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Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds
PvtVoid writes: "Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu pens a heartfelt takedown of misogyny in nerd culture: 'I’ve heard and seen the stories that those of you who followed the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter have seen—women getting groped at cons, women getting vicious insults flung at them online, women getting stalked by creeps in college and told they should be "flattered." I’ve heard Elliot Rodger’s voice before. I was expecting his manifesto to be incomprehensible madness—hoping for it to be—but it wasn’t. It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder. I've heard it from acquaintances, I've heard it from friends. I've heard it come out of my own mouth, in moments of anger and weakness.
What the f*$# is wrong with us? How much longer are we going to be in denial that there's a thing called "rape culture" and we ought to do something about it? ... To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys — we are not the victims here. We are not the underdogs. We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people's entitlement. We're not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.'"
What the f*$# is wrong with us? How much longer are we going to be in denial that there's a thing called "rape culture" and we ought to do something about it? ... To paraphrase the great John Oliver, listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys — we are not the victims here. We are not the underdogs. We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people's entitlement. We're not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.'"
"Itâ(TM)s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto ..."
You hang around a weird/scary bunch of angry geeky guys. The "manifesto" becomes far-out well before the murder-intent plans.
I don't know about you, but there's nothing wrong with me. I would appreciate it if you stopped putting words into my mouth.
I think Henry Rollins summed it up the best...
You say we're all the same.
You don't even know my name.
Sometime somewhere someone wants hurt you and I'm one of them
You think you know about me...
You don't know a damn thing about me!
So I take all the blame...
I'm not all men
I'm just one man
I'm not that man!
How much longer are we going to be in denial that there's a thing called "rape culture" and we ought to do something about it?
Forever, because there is no such thing. Only by using the ever-expanding militant-feminist definition of rape which currently stands at "anything, at all, ever, that makes me in the slightest bit uncomfortable" can we possibly believe there's actually a culture of rape. What we ACTUALLY have is a culture of socailly retarded males and females, and culture of feminists preying on the socially retarded females and making them believe that they're entitled to waltz through never being made to feel uncomfortable, ever. This is patently untrue, and no amount of slut-walks can ever create a utopia where a woman - even a man - can leave a ladeeda life.
This must be another of these fake outrage threads.
women are also bitches.
So what? You're an asshole. That does not give me the right to take your life.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
And you're an ass. Women are women.
The guy went to the gym and loved to go out and take pics of himself and his BMW. He was not a nerd.
You will have to use the Asians or autists as scapegoats because we are not taking the fall for this one. Go to hell you piece of shit.
I like to think that most of us are above all this nonsense and just treat each other equally regardless, I don't think it's quite fair to stereotype 'nerds', 'geeks', 'tech-heads' or whatever term you wish to use, and tar us all with the same brush.
Good to see the PC police out in full force. Wonder why these folks don't focus their energies on the dozens shot in inner cities around the country EVERY NIGHT rather than trying to score political points by pointing out "Look! an angry white guy did it!" every time a mass shooting happens (and by that, I mean the statistically insignificant one or two times a year it happens)? It's an election year, bitches.
Wonder how its working out for him after this.
Some variation of this comes up now and then, this has been a topic and argument within geekdom for, well, as long as I can remember at least. Sadly I rarely see people actually starting to see from another perspective and instead just circling the wagons to defend about their misogyny.
...most of my life, obviously - because I don't ever recall EVER seeing a geek/nerd in my circles stalking anyone, threatening a girl and never mind hitting one. I'd say they'd improve their life if they even TRIED to HIT on any woman at all.
Most of those I know are frightened at the very concept of dating, pretty socially awkward I guess, but kind and gentle caring people who wouldn't even DREAM of hurting anyone. Sure, they'll kick your mental-a** and hurt your coding feelings by pointing out the numerous bugs in your code, and flaws in your theories, and possibly sweep the floor with your ego in gaming, but no way they'd ever even lift a finger to actually hurt you.
Nerds are usually unsure of themselves, usually excellent at SOMETHING and not so much at everything else. This is usually because they have spent so much time coding and learning very complicated stuff that takes a LONG time of anyone's life, so it's bound to steal some time from the usual life that just about anyone else live, learning the ropes of networking and social skills.
I must have been living under a rock the last 30 years or so.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
So, while the main threads of this discussion will certainly have no trouble sustaining combustion, what happens if we change the title to:
Misogyny, Entitlement, and Muslims
Misogyny, Entitlement, and Hispanics
Misogyny, Entitlement, and The 1%
Is it still open season on Nerds? Will I not get in trouble for binding "those people" to Nerds, as opposed to Blacks, or Jews, or... ?
And I am really not in the mood to exhaust myself (to some measureable extent) (once more) (is that the actual intent???) refuting A, B, C, and D,..., in such as this standard, packaged doggerel. Perhaps I will at least read the thing (first line or two) at some point, given some level of boredom.
All I can say, is learn to think for yourself, see what makes sense to you, do your best to comport yourself in a reasonable way, all things considered.
Heraclitus: Latent structure is master of obvious structure.
Neil Young: There's more to the picture, than meets the eye, hey-hey, my-my.
Andersen: The Emperor has no clothes!
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Is this a direct offshoot of our "never a loser" upbringing? I'm afraid these kids who go out on a rampage, thinking the entire time *they* are the victim, may actually be a victim of the coddled upbringing that seems to be commonplace since the 90's. I'm talking about helicopter parents who refuse to let their children get Bs, get second place (or even, god forbid, last place) in any kind of competition. Then we see them unable to understand and cope with failure later in life and blame others instead of accepting defeat. Like most people, I blame the parents. I blame them for not letting them fail. Parents should provide positive influence and basic necessities for children, then get the hell out of the way and let children grow up on their own.
Children who grow up without siblings (ie compeition for parents time) seem to be particularly narrisistic and useless when combined with overbearing and coddling parents. Those
"No, not the straw man that all men are constantly plotting rape, but that we live in an entitlement culture where guys think they need to be having sex with girls in order to be happy and fulfilled." I really don't know where to begin and which line of thought should i follow when answering this idiotic sentence. From the meta-level fact that we as a species need to have sex in order to survive? From the evolutionary point of view, where lust is a mechanism of encouraging and rewarding intercourse? From the psychological point of view where the need for intimacy self-fulfillment and for high self-esteem is highly entangled with need of finding a partner? So "what the fuck is wrong with us?". Maybe the correct question is: "what the fuck is wrong with him?"
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Telling people who feel like Elliot Rodger that they're not a victim. This will help because 1) they'll believe it, and 2) believing it will solve their issues with reality.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps it will simply fuel their hatred even more, because now they're even having the reality of their emotions denied, as if they're somehow defective in that respect too.
Assigning victims and victimizers here is completely irrelevant to finding out what's actually wrong with this situation, and how to fix it.
...it's about how you were raised, what ethics and morals were instilled in your most influential years, and your overall social development. Being a "nerd" or a "geek" has nothing to do with it, except that it's generally more normal for people who are classified as such to have been socially outcast or on the fringe at some point in their early (pre-adult) lives.
This guy was a complete a-hole, that's a given. He was also from a wealthy family and had a tremendous sense of entitlement. I'd venture that a good part of his misogyny has a basis in that upbringing and entitled lifestyle.
Let's leave the labels out of it and have a real discussion about mental health and social attitudes for a change.
When we can all post online as AC and have TV shows like Tosh.0 and other animated shows where all the adult males are jerks and misogynistic, it's unrealistic to expect young men to think they aren't supposed to be the same.
That and the societal breakdown created by the Entitled Techies and their CEO golf buddies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Assuming posting this on Slashdot was an attempt to prove verify the author's thesis. Bravo. The comment thread proves the veracity of everything he says.
Can we please avoid posting sexist drivel like this? If I want to be attacked for being my gender I would go over to SRS on reddit. I come here for tech news and this is inappropriate.
The OP's statement of living in a rape culture is elitist and needs to be toned down. We don't have a rape culture in the US. Women aren't being systematically raped as a form of control, so please stop using that term. It's melodramatic, and pointless. What we have is a geek society that is attention-hungry and immature. More and more of us are growing up with the internet, and the sense of anonymity it provides. They haven't learned simple respect of others, and that you can have competition without belittling people, and trampling their self-esteem. Plus, you have a biased media that is more focused on ratings than actual journalistic integrity. It's a media that will spend weeks to months picking apart every detail of a tragedy, and inadvertently give a person a kind of morbid immortality. Now, all that said, I don't know what the answer is. I don't think it's a black or white issue with a simple fix.
but his history is pretty weak. Up until the rise of the internet in the '90s (or possibly the "Weird Science"/"Revenge of the Nerds" era in the 1980s), nerds/geeks/otaku were right up there with gays, women and ethnic/religious minorities for being bullied, harassed and abused by the crueler edges of the mainstream. And this kind of harassment still goes on in certain areas/communities - try being a geek in a gang-ridden slum sometime.
That certainly doesn't justify a nerd perpetuating the cycle of abuse onto women or any of the other groups. But it does mean that there are better ways to engage the "nerd community" than by claiming that they aren't the subjects of abuse themselves.
We are the 198 proof..
What is this bullshit? Why is he talking about "us", how dare he try to include ALL men in this rubbish. Perhaps he needs to find better friends?
Really people you have it backwards the cause was no misogyny that is a symptom.
If this guy had been gay he would have hated men that did not want to sleep with him.
If this person had been a straight woman she would have hated men that would not sleep with her.
If this person had been a gay woman she would have hated women that would not sleep with her.
They key here is Narcissist. It is selfishness taken to a pathological level. People like that hate those that do not give them what they want.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
5 males and 2 females got killed.
Yeah, it's definitely a femalecentric problem.
Nerds are passionate about things- ER didn't care about anything other than means to bolster his fragile constantly damaged ego.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Dark Reflection
Why is Elliot Rodger being put into the Nerd category? I have not seen anything on this guy that would put him in the Geek or Nerd category. What languages did he code in? What con's did he attend? What was his comic book/manga collection like? What technical degree's did he hold? This discussion has nothing to do with "misogyny entitlement nerds" but a genuine crazy kid.
Just because some guy is a Asperger social reject does not put him into the category of nerd or geek. Elliot has major issues and he blamed women and people who had social skills for his troubles. He was an entitled little shit who thought having a BMW, traveling the world and wearing $500 sweaters would automatically get him the girls. It turns out he lacked the one major component in the Get The Girl Formula that you really need, a personality. He found an outlet in Men's Rights/The Red Pill/Misogyny but he could have found an outlet in any of the other shitty beliefs that exist in our society like 9/11 conspiracies, Little Green Men and the Black President is from Kenya. Blaming a sub collection of a sub portion of our culture is not going to find the answer to the complex problem of what to do with truly mentally ill people.
Linux O Muerte!
Everyone who is visible on the internet will get vicious insults thrown at them, be they man or female. If you're on the internet, putting yourself out there on youtube videos or what ever, you need to learn to deal with it.
He mentioned that Revenge of the Nerds had a scene of what would be legally defined as rape, but there was plenty of other films around that time that featured attempted assault/rape/murder taken in a fairly light manner. it's also odd to pin that on 'nerds', as the way I understand it, the majority of rape happens in scenarios at least resembling a date or going out, both activities typically not strongly associated with nerds.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So much of what is coming out of #YesAllWomen is misandry disguised as fighting misogyny. Firefox is telling me misandry isn't even a word for crying out loud.
Elliot Rodger was a mental health issue, it had nothing to do with gender. Whether he got his orders from The Beatles backwards music, Allah or porn culture, the fact is he was mentally broken. Shame on the media and shame on you for distracting from the problem, mental health issues, and making it a gender issue just to get more tweets.
Despite men in the U.S. suffering violent death at a rate more than three times that of women we get campaigns to end violence, but only against women.
He could have gotten laid for less than the cost of the gun. He could have killed just women rather than more men then women. He didn't. Misogyny is an excuse, a convenient one for people to express their misandry.
That's because this entire submission should be modded -5 Flamebait
So, nerds never get beaten up in school, then.
Back to figuring out What Is Wrong With Me ...
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
This is the 3rd post I am reading today, that has nothing to do with technology other than talking about an angry geek (this particular post, other are just similar). I knew the posting quality will decline after the resignation of R. Malda, but this is becoming ridiculous lately. Is this me or other old timers are feeling the same ?
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Yes, because every mean outburst against a woman ends with her dead. Oh, wait, no it doesn't. Now, stop being an asshole.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Hey Emacs vs VI is a real division in IT and not stupid, unless you use beeping VI.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If anyone is interested in reading my response to this article and my thoughts in general of this situation. Comments welcome!
http://notjoepesci.blogspot.com/2014/05/nerds-entitlement-and-intimacy-response.html
Every week I find out a new horrible thing I am and things that I didn't know I believed. As a man, I hate women. As a Caucasian, I hate minorities. As someone with a job, I hate those without jobs. As middle class, I hate the poor.
...
There must be groups out there that I can give my money to or a bunch of canned statements I can make to minimize the horrible things I'm learning about my self, right?
Forgot one! By posting this, I'm ignorant, unwilling to change and I have just amplified all of the things above, regardless of anything else I have ever said or done. I really need to start accepting the evil that is me deep within
we cant do that today, the liberals will throw a fit about equality
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Can someone explain rape culture to me? As a human male I don't go around raping, leering, or harassing women, am I excused from this culture on the basis of good behavior?
Writing anti-male missives won't get you laid.
Hopping on the misogyny bandwagon will not get you laid.
Until you understand the differences of what women say versus how they act, you will continue to be powerless in your quest for attention.
http://www.returnofkings.com/3...
Go fuck yourself. Seriously. You count as worse than those you accuse, because you at least recognize the existence of a bigger picture, then deliberately ignore it on one side of your equation to get the result you want.
You would paint all of geek culture with the same misogynistic brush... Are all Arabs radical jihadis? Do all women suck at sports? Do all Jews drink the blood of unbaptized Christian babies? Do all blacks rock at sports?
Free hint - When geeks / men / whites / middle-class / $majority_group_x push back against this sort of bullshit, we don't do it because we disagree with your fundamental premise; we do it because you accuse us, you accuse me of doing what you describe, solely for my membership in an extremely loosely defined social grouping, and you don't know a thing about me.
You'll have much better luck trying to make friends among those who agree with you (aside from your "socially acceptable prejudice") than by alienating 99% of the group most able to assist you in your long-term goals, right out of the gate.
I would love to, if the feminists could keep their fucking man-hating agenda out of it long enough to do so.
Giving a speech about protecting women is a different skill set than treating them fairly.
The speech-makers are trying to control other people: either with rhetoric or in many cases sexual assault.
This dude was another over-educated urbanite who needed to hear about Jesus. Not theoreticizing about social ettiquette reforms.
Uh yes, a lot of us geeks HAVE had our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly. A lot of us HAVE someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes. I have about a dozen inch to two inch long scars on my left hand from where a locker door was repeatedly slammed on it.
Now the fact many geeks have been the victims of abuse in their past doesn't justify them turning around victimizing women who had nothing to do with it, but the problem is that they're transferring their anger onto innocent victims, not necessarily that they're upset to begin with.
So apparently if you're a standard frustrated angry geeky guy you need to have a manifesto? Damn. Guess I missed that memo.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Because this whole discussion is silly. Plenty of nerds are misogynistic jerks. But plenty of non-nerds are as well, and I have seen NO evidence that it is any more common among nerds than among the population in general. In the absence of evidence, associating "nerd culture" with misogynism is just stupid.
Throughout my career, I have worked with many engineers, programmers, and other nerds. My experience is that they are the least misogynistic people I have ever met, and they have mostly been polite, professional, and welcoming to their female co-workers. Have you ever worked with salesmen? Or construction workers? Nerds are saints by comparison.
It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part
Except for the part where it isn't. The manifesto is a lot of things. It's a case study in narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, social anxiety disorder...you name it, it's in there, and you can spin it however you want.
The kid played WoW, so he must be a geek.
Never mind that he didn't excel in academics, that he never showed any interest in science, mathematics or technology, that he took a handful of liberal arts courses that he had to drop because the only thing he could concentrate on were girls. Does that sound like a geek? No, to me it pretty much sounds like everybody who isn't a geek.
Is there a way to get this submission removed? There is so much wrong with this idiotic article. It doesn't belong on Slashdot.
After Columbine, with reports (true or not) that the killers had been bullied, nobody took that to mean that the anti-bullying crowd is dangerous or that people who claim to be victims of bullies are really just misanthropic killers. "Geeks who don't like to be bullied are part of a murder culture".
(Well, I'm sure some people took it to mean that, but we recognize that they're being assholes about it.)
But replace "bullied" with "rejected by women" and all of a sudden it means there is rampant misogyny among angry geeks. No, it's not, it means that if a lot of people are rejected by society, a few of them will become killers. This doesn't mean that the complaints about rejection are wrong, or that geeks with such complaints are dangerous, any more than Columbine showed that complaints about bullies are wrong, or that a higher murder rate when unemployment goes up shows that we should ignore unemployment. (What's the unemployment equivalent to rape culture?)
..."women seem wicked when you're unwanted."
Telling a bunch of people to "just stop" fails to address the underlying causes.
Geeks are frustrated because they don't have good luck with women. Rejection and loneliness results in the misogyny and creepiness lamented here. As a matter of mental self-defense, geeks decide that women are turned off by intelligence, and they (despite themselves) go around demanding that women should smarten-up and start finding intelligence sexy. Well, this is incorrect.
Women aren't turned off by intelligence. They are turned off by constantly being made to feel stupid. They are also turned off by bad social skills, bad physical health, and the inclination to play video games and study all day every day (rather than going out and doing something fun with friends).
If you want to get a real girlfriend, you are going to have to get over your sense of superiority, practice authentic humility, and be ready to give up a lot of your video-game time and study-time to instead go out on social events with a group of mutual friends, on a regular basis. Clean up your act, become what women want, and *then* you might get one. If you aren't willing to do this, then you have no business demanding that women start putting up with a bunch of stuff they don't like so they can have the privilege of being with you.
First of all, let's point out the obvious: Rodgers killed twice as many men as women.
Which doesn't mean I'm saying violence against women isn't a serious problem, or that I don't care about the two women he killed. Gad are we really that simple-minded that it has to be one or the other? I'm only saying that Rodgers shouldn't be held up as THE paradigm for the way men treat women. Rodgers knew when he posted his manifesto that he was, in effect, writing his own obituary. He deliberately framed his future actions in full, cynical knowledge of society's sexism.
Let me make what should be an obvious point here: we shouldn't accept Rodgers' framing of his actions, for the simple reason he was a twisted person with a nasty agenda. Yes, his stated views on women were ugly, but going by his actions he hated *humanity* and chose targets of opportunity. He not only robbed James Hong, George Chen, David Wang and Christopher Michael-Martinez of collectively some two hundred years of lifespan. He successfully exploited our knee-jerk credulity so as to erase those kids from our consciousness as victims of his crimes.
As for "what is wrong with nerds?", that begs the question. Is there a problem with "nerds"? What is a "nerd" anyway?
The reason for media nerd chic is that feeling marginalized is ironically something most people can identify with. So is feeling emotionally vulnerable, and sometimes even isolated. And we all make regrettable and sometimes embarrassing mistakes in conducting our relationships with other people. But that doesn't mean we can't understand that "no means no", or that it's unpleasant and threatening to have unwanted attentions forced on you.
So if by "nerd" you mean "aggressively unpleasant person who blames other people for their reaction to his obnoxious behavior," well most of us aren't that kind of "nerd". The blockhead opinions of people like that have nothing to do with us.
If by "nerd" you mean "non-coformist who'd rather live with some degree of social marginalization than not act like himself," then you have to show us that this is tantamount to being an obnoxious and possibly violent twerp, which I don't think it is.
Those idiots who cheered Rodgers on are not my fault either. Maybe they're in part my problem, as they are a problem for everyone who has to live in the same society as they do. I may feel *concern* over their actions, but I don't feel a shred of guilt. Somebody else made them blockheads, not me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
tech culture is ripe for a revolution against the basement-dwelling dork-country club pissing contest that is tech work
but this ain't it...
tech dorks problems are not the same as the UCSB killers problems
they have **similarities** but these murders are not indicative of something about tech workers
the only similarity is that both the UCSB killer and tech dorks are antagonistic to women
tech culture hates women and it resents the sensabilities they bring to a project....that's awful....but TFA does nothing to solve that
Thank you Dave Raggett
Instead there has been a long steady reduction in rape in this country that has lasted for decades and we are now down to the same rate it was in 1970.
So the data says rape is reducing down to 40 year lows...and yet the rhetoric is getting screechingly loud. Why is that?
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=datool&surl=/arrests/index.cfm#
--Filter on "All-Ages" and "Forcible Rape".
I don't get it. We are far better off, yet we need to scream about how bad it is? I am perplexed?
blah
but you can suck a bag of dicks.
It's normal and natural for someone to feel frustrated when he or she has difficulty finding someone to date. It's normal to feel rejected when you get rejected. It's normal to resent being overlooked.
At one time or another, most if not all people have felt this way.
Because I have a male point of view, I'm going to add that it's normal for men to be frustrated and bewildered by the disconnect between what women say they want in a man and what kind of men they actually date.
Obviously, violence should never result from these feelings. This frustration should be motivation for self improvement.
The response should be more along the lines of "Oh, you're not interested? ok. Take care."
Me, I use the women who ignored me and the bitches who used me as motivation to treat the woman in my life even better.
My point is that being frustrated and angry are alright just so long as you don't cross the line and start hurting people.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps its the geek culture that attracts misogynists. Or at last that slice of misogynists that wants to retreat from mixed social or work groups because the IT department has been a male bastion. But then there are a lot of different cultures that have their own subset of women haters. Traditional blue collar professions had their own memes surrounding the idea that women just can't do the job, so they are not welcome on the construction site (other than as the cute secretary in the foreman's trailer). When women did start appearing, a subset of men refused to judge them on their abilities. Same thing in traditional engineering professions back in the old days. "Women can't do math" or "don't have the requisite spatial/mechanical skills". I've heard it all before in my travels through the aforementioned professions.
The geek persona just expresses misogyny in one particular fashion that seems to stand out more in our society. So it gets attention. I don't see the alpha male or controlling sociopath cultures being singled out. But the attitude that women are here to serve men at their pleasure or comply with their wishes is every bit as bad as that of people who are just trying to retreat to a corner of their lives where they don't have to deal with women as equals. In fact, these other types of men are possibly more dangerous in that they seek out women to dominate.
Perhaps the issue should be our tolerance of all forms of misogyny. The geek expression of it has been in the news lately, but that may only be because the other forms have become more or less typical behaviors in our society.
Have gnu, will travel.
Women are human beings. And YOU are an ass. There, fixed that for you.
1 of them is an asshole.
Result--- all nerds are assholes.
I've been to conventions. I've seen the way that nerds interact with the females there. And the number of assholes is way under 1%.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
It could be worse. Someone could have brought up Hitler. ...
Dammit.
