problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
I do think it is the oddest culture war in that such an antagonistic relationship between the sexes is historically speaking quite new and seems to have originated in the West (though it is increasingly spreading to other countries now due to the fact that a huge amount of countries are culturally influenced by and want to emulate the West, and additionally feminist ideology has been intentionally promulgated by the West in countries they deem as being insufficiently progressive).
As to your list of possibilities, I think I am most sympathetic to 3, 4 and 8. I am not sympathetic to 2 at all.
The most key thing that I think it's necessary to note is that the gender "war" is mostly only fought in one direction - it's primarily feminist-leaning women and their male sympathisers accusing men of all manner of wrongdoing towards women, and most people out there who aren't all that invested in the gender war seem quite willing to go along with and accept that same narrative. The only major pushback is from people who think that feminism goes too far in their demonisation of men (a defence of men rather than a condemnation of women). Outside of a few isolated and much-maligned circles which people really love to draw attention to due to their deviance from mainstream thought, there's no real reverse equivalent where men express animosity towards women on any large scale and identify them as the source of society's major social ills.
I do think there's an element here of Western society being extremely fractured. When people's lives are atomised and disconnected, it's very easy to forget about people as being, well, people. Especially by the people most disconnected from the trials and tribulations that "normies" face. It's easy to forget about the countless men who work the dirty dangerous jobs to hold our society together when you spend your whole life far removed from that, and to see men as a group as being privileged oppressors. It's notable that feminism is predominantly a movement of upper-middle class women, and has always been such from its very inception. They are so distanced from these conditions that they have the ability to ignore the sacrifices of the men who keep society afloat, and can regard male behaviour and masculinity as a virtual pathology in need of reform. These are the women with the most social clout and influence, and who have the most ability to propagate narratives into the mainstream.
Even in the West, the further away you get from the urban sprawl and the less atomised people are, the less of a gender "war"-type dynamic there is. In the smaller and more rural towns, everyone knows each other, the conditions are far tougher, and it's probably more difficult to start arguing that the men going out and doing all kinds of dirty, thankless labour each day to bring back money for their families are nefarious oppressors of women whose behaviours exemplify toxic masculinity. It's harder to conceptualise of an imaginary spectre of "patriarchy" looming over everything when the society is cohesive and you have personally formed bonds with everyone in your small village.
Then there's the inherent unnatural-ness of the current environment we exist in which has shaped our gender roles in a very weird manner. Our advancement rendered the female role obsolete - a domain which women's psychology is suited to - and pushed them into the male sphere. While technology didn't render human labour in the public sphere obsolete (it would probably take the development of AGI to do that), it unintentionally ended up destroying the private/domestic sphere. The development of all sorts of domestic conveniences to make women's lives easier - created in the men's public sphere, might I add - ended up leading to women's discontentment, as all sorts of chores they would often do communally and share with other women essentially became a set and forget activity. The female role lost the status that it once had (which it should be noted was considerable), and so they flooded the male sphere. Who wouldn't?
The issue here is that the public sphere is characterised mostly by hierarchical, stratified relationships where people are valued for their productivity and are generally held at arms length. This contrasts with the kind of more communal relationships that women prefer, and additionally women are less likely to value climbing the rungs of the corporate ladder than men are. In line with these preferences, since women have entered the workplace and public life more broadly you can see social changes to the nature of the workplace which have made it fall better in line with women's preferences. There's increased emphasis on niceties, stepping on other people's toes is discouraged, making people feel uncomfortable is the worst thing you can do, strict hierarchies are increasingly seen as a negative and the environment has slowly started to look more and more like the personal network-type relationships women tend to be predisposed to.
But no matter how friendly to women's psychology the workplace has become, there's only so much that can be done. These cooperative super-organisms which make up the public sphere can't exist without hierarchy, and can't exist while prioritising the comfort and preferences and sensibilities of every individual at all levels. In other words, it will always suit male psychology far more than it does female, and women will always feel somewhat alienated in such an environment. So you get all these knee-jerk narratives which I think resonate with a lot of women on some level about how the public sphere and its institutions are unfriendly to women. However, they get the cause wrong.
All these things that accompanied industrialisation and modernity massively contributed to the rise of feminism. The feminist preoccupation with women's representation itself could be an ill-conceived attempt at replacing the social status and elevated moral standing that used to accrue to women for performing their roles in the private sphere with formal authority in the public sphere, and it might be ultimately why they attempt to engineer equal outcomes for women in the public sphere in the face of all evidence pointing to the fact that it is simply unworkable. Though of course they won't frame it that way, they'll point to "workplace gender bias against women" (the widespread existence of which, for the most part, I think is questionable and contested at best) in order to justify their attempts at social engineering in order to force parity in public life.
Once feminism and feminist ideas about the "patriarchy" and man-as-enemy became entrenched, the whole thing ended up feeding itself. While it claimed to be a radical, revolutionary ideology, its success was precisely because it capitalised on and reinforced very old perceptions of men as agents with a responsibility to channel their agency towards protecting and providing for women, and women as non-agentic victims who are the appropriate recipients of this protection and provision. Fundamentally, feminism is nothing new, and the main difference I see that exists is its extremely antagonistic attitude towards men and its portrayal of gender relations as being a conflict (well, and its insistence that women occupy the same sphere as men). Many generations have at this point grown up being invested in feminism, and there are plenty of feminist academics and activists who have made the entire thing their livelihoods.
As to the reason why I am not sympathetic to 2, it's because I think any claims about any historical female lack of power (and by extension, female lack of power in other similarly traditional third world societies) are incorrect and simply appeal to perceptions of potentially dangerous, agentic men and non-agentic women. Analogising it to class is a false equivalence because women have never been viewed by men like the underclass was viewed by the nobility. For an upper-class person, their entire social milieu and family are likely upper-class as well, whereas men have wives, sisters and daughters and have incentives to want them to do well. There's also all sorts of evidence pointing towards the idea that people generally (yes, including men) have a preference for protecting women and view them more positively than men which is simply not the case when it comes to other social distinctions like class or race, and there's lots and lots of evidence of traditional social norms and practices that clearly contradict the "male oppression of women" hypothesis. And that perspective is incoherent too - how is it that feminism is such a dominant ideology now if under traditionalism men were so tyrannical and women were so powerless? Men just thought "you know, we should stop doing this 'oppression of women' thing we've done for centuries on end now in virtually every society and never once questioned before?"
