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Something about me does not want to trust a webmail host who has an ad running on their front page reading "date rape appreciation station." This appalling lack

by legodt 10y ago

Something about me does not want to trust a webmail host who has an ad running on their front page reading "date rape appreciation station." This appalling lack of professionalism makes the entire service suspect to me. edit: I would like to thank all the misogynists in this thread voting this down. Thanks for keeping tech a welcoming place for women and victims of assault!

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Said person is also quoting from /g/. Why would you expect anything else? OTOH, the guy does genuinely go to great lengths to protect the security of his site (and of the mail of his users), and seems to know what he's doing. So I'm not to down on him for the unprofessionalism.
- legodt 10y ago
  I'm sure his service is just great, but, in the future, if you ever wonder why women don't go into tech (it seems so easy to, where are they?)- remember this. Tacit support of actors in the community like this make tech seem like a hostile place, or, at the very least, a boy's club of people okay with rape jokes. It's not a sustainable atmosphere to maintain
  - rndgermandude 10y ago
    Speaking of nurses (per quote), I worked with nurses before, the vast, vast majority of whom were female, and you'd probably be surprised at the never-ending stream of crude (dick) jokes and "sex-talk"... Wonder if that's the reason there are so little men in nursing?!
    - legodt 10y ago
      That is different than making a joke at the expense of rape victims. Please think this through. The gender gap in another industry does not negate on in another.
      - rndgermandude 10y ago
        I don't know where you get your "ideas", but I never said or claimed any of these things. Then again, those nurses really were into joking about and belittling of patients, especially "stupid" ones, tho they did it behind the patients' backs of course. I'm still not sure to this day if all of the ICU nurses calling the deceased "exes" as in "ex-living" was some kind of crude humor or a coping mechanism. Anyway, when I got my first call to collect an "ex" for pathology, I remember being stumped.
        legodt 10y ago
        Then what were you trying to say? It looks like you were trying to draw equivalence between crude workplace humor in your line of work and the tech communities's acceptance of misoginistic rape jokes. That is what the thread was about and that is the context I placed your reply in.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    Men are raped; not just women. By the same logic there should be no dark humor involving murder since it makes things hostile for everyone (everyone can be murdered). Infact, there should be no text talking about violence since that would makes things hostile for everyone.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    It's 4chan. Again: what did you expect?
    - dang 10y ago
      Would you please stop?
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Okay dang. ...Sorry :-(
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
njloof 10y ago
Also, maybe you don't want quite this much heat at your email provider: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367044/Maine-college-drop-21-center-hoax-terrorist-threat-emails-New-York-Las-Vegas-issue-subpoenas-former-student-claims-knows-origin-posts.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367044/Maine-colleg...
- goatsi 10y ago
  That isn't any different than what gets sent out of a "normal" email provider. VC has just been willing to post the law enforcement subpoenas so we can actually see what is going on in the background.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
striking 10y ago
That's the point. You're not supposed to trust it or take it seriously, at all. It's just a host for fun, for people from *chan websites. I'm really not sure what you're expecting.
- legodt 10y ago
  >Rape jokes >just..for fun Come on, as a tech community we deserve and can do better.
  - striking 10y ago
    I'm fairly certain cock.li is nowhere near the "tech community". I don't know where you're getting that connection from. (also, I don't appreciate you strawmanning my comment.) If it's not your sense of humor, you're welcome to not visit the site. In fact, for the conversation at hand, you didn't at all need to do that because the quote made sense without doing so. You're taking this comment thread greatly off topic. That's the reason for the downvotes. Not misogyny or something. Claiming otherwise makes your remark sound almost stereotypical.
    - adn 10y ago
      >sense of humor Rape is not a joke, by no definition is it humor.
      - tscs37 10y ago
        That is kinda missing the point and the comparison is off. Except a joke itself, nothing is a joke, nothing is by definition humor except itself. It is sort of like saying that an engine is not a plane, by no definition can an engine fly. Which is true because an engine doesn't fly, planes do. (Or Apache Attack Helicopters) Humor is something you build using other parts, it's more than the sum of it's parts, no single part in of itself is humor. Secondly, there are no rules what humor is and what it is not except that it provides laughter and amusement. If somebody laughs about a rape joke, it's by definition humor, albeit (depending on joke) not a good one by most people's standards. Lastly, there is something called "Gallows Humor" in which (to quote Freud) "the ego refuses to be distressed by [...] reality. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world." As Wylie Sypher puts it, Gallows Humor is "to be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them". It's a natural human instinct. (I'm shamelessly copying of Wikipedia here, I'm no expert in all topics) So while, yes, rape is not a joke and it's a very horrible thing to those it happens to and we as a society should make efforts to not allow it to happen, it can only be healthy to make humor and jokes about it. Not to diminish the victims but to diminish the perpetrators. The perpetrator is worth nothing more than a joke to us, they have no further value or meaning in society and ought to be locked away forever after we thoroughly laughed, helping the victim to recover in the next step. That is what I want from a strong and healthy society.
dqv 10y ago
>This appalling lack of professionalism I don't think anything about cock.li is meant to imbue professionalism. I think one of the points is that it almost immunizes them from psychological operations. [1] I know it sounds conspiratorial, but social justice movements in online communities can be easily leveraged by orgs like the NSA to disrupt an organization. Combined with anti-meritocracy ideals, it's easy to get someone "at the top" who doesn't have any credentials (and who isn't really trying to get there for any other reason than disruption). It might not be his actual strategy, but the offensive things serve as a deterrent against lowest common denominator character assassinations. He has no reputation to destroy. [1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
- legodt 10y ago
  I'm sorry that demands to be less awful to groups of people that aren't you make you feel like outside orgs are attacking your freedoms in some sort of conspiracy to destroy your insulated world, ESPECIALLY considering the context that the US has used malicious actors working against gender and racial equality to destabilize groups striving for better social justice.
dang 10y ago
That does sound like a disgusting ad, but this is the sort of off-topic generic tangent that invariably makes threads worse. You've also made it worse, below, by going into ideological flamewar. Please don't do these things on HN. Complaining about downvotes is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please don't do this either. Assuming that downvotes signify misogyny and then responding with outrage was a particularly huge and unhelpful leap. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295658 and marked it off-topic.

