Let me put it into a different metaphor (I just thought of this, and though it's not perfect, it's fairly apt):
Imagine a man finds out his wife is cheating on him. When she gets home, he confronts her.
Husband: So, I just found out that you're cheating on me.
Wfie: Oh, damn. I'm sorry. That was wrong of me. However, um... you also didn't take out the trash last night. So I think we should all just admit that none of us are perfect.
Husband: What? No, that's not the same. You lied to me and betrayed my trust. You could have gotten an STD or something, so you were endangering my health.
Wife: Well yeah, you said you were going to take the trash out and you didn't, so you lied to me and broke my trust. And having garbage in the house could possibly affect my health. So, I don't really see how these aren't the same. I think we can all just agree that we were both wrong.
Husband: I can't believe you're justifying cheating on me by saying it's the same as not taking out the garbage. That's not a defense for what you've done.
Wife: Oh, no, I'm not defending what I've done. When did I say that it was ok to cheat on you? Tell me when! I didn't say it, so you're a lying asshole for saying that I defended what I've done. I'm just saying that we both did things that were bad. Cheating was bad. Not taking out the trash was bad. We both did bad things, so... you know, I think we're both to blame here.
Now, what do you think? Is the wife being neutral there?
Sorry, at which point did I excuse nazis? Do point out it, because I haven't seen it.
Every time you answer, "Yeah, but..." or equate them with other protestors. If I say "Charles Manson is a crazy murderer," and you go, "Yeah, sure... but you know, there are a lot of murderers in the world. And every time you eat meat, aren't you also murdering an animal? Since there's a lot of murder going on, I don't see why you're singling out Manson for condemnation!" then you're defending Charles Manson. It's a weak defense that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but it's a defense.
You said that Trump was wrong, I asked objectively who started the violence and you haven't answered this.
The Nazis did. They murdered a woman.
Sure, Nazis are bad. Thing is, I do get to say that people using violence to prevent speech are bad too.
Again, "Yeah, but..."
It's not an either or...
No, it's not, but that's not relevant. If I say Nazis are bad, and counter my argument by claiming you like Ice cream, I think you'd agree that it's not relevant. It doesn't need to be either Nazis are bad or you like ice cream. Both can be true. But it's not really an argument against what I'm saying, so why bring it up?
But time and time again, when someone says, "Nazis are bad," you counter with "Yeah, but some people who don't like Nazis are also bad," and you seem to think it's a relevant counter-argument. You're implying, "You're wrong to say that Nazis are bad, because these other people are also bad."
So really, you're wrong on two levels. First, because the badness is not equivalent. You have one group with a minority of people who are doing somewhat bad things, and the other group where their entire reason for the group existing is bad.
And you're wrong also because it's totally irrelevant. Even if the counter-protestors were just as bad, it's not a relevant counter-argument to "Nazis are bad." And honestly, it speaks volumes that you (and Trump) still can't just say, "Nazis are bad," without also presenting the counter argument that "the people who don't like Nazis are also bad." It tells me a lot about where you stand.
Thing is, I didn't just call them 'assholes', I called them cunts. I'd have called them an arsehole if I'd wanted to.
So what's the difference, and how does that excuse Nazis?
I don't need to decide which is the greater set of wanking pieces of shit, I get to accuse them all. They're all arseholes.
So why does this excuse Nazis? That's the question. Because essentially people are saying, "Nazis are bad." and you and Mr. Trump are saying, "Yeah, a lot of them aren't nice people. Some of them are, but a lot of them aren't, and there are other mean people who aren't Nazis."
And then people are saying, "Yeah, I don't care about that. Nazis are bad."
And you're saying, "Yeah, but other people are bad too. I don't like it when people are mean, I agree."
And we're saying, "Ok, whatever, but can we just agree that Nazis are bad?"
And you're saying, "Well, I mean, I guess some of them are bad, just like some of any group are bad."
So why is it that you can't just agree that Nazis are bad, without saying, "Yeah, but..."?
I can be neutral about their right to free speech though.
Yeah, but that's not quite what you're doing. You're not only "being neutral" about their right to free speech, you're also trying to take a neutral stance between the groups and the nature of what they're saying.
Just because one group was 90% cunts doesn't let the 20-30% of the other group get away with acting like them.
Yeah, you're rationalizing. Even if we accepted your numbers, of 90% vs 25%, it would highlight the fact that one group was overwhelmingly "cunts" while the other only had a minority of them.
But even with that assessment, I have objections. First, to be picky and say, there's something odd to me about just calling them "assholes" (I'm going to substitute in "assholes" since Americans don't use "cunts" so often). Like, if some guy cuts in front of me in line, he's an asshole. A guy who buys and fancy dinner and doesn't leave a tip, he's an asshole. If he's also a Nazi, it kind of crosses into something else. You can't just be like, "Sure, that guy wants to exterminate the Jews, but that other guy over there didn't leave a tip for his waiter. They're both assholes, so it's the same thing."
Also, in my mind, 90% is too low a number. There wasn't 10% of the people in that group that were good. There's something wrong with 100% of the people who march with Nazis in support of enslaving black people. I don't know how many people among the counter-protestors that were assholes, so I can't argue with your 30% estimation, but I think that's probably much too high.
So I think I would have to say that it's true, just because 100% of one group are absolutely inexcusably awful people, that doesn't excuse 30% of an opposing group being assholes. But even more importantly, the possibility that 30% of one group are being assholes doesn't begin to excuse 100% of the other group being inexcusably awful people.
"I once dealt with a black person who wasn't very nice" is not an excuse for being a literal Nazi.
Well, this is the problem. People seem to be avoiding the whole 'how the fuck did this start' question and going straight to 'shit, look at the outcome'.
