I was challenged to watch an anti-feminist video on youtube! My challenger told me he got 16 minutes in before he “couldn’t stomach any more.” I told myself I was made of sterner stuff than that, and the challenge was accepted.
I only got through the first 8 minutes before gagging and having to stop. I am weak. It’s an especially dismal showing because there is almost no content in this video: it’s a guy posturing and sneering through a crudely animated puppet of an armored helmet, and most of it seems to be pointless posing and talking with a funny voice.
No, really. It starts with a long prologue, with an angel and a devil in the stupid helmet talking to each other in those ‘funny’ voices about what the head guy should talk about, and it goes on far too long. They decide to take a skeptical look at feminism.
We’re two minutes in already and I’m regretting it already. Our protagonist emerges to pose with jerky squints and stilted expressions to make his first pronouncment.
2:05 I’m not an anti-feminist
Oh. Right. That bodes well. How many times have you heard someone declare that they’re skeptical of feminism, but oh no, they don’t hate feminism. They like good feminists. Why am I wading through this drivel to get cliches?
We get an announcement of what kind of feminist claims should be regarded skeptically.
2:37 …should be skeptical of the pay gap
Well? And? That’s it. No arguments, no evidence. I guess he’s done with that point. Probably because he doesn’t want to have to flail about to wave away the facts.
2:50 Some feminists treat feminism as a religion
Again, assertion with nothing to back it up. We’re 3 minutes in and I’m not seeing anything but stereotypical anti-feminist noise from this not-an-anti-feminist.
3:20 Title? Intro music?
WTF? Everything up to this point was goddamn intro? How full of himself is this guy?
4:05 Imagine my surprise and dismay when I discovered that Steve Shives had drunk the atheism+ kool-aid…he’s going to attack the arguments made in this video
Finally, we get a statement about what he’s going to talk about, and apparently it’s going to be a criticism of this video by Steve Shives that I liked. It’s been interminable so far, but let’s see where he goes with it. He starts with a clip from the Shives video.
4:45 “Atheism and feminism are complementary to one another”…whoa, one sentence in and i’m like “whaaaat?”
Without watching it, you can’t appreciate the substantive skepticism at this moment. He draws out that “whaaaat” to great length, using one of his funny voices. Well, gosh, I guess Shives is wrong then.
But that’s it. “Whaaat,” and a cut to some old video the Armoured Skeptic did in which his helmet avatar is wearing an afro and talking in his version of black slang, giving me the opportunity to say “whaaat” back to my screen and thereby refute him thoroughly.
Shives points out that atheism and feminism have a common problem, religion, and that there are patriarchal religions that still treat women as inferiors, but apparently the Armoured Skeptic rejects this idea.
5:15 the only people I hear en masse perpetuating the concept that women are not equal to men are third wave feminists
“Whaaat?” So he’s an atheist/skeptic who has never heard of fundamentalist Christianity/Islam, who knows nothing of the Quiverfull movement, hasn’t noticed the American presidential candidate’s comments about women, but thinks modern feminism is about gender inequality?
I’m not holding up well. Boring and wrong isn’t a good way to keep my attention.
Then he starts in on Atheism+. Man, but Atheism+ sure spanked a lot of guys hard — they’re still stinging over it. So he’s going to lecture us once again that the only good atheist is a dictionary atheist.
6:10 Yes, there is an atheist community, but that community is connected by only one thing, and that is the fact that have a shared disbelief in a god
If that is the case, then we’re not talking about a community. We’re also dealing with a mob of dumbasses who are completely uninterested in pursuing the consequences of their strongly held beliefs.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about what atheism does and should mean to its proponents, and some consideration of why it’s important to us. That conversation is killed every time by these know-nothings who yell at atheists to shut up about implications and meaning and consequences, because they don’t believe there are any, and it makes them uncomfortable when you talk about intellectual responsibility.
When Shives talks about things like ethical obligations, that makes people like the Armoured Skeptic rear back in horror.
7:15 …what you’re proposing, Steven, is that we police atheist communities so that they are no longer troubling to you
Yeah, right. Shives must be talking about an Atheist Police Force, all suited up in body armor to threaten the Armoured Skeptic with tasers and clubs and handguns.
No, I think Shives is saying we should be open and talk about what being an atheist means, rather than hiding behind a kind of intellectual nihilism in which all meaning is denied. If saying we should freakin’ THINK is an act of police-state repression to you, what are you doing saying anything at all to others?
I finally gave up when I heard his ignorant tirade against Atheism+ — so ironic, so hypocritical, so dishonest.
8:00 This is exactly the issue that split the atheist community in two when Atheism+ reared its ugly head. The feminist communities started proposing regressive ideas, taking away people’s freedom of speech, punishing members for asking questions and proposing new ideas, and publicly shaming people, including women, for not toting the line. Essentially a group of bullies decided they wanted to police the community because they found it troubling.
What has split the atheist movement is a body of ranting, arrogant fools who want to keep women in an inferior place — what they’ve objected to is that people other than white men have much to contribute to the movement. Armoured Skeptic wants to claim that Atheism+ promoted regressive ideasa like … taking away people’s freedom of speech? “Whaaat?” How exactly does an internet forum dedicated to progressive ideals of equality take away anyone’s freedom of speech? How exactly does Armoured Skeptic think others have the power to take away his freedom of speech? I’m pretty sure a regressive toad like himself has been largely ignored by liberal atheists.
It seems that he thinks it is bullying and depriving people of free speech to forcefully criticize their position, which means that he himself is a bully trying to snatch away the speech of the good people who were writing and conversing with each other on Atheism+. Because he finds them troubling.
And then I looked at the time on this video and saw that it had 20 more minutes to go, and said fuck this and quit.
Challenger, you win. I couldn’t watch the rest, and if I see his videos pop up on YouTube, I’ll just retch and click to close it. It’s just another anti-feminist yahoo.
Surely you’ve heard enough of these yahoos to know that they interpret anyone contradicting or objecting to the crap they spew as “violating their freedom of speech”.
Asshole Has a Point:
This happened/happens: “punishing members for asking questions and proposing new ideas, and publicly shaming people, including women, for not toting the line. Essentially a group of bullies decided they wanted to police the community because they found it troubling”
Note this is true only if you take the words at face value instead of in context, ‘cuz he’s not talking about the people within A+ who actually do this.
Misogyny is an old idea, been around for millennia. Feminists are the one with the new idea, like treat all people, including women, as equals. And the problem with this is????
Somebody doesn’t get it. And won’t even bother to try to understand the concept they aren’t special.
I assume that the YouTuber assumes because he’s an atheist and doesn’t adopt religious-based patriarchy*, he can’t be biased against women. Therefore, when people point out things like ‘hey, women still get paid less than men, and it gets worse when you add race’, since he, Mister Unbiased, hasn’t noticed the problem, it must be Third Wave Feminists angling for special treatment for women. Skepticism is apparently only for tipping over other people’s sacred cows.
(I know I’m not perfect about this stuff myself, but I try to remind myself that to be human is to have biases that I need to examine if I wish to be a proper scientist and empathic to others.)
* Strange how one can acknowledge that America is full of loud Christians and many forms of Christianity are openly patriarchal to a small or large degree, but somehow American society in general doesn’t have sexism any more. (Let alone that American atheists might be influenced by American society in general, rather than being untouched by the culture around them.)
Becca @4:
Well obviously that’s because the sexism is wholly linked to Christianity so once you become an atheist you just automatically cease any and all sexist behaviors and all those feminists are just silly little women. It’s tots true, because someone said it on the internet.
[fires up the citation manager]
Oostendorp, R. H. “Globalization and the Gender Wage Gap.” The World Bank Economic Review 23, no. 1 (August 22, 2008): 141–61. doi:10.1093/wber/lhn022.
Ferrant, Gaëlle, Luca Maria Pesando, and Keiko Nowacka. Unpaid Care Work: The Missing Link in the Analysis of Gender Gaps in Labour Outcomes. OECD Development Centre Issues Paper, 2014.
Helen Clark. “Speech at the Launch of the 2015 Human Development Report | Human Development Reports.” United Nations Development Programme. Accessed December 16, 2015.
Dozens of economists at the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development think the gendered pay gap exists. Evidently, all of them have been paid off by Big Feminism.
Blurgh, fuck the Armoured Skeptic. And fuck avatar-only funny-voice ‘tubers (unless they have a good reason for anonymising – or unless they’re actually good at it). It’s shit-irritating when Spirit Science does it; it’s shit-irritating when AS does it. I was close to unsubbing a little while ago because I couldn’t take it much longer, but then he came out as a “feminism skeptic” and gave me a decent, non-superficial reason to do so.
Nevertheless, back to superficialities: if an avatar doing pieces-to-camera is chiefly how you’re going to ‘tube, you might as well just do pieces-to-camera in person like the aforementioned (and prolific, and required-viewing) Steve Shives; it’s a hell of a lot quicker and easier than arseing about with amateurish animation.
Again, barring any decent reason for anonymising, you’ll always earn a whisker more respect* for being yourself as opposed to hiding behind an avatar like some common troll. The Apopleptic Arsehole and Clusterfuck are definitely objectionable wankbaskets who’ve managed to monetise white-hot male entitlement and gyno-paranoia, but at least you know who they are when they’re slagging women, strawmanning feminism and demonising feminists of any & all genders. Armpit Skeptic can take his secret identity, soak it in brine and insert it into a toaster.
__________________________________
*FYI: adding a single-digit positive integer to a two, perhaps three-digit negative integer still doesn’t bring you above zero
We should be skeptical of the pay gap. If you adjust for this or that, it changes. What it means to be skeptical of it, though, means to analyze it until it is gone. The problem is that this is not what the asshole is talking about. He’s saying, in the face of all the evidence, that it “isn’t really a problem”. True, looking at different career paths, this becomes somewhat normalized, but why does it happen at all? And why are women not going into those career paths? Why aren’t men going into the lower paying ones? Why do wages drop when women enter a specific field more than men? yes, we should be skeptical of most things, but that means fixing those things rather than sweeping them under the rug.
I always cringe when I see people say “we should be skeptical of….” We should be skeptical of everything. Obviously we can’t really manage that, or our brains would melt, but, “we should be skeptical,” really is enough of a statement. “We should be skeptical of [thing],” just sounds to me like, “I’m eager to show that [thing] is false, regardless of the truth.”
The whole atheist inquisitor thing is getting tired, too. Yes, orthodox atheists, we get it, those of us who think that atheism and social justice causes mix well together are heretics. Great. We don’t hold to the sacraments, nor do we believe that our Mountain Dew and Oreos literally become the blood and flesh of Dawkins, but so what? So what? We think taking a stance in opposition to religions works well with taking stances in opposition to nonsensical social tropes that have historically been perpetuated by religions, and you think that’s somehow wicked. Ok, fine, I can see the tortured logic there, but have you tried just not joining up with us?
As long as feminists continue to knowingly perpetuate bullshit like the gender pay gap, nobody should be surprised that a great many sceptical atheists actively speak out against feminism.
Non-feminists perpetuate “bullshit” like the gender pay gap too y’know. There’s a number of factors that cause this but it’s a real thing, and there’s plenty of data to back it up (try some of the links in this thread).
Lachlan,
There is plenty of data demonstrating the pay gap is a very very real thing. Go away and read up on the subject, before you embarrass yourself (actually, that’s probably too late already, but still…).
@10
Putting aside the reality of the gender pay gap for a moment, i’m fascinated by the idea that you think behaving like an ignorant, infantile little brat whining through a long, content-free tirade of horseshit, constitutes “speaking out against feminism”.
I suposse you are the kind of atheist that thinks that laughing at christian’s beliefs is the height of intelligent argumentation.
Ah, yes, I knew the “Armoured Skeptic” already and had earlier watched a few video’s of him, which were OK. I started watching this latest one too, but shortly in I could already sense where this was headed and didn’t wanna watch more. I am really disappointed… once again. But thanks for summarizing here, so I don’t have to watch it myself.
Actually the latest from ZOMGitsKriss on this issue is also somewhat disappointing, although not nearly as bad. At least she accepts the label of “feminist”. I just felt she distorted the whole discussion about Sarkeesian. Maybe she is trying to pander to a specific segment of the audience? Shame, ‘though…
Steve’s last name is Shives, not Shires.
I feel like it needs emphasis that freedom of speech is a government concept. The government, in theory, cannot arrest you for expressing a political opinion against the establishment. If police haven’t been sent to your house to drag you to jail, your freedom of speech is probably doing just fine.
What these blowhards really don’t like is sustained negative reception of their words and behaviors, and the push to change the status quo. When I say, “that comment you made about young girls is possessive and paternalistic” (for example) I’m saying something about what I feel our attitude toward X subject should be, not what you’re required to do under threat of force. Obviously, noncompliance might send me off in the other direction and make me view you negatively – tough shit, cry me a river – but that’s as much my right as not agreeing is yours. You are not entitled to unfaltering support for everything that you run out of your mouth.
Lachlan, #10
You were given several links with detailed information in them just four posts above yours.
Aren’t you skeptical atheists supposed to be into empiricism and sources and reading to find things out?
Try harder, because so far you’re doing what creationists do.
As for Dictionary Atheism, yeah, I comprehend that chiseled down to its bare, impoverished, bones atheism only means not believing in gods. But what I fail to understand every time is why, upon inspection of the world’s great religions and the obvious-as-fuck male dominance and centralization that exists in them, I still have to explain to emotional-brick-wall, walnut-brain, atheists that being male has massive cultural advantages. The history bears this out. The statistics bear this out. The way that we construct stories, the way that we assign value, the way that we are represented bears this out.
Ah, the Armoured Skeptic. I admit, I found him amusing at first. Then I realized how boring his videos were because they are overly long and just poke fun at PRATT creationists and religious apologists, so I unsubbed.
Then I saw in my YouTube ‘recommended’ tab that he decided to take on Steve Shives for his feminism. How sadly unsurprising that he’s decided to go the way of ThunderfUCk and the Asinine Atheist.
Yeah, I only made it half-way through the video. He didn’t give ANY evidence to counter Steve’s arguments (unless it was in the latter half of the video). It’s like Armoured Skeptic just automatically assumed everybody knows the wage gap is a myth.
Why should we be skeptic about the pay gap? I mean, since the atheist community is only connected by a shared disbelief in a god, and all… no skepticism required in this dictionary definition.
Also, don’t bother engaging Lachnan, he just comes in on feminst topics to spout one short sneering comment and then never comes back or answers any of the comments directed at him.
Also, this is the tipping point for me to add the word ‘regressive’ (+ leftist/left/liberal/atheist/…) to the list of words which automatically discredit the poster. The list starts with ‘PC’.
Since all the good, substantive points have already been made, I’m just going to point out that a wannabe pundit (and let’s face it, that’s what most YouTubers and bloggers are–pundits or wannabes) should take the time to master the basic idioms of the language they are speaking.
To-wit: It’s toe the line, not “tote the line”. Sure, it’s a tiny pebble on the mountain of Armoured Skeptic’s ignorance, but sometimes the pebbles can be revealing.
Evidenceless claim, dismissed without evidence. Unless YOU provide links to support your claims, you only seem to be a delusional fool like any creationist
Athywren @ 9:
I have the cringe too, because skeptical is now the word which does not go by its dictionary definition. It now denotes a determination to be willfully ignorant in order to maintain a comfy viewpoint. I’d prefer a shift to thoughtful, as in critical thought. Skepticism, as it’s “practiced” right now by too many is utterly useless, outside of being a declaration of “lalalalalalalala I can’t hear youuuuuu, I’m being skeptical!”
I think his format/theme/shtick seems to be directed at a younger demographic. There are a lot of successful video game Tubers that use very similar antics to present their content. His other content isn’t necessarily terrible (caveat: for that style) but this one sure is. I only made it a few minutes then started skipping around looking for something, anything, of substance. Alas, ’twas not to be found.
I would recommend he just go back to playing Call Of Duty.
^ that plus a dash of haughty superiority.
“Lalalalalalalala Ican’t hear youuuuuu, I’m being skeptical! And that makes me better and totes smarter than you.”
The figures which are often quoted, 24 cents, 27 cents, whatever, come from comparing the average wage of all men and the average wage of all women. In other words, by directly comparing preschool teachers and social workers with engineers and venture capitalists. If you can’t understand why this comparison is totally absurd, and is not evidence of gender discrimination, then there’s probably nothing I can do to help you.
If you really do understand the figures which are quoted, but you still think that there’s a problem, then let’s look at our options. I can think of two ways of ‘fixing’ this problem. You could force people into professions they wouldn’t otherwise choose for themselves, or you can abolish the free market and pay preschool teachers the same as engineers. I think we can all agree that both of these options are undesirable. If you can think of another way of closing the gap, then I’d be happy to hear it.
In reality though, there’s no problem to fix here. There is nothing stopping any individual woman from earning the same salary as an equivalent man. If you believe that there is, and that many employers are in fact breaking the law by setting salaries according to genitals, then I’m afraid the burden of proof is on you. If you believe that the 20-odd percent discrepancy between the mean wages is such evidence, then you might need to learn some basic statistics.
do you seriously use comic sans to quote people you don’t agree with to make them look silly? holy shit, that’s adorable.
Lachlan,
Not even the uber libertarian Heritage foundation could attribute 100% of the wage gap to factors like job choice. Is is clear you are pulling your idiotic nonsense from your ass.
Even then you would find that NO ONE is asking a pre-school teacher should be paid the same wage as an engineer. However, there still is the reality of a lot of women not finding their way to the latter, either through subtle social norms, or even straight-up harassment, with is something that should be addressed. Or at least by people who actually care about equality. I don’t expect you do.
Lachan, no links, your blather is dismissed as fuckwittery.
I have seen evidence for the wage gap for 50 years now. It is the null hypothesis. One is only skeptical of that which doesn’t follow the well evidenced null hypothesis, and is presented without evidence. Your argument is from authority, your authority, and we must believe you. I don’t, since I am skeptical of you and your lack of evidence.
misterR
Yup. Except it’s not about disagreement, it’s about them being silly by themselves.
It’s kind of a thing around here.
We’ve been doing it for years.
Lachlan, #27
What about the figures in these sources:
Source (PDF of the report available)
Source [PDF]
Table looking at the wage gap by occupation [PDF]
AAUW’s publication with data on pay gap by level of education and occupation [PDF]
—
Lachlan, #27
No, but there’s plenty you can do to help yourself.
In the words of the paragon of skeptical dudebroness himself, go away and learn how to think.
I’ve been looking for evidence of the wage gap not being due to career choices, working hours etc. I wanted to see evidence that a women doing the exact same job as some man was paid less.
I jumped to your link: http://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/
The PDF does have a section “Is the Pay Gap Really about Women’s Life Choices?” ; but they never address the case of the same job, for a man and a women. The “same education” is mentioned again, but that’s **before** you actually start a career.
They say it’s partly explained because a lot of women choose education as their career and that’s paid less than private work. While I do agree teachers should be paid more because what they’re doing is ultra-important, it’s still a choice to do education, and it has a degree of comfort too (a lot of holiday time in my country, usually lower stress).
The “becoming a parent” I also agree there’s an issue there and I would agree that in most countries women are not receiving enough benefits for that, someone has to do this children thing you know? On the other hand a lot of people disagree with me, in that having children is also a choice. A choice that may affect the women career a lot more than the man’s (which is wrong…) but it’s still a choice.
All in all this section reminded me that there is something wrong with how having a child affects a women and a man’s career differently. But we all know people who’d rather stay at home with the children. Should we tell them they’re reinforcing a wage gap with their choice if they’re women? This sounds so weird to me.
They kind of fail to explain that the gap is not due to choices, and especially that it exists between the exact same job positions. In clearer but yet rarely used terms, it fails to prove that there is actual discrimination in the basis of sex when it comes to comparable salary (so a somewhat same position of responsibility and time investment).
Do you have other sources that may explain that specific aspect to me?
Thanks,
Lachlan, #27
You think comparing the pay of low-tier jobs to the top echelon jobs would yield a pay gap of 27 cents…
Boy, you really are at the creationist level of thinking ability here.
“gagging”
-Yet another human/frigate bird shape-changer/vomit eater identified on internet!
(see “The dark side of the atheist movement” @3)
-I vote we refer to persistent misogynists as “vomitovores”, it has a more descriptive flair than “MRAs”.
I can think of two ways of ‘fixing’ this problem. You could force people into professions they wouldn’t otherwise choose for themselves, or you can abolish the free market and pay preschool teachers the same as engineers. I think we can all agree that both of these options are undesirable.
That’s a good example of a “false dichotomy” and an “argument from ignorance.”
Because you can’t think of a solution except for two silly bad ones, we’re supposed to choose (and reject) the silly bad ones?
Here’s an easier one: everyone in a particular job at a particular pay grade gets paid the same. That means that a “software engineer 1” gets paid the same whether male or female.
The 27 cent pay gap is not the gap between what a male CEO and a female burger-flipper get paid. It’s the difference between what a male burger-flipper and a femal burger-flipper get paid. There has been considerable pressure to equalize pay within the same grades/jobs. Nobody’s talking about equalizing pay across jobs/grades – except for intellectually dishonest fools that are trying to set up false dichotomies.
Lachlan @27:
Aww, that’s cute. Not only is the misogynist refusing to read the links, they think they’re smarter than a few decades worth of social scientists.
Noonan, Mary C., M. E. Corcoran, and P. N. Courant. “Pay Differences among the Highly Trained: Cohort Differences in the Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries.” National Poverty Center, no. 03–01 (2003).
Wood, Robert G., Mary E. Corcoran, and Paul N. Courant. “Pay Differences among the Highly Paid: The Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries.” Journal of Labor Economics, 1993, 417–41.
Just gimmie a ring if you want me to do more Google Scholar searches. You’ll find my fees are quite reasonable.
Yeah, people always come to rational decisions about what a job is worth. This explains why actors and baseball players are paid far less than engineers and surgeons.
Good gravy, is the stupid strong in this one.
lol the fuck are you on about birgerjohansson, are you having a stroke?
is “human/frigate bird shape-changer” meant to be an insult or something? cuz if so, that’s the weakest shit i’ve ever seen.
vzdk @33:
Try Amptoons. I wish I’d stumbled on their work a few months ago. :P
vzdk, you have the same problem as Lachan. The null hypothesis is that the wage gap exists, due to years of evidence for it.
WHERE IS YOUR EVIDENCE REFUTING THE NULL HYPOTHESIS?
Links to third party evidence, not opinion, required.
Saad @ 32 and 34:
Nowhere did I claim that choice of profession is the only explanation for the difference in average earnings. Nor is any failure to account for some portion of this difference evidence that it is due to discrimination.
Marcus Ranum @ 36
I specifically asked for alternatives, given that I am not all-knowing. I’m guessing you can’t provide one.
No, it’s not. You’re misinformed. It’s the difference between the average earnings of all men, and the average earnings of all women. In other words, it’s a comparison which includes male engineers and female preschool teachers.
Would you care to back your currently unsupported claim with data and perhaps even explain why you chose to ignore the data provided by Saad and several others?
Hj Hornbeck @ 6 and 37
Failures to account for every variable is, again, not evidence that any remaining discrepancy is due to vagina. Paying women less for no other reason than that they’re women is illegal.
If you really believe that employers pay women less for being women, let me ask you something. This scenario you imagine is equivalent to employers deciding to pay men more money. Why would employers choose to do this? Why would they choose increase their labour costs because penis? The answer is really simple: they don’t. Employers pay their employees as little as they possibly can, regardless of their genitals.
Alright, in addition to Stats 101, let’s get you signed up to Econ 101 as well.
No, the discrepancy isn’t due to vaginas, or penises. The discrepancy is due to the way that societies as a whole in general prioritize men and deprioritize women. Boys are encouraged to do math and science, girls are encouraged to do nursing or teaching. Men who push for raises are seen as forthright and get them, women who push get seen as troublemakers and don’t. It’s not about the biology, it’s about the many many many societal influences that don’t value the work done by women (whether it’s work for pay or work in the home setting).
That you are blind to such things is sad, but not really unusual. People steeped in privilege rarely see it.
Are you too dull to work out that men’s pay is not inflated, but rather that women’s pay is deflated?
So the experts are all in the pocket of Feminism or too stupid to perform the proper analyses? Whereas, what, your gut instinct is simply perfect?
Dismissing evidence in that manner is not scepticism, it is blind cynicism, or worse.
The ability of people to rationalise and wave away discrimination has been amply demonstrated. Plus, how many low or underpaid workers have the means or opportunity to access legal remedies?
Lachlan @43:
Reducing women to vaginas? You’re quite the charmer. And given the amount of fiction you’re flinging around, I’m surprised you haven’t heard of this chap:
Speaking of which, you said this earlier in the thread:
Are you going to concede that you were incorrect, and that these studies did in fact control for career choices? Or are you going to dance away from that argument and pretend it doesn’t demonstrate your ignorance on these matters, like a common creationist would?
So is murder. Your point?
You should consider taking Econ 201 – it’s all about how all those nice abstractions you learned in Econ 101 break down as soon as they meet the real world. Employers make all sorts of irrational decisions about who to hire and how much to pay them, because (like everybody else) they’re subject to range of congitive biases.
This is one of the most poorly put together arguments I’ve seen since Crocoduck.
Your logical form breaks down to this:
∀x∈E((P(x) ∨ V(x)) → R(x,y))
Where E is the set of all employees in the world, P is the set of all employees who have a penis, V is the set of all employees who have a vagina, and R means that x and y have the same rate of pay.
All it takes is one example where R(x, y) is false for your argument to fall apart. Do you think I could find one?
Lachlan
Boy, you really swallowed that Econ 101 ‘corporations are automatons and have no biases whatsoever’ BS, haven’t you?
Seconding Dunc above, please take a course in Econ 201.
Sorry, in the above, consider E being limited to the set of all employees at the same level within the same organization. Even with that restriction, I’m fairly sure an example can be found.
I am having difficulty with the notion of “implications of disbelief in god.” How can you derive moral values or duties from atheism? As far as I can tell, atheist can be a Utilitarian, Kantian, Virtue Theorist, Humean, or a total asshole like Armoured Skeptic. Atheism can fit with any moral theory (or lack thereof) with the exception of Divine Command Theory, of course.
So, I think the problem with “skeptical feminism” is the lack of basic humanity rather than the inability to understand the implications of atheism.
Hj Hornbeck @ 46
Many studies account for the career choice variable, among others. Those studies do not reproduce a 27% gender wage gap, or anything close to it. Those links you’ve collected, you should actually read them!
I hate to sound like a broken record, but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. Attempting to account for all variables outside of gender discrimination does not mean that you have successfully accounted for all variables outside gender discrimination. In other words, coming up with a non-zero gap, despite your best efforts to eliminate everything else, is not evidence that what remains is gender discrimination.
That it’s probably extremely rare, like murder.
Blergh. Someone fix my argument. I have a migraine. It’s close, But I think it could be more clear as
∀x∈E∀y∈E((P(x) ∧ V(y)) → R(x,y))
On the whole “male engineer / female preschool teacher” thing… This is a particularly interesting study, which looks at the question from a somewhat different angle: how do wages change as the gender-balance of a given occupation changes over time?
The Feminization of Occupations and Change in Wages: A Panel Analysis of Britain, Germany, and Switzerland [Murphy & Oesch; Social Forces (2015) doi: 10.1093/sf/sov099]
Abstract:
[My emphasis]
Lachlan @52:
Once more, with emphasis.
Not only do I want you to concede your ignorance on the matter, I’d also like you to concede you cannot read.
And drug use and jaywalking. Or, from a different angle, do you think paying people less than their worth carries the same consequences as murder? That both are equally obvious, equally impossible to rationalize away by ignoring the evidence?
But the studies that people like you like to cite as proof and evidence that there is no such thing as a wage gap, no sir, no how… show a wage gap. Show women being paid less. After accounting for literally everything they could think of. When the only reason left is that they’re women. Maybe we can argue about the specific numbers, but when your definitive and certain proof that the wage gap is a myth shows that the wage gap is not a myth, you’re kind of full of shit in claiming that it’s “extremely rare.”
If the gender wage gap is explained by women making silly choices, how is the racial wage gap explained? People of color just LOOOOOVE working McD’s more than white people huh? Don’t worry Lachlan et al., I don’t really want an answer from you. These are rhetorical questions. I’m laughing at you.
So, the lesson today is that skeptics are people who refuse to read the literature of a subject that they are pontificating on. Good to know.
How do you even test directly to see if the pay gap is due to gender?
@Saad, 59
That’s easy. What you do is correct for every other causative variable you can think of. Then when you still get a non-zero number, you assert that it’s down to unspecified “other factors” because there’s absolutely no way that it could be due to gender. That’s how you science!
That’s an elegant solution.
I was thinking a more brute force method of breaking into the boss’s office to see if he wrote “BECAUSE YOU ARE A WOMAN” on women’s employee files.
“Pay docked for surfeit of X chromosomes in office space.” P:
Storytime!
Man, VP at very large corporation, gets fired for not achieving specific goals. Woman, gets Man’s job. But! Job is now called a Director position, not VP. Pay is significantly less, duties and goals are the same. After one year, specific goals are reached and exceeded! Two years later, Woman still does not make as much as Man did, still does not have VP title.
Illegal? Yes. Trivially easy to circumvent? Also, yes.
.
.
* Woman is my Sister-in-law.
Lachlan,
You seem to believe in some kind of hidden varriables interpretation of the wage gap. Such that if only the right hidden variables are taken into consideration the wage gap will vanish without a trace.
Not so. Here are some more blurbs from the study that HJ Hornbeck cited @37 and again @55.
@Lachlan #27:
I’m going to take HJ Hornbeck’s quote from #6 as a starting point (there are many other issues to deal with, but I’m happy to offer my suggestions to improve this one):
a) Provide new parent(s) with 26 weeks paid paternity/maternity leave, to be split between partners as they see fit
b) Provide free childcare for all pre-schoolers
c) Provide free breakfast clubs and after-school/homework clubs for children from school age up to age 11 (some may argue for 16)
d) Provide better and wider coverage for nursing support and assistance to people caring for disabled, chronically ill or elderly family members, along with respite opportunities
e) Make free residential care available for those who are elderly or terminally ill
The above are, of course, to be paid for out of general taxation. They would open up choices for the carers, who as the report indicates, are mostly women. They would contribute to the improvement of care for those who need it and they would make it easier for those wishing to provide care to perhaps continue to work part-time rather than having to take a long career break (which tends to come with penalties).