I don't hold the opinion that even polygyny reflects male privilege and female oppression. I don't think polygyny has to reflect control and coercion of women and there's evidence against that prevailing view, but even if we assume that that is what it is for the sake of argument the fact is that anything that controls female reproduction necessarily also controls male reproduction. Every polygynous marriage results in a man (or multiple men) being forced into reproductive oblivion and no hope of partnership (especially in these societies with strict premarital and extramarital sex taboos), and the only way you won't end up with a society full of incels is a society where a good portion of the men are dead. This is actually a big deficit of polygamous societies stability-wise - it's not good to have a huge amount of men disconnected from society and family.
There's so much more to say (I can explain and source my arguments more rigorously than I have here) but I don't want this comment to branch into a two-parter.
I don't have too much to say here because I don't have too many opinions on how society should look on this issue, but I will note that I always find it pretty funny how people on both ends of an issue (like sex-positives and sex-negatives) will often frame their preferences in terms of how it would benefit women, without too much concern for what that would do to men. On the other hand, a benefit to men is generally framed as negative and generally contextualised with how it would hurt women. It's based on a foundational idea that women are the appropriate beneficiaries of social norms, so rigging the system in women's favour is viewed as legitimate, whereas doing so for men (or even just relaxing women's attempts at rigging things to benefit themselves, like their attempts at artificial price-fixing in the sexual marketplace) is bad.
EDIT: clarity
Yes, but as Aristotle reminds us, unequal treatment of unequal things can be called for. Women stand to lose much more from sex than men and are hence much choosier. Being chosen for sex by a woman translates to "you are so attractive that the risk of carrying your offspring is a price I am either willing to pay or actively seek". Being chosen for sex by a man just means you are above a certain fuckability threshold.
This differential means that women have always been able to garner favours in exchange for sex.
And this dynamic of women being able to garner favours in exchange for sex is what leads to the generalised condemnation of promiscuity in women. Contrary to basically all established belief, it is women and not men who stand to gain from the repression of female sexuality. The fact is that restricting women's willingness to provide men with premarital or extramarital sex through several methods serves women's interests in an important way. It restricts men's ability to access sex, and since the supply has been restricted this means women can push the price of sex up to incredible levels (demanding long-term commitment through marriage, transfers of wealth and resources, and so on). The more they restrict their sexuality, the more they can relitigate sex relations in their favour. Even when she is already in a partnership the widespread suppression of female sexuality can benefit her by indirectly restricting her mate's sexuality - it prevents her partner from simply going out and finding another woman (an especially salient risk once she is old and her mate value has declined). So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women. It is a female sex cartel, a union enforced for the interests of the group as a whole. Here is a blog post containing plenty of evidence in favour of this view.
As a case study that allows us a glimpse into a very extreme version of this dynamic, we can look at the phenomenon of FGM, responsibility for which often erroneously gets shifted onto men. The fact is, the practice is most zealously supported by women, and the female peer group teases girls who have not had the operation. There are studies of men in these countries which do not indicate that they prefer women with the operation (so this can't be argued to be a reflection of their preferences), rather, they actually prize women without the operation because they enjoy sex more. Link. Fieldwork in villages that at the time were newly beginning to adopt FGM as a practice shows that the impetus for the practice comes from the girls themselves. The girls were going out to other villages and getting excisors to cut them regardless of the fact that their parents and the tribal chiefs hated the practice and strongly condemned them for doing so, and over time it became culturally entrenched. Link 2.
All this seems congenial to the theory that the cause of female genital cutting and its subsequent spread likely comes from females themselves, with male acceptance and support for the practice (and their consequent attitudes surrounding it) merely being secondary to and following from widespread female uptake of and support for the practice. Really it's very clear to me that the feminist viewpoint of "patriarchal oppression" is just utterly misleading, and I'm a bit dismayed (though not surprised) that people still give it the time of day.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
...Yes? Nobody is disputing that class mattered and that second class men fared worse than first class men. None of that invalidates the fact that men in every class were less likely to survive than women.
Depends on who was doing the evacuation. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch certainly favoured women and children in the evacuation, but when he could find no more women and children, he allowed men on. On the port side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller interpreted it as women and children only and prevented men beyond crew from boarding them, even when there were spaces available.
"During the evacuation, Lightoller took charge of lowering the lifeboats on the port side of the boat deck.[10] He helped to fill several lifeboats with passengers and launched them. Lightoller interpreted Smith's order for "the evacuation of women and children" as essentially "women and children only". As a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board, meaning to fill them to capacity once they had reached the water. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Godfrey Peuchen has the distinction of being the only adult male passenger Lightoller allowed into the boats on the port side evacuation, due to his previous nautical experience and offer of assistance when there were no seamen available from the Titanic's own complement to help command one of the lowering lifeboats."
What Quantumfreakonomics is describing did happen. And the relatively small proportion of men who did survive the Titanic came under public scrutiny and were often reflexively judged as cowards.
EDIT: As an aside, it should also be noted that there were instances of boys (at least by today's standards) being deterred from entering lifeboats on the Titanic. For example, there's George Frederick Sweet: "On the night of the sinking young George, alongside Samuel Herman, saw Mrs Herman and her daughters off in one of the lifeboats. George, although not quite 15-years-old, was probably deterred from entering a lifeboat despite his young age and he and Samuel Herman died together, George being just one day short of his 15th birthday. Their bodies, if recovered, were never identified." In a similar instance, Rhoda Abbott refused her place in a lifeboat because she realised her sons (aged 13 and 16) would not be able to enter.
Then there's this affidavit by Emily Ryerson: "We saw people getting into boats, but waited our turn. There was a rough sort of steps constructed to get up to the window. My boy, Jack, was with me. An officer at the window said, "That boy can't go." My husband stepped forward and said, "Of course, that boy goes with his mother; he is only 13." So they let him pass. They also said, "No more boys." I turned and kissed my husband, and as we left he and the other men I knew - Mr. Thayer, Mr. Widener, and others - were all standing there together very quietly."
Gamergate always seemed like a lot of the two sides talking past each other
Sure, I think we would disagree on which side is doing most of the "talking past".
The counter to "there's lot of ethics problems in videogame journalism" was never "no there aren't", it was "duh, everyone knows that; no one takes videogame journalism seriously. Why are you harassing women about it?".
This sane-washes the anti-GamerGate stance. The general anti-GamerGate stance, exemplified by Danskin, was not "well, there are ethics problems, but harassing people is a step too far", it was the stronger claim that "You people are misogynists who are just using ethics as a cover for your misogyny". Often, it does in fact veer very close to claiming that there was nothing to complain about ethically, as evidenced by Danskin's dismissal of the idea that there was an ethical conflict of interest in the Quinn/Grayson case.
