women

Rewriting “The Rules”

Jason Thibeault, , , , 11 Comments

Below the fold, I will attempt the challenge as presented by Greg Laden, to rewrite Comrade PhysioProf’s “Handy Dandy Guide for d00dly Commenters“. The guide was originally presented as a numbered list of suggestions on how to not engender the rage of basically everyone on seemingly any feminist blog, but came off as a list of rules on what would not be tolerated and what would be considered trollish behaviour on Isis’ blog specifically, no matter how earnestly posted, to all but the most sycophantic of his boosters.

Please note that I don’t personally believe in these rules, though many of them are good suggestions on civility in public discourse with people who may have pre-existing hostility to your masculinity for various, and very good, reasons. Also, any number of them should probably be stripped of their gender assignments and applied to everyone equally. The point CPP was driving at is de facto wrong-headed, in that it purports to be applicable to all feminist blogs, when it most certainly is not. This is ONLY an attempt at rewriting the message for clarity, inclusiveness and coherence (though definitely not succinctness), and to explain why each of these suggestions might have been made. Additionally, I feel that they bring out nuances of each point that are missing in CPP’s profanity-riddled tirade.

Compare with the original list, and note that because the numbered format lends itself to being interpreted as hard and fast rules that will be referenced later (e.g., “see #4”), numbers will not be used below. Two points were combined into one, in keeping with my “suggestion then explanation” format.

See, CPP? Was this so hard? I hacked this out over lunch, and revised it on a coffee break later in the day! (It helps that I’m a phenomenal typer, and wasn’t really providing much original thought.)

(EDIT: Plus I’ve made a few more edits, to both the above description and the rules themselves below, as of about 9pm AST — to fix some things that were nagging me, and to clarify my original intent in posting this to begin with.)

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Rewriting “The Rules”
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Today’s lesson: men and women ARE different

Jason Thibeault, , , , 3 Comments

Since we’re talking a bit about gender norms and sexist behaviour lately, here’s a fascinating study Jodi pointed out to me yesterday regarding what people perceive as sexist.

Jodi has reservations with some of the questions asked, feeling as though if there’s not a preexisting stereotype regarding the behaviour in the question, it’s not really sexism, or it might not be perceived as sexism. The example she gave me was that if someone were to see me typing madly away at my keyboard and say “wow, he’s good with computers, too bad he probably sucks at fishing,” while it does follow logically that heavy computer users might not get as much outdoor activity as others, the fact that there’s no preexisting stereotype suggesting that computer users are bad at fishing means that the statement is not a prejudice so much as a logical deduction. If someone were to see me and say “my, what a good looking man, too bad he must be bad at fishing”, if there was a pre-existing prejudice against hot men regarding fishing ability (like the example used of intelligence), then that would be a sexist comment.

One of the more surprising results to me is the fact that more women than men find misandry to be sexist. I suppose it’s not surprising that they’d be more attuned to sexism since the women’s liberation movement is probably still fresh in most women’s minds, but it’s quite surprising that men ignore sexism against them as often as they ignore sexism against women.

Wait, is it sexist to say that men are predisposed to turning a blind eye toward sexism as a whole? Studying this stuff always feels like you’re walking into a trap.

Today’s lesson: men and women ARE different

Dudette, you’re getting a Della

Jason Thibeault6 Comments

Dell has apparently decided that their laptop lines could use a boost in sales — one that can only be achieved by slapping some powder-colored shells on them and marketing them to women as portable digital recipe books, on their new site called, I shit you not, “Della“.

della

Don’t worry though ladies, Dell has your technical issues covered with such hard-hitting “tech tips” as this:

3. Get moving: Tools like Gyminee help you track workouts and reach your fitness goals. You can even map out new running routes via sites like Map my run.

Yeah, they packaged in some fitness software to help you shed some pounds! There’s also a note at the top of the “tech tips” page stating that the page has changed recently due to user comments — I’m assuming because of the original tech tips list, as documented by the MSNBC article above:

the site’s “tech tips” includes a feature, “Seven Unexpected Ways a Netbook Can Change Your Life,” which starts out by saying, “Once you get beyond how cute they are, you’ll find that netbooks can do a lot more than check your e-mail.”

