karibilu
1yr ago
Definitely not Wuthering Heights. It's already hard enough to make kids read. Can we please stop giving them the impression that reading is painful?
karibilu
1yr ago
Thank you for posting this. I thought about similarly posting something similar to this today.
Notably, you all have spoiled me. I got invited to a random online acquaintance's discord channel a long time ago, which I checked occasionally. Anyway, something in my area of career expertise came up yesterday and so I was vocal with my opinion on the subject. Perhaps I was a bit too terse starting out (for which I later apologized), but the individual had seen something and wanted it to be correct and then tried to convince me of it. I explained why I still didn't think it worked and then the person got extremely offended and started having a panic attack (and I think might have started insinuating that I had a closed mind).
Anyway, thanks everyone here for being charitable and open to reasoning things out, even if we disagree on things. It's so absent from the bulk of the internet, which I was painfully reminded of last night. This is the only place online where I've felt that having good logic gets vindicated. Elsewhere, people will argue with you just because they don't want to be wrong or because they want you to be wrong. Even if you make good points, it just gets dismissed and you never get external confirmation that what you've said is at least logical. Here, if you make a decent point and explain yourself well, you can just sit and watch people updoot you and no one is like "lol idiot" (or at least, not for long!). Even though not everyone may agree with me on a given thought, it's a nice to get a small confirmation that at least my logic is somewhat consistent and not worth an immediate slap-down.
I didn't say the reddit admins secretly liked that content. Rather, they liked the members who moderated those seedy subreddits. I would also disagree with your portrayal of my drawing of the cultural lines. Regardless of the more tech libertarian origins versus the more outright social liberal position today, Reddit has always been anti-social conservatives, specifically Evangelicals. R/atheism used to be one of the default subreddits and the thrust of its content was not atheists discussing atheism intellectually but rather them deriding Evangelicals as bigoted idiots. This theme continues today- just yesterday, the top post I saw on reddit was some secret gay conservative Christian getting outed.
I also don't agree banning jailbait led to a slippery slope. You can have site rules that are required to participate, without micromanaging the opinion of users on your site. So, you can ban images that abuse the bodies of children as a site rule. The problem is when these rules are applied inconsistently or in a biased manner. For instance, to Reddit, it's fine to saying completely bigoted things against Christians about how dumb they are because of a religious position they hold, but woe unto thee if you say anything slightly antagonistic about someone who is transgender. It's fine to make fun of people whose conscience has been seared towards a certain religious identify but not those compelled to a certain gender identity. And also, it's even fine to make fun of certain gender identities (see /r/femaledatingstrategy)! So, discrimination is bad except when it's not per reddit.
For me, the dye was cast when reddit banned the incels. There, one deranged individual on the subreddit, who was planning violence, was invoked as the reason to ban the whole subreddit, even though the subreddit had rules against that kind of behavior and would have banned that member for that behavior. We all know the reason Reddit banned it was because it was a zoo for them and was getting bad publicity. The subreddit /r/femaledatingstrategy is just as sexist and disgusting, but no bans for it.
karibilu
1yr ago
Hahaha, I am quite knowledgeable of Reformed traditions but I myself am more broadly Evangelical.
karibilu
1yr ago
Diverse ethnically ala Acts 2:8-11. I agree that you have to draw some thick doctrinal lines, which modern mainline denominations are not doing very well
karibilu
1yr ago
Not particularly. I cited it just because it used to be a top 50 site worldwide (or quite high at least) and now it is quite obscure.
karibilu
1yr ago
I think the desire to have a more diverse body of Christ is good. However, if your demographic reflects the demographic of the neighborhood, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think diversity becomes a problem when you have an historically white church in a predominately black neighborhood with practically no racial diversity. One of the things I've experienced with churches is that unless you're in a university or sort of cosmopolitan setting, you're just not going to cater to everyone always. For instance, a pipe organ will run off some people while contemporary music will scare off others (such as myself), frequently due to its lack of meatiness. There have been some attempts to create more robust contemporary music (such as Reformed University Fellowship, which has put classical hymns to more modern instrumentation), though, that serves the function of hitting both crowds.
If your church does want to make an effort to diversify, it might be worth talking to non-white individuals who have visited your congregations or others like it to see what made them feel welcome and what did not make them feel welcome and to see if adjusting that or making your church more broadly appealing would be wise. I know there's a lot of things that white folk don't just realize are off putting to non-white individuals and vice versa and merely starting conversations may be more enlightening.
Although, funny enough, the Catholic Church from what I've seen often tends to have more diverse populations that mainline Protestant denominations. And, the Catholics tend to be pretty rigid by comparison.
karibilu
1yr ago
Now that we're off reddit, does anyone else remember when Reddit banned all links to Gawker.com because they ran this story back in 2012:
https://www.gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web
I'm not sure if the site link ban is still in effect. But if you're unfamiliar with this story, basically Gawker doxxed a prominent reddit moderator named Violentacrez, who had a lot of connections with the administration. This guy moderated a number of disgusting subreddits, the most notable of which was /r/jailbait, where Reddit users posted images of underaged girls. Moderators like Violentacrez even went so far as to remove images of females who looked 18 years or older. Reddit kept this moderator around under the guise of "free speech" but they even went beyond this: The admins gave him a unique "pimp hat" badge to commemorate his work, as he did offer tons of free labor and offered to moderate the seedy underbelly of reddit for free. And, for reference, this wasn't back when reddit was a small, unknown site. Rather, Violentacrez ran his own Ask Me Anything around the same time that Obama did, in which the former bragged about the time he got his 19 year old step-daughter to have consensual sex with him.
The only reason reddit forced out Violentacrez was because of increased public scrutiny, where they started to having to answer for providing institutional support for a pederast and a groomer. Yet if you throw the word around today, only a decade later, you're the one who will undergo the ban hammer.
Oh Reddit, may the next decade be as kind to you as the past decade has been to Deviant Art.
Have you tried writing a grant to say "Hey, government data good! Government spend a lot of money on data! But a lot of people can't use government data because of x, y, and z reasons. Please give me grant to develop machine learning model to make government data more accessible." I'm sure you can find certain ways to spin that too. Like, if certain chemicals impact certain groups of people more than others, you can bring that up and then talk about how everyone is ignoring it and that's bad.
Something I've also figured out as an academic is that if your research is low impact you can make it a higher impact by citing it yourself. It's like building a giant tower that will collapse maybe when you die. Or, some poor researcher might have to cite you once and then go through all of your papers.
But to clarify, I have no idea how helpful any of this is. We're in completely different fields.
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