This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Abandon all hope ye who enter herein
Naughty Crip Dyke! Naughty!
*waggles finger*
oooh You’re in trouble now!
I wanted to do that link!
Thunderdomers. Please tell me to go away. I have work to do. Please.
Bicarbonate
Get to work!
G’wan, git.
O.k. G-gone. gone. gone.
Oh look, it’s the “Manssiere”
Lords Burgos:
Yeah. Your point? Try very hard to be sure it isn’t completely fuckwitted. (I won’t be holding my breath on that one.)
Scrolled up on the previous thread a bit.
LOL. Cotton isn’t cellulose, it’s protein, which is why sulfuric acid stains on lab coats are holes (acids hydrolyze protein) instead of coal (sulfuric acid is so hygroscopic it takes the hydro- out of hydrocarbons).
Hydrocarbons as building material? If you consider tarmac a building material… or that roof coating…
PSA: ‘Hank Williams’ has been banned.
Nope. Still don’t get what all the fuss is about.
Good riddance.
You know what I think of those.
PZ:
Heh. When I saw Crip Dyke’s post, I was glad there was a link at least. CD may not know that doing the first thing could bring the ban hammer down.
David Marjanović
From Wiki on cotton:
The sulfuric also hydrolyzes the cotton to glucose, which will char and fall off. Which makes the holes have a burnt edge to them.
Sili:
Seriously. Anyone who doesn’t know that yes, men have breasts (even nipples!) too, is in need of an education.
dammit
twice
@Caine/Sili:
Look at the picture on the top of the thread. It’s Big Boss in a bikini.
I’ll give Lord Burgos the benefit of the doubt he was referring to that (without, possibly understanding the underlying meaning of the picture.)
Ah. Unsurprising, and good riddance.
Oh. LOL on me, then.
I’ve never seen the burnt edge; maybe it was washed away in all examples I’ve seen? ~:-|
========================================
Anyway. Here’s comment 395 on the thread about the bowels of Christ:
I’d like to add something that would be waaaaaay out of proportion in that thread:
Something else this bizarre but still common expectation does is erase me. Somehow, Western culture is No Bisexuals and Everyone Is Bi at the same time.
Fine, I haven’t been in the situation, but I seriously can’t imagine that, in the absence of willing female partners, I’d turn to willing male ones – let alone “whatever is available, regardless of how young, non consenting, or inanimate it is”. That’s simply not, as far as I can tell, how it works!
This topic has annoyed me for years. Rant over.
No. I didn’t know what you think of those. I was very amused at the XKCD cartoon, and thought to share it ironically.
I apologize.
@Kevin
Yeah, I’m guessing it refers to the over-sexualitation of video game characters in general.
I couldn’t help but remember the “manssiere” from Seinfield (did anyone actually clicked on the link?).
@Lords Burgos:
I think it’s more supposed to be in line with the over-sexualization of female video game characters rather than male ones. See the same trend with comic book characters or other types of characters (why do lady spies wear tight catsuits while men spies wear t-shirts and pants?)
And yes, I know the “manssiere” reference.
Lord Burgos:
No, it’s not about that at all. It’s about the overt sexualization of female characters, to the point that bodies are twisted into anatomical impossibilities while wearing very little. Male characters are allowed sensible clothing and armor. Female characters, hey, baby, all you need are tits and ass, and a spine which curves in impossible ways!
Added wrinkle: IIRC, most male pedophiles who abuse boys consider themselves to be straight. But then, most of them also think that the world is divided into two groups: men, and those who men use for sexual pleasure. And they put “children” into the latter group.
Esteleth—Seems to me that it’s a twofer; sexual pleasure, and reinforcement of the power structure. After all, subordinates need to understand exactly where they stand in the food chain.
–
Most pedophiles define a preference, rather than think in terms of orientation, as their orientation is children.
I freaking love Big Boss in the fishnets. For those of you who don’t remember, we saw “Quiet,” the bikini-and-fishnet-wearing mute female sniper as the first woman in a video game at E3 this year. The designer of the character is Hideo Kojima, and he said on twitter that “I know there’s people concerning about ‘Quiet’ but don’t worry. I created her character as an antithesis to the women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed.” That’s right campers, don’t worry about a mute female sniper in a bikini because totes intent, symbolism, something something. I feel so much better now.
FWIW, I don’t think that there are men who routinely have sex with other adult men and consider themselves straight should be ignored – there’s a not-unsubtle thread in society that the relevant metric is not “who is it you’re being sexual with” but “are you penetrating or being penetrated.”
But then, that’s a restatement of “there are men, and then there are those that men fuck” duality @ 24.
Sorry, I’m new here. Is this the thread where folks discuss their love for fluffy kittens?
No, this is Thunderdome. Where we yell at each other.
You’re thinking of the Lounge.
David Marjanović#19
It’s not so much ‘everyone is bi’ as much as it is that some people’s sexuality is more fluid than others. Kinsey reported interviews with cowboys indicating that mutual and voluntary manual and oral stimulation were not uncommon on the range among otherwise heterosexually inclined men, and there are strong indicators of similar behaviours among the tall-ship sailors, although no formal research was ever done that I know of. Homosexual encounters are also historically common in cloistered orders (monasteries and nunneries), although I suspect that much of that was less situational sexuality and more a predictable outcome of gay people joining such cloisters to avoid the social expectation of engaging in heterosexual activities. I note again that this is, AFAICT, a largely separate phenomenon from the rape that goes on in the same circumstances, inasmuch as it seems to me that the amount of rape/sexual assault in boys schools or other institutions isn’t any higher, it’s just that the victims tend to be more relatively privileged than in society generally (because there are fewer members of oppressed groups available to victimize, and because the victimizers are still enough higher on the privilege ladder to still get away with it, helped by the fact that it’s often ‘tradition’).
Shoeguy:
Hello there. You are looking for the Lounge, which is here: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/09/07/lounge-434/#respond
[Fibres in concrete]
Microcracking!
The actual strength (even material) of the fibre in question is of less relevance. Jadehawk was closest to the mark. Hank a gormless googler.
@ Shoeguy
* “Fluffy kittens?” *
No.
“Battle Rats!”
*startled*
Bweark! What?!
Anti-Caturday posts … they were a thing, right?
Did they really end with Shetland ponies?
I seem to have lost track. *mumbles*
—
… and, right on cue, the feline overlady arrives at the door demanding food and accommodation.
Theophontes:
And Tardigrades on Bats!
And icy cold beer!
@ Caine
I have been living postmodernism for the last 10 days, my brain is fried trying to make sense of it. I cannot. I am an intellectual dinosaur.
Theophontes:
Heh. Most of it goes miles above my head. I’m enjoying an email exchange about it with a friend. This is what I recently wrote:
@ Caine
We are all modernist dinosaurs. We do not have the wherewithall to make sense of it. And if we did, we couldn’t.
…
Auch: Dusseldorf ist zu geil für diese Welt!
/retro
Over on the pomo thread …
That made me LOL! :-)
As a geologist (by degree) working in finance, it seems entirely plausible that the former prepared me for the latter.
cm, it’s all a *huge* abstract to me. I get the idea fine, but it would be hard to truly grok a billion dollars even if I was sitting on top of a pile of a billion dollars. (Said piles not actually existing, despite a billion dollars being a real thing. Sort of.)
And to clarify a little, I think there’s a difference between accepting billions of years and truly understanding it. For most people, it goes into a placeholder a la Discworld troll counting, “many, lots”. This tendency also answers for why so many people never question the notion of an eternal afterlife. We don’t truly understand such deepness of time, so it gets abstracted in our brains to achieve acceptance.
Und Dusseldorf ist besser als Cologne…. Die Toten Hosen. (0:30)
Caine:
If it helps to give a sense of scale, I once worked out that one billion human hairs, laid side-to-side, would make a “mat” 70,000 kilometres wide. Compared to a million (70 km, obviously), I think that gives some sort of “human-sized” perspective.
Daz:
Yes, and it also illustrates the lengths we need to go to in an attempt to understand such deepness. :D
(Not to mention the fact that I still have to remind myself that a billion, these days, is 109 not 1012.)
<sup> tags don’t work on here then…
Here is a shining (malodorous) example of Rand Paul’s Ideal United States.
Warning: Racism Trigger
for practical purposes (as opposed to e.g. social theory or philosophy of knowledge), if you understand intersectionality, you understand post-modernism well enough to work with it: it’s a form of de-centralization and de-generalization, and a way to question the universality and validity of dominant narratives. And for the most part, it’s a process more than anything: what answers you come up with is less important than that you listen to the questions and take them into account.
Jadehawk:
Yes, and I think that’s what at least half of the commenters in the thread are missing by miles. Right away, I grokked brute truth and social truth, and the intersectionality of them.
Re: conceptualizing “billions”
Sophomore year of high school, I learned Avogadro’s number: the number of molecules in a mole.
A proper understanding of mole ratios is crucial for chemistry, after all. It makes sense that the class spent some time drilling on moles (this included dressing up as moles).
Avogadro’s number is fucking huge: 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000!
I cannot conceptualize this. Avogadro’s number is a piece of trivia in the back of my mind, right next to the bit that says, “a mole of 100% pure carbon-12 weighs one gram.”
Similarly: 1 liter is by definition 1 billion microliters. Because that is what the metric prefix “micro-” means. Okay, fine.
Today I made a liter of buffer. I measured the liter of solute using a volumetric flask – which is to say I stuck it under the spigot and eyeballed the graduation. It filled a bottle about *hand gesture* so big. I could lift the bottle with one hand easily, but I preferred to hold it in two, for greater stability. It had a noticeable weight – a bit more than a kilo – but was not heavy.
Yesterday I made a 1 millimolar solution of peroxide. I did this by diluting a stock solution – which is to say I mixed 1 microliter of the stock with 7.28 milliliters of water. I used a pippette to do this. The peroxide was a sliver of liquid that occupied a fraction of the tip. I did not notice its added weight as I moved the pippette across my workspace.
Intellectually I know that the buffer I made today was (approximately) 1 billion times bigger than the amount of stock peroxide I used yesterday. If you handed me a bottle containing a liter of liquid and asked me how much was in there, I’d probably be able to say, “Looks like about a liter.” Maybe I’d peg it as about a quart – but that would depend on if I was in the lab or not. Likewise, if you handed me a eppendorf tube containing a microliter of liquid, I’d be able to squint at it and guess that it was a microliter or so.
But – I wouldn’t describe that buffer I made to day as being a billion microliters. Both because that would get me accused – rightfully – of sesquipedalian loquaciousness and because I don’t think of it that way. Maybe that’s because of my American upbringing, where I don’t default to thinking in metric. Maybe it is that – for all that my intellectual brain says “1 L = 1000 mL = 1,000,000 μL,” I don’t intuitively make that leap.
pretty sure the folks who do think in metric also wouldn’t think of something as being a billion microliters, since a liter is the most common reference point in thinking about volumes.
A different cultural thing that’s interesting for the metric system is that some units are more culturally used than others. In Poland, you can (or could, when I was I kid; kinda haven’t paid attention to it since) buy food at delis in “deko”, short for decagrams. I don’t know any place else that actually uses decagrams. But it’s a perfectly valid unit, just not a culturally popular one.
Um, a microliter is a millionth of a liter; billionths are “nano.”
And yes, the choice of units and phrasing varies: Canadians don’t seem to order cold cuts in hectograms, but ask for”200 grams of smoked meat,” Come to think of it, I could ask for 4 ounces of turkey at the deli counter here in the States, and would probably be understood, but in practice I asked for a quarter pound. And the scale then displays things in hundredths of a pound, not a unit anyone thinks in–but a reason to be asking for quarter or half pounds rather than ounces.
Wow, in addition to everything else, I apparently don’t know the difference between a million and a billion.
*embarrassed*
Don’t even start thinking bigger than moles. Transfinite mathematics has driven more than a few people to the edge of the abyss.
Me, too.
Sucker refuses to budge from my brain, notwithstanding that it’s been…hmmm…that would be back in…’73? Thenabouts-ish, anyway; so, something like 40 years, and I haven’t had any need to know it since about ’78. Meanwhile, there’s so much relevant information, stuff that I would actually use, that goes begging for brainspace.
–
However, One Trillion Dollars is quite easy to visualize. I visualized it by watching the link.
Well, the pomo thread is into full hate swing, so I wash my hands of it.
Damn. I wanted to follow it, but it was moving faster than my available focus today.
Dalillama:
It’s a clusterfuck. Amusing in spots, but mostly full of people yelling about how they don’t want pomo in their
peanutbuttertruth.I note that my bookmark in the pomo thread is comment #1.
Should I bother?
I did a quick scan by ctrleffing certain phrases and found that the answer is ‘no’.
Chigau:
That’s the right answer.
that’s because your mind does NOT want to consider how long it would take to fill a liter flask a microliter at a time.
Hell, I haven’t done chemistry for almost 30 years now, and I still shudder just thinking about how long it would take…
Just when I thought I had read it all:
Fuck me, that’s so silly I don’t have words…
I just decided I will never use that phrase again.
Was it always this irritating, or is it just me?
Well, seeing as anything can be posted here, how about checking out my newly released educational site?
Fun way to learn about logic and fallacies, including some popular examples of fallacious arguments.
Learn about logical fallacies
This is a personal site, created to help the community. If you like it, please share it with those you think could help in fallacies. Spread the word if you can. I’m not very good at advertising.
Cheers,
Edward
Agreed on “just a thought”.
and I would like to add everyone who ends a comment with “cheers”.
Chigau:
Rats below, yes. That makes me want to slap someone.
Rule suggestion/clarification:
No invitations to self-harm, even metaphorically/not seriously/insert justification here.
There is really no need to get graphically creative with “go fuck yourself”, if you really feel you have to tell someone to go fuck themselves.
To me, these illustrative suggestions of ways to “go fuck yourself” are threats of violence. They are thoroughly nasty and can be triggers.
@Caine,
Yes, the porcupines and rusty knives were a while ago. I don’t remember when I started reading the comments again. Probably some time last year. I really hope such things aren’t acceptable again. I was told they were not.
Dave:
They aren’t. Let me apologize ahead of time, I may not be able to address this thoroughly right now, as my shittastic wireless is barely loading pages for me right now.
I don’t see much difference between “they can fuck themselves” and “they can fuck a power socket”, especially when it would be quite difficult to actually fuck a power socket. (Yeah, yeah, it’s probably been done somewhere by someone, I don’t care.) Overall, there’s much less of this sort of thing than there used to be, if that helps.
Something which is still included in the new commenting rules is: This is a rude blog. Yep, it is, especially when certain subjects are up for discussion. Saying someone can go fuck themselves, creatively or plainly is most certainly not on par with something like “I hope you get violently raped!” or similar.
I found your initial post somewhat surprising, given the vile rape apologetics which caused the comment you’re upset about, because to me, the person who wrote the apologetics was much, much worse, and more offensive, and more insulting, and causing harm. This is one of the reasons I don’t get upset about plain or creative ways to tell someone to fuck off, because there are a wealth of people who, while they don’t say ‘fuck off’ in any form, say things which are damaging and vile. In there, I think, is the line in the sand for a lot of the commentariat.
be sure though, that in the end that’s all the rusty knives and porcupines were.
so tired of the folks who claimed it was a personal rape threat or something similar.
so much dishonesty.
Crip Dyke,
I understand that you disagree with how I handled thing in the SS thread. I also understand that the conversation was had across several days and several threads, so you may have missed some of my responses. I am not interested in rehashing that thread. It was immensely difficult for me to even post that first post, and I do not want to get into that emotional space again. I’m responding only in order to clarify.
What you said above was potentially misleading. JS asked me (in a previous iteration of TDome) about why I hadn’t added him to my list in the original post, I told him that it was simply because I’d missed his post, not for any other reason. It was NOT INTENTIONAL. I found the thread extremely triggering and began scanning posts after awhile. If I had it to do over, I would add the others you mention to the list.
Source: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/08/29/thunderdome-32/comment-page-2/#comment-683772
Second:
I understand that I might not have made this clear in my first reply. However, as a person who read radfem texts, I’m quite aware of feminist critiques of porn. What I said in the Stunned Silence thread is that I did not think that my former ‘nym might be construed as a a defense of rape, which is something you pointed out (and which I also quoted when I responded). In fact, I thought the use of “ladyporn” rather gave away the fact that I meant ‘erotica’ (which I write), rather than actual pornography. It occurred to me, once you pointed it out, that perhaps not everyone understood that meaning of ‘ladyporn’ (this is a common idiom to me, but I get that it might not be to everyone.) And after realizing that, I changed my ‘nym, so as not to hurt anyone.
This is pretty much all I want to say on the subject.
I think you all overestimate your brains’ actual capacity to really do numbers.
You don’t need mico and mililitres.
Try to imagine a dozen eggs. Without a box. Most people can’t spontaneously imagine 12 eggs without actually counting them. But we all get a twelvish heap of eggs right.
Alright, I’m here. Caine, can you please elucidate me on what you said? And “dude” is an incontrovertibly neuter word. Nobody takes the word “dudette” seriously.
I invite WordPress
to bit my crank.
Giliell:
I can easily imagine them without the box. They’re still in rows, just sans box. :D
ONE “dozen” eggs…
I no haz enough fingers.
Caine, what has what someone else said got to do with it?
I am already satisfied that rape apologists aren’t welcome. What I would like is for all intimations of self-harm to be unwelcome too. Especially sexualized ones.
Please explain how sexually violent cacti and porcupine imagery is different to what Ing said.
I do a 3 x 4 array.
So Ichthyic… Am I not a person? Cause you called me “it”.
quixotictendencies:
I was expressing my opinion of your intelligence. It wasn’t nice.
Y’know, we’ve seen this silly cover so many times. It’s perfectly alright to admit you fucked up, and quite simple to apologize for misgendering Chigau. Yes, ‘dude’ can be used as a neutral, however, it is not incontrovertibly a neuter word, that’s obvious from the etymology. While it doesn’t bother me on a personal level, it does bother other people, so it’s best not to assume someone gender.
quixotictendencies:
You’re all about gender neutral though, right? Personally, I don’t approve of referring to people as it. I suppose you could bother to actually learn something here, and figure out why you misgendering Chigau does matter.
I’m perfectly happy to apologize to her if it bothered her.
Chigau: I’m sorry if I bothered you. It was unintentional.
Dave:
Great. Just fuckin’ great.
And obviously free to spill their poison all over the place, as long as they don’t use naughty words. Jesus.
I already have. And no, I’m not going to coddle you anymore. You fucking explain why they are exactly the same, and present an actual argument for once.
This is not your blog. You can run your blog any way you see fit, including giving the time of day to rape apologists while castigating anyone who says fuck off. If you cannot comprehend what I wrote earlier, too bad. I am not making any more effort on this, at least not tonight. I am out of patience.
quixotictendencies (#550 of this thread)
And I have made it perfectly plain that the niggle wasn’t paltry. You’re just too ignorant to recognize it for what it is because you’re irrationally obsessed with tone. Albeit, in a way that’s somewhat different from the usual tone-obsessed trolls. So, uh, congrats for that, I suppose. You’re still wrong and the examples still prove PZ isn’t a sacred cow.
