Another notable point is that this is the first year in which Russia hasn't got any gold. There has been a minor shitstorm there over it, as math is traditionally considered a strong point (like hockey, heh).
The traditional sense of "privilege" is something that is not inherent and can be granted or withheld at will. The way in which feminism (and other minority rights movements) use it is, in fact, in direct contradiction to this definition. What they should be talking about is the rights that they have (same as every other human being) that are not being respected, as opposed to the privileges that are being withheld.
OTOH, "privilege" is a much more convenient word to use if your goal is to provoke an emotional guilt reaction. A privilege is something that you may or may not deserve. Thus, when speaking in terms of privileges, when one person has it and another one does not, it shifts the conversation into a comparison of relative worth: it invites the person possessing the privilege to ask "why am I deserving of this while this other one is not? perhaps I'm not really deserving of it then?". It's exactly why a suggestion to "check your privilege" generally elicits a very negative emotional response even from people who are very removed from this entire discourse, and aren't aware of all the intricacies of the question. It's because the conventional meaning of the word makes such a request a very passive-aggressive thing.
For example, on her steam greenlight page she forgot to log out of her developer account and posted a message attacking herself.
I went to google this up, and it's obvious from the thread in question that it was satirical. "8chan, Gamergate and Kotaku in Action, knock yourselves out" - I mean, how dense would you have to be to figure it out?
Both gender and race are ultimately an identity. If you believe that Dolezal is "racially appropriating", then every trans woman is "gender-appropriating" in exact same way. I've read many articles trying to explain why this is not the case, but it all boils down to "because it is, and fuck you for even asking" (some make that latter part very explicit, basically saying that even daring to make an analogy is incredibly offensive).
The closest thing that came to a reasonable argument is that you can't change the race the way you can change gender, but it's refuted by the very fact that Dolezal has successfully claimed to be black, and was actually treated as black by everyone interacting with her, for so long. Which makes perfect sense when you accept that race is a social construct - if it's social, it's defined solely in terms of how the person sees themselves and other people see them.
The "heritage" part is largely irrelevant unless you believe that culture is transmitted through genes and cannot be claimed without an appropriate dose of said genes (i.e. if you're an ethnic nationalist or a racialist). The "culture" part is more relevant, but again, race, insofar as it pertains to discrimination, is not what defines culture, it is defined in terms of culture. There was no such thing as "black race" until specific societies (such as US) have invented it for the specific purpose of drawing the boundaries to define who is a second class citizen. Again, it is an artificial social construct, which is blatantly obvious when you have things such as "one-drop rule". As such, it is more flexible than gender, not less.
Suppose Dolezal had a single (known) black ancestor from 1800, and everyone else in her heritage was white. By the laws of the time, her entire direct family tree would be considered black, and treated as such explicitly up until the end of segregation, and implicitly up to this day (unless they specifically chose to hide that heritage). If, instead, she invents such an ancestor, everyone today will still treat her as black in the same exact way as if the ancestor was not there.
And don't tell me that this is about her upbringing or that she wasn't discriminated against (until she declared herself to be black, that is - I think it's obvious that if she was genuinely considered as black by people, she had no "white privilege" to speak of in that status). A native immigrant from an African country would not have experiences of being "unprivileged" when growing up, but once they move to US (for the sake of analogy, assume they're of the same age as Dolezal) they will also find themselves categorized as black with all that entails - and I don't think anyone would seriously deny them the right to self-identify as black based on the fact that they were not raised in a culture where they are discriminated against.
What matters is how they are treated here and now, not what they were before. Whether it is about race, gender, religion, or any other form of self-identification is irrelevant.
He likely meant the reverse, and dropped in an extra unneeded negation. US has one of the most permissive laws in the world with respect to free speech, especially the subcategories of it that are often labeled "hate speech" elsewhere. To that extent, the notion of prohibiting speech is much more acceptable in the rest of the world than it is here, and quite often you can see foreigners not understanding what the issue is about when discussing those fringe cases.