Ok, well it was thousands of people, and I would grant straight off that there were surely people on each side, scattered around here and there, who weren't doing the best things they could. I'm sure there were some minor scuffles and people being dicks about it, and I don't think we need to dissect each encounter in detail and try to figure out exactly who did what first.
... but there's no getting around it: One side was full of armed Nazis, the KKK, and other violent white nationalist groups. They were protesting against the removal of what was essentially a pro-slavery statue, and protesting against the general existence of jews, black people, and other minorities. The other side were protesting against Nazis, and included a protest group whose fundamental issue is "police shouldn't shoot black people when they don't have to". You can't just "be neutral" between those groups unless you're a bigot. Maybe you can if you just don't know what's going on and don't understand the context, but basically, no, you can't be neutral.
And then the whole thing was punctuated by a white supremacist trying to run down dozens of people with his car, successfully killing one woman. Again, you don't get to "be neutral" between the terrorist in the car and the people he ran down.
Yeah, I'm not trying to defend VS Code. I use it and find it useful (writing Powershell scripts on a Mac), but for the sake of argument I'll concede that it's a terrible tool and that Microsoft is the devil himself. Still, that doesn't explain how a developer lost 3 months of work.
Because if you're playing with a new tool that includes file editing and file management, it's not a good idea to experiment and test it out in a production environment with files that you rely on. Even if he hadn't accidentally deleted his files, it wouldn't be unheard of for a text file editor to alter the files in some way. Even if it just changes the encoding, that could break things and cause problems.
But regardless of all of that, where are the backups? Who, in this day and age, doesn't know that you should back up your important files? If you're any kind of computer professional, not having backups is kind of inexcusable.
Supposedly Trump actually doesn't deal well with confrontation or conflict. That's not to say that he never gets into conflict, but that he can't effectively deal with conflict.
If you think about it that way, it fits with his public persona. Trump seems to put everyone into one of two classes:
(1) People that he likes and who like everything about him
(2) People who he hates and who hate everything about him.
There doesn't seem to be anything in between. As long as everything is good and you're praising him, he'll like you and praise you. If he doesn't like something you're doing or you criticize anything he has done, then you're his enemy. It's a bit paradoxical, but labelling someone as an enemy can be a way of avoiding conflict. You don't need to sort the conflict out or come to a resolution. Their opinions and views no longer hold weight. If they don't approve of you, that's not a bad thing because they're "bad people" anyway.
It's a totally different thing to actually deal with conflict. If you have a conflict with someone that you don't want to be your enemy (or you can't afford to have them be your enemy), then you actually have to deal with the conflict. You have to confront and resolve the issue somehow.
Apparently, that is the thing that Trump isn't really able to do. If he has some sort of disagreement with someone who he can't afford to berate on Twitter, he just goes silent and stops dealing with them. If they try to confront him, he begs off. He doesn't have to courage to admit that he's wrong or speak truth to power. If he likes you, he'll tell you want you want to hear, and if he doesn't like you, he insults you, but those are the only two types of interactions he can handle.
I ask this question as a neutral party; I have an equally low opinion of all politicians and, in general, public leaders.
So... I don't know if you're intentionally lying to us in order to make yourself sound more reasonable, or if you're just lying to yourself, but you're not neutral. Even if true that you "have an equally low opinion of all politicians", that means that you have a bias that favors really awful politicians and puts them on the same level as the best politicians. That's not neutral. Neutral isn't just "not taking sides". When you stay out of a fight, that's a side that you're taking.
Hell, he wasn't even wrong in his comments about who was contributing to the violence.
This is some nice rhetoric. You could say that everyone was "contributing to the violence". But that's not the issue here. However many people "contributed" in some small way, we should be asking questions like: Who is ultimately responsible for the violence? Who was the chief perpetrator of violence? Who instigated the violence? Who committed the worst of the violence?
If you're walking down the street and a mugger attacks you, you "contribute to the violence" if you make any attempt to fight back. Hell, someone could argue that you have contributed to the violence just by being there, and providing the mugger with a target. However, it'd be absolutely wrong for someone to assign you responsibility for the violent interaction overall.
In that sense, both you and Trump are wrong.
And honestly, it shows that you're not "neutral". You're siding with Trump. Your whole post is a defense of Trump. Your only criticism is that he's "tone deaf", but in the context of a post where you claim not to like politicians, that's not even a criticism.
And here's the dilemma I find myself in: I can't tell if you're a troll, a pro-Trump shill, or a genuinely misguided person. If misguided, then it may be worth talking to you. Otherwise, I've just got to hope that you're going to be modded down.
I don't think they misunderstand the word. I think they believe that he's a fascist and a white nationalist who is allied with Neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white supremacy groups.
You can argue that they're incorrect. For example, Bannon just gave an interview where he insulted various white supremacy groups. I think it's hard to deny, however, that he at least courted the favor of white nationalists as a political strategy. In any case, I don't think people are confused about the term.
I agree. I find it really disappointing how many people here seem to be looking for ways to excuse Nazis. They go through a lot of trouble to make it seem "fair" and "objective" by drawing false equivalences, and trying to distract from real issues.
Because first, as you point out, BLM is not in itself a violent extremist hate group. Its fundamental message is, "It's not ok for police to kill black people." To all the people saying, "white lives matter," yes, of course that's true. That goes without saying, literally, which is the point. The reason they aren't saying "white lives matter" is that we all know white lives matter without even saying it, but some of us don't seem to realize that black lives matter too, equally as much.
But I digress. The point is, though there may be some violent people associated with BLM, they're not equivalent to Nazis. Any group can have some violent members, but you have to look at the group as a whole, and it's just not fundamentally a violent group.
