ViV's recent activity

  1. Comment on Pro-Donald Trump Republican aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar charged with felony theft in ~news

    ViV
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    The article doesn't say how many shopping trips that was over. If I'm not mistaken, Target's MO is to flag shoplifters, and then collect tape of them stealing until they've stolen enough goods for...

    The article doesn't say how many shopping trips that was over. If I'm not mistaken, Target's MO is to flag shoplifters, and then collect tape of them stealing until they've stolen enough goods for it to be a felony theft charge. They're apparently some of the most diligent and punitive security out there.

    4 votes
  2. Comment on ‘Are you actually an MD?’: A Black doctor is questioned as she intervenes on a Delta flight in ~health

    ViV
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    The Devil's Advocate in me was considering something like this in the first couple of paragraphs of the article. When the second flight attendant also asked for ID, I was like, "Okay, this is at...

    The Devil's Advocate in me was considering something like this in the first couple of paragraphs of the article. When the second flight attendant also asked for ID, I was like, "Okay, this is at best, a bad miscommunication."

    When both flight attendants who had both been shown credentials came back and continued to ask a series of pointed and nonsensical questions, this becomes an exceptional anecdote regardless of race.

    9 votes
  3. Comment on Have any hobbies that are hard to admit? in ~hobbies

    ViV
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    Reddit

    Reddit

  4. Comment on How millennials killed mayonnaise in ~food

    ViV
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    As a millennial who has always had a strong aversion to mayo (or at least just plain Helmann’s style mayo being liberally slathered on a sandwich), I’m certain I’m part part of a small minority....

    As a millennial who has always had a strong aversion to mayo (or at least just plain Helmann’s style mayo being liberally slathered on a sandwich), I’m certain I’m part part of a small minority.

    Now, a lot of other competitors have gained steam over the years. I feel like my aversion has gotten less troublesome as it’s easy to get a sandwich with something else on it. And I feel like it’s less unusual for me to prefer something other than mayo. I’ve recently noticed that it’s become standard to ask “mayo or oil” when ordering a turkey and cheese for example. Also there’s probably the classic mixup about how old millennials are, and I wouldn’t be surprised if kids and teenagers are more averse to mayo these days.

    So the outcome’s still the same, but the progression just feels like your standard phasing out of an old, mediocre condiment.

  5. Comment on Thoughts on stand your ground laws in ~talk

    ViV
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    "I very strongly believe that everyone has a right to defend themselves ..." People have this right in non-stand-your-ground states. Stand your ground solves a problem that doesn't exist while...

    "I very strongly believe that everyone has a right to defend themselves ..."

    People have this right in non-stand-your-ground states. Stand your ground solves a problem that doesn't exist while creating very real problems. It makes it so that almost any physical confrontation can escalate to murder without either party being legally held responsible for each others' lives. We don't even need to bring race into this for it to be a problem (though obviously the subjectivity in the law gives far too much leeway toward prejudicial treatment of victims and perpetrators).

    Both examples in OP perfectly illustrate this. The inciting incident in the Trayvon Martin killing is that a kid vaguely fit a criminal profile. That led to him being followed, which led to the physical confrontation, and from there a fight to the death could take place without either party (in theory, before even considering racial prejudice) being culpable regardless of who killed whom. That's flatly ridiculous. In the other case, a dispute over a parking spot was the inciting incident that made neither party responsible for it escalating to the point of death.

    The law should hold people accountable for allowing innocuous situations escalate to fatal violence. Just like you get charged for assault if you escalate a verbal confrontation to a physical one, whoever escalates it from fisticuffs to a fatal encounter should be held responsible too. If someone kills someone without being put in mortal danger, then they should be charged with at least manslaughter.

    24 votes
  6. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~books

    ViV
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    All things short fiction are criminally underrepresented, so the theme of my recommendations is short story collections: Anything George Saunders. 10th of December is my favorite. Ben Marcus'...

    All things short fiction are criminally underrepresented, so the theme of my recommendations is short story collections:

    Anything George Saunders. 10th of December is my favorite.

