1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and
2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work.
The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching it nursing roles. The former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't. I'd argue that both are issues, but one is something that political groups get behind and the other isn't.
As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.
It's the infantilism of understanding; people wanting things to be black and white and easy to understand, where pretty much everything contentious, when you dig, is complex.
I suspect a lot of the blame for this is a combination of the short article and news industries, giving people the feeling of being informed without any of the substance to back it up, and the increasing politicisation of issues, where people hold views for reasons more tribal than rational.
Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things. Because you can read into life whatever you want.
> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.
You have your point, but is a common and too simplistic interpretation. We need to repeat this more: To have cattle or being able to shoot a rabbit is irrelevant and not a guarantee at all to understand science or modern biology. Seriously.
Radically new ideas (like for example that wolves will generate money and provide basic services valued in millions of dollars, or that if you kill the alpha wolf in a pack there is an increase, not a decrease to cattle damages, or that to cull badgers will spread faster the cattle diseases that you want to stop and thus is a questionable investment of public money)... all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics...
And I'm talking of real experts. Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub by farmers and hunters that lobby to push the local silly politician hunting for votes. Or by people that do not understand how biology works. (Ask the Chinese people about the failure of the big sparrow cull in Mao times, for example).
Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less. Basic concepts in biology are often terribly misunderstood or just ignored stubbornly by them for decades, and there is a big inertia in small villages to accept changes. For some reason, all people are instead ready to follow the local hero, with his myth based ideas, and often lose money by this.
There are 304,255 signatories to this petition. While they may agree with experts, it seems unlikely that more than a small minority have actually researched the issue, much less qualifying as experts.
> Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less. Basic concepts in biology are often terribly misunderstood or just ignored stubbornly by them for decades, and there is a big inertia in small villages to accept changes. For some reason, all people are instead ready to follow the local hero, with his myth based ideas, and often lose money by this.
> Farmers are experts in breeding cattle. Point. Not more, not less.
I hope you're going for hyperbole here. If not, you may be surprised at the proportion of farmers who do understand how biology works; who do work with vets and other professionals and follow research into animal health and disease.
Your statement does a large number of people a disservice.
Those are all directly related to raising cattle, though.
What the parent is talking about are the broader consequences of decisions that farmers make based on the limited scope of their expertise.
A big example is the use of antibiotics to manage disease in livestock, which obviously takes some understanding of biology and consultation with vets and other experts. Unfortunately, it is very likely contributing to the evolution of bacteria away from susceptibility to those antibiotics.
Farmers are not unique in the fact that their expertise doesn't cover all possible outcomes. That's true of everyone. It doesn't mean they are ignorant and I don't think it does them a disservice to say it.
What the parent is talking about cultural factors that might lead farmers or other "small town" folks to dismiss the findings of other experts, because those expert don't know as much about farming. A big-city evolutionary biologist Ph.D. is going to look stupid if they're quizzed about raising cattle or shooting guns. That doesn't mean they're wrong about bacterial evolution.
This is not limited to farmers, of course--in big cities you get people who don't listen to doctors about vaccines, simply because they don't know anything about doctors except that they make a lot of money.
If anyone is interested in a such a farmer, I would recommend looking up Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms. He really counters the general stereotype that farmers are dumb people, which they certainly are not.
> all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts in zoology, chemistry, genetics...
IIRC, so are the ideas that wolves, an animal capable of eating sheep or even moose would not eat children if they happened to walk unprotected.
Not saying we should get rid of wolves only that some realism need to be applied.
Well, if you want realism, wolves are one of the really select club of species of animals known to readily protect, nurture and adopt a lost human children if some circumstances occur. This is a fact, not a feeling.
Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses, rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, racoons, big cats, snapping turtles, electric eels, lots of arthropods, and most of all other humans or machines created by humans. This is the reason for small children never should walk unprotected by unsafe areas. For children there is a change at least of surviving a close encounter with a wolf, that will not enjoy if is a buffalo instead.
Curiously today the local press tells a story about a man that died after four years fighting lyme disease caused by a deer tick bite. For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.
Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub
For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly.
Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related?
Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population. But neither explanation has anything to do with wolves. In fact, wolf numbers in The Netherlands have doubled over the past year, and we're still seeing an increase in ticks.
> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population
True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the role of wolves as predators.
In the other hand, to put your "population of wolves has doubled between 2014 and 2015 but ticks had not changed" claim in context, we need to note that wolf population in the Netherlands between years 1869 and 2013 was composed of zero wolves.
Then, in 4-Jul-2013 something very strange happened. A she-wolf was found dead in a roadside next Luttelgeest. The first confirmed case of a "dutch" wolf in 140 years. A study in the journal Lutra covered the issue concluding that:
1) The animal was a purebreed wolf genetically related with East Europe populations [discarding a dog-wolf mix or a sarloos dog], was unchipped, and between 1.5 and 2.5 years old.
2) She fed on beaver in either the Carpathian mountains or the Eifel which is too far for the animal to have walked (9Km/h) from by itself within the 24 hours needed to digest its last meal (Genetic analysis from the remains of the beaver and the wolf linked both animals with populations living in this areas).
3) Bullet impacts and shattered fragments where found in the chest and flank indicating that the animal was shot twice before being hit by a car.
4) No car accident involving an animal was reported to local emergency services in the previous hours to the discovery of the corpse.
5) A discrepancy between the timing of the post mortem and rigor mortis intervals indicated that this wolf was shot prior to illegal transport to the Netherlands, from a distance within 2 days.
[To fake a car accident, running over a previously killed animal is a common procedure to cover environmental crimes against protected species].
Source:
The first wolf found in the Netherlands in 150 years was the victim of a wildlife crime. Lutra. 2013. 56(2): 93-109. Gravendeel, de Groot, Kik, Beentjes, Bergman, Caniglia, Cremers, Fabbri, Groenenberg, Grone, Bruinderink, Font, Hakhof, Harms, Jansman, Janssen, Lammertsma, Laros, Linnartz, van der Marel, Mulder, van der Mije, Nieman, Nowak, Randi, Rijks, Speksnijder & Vonho
Then in 9-march-2015 a single wolf was photographed in Hunze.
So, unless you can show us new data, yes, wolf population was doubled in Netherlands in the last year... but you forgot to mention that is from zero to one animal. Here have your answer to the lack of changes on tick population.
Yup, that was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I should probably have left it out. I didn't look up the specifics, but I know a second wolf sighting was claimed in Limburg, raising the number of wolves in NL from 1 to 2.
At least in the United States, a non-rabid wolf has never killed a person in the lower 48 states. Ever.[0] And there used to be millions of wolves in the US.
[0] from Vicious: Wolves and Men in America by Jon T. Coleman, Yale University Press, 2008
It's possible, but statistically the likelihood these days is very low.
Typically (not always, but usually), a wolf attack is linked to either human habituation, or disease (rabies), or loss of natural resources (wolves will attack humans if they are "food of last resort"). Humans are, um, kind of dangerous to wolves in general, so typically they do their best to avoid us. There's only two known fatal wolf attacks in North America, and both are linked to habituation. In other areas there was probably more wolf attacks in the past (probably due to encroachment), but at present there's little reason to fear a wolf in North America.
Domestic cattle actually are far more deadly (about 20 fatalities a year in North America). And we haven't even crossed into the territory of the deadliness of, say, automobiles.
Balancing livestock / ranches in areas with wolf populations is definitely a real issue and a far more pressing concern. I think many who engage in both ranching and environmental management do understand the dual need to both balance the environment and make a living off the land. (http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wolves-...)
My "gut feel observation" is that a lot of the really overtly binary debates in these sort of "environmentalism vs. hunting" debates comes from people who don't live in rural areas at all. Such as sport-only / pure recreational / trophy type hunters (many who are urban and well off... after all, isn't fox hunting traditionally associated with the UK upper class?) versus strict cute-and-fuzzy-animal environmentalists (many who also are urban and well off). So I'm not sure if the local farmers and hunters at the pub really are the ones you should necessarily point the finger at.
