> Or how things are moderated to an US standard
It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity
And of course a long slide from any sort of meaningful enforcement on monopolies and cartels, once in the American market, and now largely in the international sphere.
Finally, Microsoft Office itself is an information prison. The information is locked in proprietary and defensively changed file formats that either require more Microsoft "products" to access the information meaningfully, or decades of reverse engineering.
And keep in mind that 90% of the data in office documents is just ... text.
Anyway, Happy Microsoft Word day apparently.
That's mostly due to TikTok which is even worse than Youtube in its opacity and complete unaccountability to anyone.
IMHO this app is controlled by the Chinese government to a degree that it is intentional that kids can't talk about stuff like sexuality (which has to be censor-named to "seggsual") or suicide ("unaliving") using proper words - sort of like 1984.
What is different now is that we are getting contact with it. While in the past the Orwellian features were kept inside borders both for propaganda effect and because nobody outside of them would willingly adopt the practice.
This may come as a shock to people here, but European countries have their own censorship in their own for adults political programs and TV. This idea that it is somehow unique to censor swearing is really weird.
It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity.
Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.
Something about this line is bothering me.
In the US, we're very diverse sure, but also that diversity comes with deep history of violence, struggle, systemic oppression, etc.
To many, current movements might come off like they're overstepping, but so much about our culture is so deeply steeped in the opposite. So much of our daily life has been structured around old deeply racist systems and as a population we're struggling to come to terms with the contradictions of concepts we were taught with the reality. We're taught we're a melting pot of cultures, yet there are so many atrocities in living memory that parts of the population wish would be simply forgotten.
So there is the counter swing of the "woke"(I hate that word and the complete corruption of the concept), which is an attempt to bring these subconscious ideas into the conscious level so we can think about them and confront them, rather than let them continue to simmer.
The overarching goal isn't to make all these things the standard, but to overshoot so that when the cultural tendon relaxes, it falls to a better place.
The "Woke" movements is an attempt to fight a cultural virus, and the remnants of the virus does not like it and gets defensive, and informs other parts of the body that this medicine is actually a virus in of itself. The goal isn't that the medicine becomes a permanent fixture, but that it brings to light the virus and allows the society to understand how to extinguish it.
The problem isn’t the deep history of discrimination. I consider that something that created a lot of growth.
The problem is discrimination is natural and it is only fought with diversity but there is no such place that is truly diverse.
I live in, by world standards, a diverse part of the LA metro area. Except there’s like no Black people. Now if I go to a more Black-dominated part of LA, there might not be Koreans. Now if I take the entirety of LA, it will have both Black people and Koreans and maybe you could call it diverse? Except there will be very few Nigerians or Kazakhstanis.
The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try. It’s like an electrician who just read some books but has never worked with an actual electrician. My attempts to accommodate a group of people I don’t know will be completely fake. They will know I don’t know a single Nigerian or Kazakhstani.
So when people try to be woke, it usually comes from that level of inexperience. It’s not real diversity. It’s that electrician trying their best but doing it all wrong.
> The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try.
Yup. You demonstrate an awareness, a conscientiousness, that's too rare.
I've been in gatherings (eg board meetings) where someone will presume to speak on behalf of others. While one of those others is sitting right there, trying to be heard.
Not helpful.
And super awkward.
Which reminds me... That All Gas No Breaks guy did a terrific segment about those "antifa" & "BLM" protests in Portland Oregon. Standard in person interviews with a bunch of bored white kids just looking for a fight.
Then the genius bit: No Breaks sought out blacks and asked them about the protests. He just let's them talk, in that great way that he does.
Punchline: the blacks interviewed stated the belligerents a) were missing the point (to listen to black people) and b) were making it that much harder for blacks to be heard.
Typical.
In the social media massively distributed bullhorn industry, these issues are used to create a distracting perma-debate that both parties can employ and divide for their needed political support. But notice that the debates never center on the most important diversity issue: the fact that the rich have almost all the money, is squeezing everyone, and the squeezing appears as fissures along racial and ethnic lines.
Basically, non-whites basically are saying "hey we need money and investment from white people". Which is true! 99% of nonwhite communities need massive investment.
But white people say "we don't have any money". Which is true! Because the white middle class is gone, the upper middle class is now being hollowed out, and generational warfare has left most young "upper class" white people as well as the once-middle-class whites completely laden with loans. So 90% of whites don't have money, and THEY need investment.
So where's the money? Oh ... right.
Obviously not true. The government has almost all the money. When it needs more, it just prints off a few trillion as necessary.
As for the rich, they by and large created the wealth they have. When you invest money in an enterprise that is productive, you're creating wealth.
As someone old enough that I could be a parent of youngish EU citizen, I too watched a lot of US cartoons and movies as a kid.