Running away can allow you to gather, take a few breaths, re-group and figure out how to attack the problem in the long-term, not gear up for short-term survival (kill this guy, hope there aren't five more behind him...)
Not that this necessarily happens, mind you (I'm typically on the wrong side of the immigration debate among my ultra-liberal friends in the United States), but running away is sometimes a better answer than staying and fighting, or worse, staying, surrendering and possibly dying or, even worse than that, joining up with the other side because even though you're part of the atrocity, at least you're safe.
The backlash tends to come from people who generally backlash against hardcore pessimism. That is to say, the one guy that's determined to spoil the party by slagging on the quality of the beer in the keg. He's not wrong, and ultimately people will just keep partying no matter how awful the beer is.
Same thing with people in general: we're on a feel-good mission to blah-blah about human potential and the exceptionalism of man, but as a whole, we've got our limits. We're stupid, self-centered, and set unrealistic expectations for ourselves. That's why despite the fact that we keep returning to the prospect of colonizing space, we can barely colonize the planet we originated on without killing each other for stupid reasons, and then barely act beyond tsk-tsking, changing profile pictures and stroking that middle finger upward to reach that hashtag when it happens.
So, I tend to agree. We'll get to space via proxy in the conceivable future, and as fast as technology advances, we may see colonization in space well beyond the capacity for the human brain to process advancement at present, but looking around at the world now, it's hard to believe we'll get out of our own way to do it.
And here I thought this was just some idiot thinking she was clever and ever-so-quirky by using defense of religion to get around the rules for having a goofy picture taken for her driver's license.
I'm not quick to call someone an idiot, but if you're going to make a legal case for trying to get a government-issued ID photo done by wearing a colander on your head, it's because you're a bored idiot who can't come up with better things to do with your time besides clogging up the legal system with your petty need to be special.
Now, I'm no religious expert, since I don't follow any one of them, and I don't know the reasons that evolved for wearing a hat for religious purposes, but, much like the Quaker example posted elsewhere on this page, I'm willing to extend the notion that there's a practical reason built from thousands of years of tradition for it. Not that I agree with wearing the hat for the specific purpose of the photo (law >>>>> religion), BUT, if you're going to go around wearing a colander on your head, it doesn't matter what the reason is, I'm going to call you an attention-seeking drama-whoring idiot, no matter what pseduo-intellectual and/or obscurel logical reason you might give.
This woman should not have even been given a driver's license at all.
I presume it is known that younger people exhibit the more obnoxious behaviors online, simply because when you are a gamer, you observe this behavior, and it doesn't take an academic study to figure it out.
Now, I say "obnoxious" because it puts the behaviors contextually in the realm that they belong.
When someone says "toxic", they semantically put a greater weight on it. They give it a word that's supposed to be scary and instill paranoia, and the strong feeling that people are "problematic" and need "re-education" (okay, they don't use that last one, but guaranteed, it's coming).
That's how you know the person(s) who published this study aren't gamers. Because real gamers have been dealing with obnoxious behavior since they picked up their first controller (me: original NES in 1985; we had Atari and Colecovision, but I was way too young to use them back then), and they don't try to create a stigmatizing label over it. They keep playing. They return the smack-talk or they proceed to shut the mouthy bastard up by annihilating him.
Seems to me the only reason studies like this one exist is so some preening pseduo-intellectual can jerk him/herself off by reinforcing stereotypes about gamers being beneath them. (And yes, I'm aware that the study says that the obnoxious behaviors come from younger people, but since the word "toxic" was invoked, you can be sure that someone, somewhere will use that as evidence that gaming instills "toxic" behavior in gamers.)
Let's see...putting out an idea, novel or not, to solve a chronic problem to get interesting feedback (albeit none that's ever going to reach the source), I'd say that the comment section here is kind of like penetration testing the system on a purely theoretical level.
So...why wouldn't this matter to geeks, whether or not one of them happens to be you?
The general consensus among the guys I know (and in my own personal experience) is that you're never going to stop anyone who truly genuinely wants what they want. Women who ended up in engineering according to these guys (at least the ones with long-sustained careers) were 100% go-getters. They didn't need their hands held or any convincing that what they wanted to do was to put that pencil to paper (keys to keyboard...whatever) and go until the problem was solved.
I'd been an inveterate puzzle solver since I was little. My sister not so much.
Guess which one of us became an engineer and which one works in retail?
