And you believe your response has substance to it? Where's your argument? Anything going through your head other than "Uoogh, he same as other guy I don't like!"
It's partly an American culture problem. I'm sure the dating game in some other countries are a bit healthier than ours.
There's simply so many mixed signals now on what you are and are not allowed to do. Is it okay to go up and talk to a girl you think is cute anymore? No one is really sure. Depends on who you ask. Go up to the wrong girl and you might end up in jail or maybe shamed by her and her friends online somewhere for being creepy.
There's also the question about consent. Having to whip out a contract for the girl to sign, confirming her legal consent to have sex is not too attractive. Not to mention the fact she can take away her consent post-sex and then you become a rapist. Girls on average find the less consensual, proactive way more sexy, but that's not something anyone would admit. But that's a cultural taboo now, so yeah.
Sounds fun until you think about how the wealthy/rich already have private security and so they never needed police. The police was primarily for the regular people who don't and can't afford to have private security.
SF's core value sounds like a real cancer. I wonder if SF's homeless problem and the reality of service workers working for pittances barely able to afford living there are a form of a reality check on the elites who live there. As if to show them the reality of the world outside of their palace.
If SF can figure out to automate away all of their poor service workers and then crack down on the homeless, then it would be truly a paradise for them eh?
Well, there's a much easier alternative, which may be in reach now: rich people and tech workers become fed up with SF and leave in droves. Rents plunge and houses become much more affordable, and service workers can live there again.
This would require a level of fed-up-with-SF that I don't see in practice - like every other tech worker deciding to leave, and people in other industries too. But if that happened, yes: SF would become affordable and people with lower incomes could purchase houses there, and honestly that might not be such a bad outcome.
The city was once like this, after all - a place where people with low incomes, along with oddballs and misfits, could put down roots (buy houses) and live.
if all tech workers leave, won't this impact the businesses that employ the service workers? At that point, what's the point of affordable housing if the service workers don't have jobs?
I've talked with residents who lived in SF back when it was a lower income city. Here's what they had to say.
Example: there used to be a time when you could find sporting good stores, tire repair shops, thrift shops, toy stores, and generally not-very-much-money making businesses in SF.
Those are all gone now - priced out.
If tech workers left, it's not like their office space would stay vacant. It would get repurposed. Those kinds of businesses would move back in.
They'd need service workers, so they'd get hired back.
And house prices, rent prices would drop.
If you think that's unrealistic, I would say: that's far more realistic than hoping for something that demonstrably is not going to happen - say, 500k new housing or apt units being built. That's not gonna happen.
If you want more affordable housing at any cost, no matter what, this is one actually realistic way to get there.
> If tech workers left, it's not like their office space would stay vacant. It would get repurposed.
I'm just not sure it would, at least not until the long term. It's pretty challenging to make a retail store work on upper floors of an office building.
Wait, but don't writers usually already do real research into whatever they're going to write about? If I did research on what Belgian nuns did in their life and wrote about it, is that wrong? Is that less accurate than if the Belgian nun wrote it herself? The thing is, most Belgian nuns probably are never going to write a book and especially not the book that I wanted to write. I hope we don't start banning people from writing about things they've never experienced, because that's the point of fiction and imagination. I've never slayed a dragon, but I can write about doing so because I imagined it. Sigh, one day probably only black people will be allowed to write black characters huh? Or maybe you have to pay a black person for their input and account and for them to endorse your writing?
Russo approaches this in a less combative way than you have framed it. He has imaginative power: what does it do to him, what does he do with it, and what should he do with it? He hasn't definitively answered these questions even after 5000 words of pondering. It's the opposite of a Twitter hot take telling other people what they are allowed to do.
Authors do variable amounts of research to background their characters. Sometimes shockingly little. Many HN readers can probably relate to encountering an eyeball-rolling "hacking" scene in a thriller. It's possible that a diligent author can write a character of a certain background just as well never having lived it, but the odds are not in their favor.
