Welcome to the world as it stands in 2013. You are damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. If you do or do not do something, it can be perceived as sexist and misogynistic because you did or not do it. In fact, it doesn't even have to offend. Some pudgy white college boy in his dorm room merely has to assert that it's theoretical that someone could possibly be so sensitive as to find it offensive or harmful and it is just as bad as if it actually was offensive or harmful. It makes these discussions so much more difficult, because we're dealing with multiple layers of reality. Often, we're not discussing actual harm or actual potential harm based in reality. Just the perception that it could be construed in a certain way -- usually raised as a concern by someone who doesn't fall even remotely within the demographic of person the offense is being taken on-behalf-of.
In this case, not allowing the subject in a talk (especially when it's being given by someone who is a female sex-blogger activist sort of person) could easily be accused of being discriminatory and insensitive. Only the sexist woman-hating male geek culture would ban a woman from talking about issues that matter to women. On the other hand, they're guilty of the same things if they allow it, because it's discriminatory and insensitive to women who might claim "trigger! durp durp!". There is simply no winning position, here.
It seems the only winning move to make in any of these situations, these days, is to approach your content honestly and with sincerity and just let the rest of the world go fuck itself with its constant allegations that absolutely every single thing done is sexist or misogynistic (and that every single thing not done is, too).
Awful things happen to people, in this world. That doesn't mean the rest of the world owes you a life-time of walking on eggshells and altering their speech and behavior which is completely innocent, except when it brings up your bad memories. Memories are a thing that YOU need to cope with. Not the world. Even if they're horrible ones. Stamping your feet, pointing a finger at the other person, and shouting "YOU SAID A TRIGGER!" doesn't accomplish anything. It doesn't even help you with your bad memories. It just helps you unload on another human being who did nothing wrong, because of YOUR problem that YOU are still trying to cope with.
There are also a number of other things that have nothing to do with rape that would be just as (un)reasonable to worry about bringing up bad memories about, but people usually just deal with the memory coming up on their own and don't make a scene about it.
I've known a number of people who have been either molested in childhood or raped at some point in their lives and while the degree to which they remained impacted by it on a daily basis varied, none of them went around shouting "trigger! trigger!". Sometimes things brought back the memories they wanted to forget, but instead of going nuclear in an attention-getting sympathy-begging public moment, they just tried to process it themselves. Or, in the most extreme cases, found a polite way to remove themselves from the situation and go off to be alone for awhile.
Shrieking "trigger!" and making everyone around you feel like they've done something wrong is just absurd and fruitless.
Violet Blue is a woman. She's a sex-blogger with a pretty infamous reputation. Supposedly a pro-geek, sex progressive person who countered both of those positions a few years ago when she filed a lawsuit against a porn actress who worked under the same name (and had been using that name much longer than the blogger has been). The irony that one of this SF/San Diego hipster sex blogger types are the ones criticized for offending is fucking hilarious, to me.
I am also baffled at why they are taking this seriously. A woman read what was going to be said and then said if it was said at the conference, she would lose her shit, because it was a "trigger' (a trigger is a word that you get to use as an excuse to point out to the world that you were violated and make everyone around you feel uncomfortable and guilty about your outburst, while you take no responsibility or blame, because you get to use the "you said a trigger word you bad person!" defense). I mean, she already knows what is said in the talk. she read the words. And she knows they're coming. So it should all be good, right? I mean, this is like reading the manuscript to a film and then saying "oh man, I am going to be so surprised when I watch this movie and find out that Bruce Willis is a ghost!".
I'm sorry, but if you're so overly concerned with the sexual nature of a talk that someone is going to give at your conference, why would you invite a hipster sex-blogger to give a talk? (And one who does pretty anti-geek things like sue a porn star for using the name "Violet Blue", even though she's been using it longer than you have.)
Mostly, I find this whole thing fucking hilarious, primarily because of the "personalities" involved and the sides they're stuck on in this back and forth.