Regarding your contention of MRAs: So, what you're saying is that those sexists that are holding women back in careers, that are enforcing the wage gap and are keeping women out of tech and C-suites, and squashing them at the sprout level by calling them "bossy", are you saying they haven't got that so-called "MRA mindset"?
Because to have it explained by anyone who shouts "MRA!" at even the vaguest criticism of women/women's initiatives, it seems as if both the sexists at the top and the neckbeards at the bottom don't like it when the wimminz get their hands on the boys' toys and would very much like to shove them back into the kitchen by any means necessary.
If someone is going to whinge on about MRA-type thinking and ignore the fact that the assertion of sexism in the workplace is driven by the same mentality (at least according to feminist theory), your line of thinking is either willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
Regarding your second claim: yes, that happens, but keep in mind that a campaign was started last year by very famous (and, ironically, very successful) women to ban the word "bossy" because it is apparently (as the campaign itself said) a "squasher". Emma Watson also in her initial He for She speech to the UN made it clear that women (herself included) were plagued by such things. Another recent incident involved Anita Sarkeesian going to the UN Women group and said that people telling her "You Suck" online is a campaign of "cyber violence", specifically against women.
Hell, more than one poster here on Slashdot has jumped to my defense if an AC decides to post "tits or gtfo" at me, claiming Slashdot isn't "safe for women".
Like fuck it isn't. And anyone who claims otherwise has never been the victim of real, true violence.
So, are you going to assert that there isn't at least an idea being passed around that women get hurt by words and therefore we shouldn't use them? (My belief is that it's one of those things a governing body is more than happy to expound upon as a means to ending privacy online..."end anonymity for the sake of women!")
Point I was making is that these strawmen characterizations are often passed around, even here on Slashdot, to the point where people seem to not even mind so much that they make little sense, they're often contradictory, but yet we're more than happy to tar and feather people with them instead of judging individuals as individuals.
Thus my continual annoyance when people use "MRA" as an insult.
So we can create an economy of laborers that are unskilled and unprepared for the job market, so that the upper class can claim we're the problem because we're not trying hard enough to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, and American workers are so unworthy of the jobs they want to bestow, that they have to be filled overseas?
Call me crazy, but I think there may just be a little bit of malice going on here.
There are days when I wonder if the men around me are scared of me because they feel like they can't tell me what's really on their mind without me running to HR to tell them what kind of sexist pig they are for having the balls to be honest that my reports might not be the pinnacle of scientific progress.
I felt as if I had impostor syndrome for years because I was afraid of this very thing. I'm a little more confident nowadays, but at this point, I have no idea what to think sometimes.
Hey, I'm a woman, and I'm feeling the same frustration.
Please don't trot out the MRA strawman* here. Or shall I go with the vernacular and say that you're mansplaining?
(*This by the way is why I have problems with gender-based identity politics characterizations: either MRAs are losers that mommy didn't love enough but are powerful enough to be the invisible hand of society that holds women back, or women are strong and capable until they're called "bossy", and then they get crushed back to non-existence.)
If you're going to be a nerd about it, you can use a Forerunner (for instance) to track a lot of things, like where in the run you might get stopped or where you encounter hitting a wall in your stride.
If you're just going by beginning and end time and distance, it doesn't give you near the amount of data you can use to improve.
There's this speed these days to which people are labeled "autistic" when really it could just be that there's no underlying medical condition. It could be some people are just maladjusted.
At least, that's what it was when I was a kid.
I've said this before in this space (not looking for pity, just kind of a contrast), I was raised in an abusive environment that was detrimental to my ability to interact with people. I also just happened to have the right skill set to be able to get an engineering degree. No therapist in the number I've seen over the years has ever even so much as suggested to me that I might be autistic.
Other people haven't been exposed to circumstances like mine; they may just be introverts that aren't quite sure how to ask people how to interact with people so their unknown-unknown is "hey, there's a gap between their behavior and mine, but I don't know how to change things".
Now, I know that people who do these kinds of studies are well-intentioned (in a "gee that's sort of neat that it happens like that" way), but thing is, that's when the media looking for a story runs with it, and the meme becomes a tool used for labeling people and putting them in little intersectional boxes so that we can add words to the coded vocabularies of privilege and identity and whatnot that gets in the way of getting work done, because we need to cater to all of these little labels and associated feelings and other blah-blah.
But at the end of the day, who's getting the work done? I bet most of you that need to get stuff done in a day rarely even think about stuff like this because it's not part of your job to think about it. It's not relevant, and it taking time and energy away from what you feel is part of the discussion about your actual job.
