And again with the Young Republican-level pretense at being an internet troll.
Here's the thing you really aren;t getting: To become a law a proposal must pass through a large group of people called the "Legislature." In the United States these are bicameral. So it has to pass two bodies of people, generally a large one called something along the lines of "House," and a smaller one called the "Senate." We also add the wrinkle of a separate Executive Branch.
After the Civil War the North appointed it's own people to all these offices, guaranteed black voting rights (partly because it was the right thing to do, partly because there was no way blacks would vote for Mas'r's Democrats), etc. Adelbert Ames, Union Army Major General, was appointed Mississippi Governor in 1868, and elected in 1870. Since the state was roughly half-black (48% in the 1870 census, 52% by 1880), and all the incumbents were from the "we need black votes" party it would have been impossible to win control of the Legislature without violence.
So they supplied it, out-gunned Ames' militia, forced new Legislative elections in '75, rigged them with more privately-owned guns, impeached (and removed) the black Lieutenant Governor, and by March of '76 had forced Ames resignation by threatening to impeach him too.
Who said anything about central government in particular?
Uhh, I did. "[Jim Crow] Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War."
In the US you don;t get more central then the Feds.
While I'll grant you the authority of being a bigoted fuck who has a religious belief in your own superiority over people not just like you, it's a shame you can't remember what you just mentioned, and that you don't know what Jim Crow was.
Dude, it's not my fault that gun guys insist on bringing up the single dumbest example of the uses of gun rights they possibly could. It's not my fault their reading comprehension is non-existant when it comes to understanding information that clashes with their preconceived beliefs.
And dude, stop pretending you're an internet troll. This lame bit of ad hominem was almost good enough for AOL. But this is fucking Slashdot. Following up a clear "I have yet to read any of your posts" moment with an accusation of bigotry? You disappoint me. That is freshman-in-college-level trolling, and a site populated by as many old-ass motherfuckers as Slashdot requires a bit more thought.
Hell, at least try some creativity in your insults you phlegm-faced moronic twit-loving dongle-fuck. And get a Kleenex.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
And the obvious rebuttal is that we can measure human behavior by what people actually do as well as a bunch of other objective criteria (like deaths from cause X), rather than what other people feel they did. You give a couple of examples in your reply that illustrate this point handsomely.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Dude, this is another Non sequitur
The original claim you;re defending has nothing to do with PostDocs or Profs it was: "preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief."
You've presented no evidence of preferential treatment in admissions due to political belief, apparently because that was entirely your own delusion.
Here's the thing, if you turn the problem around and ask the question a bit differently all the moral force. Unless black people are stupider then white people you cannot have a fair college admissions system that results in 18% of the applicants getting 5% of the slots.
What is the point of such speculation when you ignore dropout rate? According to this link, we have comparable enrollment in college between Caucasian and African American, but much lower graduation rates (in six years). 60% of the former group graduates in six years, while 40% of African Americans graduate in six years. That indicates to me that enrollment rates for African Americans are too high and/or too ambitious. It makes little sense to speak of fairness of enrollment, when you ignore fairness of outcome.
So your response to my pointing out the implication of your argument is that racism is true (as is shown by lower admission rates), is to offer another proof that racism is true (as is shown by lower graduation rates).
And your solution to the problem is not "let's try to figure out what we can do to fix this," it's to say "well I guess racism is true."
Okey Dokey Smokey.
When the actual science majors did the work, they got a 3% non-political number, and none of the 97% of scientists who they put in the "thinks anthropogenic global warming is fucking real and we should do something pretty fucking Al Gore-like about that shit"
First, when I used the term, "fraudulent" I didn't mean it in a metaphorical sense.
Allow me to be blunt: That's how science works all the time. Everybody always thinks they know how the experiment will go, and they all have a plan to get maximum exposure so that their colleagues will hear their names and their careers will grow. By arguing otherwise you indicate that your uinderstanding of science is based entirely on what your fifth-grade teacher told you.
When a study is done on a political position in science, and the method is to list studies by political position, the only way to refute that study is get statements form a significant number of people who did the studied studies saying th
If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice."
[...]
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
You can't because the definition is inherently subjective and nonstandard. Notice the bolded part in your first quote? When you try to define privilege by what other people think rather than an actual objective measure, then you're basing your concept on something ephemeral and ever changing. I could change that with an ad campaign.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
What you have to do when your studying people is ask them what they think, and if you get a fairly consistant story then you have good scientific data.
Further, the part, "unchallenged" is circular logic. If I don't agree something is a "privilege", say because it isn't by the usual English definition, then it is "unchallenged" and I'm being a spoil sport (connotation discussed next).
Would you say that an Englishman who walked up to a couple Canadians talking about Elk, and assumed they meant Alces alces even after they told him they meant Cervus canadensis is being reasonable?
This is science man. For quite a few scientific terms the non-scientific definition, local dialectical definitions, the definition used by other sciences, etc. can all be different. For example, "inflation."
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
Just look at the negative connotation dripping off that. This isn't science. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" game. It's just more bigotry like the bigotry it alleges to study.
And I'll bet if you asked a Doctor for an informal English language definition of a heart attack it wouldn't be very nuetral.
Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
But we still have preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Number two, you're intentionally misinterpreting what I said. I didn't say there was no affirmative action, I said that it is incredibly common for affirmative action opponents to honestly not know that they aren't arguing against racial quotas or set-asides anymore.
And we still have people claiming there is discrimination by a group merely because the composition of the group doesn't agree with the general population with no consideration of the pool that the group is drawn from (which frequently is different from the general population). Just because the "ordinary white people" don't distinguish the fine dis
By that standard pretty much everything the US has ever done is racist, because almost everything the US has ever done was specifically designed in such a way as to make slavery possible.
Historically, slavery based on race is relatively rare. Generally it came about as the result of a war, either nation or tribe based. In modern times, slavery tends to be based on tribe, religion, or whatever person is vulnerable enough to be grabbed.
Historically the 1870s were pretty rare, but they're also literally the only time in the history of these United States that a group of US Citizens has been threatened with massive curtailment of their rights, and privately owned firearms were decisive in the battle.
Which means if you're trying to claim that privately owned firearms protect the freedom of US Citizens you damn well need a response that's better then "it was only that one time." That one time is actually the only time, so you've just conceded that in 100% of reality privately-owned firearms were tools of oppression.
...black Majorities of South Carolina and Mississippi somehow managed to lose elections with universal suffrage to pro-Jim Crow white minorities? Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War.
Guns owned by government organizations are not "privately owned firearms". The southern governments were white (as were nearly all educated southern people). Racist government officials and guns in government hands were what kept race-based voting restrictions in place, much more than guns in private possession.
"No guns in private hands" does not stop arson, hanging, and other forms of murder and intimidation.
