F1 Fanatic

I know what you mean, PM. Although thankfully, that level of bonkersness seems to be mainly confined to the United States and isn’t as prevalent in the UK or down under.

And Icthyes, blame the media.

I don’t buy that anymore. They’re only selling what sells. I know there’s not going to be a national boycott until standards are improved, but that’s where I stand on the matter.

I fear in the next few years the world is going to have to deal with larger disasters than the ones that have been faced by Japan. I feel more major cities are going to be wiped out sooner or later.

This is something that’s always intrigued me, but I am not sure whether to believe it or not. Everything seems to happen for a reason, and it’s no mistake that human beings are the most evolved species on Earth. I sometimes wonder if it was a given that the Earth was going to be like this, with everything as it is and humans ‘destroying’ the planet. I find it hard to believe anything wasn’t meant to happen, actually – and I don’t think anyone can definitively say that Earth wasn’t designed to cope with human evolution, otherwise we’d have never been granted such intelligence. My point is, was Earth designed (for lack of a better word, sorry) with the tendency to cause disasters as a way of keeping the population down? I know it’s not very nice, but it is a possibility given how clever the world actually is. Every living creature is born with a limited life-span for very good reason, so why couldn’t this be true as well?

(I don’t want to offend anyone, I just wasn’t going to start a new thread for this. I am not even saying this something I believe in myself, but it is an interesting topic)

The people of Japan are still very much in my thoughts. Stay strong.

@damonsmedley

No offence (and apologies to everyone for going off-topic, but…) but a few things in that logic are just backwards. It’s always tempting to seek ‘reasons’ behind awful events, but the only reason for earthquakes is that the Earth is a ball of molten lava covered with a very thin crust of of floating continents. The idea that natural disasters are somehow ‘designed’ to keep human populations in check doesn’t stand up to the very plain reality that as the Earth has aged and cooled over the past hundreds of millions of years, it has steadily gotten geologically more stable, that is, has fewer earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc., while human populations have grown. Japan, unfortunately, sits at the intersection of four tectonic plates that constantly bump up against one another. We simply live on a planet that is still tectonically active. At least modern technologies go some ways to counteract even the worst disasters – if Japan wasn’t the advanced country that it is, the damage would certainly be even worse, as impossible as that is to imagine given what we’re seeing.

It appears that there really is a God.

That infamous video was created by a YouTube user named “tamtampamela”. Apparently, she’s a member of several forums that parody organised religion. It’s looking like “LaughAlone.TV”, who were hosting the original video, were trying to work some kind of deal with YouTube on her behalf. They seemed to think that she would be The Next Big Thing in internet subculture, and they were trying to promote her videos for her. However, with the backlash from the video, she has deleted her account, and YouTube have cancelled the deal. She won’t be finding fame any time soon.

tamtampamela is reportedly now in hiding after her contact details were posted on several internet forums and she started receiving death threats. I have no sympathy for her.

Freedom of Speech gives you the right to say anything you want without being censored. It does NOT protect you from suffering the consequences from any incredibly moronic things that you say.

I’m with PM. No sympathy whatsoever, regardless of whether it was a genuine rant or a poorly thought out joke.