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Too many people have peed in the pool

stephenfry.com

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Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#291

Post by JetSetWilly »

tremon wrote: post #225
gaur wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I already speak a language (English) which is some bastard child of French, German, Dutch, Arabic, etc. It's a Germanic language (not a child of German), with significant lexical input from French and Latin. The input from "Dutch, Arabic, etc." is minor.

But the Germanic language family is quite large; it basically describes every language spoken on the Northern Atlantic coast. You can't say "it's Germanic" and then say "it's hardly related to Dutch or German". As for the development of the English language, I believe it derives mostly from Saxon - Frisian - Norse - French, in chronological order. I'm pretty sure Celtic should also be on that list, but I don't know i…

English and Dutch are similar because they share a common ancestor. But the direct influence of Dutch upon English is minimal. Relatedness and Influence are distinct concepts, the language that influenced English was an ancestor of both Dutch and English, and so the influence of Dutch itself on English has been small compared to other languages like French.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#292

Post by nitrogen »

humanrebar wrote: post #244
fweespeech wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My theory is that it's because social media systems encourage and publicise agreement, while discouraging and hiding disagreement. This leads to a huge positive feedback effect on any meme that catches even a tiny number of people's attention, no matter how crazy. Well, honestly, I think that effect is largely an outgrowth of how we've designed anti-spam processes to date. Scalable agreement systems where large num…

> We'd really need to figure out a better way of mitigating problematic content without using up/down votes before we can solve this problem unfortunately. Agreed. All sharing platforms, HN included, conflate agreement with importance. I can't disagree with someone without silencing them on HN and Reddit. And I can't congenially disagree on Facebook or Twitter, at least not in a way that transparently affects the var…

Maybe retweets should be associated with and grouped by SlashDot-style reasons/reactions? So you can see x approving retweets, y disapproving, etc.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#293

Post by Nelson69 »

jonstokes wrote: post #38

I have a theory about FB and Twitter -- or maybe more of an observation. Anyway, back in the stone age, people had bumper stickers with little slogans on them. And in the break rooms of various places of work, there was always a bulletin board an on a corner of it there was always some faded-from-to-many-xeroxes bit of humor/racism/sports fandom/sexism/dirty joke or other us-vs.-them thing on it that people would loo…

There never was a serious public discourse. Why would giving everyone access to easy ways to contribute simply make that happen?

I don't know the reason why, it could be simple as most people aren't that smart, but the truth is the vast vast vast majority don't have anything interesting to add and most probably don't care what you're talking about anyways.

Just think about this for a bit: it was a socially acceptable social meme that people would stand around the "water cooler" and talk about TV shows. TV Shows!? That's what we've got when the masses are left to their own devices.

What I do think could potentially become a net positive is that in the bad old days, you had to catch someone putting that racist cartoon on the bulletin board or follow them to see the bumper sticker on their car. Now you can search them out, that's kind of interesting. I don't know that it will cure racism, sexism or other discrimination but it will further push them back in to a smaller place.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#294

Post by st3v3r »

MCRed wrote: post #25
carsongross wrote: post #15

I'm a bit monomaniacal about this, but the current online culture wars (and the previous offline culture wars) make me wish that secession didn't have such a bad name. It is obvious that large groups of people have irreconcilable differences of opinion on matters of free speech, sexuality, gun ownership and so on. It is a shame that rather than a firm handshake and friendly wave goodbye, we will end up with a totalit…

As an anarchs-capitalist I'd be happy to have a society where anarchs-communists had their communes and lived under their own rules. This may seem off topic but its directly relevant- we regularly have these debates in the anarchist community. But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too. (Yes, the irony…

"But at the end of the day, it seems the anarchs-communists don't want to live under their own rules for themselves, they want us to live under their rules too."

Because generally, you guys insist on living in the community and getting all the benefits of doing so, without following that community's rules. Basically, you're saying that those people do not have the right to govern themselves, because when you live in that community, you have become one of those people.

"So, while I want to see gay married couples defending their marijuana crops with fully auto machine guns, and saying whatever they want online, because I believe in human rights"

I fail to see how fully auto machine guns involved in any way leads to human rights. Those devices only exist to deprive other humans of their right to live.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#295

Post by mineshaftgap »

hnlogics wrote: post #262
lhnz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're talking about as I've never engaged in violent or horrific behaviour or sent death threats. Bigotry and hatred are disgusting. Not once did I say they were acceptable. I think deep down you know you're making vicious, unfounded accusations and that's why you feel the need to do so from a new account disconnected from your real name.

