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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-02-17 11:58 am (UTC)That's the edited down version...
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:04 pm (UTC)For other analysis, I'm guessing you'd need to trawl tax specialist websites and similar, I've not seen it, which is why I asked "Max" to write that.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:32 am (UTC)http://faithinfire.livejournal.com/77612.html?thread=526380#t526380
Basically,
a: there is no meaningful tax cut
b: we used to tax this but the EU told us that was illegal five years ago
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:49 pm (UTC)I'm very disappointed in the Grauniad for publishing bollocks like this. A couple of scaremongering journalists are really starting to give them a bad name.
When I've heard friends refer to them as "the liberal equivalent of the Daily Mail" you know things are going seriously wrong.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:05 pm (UTC)Similarly there's been lots of completely uncritical stuff about the Forestry Commission sale. I've no idea what the actual impact would be (I'm not sure anyone else does either which is why I don't support the rushed sell off) but complaining that the UKs largest Christmas tree supplier might cut down trees as a result of the sell-off is patently ridiculous, what do these people think the Forestry Commission is for?
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-18 08:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:52 am (UTC)I'm not sure what can be done to make the public sector better at reacting to change - but I wish it was.
(There are lots of private sector places that are also bad at reacting to change - but they tend to die off and be replaced, which isn't an option with the public sector most of the time.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:47 am (UTC)That said, I have been in Internet cafes trying to get work done while teenage boys were in their playing various war games where they were hooked up to microphones and could make comments and talk to each other while playing.
This almost always ended up being a long running stream of "Shot you faggot", "You are dead bitch," and every other insult you can imagine (country dependent because I've been in this situation in France, the US and Spain and each language has it's own preferred insults.)
Now, the thought occurs to me that the teenage male gamers I've seen see nothing wrong with saying horrible things to female players, because they are also saying horrible things to each other. It could be a weird form of awful equality - i.e. it's going to the lowest common teenage denominator regardless of gender.
If a male player is screaming "take it up the ass" to a male opponent it's not that much different than saying "suck my cock" to a female opponent.
I'm sure it feels different because women have to live in a culture of perpetual potential sexual assault in a way that most males don't - but I think that asking the average 15 year old Call Of Duty player to make that distinction might be fairly difficult. That said, if I was a 15 year old female player in that situation I'd probably just start calling the boys "fags" or "limp dicks" or whatever seemed to have the most effect.
Not that using sexuality or body types or whatever as insults is a good thing - just that it's a fairly normal teenage thing that doesn't really imply misogyny or homophobia it more implies that the person using those words has not yet developed empathy or the understanding of the emotional consequences of his or her words - which makes sense for that age group. They are using the words for shock value and to have a bit of a giggle because they know they are not supposed to use those words. Eventually most of them will grow up and not be like that.
It's sorta like how "that's what she said" is funny when you are 11, but less so when you are 18.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:57 am (UTC)I mean, when at LAN parties with friends the language can get a tad...extreme, but I wouldn't behave the same way with people I didn't know.
Hmm. I wonder what the tools are like for blocking people who are abusive.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:04 pm (UTC)If you start banning any teenager who calls another teen a "fag" while playing some war game you are going to lose a huge part of your customer base.
Shit, I grew up in a very liberal household and never had any homophobia at all - but the shit my friends and I said to each other when we were 15 and playing Mortal Kombat and parents were not in the room would have been enough to get us banned from any semi public forum.
Teenagers say shitting things. Design something where your main profit base is going to come from allowing teenagers to anonymously say things and combine that with war games and you will get shitty things being said.
(Hell, while playing Black Ops last weekend I found myself screaming things at the North Vietnamese troops after the fifth or sixth time I had to reboot the level that I'd never say outside the context of playing a game. If I'd been on Xbox Live and there was a censor patrol I might have gotten banned.)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:29 pm (UTC)If you want to be able to swear at people then you tick a box. Then other people can opt to turn off voice-chat from people that swear a lot.
I believe that at the moment you can choose to block individuals.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:13 pm (UTC)There are already options for picking a player's preferred play environment; I picked "recreation", other options include "underground", "family", and "pro" if I have the titles correct. Alas that doesn't seem to filter out the obnoxiousness in my experience.
