If you're gonna divide it up like that the Great Lakes bit of the Midwest should have no shortage, either. The prairie bit of the Midwest is in much bigger trouble because the Oglala Aquifer is being drawn down too much, and the Mississippi is probably gonna be schizo with more evaporation (ie: lots of heat meaning more evaporation, and some years the rain'll come down within the Mississippi valley and they'll have too much, and others it won't and they'll have too little). The Pacific Northwest should also be fine.
I suspect the South, Southwest, and Cali will have the biggest problems.
1. White people really are fucking clueless about how they sound to anyone else, probably largely because we don't have to talk to anyone else in a context where they can get away with calling us assholes to our faces. The Sad Puppies call themselves Sad Puppies, except for Vox Days faction who prefer the term "rabid puppies." Their logo is a sad puppy. If I wanted to do what they did, and make up some insulting phrase to dismiss their entire argument, it would actually be pretty easy. They're fighting, and they called me a warrior, so warrior would probably be in it. They explicitly admit that they want SciFi to be like it was in the 60s and 70s, when the only white people in it were Uhura and Sulu. So they really don't want me to make up a bunch of words about them.
As for the brigading issue, look at the reform proposals. They're not doing anything about brigading in voting, they're doing something about brigading in the nomination system. The Sad Puppies have never said the nomination system was rigged (every year at least one Puppy-approved work has been on the final ballot), they've said the actual voting was rigged. That's why they tried to keep all non-Puppies-approved work off the ballot this year, rather then settling for a couple works in each category like they did last year.
Which means the Hugos are now changing the rules to protect the bit of the process that (the puppies say) is rigged, from the process the puppies use to de-rig the awards.
1. I'd believe that somebody who'd been trolled by Vox Day repeatedly might decide to throw the label back in his face. Day's that kind of guy. But, as someone who was on the board of one of the state-level groups that helped push for ObamaCare, I think I'm pretty well informed on how progressive activists refer to themselves. And I can assure you that nobody uses the word "warrior." Somebody somewhere (particularly in the more "I-have-a-PhD-so-you're-stupid" wing) might use the phrase "social justice," but "equality" and "fairness" are much more common.
2. "Clouds of association?" If I started putting the gun-rights guys (and in my experience gun rights ladies are rarer then black conservatives), the pro-life activists, and libertarians all under the same label I'd be an asshole. I've done it before, and I'll do it again, because it's a useful activism tool (people get more worked up about opposing Right-Wing Loonies then they do some reasonable term), but that doesn't mean I'll be right in an objective sense of the term. And those groups are as tightly allied as the so-called SJWs. More tightly aligned then gays and blacks -- those three groups really seem to understand how each-other thing, whereas I have never met a non-black gay-rights activists who has any clue how black people think.
3/4 When Vox Day is involved brigading against him is inevitable. At the actual con more then one attendee was quoted saying they agreed with the puppies, but hated their tactics/Vox Dayish personality so much they'd voted No Award.
Drawing conclusions about the nature of Hugo voting from this is roughly as sensible as drawing conclusions about French elections from that time La Pen managed to squeak through the first round and got whipped by Chirac.
The way you're using the phrase "SJWs" makes little sense. It's not like anybody would answer the question "Are you a Social Justice Warrior?" with a yes. Gay rights activist, black lives matter activist, progressive, those would all get somebody to say yes, and all three probably have pretty significant overlap with people you'd call Social Justice Warriors, but in general the whole concept of Social Justice Warrior is something that is entirely made up by their opponents.
In this case, for example, there's no progressive slate at the Hugo's. Never has been. There's a Fuck Vox Day vote, but the Fuck Vox Day vote includes a lot of people Vox Day supported strongly enough to get Hugo Nominations.
Whether Card could win would depend on what WorldCon attendees thought, and quite a few of them don't seem to mind conservative authors. Mike Resnick has gotten five, for example.
I suspect that if Card did something really, truly great, and didn't include any overt anti-gay stuff, it would be virtually impossible to beat him. He's OSC, and the extremely gray WorldCon audience is probably not very gay. It could easily turn out like the Sad Puppies campaign -- piss off all the voters for bringing politics into their little world and fail miserably.
I doubt Weber's ever campaigned. He doesn't go to WorldCon. Most Baen authors don't bother. Eric Flint went, but he did it specifically to oppose the Sad Puppies slate.
He was there because the Sad Puppy story did not add up. If the Sad Puppies'd wanted the best story to win, why did they nominate a full slate? That prevents anyone who isn't on the Sad Puppy side from having any influence. That, combined with the presence of Vox Day (who, BTW, declared victory with the No Awards on the basis that his point the entire time was to ruin the Hugos), is a major reason why No Award beat their entire slate. The logical thing for them to do next year is nominate one or two in each category, and stay far the fuck away from a guy who openly wants to destroy the awards.
And, again, as I mentioned this is SciFi. It is about the future. A story about the future that does not include gays is not a good story, because we all know perfectly well that gays are not going away.
