Somebody mod parent up. There isn't going to be another attempt at revolution any time soon because the powers that be have figured out that if you don't screw up like the British did in the 1770s you can get away with anything.
How is this +5? Where did Citizens United come into the discussion? Citizens United was just one decision in a decades-long war to turn corporations into immortal, incorporeal, sociopathic people. The citizenry gets the government it deserves, though. At some point we forgot that corporations exist to serve we the people, not an increasingly wealthy 1%. There are other forms of business if one wants to go into business, except sole proprietorships and partnerships have one little flaw. Individuals get held responsible when things go wrong.
Corporations as people pervert capitalism to the point that if this goes much further, one would not be able to call our economic system capitalism any more.
Medieval Europe had knights, lords, kings, all manner of other nobility. Medieval America will have VPs and CFOs and CEOs and Members and Directors of the Board.
By far and away I see a whole bunch of people that simple need to learn not the wiki markup, but simply how to write the English language (or whatever language they choose to use for contributions including Klingon). Most of the new contributors that are struggling with the markup language also need some remedial writing classes to figure out how to write content of any kind, much less need some hand holding on how to put that content onto a page of any kind.
This. A million times, this. It's never the idea that you denote headings with some ==s or that you emphasize text by putting it ''in these'', but it's the very concept of organized writing that implies!
These same people, given a WYISWYG always seem to produce complete garbage: random formatting, strange font changes, haphazard spacing, etc. It's not that typing == or '' is too technical, it's that proper grammar itself is too technical. The idea of a complete sentence is just as foreign and inaccessible to them as the idea of a heading.
I wish I were just being conceited. I think that the only reason that people seem to be getting dumber is that the internet and computers have forced the great majority of people into becoming writers. It turns out that writing is something that takes study and discipline, which are two things that most people just haven't ever wanted to bother with. For the average person, as long as they have food, TV, and sex, average is good enough. And why not?
Too bad we can't go back to the way it was when the average person did not need to be a writer. Maybe those secretaries taking dictation weren't such a bad idea after all. Can't write? Can't type? Let a professional do it for you.
I missed the part of the bible that specified that injecting a homosexual man with estrogen, causing his breasts to begin to develop, would cure him of homosexuality. Would you be so kind as point that out?
You're going to run into this kind of waste and mediocracy your entire life. Some people are innovators, other people are parasites and warm bodies.
For now, you're getting paid, aren't you?
Career-wise, try to network with other people who are innovators. Always keep going for the higher paying opportunity until your price rises to meet your ability.
What's that got to do with it? Why would gun owners invoke the 2nd Amendment to defend a bunch of long-haired hippies who want to steal American Property?
Especially after acquiescing to the Patriot Act and airport scanners that administer a dangerous dosage of radiation as a routine measure?
No, my friend, I'm afraid that I've yet to see the 2nd Amendment get invoked for any other reason than to kill brown people and fags except maybe the Civil War. And after the New Deal, the reasons for the secession of the Confederate States look like gripes that could be solved over an afternoon tea.
Your internet tough guy argument fails. Even after all the shortwave saber rattling I used to believe in and follow when I was growing up, the American people remain hopelessly cowed.
I saw this article was I was at work, and since I usually don't log in there, this comment will probably be lost in the sea of outrage, but...
Back when I was in high school, I took a semister of debate, and I forget the exact proposition, but it had to do with improving school systems. My partner and I ran a pretty air-tight voucher proposition, and since I actually believed in my proposition, I've tended to use similar points in meat-space discussions about the school systems that have come up since then. Of course, never ventured outside of my room back then except to go to school and my partner didn't have much ambition, either, so we never actually competed and I may never know how air tight or not it actually was, but I digress.
I think this article has shown me for the first time some solid evidence why a voucher system could fail. If I were doing negative against my old proposition, all I would have needed to do were jump forward in time to Slashdot in 2012 where I could read about how parents really, really want their kids to fail in the global marketplace just so that their kids won't get eaten by the devil.
Jeebus, the implications are frightening. I've seen how a few choice quotes from the Bible with some wiles (that I suppose this Satan guy might be impressed by) can turn an otherwise intelligent and rational man into a racist homophobe (my ex-father), but just holy shit. Claiming that the Loch Ness monster is real? Please say it ain't so and the article is doing some strawmanning of its own!
Although, I can see it. And that's the problem.
One thing that conservatives or at least "internet tough guys" like to rail against is the idea of relative values. Relative values is, on its surface, the idea that different cultures are all just as valid, which can degrade into arguing that opinions are just as real as facts.
However, it's become apparent to me that conservatives have their own notion of relative values, and they have their own opinions and facts. Except, unlike with its liberal counterpart, the conservative relative values argument starts with the axiom (yes, axiom, not assumption, because an assumption can be refuted) that god exists and that the Bible is fundamentally influenced by him and is intended to be his message to the world.
Therefore, if I conclude that the Loch Ness monster must exist based on some theological contortion, then my opinion has just as much privelege as the complete lack of evidence that Nessie exists. If I decide that blacks should be slaves because of part of Noah's story, then my opinion has just as much privelege as any argument that blacks are just as capable as whites. Q. E. D.
It's really mind-blowing. I work around a lot of people who do not have a basic grasp of maths, geography, reading, or writing. Therefore, to these people, science is just as much mysticism and hand-waving as religion. To these people, science is a religion. And from the temples of science come computers, which are sufficiently advanced technology. That's right! To these people, computers are indistinguishable from magic. Just a very kind of wonky and klunky magic, but I'm beginning to believe that they are serious when they call me a wizard. The fact that I'm obviously LGBT and obviously not a good ol' boy probably drives that superstition home.
It's sad and pathetic, and I don't know what the answer is. I have trouble understanding how I could possibly be the same species as what are essentially hairless apes that wear clothes and can talk. If there were an answer, I suppose that it could only be that perhaps people of all races and genders who really want to live in the real world instead of some medieval fairy story and want to progress their technology to the point where scarcity has been eliminated (at least for them) need to get together and stop contributing our taxes to this madness.
Do you know how much it scares the shit out of anyone living with me when I wake up screaming, even after the fourth or fifth time?
So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming. The only reason my subconscious won't let go is because I actually trusted and thought I loved that fundamentalist, racist, delusional, conspiracy-theory-loving piece of crap for 18 years, and then he broke that trust.
Veterans need this. You think Goatse or Two Girls One Cup can't be unseen?
I just wake up screaming every now and then if I haven't had my dose of b33r after a couple days. It's nothing more than that.
I don't even know what real post traumatic stress syndrome is like. I've never seen someone killed, and I've never had to kill someone or be killed myself.
The US for example has gotten rid of tests to qualify for voting precisely because it disenfranchised certain voters.
Maybe those voters need to be disenfranchised. For a long time I've seriously believed that the 19th Amendment needs to be revisited. When I was young and idealistic, I didn't think so. I've encountered too many living stereotypes, people who put themselves in bad situations just because thanks to their gender or skin color, there's always going to be some white male clamoring to pull them back out of their own crap.
I didn't choose my gender. I didn't choose my skin color. I am sick of being judged by them. What I chose was to do well in school, and apparently that was the wrong choice because everybody else really was out doing drugs and having sex.
I suppose it did help that my folks once threatened to commit me to an insane asylum and have me put in solitary with a straight jacket so that I'd shit and piss myself the one time I didn't get an A.
Let's get rid of the bullshit. Let's get rid of the excuses. Let's get rid of the politically correct horseshit. If you can't write your name, that's your choice. If you can't read, that's your choice. If you can't do basic math, that's your choice.
