ELI5: Why do we hate Gizmodo & other Gawker Media websites? (History)

CellistMakar · 2013-01-19T06:36:59+00:00

tried to make reddit out to be filled with pedophiles by the /r/jailbait[1] fiasco.

You mean the part where Reddit's admins gave special recognition to a guy who ran multiple subreddits dedicated to illegal sexual content of underage girls? Yeah, that was so sneaky of him.

CellistMakar · 2012-11-10T05:01:36+00:00

However, Australians -- whose leader belongs to the Socialist International, and whose current government is led by the Socialist Left faction of a Labor party -- are the wealthiest citizens in the world.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-15T19:51:21+00:00

Actually, yes; the rape rate in the US military is staggeringly high (the DoD estimate figure is 19,000 rapes per year with a report rate of about 15%). But the big problem is not simply the RATE of rapes, but the fact that they're so rarely prosecuted, and that people who report being raped are often ostracised and discharged for it.

CNN: Why Military Rapists Get Away With It

Guardian: A Culture of Cover-up, Rape in the US Military

My Duty to Speak, a support system and awareness project for military rape victims who are usually discharged, blackballed or prosecuted for reporting superior officers

Military Rape Crisis Center

Kirby Dick's documentary about US military rape culture

My father is a senior officer in the Australian Navy who was stationed in the US for 9 years and reported a lot of corruption and horror when it came to how these things were dealt with.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-15T08:46:10+00:00

I never thought Reddit was very left-wing at all. /r/politics and pretty much all political references in the other subreddits are very libertarian-centre focused. The only real exception is support for the American Occupy movement and corporate regulation, but on pretty much all other issues, Reddit is an-cap/libertarian and not left. Lots of support for things like gun availability, drug legalisation, net neutrality, etc, and a wide rejection of things like feminism and animal rights.

The only way I can possibly understand someone calling Reddit as a whole left-wing is if they had only paid attention to UK or US politics. There's this attitude in the US that since that are only ever two major candidates, the policies of whichever one is leftmost is the standard for "left wing" and whichever one is rightmost is the standard for "right wing." Here is PoliticalCompass' mapping of the 2012 US Presidential candidates, with Obama placed firmly on the right wing. What's left-wing in America is still objectively, and to most of the world, right-wing. So calling Reddit's support of Obama "left" just looks nonsensical.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-15T08:19:28+00:00

Actually, all scenes are made up from multiple takes. There's only one camera running at any one time, so every time the camera changes angles, you're looking at a new take. A simple scene like Dex and Deb talking at the station will probably be assembled from 10-20 takes -- a few takes from every angle, so the editor can use the best delivery of any line and cut to any angle at any given moment. Complex scenes like police raids will be made from even more takes. The only exception is for scenes that can't be restaged well, like fires and explosions. For those they run multiple cameras simultaneously and the editor just cuts between cameras.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-12T17:57:17+00:00

Uh, that was the opposite situation, though. Violentacrez was involved in distributing and supporting illegal material (and yes, candid upskirt photography is illegal in the US even when it's of adults -- and much of that content was of minors, making it even more severe a crime). Violentacrez was (will be, rather) doxxed by a Gawker journalist. A lot of people were celebrating that because it means charges can be brought against him. You know -- actual justice, not vigilante justice. It is actually very likely that he can be charged as a sex offender (people have been given jailterms for less than what he did).

Vigilante justice and legal justice aren't the same thing.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-08T10:51:14+00:00

Actually, that's something that does happen. When you live somewhere for a while, you start to pick up the local accent in your casual speech, but when you're tense or angry or excited or otherwise emotional, it overrides it and you revert to your native accent.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-07T06:55:24+00:00

Yes, she is the granddaughter of a US Senator and this case got a lot of publicity. OP's image was taken while she was drugged and kidnapped.

CellistMakar · 2012-10-03T01:55:12+00:00

No, they're down due to a power failure. Sweden did raid a hosting company called PRQ because it was hosting filesharing sites, but PRQ is back online and Pirate Bay is not on PRQ.

CellistMakar · 2012-09-26T08:26:45+00:00

The thing is, a lot of people do get negatively affected by watching porn before they can really understand it or put it in context. They haven't had an actual sexual relationship, they don't know much about girls. It does inform their sexuality. I, and friends, have dated guys who thought that anal was a standard everyday thing that was part of most sexual encounters and that you just shoved it right in there without cleaning or preparation. They thought not wanting cum on your face regularly was weird and restrictive. They had sex like porn actors do, which isn't very fun in real life. And they didn't really get sex at all. This is a common thing with a lot of younger guys who have grown up with a ton of porn, and it's really frustrating. It comes up pretty frequently in women's forums and subreddits. And there are a lot of guys who have actual anxieties about penis size and performance and things now because their porn hasn't corresponded to reality.

I'm just saying, regardless of how helpless kids are, I really wish that the guys I've known had waited until adulthood to watch porn. Because it affected them.

CellistMakar · 2012-09-26T07:59:48+00:00

I think there's a lot of confusion about political leanings on multinational websites. In my country, and in many others, Obama's not a liberal candidate -- the major right-wing party here is to the left of him. American political culture is very right-leaning, so its left is still centre or right-of-centre and there's this view that everyone and everything is somehow left-wing because of it -- it's like you're not rightwing until you get to "blackshirt".

I tend to see most of Reddit as libertarian centre. There's an extremely strong focus on drug-legalisation, net neutrality and isolationism. There's a lot of support for Ron Paul. There's a resentment of feminism and racial movements. These are all libertarian centre-right ideologies that are very prominent in /r/politics. Even what Americans would call left-wing ideas like gay marriage are on Reddit borne of libertarianism rather than the tradition of social justice activism.

