CollegeBaby

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Posts posted by CollegeBaby

  1. Posted

    My earlier comment, and concern to some extent, is the dogpiling that goes on.  Yes, people should be able to criticize feminists, including Wu.  But my impression over the coffee thing is that the dam broke and people's pent up frustrations or issues with her all got dumped that day, which is not productive.  It's like when you're having an argument with someone, and the single issue you were arguing about suddenly becomes a litany of all the wrongs you've caused each other over the last year. 

     

    That seems to be a thing that happens too often, when the last straw is placed and it becomes open season an airing all the complaints, criticisms or issues people have had with a specific person. 

     

    So it's not so much criticizing her decisions in this case, but my perception that people used it as a diving board for a bunch of other stuff. 

     

    Are there any other metaphors I can cram into this post?

     

    Yeah I agree with this which is why I feel conflicted about it. I'm not going to follow her, as if she would give a shit anyway, but as to what happens now with her position in the community is a really tricky issue.

  2. Posted

    I really don't know what to do with Brianna. I've been tentatively on board with her up until this point but definitely had the problems with her that people have already brought up.

     

    I'm so not interested in any "greater good" bullshit here. A "truce" where Wardell does not apologise for his actions, denounce GG, or amend his behaviour has zero meaning. A "greater good" literally does not exist. I really don't get Brianna's angle with this. She'll probably spend 30 minutes talking about this on her podcast next week (let's be honest Isomeric is really just the Brianna Wu Podcast) so I'll listen to her try to explain herself, but I think I'm just done with caring about anything she has to say at this point. If she can explain herself, apologise to the people who's issues she has hand-waved and show that she has improved then fine, but I don't see that happening.

     

    I take issue with the idea that Feminism should be this united front against the primary problem of male chauvinists. Passing over other marginal folk just so major white Feminists can get a win against some big male douchegargler seems like a hollow victory to me. At the same time personally calling out people on Twitter is extremely unproductive, especially when the person is as targeted as Brianna. 

     

    The echo-chamber complaint of Twitter is really weird to me as well. People will say that and/or that Twitter is a dumpster fire of drama and hostility. Both are kinda true, but I don't know what people expect other than just nobody using Twitter. It's not an RSS feed, it's a social media platform. I mean don't we all surround our personal life and spend time with people we mostly agree with? People you follow on Twitter are not your friends, but I'm not going to follow people I strongly disagree with just for some "both sides" wank. I just don't usually get along with people that I'm just going to argue with about politics all the time, and I don't know why I am supposed to feel bad about that.

  3. Posted

    Calling Zak a "one man gamergate" I think is using unnecessarily loaded language. He's not part of a misogynist pushback ideology like gamergate is. He also doesn't really have that much power over any subculture, even in sex work. I think it was meant to reflect his history of gatekeeping in the DnD community, and generally being a petulant manchild about it. He is just a classic case of Clueless White Male Ally who does defend a number of social justice issues, but considers himself immune to failure and continually refuses to listen to marginal groups when called out for being a rubbish ally. Instead he regularly frames all dissidents as anti-sex conservatives, even when being called out by other sex workers.

     

    Whatever. Like I said he is relatively benign small fry compared to the problems related to this thread. I didn't mean to go on a tangent and I don't consider it important enough to list each of his transgressions, so people are free to reserve judgment.

  4. Posted

    "I wanted to make fun of trolls by repeating exactly the same behavior they did. You know... the edgy clever thing where you make fun of a thing by being indistinguishable from the thing. It was TRUE SATIRE but now I am being harassed for realsies and now I truly understand."
     
    So sick of dudes who think this is the best thing since comedy was invented. Your intended targets completely missed the point, and you created real harm, so who was your "satire" for?*
     
    *extremely rhetorical question
     
    Now waiting for the the guy to come out and say "actually all that was ANOTHER layer of satire about how clueless white dudes do shitty things to vulnerable people, and justify it as satire of other people who do shitty things to vulnerable people." Ugh. These kinds of stunts have another horrible long term effect of diminishing the seriousness of organised sociopathic patterns of online harassment. Actual authorities barely understand online harassment as it is, and this isn't helping.
     
    On a related note, Zack S has been name searching himself and getting into arguments with people on Twitter who are calling him out for being an asshole. Probably has found this thread as well, which is why I deliberately do not spell his name correctly.
     