You're right. You didn't make death threats. You just explicitly defended sending death threats to marginalized people who you feel have found a way to profit from being marginalized; and indicated your belief that if a marginalized person finds a way to profit from being marginalized then it is acceptable to threaten them, and to do violence against them. Fortunately for you, HN is a safe space for bigots, so your h…

Hypersensitive clowns like you are why Trump is a viable candidate.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#296

Post by kofejnik »

cm2012 wrote: post #112
zkhalique wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emojis are fine. But I remember the first times I started seeing "LOL" and "ROTFLMAO". And I realized that the person wasn't really laughing, but they were quietly typing that on the keyboard. If you think about it, before AIM and online chat (way before texting), people hardly ever faked their emotions so much. I mean, you could fake a small laugh, but you didn't outright say that you're rolling on the floor laughin…

"lol" is an amazingly useful addition to written, casual language. It's the textual equivalent of a smile/head nod in normal conversation. Remember that in physical conversation, body language conveys 80-90% of the message - phrases like "lol" and emojis take the place of body language.

In online and SMS Russian, a single ), reduced from standard :), is used so often that omitting it carries a kind of serious/angry meaning much like talking in a stern voice irl

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#297

Post by lhnz »

hnlogics wrote: post #262
lhnz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're talking about as I've never engaged in violent or horrific behaviour or sent death threats. Bigotry and hatred are disgusting. Not once did I say they were acceptable. I think deep down you know you're making vicious, unfounded accusations and that's why you feel the need to do so from a new account disconnected from your real name.

You're right. You didn't make death threats. You just explicitly defended sending death threats to marginalized people who you feel have found a way to profit from being marginalized; and indicated your belief that if a marginalized person finds a way to profit from being marginalized then it is acceptable to threaten them, and to do violence against them. Fortunately for you, HN is a safe space for bigots, so your h…

That's not true. It is never acceptable to threaten someone or be violent.

To be explicit again: the reason I say monetisation of suffering is bad is because monetisation of suffering causes more suffering.

You think you're being a Good person but you've not thought things through. Every time Gawker decides to provoke a group of people with an offensive comment it's going to cause some people to relive past emotional suffering that they don't want to be reminded of. Likewise, Nero deciding to take shots at radfem twitter isn't a victimless activity - every time he does so he riles up both feminists and gamergaters causing more of the same behaviour. Monetising suffering is bad for almost everybody but journalists and extremely powerful activists.

Other than that, please take your accusations and ridiculous conspiracy theories elsewhere. I'm done trying to talk sense into you.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#298

Post by st3v3r »

KerryJones wrote: post #97
rblstr wrote: post #86

I watched the BAFTAs with my girlfriend last night and I have to say, when Stephen made that comment we both said 'woah that's a bit mean' out loud. Of course, being the general public we're not aware of Mr Fry's relationship with the lady who won the award but from an outside perspective it came across as a bit bullying. I only found out today about the twitter backlash and I don't think it should be lumped in with…

This is the problem. He shouldn't have to clarify his relationship, he shouldn't have to explain everything. In essence, that destroys jokes. It's not our job to know, but as we should assume innocence until proven guilty we should assume friendliness before assuming ridicule. If Beaven had a problem -- let her handle it. She's a big girl, we're not her collective parents.

If explaining that relationship destroys the joke, then the joke probably wasn't funny or in decent taste to begin with.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#299

Post by Nelson69 »

humanrebar wrote: post #230
inanutshellus wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we just need a 'dislike' button along with the 'like' button. It'd certainly be an interesting experiment. FWIW, this is coming very soon to FB in the form of "reactions" rather than a simple "dislike" feature. http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/27/facebook-reactions-launch...

Does that feature allow negative feedback? A frown for bad news is positive feedback. I'm concerned that all reactions might be treated as good reactions. That is, that there is no way to politely disapprove. Does anyone have any more details on this?

The genius of it all is there is no 'hate' or 'dislike' button. It only allows 'positive' or no results.

I suspect facebook and company will come up with a solution to the problem of how do you indicate that you saw something without commenting when it's not socially acceptable to 'like' it. For example a funeral announcement, you don't want to 'like' it but you want to say 'thank you' or something yet you might not want to comment.

A real dislike or hate button would simply result in a lower signal/noise ratio. Maybe new types of bullying where lot's of people 'hate' on somebody.

Re: Too many people have peed in the pool

#300

Post by mineshaftgap »

monksy wrote: post #180
rblstr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without clarifying it it looks like he stood on stage in front of a bunch of rich celebrities and slagged off the winner of an award for not wearing conventional dress to an award show. I'm all for offensive comedy, but this wasn't a joke, he was basically slagging her off in public, live on television to a room full of people. Without context of their relationship it really looks like bullying. That's completely dif…

Take a look at what was actually said: "Only one of the great cinematic costume designers would come to the awards dressed like a bag lady." If people weren't so quick to jump on the "blame the white guy" wagon... you'd see that it was actually a pretty clever statement.

"Blame the white guy" is all the ethically bankrupt SJWs have left. I mean what are they going to do, have a sense of humor?
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