Of course not. But they should avoid limiting freedom of speech if said freedom is a large part of what makes them attractive to their audience (unless they want to completely change that audience).
The point is that it's not incredibly offensive to any people in the culture where it is performed (including people that the other culture, the one that finds it incredibly offensive, would expect to be offended on account of it being directed at them).
It's actually pretty broad - a lot of what people call "black" stereotypes in US are really African-American stereotypes, and are firmly rooted in the late colonial, slavery and Jim Crow period. A lot of the associated offensive vocabulary is, too - for example, in most other languages, the word "Negro" (or its direct equivalent) is still used and is not considered offensive in any way, shape or form. Of late, due to American cultural domination, some of these stereotypes have, unfortunately, been spreading elsewhere, but it's still a very glaring distinction that virtually any immigrant will spot right away.
Of course, none of this is relevant for SW, since we're talking about the product of American culture here, and the people who made it were well aware of all these racist stereotypes (and furthermore, some of those stereotypes are not local, such as the ones about Jews).
Just because some people are finding ridiculous reasons to get offended doesn't mean that some offensive things aren't very real and glaring.
For an example of a ridiculous reason, go see the "controversy" about the actor selected to play Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones. A bunch of people with nothing better to do decided that it is "whitewashing", because the books describe Dornishmen as "swarthy", which they meant to be black or at least thoroughly dark-skinned; and because the actor in question is only first-generation Latin American (his parents were from Spain), which is "too white". When the author of the books himself noted that "swarthy" was really meant to approximate stereotypical Southern European olive-skinned appearance, as in Italian or, well, Spanish, that same bunch of people blamed the author for "whitewashing his own books", because apparently they know better than him what he actually had in mind by "swarthy" (and, in any case, even if he didn't, then he should damn well have). Now that, yes, is ridiculous.
But most of the examples that are presented in TFA sound like valid manifestations of racism to me. Especially the caricature Jew.
The part that deals with factual data (like size and orbit) is science. Categorization based on that data, though, is strictly a matter of convenience. Earth, Mars etc don't actually have a sticky label that says "planet" on them. We chose to define that category because it is somehow useful to us. We chose to redefine it now because that redefinition is again more useful.
Taliban was founded and expanded by the more fundamentalist islamist mujahideen warlords. Which is exactly the type that US and Pakistan had spent most funds on supporting during the war. The label didn't exist back when you did that, but the ideology very much did, and you were perfectly okay at using it to strike a blow at the Soviets even if that meant islamization of the country.
You guys were funding genocidal islamist assholes like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during that war, giving them more money than any moderates by far. And the reason why these guys were fighting the Soviets (or rather, their own socialist government backed by Soviets) was not because they wanted democracy - it's because they wanted sharia, and were disgusted by such socialist innovations as mixed-gender schools and male gynecologists. What would possibly make you believe that once they kicked the Soviets out, they would listen to your attempts to "instill a more democratic government"?
There's also Richmond, which is basically built on top of an island in the middle of the river that is made from the silt accumulated by that river. And the ground level there is one meter above water on average, so it's all ringed by a system of levees. In an earthquake, pretty much the entire place will liquefy in moments.
I figure we can prepare. Two weeks is going to be difficult for poor people.
The worrying part is not so much the damage from the quake itself (though it'll suck if you're in an old building on bad soil, or in one of the shoreline communities affected by tsunami). It's the damage to infrastructure. Here's the relevant quote from the article:
"in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities."
1-3 months is a whole different ballpark than two weeks. And several months without direct access to drinking water is seriously bad. Also the combo of busted sewers and healthcare facilities is an invitation to an epidemic of infectious diseases.
Furthermore, this is one of the quotes from that article that was flagged as 100% legit in the Reddit AMA that was meant to debunk some of the more sensationalist claims.
I have to say that I was always assuming that recovery time for all basic services to a reasonable level would be no more than a month in my preparations. Given these new (well, old but not widely publicized before) figures, even the basics like the amount of food & water to keep on hand has to be revised way up.
