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Messages - MsBlack

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46
General Discussion / Re: Stuff you LOVE, baby
« on: January 03, 2010, 01:39:19 am »
I could go on, but I think responding to your other comments will explain enough.

I'll use that line myself. The ridiculousness of your position goes so deep that it's not worth the effort to go into all of it. But as a starting point...

Picasso's paintings are not pretty, but they definitely have significant artistic value, would you not agree?

That's exactly my bloody point: Artistic value contributes to overall value. That's exactly what you denied, you blithering idiot!

Aesthetics can certainly influence the worth of a film, good or bad, but they are still two very independent quantities.

Evidently this isn't what you mean considering you just contradicted yourself by definitions in the same sentence.

My grudge right now with the Avatar movie is that people are ignorign the worth of the story or the acting over "how pretty it looks," i.e., the aesthetics. I put aesthetics on a far lower rung of importance when judging the value of a movie.

Exactly. Knee-jerk. You're pissed off by what people are saying in support of the movie so you have a grudge against the film itself. Again, you're agreeing with me in trying to argue why I'm wrong.

You're free to disagree, but this is how I judge a film's worth.

Yeah. And I'm saying how you judge a film's worth is crap. And it seems you are too!

Bear in mind, MsBlack, unlike literature or canvass art, the primary purpose of a motion picture(save for documentaries) is to entertain.

From whose perspective? There's a reason the phrase 'artsy movies' exists. And there's also a reason that offensive trash like Transformers 2 is backed with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since the main purpose of a movie is to entertain, rather than have artistic value, I'd say that, once again, the worth of the movie is not solely based on its aesthetics.

Your original implication was much stronger: that a aesthetic and thus artistic value and worth contributes absolutely nothing to its overall value and worth.

  • A film's artistic value is independent of how worth you think seeing it is

I meant it the other way round here: "How worth you think it to see a film is independent of its artistic value." Of course, you didn't pick up on that mistake, but went on to explicitly contradict yourself again:

I may not consider something that is "pretty" or "artistic" worth seeing if its boring, or it might be the opposite; I might think something is worth seeing just for the aesthetics or the music.

I'm sorry, I just haven't heard anything to convince me to see that movie. All I've heard is..."blah, blah, blah, looks amazing,"...

I'm not gonna say its a bad movie until I see it though, which I will, when it comes out on DVD. Screw IMax and 3-D, I don't care if it looks pretty.

For instance, even if you don't like RPG's, I'd recommend playing Chrono Trigger/Cross simply for the soundtrack that Mitsuda conducted.

My main gripe with Avatar is, again, the aesthetics is all people have to comment on.

:picardno

Moreover, not once did I say that it was not worth seeing.

Nor did I say you said that. You seem to insist upon ascribing arguments to me I simply didn't make.

47
General Discussion / Re: Stuff you LOVE, baby
« on: January 02, 2010, 10:33:05 pm »
Blah, blah, blah aesthetics means jack shit.

I think your "I don't care if it looks pretty" attitude is a knee-jerk, particularly considering the ridiculousness of what you've ended up implying:

  • A film's worth is independent of its aesthetic value
  • (Thus) A film's worth is independent of its artistic value
  • A film's artistic value is independent of how worth you think seeing it is

And so you have the cheek to say that you're "not gonna say its a bad movie" when you've declared invalid one of the two grounds upon which it could prove its worth. And so you also make the mistake of conflating seeing the film at a cinema (in 3D or IMax) and seeing it on DVD.

Let's see how you backpedal outta this one.

48
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: December 31, 2009, 01:29:35 pm »
On that note, I've been getting watery eyes most every time I've gone out in the cold these past two months. Really watery...tears streaming down my cheeks in a matter of minutes, or even seconds. I've never experienced anything remotely like this before. I have no clue what's causing it.

http://kidshealth.org/kid/talk/qa/eyes_water.html

49
General Discussion / Re: Fuck Sexism
« on: December 26, 2009, 09:31:12 pm »
(Written before I saw Z's reply.)

Yeah, looks like Appanouki's another one trying to sabotage the subreddit.