In the early to mid-1870s Southern state governments were dominated by a coalition of formerly freed slaves, Northern Carpetbaggers who'd moved south with the Union Armies, and Southern White Scalawags who were widely derided as traitors to their race. For example Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames was a Carpetbagger whose previous jobs included Union Army Major General and Military Governor of Mississippi. Ames problems started with a coup d'tat against a Sheriff in the region of Vicksburg. His official government militia did not have enough weapons, or veteran troops (almost all black men had served in the Civil War, but they'd been kept out of battle for reasons of racism, politics, and a burning desire not to repeat the Fort Pillow massacre) to counter the numerous privately-owned firearms available to the Democrats, so he was forced to sign a deal.
Part of the peace deal was a free election, which Ames thought he'd win because Mississippi was half black and the opposition's whole platform was "lets be incredibly racist to black people." Due to widespread abuse of their privately owned weapons, the Democrats were able to dominate the election and Ames had to resign or be impeached on charges that were clearly trumped up.
And thus, Mississippi's experiment in actual Democracy was destroyed by privately-owned firearms.
The single, central-most, fact of black problems in America is not the central government. The central government is almost always in favor of more black rights. The problem is that the People have historically been racist, white supremacist fucks who insisted that oppressing black people was justified by the Bible. Which in turn means that a) in many tactical circumstances a firearm would be useful to be an equalizer between the black and the white, and b) in a larger strategic sense more firearms are a disaster for blacks because the people who are willing and able to buy both firearms and brass are mostly from the white side.
In the case I just mentioned every level of government was actually officially on the black side. The Governor, his official mostly-black state militia, and the Republican President (who'd been elected with black votes) all wanted to prevent Jim Crow. It didn't work.
By that standard pretty much everything the US has ever done is racist, because almost everything the US has ever done was specifically designed in such a way as to make slavery possible. So voting (blacks couldn't), the existence of state governments (which regulated slavery), state's rights (which meant Lincoln could not have freed the slaves until after a dozen or so slave states had left), etc.
Moreover, by that standard gun rights are also racist. You remember that time the black Majorities of South Carolina and Mississippi somehow managed to lose elections with universal suffrage to pro-Jim Crow white minorities? Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War.
It specifically complains that scientists are classifying, measuring, and mapping at all because this is supposedly a "masculine" way of doing science. Furthermore, I don't hate (most) feminists; I think the movement currently is spreading some misinformation and is misguided, but most of them have good intentions.
If you show a group of scientists a particular chemical reaction the physicist will try to measure the pressure wave, the chemist will try to figure out the chemical reaction that caused the phenomena, the biologist will freak out about the poor tree leveled by said phenomena, etc.
In other words: Scientist studying different fields measure different shit, most of them actually measure shit that is unmeasurable (for example, it is actually impossible to know the average weight of a rat, you can kill a bunch of them and extrapolate from the average, but you can't actually know that number). Others deal with things that be described in words, but not actually measured.
Feminists go a little overboard with the unmeasurable rhetoric, but scientists, particularly social scientists, really need non-mathematical models of data because humans are fucking complicated. Linguistics, for example, is frequently written semi-mathematically but it isn't actually math. That doesn't mean the linguistically model of Proto-Indo-European hasn't produced testable hypotheses that turned out to be true.
Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.
Sure, I agree with that. However, that isn't what the paper is complaining about.
I said the article points out the author's intentions; it does this by quoting him in an interview he gave.
Reread it.
To quote the piece from reason.com on the press release: "I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed."
The rest of the article is quoting the abstract and then calling it ridiculous without engaging any of the ideas in it.
If you actually understand the terms she's using, the paper sounds fine.
Argument from ignorance still is a fallacy.
Or at least well within the normal traditions of feminism in the social sciences.
Which is damning with faint praise.
What I don't hear here is why a specialized language for such things as "white male privilege" (to give an example you used from another post, which you claim deviates from normal English usage somehow) is necessary (I generously assume that you were serious when you made that claim).
Dude, the whole concept is different.
A privilege in standard in English is something that you have been granted as an individual, that you know you have, and that you are either thankful for or proud of. If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice." Generally you don't know you get ethnic privilege unless you've thought about really hard, in a very rigorous way. Asians can probably go on and on and on about precisely how they get treated differently then black people, and which bits they like, because they kinda have to think about that shit to function in society.
With white privilege it gets really tricky because white people don't actually have to think about this shit. They also don't talk about it except under carefully controlled circumstances that involve like-minded people (mostly other whites, but non-whites who consistently take the white side will also be allowed in, but my white ass would not be allowed in). Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
It's one thing, if you're speaking of complex concepts which have no easy English language analogue, like "elementary particles" in physics. But we aren't. Ethnic and gender bias/favoritism has been with us forever, and our language has already evolved to cover those concepts.
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
All of social science has to deal with this. In standard English, for example, a "State" can be a subnational unit, a member of the UN, a non-member of the UN that has been recognized as sovereign, etc. So they either have to make up a new term, or include enough modifiers to make it clear their comparision of states is New South Wales vs. New York, and not Monaco vs. Spain.
This paper is about glacier-climate change research. And research into climate change frequently involves human elements because you're trying to figure out what can humans do to a) fix, b) mitigate, and/or c) respond to the problem. In those papers, half of what you're talking about is women doing women stuff. And a largely-male researcher base is likely to ignore some things that a female researcher-base would make the main headline of their paper.
Actually, read some of those papers. You find they frequently don't do cover any of your points you mention. There are several good reasons why. First, advocacy taints research by intro
people are not gonna suddenly decide to buy nails on Amazon.com and then go to Home Depot for the lumber whenever the package arrives.
I have done exactly this.
That's unusual. Partly because very few people think of projects as something you stockpile shit for, and partly because you might go to Home Depot and find out your whole plan won't work because nobody in Northeast Ohio stocks that kind of Fence Panel in December, and you've got to a) wait until March, b) pay to have multiple 40-lb fence panels shipped to Cleveland, or c) switch over to chain link fence and have to get a whole new set of fasteners.
It could become more common, and if anybody has tried that shit they're probably on slashdot, but note the Home Depot business model is quite flexible. Much more flexible then most of the retailers undone by Amazon.
In particular since you have to come in for the lumber anyway, Home Depot can simply stop charging cost for it. Maybe a registered contractor gets cost, somebody who buys $X of nails gets cost+10%, and your ass is paying cost+20%. Since shipping shit like drywall and 10 ft 2x4s requires different trucks then package delivery, and not even Amazon can actually afford to ship that shit to your house for the cost of a Prime Membership.
The paper complains about "Eurocentric knowledges", the fact that the relationship between gender and glaciers is "overlooked", and wants to "lead to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions." It talks about "marginalized knowledge", which could potentially be a valid point, but then says you need a feminist perspective because of the historical marginalization of women. It complains that men are doing a lot of glaciological research, and says the research has "manly characteristics", whatever those are. Oh, and it complains that scientists are using empirical evidence instead of asking local cultures for alternative narratives. And let's also not overlook that it complains that scientists are trying to "classify, measure, map" things. The horror!
So you want to bring in the knowledge of marginalized people, who are almost entirely neither European nor part of any European historical tradition, but you want to do it in a way that is Centered on Europe? Because that's what Eurocentric means to people who actually know what Eurocentric means.
