Raid.

Kills.

Bugs.

Dead.

Quote by JustForYou

Smirking? grinning? It's a minefield out there, isn't it. Unless you're writing a bespoke story for someone you've known for decades, trying to please all of the people. all of the time isn't an achievable goal.

If putting a roof over your head depended on how many people connected with what you wrote, I can see why it might be worth having a 'red flag' list, but if it doesn't, a general awareness of certain things that seem to get people irritated should suffice.

There is nothing wrong in striving to be the best that you can be at something, but if you get to the point where you can't be spontaneous, write how you think and get pleasure from doing so, the reason for doing it is lost for me.

A template of popular style, focus and expression could well see someone put something together that connects with more people. There is nothing wrong with that at all, What I would be sad to see is a time when being yourself and writing what you feel is redundant. Yes, some of us like to write in a way that is true to how we feel and think, others are more formulaic. It would be ironic if others' pleasure in doing things differently was was frowned up somewhere like here, wouldn't it?

You're making the obvious point: "if people enjoy reading it, that is the only measure of quality that matters. Not your petty dislikes of certain writing terms and devices" Could most things be better? Yes, absolutely, but it's also true that there is an audience that is not jaded and does not notice or mind cliches.

[Edited for unnecessary and unprovoked personal attack.]

Quote by kistinspencil

Please forgive me everyone for feeding the troll. I will retire now and do penance.

(He wasn't that interesting anyway.)

So you admit you're dishonest, can't / won't refute my logic. Just you being a troll saying in essence " don't try to improve this site, go away". You support censorship here, which means you support ALL censorship.

A Christian fundamentalist state prosecutor could file to have this site taken down for "obscene content transported over state lines". That has happened before.

Quote by kistinspencil

Perhaps you should spend some time learning to read. "...you have no say in its rules and strictures." Please feel free to blather all you wish about your ethics, but do not expect anything to change simply to placate your moral outrage.

Again: build your own site. I believe there is a gentleman in Paris who can offer pointers.

Semantics. You choose to use the term "no say" to mean "no legal control" while, as you obtusely ignore, I use the term as SAYING SOMETHING. I do have a voice, a say, and the site is consciously designed to give me one. Why are you so anxious to bully me off the site? Does the truth hurt? You can't refute my logic, so instead you lamely say "if you don't like it, leave".

How is anything ever going to improve if you pretend the flaws don't exist?

Censorship of any kind, under any circumstances, is dangerous. Everything posted on this site would be censored off by Christian fundamentalists, because the stories don't match their delusions of how life should work. Your woke/snowflake delusions should not restrict writers from publishing any content, whatever you choose to name it. Real adults don't practice censorship.

I do have a say; I just expressed it. In fact, the site invited me to do so. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I choose to stand up anywhere and everywhere censorship rears its ugly head. Those are my ethics. What are yours?

Thomas Paine pointed out that when things have been bad long enough, most persons begin to think that bad conditions are normal and inevitable. This is false.

Simply asking the question "why are we polarized" implies that there are only two poles. This is false.

There is another option:

1. Mind your own business;

2. Pay your own way;

3. Use force only in self defense.

If you'd like to understand how that would be implemented, I refer you to two essays, "The Nature of Government" and "Government Financing in a Free Society". The author has come under so much hysterical Ad Hominem attack, you may be reluctant to read these brief explanations. Consider why they would choose to attack the messenger rather than the message.

1.

I wish to apologize in advance to the reader. For various reasons, my spelling and grammar are flawed. I have an idiosyncratic method of punctuation, meant to satisfy my desire for my written words to reflect my audible speech.

I also realize that my compositional style comes across to some readers as overwrought or verbose. So be it. If you have the attention span of a small child, feel free to move on.

I freely admit that much of this is written in a "stream of consciousness" style. I do not believe that necessarily makes it incoherent or invalid, and I may at some later date edit it for greater organization and clarity.

I've given the ideas presented here a good deal of thought, over the course of many years. I realize that some persons are likely to be emotionally provoked by some of them. This generally results in hasty responses full of logical fallacies. I've numbered certain sections in order that those few calm and rational persons who may disagree can do so with some precision, so they can cite in specific what they are discussing.

Since the nation is so politically polarized as of this writing, I feel I must state that I am emphatically neither a conservative nor a liberal.

2.

There has been a lot of "noise" in the general culture,

an apparent attempt to drown out individuality. Many of the precepts of this philosophy, variously known as "Political Correctness" or "Woke", make no logical sense.

3.

For example, I notice quite a few things attacked as "racist" or "sexist". The self evident fact that there are exceptions to general stereotypes only means that the stereotype is not universal. It does not mean that NO ONE within that group fits the stereotype.

4.

If a person makes a stereotype observation about a group, and you consider it inaccurate, you're perfectly free to cite contrary examples. Unless you were there, however, you can't refute the first hand experience of the person commenting. You may not like their conclusions, but you have no basis to refute them.

