The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15hr ago
The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position
No, it isn't. It varies between "the convention ought to be broken but only in casting in the correct direction in the progressive stack" and "we aren't breaking the convention, there really were all these black people in Britain who were covered up by racist historians" (to be fair the latter was Dr. Who).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
Not even wokeness can stay the powerful dramatic impulse to write a story of karmic retribution.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
I look forward to seeing an Asian Cassius Clay and a white Idi Amin.
The conventions of movies and TV are that your actor should look like your character as best as you can; unlike in live theatre, race-blind casting isn't typically a thing. Of course there's a lot of latitude -- Naveen Andrews isn't Iraqi but they can get away with casting him as a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard because the audience doesn't know an Indian from an Iraqi anyway. It doesn't extend to filling WWII-era London with black people or making a remake of Roots with half of the African characters looking like Norwegians.
You can argue that the convention ought to be broken, but then you have to deal with what I noted in my first sentence and the Roots remake -- you also have to justify making it work one way only.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
What's the moral of the tale, to you?
Be sure to pay the piper if you want to call the tune.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
23hr ago
You can see it, but I think in general deeper messages just don't get though. Heavy-handed moralizing is used because it works.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
"Really? Do none of you remember the likes of St. Elsewhere, for example, which also trod this path of 'slice of life reality in a hospital serving lower economic area'?"
No, few of those praising the show remember St. Elsewhere. Because they were born after St. Elsewhere ended.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
If you want to be incredibly pedantic about race not existing, fine, let me rephrase: race is fundamentally incapable of being defined with any kind of real rigor. Happy?
This is just setting yourself to move the goalposts so any definition isn't rigorous enough.
We still have to recognize that (the modern idea of) race has more of the properties of a social construct than it does the properties of some innate, rigorous, underlying biological truth.
No, we don't. There are alternatives to this, such as "race is an inherited physical, biological phenomenon which is written into our every bone and tissue".
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
New York is actually trying to eradicate ailanthus.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
Israel and Iran seem to at least have stopped shooting at each other for the moment, but Israel and Gaza are still going at it.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
They brought rabbits over so they could chase and shoot them. They did bring over invasive work animals as well, however.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests.
You might have had a point sometime before the year 2010. But since that time we've seen this principal stretched to the point of excluding all views outside the progressive standard, and not only that, typically applied selectively. It's a slippery slope with no Schelling Fence, as the rationalists put it. So the entire principle must be discarded. Hitler wasn't the first to compare various people to non-human animals in a derogatory way, he won't be the last, and that wasn't the main problem with him. Sure, if someone's out there saying "black people are vermin", I can reasonably conclude they're scumbags, but trying to suppress that is not a good idea. And if I start building fences around that such that anything even close is also verboten, I'm likely just trying to create ideological uniformity.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
This principle, on the other hand, was never any good, and is even more obviously applied selectively. This is just "don't express your bad ideas because you might convince other people of them".
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter
This principle ("stochastic terrorism") was not only not any good, it was always in bad faith (suppression of bad ideas is such an old idea I don't know about that one). Note that some Trumpists have picked it up (sometimes ironically, probably sometimes seriously) to blame the assassination attempts on Trump on their opponent's rhetoric. It's less a slippery slope than a vertical drop.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
I said "first of all" but so far responses have been fixating on this point rather than the broader point that modern racism doesn't back-extrapolate to history very well at all.
If your foundation is built on shifting sand, your point collapses; no need to deal specifically with the upper stories.
The rest of the reply is just blowing smoke. That race can be determined with high accuracy based on varied physical characteristics which don't measure the usual things we associate with race (skin color, facial features) demonstrates that race 'exists'. No, it does not matter that the technique is not perfect; that something cannot be measured perfectly does not mean it does not exist.
If race does not exist, it is clearly not a Big Deal (by any reasonable definition). If race does exist, it is not proven to be a Big Deal -- but the possibility still exists. You haven't shown it's not a Big Deal. You "insist" on making that assumption, but it is unsupported.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Not "in this life", but religion doesn't offer that either. Buddhism offers many lives filled with suffering before you can perhaps reach nirvana. Atheism offers just one before you reach oblivion.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
The point is that it's not new. The "revelation" that Trump is knew Epstein and indeed even traveled on Epstein's plane has been out there for a long time. Constantly forgetting and presenting it as a new revelation every time the Epstein story comes up doesn't make it new and shocking information.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Death. With no immortality of any sort, athiesm promises an end to delusion and suffering.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
No, people listened to Wormtongue.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
(This is one big reason I still live with my mom; if I have to have a roommate anyway, who better than my mother who loves me? What's the point of moving out just to become roommates with a stranger?)
Because it makes bringing partners home for sex less weird.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
How do you make God more interesting than or more impressive than whatever's happening in their smartphone?
Well, he could start doing stuff again. Blatant smiting, parting of seas, that sort of thing.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
Even if you make enough money, working in a blue collar job all day means you hurt all evening, which is going to interfere with physics. Einstein may have overly romanticized plumbing.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
The main thing summer jobs were supposed to teach middle class kids when I was that age was how much low-skill jobs sucked and thus why you should go to college.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Plenty of Indians and Pakistanis own and/or run the convenience stores here too, hence the Apu character on the Simpsons; Koreans doing it are a local thing in some areas.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
You're mixing things up a bit; the depressed places don't have the high housing prices and until the next advance of the progressives, we're still America where even (or especially!) the poor eat meat.
This is a bad parse. The convention is not being broken for reasons separate from "woke" concerns. And it's not all about the well-being of the POC actors either; part of the point is to portray more POC characters.
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