by legodt 10y ago

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Said person is also quoting from /g/. Why would you expect anything else? OTOH, the guy does genuinely go to great lengths to protect the security of his site (and of the mail of his users), and seems to know what he's doing. So I'm not to down on him for the unprofessionalism.

legodt 10y ago
I'm sure his service is just great, but, in the future, if you ever wonder why women don't go into tech (it seems so easy to, where are they?)- remember this. Tacit support of actors in the community like this make tech seem like a hostile place, or, at the very least, a boy's club of people okay with rape jokes. It's not a sustainable atmosphere to maintain
- rndgermandude 10y ago
  Speaking of nurses (per quote), I worked with nurses before, the vast, vast majority of whom were female, and you'd probably be surprised at the never-ending stream of crude (dick) jokes and "sex-talk"... Wonder if that's the reason there are so little men in nursing?!
  - legodt 10y ago
    That is different than making a joke at the expense of rape victims. Please think this through. The gender gap in another industry does not negate on in another.
    - rndgermandude 10y ago
      I don't know where you get your "ideas", but I never said or claimed any of these things. Then again, those nurses really were into joking about and belittling of patients, especially "stupid" ones, tho they did it behind the patients' backs of course. I'm still not sure to this day if all of the ICU nurses calling the deceased "exes" as in "ex-living" was some kind of crude humor or a coping mechanism. Anyway, when I got my first call to collect an "ex" for pathology, I remember being stumped.
      - legodt 10y ago
        Then what were you trying to say? It looks like you were trying to draw equivalence between crude workplace humor in your line of work and the tech communities's acceptance of misoginistic rape jokes. That is what the thread was about and that is the context I placed your reply in.
- witty_username 10y ago
  Men are raped; not just women. By the same logic there should be no dark humor involving murder since it makes things hostile for everyone (everyone can be murdered). Infact, there should be no text talking about violence since that would makes things hostile for everyone.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  It's 4chan. Again: what did you expect?
  - dang 10y ago
    Would you please stop?
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Okay dang. ...Sorry :-(
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

njloof 10y ago

Also, maybe you don't want quite this much heat at your email provider: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367044/Maine-college-drop-21-center-hoax-terrorist-threat-emails-New-York-Las-Vegas-issue-subpoenas-former-student-claims-knows-origin-posts.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3367044/Maine-colleg...

