Part of being a male is abusing your male companions.
That's not part of "being male", that's part of "being stupid".
When your work force expands out to include key international and female workers, you find out very quickly how stupid that is. If your organization tolerates that kind of redneck white male culture as the norm, then you are losing out on the some of the best and brightest in the industry.
They think these apply to every single person out there in every single circumstance when it is simply not true.
Generalization are just that: generalizations. No one thinks these lists apply to everyone in every situation, but they are still (generally) true. Most of the points on the Male Privilege checklist come directly from Women's Studies research with some empirical evidence of their truthfulness.
"Neo-cons think the war in Iraq is a success" is also a generalization that is true of many but not all people who call themselves neo-conservatives.
If you feel that way I feel really bad for you but that is not a problem with males or society.
I seriously doubt you "feel really bad for me". I certainly don't, not after having spent some time opening my eyes to the larger world around me. My own cognitive dissonance has gone to nearly zero.
That is a problem with you and you alone.
No, it's not. Pretending that we do not live deeply embedded within a complex social fabric does not make that fabric cease to exist. And telling a male that actually listening to females and coming to understand some of the issues they face makes it a problem with HIM is called divide and conquer and puts you squarely in the camp of "la la la I'm not listening!"
Life in America isn't cushy for everyone, but being white and male in the long run has helped far more than it has hurt. We white males can actually go through life and experience mostly a meritocracy, but we are the only demographic in America that this is true for. When a black male applies for a housing loan, they are still more likely to be denied than a white male with a comparable credit score. When a young white female is interviewing for a job, cleverly-veiled questions designed to determine the likelihood of her getting pregnant are a very common occurrence. We white males rarely face these particular kinds of being undermined so we can pretend that it doesn't happen, or that each time it happens it is an isolated case, or that even if it happens a lot WE don't do it so it isn't a problem with us, or that even if it happens a lot and we catch ourselves doing it too there really isn't anything else we can do in each of those situations. But none those excuses make the direct firsthand reports from women and blacks not true, nor the studies that back up what they see in their daily lives.
This IS a problem with society in general. (Back on topic.) Until a significant portion of male IT nerds figure out how to see the social fabric around them and work to change it there will be far fewer women in IT, period.
Congratulations! You just proved why nothing should be run for-profit!
Which is PRECISELY the entire point of a competitive free market! A company will compete on efficiencies attempting to squeeze profit from the market, but their competitors will come in later and undercut their prices. In a perfect market with perfect information, profit is SUPPOSED to go to zero.
I don't have time to debate each point in the Male Privilege Checklist, though it looks like you misnumbered some of the ones you disagree with (the list stops at 45). However, there are 400 posts on that page that discuss many of them, including the point about car insurance with respect to males under 25 years old. Granted the thread is three years old, I think most of the points are justified there.
Several years ago I might have looked at that list and found counterexamples for every point, and I probably would have been able for over half, but then again I worked in a nice corporate environment that stressed work/family balance and had a rather diverse team. Since then I moved to the semi-rural South where nearly every single point is reinforced at least once a week. Representative comments: "That's a woman driver for you!" "Look at HP to see what happens when women become CEOs." "Well, she got hired because she's a woman."
You will disagree with many of my counts because I count the points from the feminist perspective. "14) Anytime I do well in business, the media will look at me as some messiah because I'm a woman. Everyone will be impressed." counts as a negative thing, not a positive. It means that when a female fails, she fails her entire gender too. The Female Checklist author thinks that this is a female privilege, but it's actually an obligation. Nonetheless, the general gist is still there even if we move a few points around categories: women are given some advantages in dating, but not when it comes to money or time.
No, the female points out that males are more likely to encounter their own sex. That says nothing about their "political and economic power".
NO, that says EVERYTHING about political and ecomonic power! If 86% of Representatives, 84% of Senators, and 98% of Fortune-1000 CEOs are male, that means males have more power than females! Duh!
No, both lists are not identical. They are radically different in the domains that they highlight.
The Male Checklist:
8 items directly relate to males having more political and economic power as a class than females.
1 items relate to private relationships in which being male provides an edge.
2 items allow a male to act masculine and not be penalized for it on the job.
4 items allow a male to spend less time on non-paid work than females.
3 items allow males to receive praise for doing work expected of females.
9 items permit males greater control of their social presentation than females.
6 items account for biological differences between male and female in which being male permits greater social flexibility or political power.
2 items allow males to be victims of sexual assault less than females.
The Female Checklist:
8 items directly relate to females having more political and economic power as a class than males.
6 items relate to private relationships in which being female provides an edge.
0 items allow a female to act feminine and not be penalized for it on the job.
1 items allow a female to spend less time on non-paid work than males.
0 items allow females to receive praise for doing work expected of males.
3 items permit females greater control of their social presentation than males.
1 items account for biological differences between male and female in which being female permits greater social flexibility or political power.
0 items allow females to be victims of sexual assault less than males.
Granted, they have a different number of points and clearly the Male Checklist with more points was thought about for a much longer time. However, in general the Female Checklist has a number of items that are either not true in general (#2, 3, 10, 13, 15, 19) or can be interpreted in precisely the opposite fashion, e.g. #28 "... complete strangers... [will] do little extra things to try and make me feel better" is listed as #43 on the Male Checklist as a negative and not positive experience for the female. Other examples of this include #14, 17, 18, and 20. On the other side, the Male Checklist also includes non-biological social obligations that are only expected of females, e.g. #33 ("I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I dont change my name.").