And you want to get knowledge from these people, who probably can't read European languages and certainly don't have an equivalent of calculus, in a way that is measured, mapped, etc. just like Europe? I believe there are formatting issues in your proposal that you don't want to acknowledge because doing so would imply that that most hated of people, a feminist, has a point.
Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.
FYI, the corresponding author is a man.
The article you're making fun of points out that the author is trying to analyze how climate change (and how it impacts glaciers) plays out for different groups of people. It also points out that the author is doing a spectacularly bad job of making this point, relying on a lot of buzzwords and non sequiturs instead of solid points.
Reread the Reason.com piece.
It never acknowledges there's anything resembling a point in the article it's trying to critique. It starts with the phrase "utterly incomprehensible." the closest is saying "human face on climate change," but that's not precisely what this paper is trying to do. This paper is trying to get scientists to get out of their own heads, and experiences, when they consider the effect of climate change on the aforementioned Afghani herders.
Lastly, your implication that people with different political views than you are less intelligent ("for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand", "therefore I don't know what they mean") is incorrect. There are both intelligent and stupid people in almost any political view you care to name. Reason has some good articles and some poor articles, much like any other site.
I didn't say anything about their IQ. To be as ridiculously wrong on these issues as Reason.com routinely manages you have to have an extremely high IQ. Otherwise when your rationalizations fall apart you lack the ability to fix them.
My problem with them is actually precisely what you accuse me of: they have an ideological preconception that anyone using terminology they associate with their political opponents by definition has no point to make. Typically they won't bother to understand the actual denotative meaning of the terms they have decided are gibberish (your attempt to interpret the phrase "Eurocentric" above is an excellent example of the phenomena), because the connotative meaning they have in their heads overpowers their centers of reading comprehension.
BTW, I have actually been told by feminists to go away because I was too skeptical for their taste more then once.
Why would people who study glaciers care about clothesmaking? That aside, there are climate change studies that focus on smaller-scale, regional impacts - they just tend to not receive as much attention because they tend to only be relevant to a smaller proportion of the audience. You're also stereotyping what people find important based on their gender. Lastly, if this money is being spent by Western countries, shouldn't it focus on things the West considers to be important?
Somebody was asking me for non-anecdotal data to prove the study's point that guys can be incredibly dense about girl stuff, and this is a perfect example.
People who live near glaciers are not city-folk, importing their goods from the Chinese. They are country-folk, making their clothes the old-fashioned way. With stuff they get (mostly plants, but also animals) from the environment. That means if you're doing a scientific study on the effects glacier-related climate change will have on human beings, and you don't have a section on how clothes will continue to be made in the climate-changed world, you have missed something that is incredibly important.
As for the Western money point, when's the last time you heard of a study of the impact of climate change on glaciers in a non-Western country that the Western paymaster didn't specifically want to be useful to the non-Westerners who actually live there?
With the IRS hack they got 700k complete sets of tax info, including SSNs, allowing them to acquire hundreds of millions in fake refunds in those 700k names; and also allowing all kinds of interesting shenanigans with identity theft. As a guy who works as a tax preparer during the season, I guarantee 100% of those 700k had at least one, and probably 2-3 really fucking bad days due to that breach.
OTOH, as one of the 56 million my bank re-issued my Credit Card before anybody used it illicitly, so instead of having a really bad day I had about 40 minutes of switching the credit card number on sites that auto-bill me.
Don't get me wrong, 56 million credit card numbers is a huge fucking deal and they probably should pay more, but the nature of the information taken and the relative ease of completely immunizing yourself from the problem, makes it really hard to say that Home Depot was worse because it had 80 times the victims.
The thing about contractors is they are businessmen, paying their guys (or "guyses" as several of ours like to put it) hourly.
If they get to the job-site and a bunch of little shit is needed they aren't gonna pay their guyses to sit on their asses bullshitting about the Browns for three hours while the boss makes stops at a half-dozen specialty stores. They'll show up at the nearest Home Depot or Lowe's, buy everything, get their guyses started, and then maybe head to9 a specialty store for that one damn thing Home Depot didn't carry.
In Northeast Ohio there is no significant difference between Home Depot and Lowe's.
Menard's just opened up a few locations, and a) everything is new and pristine, and b) they're trying to make a good impression so the stores are both beautiful and adequetely-staffed (established stores will have low-ball their staffing numbers on the basis that people will wait two minutes while you finish with the other guy, new stores need to make a perfect impression so they pay top dollar to make sure you'll be able to find someone who is area-klnowledgeable pretty much the second you walk through the door), but they don't seem to be significantly cheaper.
As a Home Depot employee, I really don;t think you understand the business model. Lumber/drywall/concrete/etc. are not there to dominate the homeowner's market, they are there to dominate the contractor's market. Thus that department always looks like shit (not like shit would cost money), the product is not replaced if it's got damage a contractor wouldn't care about because he's about to paint it, and it's all sold at actual cost. Plants are the responsibility of a local partner (in Ohio they're called "Green Circle"), we do nothing for them except water them.
OTOH, a nail costs a fraction of a penny to make, and can generally be sold for several pennies. The reason we have that ugly/underpriced lumber to attract contractors is that the contractors will need nails for all the cheap/ugly lumber they're buying, and that's where we make money.
It's actually working surprisingly well. $7 Bill in profit on $85 Bill in revenue. In most industries a 3% margin would be great, and we're double that. I see some problems (in particular, for a store that needs people who are knowledgeable about construction, it's quite quick to find reasons to fire you once you break that $10 an hour barrier), but Amazon is not gonna seize our lumber market share, and people are not gonna suddenly decide to buy nails on Amazon.com and then go to Home Depot for the lumber whenever the package arrives.
Men tend to be into very specific areas of interest.
Care to cite an example that isn't anecdote? A simple meta analysis of research papers done exclusively by men or women should suffice, with a clear pattern of differentiation by gender. Otherwise it seems putting the conclusion before the analysis with nothing more than women are like this, while men are like this to support the claim. Bonus points if you can explain it in terms of socialization with actual testing lest it contradict one of the hallmarks of western feminism.
Oh, sorry, that would be too close to actual science.
Data on guys not getting woman shit? How about this post?
Or the one I just responded to that implied clothes making had nothing to do with how humans will respond to climate change in regions that contain glaciers (note to morons: if a change in meteorological conditions is severe enough that it requires a government response it might be a good idea to head back inside and put the parka away before you die of heat stroke).
Hell, what about the scientific article that we're all supposed to be talking about? Or the entire field of gender studies?
I believe the entire point of my post was that if one is not a rich-ass Westerner, then one cannot afford to drop $hundreds on North Face gear, one has to make one's blizzard-gear oneself from whatever happens to be laying around, and in that case the ways one "deals with the cold" is going to change drastically as the local environment changes.
If you actually understand the terms she's using, the paper sounds fine. Or at least well within the normal traditions of feminism in the social sciences.
