I get your point but rap was a bad example. Rappers don't "cover" songs and artists who cover rap songs are usually bedroom artists posting on YouTube.
You may want to re-read my comment. In my example there was no rap artist covering a piece, or a rap song being covered, there was a rapper guesting on a cover. Rap is not just a genre on the side.
Being that Arch is maintained with arch users in mind[0], building an installer for that user base would have to entail a wide range of option for unique use cases because that's whats expected of their users[1]. There isn't a "cop-out" or "plea" to users outside of the community because it was never a goal to appease them.
No, it wouldn't, because that versatility can be attained by... not using the installer, the exact same as the situation without an installer.
An installer, if anything, improves "user centrality" because you're making it more accessible and usable to most users with just the most common few options.
Not having an installer improves "dev centrality" (the few users who matter are the devs and other advanced users), over and against user centrality.
You could use the same thinking to argue against having a package manager. You might have to install a package manually anyway, so why bother providing packages at all?
At the end of the day, as others have probably already said in this thread, the maintainers are unpaid volunteers and choose to focus on certain things for their own reasons and using their finite resources.
There are other distributions that focus on other things and people can choose. If Arch chose to implement lots of convenience functions, that choice could be to the detriment of other strong aspects of the distribution.
I keep up with a few Patreon podcasts through Feedly. I don't have much good say about it. Sometimes the audio cuts off after about 15 minutes of play while inside my pocket. It keeps the timestamp, though! Id love a recommendation of an android app that does not do that
Things might have changed since I was forced to unsub due not being able to comment because I refused to prove to a few subreddit mods that i am indeed a person of color.
Around that time, many if not all of the threads ended up being closed due to the the dramatic arguments that formed when users posted political/racial commentary to the sub; which is to be expected. I believe the real problem was when comments from users who portrayed themselves as POC felt their voices were less pronounced due to the downvotes and negative replies. Understandable
So they decided to lock the sub down for anyone except those who accepts a segregated bubble and willingness to prove their "blackness" in order to post an opinion
Being that there are farmlands, trailers, "boonies", smallish towns all over the US, it would be safe to say that rednecks are an American phenomena rather than a southern one.
I've always thought it was strange how acceptable it is to refer to a certain class of people as "rednecks" but referring to the same class of people with a different skin color as "wetbacks" is a bigtime no-no.
Whether a word should or should not be used is complex, and usually a matter of context and fashion. As a society we do sometimes decide (try) to drop the regular use a word entirely due to the sheer weight of the history around its use - the argument being that it becomes impossible to remove the other connotations not matter the context.
So why is one allowed when the other is not when they seem to arise from such similar contexts?
First of all, while one might feel like its use is a 'bigtime no-no', the use of 'wetback' is still very popular in certain segments. So obviously it's only disallowed in certain contexts, e.g. around people who don't hold to that particular kind of racism, in public forums, in professional settings, etc. Among other words it's used every day as a rallying cry of the anti-migrant movement in North America, and as such has a lot of negative power.
'Redneck' on the other hand has been embraced by a 'grassroots' conservative backlash movement, which now has a certain amount of political power. So while originally it marginalized a class of people: the poor rural class that have less access to adequate education or health care, and show many of the same generational problems that visible minorities do; now the term also refers to a whole bunch of definitely not marginalized middle-class Americans. People whose grandparents would never have self-described as 'Redneck'.
These new, political 'rednecks' backlash against anything they consider liberal, including efforts to help or defend the marginalized they purport to represent.
So now in some contexts the use of the term is not only allowed, but encouraged.
But where is that liberal society that's supposed to be defending the marginalized against bad words? Well, the liberals are hypocrites, just like most everyone else in this world. They'll jump on any chance to derogate 'the other' as long as it's fashionable to do so. They certainly won't come to the defense of the 'rednecks' while it's such a convenient rally cry against Trump voters.
So it's us-versus-them politics at play here, and as in any political game the marginalized get trod on by both sides.
I guess it depends on which end of the joke you are. And how often do you have to deal with it. It could be just a joke, or straight up bullying mascarading as joking. I am sure you know what I mean.
Others have already written about this extensively but there is a difference between humor that punches down and humor that punches up. There's also a big difference between the joke being bigotry and the joke being that a character is bigoted.
In the Airplane! cockpit scene the joke isn't that the pilot makes the stewardess and kid uncomfortable by sounding like a pedophile, the joke is that he's supposed to be a heroic character but acts like a total creep. It's a subversion of expectations based on the tropes of 1950s/1960s Hollywood movies.
Likewise the scene with all passengers lining up to slap the woman while shouting at her to calm down doesn't make fun of women for being hysterical. It makes fun of the sexist trope of women being hysterical and needing to be "calmed down" with physical violence. The sexism isn't what's funny, the sexism is what's being made fun of.
The problem with modern comedy is that a lot of political punditry has moved to taking the form of comedy and "it's just a joke" (or for a few years on YouTube "it's just a prank") has become a way to defend actual bigoted statements.
