Up to this point, most people considered ISIS to be human. They were someone that could be negotiated with.
Really? Because I never had the impression they were anything but terrorists and were beyond negotiations.
But I'm an American and I have little experience with foreign countries. So, the question I have to ask is: is there anywhere in the world where people thought there was a side to ISIS that the world at large wasn't seeing?
I'm trying not to sound sarcastic here; I'm genuinely curious about what circumstances would cause anyone to have seen ISIS differently than how they've set out to appear.
One of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing was being interviewed. She insisted to reporters that the name of the bomber that was still alive, Tsarnev, not be used during the interview (PTSD is the presumed reason).
I recall that because I feel I have to reiterate my answer on that here.
Whether you feel some sort of trigger from that sort of thing or not, if the information is available, it must absolutely be part of the discourse on the subject. Yes, it is rather an ugly part of history, one that, I think, most people would like to forget just as soon as they hear about it. But, despite your comfort level, that piece of information is part of history, and it's intellectually dishonest to suggest that it should be omitted from discourse on the subject.
If you don't want to see it, hear it, or think about it, that's fine. But it still happened. And suggesting its availability doesn't have a "purpose" gives the false impression that it isn't significant. Unpleasantness should not immediately be grounds for censorship.
As an added thought for this particular situation: what I fear is the beating of a war drum to a threat that I haven't been exposed to. If I am not allowed to judge for myself what brutality has happened, I fear being lulled into a false sense of having to trust politicians and journalists who inject their own biases into situations and off the cliff into skirmishes that I might have a different perspective on if given all available evidence of the subject.
While I agree your experience is a fond one, I think the idea of building things has been transformed for today's youth, in some ways for the better, and in some ways not.
3D printers, for instance, are becoming more readily available. Makerspace and hackerspaces are popping up everywhere. Companies and products like Adafruit and Arduino are flourishing and common among people my age (30's) and younger.
Granted, there is also the push by administrators for kids to learn to code (a Herculean exercise in futility, in my opinion). But there will be kids that this will benefit.
Just because kids today aren't working with component-level electronics, it doesn't mean that the thing you experienced will never be experienced by anyone again.
Thanks. It's heartening to see this kind of behavior is recognized for what it is.
I know most people generally would rather not jump into the fray. And while I participate in my own kinds of piety from time to time (sometimes you just fucking have to in order to tell people some hateful shit won't stand, usually around holiday meals), I like to think I'm not doing it to feel good about me.
I sometimes have to remember which battles are being fought for normalization, and which ones need not be fought because normalization is coming anyway, even if it's not as fast as my own personal comfort levels would like.
If that's the case, then I'm willing to admit I bit down hard.
That said, I'm seeing a lot of this hugbox stuff lately from people who are 100% serious about it. It's hard to figure out who's serious and who isn't.
I mean, I come down on the side of GG (I wouldn't say I'm a supporter, more of someone who's interested in the group psychology aspect of the whole business), but if you're going to say that there have been analyses done, the least you could possibly do is provide links.
I hope I don't sound like an asshole when I say that I'm sorry that you were co-opted for someone else's outrage.
As a lesser, more comical example, I have a friend, from whom I am feeling more and more alienated these days, who would consider himself an SJW. To him, everything seems a microbattle, at least, and everything where there is not 100% agreement needs a conflict at the center of it. To wit, I organized a movie night among friends for which we would all go to dinner first. He was invited, but declined; no big deal. I said up front that we (about 8 of us) would go to a barbecue joint for dinner, at which there weren't a lot of vegetarian options.
I'm a vegetarian (the only one of the group, I might add), and more importantly, he is not. However, he felt it necessary to point out that I, the vegetarian was being figuratively kicked in the teeth because everyone else wanted to go to a place that wasn't terribly accommodating to me.