It’s also worth noting that some countries are considering paying carers for their voluntary work because the economic double-whammy of a person needing care and a person leaving employment to provide care can be very hard on a family (some countries may already do this — any Scandinavians care to comment?).
Re: Lachlan
Ah, the cry of the failed advocate. “I can’t actually explain it to you so I will attack your intellect with rhetorical arrogance!”
It’s as persuasive as glass wool in one’s underwear. At least they tried eventually.
“The vagina discrepancy” would be a great name for a sci-fi mystery that metaphorically addresses the issue of the wage gap.
I believe, though I have no evidence available at my fingertips, that we have that in place in the UK. Unfortunately, I think it’s classed under “benefits” so it might have been tossed out of the window in the name of
fuck the poorausterity.Sorry, that last was @Rich Woods
@Athywren #67:
You’re right in that we do have a Carer’s Allowance, but it’s only paid to carers of disabled people. Carers have to earn less than £110 per week and the allowance is worth £60 (approx figures from memory).
Overall, the UK has about 6 million people providing unpaid care, and that care is estimated to be worth £18,000 per person. I think that puts the Carer’s Allowance into context. Something like 300,000 people have left work entirely, in order to provide care for family members.
I don’t know what the standard Tory fuck-you policies have done in this area, but I don’t expect them to have been sympathetic and socially forward-looking.
Steve Shives has become the person to hit by so-called Skeptics when they attack Feminist “extremists”. I have seen numerous videos attacking him in this vein. Also the fact Steve does not do videos in response to their video seems to bother them. The Armoured Skeptic’s attack is actually one of the more polite.
Ugh, why must these YouTube misogynists always be so long-winded? Half an hour of lies, half-truths, and logical fallacies is a bit too much to take.
@pacal, #81
“Also the fact Steve does not do videos in response to their video seems to bother them.”
Assholes feel entitled to having their opinions taken seriously, and simply not acknowledging someone can be the biggest insult.
rinn @ 51:
From atheism by itself? Probably very little (an understanding that blasphemy is not something anyone should be punished for, that kind of thing).
But in conjunction with other things a person might think, atheism can assist in making value judgements. For example:
God did not make my people uniquely good -> my people are not uniquely good -> other groups of people are as good as mine.
Or:
There is no god to hear our thoughts -> thoughts do not actually hurt anyone so long as we do not act on them -> thoughts are not crimes.
Or:
God does not dispense justice in the afterlife -> the only justice in here on earth, as we make it -> if I wish justice, I must work for it myself.
Yes, atheism in a vacuum cannot inform much morality at all. But no mind is a vacuum (even Dr. Ben Carson uses his to store grain…)
rinn @51:
Do you accept that for the vast majority of believers in the world, there are implications to their theistic beliefs? IOW, they don’t just believe in god, they believe in god plus a bunch of other stuff. What happens when you remove god from the equation? What happens to the other stuff? Do they continue to believe those things? Should they continue to believe those things? Or should they reexamine their beliefs and jettison the ones that don’t fit with a non-theistic worldview? That’s what *I* mean when I say there are implications to not believing in a deity.
Where I am from, engineers, preschool teachers and social workers have a similar level of higher education. Why do engineers get paid more? I suspect because it is considered ‘real work’. – Also known as ‘men’s work’.
I have had 1 child go through preschool and 1 more to start next year. I could not do this job. It would be incredibly difficult. It should be valued as just as highly as engineering. Social work would be even harder in my eyes. Why shouldnt we directly compare these jobs?
As for venture capitalists – what qualifications do you even need for this job? Or is it valued more highly because of stress levels (as if teaching and social work wouldn’t be stressful)?
I am thankful that people are being teachers and social workers because without them the world would be even more fucked up.
I specifically asked for alternatives, given that I am not all-knowing. I’m guessing you can’t provide one.
I provided one. Are you dishonest or illiterate? I’m not smart enough to think of a third possibility so it must be one of those two.
(Hint: equal pay across positions)
Apologies if this comment has been made already. Lachlan came into the thread, and there are only so many hours in the day. I can’t waste time reading:
Lachlan: I’m an idiot
Everyone: Yes you are.
That said, I decided to take up the challenge in the OP myself, and lasted less than two minutes (I’m a wimp, yes). But what I was struck by (well, beyond the fallacies, the wrongness, and the sheer amount of constipated asshole) was that there’s one guaranteed method to identify a jerk.
Americans who use British spelling. Seriously, the only thing this guy is “Armoured” against is self-awareness.
P.S. Ok, I lied slightly. I skimmed over comments, but this:
Fucking blockquotes, how do they work?
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @40
Wow I’ve never said the wage gap doesn’t exist, it exists and that’s a fact. What I’m very skeptical towards is how many people take this wage gap and tell other people that it exists because there is a system of oppression towards women and especially, people will not tell you that there is no evidence of people being paid differently for the SAME job because of their sex (which is illegal by the way, that is discrimination), thus putting a lot more weight on that looming patriarchy thing and skeptics do not like dramatisation. I know it generates clicks and stuff but we don’t like it. We like the truth laid out cleanly.
Who’s “we”? You got a mouse in your pocket?
The truth is laid out cleanly in the enourmous body of peer-reviewed literature dealing with the subject, samples of which have been repeatedly linked to in this thread. The fact that you have a negative emotional reaction to the implications of that evidence is your problem.
@vzdk, 79
Just a quick question – do you think that patriarchy suggests that there is some form of shadowy cabal who’re actively plotting to keep women In Their Place? Because it doesn’t. It doesn’t loom. There is no large table in a shadowy room, around which is gathered the leadership of the conspiracy. Nobody’s chair drops them into a pit of fiery death should they fail the mastermind. Patriarchy isn’t dramatic. It’s just a word that describes some aspects of the way the world currently works. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just cognitive bias based on centuries of human history and entrenched social attitudes.
There’s a reason people won’t tell you that there’s no evidence of people being paid differently for the SAME job, by the way. It’s because there is evidence of that. Even the studies that are presented as proof that there is no wage gap whatsoever show that paid are being paid differently for the SAME job, and those studies have the benefit of being able to ignore people who’re doing the SAME job with different job titles.
Egad, Typoman – a wordological error in the communostream!
In that last sentence, “paid are being paid,” should read, “people are being paid.”
vzdk,
Hmmmm? Wha… Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! You’re funny!
Re. the OP
John Bartholomew Christ, why do (the majority of) youtubers have to be so fucking boring?
And why not? Those preschool teachers have a huge role in turning out those future engineers. They put up with so much shit (literally, too!), and they are entrusted with the well-being of human beings, why shouldn’t they be paid accordingly?
Could it be something to do with the (oft-bemoaned) lack of men working as pre-school teachers? Because women are naturally nurturing, therefore they don’t need to be paid extra for all that stress they put into the job? I’d love it if pre-school teachers got paid the same as engineers. No, scratch that – more. And someone mentioned social workers. Those people should be fucking millionaires, if you ask me.
Note: Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. There are ways around these sorts of laws to make any kind of discrimination perfectly legal – according to the letter of the law, at least. So the cry of “But it’s illegal!” (which resonates with the oft-heard “Innocent until proven guilty [in a court of law]!”) is just that much more bullshit.
Finally,
Actually, I like a fine piece of theatre, myself, the more dramatic, the better. I also like to live life to the fullest, using my full range of emotional reactions (however narrow that might be). Too much cool, rational thinking is just boring! Bring on the drama, I want to feel it!
Sure it’s an individual choice as it should be. On an individual level nobody needs to have children any more than any individual person needs to be a doctor, trash collector or engineer. On the level of society, however, all those people are needed. Yet somehow, having chosen to have children means that you should receive some sort of punishment because of that “silly choice” as if raising the next generation of prospective doctors and trash collectors and engineers was like getting a puppy.
Apart from that, women get penalized not only for the children they actually have or want to have, but also for the hypothetical children they may have (regardless of their wishes or biological capacity). A 25 year old woman’s individual opinion to whether she wants to have children or whether she is even able to have them is completely irrelevant. When she goes for an interview she’ll only be seen as a “ticking biological clock”.
Assertion made without a link to back it up. Your assertion is dismissed as fuckwittery. Until you provide links to relevant data from the academic literature, you have nothing but blather. So, quit blathering.
All those who are skeptical of our claims made with links to the literature, I am even more skeptical of your skepticism made without any links to the literature. It is based on your self-interest, not the truth.
I’m an American who uses British spelling. Mostly. When I remember. Because otherwise my English boss and co-workers, and my Irish husband and family-in-law, and all of the other people I deal with here where I live in Ireland, laugh at me for a clueless Yank, which I admit, I am sometimes.
Also, “paid less” should, but doesn’t (probably because this sort of insidiousness can’t be directly measured), include:
– Being given the “nurturing” parts of the same job while male counterparts do the more “technical” work
– Not being given technical training because the male, more technical, counterparts “need it more”
– Being steered away from solo business trips, and business trips to certain places, because “a woman is less safe”
– Not being given promised promotions/transfers because “you are less technical/less trained/less experienced than [the male counterpart]” because of the first three things
– Eventually being let go from the team when layoffs happened because “you are the least valuable member of the team”
All of which happened in my last job, and that was a “good” job, with good pay and good perks and good colleagues and a relatively supportive culture. I have to give credit to the co-workers who saw something to mentor (even if they weren’t my team members) and the manager of another site who fired, without fuss or bother or even mentioning it to me, two engineers who other co-workers noticed sexually harassed me.
@Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda #81
Well can you link me those studies then, that’s what I’m looking for.
Patriarchy is a very difficult thing to swallow for skeptics because it doesn’t have a clear definition and it’s based on a lot of things we cannot prove, like “It’s just cognitive bias based on centuries of human history and entrenched social attitudes.” Well what social attitudes? See that’s why it looks like a conspiracy theory.
Also, do you believe all of our attitudes have nothing to do with biology? Or do you think biology creates the patriarchy? It may well but honestly I don’t know what your idea of patriarchy is exactly about. In the US and most of Europe there is no patriarchy in how I define it. There are issues that disproportionately affect women, but there is no evidence that those are all connected through the “patriarchy”.
Skeptics like it when you tackle tangible issues. Like slut shaming, it’s bad (well for some sex-negative feminists it’s not but whatever) and we can all understand why and see evidence of it happening and how it is disproportionate towards women. It may have biological reasons but it sucks nontheless and we need to end it. See? That’s something a skeptic will dig.
Same for any case of discrimination. Discrimination is bad. We don’t want it. Excisions: they’re bad… We want to talk about that. Those are more tangible than “ending the patriarchy” if that’s even possible or means anything.
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahha…
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahah…
Oooh…
You’re funny…
Oh, god-fucking-damnit! I only just subbed him a few months ago, let some of his videos slide, and he squeezes out this turd and I don’t notice?!
As a single white American male in his early 30’s can I PLEASE have a moderately populat atheist YouTube personality within my demographic that ISN’T a jackass? Is that so much to ask?! Apparently so, upon the sum total of human knowing and connectivity.
vzdk
The Urban Dictionary is a very poor place to learn word definitions.
Oh gods, did you actually bring up the idea of biology being a root cause of sexism? Are you next going to “skeptically ” bring up the idea that women evolved to do less intellectual work and more emotional stuff? Do you also skeptically believe that men are just less emotional and more rational than women? Do you also skeptically believe that attitudes that have been around for centuries are instantly forgotten the moment something becomes illegal?
Look, vzdk, just 45 years ago my mother was told too much education was harmful to the female brain. If you think that none of that remains in a covert rather than overt fashion you are no skeptic of any stripe. You are then just a person using skepticism as a smoke screen to hind from uncomfortable reality.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia #91
Yeah instead of “Patriarchy is a very difficult thing to swallow for skeptics” I should’ve said “patriarchy is too vague and loosely defined as a ‘concept’ to not raise millions of eyebrows, on a single person”.
There’s nothing wrong with the “definition”, thing is it’s used to regroup oppression in some system, for which there is no proof of existence. Connecting oppression isn’t as easy as labeling things with fancy words.
Patrick G @ 78:
! How long have you been reading here now, Patrick? All that time I’ve used British spelling because it’s what I was taught, and being on a mostly British people photography site for years. It’s a pain in the arse to go back and forth with spelling, so I just go with British as it’s automatic for me. If I’m to be judged a jerk, I’d prefer it to be based on something more valid than spelling habits.
vzdk @ 90:
No, it isn’t. Perhaps you should first learn to speak for yourself, and yourself alone, rather than attempt to speak for all skeptical peoples. Example:
You’re reminding me of someone who was here a month or two ago, making the same assertions, because they didn’t actually understand what patriarchy meant. It looks like you don’t, either. Here’s a bit of help:
There’s much more reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy
A thorough understanding of kyriarchy would be helpful too:
There’s much more reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyriarchy
Recommended reading: Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, by Jack Holland. This book provides a brief history of misogyny going back to ancient times, and how that misogyny shaped attitudes, behaviours, and laws, including attitudes, behaviours, and laws we are surrounded by today, in which women are still treated as less than human, and certainly of less value, in every way, than men.
Of course, if you’re simply here to play “lalalalalalalalala I can’t hear you, you’re wrong”, you won’t bother to do any reading or try to understand these issues, which would be a shame, because then you’d be admitting you’re happy to be a rotten person, rather than a decent, thoughtful person. Ball’s in your court.
@vzdk, 90
At this precise moment, no. I don’t have the links saved on this computer and, while I could search for them, I’m behind a filter here – which I have no interest in circumventing – and search results along these subjects tend to be blocked. There is an online service that can help you, however. It’s a site called “google.” If you go there and type “consad wage gap” in the search bar you should find links to a popular study cited by “skeptics” who say that it proves that there’s no such thing as a wage gap.
It really does have a clear definition. As anyone who wishes to claim the title of skeptic should know.
I have to admit, this confuses me. Are you saying we cannot prove that cognitive biases exist? Or that some have come about as a result of historical social attitudes? What is it that cannot be proven here?
Wait, are you saying we cannot prove that it’s not a shadowy conspiracy?
……………………………………………
Ok, what? What do you think a conspiracy theory is? It looks like a conspiracy theory, because you don’t know which social attitudes are oppressive toward women or how they might have arisen from human history? How the hell does that follow?
No.
No.
(Both possibilities get a no, FYI, because that is a false dichotomy. Biology has a non-zero influence over our attitudes, but patriarchy isn’t simply the current expression of society as determined by evolution. There are other influences at work, such as large numbers of people living together in societies.)
Nowhere in the world is there such a thing as evolution in how creationists define it. So the fuck what?
How can you say this without knowing what patriarchy even means? You are making pronouncements on issues about which you have made no effort to understand. You are searching for answers on relatively advanced topics, without having bothered to educate yourself on the basics. How can you call yourself a skeptic?
Are you just throwing random words around now? Slut shaming is a tangible issue? Women earning less is intangible? What? I can’t even figure out which word you actually mean here. I thought maybe observable, but then both are observable.
Also, I don’t think sex-negative feminism refers to what you think it does.
Ending discrimination in general is certainly more expansive than ending patriarchy – that would be ending kyriarchy (Oh no! More totally nonsensical words that definitely don’t mean at all!) – but I’m still not seeing how tangibility has anything to do with this.
Damn it. That’ll teach me to snarklink. Must remember the https.
@Caine #97
Well no I’m happy to discuss here, I’ve always been interested in this side of the debate.
The definition you mention first is fair:
In that most positions of power are occupied by males. I do not agree that we live in something that upholds the whole definition. Men do not have control of social privilege, property and family. I can look around and see that most influent political positions are male, but I can also look around and see that in most families I know, it’s not controlled by the man, nor is property. But in Internet debate greatness you could say that’s personal anecdote and experience. Alright well look around too, around you is it real men controlling property and family?
As I said in one of the post, I think many people have an easy time tackling tangible issues like “look why aren’t there more women at positions of political power?” – That’s way more potent to me than “look, patriarchy, patriarchy everywhere!”.
Also about this:
I was trying to help understand why The Armoured Skeptic talked like he did in the video. You can always dismiss arguments with personal anecdotes but in this case, a skeptic by definition will question everything, hold before taking positions as much as possible, and will demand evidence. The “patriarchy” used like it is right now in Internet activism is as a systemic oppression mechanism has no solid evidence backing it. It’s just a collection of things some people would like to be connected but there’s no telling that they are. It’s getting us away from real, tangible problems like I said before, slut shaming, excisions, women not getting their say in political discourse, … To me it’s the equivalent of going “lalalalalala no everything is sexist you have to accept that”.
That’s too easy.
It’s a pretty reasonable null hypothesis against which you have to provide evidence that a particular attitude is linked to biology. Because we see attitudes change massivly in time and space, basic human biology not so much.
No. BTW, the biologistic sexism of the body is a pretty recent phenomenon compared to patriarchy as such. It only developed when science turned its focus on the body as the locus of discourse (and let’s not even start with all the wonderful “scientific discoveries” that were made about bodies commonly labelled female).
Evidence?
Must be nice being you.
When I was born in 1979, the second child to parents who had both finished their education and who both had jobs, I was “only another girl” to my grandfather. When a year later my male cousin was born to teenage parents who were both still in the middle of their education, my grandfather told my father to go ask his brother how to do that right.
In 2009 my second daughter was born. Upon learning that I was having a second girl, many people comiserated me or tried to comfort me because obviously we had failed at making a correct child again.
@Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda #97
Sorry to be frustrating to you, I’ll clarify my “patriarchy definition” thing.
There is this:
Which is completely clear, dictionnary definition. There is nothing to be skeptical about this, it’s the “clear definition” that exists, and there’s nothing to discuss here.
What I think demands a more skeptical attitude is this definition:
This is what needs evidence. Because it’s talking about now. It’s talking about the countries we live in. I can read the ancient testament and agree that it was a patriarchy 100%, but I look around me today… And It’s not that obvious sorry. Hence the need of evidence.
Well, there is evidence of evolution. There is no evidence that I’m aware of of the wikipedia definition of patriarchy to apply to western countries.
I am reading the article about the CONSAD report right now on amptoons.com (someone suggested it earlier, thanks by the way) but I have to read a lot of other things on the report itself.
vzdk
Where is this from?
I get the feeling that these self described “skeptics” who are just too damn skeptical to simply accept that the patriarchy exists (or to look at evidence that clearly demonstrates that our culture is deeply patriarchal in its origins and that this pervades it to this day still), have a mental image of The Patriarchy as a secret, underground temple in the shape of a vaguely phallic obelisk, where an old, bearded man called Abraham sits on a throne made of chastity belts with a harem of naked concubines chained to it. Anything else is not real patriarchy…it’s just, you know, individual cases of discrimination that spring out of a vacuum…
Oh look, i was close.
chigau
It’s the Wikipedia definitio quoted earlier.
+++
And you have been given evidence. You’ve been given evidence from the lived experiences of women here, you’ve been given scientific data on things like the pay gap. In short, you’re going “lalala”
Giliell
What I quoted in #103 is not in the Wikipedia Patriarchy article.
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #106
I have read the article about the gender pay gap study commissioned by the Bush administration that I was recommended here. It’s a fair article that has a good point about sending a man and a women go to an interview for the same position and check what happens. If we did that more often we could actually fight discrimination with justice. Because that stuff is illegal. Problem is they can’t make a citation of this “empirical test that happened someday with a few people in it”.
Also most of the article is about how the study cannot show if there is sexism or not because it’s comparing full time jobs with part time, in which a lot more women are. Well alright, I can accept that the study doesn’t prove that the wage gap is not partly due to sexism, but it doesn’t give any evidence that any part of the wage gap may be due to sexism.
As for your lived experience, I’m sorry this happened to you. So you would say we live in a patriarchy right now (I’m from central Europe btw) ?
It has evidence. What you need is to see the evidence, and stop relying on your own perception of things to serve as evidence that there is no evidence.
Look, do you think it’s obvious to the rich that they have privilege over the poor? No, I don’t mean, “is it obvious to them that they have more money and are able to buy more and do nicer things?” I mean, “do they look at the world, and see that the societal balance is shifted in their favour, such that the rich have greater opportunities to become rich, while the poor have fewer?” How many of the most successful people in this world look down on the less successful, and deride them for simply not trying hard enough? Do you think they see? Can the privileged see their privilege unaided?
Things are better now than they were in the past for many of us, the past was much worse, but problems still persist. Women are still paid less than men for the same work. Financial security is still easy to find for the rich, and incredibly difficult for the poor. Innocent black people are still treated with more suspicion and hostility than white criminals. That it was so obviously broken then does not mean that it is fixed now. Ask yourself this – was it obvious to the men of 1900 that the world they were living in was “100% patriarchy”? Was it obvious to the men of the 70’s that it was, let’s say 80% patriarchy? It’s just the way the world was. If you have been raised in a biased world, if you are looking at the world through biased eyes, can you reasonably expect to see that your view is biased?
I used to be very confused by the idea that there had been two waves of feminism. I thought that the second wave was when American women got the vote because, of course, sexism had been solved in the UK in 1928. The first time I ever noticed sexism, I was stunned by it, because that had been fixed over 70 years earlier. Do you see what I’m getting at? The problem was back then – but we fixed it, so it wasn’t a problem anymore. But that wasn’t true. One aspect of the problem had been fixed, but others remained. More aspects of the problem have been solved now than had been in 1928, and we recognise those aspects as problems, but do you think they were widely recognised as problems before they came to be fixed? Do you think we can reasonably expect to recognise the problems that are yet to be fixed without a degree of skepticism directed at ourselves and our societies?
Athywren @97:
Isn’t that the very definition of a modern major skeptic?
chigau
My fault
+++
vzdk
Fuck yes. Have you taken a look at legislation, CEOs, courts etc. About the amount of positions of power taken by men? THe abhorrent numbers of sexual assault and violence against women and the shit nothing that is done against it? The prevalent attitudes that women will have children AND will take care of them? Studies on sociolinguistics?
Yeah, sure, you don’t see it. “What’s water?”, says the fish to the drowning sparrow…
vzdk @76:
Evidently they don’t like reading, either. Me @ 37:
Noonan, Mary C., M. E. Corcoran, and P. N. Courant. “Pay Differences among the Highly Trained: Cohort Differences in the Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries.” National Poverty Center, no. 03–01 (2003).
Wood, Robert G., Mary E. Corcoran, and Paul N. Courant. “Pay Differences among the Highly Paid: The Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries.” Journal of Labor Economics, 1993, 417–41.
vzdk @108:
Do you mean the one Saad linked to @ 32? Because I’m reading this:
As someone who’s read at least a dozen papers directly on the pay gap, and dozens more on issues surrounding the pay gap, the effect you mention has been known since at least the 70’s and almost all research since has compensated for this in some way, usually by only comparing full-time to full-time. For example (emphasis mine):
Bibb, Robert, and William H. Form. “The Effects of Industrial, Occupational, and Sex Stratification on Wages in Blue-Collar Markets.” Social Forces 55, no. 4 (1977): 974–96. doi:10.2307/2577567.
I should launch a research project on the connection between skepticism and illiteracy…
Giliell, #111
Yes, but was there a test conducted which shows that all those offenses against all those women are due to their gender and not due to any other factors that they may have in common? Has anyone checked if they’re all left-handed? Then you can’t say for sure, can you?
Why can’t the current offenses against women just be a coincidence? There’s no evidence that it’s a continuation of the same culture that banned women from voting and expected them to stay at home and cook and raise kids just decades ago. No, everything is happening in a vacuum with no trickle-down effect from the previous generations.
And don’t you know that once government banned gender discrimination, all men collapsed into a pile of dust and rose anew as pure non-sexist beings? People immediately stopped saying things like you hit like a girl, don’t cry like a girl, dress like you respect yourself, don’t go out dressed like that, men don’t cry, she’s bossy, it’s the hormones acting up, etc. Society stopped treating men as the default humans and women as a special interest group. All they had to do was make discrimination illegal. Just like with black people.
Women not being allowed to vote = gender discrimination
Women not being allowed to serve in military = gender discrimination
Women expected to stay home and not work = gender discrimination
Women being paid less when they work = not gender discrimination
/s of course
After being given at least a dozen studies and sources, the sea-lioning dudebros are going “but where’s the evidence?”
They seriously call this skepticism?
This reminds me of the straight people around me who are sure that Homophobia is over because Spain has full legal equality since 2005 and they haven’t seen any gay people being beaten in their neighbourhood. vzdk, you should really listen to women when it comes to whether they experience systematic discrimination or not…although to be honest, you have to be incredibly myopic to not see something so ostentatiously obvious right in fron of your eyes.
Sorry, Saad, didn’t mean to repeat your point.
vzdk @90:
First of all, why do you keep referring to “we skeptics” and the like? Why not just refer to yourself? Or are you the arbiter of all skeptics?
Secondly, the concept of patriarchy is pretty easy to understand. For USAmericans, we live in a society that has been dominated-socially, politically, economically, and religiously-by men. No, not entirely exclusively (though for much of US history it almost was exclusive), but from the founding of this country, men have dominated all walks of life. And women have been relegated to second or third class status for much of the country’s history.
How would you describe a society in which slut shaming happens, violence against women is common, feminine qualities are seen as inferior or undesirable and insulting when applied to men, women don’t enjoy the shame rights or liberties as men, they are paid less, the types of jobs where they are more prevalent are less valued, most of the positions of power are occupied by men, women are expected to do most of the care for their children, cook and do most of the house chores, etc?
Because i call that a patriarchal society, even if it doesn’t involve old men wearing robes and selling their daughters in exchange for goats and camels…
It should also be pointed out that it’s clearly a patriarchally based society even in how men are perceived and the expectations impossed on them, as well. Our society is the descendant of a patriarchy that even you “true skeptics” would recognise.
Things have improved A LOT since even a few decades ago, but we are nowhere near full equality, gender still matters, and as a general trend, our society is stacked in favour of men. This is a fact. It’s in our costums, our language, our traditions, our perceptions, our biases….it’s part of our culture.
Pure speculation here: to establish his in-group as the “skeptical” in-group so that he can justify his irrational refusal to accept data from members of the out-group since they are, by his own definition, not “skeptical.”
As usual, vzdk doesn’t understand how to do skepticism. I don’t think vzdk is capable of learning, but the lurkers probably are.
Skepticism starts with an evidenced hypothesis. Take the existence of creatures. What evidence confirms the existence of the creature? Captured creature, carcass, skeleton, hair or skat that can be tested for DNA. With the stated evidence, the existence of the platypus is not in doubt, and that it exists is the hypothesis everything is tested against. Someone saying the platypus doesn’t exist must provide the evidence to back up their claims, as the claims go against known facts.
Now look at bigfoot. No creature, carcass, skeleton, or any identifiable DNA has been found. Non-existence is the evidenced hypothesis that existence must be tested against, and therefore those claiming bigfoot exists must supply the proper evidence, the evidence stated above.
So, when we look at Western societies, they have been steeped in sexism and racism for millennia, and hypothesis to be tested against is that Western society is still sexist and racist. Those claiming there is no sexism/racism must provide the proper evidence, namely government and academic studies to support their claims. Vzdk claims there is no sexism where they live. Third party evidence to support this claim is missing in action. Which means vzdk has failed to show that their society isn’t sexist.
Therefore all vzdk has is a fee-good presupposition that their society isn’t sexist. The same type of evidenceless presuppositions are seen with godbots and creobots, where they pretend, without evidence, that their imaginary deity exists.
I’m all for looking at new evidence to see if Western societies are now sexist and racist free. But that evidence won’t be found in the words of vzkd, as their testament is presuppositional. Vzkd must point at those government/academic studies that demonstrate that society has lost all its institutional sexism and racism, and now has equal results for all sexes and people of color. Until that evidence is shown, society must be presumed to be still sexist and racist by default.
Too many “egalitarians” like to pretend we live in a post-sexist/post-racist society. This isn’t backed by evidence of equal results. It is just wishful or delusional thinking to make that false presumption that Western society is post-sexist. But it is stock belief for MRAs. And it is prima facie evidence of why they don’t do skepticism properly.
Tony @ 117 and SallyStrange @ 119:
The we thing was explained in #99.
vzdk @90:
Er, what? The feminist sex wars were over pornography, BDSM, and prostitution. Sex-negative feminists thought these were inherently degrading to women, as they permitted or even encouraged exploitation. Sex-negativity, full stop, does involve slut-shaming, but it has nothing to do with sex-negative feminism. Don’t confuse the two.
Oh wait, I got it
Now I just need to put together another few lines and we can get a show on.
(But seriously, it totally is: feminism skeptics, rape skeptics, economics skeptics, global warming skeptics — all make the same demand for real empirical evidence and combine it with a refusal to consider any evidence proffered.)
(Renewable energy skeptics too, for that matter.)
@ Caine:
Well, that was certainly a vehement response to a flippant aside. I guess I thought nobody could possibly take as some sort of actual moral judgment of all people living in the United States who spell things in the British fashion. To explain, since multiple people clearly did:
I would bet moderate sums of money the Armoured Skeptic does not have a British background, and chose to spell their name all fancy-like. “Armored Skeptic” just doesn’t have the gravitas, you know? Maybe I’m wrong. Frankly, I’m not going to lose sleep if I’ve incorrectly judged his linguistic background. This is not a high priority issue for me, though I’ll certainly not make jokes along those lines again here. :P
P.S. In five years of commenting here, I have never — never — before mocked an American for using British spelling. I reserve that strictly for needling pretentious YouTube personalities.
P.P.S. My British co-workers (humorously) come down on me like a ton of bricks whenever I use British spelling or definitions — I’m an American, and we are not allowed to do that, damn it! The only exception is proper use of the word “pants” while I’m on their soil. They don’t want to embarrass me that much.
