Interesting Links for 17-08-2016
Women Athletes Gave Up Gonads And More To Continue Olympic Competition
(tags: women testosterone mutilation OhForFucksSake olympics sports )
Nice breakdown of costs and profits on a Kickstarter novel
(tags: kickstarter business publishing CrowdFunding viaTheFerrett )
My favourite commentary on No Man's Sky
(tags: games funny video )
How to lie
( Read more... )
1. Funny that you posted the cartoon about statistics and then, a few lines down, a somewhat alarmist article about BPA being "linked" to anxiety.
2. This is something I've wanted to say for a while: Your tag "OhForFucksSake" makes me grind my teeth. As if you're standing arms crossed and tapping your feet impatiently, waiting for the world to catch up to your enlightened state of moral superiority.
Bigotry is essentially the opposite of the belief that rational, intelligent people can disagree about all kinds of things. Don't you think, for example, that a rational, intelligent person could, without any malice, argue cogently in favor of capping testosterone levels in female athletes?
If you are merely venting frustration or concern about what's going on in a given link, you should come up with a tag that communicates your feelings accurately. Otherwise you just come off as a bigot.
Meanwhile, thanks for posting interesting links so consistently. I sincerely do enjoy and get value from reading your lists.
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No it isn't. In many cases, bigotry *is* the belief that rational, intelligent people can disagree about things -- like for example the humanity of people of different races.
"Don't you think, for example, that a rational, intelligent person could, without any malice, argue cogently in favor of capping testosterone levels in female athletes?"
s/capping testosterone levels/forcing people to choose between genital mutilation and infertility or giving up their career. And no, anyone who forces women to make that choice is utterly, utterly, obscenely, evil.
It's not bigotry, and your opinion that Andrew "come[s] off as a bigot" is not one that anyone who *isn't* an anon using a throwaway account has ever expressed, because it's an utterly absurd one.
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Bigotry is all about refusal to hear and give thoughtful consideration to the other side of an argument. Most dictionaries characterize this as a stubborn and intolerant dedication to one's own opinion. Bigotry is NOT "whatever you find objectionable."
Instead of making an inverted "no true Scotsman" argument about who I am and why I might comment here, please consider the possibility that another person might perceive some of what Andrew says differently than you do.
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I generally read the tag as an immediate reaction to some sort of news/statement/study. As in one can in the first instance only state 'Oh for fuck's sake!'. The handy thing about Ducker's links is that some of them are just for the pretty pictures/interesting thing, while others are to think about, and--perhaps--engage others in conversation about them. Often an expert or at least a somewhat informed layman will help set the record straight when the content of a link is wrong or misrepresented, and this sometimes happens with the OFFS tag.
I'm seriously confused how you conflate the tag with bigotry. If it was 'GoFuckYourself' or 'FuckingDipshitsAtItAgain,BrothersAndSisters'., sure. But, um, yeah, really scratching my head here.
FWIW, to me this article highlights one of many problems about competitive sports and the lengths organisations and people will go to 'succeed'. I personally find the forced or coerced body mutilation arisen to circumvent a rule abhorrent, as well as the stigmatising of androgynous athletes.
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Why bubble up an irrational knee-jerk response? That's noise, not signal, and is usually discouraged in other contexts. The female athletes article, for example, is actually pretty even-toned despite the clickbait headline, and it'd have been nice to get a sense of that from the tags. Instead, we got "clickbait headline" + "Get a load of this evil craziness! When will they ever learn, amIrite??"
I'm not sure how to be any clearer about why I consider the tag bigoted. It's like I said: it conveys a kind of impatience, waiting for the rest of the savage brutes to catch up to one's enlightened position of moral superiority. That is an unintellectual stance, taken by people who are more committed to their own opinions than to truth.
Though, I'm starting to realize most people these days don't use "bigoted" the way it was defined in dictionaries when I was growing up. Nowadays it seems like a lot of people take bigoted to mean a particular animosity against women, racial minorities, homosexuals, etc. I'm personally not happy with that (very politicized) linguistic evolution, but I'm not interested in fighting a battle over words here, so if it helps you could just swap in the term "closed minded" or "arrogant" anywhere I wrote bigoted (though those are softer than what I'd like to be able to convey).
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If I want to express that I think pushing people into chopping bits of themselves off so that the can take part in a competition is a vile, horrific, act then I'm going to do so.
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Obviously! I'm not the internet police, and I'm not asking you to change or even hide your opinion. You allow comments and I'm using them to provide feedback, suggesting a change in tone from
- assuming malicious intent behind something you don't like
- positing yourself as obviously morally superior
to
- accurately reflecting the tone of the article you linked to
- accurately framing your response as a statement of emotion rather than a judgmental assessment.
The purpose of this change would be to help reduce, at least in one tiny corner of the universe, the amount of blind hostility flying around out there. You strike me as a thoughtful person who might be down with that goal.
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And I don't believe that morals are anything more than a kind of opinion. So none are superior to any other kind, because that concept seems ridiculous to me. However, this doesn't stop me preferring the world some ways to others, and doing what I can to influence the world towards what I would like.