But aside from all of that, it doesn't matter. Even if BLM were a violent extremist group, it's irrelevant. It doesn't serve to justify Nazi groups, not even a little. We should condemn the Nazis, full stop. No justification or equivocation. Other people's bad acts are for another conversation.
Because when you say, "Sure the Nazis are bad, but BLM is bad too!", it doesn't count as a condemnation of the Nazis. What you're actually doing is taking a combative rhetorical stance, assuming that your opponent is on the side of BLM, and you're taking the side of the Nazis. Sure, you're literally saying that the Nazis are bad, but then you're defending them by comparing them to a group you assume your opponent will want to defend.
You also see this approach where Trump supporters will say, "Maybe Trump has done some unethical and illegal things, but Clinton is a crook!" Even if we were to assume that Clinton was a criminal, that's not a valid argument that we should ignore Trump's misdemeanors (and possibly high crimes).
I'm guess two things - first is that somehow you don't take all the "white people are bad" stuff personally.
In the rare cases that I do hear someone arguing that white people are bad, no I don't take it personally. Because those people are angry and irrational, and I don't put much stock in their opinion. They also aren't the people in power, so I don't fear those people. And I'm not a little snowflake who's going to whine if the whole world doesn't think I'm the greatest thing ever.
My observation is that a liberal is as biased against a redneck just as much or more as a KKK member is against PoC.
This is nonsense, first because "redneck" and "liberal" aren't mutually exclusive. Second, because even if some liberals hate rednecks, the unifying liberal agenda isn't to get rid of all the rednecks. Third, I can't really think of a lot of examples, in public or in private, that I've heard of liberals advocating violence against rednecks, let alone genocide.
Hate is wrong, regardless of race.
This is a bullshit false equivalence. By this logic, you could say, "The prisoners in a WW2 German concentration camp were just as guilty as the Nazis. The prisoners hated the Nazis, and the Nazis hated the Jews/homosexuals/Romani/whatever, so they're both equally guilty." Sorry, no.
How is this modded "insightful"? White males are not oppressed. I am a white male living and working in one of those supposedly terrible liberal places, run by leftists, and I have never faced meaningful discrimination. I have never been in, seen, or heard of a workplace that intentionally tried to treat white males badly. I know a lot of liberal democrats, and none of them want white males to be treated badly.
The people I see complaining about the treatment of white males are people trying to invent a villain to blame their failures on.
I'm sure that was a joke. At least, my immediate response to it was to burst into laughter.
... the joke being that the poem it's referring to was written about the Nazis. The they in "First they came for the Socialists..." were the Nazis. But inserting "Nazis" in the place of "Socialists", I think it's meant to point out the absurdity of Nazis and other white supremacists pretending to be the victims. They're the victimizers.
Or #3: They fragment the catalog as much as they want. Their marketing people get to invent work for themselves. They pretty much force people to sign up to several services to get the content they want, and things just keep going on like that. Because we let them do it.
Consumers don't have enough backbone to just... stop watching some of the TV shows they like. Most people don't know how to pirate conveniently. So people will pay. They'll pay and they'll pay, and then they'll pay some more. How do you think we ended up paying $103 for cable, with almost all the channels also showing commercials?
I'm guessing, but I think that the reality is that a lot of the executives in the entertainment industry aren't actually very worried about piracy. They know it happens. They wish it didn't. They'll complain vocally about it. But it's not something that keeps them up at night.
The issue is control over distribution channels. Decades ago, studios were concerned that VHS sales would cut into theater ticket sales, and then that VHS rentals would cut into VHS sales. For a while, Disney even refused to release movies to VHS. Fundamentally, it's the same issue, and it's about control. When you went to the theater, not only did they get ticket sales, but they controlled when and where you saw the movie. They controlled how many people could see it with you. They controlled what you ate, and made money from selling junk food. The simple shift to allow you to purchase the movie and store it in your own home stripped all that control away. Not only did it change the nature of the transaction, but now the video store controlled the nature of the exchange, and the experience of the purchase.
So the shift to streaming presents a similar problem. Right now, Disney has a bunch of different distribution channels, and all their leverage and control of distribution comes from which channel they allow to have which products. Exclusivity allows them to drive up the price. Right now, they can tell Netflix, "Pay is $X or we'll release this movie on Starz instead." They can make sure the streaming companies promote their movies over other new releases. They can do cross-promotional deals. They have all kinds of marketing levers they can pull.
So the reality is, they simply don't want to push all of their movies onto all channels. It's not a money issue. There's no amount of money that Netflix could pay to get access to all Disney movies, because even with an excessive amount of money, Disney would have lost a lot of control. On the other hand, if they want to keep the control without splintering their catalog over a bunch of different services, they can open their own streaming service. Pulling all of their content from other streaming services to put it onto their own service would reduce their flexibility, since they wouldn't be able to form some strategic partnerships. However, it would maintain control.
The question, "Is this the End of Typing?" doesn't match with the story. From what I can tell from the summary, the story seems to be about the fact that there are masses of illiterate people getting online, and it may be better to communicate with those people using audio and video, since they can't read. Also, a lot of these people are in developing countries where infrastructure isn't great, so companies wanting to service them need to find ways to provide an audio/video interaction in that context. Ok, that's fair enough. Makes sense.
But that's a far cry from saying "no one will read or write anymore".** Text is an extremely efficient and useful method of communication. The reason we haven't moved to UIs based on speech recognition and text-to-speech merely because of the technological hurdles. In many cases, it's just easier, faster, less annoying, and more private to communicate via text.
** I don't know if that's actually what the argument argues, since it's behind a paywall.
One of the videos shows that they painted a road to look like a little girl is crouching down in the middle of the street. Maybe I'm just being silly, but my mind jumped back to the release of Windows Vista, and the initial versions of UAC.