    Ben Marcus' Leaving the Sea is fantastic, but you might wanna stop after the first few sections if you don't want to wade too deep in the experimental literary waters.

    Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborne

    Anything Alice Munro obviously, though citing a Nobel laureate is probably cheating ...

    My favorite local writer: Sam Allingham's Great American Songbook. Best reading I ever went to.

    Some of my favorite anthologies:

    • Sudden Fiction continued
    • Black Water: The Book of Fanastic Literature - It can be a bit dated and high-brow what with authors like Borges, Kafka, and Tennessee Williams, but it's quirky as far as literary editing choices are concerned
    2 votes
  7. Comment on Can we try to talk like normal people? in ~tildes

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    Mine is hairy with a chance of lint today.

    Mine is hairy with a chance of lint today.

    7 votes
  8. Comment on Shenzhen Tech Girl Naomi Wu: My experience with Sarah Jeong, Jason Koebler, and Vice Magazine in ~tech

    ViV
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    "If white people are a minority in China, how are they the more enfranchised group?" Sarah Jeong is a Korean-born American, so I'm not sure what your point is. If she were to go to South Korea and...

    "If white people are a minority in China, how are they the more enfranchised group?"

    Sarah Jeong is a Korean-born American, so I'm not sure what your point is. If she were to go to South Korea and denigrate white people facing discrimination there, that would be almost indisputably worse than doing it as an American journalist. Let's put semantics and technicalities and pedantics aside for a second. Wouldn't you think one was definitely worse than the other?

    "If a white supremacist moves to Somalia and still advocates killing all n*****, should they be excused because they aren't racist anymore, since they're no longer in a position of power?"

    Sincerely advocating for the murder of all members of a racial group is horrible. The real question here is whether you think Sarah Jeong is genuinely calling for genocide when she says #CancelWhitePeople.

    In any case, yes it would still be more complicated because power dynamics between white people and Africans in Africa is a lot more complicated than the power dynamic between white Americans and African Americans. Much of Somalia was a British colony as recently as the 1960s, for example, and English is still widely taught in schools. I don't actually know anything about Somalia, so I don't know what their relationship is with organizations like the IMF and USAID, whether the CIA was involved in their very recent civil war to oust their communist government, etc. I only got the British colony bit with a good guess and some CTRL+Fing on their Wikipedia page.

    Suffice to say, a white supremacist saying "white power" in Somalia would be a bit touchier than a Korean-American journalist making a joke about white people getting sunburnt in the US.

    Your logical construct is also going to fail when loosely applying it to different cultures. Race is largely a social construct determined by the powers to be of a given society, and the n-word in particular is a racial epithet with little technical meaning. If you told Somalians to kill n-words (or whatever their linguistic equivalent is) you very well may be telling them to extinguish some underprivileged group. Remember the Hutus and the Tutsis? What you might call a "black" power group committed genocide on a disenfranchised racial group you might also call "black."

    This is especially fitting when talking about a country from the horn of Africa because there's a lot of racist anthropology and phrenology bullshit that distinguishes Somalians from "black people."

    3 votes
  9. Comment on thi s is noy a creative post in ~creative

    ViV
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    Earl Grey is my favorite tea. I've started adding orange rinds to it for a little extra flavor. Whenever we get a bag of clementines now, the fridge gets stacked high with citrus rubbish. Even my...

    Earl Grey is my favorite tea. I've started adding orange rinds to it for a little extra flavor. Whenever we get a bag of clementines now, the fridge gets stacked high with citrus rubbish. Even my 2 year old when he peels his own oranges reaches up and puts them on the counter and says "Here go, for daddy's tea."

    I love that my tea tin says "Thé noir" on it. I always thought that'd be a great band name. In the US we use "noir" to refer to like dark and grim art, so The Noir sounds like a death metal band or something, but it'd really just be some frenchie way of talking about a Brit drink with fru fru associations in the states. I guess this whole thing's loaded with so many US-specific connotations that it wasn't worth explaining, haha.

    3 votes