Wouldn't a septic tank be better than sewer? Would it be a good idea to get one of those camper toilets? Although, where to put the waste is an issue.
Neither one does you any good if the piping in your yard is busted. And the problem is that you can't really know that without a detailed inspection, so the safest thing would be to stop using either one to avoid soil contamination and backflow problems that can easily end up contaminating your home. So get a portable toilet seat and stock up on garbage bags (assuming 2 bags for every time you expect to poop). The nice thing about garbage bags is that you need them anyway (so it's not a useless stockpile that just sits there for no purpose other than emergency), and they don't expire. Kitty litter added to the bags (before & after) also helps to make this all a bit more manageable.
Garbage disposal is going to be a problem in general, it's not just poop. I would assume that in densely populated areas, like Seattle proper, some form of centralized collection would be one of the first things that'd be restored. Elsewhere, I guess we'll basically just pile up the bags for a while.
You can build things that can handle a 9.0. And by "handle" I don't necessarily mean that they will stay exactly the same, but that they can be restored and operational in a short amount of time.
The Cascadia Fault has no relationship whatsoever to Yellowstone. A Yellowstone eruption is pretty unlikely as it is, but in any case the rupture in Cascadia would not change that.
People could still use online banking under their scheme. It's just that all the certificates for bank servers would have to also be provided to the govt so that it can spoof the connection and execute a MITM if they want to intercept.
I think the point is that any hate crime effectively "sends a message", even if it's not intended to (and honestly, it's intended to in most cases, which is obvious when you find out what the attackers were saying during the assault). So it still makes sense to treat those as a more severe crime than regular assault, just because of those extra negative social effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Russia is very much a European country.
Another notable point is that this is the first year in which Russia hasn't got any gold. There has been a minor shitstorm there over it, as math is traditionally considered a strong point (like hockey, heh).
A penis is not required to rape. Or would you claim that women raping men (and other women) is not a real thing?
The traditional sense of "privilege" is something that is not inherent and can be granted or withheld at will. The way in which feminism (and other minority rights movements) use it is, in fact, in direct contradiction to this definition. What they should be talking about is the rights that they have (same as every other human being) that are not being respected, as opposed to the privileges that are being withheld.
OTOH, "privilege" is a much more convenient word to use if your goal is to provoke an emotional guilt reaction. A privilege is something that you may or may not deserve. Thus, when speaking in terms of privileges, when one person has it and another one does not, it shifts the conversation into a comparison of relative worth: it invites the person possessing the privilege to ask "why am I deserving of this while this other one is not? perhaps I'm not really deserving of it then?". It's exactly why a suggestion to "check your privilege" generally elicits a very negative emotional response even from people who are very removed from this entire discourse, and aren't aware of all the intricacies of the question. It's because the conventional meaning of the word makes such a request a very passive-aggressive thing.
For example, on her steam greenlight page she forgot to log out of her developer account and posted a message attacking herself.
I went to google this up, and it's obvious from the thread in question that it was satirical. "8chan, Gamergate and Kotaku in Action, knock yourselves out" - I mean, how dense would you have to be to figure it out?
Both gender and race are ultimately an identity. If you believe that Dolezal is "racially appropriating", then every trans woman is "gender-appropriating" in exact same way. I've read many articles trying to explain why this is not the case, but it all boils down to "because it is, and fuck you for even asking" (some make that latter part very explicit, basically saying that even daring to make an analogy is incredibly offensive).
The closest thing that came to a reasonable argument is that you can't change the race the way you can change gender, but it's refuted by the very fact that Dolezal has successfully claimed to be black, and was actually treated as black by everyone interacting with her, for so long. Which makes perfect sense when you accept that race is a social construct - if it's social, it's defined solely in terms of how the person sees themselves and other people see them.
