But she WASN'T powerless. I don't know much about second life, but apparently you can stop other players from running animations on your character at any time, or 'teleport' away from an offending situation. She could have e-mailed the mods, or complained to whoever else is in charge. Failing that, at any point during the experience, she had the power to log off, or walk away from the computer. Contrast this with actual rape if you need the idea of being truly powerless illustrated more thoroughly.
So, she wasn't powerless in any sense of the word. I put a lot of weight on Eleanor Roosevelt's claim that no one can make a person feel inferior without that person's consent. If whatever happened has really left her as traumatized as the Wired article makes it sound, then maybe she needs to unplug for a little while and get back in touch with the real world before she blows a gasket.
In the sense that fantasy always proceeds the act for sex offenders, it's possible that a virtual 'rapist' might be working himself up to a real act of sexual violence.
However, it's a LOOOOOONG way from acting sexually aggressive in a game to actually attacking a woman--many sexual predators start as peeping toms before moving on to fetish burglary (panty raids, e.g.) and eventually rape, and not everybody who fantasizes about icky things does them. So it would almost certainly be a waste of limited investigative resources to pursue a virtual case as a precursor to real world crime.
Schirra was the only astronaut to fly missions for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. And the Apollo flight he commanded, which was the first one after the pad fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1, was conducted at a time when a lot of the astronauts still considered the Apollo craft to be a death trap. But they still went, and it was the success of their test flight that gave NASA the confidence to send the second manned Apollo mission all the way to lunar orbit in 1968.
I don't even understand the author's statement that "virtual rape" (whatever that means) could be traumatic. There's none of the implied threat of, say, harassing phone calls, or somebody on the street making cat calls (assuming that your virtual persona is sufficiently separated from your real world persona that a person harassing you online isn't stalking you for real). You certainly can't be physically hurt. And if somebody is saying or doing something you don't like, you sign off, or go to another area. So how could this be traumatic AT ALL, much less traumatic to such a degree that warrants comparison to rape?
"To use an analogy that might not hold much water here, take talking to a girl who you're interested in as an example. When you're just being friendly and truly enjoying the conversation, she'll be open and friendly. Once you start trying to manuveur the conversation towards getting laid, she'll pick up on it."
Right, but this is my point. The girl isn't reading my mind, or detecting some nebulous factor 'intent' that's pouring out of my head into the aether. She's noticing the way I keep glancing at her chest, or the way I'm being too touchy feely, or a change in the way I'm talking. My 'intent' is altering my observable behavior, which she (at some level) is recognizing as a come on.
I've heard the same stories of unusual healing talents with reference to the martial arts and qi. If it's real, I'd certainly like to see it. I'm not so obstinate that I can't believe the evidence of my own experience.
"Pulling out of Iraq now would result in the country collapsing into civil war and prolonged violence; better (for both the citizens and the occupying soldiers) to stay and finish the job right, THEN pull out when a decent self-supporting gov't is in place."
Darn right. And at this rate, I can be proud to know that my children, not yet born, will have the opportunity to serve their country by fighting for stability and democracy in Iraq. God bless GW.
Speaking as someone who has done some aikido, I can tell you these "phenomena" aren't necessarily mystical or spiritual. It's amazing how a small adjustment in posture--turning your hips more, or straightening your back--can turn a feeble attempt at a throw into a powerful move. This isn't qi as much as mechanics. However, the sorts of things our sensei would tell us improve our control of qi, like remaining loose, and breathing deeply, also happen to be the sorts of things that form your body into the right posture and help you adopt the proper rhythms. I don't claim this explains EVERYTHING, but for me, it goes a long way toward rationalizing the apparently irrational.
In both cases there's an obvious connection between what you're thinking and what's happening. In the first case, you're thinking about how long you've been hiding because you've been hiding for a long time: obviously the longer the seeker looks, the more likely he is to find you. And in the second case, if you're thinking about how another player is right on top of you, you're probably about to be found regardless of what you think about. And because the human mind is so good at recognizing patterns, it naturally feels like you MUST be attracting the seeker with your mind.
Say it with me now, loud and proud: correlation IS NOT causation. You'll hear it at least 10 times a week on/.
Thank God, just when I thought I was the only person who's actually read those books. Supposedly Morgan is done with Kovacs, which is too bad. Market Forces was entertaining, but it somehow managed to be less plausible than his books about the body-swapping mercenary/detective/serial killer. Go figure.
