Sarachim

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Nalyd and Sarachim: I have a sudden urge to Transcend again. You guys suck. Do you know how little free time I have these days? I've never played against another person. Wanna try it sometime?

Originally Posted By: Triumph You cannot fully explain to a toddler abstract concepts like self-control or the danger of running out in streets and getting hit by cars, but you can convey something very serious with a deliberate, controlled dose of pain. The lesson is "don't do that, or someone stronger than you will hurt you." It may produce quick short-term results but is a bad way to introduce children to morality. I know plenty of well-behaved children whose parents never use pain to control them, and I used to be one myself. You're arguing that I must have gotten hit by a car and died 20 years ago.

I would be a Senator by now if my parents had only poked me with a sharpened stick.

Originally Posted By: Space Between Quote: If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself. Chairman Sheng-ji Yang "Looking God in the Eye" When Hive children misbehave, they get thrown in the Recycling Tanks.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Sarachim Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you elitist! i do not find the etymological argument entirely convincing but it's also beside the point: idioms don't have to make logical sense, and at this point the "could" form of the expression is used widely enough that the meaning is understood Neither do I, but my point was basically the same as yours. I only included the other stuff because I found it interesting, and also because it provided an alternative to Nikki's apparent belief that Americans can't speak his language without supervision.

Originally Posted By: Nikki. Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba ...could care less. Gah, I hate when people use that expression, because they almost always use it when they mean they "couldn't care less". And I don't want to be elitist about it, but it's predominantly Americans who do it. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm Quote: Taken literally, if one could care less, then one must care at least a little, which is obviously the opposite of what is meant. It is so clearly logical nonsense that to condemn it for being so (as some commentators have done) misses the point. The intent is obviously sarcastic — the speaker is really saying, “As if there was something in the world that I care less about”. . . . There’s a close link between the stress pattern of I could care less and the kind that appears in certain sarcastic or self-deprecatory phrases that are associated with the Yiddish heritage and (especially) New York Jewish speech. Perhaps the best known is I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often “I have no hope of being so lucky”, a closely similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning. There’s no evidence to suggest that I could care less came directly from Yiddish, but the similarity is suggestive. There are other American expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means “Don’t tell me about it, because I know all about it already”. These may come from similar sources. So it’s actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it is still regarded as slangy, and also has some social class stigma attached.[Emphasis added.] Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you elitist!

It hurts to wait three weeks, but the date itself is fine.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Unless something's come up for anyone since they filled in the calendar, next session is scheduled for Saturday September Seventeenth (sorry i couldn't resist the alliteration~) at 11:00 pm UTC. be there OR ELSE Ack. Sadly, that whole weekend just filled up.

I know it's getting a little tiresome by now, but since I bought it up, I feel I should add that I, too, have used a chainsaw.

Session 1 is complete! Click to reveal.. (Lephista) Magic (Conjuration): 9 First Aid: 6 (+1 racial) Composure: 4 Melee (Aikido): 3 Alchemy: 3 Arcana: 2 Athletics: 2 Perception: 1 Stealth: 1 Acrobatics: 1 1 point banked

From the little reading I did today, they're mostly much bigger than your standard hand-held chainsaw.

The session is in just under an hour! Spectators, come to swcreeping!

Originally Posted By: Nikki. Sarachim invented the diamond-toothed chainsaw at the last Zombies! session. I'd rather have one of those. I learned two things today: 1. Diamond-toothed chainsaws already exist, and are used to cut through stone. 2. They can't cut through soft materials, making them worthless against zombies. Needless to say, I was devastated.

Originally Posted By: B.J.Earles Wednesday is bad for me. It's my birthday, so I've got plans with family. Anytime Saturday should be good. Saturday is my birthday, so I'd be unable to sub.

Since Laz is AWOL, Nikki's doing a one-shot. Anyone who's interested, come check it out.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Look at the East Coast of the US. They just had an earthquake and now hurricane Irene is bearing down on them. Earth, wind (air), and water all within a week. All they need is a forest fire for the big four of disasters. The earthquake was hardly a disaster.

