Flash was cool for certain things. Having a cartoon with randomized elements is pretty neat, as is the ability to hide clickable easter-eggs in scenes, or to use clocks that actually work. It was less great as a web development tool.

It's too bad the one couldn't be extricated from the other.

Without having read it yet, though I will soon because that sounds cool, I can see two possible scenarios. Either UBI is designed in a way that allows people to thrive, allowing for increased access to resources for all and giving people the ability to live out their dreams unfettered by employment, or everyone is paid just enough to survive and it becomes damn near impossible to acquire anything more than that, resulting in a new gilded age.

I'd hope, though, that government that's populous enough to create UBI would be populous enough to make sure it's set up so that you don't create a vast underclass of everyone who doesn't own an automated business.

Cultural exchange is incredibly important, most definitely - but I'd probably postulate that for a lot of people it's important for them to retain their 'self'. For many people in an increasingly globalized world, it's important to stick to their traditions.

Yeah, we have these people in Western cultures too. They're religious fundamentalists, nationalists, and white supremacists. Why do these beliefs suddenly become admirable when it's from another culture?

But for Western culture to take a festival that is still seen as hugely important to a very prominent religious culture and not just 'secularizing' it (that in itself isn't my problem with it) but commercializing it in a fashion where the entire original meaning behind that day and festival is lost is a bit strange to me.

That is secularizing it, though. You're not going to retain the original religious significance of the holiday because secularization is exactly that, removing the religion from it. Generally, as per Christmas and Easter, we replace that with commerce. Travel, feasting, presents, all of these help to fuel the economy. Easter was pretty religiously important before we went all hippitus hoppitus with it.

The events I'm referring to are literally an excuse for college kids to go out and have a rave party, basically. That doesn't seem to me to be a good 'cultural exchange'.

Why not? What's wrong with college kids having a rave party? Why does cultural exchange have to be somber? If I meditate does it have to be to attain religious enlightenment or can I do it to relieve my depression and anxiety?

If you had an event based around Holi that articulated its importance to Hinduism and maybe was even a bit educational?

Who on Earth goes to an educational event? People like parties more than museums. Getting drunk and tossing colored dyes at one another is probably a better introduction to Hinduism for a lot of people than some dull lecture or somber religious ritual.

Japanese Buddhists are allowed to drink alcohol, while Indian Buddhists consider it to be a distraction from the Noble Eightfold Path. Are Japanese Buddhists inappropriately culturally appropriating Buddhism from India because they drink?

Japan's fine with kimonos, sure - would they be so happy if we started a sport that consisted of nose-diving jets while shouting 'Banzai!'? Probably not.

But what you're doing here is comparing the half-assed barely educated borrowing of culture with actively attempting to offend people. We all know exactly why your later example would be offensive, that's why you picked it. It'd be impossible to come up with that scenario without knowing you're playing with a touchy subject.

That's not nearly the same as having a drunk Holi party, or having some white people in an afrobeat band, or enjoying or adopting music, food, or artistic styles from other cultures.

I think the issue here, really, is that our own culture is being seen as banal or even not a culture at all and other cultures are being exoticized.

So far this is not at all what I've found.

I think this approach is going to quickly become a necessity in the next few decades. Automation is coming to relieve the vast majority of us of any remote economic usefulness.

Personally, I think that it's a pretty terrible thing in general that cultural exchange is being discouraged at all. There seems to be this push for segregation and separation happening that's pretty opposed to any historical bonding of peoples. We entangle our cultures and develop bonds by sharing with one another and adapting ideas from one culture to another.

the UK has a few 'holi' festivals that really boil down to a bunch of drunk rich kids running around throwing colors at each other, and I definitely take issue with that

Why is this more offensive than, say, secularizing holidays like Christmas or Easter?

On Hubski we have a sort of guaranteed freedom of speech granted by the staff. It's not terribly dissimilar to freedom of speech protected by government. What seems to me to be lacking in places is the culture of free speech. It's certainly more prevalent here than many places, but there's most definitely a subsection of this site that's trying to block out content that they don't agree with. That's their right and they impact themselves more than anything, but they're still participating in that culture of shutting out dissent rather than using the generally amicable atmosphere to have a conversation where everyone isn't just nodding their heads or trying to bite one another's off.

Personally, so far my experience with these people has been that they take disagreement as offense and respond as if I'd insulted them. They're a minority of the site's users, but they most certainly impact the atmosphere even when they remove themselves from portions of it.

