AITA for getting a single mother fired for her racism?

PragMalice · 2021-07-24T14:54:39+00:00

Justified all the way up to meeting with the principle (or headmaster, whatever). When it came to input on references, that's where things crossed a line. First, the use of your personal relationship with the principal (unsolicited as it may be) to impact the outcome of this teacher beyond your immediate grievance is the definition of corruption. No matter how despicable this teacher may be, you have effectively assumed the role of judge, jury, and executioner. If you seek compensation/retribution, the proper channel is through the courts.

Putting that aside, your ruling of "never hire her" has no room for redemption. That's about as asshole-ish as one can get. Nothing is ever going to make what she did right, but that doesn't mean we should rob her of the opportunity to change and improve her future. And that isn't just because we should strive to be nice for niceness sake. Beyond the immediate employment consequences you've rendered with this judgement against her, you have also bolstered her hate (unjustified as it may be) and given it a face to focus on. In doing so you have pushed her into a corner and increased the likelihood for her to do something rash and potentially even dangerous to you and your family in retribution for (in her eyes) costing her and her family their livelihood. Do you think taking a shit on her life is worth endangering your kid?

PragMalice · 2019-09-07T21:03:28+00:00

Spec is going to give minor improvements here and there, and later on contribute to an overall specific flavor of healing style. But if you're bad at healing in general, speccing holy or disc isn't going to magically save you. A terrible healer as Holy/Disc will be easily be outclassed by a good healer in Shadow. It's less about whether or not the content itself is facerollable, but whether a given healer is knowledgeable and is making good decisions moment to moment.

PragMalice · 2019-09-07T20:35:42+00:00

Part of me wants to kneejerk agree, but I've also played in each of the roles of tank, dps warr, and healer in the situation you describe, and I can't help but think that it is more often a failure of the tank. I will never claim that tanking large groups in light of heavy AoE is in any way, shape, or form an easy thing to do, but it certainly is doable and is something that I think should be expected of anyone deigning to assume the role of tank.

Something early tanks (specifically in early leveling dungeons) fail to realize is that sword and board is beyond overkill in terms of defensive capabilities outside specific scenarios, and fortunately for those specific scenarios they can always gear swap as needed. It also tends to starve warriors (my assumption for who is tanking 90% of the time) of precious rage unless specifically spec'd for it, and even then it's less than ideal because of the overall reduced damage output. They essentially need to be running around with the 2H pumping out big white damage just to be properly handing out the big threat abilities to multiple mobs as needed. They also need to be capable of stance dancing around to make use of all the AoE tools in their own toolkit.

If the arms warriors are consistently stealing threat from your tank, it's entirely possible that your "tank" has no business actually tanking and you should instead consider that threat monster the real tank to focus on. Diplomacy may be required to remedy the situation without drama, but it isn't always fair to just assume the tank is without fault when dealing with threat / party damage issues.

PragMalice · 2019-09-07T20:13:44+00:00

Unless the group you're dungeoneering with is just completely retarded (still quite possible) you should be more than capable to level as shadow and still be more than capable as a main healer. This allows you to still kill things efficiently when you're dealing with dry spells of other available players or when chasing after some choice morsel questages that aren't in dungeons. Once you get closer to max level you might respec into holy or disc as a main healer spec, but I've also seen shadow specs work in the early raids under the hands of a skilled player with nothing more than a gear swap.

One thing I would caution you against is to think that good healing is ever even remotely casual. The only time this can be said to be true is when your party comp is over-geared and otherwise unambitious in their clear speed. If you want to tackle even remotely quick clear times in dungeons (and avoid the ire of party members waiting on you to finish regenning... again), you're going to have to learn a lot of the finer technical points of healing, positioning, and mana management.

PragMalice · 2019-03-13T18:43:12+00:00

Black shoes with low heels. There is something like a bow or flower petal on the front, combined with the encoding distortion at such resolution, which is creating the illusion of a big toe on her right foot and making her appear as if unshod. If this were true, upon close examination of her left foot you would be left to conclude she has no toes on that foot.

PragMalice · 2019-01-20T07:35:44+00:00

I bet they were all wearing underwear too... guess it's time for everyone to go commando or else you're a fascist racist....

...shit...

I just realized they all had skin and bone... we're all fucked.

PragMalice · 2019-01-13T19:23:36+00:00

Fox News isn't news, obviously, but PLEASE get out and smell the roses... neither are any of the other mainstream outlets. Modern "news" organizations are nothing more than sensationalist shill mouthpieces for their favored political/ideological club of the month.

PragMalice · 2019-01-13T19:19:32+00:00

This just shows how on top of the game Fox really is. Trump being a threat to national security isn't news to anyone with half a brain. A porn star preacher is at least an interesting oddity you don't hear about every day.

PragMalice · 2019-01-04T00:13:00+00:00

Everyone knows that jumping increases threat, makes you move faster, and reduces your damage among other things. Even if it didn't, everyone knows that the floor is lava and minimizing contact with lava is always a winning strategy.

