I don't think anyone is shocked. The shock for me comes when the suggestion is made that we should do a little self-censorship. Yeah, sure... this is just the one taboo we have to respect... this is the only bit of sharia law we infidels have to obey, right?
Except it doesn't end there. It can never end there. I mean hell, the hadith have in the past been widely interpreted to forbid all artwork of animals and humans. They've given up that battle... for now. But rest assured, they have not forgotten. None of this barbarous shit in any of the Abrahamic faiths can ever be truly forgotten, because all sitting there in the unalterable book waiting for someone to decide to take it literally again."Respect" for religious insanity is a continuous spectrum of masochistic self-censorship trailing down into an infinite abyss. Or do you really, honestly believe that ISIS's current set of laws is the most extreme interpretation possible?
It's possible to resist the scaremongering of the right (no, neither ISIS nor any of the other bearded fuckwits are in any position to do us significant harm at this very moment ) while still acknowledging that over the long run this is a zero sum game with no possibility of common ground.
We cannot share a planet with these people. So yes, let's keep making the bastards angry.
But while you're considering US motives, please pause a moment to pay some respect for the million or so (South) Vietnamese who were killed in the war proper (the majority civilian), and for the millions who died afterwards in re-education camps, doing hard labor, escaping the country on ramshackle boats, executed for being enemies of the state, or simply starved through disastrous implementation of collectivized agriculture policies.
Sure thing, as long as we also pause and pay some respect for all of those who died at the hands of the Southern Vietnamese regime and all of those who died during the hundred years of French invasion and occupation that immediately preceded American involvement. I'm not one to wave a Viet Cong flag (unlike, say, Christopher Hitchens), but there is just a tiny bit of context here that supporters of the war either don't know or don't care about. A great many VC viewed this not as a pro-communism war, but as an anti-colonial one.
Yes, bad laws should be broken by those who disagree with them. No, I don't think this is likely to tear the nation apart with raping and murdering and pillaging. I think that listening to (to borrow some D&D terminology here) lawful-evil and lawful-neutral blowhards like yourself are much more likely to result in needless suffering and (in the long run, after the anti-fascist backlash) chaos and anarchy.
If you are incapable of forming and maintaining your own moral compass independent of the law, you are not an asset to "stable civil society".
The sad truth that no one will ever talk about is that there are way to many humans on the earth to ensure the rest of the animals are not brought to extinction. we need to cut the human population in half in the next 100 years (by breeding less, not killing people off) if we really want to sustain the earth
A few points here:
1. We are eventually going to end up with too many humans of course, but we are can manage just fine with 7 billion. The alarmist faction here is woefully misinformed--population density maps show that there is plenty of physical living space and despite the hysterical rants of organic food nutjobs--who are, whether they realize it or not, advocating a return to extremely inefficient and environmentally damaging forms of food production--the fact is food supply is not a problem at all. CO2 emissions and other forms of global pollution is trickier but the solution there ultimately has to be technological. Asking us to address this by cutting the global population down to 3.5 billion is neither realistic nor terribly effective.
2. Breeding less appears to more or less occur organically as per-capita income increases. As hard as it is to figure out how to drag rural China and India and Africa into the family of first world nations, I still think that's going to be easier than trying to convince billions of dirt poor and often illiterate people to use condoms.
3. Regarding animal extinction, again you have to consider the potential effects of increased development. One of the biggest threats to the rainforests is slash and burn farming--obviously, this is something that naturally goes away once a society becomes more developed. Illegal logging has emerged in some areas as another major threat, but this too mostly goes away once a country has advanced to the point of having an effective police force.
I'm not saying sexual comments directed towards females were unheardof (although I can't recall any instances offhand that were directed at a female that wasn't a friend joking right along with them. Admittedly I didn't go to a lot of frat parties, but then again that's not what we're talking about here.) I'm saying that, when exposed to or talking about a picture of a naked female, I never witnessed any kind of male sexual frenzy that instantly targeted nearby females with jokes or crude suggestions. If there were any jokes, the picture itself was the subject of the joke.