What I DO NOT need is someone too stupid to do anything but be a baby mamma directing my tax dollars. Too stupid to understand that intelligent design IS NOT A THEORY? I don't want you legislating science class. Proud of the fact that you never took algebra class? What the fuck? Too stupid to understand that marijuana prohibition is causing mass murder in Mexico? I don't want you legislating your morality, because human life is far, far more important than whatever hysteria you have. Too stupid to understand that the USA isn't going to be on the top of the world much longer if you don't pull your head out of your ass? I don't want you making the problem worse.
I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do this fall. I'm very tempted to vote Republican for the first time since I was an idealistic, sheltered teenage kid. If this "war on women" ends with the repeal of the 19th Amendment, I'm one homosexual who doesn't care what happens to gay rights, because things are going to get better after that happens. On the other hand, can I trust Republicans to not just turn into a ball of angst because their wives aren't putting out and at the end of the day we've got a federal DOMA amendment and the 19th still guaranteeing suffrage to a demographic that has been shown time and time again to vote with their vaginas instead of with anything approaching reason?
I do have some female body parts, but nobody would ever consider me a woman. Most notably the one between my ears is female. I don't know what it's like to turn 12, get your tits, and then find out that every guy you come across will do anything you want just because they want in your panties. What I can see is what that does to someone. I keep hoping I'll figure out what's so special about women besides being able to give birth. Instead all I see are a bunch of irresponsible, spoiled children who can get pregnant.
Oh yes, the issue of poll taxes and other Jim Crow laws. I got lost on a rant about women and I forgot to respond to your point!
I've just been called a cracker and a honkie one too many times. I get sick of it. I get real damned sick of it. Don't you think I don't know that marijuana prohibition is turning a disproportinate number of colored people into criminals for no other reason than the only drug white people can handle is alcohol and even some of them can't handle that? Don't you think I don't know that marijuana prohibition started as a kind of thinly veiled racism? But you start hurling names at me, and you cross the line.
Half of me didn't even come off the boat until my great-great-grandparents fled the Kaiser. You think I owe you something because the other half of me comes from South Carolina
Hmm, your UID is too low for astroturfing, so I'll believe your story. I use shitty ass VB6 apps for a lot of the stuff I do. Why do I use those apps? Because they connect to a proprietary telephony device that we can't do business without.
The really unfortunate part is the if we'd known up front how frustrating working with this system would have been (I was promoted to handle an upgrade, and when the true horror of how much we'd been oversold became apparent, it turned into a full-time position for me), they could have just given me the 6 figures they paid for the upgrade and had a much more functional and stable system that would take a fraction of the time maintain.
So if I'm so smart, why don't I just build it in my free time? Well, my boss would own the copyright, and that's not what I want. This propritary shit-ass VB6 software has created so many problems that never existed between my co-workers before I was promoted, I'm not sure how much longer I care to take it. Even if I did built it, who's to guarantee that my boss wouldn't take the copyright and keep the existing shit system?
Why do we have this proprietary telephony device with client software that's mostly VB6, sometimes VB.Net fraken-grafted on top? Because before I came around, nobody where I worked believed that the same thing could be done with OSS software. Right now I'm considering whether to jump ship to another job that came from a friend who recently graduated or to stick around because once the company grows enough, I'll be the one to replace all of the shitty VB6-ness that goes out of its way to break normal windows UI paradigms.
The hard part of deciding to jump ship is that this software is so bad, that for all intents and purposes, I can't be fired. Nobody else knows how to work it except me, and there's no way in hell a student would take my job given that there's no skills he's going to be able to put on his resume from this job, because it's so niche.
I've lost countless data to stupid little bugs. You click that button out of order from your usual ritual? *boom* There goes 15 minutes worth of work. It happens every time, but short of reverse engineering the protocol it uses to talk to the telephony device, I'm stuck with it. I'm stuck with the endless calls from my co-workers about how to do a or b because the documentation is horrible and the user interface is the most unintuitive thing I've ever used.
The worst part, though, is that the people working on the call center floor often blame me every time this pile of VB6 shit blows up. Half of them think *I* wrote it. Of course, the people who give me a paycheck know better, but I'm hard pressed to recall anything more demoralizing than people I used to get along with accusing me of incompetence because a closed-source piece of shit I can't change is, well, a closed-source piece of VB6 shit.
Hmm, public school sure did me some good. After about 8th grade I stopped making friends, and after years of talk therapy (if I were autistic, I think someone would have said something, but not even ass burgers), now that I'm nearly 30, I've started to be able to make connections with people again. Ironically, discovering synthetic marijuana was one of the catalysts of that. Woke up something I'd buried deep inside back before everything went horribly wrong in middle school.
Although I reailzed at one point exactly what my school did to me. That district had a lot of well-to-do people in it, and it wanted to attract more well-to-do people. One way to do that is to sell the fantasy that your little Johnny is going to be a prodigy fucking genius and that the school system is more than happy to fast track him and get him in college by junior year.
Well, as it turns out, biology is messy. Me and 4 others wound up in their pilot program, only two of us that I remember, both children of lawyers, fit the demographic. But, nonetheless, there we were. It started in 4th grade when during math they'd let you sit at a special table where you got to do advanced math. In my 4th grade class, it was just me and this girl, but by the end of the year, it was just me.
Then in 5th grade, they got us winners together, I remember it was 2 girls and 3 boys including me. Now, they had this idea that they'd do some kind of class rotation, and I forget exactly how it worked, but there was science, math, and history. My "homeroom" teacher was the history teacher, and he was good at it. Once he came to class dressed up as Union officer to give us a lesson about the Civil War. I still remember Mr. G, the science teacher and how we had to memorize most of the major anatomy of the human body that year: bones, muscles, blood, and guts.
It was in Mrs. L's classroom, though, that the five of us got together. Despite my recent rantings about females and math, there was gender equality in that room. Hell, I remember A-. I met up with her on a social network the other day. She was the brightest of all of us. We'd sit back there in that room and puzzle over things like floors and ceilings and functions and algebra while the rest of the class was still learning how to properly evaluate 3 + 2 * 1 and not get 6 as the answer.
Those were fine times. It all fell apart in middle school, though. I suppose middle school's rough all around for everybody, but I made a mistake. I couldn't tell you whether the other 4 were offered the same thing I was offered, and maybe it was because the district knew my folks were fundamentalists, or maybe just because of the problems I had with being forced into the male gender against my will. So, one day in summer when school was the last thing I my mind, we got this phone call at home from the vice principal of the west side.
Now, that district doesn't have it anymore to my knowledge, but middle school had one building with an east side and a west side. The west side came from the west side of the district, but not just the west side. There was lake shore on the west side, do ye ken?
Anyway, the vice principal of the west side talked to mom, and then mom handed the phone to me to have a talk with him. I'd met him once before, when he stopped by each 5th grade classroom to put on an exaggerated display of guns, knives, and drugs to show us all how tough and dangerous middle school was. If only I'd known the word "bullshit" when I was in 5th grade, but I didn't. I was just a good, god-fearing child, learning to grow up to be a man in god's image. Bein' a man's hard, harder than bein' a woman, and that's why men can be proud they're men.
So, he tells me there's a special class for kids like me who are scared of things like guns and knives and drugs (and rightly so, he would imply). So he asks me if I want to be in that class. So, being the good christian child I was, respectful of my elders and trusting them with my future and say thankya, I
The way women's minds work is very simple. You start with the way a man's mind works, and then you take away reason and accountability. Perhaps whoever originally wrote that meant it as some kind representation of misogyny only to be conquered when the character got laid, thus proving that the root of all misogyny is sexual frustration.
