I don't watch Glenn Beck or regularly check on Fox News, but maybe you should give it a try before you give up on your friend?
From my experience reading your posts on the "Is Fox News lying to its viewers?" thread, your views are completely distorted as to the levels of "untruth" in Fox. You need to give the network more of a try and to be more tolerant towards others' beliefs. There are many Fox viewers so it makes sense at least to maintain a level of respect for the network. Many of the people on this boards seem to believe Fox is extremist and cannot concede a network with such great viewership is in the mainstream.
And I wouldn't be too unsettled by your friend calling Obama a pretentious prick. People bash politicians regularly and this is far from the worse I've heard. You can't expect everyone to bask in his glory and there are many worse things that are being said about him.
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And, in the context of Nintendo's current financial position, Pokemon is more important to Nintendo than ever. The entire company is on the fritz and once Nintendo's hardware sales die out, the only assets Nintendo will possess are its rights to series such as Pokemon and Mario.
http://pokebeach.com/2014/06/e3-pokemon-omega-ruby-alpha-sapphire-release-dates
Who is looking forward to this new Pokemon title? It has been over 10 years since the release of these title. Gosh, the remakes of Pokemon R/B/Y came out this generation. If GameFreak redoes the entire generation, it'd have to make a remake of a remake. Time really flies.
And if you actually understand the definition of "misogyny", the term has been grossly misused over the past couple decades. It's semantics, I know, but the the conventional definition of "misogyny" as defined by Merrian Webster is the "hatred of women". In more modern dictionary definitions, the linguists understand the term has been thrown around more lightly and have added "dislike" or "mistrust" to the entries. Still, I cringe whenever women simply use "misogyny" to refer to any "prejudice against women".
For example, some feminists would label a man who frequently tells sexist jokes but who has a wife a "misogynist". He disrespects women but he doesn't hate them. Now this man is compared to a serial killer Rodger who is also a "misogynist". Can you see the absurdity of the analogy? It's not fair to "misogynists" and it's not even fair to Rodger in a way because they're not guilty of the same things in the same way or to the same degree.
Of course, you could claim all Rodger media were staged like you had earlier. In this case, you invalidate your own argument that Rodger was a misogynist since everything is fabricated and we had no idea what is going on in his head. Because of these inconsistencies, I'm getting the vibe that you just like to argue a point for the sake of arguing a point so I will not invest any further into the discussion. From the tone of my prior post, you can tell I have grown weary and frustrated so this is my last post on this thread and I will be signing out.
P.S. For the record, I agree that Rodger had misogynistic tendencies; but, at the same time, it is not fair (to both men and Rodger) for feminists to use him as a poster child for misogyny due to his mental illness. Furthermore, Rodger's "misogyny" is unrelatable to the experience of most other typical misogynists, and so is not entirely appropriate for use in a campaign.
Seriously, it is sickening how feminists take every opportunity to make everything about themselves and try to reduce individuals to a one dimensional character. There is so much more to Rodger than misogyny. He was a kid who struggled to talk to people, who could not take social cues, who was bullied, who had serious social anxiety to the point of going to 3 different high schools, who took walks in the park alone because he had no one to talk to... And let's not forget that Rodger also hated men who had sex and was racist.
Rodger hardly interacted with women because of his insecurities and for the life of me could not understand how they manage to frame themselves as "victims". He wasn't a person who sexually harassed them as some women have compared him to sexual assaulters or rapists. He just never put much effort and blamed them for not interacting with him. Rodgers real victims were mostly those around who lived around him. Mostly men who were unfortunate enough to admit they had lost their virginity. Out of Rodger's murder victims, 4 were men and only 2 were women. 3 were his roommates.
I don't even think Rodger has much to his misogynistic message outside "women should have sex and fawn over me", which hardly all misogynists could relate to. Outside his constant obsession with having sex, he doesn't have much misogyny about him compared to actual misogynists with more multifaceted views about women.
And you have to give Rodger a slight pass over this (in terms of misogyny) because he was mentally ill, seeing a psychiatrist since he was 8, with other absurd viewpoints. This was a man who expected everything to be handed to him in the world so much that he believed he was destined to win the lottery. Naturally, Rodger would want to be handed sex as well. I'm not sure Rodger has the mental capacity or clarity to use him to claim as a figure of misogyny.
That feminists would use a seriously mentally ill person as their biggest figure head of misogyny is such a low blow and characterizes a lot of what is wrong with feminism.
Or if the manifesto was contrived to cast himself in a positive light, then you are clearly giving him too much credit as Rodger does not possess the EQ to pull such manipulation off with all the off putting things he says.
