The problem you seem to have is that you can't distinguish attempted humour from actual sexism.
Once again, no. If you'd actually read my post you would know this was not the case. I can distinguish perfectly well between a joke and a discriminatory belief, but the entire point I was making was that even though they are different, the one reinforces the other in most cases.
There is a lot of difference between "haha women can't park" and "durhur men a jerks", and actual sexist behaviour.
And apparently you believe "actual sexist behaviour" arises in a vacuum with no reinforcement from people in the environment saying sexist things. The two can't possibly be related, can they?
And before you start, I'm gay, so yes I do know what both are like.
I don't see how this makes you any sort of authority. I do understand how the "hey, faggot" that Dan Savage used to print at the beginning of each of the letters he answered is different from the "hey, faggot" said by a jock as he shoves another kid to the ground. Even so, people need to take account of whether the "jokes" they make create a better or worse environment for bigotry and react accordingly, and Mr. Savage ended up dropping the tongue-in-cheek "hey, faggot" greetings because he decided they weren't helping.
I think this is something you need to work on rather than attempt to change everyone around you.
So every time somebody says gays should be denied all rights, or should all be murdered, and you have a problem with it but then they claim they were just joking, how about I tell you it's something you need to work on rather than attempt to change everyone around you?
I personally don't really prefer those kinds of jokes, unless the situation makes the juxtaposition really humourous, but my point (that you're either failing to grasp or sarcastically ignoring) is that an censoring attitude to any kind of joke that offends you is a slipperly slope to disallow any jokes regardless of subject.
I completely grasp and am not ignoring your point. In fact, I completely agree, and I expressed my agreement with your point elsewhere in the thread. MY point, which I won't accuse you of either failing to grasp or sarcastically ignoring because it couldn't be clear from such a short post, is that what you call "an censoring attitude to any kind of joke that offends you" is not what's going on here. You can have care and caution to what kind of atmosphere you're creating without having a "censoring attitude".
Censoring attitude: "You can't say that. It offends people."
non-Censoring attitude: "You really ought to think about what it does to people when you say that, then continue to say it only if you still think it's worth it."
See the difference? The first one leads to a death of culture. The second one leads to people not being assholes and douchebags to each other quite as often.
Anyone who reads the stuff their trash pickup company mails to them knows what e-Waste is, but I guess you thought you were smarter than a bunch of garbage assholes and pitched it straight into the bin?
Wow, way to assume that people who don't know everything you know are stuck-up jerks, rather than simply people who've been presented with different information. You'll go far in life with that attitude.
FYI I don't have a "trash pickup company", but I've read everything the municipal waste department has ever mailed to me, especially about "e-Waste" disposal, and they don't use that term. I've taken several computers and several monitors to be recycled and the folks who take care of that don't use it either, at least not when talking to customers. I've read more than a handful of news articles about the matter, none of which referred to it as "e-Waste", but I guess I'm not as hip as your majesty, who seems to know how everything works everywhere in the world.
For those in the need to know, the recycling industry, this is since many years a well known acronym for Electronics Waste.
Yes, but Slashdot headlines aren't written for the recycling industry. They're (supposedly) written for the average nerd and if the average nerd doesn't understand a term in the headline it should be defined in the summary.
Thanks. The other guy contesting my claim presented no evidence other than his own certainty; what you've given me is much more useful in adjusting my beliefs.
So, this one car is humping another car, and he's been warned never to car-hump without a car-condom, so he asks her if she's put a car-condom on her tail pipe and she honks yes, and he feels good about that, but the next day he reads in the paper about a study which conclusively showed that there's no difference between using and not using a car-condom because the car condom literally does nothing. The cars issuing the original warning were basically just making shit up so they could sound important.
Actually it's illegal to dispose of waste in that fashion according to Chinese law. The problem though is that it's not particularly well enforced due to rampant corruption at the local level.
That seems to be the problem with all Chinese law.
It would have been way more useful if they'd defined e-waste. I don't know about you but 90% of my confusion was that the summary used that term which I had never heard before, and once I figured it out the rest all made sense. We use the prefix "e-" in most other contexts to refer to things that exist in electronic form, and in this context people use it to refer to plain old meatspace waste that happens to come from electronics.