The meme I am questioning here is the one that says that males looking at, or perhaps even laughing about a picture of female nudity in any way creates a "hostile atmosphere". This is a phenomenon I simply do not believed I've ever witnessed. What I *can* imagine are prudes (both male and female) becoming uncomfortable with the sight of nudity, or the sight of other people making jokes about sex or nudity. Some people appear to interpret their own, personal discomfort as evidence of a hostile atmosphere directed *at them* (or at the entire female gender.) I'm just saying that people really don't work like that. If you are female and you wander down Bourbon street during Mardi Gras, sure you will encounter people asking you to do things. But that atmosphere is just a wee bit different from seeing a picture of a face in class and hearing someone else giggle and mention that the full pic is a Playboy centerfold. What is the dirty comment here: "Maybe you should pose for Playboy too?" "Oh, so that's why you got into CS?" These are extremely inane comments of a sort that I've never heard. But the poster I was replying to said he was 100% sure that ALL of the girls in the CS class would have been exposed to something like this due to Lena's cropped picture being used. I hope you will at least agree that this is, at minimum, crazed hyperbole.
Seems like it was one moronic head at one school, and some bullshit hype from the Daily Mail. Pigs are not being banned in children's books, the publishers have confirmed it.
The publishers blew a hell of a lot of hot air during which they denied blanket bans "in dictionaries" and agreed that they would never "edit a pig out of a work of historical fiction"; however:
"What we do, however, is consider avoiding references to a range of topics that could be considered sensitive – in a way that does not compromise quality, or negatively impact learning. So, for example, if animals are depicted shown in a background illustration, we would think carefully about which animals to choose."
This is covered in layers of squishy politicospeak. They will "consider", they would "think carefully", yadda yadda yadda. This is clearly obscurantist, euphamistic babble. What are their actual policies and guidelines given to authors? This is what Graun has to say, a paper not generally known for their support of Daily Mail anti-Muslim puffery:
One brief for an author seen by the Guardian warned that the book: “should also work in all areas of the world including more modest markets like the Middle East. For this reason you must be extremely cautious about cultural taboos such as young men and women cohabiting as students, or girls going shopping for shorts, or friends going out drinking.”
Doesn't mention pigs, but I think it's relevant (particularly the girls + shorts bit.) This is written evidence actually "seen by the Guardian". Other evidence re: pigs that was printed in the Guardian is testimony from the authors themselves. So yeah, the very next day the publisher comes along and smears it all over with weasel-words that admit some form of soft-ban is in place... and you interpret this as proof the entire claim against them was a right-wing fabrication. Well done!
I doubt many people would agree with your logic, since the obviously conclusion must be that any kind of pornography or images are acceptable in a classroom
No, my "logic" is that pictures of faces being deemed unacceptable because they happened to be cropped from a larger nude image is a dangerous attitude to placate. With right-wing prudes, you are catering to people who will be perfectly happy to ride this slippy slope until classical art has been censored as well (See: John Ashcroft and Lady Justice.) With left-wing prudes... well, I'm not even sure what their endgame is, but it appears to involve vilifying male sexuality and/or treating women as psychologically brittle.
The only brit paper I read even semi-regularly is Graun and they have articles confirming this. (Some of it slathered in some ultra-progressive slime, but the facts are there once you wipe it off.)
Anyway, I didn't mean to imply all books in the entire country were being ruthlessly purged by decree of the Queen on penalty of branding and transportation. But some degree of self-censorship is clearly taking place. It's wrong to censor, self-censor or spend any degree of time, energy or money worrying about the depiction of pigs offending people. It is wrong not because it is a tremendous inconvenience (it isn't) or because it is bad to be sensitive to other peoples' feelings (of course it isn't.)
It is wrong because it goes far beyond "courtesy". It is an inherently unreasonable (if minor) imposition and it helps form a very slippery slope that may invite others. (In practice, this argument is much harder to win re: the Lena pic given the widespread anti-sex sentiment still entrenched on both sides of the aisle, but my stance here is the same. It's not a nude picture; it's a picture of a face, and it's sickening that both anti-sex feminists and anti-sex religious prudes have managed to agree that even 'softcore' female nudity is so shameful and dirty that even a cropped picture still carries the taint.)
Sooner or later someone figures out where the image is from and everyone, well the guys, all have a good laugh.
So yes it does create a hostile environment. I'm afraid that your armchair logic and reasoning are going to come in second to those who have not only witnessed it, but been a part of the whole thing first hand.