In case you don't remember, Microsoft released Windows Vista with the great new security feature that every time your computer was about to do something that was a security risk, a window would pop up asking, "are you sure you want to do this?" Not only was this annoying, but people quickly adapted to these interruptions by thoughtlessly clicking "Ok" or "Yes" to any window that popped up on their screen. Microsoft set up a bunch of warnings, and the result was training users to ignore warnings.
So what I'd worry about here is that people are going to get used to the idea that these paintings aren't really speed bumps, and the little girl in the middle of the street isn't a real little girl. They'll get so used to it that they'll blow straight past it. And then, on some very unfortunate day, it'll turn out the it really was a little girl playing in the street.
Honestly, I think it's tricky. There's a value to being inclusive and open to other viewpoints. At the same time... there's a limit. After a certain point, a position can be so backward and hateful that it makes sense to say, "This is a viewpoint that's not welcome."
Because on one side of the spectrum, you have an innocuous and inoffensive difference of opinion. Then on the other end, you have people who think... I don't know, that the Nazis were right. Or that the US never should have ended slavery. On that far end of the spectrum, I don't think the government should stop people from saying it, but I think polite society is perfectly justified in saying, "We don't want to hear it", or even, "If that's the way you feel, we don't want to be associated with you". Not all opinions deserve to be respected.
So the tricky part is, where do you draw the line? Along that spectrum between "innocuous" and "offensive extremism", you have to draw a line between "opinions I disagree with, but should tolerate" and "opinions deserving of shame". Where is that line?
I think that's the question underlying this, and I don't think there's a simple answer. I could offer some opinions as to where the line should be drawn, or at least how to find the line, but it'd be a distraction to the point I'd like to make. I also don't intend to argue about the particular points made in the essay. However, there's been a tendency among "conservatives" in the past few years to cross that line, and then play the victim when people don't want to tolerate it. They confuse disagreement with oppression. They confuse having a constitutional freedom of speech with being free from the consequences of their own speech.
I think the critics of this essay should be able to consider whether it makes some valid points. At the same time, I think the people who want to defend this essay's author should be ready to admit that there just aren't acceptable to say.
Ok, so what does that word "inherent" mean in that context? Earlier, you brought up the phrase "objective measurement of perceived value". Is the "inherent" value some kind of objective value, or objective measurement of value?
Because I think I might have an idea of the mistake that you're making. You're saying that there's no "objective measurement of perceived value", but what you really want to say is that nothing has "objective value", and that all value is a matter of perception. But then, you also seem to want to put a lot of stock in this idea of an "inherent value", which seems to just be a stand-in for the idea of an "objective value". So you're saying:
* There's no such thing as objective value of an item
* There is only perceived value, i.e. the amount that people perceive an item to be worth
* If a person is willing to pay a certain amount for an item, that's proof that the item is perceived to be worth at least that much
* Therefore, the amount that someone is willing to pay is the objective value
I'm pretty sure I understand. You think that things need to have an "objective measurement of perceived value" in order to have the possibility of assigning value outside of "what someone is willing to pay". That is, you'd probably claim that in my example of someone paying $10k for a slice of bread, the slice is inherently worth $10k because someone was willing to pay that much, and there's no other meaningful way to talk about value.
That's my guess, anyway, from the nonsense talk about "objective measurement of perceived value".
I don't want to get too deeply philosophical here, but what do you think you're talking about when you use the phrase, "objective measurement of perceived value"? That seems like a dumb, nonsensical phrase to me.
Some things are more valuable than others. That much is true. It's possible to judge value incorrectly. I can think that something is worth $10k and be wrong about that. But I've never claimed that there's an "objective measurement of perceived value." I don't think you know what you're talking about.
I agree with some of your points, but do not agree that "it's all true at the same time." I'd sooner say that there may be components of truth to these ideas, but some of the interpretations and conclusions are very poor.
That is to say, sure, there's some out of wedlock parenting. That's happening in various populations in this country, perhaps some populations at different rates than others. However, even if there's a greater rate of single parents in cities, it's not justified to jump to the conclusion, "Therefore these people are irresponsible and deserve to suffer." And at least to some degree, when inner cities were suffering, it wasn't that lawlessness and weak morality had caused economic problems, but rather that economic problems caused some degree of lawlessness and a breakdown of social order.
On the other hand, a lot of rural communities have seen their economic base go from thriving to crashing in time periods that really no one could have predicted or could have adapted to. If you suck some large plurality of the economic base out of a rural region, there often isn't a fix for it besides closing the towns and mass-relocating the population. If there's any "fault", its in the hands of local civic leaders for not purposefully diversifying the local economy, a difficult task when it needs to be done at the crest of economic prosperity (when the big plant was setting output records), when nobody understands it could all end and when diversification may have failed due to lack of labor or access to markets.
Part of my objection is that I've seen/heard people say this sort of thing about the current rural problems, who at other times have blamed inner-city poverty on things like "having children out of wedlock." I think the reality is that you could also argue that the inner cities went from thriving to crashing in a time period that no one foresaw. The people with money fled to the suburbs, pulling a lot of the functioning economy out of the cities. If there's a "fault", it was in civic leaders, government officials, and economic circumstances outside of the control of the people being affected.
I don't want to get into a whole argument about the causes of each of these problems, and my goal isn't to diminish the concern for the suffering that's going on in rural areas right now. I just want to point out that, if you're currently holding both the position, "The government needs to help the poor working class white rural communities!" and also holding the position, "Black people in inner cities need to take responsibility for themselves instead of looking for government handouts!", then maybe you should consider whether you're exhibiting a bias.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me put it into a different metaphor (I just thought of this, and though it's not perfect, it's fairly apt):
Imagine a man finds out his wife is cheating on him. When she gets home, he confronts her.
