The equivalency argument concludes that to consistent, if campaigns like this one are disallowed, then no campaigns by BLM whatsoever should be allowed.
But that logically holds only if anything that anyone does under the label "BLM" is morally equivalent to murder.
It's jargon, which in itself is neither good nor bad. It depends on how intelligently the person using it uses it, and that's all over the map.
At it's best it represents things that a person can take for granted, to the degree that they aren't even aware that other people can't take them for granted. For example if you're a white person in the US, you take it for granted that store detectives won't automatically follow you around to the exclusion of other shoppers, or that a cop won't pull you over for driving a nice car because he thinks you may have stolen it.
And that's fine as far as it goes. But people use jargon thoughtlessly, as if male privilege or white privilege are the only forms of privilege (in that sense) that there is. For example, when I had kids, I suddenly realized that I was no longer categorized by women with children as a potential child molester. As a woman (at least a white woman) people don't jump to the conclusion you're dangerous. When I point this out to some women they don't get it, which is ironically one of the problems with privileges. They're invisible if you have them.
"Privilege" as jargon also has the problem it conflicts with the dictionary meaning of the word. So it's not a good word to used in mixed company (i.e. people who don't use that particular cant).
Oh, the planet will continue to spin, and have life on its surface even. And a lot of people will continue to live high off the hog. But more people will be priced out of the market for meat; others will be priced out of the market for food.
Nature has a time-proven solution to a organism population that outgrows available resources: starve it until it fits.
Human society has proved more adaptable than Malthusian predictions thus far. Malthusians didn't predict the ability to of people to develop fertilizer technology and high-yield crops. But there are thermodynamic and other physical limits to how much food you can grow on an acre; only so much sunshine to extract energy from and so many minerals you can extract from the soil.
So if we are going to continue to grow our population, and grow our standard of living for the bulk of that population, we'll have to adapt. And that adaptation will take many forms: new technology (our favorite! it's like changing without having to change), developing greater efficiency, changing our diet (some of us by choice, others by force), and letting the most vulnerable fraction of the human population die.
And we'll do all of them, but my guess is we'll rely most on new tech and letting people die prematurely, simply because both of these share the advantage that they don't require making hard decisions.
To some degree the culture wars are a struggle between groups striving to reduce the other group to a bit player in their personal dramas. When you're young, you think the frustrations of your group are unique -- which in a way they are.
When you're a female engineer, you face patronization, and an entrenched belief that no women can't be good at what you do. And that sucks. Yet it makes my skin crawl to see a wealthy middle class woman lecture a poor working class man about his "privilege". It's not that she's wrong; being male, particularly white male, confers certain privileges. But not only does it completely ignore the privileges of class that he does not enjoy, it's reducing all that individual's unique life experiences to a scheme.
The bottom line is people don't have enough compassion for each other. And that's because they treat compassion as a resource; if I spare compassion for *that* group, I won't have enough left over for *my* group.
Compassion is not a resource, it is a habit of mind. What's more it's an essential tool in the the human cognitive framework; the way we enter another's skin and come to understand him or her as an individual. All these pointless arguments, you will note, take place in terms of archetypes (e.g. the average woman or man).
You're talking in vague, hand-wavy analogies here. What's actually going on is the banks are creating an obligation (to you) in exchange for liquidity. The bank then converts that liquidity into productive assets (loans and investments), subject to the requirement that they retain enough to service likely account demands in the near future.
And either way, it doesn't mean that the banks can't be regulated. From the 1930s to the 1990s retail banks couldn't undertake certain risky businesses that might jeapordize their ability to meet depositor obligations. That was changed by a law signed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, and ten years later the mix of retail and investment banking contributed to a crisis that almost brought down the world economy.
What makes you think Google was ever a common carrier?
ISPs are common carriers, but Google is not an ISP; they provide services and they have their hooks deeply into the content on those services in a way an ISP does not.
Actually, Stormfront was one of the sites I was thinking about. It's been a while since I've looked, but I remember being impressed with the effort they put into helping newbies sound more presentable.