TL;DR: Who the fuck cares? Be autistic on your own fucking time.
That's why my approach to being slandered is "I'm in if you're in".
Because if you show people that you're not afraid or mealy-mouthed about what people have to say about you, people are more likely to respect you even if they don't agree with you. Except for the ones that were looking for a reason to hate you anyway.
Eh, sometimes I just like to taunt the ACs that do stuff like that.
I know it's best to ignore them, but me being openly female, sometimes it's best to call people out on it when they think they're pissing in my cornflakes.
Members of the press, general public and constituents, journalists, friends, and Anonymous:
A list has been released that names me as a member of a well-known racist organization. Some of you may be likely to believe this because the news media reported on this story.
Fucking prove it.
This is the end of my statement. Questions may be directed to my inbox at: Nofuckyou (all one word) @ thisisbullshit.com
Eh, I'm just really more confused about at least three posters not understanding that a post with the title "Call your local Ferengi for advice" is anything but a joke.
I guess it's hyperbole from now on (or the "/s" tag), or else *gasp*, some dickweed might just call me stupid.
Where's Slashdot's fainting couch when ya need it?
While I'm pretty much in agreement with you (though I wouldn't discount the idea that politicians were part of the rank-and-file, they'd just be more clever at hiding it), if I were in law enforcement, I'd be very careful about a resurgence of the KKK if race is going to be a hot topic during the next year and for election season.
Not that I advocate arresting people for thought crimes. I'm just saying that if there's going to be a resurgence of the Civil Rights Movement in the form of Black Lives Matter (we'll see if that hasn't calmed down within the next year), there IS going to be a counter-movement as a reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a rather simplistic way of looking at it.
Running away can allow you to gather, take a few breaths, re-group and figure out how to attack the problem in the long-term, not gear up for short-term survival (kill this guy, hope there aren't five more behind him...)
Not that this necessarily happens, mind you (I'm typically on the wrong side of the immigration debate among my ultra-liberal friends in the United States), but running away is sometimes a better answer than staying and fighting, or worse, staying, surrendering and possibly dying or, even worse than that, joining up with the other side because even though you're part of the atrocity, at least you're safe.
The backlash tends to come from people who generally backlash against hardcore pessimism. That is to say, the one guy that's determined to spoil the party by slagging on the quality of the beer in the keg. He's not wrong, and ultimately people will just keep partying no matter how awful the beer is.
Same thing with people in general: we're on a feel-good mission to blah-blah about human potential and the exceptionalism of man, but as a whole, we've got our limits. We're stupid, self-centered, and set unrealistic expectations for ourselves. That's why despite the fact that we keep returning to the prospect of colonizing space, we can barely colonize the planet we originated on without killing each other for stupid reasons, and then barely act beyond tsk-tsking, changing profile pictures and stroking that middle finger upward to reach that hashtag when it happens.
So, I tend to agree. We'll get to space via proxy in the conceivable future, and as fast as technology advances, we may see colonization in space well beyond the capacity for the human brain to process advancement at present, but looking around at the world now, it's hard to believe we'll get out of our own way to do it.
And here I thought this was just some idiot thinking she was clever and ever-so-quirky by using defense of religion to get around the rules for having a goofy picture taken for her driver's license.
I'm not quick to call someone an idiot, but if you're going to make a legal case for trying to get a government-issued ID photo done by wearing a colander on your head, it's because you're a bored idiot who can't come up with better things to do with your time besides clogging up the legal system with your petty need to be special.
Now, I'm no religious expert, since I don't follow any one of them, and I don't know the reasons that evolved for wearing a hat for religious purposes, but, much like the Quaker example posted elsewhere on this page, I'm willing to extend the notion that there's a practical reason built from thousands of years of tradition for it. Not that I agree with wearing the hat for the specific purpose of the photo (law >>>>> religion), BUT, if you're going to go around wearing a colander on your head, it doesn't matter what the reason is, I'm going to call you an attention-seeking drama-whoring idiot, no matter what pseduo-intellectual and/or obscurel logical reason you might give.
This woman should not have even been given a driver's license at all.
I presume it is known that younger people exhibit the more obnoxious behaviors online, simply because when you are a gamer, you observe this behavior, and it doesn't take an academic study to figure it out.
Now, I say "obnoxious" because it puts the behaviors contextually in the realm that they belong.
When someone says "toxic", they semantically put a greater weight on it. They give it a word that's supposed to be scary and instill paranoia, and the strong feeling that people are "problematic" and need "re-education" (okay, they don't use that last one, but guaranteed, it's coming).