You recalling bad memories are your problem and any number of things could "trigger" those memories. A smell. A sound. A face. A word. An environment. And who is to decide which are so horrible that they have to be avoided? Anything that might remind abused women of their domestic violence in the past? Anything that might remind a drug user of drugs? Anything that might remind a rape victim that they were raped? Anything that might bring back memories of being beaten as a child? Anything that might bring back memories of losing your child in a horrible accident?
In my experience, people don't want to be "protected" from "triggers". They eagerly await the use of "triggers" so that they can be aghast and make a big ordeal out of this thing they claim to not want to think about at all, in the first place. A lot of us probably have some particularly horrendous memories that we stuff far down and try not to ever recall. Other people unknowingly and inadvertently say or do something to bring them back up in our mind. We fucking deal with it. However, the people who talk about "triggers", in my experience, don't just deal with it. Thy stop everything and bring it up and make a huge ordeal of it, because "trigger" is an opportunity for them to unload on the world about this fucking awful thing that they experienced.
It's fine to adjust your speech for the individual in front of you, if you are aware of things that they are sensitive to and that you don't want to make them uncomfortable about, but you don't need to do that across the board in all of your life "just in case". Especially since idiotic things are claimed to be "triggers". For example, when I had a girl nearly take my fucking head off, because I described how the dinner I had the night before kind of made me gag. Turns out "gag" is her trigger and I was a horrible human being for ever saying "gag". I mean, seriously, what the fuck? At a certain point -- and it isn't that far off in the distance -- YOU are responsible for YOUR memories and dealing with them in YOUR head. It is not a task to put off on the rest of society to nerf their conversations and situations so as not to tip over your clearly precariously balanced mental-apple cart.
"Triggers" are words, phrases, or topics that make people recall bad memories. For most of society and most of mankind's history, people have just dealt with it and not made a federal case about it. Parents who have lost their children to some horrible accident don't go around telling people to stop talking about their children or stop putting children in movies because it reminds them of the loss of their own child. People who were violently abused as children don't go around being offended or telling people to stop talking about things that remind them of being abused or that reminds them of how they didn't have great parents or a great childhood. However, with rape or molestation, you get to spend the rest of your life stopping the flow of conversation and saying "THANKS FOR UTTERING A TRIGGER, ASSHOLE! What might have been an innocently used word or phrase on your part just reminded me about that one time WHEN I GOT RAPED" and then you get to enjoy the awkward moment and feel like a shitty person for doing absolutely nothing wrong, because some self-absorbed, self-involved, navel-gazing person who has gone through an absolutely horrendous and horrifyingly atrocious violation earlier in their life needs to constantly throw out the "trigger" thing as an excuse to stop the world and, in a manner of speaking, say "HEY WORLD, I GOT RAPED OR MOLESTED. I CAN'T COPE WITH THIS OR PROCESS IT, SO SINCE YOU BROUGHT UP A WORD THAT REMINDED ME OF IT, I GET TO USE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE AN ISSUE OUT OF IT AND GET A LITTLE ATTENTION FOR THIS THING THAT I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT BUT AM ALWAYS HAPPY TO MAKE A BIG DEAL OUT OF WHEN IT COMES UP!".
Horrible things happen to people. Seriously heartbreaking things that make you lose all faith in humanity. There's nothing wrong with talking about it, if it helps you. But there is also nothing wrong with people going on with their own lives talking about things without having to constantly worry about the potential hangups of every individual in an audience or within earshot of a conversation. You have no specific right -- nor do you even have any specific expectation of someone even out of thoughtfulness -- to not have bad memories come up and it's nobody's fault when they do.
If you can only network when you're physically in front of everybody, then you're doing it wrong. If you'd rather get pinged by 500 people per minute in person, instead of ignoring IM and having triggers set to alert you to important people or events in IM only, then that's your personal choice.