I had to tell him rather sternly that I'm a big girl and was perfectly capable of feeding myself in the event that the restaurant in question didn't have a lot for me. And choice of restaurant hardly ever matters to me as long as the company is good. I regret not pointing why it wasn't any of his business anyway since he wasn't coming.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating for comic effect, same guy posted on Facebook this weekend that MRAs are responsible for all the hate coming towards the casting for the new Ghostbusters movie. The level of absurdity (not to mention superiority in its sneering tone) in that statement was mind-blowing.
Oh, please. There are plenty of "girls" on the internet. Misogyny is not NEARLY as widespread as people make it out to be. I can name plenty of places where there are women who openly admit they're women and are FINE with the interactions they make.
And for the millionth time, GG is NOT a hate movement. Yes, it has trolls that use the tag, but...why should I bother trying to explain? You've already made up your mind.
I consider myself pretty progressive AND I'm female. So f'ing what? I don't see a lot of misogyny here, and I DARE you to point me to a place where you're seeing it.
OH, now I get it. You're projecting.
You're calling THIS place a hugbox, but you've presented the contradictory idea that the poster whom you're quoting is NOT promoting a safe space.
The doublethink...it's making me dizzy. Sounds to me like YOU'RE the one that's promoting the idea of hostility where I am frankly not seeing it. And if I have a bad or flawed idea, you know what? I expect people to call me out on it. I don't always expect people to be nice, and I don't feel entitled to it if they aren't. Because I can take care of myself. I don't need some Anon to white knight for me.
I would even bet that you could post as an AC and threaten to rape me to prove your point, because nobody would know it was you.
Agreed with both you and the parent. Too many places I've been where a dissenting opinion is met with derision, sneering, character attacks, walls of text in all caps, because if you don't know someone "like that" then the "like that" person is too different, too much of an "other" to possibly be someone you can agree with about things. No listening or research necessary, just dismiss outright and have a nice day.
And I'm not even talking about any of the topics the parent brought up (though I could produce examples if necessary). I'm talking pop culture stuff that nobody who isn't at least peripherally circling the fandoms really gives a damn about.
I realize there are problems with the adoption system, and believe me I know about prospective parents who need some serious expectation management. And yes, I am well aware that not all parents who put their kids up for adoption want to, but feel they have to as it is necessary to give the child the best life possible. That is not, however, the scenario you're describing.
Rather, I think you're reading way too much into it. GP was saying (and I agree with), if you believe that you, by virtue of having a child, doom it with a potential illness and misery, would it not be better to adopt a child in need?
I don't think that's what the article is describing, nor what this thread is talking about.
Thanks. I have to say I've been pretty lucky, though developmentally, I didn't quite figure out socialization until I left college.
You feel pretty stupid when you realize you didn't figure out at 25 what most kids know by the age of 5. Then you come to the conclusion that nobody else is perfect either, and things even out again.
I'd like to respond to the allegation that home-schooling is terrible for socialization.
I went to a Catholic school where the average class size was 18 students, and generally, there wasn't a lot of turnover from Kindergarten to 8th grade.
If, among those 18 students, you were branded "unclean" (nerdy, ugly, socially inept, didn't have the right clothes, and back then "gay/lesbian" was an insult also, no matter how straight you were...this was Catholic school after all) and you didn't have any friends (and it spread to the other grades how "unclean" you were), it was conceivable that you could go for close to a decade without making any friends at all (barring any after-school activities where you could make friends among kids that don't judge nearly as much).
If you have attentive parents that pay attention when your kid is never invited to any other kids' houses to play or hang out at the mall, or whatever and generally seems depressed over it, it's up to the parents to figure out how to get your kids properly socialized. For instance, friends who run an all-ages gym have a home-schooling program.
There are resources for parents who wish to home-school, same as there are resources for parents whose kids simply don't fit in. But school doesn't automatically guarantee socialization.
And what really bugs the piss out of me about that argument is that if you're really going to go by The Bible on medical care, then you should go without ANY life-saving measures that weren't developed at that time anyway.
If it's not how they did it in The Bible, you should reject it, if you're really going to be that fucking picky.
