If hiring for the fire department was gender blind you'd expect to find a very high ratio of men to women because the requirements involve physical strength (which men have at higher rates than women).
By contrast nursing, which may focus on nurturing and multi-tasking in ways men aren't as inclined towards or good at, would have a higher proportion of women.
This is the case and so I say that, in general, things are fine. But some feminists on this board think that there are no physiological differences and thus would interpret both of the examples above as sexism (though since they tend to think only anti-women sexism can exist the would say that women are being denied jobs in fire departments and forced to work in the nursing field). Others would say that the differences are societal, not biological, and that therefore the #s need to be changed to erase inequities in society.
I think they're generally nuts and that their nannyism is degrading to women and dangerous to liberty - but that's just me.
1. The idea the women never need men to give them rights because they already have them is silly. If women already have their rights, no changes need to be made. But the genuine "I can vote if I want to" vs. the hypothetical "I am equal to males inalienably" requires those in political power to change the system. Thus in extremely patriarchal societies (Taliban) it does require either outside force (male or female) or changes in the male-dominated ruling class to level the playing field. This isn't sexist, it's real life. It's not as though women could vote to give themselves the right to vote - this was a bill voted on in Congress by men.
2. If we already have all those rights inalienably - why are you bothering to debate? Doesn't this imply that nothing needs to be changed? You're contradicting yourself because you fail to distinguish between theory and reality.
3. Your physiological arguments are all essentially meaningless unless we're talking about a "rib-having contest" or a "chromosome-having contest" (e.g., a woman as tall and as conditioned as Bryant or O'neal could go dunk for dunk in the NBA, pitting lithe track stars against line-backers is ludicrous, wouldn't you pit similarly sized and conditioned female linebackers against male linebackers?
What world do you live in? Do you think that gender is just some binary on/off switch? Like people are born and the only difference is an X or a Y chromosome? As if that's just some label that has no further implications other than "this one is called 'girl', this one is called 'boy'"? There are evolutionary differences between males and females because they are specialized for different tasks. Your point about a girl as tall as Bryant or O'neal is ludicrous and only shows how far removed you are from reality. In the first place there aren't that many women who have the height of Bryant or O'Neal. Otherwise the WNBA would be full of them. This isn't rocket science, dude, just watch ESPN. Women ARE shorter than men on average. In the second place you're flat out WRONG to say that if you got a woman of that height you could train her to be just as athletic. Seriously dude, what planet do you live on? Women have less body muscle and can not put on as much muscle as men no matter how you train them. The only way for a woman to compete with a man of the same height is through serious use of steroids and large doses of testosterone.
And you know what - even that wouldn't be enough. Women have wider hips. If you take a man and a woman of the same height and some muscle mass the man will STILL run faster because his skeletal structure is better optimized for it.
That was the whole point of the NBA linebacker vs. woman track star analogy. Women can't achieve that body type. Sure, maybe a very small proportion could. But you've got enough men who are huge, muscular and relatively fast to fill professional and college rosters in hundreds, if not thousands of teams across the country.
I know this is offensive to your politics and that what I'm saying isn't politically correct, but that's just a measure of how ridiculous the equal rights movement is. If you want to try and override the influence of millions of years of evolution and get women and men to have no physiological differences that's one thing. But to pretend that they don't exist is just plain stupid. I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but this emperor's got no clothes on.
4. I think your examples of women being different problem-solvers is a pretty good argument for why they need to be in all fields of science and not the ones "we give them the right" to be in.
This point makes no sense. We both claim to believe it's sexist to think that we need to "give them the right" to be in one career or another. The difference is that I follow through with this logic. I assume that women are intelligent, rationale, self-determining creatures. I assume that, unless I'm shown evidence otherwise, if a woman doesn't want to
Just for clarification, what exactly are you angry about?
Are you angry that I think girls are socially smarter than men, or that I think it's clearly proven? If the latter, then your anger is misplaced. I don't think it's clearly proven, just believe it to be true and generally (not universally) accepted. If you're angry that I think that, well, that can't be helped.
But lest you think that I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass to annoy you, here's an article for your reading pleasure. It presents a logical argument, based in evolutionary psychology, for my conclusion that as a group women are socially smarter then men. I didn't say proof: "socially smart" is a lot harder to measure than "physically strong", but I don't want you to leave with your impression that I'm just disguising my opinion as accepted scientific fact.
As for the inherent contradictions in posting the most subtle and simultaneously stupid posts you've come across, I'll just chalk that up to your clearly highly emotional state.
Please tell me one thing, however. You say "it works", but I'm not sure what you mean. What do you take my objective to be? If I'm trolling, then I would want a flamewar not a+5 moderation. Do you think I'm just out for the mod points? I guess I can't convince you that I don't care about those, but I'm really not sure why you're so riled or what you think my insidious scheme really achieved.
No. Men aren't elementary schools because they actually, of their own free will and volition, choose not to.
You see men aren't afraid of women. If they walk into a class of women they are just fundamentally so strong and independent that they stay there. Whereas men, on the other hand, using only passive sexism can divert women away from CS career in droves.
Furthermore only women are so weak-minded that if you give them a doll it determines their entire career path. Men are stronger in every way. That's why we have to have long-ass discusssions about how unfair CS is to women, and about what we (as men, coincidentally) can do to make it fair. And how the poor women are living out the instructions implanted into them by soceital conditioning while we as men, being the only truly sentient humans, are not constrained by such limitations and can therefore see the path to bring women to the promised land. We use our superior vantage as free agents to survey the land and determine for women that, although they may think that they want to be a mother or an author or a poet or a an entrepenour or anything else, that those desires are merely the reverberating effects of soceital sexism. It is our obligation to tell them what they really want - which is to have 51% representation in the CS field. It is only right for them to have what is fair, and it is our duty as feminist men to see that they get what they need - not what the they think they want.
Who says chivalry is dead?
-stormin
(If you can't detect the sarasm, I can't help you. And if you can't find this logic mirrored in posts scattered throughout this topic... I still can't help you.)
I'd say a more noble calling than motherhood is running an abortion clinic.
How is this funny?
Don't even ask. Just let it go away. Anyone that thinks abortion is funny is, in my opinion, borderline sociopathic and probably enjoys jokes about Hitler's birthday, Jews is ovens, infant rape, and anything else considered socially taboo.
1 - Being impressed that a girl shows a high aptitude, and interest in, coding?
2 - Assuming that whether we're impressed or not will determine (or at least largely influence) the career path of said girl?
It's time to stop treating women like herd animals or robots. Believe it or not, I doubt their entire world revolves around what we, as men, think of them. When my wife was in elementary school the teachers would let the young boys take advanced courses, but wouldn't let her take advanced math because she was a girl. THAT is sexism, and no girl should have to put up with it.
But on the other hand it didn't determine her future. She cared about math as much as any geeky guy and didn't just crumble and give up math. She taught herself algebra in elementary school and eventually got a full-ride academic scholarship to her current university.
All this hyper-emphasis on women susceptibility amounts to greater and more damaging sexism through condescencion and lowered standards and expectations than anything else. Teachers who refuse to teach girls math are isolated and rare - there's always going to be some idiot. But I'd rather my daughter have a 1/10,000 chance of getting an asshole teacher (which I and my wife can deal with) than have to face the systematic discrimination of having entire universities and corporations grant her special favors because of her sex, and because maybe they haven't met their quota of girl CS majors for the year.
Lowering expectations and standards and treating women as cattle that can be funnelled from one major or another without any innate characteristics or desires or aptitudes of their own is NOT an answer to sexism - it IS sexism.
Thanks for clarifying some of this. I hate it when people bend over and just take it because it's the PC thing to do. Larry Summers asked questions, put forward a few hypotheses, and we shouldn't be browbeaten into submission and not asking or contemplating the issue because it's not the politcally correct thing to do.