Also, notice that the Female Checklist is focused much more on interpersonal male/female relationships than money, time, political power, and social flexibility. It is also more heteronormative: many of the points are only true (sometimes) when a female is married to or dating a male. Its focus reiterates the point that a female's main role is to be in a relationship with a male. Also, it labels as "female privilege" items that allow a female to get away with aggressive/violent (and generally illegal) behavior (#4, 5, 6, 7); this in an implicit acceptance that the same acts -- even though illegal -- are *expected* of males, i.e. it directly assumes that males are incapable as a class of not being aggressive towards females. This is an example of the dark mirror of sexism: men are forced to be the oppressors in the system whether they want to be or not.
In fact, contrasting the two lists is a useful exercise in noting the workings of male privilege. The female points out that males have greater public social flexibility and greater outright political and economic power; the male response it that none of that matters because females can exert greater control in their private dating/marriage relationships.
Hmmm.... "made differently", "equal, but different", "code of honor", "respect": have you been reading Emerson Eggerichs recently?
I think that overall men in IT/science/engineering still need more experience in understanding women than the other way around, because the "differences" between men and women aren't so much either/or as two points on a continuum. Men will personalize negative information too if it is about something they hold dear -- witness how quickly "debates" on/. become insult-fests. Men can also see social nuance as clearly as women when it comes from their manager discussing job responsibilities or compensation. I think in the end both men and women need to be able to see the whole spectrum and use whichever communication method best works for the environment.
I really like the liberal feminist project of the last 50 years. Nearly every combination of human social interaction has been debated, and slowly consensus has built about how to be a fully realized non-self-hating person distinct from the social fabric around us all. I think in another 50 years it will be easy for someone to grow up lacking a lot of the cognitive dissonance we are used to facing through adolescence, and such a person will be able to choose their own style of behavior and dress and still fit in. Men may decide to dress in a more sexualized fashion and still be accepted; women who dress in jeans and loose T-shirts will still be able to be seen as sexual beings.
"You have no paid experience and you've been doing this for free. Why should we pay you much more than minimum wage yet we have 2500 other resumes here from other experienced free coders who will take the scraps we throw at them?"
Really? Where have you heard this?
I find in my circles that my Linux experience is a huge plus. Currently I do research on large clustered "supercomputers" and routinely write little snippets to transform data as I need to; before this was an embedded system running Linux; before that I was the main Linux person on a Java J2EE team who ensured that the product would actually run on customer's large systems (it's amazing how many Windows/Mac developers write code that breaks on case-sensitive filesystems).
I don't know where you go that all they talk about is TV, but I'd like to know -- so I can avoid it!
We currently live in the Bryan/College Station area of Texas (I am pursuing graduate studies at Texas A&M). There is no rock climbing in this prairie area and very few trails to race on, not that I could because I am still losing my excess weight. The weather tends to be between annoyingly warm and stifling hot, and the very few days in the year under 70 degrees outside tend to be too rainy to be outdoors. Most people talk TV, the rest tend to talk evangelical church, conservative politics, A&M sports, and NASCAR.
We don't know where we will live next, but it will have to have much better weather and community planning than this. We used to live in RTP, North Carolina, where there were plenty of greenways to walk/ride and enough urban "stuff" to do that we could sort of blend in a bit better. But even there was still mostly dominated by TV talk.
As my wife and I discovered four years ago, No TV == Much Better Life in general. More time to be with each other, more exercise for ourselves, etc.
However, it's also a much lonelier life here in America. It makes it hard to make friends when people talk about pop culture and you return a blank stare. (People with TV often have no idea how much of their conversation begins to revolve around what they see on, even to the point of talking about the advertisements!?)
The result is I can use a 486/66 for my reverse logfile cache now for over 60 million entries per day. If I can't use an mmap'd file (because my IP addresses are now larger than my entire hard disk), I'd need a database again, and I'm afraid I've grown since then.
Are you doing bulk reverse IP mapping, perhaps for web analytics?
You can't expect Apple to QA the laptop with every possible after-market modification out there-- as sold, the iBook works fine.
Sure I can. My Toshiba Satellite will drop power if the CPU temperature exceeds 85 degrees C. That saved its life on two occasions when dust had collected in the CPU heatsink.
The only time it is OK for software to permanently kill hardware is when one is flashing a new firmware image, and even then it's considered a bit poor not to have some kind of recovery option.
Who cares *which* crappy software is bricking the hardware? Would you care less if a virus/worm/trojan targeting OSX managed to kill your system?
The point is that if the hardware is lacking its own safeguards that's the hardware's fault. We didn't blame the software from Microsoft, Novell, Linux, or IBM for the Pentium F00F bug, we blamed Intel because it was a hardware problem.
My Toshiba laptop has a problem with overheating if there is too much dust collected around the CPU heat sink, but at 85 degrees C it shuts down rather than stays running to fry the CPU.
There's no way a software product that could potentially harm hardware should ever be available for download by anybody. It's a huge mark against Ubuntu that they didn't even do this very basic piece of testing before release.
There's no way hardware that can be permanently damaged by crappy software should even get past QA to be sold. It's a huge mark against Apple if they do so.