While dissent doesn’t require one hold back, it also does not require a lack of restraint. By any definition. That’s why you lose.
(#562)
Sorry, what’s that? You concede the point? I mean, you’re holding back far too much for this to be dissent. ‘Bout the same as licking my boots, innit? What do sacred cows do? Should I moo or something?
Ahahahaha! Did you collapse the planet you’re from with the density of whatever’s between your ears?
(#564)
う～ん、それ以上にお前の才能が足りなかったね。案の定、英語でも日本語でも、負け犬は負け犬だ。
Anyway, I’m done. もう私の勝ちだから。往生際の悪い奴を叩き潰し続けるのってちょっと嫌だ。あばよへたれ！www
dishonest sack of shit is dishonest.
actually, dishonest sack of shit is simply goalpost moving in order to continue trolling with stinky cheese bait.
A. Noyd: I’m not holding back. I just feel little compulsion to spew vitriol at someone who isn’t being despicable, and as much as I disagree with you, and as childish as I think you’re being, I cannot bring myself to froth at the mouth over you.
Bye then
do you need assistance with that flounce?
http://open.salon.com/blog/verbal_remedy/2009/04/08/dont_let_flouncing_make_your_ass_look_big
Ichthyic: I’m trying to wind down here. Do you mind?
And I’m not being dishonest. I am genuinely sorry if my choice of words bothered Chigau.
couldn’t stick the flounce.
sad.
I’m not the one leaving, dumbass.
Ichthyic (#87)
I loves me some stinky cheese. Though, it gets tiresome when there’s only ever one variety on the plate.
(#89)
I doubt the troll is skibbling off just yet. I said “buh bye” in Japanese and they’re responding to that.
It’s hardly trolling when somebody is actively trying to get people to simmer the fuck down. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite of trolling.
Caine,
I don’t think that. You have no grounds to think I think that.
You said that the act with a power socket is hard to do. Not actually different to porcupines and cacti. Nor do I see that difficulty is relevant.
I am not castigating anyone for saying fuck off or other “naughty words.”
I appreciate that it is your blog. As such, you obviously feel entitled to imply I “give the time of day” to rape apologists.
If I see those type of comments cropping up regularly, I will stop reading the comments again. That’s fine. Maybe it’s only me that finds it horribly negative and unpleasant to wade through them.
your epitaph.
quixotictendencies @539 from the other thread
You obviously didn’t understand my question, note I didn’t actually call you misogynist, merely asking if you were trolling for the approval of A Certain Infamous Group of PZ Haters.
Evidence based arguments presented coherently are given serious consideration on this blog, dissenting opinions based on nothing much other than personal feelings are derided as expected. Got something to say? Back it up.
Lofty: I don’t tend to involve myself with groups of people dedicated to hating something or someone. I’ve tried before, and found it to be not especially conducive to a healthy mindset. Therefore, I don’t know who you mean.
On “evidence based arguments”: I did try to engage in discussion on several topics. However, rather than addressing the points I raised, I was simply called names and told that I need to read things that I’ve already read but disagree with, or immense skyscrapers of comments that I haven’t read and shouldn’t be expected to read. I’m not going to cry about it, but it lends credence to my impression that, even if dissent is not outright banned immediately like it is in some quarters, it’s not appreciated or welcome, and dissenters (at least if they don’t already have a long and storied history of contributing) are quickly driven away by the torrent of vitriol they are instantly subject to.
It could be that commenters on this, PZ’s self styled “rude blog” have seen the same dissenting views sooo many time before they are totally fed up with refuting them again for the Nth time. If you require polite discussion on dissenting views I respectfully suggest you look elsewhere, I’m sure you’ll find such a space that meets your needs.
lying liar is lying.
or is delusional.
could be both.
I rather think it has more to do with being utterly unable to defend their position when pressed and/or frustration that the regulars can’t be deflected with the usual derailing tactics.
It’s perfectly fine that you guys are tired of addressing the same arguments over and over again, but surely you can see that the magnificent amount of hate spewed every single time an argument is rehashed is perhaps indicative that you need to calm the fuck down? I’m not saying you need to be polite to people who don’t deserve it, but the daily tidal waves of apoplectic rage are a bit much, and apart from anything else, they can’t be healthy.
Moving on from my unsolicited and nonexpert medical opinion, some of the “refutations” consistently provided to dissenters are wrong. If you want an example, so that I’m not just spouting opinion, I submit “Schrodinger’s Rapist” (pretend there’s an umlaut there). While the refutation may state that it’s statistically entirely valid to prejudge strange men, it is also statistically entirely valid to prejudge strange people of color. It’s statistically valid, but ethically wrong.
Ichthyic: Why are you so fucking childish? Seriously, you’re like a fucking trollbot.
El. Oh. Fucking. El.
Translation: “I don’t understand the point of Schrodinger’s Rapist or analogies and am also oblivious to the fact that most black people are fully aware that they are in fact Schrodinger’s Black Person to many, if not most, white people.”
Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong, and also irrelevant.
@105
Oh, well if you say so. *eyeroll*
You know how I know you don’t understand SR? Because your description of what it means, doesn’t match what it means. Your insistence that you do, in fact, understand it, does not change the fact that, when you attempted to describe what it means, you got it wrong.
Your attempt to analogize SR to people of color in that manner, is further proof that you don’t understand it.
quixotictendencies
Ö…….ö
character map
My 106 should read:
“your description of what you think it means doesn’t match what it means.”
You can repeat yourself all you want, but it doesn’t make what you say true. Besides, I didn’t describe what it means. Why would I? It’s 101 shit.
It is 101 shit. 101 shit which, as evidenced by the way you spoke about it, you clearly don’t understand.
This evidence of which you speak. I am waiting for you to point it out.
delusional liar also likes to project.
shocker.
Schrodinger’s[Whatever] is not about statistics justifying the prejudging of anyone. It’s about vulnerable people being unable to tell by looking at someone with power relative to them whether that person means them any ill will. It’s also about knowing that the person in power will likely get away with any harm they may get it in their head to do to the vulnerable person. It’s about performing a risk analysis and taking the option with the least harmful consequences to being wrong. It’s a thing every rational person does all day, every day with regard to all manner of things but is only ever considered objectionable when someone’s (usually manly) ego gets bruised by the suggestion that they are not trustworthy by default.
Of course it’s about statistics. You don’t go through the Schrodinger’s [Whatever] dilemma if there’s a virtually zero chance of something happening to you. Where did you get the idea that risk avoidance has nothing to do with statistics?
You’re right. Nobody objects to Schrodinger’s Black Mugger or Schrodinger’s Arab Terrorist. Oh wait, yes they do, and fucking rightly. Risk avoidance behavior based on *ist prejudice is wrong.
I didn’t say it has nothing to do with statistics. I said it has nothing to do with using statistics to justify prejudge anyone. Read for fucking comprehension, you fucking dishonest shitwit.
Good thing I never said it wasn’t, then.
Oh, fuck, christ, shit. I left out a clause. Oh wait, it’s the same fucking thing with or without the addition of “to prejudge someone”. You read for fucking comprehension, you bubonic cockfungus.
Lol? So the only use statistics have is for prejudging people, is it? They can’t be used for weighing the odds of one outcome happening relative to another outcome? Good to know. Thanks for clearing that up.
Yawn, angry troll is boring….
Caine, Chigau
You’re cheating! But yeah, we automatically need to put them into some kind of order, 2X, 3X4 etc.
What about Schrödinger’s Oppressor (the white person who may be actively contributing to systematic race discrimination, but you cant really tell by looking at them)? Seems like a more apt comparison, given the power differential. You know. If we want to go ridiculous places with ill-informed criticisms of very easy-to-understand metaphors.
Umpf Monitor help needed
How do I access the group? I click the linky, I use my email and password and get a “username or password wrong” message. Do I need a different password?
I sort of agree with Dave Hooke.
The “fuck off” invective is okay, IMO, and so are variations of “fuck you.”
But we tread a dangerous line hitting “fuck yourself” because people inevitably add things like “with a -blank-” or fuck something dangerous. It starts sounding like advocating sexual violence.
How is “fuck an electric socket” much different from “fuck yourself with a porcupine?”
Uhm, just ignore what I said above
For some very strange reasons Google didn’t accept my current password but my last one. Don’t ask me.
*shrugs*
I agree with Kevin.
Davehooke:
You do not like comments like ‘go fuck yourself’? For whatever reason, you view that as ‘telling someone to go harm themselves’, which I do not agree with. Masturbation? It’s a thing. People can ‘go fuck themselves’ with sex toys for instance. My point is that the phrase is not inherently a call for someone to harm themselves. That you feel it does speaks to problems you have with the phrase. Those problems are not shared by the majority of commenters here. If it were, people would likely stop using it (in much the same way that gendered slurs, calls to DIAF, or literal calls to inflict harm are condemned here).
When I use the phrase, it is usually in response to someone acting horribly, such as:
1- rape apologists
These people minimize the tremendous problem of rape, which I consider one of the absolute worst, dehumanizing, most vile acts one person can inflict upon another.
2- gun nuts
Gun violence is out of control. Whenever a gun thread pops up, there are always those assholes who turn up to remind us of their precious 2nd Amendment right, or their love of hunting–as if either of those trumps the right to life. Commenters who place more value on the 2nd Amendment–which I think should be abolished–than on harm reduction (so we can prevent more loss of life) deserve all the animosity thrown their way.
3- anti-choicers
Women are human beings, fully capable of making decisions concerning their health. I find those who would limit abortion access or outright ban it to support treating women as second class, or worse, as nothing more than baby makers, which is repulsive.
Those three examples represent positions many people hold. These positions support the current power structure which brings measurable pain, suffering and death to countless people (disproportionately women, too, I believe). In comparison, I see no comparable level of harm in telling people like that to go ‘fuck themselves’. Until such time as that phrase comes to be widely used as a call to self-harm, I will not stop using it. I am sorry if you are triggered by the phrase. Perhaps this is not the place for you.
Quixotictendencies:
There is nothing ethically wrong with women deciding that their safety is of utmost importance. Due to the tremendously high numbers of rape, if a woman does not know whether or not an unknown man will rape her or not, it makes sense to avoid them. It’s a personal risk assessment. Your dislike of SR points to a lack of understanding of various social issues (such as Rape Culture).
As a man, I take no umbrage if a woman decides to err on the side of caution around me (obviously, this assumes she does not know me). Am I a rapist? No.
But she does not know that.
__
Disclaimer:
Men get raped too. However, women are the targets of rape more often than not and the difference in power between men and women is in favor of men. In most situations, men are not at risk of being raped.
Kevin:
You make a good point. Telling someone to perform Activity X, which, if done would lead to self harm (porcupine or light socket) should be avoided. *Just* telling someone to go fuck themselves leaves off the hypothetical infliction of harm.
****
Davehooke:
Apologies, I misread you. I read your above comments as being critical of the phrase, rather than the creative, but theoretically harmful call to violence.
****
quixotictendencies:
Can you tell the difference between my apology above and your Not-pology to chigau?
@Tony!:
Do you not see a problem with “fuck an electric socket” though? I mean, capability of performing the action aside, that’s almost on par with a “DIAF” type response.
@Tony:
Posted my 128 without refreshing.
But yes, I agree with what you said: self-harm, no. Request to fuck oneself, okay.
Melissa has a post up at Shakesville about Richard Dawkins and the whole ‘mild pedophilia’ thing.
This piece right here seemed like something that folks here might be interested in:
(emphasis added)
(I would have posted this in the relevant thread, but holy fuck did that explode, so, Thunderdome)
Kevin:
It was “they can fuck a power socket.” That’s a direct quote. No “go” in it, no directive. If it upsets people, I am sorry for that, and I’ll keep an eye on such things as a monitor.
That said, I still am surprised that the particularly vile rape apologia which prompted the response is getting a pass. Apparently my priorities are different, as I think someone saying that in 50 years, the current hysteria over child molestation will be regarded as laughable and silly is much worse and more damaging. I’d prefer to place my focus on the people saying those things, rather than come down thunder and lightning on a form of fuck off. That’s me, though.
I will bring this up for discussion on the monitors group.
Howard:
Melissa is right.
Of course Dawkins focuses on the psychological harm religion can have upon children, but either ignores, is ignorant of, or downplays the physical, emotional, and psychological trauma that sexual assault can have on children. Like too many atheists (hello Pitters) his focus is largely on religion itself. Yes, religious beliefs can and do negatively impact people. But he needs to take the next step and recognize that there are many other harmful behaviors humanity engages in and many of those find support in religious teachings.
Thats why I think it is important to not stop thinking critically once you reach ‘is god real?’
Sure, we look at the evidence and there is none for any deity. Now, what about other beliefs? What about those beliefs I hold that may stem from religion? If god is not real, then some of the foundation for opinions about women, gays, gender roles, childrens rights and more NEED to be given serious analysis.
Does he even know what intersectionality is?
Okay, I have posted the subject for discussion.
This keeps coming up again and again. On any thread involving MRAs, rape, child abuse, etc, we are virtually guaranteed two things: someone just asking questions, or playing the devils advocate to show that no matter what happened to a survivor, they are culpable; and someone who, after multiple comments of rape apologia, tells a douchebag off, will object to the tone or perceive it as a threat of violence. Every fucking time. Like clockwork. Makes me wonder: is this a conscious tactic used to shout down the discussion of rape culture? Or just an amazing coincidence?
Ogvorbis:
I view it as a tactic. In the ‘I beseech you’ thread, it was a bit different, though. The person who objected to “fuck a power socket” didn’t do so until the 2nd page of the thread, and that was their sole contribution to the thread. There was absolutely no other comment, nothing which addressed the actual subject of the thread.
In comment #79 this thread, davehooke states, in response to me:
I found that appalling, because he has obviously been away quite a while, and seems to feel that there’s simply no need to address rape apologists, while there is this pressing need to insist that what they want in regard to telling people off is the most important bit in the discussion.
I’m very upset by it, but I am trying to listen to people. I’m just on the appalled side that people would much rather get self-righteous over a single “fuck a power socket” than pay the slightest bit of attention to what prompted it. I think priorities are on the fucked up side here.
Then again, what some of us have been through is so horrific that a derail over something like that is easier. I remember back when my sister was in college and a woman at her women’s college was raped and reported the crime (my sister was a good friend of hers). During a discussion of rape, and the fact that it was a non-coed school, my uncle steered the conversation to the fact that the Baltimore Colts used the college as a training facility — a pro football team using a women’s college as a training center was a far preferable discussion for him than a discussion of rape. For some people, discussions of child abuse and child rape are so frightening that a derail may be welcome. And part of me understands that.
Ogvorbis:
That’s very true, and I will keep this in mind, right at the front, because I did notice that a number of those upset about the creative fuck off are pretty much never seen in the middle of threads in which rape apologia is abundant. So, thank you for that, Ogvorbis, it’s an important reminder.
Schrödinger’s Rapist isn’t about prejudging men who are minding their own business, it’s about informing men seeking interaction with a woman that when they drop the first shoe by stepping over the woman’s boundaries, the woman will thereafter be waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s about how the woman will interpret the man’s pattern of actions towards her and what context she’s drawing on to do that.
SR is an attempt to explain to men strategies for not dropping that first shoe. Our culture teaches men to violate women’s boundaries—that they’re entitled to do so—in all sorts of interactions, but that’s a bad strategy because women aren’t psychic and can’t know where the boundary violation will stop. A guy might leave off at just pestering a woman for conversation or he might go all the way to rape. Either way, he’s already shown a willingness to disregard some of what the woman wants. Judging him for that is the opposite of prejudice.
This is why Schrödinger’s [Racist Stereotype] doesn’t work. A person of color could be genuinely exhibiting problematic behavior that a white person could reasonably interpret as a possible prelude to some sort of attack against them. But if one is profiling mugger or terrorist behavior, then race shouldn’t even enter into it. The potential mugger or terrorist’s race doesn’t actually increase the likelihood that they intend to do harm. On the other hand, if a white person considers the PoC’s race to be relevant, they’re more likely to overlook behavioral clues that the person they’re profiling isn’t dangerous.
The reverse isn’t irrational, though. White people do do racist shit all the time, and we do tend to escalate our racism from microaggressions or clueless insensitivity into larger-scale harm. And, in the same way our culture tells men that ignoring women’s boundaries is their right, culture tells white people that ignoring PoC’s humanity is our right. So people of color rightly develop a wariness towards anyone showing warning signs of worse to come.
What I do not feel the need to do is repeat refutations to rape apologists after reading two pages of refutation, and being fairly sure that troll is heading for a ban anyway. I don’t expect much from trolls and MRAs. Ing, on the other hand, is a regular. I made a simple request to Ing not to do it. I did not make a song or dance about it. It was a four word comment. I really didn’t expect Ing or anyone else to try to justify it. I had no intention of derailing the thread and I wasn’t going to do anything other than take it to Thunderdome once it carried on.
Caine, you have no grounds to think that I or anyone else who does not like these phrases is not paying “the slightest bit of attention to what prompted it.” If you really want to know what I think of rape culture, I can point you to discussions I have had.
Please stop with the “but they said…” I urge you to consider whether commenting rules have the slightest thing to do with priorities.
I have not been away for a while, as it happens. What I did do was stop reading the comments (but not the blog) for a long time because I found the “go fuck yourself with a…” trope to be thoroughly unpleasant and negative. That is the first time I have seen it again since I started reading the comments again. Hence I asked Ing not to do it. I have been reading the comments again for a while now, maybe six months to a year or longer (I don’t remember) and I have commented several times in the last several months, and contributed to “Why I am an atheist”. In fact, in the Shermer grenade thread, you replied to me, Caine.
I did actually bring this up in the new rules thread, where I was told that the “no threats of violence” rule covered it. If PZ sees this and could clarify, that would be great.
any time someone reverses the power gradient, they prove that they have no fucking clue what Schroedinger’s Rapist is about. You wanna play Schroedinger’s [X] with race? Fine. but then do it correctly, like so:
— “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like An Indian From the Reservation” by Barbara Cameron
– “Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did” by Hamden Rice
White people are Schroedinger’s Violent Racist, because making a mistake can cost you your life. Black people are not Schroedinger’s Mugger, because it’s only in the imagination of racists that they’re more likely to be harmed by black people than white people.
that’s apparently A Thing that a certain section of the Famous Atheists likes to do. Remember Harris’ “If I could make either rape or religion disappear, I’d pick religion” comment?
On the “go fuck yourself” and “they can fuck an electric socket” issue, I think a reasonable compromise is that we ask people* to avoid the latter, which could be interpreted as an invitation to self-harm, but not the former. I agree with Caine that the rape apologia Ingdigo Jump responded to was far worse than hir response, but, as happened in this case, the response can actually deflect attention from the apologia.
*And I mean “ask” – not have monitors tell them we’ll alert PZ, at least unless they make a point of repeating the offending phrase in an arseholish fashion.
Jadehawk:
I was unaware of that. I hardly know what to say, that someone could actually say such a thing and mean it.
In case this is useful to anyone for argumentation purposes. Hope it doesn’t offend Dave Hooke.
Oh, my fucking FSM. Massive trigger warnings for sexual abuse of children, even before you hover over the link.
I definitely agree with this.
Caine, Daniellavine, roro80, and Cerberus from the Consciousness raising thread; Portia, Dalillama, Morgan, Anne, and Caine (again) from the Lounge:
Thanks for having my back.
TRIGGER WARNING
A few weeks ago, I had a day I swear I had a big blinking neon sign on the roof of my car that read, “Please cut me off and then give me the finger!” And they did. Five different cars cut me off and then gave me the finger as I tried to avoid an accident. Made me feel like I had a target on me.
Last week I was, in a roundabout way, told that I was not the right kind of survivor. What I did, how I allowed my conditioning to come through, my weakness (yes, I really do look at it that way) made me, shall we say unwanted? among some survivors. As if my reaction to what was done to me, and what I did, was negated by my later actions. I rattled me. That was last week on a distant thread a long time ago (well, it has been a long week).
Today I was told, by stephen, over in the Conscious raising thread, that I was lying about what happened to me. He brought up the recovered memories scandal of the 1980s (which were egregious examples of prosecutorial and psychological misconduct and incompetence). And if I had been thinking clearly at the time, I would have pointed out that every one of those cases involved prosecutors, police and psychologists supporting the police trying to force normal weirdness into a preconceived narrative. Which is about as far from what I have gone through that one can get. So, stephen, fuck off, asshole.
And, in the same comment, stephen told me that my own feelings about my abuse, my emotional reaction to Dawkin’s minimizing of child sexual assault, was not acceptable to him. I guess he expected me to Vulcanize my feelings, my emotions, and see that Dawkin’s gradations of child sexual assault invalidated my views. stephen, if you are reading this (you can respond on Thunderdome (which is why I am putting this here and not on the Consciousness raising thread)), fuck off, asshole.
It has been a long and slow slog figuring out what my memories mean. And what Dawkin’s said, his statement about how it didn’t affect him or his friends,is a pretty damned close approximation of whre I was a couple of years ago. I knew I didn’t like scouts. And I knew that the reason I didn’t was because one particular scout leader was a pervert. And I remembered that much of it. I had buried the pain and the shame, the guilt and the pleasure, in a place where it couldn’t hurt me. I was wrong.
No one has drawn this out of me. No one has guided my memories, my experiences, into any preconceived narrative. I trust my memories. I know they are not perfect nor will they ever be perfect. I remember the beginning, the end and most of what happened in between. And I remember what I did later. What I did once. The time that I stared into an abyss and made a very uninformed decision that, since I had done what he trained me to do I was now a man and never had to do it again. I made the right decision but for a very wrong reason. But I backed away.
stephen, I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish. Was this a blind defense of a great but flawed man? were you really trying to tell a survivor that he was lying? were you really trying to tell a survivor that, since his reaction to Dawkin’s statement didn’t agree with yours it was invalid? The first option I can accept but you used both the second and third to support that goal and that was way out of line.
What you engaged in is called rape apologia. It feeds into multiple memes — those who claim they were abused are liars. Those who claim to have been raped are liars. And you get to tell a survivor how they should react in order to count as a real survivor. For a survivor reading in that thread, a survivor who, maybe, has not admitted what happened, your apologia makes it a little less likely that she, or he, will recognize that yes, it was rape. For a survivor who knows they were raped but has never told anyone, it makes a little less likely that they will ever tell anyone.
I cannot speak for others, I will not speak for others. I will say that I already blame myself. I already doubt myself. I already minimize my experience. I already think that my experience is not valid, that I am not areal survivor. I already play continuous games of woulda, coulda, shoulda. I don’t need, or want, you telling me that I am lying or that my reaction to what a very prominent member of my community is invalid.
So, stephen, if you are reading this, fuck off, asshole.
Ogvorbis @ 147, thank you for that. All of it.
You have certainly come into more than your share of abuse here recently. I am sorry for that, more than I can say. It has left me shaking with anger, feeling sick, and leaking tears because I’m not able to help or protect you in the way I want to, so I have to settle for words. All the love I have, Ogvorbis, now, always.
Ogvobis #147
What Caine said
and all of my circling wagons
Caine and Chigau:
Thanks.
Now if I can figure out how to get this target off of me and back onto the car . . . .
I’ve been angry on your behalf, Caine. I keep seeing you hit with splash damage on these threads. I keep seeing you (and others) doing some heavy lifting as the assclams in smegmarmalade sauce keep showing up again and again and again.
All of you, stay safe. Take care of yourselves first. Take a break when you need it.
Now if I can just take my own advice . . . .
Ogvobis, when you were a child no one had your back. Even if nothing else had ever happened to you, the fact that you were not protected would have been very damaging. But you had a metric fuckton of other stuff piled on, and still no one had your back. You have survived. That right there is a huge accomplishment. And we have your back. Now and forever. In every way we can.
The Lilac Berets of the Pullet Patrol™ joins the circled wagons
morgan:
Thanks, but, in all honesty, I’ve got a pretty good life. I have a job I love, a family I love, I can travel (not far and not often but it is quality travel), I get to go to forest fires and eat smoke, and, most important, I actually have the leisure time to work through the toxins of scouting and the mass murder of 12 years ago. Since scouts, the only thing that has really added to my problems was 9/11 and, perversely, even with the dreams and panic attacks, I also feel a little pride that I was there and did my part. So yes, I have survived. But I’m also immensely privileged in that I have the time and the energy to survive and, despite everything else, thrive. Yeah, I live a lie (no one outside of Pharyngula knows what happened to me in scouts or what I did) but that is my weakness, my choice, my fear.
ANyway, thanks for the support. I don’t always need it but it is good to have when things go all whahoonie shaped.
G’night.
Ogvorbis:
I know you have, Ogvorbis. And you give me strength, always. I fight because I can. I fight because so many can’t. And I fight because I love you and all the others.
I do take care, it’s important we all take care and treat ourselves well. I always remember Chris Clarke’s ‘Pancakes’, in a thread where I was so badly triggered, along with Pteryxx. When I’m reaching a certain point now, I see PANCAKES in huge, towering, mountainous letters in my head, and it helps. It really does. The silliest things sometimes…
Oggie
Still and always.
Ogvorbis:
Thank you thank you thank you.
With these words, you speak for this one other. This has me in tears. Thank you.
Ogvorbis in particular, and to all the survivors:
I just caught up with the consciousness-raising thread.
I don’t know any of you, online or off, but I would like to offer all the internet hugs, if they are welcome.
Other than that, words fail.
@Cyrano:
I already admitted I was wrong to bring those things up again in the bowels of Christ thread.
I did not yet apologize.
I hearby apologize to you, Elyse, Ogvorbis, & Jane Doe 143.
From the link posted by Ms. Daisy Cutter @145:
“It’s just another sign of the worsening rape culture that has been running rampant in America.”
Not worsening—it’s just that suddenly, people who don’t want to know about it are being forced to notice what was there all along. Like someone suddenly yanked the lid off a dumpster full of rotten garbage.
And “corrective rape” is a Hardy Perennial, with world-wide distribution.
–
Ogvorbis: *hugs* and unceasing moral support. I haven’t read this guy’s comments (not having gone into that thread), but that sounds unconscionable. He can fuck right off, and his little narrative that lets him feel comfortable about the subject, too.
*pulling wagon into circle; arming Death Ray*
–
Ooops, I don’t know why I got informal.
My post @158 was to
“Cyranothe2nd” not just “Cyrano”,
And the comment to which I was responding is #73, I believe. Again, apologies.
Kittehserf @ 157, my thanks. And hugs happily and gratefully accepted.
Okay, so I haven’t read most of what’s happened the last couple days.
Law school work has been overwhelming. Really above & beyond what anyone with kids can reasonably do. But I do need to emotionally clear my head sometimes, so I haven’t read absolutely nothing. Most of what I’ve read has been right here in TD.
So, I’m wondering: I haven’t told details of my rapes, I haven’t told a “rape story” yet. My story can be very useful in seeing how different survivors can have different responses to different assaults, because what really got to me was fairly unpredictable.
Is that thread still going on? Is the bowels of Christ one still going on. Would it be useful for me to take the time to spill this now?
I’m willing to contribute if it helps. I’m not willing to spend the time and emotional energy if the thread is largely dead or if it won’t help because others have articulately covered this ground.
Other days, I’d chime in with an “every little bit helps” attitude. Today, scant resources make that impossible. I’d appreciate anyone’s opinion, thanks.
@ Ogvorbis #153
I followed the discussion over here meaning to just give a quick supportive “shout out” to the people who so passionately argued against the “defense” of RD.
Then I see this. And please forgive me going all bold-y. But I want my written words to clearly express what I need to say.
You’re not living a lie.
No one has any right to your story.
You are not weak.
It is your story. You choose. You decide. You owe no one anything
Fear isn’t a failure. It is self protective. I have lived my own post rape life and seen the experience of rape survivors.IMO, we get to guard those wounds. No one has the right to rip off the bandages except us for ourselves when we are ready. And it’s okay to never be ready.
Really. It is.
Especially in a culture which is not content to merely dismiss us, but condemns us for the actions of other(s) at the same time as it calls us liars.
I don’t have the strength to post in a no holds barred comment thread. I barely had it in me to read much here. I just skimmed for the comments of people I have come to respect over my months of lurking. So this is likely my first, last, and only post here.
And at the risk of sounding woo-ey….I wish you well. I wish you whatever peace you are able to create for yourself. Take great care of you. And thank you. Very much. Thank you.
Crip Dyke:
That’s a personal decision, and I think whatever and whenever you feel is the right time is right. That wasn’t very helpful, was it?
That thread is still going, somewhat. It’s slow right now, but past experience informs that it could well explode again, but that could be days from now. The other thread, the one in which several rape apologists spit all over, is https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/09/10/consciousness-raising-needed/comment-page-1/#comment-689821
I would say, take your time and catch up, and see how you feel about sharing your story.
I’ve got the WTF blues:
I am so sorry you are another one in the legion. You have all my support. I understand that posting and reading can be too much. Thank you, very much, for stopping and adding your voice. It means a lot.
Ogvorbis #147:
WTF?
How heartless can you be to tell a victim they made it all up?!
Fuck that guy.
So sorry Oggie. You are a good man.
@Caine
Thanks.
Gots lots on my plate, & I’d like to see my family a little over the weekend. I can’t blow off reading for Thursday classes and add them to an already packed weekend (though, admittedly, less packed than last weekend) without a decent reason. Plus some of it I can’t blow off since I’m leading class discussion on something tomorrow. You’re helping me prioritize & I thank you.
BTW:
How messed up is it that I can just assume a near-future recurrence of this issue of using the differential experiences of survivors to justify minimizing rape? Haven’t told my story, but when there’s a thread to which I’m relatively early, where rape justification/minimization is going on, I will tell it so as to serve an educational purpose. Fine, good on me and all that, but that i can predict my story will be needed?
ARRRRRGGGHGGHGHGHHHHHHHHHHH <—- the sound of ultimate suffering
Crip Dyke:
Oh, I feel you, deeply, truly, and it’s about 10,000 kinds of messed up that you know the circumstance in which to relate your story will happen, probably right around the corner.
Back on PharyngulaSciborg, when I first told my story in a thread there, I had no idea it would be the first of too many times. I’ve lost count now. It’s all manner of fucked up, and it’s a damn sharp reminder of just how deep and pervasive rape culture is, that such things require repeating.
Okay, back to interpreting a 1938 law review article for presentation & discussion leading tomorrow night.
It was okay to take a break, but now if I don’t get back to work I won’t get any sleep. And that isn’t any better for leading an intelligent discussion than simply not doing the preparation.
Bad Zoot! Naughty Zoot!
For my sake, I hope that any procrastination on my part is punished with a spanking.
And then…?
The oral sex!
I’m so hungry.
There is stew in the kitchen.
but I have a cat on my lap
Our 4 month old kitten has pinned me, immobile, to the chair many a time.
I believe density control is a kitten’s super-power.
CD
My kitteh is 18years old and is more or less in charge of … everything.
Whoever the baker is at the Cash Wise in Bismarck, I bless you muchly for noticing that some people do like carrot cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I love them and it allows me to slice one up and announce “Delicious Cake!” to the ratties, who all come scampering.
gvrbs,
N, tht’s nt wht hppnd. n fct, y knw tht’s nt wht hppnd nd dscss wht’s rlly hppnd ltr. Y jst flt lk drmtzng ths nt l – why? Bcs y’r cnctd sshl? Bcs y’r sd t ths txc tmsphr whr “srvvr” cn spw ny knd f bllsht nd nt b clld n t? dn’t knw. Bt y cn fck rght ff wth ths knd f l.
nvr tld y r nyn ls tht y wr lyng bt wht hppnd t y. sggstd tht y shld cnsdr th pssblty tht yr rprssd mmrs (f thy r sch) r nt rl. Thr’s nthng rmtly lk lyng bt ths pssblty. Smn wth fls rprssd mmry s n trgc sttn f blvng thng tht ddn’t hppn, thy’r nt lr.
ws tryng t hlp y, y fckng mrn. Yr dscrptn f nt hvng dtld mmrs ntl yr 40s md m sspct tht myb y nvr hrd f rprssd mmrs bng cntrvrsl. nd f tht wr th cs, thn y rlly shld b tld bt t nd ncrgd t cnsdr ths pssblty – s tht wrd gn? Nt crttd, nt n ccstn, pssblty. Dsn’t mn tht t’s tr. Thr hv bn sm css f ppl rmmbrng thngs nd thn ltr cnfrmng thm thrgh thr chnnls. Thr hv ls bn mny css f ppl rmmbrng thngs, bng vry sr bt thm, nd thn lrnng th mmry ws fls ftr ll.
Th mmrs tht y grdlly dscvrd n yrslf n yr 40s (f tht’s wht hppnd) my b tr. Bt frm wht w knw bt hw mmry nd trm wrk, thy cld ls b fls. nd ths trgc sttn s nt sm thrzng – t’s rl, t’s wrckd thsnds f fmls, t pt mny nncnt ppl nt prsns. t’s fckd p. Smn wh dsn’t knw bt ll tht nd blvs n n llsn thr mnd cnstrctd s n vry trgc cndtn.
dn’t knw f tht’s wh y r r nt. t’s yr jb t wrk thrgh tht pssblty nd dcd whthr t ccpt yr mmrs r nt, nt mn. Y w t t yrslf t fgr thngs t – t’s yr lf, n n ls’s. n th chnc tht y ddn’t vn knw ths cld b pssblty, sggstd tht y gt nfrmd. Y lrdy knw bt ths nd dcdd t dsn’t pply t y? Fn by m, ‘m nt gng t ngt r scnd-gss yr xprnc. t’s yr fckng pst.
h, nd ll y snctmns sshls wh ccsd m f “tllng vctm thy md t rght p” (tht’s fckd p, Tny), n “ttmpt t rs gvrbs’s xprnc” (n t sn’t, dnllvn), mr bllsht frm Cn (ww, y rlly r txc sshl), “ccsd gvrbs f mkng p hr rp.” (n ddn’t, rr80, wht mrnc thng t sy), “TLD FCKNG RP VCTM tht thy mst b dldd” (n ddn’t, Crbrs), ll f y cn g fck yrslvs. Ths lttl htfst y wrkd yrslf p t vr th fct tht smn, n scnc-nd-thsm-thmd blg, mntnd th cntrvrsl stts f rprssd mmrs – n f th hrd-wn vctrs f scnc vr prjdc n th 90s – y ght t b shmd f yr lyng, snctmns, fckd-p slvs.
Tht’s nt tr. Y my b cnfsng th rcvrd mmry scndls wth th dycr stnc bs hystr f th 1980s, whr plc nd thrpsts “gdd” chldrn t “rmmbr” nd wtnss bt thngs tht ddn’t hppn. Tht ws vn mr fckd-p. Bt thr hv bn rcvrd mmry css whr smn wsn’t sbstntlly gdd by thrpst r nyn, bynd jst knwng n gnrl trms tht mmry “cn cm bck”. Thy strtd hvng flshbcks, thn ths rccrrd wth mr dtls, nd s n. Rd Lfts f y wnt dtld dscrptns f hw t cld hppn.
Y shldn’t trst thm blndly, bcs w nw knw, thnks t psychlgcl rsrch, hw hrrbly sy t s fr ppl t ndvrtntly crt fls mmrs nd fl thy’r rl ltr. f y knw bt ths nd stll trst thm – tht’s fn by m. Y vry wll my b rght nd yr mmrs mght b tr. dn’t knw. t’s yr lf.
stephens:
Yes, it is. You are the one lying. Your post is still right there, where you left it: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/09/10/consciousness-raising-needed/comment-page-1/#comment-689723
And I have a bit of news for you, stephens. You will not continue, even in Thunderdome, to call a rape survivor a liar, or a moron, or any of the other ever so supportive things you just shat out onto the carpet. Understand that, right now.
Also, stephens, your sense of privilege and arrogance are utterly stunning, however, you have demonstrated that you know absolutely nothing about rape, sexual assault, or how to talk to people who have been raped a/o assaulted. So, try turning that incredible genius on yourself, and figure out that yes, you are ignorant as all hells, so perhaps you should shut the fuck up and do a couple of things: listen and read.
Rape Culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture
Rape Culture 101
https://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/rape-culture-101/
http://victimblaming.tumblr.com/
Intent is not magic
http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/intent-its-fucking-magic/
https://proxy.freethought.online/brutereason/2013/04/03/my-oppression-is-not-your-thought-experiment/
h, nd gvrbs,
Ww. Th mnt f nttlmnt hr s stggrng. Ths s jst s fckd-p. chllngd yr rdng f Dwkns bcs t ws ncrrct. pntd t tht Dwkns s nt syng nythng lk wht y sd y “gt t f” hm, mr lk nrly th ppst. nd y thnk tht, s “srvvr”, y hv th rght nt t b chllngd n yr pnns hr? Tht nbdy cn cll y n yr bllsht? Tht y cn jst g n nd scrb nythng y lk t Dwkns nd nyn ls, nd s srvvr y mst b cddld?
Ww, dn’t knw f y wr ths fckd-p t bgn wth, r th txc tmsphr hr nrtrd ths n y, bt wht sght. Y sm lk thrghly nplsnt hmn bng, nd lr t bt.
f wht y wnt s plc whr n n wll vr tll y y r wrng, whr ll yr pnns wll b chrshd, whr y cn msrprsnt nythng nd nyn y lk nd n n wll cll y n t – why dn’t y g t fckng spprt grp, y dt? Wht md y thnk tht Phryngl, wblg t lst stnsbly dvtd t scnc nd trth nd thsm s th rght plc fr ths srt f tttd?
Y r srvvr? Gd fr y, nd mn t. Y thnk t gvs y ny spcl stts wth rspct t trth, t lgcl rgmnt, t ndrstndng wht thr ppl sy nd rprsntng t crrctly, t bng clld n yr bllsht? Thn y’r srvvr nd y’r fckd-p sshl. Th sght f y bng s sr nbdy pssbly hs th rght t cntrdct y s vn mr rvltng thn th snctmns blly nblrs tht g nt th brch wth ls nd hystrcl ndgntn th mmnt smn ds.
G fck yrslf.