1. So you're not an academic, but you're trying to "analyze the event" while simultaneously convincing people you strongly disagree with to change their minds?
That's a PhD-level combination of sounding smart while being totally ineffective right there.
2. If it's a term the person you're talking with does not use, in their everyday lives, it is jargon to them.
4. It's pretty simple. The official name of the act ("Affordable Care Act") has never stuck. That makes it jargon in most of the country, which means that a pol talking about the Affordable Care Act dilutes his message with a strong dose of "thinks he's smarter then me." If he's Obama, and the popular name is "ObamaCare," it gets worse because it sounds like he's trying to avoid taking credit for his signature domestic accomplishment.
You talk with your audience at their level, not above their heads.
1. One of us is really not understanding here. Your case seems to be that the fans voted because they disagreed with the puppies. My case is the fans voted because they agree with SJWs. That's not a very big disagreement. 2. A very large proportion of the people who actually bothers to engage with the puppies will bring in Academic language like "unexamined privilege," which pisses them puppies off and gets nothing accomplished. From your reaction to SJW I assumed you were one, if I was mistaken I apologize. Which feeds into four somewhat out of order: 4. The way you actually deal with these people is talk like them. Sometimes you change it up, but unless you have some deep-ass point about that precise to make at this precise moment you don't bother. You borrow their language, you put the concept in their terms. 3. The point is that society changes, and the Sad Puppies have to live with it. As an example Feminists used to be incredibly homophobic. That has changed. At this point it's very difficult to find anyone who isn't on the vanguard of the gay rights movement who doesn't consider him/herself a strong feminist and vice versa.
I'm not sure you actually disagree with anything I just said.
You don't seem to like the vocabulary chosen, but one thing one realizes when one graduates from the Academy, is that there is absolutely no point in using Academic language to talk to people who don't already use it. Either they will have no clue what you're talking about (and you might as well speak Latin) or they have been told the definition Academics use and have decided that Academics are wrong. In this case Academic language is actually worse then Latin because they understand it precisely enough to get mad at you. And making people mad at you is not a useful communications strategy.
Which in turn means my options when faced with an OP referring to "SJWs" are to either torpedo all chance of communication by correcting him, or live with it.
There's a reason Obama started calling it "ObamaCare."
There is nothing nerdier then a discussion of a fictional railroad you control via software.
It includes ridiculous amounts of jargon ("all-ALCO" is one you'd hear if you brought me into it), much of which is extremely technical (for example, you'll need model locomotives, which means you'll need to know technical terms like steam traction, cab unit, road switcher, and safety cab), and (this is the key thing) almost 100% of the discussion would be about your personal taste. I would go with almost-all-ALCO, set some generic time in the 60s, simply for the large variety of locomotive types you could have tooling around your layout.
It's like the ever popular "Would the Enterprise beat a Star Destroyer?" debate, except instead of turning on which fictional Physics model works you're actually talking about the real world.
Fantasy's won at the Hugos more often then Rocket-Ship SciFi in some categories. Hell, most rocket-ship SciFi isn't technically SciFi, it's Space Opera.
Don't act surprised that the Social Justice vision of the future dominates fan views of what should get rewarded. This has always been the case. SciFi is about the future, so a SciFi world that doesn't look like the world early 20-somethings are planning to build as soon as Grandma dies is simply stupid. What they're planing on building today is a world where gender-identity is a matter of choice; homosexuality is not necessarily the norm, but is normal; etc. And this shit moves fast. In the olden days of Bill Clinton's administration, a man named David Weber created a vision of the future which included ridiculous amounts of racial diversity (the Prussian-themed Empire, for example, is ethnic Chinese; while the British-queen Queen is a black woman with an Afro), numerous shout-outs to fans of military history (the Prussians are there basically so he can drop numerous Frederick the Great References), very well thought-through Physics (altho they are designed so that combat works much like it did in the Age of Sail), etc.
And the new generation of 20-somethings years later is going "WTF? Why isn't anybody gay?" And pointing out that, back in the early days of the Clinton Administration, the most homophobic demographic were probably feminists, who had yet to notice lesbians existed so assumed that homosexuality was the cruelest form of discrimination against women possible; does not make them want to pay money for his books.
That's all relevant to the US, not Denmark. I suspect that the legal contexts are so different that the very phrase "confession" may have a completely different definition.
ie: if you're in the US, and you tell the cops you shot that guy, but it was not murder it was self-defense; or you admit that you took those videos of the police but the statute banning videos of the police is invalid; etc. it would not be considered a confession because you aren't admitting to legal guilt. And to use those defenses effectively you'd have to bring them up very early in the investigation (just try convincing a Jury that you shot that dude in self-defense when your first story to the cops was that you were in Vegas that day).