Maybe you could elaborate a bit? Because "all the guys had a good laugh" does not in my mind instantly imply a hostile situation. It's not mutually exclusive with hostility, but neither does it imply hostility. If there are details you're leaving out then please, fill us in.
If on the other hand you do actually believe that "Hah, so she's naked!" alone is inherently and irredeemably hostile towards all females everywhere, just what in the world did you think about all of those Bobbitt jokes (preferred by females, in my experience) back in the 90s?
If the government stopped subsidizing (and prevented HB-1 workarounds), job requirements would necessarily fall and the university system would ultimately collapse. The government could accelerate this by stop requiring degrees for government jobs and focusing instead on merit-based measures of productivity.
I understand the MBA world all too well, thanks. One part low level math, one part incomplete and misleading finance theory, twenty parts navel-gazing horseshit is the general formula.
Except it's not porn. it's an image of a face cropped from a larger image that happened to feature softcore nudity.
So, there are two implicit assertions here: first, that softcore nudity is porn and unprofessional (unless it's at least a couple hundred years old, in which case it's merely 'art'). The second assertion is that softcore nudity is so horrendously unprofessional that it taints even derivative works where no nudity is detectable or implied.
No, the problem is guys who are so oblivious about women's concerns that they'd use a pornographic picture as an assignment for a high school classroom.
Yeah, keep pretending you speak for an entire gender there. Next time she visits Abby Winters, I'll be sure to let my wife know that you are hard at work telling people how much she hates the sight of female bodies.
Don't you think that using a picture that shows a woman as a sexual object is going to add to the objectification of women?
No, because "objectification" is mostly a meaningless hype term. In pornography depicting heterosexual acts, the male is typically "objectified" to a much, much greater extent than the woman. He's a living dildo, nothing more.
Dehumanization is indeed a problem, a society-wide problem, but despite decades of efforts most people still realize that normal male sexual arousal does not involve pretending that a woman is an inanimate object. (If this were true, the Realdoll market would be much, much larger.)
Except that pornography is offensive to about 50% of the human race.
Yeah, women are utterly disgusted by all depictions of female bodies. And I'm sure there wasn't a single woman who read Fifty Shades of Gray or saw the movie.
Also, women are equally offended by homosexual porn, because the lack of females clearly indicates rampant misogyny.
It's just a tradition and not a particularly proud one since it implies the field was started by guys reading porn magazines
As a "tradition", there is surely some value in being able to compare current vs.historical efforts to analyze the same image.
Also, you are implying (very un-subtly) that there is something inherently shameful, or at least "non-proud" in guys looking at porn. I would call that prudish and potentially misandric.
This exact same line of reasoning is being used at this very moment to remove all pictures and mentions of pigs in children's stories and textbooks in the United Kingdom because some Muslims might be offended.
Yeah, it's "no big deal" to change this stuff, but it's a worrying precedent. Some of us are of the opinion that, while Muslims and anti-pornography feminists and others are fully entitled to their beliefs, we shouldn't be wasting ANY of our time, money and energy kowtowing to their taboos.
What do you think is the probability, that because an image associated with pornography was used, that the (few) girls in the class were subjected by their male classmates to jokes about tits, asses, pussies, etc? My guess is about 100%.
What is the probability that you are just making shit up that has no bearing on reality? My guess is about 100%. The subject of naked women came up a few times while I was in school, but not once do I recall anyone reacting by pouncing on the nearest female and suggesting she has nice tits too (or whatever.) I'm sure it has happened somewhere, sometime, but to claim this is a universal reaction among is worryingly delusional. I heard many more jokes about the size of male penises in classical art, coming from the females slightly more than the males.
The context for Michelangelo's male nudes is he was very, very probably a homosexual and thus probably enjoyed painting, sculpting and viewing penises. The context for classical Roman nude art was a society that was (relatively) sexually open, with sexually explicit pictures and sculptures not uncommon.
By arguing that a centerfold is fundamentally different, you are projecting your puritanism onto the art of the classical world.
