My take is basically this, in bullet points:
- It's fucking dumb to be a part of any kind of group. Nazi...black panther....some religious CULT (all religions are cults...I don't care how many followers it takes to be considered not a cult. Kill a man, you're a murderer...kill many, you're a conquerer) or whatever the case may be. Once you're in a group, the individuality is gone. It's a hive mind.
- People, whether you agree with them or not, should be allowed to say whatever they want to say. The way I feel, and I see more and more people saying the same thing....is that over the past two decades true freedom of choice has been getting stripped away little by little. When you take away someone's right to say something and then punish them for it...you're going down the road to zero freedom and a world full of censorship, just to make sure everyone is PRETENDING to feel and think the same. Hive mind again. So many people think freedoms should only apply to others that think exactly like they do....how is this freedom? As long as you're not killing someone or beating someone up, you should be allowed to say what you want without being crucified for it.
- Like usual with any kind of shit like this, I'm willing to bet 90% of the argument on all sides is being flamed by people who just need to stir the pot and have no real knowledge of what in the hell they're talking about. Every protest that gets out of hand, the ones who cause it to get out of hand are always these morons who just want to start trouble. Many people go down to a protest site JUST to start shit and nothing else.
I find the whole thing just hilarious. Whether you're for or against the confederate flag, the past is the past. You're not changing anything by removing a flag or a statue either way so who cares? Also, the idiots in America who think only America had slavery. LMAO...I hate to tell you but slavery has been around since the dawn of man and it's affected every group of people on the planet at some point. Time to get over it.
I'd argue there's still slavery..only it's not skin color or ethnicity based anymore. It's paid slavery, rich vs poor. So as long as you're getting paid a shit amount of money to barely be able to survive, it's not REAL slavery.
Yeah it's pretty crazy what's going on. While I do agree with companies wanting to distance themselves from people who propagate hate and racism by firing them or dropping their website or whatever, I don't believe in lynch mobs and especially ones who make death threats.
Part of me wants to say that she's an adult now and can make her own decisions however part of me feels sympathetic because it sounds like she grew up with some pretty shit parents and now has a shit husband.
But like you said she is an adult and made the decisions that led her to this point. 100%. When I first met her she was probably 18 or 19 years old, and I could probably excuse some for unsocial behavior. Hell, we were all people hanging out at a comic convention. Not exactly the place known for people with all the social graces in the world, you know? Today though, this is all on her. And she probably deserves most of what she is getting.
-I hate that neo-nazis and white supremacists were allowed to protest but I do defend their right to, except for the violence. That's when their right to protest ceased. It should never have come to that, hate pure and simple.
-I'm not buying that Alissa Kiss didn't have a clue about what she was doing. She knew, she fucked up. It would be same for me if I got fired for posting something controversial on my Facebook page. I do feel bad about the lynchmob mentality, especially if it's undeserved. Making death threats doesn't make you any better than the other hate groups.
Hatred doesn't work, not matter what the confederate flag and swastika represented decades ago, they are symbols of hate now. My issue with the statues and confederate flags is that they are usually located on government property. The government which is supposed to represent all. So it makes perfect sense to want those symbols off state house grounds and in a museum where they can be preserved, where they truly belong. It's a little different than being displayed in someone's yard.
Like Robio and Archie, I'm glad corporations and people are taking a stand. It makes me happy to see people becoming active and not just standing on the sidelines.
-Finally, I hold the president accountable for making this worse. He's suppose to be a unifier, not tripling down on statements to divide. He should've fucking known better.
Yeah making comments about other people in one's life really shouldn't be made if they aren't actually known. Getting second hand information is always a problem because the more it gets passed around the more it can change, get misinterpreted, and get other things added into the mix from other people's perceptions. The internet has just multiplied things 1,000 times over in this regard.
