Today at work we had someone call in who was just generally unpleasant and got under my skin in a way that most people can’t pull of, and eventually she asked to speak to a supervisor because I wasn’t giving her the answers she wanted. I was more than happy to oblige her and then as she was talking to said supervisor (whose desk happens to be right next to mine and who told her the exact same thing I was telling her) that I realized that I had in fact spoken to this person before and she’d been just as unpleasant and nasty then.
I then thought of this doormat.
Google is definitely a woman, it starts suggesting things before you can even finish your sentence.
That must mean Bing is a man, tries to think it’s superior and does a horrible job with pleasing its user.
oh damn.
(via gwendolyndolyndolyn)
Actually one of the briefest but still brilliant and appreciated discussions on the nature of “heroes” occurred in one of my university “Great Books” courses when we were reviewing Greek and Roman heroic stories. The main point of the discussion being that heroes as noble, selfless, honest, etc — generally idealized good people is a relatively new concept.
The people looked up to then, the guys called “heroes”, were the most cunning tricksters and manipulators of truth who did whatever necessary and destroyed the lives and property of others to get their goals. So long as they won, whether it was getting vengeance or capturing spoils or tricking someone into handing things over, the “hero” was whichever blood-covered and tricky jerk who achieved his goal.
Right, the idea that “Hero” is automatically equated with “good person” is really a bastardization of the whole concept as it originally was. And the hero doesn’t always win either, quite frequently they actually wind up dying because of their mistakes and that’s what you’re supposed to learn from it, the message isn’t always “be this guy” it can often be “DON’T be this guy”.
Which is why when I hear some people say “But [character] can’t die, they’re the hero!” I snicker. If anything being the hero of a story may lower your chances of making it out alive.
TL;DR universes where morally grey areas exist and interpretations can be completely wrong are not mutually exclusive.
There’s a reason one of my favorite professors in college taught a philosophy course where he took two entire classes to completely tear moral relativism a new one. It wasn’t that he was saying the entire concept is rubbish since there are a lot of ways it can be used productively so much as he was saying that if you use it as a cop out when you just don’t want to continue an argument you deserve a dope slap.
In other words it’s a useful tool to examine an argument but it shouldn’t form the entire basis of your argument since by definition it makes further discussion impossible. And if you’re going to pull that on a philosophy professor then why are you even in that class.
One of my least favorite attempted comebacks is when someone responds to you pointing out that they’re full of shit with “Well that’s just my interpretation!”
There’s a big difference between having a different interpretation and being flat out wrong about what happens.
And do not even get me started on relativism and how for the most part it’s used as a gigantic cop out when someone just doesn’t want to continue the conversation. If you pull that card on me I will be this kangaroo.
SAME THO
My other favorite reaction is this graphic.
Also for the record “bashing” when I use the term refers to saying stuff like “this character is horrible they shouldn’t be in the story they’re a waste of space and if you like them all of the above applies to you as well” which is quite different from critically looking at what a character does in the story and saying it was a bad thing or a stupid move or just generally something that they should not have done.
Because if a character does do something like that it was probably on purpose on the part of the author.
I’m also generally disturbed when people don’t want to acknowledge that “heroes” are perfectly capable of doing horrible things.
And I mean if you look at classical mythology for the most part they seemed to get that so this insistence on making everything a hero does be good seems to be a relatively new thing.
Come to think of it any time someone insists on looking at a story that very deliberately frames a conflict in terms of shades of grey in terms of purely black and white issues I can sum up my reaction as
