There problem isn't manipulating data. The problem is falsely representing what a theory is in the first place, before beginning to criticize it. Until one understands what one is criticizing, one's criticisms come off as strangely random and irrelevant, because one does not know what it is one is attempting to criticize.
I repeat my analogy. Two people look at a passage written in Mandarin. One person reads Mandarin and begins criticizing the structure of the grammar, the arguments. The Creationist is the equivalent of someone who cannot read Mandarin, who looks at the text and comments on how it looks like little trees and houses, and makes flippant comments about perceived 'errors' in the 'pictures'. They simply have no idea what it is they are criticizing, nor are they interested in learning. Yet all the information is out there, available at their fingertips.
You've summed up why I don't bother to engage in certain debates now. After years of being surrounded by creationists, it's pretty obvious to me when someone has absolutely no understanding of scientific methodology, and has no real interest in coming to understand what it is before engaging in a debate on the issue, either. I find it pointless to debate when there is no established ground, and the other person makes wild assumptions about a topic they clearly know nothing about and hence it's not that their criticisms are fauty, their criticisms are actually irrelevant. Their criticisms are as relevant as a person who cannot read Chinese poetry looking at a poem and declaring it looks like a bunch of little houses.
And won't even allow you to shed light on their wildly informed assumptions, because they are physically 'addicted' to being right. As a friend of mine liked to say, the difference between (stereotypical) conservatives and liberals is one of epistemology.
Exactly, science is about finding models that work. That there are errors in them is an obvious given, that's what science is all about. Evolutionary theories by far vastly fit the facts and have the predictive power we would expect from any substantial accepted scientific theory.
BTW there is no such thing as an 'Evolutionist', unless you live in an insular religious community.
Sure. It did not really represent evolution as a whole, but rather, evolution as a political conspiracy and as a fallacy, through the use of faulty analogies, poisoning the well tactics, genetic ad hominem fallacies, and so forth.
It started off with the typical blind watchmaker, that is, the analogy that life was far too complex to arise by chance. It showed a building blown up by a bomb and said 'how could an explosion (the big bang) result in order'? It then claimed that the theory of evolution states that single-celled life spontaneously formed one day with all its inherent complexities and went into showing how that was impossible. From there it represented evolution as a singular, linear and entirely 'progressive' chain (aka man came from monkeys), then claimed there were 'missing links' that all scientists knew about and denied the existence of, and tried to hide the existence by creating pretend missing links (google the piltdown man). It showed pictures of fruit flies subjected to radiation experiments then claimed that genetic mutations were entirely destructive, and could not result in new species. And so forth and so forth.
I actually can't remember the entire strawman, but it filled an entire book with lots more like the above. The whole point was to make it appear that there was someone out there called an 'Evolutionist'. And these 'Evolutionists' knew they were wrong, and were going to all lengths of stupidity to deny God. Once I came to understand just how unrelated all of the above is to evolutionary theories, I got the vibe that whomever came up with these bizarre tin foil hat arguments was either in the grips of a stimulant-induced paranoid psychotic break with reality, a chronic liar, or a combination of both. The people who believe it on the other hand, well, since they take pride in believing it and empowerment in calling 'those scientists' a bunch of 'brainwashed idiots', thereby perpetually poisoning the well, there's not much one can do.
I so agree. What convinced me in the end was having a wealth of clear and concise information available, free of ego games. Well, that and a general sense of curiosity!:)
I work in IT at an academic institution and constantly help out in classroom scenarios. One day I was assisting a professor in an introductory biology class. A quiet student came up and began asking him questions to clarify things about evolution. As soon as the prof knew the kid was a creationist, he began to make uncalled-for assumptions about everything else the student believed, as well as ragging on the kid's religion. This, to my mind, is the opposite of a productive and enlightening discussion.
Of course, this depends on the religion. Some religions, and some individuals, are a lot more open to discussion than others. My religion was quite fundamentalist, so the idea that the bible was metaphorical was an idea they dismissed for this reason: They believed their interpretation of the bible WAS the true word of god (the Truth) and all other interpretations of the bible were temptations and manifestations of Satan.