Among those uses: Finding recipes online (Wow! I didn’t know you could do that!), making “your mini … your meditation buddy as you take mini-breaks throughout your day (schedule them, with reminders, on your calendar),” and using a netbook “to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.”

Okay, so you’re quietly scrubbing the sillier stuff, good on you Dell. That’s admitting you screwed this one up bigtime. What’ll REALLY turn this whole thing around is if you’d get rid of the “accessorizing” options like purse-shaped laptop totes, the flowery shells, and, oh, maybe, stop making shitty laptops!

Hat tip to Dan J.

Dudette, you’re getting a Della

Wherein I explain how Oprah is quantifiably damaging humankind

Jason Thibeault, , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

If only he had joined a mainstream religion, like Oprahism or Voodoo.
— Professor Farnsworth, Futurama

In a previous blog post, I made the assertion that Oprah Winfrey and her current fame is a net negative for society, and that’s not a charge I’m willing to make lightly. I’m going to start this post by describing a number of good deeds that Oprah has performed, because I am anything but an unfair critic. Bear in mind that I reserve the right to temper any praise for any individual point after the fact, because there’s at least one “charitable act” that I can think of, that was poorly thought out and ultimately a waste of money.

Get some popcorn, this is a long one.
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Wherein I explain how Oprah is quantifiably damaging humankind

Is this really how to make money while quitting smoking?

Jason Thibeault, , , , 4 Comments

Over the past several months, a radio spot has been running pretty frequently about a website, My5K.ca, where you could sign up to get $5000 just for graduating from high school smoke-free. Between the cynic and the skeptic in me, a great battle raged, between whether a) this was possible to judge fairly, and b) whether this was even a good idea, trying to incentivize the mere act of being a non-smoker. Only recently did I start digging around to find out what this whole program is about.

It seems this program is Canada wide, as the registered charity that’s administering it, the R.E.W.A.R.D.S Foundation (acronym: Rewarding Everyone Who Acts Responsibly and Doesn’t Smoke, I kid you not), operates out of British Columbia. The radio spot had left me with the impression that this was a government run initiative, and frankly, to offer a straight $5000 to anyone graduating smoke-free would be ludicrous on its face, especially if it was done Canada-wide, so I assumed it was local. It seems the ad left me with several false impressions, not the least of which being that all you had to do was graduate smoke-free.
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Is this really how to make money while quitting smoking?

Hey baby, nice stems

Jason Thibeault4 Comments

Last night’s SWIG show at the King’s Arms Pub was brilliant — pub food, beer, and great music, all of which was expected. The recent addition of Sara to the band rounds out their sound wonderfully, and (I’m sure much to her chagrin) her relatively short skirt provided a moment of hilarity near the end of their second set.

Throughout the night, as I’m not terribly used to spending any time in a place where people go angling for the opposite sex with any regularity, I occupied myself with observing various men and women chatting one another up, and had the good fortune to witness one particular stereotypically jock-ish, short, stocky, collar-popped sort of individual, completely and wholly fail to impress the ladies a number of times. After he downed a few beers and struck out with four women, it was evidently time to break the seal — only, to get to the bathroom, he had to pass directly between our table and the band. In doing so, he gave Sara one of those “hey baby” type wink and points, and after passing, stopped to crane his neck for a full three or four seconds at her legs. We all witnessed it, and after he entered the bathroom, Mark said “subtle!” into the mic mid-song, at which point we all lost our composure — the band, us, and a few tables behind us.

To the band’s credit they carried on playing with only a minimal amount of disturbance, until the douchebag left the bathroom and strode purposefully past without glancing in either direction — obviously he’d heard what had happened after he passed, and didn’t want to repeat his own embarassment. Too bad that fact wasn’t lost on us either, at which point Bill started laughing so hard he was having serious trouble singing. We didn’t stay too much longer, but I didn’t see him the rest of the night — either he left after his moment of ignominity or he decided to try his hand at the dance floor upstairs. Either way, a good time was had by all — well, all except for the dude that just had to whip his neck around to check out Sara’s stems.