Wow stephens. So it wasn’t bad enough to suggest that a survivor (the scare quotes you used around survivor made me want to puke, FYI) might be wrong about what he remembers or however you put it, but then you have to chase him in here to berate him for being angry that you think you know better than he does about what he remembers of his own fucking life? You think you’re justified to come in here and call him a moron just to quibble over the word “liar?” Because it’s just so fucking important that everyone know that all you really meant to do was to tell a rape survivor that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about with regard to his own fucking lived experience?
You are a vile human being.
stephens:
It certainly is, on your part. You really couldn’t possibly be more of a self-absorbed, arrogant, piss filled douche.
Pharyngula is chock full of people who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted. You don’t get to tell us we don’t know what we’re talking about, you vile rape apologist.
*eats a bunch of cat-grass*
*walks up to stephens*
*vomits on hir shoes*
*walks off*
It is multiple levels of sickening that stephens says that people who have survived rapes and refuse to be quiet about it are some how “entitled”.
Fuck you and the porcupine you rode in on, stephens. Dawkins is making a judgment for the simple reason that he thinks he is speaking for all of the victims that sexually abused him. But you cannot or will not understand that little detail.
And, yes, saying that sexual abuse did not harm him and hi classmates does play into the narrative that the rape of children (pedophilia) is no big deal, that there are bigger issues to deal with. People had explained this to you repeatedly. It is not a difficult concept to understand.
And, yes stephens, this makes you are terrible person. And you have earned all of the scorn that you have received here.
Also, here is an other clue for you. Many of us were atheists long before Richard Dawkins came out with The God Delusion. When I realized I was an atheist, I never even heard of Richard Dawkins. I was more influenced by the humanism of many so called golden age science fiction authors like Isaac Asimov, who was a very lecherous old man. I have taken the atheism and want to leave behind the extreme sexism.
I suggest you do the same when it come to Richard Dawkins.
Janine:
Gad, same here. I was an atheist decades before there was an internet. Long before Dawkins gained any notice. And I don’t care how many people he has or may put on the road to atheism. That has nothing to do with him being a sexist, a racist, and a rape apologist.
Oh, and I need to do this for myself.
Stephens, I apologize in regard to one thing: you did not call Ogvorbis a liar.* That said, it was you who was so swollen with entitlement that you dared to waltz in and post here, without having the slightest idea of Ogvorbis’s history, or Pharyngula’s history, or the history of any of the rape survivors here. That does not paint you in any sort of a good light.
You exhibited no empathy, no compassion, and absolutely no thought. All you cared about was defending Dawkins, and in doing so, caused a great deal of harm. You should be ashamed.
*You did go out of your way to suggest it, though.
I have a rather unusual perspective on the whole false memory thing. My girlfriend in the 90’s was a victim of false memory syndrome. All that was missing was the satanic overtones. She was convinced by her therapist that she was repressing memories of her father raping her. They did “guided visulisations” and hypnosis; her copy of The Courage to Heal was always close to hand and well used.
I also had a shitty childhood involving an abusive alcoholic. A childhood that I don’t particularly remember because I actively avoided thinking about it.
Last week my mother died and I flew home to deal with it. I was confronted with many things about my childhood that I’d forgotten. Objects, letters, photos and a brother who not only remembers it all in detail, but wanted to talk about it.
I spent the whole time there going “Wow, I’d forgotten that.” and “That seems familiar.” In some cases after a couple of days I the memories began to come back, and in some cases I still don’t have any memories at all of what my brother was talking about.
My situation and my girlfriend’s had similar features from vastly different circumstances. I had no one pushing me, no authority figure telling me that something ‘must’ have happened. And yet I didn’t remember stuff, and then on the gentlest of reminding, I suddenly did.
This shit is not cut and dried. There’s no fucking video tape that you can press play on and the whole one’s life will spool out in perfect detail. Memories not reinforced by repetition fade all the time, never mind when someone is actively not pursing those memories.
So stephens, fuck off you compassionless piece of shit. You and your kind, those who harm people to prove some fucking point, are nothing less than pus that need to be bled from the world. Do us all a favour and get on with that you fetid mass of rotting excrement.
Plus, it’s pretty arrogant to think that neither Ogvorbis nor anyone else ever thought of the idea that his memories might be mixed with imagination before. He realized that right at the beginning and has been very careful in interpreting what he’s remembering and how. And yet, stephens thinks that somehow nobody around here has ever heard of that thing that got so much press that it would have been impossible not to know about.
Thank you, Carlie.
I appreciate- quite a bit -when people with expertise in something drop in that expertise so that new things can be considered.
Asking survivors to doubt themselves because, y’know, it’s a realistic possibility that a survivor has experienced no self-doubt? That’s not expertise. That’s idiocy.
I have contrived a hack to get onto the airport wifi. Does that make me evil?
(In my own defence, I URGENTLY needed to download some pharyngula posts for offline reading on the plane.)
Edward
I looked through it. It’s really not educational. It doesn’t explain anything.
stephens
Christ, how the fuck are you that stupid?
Jesus fucking Christ, stephens, look at yourself.
—
Ogvorbis, I’m so sorry you have to deal with this. *hugs*
—
WMDKitty – You made me laugh.
—
I’m impressed, stephens. You really, really feel a need to lecture rape survivors on exactly how to interpret the traumatic events in their lives, and you really are worried about a “toxic atmosphere” in which we try to avoid judging the victims. That’s so sweet.
I am inspired by your example. To improve the atmosphere and to teach someone what an awful person they actually are, I’ve decided to…
Smack you with the banhammer, asshole.
I’m trying to help you.
@Stephens
The fact you have the utter fucking nerve to call anyone else, let alone Ogvorbis, entitled smacks so highly of projection it is beyond the fucking pale. Fuck you.
Note to self: after reading the thread, refresh before posting.
You ok, Ogvorbis? That guy was a right arsehole.
Just had to deal with a person on FB who I thought might be a good friend but is instead a rape apologist asshole who thinks Richard fucking Dawkins agrees with him that victims should just toughen up about abuse and rape, oh and that Penny Arcade did no wrong in how they handled the Dickwolf incident and that it wasnt a bad thing. And I cant talk about how fucking rage inducing and triggering he fucking is because then he’ll just tell me to grow thicker skin. Fuck rape culture.
Arawhon:
Fuck rape culture indeed.
*solidarityfistbump* or *sympatheticshoulderpat*, as desired.
Crip Dyke @168:
Already being done. Look at the GOP and religious right and their obsession with it being ‘the right kind of rape’.
My experience was that I didn’t plan to tell my story. It just happened because it was appropriate to the argument.
Safe hugs to you.
Doubting me, implying that it never happened, is helping me?
Thanks, PZed.
Yes. No. Sort of. Purple. Thursday. Maybe? Not sure yet.
I am so angry right now that I can’t see straight.
Distant support and safe ehugs. Or whatever is comfortable for you.
Richard Dawkins misses the point of the criticism and doubles down.
Fuck you, Richard Dawkins.
Never seen a better summary of the man. : p
Hugs offered, Ogvorbis. I’m so sorry. Please do let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.
I posted this break down of the recent notpology from Mike Krahulik. He basically exploded on me with those reprehensible views in the forms of teal deer rape apoligia which came out of left field. So I linked him to the beseech from bowels post and the Rape culture 101 link from Caine and then unfriended him, maybe he’ll learn but I doubt it. And thanks for the offer of sympathy.
And took too long to formulate that. I offer support to Ogvorbis who has been a good strong voice that I have learned from and any others who need it.
And Dawkins, once again, completely misses the point. His reaction to his sexual assault when he was a child is his. But he still hasn’t said a word about extending his experiences to others. That vooshing sound? That was the point missing you, Richard.
@Arawhon:
Your link didn’t work.
NightShadeQueen and Arawhon: Thanks. I’m doing okay now. Still angry but not raging. Holy shit what an arse.
Ogvorbis: not caught up at all but I’m here to support you, too. You have the right to be angry. All of us do.
I thought maybe there’d be something surprising in that, but at this point it’s expected.
Congratulations, Dawkins. I expect stupidity and hand waving from you, and you’ve validated such an expectation.
Ogvorbis – *heap of fluffy hugs* *chocolate* *rock hammers*
This part is good though:
Had that been his entire article, there’d be no problem.* But no, he needs to strawman his critics before he admits any wrongdoing.
*Well, less of a problem. This bit still speaks to his privilege and ignorance, I think.
Lets try this again. Linky
Just in case: http://alexlifschitz.tumblr.com/post/60720605376/sorry-not-sorry-penny-arcade-and-the-deeper-roots-of
what da zog? It hyperlinked it without being htmled. I think Pharyngula is possessed by internet gremlins.
At this point I’m already happy he’s capable of admitting any wrongdoing at all. *snort*
BTW, I’ve seen the replies to my comment near the top of this page; now just really isn’t the moment for me to continue that discussion…
Uh, yeah. Naked URLs have always been turned into links.
You evidently did put an <a> tag around “Linky”, if that’s what you mean.
@Ogvorbis
Understandable; he pissed me off and it wasn’t even aimed at me. Sorry I arrived too late to be of any help whatsoever.
Hope you feel better mate.
Yep. Much more annoying is the fact that naked youtube links autoembed
Crip Dyke @ 158–
Thanks, I really appreciate that! I just started school again too (unexpectedly. For some reason, I had it in my head that I started on the 17th. My phone sent me a reminder on the 10th that ‘Hey asshole, you’re supposed to be teaching classes RIGHT NOW.’ So, I missed the first class I was supposed to teach. This week has pretty much been a clusterfuck!)
Fossil Fishy @ 185–
First, I’m so sorry to hear about your mother. Wishing you all the comfort right now.
I too have a lot of things in my (abusive, fundamentalist xian) childhood I don’t remember. My sisters will bring up stuff and I’ll go, “Huh. I didn’t remember that happening but now that you say it…” The worst part of that is that all the pain and rage of the memory gets dredged back up again, too. Don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that I understand and that I’m so sorry you’re dealing with it right now. Again, all my best to you!
That it is, in fact, “business as usual”.
I also suspect that a certain amount of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is involved; and that that same cultural packaging plays a very similar part in the ubiquity of bullying in general, and the frequently dismissive reactions to that.
–
Me, either/too.
–
Nope. Chaotic neutral.
:)
–
Ogvorbis: Stephens is wrong, and an asswipe as well. Ignore Him!!!
Also, *an army of calming, hug-wielding manatees*
–
–
Totally threadrupt. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have missed the second coming of stephens. My silverware drawer has gotten pretty empty so instead I will range about how it is impossible to by comic books for my daughter.
She is 5, loves superheros (she was a rabid fan of Darkwing Duck when she was 3-4 and now she is on a Batman kick – the earlier cartoons like Batman the Brave and Bold, which we have been watching over and over and over – hum I think I will see if she will watch Darkwing with me tonight as a bit of a break). She also likes the SuperFriends cartoons (the old ones). For her birthday she wants the Lego Avengers Helicarrier.
I can’t by her a comic book! I had picked up a few of copies of Superman Family Adventures which they cancelled. Just as well since I really don’t want to give DC any more of my money. She has also been asking for stories about Wonder Woman or a girl superhero. ARGH!
WTF went so wrong that we now have entrenched pink aisles, pink @(#$^& tools and I can’t buy a damn comic book for my kids! It was better when I was a kid. This is freaken ridiculous.
There I am glad to have gotten this serious topic off my chest.
Ugh, in Dawkins’ reply/”apology” he still doesn’t get it. Yes, he minimized the experiences of other survivors, and I’m glad to see that he understands that wasn’t okay (even if he had to be a condescending douche when he apologized.) But he also said that we cannot judge people from the waaaaaaaaaayback year of 1950 for their peodphilia and 1960 for street harassment, because it was a different time. Which is just a ludicrous claim, and one that he himself rebuts when it suits him (when he argues about Biblical morality and, most especially, when he’s on his hobbyhorse about Islam.) And this point he ignores completely in his reply.
pHred,
I’ve had some luck with anime comics rather than Western ones. Of course, you will have to read them through yourself, as some of them are very adult (and contain sexism and all other sorts of stuff) but I recall really like Robotech as a kid, and my daughter loved Fruits Basket and Sailor Moon at ages 8-11.
As far as Western comics that have good female characters, I’ve heard Avatar is good.
pHred,
Check this! GeekGirlCon has a list of good comics for kids under 12!
http://www.geekgirlcon.com/10-great-comic-books-for-kids-under-12/
And here’s a tumblr for female comics fans that has some lists of good comics for girls of different age groups.
http://girlsreadcomics.com/
Hope that helps! I remember being really annoyed when my daughter was 11-ish and not being able to find her books.
Cyranothe2nd,
Thanks ! That is awesome. Now I just have to figure out how to get ahold of some copies of things to read where my kids won’t see them.
pHred: Different but similar problem. My six year old is really into metal, which is largely a penis-driven genre*. I have found some excellent bands that are 100% non-male**, but not many, and they are hard to find. Anybody got any suggestions, I am all attentive and prepared to receive them.
I’d love to help with the comic book problem, but I’ve never been into them.
*Joke: What do you call something with 2,000 legs and 2 breasts? The audience at a Slayer concert.
**I freaking love Nervosa, a 3-piece Brazilian thrash band. I hope to see them this spring.
@Cyranoth2nd / pHred:
I recommend Mouse Guard wholeheartedly because it reminds me of Redwall.
Cyranothe2nd@215 My wife teaches at more than one community college (see: adjuncts …or, how to not pay benefits by ensuring few qualify as “full time”) and their schedules are never in sync (different start days, different breaks, different finals schedules), so “when do classes begin” isn’t a trivial question.
Though this year one co-worker missed a whole week of classes and got fired. Wife would have been an optimal person to pick up the class (familiarity w/ the course and all, especially since the former coworker was new and was going to work from her lectures) but couldn’t be offered it because while she’s teaching a smaller load than last term the number of credits for this course (incl. lab) would push her over an arbitrary limit — so yet some other teacher got a copy of her syllabus and slides to work from.
@ dontpanic
Where the heck does she work? Most places consider someone’s syllabus their intellectual property, not to mention their slides. One of my coworkers actually got in trouble here for plagiarizing one of my syllabi. Wow! That is taking things to new lows.
@Antiochus Epiphanes
That is a tough one. I wish I had suggestions but don’t. My kids liked Cherri Bomb but they aren’t metal and they broke up :(
Updated Rattitude:
Agnes.
Artemis.
Vasco.
Caine, your Ratties always give me warm fuzzies. Thanks.
Morgan, you’re welcome. :D
Caine:
Squee! Thank you. *hugs*
do not take me for some conjurer of cheap tricks!
no, only if you don’t share it.
Hekuni Cat:
I changed the title of Artemis’s post to “Serious Business – Chocolate Immersion Therapy” :D
Referring back to #68.
“Just sayin'”.
I loathe that ‘folksy’ little deflection attempt of passive aggressive opinionating.
I have my Thunderstorm* running, listening to Linda Ronstadt’s Dedicated to the One I Love, and now I’m sleepy.
*Sleepy Time app, playing Rain 2/Distant Thunder 2/Rain 1. Even if I hadn’t gotten into e-books, I’d have a tablet just for this app. Mega-comfort.
From the Department of Whoa, Geology, You Scare Me Sometimes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor#Mechanism_of_the_reactors
Oh, and, also.
Only if they’re the last line of a comment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4
:-)
If I didn’t have the smiley, you’d have got …
[REDACTED]
…what became of the rocket frog, Caine?
You still wake up sometimes, don’t you?
Wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the rocket frog?
There is a greasemonkey script for de-embedding yootube vids at the wiki: http://pharyngula.wikia.com/wiki/Greasemonkey
Ichthyic:
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha *gasp*
Oh, fuck you, Hannibal.
>:)
Antiochus Epiphanes @ 222
L7 were good. More grunge/punk than metal, but shitlist could be an anthem for this blog.
16.
Caine, Fleur du mal
Huh?
I was talking about Seinfeld.
Dontpanic @ 224,
That is some disgusting bullshit! How dare the college require her to hand over her syllabus and course materials to another teacher. That’s just unconscionable!
And yeah, adjunct teaching is sure fun. Nothing like teaching at 3 different colleges, just to make ends meet! I just started at a new college that has a distance campus, but the college still wants me to travel an hour to go to the main campus and go to all these meetings which are, of course, unpaid. The amount of crap they expect adjuncts to do without actually getting paid is unreal. At another college I teach at, they pay me hourly and ONLY the hours I teach. Not office hours, not grading hours, not prep. Nothing–just the 2 hours a week I teach.
I love my job, but the way that adjuncts are abused is really abysmal.
davehooke @139, here’s my two cents re:
Please don’t infantilise people by comparing this discussion – or anyone trying to deal with rape apologists – with a whiney-little-kid trope.
Sili:
Yes, I know. Never mind.
Kittehserf:
Thank you. Although the current consensus is that certain forms of creative “fuck yous/fuck offs” are not okay, the initial complaint still bothers me.
It’s very easy for people to focus on such a thing and say “that’s bad”, when they make the choice to turn away from threads dealing with one rape apologist after another. Being in those threads is intensely difficult, which is why I’m more inclined to leniency on the cussing front. It’s much easier to make judgements when you’re at a remove.
And no, I do not think it’s alright to let loose with “die in a fire” and all that sort of thing. I just don’t give as much weight to those who make it a point to avoid such discussions.
Also, as to whether or not the commenting rules have the slightest thing to do with priorities, they do:
FFS really? Fine Whatever
cm #237
Thank you!
Caine @247 – you’re welcome.
My thoughts on “they can fuck a lightsocket” is that it’s so far from reality it doesn’t read as a threat, and is actually funny, but … well, I guess if there’s a type of abuse possible, it’s happened somewhere, so play safe, yes.
“Go pat a cactus” was quite popular on MB recently. We avoid realistic threats there, too. Well, apart from Legos, that is. They’re the default evil-wishing. Oh, and paper cuts with lemon juice.
I often stumble upon interesting news while reading gay blogs or porn sites. I did not expect to find a story of horrible human rights abuses with a heaping of possible religious extremism, xenophobia, and government censorship.
Trigger warning, torture:
.
.
.
http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2012/02/iran-letter-in-protest-to-saeed.html?m=1
Fast forward to August, 2013:
http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2013/08/iranian-man-saeed-malekpour-convicted.html?m=1
This is fucked up on so many levels. Saeed Malekpour’s rights as a human being and an Iranian citizen treated as nonexistent. Arrested for “insult to Islam”, xenophobia, conspiring against the Iranian government and for pornographic website design. Oh, wait, he designed sites for clients for their own purposes. That some were pornographic in nature is not his responsibility (unless he did create porn sites for clients; in which case, as long as it was adults engaged in consensual sex, he did nothing wrong).
But wait, was all that a distraction, meant to obscure the deeper reasons? Namely keeping the ecisting power structure in place by (among other things) manipulating and controlling the flow of information . If you have talents similar to Mr Malekpour’s, the message is easy to see. As a side benefit, people around the world are reminded of the price to be paid for “offending Islam”.
A man was arrested, denied basic human rights, held in solitary confinement, convicted of trumped up inane charges, sentenced to death, tortured-again-until he recanted and now must spend the rest of his life in jail. For what?
