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  • Coldguy said:

    Does anyone here have someskill at defining words? (E.g. idieogame) I am trying to lock down a definition for one and want to run it pass someone.

    I'm not sure we're skilled at word definition itself, but if you want an argument about the definition of a word every person here is a goddamn expert.
  • Is a Japanese prefecture like a US state or is it more like a county?
  • edited June 2015
    Closer to counties, but there isn't anything directly above them except the central government I think.
    Post edited by Banta on
  • Yeah I always thought they were basically counties.
  • Well, they do have local prefectural governments, so maybe comparing them to states is more accurate.
  • I think states as we know them in the USA have more autonomy than prefectures do, but I could be wrong.
  • Maybe we should just consider them their own thing?
  • What's the point of hate crime laws? Is there any benefit to identifying and punishing crimes which were committed because of hate as opposed to other motives?
  • Japanese prefectures are like less powerful states. There are 47 prefectures to the US's 50 states. The main difference is that local culture is different in each prefecture; different food, different crafts, etc., whereas it's just a line on a map in the US. While there's not that much difference between North and South Carolina, Aichi and Gifu are very different.

    Wiki says that it should be closer to province, but the Portuguese called them prefectures, and it stuck. The same kanji, 県, is also used for Chinese and Taiwanese counties, so that could be the source of confusion.
  • Ikatono said:

    What's the point of hate crime laws? Is there any benefit to identifying and punishing crimes which were committed because of hate as opposed to other motives?

    Yes, there is.

  • edited June 2015
    Rym said:

    Ikatono said:

    What's the point of hate crime laws? Is there any benefit to identifying and punishing crimes which were committed because of hate as opposed to other motives?

    Yes, there is.

    Define benefit. It may not be helping minorities. It is helping the industrial prison system by keeping them full by mandatory longer sentencing.
    http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses/incidentsandoffenses_final

    Maybe that will help you decide?

    I can't seem to find it but I read somewhere on average more minorities (specifically African american) are arrested for hate crimes than white people. That may be an out of date statistic though.
    Post edited by Dubyaz on
  • Dubyaz said:

    Rym said:

    Ikatono said:

    What's the point of hate crime laws? Is there any benefit to identifying and punishing crimes which were committed because of hate as opposed to other motives?

    Yes, there is.

    Define benefit. It may not be helping minorities. It is helping the industrial prison system by keeping them full by mandatory longer sentencing.
    http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2013/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses/incidentsandoffenses_final
    Most of the people in prisons/jails in the US are nonviolent offenders: that's much lower hanging fruit.

    Hate crime rules tend to apply to violent offenses. Those people probably should be removed from society (independent of when/how we fix out system to actually rehabilitate them).

    The perpetrator of a hate crime both committed a violent act AND did so motivated by the systemic, longstanding, and historic oppression of the victim's protected class. It's very easy to see how a murder of one white man by another in the deep south in the 1960s is likely a very different crime than the specifically racially motivated murder of a black man by a white man in the same place/era.

    The two crimes happen for very different reasons. We already weigh motive heavily in determining punishment. That's why second degree murder is a less serious crime than first degree murder.

    Those who commit violent acts that are demonstrably motivated by the continuance of the oppression of a protected class of people both harm their victim and harm the progress of society attempting to reverse generations of said oppression.
  • edited June 2015
    So basically committing a hate crime is correlated to being a repeat offender, so keeping these people off the streets for longer will prevent them from committing more crimes?

    EDIT: I may have oversimplified and missed your point about it being a "worse crime".

    Remember that "protected class" refers to "race, sex, sexuality, etc." not "black, female, homosexual, etc." According to Dubyaz link, 21.4% of racially biased hate crimes were anti-white, 1.7% of sexuality biased were anti-heterosexual, and 16.7% of gender biased were anti-men. These aren't really oppressed groups. Also the same link lists "crimes against property" which are not violent (except maybe in a more abstract sense) and "crimes against society" which the FBI describes elsewhere as "typically victimless crimes in which
    property is not the object". I'm having difficulty finding any sources describing what makes a crime against society a hate crime, so I can't really speak to that one.
    Post edited by Ikatono on
  • Ikatono said:

    So basically committing a hate crime is correlated to being a repeat offender, so keeping these people off the streets for longer will prevent them from committing more crimes?

    More importantly, committing a hate crime exacerbates systemic oppression and racism. We have a long way to go to be able to tip the scales neutral after a couple hundred years of gross imbalance. People who act to maintain that horrific status quo with violence are specifically damaging to progress.

    Minorities in the US need additional protections to even have a bare chance of overcoming hundreds of years of a fucked up society enslaving, murdering, and excluding them.

