New Testingstan

well it started when someone used the term "sinfully sexy" to describe a seventeen year old girl, then it degraded from there as people started talking about various countries age of consent.

I'm just going to point out that he's talking about Spacebattles. The upper limit on creepy is really somewhere in the "get your head blown off by actress's security guards" territory.

Fair point. That moratorium on those "girlfriend" threads just says so much about that board.

EDIT: Looking back, SDN used to have it's share of "creepy" moments way back in the day when we were all still in High School, but it looks like we grew out of it around 2005-2006.

Darksi4190 wrote:Fair point. That moratorium on those "girlfriend" threads just says so much about that board.

EDIT: Looking back, SDN used to have it's share of "creepy" moments way back in the day when we were all still in High School, but it looks like we grew out of it around 2005-2006.

Yeah... There were a couple banninations that brought the whole creep factor down noticeably. Raycav being the most notable.

He's gotten better since, or at least he's past the "Shatner Line" where you start to deliberately parody yourself.

Yeah the realization of what was being discussed in that SB thread really creeped me out at first because I jumped to the last page first and saw them talking about age of consent, then I went back to the page before it and saw a giant picture of the girl who plays Arya Stark. So my immediate reaction was actually something along the lines of "please god no," Then I read down the page and realized they were talking about Sansa rather than Arya and I was like "ok it's just their normal level of creepy. I don't need to call Chris Hansen."

Of course re-reading some of the comments they're making about a 17 year old, maybe I do need to call Chris Hansen.

God the NK hyperventilating is fucking hilarious. I don't just mean at SDN, though it's at peak hilarity there. OMG NK is doing something it's been doing nonstop for decades! FEAR!!!!!!

Yeah, not to do a bad joke, but from what little I follow of the television & internet news, the medias seems to be blowing this a little too much out of proportion. Almost as if they wished for the shit to hit the fan.


It's in those kind of situations that I can't help but see journalists as vultures waiting for some drama somewhere to feed themselves out of it, and when they see there's an opportunity, push the drama themselves to occur.


On the other hand, when I see the tough-guyism displayed n HPCA or SDN concerning the situation in the region, I seriously wonder if people aren't kind of seriously hoping for the war to get hot again, just to once again get a "real war", after more than a decade of humiliating asymetric warfare.

I'm pretty sure N. Korea would turn into a humiliating asymmetric war, after the initial week-long march to Pyongyang
jut like Iraq

Which is why people are smart enough to want a preemptive nuclear strike that completely removes North Korea from the map.

Consequences? What are those?

Pretty much all of the above, yes.

That's also, as far as I understand the situation, why South Korea doesn't even want to approach the idea of a re-unification of the peninsula under those conditions with a 10 miles pole.

Questor wrote:I'm just going to point out that he's talking about Spacebattles. The upper limit on creepy is really somewhere in the "get your head blown off by actress's security guards" territory.

The upper limit would be pedophilia roleplay, the parties involved in that one largely got banned and the thread deleted. Those that didn't get perma-banned got put on the staff's shitlist and generally have a ton of bricks dropped on them if they do anything vaguely wrong.

Darksi4190 wrote:Fair point. That moratorium on those "girlfriend" threads just says so much about that board.

A lot of that comes the massive influx of new members for the roleplay forum of spacebattles general and the creative writing forum.

EDIT: Looking back, SDN used to have it's share of "creepy" moments way back in the day when we were all still in High School, but it looks like we grew out of it around 2005-2006.

This is less "grew out" and more not having much in the way of new members so the worse members could get kicked off without being replaced.

so i was just thinking about media bias and one of the things the government does to control the news is only book interviews with journalists who are nice to them.

i'm thinking of ways we could counteract this. one of course would be for the media to just refuse softball interviews but in the world of competition the whole race to the bottom would ruin that. i think we the people will need to push for a legal reform

and methinks a fairly simple one would do the trick of solving this access control problem: require public officials to talk to *any* journalist who wants to on a regular basis. so they can't just pick and choose the nice ones.

now there's an obvious scheduling problem that comes up so we'd prolly have to limit it somehow which could ruin things in practice but maybe something like "someone with at least 5% circulation among your constituents is entitled to one hour interview time with you every thirty days" with the numbers up for debate

but i think that kind of thing is doable (i wouldn't be surprised if some countries already do it) and would help the adversarial journalists get this word in without fear of being cut off entirely and hopefully then the market can start racing in the other direction


what do yall think

"someone with at least 5% circulation among your constituents is entitled to one hour interview time with you every thirty days"

I'm not sure I understand the concept.

