New Testingstan

evilsoup wrote:I still think Testing Chat V: For Vendetta is a good one

Yeah well you also thought your avatar was a good idea.

Oh dear, someone made one of those "Will you go to the prom/dance/ball/etc with me?" videos, this time to a Power Rangers actress.

Seriously people it's been done, the joke's old, please move on thank you.

I have no idea what you're babbling about
also is it true that Americans pronounce 'babel' as 'babble'?

To which post are you referring, creepy avatar person?

RogueIce wrote:Oh dear, someone made one of those "Will you go to the prom/dance/ball/etc with me?" videos, this time to a Power Rangers actress.

Seriously people it's been done, the joke's old, please move on thank you.

also you're just jealous because your avatar isn't constantly watching & judging & finding wanting everyone who sees it

This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0om2ApQPvqI

Which is noteworthy because it worked and she went with him.

Later on a female Marine asked Justin Timberlake to her ball. Which I think worked mainly because she was calling him out as he was the one to tell Mila Kunis she should go, according to the media reports when the original video went viral.

Now everybody and their brother wants to get in on the act. Some seem to work: IIRC Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor from Terminator 1 and 2) went with somebody to their military ball (forgot the service). And I heard somebody famous went to some girl's prom, but I can't remember if he was a pro athlete or singer.

But most of the time it's just kind of embarrassing.

RyanThunder wrote:If we aren't going to abandon 'retard', why are we abandoning 'boy' or 'girl' in favour of a whole slew of new ways to offend people unintentionally?

I mean I'd be happy to use gender neutral pronouns if I didn't feel like it was dehumanizing.

Ok look, I'm not talking about abandoning "boy" and "girl" or anything like that. Just recognising that "has a penis" "is a boy" and "assigned the gender of male" are three separate things, though there's significant overlap. Treating them all the same gives a lot of strength to cissexism and the effects that has on people, and for trans people themselves those assumptions if internalised can cause a lot of stress or confusion in their life. I try to fight this stuff in general, and in a positive/neutral article on gender-variant children it seemed especially notable.

Also, while "it" is incredibly offensive and dehumanising, "they" is a very good generic pronoun. For some it's their preferred one, but for everyone else it lets you use a pronoun without assigning a gender to it, which is good in general.

IB you're doing god's work

I really wish we had a good, gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. They works like 80% of the time, but it can be really clunky and ugly in some sentences. Or alternatively society could chill out about gender etc., but that's not going to happen quickly.

Taco Bell Axing Unpopular Kids Meals

But in an interview, Creed said that kids' meals accounted for less than half of 1 percent of Taco Bell's sales, meaning that it's not really a sacrifice. The chain also hasn't dedicated national advertising to them for at least 12 years. As Taco Bell tries to extend the success of its Doritos-flavored tacos introduced last year, it's also trying to build its credentials with people in their 20s and 30s.

Kids' meals don't fit with that image.

"We're trying to be this Millennial edgy brand, and having a kid's meal was inconsistent," Creed said.

Clearly they should have gone to Hasbro and gotten some My Little Pony toys, then it would appeal to that Millennial crowd.

Cis people asking about why is gender such a big deal always sounded to me like white people wondering why race gets talked about so much can't we all just be people

I used to hate singular "they", too, but its social benefit is so great as an already-widely-used singular nongendered pronoun that I really can't see any reason to fight it now. A separate pronoun for it would be better, yeah, in that it'd make some stuff clearer, but many attempts have been made over centuries and nothing else in English has stuck besides "they".

Infinity Biscuit wrote:Also, while "it" is incredibly offensive and dehumanising, "they" is a very good generic pronoun.

The problem with "they" is it's really plural, it sounds awkward to me to use it to talk about an individual.

What we really need is an elegant generic individual human being pronoun; a non-gendered equivalent of "he" and "she". This would solve so many problems. I understand people have tried to come up with ones but I've never seen one I'd consider elegant ("hir"? how is that even pronounced, and wouldn't it sound a lot like "her"? "ey?" it looks like you just butchered "they/their").

"They" has been used as a singular nongendered pronoun for literally centuries. Only from a strictly prescriptivist linguistic standpoint is it "really" plural, since it's been well used and understood in the singular sense since long before anyone who's been alive during anyone alive today's life began.

It's also widely advocated by trans* groups for specifically this reason so

it is a pity we can't just drop pronouns altogether

if were to say 'IB is cool. knows stuff. said good stuff' that's all intelligible

but suppose that's even more radical than just accepting 'they' doesn't have to be plural. hell 'you' made that full transition ages ago, bet thee that thou prolly dont even notice it now lol

IB (if you're aiming that at me) I didn't mean it that way, and I agree with you about theey (on balance, not causing offence trumps an occasional clunky sentence) -- what I was trying to say was that in a hypothetical future fanfiction society nobody would care about gender and enforcing gender stereotypes, which I think would be much more comfortable for everyone. I hope that didn't come across as dismissive or anything.

evilsoup wrote:IB (if you're aiming that at me)

Eh partially, but mostly it was just the concept in general. Honestly I was mostly thinking about an argument I had two years ago with an ex-friend of mine :L

I'm not a radical feminist so I see the definition of gender and gender role as being very different things. I'd like to see a world where gender roles are long eradicated, but gender has such meaning to some people (most? I dunno) that I can't see that going away, nor its going away being a good thing.

