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Thomas Bushnell, former maintainer of GNU Hurd until his dismissal by Richard Stallman, has opined in a biased blog post that the forced resignation of Stallman from MIT and the Free Software Foundation is deserved.
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84
So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G's original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.
But I'll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
[...]4) RMS's loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.
5) I feel very sad for him. He's a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure.
6) The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.
The free software community needs to develop good leadership, and RMS has been a bad leader in many ways for a long time now. He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help.
MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work. It must make clear that this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @01:24PM (9 children)
We all know what happens next.
(Score: 5, Funny) by JNCF on Monday September 23 2019, @02:16PM (2 children)
Feature creep will result in emacs reading email? Oh no, it was so simple and pristine before this!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:27PM
I wouldn't worry about feature creep at this point. No way is Emacs getting a text editor now.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Friday September 27 2019, @01:40AM
No. It means the editor in Emacs' mail program will be replace with nano. And elisp will be replaced with either javascript or rust.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:36PM
Even bigger buttons. Less of them, but bigger. I'm talking 1/4 the screen.
No discernible graphic icons, just abstract lines.
White on white contrast for minimialist appeal.
No ability to change any of this - that would bloat the code. One choice hardcoded in.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:41PM (3 children)
I am worried about some "woke" SJW taking the reins at the FSF and giving all the money away to racist and sexist "Outreachy" like programs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:55PM (2 children)
Did you see the Growing Gnome video from Guadec 2019? That piece of shit (Gnome Foundation director) openly says they are going to discriminate against white boys in their coding contest. Someone should sue the Gnome Foundation for discrimination. Use their own BS laws against them. Stupid bolshevik fucks. Fuck that lying agent at the Freedom Software Conservancy too. She mis-characterizes what Stallman said, and you know she's plenty smart to understand the English language.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:24PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5FwESSTNRw [youtube.com]
This video? Judging by the views, almost nobody on the planet has seen it.
4:40: Diversity initiatives
12:50: Diversity and inclusion teamS
13:30: New code of conduct
17:53: "Another of our goals is to increase the number of known contributors who identify as women, non-binary, gender queer, gender non-conforming, and also to increase the percentage of Gnome contributors who don't identify as white or if you're European descent. Um, historically we've been... as I say we I mean free software in general has been pretty terrible at actually attracting people from a wider range, and some of that is because um... if you have, we, you traditionally have to be lucky enough to have enough money to code in your spare time, to learn to program in your spare time, and then do it as a hobby in your spare time. So this is kind of the aims of of this competition.
You're a white gender-conforming straight male? GTFO. Here's another interesting one:
23:47: "Yeah, I also had a question about the competition. So you did mention that you're not an educator so have you thought, started to think, I know this is very new, but have you started to think about how the uh how the projects will be selected and what types of people you'll have on the group that's doing the selection?"
"Yeah so so that's, so that's one of the key things that we need to kind of get right is the, is the judging panel for example. So we're reaching out to a few different organizations around, um, so, which I won't mention yet because we're still in discussions with them. But for me it's really key to make sure that we have that good diverse thing so it's not just a load of free software people who coming and doing things who might not know anything about education, or know um what is likely to have a good impact on, on those goals. So there's a range of organizations we're talking to as well to try and get judges in and get that experience level we need to be able to, to work out what we do there."
And some more:
29:00: Question about the environmental impact and carbon budget of the Gnome Foundation.
33:49: "Oh we can ask you the tough questions right now in front of all the people, put you on the spot. Um, so building off of these questions about environmental responsibility I'm curious what other kind of, like social justice or socio-economic or general doing good responsibilities... we as a community and we as a Foundation have uh, and kind of where are we drawing the lines around what we're going to be focusing on and things that aren't explicitly, like developing a great desktop and free software toolkit."
"So I think it can be tricky to essentially go along the lines of hey we're going to be doing this and this and these other things, and then we're going to get involved with areas over here and that aren't actually related to free software and our mission, um and so that is why I keep on mentioning this is quite important that we remain focused on this. This is our purpose and where we are. Now, where there are areas that fit in with our mission then that's something we can definitely explore and something we can look at. And so a part of that is about just for example having a good employer brand. We want to attract the best people to work for Gnome, we want to attract people who want to work for Gnome, and with an emphasis on actually we don't just pollute the world is kind of important. Um so there's areas we do fit in, but we do need to be also be mindful of not kind of going into the trap of just because it's something I think is important, or any of our staff or Foundation feels important that isn't necessarily mean it's something that the Foundation as a body um is able to, to think is important. We have to act essentially as a, as a sort of separate body that's aiming our mission and our purpose. So I'm not sure if that answers your question or nicely avoids it."
36:31: "Somebody, and I'm not sure if it was you or maybe it was you rather who mentioned that the um term limit board 2 year change proposal yesterday was prompted by some concerns that the donor had about the governance arrangements for the Foundation board. So that got me thinking about um the influence of donors on things that the Foundation tries to do. Um, so can we be reassured that if donors request activ... if donors... so I'm not talking about the competition here to be clear because that's clearly a donation to do something which the foundation is... I'm talking about sort of general donations. Can we be assured that the Foundation is always going to act sort of properly if donors are requesting things to be done as conditions for them donating money to the Foundation? Like is that something we should be concerned about? I'm guessing you're going to say no, but how can we know that things are not happening that you're not able to talk about?"
"You should, as a Foundation person, you should absolutely be concerned about that. But not because there's anything there, but it is a standard worry of what we do..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @08:08PM
Yes, I was thinking someone like her.
Though if you look at the donor list of the FSF, they seem to be individuals for the most part, though there are some corporate donors. Mozilla, "Software Freedom Conservancy" and Gnome Foundation on the other hand sound good for corporations to throw money at. Qualifies for a tax deduction, and looks good for the optics. To them, out-of-mission funding of discriminatory programs is great PR, as long as it still is acceptable for whites and males to be demonized.
Of course, that potential amount of cash attracts cancers into the leadership. I'm hoping the remaining FSF board can keep them out.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday September 23 2019, @05:21PM
McDonalds will finally bring back their szechuan mcnugget sauce?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @01:25PM
Thomas Bushnell, BSG is a Gregorian friar and automatically suspected to be a pedophile. Petty Thomas needs to learn to shut the fuck up about his old boss who fired him 16 years ago for being a lazy shit who wasn't doing any work. The faggot Brotherhood of Saint Gregory ought to have a rule about holding grudges for years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @01:33PM (16 children)
I worked with a relatively bright mechanical engineer who had self-destructive people skills. He seemed to not grasp that he was being personally offensive in any particular moment, but, having lived for 4+ decades with this flaw in his awareness - after the fact he just "owned it" with a basic: "yeah, I said that, deal with it."
While he may have structural differences in his brain that make it difficult, or impossible, for him to model and process social interactions from the perspective of others in real-time, like the vast majority of people do, he could have been helped, counseled, coached and basically remedially taught to deal with this disability in a less self-damaging way. Instead, most of his life indirectly rewarded him for his offensive behavior, promoted him into a private office, gave him a good salary for his non-people skills, and allowed him to make some pretty bad decisions which ended up costing him his marriage, children, and career path in his early 40s.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little discrete openness with people to help them through things like this. Nobody told my grandfather that it was rude to hang up the phone without saying goodbye until he was in his 60s. He was never exactly smooth about it but he did learn, in his late 60s, to say goodbye before hanging up - things like that can make a huge difference.
It may have been too late to help the self-destructive mechanical engineer in his 40s, I don't know, I was in my early 30s when I interacted with him and, having the option to maximize my personal and professional distance from him, that's the option I took - as most people did. He seemed relatively happy with himself most of the time, but that had to be hard moving cross country leaving wife and young kids behind - then they never followed - then the new job dumped him after about a year and the wife didn't take him back...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @02:43PM (4 children)
Bad behavior can be adjusted, but that is opposed by inertia: The longer someone has made their life function well by doing what they're doing, the harder it is to convince them to change. Sometimes, it takes serious consequences to give them the proverbial kick in the pants that they need to make changes, and at the very least those flaws are doing less damage to others in whatever organizations they're a part of.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @02:52PM (3 children)
Alcoholics "hit bottom" - though whatever bottom you hit, there's usually a lower one if you keep digging.
Both RMS and my ME acquaintance may have been too long trained to be who they were to change. The summary mentions: "He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help." and that's probably true.
I guess the lesson here is: if you see someone in their youth heading down this kind of path, you just might improve a lot of peoples' lives by helping them to integrate better with mainstream society - certainly try not to reward bad behavior, even if it seems profitable in the short term.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @07:40PM (2 children)
If mainstream society means you can't have wrong opinions, it is better to be an outcast. Now, I am well aware of the overton window open on pedophilia but I have actual arguments against it. Censorship is bad and the indirect censorship operated by the ones who shout louder is even worse.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @08:07PM (1 child)
Mainstream society, to me, means not being an asshole - insulting people, sometimes right to their face, as if it's nothing. (Unfounded) prejudice, (unjustified) abuse... I don't think Linus Torvalds crosses the line, he seems reasonably self-aware, but people who go around ignorant of just what jerks they are being - should at least receive counselling to ensure they understand the ramifications of being the way they are, and if they are in positions of power over others, they do deserve to lose that power if they chronically abuse it. As seems to have happened here.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:41AM
Ok I got what you meant then.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:11PM (8 children)
Thank you for sharing your experience. I am at this stage of life right now, I am 37. I lost most of my friends, everyone in my family hates me and I have a feeling my wife may leave me anytime in a year. I am just lost.
Everyone around me thinks I am really smart but I personally feel I am the dumbest person I know. I fit the mechanical engineer you described 100%. I will be grateful if you have any advice or tips to improve myself from this situation. Thank You!
Also about the brain wiring - I took many online tests and read a few books, and according to them I am severely dyslexic and have ADD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:52PM (1 child)
Still as valid as ever
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:09PM
LOL, Buddy Bears: The Book.
We are the buddy bears, we always get along, and if you ever disagree, then you are surely wrong...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by McGruber on Monday September 23 2019, @08:10PM (1 child)
Forget the online tests and self-diagnosis. Get a therapist for yourself and ask your spouse if they would like to try marriage counseling with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @08:38PM
Thank You!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:09PM
Just like with substance abuse, the first step is admitting you need help. Sometimes it is the hardest.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 24 2019, @04:40AM
Not much to offer here for advice, but what have you done to try to keep them? Relationships are give and take.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:42AM
Maybe sign up and ask about your experiences in a journal here. It's difficult to give generalized advice when it will be likely thousands of specific situations that give rise to what you're experiencing.
My social skills aren't the best either. One thing that took me a while to learn though is that if someone says something to you it's OK to just say nothing--and many times silence is infinitely preferable to putting your foot in it saying something awkward. Sometimes you can't always tell in advance if it would be awkward--I guess, if in doubt, wait. I suppose it's a version of the old proverb:
It doesn't mean you have to sit there in silence like a freak for half an hour. Maybe you'll gain some time to think through how what you were going to say might be perceived, or the other people may say more things that make a friendly response easier to judge.
Take anything I say with a pinch of salt however, as I'm a pretty asocial nerd myself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:24PM
Sorry for your condition, and the life that has led you to this point.
Find a friend, someone who has the time and emotional capacity to listen to you, learn about your life, and give some good advice about how to proceed to make things better. Your mental challenges may make it difficult to judge who would be a good friend - don't be afraid to try again if you choose a bad one or two at first.
I suspect many of your most challenging situations can be improved by "coming clean" - just get it out in the open between you and whoever that you don't always "get it" and sometimes are going to need to be told things that an average six year old might figure out on their own. Because you appear otherwise smart, people may feel you are arrogant or intentionally being a jerk - show them you aren't.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @05:20AM
Those skills are learned by practice, if your brain wiring permits.
Hyper-bright people are at risk of not learning them due to the isolation of having so little in common with the people around them.
Leta Hollingsworth a hundred years ago and Miraca Gross in this century have documented with extensive study that it improves the socialization of the profoundly gifted to accelerate their education radically.
I think there's no question anywhere that rms is profoundly gifted. I don't know whether Bushnell is accurate.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jb on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:39AM
Certainly personalities can be ``adjusted''.
A better question would be whether personalities should be adjusted.
``Adjusting personalities'' sounds a whole lot like the justification used in the USSR (and decades later in PRC) for establishing ``re-education'' camps.
Is that really the direction in which any thinking person wants Western civilisation to be taken?
Voltaire's famous line comes to mind.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Fishscene on Monday September 23 2019, @01:47PM (112 children)
"MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work."
Why aren't you calling the same thing for men? Is it because you view women as not able to make and define a safe and fair place to study and work? Isn't that kind of sexist according to our current standards of outrage and sexism?
I know I am not God, because every time I pray to Him, it's because I'm not perfect and thankful for what He's done.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @01:57PM (80 children)
Oh yes, because men have faced systemic harassment, abuse, discrimination, and have had no power dynamics where they are superior to women. Systemically, not anecdotally. Yep.
Grow up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 23 2019, @02:55PM (53 children)
It's an important point that we should all strive for *equality*. If you want to include men in that struggle, then *equality* should be paramount. A lot of men feel like the metoo movement is not one for *equality* but an attempt to belittle and demean men.
> systemic harassment, abuse, discrimination
I believe that a lot of men have suffered harassment, abuse and discrimination on a systemic level. It is just as terrible when it happens to men as when it happens to women. I hope we all agree that we should strive for a world where this doesn't happen *to anyone*. By picking out a particular group, you risk de-emphasising the terrible impact of these things on anyone not in that group. I think GP is correct to call that out. Men and women should in unity be calling for "a safe and fair place to study and work for everyone", whatever minority or group they belong to.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday September 23 2019, @03:10PM (2 children)
It's going to take a movement of men seeking honestly to expose and remediate harassment, abuse, and discrimination against them. Unfortunately, there are a couple of unique problems facing men who would start such a movement:
1. This kind of movement requires a level of open vulnerability and emotional awareness that men are culturally discouraged from displaying. This is similar to, but opposite, one problem facing early feminists: this kind of movement also requires a level of outspokenness and ambition that women were culturally discouraged from displaying.
2. This kind of movement also tends to attract reactionaries that rant about pseudo-scientific biological differences between the sexes and seek to re-establish "traditional" gender roles. This is similar to another problem still facing feminists: some women are so pissed of by The Patriarchy that rather than creating a just system for all, they would like to replace men in all positions of power and flip the power differential, giving them the opportunity for vengeance.
These are not impossible problems. They simply make the movement more complicated. Men seeking to end the victimization of men have to contend with broader cultural forces and keep the extremists from corrupting their messaging.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:49PM (1 child)
You forgot #3. The femnazis.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:59AM
No, that was point #2.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @03:51PM (42 children)
And that's because they've fallen for a trick.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a man who has never sexually harassed or sexually assaulted a woman in his life. You're completely innocent. And then some woman who you worked with a while back accuses you of doing terrible things to her. What do you think happens in the wake of #metoo? Well, this has happened, and what has happened as a result is that they were investigated, lots of people came forward to tell the world how he was actually one of the good guys, and eventually the accusations are dropped and/or fade from memory.
Contrast that to the experience of guys with a habit of behaving badly: 1 woman accuses them of bad behavior. In fairly short order, a few more say "he did that to me too". And a few more, and a few more, and usually it doesn't take long until 20+ women are describing a consistent pattern of a man using some combination of money, organizational power, and force to do things they know they should not have done.
If you're one of the good guys, you have little or nothing to fear, especially because this is helping any women you care about (and you do have women you care about, right?). If you're one of the bad guys, you have a lot to fear, but that's called justice, and it is no way unfair that you should face it.