It's the same as the religious right trying to squelch reasoned ethical debate on stem cell research or abortion. It comes down to rejecting the argument becuase they don't like the conclusions - and they don't like the conclusions because they would disrupt the politically accepted dogma. There's no reason to tolerate their knee-jerk extremism any more than there is to allow creationism to be taught in school.
Leave dogmatic politics - and dogmatic religion - out of science.
Dude, what are you smoking? This is an old and boring game.
1. Find some statistical differences between genders/race, etc. 2. Now pick the gender/race that is being oppressed. 3. Concoct the theory for why their position is evidence of oppression.
Note the orders of steps 2 and steps 3. That's where all the fun comes in.
I can only assume your previous bit about a "dean at a major university" was directed to what's-his-face at Harvard. In a meeting where the topic "why aren't more women in math/science classes" came up he said "gee... maybe women are just different and don't like them?"
How the Hell is that biased? If that's sexism rearing it's ugly head, then you're conclusive evidence that the medicine is worse than the sickness.
What if, and this is just a quesiton, what if women really don't like CS as much in general? The really scary thing about you is that your politics take precedent over questions about reality. That's like someone debating about what the answer to a math question should be instead of doing the math.
You seem to think that if a man ever tells a woman she's going to be less successful at something because she's a woman that this is sexist. But the fact is that, whether that's rude or not, SOMETIME'S IT'S THE TRUTH. In the real world where the rest of us live, men and women have different body shapes. A woman has wider hips for childbearing. Men have narrow hips. This means men can run farther and faster then woman. So if you take a bunch of guys and a bunch of girls, get them ready to race, and then tell the girls "anything guys can do, girls can do better" you might as well tell them "it's OK guys, 2+2=5 if you really want it to".
You're so caught up with the bogeyman of repressive patriarchy that you can't just see what all the rest of us on planet earth have noticed: men and women are different. When we say "you know, maybe women don't like math in general" it's not some hidden agenda - passive or aggressive - to keep women out of CS. It's actually a geuine question. We know we're different phsiologically. We know those differences extend to the brain. We know that numerous studies have shown that under the most controlled of circumsmtances gravitate towards different types of tasks and different methods of problem solving. Given this load of evidence it takes a truly dogmatic, knee-jerk reaction to be able to see past the blindingly obvious to find yet more evidence of repression where there really is none.
In my mind the real sexism is your sexism. You're the one that wants to take a male-dominated subject (CS) and use that as the criteria for judging the "success" of women. You're the one that says that if not enough women are in the CS field they are not succesful. Might as well pretend that men and women have no physical differenes, draft a few women athletes into the NBA and then hold them to the standards of Kobe Bryant or Shaq. That's fair, right? Let's just not pay attention to the fact that a slam dunk is something you hardly ever see in the WNBA and it's something you see every night in the NBA. While we're at it, let's see if we can get a few women track stars and suit 'em up for the Superbowl and see how long they survive before being crushed to death. At least we'd be treaing them equally though, right? They'd gasp their last as equals on the field of sports.
At least that's how you might see it. The rest of us would see it as a couple of 300 pound behemeths reducing a few women to pulp in a grossly unfair contest that pitted men in their strenght (bashing each other with sheer weight) against women out of their element.
No one is arguing that women (or men) should be restrained in their "element". I don't think we know what that element is. We don't know what differences there are between men and women exactly. But only ignorant fools pretend their are none. Let women and men do what they like. If there is genuine repression, then we need to stop it. Just as we did when
Personally, I have to say that I find it highly amusing when extremely nerdy guys hit on my wife (either in front of me or otherwise). She's a comp sci / math major and damn attractive (if I do say so myself) so it's really inevitable. And I guess since she's fairly young (21) and looks younger they just don't think to check for the ring. Sometimes I'm around to watch, other times she tells me about it when I get home.
I take it as a compliment to my good taste - and she takes it as a compliment too.:-)
Well, we agree in principle but disagree in application! I guess I just can't leave well enough alone. I just happen to believe that the sexual revolution and the growing acceptance of gay marriage are perfect examples of changing traditions that we don't understand for the worse.
Take marriage. I believe that families are important, and that it takes two parents to raise kids optimally, and that divorce is generally a bad thing. Nothing really groundbreaking here. But I also believe that traditional norms about sexuality - basically retaining virginity until marriage - act (or I should say acted) as significant bolstering agents to strengthen marriages in society. (Full disclosure, I'm 24, married, and was a virgin until marriage).
I think the evidence bears me out. Couples that cohabit before marriage then get married are more likely to divorce than virigins that get married. They're more likely to cheat on their spouses after marriage. And they are report lower levels of satisfaction than the virigins that got married.
There are a variety of reasons the I believe play into that factor: but the result is (in my opinion)pretty clear. Politics and philosophy trumped both tradition and empirical evidence. The drastic increased rate of divorces mirrors our growing sexual openness as a society: as we toss out our traditions we're handling sexuality worse, not better, than before.
OK, now I'm totally off-topc and my wife wants her computer back!
I say a lot of people do X, and that it annoys me.
You say that I'm dumb for not expecting people to do X. Right off the bat I'm confused. I never said anything about surprise.
So I respond, basically, "I know a lot of people do X. And it really pisses me off for these reason: " and I give you a list. Again - I've said nothing about surprise or what most people do. I'm just stating what I think and giving you the reasons.
And your response is "It's people like you that can't grasp that they are out of the mainstream".
Well, Holy shit - I'm out of the mainstream. That's the best damn argument I ever heard in my whole life. Dude, why do you even bother to think if this is what's going to be the result? I mean you invent this "surprise" issue out of nowhere and then you invent this idea that I'm not aware that I'm not in the mainstream. I've given no such indication and what's more: why the Hell should I care? Maybe you base all your opinions and beliefs and ideals on the mainstream, but I like to do a little thing called "thinking for myself".
I'll see if I can simplify this for you.
It's not a question of me being annnoyed that people are surprised that my wife is picking a diferent area than her major (your accountant to chemist example). I'm annoyed that people assume that if you're not going to be a mathematician it's a waste to study math or comp sci. This implies that the only reason to study something difficult is to use your degree to get a career. This in turn implies that learning has no intrinsic value. THAT's what I dislike - and from what you've written you don't believe it either. Why did you start arguing with me again? I think you maybe read something into my post that wasn't there, or you're just having a really bad day.
But you've pretty much totally lost any semblence of a coherent point. You're angry that I'm not in the mainstream (or at least you seem to be angry about it) and yet you're not in the mainstream either. So are you just angry that I don't roll over and accept that my ideas aren't in the mainstream? Is that what I should do? "Oh no, not everyone thinks like me! I should keep my opinion to myself until it's popular again!" Maybe that's not what you're saying, but since what you are saying amounts to little more than "I don't like what you wrote" I can hardly be faulted for being a little puzzled by the vemon that accompanies your inane babblings.
In any case you've pretty much proved that to the extent that your education was intended to teach you to think critically or logically (and to the extent that these posts are a valid measure of your ability to do so) your education was basically a complete failure. If you had the capacity to reason effectively you wouldn't have had a problem with what I said in the first case, and would have come up with something more effective for arguing against me than just that I'm not in the mainstream.
This logic is totally wrong. If you're gauge of being a good parent is just SURVIVAL, than sure, anyone can be a parent. But humans are social animals, and we exist in a society. Raising a child is a little more complex then meeting basic biolgical requirements.
When animals raise their offspring they don't just feed them - they also TEACH them. This is the key aspect of parenting that requires skill and dedication. The most important things to teach are not, by the way, scholastic subjects. Things like emotionl maturity, responsibility, and communciation skills are first - and you don't need a degree to teach those.
But the more valuable skills you can teach your offspring, the better parent you are.
And as for "I've never seen any evidence that highly educated or skilled people make even slightly better parents" I'm pretty sure you could find some if you wnted to. You just need to define the criteria for being a better parent. If education or earning potential of offspring is your criteria, then there's overwhelming evidence that successful parents raise successful children better than unsuccesful parents (eg poorly eduated, and poor parents).
