carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I've taken great pleasure in cooking and strobist portrait photography. For cooking, I'm naturally terrible but even I can follow America's Test Kitchen recipes and my family has really appreciated the results! Cooking is an opportunity to have a hobby that also improves your family's quality of life. For photography, I started out with a pretty cheap mirrorless and cheap Chinese lights (Godox), and have been getting progressively better at taking pictures (by watching YouTube and practicing a lot) for 10 years. It's a lot of fun for me and at the same time creates memorable photos that my family go back to again and again.

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Well spotted and my mistake.

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I mean, I'm a pretty reasonable character and I imagine you are too in real life. It's tough to be pithy and come across the way we want at the same time. In any case, have a good rest of your day, honestly wishing you all the best.

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

You've made tons of edits, so it is perhaps more challenging to respond than it might be. Everyone uses a thresholding approach for their consumption of media. I read the author's uncritical acceptance of a loaded quote as an indication that she is an ideologue, and it made me distrust her opinion. You don't like that, and that's fine, but I have a right to my opinion and a right to express that as an assessment around the quality of the piece. It's cool that HN is having an interesting discussion; they probably thought we covered the racial element here.

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I understand the point, and I'm suggesting that the author's uncritical acceptance of all the assumptions in the quote makes it difficult for me to take the author as a credible objective observer. For example, is there any actual analysis done to support the idea that these cafes are not owned by locals? In the earlier part of the piece, she mentions that even "local" folks converged on the same aesthetic. Is it a good notion that a neighborhood be "for people of color?" Why are racially segregated neighborhoods good, again?

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

Would it be fair to observe at this point that reading a sarcastic and contemptuous paragraph about how I should be more open minded about casual racism in my sociological fluff pieces is creating a bit of cognitive dissonance for me?

For anyone wondering, the paragraph in question is: "It wasn’t just the spaces that were homogenous, but also the customers, Gonzalez observed: “If you go into the cafes, they’re predominantly white. But [Kloof Street] is historically a neighbourhood for people of colour.” Only certain types of people were encouraged to feel comfortable in the zone of AirSpace, and others were actively filtered out. It required money and a certain fluency for someone to be comfortable with the characteristic act of plunking down a laptop on one of the generic cafes’ broad tables and sitting there for hours, akin to learning the unspoken etiquette of a cocktail bar in a luxury hotel. The AirSpace cafes 'are oppressive, in the sense that they are exclusive and expensive', Gonzalez said. When whiteness and wealth are posed as the norm, a kind of force field of aesthetics and ideology keeps out anyone who does not fit the template." No support is given for any of the gross generalizations made, and they go unchallenged by the journalist. Does this lend credence to the rest of the article?

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I have the same response to people randomly mentioning how the solution to everything is accepting Jesus into my heart. Whether secular or non secular, this kind of thing is a tell for low quality content because it is indicative of the uncritical acceptance of nonsense. I'm aware of what they're peddling, and I don't have time for people who think like this, which is different from burying my head in the sand, I suspect.

carefulobserver

2 jaar geledendiscuss

I stopped reading when the author started to lean into how this must be a representation of "whiteness." No, how about it's an artifact of Internet enabled oligarchic capitalist technocracy like you started with? Ironically, the author's performative racism is part of the same trend.

carefulobserver

3 jaar geledendiscuss

can you run large language models out of orbstack? I imagine it's not possible but am curious

carefulobserver

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Under what moral philosophy is it acceptable to hold people responsible for things they had no part in? Other than your abstract idea that "history should be fair," do you have any justification for this idea?

carefulobserver

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I would challenge you to cite any government program in history in any country that has successfully achieved "equalization of outcome for racial groups." For those advocating extreme measures and philosophies, the burden of proof should be very high.

comments