And now we get to the point of the "OMG, #metoo is attacking men!" rhetoric. What that is is a way to convince good guys that they should be on the side of bad guys rather than on the side of the truth or fairness. Don't fall for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 23 2019, @04:08PM (17 children)
It's great if metoo sorts out the bad guys from the good guys. I think that's fantastic. I was reacting to this statement
> "MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work."
The quote is slightly taken out of context, but the strong implication, also I think seen by GGP, is that the interests of men to have a safe and fair place to study and work is not paramount. This is unfortunate. Probably it was just a careless word by the author, but it is quite correct to call out the careless word.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 23 2019, @04:39PM
> is that the interests of men to have a safe and fair place to study and work is not paramount
I should have written "equally paramount" or somesuch.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:42PM (12 children)
No, it is recognizing the reality that for a very, VERY long time the system has been such that men have already had more than a safe and fair place to study and work. Where women have not.
You can change that to "interests of all people" when it becomes equal. Until then the power disparity can be recognized for what it is.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 23 2019, @05:17PM (3 children)
> such that men have already had more than a safe and fair place to study and work.
Is that really true? Even if the men are Muslims? Jewish? Christians outside the West? Democrats outside the West?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Monday September 23 2019, @11:15PM (2 children)
It's all relative. My wife can't even walk down the street without getting harassed. Most of your list are invisible unless the men volunteer the info.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:52AM (1 child)
Alternatively, if you don't look manly enough you can get your share of problems without volunteering anything whatsoever.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday September 24 2019, @03:06PM
True, though the same thing happens with women, except it is looking too masculine. Too fat as well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:06PM (7 children)
Not true. Considering how many places the women worked in the home and didn't get out much, it's the other way around. Men mostly didn't have safe places to work and study, but the women did.
Afghanistan is a pretty good example, people make it sound like the women being prevented from leaving the house was a bad thing, but outside the house was where all the bombings and mayhem was going on. As oppressive as it was to be forced to stay home without an escort, it was far safer to be at home than not.
Most of this bullshit about women being oppressed is spin. Women agreed to those terms because it was in their interest to do so. They didn't have the risk that the men had, but it meant having fewer rights as rights were granted primarily based upon what society needed people to be doing. Men were generally the ones expected to fight, so they generally wound up being the ones running the government. Women didn't usually get to run the government, but they were off the hook for numerous civic duties outside the home in most societies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:53PM (6 children)
So, women should be systematically oppressed for their own good, even if they want to leave the house without escorts? Maybe give them a choice, at least? What you're advocating for here is literal patriarchy: Government-mandated oppression.
Too bad you couldn't move to North Korea, as it seems like that government would be more in line with your values.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:27PM
Women over time gave up essential liberties for a little immediate safety, until eventually they had neither liberty nor safety except at the whim of a man.
This is a warning all people should heed, whatever their background. Because the freedoms they are taking from others are not always the freedoms they themselves will retain. As soon as an excuse is given to categorize them in with the incels, the SJWs, the liberals, the rednecks, the fools, etc they will find themselves falling upon the very sword they gleefully tossed others upon.
(Score: 2) by Demena on Monday September 23 2019, @10:49PM (2 children)
The situation in Afghanistan and other places is that BOTH sexes are oppressed. As has been the case for almost everywhere forever. Basically, you appareled to be entirely ignorant of the rights and responsibilities of the people in Afghanistan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:27AM (1 child)
Yeah, but that doesn't conflict with what I said. That person seemed to be advocating for oppression.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Demena on Tuesday September 24 2019, @01:51AM
It is arguable either way as to which sex is more oppressed in Afghanistan. The women "forced" to stay at one of the male children selling their butts to support all their female relatives because their elders have died, been killed or have gone off to fight?
Feminism is past its use-by date as it has become a tool of oppression in and of itself.
I am an equalitarian and I have distain for overt sexism. Idealism and realism have to be balanced.
For example; "take back the night" - wonderful idea except for the fact that we never had the night in the first place. That is why we have street lights. So what are men being asked to do here? Hang around the streets at night looking for trouble (they will find it out of boredom)? Maybe there should always be a reliable man to escort a woman(polite society)? Not "let" women out without an escort (Current Islam)? Exactly what direction is this going and is it wise? For both men and women going out at night involves some risk and it always will, as there will always be hostiles out there. A safe world is an ideal, it can never be a reality. Safety can be improved by more police, more lights, more cameras, curfews, more tracking, more control. People are going to have to decide where they draw the lines. More safety is less freedom and more freedom is less safety.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday September 24 2019, @05:41AM (1 child)
My view is that both men and women were being oppressed in this scenario. It's not like the men could choose to stay home either.
To play Devil's Advocate, you _could_ argue that the men are being treated as expendable (heading out into the warzone outside), while the women are too valuable to risk.
GP has a point - in older times there was a logic borne out of necessity when most 'out of the home' jobs were dangerous and better suited to male physiology (i.e. brute strength). That isn't the case any more, so it no longer makes sense to have 'male' and 'female' roles in society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @03:29PM
When you are a man, and one day you have children, you discover that babies and toddlers crave for a female for everything care-related, and for a male for stimulation.
There ARE male and female roles.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @05:58PM (2 children)
I agree that they left out the "... while maintaining the safety and fairness most men already have."
I'm going to take some educated guesses here:
1. You're a cisgender man.
2. You don't regularly make plans regarding how to escape situations you are in or how to get from one place to another safely, and have never really tried.
Because every woman I've ever known well enough to have serious conversations regularly takes personal security into account with just about everything she does. For instance, one major reason women tend to go into bathrooms in groups of friends is to protect themselves in case a creep is waiting in there to attack them, which happens often enough that it's a real and worthwhile consideration. The vast majority of women alone with almost any man that she does not have really good reason to trust completely (yes, that includes you), has in the back of her mind a plan for what she'll do if you try to attack and/or rape her, again because it happens often enough that she needs to think about it if she wants to be safe. There is a level of constant fear that a lot of men just don't understand. If you have a sister ask her, or ask your mom, and if you can't have these conversations with either of them you need to ask yourself why you can't or don't understand the lives of the women you've known your whole life.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Demena on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:35AM
I think that you have some misconceptions about men.
You have to be kidding me. You honestly believe that most men have safety and fairness in their daily lives? For the majority of men life is safe and fair? That has never, ever been true and is still not so today. To believe so is being in defiance of history and flies in the face of current affairs. Men are expendable and always have been. In the UK, of the men alive a thousand years ago only a few per cent (the elites) passed their genes through to today. Women may feel vulnerable to their core but men feel expendable to their core. Mostly they don't even mind being expended as long as the reason is good.
What qualifies your guesses as "educated"? You are asserting inherent knowledge. Always a sign of a weak argument and unclear thinking.
Do you actually know any men? What you are talking about is called situational awareness. It is the difference between life and death. Have you ever watched how men enter a men's room? From my observation it is usually carefully and slowly unless there is a crowd. I don't think you should be questioning how well a guy knows women without ascertaining that you do not have the same issue.
Remember that a liar will always suspect your veracity, a thief will always suspect your honesty. When someone suspects something about someone else it often is an indication of how that someone thinks.
Regards, Demena
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 24 2019, @01:50PM
> "... while maintaining the safety and fairness most men already have."
Unless they are gay, or muslim, or...
> fairness
Why is male life expectancy so much lower than female life expectancy?
Why is male suicide rate so much higher than female suicide rate?
Note, I'm not discounting what you say, rather I agree with the thrust of your argument. I just think we should strive for *equality*. Sometimes it sucks to be a woman, sometimes sucks to be a guy, let's make it better for *everyone*.
> fairness
If we do not strive for *equality* then we alienate the men (or whatever group we exclude) who we need to achieve "fairness". That's rather shooting ourselves in the foot.
> educated guesses
That's ad hominem; you should be ashamed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @05:35PM (13 children)
That's what happens in the good cases. If the guy, completely innocent of all charges, has somehow or another upset or otherwise alienated the #metoo interviewees, or maybe just never made any impression on them at all, they can still pile on with stories of what they remember from years ago - memories which can, in point of fact, be manufactured by the interviewer - whether intentionally or not.