Here's the link:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/225960813/Elliot-Rodger-Santa-Barbara-mass-shooting-suspect-My-Twisted-World-manifesto
I spent a couple hours reading this. I actually found many of his experiences quite relatable to my own with a bunch of key differences such as I never had thoughts of mass murder or extreme jealousy toward others (esp. not because they slept with attractive women). The manifesto is so good that I think most of it can be published or turned into a movie. The ending gets increasingly sadistic and probably wouldn't appeal to the mass market.
I'm sure most of us aren't going to read his manifesto; though, I think it was an excellent read and would highly recommend it. Out of respect for the individuals who do, I will discuss what I've discerned through it in spoiler tags.
Rodger's obsession with having sex with women consumed him. He would have crying fits over other people talking about how they lost their virginity at a young age. Then he would throw insults and act very bitterly toward these individuals. Rodger could not stand to be around couples. He would despise attractive women with boyfriends to the point where he would be in college and drop most of his courses just because there were attractive women in the class with boyfriends or popular guys hitting on popular girls or couples.
Rodger actually was a fairly amiable person and had an active social life. He was not a loner; but, his friends shunned him during his early 20's for the disturbing things he said about torturing and punishing attractive women and the men who had sex with them. His best friend James was supportive of him his whole life; but, had enough of him one day after he cursed off an attractive couple at a Panda Express and stormed out the restaurant. After, he told his friend how he wanted to kill the people.
He had two other friends he hung out with often as well: Phillip and Addison. Rodger's relationship with Addison is particularly intriguing because the two had a frenemy relationship. Addison supposed broke into the group of "popular" kids in his high school and Rodger became very hostile toward him for it. Addison even deleted Rodger on Facebook. Still, they hung out and on their last time hanging out together, after they had somewhat reconciled, Addison sensed something might be wrong and warned Rodger not to do anything stupid.
The climax/turning point of the story is the night when Rodger crashes a party, gets wasted, and could not endure the couples there. He walks outside to be alone and he sees a group of attractive guys and girls having fun on a ledge and the thought of them having sex enraged him in his drunken stupor. First, he confronts the kids. After some back and forth, he decides he needs to push the kids off the ledge and he targets the girls. He stumbles and fails miserably and, instead, the guys beat him up and throw Rodger off the ledge.
The ledge was ~10 ft and Rodger breaks a leg. After, he realizes that the gold chain his grandmother gave him that he was wearing was missing as well as his Armani(?) sunglasses. He limps back to the party house to demand his possessions. The kids there mock him and call him names and then beat him to a bloody pulp until some onlookers on the street intervened and force them to stop. That was probably the turning point that drove him to the "Day of Retribution".
There were other interesting things in the manifesto as well. It was just such a compelling story. Rodger's relationship with his mother and stepmother, his obsession over the lottery thinking it was his only redemption, and his relationship with outgoing kid Max Bonon that was nice to him were other aspects of note.
By definition, "interesting" is unusual and sociopathy is a characteristic of distinction. While we may not want to glorify sociopathic tendencies, this does not make sociopaths equally interesting as the average non-sociopathic individual. Certainly if there were nothing of interest of Elliot Rodgers, media outlets would not publish so many articles about him.
In regards to "interestingness", the importance is that the explanation Rodger gave feels legitimate to him and not you of I. (If Rodger did not feel strongly about it and simply wanted to shoot people for the hell of it, he would not compel himself to write a 100+ page long manifesto.) It is how Rodger came to this conclusion as well as the conclusion itself that is "fascinating".
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/25/justice/california-shooting-revelations/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
This Elliot Rodger is such a fascinating person. Such a fascinating, deluded, comical, sad, sad product of the Western culture. What do you think?
My reasoning comes down to the fact that Hot Dog on a Stick's menu is comically limited to largely corndogs, which are just sausages dipped in batter. They could make the best corn dogs in the world and I would characterize their food as "horrible".
While the United States is too large to serve as a haven for shady dealings, I would describe Reaganomics as putting us ahead of the European Union as the preeminent large, developed market for investing. Hence, why the United States has a higher GDP/PPP per capita and is still projected to grow faster in the long term. (The other reason could be because of population growth.) And, while you make a valid point that there are alternatives to US investment, there is significant reason to invest in a large, developed market like the United States. Hollywood, Apple, etc. do not place such great emphasis on the US for no reason.
Where the US lags in primary education, the United States continues to have leading secondary institutions. Refer to THES which measures university citation in journals, etc. Court, political, and prison systems have lesser impact on our livelihoods and are hardly "measurable" in quality. US infrastructure is admittedly aging, however.
This is a exaggerated viewpoint of several year old news.
The US dollar has largely recovered in the past couple years due to weakness in all global currencies. Relatively to other currencies, the USD is as strong as it was 10 years ago. Relative to commodities, everyone is in the crapper.