Okay, but I think you're missing the component here that espousing that point of view fails to account for: that diversity for its own sake is not necessarily beneficial.
Not that I agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies here, or that I have any problem with what you're saying on the surface, but that's the problem with ideology. There's been a lot of "taking a good idea to absurd levels" going on in geek arenas, and that's where the charges of "racism" and "misogyny" come from.
Minorities and women are sure welcome, but ideologues from the outside marched in and started telling everyone on the outside that they don't seem to be welcome enough, by some vague standard of "enough" that can't be satisfied because there are no existing qualifications to satisfy it. So, of course the media jumped on a juicy story that can get people worked up.
What, really, does "diverse enough" mean, that make fields like science fiction really guilty of not being diverse enough by some standards, and where such guilt is quantified by things other than stereotypes and strawmen?
This is probably where I fall in the scope of these things.
Indeed, I haven't read all the works in question, so I can't tell you that the strawmen built on either side ("SJW's", "right-wing nutjobs") are in any way reflective of what really is going on.
But I can say with certainty that most people (I said "most", okay? Fucking re-read before you jump down my throat about what follows in this post) who are planting a flag on one side of the other haven't either.
As near as I can figure, the majority of the talking-head opinion pieces on either side aren't making any clear citations about the either side's preferences (i.e., citations to the works in question with clear descriptions and references to the works), about what constitutes "progressive" in science fiction and what work would fall under whoever's banner.
And that as far as this particular controversy goes (as reading the works in question would take time I don't have), it's a lot of sound and fury. Awards are popularity contests. That's the way it's always been. Why anyone bothers to get upset about who wins, or why anyone bothers to trot out being an award winner as if personal preference can be swayed that way is beyond me.
There you go again, blaming the MRA strawman because you need people to hate MRAs.
Look, mate, you are the ONLY person who EVER brings up MRAs into discussions like this one. Seems to me you've got a massive hate-on for them. And that's fine. You get to have an opinion.
But your opinion loses credibility when you keep on hauling out the strawman everytime a group needs a hatin' on.
Yeah, well, look, you can take just about everything I say with a pinch (or boulder) of salt at your own pleasure, but your experience doesn't equal mine. And I have seen them. It maybe wasn't trophies. Maybe it's "no child left behind". Maybe it's "everyone's a special snowflake". Maybe, especially given the tone of Slashdot as of late, it's "women and minorities need a leg-up because they're a minority in X".
In martial arts, for instance, it's belt mills and schools where sparring is purely optional.
Insert whatever paradigm here that you like where meritocracy is sacrificed to make sure everyone feels dandy and no one's feelings are ever hurt. But it does happen. The fact that you haven't experienced it doesn't make it a strawman.
So, kindly refrain from the idea that just because you haven't experienced it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
In the past couple of decades, we've seen a rise in need for "administration" in the engineering field.
I've been to plenty of meetings where there have been more PMPs (or prior to the last five years, proto-PMP administrative types) than there have been engineers. I've been to technical interchanges that could have been cut down in attendance by half to two-thirds if the engineers in attendance could have been bothered to do their own damn reporting. I see that "meeting minutes" is a deliverable on any contract I'm working on.
I can't say that I get where this is coming from, whether it is because engineers don't want to be managers, or because the "everybody gets a trophy" generation required employers to start giving aspirational administrators more power for less qualification, or because contractors needed to pad out how many employees they needed on any given contract to establish perceived value, or maybe any combination of these.
But there's a perfect storm of "my small function, no matter how small, is worth an extra man-year and I will make a meal out of a nibble to justify it" going on here.
Indeed. I've been out of college for 15 years. In that time, I've watched so much change in the cultural landscapes of IT, CS, OSes and even general computing usage that any self-proclaimed expert who claims to be a great prognosticator for anything greater than a couple of years out is only selling so much snake oil.
I'm in my 30's and I know plenty of people, both older and younger, that DO play board games and card games, because they grew up with those and are passing them on to the kids in the family.
It's not an all-consuming thing, nor something we talk about a lot when we're not actually planning for a game night, but we don't really regard playing games as a metric of social status. Maybe it's because a lot of us are engineers or programmers or (in my night life) athletic types that enjoy competition, but it seems to me a lot of people I know just like games.
But go ahead and bag on what everyone else likes as being "uncool", hipster.
I would argue that polyamory is the domain of only those things, like you say.
There are dating sites for this sort of thing. Craigslist even makes the accommodations for this sort of thing.
Personally, I think people just want things that are simple, and are often too selfish for their own good ("You are mine and nobody else's forever and ever..."; and then we wonder why people cheat).
