crux_

Are you a dunce, or just too cowardly to stand behind your own words?

Introduction of a group opposed to MRA: "the vocal, hateful group of internet 'feminists' constantly claim they are against sexism in all forms, and thus men's rights advocacy should not exist ..."

Your counter of said group's supposed reason for believing MRA to be superfluous: "But in reality, when obvious sexism like this happens, those same 'feminists' do not speak out against it."

> I have said absolutely nothing about your opinion

Exactly. Yet you are strenuously trying to dismiss it nonetheless -- but doing so by attacking the messenger and other weasel tactics, rather than by honest disagreement.

Don't be disingenuous. Your comment introduced a group opposed to MRA's existence, then argued that they were wrong in doing so.

As for the rest, I have no interest in labeling people into petty little tribal buckets. I don't care what you call yourself.

That said, the amount of effort you are expending trying to undermine my opinion by personal attacks and misdirection strongly suggests you find my beliefs threatening, but lack either the evidence or the intellectual capabilities to produce a counterargument.

Finally, of course you are angered. On what other basis can you label my comments "inflammatory"?

The post I replied to was, in part, a (poorly worded) justification of the need for "men's rights advocates," and that is the part I chose to reply to.

If you're angered by my disagreement, it's not because I'm being inflammatory. I have not engaged in the name-calling you have, nor have I tried to undermine your posts by pretending to be unable to understand them. I have simply stated my honest opinion.

Perhaps you really do have trouble understanding what I'm communicating; if so, my condolences.

But it's more likely that you're simply unprepared for direct challenges, so you avoid the topics at hand and try to score points via misdirection.

Just because you have no response to something doesn't make it trolling.

The men's rights movement as it is should not exist. Not because male inequality is covered by feminist ideals, though it is, but because the "men's rights" movement is largely nothing more than a pretext for men to openly and self-righteously flaunt their anti-woman beliefs.

Men's rights advocacy is, as a movement, pretty much the same thing as the whole "war on Christmas" crap that comes up on right wing TV every year.

It has no legitimacy because it's not legitimate.

Instead it is largely the same old prejudices, finding renewed strength under a thin mask of collective victimhood, desperately clung to.

The comments here are absolutely disgusting. Sure, this service is shallow, and absolutely disrespectful of privacy, etc...

But the amount of faux outrage you're all whipping yourselves into a froth over is really over the top. So much hate and resentment. :(

Oh, and those of you claiming there would be some sort of anti-man frenzy if there was a site targeting similar gossip by men?

It's been done. No outrage. The most prominent example? Facebook.

.... looking for http://getcontinuum.com? :)

A transcript would be nice! But I doubt there's one out there; it took a lot of trawling to find a mirror of the podcast in the first place, unfortunately.

So, it took a while to dig up a working link, but there's a memorable/revealing story I listened to a while ago about a visit to Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty workshop... worth a listen.

mp3 link: http://fancyandawesome.com/cm/?tag=starlee-kine

Original source: The Moth podcast.

(( Spoiler: it goes beyond being merely unflattering towards Blanton, to downright disturbing. ))

Not trying to do anything more than make a side comment, but:

> If she could also make the perfect waffle, that would be desirable, too.

is the sort of casual sexism that I'd love to see less of.

Further... that's what the article was suggesting, too, although without the totalitarian overtones: "We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights."

I disagree.

Your belief that "new jobs take their place" will only remains true so long as increases in demand can keep pace with productivity: Sure, there's more demand out there in the developing world, but demand is finite in a way that productivity increases are not.

If we're not turning that particular corner today, we will someday; and from that point forth, there will be an inexorable decline in employment.

What happens then?

> Why now?

Because increases in consumption are no longer able to keep pace with increased productivity?

> low-level annoyances

... like abusive former partners, death threats, being involuntarily outed, etc etc etc.

Calling these things "low-level annoyances" betrays a deep self-absorption.

Yes indeed; if you want cultural diversity, head on out to the ghettos!

I read the article. Directly before the excerpt you quoted, as related by the same individual, you have the following quotes:

a) "Most of the kids had left", b) "obviously at that point the people who had attacked you guys had run off"

So how, exactly, were the police to arrest the attackers?

> Same thing in today's USA. The mob of teens who broke Emily Guendelsberger's leg could not be arrested because the policemen were afraid of charges of racism.

I don't get it: Arresting/picking up black teenagers in a large city simply because of their skin color would be racist, would it not? Isn't that exactly what the policeman is saying?

Your belief that targeting black teenagers in general would of course lead to the arrest of the specific (unidentified) perpetrators doesn't sound all that likely to me.

An interesting combo, even just as a thought experiment: bitcoin + mental poker. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker)

Wonder if there's a way to distribute a pot that doesn't require trusting a central server?

As a very random anecdote, I attended NYU myself ages ago and while I was not a business student, I did take classes at Stern.

Unless things have changed, the amount of cheating in Stern is astronomical compared to courses from the other schools within NYU: Of course there were cheating problems elsewhere, but nowhere else was it done as brazenly or as part of the shared culture of the student body.

IIRC, if you're really interested in that, you can munge up a bridge w/ Asterisk. Not sure if anyone's SAASing it anymore, though.

I'm not sure you understand me.

To illustrate with an extreme: If we happened to be hard-wired by evolution to be tremendously predisposed towards genocidal behavior, would that make any acts of genocide we commit morally acceptable behavior?

> we are also largely effected by our cognitive and biological biases

I agree completely that these biases exist. However, to use a programming term, our biases are implementation concerns.

Injustice doesn't somehow become otherwise simply because we are predisposed to it; our innate biases don't provide a valid excuse for inaction in the face of moral imperatives.

Of course -- however, the default used to be "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog." There were very few sites, especially online communities, that would require your real name; of those that did, very few of them would require its disclosure to, say, search engine crawlers.

That's becoming the exception.

(edit: minor grammar fix.)

Your basic underlying thesis here is that we are all hard-wired lemmings, slaves to our biology, with limited capacity to adjust our behavior on the basis of reasoned morality.

I reject that thesis. We are not animals. Our evolutionary history does not dictate right and wrong.

While I think privacy and gender issues are incredibly important symptoms, there's a deeper debate being had here:

Will the internet of the future be a place where your persona can generally be isolated from your person? Historically, online spaces were a haven for that type of anonymity.

The trend is firmly in the opposite direction; with good and bad consequences.

> Yes some people do that, but VERY few.

How many TV shows present that reality? Movies? How many advertisements? Popular music? Dare I mention video games?

"Relentless" is a very accurate way to summarize the situation.

If you're interested in thinking about our culture, the correct mirror is the artifacts we produce and consume; not behavior.

An aside: Men may be more likely to be assaulted than women, but you're measuring the wrong thing again. How many men are assaulted solely because of their gender?

Our culture is quite frankly abhorrent to me in how it dehumanizes women. That's an honest opinion; not slander, and it's one formed with ample observations to back it up.

Why equate unemployment with boredom?

Generally: Unless our demand for goods and services can grow at a pace that matches worker productivity as amplified by automation, there eventually simply won't be enough work to be done to keep everyone fed & housed.

This is paradoxical, since our productivity will be at an all-time high. Eventually we'll arrive at some sort of alternative economy but at least in the US there will be some serious unpleasantness along the way.

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the "1950" comment, is all -- making fun of one camp's deep backlash against post-modernism (among many other things).

For an example of the Culture Wars, just scroll back on the front page to the "Dangerous Mr. Khan" article.

As far as the Sokal affair goes, it may or may not have done an excellent job of discrediting people, processes, institutions, writing styles, academic subculture ... but it did and could not touch any ideas.

In fact, you could even say that the Sokal hoax was an excellent validation/demonstration of many postmodern ideas, albeit at the expense of the same people teaching and regurgitating them.