The purpose of the Kobayashi Maru is to lose. Running away gets you killed too. Everything gets you killed. The reference to "Nintendo-Hard" video games in #83 isn't actually fair, because those were beatable if you were really good. The equivalent would be beating Pac-Man; you have to define down what "beating" means. (And, indeed, beating Pac-Man means "playing well enough that the system crashes.")
Their page on this observes "Responses to the scenario are varied, with several characters improvising solutions but losing anyway (Scotty, for instance, used a physics trick that worked on paper but not in the real world; the computer's response was to spawn more ships than the entire Klingon navy had)."
Those of us who are a little younger and read the books of an author we try not to name directly tend to think of game scenario involving a certain large person's beverage.
They find your body, and give it new life. As a cyborg, you will serve SHODAN well.
Nobody's touched on one of the zombie-unique (well, nearly unique; Cortex Reavers aren't quite zombies) dynamics: what happens when you fall. If there's a group of survivors:
Zombies are the fear that you may end up turning on everything you hold dear.
Zombies are taking arms against your own brothers because the alternative is death or worse.
Zombies are begging your friends to kill you first and show no mercy against you.
The parallels to disease mentioned above are apt, but quarantining your family due to a disease or locking them in a room while they fight through withdrawal symptoms aren't as SFnal.
Jim@10: Can you explain that? The only thing I currently know about shingles is that what I recall learning as a kid (that shingles was what you got if you got chicken pox as an adult instead of as a kid) was wrong.
Abidemi #2:
Not at all. I can't even call it morbid curiosity. I would be genuinely curious to see how it was handled.
Ken Brown #190:
Will the blind recover their sight?
Vote the Christian Cyborg Transhumanist Party!
Augh! I have been plumrolled! I actually didn't see it coming until the very end.
I was five, and I lived about 10 miles from Top Gun's location at the time. I've known the story for awhile, but didn't have a name to attach to it.
So yes, thank you, sir.
Albatross: Bravo! Though, if I recall the rules for predicate nominative correctly, the puppies are actually we, not us.
The futuristic font that sticks the most strongly with me is actually Stop, which I believe I first learned from every third-grade poster-maker's best friend, The Lettering Book.
For many years I tried to re-find and couldn't, and assumed I must have misremembered the name. Today I am vindicated! Thanks, Making Light.
glowing testimonial ends
If you’re big on watching Harrison Ford get beaten up and suffering, this is the movie for you.
Brad Pitt getting the snot beaten out of him was definitely one of the major draws of Spy Game, while we're at it. Watching that movie in a mixed group was interesting.
Comment #239: the first point that I realized brtn actually wasn't "Britain".
Xopher@122: I would love to see the antisemiotic vandalism thread.
Terry@190:
It seems to me the Hobbesian state of nature has taken over all of the bits of USENET in which I used to hang out.
Usenet is still a pretty good place if you care about the faithful simulation of various 8-bit processing architectures, real and imagined. I've had six or seven newsgroups I've read regularly over the years, starting in 1996. The traffic is low enough and generally noncontentious enough that there's never been a problem larger than the occasional spam storm - and even those were only about a dozen posts at a time. Attempts to move discussions to moderated forums and the like tended to collapse under inertia.
Those are the only examples I can think of, though. rec.games.rpg.advocacy lasted past 1994, at least.
I first learned this one as "...so big He can't move it", which isn't as much fun, because then it becomes the unstoppable force/immovable object problem.
Which has an answer, at least in this universe. "Newton's Second Law! All forces are unstoppable, no objects are immovable. God can't even make a rock so big you can't move it, as long as it's in space and you've got some thrust to apply."
Despite being agnostic, I like the "God made all kinds of rocks Jesus can't lift" answer for the Christian-specific answer.
I also note that the Afterlife game had a disaster called "Disco Inferno". It was a gloriously silly game, albeit one that was ultimately kind of passive and self-defeating.
Scraps@
It begins to be difficult, with the best will in the world, to believe protestations of sincerity that are so evidently deaf to explanation.
On the off chance that this is targeting me, I agreed with it and moved on (most explicitly in #450, more in passing earlier). Accidentally hitting covert racist code words is a separate and (to some of us) at least as important topic, because it's a situation we personally are more likely to actually be in. The fact that this conversation continued is not ignorance of the result of the previous one.