When a conservative pundit who is opposed to gay rights calls a gay person a homophobic slur or follows a mention of them with a caricature of them wanting to have oral sex with a lot of men, the "joke" only works if you share the idea that gay people are sexual deviants and bad. It isn't really a joke, it's just mockery.
The reason a lot of older comedians find it hard to adjust is not that comedy has changed. The mechanics of humor have largely remained the same, it's just cultural attitudes and politics that have changed. If your politics have remained the same, you'll find it harder to do comedy expressing those politics now than when they were more closely aligned to mainstream.
In other words, if you used to have a close circle of friends with misogynist opinions a misogynist joke may have gotten a few laughs out of them. If they've all grown out of it and matured in their understanding that women are actual persons rather than just objects of sexual attraction, your old jokes will no longer work on them. They may not actually get offended, but they won't be amused.
Jokes work because they carry a message through a combination of context, content and subtext. If that message is expressing support for an oppressive social dynamic, it can be bullying. It's that simple.
I agree with you. I like your statement "The sexism isn't what's funny, the sexism is what's being made fun of.". Similarly, in this article there's a line "a joke can illuminate uncomfortable subjects by giving us permission to laugh at them". At my corporate job, we have a focus on diversity and in these times of Black Lives Matter and COVID related anti-Asian sentiment, we've been challenged to think about how we talk to our kids about jokes. Here's my take...
I've tried to express this to my teenager - that sometimes these jokes that seem racist/sexist/ist are actually making fun of the absurdity* of racism/sexism/ism, but it can also be hard to tell sometimes, and many jokes truly are bigoted. As someone who hears an off-color joke, try to cross examine it before knee-jerking taking offense (although, often offense is warranted), and as someone telling an off-color joke, be very careful* in your delivery.
For jokes, there's a time and a place, and the flip side to that is that there's a wrong time/place too! For example, I like the joke "I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather.... not screaming like the passengers in his car" - but I would never tell that to someone grieving the recent loss of a grandfather or someone who passed in a car accident. And given the current BLM movement and the anti-Asian sentiment - this is definitely not the time for some jokes. My teenager is mixed race, half Asian (prefer not to say which), and they and their friends sometimes feel like they have the green light to make certain Asian jokes. I've told them these are not the times to make those; in other times, it might be okay, but keep a lid on that stuff until some of this passes, because this is serious - it's not the time.
And very importantly: just because you find an off color joke funny as opposed to taking offense, it doesn't mean that you're a racist/sexist/etc... and it doesn't mean that you have a character flaw. But just because you find the humor in it, doesn't mean your insensitive or bigoted. As a society, we shouldn't be afraid to laugh and we shouldn't virtue signal by jumping to offense. But if someone takes offense to a joke that you make, you're almost always the one in the wrong (not always, but almost always, so do some self reflection).
Absolutely, the content of a joke matters as much as the context. This not only includes the setting and audience but also the speaker and the audience's understanding of the speaker.
This is especially relevant for in-group jokes and self-deprecation. A Black person performing for a Black audience can poke fun at Black culture as a form of self-deprecation, but if a white person tries to perform the same joke to the same audience the intention will get muddled, and if the audience is white it quickly turns from laughing at yourself to laughing at a marginalized group.
This effect is also why there is no such thing as the "n-word pass": even if a Black person tells you as a white person that they're okay with you using that word and even if they're honest, that only makes it okay in the narrow context of conversations between you and them. Even having another person around can quickly get messy.
Likewise "Karen" originating as a pejorative against white women "playing the victim" sounds very different coming from a Black person or a white man.
Language and communication are complex and jokes are just another way to communicate ideas with language, even if the ideas may be somewhat non-obvious.
Then the point remains in discriminating joke and joke. Especially in the current confusion and climate of manipulation, it is important that people are led to understand what is e.g. mockery of bigotry, vs "bigotry and mockery". Oversimplifying the world and its expression serves no one (it is damaging).
The only people who care about political correctness are liberals and conservatives, and the latter group more so than the former (which is why they are more likely to engage in "dogwhistling"). Political correctness is about the "how", not the "what".
Making jokes about Jeff Bezos is punching up. Making jokes about the homeless is punching down. The reason so many people got mad at Dave Chapelle is not just that he mocked trans people (which is a marginalized identity) and is cis (which isn't). It's that he thought being Black (which is also a marginalized identity) excused it because he completely ignored that Black trans people even exist. He assumed that as a Black comedian he was always going to be punching down regardless of whom he ridiculed.
The term "political correctness" among conservatives is often an expression of the assumption that everyone else is hypocritical and bigotry is the norm. But it's not about hiding your bigotry, it's about actually holding a different opinion. Political correctness is good in so much as it makes it harder to promote bigoted views, but it's insufficient when it comes to solving latent bigotry in a society or subculture.
I remember a recent discussion (on the slatestarcodex successor, I think) that a lot of 'punching up' is actually complaining about how (some) lower class people have too much money..
>>As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder.
This is directly on target with how I felt as a kid to late teens. Is this something you talked with others about or maybe read somewhere? I have never came to grips on why it took me longer to understand people. My siblings close my age did well socializing where I felt out of touch.