I've found that I save the time of ridiculous commutes. In a decade and a half, I've probably saved more than 15,000 hours by not community. And those 15,000 hours have gone straight back into work. And many more hours, on top of that. And I don't mind. I get paid well and I work from home full time. Being flexible, being available, and sometimes working crazy hours, and regularly working some extra hours is entirely fine with me if the trade-off is not having to rot away under fluorescent lights in an open floor plan for the rest of my life and spending a sixth of my life in traffic. Maybe if I hated my job, I wouldn't enjoy the extra hours, but I love what I do - so whatever.
On the other hand, I'm sure there are some people who want the two totally separated or are the "it's 5pm, I'm the hell out of here and I don't care" type. And that's fine. Nobody is forcing them, usually, to work remotely.
I've been fortunate enough to work for awesome managers my entire career who have always taken the mindset of "I don't give a damn where you work, as long as you work". After my first six months in my first real career contract, I went to my boss one night and said that a family member was sick and that my family asked me to return soon as he could have weeks or months left, for all they knew. I told my boss I needed to move back home, a thousand miles away, and start working remotely.
I had a first class plane ticket that night, boarded the next morning, and was back home -- permanently -- by the next afternoon and have continued ever since.
If you're being paid to do shit work for shit wages, you probably need to be supervised. If you are a professional in a professional career, paid a professional salary, you should be self-reliant and accountable and everyone else should expect that of you, too. If you can't be trusted to perform on your own steam in your own office, then you shouldn't have been hired, in the first place.
My colleagues and I are spread across at least half a dozen states and a couple countries and our manager is not within a thousand miles of three quarters of us. And his manager is 3,000 miles away from *him*. And we've managed in high stress, mission-critical, crazy-hour, professional situations for almost two decades, doing this. It gets easier and more productive, every year, too. Thanks to things like video conferencing, voice conferencing, web-ex style services, telephones, instant messaging, email, etc.
I find that the shitty attitude a lot of people have is simply because they don't personally think they could manage (or wouldn't be allowed) to work form home, so they think nobody else should, either. Unless you're assembling cars, building a house, or working at a cash register, there aren't really any knowledge-worker jobs that can't be done just as well or better, remotely, with proper use of the tools (think of the flexibility and extra time with no commute that people inevitably end up re-investing in spending far more than their 40hrs/week working).
Not exactly sure how that's an "insightful" comment. Every knowledge job can be done remotely. Working in the office, because working at home would "prove your job could be outsourced" would be kafka-esque.
If you don't have children, your job is to work in an office and cover for all the time the people with kids take off every week for PTA meetings. And doctor appointments. And picking the kids up early. And taking the kids late on half days. And leaving early to take the kids to birthday parties and soccer practice. And staying home because the kids are sick.
Of course, there are plenty of busy bodies who would then argue that if everyone had roll-cages in cars, they'd become reckless maniacs on the road, because they'd know they were invulnerable.:P
Except it seems clear to me that one of the primary reason these people attend the races is for the chance to see these exciting wrecks. They're going so that they can see carnage and when they got what they were waiting patiently the whole day for, they reacted favorably -- fueled by adrenaline or otherwise. And then they got a taste of it, directly, amid their cheering at someone else's wreckage, before it became their own.
As I said, it's gross. I couldn't quite come to call it hypocrisy and I wouldn't exactly call it "wrong", since everyone is there willingly and everyone's getting paid or paying for the experience on both sides of the fence. Just that . . . there's still something inherently gross about that whole moment and it starts with the reaction of the fans, in my mind.
My analysis and phrasing of the situation was based on the fact that the crowd was relatively quiet as they watched the race and it wasn't until the cars wrecked -- far in the distance at the turn -- that everyone began clapping and cheering. If they were sports enthusiasts giving out a good old cheer of support for respectable competitors in the final laps of said competition, why did they only dart their attention to the action and start cheering and clapping when the accident occurred? That's, specifically, what I was referring to as a sickening ejaculatory reaction.
It seems clear to me that Dan East was being willfully obtuse about my statement so that he could use my phrase in his inaccurate restatement of the events of the video which are pretty clear to anyone that watches it, despite how he positions it in text.