What does it matter if we kill 100 terrorists for every one of our casualties, if our methods of doing so just piss off and alienate people who wouldn't previously have had an axe to grind with us? Do you plan to kill off everyone on the planet who's not American? If not, then body count isn't as important as attacking the root causes of terrorism. As long as we're seen as decadent, immoral, imperialist beasts who kill civilians (yes, even if they really are enemy combatants, if the media calls them civilians that's what people will latch onto), we'll continue to have pissed off people attempting to blow us up. You can't kill all of them.
It may even be beneficial to go the non-traditional route. When I was looking at med schools, I was told that often it's the 'fuzzier' majors (international relations, English, poli sci) who have the most success applying to med school: maybe because it stands out in a sea of bio majors, or maybe because they're studying biology on the side and have to be especially dedicated to it. Nowadays degrees are almost more like signals of work ethic and general ability than an indicator that you're adept in a particular field.
I'm all for social consciousness, but take a look at any internet message board and get a sense of how many people post stupid crap just for the sake of a laugh. Combine that with a system for tracking lost kids and you get, oh, probably about a million pictures sent in of people's asses, or similar nonsense. And do we really want to empower mobs of people to block roads, or swarm public places on the chance that maybe somebody actually spotted a snatched kid? This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
In hindsight, maybe evacuating campus immediately after the first shootings (when there was no reason to believe they were anything other than an isolated incident) MIGHT have saved lives. But think about it--as far as I'm aware, they don't really know what the shooter was doing in the two hours between incidents. For all we know he was hanging around on the drill field, waiting for an evacuation to send hundreds of panicked students out into the open. Or maybe he was in one of the buildings, hoping a lockdown would give him plenty of time to do his work while preventing his victims from making a run for it (from what I've read, he attempted to do just this on his own by chaining a door shut). Keep in mind, we're not just talking about evacuating a dorm here, but an entire campus. How do you move that many people quickly? Where do they go? Or do you lock them down in place without having any idea of where the killer might have gone? Givn that the first killings were in a dorm, do you ask everybody who lives in that hall to rush back there and lock themselves in?
MAYBE evacuation/lockdown would have saved some lives. Maybe it wouldn't have. But to suggest that the VT cops should have made that call with little or no information to justify it is nothing more than Monday-morning quarterbacking.
I agree with you on the whole, but you should still consider the deterrent effect of a well-armed populace. If I was a nutter looking to exact some vengeance for a lifetime of abuse, I'd be much less likely to do so with an armed assault if I knew that the classroom I was walking into was armed and capable of shooting back. But then again, crazy is crazy, so who knows?
It seems a bit unfair to call it a lapse--we don't know all the details yet, but if the gunman fired a number of rounds inside of one large building on campus, and then quickly left for another large building on the other side of campus, it's not surprising that he was able to strike again before the cops caught up to him. Assuming he wasn't running around the freshman quad with an m-16 and 'born to kill' written on the back of his VT sweatshirt.
My point was simply that the tactic of "provoking overreaction" can be used in contexts beyond armed resistance, and therefore doesn't warrant the negative conotation.
And of course provoking overreaction isn't the ultimate goal of any resistance movement, but it is one way to get there. The insurgents in Iraq can't forcibly expel the the U.S. military, so they fight a guerilla war, they keep the conflict going on their own terms, they employ dramatic tactics to get the attention of the media and sour the voting populace on the idea of continuing the fight, with the ultimate goal of getting America out. Provoking an overreaction is just another means of doing this: get the Army to raid a village and piss off the locals, maybe injure some bystanders, and now you've further eroded local support for the Americans and maybe gotten yourself a few new recruits to keep the fight going even longer. It's a tactic, not an objective. What propagandists are insisting otherwise?
"That's a very slanted view. It is commonly put about by those keen to portray resistance movements as cruel and callous, and occupiers as mere 'victims of circumstance."
Violence isn't necessarily the only tactic, here. Take a look at the US civil rights movement. When college kids are getting blasted with firehoses simply for going to class, or crowds are throwing bottles at people engaged in a a peaceful march, it demonizes the oppressors, which makes it easier for the resistance to build support from people who otherwise might be indifferent. It's a way to, as you say, weaken and undermine the "occupier."
"Also, if the strategy were as simplistic as you claim, then it could be easily defeated by the occupier refusing to respond violently."