Actually, even as an atheist, or perhaps more accurately an 'igtheist', I agree with you. There are many, many interpretations of what God is that are not so dependent on or reactive to materialism.
That all depends on the political climate in which you live and also your beliefs.
Political climate: some countries have very accessible health care, others do not.
Beliefs: Even the poorest in Africa who are dying of aids could have benefited from modern medicine to some degree, if their religion didn't teach them that wearing a condom was sinful.
Growing up very religious in a small town, I really thought that I knew what evolution was, and why it was wrong. It seemed so silly to me that 'scientists' could believe in this conjecture,er 'theory' full of 'missing links'. Clearly it was a conspiracy by godless atheists (where I now seem to comfortably fit in) to drown out the 'Truth'.
Then at age 18 I got the internet and began to discover that I never, in fact, had ever been taught what Evolution really was. I had been taught a fantasy, an imaginary concoction that nobody actually believed in. As we all have seen, Creationists create a straw man simplification of evolutionary theory and then attack the straw man, rather than attacking the real thing.
So I set out with my newly acquired knowledge. Surely, I though, now that I know that we've only been taught a mistaken notion of what evolutionary theory is, I can convince some people. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong. The first responses I got was, quite literally, "how dare you accuse our religion of LYING to us. They wouldn't lie to us". And so forth. I learned a lot about logical fallacies. The straw man. The fallacious appeal to false authority (look, this 'scientist' says evolution is fake, therefore it is). The argument from ridicule ("Man was made from monkeys, what kind of nitwit believes that"). It was a fascinating and revealing time in my life, and the clear intellectual dishonesty I saw compelled me to change my life. Within a couple years I went from being a homophobic creationist to going out to queer parties, not because I was gay, but because I discovered many of my friends were queer, and hadn't told me for obvious reasons.
I am reminded of this Salon article talking about how social conservatives basically assign a lot of emotion and identity to their belief. They think it is rude if others challenge their beliefs, yet they desire to push their beliefs on everyone else. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/
In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
Then how does this sound: Treat everyone regardless of gender or skin color decently and well, and stop making pitiful excuses for treating others badly because one thinks one is hard done by!
Everyone has challenges in life. Fortunately, most men and women at some point grow up and treat each other with the respect they deserve. But it's hard talking to people who think they have it rough, when they've no idea what it is to have it rough. If a 6yo girl wearing a t shirt is the worst that guys get it, if the worst one has had in one's life is a couple insults, then tough cheese, grow a spine and quit using a poor availability heuristic as an excuse to make an embarassingly fallacious tu quoque argument. Most men are not on a day to day basis constantly patronized, treated like idiots, groped and sexually harassed by creeps every time they get on the subway, paid less, have their abilities stomped on, merely because of the genitals they possess. It's no different than racism, treating one as lesser because one is black. Even worse, much like sociopaths, the perpetuators of the problem deny the problem, feeling sorry for how hard done by they are because some sitcoms in the 80's dared to insulted some male characters, all the while refusing to acknowledge their own behaviour that contributes to the problem.
When people declare that boys have it tough nowadays, they show a wilful (eerily neoconservative) ignorance of human history. What, boys have it rough nowadays because boys have to *gasp* sit still and learn discipline in school? We should pick up the complainers and drop them off in Britain, circa early 20th century, when if boys so much as dared move in class, they'd be severely beaten with giant rods and belts, typically by drunken power tripping schoolmasters. Then when they were old enough to lift a firearm, off to war they went to die horrible deaths on alien battlefields. And if boys were raped, they had no recourse because the problem wasn't even acknowledged. Boys have it rough nowadays? Pah!! Boys still have challenges, everyone does, but at the same time, they've never had it easier in human history!
Your point about 'wandering eyes' is a given, and I've yet in the course of my dating career to have met any women who didn't have wandering eyes themselves, let alone have a problem with it. Typically, we share our wandering eye stories rather than feeling guilty or ashamed of them.
