I just read about the test a little bit and it sounds awful. The categories of software that will/may require a license are anything related to health, security, property, and life. That's... ridiculous. A food journal mobile app is related to health. That will need to be implemented by a licensed engineer? A webpage with a feed from a webcam is related to property and security. Another engineer-only job?
And don't think the government doesn't stretch definitions to their advantage. North Carolina, one of the states that expressed interest in the licensing program, recently shut down a diet blog since the blogger didn't have a nutrition license. The government in general is ridiculous whenever it can get away with it. Google for how many times tennis shoes have been considered deadly weapons in order to inflate charges.
I read an article by one of the test's developers and he makes some very poor arguments. He suggests rephrasing questions about the need for the license in terms of medical practice.
Or consider this question: “For years I have been developing the kinds of systems that would require a licensed professional engineer but without a license, and none have failed. So why do I need a license now?” Rephrasing this we get: “I have been doing surgery for years without a medical license and no patients have been harmed yet, so why do I need a license now?”
That's almost funny considering the dire state of health care in this country. People (not necessarily the government) want to move away from the model of having the most highly trained people do every little thing involving medicine simply because it costs so much. Nurse Practitioners are being given more and more power. People are pushing strongly for things like importing drugs from other countries. Many drugs that require prescriptions are eventually released OTC (allergy medicine for instance), and people want more drugs to be available without a doctor's visit.
But this joker compares software to one the most expensive, most difficult medical practices. That's... telling.
It depends on the purpose of the software, but taking it so seriously is a bit silly most of the time isn't it?
When a bridge fails, people might die. When your code crashes, the range of what happens is huge. It could range from people dying to really nothing more than wasting a few minutes of time redoing the work the user lost. The people who build software with lives at stake should understand the need for quality coming before timeliness. The people who build a mobile phone app that makes fart noises don't.
Think of how many terrible physical products there are in the world. People don't even think of blaming the engineers involved, they immediately understand that the product sucks because the manufacturer wanted to make it as cheap as possible and then some.
The Nazi war in Europe was not predicated on the existence of airplanes; their genocide was predicated on the existence of "inferior" races, including the existence of a "Jewish race."
So anything that their genocide was predicated on is bad? Well their genocide was not predicated on the existence of a Jewish race, but like you said, the existence of inferior races. (Jewish does not imply inferior.) The Nazis didn't invent the idea of the Jewish race for the purposes of genocide, it existed long before that. That's why I saw it as analogous to airplanes -- a neutral idea twisted to cause harm in the furtherance of Nazi ambition.
So yes, to speak of a Jewish race is to lend legitimacy to the very philosophy that led to one of the worst genocides in history.
Oh well, I just can't see it that way, and I don't think you honestly do either -- after all you have referred to "white" and "Asian" races. And you are claiming, after all, that merely acknowledging the Jewish race is what is so bad. Well if you refer to the white race, and then someone else comes along and says the white race is superior, you've done the same thing as far as I can see.
I read that as saying that Ashkenazic Jews form a genetically distinct group (perhaps you could call that a "race," though someone else pointed out that "cline" is the correct term), whereas the rest of the world's Jews do not. If you want to grab a small victory, fine: you can go around talking about the "Ashkenazic Jewish Race" if you really want to.
Are you being sarcastic? The small victory was just one example. I find it surprising you didn't already know about the Ashkenazis. They're the group that is so over-represented in Nobel Prize winners, and they are often the subject in debates over race and intelligence. They were highlighted in the popular and controversial book "The Bell Curve."
It is not a matter of being politically correct, it is a matter of understanding that there only relevant factor in modern Judaism is how a person lives their life. Things were different historically, and things are more complex when it comes to Israeli politics, but in general being Jewish in this century has nothing to do with genetics.
I agree, I don't think we're disagreeing on what it means to be Jewish. We are disagreeing on what it means to belong to the Jewish race.
yet here we are, talking about a "Jewish race." Why choose such a non-specific, confusing, and ambiguous name, if you are referring to a specific subset of Jews, from a specific region?
I didn't choose the name. It's probably an artifact from when Jews were much more insular than today.
I'm sure you're right that over time the "Jewish race" and "those who follow Judaism" will grow more and more apart, and the idea of a Jewish race will have even less significance and meaning. Eventually people will stop talking about it except in historical contexts.
The company that performed the test claimed that they could completely rule out the possibility that the MP had a Jewish ancestor, so no, this is not a "straw man," it is exactly what was claimed in TFA.
I haven't seen seen the company's claim of 100% accuracy. In the article it says
Nagy Gén scanned 18 positions in the MP’s genome for variants that it says are characteristic of Roma and Jewish ethnic groups; its report concludes that Roma and Jewish ancestry can be ruled out.
You are taking a journalist's analysis of the report as authoritative, but I've read plenty of news articles that poorly summarize scientific and medical research. I'm going on the assumption that, like every other scientific or medical test I've seen, the actual result reported by the company is a statistical result, not a black and white answer.
Your hair color example is equally flawed; unless you are claiming that dark hair is more common among Jews than it is among other populations (which is almost certainly false, since the proportion of dark hair is highest in Asia), it is a poor way to guess whether or not a person is Jewish.
Based on what I know, the proportion of Jews who are Asian is much lower than the proportion of humans who are Asian... so bringing up Asian hair color makes no sense. Also you specified a lineup of white men.
It took a lot more work than I expected looking up hair color statistics -- not for Jews, but for others. Too many hits for hair coloring products. This site has some actual numbers:
These figures show in a striking manner that in the provinces of Germany where the percentage of brunettes is smallest among the Christian population—in Prussia, for instance, only 14.05 per cent—the Jews have 42.34 per cent of brunettes; while in Alsace-Lorraine and Bavaria, where the Christians show 25.21 and 21.1 per cent of brunettes respectively, the Jews have only 34.59 and 39.45 per cent respectively of such.
It's under a section about blond hair, showing that in populations with more blonds, Jews are also more blond. But you can still see the sizable difference in the prevalence of darker hair among Jews in those populations.
Does that satisfy you? I thought it was common knowledge that Jews had darker hair on average.
So you basically throw away any counterexamples to your theory that there is a "Jewish race."
You bring up people who are religiously Jewish but not genetically Jewish and think that's a counterexample? No, because I have already admitted there are people in the Jewish religion who are not in the traditional Jewish race. As for Ethiopian Jews in particular, I just don't know. I don't think they have been studied as much as white Jewish groups. Like I said before I *bet* they would also have distinguishing genetic features, but I don't know.
It's not my fault there's a racial term that is also a religious term. I didn't come up with them. Can't you see the difference in intended usage though, and not use examples of one as a counterexample to the other just because they use the same word?