> Radically new ideas (like for example that wolves will generate money and provide basic services valued in millions of dollars, or that if you kill the alpha wolf in a pack there is an increase, not a decrease to cattle damages, or that to cull badgers will spread faster the cattle diseases that you want to stop and thus is a questionable investment of public money)... all those knowledge is generated normally in universities, placed in big cities, after years of painfully slow research done by experts
Actually, the big agricultural research universities are generally not located in big cities, because that makes it difficult for them to do their research.
The problem is that we're meant to believe everyone's opinions are equally valid. Empirically, it seems to me, some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent.
> some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent
Some are. Even more are just plain incorrect for all the many reasons human beings are incorrect.
At least in the states, we've spent the last 30 years making people believe that simply because you feel it is so, it must be.
That's got to be a huge factor in the degradation of discourse in the same time period- if instead of coming from the classical position of some attempted mutual understanding, people are essentially following their own religion of self.
If what I feel is always correct, then you disagreeing with me means that you are wrong. Thus, I can't listen to you anymore or even attempt to see where you're coming from. This leads to the same types of responses you see when you are saying things that might make someone doubt their religion. You get the hyperbolic, emotional, even physical responses that go nowhere. Now look at the outbreak of safe spaces, refusing to let people speak that have a non-popular opinion, etc.
If you watch old political interviews and things like that you can really see how far the state of political discourse has fallen, there used to be genuine public discussion, now politics (at least as shown on TV) largely consists of sound bites and catch phrases.
It makes you wonder if the sound bite cycle and instant feedback loop with the general public encourages this behavior, even more so than politicians just being more dumb. You'd think that with the educational institutions most of these people come from, they would be capable of significantly more thoughtful and in depth discussions than we see from them. I mean, Ted Cruz in college, by all accounts was a stand out on the debate team at university. I'm no fan of his, but certainly he's proven capable of the type of discussion we (at least, I) would like to see from these people. But if you engage in a classical debate and the masses get bored a la Idiocracy, or you can't engage your opponent because they are just lobbing verbal grenades and non sequiturs, there's nothing you can do. You'll either be the boring person no one listens to, the angry person that seems to be talking down to everyone else, or you just engage at the lowest comment denominator and throw out your own grenades.
Add to that social media blowing up when you say some rhetorical BS (good or bad), which then gets the news channels to talk about the social media, which then feeds back into the social media, you can see why there's no incentive to rise above it all. Being the 'better' person in this case means you get ignored, which means they aren't going to vote for you.
I recently stumbled on a podcast I found very interesting that relates: The Art of Manliness #189: The Classical Education You Never Had [0]
They had an author (Susan Bauer) on discussing topics from her book The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had [1], where they discussed the differences between a classical education and today's modern education (in America).
One of the salient points was where she described today's method of reading literature and stopping every few pages/chapters and discussing what you think/feel about it and your interpretation. She made the argument that these students are being taught to come to conclusions and judge things before getting the full picture, and human nature being what it is, we stick with that judgement even as we learn more. She went on to say that instead of this, a more classical approach would be to read the whole book first, then go back through and discuss those interesting sections and come to conclusions with the whole picture.
I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my list now- the entire episode was very interesting and thoughtful and I'm going to check out more of their podcasts as well.
Not intended, but the first two quotes are directly from the author of the book in the podcast I was referring, not my impression of the book she wrote on the subject. Because of her discussion, I'm now interested in reading in the book.
I don't think we're really meant to believe that, it's just we haven't found a way to decide (on a big scale) who we should listen too and who not. Only intelligent people? Only moral people? Only people with money? Only .. I think you get it.
Next you have the problem with "trust those with education" - sounds great, but .. what about those who have education but are paid for a specific point of view? Maybe without us knowing it.
It's the classic "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"-thing. People get told to listen to <some group> - great! People get mislead by <some group> - shitty. People get to to listen to <some (other) group> - no way. Last time you told me to listen to someone he lied to me!
That's the reason we ended with "one person, one vote" in the first place (and governing is nothing else but constant exchange of opinions). A system where automagically the "best, brightest, morally fittest, etc." would lead would be vastly superior. Unfornately, outside of fairy tales, we have no idea how to do that and instead try to limit the damage one bad apple can do.
People have confused a right to express their opinion with a right to their opinion. The first is a foundation for discussion and improvement, the second is a recipe for stupidity.
I saw this last night[1]. I looked hard to see if this was a spoof or if someone had mistaken The Onion for a valid news source.
As far as I can though it's real. This is a prime example of #2 that you mentioned. People whose connection to animals is their kids nature shows and maybe a dog or a cat.
> As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.
So I'm guessing you are from the countryside and you think its ok to hunt foxes and badgers?
Just to balance things up, I'm from Suffolk which is as countryside as you can get and I don't know anyone who thinks its ok to hunt. I also don't know anyone who'd say they "kept cattle" rather than "kept cows", so I guess we're not from quite the same countryside? :)
Suffolk boy myself (though Welsh by birth and parentage). I suspect that's more because Suffolk isn't traditionally a hunting area. However, where my fiancée is from, is, so I get both sides of the argument.
Re. badgers, my problem is that the work that's been done on the trial culls has been so badly managed that it's hard to say one way or the other whether it's working or not. Quarantine and cattle culling in Wales seems to be having a positive effect on TB spread, but at huge economic damage to farmers.
Re. foxes, my issue there is that the hunt ban is an awful piece of legislation, that neither protects foxes, nor helps those who have have dozens of hunt dogs. I'm fine with either legalising it (it's not a great past-time, but there's far worse and it's an effective way of controlling fox populations in localised areas), or with banning it (there's other ways to keep populations in check, although none are humane).
My issue is with town and city folk who didn't grow up in the countryside not understanding that it's land which has to be managed.
Bits of it are (or more accurately bits of the population are). Depends who you hang around with. The garage where I used to have my car serviced had hunts go past there.
If you look at the number of hunts in East Anglia vs the south west, midlands or north west, it's nothing like the same number. And when you consider the population differences, it's even more stark. There's hunts in Suffolk, sure. Just not as much as lots of the rest of the UK.
Also, as an addendum, describing people who hunt as "toffs" sort of doesn't work very well once you've actually known the people who do it. 100 years ago, it'd have been an vaguely accurate assessment, but nowadays it's pretty hard to argue. A red jacket does not a landed gentleman make.
While I don't disagree with the general thrust of your argument, as an aside, the lack of men in nursing roles (and teaching, especially to younger children) is seen as a problem and when you spend time in the nursing or teaching community it comes up a lot. Campaigns to attract more men into these professions have been running for a long time.
While I'm here, speaking as a townie, I don't see any complexity in the fox hunting issue. If it's vermin that needs to be controlled, kill it. Fine. But to spend a day getting pleasure out of chasing it down with a pack of dogs? That's not the same question at all.
While it is seen as a problem, the point is that it's not taken seriously enough than the opposite imbalance.
There are way worse examples:
Male students are getting a whole one level worse marks than female students with the same knowledge [1] (Czech).
Theoretically, each parent has an equal right to the custody of the child when they separate. In reality, with a whooping 85-90% the custody is resolved according to female preference [2]: "It is a very common scenario in divorce in England that the house is transferred into the wife's sole name, the children live with the wife and the husband pays maintenance for the children..."
Males are 400-600% more likely to be attacked than females, while it is females safety that is discussed way more.
The vector of home violence is woman against child and not man against woman as often believed: "The DHHS data shows that of children abused by one parent between 2001 and 2006, 70.6% were abused by their mothers, whereas only 29.4% were abused by their fathers."