Over the years I have visited neo-nazi websites, to see what was going on in their heads. So I wasn't as surprised as most at the resurgence/rebranding as "alt-right". The smarter ones among them have been working for years to get the mouth-breathers to seem less alien and sound more "normal" by training them to speak in code.
What, the Daily Stormer? Of course it was. It was named after the German Nazi Party's weekly tabloid, Der Stürmer (1923-1945).
Now anonymous has taken over the domain, but you can check the wayback if you like. It had sections for "The Jewish Problem" and "Race War" full of racist imagery.
Now, to be fair some of the people who read and contributed to the thing were just chaosmongers. But that was true of the original Nazis too. Authoritarianism for the follower is about the thrill of transgressive behavior toward safe targets. Goebbels was an intelligent, educated man whose job was making shit up. And in a certain sense of the word, he believed his own bullshit, as far as he believed anything.
For the Nazis it was all about sentiment; they could be perfectly sincere about stuff they knew was false, because they liked the way it made them feel. That should sound disturbingly familiar.
"Protected" class means "protected under this particular law". So "not in a protected class" doesn't mean "not protected by any law."
Now as for "a business should not be allowed to discriminate period," I agree. However such a law would be *much* more burdensome.
Every law has undesirable consequences, for example any law which allows you to sue someone else means companies and people get slapped with spurious lawsuits. This is true for anti-discrimination laws too; not every accusation is justified. Making the anti-discrimination laws apply to everyone means that literally every hiring and promotion decision you make would be an invitation to a lawsuit.
So in order to prevent that, you make the law apply to a minority of people most likely to be discriminated against.
This still allows for some injustices, but laws can't make things perfect, and there comes a point where trying to make things better makes things worse. However, if discrimination against white, male, heterosexual people rises to a point where making them a "protected class" (under some specific law) does less harm than good, I'd be all for it.
People assume scientists are stupid. And while scientists can act as stupidly as anyone else, generally they're not as dense as laymen seem to think they are.
It's not the gulf, it's the conflict of interest on the bank's part between its retail and investment activities, as illustrated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Even where they weren't technically gambling with depositors' funds, their investment activities put them in a position where they were in danger of failing while holding onto those funds.
Libraries are neither here nor there. This is 2017, not the 1970s. To build the kind of apps people want today to run on the platforms they use, you're using a framework, and it's going to be huge and complex.
Now sure, we still use libraries. And sure, if you are talking about a small, simple library that will never handle information from a source you don't trust. by all means gin up your own if that's easier for you. But if you're gluing a javascript browser app to a server back end, if you're not using JSON (or a mature alternative like ASN.1), you're going to end up recreating a substantial subset of it, not as well.
Now as for "provable" -- that's laughable when it comes to security, because security is a non-functional requirement domain. It's the behavior of the system in *abnormal* situations that's of concern; situations you haven't imagined yet. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you just don't have time to dream up all the things people might do.
Anyone can convince themselves that they're a security genius, because anyone can gin up security measures they *themselves* can't break.
Yep. Gin up your own solution with the exact same security flaws.
I don't care how smart you are; everyone else is collectively smarter than you are. From a security standpoint you want to use popular frameworks that take security seriously and respond to the inevitable exploits promptly. Doing things in an idiosyncratic way is not protection because (a) systems can be probed using black-box methods like fuzzing and (b) chances are your way of doing it has been used thousands of times before.
Two words you need to learn: statistical dispersion.
For the sake of argument let's take "manliness" and "womanliness" as givens, and not some kind of social construct. Not all men are equally manly; some are very manly and some are sissies. Likewise for women -- not all women are equally "womanly".
So you have two population bell-curves, and the curves overlap. That is to say some women are more manly than some men. Everybody knows this, and yet somehow they talk as if all men were identically masculine and all women were identically feminine.
What does this has to do with engineering? Not much. Different types of engineering have different requirements. Women as a population tend to have slightly better verbal reasoning skills and men as a population tend to have slightly better spatial reasoning. So you'd expect women to do better, say, as software engineers; and men to do better as mechanical engineers.