The definition of "sport" is "An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others". My understanding of NASCAR is that it involves both a lot of physical exertion and skill, no matter how boring it is to spectate.
Of course, "physical exertion" doesn't really mean anything. The word "exertion" simply means "effort". There is no definition of how much physical exertion is required for something to be a sport or to be athletic. In that case, I guess you could say poker, darts, bowling, scrabble, and Letterpress on iOS are "sports".
At any rate, as few fucks as I give about NASCAR, I'd have a hard time saying it doesn't require a lot of physical effort or mental skill.
I understand the context of this video, just fine, despite your attempt to insincerely and misleadingly describe it.
At no point did I say that cheering on people in a competition was "practically ejaculating" and you know what was clear in my statement. Including my phrasing into an entirely different set of circumstances, which you describe in your post, but did not actually happen is bullshit. I didn't describe cheering on good sportsmanship and competition as "practically ejaculating". I described leaping to your feet, cheering, and clapping as you enthusiastically partake in the carnage down and approaching form the track as "practically ejaculating". Don't act like there's not a huge fucking difference between the two.
The crowd is nearly SILENT, even as the cars approach the corner, until the first part of the wreck begins off in the distance when they rest of them start to stand up and begin cheering and clapping.
I have nothing against the sport. It seems dumb as hell to watch, but that doesn't mean there isn't incredible technology and skill to compete in it. Watching dudes turn left would be dull as hell to spectate, though. I can get into some X-Games rally racing and stuff, though. That's remarkably exciting to watch.
Slashdot is linking to Kotaku content? Why not just link directly to blogspam (which, frankly, would be better quality than the link-bait drivel on Kotaku)?
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the world as it stands in 2013. You are damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. If you do or do not do something, it can be perceived as sexist and misogynistic because you did or not do it. In fact, it doesn't even have to offend. Some pudgy white college boy in his dorm room merely has to assert that it's theoretical that someone could possibly be so sensitive as to find it offensive or harmful and it is just as bad as if it actually was offensive or harmful. It makes these discussions so much more difficult, because we're dealing with multiple layers of reality. Often, we're not discussing actual harm or actual potential harm based in reality. Just the perception that it could be construed in a certain way -- usually raised as a concern by someone who doesn't fall even remotely within the demographic of person the offense is being taken on-behalf-of.
In this case, not allowing the subject in a talk (especially when it's being given by someone who is a female sex-blogger activist sort of person) could easily be accused of being discriminatory and insensitive. Only the sexist woman-hating male geek culture would ban a woman from talking about issues that matter to women. On the other hand, they're guilty of the same things if they allow it, because it's discriminatory and insensitive to women who might claim "trigger! durp durp!". There is simply no winning position, here.
It seems the only winning move to make in any of these situations, these days, is to approach your content honestly and with sincerity and just let the rest of the world go fuck itself with its constant allegations that absolutely every single thing done is sexist or misogynistic (and that every single thing not done is, too).
Awful things happen to people, in this world. That doesn't mean the rest of the world owes you a life-time of walking on eggshells and altering their speech and behavior which is completely innocent, except when it brings up your bad memories. Memories are a thing that YOU need to cope with. Not the world. Even if they're horrible ones. Stamping your feet, pointing a finger at the other person, and shouting "YOU SAID A TRIGGER!" doesn't accomplish anything. It doesn't even help you with your bad memories. It just helps you unload on another human being who did nothing wrong, because of YOUR problem that YOU are still trying to cope with.
There are also a number of other things that have nothing to do with rape that would be just as (un)reasonable to worry about bringing up bad memories about, but people usually just deal with the memory coming up on their own and don't make a scene about it.
I've known a number of people who have been either molested in childhood or raped at some point in their lives and while the degree to which they remained impacted by it on a daily basis varied, none of them went around shouting "trigger! trigger!". Sometimes things brought back the memories they wanted to forget, but instead of going nuclear in an attention-getting sympathy-begging public moment, they just tried to process it themselves. Or, in the most extreme cases, found a polite way to remove themselves from the situation and go off to be alone for awhile.
