It's conversion therapy if you're demanding that the fat people be consistently cast as romantic leads. And admittedly, I'm sure there are people demanding that.
But most fat people, including me, just want to see fat people that are regular people. Who are the fat characters in Harry Potter? The Dursleys (obnoxious idiots) or Dolores Umbrage (obnoxious sadist). Who's the fat character in NCIS? House? The West Wing? None. Who's the fat character in Lost? Hurley, the comic relief. etc... etc... Disney animated films? Ursula (villain), Maid Marian's helper (comic relief), Pumba (comic relief), Governor Ratcliffe (villain) - The Princess & The Frog was conspicuous for having two relatively important characters that were fat. CSI had the fat medical examiner (if I remember right).
I accept that most of the population views the fatties as the ugly half. That's fine. But I take issue at being the absent half, the incompetent half, the evil half, the stupid half.
As much as this topic interests me, I'm not sure it's "news for nerds".
Hollywood is more tolerant of chubby or fat guys in dramatic roles than women: John Goodman, Alec Baldwin, Bryan Cox, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Hanks, etc.... even Jonah Hill and Jack Black have been cast in serious roles as fat guys. For fat women, typically if they're in the film or television they are the comic relief and the humor revolves partly around their size.
As you said, Hollywood is interested in making money and even among men the great majority of primary characters in film and television roles are slim, attractive, and athletic. But I still think an imbalance exists.
We still have consistent, reliable, measurable sexism in the technology industry. So that is almost certainly a factor in the way that Title 9 had a lesser impact in this industry than in others. For whatever reason, the fights against sexism in law and medicine made progress faster than they did in ours.
When we've eliminated that as a factor for decades and there is still a trend in favor of one sex, then we have interesting data. Until then, James Damore's arguments are shots in the dark.
There are problem thousands or tens of thousands of reasonable white guys here, liberal or conservative.
But the whole debate over what James Damore wrote has seen the lunatic fringe come out of the woodwork to insult anyone criticizing what he wrote on any grounds, and attacking women in general.
I'm open to the possibility that some of what he wrote is correct. But I don't expect much of an intelligent debate on the subject here... or on 4chan, or on Twitter or Reddit.
If you go back far enough, women weren't permitted to be veterinarians. So they had a minority position in the field due to sexism.
Since it isn't even a hundred years since women gained the right to vote in most of the world, I'd say it's too early to say sexism is a solved problem. It's entirely possible women will become the majority of engineers naturally (i.e. without diversification programs and other boosts) if sexism is eradicated.
It only makes sense to focus on jobs with high pay, right? Men don't work in daycare as often as women, either - but I've never seen a daycare employee driving around in a Mercedes, either.
Running a nail salon business is different. That can be lot more profitable than working in one.
I'm not saying women definitely should be a half or even a third of engineers. But I think as long as there is still measurable sexism in the industry, we're comparing two uneven things - men who choose to be engineers and don't deal with sexism at work, and women who choose to be engineers or who might choose to be engineers and some non-zero attrition rate in education and in their career due to sexism. When we've had a hundred years of sexism-free society and women are still 20% or less of engineers, then we can declare that the difference is innate to the sexes and stop studying it.
I'm not saying all men in the industry are treated fairly. I'm just saying that if women are more likely to be mistreated specifically because of their gender and unrelated to all other factors, it will cause more problems for them on average than men experience.
But we have a smoke screen around neuroticism. If you're mistreated on your job - ignored, shouted down, harassed, sexually harassed, passed over for fairly earned promotions - you're more likely to develop nervous problems.
So Damore's argument that neuroticism is a factor implicitly assumes that sexism is a completely solved issue in the industry. If he's wrong - and I would contend he is - then he's confusing an effect with a cause.
The same argument could be made to keep women out of law and medicine. Until Title 9 laws in the US in 1972, women were less than 10% of the students for either profession and even less of the practicing professionals. In 1974 they were 22% of the students. Today they're 50%.
If sexism wasn't "solved" in law and medicine until the last few decades, why is tech any different?
So what? Some jackass can make it against their religion for whites to sell services to blacks, and then deny blacks their products. Are you okay with that?
Religious freedom has to have limits. I can say my religion requires me to light fires all the time, but that doesn't mean I should be able to commit arson and get away with it.
So you can hate gays all you want on your personal property in your private time. Once you open a business, you give them the same customer services as any other paying customer.
Careful there - if we push the "businesses should be free to do business with whom they wish", that lets GoDaddy evict this site but it also lets other businesses put up the old signs, "No service for colored folk" and "No Jews allowed".