I suspect I'm outside the norm in that regard, but not nearly as far as one might suspect.
I had a discussion with a divorced man in his 40's not too long ago. He said that life isn't much like it used to be, where people stuck it out in marriage because there really weren't any better options. Divorce was difficult, living independently was difficult, people were more judgmental of your life choices, people lived shorter lives and didn't change environments, whatever.
It's getting to where most people kind of shrug at the idea that it's okay not to be in "true love forever". You grow, you change, you find you're not the same person you used to be, nor is your partner. And hopefully, you're not hanging out with the same people forever and ever.
All that having been said: most people don't give the idea of polyamory a little more than a seconds' thought for the same reason I don't: Who has the fucking time?
Seriously, unless you have Dan Savage's podcast on continual stream, you get the idea that most people aren't that preoccupied with the idea of sex or relationships all the time, and have other things that they want to do. And most of the time, being predominantly occupied in romantic relationships aren't conducive to getting those other things done.
Nor do most people really want to go through the idea of "maintenance" (weight loss, working out, updating wardrobe, etc.) to actively seek out a new partner. Hell, I think a lot of unhappy people stay married because they don't want to do the amount of work it takes to not have to be single again.
Really, I think more people than you'd suspect would be at least okay with polyamory, outside of ideological puritans (and even then, ha ha).
So many of the other forum participants were from India, China, or some African country, asking for their certificate PDF even before the course had started! I mean, the course videos, assignments and exam weren't even available yet, but these people demanded that the professor leading the course send them the certificate that they had not earned right away!
I'm not sure it's a "foreign" thing.
When I was teaching, I had one student come up to me at the start of the semester asking if I would write him a recommendation (he turned out to be of the same stripe as those you described above). Gave me no indication that he was an immigrant.
What I think you're describing is someone who needs the certificate to secure something else. They put on the overconfidence front (and generally are lousy students to boot...this young man certainly was: he needed the class to get into a "real" college and let me know that when I called him out on not only writing a lousy report but copying someone else's lousy report), but they generally want the assurance of the foregone conclusion that they're just passing the "whatever" obstacle (they take the course that's "beneath" them, whether it be going to a community college or taking a MOOC course) to get to the prize.
Beats me if that's more an immigrant thing than it is a native thing, but it's hardly unique to any culture.
I'm not a doctor, I don't know any, at least any that would be interested in trying (there's no way any doctor in my area would verify on his or her own that this works), but I'm still willing to try out this project myself. You know, for grins.
That having been said, people seem to be developing projects left and right and bending over backwards to make 3D printing a thing.
I can't say whether or not it will be, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out.
Work is a relationship if you ask a psychologist. Humans have relationships to groups too and not just individuals that meet each others needs. So like a bad gf dump.
I tell people all the time - superiors, especially - that my job, in my perception, is just as much a relationship to me as it is to my husband.
And as such, I've learned that if it isn't meeting my needs or making me happy, I should find something else to do.
The ones who understand treat me with respect. The ones who don't have typically an unhappy set of employees under them, not just me.
A small anecdote regarding the latter:
The last job I left, my boss sat me down and begged me not to leave, even after letting go of two employees due to budget cuts (cutting the staff from 10 to 8; we were a satellite office of a much larger company). I told him that I was too young to be tied down to a job where I was clearly not allowed to branch out (he constantly hedged and made excuses, but I took the diplomatic tack of not blaming him in this conversation). He was willing to offer me something like 10% above my current salary to keep me on board, but couldn't guarantee that I'd be allowed to find work elsewhere within the company.
So, I told him this, and I think he still didn't get what I was talking about:
I once had a boyfriend who would tell me "maybe" all the time. All the things I wanted to do were "maybes". Maybe we'll go out tonight. Maybe we'll make plans for next weekend. Maybe we'll move in together. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I told said boyfriend that if those maybes didn't start turning into yeses, that I'd leave.
He then went on to treat me like I was an ungrateful brat. Sure, I wanted things, but he was giving things. And even if they weren't the things I wanted, hell, he was contributing, and dammit, why wasn't I happy with that?
Boyfriend, boss, same deal. If someone keeps telling you "maybe" you'll get the things you want someday, all you're going to get is a bunch of "maybes". And that's what I got from my boss. I told him I don't have the time to sit around waiting for "maybes" to turn into "yeses".
My point here is: much as you spend time with a significant other, you're going to spend about as much with your job. I'm surprised that more people don't think that they need to set as many expectations for an employer as they do a spouse.
Generally speaking, I've had good times playing Munchkin. Not much familiar with any of his other stuff (I usually stick to Looney Labs, or Cards Against Humanity). It's just that I've heard all of this stuff before, so maybe it's the fault of the question-askers that nothing more interesting got asked.
