Was missouri synod growing up also. Awful unless you enjoy brainwashing and picketing abortion clinics at 10 years old.
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The national youth convention in New Orleans with my classmateâs brother who had just turned 18 was damn fun though. You could somehow buy at 18 then. We skipped everything.
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I still hear âjewed him downâ or some variation of âhe jewed meâ at least once a month on the poker tables around here, either talking about hands or in random conversations. Iâm not Jewish, but for some reason this particular phrase gets me in a fighting mood faster than anything else I hear nowadays (probably because itâs so widespread and people arenât to the point with it that they are with the other racial slurs they know are bad). Whenever I say something, they indicate that they sincerely didnât realize that it was bad/antisemiticâŚand as much as it sucks, I actually believe them.
Weâve been in their shoes (whether we want to admit it or not). How many of us used to say âoh thatâs so gayâ or âthatâs retardedâ? How many of you still use this one: âI got gyppedâŚâ So we have to gently educate, not just start screaming that people are racist. I highly doubt any of us were actually homophobic or bigoted against the mentally handicapped, or that we hate gypsies (Romany). But we just didnât know those phrases caused harm, or WHY they cause harm.
Itâs easy to think âhow could they not know???â But education takes time and effort. My dad is from Tennessee, and grew up in the Jim Crow south. Heâs a college professor, and always been liberal. But even he would use phrases (anâŚahemâŚinteresting name for brazil nuts, calling female college students âco-edsâ, etc) when I was a kid that would make you cringe, or be downright taboo now. He doesnât anymore, because of a slow process of education.
Itâs easy to scream at people and call them racist, but calling out their actions, rather than their character (no matter what you actually think) is usually much more effective.
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Never even stopped to think how that was spelled and what it was referring to. DamnâŚ
Like you, I hear various versions of âjewedâ around the poker table all over the country.
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Iâve heard a poker player refer to another guy as a âcoloredâ person.
Likewise. I said something like, âUhh, we donât use that word anymore,â and he looked at me like a sprouted a third eye.
When I moved to the other side of the poker table, i was super meek when I first started dealing. I mean, iâd control the game, but i mostly just ignored the table talk.
Now that Iâm a 5-year veteran, fuck that noise. You say something racist/sexist/homophobic at my table, you bet your ass Iâm calling you out. I donât give a fuck if it means youâll stop tipping (lol, most of the people who say that shit donât tip well, anyway). I also donât give a fuck about players whining about shitty people being âgood for the gameâ. Itâs time to stop letting that crap slide just so you have a chance at their money.
The worst is the sexism. Usually the 9 dudes at the table seem to forget Iâm there. Always funny when a female player sits down and some idiot comments that they now have to behave because thereâs a girl at the table. Like I havenât been there listening to their shit the whole timeâŚ
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Classism too. You donât count as a female person because youâre a servant.
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oh man when i worked in customer facing things, making not much money in a very wealthy city that is (literally) 90% white demographically, youâd get treated like you were subhuman. Itâs why I am completely incapable of complaining about bad service anywhere and just kind of take it because I know how theyâre treated most of the time.
I had the fortune of having the type of job with a completely absentee manager where you could say practically anything to customers and get away with it, and man I said some shit that was way over the line a few times. âYou know, there was a nice way to ask what you just asked, and then thereâs an asshole way, and you didnât choose the nice wayâ was one of my go-toâs, lol. âAre you blind or just an idiotâ was another one i trotted out. But seriously working in retail a few years will give you a really, really bitter view of humanity. Itâs insane how you get treated.
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Iâm rather tolerant, but Iâve told some of my dealers that if they are offended by another player and are worried about their tips if they complain, to let me know and Iâll complain for them and pretend that I am the one who is offended. I choose to subject myself to this crap and can get up and walk any time I want. I generally donât respect them as human beings, so I donât expect any better and donât think I can change them. The people who work there donât have that luxury and deserve a non-hostile work environment, but I leave it up to them to decide how much they want to put up with.
Let me just add, LOL at the drunk guy who thinks he can get away with calling a dealer âPocohantasâ at an Indian casino.
Some guys spew sexist crap when a man is dealing, but clam up when a woman gets in the box. I sometimes like needling them by obliquely referring to the previous conversation and putting them in a situation where they are embarrassed to explain it to the new dealer. Iâve always found sex talk interesting at the poker table because you can pick up on tells by watching their behavior when they are uncomfortable.
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classism too. of course, jokeâs on them, since Iâm sitting there with two engineering degrees and they can barely add two numbers together. As soon as they find out, the âwhy are you wasting your life?â questions comeâŚlike being content and not constantly stressed or bored is a âwasteâ.
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Some one needs to explain this one to me. I only hear olds do it, but I never realized it was derogatory.
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Mom and I had to have a couple discussions about âOrientalâ vs âAsianâ when seated at a Pai Gow table. Iâm still not sure what she calls her exotic rug.