The "heritage" part is largely irrelevant unless you believe that culture is transmitted through genes and cannot be claimed without an appropriate dose of said genes (i.e. if you're an ethnic nationalist or a racialist). The "culture" part is more relevant, but again, race, insofar as it pertains to discrimination, is not what defines culture, it is defined in terms of culture. There was no such thing as "black race" until specific societies (such as US) have invented it for the specific purpose of drawing the boundaries to define who is a second class citizen. Again, it is an artificial social construct, which is blatantly obvious when you have things such as "one-drop rule". As such, it is more flexible than gender, not less.
Suppose Dolezal had a single (known) black ancestor from 1800, and everyone else in her heritage was white. By the laws of the time, her entire direct family tree would be considered black, and treated as such explicitly up until the end of segregation, and implicitly up to this day (unless they specifically chose to hide that heritage). If, instead, she invents such an ancestor, everyone today will still treat her as black in the same exact way as if the ancestor was not there.
And don't tell me that this is about her upbringing or that she wasn't discriminated against (until she declared herself to be black, that is - I think it's obvious that if she was genuinely considered as black by people, she had no "white privilege" to speak of in that status). A native immigrant from an African country would not have experiences of being "unprivileged" when growing up, but once they move to US (for the sake of analogy, assume they're of the same age as Dolezal) they will also find themselves categorized as black with all that entails - and I don't think anyone would seriously deny them the right to self-identify as black based on the fact that they were not raised in a culture where they are discriminated against.
What matters is how they are treated here and now, not what they were before. Whether it is about race, gender, religion, or any other form of self-identification is irrelevant.
So, basically, you want Slashdot to be a safespace for you and your culture?
Presumably everyone who still goes there is enjoying it, so... what's the problem?
He likely meant the reverse, and dropped in an extra unneeded negation. US has one of the most permissive laws in the world with respect to free speech, especially the subcategories of it that are often labeled "hate speech" elsewhere. To that extent, the notion of prohibiting speech is much more acceptable in the rest of the world than it is here, and quite often you can see foreigners not understanding what the issue is about when discussing those fringe cases.
Yes, in the same way ACLU was defending KKK and the American Nazi Party.
Of course not. But they should avoid limiting freedom of speech if said freedom is a large part of what makes them attractive to their audience (unless they want to completely change that audience).
Right. They just happen to have an assortment of features that totally coincidentally adds up to a very recognizable racist stereotype from Earth.
The point is that it's not incredibly offensive to any people in the culture where it is performed (including people that the other culture, the one that finds it incredibly offensive, would expect to be offended on account of it being directed at them).
It's actually pretty broad - a lot of what people call "black" stereotypes in US are really African-American stereotypes, and are firmly rooted in the late colonial, slavery and Jim Crow period. A lot of the associated offensive vocabulary is, too - for example, in most other languages, the word "Negro" (or its direct equivalent) is still used and is not considered offensive in any way, shape or form. Of late, due to American cultural domination, some of these stereotypes have, unfortunately, been spreading elsewhere, but it's still a very glaring distinction that virtually any immigrant will spot right away.
Of course, none of this is relevant for SW, since we're talking about the product of American culture here, and the people who made it were well aware of all these racist stereotypes (and furthermore, some of those stereotypes are not local, such as the ones about Jews).
Just because some people are finding ridiculous reasons to get offended doesn't mean that some offensive things aren't very real and glaring.
For an example of a ridiculous reason, go see the "controversy" about the actor selected to play Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones. A bunch of people with nothing better to do decided that it is "whitewashing", because the books describe Dornishmen as "swarthy", which they meant to be black or at least thoroughly dark-skinned; and because the actor in question is only first-generation Latin American (his parents were from Spain), which is "too white". When the author of the books himself noted that "swarthy" was really meant to approximate stereotypical Southern European olive-skinned appearance, as in Italian or, well, Spanish, that same bunch of people blamed the author for "whitewashing his own books", because apparently they know better than him what he actually had in mind by "swarthy" (and, in any case, even if he didn't, then he should damn well have). Now that, yes, is ridiculous.
But most of the examples that are presented in TFA sound like valid manifestations of racism to me. Especially the caricature Jew.