As to why people got harassed, it's because it's the internet, and everybody who's even remotely controversial gets harassment. The mistake of anti-GamerGaters is to characterise basically the entirety of the harassment as being ascribable to GamerGate, when there were a large number of third parties that existed to stir shit. It, furthermore, also ignores that GamerGaters also received harassment and threats during that whole kerfuffle, and ignores their actual attempts to stop harassment. Cathy Young expounds on that argument here:
There was certainly some appalling harassment toward Quinn, Sarkeesian (who canceled a university lecture in October 2014 due to an email threatening a massacre), feminist game developer Brianna Wu (who received a death threat mentioning her home address after she mocked and trolled GamerGate), and some other people, not all of them women. Web developer and GamerGate opponent Israel Galvez was targeted by a fake 911 call that resulted in a visit from a SWAT team, a scary tactic known as “swatting.” But several caveats are in order:
(1) None of the criminal or severe harassment was ever tied to anyone known to be involved in GamerGate.
The FBI spent months investigating GamerGate-related harassment; as documents show, it ended up only issuing warnings to one man who admitted sending an email threat as a “joke” and to another who had made harassing phone calls to a woman with whom he had argued in a chat room. Neither was a known GamerGater. And, while the FBI found evidence that some of the harassment around GamerGate originated on 8chan, a site known as a GamerGate hub, some of it was linked to the forums on Something Awful, frequented by anti-GamerGate, anti-8chan posters.
When GamerGaters blamed the harassment on outside trolls, it looked like an excuse or a far-fetched conspiracy theory. But Kerzner, a neutral GamerGate observer, agrees that “there was a sizable number of third-party trolls that caused the vast majority of the really bad stuff.” There was at least one fairly well-documented instance in which the swatting of a GamerGate critic was traced — according to The Verge, hardly a GamerGate-friendly publication — to a troll from an 8chan board dedicated to “general anti-social mayhem,” where “users joked about Gamergate supporters ‘taking the fall’ for the attack.” A November 2015 post by a notorious troll known as “Wild Goose” also appears to confirm the existence of a troll nest that went after “SJWs” and “gaters” alike.
(2) While the harassment related to GamerGate was quite real, there was also a drastic failure of journalistic skepticism in reporting it.
Of course, questioning people’s reports of being victimized by harassment and threats is something that should never be done lightly. But honoring that principle shouldn’t preclude basic fact-checking.
For instance, in late 2014 and early 2015, there were scary reports of a GamerGate “psychopath” named Jace Connors who had made a series of videos threatening Wu; one of them featured knives, another a man in a skull mask. The most bizarre one showed Connors ranting dementedly against Wu after crashing his car, supposedly on his way to her house.
In February 2015, the videos were revealed to be a satirical prank; “Jace Connors” was actually sketch comedian Jan Rankowski while the man in the skull mask was one of his sidekicks, and the purpose of the videos was to troll and mock GamerGate. Yet more than two months after this disclosure, the skull mask video was still described as an instance of horrific GamerGate harassment in a Boston Magazine article.
More oddly still, Wu’s own New York Times op-ed last month asserts that GamerGaters “shot videos wearing skull masks” and displaying knives they threatened to use against her. When I reached out to Wu for comment, she initially replied that she received “many” such videos and that only GamerGaters themselves had ever claimed they were satirical — even though Wu herself was quoted commenting on the hoax in a February 2015 article in Verge. In a subsequent email, Wu reiterated that she was sent other videos matching the description during that time; however, none are mentioned on her Twitter timeline. (The closest is a screenshot of a tweet with a photo of what looks like a boy wearing a skull mask and holding a toy gun, and with a threat to kill Quinn, Sarkeesian, and Wu.) It seems likely that the reference in the op-ed is to the debunked “Jace Connors” incident.
(3) At least some of the portrayal of GamerGate as a harassment campaign had to do with speech that, while arguably unpleasant, was not threatening.
This speech ranged from polite but persistent unwanted attempts at debate (nicknamed “sea-lioning,” from a 2014 web comic) to video blogs criticizing someone’s work.
(4) GamerGaters themselves were targets of serious harassment, a fact hardly ever acknowledged in the mainstream media (with a few exceptions such as David Auerbach, then at Slate.)
A number of GamerGate supporters were doxxed (i.e., had home addresses and other private information posted online) and reported threats. In 2015, two offline GamerGate events I attended — a meetup in Washington, DC and a panel examining the pro-GamerGate side of the controversy at a Society of Professional Journalists conference in Miami — were disrupted by bomb threats that forced evacuation of the building. This received virtually no coverage.
Given that GamerGaters were defined as the “bad guys” in social justice discourse, many supposedly right-thinking people felt free to engage in startlingly hateful invective toward anyone involved. In November 2014, Geordie Tait, a Bay-area writer for the gaming website Star City Games, posted a series of tweets literally calling for a Holocaust of GamerGaters; when criticized for trivializing the Holocaust, he responded by saying that the Holocaust was “not as bad as what women have suffered.”
Even people who were not GamerGaters but were seen as too GamerGate-friendly (or even too neutral) were sometimes targeted. YouTuber John Bain, a popular video game critic known under the nickname “Total Biscuit,” who strongly condemned harassment but also took the view that GamerGaters had some valid concerns, said that he was inundated with abusive messages while undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer, including messages wishing for his painful death. (Some GamerGate critics also vilified Bain after he succumbed to cancer last year.) Kerzner was a victim of false rumors intended to undermine her career — rumors that chat transcripts disclosed in 2016 seemed to confirm came from anti-GamerGate activists.
(5) Many GamerGaters not only denounced harassment toward their opponents but actively tried to curb it.
Early on, some members launched a “#GamerGate harassment patrol.” In October 2014, Kotaku reporter Jason Schreier, a strong GamerGate critic, acknowledged on Twitter that GamerGaters were rallying to report a troll who was doxxing journalists. In a Kotaku article a month later, Schreier credited GamerGaters with tracking down a man responsible for a string of threats to Sarkeesian (though he still suggested that the climate created by GamerGate had probably egged the perpetrator on).
What are the responses we offer to women? Outlawing gender based discrimination in pay? That seems... fine to me?
One has to not be paying attention in order to believe that that is the only response offered to women. Governments around the world have devoted significant amounts of resources towards rectifying the supposedly problematic gender pay gap and resolving women's underrepresentation in STEM and leadership roles.
For example, in my country (Australia):
Noting that the gender pay gap remained significant, the government announced a $1.9 billion package to improve women’s economic security. The sum takes in $1.7 billion over five years for increased childcare subsidies, as well as $25.7 million to help more women pursue careers in science, engineering and maths.
The package also includes $38.3 million to fund projects that assist women into leadership roles.