Nerds are a hard to define group of persons. Depending on the kind of group of people, nerds have different properties. In some context it is used as a term of honor, while other use the term to decry someone. In the article I assume to a different definition of nerd is referred to. A nerd is there a person with low self-esteem. Someone who thinks suppressed, mobbed or ignored by others. They are a little closer to the autistic side and they feel uncomfortable around other people. Even more when those people are not nerds too.
The male version of such nerds tend to have had not much experience with women and might not know how to act proper around them. They might be even aware of this fact. They might even understand the psychology of mating rituals, but as they lack the intuition (which comes from practice and success) they have an unsatisfied need in that context.
A mental solution to fix this from a personal point of view is to imitate successful role models. These figures can come from the real world or from TV, books, videos and even games. However, these role models are mostly incompatible with the present and often not compatible with any culture on earth to any given time. Nevertheless, they often carry an image of women as "bitches" or "slaves", which can result in a male behavior which is highly inappropriate.
Another solution from a personal view is projection of self-hate onto others. Example: From "I hate me for not having sex with women" the nerd makes the switch to "I hate women for rejecting me". This even works when he was not actively rejected but ignored.
Both strategies can even used together for a maximum of awkwardness and hate.
Please do not misinterpret this as "He hates nerds". I don't. I am one myself. Even though I chose a third solution and after decades I tried a fourth that worked and now I am a normal person ;-)
The third solution is suggesting to yourself that you are not interested in women beside being a friend. I tried that from 20 to 35, which worked perfectly in the beginning because I had my first girlfriend shortly after I switched to that scheme. However, that relationship only worked for some month and was totally unsatisfactorily for the next 15 years. Then I decided that a new scheme might work even better. I could try to be polite and ask women out, but first I should not look like an unwashed yeti from under the bridge. And that really worked. It would also work with people who have chosen method one or two. However, they need first to accept who they are and then accept that women are humans and equals. And acceptance is not achieved by saying it but by meaning it. If you have any trouble with that: See a shrink. I did (somehow). It worked.
Rapist. Misogynist. Nerd. All labels.
You can apply them to individuals specific criteria. Have you raped? You're a rapist. Do you hate all females? Mysogynist. Overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired? Nerd.
However. The existence of Nerd Mysoginists does not make all members of the Nerd set into Mysoginists. The existence of Rapist Misogynists does not mean that all Misogynists are Rapists.
The author has a problem with Mysoginists. Hating women is not part of any nerd culture I've ever seen or participated in.
You are the exact reason it does.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It does give me the right to call bullshit on anyone who claims that this incident targeted primarily females.
I think you should watch the shooter's Youtube movie. After that, you're more than welcome to come back here and apologize.
Spoiler: he clearly states he seeks revenge on the girls for making him feel lonely, unwanted, and being a virgin well in his twenties. He had never even kissed a girl. Obligatory.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
That so? Please do explain. And then go back to tumblr and blog about it.
I've never done any of that crap. No, f'reals. I was raised very poorly by a single mother in Santa Cruz, home of excessive political correctness, but part of the good that came out of it is a clear sense of boundaries by getting that shit rammed into my head plenty. I postulate that I could have gotten laid more in my life if I did some of that, but the reward ain't worth the price. Obviously he's feeling guilty though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Too bad there are no actual females posting in response to this.... My thoughts, in summary - I don't think Arthur Chu was looking to blame ALL nerds for harassing women. I believe anyone who thinks that is missing the point. His point, as I understand it, is that if you *are* harassing, disrespecting, or abusing women, or even "just" issuing misogynistic comments, you should cease to do so. If you hear or see this type of behavior, call it out. Yes, ALL women have been harassed (at a very minimum) at some point in their lives (hence "#YesAllWomen"). No, not all of them have not been harassed or abused by nerds. But some have. So cut that shit out (IF YOU ARE DOING IT). And if you're not, well, good for you!
"We are not the ones who have our ownership over our bodies and our emotions stepped on constantly by other people's entitlement. We're not the ones where one out of six of us will have someone violently attempt to take control of our bodies in our lifetimes.'"
Are you sure?
I mean: I've never been raped. That's a legitimate fear of many women that I'm unlikely to experience outside the penal system. But I've been shoved into walls. I've been dumped in a trash can (that was when I was 5 years old). I've had notebooks knocked from me, signs put on me, been punched, kicked, had my property vandalized, been ridiculed publicly, shot with a slingshot, hit with a car.... all for having been the different kid. All for having been the nerd.
Will I ever *really* know what it's like to be a woman? No. Will a straght woman know what a homosexual man goes through? Will a white person understand the plight of a black one? Will the Jock understand the Nerd? No. Will an American Christian understand the Muslim, Wiccan, or Athiest? No.
There are a lot of cultures of violence; not just the one against women. There are a lot of cultures that dehumanize, not just the one that dehumanizes women. The talking heads on this subject take an unjustified position of universal and unique persecution. Men should look at women as people, while simultaniously the talking head saying it doesn't look at men as people.
And as to this narccissitic murderer. I've no doubt he was masogynist, but it's wrong to say that he was the product of that culture. I've seen this guy before. He's the two kids at Columbine. He's the postal worker that went after his bosses. He suffers from narccissism and a feeling of persecution (which may have at least some level of truth) and blames others for his misfortune. In Columbine it was jocks. With many, it's their boss or neighbor. For this kid it was women (among others: He also lashes out at a lack of friends. IIRC: The majority of his victims were male).
So yes: There's a real problem with a culture in the US that dehumanizes women. It's real. It's bad. It needs to be fixed. It is, however, not unique; and it is not the reason for this particular murder spree.
I came in expecting a bunch of hand-waving denials, cries of "WHAT ABOUT MEN'S RIGHTS?!?!", and other such nonsense and I was not disappointed!
Women in tech/nerd circles generally face a lot more BS than a man would in the identical situation. That continues to go on because some of us seem to think this is an attack or indictment and refuse to acknowledge it.
Here's a pro tip: the guys who grab women's breasts, stand immediately in front of a woman when they're the only two in the elevator (blocking her exit), start asking sexually-charged questions, follow her around after a meeting, or even just the ones who automatically dismiss anything a female developer says.... They don't generally act like jerks in plain view. When they do, those of us who do care sit by silently; when the manager pats a female developer on the head and tells her not to worry about it, a lot of guys just laugh or ignore it.
You may think it doesn't happen but ask the women in your group how many times people have treated them like children, dismissed them, or behaved in a really creepy way even after being asked to stop **. Ask any reasonably well-known geek girl to show you her "death & rape threat" tweet or email folder and you'll see hundreds or thousands of them.
** I've personally seen it many times; once I even witnessed a guy ask a female geek how many guys she had slept with, then get righteously offended and angry when she said that was an inappropriate question. (To my own younger self's shame I did not step in and call him out at the time - something I regret). Women often feel they can't speak up about anything that happens to them because they are loudly shouted down as liars, whores, or met with complete denial. Even asking someone politely to stop being a creep can elicit angry self-righteous replies.
I think the refusal to see the issue and complete denial stems from fear - the fear that this will spiral into some out-of-control political correctness where we can't tell a joke, give a compliment, or even chat up women anymore. As far as I can tell that's just a manufactured fear with no basis in reality. The creepy angle also comes from guys who feel they are unable to approach women, but prominent and famous women are "known" to them, a sort of false relationship we all can tend to feel we have with the public figures in our lives. In that situation they act far more familiar than they otherwise would.
So here's a simple thing you can do: make your tech meetups friendly toward women. If you see another guy acting creepy, call him out on it. If you find yourself objecting to a technical point raised by a female developer, just take a half a second to think "would I object if it were Bob asking instead of Alice?". Stop letting the bad apples spoil the whole bunch, and worse - teach the young men and women in tech that this behavior is acceptable. Most of all, stop denying there's a problem.
I bet if even 5% of the male developers spoke out against the negative behavior and actively supported women in tech, we could completely eliminate this issue almost overnight.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
....said a loser who now populates this site.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Great argument. Made an awesome showing of yourself there. Go man-hate somewhere else.
Excuse me, but Nerds *rarely* act out their fantasies. Football players, on the other hand, rape constantly and GET AWAY WITH IT, because they are football players.
We, as a culture, have elevated football to almost god-hood, and when High-school footballers raped a drunk girl, an entire town CONSPIRED to cover the whole thing up, until some "nerds" hacked the phones of the footballers for evidence and made national news, and the town couldn't hide it anymore.
Excuse me, but 99 times out of 100 it's the nerds who keep to themselves and don't harm a fly, while with Jocks you can turn that number on its head. 99 times out 100 they will beat up, rape, and basically do whatever they hell they feel like.
Stop taking this one incident and applying it to nerd culture. You might as well be taking this one incident and applying it to all gun culture or all american culture.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
It could be worse. Someone could have brought up Hitler. ...
Dammit.
No worries, it doesn't count as a Godwin until you actually compare someone to Hitler.
Carry on.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I haven't posted on Slashdot in years, but the response to this story made me want to come out of the woodwork.
So far In the comments I've seen:
--He isn't really a nerd! NOFP!
--Nerds don't hit on girls, so NOFP!
--He's using a stereotype! I'm not that guy, so NMFP!
I'm a woman working in a technical field and I've been at this game since 1996. In my current company, the men here outnumber me 9-1. When you add in a love of geeky pursuits (at one convention, I remember counting 3 women in a group of 500 men), I've spent a lot of time being one of the guys.
In the beginning, it was exciting -- thrilling!-- to be the only woman in a meeting. I was the exception! I was going to make it! I was better than those girly-girls with their silly pursuits. But, not only do I realize that was a stupid-ass position that reinforced the perceptions of women's interests being lesser than men, I'm just tired of it. Tired of little backhanded bullshit comments. Tired of having to laugh at stupid sexist shit to be one of the boys. And especially tired of being told there's no problem. And this is not just me. Again, it's necessarily a small data pool (see % above), but I've never met a woman who didn't have at least 3 stories about bullshit at work. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
Again, it's not that I can't hack it. I can. This isn't a poor me, come and save me post. At this point, my hide is tempered steel -- fucking bring it, world. It's that I shouldn't have to, and as I said above, it's fucking exhausting.
And it's more than just eating shit at work: We live in a world where literally yesterday a woman was stoned to death by her family for failing to live her life they way they wanted. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/28/world/asia/pakistan-pregnant-woman-killed/) . Our culture shames a woman for accepting sexual advances and blames her if she rejects them (http://nypost.com/cover/#covers-1401159702). There is literally no way to win as a woman.
Look, guys. Even if you've done a ton of soul searching, and you genuinely believe you're not part of the problem, go to the next step. The women around you are hurting. They're exhausted. They're being gaslighted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting) left, right and center. So if you genuinely think you're not making things works, figure out how to make it better. Find a woman to mentor. If you're in a meeting, and a woman's voice isn't getting heard, help her (although, please avoid mansplaining (i.e. "What Jane really means to say is...."). If someone say some bullshit about women in your workplace, call them out on it.
Sorry for this long cri de coeur, but you guys are my peeps and the responses broke my heart. You're my guys, my people, my tribe. Can't you back us up?
"...you can steal my woman, but you ain't done nuthin' smart."
Men, especially nerds, are horrible, mean, vicious people and all men should be treated as such at all times. Women, on the other hands, are always innocent victims of abuse, are always under threat, and must live their lives like they are about to be raped because men.
So, women, do us all a favor, and just stop. Stop interacting with men. Stop talking to men, stop dating men, stop having sex with men, stop marrying men. Just stop, because if you hate and fear men so much that is exactly what any sane person would do.
I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing how there is something intrinsically wrong with me and that I should be feared because I have a Y chromosome. Fuck you too. I haven't hit, let alone raped, any woman, ever. I have been hit three times by a woman and not once did I retaliate as I could have. I took it. But, if I had hit her back, I would have been the bad guy.