In reply, your opponent is entitled to challenge you: "Are you saying that the majority in that group are NOT the way I describe them?" , and then it is on you to prove them wrong. Good luck with that.

5.

My observation is that the premise of "Woke" and "Political Correctness" groups is absurd. They are attempting to ignore objective reality, like a child who puts fingers in his ears and yells "Nah nah nah, I can't hear you!".

Stereotypes are not, as they would like to believe, just malicious falsehoods. They are rules of thumb that emerged from objective observation over time.

6.

If someone wishes to speak up and warn against

Confirmation bias, I am strongly in favor of that.

What I am opposed to is Orwellian censorship, attempting to tell persons what words they cannot use, and what beliefs they are not allowed to hold.

That is what I observe in practice by those who label themselves "woke" or "politically correct".

7.

The wage gap.

If it were factually true that females and minorities are paid less than white males, even though they are equally qualified, that would be a self correcting situation. If there were a population of workers being paid, for example, 25% less, and I observed that they had equal skills, I could hire them away with an offer of just 12% more money, start up a competing company, and put the "unfair" company out of business. My overhead being lower would allow me to undercut them. Yet this has not happened. Insisting that some type of irrational bias overrides the survival and profit motives is absurd.

Justice and equality are not synonymous. Enforced equality of pay or grades or anything else, regardless of merit, is not justice.

8.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote, "....all men are created equal....", he was not stating that all humans are equal. On the contrary, he owned slaves and believed that women were in many ways inferior to men.

What Jefferson WAS saying was a refutation of the "Divine Right of Kings", the concept that some individuals are designated by God to rule over others. He was not saying "we are all the same", he was saying that the King had no inherent right to rule simply due to birth or supernatural designation.

Did Jefferson succumb to inaccuracy in pursuit of poetic style? Were his words subject to editing and approval from his peers before a final edition emerged? Often, documents created by the Founding Fathers are praised for their vagueness, allowing future flexibility. I suspect this may be completely unintentional. The final words were simply what a group of quarrelsome and very disparate politicians would grudgingly agree to settle upon.

9.

Many persons succumb to the game Berne named "Yes But". For example, a female friend is an actress, and she opined that females are heavily discriminated against. She asserts that women are given fewer roles, rarely leading roles, and are underpaid. I asked her if most of her female friends in the profession agreed, and she said they very much felt the same.

I said, "So, there are a lot of you, and you all want better roles and better pay, correct?"

"Yes." she replied

"Simple, then. Pool your money and talent, and produce your own plays and movies. If you really are "just as good" as male writers, actors and producers, then you will succeed. No one can prevent you from staging a play or putting your promotional material for a movie up onto YouTube.

Every cable company in America is forced by law to have a studio and a channel with free access for the community to produce programming."

She blathered about not being able to get a loan to make a female-lead or female-content movie. I replied that statistics prove that the bulk of the wealth in America is held by females, not males.

I asked her to name some under-utilized movie actresses. I looked up their status online, and discovered that many of the women had simply married a very wealthy man, and retired from acting. How many failed male actors ended up married to a Sugar Momma? Take a look for yourself.

My friend quickly lost interest in whining about women being discriminated against.

Imagine a stereotypical Romance Novel, with a female lead character. Suppose each role in the novel had reversed genders. Now, it is the man who has to be chased, seduced and won by the woman jumping through the hoops. How well do you think that would sell to women? Poorly, and rightly so. The market wants what it wants. It does not care about "fair" or "equal".

Equality of opportunity simply means the government puts no barriers in place. It does not mean that government should enforce equality of results.

10. It just now occurs to me that some, even many, hostile readers, not liking what they're finding here, will attempt to twist my words. I am not saying that there are not unfair persons who irrationally discriminate based upon race or gender. What I am saying is that some generalizations are mostly accurate.

11. I am also stating that a victimhood mentality is often destructive to the individual, and policies that reward failure, real or imagined, are corrosive.

12.

I began by commenting about racism. If someone chooses to use an ethnic slur in reference to me, or to make a comment that has a negative stereotype attached to it, I have choices.

First of all, no one can offend me unless I give them the power to do so. If I do not regard the person making the comment as someone whose opinion deserves respect, why would I get upset?

Second, that commenter might have perfectly valid personal experiences/observations to cause them to make incorrect assumptions about me. They may indeed have fallen into the lazy habit of conforming; they have heard from many others certain things about my group, and it never occurred to them that there are exceptions to every stereotype. It is up to me to determine if any of these possibilities is true.

Dismissing the speaker as a "racist" is just as ignorant as their labeling me incorrectly.

Being offended is a choice.

Before there can be a feeling, "that makes me angry" for example, there first has to be a thought. Often, the thoughts that result in negative feelings are vague, almost unconscious, and usually illogical.