How can you tell the innocent victims from the true criminals when the proof is all eyewitness testimony? You can't, ever. You can hope to get it right most of the time, but, depending on the method of interview, that success rate can be astonishingly low - well below 50% if you just let Bubba from the local PD do the questioning.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @06:20PM (12 children)
1 convenience store accuses somebody of stealing from them, but the only evidence they can supply is the clerk's testimony. The cops investigate, and 3 other convenience stores in the area accuse the same person of doing the same thing to them, again only offering the testimony of store clerks. Hearing about the case, 20 more clerks point out that the dude in question did the same thing to them. There's no security footage available, but there are now lots of people describing the same bad behavior from the same person. Now which is more likely: (a) That person has done a lot of shoplifting, or (b) That person is a victim of a conspiracy by a bunch of clerks who hadn't really talked to each other until they realized they'd all been robbed by the same dude? There has to be some n > 0 such that n eyewitness reports of criminal acts by somebody puts you beyond a reasonable doubt without evidence that this is some sort of conspiratorial frame job.
And on that same principle, there's absolutely no reason why accusations of sexual misconduct should be any different. And the reason that the "pile-on" effect is so common isn't due to some sort of feminist conspiracy, it's because the available evidence suggests that the average bad guy in this regard rapes about 4 women, sexually assaults 6, and does skeezy-but-legal things to many more.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:15PM (6 children)
No, its because many women like the attention, and want to pile on the "I'm a victim" bandwagon.
For reference, see how blacks were treated in the 40s and 50s... one person makes an accusation, and then 10 others pile on, 'I saw him too!", later to be proven innocent / was in another city..etc..
Its a witchhunt just the same.. just with a different name this time around..
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @07:52PM (5 children)
"The attention" you're referring to frequently includes threats to rape and/or kill them and anyone who helps them from men who believe themselves to be defending manhood from a giant conspiracy of feminists in a very twisted "bros before hos" mentality. In what universe do you think people go through that because they like it?
The dynamic that's really at stake here is the idea of a social hierarchy hinging on a person's identity at birth. People with that mindset basically walk around with the assumption that white men > white women > white children > non-white men > non-white women > non-white children, and that those who come higher up in that hierarchy have the right to rule over those further down, enforcing that rule with whatever means are necessary up to and including lethal force. In that mindset, using one example here, Christine Blasey Ford telling the world about what Brett Kavanaugh did is at best irrelevant because Kavanaugh should never have to answer to Ford no matter what he did, because he's a man and she's a woman, end of discussion. And following that same mindset, if she'd said exactly the same thing about, say, Samuel L Jackson, then that same social hierarchy mindset would demand that Samuel L Jackson's life or at least career would be forfeit. These are also exactly the same dudes that have a significant tendency to murder women because they tried to divorce them, because again these women are defying that social hierarchy.
The people who believe in that social hierarchy also believe that their opposition wants to create the opposite social hierarchy, where the subjagated become the oppressors and vice versa. They're generally wrong about that: The most firm opposition to that social hierarchy wants to ultimately eliminate the power of identities entirely, and views all hierarchies with a bit of suspicion.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @11:24PM (2 children)
Everyone of any importance on the internet has death and rape threats, no matter the gender, orientation or operating system. In fact, anyone who hasn't received threats is a nobody, as far as the internet's concerned.
That's the ladder of oppression. Tabulate your privilege points to find out which rung you're on today!
Now you're just making shit up. Literally nobody in the world has ever unironically said or even implied such a thing.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:07AM (1 child)
In at least one poll [publitas.com], 1 in 5 people who think Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath about his past (including his response to Christine Blasey Ford's allegations) still wanted him to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. So yes, there is a significant number of people who have reached the conclusion that he could be guilty as all get-out, but that shouldn't matter.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:35PM
Guess the 4 in 5 had it then when her lawyer came out recently and said Ford was lying to protect abortion.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Demena on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:48AM
I think you are being far too rigid in your social hierarchy. I agree there are hierarchies but they are multi faceted In your example I would think that Jackson would fare better than a white with a low income menial position. There are many factors that place people in the social hierarchy. Wealth, colour, job, looks, nationality, voice, manners. Probably a lot more too
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:24AM
> white men > white women > white children > non-white men > non-white women > non-white children
Are you motherfucker aware of the fact that there is an evolution going on here, and the white man are pretty on top?
And that, incidentalyl, is the job of any men, to put their own on top no matter the cost?
We are not, like, fucking created by God, but ACTUALLY fucking evolved?
Now, what the actual fuck are you complaining about, like honestly?
But now you actually are free. Nobody firces you to marry, nobody forces you to have children.
Despite all badness, you have this freedom handed to you.
Now leave the dying white race to RIP, and go back fucking your muslim and negro slaveholders, cuz they are much better then the white man.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23 2019, @07:32PM (3 children)
(c) dude is (choose one: white, black, latino, asian, arab, xyz, whatever), clerks and/or cops in question have a prejudice against this particular race and open the line of questioning something to the effect of: "have you had any problems with shoplifting lately?" It's a convenience store, odds are really good that they have, so that's a yes... now, one side or the other mentions "some xyz dude came through here..." yeah, yeah, that's him, let's bust the bastard. What kind of confidence interval do you want? 99% confidence that you're getting the right guy 99% of the time? Still gonna suck being that 1/100 dude thrown in jail and having his entire future derailed for something he didn't do, and if your witnesses are only 50% reliable you're going to need a shockingly high N to establish 99% confidence that you're ONLY putting 1 innocent person in jail for every 99 guilty ones. And, if you're fighting an uphill battle against prejudice, that 50% reliability on the witnesses is beyond naively optimistic.
If all you want it to be right "most" of the time, like more than 50%, then, sure, ask a handful of eyewitnesses and if you get 3 or 4 who agree, then, yeah, you'll be right more often than you're wrong. If you're destroying somebody's future, the odds that you are destroying the right person's future need to be, legally, beyond a reasonably doubt, and even if you consider 1/20 bad convictions to be acceptable, and you think that the 95/95 CI used in social statistics is somehow acceptable and meets this criteria of "beyond a reasonable doubt", and you think that your eyewitnesses are correct 50% of the time (they aren't), to meet that 95/95 CI with your flaky data you're going to need an N greater than 60.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @08:35PM
d) all the shoplifters looked the same. Insert racist snark here.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @10:02PM (1 child)
By your logic, eyewitnesses should be completely barred from any courtroom because they are all not 100% reliable. Which means that anybody with the brains to commit their crimes when there isn't a machine watching can commit said crimes with impunity. For instance, if you see a teenager you recognize in your neighborhood going around smashing car windows, that's not something they should be punished for, because all the evidence we have that said teenager committed vandalism was you and the 4 other neighbors who saw them doing it.
And remember, these are often instances where the people making the accusations know the person in question, making mistaken identity less likely.
You start from the premise that 50% of all public allegations of bad behavior under oath are false. Even if we accept that, that means that if there are 2 accusations, there's a 1/4 chance that they're both false. Add in a third accusation, and there's now a 1/8 chance that they're false. By the time you're up to 20 people making similar accusations, you're now at a 1/2^20, or a little less than 1 in 1 million chance that they're all liars. And by the time we're up to 33 accusations, the odds that the person they are talking about is completely innocent is now greater than the human population.
And of course if the numbers that organizations who study rape believe are more likely to be accurate, and it's more like 1 in 20 allegations are false, then the odds that you're talking about an innocent person go down even faster than that. As in, by the time you get to 7 people saying that somebody has committed sexual assault or rape, there's now a 1 in 1.2 billion chance that they're all lying.
Is it possible an innocent man will be accused of rape? Absolutely. The odds of that happening go down dramatically as more people provide their testimony that the same person exhibited the same behavior. Which means either there's some point at which you accept the odds of getting it wrong are sufficiently low because we're in "getting hit by a meteor" territory, or you're arguing that sexual assault should not result in any consequences whatsoever to the perpetrators of sexual assault.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @09:06AM
Stop muddling your message with horrendous use of stats and probabilities.
