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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26330 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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lighthearted cs drama

The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.

I think 'there's no hard enforced rule against this, but it makes you a jerk and everyone will call you a jerk very publicly and that might affect your career or at minimum your chances of getting laid' is a perfectly fine way to handle this, and many other, social conundrums.

Policing by police with guns, and even by event organizers and security, should only be a fallback for cases where social policing isn't enough; social policing is the default method for discouraging all kinds of negative and antisocial behavior, and that's usually good.

Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.

GHC is fucked, but that's nothing new. CS will be fine, as long as the machines don't care if they're programmed by sweaty white male nerds, Chinese and Indians of all genders, or the occasionally skinny white Eastern European woman.

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