I thought it might be interesting to dispassionately describe the content and form of political speeches. Or of the average statements of online groups.
If Scott would release a database dump of the forum, you could do similar things. Which are the smartest, dumbest, etc. Or sentiment analysis, see what users/threads are the nicest or meanest.
Reading level of posts probably isn't a particularly good indicator for how dumb the discussions on the forums get given that you have people like me, where I use really weird words and sentence structures to say incredibly obvious, dumb, and/or inane things.
I thought it might be interesting to dispassionately describe the content and form of political speeches. Or of the average statements of online groups.
If Scott would release a database dump of the forum, you could do similar things. Which are the smartest, dumbest, etc. Or sentiment analysis, see what users/threads are the nicest or meanest.
Before radio, the speeches weren't for the masses, they were for other politicians. Vocabulary size wasn't an issue for understanding.
Radio means that the speeches should be more accessible.
TV means the speeches would be more than background, so probably best to be shorter.
For cable news and 24 hour news, sentence structure should be pared down for soundbites.
For the internet, blogs, twitter, etc, the debate around the speech becomes as important as the speech itself. Clarity and brevity becomes even more important.
Conclusion: simplicity and accessibility of message doesn't mean dumber, it just means clearer and better suited to media consumption.
Here's exactly what you are trying to do. You find a word like censorship. Why? Because few people are going to argue in favor of censorship. Then you try to have a semantic argument in an attempt to label a particular behavior as censorship. If you can succeed at applying that particular label to the behavior you are then going to claim that as a logical conclusion that the behavior is bad because you can successfully apply a word to that behavior which is a bad word.
This article is relevant. Other examples of the same type of argument: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!" "Abortion is murder!" "Taxation is theft!"
"In reviewing the scenes through which it has been attained we can rejoice in the proofs given that our political institutions, founded in human rights and framed for their preservation, are equal to the severest trials of war, as well adapted to the ordinary periods of repose. "
"But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow."
Sentence complexity means that any dumbness of the message is lost. I would rather intelligent policies that a dumb person can understand than dumb policies only English professors can decode.
EA removed references to the Tea Party from Battlefield Hardline after Breitbart complained about it. Breitbart heralded it as a unilateral victory. Surely Gamergate would hate that, since its explicitly meddling with a game based on a political opinion and publishers/developers shouldn't cave to that. Nope, they're A-OK with that.
The Hugo awards are tainted by their connection to WorldCon, which is the last great bastion of the old guard of geekery. When WorldCon dies, the awards will either die with it, or find a new home. If they do find a new home, it will force them to change for the better.
Saw Twitter blowing up about Vox Day being nominated in this year's Hugo Awards. Please check out John Scalzi's Twitter feed for some perspective on that. But ALSO please note that this is not the first year that disgusting parody of a man has been nominated for a Hugo. Here's a link to the 2014 Hugo Award vote totals:
The relevant category is "Best Novelette". Day's nomination was for "Opera Vita Aeterna". There were 5 positions in the award category. He never came close in any position. In Position 4, he came in over 300 votes behind "No Award". And in Position 5 he came in almost 400 votes behind "No Award".
Note that in Position 5 he was UNOPPOSED. And lost by like 1/5 of all votes in which any preference was cast. The voters stated loud and clear that they would rather have no award presented AT ALL than see an award go to Vox Fucking Day.
Like Scalzi said, the best way you can make sure he doesn't win any awards is by VOTING in the Hugo 2015 awards. Like he tanked last year
Also - Vox is an open white supremacist, and is quite influential with the neo-reactionaries, libertarians, Ancaps, and naturally, gamergaters considering the overlap between those groups. Fun facts - he also opposes women's suffrage, and he's an anti-vaxxer, just in case there wasn't enough reason to dislike him.
The comments are amazing. I've said for years that slashdot skews increasingly conservative, and this is the big proof. Lots of gomergates posting their rubbish in there defending Sad Puppies and the Hugos.
Some choice neckbeard:
From what I've read, the Hugos, the SFWA, etc. have all been slowly taken over by SJWs in the past 10-15 years. Certainly, I once used the Hugos as a way of finding interesting new authors - but this hasn't been possible for several years, unless you are looking for a social-justice tract. Certainly "hard" SF has been scarce for a long time.
They're about wanting Hugo nominees/winners that reflect science fiction and what they consider the best story, rather than the last decade or so style of being nominated because the author is a leftist non-white male who includes the properly politically correct representatives in their story, even though the story itself isn't remotely the best SF story of the year. They're about wanting the winners to reflect SF fans, rather than just a small insular group of NY elites in the publishing business.