The not-having-lived-it problem leads to some interesting challenges with historical fiction. Nobody alive today has been a 14th century French knight. Which authors really try to do their research and don't just treat time and place as set dressing for generic drama? How much work am I going to do as a reader to discover these harder-working authors? Sometimes I wonder: should I just dive in to scholarly source material about medieval history instead of reading novels set there? Sometimes the answer is "yes, just read history."
It's tragic watching this play out. 4chan's /pol/ amongst many other racists love it. They don't have to do anything while everything implodes. They see Covid-19 as a nothing burger, and health experts giving these protestors a pass vindicates their belief. But if Covid-19 is not a nothing burger, then these protests will end up with many black people and other minorities sick and possibly dead. People on the alt-right have mostly avoided doing anything and are telling their side not to engage. Because as far as they are concerned, right now it's just leftists burning their own leftist cities down.
If they love it, perhaps they do because it proves what they have been saying: that this has been politicized from the get-go, in so many ways, and all of the staunch denials of it become ever more ludicrous as this continues. Don't worry, the WHO says that there is no human-to-human transmission, China told them. Don't buy masks. What are you doing without a mask on, do you just hate the elderly? Anyone re-opening early is going to destroy America. But get out and protest! The Lancet has assured us that Trump as usual didn't know what he was talking about.
On and on.
They love it because, like anyone, they love being proven right. If you want them not to love it, then do not prove them right.
We shouldn't have let politics drive all of our COVID-19 policies and responses, but we did, now it is evident, and we're going to have to pay for that with a loss of trust.
the information war is being fought with bricks and 'boogaloos', nothing about 9 days of riots and protests goes against 4chans goals and desire to throw the US into chaos.
you don't even need disinformation when articles will back you up based on your political alignments
I never said I thought Covid-19 was a nothing-burger, and I have nothing to do with the right-wing online crazies.
Nevertheless it is clear that public health experts have not been straight with us. You don't need to be a right-wing loon to see that their open letter contradicts what they have been saying until now.
Why did you personally attack me and associate me with the 4chan nutters with no basis whatsoever?
> I never said I thought Covid-19 was a nothing-burger, and I have nothing to do with the right-wing online crazies.
I never said you did.
> Nevertheless it is clear that public health experts have not been straight with us.
Depends on the public health officials you listen to, eh?
> You don't need to be a right-wing loon to see that their open letter contradicts what they have been saying until now.
I agree. Mass protests during a pandemic are irresponsible although understandable, in my opinion, and the open letter people are talking about in this thread sounds to me to be pretty irresponsible as well, although I haven't read it.
I just watched a bunch of videos of demonstrations happening today all over the world. While my heart soared a little voice in the back of my head was saying "...but covid is loving this..."
> Why did you personally attack me and associate me with the 4chan nutters with no basis whatsoever?
I didn't attack you, I wasn't even responding to you. I was struck by the pattern match, that's all. I apologize for the offense, and wish you well.
Nuance is not so important in this situation. The effect is that people have been effectively given a pass to disregard the virus, as long as they're "protesting". Look at the protests and all the riots, do you see social distancing happening? People are throwing punches out there my dude. It's chaos.
It seems you see this in terms of idea and theory. I am looking at things from a greater view, seeing the actual effect and impact of things. This is the same thing when health experts told everyone masks don't work. They were wrong. And you will be wrong as well.
Since if you believe I am against the protest, then it's in my benefit that the protests continue, so all my supposed enemies die off. Believe what you want :)
The "masks don't work" message the beginning was a tragic mistake. I think I understand why it might have come to be, but it was a mistake nonetheless.
Mistakes happen. If we learn from them they become lessons.
I do see this in terms of idea and theory, as well as practice. These protests are a legitimate response to systematic abuse. It clearly has peoples attention, and that's a good thing from my perspective.