You chose to take medicine whose side effect was a breach in the laws of thermodynamics?
No, I chose medicine that altered my metabolism to make it more thermodynamically efficient such that the (not ideal, but not that bad either) amounts food I had been eating for years with no weight gain suddenly started rapid weight gain of about 1-2 pounds/week. Even switching to Atkins diet (~1200 calories/day) and verifying that I was in ketosis only stopped the gain but did not reduce the weight. Atkins dieters can tell you that that is a bit unusual.
I don't know how often these kind of events happen for you, but for most people they are a rare enough occurance that they can just go and eat whatever they want for that one afternoon or whatever and it's not going to make them fat.
For someone who needs to lose 50+ pounds, even just one event like this a month can slow down their weight loss by 25-50% . If several of them fall in the same season (e.g. summer) it could realistically mean flatlining for 3-4 months at a time.
The more insidious events are the frequents outings with friends that were discussed pretty well here.
Uh, no, I just happen to have a few black friends in middle-class jobs, I read a bit about white privilege and anti-racism, and I learned how to open my fucking eyes and notice it when it happens.
Are you now going to chastise me because I'm white and cannot possibly relate or because I'm fat and have no opinion that matters?
Order a salad or an appetizer for your meal. At the pot-luck, get smaller portions of each thing you really want, and fruit or something for dessert. If you look you can find it.
In my case -- and I would expect for many others -- I cannot be surrounded by bad food and not have a little here, a little there, and before I know it consume 600+ calories. I can't have Oreos in the house or they'll be gone within a day. Yes, I could probably master some special self-discipline techniques, but it is far easier for me to simply keep the crap out of the house and avoid fooding with friends and family.
Unfortunately, friends and family only plan their activities around food. The thin ones either don't understand why one meal can hose a whole week or why I "can't just eat a little" when everyone else is eating a lot; the fat ones have already failed in their diets and essentially would like me to fail too because it would make them feel better.
If they're real friends, your physical appearance won't matter to them and they'll treat you the same.
This is a tangent but it matters. The thing is, my friends ARE "real friends" but they DO treat me a little differently, they don't really see it and couldn't do much about it anyway even if they did. It's partly an inversion of the "pretty people get more" thing (see http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/careerbytes /CBArticle.aspx?articleID=312 ) and partly the fact that I'm the odd one out with special issues regarding food and exercise. I'm not trying to sound whiny, it's simply the truth.
Why do people insist on pointing to the incredibly rare cases as an excuse for the majority?!
I don't really care about the reasons for the majority, I just care about me. I don't get a chance to explain my situation to people I meet, and they have no reason not to think that I am just another lazy and undisciplined fat person.
"Oh, and be listened to as attentively as the thin person next to you. Or be taken as seriously at a job interview as the next thin person."
Bullshit! I've never seen this happen. Ever. Fat, white people are given the exact same respect that any other white person is. Minorities are already discriminated against, and being a fat minority can make things worse, but fat white men are completely tolerated.
Who said "fat white man"? I said "fat": do you yourself give fat women the same personal attention as thin women? I've been on both sides and seen it firsthand, don't tell me that my direct experiences somehow never happened. It's subtle, but it's always there.
It becomes a challenge of willpower, and nothing else.
Damn right. And part of that means learning your own limitations and the limitations of society around you. Psychology is everything in weight loss. Head on over to sparkpeople.com and read the forums of people who are successful at dropping 40+ pounds.
Losing weight is simple science: eat less, exercise more.
And do it every day for months at a stretch. Because two bad meals can ruin an entire week of effort. One trip to visit family a month, eating half of what everyone around you eats, can cut in half your progress for that month.
And above all ignoring the dozens of people you'll meet along the way who still think that you must be some kind of lazy slacker even AFTER you've lost 30 pounds.
There's an enormous difference between kicking caffeine and maintaining the discipline necessary to lose weight. I know because I kicked caffeine in one week with the help of some basic headache medicine, but losing the weight is going to take another year. Can you name even one other kind of lifestyle change that requires multiple daily against-the-social-grain actions for over a year?
Getting miffed you family members / friends aren't congratulating you at every turn? Tough.
Well I'm glad my contact with you is limited to the Internet. (You're an asshole BTW.) I don't need congratulations at every turn, I'd just like to be able to visit family and friends without them offering me bad food and getting pissed at me when I turn it down. Our whole notion of being welcoming involves food, and when a guest can't participate in the hospitality they are the one who comes out looking rude, not the host.
I certinaly don't expect a pat on the back every time I go to the gym.
With an attitude like that I'd be surprised if anyone ever offered you one anyway.
If you can get fat without eating too much because of genes, then those genes are breaking the laws of thermodynamics. You can't get fat if calorie intake >> calorie expenditure.
You most certainly can if the overall thermodynamic efficiency of your digestive system is above average. I've heard figures before that the body only converts 25-35% of the available energy in food to ATP; having a body with 38% efficiency might mean being able to live on less than 1200 calories/day (equivalent to 4 2-cup bowls of cereal and milk or 1 fast-food serving of American Chinese food) yet still weigh 300 pounds.
Being fat is a choice. You choose to start the day with bacon and eggs, you choose to drink soda and other high-calorie beverages, you choose to stuff those cheeseburgers into your fat face. You choose not to get up off your ass and get some exercise.