I strongly suspect what's happened is that the cops decided these guy's sites were illegal, they brought said guys in after whatever legal paperwork is required, they said "is this your site?" and the guys said "yes." And then when they found out they were about to be arrested for posting the sites they pointed out that their sites aren't illegal. Some reporter whose fluent in Danish, but only high-level-conversational in English, and worse in legal English, called this a "confession." After all, they admitted they did what the cops were accusing them of, and did not realize that in English particular word strongly imples you're about to beg the Judge to give you the minimum allowable sentence.
That's in the US. Denmark is a separate country, with an entirely separate legal system. It may be wise to tell them "yes I did those things you are alleging, and if your interpretation of the law is correct I am guilty," and then fight the interpretation of the law.
For a really prominent example of the Bad Things that happen when you try to apply American rights in a non-American legal system look at Amanda Knox. In the US claiming a confession is coerced is a no-brainer. It's pretty much the only way to get a confession thrown out. In Italy it got her convicted of (and sentenced to a few years in jail for) slander.
In theory I like proportional representation. In practice every European country with PR seems to have at least one ridiculous/evil/nationalist party run by someone suspiciously similar to Donald Trump, which always seem to make the threshold. For awhile the Law of Jante seemed to protect the Scandinavian states and Germans from this, but the last Swedish elections resulted in a minority government that almost fell due to the Moderate's ignoring the Law of Jante and supporting some ridiculous brinksmanship from the Sweden Democrats.
So it's kinda a trade-off. In the first-past-the-post system minor, relatively unpopular movements, all have to co-opt themselves into a larger movement or be irrelevant. The advantage here is that they don't get office unless they have mainstream allies, which means they have to be somewhat reasonable. Unlike Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, or a half-dozen other European movements. The disadvantage is that sometimes the local definition of "reasonable" is wrong and somebody (ie: the US Greens) should have more power then they get.
In the US, of course, we have the added complication of Separation of Powers, whereby the larger movements can really fuck up the system without taking much responsibility; so they tend to court smaller movements by brinksmanship.
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.
This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.
So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.
I'd have to get into a protracted discussion about numbers to explain why that's not the case. In brief, you're counting all whites. Not just the ones in poverty, in a city, which is where most of these problems happen. Density really does matter. Never the less, even in raw numbers there are more white people killed than black people. They act as if none are killed, maybe they just don't matter.
And what you're missing is that nobody tolerates this kind of thing even in high-density, low-income, white police jurisdictions.
Poor blacks start showing up, and police tactics abruptly switch for the expensive and low-death "community policing" to the relatively cheap, high-death "broken windows" model.
There's a reason the guy who shot Tamir Rice was not tolerated in white, working-class Independence, but did get a job in black Cleveland.
Some are very needless, like that man in I think it was SC that decided to run away. WHY? It was just a traffic citation, get his ticket like everyone else and get on with life. On the other side - WHY on God's green earth did he shoot at him? He could easily have caught up to him. The black man was about 50 and out of shape - I could have easily caught him and I'm 50, the cop was around 30 and in shape. No contest. Very dumbass move.
The guy ran because getting caught up in the gears of the legal system is truly nightmarish for those on the low end of the income spectrum. Speaking for myself, I made the mistake of forgetting my insurance paperwork once, got convicted of it because my brakes went out on the court date so I couldn't show them a copy, and then forget to pay the third $several-hundred penalty (Michigan does the fine, plus two "driver responsibility fees" for forgetting your insurance paperwork) until September 30th of 2010 when it was due BY September 30th. I didn't find out I was driving on a suspended license until somebody stole my wallet, and Ohio license, in August of 2013, which meant that if I'd still been driving and an Ohio cop had noticed I'd be in their system for driving on a suspended license. For forgetting paperwork, and then paying the fine ON instead of BY.
Running probably wasn't the smart thing to do, even given that; but it is a very understandable mistake to make if you know how state and municipal governments milk their poorest residents for fines, generally enforced by the threat of completely ruining your life. And not a problem for the ruling middle class, because they have the money for a lawyer.
The cop did it because be thought he'd get away with it. Police can get away with damn near anything, if they have a somewhat sensible reason to claim they feared for public safety (and it doesn't have to be terribly sensible -- this particular cop was alleging the victim stole his stun gun, and it's kinda difficult to go on a murder spree with a stun gun).
I think there's light at the end of the tunnel. For the first time in decades they seem to be listening and re-thinking their policies.
It'll help.
If I meet a black lives matter activist whose losing hope I point out that Mayor Gribbs of Detroit set up a police unit called "Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets," which killed black men at a fairly prodigious pace. 2 every 3 months was an unusually low death toll. Whites loved it, and the white police chief became their standard bearer for the next election. It seemed like Nichols would win, and then some silly woman realized the knife "belonging" to one of the victims came out of the pockets of police-issued pants. Officer Peterson got off. The Jury decided that being on Chief Nichols force would drive anyone to becoming a racist serial killer. Chief Nichols lost the Mayoral election to a black guy, but got a nice consolation prize as Sheriff of the suburban County just north of the City.