Men tend to be into very specific areas of interest. Which means they'll research those areas. That's not bad, and none of the individual men involved are doing anything wrong, and women tend to do the same thing. As a personal example, when I talk military history women tend to completely tune me out. When they're talking about things that are objectively speaking pretty important (ie: my immortal soul) that don't fit into my "dudes should be into this" box I tune them out. This also happens in the sciences, but in many sciences (particularly hard sciences with no human element) it's completely irrelevant.
This paper is about glacier-climate change research. And research into climate change frequently involves human elements because you're trying to figure out what can humans do to a) fix, b) mitigate, and/or c) respond to the problem. In those papers, half of what you're talking about is women doing women stuff. And a largely-male researcher base is likely to ignore some things that a female researcher-base would make the main headline of their paper.
Which is pretty much what feminists have been doing in social sciences ever since there have been feminists to be in the social sciences.
Because Reason.com has a pathological need to a) make up new controversy about climate change, and b) denounce anything vaguely social sciencey based almost entirely on their inability to understand the terms social scientists use. Seriously, I have never met a Reason.,com user who actually knows what "Privilege" is, and yet they automatically assume they can all parse a sentence about "white male privilege" because they're all the same wrong. When you point out to them that they are, in fact, mostly wrong instead of trying to figure out what the sentence would mean given the new definition, they will claim that the fact they're all the same wrong means that they are actually right, and the person who knows what actual Social Scientists mean when they use the term is an idiot.
This entire article is actually an extended tour of "I don't know what that word means, but people I don't like use it, therefore I am going to rip it shreds without bothering to understand it." Seriously, just read the damn thing. If I denounced a Physics paper on the basis that "Quantum" was inherently ridiculous I'd be an idiot, and the Reason.com guy is similarly an idiot for denouncing a paper based entirely on his inability to understand simple social science terms.
In this case the point of the paper is that historically guys have dominated glacier research, which is fine if you're just talking about how glaciers behave. But if you're talking about what the people around them should do in response to climate change it is potentially problematic because half the people around the glacier are not guys, and much of what those not-guy people do does not get much shrift in a guy-dominated research environment.
For example, there's no utility company in the mountains of Nepal, what're they doing for heat? Probably burning shit. Possibly literally shit (the Sioux used Buffalo droppings), possibly plant life. Either could be affected by climate change, but how? I can imagine a zoologist getting a paper on how the changed environment would hurt the local livestock breeding practices, but who would even do the shit-burning paper?
Because glacier's and climate change care about your gender. -Bender.
No.
But the shit you care about depends partly on your gender. Which in turn means the shit you research as a scientist will depend partly on your gender.
Which means that if dudes are the ones doing all the glacier-climate change research it's likely there's more research into western-dude-type-stuff (Terrorism! Economics!) then into everything else (Family life! Heating! Clothesmaking!).
Given that people who live near glaciers are likely to freeze to death if somebody isn't taking the not-western-male shit seriously, it's pretty important to know whether somebody is doing that, and this paper seems to show they are not.
Have you read anything on this except Reason.com's takedown? Literally anything? Because this is Social Science, and they're reaction to Social Sciences tends to be heavily colored by the fact that most Scientists studying society do not actually find that Libertarianism is the One True Gospel. They're also much closer to the climate-skeptics camp then they like to admit, arguing the global-warmiong-pause,/a> is real and excoriating Di Caprio for using his Oscar Acceptance speech on the topic. Their stands on both subjects tend to be dominated by a steadfast refusal to care what their opponents are saying when they use words differently.
Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."
FYI, the abstract means she was doing some very basic research into how science emphasizes (for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand) man shit at the expense of woman shit, and how that specifically impacts papers on glaciers and climate change. If I had access to the article I suspect the man shit would be stuff like military science implications of climate change such as terrorism, environmental effects on local livestock, other large-scale economic dislocation, etc. Whereas the woman shit would be much smaller-scale.
For example, most of Central Asian cultures near glaciers are gonna be burning stuff for heat. Maybe it's actual shit, maybe it's local plant-life. Will the local plant-life change? If they're using sheep dung, and the plants change, will post-climate-change still burn the same? How can they adapt? That's pretty fucking important in that region, and a) I'd be stunned if anyone had bothered to gather the data necessary for the paper, and b) I'd be even more stunned if it got published. The Imperialism bits are included because groups that Empress Victoria of India disliked are likely still on the bad-list of important people in the region, and thus if they use some unique heating strategy that will be screwed by climate change it's likely nobody will notice until the poor bastards start freezing to death.
In practice these tend to be used in arcane, highly technical settings, with fairly old workforces. Setting up a new system that does precisely what the old system does, including bugs that 60-something workers have figured out their way around, but not adding new bugs they won't be able to figure out their way around? Not cheap.
Particularly since a) you can't pay any developer more then $174k (that's what Congresscritters make), and b) you still have to interface with the department across the hall which isn;t upgrading jack.
Under the All Writs Act if someone, literally anyone in the entire universe, besides the company served the Writ can do the job then the Writ is invalid due to a lack of Proximity. Since everyone involved swears up and down that Apple's system is unhackable without a new version of iOS signed by Apple*, they're arguing the other half of the test (that it's an Undue Burden to force Apple to comply with the Writ), along with a lot of political bullshit the Judge is officially not supposed to care about (ie: that the investigation is of a horrendous crime, that the victim's relatives who have taken a side are siding with Apple, etc.).
So if this guy is not talking out of his ass because it sounds good, he can single-handedly make himself the most popular security guy in the Valley for the price of a plane ticket and a 5c.
Since he's not doing that, I suspect he's quite wrong about the number of PINs that get tried in these kiosks.
*Strictly speaking Apple does make an argument against proximity, but it's firmly in the tradition of "we've got lawyers, let's waste everyone's time just in case this stupid shit works," not in the tradition of arguing the actual law.
What have I said that isn't a description of the effaceable memory Apple has put on the 5c? It's in Flash. Flash is not a hard disk. It is not papyrus. It is a chip on the motherboard.
It's designed so that you don't get the decryption key for the hardware on a copy, and you can't just back it up to iCloud, restore the backup to 100 iPhone 5cs, and try 10 PINs on each.
Slashdot Mirror
And again with the Young Republican-level pretense at being an internet troll.
Here's the thing you really aren;t getting: To become a law a proposal must pass through a large group of people called the "Legislature." In the United States these are bicameral. So it has to pass two bodies of people, generally a large one called something along the lines of "House," and a smaller one called the "Senate." We also add the wrinkle of a separate Executive Branch.
After the Civil War the North appointed it's own people to all these offices, guaranteed black voting rights (partly because it was the right thing to do, partly because there was no way blacks would vote for Mas'r's Democrats), etc. Adelbert Ames, Union Army Major General, was appointed Mississippi Governor in 1868, and elected in 1870. Since the state was roughly half-black (48% in the 1870 census, 52% by 1880), and all the incumbents were from the "we need black votes" party it would have been impossible to win control of the Legislature without violence.
So they supplied it, out-gunned Ames' militia, forced new Legislative elections in '75, rigged them with more privately-owned guns, impeached (and removed) the black Lieutenant Governor, and by March of '76 had forced Ames resignation by threatening to impeach him too.