Smartwatches are for people who want a smartphone on their wrist. Period.
I don't disagree with what a lot of what you're saying, but I don't agree with this particular statement.
Now, I am a smartwatch-wearer. I realize I'm not going to convince you that I find it extremely useful for both connected and non-connected purposes (moreso the latter than the former in my case, actually), but I don't believe that smartwatch users mistake it for the primary communications device, but rather an augment, or an assist, or a companion to it.
Thing is, though, someone at that level of authority in the Government, and who has decades of experience of at least protocol (in the 90's, for instance, you knew perfectly well that you didn't bring your work home with you if it even had the potential to contain classified information because there wasn't a lot of e-mailing back then), should not be that careless or lack such good judgment.
If it were an intern that had little experience with aggregate classifications, sure.
The head of the State Department has no excuse whatsoever to lack such good judgment.
No mod points, just want to call this interesting.
Some of the best people I know (best, as in "least stressed out" and "happy most of the time") are the ones who I describe not so much as "don't give a fuck", but more likely "wouldn't know what to do with it if they had a fuck to give".
Which is more dangerous: me riding the shoulder, where drivers on my left swerve into the left lane (sometimes only halfway) to make sure they don't hit me, or letting me ride in the lane and passing me safely when the opportunity presents itself?
I realize that some cyclists are "smug" and don't ride as fast as they should, but I do my part: I ride at a time of day when traffic is at a reasonable minimum, as much as I can on designated bike lanes and paths, and never on roads where there isn't an easy way for you to get around me, or have an extremely long wait for you to get where you need to go.
And the ONLY reason I still ride the shoulder is because asshole drivers, like the ones you describe, STILL complain about me (while, might I add, breaking the speed limit, which isn't really enforced on the one most problematic road where it should).
Slashdot Mirror
Where did this "Literally Hitler" thing happen?
Citations, please.
Okay, but I think you're missing the component here that espousing that point of view fails to account for: that diversity for its own sake is not necessarily beneficial.
Not that I agree with the Sad or Rabid Puppies here, or that I have any problem with what you're saying on the surface, but that's the problem with ideology. There's been a lot of "taking a good idea to absurd levels" going on in geek arenas, and that's where the charges of "racism" and "misogyny" come from.
Minorities and women are sure welcome, but ideologues from the outside marched in and started telling everyone on the outside that they don't seem to be welcome enough, by some vague standard of "enough" that can't be satisfied because there are no existing qualifications to satisfy it. So, of course the media jumped on a juicy story that can get people worked up.
What, really, does "diverse enough" mean, that make fields like science fiction really guilty of not being diverse enough by some standards, and where such guilt is quantified by things other than stereotypes and strawmen?
If I failed to recognize your contributions, then I apologize that I am lapse in my duties of you trying to make "fetch" happen.
This is probably where I fall in the scope of these things.
Indeed, I haven't read all the works in question, so I can't tell you that the strawmen built on either side ("SJW's", "right-wing nutjobs") are in any way reflective of what really is going on.
But I can say with certainty that most people (I said "most", okay? Fucking re-read before you jump down my throat about what follows in this post) who are planting a flag on one side of the other haven't either.
As near as I can figure, the majority of the talking-head opinion pieces on either side aren't making any clear citations about the either side's preferences (i.e., citations to the works in question with clear descriptions and references to the works), about what constitutes "progressive" in science fiction and what work would fall under whoever's banner.
And that as far as this particular controversy goes (as reading the works in question would take time I don't have), it's a lot of sound and fury. Awards are popularity contests. That's the way it's always been. Why anyone bothers to get upset about who wins, or why anyone bothers to trot out being an award winner as if personal preference can be swayed that way is beyond me.
There you go again, blaming the MRA strawman because you need people to hate MRAs.
Look, mate, you are the ONLY person who EVER brings up MRAs into discussions like this one. Seems to me you've got a massive hate-on for them. And that's fine. You get to have an opinion.
But your opinion loses credibility when you keep on hauling out the strawman everytime a group needs a hatin' on.
Yeah, well, look, you can take just about everything I say with a pinch (or boulder) of salt at your own pleasure, but your experience doesn't equal mine. And I have seen them. It maybe wasn't trophies. Maybe it's "no child left behind". Maybe it's "everyone's a special snowflake". Maybe, especially given the tone of Slashdot as of late, it's "women and minorities need a leg-up because they're a minority in X".
In martial arts, for instance, it's belt mills and schools where sparring is purely optional.