Understand that the Slashdot community and people who know more than a single thing about the things that you mentioned don't make up the majority of Windows users? Yes.
Presume that people that are not part of the group above might be interested in RPi from the stories they've read about it (once found an RPi developer magazine in an airport news stand, so it's not totally outside the mainstream) but can't grasp what they'd really use Windows on it for? Sure.
Thinks MS is well aware of its market share and has banked forever on being the go-to operating system for non-power users? You betcha.
The one thing I wonder about is how many Windows users that are serious enough computer users to try to look outside the box enough to consider an RPi wouldn't already shrug and say "well, why not Linux?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making any tinkering experience as tailorable and accessible as possible, but I'm not sure that Windows on an RPi is the way to bring Windows users over. Most people don't want another device to do a thing unless they already know that the extra thing in question will (per the marketing) do exactly what they want it to do in the first place. So, I presume a Windows user will probably look for ways to do a task using the equipment they already have.
I'm not trying to knock Windows users, mind you. It's the fact that Windows is ubiquitous in the market that might lead a hardcore Windows user to try and find ways to ask "can't my Windows box do that anyway?" instead of trying to DIY a solution that might take more time and effort than they're willing to expend.
I've lost my taste for the death penalty over the years (in my 20's, I would have gladly told you to put any convicted pedophile to death as soon as humanly possible). It's the result of a system that creates criminals only to punish them. That's why I agree with you in theory, but in practice, a lot of the bite gets lost by the fact that the penal system continues to punish, not rehabilitate (you surround a criminal with criminals, the only thing you ever produce is someone who knows how to interact with criminals). And then society continues to punish.
Not that I can terribly blame society for mistrusting criminals. Again, the penal system doesn't do a good job of rehab. Some criminals return to the cycle of criminal behavior because sometimes, they have no idea what else to do.
It makes me truly sad that as a society, we're at an impasse when it comes to criminals. You can rehab the hell out of someone, but even the most self-aware criminals know there's not much hope of a regular life for them.
And no, I have no idea how to fix that. I wish I did, but I suspect there's no money in fixing that problem even if I had a few decent ideas.
Real cybersecurity would require massively increasing the financial liability of corporations for any breach in security that causes their customers to lose money or waste time. For example, when a data breach at Home Depot causes banks to have to reissue credit cards, banks should be financially responsible to their customers for the many hours they have to waste on dealing with new credit card numbers, and Home Depot should be financially responsible to banks for all their resulting costs. If each of these data breaches cost corporations a few billion dollars, you'd be surprised how quickly security shapes up.
This is 100% correct, but it would also require people to be responsible for their own accounts, at least to some extent. There are some people that still use default passwords for their accounts, or easily guessable ones. And that's just the least of problems with individuals.
The truth is, no one, not providers, not consumers, not the Government, not anyone, regards computer security for the crime-lousy potential that it holds. Because that would acknowledge some really scary truths about the way it actually operates, or the amount of work a user has to do in order to protect oneself.
The difference between me and other people is that I don't interject the names of the people I favor unless asked to, or to offer an alternative when one name is shouted from the heavens as an answer.
I didn't whinge and whine when Abrams was announced, nor did I shout "My guy is better than that".
I don't really HAVE a guy. I'm just annoyed with the idea that Whedon is the answer to a question that nobody asked, ESPECIALLY since there are BETTER writer/directors in the business.
That doesn't make me a troll, by the way. It makes me someone who disagrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Up to this point, most people considered ISIS to be human. They were someone that could be negotiated with.
Really? Because I never had the impression they were anything but terrorists and were beyond negotiations.
But I'm an American and I have little experience with foreign countries. So, the question I have to ask is: is there anywhere in the world where people thought there was a side to ISIS that the world at large wasn't seeing?
I'm trying not to sound sarcastic here; I'm genuinely curious about what circumstances would cause anyone to have seen ISIS differently than how they've set out to appear.