I suspect to completely fix the problem we'd have t
Fisher and her team have tried to RetCon one onto the process, creating their own to explain admissions decisions, but the University does not involve points at all.
The thing about a "smaller world" the internet/heap flights/free trade/etc. have created, is that it means that anybody who wants the best can bid on the top guy in the field (or at least the guy in the field with the best marketing), which runs his salary up. Everyone else is not the best, so instead of being considered very good (and worth it because they're the top guy in the City, and you can;t hire the top guy from London or NYC in Poughkeepsie) they're considered mediocre (because they're compared to that top guy). They are also competing with the entire globe.
As far as I can tell the only real solutions involve massive tax-and-spend-style programs, because that way you tax the fuck out of that top guy, and spend the money of free shit that everyone can use. The Germans, Danes, and other Northern Europeans do this and it works fine. Democrats tend to shy away from those programs because they'd cost a whole hell of a lot of money (and the Democratic Party is obsessed with balanced budgets, and incapable of raising taxes significantly), Republicans tend to oppose all new social spending on principle (while claiming all old social spending, particularly that on seniors, is inviolable).
So you get programs like ObamaCare, which make life better for the very poor (because paying for enough nice things to cover the very poor is easy to budget for), plus a few selected middle-income groups that sound really sympathetic on TV (ie: little old ladies who can't insurance due to skin cancer, kids just out of college getting on their mom's insurance, etc.).
Dude, don't swallow the pro-American propaganda. Most countries aren't "racially diverse," but that's not because there utopias of homogeneity, it's because the whole concept of "race" is so imbued with American's own private bullshit that it really truly doesn't apply those countries. The Canadians are more diverse then us. The country has never not been majority minority, you just don't think of it that way because they have managed to figure out how to have two completely different nations (Anglophones and Francophones) coexist with remarkably little conflict. The Brits can't even count the nations that reside within their United Kingdom. The Baltic states have more interesting minority issues then anyone because a significant proportion of their populations are ethnic Russians; there are spirited debates over whether the Belgians have a majority group (and if so which one); African states of any size tend to be multi-tribal, multi-linguistic, multi-religious contraptions that work for reasons understandable only to the Africans themselves and (possibly, I'm not sure he's this smart) God; etc.
As for socio-economic problems in whites, yes I agree that is a problem. If God came down from heaven and made me Emperor for a week the second thing I do (first is Emperors get a pension), would probably involve major changes intended to make it the default for poor kids of all colors to get at least as far as an Associates. Most blacks strongly agree with me on this issue, which is proven by their stubborn insistence on voting for income-redistrubuting Democrats despite frequent Republican appeals to their Evangelical faith.
On personal responsibility, so whose responsible if a 18-year-old didn't teach himself to code because the computing devices in his house are a) three smartphones, b) a current-gen console, c) a last-gen console? That's the problem with just washing your hands of the issue and saying "those people should take personal responsibility." You're dealing with entire generations of people who have very little contact with the middle-class, genuinely have no fucking clue what they should be doing to ensure their kid has the right tools to succeed, and it's impossible to say who was the irresponsible party.
That's why you need an education system, run by said middle class people, and it needs to bed very very hard to not finish.
Look at the graph again. There's 1.7 white deaths per black deaths. There's 6.3 white people per black person. It's very hard to get to those numbers without some actual racism.
BTW, if you're white and killed by the cops, the Black Lives Matter movement is probably one of your best bets for publicity. Take this article: http://www.theroot.com/article...
And it's been changed a lot since it was first introduced. Quota systems were banned in '97, and systems that automatically granted points to minorities, were banned in 1997. Now they have to use very vague programs that consider the individual student.
Which basically means that they can discriminate against a) so-called perfect Asians (but only the ones who are on the low end of perfect), and b) rich-ass people whose kids only look good on paper because when Mommy paid thousand$ for a world trip the summer of Junior year it was a "Semester at Sea" and counted as college credit. But only for as long as it takes into account the individual circumstances of each student.
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If you're gonna divide it up like that the Great Lakes bit of the Midwest should have no shortage, either. The prairie bit of the Midwest is in much bigger trouble because the Oglala Aquifer is being drawn down too much, and the Mississippi is probably gonna be schizo with more evaporation (ie: lots of heat meaning more evaporation, and some years the rain'll come down within the Mississippi valley and they'll have too much, and others it won't and they'll have too little). The Pacific Northwest should also be fine.
I suspect the South, Southwest, and Cali will have the biggest problems.
No idea about the Northeast.
1. White people really are fucking clueless about how they sound to anyone else, probably largely because we don't have to talk to anyone else in a context where they can get away with calling us assholes to our faces. The Sad Puppies call themselves Sad Puppies, except for Vox Days faction who prefer the term "rabid puppies." Their logo is a sad puppy. If I wanted to do what they did, and make up some insulting phrase to dismiss their entire argument, it would actually be pretty easy. They're fighting, and they called me a warrior, so warrior would probably be in it. They explicitly admit that they want SciFi to be like it was in the 60s and 70s, when the only white people in it were Uhura and Sulu. So they really don't want me to make up a bunch of words about them.