Quote
It's been experimentally proven to be biological. Girls and boys statistically make different choices, when you control for culture. They've even shown this with monkeys.

Without having much knowledge of these oft-invoked studies, I'd suggest:

  • Such experiments typically use participants (human or otherwise) who have already been raised into gender roles.
  • Bias from the conductors of the experiment—not double-blind.
  • Valid experiments use small samples or are overwhelmed by the experiments that contradict them
  • Most importantly: Even if there are genetic predispositions or trends in a given sex, these do not reflect the whole sex and are not even guaranteed to manifest in those who do have such predispositions. Playing to such predispositions encourages their manifestation, limiting options and reaffirming gender roles

51
General Discussion / Premarital Sex
« on: December 19, 2009, 06:39:36 am »
Not to discourage this line, but this thread is not the place for it. Continue here for now, but could someone who can split from this post onwards into its own topic, and copy (but not move) Sajainta's post too for context? Thanks.

52
Welcome / Birthday / Seeya! Forum / Tutty bye for now!
« on: November 16, 2009, 05:17:03 pm »
For those whom it concerns, I'm going to try taking a hiatus from most of my internet haunts and, as much as possible, computers in general for a bit to focus on school and develop myself a bit.

'Back whenever the addiction overcomes me!

53
Chrono Compendium Discussion / Re: Encyclopedia needs Editing
« on: November 16, 2009, 04:36:00 pm »
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,8201.msg183023.html#msg183023

By the way: It makes no sense about adjusting the recorded time, seeing as it's all Linux timestamps anyway. Any adjustment would be in processing the timestamps (and that's exactly what that forum setting does!), not in the process of recording the timestamps themselves.

56
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: November 12, 2009, 09:33:28 pm »
(I would have said "high school/undergrad" but I'm not sure either term would be reflective of the educational system you're experiencing right now).

High school.

Are you able to report things anonymously, or is there a significant amount of risk involved for you? I'm really not sure how that works in your neck of the woods. If there's some kind of anonymous reporting system or structure in place, that would be enthusing, and perhaps something we should copy in the US if we don't have it already.

I can speak to various members of staff in private. The thing is that in order to report specific cases, I need to be there. And if I'm there, the others present might work it out after enough cases. Aside from which, some of the others have already labelled me a 'grass' for other things, so I'd probably be a prime suspect if they tried to figure out who's doing it. But I've considered it and I'm prepared to continue reporting even if I am identified. Or at least, I say I am now. We'll see how much steel I actually have. If I do keep going, something will have to give eventually, because I intend to keep going up the pecking order until something substantive is done. But we'll see; hopefully the person I'm reporting this to at the moment is simply building up the evidence and warnings and will eventually make a bigger impact if I keep reporting.

im still frustrated at my manager at walmart. hes giving me a lot of crap about my preferences. one of the comments he made when i told him that i was good with small children was that he didnt trust me with them because apparently gays like to fuck little kids.
whut.
he only found out about it because it was part of a survey that was supposed to be private. tomorrow im going to bring this up to the main guy... whoever that is.

I don't know whether you could get him pulled up by the law for homophobia, but if it was a private internal survey, hopefully you can get him busted by Walmart for violating company policy or something. If not, maybe report him for general inappropriate remarks or something?

57
General Discussion / Re: The $%*! frustration thread
« on: November 12, 2009, 04:55:12 pm »
My frustration is the bigotry and prejudice that’s taking place at my school.

Certainly in my own year, but also in others, there’s this typical ‘adolescent boy’ culture that dominates (the school’s all-boys for my year and all the earlier years than mine).