I didn't really "choose" to be fat. I did choose to take medicine whose side effect was major weight gain but the alternative was death, and I'd rather get through the issue and work off the weight later than be worm food. After gaining 110 lbs, I've seen exactly how fat people live life and the work required to get that weight back off.
As a fat person, you can still vote, still have a job, still do generally "everything" you expect. Except be comfortable in airplanes, or ride some of the rollercoasters at the amusement park. Oh, and be listened to as attentively as the thin person next to you. Or be taken as seriously at a job interview as the next thin person. It's subtle but real, and my thin friends don't see it at all. In that way it is similar to being a middle-class black person at a white-collar job.
(Of course the "oppression" isn't nearly as bad as actual black middle class experience these days. But it mirrors the lighter end of it, and for many middle-class white people it's the closest they'll come to it. See Ellis Cose's excellent book "The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Do Prosperous Blacks Still Have the Blues?" for good discussion covering the entire spectrum of black oppression including the "not being taken seriously" part.)
As for losing weight, once your body has gained a huge amount of weight and kept it on for more than a few months, losing the weight becomes a real challenge. Dieting means not eating with friends and family anymore which here in America means instant social isolation. No more potlucks at church, no more barbecues, and no more food at parties. Your life is literally: work, exercise, count calories, and find individually fulfilling things to do in the 2 remaining evening hours of the day while your friends are out having a life.
Exercise also requires a lot more thinking than most people are used to. For instance, if you weigh more than 300 pounds you simply cannot run or use a stairmaster machine because you risk permanent knee injury, and you cannot really "walk" on the treadmill either as that doesn't burn enough calories to benefit you. However, you can use an elliptical trainer, stationary bike, and punching bag to kick the heart rate up. A personal heart rate monitor only costs $70 and goes a long way to ensuring the workout intensity remains high.
Losing serious amounts of weight requires the kind of dedication we normally associate with martial arts. A fat person who is seriously losing weight (and I've lost 30 of my 110 extra pounds so far) needs to know as much about fitness as an amateur bodybuilder. It requires money to buy healthier food, gym membership and/or personal training, and equipment, and it also requires enough free time to actually use those fitness resources and shop for food correctly. Finally, it requires a lot of not fucking caring about the world because even your closest family might not notice the first six months and 30 pounds and you'd better stick with it despite all the negative reinforcement around you. The world will always think I suck (because I "chose" to eat crap) until that magic moment I stop looking fat and people start seeing me as a real person again.
Having been in the fat shoes, I have a lot more sympathy for people who have little free time and money and aren't quite introverted enough to handle the social isolation.
Comparing yourselves to minorities who have actually been oppressed is sickening.
Now that's rich: here on Slashdot, the enclave of middle-class white privilege, we're finally told that minorities really are oppressed!
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
but if they don't agree, if they feel that these restrictions break the FSF's assurance that future versions of GPL would be in the same spirit as v2, then that is just tough.
Many different things happen when you decide to make your software Free Software. You don't get to keep absolute control over the features your users decide to add; you don't get to take your ball and go home if you change your mind; you don't get to be elevated to a position separate from other users. If you release your code and a team of bright engineers takes it and turns it into an abomination and a million users adopt it, you can't do anything about that. You might end up with the canonical version of your software ala Torvald's Linux kernel, or you might be the unpopular branch no one uses ala Xfree86. The point is that releasing under a Free Software license has effects far beyond DRM, patents, and whatever else crops up in a new version of the GPL. If you release under any GPL-like license, you lose control of the code's future. Any developer who doesn't understand this basically has only themselves to blame for any future regrets.
The idea that others could re-distribute your work provided they did not impose additional restrictions on the recipients is central to the GPL. FSF is effectively saying "its OK when we do it for the greater good" line.
FSF is only closing loopholes that were not thought of fifteen years ago. I consider this a beneficial feature of using their particular Free Software license. When I write code and release to others, I get pretty ticked off when third parties try to interfere with my generosity.
Are they in a position to create an uphill struggle for developers who want to stick to GPLv2? Yes.
FSF is not creating strife, they are only exposing it. Some developers don't mind DRM, some hate it with a passion, yet they've been working on each other's projects for years.
It's going to be a fight for a while as popular GPL-only libraries decide whether or not to stay "V2 or later" or move to "V3 or later", but there aren't that many of them out there. Outside the libraries, there are no other forces pushing anyone's projects to GPLv3.
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
However, you missed the bit about all the developers who followed FSF's advice about the "or later" clause and now have no choice but to allow their work to be distributed under GPLv3.
And you "missed the part" where developers who wrote their own code under the "V2 or later" clause can decide for themselves whether or not to move their own projects to "V3 or later" or whatever license they want.
Only developers who signed over their copyright to FSF are being "forced" to move to "V3 or later". Since FSF legally owns that own code, good on them for moving their code to their new license.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of being a male is abusing your male companions.
That's not part of "being male", that's part of "being stupid".
When your work force expands out to include key international and female workers, you find out very quickly how stupid that is. If your organization tolerates that kind of redneck white male culture as the norm, then you are losing out on the some of the best and brightest in the industry.
They think these apply to every single person out there in every single circumstance when it is simply not true.