Husband: So, I just found out that you're cheating on me.
Wfie: Oh, damn. I'm sorry. That was wrong of me. However, um... you also didn't take out the trash last night. So I think we should all just admit that none of us are perfect.
Husband: What? No, that's not the same. You lied to me and betrayed my trust. You could have gotten an STD or something, so you were endangering my health.
Wife: Well yeah, you said you were going to take the trash out and you didn't, so you lied to me and broke my trust. And having garbage in the house could possibly affect my health. So, I don't really see how these aren't the same. I think we can all just agree that we were both wrong.
Husband: I can't believe you're justifying cheating on me by saying it's the same as not taking out the garbage. That's not a defense for what you've done.
Wife: Oh, no, I'm not defending what I've done. When did I say that it was ok to cheat on you? Tell me when! I didn't say it, so you're a lying asshole for saying that I defended what I've done. I'm just saying that we both did things that were bad. Cheating was bad. Not taking out the trash was bad. We both did bad things, so... you know, I think we're both to blame here.
Now, what do you think? Is the wife being neutral there?
Sorry, at which point did I excuse nazis? Do point out it, because I haven't seen it.
Every time you answer, "Yeah, but..." or equate them with other protestors. If I say "Charles Manson is a crazy murderer," and you go, "Yeah, sure... but you know, there are a lot of murderers in the world. And every time you eat meat, aren't you also murdering an animal? Since there's a lot of murder going on, I don't see why you're singling out Manson for condemnation!" then you're defending Charles Manson. It's a weak defense that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but it's a defense.
You said that Trump was wrong, I asked objectively who started the violence and you haven't answered this.
The Nazis did. They murdered a woman.
Sure, Nazis are bad. Thing is, I do get to say that people using violence to prevent speech are bad too.
Again, "Yeah, but..."
It's not an either or...
No, it's not, but that's not relevant. If I say Nazis are bad, and counter my argument by claiming you like Ice cream, I think you'd agree that it's not relevant. It doesn't need to be either Nazis are bad or you like ice cream. Both can be true. But it's not really an argument against what I'm saying, so why bring it up?
But time and time again, when someone says, "Nazis are bad," you counter with "Yeah, but some people who don't like Nazis are also bad," and you seem to think it's a relevant counter-argument. You're implying, "You're wrong to say that Nazis are bad, because these other people are also bad."
So really, you're wrong on two levels. First, because the badness is not equivalent. You have one group with a minority of people who are doing somewhat bad things, and the other group where their entire reason for the group existing is bad.
And you're wrong also because it's totally irrelevant. Even if the counter-protestors were just as bad, it's not a relevant counter-argument to "Nazis are bad." And honestly, it speaks volumes that you (and Trump) still can't just say, "Nazis are bad," without also presenting the counter argument that "the people who don't like Nazis are also bad." It tells me a lot about where you stand.
Thing is, I didn't just call them 'assholes', I called them cunts. I'd have called them an arsehole if I'd wanted to.
So what's the difference, and how does that excuse Nazis?
I don't need to decide which is the greater set of wanking pieces of shit, I get to accuse them all. They're all arseholes.
So why does this excuse Nazis? That's the question. Because essentially people are saying, "Nazis are bad." and you and Mr. Trump are saying, "Yeah, a lot of them aren't nice people. Some of them are, but a lot of them aren't, and there are other mean people who aren't Nazis."
And then people are saying, "Yeah, I don't care about that. Nazis are bad."
And you're saying, "Yeah, but other people are bad too. I don't like it when people are mean, I agree."
And we're saying, "Ok, whatever, but can we just agree that Nazis are bad?"
And you're saying, "Well, I mean, I guess some of them are bad, just like some of any group are bad."
So why is it that you can't just agree that Nazis are bad, without saying, "Yeah, but..."?
I can be neutral about their right to free speech though.
Yeah, but that's not quite what you're doing. You're not only "being neutral" about their right to free speech, you're also trying to take a neutral stance between the groups and the nature of what they're saying.
Just because one group was 90% cunts doesn't let the 20-30% of the other group get away with acting like them.
Yeah, you're rationalizing. Even if we accepted your numbers, of 90% vs 25%, it would highlight the fact that one group was overwhelmingly "cunts" while the other only had a minority of them.
But even with that assessment, I have objections. First, to be picky and say, there's something odd to me about just calling them "assholes" (I'm going to substitute in "assholes" since Americans don't use "cunts" so often). Like, if some guy cuts in front of me in line, he's an asshole. A guy who buys and fancy dinner and doesn't leave a tip, he's an asshole. If he's also a Nazi, it kind of crosses into something else. You can't just be like, "Sure, that guy wants to exterminate the Jews, but that other guy over there didn't leave a tip for his waiter. They're both assholes, so it's the same thing."
Also, in my mind, 90% is too low a number. There wasn't 10% of the people in that group that were good. There's something wrong with 100% of the people who march with Nazis in support of enslaving black people. I don't know how many people among the counter-protestors that were assholes, so I can't argue with your 30% estimation, but I think that's probably much too high.
So I think I would have to say that it's true, just because 100% of one group are absolutely inexcusably awful people, that doesn't excuse 30% of an opposing group being assholes. But even more importantly, the possibility that 30% of one group are being assholes doesn't begin to excuse 100% of the other group being inexcusably awful people.
"I once dealt with a black person who wasn't very nice" is not an excuse for being a literal Nazi.
Well, this is the problem. People seem to be avoiding the whole 'how the fuck did this start' question and going straight to 'shit, look at the outcome'.
Ok, well it was thousands of people, and I would grant straight off that there were surely people on each side, scattered around here and there, who weren't doing the best things they could. I'm sure there were some minor scuffles and people being dicks about it, and I don't think we need to dissect each encounter in detail and try to figure out exactly who did what first.