Bad feelings emerge when we have unrealistic expectations that are not met. When dealing with people, "hope for the best, but plan for the worst" is the only rational policy.

Why would you give anyone, let alone a stranger, the power to "make" you anything?

Happiness and unhappiness, joy and anger, are choices.

13.

Now, suppose a commenter has accurately described the negative traits of some, or most, of the persons in my group?

If I don't want to be regarded that way, which tactic is most likely to be effective? Self-righteous indignation and name-calling in return?

Or would it be more sensible to simply not display the negative traits that are being assumed to exist in me?

I happen to know many persons of my group that fit many elements of the negative stereotype. If I want to stop being lumped in with them, I can not only behave differently, I can address the persons who actually are bad examples, and tell them to clean up their act.

Telling someone it's "not nice" to make assumptions or to speak the general truth is futile. If a person is already resentful, biased or suspicious, attacking them with self righteous censorship will only deepen their hatred and confirm their beliefs.

14. The term "discrimination" is often misused. To discriminate is to tell the difference between things.

If you did not discriminate between safe and unsafe, healthy and unhealthy, good and bad, life would literally be impossible.

The trouble is, liberals in general have deliberately obscured any distinction between discrimination with rational factual criteria, and irrational discrimination.

If a person genuinely has objective merit, and they are rejected by others based upon irrational criteria, whose loss is that? No amount of resentment, shouting, legislation or childishly holding your breath until you turn blue is going to persuade an already irrational person.

15.

It's perfectly valid to demand freedom from harm, from active harassment.

Unfortunately, once minorities gained freedom from persecution, they actively attempted to force others to, not just leave them in peace, but to INCLUDE them.

16.

An example is that years ago, an annual St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston Massachusetts was hijacked. Vocal and pushy gays attempted to hijack the parade and participate, trying to turn it into a sort of gay pride event.

This was especially obnoxious in that it deeply offended many Irish Catholics, and it was unnecessary. The gays could have applied for a permit, paid the fees, and held their own parade. The reality was, they wanted to shove their chosen lifestyle down the throats of a major-venue audience, a parade with TV coverage. The majority of citizens would have actively boycotted a "gay pride" parade, and the gays knew this.

You should have a legal right to be TOLERATED, but that is where it ends. You have no "right" to be included where you are not wanted.

Your rights end where other person's rights begin. You have a right to your lifestyle, and they have a right to theirs. Theirs means you are NOT WELCOME in their lives, and you have no right to force your way in.

Now, you should bear in mind that was written by a person who has experienced lifelong bullying and rejection. I don't base my values on shallow subjective experience.

I'm conscious of having said "lifestyle choice". I'm not aware of any scientific proof that sexual orientation is genetic. If it were an inherited trait, how was the gay person conceived by two straight people?

Was persecution of gays prevalent, violent and misguided? Yes. That does not justify them being pushy assholes in response.

Quote by colin123

How many words is the ideal amount for you keep you interested in reading a story ?

Unless all of the words are used according to the rules of grammar, there is no point in reading the story.

“Amount” is used for mass nouns, and “number” is used for count nouns. A mass noun is something that can't be counted in specific measurement units or is measured in bulk. A count noun is something that is easily counted through some unit of measurement.

Nicola, censorship is the essence of evil. Did you not read Orwell's '1984'?

Plato asserted that censorship of fiction is essential: the young should never be shown depictions of the immoral being successful, only depictions of them being caught and punished. Aristotle called bullshit on that, saying that when a play depicts heinous behavior, the audience experiences catharsis, because everyone has such impulses from time to time.

Plato, and evidently you, regard the audience as children who have to be restricted and manipulated.

Sure, having sex with a minor is a crime in a lot of places. So are assault, theft and embezzling, but we don't censor those things from fiction, because writers are not supposed to treat adults as if they're "monkey see, monkey do" retards. Just writing about something is not the same as actively encouraging that behavior in the audience.

Everything is offensive to someone. I can say that it's great that the sun is bright today. Innocuous, right? But the guy whose wife died from skin cancer is going to be offended. The world currently is in an orgy of absurd whiny victimhood mentality. Being offended is a choice.

If what someone expresses is incorrect, feel free to state the actual facts, but you have no right to silence anyone. You are not perfect. To have freedom, it is necessary to give freedom.

Prohibiting "nonconsensual" content is asinine, a lame attempt at emasculation.

Show some intelligence. Show some respect for readers. Go ahead and put a Tipper Gore "warning label" on content you don't like, so the snowflakes won't have to read it, if you really think that's going to be beneficial. Then let the rest of us indulge in any and all types of content like adults are supposed to.

Every single story on this site is just as offensive to fundamentalist christians as "nonconconsensual" or "hate" content is to you. Should they be able to shut this site down because it's "harmful" to their idea of the way the world should work? Or should stories reflect the full spectrum of real human behavior?

Steel Reserve 211 Malt Liquor. Breakfast of Champions.