Originally Posted By: Triumph I'm not sure how a something can validly be called racism if race never enters the decision making process. Your example certainly leads one to ponder why blacks on average have notably poorer levels of education than other categories of people, but doesn't calling it "racism" obscure deeper problems? In your story, the unhired black person's problem is not that he is black but that his education level (or lack thereof) disqualified. Trying to change to the attitudes of the employer so he doesn't mistreat blacks wouldn't help...because he wasn't racist to begin with. Perhaps racism has more technical definitions with which I'm unfamiliar, but as I've heard understood the term, using here would actually muddle efforts to solve a real problem. When people say institutional racism, they usually mean something like the situation Diki described. The trouble is that some people assume, just because Klan membership is down, that racism is over and that blacks (or any other minority) now have equally good chances in life. In reality, institutional racism is no less unjust, and requires us to take action against it. I don't think calling the status quo racist obscures this problem, but rather calls attention to its seriousness. Note that this is different from the problem some others have identified in the last few posts, which is that just because Klan membership is down, racism in the sense that you meant is not necessarily declining. Prejudice is far more common and more subtle than most of us would like to admit, and most people who judge others on the basis of race don't realize that they're doing so.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Duck in a Top Hat In my opinion this is just a misunderstanding of the actual Maya predictions. more pertinent question: why would we expect the mayans to have any particularly useful information about when the world will end in the first place IIRC, the justification (for those who are somehow irrational enough to believe in 2012, but still rational enough to require a justification) is that the Mayans correctly predicted the coming of Cortez, so clearly they must have had some predicting chops. This is kinda-sorta true, provided that you don't know the difference between the Mayans and the Aztecs. Other arguments include that the Mayans were excellent astronomers and therefore excellent astrologers as well, even though Tycho Brahe was pretty good at that stuff too but that didn't stop him from getting his nose chopped off.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: Sarachim So it's not that employers won't hire black people. It's that employers won't hire people who speak or dress like black people do, and it's just a coincidence that all those people happen to be black. Forgive me if I'm being naive, or totally misunderstanding something, but this bothers me in a couple ways. First, it looks to me like you're assuming any boss who doesn't want to see his employee's underwear is racist. Second, it looks to me like you applying "wear his trousers halfway down his rear" as...I don't know, a characteristic, a generalization, a stereotype,even, to black people. I've known plenty of black people who didn't dress that way. I've encountered non-black people who DID dress that way. Now, maybe I've been around the wrong black people or something, I don't know. But to automatically connect these things just doesn't sound fair to black people, to me. I hope that makes sense. My apologies, Triumph. I think I sacrificed clarity for the sake of humor. I was describing Harehunter's position. His post is the one that made the assumption that most black people are either unable or unwilling to wear a belt properly, and that that (as opposed to institutional racism) is the best explanation for why they're more likely to be unemployed. In reality, yeah, not hiring someone who comes into the interview with their ass hanging out is a reasonable decision, largely because most black people don't dress that way even in their spare time and I've yet to meet any who would go to work like that. If Harehunter were right about this being a staple of black fashion rather than an unfortunate youth fad, then yeah, I think it would be right to say that it's racist not to hire someone just because they dress that way.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter Listening to interviews with employers on this topic, there does appear to be a racial bias on the surface, but the real problem here is cultural. Does the applicant appear cleanly attired or does he wear his trousers halfway down his rear? Does the applicant speak in what is considered "normal English" or does he speak in a dialect that makes understanding him difficult. More importantly, does he come in with an attitude of defiance, expecting to be discriminated against, or his he more humble (for lack of a better word). So it's not that employers won't hire black people. It's that employers won't hire people who speak or dress like black people do, and it's just a coincidence that all those people happen to be black.

Originally Posted By: Nikki. The police were viewed as untrustworthy, though it went further than that: they were seen as an enemy. . . . Obviously this is mainly my own experiences, but if anybody wants to do a Wikipedia search for Nottingham, feel free. . . . Well, with that sheriff you have, who can blame them?

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Quote: Frankly, the task of truly killing institutions seems to be the sole challenge Are you sure you're not TM? Debate over, Slarty wins!

