aluminiumtrioxid

I have been asking this for the last two pages. Please define it yourself and we take it from there. And I did! "Expecting people to not behave like racist/sexist/etc. ****wads" is pretty much my definition. The idea that racism runs on intent blatantly flies in the face of everything the last, say, 30 years' worth of developments in cognitive science has taught us.

If you define "boring" by "not populated by libertarian-leaning straight white men to the point of almost-exclusivity because everybody else finds it an unwelcoming environment", then yeah, sure, sign me up for boring. We need more boring.

Define "political correctness".

Surprising as it may sound, comedians are not the ultimate arbiters in matters of ethics.

Wait, so if someone is being racist for the sole purpose of angering people, it's not racist? Even though, logically, the people most likely to be angered by said display of racism are members of the race in question? That's some shaky logic there, methinks. Of course it's not racist. Otherwise all of rap music would racist/sexist/and so on. Without any context of it's use, then they are just words. ...You do realize that you're effectively saying "by displaying racist attitudes and causing measurable harm* to the very people being discriminated against, you are not being racist, because you set out to cause harm to other people, too". Deontological ethics is fine and good when kept in the courtrooms and academic discussions, but for establishing general rules of conduct? Hell no. You need consequentialism for that. *For a given value of harm. Let's assume the cardiovascular problems resulting from increased stress count as "harm".

Wait, so if someone is being racist for the sole purpose of angering people, it's not racist? Even though, logically, the people most likely to be angered by said display of racism are members of the race in question? That's some shaky logic there, methinks. That sentance precludes that you can somehow know the exact intent of another person. Which is not really possible unless you are a mind-reader. It was also directly answering to the statement that "trolls use [racist/sexist remarks] to rile people up which is not racist/sexist/whatever in itself". Which is right there in the quote box at the top in plain sight, making your reaction extremely puzzling. Political correctness in itself is unwelcoming to a large number of people. Freedom of speech means protecting the right of other people to say things YOU HATE. If you cannot do that, than you're not really for free speech. You merely pretend (or think) to be. I have no idea why people think that freedom of speech means people should be protected from the consequences of their actions. If you take a giant, steaming dump right on the top of your desk at work, you can rightfully expect to be fired. Making openly racist and sexist remarks is pretty much the societal equivalent of taking a giant, steaming dump right on the top of your desk. It's okay if you do it in private as long as you don't brag about it openly, but frowned upon in public.

The confusion is completely warranted, since I wasn't talking about any of these things. My reasoning was along the lines of "if you want to build a community as big and welcoming as possible, then opinions that make the forum an unwelcoming place for a large-ish number of people are objectively harmful to your goal".

Hold on, if harmful can't be defined in any way other than subjective (because it depends on the goals of the person) doesn't that mean objectively harmful is impossible? I prefer not getting second-degree burns. Sticking my hand into fire is objectively harmful to this goal. The fact that it's objectively harmful to my goal doesn't really change just because billions of people don't care whether I get second degree burns or not. Haha. Right. Side stepping. No it's not. It's the opposite of easily these days. It's navigating a minefield where the mines keep shifting under your feet. Succeeding in tasks where one never made an effort to acquire the know-how necessary to succeed on said tasks is generally considered very hard. Books being useless for someone who never learned how to read is not the books' fault.

Wait, so if someone is being racist for the sole purpose of angering people, it's not racist? Even though, logically, the people most likely to be angered by said display of racism are members of the race in question? That's some shaky logic there, methinks.

Well, that problem is easily side-stepped by the incredible feat of not making sweeping generalizations about broad groups of people, isn't it?

People generally have goals; let's assume in good faith that forum administrators have the goal of "make this forum a welcoming place for as large a number of people as possible". It's obviously an oversimplification (e.g. just because there's a large number of nazis on the internet, one doesn't necessarily want to make their forum nazi-friendly in order to welcome said large number of people), but as a model, it'll do for now. "Objectively harmful" in this case, obviously, means "counterproductive to the stated goal", because really, you can't define "harmful" in any other way than "destructive to some sort of goal you have" (generally self-preservation). Do note that I didn't say said opinions were objectively harmful; I just pointed out that if someone finds them to be such, they have a moral obligation to do something about it.