     

    Shocking charges, absolutely. I'll look into it.

     

    I don't believe his personal views are as abhorrent as the people currently being hired by the Escapist, but his behavior online and extreme aggressiveness with people calling him out is gross and has been going on for years. He is very tangential to the themes of this thread though so I don't want to distract from other topics.

  5. Posted

     Yeah... seems like there will be a little less video content on the Escapist for now. Short version: their porn stars think they're sick fucks for hiring Brandon Morse. :)

    http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.de/2015/02/were-not-playing-d-with-escapist-ever.html?zx=f4b5d38f805b2d3

    (NSFW in the US, probably completely harmless anywhere else)

    p.s. I'll say this just once, but this forum has the worst sad smiley imaginable.

     

    It's good that people are ditching the Escapist for their hiring choices, but I'd be careful not to hold up Zack S as a good example though. He's been known for a pattern of harassment himself.

     

    Fail Forward

  8. Posted

    This Ken Levine thing puts a new perspective on several personalities in GG, who now look like they're desperately trying to be ersatz Andrew Ryan.

     

    Actually it would be really nice if GG fucked off to a secret city under the sea and never bothered anyone else again.

     

    Wait is 8chan... Rapture? Only they're still lashing out against decent society.

     

    Someone probably made this comparison 6 months ago.

  11. Posted

    I'll take this as pointed directly at me. If you perceive my moral questioning to be in bad faith, then I'll stop participating in the thread. Because honestly, I want to understand and it seemed to me that people wanted me to understand. But if "read the fucking manual" is really the advice that I deserve then I'll gladly take that and be done with this.

     

    No not directed at anyone in particular, it's just a common problem with this issue being discussed. If anyone wants a dose of Veganism 101 this is a good video.

     

  12. Posted

    Reason #2 why I hesitate to discuss Veganism: being repeatedly queried with moral conundrums to test the precise priority of my ethics, especially if is done in bad faith to force some kind of contradiction. Meanwhile, I never have to ask meat-eaters to justify why they think cannibalism is wrong. But would you eat your dead neighbour if it would save the life of your first born child? Really, if you genuinely want to know more about Vegan ethics then there are plenty of resources and literature out there. If you're trying to find a loophole so you can win an internet argument, give it a rest.

     

    I want to explain I don't think owning a pet is tantamount to slavery, it is more like adopting a child. The simple act of caring for a pet I don't take much issue with. Assistant dogs for blind people and other less able people are great. It is the pet breeding industry that I have a problem with. Imagine if you wanted to adopt a child and instead of a shelter for homeless children you went to a dealer that breeds children with all the physical/psychological traits that you desired in a child. Where women used for breeding are held in cramped captivity with poor living conditions and are not socialised to other humans. Where the women are constantly in pregnancy and there are generations upon generations of inbreeding. Where the industry is very loosely regulated, profits take high priority over human welfare and medical records are not always kept. Where "defective" children are culled because they will never be adopted, along with women that are beyond the age of childbearing. Unless you do very diligent research on where you are buying your pets from, this is part and parcel of purchasing from a pet dealer.

     

    This is before you even touch on the percentage of people who impulse-buy pets only to abandon them at shelters when they change their mind, often simply to be euthanised later. Human's love affair with quaint domestic animals wont disappear so I don't think making this illegal will ever work, but there needs to be much better regulation to make it as safe and ethical as possible. Even the animals that humans ostensibly love the most are not free from animal rights abuses.

  13. Posted

    I also want to ask about keeping pets, especially indoor-only pets, because if meat is murder, then pets are slavery, aren't they? I've just realized that there's no way to frame this question so that it doesn't sound like a troll. Please feel free to ignore it.

     

    Personally I'm against keeping pets unless they are shelter rescues. Contributing to the animal breeding industry is a big no-no for me, and laden with a number of problems I don't have the patience to get into right now.

  14. Posted

    I guess this is a good time to give everyone the distinct reminder that some vegetarians and vegans (myself included) value animal lives equally whether they are human or not. So calling a farm slavery or making analogies to mistreatment of certain peoples is comparing like with like to us, not an exaggerated comparison. This is genuinely how we feel even if others among you don't see it that way.