It's not necessarily easy to exercise restraint--the U.S. military certainly didn't want to cause civilian casualties in Iraq, but any time you have significant conflict in a populated area it's going to happen, and it makes the Americans look like devils. And of course, after 9/11, there was a lot of clamoring for some kind of retributive action, which is arguably why attacking Iraq was accepted with so little criticism to begin with. It doesn't take a huge attack to provoke an overreaction--little pricks, over time, can do the trick. The reason these tactics are so commonly employed is that they work, after all.
If there are only two parties, then both parties might choose diametrically opposite positions, and if there's no inherent voter preference, they'll split the vote. However, then party A realizes that if they soften their stance a bit (for simplicity, assume only one trait matters for attracting voters) then not only do they capture all the people in their end of the voter pool, they start to suck voters away from party B. So B softens their position a bit in response, forcing A to respond...etc etc. The point is, there will always be a drive toward the center on any single issue. At the same time, there's a need to differentiate your own party from the other guys, which is why elections in this country tend to get swayed (lately at least) on things like abortion and welfare.
Of course, in the real world it's more complicated because there are multiple issues to take a position on, and there's a disconnect between what a candidate promises and what a candidate delivers. Thomas Schelling did some interesting stuff with the theory behind voting, if you get a chance to check it out.
Even if there were no political parties, individual candidates would still favor middle-of-the-road approaches because they generally appeal to the largest number of voters. Depending on the size of different interest groups (say, environmentalists) you may be able to pull more votes by taking a strong stance on a limited scope issue, but another candidate might still beat you by taking a position halfway between the extreme and the middle.
As for the electoral college system...eh. Arguments for, arguments against. Beats the hell out of me. If politicians weren't universally so terrible, the voting system might not matter so much.
I like Lewis Black's quote: "In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants."
Do you really think it's in the interests of the typical government to eliminate religious belief? What about that whole "opiate of the masses" concept, and the idea that the possibility of paradise in the next life enables people to accept a lousy situation in this life? And don't you think the government would love to have a population of true believers (assuming that the government's goals can be aligned, however uneasily, with religious belief?) Do you think George W. Bush would still be in office right now if he didn't convince a significant proportion of the U.S. voters that he's doing the Lord's work?
Slashdot Mirror
But she WASN'T powerless. I don't know much about second life, but apparently you can stop other players from running animations on your character at any time, or 'teleport' away from an offending situation. She could have e-mailed the mods, or complained to whoever else is in charge. Failing that, at any point during the experience, she had the power to log off, or walk away from the computer. Contrast this with actual rape if you need the idea of being truly powerless illustrated more thoroughly.
So, she wasn't powerless in any sense of the word. I put a lot of weight on Eleanor Roosevelt's claim that no one can make a person feel inferior without that person's consent.
If whatever happened has really left her as traumatized as the Wired article makes it sound, then maybe she needs to unplug for a little while and get back in touch with the real world before she blows a gasket.
In the sense that fantasy always proceeds the act for sex offenders, it's possible that a virtual 'rapist' might be working himself up to a real act of sexual violence. However, it's a LOOOOOONG way from acting sexually aggressive in a game to actually attacking a woman--many sexual predators start as peeping toms before moving on to fetish burglary (panty raids, e.g.) and eventually rape, and not everybody who fantasizes about icky things does them. So it would almost certainly be a waste of limited investigative resources to pursue a virtual case as a precursor to real world crime.
Schirra was the only astronaut to fly missions for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. And the Apollo flight he commanded, which was the first one after the pad fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1, was conducted at a time when a lot of the astronauts still considered the Apollo craft to be a death trap. But they still went, and it was the success of their test flight that gave NASA the confidence to send the second manned Apollo mission all the way to lunar orbit in 1968.
I don't even understand the author's statement that "virtual rape" (whatever that means) could be traumatic. There's none of the implied threat of, say, harassing phone calls, or somebody on the street making cat calls (assuming that your virtual persona is sufficiently separated from your real world persona that a person harassing you online isn't stalking you for real). You certainly can't be physically hurt. And if somebody is saying or doing something you don't like, you sign off, or go to another area. So how could this be traumatic AT ALL, much less traumatic to such a degree that warrants comparison to rape?
Was she virtually asking for it?
Don't flame me, I know it's awful.
You'd eat bacon from your own ass pigs? Remind me not to come to your house for BLTs.