As for the brigading issue, look at the reform proposals. They're not doing anything about brigading in voting, they're doing something about brigading in the nomination system. The Sad Puppies have never said the nomination system was rigged (every year at least one Puppy-approved work has been on the final ballot), they've said the actual voting was rigged. That's why they tried to keep all non-Puppies-approved work off the ballot this year, rather then settling for a couple works in each category like they did last year.
Which means the Hugos are now changing the rules to protect the bit of the process that (the puppies say) is rigged, from the process the puppies use to de-rig the awards.
1. I'd believe that somebody who'd been trolled by Vox Day repeatedly might decide to throw the label back in his face. Day's that kind of guy. But, as someone who was on the board of one of the state-level groups that helped push for ObamaCare, I think I'm pretty well informed on how progressive activists refer to themselves. And I can assure you that nobody uses the word "warrior." Somebody somewhere (particularly in the more "I-have-a-PhD-so-you're-stupid" wing) might use the phrase "social justice," but "equality" and "fairness" are much more common.
2. "Clouds of association?" If I started putting the gun-rights guys (and in my experience gun rights ladies are rarer then black conservatives), the pro-life activists, and libertarians all under the same label I'd be an asshole. I've done it before, and I'll do it again, because it's a useful activism tool (people get more worked up about opposing Right-Wing Loonies then they do some reasonable term), but that doesn't mean I'll be right in an objective sense of the term. And those groups are as tightly allied as the so-called SJWs. More tightly aligned then gays and blacks -- those three groups really seem to understand how each-other thing, whereas I have never met a non-black gay-rights activists who has any clue how black people think.
3/4 When Vox Day is involved brigading against him is inevitable. At the actual con more then one attendee was quoted saying they agreed with the puppies, but hated their tactics/Vox Dayish personality so much they'd voted No Award.
Drawing conclusions about the nature of Hugo voting from this is roughly as sensible as drawing conclusions about French elections from that time La Pen managed to squeak through the first round and got whipped by Chirac.
The way you're using the phrase "SJWs" makes little sense. It's not like anybody would answer the question "Are you a Social Justice Warrior?" with a yes. Gay rights activist, black lives matter activist, progressive, those would all get somebody to say yes, and all three probably have pretty significant overlap with people you'd call Social Justice Warriors, but in general the whole concept of Social Justice Warrior is something that is entirely made up by their opponents.
In this case, for example, there's no progressive slate at the Hugo's. Never has been. There's a Fuck Vox Day vote, but the Fuck Vox Day vote includes a lot of people Vox Day supported strongly enough to get Hugo Nominations.
Whether Card could win would depend on what WorldCon attendees thought, and quite a few of them don't seem to mind conservative authors. Mike Resnick has gotten five, for example.
I suspect that if Card did something really, truly great, and didn't include any overt anti-gay stuff, it would be virtually impossible to beat him. He's OSC, and the extremely gray WorldCon audience is probably not very gay. It could easily turn out like the Sad Puppies campaign -- piss off all the voters for bringing politics into their little world and fail miserably.
I doubt Weber's ever campaigned. He doesn't go to WorldCon. Most Baen authors don't bother. Eric Flint went, but he did it specifically to oppose the Sad Puppies slate.
He was there because the Sad Puppy story did not add up. If the Sad Puppies'd wanted the best story to win, why did they nominate a full slate? That prevents anyone who isn't on the Sad Puppy side from having any influence. That, combined with the presence of Vox Day (who, BTW, declared victory with the No Awards on the basis that his point the entire time was to ruin the Hugos), is a major reason why No Award beat their entire slate. The logical thing for them to do next year is nominate one or two in each category, and stay far the fuck away from a guy who openly wants to destroy the awards.
And, again, as I mentioned this is SciFi. It is about the future. A story about the future that does not include gays is not a good story, because we all know perfectly well that gays are not going away.
1. So you're not an academic, but you're trying to "analyze the event" while simultaneously convincing people you strongly disagree with to change their minds?
That's a PhD-level combination of sounding smart while being totally ineffective right there.
2. If it's a term the person you're talking with does not use, in their everyday lives, it is jargon to them.
4. It's pretty simple. The official name of the act ("Affordable Care Act") has never stuck. That makes it jargon in most of the country, which means that a pol talking about the Affordable Care Act dilutes his message with a strong dose of "thinks he's smarter then me." If he's Obama, and the popular name is "ObamaCare," it gets worse because it sounds like he's trying to avoid taking credit for his signature domestic accomplishment.
You talk with your audience at their level, not above their heads.
Actually it was conservatives who first called it Obamacare.