Hey baby, nice stems

I seriously dislike a number of people you probably think are cool.

Jason Thibeault, , , , , 2 Comments

I’m starting to think I like riling up outrage. Too bad I’m not actually attracting much outrage thus far. So, here’s me taking another stab at it, by attacking three of the most venerated religious figures of all time.

Given the hypothetical situation that Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama are all drowning, and you only have time to save one of them, what would you do? Personally, I’d probably take a whiz on whoever was closest. That’s right — in my estimation, none of them would be worth saving, for various reasons.

Continue reading “I seriously dislike a number of people you probably think are cool.” →

I seriously dislike a number of people you probably think are cool.

Well, they’ve stopped discriminating against blacks…

Jason Thibeault4 Comments

…but they’re still discriminating against gays.  Arizona has amended their state constitution so that only man/woman marriages would be recognized as a marriage in the state, effectively banning gay marriage; Arkansas has banned gay couples adopting children; and ballots are still being counted on the California proposition to repeal the law allowing gay marriage but so far the “yes” side is (meaning it WAS legal, but now it’s not, leaving who knows how many gay married couples in the lurch).

In two tiny bits of happy news amongst all that idiocy, at least medical marijuana is approved in Michigan, though that won’t stop the federal drug warriors from cracking down on all those evil 70-year-old glaucoma patients.  And the Colorado initiative to define “persons” for the purposes of legal definitions as being any human life from the moment an egg was fertilized, has failed, thankfully — and let’s get this one straight, that has absolutely nothing to do with fair protection under the law, it’s entirely for the religious folks who want to legislate women’s va-jay-jays.

Well, they’ve stopped discriminating against blacks…

News roundup

Jason Thibeault, , , 9 Comments

Hurricanes galore have been hitting the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico, over and over again.  The newest is a Cat-4 hurricane named Ike, and it’s going to ravage all those already-rocked spots that the last two just did (they’re coming so fast and furious I can’t even remember their damn names!).  This will probably get Bob talking about the IPCC, but rest assured folks, just because climate change is definitely happening, and lots of scientists predicted it a long time ago, nobody could ever have predicted it and should it turn out that it was anthropogenic, nobody could have predicted that either.  Sigh.  Just suck it up and weather it.  The human race will live through this, undoubtedly, and any massive shift in climate will likely spur evolution in a number of ways through a number of species, even our own.

In a nice bit of justice, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, just won the presidency of Pakistan, after the tin-pot asshat Musharraf (does this mean his ass is a tin pot?) resigned to avoid an impeachment in much the same way as Nixon dodged that particular bullet.  There is a modicum of decency left in the world.

In the meantime, John McTimebomb chose Sarah Palin as his veep pick, without evidently first vetting her at all.  Their campaign is being rocked by her incessant lying to the point where they’ve decided to curtail her access to the press in much the same way that McCain’s been restricted in his press access and cell phone use, to keep them from going off-message (read: making “gaffes”), and to keep people from possibly discovering what they, and pretty much this generation of Republicans, are all about.  Not that media access would really matter, given that right now (and for the past good while) McCain’s down in the polls so all the talking heads are all but bending over backward to fellate the man in an effort to tighten up this race.

On the homefront, I had a debate with someone (at work, no less — shame on me) involving abortion.  I of course took the position that pro-life is anti-women, and that nobody who holds the pro-life position is truly pro-life.  I say “of course” because I can’t rightly think of any other way to argue this point, given that my views are roughly that a human life is not truly viable as a potential human being until they’re at least two years old (not that I’d ever advocate “aborting” after childbirth, but I definitely don’t personally consider a 1-year-old child any more viable than a three-cell blastocyst).  Once they escape the spectre of SIDS, then they’re potentially going to be an adult.  And I’m sure this is going to spark some controversy, so feel free to call me a monster in the comments.