If women wouldn't reward the behavior of bad men, then there wouldn't be so many bad men, but, as we know, women love bad boys right up until that bad boy is bad to them. When that happens to a woman, she thinks back to all the bad men she has dated and concludes all men are bad because the problem couldn't possibly her and her choices.
Don't want to be abused or get raped? Don't be friends with or date immature, over-entitled, sociopathic bad boys with a history of hurting other people including women. Start looking at character instead of abs, or clothes, or height or cars. Stop going to clubs, getting wasted, and giving your number to that hot guy in the sick shirt, let alone banging him in a one night stand. Find a better place to meet guys or shut the fuck up about how horrible the men you fuck are because that is you having shallow and/or bad taste.
Oh, and when you get drunk and then go home and fuck a guy, you weren't raped. You were irresponsible. If you can't keep your panties on and legs closed when you get drunk, don't get drunk.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Not only is he unfairly dissing nerds, he's also being unfair to men. Whats with this idea that women on the whole are the more virtuous sex? Seems sort of an oldfashioned notion to me. Women can and are just as dirty, underhanded, and evil as men. Its just that they tend to exercise their power more through social and psychological means and not through bruteforce as much.
The difference is that those groups aren't as self-blaming as nerds are, and they aren't so quick to take the bait. It's like if you gathered a bunch of guys in a room and shouted "misogynist!" and the nerd amongst them said, "I'm sorry!" even though he didn't really do anything.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
It could be worse. Someone could have brought up Hitler. ...
Dammit.
No worries, it doesn't count as a Godwin until you actually compare someone to Hitler.
Carry on.
What are you, some kind of meme Nazi???
Just read through the comments in Four Weeks Without Soap Or Shampoo, http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Some examples, modded to 5 stars: "She sounds hideous." "A 4 week test on something related to skin and they used a female journalist? Could by chance her skin complexion improved because of her menstrual cycle? There's about a 75% chance that she wasn't coming off of her period right before application so of course she probably noticed improvements to her skin, especially her face, over a 4 week test."
OMG, she's ... the other! Her appearance and aroma are what make her of interest to me! Menstruation! Blaaaargh cooties!
Some of the comments that were modded less than 5 were ... ummm ... well, yeah. Worse.
Seriously, folks? Seriously? Aren't nerds supposed to smart? Educated? Sensitive towards bullying?
There's an obnoxious sense of entitlement and superiority in some parts of nerd culture that isn't worthy.
Well... maybe of a very thinly spread argument... on your part.
As for proof of a widespread pedophilia culture, I suggest you read this article analyzing the topic as it is treated in the DSM-V
That article describes a slight change in definition of pedophilia AS A MENTAL DISORDER.
Which "proves" a "widespread pedophilia culture" about as much as a redefinition of a unicorn as "naturally occurring horse-like creature with a single horn in its forehead, possessing as of present date scientifically unexplained powers" - proves a widespread existence of unicorns.
It's a redefinition trying to address the question "If and adult does NOT have a sexual intercourse with a child in the forest, though he or she MAY feel a desire to, and nobody else is there to NOT see or hear it - does that person actually have a mental disorder that needs treatment?"
It's a proof of someone realizing that, whodathunkit, some people manage to control their urges.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There are few phrases that make me close a tab quicker.
I came back after a 10 year hiatus when the IT department started blocking my regular sites. This site is a pathetic shadow of what it once was.
And it's all yours now.
I'd further paraphrase John Oliver: Listen up, fellow self-pitying nerd boys — In the past, we WERE victims. We WERE underdogs. We WERE ones who were bullied and ridiculed and tormented because of who we were and what we liked. We were excluded from groups because we weren't "cool enough." We should know how it feels when someone does this to you and, thus, should NEVER, EVER do this to another human being. We should NEVER exclude someone because we deem them "not knowledgeable enough" (especially not if that's the "cover excuse" with the real reason being that they are a different gender). We should never tell someone that they are asking for the treatment that some jerks are giving them because of who they are or how they are dressed. Did we deserve being tormented on a daily basis because we liked Star Trek or played D&D? We definitely shouldn't be those jerks who think that forcing themselves on a person is somehow "all in good fun." (If you're going to exclude anyone from geek culture, exclude those jerks. IMO, anyone who thinks bullying someone - or worse - is acceptable behavior isn't a "real geek.") Furthermore, if we see EVER someone treating another human being in this manner, we should leap to their aid immediately. This isn't a man/woman thing either. It should be a "decent human" thing.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This all falls well within the not-my-problem camp. There are problems in this world that are not mine, nor are they not my responsibility to solve. There are plenty of women alive to solve them. And if 1 in 6 have this problem, then there are literally hundreds of millions to solve them. Why the hell do you need me to do anything? If 1 in 6 women is too lazy to do anything about it, then really it doesn't fall on me to solve the problem for them.
I've got problems of my own, and I don't ask 1 in 6 women to solve them for me. I think they are more than capable of solving this one for themselves.
Last I checked, male university students don't get free escorts home at night, yet female university students around here do.
Me solving their problems would go against everything they fought for. I supported women's equal rights. Let them enjoy their equal rights.
They have the equal right to solve their own problems. I sure as hell won't fight their battles for them.
You forgot to say "Fuck Beta!" before you took your ball and went home.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
He's one nutjob who had mental issues. I don't ascribe anything in his story to male-female relations in general. I got through about 10 seconds of his rant and couldn't tolerate his smug entitlement. Lots of people have dating problems. Very few of them write manifestos and even fewer start killing.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
In what might have been a fit of irony, Rodgers tried killing some sorority girls who rejected him, but they didn't notice him at the door so he left.
As far as "not my problem" goes, I think being a good person involves two things: 1) Treating others with respect and 2) Standing up when others aren't treated with respect. You and I might have the first one down, but we've got to be vigilant not to shrug off idiots like Rodgers when we see their behavior first-hand. Instead, we need to stand up and tell these people that this behavior is NOT appropriate at all.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Maybe the point is not to associate nerd culture with misogyny, but to say that nerd culture also has its fair share of misogyny, and as nerds we should be examining that because it's our culture. Other cultures have their own problems, and perhaps some of the same problems, but those are their problems to deal with.
1. There is no such thing as 'rape culture' or 'patriarchy.' In any other circumstance we'd view this kind of thinking as conspiracy. Like the other marxist isms, feminism needs a bogey man to justify the crazy inroads it demands on the 'oppressor' class, ie men. It needs to be something illusory, diffuse and easily redefinable so that any accusation or concession seems reasonable, no matter what. Feminists chose rape for this and now we have these girls running around thinking they're victims because a guy looked at them in a hallway, or were asked out in an elevator. (youtube elevatorgate).
A perfect example of how marxist ideologues target societies, organizations, and corporations on the rise. This particular example is the atheist conference scene, but the same tactics are applied everywhere.
http://www.youtube.com/playlis...
2. Enough of the victimhood bullshit. I tire of being labeled an 'oppressor' because of my sex or my skin tone. Don't tell me to check my privilege. Instead, try making cogent counterarguments if you believe me to be in error. If anything, this completely biased definition of 'equality' has given women the privilege. They can lean on chivalry of men (which is still expected) and/or on 'empowerment' whenever it suits them and society will back their play. Perhaps it's time for these feminists to check their privilege. The proof for it isn't some conspiracy theory. They get preferential treatment at college, in employment, in courts of law, in 'family' court, and in the street. It's in the law and its precedent, in the prison system, and in the homeless population, all male dominated. It's there every time she decides to have the kid while knowing full well neither of them have the money, dragging him (and the taxpayer) into destitution with her. Maybe I'll start giving a shit when "Her body, her right, her choice" also becomes "her responsibility" instead of his.
3. That 1/6 ratio is bullshit. If that were true, police stations around the country would be inundated with complaints of rape. That's not the case.
Quit shaming men, regardless of their social proclivities. Quit lying about them too. One out of six men are NOT rapists. Chu must have a crazy self loathing complex to write what he did. Every nerd or geek I've known was so timid and shy around women, it's HIGHLY unlikely that they'd have the balls to talk to or proposition women, nevermind 'rape' (and I use that term loosely) them. These rampant attacks by feminism on gaming and other nerd/geek culture is a recent thing, but it's just making the bullshit fallacies it makes everywhere.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
Because this whole discussion is silly. Plenty of nerds are misogynistic jerks. But plenty of non-nerds are as well, and I have seen NO evidence that it is any more common among nerds than among the population in general. In the absence of evidence, associating "nerd culture" with misogynism is just stupid.
First let me say that I agree that this discussion is pretty silly. That being said, "because someone else does it too" is not a valid justification of bad behavior. And frankly with the supposed intellectual superiority that many (not all) profess, it's even less acceptable. I have a lot harder time forgiving someone for doing something wrong that they understood was wrong, than someone who doesn't even know what they did was wrong in the first place.
Throughout my career, I have worked with many engineers, programmers, and other nerds. My experience is that they are the least misogynistic people I have ever met, and they have mostly been polite, professional, and welcoming to their female co-workers.
In general I would agree with you. However the ones who were not professional were so far past appropriate it was cringe inducing as they self rationalized their behavior as being perfectly acceptable.
Have you ever worked with salesmen? Or construction workers? Nerds are saints by comparison.
Yes and yes. While I would agree that proportionally those groups may contain more people who are likely to say something inappropriate. They also tend to accept that they did something wrong when it's pointed out to them and even apologize for being offensive. I've seen many more "nerds" argue this point.
Tell you what, when geeks start killing people in the same numbers as pretty much any other group then you can lay this at our feet like we have a problem.
I'm pretty sure that per capita we're a pretty peaceful group. So how about this society... how about you apologize you apologize first?
I'm sure there are more mothers that have drowned their babies then there are geeks that have gone on murder sprees... So how about it mothers, care to apologize for your culture of violence and hate?
I thought not.
This whole thing is vastly over blown.
You want to know who is responsible? Crazy people.
Literally just people off their meds. You'll find them in every demographic. And it doesn't matter who they are... an 80 old lady so inclined could kill a lot of people. In fact, there have been little old lady serial killers. They tend to do it with poison.
But the point is that the geek culture such as it is, bears no responsibility for what is committed by literally ONE guy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Can you explain why Zionists see heterosexual men as a threat to their ideology? I thought Zionists were anti-homosexual and pro-heterosexual?
If you are saying Zionists when you mean Jews, they are also anti-homosexual and pro-heterosexual.
If only they were as smart, enlightened and perfect as you they would have instead made empty remarks relying entirely on their own sense of superiority. Damn nerds and their inferior misogyny.
If junior was on the verge of Going Postal, and both shrink and mom got into a car to go calm junior down; why didn't mom, or shrink call Police?
Throughout my career, I have worked with many engineers, programmers, and other nerds. My experience is that they are the least misogynistic people I have ever met, and they have mostly been polite, professional, and welcoming to their female co-workers. Have you ever worked with salesmen? Or construction workers? Nerds are saints by comparison.
This has been my uniform experience also. My personal experience has been the smarter(in the practical sense) someone is, the fewer stereotypical biases they have.
I generally agree with the tenor of your post; yes we do have to stand up for what's right. But... but... but... is the problem here really an absence of moral clarity? Do we really need to stand up and say, "going on a murder spree is wrong!"?
Or lets be a little more serious, would it have made a difference if more of us got up and said, "misogyny is wrong" ? Alright, MISOGYNY IS WRONG.
I understand feeling the need to stand up and say *something*, but a world in which that makes any difference to anything other than our feelings is beyond anything I can imagine. Maybe doing something to make ourselves feel better is important. Maybe it will alleviate *other* ills. But I don't think standing up to misogyny it's going to stop crazy guys from going on a rampage, especially *this* crazy guy, who had a lot more problems than misogyny.
