I was in elementary school (can't remember which grade). I was actually out at recess at the time hanging out by the fence by myself when my mom suddenly drove up and said that I was going home and had the rest of the day off. I remember sitting in the living room with the TV on while my mom made phone calls to friends and family, and seeing the plane hitting the towers on the news. I honestly didn't really grasp what was going on very well. The rest of the day was spent at grandma's house and I had a great time. Ignorance really is bliss I suppose.
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Well, I think you're right about the overall trend of police using excessive force, but that excessive force seems to be disproportionately directed at black people.
Regardless of any other details, Brown was shot 35 feet away from the police vehicle and it is uncontested that he was unarmed. The precipitating event was that he was walking in the street. It doesn't matter if the cop's story is true or not.
Thanks for the additional information.
I also agree with the point about police violence being largely directed at blacks, but I didn't want the OP to sound too opinionated (I've found that that tends to cause the following responses to be similarly opinionated, where I just want to first gather the facts).
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An 18 year old young man, Michael Brown, was shot multiple times and killed after allegedly assaulting a police officer (the officer claims Brown shoved him into his car and reached for his gun). Brown was African American, so there have been claims that this is part of a larger trend of police brutality on racial lines. Since then riots have broken out in Ferguson with several areas seeing looting and property destruction.
Personally, I think that this has almost nothing to do with racism, and instead has everything to do with police being too apt to use excessive force. Additionally, those involved in the riots (apparently mostly African American) are doing their cause no service, and making the officer's claims that Brown was a violent criminal seem all the more believable.
I learned from the last few cases that it's best that I wait for more information before drawing conclusions though, so I'm still on the fence as a whole. Anyone have any thoughts on this/additional information?
I brought this debate up with my younger brother and he made a remark that I don't remember seeing in this thread. Since the issue is that the term "Redskins" is derogatory, isn't the team really simply insulting itself and its players by describing themselves using a derogatory term?
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Wow, we're a more altruistic bunch than I expected (no offense meant, I just didn't expect it to be so unanimous). I'd also like to think that I would be able to, but from a purely hypothetical standpoint it sort of terrifies me to think that my entire life would come down to a random coin flip/dice roll. I know that's a little silly given that many of our actions in life involve similar risks (whether we recognize them at the time or not), but yeah...for me it feels like it'd be a bit harder, especially if I didn't know the person.
Highroller raised a good point about actually seeing the person dying probably making the decision easier.
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So I was musing last night about how I have a tendency to avoid actions where I know that the consequence of messing up are more than I am comfortable with. This led me to the following philosophic quandary:
Suppose you have a coin. Someone in front of you is literally seconds from death with no chance of an external force saving them. You however can flip this coin, and if you get heads they will be instantly healed. If you were to flip tails however, you would both die (you from losing the flip, them from succumbing to their injuries). Would you flip the coin?
Expanding on that, what if the game was to flip two coins, and they would be saved if at least one of them was heads? What if you had to roll a D20 and just had to score anything but a one? At what point would the risk of death be small enough for you to play the game to try to save this person? Would knowing this person make a difference?
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That was kinda the point thought, the idea was that the original story was in fact a twisting of the facts as such this wasnt supposed to be a 'mirror but from the villain point', but rather a "Hey this part is real this part was edited out" sort of thing (and all the insinuations of date-rape and violation and greed and insanity that follows)
I buy that for some parts of it, but the settings were completely different. It deleted the other kingdom of the original, it replaced the cursed mountain (from the original) with the moors, but then randomly threw in the cursed mountain for a random cameo (where she originally meets the crow). I don't really know why, but that annoyed me a lot.
As an aside, I also should probably explain that most of my frustrations with the movie stem from the fact that Sleeping Beauty actually HAD Maleficent POV sections, so it's not like there was a huge amount of room for misinterpretation of her goals. The real "misunderstood" part of the original Maleficent was WHY she was such a horrible person, not whether or not she was one. That's why the story I was hoping to see (if they were going to make one at all) was the story of her fall from grace, not the story of how she was good the whole time. I'm sorry, but if in your POV sections you're saying this, I'm not buying that you were secretly an angel at heart. That was I guess my biggest problem with the movie: it didn't feel like Sleeping Beauty from a different POV, but a completely different story that just happened to have characters of the same name.