For the purposes of applying an anti-discrimination law.
Of course. I wouldn't expect the Supreme Court to rule on a scientific matter, would you? It stands that many people consider "the Jewish race" to be a legitimate concept.
What a compelling example to point to...
It's not at all compelling to dismiss a point because it mentions Nazis.
Many people think that the Earth is flat, but their views have just as little merit as the views of people who think that there is a "Jewish race."
You're just making stuff up. Many people think the Earth is flat, but their views have just as little merit as the views of pe
Prove it. How will you distinguish Jews from non-Jews, other than by religion and culture?
You must be using "distinguish" to mean "identify exactly" but I'm obviously not -- that should have been clear from my argument about hair color. Nobody said it had to be or could be 100% accurate, and arguing such is simply a straw man argument.
Analogy -- pregnancy. By your logic, pregnancy has no biological basis because pregnant women can't be picked from a lineup with 100% success. Does that make sense? No. I don't know about you, but given a random sample of women, my performance in picking the pregnant women would be better than a random selection, therefore I feel comfortable saying yes, there is a visual difference in pregnant women, and therefore, yes, it has a real biological basis.
My only point was that some physical features that have a genetic basis distinguish Jews from the general population, so your aside of "hint: not at all" or whatever was in fact wrong. A visual assessment would not be 100% accurate. I admit that.
Except that the Ethiopian Jews' genetics were closer to the general population Ethiopia than to any other Jewish population. So much for using genetics to test whether or not someone is Jewish.
What about how close Ethiopian Jews' genetics are to each other relative to the general Ethiopian population?
Anyway, I've never thought of Ethiopian Jews as part of "the Jews" when thought of as a race, because yeah, they are not really genetically related to the Jewish race. I would be surprised if there weren't such thing as the "Ethiopian Jewish race" though, because if the Ethiopian Jews were as insular as other Jews, there is simply bound to be some genetic distinction among them.
It echoes your argument that you can't become black, but blacks can become Jewish. And yet it also shows that in the 1980s the Supreme Court ruled that Jews are a race. It also gives the example of Nazi Germany classifying Jews as a race.
Now.. regardless of how you feel about that, you have to admit that many people recognize the Jewish race in addition to the Jewish religion. The article says there is a genetic test -- not 100% accurate -- that identifies at least part of that traditional Jewish race. I don't see why you have a problem with that. Is it because you feel like the test might exclude you? Yeah, it might. So what? You will still be Jewish, just not necessarily part of the Jewish race as defined by the test.
So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for.
How do you know the data is crappy, have you seen it? I haven't. If the data is crappy, why not advocate for better data, rather than suggesting that the whole history of statistics is bogus and it'll never ever work?
Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students?
Ahh, so your fear of racism is preventing you from seeing the benefits of standardized testing. Since races perform differently on some standardized tests, standardized tests are tools of racists and are just automatically bad.
That's not rational.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence
That doesn't even make sense. When all the white people are together, they do well. When they are shipped to bad schools to cover up problems, they do well. So what does testing have to do with that? You're basically just calling whites racist because they do well on standardized tests, which is itself racist.
The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too.
No they're not. The bigger your sample, the more you can correct for other effects, because the individual effects become less important and the more well understood average come into play.
And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%.
Bias and low income don't matter because they can be controlled for. The low income student this year will be low income next year, and the year after, and the year after. His younger brother will be low income this year, and the next year, and the year after. The biased test will be biased this year, and next year, and the year after. So it doesn't matter. Students don't just pop into existence for a year and then disappear the next year. We have 10+ years of data for each student. We can already see, at a school level, which elementary schools don't adequately prepare kids for later learning -- we can do that on a teacher level too if we have the data.
Here's the truth. People are scared of math and things they don't understand. There was a NY Times article about a new statistical model for teacher evaluation that boiled down to: "I don't get this, and it scares me, and I didn't have time to interview any statisticians who could explain it. This stuff is evil."
You said yourself, even a very good teacher may have only a 5% impact on test performance. I think teachers don't want to hear that. Because guess what, there's no point paying teachers as well as we do if they don't contribute much. There's no point trying to entice people to make teaching a career and giving them nice pensions and tons of vacation.. because they could be replaced by minimum wage workers and there would be almost no change, for most kids. 5%? Are you kidding me? We spend more per child on education than any nation on Earth, and get terrible results... we could have within 5% of those terrible results and spend half as much! That sounds like a good deal... for the taxpayer, not the teachers.
Once you have statistics, the natural thing to do is start experimenting. "Kids are doing about this well... what happens if we try THIS?" What happens if we eliminate teacher pensions in this district and use that freed up money to send kids on more field trips?
If we actually gave a shit about trying to fix education, that's exactly what we'd be doing. And since teachers would be the most likely losers in the new approach, they are furious and terrified at the same time.
If it will satisfy you, though, I will rephrase the question: given a lineup of five white people with black hair, how will you determine which person is Jewish?
Hair color was just one example of a very simple visual assessment that would make a difference in your success rate. You claimed that Jews are indistinguishable from any other group, but that's in fact wrong. Your new question makes it harder to succinctly describe a visual method, but doesn't rule out such a method. How about if we simply use the genetic test described in the article?
I cannot convert to having dark, African skin, no matter how hard I try; yet anyone who is willing is able to convert to Judaism, and if I wanted to I could convert out of Judaism.
Say you could paint or tattoo your skin to look pretty much however you wanted, even if only for a time -- would that invalidate the idea of skin color? No because we see the difference between conscious manipulation and genetics. Same with converting to or away from Judaism. Yes I could declare that I am a Jew, but I would still be cognizant that I am Jewish in religion only, I did not suddenly change my ancestry.
So take away the religion and the culture, and what is left? What do you think Judaism is, beyond religion and culture?
As you noted there are a bunch of subgroups of Jewish people who have ancestral ties. As a result even if only due to their proximity and history there will be genetic ties as well.
By the way, your story of your great grandfather and your father only illustrates how races can change over time. The result is that identifying groups becomes harder. Races can even die out -- which generally means they were absorbed into a larger group and their racial characteristics lost. It does not mean that the group never existed, or that it ceased to exist as soon as it changed a little bit.
If I lined up a bunch of white men, would you know which ones were Jews (hint: not at all)?
Just taking some simple observations would give you an average success rate greater than random selection so your "not at all" is wrong. For instance, pick only those with dark hair. (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7061-hair#anchor7)
It is also worth pointing out that there is no single Jewish ethnic group. There are Ashkenazic Jews, Sephardic Jews, Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and less known populations of Jews in central Asia and Africa. These groups have distinct genetic patterns
The fact that race may be more complicated than the common usage does not invalidate the common usage. It doesn't stop us from talking about other poorly defined groups, like "blondes" or "children" or "smart people" or pretty much anything.