Shrieking "trigger!" and making everyone around you feel like they've done something wrong is just absurd and fruitless.
Violet Blue is a woman. She's a sex-blogger with a pretty infamous reputation. Supposedly a pro-geek, sex progressive person who countered both of those positions a few years ago when she filed a lawsuit against a porn actress who worked under the same name (and had been using that name much longer than the blogger has been). The irony that one of this SF/San Diego hipster sex blogger types are the ones criticized for offending is fucking hilarious, to me.
I am also baffled at why they are taking this seriously. A woman read what was going to be said and then said if it was said at the conference, she would lose her shit, because it was a "trigger' (a trigger is a word that you get to use as an excuse to point out to the world that you were violated and make everyone around you feel uncomfortable and guilty about your outburst, while you take no responsibility or blame, because you get to use the "you said a trigger word you bad person!" defense). I mean, she already knows what is said in the talk. she read the words. And she knows they're coming. So it should all be good, right? I mean, this is like reading the manuscript to a film and then saying "oh man, I am going to be so surprised when I watch this movie and find out that Bruce Willis is a ghost!".
It just reeks of being totally disingenuous.
I'm sorry, but if you're so overly concerned with the sexual nature of a talk that someone is going to give at your conference, why would you invite a hipster sex-blogger to give a talk? (And one who does pretty anti-geek things like sue a porn star for using the name "Violet Blue", even though she's been using it longer than you have.)
Mostly, I find this whole thing fucking hilarious, primarily because of the "personalities" involved and the sides they're stuck on in this back and forth.
Why?
You recalling bad memories are your problem and any number of things could "trigger" those memories. A smell. A sound. A face. A word. An environment. And who is to decide which are so horrible that they have to be avoided? Anything that might remind abused women of their domestic violence in the past? Anything that might remind a drug user of drugs? Anything that might remind a rape victim that they were raped? Anything that might bring back memories of being beaten as a child? Anything that might bring back memories of losing your child in a horrible accident?
In my experience, people don't want to be "protected" from "triggers". They eagerly await the use of "triggers" so that they can be aghast and make a big ordeal out of this thing they claim to not want to think about at all, in the first place. A lot of us probably have some particularly horrendous memories that we stuff far down and try not to ever recall. Other people unknowingly and inadvertently say or do something to bring them back up in our mind. We fucking deal with it. However, the people who talk about "triggers", in my experience, don't just deal with it. Thy stop everything and bring it up and make a huge ordeal of it, because "trigger" is an opportunity for them to unload on the world about this fucking awful thing that they experienced.
It's fine to adjust your speech for the individual in front of you, if you are aware of things that they are sensitive to and that you don't want to make them uncomfortable about, but you don't need to do that across the board in all of your life "just in case". Especially since idiotic things are claimed to be "triggers". For example, when I had a girl nearly take my fucking head off, because I described how the dinner I had the night before kind of made me gag. Turns out "gag" is her trigger and I was a horrible human being for ever saying "gag". I mean, seriously, what the fuck? At a certain point -- and it isn't that far off in the distance -- YOU are responsible for YOUR memories and dealing with them in YOUR head. It is not a task to put off on the rest of society to nerf their conversations and situations so as not to tip over your clearly precariously balanced mental-apple cart.
