Pattern Ghost

It was amazingly well done, frankly movie worthy (Or at least better than some superhero movies that have made it on screen)

Here I must disagree with you. There are ample cases that indicate that in some cases local officials and voters act (or decline to act) in clear violation of both the spirit and letter of the Constitution and federal statute. The beating and drowning death of Joe Campos Torres by Houston PD officers, and subsequent prosecutorial inaction followed by trivial punishment on zero-weight local charges, is case I am most familiar with. In short, even had the local prosecutor been interested in pursuing more serious charges, the Texas justice system (at least at the time) made it more or less impossible to get a conviction even in a clear case. Federal civil rights charges were pressed because federal prosecution operates independently of state and local, and a broader interpretation of venue makes it possible to get convictions when a local community complicitly finds murder of certain ethnicities acceptable or perhaps even desirable.
 
And yes, locally, I am all but determined that Seattle PD needs to be torn down and rebuilt as a police force rather than an army of occupation. When a quarter of the non-suicide homicides that occur in the city in a year happen at the hands of the police, which is the case here, there is something rotten going on. Frankly, I also think the training facility -- there is only one -- for police here in WA needs reconstitution as well.

Yep. When I say I'm not convinced of his guilt I certainly don't mean I'm convinced of his innocence. I simply don't have enough information for that. I don't have a huge problem with the outcome of this grand jury, though.

Yep. When I say I'm not convinced of his guilt I certainly don't mean I'm convinced of his innocence. I simply don't have enough information for that. I don't have a huge problem with the outcome of this grand jury, though.

The Ferguson case was no-billed the a grand jury. Not sure what the prosecutor would have to do with it. I'm also not convinced that was the wrong call. The officer's story adds up with the physical evidence as far as I can tell.

The Ferguson case was no-billed the a grand jury. Not sure what the prosecutor would have to do with it. I'm also not convinced that was the wrong call. The officer's story adds up with the physical evidence as far as I can tell.

Sometimes the problem isn't the officer, but the training. Why the NYPD allows choke holds from the outset is beyond me. Its too easy to misapply one with tragic results in the field, and law enforcement has known that for decades. The LAPD ultimately banned them after a series of unintended deaths while officers were trying to subdue suspects using them. Numerous departments, esp. in the western US, followed suit. The NYPD should have seen the pitfalls and potential ramifications of allowing choke-holds and followed suit.
 
But therein lies the problem -- indicting the officer isn't the solution. Proving criminal intent, or that the officer was being unreasonable when he was doing what his department trained him to do and cavalierly taught him was "less-than-lethal" isn't going to meaningfully address the problem, and isn't entirely reasonable. From where I sit, criminal charges in a grand jury were doomed to fail. A better solution -- and one that would be more effective in obtaining a change in policy -- would be a multimillion dollar lawsuit (lets call it 20+ million) against the NYPD for willfully maintaining policies proven flawed in other jurisdictions that resulted in wrongful death.
 
Name the officer. Name the commissioner. Name the senior policy makers responsible. But going after an officer who followed policy without being able to prove criminal intent? That sounds more like a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks demanding a scapegoat -- and the prosecutor fishing for a fall guy so they can ignore the real issue at hand -- than justice. In my opinion, justice in this case is the NYPD acknowledging their policy was irresponsible, changing said policy, firing the bosses responsible, and then paying out the shorts. It may not be the catharsis the media frenzy is looking for -- but it would mean no one else would die from a policy choke-hold in NYC.
 
NOTE: I posted a correction to this BELOW. The NYPD did ban choke-holds -- but there definition of "choke-holds" opens the door to a lot of problems....

This new one, I haven't read any details on. I do know that as far back as the late 80s, when I was an MP, choke holds were falling out of favor with police, especially carotid chokes.  Any choke or attack on the neck area is potentially lethal.

Is there a huge difference between 5.5.2 and 7.5.0? Even if the robots count as male, I don't think it matters much.
 
It's the quality of the female characters that should be the measuring stick. I don't see any of the characters going too far out of various stereotypes, but I don't see anything immediately offensive about any of the female characters, either.

Actually, one of the robots is trans-gender.  It was booted with Windows 8, but self-identifies as Apple OS X.

I'm pretty sure the robots lack chromosomes, so it seems a moot point...

I'm pretty sure the robots lack chromosomes, so it seems a moot point...

The Straw Elephants In The Room
 
Pretty much all the arguments Ms Sommers makes in the first video are rebuttals to arguments that the anti-GamerGate side isn't making or to very distorted versions of arguments made.  In other words, they are all straw men arguments.
 
* Violent video games have never been scientifically shown to cause real life violence in there players. Umm, I haven't heard Anita Sarkeesian or any one else in the anti-GamerGate camp say that they did.  So this is a rebuttal seeking an argument.
 
* I find some acts shown in video games like GTA very disturbing, but as a matter of free speech the makers have a right to make such games and the players a right to play them. I've yet to hear any anti-GamerGate person call for the banning of such games, and just because a person has a right to freedom of speech does not shield that speech from criticism if the speech is objectionable. 
 
* Anita Sarkeesian's arguments are all based on the Objectifying Gaze hypothesis which has been much criticized in the 4 decades since it was originally proposed.  Ms Sarkeesian has talked the visual objectification of women in video games, so this would be an actual non-straw man argument if Ms Sommers didn't characterize it as the whole of Ms Sarkeesian's position.  However, Ms Sarkeesian has talked about visual objectification and hyper-sexualization of women as one part of a larger argument that she is making, an argument that can stand even in the absence of the visual objectification component.  Also, a more robust attack on the notion of the objectifying gaze as it relates to video games would have been appreciated from an intellectual standpoint.  There is a bit of a difference between the deliberate decision by a game developer to frame a scene from a vantage point looking through a women spread legs or down her cleavage compared to a man taking a moment out to admire a woman's ass as he passes her on the street.  It would have been been nice if Ms Sommers took the time to argue that the criticisms of Objectifying Gaze hypothesis are valid even when presentation is completely deliberate and directed by men.
 
