Marwa Elselehdar: 'I was blamed for blocking the Suez Canal'
bbc.com
bbc.com
If you read the article it then says she was the first female to be accepted to Egypt’s merchant navy school and in the second to last sentence says she is currently the rank of fist mate though will be a Captain soon if she passes her exam. She is also clearly wearing the rank of fist mate in the photo billing her as Egypt’s first captain.
This is why people have lost faith in the news. They can’t even get a basic fact right and manage to contradict themselves in the same story no less.
It's a bit confusing. From another linked article[0]
> “One has to spend many years at sea, studying and taking exams before reaching this level.
> I graduated in 2013 and got an MBA, then I was promoted from second officer to first officer, and now I am a captain,” she added.
Still, I think this is... minutiae compared to the larger issue of smear campaign targeting oppressed classes of people. Perhaps she can be acting captain before getting the official rank?
The point is that the antidote to distasteful fake news isn’t good intentioned fake news it’s factual news. So wether this error was unintended or driven by their own biases to write an overwhelmingly positive story to counter the false one it manages to perpetuate the problem.
The antidote to a bad typo is the anecdote of a good typo.
At least here in Germany it only take ~3 years of sea service to progress from officer of the watch to master - but no one will entrust you with a major cargo or passenger vessel with that little experience.
It's a very good thing that the media was more cautious IMO. And conspiracy theories don't need anybody feeding them, you have armies of losers online doing nothing but making that stuff up 24/7.
I don't think there's anything "strange" going on (a rather conspiratorial wording in and of itself IMO), it's just that it's very hard to place the blame with the information currently available, especially since all the first party sources have a very strong incentive to push a certain narrative.
The Costa Concordia on the other hand was much more clear cut and you had the extremely embarrassing recording of the coast guard telling the captain to return to the ship and him cowardly refusing to do so. There's no such thing here as far as I know.
Referring to "them" like this is partially what feeds them. If you are interested.
I'd much rather empathize with this captain who was targeted solely because she's a woman. That seems like a much better use of my time than caring about keyboard warriors on twitter or 4chan.
I live in a very "purple" area and even though I am "blue" I get along with "red" people easily by, I dunno, not calling them "deplorables" when they say something that offends me.
It's up to each of us if we want to link our identity with a zealous cause and never back down because we're afraid of social penalties from our in-group, or if we want to actually learn how to get along. But if you go around calling people "losers", you should consider how that might be adding to the problem you're trying to solve.
Edit: btw I agree 100% with everything you've said except for the "armies of losers" phrasing. That's all I'm trying to communicate to you. That there may have been a more constructive way to get your (correct) point across.
Playing the victim is a competitive sport online, suffice to see the outrage caused by "literally whos" who post some silly extreme take on some social network. It then gets posted and reposted everywhere to rile the troups.
My point is, if a nobody like myself calling a bunch of people "losers" online is enough to motive some of these people to change their behaviours, IMO they were just looking for an excuse to do so. In truth in my experience they're not arguing that in good faith, they're just cherry picking in order to "both-sides" the issue.
I think it's a waste of energy to try to build bridges with these types of people, they're not interesting in honest debate, they just espouse the form of a civil debate in order to bog you down. So I just explicitly reject them without engaging, if you're the type of person who likes to spread disinformation like the one discussed in TFA then you're a loser in my book and I move on with my life.
Note that I'm not singling any particular faction here, while I do think that the right wing is definitely employing these tactics at a much greater scale, the left is definitely not above them either. It's standard internet discussion tactics, unfortunately.
I cherish HN because it's one of the only relatively mainstream online forums I know of where these types of discussions don't turn completely one-sided. It's far from perfect but places like reddit, facebook, twitter or 4chan are effectively lost to civil discourse as far as I'm concerned.
Again, my only point, is that your idea that calling them losers will do anything except trigger a double-down is hurting your own cause.
Also, HN is a niche echo chamber similar to those others you mention, in many ways.
This kind of thing happens regardless of whether the media correctly identifies the person(s) responsible, especially if the scapegoat people run with fits into preexisting prejudices (e.g. nobody in the country questioned it when the German police blamed the murders of Turkish minority business owners on "probably the Turkish mafia" until it became clear they were part of a terrorism plot of the _National Socialist Underground_, a white nazi group).
It's also worth questioning what good identifying "the person" responsible in the media would do. If anyone directly involved faces criminal charges, we'll probably find out once they've been found guilty. But anyone involved in software development should know that saying "this person did it" when doing a post mortem on a catastrophic incident like this is not a productive use of anyone's time unless the goal is just to have someone to sacrifice in order to avoid addressing the underlying problems that led to the incident.
Also, while the Canal was blocked for days, the ship did not sustain any critical damage and the cargo seems to have remained safe and secure. The captain of the Costa Concordia on the other hand killed 32 people and sunk his ship. The two incidents are hardly comparable.
The white media would have covered fascist France run by dictatorial Macron differently if it was say in Russia or China or Bolivia:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/leading-french-civil-libert...
When it came to light that four out of five of the navigators on board were female, the results were fairly predictable[2][3].
Will be interesting to read the final accident report once it's released.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNoMS_Helge_Ingstad_(F313)
[2]: https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/kvinner-henges-ut-etter-hel...
[3]: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/11/22/gender-pol...