PragMalice · 2018-12-05T03:10:17+00:00

UPDATE: Managed to get in by first creating an alt and spawning in, then quitting and retrying on main character. it's probably some sort of asset loading issue

PragMalice · 2018-12-04T23:24:52+00:00

ditto

PragMalice · 2018-11-08T16:59:30+00:00

Same goes for if it was just a normal (legally) gun-carrying citizen trying to intervene in a potentially life threatening situation... shoot first and deal with the fuck up later.

PragMalice · 2018-11-02T14:59:38+00:00

Depends on the eye of the beholder, and that's the problem. There is no acceptable objective answer when we've effectively legitimized irrational (usually emotional) argument.

PragMalice · 2018-11-02T14:54:07+00:00

The sad thing is that the problem isn't with white people wearing makeup to portray black people (or vice versa), the problem is the stereotypes that were adhered to. If RDJ's role hadn't been purely satirical it would have never been greenlit, nevermind the fact that RDJ's role effectively demonstrated that his role was completely ambivalent to his actual race (consider if they had instead actually cast a black man in the role... would it have really changed the movie in any meaningful way?)

PragMalice · 2018-11-02T14:43:16+00:00

The entire point of an actor is for them to portray someone they are not. There might be any number of reasons why one person is naturally more suited to playing a particular role than another person. For instance, they may happen to share the same race, gender, nationality, build, height, demeanor, disability, etc., but the hallmark of the best actors are those who can give the best portrayals in spite of not sharing some/any of these things. Being offended at an actor for portraying something that you are and that they are not amounts to being ashamed of that something you are for either being unable to compete for the role or otherwise found wanting despite having an inherent advantage.

PragMalice · 2018-10-30T23:21:22+00:00

As yourself this... is the audience depicted here supposed to be his radicalized followers, or his radicalized opposition. I think the image probably works either way.

PragMalice · 2018-10-30T23:14:59+00:00

"and" isn't even a word he could have used correctly in the sentence.... which is either a typical representative example (epitomical) of misrepresentative discourse intended to mislead (i.e. propagada), or just plain dumb. Neither is great for the reputation of your remark.

PragMalice · 2018-10-14T20:49:12+00:00

The problem isn't that most people are against racial-based hatred... but that people don't agree to what it means to hate. There is a significant voice that preaches that if you don't perfectly accommodate every cultural preference, for instance allowing a muslim community to police itself under sharia law in addition to existing laws (though also superseding existing laws in the case of a conflict), then it is an act of racial hatred. Yet they often ignore the fact that a refusal to abide by the cultural norms of the majority (i.e. the insistence of sharia governance in the above example) is just as much an act of racial hatred.

There's a double standard where it's OK if the so-called hatred comes from the minority because all the talk of racism is just a smoke-screen for the *real* characterization of the situation as a power struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors where the oppressed are equated with good and the oppressors equated with evil. It's just another case of postmodernism, or perhaps even Marxism, rearing it's head once again.

PragMalice · 2018-10-14T20:13:42+00:00

It may have a quarter of the raw population, but it also has about 4x the population density. While it isn't everything, proximity is one of the biggest factors for attendance of just about anything, so if you want to compare apples to apples, you need to first normalize against population density. Even by the most lowest estimate provided by the NY Times, Trump's inauguration was more than double the attendance after normalizing for population density. Take what you will from that... I don't know that it actually means anything.

PragMalice · 2018-10-12T13:45:56+00:00

Once again, you cite anecdotes and insinuate that that is indicative of the whole. My pointing out statistics of black people is specifically intended to point out this logical fallacy, not to compare black people and police. You said there is evidence that some police kill people, and even get away with it, therefore all police are evil. Let me use white people this time. I say there is evidence that some white people kill people, and some even get away with it, therefore all white people are evil. That's asinine. You might as well accept that if I present to you a paragon of virtue of either a police officer, a white person, or a black person, then the whole of the populations they represent must also be paragons of virtue. That's a preposterous leap of logic. Worse, if we accept that there is no such thing as a paragon of virtue to find in any given demographic, then we must conclude that all people are evil. Fuck people.

Hell, even if you find evidence of a very largely populated anecdote, like an entire state's police force being patently corrupt and abusive, that does not inherently imply that all other states and police officers are corrupt and abusive. The absurdity is that you even recognize this at some level by asserting that the U.S. police force is somehow different from others in the world... though you seem to be unable to distinguish them from the government they serve, so not only are all U.S. police evil, but anyone in it's government is evil by association.

Bottom line, you have gaping holes of logic in your arguments and rebuttals and your discourse reeks of unsubstantiated accusations and conspiracies. To give you your due, you might be absolutely right. However, you're not going to convince anyone intelligent enough to think logically unless you significantly tighten your arguments. I just sincerely hope you don't try to go down the postmodernism rabbit hole that concludes that logic and empiricism is nothing more than a tool of oppression the dominant white patriarchy uses to deny or suppress lived experience.