In most cases I like to think that someone is at least afforded the opportunity to learn and grow from things so while I don't think people should tolerate these kind of things it can be disappointing when these lynch mobs don't give these people a chance. Hopefully this could be something that would inspire her to change however from what you have said it doesn't really sound promising and that I think is the real shame.
Yeah Trump and many of those around him like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones have really fanned the flames and emboldened these hate groups like the KKK.
People who were once on the sidelines no longer being on the sidelines is a terrible thing. Political apathy turning to activism is the first step to violent activism, which is an important part of the creation or the perpetuation of tyranny.*
Totalitarianism does not begin unopposed, but only gains power when it has an opponent to crush and people are fearful enough once it has been crushed to accept the new order on the basis of it ending the conflict it itself created. Fear created by internal conflict is key to this. The political apathy of a totalitarian society is actually the active support, out of fear, of the political status quo. Just as political apathy in a democracy is passive support of the political status quo.
A nation’s censoring of its own history, is usually related to evil it is presently or planning to commit. In Australia, understanding of our colonial and immigration history is a joke, and our oppression of aborigines and punishment of illegal immigrants is exceptionally cruel. This censoring is actually very important. The history of aboriginal oppression has been historically justified by mercifully saving a group of people from themselves. So it's important to either censor completely the historical oppression, or to censor the justification of it. Thus, the scholastic side of history ignores it completely, and intellectuals think of it in terms of colonialism being sadistically and knowingly cruel. Both sides are thus implicit in the application of the same oppression today; one side not knowing it exists, and the other justifying it as mercifully saving a group of people who, after many years of oppression, are incapable of caring for themselves.
Lastly, justice is a synonym for justification. That is, justice is the justification of cruelty. The action of a person or a people too stupid to respond to cruelty with anything but cruelty itself.
Poetic justice is the justification of schadenfreude. 
All signs point to America imploding, but it's done that before, so it's easy to read things like that into it.
P.S. Real slavery still exists, including in first world nations; albeit it's rare in the latter. But this was also often the case during the height of slavery. The richest nations didn't need slaves to do their work at home, but in their colonies. Thus we have England using African slaves in America and other colonies, but not in England, and King Leopold’s pet colonialism killing 12 million Congolese, but Belgium not having a significant Congolese population today but a lot of sweet, sweet rubber money! Interesting sidenote, the English also enslaved their own people in the same way America does today—particularly after abolitionism became popular—slavery as criminal punishment. Much of Australia was built with the slave labour of English convicts, for instance.
*Mmm, the classic "slippery steps" argument!
Hate speech is a gray area with our Freedom of Speech right. There are limits to it, and that one rides right on the line. You're not allowed to say anything that could put a person directly in harm (i.e. shouting "FIRE" in a crowed movie theater). Direct threats upon individuals are also not allowed, and will also get you a visit from the police. I suspect we're not far away from further clarification of the law to curb hate speech.
I'm a pretty big freedom of speech advocate, so I'm never a fan of seeing it restricted, but over the years social media has really shown me that there really is a large swath of the population that is way too easily influenced. Definitely makes me rethink things.
Foolz said:People who were once on the sidelines no longer being on the sidelines is a terrible thing. Political apathy turning to activism is the first step to violent activism, which is an important part of the creation or the perpetuation of tyranny.*
Totalitarianism does not begin unopposed, but only gains power when it has an opponent to crush and people are fearful enough once it has been crushed to accept the new order on the basis of it ending the conflict it itself created. Fear created by internal conflict is key to this. The political apathy of a totalitarian society is actually the active support, out of fear, of the political status quo. Just as political apathy in a democracy is passive support of the political status quo.
A nation’s censoring of its own history, is usually related to evil it is presently or planning to commit. In Australia, understanding of our colonial and immigration history is a joke, and our oppression of aborigines and punishment of illegal immigrants is exceptionally cruel. This censoring is actually very important. The history of aboriginal oppression has been historically justified by mercifully saving a group of people from themselves. So it's important to either censor completely the historical oppression, or to censor the justification of it. Thus, the scholastic side of history ignores it completely, and intellectuals think of it in terms of colonialism being sadistically and knowingly cruel. Both sides are thus implicit in the application of the same oppression today; one side not knowing it exists, and the other justifying it as mercifully saving a group of people who, after many years of oppression, are incapable of caring for themselves.