Tony: That’s so terrible. Given my experience with refugee law, I too have come across horrifying accounts of human rights abuses by the Iranian regime. It’s one of the worst.
====
I am very pleased to see Foundation Beyond Belief supporting immigrants’ rights and immigration reform. Great news.
Walton:
A question for you.
I have seen comments from you about how you used to be a libertarian. How did you come to reject that ideology?
(Given the personal nature of my query, I fully understand if you choose not to reply and apologies if I am being too nosy).
It’s complicated. I wrote a blog post about it here. Jadehawk and SGBM can take quite a lot of the credit for “deconverting” me from libertarianism, so to speak. And studying social science also made a major difference. I don’t completely regret my libertarian days, since it was in those days that I first became interested in combating police brutality, ending the War on Drugs, and so on. But I eventually came to realize that dogmatic free-market libertarianism is at best hopelessly naive and simplistic, and at worst simple propaganda for the class interests of the rich.
There are really two different arguments for libertarianism, although I’m simplifying here; the deontological argument and the consequentialist argument. I think they’re both wrong in different ways. Apologies if this is a tl;dr.
Deontological libertarianism is based on the non-aggression principle: the idea that initiating coercive force against another is morally wrong in principle, and that, therefore, the only just society is one in which individuals enter into voluntary interactions in a free market, with no coercion involved. The problem with that is that while the principle sounds superficially great, its application is based on factual assumptions which simply are not true. Capitalism, as it actually exists in the real world, is based on centuries of institutionalized violence and coercion: colonialism, union-busting, land theft, forced labour, and so on. Throughout its existence, capitalism has been maintained by violence on a vast scale, perpetrated both by the state and by private actors, to protect the class interests of the rich and powerful. Deontological libertarians make assumptions about economic and social history which are just straightforwardly wrong: Rothbard’s “homestead principle”, for instance, is completely ahistorical, a propagandistic just-so story which bears no resemblance to the actual bloody and brutal history of colonialism. As such, the idealized market society imagined by deontological libertarians doesn’t exist, has never existed, and probably can’t exist. It certainly bears no relation to actual existing capitalism. (I remember SC and Nick Gotts pointing out exactly this, many years ago when I was cluelessly repeating libertarian nostrums.) And so when deontological libertarians defend capitalism, they’re not actually defending the non-coercive society that they imagine; they’re defending the violent and oppressive status quo.
Consequentialist libertarianism, the type preferred by Friedman, posits that a market-based capitalist society is in practical terms the best way to maximise human wellbeing, and that government intervention usually makes things worse. But this is just not true as a general rule. It’s a view from the perspective of the privileged, and it only makes sense if you view human societies through a very narrow lens, completely ignoring power differentials and institutionalized oppressions. There’s a reason why you see many libertarian economists but very few libertarian sociologists; and there’s a reason why most libertarians tend to be middle-class-or-above and privileged in other ways. “Free market” solutions to social injustices just don’t work, and never have. It’s not much comfort to tell a low-wage worker who is being abused and exploited by their employer, and can’t quit because they need to feed their children, that they can’t have any employment protections in the workplace because it would interfere with “freedom of contract”. “Freedom of contract” doesn’t mean anything when there is a vast inequality of power between the contracting parties. As such, consequentialist libertarianism is sociologically ignorant, and ignores the reality of power, privilege and social inequality.
Sorry, I forgot to link the blog post I mentioned. It’s here.
1. procrastinatorordinaire: I loved me some L7 style sludge back in the day. I kinda wish the kid wasn’t so averse to punk rock, because there are lots of great non-peniscentric punk rock bands. She’s snooty. I guess to her, punk rock is milquetoast the way that the Beatles seemed weak and sad to me, and the way my da rejected the Everly brothers as not even rock and roll.
2. Ok…no “go fuck (yourself with) a ….” Never really cared for that kind of sentiment anyway. What about “Up your nose with a rubber hose”?
3. Walton is awesome. Oh wait. This is Thunderdome. I meant, Fie on Walton.
@kittehserf (251):
By LEGO related wishes, do you mean – “I hope you step on a LEGO”?
pHred
I hear you.
If I hear “but pink is a girls colour and if I wear red I’m a boy one more time I’m going to screaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam.
Caine
The initial complaint has something of “th dog that didn’t bark”. I don’t think it’s intentional, it’s something lots of people do with realizing that in fact, they’re supporting the worse person. It’s like parents only scolding one kid after a fight because “they expexted better from you”.
rant
So, it’s election time and finally the fascists have hung up their propaganda*
Slogans:
Maria (showing a blonde blue-eyed young woman) instead of Sharia (showing a veiled woman where you see only the eyes)
Naturally German (blue-eyed, blond girl)
Work for Germans first
Money for gran and grandpa instead of Sinti and Roma
and the the one most of our atheist Islamophobes would like best:
Miniskirt instead of minarett
And while I drive through streets hung with that bullshit Naslima Tasreen tells me the following about Germany:
*Small comfort: They have to hang it awefully high or it disappears quietly
Walton:
Thank you.
I’ll be checking that link out .
Giliell: Argh. That’s terrible. I’m getting very worried about the resurgence of the anti-immigration far right across Europe.
Walton
Absolutely, and they’re getting support by otherwise decent people who buy into “Muslims want to kill us all and ban our beer”
Amusing – but I used to own a cactus that you would really regret patting. Not just a jab from a sharp spine – this one had myriads of very fine spines, like stiff hairs, that would break off in your skin and were almost impossible to get out. I can’t say I was really that sorry when it died.
Since I’m here – some interesting (and I think good) news about the students’ union at the university my son’s just started at: Blurred Lines song banned at Edinburgh students’ union.
Hey Nick! What subject(s) is he studying? My niece is just starting there this year too! :-)
Currently so tired that all I want to do is curl up under my desk and sleep. Ugh.
The molasses spill in Hawaii is amazing in all the wrong ways. Used it in my environmental class today because we are taking about what constitutes an environmental disaster and they are trying to come up with the top 20 list
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/12/20454733-everything-is-dead-hawaii-molasses-spill-killing-thousands-of-fish?lite
opposablethumbs@265,
He’s registered for an M.Eng in Mechanical Engineering. Quite a chunk of his school social circle have also started there, in various subjects – there’s not so many universities in Scotland, and for a Scottish resident, there are no fees, so I think the numbers going to English universities have dropped since the huge fee increases there.
Yes, I know – makes me wish I’d never left, sometimes … :-(
My spawn will have the loan repayment “tax” (well, tax-like) percentage to pay as soon as they earn over the threshold (if they ever do, of course) (and in the case of Spawn#2, if he gets in in the first place. Application deadline is 1st Oct … good times)
I guess he and my niece are unlikely to cross paths, then – she’s doing Japanese.
All the best for first year!
@ Giliell
Bleaugh. That sounds terrible.
On the other hand, I was lucky not to see any of those. Up in Hamburg, it was more about the Piratenpartei ( The Pirate Party, Aaaaaaaarrrrrr!)
They have posters such as this: “Vater, vater, kind” (Father, father, child.)
I even saw a pro-atheist poster (which I cannot seem to find online.)
PS: Religion Privatiseren (Privatise Religion)
Translation: “For the repeal of the financial and structural priviledges of certain global corporations.”
Hey Nick Gotts –
you live in a quaint liberal area. Don’t you wish you lived somewhere more progressive, like Canada?
AE:
How is that different from “you can fuck a power socket”? Yes, “Up your nose with a rubber hose” is connected to a tv show, however, wouldn’t the same people who find a creative fuck off offensive be just as upset about that? What if it were “Up your ass with a rubber hose”? So, telling someone to shove something up their nose is okay, but anywhere else isn’t?
Sorry, but I think there’s a fair amount of hypocrisy and silliness in all this, and I still think it’s wrong of people who never dip into threads full of contentious rape apologists to decide that everyone must be all prim and proper. I’ll abide by consensus, I simply think this is stupid. *shrug*
272
Caine, Fleur du mal
Agreed. My first thought with “up your nose with a rubber hose” wasn’t a TV show. Either I don’t remember it or haven’t seen it. My first thought was torture, *Trigger Warning* force feeding* and an S& M mask with rubber hoses for breathing though the nose**.
The distinction seems rather silly to me.
*that picture of the suffragette makes me want to cry
**saw that on the original CSI so I don’t know if it’s an actual mask/thing
JAL:
It was a *long* time ago, and a damn stupid show. Welcome Back, Kotter.
DC Comics screws up *again*.
They are still being criticized for the misogynistic drawing contest (I could see a good writer turning in a story where Harley Quinn contemplated suicide. Comics have touched upon all manner of social issues-to wildly varying degrees of success-but this contest, complete with the objectification of women is a horrible idea).
Now they are in hot water with the queer community and their supporters:
http://goodmenproject.com/arts/hesaid-no-love-for-the-batwoman/
Batwoman has had much critical acclaim. Though I have been boycotting DC since they hit the reset button on their continuity–again–I am familiar with the work of one of the creators involved. JH Williams, is a spectacular artist who has shown good writing ability as well. I applaud the decision of both creators to quit the book.
Williams says:
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=47715
Williams does not specify the reason for the changes, which are possibly unknown to him. At this point, though, when the book features a hero touted in mainstream media as *Lesbian Hero* is suddenly prohibited from getting married to her partner, no matter the reasons, people will assume it is due to marriage equality. Especially given they had approval long before they began writing the book.
At the above link, a DC Comics spokesperson says the changes had nothing to do with Batwomans impending marriage. But even so, the damage may already be done. For a company dealing with an incredibly ill thought misogynist promotion, as well as the firing/rehiring of one of the comic industrys highest profile female writers (Gail Simone), DC Comics is making some bad choices. The departure of Batwomans writers adds to the backlash they rightfully face.
274
Caine, Fleur du mal
13 September 2013 at 1:35 pm (UTC -5)
Ah. Yeah, way before my time. Just reading the wiki makes me uneasy. I have no idea why that is but I’m not rushing off to watch it.
Really? I think of it as an obnoxious rhyme with no actual meaning.
277
Jacob Schmidt
Yes. Really. Rubber hoses up noses are usually not a good thing. And you’re surprised I don’t have a good associate with it?
*association
Damnit. I previewed and everything.
A little, yeah. I don’t mean to disparage your association; it just never occurred to me.
Fuck, I even screwed up my previous link. Trying again: force feeding
Just popping in to say one thing for what its worth:
I did not comment in the bowel OP, simply because comments appeared faster than I could read them and anything I eventually wanted to say was said. And I agre with the OP and most of what was said (including the critique of PZ about victim blaming).
But I found the “fuck power socket” comment out of place, strongly disturbing and if I managed to stay ahead of the comments, I would object to it too. It seemed out of place and as an invitation to self harm.
It is irrelevant that it is not possible to stick your dick into power socket. It is not possible to take long run on a short pier either. What is relevant that if it were possible, the result would be electrocution, just as if someone tried to have long run on short pier they would drown. And there is significant ammount people commiting suicide by electrocuting themselves. What counts is not if it is literally possible, but what associations it can trigger.
Given that Ing is a regular, I sincerely believe he did not intend anything like that. I know, that “go fuck yourself” is a common english swear and I believe that ” fuck a power socket” was only meant as a more creative way to say just that as Caine interprets it.
However, possibly because I am not native english speaker, I process many such sayings firstly more literally. And even vividly. I cannot influence this. And I do not think I am so unique as to be alone in this.
Just finished updating my library at LibraryThing. It’s official, we haz 1,000 books in the house.
Charly:
You aren’t alone, which is why I will go with consensus on this one. That said, I do think there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved, because most people wouldn’t even blink at “you can take a long walk off a short pier” or the like, however, if the word ‘fuck’ is involved, you see a number of people get on their high horse, using the opportunity to whine incessantly about tone. That rubs me the wrong way, not people who find it genuinely upsetting.
280
Jacob Schmidt
You should read up then. From the Suffragette:
*TRIGGER WARNING*
When I was first learning about them, I learned this. I imagined what it would be like to them. It’s fucking awful.
If we’re going to be all “what Ing said was wrong” then “up your nose with a rubber hose” HAS to be out. I mean we’re feminists, right? WTF we would use such a saying considering the history?
It’s a real thing. It’s been harmful. Isn’t that the same reason we stop with the “die in a fire” comments?
We should at least be consistent if we’re going down that road. Sheesh.
JAL @ 280
Why do you have to refer back to the Suffragettes as an example when the US government is currently force feeding detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the same manner?
procrastinatorordinaire:
Because it was the image that came to her mind? There’s certainly no reason not to educate people who were unaware of the things done to Suffragettes, and there’s no reason to consider what was done to them as irrelevant just because it didn’t happen yesterday.
If you wanted to make a point about current torturous use, you could have done that without questioning JAL’s choice.
286
procrastinatorordinaire
I don’t have to. It’s history. It’s something that people could’ve know about for while. Hence, why I brought it up with the whole “I’m surprised that’s your association”. Rubber hoses up noses has a been a bad thing for while, which was my point.
Guantanamo Bay is mentioned in the force feeding link. if people read it. I don’t think I have to mention every instance or the current ones. If people said “it doesn’t happen anymore”, I would’ve used that example.
Okay. DC Comics is/are dead to me, now.
:(
–
Just pointing out that, that wouldn’t be my damn fault if other people respond to me in such a way as to derail.
Do we just want to set some actual guidlines of what are acceptable at this point?
Are chuck Jones Looney Toon style imagry grandfathered in or is that not ok now either?
Sorry if my snark or complaints about complaints about my snark caused any offense. Too depressed in meat space right not to actually do good diplomatic response. Ignore me if anyone wants.
Can we move on from the damn topic now; because I don’t care enough to argue it anymore and would rather not harp on my apparent fuck ups anymore?
Ingdigo Jump:
The basic discussion on the monitors group can be distilled down to this: Please avoid anything that could even sound like a threat of violence or an invitation to self-harm.
Now, it was brought up that creative forms of “you can fuck _______” and “fuck off” are possible without sounding like a threat of violence or an invite to self harm, however, no one provided good examples, so for those who are upset, please, provide acceptable creative forms.
I am sorry, Ing, this must feel like a massive dog pile. It has gone way beyond you at this point, it even went all the way back to decaying porcupines and rusty knives. It seems some people have refused to move on at all, even when the Horde has already done so.
It’s out now, and it’s best to work it the fuck out.
292
Ingdigo Jump
I’m sorry. :(
On another topic, why the fuck am I so stupid as to actually expect a self-proclaimed libertarian to actually answer a fucking question?
Ogvorbis:
Oh, that’s a shared stupidity, Ogvorbis. Fueled by hope, I believe. As in, “maybe they’ll get it!”
Caine
I always liked “go fuck a duck” because it rhymed. I got a thing for rhyming insults. Really, go fuck anything that won’t hurt you in doing so: “Go fuck some fruit, you ignorant fool.”
Ogvorbis
I dunno about stupid. I get my hopes up sometimes: “Hey, maybe this idiot will actually reconcile this blatant contradiction in their philosophy! Maybe they aren’t all bad, and I’ve just had bad luck. Aaaaand nope it’s just hand waving bullshit. “
Ingdigo Jump
I’m sorry for any contribution I made to the dog pile.
As Caine said you were just the catalyst that galvanized the discussion.
winkwink
Jacob:
Right. The thing is, I want to know just what level of absurdity this is going to reach. If people say “go fuck some fruit”, will there be someone whining about how “fruit” is used as a slur against gay men, therefor it is very bad to say “go fuck some fruit”?
If I say “you can fuck a roll of bubblewrap”, is someone going to whine about the potential for suffocation if someone actually does that?
Seems to me what some people want is “you must take every single thing literally, all the time!”, and that is irritating the fuck outta me.
298
Jacob Schmidt
…but that would hurt the duck… :(
Oh, and as for ‘fuck a duck’, I tend to use that as an exclamatory, a la “fuck a duck, how can anyone be that stupid?” I imagine that telling someone they are free to fuck a duck would result in upset.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand, JAL @ 301.
I posted before I saw your comment. I’m trying to illustrate that with my examples, but you spell it out nicely instead.
It seems to me like it has to be totally restrictive if we’re going down this route. Otherwise, what’s the difference?
303
Caine, Fleur du mal
XD
Sorry. I seem to have a problem with distinguishing between “fuck a socket” and “fuck a duck”. If we’re going literal with the first, it only seems fair/logical to go literal with the second.
Reading about the molasses leak in Hawaii, it reminded me of one that killed people. The Great Molasses Flood of Boston happened in 1919. Molasses roared through streets from a busted bulk storage tank.(going about 50km pr hr is the estimate) in January, even up slope.
Boston Molasses Flood
In a somewhat related aside, Randian libertarians can talk all they like about markets correcting themselves by angry consumers punishing deceptive and malfeasant producers who have caused them harm. They don’t seem to ever put themselves into the shoes of people who might be victims of misfeasance and malfeasance or the idea that enforced inspection by government regulators saves not only consumers, but bystanders and even the producers themselves from horrific consequences of missed flaws and accumulating safety hazards.
Of course, it’s never the rich (which seems to be the synonym of ‘producers’ in most libertarian ideals) who end up living around disastrously hazardous industrial areas and relying on foods and goods produced for the downmarket consumption. Maybe they think that if people didn’t want to endure shitty products, they should learn how to be rich and stop caring about people who aren’t.
JAL
That’s actually why I don’t use it that often. I like ducks.
Caine
Didn’t think of that. See, I’ve seen guides on how to warm up fruit so that you can masturbate with them.
JAL
I thought the issue was “self harm.” The former is harmful; the latter is not (at least to oneself).
I like ‘unfuck you’ as a curse just for the metaphoric pleasure of magically rubbing fucks away from people’s scorecards.
It’ll never catch on but I’ve unfucked some back into metaphoric virginity and beyonnnnnd. It’s odd but after they realize what I’ve actually said, some do take it as a real threat to their fuck score. Maybe they’re the ones desperate to use any measure to get laid in the first place.
Fuck…… this is surreal.
Jacob:
Yeah, I’ve read detailed, graphic accounts of fruit fucking. It’s a thing. That said, I think it will be too easy for people seriously hung up about tone to turn Pharyngula into Shakesville, and I have no desire to see that. It’s fine to go on about “no invitations to self harm”, however, a line should be drawn somewhere. It’s utterly absurd to take every fucking word literally, and honestly, there’s next to no activity which has no capacity for harm.
308
Jacob Schmidt
But it is to ducks. Why are animals different? Why don’t we care about them?
See, this is my problem: where to draw the line with taking things literal. It doesn’t seem right that a socket is bad because someone can electrocute themselves using a fork, but not a body part like suggested. That realistic possibility gets added to change the expression, why not with every expression? Why do ducks get exempted? Wasn ‘t part of the whole porcupine thing “Oh, we’ll make it ‘dead’ porcupines, so no animals are harmed”?
If we’re doing guidelines, shouldn’t we go through it all and get it right the first time? What are you going to say when someone or troll pops up with “But it hurts ducks!”. You’re response is basically “Because fuck ducks, it’s about people.” That doesn’t seem right. I’m sure there’s plenty of people to take offense at that attitude.
