I fail to see how political correctness is both a nebulous concept and a dogmatic belief system at the same time.
Along the same lines, the idea that their is some sort of over-arching "liberal elite" belief system that colleges slavishly adhere to is laughable, or it would be, if folks like the author of this piece didn't take it serious. While professors in any given discipline often share a number of "beliefs", colloquially known as "facts", if you get a few of them together in a casual setting, they'll more often than not take to arguing about the finer points of their field. In fact, this sort of behavior is often encouraged, in both casual and professional settings. That's why grad students write and defend a thesis.
I also think that accusing professors and students of using political correctness as a tool to further their own aims and to preserve their entrenched power is assuming quite a lot about the actions and motivations of a huge swath of people.
If the author didn't want to talk about the banh mi thing, why even mention it? It is relevant to the discussion after all, since the portrayal of such instances in the media have had a strong influence on the way political correctness is currently defined and understood.
I'd also like to point out that the definition of political correctness, as it's used colloquially, doesn't change just because you say it does. I also don't think that using the term political correctness in the sense that practically everyone understands it constitutes a deliberate misconstrual. Also, to the authors point, I don't think the majority of commenters on the right (when did this become a discussion of partisan politics again?) are talking about "the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets" when they rail against political correctness. More often it seems they are railing against the perceived suppression of their unwelcome beliefs and ideas. Hence my comment to the effect of "don't dish it out if you can't take it."
As for the second passage you copy/pasted, I don't see how that disagrees with what I said.
Of course many of the policies enacted on campuses are what you might call penny smart, pound foolish, but that doesn't mean that the intention is bad, or that we should not even try. It's unfortunate that many of these policies are seen to have a chilling effect on campuses, but I don't feel that asking college students to think before speaking is unreasonable, especially if the net benefit is reducing bigotry, racism, and prejudice. Perhaps these methods are not the most effective, but I don't exactly see the author offering up any better solutions. He seems content to complain about the dozen or so people he's met that were made to feel uncomfortable by these policies, while ignoring the many generations of people who have suffered far worse.
Also, since you seem to have read the article more thoroughly than I, what do you make of the authors closing statement, where he says,
When we talk about political correctness and its many florid manifestations, so much in the news of late, we are talking not only about racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, or about the coddling of privileged youth, though both are certainly at play. We are also talking, or rather not talking, about the pathologies of the American class system. And those are also what we need to deal with.
Seems a bit convoluted to me. Is he arguing that we should ignore addressing racism in favor of some sort of attack on the American class system or what?
When did not wanting to eat shitty banh mi become a case of political correctness gone too far? If I pay for a slice of prosciutto di parma and get ham from some farm in the US, shouldn't I rightfully be pissed off?
It also seems to me that the so called "pc police" feature more prominently in peoples imaginations than they do in their actual lives. Any time I've seen someone called out (in real life) for issues of cultural sensitivity, it has been in a respectful and reasonable fashion, even if the situation has warranted a much harsher response (and occasionally it has).
The situation online or in a college is a bit different, but at the end of the day I would consider it similar to talking to a stranger at a bar; if you talk some shit, expect to get shit talked. If you have a problem with that, you can go crying to the bouncer, but if they are at all good at their job, they will either nod and ignore you, or kick you out if you are out of line.
I realize the analogy is a bit crude, but as other commenters have pointed out, most of these so called "pc police" are just trying to correct centuries of systemic racism, sexism, etc. by having a reasonable discussion. If they are a bit shrill sometimes, just be thankful that they aren't using the same tactics that were once used to keep them from speaking out.
from the wiki page: In addition to the many unresolved arguments about the construction techniques, there have been disagreements as to the kind of workforce used. The Greeks, many years after the event, believed that the pyramids must have been built by slave labor. Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levy) until the construction was completed, pointing to workers' cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner. For the Middle Kingdom Pyramid of Amenemhat II, there is evidence from the annal stone of the king that foreigners from Palestine were used.[1]
Couple points. You can be both a skilled worker and a slave. Also, if you are working to pay off a tax debt, that pretty much makes you an indentured servant or slave.
Latency is the biggest issue with ipad for me. Laptops and desktops respond almost instantly when you type or scroll, while ipads and other tablets have a lot of latency built into the OS. I know an extra 20-60 milliseconds doesn't seem like much, but it definitely adds up, and it really ruins the feel of things.
When you read a physical book, you can flip through pages instantly and scan the contents with zero wait time. A laptop is much closer to this ideal than a tablet.
Tautology or not, it's actually pretty easy not to eat too much, considering that our bodies are pretty good at telling us when we've had enough.
