American Congressmen lobbies the Australian government regarding plain packaging for cigarettes

mczorg · 11 months

Yeah, exactly. Thus my pet theory that many cultures think other cultures don't get dry humor. It's not that the other culture doesn't have dry humor, it's just that dry humor doesn't translate well.

unclefreeze · 11 months

You don't agree with me therefore you must be a racist.

I don't remember saying that. I said that, considering how weird and skittish you're acting about a reasonably clear issue, I'm guessing you're hiding something you're afraid that people holding the consensus view wouldn't like. It's just a guess, but it seemed worth pointing out.

The ball is in your court here. You can argue against my assertion that skin color is not race. You can make sense of what you've asserted. But making my position out to be vague is a bit silly, isn't it?

mczorg · 11 months

Sure. Some humor is missed just because of translation issues. I used to listen to a radio show that had a lot of Australian political satire, and it was like I had tuned a shortwave to a Martian wavelength. For example, this is hilarious because I’m familiar with far-right and radical Muslim nonsense, but I have no idea who most of the people mentioned are. But as you point out, that's really on a different level from things like irony.

mczorg · 11 months

Yeah.

Really I think there isn't that much difference between Australian and American humor, from what I've seen. I think Greg Fleet, Shaun Micallef, and Geraldine Hickey are hilarious, and I know plenty of Australians who like Seinfeld, Arrested Development, and Patton Oswalt. There are consistent and important differences, yes, but it's not like we're blind to the structure of one another's jokes.

It seems to me that many cultures think that other cultures "don't get irony" when it's more that they don't reliably get the small, culturally bound cues that irony is happening, or the significance of the fine social foibles that irony is often about. For example, if I put on a certain American accent to ironize something I say, it's not necessarily fair of me to think that an Anglophone South African, say, "can't understand dry humor" if they don't laugh. And this goes double for text-only communication.

As I type this I realize I'm probably just regurgitating half-remembered bits of this Simon Pegg essay/plug from a few years ago.

unclefreeze · 11 months

Yeah, in light of the overemphasis, straw men, and apparently deliberately missing the point, I'm gonna guess you're trying to make some kind of racist point that you're afraid to set out in clear language.

The heritability of heritable traits is not in dispute here. The place where you quote yourself is begging the question to some degree -- you're hammering on the point that there are visible distinctions between people (a good point!) without raising your head up to look around at what's actually being argued.

You could start by explaining the difference between "based on" and "is".

The passage you bolded would also be useful for you to read, think about, and understand.

mczorg · 11 months

'S cool. I was too in my original comment, of course.

I get angry when people of any nationality, my own or others, get self-righteous without looking at context. I'm sick of Americans acting like they can get away with anything because they're the World Police. I get sick of non-Americans acting like America is the sole cause of every problem that it happens to be involved with in any way.

I wish everyone would take a deep breath and remember it's just lines on a map, and we're all complicit in each other's problems but we can help each other out.

mczorg · 11 months

Think about per-capita v. absolute terms here.

unclefreeze · 12 months

I think the reason it seems like everyone in the world except you is missing something is that you're missing something:

Skin color is not race.

mczorg · 12 months

As an American, I'd like to apologize for Manzullo and publicly state my hope that he gets a nonlethal but extremely painful form of lung cancer.

How about a deal, Australia? You stop selling coal, we stop selling tobacco.

skookybird · 1 year

I didn't. It was either a bug or moderation, I guess.

skookybird · 1 year

Parens should be brackets.
"whooooosh" should be capitalized.
Please demonstrate understanding of the distinction between typography and grammar.
"proofreading", without a hyphen, is more accepted.
"valued" is vague; consider something like "highly valued".
The citizen grammarians et al. are not themselves democratized, surely; remove either "of the ‘democratization’" or all three "citizen"s.
You use a serial comma in the first part of the second sentence of the second paragraph but not in its second part. Please be consistent.
Please do not use full caps in "EDIT".
"tl:dr:" should be "tl;dr:".
"C20^th" should be "20C".
In any case, do not superscript ordinal indicators in running text.
The last sentence should end with a period.

unclefreeze · 1 year

Unfortunately I have other things to divide my time among. Also, it’s hard getting through to a serious homophobe because to them I'm essentially an Uncle Tom.

unclefreeze · 1 year

It's a subtext I consistently see in straight porn when I don't specifically search for stuff of a higher quality. It's the great majority of the front page of most any generic "free" porn site. I admit 99% is an exaggeration, but I think it's so common that it can consistently disturb straight men into preferring what the quote lesbians end quote are up to.