Generalization are just that: generalizations. No one thinks these lists apply to everyone in every situation, but they are still (generally) true. Most of the points on the Male Privilege checklist come directly from Women's Studies research with some empirical evidence of their truthfulness.
"Neo-cons think the war in Iraq is a success" is also a generalization that is true of many but not all people who call themselves neo-conservatives.
If you feel that way I feel really bad for you but that is not a problem with males or society.
I seriously doubt you "feel really bad for me". I certainly don't, not after having spent some time opening my eyes to the larger world around me. My own cognitive dissonance has gone to nearly zero.
That is a problem with you and you alone.
No, it's not. Pretending that we do not live deeply embedded within a complex social fabric does not make that fabric cease to exist. And telling a male that actually listening to females and coming to understand some of the issues they face makes it a problem with HIM is called divide and conquer and puts you squarely in the camp of "la la la I'm not listening!"
Life in America isn't cushy for everyone, but being white and male in the long run has helped far more than it has hurt. We white males can actually go through life and experience mostly a meritocracy, but we are the only demographic in America that this is true for. When a black male applies for a housing loan, they are still more likely to be denied than a white male with a comparable credit score. When a young white female is interviewing for a job, cleverly-veiled questions designed to determine the likelihood of her getting pregnant are a very common occurrence. We white males rarely face these particular kinds of being undermined so we can pretend that it doesn't happen, or that each time it happens it is an isolated case, or that even if it happens a lot WE don't do it so it isn't a problem with us, or that even if it happens a lot and we catch ourselves doing it too there really isn't anything else we can do in each of those situations. But none those excuses make the direct firsthand reports from women and blacks not true, nor the studies that back up what they see in their daily lives.
This IS a problem with society in general. (Back on topic.) Until a significant portion of male IT nerds figure out how to see the social fabric around them and work to change it there will be far fewer women in IT, period.
Congratulations! You just proved why nothing should be run for-profit!
Which is PRECISELY the entire point of a competitive free market! A company will compete on efficiencies attempting to squeeze profit from the market, but their competitors will come in later and undercut their prices. In a perfect market with perfect information, profit is SUPPOSED to go to zero.
I don't have time to debate each point in the Male Privilege Checklist, though it looks like you misnumbered some of the ones you disagree with (the list stops at 45). However, there are 400 posts on that page that discuss many of them, including the point about car insurance with respect to males under 25 years old. Granted the thread is three years old, I think most of the points are justified there.
Several years ago I might have looked at that list and found counterexamples for every point, and I probably would have been able for over half, but then again I worked in a nice corporate environment that stressed work/family balance and had a rather diverse team. Since then I moved to the semi-rural South where nearly every single point is reinforced at least once a week. Representative comments: "That's a woman driver for you!" "Look at HP to see what happens when women become CEOs." "Well, she got hired because she's a woman."
You will disagree with many of my counts because I count the points from the feminist perspective. "14) Anytime I do well in business, the media will look at me as some messiah because I'm a woman. Everyone will be impressed." counts as a negative thing, not a positive. It means that when a female fails, she fails her entire gender too. The Female Checklist author thinks that this is a female privilege, but it's actually an obligation. Nonetheless, the general gist is still there even if we move a few points around categories: women are given some advantages in dating, but not when it comes to money or time.
No, the female points out that males are more likely to encounter their own sex. That says nothing about their "political and economic power".
NO, that says EVERYTHING about political and ecomonic power! If 86% of Representatives, 84% of Senators, and 98% of Fortune-1000 CEOs are male, that means males have more power than females! Duh!
The Male Checklist:
- 8 items directly relate to males having more political and economic power as a class than females.
- 1 items relate to private relationships in which being male provides an edge.
- 2 items allow a male to act masculine and not be penalized for it on the job.
- 4 items allow a male to spend less time on non-paid work than females.
- 3 items allow males to receive praise for doing work expected of females.
- 9 items permit males greater control of their social presentation than females.
- 6 items account for biological differences between male and female in which being male permits greater social flexibility or political power.
- 2 items allow males to be victims of sexual assault less than females.
The Female Checklist:- 8 items directly relate to females having more political and economic power as a class than males.
- 6 items relate to private relationships in which being female provides an edge.
- 0 items allow a female to act feminine and not be penalized for it on the job.
- 1 items allow a female to spend less time on non-paid work than males.
- 0 items allow females to receive praise for doing work expected of males.
- 3 items permit females greater control of their social presentation than males.
- 1 items account for biological differences between male and female in which being female permits greater social flexibility or political power.
- 0 items allow females to be victims of sexual assault less than males.
Granted, they have a different number of points and clearly the Male Checklist with more points was thought about for a much longer time. However, in general the Female Checklist has a number of items that are either not true in general (#2, 3, 10, 13, 15, 19) or can be interpreted in precisely the opposite fashion, e.g. #28 "... complete strangersAlso, notice that the Female Checklist is focused much more on interpersonal male/female relationships than money, time, political power, and social flexibility. It is also more heteronormative: many of the points are only true (sometimes) when a female is married to or dating a male. Its focus reiterates the point that a female's main role is to be in a relationship with a male. Also, it labels as "female privilege" items that allow a female to get away with aggressive/violent (and generally illegal) behavior (#4, 5, 6, 7); this in an implicit acceptance that the same acts -- even though illegal -- are *expected* of males, i.e. it directly assumes that males are incapable as a class of not being aggressive towards females. This is an example of the dark mirror of sexism: men are forced to be the oppressors in the system whether they want to be or not.
In fact, contrasting the two lists is a useful exercise in noting the workings of male privilege. The female points out that males have greater public social flexibility and greater outright political and economic power; the male response it that none of that matters because females can exert greater control in their private dating/marriage relationships.
Excellent! Where can we find those?
t he-male-privilege-checklist/
a cking.html , but tonight the server is down so try this instead: http://justworld.typepad.com/perspectives/2005/11/ peggy_mcintoshs.html .
How about the Internet? Start with the "Male Privilege Checklist": http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2004/09/15/
Then start reading in the feminist blogosphere, two decent entry points into it are http://pandagon.blogsome.com/ and http://feministing.com/ .
Then begin looking up "white privilege" and "anti-racism", since the strategies are nearly identical between both problem domains. Google for the excellent essay "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", normally at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unp
After some time it might start making sense.
Hmmm.... "made differently", "equal, but different", "code of honor", "respect": have you been reading Emerson Eggerichs recently?
/. become insult-fests. Men can also see social nuance as clearly as women when it comes from their manager discussing job responsibilities or compensation. I think in the end both men and women need to be able to see the whole spectrum and use whichever communication method best works for the environment.
I think that overall men in IT/science/engineering still need more experience in understanding women than the other way around, because the "differences" between men and women aren't so much either/or as two points on a continuum. Men will personalize negative information too if it is about something they hold dear -- witness how quickly "debates" on
I really like the liberal feminist project of the last 50 years. Nearly every combination of human social interaction has been debated, and slowly consensus has built about how to be a fully realized non-self-hating person distinct from the social fabric around us all. I think in another 50 years it will be easy for someone to grow up lacking a lot of the cognitive dissonance we are used to facing through adolescence, and such a person will be able to choose their own style of behavior and dress and still fit in. Men may decide to dress in a more sexualized fashion and still be accepted; women who dress in jeans and loose T-shirts will still be able to be seen as sexual beings.
Anyway, back to sleep for me...
"You have no paid experience and you've been doing this for free. Why should we pay you much more than minimum wage yet we have 2500 other resumes here from other experienced free coders who will take the scraps we throw at them?"
Really? Where have you heard this?
I find in my circles that my Linux experience is a huge plus. Currently I do research on large clustered "supercomputers" and routinely write little snippets to transform data as I need to; before this was an embedded system running Linux; before that I was the main Linux person on a Java J2EE team who ensured that the product would actually run on customer's large systems (it's amazing how many Windows/Mac developers write code that breaks on case-sensitive filesystems).
it also runs POSIX software
Does it have select(), poll(), fork(), and termios, or would I have to use Cygwin to get that?
I don't know where you go that all they talk about is TV, but I'd like to know -- so I can avoid it!
We currently live in the Bryan/College Station area of Texas (I am pursuing graduate studies at Texas A&M). There is no rock climbing in this prairie area and very few trails to race on, not that I could because I am still losing my excess weight. The weather tends to be between annoyingly warm and stifling hot, and the very few days in the year under 70 degrees outside tend to be too rainy to be outdoors. Most people talk TV, the rest tend to talk evangelical church, conservative politics, A&M sports, and NASCAR.
We don't know where we will live next, but it will have to have much better weather and community planning than this. We used to live in RTP, North Carolina, where there were plenty of greenways to walk/ride and enough urban "stuff" to do that we could sort of blend in a bit better. But even there was still mostly dominated by TV talk.
Unplug the TV.
As my wife and I discovered four years ago, No TV == Much Better Life in general. More time to be with each other, more exercise for ourselves, etc.
However, it's also a much lonelier life here in America. It makes it hard to make friends when people talk about pop culture and you return a blank stare. (People with TV often have no idea how much of their conversation begins to revolve around what they see on, even to the point of talking about the advertisements!?)
The result is I can use a 486/66 for my reverse logfile cache now for over 60 million entries per day. If I can't use an mmap'd file (because my IP addresses are now larger than my entire hard disk), I'd need a database again, and I'm afraid I've grown since then.
Are you doing bulk reverse IP mapping, perhaps for web analytics?
You can't expect Apple to QA the laptop with every possible after-market modification out there-- as sold, the iBook works fine.
Sure I can. My Toshiba Satellite will drop power if the CPU temperature exceeds 85 degrees C. That saved its life on two occasions when dust had collected in the CPU heatsink.
The only time it is OK for software to permanently kill hardware is when one is flashing a new firmware image, and even then it's considered a bit poor not to have some kind of recovery option.
Who cares *which* crappy software is bricking the hardware? Would you care less if a virus/worm/trojan targeting OSX managed to kill your system?
The point is that if the hardware is lacking its own safeguards that's the hardware's fault. We didn't blame the software from Microsoft, Novell, Linux, or IBM for the Pentium F00F bug, we blamed Intel because it was a hardware problem.
My Toshiba laptop has a problem with overheating if there is too much dust collected around the CPU heat sink, but at 85 degrees C it shuts down rather than stays running to fry the CPU.
There's no way a software product that could potentially harm hardware should ever be available for download by anybody. It's a huge mark against Ubuntu that they didn't even do this very basic piece of testing before release.