Why do people insist on having an airtight, scientifically sound, completely precise definition for race?
there is no gene that makes someone Jewish, Jewish people are not born keeping kosher or covering their heads
You're mistaking the religious beliefs with the race.
There's no reason why it should be tied to drinking, and someone who is just a bad driver can be as dangerous as a good driver who is drunk.
So if we take that back to sexuality, we should also arrest people who look at rape and incest porn? How about people who take it past pictures and actually engage in bondage, rape role playing, etc? Adult women don't like to be raped any more than children, why isn't "harmful" porn about that considered illegal?
and that it only ceases to be exponential to assume a form of a logistic function [wikipedia.org] if either political measures are put in place to stunt growth in our terms, or nature naturally limits the amount of people that can actually live by imposing its own terms.
There's no need for an "if" there. We most assuredly can assume either the former or latter. Do you imagine you could ever have 10^100 humans on the planet?
What's going to happen is each society will want to settle into an equilibrium based on what they feel they're entitled to. If the sum of those equilibriums is too great, there will be conflict, and some societies will win and some will lose. It's inevitable that there's going to be conflict, just as there's been conflict over resources for thousands of years when it wasn't even necessary. Let's not pretend that we can prevent it. Let's be prepared instead. So.. we shouldn't cut military budgets and we shouldn't cut farm aid. That's a great, if blindingly obvious, start.
What this argument forgets is that there are two human beings involved.
No that's precisely the point of the argument, and the assumption is that the two human beings are equal and both deserving of tolerance and respect. Society recognizes important biological functions of women like pregnancy and makes allowances for them, even though they may have a real and detrimental impact on their companies and coworkers. Why shouldn't we tolerate the actions of men that may be detrimental to some coworkers?
It's absolutely possible to glimpse at someone whose totally hot without staring at them like a creep. A simple 'good morning!' can work wonders. There's a huge difference between that and the extremes of harassment.
I agree, but I think the reality of the situation is that men are prosecuted more for sexual harassment than women and it's definitely not always or largely "extremes" of harassment (by this I assume you mean stuff like directly saying "have sex with me or you're fired" -- that's extreme).
Making a joke, flirting, having "inappropriate" screensavers.. all of that leads to men being terminated when it's actually rather harmless.
Also, in saying that men must be free to do the above, you're claiming that men really cannot help themselves in the face of their urges, which is basically claiming that men cannot control themselves, that is, they have no free will.
No way.. I really don't understand this argument. Of course we have free will. Of course we can control our behavior (men and women both). The question is how much we want to control our behavior. Do women naturally want to look pretty? I think so. Obviously they have free will, but they still choose to look pretty because that makes them happy. How you connect something like that to lack of free will is beyond me. Similarly, men can obviously stop themselves from flirting, making suggestive eye contact, watching girls walk by, etc. But they still want to. Why shouldn't they be allowed to?
That argument about pregnancy is a faulty analogy, because a job exists to provide mutual benefit between employer and employee
I don't understand, the mutual benefit of a job applies to men and women, not just one or the other. It has no bearing on how the employee's actions affect others and what we end up tolerating. Perhaps you could argue that pregnancy itself provides benefits to society as a whole, so that's why we tolerate it, but that's not really fair -- men's traits also provide benefits to society, including traits like aggressiveness. That's not a reason by itself to distinguish between men's and women's faults.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data
Most teachers teach multiple related classes (for instance, an English teacher may teach 3 periods of English per day) and most teachers teach the same classes for more than one term (for instance, a Biology teacher may teach Biology every semester for 10+ years).
What we're interested in is finding effective teachers. An effective teacher's impact probably spreads to some extent into every aspect of a student's academic performance. An inspiring math teacher may inspire the student to do well in his other subjects for instance. An excellent physics teacher would most likely have an impact on the student's math scores.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant.
So standardized testing doesn't correlate at all with academic outcome? In other words, if you take a random sample of 1000 kids across the country who aced their standardized tests, and a random sample of 1000 who flunked them, you'd see no consistent difference in their academic performance?......
It's actually an interesting question. We learn that the Earth goes around the Sun and there's a heavy implication that the Sun is fixed. In reality, they both go around the center of gravity, which happens to be much closer (probably inside) the Sun. Most people don't "get" that the Earth pulls on the Sun as much as the Sun pulls on the Earth -- the gravitational force equation doesn't change based on which object you treat as the frame of reference. You could show a picture of a binary star system where the two stars are closer in mass so the fact that they orbit each other is more obvious.
Indeed. Geometry is the formal introduction to axioms for most people, and they are not taught as fact that must be accepted on the teacher's authority. They are taught as being starting points that everybody can agree to based on their own observations and thinking. However, a good teacher will also point out that even these obvious axioms can be purposely excluded, if only to see what happens. In geometry the great example is how one or the other of Euclid's axioms can be excluded to come up with things like spherical geometry, and it's just as "true" as Euclidean geometry. Seriously, doesn't everybody get the lecture about "how do you make a triangle with three 90 degree angles" in geometry?
So when we have to rely on experts to just progress in something as trivial as Commutation
In general the math you learn before college is based on simple and obvious axioms, even to the point that they are incomplete. I certainly didn't learn any type of rigorous set theory in 6th grade algebra, just that sets are collections of numbers that aren't allowed to have duplicates. And until you get into very nitpicky situations that's all you need anyway.
In your example, the commutative property of addition is so blindingly obvious that people just get it. "If Bob has 3 apples and Jill has 2 apples, how many do they have together? Does it make a difference if you count Bob's first of Jill's first?"
It's not fair to equate those intuitive axioms with the science behind a particular climate change model.
I think climate change as science should not be taught before college. No school is going to seriously dissect a climate model, the tools (required math, statistics, physics, etc) just aren't there. It's not possible. So it would have to be presented as an opaque fact. Unlike the commutative property of addition, nobody would have any way of judging its truth except through appeal to authority.
Furthermore, the human contribution to climate change has no place in a science classroom. We generally don't study ongoing human behavior as science before college, especially if it's controversial (for whatever reason). It can't help but come off as judgmental, and it accomplishes nothing useful except further politicizing science. Is it REALLY important for children to be exposed to the idea of climate change, and anthropogenic climate change in particular? Why? What happened to the idea that school was to help you learn how to learn.. not drill rote facts into your skull. Controversial subjects are not worth it for the mission they are trying to accomplish.