If we need to do anything in response to this situation, it would be to find t a better way to respond to someone who has obviously lost it and is making threats of violence. That's a lot harder than just standing up and being counted, though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That this sort of thing appears to be happening with greater frequency.
Number one problem seems to be an increasing number people who reach a point where they have little regard for life. Their's or anyone else's. They think of themselves as victims of some sort. "Entitlement" might be an appropriate word. Rodgers definitely felt as if the world was not delivering on something it owed to him. Don't know how common this is among similar perpetrators but I'm guessing it is.
This thread focuses on nerds but all the perpetrators probably share some form of mental illness that either contributed to their social awkwardness or was aggravated by their social awkwardness. I'm not saying nerds are mentally ill but social awkwardness is usually considered one of the defining traits. There are non-nerds who suffer from this too.
I do think our culture and media often portray young adults living an idealized lifestyle that few if any actually lead. And if you do surround yourself with people who are more affluent than yourself, it is not surprising that it would lead to some feelings of resentment. The fact is that life doesn't owe you a certain level of income or a good looking girlfriend/boyfriend. Some people do not seem to get this for whatever reason.
And perhaps acts like this beget more acts like this. Even the planning stages probably give the perpetrators a feeling of power that they haven't felt before.
As for the misogyny, it was a factor in this case and it could be in others, but not always.
You may think it doesn't happen but ask the women in your group how many times people have treated them like children, dismissed them, or behaved in a really creepy way even after being asked to stop **. Ask any reasonably well-known geek girl to show you her "death & rape threat" tweet or email folder and you'll see hundreds or thousands of them.
Absolutely. It's significantly telling that the woman who started the #yesallwomen hashtag trend on Twitter shut down her account after countless numbers of rape threats.
And yeah, the backlash to that, the point behind the #notallmen tag, and the strident denials in the comments here are all correct: not all men make those threats, or treat women poorly or dismissively...
But we've all seen it and failed to speak up. Like you said:
** I've personally seen it many times; once I even witnessed a guy ask a female geek how many guys she had slept with, then get righteously offended and angry when she said that was an inappropriate question. (To my own younger self's shame I did not step in and call him out at the time - something I regret).
And like Chu said:
I’ve known situations where I knew something was going on but didn’t say anything—because I didn’t want to stick my neck out, because some vile part of me thought that this kind of thing was “normal,” because, in other words, I was a coward and I had the privilege of ignoring the problem.
I've failed to speak up, too, and so has every man. And as you note, that's the real problem. Sociopaths make up a tiny percentage of the population - they're the few men that the #notallmen tag refers to - but they're really good at blending in, particularly when we don't speak up about this stuff, or worse, dismiss it, deny it, or laugh about it.
As an analogy, consider how many Slashdotters are anti-cop... We readily acknowledge that not all cops are corrupt assholes who falsify evidence and beat suspects, but we rightly criticize the so-called "good" cops who don't do that, but also don't speak up and maintain the thin blue line. The cop who doesn't take part in the beating but merely watches, or who doesn't say anything when another cop deletes a cop-incriminating recording from a dash camera or cell phone isn't the bad apple in the barrel, but they've sure been spoiled by that association.
Well, that's us when we don't speak up when we see someone treating women badly. Maybe we can protest that we aren't doing it, but we're spoiled by the association. Our thin blue line is the "brocode" or membership as "one of the guys", and it can be really difficult to face the peer pressure against speaking up, and it's so much easier to say silent, or laugh nervously, or do anything other than say "that's not right". But if we're not saying it, then we're no better those those "good" cops who cover for the bad ones.
First let me say that I agree that this discussion is pretty silly. That being said, "because someone else does it too" is not a valid justification of bad behavior. And frankly with the supposed intellectual superiority that many (not all) profess, it's even less acceptable. I have a lot harder time forgiving someone for doing something wrong that they understood was wrong, than someone who doesn't even know what they did was wrong in the first place.
However the [nerds] who were not professional were so far past appropriate it was cringe inducing as they self rationalized their behavior as being perfectly acceptable.
A former co-worker would ask waitresses and female hotel staff about their porn preferences. I used to do IT for traders; not even they would go that far.
Yes and yes. While I would agree that proportionally those groups may contain more people who are likely to say something inappropriate. They also tend to accept that they did something wrong when it's pointed out to them and even apologize for being offensive. I've seen many more "nerds" argue this point.
That co-worker? Thought he was being charmy and flirty and never did notice the shocked look on everyone else's faces. When asked to stop, he would say things like, "Just having fun," or, "Loosen up."
It's a perception vs reality issue.
Same reason we have no end of media submissions about how we need to do something about the 'epidemic' of gun violence that takes 30,000 lives a year, but turn a blind eye to the negligent medical care issue that kills 7 times as many people in the same time period.
Remember the media adage, "if it bleeds, it leads."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The discussion is *absolutely* necessary. Because we should expect better from our lot. For the impatient "tl;dr", Chu ends with the words "He [Elliot] needed to grow up. We all do." Some of us need to talk it out in order reach that maturity. I, for one, feel that if we are intelligent enough to parse knowledge incomprehensible to that majority of non-technical human masses, we should be intelligent enough to understand that some things, like the way you think about and treat others, are just NOT FUCKING COOL!
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
NAZIS! NAZIS! HITLER!
*Drops Mike, walks out*
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
... the existence of "rape culture" when Someone provides an objective definition of what it is.
I've seen it. Frankly, this guy objectified everyone: women as things he wanted to own/obtain, and men as things that were in his way and from which he could obtain esteem, power, etc.
I think this tragedy is a little more complex than some are making it out to be.
Kythe
Now, on the other hand, can we address the reality that men are FAR more likely than women to be victims of violence, physical intimidation, violent crime, and other physical threats such as military hazards and other job-related physical danger?
My first response to up-modded but unsupported assertions like this is to look at the numbers.
Victims
Victimization rates for both males and females have been relatively stable since 2000.
Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).
Females were most likely to be victims of domestic homicides (63.7%) and sex-related homicides (81.7%)
Males were most likely to be victims of drug- (90.5%) and gang-related homicides (94.6%).
Offenders
Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90% of the total number of offenders.
Young adult black males had the highest homicide offending rate compared to offenders in other racial and sex categories.
White females of all ages had the lowest offending rates of any racial or age groups.
The overall offending rates for both males and females have declined since 1990.
Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was slightly higher than for biological mothers.
However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males.
Sex differences in crime
[1980-2008 Stats sourced from a 2011 USDOJ report]
''Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.'' ----Neal Stephenson
The frustration stems from an inconsistency I've noticed in female behavior. I've asked a lot of my female friends the following, and none of them has been able to give me a clear, logical answer: At what point does chasing after a woman cross the line from flattering and endearing, to creepy and stalkerish? As best as I can tell, there is no consistent answer. It all seems to depend on how much she likes you. If she likes you, anything you do is flattering and endearing. If she doesn't like you, just asking her a second time after she's said no is creepy and stalkerish.
This results in a common, perverse situation. Women say they want men to respect their wishes. Nice guys (most geeks are nice guys) listen to this, and leave the woman alone after they ask her out and she tells them no. Jerks and abusive guys however don't. They persist in bugging a woman they like who's told them no, and somehow their strategy has a higher success rate at starting a relationship than the geek strategy of respect and listening to what the woman says she wants. Of the married couples I've asked, a clear majority started off with the woman disliking the man and being annoyed at his attentions, before he "won her over" and she fell for him.
So we have a fundamental disconnect between how men are told they should behave, and the behavior which actually works. Consequently a lot of they guys who try to be nice to and respectful of women and treat them as they say they want to be treated, end up being frustrated by "their inability" to enter a relationship. It's not at all surprising that some of them snap and leap to the extreme opposite of their previous strategy (from respecting women to misogyny).
(As a side note, I suspect this is why a significant fraction of women are in abusive relationships. Many women spurn the nice guys who wouldn't abuse her, who give up when she tells them she's not interested. The guys who would abuse her do not respect her wishes and persist, eventually winning her over, and she ends up in an abusive relationship. Look at women who seem to jump from one abusive relationship to another, and I think you'll find someone who puts too much emphasis on the man's persistence as an indicator of how much he likes her. That is probably the perfect filter for eliminating all but the most abusive guys who have zero respect the woman's wishes.)
Just baiting people and throwing around labels; put in nerd or label some nutcase a nerd to get the nerds all worked up and maybe get the stupid people in on the thing... Maybe there are motives behind that like resentment of nerds or some feeling for more conformity... It's one thing to bait people and another to mislabel with a possible attempt to confuse slower people.
As far as the BS about conventions-- that is a problem anywhere those guys can get away with it; those situations are a magnet for those types. I would say nerd culture is better than most the others and those conventions may have 1% be "bad apples" but that the actual proportion of the non-attending members who are like them is probably within rounding error of 0.0%.
As far as some upset crazy shooting people in the USA... again... I don't even bother, it's not even really news. People have feelings, thoughts at moments of their lives which are every bit as dark and as bad as these crazy people; the difference is they have the mental health (or culturally conditioned self control) to NOT act on it or take it seriously. I find it sad that anything is made of people having similar feelings to whatever nutcase is in the news; what is the problem is the difference between the nut and the sane people who have the same ideas; namely, the mental illness.
Sadly, we are not allowed to know his medical history, a lot of these nuts are on legal drugs but not many families ever disclose such information afterward. Plus when they do, the media doesn't make an issue of it... can't upset the sponsors.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is a direct result of the left-wing feminist culture. Men of the past may had their problems, but they were taught not to hit
women, cuss in front of them, and treat them right.
The feminist revolution brought this on themselves and some women are finally waking up to the BS that they were fed by
these so-called feminists.
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
No, it might not prevent the crazies from going on a misogyny-fueled murder rampage, but it will help the women who are the victims of day-to-day misogyny. If a women goes to a convention, is grouped by some idiot "because her costume was skimpy", and the rest of the people present ignore the situation, that makes it worse. If more people stood up and told the idiot that this wasn't acceptable, the misogynist idiots would be marginalized and would need to change their behavior if they wanted to participate in society. Maybe they would even turn off the path that leads to the crazy actions of Rodger. Meanwhile, women would feel more comfortable in day-to-day life.
How many of us were bullied growing up? How many of us would have loved for someone to have walked over to our bullies and tell them "This is NOT ok. Do NOT treat this person like this"? I know I would have. It would have saved me years of torment when I couldn't speak up for myself. How can we not stand up for others when they need help?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
It could be worse. Someone could have brought up Hitler. ...
Dammit.
No worries, it doesn't count as a Godwin until you actually compare someone to Hitler.
Carry on.
What are you, some kind of meme Nazi???
Touche`, Herr Doofus.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Something interesting to note, A 'construction worker' is largely a bivalent obvious label. It is relatively clear cut if someone is a member of this set of people. "nerd' is a term that is much more loosely defined, and large portions of the general population would be able to distinguish between a 'nerd', a 'geek', and a 'gamer'. I thought it was telling that the GP post spoke of engineers and other nerds, suggesting that all engineers and programmers were automatically part of the group of people who were nerds. Programmer != nerd, I have meet many coders who aren't anywhere near the intellectual caliber to be called a nerd.
TLDR? - Please be more specific in your generalizations.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
...for not phrasing his loaded question in a form of a question.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Welcome to cultural marxism.
His video is out of context from his larger "body of work" (including his other videos, other postings, and "manifesto"). I don't think anybody is saying that his video didn't contain primarily hatred towards women. It did. And the rest of his material also contained a substantial portion. I think that if you look past that, at the rest of what this kid said motivated him, it was his overall feeling of alienation and rejection - by everyone. He was overly-concerned with sexual conquest, as a benchmark of his self-worth. And that came out as misogyny, and the targeting of women.