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Well like I said, it connotes a sense of waiting impatiently for the rest of the world to catch up to your position of moral superiority. There is of course an emotional dressing there, but the core message, to my eyes anyway, is the moral superiority part. ("Oh for fuck's sake" is the kind of thing I might yell at my router when my internet's acting up: I have a standard it's not living up to.)
So, your own beliefs about morals don't come across from the tag, but I'll get into that more in a response to a different comment of yours below. (I'll put a * there.)
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(The comment has been removed)
Linguistically, and as it is commonly used, the phrase connotes a judgment about some object of anger/frustration. E.g., somebody or some thing isn't acting right and therefore is causing problems.
Like if you stub your toe on the edge of your bed, you might yell "Oh for fuck's sake" to nobody in particular but you're really kinda yelling it at your bed for being in your way, or at yourself for being clumsy. It only works because your bed isn't supposed to be in your way, and you're not supposed to be clumsy.
When Andrew uses the phrase, let's say for this article about female athletes' hormone levels, he's kinda yelling "Oh for fuck's sake" at the IAAF, because they acted in a way he considers vile/horrific.
There are 3 ways to respond to someone who does something you detect as vile/horrific (abbreviate as "evil"). I listed these at the bottom of another comment, but I'll duplicate them here:
1. Get out there and destroy the evil;
2. Acknowledge that the detection of evil could be a false positive, assume most people aren't trying to be evil, and expend energy trying to get a better understanding of where they are coming from;
3. Expend energy signaling to others what side of the evil you're on while revealing it isn't serious enough for you to expend energy on #1.
Really, there's another one too:
4. Acknowledge your emotional reaction to the evil but don't expend energy either judging it or trying to understand it.
Andrew's tag is #3 through and through. My original suggestion was that he change it to something like #4.
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(The comment has been removed)
Yes, on both counts, and I appreciate it. :)
I agree, there is value in having personality and moral principles come across, even just from the tags. I think there's a way to do that, however, without implying one's moral superiority and assuming malicious intent in one's opponents. As I said:
"If you are merely venting frustration or concern about what's going on in a given link, you should come up with a tag that communicates your feelings accurately."
Just off the top of my head, this could be something like "ThisMakesMeMad", "MakesMeConcerned", etc. Even a tag that more objectively summarizes the situation could still convey one's own values, for example "MoralHazard".
At the end of the day though, I also think it's worth considering whether having your personality come across online is more valuable than reducing the total amount of emotional/intellectual hostility flying around in the universe. I'm making an assumption that most thoughtful people would say the latter is more important, but I recognize that is only an assumption.
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Because I also believe that things change because people point out how awful they are, and inspire themselves (and others) to work to change them. I also think that the ability to sit back and say "Here is an interesting snippet, thousands of people have been rounded up and killed because of their race/religion/gender/taste in music." without being upset about it is a very privileged position which, if anything, perpetuates the situation. Black people don't get to have a clinical position on racism, because it affects them - so for me to sit there and report on racism coldly really does feel like I'm on the wrong side.
(And yes, "OhForFucksSake" is the explosive version of "ThisMakesMeVeryCrossIndeed")
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Let's assume you're right that being able to have a clinical position on, say, racism is a privilege not available to black people. I'm not seeing why that means you shouldn't take advantage of your privilege if you've got it.
For instance, if you can use your clinical position to have a civil and productive dialog with someone who dislikes black people, aren't you BOTH more likely to come out with increased understanding and mutual respect, which can be used to work toward more racial tolerance in practice? Doesn't vilifying and holding the other side at arm's length (intellectually) only fester into increased racial animosity in the long run--not to mention increased hostility between white people which is also not desirable?
Let's say for the sake of argument that my being able to participate in a productive racial dialog is a privilege. If racial tolerance is a goal I support (which it is, by the way), then I have an obligation to use my privilege to try and convert shouting matches into productive dialogs.
*Regarding morality: I'm seeing an incongruity here. You said you have a way you'd prefer the world to be, but if that's anything more than just your humble opinion, then I think you are misrepresenting your views on morality. If calling something awful/vile/horrific isn't just a glib assessment for fun (like ranking your top 10 favorite movies or something) but an actual statement of earnest outrage on your part, then you must believe there really IS evil/immorality in the world. In which case, you are faced with three options when you detect evil:
1. Get out there and destroy the evil;
2. Acknowledge that the detection of evil could be a false positive, assume most people aren't trying to be evil, and expend energy trying to get a better understanding of where they are coming from (this is what I tend to try to do);
3. Expend energy signaling to others what side of the evil you're on while revealing it isn't serious enough for you to expend energy on #1.
[EDIT] BTW, "OhForFucksSake" does not read to me as the explosive version of "ThisMakesMeVeryCrossIndeed" because the latter is explicitly subjective, while the former is implicitly objective. There are more explosive ways to say "This makes me very cross indeed", and that's exactly what I'd love to see you find.
[EDIT 2] Thanks for a great discussion so far. This conversation by itself is proof to me that when two people come together in good faith to discuss something the result is very productive, even if they fundamentally disagree about something.
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