  • Ikatono said:

    So basically committing a hate crime is correlated to being a repeat offender, so keeping these people off the streets for longer will prevent them from committing more crimes?

    Only crimes against people who haven't been caught yet. There are still people in prison to commit more crimes upon.

    And doing a crime multiple times doesn't matter as long as you dont shout "die whitey die" while commiting it.
  • Dubyaz said:

    Ikatono said:

    So basically committing a hate crime is correlated to being a repeat offender, so keeping these people off the streets for longer will prevent them from committing more crimes?

    Only crimes against people who haven't been caught yet. There are still people in prison to commit more crimes upon.
    Most people here will probably agree with you about the major flaws in the American prison system, it's just not really relevant to the discussion.
  • Rym said:

    Ikatono said:

    So basically committing a hate crime is correlated to being a repeat offender, so keeping these people off the streets for longer will prevent them from committing more crimes?

    More importantly, committing a hate crime exacerbates systemic oppression and racism. We have a long way to go to be able to tip the scales neutral after a couple hundred years of gross imbalance. People who act to maintain that horrific status quo with violence are specifically damaging to progress.
    So in a sense, the "hate" part is almost a separate charge (speaking morally not legally)?

  • Hate isn't a crime: it's just pathetic.
    Murder is a crime no matter its motivation.
    The degree and nature of motivation is used to determine punishment.

    Murder motivated by hate is particularly harmful to oppressed classes and to society as a whole.

    Hate crimes are modifiers to existing violent crimes based on motive and general effect.

    As an example, imagine the murder of a trans woman by a stranger in the street motivated primarily and openly by the perpetrator's hatred of trans women. This not only is a murder, but causes a justified fear among trans women that being open and in public is a danger to their lives.

    So the crime of murder is one thing. The reason for the commission of the murder, and the effect this has on the rest of society, is a second crime.
  • What are your thoughts on cases where the crime was committed with similarly hateful motives, but against a class that isn't at all oppressed? For example, the FBI website lists 1.7% of sexual orientation biased hate crimes as anti-heterosexual, with the rest being against gays, lesbians and/or bisexuals. Given that only roughly 4% of the US population is LGB, there are about 1400 hate crimes per person against LGB persons. My point being that hate crimes against heterosexuals really don't create any sort of "justified fear" in the straight community, despite their motivations being just as bad.
  • http://www.codecademy.com/

    Decent place to learn coding? I do t know enough to know if what they teach is accurate.
  • I remember trying to first learn JavaScript from code academy and I didn't like it at all. It was just easier for me to read through a book and experiment on JSFiddle. Maybe it works okay for other stuff.
  • I went through all the courses about a year ago, and the material is accurate, but very basic. I think it's a decent starting place for web development but not much else. My biggest complaints about the site are that the courses are very obviously written by different people with varying degrees of quality, and the exercise "grader" is flaky at times.

    So if you are literally starting from zero, go for it. But if you're expecting it to teach you how to do real things, it won't.
  • Dubyaz said:

    http://www.codecademy.com/

    Decent place to learn coding? I do t know enough to know if what they teach is accurate.

    Pick a language, download a PDF of a good textbook for that that manual and work through the first 6 - 8 chapters.
    Proceed to make what you want.

    However if you have a reason for wanting to learn how to code, you can be more selective about what language to learn (i.e. webdesign, writing a desktop application, mobile app etc.).

  • Here's a crazy suggestion. If you want to learn to program, the best thing to do is have an actual project work on. But most people don't. So how about this. Go and play some programming games. Zachtronics games like Spacechem, Infinifactory, and the new TIS-100 are all good choices. Playing those games IS programming. If you like those games, you like programming. If you beat them, you've learned programming. After that, come back and ask again.
  • Do what I did and learn by fucking around on a TI-84. Everything else will seem like a godsend.
  • Why do people put their feet on the dash of a car? I typically notice it with females but have seen the occasional male do it (sometimes while he's driving). Seems like the most crazy dangerous thing if you should get in an accident.
  • Ikatono said:

    Do what I did and learn by fucking around on a TI-84. Everything else will seem like a godsend.

    This. Granted, I'm still shit at coding, but it will help you learn and it can also help a lot in other ways, especially in high school. Tired of doing busywork with quadratic equations? Program it in there and save lots of time.
  • What's the best way to trim nose hairs? FML
  • Dazzle369 said:

    What's the best way to trim nose hairs? FML

    A nose hair trimmer.
  • Apreche said:

    Dazzle369 said:

    What's the best way to trim nose hairs? FML

    A nose hair trimmer.
    I got a nose trimmer attachment, but it doesn't quite have 'reach'. So I get prickly hairs, or long ones at the back. Very irritating.

    Definitely never pluck, god almighty, never pluck.
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