     

    Agreed. The reason I don't eat meat, or support any kind of animal product, is exactly the same reason I don't for humans. All animals can feel suffering as a result of having a nervous system, and all want to live because of their will for self-preservation. Because of this, I think it is ethically preferable that at the very least they are given the right to live according to their will. While I don't believe there is such a thing as an objective morality, or that you can create morals from simple physical facts of the world, this seems like a rather simple and obvious moral premise to me as an entity capable of empathy. However, the philosophy of ethics is a fuzzy topic, and possibly one of the most pointless things to be arguing about if we can't agree on moral premises.

     

    It's weird because I consider myself to be moral in many other -ism situations, but it seems like I'd be wrong if I considered myself moral on this by what has been discussed in this thread.

     

    This is pretty much the core reason I loathe debating this with people. Almost everyone thinks themselves to be a "good" person, so when somebody else makes the suggestion that something they are doing is unethical, they can't resolve the two thoughts. Most of the time they will deny that the behaviour is unethical, or say it is not their responsibility. It's the same issue when talking Feminism with someone who is being sexist. Most people don't want to believe they are sexist because then they must believe they are committing bad behaviour or reinforcing harmful attitudes. That is why we have stupid things like "SJW" which is somehow meant to be a slur. Likewise, vegans are cast as being stereotypically holier-than-thou for their views.
     
    It is my view that eating meat, being sexist, or whatever other transgressions of injustice do not automatically make you a bad person. Good people can do bad things when the weight of a cultural status quo is bearing down upon you to define your attitudes for you and drive you towards certain behaviours. Honestly I do not even know what substance there is in defining a person as either bad or good, but that's a different topic. Like I said earlier, you absolutely can not underestimate how much the animal product industry has become a deeply rooted component of our society. You can't have an industry that large and that old, and not have it affect people's attitudes. This industry has been working very, very hard to disassociate your sense of empathy for a another living creature so that you only view it as a banal supermarket product.

  15. Posted

    I dated a vegan for half a decade and lived with two vegans, so I don't think I'm too out of hand saying your living situation, in terms of location, transportation, and access, must be much more fortunate than most vegans I've known. It's also good for the purposes of a productive and bilateral discussion if you don't assume that your body and metabolism are representative of the entirety of all people in this thread, vegan or not.

     

    In general, I'm fine debating the morality of the decision not to eat meat. I think the utility of the decision not to eat meat is a different question and one that has been handled horribly by most people here, myself included. "Works for me" and "Doesn't work for me" seem to be a good stopping point, if we can't progress beyond anecdote.

     

    Despite being vegan I loathe to get into these discussions most of the time, especially on the internet. However I think it's important to remind ourselves how heavily our economy is structured around animal products, and that because  vegetarianism/veganism is a niche market it is not always economical for the consumer. So instead I advocate foremost that people try to minimise harm as best they can, rather than trying to meet ultimate rules. Even being vegan you can't expect to be 100% ethical 100% of the time. Doing the best you can is all that you can do.

  17. Posted

    The problem with "life expectancy" is that it's usually taken as a mean. As you said, infant mortality was quite high, which massively distorts the picture. People lived older than is assumed by the statistic prior to 100 years ago and I believe 60s is a pretty good estimate for a person to live if they made it past their teen years. Even as far back as 100/200CE. 

     

    I'm by no means an expert in this though, so don't ask any follow up questions, because I'm sure you can google the answer as easily as I can. Although it's probably not really relevant to your point.

     

    You're right 40 might be an exaggeration, I did not look up the exact statistic because it is too vague to encompass all cultures. That said, just because it is the mean average doesn't mean that life expectancy didn't influence people's long term decisions. The other thing I forgot to bring up was the rate of women dying from childbirth is of less concern now. Nevertheless, the improved medical science afforded by developing countries has been crucial to the liberation of women's role as caregivers. Immutable biological traits are becoming less and less of a relevant excuse, which was the larger point I was trying to make.

  18. Posted

    I feel like this is a better representation. I'm in no way defending the CH cartoons. They look pretty shitty and entirely racist, but I think this is the key point you're ignoring which caused the huge outcry. 

     

    For that interpretation to make sense you would have to ignore that Charlie Hebdo were targeted for blasphemous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and that it would not make sense for them to be concerned about comics that perpetuate racist stereotypes by committing an act that would embody the very worst stereotype that Muslims are vilified for.

  19. Posted

    To be honest, the thread title grates on me the way almost any internet humor that depends on substituting similar sounding words like that. 