One of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing was being interviewed. She insisted to reporters that the name of the bomber that was still alive, Tsarnev, not be used during the interview (PTSD is the presumed reason).
I recall that because I feel I have to reiterate my answer on that here.
Whether you feel some sort of trigger from that sort of thing or not, if the information is available, it must absolutely be part of the discourse on the subject. Yes, it is rather an ugly part of history, one that, I think, most people would like to forget just as soon as they hear about it. But, despite your comfort level, that piece of information is part of history, and it's intellectually dishonest to suggest that it should be omitted from discourse on the subject.
If you don't want to see it, hear it, or think about it, that's fine. But it still happened. And suggesting its availability doesn't have a "purpose" gives the false impression that it isn't significant. Unpleasantness should not immediately be grounds for censorship.
As an added thought for this particular situation: what I fear is the beating of a war drum to a threat that I haven't been exposed to. If I am not allowed to judge for myself what brutality has happened, I fear being lulled into a false sense of having to trust politicians and journalists who inject their own biases into situations and off the cliff into skirmishes that I might have a different perspective on if given all available evidence of the subject.
While I agree your experience is a fond one, I think the idea of building things has been transformed for today's youth, in some ways for the better, and in some ways not.
3D printers, for instance, are becoming more readily available. Makerspace and hackerspaces are popping up everywhere. Companies and products like Adafruit and Arduino are flourishing and common among people my age (30's) and younger.
Granted, there is also the push by administrators for kids to learn to code (a Herculean exercise in futility, in my opinion). But there will be kids that this will benefit.
Just because kids today aren't working with component-level electronics, it doesn't mean that the thing you experienced will never be experienced by anyone again.
Thanks. It's heartening to see this kind of behavior is recognized for what it is.
I know most people generally would rather not jump into the fray. And while I participate in my own kinds of piety from time to time (sometimes you just fucking have to in order to tell people some hateful shit won't stand, usually around holiday meals), I like to think I'm not doing it to feel good about me.
I sometimes have to remember which battles are being fought for normalization, and which ones need not be fought because normalization is coming anyway, even if it's not as fast as my own personal comfort levels would like.
If that's the case, then I'm willing to admit I bit down hard.
That said, I'm seeing a lot of this hugbox stuff lately from people who are 100% serious about it. It's hard to figure out who's serious and who isn't.
Citation, please.
I mean, I come down on the side of GG (I wouldn't say I'm a supporter, more of someone who's interested in the group psychology aspect of the whole business), but if you're going to say that there have been analyses done, the least you could possibly do is provide links.
I hope I don't sound like an asshole when I say that I'm sorry that you were co-opted for someone else's outrage.
As a lesser, more comical example, I have a friend, from whom I am feeling more and more alienated these days, who would consider himself an SJW. To him, everything seems a microbattle, at least, and everything where there is not 100% agreement needs a conflict at the center of it. To wit, I organized a movie night among friends for which we would all go to dinner first. He was invited, but declined; no big deal. I said up front that we (about 8 of us) would go to a barbecue joint for dinner, at which there weren't a lot of vegetarian options.
I'm a vegetarian (the only one of the group, I might add), and more importantly, he is not. However, he felt it necessary to point out that I, the vegetarian was being figuratively kicked in the teeth because everyone else wanted to go to a place that wasn't terribly accommodating to me.
I had to tell him rather sternly that I'm a big girl and was perfectly capable of feeding myself in the event that the restaurant in question didn't have a lot for me. And choice of restaurant hardly ever matters to me as long as the company is good. I regret not pointing why it wasn't any of his business anyway since he wasn't coming.
Lest you think I'm exaggerating for comic effect, same guy posted on Facebook this weekend that MRAs are responsible for all the hate coming towards the casting for the new Ghostbusters movie. The level of absurdity (not to mention superiority in its sneering tone) in that statement was mind-blowing.