The comparisson with global warming “skeptics” is very apt. Just like they can be forced to concede a smaller point by repeteadly providing them with overwhelming evidence, they stubbornly refuse to see the larger pattern and will twist into knots in order to avoid recognising that the only reasonable conclussion is, in fact, the one that they started off denying.
It’s like someone solving a puzzle and trying to fit the pieces in such a way that the end result is anything other than the puppy playing with a ball which it obviously is.
It is also strongly reminds me of almost every creationist, anti-vaxer, medical wooist, and conspiracy theorist I have encountered. They will often concede they were wrong about a point they were making, after a huge amount of work to demonstrate how overwhelming the evidence against them is, but it never slows them down, no matter how much it indicates they lack the most basic knowledge of a topic. Rather than pausing and wondering “Do I really know anything about this topic? Surely if I knew something I would not have been wrong about this basic fact. Maybe I should rethink my stance.”, they just move on to something new, and hope that will stick. It never alters their basic view that they must be right.
It was explained, but poorly. It wasn’t really an explanation too, just a transference of the question to why Armoured Skeptic uses such phraseology.
I like my explanation better.
:P
I live in central Europe too, and there is definitively patriarchy (and pay gap) here.
Last year one of my (female) friends asked me about the whole feminism issue, because in casual conversation I said that I support quotas for women in leadership positions in politics and in companies. She did not see the point of it anymore with everything being fixed – discrimination being illegal and all. After some discussion she uttered following sentence:
“Well maybe, but I was never discriminated due to my gender, although it has been significantly harder for me to find a job after we got a child.”
She failed to see the contradiction in that and I left the discussion die because I got exasperated. It was even more strange because I am white male with tons of privilege and it felt wrong explaining feminism to a woman.
@PatrickG, #125
He’s not even American, he’s Canadian. Guess you owe me moderate sums of money now :P
There would be a lot to answer to here and I’m grateful I could have this exchange of thought, although not always very civil but I understand why.
I’m one of those people who really don’t like “conversation closer” elements in arguments, like good ol’ Internet Argument Jargon (straw man, ad hominem, false dichotomy, …) or the labels (you’re a mysoginist!). It was great to see you don’t use labels. You can call me ignorant, I don’t take it as a conversation closer :)
I’m sorry my ideas weren’t put as clearly as I would’ve wanted but that’s part of the learning. The thing is, Internet Argument Jargon can pretty much invalidate anything that’s not peer reviewed scientific research. It doesn’t help the debate.
Now I read more reports and evidence of field studies sending different resumes to employers, just changing the names to specific sex-related names or ones associated with a specific race. They found discrimination towards race and sex. Not everywhere, but they found it.
As far the wage gap specific to people working the same job, it exists too, and it’s about 2 to 5 cents from what I’ve (so significantly less than the wage gap usually thrown around, the 79 cents to 100 I think). Whether that’s explained by different willingness in negociating is irrelevant, there is a real wage gap that could very well imply sexism, and I did not know about it before at all. Mostly because the figure comparing the same jobs is never used anywhere. ‘Anti-feminists” don’t use it either, of course.
Now to me that doesn’t mean there is an organised sexist society. Which is where our opinion differ drastically I think. I do think individuals will want not hire women, hell I’ve actually seen it: in IT there was a guy who wanted to avoid hiring women tech-persons because the mostly-male work force would get distracted and it would cause drama. On the other hand I know another IT guy who would want to have at least one women in all their teams because that broadens the spectrum of ideas (and I can vouch that is true – you need “different” brains in a team) so he would actually discriminate against male applicants that were a lot more numerous. Some of those discrimination happens not because of ancestral patriarchy but for stupid reasons.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think the “patriarchy” idea helps… Everything is not sexist. There are situations and sexist individuals, and we need to work towards pointing out discrimination and try to end it. Labeling the whole society as sexist and racist is dangerous and alienates a lot of people.
I mean look, I admit my discourse was really unclear at times but I’ve been laughed at and visibly frustrated some of you (I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intent, I swear).
Anyway, I think I learned some stuff and I’m thankful to you guys and gals, I’m writing down some of the sources mentioned before.
Thanks for the ride,
I’m on my phone on this page now (it got filtered) so this’ll be brief…
@vzdk
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not organised.
The thing with the 2-5% gap not being used is that it’s poor data. It comes from studies that are aiming to show no gap – studies that ignore people doing the exact same work with different job titles; studies that, slightly off the equal work/equal pay topic, brush aside issues of discrimination in hiring (which you mention) and promotion and lump them in with “women’s choices.”
Really, the only real worth of those particular numbers is to show that even when people are looking to shore up their belief that there is no real gap, they cannot do it.
vzdk:
What you call Internet Argument Jargon is nomenclature for informal logical fallacies. You can dispute their existence (whatever the label), or you can dismiss them (and I can see which you’re doing), but whether or not you like them is rather irrelevant.
Because you apparently can’t distinguish between de facto and de jure, and so conflate the two.
I live in Australia, and the Bureau of Statistics has figures:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4125.0~Feb%202015~Main%20Features~Earnings,%20income%20and%20economic%20situation~120
You can argue why the figures are as they are, but dismissing that they are what they are is pure denialism.
What if it’s not ‘organised’, but merely situationist? ;)
(Something for you to mull)
@Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda
Yeah what I actually meant to say is that I don’t think we live in a patriarchy. I do think we should conduct more studies that may prove that there is an even bigger wage gap between the same job (taking the different titles in too). We’d also have to examine where this is happening because still in the IT, I know companies wherein it’s pretty transparent everybody in team X have the same salary.
Maybe that would be a good thing: more transaprency, less negociation possibilities. However when the number of applicants is scarce, you sometimes have to accept paying them more at some specific time. Since there seem to be more men in the highest paying jobs (mostly because of choice here, I think we agree on that), it’s also possible they got more headroom to negociate because the demande exceeds the supply in those fields. I would know we we’re offered helicopter rides and trips to Disney Land (FOR 2 PEOPLE) by companies when we got our engineering degrees.
——
@John Morales
You’re missing my point. What I mean is that it’s not helpful at all to the debate. And of course I know they are logical fallacies… A lot of the time you will identify a fallacy in some argument, but you do understand the idea they wanted to express, yet you will just dismiss it entirely using a fallacy card. I don’t know how to express this otherwise, it just doesn’t help the debate and seeing fallacy internet wars between people is not making us smarter. You know you could just say all I think is irrelevant, which is pretty accurate. But it doesn’t do anything productive except immediately put some people on the defensive which creates aweful debates. Welcome to the internet.
Yeah well not everybody is as smart as you are and they will conflate the two. Because they look very conflatable. Like, really.
I will read the Aus figures but yes, I do see there is a wage gap even in identical positions now and I was ignorant of it before, so thanks for the enlightment.
I’m not saying it’s organised, it’s just what I’ve seen tweeted around and written in blog posts. For what it’s worth. You know it’s irrelevant anyway ;)
If it’s not fallacious, then you should be able to demonstrate that.
If it’s fallacious but irrelevant to the idea you want to express, then you can restate the idea without recourse to the fallacy.
If it’s neither of the above, then…
Before the Web were Telnet and BBSs and Usenet and university accounts with which to access it. Some of us are veterans.
Welcome to FreeThought blogs — where you can form your own opinion (and even revise it!) instead of parroting others’.
—
PS
Thanks for your intellectual honesty. It’s refreshing.
Before the Web was Telnet and Usenet, and some of us are veterans.
You’re not disputing my contention.
Are there special schools where people learn to be so stupid?
Google “Lilly Ledbetter”
So your point is something blatantly false and incredibly stupid.
If it’s a fallacy then the argument being made is invalid and should be dismissed, you dolt.
When the debate is with imbeciles like you who a) argue using fallacies b) don’t understand what a fallacy is c) think that it’s irrelevant that an argument is fallacious … then there is no point to the debate. Nothing will make you smarter as long as you insist on being so stupid. What would make you smarter is to shut up for a while and just listen to the people who aren’t morons and try to absorb what they say.
[sifu!]
If you’re debating then you’re already defending a position, you nincompoop. And if your arguments are demonstrably full of errors then you should concede and STFU.
Debates with people like you are bound to be awful because you’re stupid, ignorant, and intellectually dishonest.
Shades of times gone by, John … but as back then, I really shouldn’t be here … I have sleep (it’s 4:30am) and work to attend to.
Be well.
“I hate conversation closers, so if you use certain language, identify my fallacies or my prejudices, i’ll just end the conversation and declare myself the winner because i stuck to self-impossed irrational guidelines that have nothing to do with the validity of an argument”.
That’s a very shitty way of having any conversation.
Like Athywren already pointed out, it’s not organised, at least not in a simplistic sense like if there was an actual headquarters were men meet to make decissions about how to enforce sexism. It doesn’t have to be, because when the bias infects the entire culture from whithin and different elements reinforce each other, there is no need for an actual organisation to enforce the ideas, they are already there, replicating themselves in the minds of people who grow up and develop immersed in them. Everyone in our society, without exception is sexist and the negative effects of this sexism disproportionally affect women. It’s what you do about it, how you try to recognise your biases and prejudices, identify them and learn to either change them or ignore them so that hopefully you can prevent them from mudding your thinking in the future, that’s what matters.
When people say things like “conversation closers” or “not helpful to the debate”, etc, what they really mean is that the conversation can only be had on their terms, which are designed to create the illusion that they are not wrong, that their opinions must be taken seriously and to silence dissent.
The illusion of validity that these people get from their irrational misconception that civility equals reasonability is nothing but ego stroking. It’s pretty much the equivalent of two people smoking weed and making shit up about the universe and thinking that it’s some ultradeep shit, maaaaaaaan.
Oh my god this could go forever…
@John Morales
You don’t see how condescending you are. It doesn’t make you look smart to state the obvious. And you still don’t think that fallacy stuff is hurtful to debates right? Then we have reached a final non-agreement and it’s useless to try and demean me further.
And I still actually don’t see your point except that you’re mean? If you’re point is I’m a stupid asshole then ok I think I see it. Your mom must be proud of your acceptance and humility.
———–
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
Not even going to answer to this. You’re even more aggressive. We have a non-agreement about pointing out fallacies on the internet as well. The fact that I had my vision challenged and am grateful for it is not enough for you, alright.
My opinions don’t have to be taken seriously ever, but if they don’t, then that’s it… At least I take your opinion seriously.
You must be the expert on non-ego stroking though. I’m sure you have all your biases and prejudices checked out. You’re a great person.
Bunch of meanies…
So I guess you either think they’re not being mean, or that I deserved it?
Either one is fair enough, I’m just curious
Actually, you could also say it’s a false dichotomy, probably applies here.
I’ve usually found it to be a thought opener to have fallacies pointed out. I mean, obviously there are exceptions – claims of ad hominem when it’s actually just a common, garden variety insult and the like – but, if properly used, those “conversation closers” can give you a clear idea of the errors you’ve made, and a good idea of how to go about correcting them. I don’t really understand objecting to them. I can see how it would be frustrating to have your point rejected, and it doesn’t necessarily follow from an argument containing fallacies that it will necessarily have a false conclusion, but it’s certainly a hint, and would seem to be increasingly likely based on the number and severity of them.
vzdk is only complaining about “conversation closers” because the only reason these things “close” the conversation is that they show he’s fucking wrong.
It’s a nice distraction from the topic of whether “patrarichy” is an adequate explanation for the facts on the ground though. Of course vzdk is still in the “deny the facts on the ground” stage of the conversation so whatever.
Hey vzdk.
Fuck you very much for helping anti-feminists in their fight against gender equality. They fucking love it when clueless dudes mistake their lack of experience with sexism for the nonexistence of sexism.
@143 vzdk
Oh no, such aggression…
Look, i know you think people are being mean to you for no reason, that you just came here to have an honest conversation (on your own, silly terms) and that instead of engaging you the way you would like them to, they are being rude pointing out logical fallacies, biases, your ignorance about the subject, ridiculous contradictions, etc.
The reality, however, is that you came in here insulting everybody by declaring that Real Skeptics ought to be suspicious of claims about systematic discrimination and biases in our culture, that because you don’t see families where the woman is chained to the kitchen, sexism doesn’t exist in any real sense, etc…You came here, threw a bucket of shit all over the place and now you are whining that people are not happy with you as a guest.
You get what you give…and you’ve given us nothing but insults and whining even if you don’t use expletives.
Instead of being so worried about your own feelings and your own desires of how the conversation should go according to you, stop for a moment and think of how incredibly rude and insulting you have been to every woman and every skeptic (or both) in this thread.
I should add that a great many of the people here are not only skeptics, they are also very well informed about this subject, unlike you. They don’t get their opinions from some stuff they’ve read on tweets or on some internet post where someone declared that the wage gap is real and patriarchy is a thing, and then go around unthinkingly parroting those ideas. These are people who have the experience AND the data to fully support their positions. You are nowhere near their level (neither am i for that matter). You should be thankful that they engage you at all, despite how rude you have been to declare yourself competent to pass judgement on a subject you know nothing about and on top of that, have the gall to declare that to be the skeptical and rational thing to do.
Oh no no no no, vzdk. You don’t get to run away that easily. You claimed that one of the studies linked in this thread failed to account for part-time work; I not only demonstrated that the most plausible candidate did account for it, I also showed that the effect has been known about for forty years in the literature, and asserted it is routinely accounted for. Are you going to refute my examples and assertions with citations, or are you going to concede you either misunderstood what you were reading or invented it outright?
Vzdk @131:
Read? Invented? It sure seems like the latter. Me @ 37 again:
Noonan, Mary C., M. E. Corcoran, and P. N. Courant. “Pay Differences among the Highly Trained: Cohort Differences in the Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries.” National Poverty Center, no. 03–01 (2003).
And since I’m bored of repeating myself over and over again, without being listened to, here’s another for the pile:
Bell, Linda A. “Women-Led Firms and the Gender Gap in Top Executive Jobs,” 2005.
Real Skeptics ignore data that conflicts with their preconceptions, it seems…
Except you aren’t here to learn, but to preach.
Lie. Nothing invalidates peer reviewed research except more peer reviewed research. Opinion by ignoramuses refutes nothing.
Then your claim that there is no wage gap is a deliberate lie. Thanks for the confirmation.
Here comes your presuppositional and fallacious non-thinking. No rational person ignores solid evidence.
More admission that we live in sexist society….
Either patriarchy exists or it doesn’t, and you have admitted it exists. Where the fuck is your rational processes?
Think is irrelevant to actual evidence, and yours is MIA. Essentially you have an emotional problem with patriarchy, and who the fuck cares about YOUR problem? I certainly don’t.
But you don’t do anything about that….
Then, you have the responsibility not to say them. If you say them, expect people to respond.
Freeze Peach: You can say anything without people criticizing what you say.
Free Speech: Anybody can use their free speech to show what an idjit you are in so many words.
You believe in freeze peach, not free speech.
So, at the end of the day,
vzdk is not a rational skeptic, isn’t a believer in free speech, nor a rational evidence based thinker. And is afraid of seeming like a male chauvinist pig, although most of the females who know them know better.
You don’t see how deserving of it you are.
As you state the obvious but irrelevant.
It’s helpful to debates. What it isn’t helpful to is stupid, ignorant, intellectually dishonest jackasses like yourself who want to be able to “debate” no matter how wrong you are or fallacious your arguments.
Only if you’re going away and staying away.
That’s because you’re stupid. Failure to understand is not a virtue.
I don’t think you quite do.
I’m an independent adult, my parents are dead, and I learned, of necessity, long ago not to base my sense of self worth on their opinions.
There’s no pride in accepting willful stupidity and intellectual dishonesty. As for humility, none is warranted in regard to you, and if you had a fraction of the humility that you should then you would have STFU long ago.
ffs
TM @ 155:
You should take your own advice.
Being skeptical of some idea, hypothesis, theory or even reported observation is fine. However, it should be borne in mind that as the amount and credibility of evidence increases, skepticism should decrease in proportion, approaching zero as a limit.
He’s not an anti-feminist. Just because someone doesn’t agree with some of the things you say doesn’t make them against your beliefs. I don’t agree with a lot of Jewish ideals, but that in no way makes me an anti-semite.
Ana Kasparian talks about this one all the time. The pay gap is terribly small or non-existant for women working the same jobs as men, but if you look at the numbers overall there is a large pay gap because women are not frequently found in the same high-positions, which is due to a large number of factors, and has a bit more to do with the industries you see the most women in rather than whether or not someone is making a conscious decision to pay women less. I myself work a job for a specific hourly wage, and I don’t get paid any more than the female workers on my team, and if I found out I did we would probably sue the company about that.
I would attack that as more of a general claim. For any group of people focused on a single ideal there will always be X number of people who treat that ideal in an almost religious way.
It’s called a preface or prologue. Do you not watch TV at all?
I’m pretty much going to mirror Armoured Skeptic here, but Atheism does not have any problems. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god. It has no relation to feminisim in any way. Most religions do oppress women in some manner or fashion, and since Atheism does not oppress women it would be a fair statement to say that atheists do not oppress women for religous reasons unlike theists. It is not a valid statement to say that “Atheists and Feminists have a common problem” or that “Atheism and Feminism are complimentary to each other”. They have no relation to each other.
Armoured skeptic is guilty of making a blanket statment here, so bad skeptic. However, I think you’re missing the point of what he’s trying to say. He’s saying that the people he largely hears talking about it the most are feminists. Not school teachers, not people in authority, and not people in his community. You could point this to the glass bubbly fallacy, but I’m pretty sure that the majority of people think that women are in fact equal to men and deserve equal rights. You point out that Christians and Republican presidential candidates tend to be terribly bigoted toward women and we KNOW that, the public at large talks about how these people are insane on a daily basis. For what you’re suggesting, we would have to think that what they’re saying is perfectly valid and just, and MOST people feel the opposite.
No, you are again clearly missing the point. The Athiest community is not connected by any idea other than the lack of belief in a god. We are a community of individuals with a single shared belief. The same way that the black community is only connected by the color of their skin. They are otherwise completely unique individuals and each believe and think something different.
Being an atheist means that you do not believe in a god. It does not mean anything else. This is a very bad argument based on a fundamental misconception about atheism.
Because you take away people’s freedom of speech by telling them that they’re not allowed to say certain things. That is trying to take away someone’s freedom of speech. No one is objecting to the fact that you are contributing, it is specifically what you’re contributing that people have a problem with, and it isn’t the fact that you have progressive ideals it’s that you have progressive ideals that violate other people’s rights.
You are more than welcomed to criticize other people’s positions, but you cannot attempt to censor people for their positions. He is not saying that you yourself have done so, but there are a lot of people in certain branches of the feminist movement who attempt to do so which gives feminists at large a bad name because usually they are the ones everyone notices, and that is where we have people losing their freedom of speech. The ACLU has at least once defended a KKK group who was trying to have a peaceful parade in the south that people were trying to censor. Regardless of what their message is, as long as it is a peaceful one, they have every right to say it.
https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-em-defends-kkks-right-free-speech
Nearedge, not ONE link to support your assertions. They are dismissed without evidence.
You want to show us we are wrong. Link to evidence we are wrong. Or shut the fuck up.
Nerd
Why fucking bother?
This thread is dead.
K
The only thing here that even needs citation is the pay gap.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/jul/15/politifact-sheet-gender-pay-gap/
Nope, every assertion without evidence. You don’t understand the difference between opinion and fact. For example, from your citation:
You lose.
omfg. Hey POCs! You don’t have a community or group of shared experiences aside from skin color! You don’t have common themes of prejudice and racism that help tie you together! You don’t have your own cultures that white people constantly try to co-opt! Everything is totes fine and therefore you don’t need a community or safe places just for your community’s particular interests/needs. :D nearedge said so, so it must be true!
Also, you think ceasing to believe in a deity instantly frees you up from prejudice? A great deal of the prejudice against women in american society has some basis in religion… and you don’t lose that the moment you cease to believe. If your newfound lack of belief in a deity does *not* make you reconsider your attitudes and try to deal with any that come from a religious bias, then you are a shitty person.
I suspect you are, in fact, a shitty person.
See, the thing you’re missing is the cause of that pay gap which remains inconclusive.
Now, at the same time it also does say that it tried to take that into account, but it has a very difficult time citing that as the cause of the pay gap; however, I myself will admit that the 7% gap they found could be due to discrimination, or a reluctance to ask for raises. I’ll take it a step further and say that I absolutely do believe that there are still women being actively discriminated against in the workplace, but a 7% pay gap when specifically looking for that shows that it isn’t anywhere near as wide spread of an issue as a lot of people think it is. Now, keep in mind: That doesn’t mean that I’m saying it isn’t still a SERIOUS issue.
Now, past that. I don’t think I need to prove the anti-feminist thing, because that is more of a logical conclusion, and OP did not provide any evidence as to why he was an anti-feminist, so the initial claim has not been proven.
I already touched on the pay gap.
Do I really need to prove that some people treat some things like a religion? I’m sure that you yourself know someone who does that. Hell, I know of a single person who to this day has a little Michael Jackson shrine.
Do I need to prove that content appearing before the introduction is called a prologue in relation to film?
I can in fact prove that Atheism and Feminism are not related to each other, and that just comes from their respective definitions:
These two things have no relation.
The next point was Armored Skeptic voicing his experiences, and I voiced my opinion, but I can also cite my own opinion. Most people do in fact agree that women should have equal rights: http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2010/07/01/equal-rights-gender-men-women-jobs-pew-research/
Already touched on the next point.
Now, I do make a claim about free speech here, but this very thread is an exercise in exactly what I’m referring to.
Let’s look at this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3132206/How-free-speech-thought-crime-chilling-warning-feminists-hound-Nobel-winner-job-sexism.html
Keep in mind that just like with the ACLU defending the KKK, I do NOT have to agree with what is being said to defend the free speech of another individual. They have just as much right do express their opinion regardless of how backward ass, archaic, racist, or misogynistic it is. Sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s right, or you have to agree with it, but they have every right to say it.
Also, don’t say things like ‘You lose’. It’s not really about winning or losing, the economy is still shit, something like 30% of Americans think that Donald Trump is fit to be president, we’re still in wars where we’re killing innocent women and children, and I could have had a V8. We all lose. :/
Psst… nearedge… free speech means the government can’t arrest you for saying certain things. It doesn’t mean you don’t get to have people call your crap arguments crap, and that people don’t get to call out sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and all sorts of other shitty behaviour.
Free Speech, everything you say can and will be criticized for being bullshit.
Freeze Peach, nothing you says can be criticized, and must be accepted as gospel.
You believe in Freeze Peach, not Free Speech.
Still no ONE link evidence based. Just OPINION. Dismissed.
Okay, first and foremost, you are talking to a black person. I made sure I chose something I actually know something about, and I reserve the right to find it racist because your comment appears to be under the assumption that I am not black. The prejudice and racism that comes toward black people is due to the color of our skin, not by the contents of our character, or who we are as individuals. When I say that the only thing connecting us is the color of our skin I am absolutely correct, because historically the color of our skin is the only reason we’ve been disconnected from society and oppressed. Aside from that, we are all unique individuals bonded by a heritage that shows itself not in who we are as people, but what we look like.
No I don’t, and I never said that. Yes, a lot of the prejudice against women DOES have basis in religion, I think the majority of it does actually. When I was in a christian school for senior year I had a female teacher who actually had been so brainwashed by her faith that she very passionately expressed her disdain for women working the same jobs as men such as being a firefighter, doctor, or police? I’ll never forget that conversation because in that single instance I caught a glimpse of everything that was wrong with this country. I’ll honestly say I have a problem with a lot of the most popular branch of the feminist movement, but it has nothing to do with most of what they say, but the fact that they tend to attack everyone who disagrees with them on smaller issues, rather than fully expressing their concerns and ironing out what their differences so that we can in fact work together for a better world. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but based on your second paragraph I feel like you’re assuming that I’m a misogynist because I don’t agree with you.
Nerd, we’ve already seen your “JUST AN OPINION” speech more than once. You don’t have to repeat it anymore.
Nearedge: there are 170 comments on this thread already. Are you expecting everyone to repeat their arguments just for you? Because you’ve said nothing new.
“Challenger, you win.”
8 minutes in, eh? Seems like Armored Skeptic wins as well.
@nearedge
PZ never said that the tuber was an antifeminist because they disagreed.
You need to look at the links to studies posted earlier in this thread. There are comments that reference the question of same and different industries that include links to references.
This is where your reply to me will determine if I believe you are here on honest pretenses. I need you to answer this.
Why are you here if all atheism is, is the lack of belief in a god?
This matters because every single time I have seen the definition of atheism brought up as a means to avoid the point someone was really making. There is an [atheist community], it is atheists who choose to socialize and do politics as atheists. That objective really exists and can be referred to in an objective sense. In this case I just watched you, a person sensitive to the use of atheist in a social context because it objectively has social dimensions, totally avoid the fact that PZ was speaking to atheists that socialize as atheists. You did precisely what PZ is complaining about. It’s absolutely fucking valid because there is an atheist community.
Ignoring that you just missed the point of what PZ was saying about atheists in a community context… (not really ignoring, that was rhetorical)
Not “bad skeptic”, bad reasoner. That is not about simply suspending belief, that is about why one goes down a particular train of thought which has to do with motivated reasoning. These categories matter and as I see it piss poor reasoning skills allowing motivated reasoning to trigger when people become skeptical is a huge problem in the atheist community.
Bullshit. That “point” has no actual bearing on reality other than rhetoric that obfuscates.
1) How does that “connection” happen functionally?
2) How do people tend to socialize?
You are completely ignoring reality here and I cannot let this go. The details of how people stop being religious are different. Some are treated like shit because they are LGBT+, or female, or a passionate learner, or just don’t like the restrictive social rules. Those things really have been cited as reasons for why they left the faith, often because of “my conception of god was bases on X and I learned Y was true”, among other things.
And once they leave religion how do people actually choose to socialize? How do people choose to socialize in general? Can you even answer that question? As I watched this community form I saw a bunch of people interact defensively against a hostile culture based on what they did not believe, but once they started interacting they chose to interact based on common experiences related to atheism and their lives for different reasons (they get to choose either and by your own reasoning you don’t have a damn reason to tell them not to, it takes more than the dictionary definition to choose to tell someone how to stop socializing).
Rejected because it’s not an argument, it’s a recognition of objective reality.
Freedom of speech ONLY has to do with the relationship between a government and it’s citizens. It does not have to do with a blog owner and it’s commentators. This literal metaphor as hyperbole. Your job is now to defend why PZ should not choose what kind of speech is or is not acceptable in his social space, and we need examples.
Emphasis mine.
Specifically what things? Since this is literally not a freedom of speech issue (I think I can safely assume you can go on to say these things in other parts of the internet without the government doing anything unless you live in a place with no freedom of speech), you must get specific or we have no way to assess your reason or logic.
The last bit is ignored due to hyperbolic metaphor being confused for reality.
nearedge, your phrasing made it sound like there is no real community, because it was ‘only’ skin color. It was so dismissively stated that it sounded just like something my racist uncle would say… and that level of sheer dismissiveness is usually only seen in white people, because mostly it’s only us pasty-as-fuck people that are that degree of asshole. So I do apologise for that un-thinking assumption. However, please re-think how you state things, because your phrasing makes you look shitty.
I did not, however, assume you were misogynistic. I assumed that you considered not reconsidering societal attitudes to be a-okay because losing god has no outside consequences, per you. Which means that a person who thinks women are shit, because of the religious biases that lead into that, is still just dandy considering women as shit when they’re an atheist. If lack of belief in a deity does not make one reconsider just about all their previously held ideas, then one is a shitty person. Sadly, there are a LOT of shitty atheists. And I’m still moderately certain that you are at least moderately shitty.
Pray-tell elaborate. Define ‘smaller issue’, and why you think they aren’t important? And why should I have to put up with microaggressions and not call those out? When men I don’t know pet my hair, should I have not made a scene? They weren’t hurting me, after all. How about when men at my job have tried to carry the 30lb bags of dog food for me and then try to pull the “I was just trying to be nice” card when I tell them I’m perfectly capable of carrying such things, and that is part of my job? Also please describe how I am to iron out the differences between someone who thinks that I am ‘weaker’ because I have a uterus? And why should I iron out differences with someone who uses gendered slurs or that I’m going to be naturally irrational and emotional?
The “emphasis mine” in my comment was messed up by the fact that my empheses did not occur. I’m not sure what happened. I tried to underline “…certain things…”, and bold “…other people’s rights…”
nearedge @165:
Mmmm, no. Look more carefully:
These seem like a trivial details, but occupational segregation is a large driver of the gendered wage gap. Women are steered towards certain jobs, and those jobs become devalued. Check Dunc’s comment at 54 for evidence of that. The only larger influence I’m aware of is the care gap: women do more housework and childcare than men, due to gender norms, and this prevents them from earning as much in the workforce. Check my comment at 6 for evidence of that.
Otherwise, I agree with you: when you ignore the major sources of discrimination, you don’t find a lot of discrimination.
I will start off by disagreeing with a single sentence from this, because I myself am guilty of doing similar things, but not for the reason you might think.
Now, I can’t speak for your co-workers as I’m me, and they’re them; however, in that kind of situation I know that a lot of guys, myself included, will try to do things like that if they don’t feel comfortable talking to someone they’re interested in. The only thing I’m suggesting here is that they may have legitimately have been doing that if they had the same kind of feeling toward you. It’s what I might do in that same situation, especially if I’m someone who didn’t typically converse with you a whole lot, but I don’t know them after all.
No one should just walk up and pet your hair, that’s blatant disregard for your personal space. No one should assume that you’re unable to do things just because you’re a woman. The reason you shouldn’t call out microaggressions is that a lot of the time (as hard as it is to see it from their perspective) people don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, and when you call people out on the things they do it is a natural reaction to get defensive, and when those defenses go up it’s really easy to ignore common sense. I couldn’t really tell you how to go about ironing things out just off the top of my head, but you certainly should even if someone uses gender slurs toward you because it’s more important to try to change their opinion than it is to get those defenses. We know they’re wrong, but they don’t know they’re wrong so we need to prove it to them in the best way they’ll understand.