1) I see no reason why "try not to be a racist ****wad" would be incompatible with honesty, assertiveness, etc. 2) It does tend to encourage marginalized groups to actually speak up, so there's that. Wait, wait, wait. You didn't establish what political correctness is as a pretense before making those statements. But that was my fault as well for not typing it down in the first place. Because as it is for now, both your answers could equally be attributed to socialism, christian ethics and so on. Since "political correctness" is generally a phrase used when complaining about being called out on behaving like a racist/sexist/etc. ****wad, the "not behaving like a racist ****wad" part was pretty much me establishing what I mean by political correctness.

Then again, if those opinions are objectively harmful, isn't that certain someone morally obligated to lock the threads in question?

1) I see no reason why "try not to be a racist ****wad" would be incompatible with honesty, assertiveness, etc. 2) It does tend to encourage marginalized groups to actually speak up, so there's that.

Professionalism!

Elaborate.

Ah, the sweet ramblings of the paranoid. You have to seriously overestimate the impact isolated academic discussion has on the public consciousness to believe that mind-controlling America through the power of "cultural marxism" was ever a feasible plan.

What the **** oh god the stupid it burns IT BUUURRRRNSSSS USSSS

^This. Libertarians don't count as left-wing folks.

Oh, really? Well, it's pretty much the equivalent of saying "nowadays, all movies are awful", based on the (debatable, but not completely inane) notion of "nowadays, all Hollywood blockbusters are awful". Well, duh, 90% of everything ever created is crap. The onus is on you to discover the good stuff.

Because that's all we hear and see... Confirmation bias much?

Could we... not play today? I'm having a tabletop session in the early afternoon(-ish), and it would be mighty nice to have some time left to study. Whether this means skipping this week's session, playing on Sunday, or you guys playing something else in our regular timeslot is up to you.

Well, actually, no, not even that. Question: why are we told we should give spy agencies access to our private communications? Answer usually is "because this can prevent acts of terror". Thing is, it's bull****. The US Census says there are around 300 million people living in the USA. No matter how big and well-funded your spy organization, you simply can't sift through all communications manually; you have to use some kind of algorithm to narrow your search down to possible suspects. Now, let's go paranoid and say there are currently about 1000 terrorist on US soil who are actively planning to commit atrocities, and include clues regarding these plans in their electronic communications. Since there are around 300 million people living in the USA, this means a 0.00033 base rate of terrorists in the population. Let's assume that the algorithm the intelligence community uses is very good - it identifies 40% of all possible terrorists (giving us an accuracy rate of 0.4, which, considering that the terrorists presumably try to conceal their intent, is more than fair), and only has a misidentification rate of 0,01% (0,001, note that this is still 30000 people, far above the 400 terrorists the algorithm will correctly identify). When, using Bayes' theorem, we calculate the conditional probability of a person being correctly flagged as terrorist by the system, even with our fairly generous starting assumptions, we only get a p=0.0132, a whopping <2% chance of being correct. This is, obviously, useless for identifying terrorists. But okay, let's be more generous and allow for a 70% accuracy rate. This pretty much assumes that the terrorists are idiots, and/or the NSA programmers are supergeniuses, but let's just roll with it. This would give us a p=0.0228, which is still only correct in less than 2,5% of the cases. Which is still useless. Even if we go completely sci-fi and assume a 90% identification rate, with only a 0,001% misidentification rate, the chances of The Machine our algorithm being correct when it barfs up a name is still only 23,08%, well below the odds of a coin toss, and hence, given that it spits out around 4000 suspects, useless. Conclusion: the idea that mass surveillance will ever be an efficient tool in identifying terrorists strongly hinges on an irrealistically huge percentage of the population being terrorists. Which is absurd.

It's indexed fairly well, and the search function is one's friend in such endeavors.

So you're saying they should be let off the hook for this most grievous, wasteful and incompetently done human rights violation, because they say it helped prevent attacks on US soil? Let me remind you, this is an agency so bad at doing spy stuff, they're waterboarding their own allies because they can't tell them from terrorists and are getting caught red-handed when trying to tamper with evidence of their wrongdoings. If they were any good at spycraft, we wouldn't be having this discussion, because there would be no evidence of it. (Okay, actually, if they were any real good, we wouldn't be having this discussion because they hadn't been as incompetent as to try solving problems by mass torture, but that's beside the point.) I already did so. Is the government's very own report on the issue credible enough for ya? Repeatedly. (Note: it's page 16 in the actual report, which means page 42 of the pdf, if I remember correctly.)