One: eyewitnesses do matter in court, but not all proof is created the same. The role of imperfect proofs (of which eyewitnesses and traits of character) is to weigh in but not to be the entirety of the proof.
Two: witness reliability isn't only a product of lying, honest but mistaken witnesses exist and in fact abound.
Three: when we take witness reliability at 50%, it's a statistical figure. You don't get your witnesses all at once like if you were throwing a handful of dice. Each witness, exists because of the context before they speak up. This means both honest witnesses and liars may come up because they see other witnesses appearing. You see what we have here? A lot of variance. Aka fucking poison when it comes to avoiding collateral damage.
Four: organisations that study rape don't have meaningful numbers for the kind of sophism you're trying to pull and will never have them. Because they base their numbers on results of legal cases (in the best case scenario). That's third hand data. No one will ever have first hand data because that would require actual studies that include real rape and would be a fucking nightmare.
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Monday September 23 2019, @07:48PM
True fact, only evil witches in were killed in salem. Any statement to the contrary is demonstrably false as Thexalon has so clearly demonstrated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:37PM
FTFY, and assume the position, you craven incel!!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Monday September 23 2019, @08:33PM
That's pure unmitigated bullshit.
#1: you turn due process on its head when you accept uncritically all accusations. This is the foundation of any authoritarian police state -- accusation == guilt.
#2: even if after gargantuan effort and expense, you win in court, it doesn't matter to the MeToo authoritocracy. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-ghomeshi-was-acquitted-why-should-he-not-be-allowed-a-voice [nationalpost.com]
#3: metoo is mostly a scam by elite white women to replace elite white men, it is not designed to help the average Josephine slaving away at two low paying jobs (or the average Joe doing the same thing) -- it is at its core, about power, about people as slimy and gross as those who they wish to replace.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:15PM (3 children)
Except that in Stallman's case, instead of saying "Epstein is a good guy, he would never do that" and having himself branded an idiot; he decided to say "Pedophilia is not that bad, she was almost 18, and she was asking for it."
No, just... No. No amount of Asperger's or geek anti-social excuses is going to cover that up.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:59PM (1 child)
Except that's not at all what he said. It's not even a reasonable interpretation of what he said.
You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.
See for yourself:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/09132019142056-0001.pdf [documentcloud.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:15AM
Heh. His attempt at virtue signalling while AC got him a -1 Troll.
Anyway, yet another discussion of RMS and the future of the FSF derailed by useless invocations of Epstein and alleged victimhood and survivorship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @11:27PM
He said nothing of the sort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @11:09PM
Hah!
(Score: 1) by In hydraulis on Tuesday September 24 2019, @01:45AM (1 child)
Sometimes they are allowed to fade—after the man has already been destroyed. [youtube.com]
And sometimes they aren't. The Kavanaugh accusations show us that the enemy is organized and willing to strike again and again if the first blow misses the mark.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:19AM
It would be nice if "them" going after Kavanaugh repeatedly with half-baked baloney led to the end of cancel culture.
But it won't. Cancel culture is really clickbait culture. It's a business proposition. People will always click, outlets will always amplify. Burning down a man's reputation is just another way to compete with viral cat videos.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08 2019, @11:27AM
>If you're one of the good guys, you have little or nothing to fear, especially because this is helping any women you care about (and you do have women you care about, right?)
Fuck you. Women are the enemy of men.
Men should rule over females, not "care about" them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:11PM (6 children)
I can tell you not all white men, or white women recieve that 'white privilege' everyone talks about.
It's not as bad as being a random ethnic minority around the wrong group of people, but plenty of us get persecuted from both sides of the aisle. The indignant SJW types bash us for the color of our skin, our sexual orientation, our 'breeding' status by being straight, the less enlightened and indoctrinated folks of color (I haven't actually met many of these, although my ex-GFs parents and some of her siblings were, and she had 'race traitor' issues. As if we're not all the same race, and as if black ethnic groups don't hate on the wrong kind of blacks, or whites hate on the wrong kind of whites...) The point is, the persecution comes from all sides, in all forms, and the only ones with the gall to throw that in other peoples faces haven't taken the time to consider a walk in the other's shoes. Or even just asking them about their own personal experiences. I remember when I was younger, people, it didn't matter their color, would tell you off on why you were wrong if you did that in their face. Not some vague white privilege bullshit, but actually drive a point home. Some wouldn't give time for a retort or lend an ear back. Some were obviously talking from experiences of privilege, but except for the overtly narrowminded, never was it some uniformly a line as it has become, on all sides of the divide as it is today. People parrot arguments, soundbytes, and other clips verbatim, without any thought going into them, or providing any intelligent discourse of their own. I fear for what this means for the future, but I also wonder if anyone will have the time to pay attention with all the information they are inundated with. History repeats because man forgets.
Also yeah, I support the equality/egalitarian point of view. Until equilibrium is reached we will just shift who is the derided party for the day.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
There's no such thing as privilege. The reason that not all men get it is because it's not privilege, it's achievement. Certain individuals and groups have the spoils of achievement and others don't.
That's not to say that it's completely fair and that the achievements were earned on an equal basis, just that bad mouthing some groups because they actually bothered to build the necessary infrastructure for success isn't helpful. What is helpful is figuring out how other groups can do the same and ensuring that the rungs on the ladder haven't been removed to prevent others from following.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:24PM
AKA those groups that achieved having used their privilege. Check.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @10:20PM
Yes they do.
Having white privilege doesn't mean your life doesn't suck or nobody ever says something mean about you. It means that your skin color isn't stopping you from, for example, surviving police encounters, getting a job, or renting an apartment.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:25PM
Such uses of privilege are not about individuals. They are a cultural advantage.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:24AM (1 child)
All "privilege" means is "However much your life sucks or does not suck now, would it suck more if you were not $THING? If yes, you have $THING privilege." This isn't difficult. And privilege by itself isn't evil, it's just one of the emergent phenomena arising from the intersection and interplay of who you are and the society you find yourself in. Now what *is* evil is when you don't recognize it and punch down.
Examples: I have white privilege, can pretend to straight privilege because I'm mostly femme and don't "look gay," am not overweight or visibly disabled (hearing aside), am of above-average intelligence, and had the advantage of a college degree, as arguable as that may now be due to debt. My life has also sucked in a lot of ways, being from generational poverty and having endured things I do not propose to speak about here and now. But it would have sucked worse, so much worse, if I were black, or if I were more butch, or if I had an IQ of 85, or if I were obese, or if I didn't have a Bachelor's.
Knowing all this, what can I do? I can take into account that many, indeed most, people don't have my advantages. I can think about the implications for other peoples' lives. I can interact with them in ways that bring them up instead of patronizing or condescending to them. It's not hard. It just takes some thought.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @03:54PM
Maybe your life would not suck the same if you didn't have white-female-non-straight-entitlement where you think you deserve $SOMETHING to be happy. Probably with an IQ of 85 you would be much happier.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:01PM (1 child)
"Oh yes, because men have faced systemic harassment, abuse, discrimination, and have had no power dynamics where they are superior to women. Systemically, not anecdotally. Yep."
You are referring to marriage I assume?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @11:10PM
Abusers abuse those closest to them first. It is usually the bullies abusing the weak then moving onto softer targets.
It took me years to undo the verbal abuse of my friends mother. Who took it upon herself to badmouth me to every other parent in the neighborhood. Good luck making friends in that environment. I honestly did not understand why people disliked me. Right up until they told me what was going on. Trusting others is wickedly difficult now. I had to learn that what a bully projects on you is your greatest weapon against them. It is what they fear.
As a dude what is my way to 'deal with it'? "suck it up your a man". "show a little backbone" ... I want retribution which will never come. Men usually have little recourse when the main abuser is a woman. I heard it best put. Men hurt you physically, women hurt you emotionally.
