wanorris

Really? Trans people are criminals or even Hitler now? Ouch, that's pretty cold.

I have a lot of trans friends. Just hearing someone use their deadname (a common term in the community) can cause serious emotional pain. Having it broadcast to all their Facebook friends would absolutely be traumatic.

Look, if you don't like trans people or you think it's unreasonable to do them the "special favor" of calling them by their actual name, it's a free country and you are just as entitled to that point of view as you are to hold racist views.

I'm pretty sure that Facebook, on the other hand, would not consider it a positive to be widely known as transphobic. So if they are operating in a way that is hostile to trans people, the obvious options are for them to fix it or for trans people and trans allies to keep publicizing it until it completely blows up in Facebook's face. They would be smarter to just try to fix the problem.

1. Violet Blue has been a reasonably widely published journalist for many years now. Her bylines include CNet and the SF Chronicle, and she's written or edited a couple of dozen books. She writes both about sexuality and technology, and sometimes about the ways in which they overlap.

2. Your reading comprehension has failed you. Several different people at Facebook offered to do her inside special favors and she chose to decline that because she doesn't like that kind of thing either.

The birth certificate was not the only form of ID that person sent. Facebook outed the past name of a transgender person -- that's never ok, and it's a problem taken very seriously in the transgender community.

And yes, if you want, you could say that, well, trans people just shouldn't use Facebook, but given the position Facebook occupies in our society in practice, that's quite a statement.

Just as important, in cases like this, the damage has already been done -- potentially quite serious -- be the time the user might choose to abandon Facebook over the problem.

Forcing trans people to provide a bunch of ID to use the site, outing them to the world, and then saying whoops, sorry, but you can quit the site if you don't like it -- that's not ok.

And your basic attitude seems to be that trans people's own fault for being different from most people, so of course they should expect to see problems or to just stay off of common services if they don't like those problems. This attitude is part of the problem -- basic human empathy seems like it would require a more considerate attitude than that.

I don't really get this complaint. The spectrum of technical investment in your own devices spans all the way from soldering your own boards and implementing custom hardware logic with FPGAs to hacking together your own firmware for hardware you purchased to installing an OS that gives you low level access to being able to run programs you wrote yourself to having to buy all the software from an app store to having a bread machine with 3 buttons on the top that you can press to tell it what to do.

Depending on what you want to do, any of these points on the spectrum can be perfectly valid. Even the bread machine can have you making bread out of scratch ingredients yourself using a recipe you control instead of just buying a loaf of bread at the store.

Doesn't Spotify use DRM? Which is not to say that it's wrong for them to use DRM on music you didn't buy -- that's a different question.

But "only used for music you don't own" isn't the same the same thing as "dead".

I was that way for years. After accumulating a certain number of cubic meters of books (wish this was hyperbole, but it's not), having shelves to put them on so that they're accessible requires a pretty hardcore commitment in terms of the layout and decor of your home, and moving becomes something of a logistic nightmare.

Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.

The way for them to get out of it was to not help write legislation that their customers would consider completely toxic. In general, this is rarely a wise business move.

They use completely different technologies with incompatible handsets and cell towers, so a Sprint/T-Mo merger is likely to be worth considerably less together than separate.

> There is really no such thing as too big to fail.

Yes, actually there is. Too big to fail means that when an institution fails, its default will cause a cascade failure of other institutions relying on it -- and still other institutions relying on those -- including otherwise healthy ones whose only mistake was being integrated with the world economy.

This can ripple through the whole economy and work in tandem with the Paradox of Deleveraging to effectively cause a GDP death spiral. (See also: Great Depression.)

You're right -- the erasure of straight male domestic violence survivors is not an example of heterosexism, it's gender essentialism. It involves the assumption that being male means being stereotypically masculine, and being female means being stereotypically feminine. (Heterosexism occurs when domestic violence survivors in same-sex relationships are erased because the relationships don't follow the heteronormative male/female dynamic.)

> The problem is that talking about gender privilege has taken place entirely in a discussion about sexism rather than a discussion about society in general.