All you have to do is eat a moderate amount, wait twenty or thirty minutes (for your stomach to start digestion, send signals to your brain, etc), see if you are still hungry, and eat a bit more if you are. If you reach the point where you feel 'full' you've probably overeaten. Not complicated, although many people, myself included, don't always take the time to listen to their bodies or have the self control to stop eating when they are chowing down on something delicious, even though know they've probably had enough.
Thanks, was trying to parse the actual document and not getting very far. Interesting to try and read that stuff, but it's pretty dense with acronyms, and I wasn't getting too far trying to google them.
No real habits to report, but for anyone interested in sit to stand desks, I found a site that sells them for relatively cheap. I can't personally vouch for the quality of these desks, but as far as I can tell, they are the same sort of thing that office furniture companies sell, only 300-400 bucks instead of 1000-1500. Not necessarily high quality, but functional enough.
You do have to assemble it yourself, but anyone with a cordless drill and a bit of sense should be able to manage. There are a couple things that can go wrong, but they are easy to avoid and/or fix. The desk surfaces that come with these are probably a crappy laminate, like sub MDF quality fiberboard. That means that you have to be careful when screwing the legs into the surface, because if your drill's torque/clutch setting is too high, the screw will just spin and blow out the hole instead of fastening tightly. This is easy to avoid though, just set the drill to one of the lowest torque settings, say 1-3, and work your way up if the screw doesn't go in all the way. Also, there are usually plenty of holes on the legs, so if you blow 1 or 2 out, it's not the end of the world.
The only other thing to look out for is bad leg motors and/or bad control boxes, which are surprisingly common. No worries though, these things are easy to troubleshoot, and I'm sure the company will get you a replacement in no time if anything is DOA, as it's pretty common.
Anyways, my point is, if you don't mind spending around 4 hours of your time to read a manual and put one of these things together, you can save a substantial amount of money.
Also, if you don't want a crappy surface, you can just order the legs and add your own surface, although make sure to check that the legs can support the weight.
>Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school.
So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?
> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed.
Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools.
You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society.
I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
Actually, several developers have stated as much, most notably Thomas Biskup, who develops Ancient Domains of Mystery.
That's not to say you're wrong on any of your other points, but I think the reasoning for it isn't so much to prevent players from figuring stuff out and publishing guides, but more to encourage players to experiment and figure stuff out for themselves rather than relying on a guide to tell them the 'right' way to do things.
You're not wrong, but the idea is that it has a longer shelf life, and perhaps more consistency in flavor.
Many American staples are throwbacks to the depression era, where buying a flat of Campbell's soup was a safer bet than buying a bunch of tomatoes and cream. Since then, marketers have capitalized on that sense of consistency, as well as feelings of nostalgia, to ingrain that sort of food into the American psyche.
Heh, kinda like kraft singles being so named because they are no longer allowed to call themselves cheese.
My grandmother, who grew up during the depression, occasionally complained about the decline in the quality of sweets and chocolates. I used to think she was exaggerating a bit, but seeing the decline in quality in my time, going from bad to worse, it's easy to see what she was talking about.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that it has been a shame to see large companies move away from making proper chocolate bars just to maintain their bottom line, and I can only expect that this latest maneuver is in the same spirit.
I think that a lot of it comes down to designers needing/wanting to justify their job.
If a designer or typographer does good work, it goes largely unnoticed, since navigating the page and reading the text is easy and fluid. This can lead clients to believe that the designer is not doing much at all, when in fact they are doing their job exceptionally well.
This leads to designers adding unnecessary ornamentation (often at the clients behest), just to make it seem as though they are providing more of a service.
As others have pointed out, no one is sitting in meetings reading the boiler plate text on designs, they are just looking at the overall page to see if it 'pops' or whatever. So really, it's as much the clients fault as the designers, although a good designer should be able to communicate why the flashiest, most cutting edge choices are not always the best.
Also, I'd like to recommend this book, The New Typography. It's an old book, but they do a really great job of explaining the goals of typography, and how one can be creative without sacrificing readability, etc. https://www.amazon.com/New-Typography-Weimar-Now-Criticism/d...
Along the same lines, the idea that their is some sort of over-arching "liberal elite" belief system that colleges slavishly adhere to is laughable, or it would be, if folks like the author of this piece didn't take it serious. While professors in any given discipline often share a number of "beliefs", colloquially known as "facts", if you get a few of them together in a casual setting, they'll more often than not take to arguing about the finer points of their field. In fact, this sort of behavior is often encouraged, in both casual and professional settings. That's why grad students write and defend a thesis.
I also think that accusing professors and students of using political correctness as a tool to further their own aims and to preserve their entrenched power is assuming quite a lot about the actions and motivations of a huge swath of people.