goatsi 10y ago
That isn't any different than what gets sent out of a "normal" email provider. VC has just been willing to post the law enforcement subpoenas so we can actually see what is going on in the background.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

striking 10y ago

That's the point. You're not supposed to trust it or take it seriously, at all. It's just a host for fun, for people from *chan websites. I'm really not sure what you're expecting.

legodt 10y ago
>Rape jokes >just..for fun Come on, as a tech community we deserve and can do better.
- striking 10y ago
  I'm fairly certain cock.li is nowhere near the "tech community". I don't know where you're getting that connection from. (also, I don't appreciate you strawmanning my comment.) If it's not your sense of humor, you're welcome to not visit the site. In fact, for the conversation at hand, you didn't at all need to do that because the quote made sense without doing so. You're taking this comment thread greatly off topic. That's the reason for the downvotes. Not misogyny or something. Claiming otherwise makes your remark sound almost stereotypical.
  - adn 10y ago
    >sense of humor Rape is not a joke, by no definition is it humor.
    - tscs37 10y ago
      That is kinda missing the point and the comparison is off. Except a joke itself, nothing is a joke, nothing is by definition humor except itself. It is sort of like saying that an engine is not a plane, by no definition can an engine fly. Which is true because an engine doesn't fly, planes do. (Or Apache Attack Helicopters) Humor is something you build using other parts, it's more than the sum of it's parts, no single part in of itself is humor. Secondly, there are no rules what humor is and what it is not except that it provides laughter and amusement. If somebody laughs about a rape joke, it's by definition humor, albeit (depending on joke) not a good one by most people's standards. Lastly, there is something called "Gallows Humor" in which (to quote Freud) "the ego refuses to be distressed by [...] reality. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world." As Wylie Sypher puts it, Gallows Humor is "to be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them". It's a natural human instinct. (I'm shamelessly copying of Wikipedia here, I'm no expert in all topics) So while, yes, rape is not a joke and it's a very horrible thing to those it happens to and we as a society should make efforts to not allow it to happen, it can only be healthy to make humor and jokes about it. Not to diminish the victims but to diminish the perpetrators. The perpetrator is worth nothing more than a joke to us, they have no further value or meaning in society and ought to be locked away forever after we thoroughly laughed, helping the victim to recover in the next step. That is what I want from a strong and healthy society.

dqv 10y ago

>This appalling lack of professionalism I don't think anything about cock.li is meant to imbue professionalism. I think one of the points is that it almost immunizes them from psychological operations. [1] I know it sounds conspiratorial, but social justice movements in online communities can be easily leveraged by orgs like the NSA to disrupt an organization. Combined with anti-meritocracy ideals, it's easy to get someone "at the top" who doesn't have any credentials (and who isn't really trying to get there for any other reason than disruption). It might not be his actual strategy, but the offensive things serve as a deterrent against lowest common denominator character assassinations. He has no reputation to destroy. [1] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

legodt 10y ago
I'm sorry that demands to be less awful to groups of people that aren't you make you feel like outside orgs are attacking your freedoms in some sort of conspiracy to destroy your insulated world, ESPECIALLY considering the context that the US has used malicious actors working against gender and racial equality to destabilize groups striving for better social justice.

dang 10y ago

That does sound like a disgusting ad, but this is the sort of off-topic generic tangent that invariably makes threads worse. You've also made it worse, below, by going into ideological flamewar. Please don't do these things on HN. Complaining about downvotes is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so please don't do this either. Assuming that downvotes signify misogyny and then responding with outrage was a particularly huge and unhelpful leap. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295658 and marked it off-topic.