... but there's no getting around it: One side was full of armed Nazis, the KKK, and other violent white nationalist groups. They were protesting against the removal of what was essentially a pro-slavery statue, and protesting against the general existence of jews, black people, and other minorities. The other side were protesting against Nazis, and included a protest group whose fundamental issue is "police shouldn't shoot black people when they don't have to". You can't just "be neutral" between those groups unless you're a bigot. Maybe you can if you just don't know what's going on and don't understand the context, but basically, no, you can't be neutral.
And then the whole thing was punctuated by a white supremacist trying to run down dozens of people with his car, successfully killing one woman. Again, you don't get to "be neutral" between the terrorist in the car and the people he ran down.
Do share, please, because I haven't seen any unbiased reports at all about how the violence actually started.
Oh? What do the "biased" reports say? And how are you determining that they're "biased" rather than just telling you something you don't want to hear?
Yeah, I'm not trying to defend VS Code. I use it and find it useful (writing Powershell scripts on a Mac), but for the sake of argument I'll concede that it's a terrible tool and that Microsoft is the devil himself. Still, that doesn't explain how a developer lost 3 months of work.
Because if you're playing with a new tool that includes file editing and file management, it's not a good idea to experiment and test it out in a production environment with files that you rely on. Even if he hadn't accidentally deleted his files, it wouldn't be unheard of for a text file editor to alter the files in some way. Even if it just changes the encoding, that could break things and cause problems.
But regardless of all of that, where are the backups? Who, in this day and age, doesn't know that you should back up your important files? If you're any kind of computer professional, not having backups is kind of inexcusable.
Supposedly Trump actually doesn't deal well with confrontation or conflict. That's not to say that he never gets into conflict, but that he can't effectively deal with conflict.
If you think about it that way, it fits with his public persona. Trump seems to put everyone into one of two classes:
(1) People that he likes and who like everything about him
(2) People who he hates and who hate everything about him.
There doesn't seem to be anything in between. As long as everything is good and you're praising him, he'll like you and praise you. If he doesn't like something you're doing or you criticize anything he has done, then you're his enemy. It's a bit paradoxical, but labelling someone as an enemy can be a way of avoiding conflict. You don't need to sort the conflict out or come to a resolution. Their opinions and views no longer hold weight. If they don't approve of you, that's not a bad thing because they're "bad people" anyway.
It's a totally different thing to actually deal with conflict. If you have a conflict with someone that you don't want to be your enemy (or you can't afford to have them be your enemy), then you actually have to deal with the conflict. You have to confront and resolve the issue somehow.
Apparently, that is the thing that Trump isn't really able to do. If he has some sort of disagreement with someone who he can't afford to berate on Twitter, he just goes silent and stops dealing with them. If they try to confront him, he begs off. He doesn't have to courage to admit that he's wrong or speak truth to power. If he likes you, he'll tell you want you want to hear, and if he doesn't like you, he insults you, but those are the only two types of interactions he can handle.
I ask this question as a neutral party; I have an equally low opinion of all politicians and, in general, public leaders.
So... I don't know if you're intentionally lying to us in order to make yourself sound more reasonable, or if you're just lying to yourself, but you're not neutral. Even if true that you "have an equally low opinion of all politicians", that means that you have a bias that favors really awful politicians and puts them on the same level as the best politicians. That's not neutral. Neutral isn't just "not taking sides". When you stay out of a fight, that's a side that you're taking.
Hell, he wasn't even wrong in his comments about who was contributing to the violence.
This is some nice rhetoric. You could say that everyone was "contributing to the violence". But that's not the issue here. However many people "contributed" in some small way, we should be asking questions like: Who is ultimately responsible for the violence? Who was the chief perpetrator of violence? Who instigated the violence? Who committed the worst of the violence?
If you're walking down the street and a mugger attacks you, you "contribute to the violence" if you make any attempt to fight back. Hell, someone could argue that you have contributed to the violence just by being there, and providing the mugger with a target. However, it'd be absolutely wrong for someone to assign you responsibility for the violent interaction overall.
In that sense, both you and Trump are wrong.
And honestly, it shows that you're not "neutral". You're siding with Trump. Your whole post is a defense of Trump. Your only criticism is that he's "tone deaf", but in the context of a post where you claim not to like politicians, that's not even a criticism.
And here's the dilemma I find myself in: I can't tell if you're a troll, a pro-Trump shill, or a genuinely misguided person. If misguided, then it may be worth talking to you. Otherwise, I've just got to hope that you're going to be modded down.
I don't think they misunderstand the word. I think they believe that he's a fascist and a white nationalist who is allied with Neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white supremacy groups.
You can argue that they're incorrect. For example, Bannon just gave an interview where he insulted various white supremacy groups. I think it's hard to deny, however, that he at least courted the favor of white nationalists as a political strategy. In any case, I don't think people are confused about the term.
I agree. I find it really disappointing how many people here seem to be looking for ways to excuse Nazis. They go through a lot of trouble to make it seem "fair" and "objective" by drawing false equivalences, and trying to distract from real issues.
Because first, as you point out, BLM is not in itself a violent extremist hate group. Its fundamental message is, "It's not ok for police to kill black people." To all the people saying, "white lives matter," yes, of course that's true. That goes without saying, literally, which is the point. The reason they aren't saying "white lives matter" is that we all know white lives matter without even saying it, but some of us don't seem to realize that black lives matter too, equally as much.
But I digress. The point is, though there may be some violent people associated with BLM, they're not equivalent to Nazis. Any group can have some violent members, but you have to look at the group as a whole, and it's just not fundamentally a violent group.