The part that deals with factual data (like size and orbit) is science. Categorization based on that data, though, is strictly a matter of convenience. Earth, Mars etc don't actually have a sticky label that says "planet" on them. We chose to define that category because it is somehow useful to us. We chose to redefine it now because that redefinition is again more useful.
It's all the doing of fire giants from Muspelheim. Unfortunately, even the gods cannot stop them alone.
Didn't they say they're planning to retire XMPP for Chat in general eventually, in favor of whatever proprietary crap they're using for Hangouts?
Taliban was founded and expanded by the more fundamentalist islamist mujahideen warlords. Which is exactly the type that US and Pakistan had spent most funds on supporting during the war. The label didn't exist back when you did that, but the ideology very much did, and you were perfectly okay at using it to strike a blow at the Soviets even if that meant islamization of the country.
You guys were funding genocidal islamist assholes like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during that war, giving them more money than any moderates by far. And the reason why these guys were fighting the Soviets (or rather, their own socialist government backed by Soviets) was not because they wanted democracy - it's because they wanted sharia, and were disgusted by such socialist innovations as mixed-gender schools and male gynecologists. What would possibly make you believe that once they kicked the Soviets out, they would listen to your attempts to "instill a more democratic government"?
There's also Richmond, which is basically built on top of an island in the middle of the river that is made from the silt accumulated by that river. And the ground level there is one meter above water on average, so it's all ringed by a system of levees. In an earthquake, pretty much the entire place will liquefy in moments.
I figure we can prepare. Two weeks is going to be difficult for poor people.
The worrying part is not so much the damage from the quake itself (though it'll suck if you're in an old building on bad soil, or in one of the shoreline communities affected by tsunami). It's the damage to infrastructure. Here's the relevant quote from the article:
"in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities."
1-3 months is a whole different ballpark than two weeks. And several months without direct access to drinking water is seriously bad. Also the combo of busted sewers and healthcare facilities is an invitation to an epidemic of infectious diseases.
Furthermore, this is one of the quotes from that article that was flagged as 100% legit in the Reddit AMA that was meant to debunk some of the more sensationalist claims.
I have to say that I was always assuming that recovery time for all basic services to a reasonable level would be no more than a month in my preparations. Given these new (well, old but not widely publicized before) figures, even the basics like the amount of food & water to keep on hand has to be revised way up.
Wouldn't a septic tank be better than sewer? Would it be a good idea to get one of those camper toilets? Although, where to put the waste is an issue.
Neither one does you any good if the piping in your yard is busted. And the problem is that you can't really know that without a detailed inspection, so the safest thing would be to stop using either one to avoid soil contamination and backflow problems that can easily end up contaminating your home. So get a portable toilet seat and stock up on garbage bags (assuming 2 bags for every time you expect to poop). The nice thing about garbage bags is that you need them anyway (so it's not a useless stockpile that just sits there for no purpose other than emergency), and they don't expire. Kitty litter added to the bags (before & after) also helps to make this all a bit more manageable.
Garbage disposal is going to be a problem in general, it's not just poop. I would assume that in densely populated areas, like Seattle proper, some form of centralized collection would be one of the first things that'd be restored. Elsewhere, I guess we'll basically just pile up the bags for a while.
You can build things that can handle a 9.0. And by "handle" I don't necessarily mean that they will stay exactly the same, but that they can be restored and operational in a short amount of time.
The Cascadia Fault has no relationship whatsoever to Yellowstone. A Yellowstone eruption is pretty unlikely as it is, but in any case the rupture in Cascadia would not change that.
People could still use online banking under their scheme. It's just that all the certificates for bank servers would have to also be provided to the govt so that it can spoof the connection and execute a MITM if they want to intercept.
I think the point is that any hate crime effectively "sends a message", even if it's not intended to (and honestly, it's intended to in most cases, which is obvious when you find out what the attackers were saying during the assault). So it still makes sense to treat those as a more severe crime than regular assault, just because of those extra negative social effects.