Imagine a statistics class that studied the achievement gap between racial groups in the US. Appropriate? Well, it's evidence based, it's objective, trying to understand it will lead the way to statistical techniques like controlling for variables... but is it appropriate? Schools should provide the tools, not the blueprints for a political mindset. Teach statistics. Let the child study racial performance with statistics on his own time. Teach about how the climate works. Let him connect his dad's SUV to the global climate on his own time.
Getting into someone's pants doesn't imply disrespect or using them, but even you assume it does in the situation you were talking about, that's again the same justification people use to discriminate against women due to pregnancy. "She just wants a job to get on our health care then she'll have a baby. She's using us. It's disrespectful to real employees who sacrifice for their careers."
I don't think you can have it both ways. If you want equality, and the ability for women to retain femininity (i.e. not become men with boobs) in the workplace, then men must have the right to retain their masculinity (not become sexless drones who don't dare to look at females for fear of harassment). Maybe Joe Schmoe will never successfully get that date with the cute coworker, but why shouldn't he try? Why not try again and again? Realistically most people give up in the face of rejection so I don't think it's a big issue as most people make it.
It's a hard argument to refute. After all it's pretty much the foundation of our country -- a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Imagine if some country had a democratic referendum to support terrorists against the US. They started funding terrorist groups, providing safe harbor, etc. At what point would you say they share in responsibility for terrorist attacks? We convict people here in the US for materially supporting terrorists even if they never wanted nor planned to take up arms themselves.
I totally understand Osama and why he hates us and why many Muslims are sympathetic to him around the world. And I'm thankful that we're stronger than them.
Terrorists do make the same justification against the United States.
It's really just the difference between war and peacekeeping I'd say. We're lucky today that we can be so arrogant to call the operation in Afghanistan "war".
Assuming that a woman dressed in a certain way is sending a 'mating signal' basically reveals that you think men have no free will whatsoever.
How does a mating signal imply no free will? That doesn't even make sense. I suppose you think that phones having ringers also means you have no free will?
If a phone rings, you still choose whether to answer it or not. But the fact is most people don't spontaneously pick up a phone and say "Hello? Hello?" if it wasn't ringing.
You clearly remain wilfuly uninformed on the issue by belittling the sexual assault problem, considering the ridiculously high percentage of women who are raped and sexually assaulted.
Let's look at what dear AC said to start this: "The problem is that our society has decided that it's OK for a female to engage in a Mating Display and expect the males to not respond. So the women are driven away by the unwelcome responses."
So either you are all mixed up and responding to a different person in the wrong thread, or you think that "unwelcome response" means "rape".
As someone who is both male and hypersexual, I find this kind of presupposition laughable. Blaming others for one's own personal issues is what sociopaths do.
Well, in fairness to you, perhaps being hypersexual makes you overly sensitive to what you consider "unwelcome responses." I don't know. I'm not hypersexual, and I think that as a result I have a much clearer and more objective view about sexuality than you. You seem to think that men who are attracted to women go around raping them and abusing them regularly, which makes you sound a bit crazy.
Let's agree to disagree, and I promise that, like the rest of my life and everyone I know, I won't start raping women who are engaging in mating displays (consciously or not). You continue being hypersexual and seeing male terrorists in every friendly flirt.
Little girls play with toys that don't encourage them to develop their cognitive skills as much as boy toys.
No way. Girls develop language faster and language is perhaps our most important cognitive skill. It's fundamental to pretty much every other cognitive skill we eventually develop, especially abstract reasoning.
The the point about children vs adults is right in general. I think the key that we should focus on isn't that girls should be made to play with engineering-related toys. Instead, girls and boys should be encouraged to do things for reasons other than innate love. You want to play with dolls, fine, but that's not a career. End of story. If girls were given that message, rather than "Ohh how cute! Oh everybody is so special, find something you love and you will find a career around it! Nothing is more important than being happy!" we'd have soooo much more equal representation in the workforce.
But, that only holds for as long as they're not commercial public entities. The moment they start, say, charging money for their services, they have to stop discriminating.
I've never understood that and I'm not totally sure it's true. For instance, if you're a porn star, and your director wants you to do an interracial scene, and you don't want to, can you be prosecuted? Or from the director's perspective, if you want to make an interracial film, can you be prosecuted because once the guy is cast, the female part cannot go to the same race so you're discriminating on hiring?
I think any laws about discrimination should be confined to the government itself. Equal protection under the law, that's it. People should be allowed to freely associate, whether there's money involved or not.
Well it was both, I think you made a strawman argument by painting GP as a sex-crazed lunatic (ad hominem). In reality, GP and the vast majority of guys who pay attention to girls are not sex-crazed lunatics so arguing against that is a strawman.
The thing is that when a man is being insulted by other men, he (the individual) is being attacked. In many male-dominated workplaces, when the men insult a female that's new to the job, they don't attack her, they often aim their attacks at women in general. They don't have any experience with dealing with women other than in a sexual context (or imagined sexual context), and so their insults always carry the stench of sexism. That's how I'VE seen it play out a lot of times. Anecdote for anecdote.
That's interesting and I agree with you (when it comes to Americans) but that's not sexism. Like you said, it's inexperience dealing with women. I don't know why you said that and then said it's sexism. If someone is inexperienced in dealing with women that's not a bad thing and it's not sexist either. I mean wtf. Talk about blaming the victim. Guys who don't have experience with girls may act unexpectedly to the girls, but that's just being human, not sexism.
It's also really stupid that you think the inexperienced guy is at fault. How can you blame someone for something they have no experience with? Why not say "These girls should just learn how to interact with inexperienced guys, after all there are plenty of them." Really, why shouldn't they be more tolerant of someone who is inexperienced? How else is one supposed to become experienced, especially if for whatever reason they missed that development during their youth?
They can't dress too slutty, or even the "feminist" guys feel entitled to pass comments, and other women start getting hostile. Yet if they dress too "frumpy", suddenly they're attacked by people who were perfectly civil to them when they were dressed with their "warpaint" on. Women are judged on their appearances in ways that men are not.
See, here you admit women can dress slutty or frumpy, but before you said "A woman gets harassed and you think SHE STARTED IT by being ATTRACTIVE?" as if to imply that she can't possibly start it. But getting dressed in the morning is most definitely starting something, one way or the other.
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I just read about the test a little bit and it sounds awful. The categories of software that will/may require a license are anything related to health, security, property, and life. That's... ridiculous. A food journal mobile app is related to health. That will need to be implemented by a licensed engineer? A webpage with a feed from a webcam is related to property and security. Another engineer-only job?
And don't think the government doesn't stretch definitions to their advantage. North Carolina, one of the states that expressed interest in the licensing program, recently shut down a diet blog since the blogger didn't have a nutrition license. The government in general is ridiculous whenever it can get away with it. Google for how many times tennis shoes have been considered deadly weapons in order to inflate charges.