As for the 'mating display' you don't get it. It doesn't matter what women dress. Some men, somewhere, will ALWAYS interpret it as a mating display. In the Victorian era when women wore drapes and so much as showed an ankle, it was considered a 'mating' display. In Saudi Arabia men are so religiously terrified of mating displays that women cover their entire bodies to say nothing of being not permitted to wander down the street.
Throughout history, some men have always blamed women for their lack of self-control. I've met plenty of alphas in my time and they don't harass women. Blaming other people for your own lack of self control is the hallmark of the sociopath.
As a male, I assure you, you are speaking for yourself, if you assume that just because a girl is in short shorts, she's sending you a 'mating display'. Shame on you if you blame her for not being able to control your own urges. It's your own problem, not hers. And the worst part is when you blame women for men not being able to control their own urges, is that real sociopaths and abusers read these kinds of posts, and this is where they draw their weak justifcations from.
Thank you sir, for equating masculinity with sociopathy.
Agreed, genetics environment all play a role but what is conveniently forgotten in such arguments is that in the end, we are dealing with averages, not absolutes.
This is why for example, influential mathematician Emmy Noether is only now receiving her just due, even though Einstein and others referred to her as one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Likewise throughout history why you'll find men who'd rather write poetry and engage in philosophy than play football. Or the women who snuck into the Civil War (against the rules) as combatants, nothing could stop them. And this is indeed where culture steps in, because culture is coercive, it punishes people who step outside the norms even if those people are not only completely harmless, but perhaps even helpful. Really, why shouldn't people as individuals be able to be what it is they are the best at?
This is a brilliant comment that really sums it up. I too have seen the same problems throughout my life. Not only in IT, but as a pat time musician (also a male-dominated field) I've met many women who, if they make it, are completely on their own. As kids they were constantly excluded from the boys club of the music jam.. or discouraged or belittled for any attempts at creativity. And if they did it was always about boys trying to get into their pants. Even as an adult, as a male, I've deliberately left projects where men deliberately turned projects into boys clubs, because I'm all the more aware of the issue now. (And I find it hypocritical, because what, you to drink and smoke doobies, and you can't do that around female musicians? Rolls eyes.)
Sexism is alive and well and rampant. Those who decry its existence are those who perpetuate it (not even intentionally, but by their sheer apathy and lack of empathy for others).
How amusing that you claim an ad hominem bias when you utilize at least two in your above argument. First, your ad hominem attack on feminism (which is no singular view but a vast multiplicity of views that you clearly have constructed a caricature of), and second, your tu quoque ad hominem response to the above poster, claiming that it's ok to be biased against women, because supposedly, feminism is biased too.
That's a valid point.. a contract is a contract. Likewise if your theoretical store was the most popular brick and mortar store on earth it could also have a contract with a similar clause in it with any software developers who want to distribute to it.
If anything the only way this will change is if developers and consumers made a very, very big stink about it. Which aside from minor complaints now and then, probably won't be happening too soon.
Your store sells a video game published by say EA that has an online component with a monthly registration fee. You don't get a cut of the online component, just a cut of the game. In fact, it would be patently unfair for you to call up EA and demand a cut of the online registration fee, just because the game was sold in your store. It is completely separate and external.
I shouldn't have said we don't have any new problems (holes in ozone layer for starters), rather, similar problems in new flavours. For example in terms of controlling what it is people believe or monitoring them, in days gone by disagreeing with the King or the Church could have you being tortured to death slowly for public amusement. Nowadays we argue over issues of separation of Church and State and the media instead without fear of the above. 150 years ago public sentiment in Western culture was tribalistic and nationalistic, now a good chunk of us understand that Africans and Asians are human beings with families who experience pain. And violent crime rates have plummeted in industrialized nations.
But yes, there is still a lot of serious problems right now as you pointed out. Two steps forward, one step back, with the danger of going back further.