Also, that wasn't, at least, how I was using "mine". The mines were the code words, accidentally using one and thus hurting a friend was the explosion.
Madeline@521: Is "I'm sorry you ..." ever an apology?
There is, as you note, a distinction between "I'm sorry" as "I take responsibility for harming you" and "I'm sorry" as in "this causes me distress."
(1) "I'm sorry I rear-ended you." There was an accident and it's your fault. This is an apology where you take responsibility.
(2) "I'm sorry my car went runaway and rammed your car; I should have set the parking brake parking on that hill." This is still your fault, but for negligence this time instead of direct agency. This is an apology taking responsibility for a more indirect failing.
(3) "I'm sorry my car went runaway and rammed your car; I can't believe the parking brake failed." This is a statement of regret at an unfortunate turn of events, not an apology. There seems to be a point of disagreement between us as to whether this situation deserves a responsibility-taking apology; I read you as saying it does, while I do not believe so. For me, the precautions taken were sufficient that there is no wrongdoer at all, despite the fact that a wrong has clearly been done (the victim's car is totalled).
(4) I've been treating the "stumbling into covert racism" scenario as being like (3), but with a third party who sabotaged the apologizer's parking brake. Chaos ensues: the victim has no reason to believe the brake was ever set in the first place, and the "perpetrator" won't accept that this was due to his being insufficiently diligent about car maintenance. Everybody's going to get angry, but only one person also has a totaled car. Unlike in (3), there's an actual guilty party here, but he isn't on the scene.
In both 3 and 4, it is entirely appropriate for the person whose car caused the crash to still feel regret about the situation, and it's damned near mandatory if the person whose car was totaled was a friend. I'd say it's even appropriate for them to feel more sorrow about it since they were involved, even if their involvement was blameless. But feeling more sorrow about it doesn't mean taking responsibility.
So, I suppose, yes, my sample "honest apologies" for stumbling across a code word really aren't apologies by your lights: I am saying that if someone innocently triggers distress in someone by misspeaking, they should only owe emotional solidarity and a promise to not make the same mistake twice - that's the best they can do without lying about their intent. They cannot honestly apologize in the sense of "taking responsibility for wrongdoing" because there's no decision they could have made that would involve explicitly avoiding it - it was a matter of bad luck, not negligence, and any such apology would be only slightly more sincere than "I'm sorry I lost the lottery; I'm a bad mathematician and will try to pick better numbers in the future."
Nicole@452: Eagh. I have happily never run into that kind of cluelessness, and if I did I'm not at all sure I could manage to not make a scene ("Did we not pass THIRD GRADE where we learned about personal space? There are LAMPREYS that are quivering in embarrassment for having to share a PHYLUM with you..."). I considered adding a separate category for "clueless privileged who are in their cluelessness being openly wildly offensive" but decided that complicated things to much.
That might have been a mistake. But from the point of that classification? They are Category As. It falls to those of us who share the privilege to, er, accept that opportunity to have a teaching moment so that with luck it does not also fall on the unprivileged.
If one is unprivileged, I see no need to waste time on the terminally clueless; ostracization or other minimization of contact is perfectly justifiable, as are attempts at social engineering to make this minimization more practical.
(I'm using "privileged" here because I think this generalizes beyond race to gender, class, etc.)
John@456: I meant something more along the lines of what Xopher said later on in #469 - I don't mind being jerked short. But these people are, after all, friends - I don't want to hurt them, and perception and sensitivity will only tell you that you *just did* hurt them, not that you're *about* to if you aren't careful. From a debate standpoint, you also don't want the person you're talking to to decide you're a hopeless case and walk away, leaving you confused.
Constance@465: I don't live a segregated life. I've lived in heavily multiethnic environments all my life, and I cannot offhand recall a time when even a majority of my friends were white[*]. I still never ran into these, because they weren't live in any of my environments. The world isn't monolithic.
In fact, I rather suspect that this is itself a form of privilege because it means the whites I did know were incapable of being as aggressively clueless as they would be otherwise. I'm probably much easier to shock as a result.
[* If Asian-Americans and Asian nationals count as "white" this is no longer true. Regardless, the rules change when the culture or subculture you're dealing with does. None of the specific examples would apply, but the general principles do.]