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Not a bad thing, though is there a particular point to it? I mean, is there any evidence that male players are less likely to play cards that depict female creatures, or vice versa for females and male art? Does the race/gender of a card's art even factor into people's decision to play MTG?
I understand the point about the importance of variety for the sake of storytelling, but I'm not particularly convinced that most MTG planeswalker's race or gender really HAS much bearing on their stories. I admit I'm a little behind on my reading, but in the last few blocks were there a lot of cases of this?
The part of the thread I was replying to spun off a comment that 33% representation for women wasn't enough for MaRo. Presumably he, at least, thinks increasing representation could bring more women to the game.
But if race/gender has no bearing on the story, why not be inclusive? Why are people arguing for Infinite Variety of White Male instead?
I definitely am not arguing for white males specifically (I generally don't even remember the gender of the cards I play). I just found it an odd claim that females would be more drawn to the game if more of the planeswalkers were females, as the thought had never really occurred to me as an important consideration. Whatever MaRo wants to do, I don't particularly care, I just don't necessarily agree with the logic he presented.
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This one sort of disappointed me. I was sort of expecting a film that mirrored the original story, but told from Maleficent's perspective, and thus we might see a different view of the story. They changed so much though with the setting and plot that I honestly didn't feel like it was even a sleeping beauty story. Maybe I'm being too hard on it though.
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Wow, now that you've boiled down the characters to their skin color and age, I realize MTG really is filled with identical characters. I hope WotC becomes populated with more people like you who understand the quality of characters and the game are based mostly on the ratio of people with different skin color and genitals. After all, how will our progressive audience be able to enjoy the game without having a character that matches their combination of age, sex, gender identity, skin color, political beliefs, disability, nationality, and otherskin species. Thank you for the eye-opening analysis.
Pretty sure you're being sarcastic here, but the people being underrepresented do seem to care about it. Why shouldn't women be represented more evenly than 1:2? Why would 50/50 representation, and making female gamers feel more welcome, be a bad thing?
Not a bad thing, though is there a particular point to it? I mean, is there any evidence that male players are less likely to play cards that depict female creatures, or vice versa for females and male art? Does the race/gender of a card's art even factor into people's decision to play MTG?
I understand the point about the importance of variety for the sake of storytelling, but I'm not particularly convinced that most MTG planeswalker's race or gender really HAS much bearing on their stories. I admit I'm a little behind on my reading, but in the last few blocks were there a lot of cases of this?
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My big question is whether this study is using the activity in Syria in compiling this data. There are so many rebel groups that have formed since the start of the revolution that I imagine would heavily impact the data.
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1.) The feasibility of a goal says nothing about whether or not it should be pursued, particularly when discussing broad principles. World peace in many ways is a pipe dream. In a world of limited resources and competing interests, there will always be conflict. That said, the goal of working towards world peace is still worthwhile in that the individual steps make the world a more desirable place to live and work in, even if they ultimately will never achieve the stated end goal.
The same applies for equality. The civil rights movement, the women's right movement, anti workplace discrimination laws, etc are all generally heralded as positive accomplishments regardless of the feasibility of equality as a concept.
2.) The follow up question to that however is to focus on what is meant by equality. If, as your post seems to suggest, we're talking mathematical equality, then of course people will never be equal. You could clone a person, and the fact that there are two people means that by definition each person is distinct (and therefore not the same).
What is generally referred to by equality however is the idea that people all possess the same RIGHTS. Intelligence is indeed not something that will ever be equal, but the right to life regardless of your intelligence can protected in all people. The pushes for greater equality you see in society are reflections of the fact that, for many people, these on paper rights don't translate to society, and this should be rectified legally to the full extent that it can. While also something of an endless task, it's by no means undoable.
3.) The founding principle of the US that you're referring to was not the idea that all people were identical, but that who you were at birth should not have any relevance to the rights that you possessed as a human being. People of the colonies were subject to British law and were subjects of the British Empire, but because they were born in/lived in the colonies, they lacked many of the rights that were afforded British citizens. This was the type of "inequality" that the framers referred to, not that everyone is born with identical IQ.
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Thanks for the additional information.
I also agree with the point about police violence being largely directed at blacks, but I didn't want the OP to sound too opinionated (I've found that that tends to cause the following responses to be similarly opinionated, where I just want to first gather the facts).