Insert whatever paradigm here that you like where meritocracy is sacrificed to make sure everyone feels dandy and no one's feelings are ever hurt. But it does happen. The fact that you haven't experienced it doesn't make it a strawman.
So, kindly refrain from the idea that just because you haven't experienced it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
It isn't just education. It's everywhere.
In the past couple of decades, we've seen a rise in need for "administration" in the engineering field.
I've been to plenty of meetings where there have been more PMPs (or prior to the last five years, proto-PMP administrative types) than there have been engineers. I've been to technical interchanges that could have been cut down in attendance by half to two-thirds if the engineers in attendance could have been bothered to do their own damn reporting. I see that "meeting minutes" is a deliverable on any contract I'm working on.
I can't say that I get where this is coming from, whether it is because engineers don't want to be managers, or because the "everybody gets a trophy" generation required employers to start giving aspirational administrators more power for less qualification, or because contractors needed to pad out how many employees they needed on any given contract to establish perceived value, or maybe any combination of these.
But there's a perfect storm of "my small function, no matter how small, is worth an extra man-year and I will make a meal out of a nibble to justify it" going on here.
Indeed. I've been out of college for 15 years. In that time, I've watched so much change in the cultural landscapes of IT, CS, OSes and even general computing usage that any self-proclaimed expert who claims to be a great prognosticator for anything greater than a couple of years out is only selling so much snake oil.
I'm not sure that's right, at least in this case.
I'm in my 30's and I know plenty of people, both older and younger, that DO play board games and card games, because they grew up with those and are passing them on to the kids in the family.
It's not an all-consuming thing, nor something we talk about a lot when we're not actually planning for a game night, but we don't really regard playing games as a metric of social status. Maybe it's because a lot of us are engineers or programmers or (in my night life) athletic types that enjoy competition, but it seems to me a lot of people I know just like games.
But go ahead and bag on what everyone else likes as being "uncool", hipster.
I would argue that polyamory is the domain of only those things, like you say.
There are dating sites for this sort of thing. Craigslist even makes the accommodations for this sort of thing.
Personally, I think people just want things that are simple, and are often too selfish for their own good ("You are mine and nobody else's forever and ever..."; and then we wonder why people cheat).
Eh, I have no problem with polyamory.
I suspect I'm outside the norm in that regard, but not nearly as far as one might suspect.
I had a discussion with a divorced man in his 40's not too long ago. He said that life isn't much like it used to be, where people stuck it out in marriage because there really weren't any better options. Divorce was difficult, living independently was difficult, people were more judgmental of your life choices, people lived shorter lives and didn't change environments, whatever.
It's getting to where most people kind of shrug at the idea that it's okay not to be in "true love forever". You grow, you change, you find you're not the same person you used to be, nor is your partner. And hopefully, you're not hanging out with the same people forever and ever.
All that having been said: most people don't give the idea of polyamory a little more than a seconds' thought for the same reason I don't: Who has the fucking time?
Seriously, unless you have Dan Savage's podcast on continual stream, you get the idea that most people aren't that preoccupied with the idea of sex or relationships all the time, and have other things that they want to do. And most of the time, being predominantly occupied in romantic relationships aren't conducive to getting those other things done.
Nor do most people really want to go through the idea of "maintenance" (weight loss, working out, updating wardrobe, etc.) to actively seek out a new partner. Hell, I think a lot of unhappy people stay married because they don't want to do the amount of work it takes to not have to be single again.
Really, I think more people than you'd suspect would be at least okay with polyamory, outside of ideological puritans (and even then, ha ha).
So many of the other forum participants were from India, China, or some African country, asking for their certificate PDF even before the course had started! I mean, the course videos, assignments and exam weren't even available yet, but these people demanded that the professor leading the course send them the certificate that they had not earned right away!
I'm not sure it's a "foreign" thing.
When I was teaching, I had one student come up to me at the start of the semester asking if I would write him a recommendation (he turned out to be of the same stripe as those you described above). Gave me no indication that he was an immigrant.
What I think you're describing is someone who needs the certificate to secure something else. They put on the overconfidence front (and generally are lousy students to boot...this young man certainly was: he needed the class to get into a "real" college and let me know that when I called him out on not only writing a lousy report but copying someone else's lousy report), but they generally want the assurance of the foregone conclusion that they're just passing the "whatever" obstacle (they take the course that's "beneath" them, whether it be going to a community college or taking a MOOC course) to get to the prize.
Beats me if that's more an immigrant thing than it is a native thing, but it's hardly unique to any culture.
It has been way too long since I've read those books.
Yes, because all cops everywhere are straight and narrow and won't hassle/overreact to you for jollies.
