12 ms·

What is the distinction in this case? Is the sexism the beliefs and mindset, and the actual hiring actions are the sexual discrimination?

by xanados 14y ago

steveklabnik 14y ago
Sexism is socially systemic sexual discrimination. Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination. Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination. This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'
- philwelch 14y ago
  Incidentally, this is exhibit A in Orwellian political redefinition. Instead of using the plain meaning of a word, you load it with political assumptions based on your manichean worldview so any word with a bad connotation cannot be applied to your side. "You can't be sexist against men" is a classic Orwellian contradiction in that (by the plain meaning of the term) it itself is a sexist statement while simultaneously reinforcing this redefinition. It is so blatantly self-refuting that I'd long assumed it to be some kind of straw man, not something feminists actually said.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    Cool story bro. (I've seen you comment on these stories before, and I know I'm not going to get anywhere with you, so know that I'm just choosing not to respond to you.)
    - philwelch 14y ago
      It's fine if you don't respond--the strange thing about ideologies is that any two followers of them are largely interchangeable due to the lack of original thought involved. Given recent events though, I'm surprised you're still going around setting yourself up as some type of moral authority. Someone who bullies women programmers doesn't really have much credibility on this issue, does he?
      - qohen 14y ago
        > Someone who bullies women programmers Whoa...slow down there, hoss. Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node And, @harthur then said this in a followup to her original post, http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-follow-up/ http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-fo... My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity. First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind. So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.
        qohen 14y ago
        (In fact, the only thing Steve perhaps can be criticized for, in my view, is for using the word, "unequivocably" -- which is non-standard -- instead of, "unequivocally", when writing his apology. :-) http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocably-vs-unequivocally http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocab... )
        steveklabnik 14y ago
        Thanks. I just can't type. Fixing. (I didn't even know that people said 'unequivocably.')
        philwelch 14y ago
        Intentions don't matter. I'm glad harthur was magnanimous enough to accept the apology, but that doesn't really change much.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeffcutsinger 14y ago
    Incidentally, this is Hitlerian argumentation style. Instead of making a straightforward argument, you load it with emotional baggage to support your Stalinesque worldview.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.
      - jeffcutsinger 14y ago
        > Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. Thanks for pointing this out. I did go through high school, so I'm hip to your extremely erudite reference. > "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful. Really. I don't find much use for it. Maybe if I just spent more time virtuously casting my opponents as evil users of "Orwellian" tactics, I could also point out that _their_ worldview is manichean.
        philwelch 14y ago
        I guess I should have known you wouldn't have anything useful to say when you started off by comparing me to Hitler.
    - cobrausn 14y ago
      Hitler and Stalin reference in one comment! Surely there is some kind of achievement for that.
  - benblack 14y ago
    That you are unable to distinguish between an instance of sexual discrimination (called sexual discrimination) and systemic sexual discrimination (called sexism) does not mean anything political or Orwellian is afoot. Words have meanings. Ignorance of the meanings of words is easily solved. Stubborn refusal to recognize your own errors is rather less so.
    - svlasits 14y ago
      +9000 Cause upvoting this comment just isn't enough.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      I don't accept redefinitions of words that pack in political assumptions. Lots of people use "socialist" to mean "anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan" but we have no problem dismissing that as biased hyperbole. What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly. As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language. Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude. As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.
      - king_jester 14y ago
- gd1 14y ago
  Are you going to let the dictionary makers know?