First let me grant that this is obviously worthy of more study due to all of the experimental confirmations. However... you can't go through life saying "hmm, interesting" to every weird claim everyone makes. For example, if you listen to a moon hoaxer or 9/11 truther you will very quickly hear something that is either:
1. Complete nonsense, delusions and/or lies
2. A gross distortion of the actual facts
3. A somewhat interesting and entirely truthful claim about reality, but one that has a much simpler explanation than the one the nutjob is putting forth.
4. (not yet seen this one) an unexplained phenomenon
5. (not yet seen anything remotely resembling this one) Proof that explains away the evidence that appears to support conventional wisdom and supports the nutjob's theory instead.
You literally can spend your entire life examining the claims made by these nutjobs--just these two specific types of nutjobs (nevermind the homeopaths and miracle workers and such.) You occasionally run into item #3, which is cool but doesn't significantly add to our understanding of the world. It's not reasonable to chastise us that we must keep digging, we must stay perfectly neutral and agnostic because of the possibility of #4 or #5. The world is utterly teeming with nutjobs and cynical snake oil salesmen. The burden of proof must remain on those with the extraordinary claims, even if us skeptics do not have a ready alternative explanation.
One main issue here is the nutty behavior and statements of the original inventors). This is somewhat alleviated by experimental replication, but the other outstanding issue is, as others (and XKCD) have noted is the very low efficiency. If you pump a large amount of power into something and there is a small unexplained movement, the natural assumption is there is some unnoticed flaw in the system that is somehow allowing the apparatus to turn a small portion of that energy into physical motion through conventional, well-understood physical laws. It's a mystery, sure. But it's not one that automatically demands huge amounts of our attention and money.
The central point was that the parent was laughably incorrect in saying that a claim of repression is self-justifying when that claim itself suffers some form of repression. This is ridiculous, and as I said Truthers are the perfect example for why it is ridiculous. Intelligent Design is another example. Both of these groups are self-pitying and whine about being repressed, but that doesn't mean that they are justified in complaining about repression when it actually does occur, because the alternative is to pollute science classrooms with nonsense and have every single 9/11 discussion on the internet spammed into oblivion by jackasses babbling about lasers and thermite and holograms. While not *quite* as laughably stupid, certain allegedly feminist arguments involve screaming nonsense about "rape culture" when it is clear that female rape is much less tolerated or joked about than murder, repeatedly quoting ridiculously bad apples to oranges wage comparisons, or denying the fundamentals of egalitarianism by insisting that the speaker's genitals always be taken into account, regardless of the content of the statement.
On the other hand, I criticized the person who did the censoring in this case as obviously not being at all reasonable or egalitarian in his methods, either.
The common issue here, as I said, is one of crapflooding. There are vital discussions to be had regarding the details of 9/11, the mysteries of abiogenesis and evolution, and persistent gender inequalities, but certain parties in all of these discussions are clearly being senselessly disruptive and tribalistic.
Hate to reply to my own comment a second time, but I feel that I should clarify: "feminism" always belongs in quotes because it's highly questionable as a word. I'm not a "gay-ist", I am for marriage equality. I am not a "black-ist"; I am for racial equality. "Feminism" is an inherently loaded word. Most of the people who use the term to describe themselves do appear to be true egalitarians, but some of the loudest people using the term today clearly are not.
It would be considered unacceptable if a homosexual was forced out of a job for supporting same-sex marriage, and it should be considered just as unacceptable if a heterosexual was forced out of a job for not supporting same-sex marriage. This is no place for hypocrisy or double standards.
In other words: "Odious beliefs rooted in superstition must be treated exactly the same as egalitarian beliefs; otherwise, you are a hypocrite!"
Um, no. I'm not totally comfortable with his dismissal (the details of this specific case make it a tricky gray area, unlike the rather clear-cut situation with Orson Scott Card), but this statement is complete nonsense. Tolerance of group X does not imply tolerating people who are intolerant of group X. If this isn't immediately self-evident then please let me know. I'd be happy to give you an apt, Godwin-ed analogy.
I'm trying to decide whether this was more likely to have been modded down by a truther, a rabid misandric "feminist", or an exceptionally rabid misogynist MRA incensed at my criticism of the reviewer. I'm leaning towards the middle option, but it's a tough call.
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I don't think anyone is shocked. The shock for me comes when the suggestion is made that we should do a little self-censorship. Yeah, sure... this is just the one taboo we have to respect... this is the only bit of sharia law we infidels have to obey, right?