unclefreeze · 1 year

Same root.

unclefreeze · 1 year

Maybe. I'm not trying to tell LGBT people to calm down, or anything like that. I see LGBT people being mean to non-LGBT people much less than vice-versa, you know?
Oh, yeah, no, don't come out to people you don't want to come out to. I mean talking to people who are already allies about how to be better allies.

unclefreeze · 1 year

And, for that matter, just because you are straight doesn't mean you aren't gay. A bi person could say yes to both identities.

unclefreeze · 1 year

Ah, interesting, thanks. I don't hear it this way in the particular contexts I'm talking about, because describing that you're not in the implicit audience of the subreddit is kind of the point, but I'll try to keep in mind that people could take it this way.

Oh, also, this brings us to the point that "gay" is different from LGBTQ, which is another perfectly valid reason to use "am straight (and cisgendered)" instead of "not gay" or whatever.

I guess what I'm asking for there is patience with people who aren't used to it being clumsy about discussing their identity. They -- we -- will step on some toes. Obviously that should be corrected. But I want to remind folks that it's sometimes an earnest step in the right direction, even when it comes across real insensitive.

unclefreeze · 1 year

I put that in quotes because I wanted to represent a naive but not dumb-as-rocks perspective.

mepper · 1 year

(Second edit: I basically just made this comment its own post, because hey, free karma.)

Hi. I'm straight.

You know why we in The Straight Community tend to bring that up here? Because we're trying not to be heteronormative jerks. We know we're guests, and we don't want to seem to be pretending we're living the kinds of experiences that this subreddit happens to be about.

It's exactly the same if you look at TwoXChromosomes, where men will often say they're men at the top of their comments. That's not sexism -- if anything, it's an attempt to avoid sexism. It's simple politeness and respect. I don't happen to know, but if there's a subreddit devoted to, say, Americans of color, I bet white Americans mention that they're white there.

It's not homophobia every time I mention my orientation. I know that often it is when people mention their orientation. But maybe straight people posting polite comments in r/LGBT could be given the benefit of the doubt that they aren't being insultingly defensive, just clear about their identity in one of the few places where they're in the minority.

Please be nice when people are recognizing their privilege.

Edit: I'm not sayin' schlimschlamschlomi deserves to be downvoted in this case. Just trying to answer something that seems to keep coming up.

potato21 · 1 year

Usually, there is an expectation that during a mathematical discussion the listeners is capable of some abstract thinking.

Yes, but this takes place within reasonable boundaries. When someone abstracts a real-world situation differently from the way you do, you don't necessarily get to look down on them. That's my point.

So, are you telling me that puzzle is not a good way to delve into mathematics?

On the contrary, puzzles are a great way to get started (and to continue!). But being kind of a dick about puzzles when people are trying their best and merely using alternate interpretations of the world, not being wrong in any mathematical sense, helps no one.

Perhaps I am expecting too much of the people here.

Perhaps you are, in some sense. When teaching, it's important to remember that some things that are obvious to you, like how to idealize a dartboard, are not necessarily obvious to other people.

One reason that teaching is so hard is that you have to make things clear to people without treating them as stupid.

andrewsmith1986 · 1 year

(Those are quotation marks, not parentheses. These are parentheses.)

potato21 · 1 year

Soapbox time.

You are making an error here.

You're mapping everyday concepts like "dart", "line", and "dartboard" onto mathematical concepts like "point", "line", and "unit disc". This is not a defined mapping. (For example, we can easily model dart impact areas as small circles.) Then you do some reasoning on the mathematical concepts, which is fine in itself. But then you map the mathematical concepts back onto the everyday concepts. This is not a defined mapping either. You're implicitly assuming that you're dealing with a bijection here, but you aren't necessarily.

(To put it another way: In the real world, if I put a fine thread across a dartboard, p ≠ 0 that it will break on a typical throw. So your metaphor assumes a contrafactual, and points it makes are not fair to insist upon.)

Neither your friend nor you is correct, because neither of you have well-defined terms. If you want to explain to your friend that a line does not have area in ℝ² yet does contain points, find another way. Abusing his common sense is not rigorous and discourages him from thinking of math as connected to sanity.

I don't mean to sound harsh. I'm really glad you're explaining things to your friend. But please don't use oversimplified models that may discourage people.

trant · 1 year

Hey. We are not into necro over there.

unclefreeze · 1 year

Me too!

Oh, you mean in the photo?

unclefreeze

TROPHY CASE

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