On the other hand, it does work marvelously well. The other trick is when she inevitably gets her feelings hurt (like when you suggest one interpretation of the client's wishes and then she sends you something completely different to actually implement and then you turn out to be right and she wrong and on the receiving end of some less than nice words from the client), don't worry about it. You're dealing with someone with the mentality of a 6-year old.
Of course, there's no inherent biological reason it has to be that way. I've got a female-model brain, but it seems to be the other body parts that usually go with that one. Women get their boobs, then all of a sudden they can get 90% of men to do anything for them. Reason and accountability are things that are hard like math (you may not realize it, but most females are proud they don't know math) that are quite unnecessary. And, well, the other 10% who took that gender equality stuff seriously and expect quality work from their female colleagues, well, they're just gay so they don't matter.
That's the beauty of it, good doctor. You can fight over censorship. You can't fight a mass of undereducated, brainwashed, misinformed, superstitious voters. After all, things must be the way they are because the public wants them that way. After all, it's what they voted for, and it's not like we haven't censored contrary opinions, so what you hear on the news must be genuinely fair and balanced.
I guess, any more, I can't help but to find these attempts to interpret a meaningless 3,000 year old text not much different from trying to reconstruct some Vulcan matron's philosophical works and the meaning of life from a few disparate episodes of varies Trek series.
Once, before I learned that I couldn't be a woman because I have a body part that enables me to do math (per people who have the other body part and claim that's why they can't do math), I was looking for a netbook. Pink was one of my main criteria.
It's been for a while, but the male dominated world of computing dictates one's choices have traditionally been black or gray. Bleh, how drab.
Yes, it would have been a fashion accessory. A fashion accessory powered by GNU/Linux, oh oops.
But, like I said, I'm actually one of Raymond's she-males. The only lady bits I was born with are between my ears, but you females don't know what that organ is for since all you can do is think with your vagina and thinking about anything that's not in terms of steamy body parts is just too technical for you, so oh well.
How do I feel right now? I feel livid that womyn-born-womyn like you think that the body part between your legs makes you just so damned better. You go off and screw five guys a week? That makes you a powerful woman in tune with her sexuality. I mention that I'm seeing a movie with my boyfriend over the weekend? It's the end of the fucking world.
I hit submit too fast. I used to believe what you're saying. It would seem basic logic.
I guess you get worn down after a while.
You can wear pants the day I can go outside in one of my nice, long skirts I like without needing to worry about what gender someone is going to assign to me and the ensuing drama of someone gendering me male in a skirt because I was forced through male puberty, which left a good number of unerasable features. Usually, though, people gender me female until I speak and the wrong voice comes out or make some other faux paux because I didnt have the advantage of learning all the basics about being a girl in the first 5 years of my life.
What a difference it makes, depending on how someone genders you. I've had people both mistake me for a man, then apologize to their embarassment that they called a lady "sir," and the other way around (more common) as well. And how moving it is for some people to mistake a "man" for a "woman." I once had a restaurant owner call the police and attempt to press charges against me for trespassing because he couldn't make up his mind what gender I was (not to mention rob two of my friends at that time who hadn't received their order--fortunately the police forced the owner to refund them).
Once I was talking to a guy who was interested in me, and I excused myself to the restroom. Half way through relieving myself, he entered and was absolutely amazed to see me there, in front of a urinal (obviously pants that night, no skirt. sometimes pockets are handy). I always use the men's restroom no matter how I'm dressed just because you females can get violent if you believe there's a "man" in your female-only space. One time I walked into the men's room, and this big guy said, "wrong door!" My reply was "nope," to which he riposted, "get a hair cut!"
That should be a suitable segue.
You females enjoy so many gender privileges. I know. I've been on the other side of the fence. The grass is greener. When someone genders you female, everything is so much easier.
Why is it ok for you females to have your hair however you please? Why is it ok for you females to wear whatever you damned well want, and in the case of high heels you can even bitch about it, bitch about the choice you made. I'm only 5'5". I could use heels more than most of you females. And why is it ok for you females to sleep with guy after guy after guy and juggle 3 boyfriends at a time? Have 5 kids with 4 different men? And how the hell did the idea that you females are better communicators or nurturers or better anything other than baby machines ever come about?
I am forced to work as a man, because that's what you damned females said I was. And yet you feel no remorse when Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin or that bitch you females love Janet Raymond gets up and tells men to know their role. I am not your slave. I can always escape you, because I can always die.
Is there a parallel universe were females aren't pigs? I don't know. It's the internet. Nobody knows you're a [giraffe] on the internet.
Sorry. I wouldn't be the misogyinist I am today without having been forcefed an adequate amount of drivel from you females about how all men are rapists, etc and being told to know my role enough.
I'll know my role when you get in my kitchen and make me a sandwich.
Again, as I've been saying lately, I wish I knew how to get to your parallel universe. It sounds like a better one than mine.
I was flabbergasted the other week that one of the baby-mammas where I work was proud that she never took algebra. I wish it weren't just a matter of her projecting pride as a self-defense mechanism. One time the women I work with started from the proposition that programming is actually very easy and, because I'm a sexist man, I was just keeping the secret from them. So we sat down once a week for an hour, and I tried to teach them remedial algebra when it became apparently they didn't understand the idea of a variable. As other women have noted, Newton's Principia Mathematica is a rape manual, and I realized that I was looking at the horrified faces of women being raped. I resolved to never again delude myself into thinking that women could think abstractly.
I just wish I knew how to get over to your universe. I really do. I'm sure that over there, when a 10 year old boy says that he wants to kill himself because he's not a girl, they let him undergo gender transition instead of forcing him through male puberty ("because you'll grow out of it and thank us later"). And why not if in your universe women have the same faculties as men?
I'll tell you what. Lots of other posters have already pointed out the obvious. D&D, rock and roll, marihuana, you name it. There's a song from a move I remember that starts with Oompa-Loompa and then it turns into a musical version of Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book about Men (it nicely complement Warren Farrel's The Myth of Male Power). If there's a problem with the young men, it's a failure of the old men.
I used to be able to call myself a trans woman.
(till I took an arrow to the knee, yuk yuk yuk).
But seriously. I realized that I could never be a woman, because of the phrase "women and children." This, gentlemen, is the answer key to why men always get the blame.
You see, it's really quite simple to talk to a woman. Assume she has the intellect of a 10 year old.
Yes. I realized a while back that in order to interact with a woman and keep my sanity, I had to trivilize and objectify her. There is simply no other way. Women do not want responsibility and they do not want equality, except as I wrote in another post, Orwellian equality where all genders are created equal but some genders are more equal than others.
You cannot have a system of separate-but-equal. It never works.
And, to conclude, I must also recommend Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. Those three books are a trifecta that shows how misandry hurts women. They should be mandatory reading instead of the usual drivel in English classes about pregnant houses and how long hair is rape.
a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paycheck
As a sidenote, my ex made an interesting comment the other day in support of gay marriage. I was bitching about lesbians, and he noted that in a legal framework with gay marriage, if a legally married lesbian couple has children, then can you legally hold the man who had a one night stand with omg lesbians responsible for child support? The contention is that in such a system, one could not, because the law must needs assume that two women who would invoke a sacred thing like marriage to form a life-long bond had invited the man into their bedroom for the sole purpose of conceiving a child.
Of course that's mostly sophistry. I'll be shocked if any of the DOMA laws are repealed before I die. Giving niggers equality, that's one thing, but I guess giving faggots equality is asking too much.
I have never understood this. How do you have a child unintentionally?
No, seriously. I want to know. No thoughts about birth control or condoms or gee, maybe I'm not ready for this yet? I don't know your body parts. Was it a case of you not being able to keep your dick in your pants or not being able to keep a dick out of your pants? I really, really don't get it.