Except it doesn't end there. It can never end there. I mean hell, the hadith have in the past been widely interpreted to forbid all artwork of animals and humans. They've given up that battle... for now. But rest assured, they have not forgotten. None of this barbarous shit in any of the Abrahamic faiths can ever be truly forgotten, because all sitting there in the unalterable book waiting for someone to decide to take it literally again."Respect" for religious insanity is a continuous spectrum of masochistic self-censorship trailing down into an infinite abyss. Or do you really, honestly believe that ISIS's current set of laws is the most extreme interpretation possible?
It's possible to resist the scaremongering of the right (no, neither ISIS nor any of the other bearded fuckwits are in any position to do us significant harm at this very moment ) while still acknowledging that over the long run this is a zero sum game with no possibility of common ground.
We cannot share a planet with these people. So yes, let's keep making the bastards angry.
The unfortunate part is they organize their lives around a fucking fairy tale.
If we don't keep poking the bear, it might get the idea in its head that we're afraid of it.
But while you're considering US motives, please pause a moment to pay some respect for the million or so (South) Vietnamese who were killed in the war proper (the majority civilian), and for the millions who died afterwards in re-education camps, doing hard labor, escaping the country on ramshackle boats, executed for being enemies of the state, or simply starved through disastrous implementation of collectivized agriculture policies.
Sure thing, as long as we also pause and pay some respect for all of those who died at the hands of the Southern Vietnamese regime and all of those who died during the hundred years of French invasion and occupation that immediately preceded American involvement. I'm not one to wave a Viet Cong flag (unlike, say, Christopher Hitchens), but there is just a tiny bit of context here that supporters of the war either don't know or don't care about. A great many VC viewed this not as a pro-communism war, but as an anti-colonial one.
Yes, bad laws should be broken by those who disagree with them. No, I don't think this is likely to tear the nation apart with raping and murdering and pillaging. I think that listening to (to borrow some D&D terminology here) lawful-evil and lawful-neutral blowhards like yourself are much more likely to result in needless suffering and (in the long run, after the anti-fascist backlash) chaos and anarchy.
If you are incapable of forming and maintaining your own moral compass independent of the law, you are not an asset to "stable civil society".
The sad truth that no one will ever talk about is that there are way to many humans on the earth to ensure the rest of the animals are not brought to extinction. we need to cut the human population in half in the next 100 years (by breeding less, not killing people off) if we really want to sustain the earth
A few points here:
1. We are eventually going to end up with too many humans of course, but we are can manage just fine with 7 billion. The alarmist faction here is woefully misinformed--population density maps show that there is plenty of physical living space and despite the hysterical rants of organic food nutjobs--who are, whether they realize it or not, advocating a return to extremely inefficient and environmentally damaging forms of food production--the fact is food supply is not a problem at all. CO2 emissions and other forms of global pollution is trickier but the solution there ultimately has to be technological. Asking us to address this by cutting the global population down to 3.5 billion is neither realistic nor terribly effective.
2. Breeding less appears to more or less occur organically as per-capita income increases. As hard as it is to figure out how to drag rural China and India and Africa into the family of first world nations, I still think that's going to be easier than trying to convince billions of dirt poor and often illiterate people to use condoms.
3. Regarding animal extinction, again you have to consider the potential effects of increased development. One of the biggest threats to the rainforests is slash and burn farming--obviously, this is something that naturally goes away once a society becomes more developed. Illegal logging has emerged in some areas as another major threat, but this too mostly goes away once a country has advanced to the point of having an effective police force.
I'm not saying sexual comments directed towards females were unheardof (although I can't recall any instances offhand that were directed at a female that wasn't a friend joking right along with them. Admittedly I didn't go to a lot of frat parties, but then again that's not what we're talking about here.) I'm saying that, when exposed to or talking about a picture of a naked female, I never witnessed any kind of male sexual frenzy that instantly targeted nearby females with jokes or crude suggestions. If there were any jokes, the picture itself was the subject of the joke.