Measuring emotional health would probably be a good indication as well. But look, this is really too obvious to require much evidence. Parents pass on their genetics AND their behavior (good or bad) to their children. Abuse is cyclic, SO is absence of abuse.
If you thnk that someone who is completely emotionall underdeveloped and a generally unsuccessful adult will have the same chance of raising a well-adjusted child you're nuts.
Hmm... I'm not sure if that's a tautology, a contradiction, or just plain irony.
I really don't mean to be harsh but I can't state emphatically enough how many things are wrong with this position.
Men are taller than women. It's just a fact that, as a group, guys are. It does no good to say whether or not this generalization sucks. That's like saying that it sucks that 2+2=4. Whether or not it sucks it's just the way it is.
So we have two options of handling these kinds of differences. If we think that differences are bad and scary and inequitable then we can shout as loud as we want and pretend they don't exist. We can pretend that guys are not actually stronger then girls, or that girls aren't socially smarter than men. We can obfuscate, complain, and trash anyone who makes the mistake of pointing the obvious out. But this is at best living in la-la land and at worst dangerous. When we have to lower standards so that we can hire enough women firefighters I think we've just gone to far. As my mum said (in reference to rules changes that said instead of a fireman's carry dragging a victim down the stairs was sufficient to become a firemen) "Who are these stupid feminists? I don't want some 5'2" woman dragging me out of the building, I want a 6'2" giant to carry me out!"
Sure, some men are 5'2". And there are some women who are 6'2". But how many of either do you know? And how many women do you know that are 5'2"? Or men that are 6'2"?
Look, the reason I say "I don't want to be harsh" is that I understand what it is that you don't like. You don't like it when people use a generalization to apply it unfairly to an individual. That's discrimination - and in many cases it's mean, evil, wrong, etc. But trying to make discrimination go away by trying to outlaw generalizations is like trying to make electrocution go away by outlawing electricity. It would be stupid to try and in the real world it's not possible anyway.
There's a danger here. If we change traditions before we understand their origin, impact and function we may do serious damage. If traditions are the result of evolution, and I believe that to some extent they are, then saying "society's changed, time for traditions to change to" is akin to saying "well, our habitat has changed, so I guess we don't need this limb anymore" and whacking off our right hand.
I don't think we do enough thinking about what traditions mean and where they come from. We just act as though they are arbitrary and that's the end of it. Take cloning for example. The move from sexual to asexual reproduction isn't just automoatically wrong because it's "not natural", but at the same time it's not automatically OK because to say otherwise is arbitrary either. The fact that humans reproduce sexually has deep implications for us as individuals and as a society that I think we would do well to understand before we rush blindly into the future just because we can (just as an example).
You can tell the guys who favor cloning are nerds at heart because they want to take stuff apart before they know how to put it back together.
I completely agree that someone are taught by society to not care about intellectual concerns. And that some are further taught that if you're going to be a mother you don't need to be educated. I'm not so much as saying that this is not so as just saying I wish it wasn't.
My wife and I rent out one of our rooms to a girl like this. She's clearly bright, but for whatever reason she spends her time acting stupid - especially around guys. I don't know who taught her that this is what guys want, but I do know that the type of guy who wants a submissive, stupid, doe-eyed girl who will simper and say "you're so smart" is not the kind of guy worth getting.
But as long as we treat women as victims of societal conditioning in all cases, how are we going to change things? If the argument goes - "giving your daughter a barbie will make her think nothing matters but popping out babies" then I think we have a bigger problem than the specific conditioning. The bigger problem is that we treat women as passive creatures that can be so easily trained.
Sure, societal influence can be powerful, but I believe that by overemphasizing this influence we actualy feed the root problem: treating women as powerless victims. I wish the young girl we rented a room out to would knock it off with her insipid dumb-act. She's actually got an acidic wit that can make people feel very stupid, but for fear of not geting a man or whatever, she hides it whenever possible. It's a big waste for all concerned. But the answer is not to train her to act another way, it's to empower her to quit being trained at all.
Cleary the term "liberal arts education" is not in your vocabulary. The truth of the matter is that institutions of higher learning were not, in fact, founded as a way to simply increase the wage-earning power of those with degrees. For several hundred years these insitutions existed primarily for those who already had wealth.
The idea you're espousing as "mature" is, in fact, the sad state of affairs reached when education and learning become not ends in and of themselves but merely means towards the greater end: pursuit of the almighty dollar. Just because you have no conception of eduation other than as a commodity doesn't mean that no one else does.
It's people like you who have no concept of the traditional purpose or history of higher education that make me wish that CS programs would just spin off into trade schools. If you think that going to college is ust about getting a job you should head to some technical institute where you belong.
I'm not saying that a liberal arts eduation (which is what she and anyone else with a non-engineering undergraduate degree is getting) should not be practical - just that education should be valued for what it is and not just for what it can get you.
So the truth is that I'm not, nor did I ever say that I was, surprised at people who think it's waste of time to learn difficult subjects for some reason other than financial gain. I just find such people excessively narrow-minded and shallow.
I've read at least one study that says if you compare carefully enough (eg never married men to never married women in the same career field) women have been making more than men since the 1950s.
I'm not saying that 1950s was the height of equal rights by any stretch of the imagination - but what I do believe is that we're becoming hopelessly mired in a web or fruitless argument over whether or not we're equal in region A or equal in region B. Two problems with this: 1 - I think it's really tough to nail down "equality" or ascertain the drivers for it (too often it's asssumed that any difference between men and women is automaticaly discrimination against women) and 2 - since equality of opportunity can be tricky to measure we end up measuring outcomes. This lends itself to shoddy fixes when there is a discrepencey (eg admit woefully unprepared minorities to college programs in order to meet quotas rather than actually address inadequacies in the public school systems) and is a fundamentally bad idea anyway - since we want a meritocracy in most situations.
What you have, I believe, is women radicalizing the feminisnt movement in a naked power grab that has nothing to do with bias or equal rights. And the sad thing is that this power-grab only makes it harder to determine when and if there is a genuine problem.
Dude... women mature faster in pretty much every way. You just didn't notice this becase you weren't mature enough to appreciate the differences at the time it was happening.
Some things are just too obviously true to be sexist.
-stormin
(mangled Harry Potter quote for good measure->)
Ron: No one could have that many emotions at once! They'd explode! Hermione: Ron, just because you have the emotional content of a teaspoon doesn't mean everyone does.
Your post is a pretty good example of why not to trust statistics. You jump straight from the different statistics for male and female lawyers to conclusions as though the correlation between gender and salary is causal. You have to do a lot more work to get there.
Personally I think there's a lot of uncertainty here. For example you just assume that since women are willing to work 60 hours a week they must be just as motivated as men to go for partner. I don't think that's obvious at all. What about women who want to be mothers?
I also think that the whole "society tells women to play with barbie dolls" thing cuts both ways. Now society, instead of telling girls to play with barbie dolls, tries to tell young women that they can have a career and be a mother too. I believe that this is just setting women up for failure and dissappointment. This just sets women up for feelings of conflict and guilt and inadequacy when they can't live up to the mythical "do everything" mom. Plus I've always been saddened when I talked to girls my age or a little younger (in college or just graduated) who have this glow in their eyes that they're going to really *do* something - they're going to have a *career*!
Who the Hell talks like that? I'm not saying you shouldn't be excited about your career, but women are being sold a bunch of horseshit here. A career means welcome to the 9-5 grind. A career means a cubicle. A career means having to accept the authority of some corporate boss. That's what a career is. Sure, not all careers suck, but by and large Dilbert is what a career is, and yet women are being sold on this idea of a career as the path to fulfillment, enlightenment and self-actualization. What a crock!
It's this awful Orwellian lie that somehow becoming a cog in some corporate machine is the straight and narrow path towards really being someone. What it really is amounts to nothing more than a materialist, consumerist trap for women as well as men. It's the basic Tom Sawyer painting the fence story - and yet the vast majority of people, men and women alike, are lining up to trade their toys for a chance to whitewash the fence.
You should check out an article at the Escapist Magazine discussing gender differences from an evolutionary pyschology standpoint. I'm not going to try and tell you it's in any way definitive, but I think it demonstrates a rationale framework for a biological basis for gender differences.
You've go to remember that individual variation will be greater than group variation, and I definitely think that we sometimes use tradition to override individuality (and that's a bad thing). But to say that "it's just arbitrary tradition" doesn't really make sense: where do you think tradition comes from? Traditions evolved with society, and I think that both society and, therefore tradition, are essentially products of evolution.
Raise girls to be princesses and moms, and you get women who's highest goals are domestic crap and social climbing.
I think that's a completely false dichotomy. My wife is one semester away from her undergraduate degree - dual math/cs (I got a math degree with a cs minor). Her highest aspiration is to make babies and teach them algebra before she teaches them to read. But this doesn't preclude eduation at all - for her it's just another incentive.
Your attitude (don't take this too personally) has gotten so annooying that I'm extremely close to carrying around a 2X4 just to whack people over the head with when they say it. They ask me about what my wife is studying. I say "dual comp sci/math". Then they say "what does she want to do". I say "she wants to start a family". They say "Oh, then why on earth is shy taking such hard subjects?" That's when I restrain myself from yelling any of a variety of answers like "I don't know, because she likes the damn subjects?" or "Holy crap, you're right! What *IS* she doing outside of the kitchen?"
Why is it that we have this awful attitude that being a mother is somehow this dead-end proposition that requires no job skills? Sure, biologically making a child may require no skills, but educating and raising said child is not only one of the most demanding but in my opinion the most noble "careers" any one - man or woman - can choose. Sure, I have a career, but when the little ones come around I guarantee that being a good father will be #1 to me - not climbing the corporate ladder. I work 60 hours weeks in a full time and two part time jobs now specifically to get as secure as I can financially just so that I can have more time and freedom to spend on my family when we have one.
And my wife is doing the same thing that I'm doing financially from an education standpoint. I want to be able to provide financial independence to my family and she wants to be able to teach our kids valuable skills (which apparently are going to include both multivariate calculus and C programming) and encourage their interests - no matter what they are. The more my wife knows (she also plays guitar and piano and went to a high school focussing on humanities were she was the valedictorian) the better able she will be to give her kids that much of a boost in their own educations.
And on a final note - being a mother is not the end of your education either. My own mother dropped out of college to have her family. Not what I wanted my wife to do, but the point is that she went back to school recently and finished her BA. Now she's almost done with her masters, and when if she wants she's in a fine position to get her PhD as well.
I'm not going to say you can be a mother and a corporate VP at the same time, but I AM going to say you can be a mother and also be well educated and have an impact outside your own household.
Freedom and privacy are certainly not the same, but the reason for the connection stems from the fact that freedom in a traditional sense bestows at least some privacy. The freedom that the US is truly founded on is the right to own property. So for example the right to own your own house prevents the gov't from invading your house without your consent - thus you get privacy at home. I would say that this privacy in your own space is not a mere luxury, but in fact a right just by virtue of its codified nature in US law and the fact that without that privacy your freedom to do things on your own time in your own space that society may frown upon (but that aren't illegel or harmful to others) your freedom to do these things would be curtailed.
Privacy in public is another matter entirely, however. You can't walk down to the mall, start picking your nose, and then get mad if someone takes pictures. You should keep your embarassing habits to your own space or abandon your expectation of privacy.
So the first question we have to ask is whether or not phone conversations, emails, blogs, etc. take place in the public or private sphere. While blogs are obviously public by nature, it's less clear with direct person-to-person communcation (which is generally conducted with the expectation of privacy). All things being equal, these communications should certainly be private, in my opinion.
But there are two more things to consider. 1 - in the law above, are conversations actually monitored actively, or merely recorded? If they are merely recorded, so that once someone is under investigation and a warrant can be obtained then the relevant phone calls can be made I see no problem with the law. How is this substantially different from obtaining a wire-tap warrant? As long as the procedure to open the records is identical it doesn't seem to be a genuine encroachment on privacy any more than society already generally allows. 2 - is the communcation actually read or just scanned by a computer? This is a bit more tricky. Privacy is maintained for all people who don't, for example, use the word "bomb" in their conversations. In that case perhaps a filter would kick in and someone actually listens/reads the conversation to determine whether it's genuinely dangerous or not.
In the last case I think it's clear that privacy is being encroached on because saying the word "bomb" in conversation isn't, as far as I know, sufficient grounds to get a warrant. But the last thing to consider is: are the benefits of this encroachment worth the cost? We all sacrifice some privacy for security. Otherwise warrants would never be allowed. The question is where to draw the line.
Personally I think that stopping child porn isn't just a fringe benefit. Before the advent of the internet the crime was incredibly rare, but now more and more children are being abused every year for profit. The increased power of communication in a digital age probably needs to be met with at least some increased monitoring to prevent abuse. Terrorism is also a valid threat. Sure, the US administration may "sex up" the threat for their own purposes, but that doesn't alter the fact that the threat is real.
If monitoring conversation can be done with an efficient filter, and if the process is subject to public scrutiny (obviously the algorithms or code-words would have to be secret, but the rules that govern monitoring and obtaining records as well as stats on the # of arrests/preventions should be available) I think we don't have a 1984 "big brother" situation at all.
Sure, the ACLU would be all over any such law in America (the result of which is we get the Patriot Act instead - which is easier to abuse and has practically no oversight by the public or our elected represtentatives) but depending on the specifics of the law, I can see myself actually in favor of it.
I still can't believe that Fox cancelled it. It actually got pretty good ratings until Chris Carter managed to get it pre-empted all the time. Ratings fell, Fox axed it, and Carter got his X-Files script-writers back. Loser.
Then Fox comes out with Firefly, screws up the series (by airing them out of order) and axes it before they finish the first series.
This is why I'm excited about the decentralization and democratization of media. As digital media production and disstribution costs fall I hope we'll start to see high-quality indie-productions (both music and video) that will be able to be successful given a core of dedicated fans instead of having to pander to the great hump of the bell curve in every media endeavor.
In the meantime what I want to know is why sci-fi shows with actual depth that focus on characters who seem real (S:AAB, Firefly) get canned after one show while Andromeda manages to stay on the air forever. I mean, no matter how much Voyager and DS9 sucked, at least they had a successful franchise to build on. So while the shows were awful, you can at least chalk it up to misguided franchise loyalty (see also the Star Wars prequals). But the last thing sci-fi needs if it ever wants to grow as a genre is to see Hercules cruising aroung in a space ship with a laser baton.
Space: Above and Beyond was my favorite show of all time until Firefly.
I miss that show.
B5 had just a little too much "Hercules" or "Xena"-style cheese for me (Andromeda, anyone?), although in general it was much, much better.
The fact is that sci-fi is a genre: and that means you're always going to have people who try to capitalize on the built-in audience rather than try to tell good stories. Same thing happens with mysteries and fantasies. Yet for some reason, sci-fi fans seem desperate enough to lap up the most artistically-flawed crap imaginable. They'll just ignore plot holes, utterly ridiculous dialoge, internal inconsistencies, and see-through, 2-d characters as long as we have:
1. space ships 2. lasers 3. at least one moderately-hot chick per
(you get extra points for having strange facial prosthetics with one sub-crowd and the other sub-crowd likes superficial political commentary)
Slashdot Mirror
In general I agree.
If hiring for the fire department was gender blind you'd expect to find a very high ratio of men to women because the requirements involve physical strength (which men have at higher rates than women).
By contrast nursing, which may focus on nurturing and multi-tasking in ways men aren't as inclined towards or good at, would have a higher proportion of women.
