Notices by Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com), page 28
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Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 07:01:11 EST 
Verius
One of the most famous songs about the Netherlands ("15 million people" (it's a bit old by now)) says "Het land wars van betutteling", which translates (roughly to) "The land averse to patronizing/belittlement". I've found that to be very accurate about my character and that of many other Dutch. There's a deep anti-authoritarian streak around these parts and any Dutch leader who tries to import norms and values upon us will be met with ridicule (that's not a hypothetical, just ask our previous prime minister). -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:56:06 EST
Verius
@pettter @mmn Doubt it actually. I myself am pretty cool with people choosing their own gender expression. I even try to use the correct pronouns because it's the decent thing to do in my views. But I resent people trying to force me to do something, even if it's something I would do voluntarily. It's a bit of a cultural trait around these parts. Also you seem to be constantly projecting stuff onto me whereas my argument is freedom of political opinion for others. That is, I support the right of others to use different pronouns than the transperson would like because I rate the value of freedom of speech higher than someone's personal comfort (up to the bounds of the law). But I'm tired of this discussion, so goodbye. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:36:06 EST
Verius
@mmn @pettter Also making me change my speech to suit your preferred gender expression is a form of restricting my freedom of speech, also a political impact. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:35:10 EST
Verius
@mmn @pettter There are plenty of people who don't believe you get to choose your pronouns and that a man doesn't simply get to be called a women simply by choice. That's the political part. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:26:44 EST
Verius
@mmn I'm not. Personally I'd just use whatever the hell the person I'm talking to prefers. It's more that I recognize that pronouns are a political issue and I very much like freedom of political speech. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:17:22 EST
Verius
Hmm, so the CCC will adopt an anti-harassment policy. Sounds like a good idea: a specific policy to specifically address a specific (and unfortunately all too real) problem. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:14:23 EST
Verius
Wonder if people think I'm a right winger. That would be pretty rich considering my voting history. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 06:00:39 EST
Verius
@mmn I would say that the words "Code of Conduct" have acquired a particular connotation through their practical use. I will acknowledge that it's possible to have a code of conduct that's more like good old-fashioned mailing list rules or house rules: these are the rules in this venue, if you violate them we reserve the right to deny service. But there's a particular and very important nuance: house rules don't say "we expect you to behave like this", they simply say "if you behave like that those will be the consequences". Also things like mailing list rules tend to simply say "keep it on-topic" instead of restricting particular viewpoints in political speech. This may be cultural, I'm Dutch and we have a reputation for not respecting authority and valuing the right to speech rather highly. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 05:50:05 EST
Verius
@pettter It kind of depends on the person. If you have a transgender born male who _appears_ to be a woman most people would say "she" is appropriate. When you have someone who looks like a man in transition to being a woman there's already a fairly large group that would still say "he". And when you have someone who appears more like a man than a women a very large group would say "he". Which is to say whether people respect pronouns is generally a function of how much the pronoun matches the apparent gender of the person. Only a particular (though granted, significant), generally leftist, political group holds that pronouns should always be respected. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 05:41:54 EST
Verius
@mmn You're not going to get a discussion since a Code of Conduct pretty much in effect says "you're not allowed to have those opinions". Regardless of your intent a Code of Conduct is widely considered by those who aren't in the CoCs-are-good camp to be an indication of acceptable viewpoints. What you will get instead is resentment and people considering your conference to be politically colored. It may in fact help in getting only people with compatible norms into your conference but it will do so by signalling heavily that the conference is very political in a particular way. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 05:36:32 EST
Verius
@pettter The preferred pronoun stuff is in fact a very political norm. Don't make racist jokes when there aren't any people around who's it about around is highly dependent on situation and how well you know the people within earshot. Women are people is a VERY clear cultural norm that you may assume even foreigners visitors to a western country know. And bigoted is just too vague for me to say anything about since it could range from a statement like "gay people shouldn't have the right to marry", which is very much not against the general western norms to say in general (it's a common political view) to insulting gay people, which is against common norms. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 05:25:55 EST
Verius
@maiyannah @mmn @pettter @bob The one big exception is when people are consciously and deliberately entering a foreign "culture", then they tend to be more willing to temporarily adopt foreign norms. E.g. not blaspheming when you're visiting a religious family. However most of the stuff CoC's are marketed to protect against are already violations of common western cultural norms so they don't add protection against that. And places like technical conferences typically aren't seen as foreign cultures by participants, meaning they're not going to be voluntarily adapting added norms, at best they do it grudgingly. Only people who already share norms with the conference will have no problem with any added norms. Meanwhile those added norms that are different from western common norms are likely to be pretty political things, as in very leftist identity politics stuff. So you make people unhappy and needlessly politicize your conference without gaining any real benefits. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2017 05:18:03 EST
Verius
@maiyannah @mmn @pettter @bob The thing most Codes of Conduct miss is that society already has adopted a Code of Conduct. It's called norms. Pretty much everyone knows the common norms of society, such as not slapping women on the butt. The problem is that not everyone is willing to respect those norms. However since people can be assumed to be already aware of the common norms you can safely assume that when your norm is violated it's either because someone doesn't care about the norm, in which case a Code of Conduct doesn't help, or your norm isn't actually considered a norm by that person, in which case a Code of Conduct is dubious as well since people tend not to respond too well to foreign norms being imposed on them. (1/2) -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Dec-2017 05:15:40 EST
Verius
@maiyannah Or care about talking to someone who can be bullied around by that social ingroup. The idea is that they subvert ever more nodes causing more pressure on other nodes that are now directly connected to subverted nodes where they previously weren't to become subverted. Kinda a pandemic scenario really. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Dec-2017 05:12:30 EST
Verius
@maiyannah I would expect such an old OS to turn rather quickly these days? Are you sure your emulator is set up correctly? :P -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 06:42:08 EST
Verius
@halani @maiyannah You know you're a geek when you immediately see that's the DS9 promenade even before you see the wormhole in the back. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 06:40:38 EST
Verius
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Anvilicious A new favorite for me. Wonder if it applies to Anvilania. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 05:18:23 EST
Verius
This is good news. https://www.poynter.org/news/text-only-news-sites-are-slowly-making-comeback-heres-why Checked out the CNN site. It's still CNN, so the content is pretty shit but at least it's not ad-loaded shit. (Of course the cycle will repeat very soon) -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 05:16:14 EST
Verius
@gameragodzilla @maiyannah I fear scientists are more like politicians than you might like. There's an intense amount of politicking in universities. -
Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Dec-2017 05:15:35 EST
Verius
@maiyannah I would say that the best system that survives contact with reality is somewhere in the middle. The main problems with capitalism arise from inefficient markets, which is to say cornered markets (monopoly/antitrust stuff), markets in which the consumer acts imperfect (such as healthcare or anything really complicated) and costs which aren't paid by their creator (e.g. environmental impact). Capitalism can be largely kept under control given sufficient regulations provided regulatory capture doesn't occur. It's still imperfect but I don't know of a better system that works in practice.
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