Even worse, when child is killed: "And of children who died at the hands of one parent between 2001 and 2006, 70.8% were killed by their mothers, whereas only 29.2% were killed by their fathers."
I don’t know enough about Czech grades to comment, and I generally agree with you about the common unfairness of custody disputes, but the rest of your claims seem a bit shaky.
Your point #2 (along with other reasons for a child to more commonly live with a single mother, e.g. the father isn’t known, is in prison, or runs off) partly explains your points #4 and #5. From the document you cite, 27% of abuse victims were living with a single mother and another 5% were living with their mother and another adult, while only 3% were living with a single father. If you only look at children living with both parents, it looks like either parent could be the abuser with approximately equal likelihood. Looking at the source document, your claim #5 seems to be a complete misinterpretation of the data, but in any event, the largest cause of fatalities is “neglect”, and most fatalities were in children under the age of 3.
More generally, I suspect a significant proportion of children spend substantially more time with their mothers than their fathers, e.g. because fathers are more likely to work, tend to work longer hours when both parents are working, and do much less housework and childcare. I suspect these disparities are even more prevalent if you restrict your examination to households where child abuse occurs.
If you want to understand child abuse by parents, you should try to gather concrete data about the family structure and other context. Aggregate statistics about which parent is more often the aggressor can be misleading without considering those other factors (most relevantly here, who the primary caregiver is).
Interpreting this document to imply that children are at much greater danger from women than men is disingenuous, or sloppy at best.
Similarly for your point #3. What is the context for the “attacks” you are talking about? Gang violence? Bar fights? School bullying? Muggings in dark alleys late at night? You don’t cite a source, so it’s not clear quite what you’re referring to.
I showed only few examples. While we may discuss individual points, I believe the whole imbalance has been clearly shown.
By arguing that the level of abuse by man and woman is roughly the same you are actually enforcing the point, not making is weaker. And if we are looking at the whole picture, presenting totals makes complete sense. We don't need detailed statistics to point the imbalance. There's no question that the type of abuse differs among men and women.
You've got to get over the idea that there is some sort of fair level at which all these problems should be talked about.
For one thing, unless you've done some rigorous surveying of the total communications landscape, your perception of how seriously everyone is taking these imbalances is going to be limited by what you happen to see (intentional or accidental filtering), and what you remember (confirmation bias).
For another thing, the solutions are not mutually dependent--some people can try to get more women into STEM jobs without hurting the efforts of other people who are trying to get more men into nursing jobs. We don't need to achieve some fair and balanced level of discourse before we start actually fixing things.
Finally, imbalances are not themselves a problem, they are a symptom. In STEM jobs, the big problem is not there are too few women, it is that the culture of many places is abusive and off-putting to women. That's what needs to be solved. Gender imbalance is just a proxy that's easier to measure.
"While I'm here, speaking as a townie, I don't see any complexity in the fox hunting issue."
Well, that's the point the grandparent comment was making. The fact that there is multiple sides on this issue shows that it is not as black and white as you seem to see it.
The people hunting foxes and badger are not devils made of pure evil, so there must be a reason why they are doing it.
But the actual debate about hunting foxes does not matter here, the point is : the world is not as black and white as people see it.
Oh gosh no, nobody is pure evil. Many people who take part in lynchings, for example, go home to show tenderness to their spouse and children. Not being pure evil doesn't make it ok.
Recently I read a report done by the national agency for higher education in Sweden, on order by the government, to study why there are so few male teachers. As part of the study, a poll was sent to each of the teaching districts in Sweden with question like "what strategies do the district have to increase the ratio of male student for the teaching profession." Out of 19, only 3 responded that they had any strategy at all to increase the ratio of male students, and out of the remaining 16, only 6 had some strategy regarding gender equality at all. One university simply replied by saying "in order to have a strategy, we first need to figure out why there is so few men who want to become teachers. More research needed.".
If it comes up often in the teaching community, its not something which much money is being directed to, projected being run, and time being spent on. There is no political pressure to apply affirmative action, no ear marked funds in the budget, and no policy changes in order to change the dominated female culture that the teaching profession has (The report attribute the culture as a major cause for male teacher having significant higher exit rate both as student but also after they have worked a few years).
As for campaigns "running for a long time", the report says the exact opposite. It explicitly say there hasn't been any significant effort to bring male student to female dominated professions, while the opposite has existed for about 50 years. It suggest that university programs should look at the past and current efforts to bring female students to STEM subject and use it as a guide in order to create programs for gender equality which also include male students.
Personally, I think the recent decided policy by Norway is a good step in the right direction. A simple policy that dictate that minority students, that is when the gender ration is less than 20%-80%, will receive some benefits/incentives to counter gender discrimination.
(The report is 2009:7 R, by the Swedish national agency for higher education)
Personally, I think the recent decided policy by Norway is a good step in the right direction. A simple policy that dictate that minority students, that is when the gender ratio is less than 20%-80%, will receive some benefits/incentives to counter gender discrimination.
I think this is great idea. It is simple to execute and does not attempt to prescribe an "optimal ratio". Of course, there's always room for debate, like whether it should only be applied to gender minorities, but that's simple enough to tweak.
I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.
Not that they're always successful, but hunters also want animals killed as quickly as possible (not necessarily painlessly, but are our methods of slaughtering really that painless? Do we give them a nice general anesthetic before bashing in their brains or decapitating them?). Anything but a good clean shot is considered, depending on the hunter, cruel, wasteful, poor form, etc. Most of the people I know who hunt aren't sports hunters. They hunt deer (because there's an abundance in the area, more than were here before the US was founded), primarily for food. A couple decent-sized deer, properly butchered, will last quite a while for them. If they hunt anything beyond what they need, it's to give to family/friends who won't or can't hunt.
Fox hunting, where the fox is chased around by dogs for a long time before it is finally killed, is torture. Hunting with a rifle, where you sneak up on an animal and kill it before it even knows it's being hunted, is not. I'd say bow hunting is a grey area; if you have to track the bleeding animal down while it is slowly bleeding out, that's cruel. But if you're hunting for survival and a bow is all you have, or if you're training for that situation (and it's realistic that you might be in that situation) then it's ok.
If you compare the worst case scenario for hunting (fox hunting) with the best case scenario for slaughter, but often the slaughter isn't fun either. Many animals are very distressed on their way to the slaughter. Even more importantly, the lives they had before that point were probably much worse than the lives of the wild foxes. Farming animals for meat also happens on a scale that is absolutely incomparable to fox hunting. More animals are slaughtered every day than the number of foxes that were hunted in the entire history of humankind.
Secondly, you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival. Why doesn't the same apply for slaughter? You don't need to eat farmed animals for survival.
I'm reading the parent post not as "you say that hunting is permissible if you're hunting for survival" but instead as a claim that this cruelty is justified if and only if you're hunting for survival.
The same would apply for slaughter - if it would be a survival matter, then any methods would be permissible (i.e. some of the more cruel traditional approaches) but since it is not, it should be mandatory to use only the less painful approaches to slaughter.
I'm comparing "hunting for sport" against "hunting for food", and I'm comparing "hunting for food in a cruel way for the challenge" against "hunting for food in a cruel way out of necessity."
I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because it had a nice life before the torture started.
I don't think it's ok to torture a fox because we kill a lot more cows than foxes.
I don't think it's ok to torture animals that we raise for slaughter. I pay more for organic grass-fed cattle, free-range chicken and eggs, etc, in the hopes that the animals that provide my food were treated well while they were alive.
As I said at the start, I'm not a vegetarian. I'm definitely a part of the animal food chain, so I'm ok with the killing of animals further down the chain for me to eat, and I avoid the animals further up the chain so that I don't get eaten. (I wouldn't blame them if they got me, though.) What I object to is killing in a way that causes more suffering than it has to.