This is the case and so I say that, in general, things are fine. But some feminists on this board think that there are no physiological differences and thus would interpret both of the examples above as sexism (though since they tend to think only anti-women sexism can exist the would say that women are being denied jobs in fire departments and forced to work in the nursing field). Others would say that the differences are societal, not biological, and that therefore the #s need to be changed to erase inequities in society.
I think they're generally nuts and that their nannyism is degrading to women and dangerous to liberty - but that's just me.
-stormin
1. The idea the women never need men to give them rights because they already have them is silly. If women already have their rights, no changes need to be made. But the genuine "I can vote if I want to" vs. the hypothetical "I am equal to males inalienably" requires those in political power to change the system. Thus in extremely patriarchal societies (Taliban) it does require either outside force (male or female) or changes in the male-dominated ruling class to level the playing field. This isn't sexist, it's real life. It's not as though women could vote to give themselves the right to vote - this was a bill voted on in Congress by men.
2. If we already have all those rights inalienably - why are you bothering to debate? Doesn't this imply that nothing needs to be changed? You're contradicting yourself because you fail to distinguish between theory and reality.
3. Your physiological arguments are all essentially meaningless unless we're talking about a "rib-having contest" or a "chromosome-having contest" (e.g., a woman as tall and as conditioned as Bryant or O'neal could go dunk for dunk in the NBA, pitting lithe track stars against line-backers is ludicrous, wouldn't you pit similarly sized and conditioned female linebackers against male linebackers?
What world do you live in? Do you think that gender is just some binary on/off switch? Like people are born and the only difference is an X or a Y chromosome? As if that's just some label that has no further implications other than "this one is called 'girl', this one is called 'boy'"? There are evolutionary differences between males and females because they are specialized for different tasks. Your point about a girl as tall as Bryant or O'neal is ludicrous and only shows how far removed you are from reality. In the first place there aren't that many women who have the height of Bryant or O'Neal. Otherwise the WNBA would be full of them. This isn't rocket science, dude, just watch ESPN. Women ARE shorter than men on average. In the second place you're flat out WRONG to say that if you got a woman of that height you could train her to be just as athletic. Seriously dude, what planet do you live on? Women have less body muscle and can not put on as much muscle as men no matter how you train them. The only way for a woman to compete with a man of the same height is through serious use of steroids and large doses of testosterone.
And you know what - even that wouldn't be enough. Women have wider hips. If you take a man and a woman of the same height and some muscle mass the man will STILL run faster because his skeletal structure is better optimized for it.
That was the whole point of the NBA linebacker vs. woman track star analogy. Women can't achieve that body type. Sure, maybe a very small proportion could. But you've got enough men who are huge, muscular and relatively fast to fill professional and college rosters in hundreds, if not thousands of teams across the country.
I know this is offensive to your politics and that what I'm saying isn't politically correct, but that's just a measure of how ridiculous the equal rights movement is. If you want to try and override the influence of millions of years of evolution and get women and men to have no physiological differences that's one thing. But to pretend that they don't exist is just plain stupid. I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but this emperor's got no clothes on.
4. I think your examples of women being different problem-solvers is a pretty good argument for why they need to be in all fields of science and not the ones "we give them the right" to be in.
This point makes no sense. We both claim to believe it's sexist to think that we need to "give them the right" to be in one career or another. The difference is that I follow through with this logic. I assume that women are intelligent, rationale, self-determining creatures. I assume that, unless I'm shown evidence otherwise, if a woman doesn't want to
Woohoo a nomination.
Just for clarification, what exactly are you angry about?
Are you angry that I think girls are socially smarter than men, or that I think it's clearly proven? If the latter, then your anger is misplaced. I don't think it's clearly proven, just believe it to be true and generally (not universally) accepted. If you're angry that I think that, well, that can't be helped.
But lest you think that I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass to annoy you, here's an article for your reading pleasure. It presents a logical argument, based in evolutionary psychology, for my conclusion that as a group women are socially smarter then men. I didn't say proof: "socially smart" is a lot harder to measure than "physically strong", but I don't want you to leave with your impression that I'm just disguising my opinion as accepted scientific fact.
Chris Crawford, Women in Games: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/3 [Escapist Magazine]
As for the inherent contradictions in posting the most subtle and simultaneously stupid posts you've come across, I'll just chalk that up to your clearly highly emotional state.
Please tell me one thing, however. You say "it works", but I'm not sure what you mean. What do you take my objective to be? If I'm trolling, then I would want a flamewar not a+5 moderation. Do you think I'm just out for the mod points? I guess I can't convince you that I don't care about those, but I'm really not sure why you're so riled or what you think my insidious scheme really achieved.
-stormin
No. Men aren't elementary schools because they actually, of their own free will and volition, choose not to.
You see men aren't afraid of women. If they walk into a class of women they are just fundamentally so strong and independent that they stay there. Whereas men, on the other hand, using only passive sexism can divert women away from CS career in droves.
Furthermore only women are so weak-minded that if you give them a doll it determines their entire career path. Men are stronger in every way. That's why we have to have long-ass discusssions about how unfair CS is to women, and about what we (as men, coincidentally) can do to make it fair. And how the poor women are living out the instructions implanted into them by soceital conditioning while we as men, being the only truly sentient humans, are not constrained by such limitations and can therefore see the path to bring women to the promised land. We use our superior vantage as free agents to survey the land and determine for women that, although they may think that they want to be a mother or an author or a poet or a an entrepenour or anything else, that those desires are merely the reverberating effects of soceital sexism. It is our obligation to tell them what they really want - which is to have 51% representation in the CS field. It is only right for them to have what is fair, and it is our duty as feminist men to see that they get what they need - not what the they think they want.
Who says chivalry is dead?
-stormin
(If you can't detect the sarasm, I can't help you. And if you can't find this logic mirrored in posts scattered throughout this topic... I still can't help you.)
I'd say a more noble calling than motherhood is running an abortion clinic.
How is this funny?
Don't even ask. Just let it go away. Anyone that thinks abortion is funny is, in my opinion, borderline sociopathic and probably enjoys jokes about Hitler's birthday, Jews is ovens, infant rape, and anything else considered socially taboo.
What's more sexist:
1 - Being impressed that a girl shows a high aptitude, and interest in, coding?
2 - Assuming that whether we're impressed or not will determine (or at least largely influence) the career path of said girl?
It's time to stop treating women like herd animals or robots. Believe it or not, I doubt their entire world revolves around what we, as men, think of them. When my wife was in elementary school the teachers would let the young boys take advanced courses, but wouldn't let her take advanced math because she was a girl. THAT is sexism, and no girl should have to put up with it.
But on the other hand it didn't determine her future. She cared about math as much as any geeky guy and didn't just crumble and give up math. She taught herself algebra in elementary school and eventually got a full-ride academic scholarship to her current university.
All this hyper-emphasis on women susceptibility amounts to greater and more damaging sexism through condescencion and lowered standards and expectations than anything else. Teachers who refuse to teach girls math are isolated and rare - there's always going to be some idiot. But I'd rather my daughter have a 1/10,000 chance of getting an asshole teacher (which I and my wife can deal with) than have to face the systematic discrimination of having entire universities and corporations grant her special favors because of her sex, and because maybe they haven't met their quota of girl CS majors for the year.
Lowering expectations and standards and treating women as cattle that can be funnelled from one major or another without any innate characteristics or desires or aptitudes of their own is NOT an answer to sexism - it IS sexism.
-stormin
Thanks for clarifying some of this. I hate it when people bend over and just take it because it's the PC thing to do. Larry Summers asked questions, put forward a few hypotheses, and we shouldn't be browbeaten into submission and not asking or contemplating the issue because it's not the politcally correct thing to do.
It's the same as the religious right trying to squelch reasoned ethical debate on stem cell research or abortion. It comes down to rejecting the argument becuase they don't like the conclusions - and they don't like the conclusions because they would disrupt the politically accepted dogma. There's no reason to tolerate their knee-jerk extremism any more than there is to allow creationism to be taught in school.