 
In the second video, Ms Sommers provides some numbers about the sex of gamers, and while I don't think that anyone would classify her as a gamer based on playing PacMan  a few times in the Eighties, I do appreciate the numbers.  Numbers can be very helpful in "keeping it real".  Keeping it real in this case goes a long way towards explaining why AAA games are the way they are but it's not really much of a shield against criticism.  It may explain why game developers create so many games point of view of heterosexual white males, but that is no reason women, gays, and racial minorities not to clamor for representation also.  It is no reason for them to "stand down" as Ms Sommers puts it.
 
Also, you can ding games on individual acts of misogyny, without proving that the games cause their players to become misogynous.  Even if the games are promoting misogyny in their players it is going to be almost impossible to prove scientifically because nothing happens in a bubble, and it is irrelevant.  If someone uses the N word, it is not necessary to prove that they turned all the people who heard it into racist in order state that the usage was in itself crass, rude, and racist.  Just so video games criticized for individual bits of misogyny that appear in the games, and if these instances are so numerous as to be wide spread and pervasive then the industry as a whole can be criticized.

Small world. Alpha 795 was where I spent my OSUT.

Like McClellan, where I had the good fortune of going to MP school. Lucky me!

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

Actually, that's an easy one to answer: by looking at ancient pathogens (and comparing them with their modern descendants), you can determine the rate of evolutionary change. That's scientifically interesting, but also allows us to refine our understanding of how pathogens change and how fast, which is very, very relevant knowledge when dealing with new or unknown pathogens.
 
By looking at *which* genes change (and how they changed) over time, you can determine which ones are under selective pressure. That tells you a lot about host defences and immunology. Again, scientifically interesting, but also practically useful in things like pharmaceutical development and plant breeding.
 
I can think of a few other reasons as well, but you get the idea: basically you can learn a lot by looking at ancient organisms.
 
Cheers, Mark

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

It is extremely oversimplified. It is contentious. And her "toxic masculinity" shtick is less oriented in "not seeking help" and more in "men hate women". So, it is an unrelated issue unless one does some mental gymnastics to try and reason her out of the corner she built up. And I am just going to quote myself, 
 
"[W]hile I understand she has a predisposition to think men and masculinity are the great evils of this world, she is jumping the gun on her conclusion. The presupposition that somehow these mass murderers are driven by sexist intentions or that masculinity is to blame, is a big leap of faith. While I can understand her concerns about the unfortunate prevalence of these individuals being male, that does not mean that masculinity, or more aptly, society's concept of masculinity is the root or even most compounding factor. Rather there may be more ingrained biological reasons for it that far outweigh any social constructs"
 
Lastly, believe it or not, not every issue needs to be hashed out on Twitter. Twitter does not provide the ability to make nuanced arguments - the kind this topic needs. So, given the choice of rampant over simplification of an issue for the sake of stirring up controversy, and of fully articulating one's case for the sake of clarity, Ms. Anita chose the former. Again, trolling behavior. 
 
La Rose. 

Marvel has officially announced plans for Phase Three of the MCU so we need one thread to tie it all together, right? Right. 
 
Bazza reporting from the Internet: 
 
Marvel Announces Phase Three Slate, Included Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Captain Marvel And Inhumans
 
 

 
Keven Feige interview with Screenrant

The single biggest problem I have with Ms. (?) Sarkeesian is that she is a man-hater. She spits vitriol and propaganda at every turn to espouse her militantly sexist views. I've watched some of her videos and the worst part is, she has some very valid points. She just paints them in such a way as I should feel shame for being a man and for embracing my masculinity. Well I don't feel that shame. If Ms. Sarkeesian could back down on the rhetoric, she would probably find a more receptive audience.
 
And then there are the idiots that respond to her. I don't consider them men or masculine. They are spoiled, little boys with little thought to the consequences of their actions. Threatening to harm somebody (and I have seen many comments referring to rape, assault, and even murder) is not a sign of maturity. Especially in light of perceived internet anonymity, I can only categorize those attacks as cowardly. In fact, that sort of thing reminds me very strongly of the bullies I used to fight in school. I don't much care for bullies, even if I can identify with their "cause."  That they are only adding fuel to Ms. Sarkeesian's fire is only that much worse. They are practically making her case for her. And in that way, I think that Ms. Sarkeesian is a very clever person. She posts a comment specifically designed to incite a certain reaction from these wannabe men and sits back while the threats come rolling in. Then she and her network (and she definitely has a network of sympathetic media and blogosphere personas) point out how she is the victim of these hateful "men," thereby securing the sympathy judgment from anybody who might know little about the subject matter. Those threats, by the way, I consider criminal behavior.
 
It doesn't take a college grad to see the pattern. When the cacophony dies down and Ms. Sarkeesian faces the true, dual threats of obscurity and irrelevance, out pops another comment followed by the sad, but inevitable, reaction. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
 
The whole affair makes me a little ill.

I would apply another, more brutal if lexical, criterion, as well. For any writer, is "toxic" a modifer on "masculinity", or is "masculinity" a subset of "toxic"? If the latter (and I have encountered writings for which the latter was true), then that flips the bozo bit.