I've only had one sexual partner in my life. If I could have kids, I would have definitely given that a "ok, blowjob for tonight, but I at least need to be on the pill, honey" (or let's go get some condoms, baby, which ever intact body part I could hope to use to have kids of my own). And yet you same straight assholes are out there saying that people like me have thousands of sexual partners and are the reason marriage is falling apart? Look in the mirror.
One additional data point before I move on. It turns out that the guy I fell in love with isn't gay. He was just attracted to my androgyny, and it was good while it was, but all things must come to an end. Now, he's an athiest like me but also practical. He says he never uses condoms. He's had tons of sexual partners. Now he wants a wife and wants children. All those sexual partners and no accidental children. Just lucky? Who knows.
And now for something completely different.
Ok, here's the thing. People make mistakes. That's why I used to donate to food banks before I learned that all I was doing was helping people who want to turn me into a second class citizen (if you define marriage in terms of male and female, your next task is to define male and female at the great risk of turning people who "just are" female into legal males because biology is messy, and don't even start with fundamentalist bullshit, because simplistic bullshit is all it is no matter whether it works for 90% or 99% of the population or not. There will always be counterexamples.).
So, you had a beautiful baby girl, the system worked, you got help, and everybody won. That's excellent. I wish I knew more stories like yours.
Unfortunately, your story, if it is to be believed, is a severe outlier. I've been exposed to many females who have chosen the single mother lifestyle, a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paychecks. I even had a passing interest in a guy who had 3 kids and was having child support issues. The issue is that he had never worked a day in his life, literally. His entitlement complex, the way he talked about his welfare cash assistance as "his money" and the indignation that the economy collapsing meant that the state was going to cut some of "his money" was just too much.
The devil is that I have to agree with the person you responded to. Yes, I would rather live in a world where your daughter would have been taken from you. The advantage is egalitarianism and encouraging people to think ahead before they make big choices like having children. It simply isn't right that people who take the awesome responsibility of creating human life trivially get privileged over other, more responsible people.
As a footnote, I'm not suggesting that kind of egalitarianism would enable me to adopt kids. I'm in no position to have children yet. Some day I may be, and maybe I'll find the right person and maybe there won't be too many Jim Crow laws to get in our way and maybe I'll adopt when Mr. Right and I are ready. Not a moment before. I suppose I should be glad at my sexual worthlessness, but there is no sense in giving people leave to have babies just for the sake of having babies and leaving people like me with the bill. The opening to the movie Idiocracy makes my point better than I ever could hope to, having established that the question of having kids has been taken out of my hands by messy biology and even messier superstitions.
"Hi, there's no paper in the printer, and an orange light on it and it wont print, can you come and have a look at it?"
That might not have been quite what you thought it was. I've worked in a nearly all female environment for a while now (extremely stable job, company actually started growing when the economy fell apart).
We all had it beat into our heads during the ninties with shows like Home Improvement that males are all lunkheads who are too prideful to ask for help or directions. Naturally, females were portrayed as flawless, rational, civilizing influences that just have some kind of higher existence than a man could ever imagine. And maybe that's still what primtime TV is like, and all that changed last decade was I stopped watching mainstream TV.
The thing is, females typically have a good idea of what needs to be done in a physical-objects situation like that, but there are two things going on there. First, females would rather ask a person a question than read written instructions to the point that most females have severely impaired reading comprehension, which just drives the inclination that their best bet is to ask someone. Presumably there were insructions on the printer for how to change paper, but her preference was to call someone with experience. When a female does that, it's because she has respect for your experience (but not for you because you don't have body parts that can make kids and leave you alone for 25 days out of a 28 day cycle when not making a baby).
Second, females I believe are even more afraid of being wrong than a man is. A man isn't adverse to saying "I don't know" or "I was wrong," but men desire to understand things so they'll try to arrive at answers for themselves, at least a partial answer, before giving up. In the event that the answer is partial or wrong, the man will have a dialogue with someone wiser both in order to acheive a better understanding and also to challenge the other person to ensure that they are, in fact, wiser or more experienced with the matter at hand. The problem is that after all the feminism that was shoved down my throat, I've come to understand that the word dialogue does not mean to a female what I think it means. Instead, the world dialogue as used by a female means "I'm right. You're wrong. And don't dare contradict me."
Therefore, when a task must be completed and a female knows there's no bullshitting her way out of it (in this instance, she does understand full well that the printer needs paper to print), she'll play dumb. That way there's no threat to any of her internal knowledge of the world, and she can continue to believe that she's just somehow better than males.
So, is it irritating when females do that? Yes, especially when they turn around and writing feminist diatribes about how being a woman is so hard and how having long hair is like rape. Does it mean she's an airhead? By no measure.
Just my $0.02. And countdown to being modded troll... Seriously, people, open your eyes and look past the boobs. Females are pampered, and it needs to come to an end because the only kind of equality they were ever after is the Orwellian kind where all genders are equal, but some genders are more equal than other genders.
And I know it makes drunk girls feel emotionally drawn to you when you say that you have 9.5 million dollars left after buying a top-end sports car with cash that you can give her a ride in if she'd like.
Fixed that for you, although perhaps that was your point in the end.
News flash. Women want to have children, and we've designed all kinds of things like child support and welfare to encourage them to be able to exercise exactly zero forethought before going to a party, doing a bunch of drugs, getting knocked up, then calling date rape once their pregnancy test comes back positive.
If anybody cared about gender equality, a woman who had children with no way to support them would be shunned the exact same way as a deadbeat dad, and instead we'd have some way to either let the children starve or just take them away from her.
I keep getting told I'm trolling, so either I'm in a parallel universe or men need to start opening their eyes and seeing what's happening around them.
It's not homosexuals who are destroying marriage, it's women.
I work around a lot of women, and I see this consistently. When one of them gets pregnant, it's always outside of marriage. Either it's date rape or otherwise the father to be mysteriously turns into a total jackass around the 5th month of pregnancy (give or take a month). The benefits to a woman for making the baby's father out to be a complete creep creates quite the conflict of interest there.
Every now and then I'm flabbergasted to learn that one of these pregnancies happened within marriage. Then these exact same women turn around and parrot everything fox news has to say about homosexuality. It's completely hypocritical, and nobody has a problem with it. I can accept that perhaps homosexuals are abominations before god, but I'm pretty sure the scriptual basis for that also says that women having children outside of wedlock or even having children with two different men is equally abominable.
I'm sure that was part of the point you were trying to make, but let's face it. As a homosexual property owner, I'm forced to cough up tax money both from my income and for my property, and all I can do is helplessly watch as it's given to women who, beside being able to have babies, have no skills or any other way to support themselves. If that's how they want to be, then fine. They can get a husband, because I sure as hell don't want to pay for them to be able to freeload.
Or, if they really, really want to have children without involving a man for anything other than a one night stand, then they can do the responsible thing and advance themselves to a job that will pay them enough to be able to support themselves and their child. I know in an intellectual sense that females are capable of reading, writing, and math, but we have a system that lets them play the victim card and go the easy route instead of doing something they want us to believe that is just too hard like basic algebra.
But, nobody cares. Women just play the victim card over and over again, and men are perfectly happy to play along with it. I can only wonder if men who legitimize inherent victimhood for women are really so delusional as to believe that they're going to get pussy for being a white knight saving the damsel in distress.
Sickening. Simply sickening. Oh well, countdown to being modded -1 troll or offtopic for talking about the elephant in the room in 5... 4... 3...
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody mod parent up. There isn't going to be another attempt at revolution any time soon because the powers that be have figured out that if you don't screw up like the British did in the 1770s you can get away with anything.