"Triggers" are words, phrases, or topics that make people recall bad memories. For most of society and most of mankind's history, people have just dealt with it and not made a federal case about it. Parents who have lost their children to some horrible accident don't go around telling people to stop talking about their children or stop putting children in movies because it reminds them of the loss of their own child. People who were violently abused as children don't go around being offended or telling people to stop talking about things that remind them of being abused or that reminds them of how they didn't have great parents or a great childhood. However, with rape or molestation, you get to spend the rest of your life stopping the flow of conversation and saying "THANKS FOR UTTERING A TRIGGER, ASSHOLE! What might have been an innocently used word or phrase on your part just reminded me about that one time WHEN I GOT RAPED" and then you get to enjoy the awkward moment and feel like a shitty person for doing absolutely nothing wrong, because some self-absorbed, self-involved, navel-gazing person who has gone through an absolutely horrendous and horrifyingly atrocious violation earlier in their life needs to constantly throw out the "trigger" thing as an excuse to stop the world and, in a manner of speaking, say "HEY WORLD, I GOT RAPED OR MOLESTED. I CAN'T COPE WITH THIS OR PROCESS IT, SO SINCE YOU BROUGHT UP A WORD THAT REMINDED ME OF IT, I GET TO USE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE AN ISSUE OUT OF IT AND GET A LITTLE ATTENTION FOR THIS THING THAT I DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT BUT AM ALWAYS HAPPY TO MAKE A BIG DEAL OUT OF WHEN IT COMES UP!".
Horrible things happen to people. Seriously heartbreaking things that make you lose all faith in humanity. There's nothing wrong with talking about it, if it helps you. But there is also nothing wrong with people going on with their own lives talking about things without having to constantly worry about the potential hangups of every individual in an audience or within earshot of a conversation. You have no specific right -- nor do you even have any specific expectation of someone even out of thoughtfulness -- to not have bad memories come up and it's nobody's fault when they do.
Rolled over at the first sign of adversity?
Are you seriously?
I don't think you have made yourself even remotely familiar with the case, whatsoever, by that statement alone.
A lot of companies have remote/satellite drop-in offices for just this thing.
I just don't get it. Either you produce output or you don't. Why does someone need to videotape your every constant action to determine that output?
If you can only network when you're physically in front of everybody, then you're doing it wrong. If you'd rather get pinged by 500 people per minute in person, instead of ignoring IM and having triggers set to alert you to important people or events in IM only, then that's your personal choice.
I've found that I save the time of ridiculous commutes. In a decade and a half, I've probably saved more than 15,000 hours by not community. And those 15,000 hours have gone straight back into work. And many more hours, on top of that. And I don't mind. I get paid well and I work from home full time. Being flexible, being available, and sometimes working crazy hours, and regularly working some extra hours is entirely fine with me if the trade-off is not having to rot away under fluorescent lights in an open floor plan for the rest of my life and spending a sixth of my life in traffic. Maybe if I hated my job, I wouldn't enjoy the extra hours, but I love what I do - so whatever.
On the other hand, I'm sure there are some people who want the two totally separated or are the "it's 5pm, I'm the hell out of here and I don't care" type. And that's fine. Nobody is forcing them, usually, to work remotely.
I've been fortunate enough to work for awesome managers my entire career who have always taken the mindset of "I don't give a damn where you work, as long as you work". After my first six months in my first real career contract, I went to my boss one night and said that a family member was sick and that my family asked me to return soon as he could have weeks or months left, for all they knew. I told my boss I needed to move back home, a thousand miles away, and start working remotely.
I had a first class plane ticket that night, boarded the next morning, and was back home -- permanently -- by the next afternoon and have continued ever since.
If you're being paid to do shit work for shit wages, you probably need to be supervised. If you are a professional in a professional career, paid a professional salary, you should be self-reliant and accountable and everyone else should expect that of you, too. If you can't be trusted to perform on your own steam in your own office, then you shouldn't have been hired, in the first place.
Oh no, I won't get promoted to a management position that I don't want! My life is over!
My colleagues and I are spread across at least half a dozen states and a couple countries and our manager is not within a thousand miles of three quarters of us. And his manager is 3,000 miles away from *him*. And we've managed in high stress, mission-critical, crazy-hour, professional situations for almost two decades, doing this. It gets easier and more productive, every year, too. Thanks to things like video conferencing, voice conferencing, web-ex style services, telephones, instant messaging, email, etc.