Free speech doesn't just mean the first amendment. The first amendment is a law protecting free speech in the context of government intervention. It protects us from legal recourse for expressing our opinions and ensures that we're not censored in public arenas. Public schools have frequently been the subject of free speech cases.

Why do we do this? Well it's a pretty basic idea that we probably shouldn't be locking people up for what they say, but as you can see our own free speech laws go beyond that. They're geared not only at guaranteeing legal safety to speakers, but at preventing censorship. That would seem to go beyond merely ensuring that people are able to speak without going to jail, there seems to be some other motivation here.

That motivation is the acknowledgement that the free exchange of ideas leads to socially positive outcomes. Issues are raised and discussed even when they might seem heretical or silly to contemporary thinkers. We have educational institutions where we're protected against censorship and the right to protest peacefully in public without molestation.

That's not the only place free speech exists, though. That idea that free exchange is socially positive is carried into other places as well. You might have heard of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Campaign. I don't think it gets as much attention as it once did, but this was a pretty big deal when I first got online in the late 90s. You'd see these little Blue Ribbon banners plastered across half the sites on the internet and 90% of geocities. A lot of what they did was securing legal free speech online, but another part of it was encouraging the culture of free speech.

You can certainly be in favor of legal free speech but not in favor of a culture of free speech, but pretending the later doesn't exist isn't an argument, it's just nonsense.

Personally, I'm not terribly concerned with what people are allowed to say or do on reddit. If anything reddit becoming more restrictive might cause its userbase to fragment, leading to a more decentralized internet (a good thing). I am concerned with professors who are censored with title ix charges for things like not putting trigger warnings in their syllabus. I am concerned with blackballing and anti-competitive business practices (like threatening to pull your product if someone else's is picked up), on any grounds, but especially on ideological grounds. I am concerned when one of the cleanest comedians of our era feels like crowds have gotten too PC. I am concerned when social fear of ideological backlash is to the point that Boston's Museum of Fine Arts shuts down kimono Wednesdays for fear of offending people who apparently have no idea how Japan sees foreigners wearing kimono.

When we're at a point when people are walking around on eggshells and you can lose your job for making a joke about USB dongles to your friend at a tech conference, yeah, I'm a little worried about the cultural climate regarding the idea of free speech. When people are openly mocking the very idea of free speech, that's not a positive trend.

I just found out about this guy. Saw his police video, laughed my ass off, and now I'm sad. :(

But are those just loud voices, or are they actually the majority? I mean, if we're talking about reddit as a site we ought to be talking about the users themselves not the impression we get of their amalgamation. We already know that the vast majority of reddit users don't vote or comment, even those that do comment aren't going to participate in most threads.

FPH managed to completely dominate the front page with just a few thousand people, relatively little compared to the overall numbers on reddit. Given that, I don't see how we can think we can gauge reddit users' political compasses simply based on what the front page looks like.

Libertarians in the sense of the third party that had Ron Paul as a front runner? I absolutely agree. Libertarian as a second axis of the political spectrum (libertarian/authoritarian as well as liberal/conservative)? Not at all.

That second meaning of libertarian, defined by its contrast with authoritarian ideals, can be liberal or conservative.

Sure, but that said, when we have surveys of reddit saying that it's mostly liberal it doesn't make sense to say it's mostly conservative because of the impression you get based on select issues.

Well, feminism is about gender equality from a very specific perspective on society, namely one that assumes the existence of patriarchy. You don't need to demonize feminism as inherently anti-male to disagree with that concept and thus disagree with feminism's focus or some of the contemporary rhetoric that seems to accompany it. Likewise you don't need to worry about things like 'cultural appropriation' to be anti-racist.

It's all well and good if you disagree with people's opinions on whatever, but it's disingenuous to decide that because someone thinks something you don't feel is very liberal they're suddenly a secret conservative even though they're life-long democrats who've always supported liberal causes.

You may remember that back in the 90s it was liberals who were defending art and media that was under fire from religious conservatives. That the same sort of hypercritical attitude is coming from left-wing authoritarians rather than right-wing authoritarians doesn't suddenly push those who oppose it to the right.

Again, the question here is how much evidence exists that reddit is leaning to the right. Pointing out redditors who oppose authoritarian positions isn't the same as pointing out conservatives.