How is this +5? Where did Citizens United come into the discussion? Citizens United was just one decision in a decades-long war to turn corporations into immortal, incorporeal, sociopathic people. The citizenry gets the government it deserves, though. At some point we forgot that corporations exist to serve we the people, not an increasingly wealthy 1%. There are other forms of business if one wants to go into business, except sole proprietorships and partnerships have one little flaw. Individuals get held responsible when things go wrong.
Corporations as people pervert capitalism to the point that if this goes much further, one would not be able to call our economic system capitalism any more.
It was not necessary for the court to state that corporations are people, because it's standing on the shoulders of giants: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Medieval Europe had knights, lords, kings, all manner of other nobility. Medieval America will have VPs and CFOs and CEOs and Members and Directors of the Board.
By far and away I see a whole bunch of people that simple need to learn not the wiki markup, but simply how to write the English language (or whatever language they choose to use for contributions including Klingon). Most of the new contributors that are struggling with the markup language also need some remedial writing classes to figure out how to write content of any kind, much less need some hand holding on how to put that content onto a page of any kind.
This. A million times, this. It's never the idea that you denote headings with some ==s or that you emphasize text by putting it ''in these'', but it's the very concept of organized writing that implies!
These same people, given a WYISWYG always seem to produce complete garbage: random formatting, strange font changes, haphazard spacing, etc. It's not that typing == or '' is too technical, it's that proper grammar itself is too technical. The idea of a complete sentence is just as foreign and inaccessible to them as the idea of a heading.
I wish I were just being conceited. I think that the only reason that people seem to be getting dumber is that the internet and computers have forced the great majority of people into becoming writers. It turns out that writing is something that takes study and discipline, which are two things that most people just haven't ever wanted to bother with. For the average person, as long as they have food, TV, and sex, average is good enough. And why not?
Too bad we can't go back to the way it was when the average person did not need to be a writer. Maybe those secretaries taking dictation weren't such a bad idea after all. Can't write? Can't type? Let a professional do it for you.
I missed the part of the bible that specified that injecting a homosexual man with estrogen, causing his breasts to begin to develop, would cure him of homosexuality. Would you be so kind as point that out?
You're going to run into this kind of waste and mediocracy your entire life. Some people are innovators, other people are parasites and warm bodies.
For now, you're getting paid, aren't you?
Career-wise, try to network with other people who are innovators. Always keep going for the higher paying opportunity until your price rises to meet your ability.
Yes. They do.
My suggestion to OP is to keep looking or accept what your co-workers have deemed the way things are.
What's that got to do with it? Why would gun owners invoke the 2nd Amendment to defend a bunch of long-haired hippies who want to steal American Property?
Especially after acquiescing to the Patriot Act and airport scanners that administer a dangerous dosage of radiation as a routine measure?
No, my friend, I'm afraid that I've yet to see the 2nd Amendment get invoked for any other reason than to kill brown people and fags except maybe the Civil War. And after the New Deal, the reasons for the secession of the Confederate States look like gripes that could be solved over an afternoon tea.
Your internet tough guy argument fails. Even after all the shortwave saber rattling I used to believe in and follow when I was growing up, the American people remain hopelessly cowed.
I saw this article was I was at work, and since I usually don't log in there, this comment will probably be lost in the sea of outrage, but...
Back when I was in high school, I took a semister of debate, and I forget the exact proposition, but it had to do with improving school systems. My partner and I ran a pretty air-tight voucher proposition, and since I actually believed in my proposition, I've tended to use similar points in meat-space discussions about the school systems that have come up since then. Of course, never ventured outside of my room back then except to go to school and my partner didn't have much ambition, either, so we never actually competed and I may never know how air tight or not it actually was, but I digress.
I think this article has shown me for the first time some solid evidence why a voucher system could fail. If I were doing negative against my old proposition, all I would have needed to do were jump forward in time to Slashdot in 2012 where I could read about how parents really, really want their kids to fail in the global marketplace just so that their kids won't get eaten by the devil.
Jeebus, the implications are frightening. I've seen how a few choice quotes from the Bible with some wiles (that I suppose this Satan guy might be impressed by) can turn an otherwise intelligent and rational man into a racist homophobe (my ex-father), but just holy shit. Claiming that the Loch Ness monster is real? Please say it ain't so and the article is doing some strawmanning of its own!
Although, I can see it. And that's the problem.
One thing that conservatives or at least "internet tough guys" like to rail against is the idea of relative values. Relative values is, on its surface, the idea that different cultures are all just as valid, which can degrade into arguing that opinions are just as real as facts.
However, it's become apparent to me that conservatives have their own notion of relative values, and they have their own opinions and facts. Except, unlike with its liberal counterpart, the conservative relative values argument starts with the axiom (yes, axiom, not assumption, because an assumption can be refuted) that god exists and that the Bible is fundamentally influenced by him and is intended to be his message to the world.
Therefore, if I conclude that the Loch Ness monster must exist based on some theological contortion, then my opinion has just as much privelege as the complete lack of evidence that Nessie exists. If I decide that blacks should be slaves because of part of Noah's story, then my opinion has just as much privelege as any argument that blacks are just as capable as whites. Q. E. D.
It's really mind-blowing. I work around a lot of people who do not have a basic grasp of maths, geography, reading, or writing. Therefore, to these people, science is just as much mysticism and hand-waving as religion. To these people, science is a religion. And from the temples of science come computers, which are sufficiently advanced technology. That's right! To these people, computers are indistinguishable from magic. Just a very kind of wonky and klunky magic, but I'm beginning to believe that they are serious when they call me a wizard. The fact that I'm obviously LGBT and obviously not a good ol' boy probably drives that superstition home.
It's sad and pathetic, and I don't know what the answer is. I have trouble understanding how I could possibly be the same species as what are essentially hairless apes that wear clothes and can talk. If there were an answer, I suppose that it could only be that perhaps people of all races and genders who really want to live in the real world instead of some medieval fairy story and want to progress their technology to the point where scarcity has been eliminated (at least for them) need to get together and stop contributing our taxes to this madness.
Oh good god. Fuck your smug, comfy-ass bullshit.
Do you know how much it scares the shit out of anyone living with me when I wake up screaming, even after the fourth or fifth time?
So I'm not a veteran and I wasn't abused or anything like that, but it doesn't change when my ex-father attacks me and starts breaking every bone in my body and I wake up screaming. The only reason my subconscious won't let go is because I actually trusted and thought I loved that fundamentalist, racist, delusional, conspiracy-theory-loving piece of crap for 18 years, and then he broke that trust.
Veterans need this. You think Goatse or Two Girls One Cup can't be unseen?
I just wake up screaming every now and then if I haven't had my dose of b33r after a couple days. It's nothing more than that.
I don't even know what real post traumatic stress syndrome is like. I've never seen someone killed, and I've never had to kill someone or be killed myself.
The US for example has gotten rid of tests to qualify for voting precisely because it disenfranchised certain voters.
Maybe those voters need to be disenfranchised. For a long time I've seriously believed that the 19th Amendment needs to be revisited. When I was young and idealistic, I didn't think so. I've encountered too many living stereotypes, people who put themselves in bad situations just because thanks to their gender or skin color, there's always going to be some white male clamoring to pull them back out of their own crap.
I didn't choose my gender. I didn't choose my skin color. I am sick of being judged by them. What I chose was to do well in school, and apparently that was the wrong choice because everybody else really was out doing drugs and having sex.
I suppose it did help that my folks once threatened to commit me to an insane asylum and have me put in solitary with a straight jacket so that I'd shit and piss myself the one time I didn't get an A.
Let's get rid of the bullshit. Let's get rid of the excuses. Let's get rid of the politically correct horseshit. If you can't write your name, that's your choice. If you can't read, that's your choice. If you can't do basic math, that's your choice.