However the small population differences in ability are dwarfed by individual variability. There are men with extremely formidable verbal reasoning skills, and women with astonishing spatial reasoning skills. Case in point: when I was at MIT I knew a woman who got her PhD in EE and was the first person to figure out how to fold a stellated icosahedron in origami. I don't care if you are a man, even a manly man, it's a safe bet that her right brain could kick your right brain's ass.
And that's OK. It doesn't make you less of a man; it means you have to judge people as individuals.
That's not even necessary. Journals have conflict of interest disclosure rules; any potential conflict such as funding from an interested party is disclosed when the paper is published, and everything is kosher.
In fact if you go to the paper itself, here's the relevant bit from the disclosure statement:
The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company. Funding for this evaluation was provided to Intertek by the Monsanto Company which is a primary producer of glyphosate and products containing this active ingredient. Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel's manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.
[emphasis mine]
The bit I've highlighted is the crux of this matter. The accusation was that those bits were false.
Deliberately misrepresentation on a conflict of interest statement constitutes scientific fraud.
I also read the document. And while I believe he (in good faith) misstates the state of scientific evidence, I strongly disagree with him being fired for that.
Workers have the right to discuss and even contest workplace conditions, including hiring, promotion, disciplinary and employee development policies. This is the basis for the right to form a union.
Agreeing or disagreeing with someone's position should have no bearing on his rights to state that opinion.
Actually, we have seismic confirmation of North Korea's five nuclear tests, the most recent of which was last September. We can even estimate the yield of each test; last September's test was about 25kt, about 2/3 greater than the Hiroshima bomb.
It was North Korea itself that claimed the warhead from last September was missile launchable.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The equivalency argument concludes that to consistent, if campaigns like this one are disallowed, then no campaigns by BLM whatsoever should be allowed.
But that logically holds only if anything that anyone does under the label "BLM" is morally equivalent to murder.
Actually compassion fatigue isn't the exhaustion of compassion, it's the exhaustion of an individual's capacity to deal with helplessness.
It's jargon, which in itself is neither good nor bad. It depends on how intelligently the person using it uses it, and that's all over the map.
At it's best it represents things that a person can take for granted, to the degree that they aren't even aware that other people can't take them for granted. For example if you're a white person in the US, you take it for granted that store detectives won't automatically follow you around to the exclusion of other shoppers, or that a cop won't pull you over for driving a nice car because he thinks you may have stolen it.
And that's fine as far as it goes. But people use jargon thoughtlessly, as if male privilege or white privilege are the only forms of privilege (in that sense) that there is. For example, when I had kids, I suddenly realized that I was no longer categorized by women with children as a potential child molester. As a woman (at least a white woman) people don't jump to the conclusion you're dangerous. When I point this out to some women they don't get it, which is ironically one of the problems with privileges. They're invisible if you have them.
"Privilege" as jargon also has the problem it conflicts with the dictionary meaning of the word. So it's not a good word to used in mixed company (i.e. people who don't use that particular cant).
Oh, the planet will continue to spin, and have life on its surface even. And a lot of people will continue to live high off the hog. But more people will be priced out of the market for meat; others will be priced out of the market for food.
Nature has a time-proven solution to a organism population that outgrows available resources: starve it until it fits.
Human society has proved more adaptable than Malthusian predictions thus far. Malthusians didn't predict the ability to of people to develop fertilizer technology and high-yield crops. But there are thermodynamic and other physical limits to how much food you can grow on an acre; only so much sunshine to extract energy from and so many minerals you can extract from the soil.
So if we are going to continue to grow our population, and grow our standard of living for the bulk of that population, we'll have to adapt. And that adaptation will take many forms: new technology (our favorite! it's like changing without having to change), developing greater efficiency, changing our diet (some of us by choice, others by force), and letting the most vulnerable fraction of the human population die.
And we'll do all of them, but my guess is we'll rely most on new tech and letting people die prematurely, simply because both of these share the advantage that they don't require making hard decisions.
To some degree the culture wars are a struggle between groups striving to reduce the other group to a bit player in their personal dramas. When you're young, you think the frustrations of your group are unique -- which in a way they are.