Who said anything about central government in particular?
Uhh, I did. "[Jim Crow] Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War."
In the US you don;t get more central then the Feds.
While I'll grant you the authority of being a bigoted fuck who has a religious belief in your own superiority over people not just like you, it's a shame you can't remember what you just mentioned, and that you don't know what Jim Crow was.
Dude, it's not my fault that gun guys insist on bringing up the single dumbest example of the uses of gun rights they possibly could. It's not my fault their reading comprehension is non-existant when it comes to understanding information that clashes with their preconceived beliefs.
And dude, stop pretending you're an internet troll. This lame bit of ad hominem was almost good enough for AOL. But this is fucking Slashdot. Following up a clear "I have yet to read any of your posts" moment with an accusation of bigotry? You disappoint me. That is freshman-in-college-level trolling, and a site populated by as many old-ass motherfuckers as Slashdot requires a bit more thought.
Hell, at least try some creativity in your insults you phlegm-faced moronic twit-loving dongle-fuck. And get a Kleenex.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
And the obvious rebuttal is that we can measure human behavior by what people actually do as well as a bunch of other objective criteria (like deaths from cause X), rather than what other people feel they did. You give a couple of examples in your reply that illustrate this point handsomely.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Didn't you just spend a considerable bit of time telling me about how things perceived by one person are not perceived by another? Just because you didn't hear about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. This article describes research that claims enormous bias in social studies (social psychology here):
Dude, this is another Non sequitur
The original claim you;re defending has nothing to do with PostDocs or Profs it was: "preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief."
You've presented no evidence of preferential treatment in admissions due to political belief, apparently because that was entirely your own delusion.
Here's the thing, if you turn the problem around and ask the question a bit differently all the moral force. Unless black people are stupider then white people you cannot have a fair college admissions system that results in 18% of the applicants getting 5% of the slots.
What is the point of such speculation when you ignore dropout rate? According to this link, we have comparable enrollment in college between Caucasian and African American, but much lower graduation rates (in six years). 60% of the former group graduates in six years, while 40% of African Americans graduate in six years. That indicates to me that enrollment rates for African Americans are too high and/or too ambitious. It makes little sense to speak of fairness of enrollment, when you ignore fairness of outcome.
So your response to my pointing out the implication of your argument is that racism is true (as is shown by lower admission rates), is to offer another proof that racism is true (as is shown by lower graduation rates).
And your solution to the problem is not "let's try to figure out what we can do to fix this," it's to say "well I guess racism is true."
Okey Dokey Smokey.
When the actual science majors did the work, they got a 3% non-political number, and none of the 97% of scientists who they put in the "thinks anthropogenic global warming is fucking real and we should do something pretty fucking Al Gore-like about that shit"
First, when I used the term, "fraudulent" I didn't mean it in a metaphorical sense.
Allow me to be blunt:
That's how science works all the time. Everybody always thinks they know how the experiment will go, and they all have a plan to get maximum exposure so that their colleagues will hear their names and their careers will grow. By arguing otherwise you indicate that your uinderstanding of science is based entirely on what your fifth-grade teacher told you.
When a study is done on a political position in science, and the method is to list studies by political position, the only way to refute that study is get statements form a significant number of people who did the studied studies saying th
If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice."
[...]
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
You can't because the definition is inherently subjective and nonstandard. Notice the bolded part in your first quote? When you try to define privilege by what other people think rather than an actual objective measure, then you're basing your concept on something ephemeral and ever changing. I could change that with an ad campaign.
By that standard all study of human behavior is complete bullshit because there's no standard definition of anything. Even legal terms can mean completely different things depending on cultural context. Just ask the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Or hell take Medicine. Whose to say your sharp pain is my sharp pain?
What you have to do when your studying people is ask them what they think, and if you get a fairly consistant story then you have good scientific data.
Further, the part, "unchallenged" is circular logic. If I don't agree something is a "privilege", say because it isn't by the usual English definition, then it is "unchallenged" and I'm being a spoil sport (connotation discussed next).
Would you say that an Englishman who walked up to a couple Canadians talking about Elk, and assumed they meant Alces alces even after they told him they meant Cervus canadensis is being reasonable?
This is science man. For quite a few scientific terms the non-scientific definition, local dialectical definitions, the definition used by other sciences, etc. can all be different. For example, "inflation."
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
Just look at the negative connotation dripping off that. This isn't science. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" game. It's just more bigotry like the bigotry it alleges to study.
And I'll bet if you asked a Doctor for an informal English language definition of a heart attack it wouldn't be very nuetral.
Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
But we still have preferential treatment in college admissions based on ethnicity, gender, and political belief.
Number one, I've never heard of any school (except some particularly conservative Christian ones) that even tries to figure out a prospective students political beliefs.
Number two, you're intentionally misinterpreting what I said. I didn't say there was no affirmative action, I said that it is incredibly common for affirmative action opponents to honestly not know that they aren't arguing against racial quotas or set-asides anymore.
And we still have people claiming there is discrimination by a group merely because the composition of the group doesn't agree with the general population with no consideration of the pool that the group is drawn from (which frequently is different from the general population). Just because the "ordinary white people" don't distinguish the fine dis
Historically, slavery based on race is relatively rare. Generally it came about as the result of a war, either nation or tribe based. In modern times, slavery tends to be based on tribe, religion, or whatever person is vulnerable enough to be grabbed.
Historically the 1870s were pretty rare, but they're also literally the only time in the history of these United States that a group of US Citizens has been threatened with massive curtailment of their rights, and privately owned firearms were decisive in the battle.
Which means if you're trying to claim that privately owned firearms protect the freedom of US Citizens you damn well need a response that's better then "it was only that one time." That one time is actually the only time, so you've just conceded that in 100% of reality privately-owned firearms were tools of oppression.
Guns owned by government organizations are not "privately owned firearms". The southern governments were white (as were nearly all educated southern people). Racist government officials and guns in government hands were what kept race-based voting restrictions in place, much more than guns in private possession.
"No guns in private hands" does not stop arson, hanging, and other forms of murder and intimidation.
In the early to mid-1870s Southern state governments were dominated by a coalition of formerly freed slaves, Northern Carpetbaggers who'd moved south with the Union Armies, and Southern White Scalawags who were widely derided as traitors to their race. For example Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames was a Carpetbagger whose previous jobs included Union Army Major General and Military Governor of Mississippi. Ames problems started with a coup d'tat against a Sheriff in the region of Vicksburg. His official government militia did not have enough weapons, or veteran troops (almost all black men had served in the Civil War, but they'd been kept out of battle for reasons of racism, politics, and a burning desire not to repeat the Fort Pillow massacre) to counter the numerous privately-owned firearms available to the Democrats, so he was forced to sign a deal.
Part of the peace deal was a free election, which Ames thought he'd win because Mississippi was half black and the opposition's whole platform was "lets be incredibly racist to black people." Due to widespread abuse of their privately owned weapons, the Democrats were able to dominate the election and Ames had to resign or be impeached on charges that were clearly trumped up.