Madeline@489: Xopher's comment at 490 nails it. "I'm sorry for being racist", "I'm sorry for accidentally acting out an unconscious racist assumption", and "I'm sorry you were hurt due to my unawareness of the hidden meanings of that action in this context" are, if honest, apologies for three entirely different sorts of trangressions.
--
Regarding doors, I tend to like to see the door if I'm at a restaurant eating alone. It seems that I'm going to have to graciously volunteer to take seats facing away from the door if I'm at a ML gathering. The folks facing the door can warn me if someone inimical approaches.
Madeline@447: Because I've been subdividing things more finely than the rest of them, and so they were listed individually as slightly different things, with different answers. See my many posts in this thread where I agree point-by-point with the various responses.
I was also (possibly mis-) reading Doctor Science and others as claiming that it is possible for any person with a shred of empathy to be able to avoid making the mistakes in the first place, which I doubted, and which your comment to me apparently takes for granted is false. (As far as I was concerned, most of the discussion I was in was around the question "if it *isn't* false, then how do we avoid placing pointless additional burdens on POCs, and if it is, what protocols will minimize them?")
Doctor Science: I'm not talking entirely about Biden here. As I read Darkrose's comment, any use of the word at all carries that connotation, and you'll have to take my word for it that it's entirely possible to be an American for 30 years and never run across this fact until it makes the national news is a more explicit context. (Her comment also, as a data point, matched the responses I got when asking about it at the time.) The people parsing Biden's statement in particular and coming up with "harmless" forms of it I was reading as exactly the "flailing of hapless white people" that was under discussion.
"The first articulate, clean, etc." being bad is indeed deducible from first principles as you say. DWB, once expanded, it deducible from general cultural knowledge, but I'm not sure how the concept applies to not giving offense in a discussion, except as an unrelated example of privilege. "Articulate" being a standalone slur, however, seems no more deducible from first principles than "clean" being a standalone slur would be.
Bruce Cohen: That whole thread may boil down to me thinking "I'm sorry you've been hurt; this was unintentional" isn't an acceptable apology since it makes no admission of actual wrongdoing. I agree that in the situation you describe (and that Madeline describes) it's still the best response, but I continue to also believe that someone who doesn't like you can paint it as a "non-apology apology".
At this point I seem to be producing more heat than light, so I'll shut up unless someone has direct questions to ask.
Heresiarch@438, Scraps@439, Allan@440
Busted - I was kind of skimming albatross's comments all through, since the subthread I was most active in involved what Soon Lee called The Secret Racists' Cant.
a) Whether or not they have any racist intent, their words can still be unacceptably racist.
Indeed.
b) Believing you are not a racist and not wanting to be a racist isn't the same thing as not being racist.
This is true, and generally what I've been talking about with respect to "unconscious bias".
c) Putting the onus on POC to tolerate the well-meaning flailings of white people discussing race is a bit whack, given that one of the major outcomes of racism is that POC already get more than their fair share of rhetorical (and literal) bruising.
This depends crucially on what you mean by "tolerate."
From Lance Weber@412:
I [since I was unaware of the code-word status of "articulate"] use it all the time, especially when formally evaluating people (recommendations, interviews, reviews, etc)
So, suppose someone gets a job recommendation from him that includes it, and decides that this is a racist statement and they won't tolerate it.
Not tolerating it by writing back "dude, that's a code word for racism" is obviously acceptable - that's what I meant by "assumption of good faith".
However, if they failed to tolerate it by posting it on the Internet wondering aloud why this racist thug still had a job, then this would also be, as you say, "a bit whack."
So, to answer whether you missed any, I will add:
(d) It is not socially acceptable to be openly racist anymore; other whites will turn on you if you are. There is thus a group of privately-but-consciously racist whites, and they are the ones who find the codewords necessary.
(e) It is thus entirely possible to make a statement that can be read as racist when there is not even a subconscious bias inclining one to do so.
One of the disagreements in this thread appears to be whether or not situations covered by (e) are, in fact, actually racist.
Scraps:
And this after a direct statement by Biden -- "trying to imply" indeed -- whose racism is explicit and undeniable, however unconscious it might well have been. But it's more important to understand Joe Biden -- understand the hapless white man -- than to talk about the racist statement.
If we accept that it was explicit and undeniable, then there's a point. But then, there isn't a lot to say about the racist statement ("WTF is this?"), and the fact that everyone immediately rushed to his defense is a separate, noteworthy fact.