Some quotes from the relevant budget statement:
The Government’s Boosting Female Founders Initiative provides co-funded grants to majority women-owned and led start-ups, and facilitates access to expert mentoring and advice. The Initiative, announced in the 2018 and further expanded in the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statements, provides $52.2 million in competitive grant funding plus $1.8 million in mentoring support. The program commenced in 2020, with round one of the Initiative providing approximately $11.9 million in grant funding to 51 successful applicants. Round two closed on 22 April 2021.
And:
To further grow the pool of women in STEM, the Government is investing $42.4 million over seven years to support more than 230 women to pursue Higher Level STEM Qualifications. These scholarships will be provided in partnership with industry, to build job-ready experience, networks and the cross-cutting capabilities to succeed in modern STEM careers. This program will complement the Women in STEM Cadetship and Advanced Apprenticeships Program announced in the 2020-21 Budget, which targets women to enter industry-relevant, pre-bachelor study.
And:
The Australian Government is committed to supporting more women into leadership positions and to further closing the gender pay gap. The Government is providing $38.3 million over five years to expand the successful Women’s Leadership and Development Program. This builds on the $47.9 million expansion to the Program announced as part of the 2020 Women’s Economic Security Statement. This program funds projects such as Women Building Australia run by Master Builders Australia to support more women into building and construction. These initiatives form part of the Government’s response to increasing gender equality, extending leadership and economic participation opportunities for Australian women, and building a safer, more respectful culture.
https://archive.budget.gov.au/2021-22/womens-statement/download/womens_budget_statement_2021-22.pdf
That's from the 2021-22 budget statement, what has Australia been doing in 2022-23? Let's have a look:
Further measures in the Budget are focused on helping women into higher-paying and traditionally male-dominated industries. To boost the number of women in trades, the Government is investing $38.6 million over 4 years from 2022‑23. Women who commence in higher paying trade occupations on the Australian Apprenticeship Priority List will be provided additional supports, such as mentoring and wraparound services.
And:
The Morrison Government is making a further investment, building on the success of existing initiatives to improve leadership outcomes for women, by providing an additional $18.2 million for the Women’s Leadership and Development Program.
This includes $9 million from 2023-24 to 2025-26 to expand the successful Future Female Entrepreneurs program to develop and grow women’s core entrepreneurial skills. Funding will continue the successful Academy for Enterprising Girls (10-18 year olds) and the Accelerator for Enterprising Women, expanding it to include all women aged 18+, as well as adding a new Senior Enterprising Women program.
To support women facing unique barriers to leadership and employment, the Government is also investing $9.4 million to expand the Future Women’s Jobs Academy and to support gender balanced boards.
Governments are not the only ones who have done this. Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager, is explicitly using their voting power as shareholders to force gender diversity in boards of directors.
We voted against one or more directors at over 3,400 companies globally. Corporate governance concerns - including lack of board independence, insufficient diversity, and executive compensation - prompted most of the votes against directors' elections," BIS stated."
According to BlackRock, insufficient board gender diversity was the main reason for voting against a director in the Americas region, where it voted against 1,554 directors at 975 companies - or 61% of the votes that the firm cast against directors in the region - for board gender diversity-related reasons.
When women complain, they receive commiseration, help and often outright preferencing. I can't say that I see the same thing occurring when men complain.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
I'm aware of how it looks. That being said, Danskin's UC Merced talk is from 2021, so if the woke are still talking about it, I see no reason why they shouldn't continue to be countered and called out on their misstatements. Furthermore, I am aware of several occasions where users on TheMotte have stated that they'd like to know more about GamerGate from a non-mainstream source to get an alternative opinion, and I thought this video would be a good jumping-off point to get into the topic.
Why do you let clients demand things like that? Can't you clearly define deadlines and turn around times upfront? Make them pay rush fees if they really need to?
I'm a graduate who works with other people on clients, work gets delegated downwards to me. I'm not involved in client management to the degree where I would be able to tell them to fuck off. I do communicate with clients insofar as it's relevant to me finishing the job, but setting boundaries with clients would be a clear breach of my ambit.
Why when others have plans, are you expected to do the work? Is this reciprocal? Can't you make "fake" plans and stand firm?
I didn't make "fake" plans since I want to see just how much progression I can milk out of the job. If burning my candle at both ends does absolutely nothing for me, I'll scale back my participation.
As to whether it's reciprocal, I don't know. I may not end up being the one doing the work, since one of my superiors has said that they might be able to do the work if their schedule allows for it. So that's a possible indication that they would try to accommodate a schedule I had.
Why do you work after work hours? Do other people do this? Is it part of the industry or is it just you?
Yes, other people do this. To varying extents. I have been told that I work quite hard and that I don't have to stay so late completing client work. But the reason why I do this is because if I don't get tasks off my plate early, I'm going to be absolutely overwhelmed later when things start coming due and clients start making stupid requests that derail my plans.
For example, one of the earliest clients I started work on back in September did not respond to a query that we sent them, and made us wait for a month. When their representative/intermediary responded in the middle-to-end of October, her stated reason was that she was on leave and that none of her staff were able to deal with our query. Then reminded us she wanted the work done by 31 October. Making this worse is that this was a period where I had another client's deadlines coming due. I had to work almost exclusively on these two clients and drop the rest of my existing client work to deal with it, and have just been getting back to working on my other clients now.
Once I sent the financial statements and income tax returns off to her (very late in the month), she found a discrepancy between the client's internal financials and ours, then passed it back to me to investigate this discrepancy. It turns out our numbers were correct and this discrepancy was the client's own damn fault because they posted an adjusting journal twice in the prior year, which affected current year balances. Then after she was told this, she then came back with yet another issue - this time it was a trivial nitpick about the presentation of prior year figures, which meant I had to adjust it and send off again.
This kind of thing makes it impossible to properly plan my time, so I just get all the work out of the way early so I won't be too swamped once a client does something utterly irritating like that.
problem_redditor
5mo ago
I wasn't claiming she was relevant anymore. Acknowledging that people drop off the map doesn't also exclude acknowledging that there was a time when they had more relevance.
You would think that the ban on widow remarriage in such societies also disadvantages men
As far as I know there is currently no legal ban on widow remarriage in India at the moment. This is not a particularly new development either - the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856 is the early piece of legislation that granted widows the legal ability to remarry, and more current laws such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 do not prevent widows from remarrying (rather, it simply provides that a marriage may be solemnised between any two Hindus as long as neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage). The article you linked is talking more about the social stigma that gets attached to widows in very staunchly conservative parts of the country than anything else.
If we were to talk about the current Indian laws, I think there's actually an argument that the laws are very favourable to women in quite a few ways, especially considering the fact that preferential treatment of women is explicitly allowed in the equality provisions of the Indian constitution. In a section dictating that the State shall not discriminate based on demography, it's followed up with a bunch of caveats, including "(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children."
and yet it is always the widows who seem to do worse.