I'm thoroughly humbled by the fact that I have no friggin idea what the summary is saying. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?
As far as I can tell it's about improper handling of e-waste, specifically e-waste was submitted to Slashdot and rather than handling it properly the Slashdot editors just passed the garbage on to it's readers unmodified.
A man had two sons, and he came to the first, and said, 'Son, go work today in my vineyard.' He answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind, and went. He came to the second, and said the same thing. He answered, 'I go, sir,' but he didn't go. Which of the two did the will of his father?
Irrelevant. The third son said "Screw you and your patriarchial abuse", and had his father arrested for exploiting children for labour.
The farm was sold, the sons finally received a decent education instead of anecdotal fairy tales, and got laid regularly.
But on their deathbed, they wept openly and cried out, "I only regret that I never learned the difference between a fairy tale and a parable!"
Kinda makes you feel like the mods are compensating for something, doesn't it? Maybe you hit too close to home...
Is this a joke about small penises? I hope the girls aren't offended too much.
I intended to imply that they were compensating for their guilt by attacking the messenger, but I am also aware of the sexual implications and am perfectly fine if people take it that way, too. I don't think anyone already on/. will be offended, and if you think that's what this discussion is about, you probably should go back and read the original link.
Oh yes. If there's ONE FUCKING THING WE NEED, it's another community so afraid of offending anyone, we walk around mincing words and generally acting like complete pussies.
How is it mincing words to refrain from insulting 50% of the world's population just for a chuckle? If you don't go around gratuitously demeaning everyone you possibly can then you're being a pussy?
I work in the education field, and it's completely pathological there. You can get fired, directly or indirectly, for saying anything not politically correct. (Indirectly is a lot more common, by the by.)
I'll admit that that sucks, but you're basically saying that if we start respecting women's intelligence and individuality then we'll automatically end up there. I don't think that's an accurate appraisal of the situation. The biggest reason education is as f---ed up as it is (and believe me I know, my wife teaches high-school special ed) is because you're dealing with people's children, and people are really touchy about their children. Also, in public education (as opposed to private) you basically have everyone in there from every background all lumped together so that's bound to include some people who are super-sensitive about race and some who are super-sensitive about sexuality and some who are super-sensitive about religion (where I went to school it was Magic cards that were the big un-PC controversy, because some of them depicted demons). I don't think that's in any way connected to whether the FOSS community decides to be more thoughtful towards the other half, it more has to do with the nature of the educational beast.
That's not to say that we couldn't use more women in computer science, but it honestly doesn't have so much to do with off color jokes, but more with the boys' club status it currently has.
You don't think the off-color jokes are part and parcel of the boys' club status? Really? Do you know of any boys'-club-type culture without them?
I have this nice movie you really should watch. It's called Equilibrium (or Cubic in some places). I really see the great thing with no humour (and culture) that they got going. I mean really, no wars!
Yeah, because the only type of humor is humor that demeans women. No other humorous statements are possible, or even conceivable!
It's awful that some people have gone so far off the deep end that simple jokes cannot be told without questioning their intentions.
I don't think anyone was questioning the intentions. They were questioning the effects that such jokes have on the culture, particularly when they are so one-sidedly against women all the time. It's great that you're an equal-opportunity offender and I salute that, but the FOSS community as a whole is not. Even if the individual jokes themselves are all meant in good fun, taken together they create a boys'-club atmosphere that is not healthy to the growth of the community.
On the other hand, folks are overly sensitive about some things. No one granted anyone the 'unalienable right' to not be offended. Some shit offends me too, but I get over it.
I would re-read the link notionalTenacity posted. It isn't about safeguarding the right not to be offended, because of course no such right exists. It's about creating an environment that encourages all to participate, which is not something we have a "right" to but would be a very smart thing for the FOSS community to foster.
Have you tried getting over it and trying to have a sense of humor? Not about things like the dude sticking his hand down the chick's pants....that's messed up and he should at least have the hell beaten out of him a few good times for it. About things like "hur hur, women ain't got no direction smarts!"
