This in and of itself is interesting. How do you whip up a crowd into a mob? What is the mental state of the members of a mob when they are frenzied? Can you really induce people to take leave of their sense of reason and responsibility, or is something else happening that makes us (as observers) misunderstand what…

What is spontaneous about a BF mob is how they react to the induced conditions. Most are peaceable if competitive. Predicting which will have violence is tougher.

I felt like I was AARP eligible when I finished grad school, and I was one of the youngest kids in my class through high school.

8‽ So, these kids will turn 20 their senior year? Yeah, that won't be skeezy at all.

I'm pretty sure there's two different things at work here.

So I guess humanity then falls into one of two categories "weak minded conformists" or "ubermensch"?

I'd need a lot more data before I'd be comfortable ascribing Black Friday mob violence to self selecting crowds. For one thing, everyone is an individual and everyone is a social animal - grouping everyone into two exclusive categories obliterates any chance at understanding crowd dynamics. It's also bad practice to…

I understand your first point; as I said - we only hear about the mobs where something stupid happens. As I also said - it keeps happening. One or two out of thousands - nearly every year, which seems more statistically significant. Sometimes it's just two people in a fight over something, which I could see…

I really like the 7 myths of crowd psychology article linked herein (I love to see assumptions challenged if nothing else), but I did keep wondering - how is this consistent with Black Friday mobs, which regularly seem to be the epitome of spontaneous, suggestible, irrational, emotional, and destructive crowds? I…

If a deaf roshi faps in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Another great place to see oodles of Art Nouveau is Riga, Latvia.

Yeah, well, when the USN says, "Gays are A-OK!" perhaps God is speaking for himself.

I vaguely want to see the genderbent Jabba holding the other end of the chain.

Who else thinks the pope got advanced notice on this and figured, "Shit, if the US military is making me look like an ignorant backwards tool it's time to hang up the Fanon, Camauro, and Tiara."

Hmm, my "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" addition may be getting out of hand. I saw the picture and thought, "Wow, her hair looks fantastic, like one of the LBD sisters!"

Libertarian ubermensches will not be controlled by your so called sense of fashion!

JP-2 packed the College of Cardinals with conservative cardinals, so unless a more liberal member of the collage has some serious blackmail material it'll definitely be conservative.

Has Savage lightened up on monogamy? I've read a few interviews months back where he was pretty universally critical of it.

I'm a fan of the concept that there are two competing but valid evolutionary strategies at play in human society - monogamy and polyamory - and each of us tend more towards one or the other. It would be best if we could all determine for ourselves which we tend towards, and find like minded mates.

The Non-Adventures of Wonderella