Posts by Joe Wylie
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Great post Finn.
While communities of male obsessives may not necessarily be inherently malicious, I have a feeling that there's a huge resentment generated from the way in which they're often complicit in their own exploitation. Technology and a lack of imagination makes a dangerous combination, and even women aren't immune - during the RSI plague of the early 80s there were stories of female typists obsessively competing to achieve astronomical word-per-minute scores with the then new-fangled word processors.I suspect most geeks sense that, without some degree of vision and imagination, they're working themselves out of a job, or at least condemning themselves to the treadmill of techno-peasantry. It seems that Kathy Sierra became the focus of envy and loathing simply because, in addition to being technically savvy, she was outgoing and imaginative, with great communication skills. And, as Russell noted, blonde and attractive. You bust your nuts saving the world with your C (or whatever) skills for a bunch of ungrateful technoklutzes, and here's this chick getting the kudos. Why isn't she an airhead? It's against nature.
As Marshall McLuhan was supposed to have said, "The future masters (sexist, yes - this was 1969) of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent - the machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." Perhaps creativity and imagination are an inherent gift, but I believe they can at least be developed, if not taught. There was a certain hideously misdirected creativity in some of the vile stuff posted by those venting their frustrations on Sierra.
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Americans, outside of parts of NYC, rarely get reggae, Marley excluded (and then only the watered down later era),
Don't know if you'd call this watered down, but it's technically reggae and VERY German:
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A lot of the worst behaviour (and some of the fun!:-) would disappear overnight if the perps knew their real names would magically (techno-magically!) appear next to their comment/blog post next day.
Amen to that - which is pretty much the 'crap life' visited on Kathy Sierra by those 'perps' who published her home address and social security number. As so many here have said, I'd be devastated/ballistic/whatever if it happened to me/someone close to me. Thanks for a marvellous Sunday's worth of thoughtful and generous posts, but it still creeps me out to think about what was done to Sierra.
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It might be helpful to realize that these calculations have know scientific foundation.
No need to feed that line to the Genie - 100% bloke.
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A quickie cut & pate test with the Gender Genie confirms Austen as female, and Dickens as a dude.
Tze Ming Mok comes up markedly girlier than Austen.
I then fed a slab of utterly brilliant female autobiography (Tove Jansson, Sculptor's Daughter). Here's what I got:Words: 585
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)Female Score: 876
Male Score: 876
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!The Gender Genie is completely confounded. Try going back to the text box and entering a different text.
I wonder how often that happens?
Fabulous link, span, thanks a heap. -
doesn't the fact that he now lives (and presumably always will) in a secure hospital for the seriously mentally ill have a bearing on it?
Certainly, although it doesn't really shed any light on what that "something seriously wrong in his head" is. While it's fair to speculate how things might have been different if Cho had received psychiatric help, we know that Bryant did, and it plainly failed him and his 35 victims. Perhaps we could blame the woman who artificially raised his expectations by unconditionally leaving him a fortune - maybe early psychiatric intervention in her life would have prevented the tragedy.
With hindsight, only the most vindictive would disagree that Bryant should have spent all of his incarceration to date in the kind of facility where he was only moved to last year. For the common good, though, if there's any way that any further insight can be gained into why he behaved as he did, without causing him any undue suffering, then surely it should be done.
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The difficulty arises when the environment, mental health and conditioning arrive in a torrid confluence that some are clearly ill-equipped to handle.
Nicely put. What I find chilling is that in the case of Cho, the Columbine perpetrators, Martin Bryant, and the whole Aum Shinrikyo cult, this provides the catalyst for a purpose in life. The resulting crimes don't occur in a spontaneous moment of manic meltdown. They're the result of months, sometimes years, of planning.
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I'm not sure if "pampered" is the right word Joe. I doubt you'd swap your life for his.
Well, naturally.
While the term simpleton may be somewhat unclinical and pejorative, I believe it aptly decribes Bryant. I'd be inclined to doubt that claimed IQ of 66 though - Bryant was, for example, a capable driver.
As for pampered, all the tribulations you describe occured after Bryant was jailed. Of course no-one should be forced to suffer like that. My point is that Bryant had no apparent reason, prior to commiting his crime, for holding a major grudge against the world. -
How do authorities decide that? They can't in many cases until it is too late. Clearly Cho was in the system that failed him and ultimately all his victims.
You may be right to treat this as a mental health issue, but did the 'system' also fail the Columbine perpetrators, or the mass murderers of Aum Shinrikyo? Why does no-one raise the issue of whether Shoko Asahara is autistic? The pampered simpleton Martin Bryant's 'alienation' didn't prevent him from begging his jailers for any scrap of news that might confirm his expectation that his crimes had made him some kind of hero. What all of these have in common with Cho is that they're products of societies that more than provided for their material needs. Perhaps we need a clinical definition of a syndrome that appears to resemble affluence poisoning.
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i don't think dads4justice is a lunatic.
he's a poet who needs to be outed.Oh cool, the antiBaxter.
Had to happen.