This is why it seems absurd to me. I don’t get where to draw the line, and why. It doesn’t seem fair. Might as well say “Stick to saying fuck off”, which would be a great loss.
morgan
Beats my previous discussion. I was having it out with a guy over at Ally’s blog. He argued that since he can strawman what “rape culture” means, the term is useless. Never mind that no one uses like that (a fact that he all but admits), never mind that his entire argument relies on taking the word tolerance to it’s most general meaning, “rape culture” is useless and we should all stop using it.
cuervodecuero
Minus the scorecard bit, I like it. You’re not wishing harm on them; you’re wishing that they miss an opportunity of pleasure.
I got so fucking tiring to see firtsh the Intersectionist and then the pitters go off on how we telling people “to go fuck themselves” with various objects were rape threats.
Quite a few of the more stupid and reality detached pitters still make the claim they we engage in rape jokes here. And one brain dead member, trying to copy the bot, bans people because we are “abusive of women”.
(I seemed to have made a free form rant. Sorry.)
Of course, I thought the socket thing was fine so I’m an outlier. It’s not like someone said “stick a fork in toaster”.
I’m not saying we don’t; I’m saying harm to animals wasn’t the specific issue at hand.
On that note, no one is actually gonna fuck a duck and ducks can’t read to be hurt by those words.
Yeah, this whole thing can get ridiculous fast.
A short rhetorical query……. If an epithet is not meant to offend, is it an epithet?
316
Jacob Schmidt
Self-harm was only the issue because someone took it beyond the actual saying. If we’re basing rules/guidelines on doing that, doesn’t it need to be consistant?
And no one is going to fuck a socket. But if the socket as associate of suicide by electrocution, then the duck has to have association of bestiality.
^ My point exactly.
*shrug*
Obviously, even if I don’t like/agree, I’ll follow the rules. I just personally don’t get it.
JAL:
No, that wasn’t why. A decaying porcupine was disgusting, which is the why of it.
And you aren’t an outlier, I didn’t have a problem with “they can fuck a power socket”. As I said, there was no directive involved, and no, I don’t think the rape apologist who engendered that response is going to read that and go “oh noes, I *must* go fuck a power socket now!” FFS.
Or, if an epithet falls in a forest and no one hears it is the tree justified in being offended?
I think we could leave it at “no suggestions to self-harm” for now.
We aren’t carving anything in stone but rather in jello.
319
Caine, Fleur du mal
13 September 2013 at 5:24 pm (UTC -5)
Ahhh. I either misrembered or just assumed. Good to know. My bad.
According to this, epithets are just common characterizations. I learned something today.
I always thought so, but them I’m a fan of Dali.
Chigau:
Sure, but who is defining self-harm? Us, or people who do not post here and certainly don’t do any of the heavy lifting?
As I noted to Jacob, will someone object to “go fuck some fruit” or “go fuck a roll of bubblewrap”? Because that’s straight where we’re headed.
So apparently the answer to my question was “no”
Ok fine.
Three (maybe four) things
a) Maybe while not magic, intent has so fucking meaning? Maybe context and intent are needed so we all don’t willingly lobotomize ourselves and act like hyper literal robots? Cause let me tell you, it sure will be loads of fun to try to talk to people in that environment
b) There has to be some sense of a reasonable reader/viewer standard because the Pit is never going to not twist things into absurdity and you’ll break your backs trying to accomodate to their “standard”. Now yes we can’t judge and say my value cut off of offense is better or whatever but what we’re doing now is going to have people either with good or mallicious intentions rules lawyer and nit pick any.
c) I’m getting the annoying feeling like I’m back in elementary school sometimes in this particular cluster fuck. Which is both irksome in a “oh do we have to make every discussion a hyper conscious tip toeing now” and patronizing
@cyranothe2nd at 218:
That was, in fact, always my biggest problem with his statement.
If he had said that he can’t blame doctors for believing that they could cure pedophiles or bishops for thinking they could pray the rape away, well, yeah: at one point in time there may not have been evidence for them to look at.
But he’s saying he can’t blame the rapists, and that’s just wrong. That’s dating-Russ-Douthat-level wrong. That’s Newt-Gingrich-is-an-idea-man wrong. Wrong.
Moreover, at one point he was saying that he couldn’t condemn “it” – meaning the assault itself as an act, not any particular moral agent – the same way.
I get why people said he was speaking for other survivors. But he was also using the qualifying language of , “I think…” and similar devices. While I think he was wrong to do so, saying, “I don’t think anyone was permanently hurt” doesn’t go as far up my concern-meter as stating that rape and assault themselves, as **acts**, are less evil when someone doesn’t know that the other party is going to be fucked-as-F for life.
no. Wrong. You still can’t know when you rape someone whether your victim will be fucked-as-F for life, or will be massively traumatized for a week with PTSD for 7 years before full recovery, or whether the person will somehow manage to avoid long term harm. And that rape, and your choice, and you are all still equally morally horrific, regardless of the eventual level of harm incurred by your victim.
Seriously, Dawkins, this is horrifying stuff you’re saying.
Well yes. I’m just saying that, even taken literally, “fuck a duck” doesn’t cross a boundary wrt self harm.
Well yeah. But still, the thing being harmed in the insult can’t read the insult to be harmed by it.
328
Jacob Schmidt
By that logic it’s okay to harm comatose patients in the insult since they can’t read it.
Sorry, Ing. I’ll shut up.
But yes, communication is a two way street. The audience has some responsibility in making a reasonable interpretation.
I’m not trying to be a troll here, horde. I’m only sorry that in sanitizing the T-dome things will become much less amusing. It is good creative fun to devise colorful images to fling at dunderheads. And besides, as our squidly overlord has stated, “This is a Rude Blog.” If folks are so easily damaged I suggest that the T-Dome is not the place for them to be. As for the rest of the blog, yes, some consideration should be given, but let’s not go too far overboard. Over ‘n out.
Point, though comatose patients do often wake up and may still read it.
(Shutting up for real now)
I don’t think there’s any harm in having a rousing discussion of the import of words and deconstructing what gives epithets shock value in how they intersect privilege, Othering, shunning and threat. Epithets are the human equivalent of snarling and growling and otherwise letting people know your ape self is not in a happy space so pay attention why. Using ‘minced oaths’ is a long standing tradition to be a place-holder for real shock value words. Farg for fuck. The Deuce for The Devil. etc. When you know what it’s standing in for, why is it less shocking?
What annoys me is when someone is patently abusing such deconstruction to be nothing more than annoying all blinky eyed who-me ‘innocence’, for one manipulative reason or another.
Beyond that, I sometimes long for everyone to have Shakespearean swearing generators. The fuck you of today seems rather paltry next to some of the golden streams of really inspired English language swearing. I still think Deadwood wasn’t improved by using modern swearing rather than period barrages but it’s faster and easier.
As far as Dawkins is concerned, *everyone* should read this post by Eristae, and shut up, because there’s nothing more to say about it:
330
Jacob Schmidt
Define reasonable.
Seriously. This sucks. I don’t see the problem with what we have now. I don’t see the problem here. The problem comes in with trying to make a stricter guideline. I
Can’t we just say: if you have a problem with a creative insult, take it to the thunderdome as not to derail the thread, unless the insult is explicit self-harm a/o slurs. Creative insults may be up to interpretation, so don’t derail the thread with tone arguments.
Yeah and the fucking fairy queen may cast Awaken Beast on a duck if we’re going into this nonsense.
Glad everyone else is having fun
Morgan @ 331, this whole thing was started by davehooke, in the ‘I beseech you’ thread. I requested it be moved to Thunderdome to avoid a derail. This isn’t about what one can or can’t express in Tdome, but Pharyngula wide.
Ing, again, I’m sorry, but this has to be hashed out now. It’s too late to stop it, because it will come up again, sooner or later. I will re-state that I think it’s damn nervy of people who never, ever do any of the heavy lifting to want to dictate what expressions are allowed, going by their personal metric.
n. “fuckaphone”, one who comments nastily on one of them newfangled smartyphones.
insults:
“Go fuck an Android!”**
“Go Nokia yourself”
“Your mind is having a wardrobe malfunction”
Be creative.
(**Obligatory OH&S warning, make sure any device you fuck is unplugged from the mains socket.)
JAL:
That’s a good idea.
Ing, I am not having fun. I’m against restrictions, in case you hadn’t noticed. I am going with consensus, even though I don’t agree.
332
Jacob Schmidt
Fine, they’re brain dead. Vegetables. Oh, no now we can’t say “Go fuck a vegetable!”
Utterly ridiculous.
Sorry, Ing I was so used to just responding to Caine and Jacob, I flew right by your comment.
I’ll shut the fuck up now too.
I’ve writen a comment two times now and had it eaten by the shitty blocking software at work.
Forget it. I’ll just have to accept the bad luck of being the lightnign rod and have what I said picked at like a scab.
Talk about whatever you want, I’ll stay away.
339
Caine, Fleur du mal
See, I’m torn. I agree I want to get it over and done with. This isn’t fun. This isn’t a great debate. We’re arguing over imaginary people’s potential hurt feelings and trampling (thought not intentionally) on a real human being right here. That’s just fucked up and sucks.
I can’t seem to shut the fuck up. :(
I am a horrible person.
Before I read the Pffft account of the Boston Molasses Disaster, I kinda laffed
and on that page is a link to the London Beer Flood (more laffing)
—
We will never make a completely trigger-free space.
But we must keep trying.
(not the T-dome, abandon thinskin™ all who enter here)
I’m good with no self-harm and no slurs, if you have a problem, go to TD.
I acknowledge that I feel weird about “go fuck a light socket” but maybe that’s my sensitivity to assumptions of sex getting mixed up with aversion to violence, b/c that’s really not objectively more related to self-harm than “go jump in a lake”, and arguably less related. In general I don’t want advocacy of violence, even to oneself, to be part of the culture here.
BUT, and it’s a gigantic but, I don’t run this place and phrases don’t bother me when they could be used during advocacy of harm, but the context makes that interpretation unreasonable.
I’m sorry. I was being intentionally silly. I’m happy to abide by whatever standards make people here comfortable, or to absorb any abuse that people here think is appropriate; I wouldn’t ever actually weigh in on this issue.
JAL:
I agree. It sucks.
Chigau:
Sure, I agree. This isn’t about triggers, though. It’s about one person who thought that their desire to see all instances of certain language scrubbed from Pharyngula was the most important thing ever.
Crip Dyke:
This is exactly what pissed me off from the moment davehooke got all upsetty – he ignored, absolutely, that the phrase in question was in response to particularly vile rape apologetics. Ignoring the context, to me, is doing nothing more than tone trolling.
346
Caine, Fleur du mal
Indeed. In case anyone forgot, this is what davehooke wanted:
“if you really have to”
Yes, because after all the douchnozels, they really do need to be told to fuck off. He clearly doesn’t even approve of “fuck off”.
Correction:
*doesn’t approve of “go fuck yourself”.
Yeah, in fact, I was much more ok with the whole porcupine thing than I ever was with the rusty knife. I can try to separate that from my own experience, though I will never fully be able, but I think that even if I can’t (completely) do so that it should be obvious from the physical impossibility of fitting a porcupine inside any human orifice that this is an unserious thing. That’s even before the porcupines were reanimated.
I don’t miss the porcupines, but I didn’t read whatever thread it was when people decided that they were no longer a good fit for pharyngula. I don’t quite understand why they’re gone.
But, again, I’m not clamoring to get them back. Just saying that I don’t quite understand what the issue is when something is obviously not serious.
While I think it’s possible to have a discussion about tone without trolling, I long since was convinced that the Horde’s collective wisdom is correct concerning people who spend their commenting-efforts on condemning the tone of those abhoring rape (we must abhor rape reasonably!!!) when there are plenty of enraging-as-F rape apologetics on the same thread to condemn.
I see nothing wrong with fuck off. But then, I see it more as taking your mental wanking somewhere private, and cleaning up afterwards, before they reappear on the intertubes.
351
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Sorry, Nerd, I have no idea how he feels about fuck off. I should’ve said “doesn’t approve of ‘go fuck yourself'”. Telling someone to fuck off isn’t an issue being raised
@chigau, #343
What exactly do you mean by this? Because I really, really think I’m seriously opposed to this.
Cause I’ve got to tell you, my existence is triggering to a lot of people, and I don’t particularly want to cease existing. At least not at the moment.
Seems to me that it is part of the discussion on what has or hasn’t splash damage.
But then, this has been a busy week at work and home, so I might not be as focused as I should be.
this is a good point.
why must we even attempt to apply fixed rules? can’t the only rule be: adjust to circumstances as need be?
if all of a sudden (as did happen), most people find telling another to cram a decaying porcupine up their ass to be a “bridge too far”, then so be it, and it can be explained whenever it comes up.
that leaves flexibility in how one deals with these kinds of issues. trying to force a hard and fast rule on language will backfire.
Crip Dyke:
They’re gone because of the clusterfuck that was The Intersection, the insistence that we were collectively threatening rape. As far as that goes, Janine and Ing are right – the assholes who will interpret anything said here as a rape threat will continue to do so, they’ll cite “go fuck yourself” that way if they have no other material.
As for porcupines, I still have this: I have this nice crown of decayed porcupines for you. You can wear it as a sign of your terrible persecution as you trample out the vintage of the internet.
this is why what you folks are trying to do here, while well intentioned, is entirely impossible.
there is no objective answer to why one would feel ok with decaying porcupines, but not rusty knives.
what you are trying to do will inevitably end up boiling down to a tryanny of the majority, and little else.
Ooh, I like….
Crip Dyke:
Yeah, so is mine, and I quite like existing myself. This does bring up the point, that if we go for trigger free, we won’t make it, full stop, and I think even trying is going to hit full court absurdity.
re: triggers
I think I may have lost track of what the word means.
In the past few weeks, on-line and in meat-space, I have seen it used to describe things on a continuum running from remembering a lost ice-cream cone to Ogvorbis’s memories.
Maybe I need a new word.
Chigau
That started a while ago. I remember some people arguing that trigger meant “that which incites emotion”.
For anyone that cares, Anne Jones’ blog is active.
Chigau:
Yeah, people have gotten a little trigger happy with trigger. A new word might be a good idea.
I think that something that people miss, is that we still do a couple of things fundamentally wrong.
We use the same word – trigger – for the environmental stimulus that sets off our internal reactions and the priming in ourselves that makes possible the cascade of association leading to our internal reactions.
I try to use trigger to describe only that which, in me, can too easily set off a reaction that causes me pain.
The environmental stimulus pulls the trigger, or jiggles it, or whatever. It is not the trigger itself.
We have to make this distinction at the start, because that helps us with step 2:
We have to stop blaming other people for activating our triggers. They aren’t responsible. That’s what the fuck a trigger is: an unpredictable and uncontrollable vulnerability. Our triggers might be somewhat more predictable (e.g. from my own life: rusty knife imagery, a dark skinned hand moving at the edge of my vision*) or rather less predictable (e.g. certain handbags, a glass of milk), but if they were utterly predictable, like, say, getting horrified at detailed descriptions of the deaths of some of my co-congregants’ grandparents in Nazi death camps, **we wouldn’t call them triggers**.
Every time we blame the environmental stimulus or the person who set in motion events resulting in the environmental stimulus, we are deflecting responsibility from the people who assaulted, abused, and raped us. We are deflecting responsibility from those who deliberately harmed us and getting pissed at those who – by definition – are doing something that on its own is utterly harmless, but can aggravate these old wounds.
And if aggravating those old wounds required us to enter someone’s personal space, or ourselves to violate that someone’s consent, that would be worthy of independent condemnation even if it would not have been harmful (or consent would have existed) save for the aftermath of previous harm. But if our rapists make it impossible for us to talk about rape in the detailed ways necessary to understand rape, to figure out where and how it lives, and then to barricade it away where it can scream for release until it dies of starvation…well, then, who the F is winning by avoiding triggers?
I have triggers. Plenty. They don’t affect me nearly as badly as they did 8 years ago or 18 years ago or 28 years ago. But I have them. And I won’t make a single one of you responsible for activating them.
You put out an image like rusty knife – even knowing that I’ve been attacked with one, even knowing that my family kept the rusty knife of a family friend after she was arrested for stabbing her husband with it so her husband would feel safer…and then told me that story instead of recycling the damn knife – and I’ll be pissed at 3 people. None of which will be someone on Pharyngula. Not one.
Putting the blame for our triggers, or the activation of same, anywhere other than on our abusers only aids and abets the assault, rape, abuse, and murder that the worst among us choose to inflict on others.
I
won’t
do it.
*some people will misread that: I’m saying that due to racism it’s more predictable that I would develop that trigger from my experiences, not that it’s okay that I’m more likely to develop that trigger or that the fact that I developed that trigger means I didn’t have a lot of hard, internal anti-racism work to do
Jacob:
That renders it rather useless. When used in the context of rape discussions, it means to trigger memories, flashbacks, that sort of thing. One could just as easily use spark/prompt/provoke or provocation/actuate or actuation, and so on.
Ha!
@360/362 –
I was writing that as you were commenting. It took me a while, but I hadn’t seen either of your comments before my 363.
The triggers are inside us. Unfortunately some of us were left with safety-locked triggers and some of us were left with flint-locked triggers.
So the drops and jiggles and jolts that are sufficient to set them off are rather different in both magnitude and nature.
As for what word, precisely, to apply to those stimuli? I’m not sure.
I’m still okay with “trigger warning”
Because that’s reasonably interpreted as “take care of your triggers”.
What would either of you suggest for what I’m calling the stimuli, the drops, the jiggles, the jolts?
Crip Dyke:
QFMFT. If you don’t mind, I’ve bookmarked your post, to be brought out again when needed.
It’s interesting, all the things which can cave your head in. Even though a knife was involved in my rape, that’s not what triggers me, ever. Knives don’t bother me, I own a bunch, references to knives don’t bother me…but hands in skintight black leather gloves? Oh yeah. I have a hard time seeing a character in a movie wearing them, and I fully understand the absurdity of that. It doesn’t change my reaction, but I’m not going to pitch a fit if someone wants to talk about or wear black leather gloves.
Crip Dyke:
I’d suggest Trapdoors.
Caine
I always used it to mean something that puts me back in the mindset I have when my anxiety is acting up.
On that note:
Crip Dyke
I remember one of Caine’s comments that triggered me. Caine, you mentioned fear at growing old and getting dementia. One of my greatest fears when my anxiety is in full swing is the fear that I’ll never get better. Dementia is something that terrifies me. That comment of yours put me right back into that mindset. I went back to memories of pacing around the house, trying to find some means of escape. I had to take sometime to calm myself. and even then I was uneasy for the rest of the evening.
It would be stupid of me to blame you. You did nothing wrong. You were entirely on topic. Hell, I knew that discussions of psychological problems can trigger me (I dread ever taking a psychology class).
There are some common re-occurrences among triggers. I can get behind asking people to respect the general ones (like warning before describing rape; content notes at the top of posts and articles; etc), but we can’t ask others to predict anything.
It’s interesting watching the evolution of a social space.
-starts off as a benign dictatorship (not benign in some cases, but those rarely go anywhere)
-then when the participants’ interests become diverse enough, it is too big for the dictator to handle, so they typically pick delegates to act as representatives to decide on a lot of the infrastructure issues
-those who felt a keen interest in the issues the representatives are acting on, either participate, or accept the consequences, or leave.
-next step will be competing representative influences….
thus, how politics works. I find it an interesting microcosm, with myself on the end of “accept the consequences” since most of the infrastructure issues that get debated by representatives I’m fairly neutral on.
It’s just interesting watching it happen in this microcosm, and realizing that there essentially is no longer a difference between online space and meatspace. probably the biggest thing the human species will need to adjust to in this century.
Well, that and global warming anyway.
A bit late to the ‘go fuck…’ party, but would ‘go fuck a figment of your imagination, and fuck off’ be acceptable?
AoS #370
Probably. There is no suggested harm.
How are your hands?
Jacob:
Jesus, that sounds awful. I am sorry, Jacob, because I know what that sort of thing is like, and the only way to avoid doing it or ending up triggered yourself is to go live in a closet and never say a word.
Acolyte of Sagan:
:snort: It’s fine by me, but I’m being truculent about the whole thing.
@Caine, #366:
Bookmark away. Everything I write here is given to the community. If it turns out to be a gift, so much the better.
@Acolyte of Sagan, #370
We’re working on things. I said, kind of reluctantly and thoughtlessly when I was distracted, that “go fuck a lightsocket” was different from “fuck off” because there was a difference between the two statements in the ease of which each could be mistaken for an invitation to self harm.
However, I’m fine with “Go fuck yourself with a lightsaber” if in context it is completely clear that what is meant is “go away” and not “I hope you come to harm” or (worse) “please come to harm”.
Again, we’re working on things, but the consensus is likely to be something that permits creativity but discourages statements that could reasonably interpreted as either “I hope you come to harm” or “please come to harm”.
“fuck a figment of your imagination” is so far from that line I don’t see how it could reasonably even be raised as a border case.
At risk of soundling like an ass (again sorry mood is lowering normal filters on this)
There’s little you can do about splash damage for people who throw themselves onto grenades.
Now I’m clarify that most people here don’t do that but yeah….
Yeah that’s SOOOOOO much different from what I said.
I’d think physically impossible cartoonish acts would clarify as meeting the reasonable standard…provided it’s not going into obscenely graphic territory.
Ok while whatever euphanisms you want to use are cool. Some of us may find them corny, obnoxiously “cutsy” or even patronizing to sugest using them. I’m seriously reminded of times in school where I was forced to sit down with people who tormented me and brainstorm better ways to express anger and go into the fluffy bunnies and kittens swearing lessons. I feel like I’m being treated like a child here
I’m going to have to give up, my wireless is *this close* to “what wireless?” Aaaaugh. The joys of home ownership, my ass. :snarl:
Crip Dyke
QFMFT
I agree with all of your post, but this paragraph really encapsulates it for me. I get triggered by Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Juno. Unless someone is aware of the associations and purposefully trying to upset me, them talking about one of those movies and me being triggered has jack shit to do with them. And if they’re trying to upset me, the problem still isn’t the triggering stimulus itself: it’s them being an asshole.
Ingdigo Jump:
Then you aren’t reading. Most of us are on your side of things, you know.
I’m out, too many aggravations right now.
ALso sorry to Caine if it sounded like I was snarling at her.
The Mellow Monkey: Non-Hypothetical!
You’ve been invited to be a monitor – PZ sent you email. If you didn’t get it, could you email me at fleuret du amour AT gmail thing, no spaces?
Apologies, sorry
Chigau, the bones have set quite nicely; the left still gets a little sore and stiff towards the end of the day but at least they still work so I’ll settle for that.
Thanks for asking.
AoS
I envy your quick healing.
Best wishes to you.
Yes. Absolutely yes.
Kevin @258:
Precisely! :)
“I hope your child loves deconstructing lego structures and hates cleaning up”
is about as far as I go. If they don’t want to clean up the legos on the floor of my fantasy of their house from the legos left behind by their imaginary child, then their imaginary injuries are not my problem.
Chigau, tiny devices. Thank the Maker indeed. For whatever reason, my teeny weeny netbook, in the studio annex, is picking up the Signal.
I had thought of something similar to the unfucking idea also – something along the lines of “may all your future fucks end abruptly before climax” or something of the sort.
What I don’t want to see happen here is so much of an emphasis on possible interpretations of insults that the main points of the conversation get lost – that’s what we chide tone trolls about. I also don’t want to see it end up with so many tripwires that it’s impossible to navigate. Shakesville was mentioned upthread, and I’ll say it was a blog I started reading about the same time as I found PZ’s, I love it, I love Melissa, and I love almost everything about it, but I don’t comment there anymore. It’s very rare for me to throw a comment in, because I simply don’t have the skills and energy to be sure that whatever I’m saying doesn’t smack up against any of the rules, so it’s easier just not to. I don’t think I would run afoul of them often, but I know it’s a possibility and my responsibility and I just don’t have the reserves to do it routinely. I don’t want to see that level of filtering end up happening here, not by a long shot.
Nick Gotts @263 – our “pet a cactus” was started by a cactus-owner who knew whereof they spoke, too.
theophontes @269 – there was a Pirate Party standing in our federal election last week, too. I’d only heard of ’em recently (not being into downloading music and stuff, I don’t take much notice of such issues) and was so disappointed that they were not of the Arrrr! variety and have nothing to do with Talk Like A Pirate Day.
@Ing, I apologise for adding to any pile-on.
Kittehserf:
I watched a video clip once. It was a bunch of young men, one of whom was riding in the back of the truck. He decided he wanted to jump out of the moving truck onto a large, spiny cactus. Why? Because as far as he could figure out, no one else had done so. So, he took a flying leap out of the truck bed, and hugged a large, spiny cactus at speed, with the predictable result.
I have no compunction about telling someone to go hug a cactus. If they are stupid enough to actually do so, that’s on them.
Caine
Just found the email from PZ in my spam trap. Thanks.
Now I feel like an asshole. I’ll shut up
Chigau:
I really have been trying to remember to TW my comments if I think they might be going somewhere dangerous.
But I do not blame others when I trigger. Some things that trigger me I recognize and are pretty obvious. Other times (certain cameras, sometimes discussion of scouting, sometimes discussions involving the LDS) I get triggered by things that are innocent for normal people. Other times I don’t. But each time I trigger on something, whether it is egregious silencing (stephen) or just normal stuff, it is me triggering. No one triggers me. I read something, or hear something, or smell something, or whatever, and I may trigger. Usually I don’t.
I have no problem posting trigger warnings for discussions of my experiences when it comes to rape and child abuse. But, like all of you, I have absolutely no control over other people’s triggers just as you have no control over mine. I know that there are things that are sensitive (carnivory, free will, monarchy) for some people and I try to be aware of that but those aren’t really the emotional brick-in-a-sock that the triggers being discussed are.
Again, I never know if I will trigger on something, even something obvious, so how would any of you know?
Ingdigo, you are not being an asshole (well, I don’t think so). This is a weird dynamic. The people here honestly care about each other and we don’t want to cause pain to anyone else which means that are working towards a different paradigm of acceptablility for language. And it is weird. or I think it is.
Hugs to you.
Using my powers of video embedding, this is me looking grumpily at you!
Ingdigo Jump! You are *not* an asshole, so please, don’t go feeling like one. I know it’s been a clusterfuck, and you feel stuck on the top of it, but davehooke started this, not you. Besides, I think it’s been a useful and productive discussion all around.
About the whole “you can fuck a lightsaber” business, you are right, there’s no difference between that and what you said, because some ass somewhere would pop up to say that “you can buy a lightsaber, so…”, which just illustrates that there will be no winning with some people, and I’m not going to worry myself about them.
Oh, posts between where I was intending to land and where I ended up.
*sigh*
Sorry.
Also, may I point out, that I said that **I** am okay with it, not that that would be the consensus.
Apparently my mind control tech is 3-5 years from market penetration.*
*Lord, I hope that somebody gets this joke.
Crip Dyke:
I know. I just think it’s a good illustration that someone can *always* come up with an objection. Whether or not to take such objections seriously is another thing altogether.
P.S. I got the joke. :D
(I have also been on a YouTube Chopin trawl.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shwiptJvLOA
Li Yundi. Shockingly brillliant. (Original sense of the word.)
There;s something that’s been bugging me: how do I differentiate between normalization within media some behaviour simply being part of a character?
I ask this because I’m playing through an old JRPG. I love the game, but the occasional bits of sexism stand out far more than they did 12 years ago. The latest line was, “Women should laugh. If they cry they’ll just drive men crazy.” There are others sprinkled around, with a few aimed at men as well (about how a Real Man™ acts).
So how do I tell the difference? Is there a difference? This particular work is fairly simple, and I’m confident in calling it normalization, but a more complex work may have sexism as a flaw in an otherwise good character. Is displaying that flaw without unambiguously opposing it normalization?
I mean, sometimes it’s obvious. In old horrors, the promiscuous get murdered while the virtuously abstinent survive. Hell, the promiscuous often get murdered while going off to have sex in the dark, scary woods.
In other cases, the narrators description tells you who to side with. When someone says something sexist and someone gets mad for it, the one mad get’s described with negative words (i.e. shrill, whiny, etc.). You get a sense for how the author feels about these issues.
I dunno, I’m just kind of ranting now.
I ask partly because of a kerfuffle surrounding the webcomic Goblins. In it, one of the characters is raped. It’s not, in my opinion, handled well. I don’t think it was degrading to the character in question, but it reads more like a plot device for the male hero who saves her. She also get’s over it fairly quickly. The thing is, it was based on something that happened to the author’s mother, including the part where she heals quickly. The author wanted to tell his mother’s story through his story, and he did so with full support from his mother. The author was also the recipient of many emails and messages calling him a raging misogynist.
I’m actually just ranting about this now. I dunno. I have a point in here somewhere (something about differentiating between accidental misogyny and deliberate misogyny), but it’s too late now. It’s the sort of thing that nags you for weeks but you just can’t quite nail it down.
Oh, another thing: the victim seems to be occasionally sexualized. Sexualizing a rape victim just seems creepy. Then again, I think there are several of his female characters that are sexualized. It’s not any less creepy, but at least he isn’t targeting the rape victim for sexualization. I’m guessing that context of sexualization is what drained many people’s willingness to read charitably into the rape scenario. It certainly did for me.
*non-intrusive-and-refusable gestures of sympathy* for Ingdigo Jump.
–
“Fuck a ducky plushy”?
–
If the salt be withheld from a jibe, wherewith shall it be salty?
–
“Go epithet yourself?”
“Go fuck a metaphor?”
Ha!
“Go epithet a metaphor!”
:)
–
And a lovely crown it is!
:)
–
(The Husband asks: What is the half-life of a decaying porcupine?)
–
*applause* for Crip Dyke @363.
There is no comprehensive list of “Things That May Be A Trigger”, ’cause our triggers are context-driven, and individualized; though deliberately and maliciously jumping up and down on somebody’s known trigger/s is another metaphor of epithets, entirely.
–
Cicely:
:snortle: +7 with a tentacle on top.
Then again removing rape victims as sexual beings is itself problematic because it’s the “they’re damaged goods so now their sex is icky”.
I’m familiar with the web comic and am gestating thoughts on that part of it. I do think though that you can’t say it’s fully over and that there are character developments or hints that seem to be indicating it’s, if not going to be raised again, hasn’t been brushed off and solved. (As an aside I also suspect the character that was the rapist is only mostly dead and will return so there’s that)
That also said; I think we can all recognize that being a victim or a member of a minority doesn’t make you an expert or authority on oppression or what is and isn’t acceptable (Girl asks what?) so it’s fine to critique it.
IMO It’s not perfect, but it’s not terrible (yet) and I’m cautiously watching.
Ingdigo
True.
It bugs me for several reasons, one of which is the idea that rape victims need to be sexualized so that they can get over their assault.
But you’re right, I should be careful to not imply that victims aren’t sexual beings.
I certainly hope it can be saved.
I don’t think it’s terrible. I do think the author fell into some common patterns regarding female characters. Hopefully by the end it’ll feel like Kin’s story rather than Minmax’s. It seems to be going in that direction.
Cicely:
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings (re: DC).
Jacob:
There’s a difference between being sexualized and being a sexual person. Sexualization generally has an element of objectification in it. Any time you turn even a part of a character into an object, you’re on the wrong foot.
As for people who have been raped, well, for some people, it is an important step to reclaim their ability to be sexual, and that can be a complex process. None of it is easily characterized. Also, always making a rape victim a female can lead to easier mischaracterization, and more prone to unconscious sexist bias seeping in.
Caine, @390 – strewth. Is that Darwin Award material or what?
cicely @403 – ““Fuck a ducky plushy”?” – makes me think “May all your future fucks be with PlushDolls.” Which is one hell of a creepy curse, for me, given what their customers are like. ::shudders theatrically::
Re: sexualising rape victims – am I splitting hairs or misunderstanding the term when I say there seems to be a difference in meaning here? Sexualising reads to me as fetishising, objectifying and, well, drooling over, someone. It seems very different from acknowledging that yes, they are still a sexual being (assuming they were before being raped, since not everyone is sexual). The first seems to be imposing something, where the second doesn’t.
Work this time, you rotten italics.
Pithily ninjaed by Caine!
Kittehserf:
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that person ends up a Darwin Award. They survived the jump at a cactus at speed, albeit well punctured, with a lot of time with tweezers being required. Honestly, when I see things like that, I feel no need at all to be nice to a great many people.
A couple bits of old business, if nobody minds.
I’m inclined to agree with the people saying that DC Comics’ botched handling of Batwoman doesn’t have any distinctly homophobic elements in it. Just in the last few weeks, the same editorial folks who screwed that up also announced while at a con that Aquaman’s never been married, even though Mera has appeared since the last reboot as Aquaman’s wife, and explained that superheroes just shouldn’t be married or trying to have happy personal lives. I think it’s their general clueless disphittery plus not bothering to give a moment’s thought to the idea that Batwoman’s recent iconic status might warrant any special consideration.
“Not homophobes, just assholes all around” is not, I hope it’s clear, intended as a rousing defense or anything. :)
Backing up a few days more…
To me, the essence of postmodernism isn’t a denial that there is an objective reality, but a denial that there is or can be an objective human. It’s about how we are all subjects, with histories and identities that affect how we experience the world – metaphors for understanding based on sight are themselves cultural artifacts, to take one example – and how we go about deciding what’s important, how we report our experiences to others, and all the rest. The part about deciding what’s important, what constitutes an identity, and what’s extraneous seems to me most crucial, when it comes to postmodernism and the sciences. Every step of how we observe, how we report, how we resolve competing claims, how we decide what rivals in interpretation are owed, and all that stuff…that’s shaped along with the things that shape our sense of what’s admirable and hateful, expected and weird, normal and abnormal.
Gathered data presumably have a lot of truth about the world in them. So do data that might have been gathered but aren’t, and the processes that lead to some people having the opportunity to decide what experiments to make and whose claims get respected, that’s hugely subjective.
At least, that’s the postmodernism that lives in my head. :)
hiddenheart, if you don’t mind me asking, who are you? Pharyngulite with a new nym, new person, lurker?
Sorry, I don’t recognize your nym, and I’m nosy about new folk.
Caine
Oh, I’m aware. I’m thinking of what victims like Elyse or my partner go through: their partner pushing them towards sex so that they can “get over it.” It’s not giving victims agency to be comfortable with sex; rather the opposite.
kittehserf
Yeah, that’s usually it. That happens to the character, a few times.
I also call above sexualization as well since the choice to be sexual is not in their hands; it’s something their partner pushes on them.
Caine:
Same here. I get to the stage of “If you are that fucking stupid, don’t expect me to fix you up afterward!” with a side order of “How do you manage to breathe and walk at the same time?”
Jacob – that part about partners pushing puts me in mind of a truly horrendous Savage Love post, where DS was blaming a rape victim for not wanting sex with her husband, and being triggered by it, although she was okay having sex with her boyfriend (it was a poly relationship). It was the husband writing and DS was being foul about the whole thing.
Caine: Newcomer. I did a bit of intro in my first post, over in the libertarianism thread.
I’m a 40-something (closer to 50 than 40) white transgendered disabled cat owner, long-time nerd, sf, fantasy, horror, and comics fan, once a history major, still a history fan, former libertarian now fairly thoroughly leftist in politics, life-long resident of Pacific coastal states (never lived more than an hour’s drive from the sea), left-handed, Internet user since back when that meant UUCP mail and Usenet, fan of chamber music and opera and progressive rock and new wave and eclectica, raised moderately conservative evangelical, drifted through paganism to atheism with a bit of psychological animism when I have too much fun nature-watching.
You know. One of those. :)
Oh, and lesbian in orientation and actual relationship. Though there was the weird, weird stretch of time where I’d worked out that I was attracted to people sprung the same way as me in terms of identity but hadn’t realized how much of my ongoing unhappiness at self was gender dysphoria. I’m not the only late-blooming trans woman ever to have had a series of frustrating attempts at gay male relationships, but I’m sooo glad that’s long behind me now.
hiddenheart:
Aye, you’ll fit right in here. Welcome to the Shark Tank! The other open thread here is the Lounge, where it’s all sweetness and stuff.
Thanks. :)
Oh, I almost forgot. PSA AHEAD.
The list of current monitors is now available at the end of the commenting rules.
@Ing
I am sorry if my comment upset you, it was not intended. I took the care to interpret your saying correctly and I only wanted to point out, that it needed conscious effort on my side and someone unwilling/unable to undergo that effort might end up differently. If unwilling, their fault, if unable, well, nobody’s fault… But none of my comment was inteded at you as a person and I appologize if it came across that way.
I am not feeling particularly joyous myself lately, again (to putit very, very mildly). And I guess I am oversensitive, again. I try to take more care of not taking my personal problems into the public in the future.
_________
I actually do not think any change of rules is needed. If someone musunderstands/misinterprets something and it could derail, thunderdome is already here.
_________
As a side note that might interest some curious minds, I cannot translate and internalize, the “go fuck yourself” or “fuck off” since my native language does not have them. Czech equivalents cannot be translated in english either, they would be absurd “go shit your eye out”, “dissapear in the woods”, “jump in the toilet”, “go in the ass(hole)”. And though none of them carry the connotations to self-harm in Czech, I actually do think their literal translations might at worst, or they sound completely alien at best.
I always admire all multilingual folks who cope better than I do with this shit. It makes a mess of my brain. But again, my problem.
OK, so here’s my two pennies about the “go fuck X”:
I’m uncomfortable with it because they all continue to promote sex as something violent and punishment.
Compare it with “go step on a Lego” (with which I have no problem because, seriously, wtf):
The action you desire is meant to be hurtful and punishment.
Ing
Sorry *hugs*
I don’t think this is about you. Your comment sparked a discussion, it has long since moved from what you said.
cicely #403
I like this.
“Go epithet a metaphor, you derogatory substantive!”
A pedantic aside: one cannot step on a Lego. A Lego set yes, an individual Lego no. Lego is the trade name, the individual pieces are simply called bricks.
Two of my favourite old curses:-
May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.
May you live in interesting times (this one, I was told, is an ancient Chinese curse. It doesn’t sound like a curse at all, until one considers just what might constitute ‘interesting’).