"To use an analogy that might not hold much water here, take talking to a girl who you're interested in as an example. When you're just being friendly and truly enjoying the conversation, she'll be open and friendly. Once you start trying to manuveur the conversation towards getting laid, she'll pick up on it." Right, but this is my point. The girl isn't reading my mind, or detecting some nebulous factor 'intent' that's pouring out of my head into the aether. She's noticing the way I keep glancing at her chest, or the way I'm being too touchy feely, or a change in the way I'm talking. My 'intent' is altering my observable behavior, which she (at some level) is recognizing as a come on. I've heard the same stories of unusual healing talents with reference to the martial arts and qi. If it's real, I'd certainly like to see it. I'm not so obstinate that I can't believe the evidence of my own experience.
"Pulling out of Iraq now would result in the country collapsing into civil war and prolonged violence; better (for both the citizens and the occupying soldiers) to stay and finish the job right, THEN pull out when a decent self-supporting gov't is in place."
Darn right. And at this rate, I can be proud to know that my children, not yet born, will have the opportunity to serve their country by fighting for stability and democracy in Iraq. God bless GW.
Speaking as someone who has done some aikido, I can tell you these "phenomena" aren't necessarily mystical or spiritual. It's amazing how a small adjustment in posture--turning your hips more, or straightening your back--can turn a feeble attempt at a throw into a powerful move. This isn't qi as much as mechanics. However, the sorts of things our sensei would tell us improve our control of qi, like remaining loose, and breathing deeply, also happen to be the sorts of things that form your body into the right posture and help you adopt the proper rhythms. I don't claim this explains EVERYTHING, but for me, it goes a long way toward rationalizing the apparently irrational.
In both cases there's an obvious connection between what you're thinking and what's happening. In the first case, you're thinking about how long you've been hiding because you've been hiding for a long time: obviously the longer the seeker looks, the more likely he is to find you. And in the second case, if you're thinking about how another player is right on top of you, you're probably about to be found regardless of what you think about. And because the human mind is so good at recognizing patterns, it naturally feels like you MUST be attracting the seeker with your mind. Say it with me now, loud and proud: correlation IS NOT causation. You'll hear it at least 10 times a week on /.
Thank God, just when I thought I was the only person who's actually read those books. Supposedly Morgan is done with Kovacs, which is too bad. Market Forces was entertaining, but it somehow managed to be less plausible than his books about the body-swapping mercenary/detective/serial killer. Go figure.
What does it matter if we kill 100 terrorists for every one of our casualties, if our methods of doing so just piss off and alienate people who wouldn't previously have had an axe to grind with us? Do you plan to kill off everyone on the planet who's not American? If not, then body count isn't as important as attacking the root causes of terrorism. As long as we're seen as decadent, immoral, imperialist beasts who kill civilians (yes, even if they really are enemy combatants, if the media calls them civilians that's what people will latch onto), we'll continue to have pissed off people attempting to blow us up. You can't kill all of them.
It may even be beneficial to go the non-traditional route. When I was looking at med schools, I was told that often it's the 'fuzzier' majors (international relations, English, poli sci) who have the most success applying to med school: maybe because it stands out in a sea of bio majors, or maybe because they're studying biology on the side and have to be especially dedicated to it. Nowadays degrees are almost more like signals of work ethic and general ability than an indicator that you're adept in a particular field.
If you ask me, most of the people studying this sort of thing lost touch with reality long ago...
I'm all for social consciousness, but take a look at any internet message board and get a sense of how many people post stupid crap just for the sake of a laugh. Combine that with a system for tracking lost kids and you get, oh, probably about a million pictures sent in of people's asses, or similar nonsense. And do we really want to empower mobs of people to block roads, or swarm public places on the chance that maybe somebody actually spotted a snatched kid? This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
In hindsight, maybe evacuating campus immediately after the first shootings (when there was no reason to believe they were anything other than an isolated incident) MIGHT have saved lives. But think about it--as far as I'm aware, they don't really know what the shooter was doing in the two hours between incidents. For all we know he was hanging around on the drill field, waiting for an evacuation to send hundreds of panicked students out into the open. Or maybe he was in one of the buildings, hoping a lockdown would give him plenty of time to do his work while preventing his victims from making a run for it (from what I've read, he attempted to do just this on his own by chaining a door shut). Keep in mind, we're not just talking about evacuating a dorm here, but an entire campus. How do you move that many people quickly? Where do they go? Or do you lock them down in place without having any idea of where the killer might have gone? Givn that the first killings were in a dorm, do you ask everybody who lives in that hall to rush back there and lock themselves in? MAYBE evacuation/lockdown would have saved some lives. Maybe it wouldn't have. But to suggest that the VT cops should have made that call with little or no information to justify it is nothing more than Monday-morning quarterbacking.
