Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

ABP'd. Still some good potential for discussion in that thread.

Its the same thread, dude.

Off the subject of merged topics, I tend to agree with what BTG said on the last page. Sure, some games out there glorify sex and violence, but so do movies. Are we going to be banning Hollywood?

Off the subject of merged topics, I tend to agree with what BTG said on the last page. Sure, some games out there glorify sex and violence, but so do movies. Are we going to be banning Hollywood?

Seriously, what one thing has this guy been successful at other than getting a degree in law?

That's success?

Everyone needs sex to survive! Everyone also needs violence to survive!

That is one of the stupidest things I ever read. No offense.

Well, the first part is true, at least--our species needs sex as our means of reproduction for the species to continue its survival. Though I'm pretty sure COLA was writing that very much with tongue-in-cheek.

Oh yeah, forgot about the reproduction thing... But I can't see how we need violence to survive.

We need Violence. If we don't have violence, than anyone, anywhere, can do anything they want because noone will be there to exact violence or revenge upon them. Without violence, I can go and steal your Girlfriend, and you can't do anything about it because violence is outlawed, or you never saw violence at all. Because of that, you can't come over here and beat my head in or anything that would send me a message "Hey, don't touch my chick."
Without violence, we loose one of our most primal instincts. Humans are naturally violent. When someone does something we don't like, our basic instinct is to do something they don't like back to them. Of course, there are people that do somehow bypass this instinct, and are naturally nice, even when hurt. People do need violence, because it teaches them how not to act when someone does something bad to them. Without violence, people like Jack Thompson or Osama Bin Laden wouldn't exist. It would be a very boring world, but at least people wouldn't die of bullet wounds or anything...Right?

As much as I loathe Jack Thompson, I don't want him to go away. If he does, someone will inevitably pop up to fill the vacuum—and, unlike Thompson, they may be smart.

He never puts up good and truthful arguements, and he never looks up the video game he complains about. All he does is lie to people who never play video games and they naturally assume that his claims are correct. He also uses insults a lot. One Judge thought he was pushing the limit of how a lawyer should act in the Court. Books and movies should be considered worse because they supply real and understandable reasons for the violence .

Heck, he (she?) might show up exactly because Jack Thompson is so laughably incompetent.

Sometimes you just can't win.

- Kef

Another new thing:

He's being counter-sued by those people, not Rockstar, who make GTA games, for public nuisance. Boo-ya!

He's sued Midway for the new Mortal Kombat for puttng him in the game. No, he is not in the game. There is a create a person option, and there are pictures online of "him" that people created.

No, he just sent a cease-and-desist letter. Naturally, Midway ignored it.

- Kef

Mirror neurons are cells located in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain relevant to the planning, selection, and execution of actions. In the ventral sector of the premotor cortex, there are cells that fire in relation to specific goal-related motor acts, such as grasping, holding, and bringing to the mouth. Surprisingly, a subset of these cells--what we call mirror neurons--also fire when we observe somebody else performing the same action. The behavior of these cells seems to suggest that the observer is looking at his or her own actions reflected in a mirror while watching somebody else's actions. My group has shown, in several studies, that human mirror neuron areas are also critical to imitation. There is evidence that the activation of this neural system is fairly automatic, thus suggesting that it may bypass conscious mediation. Moreover, mirror neurons also code the intention associated with the observed actions, even though there is not a one-to-one mapping between actions and intentions. (I can grasp a cup because I want to drink or because I want to put it in the dishwasher.) This suggests that the system can indeed code sequences of action (that is, what happens after I grasp the cup), even though only one action in the sequence has been observed.

Some years ago, when we still were a very small group of neuroscientists studying mirror neurons and just starting to investigate the role of mirror neurons in intention understanding, we discussed the possibility of super-mirror neurons. After all, if you have such a powerful neural system in your brain, you also want to have some control or modulatory neural mechanisms. We now have preliminary evidence suggesting that some prefrontal areas have super mirrors.

I think super mirrors come in at least two flavors. One is inhibition of overt mirroring and the other--the one that might explain why we imitate violent behavior, which requires a fairly complex sequence of motor acts--is mirroring of sequences of motor actions. Super-mirror mechanisms may provide a fairly detailed explanation for imitative violence that arises after exposure to media violence.

(as I have no idea where Mr. Thompson studied),