I find that the shitty attitude a lot of people have is simply because they don't personally think they could manage (or wouldn't be allowed) to work form home, so they think nobody else should, either. Unless you're assembling cars, building a house, or working at a cash register, there aren't really any knowledge-worker jobs that can't be done just as well or better, remotely, with proper use of the tools (think of the flexibility and extra time with no commute that people inevitably end up re-investing in spending far more than their 40hrs/week working).
Not exactly sure how that's an "insightful" comment. Every knowledge job can be done remotely. Working in the office, because working at home would "prove your job could be outsourced" would be kafka-esque.
If you don't have children, your job is to work in an office and cover for all the time the people with kids take off every week for PTA meetings. And doctor appointments. And picking the kids up early. And taking the kids late on half days. And leaving early to take the kids to birthday parties and soccer practice. And staying home because the kids are sick.
Of course, there are plenty of busy bodies who would then argue that if everyone had roll-cages in cars, they'd become reckless maniacs on the road, because they'd know they were invulnerable. :P
Except it seems clear to me that one of the primary reason these people attend the races is for the chance to see these exciting wrecks. They're going so that they can see carnage and when they got what they were waiting patiently the whole day for, they reacted favorably -- fueled by adrenaline or otherwise. And then they got a taste of it, directly, amid their cheering at someone else's wreckage, before it became their own.
As I said, it's gross. I couldn't quite come to call it hypocrisy and I wouldn't exactly call it "wrong", since everyone is there willingly and everyone's getting paid or paying for the experience on both sides of the fence. Just that . . . there's still something inherently gross about that whole moment and it starts with the reaction of the fans, in my mind.
My analysis and phrasing of the situation was based on the fact that the crowd was relatively quiet as they watched the race and it wasn't until the cars wrecked -- far in the distance at the turn -- that everyone began clapping and cheering. If they were sports enthusiasts giving out a good old cheer of support for respectable competitors in the final laps of said competition, why did they only dart their attention to the action and start cheering and clapping when the accident occurred? That's, specifically, what I was referring to as a sickening ejaculatory reaction.
It seems clear to me that Dan East was being willfully obtuse about my statement so that he could use my phrase in his inaccurate restatement of the events of the video which are pretty clear to anyone that watches it, despite how he positions it in text.
The definition of "sport" is "An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others". My understanding of NASCAR is that it involves both a lot of physical exertion and skill, no matter how boring it is to spectate.
Of course, "physical exertion" doesn't really mean anything. The word "exertion" simply means "effort". There is no definition of how much physical exertion is required for something to be a sport or to be athletic. In that case, I guess you could say poker, darts, bowling, scrabble, and Letterpress on iOS are "sports".
At any rate, as few fucks as I give about NASCAR, I'd have a hard time saying it doesn't require a lot of physical effort or mental skill.
I understand the context of this video, just fine, despite your attempt to insincerely and misleadingly describe it.
At no point did I say that cheering on people in a competition was "practically ejaculating" and you know what was clear in my statement. Including my phrasing into an entirely different set of circumstances, which you describe in your post, but did not actually happen is bullshit. I didn't describe cheering on good sportsmanship and competition as "practically ejaculating". I described leaping to your feet, cheering, and clapping as you enthusiastically partake in the carnage down and approaching form the track as "practically ejaculating". Don't act like there's not a huge fucking difference between the two.
The crowd is nearly SILENT , even as the cars approach the corner, until the first part of the wreck begins off in the distance when they rest of them start to stand up and begin cheering and clapping .
I have nothing against the sport. It seems dumb as hell to watch, but that doesn't mean there isn't incredible technology and skill to compete in it. Watching dudes turn left would be dull as hell to spectate, though. I can get into some X-Games rally racing and stuff, though. That's remarkably exciting to watch.
I'm on to you. You just want me to get hit in the skull with a massive NASCAR tire.
Slashdot is linking to Kotaku content? Why not just link directly to blogspam (which, frankly, would be better quality than the link-bait drivel on Kotaku)?
In practice, I believe these clauses of the DMCA only apply to the little guys.