Steuard

88 ms·

661.
by Steuard 14y ago
These issues are not as simple as you think they are. Race and gender are at least as complicated as, say, physics or programming. Unless you've done substantial and reasonably formal study of these topics, it turns out that you're going to
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by Steuard 14y ago
Do you really want to base your analysis on the assumption that that this was the only dick joke anyone made in a public space at this conference? I sure wouldn't take that bet. The reason this sort of thing is an issue is that there are
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by Steuard 14y ago
Stealing something I wrote on another thread here: Dick jokes are perceived to be almost exclusively a part of "guy culture". Want proof? Watch how fast a group of guys making those jokes suddenly clams up and changes the topic the moment a
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by Steuard 14y ago
I may be misunderstanding you here, but your comments feel to me as if they're based on an assumption that everyone in society faces more or less comparable levels of offensive behavior. For instance, to my eye, your argument about lawyers
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by Steuard 14y ago
Not in the slightest. (Unless you took my "constant" to mean "every second" rather than "multiple times each day".) I used to think about this sort of issue in much the same way that you seem to (or at least, I made similar comments at time
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by Steuard 14y ago
"It's not sexist to make a jokes about the word "dongle" sounding like "dong". They sound pretty similar. It's not very funny unless you're bored stiff or in grade five, but nevertheless it's pretty harmless joke material, and it isn't sexi
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by Steuard 14y ago
People really, really oversimplify these situations when they focus on ideas like "feeling offended". Yes, everyone is allowed to feel offended. That's not the point. The point is that women in our society live their entire lives under a co
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by Steuard 14y ago
"Most [all, actually] of the women I've talked to about this are furious with her over how badly this portrays women." And I'm furious with how badly the comments here and elsewhere portray men. The worst are the threats of violence that
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by Steuard 14y ago
I assume that depends on what the miner does with their bitcoins. My reading is that if they spend them directly as bitcoins, then no. If they convert them to US dollars, then yes. (I'm willing to believe that the latter is more common, of
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by Steuard 14y ago
In Firefox, that Easter egg is called "about:config". (And it even comes with a warning to scare away less technical folks who stumble into it.)
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by Steuard 14y ago
It seems clear that any more complete theory describing particle physics must inevitably reduce to something equivalent to the standard model in the appropriate limits. So in that sense, the standard model will hold forever. It's exactly
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by Steuard 14y ago
> I don't want to automatically get turned down for a job because a woman applied. I don't want to automatically get turned down for CS help because I am the wrong gender. Certainly! Nobody's goal is to reverse the historical situatio
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by Steuard 14y ago
To be a bit more succinct than my previous reply, I think there is a legitimate distinction between "making up content to fill up spaces not covered in the original story" (i.e. fan fiction) and "reasoning out as much as you reliably can ab
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by Steuard 14y ago
I understand the point you're making here, and I've certainly seen plenty of "fan fiction" theories taken far too seriously in discussions of Tolkien. But for my own pride's sake, I would attempt to draw a distinction between those "fan the
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by Steuard 14y ago
Nobody should stop him from talking, of course, but I don't see any good reason for anyone to listen for more than a few minutes, either. Neither the scientific community nor society as a whole will benefit from spending time and energy "de
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by Steuard 14y ago
Starting around 14:48 in the video, he says, "I myself think the constants may vary, quite considerably, well, within narrow limits, but they may all be varying. And I think the day will come when the scientific journals, like Nature, have
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by Steuard 14y ago
1. Fair point. I think I had in mind a future where these devices were in such common use that any bystander could be assumed to be wearing one. That might lead to greater targeting of all bystanders, but at some point I suspect criminals
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by Steuard 14y ago
If it becomes standard for that video to be continuously uploaded to a remote server, then hunting down the bystander would be entirely pointless. I think that's what we have to hope for.
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by Steuard 14y ago
You are continuing to ignore my central point. Men in our society are not indoctrinated in a culture of fear about rape the way women are. People do not routinely lecture men on things they should do to avoid getting raped. Most men walking
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by Steuard 14y ago
"I want to make clear I personally do not use this word in this context." Oh, good! :) As for your later point, again, I'm not an expert on this either, but I'd guess that context is essential for these things. I've lived my entire life in
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by Steuard 14y ago
I more or less agree with what you've said, though it still makes me uncomfortable that it only applies to women. Some level of advice on ways to reduce risk is clearly necessary. But , as I've said elsewhere, it is my strong impression th
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by Steuard 14y ago
"I would expect that if a woman reported a sexual assault to basically anybody either a vigilante mob or police investigation would be mustered in short order rather than the incident trivialised or the victim blamed." Unfortunately, this i
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by Steuard 14y ago
It's really not a great example, though there are obviously similarities. Rather than repeating myself at length, I'll just suggest that you read my response to the parent post. This stuff is complicated, and I know that it took me an awful
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by Steuard 14y ago
Yes, this always looks like just "giving safety advice", and yes, similar advice does get offered after other crimes. The difference in the case of rape is the extraordinary range and intrusiveness of such "advice" that all women (and onl
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by Steuard 14y ago
It's hard for me to read your original post in a way that does not imply, "This would not be as troubling if the word 'rape' was not intended to refer to forced intercourse." That may not be equivalent to saying, "This usage is OK", but its
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by Steuard 14y ago
The usage you cite here is indeed common, and the fact that it is common is a terrible thing. I'm not going to repeat a dozen other posts in this thread, but this usage does a great deal to normalize rape in our culture: it makes actual r
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by Steuard 14y ago
You must have overlooked my examples. It is routine , after a man rapes a woman, for people to ask things like "What was she wearing?" or "Why was she at that party?" or to say things like "Well, after all, she has a reputation for being '
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by Steuard 14y ago
Your point is well taken: we can't just assume this stuff, and it really does have to be measured. And I'm not remotely an expert on this stuff, so I can't provide thorough evidence for this. However, I've heard plenty of people who have st
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by Steuard 14y ago
I agree that the silent acceptance (and normalization) of prison rape is horrific. There is no excuse for it (except "out of sight, out of mind", which of course is no excuse at all). But, as I keep saying here, the biggest impact of rape
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by Steuard 14y ago
This isn't about "oversensitivity", it's about normalizing rape. There is evidence that actual rapists very often believe that most men either commit rape or want to commit rape: that they aren't all that different than the other guys they

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