I agree with you on the whole, but you should still consider the deterrent effect of a well-armed populace. If I was a nutter looking to exact some vengeance for a lifetime of abuse, I'd be much less likely to do so with an armed assault if I knew that the classroom I was walking into was armed and capable of shooting back. But then again, crazy is crazy, so who knows?
It seems a bit unfair to call it a lapse--we don't know all the details yet, but if the gunman fired a number of rounds inside of one large building on campus, and then quickly left for another large building on the other side of campus, it's not surprising that he was able to strike again before the cops caught up to him. Assuming he wasn't running around the freshman quad with an m-16 and 'born to kill' written on the back of his VT sweatshirt.
My point was simply that the tactic of "provoking overreaction" can be used in contexts beyond armed resistance, and therefore doesn't warrant the negative conotation.
And of course provoking overreaction isn't the ultimate goal of any resistance movement, but it is one way to get there. The insurgents in Iraq can't forcibly expel the the U.S. military, so they fight a guerilla war, they keep the conflict going on their own terms, they employ dramatic tactics to get the attention of the media and sour the voting populace on the idea of continuing the fight, with the ultimate goal of getting America out. Provoking an overreaction is just another means of doing this: get the Army to raid a village and piss off the locals, maybe injure some bystanders, and now you've further eroded local support for the Americans and maybe gotten yourself a few new recruits to keep the fight going even longer. It's a tactic, not an objective. What propagandists are insisting otherwise?
"That's a very slanted view. It is commonly put about by those keen to portray resistance movements as cruel and callous, and occupiers as mere 'victims of circumstance."
Violence isn't necessarily the only tactic, here. Take a look at the US civil rights movement. When college kids are getting blasted with firehoses simply for going to class, or crowds are throwing bottles at people engaged in a a peaceful march, it demonizes the oppressors, which makes it easier for the resistance to build support from people who otherwise might be indifferent. It's a way to, as you say, weaken and undermine the "occupier."
"Also, if the strategy were as simplistic as you claim, then it could be easily defeated by the occupier refusing to respond violently."
It's not necessarily easy to exercise restraint--the U.S. military certainly didn't want to cause civilian casualties in Iraq, but any time you have significant conflict in a populated area it's going to happen, and it makes the Americans look like devils. And of course, after 9/11, there was a lot of clamoring for some kind of retributive action, which is arguably why attacking Iraq was accepted with so little criticism to begin with. It doesn't take a huge attack to provoke an overreaction--little pricks, over time, can do the trick. The reason these tactics are so commonly employed is that they work, after all.
If there are only two parties, then both parties might choose diametrically opposite positions, and if there's no inherent voter preference, they'll split the vote. However, then party A realizes that if they soften their stance a bit (for simplicity, assume only one trait matters for attracting voters) then not only do they capture all the people in their end of the voter pool, they start to suck voters away from party B. So B softens their position a bit in response, forcing A to respond...etc etc. The point is, there will always be a drive toward the center on any single issue. At the same time, there's a need to differentiate your own party from the other guys, which is why elections in this country tend to get swayed (lately at least) on things like abortion and welfare.
Of course, in the real world it's more complicated because there are multiple issues to take a position on, and there's a disconnect between what a candidate promises and what a candidate delivers. Thomas Schelling did some interesting stuff with the theory behind voting, if you get a chance to check it out.
Even if there were no political parties, individual candidates would still favor middle-of-the-road approaches because they generally appeal to the largest number of voters. Depending on the size of different interest groups (say, environmentalists) you may be able to pull more votes by taking a strong stance on a limited scope issue, but another candidate might still beat you by taking a position halfway between the extreme and the middle.
As for the electoral college system...eh. Arguments for, arguments against. Beats the hell out of me. If politicians weren't universally so terrible, the voting system might not matter so much.
I like Lewis Black's quote: "In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in 12 years, we'll be voting for plants."
...from those who have taken a flying fuck at a rolling donut, or a flying fuck at the moooooon.
Another one bites the dust. Ho hum.
Do you really think it's in the interests of the typical government to eliminate religious belief? What about that whole "opiate of the masses" concept, and the idea that the possibility of paradise in the next life enables people to accept a lousy situation in this life? And don't you think the government would love to have a population of true believers (assuming that the government's goals can be aligned, however uneasily, with religious belief?) Do you think George W. Bush would still be in office right now if he didn't convince a significant proportion of the U.S. voters that he's doing the Lord's work?
I think "EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!" would also be appropriate. Variety being the spice of life, and all.