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-UE
IJBM II's Four Year Anniversary
Happy Birthday, IJBM! Another journey around the sun went by, with threads and posts and stuff going through this lil' corner of the internet. What do you think about it?
Per the tradition, there's a questionnaire to gather people's opinions. I tried to keep it simple this time around. I especially invite lurkers (assuming you're still there) to join in and give out your opinions. I suggest answering the questions before reading the replies if you feel it might affect your answers. Here it goes:
- What do you think of the last year? What has happened that you like or dislike?
- What do you think about IJBM's nowadays?
- What would you want IJBM to be in the future? How would we go about making it so?
Have fun!
Comments
Last year: same as usual. Liked that the Shredded Moose guy showed up here and kept responding to bait, disliked the fact that none of the lurkers who looked active when responding in Activity actually got to posting on the main forums.
IJBM in general: it's a habit you can't quit.
IJBM in the future: the same but a bit more crowded. I'd go about this by screencapping my own posts and sending them to websites for people to get offended at so they come here to argue me by siglinking.
I want to see this.
That's a very sensitive and honestly really unpleasant topic (mostly because no matter what "discussion" about it becomes obviously the other side is racist) plus there isn't much to say unless you want to get scholarly about it and most of us aren't American enough to know much post-Civil Rights era stuff.
How?
I like coming here and last year didn't change that. Lots of people had opinions (mostly about GG) and that was enlightening.
GamerGate Random things that happen that we discuss sometimes.
Change is eeeeeeeevil I'm good with the way it is now. If anything needs to change it should probably be me, I kind of take the fact that my opinions are obvious and that others will liven up the discussion so I don't post enough (oh wow I make being lazy sound great).
Seconded.
@RedEyedAbyss: wow, bitter much?
But really, it's already been pointed out that Ferguson was the kind of topic where the most you can expect is people nodding in agreement that X thing is bad. I follow a thread about it on another board and the topic was at the best of times* a bunch of people nodding in agreement that something is bad. You'd get more discussion of the topic at whatever place with lots of people who spout thinly-veiled racism.
*well, it was more interesting when they bring up a bunch of things pertaining to related issues like abuse of power but they weren't discussing Ferguson in particular at those times, and it required having posters who have some level of familiarity with issues in the U.S. Which I doubt is a category that's even remotely abundant here.
Point taken. I'm just annoyed at how quickly conversations die these days and that only something as insipid as GamerGate could sustain a protracted conversation.
As for rebooting, I said we should have a more diverse user base every year before, but it's not going to happen. At the least, we should consider what scared off the rest of the TV Tropes lot.
^^What he said(except the bitter part). I follow Ferguson tangentially via Gradient Lair and the drama around gettingracistsfired, and for me it's mostly narcissism of small differences. You'll get more mileage out of it with regard to the viability of certain activist responses, factors that create and keep down the position of black peeps in America, and what reforms of the police might actually work in practice.
The forum was more diverse, but once in a while an argument ended with people leaving, so I guess by now we're the most insensitive or too addicted to leave.
Perhaps we can agree to post breaking news even if we don't expect much discussion to come out of it (e.g. the Charlie Hebdo thing), just in case someone else has something to say.
I think that the Charlie Hebdo massacre actually has quite a lot of potential for discussion, since it touches the topics of Islamophobia in media, the position of Muslims in Western European society and the relation between racism and a particular brand of Dawkins-esque secularism. There's a lot more to it than a simple echo chamber of "Je suis Charlie".
It's for many people an exercise in falling over each other to be as contrarian as possible on social media.
-"Why did they capitulate when the same rag published unflattering cartoons about jews?"
-"You are assuming the incident wasn't a Mossad false flag in the first place."
-"We should be the bigger person in all of this precisely because their satire was constantly punching down at minorities."
-"We shoud be the bigger person, but not because of the preceeding milquetoast swipple sentiments, but to show that we are more civilized than those barbarian pigs!"
-"They're never going to topple the West anyway, guys, in homage to the spirit of the magazine I'm going to be as offensive as possible about this still ongoing tragedy."
And of course I'm also trapped in the machine of calling all of these things mere social signalling.
I can only say: They were a bunch of pricks being offensive for the sake of being offensive. I would have never wished death upon them, but sanctifying them for their deaths feels a hollow gesture.
I might have wished upon them being hit by a bus, but death seems like a bit excessive. Anyway. Regardless what the guys did, on average, it ain't healthy to have religious fanatics run amok in your country.
re: Charlie Hebdo murders
I'm kind of annoyed that it looks like the biggest mililtant Islamist story in the news right now, even though Boko Haram are still at large.
Boko Haram is such an isolated issue and it happens in Africa so most news outlets won't pay mind, It's sad.
I saw that story on a rather right-wing wanker kind of website, so I was somewhat skeptical.
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Personally, I would say it's the same kind of brought upon themselves as walking around the bad side of town in high heels and miniskirt late at night. As in, what happened was somewhat predictable but I feel icky pointing it out.
Operation Make-People-Talk-About-Something has been a sound success.
Regardless, count me out of the "it's tragic, but..." group.
I'm happy to leave it at "it's tragic" if their supporters are willing to do the same. That doesn't work if people want to paint it as a catastrophic attack on freeze peach (because, as we all know, racist caricatures are the most important kind of speech there is) and proof that, in fact, their cartoons were "important" and deserve to be republished.
Link is not an endorsement, but it shows that some of the accusations of racism are missing the context: http://67-tardis-street.tumblr.com/post/107589955860/dear-us-followers , and some of the cartoons were a lot more nuanced than the usual Arab terrorist with a bomb: http://static.pulse.ng/img/incoming/origs3393892/8175561216-w644-h429/Charlie-Hebdo-offending-cartoons-4.jpg
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> http://67-tardis-street.tumblr.com/post/107589955860/dear-us-followers
"We prefer an equilibrium of mockery, rather than an equilibrium of terror and censorship."
Interesting way of putting it.
I feel somewhat inclined to agree with this...?
So do I. Ultimately, it's an attack aiming to intimidate would-be satirists, and that's reason enough to stand in support not for the magazine itself or even its deceased contributors, but for the right to express oneself without being under the threat of violence.
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What's the difference between "institutionalized atheism" and "religion-nutral"?
That typo got me wondering for a second what does atheism have to do with nutrition. (Well, you can have fish any day of week and pork is a-okay.) I guess it's along the lines of active-passive. That said, there's the enforced active, enforced passive... I don't know what I'm talking of.
Religion-neutral probably wouldn't ban headscarfs and crosses in schools.
At least, wearing crosses. As for hanging in classrooms, around here we have the left who's like, get rid of them, the right who's like, HELP I'M BEING OPPRESSED, and the rest who's like, who cares, let 'em hang there.
Maybe we should make a separate thread for this stuff, but until then, have an article on that debunks some of the more common misconceptions surrounding Hebdo(this time in professional form instead of in interweb postings): https://ricochet.media/en/292/lost-in-translation-charlie-hebdo-free-speech-and-the-unilingual-left
The article also ties it to broader leftie censorship, though with the campus protests in think it ignores how campus authorities or the speakers themselves cancel, instead of blaming everything on the protesting folks.