What I DO NOT need is someone too stupid to do anything but be a baby mamma directing my tax dollars. Too stupid to understand that intelligent design IS NOT A THEORY? I don't want you legislating science class. Proud of the fact that you never took algebra class? What the fuck? Too stupid to understand that marijuana prohibition is causing mass murder in Mexico? I don't want you legislating your morality, because human life is far, far more important than whatever hysteria you have. Too stupid to understand that the USA isn't going to be on the top of the world much longer if you don't pull your head out of your ass? I don't want you making the problem worse.
I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do this fall. I'm very tempted to vote Republican for the first time since I was an idealistic, sheltered teenage kid. If this "war on women" ends with the repeal of the 19th Amendment, I'm one homosexual who doesn't care what happens to gay rights, because things are going to get better after that happens. On the other hand, can I trust Republicans to not just turn into a ball of angst because their wives aren't putting out and at the end of the day we've got a federal DOMA amendment and the 19th still guaranteeing suffrage to a demographic that has been shown time and time again to vote with their vaginas instead of with anything approaching reason?
I do have some female body parts, but nobody would ever consider me a woman. Most notably the one between my ears is female. I don't know what it's like to turn 12, get your tits, and then find out that every guy you come across will do anything you want just because they want in your panties. What I can see is what that does to someone. I keep hoping I'll figure out what's so special about women besides being able to give birth. Instead all I see are a bunch of irresponsible, spoiled children who can get pregnant.
Oh yes, the issue of poll taxes and other Jim Crow laws. I got lost on a rant about women and I forgot to respond to your point!
I've just been called a cracker and a honkie one too many times. I get sick of it. I get real damned sick of it. Don't you think I don't know that marijuana prohibition is turning a disproportinate number of colored people into criminals for no other reason than the only drug white people can handle is alcohol and even some of them can't handle that? Don't you think I don't know that marijuana prohibition started as a kind of thinly veiled racism? But you start hurling names at me, and you cross the line.
Half of me didn't even come off the boat until my great-great-grandparents fled the Kaiser. You think I owe you something because the other half of me comes from South Carolina
Amtelco, is that you?
Hmm, your UID is too low for astroturfing, so I'll believe your story. I use shitty ass VB6 apps for a lot of the stuff I do. Why do I use those apps? Because they connect to a proprietary telephony device that we can't do business without.
The really unfortunate part is the if we'd known up front how frustrating working with this system would have been (I was promoted to handle an upgrade, and when the true horror of how much we'd been oversold became apparent, it turned into a full-time position for me), they could have just given me the 6 figures they paid for the upgrade and had a much more functional and stable system that would take a fraction of the time maintain.
So if I'm so smart, why don't I just build it in my free time? Well, my boss would own the copyright, and that's not what I want. This propritary shit-ass VB6 software has created so many problems that never existed between my co-workers before I was promoted, I'm not sure how much longer I care to take it. Even if I did built it, who's to guarantee that my boss wouldn't take the copyright and keep the existing shit system?
Why do we have this proprietary telephony device with client software that's mostly VB6, sometimes VB.Net fraken-grafted on top? Because before I came around, nobody where I worked believed that the same thing could be done with OSS software. Right now I'm considering whether to jump ship to another job that came from a friend who recently graduated or to stick around because once the company grows enough, I'll be the one to replace all of the shitty VB6-ness that goes out of its way to break normal windows UI paradigms.
The hard part of deciding to jump ship is that this software is so bad, that for all intents and purposes, I can't be fired. Nobody else knows how to work it except me, and there's no way in hell a student would take my job given that there's no skills he's going to be able to put on his resume from this job, because it's so niche.
I've lost countless data to stupid little bugs. You click that button out of order from your usual ritual? *boom* There goes 15 minutes worth of work. It happens every time, but short of reverse engineering the protocol it uses to talk to the telephony device, I'm stuck with it. I'm stuck with the endless calls from my co-workers about how to do a or b because the documentation is horrible and the user interface is the most unintuitive thing I've ever used.
The worst part, though, is that the people working on the call center floor often blame me every time this pile of VB6 shit blows up. Half of them think *I* wrote it. Of course, the people who give me a paycheck know better, but I'm hard pressed to recall anything more demoralizing than people I used to get along with accusing me of incompetence because a closed-source piece of shit I can't change is, well, a closed-source piece of VB6 shit.
Is your VB6 application something like that?
Hmm, public school sure did me some good. After about 8th grade I stopped making friends, and after years of talk therapy (if I were autistic, I think someone would have said something, but not even ass burgers), now that I'm nearly 30, I've started to be able to make connections with people again. Ironically, discovering synthetic marijuana was one of the catalysts of that. Woke up something I'd buried deep inside back before everything went horribly wrong in middle school.
Although I reailzed at one point exactly what my school did to me. That district had a lot of well-to-do people in it, and it wanted to attract more well-to-do people. One way to do that is to sell the fantasy that your little Johnny is going to be a prodigy fucking genius and that the school system is more than happy to fast track him and get him in college by junior year.
Well, as it turns out, biology is messy. Me and 4 others wound up in their pilot program, only two of us that I remember, both children of lawyers, fit the demographic. But, nonetheless, there we were. It started in 4th grade when during math they'd let you sit at a special table where you got to do advanced math. In my 4th grade class, it was just me and this girl, but by the end of the year, it was just me.
Then in 5th grade, they got us winners together, I remember it was 2 girls and 3 boys including me. Now, they had this idea that they'd do some kind of class rotation, and I forget exactly how it worked, but there was science, math, and history. My "homeroom" teacher was the history teacher, and he was good at it. Once he came to class dressed up as Union officer to give us a lesson about the Civil War. I still remember Mr. G, the science teacher and how we had to memorize most of the major anatomy of the human body that year: bones, muscles, blood, and guts.
It was in Mrs. L's classroom, though, that the five of us got together. Despite my recent rantings about females and math, there was gender equality in that room. Hell, I remember A-. I met up with her on a social network the other day. She was the brightest of all of us. We'd sit back there in that room and puzzle over things like floors and ceilings and functions and algebra while the rest of the class was still learning how to properly evaluate 3 + 2 * 1 and not get 6 as the answer.
Those were fine times. It all fell apart in middle school, though. I suppose middle school's rough all around for everybody, but I made a mistake. I couldn't tell you whether the other 4 were offered the same thing I was offered, and maybe it was because the district knew my folks were fundamentalists, or maybe just because of the problems I had with being forced into the male gender against my will. So, one day in summer when school was the last thing I my mind, we got this phone call at home from the vice principal of the west side.
Now, that district doesn't have it anymore to my knowledge, but middle school had one building with an east side and a west side. The west side came from the west side of the district, but not just the west side. There was lake shore on the west side, do ye ken?
Anyway, the vice principal of the west side talked to mom, and then mom handed the phone to me to have a talk with him. I'd met him once before, when he stopped by each 5th grade classroom to put on an exaggerated display of guns, knives, and drugs to show us all how tough and dangerous middle school was. If only I'd known the word "bullshit" when I was in 5th grade, but I didn't. I was just a good, god-fearing child, learning to grow up to be a man in god's image. Bein' a man's hard, harder than bein' a woman, and that's why men can be proud they're men.
So, he tells me there's a special class for kids like me who are scared of things like guns and knives and drugs (and rightly so, he would imply). So he asks me if I want to be in that class. So, being the good christian child I was, respectful of my elders and trusting them with my future and say thankya, I
The way women's minds work is very simple. You start with the way a man's mind works, and then you take away reason and accountability. Perhaps whoever originally wrote that meant it as some kind representation of misogyny only to be conquered when the character got laid, thus proving that the root of all misogyny is sexual frustration.