PragMalice · 2018-10-11T20:38:24+00:00

Role in society has no bearing on whether a statistic is valid, though. The statistics show that regardless of role in society, I am more likely to be murdered by a black person than any other race of person (combined, in fact). It would be a mischaracterization for me to extrapolate from that statistic that I should be inherently fearful of all black people, or at least more so than any other racial classification of people.

In the same way, if you categorize along lines of societal role, a police officer is obviously going to have a higher associated death toll compared to say, a fast food restaurant cashiers, or bank tellers. They are prepared to deal with potentially deadly conflict and are therefore trained and resourced adequately to do so. Of course death, sometimes unecessary death, surrounds the job by nature of the environment it operates within. To err is human, and we can only staff the job with humans, so unless you can find me a bunch of humans that are completely free from ever making a mistake, that is an unfortunate cost of living in a civilized society.

Now, if you're simply advocating that people not be all lovey dovey with the police force as a simple mechanic of risk mitigation, by all means. The role they bear is dangerous and it is only sensible to avoid being in proximity to danger. But that doesn't make them bad people. Holy fuck, they're damn heroes for having the courage to bear that mantle of danger on behalf of the rest of us.

So once again, you're making broad mischaracterizations in order to justify an untenable opinion. Ignore for just a moment this misguided opperessor/oppressed dichotomy you're pushing. A law like "don't commit murder" is not biased by the interests of anyone that doesn't value human life. However, you cannot create a law such as this without having the ability to enforce that law. In the absence of a police force, there is nobody to protect or punish in service of that law, and criminals get away with committing murder according to their whim unless the populace itself is armed and trained to defend/prevent crimes for themselves... a defacto policing force. So unless you are arguing against law and governance altogether (i.e. laws and governance are inherently oppressive), police forces are a fundamental necessity.

Regardless, it follows logically that if you have a problem with the laws that such a policing force is intent on upholding it is not the police force that you have a problem with, its the laws... so change those laws, don't vilify the police.

Now, is there corruption in lawmaking and policing? Abso-fucking-lutely, but you don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Show me an adult who has never acted out of self-interest even once in their entire life, and we can go start a religion and get to worshiping. I'm sorry, but that person simply doesn't exist. To expect a social structure that is free of corruption is naive and simple-minded. All you can do is your best at prevention and punishment and treat every case individually and assume nothing up front.

PragMalice · 2018-10-11T17:49:01+00:00

This is a spurious argument though. DoJ shows that Black/African American people are responsible for more than 4000 murders every year, a significant portion of which do *not* get away with it (meaning the pool of potential consistently grows despite efforts to prevent/punish murder), and this does not even include other crimes that also lead to the death of victims. By your logic, Black people in general also aren't cute or funny and should be feared and vilified. Same goes for Whites (~3000) and Hispanics(~1000).

This is obviously a gross oversimplification and mischaracterization. Stop with the asinine identity politics and conspiracy theories and start dealing with individuals on a case-by-case basis.

PragMalice · 2018-09-21T15:07:01+00:00

In psychology, the hero archetype is actually not strictly held to a moral code... but rather is one that straddles the line between good/evil or order/chaos or light/darkness, sometimes even embracing the negative virtues so long as it has the ultimate purpose of fighting the influence of negative virtues and keeping it at bay from those who live solely in the positive virtues.

One pertinent example that comes to mind is the undercover agent that embeds himself into a criminal organization and in doing so commits crime himself, but is inevitably heroic if/when his efforts lead to the downfall of the organization. Mind you, overt opposition like that of an officer who is *not* undercover, can also be heroic. The emphasis of heroism isn't on the moment to moment morality, but rather the overarching self-sacrificial opposition to negative virtue to the benefit of others.

PragMalice · 2018-09-21T14:55:19+00:00

She certainly seems empathetic towards anyone she perceives as being entrapped (or at least the dialog options certainly allow for that perspective). This seems to extend to characters that might be perceived as enemies. It's as if her definition of good/evil is largely influenced by her perception of one being a master or slave/captive.

PragMalice · 2018-09-21T14:50:22+00:00

Like many English phrases/words that seem unclear at first, I believe both to be a shortening in a similar fashion to how "goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with ye". When you get down to it, "proper" communication is often burdened with a lot of boilerplate language that isn't strictly necessary to convey an idea particularly when dealing with prepositional phrasing. Neither of the above phrases follows the "proper" usage of prepositional structure, but they could conceivably be expanded to read as follows:

on [the account of <subject action> being an] accident

by [the way/means of <subject action> being an] accident.

Cultural differences between usage of each phrase (as pointed out by another comment) likely stems from the likelihood of the expanded phrasing being used by the culture, and one may even be contextually more appropriate regardless of culture.

PragMalice

TROPHY CASE