I read an article by one of the test's developers and he makes some very poor arguments. He suggests rephrasing questions about the need for the license in terms of medical practice.
Or consider this question: “For years I have been developing the kinds of systems that would require a licensed professional engineer but without a license, and none have failed. So why do I need a license now?” Rephrasing this we get: “I have been doing surgery for years without a medical license and no patients have been harmed yet, so why do I need a license now?”
That's almost funny considering the dire state of health care in this country. People (not necessarily the government) want to move away from the model of having the most highly trained people do every little thing involving medicine simply because it costs so much. Nurse Practitioners are being given more and more power. People are pushing strongly for things like importing drugs from other countries. Many drugs that require prescriptions are eventually released OTC (allergy medicine for instance), and people want more drugs to be available without a doctor's visit.
But this joker compares software to one the most expensive, most difficult medical practices. That's... telling.
It depends on the purpose of the software, but taking it so seriously is a bit silly most of the time isn't it?
When a bridge fails, people might die. When your code crashes, the range of what happens is huge. It could range from people dying to really nothing more than wasting a few minutes of time redoing the work the user lost. The people who build software with lives at stake should understand the need for quality coming before timeliness. The people who build a mobile phone app that makes fart noises don't.
Think of how many terrible physical products there are in the world. People don't even think of blaming the engineers involved, they immediately understand that the product sucks because the manufacturer wanted to make it as cheap as possible and then some.
The Nazi war in Europe was not predicated on the existence of airplanes; their genocide was predicated on the existence of "inferior" races, including the existence of a "Jewish race."
So anything that their genocide was predicated on is bad? Well their genocide was not predicated on the existence of a Jewish race, but like you said, the existence of inferior races. (Jewish does not imply inferior.) The Nazis didn't invent the idea of the Jewish race for the purposes of genocide, it existed long before that. That's why I saw it as analogous to airplanes -- a neutral idea twisted to cause harm in the furtherance of Nazi ambition.
So yes, to speak of a Jewish race is to lend legitimacy to the very philosophy that led to one of the worst genocides in history.
Oh well, I just can't see it that way, and I don't think you honestly do either -- after all you have referred to "white" and "Asian" races. And you are claiming, after all, that merely acknowledging the Jewish race is what is so bad. Well if you refer to the white race, and then someone else comes along and says the white race is superior, you've done the same thing as far as I can see.
I read that as saying that Ashkenazic Jews form a genetically distinct group (perhaps you could call that a "race," though someone else pointed out that "cline" is the correct term), whereas the rest of the world's Jews do not. If you want to grab a small victory, fine: you can go around talking about the "Ashkenazic Jewish Race" if you really want to.
Are you being sarcastic? The small victory was just one example. I find it surprising you didn't already know about the Ashkenazis. They're the group that is so over-represented in Nobel Prize winners, and they are often the subject in debates over race and intelligence. They were highlighted in the popular and controversial book "The Bell Curve."
Anyway, since I'm the one who seems to be doing all the research with you just shooting it down, check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_ethnic_divisions#Genetic_studies_of_DNA
It is not a matter of being politically correct, it is a matter of understanding that there only relevant factor in modern Judaism is how a person lives their life. Things were different historically, and things are more complex when it comes to Israeli politics, but in general being Jewish in this century has nothing to do with genetics.
I agree, I don't think we're disagreeing on what it means to be Jewish. We are disagreeing on what it means to belong to the Jewish race.
yet here we are, talking about a "Jewish race." Why choose such a non-specific, confusing, and ambiguous name, if you are referring to a specific subset of Jews, from a specific region?
I didn't choose the name. It's probably an artifact from when Jews were much more insular than today.
I'm sure you're right that over time the "Jewish race" and "those who follow Judaism" will grow more and more apart, and the idea of a Jewish race will have even less significance and meaning. Eventually people will stop talking about it except in historical contexts.
If a majority of the country wants a genocide.. how exactly are you going to stop them??
The company that performed the test claimed that they could completely rule out the possibility that the MP had a Jewish ancestor, so no, this is not a "straw man," it is exactly what was claimed in TFA.
I haven't seen seen the company's claim of 100% accuracy. In the article it says
Nagy Gén scanned 18 positions in the MP’s genome for variants that it says are characteristic of Roma and Jewish ethnic groups; its report concludes that Roma and Jewish ancestry can be ruled out.
You are taking a journalist's analysis of the report as authoritative, but I've read plenty of news articles that poorly summarize scientific and medical research. I'm going on the assumption that, like every other scientific or medical test I've seen, the actual result reported by the company is a statistical result, not a black and white answer.
Your hair color example is equally flawed; unless you are claiming that dark hair is more common among Jews than it is among other populations (which is almost certainly false, since the proportion of dark hair is highest in Asia), it is a poor way to guess whether or not a person is Jewish.
Based on what I know, the proportion of Jews who are Asian is much lower than the proportion of humans who are Asian... so bringing up Asian hair color makes no sense. Also you specified a lineup of white men.
It took a lot more work than I expected looking up hair color statistics -- not for Jews, but for others. Too many hits for hair coloring products. This site has some actual numbers:
These figures show in a striking manner that in the provinces of Germany where the percentage of brunettes is smallest among the Christian population—in Prussia, for instance, only 14.05 per cent—the Jews have 42.34 per cent of brunettes; while in Alsace-Lorraine and Bavaria, where the Christians show 25.21 and 21.1 per cent of brunettes respectively, the Jews have only 34.59 and 39.45 per cent respectively of such.
It's under a section about blond hair, showing that in populations with more blonds, Jews are also more blond. But you can still see the sizable difference in the prevalence of darker hair among Jews in those populations.
Does that satisfy you? I thought it was common knowledge that Jews had darker hair on average.
So you basically throw away any counterexamples to your theory that there is a "Jewish race."
You bring up people who are religiously Jewish but not genetically Jewish and think that's a counterexample? No, because I have already admitted there are people in the Jewish religion who are not in the traditional Jewish race. As for Ethiopian Jews in particular, I just don't know. I don't think they have been studied as much as white Jewish groups. Like I said before I *bet* they would also have distinguishing genetic features, but I don't know.
It's not my fault there's a racial term that is also a religious term. I didn't come up with them. Can't you see the difference in intended usage though, and not use examples of one as a counterexample to the other just because they use the same word?
For the purposes of applying an anti-discrimination law.
Of course. I wouldn't expect the Supreme Court to rule on a scientific matter, would you? It stands that many people consider "the Jewish race" to be a legitimate concept.
What a compelling example to point to...
It's not at all compelling to dismiss a point because it mentions Nazis.
Many people think that the Earth is flat, but their views have just as little merit as the views of people who think that there is a "Jewish race."