I’ve known some pretty racist people in my time, and what has always worked out the best for me is making them feel comfortable, you know? If we’re not changing the opinions of people, we aren’t getting anywhere. It’s the Malcolm X approach vs the MLK approach. The biggest thing is we have to make folks pay attention to how women are the same as men, not how we’re different. I say we because it’s everyone’s issue. It’s not your issue, it’s not my issue, it’s a roadblock to a better future.
@Hj Hornbeck
THAT is the real issue, and THAT is what we need to be focusing on. The question isn’t how we close the pay gap, it’s how do we get more women into STEM fields? This is where gender related stigma does come into play because as we’re growing up girls are pushed toward things like dolls, animals, and clothes rather than the things that boys grow up with like building toys, cars, and other things like that. THAT is the real issue.
But if we never tell people they’re doing something wrong, they will never consider that they *are* doing something wrong. And why should I be concerned about how to gently treat their emotions when they run roughshod over mine? Playing nice and not stirring things up has improved very little, if anything. There’s no one-size fits all approach to dealing with people as different people react better to different things. Advocating for *only* gentle won’t always get through and is often used as a bludgeon for the idea that we are being irrational and emotional, and in the case of women, “is it that time of the month, or something?”
For example, this:
That actually reads as pretty aggressive, and you outright used the word racist. My racist uncle would *immediately* be on the defensive about that. I read it in an aggressive tone and my response was “Well… fuck me.” I did make an assumption, and it was wrong of me. And being called out on that works for me, because I actually *am* a person that responds well to aggressive approaches. PZs criticism of christianity that I so enjoyed forced me to take a look at my own spiritual beliefs and realise that all the mockery aimed elsewhere that I enjoyed could just as easily be aimed at my beliefs… and be just as accurate. Also, early on in my commenting career I made a comment that while I would *never* actually want it to happen, I sometimes *wished* that I could force some young women to carry a pregnancy to term, because I overheard someone at my college complaining that she missed a party to have her third abortion. I, rightfully, got my chewed up ass handed to me on a platter. I spent a few comments digging, and then went away and *thought* about it. First kinda hurt (because human, hello), and then realizing that I had been absolutely, 100%, horrifically wrong.
I also, absolutely, 100% refuse to EVER be ‘nice’ to someone who aims a gendered slur at me because that is something I cannot tolerate. That is game over for me. Telling me that I should just let that stuff go is infuriating.
With regards to the bags of food, it’s actually clients that do that. People I often see only once a year. I’m unusually strong and my male coworkers often asked *me* for help with lifting things. But clients of all genders would often ask if there was a guy around who could carry that bag to the car, or a man would come over and try to take a bag from me.
nearedge @177:
Uh, why the sudden mention of STEM? Do you think the gender pay gap is exclusive to STEM? Because there’s a number of citations in this thread that show otherwise.
THAT is one small aspect of the real issue. So too are the devaluation of motherhood, unequal division of housework, inadequate family leave policies, squishy human brains that easily host unconscious bias, toothless anti-discrimination laws, and even sexual assault and sexual harassment. This is a complex problem that spans the globe, and it isn’t helped by glossing over that complexity or dismissing it.
@Rowan vet-tech
See, there’s the difference between people like you and I, and most other people. Most people are irrational and give visceral responses to a large number of situations. Because of this, the standard practice of most people is to forcibly escalate the situation by looking for triggers and hitting them to invoke the same visceral responses that they themselves would provide in the same situation. I’m not telling you to let it go, and I’m sure as hell not telling you to put up with their bullshit. Now, if the kill them with kindness approach doesn’t work for you, then I encourage you to go for the intellectually superior route. People in general have a desire to be right, and if you can prove them wrong while keeping them emotionally in check or even better, catch them in their own tricks and push a reversal, they’ll have mixed feelings. Most of people will either back down or double down despite knowing that they’re wrong. The ones that back down will reconsider things, but the ones that double down are in a logical corner. Change the subject to something they’re comfortable talking about, and return to it at the end of the conversation and they won’t want to participate. Make sure they leave the conversation thinking about it, and they reconsider their stance. Now, people do not always fit into generalizations, but these are the most common things I’ve noticed in debating people. The point of both ideas is to force them to think. People love to learn new things, but hate actually learning. Make them learn without teaching, but do not teach without making them learn. People like you and I are reasonable and demand rational responses from emotional people in logical situations
@Hj Hornbeck
I’m an engineer myself, so STEM is what I’ll always talk about in the situation because it’s where I witness the most gender inequality. As small of an aspect as it is, it’s probably the best place to get started because there is still to this day a massive demand for workers in STEM fields and a short supply of workers of any race or gender. More women should go for STEM fields because they’ll be the easiest ones to fill, and are the most accepting as far as I’ve seen. Now, this is totally my personal opinion, but if I were tasked with rectifying an issue like this it’s what I would do as a tactician.
The rest of this goes into politics in all honesty, and while I’m 100% willing to have a political discussion I don’t think it would be appropriate in this particular venue. I’ve got some damn good ideas on how to change that though :>
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
Sorry for making you wait.
@nearedge
That’s kind of a bad comparison. Ideals and claims are not really all that similar, although, interestingly, disagreeing with feminist ideals, particularly the ones specifically about gender equality, does have a habit – it’s not universal, but pretty common – of making someone an anti-feminist.
A better, although still kind of questionable, comparison here would be disagreeing that Jews have historically been oppressed in various parts of the world, and expressing skepticism toward the claims of victimhood in the holocaust. I’d be hard pressed to say that expressing that particular disagreement wouldn’t make someone an anti-Semite, especially when you consider how pitifully easy it is to do the basic research. Of course, there are areas where it’s reasonable to apply skepticism to commonly held views about the holocaust. The idea that it was only Jews who were targeted, for instance. That wasn’t the case. Political prisoners, gays, Romani, and so on; there are plenty of groups who were targeted by it, and recognising that fact is not anti-Semitic. Using that fact to deny that Jews were even a target of it, however, quite definitely is.
This is obviously still a bad comparison, but there’s a core point that translates across well. Pointing out that a man and a woman in the exact same job with the exact same job title for the exact same length of time, working the exact same hours experience less of a wage gap than the average man and the average woman in full time employment is absolutely fine and reasonable. Pretending that this means there is no real wage gap at all is, among other things, intellectually lazy and dishonest. Pretending that it means that the gap between the average man and woman is not a problem is likewise. Same with pretending that this fact accurately represents the pay conditions between men and women doing the same work – same work with a different job title gives you a different number.
If these “skeptics” who are definitely not anti-feminists were simply pointing out that simple fact, that would be fine. Pointless, but fine – it’s something that really should be obvious to anyone who thinks. Not even about this issue, just in general. Where the problem comes in, and where I stop giving a fuck whether they, personally, think of themselves as enemies of feminism, is when they start drawing nonsensical and unconsidered conclusions from that patently obvious fact and giving those who actually do see feminism as the great Satan sound bites to “prove” their pitiful misunderstanding of reality true.
??
Have I understood this statement correctly; if someone is doing something wrong, but doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong, you should make no attempt to draw their attention to the fact that they’re doing something wrong?
There’s a word for what that is. Quite a few, actually. I’m going to go with irrational. How can you expect humanity to ever progress with such an attitude?
I don’t care how long it takes.
Just answer honestly. Frankly the fact that you had to say that makes me wonder why you felt I d3eserved such a response, when I am the white male masculine one.
Well, a white male masculine one. But still…
Okay! I see your point. I didn’t necessarily convey what I was thinking in the way I typed that, and I’ll also concede that I probably misinterpreted Rowan vet-tech’s response. Iunno. The whole micro-aggressions thing is relatively new to me conceptually. I’m going to call it like it is and reiterate: Don’t put up with bullshit. Point out that they’re wrong and what they’re wrong about, but you have to go about it in a specific way otherwise they’ll just get defensive and act the way you’ll expect them to act. That was a bit more along the lines of what I was trying to say.
This gets me back to the first part of this. If that’s the objection then PZ needed to have said that specifically. Hell, bring that up with skeptic because I know that he doesn’t want to be seen as on the side of anti-feminism, and that wasn’t the point of the video. If it’s something as simple as they way he conveyed what he was trying to convey then point it out to the guy and give him the chance to rectify the issue. The entire reason I was linked to this post was because someone brought it up to say that Skeptic was a misogynist and that was why people shouldn’t like him, and the title of this does say “Oh, crap, another YouTube misogynist”. You know, one of the biggest things people criticize the current feminist movement about is the whole rape culture thing. The majority of people in the US do not think that it’s okay to do victim shaming, we do not think that it’s okay to suggest that a woman was “asking for it” because she dressed a certain way or flirted with someone, and we ABSOLUTELY do NOT think that rape is okay or justifiable by any means. The people who do think that are a minority, but they’re the only people talking in support of it because everyone else knows that it’s wrong. People are afraid of feminism all together because of overly large generalizations, and similarly small groups that are taking the public eye. At the college I used to go to a single feminist group in the area rallied against the school’s culinary arts class because they felt that women were being forced to take it when in reality no one was being forced to take it. Because of that, the school removed the program entirely because they couldn’t manage to reason with the group and explain that very fact. I was pretty pissed about it in all honesty, but neither the school nor myself hold feminism as a movement responsible for it, just that group. Which is not to say that rape culture is by every feminist directed at society at large, but that’s the way it appears to everyone on the outside which is why people make the argument that there is no rape culture in the way it’s portrayed to them at large.
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
I don’t care about your, or anyone’s gender.
Why does PZ call Skeptic a misogynist in that case?
This goes back to what Skeptic said in his video. Those athiests who organize as a community are still made up of lots of diverse people. Some of those people are feminists, some of those people are anti-feminists, some of those people just legitimately do not care. You are referring to “a specific sect of the athiest community” and that statement should be specified in the way that it is meant, and once you specify it in the way it’s meant the wording used undermines it because, yes, “athiesm means not believing in a god and that’s all it means”. “Yes there is an athiest community, but that community is connected by only one thing and that is that they have a shared disbelief in a god”. I’m directly quoting Skeptic’s video here. Steve Shives is referring to a specific sect of athiesm as just “athiesm” without taking into account that athiesm as a whole includes shitty people who are anti-feminists, or just flat out do not want the label of feminist attached to them for their own reasons. Atheism and feminism are not complimentary to each other and to tack feminism onto atheism would undermine the fundamental feminist movement as a whole in addition to that. I’ll encourage you to re-watch Skeptic’s video and evaluate his points again.
The issue here, upon further inspection, appears to be blanket terminology.
Something that bothers me with this response by PZ is that he did not make it through the video. Is it not the case the Atheism has subsisted through debunking things that it finds false through the logical apparatuses that we as human beings treasure? How can PZ properly say an argument is false without looking at the presented whole of the argument? Not saying I necessarily agree or disagree with the skeptic, but this seems to be a problem with postmodern discourse– there is so much information out there that we think it is okay to simply disregard the whole of an argument because of a few things that we don’t like. This is not the way we should be thinking.
Once again, take a look at the example of the atheist, they do not simply decide to not believe in any god arbitrarily (that is, most don’t, there’s always an exception). The community seems to pride itself on doing its research before making a decision. Atheists read the bible and reject its claims, atheists look at the claims of theists and reject them, etc.. To me, it seems there should be a little bit of discomfort in knowing that a man of supposed rationality like PZ did not make it through the video. I do not agree with PZ or ArmouredSkeptic on many of the points they make but I still make my best attempt to understand their argument as whole instead of saying “I can’t make it through this because I disagree”. Maybe it’s just me, but I find this particular attitude to be against the very notion of logic and rationality– how can you prove a conclusion wrong when you don’t know the whole of the premises?
Something that is equally disheartening is the idea that Steve Shives, the topic of the video PZ mentions, is happy to block people for even suggesting logical and rational discourse. For example, Mr. Shives blocked me on twitter for tweeting, “@steve_shives Yeah, but maybe you could, y’know, debate them in an open and forum [sic] instead [of] generalizing and calling them “misogynists”.” Was my comment a little uppity and aggressive? Certainly, but to me there is a problem with simply labeling someone without addressing their argument. There is something to be said about a person who blocks someone for suggesting a debate in an open forum instead of quick to the trigger labels.
I’m certainly not perfect myself as I’m human, however I strive to try and understand the sides of a debate before I jump into a discussion and it would be refreshing if both sides came together to debate in an open forum for all to see
blindcaesar @ 186
If you’ve got a politician giving a speech and all he’s using are a bunch of talking points that you already know are BS, are you still obligated to listen to the whole speech before pointing out that he’s full of shit?
Yes! Absolutely. You should still watch through every debate regardless of how disgusting the things one of the sides says.
blindcaesar @186:
Nope. That’s merely one way of doing it.
(Do you realise that by capitalising atheism you have converted it into an ideology, rather than an attribute?)
An argument requires both sound premises and valid inferences to be compelling; if any premise is unsound, the argument is flawed ab initio.
And it’s not a matter of liking or disliking any given element; unless any such element is irrelevant to the argument (in which case, what’s it even doing there?), it only takes one flaw to make the argument flawed.
There is no reason to require a god for anything, so for this atheist, without such a reason to believe, such belief is unnecessary. That suffices.
Heh. If you take a bite out of a sandwich and it tastes like shit, do you finish the sandwitch anyway before disliking it?
You really should educate yourself; again: an argument requires both sound premises and valid inferences to be compelling; if any premise is unsound, the argument is thereby flawed.
It would be even more refreshing if you learnt what constitutes a proper argument.
nearedge
I just want to highlight this piece of stupidity.
1) people do something that hurts other people
2) people don’t know this is hurtful (assuming ignorance, not malvolence)
3) therefore we should not tell people they hurt others
4) profit. Or something.
Tell me, do you keep quiet when somebody accidentially steps on your foot? Or feeds your dog chocolate because they’re nice people who’d never consciously hurt a dog?
1) Which one is it now?
2) Can you tell us the way in which we should do this so we’Re not getting a hostile respone? Because, you know, we’ve been through this before and we’ve tried a megafuckton of approaches and almost always got a hostile respone. I remember a woman saying “guys, don’t do that” and the result were years of harassment…
No, the question is why are fields of occupation that require a lot of training and come with huge responsibilities devalued just because they’re done in majority by women. Why is a car mechanic better paid than a nurse?
But thankfully you‘re from Vulcan, right?
I don’t have enough hands for this facepalm. This is fractionally wrong. Just read the last few entries on ths page that deal with rape….
blindcesar
Why? why do it again and again and again? Really, what’s the point and no,atheis mi s actuallymuch older and broader than “debunking creationists on youtube”
I’m not sure how blindcesar can find the time to comment here, what with having to read absolutely every piece of religious apologetics ever written, in full, in order to be sure he’s fully understood the whole of the argument viz-a-viz the existence of God… That’s probably going to take him several lifetimes.
Meanwhile, I’m sure nearedge is busy reading every piece of Nazi and neo-Nazi literature he can find, so that he’s sure he hasn’t jumped the gun in concluding that they were the bad guys, since “[y]ou should still watch through every debate regardless of how disgusting the things one of the sides says”…
“So he’s going to lecture us once again that the only good atheist is a dictionary atheist.”
I just had to make a profile so I could respond to this. This is the single most ironic statement I have heard this year. The no true Scotsman and dictionary definition are respectively the third most and single most popular and often used logical fallacies among feminists. (The second most is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy if anyone is interested.)
Also, “What has split the atheist movement is a body of ranting, arrogant fools who want to keep women in an inferior place ” This is what Atheism+ keeps claiming, yet always fails to provide a single shred of evidence for. And when we ask for proof, we are called misogynists. Atheism+ is more dogmatic than the Catholic church ffs.
Antoine Nuyens, #193
Richard Dawkins, Slymepit, thunderf00t, Amazing Atheist, Michael Shermer
(Folks, it’s 6:30 in the morning and this is all I could come up with off the top of my head, so please feel free to append my list)
Aw, but Saad, don’t you see? The problem isn’t that these people are racist, misogynist, and/or a rapist, the pronblem is that people decided to no longer put up with it. Those uppity women and minorities are to blame!
Antoine Nuyens:
This is important to you, then. Excellent!
In what way do you find it ironic?
Much noise, fuck-all signal.
Tell me: of the three mutually-exclusive fallacies, do you imagine that “So he’s going to lecture us once again that the only good atheist is a dictionary atheist.” is
a) The no true Scotsman fallacy; or
b) The “dictionary definition” fallacy ; or
c) The Texas sharpshooter fallacy?
(Whichever it may be, do you care to attempt to justify your answer?)
—
[next comment]
And you fail to provide a single shred of evidence against, so the contention remains unchallenged.
Tell me more about what you imagine Atheism+ is about (and perhaps address your claimed how you are avoiding the “dictionary definition” fallacy. ;)
—
Heh. For someone who bothered to generate an account with which to comment, you sure didn’t achieve much by your comment, other than amusing me.
(I do like a new chew-toy, but. Have at it!)
Expect a few more idiots to trot in to this thread with their repetitive comments. The Armoured Skeptic came out with another video all about me, apparently — I haven’t watched it. It’s 41 minutes long. I couldn’t get through the fluff and noise and ignorance of the video linked to in the opening post…I’m sure as hell not going to be able to listen to 41 minutes of that babble.
His primary criticism, judging from the comments his viewers are making here and on twitter, is that I didn’t watch the whole thing, and that somehow he’s going to explain everything in the 20 minutes I missed. No, that’s nonsense.
1) He’s not that entertaining, yet he seems to think he is. There was an awful lot of empty posturing in the bits I did see, promising a very low signal-to-noise ratio, and if he can’t get to the point, I’m not going to wait for him to meander through cartoon dialog to get to it.
2) The fallacies in those first few minutes were enough to tell me that he’s ignorant about feminism and atheism, and is full up with crap about Atheism+. That and the responses of his fans tell me he’s just another anti-feminist asshole.
So no, nothing will persuade me to watch another Armoured Skeptic video. Not even the fact that he’s made one all about me. Haters are dime-a-dozen.
How much spare time do these people have?
Innocent question: is anybody except atheist dudebros still referencing A+ except as, you know, something that took place?
I’m not saying the ideas haven’t developed greatly, but nevertheless it’s been a while that I’ve seen anybody on “our” side of the rifts makin’ references to it…
Giliell @ 199:
I don’t think so. Keeping up with what’s going on doesn’t seem to be one of their strong points.
Surely, if those 20 minutes contained something that completely invalidated your post, someone could summarize those points and make it clear why missing 20 minutes was of such vital importance. Complaining that you need to watch it all only has some validity if it addresses the criticisms in some way. I suspect watching the rest would have simply resulted in a far longer evisceration of it.
I really do not understand how anyone could watch these things. I can barely sit through a minute or two of them. YouTube, video in general, is useful for some things, but it is not exactly an information dense medium. Combine that with people that ramble like this, and you get 41 minutes rants that never seem to say much. These videos could be compressed down to 5-10 minutes in most cases, if the creators were more skilled. Also, you can say so much more in text, people can read that text so much more quickly. I would far rather spend 10 minutes reading, than 40 minutes watching a video. And it is much easier to go back and check things in text, than to go back and rewatch segments.
@199 Giliell
Considering that they only ever heard about it as that scary thing that wanted to take over all of atheism and make everybody a feminist against their will, i doubt they are informed about its status either…
A+ is the bogeyman of the atheist dudebro, it will live on forever in their panicked, irrational minds.
nearedge @180:
You’d solve world hunger by increasing food production in Tanzania? That seems oddly myopic, and it ignores the complex interlinking of the underlying causes. You might be setting yourself up for failure, by ignoring solutions that don’t directly impact your target area but in reality have a huge indirect impact.
STEM fields…. the most accepting……. That sound you hear is my brain fizzling.
@ PZ Myers 197
No, no it isn’t nonsense. What would be nonsense is for someone to refute evolution without a good understanding of what evolution is. Why, imagine if someone was tasked with watching a 28 minute video on evolution, only got as far as 8 minutes in, and then denied the video on the grounds that they found the thesis offensive. Evolution is known to be scientific fact; however, the situation remains analogous as both Armored Skeptic’s video, and the hypothetical evolution video would be posing an argument.
If you do not take the time to receive the full argument, then you are not fit to refute said argument. Earlier this month I made a video on one of my youtube channels where I refute arguments made by AaronClarey, who is a US right-wing conservative youtuber. He said disgusting racist things in addition to making points with no credibility and just flat out lying. Yeah, I could have stopped watching when he asserted that Affirmative Action was racist, or when he claims that “Obama hates white people” and “Has never worked a real job”, but I didn’t. That isn’t how you handle a debate with another person. Until you have their full argument, you do not have the ability to refute it, and as a person of science you should know that. You could thoroughly disagree with the thesis of a student’s essay, but you could not possibly give the essay’s contents an F based on the first paragraph, could you? Granted, I’ve seen some peers in my English classes get failed for their thesis alone, but that was due to errors and not content, lol.
Then why not just skip ahead to his actual points? I have to admit, criticizing his prologue and intro simply for being a prologue and intro is as Ad Hominem as it gets.
You know, in your blog you don’t actually refute the individual points you bring up. You just draw attention to them and start talking around them. Furthermore, Armored Skeptic was a member of Athiesm+ until he was kicked out and harassed for not wanted to take part in the full doctrine of the group. He actually talked about his personal experiences in this video. He says more about his experiences with Athiesm+ during an interview with Sargon of Akkad.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. I didn’t take the time to specifically pick apart what you were saying in my initial comment, but I’ll go into a bit more detail about what’s wrong with this response. For starters, you spend more time criticizing how he chooses to make his video rather than the argument being posed. If you don’t find it entertaining, that’s all fine and well, but understand that it is just your opinion of his video. Shives did not say what you’re asserting. Shives said that, and I quote: “Atheism and Feminism are naturally complimentary to one another” then talks about how organized religion has held women down historically and then links it back to atheism by saying that “for most of the history of civilization the proposition that women ought to be treated equally to men was just as radical as the proposition that gods did not exist”. While this statement is true, it does not suit his argument that atheism and feminism are complimentary to each other, just that they’re ideals that have been treated with equal disbelief and bases his case for the rest of the video on this. Shives also goes on to say that while he realizes that “athiesm means not believing in a god and that’s all it means” he is still going to superimpose an additional meaning to athiesm. Your statement is flatout incorrect because atheism does not have the problem of religion, atheism isn’t even mutually exclusive with religion. An athiest could very easily have a non-theistic religion and that religion could be even more misogynistic than say Islam, but that wouldn’t make that person not an athiest. You and Steve Shives have a common problem and it’s that your definition of athiesm is not the actual definition of athiesm.
I find it quite ironic that you criticize Skeptic for saying that “The feminist communities started proposing regressive ideas, taking away people’s freedom of speech” then you immediately block him after he responds to you on Twitter. You talk about how no one is trying to take away anyone’s freedom of speech, then immediately deny him of his ability to voice his thoughts. You actually went as far as to say that “he thinks it is bullying and depriving people of free speech to forcefully criticize their position” while simultaneously taking away his ability to do just that. Apparently you DO find it troubling that someone is forcefully criticizing YOUR opinion so you call him a misogynist and ignore him. You are an active demonstration of the very point you were refuting: “taking away people’s freedom of speech, punishing members for asking questions and proposing new ideas, and publicly shaming people”.
@nearedge
…and the ones that PZ cares about are the ones that actually respond to the word atheist used in a social context, people like you. You did not answer my question. I will give you one more chance before I start applying invective rationally.
Why are you here?
Give me an example of your alternate wording, because as it stands you are trying to control our language and given the reality of how social emotions work all I care about are the people that respond socially to the word atheist, people like you. Referring to the “atheist community” is not undermined by anything that I can see. The word “skeptic” is similar and there is a skeptic community. There are many communities where simple wording works in a social context. I will not be controlled by you without better than that. Especially since language objectively evolves and if we use it differently that will become a valid use, dictionaries reflect actual use, not preferred use after all.
Bull shit. That community is also connected by anything else that they choose to use to interact around in addition to their atheism. I was right, you have no idea at all how human communities work, you are utterly dependent on simple concepts that are politically useful to you.
I will take a feminists word on that one over the author of the video. I think that they very clearly have an anti-feminist bias and the idea that identifying atheist feminists, who objectively exist no matter what you prefer, is a problem is frankly dumb as hell. If you wish me to watch a part of the video give me a specific time point, I’m not wasting any more of my time on that garbage beyond what it takes to check your reference.
Blanket terminology that is still valid based on actual use of the words and not your preferred use of them that seems to have a political motivation. Answer my question, why are you here?
@Rowan vet-tech, 204
I did say from my experiences! My mother has always worked in STEM fields, I’ve met a lot of her female co-workers, and while they were a minority in the companies they were in they still were not hassled for being women through the process of hiring and working for those companies. This is a bit of a glass bubble, but you can take example from companies like HP and Xerox. As much as I hate talking about Carly Fiorina, she still was the CEO of HP for 7 years (1998-2005) and Ursula Burns is currently the CEO of Xerox. Apple has at least one female executive that I know of myself, Angela Ahrendts, and they’ve hired 11,000 women over the last year. Google themselves expressed an interest in having more gender diversity in their business just last year. I realize that a few specific examples are not enough to say that the industry as a whole is very accepting, but the fact that the biggest names in the industry give a damn is quite telling I think.
@blindcaesar
If a point needs a specific piece of context to be properly understood feel free to point out the context with a citation. Your vague concerns are utterly unhelpful.
How can you say PZ is wrong without pointing out the missing part of the argument that you seem to simply assume is absent? Do your damn work concern troll. When creationists did this crap we got the missing context and shoved it in their faces, when that context actually changed the meaning in a relevant way.
It is indeed a problem and the relevant question is who is the one who should go get that extra information. I say it’s the one familiar with it. If you are familiar with it feel free to point it out. I’m perfectly happy with the warning signs that PZ and others have pointed out about the video.
Says who?
Part of that research involves noticing repeated patterns among kinds of people. This is part of why the word “creationists” exists. This community is satisfied that the author of the video has enough signs of anti-feminism that the rest of the video can be safely ignored.
If you feel differently feel free to point out the specific parts. I will not do your work for you concern troll.
If there is a missing part of the argument you should be able to point it out! If you can’t do this you are not worth listening to.
1) Show the missing part of the premises.
2) PZ and others here provided reason to reject the rest of the video, you are now choosing to ignore that.
Screw the rest of your comment until you actually do more than express overwrought concern with literally no reason given. That is a specific thing in the video that changes what we all see.
@205
You know, that would be the case if the “argument” wasn’t transparently bullshit from the very beginning….why waste time listening to the ramblings of someone who has demonstrated from the get go that they are full of shit?
Equating this to evolution, which is actually supported by the facts, gives the anti-feminists waaaaaaaay too much credit.
Also, you have no idea what free speech is. Armoured Skeptic is entirely free to continue to say idiotic bullshit, that doesn’t mean PZ is in any way obligated to listen to it. Not listening to some idiot is NOT taking away their freedom of speech, you complete and utter moron. Neither you, nor AS get to demand an audience. PZ’s twitter feed is not a public setting, it’s his own private choice of content, he also is not the government, he absolutely gets to block freeze peach anti-feminists who can’t think their way out of a paper bag.
Why don’t you have a problem with AS’s conflation of atheism and skepticism? Where does it say in the dictionary definition of atheism that thou salt be skeptical of claims? It’s only when it comes to certain social values that people like you object to atheism having any implications at all….otherwise you are contempt to ignore the dictionary definition and embrace an atheism that has implications. Same bullshit as always…boring…
@nearedge 205
Point out the specific parts of the video that are relevant you intellectual coward.
As I helped to combat creationists over two decades we did not expect them to go hunting through science journals for what they needed. Do your work lazy.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia, 209
Okay, two things: How and why do you interpret his argument to be “transparently bullshit from the very beginning”, and why do you think that Armoured Skeptic is an anti-feminist? On top of that, it doesn’t matter if you think that making that kind of analogy is giving anyone too much credit, if the analogy is true the logic behind it is in fact true.
Just because PZ isn’t obligated to listen to it doesn’t make it not a revocation of Armoured Skeptic’s free speech. The internet is a public forum in and of itself. If you are having a public conversation with someone and you refuse to hear their side or block them, you are censoring them which is against the idea of free speech. “Freedom of speech is the concept of the inherent human right to voice one’s opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment. ” If you deny someone the ability to voice their opinion to you, you are in fact denying them free speech in relation to you. I myself do not block people for that reason and that reason alone. Granted, you are not the government and it is your civil liberty to do so, but you must also recognize that you are not allowing them the freedom to express their opinion to you, and when you take it a step further and start shaming them and spreading the idea that they’re a misogynist you are retaliating against them which is not part of your civil liberties. Armoured Skeptic could go as far as to sue PZ Myers for perpetuating the idea that he is an anti-feminist and a misogynist without having made a proper case for why that is. That is not your freedom speech, that’s defamation of character. I’m not saying that he should, but he does in fact have the legal grounds to do so. If you want to call someone something or other, you must first prove that to be true, but without making a proper argument you cannot do so.
That is a misnomer. Armoured Skeptic did not say that as an atheist you should be skeptical of the pay gap. the video at That point in the video said (dialogue):
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite, 210
I wouldn’t even know what specific parts of the video to give you, it is a 30 minute argument. Why do you expect me to watch the video and summarize it for you? Why do you expect me to go hunting through Armoured Skeptic’s argument to tell you what his argument is? Just listen to his argument! That has to be the most intellectually dishonest thing anyone has said to me this week. I am telling you that you cannot refute his entire argument without listening to his entire argument.
Armoured Skeptic pretty much called that he would be called a misogynist for his video in his video, and gave valid proof of his assertion immediately after to have it further proven by this very blog post. Watch this clip to see what I’m talking about, watch from 19:10(Linkstamp) to 22:20. That’s just 3:10 worth of argument, is that too much to ask?
On pretty much any skeptical or atheist forum I have visited, when a creationist, or some sort of medical woo-ist, tells people to “do their own research” or refuses to be specific in their arguments when presenting evidence, they get ripped to shreds for being dishonest and lazy, not doing the most basic work to form an argument. But apparently being vague, and not being willing to be specific is actually okay, at least when they are making their own arguments.
