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The Woman Who Should Have Been the First Female Astronaut
StartsWithABang writes We like to think of the Mercury 7 — the very first group of NASA astronauts — as the "best of the best," having been chosen from a pool of over 500 of the top military test pilots after three rounds of intense physical and mental tests. Yet when women were allowed to take the same tests, one of them clearly distinguished herself, outperforming practically all of the men. If NASA had really believed in merit, Jerrie Cobb would have been the first female in space, even before Valentina Tereshkova, more than 50 years ago. She still deserves to go.
Wow what a hypocrite. Your post reeks of racism.
Wtf happened to Slashdot? There's a story like this posted 5 times a week now, and I'm getting really sick of it. Donglegate, women hula hooping at GitHub, failed female astronauts, and a ton of other non-stories get posted here. And then a million femnazis come out of the woodwork and post as AC in support of the thesis that "All women would be super-rich internet entrepreneurs were it not for the developer-king patriarchs ruling Silicon Valley", ie "Boys are mean and girls are sugar and spice and everything nice".
Walter Isaacson "singles out the achievements of unheralded women" in computing in his latest book, and absurdly pretends that nobody ever heard of Ada Lovelace any credit..
STOP WHINING ALREADY YOU SOUND LIKE A BUNCH OF SPOILED BRATS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If one of your required qualifications is "be part of an existing program that old admits men" then the program is sexist merely by its requirements, even if those requirements are applied equally to all candidates. Neither does discrimination require malice or intent -- unintentional discrimination has exactly the same outcomes as intentional discrimination.
You also can't claim both that there were no women up-to-snuff therefore no discrimination existed, and also that selecting women would have imposed an additional burden on NASA. One of those scenarios claims there was no discrimination while the other one claims that discrimination was present and intentional but justified. And again, if you construct one of the requirements to be "must urinate via a penis" it doesn't matter that you apply that standard to everyone who applies, it's still sexist (and assumes that "male" is the default option and the females have "extra" requirements -- even if gender was a legitimate reason to discriminate, why are females the group selected against instead of males?).
But mostly this is absurd, because if NASA wasn't discriminating against females they would have been in the extreme minority of organizations at the time. Sexism was even more ridiculous then than it is now and to presume that NASA is or was somehow exempt from that culture-wide phenomenon just because they dreamed up an arbitrary set of performance standards is insane.
Where do you see racism in his post? All I see is an accurate analysis of the racism that was shown by people in the past.
It was widely known that physiologically and psychologically a woman is better suited for space flights
Careful, you are contradicting PC axiom that men and women are equal in all things, including any psychological predispositions.
Israeli army is very effective when shooting unarmed civilians. Not so much going against people that when going against comparably armed men, instead of kids throwing rocks at tanks. Maybe it is because all the women serving, maybe not.
His post implies that white people are sexist.
That is racist.
YOU SEXIST. She is a woman... there cannot be anything more qualified than her.... Except... perhaps... a lesbian woman.
"Men can run faster than women" is not sexist"
Actually it is. Not all men can run faster than all women, and not all women can run faster than all men.
So what you said, is actually 100% sexist.
Some men are great in the kitchen, some women suck in the kitchen. Vice versa.
If you want to get into biology and genetics, it would be correct to say, "On average, the average man in good health without special training or efforts may run faster or be stronger than the average women in the same conditions" could be correct, for averages. However there are women genetically predispositioned to be faster and stronger than the average man. Taller, etc, whatever trait you want.