On the other hand, it does work marvelously well. The other trick is when she inevitably gets her feelings hurt (like when you suggest one interpretation of the client's wishes and then she sends you something completely different to actually implement and then you turn out to be right and she wrong and on the receiving end of some less than nice words from the client), don't worry about it. You're dealing with someone with the mentality of a 6-year old.
Of course, there's no inherent biological reason it has to be that way. I've got a female-model brain, but it seems to be the other body parts that usually go with that one. Women get their boobs, then all of a sudden they can get 90% of men to do anything for them. Reason and accountability are things that are hard like math (you may not realize it, but most females are proud they don't know math) that are quite unnecessary. And, well, the other 10% who took that gender equality stuff seriously and expect quality work from their female colleagues, well, they're just gay so they don't matter.
That's the beauty of it, good doctor. You can fight over censorship. You can't fight a mass of undereducated, brainwashed, misinformed, superstitious voters. After all, things must be the way they are because the public wants them that way. After all, it's what they voted for, and it's not like we haven't censored contrary opinions, so what you hear on the news must be genuinely fair and balanced.
I guess, any more, I can't help but to find these attempts to interpret a meaningless 3,000 year old text not much different from trying to reconstruct some Vulcan matron's philosophical works and the meaning of life from a few disparate episodes of varies Trek series.
Cheers.
Once, before I learned that I couldn't be a woman because I have a body part that enables me to do math (per people who have the other body part and claim that's why they can't do math), I was looking for a netbook. Pink was one of my main criteria.
It's been for a while, but the male dominated world of computing dictates one's choices have traditionally been black or gray. Bleh, how drab.
Yes, it would have been a fashion accessory. A fashion accessory powered by GNU/Linux, oh oops.
But, like I said, I'm actually one of Raymond's she-males. The only lady bits I was born with are between my ears, but you females don't know what that organ is for since all you can do is think with your vagina and thinking about anything that's not in terms of steamy body parts is just too technical for you, so oh well.
How do I feel right now? I feel livid that womyn-born-womyn like you think that the body part between your legs makes you just so damned better. You go off and screw five guys a week? That makes you a powerful woman in tune with her sexuality. I mention that I'm seeing a movie with my boyfriend over the weekend? It's the end of the fucking world.
I hit submit too fast. I used to believe what you're saying. It would seem basic logic.
I guess you get worn down after a while.
You can wear pants the day I can go outside in one of my nice, long skirts I like without needing to worry about what gender someone is going to assign to me and the ensuing drama of someone gendering me male in a skirt because I was forced through male puberty, which left a good number of unerasable features. Usually, though, people gender me female until I speak and the wrong voice comes out or make some other faux paux because I didnt have the advantage of learning all the basics about being a girl in the first 5 years of my life.
What a difference it makes, depending on how someone genders you. I've had people both mistake me for a man, then apologize to their embarassment that they called a lady "sir," and the other way around (more common) as well. And how moving it is for some people to mistake a "man" for a "woman." I once had a restaurant owner call the police and attempt to press charges against me for trespassing because he couldn't make up his mind what gender I was (not to mention rob two of my friends at that time who hadn't received their order--fortunately the police forced the owner to refund them).
Once I was talking to a guy who was interested in me, and I excused myself to the restroom. Half way through relieving myself, he entered and was absolutely amazed to see me there, in front of a urinal (obviously pants that night, no skirt. sometimes pockets are handy). I always use the men's restroom no matter how I'm dressed just because you females can get violent if you believe there's a "man" in your female-only space. One time I walked into the men's room, and this big guy said, "wrong door!" My reply was "nope," to which he riposted, "get a hair cut!"
That should be a suitable segue. You females enjoy so many gender privileges. I know. I've been on the other side of the fence. The grass is greener. When someone genders you female, everything is so much easier.
Why is it ok for you females to have your hair however you please? Why is it ok for you females to wear whatever you damned well want, and in the case of high heels you can even bitch about it, bitch about the choice you made. I'm only 5'5". I could use heels more than most of you females. And why is it ok for you females to sleep with guy after guy after guy and juggle 3 boyfriends at a time? Have 5 kids with 4 different men? And how the hell did the idea that you females are better communicators or nurturers or better anything other than baby machines ever come about?
I am forced to work as a man, because that's what you damned females said I was. And yet you feel no remorse when Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin or that bitch you females love Janet Raymond gets up and tells men to know their role. I am not your slave. I can always escape you, because I can always die.
Is there a parallel universe were females aren't pigs? I don't know. It's the internet. Nobody knows you're a [giraffe] on the internet.
Sorry. I wouldn't be the misogyinist I am today without having been forcefed an adequate amount of drivel from you females about how all men are rapists, etc and being told to know my role enough.
I'll know my role when you get in my kitchen and make me a sandwich.
Again, as I've been saying lately, I wish I knew how to get to your parallel universe. It sounds like a better one than mine.
Perhaps your point supplements mine.
I was flabbergasted the other week that one of the baby-mammas where I work was proud that she never took algebra. I wish it weren't just a matter of her projecting pride as a self-defense mechanism. One time the women I work with started from the proposition that programming is actually very easy and, because I'm a sexist man, I was just keeping the secret from them. So we sat down once a week for an hour, and I tried to teach them remedial algebra when it became apparently they didn't understand the idea of a variable. As other women have noted, Newton's Principia Mathematica is a rape manual, and I realized that I was looking at the horrified faces of women being raped. I resolved to never again delude myself into thinking that women could think abstractly.
I just wish I knew how to get over to your universe. I really do. I'm sure that over there, when a 10 year old boy says that he wants to kill himself because he's not a girl, they let him undergo gender transition instead of forcing him through male puberty ("because you'll grow out of it and thank us later"). And why not if in your universe women have the same faculties as men?
I'll tell you what. Lots of other posters have already pointed out the obvious. D&D, rock and roll, marihuana, you name it. There's a song from a move I remember that starts with Oompa-Loompa and then it turns into a musical version of Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book about Men (it nicely complement Warren Farrel's The Myth of Male Power). If there's a problem with the young men, it's a failure of the old men.
I used to be able to call myself a trans woman.
(till I took an arrow to the knee, yuk yuk yuk).
But seriously. I realized that I could never be a woman, because of the phrase "women and children." This, gentlemen, is the answer key to why men always get the blame.
You see, it's really quite simple to talk to a woman. Assume she has the intellect of a 10 year old.
Yes. I realized a while back that in order to interact with a woman and keep my sanity, I had to trivilize and objectify her. There is simply no other way. Women do not want responsibility and they do not want equality, except as I wrote in another post, Orwellian equality where all genders are created equal but some genders are more equal than others.
You cannot have a system of separate-but-equal. It never works.
And, to conclude, I must also recommend Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. Those three books are a trifecta that shows how misandry hurts women. They should be mandatory reading instead of the usual drivel in English classes about pregnant houses and how long hair is rape.
a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paycheck
As a sidenote, my ex made an interesting comment the other day in support of gay marriage. I was bitching about lesbians, and he noted that in a legal framework with gay marriage, if a legally married lesbian couple has children, then can you legally hold the man who had a one night stand with omg lesbians responsible for child support? The contention is that in such a system, one could not, because the law must needs assume that two women who would invoke a sacred thing like marriage to form a life-long bond had invited the man into their bedroom for the sole purpose of conceiving a child.
Of course that's mostly sophistry. I'll be shocked if any of the DOMA laws are repealed before I die. Giving niggers equality, that's one thing, but I guess giving faggots equality is asking too much.
I'll stand with the assholes on this one.
I have never understood this. How do you have a child unintentionally?