Unless you do a proper comparison as to who's "doing worse", I don't quite see how this has been proven. The article does speak about the plight of shunned Hindu widows, but it does not provide any such comparison, nor does it attempt to.
I do think we don't realise how heavily Western values were influenced by Christianity, especially by the honour paid to the Virgin Mary. This slowly changed attitudes to women, to marriage, to sexuality, to a lot of things.
This is a common view I see expressed - that the Western world is unique in its treatment of women, even historically - and I am a bit doubtful about it. I've noticed that women are simply assumed to be worse off in the third world with no real substantiation - this is not to say that everything is great for women in these societies, but there's little acknowledgement of the corresponding male issues that exist in them.
In countries such as Afghanistan, there is a practice such as bacha bazi, which translates as 'boy play'. It is on the surface a harmless form of entertainment - young boys dancing for the entertainment of their elders. The boys are trained as dancers, dressed as girls and made to perform to groups of men. Then the boys are taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused. And despite the US military knowing that many of their Afghan allies were involved in the practice of bacha bazi, they continued providing aid to these units.
Then there's things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. People know them for kidnapping the Chibok girls. What people don't know is that Boko Haram went from village to village kidnapping thousands of boys. They not only kidnapped boys, but they killed them too (in many of their attacks, they seem to have specifically targeted men and boys and exempted the women and girls). Here are some links about that. Source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4.
A report by Oxfam in August 2016 noted that thousands of men and boys were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria. In an Oxfam protection survey with communities affected by violence, people reported 41% more killings of men and boys by Boko Haram than of women and girls; and the number is even higher among adults, with 77% more men killed than women.
What the mainstream goes nuts over, though, is the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This despite the fact that Boko Haram were not initially intending to kidnap the girls - the girls were not even the actual target of the raid, and yet these girls being kidnapped was the event that galvanised the international community to start paying attention, as well as offering equipment, intelligence, resources and manpower to "bring back the girls" and deal with Boko Haram.
So let's just say I always regard it as a bit dubious whenever the spectre of misogyny and unique female hardship in third-world countries is raised due to the selectivity of the attention applied to the third world. This is a very good counter-narrative article on women in the third world and media bias (actually, it's a chapter in a book by Tim Goldich, published as an article), which sums up my views on this pretty well:
"You can go to a brutal place, catalogue only the brutality toward women, and on that basis conclude that women are the victims, but if you don’t research conditions for men, if you don’t compare the female victimization against male victimization, your conclusion is logically bankrupt."
Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to argue who has it worse or better. I'm trying to explain why as a result of all of this, I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best.
4/4
22 March 2014: Grayson publishes an article in RockPaperShotgun called "A Game And A Chat: The End Of GDC Spectacularmathon". In it, Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest is featured again.
Some quotes:
"Part one’s guests include Papers Please creator Lucas Pope, Depression Quest creator Zoe Quinn, and Boon Hill dev Matt Ritter. Part two, meanwhile, brings in such luminaries and champion toe fighters as Gone Home writerly brain man Steve Gaynor, Kotaku features editor Kirk Hamilton, resident Vlambeer madman JW Nijman, Action Henk‘s Kitty Calis, and RPS god heroes Cara Ellison and Hayden Dingman."
"Among many other things, we talked everyone’s favorite GDC moments, diversity in the gaming industry, the virtual reality fuuuuuuuture’s growing pains, my Lost Levels talk, and what happens after you release a game like Papers Please or Depression Quest."
So again, Quinn and Depression Quest are highlighted alongside far larger games like Papers Please. Just like all the others, this isn't incriminating on its own, but it does form part of a larger pattern. No conflict of interest is reported.
23 March 2014: Quinn openly admits she hangs with Grayson on Twitter.
Quinn: @tha_rami I'm headed over to butter to hang with @Vahn16
25 March 2014: Quinn and Grayson speak again on Twitter and send "solidarity" to each other. Quinn is calling Grayson "friend" and they are confirmed to be emailing each other.
Quinn: Realizing the degrees to which working on my art and career has destroyed like 95% of my personal life.
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel I am sending solidarity from my lonely bedroom work perch. I will be here until 5AM or so, I'm thinking
Quinn: @Vahn16 solidarity from the skies, friend. Also answer your damn email
https://archive.md/mmArt#selection-1387.0-1393.63
30 March 2014: Zoe Quinn speaks with Leigh Alexander on Twitter about going to Vegas with Nathan Grayson for a planned collaboration, the DAY BEFORE Grayson wrote an article about her.
Quinn: @leighalexander good thing I'm launching a gonzo games zine this week I guess
Alexander: @ZoeQuinnzel omg no way i wanna know about this
Quinn: @leighalexander it involves me and @notquitefrodo and @Carachan1 and @Vahn16 all going to vegas.
31 March 2014: Grayson writes an article in Kotaku featuring Quinn, and it's his most incriminating yet. The article is called "The Indie Game Reality TV Show That Went To Hell". This happens only three days before they go to Vegas (where they have sex). The topic of the article is about the failed GAME_JAM which Zoe Quinn was involved in. He paints Quinn as the "good guy" in the drama that ensued and at the very end, he posts about Quinn's desire to start her own game jam.
"And while the experience was trying for all involved, it was also rife with important lessons. Quinn summed it up:"
""There was this amazing thing that happened after the production was over. Without any organization or prompting, we acquired and shared some refreshments around, set up some multiplayer games, invited production staff to just come be people and play with us, and had a spontaneous pop up party more or less. It was the first time I had started to feel like myself at all since landing in LA. I started to remember what life felt like off-set again, and it reminded me of what I love about game jams and the indie community in general. It felt like such a complete contrast to the 24 hours that preceded it, and a thought clicked into my head.""
""I want to run a game jam. I'd love to have the LPers do what they're so often so brilliant at and bridge the gap between the games and the audience, and do it super low-tech, low-budget, documentary style. Capture the inspiration, the hard work, the 3am delirium and the dumb jokes that come with it. Show people how we all band together and support each other through the deadline. That's what I want to show the world about game jams. That's the ambassador I'd rather be.""
This is incriminating because at least less than a month later, in April 2014, Quinn went on to solicit donations for her own game jam, called Rebel Jam, despite having no start date and no determined location. Clicking on the "donate" button goes to what looks like a personal Paypal account. Even more importantly, Rebel Jam never actually ended up happening. I'm going to be charitable and assume that Quinn couldn't get enough funding, but there's also the more unpleasant possibility that I don't think I have to mention.