Oxymoron wrote:Hey ford,

if you want to educate people

If I wanted to educate people I wouldn't be talking to Ryan.

update on the leninism thing that nobody cares about- well, i got one guy so angry he stared becoming incoherent, white-knighting china post-mao as marxist heroes for standing up to the tiananmen square protesters, jabbering about how free speech is constrained in practice so banning books is a good thing, etc.. i guess conflating sexual potency with political potency is really good for pissing some people off. but yeah, i'm done because there's no room for discussion, leninists are idiotic scum who glorify violence and shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly :marxtear:

i find it so sad that all kinds of marxists and others on the left agree that the workers united will never be defeated...

...yet they continue having big battles over if you're a marxist or a leninist or a marxist-leninist or a maoist or a hoxhaistist or a castroist or blah blah blah blah blah

i get it. we don't want to unite just to usher in a new tyranny. but still it makes me sad

That sounds like some reactionary talk there, comrade...

adr wrote:i find it so sad that all kinds of marxists and others on the left agree that the workers united will never be defeated...

...yet they continue having big battles over if you're a marxist or a leninist or a marxist-leninist or a maoist or a hoxhaistist or a castroist or blah blah blah blah blah

i get it. we don't want to unite just to usher in a new tyranny. but still it makes me sad

i think this is largely an internet phenomenon, where you can realistically reduce people to ideology. i actually was considering making a post about that sort of thing, because things really got kicked off when somebody said that because i defended anarchism and wasn't nice enough in suggesting that the gulags were a mistake i was a reactionary who shouldn't be surprised if real leftists wanted to shoot me for being counter-revolutionary, and a bunch of people stood up for glorifying violence in this fashion, so i was planning on writing, basically, about how this glorification in the abstract necessitates and facilitates glorifying the visceral and concrete, glorifying the smell of shit as somebody's body fails from the bullets you shot through their skull, or the sound of bones and cartilage breaking from the beating you're giving to the suspected reactionary, but it would not have been appreciated. edit: also i was pretty disgusted at the time.

Straha wrote:That sounds like some reactionary talk there, comrade...

heh. you had people literally talking about how shooting everyone at kronstadt was a great thing and trying to justify literally everything the ussr did because hindsight apparently is bad

Bakustra wrote:

adr wrote:i find it so sad that all kinds of marxists and others on the left agree that the workers united will never be defeated...

...yet they continue having big battles over if you're a marxist or a leninist or a marxist-leninist or a maoist or a hoxhaistist or a castroist or blah blah blah blah blah

i get it. we don't want to unite just to usher in a new tyranny. but still it makes me sad

i think this is largely an internet phenomenon, where you can realistically reduce people to ideology. i actually was considering making a post about that sort of thing, because things really got kicked off when somebody said that because i defended anarchism and wasn't nice enough in suggesting that the gulags were a mistake i was a reactionary who shouldn't be surprised if real leftists wanted to shoot me for being counter-revolutionary, and a bunch of people stood up for glorifying violence in this fashion, so i was planning on writing, basically, about how this glorification in the abstract necessitates and facilitates glorifying the visceral and concrete, glorifying the smell of shit as somebody's body fails from the bullets you shot through their skull, or the sound of bones and cartilage breaking from the beating you're giving to the suspected reactionary, but it would not have been appreciated. edit: also i was pretty disgusted at the time.

Nah, this goes well before the internet. This sort of shit happened all the time in the early 1900s, and French academic culture can be summarized as waves of different mostly-communist Leftist stances sweeping through on a tidal wave of accusing the previous wave (be it Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc.) of being fascistic and overly ideological. These sorts of petty squabbles pretty much define all of human political history for the past five hundred years or so.


Speaking of petty ideological squabbles, I must not post in the TEO's race threads. I must not post in TEO's race threads. I must not post in TEO's race threads....

Straha wrote:

Nah, this goes well before the internet. This sort of shit happened all the time in the early 1900s, and French academic culture can be summarized as waves of different mostly-communist Leftist stances sweeping through on a tidal wave of accusing the previous wave (be it Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc.) of being fascistic and overly ideological. These sorts of petty squabbles pretty much define all of human political history for the past five hundred years or so.


Speaking of petty ideological squabbles, I must not post in the TEO's race threads. I must not post in TEO's race threads. I must not post in TEO's race threads....

In modern terms, I mean. Like, the local IWW hall is chill with the local marxists, but the tenor of the thread was "anarchists are stupid babies and we should have wiped them all out in catalonia so they wouldn't be whining today". maybe detroit is just bereft of leninists and maoists. but yeah, that is a pretty noteworthy feature.

my time in occupy taught me that you will be condemned, ostracized, and threatened for even the most minor of ideological differences, even in the face of actual oppression from the police

edit: one guy was being followed and put under surveillance by another person under suspicion of being a fascist double agent because he suggested that maybe the mayor did not literally want to kill us all considering said mayor was doing everything he could to allow the camp to stay running

That's part of the reason why even if I like discussing politics, I don't like being in prolonged contact with actual political activists...