Oh, and finally, as any good conservative knows, welfare for the poor is abhorrent, but welfare for the rich who go bankrupt is apparently perfectly justified.  Far as I’m concerned, if you want to live by the sword, you should die by the sword.  Don’t make it seem like helping those that are less fortunate is robbing them of the opportunity to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and without missing a beat immediately turn around and give a failing business a golden parachute.  If life is supposed to be hard and hard work is the only virtue, then let life be hard equally for those that have power once in a goddamn while.

I’ve got two posts planned, one for the Canadian election that’s coming up (and you can probably guess what I’ve got to say about Harper’s massive ad campaigns and massive last-second spending on military), and another hopefully relatively funny one about Darwin pareidolia, which has been covered recently by Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy and The Onion recently.

News roundup

I’m beat.

Jason Thibeault, , 5 Comments

Last night, I went to bed at 12:30. Admittedly late knowing that I was to take an hour and a half drive the next morning, meaning I’d have to leave at 8 am to get there in any decent amount of time. I fell asleep pretty well right away, which is unusual for lately, then at 2 am one of our smoke detectors (with CO2 detection) went off… for five seconds. And stopped.

I pretty well bolted out of bed (I remember saying “what the hell?” out loud twice and was halfway downstairs before I was really conscious), searching for any sign of anything that could have caused the smoke detector to freak out randomly, given that it wasn’t a short chirp like the usual warning that your battery’s giving way. In fact, as I was still in a half asleep fog, I wasn’t even sure which of our three detectors had gone off. Also, neither of the other two had registered a even a blip. So, I closed all the windows in case someone was burning something outside (which happens often around here in the summertime), then went back to bed. I was concerned it would happen again, and the adrenaline of the situation was still pumping, so I didn’t fall asleep easily.

And at 3 am, it did happen again, only it kept ringing. I tore it down off the ceiling and pulled it out of the power outlet it was connected to, but it kept ringing. It took me about a minute and a half of turning it over, twisting it and prodding it before I found the battery outlet, on the front of the stupid thing. Having taken it down, I was able to get back to sleep relatively easily this time. Too bad 7:15 came along really quickly.

Got to work, thinking I was doing the job solo, but the IT guy for the site was there, bum knee and all. Sadly, I had to do much of the brainwork, being that that’s why I was called in — the other IT guy couldn’t figure out what it was exactly that was necessary to get all the phones moved, despite being walked through it by folks higher up on the food chain than myself. So he was stuck doing gruntwork, hobbling back and forth using a chair to transport computers back and forth, while I hunted down the correct punchdowns to pull, reroute and re-punch on the proper spots. The whole job had much fewer complications than I had anticipated, given that I was told there was a number of wires that needed special punchdown configurations (which by the way nobody gave to me, so I would have had to guess and test through the process).

The biggest complication, however, came from something totally out of my control. Some idiot apparently wrote something along the lines of, “there’s a bomb in the building”, on the womens’ washroom mirror, using mascara. This delayed our move project significantly — almost two hours lost right after lunch, right after I had gotten everything straight and gotten a plan put together, and right before I actually got to implement it. So there I was, stuck sitting in the parking lot (sitting, literally, because of the amount of standing and walking I’d had to do for quite some time up until that point), needing to go to the bathroom, with absolutely nothing to do but watch the comings and goings of the cops and fire truck and forensic unit, desperately wanting coffee (those two facts kind of go hand in hand — I’d drank a good deal of coffee already at that point), not knowing hardly anyone at the centre, when it started to rain.

Impressed by this turn of events, I marched off to a nearby building (where Clifton happens to work) to find a bathroom and some coffee. The coffee was definitely necessary at that point — I was nearly falling asleep on my feet. It was also horrible. Seriously tasted like it was on a burner for eight hours, even though it was in a carafe.

Anyway, to wrap this story up (as I’m dead at this point), we dealt with the remainder of the phones in roughly five hours after regaining access to the building once the forensic unit had left.  The drive home was a killer as far as awakeness is concerned, though luckily it only sprinkled a bit so I didn’t also have to deal with the elements.

Now.  It’s time for bed.  Once again I push off my draft.  (Not that it’s the only one.  I have two other drafts on the go that I still haven’t posted, because I never really get around to working on them.)

I’m beat.