Fun facts - The gators also seem to belive that SJWs are what killed Occupy Wall street. Not, y'know, the complete lack of coherent, achievable goals, any sort of plan on how to actually achieve the vague goals they did have, the trying to solve everything at once rather than breaking it into smaller problems, the complete and utter lack of any sort of willingness to deal with the media in a sensible fashion leaving it open for crazies to become the face of OWS, the lack of horizontal structure, or the confusion of everyone having a say with everyone's say being equally legitimate leading to the rapid takeover by conspiracy theorists, libertarians, and so on.
In 2003, Worldcon was held in Toronto, and called Torcon 3. In a stunning coincidence, Robert J Sawyer, an author who lives in Toronto, won the Hugo with Hominids, a novel about Canadians and set in Toronto and Ontario. Hominids also happened to be most deserving book to win in 2003.
In 2009 the guest of honor at Worldcon was Neil Gaiman. He had a novel out that year. His fans turned up to the con, and also voted for the most deserving novel to win the Hugo. In a massive coincidence, Neil Gaiman's novel won the Hugo!
2001? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Right. So that book just happened to be the one all the Harry Potter fans just happened to nominate... and it was obviously the most deserving science fiction novel of the year.
The Hugo Award has been broken for years. It is no more broken this year.
Well, honestly, infighting probably led to most of the issues you just listed with OWS, Churba, and the sort of SJW trolls that inhabit places like ShitRedditSays and so on do tend to stir an awful lot of that sort of thing.
OWS was a populist movement that tried to be headless, which meant that the loudest screamers tended to be the ones who were heard. SRS (and its ilk) is full of the loudest screamers on the internet. Now, whether it's fair to call those people SJWs... I dunno.
And for sure, there are plenty of loudmouths of all stripes. Conspiracy theorists I'm sure we heard a lot from back then. Libertarians? Not so sure about that one.
The idea that SRS are "the loudest screamers on the internet" is pretty lulzy considering it is an insular and non-interactive community whose public front is also it's own self-parody. People are far madder at SRS than SRS is at people, and SRS is a pretty shitty and stupid place so that's saying something.
SRS is used as a catch-all term for all similar communities on reddit. SRS self parodies, or they pretend to, and they also have rules about not brigading and so forth so that they don't get kicked off of reddit. They also bleed all over the place and into LOTS of other communities. There are MANY subs that have been "invaded" by troll mods who started out there or in some similar place and have run them into the ground. /r/communism is a big fat joke now, among others. We kicked a few out of /r/fiction when they started banning people from our (dead as a doornail) sub left and right (whenever they were banned from one of their other communities, almost like a "list").
Ultimately it's just a dumb news aggregator/forum site, but it's pretty insidious how a likeminded group of agitators and trolls manage to spread all over the place and ruin one community after another (none of which has anything to do with social justice, but social justice is often a convenient front for the lulz).
It's dumb and silly until it gets unwieldy and large and impossible to ignore and prevents any real discussion from going on. /r/communism, /r/philosophy, etc, used to be pretty interesting places.
Well, honestly, infighting probably led to most of the issues you just listed with OWS, Churba, and the sort of SJW trolls that inhabit places like ShitRedditSays and so on do tend to stir an awful lot of that sort of thing.
OWS was a populist movement that tried to be headless, which meant that the loudest screamers tended to be the ones who were heard. SRS (and its ilk) is full of the loudest screamers on the internet. Now, whether it's fair to call those people SJWs... I dunno.
Dude, I did a lot of work both writing/researching and as an intermediary for other journos with OWS, and let me tell you - that's absolutely not the case. Literally the furthest thing from the truth. Social justice and even trolls had nothing to do with the collapse of OWS, it was a fucking mess from start to finish. The closest you could come to that would be blaming the Conspiracy theorists and Libertarians who hitched their wagon to the OWS train, but they're far more a symptom than the cause.
And as for SRS being the loudest screamers on the internet - Well, they're the reddit boogeyman because they point their critical gaze(however misguided and silly it often is) inward at reddit, rather than outward at other people. Reddit, as a group, hates and fears criticism above anything else.
Outside of reddit, the people who tend to be most concerned with those sorts of people tend to be the MRAs, redpillers, neo-reactionaries, and other people along those lines, because they see the spooky skary skeletons everywhere, in everything.
Fuck, if SJWs were half as influential as people in those circles claim they are, then there wouldn't be a need for feminism anymore, the movement would have already won everything it could possibly fight for.
Fair enough about OWS, it was disorganized by design. It was an anti-organization.
Reddit as a group HATES criticism, no doubt about it. SRS, though (and by 'SRS' I mean phony SJW trolls and their hangers on, primarily), is a cancer made of internet trolls. It doesn't stop at reddit, either, although yes obviously it's concentrated there and was born there.
I've tried pretty hard above to make distinction between SRS-style trolls and actual SJWs, so... the rest I'll leave be since I don't really think it applies to what I was saying.
I understand a dislike for certain radfems and tumblr feminists that often have the loudest voices in modern feminism, but its pretty hard to then say you're the one for real equality when a literal white supremacist and anti-women's suffrage supporter is on your "side." Also, is Vox the dude with the skull on his desk, or is that a different white supremacist who's against women having rights?
Comments
If Scott would release a database dump of the forum, you could do similar things. Which are the smartest, dumbest, etc. Or sentiment analysis, see what users/threads are the nicest or meanest.
Radio means that the speeches should be more accessible.
TV means the speeches would be more than background, so probably best to be shorter.
For cable news and 24 hour news, sentence structure should be pared down for soundbites.
For the internet, blogs, twitter, etc, the debate around the speech becomes as important as the speech itself. Clarity and brevity becomes even more important.
Conclusion: simplicity and accessibility of message doesn't mean dumber, it just means clearer and better suited to media consumption.
"But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
"Abortion is murder!"
"Taxation is theft!"
"But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people's doubts grow."
Sentence complexity means that any dumbness of the message is lost. I would rather intelligent policies that a dumb person can understand than dumb policies only English professors can decode.
http://madelineashby.com/?p=1502
https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-science-fiction-books-2014
Goodreads award: 146,000 votes
Hugo award: 3,000 votes
Also the winner of the Goodreads award happened to be one of my favorite novels of last year.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/04/06/1143240/hugo-awards-turn-even-more-political
The comments are amazing. I've said for years that slashdot skews increasingly conservative, and this is the big proof. Lots of gomergates posting their rubbish in there defending Sad Puppies and the Hugos.
Some choice neckbeard:
In 2009 the guest of honor at Worldcon was Neil Gaiman. He had a novel out that year. His fans turned up to the con, and also voted for the most deserving novel to win the Hugo. In a massive coincidence, Neil Gaiman's novel won the Hugo!
2001? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Right. So that book just happened to be the one all the Harry Potter fans just happened to nominate... and it was obviously the most deserving science fiction novel of the year.
The Hugo Award has been broken for years. It is no more broken this year.
OWS was a populist movement that tried to be headless, which meant that the loudest screamers tended to be the ones who were heard. SRS (and its ilk) is full of the loudest screamers on the internet. Now, whether it's fair to call those people SJWs... I dunno.
And for sure, there are plenty of loudmouths of all stripes. Conspiracy theorists I'm sure we heard a lot from back then. Libertarians? Not so sure about that one.
Ultimately it's just a dumb news aggregator/forum site, but it's pretty insidious how a likeminded group of agitators and trolls manage to spread all over the place and ruin one community after another (none of which has anything to do with social justice, but social justice is often a convenient front for the lulz).
It's dumb and silly until it gets unwieldy and large and impossible to ignore and prevents any real discussion from going on. /r/communism, /r/philosophy, etc, used to be pretty interesting places.
And as for SRS being the loudest screamers on the internet - Well, they're the reddit boogeyman because they point their critical gaze(however misguided and silly it often is) inward at reddit, rather than outward at other people. Reddit, as a group, hates and fears criticism above anything else.
Outside of reddit, the people who tend to be most concerned with those sorts of people tend to be the MRAs, redpillers, neo-reactionaries, and other people along those lines, because they see the spooky skary skeletons everywhere, in everything.
Fuck, if SJWs were half as influential as people in those circles claim they are, then there wouldn't be a need for feminism anymore, the movement would have already won everything it could possibly fight for.
Reddit as a group HATES criticism, no doubt about it. SRS, though (and by 'SRS' I mean phony SJW trolls and their hangers on, primarily), is a cancer made of internet trolls. It doesn't stop at reddit, either, although yes obviously it's concentrated there and was born there.
I've tried pretty hard above to make distinction between SRS-style trolls and actual SJWs, so... the rest I'll leave be since I don't really think it applies to what I was saying.