That's how you know the person(s) who published this study aren't gamers. Because real gamers have been dealing with obnoxious behavior since they picked up their first controller (me: original NES in 1985; we had Atari and Colecovision, but I was way too young to use them back then), and they don't try to create a stigmatizing label over it. They keep playing. They return the smack-talk or they proceed to shut the mouthy bastard up by annihilating him.
Seems to me the only reason studies like this one exist is so some preening pseduo-intellectual can jerk him/herself off by reinforcing stereotypes about gamers being beneath them. (And yes, I'm aware that the study says that the obnoxious behaviors come from younger people, but since the word "toxic" was invoked, you can be sure that someone, somewhere will use that as evidence that gaming instills "toxic" behavior in gamers.)
-LaurenC
Let's see...putting out an idea, novel or not, to solve a chronic problem to get interesting feedback (albeit none that's ever going to reach the source), I'd say that the comment section here is kind of like penetration testing the system on a purely theoretical level.
So...why wouldn't this matter to geeks, whether or not one of them happens to be you?
I guess this throws out the idea that crocodiles can't be bribed.
Damn it, Fight Club wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual!
In other news, I wish I could +1 Funny this entire comment section.
Indeed. Waivers help the process.
The general consensus among the guys I know (and in my own personal experience) is that you're never going to stop anyone who truly genuinely wants what they want. Women who ended up in engineering according to these guys (at least the ones with long-sustained careers) were 100% go-getters. They didn't need their hands held or any convincing that what they wanted to do was to put that pencil to paper (keys to keyboard...whatever) and go until the problem was solved.
I'd been an inveterate puzzle solver since I was little. My sister not so much.
Guess which one of us became an engineer and which one works in retail?
Regarding your contention of MRAs: So, what you're saying is that those sexists that are holding women back in careers, that are enforcing the wage gap and are keeping women out of tech and C-suites, and squashing them at the sprout level by calling them "bossy", are you saying they haven't got that so-called "MRA mindset"?
Because to have it explained by anyone who shouts "MRA!" at even the vaguest criticism of women/women's initiatives, it seems as if both the sexists at the top and the neckbeards at the bottom don't like it when the wimminz get their hands on the boys' toys and would very much like to shove them back into the kitchen by any means necessary.
If someone is going to whinge on about MRA-type thinking and ignore the fact that the assertion of sexism in the workplace is driven by the same mentality (at least according to feminist theory), your line of thinking is either willfully ignorant or disingenuous.
Regarding your second claim: yes, that happens, but keep in mind that a campaign was started last year by very famous (and, ironically, very successful) women to ban the word "bossy" because it is apparently (as the campaign itself said) a "squasher". Emma Watson also in her initial He for She speech to the UN made it clear that women (herself included) were plagued by such things. Another recent incident involved Anita Sarkeesian going to the UN Women group and said that people telling her "You Suck" online is a campaign of "cyber violence", specifically against women.
Hell, more than one poster here on Slashdot has jumped to my defense if an AC decides to post "tits or gtfo" at me, claiming Slashdot isn't "safe for women".
Like fuck it isn't. And anyone who claims otherwise has never been the victim of real, true violence.
So, are you going to assert that there isn't at least an idea being passed around that women get hurt by words and therefore we shouldn't use them? (My belief is that it's one of those things a governing body is more than happy to expound upon as a means to ending privacy online..."end anonymity for the sake of women!")
Point I was making is that these strawmen characterizations are often passed around, even here on Slashdot, to the point where people seem to not even mind so much that they make little sense, they're often contradictory, but yet we're more than happy to tar and feather people with them instead of judging individuals as individuals.
Thus my continual annoyance when people use "MRA" as an insult.
I mean, seriously, first, we lay down, then we stay there, then we let the nice AI take care of everything...
So we can create an economy of laborers that are unskilled and unprepared for the job market, so that the upper class can claim we're the problem because we're not trying hard enough to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, and American workers are so unworthy of the jobs they want to bestow, that they have to be filled overseas?
Call me crazy, but I think there may just be a little bit of malice going on here.
No fucking kidding.
There are days when I wonder if the men around me are scared of me because they feel like they can't tell me what's really on their mind without me running to HR to tell them what kind of sexist pig they are for having the balls to be honest that my reports might not be the pinnacle of scientific progress.
I felt as if I had impostor syndrome for years because I was afraid of this very thing. I'm a little more confident nowadays, but at this point, I have no idea what to think sometimes.