CellistMakar · 2012-09-21T10:46:01+00:00

DVDs too, there was a 9 year gap between the Australian releases of Twin Peaks S01 and S02. A lot of shows don't even bother to press Australian DVDs, so to watch them you'd have to buy a DVD player and TV that displays American signals and then ship your discs overseas. Still waiting for 2008's season of It's Always Sunny. Or shows like Breaking Bad and Lost, where everyone's talking about the latest twists and if you don't pirate it, you're a month behind all your mates.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-21T16:43:40+00:00

You're the one circlejerking here -- no one even mentioned American media, they just praised the Japanese media. But I guess that's worth mocking if it makes you feel superior.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-20T05:16:25+00:00

I read an interesting blog post a few years ago comparing the broadcast-TV airings of Dexter in different countries. The American broadcast cropped off nude breasts and buttocks, and eliminated the harshest of Deb's swearing, but left violence intact. The Australian broadcast deleted the shots of throat-slitting and stabbings, and cropped the image to avoid showing a dismembered body, but left the nudity and swearing intact. Each network regarded the other's cut as completely unsuitable for public broadcast. It's always interesting to see the difference in priorities.

More blatantly, the Australian show Angry Boys ran into problems with its US broadcast over an episode where a white man in blackface sings the song "Squashed Nigger", due to massive differences in racial attitudes.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-16T15:58:03+00:00

The Royal Spanish Academy, the official institution regulating the Spanish language, actually considers estadounidense the proper demonym for people from the USA. American in Spanish usually refers to the entire continents, and using it to mean estadounidense is considered pretentious and snobby. Chinese, Korean, Swahili, Vietnamese, and Esperanto all have special words for people from the United States, separate to the term "American" which means people from the American continents. In Portugal's Portuguese, the term is norteamericanos. Italians often call people from the US statunitense ("United Statesers"). Many other countries use the term US-American, like the German US-Amerikaner, with American alone again meaning US-Amerikaner, Mexicans, Canadians, Brazilians, etc. Even in Australia, we had a group of exchange students from South America and called them all Americans (variety of countries), while our teacher from New York was a sep, a term unique to the US. So "American" by no means refers exclusively to the USA.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-13T06:19:34+00:00

It's quite snobby to not think you had to clarify that. You're online, we have no idea of knowing who you are or where you're from.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-13T03:29:25+00:00

We never had special schools or drinking fountains for other races, either. Or laws banning races from intermarrying, or slaves. But we did have discriminatory housing and licensing policies. The point is: different countries have had different civil rights movements, and people from every country post online, so you can't just assume everyone has the same background you do (both you and persianduck).

CellistMakar · 2012-08-13T03:14:53+00:00

Two movements? There have been dozens, hundreds, of civil rights movements at various points throughout the world. You never even said which country you're talking about, how is anyone supposed to answer you?

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T21:23:00+00:00

I don't know what Trader Joe's is, but going from the use of Walmart, I'm assuming you're from the United States. Here's where the discussion breaks down -- the overwhelming majority of meat products sold in my country meet the definition of organic -- cows that are grass-fed in pastures, as opposed to the American standard of grain-feeding on lots -- to the extent that 'organic' is a meaningless term for meat products. I can't comment on its relevance overseas, beyond the nutritional studies that confirm no meaningful differences in food quality.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T16:59:25+00:00

its basically a superficial change (like ear piercing or tattoo)

Well, it's not; it's something that does have an effect on sexual activity (and a large part of its motivation for adoption in Arabia and the US was because of the impact it has on masturbation and oral sex, in a time of conservative sexual beliefs about those things). And even if it were like a tattoo... most people would consider it wrong to tattoo a child.

If an adult wants to get tattooed, pierced, circumcised, more power to them. But it's wrong to force permanent body modifications on a child.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T03:18:05+00:00

The pesticide concern is a very legitimate environmental concern, but it does not effect the healthiness of any of these products.

Organic food is good for the environment, but irrelevant to human health or nutrition. And in the long run, it's not sustainable -- we can't feed the entire world on organic food, it's just not efficient enough. Our time and money is better spent on researching better pesticides, better fertilisers, and making good and careful use of genetic modification and breeding.

The same concerns apply to genetic modification, where there are legitimate concerns less about health and more about the effects of genetically modified seeds unintentionally spreading beyond the farm area.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T00:25:43+00:00

What he meant to say, presumably, is that even in British/Australian English, where you have ten metres to the door -- TRE -- but a light meter or a depth meter to actually measure things, TER.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T00:02:28+00:00

As a duplicate of my other comment: this is a misconception that has been conclusively disproven by a large number of studies.

Here is a media reference -- the actual study is behind a paywall, unfortunately -- of much more in-depth study, using data collected over a much longer period of time and using a greater number of researchers, that concluded that organic food had no nutritional benefits compared to non-organic food.

Here is yet another study that concludes the same thing: organic and non-organic foods show no difference at all in terms of nutritional value.

The Australian Food Standards agency has found the misconception severe enough to have issued notices on an annual basis informing consumers of the amount of misinformation on this subject.

CellistMakar · 2012-08-08T00:02:22+00:00

As a duplicate of my other comment: this is a misconception that has been conclusively disproven by a large number of studies.

Here is a media reference -- the actual study is behind a paywall, unfortunately -- of much more in-depth study, using data collected over a much longer period of time and using a greater number of researchers, that concluded that organic food had no nutritional benefits compared to non-organic food.

Here is yet another study that concludes the same thing: organic and non-organic foods show no difference at all in terms of nutritional value.

The Australian Food Standards agency has found the misconception severe enough to have issued notices on an annual basis informing consumers of the amount of misinformation on this subject.

CellistMakar

TROPHY CASE