Lastly, justice is a synonym for justification. That is, justice is the justification of cruelty. The action of a person or a people too stupid to respond to cruelty with anything but cruelty itself.
Poetic justice is the justification of schadenfreude.
All signs point to America imploding, but it's done that before, so it's easy to read things like that into it.
P.S. Real slavery still exists, including in first world nations; albeit it's rare in the latter. But this was also often the case during the height of slavery. The richest nations didn't need slaves to do their work at home, but in their colonies. Thus we have England using African slaves in America and other colonies, but not in England, and King Leopold’s pet colonialism killing 12 million Congolese, but Belgium not having a significant Congolese population today but a lot of sweet, sweet rubber money! Interesting sidenote, the English also enslaved their own people in the same way America does today—particularly after abolitionism became popular—slavery as criminal punishment. Much of Australia was built with the slave labour of English convicts, for instance.
*Mmm, the classic "slippery steps" argument!
I'm never sure if you're the smartest person in the room, or just the best bullshit artist I've ever known. Little of column A and a little of column B maybe?
gamingeek said:Here you'd get arrested for offensive hate speech or inciting violence. Even online if you make a racist or hateful malicious communication the cops can knock on your door. I get you guys have this freedom of speech thing but some of the stuff I have seen and heard about these neo nazis and counter groups is just kinda mind blowing for a European. There were angry white men literally with burning torches chanting "Jews will not replace us."
I don't think they were saying jews. It sounds like "YOU will not replace us" to me.
I've never really understood hate groups of any kind. It's one thing to protect your own, but to just outright be against everybody else who isn't exactly like you doesn't make much sense to me. People always like to feel as if they're a part of SOME kind of group though, one way or another. I truly think the media and the news outlets make everything out to be worse than it is though. They always do....constant spin and trying to push their own agenda. Even the images they show you over and over again...it's designed to give you a certain impression of any given subject. Not always the most truthful one.
As for the freedom of speech...it's not just hate per se. Corporations are really taking advantage of social media and you could take any subject at all, and anything even remotely "on the edge" that you say is being used against people now. That is fucking ridiculous, and it's something that has only popped up in the past decade. I know for a fact the company I work for would be scoping out this website if they knew I posted here. I don't even give anyone at work my gaming username's on the consoles, because I'm all set getting in trouble for calling out of work and having some jackass tell people I was playing videogames or some shit.
Yep, I never link this site to social media for that very reason, though I do think it's fairly innocent here, still not worth it.
robio said:I'm never sure if you're the smartest person in the room, or just the best bullshit artist I've ever known. Little of column A and a little of column B maybe?
The only two reasonable positions are always completely true or completely bullshit (making the former easy to distinguish from the latter), so perhaps the stupidest if I'm muddying the two with each other.
But I'm trying to be completely sincere in anything I say now. Which is why I say very little on the internet anymore.
I think freedom of speech should be paramount, as long as it doesn't lead to violence or stigmatizes a group of people. Purely as an example, it's ok to say that Robio is an idiot and a danger to society who should be locked up, but to say that all VGPressers are idiots, a danger to society, and that they should all be locked up is taking things too far in my opinion. Also, crying out to go over to Robio's place and bash him up good is where free speech ends.
As I've said before, this whole polarisation of western society can be traced back to the advent of the internet as a means of mass communication. It gives everyone a more or less annonymous forum to place their small crate, climb it and start spewing nonsense. Even worse, contrary to the roman fora of old, this virtual forum has the tendency of sorting all these crate-abusing loonatics together, giving them their own quiet corner in which to bask in the approval of likeminded idiots untill they have all convinced eachother that their common viewpoint is acceptable and the only correct one.