Either way, it doesn't matter because this looks pretty bad regardless of the point of Rebel Jam. Grayson and Quinn's exchanges definitively seem to imply that they are close, and him creating publicity for her projects definitely violates any code of journalistic integrity.
Again, no conflict of interest is disclosed.
2 April 2014: Quinn states that the Vegas trip is the next day.
Molinari: @legobutts @ZoeQuinnzel Did I hear someone's coming to Vegas? :o
Quinn: @OneMrBean @legobutts Yeah! I'm going there tomorrow for a few days with @Vahn16 and @notquitefrodo
2/3 April 2014: Grayson and Quinn go to Vegas and even tweet at each other during the car ride.
Grayson: I've lost track of the number of hours we've been on the road (1? 2?!?). I've eaten both my bags of mini-Reese's. Morale dwindling
Quinn: @Vahn16 what the hell you already ate all that?
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel MY FOOT IS ON YOUR CHAIR WE WILL USE HUMAN SPEECH DAMMIT
Quinn: @Vahn16 I don't sound like a human right now tho also you just tweeted me telling me we were gonna talk instead of tweeting you boob
https://twitter.com/UnburntWitch/status/451535398980706304
3 April 2014: Grayson posts a vine while in Vegas which features Quinn.
Grayson: The most Las Vegas thing I've ever seen in Las Vegas
Here is the vine in question. You can see what looks like Quinn's hair in the bottom right when you play the video. It's easily distinguishable because of just how oddly coloured it is.
At some point during the Vegas trip, they start having sex. This is corroborated by Gjoni's logs in The Zoe Post, and it is backed up by Grayson's admission in the Totilo article where he states that they started a romantic relationship in early April.
5 April 2014: The end of the Vegas trip. Grayson and Quinn act all mushy on Twitter talking about how they'll "miss each other's faces", and a mutual doesn't seem very surprised to see this lovey dovey behaviour.
Quinn: @Vahn16 yep definitely miss yer face already
Grayson: @ZoeQuinnzel aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame
Quinn: @Vahn16 <3 <3 <3
Harper: @ZoeQuinnzel @Vahn16 Guys, gross. At least invite me next time so I get to be all lovey too. sourface, bitterface
Quinn: @NikaHarper @Vahn16 fuck yes you are invited as HECK
https://archive.is/t56H4#selection-4233.1-4233.73
So let's recap what we have here. Grayson and Quinn seem to have been good friends whose relationship strengthened overtime (just going off their Twitter exchanges alone), and throughout the time they knew each other Grayson wrote not one, not two, not three, but four articles featuring Zoe Quinn all of which brought attention to her future or current projects in some way. The fourth of these articles is the most blatant, undeniable and egregious, and in it Grayson unashamedly shills for Quinn's upcoming game jam project that she solicits donations for (and which never actually ends up happening). And that article is set only a few days before they have sex in Vegas.
As a journalist, if you have a conflict of interest you have to recuse yourself or disclose the conflict of interest, and Grayson did neither. Grayson's excuse was that since they supposedly didn't have sex until a few days after the GAME_JAM article was published, they weren't in a "relationship" at the time, so it's apparently fine that they were at the very least friends before then and were doing a lot of stuff that indicated their blatant personal conflict of interest. But as this redditor notes: "personal conflicts of interest are not limited to people you are having sex with, and putting the sex a few days after the article doesn't really make it notably more ethical".
Funnily enough, Totilo himself stated back in August 2014 on Twitter that "reporters who are in any way close to people they might report on should recuse themselves". Wonder where that principle went.
https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/501817475097702402
Anyway, I hope you've noticed just how different the reality is from the portrayal in Danskin's talk to UC Merced, where he makes sure to completely brush over anything at all that might imply that there was a breach of journalistic ethics. The treatment of Gamergate by the mainstream has been an attempt at historical revisionism par excellence, where any indication of unethical behaviour has been stripped out of the record and replaced with some narrative where no one ever had any justification to be angry and Quinn was only ever a Poor Oppressed Victim being unjustly attacked by a virulently misogynist mob. It is an example of where if you repeat a falsehood enough, people will accept it as truth.
there are plenty of stories of women who got drunk at a party and wound up with a child and a deadbeat dad.
And if and when she did, the system won't hold her accountable. It offers her plenty of outs, such as 1: abortion, 2: safe haven abandonment, and 3: adoption, all of which she has a unique ability to access because she carries the child, and additionally any child born out of wedlock is in her sole custody by default and thus she won't be guilty of custodial interference by taking advantage of safe haven laws. Pray tell, why has your hypothetical woman not taken advantage of any of these options available to her, if she does not want to care for a child and the father is out of the picture? And which analogous "ways out" are fathers allowed?
The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. You want to get your dick wet, you know there is a possibility of producing a child, and if it's not your responsibility (jointly) to provide for that child, then whose is it?
Yet safe haven abandonment is explicitly allowed, and these laws absolutely create unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. I suppose that by the same token, you oppose safe haven abandonment as a method of surrendering parental responsibility for women, correct? If you have decided not only to perform the act that resulted in conception but also have carried the pregnancy to term and have eschewed every option to terminate up until that point, then you absolutely have the responsibility to care for it. Under this worldview, that is.
I'm not going to lie, this entire "personal responsibility" screed you've produced here sounds like an awfully convenient way to avoid the clear double standards that exist surrounding this entire thing.
The law isn't an algorithm, this is like comparing that one man who shot someone in Kansas and got a suspended sentence and that other woman who shot someone in Florida and got life.
If you look at it in isolation, perhaps. Looking at the entire picture, it forms part of a much larger pattern wherein women are treated with far more leniency and are granted far more options when it comes to abrogating parental responsibilities.
None of the men moaning that it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities after a hook-up would be satisfied by a law carving out an exception for male rape victims.
Sure. They're claiming it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities because women can.
No, I’m suggesting that the level of discrimination faced by a white or Asian man is lower than for most other groups, particularly women—even though the social acceptability of discriminating against the former is much higher. There are obviously some jobs (childcare, nursing) where a woman gets a discriminatory advantage.
Oh, there are plenty of jobs where women get a discriminatory advantage, and not necessarily always in stereotypically female fields either. STEM for example is a good case study of a field which is thought to be discriminatory against women, but actually favours them.
This paper by Williams and Ceci finds that faculty members in STEM, when evaluating hypothetical applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology, "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."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This review in Psychology Today considering the evidence regarding gender bias in science shows that studies showing egalitarian attitudes or bias against male scientists are more common than those showing bias against female scientists. There were 4 papers showing bias favouring men, whereas there were 8 showing no gender bias and 6 showing bias favouring women.