To be clear, I hate these racists and what they stand for, and I hate what they say, and I have no interest in their sites. But I think any hosting service had better make crystal clear what is and is not permitted in their terms of use and then stick to it. The anti-discrimination, freedom of speech laws have to protect everyone - not just the people we like.
The treatment of the cake bakers is not a problem. It's not like the cake message was, "We should see gay men bang each other in public! Add it to the flag!"
You can't turn a customer away from your auto repair shop because he's Jewish. You can't send a woman away from a medical clinic because she's black. How is this any different?
Most of those jobs are going away regardless. If they don't head to South America or Asia today they're going to be replaced by automation tomorrow. Neither the liberals nor the conservatives have a real solution. But the racists are taking advantage of the frustration and anger in the meanwhile.
I've seen BLM and P (as in Police) LM stickers on the same cars and on signs in the same yards - and that's cars and yards owned by white people, black people, Indians, Hispanics, whatever.
Somebody call me when you see a BLM and pro KKK bumper stickers on the same car.
Separately, Linux works fine for me as long as I'm not riding the cutting edge. If I want the latest Java JDK 9 (back when it was in alpha state), or Wine, or mesalib, I will have headaches. If I'm just installing it and using packages, and the only updates I do are fixes and security updates, then it's a pleasant existence.
Gentoo is fantastic, enjoy. I usually run Ubuntu derivatives, though I've been playing with GuixSD recently. I don't have any problems with systemd at home or at work, but GuixSD doesn't use systemd either.
To be fair to most Apple or Microsoft customers, they don't even consciously realize the walled garden exists. That makes it harder for them to understand why it's bad.
The Playstation 4 in my living room has enough compute power to play all sorts of fancy 3D games and playback Blu Rays. But I can't install Kodi on it to stream my (legal, if anyone cars) ripped movie collection. This makes me furious. My wife and kids don't care. I can't even convince my own family that proprietary software and DRM is a great evil, let alone the average person.
If Toyota told the customers "We won't fix any car more than three years old and we've even put safeguards in place to make it difficult or even illegal for anyone else to fix it" there would be a revolt because buyers are accustomed to long service lives for cars. But Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, etc... do that with their smart phones and people complain about the money they're spending but just take for granted that this year's $300 or $500 or $700 phone is 2020's trash. the walled gardens are everywhere, and it's our job to show them to the public. We're failing.
It doesn't have to be. There was nothing stopping Microsoft or anyone else from implementing the auto save and edit history in Google Docs. I do my personal document writing on Etherpad (an open source equivalent to Google Docs) that I host myself for the same reason.
Making people save manually made sense when floppies were the dominant form of storage. Since then, it's a design failure to make it something end users need to understand.
I hate Apple, but this is why Apple has rabid fans and Microsoft generally doesn't. Apple does a better job at sweating the details. Not a perfect job. Not a great job. Not a good enough job to justify the high prices. But much better than Microsoft. And it pays them back in rabid fan loyalty.
Me, I'm a Linux geek. Stuff breaks a lot. But I'll take a hundred headaches from a global network of loosely connected volunteers over five headaches from a hundred billion dollar mega-corporation.
The Guild Navigators used the spice to plot ship courses instead of computer calculations or even manual calculations. I don't care how you label it, that's magic to see the future.
But again, The Goblin Reservation all of the way back in the 1970s was a nominee with magic. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has magic. The Hugos have magic, get over.
I would disagree with that, but it doesn't matter. Other Hugo winners have magic. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The Graveyard Book. Redshirts is pure fantasy. Three of the five nominees last year were fantasy: The Fifth Age (which one), The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass, and Uprooted.
The Expanse is an awesome book series. I haven't seen the television show yet. Obelisk Gate is spectacular sci fi, period. The Vorkosigan Saga is spectacular sci fi, period.
I've read books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Jordan, George RR Martin, Brent Weeks, Jim Butcher, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Anne McCaffrey, David Brin, Steven Erikson, Raymond Feist, Patrick Rothfuss, Kevin Hearne, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Orson Scott Card, Robert Howard, Neal Stephenson, Elizabeth Moon, JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Fritz Leiber, Philip K Dick, and Walter M. Miller Jr. Most of them are Hugo Award nominees or winners. I would easily rank NK Jemisin (author of the Hugo winner The Obelisk Gate) and Lois McMaster Bujold (author of the Hugo winner The Vorkosigan Saga) with the very best among them.
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It's conversion therapy if you're demanding that the fat people be consistently cast as romantic leads. And admittedly, I'm sure there are people demanding that.