Leave dogmatic politics - and dogmatic religion - out of science.
-stormin
Dude, what are you smoking? This is an old and boring game.
1. Find some statistical differences between genders/race, etc.
2. Now pick the gender/race that is being oppressed.
3. Concoct the theory for why their position is evidence of oppression.
Note the orders of steps 2 and steps 3. That's where all the fun comes in.
I can only assume your previous bit about a "dean at a major university" was directed to what's-his-face at Harvard. In a meeting where the topic "why aren't more women in math/science classes" came up he said "gee... maybe women are just different and don't like them?"
How the Hell is that biased? If that's sexism rearing it's ugly head, then you're conclusive evidence that the medicine is worse than the sickness.
What if, and this is just a quesiton, what if women really don't like CS as much in general? The really scary thing about you is that your politics take precedent over questions about reality. That's like someone debating about what the answer to a math question should be instead of doing the math.
You seem to think that if a man ever tells a woman she's going to be less successful at something because she's a woman that this is sexist. But the fact is that, whether that's rude or not, SOMETIME'S IT'S THE TRUTH. In the real world where the rest of us live, men and women have different body shapes. A woman has wider hips for childbearing. Men have narrow hips. This means men can run farther and faster then woman. So if you take a bunch of guys and a bunch of girls, get them ready to race, and then tell the girls "anything guys can do, girls can do better" you might as well tell them "it's OK guys, 2+2=5 if you really want it to".
You're so caught up with the bogeyman of repressive patriarchy that you can't just see what all the rest of us on planet earth have noticed: men and women are different. When we say "you know, maybe women don't like math in general" it's not some hidden agenda - passive or aggressive - to keep women out of CS. It's actually a geuine question. We know we're different phsiologically. We know those differences extend to the brain. We know that numerous studies have shown that under the most controlled of circumsmtances gravitate towards different types of tasks and different methods of problem solving. Given this load of evidence it takes a truly dogmatic, knee-jerk reaction to be able to see past the blindingly obvious to find yet more evidence of repression where there really is none.
In my mind the real sexism is your sexism. You're the one that wants to take a male-dominated subject (CS) and use that as the criteria for judging the "success" of women. You're the one that says that if not enough women are in the CS field they are not succesful. Might as well pretend that men and women have no physical differenes, draft a few women athletes into the NBA and then hold them to the standards of Kobe Bryant or Shaq. That's fair, right? Let's just not pay attention to the fact that a slam dunk is something you hardly ever see in the WNBA and it's something you see every night in the NBA. While we're at it, let's see if we can get a few women track stars and suit 'em up for the Superbowl and see how long they survive before being crushed to death. At least we'd be treaing them equally though, right? They'd gasp their last as equals on the field of sports.
At least that's how you might see it. The rest of us would see it as a couple of 300 pound behemeths reducing a few women to pulp in a grossly unfair contest that pitted men in their strenght (bashing each other with sheer weight) against women out of their element.
No one is arguing that women (or men) should be restrained in their "element". I don't think we know what that element is. We don't know what differences there are between men and women exactly. But only ignorant fools pretend their are none. Let women and men do what they like. If there is genuine repression, then we need to stop it. Just as we did when
Personally, I have to say that I find it highly amusing when extremely nerdy guys hit on my wife (either in front of me or otherwise). She's a comp sci / math major and damn attractive (if I do say so myself) so it's really inevitable. And I guess since she's fairly young (21) and looks younger they just don't think to check for the ring. Sometimes I'm around to watch, other times she tells me about it when I get home.
:-)
I take it as a compliment to my good taste - and she takes it as a compliment too.
-stormin
Well, we agree in principle but disagree in application! I guess I just can't leave well enough alone. I just happen to believe that the sexual revolution and the growing acceptance of gay marriage are perfect examples of changing traditions that we don't understand for the worse.
Take marriage. I believe that families are important, and that it takes two parents to raise kids optimally, and that divorce is generally a bad thing. Nothing really groundbreaking here. But I also believe that traditional norms about sexuality - basically retaining virginity until marriage - act (or I should say acted) as significant bolstering agents to strengthen marriages in society. (Full disclosure, I'm 24, married, and was a virgin until marriage).
I think the evidence bears me out. Couples that cohabit before marriage then get married are more likely to divorce than virigins that get married. They're more likely to cheat on their spouses after marriage. And they are report lower levels of satisfaction than the virigins that got married.
There are a variety of reasons the I believe play into that factor: but the result is (in my opinion)pretty clear. Politics and philosophy trumped both tradition and empirical evidence. The drastic increased rate of divorces mirrors our growing sexual openness as a society: as we toss out our traditions we're handling sexuality worse, not better, than before.
OK, now I'm totally off-topc and my wife wants her computer back!
-stormin
So let me get this straight:
I say a lot of people do X, and that it annoys me.
You say that I'm dumb for not expecting people to do X. Right off the bat I'm confused. I never said anything about surprise.
So I respond, basically, "I know a lot of people do X. And it really pisses me off for these reason: " and I give you a list. Again - I've said nothing about surprise or what most people do. I'm just stating what I think and giving you the reasons.
And your response is "It's people like you that can't grasp that they are out of the mainstream".
Well, Holy shit - I'm out of the mainstream. That's the best damn argument I ever heard in my whole life. Dude, why do you even bother to think if this is what's going to be the result? I mean you invent this "surprise" issue out of nowhere and then you invent this idea that I'm not aware that I'm not in the mainstream. I've given no such indication and what's more: why the Hell should I care? Maybe you base all your opinions and beliefs and ideals on the mainstream, but I like to do a little thing called "thinking for myself".
I'll see if I can simplify this for you.
It's not a question of me being annnoyed that people are surprised that my wife is picking a diferent area than her major (your accountant to chemist example). I'm annoyed that people assume that if you're not going to be a mathematician it's a waste to study math or comp sci. This implies that the only reason to study something difficult is to use your degree to get a career. This in turn implies that learning has no intrinsic value. THAT's what I dislike - and from what you've written you don't believe it either. Why did you start arguing with me again? I think you maybe read something into my post that wasn't there, or you're just having a really bad day.
But you've pretty much totally lost any semblence of a coherent point. You're angry that I'm not in the mainstream (or at least you seem to be angry about it) and yet you're not in the mainstream either. So are you just angry that I don't roll over and accept that my ideas aren't in the mainstream? Is that what I should do? "Oh no, not everyone thinks like me! I should keep my opinion to myself until it's popular again!" Maybe that's not what you're saying, but since what you are saying amounts to little more than "I don't like what you wrote" I can hardly be faulted for being a little puzzled by the vemon that accompanies your inane babblings.
In any case you've pretty much proved that to the extent that your education was intended to teach you to think critically or logically (and to the extent that these posts are a valid measure of your ability to do so) your education was basically a complete failure. If you had the capacity to reason effectively you wouldn't have had a problem with what I said in the first case, and would have come up with something more effective for arguing against me than just that I'm not in the mainstream.
Really, you call that an argument?
-stormin
This logic is totally wrong. If you're gauge of being a good parent is just SURVIVAL, than sure, anyone can be a parent. But humans are social animals, and we exist in a society. Raising a child is a little more complex then meeting basic biolgical requirements.
When animals raise their offspring they don't just feed them - they also TEACH them. This is the key aspect of parenting that requires skill and dedication. The most important things to teach are not, by the way, scholastic subjects. Things like emotionl maturity, responsibility, and communciation skills are first - and you don't need a degree to teach those.
But the more valuable skills you can teach your offspring, the better parent you are.
And as for "I've never seen any evidence that highly educated or skilled people make even slightly better parents" I'm pretty sure you could find some if you wnted to. You just need to define the criteria for being a better parent. If education or earning potential of offspring is your criteria, then there's overwhelming evidence that successful parents raise successful children better than unsuccesful parents (eg poorly eduated, and poor parents).