I still on occasion catch myself mentally over retarded (dumb) and gay (lame). (LOL OLD)
I get that every now and then too, I made it a little uncomfortable for a guy when he did it to me in a WSOP event lolâŚ
I tend to be in the camp of letting more slide from players who are losing tons of money and/or tipping well, and I tip dealers better who are tolerating behavior that I know must be annoying to them, which could range from slowing the game down to breaking minor rules that everyone at the table definitely wants the player to be allowed to slide on, up to saying offensive stuff or being obnoxiously drunk⌠If a dealer stands up to someone, I try to always back them up, and if I can tell theyâre upset by something and not speaking up, I try to be the one to speak up (though Iâve had a dealer get upset with me for it before).
Itâs a fine line, but I try to do better than average even if I donât live up to my standards for every other atmosphere in life. Iâm also on the receiving end of some very offensive jokes in one of my usual games, and I tolerate it because I donât think theyâre trying to hurt my feelings (almost everyone is on the receiving end at some point in the day) or do anything other than be funny, and I can basically choose to show up and deal with it (and make money) or not.
Physics professor likens online extremism to bubbles, not cancer
Lone wolves. Terrorist cells. Bad apples. Viral infections.
The language we use to discuss violent extremism is rife with metaphors from the natural world. As we seek to understand why some humans behave so utterly inhumanely, we rely on comparisons to biology, ecology and medicine.
But what if weâve been working in the wrong scientific discipline? What if the spread of hate is less like the spread of cancer through the proverbial body politic and more like ⌠the formation of bubbles in a boiling pot of water?
That is the contention of Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University and the lead author on a study published this week in Nature analyzing the spread of online hate. If that sounds like an odd topic for a physicist â it is. Johnson began his career at the University of Oxford, where he published extensively on quantum information and âcomplexity theoryâ. After moving to the US in 2007, he embarked on a new course of research, applying theories from physics to complex human behavior, from financial markets and conflict zones to insurgency and terrorist recruitment.
Johnsonâs unusual approach has resulted in some surprising conclusions â he says all online hate globally originates from just 1,000 online âclustersâ â as well as counterintuitive policy proposals. On Wednesday, he spoke to the Guardian about his findings.
The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity .
How did you go from physics to studying these social issues of violent extremism and online hate?
Most people think of physics as smashing things up into smaller and smaller pieces, but thereâs actually a whole wealth of physics which goes in the other direction and looks at what happens when you put things together. If I put molecules of water together, well, suddenly, I get a liquid and ice forms and icebergs form and the Titanic sinks. Thereâs all sorts of consequences of what happens when you put together objects, good and bad.
We have a tendency to want to pin blame on individual objects, but you would never do that in the physics world. Thereâs no bad molecule that causes water to boil. Itâs a collective effect. And so, we wondered if a lot of the social problems that we face are actually better looked at through that lens.
[For this study], we just naively said, well, what does the online world of hate look like? So we set about trying to work that out, and we found an unbelievable global network of hate.
I study networks in biological systems, economic systems. This is the most complicated network Iâve ever studied â tenfold more complicated â because it mixes geography, continents, languages, cultures, and online platforms. Trying to police it within one platform is a little bit like saying if you take care of the weeds in your own garden, you can eliminate the problem from the neighborhood.
You talk about hate in terms of chemical bonds and âgelation theoryâ. How did you develop that framework?
These are not analogies. We looked at the behavior of the data, of the numbers, and saw that it is similar [to chemical bonding] not just because the numbers change in a certain way, but actually microscopically, in terms of interactions.
If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, youâre getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities. Now, the typical reaction is: âOh, but Iâm an individual, I donât behave like a molecule of milk.â Yeah, but collectively we do, because weâre constrained by the others. So thereâs only a certain number of things that we can actually do, and we tend to do them again and again and again.
So itâs not an analogy. People say [online hate] is like cancer, itâs like a virus, itâs like this, itâs like that â no. Itâs exactly like gelation, which is another way of saying the formation of bubbles.
How did you create your map?
We started with a seed of clusters that were already banned on Facebook, such as the KKK. We looked at what other clusters they connect to that also connect back to them and kept going through this chain.
We found thereâs a closed network of about 1,000 clusters, worldwide, online, across all platforms, propagating global hate of all flavors. Now, if thereâs about 1,000 people in each of those (itâs actually between 10 and maybe up to 100,000, so letâs just say 1,000 on average) youâve got 1,000 clusters of 1,000 people â thatâs a million people. And thatâs our very, very crude first estimate of the number of people online involved with this.
Thatâs a startlingly manageable number â 1000 networks.
Not if youâre trying to find that among seven billion. But theyâve already done the job for you. Theyâve already grouped themselves into community.
Do you have a list of those 1000 groups?