I believe if you try to exercise some reading comprehension you'll discover that was my point.
Conservatives were calling it ObamaCare, which was sticking with a sufficiently large slice of the general public that Obama had to do the same.
1. One of us is really not understanding here. Your case seems to be that the fans voted because they disagreed with the puppies. My case is the fans voted because they agree with SJWs. That's not a very big disagreement.
2. A very large proportion of the people who actually bothers to engage with the puppies will bring in Academic language like "unexamined privilege," which pisses them puppies off and gets nothing accomplished. From your reaction to SJW I assumed you were one, if I was mistaken I apologize. Which feeds into four somewhat out of order:
4. The way you actually deal with these people is talk like them. Sometimes you change it up, but unless you have some deep-ass point about that precise to make at this precise moment you don't bother. You borrow their language, you put the concept in their terms.
3. The point is that society changes, and the Sad Puppies have to live with it. As an example Feminists used to be incredibly homophobic. That has changed. At this point it's very difficult to find anyone who isn't on the vanguard of the gay rights movement who doesn't consider him/herself a strong feminist and vice versa.
I'm not sure you actually disagree with anything I just said.
You don't seem to like the vocabulary chosen, but one thing one realizes when one graduates from the Academy, is that there is absolutely no point in using Academic language to talk to people who don't already use it. Either they will have no clue what you're talking about (and you might as well speak Latin) or they have been told the definition Academics use and have decided that Academics are wrong. In this case Academic language is actually worse then Latin because they understand it precisely enough to get mad at you. And making people mad at you is not a useful communications strategy.
Which in turn means my options when faced with an OP referring to "SJWs" are to either torpedo all chance of communication by correcting him, or live with it.
There's a reason Obama started calling it "ObamaCare."
There is nothing nerdier then a discussion of a fictional railroad you control via software.
It includes ridiculous amounts of jargon ("all-ALCO" is one you'd hear if you brought me into it), much of which is extremely technical (for example, you'll need model locomotives, which means you'll need to know technical terms like steam traction, cab unit, road switcher, and safety cab), and (this is the key thing) almost 100% of the discussion would be about your personal taste. I would go with almost-all-ALCO, set some generic time in the 60s, simply for the large variety of locomotive types you could have tooling around your layout.
It's like the ever popular "Would the Enterprise beat a Star Destroyer?" debate, except instead of turning on which fictional Physics model works you're actually talking about the real world.
Fantasy's won at the Hugos more often then Rocket-Ship SciFi in some categories. Hell, most rocket-ship SciFi isn't technically SciFi, it's Space Opera.
Don't act surprised that the Social Justice vision of the future dominates fan views of what should get rewarded. This has always been the case. SciFi is about the future, so a SciFi world that doesn't look like the world early 20-somethings are planning to build as soon as Grandma dies is simply stupid. What they're planing on building today is a world where gender-identity is a matter of choice; homosexuality is not necessarily the norm, but is normal; etc. And this shit moves fast. In the olden days of Bill Clinton's administration, a man named David Weber created a vision of the future which included ridiculous amounts of racial diversity (the Prussian-themed Empire, for example, is ethnic Chinese; while the British-queen Queen is a black woman with an Afro), numerous shout-outs to fans of military history (the Prussians are there basically so he can drop numerous Frederick the Great References), very well thought-through Physics (altho they are designed so that combat works much like it did in the Age of Sail), etc.
And the new generation of 20-somethings years later is going "WTF? Why isn't anybody gay?" And pointing out that, back in the early days of the Clinton Administration, the most homophobic demographic were probably feminists, who had yet to notice lesbians existed so assumed that homosexuality was the cruelest form of discrimination against women possible; does not make them want to pay money for his books.
Don't be ridiculous.
HO cars would never survive the weather. He'd need G. It's a totally different Ask Slashdot.
That's all relevant to the US, not Denmark. I suspect that the legal contexts are so different that the very phrase "confession" may have a completely different definition.
ie: if you're in the US, and you tell the cops you shot that guy, but it was not murder it was self-defense; or you admit that you took those videos of the police but the statute banning videos of the police is invalid; etc. it would not be considered a confession because you aren't admitting to legal guilt. And to use those defenses effectively you'd have to bring them up very early in the investigation (just try convincing a Jury that you shot that dude in self-defense when your first story to the cops was that you were in Vegas that day).
I strongly suspect what's happened is that the cops decided these guy's sites were illegal, they brought said guys in after whatever legal paperwork is required, they said "is this your site?" and the guys said "yes." And then when they found out they were about to be arrested for posting the sites they pointed out that their sites aren't illegal. Some reporter whose fluent in Danish, but only high-level-conversational in English, and worse in legal English, called this a "confession." After all, they admitted they did what the cops were accusing them of, and did not realize that in English particular word strongly imples you're about to beg the Judge to give you the minimum allowable sentence.