Measuring emotional health would probably be a good indication as well. But look, this is really too obvious to require much evidence. Parents pass on their genetics AND their behavior (good or bad) to their children. Abuse is cyclic, SO is absence of abuse.
If you thnk that someone who is completely emotionall underdeveloped and a generally unsuccessful adult will have the same chance of raising a well-adjusted child you're nuts.
-stormin
Blanket statements suck
Hmm... I'm not sure if that's a tautology, a contradiction, or just plain irony.
I really don't mean to be harsh but I can't state emphatically enough how many things are wrong with this position.
Men are taller than women. It's just a fact that, as a group, guys are. It does no good to say whether or not this generalization sucks. That's like saying that it sucks that 2+2=4. Whether or not it sucks it's just the way it is.
So we have two options of handling these kinds of differences. If we think that differences are bad and scary and inequitable then we can shout as loud as we want and pretend they don't exist. We can pretend that guys are not actually stronger then girls, or that girls aren't socially smarter than men. We can obfuscate, complain, and trash anyone who makes the mistake of pointing the obvious out. But this is at best living in la-la land and at worst dangerous. When we have to lower standards so that we can hire enough women firefighters I think we've just gone to far. As my mum said (in reference to rules changes that said instead of a fireman's carry dragging a victim down the stairs was sufficient to become a firemen) "Who are these stupid feminists? I don't want some 5'2" woman dragging me out of the building, I want a 6'2" giant to carry me out!"
Sure, some men are 5'2". And there are some women who are 6'2". But how many of either do you know? And how many women do you know that are 5'2"? Or men that are 6'2"?
Look, the reason I say "I don't want to be harsh" is that I understand what it is that you don't like. You don't like it when people use a generalization to apply it unfairly to an individual. That's discrimination - and in many cases it's mean, evil, wrong, etc. But trying to make discrimination go away by trying to outlaw generalizations is like trying to make electrocution go away by outlawing electricity. It would be stupid to try and in the real world it's not possible anyway.
-stormin
There's a danger here. If we change traditions before we understand their origin, impact and function we may do serious damage. If traditions are the result of evolution, and I believe that to some extent they are, then saying "society's changed, time for traditions to change to" is akin to saying "well, our habitat has changed, so I guess we don't need this limb anymore" and whacking off our right hand.
I don't think we do enough thinking about what traditions mean and where they come from. We just act as though they are arbitrary and that's the end of it. Take cloning for example. The move from sexual to asexual reproduction isn't just automoatically wrong because it's "not natural", but at the same time it's not automatically OK because to say otherwise is arbitrary either. The fact that humans reproduce sexually has deep implications for us as individuals and as a society that I think we would do well to understand before we rush blindly into the future just because we can (just as an example).
You can tell the guys who favor cloning are nerds at heart because they want to take stuff apart before they know how to put it back together.
-stormin
I completely agree that someone are taught by society to not care about intellectual concerns. And that some are further taught that if you're going to be a mother you don't need to be educated. I'm not so much as saying that this is not so as just saying I wish it wasn't.
My wife and I rent out one of our rooms to a girl like this. She's clearly bright, but for whatever reason she spends her time acting stupid - especially around guys. I don't know who taught her that this is what guys want, but I do know that the type of guy who wants a submissive, stupid, doe-eyed girl who will simper and say "you're so smart" is not the kind of guy worth getting.
But as long as we treat women as victims of societal conditioning in all cases, how are we going to change things? If the argument goes - "giving your daughter a barbie will make her think nothing matters but popping out babies" then I think we have a bigger problem than the specific conditioning. The bigger problem is that we treat women as passive creatures that can be so easily trained.
Sure, societal influence can be powerful, but I believe that by overemphasizing this influence we actualy feed the root problem: treating women as powerless victims. I wish the young girl we rented a room out to would knock it off with her insipid dumb-act. She's actually got an acidic wit that can make people feel very stupid, but for fear of not geting a man or whatever, she hides it whenever possible. It's a big waste for all concerned. But the answer is not to train her to act another way, it's to empower her to quit being trained at all.
-stormin
Cleary the term "liberal arts education" is not in your vocabulary. The truth of the matter is that institutions of higher learning were not, in fact, founded as a way to simply increase the wage-earning power of those with degrees. For several hundred years these insitutions existed primarily for those who already had wealth.
The idea you're espousing as "mature" is, in fact, the sad state of affairs reached when education and learning become not ends in and of themselves but merely means towards the greater end: pursuit of the almighty dollar. Just because you have no conception of eduation other than as a commodity doesn't mean that no one else does.
It's people like you who have no concept of the traditional purpose or history of higher education that make me wish that CS programs would just spin off into trade schools. If you think that going to college is ust about getting a job you should head to some technical institute where you belong.
I'm not saying that a liberal arts eduation (which is what she and anyone else with a non-engineering undergraduate degree is getting) should not be practical - just that education should be valued for what it is and not just for what it can get you.
So the truth is that I'm not, nor did I ever say that I was, surprised at people who think it's waste of time to learn difficult subjects for some reason other than financial gain. I just find such people excessively narrow-minded and shallow.
-stormin
I've read at least one study that says if you compare carefully enough (eg never married men to never married women in the same career field) women have been making more than men since the 1950s.
I'm not saying that 1950s was the height of equal rights by any stretch of the imagination - but what I do believe is that we're becoming hopelessly mired in a web or fruitless argument over whether or not we're equal in region A or equal in region B. Two problems with this: 1 - I think it's really tough to nail down "equality" or ascertain the drivers for it (too often it's asssumed that any difference between men and women is automaticaly discrimination against women) and 2 - since equality of opportunity can be tricky to measure we end up measuring outcomes. This lends itself to shoddy fixes when there is a discrepencey (eg admit woefully unprepared minorities to college programs in order to meet quotas rather than actually address inadequacies in the public school systems) and is a fundamentally bad idea anyway - since we want a meritocracy in most situations.
What you have, I believe, is women radicalizing the feminisnt movement in a naked power grab that has nothing to do with bias or equal rights. And the sad thing is that this power-grab only makes it harder to determine when and if there is a genuine problem.
-stormin
Dude... women mature faster in pretty much every way. You just didn't notice this becase you weren't mature enough to appreciate the differences at the time it was happening.
Some things are just too obviously true to be sexist.
-stormin
(mangled Harry Potter quote for good measure->)
Ron: No one could have that many emotions at once! They'd explode!
Hermione: Ron, just because you have the emotional content of a teaspoon doesn't mean everyone does.
Your post is a pretty good example of why not to trust statistics. You jump straight from the different statistics for male and female lawyers to conclusions as though the correlation between gender and salary is causal. You have to do a lot more work to get there.
Personally I think there's a lot of uncertainty here. For example you just assume that since women are willing to work 60 hours a week they must be just as motivated as men to go for partner. I don't think that's obvious at all. What about women who want to be mothers?
I also think that the whole "society tells women to play with barbie dolls" thing cuts both ways. Now society, instead of telling girls to play with barbie dolls, tries to tell young women that they can have a career and be a mother too. I believe that this is just setting women up for failure and dissappointment. This just sets women up for feelings of conflict and guilt and inadequacy when they can't live up to the mythical "do everything" mom. Plus I've always been saddened when I talked to girls my age or a little younger (in college or just graduated) who have this glow in their eyes that they're going to really *do* something - they're going to have a *career*!
Who the Hell talks like that? I'm not saying you shouldn't be excited about your career, but women are being sold a bunch of horseshit here. A career means welcome to the 9-5 grind. A career means a cubicle. A career means having to accept the authority of some corporate boss. That's what a career is. Sure, not all careers suck, but by and large Dilbert is what a career is, and yet women are being sold on this idea of a career as the path to fulfillment, enlightenment and self-actualization. What a crock!