You don't think the two are related? Really, would a man really try to stick his hand down a woman's pants at a conference where people didn't make repeated jokes about the entire female sex and there weren't pictures of women in bikinis in the presentations? One sexist joke is harmless, if it's the only one, but that kind of pervasive behavior creates an environment where men literally think, "these women are here to pleasure me, not to participate in tech talk", and that mindset leads directly to the odd one attempting the ol' scoop-n-grab.
You realize that your argument is logically equivalent to, "I can say anything I want about black people because many of them say racist things about white people", right? "I'm sure that there are some black people out there that genuinely consider racism to be wrong, but I don't see them because I'm too busy noticing the racist blacks and the people who only complain about black-on-white racism" is basically a direct paraphrase of what you're saying with race substituted for sex. It's like you're trying to be the Dr. Laura of sexism.
Look at that, you make a valid point that the community would do well to heed and the mods try to censor you by modding you down so far (currently Score: -1) nobody will read what you have to say. Then somebody responds by saying, basically, "Men are only sexist because you women are mostly hypocritical bitches" and that poster gets modded up (currently Score:4, Insightful) while the one who responds by pointing out flaws and counterexamples to that "Insightful" post gets modded down and hit with another (Score:4 Insightful) response that presents no insight but more unsupported assertions.
Kinda makes you feel like the mods are compensating for something, doesn't it? Maybe you hit too close to home...
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman.
Only if you define it narrowly to be reported physical domestic violence. If you look at it more broadly and include emotional abuse and unreported abuse, I think you'll find that men and women are roughly equal opportunity offenders.
Emotional abuse is not the same as violence. Besides which, there is a vast array of data showing the phenomenon I've described, so I'd like to see some supporting your position, because what you "think I'll find" is no substitute for actual methodical inquiry.
It just looks like it's mostly men on women because:
Statistically men are stronger than women on average. Thus men are far more likely to be able to physically overpower women than the other way around, and men are likely to cause more damage to women on average than the other way around.
...which is one of the reasons men are more likely to beat women in the first place. Would you smack someone who could overpower you?
Men are statistically less likely to put up with it and stay in the relationship, so domestic violence against men tends to be more distributed, making it harder to spot. You're less likely to notice that a girl gave a different guy a black eye every week than to notice that a girl has gotten a black eye every week.
I personally put up with domestic violence and stayed in a relationship for years (still ongoing, no longer violent). I am a man. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but I'd like to see some data before I believe you're right.
Women are more likely to abuse people in ways that don't leave a physical scar. You know, like boiling your bunny.
I don't even know what that euphemism means. But if you're talking about emotional abuse again, that's not a form of violence. I've been subjected to both in relationships, I think I know the difference.
And I'm sure that the GP will care as soon as women start caring about the unintended consequences of all the sexist things they say and do. It's really easy to be sanctimonious if you're OK ignoring the hypocrisy involved with it. Personally, I'd take sexism significantly more seriously if I wasn't expected to put up with so much sexual harassment and jokes that are far worse than the one the GP made.
Could you give us an example?
I'm sure that there are some women out there that genuinely consider sexism to be wrong and do their best not to involve themselves in it either way, but I don't see them because that's a subtlety that isn't particularly easy to pick up on.
I am a man who frequently confronts other men when they say sexist things about women, and also confronts women when they say sexist things about men. You assume notionalTenacity must be a woman because he or she criticized a stupid generalization about women.
What I do however see is the leering, the sexist comments about what scum men are and how serious domestic violence is, but mysteriously defining it as man on woman.
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman. How is observing that empirical fact "mysteriously defining it" as such? Do the people you're talking about say, or even believe, that women can never commit domestic violence against men? Somehow I doubt it.
All persons belonging to organizations are assumed to speak for the entire organization. Also, all quotes in blogs are assumed to reflect what the quoted person actually said, even when two blogs contradict each other on what the person said (both are true, cognitive dissonance be damned!!).
The State Dept's privacy goals are not to maintain secrecy against its citizens per se, but to ultimately keep things secret from other countries and their govts, who
Who you calling who?
No, but seriously, you're assuming a lot about the State Department there.
Slashdot Mirror
When is modern science going to find a cure for a woman's mouth?