But most fat people, including me, just want to see fat people that are regular people. Who are the fat characters in Harry Potter? The Dursleys (obnoxious idiots) or Dolores Umbrage (obnoxious sadist). Who's the fat character in NCIS? House? The West Wing? None. Who's the fat character in Lost? Hurley, the comic relief. etc... etc... Disney animated films? Ursula (villain), Maid Marian's helper (comic relief), Pumba (comic relief), Governor Ratcliffe (villain) - The Princess & The Frog was conspicuous for having two relatively important characters that were fat. CSI had the fat medical examiner (if I remember right).
I accept that most of the population views the fatties as the ugly half. That's fine. But I take issue at being the absent half, the incompetent half, the evil half, the stupid half.
As much as this topic interests me, I'm not sure it's "news for nerds".
Hollywood is more tolerant of chubby or fat guys in dramatic roles than women: John Goodman, Alec Baldwin, Bryan Cox, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Hanks, etc.... even Jonah Hill and Jack Black have been cast in serious roles as fat guys. For fat women, typically if they're in the film or television they are the comic relief and the humor revolves partly around their size.
As you said, Hollywood is interested in making money and even among men the great majority of primary characters in film and television roles are slim, attractive, and athletic. But I still think an imbalance exists.
We still have consistent, reliable, measurable sexism in the technology industry. So that is almost certainly a factor in the way that Title 9 had a lesser impact in this industry than in others. For whatever reason, the fights against sexism in law and medicine made progress faster than they did in ours.
When we've eliminated that as a factor for decades and there is still a trend in favor of one sex, then we have interesting data. Until then, James Damore's arguments are shots in the dark.
There are problem thousands or tens of thousands of reasonable white guys here, liberal or conservative.
But the whole debate over what James Damore wrote has seen the lunatic fringe come out of the woodwork to insult anyone criticizing what he wrote on any grounds, and attacking women in general.
I'm open to the possibility that some of what he wrote is correct. But I don't expect much of an intelligent debate on the subject here... or on 4chan, or on Twitter or Reddit.
If you go back far enough, women weren't permitted to be veterinarians. So they had a minority position in the field due to sexism.
Since it isn't even a hundred years since women gained the right to vote in most of the world, I'd say it's too early to say sexism is a solved problem. It's entirely possible women will become the majority of engineers naturally (i.e. without diversification programs and other boosts) if sexism is eradicated.
It only makes sense to focus on jobs with high pay, right? Men don't work in daycare as often as women, either - but I've never seen a daycare employee driving around in a Mercedes, either.
Running a nail salon business is different. That can be lot more profitable than working in one.
I'm not saying women definitely should be a half or even a third of engineers. But I think as long as there is still measurable sexism in the industry, we're comparing two uneven things - men who choose to be engineers and don't deal with sexism at work, and women who choose to be engineers or who might choose to be engineers and some non-zero attrition rate in education and in their career due to sexism. When we've had a hundred years of sexism-free society and women are still 20% or less of engineers, then we can declare that the difference is innate to the sexes and stop studying it.
I'm not saying all men in the industry are treated fairly. I'm just saying that if women are more likely to be mistreated specifically because of their gender and unrelated to all other factors, it will cause more problems for them on average than men experience.
But we have a smoke screen around neuroticism. If you're mistreated on your job - ignored, shouted down, harassed, sexually harassed, passed over for fairly earned promotions - you're more likely to develop nervous problems.
So Damore's argument that neuroticism is a factor implicitly assumes that sexism is a completely solved issue in the industry. If he's wrong - and I would contend he is - then he's confusing an effect with a cause.
The same argument could be made to keep women out of law and medicine. Until Title 9 laws in the US in 1972, women were less than 10% of the students for either profession and even less of the practicing professionals. In 1974 they were 22% of the students. Today they're 50%.
If sexism wasn't "solved" in law and medicine until the last few decades, why is tech any different?
Maybe you should post the question to a website with fewer trolls. I suggest 4chan.
So what? Some jackass can make it against their religion for whites to sell services to blacks, and then deny blacks their products. Are you okay with that?
Religious freedom has to have limits. I can say my religion requires me to light fires all the time, but that doesn't mean I should be able to commit arson and get away with it.
So you can hate gays all you want on your personal property in your private time. Once you open a business, you give them the same customer services as any other paying customer.
Careful there - if we push the "businesses should be free to do business with whom they wish", that lets GoDaddy evict this site but it also lets other businesses put up the old signs, "No service for colored folk" and "No Jews allowed".
To be clear, I hate these racists and what they stand for, and I hate what they say, and I have no interest in their sites. But I think any hosting service had better make crystal clear what is and is not permitted in their terms of use and then stick to it. The anti-discrimination, freedom of speech laws have to protect everyone - not just the people we like.