     

    In other news, France, the bastion of free speech where millions rallied in unity to not be bowed by terrorism.  In this country where people shared and published Charlie Hebdo's work far and wide, so that the terrorists could not win.  The country to which all have looked for leadership in this moment...has been arresting people for shit they be saying and drawing.

     

    Please Charlie Hebdo, if you want to prove how subversive and anti-establishment you are run a cartoon skewering all the politicians and world leaders who use your name to score political brownie points, while also denying the freedoms of their own citizens.

     

    ‘Staunch defenders of free press’ attend Paris rally

     

    paris480.jpg?w=480&h=1155

  20. Posted

    I've heard it suggested that institutional patriarchy had its seeds planted as far back as the rise of industrial agriculture about 10,000 years ago when it was customary to hand down your land/property to your children. Men wanted to be certain that their children were biologically their own, and in response became more possessive and controlling of their female partners' sexual access. I do not know how substantiated this is, I can't imagine all cultures would have followed this exact path. I suppose you could test this by comparing the gender politics of nomadic cultures who do not own land.

     

    Something we take for granted regarding the role of women as caregivers is that for the entirety of human history up until 100 or so years ago child mortality rates were much higher and life expectancy was much lower, as such you see people having more children. A mother having 5-10 children under the expectation they may die before age 40 could not reasonably expect to hold down a career even in this day and age. However, as birthrates decline and childcare resources improve in developed countries this expectation of women being the primary caregiver should really be falling into irrelevance.

  21. Posted

    Free speech.

     

    Nah Tegan is right, although more accurately it is frozen yogurt. This thread has just been about me projecting my anger for not getting my frozen yogurt, while at the same time trying to convince myself that it is overrated and probably also cursed.

  22. Posted

    On the gender wage gap: Apart from the basic problem that women's work is not as valued as men's, the wage gap is exacerbated by a large set of other relationships. Women are less likely to complete higher education, they are more likely to work in lower paying job sectors, they are less likely to get promotions, they are less likely to have full-time positions, they work less hours in casual/part-time jobs etc. Apologists use this is a way to mitigate the severity of the wage gap as women not being good enough employees, but they fail to understand how expectations of gender roles play a part in all these factors. None of these things just happened out of nowhere, actually they reinforce a dangerous cycle.

     

    To me the biggest sign of the sexism at the heart of the gender wage gap is that around the world there is only one industry where women are consistently paid higher than men. Sex work.

  23. Posted

    I agree that "Let's republish the cartoons" makes sense as a knee-jerk reaction but isn't very useful beyond that. Same thing for the hashtag, it is a coping mechanism I guess but it's also very meaningless. It's a bit unfair to expect people to get into a reflective phase right away though.

    Once again, I feel like the national and the international discussion on this is going to be different. The whole freedom of speech issue might be what will remain of it outside of France, and it's fine. There are people saying freedom of speech is important and so forth here as well, but I don't think it will be the legacy of the event. Even the focus on the symbol of the pen/pencil feels more related to the disproportion between stupid drawings and such organized violence.

    The long-term true political question here should be along the lines of "Why does a French-born French-raised guy turn into a terrorist and what do we do about it ?". Everyone here already has its answers for the first part of the question. Sometimes that answer itself is part of the problem, for instance when you hear that it is an "integration problem", because a good portion of the integration problem is people being told they are not integrated.

    And the annoying thing is, you only have easy answers to the second part of the question if your answer to the first part is simplistic.

     

    If it were up to me, the biggest takeaway from this tragedy shouldn't be free speech, but unity. Unity in the face of forces that will drive people apart. I don't know what causes anyone to become a terrorist, but I think we first have to ask why a decade long War on Terror has produced no meaningful results, and why we expect Western aggression in the Middle East to solve Terrorism but we don't expect to deal with the refugees and the immense humanitarian aid crisis that results from it.

     

     

    To clarify: In my example, I was talking about Neo-Nazis (although, nowadays I guess Nazi-skinheads would be considered "old Neonazis" since the preferred way for the movement to present itself has somewhat adjusted itself to match the times) and I mentioned them being German, because I am as well and most of the (thankfully brief) encounters I've had with and stuff I read about them has been with German Neo-Nazis, so I don't know if the impression I got of their major demographic ("White trash" projecting the blame for their disadvantaged position on immigrants/some undefined other, instead of acknowledging their own agency and the forces of the system they live in) would be accurate for other countries, although I wouldn't be surprised if it were.