Oh, please. There are plenty of "girls" on the internet. Misogyny is not NEARLY as widespread as people make it out to be. I can name plenty of places where there are women who openly admit they're women and are FINE with the interactions they make.
And for the millionth time, GG is NOT a hate movement. Yes, it has trolls that use the tag, but...why should I bother trying to explain? You've already made up your mind.
I consider myself pretty progressive AND I'm female. So f'ing what? I don't see a lot of misogyny here, and I DARE you to point me to a place where you're seeing it.
OH, now I get it. You're projecting.
You're calling THIS place a hugbox, but you've presented the contradictory idea that the poster whom you're quoting is NOT promoting a safe space.
The doublethink...it's making me dizzy. Sounds to me like YOU'RE the one that's promoting the idea of hostility where I am frankly not seeing it. And if I have a bad or flawed idea, you know what? I expect people to call me out on it. I don't always expect people to be nice, and I don't feel entitled to it if they aren't. Because I can take care of myself. I don't need some Anon to white knight for me.
I would even bet that you could post as an AC and threaten to rape me to prove your point, because nobody would know it was you.
And the GP assumes it's impossible to spoof someone else's identity as well.
Agreed with both you and the parent. Too many places I've been where a dissenting opinion is met with derision, sneering, character attacks, walls of text in all caps, because if you don't know someone "like that" then the "like that" person is too different, too much of an "other" to possibly be someone you can agree with about things. No listening or research necessary, just dismiss outright and have a nice day.
And I'm not even talking about any of the topics the parent brought up (though I could produce examples if necessary). I'm talking pop culture stuff that nobody who isn't at least peripherally circling the fandoms really gives a damn about.
I realize there are problems with the adoption system, and believe me I know about prospective parents who need some serious expectation management. And yes, I am well aware that not all parents who put their kids up for adoption want to, but feel they have to as it is necessary to give the child the best life possible. That is not, however, the scenario you're describing.
Rather, I think you're reading way too much into it. GP was saying (and I agree with), if you believe that you, by virtue of having a child, doom it with a potential illness and misery, would it not be better to adopt a child in need?
I don't think that's what the article is describing, nor what this thread is talking about.
Thanks. I have to say I've been pretty lucky, though developmentally, I didn't quite figure out socialization until I left college.
You feel pretty stupid when you realize you didn't figure out at 25 what most kids know by the age of 5. Then you come to the conclusion that nobody else is perfect either, and things even out again.
I'd like to respond to the allegation that home-schooling is terrible for socialization.
I went to a Catholic school where the average class size was 18 students, and generally, there wasn't a lot of turnover from Kindergarten to 8th grade.
If, among those 18 students, you were branded "unclean" (nerdy, ugly, socially inept, didn't have the right clothes, and back then "gay/lesbian" was an insult also, no matter how straight you were...this was Catholic school after all) and you didn't have any friends (and it spread to the other grades how "unclean" you were), it was conceivable that you could go for close to a decade without making any friends at all (barring any after-school activities where you could make friends among kids that don't judge nearly as much).
If you have attentive parents that pay attention when your kid is never invited to any other kids' houses to play or hang out at the mall, or whatever and generally seems depressed over it, it's up to the parents to figure out how to get your kids properly socialized. For instance, friends who run an all-ages gym have a home-schooling program.
There are resources for parents who wish to home-school, same as there are resources for parents whose kids simply don't fit in. But school doesn't automatically guarantee socialization.
I guess I don't get how this is a troll.
What's more important, your need to have your own children or potentially watching your child suffer horribly for your pride?
There's alarming amounts of diabetes in my family. No way would I ever wish that on any kid if I could help it.
And what really bugs the piss out of me about that argument is that if you're really going to go by The Bible on medical care, then you should go without ANY life-saving measures that weren't developed at that time anyway.
If it's not how they did it in The Bible, you should reject it, if you're really going to be that fucking picky.
If that's the case, then by your logic, parents should need to get permission to even HAVE children in the first place.
I think you missed the sarcasm there.