Sweet non-existent Jesus, no wonder you want people to be able to call me gendered slurs and for me to just fucking take it.
So, no calling out racism (which means you saying my earlier statement in this thread to be racist was impinging on my civil liberties, by the by, so now you’re a hypocrite), no calling out sexism, no calling out rape or death threats, no calling out people who are calling out for the death of trans individuals, no calling out anyone or anything because somehow having to hear that something thinks you’re a fucking shithead is impinging on your ability to form and express an opinion freely.
Well… let’s begin then.
Fuck you, you goddamn raging asshat of a shithole human being.
nearedge, unless you dispute the quotations featured in the OP, it’s clear that there is at least one incoherent claim:
(Watching someone ramble incoherently is only worth it for the amusement value, much as is reading your comments)
No, no, no, no, no. That is not what I meant by that, and outside of its context I see how it could be interpreted that way. I will fix that sentence to convey the full idea: “Granted, you are not the government and it is your civil liberty to do so, but you must also recognize that you are not allowing them the freedom to express their opinion to you, and when you take it a step further and start shaming them and spreading the idea that they’re a misogynist [without having made a proper case for why they are] you are retaliating against them [for voicing their opinion] which is not part of your civil liberties.”
All of those things you mentioned are disgusting and wrong and everyone should feel morally obligated to call them out when they see them and provide proof of them alongside those claims. You absolutely can call someone out on being a misogynist if they’re being a misogynist and you say why they are in fact being a misogynist. That sentence was directed at PZ who called Armoured Skeptic a misogynist and did not provide a reason why that was. Nowhere in the video does Armoured Skeptic voice any kind of hate or dislike toward women, so to call him a misogynist because of the video is unfounded to say the very least.
So I have to reiterate to the person exactly *why* they’re a misogynist? What the ever loving fuck. And I have absolutely no fucking qualms about not letting someone have the ‘freedom to express’ their entirely odious ‘opinion’ to me. No one has the right to an audience. They can freely express their shitty opinion to the fucking walls of their own house. I do NOT have to listen to, and implying that I have to listen to people debate my humanity makes you a fucking asshole. Encouraging people to listen to those who want to harm them in some fashion is aiding and abetting the bigots, so congratulations. You are an accessory to bigotry. I hope you’re proud.
In the mean time, I need to continue denying you your freedom of speech because I haven’t provided sources for why I think you’re an asshole.
So, you’re a fucking asshole and a shitty human and you should be goddamned ashamed of yourself you ass wipe.
@nearedge
>”I wouldn’t even know what specific parts of the video to give you, it is a 30 minute argument.”
(Formatting change due to phone)
So you literally have nothing but your emotional impressions? You can fuck right off then. You are useless to me on a basic human level.
Yes! This is what I was talking to you specifically about earlier. Some people honestly do not know what they’re doing is wrong, you cannot just tell them that they are wrong. You need to convey BOTH that and why they are wrong in a way they can understand without making them get emotional or defensive about it. The point of the movement should not be to attack people for being wrong, but to educate them so that they’ll know better and do better in the future. You don’t reach people by making them get defensive, that is the idea I was trying to convey. In what you are saying you are attacking my character, which would make someone other than me get defensive and possibly retaliate against you. That’s not learning, that’s not making anyone think about why they should see women as equal to men, that’s not what feminism is about.
I guess this is going against what I was trying to say in the end. I didn’t mean to say put up with their bullshit, I was trying to say that the situation needs to be handled gingerly.
Because their feefees are more important than mine, got it. So I don’t get freedom of speech, but they do. Isn’t that just grand. They can say all manner of awful things, but I have to be ginger in my response.
I’m just gonna opt out of that right now. You clearly have no idea why your view is repugnant. It’s been calmly explained and you didn’t get it, so all I’m left with is pointing out that you are an odious human being and I hope to never encounter you in person.
You are an asshole who abets bigotry.
This talk about how you have to handle bigots with kid gloves, and not call them out all the time because it will upset them has got me thinking about the Accommodationist Wars of years gone by. I’d be curious how many of the atheists that make this argument were supporters of accommodationalist thinking vs those that realized that being loud and pushing back, and playing it softly were both valid strategies to changing minds. If they are not accommodationalists, then I would love to know what is so special about bigots that makes playing nice the only option.
That is not what I’m saying. I’m saying that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about doing something. It is wrong of someone to throw racist slurs at me, but I would be equally wrong to attack them in any way, shape, or form due to them having done so, and that includes verbally. There is a right and wrong way to handle oppression, and as a person who takes on the role of representing a movement you have to stand for peaceful protest, not retaliation. This is what I meant when I said Malcolm X vs Martin Luther King Jr. Responding with verbal attacks, as true as they may be, is what Malcolm X would do, forgiving them for being ignorant and educating them is what Martin Luther King would do.
nearedge, #221
Hey, that sounds familiar!
nearedge @221:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!
Look, you’re an engineer, right? I’m a computer scientist, so I know the mindset: you think you can understand everything so long as you formulate the proper model, set down the proper approximations. There’s a sort of swagger, of arrogance, that’s natural in both fields.
Unlike you, though, I’ve spent a little time in social justice circles. I’m no expert, by any means, but I do know that these discussions have happened for centuries. Suffragettes argued long and loud over about the proper techniques, the subjects they should and shouldn’t cover. There’s even a solid body of academic literature on the subject, dating back to at least Henry David Thoreau in 1848.
Talk is helpful, but it is cheap and easily ignored. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this and was willing to take more radical measures, hence why he found himself in a jail cell in 1963. History, alas, has falsely painted MLK Jr. as the saint and everyone else as the baddies in the 60’s civil rights movement. He became the “respectable” one, the one who got results by showing endless kindness and tolerance.
It’s utter bullshit, and in a mix of ignorance and arrogance you fell for it completely. Seriously, kid, you’re embarassing yourself here.
Ah, peaceful protest means meekly submitting to being harassed by bullies. Is that your point? If so, why isn’t it inane?
Nearedge @ 221
You’ve managed to hit on one of my pet peeves, the Revisionist Fluffy Bunny Unicorn Riding King. Go and read some of King’s own writings regarding the so-called right way to go about things. At the moment it’s clear you know next to nothing about the man.
nearedge, please be aware that your attempts at clarification basically look like you’re saying “No, you shouldn’t let people take a shit on you… but you should kinda let them take a shit on you and you should be gentle to that person.” Each ‘clarification’ ends up with the exact same thing being said that you say you aren’t saying.
@HJ Hornbeck
You are entirely misrepresenting MLK’s speech to suit your own means. What are you even implying? Did you even read what you posted? He was talking about an extremely large protest. The idea was to create a protest so large that police could not reasonably arrest/stop all of them fast enough before they spoke their message to enough people. Dr. King was arrested because he led a protest despite having been told by a police chief that he was not allowed to do so. He was thrown in jail for the same reason Bernie Sanders was thrown in jail in the late 50’s: being an outside agitator and starting a protest. Neither a chief of police, nor a court has the right to stop people from gathering in peaceful protest as per the first amendment which is why Dr. King went against the orders of the police and had the protest in Birmingham anyways.
nearedge
I think that you should stop digging.
I am not violent towards people when I call them out on their bullshit. But I am blunt and I don’t tolerate being shit upon.
Tell me again how I’m supposed to oh-so-nicely just talk to them, the way MLK in that letter says doesn’t work?
Not tolerating bullying is not aggression. Those doing the bullying are the aggressors, and are usually the bigots, misogynyists, homophobes, and other vermin against humanity. They won’t listen either, they are scared shitless things are changing, and all they have is their anger. I don’t have to tolerate their anger. And won’t. That’s my freedom of speech.
@nearedge
What would you consider an attack? There are people who react to the rational application of racist or sexist as if you slapped them in the face. How do you propose I deal with them?
Let me give you my story. You need to be a hell of a lot more specific than that pile of dreck to get me to do anything differently.
Have you ever heard of tourette’s syndrome? Strike that, I’m sure you are at least familiar with the stereotype. The reality is something that society is not very honest about at all. I have the distinction of being a human that makes every group he is a part of uneasy because biology decided that I should have an big concentrated dose of authoritarian instinct. You know that thing that Donald Trump does that gets a segment of the republican base riled up to the point where nothing can change their minds? I know how that works. That is the shit that beats on my brain until my body twitches, why do you think some of us have problems with insults?
This community taught me when I should choose to be insulting because sometimes it’s necessary. I let these people change what I am and I do not do that casually.
There are people who try to be the gatekeepers of what is appropriate language and it just so happens that things like sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe and more are just too much. Those people are weak, fear soaked wretches and they smell like prey to me. They are utterly unable to deal with the fact that some insulting characterizations are quite appropriate and I have no patience for their bleating. The shit they are enduring is a tiny fraction of what the people criticizing them have endured. And I only understand a small portion of it because of what the tourette’s does to me in a social environment.
I actually moderated my responses to you quite a bit. Think about that. What I wanted to say bears more resemblance to a rabid chimpanzee shaking it’s cage in rage, but I toned it down a couple of steps and you still could not deal with a lot of what I asked. Do you really think you are going to be competitive in a social conflict? You smell like prey…
So I offer you an opportunity to change what I am, but you must meet the same standard of evidence that the people here have.
You must say precisely why something i=t is an attack and how it is different from rational, logical criticism.
You must give me a really good reason to abandon invective when the dominant social group tries to choose what is insulting, and because invective is just plain effective. You would be surprised what you can get people to do when you drop a couple of cuss words.
You have not touched on rhetoric, but I guess it worth mentioning.
Well? I’m waiting…
@nearedge, 211
………………………………………………………………………………………………….?
Ok, no. I hearby revoke your free speech. By which I mean it’s clearly not worth my time reading anything else by you. That you think someone not paying attention to you is an infringement of your free speech is just… no. Seriously, no. That’s utter nonsense.
nearedge @227:
I’m astounded; apparently two of my university professors and a few activists have deeply misunderstood MLKjr. I’ve double-checked, and can find no reference to the size of protests. Your assertion also stands in contradiction with his enthusiastic support for sit-ins, where a handful of students would sit at the wrong part of the lunch counter. Still, if you are the MLKjr scholar you claim you are, you should have no problem citing a letter where he reverses course and endorses large-scale protest in order to confound the police.
Because otherwise, he’d have stern words for you.
WTF?
So if I’m giving a public speech and don’t give you the microphone and listen to you for the next 2 hours I’m violating your free speech?
If a street preacher approaches me I’m not allowed to say “no thanks”?
If I watch ONE youtube video I must watch ALL youtube videos?
Not listening to you is censoring you?
Get your head out of your ass.
nearedge doesn’t seem to know anything about the civil rights movement, MLK Jr, protesting and civil disobedience in general, and free speech.
Yes, it is. It’s not the first time you’ve complained that that’s not what you are saying when in fact it is what you are saying. Maybe you should think before you write, as you apparently keep realising how stupid the shit you say is after the fact.
The right way, according to you, being to put up with the abuse and politely and meekly point out to the abuser that what they are doing is perhaps not ideal….because as anybody who has gone to school knows, that works perfectly every time.
(Emphasis mine) No, it fucking isn’t. Pointing out that someone is being racist for saying something racist is fucking not on the same level and is not wrong. It is entirely fucking apropriate and if the racist is offended by being identified for what they are, fuck them.
Look, i kind of get your point about educating people, providing accurate information to the misinformed, etc, in short the accomodationists, soft-spoken, ubernice aproach, we all get that around here, but what you don’t get is that you are prioritising the feefees of the abusers to the detriment of the abused. Before you say “that’s not what i’m saying”, yes, it is. You seem to have not heard of the past 10 years in atheism, as somebody already pointed out. People have already dealt with this shit…the “this is the right way” horseshit has been taken apart a million times already…
I’m not going to touch on your surreal take on free speech, because wow. I’ll just end by saying that from now on i shall be “censoring” you, as you are currently, censoring thousands and thousands of poor people, taking away their voices and their rights, you monster (no you’re not, you’re just an idiot).
Sorry, I lost my internet the other day due to this massive storm that’s passing through.
Apparently you guys have. Why are you trying to imply that there was something wrong with those sit-ins? You are making this strange connection between peaceful protest and violence, or are you connecting violence with breaking the law? Law isn’t always right, and in this case it absolutely was not right.
Protesting and civil disobedience are not the same thing, but protesting can be a means of civil disobedience. In addition to that, the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement was to defend the first amendment rights of the people protesting. Segregation was contrary to the first amendment, telling people they cannot protest is contrary to the first amendment. And at the end of the day, MLK did not advocate violence, and he did not advocate verbal or non-verbal attacks against his oppressors. MLK’s strategy was to send a message, not to combat the people who did not agree with that message.
Please do not strawman. Your first sentence was kind of close to being analogous to what I said (still wasn’t), but you continued to go further and further away with the next two sentences and you did so in a way where you attacked a portion of my argument without actually addressing my argument.
A public speech is not a public conversation. It is not a dialogue, it is a monologue. If someone demands you give them the microphone they are attempting to deny you of your free speech.
This is also not a public conversation. You are absolutely allowed to not engage in a conversation with someone, but it is wrong to censor them after you engage the conversation. If you haven’t engaged them in conversation, they’re just badgering you.
How is that even remotely close to what I said? I honestly just want to understand how you got to this train of thought so I can correct my wording.
During a conversation, yes absolutely. If you engage in a dialogue with someone then refuse to listen to what they’re saying you are censoring them.
Imagine this complete hypothetical: A woman is saying why she should have equal rights and a man then engages her in conversation on the topic. Half way through the conversation the man said that he is no longer going to listen to her arguments because he finds the implication that women should be equal to men offensive. He is censoring her because he does not like what she’s saying.
If what you’re saying is that after engaging in this conversation you are going to willingly ignore this very response, then you would in effect be denying me my free speech. The same way I would be to willingly ignore your response in the first place. You are not obligated to read this, I would never try to force you to read it either, but you are denying me my free speech by not reading it. If you know that I’ve responded and you choose to not read what I say to you then you are denying me the ability to express my ideas to you, which you are 100% right to do because that is YOUR right as a human. However, you must keep in mind that in order to exercise that right you have to deny me of mine in this context where you have engaged me in conversation. In any other context where we have not engaged in conversation, I have no right to express an idea to you.
It doesn’t work perfectly every time, and it may not have an immediate impact; however, with enough time and a strong enough campaign it does work in the end where as attacking people verbally does not. Violent acts only beget violent acts, and violent words only beget violent words.
There’s a difference between attacking and responding. For example, over the course of this conversation I’ve been called several things:
These things are not true and I find them offensive, but I’m not going to attack them for attacking me. I come back from responses like that unfazed and respond to their arguments rather than attacking them or their words. The right way to handle these things is to listen to what they’re saying, take the time to understand why they feel the way they do, and express to them that their thoughts and feelings are incorrect.
I will also represent my position on the Syrian refugee situation. A lot of people made posts on facebook concluding that the refugees should not be allowed into the United States. I didn’t just attack them for feeling that way, not at all. I took the time to explain to them that the United States has the best refugee vetting process in the world, and that no terrorists have ever been allowed to enter the United States as refugees. I received the argument that the Tsarnaev brothers came to the country as refugees to which the rational response is that they came into the country as innocent children and were radicalized as teenagers by a few people in their community (and more over by Anwar al-Awlaki, the Al-Qaeda recruiter), but they had been law abiding American citizens for years before that happened. This is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, but I hope that the idea of how to properly handle a situation like this is what is conveyed.
Again I will re-iterate, if you are willingly choose to ignore my side of the conversation because you find what I’m saying to be offensive then you are by definition censoring me. https://www.aclu.org/what-censorship
If you hadn’t called it out yourself I would have responded by telling you that this is probably exactly what Donald Trump’s campaign manager tells him on a daily basis. Start from that realization then look outward at the world and see the kind of shit that being invective stirs up.
@nearedge
Yet you do not tell me what is objectively wrong with invective, you merely show me examples of it being used by someone with clearly bad motivations. Sometimes it’s perfectly appropriate to attack in a social context because of role-modeling. Your lesson will be lost on your example, but it is an important lesson so you do it anyway. If I see someone being harassed by a racist or a sexist, if I attack them that is a good thing.
I will also point out that you did not respond to that part of my comment. what do I do about racists and sexists that bleat out that they are being unfairly attacked? If you can not give me a tool against them you will change nothing about me but to add another bit of data for the people offering utterly unhelpful advice that happens to help terrible people.
From here, I’ll take this a step further and point out that the contents of this blog, especially the comments, are exactly why a lot of feminists do not call themselves feminists.
I am a feminist, Armoured Skeptic is a feminist, a lot of people in general are feminists regardless of race or religion.
I came here to pose a disagreement with what PZ Myers said about Armoured Skeptic’s video and instead of having an intellectual conversation about the specific points of each side of the argument this has regressed into myself and other people being criticized and abused for having a differing opinion through no fault of our own (save for some improperly made points by me which I am more than willing to admit).
the core idea of this is that I am not your enemy, Armoured Skeptic is not your enemy either. We are not misogynists or anti-feminists, we just disagree with you and Steve Shives. Although we disagree with some claims and arguments posed, we still believe that women should be treated equally to men socially, economically, politicially, and as humans. This was the point of Armoured Skeptic’s video and if PZ Myers had actually taken the time to watch the video all the way through he should have seen that.
@nearedge
Seriously, your dictionary simply asserts that it is abusive. My biological role-model as a person with tourette’s syndrome revolutionized the dictionary as we know it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language
Prove that it is abusive and not simply making a person feel bad for rational reasons in a social context.
@nearedge
>”From here, I’ll take this a step further and point out that the contents of this blog, especially the comments, are exactly why a lot of feminists do not call themselves feminists.”
I’ve met many people that call themselves feminists that female people look at with extreme skepticism. I will let them inform my decision.
>”I am a feminist, Armoured Skeptic is a feminist, a lot of people in general are feminists regardless of race or religion.”
Why? I’m actually pretty bad on the specifics of what feminism is, I can’t say much about the history or the people of specific related. But what I know really well is social conflict and issues having to do with sex and gender since those buttons get mashed by tourette’s syndrome, and I am extremely good at understanding what people are based on what they do, so I learned feminism by watching people calling themselves feminsts. I have noticed that if you are a male asserting yourself and you need claim you are a feminist, you are very likely to be defending unfeminist things.
>”I came here to pose a disagreement with what PZ Myers said about Armoured Skeptic’s video and instead of having an intellectual conversation about the specific points of each side of the argument this has regressed into myself and other people being criticized and abused for having a differing opinion through no fault of our own (save for some improperly made points by me which I am more than willing to admit).”
I saw both emotion and analysis take place when it comes to your comments. That you can not separate the former from the latter is your weakness. I do not feel sorry for you. I saw people respond to you substantively, I saw you neglect what they said, and then I saw people get upset with you.
>…”the core idea of this is that I am not your enemy, Armoured Skeptic is not your enemy either. We are not misogynists or anti-feminists, we just disagree with you and Steve Shives.”
Then stop taking actions that are supportive of misogynists and others with harmful intent towards female people.
>”Although we disagree with some claims and arguments posed, we still believe that women should be treated equally to men socially, economically, politicially, and as humans. This was the point of Armoured Skeptic’s video and if PZ Myers had actually taken the time to watch the video all the way through he should have seen that.”
I do not believe you. Your actions speak otherwise.
No, don’t let anyone form your thoughts for you. Think freely.
This is kind of an issue. Your opinion of feminism is based on the actions of other people and not on what feminism is. Feminism is simply the idea that women, in all aspects of life, should be treated equally to men. It is not anything other than that. If someone disagrees with THAT idea then they are in fact an anti-feminist.
I try to remove emotion from the things I do and say as much as I possibly can, but alas I am in fact human. As far as neglect goes, if you saw that then please point it out to me. I’m not intentionally doing it. I’ve been responding to like 10 different people at once and while I try to not miss anyone’s arguments it is almost inevitable that I’m going to.
What are those actions? You cannot just say that I’m supporting such things without also pointing out where I did in fact do that.
What actions are you referring to?
@nearedge
>”No, don’t let anyone form your thoughts for you. Think freely.”
So female people’s experiences mean nothing to you when it comes to feminism? I am thining freely and that thought process shows that female people will provide necessary data. That you respond with “think freely” means you might as well be thinking while hallucinating. The same boundaries apply.
>”Feminism is simply the idea that women, in all aspects of life, should be treated equally to men. It is not anything other than that. If someone disagrees with THAT idea then they are in fact an anti-feminist.”
And? You have ignored the context withing which I made that comment and that does you no favors when it comes to reputation.
Why does the fact that you say you are a feminist matter? You can be a male feminist and be utterly, tragically wrong.
>”I try to remove emotion from the things I do and say as much as I possibly can, but alas I am in fact human. As far as neglect goes, if you saw that then please point it out to me. I’m not intentionally doing it. I’ve been responding to like 10 different people at once and while I try to not miss anyone’s arguments it is almost inevitable that I’m going to.”
How about you finish responding to me first? If you can not respond to 10 people at once do not do so. Respond to one and do a good job.
As for emotion, why should I respect someone who thinks that emotion can be removed from thought? Emotion is a filing system structure, it’s always a factor. What matters is your personal skill at dealing with it and you have yet to explain how yours is relevant.
>”What are those actions? You cannot just say that I’m supporting such things without also pointing out where I did in fact do that.”
That would be that resisting data on what female people experience in contexts that you brought up and were addressed above. I’ve yet to see you respond to that. Do so now.
So if someone you are having a conversation with wants to continue that conversation but you want to to got bed, and you do, you are engaging in hideous censorship.
Also, have you heard of logical conclussions, like, at all, as a thing?
Also the coward nearedge needs to defend why the think they were responding to was abuse beyond the dictionary definition. I will be emphasizing this in future comments because it is a continuing issue. Nearedge is utterly fucking useless when it comes to interacting with racists and sexists.
The experiences of women are only valid in the assertions of where sexism exists society, their experiences cannot define or redefine what feminism is. In the same light, the experiences of black people can only show where racism exists in society, they cannot define what racism is. Because a lot black folks have done poorly on the SAT does not mean that the SAT is in fact racist (this is an assertion made by some members of the black community that has been posed to me and that I’ve disagreed with first hand). The SAT was not and is not designed with black people in mind either positively or negatively. Nothing about that stopped me from scoring in the 90th percentile. It is not designed to help or hinder anyone of any race or culture. It is merely a Scholastic Aptitude Test.
You can also be a female feminist and be utterly, tragically wrong. I’m failing to see where I ignored the context of what you said. You said that you “learned feminism by watching people calling themselves feminsts”. There is a fundamental issue with that statement. The fact that I AM a feminist matters because I’m making the point that I openly advocate for women’s rights.
Emotion absolutely can be removed from thoughts, and should be removed from thoughts in situations that must be handled in an objective and unbiased matter. Emotion is not what you make it out to be. Emotion is illogical, and does not deal with reason or knowledge, it is almost purely experience based and 100% subjective for that reason. It is simply how you feel. For example, it is emotion that makes people fear going to the doctor. When you remove emotion from the matter and apply logic, going to the doctor is a great thing which everyone should be doing.
That is not anti-feminist or misogynist. That is disagreeing on the conclusions drawn based on those experiences, and in some instances I didn’t even disagree with what was presented to me. If you don’t know the difference between disagreeing with someone on something, and being an anti-feminist or misogynist you shouldn’t go around calling people misogynists or anti-feminists.
@nearedge
Here you go ignorant child.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/201006/reason-and-emotion-note-plato-darwin-and-damasio
Any argument that emotion is hindering reason or logic better be paired with an argument or remain a mere assertion.
As for the rest, all it takes to say “I am a feminist” are those four words. I am happy with my feelings based on the comparison between nearedge and people clearly embedded in that movement.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
“Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive””
If you need to leave a conversation, that’s one thing. It’s completely different if you are intentionally denying them the ability to voice their opinion because you do not agree or find it offensive.
How is anything written here, or me not watching the video, denying Armoured Skeptic the ability to spread a message? How is PZed’s critique denying Armoured Skeptic the ability to spread a message?
@nearedge
Is reaming of an Atheistic Newtopia the government?
@ Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
This is just a psychologist’s opinion on the matter. If proving an argument were as simple as linking to a blog post with confirmation bias, then I could just as easily tell you that the Earth is flat and link to a blog where a geographer swears that the Earth is flat. Or I could link you to an article where a scientist SWEARS that climate change isn’t real.
Speaking of which, http://bigthink.com/experts-corner/decisions-are-emotional-not-logical-the-neuroscience-behind-decision-making.
That should have said “dreaming” in my previous comment, but if the atheistic newtopia wants to be reamed that’s none of my business..
@nearedge
1) then if emotion is overriding my reason and logic you should be able to demonstrate it.
2) That article cited data which is not opinion. Try again Child.
@nearedge
You have yet to explain how I am supposed to deal with sexists and racists when they react to that descriptive label as if they are insults. If you are useless you will not be used.
@Ogvorbis: failed human
Hang on, it is not that general. Please read the entire chain of thought here, start from #211 at least.
@nearedge
Here is an example if you can’t imagine how one might show that emotion is getting in the way of logic.
The ad hominem fallacy is when someone appeals to an irrelevant characteristic as a means of dismissing an argument. For example someone arguing that global warming does not exist because the people supporting it are on the political left. The emotions of that characteristic override that person’s ability to critically analyze the information independent of the group affiliation of the person providing the information.
This is where negative emotion overrides proper judgement and that can be demonstrated. When someone says or implies you are wrong simply because there is emotion present they deserve a good solid “fuck off” until they do the work their assertion requires.
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite@
And you’re right, I haven’t explained it. I was trying to figure out exactly how I could explain it then and I came to the realization that I was actively doing it. So, take this entire conversation as an example of what I mean.
I refuse to apply invective speech to you who are not my enemy although some here have done so to me, I will not attack you, I’ll only consider your side of the matter and respond to it. I will treat you with civility, and expect the same in return. I reject the notion that regressive behavior is a valid means of dealing with an issue.
Denying someone a platform is not denying them the freedom of speech. If I decide to set up a table and hand out literature at Disney World stating that gay marriage is an abomination unto Nuggan, Disney World has the right to ask me to stop and, if I do not, have me arrested for trespassing. If I decide to set up a table at Canaveral National Seashore stating that gay marriage is an abomination unto Nuggan, as long as I have the special use permit for protests on government property, all is good. If I decide to set up a table in your house stating that gay marriage is an abomination unto Nuggan, you have the right to ask me to stop and, if I do not, have me arrested for trespassing. YouTube is private. So is this blog. So is Facebook and Twitter and every other social media venue on the web. The owners/administrators of those venues can choose to stifle individual viewpoints (most often limited to such things as child pornography and women breast feeding babies), whether I agree or not, that is their right. A private concern or an individual can choose not to provide a platform for anyone else’s speech. Additionally, you and I have the right to take them to task for what they have decided are not acceptable on their platform. Denying someone a platform on a privately operated/owned web page is not censorship. Denying someone a platform on private property is, in most cases, not censorship. Nor is it denying an individual their freedom of speech.
Kudos to you that you allow anyone, at any time, to write or say anything that they want on your property (and that includes a website (within the limits already stated since your website would most likely be hosted by another private concern)). That doesn’t mean that I have to read it or listen to it. Freedom of speech and freedom from censorship does not mean that an audience is guaranteed. No one has to listen to me or read me. Or you. Or Armoured Skeptic. Refusing to listen is not censorship. Critique is not censorship (and telling others they cannot critique a YouTube video is also not censorship).
@nearedge
>”So, take this entire conversation as an example of what I mean.”
How?
You have been repeatedly asked what you mean my “unconstructive” or other euphemisms for functionally useless communication. You just handwaved at you previous comments as if I can read you r mind and figure out what goes with what.
IF YOU CAN NOT TELL ME PRECISELY HOW MY SPEECH IS A PROBLEM YOU DO NOT GET TO CONTROL IT. PERIOD.
Fuck off. I’m happy where I stand.
Note to self. Self, paragraphs are your friend. Sorry ’bout that.
Not quite… Ad hominem is when you attack a person rather than their argument. It has little to do with emotion and more so with attacking a person (Although, someone could do ad hominem by triggering a visceral response in the person making the judgement). The example you gave would be ad hominem, but it’s a rather poor ad hominem attack in general. The logical formula for ad hominem is something like this: Person A presents their argument. Person B points out that Person A supports Person/Position C, which is unrelated to A’s argument. B Concludes that for this reason, A’s argument is invalid. This is guilt by association, and one possible form of an ad hominem argument.
Hell, I’ll do an ad hominem attack on Hilary Clinton.
Hilary Clinton says that she’s going to be tough on the big banks. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, Hilary spoke in support of repealing Glass–Steagall. She was in support of helping the big banks before, so why should we believe that she’s going to split them up now? This is ad hominem tu quoque. There’s no emotion in this, it is a valid logical point.
@nearedge
Really? Fallacious reasoning has little to do with emotion? Just how is it that reasoning is misdirected then? You are confusing the objective structure of results with the underlying circuitry that produces it. And I see you still can’t functionally interact with the research showing that emotion does not necessarily lead to bad reasoning.
A poor ad hominem? Based on what? My example followed your formula you dense child! Person B rejected person A’s argument based on their political affiliation, an unrelated characteristic. Fuck your example, mine is fine.
Fuck you are bad at this and clearly emotionally invested on an irrational level. Why else would you replace one perfectly good example of an ad hominem with another unnecessarily? A need to show dominance.
Has anyone tried to take down the you tube channel of the tin plated skeptic? No? Then what is all the fuss about then nearedge?
My argument is that it is in general. I extended that argument by saying that it was also wrong to do so during a conversation.
Both this and my argument are true. Disney World has every right to stop you from exercising your free speech on their property. They are still denying you your free speech, and are in fact censoring you. The fact that they have the right to do it doesn’t change what it is.
Not all government property is fully public domain. This is why a permit is required. If you went onto some random street and did the same thing, it would be a different situation entirely. In fact, the permit isn’t even really required for what you’re saying, you need a permit to fall in line with the rules of the park. http://www.nps.gov/cana/planyourvisit/permits.htm
You are absolutely correct. Having the right to do something doesn’t change what it is. The law has the ability to execute someone in certain states, but that doesn’t make it not murder, that just makes it justified murder.
