If it seems impossible to do, you're probably doing it wrong. People don't generally design things to be impossible to do.
Q: How many geeks does it take to ruin a joke?
A: You mean nerd, not geek. And not joke, but riddle. Proceed.
-Stolen from some guy on Twitter
A: You mean nerd, not geek. And not joke, but riddle. Proceed.
-Stolen from some guy on Twitter
@EFF has a new campaign to ask Congress to defend bloggers against bogus lawsuits designed to silence them. I signed up, and I hope you will do the same.
I recently read How to be Black, by Baratunde Thurston, and I enjoyed it a lot. It got me thinking about racism again, but in a more wholistic way. The author managed to really bring me into his experience and let me see things from a new perspective. I actually remembered some uncomfortable instances at work, and I think I have a better idea of what my black coworkers thought at the time, being asked to speak for all black people or similar stupid shit.
I also found the highly amusing website, Yo, Is This Racist?, which seems to have a technical difficulty of some sort at the moment, displaying a bunch of white text on a white background. If someone has done that deliberately, I don't get the message, and couldn't find any indication of it. I just pasted each page into notepad and read it.
I had to step away for a minute, but I wanted to add the original thought that I had that made me want to write this. We have all kinds of ways to say anything we want, and I no longer see the point in trying to defend something as not racist. If it seems even a little racist, we might as well just find a different way to make the same point, and if we can't make the point without sounding even a little racist, then maybe we should re-examine the point itself.
I think pretty highly of intellectual honesty, and I feel childish saying "the n-word" in an intellectual conversation, or reading literature, but if me saying that will keep even one person from feeling one second of shame or rage, then my version of intellectual honesty means that I'll go ahead and feel childish.
Also this article, Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
I also found the highly amusing website, Yo, Is This Racist?, which seems to have a technical difficulty of some sort at the moment, displaying a bunch of white text on a white background. If someone has done that deliberately, I don't get the message, and couldn't find any indication of it. I just pasted each page into notepad and read it.
I had to step away for a minute, but I wanted to add the original thought that I had that made me want to write this. We have all kinds of ways to say anything we want, and I no longer see the point in trying to defend something as not racist. If it seems even a little racist, we might as well just find a different way to make the same point, and if we can't make the point without sounding even a little racist, then maybe we should re-examine the point itself.
I think pretty highly of intellectual honesty, and I feel childish saying "the n-word" in an intellectual conversation, or reading literature, but if me saying that will keep even one person from feeling one second of shame or rage, then my version of intellectual honesty means that I'll go ahead and feel childish.
Also this article, Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
People change, and I have a hard time telling whether their preferences or their behavior has changed. If a person behaves in the way that they prefer and changes their behavior because of their preferences, I may not like it but I have an easier time accepting it than in the other case. If a person changes their behavior because they previously behaved contrary to their preferences, that creates a more difficult situation for me to accept.
I find it particularly annoying when a person acts against their preferences in order to obtain a committment, then changes their behavior.
If that doesn't make any sense, please comment to that effect and I'll try to clarify what I mean. Yes, it applies to a specific case, but that case doesn't merit an essay by itself. It just brought the dynamic into my consciousness and I decided to examine it from my current perspective. I would have once written it off as typical human fakeness, but I think that I can develop a more nuanced view if I consider it further.
I find it particularly annoying when a person acts against their preferences in order to obtain a committment, then changes their behavior.
If that doesn't make any sense, please comment to that effect and I'll try to clarify what I mean. Yes, it applies to a specific case, but that case doesn't merit an essay by itself. It just brought the dynamic into my consciousness and I decided to examine it from my current perspective. I would have once written it off as typical human fakeness, but I think that I can develop a more nuanced view if I consider it further.