But over a year ago, he wrote that he was going to START his killing spree, at his apartment, on his male room-mates. He also wanted to murder his little brother.
These were the people he felt most hurt by, because they didn't meet some expectation he had of "acceptance".
(and that expectation was what's wildly out of line here. It changes from someone just talking with him, to being treated as some god or supreme ruler with a secret underground breeding facility for women - - I don't care what is in our horrible "rape culture" - this is simply a screaming red-flag of extreme psychosis.)
I think this whole misogyny discussion is a mis-classification of where he directed his hate.
He didn't direct his hate against women (exclusively). He directed his hate against all people who were having a better life than him. And his definition of "better-life" changes as you go; from simply being accepted as a human being to, like his teenage black friend, who was getting sex (with "white women") at age 13. At some point, someone told him that if he wasn't getting laid, he wasn't "okay" - and he seriously took that to heart.
You missed the point. No one is saying it is or is not any place else, what they are saying is in the 'nerd community' any time someone tries to address it people like you come out and say it's not worth discussing because it happens elsewhere to.
Which is pretty pathetic.
Oh, you anecdote contrary to what everyone else agree sis going on isn't the same. well then I guess that shows us.
and What it shows us is that you are a self centered person that can barely survive above rote thinking.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How the heck are you supposed to get motivated to find a mate if you don't feel like you deserve one? I think that part is normal, but what gets tricky for some people is reconciling that with respecting another person's rights. That takes some fairly sophisticated ethical thought that unfortunately, not everyone is capable of. Certainly not a narcissist with asperger's or whatever was wrong with that guy. So unfortunately, I don't think that merely "educating" nerdy men is the solution to this problem.
He makes some good points. I can only imagine what a real-life "Laura" would think of an "Urkel" constantly stalking her. She shouldn't have to put up with that. To come out and say it is all men's (and more specifically "nerds'") fault for perpetuating this attitude of entitlement is absurd. Nearly everybody has had a crush on someone and has been rejected. There are respectful guys that just chalk it up to incompatibility between two people. There are nice guys that take that rejection and use it as an opportunity for introspection to see their own flaws. There are assholes that chalk it up to feeling entitled and that the woman should have given in. Then there are the mentally ill who go on a shooting spree. Lumping all "nerds" in to basically the last two categories, or enabling of them, is flat out wrong.
While (thankfully) I don't know of any women who have gone on shooting sprees because they were rejected, I do know women who fill all of the other categories. Women who feel entitled to date any man they want. Women who think a man "must be gay" if he doesn't date them. Women who write songs about sabotaging a man's vehicle because he went out with another woman (yes cheating, but that still doesn't justify the vandalism, Ms. Underwood.) And yes even some women who have murdered men because they were rejected, just non on a spree.
This is a mental health issue clearly. This is not a misogyny or misandry issue. Men can be assholes, but so can women. Love-scorned people of both genders have committed horrible acts against others.
To top it off, the article is factually inaccurate. The statistics he mentions are out dated. Newer studies are showing that victims of rape and domestic violence are closer to equal when divided by gender, not the 8 out of 10 numbers he used. The newer numbers take under reporting into consideration where men are discouraged from reporting, cases where by definition of local law men can not be raped, etc.
My heart really does go out to the families of the women, and men, that were killed or injured by Elliott Rogers. We need to stand together as men and women to do something about it and work on the real cause. The kid was mentally ill. He happened to be a misogynist asshole, but that that didn't cause him to go kill people.
More men are raped than women (see: prison and military) overall. No doubt someone steeped in Demagogue Culture will complain that bringing up that fact is unfair because a man being raped dozens or more times in prison over the course of his sentence isn't the same thing as a college coed being attacked in a dark alley. Which means the latter is worse. Or something.
Demagogue Culture trolls will stop being full of crap when they start talking about female teachers raping male high school students in terms of "rape culture" along with the coed in the ally. Or when you can read a story like this and have "rape culture" mentioned every other sentence.
I think Henry Rollins summed it up the best...!
Yes. However, I think the message is somewhat diluted by the fact that Liar is on the same album.
Kevin Seghetti: kts@tenetti.org, HTTP: www.tenetti.org GPG key: http://tenetti.org/phpwiki/index.php/KevinSeghett
He's a crazy person. When did we decide that whatever the shooter says needs to make sense? The man was clearly insane. Do I worry about the ramblings of a man blaming reptilian Illuminati for his rampage? Do we worry about a "culture of anti-reptileism"? No. We don't do that because the people that believe that shit are obviously insane. Comparing him to nerds/geeks or even MRAs is insane. None of those groups have voiced the shit he was voicing. Yeah, some guys feel left out, and they blame it on their looks or the modern culture. It's whatever, they should be allowed to complain. Everyone has that right. It doesn't mean that we suddenly start silencing people for complaining about deficiencies in their lives. Should we silence libertarians every time an anti-government loon blows up a building? No. We don't do that, as the bombers and mass shooters are obviously insane. Furthermore, how is this guy in any way a geek or a nerd? To me he seemed entirely too preoccupied with women and not enough with beowulf clusters. That's a whole other level of tragedy.
Nerds, (perhaps I overgeneralize, but programmers certainly) make a career of looking at things that might technically be “working,” and trying to make them better. We optimize code to make it run faster, use less resources. When someone points out a problem (“Hey, you should do that outside the loop, and it’ll run O(N) faster”) most of us can accept it as the beneficial feedback it is, fix the problem, and carry on. We’re used to accepting our own human failings and doing the best that we know how within our limitations, ever improving.
We do the same to ourselves. When someone points out a problem in our world view (in the present example, our attitudes towards women), where many would reject such criticism as a personal attack and vehemently deny it, nerds (at least the good ones) make a daily habit out of acknowledging, “I screwed up, how can I make it better?” This is just another example of that.
I think when an issue like this is directed at us, many of us will take an honest look at our past and daily interactions, see situations that we could have behaved better, and accept the assertion that we are (or have been) complacent in rape culture, misogyny, etc., and we want to be better. Compare that to the population at large that would be much more likely to dismiss it and continue set in their ways.
That’s not to say as a sub-culture we’re inherently better or worse than any other group (my own observations agree that on the whole we’re better than many, worse than some), but we’re much more willing to self-label and own our behavior.
The rate of intimate partner violence against females declined 53% between 1993 and
2008, from 9.4 victimizations per 1,000 females age 12 or older to 4.3 per 1,000.
Against males, the rate declined 54%, from 1.8 victimizations per 1,000 males age 12
or older to 0.8 per 1,000.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
Since the data indicate you are wrong I fully expect you to apologize and use the data to change you narrative.
BWAhahahha I kid you clearly can't do that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
40% of women think their ass is too fat
an addition 40% think their ass is too skinny
the remaining 20% say he's just right and a hard worker
So... that joke wasn't funny until the end, right? Why is that?
Because at some point, man-bashing became socially acceptable, kinda like lawyer jokes, etc. Personally, I do find the twist of that one amusing, but if it were the other way around...
I think the point is, yes, we do realize that there are a lot of jerks out there. They are jerks for a variety of reasons. Beyond that are the true pieces of sh** like this guy [in the article] and those that kill their family. Unfortunately we - based on our gender - are somehow associated with this guy. It's not a *MAN* problem, it's a human problem.
Mario saves the princess? Is that because men identify women are useless and weak, or because they want to be heroic. Just because they might like to be "Thor" doesn't mean that they wouldn't appreciate Janeway, Ripley, or Sarah Conner doing the same for us dudes.
Honestly, I'm not Urkle or even a Leonard. When I was younger I admit to be a complete dork (and annoying to girls and guy both), but that was a social awkwardness I grew out of. The same a**holes that women have so hard a time get a leg up with are the ones that regular guys have issues with, and the thing is, we DO make an issue of it. Maybe not right away in the open, but a "that wasn't cool" or "that was totally unprofessional" when a moment is available to do so. I've dealt with some pretty horrible women too, both personally and professionally (though I'd admit, professionally women do come out on top overall).
So why are we associated Mario and Big Bang Theory nerds - they type that go out of their way to be helpful but don't quite get it - with some sociopathic monster who murdered a bunch of people?
Figure out how to make it better. Call people out. A lot of us are already doing that. Sometimes it even puts us in jeopardy (suddenly we're not team players for appreciating b.s. "humor"). Our response isn't that we don't realize there are jerks out there, it's DON'T ASSOCIATE US WITH THEM, because we're not.
The key word is "appears". The actual occurence of mass shootings has been stable for roughly 40 years:
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
It only appears to be happening with greater frequency due to news media needing sensationalist coverage to drive viewership. That is, there's the same number of shootings, we just hear about it a lot more than we used to.
Sorry, wrong URL. Meant to include this one:
http://www.boston.com/communit...
Of course you should stand up when someone else is bullied. What I object is drawing generalizations about nerds, or men from the fact that some men, and some nerds, don't know how to behave.
This kind of overgeneralization is pernicious. For one thing, that actually feeds into the misconception that such behavior is somehow normal for men. "You politically correct folks have it in for *men* who act like *men*!" "No, we have it in for people who act like jerks."
I remember once, years, ago, a friend of mine told me she wanted her new boyfirend to spend time hanging out with me.
"Why?" I asked.
"So he can see that men aren't icky," she said.
I was mortified. In a weird way people on both extremes of this issue agree on the way "men behave"; they just disagree on whether it's icky or not. Well, bugger that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That article only shows stats until 2010 and lumps these shooting sprees in with crimes where there were motives other than just killing random people, - or where the perpetrators where not killing random people at all, but their own families.
"digsbo already cited the relevant reference showing that men have more to fear from others than women do"
no he didn't. He doesn't understand the context and is using a specific type of crime as all crime, it is not.
For example, the paper does not include homicide. It's a report on interviewed victims, not a report of all violent crime.
Lets look at a more accurate and detail review, shall we?
" Domestic violence accounted for 21% of all violent crime."
"The majority of domestic violence was committed against
females (76%) compared to males (24%)."
"The majority of domestic violence was committed
against females compared to males"
"In 2003–12, females (6.2 per 1,000) had a higher rate
of intimate partner violence than males (1.4 per 1,000)"
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Get married.
Have kids.
Activate the parenting part of your brain.
This will change all your priorities and make you a better person.
Unless it won't in which case don't.
Get your priorities straight and figure this out.
Chicks hate that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I don't know of any nerds, geeks, women, or even misogynists who actually fit the stereotypes being thrown around here.
This is the social equivalent of closing a bug as WORKSFORME.
Even if we stipulate that that you yourself really have not witnessed the scenario, it is pretty arrogant to dismiss out of hand all other contrary evidence without bothering to refute it.
Except the issue is exactly your point, but these people should be separated, for multiple reasons. They shouldnt be disrupting the rest of the class, and more importantly like you pointed out they need help, they need one on one learning, not group learning. Obviously im not talking about the vast majority but equality laws, no laws in reality should be absolute, meaning there are always exceptions that should be made
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This article seems to be a reaction to Elliot Roger's autobiography and rant. The autobiography is not that of a "nerd". This guy had no tech skills. He played World of Warcraft too much; that's about it.
What seems to have driven him nuts is growing up in Malibu and UCSB, two of the greatest concentrations of hot women on the planet, and not getting any.
It is also a nice exercise to think about consequences of getting rid of male sex drive alltogether. It would be actually good to think about that before thinking about how to get there.... But then again that is my perverted brain. I am male after all.
"Even though I have no contradictory evidence to provide; I'm going to just ignore this data because I prefer my feels that crime must be getting worse"
people like you come out and say it's not worth discussing
I didn't say it wasn't worth discussing. I said it was silly to discuss the "problem" in the absence of any evidence that the "problem" actually exists. These discussions always start with the presumption that nerds are all a bunch of women haters, yet base that presumption on an anecdote about a woman that was groped a few years ago by some jerk at a game conference. Sure, some nerds are sexist jerks. Some are also racists, child abusers, pedophiles, and even murders. Should we also discuss how racism, child abuse and murder are part of "nerd culture"? These are not "nerd problems", they are "human problems", and should be discussed as such. Misogyny is no different. It has nothing to do with "nerds" or "nerd culture" specifically. If you have some evidence that says otherwise, I am happy to hear it.
I would argue that is part of our larger mysoginistic 'alpha male' culture. Boys are taught from a young age that they are defined by their sexual conquests - 'if you can't get a girl you're a loser', etc.
Culture.
It really doesn't matter if a person has a piece of metal in their hands.
Most of the mass murders speak EPIC VOLUMES about the civilization we have created and its values we teach to each other at Universities (We are all just animals, no better than the house cat or any of Darwins creatures for example).
The ludicrous civlization of control, butchery and savagery. Look at the EPIC amounts of crime going on by our own government who can now sign executive orders and eliminate anybody Mr. PODUS demands.
After all, if PODUS can do it, I Elliot can do it to.
You know we haven't been living very long with Nuclear Weapons, or weapons of mass destruction. Given time and if we continue this path of humanism (i.e. Kill God make our own rules because after all we are just animals) destruction won't be far along the line.
We live in a time of massive change and the powers that be are doing everything they can to divert your attention from their criminal mischief stealing your labor, your liberty and your life through the doctrine of GLOBALISM and its enabler AGENDA 21.
If you want to know why Elliot has the manifesto of the typical government official, look no further next time to your next election to understand why seemingly sane people, murder and kill using their hands, pieces of metal or clubs.
Our society is sick, and our leaders are leading us to destruction.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Wow. That article is all over the place. I swear some three-sentence paragraphs had three different thoughts. I think part of the problem with these kinds of essays is that guys get tired of being blamed for everything. (For comparison, just try to think back to any mainstream article that blamed women for anything.) That's why guys are always getting defensive - because guys are always getting the blame. Rather than this essay, I recommend Mark Manson's article: http://markmanson.net/school-s...
He is writing the diary of a schizophrenic.
Geeks aren't sick, just a bid different than most.
Schizophrenics are sick. For whatever reason.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The problem isn't misogyny itself, on an individual basis, any more than the problem is invidualized misandry. The problem is when such hate is institutionalized, and I think it's arguable that institutionalized misogyny is at its lowest point in decades. If you start trying to tell individuals what's right and wrong to think, then you are dangerously close to Orwellian thoughtcrime for my tastes. What matters is how people act, which is where any protections need to be placed.
FC Closer
The question on everyone's mind that no one is willing to openly state:
Will this article get Arthur Chu a woman?
Seastead this.
Look, this is not a nerd problem. This is not a subset-of-men problem. The problem is simplified as "misogyny" and that's it.
Yes, there are misogynist nerds. But to be frank, let's call 'em what they are - misogynist. Because there are misogynist Christians, there are misogynist atheists, there are misogynist railfans, there are misogynist bus drivers, there are misogynist flautists. it does not matter what group they are part of, a misogynist is a misogynist.
I'd say "fuck them", but that would be a lowering of standards. I suggest not fucking them.
This sig no verb.
Wow.....lots of dumbfuckery in this little tid bit.....
I'm wondering about a higher incidence of Aspergers among nerds. Those folks say all sorts of crazy shit and have no clue it pisses people off.
You don't have to look any farther than the article you posted and the research that Mother Jones did. The author in your article didn't like Mother Jones' criteria for defining mass shootings but they used basically the same definition used in this report from the Congressional Research Service:
http://journalistsresource.org...
Apparently the FBI uses that definition as well.
"Even though I have no contradictory evidence to provide; I'm going to just ignore this data because I prefer my feels that crime must be getting worse"
And to be clear, I wasn't talking about the frequency of murders, violent crime, or criminal activity in general. I was talking about incidents like the one in Isle Vista: Mass Shootings.
I never said that crime must be getting worse.
Not all nerds are Canadian, you insensitive clod! ...I'm sorry.
<- Canadian
--- Need web hosting?
Yeah, I'm pretty sick of the portion of nerd culture that thinks the way to get women is to portray all men as misogynists. Men and women live in the world together, they always have and they always will. Get over it, be happy.
I think everyone in this Slashdot crowd looooves lesbian porn, filled with women and nothing but women. How can you call us misogynistic?
critique of feminism is not misogyny.
Of course not, because the argument is fallacious.
The word "misogyny" has lost all of its meaning. Basically, misogyny now means "anyone who disagrees with a women about anything." You don't agree with feminism? Misogynist. Don't believe in rape culture? Misogynist. You are attracted to slender women? Misogynist. You cannot escape it without kowtowing to any demand any women makes at any time.
The war on misogyny is just like the war on terror: a never-ending conflict with an invisible enemy that can never be defeated and could be anywhere.
Mod parent up.
Play Command HQ online
Not all is, but, honestly, a lot of it is.
Seriously, the responses on here demonstrate that there is a huge problem amongst slashdot readers. You have to be willing to admit that you might not understand women's experience in order to have an honest conversation and learn something.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I may be a geek, nerd, male, hetero and perhaps other things. Lots of labels.
But don't you dare tar me with this guy's manifesto as if having something, anything, in common with him somehow convicts me as well of any of his crimes. I'll take blame for things I do, and have done, but not for one goddamn second will I take any shit or blame for something somebody else did, especially not this guy and especially not scumbags who crawl cons and paw at cosplayers.
I worked my ass off for almost two decades as a con organizer and staffer and spent a lot of that time trying to protect idiots from themselves and prevent predators from getting at their prey. And mostly it worked out. Perfect? Nope. But nobody can protect everyone from everything all the time. And I quit working at cons and attending cons because you can generally judge something by the people it attracts. Working at those events or giving them money endorses what they do. Never again.
But just generally, I reject the basic construct that I'm somehow guilty of something just for being male. I'm not guilty by association of stoning a woman to death in a country I've never visited. I'm not guilty of raping somebody in a convention hotel room and I've never, ever, EVER groped anyone in my entire life. Zero.
All I've ever been is nice to women my whole life. I treat them with respect and care and as equals. And they tend to like me. Funny how that works.
So this guilt by nerd/geek/born male/whatever association is not gonna fly with me. To hell with you. Nobody speaks for me but me, and my actions speak for who and what I am and what I believe. Both the OP and this Rodger guy speak for themselves, only.
Sig for hire.
This thing with Elliot Rodgers has been on my mind for days now, eating away at me. He's that "nice guy" who went and shot four men and two women, because the women wouldn't have sex with him, and the men took what he believed to be rightly his. I've read a lot of discussion about him and his actions, lots of related peripheral discussion, and read and read and read.
I'm reading because it's personal to me. More personal than I thought possible. It's personal because it's delving into geek culture. It's personal because of the deep conflicts I feel about what happened.
It's personal because every other factor is, in my mind, a distraction. This isn't really about gun control, for example. The problem wasn't his guns. It’s about him.
It's personal because, just like the Columbine shooting, it's morally reprehensible. Utterly inexcusable. This is the product of a deranged man, a narcissist and deluded person, taking his anger out on a world he thought owed him everything simply for him being who he was. He was the ultimate "nice guy", a concept which is something of a berserk button for me; entitled, selfish, in love with himself, bitter, jaded, hateful. Indefensible. Repugnant. Evil.
It's personal because, on some level, I sympathise with him.
Feels dirty to even type that. In case I haven't already been perfectly clear, I really, really hate the so-called "nice guys". I make them villains in my stories. I council anyone I see displaying "nice guy"-ism against the folly of their ways. I speak out about it as often as I can. My philosophy is this:
If you believe that you are owed romantic or sexual favours because you do things for them, you are not a nice guy. If you misrepresent your intentions towards women, in the belief that this makes you "deserve" their affection, you are not a nice guy. If you think that treating a woman well means she owes you something, treating basic human interaction as an exchange of goods and services, you're not a nice guy.
You're *supposed* to be nice. To everyone. You don't get credit for that. You're *supposed* to be good to people. You're *supposed* to do kindnesses for people without expectation of reward. You're supposed to have the courage to do the right thing without holding your hand out for payment. You're supposed to treat women and men of all ages and backgrounds with the same level of respect, friendship, kindness, loyalty, strength, compassion, dignity, autonomy, charity, gratitude and love. If you can't do that, you're not a nice guy and you never will be.
So why do I sympathise with someone I despise?
We've all felt helpless at some time. Especially so when it comes to romance. Male, female, straight, gay, or something in between. We've all felt attracted to someone who didn't return our affections. It hurts. I don't know anyone who'll say that being rejected doesn't cut them. Frankly, I'd be worried about someone who *didn't* care. It's painful, and in that pain, we can think stupid things. Pry open the diary of any 15 year old kid and you will find some messed up stuff in there. Peel back their skin, cut open their skull, read their minds and you'll find much darker and hurtful things. Being rejected is painful. It's frustrating. It hurts. It can be hurtful to look at those who have what you want.
But you know what?
Tough.
Yep, tough.
Australians have a saying: "Tough bikkies". Hard luck. You're not owed anything because you're in pain. You're going to have to find some way of dealing with it -- introspection, self-improvement, even physical relocation. This is YOUR problem. Not anyone elses. Nobody owes you resolution. I can sympathise, empathise, and relate -- but it's your problem to deal with. Go hiking in Tibet. Join a gym. Eat a bucket of icecream and watch Pacific Rim. Go do whatever it is that you do to cope with things.
You don't get to take it out on the world. You don't get to do things like grope women at conventions because you can't control yourself, and then blame th
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
True, among the ravings of a homocidal narciscistic sociopath there was some misogyny but it's clearly a side issue.
The feminist music etc columnist Helen Razer had an interesting piece on it this week.
Well no, but you'd be hard pressed to call his targeting sexist.
Also how many people in mainstream movies or TV are ugly? Don't blame the demographic for the machinations of those selling to them.
"When women are paid less then men for the same work" - Where are these women? I want to hire them. If they will do the same work as men for less money, I am going to replace all the men that work for me with these women. Any sensible employer would do the same.
Seen a lot of people talking about rape in the aftermath of Elliot Rodger, but I don't know where that's coming from. Yeah Elliott Rodger was sexually frustrated, but he presumably never tried to rape anyone. He is a murderer, not a rapist. Let's talk about guns or the people he killed, but he didn't have anything to do with rape.
"Please don't come back"? I made a sarcastic comment about how quickly the tread was going downhill, and that is the response I get? I am so very disappointed on so many levels. I offer this rebuttal, you filthy, Portland hippy:
Sir, the whole of your taste is in your mouth, your father only impregnated your mother because he was drunk at the time and mistook her for a overly portly circus clown, and you tip poorly. The Irish think you drink too much, and racists call you thick-witted but only behind your back, because they find you to be too violent and moody to deal with. All your dates with the opposite gender have occurred because of dares or pity, and your hair is more oily that Saudi Arabia. You dress like a pimp from New Jersey, and I would have a better conversation with a rotting stump than with you. I'd suggest that you kill yourself to improve humanity as a whole, but that would just waste an empty hole in the ground where someone would doubtlessly stuff your bloated hideous body, that could otherwise be doing something useful like storing landfill. Mail yourself to Tasmania, and stop lowering this website's name by posting your filthy opinions on it. Bits cost almost nothing, and yet I feel you are wasting Slashdot's money ever time you foolishly click 'post' in the vain hope that if you spew enough verbal fappery you might actually say something that somehow matters. Away, chaff, away with you.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Nerdy guys aren’t guaranteed to get laid by the hot chick as long as we work hard. "
oooh, news flash
Find me five people in the universe who needed you to tell them that. Most people assume that nerdy guys are guaranteed *not* to get the girl.