Now this is where you’re wrong. Social media is not private, nor is youtube or this blog. These are all what are called ‘public services’ in that anyone may use them. You may have the ability to make some information on these services private, or CPNI/CPII, but nothing you do or say on them is private. More over, nothing on the internet itself is private as the internet itself is public domain. This subject goes more into the topic of security, but the only things on the internet that should ever be considered to be private are things that are heavily guarded with digital security. But, no. Anything that is in a place where everyone can access it is by definition public.
This is true.
Actually, that is the definition of censorship… Literally! It is still denying them free speech. I think you you may be confused in my use of free speech. I’m not implying that the practice is breaking the first amendment, but that it violates the principle of free speech.
Ad hominem actually isn’t a fallacy by itself, ad hominem is a fallacy when used incorrectly. The reason your example was a poor ad hominem is because it is an example of the incorrect use of ad hominem.
Additionally, fallacious reasoning has nothing to do with emotion.
If A is in subgroup B, and C is in subgroup B, then A is in subgroup C.
This is fallacious reasoning and there is no emotion in the sentence what-so-ever.
The problem is that like the molestation, harassment and rape apologists that have a need to pull the legal world outside of its sphere of influence and into online conversation, nearedge has a need to shoehorn the term [freedom of speech] into discourse that has nothing to do with how the government influences the free speech if it’s citizens. Like it or not they have free speech because when I deny them an audience they are free to take whatever they were going to say elsewhere without getting locked up by the government. Their freedom does not come at the expense of mine, and those three words are different from the term they form.
@nearedge
Yep, my example matches the “other attribute of the person”.
nearedge:
No, it isn’t. Your cargo-cult pseudologic amuses me. In your example, the issue at hand is Hillary’s credibility, not the truth-status of a proposition, so the objection is not irrelevant (though it’s overstated) and therefore not fallacious.
nearedge:
<snicker>
(Such irony!)
Censorship has to do with imposing one’s political views on another and like it or not refusing to hear out something is not an imposition. Especially when it’s not my job to go hunting though material at the demand of another who should be able to cite it.
This is amazingly like an utterly offensive concept that I heard some MRA types going on about on youtube, “involuntary celibacy”, which turns the whole idea of volition on it’s head. Fuck this garbage.
nearedge:
Wow. You are seriously confused; the distinction you miss refers to public vs. private ownership.
(Anyone can use them, as permitted by their owners)
@John Morales
See 265
Also, a privately owned public service is still a public service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility
@ Brony, Ally of Justice Catastor
I like how I cited several definitions of the word censorship and provided an argument as to why refusing to listen to someone opinions during a conversation is censorship for you give me your definition of censorship. And to be fair, you could have very easily just watched the video and then tried to shut down my arguments by citing the video if you’re so sure PZ Myers arguments are correct. This conversation has been going on for 5 hours and some days now, and the video is 28 minutes and 22 seconds long.
@John Morales
See 265
Also, a privately owned public service is still a public service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility
Heh. I quoted from #265, so it should be evident I have seen it.
(You’re very slow)
Also, your claim was about “public services”, not about public utilities. You cited the wrong article — it should have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service. But then, you’d have no case.
(That’s called a red herring fallacy)
[erratum]
Obviously, I neglected the blockquote markup in my previous.
@John Morales
Not quite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utility
This is a debated topic as far as whether or not regulations should apply, however, the one thing both sides agree on is that social media already acts as a public utility. Interestingly, I was more pushing toward the fact that social media acts as a public service, a privately owned public service. YouTube is a service under private ownership that anyone can publicly access. This blog is also a service under private ownership that anyone can publicly access. Privately owned public services, if you will. Additionally, even if everyone can’t log into it, everyone can see it publicly which makes this a public setting.
nearedge, I refer you to my #171, the parenthetical in particular.
It’s becoming evident to me that you link to words, not to terms. It is futile.
Here is that which you cited:
Care to account for how a theory which is hotly disputed represents either a public utility or a public service.
(Your fallacy this time is a category error)
nearedge:
Why you imagine reiterating your silly contention adds any weight to your argument?
Again: the significant thing is that YouTube can ban any user they want to ban, and that PZ can do the same… on his blog.
(This time, it’s argumentum ad nauseam)
—
I seriously recommend you read the commenting rules, prominently featured in the sidebar to this very post. It makes the point you seem to fail to grasp quite clearly.
@nearedge
To be fair, several of us have watched the video, and if you read the earlier comments you’ll see that people have expanded on the substance that is entirely lacking in that video and shut down arguments that were alluded to but not made. For instance, he tells us that the wage gap does not exist as we believe it does (in reality, it does not exist as he believes we believe it does, but still exists in the way that we believe it does, because we have made the effort to understand the claims and read the studies) but provides no data and demonstrably false assertions to account for it; we discussed the common arguments against the wage gap and explained why they’re incorrect.
That video is a half hour exercise in tedium. There is no actual content within it. All that gets across is the fact that he’s offended by feminists from the 90’s for some weird reason, doesn’t understand what sex-negativity means in a feminist context, is pissy about a thing that never really got off the ground, and doesn’t understand what it means for something to be “systemic.” Oh, and that he’s offended by the idea that the environment in which you’re raised has an influence over your attitudes (because that’s what people mean when they say that people are racist and sexist whether they realise it or not – that they were raised in a society which is and has, for a very long time, been racist and sexist, and that this upbringing unavoidably had an impact on their thinking; essentially, he’s taking offence at being called human, which seems a little silly to me). It’s an adventure in the wondrous realms of failing to understand what he’s talking about.
Maybe he’s not an anti-feminist, I’m willing to believe that, but he’s allowing his opinions to be moulded by anti-feminist talking points rather than actually making the painfully simple attempt to understand before commenting. Having said that, what I’m not willing to believe is that he’s a skeptic; call this a No True Scotsman if you like, but skeptics try to understand a topic before they address it.
Also, it’s possible to be out in public, and yet not be on public ground. It’s the problem of words having multiple meanings. There are two different meanings of public at work; like how some Christians believe that all expressions of religion are banned in public, and this is evidence that they’re being oppressed, when it’s actually just that they cannot be displayed on public property, since that would be a case of the government displaying sectarian favouritism.
I could infer from this very sentence alone that PZ Myers recognizes that any information posted here is public, but I realize this is not what you were referring to. If you’re trying to say that I’m breaking one of the three rules then you’ll have to point out which one and how. If, however, you’re trying to say that PZ’s ownership of the blog makes it not a public service, then you are not correct. Anything that can be freely accessed by the public is a public service or item.
Additionally, the ability of the owner to ban someone is not an argument as to why the service is not public.
You can be banned from a public park, you can be banned from your local library, you can be banned from accessing electricity by the electric company, and you can be banned from YouTube. What do these things have in common? They’re all public services.
If you want to make a case that this blog and YouTube are not public, you should start by trying to make the case as to how it is a service contrary to the definition of the word ‘public’.
nearedge:
Remarkable how you try to deny that it’s PZ’s blog, not the public’s.
The relevant sense of ‘public’ vs ‘private’ is who has discretion over the activities of that vague “something” to which you refer — the public, or a private entity.
Amusingly, using your sense, a street preacher or a Mormon missionary are public services, too. As is spam.
(This time, you’ve appealed to equivocation)
—
PS you also have a similar blind spot towards the relevant concept of censorship.
—
Anyway, I’m out. I’ve posted more than enough posts in a row.
@nearedge
Still being a dumbass.
If I speak about a relevant aspect of the definition of a term I am not creating my own definition. One of your references addresses it actually. If I am refusing to look at something I am imposing nothing. It’s amazing the mental gymnastics you jump through to deal with the fact that it’s your obligation to cite things that change our views on things.
You know the value of bringing up a debated topic without the force of law like social media as a public good? You don’t get to force people to allow you a place on their social spaces, which is what you want here. That has the same force as trying to get me to be polite when you want to force yourself into other people’s spaces. I refuse to be polite about offensive things. Fuck off.
Hey! Now we’re back on track.
Where you been for the past little while, Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda? :>
Part of his assertion could be called incorrect. In fact, I really didn’t like the way he presented his argument for the wage gap because the literal way he posed it would make it untrue. Lop off the STEM part, and it holds up. The wage gap exists primarily because there aren’t as many women in the same higher paying fields as there are men. Beyond that, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the 7% gap in the same fields, but it’s difficult to impossible to demonstrate that this is being caused by oppression. More to the point though, when he says ‘you’ he’s not talking to feminists as a whole, he’s talking to/about Steve Shives who in his videos has represented the overall wage gap to be the true wage gap, not the wage gap based on women working in the same positions. So, yeah. He could have done a much better job of posing that argument.
“Third Wave Feminism” is the current feminist movement of which today’s feminists are a part of, which includes all of us in this blog. This gets back to the blanket terminology problem I touched on earlier. He has a problem with some third wave feminists, not every third wave feminist. There’s a some third wave feminists, including Steve Shives and the Athiesm+ movement, have a habit of publicly attacking and shaming people, including women, who disagree with anything they say. Armoured Skeptic points out in several places in his video, particularly from 19:10 to 22:20,
He says most, but that’s a definite overstatement.
Is the “thing that never really got off the ground” Atheism+? He knows way more about that whole thing than I do, but Steve Shives was part of that whole disaster. This video is really just a response to Steve Shives rather than feminism.
And as for the systemic thing, he did not once incorrectly use the word systemic. Could you clarify what you mean on that one?
This is where I’m going to fundamentally disagree with you. I’ve seen a lot of people say things like “privileged cis male”, “privileged white male”, etc, and this is something that I myself find quite troubling. Usually when I see it the person saying it is terribly out of line for having said something like that, and the usual implication is a logical fallacy. While people are a result of the culture of which they grow up in, they’re not a representative or mirror of where they grew up. Even more so, that notion seems to present itself more as shaming people for being born heterosexual, male, and/or white. I’ve had someone actually say to me that I was taking privilege from someone else by being cisgender male. If I’m interpreting this idea incorrectly, then I honestly would like you to explain it to me so I can understand it because how it’s been posed to me in the past has painted a picture that some people hate cisgendered males simply for being cisgendered males, and not for who they are as individuals. I also find all of this labeling to be derogatory and self-defeating due to auto-segregation. But, again I don’t really understand that conceptually, and I truly would like for someone to explain the concept.
Armoured Skeptic always takes the time to do his research before he posts his videos. He didn’t take any popular talking points, he just responded to the claims from Steve Shives’ “Why YouTube Atheism Needs Feminism” video in the order of which they appeared. Also, nothing in that video could be objectively be labelled as anti-feminist. I stand here as a middle party, only a fan of Armoured Skeptic’s videos and someone who believes that women should have the same rights as men, and I do not see anything anti-feminist in the video. Nowhere in the video does Armoured Skeptic say that women should be treated as less than a man, paid less than a man, not have the same rights as a man, or not be able to do the same things as a man.
@nearedge, 283
I’m off to bed pretty soon, so I’ll keep this relatively short. Apologies for ignoring some bits.
I’ve been engaged in an admittedly brief campaign of censorship against the people commenting on this topic.
Btw, just Athywren is fine – the thing after the dash is just a thing.
Technically true, but pretty much only because nobody’s really popularly declared this to be the fourth wave – today’s feminism may not be as radically different from that of the 80’s and 90’s as third wave was from the second, but there’s definitely a distinction.
Besides, it’s not really the point. People who refer to third wave feminism as a bad thing generally have no idea what it is. More often than not, when asked, or simply given the opportunity to point to a third wave feminist who has raised their ire, they give quotemines of such contemporary thinkers as Andrea Dworkin.
I didn’t make a transcript, but he claims that there’s no such thing as systemic sexism. That’s a claim that can only be made by someone who has no understanding of what systemic means, or who really hasn’t done their homework. In retrospect, I’m willing to accept that it’s the latter rather than the former.
Weirdly, you obviously understand the concept at some level, as you drew the link between social norms influencing our thinking and privilege, but… um….
Either thar person didn’t understand what they were talking about, or you didn’t understand what they were saying. Or both.
Ok, I’ll see what I can do.
So I’m an atheist. This is probably not a surprise. In some parts of the world, saying that out loud in the wrong company could get me killed, but I live in a de facto secular state (we have a state church, but their god doesn’t really factor into much of anything). I have the privilege of not having to worry that the wrong person might find out about my views on religion and set me up for a heresy charge. (That’s basically what privilege is in this sense – it’s a recognition of the things you don’t have to worry about, the barriers you don’t have push against. There’s no reason to view it as derogatory.)
I’m not cis, but I’m not trans either – not as I understand it, nor, frankly, as most of society outside of trans communities seems to understand it. I’d have a hard time accepting that I have cis privilege for various reasons, but I wouldn’t start a fight over being told that I do because I definitely have not-trans privilege: Nobody (at least nobody inappropriate) has ever obsessed over my genitals, for example; nobody has ever written an essay about my chromosomes and how they prove me to be delusional and intent on self-mutilation; nobody has accused me of attempting to assault or defile them because my gender doesn’t match their perception of me; nobody has ever attempted to murder me on discovering that the label applied to me on my birth and my understanding of my own gender are not in sync with one another, and while I suppose it’s not completely inconceivable, it’s not something that I expect to ever face; nobody has asserted that it’s simple skepticism to outright deny my own understanding of who I am… I suppose that might change if and when trans people are properly accepted by society and the savvier bigots have to go hunting for a socially acceptable target again, but I suspect we’ll be skipped because, at least in my experience, most of the shit I get seems to be splash damage from homophobia, which is (hopefully) dying away now; while I have a very confused and frustrating relationship with my body, I don’t feel as though I need to undergo surgery or hormone therapy to change it, nor do I have the pressure of people telling me that I’m not really what I say I am unless I do feel that need and undergo it.
Privilege, in this sense, is not something extra you have that others should be envious of, which you should be vilified for. It’s assumptions that aren’t made about you, (Stop that train of thought. Yes, I know, assumptions are made about you. I’m not saying no assumptions are made about you. For one thing, you’re not omniprivileged… I’m not sure that’s even possible. For another people will probably always make assumptions, no matter what.) it’s obstacles that aren’t put in your way, (Stop that train of thought too. I hope I don’t have to repeat the last brackety bit? This is already long….) it’s the things you don’t have to think about, (ditto) the stresses you don’t have to deal with. It’s not derogatory, it’s not a slur, it’s not about calling you out as a bad person. It’s just a descriptor, and an opportunity for you to recognise and think about those things. It’s, “you have no experience with this – please take these things on board before you utterly dismiss everything we’re saying.”
Sure, some people are aggressive about it, “cis scum,” etc. but I can’t blame them for that. If you spent your whole life being marginalised for who you are, if you tried to communicate the issue and get people to think about the way they’re treating you, and their reaction is to cry that you’re discriminating against them… is it surprising that people get pissed off?
Doing research doesn’t guarantee understanding, nor does it make a person a skeptic. I can spend a week reading flat earth documents before debunking a geologist’s video, but that doesn’t mean I’m demonstrating an understanding of geology or that I can claim to be a skeptic.
Why would you expect to see those things explicitly stated? Do you think prejudice can only be overt, or even that it must always conscious and intentional? Do you know what the term “dog-whistle” refers to?
Like I said, I’m willing to believe that he’s not an anti-feminist, but he’s still parroting anti-feminist talking points like the wage gap thing. That he’s not going on to add “and by the way, I believe that women should be paid less than men” doesn’t really change the fact that he’s uncritically accepting and spreading misinformation that leads people to believe that there is no problem with pay equality, when there is actually a complex and multifaceted one which can be observed in multiple ways… I live pretty near to a church. It has big stained glass windows. If I get really close to one of the little panes in one of those windows, stare very intently so that I can only see that one little piece of glass, is it reasonable of me to claim that there’s not really a stained glass window? Because that’s what he’s doing there. The big gap is made of lots of little problems. Complex, old social norms, subtle bias, overt, covert, or unintentional discrimination. There’s a lot going on, and focussing on one part and declaring the whole issue to be encapsulated in that one part is not rational.
I normally read through my posts before posting them, but that’s not happening tonight… hopefully it’s coherent. Sorry if it’s not.
Relative, in this case, is obviously synonymous with “not.”
The word “government” in boldface above is serving a double role: it is part of the noun phrase “government retaliation” and also part of the noun phrase “government censorship.”
nearedge @237:
You’ve been wheeling those goalposts quite some ways! In comment #221, you claimed MLKjr only advocated for vocal persuasion; in 223, I pointed to an example where he advocated civil disobedience was a better course. You shifted the argument in 227, now claiming MLKjr only advocated for civil disobedience for large-scale protests; in 233, I pointed out his enthusiasm for small-scale lunch counter sit-ins. Now you’ve shifted the argument again, to something that only seems to exist in your head.
Are you going to concede you were wrong about MLKjr, or are we going to suffer through more long, tortured twists of logic?
The answer is clearly going to be more long, tortured twists of logic. After all, nearedge says that if I say anything, to anyone, that if I later decide to not talk to them that i’m totally suppressing their free speech and that’s HORRIBLE. But it’s totally my right, but it’s HORRIBLE HOW DARE YOU!?
So therefore if I say “no, thankyou” to someone and they start slinging slurs at me I have to sit there meekly taking note of their ‘arguments’ because somehow this is a ‘dialogue’, and then I am supposed to counter their arguments all calmly with citations. I certainly can’t get upset, because then I’m irrational and not engaging in a dialogue.
And you, nearedge, whine about why I’m fairly certain you’re a shitty person? And DO NOT say “that’s not what I said!”. That is EXACTLY what you’ve been espousing, and your method DOES abet bigots. You just don’t want to see that.
Then there is no reason AS couldn’t have cited the conclusive academic/government paper showing that the wage gap has finally vanished, and wages have been equal for a while. Positive evidence for the claim that the wage gap doesn’t exist. He didn’t, you don’t, so it appears such evidence doesn’t exist. Therefore, the well evidenced and therefore established FACT of the wage gap exists stands until such evidence as described above is available.
Nearedge, we have had problems here in the past with MRAs and other scum trying to pretend they were having “intellectual” discussions. But, what they were really doing, was purposely giving out microaggressions, and sometimes macroaggressions, against women, PoC, rape victims, LGBT, etc., all in the name of free speech. What I always found amusing and frustrating, was their inability to take responsibility for their speech. They didn’t like being told what they were doing was aggressive and obnoxious. They didn’t like being called out for what they were and what they were doing, as it interrupted their hostile attempts to intimidate (bully) in order to shut down the discussion. Intellectual my ass.
Typically, they claimed they were discussing. In my book, discussing means you can acknowledge you are wrong if shown be wrong. Almost all couldn’t do that. They were preaching their hate and intimidation, and not listening to any rebuttals. You are doing the same. You can’t be wrong, therefore we must be. Which makes me utterly skeptical of everything you say.
I have better things to do today than to read your drivel.
@Athywren
Thank you very much for taking the time to explain things in such a candid way. I’m going to reply the the comments that came in behind yours first, but I did want to make sure that I expressed my appreciation to you. It is honestly rare to receive such an open and honest response from another person, especially online, and I would not doubt that it took a lot within yourself months or years prior to this before you felt comfortable talking about this subject as it relates to yourself in such a manner. Thank you! :>
@Hj Hornbeck
I will defend that I was not wrong about what I said about MLK and then prove it using the very comments you mentioned. I will not add on to them, or change them in any way, I will only re-iterate what I said earlier via copy-and-paste. You have twisted your own argument against me at least twice now, and for some reason you felt the need to draw attention to it in order to create another logically shifted argument against me and I’m actually going to call it out this time since you’re accusing me of the very thing you did more than once.
@Rowan vet-tech
Let me start by saying: That’s not what I said. Not “that’s not what I meant to say” or “I may have mistyped that”. That is literally not what I said. For the very hypotheticals you provided what I said was literally the opposite and I am going to just copy and paste what I said earlier to signal how it stands in juxtaposition with what you said that I said. This is, by definition, a straw man.
I neither said nor implied that forgiving them for being ignorant and educating them is the only thing Martin Luther King Jr. would do. I quite clearly present a situation in which a black man, me, receives racially charged remarks and I state how Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. would respond to said situation. I even specifically brought up peaceful protest in this very comment. The protest in Birmingham which got King thrown in jail was a peaceful protest, as were the sit-ins.
Considering what I said in #221, I have a hard time seeing where you yourself are even referring to civil disobedience. Your statement “Talk is helpful, but it is cheap and easily ignored. Martin Luther King Jr. knew this and was willing to take more radical measures, hence why he found himself in a jail cell in 1963” appears to directly be implying that Martin Luther King Jr. was willing to resort to violence if necessary. That by itself could be taken to mean that you were talking about civil disobedience by some stretch of logic; however, you strengthen that you are referring to violent action when you go on to say “History, alas, has falsely painted MLK Jr. as the saint and everyone else as the baddies in the 60’s civil rights movement.” and further this implication with the following sentence “He became the “respectable” one, the one who got results by showing endless kindness and tolerance.” The latter sentence is a direct implication that showing kindness and tolerance in fact was not what Martin Luther King Jr. did. You are directly opposing the idea that Martin Luther King Jr. got results by maintaining peaceful protest, and you then you yourself twisted your own words to mean civil disobedience after I called you out for implying that Martin Luther King Jr. used violence as a tool to achieve a goal.
I’ll point out that I made the small error of saying ‘speech’ and not ‘letter’, but what I said here is exactly what MLK alluded to in the very letter you linked:
Finally,
In #233 you did in fact do that, so there’s nothing to point out about quote other than that you did not address the question asked of you: Why are you trying to imply that there was something wrong with those sit-ins? You are making this strange connection between peaceful protest and violence, or are you connecting violence with breaking the law?
And I’ll finish this response to you by asking an additional question, are you going to concede you were wrong about MLK jr., or are we going to suffer through more long, tortured twists of logic?
@ Rowan vet-tech
Your first and second paragraph are in direct contradiction of what I said.
Since I was on the topic of MLK earlier and I brought it up in relation to what you said to me to begin with, I’ll also leave this quote from MLK. I will also clarify that when I first invoked the idea of MLK I thought you were suggesting that the response to someone being invective toward you was to be invective toward them.
@Nerd of Redhead
The problem with this is that Armoured Skeptic did not say that the wage gap didn’t exist, he said that the wage gap did not exist in the way that Steve Shives portrays it. He specifically said in the video: “The gender wage gap does not exist in the way that you think it does. Yes, women as a whole are making less money than men as a whole, but that’s because there are less women in STEM fields. And not because they’re not allowed to join it’s because they do not want to join.“
In my response to Athywren I said that I didn’t like the way that he posed this argument. You could say that women don’t gravitate toward STEM fields; however, I believe that the truth of the matter is that as girls are raised into women they are typically pushed away from STEM fields and into other jobs that do not pay as well as STEM jobs. In the same breath, I will also say that this is not because people think that women can’t do the same jobs men can, but they assume that women would not be interested in doing those same jobs while not realizing that they are raising their children in a way that has a high likelihood of making them not interested in doing those jobs, and I think we all know this statement is true because we’ve all been children once. You know that growing up you saw parents, teachers, and other people of authority drawing lines in the sand between genders. You know that when you order a kid’s meal in a drive-thru they ask your parents “Boy toy or girl toy?”. You know that society has a problem with drawing these arbitrary lines in a way that unintentionally prevents girls from growing up with the same experiences as boys, and you know that we are in agreement on this.
I’m listening to what everyone is saying to me, but with a lot of things I either don’t agree or find some points to be incorrect. I’ve admitted to being wrong about something at least twice now, but this also relates back to what I was telling Rowan vet-tech. You can’t just say that someone is wrong, and you can’t really get mad if they don’t accept you telling them that they’re wrong when you don’t provide direct proof of them in fact being wrong.
Through the course of the past 149 posts, I can only specifically cite two people(Brony, and HJ Hornbeck) as having tried to show where anything I said was wrong with any kind of evidence, and everything else has just been logical debate. And, I’d also like to point out that you’re kind of making a logical fallacy here that I think everyone’s parents have made before called the Argument from Ignorance Fallacy, or the “Always have to have the last word” fallacy (Proof by Assertion).
golly
that was a right mess
nearedge:
<smirk>
Can’t even do sophistry right; the contention works either per capita or in toto — it’s right both ways.
(I like how the helmet imagines STEM practicioners are the highest earners, too…
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046855/fast-feed/how-the-10-highest-paid-women-ceos-compare-to-their-male-counterparts
http://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-sexism-exposed-in-top-paid-actresses-vs-top-paid-actors-lists/)
Firstly: I am not representing a movement. I’m representing me, a fully human being, and what I will and will not tolerate. This includes anyone even slightly hinting that I am less because of my sex, that anyone is less because of their sex, gender identity, or lack thereof, that anyone is less because of skin color, ethnicity, or nationality, that anyone is less because of sexual orientation, romantic orientation, or lack thereof. Because I am a representing myself, a human being, I’m going to call out shitty behaviour and I’m not going to write a 10,000 word essay with citations. Especially in face-to-face dealings, I’m not going to detail why the behaviour is shitty, just that it is. Because it IS shitty.
And telling me that if I engage with someone that I must therefore CONTINUE to engage or else I’m denying them freedom of expression somehow, is shitty. It tells that I have to listen to bigots, or else I’m being an asshole.
me:
you:
You said that if I engage in a dialogue, I must allow the person to continue or I’m denying them freedom of expression. But that it’s totally my right to do so, and is okay to do so, but I’m denying them freedom of expression (which is coded as therefore being OMG HORRIBLE HOW DARE YOU).
So yeah, I DID tell you before why what you said is shitty, and your insistence on it is shitty, and that it abets bigotry by making ME seem the bad person (I’m denying their RIGHTS) when I don’t want to listen to bigoted statements. You just didn’t want to listen, because invective.
Part of you being shitty is your fucking insistence on tone as being more important than substance. Not that you don’t think substance is important but it’s damn clear that for you, pretty words are definitely higher up on the list. And that’s a really shitty thing to consider important.
Also, please learn the difference between hyperbole and strawman. You are really terrible at identifying fallacies.
@John Morales
For this to mean what you’re implying it to mean, you would have to show how the pay differences here are the result of some kind of oppression and to make matters worse, your examples are of fields where the subjects within get paid directly based upon not their own skill, but the success of the projects of which they work on. Are you trying to suggest that Marissa Mayer, the President, CEO, and head of the Board at Yahoo, is oppressing herself by not taking more money than she actually needs from her own company?
Additionally, you should look into why David Zaslav is cited as making such an absurdly large amount of money because in 2013 he received $33 Million in compensation, which is a lot less than the $214 million in total compensation that Marissa Mayer herself received in that same year. There is a LOT going on at the CEO level that they have no interest in disclosing to the public or the government for that matter. Additionally, this is not showing how there is oppression at this level when we already know that there are more male CEO’s than female CEO’s which means that logically, there are also a lot more successful businesses with male CEO’s than there are successful businesses with female CEO’s. This might be proof of something if they were all working at the same company, but since they each work for different companies, with different net profits, different board memebers, share holders, business strategies, and numbers of employees.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-discovery-ceo-david-zaslav-156-million-20150403-story.html
http://mashable.com/2014/04/30/marissa-mayer-compensation-2013/#DWhXSvXCKOqx
Now, with the hollywood thing… Come on John, honestly? You know that how much actors and actresses make is directly tied to the success of the works that they act in, the collective value of all of the works they’ve done in the past, and their overall relevance.
Jennifer Lawrence has been in two productions in 2015: Joy(which just came out) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 which has made $600 Million worldwide.
Robert Downey Jr. has only done Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015 which has made over $1.4 billion worldwide.
When you compare them as percentages, J. Law made MORE than RDj. She took home a total of 8.6% of the movie’s total revenue compared to the 5.7% RDj made. This means that if Mockingjay Part 2 had grossed $1.4 Billion, she would have made $121.3 Million dollars. And, seeing as how Joy just released yesterday, December 25th, she could even top RDj’s $80 Million if it sells well enough before the end of the year.
You left a VERY important sentence out of that.
Okay! With what you expressed to me, I think I can clear this up finally.
Saying anything to someone is not necessarily engaging them in conversation.
If someone says “Hey, I want to talk to you about XYZ” and you say “Sorry, I’m not interested in talking about XYZ” that is not engaging them in conversation. You, in fact, declined their request to converse with you. However, if you agree to the conversation and they say something about XYZ you don’t like to which you promptly end the conversation then you have denied them the ability to express their ideas to you.
If someone says to you “Hey, did you know that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain?” and you say “No, I did not know that.” and you two go on about your day that is not a conversation, that’s just communication. If you were to instead say to them “No, I did not know that, but what do you think about Spanish cuisine?” you would be making a request to engage in conversation. If they say “I don’t really want to talk about Spanish cuisine” then they’ve denied your request to engage in conversation, but if they say “I think that Spanish cuisine is vile” and you say “That is offensive to Spanish people” and end the conversation then you are denying them the ability to express their ideas to you. It doesn’t mean that you’re evil or wrong it just means that you do not want them to express ideas to you that you find offensive.
Now, let’s use a far less innocent example.
If you are in the middle of a conversation with someone and they say “Hey, how about those Muslims? I think those satanist jihadist bastards should all be blown up.” and you promptly end the conversation with them then you are denying them of their free speech. It for damn sure does not mean that you’re wrong for doing so and you’re certainly not evil for not wanting to listen to their backwards ass hateful views on a religion other than theirs, but you are still denying them their free speech in relation to yourself and you are 100% within your rights as a human to do so. If someone wants to use their free speech to convey disgusting thoughts to you that you find offensive, you have a right to deny them of their free speech in relation to you. I did not say or imply that it was inherently good or bad because it cannot be good or bad, it just is.
I think that with this, the idea here is definitely cleared up so I’ll relate the idea back to the context of which it was first introduced:
The idea here is that I am criticizing PZ Myers for having publicly joined the conversation by criticizing Armoured Skeptic and calling him a misogynist and then not allowing Armoured Skeptic to respond to his criticism to him directly by blocking him on twitter. And, to be 100% fair so that nothing is left out, Armoured Skeptic didn’t send him a tweet belittling him or anything like that he said this:
That’s literally all he said.
Heh. That you seek to justify the discrepancy is an admission that it exists.
Oh yeah… http://qz.com/570625/it-pays-to-be-a-woman-in-banking-but-not-nearly-as-much-as-a-man/
No one is saying that it doesn’t. What we are saying is that it is very rarely due to some kind of oppression. Until not too long ago in history it was unheard of for a woman to be even working a job so logically it is going to take some time for the number of women making some amount of money to catch up to the number of men making that same amount of money, and the fact of the matter is, women will eventually be the people making the most amount of money in the world. Women will inevitably wind up as the biggest money earners in the end, after things balance out, because there are far more women in the world than there are men, and this is because of the fact that the human genome prefers women over men. What we’re saying is that it’s on the rise and almost equal and only in extremely rare cases is someone trying to stop it from catching up. Not to mention that it’s already illegal to discriminate against women in the workplace. I mean like, let’s say assume that there is some kind of overwhelming oppression from a lot of men against women in the workplace. What do you want society to do about it, make it illegal? It’s illegal already. That was kind of the point of second-wave feminism if you don’t recall which was settled with the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The pay gap has been slowly closing since then and is continuing to close.
http://www.pay-equity.org/info-time.html Look at this chart! The overall pay gap has been on the steady decline since 1960, and at the rate it’s increasing it won’t exist at all by 2042.
So when some feminists claim that there is a systemic issue of female oppression in the workplace, it just simply isn’t true. Second-wave feminists already took care of that problem, the economy just needs time to accept all of the new people in its workforce and a systemic change in a country of over 318 million people and counting takes time.What you’re doing with this is sending legitimately concerned people on a witch-hunt and what they wind up doing is looking for a problem where there isn’t one, or more specifically, looking for the wrong problem because the problem is how to get the numbers to balance out faster not how to get the numbers to balance out in general because that was already taken care of.
What I’m trying to say is that this particular thought in the current feminist movement is leading to a lot of feminists demonizing people who have done nothing wrong, and because of that people are starting to develop a fear of feminism in general and it’s really defeating the feminist movement as a whole.
@278 Athywren
You were right, we can add “systemic” to the pile of things nearedge doesn’t understand.
I’m in awe at nearedge’s ability to twist and knot definitions into comical meaninglessness to suit their case. You’d make an awesome creationist.
Yeah, because microaggressions, internet abuse, denial of sexism, etc, are “nothing wrong”.
People are just going about their business being perfectly unbiased and unprejudiced and those damned feminists are bothering everyone and making shit up and whining about nothing! Of course there are sectors of people that are turning against those nagging, whiny b*tche….i mean….feminists. And then Santa came and gave everybody a new christmas bong!
Meanwhile in reality, people have biases and prejudices that affect, in this case, women, in ways big and small, and when people point this out, no matter if they are aggressive or if they are the nicest, most polite of sugarbunnies, sections of those in a position of social privilege and who don’t want to recognise either that fact or their biases and prejudices, push back by attacking the people who call out the abuse and the unjustice, denying the existence of the problem, inventing ways to make it look like it’s vanished into thin air, pretending that the calling out of the problem is the “real” problem. In some cases, they do this out of conscious malice, out of spite and hatred towards the group that’s trying to speak out, in others, it’s an emotional, unrecognised defensive reaction towards being told that they are unwittingly causing harm or seeing the status quo challenged. And yes, in a tiny minority of cases, it’s actually legitimate as there are some arseholes in every group, including feminism. Out of those, you are waving away the first two, using your magical powers of ignorance and unskeptical a priori conclussions, and making a molehill out of the grain of sand that is the third group. Congratulations, you are part of the problem.
nearedge:
You’re in denial about what helmet said, ain’t ya?
Note that its admitted existence [by you, not by helmet] is functionally oppression. Duh.
An injury hurts every bit as much whether it was accidentally or deliberately caused.
Note also that the quotation was “The gender wage gap does not exist in the way that you think it does.”, not “The gender wage gap does not exist for the reason you think it does.”
Um. We are living in the present, not in the future.
(And when you die, there’ll be pie in the sky!)
—
Well, there — you’ve said it. Pure concern trolling.
I personally think it’s a very stupid thing to say.
(Fearsome feminism, Oh my!)
@299 John Morales
No, no, no, no, John, it only counts as oppression if you can get video confessions of at least 80 CEOs where they explicitely say they pay women less because they hate them, with those exact words, looking straight at the camara, in HD, with signed documents confirming their identity, soundness of mind and that they are not being threatened by The Feminazis.
Otherwise, it’s just hysteria…
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
Implying that there is an issue with N in society means that the issue with N is a systemic issue in the social system
Society is a system. If society has an issue it is by definition a systemic issue.
nearedge, consider this claim of yours:
Let me put an analogy to you (and no, I’m not suggesting race and gender issues are particularly similar, except in certain abstract aspects):
You claimed expertise in matters of race, so do you think there’s a “prison gap” between PoC and whites, for example?
If so, do you think that’s symptomatic of PoC oppression?
If so, do you think it’s systemic?
(Didn’t the civil rights movement already take care of that problem? The laws are in place, no?)
@John Morales
Note also that the quotation was “The gender wage gap does not exist in the way that you think it does.”, not “The gender wage gap does not exist.”
You also seem to not understand what oppression is.
If there are not equal numbers of women and men in particular positions, and no one is controlling it then it isn’t oppression.
This is the same argument that should have been used by my old school against the feminist group who got them to shut down the culinary arts class. If the school themselves is not forcing women to do it, then it clearly isn’t oppression it is just a popular choice of female students.
You missed the point by a long shot.
It is impossible to immediately close the wage gap, the same way it is impossible to instantaneously spread information to the entire united states or like how it is impossible to remove the cold virus from the human body instantaneously. These things are impossible for the same reason: the subject is millions of items (People, viruses) and they cannot be changed in the same instance. There are millions of jobs, and those jobs are mostly filled by men. New openings are not created everywhere every second, and openings have to be filled by judging applicants based on some proprietary criteria. It is illegal to include gender as part of that criteria. If the majority of applicants for higher paying jobs are men, then it is more likely that a man will be chosen for that job, and this is a known fact.
https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/textio-unitive-bias-software_n_7493624.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2014/09/11/are-women-too-timid-when-they-job-search/
And, I will also point out this particular article from a school that is at a point where it has to turn down more female applicants than male applicants. http://www.browndailyherald.com/2012/04/26/female-applicants-face-lower-acceptance-rates/
Now, by itself that sounds pretty bad, but read the reason why:
More students at the school are women than are men and the majority of applicants are female. As of today 52% of undergraduates at Brown are female which means that overall, they are accepting more women than they are men. This means that while they accept more women in general than they do men, they receive several times more female applicants than they do men. For this very year, 60% of all applications to brown were from women and there were 30,944 applicants. This means that 18567 were female applicants and 12377 were men. Of those 30,944 applicants, 10.8% of male applicants were accepted and 7.6% were women. And of those accepted applicants 1336 were men and 1411 women. There were a total of 2747 accepted applicants, of those 51.3% were female! So this is not oppression where you have a school accepting more female applicants than male applicants.
A law was put in place to close the wage gap 72 years ago, it is doing its job, the wage gap is closing. It cannot be closed instantaneously. There is literally nothing you, I or anyone else can do to make that happen. I even took the time to explain to you why this is.
This is not ‘concern trolling’. I have pointed out why seeing the wage gap as being due to some kind of workplace oppression is incorrect (Unless you want to say it’s due to the workplace oppression that used to exist in which you would be correct). The problem will take care of itself in time. If you want it to happen faster then figure out how to make it happen faster, but do not say that there is some unknown group oppressing women at large because that is not true and when you perpetuate that idea you send well-meaning people who just want a better world on a witch-hunt.
Don’t be silly, the “prison gap” is the result of black men’s choices and the fact that they just don’t want to join the STEM fields.
@John Morales
Of course it is, we know that it is, it has been demonstrated to be true that there is a systemic issue of racism that comes from both police training and the privatization of the prison system.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/systemic-racism/
The problem here is that no one has been able to prove that there is a systemic issue of sexism. See, if the disproportionate number of black people being incarcerated could be linked to a disproportional number of black people committing crimes then it wouldn’t be racism, it would just be that black people commit more crimes. But this isn’t the case. It has been documented by the FBI that about 70% of all crimes in 2012 were committed by white people. https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/43tabledatadecoverviewpdf
This stands in juxtaposition to the fact that 35% of all prisoners in the US in 2012 were white while 38% were black. This is direct evidence of a systemic issue.
The thing with feminism is that while there is a wage gap, there’s no evidence showing that it’s being cause by a systemic issue of sexism in the workplace. The evidence shows that there in fact is not one.
Nope, nothing. You have evidenced nothing. You have blathered greatly, but you haven’t evidenced it properly, and your blather is treated with the same skepticism as the testament that a deity exists or the Earth is only 6000 years old.
You failed. Why to you stop while you’re losing, as you can’t win the argument. You don’t know how.
No, I didn’t leave out an important part, because….
Example of a conversation:
Him: Do you want to get a drink?
Me: No, thankyou.
Also above is an example of me shutting a conversation down, and clearly not wanting to continue it.
Now, I don’t know where you live, but in the states rights are practically fetishized. Just look at how people react to the idea of their guns being regulated, and your own cries of “FREE SPEECH!”… when I AM NOT THE GOVERNMENT. I cannot jail you, or silence you. Not listening to you is NOT silencing you because I have not taped your mouth shut or bound your hands. I’ve simply declined to be part of your audience.
But you go on, and on, and on, and on, about removing someone’s rights, but heeeeey, it’s totally okay, you’re just denying their rights, yaknow? So here, in the united states, that is a dogwhistle for “This person is horrible and awful and anti-american!” Which then, in turn, tells me that I am a horrible person for not listening to other people spew horrible stuff, especially if we were engaged in a prolonged conversation prior.
Say I was discussing the latest star wars movie with someone, and they started going on about how women could never be Jedi because they’re too weak mentally to control the force. If I respond that that is blatantly untrue, and a fucking shitty thing to say, and then remove myself, I have not at all denied that person’s rights. They can still talk to the air. They can still find someone who agrees with them, and rant to them.
SO FUCKING STOP SAYING I’M DENYING RIGHTS WHEN I AM NOT YOU DISINGENOUS SHITHEAD.
:D
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
Things that people claim are true only if they can prove them to be true. If you cannot prove that some percentage of CEOs are paying their female employees less intentionally or are intentionally not hiring female applicants then you cannot say that it is the case. I could say that my teachers have given me bad grades on tests because they’re racist, but I cannot prove that to be true because on every test I’ve received back the teacher has marked each question I got wrong and showed me what the correct answer was. The evidence does not show that. No claim is true without proof. The fact that there is a gender wage gap only proves that there is a gender wage gap. It does not prove why it exists.
No one said that. I said that innocent people are being vilified by feminists who are chasing after an enemy that has not been proven to exist. i.e.: A witch-hunt.
A lot of people are literally going about their business being perfectly unbiased and unprejudiced just to be called misogynists and anti-feminists for something they themselves did not do. When it can be proven that someone is doing something for misogynistic reasons, no one argues with it except for legitimate misogynists and anti-feminists, but it if has not been proven then no one has a reason to believe that it’s true.
There are lots of people who have biases and prejudices, but the overwhelming majority for the majority of issues do not. I know that today especially that seems like it isn’t true with Donald Trump being the front runner in the republican party, but we’ve always known that within the republicans are the majority of people with pre-existing prejudices against people of different genders and races, and only 40% of them are in favor of Trump which means that closer to 40% of 42% of people in America are prejudice in general because 42% of Americans are republican. 40% of 42% of Americans is 16.8% of all Americans.
Furthermore, when you look at the actual data for proven workplace discrimination in 2014 only 3.5% of claims were able to be proven when they went to trial, and 9% were ended with settlements. I’m willing to count the settlements as an admission of guilt, even though I’m sure some of them were not guilty (not on GP mind you, but it is possible to have a situation which strongly points to one thing when it is in fact not that thing). So let’s say that 12.5% of all of these gender discrimination cases were proven to be true. In 2014, 29.3 of all discrimination charges were gender based or 26027 total cases. I could only find the number of female workers in the US from 2013, but the number should have increased in 2014 so this number will only add to the percentage of overall discrimination, not to mention that the 12.5% of all gender discrimination cases includes both men and women, but let’s assume that the 12.5% is purely women. 12.5% of 26027 is 3253.375, which I’ll round up to 3254 because you can’t have 3/8 a person. If 118,555,000 women were working in 2013 (which again, should be less than the actual 2014 number and skew the results in favor of discrimination mathematically), and there were a total of 3254 proven cases of gender discrimination that means that only 0.0027% of female workers in 2014 can be proven to have been discriminated against.
http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/definitions.cfm
http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/sex.cfm
http://eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/charges.cfm
http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/women-in-the-labor-force-a-databook-2014.pdf
The evidence for the claim of oppression is simply not there.
Again, you cannot just say that this is in fact the case, you have to prove it.
Nearedge, nothing we say to you will ‘prove it’ to you, because you don’t want to see it. You’ve shown over and over again that when presented with evidence that you hand-wave it away. You may think you’re countering it, but you’re not.
Prove it. The overwhelming weight of evidence says you are fucking wrong.
Nope, there is plenty of evidence for institutional sexism and bigotry. You don’t want to see it, as it interferes with your delusion of how the world functions. We see the same attitude with those of who have the delusion of a deity and young Earth.
The problem for you is that if institutional sexism and bigotry still exist, you feel you must be a sexist/bigot. Not true, as you could be working to remove those traces like the SJWs are doing.
Only if you continue to support the status quo, you do support the present institutional sexism/bigotry, and therefore you support sexism/bigotry.
@Nerd of Redhead
What are you talking about? I provided plenty of evidence and in my last post I supplied definitive evidence. I didn’t just give what I thought, I gave articles that show very clearly what the issues are, all of which were written by women who are tasked with studying this as a profession by the way. If I can’t win the argument it isn’t because it I’m not supplying evidence, that’s for sure.
@Rowan vet-tech
That wasn’t by any definition a conversation, that was just communication.
http://www.grbj.com/articles/78105-the-big-difference-between-conversation-and-communication
http://relationshipplaybook.com/2010/08/conversation/
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-interaction-communication-conversation-and-discussion
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-difference-between-conversation-communication-syed-nawaz-uddin
I’m in the US, but I’m not an extreme conservative so I don’t fetishize human rights. I’m also not making cries of free speech in the way you’re implying. Everyone has a right to free speech, and everyone has the right to deny someone of free speech as it relates to them. It is not right or wrong to do things that are within your rights. Morality is subjective, and the idea of free speech is not.
You are still not allowing someone to express their ideas to you so as it relates to you and you specifically, you have denied the other party free speech.
No, that’s just how you interpret it. I told you earlier that the revocation of rights with respect to yourself is neither good nor bad. It does not have morality, it is just something you are able to do.
I would agree with part of that as it certainly is blatantly untrue, but then I would also go on to point out that there are plenty of female Jedi, for example: Shaak Ti, Yaddle, Depa Billaba, Adi Gallia, Stass Allie, Bultar Swan, Jocasta Nu, Ahsoka Tano, Aayla Secura, Luminara Unduli, Barriss Offee, Tahl, and these are only Universal Protection Council members. Oh! And let’s not forget about the first female Jedi Master, Karymis Mar-Klaar. You can tell someone off, but proving them wrong is more effective. I’d rather claim my victory than just dismiss them entirely.
You still are. Stop treating it like it’s a bad thing, and please stop with the verbal harassment. That’s not cool.
@Rowan vet-tech
What evidence have you presented? I’m asking you to provide evidence. You can’t just say things and have them be true, you need to provide proof of what you’re saying.
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
Where is this evidence? Why did you not just respond with it if you’re aware that it exists? I would love to see it. I would love to see the evidence that proves your claims to be true. I’m not inherently opposed to any argument, I did my own research, cited that research, and did not find any evidence that the majority of people are prejudice. I also presented this evidence in the argument I made earlier.
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
I’m not supporting the ‘status quo’, I found no evidence of institutional sexism and bigotry. If you have evidence then show me it. I don’t care if I’m wrong, I just want you to prove that I’m wrong if I am in fact wrong. If institutional sexism exists, that doesn’t make me a bigot or a sexist because I myself am not bigoted or sexist. I am a feminist as I have disclosed earlier, and I have no intolerance toward anyone with differing beliefs than myself. I accept them, in fact, I accept them to the point where I will not end a conversation with them if they say something that offends me.
You know, i could just dismiss the evidence for systemic racism, like you do with the evidence for systemic sexism. I mean, unless you have taped confessions of racists declaring their hatred of POCs, how could i possibly evaluate the existence of biases and prejudices and their manifestations in today’s society?
But i’m not gonna, because the evidence for systemic racism is compelling for anyone who is not blind to it, just like the evidence for systemic sexism is fucking everywhere, unless you are determined to find ways to dismiss it and pretend it’s not there.
Bullshit.
Just because YOU don’t consider their actions to be sexist, it doesn’t mean that people are being called out on imaginary sexism in any significant numbers. When sexism is called out, the overwhelming majority of times, there is a perfectly good reason for it, whether you see it or not. If you weren’t so intent in denying sexism and you listened to women and what they are actually complaining about, maybe you’d actually fucking see that in general terms they aren’t whining just because, they aren’t prostesting about imaginary aggressions, they aren’t playing the victim…
I mean, do you even know any women? Because i do and not only do i hear about their experiences, i see them as well, and as good as things are around here compared to other places, their lifes are fucking full of sexism, big and small.
Perfectly unbiased, my fucking arse…
nearedge @289,
This is unmitigated horseshit. In point of fact MLK was jailed in 1963 not because he committed any acts of violence but rather because of acts of civil disobedience. Namely he violated Alabama’s law against mass public demonstrations. In light of this historical fact your contention about being “willing to resort to violence” is absurd revisionist nonsense of the highest order.
Your supposed implication about violence makes sense if and only if you ignore actual history (that he was jailed for civil disobedience) and substitute your own made up history instead. It further requires you to ignore everything MLK said and wrote about nonviolence.
It doesn’t require any stretch at all. It merely requires acknowledging actual historical facts such as the actual reason MLK was actually jailed in 1963 and the things he actually wrote and said about nonviolence.
So can you tell us why he was jailed in 1963? Was it for violence or for civil disobedience? Can you tell us whether he advocated for violence or nonviolence?
@Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia
No one said that taped confessions were the only way of proving things. If there is in fact evidence for systemic sexism ‘fucking everywhere’ then why won’t you just show me some? I’m 100% open to the idea that there is systemic sexism, you just have to show me it because by my own admission, I have not found any evidence of such on my own. I must not be great at finding this evidence and I clearly need help if that’s the case.
Actually, the numbers I showed said that the overwhelming majority of sexism cases are found to not hold water: http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/sex.cfm
I don’t have any intent to deny sexism. Sexism definitely still exists, but not at the rate you’re claiming it to according to the numbers from the EEOC.
Well, yeah! I know plenty of women, most of my friends are women. Some of my friends are even feminists. We talk about the times when sexism comes up, but it’s almost always some random jerk being a jerk. The overwhelming majority of people they come across aren’t sexist toward them.
@We are Plethora, Protectors of the Orb of Tranquility ~+~ Seated on the Throne of Fantasia
I think you entirely misinterpreted what I was saying. I wasn’t saying that MLK was willing to resort to violence, I was saying that HJ Hornbeck was suggesting that he was. Of course he was jailed for civil disobedience.
That essentially was my argument.
nearedge,
No we understood exactly what you meant. Your contention that HJ Hornbeck was implying MLK was willing to resort to violence doesn’t make any sense at all in light of the actual reason MLK was jailed.
You quoted HJ Hornbeck as saying:
You seem to agree that “more radical measures” and “hence why he found himself in a jail cell in 1963” refers to acts of civil disobedience as opposed to acts of violence.
Which is why it makes no sense at all to then claim that HJ Hornbeck “appears to directly be implying that Martin Luther King Jr. was willing to resort to violence if necessary.”
Nearedge, so it’s only sexism if it is found to be so by law enforcement? There are people who don’t think men petting my hair without my consent as sexist. Law enforcement probably wouldn’t consider it so, either. But it is. Because women’s bodies are viewed somewhat as public property.
Being told to smile is sexist. Saying I’d be prettier with makeup is sexist. Trying to take a 27# bag of dog food from is sexist. There are tons of things that are sexist that never become ‘cases’.
Also, I still can’t take away anyone’s rights, because I’m not the government. Shall we continue this stupid tapdance of yours?
Oh, and hypothetical horrible star wars guy’s response to you:
“That’s just how unrealistic it is. If it were real, there’d be no female Jedi. That’s just the movie makers submitting to the PC sjw-types.”
So yeah, when faced with that sort of shit for years and years and years, you kinda stop bothering to explain. We already know what’s coming.
[zombie thread]
nearedge @221:
nearedge @289:
And, as I pointed out, MLKjr. argued that forgiveness has limits. Your dodge was to equivocate between “verbal attacks” and “peaceful protests:”
nearedge @289:
These aren’t remotely similar. MLKjr had no problems with disruptive protests, either, as I quoted. Which you then claimed to be an endorsement of violent protests.
nearedge @289:
Your entire comment history here has been a never-ending trainwreck of misinterpretations, denial, and endless crank theories. Some examples that struck me:
@293:
@308:
I had a citation which refutes this in comment 152, which you’ve ignored.
@296:
So second-wave feminism completed a total systematic change to the worldwide workforce in less than two decades, yet systematic change is difficult and several decades on the process still isn’t done?
@303:
And yet those laws aren’t why the gap has decreased in the United States, other people are taking action to close the gap, and the world isn’t the United States.
Aimee Picchi. “Gender Pay Gap Is the Smallest Yet, but Don’t Rejoice.” CBS Moneywatch, September 15th, 2015.
You would have learned that if you read through my citations.
@ 305:
Sure, if you ignore the existence of a worldwide systemic gender gap, and the evidence for much of that gap being due to non-paid productive work, and the evidence for occupancy segregation and the undervaluation of care-related work, and the evidence for undervaluation of women and mothers shown in laboratory experiments, and the evidence for differing mean performance, then yes, there is nothing which proves systemic sexism exists in the workforce. You have to ignore the words of many economists, from the USA and around the world, but you seem up to the task.
@296:
The fuck is this?! No, don’t explain it to me, I really don’t care. You’re just another crank who’s happy to quote the scraps of evidence that support their pet theory, without considering how that evidence fits into others, and ignoring all the evidence in favor of others that happens to contradict your own pet theory. All that matters is that people in power recognize there’s a gap, and are working towards fixing the issue; your contrary opinion will be left in the ditch of history, to be clucked at by the occasional historian.
This is the video that made me stop watching Armored Skeptic. Fuck him.
One last word, since it’s kind of bothering me. Follow nearedge’s link to the Title VII page, and you’ll find a chart of Title VII cases between 1997 and 2014; click a link, and you can retrieve the ones from 1992 to 1996 as well. If what they’re saying is true, that the legal system has helped reduce the gender gap via complaints brought forward, then you’d expect to find an exponential decay in the numbers, starting strong in 1992 but dwindling down as more and more sexism was caught and handled.
If you actually throw those case numbers into a spreadsheet, and adjust for population growth, you’ll find… a pretty flat trendline. Either there was no major spike in convictions, due to a change in the law; or, these cases form only a small subset of workplace sex discrimination incidents, and thus don’t follow the global trend; or, the level of workplace sex discrimination has remained pretty flat over the last two decades.
@Rowan vet-tech
It’s only sexism if it can be proven to be true. You cannot make a claim and have it be true by default. People are innocent until proven guilty for a reason. If I just came up out of nowhere and said that someone raped me who did not do so, the court of public opinion almost always tends to believe what the victim says while having no access to the evidence.
Take the Duke Lacrosse case for example, the claims that they had raped anyone were found to be entirely untrue; however, just because someone said that they did a large number of people, including the local townspeople, believed it immediately and by the Sunday following the accusations there was a mob demanding that the Duke Lacrosse players confess to a crime that they did not commit. There is a reason that the law system works on the basis of innocent until proven guilty, and this is exactly why. People should not assume that something is true until it can in fact be proven to be true because if it turns out to not be true then you will have just destroyed someone’s life for no reason.
Take the Central Park ‘rapists’ for example. These 5 men did nothing wrong and spent a large portion of their lives in jail for a rape that never happened because someone accused them of rape and they happened to be minorities and at a large disadvantage to begin with in our legal system which has a systematic issue of racism. The actual culprit turned out to be just one person who was a serial rapist, not a group of 5 teenagers, yet they were sentenced without absolute proof that they in fact were guilty.
Then you have the issue of Planned Parenthood. The terrible disgusting things said about it such as “They’re selling aborted baby parts” and other right-winged propoganda drove Robert Dear to go and try to shoot up a planned parenthood thinking that he was “Warrior for the Babies” despite not only the fact that had that been disproven already after several right winged propaganda peddlers pushed this onto scared Americans, but also the fact that the planned parenthood he attacked didn’t even offer abortion services.
The response to serious claims like this is not “Oh my god, that’s horrible.” it’s “Oh my god, is that true?” because the difference between those two things is 4 innocent people being dead and 4 innocent people not being dead (Granted, the overwhelming majority of people aren’t insane and extreme, but the ones that are will kill people based on whatever lie pushes them over the edge). The difference between those things is the difference between 5 men serving between 6 and 13 years in prison and having been registered as sex offenders, and probably beaten in jails by other inmates (because we know that inmates regularly do vigilante action against rapists and child molesters) and now having to live with the memories and psychological damage that having an entire country think that you’re scum entails. This is why there must be absolute proof for a claim. It cannot be assumed to be true just because someone said it.
To be fair, it isn’t, but it is a violation of your personal space which is illegal and also worse than sexism in general on the grounds that someone randomly touching you could easily become someone inflicting harm on you in some way, which is why it isn’t legal to go around touching people. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a man or woman, it’s illegal for anyone to do already, it’s assault (Usually known as simple assault for the circumstance you provided under most jurisdictions as some may not make the distinction between simple assault and assault.).
No, that guy is definitely guilty of assault if you can prove it in court.
Well, that’s objectively not sexist. Who’s telling you to smile and why? If you work in a customer facing job and your employer is telling you to smile that’s within their right as an employer because you’re a representative of their establishment while you’re on the clock. I myself have been told to smile while working as an office secretary for in my college’s department of education and I’m male. I’ve worked for Comcast and for Apple as a technical service agent/advisor and during training they give the same talk about sounding like you’re smiling to everyone, and I typically hear the trainers telling men to sound like they’re smiling more than they do to women, and I think part of that overall is because I’ve noticed that women tend to take their jobs more seriously. Now, what I just said was somewhat sexist in that suggesting that women tend to take their jobs more seriously, but I’ll also say that it has only been my experience. I may have just known some male co-workers who were particularly lazy, iunno.
While I don’t find the statement itself to be socially acceptable, it also isn’t sexist. Most people would look better with some makeup. A lot of guys have pizza faces from puberty hitting them like a ton of bricks, I kinda do myself in fact. I’ve had friends tell me I would look better with some foundation, and it’ll become more common for people to say it to men as more of the arbitrary lines in the sand between the genders disappear from society as a whole and men wearing makeup stops being a faux pas.
I said in my very first response to you why someone trying to carry something for you isn’t necessarily sexist. Their motivations may not be that they think that you can’t carry it because you’re a woman, and it’s possible that they’re simply extending a kind gesture. Now, in the situations you provided where customers are specifically requesting that a male co-worker carry the bag out to their car, that has a much higher likelihood of being sexist. However, I’ll also present the possibility that maybe the customer wanted a male to do it because from when they walked in to when they purchased the dog food they saw you busting your ass and being a good employee while a group of male co-workers are lazing around not doing anything. In that situation, they may just honestly be trying to do you a favor by trying to appropriate the situation in their minds. That wouldn’t at all be sexist, that would just deal with that particular person’s views on morality. But, you know, sexist or not you ultimately have to yield to the customer’s request because “the customer is always right” (especially when they’re wrong).
In the general, no, but in relation to yourself absolutely.
To be fair and objective, nearedge, you are passing your ‘best before’ date.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge across the East River for sale.
Sexual harassment. YOUR belief in your innocence is irrelevant to that of the harassed. I’ll listen to the victim every time not the man ‘splainer. Which is you.
A work of beauty
Oh for fuck’s sake. What an idiot.
Weird thing. I just randomly searched “oppression” in this thread, and pretty much the only people who used that term here were people claiming that there’s no such thing happening, or people quoting or responding directly to them on topics where they’ve used that term. I find that quite interesting because, while, if pressed, and not allowed to substitute another word, I would say that oppression is very much alive in western societies, it certainly does seem to have certain implications around enforcement and intent. I wonder if those asserting that it’s not happening are giving to much weight to those implications? If they are, it could well explain why they’re so determined to argue that it’s not the case, but it’s also kind of a strawman at that point.
I’m also starting to wonder what nearedge would consider sexism….
nearedge,
This was the post of Rowan that you replied to:
Why did you just quote the first sentence and then started talking about rape? Rowan wasn’t talking about crimes if you had honestly addressed the sentences that followed.
Why are you incapable of honest conversation?
@chigau
I do not understand the implication.
@Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Easy hypothetical:
I walk into a McDonald’s and order Big Mac and a female cashier tells me that they are only serving breakfast so instead I order a McGriddle. A woman walks in and orders a Big Mac. I notice this and accuse the cashier of being sexist to which the manager asks me to leave.
Was the cashier being sexist?
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
I’m not sure what you’re saying.
Just because one gender happens to experience something more often than another gender doesn’t make it sexist.
Women are several times more likely to experience breast cancer than men, but that doesn’t make it sexist. It’s a disease, it has no ability to be sexist.