Thatâs what we built. I was expecting us never to end the process. But we got to the stage where we thought, my goodness, weâve mapped out the universe of online hate to some degree. Now we can begin to understand how interconnected things are and what things look like.
What was the range of ideology in these hate clusters? Is it mostly antisemitism, racism, white nationalism?
We thought we would see a discrete, well-defined set of boxes. But just as people havenât been able to categorize [mass] shooters in defined sets of boxes, we didnât find those online. Instead of it being like a menu of flavors, itâs actually a continuous spectrum. And itâs not a spectrum along the one line, itâs multidimensional.
In the study, you describe forms of resilience by hate groups when theyâre threatened. Particularly concerning was this warning: âPolicing within a single platform (such as Facebook) can make matters worse and will eventually generate global âdark poolsâ in which online hate will flourish .â Can you describe how this works? What do you mean by a âdark poolâ? Is that like 8Chan?
No, itâs even worse. 8chan is a little bit of a remote island by itself. Iâm talking about dark pools forming within the major commercial platforms that we âtrustâ.
When the KKK got banned from Facebook, they were looking for a platform, and suddenly, there was this welcoming committee on [the Russian social network] VK. It was like orientation week in college [with people saying], âWeâll hold your hand, weâll take you to see the community, and youâll find what you want here.â Theyâre now in a kind of close-knit group like freshman orientation, and they quickly can develop bonds discuss what was it that got them banned, and therefore how to avoid it when they go back in.
One of the adaptations was they then reinserted themselves into Facebook with a simple change of writing the name [KKK] in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. It looks pretty similar and yet a machine learning algorithm doesnât know about Cyrillic. Itâs clever.
How did you come up with your four policy proposals?
If I want to stop water boiling, I donât have to stop individual molecules from jumping up into the steam, I have to stop the bubbles from forming. We know that the big bubbles form from the smaller ones. And the big bubble today becomes old news for the next generation.
[The first proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones â and we showed this mathematically â rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply.
Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart.
Itâs a really interesting idea. It also seems a bit fraught in terms of our general understanding of what is fair, to say that just 10% of the people engaging in a specific negative behavior should be punished.
Ostensibly all of the people involved in this have broken the terms of service of the platform, so all of the people should, in principle, have their accounts removed. Facebookâs trying to remove them all anyway. Our push is, just donât go after the most important people first.
Your second proposal involves deploying âanti-hate clustersâ to engage with hate groups. How could that work?
You get [the hate clusters] engaged in a skirmish, basically, and they think that thatâs a kind of supreme battle. It slows them down in terms of recruiting; it just engages them in something that actually isnât that important.
So youâre saying that fighting with trolls online is actually worth your time?
Right. But do it as a group, do it as a cluster. Donât do it individually. It will break you.
Are there examples of this that youâve observed where itâs been effective?
I havenât. Like I said, this comes out of the idea of: how do I cancel a bubble? Well, thereâs no such thing as an anti-bubble. But there is in physics the idea of just getting two [opposites] together and they should neutralize each other. They form a tightly bound pair, the plus and the minus.
[The fourth proposal] is my favorite because it it really exploits the weakness that comes from the multi-dimensional flavors of hate. There are two neo-Nazi groups, both in the UK, both ostensibly wanting the same thing. But they donât â one wants a unified Europe, the other wants to break everything apart and obliterate the rest of the countries. So introduce a cluster that draws out the differences. I donât think that [the introduced cluster] would necessarily contain members of the public unless they were trained in some way. But it will certainly contain people who use good psychology, social psychology, and know some history that could actually engage.
That strategy sounds like some of the tactics that the FBI used under Cointelpro when it was trying to pit different sectors of the civil rights movement against each other and taking advantage of potential ideological divisions to create a splintering effect.
I donât know that [history], and I certainly wouldnât want it to be used in some bad way. But I see it as a way to wear individuals in hate clusters out. In the end, theyâll just get fed up. Itâs not that it goes away. Itâs just that now theyâre actually hating the traffic more than they hate the Jews. It shifts the focus.
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This interview is long but itâs hysterical all the way through.
https://twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/1164897037139271684?s=21
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This doorman in New York recognized me the other day, and he said, âHow you doing?â And, âI hope you have a long life.â But he said to me, âIâm very disappointed about what happened to you, because I thought, when Trump was elected, we could say whatever we wanted.â And I said, âWell, obviously we can never say whatever we want. Thatâs called civilization.â But I was very interested in that. He said, âWe are totally scripted for what we can say and what we canât say, regardless of what reality presents to us.â This guy was a person of color. I donât know where he was from.
He just recognized you because he knew about your academic work?
No, he knew about my whatever has been about me in the news, I guess. Itâs amazing how often that happens.
I donât doubt it.
God damn motherfucker stole my fucking idea! Calling all recruits to the dark arts thread
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