See, I think it's a mistake to decide to start defining people based on how you see their beliefs. Those same people who might not go along with considerations of political correctness may also be in support of issues that are most definitely leftist. Welfare, gay rights, reproductive rights, rejection of religious taboo, environmental conservation, shifting more of the tax burden onto the rich, single payer health-care even. It's certainly true that politics in the US is more complex than simply left and right, but you can point to specific issues that tend to be more popular with one side or the other. Bernie Sanders doesn't stop being further to the left than Hilary Clinton simply because he acknowledges the importance of gun rights.

At any rate, I'd say the simplest way of determining whether a group is on the left or the right is to take some surveys. Those surveys have in the past shown that reddit is to the left of the US in general. Maybe not to the left of some areas of Europe, but by the standards of the US it's typically been pretty leftist. Maybe it'd be better to ask a series of questions of each individual regarding a bunch of different policies and beliefs and use that to chart where they're at, but to judge people's position on the political spectrum between liberal and conservative based solely on one issue or another is going to mislead you.

Especially when it's something as controversial as feminism. A couple years back a poll by Yougov and the Huffington Post showed 82% of respondents saying they believed that people should be treated equally regardless of gender and only 20% of respondents saying they considered themselves feminist. Clearly there's a sizable portion of the population that believes in gender equality but has some criticism of some sort of feminism. All of those people probably aren't secretly conservatives.

It's also important to note that supporting a cause doesn't necessarily mean that you want that topic to be treated with kid gloves. You can be supportive of something and still think that jokes about it are funny or that humorless people are taking advantage of that situation to promote their stick in the mud attitude. Like you said, there's a lot more nuance to it than just left/right.

Edit: j4d3 if PC meant "respect" I'd say something entirely different. It's cowardly enough to construct a strawman, are you really going to build it in response to someone who you have blocked?

Anti-feminist isn't necessarily conservative. The left isn't just progressive identity politics, it's also often upheld values like freedom of speech and individual rights. There certainly seems to be a division between the more authoritarian and libertarian aspects of the left, but taking anti-authoritarian positions doesn't necessarily place someone on the right.

In past surveys reddit users have identified themselves as politically leftist.

What's your source for reddit being right-leaning? Last survey I saw said reddit was significantly to the left.

Camelbacks! What are you doing with 20 oz plastic bottles? Those aren't even the big bottles!

Isn't policing images already either an issue or a non-issue, though? We can post images in comments, link to images in new posts, and put stuff in our profile's sidebar already.

Yesterday!

I hadn't in ages, but I hooked a second drive up to my machine for storage and tossed a second copy of all the stuff I actually care about onto it.

Jesus Christ. I'm not "going around trying to start an argument" and I don't need to "repair" anything. Get over yourself.

Well maybe I would if there hadn't just been a thread full of people acting like my not supporting protests means I'm a racist bastard. If you're not referencing that, though, fair enough. I guess I'm not privvy to whatever subject it is you are referencing, as I've yet to see any of the sort of interactions you describe on Hubski and I'm only aware of one user who spouts that kind of shit.

Unless there's some big thing that happened that I totally missed, I think you're typifying my interaction with eightbit last night as "racist" or "hate speech" or at least "speech that is harmful to others".

If challenging your narrative is hate speech you really ought to step back and check your personal bias.

I think this is something that people need to keep in mind in general, both on and off the internet. People have a tendency to assume that they're right rather than to check if they're wrong. This doesn't just apply to their opinions, but to their opinions about those who hold conflicting opinions. Adhering to a specific narrative not only clouds your judgement in regard to issues, but it can cloud your judgement in regard to people as well.

If people aren't willing to have good faith conversations with those they disagree with there's never any opportunity for change. Humility goes a lot further than arrogance.

I don't think it's just this website. The internet, especially in the last decade or so, has developed a tendency to cluster people and their activities into little bubbles. People are more comfortable with reinforcing their own ideas than challenging them or even accepting the possibility that somebody disagrees with them and isn't a complete moron or piece of shit. When you really can surround yourself with people who agree with you all the time, or at least who seem to, it becomes easy to take any disagreement as antagonism.

We also seem to live in particularly ideologically heated times. Whether that has anything to do with the internet or not I don't know.

Anyway I'd say that if anything Hubski is less likely to assume that disagreement means you're a troll or an asshole than other sites. Some people seem to get really upset about disagreement here, but from what I can tell they're in the minority.