Originally Posted By: Harehunter That is why the U.S. is not a true democracy. It was not a viable option in 1787, when the fastest communication was measured in days. Nor is it a viable option today, with the size of our current population. That is why a republic was formed, where the people elect their representatives, and their chief executive, and empower them to make those decisions. This is a pet peeve of mine. What you mean is that the US is not a DIRECT democracy. It is instead a REPRESENTATIVE democracy. Neither is more or less "true" than the other. In fact, when you talk about liberaldemocracy-- in which the will of the majority is tempered by protections for the rights of the minority-- representative democracy has a history of producing more democratic outcomes. History's most famous direct democracy, ancient Athens, tended to do dumb things like execute all of its generals in the middle of a war because they lost a battle, or kill Socrates because his philosophy was unpopular. These things tend to happen when people's very lives are in the hands of a majority vote. A republic is a state in which the government bases its claim to authority on the will of the people. The U.K. is a democracy but not a republic. China is a republic but not a democracy. The U.S. is both.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Furthermore, claims about the "corporate power structure" not enabling people to place ethics above profit, well duh. The only time that it's actually possible for someone to do that is if they founded the corporation in the first place. Exactly. Separating ownership from management leaves nobody responsible the trade-off between profits and ethics. That was my point. Originally Posted By: Dantius If anything, publicly trading a company offers an incentive to behave in a more ethical manner, since the price of a stock and thus the value of the corporation is dependent on public image- look at how BP's stock lost half its value during the Deepwater Horizon fiasco. First: I would argue that the drop in BP's stock had nothing to do with ethical revulsion, but was a herd response to the fact that BP's value was obviously about to decrease. A stock going down makes a stock going down. See also: every market panic ever. Second: Even if I grant your argument, you're only strengthening my point. You're arguing that the people who literally owned BP had no idea (and thus, no control over) what was being done in their name and with their capital. If I needed proof that distributed ownership leads to a moral vacuum, this is it. Originally Posted By: Dantius Your solution, somehow placing ethics over profit in the corporate power structure, is laughable. Straw man. When did I propose this as a solution? It's one of the properties of a solution. Debating solutions requires that we first agree about the existence of the problem I am proposing to solve. Originally Posted By: Dantius If I'm the president of Dantius Industries (especially if I'm paid in options or something like that), then I have a very, very strong motive to do everything possible to maximize the profitability of my company by, say, bulldozing Ephesos's forests, especially if the company is privately held, so the bad press wouldn't affect my salary much. If I own 100 shares of Slarty Industries, a stock that pays out a decent dividend with good stability, then I don't really need to be concerned with bulldozing Ephesos' forests to squeeze an extra buck fifty worth of dividend every quarter, and if President Slarty of Slarty Industries decided to do so, then the resulting stock tank would make it way, way worse for me in all except the very long haul, which most investors aren't in for. So in the privately held company, the motive to place profit above ethics is quite strong, whereas in the publicly traded company, it's far weaker, and practically nonexistent for the shareholders. This scenario assumes that the general public is aware of the unethical behavior in question. In reality, as your BP example showed, it's generally kept secret from the public until the damage has already been done, and anything that's secret from the public is also secret from the shareholders. Originally Posted By: Dantius The actual solution, of course, is a thing called "regulation". We have agencies like the FTC and EPA for things like security fraud and bulldozing forests and such, and if a corporation in behaving irresponsibly, then the answer is not to decouple it from collective ownership, but to crack down on it with regulation and such. This is a false dilemma between regulation and consolidation of responsibility. Regulation is obviously indispensable, but I think you'll agree that it's never going to be perfect. Regulation would be more effective if it were possible to pin responsibility on individuals in addition to corporations, especially since this would allow us to bring criminal law into play (this does happen sometimes, but not nearly as often as it ought to.) In the case of BP, the people who were punished (the shareholders) had no idea what was going on, while the people responsible (BP's management) got off unscathed, except insofar as they were also shareholders.

Originally Posted By: Dantius I'm kind of confused at what point you are driving at. Are you saying that the stock market is a construct of the upper classes to stop the poor from becoming enfranchised? Because that's what it seems like your saying, and that's not really the case at all. Responsibility to shareholders effectively guarantees that a corporation is legally obligated to behave like a sociopath. There is nobody within the corporate power structure who has the power to place ethics over profit, because they are all subservient to the interests of shareholders who have not given them a directive to do so. Meanwhile, the shareholders themselves are almost all totally disengaged from actual management of the business of which they are part-owners.