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The "people loving liberals in Hollywood" would rage against such suggested characters claiming they are nothing more that sick-minded caricatures of real people with real problems.

After all, Hollywood no longer understands what satire really is.

In Hollywood it goes something like this:

You can't decide if you are a male, a female, or something else? Yes, that's a real problem that you are not responsible for.

You can't figure out if you are an immigrant or not, or don't want to be thought of as one? Yes, that's a real problem that you are not responsible for.

You have a handicap, either real and recognized by medical science, or real enought to you but not recognized by those alt-Right so-called medical doctors? Yes, that's a real problem that you are not responsible for.

You can't fall into line and SUPPORT HER and the rest of the Democratic party and alt-Left "fringe"? Well, that's a real problem that you are truly responsible for and we will hound you out of a job even if you "conform".

It is a misconception that only government can censor things. In fact government can tell you and your company to censor things or in most of the cases it does not even have to talk with you. It is enough that they have the ability to make people censor themselves. Not only government has this ability. You may realize that there are not that many caricatures of saints of certain religion and yet there are more of any other. It could be that this trend has increased after few unfortunate cases of caricature in Denmark and problems few satirists in Paris had few years ago.

That's a damn good point. Pepe is being used in various protests. (IANAL but) I recall protest being the highest, most protected right of speech, like when that guy wrote a "Fuck you to the TSA" on his chest for when he got body scanned even though the airport was scared of "muh security".

If we really think you can take down Pepe, then shouldn't everyone burning a Trump face be sued into oblivion? And for another comparison, shouldn't every political cartoon be subject to banning? What's the difference between a political cartoon featuring a caricature to make a point, and a meme... featuring a caricature to make a point? I'm honestly out of ways to cut and slice it any further... political cartoons are 100% legal.

The "only" difference I can think of--if pressed--is someone might say some pepe memes are directly copy-and-pasting his original creation (and then added their derivative work). But what about all "pepe" memes that were written by hand by a new creator?

This guy is turning the Streisand effect up to 11. And the other posts about "who is funding it?" are really good questions to ask. Because this guy is either getting paid by someone, or, his fellow liberals are making his life a living hell and he's trying to "atone" for it to get them off his back. Because who gives a freakin' shit about a meme being used by other people? I mean, how many memes (containing OTHER'S copyrighted content) has this guy copied-and-pasted throughout his lifetime?

I agree with that too.

I simply think that if something has been woven into the cultural fabric, using it in obvious satire should be allowed.

Like, it should be completely legal to use a character, even a recent one, to criticize (or praise) a politician by invoking the attributes of said character. Currently that's copyright violation.

Like comparing a caricature of a politician as Tony Soprano should be unambiguously fair use (IMO), but because the commentary is not on the original subject, it is not (the fact that it's political may tip it into fair use though).

A shorter term would allow recycling of good IP, which is a wholly different argument I have many opinions on too...

I just don't think it's cheap to take a something woven into the cultural fabric (even if recently) to comment on something else, especially if it's for commentary and not profit.

More than that, Lee disagreed with slavery and thought the dissolution of the Union a mistake. He fought to protect his state and people -the primary motivation of most in the south as very few actually owned slaves but many suffered under the tariffs and taxes. Lincoln actually offered Lee command in the north.

The civil war was far from the caricature that we are taught in school.

mykepredko enthused:

Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre.

-1 Disagree

As an SF writer, Pournelle was, at best, a hack. Were it not for Larry Niven, he'd be known only for his Byte column. As a writer of fiction, his prose was pedestrian, his characters one-dimensional, and his philosophy repugnant.

He was also an intolerant, alchoholic narcissist.

I know I'm going to attract a lot of hate for the above, but hear me out before you downmod me.

At an SF convention in the Bay Area, he was on a panel discussing the Reagan Star Wars initiative - and pretty strident in his advocacy of it. After the panel discussion concluded, one of the attendees approached him to engage him in debate about the program. The guy made it clear that he disagreed with Pournelle about the initiative's technical feasibility, was concerned by its projected cost, and felt that it would decrease geopolitical stability. He made his points calmly and respectfully, and he stood his ground, despite Pournelle calling him a Communist and a traitor. When he pointed out that ad hominems didn't address his factual arguments, Pournelle sucker-punched him.

I was there. I witnessed it. And whatever respect I might have had for Jerry Pournelle permanently vanished the moment he resorted to violence to silence someone who presented zero physical threat, merely because he didn't like what the man had to say.

That action is of a piece with the facsistic philosophy he espoused via his fantasy doppelganger John Christian Falkenberg, and is best exemplified by Falkenberg's "final solution" to the problem of overpopulation of the planet Hadley by involuntarily-transported convict-colonists. Falkenberg conspires to trap them in the capitol city's stadium, then orders his troopers to murder literally thousands of them - and Pournelle presents this act of mass murder with a straight face as somehow necessary, noble, and right.