The meme I am questioning here is the one that says that males looking at, or perhaps even laughing about a picture of female nudity in any way creates a "hostile atmosphere". This is a phenomenon I simply do not believed I've ever witnessed. What I *can* imagine are prudes (both male and female) becoming uncomfortable with the sight of nudity, or the sight of other people making jokes about sex or nudity. Some people appear to interpret their own, personal discomfort as evidence of a hostile atmosphere directed *at them* (or at the entire female gender.) I'm just saying that people really don't work like that. If you are female and you wander down Bourbon street during Mardi Gras, sure you will encounter people asking you to do things. But that atmosphere is just a wee bit different from seeing a picture of a face in class and hearing someone else giggle and mention that the full pic is a Playboy centerfold. What is the dirty comment here: "Maybe you should pose for Playboy too?" "Oh, so that's why you got into CS?" These are extremely inane comments of a sort that I've never heard. But the poster I was replying to said he was 100% sure that ALL of the girls in the CS class would have been exposed to something like this due to Lena's cropped picture being used. I hope you will at least agree that this is, at minimum, crazed hyperbole.
Seems like it was one moronic head at one school, and some bullshit hype from the Daily Mail. Pigs are not being banned in children's books, the publishers have confirmed it.
The publishers blew a hell of a lot of hot air during which they denied blanket bans "in dictionaries" and agreed that they would never "edit a pig out of a work of historical fiction"; however:
"What we do, however, is consider avoiding references to a range of topics that could be considered sensitive – in a way that does not compromise quality, or negatively impact learning. So, for example, if animals are depicted shown in a background illustration, we would think carefully about which animals to choose."
This is covered in layers of squishy politicospeak. They will "consider", they would "think carefully", yadda yadda yadda. This is clearly obscurantist, euphamistic babble. What are their actual policies and guidelines given to authors? This is what Graun has to say, a paper not generally known for their support of Daily Mail anti-Muslim puffery:
One brief for an author seen by the Guardian warned that the book: “should also work in all areas of the world including more modest markets like the Middle East. For this reason you must be extremely cautious about cultural taboos such as young men and women cohabiting as students, or girls going shopping for shorts, or friends going out drinking.”
Doesn't mention pigs, but I think it's relevant (particularly the girls + shorts bit.) This is written evidence actually "seen by the Guardian". Other evidence re: pigs that was printed in the Guardian is testimony from the authors themselves. So yeah, the very next day the publisher comes along and smears it all over with weasel-words that admit some form of soft-ban is in place... and you interpret this as proof the entire claim against them was a right-wing fabrication. Well done!
I doubt many people would agree with your logic, since the obviously conclusion must be that any kind of pornography or images are acceptable in a classroom
No, my "logic" is that pictures of faces being deemed unacceptable because they happened to be cropped from a larger nude image is a dangerous attitude to placate. With right-wing prudes, you are catering to people who will be perfectly happy to ride this slippy slope until classical art has been censored as well (See: John Ashcroft and Lady Justice.) With left-wing prudes... well, I'm not even sure what their endgame is, but it appears to involve vilifying male sexuality and/or treating women as psychologically brittle.
The only brit paper I read even semi-regularly is Graun and they have articles confirming this. (Some of it slathered in some ultra-progressive slime, but the facts are there once you wipe it off.)
Anyway, I didn't mean to imply all books in the entire country were being ruthlessly purged by decree of the Queen on penalty of branding and transportation. But some degree of self-censorship is clearly taking place. It's wrong to censor, self-censor or spend any degree of time, energy or money worrying about the depiction of pigs offending people. It is wrong not because it is a tremendous inconvenience (it isn't) or because it is bad to be sensitive to other peoples' feelings (of course it isn't.)
It is wrong because it goes far beyond "courtesy". It is an inherently unreasonable (if minor) imposition and it helps form a very slippery slope that may invite others. (In practice, this argument is much harder to win re: the Lena pic given the widespread anti-sex sentiment still entrenched on both sides of the aisle, but my stance here is the same. It's not a nude picture; it's a picture of a face, and it's sickening that both anti-sex feminists and anti-sex religious prudes have managed to agree that even 'softcore' female nudity is so shameful and dirty that even a cropped picture still carries the taint.)
Sooner or later someone figures out where the image is from and everyone, well the guys, all have a good laugh.
So yes it does create a hostile environment. I'm afraid that your armchair logic and reasoning are going to come in second to those who have not only witnessed it, but been a part of the whole thing first hand.
