Good! I’ve missed HAL. (I used read your replies using HAL’s voice, and I always added “Dave” to the end of your sentences.
)
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I really wish someone would make Clarke’s 3001 as a straight-up science fiction movie. Probably wouldn’t make any money, though.
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Because the law protects any ham sandwich making a decision in good conscience and without “malice” in its heart.
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And acting mildly trollish to boot.
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Why do you hate white people? /s
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edit never mind I can’t think of a self depreciating response that sounds good.
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If you want to label being sensitive to others and trying to not needlessly offend and insult others as “self-censoring,” you can use that label, though there are better terms, like “thoughtful,” “empathetic,” or “polite” that might be a better fit depending on the context.
The opposite, though, being comfortable with needlessly offending, belittling, and insulting others, what’s a good term for that?
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It’s true… racial humor is hard. it’s a fine line, I think.
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Mildly? First comment to me ever was why was I a self-hater? Talk about “check your privilege!”
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I think @TobinL might have been understating it a bit on purpose!
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I think the purpose is to make everyone feel as helpless and frustrated as Black people feel right now, until things change. If equity isn’t going to be enforced, it can be forced. We’re collectively accountable for the actions of the state, so we’re all responsible for police brutality. I don’t think that slow-downs of society are out of the question as a tactic, since it’s society at large that bears ultimate responsibility for its own apathy and indifference. So when does it become acceptable to make people less indifferent? When people start dying? Because they already are.
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I dunno. When I hear that protesters blocked the bay bridge, I generally don’t hear a “Yeah, right on!” after it. I hear “Shit, I have to use my car. Those assholes…” and then the folks move on without reflecting on why the protest is happening. There is a fine line between coddling potential supporters in their privilege and just making them angry and alienated to your cause. I find blocking traffic on freeways and what not just tends to alienate people. That said, folks will do what they do and I’m not trying to stop them either. I just don’t go out in my car on those days.
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One shared video of actual police brutality is worth a MILLION of these pointless “traffic slowdowns” in terms of real effect.
Thank God for cheap, powerful smartphones and pervasive high speed internet that allows video sharing. You want change? That’s how it’s gonna happen.
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Raised fists and signs will always be a form of protest, but now that you say it, it kinda makes sense. Showing up in numbers meant attracting the media and getting some screen time or ink for the dissenters. Today, you are the media.
But does it work fast enough? And what if it were a literal MILLION of these showdowns? Then people might start to weigh the issue of basic fairness being worth getting to work on time. People are funny and weird. They might go the other way and decide it’s worth doubling down on police brutality because they missed an important meeting and “fuck those guys.” But should that attitude be accommodated? Rewarded? Treated as if it’s normal?
When Gordon Cooper, the astronaut, was given a ticker-tape parade, civil rights activists who threatened to disrupt it managed to get concessions in exchange for cancelling the protest. What kind of concessions can you get right before traffic for something like Comic-Con? Or playoffs? I don’t think this tactic is entirely useless.
ETA: And I do question the ability of new technologies and media to effect positive social change. I’m not saying they can’t do so, but I do think people wax poetic about them too quickly right before we acclimate to the new technology and the positive effects we expect kind of dissipate. We were in Iraq longer than we were in Vietnam, but the consensus is that Vietnam ended the way it did because it was the first televised war. So why didn’t it seem to have that effect in Iraq or Afghanistan? In fact, Fox News arguably exacerbated our decision to go to war and to stay there. My hypothesis is that the balance of how a new technology is used tends to shift to minimize disruption.
ETAA: Sorry I keep editing. I keep finding tcpos.
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Oh, my sweet @subextraordinaire, I am no HAL. That robot is sonorous. I’ve got more of a keening wail on my normal setting.
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Or they overstate the effect altogether… Take the case of Egypt and the Arab Spring, where more people came out on the street, where the action was, when Mubarak cut off the internet.
Or people gloss over the downsides of new technologies:
Ignoring that these are also technologies of mass surveillance as much as they are communication.
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That’s 1.8 minutes of stopped traffic for every arrest. Even protesting costs more in the Bay Area. All you have to do to stop traffic in Austin for 45 minutes is nothing at all. You could just walk down MoPac at 4 pm on Monday to a packed house.
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I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the effects of sharing police brutality / racism video recordings. There’s a huge class of people who have never seen this stuff because it doesn’t happen to them, and it is not “newsworthy” for the mass media to cover – or it is too controversial for them to cover, as in, sharing video of a person dying due to wounds inflicted by a police officer.
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I’m not saying it’s not important or impactful, I’m saying that you can’t just have that to effect meaningful change. I do agree that sharing the videos can illuminate the problem, but then you have the issue of some people not seeing it as “their” problem, but as a sad fact of life that they have no way to change or that they don’t see as being system in any meaningful way (they see it as individualized racism or bad policing). Just watching a video doesn’t necessarily bring people into the realm of political action, if they don’t see it as their problem to begin with.
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