On the other hand in the "Why should Lance keep his job" example, the "poor, befuddled, white[*] man" would, indeed, be the crux of the question - the only answers end up being "he shouldn't, because he's a racist scumbag" or "he should, because you're reading racism in where it is not." And that's a question, ultimately, that's about him, not the recipient. We already know the recipient thought it was a terrible thing, or the question would never have even been asked.
If you think that it is the recipient's feelings that are more important to this question, then we do, indeed, have a pretty fundamental disagreement, and it's probably somewhere that has nothing to do with race. I'd be happy to explore it.
Allan@440:
In a conversation about racism, the mines are in plain sight if you know what to look for and take the trouble to look.
Yes, but. These are called "racist code words" for a reason. Lance, Xopher, Soon, etc. are exactly the people that the privately-but-consciously-racist designed the code to hide the racism from. The implication that their ignorance of this is thus a sign of their privilege - or worse, evidence of racist indoctrination - is a bit bizarre, and it is not justified by the fact that the privately-but-consciously racist mistreat minorities more.
Similarly, "just think through what you're going to say; it is, after all, just basic courtesy" is not going to save you when you don't have the facts you need in order to get the right answer. I'll reiterate Soon's question: where do I find a copy of the Secret Racists' Cant so I know what not to say? It took me 30 years and a national scandal to learn about this "articulate" thing, and I haven't exactly been living in a monestary. There've gotta be others. If it's obvious to all with eyes to see, point me to the heading.
* I'm assuming here that Lance is white and male. Also, sorry for picking on you in this post.
Avram@433
Sadly, able to speak clearly is no longer a taken-for-granted trait amongst our candidates, even if you just go for basic comprehensibility.
That said, "articulate" has quite a bit more of a positive connotation as I learned it. It's "clearly" in all senses. Writing clearly is more than just penmanship - it's about being able to pick the words and sentences for maximum informational impact. Speaking clearly is similar, but you have to do it on the fly. It is a genuine talent, and the gap between "articulate" and "inarticulate" is large.
Obama is a rousing speaker, yes, but that's an emotional impact. He can also transmit a good deal of information for effect. That he can do both at once is what makes him a great communicator.
Scraps@430
people of color being told how they are responsible for carefully getting the message across, being sensitive of the white folks' delicate feelings, etc. You can see this in action in just about any online conversation on the subject. And you can see it in this one.
Actually, I can't (or, more precisely, I haven't remembered seeing it, and a quick rescan doesn't bring it up). I see a great many assertions that it happens, which I will easily believe. But I don't see anyone saying it directly. The closest I've seen is in the assertion that not being racist and not appearing racist are two different things, that they're very hard to do simultaneously, and that if the minority doesn't at least pretend that the bumbling white is speaking in good faith[*], a dialogue is impossible.
That means, to pick some apples and oranges out of this thread, reacting more like Darkrose@386 and less like either of the reactions in the first sentence of Madeline@94.
I haven't seen any "I don't want to be criticized for my use of language" in this thread. I have seen a bit of "I don't want to be personally maligned and designated an acceptable target for retaliation unless I consciously do something to deserve it" (Lance@412, Soon@421), but that's not the same thing.
Unless it is. So, where's it happening in this thread?
* This is assuming that comity is a goal. If you have other reasons to believe that they aren't acting in good faith (hi, original topic of this thread), then there's no real reason for it to be so, and none of this applies.
Soon@421
For another example of self-censorship, I've been deliberately avoiding the word "innocuous" in this thread because insisting that something is "perfectly innocuous" felt to me too much like claiming anyone offended by it was being "oversensitive."
Clifton@423
Read Darkrose's comment again. Using it even as a compliment gives offense, and it does so regardless of intent. The term got hijacked and carries ugly connotations even when the speaker doesn't intend it. That's exactly what makes it a "mine".
Scraps@424
If they want them to talk. Listening is easy, but it's not a dialogue. This is all in the specific context of "We want to have a dialogue", i.e., both people speaking, which is not remotely the entirety of race relations and in fact isn't even demonstrably necessary for the removal of injustice. Examples were demanded for why a white would ever find it necessary to "self-censor" or why the "minefield" was anything other than "worrying about exposing your unconscious racism". That's why there's been this focus.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 4 |
| 2008 | 27 |
| 2007 | 7 |
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