Maybe you could elaborate a bit? Because "all the guys had a good laugh" does not in my mind instantly imply a hostile situation. It's not mutually exclusive with hostility, but neither does it imply hostility. If there are details you're leaving out then please, fill us in.
If on the other hand you do actually believe that "Hah, so she's naked!" alone is inherently and irredeemably hostile towards all females everywhere, just what in the world did you think about all of those Bobbitt jokes (preferred by females, in my experience) back in the 90s?
If the government stopped subsidizing (and prevented HB-1 workarounds), job requirements would necessarily fall and the university system would ultimately collapse. The government could accelerate this by stop requiring degrees for government jobs and focusing instead on merit-based measures of productivity.
I understand the MBA world all too well, thanks. One part low level math, one part incomplete and misleading finance theory, twenty parts navel-gazing horseshit is the general formula.
Except it's not porn. it's an image of a face cropped from a larger image that happened to feature softcore nudity.
So, there are two implicit assertions here: first, that softcore nudity is porn and unprofessional (unless it's at least a couple hundred years old, in which case it's merely 'art'). The second assertion is that softcore nudity is so horrendously unprofessional that it taints even derivative works where no nudity is detectable or implied.
No, the problem is guys who are so oblivious about women's concerns that they'd use a pornographic picture as an assignment for a high school classroom.
Yeah, keep pretending you speak for an entire gender there. Next time she visits Abby Winters, I'll be sure to let my wife know that you are hard at work telling people how much she hates the sight of female bodies.
Don't you think that using a picture that shows a woman as a sexual object is going to add to the objectification of women?
No, because "objectification" is mostly a meaningless hype term. In pornography depicting heterosexual acts, the male is typically "objectified" to a much, much greater extent than the woman. He's a living dildo, nothing more.
Dehumanization is indeed a problem, a society-wide problem, but despite decades of efforts most people still realize that normal male sexual arousal does not involve pretending that a woman is an inanimate object. (If this were true, the Realdoll market would be much, much larger.)
Except that pornography is offensive to about 50% of the human race.
Yeah, women are utterly disgusted by all depictions of female bodies. And I'm sure there wasn't a single woman who read Fifty Shades of Gray or saw the movie.
Also, women are equally offended by homosexual porn, because the lack of females clearly indicates rampant misogyny.
It's just a tradition and not a particularly proud one since it implies the field was started by guys reading porn magazines
As a "tradition", there is surely some value in being able to compare current vs .historical efforts to analyze the same image.
Also, you are implying (very un-subtly) that there is something inherently shameful, or at least "non-proud" in guys looking at porn. I would call that prudish and potentially misandric.
This exact same line of reasoning is being used at this very moment to remove all pictures and mentions of pigs in children's stories and textbooks in the United Kingdom because some Muslims might be offended.
Yeah, it's "no big deal" to change this stuff, but it's a worrying precedent. Some of us are of the opinion that, while Muslims and anti-pornography feminists and others are fully entitled to their beliefs, we shouldn't be wasting ANY of our time, money and energy kowtowing to their taboos.
errr, first paragraph should have been quoted
What do you think is the probability, that because an image associated with pornography was used, that the (few) girls in the class were subjected by their male classmates to jokes about tits, asses, pussies, etc? My guess is about 100%.
What is the probability that you are just making shit up that has no bearing on reality? My guess is about 100%. The subject of naked women came up a few times while I was in school, but not once do I recall anyone reacting by pouncing on the nearest female and suggesting she has nice tits too (or whatever.) I'm sure it has happened somewhere, sometime, but to claim this is a universal reaction among is worryingly delusional. I heard many more jokes about the size of male penises in classical art, coming from the females slightly more than the males.
The context for Michelangelo's male nudes is he was very, very probably a homosexual and thus probably enjoyed painting, sculpting and viewing penises. The context for classical Roman nude art was a society that was (relatively) sexually open, with sexually explicit pictures and sculptures not uncommon.
By arguing that a centerfold is fundamentally different, you are projecting your puritanism onto the art of the classical world.
