Violence in Entertainment (Sports, Movies, TV, Videogames): Can an argument be made that questions like the one about how to lay siege to the Magic Kingdom should share blame for inspiring events like the shooting in Aurora, Colorado?
No. BTW I wrote Jon Davis's answer to What are the optimal siege tactics for taking Magic Kingdom's Cinderella Castle?This is satirical fiction. It mixes elements of military lingo and thinking with the absurd to form a comedic rendition of an event beyond any realm of the conceivably possible. People who lack the mental limits to not murder people are not made this way by a humorous post that has been upvoted on a still young social network and was shared a few times on Facebook. I feel no responsibility for those who conduct acts of violence. They are insane. They would have done what they did regardless of what the rest of us do in life. Besides this, the answers themselves do not lend themselves to teaching anyone how to commit violence. The weapons used range from an entire Marine Corps regiment to animatronic pirates and a few call for pixie dust. Should a person lacking in mental capacities gain hold any of these there should be cause for alarm, but that isn't practical. It isn't rational. It's fiction.Art will always be blamed for the failures of a population too afraid to actually solve their problems. Book burnings and censorship will have far less of impact on sociopaths than proper diagnosis and medical treatment.-AdieuAlong with myself, these are the authors of answers on that question. I think this is an interesting opportunity to ask the them how they feel about their contributions and how it should be treated in lieu of questions like this.Andrew Lemke, Ian McCullough, Sanjay Sabnani, Ian Osmond, Daniel M. Clark, Christopher Patrick, Ben Newman, Joel Postman, Bill Brouse, Andrew Ballinger, Heidi McDonald, User, Mary M Haselbauer, Bob Smith, Mike Cook, Elron Aven, Jack Holt, Daniel Dudley, Justin Murray, Carl Albert Wayne Knudson, Kevin Garcia
How many people in this world live in poverty?
There are still 800 million people living on less than $1.25 a day, which is appalling. But that’s an extremely low and mostly arbitrary line. Move the benchmark to a more realistic measure of poverty, and it gets worse – at $2.5o a day we’re talking about 2.7 billion people. Add a dollar more and we’re approaching half the world’s population.In other words, half the world still lives in extreme poverty. That’s easy to forget if we just focus on the absolute poorest. We have a long way to go.Here’s a graph from the book Reducing Global Poverty that shows the poverty headcount at several different levels, and projects the change in the decades to come. In the year 2040, half of the world is likely to be taking home less than $10 a day.Of course, we want everyone to enjoy a healthy and fulfilling life, to reach their full potential and get an honest day’s wages. But when you consider how many people there are to raise up to anything like the Western standard of living, the environmental challenge should be obvious. Delivering that level of wealth to one billion people has brought side effects such as climate change and the 6th global extinction event. It can’t be universalized.Read more about poverty at The Global Millennial
Do you agree that black people can't be racist? Since only Africans were colonized, can they be racists?
Racism is actually indiscriminating (pun intended) in how it discriminates. Anyone can be at the receiving end, and being a minority does not miraculously vaccine against being racist. Ask any former colony if the minority of foreign rulers was treating them equally.The idea that black people cannot be racist is based on two false assumptions. First, that there is a scale of races. And second, that racism can only go downstream and never upstream nor horizontally. This is a classical syllogism:Black people are at the bottom of the racial scale.Black people have no one below them to be racist with.Therefore black people cannot be racist.The ethnic groups from the top of the scale are so oblivious to the indiscriminating virtue of racism that when they are on the receiving end, for example in the Caribbean (Caribbean Racisms - Connections and Complexities in the Racialization | I. Law | Springer), they can only describe it as reverse racism, because the notion that racism might also go upstream would challenge the very concept of a downstream-only racial scale.Racism can also be horizontal, as I have seen first hand with blue-eyed Romanian citizens being shunned by brown-eyed Italians. As nations, we have also witnessed blue-eyed Muslims being persecuted in Central and Eastern Europe, or Tusti being massacred by their Hutu lookalikes.The truth is that any racial scale is a purely fictitious and arbitrary construct. Racism is an ugly thing. When it is unleashed it knows no boundaries and does however it pleases, regardless of who is giving and who is receiving.
Why do I perceive some black people as loud?
As a French person living in NYC for 14 years, I find all Americans loud. I am used to it and perfectly fine. My voice level has even gone up a little according to the wife. Those who are saying that some culture are not louder thank others have never watched a Greek political debate.Those who assume that you are biased or racist are also imply that being loud is a bad thing. It is, if the culture decides so. Quietness is associated with education and all things upper class. So, you may not be saying Obama or Neil Degrasse Tyson are louder, you may be saying that the majority of the black is poorer and benefit from fewer education opportunities. And that is saddly true and we must all need to think of what we can do to change that.You may also be saying that they are less repressed and more used to express their emotions out loud. I will take a loud happy laugher over a vocal fried and soulless “OMG. That is hillarious…” any day.I am writting this on a bus that is half black project and half white college-educated upper middle class. Currently, no one is loud. When someone is, yes, it is usually not that lone middle class white man reading the New Yorker. It’s a mother facetiming her little daughter that she doesn’t get to see grow because she works two jobs with an hour commute. It’s two coworkers having a laugh about a shitty min wage job. I hear sad stories, talks about prisons, drugs and alcoholism. I accept all of it as my environment and I wouldn’t think anything of it and wouldn’t want to change. Bu if I want to focus on good book, I’ll try to sit elsewhere than from a full volume candy crush player.The fact that you are questioning your perception means that your heart is in the right place. It may be more for lack of habit, societal bias, but mostly because you can’t say anything about it. Shushing stupid drunk white girls at the next table butchering Justin Bieber’s songs as if it were possible? Oh hell to the yeah! Otherwise, just learn to enjoy it.Note: there is also a great joke by Marina Franklin that about the white girl who came her Harlem apartment to tell her to lower the music. “ I said ‘It’s a black neighborhood. That’s what we do. We play our black music loud. You don’t like it, get out.’ It was messed up. Cause I was playing Simon and Garfunkel.”