Girls are sluts (some teachers too, apparently) or ugly and therefore near-worthless pieces of meat whose meagre worth is exactly and only their sexual worth (if they’re ‘fit’—if not, they can just die). It’s cool to make racist jokes because ‘It’s just a joke and we [kids of different races] have an understanding’. It’s cool to pick on people for their height. It’s cool to express bigotry towards people based on their size. It’s cool to act like drunken louts, vandalising and being rowdy. It’s cool to actually get drunk at the weekends and act like one’s not only not even sapient but to act lower than any fucking ‘animal’ possibly could. It’s cool to make fun of people with Down’s syndrome and use it as an insult along with ‘retarded’. It’s cool to disrupt lessons intentionally…just ‘cause, y’know? Chinks all look the same. Blonds are dumb. Gingers are subhuman. Being a bender or a faggot or a homo is the worst possible thing anyone could ever experience. It’s still funny to make fun of Indian accents. Heck, it’s funny in general to make jokes about immigrants and people who aren’t white. But remember that the BNP are bigots—they’re different from us. We’re good people. We don’t deny the Holocaust. Although we do say that Jews are dirty or imply their inferiority. And maybe we did make that ‘Jews in an ashtray’ joke. And, I suppose, that ‘Jews in an oven’ joke. And maybe some gas chamber jokes. Rape’s a joke and girls are ‘asking for it’ if they wear short skirts…

That mentality is mainstream in my year. But it’s nothing surprising and nothing original. What’s most disturbing is that not only does this take place just between the boys, but that it’s thinly veiled and done in front of teachers, who do nothing. Some teachers are apparently so spineless that they’ve learned to tune it out; apparently they don’t hear when kids are shouting this shit in class, calling each other ‘gay’, or ‘retarded’ or laughing when a brown person comes up in a video. All this at ‘one of the best state schools in the country’, whose alumni ‘will be tomorrow’s leaders’.

The Rugby captain and other popular kids walk all over my registration group teacher, so I went to the person next up in the pecking order about this—the person in charge of our year. He told me to note it down over the course of two weeks. Of course, a lot of this requires one to be there to understand, so I only took down the most obvious things (such as one kid seeing a kid in another year and jeering, ‘Ha ha! You’re black!’). I reported back to him and apparently he spoke to the people I told him about. I didn’t hear any talk about it though amongst ‘my peers’, and the same people continue doing it. The school claims to ‘take racism very seriously’, and that ‘If any member of the school is racist they will be expelled immediately.’ And yet, these kids have outright said to each other that they know they have nothing to fear from this because it’s a complete fucking lie. Just like how ‘all racial incidents that come to the school’s attention have to be reported to the borough’.

So I’m continuing with reporting. In all honesty, the person I’ve been reporting to hasn’t done much so far, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up having to submit a report to council myself if nobody else takes it seriously enough; the school’s seeming ever more full of shit on this. If this weren’t in school but were at work or anywhere in the general public, these trash would be taken the fuck out for racism, sexism, sexual harassment, general harassment and anti-Semitism. Maybe also for bigotry towards the mentally impaired. Definitely not for sizeism or rape apologism or any of the ‘subtle’ discrimination, since people of this kind are exactly the ones that stop society from outlawing this shit. The people on the receiving end have been conditioned to accept it or, in the more ‘subtle’ cases, not even recognize it. If this escalates, I’ll probably be ‘found out’ and targeted and I wouldn’t be surprised if I were assaulted or cornered or threatened.

Bleagh.

That’s my frustration!

58
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgNh9mGb2K4

This is a link to a video of someone just about to start the first of three successive forty-day fasts. As they describe, their fast was undertaken for religious reasons. They actually managed to do it, and comment on the last day that they 'wanna give God the praise, honor and glory for it.'

59
This thread is a complement to Lord J's Record of Right-Wing Crazy, for the record of noteworthy religious craziness. Although there is of course much potential for overlap between the two threads, and American Right-Wing Crazy™ is filed under Religious Insanity™, there is undoubtedly enough Religious Insanity™ that would be better placed here.

As with the other thread, please create a separate thread for this thread's discussion. Contributions to the Record only in here, please!

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