honestly, I’m always surprised by ya’ll trolls. Ya’ll wanna rep feminism, but then your example of a positive male role model is a man who kills with callous indifference? Is this really what a positive masculinity looks like? The revolution will not star steven seagal.
It’s a bit old but I only noticed it now and it’s still lulworthy.
Concentrated privilege denial. It burnssss
Holy shit, I think I’ve hit the motherlode!
Here’s some necessary background.
Of course, one doesn’t expect much from a community of primarily male teenagers with serious behaviour issues but almost every other post seems to be a PDD waiting to happen. I couldn’t resist making a few and posting them to the privielege denying dude website. And these are just from this 1 post! I could easily cook up another or two from it as well.
You can see the second one below (click for large image)
Now go forth and mine this thread for glorious PDDs!
It’s like the dream-week for all Strategy gamers. 3 mega-patches for 2 TBS and one RTS. We’re never seeing the sun again
It seems this is the week of the mega-update. Three of my favourite games have been patched with a pretty heavy update which changes quite a lot of things all over the place. First it was Heroes of Newerth, which got to version 2.0 and introduced the Casual Mode (that I played and I really enjoyed) a new LoL-style ((League of Legends, another game that follows the DotA recipe)) online shop where people can buy extra stuff for their game like alternative models and soundpacks, plus the preparation for the new Matchmaking system. Unfortunately this also spurred some controversy when it was revealed that one of the new Sound packs was playing on a steretype of gays. The company behind HoN, S2, tried to play it as if it was nothing of the sort , but unfortunately for them, someone spilled the beans. Not cool S2.
Then it was Elemental: War Of Magic, who’s disastrous launch saw the game bashed in almost all reviews and burned a lot of early buyers. Fortunately, Stardock stayed with it and hired some excellent talent in the form of Kael (the guy who directed/created the awesome Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV) and the game has completely reworked its mechanics and interface. Now the patch 1.1 which introduces these changes to the community is out and after a few hours of playing it yesterday, I’m extremely happy to say that the game is starting to shape up to my expectations. The game is infinitelly more playable and enjoyable now and the next two expansions (which I’m going to get for free, as a bonus for buying the game early) are going to just keep building on top of that. If you haven’t yet checked Elemental, now is the time, since if you buy it before the new year, you will get the first expansion for free 😉
And finally today, Civilization V released its own big patch, which promises to make significant changes to the AI and address a lot of the game mechanics that were broken or badly designed since release. The AI changes are nowhere near the stuff that Elemental implemented (such as multi-threading AI, which makes new turns come instantly) but are sure to make the game a bit more interesting to play on anything but the highest difficulties where the computer is cheating its arse off. I haven’t yet tried it out as it just came out, but I’m excited about that as well.
With all these updates, I now just have to replay those games, and given other stuff, such as the recent Humble Indie Bundle 2 which just came out this week as well and provides the best offer ever (hint, hint, buy it the fuck now) and the upcoming Steam Christmas Sale, I don’t think I can afford to leave my hourse, eat or sleep for the next weeks. Good thing I’ve got a vacation coming out. Oh and do pay attention to how many people bought the bundle for GNU/Linux and what they paid on average. It’s as if there’s an untapped market or something… 😉
Why do the lower classes seem to be the more kind, even though popular media routinelly paints them as uncouth violent criminals?
US. Americans like to pride themselves on their hospitality and generosity and I’ve heard many visitors to the US back this impression up so there must be a truth to it and I do not doubt that towards more “trustworthy” people, as are for example white, middle-class European tourists, Americans will go out of their way to take care for them. However, things are radically different when one is talking about lower class people, immigrants and PoC. This story from reddit is quite enlightening on this respect. Here’s a quick quote-summary ((Btw, the above are not the best parts, just the parts that convey the main point I’m trying to make. I won’t spoil the whole comment and you should really read it in full to get the whole emotional impact of it.)):
This past year I have had 3 instances of car trouble. A blow out on a freeway, a bunch of blown fuses and an out of gas situation[…]
Anyway, each of these times this shit happened I was DISGUSTED with how people would not bother to help me. I spent hours on the side of the freeway waiting, watching roadside assistance vehicles blow past me, for AAA to show. The 4 gas stations I asked for a gas can at told me that they couldn’t loan them out “for my safety” but I could buy a really shitty 1-gallon one with no cap for $15. It was enough, each time, to make you say shit like “this country is going to hell in a handbasket.”
But you know who came to my rescue all three times? Immigrants. Mexican immigrants. None of them spoke a lick of the language. But one of those dudes had a profound affect on me.
He was the guy that stopped to help me with a blow out with his whole family of 6 in tow. I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice[…]
So, to clarify, a family that is undoubtedly poorer than you, me, and just about everyone else on that stretch of road, working on a seasonal basis where time is money, took an hour or two out of their day to help some strange dude on the side of the road when people in tow trucks were just passing me by. Wow…
This isn’t of course just to rant against the US. Most, if not all primarily middle-class countries in the world behave like this. I do not think that Germans or Englishmen would be more willing to stop to help than the Americans. Hell, the Germans had to implement laws which make it illegal not to stop to help during a car accident, just to prevent everyone just driving by.
Things vary of course, depending on how society is formed, along with their traditions and the incentives the system creates, where small economic variables can have a very big impact ((Example: Having to pay for health or an ambulance to come will make people involved or watching accidents have a significantly altered reaction compared to countries where all health care is free. I still remember the story about a guy in Switzerland passed by a motorcycle accident with an unconscious cyclist. He called out an ambulance to the scene which was turned back by the cyclist who had woken up by then. Since ambulance call-outs are charged there and the cyclist refused service, they tracked down the original caller and charged him. Now what incentive would that give you?)) but there is an obvious correlation to social class and how much your “good samaritan” feelings extend. To me, it looks like one’s mutual aid tends to focused towards their own social class or and higher, which of course why the rich (which have the smallest numbers) seem to be meaner on average than the rest of us.
I’m not a scientist and especially not sociologist so I can only state my impressions on this of course, but I see various interlocking psychological and material effects taking place here to form this reality, from the monkeysphere, to tribalism, to class warfare, and all of them together form this reality and this is just yet another emergent phenomenon from the existence of inequality. It is exactly these kind of emergent effect that simple logical assumptions and rationale (such as the favourite right-libertarian defence of inequality as “harmless”) cannot predict or combat.
Until we achieve global equality, such phenomena as the above will always exist and the most oppressed classes will be always the most altruistic while the ruling elite and all kinds of managers will act the most crassly and egoistically to the detriment of everyone else. All the pleading in the world for a more empathetic “first world” will continue falling on deaf ears, because it’s not that these citizens of the rich nations willfully become this way, but rather that any existence of inequality, will affect the psychology of people to make them act this way. And unfortunately, it’s not possible for everyone to receive the kind of life-altering event, as the redditor above.
Very interesting.I have finally bought myself an android and I see that there is even an app for wordpress.Awesome stuff. As you might expect this is a post coming directly from it using the very handy swype typing interface.
Unfortunately the android wordpress interface is only useful for small posts like this one so it’s more likely I’ll be using this for twitter rather than my blog.
Still I am completely exited with my new gadget, and off a diaspora app comes out soon I believe I’ll be complete.
Also, photos directly to my blog.fun