You're just making stuff up. Many people think the Earth is flat, but their views have just as little merit as the views of pe
Prove it. How will you distinguish Jews from non-Jews, other than by religion and culture?
You must be using "distinguish" to mean "identify exactly" but I'm obviously not -- that should have been clear from my argument about hair color. Nobody said it had to be or could be 100% accurate, and arguing such is simply a straw man argument.
Analogy -- pregnancy. By your logic, pregnancy has no biological basis because pregnant women can't be picked from a lineup with 100% success. Does that make sense? No. I don't know about you, but given a random sample of women, my performance in picking the pregnant women would be better than a random selection, therefore I feel comfortable saying yes, there is a visual difference in pregnant women, and therefore, yes, it has a real biological basis.
My only point was that some physical features that have a genetic basis distinguish Jews from the general population, so your aside of "hint: not at all" or whatever was in fact wrong. A visual assessment would not be 100% accurate. I admit that.
Except that the Ethiopian Jews' genetics were closer to the general population Ethiopia than to any other Jewish population. So much for using genetics to test whether or not someone is Jewish.
What about how close Ethiopian Jews' genetics are to each other relative to the general Ethiopian population?
Anyway, I've never thought of Ethiopian Jews as part of "the Jews" when thought of as a race, because yeah, they are not really genetically related to the Jewish race. I would be surprised if there weren't such thing as the "Ethiopian Jewish race" though, because if the Ethiopian Jews were as insular as other Jews, there is simply bound to be some genetic distinction among them.
Look at this page: http://www.jewfaq.org/judaism.htm#Race
It echoes your argument that you can't become black, but blacks can become Jewish. And yet it also shows that in the 1980s the Supreme Court ruled that Jews are a race. It also gives the example of Nazi Germany classifying Jews as a race.
Now.. regardless of how you feel about that, you have to admit that many people recognize the Jewish race in addition to the Jewish religion. The article says there is a genetic test -- not 100% accurate -- that identifies at least part of that traditional Jewish race. I don't see why you have a problem with that. Is it because you feel like the test might exclude you? Yeah, it might. So what? You will still be Jewish, just not necessarily part of the Jewish race as defined by the test.
So, you say you're looking for effective teachers, but you're going about it with a heap of crappy data that can't possibly help you find what you're looking for.
How do you know the data is crappy, have you seen it? I haven't. If the data is crappy, why not advocate for better data, rather than suggesting that the whole history of statistics is bogus and it'll never ever work?
Just look at the results. How can you not get ill when you see how closely the tied the scores are with the percentage of white students?
Ahh, so your fear of racism is preventing you from seeing the benefits of standardized testing. Since races perform differently on some standardized tests, standardized tests are tools of racists and are just automatically bad.
That's not rational.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that the whole racism thing is an unintended consequence
That doesn't even make sense. When all the white people are together, they do well. When they are shipped to bad schools to cover up problems, they do well. So what does testing have to do with that? You're basically just calling whites racist because they do well on standardized tests, which is itself racist.
The bigger point is that combining a thousand of those tests together doesn't magically isolate the one variable you care about. Instead, the biases are amplified, too.
No they're not. The bigger your sample, the more you can correct for other effects, because the individual effects become less important and the more well understood average come into play.
And looking at past studies, biased test construction can negatively affect test scores for target groups by up to 10% (or more). Being from a very low income family can affect scores by up to 15%. The effect of a very good teacher on standardized test scores is not more than 5%.
Bias and low income don't matter because they can be controlled for. The low income student this year will be low income next year, and the year after, and the year after. His younger brother will be low income this year, and the next year, and the year after. The biased test will be biased this year, and next year, and the year after. So it doesn't matter. Students don't just pop into existence for a year and then disappear the next year. We have 10+ years of data for each student. We can already see, at a school level, which elementary schools don't adequately prepare kids for later learning -- we can do that on a teacher level too if we have the data.
Here's the truth. People are scared of math and things they don't understand. There was a NY Times article about a new statistical model for teacher evaluation that boiled down to: "I don't get this, and it scares me, and I didn't have time to interview any statisticians who could explain it. This stuff is evil."
You said yourself, even a very good teacher may have only a 5% impact on test performance. I think teachers don't want to hear that. Because guess what, there's no point paying teachers as well as we do if they don't contribute much. There's no point trying to entice people to make teaching a career and giving them nice pensions and tons of vacation.. because they could be replaced by minimum wage workers and there would be almost no change, for most kids. 5%? Are you kidding me? We spend more per child on education than any nation on Earth, and get terrible results... we could have within 5% of those terrible results and spend half as much! That sounds like a good deal... for the taxpayer, not the teachers.
Once you have statistics, the natural thing to do is start experimenting. "Kids are doing about this well... what happens if we try THIS?" What happens if we eliminate teacher pensions in this district and use that freed up money to send kids on more field trips?
If we actually gave a shit about trying to fix education, that's exactly what we'd be doing. And since teachers would be the most likely losers in the new approach, they are furious and terrified at the same time.
If it will satisfy you, though, I will rephrase the question: given a lineup of five white people with black hair, how will you determine which person is Jewish?
Hair color was just one example of a very simple visual assessment that would make a difference in your success rate. You claimed that Jews are indistinguishable from any other group, but that's in fact wrong. Your new question makes it harder to succinctly describe a visual method, but doesn't rule out such a method. How about if we simply use the genetic test described in the article?
I cannot convert to having dark, African skin, no matter how hard I try; yet anyone who is willing is able to convert to Judaism, and if I wanted to I could convert out of Judaism.
Say you could paint or tattoo your skin to look pretty much however you wanted, even if only for a time -- would that invalidate the idea of skin color? No because we see the difference between conscious manipulation and genetics. Same with converting to or away from Judaism. Yes I could declare that I am a Jew, but I would still be cognizant that I am Jewish in religion only, I did not suddenly change my ancestry.
So take away the religion and the culture, and what is left? What do you think Judaism is, beyond religion and culture?
As you noted there are a bunch of subgroups of Jewish people who have ancestral ties. As a result even if only due to their proximity and history there will be genetic ties as well.
By the way, your story of your great grandfather and your father only illustrates how races can change over time. The result is that identifying groups becomes harder. Races can even die out -- which generally means they were absorbed into a larger group and their racial characteristics lost. It does not mean that the group never existed, or that it ceased to exist as soon as it changed a little bit.
If I lined up a bunch of white men, would you know which ones were Jews (hint: not at all)?