It's this awful Orwellian lie that somehow becoming a cog in some corporate machine is the straight and narrow path towards really being someone. What it really is amounts to nothing more than a materialist, consumerist trap for women as well as men. It's the basic Tom Sawyer painting the fence story - and yet the vast majority of people, men and women alike, are lining up to trade their toys for a chance to whitewash the fence.
-stormin
You should check out an article at the Escapist Magazine discussing gender differences from an evolutionary pyschology standpoint. I'm not going to try and tell you it's in any way definitive, but I think it demonstrates a rationale framework for a biological basis for gender differences.
Women in Games, by Chris Crawford
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/3
You've go to remember that individual variation will be greater than group variation, and I definitely think that we sometimes use tradition to override individuality (and that's a bad thing). But to say that "it's just arbitrary tradition" doesn't really make sense: where do you think tradition comes from? Traditions evolved with society, and I think that both society and, therefore tradition, are essentially products of evolution.
-stormin
Raise girls to be princesses and moms, and you get women who's highest goals are domestic crap and social climbing.
I think that's a completely false dichotomy. My wife is one semester away from her undergraduate degree - dual math/cs (I got a math degree with a cs minor). Her highest aspiration is to make babies and teach them algebra before she teaches them to read. But this doesn't preclude eduation at all - for her it's just another incentive.
Your attitude (don't take this too personally) has gotten so annooying that I'm extremely close to carrying around a 2X4 just to whack people over the head with when they say it. They ask me about what my wife is studying. I say "dual comp sci/math". Then they say "what does she want to do". I say "she wants to start a family". They say "Oh, then why on earth is shy taking such hard subjects?" That's when I restrain myself from yelling any of a variety of answers like "I don't know, because she likes the damn subjects?" or "Holy crap, you're right! What *IS* she doing outside of the kitchen?"
Why is it that we have this awful attitude that being a mother is somehow this dead-end proposition that requires no job skills? Sure, biologically making a child may require no skills, but educating and raising said child is not only one of the most demanding but in my opinion the most noble "careers" any one - man or woman - can choose. Sure, I have a career, but when the little ones come around I guarantee that being a good father will be #1 to me - not climbing the corporate ladder. I work 60 hours weeks in a full time and two part time jobs now specifically to get as secure as I can financially just so that I can have more time and freedom to spend on my family when we have one.
And my wife is doing the same thing that I'm doing financially from an education standpoint. I want to be able to provide financial independence to my family and she wants to be able to teach our kids valuable skills (which apparently are going to include both multivariate calculus and C programming) and encourage their interests - no matter what they are. The more my wife knows (she also plays guitar and piano and went to a high school focussing on humanities were she was the valedictorian) the better able she will be to give her kids that much of a boost in their own educations.
And on a final note - being a mother is not the end of your education either. My own mother dropped out of college to have her family. Not what I wanted my wife to do, but the point is that she went back to school recently and finished her BA. Now she's almost done with her masters, and when if she wants she's in a fine position to get her PhD as well.
I'm not going to say you can be a mother and a corporate VP at the same time, but I AM going to say you can be a mother and also be well educated and have an impact outside your own household.
-stormin
(PS, my wife is way smarter than me)
Freedom and privacy are certainly not the same, but the reason for the connection stems from the fact that freedom in a traditional sense bestows at least some privacy. The freedom that the US is truly founded on is the right to own property. So for example the right to own your own house prevents the gov't from invading your house without your consent - thus you get privacy at home. I would say that this privacy in your own space is not a mere luxury, but in fact a right just by virtue of its codified nature in US law and the fact that without that privacy your freedom to do things on your own time in your own space that society may frown upon (but that aren't illegel or harmful to others) your freedom to do these things would be curtailed.
Privacy in public is another matter entirely, however. You can't walk down to the mall, start picking your nose, and then get mad if someone takes pictures. You should keep your embarassing habits to your own space or abandon your expectation of privacy.
So the first question we have to ask is whether or not phone conversations, emails, blogs, etc. take place in the public or private sphere. While blogs are obviously public by nature, it's less clear with direct person-to-person communcation (which is generally conducted with the expectation of privacy). All things being equal, these communications should certainly be private, in my opinion.
But there are two more things to consider. 1 - in the law above, are conversations actually monitored actively, or merely recorded? If they are merely recorded, so that once someone is under investigation and a warrant can be obtained then the relevant phone calls can be made I see no problem with the law. How is this substantially different from obtaining a wire-tap warrant? As long as the procedure to open the records is identical it doesn't seem to be a genuine encroachment on privacy any more than society already generally allows. 2 - is the communcation actually read or just scanned by a computer? This is a bit more tricky. Privacy is maintained for all people who don't, for example, use the word "bomb" in their conversations. In that case perhaps a filter would kick in and someone actually listens/reads the conversation to determine whether it's genuinely dangerous or not.
In the last case I think it's clear that privacy is being encroached on because saying the word "bomb" in conversation isn't, as far as I know, sufficient grounds to get a warrant. But the last thing to consider is: are the benefits of this encroachment worth the cost? We all sacrifice some privacy for security. Otherwise warrants would never be allowed. The question is where to draw the line.
Personally I think that stopping child porn isn't just a fringe benefit. Before the advent of the internet the crime was incredibly rare, but now more and more children are being abused every year for profit. The increased power of communication in a digital age probably needs to be met with at least some increased monitoring to prevent abuse. Terrorism is also a valid threat. Sure, the US administration may "sex up" the threat for their own purposes, but that doesn't alter the fact that the threat is real.
If monitoring conversation can be done with an efficient filter, and if the process is subject to public scrutiny (obviously the algorithms or code-words would have to be secret, but the rules that govern monitoring and obtaining records as well as stats on the # of arrests/preventions should be available) I think we don't have a 1984 "big brother" situation at all.
Sure, the ACLU would be all over any such law in America (the result of which is we get the Patriot Act instead - which is easier to abuse and has practically no oversight by the public or our elected represtentatives) but depending on the specifics of the law, I can see myself actually in favor of it.
stormin
Is ripping people's quotes out of context to make points a hobby of yours?
Someone mod this troll down.
-stormin
I still can't believe that Fox cancelled it. It actually got pretty good ratings until Chris Carter managed to get it pre-empted all the time. Ratings fell, Fox axed it, and Carter got his X-Files script-writers back. Loser.
Then Fox comes out with Firefly, screws up the series (by airing them out of order) and axes it before they finish the first series.
This is why I'm excited about the decentralization and democratization of media. As digital media production and disstribution costs fall I hope we'll start to see high-quality indie-productions (both music and video) that will be able to be successful given a core of dedicated fans instead of having to pander to the great hump of the bell curve in every media endeavor.
In the meantime what I want to know is why sci-fi shows with actual depth that focus on characters who seem real (S:AAB, Firefly) get canned after one show while Andromeda manages to stay on the air forever. I mean, no matter how much Voyager and DS9 sucked, at least they had a successful franchise to build on. So while the shows were awful, you can at least chalk it up to misguided franchise loyalty (see also the Star Wars prequals). But the last thing sci-fi needs if it ever wants to grow as a genre is to see Hercules cruising aroung in a space ship with a laser baton.
-stormin
Space: Above and Beyond was my favorite show of all time until Firefly.
I miss that show.
B5 had just a little too much "Hercules" or "Xena"-style cheese for me (Andromeda, anyone?), although in general it was much, much better.
The fact is that sci-fi is a genre: and that means you're always going to have people who try to capitalize on the built-in audience rather than try to tell good stories. Same thing happens with mysteries and fantasies. Yet for some reason, sci-fi fans seem desperate enough to lap up the most artistically-flawed crap imaginable. They'll just ignore plot holes, utterly ridiculous dialoge, internal inconsistencies, and see-through, 2-d characters as long as we have:
1. space ships
2. lasers
3. at least one moderately-hot chick per
(you get extra points for having strange facial prosthetics with one sub-crowd and the other sub-crowd likes superficial political commentary)
-stormin