I'm not a doctor, I don't know any, at least any that would be interested in trying (there's no way any doctor in my area would verify on his or her own that this works), but I'm still willing to try out this project myself. You know, for grins.
That having been said, people seem to be developing projects left and right and bending over backwards to make 3D printing a thing.
I can't say whether or not it will be, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out.
Work is a relationship if you ask a psychologist. Humans have relationships to groups too and not just individuals that meet each others needs. So like a bad gf dump.
I tell people all the time - superiors, especially - that my job, in my perception, is just as much a relationship to me as it is to my husband.
And as such, I've learned that if it isn't meeting my needs or making me happy, I should find something else to do.
The ones who understand treat me with respect. The ones who don't have typically an unhappy set of employees under them, not just me.
A small anecdote regarding the latter:
The last job I left, my boss sat me down and begged me not to leave, even after letting go of two employees due to budget cuts (cutting the staff from 10 to 8; we were a satellite office of a much larger company). I told him that I was too young to be tied down to a job where I was clearly not allowed to branch out (he constantly hedged and made excuses, but I took the diplomatic tack of not blaming him in this conversation). He was willing to offer me something like 10% above my current salary to keep me on board, but couldn't guarantee that I'd be allowed to find work elsewhere within the company.
So, I told him this, and I think he still didn't get what I was talking about:
I once had a boyfriend who would tell me "maybe" all the time. All the things I wanted to do were "maybes". Maybe we'll go out tonight. Maybe we'll make plans for next weekend. Maybe we'll move in together. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
I told said boyfriend that if those maybes didn't start turning into yeses, that I'd leave.
He then went on to treat me like I was an ungrateful brat. Sure, I wanted things, but he was giving things. And even if they weren't the things I wanted, hell, he was contributing, and dammit, why wasn't I happy with that?
Boyfriend, boss, same deal. If someone keeps telling you "maybe" you'll get the things you want someday, all you're going to get is a bunch of "maybes". And that's what I got from my boss. I told him I don't have the time to sit around waiting for "maybes" to turn into "yeses".
My point here is: much as you spend time with a significant other, you're going to spend about as much with your job. I'm surprised that more people don't think that they need to set as many expectations for an employer as they do a spouse.
Yeah, I was a little off center when I posted.
Generally speaking, I've had good times playing Munchkin. Not much familiar with any of his other stuff (I usually stick to Looney Labs, or Cards Against Humanity). It's just that I've heard all of this stuff before, so maybe it's the fault of the question-askers that nothing more interesting got asked.
I've played and enjoyed Munchkin, but this list seems blah.
Smartwatches are for people who want a smartphone on their wrist. Period.
I don't disagree with what a lot of what you're saying, but I don't agree with this particular statement.
Now, I am a smartwatch-wearer. I realize I'm not going to convince you that I find it extremely useful for both connected and non-connected purposes (moreso the latter than the former in my case, actually), but I don't believe that smartwatch users mistake it for the primary communications device, but rather an augment, or an assist, or a companion to it.
Yeah, and ALL of them should have been prosecuted for this nonsense.
Thing is, though, someone at that level of authority in the Government, and who has decades of experience of at least protocol (in the 90's, for instance, you knew perfectly well that you didn't bring your work home with you if it even had the potential to contain classified information because there wasn't a lot of e-mailing back then), should not be that careless or lack such good judgment.
If it were an intern that had little experience with aggregate classifications, sure.
The head of the State Department has no excuse whatsoever to lack such good judgment.
No mod points, just want to call this interesting.
Some of the best people I know (best, as in "least stressed out" and "happy most of the time") are the ones who I describe not so much as "don't give a fuck", but more likely "wouldn't know what to do with it if they had a fuck to give".
I find writing angry emails to be cathartic.
Sending them, and then getting responses back that escalate the situation, is not.
Fair enough. I live in a fairly rural/suburban community.
I also have ATVs to fight with.
Thus my original point.
Which is more dangerous: me riding the shoulder, where drivers on my left swerve into the left lane (sometimes only halfway) to make sure they don't hit me, or letting me ride in the lane and passing me safely when the opportunity presents itself?
I realize that some cyclists are "smug" and don't ride as fast as they should, but I do my part: I ride at a time of day when traffic is at a reasonable minimum, as much as I can on designated bike lanes and paths, and never on roads where there isn't an easy way for you to get around me, or have an extremely long wait for you to get where you need to go.
And the ONLY reason I still ride the shoulder is because asshole drivers, like the ones you describe, STILL complain about me (while, might I add, breaking the speed limit, which isn't really enforced on the one most problematic road where it should).