Just taking some simple observations would give you an average success rate greater than random selection so your "not at all" is wrong. For instance, pick only those with dark hair. (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7061-hair#anchor7)
It is also worth pointing out that there is no single Jewish ethnic group. There are Ashkenazic Jews, Sephardic Jews, Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and less known populations of Jews in central Asia and Africa. These groups have distinct genetic patterns
The fact that race may be more complicated than the common usage does not invalidate the common usage. It doesn't stop us from talking about other poorly defined groups, like "blondes" or "children" or "smart people" or pretty much anything.
Why do people insist on having an airtight, scientifically sound, completely precise definition for race?
there is no gene that makes someone Jewish, Jewish people are not born keeping kosher or covering their heads
You're mistaking the religious beliefs with the race.
There's no reason why it should be tied to drinking, and someone who is just a bad driver can be as dangerous as a good driver who is drunk.
So if we take that back to sexuality, we should also arrest people who look at rape and incest porn? How about people who take it past pictures and actually engage in bondage, rape role playing, etc? Adult women don't like to be raped any more than children, why isn't "harmful" porn about that considered illegal?
and that it only ceases to be exponential to assume a form of a logistic function [wikipedia.org] if either political measures are put in place to stunt growth in our terms, or nature naturally limits the amount of people that can actually live by imposing its own terms.
There's no need for an "if" there. We most assuredly can assume either the former or latter. Do you imagine you could ever have 10^100 humans on the planet?
What's going to happen is each society will want to settle into an equilibrium based on what they feel they're entitled to. If the sum of those equilibriums is too great, there will be conflict, and some societies will win and some will lose. It's inevitable that there's going to be conflict, just as there's been conflict over resources for thousands of years when it wasn't even necessary. Let's not pretend that we can prevent it. Let's be prepared instead. So.. we shouldn't cut military budgets and we shouldn't cut farm aid. That's a great, if blindingly obvious, start.
We never had guard dogs under our control in this fight.
I wonder if that's true. Clean is expensive in many areas of life. As an example, poor people still drive cars, but not electrics or hybrids.
What this argument forgets is that there are two human beings involved.
No that's precisely the point of the argument, and the assumption is that the two human beings are equal and both deserving of tolerance and respect. Society recognizes important biological functions of women like pregnancy and makes allowances for them, even though they may have a real and detrimental impact on their companies and coworkers. Why shouldn't we tolerate the actions of men that may be detrimental to some coworkers?
It's absolutely possible to glimpse at someone whose totally hot without staring at them like a creep. A simple 'good morning!' can work wonders. There's a huge difference between that and the extremes of harassment.
I agree, but I think the reality of the situation is that men are prosecuted more for sexual harassment than women and it's definitely not always or largely "extremes" of harassment (by this I assume you mean stuff like directly saying "have sex with me or you're fired" -- that's extreme).
Making a joke, flirting, having "inappropriate" screensavers.. all of that leads to men being terminated when it's actually rather harmless.
Also, in saying that men must be free to do the above, you're claiming that men really cannot help themselves in the face of their urges, which is basically claiming that men cannot control themselves, that is, they have no free will.
No way.. I really don't understand this argument. Of course we have free will. Of course we can control our behavior (men and women both). The question is how much we want to control our behavior. Do women naturally want to look pretty? I think so. Obviously they have free will, but they still choose to look pretty because that makes them happy. How you connect something like that to lack of free will is beyond me. Similarly, men can obviously stop themselves from flirting, making suggestive eye contact, watching girls walk by, etc. But they still want to. Why shouldn't they be allowed to?
That argument about pregnancy is a faulty analogy, because a job exists to provide mutual benefit between employer and employee
I don't understand, the mutual benefit of a job applies to men and women, not just one or the other. It has no bearing on how the employee's actions affect others and what we end up tolerating. Perhaps you could argue that pregnancy itself provides benefits to society as a whole, so that's why we tolerate it, but that's not really fair -- men's traits also provide benefits to society, including traits like aggressiveness. That's not a reason by itself to distinguish between men's and women's faults.
If you think that the multiple choice scores of twenty individuals are scientific data
Most teachers teach multiple related classes (for instance, an English teacher may teach 3 periods of English per day) and most teachers teach the same classes for more than one term (for instance, a Biology teacher may teach Biology every semester for 10+ years).
What we're interested in is finding effective teachers. An effective teacher's impact probably spreads to some extent into every aspect of a student's academic performance. An inspiring math teacher may inspire the student to do well in his other subjects for instance. An excellent physics teacher would most likely have an impact on the student's math scores.
It'd be great if there was good data, but standardized tests are inaccurate, misinterpreted, grossly biased, and statistically insignificant.
So standardized testing doesn't correlate at all with academic outcome? In other words, if you take a random sample of 1000 kids across the country who aced their standardized tests, and a random sample of 1000 who flunked them, you'd see no consistent difference in their academic performance? ......
It's actually an interesting question. We learn that the Earth goes around the Sun and there's a heavy implication that the Sun is fixed. In reality, they both go around the center of gravity, which happens to be much closer (probably inside) the Sun. Most people don't "get" that the Earth pulls on the Sun as much as the Sun pulls on the Earth -- the gravitational force equation doesn't change based on which object you treat as the frame of reference. You could show a picture of a binary star system where the two stars are closer in mass so the fact that they orbit each other is more obvious.
Indeed. Geometry is the formal introduction to axioms for most people, and they are not taught as fact that must be accepted on the teacher's authority. They are taught as being starting points that everybody can agree to based on their own observations and thinking. However, a good teacher will also point out that even these obvious axioms can be purposely excluded, if only to see what happens. In geometry the great example is how one or the other of Euclid's axioms can be excluded to come up with things like spherical geometry, and it's just as "true" as Euclidean geometry. Seriously, doesn't everybody get the lecture about "how do you make a triangle with three 90 degree angles" in geometry?
So when we have to rely on experts to just progress in something as trivial as Commutation
In general the math you learn before college is based on simple and obvious axioms, even to the point that they are incomplete. I certainly didn't learn any type of rigorous set theory in 6th grade algebra, just that sets are collections of numbers that aren't allowed to have duplicates. And until you get into very nitpicky situations that's all you need anyway.
In your example, the commutative property of addition is so blindingly obvious that people just get it. "If Bob has 3 apples and Jill has 2 apples, how many do they have together? Does it make a difference if you count Bob's first of Jill's first?"
It's not fair to equate those intuitive axioms with the science behind a particular climate change model.
I think climate change as science should not be taught before college. No school is going to seriously dissect a climate model, the tools (required math, statistics, physics, etc) just aren't there. It's not possible. So it would have to be presented as an opaque fact. Unlike the commutative property of addition, nobody would have any way of judging its truth except through appeal to authority.