Dude,
That's in the US. Denmark is a separate country, with an entirely separate legal system. It may be wise to tell them "yes I did those things you are alleging, and if your interpretation of the law is correct I am guilty," and then fight the interpretation of the law.
For a really prominent example of the Bad Things that happen when you try to apply American rights in a non-American legal system look at Amanda Knox. In the US claiming a confession is coerced is a no-brainer. It's pretty much the only way to get a confession thrown out. In Italy it got her convicted of (and sentenced to a few years in jail for) slander.
In theory I like proportional representation. In practice every European country with PR seems to have at least one ridiculous/evil/nationalist party run by someone suspiciously similar to Donald Trump, which always seem to make the threshold. For awhile the Law of Jante seemed to protect the Scandinavian states and Germans from this, but the last Swedish elections resulted in a minority government that almost fell due to the Moderate's ignoring the Law of Jante and supporting some ridiculous brinksmanship from the Sweden Democrats.
So it's kinda a trade-off. In the first-past-the-post system minor, relatively unpopular movements, all have to co-opt themselves into a larger movement or be irrelevant. The advantage here is that they don't get office unless they have mainstream allies, which means they have to be somewhat reasonable. Unlike Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, or a half-dozen other European movements. The disadvantage is that sometimes the local definition of "reasonable" is wrong and somebody (ie: the US Greens) should have more power then they get.
In the US, of course, we have the added complication of Separation of Powers, whereby the larger movements can really fuck up the system without taking much responsibility; so they tend to court smaller movements by brinksmanship.
The reason is if there was some sort of universal, or natural grammar/vocabulary/etc. inherent to the human animal you would expect languages to tend towards this universal. They don't. There's some small things (many words for mother start with 'm'), but after years of research Chomsky's got a tiny and ever-shrinking list of large universal things. What seems to be going on is that a big part of what we use language for is identifying group membership (ie: ebonics, in the UK you can frequently identify both someone's home county and their class from their accent, etc.), which means that almost anything goes.
This particular study is somewhat interesting, they put a bunch of college students in a room and had them make up new words for for concepts like big vs. small, and their partners were able to guess whether it was big or small at greater then 50%. It does not say how much greater. They were also able to find some commonalities in the new words vs. their opposites. Then they repeated with Mandarin-speakers in China, and got a slightly different set of commonalities.
So I suspect that non-verbal cues had a part to play, and they'll have a devil of a time proving that their vague commonalities between big vs. small were not simply a reflection of English usage.
I'd have to get into a protracted discussion about numbers to explain why that's not the case. In brief, you're counting all whites. Not just the ones in poverty, in a city, which is where most of these problems happen. Density really does matter. Never the less, even in raw numbers there are more white people killed than black people. They act as if none are killed, maybe they just don't matter.
And what you're missing is that nobody tolerates this kind of thing even in high-density, low-income, white police jurisdictions.
Poor blacks start showing up, and police tactics abruptly switch for the expensive and low-death "community policing" to the relatively cheap, high-death "broken windows" model.
There's a reason the guy who shot Tamir Rice was not tolerated in white, working-class Independence, but did get a job in black Cleveland.
Some are very needless, like that man in I think it was SC that decided to run away. WHY? It was just a traffic citation, get his ticket like everyone else and get on with life. On the other side - WHY on God's green earth did he shoot at him? He could easily have caught up to him. The black man was about 50 and out of shape - I could have easily caught him and I'm 50, the cop was around 30 and in shape. No contest. Very dumbass move.
The guy ran because getting caught up in the gears of the legal system is truly nightmarish for those on the low end of the income spectrum. Speaking for myself, I made the mistake of forgetting my insurance paperwork once, got convicted of it because my brakes went out on the court date so I couldn't show them a copy, and then forget to pay the third $several-hundred penalty (Michigan does the fine, plus two "driver responsibility fees" for forgetting your insurance paperwork) until September 30th of 2010 when it was due BY September 30th. I didn't find out I was driving on a suspended license until somebody stole my wallet, and Ohio license, in August of 2013, which meant that if I'd still been driving and an Ohio cop had noticed I'd be in their system for driving on a suspended license. For forgetting paperwork, and then paying the fine ON instead of BY.
Running probably wasn't the smart thing to do, even given that; but it is a very understandable mistake to make if you know how state and municipal governments milk their poorest residents for fines, generally enforced by the threat of completely ruining your life. And not a problem for the ruling middle class, because they have the money for a lawyer.
The cop did it because be thought he'd get away with it. Police can get away with damn near anything, if they have a somewhat sensible reason to claim they feared for public safety (and it doesn't have to be terribly sensible -- this particular cop was alleging the victim stole his stun gun, and it's kinda difficult to go on a murder spree with a stun gun).
I think there's light at the end of the tunnel. For the first time in decades they seem to be listening and re-thinking their policies.
It'll help.