I literally had to move 1500 miles away to restart my life due to what she had done to a 7 year old boy. I was visiting and telling people how wonderful it is having friends and going out. Someone brought up what she had done. They had all kept it a secret from me and buried me. That was when I realized I had been abused. Not to my face but behind my back across dozens of kitchen tables and 'quick calls on the phone'. Isolated and shunned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:05PM (2 children)
Are you saying men have not been subjected to the same things? I can't seem to find that history book where it says men pranced around singing jolly songs to eachother while harassing women. I'm not excusing any such behaviour against any living creature, but seriously.. the trouble is with the elite. Those who set the rules, those in power. If you're making this a gender war, we're all going to loose once again to the elite, who thrive when we fight eachother. Do you want to solve the problem? Are you choosing the right path to solve the problem? Nothing is going to change until this obnoxious behaviour of the lower classes fighting eachother ends.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @10:23PM (1 child)
Apparently fraternities, bachelor parties, strip clubs, and churches (to name just a few places where that happens) don't exist where you come from. Well, except for the prancing part in some cases.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:00PM
Okay, so now I know that you think that fraternities, bachelor parties, strip clubs and churches are a hotbed for men prancing around singing jolly songs and harassing women.
Thank you?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Monday September 23 2019, @03:42PM (11 children)
Bwahahah! Are you talking about 50 years ago? Lets see if I can tell some stories of the opposite. And the context is sexual misconduct, so I'll stick with that. I'm going to skip being groped or propositioned by superiors because that's too easy.
As a guy I've been reprimanded, reassigned and lost a raise because I turned down a date at work by saying 'no thank you'.
I've been threatened with a rape accusation unless I work nights/weekends to do her work. HR told me I'd be terminated immediately if she complained.
(since this is a tech site) I was under a cubical desk repairing a cable termination when three women returned from lunch and started a conversation in the next row of cubicles over. There said they didn't like their immediate supervisor (including normal he makes us work complaints) then one said we need to get him replaced with some date-able, he's gross. 'Yeah, someone hot' said one of the others. Then went on to talk about how gross it was when he talked to his wife. The three then brainstormed sexual misconduct allegations they could all make individually to make sure she's fired, and went on to plan what they'd say to make the stories seem to corroborate each other but not sound like they conspired together. (They cat called an attractive male co-worker picking up a printout during this time, while talking about 'hostile work environment'!)
Fast forward a few days and apparently they weren't getting the instantly fired without investigation response they were hoping for. One poured water in her keyboard to force me to visit. Once there, they told me they'd each file on me unless I fabricated and planted evidence supporting their claims on the guys PC, along with planting porn etc sufficient to get him fired or it'd be me too. They were friends with the HR person, so going there was out. (the other guy had a good relationship with one of the owners protecting him, an advantage I didn't have)
I sought legal advice, and was warned I faced jail time. If I did what the female co-workers demanded, I'd be civilly liable to the guy (lost wages etc) and because the framed conduct could be criminal my actions framing him would have been criminal as well. If instead I reported the blackmail to the police/prosecutors then the women would have an easy choice. They could face blackmail charges, or instead they could go ahead and falsely report sexual assault. It was explained to me that once they do that my report of blackmail will be considered retaliatory (not their allegation! the timeline is reversed as a matter of law?!?) and I'll be jailed immediately. I was pointed to the Duluth model of policing and (I think) the Violence against women act that mandates doing it that way. I was told my blackmailers would make the obvious choice and I'd be arrested, but if I do what they demand I'll face the same threat but they'll also be able to turn me in for planting stuff to get the male co-worker fired. (i.e. my situation gets even worse)
And then one of the women said they'd also report me unless I had an affair with her. (if you've ever though about workplace relationships being a problem, consider this one, then ask yourself how understanding your SO will be when you explain you've been cheated because the other woman blackmailed you)
Can you tell me some more about the power dynamics please? How many years of incarceration is appropriate for me?
(Score: 3, Touché) by lars on Monday September 23 2019, @03:52PM (3 children)
Dear Penthouse forum...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @08:25PM (1 child)
First stage is denial.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:14AM
Is this the same AC who was verbally abused by his friend's mother, and socially ostracised, had to move 1500 miles away to start a new life, and now the same thing is happening, AGAIN? Hmm, what is the common element here?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:26AM
Stop that. We have no reason to disbelieve him, and there are plenty of women who have a chip on their shoulder and something to prove by putting a male subordinate in a bad position. Consistency here means we take *all* of these complaints seriously. It's no less wrong when someone from an historically oppressed group does it to someone from an historically oppressive group, because guess what? On an individual level, *it's still wrong.* Break the cycle or continue it, the choice is ours.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:56PM (1 child)
Come on. Don't leave us on a cliffhanger! How did you end up dealing with that situation?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:23PM
Not until his screenplay is finished.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:06PM (3 children)
You didn't give a date for your story, but if small voice recorders were available at that time, it might have made sense to use one? I'd have it out in the open, show up for the "service call" with a cheerful, "This conversation is being recorded."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:57PM (2 children)
I'm many places that's felony wiretapping and can lead to prison time. If you get something particularly damning, you might get away with it, but there's no guarantee that it would be admissible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:34PM (1 child)
Then you've been told wrong. Openly declaring that you are making a recording is in no shape, way, or form wiretapping. Wiretapping occurs when the other party is unaware of your actions.
Work considerations aside, there are some states which require consent to be recorded but in that case you say, "OK. I cannot remain here then," and shut off the recorder and walk away.
Or what you do is make a written complaint to HR of exactly the allegations which were made with a copy to the company CEO and/or President, then let them sort it out. Then, if one is in fact accused or fired, one sues. Alternate bonus model credit: On being threatened one reports the complaint to the police as well and request a report with numbers be taken, even if no action is.
As to the consideration as this story as a #metoo moment, yep. Nobody ever said it doesn't happen in the opposite. But as a male you are far more likely to have your story believed and acted upon. That's one of the differences. Sort of akin to if a woman in pencil put up on their door sign something that reads, "Defender of Justice (And: Hot Men!!!)", how long do you think such a woman would last at that position?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday September 23 2019, @10:40PM
In my state the rule is that you need consent of both parties to a conversation unless there is a threat involved, and then only one party needs to consent (that would be the person making the recording of the threat).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @11:06PM
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday September 23 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
There are plenty of man-hating women out there, especially white men. That will result in strong discrimination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:19AM
Plenty of white men who are women who hate men? Why would these "women" especially be "white men"? I find your post confused and idiotic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:45PM (1 child)
Your argument is the same as claiming that Jews cannot possibly become oppressors because they were oppressed. Or blacks of South Africa. Or blacks of Zimbabwe. Or atheists in general.
Or maybe wake the fuck up and realize that humanity of all types can and therefore WILL switch roles. Given a chance, the oppressed become the oppressors. The apple does not fall far from the tree. And we learn fucking nothing from it so it happens, over and over again. And now again.
So grow the fuck up and learn from history instead of just replaying it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @10:37PM
No, my argument is saying that systematic oppression still exists against women. Not about what might happen in your fantasy future.
Sorry that triggered you enough to use harsh language, but it's reality and from your vehement reaction you know it.
So no, you've shown that you have more growing to do than I, sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:56PM
As an ugly man I can totally confirm this.
The problem is that accepting ugliness in other people would lower incomes of companies as people will buy less. So no tolerance here.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday September 23 2019, @07:57PM
Ok but not all places implement Islam... In those places, men are actually hesitant to get married, which according to the picture you present is nonsensical, they would be passing on the opportunity to submit a woman with the complicity of the patriarchy.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @01:29AM (1 child)
Have you been on a college campus lately? Men face systemic harassment, abuse, discrimination, and have no power dynamics where they are superior to women.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:16AM
Frat boys are wusses. Boys, not even if they are Proud Boys, are not Gentlemen. Or even men, for that matter. Bugger off, incel!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday September 24 2019, @06:33AM
You need to look up the definition of 'equality'. We are all equal - men do not have special rights over women, and women do not have special rights over men. Giving something to one group that is not afforded to the other is not equal.