Personally, I think that this has almost nothing to do with racism, and instead has everything to do with police being too apt to use excessive force. Additionally, those involved in the riots (apparently mostly African American) are doing their cause no service, and making the officer's claims that Brown was a violent criminal seem all the more believable.
I learned from the last few cases that it's best that I wait for more information before drawing conclusions though, so I'm still on the fence as a whole. Anyone have any thoughts on this/additional information?
I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard
http://matchhistory.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/#match-details/NA1/1448851001/34252472
Highroller raised a good point about actually seeing the person dying probably making the decision easier.
Suppose you have a coin. Someone in front of you is literally seconds from death with no chance of an external force saving them. You however can flip this coin, and if you get heads they will be instantly healed. If you were to flip tails however, you would both die (you from losing the flip, them from succumbing to their injuries). Would you flip the coin?
Expanding on that, what if the game was to flip two coins, and they would be saved if at least one of them was heads? What if you had to roll a D20 and just had to score anything but a one? At what point would the risk of death be small enough for you to play the game to try to save this person? Would knowing this person make a difference?
I buy that for some parts of it, but the settings were completely different. It deleted the other kingdom of the original, it replaced the cursed mountain (from the original) with the moors, but then randomly threw in the cursed mountain for a random cameo (where she originally meets the crow). I don't really know why, but that annoyed me a lot.
As an aside, I also should probably explain that most of my frustrations with the movie stem from the fact that Sleeping Beauty actually HAD Maleficent POV sections, so it's not like there was a huge amount of room for misinterpretation of her goals. The real "misunderstood" part of the original Maleficent was WHY she was such a horrible person, not whether or not she was one. That's why the story I was hoping to see (if they were going to make one at all) was the story of her fall from grace, not the story of how she was good the whole time. I'm sorry, but if in your POV sections you're saying this, I'm not buying that you were secretly an angel at heart. That was I guess my biggest problem with the movie: it didn't feel like Sleeping Beauty from a different POV, but a completely different story that just happened to have characters of the same name.
I definitely am not arguing for white males specifically (I generally don't even remember the gender of the cards I play). I just found it an odd claim that females would be more drawn to the game if more of the planeswalkers were females, as the thought had never really occurred to me as an important consideration. Whatever MaRo wants to do, I don't particularly care, I just don't necessarily agree with the logic he presented.
Not a bad thing, though is there a particular point to it? I mean, is there any evidence that male players are less likely to play cards that depict female creatures, or vice versa for females and male art? Does the race/gender of a card's art even factor into people's decision to play MTG?
I understand the point about the importance of variety for the sake of storytelling, but I'm not particularly convinced that most MTG planeswalker's race or gender really HAS much bearing on their stories. I admit I'm a little behind on my reading, but in the last few blocks were there a lot of cases of this?
Why this is the case?
My big question is whether this study is using the activity in Syria in compiling this data. There are so many rebel groups that have formed since the start of the revolution that I imagine would heavily impact the data.
1.) The feasibility of a goal says nothing about whether or not it should be pursued, particularly when discussing broad principles. World peace in many ways is a pipe dream. In a world of limited resources and competing interests, there will always be conflict. That said, the goal of working towards world peace is still worthwhile in that the individual steps make the world a more desirable place to live and work in, even if they ultimately will never achieve the stated end goal.
The same applies for equality. The civil rights movement, the women's right movement, anti workplace discrimination laws, etc are all generally heralded as positive accomplishments regardless of the feasibility of equality as a concept.
2.) The follow up question to that however is to focus on what is meant by equality. If, as your post seems to suggest, we're talking mathematical equality, then of course people will never be equal. You could clone a person, and the fact that there are two people means that by definition each person is distinct (and therefore not the same).
What is generally referred to by equality however is the idea that people all possess the same RIGHTS. Intelligence is indeed not something that will ever be equal, but the right to life regardless of your intelligence can protected in all people. The pushes for greater equality you see in society are reflections of the fact that, for many people, these on paper rights don't translate to society, and this should be rectified legally to the full extent that it can. While also something of an endless task, it's by no means undoable.
3.) The founding principle of the US that you're referring to was not the idea that all people were identical, but that who you were at birth should not have any relevance to the rights that you possessed as a human being. People of the colonies were subject to British law and were subjects of the British Empire, but because they were born in/lived in the colonies, they lacked many of the rights that were afforded British citizens. This was the type of "inequality" that the framers referred to, not that everyone is born with identical IQ.