrong.

Imagine if Gold applied that rationale to police.

I think the problem with John's final point is that there really is no such thing as an "average person" in this case. The average person would probably be much less likely to find themselves in homicidal situations than cops but there is a small minority (oh, no pun intended!) population that exists in a violent environment and skew the average.

You can take this Ferguson case as an example. Had Brown's assault been more successful it's reasonable to assume that Officer Wilson might have been murdered. He wasn't, of course, and justifiably killed a violent criminal. And I'm assuming your number of average people include those killed during the commission of violent crime.

I always thought the average person was just the means of all quantifiable parameters.. but hey

Of course I understand that, I just think that in this case comparing to the societal average is flawed. The point is still a valid one, however, but the underlying flaws reduce the level of ownage.

There may be flaws; why not bring up the statistics he cited and analyze it from that angle? Jabbing blindly at his argument will probably not help..

I don't think that was "blindly" but I'm on my phone. There are some more specific aspects I intend to research and comment on later. We'll see how that goes.

You know, you can just say black people.

It also includes infants. Also from CDC: for ages 25-44 the overall rate of death by homicide is 8.1.

Unfortunately they don't have a table for white males from 25-44 by cause of death, so we can't determine the independent effect of policework on mortality by homicide. What we can say about it is:

- If the value is greater than the rate for LEOs, then you're actually safer from crime as a police officer and they don't deserve the hero worship they're automatically given today.

- If the value is less than the rate for LEOs, then the "minority population that exists in a violent environment" really does skew the average, in which case there exists an underclass of citizen which is not being protected by the police, and they don't deserve the hero worship they're automatically given today.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle.

For such an efficient reader you obviously haven't read this thread and figured out that I never once said Jon's reading speed sounded fake, infact I don't believe anyone has in this thread. Echoman was the person who asked Jon how he arrived at this number. Stop assuming.

Anyhow, I was going to respond to Jon's now more reasonable points, but since today is a monday and I have little free time during the week, I'll just leave it at one of Jon's final comments:

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

I have nothing to gain from that section of the thread

This whole thread was worthwhile just because we got to see Gold respond to a dick joke like it was genuine advice.

dicks dicks dicks dicks dicks

Wow.

I can't wait to see this never happen.

HAHAHA



http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/?page=full
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8755470

Oh look, it's SF_GoldG_01 making an excuse for being lazy.

Let's be real here: The reason you're such a troll is that you're a ****ing coward. You don't have the courage of your convictions. (Perversely, that lack of courage is the only defensible thing about the way you think.) You recognize on some level that nothing you believe stands up to scrutiny. And so the only avenue left to you is to pull a temporary disappearing act after making some vague gestures in the direction of disputing the facts that put the lie to your entire worldview.

Get banned again, as quickly as possible.

I so want to see a movie where Sean Penn plays a Southern lawyer named Michael MacFarlane, in which the entire plot is a buildup to a massive courtroom smack-down of the village bigot.

While you're waiting for that one, I recommend checking out A Few Good Men. Similar themes, and Wookie probably still thinks Jack Nicholson is the good guy.

He.... isn't?

YOU NEED ME ON THAT WALL

Without him on that wall, Cuba would mount a successful invasion of the United States.

I had fully intended to get to this last night when I posted yesterday but I was too tired an apathetic when I got home and now that a day has passed I've lost interest. About all I was going to research much into dealt with firearm statistics. What I was thinking about was along the lines that even though law enforcement could be considered a hazardous profession, the training, fact that they're armed, along with some other things seem to me would be factors that reduce the likelihood of them being killed. Like I said, I have lost interest.

I'm tired. When I get stressed I get tired. Terrible slow my metabolism down tired. I don't even have any real reason to feel stressed now but I do. Actually, I know what it is. It's when I have things to do that are not finished. Of course there are holiday items going on now, haven't done any shopping. Got my Jeep up and running in good order now it appears I have a brake issue going on in my truck so I pulled that in the garage last night, busted the wheels off it when I got home today. I think it has to do with the parking brakes but we'll see. Got a finance thing in the process which is a positive thing but since it is new to me and I can't see it in black and white yet the mystery part of it is getting to me.

Participating in discussion here used to be a diversion. It's not particularly enjoyable anymore and, even though I just said I feel stressed right now, in so many ways my life is better than it ever has been. This place used to fill a void that no longer exists. It's why, after a very slight learning curve, I don't take any of this personal here anymore. It's why it doesn't bother me when any of you call me the things you should certainly know I'm not. I've never been a janitor, a racist, a homophobe, etc. And, for God's sake, what's wrong with being a janitor? If that's what a guy needs to do to provide for their family, so be it. What some of you claim I am to minorities, you actually are to many hard working people that are busy working to provide for their families.

I've gone off on a tangent here but there is one final point that I'm going to make using some of my experiences as an example. It's not to garner sympathy for myself but illustrate a broader point. First, I'm considered "human trash" by many of you here. Specifically in this thread because I advocate violence against those that hold a different world view. Clearly, that is not what I advocate. I didn't advocate anything. I simply stated that it would not be surprising if someone insulting people the way they do here might get punched in the face if they did it in person. Ironically, I'm the one being insulted because I hold a different view. Certainly not "world view". That's dumb, we all would certainly agree on many principles. Anyway, my point is that you never know what a person is going through when you choose to hurl insults. Because I haven't shared many things on this board doesn't mean I'm living some blissful existence, free from life's hurdles. I never shared when my father died, rather terribly, in the hospital and I had to say good bye over the phone not knowing if he even understood me while my mom had to deal with the drama alone thousands of miles away. More recently I never shared my wife's cancer scare. I haven't come to ask for those famous Massassi vibes for surgery I need to have in a couple weeks. I don't believe I ever shared how heart breaking it is to leave your family for a year not knowing if it will be the last time you will see them and wondering how they will manage with out you either temporarily or permanently.

I share this now not to try to change the way you treat me but to hopefully think to just treat anybody as you would like to be treated. I get it, and can handle it, if you want to treat me like a pos but I see no reason for you to continue tormenting SF_Gold for age old crap. The man has apologized far more profusely than you'll ever get from me and he doesn't deserve your ****. For Christ's sake, did those of you that wanted members unbanned only want them back to troll them into fights? So what if he or I or anyone isn't as God damned smart as anyone else around here? What makes any of you more special than anybody else to feel so justified in the way you treat others?

I could go on but, guess what? I'm going to go read with my son, tuck him in, and then go to bed.

I'm feeling better already.