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    Are you going to let them know that they don't have the Computer Science definitions of 'object' in there? http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object According to this line of argumentation, anyone doing OOP is calling it the wrong thing. (This particular dictionary has a reference to a 'computing dictionary' waaaaay down at the bottom. But if you picked up an actual dictionary, or went to a different one, it wouldn't be there. Dictionaries have different things for the same words!)
  - benblack 14y ago
    They've known for some time http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ism http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ism .
- gd1 14y ago
  I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. So if a Japanese person discriminates against me on the basis of race in Japan, it is racist, but do it in the US and it is "racial discrimination"?
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    Can you expand on why you find this ridiculous? When discussing social groups, the make-up of the group is obviously important.
    - gd1 14y ago
      How do I explain this... it is quite odd talking to someone who thinks your way. I know you exist but I struggle even to wrap my head around it. Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Fight it wherever you find it. My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. Recursively. All I have seen the left do in the last 40 years is carve up society into ever smaller and more specific groups with associated victim-hood points and it doesn't get us anywhere. All you are doing is entrenching division.
      - king_jester 14y ago
        Talking about experiences and pointing out issues that are driven by more than just individual encounters is very important for groups of people. to gain control over their lives and to break free from the kinds of violence and oppression they face. By definition, racism and sexism is discriminatory to whole groups of people, talking about the collective experience of that doesn't make those oppressions stronger.
      - steveklabnik 14y ago
        > Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Sure. Sexual discrimination is bad, no matter who is being discriminated against. It's about false equivalencies. You might want to see the last part of my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799 > My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Two people aren't a group? > Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. You might actually really like Latour, who's a sociologist who argues that his entire field is wrong because of too much abstraction. I've been reading 'Reassembling the Social' lately, and it's fascinating. That said, I actually disagree that the cause is 'thinking of people as groups,' but you of course are entitled to your opinion. > All you are doing is entrenching division. I'm not sure how advocating that we have more women in computer science is 'entrenching division.'
- papsosouid 14y ago
  Yes, we understand that you wish to redefine words to make them more suitable to you. It is not ignorance of your dialect, it is a rejection of it. Those words already have meanings in English, and people are not wrong for continuing to use those meanings. You are welcome to use whatever meaning you wish, but saying "my clique uses a totally different meaning for those words, so you are wrong now" is not a constructive activity.
  - steveklabnik 14y ago
    It's not 'my clique,' it's people who study social groups. You're of coure, free to reject an entire branch of science, but that doesn't seem very hacker to me.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      There is no branch of science which defines the words that way. And even if there were, rejecting a redefinition of a common word is not rejecting an entire branch of science. If everyone involved in astronomy suddenly decided the word large only applies to things greater in size than the sun, people continuing to use large to refer to their soda would not be rejecting astronomy as a consequence. Also, you appear to be deliberately misrepresenting a small subset of sociologists as being representative of the entire field. That redefinition of sexism isn't even universally accepted in women's studies and feminism, much less sociology. It is in fact a clique that uses those terms that way, not a branch of science.
      - bitcrunch 14y ago
        You are wrong. These terms (and the definitions steveklabnik gave) are very important in sociology, and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed. We've used them in the vernacular (which is the dictionary definition) to describe individual offenses, but when sociologists and academics use them (the field the terms came out of), it is very useful to describe a power structure and things that happen within that power structure. I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
- dradtke 14y ago
  > You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. I would argue that many of the pressures men face, such as those to "man up" in difficult situations rather than freely express their feelings, counts as a routine, ingrained, and pervasive form of sexual discrimination. Even if I fully agree with your definition of sexism, that doesn't mean that sexism against men is nonexistent.