First let me grant that this is obviously worthy of more study due to all of the experimental confirmations. However... you can't go through life saying "hmm, interesting" to every weird claim everyone makes. For example, if you listen to a moon hoaxer or 9/11 truther you will very quickly hear something that is either:
1. Complete nonsense, delusions and/or lies
2. A gross distortion of the actual facts
3. A somewhat interesting and entirely truthful claim about reality, but one that has a much simpler explanation than the one the nutjob is putting forth.
4. (not yet seen this one) an unexplained phenomenon
5. (not yet seen anything remotely resembling this one) Proof that explains away the evidence that appears to support conventional wisdom and supports the nutjob's theory instead.
You literally can spend your entire life examining the claims made by these nutjobs--just these two specific types of nutjobs (nevermind the homeopaths and miracle workers and such.) You occasionally run into item #3, which is cool but doesn't significantly add to our understanding of the world. It's not reasonable to chastise us that we must keep digging, we must stay perfectly neutral and agnostic because of the possibility of #4 or #5. The world is utterly teeming with nutjobs and cynical snake oil salesmen. The burden of proof must remain on those with the extraordinary claims, even if us skeptics do not have a ready alternative explanation.
One main issue here is the nutty behavior and statements of the original inventors). This is somewhat alleviated by experimental replication, but the other outstanding issue is, as others (and XKCD) have noted is the very low efficiency. If you pump a large amount of power into something and there is a small unexplained movement, the natural assumption is there is some unnoticed flaw in the system that is somehow allowing the apparatus to turn a small portion of that energy into physical motion through conventional, well-understood physical laws. It's a mystery, sure. But it's not one that automatically demands huge amounts of our attention and money.
Ah, reading comprehension and attention span issues. Gotcha.
Way to miss the point--which part was "stupid"?
The central point was that the parent was laughably incorrect in saying that a claim of repression is self-justifying when that claim itself suffers some form of repression. This is ridiculous, and as I said Truthers are the perfect example for why it is ridiculous. Intelligent Design is another example. Both of these groups are self-pitying and whine about being repressed, but that doesn't mean that they are justified in complaining about repression when it actually does occur, because the alternative is to pollute science classrooms with nonsense and have every single 9/11 discussion on the internet spammed into oblivion by jackasses babbling about lasers and thermite and holograms. While not *quite* as laughably stupid, certain allegedly feminist arguments involve screaming nonsense about "rape culture" when it is clear that female rape is much less tolerated or joked about than murder, repeatedly quoting ridiculously bad apples to oranges wage comparisons, or denying the fundamentals of egalitarianism by insisting that the speaker's genitals always be taken into account, regardless of the content of the statement.
On the other hand, I criticized the person who did the censoring in this case as obviously not being at all reasonable or egalitarian in his methods, either.
The common issue here, as I said, is one of crapflooding. There are vital discussions to be had regarding the details of 9/11, the mysteries of abiogenesis and evolution, and persistent gender inequalities, but certain parties in all of these discussions are clearly being senselessly disruptive and tribalistic.
So... whence does your butthurt come?
Hate to reply to my own comment a second time, but I feel that I should clarify: "feminism" always belongs in quotes because it's highly questionable as a word. I'm not a "gay-ist", I am for marriage equality. I am not a "black-ist"; I am for racial equality. "Feminism" is an inherently loaded word. Most of the people who use the term to describe themselves do appear to be true egalitarians, but some of the loudest people using the term today clearly are not.
It would be considered unacceptable if a homosexual was forced out of a job for supporting same-sex marriage, and it should be considered just as unacceptable if a heterosexual was forced out of a job for not supporting same-sex marriage. This is no place for hypocrisy or double standards.
In other words: "Odious beliefs rooted in superstition must be treated exactly the same as egalitarian beliefs; otherwise, you are a hypocrite!"
Um, no. I'm not totally comfortable with his dismissal (the details of this specific case make it a tricky gray area, unlike the rather clear-cut situation with Orson Scott Card), but this statement is complete nonsense. Tolerance of group X does not imply tolerating people who are intolerant of group X. If this isn't immediately self-evident then please let me know. I'd be happy to give you an apt, Godwin-ed analogy.
I'm trying to decide whether this was more likely to have been modded down by a truther, a rabid misandric "feminist", or an exceptionally rabid misogynist MRA incensed at my criticism of the reviewer. I'm leaning towards the middle option, but it's a tough call.