I agree. Because the first waves of gender studies were "women's studies", it made it much harder to discuss topics outside the basic men-oppress-women dynamic of sexism. And even as gay and lesbian studies became more prominent, there wasn't nearly as much work being done on gender roles as they apply to heterosexual males. Most of the work I've seen that's really applicable to the problem is being done either (to a lesser degree) in studying masculinity and femininity in the context of butch and femme lesbian roles, or from a trans* point of view. Some trans men, in particular, claim the right to be considered men and still be feminine or androgynous, and they can approach the topic without the stigma attached to either gay or straight cis men when they broach the topic outside of narrow venues like drag performances. Hopefully this will be the precursor to constructively reconsidering the entire topic and a general fight against that stigma.

There is more and more work being done in social justice circles now to degender the assumptions in discussions about rape and domestic violence. Many members of earlier generations of feminists found it easy to dismiss talk about problems like domestic violence that affected heterosexual men as unimportant, which is obviously unfortunate. But as gay, lesbian, and transgender people gain visibility within the social justice community, it becomes more obvious that this is based on gender essentialist, heterosexist assumptions that are simply not valid.

Of course, this doesn't change the fact that most resources for rape and domestic violence are geared toward women. This is a problem not only for straight men, for for gay men and transgender people as well. There's a lot more work that has to be done in this area, and if you feel strongly abut it, I would strongly encourage you to get involved.

> None of this captured by your list though so I suppose it's irrelevant.

They're not on a male privilege checklist. A catalog of gender differences would be a different list.

> When is the last time you read an article about leveling the field of female privilege? In theory the idea of privilege is inclusive but in practice it's not.

I think most feminists would discount the idea of "female privilege" per se as a false equivalence similar to a hypothetical "black privilege".

> "Weakness" in females signals a socialized response to reach out and support. "Weakness" in males signals a socialized response to stigmatize.

The fact that there is a societal preference toward masculinity, which underlies many of your points, is definitely a topic that gets brought up in feminist/gender studies circles. This is why it's comparatively okay for women to be tomboys and such, and highly frowned upon for men to be effeminate or show what are considered feminine traits.

Many feminists call this general societal enforcement of gender roles part of patriarchy, and seek to remove the stigma associated with violating these roles. So if that's something you're interested in, there's no reason you can't find common cause.

This is a pretty good starter inventory for what feminists mean when they talk about "male privilege".

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/

You may disagree with the analysis behind the list's construction, but I see little if anything on that list that obviously gets crossed off the list by virtue of being a geek.

Social justice theorists also talk about different kinds of privileges, so the idea that geeks have male privilege does not exclude the possibility that there is another form of privilege that they lack that others have. Some other types of privilege that are sometimes considered are white privilege, class privilege, heterosexual privilege, etc. You can have male privilege but not white privilege, etc.

In other words, privilege isn't simply a binary have/don't have thing such that geeks have it and women don't.

You could make an argument that there is some sort of gender-stereotypical privilege that, say, football players share in but geeks do not. Is that where you were going?

> Give most gaming girls a choice, and they will CHOOSE to dress their characters in slutty--or as they call it, "sexy cute"--clothing.

I think there's a subtle point being lost here. Female characters designed to appeal to women look different than female characters designed to appeal to men. For example, if the characters are designed to appeal to women, you can pretty much guarantee that they will not look like they have had basketballs implanted in their chests.

Likewise, massive male characters built out of a mountain of muscle are designed primarily to appeal to male power fantasies. Relatively few women will find this especially attractive, and male characters designed to appeal to more (straight) women would be built more along the lines of Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds.

This is a tough seat to go after because it's a reliable Republican district (around 2/3) and Smith has held his seat since way back in 1986. He's extremely entrenched, so the Republicans aren't going to be particularly tolerant of a challenger (edit: in the Primary), and the Democrats probably can't win the district.

I'm not sure who exactly lives in that weirdly-outlined subset of Austin, but unless something dramatic has changed since I lived there, his segment of San Antonio is dominated by traditionalist Chamber of Commerce types. His chunk of Austin might be an exception, but I would expect it will be pretty hard to get much traction in the rest of his district based on tech issues.

Once you start down that road, it comes to mind that estimates generally say that something like 50% of all IT projects fail.

Hmm....

> "If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization."

I think this is actually a pretty reasonable statement, as long as it includes the caveat "on average" or "most of the time". Just as Down's syndrome isn't a huge problem for a population -- as long as it stays relatively uncommon.