The Williams and Ceci paper included in the review reported 5 studies, however, so if we shift our focus to number of studies instead of papers the empirical data shows that there were 4 studies showing bias favouring men, 8 showing no gender bias and 10 showing bias favouring women. On the whole, the evidence as presented in this review seems to lean towards "there is bias in favour of women in STEM".
The author goes on to state that "there was far more evidence of egalitarian or pro-female bias than there is of pro-male bias". He also notes that studies showing peer-reviewed science is unbiased or favours women tend to have larger sample sizes than those which show biases favouring men, but are cited much less (largely due to an ideological bias in academia in favour of the "discrimination against women" hypothesis).
There's also research with a more generalised scope, and a lot of that data does not support the idea that discrimination in the workplace is primarily a women's issue (rather, the findings often indicate the very opposite). For example:
"By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere."
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false
The notion that women are "disadvantaged more" is very questionable at best.
But I’ve got it pretty good, and I suspect that all else equal, white men of comparable intelligence and background are likely to say the same.
Relying on personal perception (which seems to be the main source that you and many other people here are drawing from) is a particularly unconvincing argument, since people have biases. White men in particular have been exposed to a narrative from a very young age that they do not face issues because of their race or sex, in fact they are told they are privileged because of it, whereas women and PoC get it hammered into their head that the society they live in is a white cisheteropatriarchal one that oppresses them. It's not hard to see how this is going to influence perceptions, and how this is going to lead to women and PoC interpreting more events as discriminatory against them than white men since it takes far more for white men to jump to the conclusion that they're being discriminated against because of their immutable characteristics. The narrative that endlessly circulates in society gears white men to perceive evidence of their privilege, not their disadvantage.
Furthermore, in the case of male/female dynamics there are also other factors that influence things. For example women score higher on neuroticism than men which obviously predisposes them to perceive more things as malicious than men do. Women can capitalise on claims of vulnerability in ways men simply can't due to our protectiveness towards women, and thus benefit from perceiving danger and expressing it to others in order to elicit nurturance and help (the opposite is true for men: Men who complain and present themselves as vulnerable and put-upon run the risk of inviting ire). This is obviously going to impact which sex is more likely to perceive slight and complain about that slight.
EDIT: clarity
The Good Place is decent, but anyone thinking of watching should keep in mind that it does bludgeon you over the head with progressive-isms which are immensely hard to ignore. Zero HP Lovecraft, whatever you may think about him, has a pretty good summary of how the ideology is interwoven through the show's plot.
I have no idea what it's swinging towards, especially since in reality the pendulum is a 4d object zigzagging through multiple political dimensions. Still, it's a welcome sign that at least this flavor demagoguery is losing its bite.
I doubt this actually represents any kind of substantive shift in the public discourse. There has long been a widespread rejection of this kind of clear woke overreach, but people still support the false underlying tenets of woke ideology and are in favour of censorship of things that might threaten it even if they think it sometimes goes too far. Just because they're willing to criticise Stanford's egregious problematisation of half the English lexicon doesn't mean they don't believe in the idea of, say, disparities being a result of discrimination and doesn't mean they're not willing to censor alternative ideas that threaten their underlying belief system.
Sincerely, I hope you're right. But I've seen so many predictions along the lines of "Perhaps wokeness is truly dying" too many times in the culture war, and every time those who advance this view are wrong.
I think men are violent by only insofar that men are agentic. I don't think it's really possible to separate men's propensity towards violence from their tendency to exert agency in other ways and other parts of societies.
Related to this, I always find it a bit surprising how we've gendered violence of all kinds as male (even types of violence which aren't primarily male-perpetrated, like domestic violence) but almost completely fail to acknowledge that most bystanders who go out of their way to risk their lives for somebody else or expose themselves to danger to protect somebody else are also men.
Even in non-dangerous scenarios, you can see greater male helping behaviours in a public context.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2786599
"One hundred forty-five experimenters "accidentally" dropped a handful of pencils or coins on 1,497 occasions before a total of 4,813 bystanders in elevators in Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Atlanta, Georgia. In picking up the objects, females received more help than did males, males gave more help than did females, and these differences were greatly exaggerated in Atlanta."
In addition, this study does a review of the literature surrounding gender and helping.
"Many previous studies have found that males are more likely to give help than females and/or that females are more likely to receive it than males (e.g., Bryan and Test, 1967; Ehlert et al., 1973; Gaertner and Bickman, 1971; Graf and Riddle, 1972; Latane, 1970; Morgan, 1973; Penner et al., 1973; Piliavin and Piliavin, 1972; Piliavin et al., 1969; Pomazal and Clore, 1973; Simon, 1971; Werner, 1974; Wispe and Freshly, 1971). A few studies have found no main effects due to sex (Gruder and Cook, 1971; Thayer, 1973) and in one case males were more likely to receive help (Emswiller et al., 1971). Two studies have found cross-sex helping to be more frequent than same-sex helping (Bickman, 1974; Thayer, 1973), one has found same-sex helping to be more common (Werner, 1974), and most have found no difference. Although the relation of sex to helping may depend on the specific type of help requested, it is clear that in the preponderance of settings tested to date, males help more than females, and females receive more help than males."
Heroism is likely mostly engaged in by men. As this article notes:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00369/full
"To this end, we investigated reactions to newsworthy, exceptional social roles that are often dealt with in the media: hero and murderer. Both social roles attract much attention and have similarly low percentages of women (ca. 10–20%). In the US, only 9% of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal for saving others are women, and in Germany only about 20% of similar medals are awarded to women. This may be because there are fewer women in professions such as firefighters, soldiers, or police officers—jobs involving dangerous situations where jobholders can act heroically."
I would differ from the authors here. Fewer women in dangerous professions is likely not a very big reason for the difference in heroism found between men and women, because the Carnegie Hero Medal excludes from awards of persons such as firefighters whose duties in their regular vocations require heroism, unless the act of heroism is truly outstanding. "The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued, which precludes those whose vocational duties require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty; and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Hero_Fund
This article in Men's Health notes "nine out of every 10 Carnegie heroes have been men".
"Heroic rescuing behaviour is a male-typical trait in humans ... This study looked at news archives of local papers in the UK in order to discover what kind of characteristics rescuers possess. It was found that males were highly more likely to rescue than females were".
When it comes to men there's very much a tendency to focus on the negative manifestations of public sphere agency and ignore all the positive ways it manifests. I think in the past we had a more balanced viewpoint surrounding it, and there's been a very motivated attempt to stamp out positive perceptions of men due to an idea that these perceptions are problematic. It's very hard for me not to see the slow erasure of positive male qualities from the public discourse as being intentional.
Men are expected to commit violence on behalf of women, and to perform on behalf of women.