Wrong. All people need a safe and fair place to study and work.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @02:35PM
Their policy is women are inferior, as men are exclusively responsible for the outcome of sex, and RMS questioned that religious dogma. So they can "rebel" against their own beliefs. Kinda weird strawman, but whatevs.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:07PM (24 children)
Everytime I want to say 'why don't men get the same protections', or 'why are you so offended by a rape joke' I have to remind myself first and then everyone else, that we are not experiencing a domineering matriarchy or epidemic of female on male violence, nor was epstein able to get away with seducing, brainwashing, drugging, raping and pimping hundreds of 12 year old boys.
We are experiencing an epidemic of male on female rape and violence, even belittling of its victims via words like 'butthurt'. Then people like kavanaugh, the duke lacross team, the TJ Bunn story, Rupert Ditsworth, india. And all of the other indirect abuse of femininity on a global scale with all of this 'right wing' anti-ecological idiocy. All child abuse is mysogeny, and the republican party, many christian churches, islam catholicism and judaism all have this problem, it's across the board and over the course of my life I have seen it get worse not better.
Women and children have a real reason to be afraid and fear for their safety as a group due to enshrined mysogeny in our culture. Men do not.
I like to do standup comedy and I frequently hear at shows comedians doing rape jokes to prove they are edgy and I don't say anything usually, but these people are showing me what they are really made of. In portland once, I took a shithead to town for trying to make a joke that 'women should just get over it and be tougher so they can handle rape jokes.' I think that is still up on my soundcloud, oh yeah check it out!
https://soundcloud.com/j-michael-hudson/kyle-harbors-views-on-morality [soundcloud.com]
I only think people should make rape jokes if they could make the same joke while actually getting raped, and this is not a joke. I will hold this opinion until I see some actual change in the stats and even in the most optimistic scenario this will not be soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:24PM
No, that would be a certain Greek who haunts Soylent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:56PM (16 children)
True, but Michael Jackson was. The Catholic church was (and the organization was complicit). Jerry Sandusky was (and that organization probably was complicit).
Feminists like to pretend that only women experience sexual victimization, but like everything else that spews from them, it's a lie. If you count what goes on in prison, it's possible that men actually experience more of it overall.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:54PM (12 children)
Was it ever actually proven that Michael Jackson did anything?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 23 2019, @05:34PM (11 children)
No.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday September 23 2019, @09:10PM (10 children)
But we all know he did.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday September 23 2019, @09:37PM (9 children)
Which goes to show that the mere accusation in and of itself may be more damning than anything else.
Job Interview Scenario 1:
Why were you fired from your last job?
Due to accusations of sexual misconduct, but they didn't sue me (or I was acquitted).
Job Interview Scenario 2: (Still looking for a job.)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:30AM (8 children)
Oh, come on: he was grooming children for sex.
How many grown men do you know who sleep with little boys who aren't called "Uncle Pervy"?
Give. me. a. break.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday September 24 2019, @04:51AM (7 children)
I started with no particular opinion on MJ (not a fan, thought him astonishingly immature, and mostly ignored his existence) but a couple things changed my mind:
-- saw video of MJ playing in a pile with several kids. It was remarkably like watching a little boy playing with puppies for the first time, surprised and delighted that all the puppies love him. This isn't the behavior of a pervert. For contrast, observe Gropin' Joe around preteen girls, where it's all about having them in his power (however briefly).
-- MJ's wife's kids are quite obviously not his. (Been a long time since I saw good photos, but I remember thinking they must be the offspring of some unknown white dude.)
So I began to doubt MJ was sexually competent (ie. that immaturity was physiological), thus unlikely to get it on with kids. Wouldn't rule it out, but this is why I don't jump on that kneejerk bandwagon.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:43PM (4 children)
Read up on serial killers, and pedophiles grooming kids: it is astounding how these people can seem to be the best person while conning parents and others while moving their agenda forward.
MJ was grooming those kids, picking and choosing the most vulnerable, and when 'caught' moved to the child sex trade capital of the world: he could have gone anywhere in the world, but chose to go where he had access to children, no questions asked.
Nope: it may be love to him, just love, but most people call it pedophilia.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:00PM (3 children)
Where, Belize? that seems to be where all the pedo types wind up. I've heard some ...interesting... tales from folks who've been there.
I don't think sexually incompetent and 'interested in younger boys' are mutually exclusive. I don't doubt there was plenty of circle-jerking, that being the nature of unsupervised youth (and IMO MJ never matured mentally past about age 15 -- I wouldn't call him normal by any stretch). But I'm not sure I'd call it 'grooming' when the perp is so emotionally needy that he's looking for love any way and anywhere, and absent that, puppy-like adoration will do. It isn't good, or right, but I'm not (yet?) convinced he crossed the line to intentional harm.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 25 2019, @01:04AM (2 children)
I'm old and my brain is going, but i thought i read that he had moved to Malaysia or Taiwan: that general area... can't remember.
I just don't buy it: if he was interested in 'children', why did he only invite little boys and not girls?
Here's some interesting stuff:
https://www.thoughtco.com/profile-of-pedophile-and-common-characteristics-973203 [thoughtco.com]
and a quick google search brought up this, with info about the pornography and picture books found in Neverland:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Michael-Jackson-really-a-pedophile [quora.com]
I dunno: if he WASN'T, then what WAS it all about???
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 25 2019, @05:35PM
Someone wanted a payday, because he had deep pockets.
Also, he's quite dead now, but I don't remember hearing he'd moved to any place outside of the USA.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 26 2019, @03:14AM
He got married the 2nd time in the Dominican Republic. Can't find anything about moving elsewhere. (Maybe thinking of McAfee? IIRC he spent a while in Belize, possibly for lamentable reasons.)
As Freeman says, more likely "deep pockets" has more to do with it than anyone's sexual predilections. Guy is dead and can't tell us, and I don't put much trust in kids' old memories; I remember the McMartin Preschool debacle all too well.
I'm old too (dang, when did that happen?) and spent the day fixing roof; by some miracle I did not fall off, but I think my brain is still up there...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 24 2019, @07:47PM (1 child)
Read Mindhunters, by the guy who started the behavioral science dept at the FBI to catch serial killers: they can seem perfectly normal while being rotten inside: it is their CRAFT, it is honed to perfection so they can do what they do.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 25 2019, @05:56PM
The accusation was enough to stick with his name ever since, no matter that he wasn't convicted. Even, with the FBI's file supporting his innocence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_child_sexual_abuse_accusations_against_Michael_Jackson [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:55PM (1 child)
I don't mean to make light of anything, but in terms of scale the difference is many orders of magnitude. And for example the Catholic priests in the pedophile scandal attacked little girls as well as little boys.
And we know forced prostitution, rape, date rape, etc... are huge problems for adult women still. Yes, women rape and assault men. But what are the relative proportions? 100 to 1?
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday September 23 2019, @08:51PM
No, women do not rape and assault men, because most places rape is _defined_ as something a man (or at least a person with a penis) does. Thus saying men do most of the raping is a circular argument based on nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:29AM
Michael Jackson wasn't an abuser. He was just another victim of the media and various gold digging vultures. The record won't be corrected because the jokes and salacious headlines of the time are what people remember.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday September 23 2019, @06:07PM (1 child)
I think Norm Macdonald would strongly disagree [youtube.com].
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @07:02PM
I am already telling you I know other comedians disagree, I will argue with them.
I don't demand to be right, I demand to be heard.
If someone is an actual rape victim, they are coming to laugh and get their mind off their problems.
I usually think before I perform that the audience members are all half dying, recovering from trauma, and my job is to be uplifting.
This is, however in the united states at the moment seen as a heresy. When was the last time you heard someone like Bill Hicks talking?
That's not an accident. I love norm macdonald but frankly I would only want to hear the viewpoint of pro-rape jokes from women and like I said, rape victims.