This brings me to your point, "most folks thought we were past that point in our cultural development." And that's just it. We say things like that nowadays. We've the education and information at our disposal and the communicative tools to do so. In the past the average person knew little about the outside world in the way we do now. There's more opportunities to be educated and be aware. For example I grew up in a fundie community with little knowledge of the internet.. when I got the internet and read up on the real theory of evolution, it changed my life.
I think in a round about way we're agreeing somewhat in that you're subscribing to realism as opposed to being optimistic or pessimistic. By pessimism=destructive--giving up, don't bother trying, and I see this all the time, and that's kind of how I read the article. Contrast that with, if we don't bury our heads in the sand and deal with our problems, things might at least stay the same or get better, no promises--but it's worth the effort to try. I think that's more constructive..
Yeah that and really, in Star Trek, much of the universe was a messed up wasteland of constant war. I recall the show dealing with topics ranging from colonialism, racism, genocide to torture in a way that nearly anyone could engage with, which if you think about 80's television was actually pretty subversive. If anything the show was dealing with these topics and contrasting them deliberately with its' utopic ideals, ideals which often were challenged and failed. It's hardly the brain-dead clap happy show people claim it is. If anything it was just family-friendly.
1984 wasn't about the future. It was about the politics and mind games of World War II. Likely Ray Bradbury did not invent book burnings. I'm not even sure who did. The history of mainland China is full of conquests where the educated were routinely killed off and books burned. The drug wars have been occurring for centuries, look at the use and or prohibition of hashish in Eastern cultures, or the profound loss of life due to the Opium wars. As far as mind control goes, try living in a medieval village where the Church was your reality.. especially if you were an atheist.
Pessimism can be easily misplaced when people are naive about history. We do not face any new problems in this era. In fact, we have it easier now than we've ever had it before in human history. A hundred and fifteen years ago your job as a male would have been to go to Africa and get pierced by some dude's spear while attempting to murder off villages, or if you were a lady you would have been prohibited from getting a higher education if you had a mindset of inquiry. Plus about half this planet lives lifespans twice to three times as long as they did in ages past. It's not that things are perfect today, caution is always in order, but claiming that the sky is falling is just fallacious and wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a recipe for throwing one's hands in the air and giving up. And this is exactly what Neal is warning against here.
Really? Star Trek TNG constantly presented the crew with ethical choices that had no clear win-win scenarios, and the complexities of dealing with vastly different cultural values.. it often played with the idea of a 'utopian' world mindset versus solving problems with brute force, and where, when and how such utopian ideals would break down. The crew constantly had to make choices that might condemn entire civilizations to misery just because they felt it was a greater risk to violate the prime directive, or choices that would send crew members to their untimely deaths. It dealt with topics like gang rape in a way that kids could still watch--so if it was crippled by anything, it was that it had to be family-friendly to fit into a timeslot and appeal to a larger market. Their living in a rational mindset was a perfect foil for the world they lived in. Never mind that Star Trek was originally designed to be socially subversive--It came out in the cold war era and yet it featured men and women of vastly different ethnicities working together.
"We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look — you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself." (William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview)"
And my favourite: "I’ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian. I suspect that the people who say I’m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse."
Mutual cooperation is in the world's best interest, that is, if we ever want to stop hitting each other with billy clubs over petty ideals and focus on our long-term survival as a species. Getting out of the gravity well would be a great first step... but it takes a significant amount of resources and cooperation to do so.
Exactly. It's long-term thinking for long-term gain as opposed to short-term. You can't get to new and exciting places if you don't experiment and fool around. None of the things we listen to or observe today would exist if not for countless experiments that led nowhere in the short term. Such is the history of art. You can't be afraid of everything that comes with experimentation, and that includes successes and failures, and things that are a mix of both (eg things with redeeming qualities). And of course in the end it's still all subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
Former Creationist reads above post and sends you an obligatory ra-men.
There problem isn't manipulating data. The problem is falsely representing what a theory is in the first place, before beginning to criticize it. Until one understands what one is criticizing, one's criticisms come off as strangely random and irrelevant, because one does not know what it is one is attempting to criticize.