>Norway’s Ministry of Defence has not yet reported whether they plan to lift the frigate from where it sunk to repair the vessel.
hilarious
Indeed. Also part of the reason the Navy has sued both the manufacturer and the company who vetted the design plans[1].
Time will tell if that pans out for the Navy or not.
[1]: https://militaryleak.com/2020/11/08/norway-sues-dnv-certific...
My cousin is a quantity surveyor. Her mother wanted her to be a nurse and made a huge drama over what would she do all day discussing with construction workers, but there she is, also rising two children.
https://www.ted.com/talks/yasheng_huang_does_democracy_stifl...
- Ships large navigating the canal normally do so through pilots specialized in it provided by whoever operates the canal. And while the captain still is in control he/she delegates the control to this pilots under his/here supervision (as they are still responsible for the ship I think). So even if the captain is responsible he/she wasn't "really" navigating the ship...
- There was a unusual large sand storm, it is possible that things had been 100% outside of the control of anyone navigating the ship. Just consider a causality chain like sand-storm => engine failure(cause by it) => wind drives ship onto shore before restart of engines is possible.
So it's completely pointless to name anyone human involved until the actual causality chain is properly investigates.
A thing which tbh. should be done much more in other cases, too.
Citation needed. HN is going down the drain with low quality comments like these. Identities are probably hidden to prevent Western media from spinning a bullshit narrative about how the crew nationality was a factor in the accident and get more clicks with clickbait headlines.
However the reality we see is that the News doesn't think so. So what, in this case, is different?
Or look at the reporting about the airliner that crashed in Indonesia earlier this year: While the pilots name is public knowledge, its also not really been part of the reporting because it's not especially relevant yet and there is nothing interesting to say about them. (Apparently the voice recorder has been found, so if there is anything interesting on there expect that to change)
Different countries/societies choose this trade-off differently.
so even if this was human error, it's not likely that the actual captain was responsible. but i can also imagine that a guide, while familiar with the local conditions was less familiar with the ship itself, a ship that large, which has a different response time than smaller ships. this alone should increase the risk for innocent mistakes. so i find it hard to believe that there should be anyone to blame.
However, you're wrong about ship size being a problem. A suez canal pilot is guaranteed to be very familiar with container ships of the suezmax size, specially considering that to become a pilot, you have to have been a captain yourself.
It'll be interesting how it plays out, but the captain is ultimately responsible and can overrule the 'guide'. So the captain is not off the hook here.
but you are right. we'll just have to wait until we know more about what really happened
No doubt. This is going to take years to sort out. The Egyption government has a lot of power here because they can simply bar Evergreen Marine from crossing the Suez and ostensibly destroy them as a business ... but then they wouldn't get anything either. Most likely it will be quietly settled in a way that all sides save face, especially if the appointed guides made a mistake.
But by your logic, couldn't one argue that reaction time plays a rather large role? If you are navigating a narrow canal with thin margins for error, wouldn't you need good timing to start a manuever at a certain point so that the ship is able to respond by the time that you need to truly adjust it's position? If some sort of weather event/anomaly caused an unexpected change of course, wouldn't reaction time be even more critical because you have less time to make a correction if you don't act immediately?
i don't have any experience with ships larger than a small sailing yacht myself and i guess, either you see a problem coming, then you have enough time to react, or you don't see it, and then it's to late either way.
The ship size is also common for the canal, pilots are trained especially to be able to route such big ships through the canal.
But it still likely a chain of bad coincidences which you can't really blame on anyone. Including a unusual strong sandstorm and an engine failure as far as I can tell.
It literally might have been sand storm => engine failure due to sandstorm (air intake getting clogged up or similar) => wind moves ship onto shore without anyone being able to do anything against it. Not I said it might. It needs a proper investigation as far as I can tell.
I think even on this site there was a link documenting the crazy amount of bribery needed to easily transit.
“At the time of the Suez blockage, she was working as a first mate, in command of the Aida IV, hundreds of miles away”
I think being “hundreds of miles away” qualifies as “she wasn’t at the helm of the ship”.
Two lines: at the time of grounding Marwa Elselehdar were in charge of ship name. The Evergreen was under command of captain name and pilot name.
Am I the only one wondering why these two lines are not publishers yet?
It doesn't matter whether the correlation is real because the narrative feeds into existing stereotypes and anyone peddling it confronted with evidence to the contrary will just say that while it may be factually untrue, it still carries some underlying truth and that's what matters.
This is just a microcosm of why "fake news" has become so widespread on social media.
- empathize with a victim of misogyny
- attack sexism as an eternal bugaboo
- virtue signal our personal swellness for fighting sexism
The real power of Woke propaganda is that we can transmute anyone into saint- or hitler-hood at will.
Not sure we can or should read too much into it.
Men pose higher per-km risk to others than women for all modes except buses, as well as being over-represented among users of the most dangerous vehicles.
(From abstract)
The distribution skews at the extremes and that's where the common perception that women can't drive comes from (and probably also the fact that men kill more people in aggregate). Actual data is not going to dissolve this perception because you see it every time you get outside.
I'll make an example of how this works between well intentioned people:
My wife is an excellent driver. We live in small town, in a country where infrastructure predates cars. Roads are very narrow, often on steep inclines, and flanked by tall stone walls. My wife regularly complains of large SUVs stuck unable to maneuver. On her account, they are almost always driven by women. