>Wellesley College
Is shit. This is widely known and accepted, they are ridiculed and ignored for it.

Shit Wendys Say

They say "check your privilege" seriously, also "scare quotes".

At one point Wellesley chicks (it's an all girls school) protested for a full week because they didn't get to enter a candidate in the sexiest college guy contest.

>a person cant decide whether to have sex until 16
>but they can decide what gender they want to be at 6
logic

>>389199
I fail to see the relationship between those two points.

>>389199
this is A Dumb Post

>>389199

>>389199
>equating realizing one's gender expression (or comfortable range of gender expressions) to consenting in an act that potentially has long term life and death ramifications

the reason sex at a young age is bad is not unethical in that children are incapable of knowing anything about themselves. it's because we want to give them time to experience life long enough to make big and potentially permanent decisions for themselves. if this were an issue of "letting children opt into gender reassignment surgery" you may have a case, but this is primarily about personal identity, not genitals. and what the hell is wrong with a straight male child dressing and acting like a girl for a while, anyway? even if he finds out he doesn't recognize himself as a girl, i don't see the problem of having made sure.

>2014

>"decide what gender they want to be"

just like how one can decide to be/not be homosexual, right?

>>389205
Homosexuality and transsexuality are complex ideas, I seriously doubt a 6 year old understand what it means let alone the difference between feeling like a transsexual or a straight person. I'm not the guy above, and I'm totally fine with LGBT, just... hold off on permanent decisions until later ffs.

How do you even test homosexuality for 6 year olds, ask them if the prefer anal sex, or fellating another boy?

>>389206
>I seriously doubt a 6 year old understand what it means let alone the difference between feeling like a transsexual or a straight person
i assume you meant cis person
if that's the case
then you don't really know what being trans is
which is fine i guess, it gets buried under a lot of garbage from the special snowflakes but
yeah

>>389207
No, I meant straight, as in attracted to the opposite sex. The cis-trans bullshit implies people who are "cis" are comfortable with their sexuality while people who are "trans" are not. It also completely shits on gay and lesbian people because they're not covered in the classification, it completely shits on the gender-sex difference, and of course it pisses off chemistry majors.

Lets leave this particular mistake buried in the 90s where it belongs.

>then you don't really know what being trans is
Feel free to expand on this.

>Anyone in any walk of life giving a shit about gender.

>>389208
okay. let's do the accepted explanation of cis/trans gay/straight talk

physical expression of gender (which is not always as simple as male or female) is one thing. this gender thing is not so straightforward. example: some people with XY chromosomes physically express as female. there's a whole spectrum/bunch of non-binary examples that make things more complex than guy or gal.

cis is where you emotionally/mentally/physically identify with and feel like and identify as the same gender your body physically expresses itself.

trans is where it's the opposite.

this is a spectrum.

straight is usually given with respect to your identity. if you identify as a female and are interested in men (typically this refers to physical attraction) you're considered straight, regardless of physical expression.

you're gay if you're attracted to the same gender (usually physical expression) you identify as.

there's a spectrum here, too.

there are so so so many examples of people that fall outside of even these sort of rudimentary spectra. the most common are usually what people go by to explain everyone, but we miss people with our incomplete language.

please correct me if i'm wrong, anyone.

>>389208
i have no idea what the fuck you're talking about or why you're presenting "trans" and "straight" as opposites
i would prefer to hold off on engaging you until you elaborate a bit more on...mostly everything that you're typing.

i've run out of pictures of slowpokes with question marks around them to indicate confusion. this board moves really slowly.

>>389208
>It also completely shits on gay and lesbian people because they're not covered in the classification
That's because it's not a classification system about what you're attracted to.

They're not included in the P-Q Linquistic classification system, either.

Just wanted to add, I hate the terms "gay" and "straight" because not only do they carry unfortunate implications with the language (a misbehaving child can be yelled at by a drill instructor and thus "scared straight", which implies among several other examples that "straight" is thus the preferred state, and any deviance is wrong) but you run into problems when you add gender identity in the mix.

For example, what do you call a physical woman with the mental/emotional preference of a male (a trans woman) who is sexually attracted to men? Straight? Gay? Most people would say straight because most people only seem to think it depends on whether the genitals involved match or not, which is a stupid way of thinking caused by the terminology. To extend this further, what if she then has surgery to become physically male? Does she become gay? Was she always gay? Don't even try to figure out what would happen if this hypothetical person were a hermaphrodite or gender-neutral.

See, it's ridiculous, confusing, and altogether pointless in modern society to define things this way. Personally, I use "androphilic" and "gynephilic". Do you like men, or do you like women? The term has nothing to do with what sex/gender YOU are, which is why scientists use these terms instead of the others.

>>389219
that definition is a trans man, first of all--i'm not sure why anyone so opposed to the gender they were assigned at birth that they'd go through the social stigma of identifying otherwise would continue to call themselves by whatever term they were trying to get away from (although i'm sure there are some people out there who do, and that's their call)

secondly, a trans man who is attracted to men is generally considered gay by people who aren't huge douchebags
on account of being a man who likes men

>>389210
Alright but don't get mad at the corrections.

>physical expression of gender (which is not always as simple as male or female) is one thing.
That's sex, not gender.
Sex is determined by a set of biological features such as chromosome number or shape of genitals, parts of it can be surgically altered in a process called "sexual reassignment surgery".
Gender is determined by a set of social features such as child rearing, housework, bringing home the bacon and so on, if someone asks you "what gender are you?" they're really asking "where in my preconcieved notions of what men/women do you want to fit?".

>this gender thing is not so straightforward. example: some people with XY chromosomes physically express as female.
That's called a disorder and it is not defining in any way, that's what makes it a disorder. Although note that it's called "intersexed" not "intergendered".

t. guy shooting for a MSc in integrative biology

Some comments (didn't read much of the argument in this thread):
Do remember that even two genuinely tolerant persons run the risk of pissing off each other because they are speaking different languages. So relax when talking to each other and kindly explain what you believe the words mean, because in this day and age the vocabulary is changing too fast and with too many unofficial inputs for there to be an easy understanding between two people.

The reason for the confusion is that although sociology calls itself a "social science" it doesn't really use the scientific method and is not organized enough or held to the same standards as the sciences.
So to fix this problem, sociologists are trying to invent a new vocabulary to bring some order to what is a very confusing discipline... it goes without saying that there hasn't been much success.
It doesn't help that sociologists aren't even consulting any of the disciplines they're borrowing diction from (geometry/chemistry/history etc) so it just causes a massive amount of confusion in that sense, both in the academic community and among the general public, politicians, lawmakers...

If you want to fight each other, ok, but don't do it over a misunderstanding.

If I may contribute a personal opinion to this, the real crux of this debate is actually what we are allowing other people to decide to do with their own bodies. As a male who identifies as male and who has always been attracted to people who identify as female and have always been comfortable in my own skin (however accurate that is to the nomenclature), I have no right to tell someone who does not feel like they are the gender they physical appear to be that they have to be that gender. I can't ever really be inside their head, really understand what they feel about it (though research has shown that neurological differences do present in people who feel this way, you just need a CAT scan or similar to determine that for certain). If a person where to feel this way, go through the necessary steps to appear as what they feel like as possible, and then proceeds to act creepy to members of any gender, that doesn't mean that their feelings of displacement are wrong, it means that their actions towards others are wrong, and should be educated against, though this scenario is actually incredibly rare as I understand it.

What this boils down to is an argument over whether we as a society can define what people can do with their own lives and bodies. And the only time intervening in these matters is remotely acceptable is when the choices of an individual infringe upon the rights and physical well-being of others.

>>389228
>If you want to fight each other, ok, but don't do it over a misunderstanding.
HOW DARE YOU TELL US WHAT TO DO!?

>>389247

>What this boils down to is an argument over whether we as a society can define what people can do with their own lives and bodies. And the only time intervening in these matters is remotely acceptable is when the choices of an individual infringe upon the rights and physical well-being of others.

Y'know, I think there's another highly-debated sociopolitical issue that this line of thinking applies to...

>>389228
nope. not mad at all. i like having my opinions adjusted by better information than i've garnered. thanks!

>>389272
Yeah it's funny how individual rights all kind of sound the same regardless of socio-political issue

>>389222

Way to miss the entire point by picking nits over one sentence. This is why unambiguous language is important. Most people tend to think in concrete terms, not ideal ones; or what IS not what MIGHT BE. The term "transsexual" is simple enough at face value, but it implies only a condition, not a direction. When used as a modifier before a gender pronoun, there is no rule that says whether it means "trans to" or "trans from". I understand what you're getting at from a psychological point of view of the person describing themself; but my entire point was that this can be confusing for others when they encounter unfamiliar terminology without being familiar with the sociological norms associated with using it.

As I had stated before, the terms "gay" and "straight" are used by almost all people (with no malice or derision) solely based on the physical sex of the two involved. This isn't because they are mean, but because they are ignorant. "Gay" means "penis-plus-penis" to most people, and "lesbian" means "vagina-plus-vagina"; the gender of the people involved doesn't figure into it at all.

Shall we invent a new term to describe an individual person's preferred gender identity that doesn't also depend on their own current physical sex and/or a possible future surgical alteration thereof? Because I don't like it, either.

>>389284
i didn't miss any points? i answered your question.

also "but it's haaaaard" isn't really a valid argument for...anything. like a lot of both of those posts consist of how ~confusing~ trans terminology is and i'm not sure what the point behind it is other than you just kind of complaining. is that the point i'm missing?

(p.s. all trans stuff is rendered 200% more simple if you just respect their identity. they identify as male? ok. think of them as a man. boom. all terminology problems solved. wow. magic.)

(p.p.s. sorry for being kind of an ass, i spent like 2 hours earlier teaching a very right-wing friend Baby's First Gender Lesson, and frankly i already have a very low patience level when it comes to you)

>>389284
"this term is confusing because i haven't encountered it a lot, so everyone using it should change it to another word i would complain about not understanding immediately, because i refuse to learn anything."

here, i will help. trans means "on the opposite side" (it is a latin root, not short for "transitioning" or something like that). man means someone who feels and presents as male, who should be thought of and treated as male. therefore transman means someone who feels and presents as male but their physical sex is/was opposite to what they present as. what they present as is more important than whatever their genitals look like. you don't need to know what a conversation partner has in their pants in order to interact with them. this term exists mainly for people to identify themselves to other members of the transgender community and is not really for cis people to use to refer to trans people. for all intents and purposes, to you, a transman is just a regular man.

do you understand? if someone looks, acts, and wants to be referred to as a man, you treat them as a man. same for women.

>>389302
This is A Good Post.

>>389302

A furry artist I follow did a comic recently about the whole pronoun issue (as it relates to their personal life experience):

https://www.weasyl.com/submission/455121

Safe for work, I assure you.

>>389284

why do care so much about how other people present do you seriously expect us to believe you talk to people other than your own mother

What matters here is that we need to make an evil supercomputer that has us all wear one of a handful of white, silver, and black suits, refers to us by number, and declares identity as being insignificant beyond its relevance to determining what duties one would be suited for assignment to. I have, fortunately for humanity, already begun bringing the entirety of modern science to bear on this problem.

>>389304
No, that's a horrible post, just look at this
>man means someone who feels and presents as male,
Man is gender, male is sex. People like that guy are just confusing the fuck out of everybody.

>>389311
How the fuck you gonna get bent outta shape about man/male distinction(especially since "presenting as [opposite sex]" is a completely legit thing to say???) and not even touch on how they said someone needs to look like a man/woman to be treated like one? I'm sure they didn't mean it like that, but fact remains, you gonna nitpick, do it right.

>>389311
Did you mean:
>Man is gender, male is sex. People like that guy are just confusing the fuck out of [me personally, because I am dumber than a box of rocks].

Or maybe?
>Man is gender, male [can refer to both sex and gender]. People like that guy are [using English correctly, but since I am a petulant cis manchild, I don't want gross "transgenders" to refer to themselves as a gender I belong to!!! YUCK].

>>389309
also, fucking sick burn, jesus christ

>>389317
>talking about cars
>someone calling the bugatti veyron a truck
>"its not a truck"
>"why are you nitpicking?!?!?!"
This isn't nitpicking, it's kind of important. If you don't know the difference and aren't using it properly you don't really have a place in the discussion.

> "presenting as [opposite sex]" is a completely legit thing to say???
After hormone therapy or SRS.... see

God, some of you people are such fucking assholes to each other.

I think >>389228 is the only person who said something actually unambiguously true, here, seeing how basically everyone who follows is misunderstanding each other and raising Hell for it. Also: Bea, Slowpoke, do you really have to give each other an off-topic circlejerk over petty insults? It makes plus4 look really bad when you get people doing that kind of pubescent garbage on the front page. Mods should consider bans over posts that are inflammatory and add nothing.

Also, this is already heading for: "you're a cis man, so everything you say is automatically wrong", which is what every single gender discussion basically devolves into. Which is hilariously hypocritical, considering the entire point of being transgender is as a rejection of traditional gender norms, and yet there you go assigning a stereotype based solely on a person's gender.

I think we should just stop, now. As much as I enjoy laughing at a dick-measuring contest, except instead of dicks it's how unprivileged you are on a scale from straight, rich, white, cis male to a homeless trans cripple with paralyzing jock-itch, it's not very productive.

>>389331
>Also, this is already heading for: "you're a cis man, so everything you say is automatically wrong"

wut

>>389326
>talking about cars
>someone casually refers to a Toyota 4Runner as a van in a long and fairly helpful post
>"wow it's not a van it's a fucking SUV, post disregarded"
While it may be technically true, plenty of people refer to SUVs as vans in conversation(around here at least, may be a regional thing), no one is confused by it and everyone understands what the person is talking about, and raising hell about it ACTUALLY kind of makes you an asshole.
>>389331
>Also: Bea, Slowpoke, do you really have to give each other an off-topic circlejerk over petty insults?
lmao, it was one short saged congrats over a quality diss. Ease up little buddy.

>>389335
>plenty of people refer to SUVs as vans in conversation
In casual conversation ok, but when we're in an argument about the terms we should make an effort to use more formal definitions.

>>389338
Then would you prefer to follow Candlejack's example and use terms like "androphile" and "gynephile" for the rest of the thread?

No one misunderstood anything, you just jumped in and tore up a post over the dumbest fuckin issue I've ever seen. We're not Bad Sci-Fi Movie Robots, we're capable of understanding and conversing without having to use medical terms, Christ.

>>389339
>Then would you prefer to follow Candlejack's example and use terms like "androphile" and "gynephile" for the rest of the thread?
Sure, why not.

Stop being so mad over this.

>>389342
I'm not mad, I just think you're a dumbass.

>>389331
>Which is hilariously hypocritical, considering the entire point of being transgender is as a rejection of traditional gender norms

Um, no, it's not. It doesn't have anything to do with rebellion or challenging gender norms. Many trans people fit well within established gender norms of their psychological gender, they are not rebels in the least.

You're not wrong because you are cis man, you're wrong because you make statements that are false. It's just sort of easy to tell when a poster is a cis man without any first-hand experience with trans people because they say the same wrong things every time they enter a discussion and then get defensive about it.

>>389331
>considering the entire point of being transgender is as a rejection of traditional gender norms

youre framing this as a choice people make for political reasons which is really really really not the reason why trans people are trans.

>>389331
>the entire point of being transgender is as a rejection of traditional gender norms

lmao

do you believe that mental illnesses are a choice too?

>>389352
do you believe that trans people are mentally ill?

>>389355

I wonder what compels a man to go on the internet and try to speak at length about subjects he knows nothing about.

>>389356

Ego.

>>389355
kind of, if we use the term mental illnes to refer to an error state that needs to be corrected
a mismatch between hardware (sex) and software (gender) generally results in adverse psychological effects in the individuum, not every problem is caused by society
sex reassignment surgery exists because trying to cure the ailment from the other end is basically brainwashing (and thus undesirable to non-assholes)

try harder next time, amateur

>>389358
Please leave...

>>389356
IDK what you're talking about but I like the cut of your jib.

>>389360
>Please leave...
They're kinda right though. I wouldn't use "mental illness," but for a lot of trans people, it's definitely some sort of disorder, and is acknowledged by the medical community as one.

To my understanding, "gender" comes about from the way hormones and the brain develop in utero. In almost every case, when they develop "correctly," for lack of a less potentially offensive word, you end up with a male brain in a male body or a female brain in a female body. Occasionally though, something diverges from the norm, and the brain develops as female while the body develops as male, or vice versa. This is an actual physical difference that can be seen in brain scans.
This is why a 6 year old AMAB is capable of determining whether or not she feels like a girl. It's not just cause she likes Barbies. It's because she has a female brain, regardless of what her body looks like.

Furthermore, this can have actual medical side effects, such as "phantom limb"-like feelings when the body is lacking the parts the brain believes it should have.

