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... )
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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