But aside from all of that, it doesn't matter. Even if BLM were a violent extremist group, it's irrelevant. It doesn't serve to justify Nazi groups, not even a little. We should condemn the Nazis, full stop. No justification or equivocation. Other people's bad acts are for another conversation.
Because when you say, "Sure the Nazis are bad, but BLM is bad too!", it doesn't count as a condemnation of the Nazis. What you're actually doing is taking a combative rhetorical stance, assuming that your opponent is on the side of BLM, and you're taking the side of the Nazis. Sure, you're literally saying that the Nazis are bad, but then you're defending them by comparing them to a group you assume your opponent will want to defend.
You also see this approach where Trump supporters will say, "Maybe Trump has done some unethical and illegal things, but Clinton is a crook!" Even if we were to assume that Clinton was a criminal, that's not a valid argument that we should ignore Trump's misdemeanors (and possibly high crimes).
I'm guess two things - first is that somehow you don't take all the "white people are bad" stuff personally.
In the rare cases that I do hear someone arguing that white people are bad, no I don't take it personally. Because those people are angry and irrational, and I don't put much stock in their opinion. They also aren't the people in power, so I don't fear those people. And I'm not a little snowflake who's going to whine if the whole world doesn't think I'm the greatest thing ever.
My observation is that a liberal is as biased against a redneck just as much or more as a KKK member is against PoC.
This is nonsense, first because "redneck" and "liberal" aren't mutually exclusive. Second, because even if some liberals hate rednecks, the unifying liberal agenda isn't to get rid of all the rednecks. Third, I can't really think of a lot of examples, in public or in private, that I've heard of liberals advocating violence against rednecks, let alone genocide.
Hate is wrong, regardless of race.
This is a bullshit false equivalence. By this logic, you could say, "The prisoners in a WW2 German concentration camp were just as guilty as the Nazis. The prisoners hated the Nazis, and the Nazis hated the Jews/homosexuals/Romani/whatever, so they're both equally guilty." Sorry, no.
Did anyone say I was offering a scientific study?
How is this modded "insightful"? White males are not oppressed. I am a white male living and working in one of those supposedly terrible liberal places, run by leftists, and I have never faced meaningful discrimination. I have never been in, seen, or heard of a workplace that intentionally tried to treat white males badly. I know a lot of liberal democrats, and none of them want white males to be treated badly.
The people I see complaining about the treatment of white males are people trying to invent a villain to blame their failures on.
I'm sure that was a joke. At least, my immediate response to it was to burst into laughter.
... the joke being that the poem it's referring to was written about the Nazis. The they in "First they came for the Socialists..." were the Nazis. But inserting "Nazis" in the place of "Socialists", I think it's meant to point out the absurdity of Nazis and other white supremacists pretending to be the victims. They're the victimizers.
Or #3: They fragment the catalog as much as they want. Their marketing people get to invent work for themselves. They pretty much force people to sign up to several services to get the content they want, and things just keep going on like that. Because we let them do it.
Consumers don't have enough backbone to just... stop watching some of the TV shows they like. Most people don't know how to pirate conveniently. So people will pay. They'll pay and they'll pay, and then they'll pay some more. How do you think we ended up paying $103 for cable, with almost all the channels also showing commercials?
I'm guessing, but I think that the reality is that a lot of the executives in the entertainment industry aren't actually very worried about piracy. They know it happens. They wish it didn't. They'll complain vocally about it. But it's not something that keeps them up at night.
The issue is control over distribution channels. Decades ago, studios were concerned that VHS sales would cut into theater ticket sales, and then that VHS rentals would cut into VHS sales. For a while, Disney even refused to release movies to VHS. Fundamentally, it's the same issue, and it's about control. When you went to the theater, not only did they get ticket sales, but they controlled when and where you saw the movie. They controlled how many people could see it with you. They controlled what you ate, and made money from selling junk food. The simple shift to allow you to purchase the movie and store it in your own home stripped all that control away. Not only did it change the nature of the transaction, but now the video store controlled the nature of the exchange, and the experience of the purchase.
So the shift to streaming presents a similar problem. Right now, Disney has a bunch of different distribution channels, and all their leverage and control of distribution comes from which channel they allow to have which products. Exclusivity allows them to drive up the price. Right now, they can tell Netflix, "Pay is $X or we'll release this movie on Starz instead." They can make sure the streaming companies promote their movies over other new releases. They can do cross-promotional deals. They have all kinds of marketing levers they can pull.
So the reality is, they simply don't want to push all of their movies onto all channels. It's not a money issue. There's no amount of money that Netflix could pay to get access to all Disney movies, because even with an excessive amount of money, Disney would have lost a lot of control. On the other hand, if they want to keep the control without splintering their catalog over a bunch of different services, they can open their own streaming service. Pulling all of their content from other streaming services to put it onto their own service would reduce their flexibility, since they wouldn't be able to form some strategic partnerships. However, it would maintain control.
The question, "Is this the End of Typing?" doesn't match with the story. From what I can tell from the summary, the story seems to be about the fact that there are masses of illiterate people getting online, and it may be better to communicate with those people using audio and video, since they can't read. Also, a lot of these people are in developing countries where infrastructure isn't great, so companies wanting to service them need to find ways to provide an audio/video interaction in that context. Ok, that's fair enough. Makes sense.
But that's a far cry from saying "no one will read or write anymore".** Text is an extremely efficient and useful method of communication. The reason we haven't moved to UIs based on speech recognition and text-to-speech merely because of the technological hurdles. In many cases, it's just easier, faster, less annoying, and more private to communicate via text.
** I don't know if that's actually what the argument argues, since it's behind a paywall.
One of the videos shows that they painted a road to look like a little girl is crouching down in the middle of the street. Maybe I'm just being silly, but my mind jumped back to the release of Windows Vista, and the initial versions of UAC.