So while I'm not gonna say this is the only definition of trans or the only way to be trans, it's most certainly one way, and it most certainly is a medical condition.

Apologies for any misinformation or incoherence, I don't claim to be an expert and also I just woke up, so.

>>389360
>>389361
As a trans person, I much prefer talking about it in terms of a medical disorder. My brain does not match up with my body. Even if we had some sort of cure for it on the brain end, it would be ethically problematic. So the only viable treatment is at the body end.

I really wish it could just be talked about and acknowledged like some ordinary medical disorder. I think the reason a lot of people have a problem talking about it in these terms is because there exists a huge stigma against mental illness as well, which is also bullshit.

>>389360
hey, I'm not the one claiming that being trans is just "rebelling against tradition" (aka something you can decide to stop doing)

>>389361
>To my understanding, "gender" comes about from the way hormones and the brain develop in utero.
No that's still sex, gender is entirely social.

If in 100 years it becomes fashionable again for men to wear makeup, pantyhose and corsets, men who do that will be cis not trans.

See why people keep insisting on using terms properly?

>>389364
womp womp
this is where i feel like we'll keep talking over each other. as previously stated, we all clearly have different nuances and strictness with our choice of language here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/

I think the question I want to ask then is... does there, then, exist a gender identity that speaks to an innate preference toward masculinity and/or femininity in some non-specific sense? taking the assumption that by gender we mean the cultural roles and and attributes that we separate as masculine and feminine, if we were to create a culture where gender acquisition and expression were entirely fluid and adaptable, would there still be a male and female gender identity? i think one could develop, but it wouldn't be as strict with positive or negative judgment toward any roles/expressions taken.

i honestly don't know, though. i haven't thought about this enough.

>>389364
>No that's still sex, gender is entirely social.
I disagree, for this reason:
>If in 100 years it becomes fashionable again for men to wear makeup, pantyhose and corsets, men who do that will be cis not trans.
Which shows (operating under the definitions that I use and see used, i.e., sex is the physical, gender is the mental, to make it simple) that gender roles have absolutely no bearing on actual gender. Men can wear makeup and dresses and be pretty and still be men, in both gender and sex. Women can wear slacks and button-up shirts and shave their heads--and shave nothing else--and still be women, in both gender and sex.

In the definitions I see used in the trans community, as well as the definitions I use, "gender" refers to what you are mentally. Hence, you know, why the terms "cisgender," "transgender," and "agender" make sense linguistically.

>>389365
>if we were to create a culture where gender acquisition and expression were entirely fluid and adaptable, would there still be a male and female gender identity?
Reminds me of the question about whether bisexuality is the "default" state, and if there were absolutely no stigma concerning homosexuality, would everyone be bi?
I personally think individual identities would still exist in both hypotheticals--there would still be males and females in yours, and still be straight and gay people in mine, but obviously I can't really prove that.

>>389368
>>389369
an then there are those that would throw all kinds of wrenches into the works of such an ideal since they make a living pitting groups against each other.

>>389370
not just a living. half-baked and downright unhealthy ideas take hold simply because sometimes they work.
evolution of ideas, mate.

but yeah. it blows. i didn't want to suggest that the sort of hypothetical world where people were accepting of gender fluidity was inherently stable. just that it would be one i'd like to live in and explore...

>>389371
And it just seems to be getting more caustic and worse, thankfully I found a few people on twitter that could give a toss about that kinda thing and like the idea of "treating a person as a person" which I follow. They've given me some confidence that something may actually come of my book series too, I'll know more once I finish the prologue and let them look over that whole piece.

>>389364
Does that mean that according to your views, people like >>389362 are using the term "gender" incorrectly?

>>389364
its becoming increasingly clear that your only brush with gender studies+trans issues was your 9th grade bio book circa 1997.

>>389364
So if you put on a skirt, you would feel as if you were a woman trapped in a male body, because society thinks skirts should only be worn by women? Is that how this works?

>>389365
Hard to say since the entire spectrum would be equally viewed as acceptable terms like "trans" or "cis" would be next to useless, we're kind of heading towards that society (or so one hopes), by the time we're in space it shouldn't matter.
There's few novels that explore such societies so I'm always on the lookout for them ever since Brother's Price blew my mind.

>>389373
>>389374
>>389376
Doesn't use gender at all that I can see... ok bea I love you too... no that's not how it works, societal expectations come first not the clothes.

>>389378
>no that's not how it works, societal expectations come first not the clothes

Yes, so if you wear skirts, you are trans, because you defy social expectations of masculinity and wear things designated for women only. That's literally what you said. This should make perfect sense in your world because I am just rephrasing what you already said. If it sounds fucking stupid to you when I say it, maybe that's because....... it is... ??? You have no idea what you are talking about, please hang your head in shame

>>389379
Did I just finish saying that's not how it works?

WTF is wrong with you?

>>389381
But it's the way you implied it works with >>389364

>>389383
No I didn't brohime, the clothes are an example of how fashion influences gender concepts.

The feeling of being the opposite gender appears in people first regardless of what they're wearing, it doesn't originate from what you wear. Only later do transgender people start changing their wardrobe or appearance in general, and it's up to them if they really want to do that.

tl;dr it's the other way around, stop being dense

>>389384
you're literally arguing against your own posts. you are now making the same kind of point slowpoke made in >>389361, which you disagreed with and made an embarrassingly stupid post to refute it. in your quest to admonish people for semantics in a discussion where "gender" clearly means "psychological sex," it's you who tripped over your own nitpicking feet and landed on your face, and now you have no idea what is going on.

in academic papers dealing with this subject, "gender" and "psychological sex" (or a number of other variations) are used interchangeably, by the way. which one is used typically depends on the writer and how many letters they want to use, and "gender" is used most often. nobody uses the term "sex" without a modifier to specify that we are dealing with the brain. so not only are you splitting hairs over synonyms, you are also demanding that we use the one nobody but yourself uses, precisely because it is confusing?

I have to dig for change so I can put $5 gas into my car to make it to community college, she plays video games and gets $22,000+

Fucking kill me...

>>389386
I didn't disagree with his point, I disagreed with his usage of the word gender. See the WHO definition here >>389365. Actually I'll copy it down for you so you don't have to click.

"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.

Some examples of gender characteristics :

In the United States (and most other countries), women earn significantly less money than men for similar work
In Viet Nam, many more men than women smoke, as female smoking has not traditionally been considered appropriate
In Saudi Arabia men are allowed to drive cars while women are not
In most of the world, women do more housework than men

>>389387
That's not "female privilege" it's a privilege of all attractive people. Boytoys probably earn more from their "mommies" or whatever it's called.

I guess the internet just lets her reach a wider audience.

>>389389
In fact here are the earnings from a MALE player.

>>389387

using sexism for fun and profit is my Ideal

>>389392
Hey sexy I'll buy you a tablet if you show me your bra strap!

>>389395

hell yea

>>389387
Supply and demand.
Horny dude wants to see a girl in her home wear from the comfort of his own basement. Girl supplies.
Easy.

>>389387
>other men are giving away money for shallow reasons
>it's the woman's fault

yeah man she totally used her female mind control powers on those poor helpless dudes, it totally wasn't their decision, nope, MISANDRY YO

retard

>>389408
Also note this >>389391

Who the fuck are Obaid and Amhai? They're just giving out tens of thousands of dollars to random people.

>>389398
>>389398

http://tongueofcat.tumblr.com/post/76238963881
alternatively
Portlandia LGBTQ community
alternatively
ughhhhhh

>VAGINA PILLOW
>GENDER DETECTIVE

>>389409
Some people just have that much money to waste, and you have to waste it on something or someone. I tend to find people with that much throwing around money sometimes have very little idea of what to do with it or that it won't make anyone love you

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/6391918/whos-the-daddy/
>DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science
>removed from women a powerful instrument of choice
>Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.
>But in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.
this is some funny shit

>>389661
I don't see how giving actual arguments to MRAs is in any way funny, unless you just want to watch the world burn.

>>389662
I want to specifically see it burn in all sorts of pretty colors, so i guess I'd better get to coating everything in metal powders.

>>389662
Nobody's gonna listen to the crazy radfems anyway, if they do, just respond with "read some barbara kay!"

The real meat of this story is that the author is not really a consistent feminist or liberal..... but she does have two kids..... I really hope her husband gets a paternity test on them, methinks she doth protest too much.

>>389664
wat

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2561467/Firearms-officer-wins-sex-discrimination-case-against-police-chiefs-gun-big-small-hands.html
>handles of their guns were too big
>complained to senior staff but were ignored
>pay-out of $117,000

>>389714

a victory for tiny people everywhere

>>389720
you shall all now be given axes and helmets instead.

>>389721
best post on +4 award

>>389722
no, that's still the horse guy in the /baw/ Secrets thread.
thanks for reminding me of him though.
i love that post so much.

>>389721

>>389721
>>you shall all now be given axes and helmets instead.

Or Axe helmets. The helmets you throw to kill enemies.

No....that will be too heavy....BETTER IDEA!
Replace the helmets with bowler hats!

There! I have just transformed a bunch tiny people into an army of Oddjobs. You're welcome.

>>389735
you got fucking owned, nerd

haha im
actually pretty fucking distressed about people on tumblr with absurd plant/fairy/ghost pronouns
im actually quite bothered by this
(´ｏ｀)

>>389744

its garbage. its trash. put everyone who does such a thing in the trashcan.

>>389745
y'know, it started (by it i mean my experience with this new trend) with the bunny/fairy pronouns. and that was horrible, but i mean, i've seen furries/otherkin try to co-opt the trans movement in other ways, so while it pissed me off a lot, it was in a "oh, this trash again" kind of way.
but then they just started getting more and more fucked up and i just saw someone using GHOST PRONOUNS (boo/boos/booself) and i am having a fucking meltdown.
i'm actually really upset about this. i'm usually as kind of vacantly cheerful as my namesake and just kind of brush most things off but this is legitimately upsetting me.
what fucking justification could they have to try and pass this off as not 100% disgusting.

>>389746
it's the lack of awareness that i find so distasteful. you can do whatever idiotic stuff you want that makes you happy but if you compare something completely fabricated to something that's prejudiced, physically verifiable, and ... well... real... you have my extreme ire.

it's like watching kids break into an explosives lab and pretend to be scientists. they're likely to burn the whole fucking place down and a part of me wants them to do it all on their own before any of the actual people show up and get hurt, too.

>>389746
>boo/boos/booself
There is no way that's not a parody.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about right now, but is it anything like those dipshits who say Big Bang Theory is "blackface" for nerds?

As a black dude who's been pretty nerdy since 19-whatever, that kinda bugs me a bit. Some guy on 4chan went as far to call me "sociopathic" when I called him out on it and told him the two situations were not comparable.

>>389751
Then it's just incomparably bad.

I wonder how this people with their wacky pronouns would react if they even gonna learn another language. You know, spanish and japanese aren't as permisive and soft for that kind of shit.

>>389751
It still bothers me how an above average, mediocre show can do so much damage.

>>389757
Spanish technically has the gender neutral pronoun "se", it's all the other words that are gendered.

Ugh, I don't want to ask this, but wasn't the the evidence that originally proved gender and sexuality were different based on sexually reassigning a baby boy into a girl after a botched circumcision, and abused out the wazoo with his brother?

>>389757
>above average

It's frustrating how it's seen as a "nerd positive" show when it really isn't. But "nerd blackface" is just fucking garbage. Getting ostracized for liking something too much is in no way equal to the mockery of a history of subjugation and genocide based on skin color.

And I kind of don't really get the whole "we need new pronouns" thing. I mean, I thought the goal of most trans people was to be associated with the gender they felt most comfortable as. The people trying to make different pronouns actually strike me as the worst kind of politically correct, grasping for answers to questions that matter to damn few people. Like people who identify as "womyn". You're not actually helping any kind of cause by doing that, you're just identifying yourself as an idiot who can't spell.

>>389768
Damn, I meant say below average.
My bad.

>>389750
It's not. If it was a parody, I wouldn't have flipped out so hard.
>>389768
I get the desire for some, like "ey/eirs/emself" (basically "they" and all variants of it, but without the TH) because I can get why some people wouldn't want "he" right in the middle of their pronoun of choice without having to be called "it," but honestly anything any stranger than that just strikes me as trying to be a special snowflake.
I mean I'm all for people finding their own gender identity and shit, but there's a point where you start damaging trans peeps' ability to be taken seriously, and that's a big fucking no-no. There's no possible way you can only be comfortable being addressed as "szael," so please don't act like it and make it harder for trans people to get people to take them seriously for a request to just use "she."
That's what makes me the maddest.

>>389775
What we really need are widely used gender neutral pronouns. Right now you can't naturally talk about someone without classifying them as something, which does go against them forming their own identity.

>>389751
it's a problem but that's not the right parallel. obviously. the context and the kind of discrimination are... i mean... not even close.

the only thing that's similar is that there's a negative stereotyping, but one is based on behavior while the other is based on your heritage and... that's not cool.

and as much as i hate that show, not all the nerds on it are social pariahs...

>>389779
One does have another option, if one is not deterred by the air of old religious texts that comes with referring to people as this one, that one, the other, the one over there, and other such terms.

>>389781
Sorry.

>>389779

The singular they will almost certainly win out over the other alternatives (and it can be argued that it's already won). It has a long history of use in the English language, even if it's not been considered 'proper', and like all natural languages, English resists artificial impositions like 'ze' and 'hir'.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo
I'm more surprised that Yahoo is still relevant to people than that the NSA and GCHQ were spying on webcams.
Also the line about using Kinect as a means to gather information is really amusing since the always on thing was a major contentious point for the One's announcement.

I'm think I'm figuring out what it is that feminism, or pop-feminism, the stuff where a youtube celebrity or a social blog goes on about privilege or patriarchy, that makes it so frustrating: it's just pointing out problems and saying 'SOMEBODY MAKE THESE THINGS NOT HAPPEN', and then doing not one damn thing about it beyond laws that never pass.

Social structures that have lasted for eons don't just go away because you're upset by them. Yes, of course, people are talking about them more deeply than that., but they're talking about them in groupthink boxes of internalized debate and when someone is talking it feels like talking to a wall set in their opinions, and it's even more of a wall of set ideas. I know everyone's doing it, but feminism, especially the feminism of the internet, is really locked in this, and it sucks.

It's Social Engineering 101, you gotta actually engage with the people, chat and sit down and talk mano a mano, not preach on high your greivances. Engineers don't walk up to a tractor, whack the engine with a wrench and sob 'WHY AREN'T YOU A CAR?!?! I HATE YOU!!!" You really want to shape the paradigm, don't cut yourself off from it, and don't assume you can shape it in your lifetime. This shit is centuries. How many millenia did it take for everyone to collectively go 'yeah slavery is a fucking horrible thing?' What about democracies? What about the idea that we're not the center of the universe? Basic, fundamental, really easy things to get took millenia, how in the FUCK are you going to realign the structure of male-female relations that's been going around since before the damn Ice Ace in some thirty-something years of yelling that the world sucks?

>>390101
talking about things does do something though. especially when you're dealing with mindsets.

i also think you have the wrong idea about...most things. like i don't understand what time has to do with anything.

>>390102
Every generation shapes and reacts to the decisions and mentality of the last generation, and if you really want a concept to last, you have to think about it in those bigger points. And it's slow, but it sort of rolls and rolls until it has to be able to get the thing you wanted.

Say, for instance, you want the population of women in Congress to be 50% of the group. You have two real options here
1. Make it a goal to meet today and now.
So, what's standing in your way?
>Social conceptions of women in politics
>The pool of women that are both part of a political model AND competent for the job they require being small
>getting people to vote for women politicians consistently to get that magic number
You can do all these things with laws and bills, but then you haven't changed anyone's mind, you haven't gotten anybody to immediately assume that they're qualified, you made a quota and now there's the stigma of 'she was a diversity hire, so she's actually not qualified because they needed to hire her through a law'. And maybe it'll trickle down and change hearts and minds with action, but what are they going to look at when a politician who is a woman is bad? Even one of them, what are they going to focus on? The woman part of her description. PROOF. Then in rolls the opposition, promising people elected by the people's wishes, competent leaders not bound by bureacracy, and you're back to square one. Shake your fist at that patriarchy all you want, but you still lost. Being RIGHT doesn't mean you win.

What could you have done instead? I don't know, address the whole 'women not interested in politics'. Start small, get women interested in politics at a young age. And I don't mean superficially, I mean actually talk to girls about it. Then more competent politicians can be made, who speak on a lot of issues and can run a good government, and then that stigma's cracked day by day, mayor by mayor. And no, it's not enough that they're women and running, vote for them because they have good ideas. And when you do that, when you get people thinking out of their boxes and figuring out how to vote for politicians, and you get people of all kinds wanting to BE politicans, you don't need your law. People will want to join that world of jobs, all sorts of people. And yes, there's a possibility you didn't get that 50% in your lifetime, but you've still made things better. You've helped break a stereotype, build some solid politicians, and the opposition can't use the same tactics to fight it. They have to play by the regular rules.

The problem is the latter is generational, but that's okay. You don't need to win everything this time around. You're not one chance to fix the world forever, just keep shaping in ways that ripple, not big disruptions that halt the road and have a chance to work, but are easily backfired as well. It's all tactics and strategy and long-term shit, but instead of people going 'let's get women excited about new fields of jobs!' which no one's going to argue, it's going 'hey this consequence of the terrible complicated mix of cultural norms is bad, let's outlaw it forever' and calling it a world 'fixed'.

>>390103
>People should stop talking about things and should do things instead
Talking is how ideas are spread. Changing ideas will have far more effect on changing the world than trying to force people to change. Look at the gay marriage thing that's steadily gaining steam--this change didn't come about because we elected enough gay politicians, or even because we elected gay-friendly politicians. It happened because society at large has come to believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people, up to and including marriage. And many politicians are beginning to change because they've begun to see the tide turning against them if they don't, because of how strongly Generation Y feels about this.

This happened because of communication--talk, yes, but also representation in media, showing both that gay people are still just as human and have feelings just like straight people, but also showing how horrible the mindset that would try to deny them their rights is.

The "feminism" discussion is that happening in regards to the issues with the inequality between the sexes. It will be slow, mostly because there are a lot of men who believe they benefit from the situation, and other men who are so invested in the idea that they're not sexist that they refuse to examine the actions they take in any greater detail for fear they'll realize that they actually ARE guilty of sexism. And still others who may not actually be sexist but just don't give a shit at all. And a lot of women who feel like they would rather avoid the confrontation, avoid being seen as bitches for throwing their weight around to make change.

That last bit, incidentally, exactly why what you're suggesting is problematic--it's not that women aren't interested in politics. It's that women are trained from birth to be conciliatory and to work around problems by working together, while men are trained from birth to punch anything that gets in front of them, metaphorically speaking. And politics have been built in such a way that the latter behavior is the one that's seen as "Showing Leadership." Meaning that we have literally been programmed from birth by culture to think of masculine behavior as more appropriate to leaders, and feminine behavior as more appropriate to support staff.

Which is why this is a societal issue, and not an issue of "not enough women running for office." We have to address the ways in which we raise young women, and for that matter, the ways in which we raise young men. And that's not going to happen by passing laws, it's going to happen by changing the conversation.

UK government starts producing child pornography.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26367781

>>390114
> a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person,
Surprising.
Right.

>>390118
You know, as quaintly funny as it is when they make stupid mistakes like this, it's genuinely concerning to me sometimes how far removed from the real world our authority figures are. How are these people supposed to pose legislation that's actually both sensible and applicable to our lives if they can't even infer bloody obvious things about technology and its effect on the lives of ordinary people like "people often use webcams for sexy times?"

>>390126
The guy with he sole authority to dictate the terms of the DMCA took his job before the invention of the microchip.

>>390126
>>390128
There is a real disconnect though when you consider that a lot of people of true influence seem to gain tat influence simply by being in that strata of society. Thinking back on the whole British "Pastie" arguments, it's weird how disconnected these people are from the issues of the common folk. Although it's also disturbing that a large amount of the discord in trying to get even American society to move forward is just how ill informed some sections of society are about the plight of others.

http://www.ticotimes.net/2014/03/05/costa-rica-ruling-party-candidate-johnny-araya-drops-out-of-presidential-race
Welp, while on the bright side, this means the end of the bipartisanship on the country; it also means that Costa Rica has no political course whatsoever.
Well, shit.

http://time.com/30545/its-time-to-end-rape-culture-hysteria/
>In the last few years, there has been an unfortunate trend towards blaming “rape culture” for the extensive problem of sexual violence on campus. While it is helpful to point out the systemic barriers to addressing the problem, it is important not to lose sight of a simple fact: Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.
Finally...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLCEUpIg8rE

>>390695

>suggests a three-pronged approach for combating rape...promoting clearer education on “where the ‘consent line’ is.”
>RAINN is especially critical of the idea that we need to focus on teaching men not to rape

Uh, motherfuckers, that's precisely what you just told us not to do!

Either RAINN is run by retards, or this writer is misrepresenting them to further their agenda. Given the polemical tone of the piece I'm guessing the latter.

>>390692
>Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.
Does this guy not know how culture works? The vast majority of "conscious decisions" a person makes is based on cultural cues, whether they are going in line with what culture expects or specifically deciding to act in a contrary manner. It's hard to even make a hard line between decisions that are based on cultural conditioning and decisions that aren't--it's entirely possible there are NO decisions that aren't informed by cultural conditioning.

But again, it's hard to prove because of how little of the data is quantifiable. You would need to do studies involving feral children probably, and they're both rare and hard to work with, and there are moral issues to consider.

>>390703
>Does this guy not know how culture works?
Do you not realize how crime works? Law is basically a list of things culture demands we not do, and you can define crime as going against the ingrained wishes of your culture.

Acting as though rape is acceptable or even "unofficially legalized" is fucking bullshit and needs to stop. Immediately.

>>390704

>Law is basically a list of things culture demands we not do, and you can define crime as going against the ingrained wishes of your culture.

You could, but you'd be wrong.

>>390705
Nuh uh, I'd be right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime#Sociology
>A normative definition views crime as deviant behavior that violates prevailing norms – cultural standards prescribing how humans ought to behave normally.

I'll take a written apology for your rude comment plz.

>>390707
And what of societal norms that are not dictated by the law

>>390707

No, I don't think I will.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/venezuela-revolt-truth-not-terror-campaign
This isn't really something surprising.
Not that Maduro isn't something great or good, but he's the lesser evil on this situation.

I think what some people are missing is that 'rape culture' isn't about the obvious, violent kind of rape (the one you would immediately think of) - it's about what some might argue as 'gray area' or 'not rape' as well as casual rape jokes not being considered a critical social faux pas

>>390707
Yeah, that definition only flies in a pre-legal society. After Bablyon or so, crime has been defined much more simply--behavior which violates the law. And law is rules written by the ruling class. It's not about what the Culture At Large views as normal, abnormal, acceptable, unacceptable, it's what The Powers That Be deem to be acceptable and unacceptable. The Culture At Large has only limited ability to affect what the Powers That Be consider acceptable.

While the Powers That Be often serve self-serving interests above all else (maybe even MOST often), the fact that they AREN'T part of the Culture At Large means that they are able to affect a certain degree of objectivity and perspective over some matters that people in general aren't. So for example, the Powers That Be can consider it Wrong for a man to get a girl so drunk she can't be trusted to make decisions about whether or not to have sex, while the Culture At Large is mostly made up of people who are In Favor Of It (Date Rapists) Okay With It (Date Rape Apologists), People Who Wish You'd Stop Talking About It (People who have allowed the Sex Negativity of culture at large to make them ignore the plights of those who are hurt so they can pretend it's not happening), People Who Think She Had It Coming (Scum), and People Who Think In General It's Bad But This Boy Is a Star Athlete There's No Way He Did That, That Girl's Just a Tramp and a Liar (I'm still gonna go with "Scum").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBZwu5bAEdo

This makes me love Australians and pity them for the government they have to deal with.

>>390714
Jokes work because they go against everything we expect, this forces our brain to consider a new reality.
>rape jokes not being considered a critical social faux pas
Rape jokes aren't considered a social faux pas because rape in them is presented as a social faux pas, that's why the joke works, because everyone in the audience is cringing and that's a good lever. Other things are used the same way, disfiguration, murder, cannibalism, pedophilia, bestiality, the disabled.... when it comes to unspeakable topics, jokes are a way for a culture to speak about things that we avoid (dark humor) and to force us to think about things that we avoid, a way to confront problems without inviting denial.
It works a hell of a lot better than seminars because a funny joke will perpetuate itself through a society faster than any presentation. You should start getting worried if we stop joking about rape, because our society will have lost a coping mechanism. You remove jokes about rape and you remove negative associations of rape from the public consciousness. This is not a good thing.

Some reading material:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cringe_humor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallows_humor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy

And I'll give you a few examples, although I feel kind of bad for having to explain and deconstruct jokes:
- As a policeman I deal with rape victims on a daily basis, they really seem to trust me when I'm in a police uniform
Raises the topic of statutory rape, something which couldn't be talked about without a shitload of statistics, and even then people wouldn't understand just how bad the situation is for the victim. Don't place excessive trust into people in authority or it may come back to bite you in the ass, literally.

- I bought a rape whistle and it does come in handy, really helps to mask the screams
Raises the topic of how certain anti-rape tools are really useless and just ways to feel safe instead of be safe. Rape whistles are the worst thing ever, because there's no agreed upon sound and even the most retarded rapist can stop someone from blowing on a whistle.

-Why does R Kelly. cry after sex? That's what mace does to you.
Much better defense device.

-R Kelly. Taking the art out of rap artist.
Criticizes shitty gangster mindset present in rap scene. This is perhaps one culture that does glorify crimes like rape, or theft, murder, assault... So if you really want to attack rape culture I suggest you start with cultures that glorify crime, because rape is a crime.

Of course not all rape jokes have a moral of the story, some of them just paint rape as a horrible thing. Some rape jokes aren't even related to rape. Ex:
-Statistically 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape.
This is not so much about rape as it is about how democracy is a shitty ideal if you're the lone party, a political joke that uses rape as a horrible thing to lever out an experience of how bad it can get. A modern example could be that 90% of Crimea wants to join Russia, and the 10% that doesn't is royally screwed.

>>390717
>Jokes work because they go against everything we expect, this forces our brain to consider a new reality.

what

>>390717
What do you think of using the word 'rape' to replace 'defeat'? Wouldn't such casual use lessen the meaning of the word? After all, losing in a game is perfectly normal and acceptable.
Someone used to this trivialization might respond to hearing "I got raped" by thinking "So what?", and before you attempt any "it's just a word" nonsense: language influences how people think - politicians know and exploit this. Social justice activists are aware of this - and "anti-sjw" too, or they wouldn't complain about "language policing".

>>390720

>The thing to understand about comedy is that it's almost always about defying your expectations.

>[C]omedy […] is always about going in a different direction than what you're thinking. It's zigging when you expect a zag. And often they play on our familiarity and understanding. (There's an offensive Jeselnik joke that highlights this dynamic completely: "My girlfriend always complains 'I'm a chocoholic! I'm a chocoholic!' so I took her down to skid row and showed her all the drug-addled crack addicts stumbling about and said to her, 'See? Why can't you be that skinny?'"). Please note that this is exactly like magic. It's distraction. Subverting logic. It's built on a turn.

>And often it's not quite as mechanical and "jokey" as that. Sometimes comedy is about hitting you with a witty retort before an audience member can even think of their own response (cue: Preston Sturges, which is akin to watching verbal tennis). You're really just playing a game with the audience's brains. And it's a really, really complicated game. Because sometimes the best comedy isn't so much about defying expectation, but staying true to the obvious answer, which is its own way of defying expectation. Sometimes it's about promising a zig and doubling-down with an extra zig if that makes sense (think Norm Macdonald: "The UFC just announced the expansion of its new sport, MURDER!"). We just all have different sets of comedic expectations and that's really why we all have different senses of humor. You just need the cognition to recognize the joke. (Please note how the most popular comedians of each era tend to be the kind that like to double-down on the realities of life because they are not-so-coincidentally trying to talk about the most universal truths among us all.) And while we may all have different forms of comedic release, the thing to understand is that it is almost always visceral. Which is really the common trait of every other story mechanism too. Horror wants to make you jump. Romance wants to make you swoon. Pornography wants to get you aroused. And comedy wants you to make you laugh.

— http://badassdigest.com/2014/01/13/film-crit-hulk-smash-anchorman-2-and-the-inherent-problem-with-comedy-seque/ (converted to sentence case using http://convertcase.net/)

>>390721
Considering they probably just blew the other player to chunks of steaming meat and rape is the absolute worst thing a gamer can think of to say, that should be a case against trivialization.

>After all, losing in a game is perfectly normal and acceptable.
Look Anita Sarkeesian, you may you suck at video games, but don't call that "normal".

>>390724
>context - what's that? let's call him a leddit feminazi spy!!

I want the counter-counter-counterculture to die already.

>>390724
and protip: it's not sarcasm if you actually believe it

I never understood why it's illegal to show sex on primetime TV but murdering, dismembering and eating a person is ok.

It's like our society is run by murderous virgins.

>>390724
>Rape is the absolute worst thing a player can think of to say

speaks to a mental deficiency on the players' part, I shouldn't wonder

>>390728
>durr gamers dont think rape is bad and that makes them evil
>hurr gamers think rape is bad and that makes them dumb
Make up your damn mind you disgusting blob of contradictions.

>>390729
>1 person

Also reading comprehension. I was actually suggesting that immediately resorting to rape is the sign of a dipshit. You can be way more entertaining and way more mentally scaring without ever getting near rape, or swear words. It's just that most of the twits would rather scream "faggot" at the TV as loud as they can like it's some kind of original thought.

At least "pwned" has the excuse of coming from "pawned". That doesn't make it any less dumb and annoying, but at least there's an actual gaming root to the word, rather than just being the first resort of the base moron.

>>390727
Sex negativity makes sexuality more controllable and gives those in strong positions in society but weak positions among their peer groups (i.e. "beta" males) more leverage in sexual dealings. By making people ashamed of sex, they are able to shift most of the burden of the "evilness" of sex onto the politically weaker sex by setting up a cultural meme that "all men want sex indiscriminantly" and pushing the meme that "good girls must stop them from getting it."

Now that the meme has made sex into a commodity, it has a quantifiable value that can be arrived at through transactions--it leads to the less powerful sex (in our case women) becoming effectively prostitutes by being forced to trade sex (the thing they have that is of most value, as the "gatekeepers" for the thing that, while both sexes want, the other sex is allowed to pursue) for increased power / status / improved life condition. In other words, it puts power in the hands of those who can accrue other resources society deems valuable and can trade for sex (i.e. through marriage to a partner of lower status, which is most of them, in a non-equal society) for access to these resources.

Of course, at this point the scam has become tradition, such that no one, or at least almost no one, who perpetuates the traditions realizes that's why they started doing them. They genuinely believe that sex is dirty or wrong and that men are uncontrollable horndogs and that women don't want sex as much as men and that it's their duty to keep the men from having sex with them. But the reason those traditions started were to give control over sex to the ones who started the meme.

>>390731
I'm sort of with you except for your use of the word "beta". That shit merely contributes to the very sexual control you're describing. The people who enforce that do have a vested interest in the ideological control of sex, but by using the whole "alpha-beta-omega" schtick, you're merely giving more power to that control. Nobody should take anyone who uses that dichotomy seriously, as it's trying to take incredibly complex human interaction and boil it down to to something as simple as outdated research about wolves.
http://io9.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-packs-is-wrong-502754629

Maybe there are certain social dominances and dynamics, but honestly people do themselves more disservice by categorizing themselves as "beta" or "alpha" than they do by just learning to accept other people and in turn be comfortable with themselves. It's self pity; worse, it's self pity as suggested by other men who don't know any better.

>>390730
I suppose you use polite words to insult people. Stop posting.

>>390727
This is true because it is easier for an actor to slam a fake hatchet into a dummys head than to expose their genitals on TV.
This is why you see no normal bodies or situations in porn, because people in porn are usually actors that washed out of the regular acting world, got boob jobs and decided to sell their bodies for money on TV. There was a survey iirc that said a huge majority of porn stars went to LA to score normal jobs in Hollywood, but the bills piled up and they had to do something in the meantime.

It is true though that it would be a lot healthier for people to watch sex than murder, countries that have allowed such programming on their TV have a lot fewer violent crimes.

>>390733
>only bad words can be used to insult people

>>390733
>This is why you see no normal bodies or situations in porn, because people in porn are usually actors that washed out of the regular acting world, got boob jobs and decided to sell their bodies for money on TV. There was a survey iirc that said a huge majority of porn stars went to LA to score normal jobs in Hollywood, but the bills piled up and they had to do something in the meantime.

what

>>390732
I don't actually buy into the idea that humans arrange themselves into alpha and beta male situations like gorillas--we're closer related to bonobos, who have no such social arrangements. That's why I put "beta" in quotation marks--I was using a term that people would be familiar with but which I don't necessarily agree with. I was referring to the sort of person who SEES himself as a "beta," whether or not such an arrangement actually exists. Sorry for the miscommunication there.

>>390736
Sentence beforehand explains it.

>Thousands of babies who had died from abortion and miscarriage were being used to heat hospitals in Britain. An investigation has found that baby corpses go to the incinerator as clinical waste, aside from using the remains as fuel to keep British hospitals warm.

>According to Channel 4's Dispatches, at least 15,500 dead fetuses were burned by 27 hospitals in the last two years. The TV programme had discovered that parents of lost fetuses in early pregnancy were often treated without mercy. They were also not consulted about what will happen to their dead babies.

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/544653/20140324/dead-fetuses.htm

The funniest thing is
>girl aborts child
>hospital burns it for heat
>complain about how they didn't ask her first
lel

>>390744
Eh, I doubt they used the fetuses with heating in mind, but simply threw everything in the same incinerator. Human flesh isn't exactly the most efficent material to use as fuel, too much water in it.

I don't know why people think of evil intent first, when in most cases it's simple neglect and not giving a fuck.

Yeah, I don't see the big deal. It's not a happy thought, but what's the alternative? Toss them in the trash? If they were disregarding the would-be mother's wish to take it home or have it cremated or something, I could understand outrage; otherwise, this is just a unhappy but necessary process. This is at least doing something useful for them; the best outcome of a bad situation.

Kind of like treating sewage water. It's necessary, but no one ever wants to think about it.

>>390748
Yeah, at the worst, this looks like criminal neglect of duties. Distasteful, but not exactly super horrifying.

>>390748
After fetus is crushed and pulled from the mom, it sprouts wings and goes to fetus heaven. But seriously, we are so removed from how the world functions it's not even funny.
We don't think spend a second a day on thinking of sending our soldiers to kill abroad, or on how our delicious hamburgers arrive to the table... most people don't even think about where their water comes from, if you ask them they'll say "from the tap". When they are confronted with reality some people just freak out because their bubble world has collapsed.
So this article surprises me not at all.

This:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackBox
Is 99% of our existence.

>>390751
Part of that is out of necessity, though; if we spent all of our time trying to learn/figure out the minute details of various things, we would never get anything productive done.

Most of us probably know that nuclear waste is stored deep underground, but the why/how is lost on most of us.

>>390756
> if we spent all of our time trying to learn/figure out the minute details of various things, we couldn't spend 99.9999999999% of our free time on mindless entertainment!
fixd

>>390763
You didn't fix anything.

>>390768
You ever get tired of doing driveby posts with no content?

>>390770
You ever get tired living on Drive-By Lane?

>>390770
But that's exactly what >>390763 did

>Thousands of Dead Fetuses Burned to Heat British Hospitals

Meanwhile in America, cosmetics industries are making millions of dollars by putting collagen into their skincare products. Where does this collagen come from? Why, it's cultured from discarded baby foreskins!

http://www.newser.com/story/105231/babies-foreskins-turned-into-beauty-products.html

Ah yes, and you're a great parent because you believed your doctor when he told you circumcision is always necessary for "medical reasons". Simply adorable.

>>390778
>Ah yes, and you're a great parent because you believed your doctor when he told you circumcision is always necessary for "medical reasons". Simply adorable.

what doctor says this

'Cause I was under the implication that circumcision was only done for cultural/religious reasons these days since we aren't wandering around in the desert anymore.

>>390774
No. That poster suggested that we spend more time playing and some of that time could be re-streamed to education. This >>390770 guy went "nuh uh!".
No reason why he's wrong or a mechanism for being wrong or any new addition of information. It's a brain dead post and I'm sick enough of seeing this shit on 4chan, I don't want it here.

>>390779
>what doctor says this
The doctor who was circumcised himself, as in the old "well this babys parents are doomed to hell but maybe I can save the kid!" bullshit. American Evangelical Christian doctors started doing this in the 1900s because they didn't distinguish between the old and new testaments as other Christians do. Muslim doctors have done it without asking parents, and in Israel they circumcise dead people "just to make sure". Also if a parent decides not to circumcise they get a fine of 500 shekels per day until they do.
But that's just the religious bullshit, it gets worse from there.
There are also people who believe circumcised penises are more appealing, because their only exposure to penises was via circumcised porn stars, and they've never even seen an uncircumcised penis in real life. The biggest bullshit cause is phimosis, which is basically the male equivalent of a hymen in that it keeps shit off the dick until maturity, it gradually disappears as a person ages. Circumcising for phimosis is equivalent to shoving a finger in a baby girls vagina to get rid of her hymen. There are also people who firmly believe (contrary to all evidence) that circumcised penises are cleaner, and doctors will "accidentally" circumcise kids because of the conviction of their belief.
Which is fucking stupid, circumcision primarily arose in desert societies as a way to keep dust out of the foreskin, which could be painful while working in the field. It really has no medical benefit besides that for anyone who bothers to wash their dick.

>>390780
FYI changing a few words, going "fixed" and pretending it's a substantial contribution to the thread is stupid.

If you don't put work into your responses, don't expect people to do the same in return. If you're going to make dumb snippy comments, don't get mad when people return the favor.

>>390778
>Know more, read less

now there's a laughable claim

>>390780

It does reduce the risks of STDs slightly and diminish the need for daily cleaning, but of course condoms are much more effective, and the risks of complication hardly worth the spared hassle of running a qtip over it. Plus, you know, bodily autonomy and what not. I'm against it, but it does have *some* medical benefit.

Also it caught on in the late 19th/early 20th centuries as a way to keep boys from mastrubating. Yeah.


>>390778

>miscarried and aborted babies burned to fuel a hospital

Reminds me of this for some reason.

I'm still confused about how people are reading Blurred Lines as pro-rape without applying liberal amounts of Death of the Author. Is it still misogynistic? Yeah, I agree on a level with people finding it offensive. Is it still objectifying the woman in the song? Hell yes, but it's a big problem within the music industry as a whole and it seems bizarre to single out just this one out when a lot of rappers are even more brazen on a regular basis (though Tumblr tends to dismiss them because they're POC culture and therefore complaining about the misogyny makes you racist, wtf).

But what I'm getting out of Blurred Lines is that he's asking the girl to have sex with her by convincing her to leave her partner for him, and that as manipulative as he's being he's still ultimately putting it as her call, and therefore if it happens it's going to be consensual. Yes, some of the lines are used by rapists IRL, but in the context I'm getting out of the song is that the singer still wants her consent. If "rapists say it too" is the only logic being used to justify it, that's not much different from the Hitler eating sugar fallacy. I'm not trying to make light of the people who are legitimately triggered by it because they don't have control over where triggers might show up, but the huge antipathy the rest of Tumblr has against it seems rather myopic and disproportionate.

>>390787
u wot m8

People have been talking about misogyny in rap for YEARS. YEARS. People haven't been ignoring that shit.

>>390788
Hell, there's a wikipedia article on it. A pretty lengthy one with a ton of citations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny_in_hip_hop_culture

I have no idea why you would think anyone is getting a free pass with this. Maybe it's because it's the only time you've noticed? Because the criticism has been there.

>>390788
I know about that, I'm referring specifically to Tumblr and their weird ass double standards.

>>390790
Oh, that's nice.

Now if you'll excuse me, let me use 4chan as a place to gauge race relations.

>>390791
Maybe that was a bit harsh. Sorry about that.

But my point, in a less snarky tone, is that you don't really expect things from certain places of the internet.

>>390791
Where in the post did it imply they saw Tumblr as representing everyone? Everbody and their mom knows about Tumblr's hateboner for Thicke, it's just that as the legit moral outrage gets drowned out by "I hate this song because the SJW told me it was cool to" slacktivists.

>>390793
I already apologized, but if you look at my example, that wasn't exactly my implication

When slacktivists make up like 99% of activists, you've got a problem jack.....

>>390796
>jack
or jane.... whichever stops people from keying my car

>>390796
Is it really 99% or was that just a number pulled out of your ass and pieced together by your anecdotal evidence from browsing the internet

>>390798
>implying educated opinion is more numerous than uneducated opinion
Ach, fantazie.

With such a gamut of information now, activism itself seems a paralytic activity. Simply parsing information effectively is almost a full time job where no one really sets "standards" of any kind. Even the things that a priori seem logical and Just are often, in deeper contemplation, simply the opposite.

>>390801
I didn't imply that and that wasn't my implication.

>>390803
Been up all night. I meant to type "You didn't answer my question and that wasn't my implication."

>>390802
Activists used to do activities in the past, instead of just making angry forum posts.

>>390806
So your strategy is to invalidate their opinions by saying other people have done more than them. That's a clever way to help marginalize people while maintaining plausible deniability. "No, no, I'm not in favor of women being treated worse, I just don't think you should be allowed to COMPLAIN about it!"

>>390807
That's really reaching, saying someone who respects Ayaan Hirsi Ali's work over Rebecca Watson's is a sign of wanting to treat women bad.

Blogging and video-logging can only go so far compared to what Ali does.

>>390807
That's really reaching, saying someone who respects Ayaan Hirsi Ali's work over Rebecca Watson's is a sign of wanting to treat women bad.

Blogging and video-logging can only go so far compared to what Ali does.

>>390807
My strategy is to invalidate their claim to being an activist because they've never done jack shit. At best they can call themselves academics if they've published something... or vigorous advocates, pleaders, debaters, bickerers and squabblers if they haven't.

Second part of your comment is reading so far between the lines you're writing your own novels there. Slow down a bit and take some deep breaths.

>>390807
there's nothing wrong with criticizing people or actions, even if they belong to a good cause
considering your cause infallible and shooting down any criticism of members of it is a good way to give yourself tunnelvision and box yourself in! not very healthy to progressive viewpoints, bad mindset to have when it comes to learning.
but i'm just a pokemon, i don't know much about politics.

>>390813
You're missing the point. I am not defending THIS INDIVIDUAL FEMINIST who they're "criticizing." I am responding poorly to the implication made by that image, that there is no place for criticization of structures of inequality when they're not as dramatic as the ones that Ali was fighting.

This image, and the people posting it, are saying that "a Women's Rights Activist (good) is someone who fights back against female circumcision in foreign countries or Islamic oppression of women. A Feminist (bad) is someone who fights back against western men in developed countries harassing or creeping on women." They are saying that because "feminists'" struggles aren't as much of a clear and present danger, that they are unworthy of any sort of consideration or sympathy.

>>390814
It's funny. Same type of people like to ignore things like racial microaggressions and try to act as if racism is over in 2014.

Just because things are better doesn't mean that it's over or that you shouldn't care.

>>390814
>harassing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Watson#Elevator_incident
>"Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?"

lol he practically raped her

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/islamic-law-to-be-enshrined-in-british-law-as-solicitors-get-guidelines-on-sharia-compliant-wills-92106
82.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10717676/Sharia-law-for-wills-and-then-what.html
http://digitaljournal.com/news/world/sharia-law-to-be-incorporated-into-british-legal-system/article/377999

Throw gay marriage out the window?

>>390819
>Watson spoke about her experiences with sexism within the atheist movement. Among the topics in a vlog posted following her return from the trip, she described how after the talk and extended discussion with a group of attendees, a man from the group followed her into an elevator and after a brief discussion said, "Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Watson cited various contextual reasons why this felt inappropriate, and advised, "...guys, don't do that."[25][26] The ensuing discussion and criticism across several websites, including reddit and the Pharyngula blog, became highly polarized and heated to the point of vulgar name-calling and some personal threats, including rape and death.

If it was just some random chatting in an elevator she overreacted to, sure. But the guy follows her into the elevator, then on the briefest of meetings, asks her to a secluded place, in a manner that looks like a thinly veiled request for sex. And all this after she gave a talk on Sexism to the whole goddamn convention.

The problem here isn't that it's "rape". It's harassment. It's dudes thinking it's okay to follow women around and trying to get them alone without so much as even having a conversation for 5 minutes. The problem with what Dawkins said is that, even though she wasn't hurt, if she went with the guy, and he did turn out to be a complete scumbag, that story ends differently. And we can't really discuss how likely that is, as we don't have any information about the guy. Even if he was a decent person though, the simple fact that he thought it was okay to try and seclude her after knowing her for apparently no time at all suggests he believes he is owed attention, possibly attentions. If she did go with him, as a "friend", then subsequently denied him the things he thought he was owed (because he wasn't actually owed them), then she could've born the brunt of a vicious backlash. As it stands, the internet flame war dissolved into rape and death threats anyway, which are still considered "okay" by an amazing amount of men. That's the kind of response that reinforces the notion that going back to any hotel room with this guy would not have been a good idea, regardless of his intentions.

tl;dr creepily propositioning people in elevators isn't okay at all, and it's weird how guys are raised to think it's completely acceptable. It doesn't matter if it's rape; say yes to the wrong guy and it could be. And since there's no way of knowing that for certain, the de facto answer is always going to be "no".

>>390825
Please, no what-if's or could-have-happened's, they are massively unfair to the guy. You don't know who he is as a person, stop trying to make him out into a rapist based on zero evidence, especially when in fact the available evidence proves he's a decent guy. If you do that you became the one who sets out to do harm, the aggressor.

It's not harassment for someone to ask a girl out. He wasn't rude, offensive or pushy and he gave her a polite and easy way to back out.
Harassment (look up the definition) would be if he didn't back down after she declined, or if he set it up so that declining was going to hurt her in some way, or if he was excessively pushy/repetitive. None of this occurred, it simply isn't harassment in any form if the dude takes no for an answer and nothing happens, it is a normal situation that for me happens a few times a month on average.

Normal people don't respond this way to being asked out, in fact I think she has some kind of mental illness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidant_personality_disorder

>>390826
I didn't know girls suffered from kuumotus as well.

>>390827
Everyone can feel the heatenings in right situation.

>>390825
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/rape.html

educate yourself

>>390829
meant to reply to >>390826

>>390829
>>390830
>Provoking An Attack
>High Risk Behavior
Wow that website manages to blame victims AND advise women to treat virtually all guys as potential rapists. No thanks, peddle that shit elsewhere.

The funny part is the stupid link has no connection to the comment you linked to or the discussion in general. But you knew that, didn't you, Mr. Troll?

>>390833
how about actually reading it instead of throwing up knee-jerk defensive reactions?
it is relevant to >>390826


criminals don't give a shit about your rights

they don't care that what they're doing is wrong and that they harm others

they won't stop commiting crimes just because you and anyone decent knows that assault, theft and rape are wrong

you can treat crime like an unpredictable natural disaster that can strike anyone anywhere without any warning at all and then lament the fact that it happened, or you can try to avoid becoming a victim, which generally takes the form of not poking the rabid dog with a stick, metaphorically speaking
this is because you aren't a superhero, not because "the criminal is actually right"(== victim blaming)

walking up to criminals and telling them to not commit crimes isn't going to stop them, it's going to get you beaten up

moral high ground does not protect you from a bullet through the head

being right and staying alive and healthy aren't always compatible because some people WILL respond with violence - this is reality, and reality isn't just or fair

when you're dealing with violent criminals, being right or wrong DOESN'T MATTER, because THEY DON'T CARE - what matters in that situation is SURVIVING

this isn't victim blaming, this is pragmaticism



when you pick a fight, pick one that is worth fighting - the right time and place to argue about ways to change society is NOT when some thug is holding a knife to your throat

>>390834
>thug is holding a knife to your throat
The dude asked her out, he didn't fucking threaten her. Where is this coming from?

>>390835
I was trying to explain what the general idea of that site I linked is

using the thug metaphor, the man's question in the described context (why a private place?) would be equivalent to a dark back alley that may or may not hide danger

>>390838
So, what you dd here is you jumped from the actual fact of what happened to cartoon-villain caricature of actual criminals. Most criminals are "normal" people. Granted, there are a few outright nuts who completely disregard the law and have actual mental problems empathizing with others. They are such a tiny minority of the public that actually encountering someone like that is statistically improbable. Most rapes are not committed in dark alleys, they're committed at home, by someone the victim knows and possibly loves (love does not negate rape. Assault is assault, bodily harm is bodily harm, it doesn't matter how much anyone claims to "love" another person. Love is not expressed with fists).

Most people who commit crimes are very much normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances. They are most often pushed into crime by economic hardship, systemic inequality, or they simply don't know that what they are doing is a crime (which is not difficult to not know in America's legal system).

I agree with you on one thing: the fact of this guy's character does not matter. What does matter is what he did and said: he followed this woman from a public space, the convention floor, into a less public space, then specifically asked her if she wanted to remove herself to a completely private space with some guy who she literally just met. That nothing happened after that is solely a product of her saying "no", not a product of his character or anything else. If she had said "yes", it could've been the start of the beautiful friendship, or we could be discussing the woman who was violently raped and/or murdered in a hotel room. Neither of us can say either way that that is what would've occurred, but that's the coin every woman is flipping every time some random guy approaches them anywhere: gentleman or rapist? This guy didn't even have the sense to say "would you care to get coffee or attend a function at a public space, maybe with some friends?". Public, safe, with other people, provides getting to know you and getting to know the people around you time. Just asking someone to go to a hotel room with you not 5 minutes after meeting, especially in a space that is not geared towards meeting potential romantic interests, that should set off major warning bells in anyone's head. It's creepy, and it isn't actually normal.

Would you want someone you didn't know, who you weren't sexually attracted to, to follow you into an elevator, keep making passes at you, oblivious that you don't give a shit about them, until they popped the question of "hey want to go somewhere nobody can see us and keep "talking"?". I'd go out on a limb and tell you to imagine it's a gay guy, but if you've ever experienced anything like this, your answer is probably "no".

Think about how crazy what you just asserted sounds: anyone would say yes to going to a secluded place with some random person they just met. What's normal is her saying "no", not the other way around. And while harassment can be very variable, essentially any time some one approaches someone else out of nowhere, with no prior introduction, and starts chatting them up, it can be construed as harassment, and it can be really tiring for women who have to put up with multiple assholes like this many times a day. Whistling at woman on the sidewalk as you drive by is harassment, trying to strike up a conversation in a public place when someone is reading, or working on a laptop, following women around attempting to get them to agree to go someplace with you is harassment. And it's not technically illegal, as it's hard to define, but does mark you as a creep, and not someone to be readily trusted. You're not introducing yourself, you're not trying have a real conversation, you're only thinly veiling a request for sex. Most people are going to say no, and it's the really the odd one out who will say "yeah sure", unless you're rich, famous, or one of those genetic freaks who just looks good to everyone.

>>390846
I didn't make this clear earlier, so let me state it explicitly: I am talking about violent criminals

>Most criminals are "normal" people

...who still at some point decided to not care that it's wrong or justify it to themselves as being right

>Most rapes are not committed in dark alleys, they're committed at home, by someone the victim knows and possibly loves

a.k.a. by people who made the decision to ignore other people's rights

>Most people who commit crimes are very much normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances. They are most often pushed into crime by economic hardship, systemic inequality, or they simply don't know that what they are doing is a crime (which is not difficult to not know in America's legal system).

while a valid point, it hardly applies to the kind of criminal I'm referring to

I should have made my point clearer earlier

>third paragraph and onward

that was directed at someone else, right?

>>390847
And my point is you're only talking about violent criminals when it is not about violent criminals. Violent criminals, as you say, are going to do violent shit one way or the other. But the guy we are talking about, in the original point, is not a violent criminal. He is not even a regular criminal. At best, he is a sexist idiot.

>a.k.a. by people who made the decision to ignore other people's rights

Like the right to privacy? You're not hearing me, and you're trying to argue a point that is in no way centered around the original argument. Whether the guy in question is a rapist is immaterial.

Teaching all women everywhere how to break a wrist is not a viable solution. It's a viable solution against violent offenders, sure, I.E. people you're almost never going to have to deal with. It is not a viable solution in a surprise assault, and really, it ignores the whole problem of why are these guys assaulting women in the first place?. Why do husbands, brothers, boyfriends and sons think that it's okay to hound a woman, to bother her in a public space? If your method is the best method, why are most of these women going to use this on the people supposedly closest to them?

The whole problem with your solution is that it heaps all of the blame on the victims, again. "Well, she should've just pile-driven the guy" sounds really weak and sickening in the wake of a violent assault. And here, it's not even about violent assault, it's about having no respect or empathy for women. Your whole point is so far from the original concept that it's a semantic debate about nothing.

Look, teaching someone to defend themselves is always a good thing. But we cannot teach every single person to defend themselves all the time from everybody, especially people who are already in their circle of trust. Your solution sounds noble, but it completely ignores the perpetrators. "We'll teach the victims to defend themselves but in no way will we teach the attackers to not attack, or even any kind of correct notion of how to deal with relationships". It sounds all well and good until you think about it.

>>390847
>>390838
>>390829
This is the same troll that keeps drive-by posting in every thread. It posts one offtopic comment and then spends a few days defending it, because it has no life.

Ignore it.

>>390848
>Teaching all women everywhere how to break a wrist is not a viable solution. It's a viable solution against violent offenders, sure, I.E. people you're almost never going to have to deal with. It is not a viable solution in a surprise assault, and really, it ignores the whole problem of why are these guys assaulting women in the first place?. Why do husbands, brothers, boyfriends and sons think that it's okay to hound a woman, to bother her in a public spaaaaaace? If your method is the best method, why are most of these women going to use this on the people supposedly closest to them?

The other part of course is it's not even just surprise assault--a lot of times it's manipulation. Women are taught from a very early age to avoid conflict, and to submit in social confrontations, especially toward men. A man who hounds a woman for long enough in a situation she can't escape from (whether because she's physically restrained or socially restrained--like say a woman who works in the same place as a man and therefore has to see him every day) actually has decent odds of getting many women to capitulate to his demands even though she doesn't actually want to. Getting a "yes," but a yes that was coerced and/or forced--which in the minds of many men "Isn't really rape," because she said "yes." Self-defense won't help you in a situation where you've been trained by society to think you're SUPPOSED to submit.

>>390848
please do not put words into my mouth

it's like you read one or two words, then start acting by instinct and extrapolate whatever makes me look like the biggest asshole you can imagine

examples of you completely missing my point:

invariably associating the term self-defense with violence (not what I said AT ALL)

claiming that what I posted somehow represents the optimum of reality - you claim that, by acknowleding that crime happens, any discussion about how to treat the causes is invalid/forbidden/unnecessary (that's what you claim because of what you believe I think, nevermind what I actually posted)

claiming that I consider criminals as being right if people don't follow advice that could potentially help them avoid becoming the victim (you believe I assign guilt to the victim when that's not what I wrote at all)


>you're only talking about violent criminals when it is not about violent criminals

wrong
rape is violent BY ITS VERY NATURE
it doesn't matter if there is manipulation or verbal coercion involved - one person made the decision to ignore the other's right to choose when and who to have sex with and carries it out

>it ignores the whole problem of why are these guys assaulting women in the first place?

because fighting the illness (why does rape happen?) happens on a different level - it is necessary and justified (according to your claim I supposedly stated the opposite), but it has no relevance in a situation where the symptom is possibly about to display itself (the scenario of a woman being confronted by a potential rapist), because at that point any talk about changing society for the better isn't going to help her

did I make myself clear, or do you still believe my message to be "don't talk about changing society"?

>But the guy we are talking about, in the original point, is not a violent criminal. He is not even a regular criminal. At best, he is a sexist idiot.

but the woman cannot be certain of that, so she has to judge the situation based on the information she has (and those point toward danger)

>Teaching all women everywhere how to break a wrist

this is you only reading one word and extrapolating from that

>If your method is the best method

this is you putting words into my mouth; I never made that claim

>The whole problem with your solution is that it heaps all of the blame on the victims, again

this is you interpreting what I wrote based on what you assume I believe
and apparently your own belief too, because you make it sound as if crime is like an unfathomable force of nature that cannot be protected against
reality doesn't roll dice to decide whether someone gets targeted by criminals; CRIMINALS decide who they target
knowing how to read the signs might (this is not a guarantee!) help you avoid them

and because you misinterpreted this multiple times now: FAILING TO READ THE SIGNS DOES NOT MAKE THE CRIMINAL RIGHT - IT DOES NOT MAKE CRIME THE VICTIM'S FAULT

it's obviously also not something you tell people who recently became victim of a crime, OBVIOUSLY (because the CONTEXT would distort the intended message) - you really should stop assuming you know what I believe

>Your whole point is so far from the original concept that it's a semantic debate about nothing

my original point was that >>390826 is a fucking idiot for equating rational behavior with mental illness
but then someone (starting with >>390833) couldn't be bothered to read and decided to declare me the offender instead

>>390849
>having an opinion == trolling
>participating in a discussion == having no life

why don't you go a step further and call me SRS/JIDF/MRA/Stormfront or whatever else you believe I represent

What I learned from this thread is 2 things: If you arent a 7 foot tall African men whit a 12 inches dick you shouldnt even aproach women, and, that genetically inferior men have no rights and should be purged from society.

>>390875
>African men
>inferior men
Found your problem...

>>390875
>>390879

I think it's wonderful that the politics thread has gone from one dipshit trolling to straight up shitposting.

Wait, I don't think that's wonderful at all.

>>390880
Hey it's not my fault, I tried to defuse. The guy with the sage in his name is the troll.

>opinions you disagree with == trolling

obviously

>>390854
Then what are you actually really saying here? "It's okay to kick them in the dick if they are intending to rape you"? That's not exactly a revelation, man. In the original example, any potential threat was diffused by the woman in question recognizing a potential threat and saying "no", negating any need for any of your proposed solutions.

I'm assuming what you believe because of what you posted and how you presented it. The original problem is "harassment in an elevator", and from there you jumped to defense training. While defense training on its' own is never a bad idea, the problem is that we've jumped from "accosting women you don't know in public spaces is rude, wrong and creepy" to "she should've just kicked his ass if he tried anything".

You've completely side-stepped the original issue and moved straight on to the idea that she should just defend herself. I don't think anyone who finds themselves in such a situation would find that idea radical. I think they might find the idea of a rape being a stand-up fight you can approach head on to be not true to reality at all, but all of this is actually besides the point, and the real problem.

Why do you think it was okay for this guy to follow her into the elevator? Why is everyone reacting so negatively to the notion that him asking her back to his room on such a short time frame was technically harassment? These are questions you have not answered, and have implied, through your postings, that she should have gone straight back with him, and if anything happened, like him surprising her by clocking her in the back of the head with a lamp or something, she should have just defended herself, even though she was unconscious. By what you are posting and the points you are defending, you are implying that her refusal to put herself in potential harms way was less of a defense than physical violence. And there's a logical disconnect there.

I conflated your posts with the posts from the other guys' because you two share a common argument, one which you defended: "what that guy did was not harassment". I am extrapolating, because yours is an argument that has been presented before in other places and other contexts, and it has fallacies. Violence begets violence and truly violent offenders don't have to leave you in one piece. If you start fighting back, they have all the more reason to be even more brutal, to prevent you from getting to help before they've had a chance to have their way. No amount of self-defense training is ever going to truly prepare someone for that situation, especially if, statistically, it's a relative or an acquaintance.

Why is the guy who followed her not in the wrong here? Because he is actually in the wrong, and her response was completely appropriate. So why is everyone so adamant to say that she somehow acted not in her best interests? "Legally, it wasn't harassment, and he didn't DO anything", while technically correct, ignores the whole fact of his actions driving her to make a decision for her personal safety. Regardless of his actual character, regardless of his actual intent, when he followed her into the elevator and propositioned her to go somewhere away from public eyes, away from security cameras and witnesses and friends, alarm bells set off in her head. That is a completely normal and rational reaction to someone you just met five minutes ago directly asking you if you want to be alone with them. This is especially true if you've been sexually assaulted or had to deal with sexual assault at a previous point in your life, which, if you're a woman, is actually extremely likely.

Look, I'm extrapolating because I do get where you're coming from, and it's a place of noble intent and a little outrage that this whole debate has really blown up into a battle of the sexes. But you're prescribing a solution that is not actually for this problem. Telling people that they can attack people who are assaulting them is noble, but it's not exactly revolutionary. And the problem ere isn't even "rape"; the problem is that, in our hypotethical-that-happened, a random person on the street says "no" to going off alone with someone they almost literally just met. You and at least one other person in this thread thought that that peson who said "no" was crazy. You didn't see anything wrong with propositioning some random person on the street, and saw everything wrong with them when they, like a sane person, said "no" to the proposition. You then post a link essentially arguing that "she should have gone along with this proposition because she could've just beat this persons' ass if they tried anything". You've jumped the question away from the actual problem; you assume you're in the right to go up to anyone and ask them to do something risky, and then blame them if they identify that risk and step away from the situation. And I get it, that's personally angering: You're not a bad person. Why would anyone say "no" to you over anything? But the person you're talking to? They don't know you from Saddam.

The weird thing is, while what the guy did was creepy, he could've diffused a lot of the creep factor by asking to meet her in a public place. Following her into the elevator, even accosting her in public and trying to get her alone without really getting the sense from her that she'd like that, that was still creepy, but trying to get her alone is what pushed it over the edge. It's still creepy, but it would've been less so if the intent, and his inability to recognize her discomfort, weren't so clear.

The problem isn't rape. The problem is "why do so many men believe they can whistle at women o the sidewalk?". Why is it okay to butt into someones' work or leisure space in a coffee shop and say "I can see you're doing something, that is clearly a cry for someone to bother you"? Why do you feel this woman was obligated to follow this guy to his hotel room, and then that it was her obligation to defend herself if he attacked her, when she made the much more strategically sound decision of never following him in the first place?

>>390884
it's like you didn't read anything I posted, at all

>from there you jumped to defense training

example of you refusing to read, my posts as well as the site I linked to

>Why do you think it was okay for this guy to follow her into the elevator?
>have implied, through your postings, that she should have gone straight back with him
>you two share a common argument, one which you defended: "what that guy did was not harassment"
>You and at least one other person in this thread thought that that peson who said "no" was crazy.
>you assume you're in the right to go up to anyone and ask them to do something risky

more putting words into my mouth

>By what you are posting and the points you are defending, you are implying that her refusal to put herself in potential harms way was less of a defense than physical violence
>You didn't see anything wrong with propositioning some random person on the street, and saw everything wrong with them when they, like a sane person, said "no" to the proposition.
>Why do you feel this woman was obligated to follow this guy to his hotel room, and then that it was her obligation to defend herself if he attacked her, when she made the much more strategically sound decision of never following him in the first place?

that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I said

it is also the EXACT OPPOSITE of the general message of the site I linked to

>Because he is actually in the wrong, and her response was completely appropriate

show me exactly where I stated the opposite

>You then post a link essentially arguing that "she should have gone along with this proposition because she could've just beat this persons' ass if they tried anything"

this is FACTUALLY INCORRECT and you would know that if you had bothered to read it

you are IGNORING what I post and fabricating arguments based on assumptions after reading ONE WORD

at this point it cannot possibly be a mere misunderstanding

it is not logical that an intelligent person would read my posts and the site I linked to and then arrive at literally the exact opposite of the intended meaning of every single point

the fact that you didn't quote anything I supposedly said and didn't adress anything that I actually said in my post is telling

you're doing this on purpose; the only question is: why?

you disagree with >>390826
my post that started this (>>390829) was a rebuttal of >>390826

so why do you keep insisting that I supported >>390826 when in fact I did the opposite?
at this point the only reasons I can think of are stupidity or malice, and I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not stupid

I thought plus4chan let trolling be the domain of 4chan instead of merely practicing a more refined form of it

>>390887

stop trolling?

>>390892
>Someone's overreacting to even the slightest perceived misunderstanding of what they mean, to the point that everything else is practically just a backdrop to the argument.
>Tell them they must be a troll.
You sure that's a great idea?

>>390893
Well it's the truth. He jumped into the argument with off topic bullshit and then tried to prod a reaction out of people.

>>390892
>>390897
how exactly is telling >>390826 that he is wrong "off topic bullshit"?
he claimed that rational behavior on the woman's part is mental illness; I linked to a site by people who know a lot more about the issue than he does and told him to educate himself

then >>390833 jumps in and makes ill-informed claims

>>390893
it's not really a "sleight misunderstanding" when someone reads only a few words, then decides to label me [the enemy] and responds to my attempts at clarification with stawmen

sure, I made a lot of noise, but >>390833 misrepresented what I posted to a degree that paints me as the sort of person who would be banned on sight, so I felt that clarification was required

not that it did any good, considering they refuse to even read my responses

maybe I could have handled the situation better, but still, someone in this thread (>>390833) is convinced I am [the enemy] and is trying to get me banned; that person is posting the way they do in order to "bait" me into "revealing myself" as [the enemy]

I think I get gentrification's concern, but at the same time, I have no reason to fight it based on what I know.

Like, rich people move to new and cheap neighborhoods because of the selection is nice, and they have the money to push up the value more, but that bleeds into making the neighborhood too expensive for the people that were living there, and have to move, and make a better neighborhood elsewhere, and while we can assume that rich people are out to do it to fuck with poor or something, coming from the rich side, I'm not as secure as you'd think.

When I move to a new neighborhood, I'm also considering job opportunities, distance to work or shops I like and expenses that I can manage, with debts to college or cars or housing to consider, while keeping a style of living that is comfortable. I choose a low-cost, relatively clean neighborhood to move to because of the information I have on it compared to others based on going online, asking around, and deciding, and it works for what I need. If those actions affect others, I'm sorry, but the other options I have require spending more on gas, more on home costs, more time lost on travel and more money out of my pockets in security. In short, it makes me as economically unstable as the people in the neighborhoods I was going to displace by choosing the easiest solution.

If I don't follow my interests, I'm actively handicapping my economic success and my family for the future on the potential that someone else that these less-economically stable families can stay... economically unstable as me, I guess? It doesn't do anything to benefit me, and as anti-utopian 'we care for one another' world as that is, that's sort of a big deal. And what's worse, they might be able to work out of their economic instability and be rich enough to outgentrify MY neighborhood, and I was now made poor because I chose to let someone else have more than me.

Why on earth would I choose any other path than to just work for my best interests, and hope that everyone else can handle on their own? I mean, I wish there was something that benefited us both, but I'm not seeing it outside of spending disposable income on your neighborhoods while you're there, which I can't have unless I'm doing this sort of thing. I understand I have these privileges, but that really isn't enough of an incentive to throw my savings at the altar of a potential better world for everyone.

lol some butthurt girl wants to cancel colbert because she doesnt understand sarcasm

>>390964
It was only a matter of time before someone lashed out at him because they don't understand satire.

People have to remember that those on the "left" can be just as stupid as those on the "right".

>>390966

It's funny because her own family and several media groups in Korea are telling her to stfu and stop being embarrassing.

>>390964
For those that want to know more about this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/03/twitter-campaign-to-cancel-colbert-report.html
>#CancelColbert started with Suey Park, a twenty-three-year-old writer and activist, who, in December of last year, came to Twitter prominence when she set up #NotYourAsianSidekick, an online conversation that encouraged Asian-American women to voice their frustrations with traditional feminism.
>Park does not consider herself a “full-time” activist and claims that she does not particularly enjoy hustling along a hashtag.
...but...
>As #CancelColbert grew, Park acted as something of an online personal trainer, exhorting her followers to push the hashtag up the list of Twitter’s trending topics.
>Park admitted that despite the hashtag’s command, she did not want “The Colbert Report” to be cancelled.

This is why we haven't done shit like cure cancer.

>Deadspin published a post by two Korean-American writers with the tongue-in-cheek headline “Gooks Don’t Get Redskins Joke,”
lawl

>>390972
The best was by Taiwanese Animators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2GVel4Hxd8

>>390973
i fuken love those guys

I hope everyone is ready to herp their derp.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/fort-hood-shooting/shooting-fort-hood-military-base-many-eight-wounded-n70276

>>390972
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/01/my_white_liberal_frenemies_when_twitter_exchanges_reveal_untrustworthy_allies/
Urgh, as a (probably not as token as I think) Asian female bisexual atheistic lower-middle class person who likes Colbert and thought the joke was fitting but meh, this article is really fucking dumb. Shows how Park and her allies exemplify everything wrong with SJW.

>Watching Jeopardy!
>Very upset because still no Ken Jennings, who was the only one I wanted to see, and I have to work evenings tomorrow and Friday so now I know I'll surely miss it
>Should I quit my job just so I can watch Jeopardy!?

Anyway, in case you don't know, all of the contestants in this tournament are former winners who won a LOT and otherwise made a name for themselves. All of of them are introduced saying that they won all this money, how long they were champion, when this happened, blah blah blah. The middle contestant, a woman, was introduced only as being the first woman to win more than five days in a row, and as currently holding the record amount of money for a woman.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. Now, I'm about the furthest thing you can get from being a feminist without crossing into misogynist territory (it's more of an apathetic stance) but am I the only one that thinks that is ENORMOUSLY sexist? Jeopardy! isn't an athletic competition; there is no separate "men's division" and "women's division". Given that there has been no proven difference in level of intellect between men and women, this would be equivalent to a contestant on Jeopardy! as being introduced as the winningest black person, or to be absurd instead of inflammatory, the winningest man with early-onset baldness.

I mean, unless Jeopardy! is essentially admitting they put her in there just as part of some affirmative action nonsense, that shouldn't happen. They said later on that she won over $200,000; that's not insignificant; that's should be enough of a qualification to be there; her gender didn't need to have been mentioned at all.

I don't even know why I'm upset at this. I objectively don't care and shouldn't even care because cis male privilege etc. It just confounds me that there can still be such blase sexism in the modern era, on a relatively high-brow, nationally-broadcast trivia show.

The gay community just got the Mozilla CEO fired.

Let me just say bravo and congratulate you for alienating a large portion of the online community, probably the only place where you were accepted.

Enjoy your internet exploder.

>>391000

I don't wholly agree with him stepping down, but I hope I shouldn't interpret your post as you implying that nobody should've criticised him for donating to Prop 8 because he just became CEO of Mozilla — that he sat above censure, no matter the reason why, for actively trying to deny civil rights to gay people.

>>391000
I don't really have the energy to respond to your stupidity because of your blanketing and >>391001, but I will laugh at you.

>>391000
HA HA HA HA HA HA!

U dumb.

>>391000
>freedom of speech means I get to voice offensive opinions (here: wanting the government to deny other people their rights) in public, but if I ever have to face the consequences then YOU are the evil ones

I've seen this discussion enough times already and it mainly bolis down to one primal fallacy

stop pretending that all opinions are inherently equal

I get it, [you] are never going to change your mind, but [you] really ought to be more honest

"[homosexuals] shouldn't have the same rights as heterosexuals because [my religion says so/they're out to destroy civilization/it's just wrong/look at these numbers I reinterpreted]" isn't "just an opinion" like your choice of internet browser

>>391004
OK I don't have a dog in this fight but what is this:
>stop pretending that all opinions are inherently equal
?

>>391006
If I had an opinion that humorism was the correct path medical science should have taken my opinion would be worthless because it's a DUMB, STUPID, IDIOTIC opinion.

Just like that guys opinion is stupid and based on similarly ridiculous ideas.

>>391006

Society tolerates the fact that some people hold the opinion of ‘the world is flat’ (and yes that still happens in this day and age), but society don’t generally tolerate the notion that such an opinion holds as much weight as the ‘opinion’ of ‘the world is a sphere’.

In situations such as the one that prompted these last few posts, people who argue for the ‘he shouldn’t suffer for holding opinions!’ standpoint also argue — however implicitly — that all opinions should hold equal weight and no one should ‘suffer’ (read: face criticism of any kind) for expressing ‘unacceptable’ or ‘politically incorrect’ opinions.

By that logic, no one should ‘suffer’ for saying ‘gay people choose to be gay like it's an internal light switch’ because their opinion would hold as much weight as ‘sexual orientation has a biological origin’, even though we all but know for sure that one of those opinions does not (and will never) stand up to objective scientific scrutiny.

We can tolerate the fact that people hold objectionable and horrendous opinions, but that doesn't mean we must tolerate the opinion itself (or think of such opinions as ‘equal’ to more informed opinions). Mr. Eich can believe gay people don’t deserve the civil rights associated with marriage (or civil marriage itself), but that doesn’t mean both he and his opinion won’t face criticism and scrutiny.

In the end, Mr. Eich chose to step down in order to protect Mozilla from a potentially harmful association with his own personal beliefs/politics — which, when you think about it, actually proves at least some of his worth as a potential CEO.

http://youtu.be/snLKCx2ghDQ?t=1m50s
I think Patton said it best.

>>391007
>>391008
Yeah but those opinions were disprove over a very long period, you can't just dismiss anyone with an opinion without bothering to disprove them...

>>391016
how about he proves himself right first?

he is the one asserting that [homosexuals] should not be allowed to marry
this is not a neutral opinion (it cannot be, as it deals with other people's rights); this one has to be evaluated to 'right' or 'wrong' (the context implies that he believes it to be 'right')

Also: it should be noted that Mr. Eich looked as if he would stay on as Mozilla CEO until his older donations to political candidates with…highly questionable records in regards to equality (and not just for gay people) came to light.

Is it reasonable for a person to be fired for their opinions? Yes. If you find the opinions of some employee of a business to be that bad, you have every right to do your business elsewhere and let the business know why. You'll hit them in the only place a business can feel it: the profit margin. The only reason businesses care about bad publicity is because it hurts sales.

So whether or not you approve of this event all this boils down to whether or not you think the CEO of Mozilla supporting Prop 8 is bad enough to stop using Mozilla. I do not, and so I think it's a shame that this guy was persecuted for his convictions. It's clear that many of you think otherwise, and since the only way to try to change your mind is to start arguing on the internet (which never works), I won't try to convince you.

>>391022
>persecuted for his convictions

so, do you believe that [homosexual] marriage should not be allowed or is your stance a case of neutrality at any cost?

>>391022
>I think it's a shame that this guy was persecuted for his convictions.
He wasn't persecuted for his convictions. His brand was sullied by his public record. Everyone working in the public eye (meaning all celebrities, all self-employed people, and CEOs and other high ranking officers of major corporations) has to maintain their brand as a major part of their business management--and part of brand management is not publicly tying yourself to controversial politics unless controversy is your milieu (i.e. Rush Limbaugh), or your audience supports your controversial politics (i.e. that Duck Dynasty guy). When your company's primary audience is largely of a socially liberal persuasion like Firefox, tying yourself to a position that audience will find toxic is poor business sense.

He had to step down because the damage that he had done to his own brand was beginning to hurt Firefox's brand. In other words, he was bad at the job he had been hired to do--a CEO's entire job is to strengthen the brand, and he was doing the opposite.

>>391022

>persecuted for his convictions

You use that word ‘persecution’. I do not think it means what you think it means.

People want to go on and on and on about ‘political correctness’ and ‘thoughtcrime’ and all that other ‘but muh freedoms’ stuff — but if people didn’t face censure and criticism over the expression of their opinions (whether through op-eds or political donations or direct actions), we’d have a country where everybody would duck responsibility for expressing ridiculous (and potentially harmful) opinions and ideas by saying ‘free speech’ and shutting down all discussion.

I think Mr. Eich saw what his tenure as CEO of Mozilla would ultimately entail (a lot of questions about his personal beliefs vis-á-vis gay people/marriage equality rather than questions about the future of Mozilla) and resigned so that his tenure as CEO wouldn’t cast Mozilla in a bad light. And, as others have noted, the initial protests over Mr. Eich’s promotion to CEO started within Mozilla instead of outside the company; had Mozilla employees not made such a big deal about their company’s new CEO donating to a cause that Mozilla ultimately stood against, Mr. Eich might not have faced as much scrutiny as he did over the past couple of weeks.

Ultimately, the power of free expression and the free exchange of ideas worked as it should: Mr. Eich expressed his opinions via the donation to Prop 8, Mozilla employees/LGBT activists expressed their opinions via the criticism over Mr. Eich's promotion to CEO, and anti-gay voices/those who think this situation went ‘too far’ expressed their opinions via the criticism over Mr. Eich’s resignation. Everyone had a chance to express their opinions and nobody escaped criticism or censure for expressing them. The First Amendment and the principles of Free Speech worked as they should.

Now, I have an idea of what you want to say here: ‘Mr. Eich shouldn’t have had to step down because he thinks gay people shouldn’t get married! Political correctness has gone too far! Nobody can say what they want any more without some uppity social justice anti-cis Tumblr asshole getting their custom-made panties in a twist!’ At this point, I’d have to correct you on something: you can absolutely express your opinion in any way you see fit. If you want to go on Tumblr and refer to gay people as ‘shit-eating pondscum not fit to lick my shoes much less get married to each other’, you have the government-protected right to do so — but you cannot and will not escape criticism for expressing that opinion in what amounts to an open forum.

Nobody in this country possesses immunity from criticism and censure, least of all you; saying things you’d call ‘politically incorrect’ and expecting that immunity would make you an asshole.

>>391022
Wasn't it ultimately his choice whether or not to step down? Now if they outright forced him out of the job or banned him from holding a position just for having unpopular views (for the note I strongly disagree with him, but it's the principle of the thing) one could argue it's persecution. But in this case, the fora of public discourse dictated that it was in the best interest of the company that he leave, and instead of keeping his position in the face of major opposition (which he has the legal right to do), he took heed of the desires of the majority.

>>391023
My opinions on that subject would do more to distract from the topic than strengthen the conversation, so I don't think I'll answer that question. Not now, anyways.

>>391025
Perhaps this is closer to a satisfactory opinion: I'm sorry that the public opinion of his convictions was such that it caused such a big problem for him.

>>391026
Didn't I just say that people should voice criticism about these sort of things? My problem was that it happened over an issue that I don't think desired this level of ire. Based on what I've read here, it sounds like he did the right thing in stepping down. I don't like that it happened, but I'm not saying that it should have been forced in such a way that it didn't happen. I don't like a lot of things, but that doesn't mean I think that they should all be forbidden.

>>391032

>it happened over an issue that I don't think desired this level of ire

He donated a thousand dollars to a political cause dedicated to denigrating and demeaning gay people (via some of the most anti-gay/homophobic political ads ever aired on American television) in an attempt to convice voters to revoke gay peoples’ civil marriage rights in California. He didn’t deserve to lose his job over his beliefs, but he deserved every bit of ire he received over his donation.

>>391033
>political cause dedicated to denigrating and demeaning gay people
Wut? Prop 8 wasn't nearly that bad.

>>391040

Take a look at some of the pro-Prop 8 ads:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html

Now, imagine those ads airing all over television at all hours of the day — and then remember that Mr. Eich’s donation helped make the creation and airing of those ads possible.

And again, remember that the Prop 8 movement wanted to revoke legally-granted civil rights from a minority group (gay people) specifically because of an animus held towards said minority group.

As I said: Mr. Eich didn’t deserve to lose his job over his donation to Prop 8, but he damn well deserved any criticism/ire tossed his way over said donation.

>>391042
Do you have a different site? Can't see anything there, my adblocker must not be allowing the pics.

>revoke legally-granted civil rights
Actually no, those rights didn't exist at the time of the prop 8 came out, they were just being discussed in congress. And after the congress vote came through and prop 8 got shitcanned, Eich didn't pay to overturn the decision or anything, he agreed to follow the will of the majority.

>>391044

>those rights didn't exist at the time of the prop 8 came out

In California, they did. In In re Marriage Cases, the courts ruled Proposition 22 (the original "gay marriage ban" law) unconstitutional and eventually issued a writ of mandate that directed the state government to grant same-sex marriages. That happened on 19 June 2008; Prop 8 passed as an amendment to the California state consitution on 4 November 2008 and went into effect the next day. For just over four months, gay people had the legal right to marry in California — a right that Prop 8 took away by virtue of its passage. Gay people didn't have the right to marry in California again until 28 June 2013, thus Prop 8 (and the legal challenges that eventually invalidated Prop 8) revoked the legally-enacted civil marriage rights of gay Californians for nearly five years.

You might want to make a better argument.

>>391046

Oh, and I should note two more things: the Prop 8 campaign began before the final In re Marriage Cases ruling, and the final ballot title of Prop 8 read as ‘Proposition 8 - Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry’.

So yeah, tell me again how Prop 8 and its supporters (including Mr. Eich) didn't somehow attempt to invalidate a right that gay people in California didn't already have. Go ahead.

Every single time I don't think I can hate him more something like this comes out on Tony Abbot.

I like how everyone immediately assumes gay people must want marriage, even though gays have the only free love culture to currently exist on the planet.... during an age when the western world is moving towards an abandonment of marriage as a concept. Hint: Those of us who thought it through fucking don't.
If someone wants the same treatment as straight marrieds by the government, it's possible to sign a document and have joint bank accounts, visitation rights, tax breaks, the whole shebang. If anyone wants to call themselves married there is "common law" and accepting religious institutions which will marry you and you can say we're husband and husband. Wedding is a fantasy little girls grow up with not boys, but if a flaming gay tryhard wants it he can have that too. It is NOT something to lose your shit over, the only people that care have no life.
tl;dr the LGBT wedding debate in America is about being pedantic enough to want the dictionary definition "officially" changed (hurr official language use), and caring what some government database in an NSA compound calls two people living together.

That being said, the mozilla guys position as CEO of a nonprofit organization was largely ornamental anyway, so no one cares that he stepped up or down. I'm not going to shed any tears over it, and probably neither will he.

>>391052
And the average Irish didn't give a fuck about if any of them could actually be in the senate but it was a mark against them that had to be struck down, there is symbolism in these small victories against fucking assholes. Because when someone says "You and all people that are like you can't do this thing that everyone else can" it's a fucking black mark against them and their rights.

Really disgusting legislate that bans rights has to be overturned or it just keeps getting worse.

>>391052
It's stupid to say that one group of people can do this thing but another group cannot, full stop. Stop trying to make this less than what it is.

The point is that we shouldn't have rules against this in the first place. Not to mention forbidding one group of people from doing something that everyone should be able to do sets a dangerous precedent.

>Those of us who thought it through fucking don't.

I take it you're gay? Being gay doesn't mean you speak for gay people. If you don't want to get married, fine. Don't project your desires on everyone else, because there are gay men and women in this country who DO want to get married.

>>391052

Other people have noted how stupid this post is on the subject of marriage as a rights issue, so I'll take another tack.

>I like how everyone immediately assumes gay people must want marriage, even though gays have the only free love culture to currently exist on the planet....

Yes, because club culture is gay culture and all gay people are involved in it. That's not an offensive stereotype at all.

(Hint: You're retarded)

>>391052

>I like how everyone immediately assumes gay people must want marriage

Do all gay people want to marry? Hell no; assuming otherwise makes you an ignorant dick and you'd do well to educate yourself about making assumptions and such.

Do some gay people want to marry? Yes, they do; the fight over Prop 8, in part, affected the four thousand-plus couples whose status as legally married couples (and the status of all the civil rights and privileges granted to them by virtue of marriage) sat in limbo while the legal challenges to Prop 8 went through the courts.

Just because some gay people may not want to marry doesn't mean they don't deserve to have that right made available to them in the event they should change their minds. The Prop 8 situation and other legal fights over marriage equality center around that very notion.

>If someone wants the same treatment as straight marrieds by the government, it's possible to sign a document and have joint bank accounts, visitation rights, tax breaks, the whole shebang.

Right, so, what document would do all that, again?

>If anyone wants to call themselves married there is "common law" and accepting religious institutions which will marry you and you can say we're husband and husband.

That sounds nice and all, but ‘commonlaw’ marriages don’t exactly have the force of law behind them, and gay people kinda need that when they go to do things like visit their partners in the hospital (especially when their partners’ families or hospital staff try to prevent such visits). Marriage offers the force of civil law; living together for some number of years and having a clergyman say ‘you’re married’ does not.

>It is NOT something to lose your shit over, the only people that care have no life.

You’ve just implied to us that the eight thousand-plus gay people who married in the brief window between the invalidation of Prop 22 and the validation of Prop 8 all have no life.

I suggest you rethink such a horrid assumption.

>the LGBT wedding debate in America is about being pedantic enough to want the dictionary definition "officially" changed (hurr official language use), and caring what some government database in an NSA compound calls two people living together.

That description dismisses the very real discrimination gay couples have suffered because of marriage inequality — discrimination that could not happen (at least, not without severe legal consequences for the discrminating party) if those gay couples had the legal recognition of civil marriage law behind them.

>>391059
Free love =/= club culture. So you're combating one of your offensive assumption by making another offensive assumption, good job. I'm not going to call you names, but you know what you are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
>Free love is a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social and financial bondage. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.
^
That is fucking admirable, beautiful, and the epitome of everything our society should strive for. The gay community has it already, why step back into the middle ages and put your feelings and relations to other people under control of the state?

>>391058
>It's stupid to say that one group of people can do this thing but another group cannot, full stop.
That was never the issue, gays could marry even under prop 8. They could even call it marriage, and have all the perks with being married that the government gives them. It's just that the government of California would not use the word marriage in official documents to describe the relationship of two gay people.

What is a wedding? What is a marriage?
1. Meeting of a group of related people. Covered by freedom of public association.
2. Someone speaks and proclaims two people to be married. Covered by freedom of speech.
3. Their friends and family the call them married, spouses, husbands, wives whatever. Also covered by freedom of speech.
4. Some legal documents are signed which tie the two people together financially and in other ways.
5. The marriage is consummated. Covered by freedom of personal association.
You understand? Nobody could stop gays from marrying, or calling themselves married, or other people calling them married... nobody could forbid it any more than they could forbid them to breathe.
If prop 8 passed it's not like two gay guys marrying each other in a gay friendly church would have the place raided by FBI. That wasn't the fucking case. And it's not like the FBI could arrest any media outlet that called two guys married, that's covered by free speech.

So really it was not a fight over what you could do, what perks you got, or how you are perceived by people around you; It was a fight over what the government called your relationship. How mental is that? How anal do you have to be to give two fucks about what the government calls two people in a consensual relationship? To actually strongly desire that the government defines your personal life?
To me at least, that's fucking insane, nuts in the extreme, people who think that should be locked up for their own damn safety.

Most of the gay marriage supporters are not even gay, they're just a bunch of soccer moms trying to fill their "help the needy" quota for the day. Google gays against gay marriage, it was big during prop 8 and is still discussed to this day, although the steam wagon has passed so people care less.

I love this guy
Homosexuals Against Gay Marriage
>"I don't need a piece of paper from the government that tells me I'm married, marriage is in the heart and the mind.

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/gays-against-adam-and-steve/

>>391064
That's a whole lot of stupidity in one post, not to mention a bunch of generalizations and what not. You guys have fun with this kid, just know that you're talking to either a ruseman or an idiot before you continue posting.

>>391064

>gays could marry even under prop 8
>it was not a fight over what you could do, what perks you got, or how you are perceived by people around you; It was a fight over what the government called your relationship

Under Prop 8, gay people could've put on a big fancy church wedding if they really wanted it (so long as they found a church willing to host it), but under civil law, California could not legally grant gay couples a marriage license or recognize same-sex marriages under the law until Prop 8 met its end at the hands of the courts.

And hey, those church weddings? They don't confer things like survivors' benefits and hospital visitation rights and all the other rights and privileges granted to married couples under civil marriage law.

Now, you can argue about whether we need the State involved in marriage all you want, but for the time being, the State has its hands so far up marriage's ass that it could probably feel the State tickling the esophagus. Since we have to deal with that situation as a reality, we have to deal with an inequality in civil marriage law (gay people can't marry in and have those marriages recognized by a majority of states throughout the country) and the discrimination that exists because of said inequality.

>How anal do you have to be to give two fucks about what the government calls two people in a consensual relationship? To actually strongly desire that the government defines your personal life?

If having the government somehow "define" my personal life/relationship with another person allows me to visit them in the hospital without having security escort me out over the fact that the government (and thus the hospital) doesn't legally recognize me as my partner's next of kin, I will damn sure care about how the government defines my relationship.

I don't think I'm ever going to get married. Most probably, I'll never so much as go on a date or have sex again for the rest of my life, unless something so dramatic happens to my impressions of love and human beings, that it borders in "miraculous". That said, marriage equality isn't really about marriage. When I see things like these here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_supported_prop_8_which_was_worse_than_you_remember.html , I don't care about the marriage part. What bothers me is conservative "values" turning me, and the other ~200 million homosexuals in the world into some kind of second-class citizen, or sub-human. The stereotype of gays being predators in disguise that gain "membership" by molesting children and so turning them gay thankfully died out in the 50's; but these fuckers want to revive that impression entirely. The idea that children will be irrevocably harmed if they don't have a mother and a father is Freudian nonsense that thankfully died out in the 20's; but these fuckers what to revive that "science" entirely.

The fact remains that people are either born gay, or it's set in stone by a few years of age, and while maturity will always differ, many people figure out they are gay when they are still children. In this modern era — the "information age" — it's easier than ever for young children to be exposed to sensual and sexual material, and discuss it with peers, and so realize their orientation, even before puberty. Instead of "protecting" the straight children by pretending gays don't exist, the other side of the coin is seeing how we are isolating and endangering gay children and teens. What we are telling them is that, despite being a human being, despite living in a country that prides itself on protection of minorities, despite being supposedly endowed with the same rights and privileges as anyone else by a Creator and by the State, they are NOT WORTHY to live the same kind of life, because they are inferior. Their manner of loving is improper and invalid; the only accepted method is to simply not love anymore. For a social creature like a human, you might as well cut to the chase and sentence them to death.

That is what this is about. Because there can exist NO argument against gay marriage or any other gay rights that doesn't start with: "You're inferior to me, therefore you just don't deserve..."

>>391058
OK sure but wouldn't the proper response be trying to stop government monopoly on marriage, instead of increasing that monopoly?

>>391068
>marriage license
>recognize same-sex marriages under the law
>we have to deal with that situation as a reality
Oh, we can deal with that situation as reality, but we can't deal with marriage being heterosexual. We gotta change that. Government tentacles in marriage is sad but civil unions allow all these privileges anyway so the entire argument is moot.

It's not about the privileges, it's about the terminology.

>>391072

>civil unions allow all these privileges anyway

No, they don't — and the Supreme Court said as much in its ruling in the Windsor case (the one that ruled part of DOMA unconstitutional and laid the groundwork for all the current pro-marriage equality cases to win).

I’mma quote from a comment on the Mozilla story from elsewhere that covers your whole "we should get the government out of marriage" argument well:

>[A] lot of people suggest that government should get out of the marriage business. (Usually this comes from people who oppose gay marriage but never dare threaten straight marriage.) I tend to agree in principle, but I'm increasingly inclined to think the idea is completely unviable: we would still largely tend to pair off, we would still want to get some set of government and legal benefits appropriate for a permanent pair (even if we had to sign individual contracts for all of those benefits), and us being people who like to name things, we would still give this behavior a term. And we would almost certainly call it "marriage", because that's what we already call it. So the upshot would be that getting all the benefits is a bigger pain in the ass, and... that's about all.

>In fact, from that perspective, society as a whole already considers a permanent pairing of two people of the same sex to be "marriage", and the opposition is trying to retroactively redefine a colloquial term to exclude some pairings, on the flimsy grounds that those pairings didn't really exist publicly until now.

>>391073
Wow what a stupid quote, it lumps all people against the whole gay marriage brouhaha into one group. You could be against wanting gay marriage to be government controlled because you hate gays and are a bigot, sure. But you could also be against it if you hate government, or if you hate marriage as a concept.
Examples are the gay guy ITT obviously hates marriage as a concept, and I hate the fact that government wants to control it.

>[A] lot of people suggest that government should get out of the marriage business.
>(Usually this comes from people who oppose gay marriage but never dare threaten straight marriage.)
What the fuck? How would someone who doesn't want to threaten straight marriage remove the benefits it gets? That affects both types of marriage equally (and for the better by removing government, so I don't think "threaten" is the word).
Statements like "get government out of marriage business" don't come from bigots or homophobes, they comes from lower-government-control types such as myself.

>we would still want to get some set of government and legal benefits appropriate for a permanent pair
No we fucking wouldn't. Financial subsidies to married folks was first invented as a way to promote population growth, because back in the roaring 20s people related marriage and babies, and thought that aiding families with tax breaks would get them to have more babies.
Now pause and think about it... we fund programs in schools teaching girls to delay having babies, then we have dinosaur programs promoting conception (albeit in a tangential way that makes sense only to people from that era). That's pretty nucking futs, it's a form of population control similar to turning on your heat and AC at the same time to keep a balanced temperature.

Also if by "benefits" that quote means things like visitation rights or inheritance issues, these can be resolved through normal legal channels and don't need the governments grubby paws all over it.

>society as a whole already considers a permanent pairing of two people of the same sex to be "marriage"
Perfect, stop right there, let's leave it at that.

>>391074
Not the guy you're arguing with, but I'll speak up to oppose an idea you've said here--that the people who want government out of marriage are mostly people who oppose gay marriage. I'm actually perfectly in favor of gay marriage, I just feel that all the tradition and (to some) religious baggage that's associated with it makes it better left as a personal decision between the people getting married and the person or organization willing to oversee that marriage. The government's concern starts and ends with the allocation and distribution of property. For that reason, I am in favor of Government saying "Marriage is your own fucking problem," and granting ONLY civil unions, but not being able to turn down a civil union between anyone capable of entering into a legal contract, as it's purely a business union. For tax purposes and for the purposes of regulating how insurance companies and the like are required to distribute spousal benefits, I am willing to allow that government can rule that it will only legally recognize one such business asset per person, so bigamy would be (while legal) unrecognized financially, but completely outside the purview of government otherwise--likewise any other sort of limitation on "marriage" (now civil unions) that could ever be broached. This would even mean that if robots ever became sentient and capable of entering into contracts, people could marry robots--for that matter, they could marry their cousins or worse--solely because in my mind moralizing is not and should not be the government's business; its only job should be to protect citizens from one another and encourage interstate and international prosperity through the establishment and the patronizing of institutions that have a palpable positive effect on society, such as funding scientific studies of worth to all of us. Teaching a person the moral way to behave is the job of a person's parents and peers, or their priests if they choose to outsource their ethical decisions to third parties.

>>391079
Thank you, finally someone gets it.

I was beginning to fear I was the only one here who thought it through.

>>391079
As a person who is morally opposed to homosexuality, this is basically my stance as well. That's why I was being so cagey about my opinion on the subject earlier. I'm against gay marriage, but I'm not exactly for making gay marriage illegal either. People can do whatever they please with their own lives, and if they want to sign a contract, the government needs to recognize it.

>>391073
Would also technically allow you to have a civil union with a legal entity. No idea what civil unions between corporations would be like. Or civil unions between unions.

>>391083
What I don't get is why you presume allowing gay marriage and renouncing legal officialness of marriage are opposed rather than incidentally related issues. That is, I don't see how allowing gay marriage actually prevents civil unions or further alteration to the legal concept of marriage.

>>391084

>a person who is morally opposed to homosexuality

I don’t understand this at all. Like, one bit. Can you please explain to me how you can feel morally opposed to an immutable human trait like sexual orientation?

>>391084
>As a person who is morally opposed to homosexuality

LMFAO

>>391089
I'm curious to hear his reasoning, too.

I'm reminded of one night on a TF2 server where we started talking about religion and someone admitted they thought the world was only 6000 years old, and when pressed for evidence they couldn't come up with anything aside from religion.

>>391084
>a person who is morally opposed to homosexuality

is it a religious thing, or do you have some 'evidence' you'd like to present?

>>391085
>What I don't get is why you presume allowing gay marriage and renouncing legal officialness of marriage are opposed rather than incidentally related issues.
When else am I going to get a chance to discuss my stance on marriage? I basically have to wait for robot-human, alien-human,. or animal hybrid-human marriages to discuss the issue again.

http://boards.4chan.org/lgbt/res/2477298#p2477298

>>391095
I can see how it can seem a bit impractical to bring up on it's own, but it helps to convey an idea without making it an accusation. I've made a similar argument before when people've talked about gay marriage, and they were more receptive when I let them take it as a side issue rather than something they need to drop everything for. Telling people they haven't thought something through because they don't share the priorities needed for an idea to seem obvious doesn't really sell or even explain that idea very well.

>>391099

When you bring up the idea of ‘get the State out of marriage’ during a discussion about civil marriage equality, doing so can come off as a type of ‘if we can’t have it all to ourselves, nobody should have it’ argument. I want to make it clear that I don’t (and would never) accuse you of having such a mindset, but taking the fight for civil marriage equality into account, you can surely see how your argument can initially project the surface appearance of an anti-marriage equality stance.

>>391100
Ah, I actually haven't run into that, but I tend to mention that I'm not interested in a relationship anyway, so it's not really something I think I have a particular stake in. It's just what I think makes sense as part of the separation of church and state. Figured there was something I was missing when I posted >>391099.

>>391089
>>391090
>>391092
>>391093
I seem to have an annoying talent for making posts with one line just outrageous enough to shift the focus of the conversation away from the original topic and towards my personal beliefs and opinions.

SNES is bullshit anyway

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/07/star-trek-actress-lends-her-gravitas-to-film-promoting-idea-that-sun-revolves-around-earth/
What in the actual fuck, America?

>>391112

"About one in four Americans believe in geocentrism..."

I refuse to believe that statistic. Even if literally the entire South was that book-dumb, that wouldn't be enough people to offset the populations of California and the Northeast. The sad part is, unlike a lot of the really deep physics that is all about unseeable bits of knowledge gleaned from computer analysis of giant machines doing stuff, disproving the geocentric model doesn't require such "faith" regarding invisible particles and invisible matter/energy. It can be done with simple observation of the planets in the sky and a little high-school trigonometry. Next they'll try claiming that sticking your hand on a hot stove doesn't actually cause burns.

As for Kate Mulgew? Well, money talks. I can't imagine she's had much work since Voyager wrapped up like a decade ago.

>>391113
>Even if literally the entire South was that book-dumb, that wouldn't be enough people to offset the populations of California and the Northeast.
I'm so happy to hear the wise and generous benefactors of the North think so well of us lowly Southerners. 'There's not enough of them to make a 4th of the United States to look stupid'. Really cool of you.

>>391112
This is why Janeway was the worst Captain.

>>391112

Red's been on the inside too long. She's lost her marbles.

>>391112
>lends her gravitas
She's narrating it, not endorsing it. She's an actress out of a job for fucks sake.

>About one in four Americans surveyed in a recent poll were unaware the Earth orbited the sun.
These would be the people under 90 IQ, it's not due to misinformation, it's due to basic stupidity.

I'm more "appalled" at the sensationalism in that article than anything else.

>>391113
Yeah because there are no dumb people in California and the northeast. Oh wait, california is the third DUMBEST state in the union with an average IQ of 95.5, the northeast is barely average, and the states that shine the most is the midwest. MONTANA STRONGGGGGGG BITCHH!
And why don't you look up where NASA is headquartered dumbshit, protip: it's not in the state of vapid cunts that make garbage television and rot the national brain.

>>391106

Well, when you say you feel morally opposed to a human trait with an at-least-partial genetic basis, such a statement tends to require questioning.

But I'm pro gay marriage.

In fact I believe in mandatory arranged gay marriage.

All gays should be paired off according to appearance, likes and dislikes, then married.

A shock collar should be installed which gives them 1.5 million volts if they approach a non gay person, and 500k volts if they approach a gay person who isn't their assigned spouse.

Don't you see?

The only reason gays exist is because they are forced to suppress their desires, marry a girl, and have kids.

By forcing everyone with the gay gene cluster to pair off and marry, further children from their line will be prevented and the gay gene cluster will be eliminated in one generation.

I mean we could do it the liberal way and just have them choose to pair off (that will take at least a few dozen generations though, my way is quicker).

That's why I'm pro gay marriage and why you should be pro gay marriage too.

>>391117
I'm not from either of those areas but IQ tests don't mean shit. There's literally no way to accurately measure intelligence, not even taking into account there are different types of intelligence. Don't put stock in them and especially don't put stock in averages of IQ tests.

>>391117

It has nothing to do with IQ; it's like you don't even know what IQ is (probably because you weren't properly educated). Knowledge of facts as opposed to fallacies is purely a mark of education, and the fact remains that educators in the South CAN and DO alter science in textbooks to line up with Creationist theories and Intelligent Design.

By the way, NASA is headquartered where it is partially because it's in the center of the country, and mostly because Rice University donated the land for the development. Why don't YOU look up where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is located? What about Edwards Air Force Base, above which the sound barrier was first breached? What about Lockheed Martin, developers of the fastest non-rocket-powered production aircraft in existence? If you want to completely debunk this entire argument, realize that Los Alamos was located in the middle of a giant freaking desert, as is Groom Lake (or "Area-51", as you guys out in the sticks of Montana might know it). Let's not forget that all the technology that went into inventing the computer you're typing on was pioneered in Silicon Valley.


>>391120

Not sure if troll or just stupid.

However, I do approve of all the gays getting paired off into marriages in accordance to compatibility. That'll fix my forever alone problem.

>>391122
>>391121
>bullshit regional bigotry
please stop, this is a multinational board

>>391122
IQ tests are notoriously biased, such that they have been objected to both on the basis of being racially discriminatory AND economically discriminatory. The fact that the South is the poorest region of the country and the fact that it has such a high incidence of low average IQs only supports the already alleged fact that IQ tests favor those who have access to resources available to the affluent.

And while you're correct that IQ tests aren't about "acquired knowledge," they ARE in large part dependent on acquired skills, skills which are going to be fostered more in people who either have good early childhood education, access to better mental stimuli in youth, and access to healthier nutrition in early years. The fact that these IQ tests show these childrens' scores as low does not make a meaningful predictor of a child's ability to learn when put in an environment conducive to it, and it especially doesn't measure forms of intelligence which can be even more important than analytical intelligence in a person's ability to thrive, such as social intelligence.

“Why photograph war? Is it possible to put an end to a form of human behavior, which has existed throughout history by the means of photography? The proportions of that notion seem ridiculously out of balance yet that very idea has motivated me. For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke a sense of humanity, if war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war; and if its used well it can be a powerful ingredient in the antidote to war.

In a way, if an individual assumes the risk of placing himself in the middle of a war in order to communicate to the rest of the world what is happening, he’s trying to negotiate for peace. Perhaps that’s the reason for those in charge of perpetuating war do not like to have photographers around. In the field where your experience is extremely immediate, what you see is not an image on a page in a magazine ten thousand miles away with an advertisement for Rolex watches on the next page. What you see is unmitigated pain, injustice, and misery. It’s occurred to me that if everyone could be there just once, to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child, or what unspeakable pain is caused by the impact of a single bullet, or how a jagged piece of shrapnel can rip someone’s leg off. If everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and the grief just one time, then they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.

But everyone cannot be there, and that is why photographers go there, to show them, to reach out and grab them, and make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on. To create pictures powerful enough to overcome the deluding effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference. To protest, and by the strength of that protest, to make others protest.”

— James Nachtwey, "War Photographer" (2001)

Jesus Christ his photographs are heart breaking, I've been sitting here going through them with tears pouring down my face for hours.

Oh I don't know maybe I'd
STOP FUCKING WITH THEM

OR MOVE

LIKE EVERYONE IS ASKING YOU TO DO ONE OR THE FUCKING OTHER JESUS CHRIST

>>391201
>living at rocket range
>basically just means they are upset that there's an arab 300m from them

totally classy

>>391201
How many Palestineans are living within the range of the Israeli military choppers? 100%?

>>391201
b-but Anon, don't you know that disagreeing with Israel is automatically Anti-Semitism?!

>>391210
As someone who thinks that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is disgusting, refrain from making posts like these since they don't actually contribute to the discourse. I've found (anecdotally, mind you) very few people actually think like that.

>>391213

I dunno, man, watch any US politician say anything even remotely critical of Israel and watch AIPAC go to work on them. There may not be many people who will come right out and say that anybody critical of Israel is an antisemite, but there sure are a lot of people who will come out of the woodwork at the first sign of even tepid criticism and start talking about antisemitism.

Seriously though that whole Israel/Palestine situation is straight up fucked. There's not really any good solution for it, especially while an imperialist lunatic like Netanyahu is in charge of Israel.

>>391214
I was talking more about your average person and not politicians, but fair enough.

That situation doesn't get a whole lot of attention in that way. Or many other ways for that matter.

>>391214
>you will never be a dastardly supervillain that shuffles around all the holy stuff in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem overnight and just lets everyone try and figure it out themselves.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/14/302856805/police-seek-answers-after-7-dead-babies-found?ft=1&f=1001
So, according to the article, they've booked and charged a 39-year-old woman for six counts of murder (article says they don't know why it's not 7), and that these were her babies. BUT, the article also says that she had three living daughters, a teen and two young adults.

Why no possibility of those daughters being the mothers? I know NPR doesn't lend itself to idle speculation like CNN or Fox News, but it seems rather strange that, according to the article, absolutely no one, including the three daughters, had any idea their mother was ever pregnant. It seems more likely that it was three daughters trying to hide their pregnancies from their mother (or perhaps the whole family was just taking turns popping out babies and murdering them, idk.) If a daughter stopped appearing in public for a few months at a time, especially if it was at different times or something.

Bundy Ranch - What You're Not Being Told

tl;dr Harry Reid (senate majority leader) kicked off people from land in Nevada using a government agency, and through his son sold it to a Chinese solar panel company.

>>391234
...which is problematic, but no where near as problematic as the fact that people like you are apologists for armed insurrectionists who threaten to start goddamned civil wars over his right to ignore federal law. Federal laws which Reid followed, even if it was an underhanded way of following it.

tl;dr: Bundy is still a criminal and an anarchist challenging the government to armed conflict.

>>391235
>hurr just follow the law
Except you twit, laws serve people, not the other way around. If a law is bad we remove it, and the first step to removing it is forming an organized opposition to it. If Bundy is supported by his community, the elected sheriff of his community and the governor of his state, it's time to shut up and change the law.
It's only come to "civil war" levels because the lawmakers refuse to change laws that the society doesn't like and never agreed to.

You're the kind of jackass who would be on the side of slavers in the civil war, or the cops beating up flappers in the 20s and african americans in the 50s, just because of some inane "follow the law" bullshit. There's lawful neutral, lawful evil, lawful good... and then there's you - lawful stupid.

>>391252
This guy is not a freedom fighter. He wants to disobey property laws for his own personal gain. He's a thief who has been built up as a hero by Fox News because they've been able to build a narrative where he's standing up to Obama. If he were Muslim they'd be breaking out the pitchforks and torches.

>>391259
>fox news
>obama
>muslim
lol sure, this has nothing to do with political corruption.

I doubt Obama even knows of the event btw, and wasn't in power when it started. Kinda wondering why you threw him in there.

>>391252
Don't forget the Nazis! Come on, if you're not going to call people who disagree with you Nazis, what's the point of even getting on the internet?

>>391252
>If a law is bad we remove it
Which part of the law "The government is allowed to own land" is it that you find bad, exactly?

>>391264
The part where they can take it from you?

>>391270

That land was never Bundy's to take from him. It was always federal land. Thirty years ago, they let ranchers graze their animals on it, but that doesn't mean it was his land or that he has an inherent right to it.

>>391271
>It was always federal land.
I read that as "fedora land". I spend way too much time around shitposters.

>>391271
Yeah, exactly. The only property of Bundy's the government was ever talking of seizing were his cattle, and that was only because 1.) he was continuing to graze them on federal land 2.) in flagrant defiance of court orders and 3.) owes the government over $3 million in fines for his decades-long abuse of the laws.

>>391274

The best part is that he could have been legally grazing his herd there by paying a fee. He refused, and on the occasion when he did decide to pay, he tried sending the check to his municipal government. Who of course returned the check because he didn't owe them money and they can't take payment on the federal government's behalf.

Bundy is so unambiguously in the wrong here that it can be used as a litmus test for brain-dead conservatism.

>>391180
>Why Photograph War?

Being an aspie, I tend to develop periodic obsessions with random things. It was even more developed when I was a child. When I was about nine, for reasons I do not remember, I became obsessed with nuclear weaponry. The power, the technology, the destruction, the transitory beauty and otherwordly menace of a mushroom cloud. The human element never entered my mind beyond mere statistics, medical information, cold numbers. For about two or three years, I obsessed over everything I could get my hands on regarding the subject. In short order, I knew and could quote with accuracy the entire history of nukes: the theories, the development, the use in war, the extensive testing in land, sea, underground, and even in space. I was in love with nukes. I worshipped nukes. I lived and breathed for nukes. My single greatest regret was that they'd stopped testing them so that I'd never get to see a real mushroom cloud. In the middle of the night, when other boys my age were sneaking out of their room to the TV to watch scrambled porn on premium channels, I was sneaking out to watch Trinity and Beyond, the atomic bomb documentary. It was never enough.

Then, one day, I was looking for more material in the library. I was in the adult section, of course, because there isn't any information about nuclear weaponry in the kid's section, and anyway at 12 I was already reading at a college level. I picked up a book with photographs in it regarding the destruction of Hiroshima, and flipped through. I got my high easily, there were before/after aerial photos, pictures of various destroyed structures, a few pin-ups of the fireball and mushroom cloud — the usual fare. But then I stopped at one page. It was a picture of a boy around the same age I was, clothes gone, burnt head-to-toe into charcoal, contorted in a grimace of agony like the figures from Pompeii, arms raised to his face showing how he died a split second after seeing a blinding flash of light. The caption was something very close to: "The charred remains of a young Hiroshima boy, 200 feet from the central blast."

I was struck dumb. I didn't know what to think. It wasn't as if I was a stupid kid; I couldn't claim ignorance of the human cost of nuclear weaponry, and I certainly cared on some level. For some reason, it just never clicked with me until I saw that photo. I thought: just what the FUCK am I doing? He was just some kid like me, maybe liked to read as I did, and then one day he was minding his own business when boom, now he's dead, a human-shaped lump of coal the only remains. Probably nobody left to bury him or mourn. God Almighty.

After that moment, I didn't like nukes much anymore. The influence of a simple photograph can be something immense, something more powerful than even a nuclear bomb.

Oh and while we're talking about the Bundy Ranch thing:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/nevada.asp

Anyone parroting the 'Harry Reid and Chinese solar panels company!' line is a credulous moron.

>>391278

This isn't exactly what you're talking about but I think it says a lot about the importance of art in general:

http://youtu.be/nDwTjPsG4b0

>>391264
>Which part of the law "The government is allowed to own land" is it that you find bad, exactly?
Is this a serious question? The federal government can manage land, they don't own it in the sense that Crown Land is owned by the Royal family, that way leads to armed rebellion.

The Taylor Grazing act (what BLM is invoking to make him pay fees) was about disputes between farmers and maintain grazelands for ranchers. In effect so that two ranchers weren't using the same land. Bundy being the only rancher there means the BLM can't use this act to chang the terms to prohibit or limit his access to the land. As for the Endangered species act, the desert tortoise population was not impacted by the cattle. Bundy was in fact improving the quality of the land for the tortoise as domestic cow herds replace massive bison herds the land was adapted to.

The BLM doesn't have a leg to stand on, "the court said it" is not a valid reason especially in cases where citizens and government clash on policy. Courts can and do frequently change their rulings as new information comes up, and governments change their policies in response to public pressure. In fact a case exactly like Bundys got this court ruling instead:
>"government officials ... entered into a literal, intentional conspiracy to deprive the Hages not only of their permits but also of their vested water rights. This behavior shocks the conscience of the Court and provides a sufficient basis for a finding of irreparable harm to support the injunction described at the end of this Order."

The people are well within their rights to get armed and stage a stern protest of the way BLM has been behaving, even if the major media outlets refuse to air footage of several thousand protesters.

>>391271
>>391276
>>391274
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff#Federal_rangeland_regulatory_changes_in_1993
>Currently there are no grazing permits on the Bunkerville allotment, and any livestock on that land are there illegally. Bundy owns land previously considered base property and paid AUM animal unit permit fees prior to 1993 for grazing on the nearby Bunkerville Allotment area. Bundy asserts that the terms of land use changes in 1993 reduced his allowed cattle by 90%, capping it to about 150 animals.
Paying fees was not the cause of this conflict, the million plus number people keep toting around is not from any fees but from trespass fines. Ordering bundy to leave the allotment, fining him $200 per day per head of cattle until he left, forcing Bundy into the desert, reducing the number of cattle he can have on any public land to a tenth of what he was allowed, beating up, threatening and intimidating his family.... these are the root causes. In fact I didn't gave a damn about Bundy before the BLM started using underhanded methods to force him off. If you want a parallel to other criminals imagine if the government beat up Bernie Madoffs pregnant daughter in law to get him to confess.

>>391286
>The BLM doesn't have a leg to stand on, "the court said it" is not a valid reason

Uh. "The court said it" is the very definition of a leg to stand on, legally. The court is the arbiter of the law.

>>391291
Finish the sentence at least...

>>391295

Why should I? Again, arbitrating clashes between government and citizens is one of the court's functions.

Like you can always appeal the decision or try again later when the court's changed up a bit and see if they're willing to reconsider. A court ruling isn't absolute and forever. But when you've been litigating a case for twenty years and in that time you can't find a single judge willing to give your interpretation of the law the time of day? Your interpretation might be bullshit.

>>391286
>underhanded methods
What underhanded methods? I have heard nothing about underhanded methods. Nothing you've said and none of the sources you have linked to have indicated anything underhanded on the government's part. Unless, like Bundy, you consider the very existence of the government and the fact that it can make and enforce laws to be underhanded.

>I have heard nothing about underhanded methods.
then why are you posting?

>391305
You seem to have misunderstood what I am saying: I'm not saying I haven't heard about the Bundy case. I am saying you and your side have presented nothing that is even slightly underhanded.

>>391307
>expressing opinion outside a free speech zone

>>391318
Oh, I see, so you're a schizophrenic hobo who wandered into the library to post on the internet. I can see now where trying to have a conversation with you was futile.

>>391323
I think that's the most off topic insult I've ever received. Still scratching my head.

>>391325
Ah, I'm sorry, based on your post I thought we were playing the non-sequitur game.

In other news, BLM tries to redraw the borders of Texas so they can steal more land.
http://www.inquisitr.com/1211766/blm-claims-90000-acres-does-not-belong-to-texas-attempts-to-seize-ranch/
>The BLM removed armed federal agents from Bunkeville and near the Bundy ranch, but another possible “land grab” or range war appears to be brewing in Texas. Fellow rancher Tommy Henderson has been fighting the BLM for 30 years, and appears to be losing yet another round in the battle.
>Tommy Henderson is locked in a property rights fight with the BLM. Although many students are taught in geography class that the border between Texas and Oklahoma is the Red River, the issue is far more complicated than that, according to the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM used an ongoing debate over the border to nab 140 acres of land Henderson’s failed lawsuit against the agency three decades ago.
>BLM is now using the Tommy Henderson lawsuit ruling as a precedent to seize even more of his land along a 116-mile stretch of the river which the agency claims never belonged to Texas in the first place. Henderson holds a deed to the 90,000 acres, but such a legal document did not prevent him from losing the 140-acre parcel he had labored over and paid property taxes on for years.
Yeah it's the damn militias fault for starting the next civil war, angelic public servants at BLM weren't provoking anything...

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/04/18/3141279/western-states-meet-discuss-taking.html?sp=/99/101/531/
>Officials from nine Western states say it's time they take control of federal lands within their borders.
>The lawmakers and county commissioners met at Utah's Capitol on Friday to discuss their joint goal of wresting oil-, timber- and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.

>>391326
That was on topic, the BLM practically invented free speech zones. It's standard to have such zones in their parks, you will be arrested if you try protesting elsewhere.

>>391340
>That was on topic, the BLM practically invented free speech zones. It's standard to have such zones in their parks, you will be arrested if you try protesting elsewhere.
The topic here is, or at least WAS, the Bundy case. Not "Is the BLM the boogeyman?"