Otherwise the victims are afraid to go to see comedy, then the bullies and rapists fill the place up, and comedy is not about empowering bullies, or at least I am not here to entertain the epsteins of the world. I am here to piss them off.
Comedy should go up the chain of power, not down it, print. Although the latter is en vogue, which is why I can't stand to go to an american comedy club.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Monday September 23 2019, @08:47PM (1 child)
We are "experiencing" what the media chooses to report, unless we actually choose to dig deeper and look further.
Epstein could have got away with doing nasty things to hundreds of 12 year old boys had he wanted to, plenty of other powerful people in certain organisations are known to have - you are deciding which sex is the aggressor and which the victim purely on the basis of one mans sexual preference.
So let's use stats instead. But rape stats will never show anything like an "epidemic of female on male violence" until we move away from defining "rape" as "something done with a penis" (which is the legal definition where I sit now) - so they are useless. If you look at domestic violence on the other hand, it's far more even, a third of the _reported_ victims are male ( https://fullfact.org/crime/are-third-domestic-abuse-victims-men/ [fullfact.org] ). A third, and that's IF men are as likely to report it (and have it recorded by the authorities) as women. Even based on the reported stats we should have half the number of "mens shelters" as we have "womens shelters", anyone reckon we do? Really?
We are, very slowly, starting to move away from the "women are victims, not perpetrators" bias in child abuse, and where we have, we have found female perpetrators who have been getting away with it, because they were not suspected. Same goes for female serial killers, and paedophile priests (who were beyond suspicion for centuries). Eventually we may shed the gender blinkers and find that females are just as nasty as males, maybe not in exactly the same numbers or in the same ways, but of the same order. The raw capability is clearly there - look at the reputation of female Kurdish Peshmerga for example (more feared by ISIS than the men).
Yes, there is an epidemic, of person on person violence. It's been documented for as long as we've had documentation, and has likely been going on for as long as people have existed.
Is it getting better or worse? I don't know.
Can we fix it? I don't know - historically, people have tried, some have infamously become victims for trying whilst more people-on-people violence is then carried out in their memory.
Should we try? Yes.
But, if you are defining the problem as one group on another (be it by gender, sex, race, sexual preference, skin colour, religion, culture, dress, whatever) you are part of the problem not part of the solution.
Defining groups of people as victims simply means they are not suspected of being aggressors because they are victims, which means they can be aggressors and get away with it - and if there's one thing all people have in common it's the tendency to do what we can get away with. It's people who are the aggressors (not all of them, but all varieties), and people who are the victims.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:29AM
When rape ceases to be defined as essentially a property crime, then we'll move off that idiocy about it being something only a penis-haver can do. Can't have it both ways here.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:57AM
No.
"Butthurt" comes from internet culture in the days when the men were men, the women were men, and the little girls were feds. As such, it generally refers to male-on-male assrape rather than male-on-female.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Tuesday September 24 2019, @08:38PM
I guess you have never been married. And you can't possibly have been through a divorce.
I see you don't read the papers much either. Over the past several years, the reported statutory rape crimes against middle and high school students seem heavily weighted on the female teacher/male student side. But I guess that doesn't qualify as rape, huh?
Way to flame out. The New York Times had to print a retraction when they admitted that the most recent alleged named victim had no memory of any such attack and the whole story quickly disappeared down the memory hole. And Dr. Ford couldn't testify when or where her attack happened or how she even got home. And her friend who allegedly was with her at the party in question stated she had never met Kavanaugh and has no memory of any party. Despite all that, she was so traumatized by the incident that she had to have extra doors installed in her home to facilitate escape and was so claustrophobic after the "assault" she couldn't fly in an airplane unless, of course, it was to a vacation destination.
Or perhaps you refer to the psycho that Michael Avenatti dredged up who made claims of gang rape after facing six lawsuits including one for falsifying documents. The same Avenatti that is facing 400 years in prison for extortion, fraud, theft, forgery and embezzlement. This kind of guilt-by-accusation is exactly why so many men oppose the toxic culture of "believe her" without ever questioning even the most rudimentary gaps in their story. The more extreme the consequences of being judged guilty of such behavior, the greater the need to prove the case.
Feel free to "take a shithead to town" for violating your own self imposed restrictions of what humor should be permitted but don't expect everyone else to jump on the cancel culture bandwagon. Most of us can laugh at anything even if it's distasteful and we can walk away if we don't find it funny. Even the most self righteous of the progressive culture is starting to realize they have created a monster after becoming targets themselves. See Sarah Silverman and Justin Trudeau for recent examples just this past week.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
Because there's no documented ongoing pattern of discrimination against men on the basis of sex that has been rampant for decades.
There was a major effort in the 1950's and 1960's to turn computer software from being a primarily female profession into a primarily male profession, in an era when professional consequences for things like racial identity and gender were perfectly legal, specifically because computer software had gone from being seen as a low-status occupation into becoming a high-status occupation and there were lots of men at the time who believed women shouldn't be in high-status positions. It plainly had nothing to do with women being unable to do the work that they'd been doing for 3 decades before that.
My own experience at another university, one that has a reputation for liberal politics and policies, and was run by a woman and had a majority-female student body and faculty: Our computer science major track started with quite a few women interested in the field coming in with a strong background in mathematics and science. Some of those women that I have every reason to believe reported significant sexual harassment (e.g. guys pressuring them with various cajoleries and threats to expose their breasts while they were trying to work on their code in the computer labs), some experienced what they reasonably believed to be grading discrimination, and all of them ended up changing majors to related fields like math and physics before graduation. And this wasn't in the 1950's, this was in the early 2000's.
And when I graduated and went into the world of work, I observed plenty of other cases of fairly overt discrimination against women in technology. For instance, I worked with a woman who was a top-notch coder with a particular knack for finding and fixing security issues, and she was all but forced to do UI design instead of coding because she was presumed to have more artistic sensibilities solely because she was a woman.
You want to pretend there isn't a problem. You want to pretend that men are the real victims. I know better.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @07:48PM
Bad things were done by others, so you must suffer because of my bs logic.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:45PM (2 children)
That's right, and the abolitionists in the 19th century United States were wrong to call for an abolish of slavery of blacks. They should have called for the abolition of slavery of all peoples. It was naked discrimination to non-blacks. What were they thinking?
...do you understand why your post is absurd? Nobody is supporting oppression and mistreatment of men, explicitly or implicitly, in this discussion. The point is that RMS and people like him were not making a hostile environment for men but were making it for women, so to pursue equality and safe and fair environments for all MIT has to focus on improving their current treatment of women.
Now when evidence is presented that men are treated unfairly in a way that is not affecting women, your argument would have a point. Until then, it's ridiculous.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday September 24 2019, @02:31AM (1 child)
Modded up! You're putting your finger on the unspoken assumption these people are making, that all interactions are zero-sum or worse: that if women (for example) gain something, it must come at the expense of men (for example). What a sad way to think. This is the kind of thing that makes people reflexively respond to "Black lives matter" with "ALL lives matter."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Fishscene on Tuesday September 24 2019, @09:59PM
"MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work."
"that if women (for example) gain something, it must come at the expense of men (for example)."
But it's not paramount to balance interests?
-----------
For Black lives matter... Nobody was saying they *didn't* matter. Especially NOT me. So when I say "All Lives Matter" - I'm calling attention to get to the root of injustice problems and not focus on creating special laws or procedures based on whether you're black or not. Special rules based on ethnicity *IS* racism as the privilege it creates cannot be enjoyed by those with a different color of skin. And yea. I'm against that.
I'd rather we treat All people as equal. The "Black Lives Matter" movement is calling for special treatment based on skin color and specifically calling out one skin color to give free and expensive stuff to another skin color because *skin color*. Screw that noise.
Think I'm off my rocker? https://www.leoweekly.com/2017/08/white-people/ [leoweekly.com] This is the leader of the BLM movement.
I know I am not God, because every time I pray to Him, it's because I'm not perfect and thankful for what He's done.