I repeat my analogy. Two people look at a passage written in Mandarin. One person reads Mandarin and begins criticizing the structure of the grammar, the arguments. The Creationist is the equivalent of someone who cannot read Mandarin, who looks at the text and comments on how it looks like little trees and houses, and makes flippant comments about perceived 'errors' in the 'pictures'. They simply have no idea what it is they are criticizing, nor are they interested in learning. Yet all the information is out there, available at their fingertips.
eg: www.talkorigins.org
You've summed up why I don't bother to engage in certain debates now. After years of being surrounded by creationists, it's pretty obvious to me when someone has absolutely no understanding of scientific methodology, and has no real interest in coming to understand what it is before engaging in a debate on the issue, either. I find it pointless to debate when there is no established ground, and the other person makes wild assumptions about a topic they clearly know nothing about and hence it's not that their criticisms are fauty, their criticisms are actually irrelevant. Their criticisms are as relevant as a person who cannot read Chinese poetry looking at a poem and declaring it looks like a bunch of little houses.
And won't even allow you to shed light on their wildly informed assumptions, because they are physically 'addicted' to being right. As a friend of mine liked to say, the difference between (stereotypical) conservatives and liberals is one of epistemology.
Exactly, science is about finding models that work. That there are errors in them is an obvious given, that's what science is all about. Evolutionary theories by far vastly fit the facts and have the predictive power we would expect from any substantial accepted scientific theory.
BTW there is no such thing as an 'Evolutionist', unless you live in an insular religious community.
Sure. It did not really represent evolution as a whole, but rather, evolution as a political conspiracy and as a fallacy, through the use of faulty analogies, poisoning the well tactics, genetic ad hominem fallacies, and so forth.
It started off with the typical blind watchmaker, that is, the analogy that life was far too complex to arise by chance. It showed a building blown up by a bomb and said 'how could an explosion (the big bang) result in order'? It then claimed that the theory of evolution states that single-celled life spontaneously formed one day with all its inherent complexities and went into showing how that was impossible. From there it represented evolution as a singular, linear and entirely 'progressive' chain (aka man came from monkeys), then claimed there were 'missing links' that all scientists knew about and denied the existence of, and tried to hide the existence by creating pretend missing links (google the piltdown man). It showed pictures of fruit flies subjected to radiation experiments then claimed that genetic mutations were entirely destructive, and could not result in new species. And so forth and so forth.
I actually can't remember the entire strawman, but it filled an entire book with lots more like the above. The whole point was to make it appear that there was someone out there called an 'Evolutionist'. And these 'Evolutionists' knew they were wrong, and were going to all lengths of stupidity to deny God. Once I came to understand just how unrelated all of the above is to evolutionary theories, I got the vibe that whomever came up with these bizarre tin foil hat arguments was either in the grips of a stimulant-induced paranoid psychotic break with reality, a chronic liar, or a combination of both. The people who believe it on the other hand, well, since they take pride in believing it and empowerment in calling 'those scientists' a bunch of 'brainwashed idiots', thereby perpetually poisoning the well, there's not much one can do.
I so agree. What convinced me in the end was having a wealth of clear and concise information available, free of ego games. Well, that and a general sense of curiosity! :)
I work in IT at an academic institution and constantly help out in classroom scenarios. One day I was assisting a professor in an introductory biology class. A quiet student came up and began asking him questions to clarify things about evolution. As soon as the prof knew the kid was a creationist, he began to make uncalled-for assumptions about everything else the student believed, as well as ragging on the kid's religion. This, to my mind, is the opposite of a productive and enlightening discussion.
Of course, this depends on the religion. Some religions, and some individuals, are a lot more open to discussion than others. My religion was quite fundamentalist, so the idea that the bible was metaphorical was an idea they dismissed for this reason: They believed their interpretation of the bible WAS the true word of god (the Truth) and all other interpretations of the bible were temptations and manifestations of Satan.