Furthermore, the human contribution to climate change has no place in a science classroom. We generally don't study ongoing human behavior as science before college, especially if it's controversial (for whatever reason). It can't help but come off as judgmental, and it accomplishes nothing useful except further politicizing science. Is it REALLY important for children to be exposed to the idea of climate change, and anthropogenic climate change in particular? Why? What happened to the idea that school was to help you learn how to learn.. not drill rote facts into your skull. Controversial subjects are not worth it for the mission they are trying to accomplish.
Imagine a statistics class that studied the achievement gap between racial groups in the US. Appropriate? Well, it's evidence based, it's objective, trying to understand it will lead the way to statistical techniques like controlling for variables... but is it appropriate? Schools should provide the tools, not the blueprints for a political mindset. Teach statistics. Let the child study racial performance with statistics on his own time. Teach about how the climate works. Let him connect his dad's SUV to the global climate on his own time.
Getting into someone's pants doesn't imply disrespect or using them, but even you assume it does in the situation you were talking about, that's again the same justification people use to discriminate against women due to pregnancy. "She just wants a job to get on our health care then she'll have a baby. She's using us. It's disrespectful to real employees who sacrifice for their careers."
I don't think you can have it both ways. If you want equality, and the ability for women to retain femininity (i.e. not become men with boobs) in the workplace, then men must have the right to retain their masculinity (not become sexless drones who don't dare to look at females for fear of harassment). Maybe Joe Schmoe will never successfully get that date with the cute coworker, but why shouldn't he try? Why not try again and again? Realistically most people give up in the face of rejection so I don't think it's a big issue as most people make it.
It's a hard argument to refute. After all it's pretty much the foundation of our country -- a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Imagine if some country had a democratic referendum to support terrorists against the US. They started funding terrorist groups, providing safe harbor, etc. At what point would you say they share in responsibility for terrorist attacks? We convict people here in the US for materially supporting terrorists even if they never wanted nor planned to take up arms themselves.
I totally understand Osama and why he hates us and why many Muslims are sympathetic to him around the world. And I'm thankful that we're stronger than them.
Terrorists do make the same justification against the United States.
It's really just the difference between war and peacekeeping I'd say. We're lucky today that we can be so arrogant to call the operation in Afghanistan "war".
Assuming that a woman dressed in a certain way is sending a 'mating signal' basically reveals that you think men have no free will whatsoever.
How does a mating signal imply no free will? That doesn't even make sense. I suppose you think that phones having ringers also means you have no free will?
If a phone rings, you still choose whether to answer it or not. But the fact is most people don't spontaneously pick up a phone and say "Hello? Hello?" if it wasn't ringing.
You clearly remain wilfuly uninformed on the issue by belittling the sexual assault problem, considering the ridiculously high percentage of women who are raped and sexually assaulted.
Let's look at what dear AC said to start this: "The problem is that our society has decided that it's OK for a female to engage in a Mating Display and expect the males to not respond. So the women are driven away by the unwelcome responses."
So either you are all mixed up and responding to a different person in the wrong thread, or you think that "unwelcome response" means "rape".
As someone who is both male and hypersexual, I find this kind of presupposition laughable. Blaming others for one's own personal issues is what sociopaths do.
Well, in fairness to you, perhaps being hypersexual makes you overly sensitive to what you consider "unwelcome responses." I don't know. I'm not hypersexual, and I think that as a result I have a much clearer and more objective view about sexuality than you. You seem to think that men who are attracted to women go around raping them and abusing them regularly, which makes you sound a bit crazy.
Let's agree to disagree, and I promise that, like the rest of my life and everyone I know, I won't start raping women who are engaging in mating displays (consciously or not). You continue being hypersexual and seeing male terrorists in every friendly flirt.
Little girls play with toys that don't encourage them to develop their cognitive skills as much as boy toys.
No way. Girls develop language faster and language is perhaps our most important cognitive skill. It's fundamental to pretty much every other cognitive skill we eventually develop, especially abstract reasoning.
The the point about children vs adults is right in general. I think the key that we should focus on isn't that girls should be made to play with engineering-related toys. Instead, girls and boys should be encouraged to do things for reasons other than innate love. You want to play with dolls, fine, but that's not a career. End of story. If girls were given that message, rather than "Ohh how cute! Oh everybody is so special, find something you love and you will find a career around it! Nothing is more important than being happy!" we'd have soooo much more equal representation in the workforce.
But, that only holds for as long as they're not commercial public entities. The moment they start, say, charging money for their services, they have to stop discriminating.
I've never understood that and I'm not totally sure it's true. For instance, if you're a porn star, and your director wants you to do an interracial scene, and you don't want to, can you be prosecuted? Or from the director's perspective, if you want to make an interracial film, can you be prosecuted because once the guy is cast, the female part cannot go to the same race so you're discriminating on hiring?
I think any laws about discrimination should be confined to the government itself. Equal protection under the law, that's it. People should be allowed to freely associate, whether there's money involved or not.
What is it? A strawman or an ad hominem?
Well it was both, I think you made a strawman argument by painting GP as a sex-crazed lunatic (ad hominem). In reality, GP and the vast majority of guys who pay attention to girls are not sex-crazed lunatics so arguing against that is a strawman.
The thing is that when a man is being insulted by other men, he (the individual) is being attacked. In many male-dominated workplaces, when the men insult a female that's new to the job, they don't attack her, they often aim their attacks at women in general. They don't have any experience with dealing with women other than in a sexual context (or imagined sexual context), and so their insults always carry the stench of sexism. That's how I'VE seen it play out a lot of times. Anecdote for anecdote.
That's interesting and I agree with you (when it comes to Americans) but that's not sexism. Like you said, it's inexperience dealing with women. I don't know why you said that and then said it's sexism. If someone is inexperienced in dealing with women that's not a bad thing and it's not sexist either. I mean wtf. Talk about blaming the victim. Guys who don't have experience with girls may act unexpectedly to the girls, but that's just being human, not sexism.
It's also really stupid that you think the inexperienced guy is at fault. How can you blame someone for something they have no experience with? Why not say "These girls should just learn how to interact with inexperienced guys, after all there are plenty of them." Really, why shouldn't they be more tolerant of someone who is inexperienced? How else is one supposed to become experienced, especially if for whatever reason they missed that development during their youth?
They can't dress too slutty, or even the "feminist" guys feel entitled to pass comments, and other women start getting hostile. Yet if they dress too "frumpy", suddenly they're attacked by people who were perfectly civil to them when they were dressed with their "warpaint" on. Women are judged on their appearances in ways that men are not.
See, here you admit women can dress slutty or frumpy, but before you said "A woman gets harassed and you think SHE STARTED IT by being ATTRACTIVE?" as if to imply that she can't possibly start it. But getting dressed in the morning is most definitely starting something, one way or the other.