If you object to inflicting more suffering than you have to, how do you justify not being a vegetarian? In the end this is a trade of a bit of pleasure for you and quite a bit of suffering for the animal. Fox hunting, it seems to me, is precisely the same sort of trade. You could argue that the pleasure you get from eating meat is worth the suffering, but the pleasure the hunters get from fox hunting is not worth the suffering, but it is not clear to me how you would justify such a claim. Firstly, it seems to me not impossible that a hunter derives more pleasure from a hunting trip than from eating a piece of chicken. Secondly, it seems to me not impossible that the total amount of suffering inflicted on a chicken during its farm lifetime including slaughter is greater than the total amount of suffering inflicted on a fox during the hunt, particularly since free range isn't all it's made out to be. Thirdly, even if it were the case that fox hunting is a worse trade than meat eating, it's still unclear why it couldn't be the case that both are still worth it, or neither is worth it.
> The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.
Where is your evidence that the the most outspoken people who oppose fox hunting and badger culls do so because they think badgers and foxes are "cute"?
Why would people who oppose fox hunting go on fox hunts?
Why is going on hunts or owning cattle or living outside of a city necessary to validate an opinion about killing animals?
> Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things
It's also easy to write people off whose opinions you don't like/accept, by pretending they only hold them for ridiculously simplistic reasons.
I used to go hunt sabbing. everyone else that went had lived in villages for most of their lives. You're simply wrong about that - lots of people in HSA are by any definition rural people.
You're wrong about nursing and teaching too. Lack of women in STEM comes up on HN because HN has a STEM focus. All the teaching / nursing unions, professional bodies, colleges, etc think that the lack of men is a problem. There are plenty of news paper articles about this too.
It's weird that you call your opponents infantile yet present such a simplistic, and wrong, set of argument.
I would argue that neither are issues, so long as the imbalances aren't due to discrimination (like real discrimination, not the "anything can be discrimination if you put your mind to it!" stuff we see today).
I think you're right about most of this, especially the fact that news media coverage is "bite-sized" and incomprehensive.
But, I'd like to point out that the lack of women in STEM fields is about decision-making power and not necessarily equity. Women aren't fighting for equity in garbage collection jobs either.
If women are to have equal say on the goings-on's of society they need to partake in the upper echelons of power equally (Government, Corporate Leadership, STEM positions etc.).
I think this is the difference between a collectivist and individualist point of view. You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender. The last sentence of your comment is from a collectivist point of view. I don't think this view is helpful. One woman isn't really helped by another woman being in the government. What matters is that each individual has equal opportunity regardless of characteristics such as gender that are not directly relevant to the position. The tribal point of view does the opposite: rather than de-emphasising characteristics irrelevant to the situation at hand, it amps up those characteristics in a tribal us-vs-them conflict situation. Complaining that there aren't enough women in STEM seems to me as silly as complaining that there aren't enough people with red hair in STEM. What we should strive for is a world where each individual has the same opportunity based on their merits regardless of irrelevant characteristics, not a world with an elaborate system of conflicting tribes that lobby top-down control to ensure that their tribe gets an equal number of tribes(wo)men in prestigious positions.
Yes, what you described is a pure meritocracy and all things being equal, that would be GREAT, unfortunately, all things are not equal.
If all people got equal encouragement, inspiration, and opportunity (from the moment of birth) then we could simply focus at the moment of judgement (which btw, is also currently biased [1]). So that is basically what STEM advocates are working on, making sure women and other disadvantaged minorities have equal encouragement, inspiration and opportunity (specifically to learn) so we can claim to have an equitable meritocracy.
> The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist hiring. Here we report five hiring experiments in which faculty evaluated hypothetical female and male applicants, using systematically varied profiles disguising identical scholarship, for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.
Encouraging everyone equally is great, but the problem is that many of these advocates seem to operate under the unsubstantiated hypothesis that there are no correlations between gender and career choice except those caused by upbringing. This leads to the idea that an unequal representation is necessarily a sign of a problem that needs to be fixed. I don't think this is supported by the data. We know from biology and other fields that there are natural differences. We also know that in more emancipated societies where people have more opportunity to choose what they want, there is a greater gender imbalance in universities (example: highest % of women earning science degrees is Iran; no western european country nor the US nor Canada is even in the top 20). Perhaps a gender imbalance is a sign of a society where individuals can do what they really want.
We'd have to look at a meta-study to weed out problems in individual studies.
"Encouraging everyone equally is great".
We should probably just end the argument on that point we both agree :). The rest will work itself out. If everybody was encouraged and inspired equally and there were still imbalances your point will remain. Unfortunately, that's not true today, so we won't know.
Iran and India have much higher representation of women in STEM fields, and while they have other issues with misogyny, the inculcation of ambition (across gender lines) is very high (I say that having lived in India). The result seems to contradict any "biological" predilections.
> Iran and India have much higher representation of women in STEM fields, and while they have other issues with misogyny, the inculcation of ambition (across gender lines) is very high (I say that having lived in India). The result seems to contradict any "biological" predilections.
I don't see how it does. If I were to guess I'd say that in those countries there is a greater economic necessity to go into a high earning field in order to earn freedom than in Sweden and Norway. In Sweden and Norway people can follow their passion instead, without having to worry too much about the pay.
It seems inadvisable to me to assume that all differences must be due to socialisation and therefore indicative of a problem that has to be fixed, until the time that research shows this to be the case. Otherwise we risk implementing policies with incentives that make people less happy overall, by incentivising careers that people don't really want to go in. At the very least it should be a warning sign if your metric for gender equality shows Iran at the top and Sweden at the bottom.
And until I see definitive proof (meta-studies, convergence in scientific beliefs) that passion is something you are born with and not learn from your environment (through you know..inspiration, encouragement, and reaffirmation). I'm gonna keep trying!
Because currently, a 'passion' for STEM fields will tilt your future power prospects. If there is a systematic bias that causes a tilt the other way, it is simply untenable.
(a) Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation.
(b) Unless male economists are uniquely meritocratic there's more at play here than personal bias. It seems more likely that the other subjects have a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance. Since those preferences seem to occur at a subject/departmental level it seems even more unwise to try to generalise off the back of them.
(c) If you do want to generalise, there are other more generalisable studies that contradict the results of this one.
You can speculate on the reason why the discrimination exists, but calling it "a culture of progressively trying to redress historic gender imbalance" is again a collectivist attitude, as if the treatment of somebody's grandmother somehow confers a debt that must be repaid to their granddaughter but not to their grandson, because the granddaughter is in the same tribe as her grandmother. From an individual perspective it's just discrimination. According to the study an individual human has a 2:1 hiring advantage compared to another individual human, simply because of an attribute that should not significantly factor into the decision. It doesn't suddenly stop being discrimination because the advantaged gender happens to be the female one. By the way, I think this is particularly damaging for the talented women who were hired on merit, because it becomes rational to believe that they they might not have been hired on merit.
I've had Williams/Ceci 2014 quoted at me before and it was hugely over-generalised then too. There's simply no rational basis for claiming (like you implied) that it shows wide-spread discrimination against men. It's a study of tenure-track hiring for four STEM subjects, one of which showed zero bias.
> The drop out rates for males are (much) higher.
Seems off-topic, can you explain the relevence of this? There are serious problems with boys education but they don't seem to have a problem with discrimination in the workplace, see [0][1][2][3][4].
> ... simply because of an attribute that should not significantly factor into the decision.
That's an opinion I think there's reasonable evidence to discard, or at least add some nuance to.
Diverse workplaces are more pleasant to work in, and in the case of universities it seems reasonable to believe (based on the work of Carol Dweck & others) that having relevant female role models would improve outcomes for female students in STEM subjects.