I don't want to be wrong, so could you clarify exactly how I'm wrong? In supporting protests? In taking the letter you cited on its word that social distancing and other preventative measures should be taken by protesters?
I can only guess that you are against these protests, in that you quoted them as "protests" and can only cite the the negatives you see (not enough social distancing and too much violence).
If the current administration prevails, I will indeed be on the wrong side of history by virtue of who is writing it, and why. I'm proud to be on the side that opposes fascism and I don't need external approval to know that authoritarianism does not promote a just society.
When I said you would be wrong, I'm talking about the effects of that letter. The letter probably does mention that social distancing should be taken by protestors. But that is not what's happening and will not happen. So the main message the letter is: Coronavirus bad! Shut down your businesses and stay home. Except if you're protesting.
As soon as you have a confrontation here and there, the virus is no longer of concern. If you are someone who is legitimately concerned about the pandemic, you should be angry at all the health experts who signed that letter. For they have delegitimized the pandemic and vindicated those who do not believe it to be the threat it was made out to be. As with the WHO masks thing, these kinds of actions have only destroyed the credibility of the science community, or whatever's left of it. The effects of that are to be seen. But you will see them.
I don't know if I'm against the protests or not, perhaps it's more like I am against poor strategy. What has the protests done other than become co-opted by looters, dirty the perception of African Americans and other minorities, and now caused the science/health experts to disgrace themselves further? This is a big win for our enemies. I believe it's time for the protests to stop, so that we could see who's left, who are the people co-opting this movement to further their political goals. However pure and legitimate the protests are, to continue them is to continue providing a cover for those who would like to use the protests to further their political goals.
People living in a certain form of hell aren't afraid of dying of corona... I personally would rather die of pneumonia than 20 or so bullets to the back from an agent of the state operating with a hair trigger and impunity.
Do people really think MLK felt safe when he was protesting? He was brave, new assassination was likely, and still marched.
Yeah, but if all the proponents of BLM die to Covid-19, who is going to be there to keep up the fight afterward? This is all very short-term thinking. There are other ways to protest.
Instead of destroying local businesses and terrorizing innocent people in their own cities, maybe they should be targetting the rich multinational corporations? Those corps will bend over for basically anything if to avoid backlash and protect their profits.
If BLM could get enough people to boycott corporations who have benefitted from this status quo, then they could force them to push through the changes they want.
If you have numbers, theres a bunch of things you could do without even stepping outside, let alone go and protesting, causing mayhem and chaos for our essential workers during this pandemic. My idea may not be the right one, they'll have to figure it out.
Here's the thing: I'm not advocating for violence and neither are most of "us". This violence is not because of the protest, it's because of interlopers.
You only see these protests as exercises in violence and mayhem, which is exactly what the powers that be want. It completely delegitimizes these First Amendment protests in the eyes of many.
Much of that violence comes from interlopers who hijack the effort, and of that violence is manufactured by outsiders intentionally stirring up shit. The recent "antifa" account that was really a white nationalist organization comes to mind.
Consistently framing the protesters as being the ones who are inciting or participating in this violence can only be disingenuous at best.
Again, violence is bad, m'kay? We get that. It also means that it's bad when it comes from the police as well.
Boycotting is a luxury, and is a dilute and indirect route to change. Perhaps they should just calm down and file a complaint with the police department and a manager will straighten everything out just right?
Please don't paste boilerplate lists of links or talking points into HN threads. This isn't conversation, and the site guidelines ask people not to use HN for political or ideological battle.
I think that is irrelevant to many of the protestors. Most know that black Ferguson, Missouri protestors started to mysteriously die weeks after the protests ended (suspect foul play), they know the state may target them for the rest of their lives, and many made peace with putting their life on the line for this cause -before- they walked into the streets.
>There are other ways to protest.
Feel free to share any protest ideas you have that keep them safe and achieve Civil Rights Act level reforms without requiring people in the streets making the powerful uncomfortable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Banks_(American_football...