     

    I see. I can't speak for other countries but that's definitely the relationship with Neo-Nazis in Australia too, and other related White Nationalist shitlickers. Australia has a definite problem with White Nationalism, maybe not so strong in the mainstream politics but it has a sizable count of the voting bloc. This is getting off topic, but I just wanted to say that since I don't want to feel like I'm talking down from an Ivory Tower.

  24. Posted

    Haha Bjorn that video was so gross. Like David Cronenberg level of gross. I had to turn the sound off, but I'm sure that's absolutely the effect they were going for.

     

    In other news a study observes sexism in STEM fields. Men react with predictable sexism.

     

    Men (on the Internet) don’t believe sexism is a problem in science, even when they see evidence

     

    22 percent  of all of the comments justified the existence of gender bias.
    -10.6 percent (of the 22%) justified gender bias stating that women perpetrate it by discriminating against other women.

     

    wat

  25. Posted

    There's something I don't understand about the whole "Comedy shouldn't punch downward" sentiment: What if the person or sentiment that is "beneath" our level or is held by people that are, is still really dumb and deserving of our scorn/ridicule. For instance, would it be immoral for me to make fun of the "classic", german Nazi-Skinhead-demography because in the 80's and 90's (and even now to some extent) they are mostly people that lost in society, are statistically likely to have a lower grade of education, income and social acceptance than me. Still, they also do believe that the people responsible for their shitty (at least doubtlessly shittier than mine) lot in life are people who have it even shittier than themselves and take it out on them and that is really stupid. Also, much of the stuff they say to justify their behaviour or explain their political platform is really bad and funny (such as explaining their opinion that "people what can't even speak proper german should go back to where they came from" when referring to someone whose family has been living in that town for three generations now.).

    Would it be mean for me as a relatively wealthy white guy who is currently at university to draw a cartoon that might end up hurting their feelings?

     

    As I mentioned, the issue isn't so much about having hurt feelings. Targets of good satire will almost always have hurt feelings. Not that it was satire, but I told a bunch of people to go fuck themselves after all, which I still take responsibility for. Pretty sure I hurt some feelings. It is about whether or not it challenges or reinforces certain problematic power structures in our society. Nazis are a group defined by their ideology. Even though they are social pariahs and are widely hated for their beliefs, they are not a social underclass in the same way that race minorities are oppressed because of inane bigotry against their intrinsic natures.

     

    Conflating Nazism with Germany - while possibly not a strong example of punching down - is still poor taste because it reinforces a meaningless stereotype of Germans being Nazis, or Nazis being German - when the two are not causal and are simply a circumstance of a time and place where Nazism had the right conditions to flourish. Nazis should be mocked for their Nazism, not for being German or for living in poverty.

     

    I think if somebody wants to make good satire about Nazism today and the relationship it has with poverty they would do well to understand the conditions in Germany post WW1 where Nationalism became a strong identity among the working class who faced huge levels of unemployment as a result of the Depression.

    I feel like attempts to lionize the work and lives of those killed pushes a narrative that only good victims don't deserve to die, versus a larger narrative that people shouldn't be killed in general, but that they might have not been good people and we need to talk about that still. Which I think is something Busby poked at a little.

     

    That's part of what has been frustrating me. Because people died and the rest of us were rightly saddened by this, we are wanting to pay some sort of tribute or honor to them for being killed in cold blood. As they should. But I think in our rush to call them heroes as if in death they have been washed of all their sins people have put them beyond all criticism of the fact that these are not the people protecting our freedoms. They did not deserve this, they are not at fault for this, but I am not Charlie Hebdo and they don't represent my idea of freedom.

     

    The sorts of illustrations that Bjorn lined to (thank you) I think are all that's necessary to pay tribute to them and honor them. Reposting their work is not necessary.

     

    And now for something completely different...

     
    5vawrt.jpg
     
    "Moslems"
     
    "growing jihadist cancer"
     
    Uuuuuuhhhhgghgghuuuhghghghfsgsredvdhaerq4238u5 -0WQRH-243 %13 6
     
    This is why free speech is a false promise, because this damn guy has more say over the world's media than any anyone targetted by islamophbia. People who need free speech the most are rarely afforded it.