And you can easily see plenty of instances throughout history of women weaponising that social expectation and openly cajoling men into performing violence against others, as I mentioned in a previous comment of mine. But violence by proxy perpetrated by women is, again, largely a topic that is taboo in the public discourse.
Haven't written anything significant in one of these Wellness threads for a while, suppose now's a good time.
I'm currently in my fourth week of my first job at an accounting firm after a year or so of actively looking for a job (after recovering from years of chronic illness that derailed a lot of my plans). A lot has been thrown at me so far and it's been fairly exhausting. Despite how draining it can be, this is a development I'm fairly pleased with, and I'm even more pleased with it given that I have a reasonable level of certainty that I got in because of merit and not identity. During the job application process, I had a practice of entering "prefer not to answer" to any identity-based questions that could work in my favour, especially if the organisation indicated they would like to diversity hire (an all too common sight in Australia).
There is one thing that has been causing dissonance though, and it's the gulf between how I perceive myself vs. how other people seem to perceive me. So far people have told me that I have been doing well, and according to my superiors everyone who has worked with me has offered up very positive feedback. I am frankly very perplexed by this - I consider the rate at which I've been picking things up to be normal and expected, if not slower than I would personally like. I do attempt to be as fastidious as possible in my work, but I get the sense that I sometimes ask questions in excess and miss things that should be obvious. Note, I'm not complaining about the positive feedback in any way and I'm glad they consider me to have been performing well, but it's genuinely surreal to see how different their evaluation of my performance is from my own.
Perhaps I'm just used to unreasonably high expectations and perhaps my idea of "basic competence" is biased upwards, but I feel like short of actual mental retardation it's very hard to mess up what I'm currently doing. And it sometimes makes me think that the other shoe is going to drop, and other people are eventually going to see me in the way that I see myself.
Automating away a bunch of my work has actually been in my mind. There's often no standardised format to the data though (sometimes a client will just throw us various bank statements, rental statements and other such documents and we'll just have to use those). This isn't an insurmountable problem and I do want to do it, but I haven't had sufficient downtime to pursue that goal yet.
This is basically a rehash of the "It's [current year], why is [thing I don't like] still happening" meme, without using these exact words.
Apart from the specific criticisms of the incident others have already offered, I'd note that this "society is still racist" idea bubbling right under the surface of your comment basically implies that for society to be sufficiently non-racist the incidence of bad actors would need to be literally zero, which is ridiculous and impossible.
I'll also note that it's very easy for media to create the appearance of omnipresent racism. They can do this because if the population is large enough even incidents with a 1 in 1000 chance of occurring will occur sufficiently regularly, which means the frequency of news reporting on racist incidents is high enough to give everyone the illusion that racism is everywhere regardless of actual probability.
(Except anti-white racism, that can be swept under the rug or alternatively, if it is legalised, portrayed as noble diversity initiatives aimed at helping PoC.)
Is it an effective debating tactic? This is an interesting experiment (and a pretty funny one at that) but what the results seem to indicate is that ChatGPT's responses lack the dynamism of an actual human. Most of its responses are almost indistinguishable from each other - it seems to be unable to adapt to the prior context of the conversation and tailor its output accordingly, and the uncanniness is pretty identifiable as a result. The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.
I'm going to say something perhaps inflammatory: If I had a daughter and that happened, yes, I would feel some sympathy for the guy who propositioned her, and I would expect her to understand that. In order to explain my position, I'm going to relay a personal experience of mine.
Many guys tend to not have the experience of being approached since they are the ones typically expected to initiate and take on all risk. However, I'm a guy who's had an experience of being propositioned by another guy, and though granted his advance was less direct than "do you want to be FWB" it was done by a random dude in a park who I had never met before (and I was admittedly a bit flustered by it and politely rejected him). My initial reaction wasn't really "What an asshole, fuck that guy", instead it was worry about the fact that perhaps I could've cushioned the blow of rejection a little further. My primary emotion was in fact a feeling of sympathy (and a bit of confusion about how he figured out my orientation on sight alone).
I did not think I should be offended simply because he suggested to me something we might both enjoy, and I did not envy his position. Being the one who initiates is terrifying, opens you up to the inherent humiliation of rejection and could end up with you on the receiving end of a claim of harassment. I felt an obligation to respect that. And while I did tell some people I knew about what happened (which I felt comfortable doing because we definitely did not hang out in the same social circles and in fact would likely never see each other again), I never provided any identifying information that would have reasonably allowed anyone even in his social circles to know who he was off my account alone. I certainly did not go blabbering about how terrible he was and in fact made it a point to stress to people I told that I did not think of him as a creep.
I would expect from any daughter of mine the same conduct I expect from myself. No amount of "but physical strength differences, though" works here, because I am unusually small and thin (I barely weigh 100 pounds) and the guy propositioning me was much larger. Furthermore, any claim that the consequences of unwanted sex for women is greater than it is for me also has to contend with the fact that women now have a huge amount of control over their sexuality even after the act has occurred as they have access to things like the morning after pill. As an aside, it is easier for women to escape the consequences of PIV sex than it is for men (whose financial obligations will be enforced even if the sex was against his will).
And yes, women have a different instinctual reaction to these things than men do because of the historic reproductive risks and costs of sex for women which no longer holds up under modernity. Humans are full of evolutionary baggage that isn't necessarily rational under modern circumstances. However, I expect women to deal with their feelings in a way that doesn't blow back on others who have according to all objective criteria done nothing wrong. Managing your emotions and not capriciously doing things that would cause others harm simply for offending your sensibilities is part and parcel of mature behaviour.
If I'd found out my hypothetical daughter had gone and told people about it, and found out it had blown back on the guy to the point he was being treated like a predator, I would definitely at least be telling her that her actions matter, and that she should have thought twice before badmouthing him in a social group where it could result in actual consequences for him.
EDIT: added more
While it is true that Lightoller's behaviour was not necessarily replicated among other officers (something which I acknowledged), you seem to be trying to equate "They allowed men onto the boats sometimes" with "there was no chivalry involved" which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Other officers did in fact prioritise women and children.
Furthermore, your isolation of that "33% survival rate" statistic and selective presentation of it is also misleading. First class men on the Titanic survived at rates lower than third class women.
Yeah, relying on the whole "oppressed groups have epistemic advantage" argument in order to substantiate a claim of oppression always leads to some variant of the following horror: "I'm oppressed and you're privileged, thus I have a superior knowledge which allows me to tell you that I'm oppressed and you're privileged and you have no such standing. How can I be sure that I'm oppressed and you're privileged? Because I'm oppressed and you're privileged".
The fact that people genuinely use this circular argument and see no problem with the foundational logic behind it is shocking.
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