And thus, Mississippi's experiment in actual Democracy was destroyed by privately-owned firearms.
*woosh*
The single, central-most, fact of black problems in America is not the central government. The central government is almost always in favor of more black rights. The problem is that the People have historically been racist, white supremacist fucks who insisted that oppressing black people was justified by the Bible. Which in turn means that a) in many tactical circumstances a firearm would be useful to be an equalizer between the black and the white, and b) in a larger strategic sense more firearms are a disaster for blacks because the people who are willing and able to buy both firearms and brass are mostly from the white side.
In the case I just mentioned every level of government was actually officially on the black side. The Governor, his official mostly-black state militia, and the Republican President (who'd been elected with black votes) all wanted to prevent Jim Crow. It didn't work.
By that standard pretty much everything the US has ever done is racist, because almost everything the US has ever done was specifically designed in such a way as to make slavery possible. So voting (blacks couldn't), the existence of state governments (which regulated slavery), state's rights (which meant Lincoln could not have freed the slaves until after a dozen or so slave states had left), etc.
Moreover, by that standard gun rights are also racist. You remember that time the black Majorities of South Carolina and Mississippi somehow managed to lose elections with universal suffrage to pro-Jim Crow white minorities? Could not have happened if the Feds had seized all privately owned firearms in those states after the Civil War.
The phrase "Eurocentric knowledges" often, in this context, means "Eurocentric ways of knowing things" i.e. science.
It specifically complains that scientists are classifying, measuring, and mapping at all because this is supposedly a "masculine" way of doing science. Furthermore, I don't hate (most) feminists; I think the movement currently is spreading some misinformation and is misguided, but most of them have good intentions.
If you show a group of scientists a particular chemical reaction the physicist will try to measure the pressure wave, the chemist will try to figure out the chemical reaction that caused the phenomena, the biologist will freak out about the poor tree leveled by said phenomena, etc.
In other words:
Scientist studying different fields measure different shit, most of them actually measure shit that is unmeasurable (for example, it is actually impossible to know the average weight of a rat, you can kill a bunch of them and extrapolate from the average, but you can't actually know that number). Others deal with things that be described in words, but not actually measured.
Feminists go a little overboard with the unmeasurable rhetoric, but scientists, particularly social scientists, really need non-mathematical models of data because humans are fucking complicated. Linguistics, for example, is frequently written semi-mathematically but it isn't actually math. That doesn't mean the linguistically model of Proto-Indo-European hasn't produced testable hypotheses that turned out to be true.
Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.
Sure, I agree with that. However, that isn't what the paper is complaining about.
I said the article points out the author's intentions; it does this by quoting him in an interview he gave.
Reread it.
To quote the piece from reason.com on the press release: "I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed."
The rest of the article is quoting the abstract and then calling it ridiculous without engaging any of the ideas in it.
If you actually understand the terms she's using, the paper sounds fine.
Argument from ignorance still is a fallacy.
Or at least well within the normal traditions of feminism in the social sciences.
Which is damning with faint praise.
What I don't hear here is why a specialized language for such things as "white male privilege" (to give an example you used from another post, which you claim deviates from normal English usage somehow) is necessary (I generously assume that you were serious when you made that claim).
Dude, the whole concept is different.
A privilege in standard in English is something that you have been granted as an individual, that you know you have, and that you are either thankful for or proud of. If you're talking about social science studies of discrimination, Asian Privilege is something about Asians that cause non-Asians to go "that must be nice." Generally you don't know you get ethnic privilege unless you've thought about really hard, in a very rigorous way. Asians can probably go on and on and on about precisely how they get treated differently then black people, and which bits they like, because they kinda have to think about that shit to function in society.
With white privilege it gets really tricky because white people don't actually have to think about this shit. They also don't talk about it except under carefully controlled circumstances that involve like-minded people (mostly other whites, but non-whites who consistently take the white side will also be allowed in, but my white ass would not be allowed in). Thus, most of the actual data they use tends to woefully out-of-date -- for example, racial quotas have not been legal elements of college admissions since '78, yet if you watch any debate on Affirmative Action that involves ordinary white people it rapidly becomes clear that their entire conception of the concept of Affirmative Action is based on a quota system.
Which is why you start talking about "unchallenged white privilege." Which is defined as "nice shit you get because partly you're white in America, and instead of realizing you got it partly because you were white you thought you got it because you earned it and now you're extremely pissed that someone is daring to argue the point."
It's one thing, if you're speaking of complex concepts which have no easy English language analogue, like "elementary particles" in physics. But we aren't. Ethnic and gender bias/favoritism has been with us forever, and our language has already evolved to cover those concepts.
Then give me the standard way to say "unchallenged white privilege" that actually means precisely what "unchallenged white privilege" means with no messy sub-meanings that would cause confusion.
All of social science has to deal with this. In standard English, for example, a "State" can be a subnational unit, a member of the UN, a non-member of the UN that has been recognized as sovereign, etc. So they either have to make up a new term, or include enough modifiers to make it clear their comparision of states is New South Wales vs. New York, and not Monaco vs. Spain.
This paper is about glacier-climate change research. And research into climate change frequently involves human elements because you're trying to figure out what can humans do to a) fix, b) mitigate, and/or c) respond to the problem. In those papers, half of what you're talking about is women doing women stuff. And a largely-male researcher base is likely to ignore some things that a female researcher-base would make the main headline of their paper.
Actually, read some of those papers. You find they frequently don't do cover any of your points you mention. There are several good reasons why. First, advocacy taints research by intro
people are not gonna suddenly decide to buy nails on Amazon.com and then go to Home Depot for the lumber whenever the package arrives.
I have done exactly this.
That's unusual. Partly because very few people think of projects as something you stockpile shit for, and partly because you might go to Home Depot and find out your whole plan won't work because nobody in Northeast Ohio stocks that kind of Fence Panel in December, and you've got to a) wait until March, b) pay to have multiple 40-lb fence panels shipped to Cleveland, or c) switch over to chain link fence and have to get a whole new set of fasteners.
It could become more common, and if anybody has tried that shit they're probably on slashdot, but note the Home Depot business model is quite flexible. Much more flexible then most of the retailers undone by Amazon.
In particular since you have to come in for the lumber anyway, Home Depot can simply stop charging cost for it. Maybe a registered contractor gets cost, somebody who buys $X of nails gets cost+10%, and your ass is paying cost+20%. Since shipping shit like drywall and 10 ft 2x4s requires different trucks then package delivery, and not even Amazon can actually afford to ship that shit to your house for the cost of a Prime Membership.
The paper complains about "Eurocentric knowledges", the fact that the relationship between gender and glaciers is "overlooked", and wants to "lead to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions." It talks about "marginalized knowledge", which could potentially be a valid point, but then says you need a feminist perspective because of the historical marginalization of women. It complains that men are doing a lot of glaciological research, and says the research has "manly characteristics", whatever those are. Oh, and it complains that scientists are using empirical evidence instead of asking local cultures for alternative narratives. And let's also not overlook that it complains that scientists are trying to "classify, measure, map" things. The horror!