After it finds a cure for thinking with your dick.
We've had that for years, it's called Porn
I keep trying it, but the problem only gets worse!
The problem you seem to have is that you can't distinguish attempted humour from actual sexism.
Once again, no. If you'd actually read my post you would know this was not the case. I can distinguish perfectly well between a joke and a discriminatory belief, but the entire point I was making was that even though they are different, the one reinforces the other in most cases.
There is a lot of difference between "haha women can't park" and "durhur men a jerks", and actual sexist behaviour.
And apparently you believe "actual sexist behaviour" arises in a vacuum with no reinforcement from people in the environment saying sexist things. The two can't possibly be related, can they?
And before you start, I'm gay, so yes I do know what both are like.
I don't see how this makes you any sort of authority. I do understand how the "hey, faggot" that Dan Savage used to print at the beginning of each of the letters he answered is different from the "hey, faggot" said by a jock as he shoves another kid to the ground. Even so, people need to take account of whether the "jokes" they make create a better or worse environment for bigotry and react accordingly, and Mr. Savage ended up dropping the tongue-in-cheek "hey, faggot" greetings because he decided they weren't helping.
I think this is something you need to work on rather than attempt to change everyone around you.
So every time somebody says gays should be denied all rights, or should all be murdered, and you have a problem with it but then they claim they were just joking, how about I tell you it's something you need to work on rather than attempt to change everyone around you?
I personally don't really prefer those kinds of jokes, unless the situation makes the juxtaposition really humourous, but my point (that you're either failing to grasp or sarcastically ignoring) is that an censoring attitude to any kind of joke that offends you is a slipperly slope to disallow any jokes regardless of subject.
I completely grasp and am not ignoring your point. In fact, I completely agree, and I expressed my agreement with your point elsewhere in the thread. MY point, which I won't accuse you of either failing to grasp or sarcastically ignoring because it couldn't be clear from such a short post, is that what you call "an censoring attitude to any kind of joke that offends you" is not what's going on here. You can have care and caution to what kind of atmosphere you're creating without having a "censoring attitude".
Censoring attitude: "You can't say that. It offends people."
non-Censoring attitude: "You really ought to think about what it does to people when you say that, then continue to say it only if you still think it's worth it."
See the difference? The first one leads to a death of culture. The second one leads to people not being assholes and douchebags to each other quite as often.
Anyone who reads the stuff their trash pickup company mails to them knows what e-Waste is, but I guess you thought you were smarter than a bunch of garbage assholes and pitched it straight into the bin?
Wow, way to assume that people who don't know everything you know are stuck-up jerks, rather than simply people who've been presented with different information. You'll go far in life with that attitude.
FYI I don't have a "trash pickup company", but I've read everything the municipal waste department has ever mailed to me, especially about "e-Waste" disposal, and they don't use that term. I've taken several computers and several monitors to be recycled and the folks who take care of that don't use it either, at least not when talking to customers. I've read more than a handful of news articles about the matter, none of which referred to it as "e-Waste", but I guess I'm not as hip as your majesty, who seems to know how everything works everywhere in the world.
For those in the need to know, the recycling industry, this is since many years a well known acronym for Electronics Waste.
Yes, but Slashdot headlines aren't written for the recycling industry. They're (supposedly) written for the average nerd and if the average nerd doesn't understand a term in the headline it should be defined in the summary.
Thanks. The other guy contesting my claim presented no evidence other than his own certainty; what you've given me is much more useful in adjusting my beliefs.
How about a car sex analogy?
So, this one car is humping another car, and he's been warned never to car-hump without a car-condom, so he asks her if she's put a car-condom on her tail pipe and she honks yes, and he feels good about that, but the next day he reads in the paper about a study which conclusively showed that there's no difference between using and not using a car-condom because the car condom literally does nothing. The cars issuing the original warning were basically just making shit up so they could sound important.
Actually it's illegal to dispose of waste in that fashion according to Chinese law. The problem though is that it's not particularly well enforced due to rampant corruption at the local level.
That seems to be the problem with all Chinese law.
but I am confused by the summary.