What do you mean by "5% circulation" or whatever ?

like say you're a congressman for a district with 100,000 voters

if a newspaper has at least 5,000 readers/subscribers, they are entitled to interview time with you.


or if you are the president and there's 100,000,000 voters, a newspaper would need 5,000,000 readers to be entitled to the mandatory interview

So what you're saying,

is that to ensure that the politicians are not interviewed only by the people they want coming from friendly Big Media,

you'll create a law that will allow politicians to refuse an interview coming from reporter which do not come from Big Medias

I'm not sure even the biggest newspapers in the US have 5 million readers each.

Oxymoron wrote:I'm not sure even the biggest newspapers in the US have 5 million readers each.

this is why i said "with the numbers up for debate". i don't know what kind of ratings news has nor the volume of interview requests politicians get, so i don't know exactly what balance makes sense.

but i do think some kind of balance is necessary because if they were required to accept every interview request, the waiting list may be longer than their term of office! imagine thousands of people demanding their mandated interview time

including those using it as a cover for some random lobbying. hell i'd be tempted to abuse an open mandatory interview myself just to sit down with the president and tell him about jesus


so there has to be some kind of limit both to keep it being used for the intended purpose (informing the public) and as a practical scheduling matter


the question is how to limit it fairly? since the goal though is to inform the public, having an audience with the public seems like a natural, objective measure

now this can obviously be abused too to reinforce certain big players (such as what has happened with presidental debates in the US) but i haven't thought of anything better and if we pick fair numbers based on real world scheduling (that is, if the officials still have a lot of free time or are going to the same people over and over again, the number is too big) it should minimize this kind of thing.

I think you're going about it the wrong way.

If what you want is making politicians more accountable toward the general public,

then require them to attend every month a meeting where the general public and citizens will be able to ask them questions and bring various subjects of interests to the table.

That's an element of Participative Democracy among others : if you want citizens to have a say in how their city / region / country is run, then make it so that they can directly voice their concerns to the ones in charge.

Thinking that you need journalists to do that job is shooting yourself in the foot as far as fighting for more democracy goes.


Sure the process is going to be a pain in the ass for each politician, probably a waste of time for everyone involved and an exercise in empty promises in most cases, but at least that would have more chances of leading to a real change in the long term than what you propose.



People have to learn that they are the first actors of their own democracy, and shouldn't wait for journalists to do the job for them.


Create associations, talk to your neighbors, get them involved... That's how things advance.

Oxy, that's how local government (City/County/School District) works in California. Obviously, the larger the population, the less that ends up being something that a normal person can attend.

I kind of figured that's how most local government works. Is it different in France?

Not at all. That's kind of the spirit of what I'm saying :

The means already exist, the problem is people not moving their asses and handling their responsibility as citizens to the medias.

The media already exists too and would surely still exist even if we got a lot of other changes. Everything you said is a good idea, just it doesn't have to be either/or, we can both change the media and work towards longer term goals at the same time.

I've read a lot of stories with reporters agreeing to only ask softball, pre-approved questions or to let officials censor their reports after the fact because they are afraid if they don't, they will lose their access next time. Now we can point out that access restricted like this is worthless anyway and so on.... but if their competitors are interviewing the president and they aren't, it isn't going to look good in the competitive market. So they play ball.

With guaranteed interviews though we can take this pressure off and hopefully news people would take advantage of it - indeed maybe upstarts taking the opportunity to ask the hard questions would force the big organizations to follow their lead.

Darksi4190 wrote:Of course re-reading some of the comments they're making about a 17 year old, maybe I do need to call Chris Hansen.

Not to defend people drooling over female celebrities, which gets creepy enough in its own right...but if they're 18/19/20 years old or around that age, I don't think it makes it extra creepy just because she's 17. I mean would you still think it's that horrible if they waited however many months until her 18th birthday, or would it just be the usual creepy factor of "OMG ANGELINA JOLIE SOOOO HOT"?

Now sure if they're mid-20s or older I guess that starts getting weirder and ups the creep factor, but then I'd likely say the same if it was a bunch of dudes in their late 30s and older drooling over 18/19 year old celebrities, even if they're considered adults in the eyes of the law.

You guys remember when those twins from full house were about the turn 18 and people started making timers and shit for it?

That was creepy as fuck.