There's no way hardware that can be permanently damaged by crappy software should even get past QA to be sold. It's a huge mark against Apple if they do so.
You chose to take medicine whose side effect was a breach in the laws of thermodynamics?
No, I chose medicine that altered my metabolism to make it more thermodynamically efficient such that the (not ideal, but not that bad either) amounts food I had been eating for years with no weight gain suddenly started rapid weight gain of about 1-2 pounds/week. Even switching to Atkins diet (~1200 calories/day) and verifying that I was in ketosis only stopped the gain but did not reduce the weight. Atkins dieters can tell you that that is a bit unusual.
I don't know how often these kind of events happen for you, but for most people they are a rare enough occurance that they can just go and eat whatever they want for that one afternoon or whatever and it's not going to make them fat.
For someone who needs to lose 50+ pounds, even just one event like this a month can slow down their weight loss by 25-50% . If several of them fall in the same season (e.g. summer) it could realistically mean flatlining for 3-4 months at a time.
The more insidious events are the frequents outings with friends that were discussed pretty well here.
What, did you try being black?
Uh, no, I just happen to have a few black friends in middle-class jobs, I read a bit about white privilege and anti-racism, and I learned how to open my fucking eyes and notice it when it happens.
Are you now going to chastise me because I'm white and cannot possibly relate or because I'm fat and have no opinion that matters?
Order a salad or an appetizer for your meal. At the pot-luck, get smaller portions of each thing you really want, and fruit or something for dessert. If you look you can find it.
s /CBArticle.aspx?articleID=312 ) and partly the fact that I'm the odd one out with special issues regarding food and exercise. I'm not trying to sound whiny, it's simply the truth.
In my case -- and I would expect for many others -- I cannot be surrounded by bad food and not have a little here, a little there, and before I know it consume 600+ calories. I can't have Oreos in the house or they'll be gone within a day. Yes, I could probably master some special self-discipline techniques, but it is far easier for me to simply keep the crap out of the house and avoid fooding with friends and family.
Unfortunately, friends and family only plan their activities around food. The thin ones either don't understand why one meal can hose a whole week or why I "can't just eat a little" when everyone else is eating a lot; the fat ones have already failed in their diets and essentially would like me to fail too because it would make them feel better.
If they're real friends, your physical appearance won't matter to them and they'll treat you the same.
This is a tangent but it matters. The thing is, my friends ARE "real friends" but they DO treat me a little differently, they don't really see it and couldn't do much about it anyway even if they did. It's partly an inversion of the "pretty people get more" thing (see http://www.careerbuilder.com/JobSeeker/careerbyte
Thanks for the kudos, though.
Why do people insist on pointing to the incredibly rare cases as an excuse for the majority?!
I don't really care about the reasons for the majority, I just care about me. I don't get a chance to explain my situation to people I meet, and they have no reason not to think that I am just another lazy and undisciplined fat person.
"Oh, and be listened to as attentively as the thin person next to you. Or be taken as seriously at a job interview as the next thin person."
Bullshit! I've never seen this happen. Ever. Fat, white people are given the exact same respect that any other white person is. Minorities are already discriminated against, and being a fat minority can make things worse, but fat white men are completely tolerated.
Who said "fat white man"? I said "fat": do you yourself give fat women the same personal attention as thin women? I've been on both sides and seen it firsthand, don't tell me that my direct experiences somehow never happened. It's subtle, but it's always there.
It becomes a challenge of willpower, and nothing else.
Damn right. And part of that means learning your own limitations and the limitations of society around you. Psychology is everything in weight loss. Head on over to sparkpeople.com and read the forums of people who are successful at dropping 40+ pounds.
Losing weight is simple science: eat less, exercise more.
And do it every day for months at a stretch. Because two bad meals can ruin an entire week of effort. One trip to visit family a month, eating half of what everyone around you eats, can cut in half your progress for that month.
And above all ignoring the dozens of people you'll meet along the way who still think that you must be some kind of lazy slacker even AFTER you've lost 30 pounds.
There's an enormous difference between kicking caffeine and maintaining the discipline necessary to lose weight. I know because I kicked caffeine in one week with the help of some basic headache medicine, but losing the weight is going to take another year. Can you name even one other kind of lifestyle change that requires multiple daily against-the-social-grain actions for over a year?
Getting miffed you family members / friends aren't congratulating you at every turn? Tough.
Well I'm glad my contact with you is limited to the Internet. (You're an asshole BTW.) I don't need congratulations at every turn, I'd just like to be able to visit family and friends without them offering me bad food and getting pissed at me when I turn it down. Our whole notion of being welcoming involves food, and when a guest can't participate in the hospitality they are the one who comes out looking rude, not the host.
I certinaly don't expect a pat on the back every time I go to the gym.
With an attitude like that I'd be surprised if anyone ever offered you one anyway.
If you can get fat without eating too much because of genes, then those genes are breaking the laws of thermodynamics. You can't get fat if calorie intake >> calorie expenditure.
/ 15 . Note that this is an actual paper from actual PhD biochemists discussing differing levels of thermodynamic efficiency and diets.