It's an absolutely classic example of narcissist wish-fulfillment: treating the lives people of whose political views and power he disapproves as subhuman, and therefore legitimate targets of genocide ... all for the "greater good", of course. And, because Falkenberg has the "strength" to murder thousands whose only crime is that he considers them surplus population, Pournelle presents this despicable atrocity as admirable and praiseworthy.

It turned my stomach when I read it in Analog as a 20-something, and it still revolts me today.

It was clear to me then that Pournelle desperately wanted to be Gordon R. Dickson and the Falkenberg chronicles was his attempt to re-imagine the Childe Cycle from a far-right perspective - and minus all that nauseating, limp-wristed, left-wing compassion and humanity with which Dickson insisted on spoiling his narrative. Humanity and compassion had no place in Pournelle's philosophy. To him they were unnecessary distractions that should ruthlessly be dispensed with, along with the undeserving hordes of subhuman trash.

What makes Pournelle's fiction particualrly dull is that he constantly indulged himself in polemical justifications for his principal characters' psychopathic actions by constructing antagonists who were uniformly, relentlessly unidimensional caricatures, rather than characters. No one who disagreed with what he presented as ideologically-correct attitudes, strategies, and philosophies displays ANY characteristics other than unwavering venality and profound physical cowardice. (Well, okay, I'll concede that some of them also exhibit ham-fisted duplicity, as well.) They barely even aspire to the status of straw men, much less fully-realized, three-dimensional characters complete with depth, nuance, and complexity. They are, without exception, not so much cartoons as stick figures.

Of course, the same can fairly be said of Pournelle's protagonists, so that's

>If the credit bureaus don’t like that, get out of the market, John Galt. There are plenty of other companies which will assume the risk ...
"John Galt?" You're tilting at windmills. No company is a Randian caricature for not wanting to expose themselves to capricious laws decided by bloodthirsty slashdot loonies.
PCI-DSS is a reasonably good checklist, but not enough; a sophisticated breach that bypasses ingress and egress detection for weeks on a credit-card handler could gather millions of credit card data even though it's encrypted at all levels. And then J. Random Slashdot Loony would advocate the death penalty again for still not doing enough, no thanks.

Maybe you should learn to read. Here's what you wrote (emphasis added):

people who fit the stereotype

Wow, you're conflating various stereotypes into a Big Bang caricature. I thought only Hollywood correlated video game enthusiasm with coding competency.

Contrast that with what I actually wrote (emphasis added):

It's not just IT - take a look at all the guys now in their 20s and 30s (and 40s) whose "social life" is limited to playing video games with other guys or by themselves.

There are plenty of guys whose life outside of work centers around video games. It's not limited to any one type of job.

people who fit the stereotype

Wow, you're conflating various stereotypes into a Big Bang caricature. I thought only Hollywood correlated video game enthusiasm with coding competency. STEM careers have been around for at least a couple hundred years. Before that you needed to be independently wealthy or a member of the church. These careers may exhibit an attraction for certain personality types who have an aversion towards your "social challenges". So? Not everybody's perfect and other careers likely attract other types who have their own aversions to technological challenges, or whatever.

Parents want their children to grow up happy, which means pursuing a career where they're more likely to succeed.

I see, so, your preference for picture-free books makes you arrogant and derisive of others, then?

I have nothing against pictures. But not as a replacement for descriptive language. Pictures are snapshots with big gaps between them, and have to be caricatures if they are to convey emotions, or they will be lost. Subtlety is almost impossible to convey, or it will be missed.
But if you transform a 400 page novel into an 800 page illustrated novel, I see no problem with it. But if it becomes a 60 page comic book, well, a lot will get lost.

As for arrogance and derision, those are generally seen as bad - by those who feel hit. The solution to that is not to drag everybody down to the same level.

It's not trying to "change the rules" of the election. Nobody is suggesting installing Hillary. The political term is "mandate" and the Republicans clearly didn't get one. That's why they are struggling so much to govern right now. You don't have a mandate with 49% of the vote.

So the whole concept of a mandate (from the people, I'm assuming is what you mean) is fairly pointless when US elections typically get only 60% of eligible voters to even cast a vote. Let's follow your logic through: from your comment I'm assuming you feel that Obama's 2008 win with 53% of the vote counted as a "mandate"? He won with 69.5 million votes. In 2016 Trump got 63 million. To say that one got a mandate from the people when the other didn't seems like there must be a pretty incredibly thin line between what qualifies as a mandate! Guess what? The reality is that *neither* of them received any sort of mandate. The US has about 200 million eligible voters but about 80 million of them don't cast a vote for either a D or an R in any given election. Obama got about 34% of the eligible voters to vote for him. Trump got about 32%. Those are both quite low and both quite close - either they are both mandates or, much more likely, neither are.