When you're a female engineer, you face patronization, and an entrenched belief that no women can't be good at what you do. And that sucks. Yet it makes my skin crawl to see a wealthy middle class woman lecture a poor working class man about his "privilege". It's not that she's wrong; being male, particularly white male, confers certain privileges. But not only does it completely ignore the privileges of class that he does not enjoy, it's reducing all that individual's unique life experiences to a scheme.
The bottom line is people don't have enough compassion for each other. And that's because they treat compassion as a resource; if I spare compassion for *that* group, I won't have enough left over for *my* group.
Compassion is not a resource, it is a habit of mind. What's more it's an essential tool in the the human cognitive framework; the way we enter another's skin and come to understand him or her as an individual. All these pointless arguments, you will note, take place in terms of archetypes (e.g. the average woman or man).
You're talking in vague, hand-wavy analogies here. What's actually going on is the banks are creating an obligation (to you) in exchange for liquidity. The bank then converts that liquidity into productive assets (loans and investments), subject to the requirement that they retain enough to service likely account demands in the near future.
And either way, it doesn't mean that the banks can't be regulated. From the 1930s to the 1990s retail banks couldn't undertake certain risky businesses that might jeapordize their ability to meet depositor obligations. That was changed by a law signed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, and ten years later the mix of retail and investment banking contributed to a crisis that almost brought down the world economy.
What makes you think Google was ever a common carrier?
ISPs are common carriers, but Google is not an ISP; they provide services and they have their hooks deeply into the content on those services in a way an ISP does not.
Personally I think ridicule works better. War plays into their histrionic delusions. They love being in metaphorical wars.
Actually, Stormfront was one of the sites I was thinking about. It's been a while since I've looked, but I remember being impressed with the effort they put into helping newbies sound more presentable.
Everyone has motivations. And one of them most people have (scientists more than most) is not to look stupid.
The point of worrying about it is that that's their job.
I'm not so sure.
Over the years I have visited neo-nazi websites, to see what was going on in their heads. So I wasn't as surprised as most at the resurgence/rebranding as "alt-right". The smarter ones among them have been working for years to get the mouth-breathers to seem less alien and sound more "normal" by training them to speak in code.
What, the Daily Stormer? Of course it was. It was named after the German Nazi Party's weekly tabloid, Der Stürmer (1923-1945).
Now anonymous has taken over the domain, but you can check the wayback if you like. It had sections for "The Jewish Problem" and "Race War" full of racist imagery.
Now, to be fair some of the people who read and contributed to the thing were just chaosmongers. But that was true of the original Nazis too. Authoritarianism for the follower is about the thrill of transgressive behavior toward safe targets. Goebbels was an intelligent, educated man whose job was making shit up. And in a certain sense of the word, he believed his own bullshit, as far as he believed anything.
For the Nazis it was all about sentiment; they could be perfectly sincere about stuff they knew was false, because they liked the way it made them feel. That should sound disturbingly familiar.
"Protected" class means "protected under this particular law". So "not in a protected class" doesn't mean "not protected by any law."
Now as for "a business should not be allowed to discriminate period," I agree. However such a law would be *much* more burdensome.
Every law has undesirable consequences, for example any law which allows you to sue someone else means companies and people get slapped with spurious lawsuits. This is true for anti-discrimination laws too; not every accusation is justified. Making the anti-discrimination laws apply to everyone means that literally every hiring and promotion decision you make would be an invitation to a lawsuit.
So in order to prevent that, you make the law apply to a minority of people most likely to be discriminated against.
This still allows for some injustices, but laws can't make things perfect, and there comes a point where trying to make things better makes things worse. However, if discrimination against white, male, heterosexual people rises to a point where making them a "protected class" (under some specific law) does less harm than good, I'd be all for it.
People assume scientists are stupid. And while scientists can act as stupidly as anyone else, generally they're not as dense as laymen seem to think they are.
It's not the gulf, it's the conflict of interest on the bank's part between its retail and investment activities, as illustrated by the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008. Even where they weren't technically gambling with depositors' funds, their investment activities put them in a position where they were in danger of failing while holding onto those funds.
Interests function identically to opinions.
In many people there really isn't any distinction between the two.
And why would volcanoes around the globe be more active?
Libraries are neither here nor there. This is 2017, not the 1970s. To build the kind of apps people want today to run on the platforms they use, you're using a framework, and it's going to be huge and complex.
Now sure, we still use libraries. And sure, if you are talking about a small, simple library that will never handle information from a source you don't trust. by all means gin up your own if that's easier for you. But if you're gluing a javascript browser app to a server back end, if you're not using JSON (or a mature alternative like ASN.1), you're going to end up recreating a substantial subset of it, not as well.
Now as for "provable" -- that's laughable when it comes to security, because security is a non-functional requirement domain. It's the behavior of the system in *abnormal* situations that's of concern; situations you haven't imagined yet. It doesn't matter how smart you are, you just don't have time to dream up all the things people might do.
Anyone can convince themselves that they're a security genius, because anyone can gin up security measures they *themselves* can't break.
Yep. Gin up your own solution with the exact same security flaws.
I don't care how smart you are; everyone else is collectively smarter than you are. From a security standpoint you want to use popular frameworks that take security seriously and respond to the inevitable exploits promptly. Doing things in an idiosyncratic way is not protection because (a) systems can be probed using black-box methods like fuzzing and (b) chances are your way of doing it has been used thousands of times before.
My point is that your biological sex doesn't automatically qualify or disqualify you for any intellectual job.
Two words you need to learn: statistical dispersion.
For the sake of argument let's take "manliness" and "womanliness" as givens, and not some kind of social construct. Not all men are equally manly; some are very manly and some are sissies. Likewise for women -- not all women are equally "womanly".
So you have two population bell-curves, and the curves overlap. That is to say some women are more manly than some men. Everybody knows this, and yet somehow they talk as if all men were identically masculine and all women were identically feminine.
What does this has to do with engineering? Not much. Different types of engineering have different requirements. Women as a population tend to have slightly better verbal reasoning skills and men as a population tend to have slightly better spatial reasoning. So you'd expect women to do better, say, as software engineers; and men to do better as mechanical engineers.
However the small population differences in ability are dwarfed by individual variability. There are men with extremely formidable verbal reasoning skills, and women with astonishing spatial reasoning skills. Case in point: when I was at MIT I knew a woman who got her PhD in EE and was the first person to figure out how to fold a stellated icosahedron in origami. I don't care if you are a man, even a manly man, it's a safe bet that her right brain could kick your right brain's ass.
And that's OK. It doesn't make you less of a man; it means you have to judge people as individuals.
That's not even necessary. Journals have conflict of interest disclosure rules; any potential conflict such as funding from an interested party is disclosed when the paper is published, and everything is kosher.
In fact if you go to the paper itself, here's the relevant bit from the disclosure statement:
The Expert Panelists were engaged by, and acted as consultants to, Intertek, and were not directly contacted by the Monsanto Company. Funding for this evaluation was provided to Intertek by the Monsanto Company which is a primary producer of glyphosate and products containing this active ingredient. Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel's manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.
[emphasis mine]
The bit I've highlighted is the crux of this matter. The accusation was that those bits were false.
Deliberately misrepresentation on a conflict of interest statement constitutes scientific fraud.
I also read the document. And while I believe he (in good faith) misstates the state of scientific evidence, I strongly disagree with him being fired for that.
Workers have the right to discuss and even contest workplace conditions, including hiring, promotion, disciplinary and employee development policies. This is the basis for the right to form a union.
Agreeing or disagreeing with someone's position should have no bearing on his rights to state that opinion.
Not unless he is making a crime public. Instead he wrote an internal memo discussing legal (but controversial) management practices.
Just because it makes you *feel* a certain way doesn't make it a crime.
Now he may well be covered under laws intended to protect union organizing.
Actually, we have seismic confirmation of North Korea's five nuclear tests, the most recent of which was last September. We can even estimate the yield of each test; last September's test was about 25kt, about 2/3 greater than the Hiroshima bomb.
It was North Korea itself that claimed the warhead from last September was missile launchable.