Hey, I'm a woman, and I'm feeling the same frustration.
Please don't trot out the MRA strawman* here. Or shall I go with the vernacular and say that you're mansplaining?
(*This by the way is why I have problems with gender-based identity politics characterizations: either MRAs are losers that mommy didn't love enough but are powerful enough to be the invisible hand of society that holds women back, or women are strong and capable until they're called "bossy", and then they get crushed back to non-existence.)
If you're going to be a nerd about it, you can use a Forerunner (for instance) to track a lot of things, like where in the run you might get stopped or where you encounter hitting a wall in your stride.
If you're just going by beginning and end time and distance, it doesn't give you near the amount of data you can use to improve.
Indeed. I thought it was weird that a Forerunner would only have 3 hours of run time.
I bought one a decade ago that had at least 10 hours. And given Garmin's market, I don't think they'd create something that would last only 3 hours.
No, seriously.
There's this speed these days to which people are labeled "autistic" when really it could just be that there's no underlying medical condition. It could be some people are just maladjusted.
At least, that's what it was when I was a kid.
I've said this before in this space (not looking for pity, just kind of a contrast), I was raised in an abusive environment that was detrimental to my ability to interact with people. I also just happened to have the right skill set to be able to get an engineering degree. No therapist in the number I've seen over the years has ever even so much as suggested to me that I might be autistic.
Other people haven't been exposed to circumstances like mine; they may just be introverts that aren't quite sure how to ask people how to interact with people so their unknown-unknown is "hey, there's a gap between their behavior and mine, but I don't know how to change things".
Now, I know that people who do these kinds of studies are well-intentioned (in a "gee that's sort of neat that it happens like that" way), but thing is, that's when the media looking for a story runs with it, and the meme becomes a tool used for labeling people and putting them in little intersectional boxes so that we can add words to the coded vocabularies of privilege and identity and whatnot that gets in the way of getting work done, because we need to cater to all of these little labels and associated feelings and other blah-blah.
But at the end of the day, who's getting the work done? I bet most of you that need to get stuff done in a day rarely even think about stuff like this because it's not part of your job to think about it. It's not relevant, and it taking time and energy away from what you feel is part of the discussion about your actual job.
TL;DR: Who the fuck cares? Be autistic on your own fucking time.
That's why my approach to being slandered is "I'm in if you're in".
Because if you show people that you're not afraid or mealy-mouthed about what people have to say about you, people are more likely to respect you even if they don't agree with you. Except for the ones that were looking for a reason to hate you anyway.
Eh, sometimes I just like to taunt the ACs that do stuff like that.
I know it's best to ignore them, but me being openly female, sometimes it's best to call people out on it when they think they're pissing in my cornflakes.
That, and I just like being snarky.
Oh, wow, modded down. Got 'im now.
I bet you'll be given the keys to the city for your acts of sheer heroism.
Tell me truly, what's it feel like to be braver than the average two-toed sloth?
My public statement on the matter would read:
Members of the press, general public and constituents, journalists, friends, and Anonymous:
A list has been released that names me as a member of a well-known racist organization. Some of you may be likely to believe this because the news media reported on this story.
Fucking prove it.
This is the end of my statement. Questions may be directed to my inbox at: Nofuckyou (all one word) @ thisisbullshit.com
Eh, I'm just really more confused about at least three posters not understanding that a post with the title "Call your local Ferengi for advice" is anything but a joke.
I guess it's hyperbole from now on (or the "/s" tag), or else *gasp*, some dickweed might just call me stupid.
Where's Slashdot's fainting couch when ya need it?
While I'm pretty much in agreement with you (though I wouldn't discount the idea that politicians were part of the rank-and-file, they'd just be more clever at hiding it), if I were in law enforcement, I'd be very careful about a resurgence of the KKK if race is going to be a hot topic during the next year and for election season.
Not that I advocate arresting people for thought crimes. I'm just saying that if there's going to be a resurgence of the Civil Rights Movement in the form of Black Lives Matter (we'll see if that hasn't calmed down within the next year), there IS going to be a counter-movement as a reaction.
By the way, the reply notification I got that points to this message is, apparently from "silentcoder".
If you aren't silentcoder, I apologize for falsely attributing you.
If you are, how pathetic are you that you couldn't step up, be a man and call me a stupid bitch using your username?
"They can't all be gems, you have to expect that once in a while." - Groucho Marx
Is it National Give an Anoymous Coward a hug day again? Come on over, ya big galloot!