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Here you show your difficulty perceiving men as victims. He didn't just apologize, he broke down crying. He was being tried in a court of public opinion where

• wpietri 11y ago
  I can perceive men as victims. But here he is not a victim. He thoughtlessly did something bad in front of the whole world. People told him that he did something bad. Lots of people, many of them angry. This upset him and he apologized. Forgiven and forgotten, end of story. Except, apparently, for bitter anti-feminists who can't help bringing this up every time Rosetta is in the news. I too have said and done dumb, hurtful things, been called out, and tearfully apologized. That's not victimhood. It's being a vaguely responsible human. > the benefit of the doubt What doubt did he fail to benefit from? The accusation is that he wore an inappropriate shirt on an international stage while representing an important scientific effort. I am not seeing a lot of room to doubt that was true. The general assumption I saw was that it was something he did thoughtlessly, with no understanding of the impact. So to the extent that his motivation was unknown, I'd say he got plenty of benefit of the doubt. > I'm not convinced. You say that like I might worry, but I don't. Quite a lot of views change in a progressive direction not because any given individual learns anything, but because those defending old errors die off. Note the rate of change here is pretty close to the rate of death: http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/bb8ic2qate-wa_cbgc2ifg.png http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod... We've been moving toward gradually less sexism for the last couple hundred years. I figure it's going to be at least a century more. If you have sincere questions (as opposed to argumentation in question form) I'm glad to answer. But otherwise, feel free to remain unconvinced. Your participation in bettering the world would be useful, but history suggests it's far from necessary. > Since you're calling people out for being anonymous in this conversation just remember you get to have your name attached to your arguments without risking your social life and career. Sure, but this is mainly true because I'm an older white guy. Just based on that status, I can get away with almost anything and still be employable. I agree that things have changed such that for the first time older white guys can no longer be guaranteed total impunity for being openly and vocally bigoted while occupying high leadership roles. I agree that this sucks mildly for people like me. Now I have to do the slightly difficult work of actually caring how my words might impact other people, and the actually hard work of learning how to apologize well when I fuck that up. But as far as I'm concerned, that is good news. Certainly for everybody who isn't an old white guy, as they can throw off some of their burden of fear of unpleasant consequences for saying things that might upset older white guys. I think it's good even for we old white guys. Privilege stunts people. I'm glad to live in an age where decreasing power imbalances mean a decrease in distorted communication.
  • hoopd 11y ago
    In the situation of the shirt a reasonable reaction would be to not hijack the publicity earned by the Rosetta team and to deal with the issue once the mission was at a point where the lead scientist could be pulled aside to talk about his wardrobe choices. Benefit of the doubt means that you accept your own fallibility, not that you use weasel words and implications to communicate the outright accusations you're making. To be clear, the accusation was at best that this guy in his stupidity is responsible for the gender gap in science. If you're a jealous keyboard warrior that's even better than calling him aggressively sexist because now you get to call him stupid even though he's the one with a PhD in magnetohydrodynamcs and you barely got a communications degree. In your view of history women have entered science as the barriers of sexism have fallen so you believe fighting sexism is a Very Important Cause. But in the time period of science we've also had several major technological revolutions and science itself has drastically changed. That means you can't choose two signals and establish a cause-and-effect relationship between them. These days STEM fields are the only ones feminists get to complain about because women dominate education at almost every level except for STEM fields. But we don't talk about women being 60% of college students, we don't talk about young black men having a 50% high school graduation rate while their female counterparts are doing significantly better. Instead we talk about the STEM gap and if we resist we get shamed into public apologies? > If you have sincere questions (as opposed to argumentation in question form) I'm glad to answer. I'm not sure if you realize how condescending it is to assume that you have nothing to learn from me but this is a great opportunity for me to learn from you. It's a common point in these conversatins where the person I'm speaking to assumes I just don't understand their One True Worldview. Next you realize I do, after that you decide I'm too emotionally attached to my privilege to admit the truth. Then, if this were in person, the public shaming and social penalties would begin and wouldn't stop until I gave an unqualified apology and retracted all previous statements. > But as far as I'm concerned, that is good news.....I'm glad to live in an age where decreasing power imbalances mean a decrease in distorted communication. I look at this and I see hegemony[0]. A social group with a significant amount of power over you has publicly shamed you (call-outs are done in public for a reason) into at least one tearful apology and as a result their worldview became your own. There was a time the Left thought this was a tool of evil people, seeing it become business as usual has been....interesting. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony