Full comments are here, main drama is here. Some has been deleted, so archive is here. Excerpt:
>Someone's going to say this is "terrorism", but occupying forces are a legitimate target when under occupation. >>Terrorism is such an abused term. Even the US army called 9/11 asymmetric warfare at first before they got their stories straight but yeah attacking soldiers can't be terrorism by definition, the targets have to be civilians and the objective has to be political/non military in nature. Killing civilians because you want them to be banned from your country is terrorism, killing civilians because you want them to take their army out of your country is simply war and it always has been. >>>"killing civilians because you want them to take their army out of your country is simply war and it always has been." Is this a joke? So you think it's right for an afghan to bomb a bus in the US? Why even go this far when the story is about someone attacking a soldier? >>>>Stfu liberal
etc. etc.
Then the CTH post is called out on r/AgainstHateSubreddits. Again some posts are deleted, so archive here
I was invited by Claire Fox to take part in this event. Here are my introductory remarks. I was alongside, among others, Melanie Phillips, Brendan O'Neill, and Richard Angel (Progress).
You might wonder why I, a philosopher, have been invited on to this panel. I guess the reason is I'm interested in and have published on the ways in which bullshit beliefs - myths and prejudices - can get a grip on public thinking.
I wrote a book called Believing Bullshit - How Not To Fall Into an Intellectual Black Hole which flags up some of the key signs that we are dealing with a myth or prejudice rather than rational belief.
So how, in particular do prejudices regarding women, black people, Jews and so on get started?
Well, once it's been suggested that a certain group have some 'problem' - that women have a bad driving problem, say, or Jews have a greed problem, it's usually not hard to find examples.
After all, inevitably, some women are terrible drivers. And inevitably, some Jewish people are greedy.
Indeed, once it's suggested there may be a 'problem', people will often start to find their own examples. Often, they'll notice the really emotionally arresting examples and then later be able to recite them with ease - a woman who caused an awful motorway pile-up that killed several children, for example.
Once this pattern of thought has set in - it's called confirmation bias - where we search only for positive instances to confirm what we already suspect is true - people can easily convince themselves of things that aren't true.
They may become so convinced, in fact, that if we present them with hard evidence that women are just as good - perhaps even better - drivers than men, they'll dismiss it out of hand. They'll insist it's just obvious that women are bad drivers - everyone knows women are bad drivers - that they can point to lots of examples of women being bad drivers.
And yet this supposed evidence that women have a 'bad driving problem' is of course entirely useless and ancedotal. Obviously some women really are very bad drivers. There's no denying that. But of course, that doesn't remotely justify the conclusion that 'women have a bad driving problem' - i.e. that women are worse drivers than are men.
I'm sure we all recognise such anecdote-driven patterns of thought are one of the main ways racial and other prejudices get a grip: including anti-semitism.
So, now let's consider the charge that Labour has an anti-semitism problem.
**Publ
... keep reading on reddit ➡This story is centered around DnD, but it's really about the DM and what a criminal PoS he was out of game. (There is a TLDR at the bottom {If you intend to read this story, don't look at the TLDR first, it contains a big spoiler about the tale})
Pre info: This took place about 5 years ago, the summer after I had graduated high school and was my first experience playing with a total stranger. My best friend (Let's say "Bard") went to work at a massive factory nearby where we attended school, and he met a coworker who wanted to try his hand at DMing for the first time (Let's call him "DM", so we agreed and went to the DMs apartment to play.
Story: Bard and I drive to a part of a nearby town that I can only describe as being "dangerous", and we manage to find DMs apartment. Previous to this, Bard and I had written up our characters as requested prior to session 1, so when we were invited in we expected to start playing shortly. Wrong.
DM introduces himself to me, then asks Bard "Damn, why didn't you tell me he was so fat!?" referring to me (admittedly I was really heavy back then). I laugh nervously, off to a rocky start. DM laughs, and tells me that in HIS house, I better be ready to get my balls busted. Okay, I think to myself, this guy might be a dick, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
DM then has us stand in his kitchen while he watches the last 10 minutes of the TV show on in the other room (There was only one chair in there, despite having a wife and a son that lived with him, so there was nowhere for us in that room). When he wraps his show up, he brings out the table for the session. Well, it's a "table" in the sense that it's flat and has legs. It's a folding TV dinner tray, the kind you would put in front of you if you wanted to eat a meal on your couch. He then sets up his DM shield on it and tells us to hand over our character sheets, and motions for us to sit in the folding chairs in front of him. He takes them, erases all of our stats and sets them all to 10. All our stats. To 10. He then makes us each make a case for why our characters would be "So special as to have higher stats than the average peasant?". I think one of us got maybe one stat to 13 after explaining our backstories.
Then he erases the weight section of my character and rolls a bunch of dice that I can't see, and sets my 4'4" dwarfs weight to 2200 lbs, handing me back my character sheet and making some un-funny joke about that being as close as he could make it to my re
... keep reading on reddit ➡I ran into something today on Electronic Intifada which led to an article from October I had missed.
I want to open with an image.
This image was created by the website Incogman to represent how Jews (nothing about Zionism or Israel) were parasites on America and responsible for the “financial heists of entire nations”. The goal was to warn readers about allowing Jews free access to the society. The Statute of Liberty is of course meant to symbolize America, the crab looking creature (the face hugger from Alien) with blood sacks on so an obvious parasite and the Star of David makes it clear who is being talked about. Incogman doesn't deny the image is antisemitic, they are an openly antisemitic publication. In their opinion and often repeated view Jews are a particularly nasty racial danger to the United States. They agree that both the illustration above and the long article it was part of were specifically intended to share and express that view. Incogman knows that a Star of David without a white background against a parasite represents Jews clearly. There is no ambiguity in the symbolism and there wasn't meant to be. Certainly Incogman doesn't like Israelis much either, but assuming the Jews aren't going to be rightfully exterminated in so far as the options go having Jews leave and stop polluting decent Christian countries to go off and kill or be killed by Arab Muslims sounds vastly preferable to them. So while I'd hate to call Incogman "Zionist" they certainly can't be described as anti-Zionist. Their hatred is openly much more directed towards Jews living in the USA and then to lesser extent those living in Europe, Israelis way down on the list.
The photo was retweet by a Labour UK conference rep from Liverpool Riverside constituency named Kayla Bibby , While the original tweet was taken down you can see a copy preserved here. Her caption had been, “The most accurate photo I’ve seen all year!”. Since she appears to be the originator in leftwing circles she must have read and seen the art
... keep reading on reddit ➡
