In this day and age of Twitter-fueled, overnight social justice crusades, I'm sure someone's already beaten you to the punch on that.

My original question was pretty much rhetorical anyway.

I'm not so sure about your second point, though. Way too many people go way out of their way to be offended by anything these days. Just the other night, a bunch of people were ranting all over Twitter about Darius Rucker, a black musician, singing White Christmas at the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in NYC. They took a traditional holiday song about someone wishing for snow on Christmas Day and read all kinds of racial messages into it.

It can get confusing for sure. I mean, when should I get offended over something that's actually offensive when almost everyone is offended at everything? xD

Tired now. Going to bed. Be good, my peeps. <3

Yeah, there's a lot of people out there who seem to think the way to deal with a blackberry thicket is to force people to break of its thorns one by one, the idea being that once all the thorns are gone the plant will somehow go away.

The reality, however, is that you've got to get in and attack it from the roots. Doing so can be painful and take a lot of effort and time, but ultimately it's the only way to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the people who want to get on with that are drowned out by the folks carrying on about how hurtful these damn thorns are and yelling that we simply must do something about those awful things, which means fewer people hear those who have the right idea and those who do are more likely to be tired out from all the running around the other mob has had them doing.

Hopefully some sort of sense can be wrung from that metaphor .

It actually wasn't too bad.

This kind of thinking crosses the line from overly-sensitive to pure stupidity.

Who in their right mind thinks that way?

Im still wondering why 5c3j9r7Productions bothered with such a non issue to lead to where people took it to, i explained earlier its more those companies looking like good corporate citizens they could care less about the underlying issue, its Christmas be nice and friendly and cuddly, they'll happily lose a few dollars to Big W, JB Hi Fi, EB Games/Gamesstop and other specialty stores if it gets them some good PR during Christmas, Wesfarmers stock has been up and down like something i cant explain on this forum, nobody in Australia really cares they'll buy it elsewhere, all ive seen is a link to Kotaku and IGN a crap Murdoch owned piece of trash, oh and our local rag, thats owned by Fairfax and now contains about 10 pages, i havent even seen it on tv yet and as desperate as the Today show and Morning show are to get some road kill news im surprised.

If you asked someone in the street they'd say have you seen the price of fuel, taxes might be going up, we might be paying more for everything, a gate to hell started opening in Canberra and closed because even they didnt want to be there, thats other than Tasmania of course.

That sounds almost like a segue into a stream of Tasmania jokes, especially given the state in which the OP, 5P, resides .

I started a thread about it because it seems to be a fairly popular talking point around the Internet at the moment.

What's this about gates to hell and Tasmania?

Came here to see the news and the topic is just like the trains of GTA SA after I drive them.

NOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOO YES.

Way back in the day, a secret society managed to set up this thing which basically means that gates from hell can open only in Tasmania. This is why we no longer suffer demonic invasions.

How'd I do?

But, of course.

okay, this has gone completely off the rails, and will likely be locked at this point..

Hrm...I don't think it's so rampant anywhere here that the area is dangerous to "average people" either. I pass through "bad" neighborhoods regularly. My brother-in-law does walk-throughs of properties in bad neighborhoods multiple times per week doing real estate appraisals. The vast majority of violent crime here is gang-related, and isolated to certain parts of the city where there's literally no reason to go unless you live there. Even if you do go there, it's unlikely that you'll be in danger unless you're a member of a gang that's active in the area. It's not random violence against random people, in general. It's a big city, so unless you decide to join a gang or go walking down dark alleys alone at night in bad neighborhoods you're unlikely to be affected by it at all. I've lived in the city for 14 years and have never felt unsafe (not like I was going to be shot or robbed, anyway). My third day in Bangkok a crazy guy with one eye tried to bite me. No kidding.

I wouldn't doubt that there's more crime in Chicago than in Melbourne. That said, Melbourne has a pretty low crime rate for a city with 4 million people living in it. It's certainly http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_current.jsp.

The U.S. becoming like real-life GTA, though (which is what my post was in response to)? Come on, that's just silliness that could only come from too much TV or too many movies.

It obviously isn't worse than Brazil. There is no safe place here. It doesn't matter if you're walking in the rich areas or poor areas. You can always lose your wallet and even your life.

Then [censored] report it instead of spamming the thread up with (ineffectual) whinging.

I have actually seen threads locked due to people saying it'll get locked rather than the actual topic of the thread. Moderators do not want you going on and on about it in the thread, as that just means they'll have more crud to clean up if they feel a need to delete things -- just as cops don't want people jumping into fistfights. Mods only lock things that are either out of bounds from the start or so full of stuff that cleanup would take way too much effort. Report and move on.

Eh, mods you might as well lock this thread.

I don't know whether, as OP, I can ask for that, but I'm asking.

no reason to get Violent..

I was merely pointing out to people that the conversation had strayed from its purpose and into a discussion that Goes against Forum rules.. People do it all the time on these forums, in hopes it will make people notice and get back on topic..

its no Different than when Someone opens a thread, and you show them another thread for it already exists.. Its called trying to be a productive member of the forums, and trying to get a thread back on track instead of it getting closed because of further derailment

You can. Hitting the report button is the fastest way (I've done so for you).

WFT? It's not like I've punched you or threatened you or anything actually harmful!