If I meet a black lives matter activist whose losing hope I point out that Mayor Gribbs of Detroit set up a police unit called "Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets," which killed black men at a fairly prodigious pace. 2 every 3 months was an unusually low death toll. Whites loved it, and the white police chief became their standard bearer for the next election. It seemed like Nichols would win, and then some silly woman realized the knife "belonging" to one of the victims came out of the pockets of police-issued pants. Officer Peterson got off. The Jury decided that being on Chief Nichols force would drive anyone to becoming a racist serial killer. Chief Nichols lost the Mayoral election to a black guy, but got a nice consolation prize as Sheriff of the suburban County just north of the City.
I suspect to completely fix the problem we'd have t
Read your source. There's no point system.
Fisher and her team have tried to RetCon one onto the process, creating their own to explain admissions decisions, but the University does not involve points at all.
The way the world's going the middle is screwed.
The thing about a "smaller world" the internet/heap flights/free trade/etc. have created, is that it means that anybody who wants the best can bid on the top guy in the field (or at least the guy in the field with the best marketing), which runs his salary up. Everyone else is not the best, so instead of being considered very good (and worth it because they're the top guy in the City, and you can;t hire the top guy from London or NYC in Poughkeepsie) they're considered mediocre (because they're compared to that top guy). They are also competing with the entire globe.
As far as I can tell the only real solutions involve massive tax-and-spend-style programs, because that way you tax the fuck out of that top guy, and spend the money of free shit that everyone can use. The Germans, Danes, and other Northern Europeans do this and it works fine. Democrats tend to shy away from those programs because they'd cost a whole hell of a lot of money (and the Democratic Party is obsessed with balanced budgets, and incapable of raising taxes significantly), Republicans tend to oppose all new social spending on principle (while claiming all old social spending, particularly that on seniors, is inviolable).
So you get programs like ObamaCare, which make life better for the very poor (because paying for enough nice things to cover the very poor is easy to budget for), plus a few selected middle-income groups that sound really sympathetic on TV (ie: little old ladies who can't insurance due to skin cancer, kids just out of college getting on their mom's insurance, etc.).
Dude, don't swallow the pro-American propaganda. Most countries aren't "racially diverse," but that's not because there utopias of homogeneity, it's because the whole concept of "race" is so imbued with American's own private bullshit that it really truly doesn't apply those countries. The Canadians are more diverse then us. The country has never not been majority minority, you just don't think of it that way because they have managed to figure out how to have two completely different nations (Anglophones and Francophones) coexist with remarkably little conflict. The Brits can't even count the nations that reside within their United Kingdom. The Baltic states have more interesting minority issues then anyone because a significant proportion of their populations are ethnic Russians; there are spirited debates over whether the Belgians have a majority group (and if so which one); African states of any size tend to be multi-tribal, multi-linguistic, multi-religious contraptions that work for reasons understandable only to the Africans themselves and (possibly, I'm not sure he's this smart) God; etc.
As for socio-economic problems in whites, yes I agree that is a problem. If God came down from heaven and made me Emperor for a week the second thing I do (first is Emperors get a pension), would probably involve major changes intended to make it the default for poor kids of all colors to get at least as far as an Associates. Most blacks strongly agree with me on this issue, which is proven by their stubborn insistence on voting for income-redistrubuting Democrats despite frequent Republican appeals to their Evangelical faith.
On personal responsibility, so whose responsible if a 18-year-old didn't teach himself to code because the computing devices in his house are a) three smartphones, b) a current-gen console, c) a last-gen console? That's the problem with just washing your hands of the issue and saying "those people should take personal responsibility." You're dealing with entire generations of people who have very little contact with the middle-class, genuinely have no fucking clue what they should be doing to ensure their kid has the right tools to succeed, and it's impossible to say who was the irresponsible party.
That's why you need an education system, run by said middle class people, and it needs to bed very very hard to not finish.
Look at the graph again. There's 1.7 white deaths per black deaths. There's 6.3 white people per black person. It's very hard to get to those numbers without some actual racism.
BTW, if you're white and killed by the cops, the Black Lives Matter movement is probably one of your best bets for publicity. Take this article:
http://www.theroot.com/article...
And it's been changed a lot since it was first introduced. Quota systems were banned in '97, and systems that automatically granted points to minorities, were banned in 1997. Now they have to use very vague programs that consider the individual student.
Which basically means that they can discriminate against a) so-called perfect Asians (but only the ones who are on the low end of perfect), and b) rich-ass people whose kids only look good on paper because when Mommy paid thousand$ for a world trip the summer of Junior year it was a "Semester at Sea" and counted as college credit. But only for as long as it takes into account the individual circumstances of each student.
All races are treated the same?
When's the last time you saw a white guy shot in the head by a cop, for no reason?
Because hipsters are being super extra-loud at the moment and the government is close to passing laws requiring workforce diversity in big companies?
Dude, Hipsters didn't just shut down Bernie's rally in Washington State.
Hipsters tried to be extra-loud in Occupy Wall Street, but it didn't work because we suck at it.