You most certainly can if the overall thermodynamic efficiency of your digestive system is above average. I've heard figures before that the body only converts 25-35% of the available energy in food to ATP; having a body with 38% efficiency might mean being able to live on less than 1200 calories/day (equivalent to 4 2-cup bowls of cereal and milk or 1 fast-food serving of American Chinese food) yet still weigh 300 pounds.
See here for more: http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/1/1
Being fat is a choice. You choose to start the day with bacon and eggs, you choose to drink soda and other high-calorie beverages, you choose to stuff those cheeseburgers into your fat face. You choose not to get up off your ass and get some exercise.
I didn't really "choose" to be fat. I did choose to take medicine whose side effect was major weight gain but the alternative was death, and I'd rather get through the issue and work off the weight later than be worm food. After gaining 110 lbs, I've seen exactly how fat people live life and the work required to get that weight back off.
As a fat person, you can still vote, still have a job, still do generally "everything" you expect. Except be comfortable in airplanes, or ride some of the rollercoasters at the amusement park. Oh, and be listened to as attentively as the thin person next to you. Or be taken as seriously at a job interview as the next thin person. It's subtle but real, and my thin friends don't see it at all. In that way it is similar to being a middle-class black person at a white-collar job.
(Of course the "oppression" isn't nearly as bad as actual black middle class experience these days. But it mirrors the lighter end of it, and for many middle-class white people it's the closest they'll come to it. See Ellis Cose's excellent book "The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Do Prosperous Blacks Still Have the Blues?" for good discussion covering the entire spectrum of black oppression including the "not being taken seriously" part.)
As for losing weight, once your body has gained a huge amount of weight and kept it on for more than a few months, losing the weight becomes a real challenge. Dieting means not eating with friends and family anymore which here in America means instant social isolation. No more potlucks at church, no more barbecues, and no more food at parties. Your life is literally: work, exercise, count calories, and find individually fulfilling things to do in the 2 remaining evening hours of the day while your friends are out having a life.
Exercise also requires a lot more thinking than most people are used to. For instance, if you weigh more than 300 pounds you simply cannot run or use a stairmaster machine because you risk permanent knee injury, and you cannot really "walk" on the treadmill either as that doesn't burn enough calories to benefit you. However, you can use an elliptical trainer, stationary bike, and punching bag to kick the heart rate up. A personal heart rate monitor only costs $70 and goes a long way to ensuring the workout intensity remains high.
Losing serious amounts of weight requires the kind of dedication we normally associate with martial arts. A fat person who is seriously losing weight (and I've lost 30 of my 110 extra pounds so far) needs to know as much about fitness as an amateur bodybuilder. It requires money to buy healthier food, gym membership and/or personal training, and equipment, and it also requires enough free time to actually use those fitness resources and shop for food correctly. Finally, it requires a lot of not fucking caring about the world because even your closest family might not notice the first six months and 30 pounds and you'd better stick with it despite all the negative reinforcement around you. The world will always think I suck (because I "chose" to eat crap) until that magic moment I stop looking fat and people start seeing me as a real person again.
Having been in the fat shoes, I have a lot more sympathy for people who have little free time and money and aren't quite introverted enough to handle the social isolation.
Comparing yourselves to minorities who have actually been oppressed is sickening.
Now that's rich: here on Slashdot, the enclave of middle-class white privilege, we're finally told that minorities really are oppressed!
but if they don't agree, if they feel that these restrictions break the FSF's assurance that future versions of GPL would be in the same spirit as v2, then that is just tough.
Many different things happen when you decide to make your software Free Software. You don't get to keep absolute control over the features your users decide to add; you don't get to take your ball and go home if you change your mind; you don't get to be elevated to a position separate from other users. If you release your code and a team of bright engineers takes it and turns it into an abomination and a million users adopt it, you can't do anything about that. You might end up with the canonical version of your software ala Torvald's Linux kernel, or you might be the unpopular branch no one uses ala Xfree86. The point is that releasing under a Free Software license has effects far beyond DRM, patents, and whatever else crops up in a new version of the GPL. If you release under any GPL-like license, you lose control of the code's future. Any developer who doesn't understand this basically has only themselves to blame for any future regrets.
The idea that others could re-distribute your work provided they did not impose additional restrictions on the recipients is central to the GPL. FSF is effectively saying "its OK when we do it for the greater good" line.
FSF is only closing loopholes that were not thought of fifteen years ago. I consider this a beneficial feature of using their particular Free Software license. When I write code and release to others, I get pretty ticked off when third parties try to interfere with my generosity.
Are they in a position to create an uphill struggle for developers who want to stick to GPLv2? Yes.
FSF is not creating strife, they are only exposing it. Some developers don't mind DRM, some hate it with a passion, yet they've been working on each other's projects for years.
It's going to be a fight for a while as popular GPL-only libraries decide whether or not to stay "V2 or later" or move to "V3 or later", but there aren't that many of them out there. Outside the libraries, there are no other forces pushing anyone's projects to GPLv3.
However, you missed the bit about all the developers who followed FSF's advice about the "or later" clause and now have no choice but to allow their work to be distributed under GPLv3.
And you "missed the part" where developers who wrote their own code under the "V2 or later" clause can decide for themselves whether or not to move their own projects to "V3 or later" or whatever license they want.
Only developers who signed over their copyright to FSF are being "forced" to move to "V3 or later". Since FSF legally owns that own code, good on them for moving their code to their new license.