What is the distinction in this case? Is the sexism the beliefs and mindset, and the actual hiring actions are the sexual discrimination?

by xanados 14y ago

What is the distinction in this case? Is the sexism the beliefs and mindset, and the actual hiring actions are the sexual discrimination?

steveklabnik 14y ago

Sexism is socially systemic sexual discrimination. Racism is socially systemic racial discrimination. Classism is socially systemic class-based discrimination. This is why you'll find people who say "You can't be sexist against men." You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. When the discrimination becomes routine, ingrained, and pervasive, that turns it into an 'ism.'

philwelch 14y ago
Incidentally, this is exhibit A in Orwellian political redefinition. Instead of using the plain meaning of a word, you load it with political assumptions based on your manichean worldview so any word with a bad connotation cannot be applied to your side. "You can't be sexist against men" is a classic Orwellian contradiction in that (by the plain meaning of the term) it itself is a sexist statement while simultaneously reinforcing this redefinition. It is so blatantly self-refuting that I'd long assumed it to be some kind of straw man, not something feminists actually said.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Cool story bro. (I've seen you comment on these stories before, and I know I'm not going to get anywhere with you, so know that I'm just choosing not to respond to you.)
  - philwelch 14y ago
    It's fine if you don't respond--the strange thing about ideologies is that any two followers of them are largely interchangeable due to the lack of original thought involved. Given recent events though, I'm surprised you're still going around setting yourself up as some type of moral authority. Someone who bullies women programmers doesn't really have much credibility on this issue, does he?
    - qohen 14y ago
      > Someone who bullies women programmers Whoa...slow down there, hoss. Steve explained that his tweet about @harthur's replace utility was not meant to disparage its author, or its code, but was meant to express his feelings about Node (i.e. the ecosystem for which replace was written). And, he apologized, "unequivocably", for the fact that his tweet had caused pain to @harthur: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node And, @harthur then said this in a followup to her original post, http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-follow-up/ http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/02/01/open-source-rocks-fo... My last blog post was quite a downer, so I want to do a short follow up for posterity. First of all, there were some nice responses to it from Steve Klabnik and especially Corey Haines, who gave a very sincere straight-up apology. Several people have told me they are usually very nice, so keep that in mind. So, your characterization appears to be incorrect and unfair.
      - qohen 14y ago
        (In fact, the only thing Steve perhaps can be criticized for, in my view, is for using the word, "unequivocably" -- which is non-standard -- instead of, "unequivocally", when writing his apology. :-) http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocably-vs-unequivocally http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/69930/unequivocab... )
        steveklabnik 14y ago
        Thanks. I just can't type. Fixing. (I didn't even know that people said 'unequivocably.')
      - philwelch 14y ago
        Intentions don't matter. I'm glad harthur was magnanimous enough to accept the apology, but that doesn't really change much.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jeffcutsinger 14y ago
  Incidentally, this is Hitlerian argumentation style. Instead of making a straightforward argument, you load it with emotional baggage to support your Stalinesque worldview.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful.
    - jeffcutsinger 14y ago
      > Admittedly, if you haven't read 1984 the Orwell reference probably went over your head. Thanks for pointing this out. I did go through high school, so I'm hip to your extremely erudite reference. > "Manichean" is a word you should just look up, as it is quite useful. Really. I don't find much use for it. Maybe if I just spent more time virtuously casting my opponents as evil users of "Orwellian" tactics, I could also point out that _their_ worldview is manichean.
      - philwelch 14y ago
        I guess I should have known you wouldn't have anything useful to say when you started off by comparing me to Hitler.
  - cobrausn 14y ago
    Hitler and Stalin reference in one comment! Surely there is some kind of achievement for that.
- benblack 14y ago
  That you are unable to distinguish between an instance of sexual discrimination (called sexual discrimination) and systemic sexual discrimination (called sexism) does not mean anything political or Orwellian is afoot. Words have meanings. Ignorance of the meanings of words is easily solved. Stubborn refusal to recognize your own errors is rather less so.
  - svlasits 14y ago
    +9000 Cause upvoting this comment just isn't enough.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    I don't accept redefinitions of words that pack in political assumptions. Lots of people use "socialist" to mean "anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan" but we have no problem dismissing that as biased hyperbole. What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly. As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language. Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude. As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.
    - king_jester 14y ago
gd1 14y ago