What we're seeing now is that nationalistic and protectionistic political ideologies, which are currently on the rise because people yearn for simpler days when the world seemed smaller and safer while at the same time ignoring all the extra wealth globalisation has brought them, are giving credit to what once were rather harmless minorities, strengthening the beliefs of said minorities even further to the point where it seems, to them, acceptable to go out onto the street declaring their twisted views to the world, or worse feeling justified to start physically harrassing certain demographics, like we saw happening in Brittain after the Brexit.
I think that we're at a crossroad in history which started with the industrial revolution. We've come at a point where life standards in the west are so high that they are incapable of sustaining themselves. We all love all the little bits and bobs we can afford, but also ignore the fact that the only reason we can afford them is because they're being made far away in appalling circumstances. This then leads to the loss of jobs. At the same time, the wealth in certain poorer parts of the world is increasing as well, which in the end will leave us all with money to burn, but no one willing to cheaply manufacture the goods we crave. At that point we will either be forced to pay a fair price for our goods, which in return we will want to be more durable than the disposable nature of most consumer level goods we buy today. But in the end this will lead to a perceived loss of wealth as we will be able to buy less for our money. The other option is that robotics will take over nearly all production processes, leaving humanity with nothing but spare time and free goods, be they actually free or subsidized through a form of base income for everyone.
Foolz said:The only two reasonable positions are always completely true or completely bullshit (making the former easy to distinguish from the latter), so perhaps the stupidest if I'm muddying the two with each other.
But I'm trying to be completely sincere in anything I say now. Which is why I say very little on the internet anymore.
Lol poor foolz, great post before even I got it was very proffersor like.
I believe all forms of hate speech needs to disbanded. If you want to do it privately, post some stupid viewpoint on social media, put a confederate flag outside your home, that's fine. An organized march of people who's message is hate other races needs to be shut down immediately. Same if BLM starts ranting about attacking cops, you cross a line into personal threats goodbye. Yes it gets muddy cause taking down the police infrastructure can be viewed as a threat, the message needs to be clear to that you are attacking the system not a person.
Now ifthe argument about the hate groups is they marched on a social platform of "take back what's ours" ok that's no necessarily a direct threat, well you know what too fucking bad. Those groups have a long enough history of violence where they shouldn't be allowed a public space ever.
Man this whole saga just took another step into WTFville. Alisa just got herself a well known defender in the costuming community named Jamin Fite. He makes Slave Leia metal bikinis and they're considered the top of the line. He also organizes these big meet-ups of girls dressed as Slave Leia at the bigger conventions like Star Wars Celebration that get a lot of press, and because of this he goes by the very charming name of "The Slavemaster." He does however exclude any woman who is over a size 6 from participating in these shoots. Oh and he's also a very public holocaust denier.
Yeah, he actually is a very public holocaust denier. People who've known the guy for a while have always known he was a scumbag for various reasons, but about a year ago he got a little too public on social media about how much he hates the Jews, and a lot of his holocaust opinions came out of the woodwork. When that whole controversary hit he eventually ended with a special apology that went something like, "I'm sorry.... that you're too stupid to understand what I'm saying" and then deactivated his social media accounts. That kind of sunk of professionally, but only briefly, as he did quietly reactivate things, and went about his work to people who don't pay attention to this kind of stuff.
Anyway he chimed in to defend Alisa, and reminded everyone what an awful human being he is. And he really is. The details are of course at Bleeding Cool News once again - https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/20/holocaust-star-wars-cosplay-designer/
I'd like to say, "what the hell happened to this hobby of mine?" but the truth is, whenever anything gets popular dumbasses find their way into it. And hell, a lot of these dumbasses were here all along. They just had the sense to keep it quiet and didn't have a dillhole of a president to empower them.
And...... its been locked.