Additionally there's a growing body of evidence that documents how diverse workplaces have higher productivity; and gender gaps in entrepreneurship negatively affect GDP (Cuberes & Teignier for a 2015 example http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21661804-gender-equal...)
[0] Female students seen as less competent than identical male students with identical application materials, offered lower starting salaries (Moss-Racusin et al, 2012)
[1] People in gender-incongruent roles penalised more heavily for mistakes (Brescoll, Dawson, & Uhlmann, 2010).
[2] Voluble women perceived as less competent and less suitable leaders, inverse true for men (Brescoll, 2011).
[3] Women who succeed in male-dominated fields percieved as not likeable (Heilman et al, 2004).
[4] Students question the competence of female teachers who evaluate them negatively, less so than male teachers (Sinclair & Kunda 2000).
> Seems off-topic, can you explain the relevence of this?
You said:
> Hiring faculty is a very different thing (and subject to different rules and policies) than getting students succesfully to graduation.
That's why I mentioned it.
> Diverse workplaces are more pleasant to work in
If somebody's opinion was that all male workplaces are more pleasant to work in, would you find that a reasonable basis for discriminating against female applicants?
> Additionally there's a growing body of evidence that documents how diverse workplaces have higher productivity; and gender gaps in entrepreneurship negatively affect GDP (Cuberes & Teignier for a 2015 example http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21661804-gender-equal...)
Not a very convincing study. They just noticed that women work less than men, and calculated the increase in GDP if women worked as much as men. Note that from the data they use it is apparent that women work more in poorer societies. So maybe women work less in richer societies because they can. This is a good thing, because it means the things people do are dictated more by their passion and less by economic necessity.
The other studies are all about perception. I wonder how much of it is due to the effect that I mentioned (if you confer a selection advantage to a group then it becomes rational to believe that post selection individuals in that group are less competent). I'm also a bit wary of publication bias. I've heard from people in the field that there are certain results that are good for your career and certain results that are not.
Do you know of any reliable studies showing actual discrimination of the magnitude that the study I cited showed?
You keep dodging the fact that this entire comment thread started from you massively overstating the results of a single study, taking it far past the credible scope of the study.
Either knowingly or unknowingly you're abusing both the study's findings and the scientific method as a whole.
We can talk hypotheticals or debate the relative merit of affirmative action, or discuss the flaws in specific studies (because let's face it perfection is hard in social science), but first we need to address why you feel the need to misrepresent the findings of studies. Did you not read the abstract you linked to?
I did. How did I misrepresent it, and how am I overstating the results of the study I cited? How am I abusing the scientific method as a whole? When you make these grandiose claims it would have been nice to provide at least some form of accompanying argument, rather than just stating it as fact.
At risk of repeating myself... You've taken a study that looked specifically at tenure-track faculty hiring within four STEM subjects, i.e. a very specific, limited, scope. You then presented that as "evidence" in a general context (in reply to a point about hiring in general being biased against women) in order to argue that the hiring process is biased against men, without any mention of the limited scope of that study.
The way I see it, one of these things is true;
(a) You made a mistake, fair enough, no big deal
(b) You're unfamiliar interpreting studies, fair enough, no big deal
(c) You're misrepresenting science to further an agenda
Given your vociferous objections to affirmative action I'm guessing (c) but happy to give you the benefit of the doubt.
(d) You are deeply embedded in an ideology and therefore not able to deal with facts in an unbiased way. Had the results of that study been the reverse, the study would have been fantastic since it is objectively much stronger than any of the studies you cited.
All you are saying is that due to bad luck during upbringing, some people have less merit than others. Furthermore this bad luck is not statistically independent of various other characteristics.
Why does this imply that meritocracy is not great?
You do realize that the term meritocracy is literally a joke, right? I mean, it was actually invented as a joke by a sociologist, who's apparently not very observant because he'd assumed everyone would get it. Obviously, every 'cracy believes that it's a meritocracy; the only defining characteristic of one that actually calls itself meritocracy is a lack of self awareness. The word meritocracy sounds to me exactly the same way "positive energies" sounds to me and you; it makes me laugh because it is a word that expresses absolutely nothing but the cluelessness of those who may use it with a straight face (the only difference is that "positive energies" wasn't originally invented by a physicist as a joke, while meritocracy was).
I mean, a noble family really did have a greater relative contribution to the economy and to society than a common family (or, at least, could have been said to have a greater contribution by the norms of the time) -- until it didn't, and that's when things changed. It's not like previous societies realized that they're not meritocracies; they utterly and truly believed that their system was the best possible one (and they could prove it!) and that there are people who are less represented in positions of power is just bad luck. No society (that lasted long) has ever said, let's put all the people with real talent at the bottom. It's only when resources were allocated differently due to political action (or natural disaster, like the black death) talent "suddenly" grew where everyone had until then known little talent could be found (and they were right: there was little talent because talent requires cultivation to become effective).
So I guess you're against trying to find a cure for cancer.
BTW, it's pretty funny that you call systematic bias a "label", yet bad luck is something that seems sufficiently explanatory to you. It seems to me that "bad luck" is a label that you apply to something that you don't wish to study because you just don't care. It's bad luck that humans can't fly. It's bad luck that people die of the flu. As pretty much everything humans do is try to eradicate things that could be labelled as bad luck, actually using that term is essentially yelling "I don't care about this! I like things as they are!"
Can you do the same (or even provide a coherent definition of) systemic bias? If so, you may convince me it is worth studying. Im unconvinced it is even well defined, since I've never seen a definition that advocates of it consistently apply.
> Can you do the same (or even provide a coherent definition of) systemic bias?
Easily! But just as your reasoning is completely dependent on an axiomatic value (death is bad), so is mine: That many people's freedom to cultivate, explore and express their talents is hindered by those in power (positive claim) is bad because freedom is good (normative claim), therefore we should study how those restrictions work so we can remove them.
But don't get me wrong: the distribution of power will change (it always does), yet inequality will grow again (it always does; a dynamic system that is not perfectly balanced and that includes positive feedback loops will always go out of balance) and this process will be repeated. I know this because pretty much all of history has been this way: inequality grows; social strife grows; people demand change; others first politely and then less so explain to them that that is scientifically/theologically impossible or that things are best as the are; after a lot of struggle things change and power shifts; inequality grows and so on and so forth.
> Im unconvinced it is even well defined, since I've never seen a definition that advocates of it consistently apply.
You are right in the sense that "systemic bias" is a term invented to explain to laymen what "bias" is. To social researchers, it's clear that all social bias (where "social" means "not exploding volcano in one town and not in another") is "systemic" (whatever that means). It really means nothing more than "a result of social dynamics disproportionately directed by those with power", and even that is a definition for laymen because obviously, that's what power is, so it really means "a result of social dynamics". But even that is redundant because every social phenomenon is a result of social dynamics (that's what a social phenomenon means), so it really just means "bias". Personally, I hate the term "systemic bias" because "systemic" may suggest either a bureaucratic bias or something dictated by law or decree.
The theme of the series is basically how societal power dynamics play out on a multi-millennial timescale. The author called the series Dune after he noticed that, from above, sand dunes form a wave pattern over the land, so suddenly something he had only thought about at a local level had much greater meaning from this higher perspective of time. Anyway I thought it seemed up your alley. The first novel is a classic but it just scrathes the surface thematically.
> You can view women as a group or tribe, competing against other groups or tribes, or you can view each person as an individual with one of the characteristics being gender.
This distinction results from a poor understanding of what you call the "collectivist view". This approach does not view a social group as a constructive set -- a tribe as you call it -- but as an empirical, emergent set. The idea is that certain shared experiences that arise in society create a correlation of viewpoints and goals. Note that this isn't a statistical construct alone but also a social construct. If social dynamics give rise to certain shared experiences, then the shared experience would likely give rise to certain shared views and goals. Once again, this is not a philosophical question, but an empirical one. It either really happens or it doesn't.
Either women statistically have common goals or they don't (they do). This isn't a tribe also because a single person can be part of many such correlative social groups. A woman could be working-class and share goals with other working-class people (men and women).
In other words, I don't think that there is a difference in philosophy, but a difference in a philosophy vs. empiricism. One side says that philosophically every individual is on his own (based on the premises that the people holding this view seem to accept), while the other groups says, well, maybe, but in practice there are clear group dynamics that arise and can be seen empirically.
> One woman isn't really helped by another woman being in the government.
How do you know?
> The tribal point of view does the opposite: rather than de-emphasising characteristics irrelevant to the situation at hand, it amps up those characteristics in a tribal us-vs-them conflict situation.
Nah I think that that's just the common description among those who oppose the liberal view, and is usually a result of failing to notice what the demands really are. It's not us-vs.-them but a group that is empirically and statistically found to have opposing interests to those of another group. What you call "tribal conflict" is either empirically found to be real or it isn't; I don't think it can be argued against based on some philosophical notion.
For example, statistically and empirically women get pregnant more often then men. Statistically and empirically, the father is less likely to care for the child than the woman. As a result, statistically and empirically, issues relating to abortion, contraceptives or day care affect the lives of women more than men.
For example, statistically and empirically women get sexually assaulted and harassed more than men. Statistically and empirically, then, issues relating to sexual harassment/assault laws matter affect the lives of women more than men.
For example, statistically and empirically, women get paid less than men for doing the same job. Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws.
>Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws.
I don't think that actually follows:
1. People are perfectly capable of caring for injustices they don't experience personally. E.g. men being interested in pay-equity laws not because it would benefit them, but because of a belief that they are necessary for a just society.
2. People are also perfectly capable of acting against their best interests. E.g. women being against pay-equity laws because <insert reason why women "deserve" to be paid less>.
Which is why I said statistically and empirically. As to men caring about this too, this is obviously possible, but even if they care, they are less affected, so they may prioritize it less. Like the joke about the chicken and the pig vis-a-vis breakfast: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!
I am quite affected by pay equality. The presence of it with my current employers means that we have much better demographic representation here. We're able to retain a lot of good engineers/scientists that happen to be women or minorities, that at a previous employer would have left due to the pay disparity (or silently or loudly suffered, affecting work performance and morale).
I simply mean that some time between 300 BC and 2016 AD somebody figured out that the human mind is great at explaining pretty much anything, so between bouts of solemn cogitation we might want to check out what's really going on in the real world just to make sure that we're on the right track.
Logic is obviously necessary, but as today we know that our universe is not a logical tautology, just one of many possible-Kripke-worlds, different models for the logic can lead to different results, so opening the window from time to time to see which of the possible worlds we actually live in is a good idea.
> If women are to have equal say on the goings-on's of society they need to partake in the upper echelons of power equally (Government, Corporate Leadership, STEM positions etc.)
> The former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't
That's not true. There are organized efforts to increase the number of men in (especially elementary school) teaching roles as well as efforts to increase the number of male nurses.
First writers started to use leaving the toilet seat up as a plot device to generate drama in sitcoms. Then others started to write light hearted articles in women magazines telling women how to deal with man who leaves toilet seat up. Now we have number of people who think it's something that can be reason to have a heated argument.
My theory is that we are living in society where people take cues on how to deal with everyday issues from media, social media and written word instead of their community and social environment. We look at the Rorschach inkblot and there is always some group who knows how it makes you feel and how those feelings are responsibility of others if you are willing to listen.
I will never forget having this argument and her reason being, "I might accidentally sit on it with the seat up."
Yeah, that's gross and disconcerting, I'm sure. My response was that it was her responsibility to make sure she didn't sit on anything gross, and she should be looking where she's sitting anyhow.
My solution was to put the lid down with the seat. This is cleaner, looks nicer, stops the flush from spewing grossness into the room, and does not solve her problem at all.
Yeah, I was a little petty about it.
Of course, then I got complaints about the lid being down. I refused to budge on my position, and eventually she stopped trying to argue about it.
My take on the whole situation is that as we solved some really big problems, people needed a reason to complain or feel afraid. We went from worrying about dying constantly to worrying about getting a cold or totally treatable diseases. We're unable to stop worrying about something, and so things get blown out of proportion. We're obsessed with preventing everything that's viewed as negative.
There seems to be a spectrum between whether you consider your feelings mutable and the world absolute or whether your feelings are absolute and the world needs to change to accommodate them. The ever-expanding harm movement leans heavily towards the latter.
If something makes you feel bad, then it must inherently be bad and must be changed. There doesn't seem to be any consideration that maybe it's your feelings that need to change, or even any acknowledgement that you can change how you feel about something.
It's definitely not always one or other other, but to be constantly at the mercy of whatever circumstances happen to exist at the moment seems like a very difficult way to live one's life.
I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist, micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to 'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from 'ordinary' personality.
Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the process of coming to awareness. You overreact out of confusion at first, but eventually you figure it out and move on to the next lesson. It's how society works, you think they didn't have breathless articles in the '50's bemoaning both the fears of the day and the overreactions to those fears?
I thought the article laid out nice examples where the "evolving" can be good in some ways, but harmful in others.
I know teenagers who have never been left alone. I know people graduating high school who have never independently taken care of themselves. And even on an independence scale, when I was 18, my friends and I could pretty much survive on our own in wilderness situations just fine, and we did - heading into the woods and mountains to explore almost every day. Nowadays that would get you on reality TV shows.
Sure, things are safer now... As long as we all stick inside the little boxes society provides for us. But that is not always what is actually best for us.
The more concerning thing is that these words have broadened in definition such that when someone is accused of being prejudiced, people think KKK and not "someone who committed a microaggression". Further, these sensitivities disproportionately affect certain groups; we're very concerned about microaggressions toward certain groups, but hate toward other groups seems to be on the increase.
I try to take your view day-to-day, but ultimately, it seems like we've veered well into overreaction territory rather than simply conscientious reactions to dangers.
Individualistic, freedom/harm based moral thinking is far from ubiquitous.
This can lead to libertarian leaning people (like me and many members of Hacker News) mischaracterising the world-view of many conservatives/liberals who have different moral beliefs to us and having discussions with them which are not constructive.
Johnathan Haidt has some interesting ideas on the topic. The idea that many people value stability/group loyalty/ideas of sanctity is often missed by many responses to moral issues on this site when people correctly state 'I can't see who is being harmed here' or 'I'm uncomfortable with people's freedom being restricted' in response to the day's moral issue.
Ultimately, many/most people have a bunch of sacred beliefs/narratives that they do not objectively challenge when faced with new evidence (instead they act like defence lawyers trying to reframe/discredit the information).
This article is a bit muddled in several issues. Important and not mentioned, though by no means authoritative, is the enduring "negative liberty" principle and its enormous impact on the American ethos from its founding. An big reason a lot of this "concept creep" makes us uncomfortable is that the "right to be free from harm or negligence causing harm" is coming into diametric opposition with other people's right of expression, movement, and property. For an article that goes so far as to evoke Aristotle, I'm surprised no mention of Locke or JS Mill was made.
This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan wrote many decades ago:
"The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums."
"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."
Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet.
"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."
We are headed to a dystopian state so quickly it's not even remotely funny anymore. The only thing I will say is resist them - resist the status quo and fight back against authority.
We can fight back with tools like cryptocurrency, or even secure messaging apps like Signal (and though end-to-end encryption is heavily criticized on here, it's a start). We can collectively become hackers that dismantle the corrupt institutions that have become so heavily entrenched in our society by engaging in these small initiatives.
They talk about the influence of academics, and yet we (as a people) seem to successfully ignore things like global warming... I don't know if that explains it.
We have, indeed, become a nation of wimps, with little common sense. We fear now, much more than we used to. When I was a kid, we feared the red menace (Communism), but that didn't stop us from moving forward, or adhering to our ideals. Our independent spirit as a people.
I don't understand what is happening to us, but I think what they are talking about in the article is a reaction to the shift in public attitudes, not the cause of it.
It makes me wonder if lacking bigger problems to focus on dealing with (competing with the Soviets, overthrowing the Axis powers) is the reason people create these non-issues to fight about instead
Geez, this is exactly what the commenter is talking about. Nobody brought race into this, and everyone knows about the racist history of America. Your comment was off-topic and did not further the conversation in any meaningful way, except set a tone of condescension towards this person's generation. Stop it.
Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.
Most of the world calls soccer Football so this is yet again an american only issue. I can't believe someone would be "triggered" by such a silly thing, it's like some people are actively seeking outrage for a reason I don't know. To get popular on social medias? and get many likes on Twitter? to feel like they are victim of racism every second? or just to get attention, I really don't understand.
So remind me again who invented Football (Soccer) by the offended persons rules those of us form the UK should be offended by the appropriation of Football :-)
Sorry of course this is Association football we are talking about and not Rugby :-)
Football is the British English word for soccer, a game that is played with your foot on the ball obviously. I've never heard of anyone finding "futbol" to be cultural appropriation of that.
Hi from Argentina! The land of Maradona and Messi, but not Pele.
I find strange and slightly annoying that they say "soccer" instead of "football", but I consider that a part of the strange quirks of en-us, like calling "America" to "USA" or writing "January 1st" instead of "1st of January". But I'd nerved consider any of that like a type of offense or micro/macro aggression.
I'm not Hispanic, and don't care at all about soccer, but I imagine it would be aggravating as hell. I'm black, and when white people call me bro, or start speaking in dialect - I honestly start to hate them.
For cultural reasons, when a lot of white Americans are talking about getting fighting and getting angry, or partying and having fun, relaxing and being lazy, flirting or getting laid, or one-upping people or hustling for money, they drop into a black dialect (and an entire stereotypical affect) for a moment. Even upper-middle class black people do it sometimes - Oprah is famous for it.
I spoke like that growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my grandparents speak like that, and many of the people I love speak like that. People are dropping into dialect because, deep down, they think of black people as a bunch of violent, lazy, partying, horny grifters - and find it very amusing and black of themselves when they experience anger, laziness, joy, sexual arousal, or pride at their own craftiness. This is the reason why most pop music is delivered in black dialect. It reminds me of what they think of me, and my family, although they would never acknowledge it to me, and many wouldn't acknowledge it to themselves.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of oversensitivity and preciousness, or "microaggressions" or cultural studies departments, or theory-theory psychology in general, which I think is just secular religion. But someone dropping into dialect when they talk to you is not all that subtle.
I could see Hispanic people feeling stereotyped by soccer stuff. Soccer is English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into Spanish dialect all of a sudden? Do you drop into dialect when you talk to your white friends? If you do, why?
edit: And I don't mean to imply that white people don't get treated like this - I hear people drop into an Italian-American affect a lot when they're talking about being criminals, or being rapey.
I'm white and grew up in a near-western suburb of Chicago and have also noticed that white people were quick to adopt a black dialect. I'm not sure it was necessarily only correlated with the things you mentioned (partying, anger, etc...) but it definitely existed. People adopted a lot of slang words from the black community too, which can sound really unnatural coming from a rich white kid's mouth.
However, I don't think it was necessarily a result of people viewing black people negatively, in fact, it often seemed to be admiration. I could be wrong because I can't read minds but these were young kids that had been raised in an anti-racist environment, so suggesting that they were mimicking black culture because they secretly felt negatively about it isn't a convincing explanation for the entirety of it.
> However, I don't think it was necessarily a result of people viewing black people negatively, in fact, it often seemed to be admiration
But see, that's still racist. And the contexts in which it comes out makes it seem like an admiration of looseness, coolness, style, toughness, sexiness, grittiness, authenticity... an escape from just being a plain old person. Really, these are qualities involved in the identities many teenagers hope to construct. I'm just a plain old person too, but the culture makes me a repository for fantasy.
I'll go on a tangent here about something that really bothered me yesterday. There was a really interesting and informative article yesterday in the LA Times about an "Asian" propensity towards diabetes - an article which could help people with their health by informing them of something which they may not have been aware of.
and later: "Asians tend to have less muscle and more fat than Europeans of the same weight and height, studies show. So an Asian who isn't obese or even overweight could have enough fat to be in danger of getting diabetes, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as 'skinny-fat.'"
So how did white people get to be the baseline? The zeros of the world, the people that other people are a divergence from, the people that you have to know to understand? Why is an article about Asian diabetes instead an article about comparative rates of diabetes between Asians and whites? Some liberal arts major might call it a "microaggression", but as a engineering major, I am just literally looking at Asian health being described mainly in relation to the health of whites and trying to figure out the words to explain how that bothers me to white people who can't see it, without them erupting into rage.
White people shouldn't call you bro like black people shouldn't call you bro either. I'm black, no one calls me bro or the n word, black or white, it shouldn't be a matter of color but respect. I don't understand why you need to single out whites on that matter.
Likewise it would be stupid to say it's ok for girls to call each other bitch or cunt, but not ok for a man to do that because he is a man.
I'm black, and I feel as if I'm in a brotherhood of common experience with other black people. I'm perfectly fine if someone from that same experience calls me brother or bro. But take it from me, I get bro from white guys who don't bro other white guys, and it's not once in a blue moon, it's more like once a week.
My sister calls me bro, does that mean I'm somehow obligated to take it from you or that she's disrespecting me? I'm not remotely offended when another black person calls me "nigger", because when black people say that to me, they're referring to a position in society that we both know that we're in. Does that mean I have to take it from you? Because you definitely don't mean the same thing. Also, I don't personally say it because every black person doesn't feel the same way, and I don't have any cause to impose my belief system onto them.
> Likewise it would be stupid to say it's ok for girls to call each other bitch or cunt, but not ok for a man to do that because he is a man.
I'm not sure why you think that's not disrespectful; telling other people what they should be called and by who.
Honest question, since I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to ask this, but I'm curious where that line sits for you?
To provide context while answering something you asked,
I grew up in philly. I went to a city high school. I have (and most of the other white kids I associated with have) some parts of a philly accent, which I'm very aware I revert to when I, as you say, start partying/relaxing, but in my case it's because I'm relaxing the forced inflection of my speech, and my more natural way of talking comes out. The same thing happens if I talk to someone with a similar east coast manner of speech out of a natural desire to express similarity and establish comfort with the conversation partner. (to answer your, I imagine somewhat rhetorical, question about "do you drop into dialect... white friends", since the above is a thing sans-race)
I can tell you authoritatively, although you may not believe me (or say I should stop anyway, which would beg other questions on my part), that there's no "deep opinion" of black culture or speech in that, in fact, the highschool was unfortunately VERY self segregating and most of the white kids didn't have enough interaction to form deep opinions. (which is part of why I'd be curious to ask now about the accent thing, since I know that ALL of the kids there, race aside, picked it up to some degree but it was never something that was discussed, since we just... didn't really talk.)
I say this largely in the hope, if we ever talk and I accidentally let that show, that you would think better of me for it and not start to hate :) (the world already has plenty of that, as you point out from the insinuations you identify)
> I can tell you authoritatively, although you may not believe me (or say I should stop anyway, which would beg other questions on my part), that there's no "deep opinion" of black culture or speech in that, in fact, the highschool was unfortunately VERY self segregating and most of the white kids didn't have enough interaction to form deep opinions. (which is part of why I'd be curious to ask now about the accent thing, since I know that ALL of the kids there, race aside, picked it up to some degree but it was never something that was discussed, since we just... didn't really talk.)
I'd say the fact that one does pick up a dialect without much exposure to black people means that they do have a deep opinion of black culture - enough to imitate it without any social reason involving black people. They're trying to communicate something to the white people they interact with - what is it?
I know white people who have grown up completely surrounded by black people, with black relatives, black parents, black children, and have a harder time straightening out their speech than I do because I've hung out with tons of white people since I was a teenager. It's different than a white person who was/is isolated from black people constructing some practised black affect.
I bet I can tell Philly from dialect though. There's plenty of white people who have a natural accent close to a lot of black people. It's not really what I'm talking about.
Fair enough; your last sentence was a reasonable answer to my primary question, since I'm not sure I could differentiate natural vs constructed dialects (I'm tone-deaf enough to have trouble with truly foreign language accent identification) so I err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt that it's not malicious, however it seems you were referring to more obvious imitation which I can't speak to, and have to trust your judgement on.
And to your middle question, self segregation of direct interaction doesn't necessarily limit exposure. We sat in the same cafeteria, went to the same classes, rode the same busses, so it seems natural that some aspects of speech cross pollinated out of peripheral immersion. Take "jawns" for example. I'm pretty sure I first started hearing it in... 4th, 5th grade? Had _no_ idea what it meant or the implications of using it, but used it because the people around me used it; nothing more sinister or subversive than that, frankly I don't think I had the social sophistication to motivate that sort of conscious mimicry at that age.
I very much appreciate your comment. I also don't have a good understanding of the "fútbol" kerfuffle, if it indeed is offensive to some people. But at worst it'd seem to be on a par with folks mockingly pronouncing the name of a Minneapolis-based department store chain as "Tar-ZHAY". Why drop into French 'dialect'? Because you're communicating a point about its relative sophistication using (indeed) a stereotype, but not, I think, a particularly harmful one.
And English has been picking up foreign words (often where there was already a native equivalent) for their concepts and connotations forever. I think there's a distinction to be made between referring to a chic party as a "soirée", or soccer as "fútbol", and switching into a bad Italian accent to describe criminal debauchery.
That's the old Norman stereotype of French things being better than English things. It's baked into the language.
There's no such relationship between Spanish and English, or at least none that I'm aware of. I would literally narrow that distinction all the way down to the use of French within English.
edit: I mean, we literally have no idea how to pronounce the most common English words until we figure out whether they were derived from French or not.
>Soccer is English, it's called "football" in English, so what's this urge to drop into Spanish dialect all of a sudden?
It's probably just to verbally differentiate it from American football without saying 'soccer'.
Should British people feel offended if Americans call British football 'football' and not 'soccer'? IME they'd more likely be happy an American didn't call it by the Americanized name
Edit: I'd guess that the location of the last World Cup, and the fact that the US team didn't do too badly may also factor into things
I'm Puerto Rican. I've never heard of someone being offended at an American saying futbol. Then again, we say soccer over here, unlike all other Spanish speaking nations. As for myself, I just think it would be silly to hear. I assume an American who does that would merely be trying to be accommodating.
Interesting article .... until the Bush blaming at the end which totally irrelevant to the matter. Both parties are equally to blame for playing identity politics and encouraging the "us vs them" mentality in US.
Excellent piece here. Does a great job of demonstrating "concept creep" from both liberal and conservative ideologies, and of describing how we got to this situation in the first place. The bullet points towards the end summarize the article perfectly:
>“by applying concepts of abuse, bullying, and trauma to less severe and clearly defined actions and events, and by increasingly including subjective elements into them, concept creep may release a flood of unjustified accusations and litigation, as well as excessive and disproportionate enforcement regimes.”
>“...concept creep can produce a kind of semantic dilution. If a concept expands to encompass less extreme phenomena... then its prototypical meaning is likely to shift... If trauma, for example, ceases to refer exclusively to terrifying events that are outside normal human experience, and is applied to less severe and more prevalent stresses, it will come to be seen in a more benign light.”
>“...by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” There is a tendency “for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence...The flip-side of this expanding sense of victimhood would be a typecast assortment of moral villains: abusers, bullies, bigots, and traumatizers.”
>Expanding mental disorder “can pathologize normal experiences, generate over-diagnosis and over-treatment, and engender a sense of diminished agency.”
Of all these, I find the tendency towards victimhood particularly troubling. We're seeing a generation of kids growing up blaming everyone but themselves for their problems, and demanding that someone else change to solve their problems instead of learning the resiliency needed to survive and thrive. Couple that with the tribalism of said victims setting one group against the other, and we're setting ourselves up for civil unrest in the near future.
B.) Call the police (escalate upwards in authority)
C.) Do something else, like find a safer place for the child to be, if you truly believe the park to be dangerous.
A is free, but comes with the non-zero cost of being "the person who did nothing" when something bad happens to the girl (unlikely, but possible). B is cheap (you need to hang around for the police and all that entails), but is an easy way to attain the moral high ground. C is expensive and really you'd be no better off than if you did B.
These three options exist for everyone involved, and they escalated upwards until they found someone who had enough power to do C cheaply enough that they didn't need to do B. That involved taking the child away.
Passing the buck upwards is easy to do and seldom will someone come after you for it. I don't have a good answer for how this can be solved, because I can't say with good conscience that it is never the right thing to do - there are obvious cases where it is.
I also find the amusing that my thoughts on "how would I make this right?" lead to "that mother should sue the state for lost wages or something". Clearly we have too many lawyers.
a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps.
when the individual becomes so important that community suffers we have our priorities wrong.
For at at least some of the cases discussed in the article, there is nothing minority about it at all. For example, the social pressure to disallow children's independence is by far the majority position now, as far as I can see. The "free range kids" folks and similar represent a minority that gets a lot of social disapprobation for wanting their kids to have the same sort of freedoms that were common place 25 years ago. Vague and unsupported concerns about "safety" are usually hand waved about.
What you say may be in play for some of these issues, but I suspect it is far too blunt a tool to truly explain much of it.
What minority in the US is currently given special treatment by the government? It certainly isn't black people. It certainly isn't Hispanics, or homosexuals, or transgender people.
Look at hiring practices and policies. By law, minorities, and women most certainly are given special treatment when it comes to government positions. As well as veterans, whom some may argue, have earned it.
Homosexuals and transgendered people are still too 'bleeding' edge to be classified as a 'protected' class. Give it 10 years and they likely will be.
This seems to be a commonly expressed concept, the idea that in large this phenomenon is strongly either caused or encouraged by a 'conspiracy' of the government.
How about multinational corporations that answer to nobody and are staffed by the top psychologists in the world to subtly manipulate the masses? Is that a "conspiracy" in your eyes or merely reality?
Personably, I just consider the timing of all this stuff suspicious. Like how it became an increasingly large issue right after talk of income/class inequality and the 1% and Occupy and all that stuff. Suddenly the focus switches to something more convenient for large corporations and the well off...
I think this has much to do with the US infatuation with, and fear of, litigation (as well as the relationship between expert witnesses and the court system) as any psychological phenomenon. In other words, I think the explanation is sociological more than psychological.
1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and
2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work.
The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching it nursing roles. The former is seen as "a problem" and the latter isn't. I'd argue that both are issues, but one is something that political groups get behind and the other isn't.
As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute.
It's the infantilism of understanding; people wanting things to be black and white and easy to understand, where pretty much everything contentious, when you dig, is complex.
I suspect a lot of the blame for this is a combination of the short article and news industries, giving people the feeling of being informed without any of the substance to back it up, and the increasing politicisation of issues, where people hold views for reasons more tribal than rational.
Once you start believing that issues are simple, it's easy to fit everything into that framework and to wander round being outraged or offended or insulted by things. Because you can read into life whatever you want.