There is the option to block individuals. You can also choose to block everyone except people on your Friends list, or to block everyone except those in the Party you've gathered. I most often play with "Friends and Team" enabled, so that I only hear people I've been teamed up with and those I've picked to be preferred teammates/opponents.
Xbox Live does tally the number of times players are muted, and does investigate if that number grows large. Halo: Reach goes a step further and auto-mutes players who break a certain threshold on that count.
There is, of course, always the option of reporting players who are being abusive... I wish more would do so, as then the enforcement team would have more to go on.
-- Steve thinks half the problem is that folks aren't letting XBL know about individual cases of abuse, and instead wait until later to grumble about it. It's the old problem that the cops probably won't show up unless someone calls 'em...
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:29 pm (UTC)Regrettably, in-game abusive/harassing chat probably wouldn't get you into any kind of trouble on the PC outside of a full-blown court case for wide-ranging abuse and harassment, due to the lack of an XBL type infrastructure of rules.
You might get kicked from certain servers depending on the way the game is set up (Black Ops, for example, but not in MW2) but other than that, you're generally free to say what you like to whoever is using the same chat system (built into the game or TS or Ventrilo or that Mumble one or whatever it is)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:35 pm (UTC)-- Steve nearly injured himself laughing while listening to the version recorded by Major Nelson.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-18 08:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:42 pm (UTC)The problem isn't just an attitude towards women, it's an attitude towards everyone different from a supposed norm that isn't necessarily a norm any more. In one specific game of Black Ops, without even turning on voice chat, I saw homophobia, racism and religious bigotry of a kind that would even upset the people at work who casually use racist terms that are in regrettably common usage. Hilariously misguided religious bigotry, in actual fact, but that's beside the point.
There is a culture of casual offensiveness built around a lot of online games and online communities in general. The weird thing is that in a multiplayer game like Modern Warfare, MW2 or Black Ops, one of the factions is quite often an ethnic group that bigoted people are prejudiced against, but the offensiveness in-game isn't related to that. I've never seen people saying "Oh dammit, why do I have to be on the NVA side, I want to be an American because I hate [racist epithet here]!"
(actually that's a lie, I did see people talking about that online in 2003 or so when anti-Iraqi/generic foreign terrorist propaganda was at its height, and people complained about playing as the middle eastern faction in a couple of games, but I've not seen it since)
Basically people online are all morons. Although since I try to bait people into bigotry, I am probably a part of the problem.
Imagine that I linked that fairly well-known Penny Arcade strip about internet behaviour.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:50 pm (UTC)http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:47 pm (UTC)"Try to name a basic assault class "Assault" and you can't because it has "Ass" in it. How gay is that?"
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:11 pm (UTC)Saying the absolute worst thing possible - to both males and females - is part of that culture. This is not an excuse for it, just an observation that it may be immaturity and not misogyny at work here. Age 15 is when kids are still telling dead baby jokes and AIDS jokes and such. They have yet to grow up enough to understand how much these "jokes" can hurt.
In short, 15 year old boys are assholes to girls but they are also assholes to boys.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 02:47 pm (UTC)I was trying to extrapolate out from that part of the article. As to comments being invisible because the get deleted by site admins, that's another story.
I am paid to monitor a bunch of web forms for gay fetish communities adn as you can imagine they attract trollasholes fairly often. My policy is to ban the user but leave the comments up just so people don't forget these attitudes are out there.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 02:48 pm (UTC)"the hilarious/disturbing messages that many female gamers receive while playing online games."
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:15 pm (UTC)This is another reason why I've never activated Xbox Live. I'm very well aware of what I would have done on XBox Live if it had existed when I was 15 and would really, really like to avoid immersion into that culture.
Luckily nobody will ever know the things I screamed at Sonja Blade back in the day when her character did a finishing move on my Raiden.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 03:16 pm (UTC)The thing is, most people do appreciate things more if they're connected directly to their life, and cosmetic surgery does seem to be something that more women seem to be interested in than men.
There is a risk of simply reinforcing cultural stereotypes - but there's the opposite risk of turning people off if you don't show them how these things are connected to their interests.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-25 08:54 pm (UTC)