Note that the psycho du jour showed no signs in believing in work or of being a nerd. He was a wannabe popular vapid tool, as opposed to the unpopular vapid tool he actually was. I guess he played video games. Is that all it's supposed to take to be a nerd these days?
If Chu wants to castrate himself for the sin of being born with a penis, he should feel free.
You're missing popularity too. Remember the most common difference between creepy and charming is how the guy is viewed. Look how they try to blame video games for violence, despite just accepting sport hoodlums, and video games aren't even remotely niche anymore. The (actual) nerd is a safe goto target, especially for women, and knows it.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Over the past several days, I've read several commentaries about Elliot Rodgers and his motivation for commiting several murders. These murders have been blamed on "white privilege", misogyny, a rape culture, nerd culture, a (of course) gun culture, and so on. From what I understand, Rodgers was in psychotherapy for many years. What hasn't been adequately explored (in my opinion) is assigning "blame" to the apparent fact that the shooter was mentally ill. Quite a number of the high media profile mass shootings within the past several years were committed by individuals with histories of mental illness. If there's any sort of answer to these tragedies or any way to address and hopefully avert future shootings of this nature, how about revisiting our system of treating mental illness in potentially violent people? Blaming men, blaming white people, or blaming guns doesn't seem to be an effective countermeasure.
Doesnt' makes sense to me. The last thing I would be afraid of if I were I chick would be to be raped by a huge horde of nerds. And I say a huge horde because the idea of being raped by less than a huge horde is a concept that even in the form of mere thought is contrary to the laws of this space-time continuum.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
wishful thinking again?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
THIS woman has never done so, so your gross over-generalization falls flat.
So, it is women's problem, eh? Let's be clear: Rape has nothing to do with sex; it is an act of VIOLENCE. If you don't understand that, you're truly the "Anonymous Coward" as which you post.
I think you raise an important point with respect to the neuropathology of this particular case (Eliot Rodger). His monolog reflects a narcissistic ego- entitlement with no personal responsibility. He may have had organic issues like autism or even schizophrenia but his long history of therapy did not overcome the narcissism that seems to have driven him to this maniacal act. What do therapists do for people like this? Are they doing any good at all?
Go back to bed, kid.
You rock.
Did you even read what I wrote?
Please read it again and then look at the piece of text of yours I just quoted. Consider the connection. Then try again.
Note that I stil have not mocked you yet so lay off on the "confirm your biases" pre-emptive bullshit attack.
If you are too lazy to think the point I'm making is that sadly there is still a very large amount of medical evidence to show that the assault injury statistics show a much larger number of assaults are occuring than the reported crime statistics. For cultural reasons a lot of rapes and other assaults end up in medical reports without ending up in criminal reports. Such a thing is general knowledge among the majority of most communities but for some reason you appear to have been sheltered from such awareness or are for some reason denying what is occurring around you.
Getting a bit out of hand. Elliot was one guy, with crazy ideas, and mental health issues, he isn't a reflection of the rest of us. Let's just be glad he wasn't smart enough to get into politics and pull a hitler on us.
sudo apt-get install sl && sl
Hey wait, GOTO isn't safe.
I've read through this thread and all I want to do is bang my head up against the wall. The majority of the posters above are missing the entire point. Let me spell out one example for you guys. One. As in yes there are so very many more to choose from but here's just one example of what it is like to be a woman in society today. We live in a society where (and I apologize but just focusing on male-female relationships/interactions for now) 1- Women are concerned about reactions when they are simply honest. Telling a stranger (or sometimes even a friend) you're not interested in a relationship (romantic) with them can result in different ways: A- he takes it well and everything is fine. B- he seems to listen but thinks you're playing hard to get so he keeps at it and makes the woman uncomfortable because he's already not listening or respecting what she has told him. Things escalate from there. C- He does not take it well and in a show of pride scoffs he wasn't interested/just doing her a favor and other aggressive moves. D- he's reacts quite strongly taking it as a personal affront and makes a threatening comment or gesture. E- he says she's wrong and that she will be with him and proceeds to be completely inappropriate. The A guys are the majority. We know that. We're not worried about them. It's the fact that B-E guys exist and no one is wearing a nametag saying "yeap I'm a jerk" that we have to be concerned. Because it can be a physical threat. The worst part of it is-- short of E and him dragging her away while she screams no - the rest of the crowd tends to be on the male's side in this. No one wants to be rejected for any reason or in any way so it is easy to sympathize with the male and god forbid, no one wants to get involved in a argument. No one tells B to lay off, or C to cool off or D to leave as he's inappropriate. E you might get someone to assist but don't count on it. The fear in this comes from what could happen- based on what has happened and what clues are provided by the males that insinuate possible danger if not agreed with. Call us irrational all you want, but typically most women have experienced enough incidents to make us cautious in these situations. My first experience with someone like this was when I was 12. Twelve. I was at the beach and didn't realize what was even happening because again, I was 12 and relatively naive. I realized an older man was following me around a small store we were visiting. I was was wearing long shorts and a scrub top, nothing revealing. When I finally realized he was following me and looked him in the eye, he eyed me top to bottom and smiled as he walked up to me. I had no idea what he was doing (but understand now) bur I turned to get away because instinct said so- as I did he took the rejection of his advances negatively and called me a vulgar term in a very angry voice, while stepping towards me. If I had not ran to the safety of more people in the store in another area, what perhaps would have happened? Admittedly growing up I always looked older than my age, I doubt he realized how young I was, but regardless of my age at the time I should not have been treated in the manner he treated me. I'm still surprised at his sense of entitlement to my affections just because he displayed interest towards me. Another more recent experience was when I was meeting new people when a number of friends were moving out of the area. I agreed to meet a guy for coffee - not a date at all, specifically and clearly stated as such, in the middle of a local mall. Completely open area. He turned out to be a guy trying to be nice but failing because he wasn't really a nice guy. He was definitely a B and as I said goodbye he grabbed me in the middle of the mall and kissed me. There was NOTHING to signify I wanted or interested in this from him. He assaulted me. Clear and simple. I shoved him away, said that was inappropriate, and left. I know if I'd tried to press charges it would not have gone anywhere because I did "meet him there" and "showed interest by talking to him" and t
This problematic attitude of fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she shows or tells that she is not interested, leads in many societies to honor killings, disfigurement by flinging acid on the woman and rape.
One thing to keep in mind with many of these statistics is that it only accounts for "reported" (and to some extent acknowledged) issues.
Certainly abuse of women is a big issue, but keep in mind that often abuse of (or violence towards) men is ignored or under-reported.
Is an insult to everyone, who was raped. Like real rape.
And that there is no reason to believe that pedophilia is a rare mental illness any more than we once believed homosexuality was a rare mental illness.
So you ARE arguing that homosexuality IS a mental illness?
It's just that we once wrongly thought that it was rare?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think you've hit the nail completely on the head here. Geekery has more intelligent people in it than the average, and more of a history of being "outsiders" (say, in high school), and more autism. This is a volatile mix, and the result seems to be that there is no "middle ground".
I concur that almost all of the guys I've worked with have been perfectly professional and respectful to women in a professional capacity. We all make mistakes (and given what mainstream culture teaches us, it's unsurprising that we make mistakes in gender relations), but I've noticed that when male geeks have it pointed out to them that they did make a mistake (be it a joke which could be seen as sexist, or something else), they either completely get it or completely don't get it, to the point of coming up with elaborate excuses as to why the bad behaviour is acceptable.
You can see both extremes here in this very thread. In the thread, it seems to be pretty much evenly split between guys who get it and guys who don't, but I don't believe that these proportions are indicative of the industry as a whole.
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That's also my experience, but I've also found it to be true that the few who do have biases (or, more likely, an unrealistic picture of what constitutes "normal") are far more likely to argue that they don't and make excuses as to why their behaviour should be considered acceptable, than admit it and change their ways. Intelligence cuts both ways.
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Nobody, I repeat nobody, is claiming that "nerds are all a bunch of women haters". Only a tiny number of nerds are women haters.
See, it's not just "a woman" who had a bad experience at a conference. It's that most women have had bad experiences (not all of them as bad as being groped, admittedly) at these events. It's a tiny proportion, but it only takes a tiny proportion.
A few act like floppy clumsy puppies and make obvious blunders which can make an environment uncomfortable for someone who doesn't fit the nerd stereotype. This is just ignorance, and it's nothing that a little bit of pointing-out can't fix.
But the real problem is this, and this is what most people don't get: Many nerds do not step in and stop their fellow nerds if they are creating a hostile environment, or otherwise make it clear to the few that certain behaviours are unacceptable, and most nerds are oblivious to what women and other minorities face in the community from the actions of the few.
Hopefully, the claim that "nerds are oblivious" is not a controversial statement...
You're absolutely right that it's not specific to nerds or nerd culture. However, we pride ourselves on being typically smarter than the average bear. We are natural problem solvers, if only that we can see a problem to be solved.
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whilst there are more people with autistic and aspergers symtomps working in computing that most other industries there is still an underlying behaviour we all exhibit that is grumpy and short tempered regardless of gender , this is not related but IMHO inherited.
I think the intention of the OP was to point out that we males in the it community need to as a community address the problem of bad communication skills as we are likely to be caught up in the wider problem of male misogyny if we don't take a clear stance against it. We are also wasting the capable resources of many females who are dropping out of tech projects because of this abuse and having to pretend to be men to participate.
We need to reinforce good behaviour and as men we need to confront those exhibiting misogynistic behaviour and make it abundently clear that is not acceptable , just the same way as we do with racists.
we are responsible for the world and we must act like it , no excuses
[site]
You just explained how ALL marginalized groups of people develop resentment for non-marginalized groups of people.
Which is to say that social marginalization is the problem, not nerds.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
> But the real problem is this, and this is what most people don't get: Many nerds do not step in and stop their fellow nerds if they are creating a hostile environment, or otherwise make it clear to the few that certain behaviours are unacceptable, and most nerds are oblivious to what women and other minorities face in the community from the actions of the few.
Because when we do, we're accused (by that woman) of "White Knighting". And sometimes legitimately - there's a LOT of false signalling going on when the stakes are this high (and when reproduction AND pack dynamics are involved, the stakes are ALWAYS high).
There's a LOT of misogynistic jerks out there. But there's also a LOT of role-confusion and conflicting signals about what we're supposed to do about it.
The tumbler Social Justice Warriors have some damn good, highly valid points - but they're expressing them in pretty toxic and unhelpful ways.
The MRA movement also has a few damn good, highly valid points - but they're expressing them in pretty toxic and unhelpful ways.
And the narcissistic sociopaths stand in the middle, egging both sides on, because chaos is fun, and tears are delicious.
And each time one side presents a toxic, unhelpful argument, it makes the other side that less capable of presenting their side in non-toxic and helpful ways - because coalition politics are buried pretty deeply inside our monkey-brains.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
It doesn't help that nerds are more confused than most about social cues, on the whole.
They do? I've never seen any good or valid point within a several-mile radius of the MRA movement, and certainly not its online wing.
Oh, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of damn good and highly valid points that a sane group dedicated to "men's rights" could be making. There's no shortage of issues in the world that disproportionately affect men adversely (child custody, prison rape, conscription... I'm sure I don't need to go on). I've just never seen any of it it even hinted at by the MRA movement.
I made one comment elsewhere that I'm going to repeat here: The slogan of the Good Men Project is "the conversation no one else is having". Sadly, that appears to be accurate.
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