It would have been way more useful if they'd defined e-waste. I don't know about you but 90% of my confusion was that the summary used that term which I had never heard before, and once I figured it out the rest all made sense. We use the prefix "e-" in most other contexts to refer to things that exist in electronic form, and in this context people use it to refer to plain old meatspace waste that happens to come from electronics.
As far as I can tell it's about improper handling of e-waste, specifically e-waste was submitted to Slashdot and rather than handling it properly the Slashdot editors just passed the garbage on to it's readers unmodified.
How is that news? We've all known that for years.
A man had two sons, and he came to the first, and said, 'Son, go work today in my vineyard.' He answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind, and went. He came to the second, and said the same thing. He answered, 'I go, sir,' but he didn't go. Which of the two did the will of his father?
Irrelevant. The third son said "Screw you and your patriarchial abuse", and had his father arrested for exploiting children for labour. The farm was sold, the sons finally received a decent education instead of anecdotal fairy tales, and got laid regularly.
But on their deathbed, they wept openly and cried out, "I only regret that I never learned the difference between a fairy tale and a parable!"
I'm thoroughly humbled by the fact that I have no friggin idea what the summary is saying. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?
Sure. Do you want a car analogy, or a sex analogy?
Kinda makes you feel like the mods are compensating for something, doesn't it? Maybe you hit too close to home...
Is this a joke about small penises? I hope the girls aren't offended too much.
I intended to imply that they were compensating for their guilt by attacking the messenger, but I am also aware of the sexual implications and am perfectly fine if people take it that way, too. I don't think anyone already on /. will be offended, and if you think that's what this discussion is about, you probably should go back and read the original link.
Oh yes. If there's ONE FUCKING THING WE NEED, it's another community so afraid of offending anyone, we walk around mincing words and generally acting like complete pussies.
How is it mincing words to refrain from insulting 50% of the world's population just for a chuckle? If you don't go around gratuitously demeaning everyone you possibly can then you're being a pussy?
I work in the education field, and it's completely pathological there. You can get fired, directly or indirectly, for saying anything not politically correct. (Indirectly is a lot more common, by the by.)
I'll admit that that sucks, but you're basically saying that if we start respecting women's intelligence and individuality then we'll automatically end up there. I don't think that's an accurate appraisal of the situation. The biggest reason education is as f---ed up as it is (and believe me I know, my wife teaches high-school special ed) is because you're dealing with people's children, and people are really touchy about their children. Also, in public education (as opposed to private) you basically have everyone in there from every background all lumped together so that's bound to include some people who are super-sensitive about race and some who are super-sensitive about sexuality and some who are super-sensitive about religion (where I went to school it was Magic cards that were the big un-PC controversy, because some of them depicted demons). I don't think that's in any way connected to whether the FOSS community decides to be more thoughtful towards the other half, it more has to do with the nature of the educational beast.
That's not to say that we couldn't use more women in computer science, but it honestly doesn't have so much to do with off color jokes, but more with the boys' club status it currently has.
You don't think the off-color jokes are part and parcel of the boys' club status? Really? Do you know of any boys'-club-type culture without them?
I have this nice movie you really should watch. It's called Equilibrium (or Cubic in some places). I really see the great thing with no humour (and culture) that they got going. I mean really, no wars!
Yeah, because the only type of humor is humor that demeans women. No other humorous statements are possible, or even conceivable!
It's awful that some people have gone so far off the deep end that simple jokes cannot be told without questioning their intentions.
I don't think anyone was questioning the intentions. They were questioning the effects that such jokes have on the culture, particularly when they are so one-sidedly against women all the time. It's great that you're an equal-opportunity offender and I salute that, but the FOSS community as a whole is not. Even if the individual jokes themselves are all meant in good fun, taken together they create a boys'-club atmosphere that is not healthy to the growth of the community.
On the other hand, folks are overly sensitive about some things. No one granted anyone the 'unalienable right' to not be offended. Some shit offends me too, but I get over it.
I would re-read the link notionalTenacity posted. It isn't about safeguarding the right not to be offended, because of course no such right exists. It's about creating an environment that encourages all to participate, which is not something we have a "right" to but would be a very smart thing for the FOSS community to foster.
