First off, the comment I originally responded to was talking about ruining their lives. Secondly, prison or juvie will not teachthem to accept responsibility. It will teach them how to survive by victimizing people weaker than them. If they're tried as adults, a record of conviction will keep them out of school,…

You believe you would step in. Maybe you would. Maybe you don't have any idea what you would do. I don't. Maybe you just want to punish these idiots to reinforce your belief that you would have done better.

First, people who commit theft or fraud are absolutely dangerous. Second, there is no such thing as general deterrence. People don't litter because its easy not to and they can pat themselves on the back for it. Nobody weighs the legal consequences of littering or not littering before deciding not to litter. …

To protect the public from dangerous people. These people aren't dangerous.

Yes. They're teenagers. At that age, in a group, the most you can hope for is inaction. Same goes for adults- you, me, anybody. We'd ignore it, tell ourselves it's not our business, or convince ourselves we never saw anything on the first place. Most people aren't heroes, that's why heroics stand out.

Yeah, I want to ruin their lives, and pay for it with taxpayer money, so that we can all feel that sweet self-righteousness high for three days before we're distracted by some other news story.

Hopefully not. Laws like that do nothing. If people could be persuaded to do good simply by threatening them with punishment, there would be no crime.

You're thinking about Van Halen's "Jump."
Callousness has little to do with it. Most people don't do anything in those situations because they assume someone else took the responsibility. Stop worrying about psychopaths; real life is nothing like "Criminal Minds."

A sous chef is an assistant chef; a souse chef is a chef with a drinking problem. So, any chef.

"Troubled" seems like kind of a low-wattage descriptor in this case.

Saw Dunkirk, liked it a lot. All men everywhere can stop trying to be sexy ever again, because heroic WWII fighter ace Tom Hardy has set a new, unreachable bar.

Netflix is spending a lot of money changing itself from Destination For Everything You Want To Watch into Just Another TV Network.

I'm a weirdo who plays games with the sound muted, so that would have been weird. "The A button doesn't do anything! It's like a main button!."

I used to work at a restaurant called Higgins Alley, because nothing says "where do you want to eat?" like "alley." Before that, it was a red sauce place called Red Pies Over Montana, a pun on a little-remembered movie about wildfire fighters from the '40's called Red Skies Over Montana.

Green Lantern Corps.

Ah, yes, well, I concede in the face of your rigorous argument. The day belongs to you, good sir.

Naomi Watts is 48.

I'm not so sure I'm sure of that. If I insult someone, and that person says they're hurt by that, I only have their subjective impression of harm. But if I have a study that shows insulting people leads to suicide, why wouldn't the government step in?

I pretty explicitly said there is no First Amendment issue here. My concern is that the underlying rationalization for the criticism could be used to advocate for censorship. I'm not saying that anyone is doing that now.

My point is more that we're at the top of the slope, and we don't know how slippery it is yet, and we need to keep that in mind.