For you, sure. You were lucky enough to have exposure and resources to information on those languages outside the regular HS curriculum.
Some kids need school to fill in the blanks in the world that their parents and friends can't.
"[C]ompletely miss"? No.
Understand that the Slashdot community and people who know more than a single thing about the things that you mentioned don't make up the majority of Windows users? Yes.
Presume that people that are not part of the group above might be interested in RPi from the stories they've read about it (once found an RPi developer magazine in an airport news stand, so it's not totally outside the mainstream) but can't grasp what they'd really use Windows on it for? Sure.
Thinks MS is well aware of its market share and has banked forever on being the go-to operating system for non-power users? You betcha.
Yo dawg, I put something cool in your cooler, so you can be cool while you cool.
The one thing I wonder about is how many Windows users that are serious enough computer users to try to look outside the box enough to consider an RPi wouldn't already shrug and say "well, why not Linux?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making any tinkering experience as tailorable and accessible as possible, but I'm not sure that Windows on an RPi is the way to bring Windows users over. Most people don't want another device to do a thing unless they already know that the extra thing in question will (per the marketing) do exactly what they want it to do in the first place. So, I presume a Windows user will probably look for ways to do a task using the equipment they already have.
I'm not trying to knock Windows users, mind you. It's the fact that Windows is ubiquitous in the market that might lead a hardcore Windows user to try and find ways to ask "can't my Windows box do that anyway?" instead of trying to DIY a solution that might take more time and effort than they're willing to expend.
Kind of. I taught at a school that issued MacBooks for lab sections (the loans began and ended with the lab period).
The MacBooks in question were running Windows.
The parent poster had already made the point I was going to make, by the way, that Windows, by and large is a "safer" choice for many, many people.
I've lost my taste for the death penalty over the years (in my 20's, I would have gladly told you to put any convicted pedophile to death as soon as humanly possible). It's the result of a system that creates criminals only to punish them. That's why I agree with you in theory, but in practice, a lot of the bite gets lost by the fact that the penal system continues to punish, not rehabilitate (you surround a criminal with criminals, the only thing you ever produce is someone who knows how to interact with criminals). And then society continues to punish.
Not that I can terribly blame society for mistrusting criminals. Again, the penal system doesn't do a good job of rehab. Some criminals return to the cycle of criminal behavior because sometimes, they have no idea what else to do.
It makes me truly sad that as a society, we're at an impasse when it comes to criminals. You can rehab the hell out of someone, but even the most self-aware criminals know there's not much hope of a regular life for them.
And no, I have no idea how to fix that. I wish I did, but I suspect there's no money in fixing that problem even if I had a few decent ideas.
Real cybersecurity would require massively increasing the financial liability of corporations for any breach in security that causes their customers to lose money or waste time. For example, when a data breach at Home Depot causes banks to have to reissue credit cards, banks should be financially responsible to their customers for the many hours they have to waste on dealing with new credit card numbers, and Home Depot should be financially responsible to banks for all their resulting costs. If each of these data breaches cost corporations a few billion dollars, you'd be surprised how quickly security shapes up.
This is 100% correct, but it would also require people to be responsible for their own accounts, at least to some extent. There are some people that still use default passwords for their accounts, or easily guessable ones. And that's just the least of problems with individuals.
The truth is, no one, not providers, not consumers, not the Government, not anyone, regards computer security for the crime-lousy potential that it holds. Because that would acknowledge some really scary truths about the way it actually operates, or the amount of work a user has to do in order to protect oneself.
The difference between me and other people is that I don't interject the names of the people I favor unless asked to, or to offer an alternative when one name is shouted from the heavens as an answer.
I didn't whinge and whine when Abrams was announced, nor did I shout "My guy is better than that".
I don't really HAVE a guy. I'm just annoyed with the idea that Whedon is the answer to a question that nobody asked, ESPECIALLY since there are BETTER writer/directors in the business.
That doesn't make me a troll, by the way. It makes me someone who disagrees.