Just a quick note, the following is not game related and may not even be all that humorous. We'll see as I write it.
Okay so whether you live in America or not, you probably saw some sort of news coverage last week about a white nationalist/supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia that turned very ugly. Hard to believe a bunch of people who identify with Nazis attract negativity huh? As bad as it is though, it's starting to unite everyone else. Lots of people who might have been on the sidelines no longer are, and that's a good thing. And one thing we're starting to see is individuals who were marching with the white nationalists or whatever you want to call them are being identified and singled out. They're being reported to employers and losing their jobs. Basically they're paying the price for their hate speech. Good. However, I'm starting to worry that the righteous might be getting a little too righteous with their vengeance.
One of the people who was recently singled out and identified as taking part of all of this was a cosplayer who went by the name Alisa Kiss, and she's someone I happen to know. She was never an A-list cosplay celeb (who are all D-list celebs in the first place), but Alisa was one of the first girls out there with a name that you could say and other people in the scene would at least recognize her name and even today a lot of people in the Southeast know her name. This is partially due to a couple reasons:
1. Her costumes which were good.
2. The pool of costumers was a lot smaller in the 2000's than it is now.
3. She had a softcore/tease porn site that apparently made her quite a few bucks for a while.
I won't pretend to have ever been friends with Alisa or I even have something nice to say about her. Frankly, she was always kind of a cunt. I first met her 15 years ago when I went to my first big comic convention, DragonCon, and we were all a part of the burgeoning cosplay scene. Sidenote, that's also when I met a pre-boob job Yaya Han for the first time. Anyway, Alisa was not particularly friendly to many people and earned a pretty deserved reputation of giving the cold sholder to anyone who wasn't a photographer and being pretty full of herself. But we were in the same social circles so our paths crossed from time to time and over the years our paths crossed multiple times. She even dated a friend of mine for a few months. And in all that time I learned more than anything else she was dumb as a brick. Brown toilet paper kind of dumb. So now that I hear she is attending a white pride neo-nazi rally? Well it makes a certain amount of sense.
So that brings us back to earlier in the week when it was discovered by someone or something that she attended the event in Charlottesville. I don't know all the details of how that was discovered, but it was. She tried to deny it at first and insisted she was just in the area. That was proven to be a lie. Then the real damage hit. An article about her was posted at Bleeding Cool News and it details everything that went on and even provided video of her alongside her husband who does appear to be a full-fledged cardboard shield carrying neo-nazi. - https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/18/supergirl-cosplayer-went-charlottesville-guess-whose-side/
Anyway the fallout for her has been pretty swift. She's deleted her social media accounts or locked them down. Her web host is no longer hosting her porn site. And on social media... yikes. Since we travel in similar social circles we have several mutual friends on Facebook, and man let me tell you I'm seeing the virtual lynch mob up close and personal and it is scary. There are insults, mud slinging and death threats. If I'm to believe everything I hear she's been a racist since high school, and her mom is an even worse and a full fledged neo-nazi.
Surprisingly though I almost feel bad for her. Almost. Like I said before Alisa, while cold, was stupid as fuck. I can honestly see her husband brainwashing her to some extent. But that really doesn't matter. She was there, she was chanting, and she earned the fallout. Take away her cosplay fame. Take away her porn site. But the lynch mob mentality that's heating up... I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. There's too much being thrown around, and who knows if its all true. Seeing what's happening to her makes me wonder what would happen if the wrong person got fingered in a case like this. Hell, it did a few years ago during the Trayvon Martin shooting and Spike Lee tweeted the address of the shooter George Zimmerman. But it turned out, it was the wrong George Zimmerman, and the result was an innocent elderly couple got harassed and threatened (there's your additional reason to dislike Spike Lee if you needed one).
So it's all got me wondering about justice and how far people should take things. Hell, I just want this summer to be over. Things always seem to get bad when it gets hot. I think that alone is reason enough to care about global warming.