I don’t find the phrase “You would look better with makeup.” to be socially acceptable because wearing makeup is an individual’s choice and it’s expensive and unnecessary. Makeup is more associated with women these days because women have more interest in makeup than men do at this point in time. In the past, cosmetics have shifted between the genders from one era to another and from one culture to another for a plethora of different reasons, and eventually men will be the primary consumers of makeup and then it’ll shift back to women and so on and so fourth.
The same is true with styles of clothing. We didn’t start off with pants you know, as people we all started off with some kind of dress or robe and it graduated from there. It really wasn’t until the Victorian era where society began dictating exactly who should be wearing what, or who should be doing what based on gender and it was a woman, specifically Queen Victoria, who started drawing those lines in the sand which are slowly fading away today. It was a woman in power who told women that they were supposed to act a certain way, dress a certain way, and look a certain way. George Cromwell didn’t do it. King George didn’t do it. King William didn’t do it. Ernest Augustus didn’t do it either. It was Queen Victoria. Granted, there had been some societal sexism at work prior to this, but don’t forget who spearheaded it and made it into what we see today. Those ‘Victorian Morals’ then spread around the world because the British influence was as strong then as the American influence is today.
@Saad
#MissingThePoint
Claims of X are not X, they are only claims until they are proven to be X. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the legal context or the social context. I cannot just say that Ghandi was sexist. I cannot just say that Susan B. Anthony was sexist. I cannot just say that anyone is sexist. In order for them or their actions to be sexist, it has to be proven to be true.
Irrelevant bullshit and you know that. The victims of microaggressions are the ones that make the determination. not YOU, the cis-white-malesplainer.
Which is why you are trying overly hard for what you consider an egalitarian society, where the present microaggressions that keep down women, POC, LGBT etc., are still in place so you can continue your bullshit to keep them “in their place”.
Until the country has equal results we cis-white-males need to learn to share with everybody else. Until all is equal pay, education, crime etc., we as cis-white-males need to keep an eye on what doesn’t allow others to fully share, and correct that. You don’t believe anything needs more correcting, therefore you should be ashamed of your attitude, as it isn’t nothing but selfishness.
nearedge @332:
It means you’ve gotten stale. You’re simply repeating the same evidence-free assertions over and over again while ignoring or handwaving every bit of evidence anyone else has posted.
nearedge
Good god.
What colour is the sky on your planet.
This thread is still shambling along? That last post by nearedge is such a steaming pile of self-refuting, philisophisticate deepity.
Following this logic, the only crimes that ever happen are the ones that result in court convictions. Quick, someone alert all unsolved murder victims that they aren’t really dead, because nobody was ever convicted in court for their murder.
This is rather besides the point considering you are talking about examples of everyday sexism, not cases that are such egregious violations that they end up in court. Claiming that the victim of the crime is lying is the opposite of assuming innocence you idiot. If women spent their lives tryoing to prosecute sexism case, we wouldn’t have time to have a life
Believing the victims “might” destroy a life? Yes, OJ Simpson, Bill Cosby, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn have such terrible lives. Won’t somebody think of the poor criminals? *blech * Perhaps that empathy is better extended to the victims, and their destroyed lives?
In reality, false reports are consistently very low (2% -8 %) so believing the claimant/victim is statistically, logically, and ethically correct.
Incorrect.
Going back to Rowan’s post (the one to which you dishonestly replied), someone telling a woman to smile more is sexist.
No proof needed. It’s simply about lived experience. If someone yells a racist slur to me as I’m walking to the store, I can recount that story when I get home without being asked to furnish audio proof of it. Get your head out of your stupid sexist ass.
nearedge @333,
How do you “prove” that something is sexist? Would you be so kind as to offer a few examples of proven sexism just by way of illustration? IOW please describe something that’s sexist and show your work proving it to be so.
This ought to be interesting if nothing else and it may offer some more insight into your thought process.
nearedge:
Oh for…
You are in serious need of an education, I suggest you get one. Stat.
On the day of that debate, Roman women have the nerve to actually show up at the Senate House, which shocked and upset many a man. Cato the Elder was against the repeal, and here’s part of his speech:
This line of Cato’s: Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters, it’s repeated damn near constantly now, by anti-feminists and people like yourself, who claim there’s no such thing as sexism, and it’s the 21st century now. This shit’s been going on for fucking forever, and you simply hug your ignorance close, reveling in the emptiness of your mind. Try learning something, for fuck’s sake, do something really radical – read a book (or three, or a dozen), think (that bit’s crucial), and stop being so fucking dependent on empty ignorance.
Quotes from Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, by Jack Holland.
Only Victorians had gender roles, huh.
What did Xanthippe, Socrates’ wife do?
How old are the prescribed roles of women from the Bible?
This nearedge clown is godawful ignorant.
nearedge #325
Damn.
Maybe nearedge is twelve years old.
@Caine, 340
Ah, but can you prove that any of that is sexism? Or before the Victorian Era, for that matter? (It has been said that the sun never set upon her empire, and so it must be that said empire must have come into existence fully at the same time as or before the sun!)
Checkmate, atheists!
@Nerd of Redhead
Okay, first: Not white. Barely cis in that I just choose to accept my gender identity given that I find it would be self-destructive to correct it, but, you know, talk to my Mother about that one if you want the full story. She’s had some shit to say over the years. Ironically, I’m a PoC and a member of the LGBT community.
There’s also nothing irrelevant about the example. Is the cashier sexist?
I believe a lot of things need correcting, but I think that you guys are trying to correct the wrong things.
@Tethys
No, following that logic the only crimes that ever happen are the ones that have evidence of being crimes. Unsolved murders have proof of being murders because the victims were proven to be murdered. You don’t have to prove that someone is dead, but you do have to prove that their death was a murder. It just so happens that some things like gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt force trauma, and poisoning typically speak for themselves.
For starters, no one is saying that sexism doesn’t happen every single day, but it doesn’t happen exclusively to women and it isn’t as rampant as you’re making it out to be.
I don’t know what to think about the Bill Cosby situation, he is the one who is currently pursuing legal action while the some-50 women have not and did not; however, the fact that 50 women are all alleging rape is quite telling; however, history tells me to be skeptical of a black man being able to rape numerous white women in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s and not get lynched for it. So, I’m going to let both parties display their evidence in court, and form my decision based upon the evidence once it becomes public. I haven’t done research into the subject matter surrounding the OJ Trial since it happened before I was even an adult, and I honestly don’t care about Domonique Strauss-Kahn because I don’t care if some politician uses their money to buy prostitutes. Prostitution should be legal because the government does not have the right to tell women or men what they can or cannot do with their own bodies.
Actually I proved earlier that the overwhelming majority of claims of sexual discrimination in the workplace are found to be false, and I also put together some graphs from the information supplied by the EEOC that I was going to use in a response to HJ Hornbeck earlier.
In 2014, 18.9% of gender discrimination claims were proven to have merit and there were 26027 total claims nation-wide. The US Population in 2014 was 318.9 Million. Out of 318900000 people, less than 0.0082% have even claimed to be discriminated against in the workplace, and out of that 0.0082% of people 18.9% actually were which is only 0.0015% of the population. Less than two one-thousandanths of one percent of people in the US were discriminated against based on gender in the workplace in 2014 So no, it is not statistically, logically, or ethically correct to believe the person making the claim without proof. It is never okay to believe anyone
Source: http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/sex.cfm
Speaking of which,
@Hj Hornbeck
That doc sheet you showed doesn’t say anything about anything. You have a graph of the total number of cases filed “receipts” and the total number of resolutions to those cases “resolutions”. It’s not convictions, it’s resolutions in general and the EEOC’s site said that the number of resolutions fluctuates because the total number is itemized and is not necessarily one-per-case if a case even has one. The information you have on your spreadsheet is not related to anything you talk about in this post. These are of ALL of the workplace gender discrimination claims that were made for their respective years because all workplace discrimination claims go through the EEOC including race, age, religion, and disability-related discrimination.
Have a look at mine: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bddtAZAPYi3HPm6mdEx9nN4_KKpiF9bvJOmB4JVSGvg/pubhtml (Yes I know the series labels aren’t there properly, but that’s a fault of having made this in Excel first.)
@microraptor
I think I’ve supplied some pretty strong evidence so far. What do you think of the evidence I provide in this post?
Athywren @ 343:
Sure. I’d prefer it if nearedge decided to exercise that lump in their skull, though. I’m not up to a compleat lecture on codified misogyny throughout the ages, especially when I’m not sure our antagonist even knows what codified means. As for systemic sexism, perhaps after nearedge finishes struggling with the massive problems of zits, and the agonizing question to foundation or not to foundation,* they might lift their eyes and start paying attention to things a wee bit past their nose.
*Alas, I also expect that reference to go a sailing overhead.
No, your arguments aren’t evidence that is convincing to anybody by you. Proper evidence is supplied by academic and government statistics and reviews. Which show institutional sexism and bigotry is alive and well in the US. It is also supplied by the cataloging of the microaggressions faced by those who aren’t cis-white-males at the hands of those cis-white-males and the non-equality of the results for the people at the receiving end of those microaggressions. And that cataloging shows how the sexism and bigotry is demonstrated (and the catalog is evidence) of how some folks try like hell to keep others down so they can feel good about themselves. Sexism is proven. So is bigotry. You can’t talk your way out of them existing.
We have solid evidence, and you don’t.
Okay, let me concede that I did in fact make an overstatement.
What I was trying to imply was that things were on there way to equaling out before the Victorian era revived a whole bunch of oppression for women in a new form. I’m not saying that it didn’t exist before then. With this one I saw it after I posted it and hoped people wouldn’t think that I was implying that Queen Victoria created female oppression or something like that.
@Nerd of Redhead
Are you suggesting that the statistical information from the government agency known as the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is not ‘solid evidence’? Because I have news for you, no other agency exists that could provide more solid evidence for your argument or mine than the very government agency whose job it is to ensure that people don’t get discriminated against.
I think that your manufactured proof is evidence that you are an ignorant twit.
Except that as noted by myself and Saad, you changed the subject in your reply to Rowan from everyday sexism and workplace discrimination, to speaking about rape and proceeding to claim that it’s not okay to simply believe victims because we may ruin some poor rapists life, false reports, and other bog standard misogynist apologia. I hereby award you the richard dawkins award for achieving such a spectacular own goal in disproving the existence of sexism. Bravo.
@Tethys
No, there’s nothing manufactured about the proof I provided. The EEOC put out the numbers, I just made a graph out of them.
I didn’t change the subject. Those were analogous situations in which someone made a claim and people believed the claim to be true without proof. The point is that you do not have a rapist without proof. If you claim that someone innocent of rape is a rapist, that has a huge impact on their lives if people then go on to believe you without proof. You could be condemning an innocent person to death if some insane person decides to kill them because he thinks they’re a rapist because you said it. There are consequences to every action or accusation.
If a teenager falsely accuses a female teacher of rape, even before it’s proved to be true, she’s going to lose her job. She’s going to have trouble finding jobs in the future even if the student’s claims are rightfully proven to be false. She is not a rapist and she should not be treated like one just because someone said she was without proof.
Sexism and workplace discrimination exist, but they are not as rampant as you suggest they are.
nearedge
If you stop commenting now and just lurk for a while, you probably won’t be banned.
Nearedge, are you a guy? You not understanding how having MEN tell me to smile and MEN pet my hair and MEN tell me I’d be prettier with makeup and MEN trying to carry things for me that I am clearly easily capable of carrying makes me wonder.
Do you know what happens if you don’t respond with a smile, as a woman? You often get verbally harassed and sometimes physically intimidated.
Men telling me I’d be prettier with makeup tells me that my purpose is to be proper eye candy… for men.
Men trying to take things from me, when I’ve got them balanced, is them telling me that I’m weak.
And tell the cops about having my hair touched? Because clearly I want to spend my day being treated as an overly emotional ‘crazy b***h’ by the cops. You honestly think cops would take such a thing seriously? What astounding ignorance.
Sexism is absolutely rampant, it’s just not blatant. And apparently you are completely unwilling to see anything that is not blatant.
Wrong. They are rife. The NFL even had to pass the Rooney Rule which requires one black head coach candidate be interviewed for every white candidate interviewed. Don’t have to be hired, just interviewed. It effectively increased the pool of candidates, and gave the black candidates who were previously ignored, a chance to show what they could do. Doubled the number of black head coaches some of whom have won the Super Bowl. Prior to that institutional racism kept the numbers down. Prima facie evidence. Which you won’t recognize.
If the false report rate for rape is 2 – 8 %, then 92 to 98% of rape reports are true. Therefore, the math, basic human decency, and logic all confirm that believing the victim is pretty much a sure bet. However, in the ignore the facts in favor of their very own special theory of trollery as explained by nearedge,
That Dawkins Golden Douchbag award is really appropriate. For future reference, if someone says they have been raped, it is as near a sure thing as makes little difference that they aren’t lying.
@Rowan vet-tech
Do you happen to know any of the guys who do that to you? It sounds like the guys in your area think it’s okay to bully women and need to be made an example of.
See, there’s a reason people always ask for proof and it’s because if you can prove that in your area people just think it’s okay to be sexist toward women, society will rain down on them like a fucking plague. Are you aware of any civil rights leaders in your area? Check http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/ and see who you can get in contact with to put pressure on the police force to do their jobs.
They may require a petition with a certain number of signatures from residence in your area, but believe me, they do care and can make it stop even if they have to threaten your Mayor to do so. Almost every mayor receives some kind of federal money, and they can dry up all of that federal cash in a heartbeat if the Mayor knows about this and isn’t doing his job to his citizens. If that doesn’t work, let’s get the ACLU involved. https://www.aclu.org/
Sexism isn’t rampant all over the US but if it’s rampant where you live then lets stop arguing about ideas, put our heads together, and spark some change. There are even a lot of men’s groups that will happily assist you in making sure that local issue gets taken care of because when the men of an area act like scum, they make all men look like scum, and other men’s groups don’t like that. The majority of men are disgusted to have to share a chromosome with filth who think that they’re better just because they have a penis.
Nearedge… nope! These were things that have happened over the so-far 33 years of my life. And guys are like that all over. Most are decent, but a fair chunk are assholes who are awash in male privilege and THEY DO NOT BELIEVE THEY ARE SEXIST. You… don’t think sexism is rampant all over the US?
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA……… *dies*
You actually had me going til this paragraph. A petition? Fucking brilliant.
Or you are the dunderest of dunderheads.
@HappyNat
Well, yeah. It’s a federal agency. They would need proof that it was a local issue before they’ll threaten to cut a mayor’s funding and a petition is a great way to show that is an issue of high prevalence in your community. What about that seems unreasonable?
nearedge @344:
Yes, this is in line with your hypothesis that sexism is largely over. The introduction of Title VII in 1964 should have lead to a large uptick of sexist incidents being reported, which then gradually tapered down over time. That means both receipts and resolutions should follow that trend.
And Title VII made all of those illegal at the same time, hence by your hypothesis there should be no difference among the lot. Or are you willing to admit that making something illegal may not actually stop all such incidents from happening?
You’ve blocked me from downloading the sheet, so I can’t verify how you calculated your numbers. For now, though, I’ll just assume “Percentage of US Population claiming to be discriminated against due to gender” and “Percentage of US Population proven to be discriminated against due to gender” were calculated correctly. I copy-pasted those numbers into my spreadsheet… and found two flat trend lines. Your own hypothesis is again refuted, by your own numbers and calculations. You can’t even read your own spreadsheet!
And of course, all of the above takes your assumptions at face value. We have good reason to think Title VII cases that don’t end in a reward were legit cases of discrimination.
Kevin M. Clermont, and Stewart J. Schwab. “How Employment Discrimination Plaintiffs Fare in Federal Court.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 1, no. 2 (July 1, 2004): 429–58.
But what really cements you as a crank is what’s missing. In comment 322, I pointed out how you were misrepresenting my words and equivocating between “verbal attacks” and “peaceful protests;” this has been ignored. I pointed out I’d refuted two of your arguments via a citation in comment 152; this has been ignored. I pointed out you argued that “second-wave feminism completed a total systematic change to the worldwide workforce in less than two decades, yet systematic change is difficult and several decades on the process still isn’t done;” this has been ignored. I pointed out there’s more to the world than the United States, and the gap hasn’t closed there for the reasons you claimed; these have been ignored. I provided a quick reference to several lines of evidence which point to the existence of systematic sexism within the workforce, from economists and others, a few of which have been discussed in depth prior in the thread; these have been ignored.
Now, you’ve got a lot of arguments on the go, so it’s unrealistic to expect all of mine to be followed up on. But if you can find the time to whip up that large spreadsheet, you had the time to follow up on some of these.
Your failure to do so marks you as an intellectual coward, a crank who’s desperate for the smallest of victories so that they can wipe away all their defeats. No doubt you’ll cheer at being banned, as it allows you to pretend these damn feminists can’t take an honest debate, while letting you put out of mind the mountain of evidence they’ve buried you under.
@HJ Hornbeck
I honestly have not read all of your response since I need to hurry up and get to the store, but I saw that you couldn’t download the worksheet so I dropbox’d the xlsx for you (Which looks much cleaner IMHO) https://www.dropbox.com/s/p8hmypawao8rrs6/numbers.xlsx?dl=0
@nearedge, 355
You do know that Rowan isn’t the first person to raise these issues, right? She’s one of very, very, very many, and do you know what each of them I’ve seen raise those issues to someone who claims sexism is essentially over gets in response? “It sounds like the guys in your area think it’s okay….”
I mean, I guess the specific words in that sentence make a true statement. Guys in whatever area think it’s okay to bully women. Depressingly true enough. What doesn’t really follow is that it’s isolated to a specific area. When women around the world are raising the issue, and being told it’s obviously a local thing that’s restricted to just their area… well… maybe the area that it’s restricted to is… the earth? Only the populated areas, mind. Obviously, the south pole is a utopian vision of universal equity. I’d guess it’s probably better on the ISS… though I’m not sure if that’s just the eternal optimist in me, sticking its head up like a mole beneath the rubber mallet of reality.
Dingdingdingdingding.
Cancer is not a conscious being. People usually are. People treating a person differently because of their gender is the fucking definition of sexism.
And not only did she do so all by herself, while having been raised in a totally egalitarian society, she also did this in countries she didn’t even rule like Germany, Norway, the USA, Japan, Peru, …
Great goodness, is there any area where you are at least somewhat competent?
History. Learn some. Really.
Are you aware that courts are NOT institutions that decide the truth?
Men deciding that other men are no sexist. Yeah. Or that since society is allegedly no longer sexist, things that are totally normal cannot be sexist. Like constantly remarking on women’s apperance.
I mean, there have been courts that decided that a man grabbing a woman’s ass in public AFTER she expliciptly told him to keep his hands off is not sexual assault, which makes it a fact that men grabbing women’s asses is not sexual assault and totally not sexist…
Please cite examples of this actually happening. Heck, I’ve never seen a “men’s group” help MEN who were experiencing problems that are typically associated with women, i.e. domestic abuse, prejudice at work, difficulty getting adequate medical care for certain problems, etc, much less women.
You said you were a member of the LGBTQA community. Have you ever experienced homophobia?
nearedge, #332
Holy shit, you really are a complete idiot.
You just undermined your own point with that bolded part…
False statement :
2:37 …should be skeptical of the pay gap
Well? And? That’s it. No arguments,
In truth 2:37 is just the intro, at 11:17 he makes several arguments. Of course, knowing that would require listening to the video before criticizing (falsely) its lack of argument development.
The “facts” you provide do show that otherwise scientifically minded people will trot out gross statistics that fail to control for critical factors when it confirms an existing bias.
To be meaningful statistics for the supposed wage gap need to control for
Job title
Specific field or industry
Years of directly relevant experience
Degree title
Degree level
With out control of such variables the 79% figure bandied about utterly fails to demonstrate any supposed wage gap.
You are aware of the “fact” that to be meaningful statistical studies must control for critical variables, aren’t you?
Nova Conceptum
The number 366 before your ‘nym indicates that your comment is #366 in this thread.
That could indicate that everything in your comment has already been covered by other comments.
You should go read them.
Nova conceptum, your username is blatantly false advertising with regards to the content of your comments. Do as chigau said and read the prior comments.
Nova C:
The inadvertent irony of your assertion escapes you, doesn’t it?
You’re aware that a “fact” is not a fact, aren’t you?
(Sarcasm is tricky, no? ;) )
[meta]
I have just now noticed that there is no emoticon or emoji that looks like Groucho Marx, wiggling his eyebrows and cigar.
This must be addressed.
It could end the need for {sarc} tags.
[/meta]
@Nova Conceptum, 366
Actually, simply controlling for job title is a really good way of getting misleading statistics. Granted, most jobs with the same job title at the same place of business will have the same duties, but it’s not a completely safe bet that jobs with the same duties will always have the same job title, and you will miss that issue every single time if you simply assume you’ve covered it with job titles. Rather than failing to control for a critical factor here, you’re accounting for a misleading factor and making your resulting statistics suspect at best.
chigau @370:
http://jakarnilson.deviantart.com/art/Groucho-Marx-Emoticon-47469901
We are Plethora #372
Thanks!
I have seen that and similar.
I am waiting for it to appear on my virtual keyboard.
w…a…i…t…i…n…g
ᅘ
John Morales #374
Sadly, on my iPad, that is a small, white, rectangle.
got numbers?
chigau, U+1158.
(The glasses only)
Wow, never seen a conversation so thoroughly hijacked
Armoured skeptic is not argueing against feminist ideology, but rather the attempt to force the atheist community to adopt that ideology
Steve shives argument boils down to all atheist should be feminists, why not all feminists should be atheists? Both statements are wrong as they oppresively try to force one ideology or system of thought to adhere to the other. Feminist (and rightly so) would rail against this oppression of their choice to believe being taken away, yet when armoured skeptic states the same in relation to his being an atheist he is labelled a mysogonist.
There are militant factions/bad seeds (call them what you will) within all thought systems and ideologies who would rather attack than have a discourse openly discussing differences of views and attempting to understand each other, as an example (not related to the videos supposedly being discussed) this year i was labelled a totalitarian fascist because i would not attend demonstrations in australia protesting the executions of two convicted australian drug smugglers in indonesia. Why would i not protest? Because while i am against the death penalty for any crime, i can not reconcile supporting criminals who have willfully and with full knowledge of the possible penalties committed crimes which are harmful to other human beings and their communitties, but rather than discuss these views and attempt to understand and persuade me i was attacked and labelled.
This behaviour is exhibited by a few in all communities, even feminism, as evidenced by this blog post
aus0skeptic, the above is hard to read, can you try again for some clarity?
Fail to see what needs clarifying
aus0skeptic, you reek of masochistic perversity — such evident, tremulous hope that you will be attacked and oppressed by having people express their opinions about you!
(Happy to oblige)
Again missing the point of the video and comment
I can see how wanting an open and honest discussion of ideas is masochistic in this modern world, but if it is truely perverse then the world is in worse shape than i thought
Pz meyers et al here have taken a video about the enforced merger of a system of thought onto another and rather than openly and honestly discussing the pros and cons of such a situation, have instead labelled armoured skeptic as a mysogonist and gone on to discuss social issues such as the wage gap and the evidence supporting its existence or not
auszeroskeptic, you poor, scared little thing. There, there. It’ll be all right!
Tell me more about this enforced merger of systems of thought, which has you and helmet sputtering so.
(Forceful feminism, Oh my!)
John morales, maybe watch armoured skeptics video before commenting further
It’s Myers mate.
Poorly spelled and punctuated words and names may sound clear in your own mind but sound somewhat incoherent out here. What is it about people with “skeptic” in their ‘nyms?
Why bother to watch the ignorant blathering of AS unless the reports of what AS said are wrong?
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls – and therein lies part of the problem, the video has been seriously misrepresented
Again rather than having an open and honest discussion on the topic of the video, pz myers decided to attack as and all commentors so far have decided to discuss a seperate topic that they are comfortable with
aus0skeptic:
Sigh. No such reality. No one is attempting to force anything on anyone here. And before you prepare yourself an incoherent excuse for an argument, please, let me remind you – you came here. No one chased you down, saying you couldn’t possibly be an atheist or a skeptic, or whatthefuckever it is you think you are, unless you embraced this warped notion you have of feminism.
And what was seriously misrepresented. Show your work.
Caine – whether it is a reality or not, it was the subject of the video, if you disagree or agree with the two opposing views in the video you should discuss that.
Thats the simple point i am making, the topic of the video is being ignored so that pz and followers can discuss social issues they are more comfortable discussing
Caine – you’re also right in stating that i came here.
I came looking for informed discussion on both videos and have sadly been let down.
aus0skeptic:
What, this purported enforced merger of systems of thought to which you allude, but then shy away from describing?
Seems pretty evident that you imagine you are informed by virtue of helmet, who (as I noted above, is incoherent).
So, get yourself informed, then come back when you have actual information.
(You waded into the deep end of the pool, and sadly sank)
What discussion? You have only posited that AS has been misrepresented. Yet, you haven’t presented one thing that was misrepresented. It’s hard to take you seriously until you do so.
I suppose it can’t hurt to be helpful.
Here is the FAQ for what you imagine is some fearful feminist behemoth, aus0skeptic.
(Read it and tremble at its fearsomeness and its jack-booted enforcement policy)
Re: nearedge
This right here. This shit is why I come here. The people here make this make sense. You poor pathetic deluded fool. You have no idea just ho much you have been preprogrammed. I genuinely feel sorry for you despite my hostility earlier. YOU JUST SAID A SIGNIFICANT CHUNK OF THE DEFINITION OF SEXISM IN EXPLAINING THIS. jUST GIVE IN. YOU WILL BECOME SO MUCH MORE POWERFUL.
The whole time I was crafting this reply i was listening to Metallica’s “to live is to die”. Just die already, it;s better now than later.
aus0skeptic, #377
1. Why do you use the word “force”? Nobody is forcing anything. The whole point of various human rights movements is to persuade people to adopt that viewpoint.
2. How does this sound:
Also, everybody should adopt feminist “ideology” (as you call it). That’s the whole point. Just like everybody should adopt black rights “ideology”.
Just like the atheist community has been forcing religious people to abandon their beliefs and the skeptics have been forcing bigfoot botherers to adopt a reality-based ideology. Ah, no, wait, only a VERY dishonest and deeply scared arsehole would pretend that using the term “force” is in any way legitimate in those contexts. That kind of rhetoric is just a smokescreen in the hands of anti-feminists. Look at this boogieman i made out of papermache and spit, isn’t it scary? Don’t focus on the fact that i’m trying to draw attention away from any honest discussion of why ANY group shouldn’t adopt feminist values, which of course they fucking should, what kind of arsehole wouldn’t?
I think that’s what bothers me the most about these people…it’s not just that they are anti-feminist…it’s that they are trying to pretend they aren’t. Gutless arseholes…
aus0skeptic @ 390:
You disappointed yourself. One thing: 397 comments as of this typing. Prior to diving in with something we had already read, hundreds of times, you could have (and most certainly should have) read all the effing comments first. You would have found all your points addressed.
Pharyngula goes way back, you know. Years back. Before FTB. Before Science Blogs, even. Feminism has been discussed here, in depth, for years. That includes the compleat dissection and analysis of more anti-feminist ideas and anti-feminism in general videos than I could begin to count. After years and years of that, honestly, no one is saying anything remotely new. The so-called arguments proffered are weak excuses wrapped up in fear. As an exercise, you could do a tag search here on feminism. Or you could try this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=feminism+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffreethoughtblogs.com%2Fpharyngula
You could also read the current posts at We Hunted the Mammoth, then hit the archives. Same old everywhere.
You could always go with the most radical approach, and listen to women when they inform you of their experience, and understand the concept of privilege allows you to blithely handwave our lives, and there’s something wrong with that, so perhaps you should try to wake up a little bit, become aware of your privilege, because that would make you a better human being.
Also, aus0skeptic, we’ve discussed Shives’ videos:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/09/29/i-approve-of-this-message/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/10/14/we-need-to-encourage-more-youtubers-to-engage-in-progressive-atheism/
Prior to that, there was an experiment here, in 2012: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/21/an-experiment-why-do-you-despise-feminism/comment-page-1/#comments
An excerpt from that post:
There’s something like 3 or 4 pages of comments, well over a thousand. Not one person managed to respond to PZ’s request. It wasn’t interesting reading to the regulars here, because it was the same old dogmatic excuses, examples of privilege speaking, and people trying desperately to hang onto the status quo. It might prove enlightening reading to you, though.
Yes, it is a curious choice of word, since no one was forcing anything. Atheism+ set themselves up to be independent of the usual network of atheists — they explicitly removed themselves from the argument, and wanted nothing more than to promote their own ideas — and what they got for their trouble was wave after wave of harassment, lots of trolling, and open hatred. If anyone wants to “force” anything, it’s the tribalists who want to make sure that atheism is free of any kind of social responsibility at all.
You are an atheist interested in promoting skepticism? Awesome, here’s some money. When’s the next conference?
You are an atheist interested in promoting science education? That’s fantastic! you have my full support!
You are an atheist interested in promoting church/state separation? So important, go fight them!
You are an atheist interested in promoting feminism? Why are you forcing your ideology on me? Christ, don’t you know atheism is just a lack of belief in gods! It has nothing to do with feminism! Yes, yes, feminism is a good thing, but only those non-radical feminists i like who reinforce all of my biases and only if you don’t talk about it in MY atheist cons/programs/blogs/sites!
They think we can’t tell they are full of shit.
Just in case anyone was wondering that “just die already” was non-literal in context. I think it was obvious but I should probably not take chances with that sort of thing.
@aus0skeptic, 377
It’s oppressive to suggest that people should be rational? Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooookay. That’s… precious.
When you consider how most atheists fetishise skepticism and rationality, to the point that some even use one or other of the terms in their pseudonyms – can you imagine being that arrogant?! – I would’ve hoped that atheists should be feminists was a tautology. Unfortunately, fetishising a thing doesn’t equate to actually embracing it.
All feminists SHOULD be atheists. All cauliflower farmers should be atheists AND feminists, and so should teachers, and astronauts and people who like Star Trek and fly fishing. I know, i know, such an opressive and forceful suggestion…