Have you tried getting over it and trying to have a sense of humor? Not about things like the dude sticking his hand down the chick's pants....that's messed up and he should at least have the hell beaten out of him a few good times for it. About things like "hur hur, women ain't got no direction smarts!"
You don't think the two are related? Really, would a man really try to stick his hand down a woman's pants at a conference where people didn't make repeated jokes about the entire female sex and there weren't pictures of women in bikinis in the presentations? One sexist joke is harmless, if it's the only one, but that kind of pervasive behavior creates an environment where men literally think, "these women are here to pleasure me, not to participate in tech talk", and that mindset leads directly to the odd one attempting the ol' scoop-n-grab.
When is modern science going to find a cure for a woman's mouth?
After it finds a cure for thinking with your dick.
You realize that your argument is logically equivalent to, "I can say anything I want about black people because many of them say racist things about white people", right? "I'm sure that there are some black people out there that genuinely consider racism to be wrong, but I don't see them because I'm too busy noticing the racist blacks and the people who only complain about black-on-white racism" is basically a direct paraphrase of what you're saying with race substituted for sex. It's like you're trying to be the Dr. Laura of sexism.
Look at that, you make a valid point that the community would do well to heed and the mods try to censor you by modding you down so far (currently Score: -1) nobody will read what you have to say. Then somebody responds by saying, basically, "Men are only sexist because you women are mostly hypocritical bitches" and that poster gets modded up (currently Score:4, Insightful) while the one who responds by pointing out flaws and counterexamples to that "Insightful" post gets modded down and hit with another (Score:4 Insightful) response that presents no insight but more unsupported assertions.
Kinda makes you feel like the mods are compensating for something, doesn't it? Maybe you hit too close to home...
Only if you define it narrowly to be reported physical domestic violence. If you look at it more broadly and include emotional abuse and unreported abuse, I think you'll find that men and women are roughly equal opportunity offenders.
Emotional abuse is not the same as violence. Besides which, there is a vast array of data showing the phenomenon I've described, so I'd like to see some supporting your position, because what you "think I'll find" is no substitute for actual methodical inquiry.
It just looks like it's mostly men on women because:
...which is one of the reasons men are more likely to beat women in the first place. Would you smack someone who could overpower you?
I personally put up with domestic violence and stayed in a relationship for years (still ongoing, no longer violent). I am a man. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but I'd like to see some data before I believe you're right.
I don't even know what that euphemism means. But if you're talking about emotional abuse again, that's not a form of violence. I've been subjected to both in relationships, I think I know the difference.
And I'm sure that the GP will care as soon as women start caring about the unintended consequences of all the sexist things they say and do. It's really easy to be sanctimonious if you're OK ignoring the hypocrisy involved with it. Personally, I'd take sexism significantly more seriously if I wasn't expected to put up with so much sexual harassment and jokes that are far worse than the one the GP made.
Could you give us an example?
I'm sure that there are some women out there that genuinely consider sexism to be wrong and do their best not to involve themselves in it either way, but I don't see them because that's a subtlety that isn't particularly easy to pick up on.
I am a man who frequently confronts other men when they say sexist things about women, and also confronts women when they say sexist things about men. You assume notionalTenacity must be a woman because he or she criticized a stupid generalization about women.
What I do however see is the leering, the sexist comments about what scum men are and how serious domestic violence is, but mysteriously defining it as man on woman.
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman. How is observing that empirical fact "mysteriously defining it" as such? Do the people you're talking about say, or even believe, that women can never commit domestic violence against men? Somehow I doubt it.
All persons belonging to organizations are assumed to speak for the entire organization. Also, all quotes in blogs are assumed to reflect what the quoted person actually said, even when two blogs contradict each other on what the person said (both are true, cognitive dissonance be damned!!).
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. "
Seriously treat the problem, don't go shooting the messenger.
Can we shoot the guy who uses Star Wars quotes indiscriminately?
Your point would be easier to take if you (a) stopped ranting and (b) learned English.
The State Dept's privacy goals are not to maintain secrecy against its citizens per se, but to ultimately keep things secret from other countries and their govts, who
Who you calling who?
No, but seriously, you're assuming a lot about the State Department there.