Actually, even as an atheist, or perhaps more accurately an 'igtheist', I agree with you. There are many, many interpretations of what God is that are not so dependent on or reactive to materialism.
That all depends on the political climate in which you live and also your beliefs.
Political climate: some countries have very accessible health care, others do not.
Beliefs: Even the poorest in Africa who are dying of aids could have benefited from modern medicine to some degree, if their religion didn't teach them that wearing a condom was sinful.
I'm sure as science explains more and more of the natural world we'll see the 'God of the gaps' retreating, gap by gap.
Growing up very religious in a small town, I really thought that I knew what evolution was, and why it was wrong. It seemed so silly to me that 'scientists' could believe in this conjecture,er 'theory' full of 'missing links'. Clearly it was a conspiracy by godless atheists (where I now seem to comfortably fit in) to drown out the 'Truth'.
Then at age 18 I got the internet and began to discover that I never, in fact, had ever been taught what Evolution really was. I had been taught a fantasy, an imaginary concoction that nobody actually believed in. As we all have seen, Creationists create a straw man simplification of evolutionary theory and then attack the straw man, rather than attacking the real thing.
So I set out with my newly acquired knowledge. Surely, I though, now that I know that we've only been taught a mistaken notion of what evolutionary theory is, I can convince some people. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong. The first responses I got was, quite literally, "how dare you accuse our religion of LYING to us. They wouldn't lie to us". And so forth. I learned a lot about logical fallacies. The straw man. The fallacious appeal to false authority (look, this 'scientist' says evolution is fake, therefore it is). The argument from ridicule ("Man was made from monkeys, what kind of nitwit believes that"). It was a fascinating and revealing time in my life, and the clear intellectual dishonesty I saw compelled me to change my life. Within a couple years I went from being a homophobic creationist to going out to queer parties, not because I was gay, but because I discovered many of my friends were queer, and hadn't told me for obvious reasons.
I am reminded of this Salon article talking about how social conservatives basically assign a lot of emotion and identity to their belief. They think it is rude if others challenge their beliefs, yet they desire to push their beliefs on everyone else. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/
In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
Then how does this sound: Treat everyone regardless of gender or skin color decently and well, and stop making pitiful excuses for treating others badly because one thinks one is hard done by!
Everyone has challenges in life. Fortunately, most men and women at some point grow up and treat each other with the respect they deserve. But it's hard talking to people who think they have it rough, when they've no idea what it is to have it rough. If a 6yo girl wearing a t shirt is the worst that guys get it, if the worst one has had in one's life is a couple insults, then tough cheese, grow a spine and quit using a poor availability heuristic as an excuse to make an embarassingly fallacious tu quoque argument. Most men are not on a day to day basis constantly patronized, treated like idiots, groped and sexually harassed by creeps every time they get on the subway, paid less, have their abilities stomped on, merely because of the genitals they possess. It's no different than racism, treating one as lesser because one is black. Even worse, much like sociopaths, the perpetuators of the problem deny the problem, feeling sorry for how hard done by they are because some sitcoms in the 80's dared to insulted some male characters, all the while refusing to acknowledge their own behaviour that contributes to the problem.
When people declare that boys have it tough nowadays, they show a wilful (eerily neoconservative) ignorance of human history. What, boys have it rough nowadays because boys have to *gasp* sit still and learn discipline in school? We should pick up the complainers and drop them off in Britain, circa early 20th century, when if boys so much as dared move in class, they'd be severely beaten with giant rods and belts, typically by drunken power tripping schoolmasters. Then when they were old enough to lift a firearm, off to war they went to die horrible deaths on alien battlefields. And if boys were raped, they had no recourse because the problem wasn't even acknowledged. Boys have it rough nowadays? Pah!! Boys still have challenges, everyone does, but at the same time, they've never had it easier in human history!
Your point about 'wandering eyes' is a given, and I've yet in the course of my dating career to have met any women who didn't have wandering eyes themselves, let alone have a problem with it. Typically, we share our wandering eye stories rather than feeling guilty or ashamed of them.
As for the 'mating display' you don't get it. It doesn't matter what women dress. Some men, somewhere, will ALWAYS interpret it as a mating display. In the Victorian era when women wore drapes and so much as showed an ankle, it was considered a 'mating' display. In Saudi Arabia men are so religiously terrified of mating displays that women cover their entire bodies to say nothing of being not permitted to wander down the street.
Throughout history, some men have always blamed women for their lack of self-control. I've met plenty of alphas in my time and they don't harass women. Blaming other people for your own lack of self control is the hallmark of the sociopath.
As a male, I assure you, you are speaking for yourself, if you assume that just because a girl is in short shorts, she's sending you a 'mating display'. Shame on you if you blame her for not being able to control your own urges. It's your own problem, not hers. And the worst part is when you blame women for men not being able to control their own urges, is that real sociopaths and abusers read these kinds of posts, and this is where they draw their weak justifcations from.
Thank you sir, for equating masculinity with sociopathy.
Agreed, genetics environment all play a role but what is conveniently forgotten in such arguments is that in the end, we are dealing with averages, not absolutes.
This is why for example, influential mathematician Emmy Noether is only now receiving her just due, even though Einstein and others referred to her as one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Likewise throughout history why you'll find men who'd rather write poetry and engage in philosophy than play football. Or the women who snuck into the Civil War (against the rules) as combatants, nothing could stop them. And this is indeed where culture steps in, because culture is coercive, it punishes people who step outside the norms even if those people are not only completely harmless, but perhaps even helpful. Really, why shouldn't people as individuals be able to be what it is they are the best at?
This is a brilliant comment that really sums it up. I too have seen the same problems throughout my life. Not only in IT, but as a pat time musician (also a male-dominated field) I've met many women who, if they make it, are completely on their own. As kids they were constantly excluded from the boys club of the music jam.. or discouraged or belittled for any attempts at creativity. And if they did it was always about boys trying to get into their pants. Even as an adult, as a male, I've deliberately left projects where men deliberately turned projects into boys clubs, because I'm all the more aware of the issue now. (And I find it hypocritical, because what, you to drink and smoke doobies, and you can't do that around female musicians? Rolls eyes.)
Sexism is alive and well and rampant. Those who decry its existence are those who perpetuate it (not even intentionally, but by their sheer apathy and lack of empathy for others).
How amusing that you claim an ad hominem bias when you utilize at least two in your above argument. First, your ad hominem attack on feminism (which is no singular view but a vast multiplicity of views that you clearly have constructed a caricature of), and second, your tu quoque ad hominem response to the above poster, claiming that it's ok to be biased against women, because supposedly, feminism is biased too.
That's a valid point.. a contract is a contract. Likewise if your theoretical store was the most popular brick and mortar store on earth it could also have a contract with a similar clause in it with any software developers who want to distribute to it.
If anything the only way this will change is if developers and consumers made a very, very big stink about it. Which aside from minor complaints now and then, probably won't be happening too soon.
Your store sells a video game published by say EA that has an online component with a monthly registration fee. You don't get a cut of the online component, just a cut of the game. In fact, it would be patently unfair for you to call up EA and demand a cut of the online registration fee, just because the game was sold in your store. It is completely separate and external.
Should have read 'little knowledge of the outside world'.. was typing quickly while running out the door to start my weekend!
I shouldn't have said we don't have any new problems (holes in ozone layer for starters), rather, similar problems in new flavours. For example in terms of controlling what it is people believe or monitoring them, in days gone by disagreeing with the King or the Church could have you being tortured to death slowly for public amusement. Nowadays we argue over issues of separation of Church and State and the media instead without fear of the above. 150 years ago public sentiment in Western culture was tribalistic and nationalistic, now a good chunk of us understand that Africans and Asians are human beings with families who experience pain. And violent crime rates have plummeted in industrialized nations.
But yes, there is still a lot of serious problems right now as you pointed out. Two steps forward, one step back, with the danger of going back further.
This brings me to your point, "most folks thought we were past that point in our cultural development." And that's just it. We say things like that nowadays. We've the education and information at our disposal and the communicative tools to do so. In the past the average person knew little about the outside world in the way we do now. There's more opportunities to be educated and be aware. For example I grew up in a fundie community with little knowledge of the internet.. when I got the internet and read up on the real theory of evolution, it changed my life.
I think in a round about way we're agreeing somewhat in that you're subscribing to realism as opposed to being optimistic or pessimistic. By pessimism=destructive--giving up, don't bother trying, and I see this all the time, and that's kind of how I read the article. Contrast that with, if we don't bury our heads in the sand and deal with our problems, things might at least stay the same or get better, no promises--but it's worth the effort to try. I think that's more constructive..
Yeah that and really, in Star Trek, much of the universe was a messed up wasteland of constant war. I recall the show dealing with topics ranging from colonialism, racism, genocide to torture in a way that nearly anyone could engage with, which if you think about 80's television was actually pretty subversive. If anything the show was dealing with these topics and contrasting them deliberately with its' utopic ideals, ideals which often were challenged and failed. It's hardly the brain-dead clap happy show people claim it is. If anything it was just family-friendly.
1984 wasn't about the future. It was about the politics and mind games of World War II. Likely Ray Bradbury did not invent book burnings. I'm not even sure who did. The history of mainland China is full of conquests where the educated were routinely killed off and books burned. The drug wars have been occurring for centuries, look at the use and or prohibition of hashish in Eastern cultures, or the profound loss of life due to the Opium wars. As far as mind control goes, try living in a medieval village where the Church was your reality.. especially if you were an atheist. Pessimism can be easily misplaced when people are naive about history. We do not face any new problems in this era. In fact, we have it easier now than we've ever had it before in human history. A hundred and fifteen years ago your job as a male would have been to go to Africa and get pierced by some dude's spear while attempting to murder off villages, or if you were a lady you would have been prohibited from getting a higher education if you had a mindset of inquiry. Plus about half this planet lives lifespans twice to three times as long as they did in ages past. It's not that things are perfect today, caution is always in order, but claiming that the sky is falling is just fallacious and wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a recipe for throwing one's hands in the air and giving up. And this is exactly what Neal is warning against here.
Really? Star Trek TNG constantly presented the crew with ethical choices that had no clear win-win scenarios, and the complexities of dealing with vastly different cultural values.. it often played with the idea of a 'utopian' world mindset versus solving problems with brute force, and where, when and how such utopian ideals would break down. The crew constantly had to make choices that might condemn entire civilizations to misery just because they felt it was a greater risk to violate the prime directive, or choices that would send crew members to their untimely deaths. It dealt with topics like gang rape in a way that kids could still watch--so if it was crippled by anything, it was that it had to be family-friendly to fit into a timeslot and appeal to a larger market. Their living in a rational mindset was a perfect foil for the world they lived in. Never mind that Star Trek was originally designed to be socially subversive--It came out in the cold war era and yet it featured men and women of vastly different ethnicities working together.
"We've forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: "Hey, look — you do have a future. It's kind of harsh, but here it is." I wasn't going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself." (William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview)" And my favourite: "I’ve always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian. I suspect that the people who say I’m dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives. The world is filled with much nastier places than my inventions, places that the denizens of the Sprawl would find it punishment to be relocated to, and a lot of those places seem to be steadily getting worse."
Mutual cooperation is in the world's best interest, that is, if we ever want to stop hitting each other with billy clubs over petty ideals and focus on our long-term survival as a species. Getting out of the gravity well would be a great first step... but it takes a significant amount of resources and cooperation to do so.
Exactly. It's long-term thinking for long-term gain as opposed to short-term. You can't get to new and exciting places if you don't experiment and fool around. None of the things we listen to or observe today would exist if not for countless experiments that led nowhere in the short term. Such is the history of art. You can't be afraid of everything that comes with experimentation, and that includes successes and failures, and things that are a mix of both (eg things with redeeming qualities). And of course in the end it's still all subjective.