Hiddenheart
I agree. It reeks of incompetence, not bigotry.
kittehserf
I’m willing to bet the husbands apparent entitlement plays a significant role in her feeling uncomfortable with him.
I’m very wary of reading Dan Savage now. I remember another article where he advised people to disbelieve women when they say there partner did something they didn’t want during sex.
Charly
I actually really like that one. I’m gonna have to use it.
Dan Savage gives whatever advice that would benefit him if he was in that situation. Or someone like him.
May the camels of a thousand fleas infest your armpits.
‘Jump in the toilet’ reminds me of another classic: ‘Take your head for a shit’.
I have an ethical guideline adapted from an aesthetic one. In his great book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud argues that there should be a reason for the format, medium, etc., you’re using for a work, and that it should matter that the work is done as a poem making no use of special typographic features rather than as a comic strip, or a series of balloon animals, or whatever. A work whose medium doesn’t matter is unnecessarily weakening itself when compared to one where the artist has considered other possibilities, made a deliberate choice, and use the particular strengths of the chosen medium (and tools, etc.) to enhance the work.
Well, same kind of thing when it comes to advice-giving, politics, and lots more. What’s distinctive about the person, group, or idea at hand? If the person has major problematic elements that make me flinch or rage, is the good stuff actually worth the cost? Is the good stuff anything I can find anywhere else without the crap coming along too?
Sometimes the answer is “Yes, despite all the crap, this person is making points nobody else is, and using them in a way nobody else is, and that matters.” But very, very often, the answer is, “No, actually, all the good stuff here is also available over there, without the crap.” For me, at least, Dan Savage started failing the distinctive-merits test a long time ago, and so I just stopped paying attention.
@ Ichthyic
As a fan of Dali, you might have seen articles in the press, such as this (linky):
Salvador Dalí’s home town to be recreated in China. Since then things have moved ahead, but it all turned out to be a little more complicated than first anticipated. The result was that a certain tardigrade of your acquaintance was brought in to redesign the project, which is now being built post haste: More linky: Photo I took today.
@ kittehserf (I like the nym!)
Another good one was:
Giliell:
I understand that, I just don’t see it that way. The cussing use of ‘fuck’ is far removed from the sexual use in my mind. I know it’s not that way for everyone. If I say something like “take a flying leap and fuck a spiny cactus”, I’d hope someone would understand that’s not remotely sexual. That said, I’m willing to be more careful of my own expressive language.
If this sort of thing was being used all the time, like how the whole decaying porcupine business got (that was being used about every other post for a while), I’d be more on board with restrictions. That’s not the case, though. Such things don’t come up often anymore, and when they do, it’s generally in response to something truly vile, which is why I lean toward leniency.
Just today, Azkyroth, in the lounge, obviously needed to vent some serious frustration, and did so by saying “Assistance locking the development team in a room full of flavored light sockets. >.>”, which made me laugh, because I understand that level of frustration all too well. However, if you go with what davehooke wants, saying that would be off the table, because it’s not far different from “fuck a power socket”, and again, I think people are taking things much too literally.
theophontes
The Pirates have nice slogan and I’ll give them credit for at least putting poistions on their signs instead of faces. Sadly the party is the playground of white middle-class kids who ooze privilege and think that we’re living in a post-racism and post-gender world. They’re also pretty much removed from the realities of life of anybody who isn’t a white middle-class college educated kid of white middle-class college educated parents. They are people who demand at the same time that college has to become more “family friendly” and that more classes have to take place in the evening….
[TW: sexual abuse of detainees]
New and horrifying information has come to light about the sexual abuse of women detainees by guards at the infamous Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, run by private contractor Serco.
This is a facility which was previously the scene of a hunger strike, and where women were locked in corridors with no access to food, water or medical care. Pregnant women and mothers with children have also talked about their horrifying experience at Yarl’s Wood, including systematic abuse and neglect by guards. Independent inspectors have condemned the abuse and neglect suffered by child detainees. This has been going on for years. But this time it’s made the front page of a national newspaper, so I’m hoping the public – who generally show callous indifference to the fate of immigrants – will finally start paying attention.
I hope that one day we will stop this madness, close Yarl’s Wood and every place like it, and end the violent cruelty of immigration controls. No one should be imprisoned in hellish conditions simply for wanting to move across an international border.
I’m finding that playing Alice in Chains at ear bleed is conducive to getting a backlog of dirty dishes washed.
*lightbulb*
I’m now listening to Dirt while the dishwasher takes care of things.
:-)
cm:
Hahahahahahahaha. Hmmm, perhaps this is a thing.
Fuck me, but Rooster is a monster track.
I’m sorry, I haven’t listened to this album for ages. Expect excited posts until it’s over.
If I go to Superunknown thereafter, things might persist. Apologies in advance.
I’ve run out of hot water. On to other types of cleaning, Queen providing motivation.
Switch, Smashing Pumpkins…
Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage…
Weird. I was blasting Facelift yesterday while doing dishes. I also found out, after 20 years together, that my wife has never liked Alice in Chains. You think you know a person.
As per Caine. And you are a titanically ignorant jackass. Transhumanism regularly ignores the problems of everyone that isn’t Whitey McStraighterson III, assumes that transhumanism will just wipe that shit out, and that the only thing that matters is their pie-in-the-sky tech nonsense in terms of bigotry. It also tends to pretend it has no bigotry at all, but that much is common to white dudes, so it’s not a particularly transhuman thing.
I have been doing my work lately to Janelle Monae’s new Electric Lady album. It kicks ass. :)
Metallica, beyond ear bleed.
Followed by
Pink Floyd, beyond ear bleed.
Wish you were here, baby.
AE:
Aha! It *is* a thing!
I think Dali would have both smiled at, and cursed that.
Carlie:
Ooh, shiny. Alas, I am a compleat slob. (Actually, if things are clean, and I’m alone, they stay clean. Problem is, Mister comes home.) It’s gonna take days on end and much ear bleed metal to get this pile clean.
Rutee, who are you responding to?
Jacob:
One see_the_galaxy, in this thread: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2013/09/14/i-blame-david-futrelle-and-maybe-the-jews/comment-page-1/#comment-691725
They have flounced off in a huff, however, please keep any responses here in Thunderdome, not that thread. Thanks.
Thanks Caine.
What a weird non sequitur; “Racism need not follow from transhumanism, therefor no racism in transhumanism”. It’s like xe doesn’t understand that a correlation need not follow from the principles.
(Note: I dunno if racism follows from transhumanism. I’m just pointing out that the possibility that racism doesn’t follow does not exclude the possibility that transhumanism tends to be racist)
Jacob, yes, it was dense, to say the least. I’m afraid transhumanists are just as subject to having massive assholes in their club, it’s a problem which affects every group. Some people just can’t seem to face that reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_You_Were_Here_%28Pink_Floyd_album%29
I saw Stéphane Grappelli 20+ years ago and got his autograph, albeit with a bit of huffy ‘entente cordiale’ sarcasm.
If I’d known, I’d have taken my copy of Wish You Were Here to sign. That’d have learned him. ;-)
… aaand the long summer ten years ago, during which I ripped enormous amounts of vinyl pays back, finally.
Shine On You Crazy Diamond
I’m not streaming it from YouTube, for once.
cm:
May it ever shine. I could get close to building a shrine to that song.
Next up:
Kitaro, Gaia * Onbashira
Tracy Chapman, New Beginning
Erykah Badu, Baduizm
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty, with the loooooong version of Stay.
I do major vacuuming to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
always have always will
—
…still just a rat in a cage…
In Caineland, is that a bad thing?
;)
Chigau:
Yep.
Caine
?
The cages are huge. Three levels. Climbing stuff. Hiding places. Etc.
Chigau:
Still a cage, ennit?
Caine
ah
Fuck, I feel nauseous. Going to run off, down some anti-nausea meds, and find something to eat. And hope it works.
Catch everyone tomorrow.
Caine
Eat and sleep well.
明日、ぬ。
Catch you tomorrow.
Heeeey, members of the IlkHorde get plots of land named after them?
I wanna land.
Can I can I huh huh?
Or maybe I will take a ‘ville. All the Shoops down in Shoopville has a nice ring to it.
I will be known as Shoop Doggy Dog henceforth.
Dunno, I think we’re superimposing our human feelings about cages on animals. The rabbits, they positively like their cage. They have that outdoor run where they spend the days unless it’s wet. At around 6pm they line up at the door. You open the door, they hop three rounds in the garden, nibbling this and that and then they jump into their cage. Sometimes the kids forget to close the doors when they give them treats or something and the doors stand ajar. They stay inside.
Caine
Argh, sorry, didn’t see your post, you probably posted while I was typing mine just below.
I agree with the cussing “fuck” being removed from sex. Fuck, fuck off, the fucking car… Yet in “go fuck a cactus” it goes right back to sex IMO.
Giliell:
That’s great, and cages are grand for animals who require that sort of security. Rats aren’t rabbits. Rats are intensely curious, about everything. They love exploring, and they also need quality time with their human. My first rat, Ash, I locked him up every night. Each morning, he’d be waiting in the rat condo, on the level with the latch, shifting weight from one hand to another, so excited to see me and be let free. I finally stopped locking him up, and his happiness was evident and palpable.
The current crew has over one wall of my studio dedicated to habitat. They have two playstations, two condos, and two feeding stations. They have a *wealth* of places to stash their hoards, hole up, sleep, whatever. They have many ‘security blanket’ places, including spaces for those rats who aren’t terribly social, and find being social all the time extremely stressful. (By social, I mean being with other rats – in a cage, there’s no choice for not-so-social rats.) I just don’t lock them up. My rats have always been very happy, being free rats. I’m not terribly keen on caging anything, just the way I am.
I don’t care if someone else does, because a lot of the time, it’s much easier to deal with them in a cage, and most rat people are very conscientious about making sure they have time out from the cage to explore every day.
The wonderful Mrs o’Sagan has a very effective – and much quieter – method of dealing with dirty dishes. She simply settles down on the sofa and turns the TV to the soap operas, safe in the knowledge that before the theme tune has finished I’ll be in the kitchen running a sink-full of hot water. She pulls the same stunt at the weekends with those ‘talent’ shows such as X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent (whoever came up with that title is either a 3rd dan black-belt at irony, or a real cynical bastard).
Disclaimer: Please do not take the above as a claim that women like soaps operas and ‘talent’ shows whilst men don’t. Whilst it’s true that stereotyping is wrong it is also true that some people do fit certain stereotypes. It just so happens that my wife is a woman who likes soap operas and ‘talent’ shows, and I’m a man who can’t abide ’em.
@ Giliell
Woah. That is sad. All the more so in that they do raise such pertinent issues in their slogans. My concern would be that if they were to attach themselves to, and bungle, such issues through political naivety, they might do harm.
I have heard of the Scandinavian Pirates in the context of protecting privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet. Handling that one, important, issue well may have been a better goal for a fledgling party.
@ Ichthyic
It has turned out to be extremely popular, at least in terms of sales, and I am now the “blue-eyed-boy”. Yet I am left feeling, like your hypothetical Dali, rather ambiguous about it all.
Architecture died with Hans Scharoun.
Disney won.
(Translation from Dutch: “Hey. What is it? Is it now a palace or a funfair?”
@ Caine
{theophontes proffers a large chocolate puddle}
Thanks for updating Rattitude. The rodents never fail to bring a smile to my dial.
:D
I’ve been wanting to hear that, and I don’t buy music or follow music, I am not a good music fan. (I don’t steal it either, I use Pandora or some such). I think I’ll treat myself for my housework day. :) Thanks for the nudge, carlie.
Well, to me that is delightfully surreal.
Folks who like to have some nice noisy ambience may want to check out The Sword. They’re a new band – formed in 2003, and anyone who started after about 1985 is “new” to me :) – and they do heavy metal with huge doses of fantasy and sf in their lyrics. It’s a glorious throwback to how a bunch of bands did prog, heavy metal, and hard rock when I was young and impressionable.
Warp Riders is fairly representative of their work. :)
@ Ogvorbis
In Durban (kwaZulu-Natal,South Africa), so I have been told, there are several roads that where built on the ancient elephant tracks that were used by the lumbering giants to get too and from the coast. For such a large animal, it is of course a negotiation with the topography to get from A to B with the minimal amount of effort. As it was, A and B coincided with the destinations of wagons loaded with goods going to and from the port of Durban.
I am sure you can appreciate the variables at play (being not that different from the concerns of people laying railway tracks). What the elephants had perfected over millennia , the road builders simply utilised to great effect in far shorter time.
This story helps me sleep at night.
I had a friend who thought the lyrics for “Rat in a Cage” were:
This same friend, when opening a bank account for the first time (we were like, 16), was asked for his mothers maiden-name. He had no idea what “maiden name” meant. The banker explained that it was her name before she was married. He then explained that before his parents were married, as far as he knew, his mothers name was also Theresa, and he thought maybe that had always been her name.
This puts me in mind of a small child who, when asked what hir mother’s name is, replies “Mommy.”
All hail Borkquotia, acolyte of Tpyos!
Caine
I think it depends a lot on the species. That’s why the golden rule, which is already pretty shaky when dealing with humans, is total bullshit when dealing with different species.
theophontes,
I find most Asian airports have free Wifi already(with the notable exeption of Bkk, technically free but for all intents and purposes unusable, SO is talking to the minister to have it fixed).
If you’re ever at Frankfurt airport, for the last 2 years they have had this rather astonishing loophole where you are given free access for 30 minutes and then have to pay. However, the system doesn’t remember your machine, so when the 30 mins are up you can just re-register with the same account and keep going ad infinitum.
@ rorschach
They usually work with cookies. If you delete those and go into a surreptitious mode (most browsers have this), you should be fine again. All you need is a stockpile of hotmail accounts, and you can log-in most anywhere indefinitely.
The new trick is to ask for a cell phone number (eg: Oslo Airport). Problem is, many of us people in China cann’t recieve sms’s in Europe for whatever reason.
What really needs to happen: We need to acknowledge the Internet as a fundamental part of our urban infrastructure. Hell, can one imagine charging people to walk down the corridors or use the lifts in an hotel? (Actually, in Europe I can.)
…
Jetlag:
I realise this is very much a first world problem, but it is rather severe. I think I know what it feels like to be a zombie.
@ rorschach
Just an idea to throw about (as you will likely know the airports in question):
Large airports are pretty much the same, very large, size. There are a few that really stand out though. Seoul, for example, gives you places to sleep and internet access (or IIRC, it did). Also showers and dry towels. All for very little or free. To me it is counter productive to try and screw travellers over at every opportunity – as happens all to often.
…
Nick Gotts raised the problem with airlines recently. They literally fuck up the environment. On the other hand they are really good at churning people and aiding communication.
Who is really to say if the results are finally for better or worse? I suspect we should all slow down a little. With this will come a weaning off of our addiction to air travel. I hope.
(And yes, I am the enemy. I travel a lot and rely on flying to conduct business. Do I like it? No!)
So does Singapore. Bangkok isnt actually a bad airport either, its just the net that’s borked. Hanoi was bad. Beijing is a bit paranoid but gives you internet. Hongkong is good. In Europe, Frankfurt you can game as above, haven’t been to Paris or Amsterdam recently.
Agree, airports are a bit like hotels, and just like hotels they shouldn’t be charging for essentials like water, electricity or net access. It’s 2013 and internet access is a commodity just like a bed, a power plug and a toilet.
@ rorschach
Try explaining that to the Powers-that-be ™ !!!
Our power to communicate is what will drive us forward. It is truly disconcerting that this is not understood.
Very true. I’m currently in the process of establishing an online presence in the medical field, would love to work in my job online and be based somewhere in Asia with fast internet service. SO is in Bangkok so that would be ideal.
No chance to realise online business in Australia with the new government hellbent to take us back to the 1950s, coal, mining, internet frozen at current speeds. Tragic, really.
@ rorschach
The only truly scary experience I had in Europe was the medieval attitude towards the internet.
I am happy to share … just give me the means damnit!!!
Theophontes:
Aaaw, thank you. The Rats are little bundles of happy. :D
Giliell:
Oh yes. I think the best thing, when dealing with people or critters, is to do your best and go by the individuals involved. A little more difficult, but a good way to go. I know with the current crew of rats, that if I forced Neville or Dexter to share quarters, they’d completely melt down. They are my little outliers. :D
Hey not to make drama but though I’m not part of A+, if some dip shits start to pass around the claim that one of y’all called them a pedophile here’s the context for it
https://t.co/FYs2J2pHFw
https://t.co/gJcLD6tuFX
My apologies for causing you trouble. I was clear I wasn’t part of it and just speaking as myself but no one cares. Probably will be forgotten but if they try to bug you with it there’s the story.
For what it’s worth, I’m laughing.
Has that guy ever said anything on false allegations? ‘twould be hilarious to shove that quote in his face.
@Jacob Schmidt
I’d bet he has.
Jacob Schmidt #449:
Sorry? The way I read see_the_galaxy’s comments, xe was just saying “Racism need not follow from Transhumanism, therefore not all Transhumanists are racists”, which is not the same thing as the “No True Scotsman” fallacy several commentators accused xie of writing.
True, saying “not all Transhumanists are racists” is a) a defensive attitude and, b) a very feeble defense, since you only need one non-racist Transhumanist for it to be true. (One would have been on better grounds by criticizing see_the_galaxy’s comment as a kind of “A few bad apples” defense, for instance.)
Ironically enough, though, considering that the OP was about the writings of a ranting anti-Semite, several luminaries of the Transhumanist movements, including Kurzweil himself, are of Jewish background. Which of course doesn’t mean that there isn’t racism against non-White people in that movement, but it should tip the observer to the complexity of the matter.
Personnally, I neither endorse nor abhore transhumanist ideas, although they do often strike me as “First World Issues”! But it’s an interesting source of themes and ideas in science-fiction, and in the domain of arts and literature, and as a domain of inspiration, certainly not relegated to white authors and audiences. I could point to the transhuman themes in Japanese anime and manga, or to certain trends of radical Afrofuturism.
Tony:
No worries. It was basically the final nail in the coffin, the recent Harley Quinn fuck up being the penultimate nail.
–
Welcome in, hiddenheart!
–
opposablethumbs:
Awesomeness!
Co-authorship credit offered.
:)
–
Hi y’all. Just wanted to let you know I expropriated “epitheting a metaphor.” Any objections?
During the downfall of Nixon, Trudeau did a series in Doonesbury about the poor people who were transcribing the tapes. Just plain type in front of a brick wall with the White House in the background.
I’ve always liked that one.
“Perform an anatomically impossible act”
Oggie, well done.
Not from me.
I am pleased.
:)
–
Thanks, cicely. If anyone asks, I’ll give you credit.
Mighty quiet around these parts to-night/day.
irenedelse
What xe was actually arguing, from what I could tell, was that there was no significant correlation between transhumanism and racism. Xe wasn’t arguing “not all”, xe was arguing “most aren’t”. At one point, xe asserted that there was no logical connection between racism and transhumanism. This was, as far as I could tell, an attempt to bolster hir point. Except, you know, that bolsters nothing.
I was lazy in summarizing the argument. “Not very much” would be better than “no” in that quote.
A lot of transhumanists get deep into ableism and classism, which over laps with racism obviously.