Are you going to let the dictionary makers know?
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Are you going to let them know that they don't have the Computer Science definitions of 'object' in there? http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/object According to this line of argumentation, anyone doing OOP is calling it the wrong thing. (This particular dictionary has a reference to a 'computing dictionary' waaaaay down at the bottom. But if you picked up an actual dictionary, or went to a different one, it wouldn't be there. Dictionaries have different things for the same words!)
- benblack 14y ago
  They've known for some time http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ism http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ism .
gd1 14y ago
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. So if a Japanese person discriminates against me on the basis of race in Japan, it is racist, but do it in the US and it is "racial discrimination"?
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  Can you expand on why you find this ridiculous? When discussing social groups, the make-up of the group is obviously important.
  - gd1 14y ago
    How do I explain this... it is quite odd talking to someone who thinks your way. I know you exist but I struggle even to wrap my head around it. Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Fight it wherever you find it. My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. Recursively. All I have seen the left do in the last 40 years is carve up society into ever smaller and more specific groups with associated victim-hood points and it doesn't get us anywhere. All you are doing is entrenching division.
    - king_jester 14y ago
      Talking about experiences and pointing out issues that are driven by more than just individual encounters is very important for groups of people. to gain control over their lives and to break free from the kinds of violence and oppression they face. By definition, racism and sexism is discriminatory to whole groups of people, talking about the collective experience of that doesn't make those oppressions stronger.
    - steveklabnik 14y ago
      > Racism/sexism/whatever... a wrong is a wrong. Sure. Sexual discrimination is bad, no matter who is being discriminated against. It's about false equivalencies. You might want to see the last part of my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5178799 > My example was an interaction between two people, two individuals, and now you're talking about "discussing social groups". Two people aren't a group? > Racism and sexism is caused by considering people as "groups" and not individuals, and your solution is to... do more of the same. You might actually really like Latour, who's a sociologist who argues that his entire field is wrong because of too much abstraction. I've been reading 'Reassembling the Social' lately, and it's fascinating. That said, I actually disagree that the cause is 'thinking of people as groups,' but you of course are entitled to your opinion. > All you are doing is entrenching division. I'm not sure how advocating that we have more women in computer science is 'entrenching division.'
papsosouid 14y ago
Yes, we understand that you wish to redefine words to make them more suitable to you. It is not ignorance of your dialect, it is a rejection of it. Those words already have meanings in English, and people are not wrong for continuing to use those meanings. You are welcome to use whatever meaning you wish, but saying "my clique uses a totally different meaning for those words, so you are wrong now" is not a constructive activity.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  It's not 'my clique,' it's people who study social groups. You're of coure, free to reject an entire branch of science, but that doesn't seem very hacker to me.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    There is no branch of science which defines the words that way. And even if there were, rejecting a redefinition of a common word is not rejecting an entire branch of science. If everyone involved in astronomy suddenly decided the word large only applies to things greater in size than the sun, people continuing to use large to refer to their soda would not be rejecting astronomy as a consequence. Also, you appear to be deliberately misrepresenting a small subset of sociologists as being representative of the entire field. That redefinition of sexism isn't even universally accepted in women's studies and feminism, much less sociology. It is in fact a clique that uses those terms that way, not a branch of science.
    - bitcrunch 14y ago
      You are wrong. These terms (and the definitions steveklabnik gave) are very important in sociology, and were coined in large part by sociologists looking for a way to describe social phenomenon that they'd observed. We've used them in the vernacular (which is the dictionary definition) to describe individual offenses, but when sociologists and academics use them (the field the terms came out of), it is very useful to describe a power structure and things that happen within that power structure. I'm sad to see that steveklabnik has been downvoted so much on this board for saying something that is so very correct.
dradtke 14y ago
> You can obviously discriminate against a man based on sex, but that's not part of a larger, overarching societal norm. I would argue that many of the pressures men face, such as those to "man up" in difficult situations rather than freely express their feelings, counts as a routine, ingrained, and pervasive form of sexual discrimination. Even if I fully agree with your definition of sexism, that doesn't mean that sexism against men is nonexistent.