So you want to bring in the knowledge of marginalized people, who are almost entirely neither European nor part of any European historical tradition, but you want to do it in a way that is Centered on Europe? Because that's what Eurocentric means to people who actually know what Eurocentric means.
And you want to get knowledge from these people, who probably can't read European languages and certainly don't have an equivalent of calculus, in a way that is measured, mapped, etc. just like Europe? I believe there are formatting issues in your proposal that you don't want to acknowledge because doing so would imply that that most hated of people, a feminist, has a point.
Don't get me wrong, at some point everything in science actually has to be brought into the standard, highly measured, statistically proven, format. But if you're trying to anticipate how climate change will affect a bunch of Afghani herders whose idea of literacy is learning to recite the Koran from heart, and whose idea of numeracy is being able to calculate complex fractions in your head really fast; the data they give you is not gonna start in a science-friendly format.
FYI, the corresponding author is a man.
The article you're making fun of points out that the author is trying to analyze how climate change (and how it impacts glaciers) plays out for different groups of people. It also points out that the author is doing a spectacularly bad job of making this point, relying on a lot of buzzwords and non sequiturs instead of solid points.
Reread the Reason.com piece.
It never acknowledges there's anything resembling a point in the article it's trying to critique. It starts with the phrase "utterly incomprehensible." the closest is saying "human face on climate change," but that's not precisely what this paper is trying to do. This paper is trying to get scientists to get out of their own heads, and experiences, when they consider the effect of climate change on the aforementioned Afghani herders.
Lastly, your implication that people with different political views than you are less intelligent ("for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand", "therefore I don't know what they mean") is incorrect. There are both intelligent and stupid people in almost any political view you care to name. Reason has some good articles and some poor articles, much like any other site.
I didn't say anything about their IQ. To be as ridiculously wrong on these issues as Reason.com routinely manages you have to have an extremely high IQ. Otherwise when your rationalizations fall apart you lack the ability to fix them.
My problem with them is actually precisely what you accuse me of: they have an ideological preconception that anyone using terminology they associate with their political opponents by definition has no point to make. Typically they won't bother to understand the actual denotative meaning of the terms they have decided are gibberish (your attempt to interpret the phrase "Eurocentric" above is an excellent example of the phenomena), because the connotative meaning they have in their heads overpowers their centers of reading comprehension.
BTW, I have actually been told by feminists to go away because I was too skeptical for their taste more then once.
Why would people who study glaciers care about clothesmaking? That aside, there are climate change studies that focus on smaller-scale, regional impacts - they just tend to not receive as much attention because they tend to only be relevant to a smaller proportion of the audience. You're also stereotyping what people find important based on their gender. Lastly, if this money is being spent by Western countries, shouldn't it focus on things the West considers to be important?
Somebody was asking me for non-anecdotal data to prove the study's point that guys can be incredibly dense about girl stuff, and this is a perfect example.
People who live near glaciers are not city-folk, importing their goods from the Chinese. They are country-folk, making their clothes the old-fashioned way. With stuff they get (mostly plants, but also animals) from the environment. That means if you're doing a scientific study on the effects glacier-related climate change will have on human beings, and you don't have a section on how clothes will continue to be made in the climate-changed world, you have missed something that is incredibly important.
As for the Western money point, when's the last time you heard of a study of the impact of climate change on glaciers in a non-Western country that the Western paymaster didn't specifically want to be useful to the non-Westerners who actually live there?
Which hack was worse? Hard to say.
With the IRS hack they got 700k complete sets of tax info, including SSNs, allowing them to acquire hundreds of millions in fake refunds in those 700k names; and also allowing all kinds of interesting shenanigans with identity theft. As a guy who works as a tax preparer during the season, I guarantee 100% of those 700k had at least one, and probably 2-3 really fucking bad days due to that breach.
OTOH, as one of the 56 million my bank re-issued my Credit Card before anybody used it illicitly, so instead of having a really bad day I had about 40 minutes of switching the credit card number on sites that auto-bill me.
Don't get me wrong, 56 million credit card numbers is a huge fucking deal and they probably should pay more, but the nature of the information taken and the relative ease of completely immunizing yourself from the problem, makes it really hard to say that Home Depot was worse because it had 80 times the victims.
The thing about contractors is they are businessmen, paying their guys (or "guyses" as several of ours like to put it) hourly.
If they get to the job-site and a bunch of little shit is needed they aren't gonna pay their guyses to sit on their asses bullshitting about the Browns for three hours while the boss makes stops at a half-dozen specialty stores. They'll show up at the nearest Home Depot or Lowe's, buy everything, get their guyses started, and then maybe head to9 a specialty store for that one damn thing Home Depot didn't carry.
In Northeast Ohio there is no significant difference between Home Depot and Lowe's.
Menard's just opened up a few locations, and a) everything is new and pristine, and b) they're trying to make a good impression so the stores are both beautiful and adequetely-staffed (established stores will have low-ball their staffing numbers on the basis that people will wait two minutes while you finish with the other guy, new stores need to make a perfect impression so they pay top dollar to make sure you'll be able to find someone who is area-klnowledgeable pretty much the second you walk through the door), but they don't seem to be significantly cheaper.
As a Home Depot employee, I really don;t think you understand the business model. Lumber/drywall/concrete/etc. are not there to dominate the homeowner's market, they are there to dominate the contractor's market. Thus that department always looks like shit (not like shit would cost money), the product is not replaced if it's got damage a contractor wouldn't care about because he's about to paint it, and it's all sold at actual cost. Plants are the responsibility of a local partner (in Ohio they're called "Green Circle"), we do nothing for them except water them.
OTOH, a nail costs a fraction of a penny to make, and can generally be sold for several pennies. The reason we have that ugly/underpriced lumber to attract contractors is that the contractors will need nails for all the cheap/ugly lumber they're buying, and that's where we make money.
It's actually working surprisingly well. $7 Bill in profit on $85 Bill in revenue. In most industries a 3% margin would be great, and we're double that. I see some problems (in particular, for a store that needs people who are knowledgeable about construction, it's quite quick to find reasons to fire you once you break that $10 an hour barrier), but Amazon is not gonna seize our lumber market share, and people are not gonna suddenly decide to buy nails on Amazon.com and then go to Home Depot for the lumber whenever the package arrives.
Men tend to be into very specific areas of interest.
Care to cite an example that isn't anecdote? A simple meta analysis of research papers done exclusively by men or women should suffice, with a clear pattern of differentiation by gender. Otherwise it seems putting the conclusion before the analysis with nothing more than women are like this, while men are like this to support the claim. Bonus points if you can explain it in terms of socialization with actual testing lest it contradict one of the hallmarks of western feminism.
Oh, sorry, that would be too close to actual science.
Data on guys not getting woman shit? How about this post?
Or the one I just responded to that implied clothes making had nothing to do with how humans will respond to climate change in regions that contain glaciers (note to morons: if a change in meteorological conditions is severe enough that it requires a government response it might be a good idea to head back inside and put the parka away before you die of heat stroke).
Hell, what about the scientific article that we're all supposed to be talking about? Or the entire field of gender studies?
I believe the entire point of my post was that if one is not a rich-ass Westerner, then one cannot afford to drop $hundreds on North Face gear, one has to make one's blizzard-gear oneself from whatever happens to be laying around, and in that case the ways one "deals with the cold" is going to change drastically as the local environment changes.
Doubt it.
If you actually understand the terms she's using, the paper sounds fine. Or at least well within the normal traditions of feminism in the social sciences.
Men tend to be into very specific areas of interest. Which means they'll research those areas. That's not bad, and none of the individual men involved are doing anything wrong, and women tend to do the same thing. As a personal example, when I talk military history women tend to completely tune me out. When they're talking about things that are objectively speaking pretty important (ie: my immortal soul) that don't fit into my "dudes should be into this" box I tune them out. This also happens in the sciences, but in many sciences (particularly hard sciences with no human element) it's completely irrelevant.
This paper is about glacier-climate change research. And research into climate change frequently involves human elements because you're trying to figure out what can humans do to a) fix, b) mitigate, and/or c) respond to the problem. In those papers, half of what you're talking about is women doing women stuff. And a largely-male researcher base is likely to ignore some things that a female researcher-base would make the main headline of their paper.
Which is pretty much what feminists have been doing in social sciences ever since there have been feminists to be in the social sciences.
Because Reason.com has a pathological need to a) make up new controversy about climate change, and b) denounce anything vaguely social sciencey based almost entirely on their inability to understand the terms social scientists use. Seriously, I have never met a Reason.,com user who actually knows what "Privilege" is, and yet they automatically assume they can all parse a sentence about "white male privilege" because they're all the same wrong. When you point out to them that they are, in fact, mostly wrong instead of trying to figure out what the sentence would mean given the new definition, they will claim that the fact they're all the same wrong means that they are actually right, and the person who knows what actual Social Scientists mean when they use the term is an idiot.
This entire article is actually an extended tour of "I don't know what that word means, but people I don't like use it, therefore I am going to rip it shreds without bothering to understand it." Seriously, just read the damn thing. If I denounced a Physics paper on the basis that "Quantum" was inherently ridiculous I'd be an idiot, and the Reason.com guy is similarly an idiot for denouncing a paper based entirely on his inability to understand simple social science terms.
In this case the point of the paper is that historically guys have dominated glacier research, which is fine if you're just talking about how glaciers behave. But if you're talking about what the people around them should do in response to climate change it is potentially problematic because half the people around the glacier are not guys, and much of what those not-guy people do does not get much shrift in a guy-dominated research environment.
For example, there's no utility company in the mountains of Nepal, what're they doing for heat? Probably burning shit. Possibly literally shit (the Sioux used Buffalo droppings), possibly plant life. Either could be affected by climate change, but how? I can imagine a zoologist getting a paper on how the changed environment would hurt the local livestock breeding practices, but who would even do the shit-burning paper?
Because glacier's and climate change care about your gender. -Bender.
No.
But the shit you care about depends partly on your gender. Which in turn means the shit you research as a scientist will depend partly on your gender.
Which means that if dudes are the ones doing all the glacier-climate change research it's likely there's more research into western-dude-type-stuff (Terrorism! Economics!) then into everything else (Family life! Heating! Clothesmaking!).
Given that people who live near glaciers are likely to freeze to death if somebody isn't taking the not-western-male shit seriously, it's pretty important to know whether somebody is doing that, and this paper seems to show they are not.
Have you read anything on this except Reason.com's takedown? Literally anything? Because this is Social Science, and they're reaction to Social Sciences tends to be heavily colored by the fact that most Scientists studying society do not actually find that Libertarianism is the One True Gospel. They're also much closer to the climate-skeptics camp then they like to admit, arguing the global-warmiong-pause,/a> is real and excoriating Di Caprio for using his Oscar Acceptance speech on the topic. Their stands on both subjects tend to be dominated by a steadfast refusal to care what their opponents are saying when they use words differently.
Pretty much the entire article that we are talking about can be summarized by the phrase "Ayn Rand didn't use the words 'gendered,' 'postcolonial,' or 'political ecology' in her books; therefore I don't know what they mean; therefore this paper's abstract is meaningless gibberish."
FYI, the abstract means she was doing some very basic research into how science emphasizes (for lack of a term a reason.com reader would understand) man shit at the expense of woman shit, and how that specifically impacts papers on glaciers and climate change. If I had access to the article I suspect the man shit would be stuff like military science implications of climate change such as terrorism, environmental effects on local livestock, other large-scale economic dislocation, etc. Whereas the woman shit would be much smaller-scale.
For example, most of Central Asian cultures near glaciers are gonna be burning stuff for heat. Maybe it's actual shit, maybe it's local plant-life. Will the local plant-life change? If they're using sheep dung, and the plants change, will post-climate-change still burn the same? How can they adapt? That's pretty fucking important in that region, and a) I'd be stunned if anyone had bothered to gather the data necessary for the paper, and b) I'd be even more stunned if it got published. The Imperialism bits are included because groups that Empress Victoria of India disliked are likely still on the bad-list of important people in the region, and thus if they use some unique heating strategy that will be screwed by climate change it's likely nobody will notice until the poor bastards start freezing to death.
In theory.
In practice these tend to be used in arcane, highly technical settings, with fairly old workforces. Setting up a new system that does precisely what the old system does, including bugs that 60-something workers have figured out their way around, but not adding new bugs they won't be able to figure out their way around? Not cheap.
Particularly since a) you can't pay any developer more then $174k (that's what Congresscritters make), and b) you still have to interface with the department across the hall which isn;t upgrading jack.
Yes it makes the case go away.
Under the All Writs Act if someone, literally anyone in the entire universe, besides the company served the Writ can do the job then the Writ is invalid due to a lack of Proximity. Since everyone involved swears up and down that Apple's system is unhackable without a new version of iOS signed by Apple*, they're arguing the other half of the test (that it's an Undue Burden to force Apple to comply with the Writ), along with a lot of political bullshit the Judge is officially not supposed to care about (ie: that the investigation is of a horrendous crime, that the victim's relatives who have taken a side are siding with Apple, etc.).
So if this guy is not talking out of his ass because it sounds good, he can single-handedly make himself the most popular security guy in the Valley for the price of a plane ticket and a 5c.
Since he's not doing that, I suspect he's quite wrong about the number of PINs that get tried in these kiosks.
*Strictly speaking Apple does make an argument against proximity, but it's firmly in the tradition of "we've got lawyers, let's waste everyone's time just in case this stupid shit works," not in the tradition of arguing the actual law.
What have I said that isn't a description of the effaceable memory Apple has put on the 5c? It's in Flash. Flash is not a hard disk. It is not papyrus. It is a chip on the motherboard.
It's designed so that you don't get the decryption key for the hardware on a copy, and you can't just back it up to iCloud, restore the backup to 100 iPhone 5cs, and try 10 PINs on each.