A population comprised largely of people with Down's syndrome would likely be poorly adapted, and that's probably the case with a population comprised largely of gay people or transgender people as well. (Obviously, this is complete speculation, so I could be utterly mistaken.)

But yes, a population with a certain percentage of gay people could be better adapted just for having them, or alternatively, it could be better adapted because the same genetic diversity that leads a percentage of the population to be gay could be desirable in other ways.

As people who have been in certain kinds of accidents or been treated for certain kinds of medical conditions can tell you, having a certain set of body parts is not a requirement for being a member of either gender.

The overwhelming majority of people are born with a certain set of chromosomes, a set of parts between their legs, and an idea in their head that all agree with one another on what gender they are. It's a large enough majority that it's easy to think that these are the same thing, because for most people, they are.

But for trans people, these things disagree, and the gender that they think of themselves as in their heads wins. Since they are being treated by the world at large as something they don't consider themselves to be, they take steps to correct how the world views them by transitioning. Given money, access to treatment, and other constraints, this may include surgery, hormones, etc. But even in the absence of these things, they can still be trans people who know what their true gender is.

Given that they're identical twins, I think it's also pretty clear that this case undercuts the argument that it's all just genetics as well.

Oh, and "decided he'd rather be a girl" is generally considered offensive to trans people. She believes that she's always been a girl, and did not "decide" anything of the kind. Her physical characteristics were simply misleading regarding her true gender.

And yet there are plenty of kids who are gender atypical, sometimes in a few ways, sometimes in many ways, sometimes such that they identify with the opposite gender.

The reality is not that there are hard categories of things that we can simply say a person's brain is "hard wired" to be either A or B, but that there are clusters and statistical probabilities. Some people are one or more standard deviations removed from what we think of as "gender typical."

There's definitely an element of truth to the "hard wiring" thing -- you can't change a child's personality and enthusiasms simply by wishing it so or trying to "train" them. But the picture is far more complicated than you seem to think.

Absent a 60-member supermajority, passing a bill in the Senate requires both parties to at least agree to let it come to a vote. Passing a bill in the House does not require it to be palatable to the other party, the Senate, or the President, nor is it required for it to have any realistic hope of ever becoming law.

I didn't really mean for this to be an unpleasantly partisan post, just a statement of facts about the situation in Washington as I see it. The current Democrats in power have many flaws, but I see no reason to think their goal is to avoid action, because a lack of action would provide no benefit to them.

To argue that the House has genuinely tried to get things done during this session, I would think you would have to assent to one of the following two things:

1. Even with a divided Congress, it is not required for both parties to work together in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.

2. The current House of Representatives has genuinely tried to work closely together with Senate Democrats and the President in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.

Do you believe one of these things?

The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it.

I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.

I think it is true both that politics were more substantive 30 years ago and that many 19th century presidential campaigns were incredibly nasty.

There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.

But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.

In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.

Tumblr is hardly Google or Facebook, and they were able to generate massive grassroots political response, mainly through a banner. Any kind of coordinated action by major internet sites could generate the kind of response that I doubt Congress has ever seen before.

> Protesters vanish without a trace

Didn't that just pass the Senate?

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

U.S. Constitution, 5th Amendment

I'm not saying that the iPhone is anything other than an unqualified success, but the idea that Apple didn't really want that market share anyway seems a little off.

Apple seemed quite happy to have 70% share or whatever it was with iPods. They've also offered cheaper models whenever they needed to to try and address more of the market -- for example, the iPod Shuffle, or the free-with-contract iPhone 3GS. The Apple TV certainly wasn't priced only to appeal to the high-end market.

I think the article makes quite clear that it is primarily Nokia and RIM that have been devastated, but I don't think it's all inappropriate to look at the way Android has been successful at pulling share away from these companies as something that they have done better at (from a market share standpoint) than Apple.

And depending on where you got your summaries from, the accuracy would likely be much, much higher.

Your point is well taken, but I can't help feeling that the original post and this entire discussion are ultimately worthless without specifics and examples regarding the test what the original author was complaining about.

Yes, we should confirm our biases with studies, but at an even more basic level, we don't even know what we're arguing about here.

So go register hidemyporn.com or something and get to work.

For bonus points: secretly build both types of services and sell to both sides in an arms race. You could even offer an extra premium tier of each that defeats the non-premium tier of the other.