No, seriously. I want to know. No thoughts about birth control or condoms or gee, maybe I'm not ready for this yet? I don't know your body parts. Was it a case of you not being able to keep your dick in your pants or not being able to keep a dick out of your pants? I really, really don't get it.
I've only had one sexual partner in my life. If I could have kids, I would have definitely given that a "ok, blowjob for tonight, but I at least need to be on the pill, honey" (or let's go get some condoms, baby, which ever intact body part I could hope to use to have kids of my own). And yet you same straight assholes are out there saying that people like me have thousands of sexual partners and are the reason marriage is falling apart? Look in the mirror.
One additional data point before I move on. It turns out that the guy I fell in love with isn't gay. He was just attracted to my androgyny, and it was good while it was, but all things must come to an end. Now, he's an athiest like me but also practical. He says he never uses condoms. He's had tons of sexual partners. Now he wants a wife and wants children. All those sexual partners and no accidental children. Just lucky? Who knows.
And now for something completely different.
Ok, here's the thing. People make mistakes. That's why I used to donate to food banks before I learned that all I was doing was helping people who want to turn me into a second class citizen (if you define marriage in terms of male and female, your next task is to define male and female at the great risk of turning people who "just are" female into legal males because biology is messy, and don't even start with fundamentalist bullshit, because simplistic bullshit is all it is no matter whether it works for 90% or 99% of the population or not. There will always be counterexamples.).
So, you had a beautiful baby girl, the system worked, you got help, and everybody won. That's excellent. I wish I knew more stories like yours.
Unfortunately, your story, if it is to be believed, is a severe outlier. I've been exposed to many females who have chosen the single mother lifestyle, a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paychecks. I even had a passing interest in a guy who had 3 kids and was having child support issues. The issue is that he had never worked a day in his life, literally. His entitlement complex, the way he talked about his welfare cash assistance as "his money" and the indignation that the economy collapsing meant that the state was going to cut some of "his money" was just too much.
The devil is that I have to agree with the person you responded to. Yes, I would rather live in a world where your daughter would have been taken from you. The advantage is egalitarianism and encouraging people to think ahead before they make big choices like having children. It simply isn't right that people who take the awesome responsibility of creating human life trivially get privileged over other, more responsible people.
As a footnote, I'm not suggesting that kind of egalitarianism would enable me to adopt kids. I'm in no position to have children yet. Some day I may be, and maybe I'll find the right person and maybe there won't be too many Jim Crow laws to get in our way and maybe I'll adopt when Mr. Right and I are ready. Not a moment before. I suppose I should be glad at my sexual worthlessness, but there is no sense in giving people leave to have babies just for the sake of having babies and leaving people like me with the bill. The opening to the movie Idiocracy makes my point better than I ever could hope to, having established that the question of having kids has been taken out of my hands by messy biology and even messier superstitions.
"Hi, there's no paper in the printer, and an orange light on it and it wont print, can you come and have a look at it?"
That might not have been quite what you thought it was. I've worked in a nearly all female environment for a while now (extremely stable job, company actually started growing when the economy fell apart).
We all had it beat into our heads during the ninties with shows like Home Improvement that males are all lunkheads who are too prideful to ask for help or directions. Naturally, females were portrayed as flawless, rational, civilizing influences that just have some kind of higher existence than a man could ever imagine. And maybe that's still what primtime TV is like, and all that changed last decade was I stopped watching mainstream TV.
The thing is, females typically have a good idea of what needs to be done in a physical-objects situation like that, but there are two things going on there. First, females would rather ask a person a question than read written instructions to the point that most females have severely impaired reading comprehension, which just drives the inclination that their best bet is to ask someone. Presumably there were insructions on the printer for how to change paper, but her preference was to call someone with experience. When a female does that, it's because she has respect for your experience (but not for you because you don't have body parts that can make kids and leave you alone for 25 days out of a 28 day cycle when not making a baby).
Second, females I believe are even more afraid of being wrong than a man is. A man isn't adverse to saying "I don't know" or "I was wrong," but men desire to understand things so they'll try to arrive at answers for themselves, at least a partial answer, before giving up. In the event that the answer is partial or wrong, the man will have a dialogue with someone wiser both in order to acheive a better understanding and also to challenge the other person to ensure that they are, in fact, wiser or more experienced with the matter at hand. The problem is that after all the feminism that was shoved down my throat, I've come to understand that the word dialogue does not mean to a female what I think it means. Instead, the world dialogue as used by a female means "I'm right. You're wrong. And don't dare contradict me."
Therefore, when a task must be completed and a female knows there's no bullshitting her way out of it (in this instance, she does understand full well that the printer needs paper to print), she'll play dumb. That way there's no threat to any of her internal knowledge of the world, and she can continue to believe that she's just somehow better than males.
So, is it irritating when females do that? Yes, especially when they turn around and writing feminist diatribes about how being a woman is so hard and how having long hair is like rape. Does it mean she's an airhead? By no measure.
Just my $0.02. And countdown to being modded troll... Seriously, people, open your eyes and look past the boobs. Females are pampered, and it needs to come to an end because the only kind of equality they were ever after is the Orwellian kind where all genders are equal, but some genders are more equal than other genders.
And I know it makes drunk girls feel emotionally drawn to you when you say that you have 9.5 million dollars left after buying a top-end sports car with cash that you can give her a ride in if she'd like.
Fixed that for you, although perhaps that was your point in the end.
Oh, good grief. Really?
News flash. Women want to have children, and we've designed all kinds of things like child support and welfare to encourage them to be able to exercise exactly zero forethought before going to a party, doing a bunch of drugs, getting knocked up, then calling date rape once their pregnancy test comes back positive.
If anybody cared about gender equality, a woman who had children with no way to support them would be shunned the exact same way as a deadbeat dad, and instead we'd have some way to either let the children starve or just take them away from her.
I keep getting told I'm trolling, so either I'm in a parallel universe or men need to start opening their eyes and seeing what's happening around them.
It's not homosexuals who are destroying marriage, it's women.
I work around a lot of women, and I see this consistently. When one of them gets pregnant, it's always outside of marriage. Either it's date rape or otherwise the father to be mysteriously turns into a total jackass around the 5th month of pregnancy (give or take a month). The benefits to a woman for making the baby's father out to be a complete creep creates quite the conflict of interest there.
Every now and then I'm flabbergasted to learn that one of these pregnancies happened within marriage. Then these exact same women turn around and parrot everything fox news has to say about homosexuality. It's completely hypocritical, and nobody has a problem with it. I can accept that perhaps homosexuals are abominations before god, but I'm pretty sure the scriptual basis for that also says that women having children outside of wedlock or even having children with two different men is equally abominable.
I'm sure that was part of the point you were trying to make, but let's face it. As a homosexual property owner, I'm forced to cough up tax money both from my income and for my property, and all I can do is helplessly watch as it's given to women who, beside being able to have babies, have no skills or any other way to support themselves. If that's how they want to be, then fine. They can get a husband, because I sure as hell don't want to pay for them to be able to freeload.
Or, if they really, really want to have children without involving a man for anything other than a one night stand, then they can do the responsible thing and advance themselves to a job that will pay them enough to be able to support themselves and their child. I know in an intellectual sense that females are capable of reading, writing, and math, but we have a system that lets them play the victim card and go the easy route instead of doing something they want us to believe that is just too hard like basic algebra.
But, nobody cares. Women just play the victim card over and over again, and men are perfectly happy to play along with it. I can only wonder if men who legitimize inherent victimhood for women are really so delusional as to believe that they're going to get pussy for being a white knight saving the damsel in distress.
Sickening. Simply sickening. Oh well, countdown to being modded -1 troll or offtopic for talking about the elephant in the room in 5... 4... 3...