In case you don't remember, Microsoft released Windows Vista with the great new security feature that every time your computer was about to do something that was a security risk, a window would pop up asking, "are you sure you want to do this?" Not only was this annoying, but people quickly adapted to these interruptions by thoughtlessly clicking "Ok" or "Yes" to any window that popped up on their screen. Microsoft set up a bunch of warnings, and the result was training users to ignore warnings.
So what I'd worry about here is that people are going to get used to the idea that these paintings aren't really speed bumps, and the little girl in the middle of the street isn't a real little girl. They'll get so used to it that they'll blow straight past it. And then, on some very unfortunate day, it'll turn out the it really was a little girl playing in the street.
Honestly, I think it's tricky. There's a value to being inclusive and open to other viewpoints. At the same time... there's a limit. After a certain point, a position can be so backward and hateful that it makes sense to say, "This is a viewpoint that's not welcome."
Because on one side of the spectrum, you have an innocuous and inoffensive difference of opinion. Then on the other end, you have people who think... I don't know, that the Nazis were right. Or that the US never should have ended slavery. On that far end of the spectrum, I don't think the government should stop people from saying it, but I think polite society is perfectly justified in saying, "We don't want to hear it", or even, "If that's the way you feel, we don't want to be associated with you". Not all opinions deserve to be respected.
So the tricky part is, where do you draw the line? Along that spectrum between "innocuous" and "offensive extremism", you have to draw a line between "opinions I disagree with, but should tolerate" and "opinions deserving of shame". Where is that line?
I think that's the question underlying this, and I don't think there's a simple answer. I could offer some opinions as to where the line should be drawn, or at least how to find the line, but it'd be a distraction to the point I'd like to make. I also don't intend to argue about the particular points made in the essay. However, there's been a tendency among "conservatives" in the past few years to cross that line, and then play the victim when people don't want to tolerate it. They confuse disagreement with oppression. They confuse having a constitutional freedom of speech with being free from the consequences of their own speech.
I think the critics of this essay should be able to consider whether it makes some valid points. At the same time, I think the people who want to defend this essay's author should be ready to admit that there just aren't acceptable to say.
... the inherent value of Widget X is 10k.
Ok, so what does that word "inherent" mean in that context? Earlier, you brought up the phrase "objective measurement of perceived value". Is the "inherent" value some kind of objective value, or objective measurement of value?
Because I think I might have an idea of the mistake that you're making. You're saying that there's no "objective measurement of perceived value", but what you really want to say is that nothing has "objective value", and that all value is a matter of perception. But then, you also seem to want to put a lot of stock in this idea of an "inherent value", which seems to just be a stand-in for the idea of an "objective value". So you're saying:
* There's no such thing as objective value of an item
* There is only perceived value, i.e. the amount that people perceive an item to be worth
* If a person is willing to pay a certain amount for an item, that's proof that the item is perceived to be worth at least that much
* Therefore, the amount that someone is willing to pay is the objective value
how does anyone else's rationalization change the value inherent in that transaction?
What value is "inherent" in the transaction?
I'm pretty sure I understand. You think that things need to have an "objective measurement of perceived value" in order to have the possibility of assigning value outside of "what someone is willing to pay". That is, you'd probably claim that in my example of someone paying $10k for a slice of bread, the slice is inherently worth $10k because someone was willing to pay that much, and there's no other meaningful way to talk about value.
That's my guess, anyway, from the nonsense talk about "objective measurement of perceived value".
I don't want to get too deeply philosophical here, but what do you think you're talking about when you use the phrase, "objective measurement of perceived value"? That seems like a dumb, nonsensical phrase to me.
Some things are more valuable than others. That much is true. It's possible to judge value incorrectly. I can think that something is worth $10k and be wrong about that. But I've never claimed that there's an "objective measurement of perceived value." I don't think you know what you're talking about.
I agree with some of your points, but do not agree that "it's all true at the same time." I'd sooner say that there may be components of truth to these ideas, but some of the interpretations and conclusions are very poor.
That is to say, sure, there's some out of wedlock parenting. That's happening in various populations in this country, perhaps some populations at different rates than others. However, even if there's a greater rate of single parents in cities, it's not justified to jump to the conclusion, "Therefore these people are irresponsible and deserve to suffer." And at least to some degree, when inner cities were suffering, it wasn't that lawlessness and weak morality had caused economic problems, but rather that economic problems caused some degree of lawlessness and a breakdown of social order.
On the other hand, a lot of rural communities have seen their economic base go from thriving to crashing in time periods that really no one could have predicted or could have adapted to. If you suck some large plurality of the economic base out of a rural region, there often isn't a fix for it besides closing the towns and mass-relocating the population. If there's any "fault", its in the hands of local civic leaders for not purposefully diversifying the local economy, a difficult task when it needs to be done at the crest of economic prosperity (when the big plant was setting output records), when nobody understands it could all end and when diversification may have failed due to lack of labor or access to markets.
Part of my objection is that I've seen/heard people say this sort of thing about the current rural problems, who at other times have blamed inner-city poverty on things like "having children out of wedlock." I think the reality is that you could also argue that the inner cities went from thriving to crashing in a time period that no one foresaw. The people with money fled to the suburbs, pulling a lot of the functioning economy out of the cities. If there's a "fault", it was in civic leaders, government officials, and economic circumstances outside of the control of the people being affected.
I don't want to get into a whole argument about the causes of each of these problems, and my goal isn't to diminish the concern for the suffering that's going on in rural areas right now. I just want to point out that, if you're currently holding both the position, "The government needs to help the poor working class white rural communities!" and also holding the position, "Black people in inner cities need to take responsibility for themselves instead of looking for government handouts!", then maybe you should consider whether you're exhibiting a bias.