The treatment of the cake bakers is not a problem. It's not like the cake message was, "We should see gay men bang each other in public! Add it to the flag!"
You can't turn a customer away from your auto repair shop because he's Jewish. You can't send a woman away from a medical clinic because she's black. How is this any different?
Most of those jobs are going away regardless. If they don't head to South America or Asia today they're going to be replaced by automation tomorrow. Neither the liberals nor the conservatives have a real solution. But the racists are taking advantage of the frustration and anger in the meanwhile.
I've seen BLM and P (as in Police) LM stickers on the same cars and on signs in the same yards - and that's cars and yards owned by white people, black people, Indians, Hispanics, whatever.
Somebody call me when you see a BLM and pro KKK bumper stickers on the same car.
Separately, Linux works fine for me as long as I'm not riding the cutting edge. If I want the latest Java JDK 9 (back when it was in alpha state), or Wine, or mesalib, I will have headaches. If I'm just installing it and using packages, and the only updates I do are fixes and security updates, then it's a pleasant existence.
Gentoo is fantastic, enjoy. I usually run Ubuntu derivatives, though I've been playing with GuixSD recently. I don't have any problems with systemd at home or at work, but GuixSD doesn't use systemd either.
To be fair to most Apple or Microsoft customers, they don't even consciously realize the walled garden exists. That makes it harder for them to understand why it's bad.
The Playstation 4 in my living room has enough compute power to play all sorts of fancy 3D games and playback Blu Rays. But I can't install Kodi on it to stream my (legal, if anyone cars) ripped movie collection. This makes me furious. My wife and kids don't care. I can't even convince my own family that proprietary software and DRM is a great evil, let alone the average person.
If Toyota told the customers "We won't fix any car more than three years old and we've even put safeguards in place to make it difficult or even illegal for anyone else to fix it" there would be a revolt because buyers are accustomed to long service lives for cars. But Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola, etc... do that with their smart phones and people complain about the money they're spending but just take for granted that this year's $300 or $500 or $700 phone is 2020's trash. the walled gardens are everywhere, and it's our job to show them to the public. We're failing.
It doesn't have to be. There was nothing stopping Microsoft or anyone else from implementing the auto save and edit history in Google Docs. I do my personal document writing on Etherpad (an open source equivalent to Google Docs) that I host myself for the same reason.
Making people save manually made sense when floppies were the dominant form of storage. Since then, it's a design failure to make it something end users need to understand.
I hate Apple, but this is why Apple has rabid fans and Microsoft generally doesn't. Apple does a better job at sweating the details. Not a perfect job. Not a great job. Not a good enough job to justify the high prices. But much better than Microsoft. And it pays them back in rabid fan loyalty.
Me, I'm a Linux geek. Stuff breaks a lot. But I'll take a hundred headaches from a global network of loosely connected volunteers over five headaches from a hundred billion dollar mega-corporation.
Thanks, I wish I had known that. I would have led with it in my responses.
A white guy hasn't won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette since 2015 or Best Novel since 2013! Conspiracy!!!!!11111
The Guild Navigators used the spice to plot ship courses instead of computer calculations or even manual calculations. I don't care how you label it, that's magic to see the future.
But again, The Goblin Reservation all of the way back in the 1970s was a nominee with magic. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has magic. The Hugos have magic, get over.
Again, look at the list of winners and nominees for the Hugo Awards through time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Wheel of Time - tons of pure fantasy. As far back as 1968 when "The Goblin Reservation" was nominated, fantasy was allowed.
I would disagree with that, but it doesn't matter. Other Hugo winners have magic. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The Graveyard Book. Redshirts is pure fantasy. Three of the five nominees last year were fantasy: The Fifth Age (which one), The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass, and Uprooted.
The Expanse is an awesome book series. I haven't seen the television show yet. Obelisk Gate is spectacular sci fi, period. The Vorkosigan Saga is spectacular sci fi, period.
I've read books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Jordan, George RR Martin, Brent Weeks, Jim Butcher, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Anne McCaffrey, David Brin, Steven Erikson, Raymond Feist, Patrick Rothfuss, Kevin Hearne, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Orson Scott Card, Robert Howard, Neal Stephenson, Elizabeth Moon, JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi, Fritz Leiber, Philip K Dick, and Walter M. Miller Jr. Most of them are Hugo Award nominees or winners. I would easily rank NK Jemisin (author of the Hugo winner The Obelisk Gate) and Lois McMaster Bujold (author of the Hugo winner The Vorkosigan Saga) with the very best among them.