There is no firm definition of what would even count as getting a mandate from the people, but if you can only get about 1 out of 3 people to throw their support behind you, that probably doesn't cut it.

(and BTW, I'm just going to skip over the whole notion that the Republicans are struggling to govern and that the source of that struggle is the lack of a mandate - that seems like quite a stretch and you didn't provide any evidence to support it, so... moving on!)

Do I really, truly, honestly think that's what the Republicans are all about? Certainly not all of them. There may be no good neo-Nazis, but I have no doubt that there are good Republicans as individuals. However, having watched the Republican primary debates, every single candidate would answer each and every question with an inspiring vision of a great society followed by declaring that they would achieve that outcome by cutting taxes for the rich.

You're missing the point: just as you like the D convention and were repulsed by the R convention, there are a similar number of people out there who liked the R convention and were repulsed by the D convention. You don't seem to be even open to the idea that the vast majority of the "others" are rational, caring human beings. Both parties have the nutters on the extreme, and unfortunately those types make for entertaining news coverage, but on neither side are they representative of the vast majority of the people in either party.

I don't believe that cutting taxes for the rich is a panacea and I can't imagine any thinking person actually subscribes to that.

This is a straw man argument. Please show me where any candidate came out and said "the solution to our problems is to cut taxes on the rich" (their position, not your wild interpretation of it). And then show me where that candidate came anywhere close to claiming that such a move would be anything close to a "panacea". You have taken their position and used your own bias to distill it down to something absurdly simplistic and not actually representative of their position.

Again, it seems like you've dreamed up a caricature of the other side and are arguing against that. I know, I know, it's far easier to feel good about a position if you can demonize and/or belittle the opposing point of view, but the reality is that both sides' positions on every single issue are far more nuanced than you seem willing to believe. Defense spending, abortion, gay rights, states vs federal powers, entitlements, budgets, healthcare, and on and on - every single one of those involves tradeoffs and less than perfect choices.

At a very high level, pretty much all sides want prosperity, fairness, the good of the country, e

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Ugly beliefs, ideologies, and ideas will die on the vine when heard by sensible people.

Ah, but what if that's the reason they're really so scared? What if the belief isn't ugly and it's just that all people deserve a nation of their own, and that all races have a right to exist? "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for our children" -- Any sensible person hearing such words would agree, and yet these are the infamous 14 words uttered by the "Nazi" 1488 crowd.

What if your views were tainted because of propaganda? Have you actually listened to what these people have to say? Do you know what identitarianism is? What if the real reason they're being persecuted is that the existing political establishment is fearful that if you hear what they have to say, you will agree. National Socialists believe in healthy "Darwinian" competition between separate nations; They don't seek to destroy any other nation, they just acknowledge that some races are better at different things and through barter and trade they can all take advantage of each other's gifts.

Note: Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews. No one would take them as refugees. Since some were carrying out terrorist acts he put them in camps and planned to establish a home for them in the island paradise of Madagascar. Unfortunately he didn't know about the Balfour Declaration which was a pact between Zionists and Great Brittan to establish Israel by using the war machine on Palestine. Which was one of the many reasons WWII was instigated. It had nothing to do with genocide of Jews, but the average person has only believed propaganda, ignoring that victors rewrite the history.

No one with an IQ above room temperature believes that black people, for example, are any less valuable

You're right. Not even Nazis believe that... but you wouldn't know because you've only heard media caricatures. P.S. Hitler would have round up and shot the racist Skinheads for being hateful degenerates.

You've seen it so many times because it's obvious that many people who claim to have read it are also claiming that it says things that it clearly doesn't. So they either didn't read it and are lying or tried to read it and substituted their own caricature of what was on the page for what was actually on the page. And they keep refering to it as a "screed," a "manifesto," a "rant," and all sorts of loaded words that don't comport with neither the style nor the substance of the actual document. So no, you didn't read it. If you think you did, then you've failed at reading comprehension.

But Trumpists don't believe in Enlightenment ideals. The Trump camp is dominated by people who want to uphold religion and some caricature of what they think is traditional.

Ideas, not facts, you absurd caricature of a human. That quote is WAY beyond your intellectual pay scale, fat boy.

The VP's statement is a caricature of self-contradiction. He wants challenging discussion, just so long as it doesn't challenge any of his PC assumptions. Step over the (undefined) line, and you're fired; no warning or nothing. With management like that, who needs enemies?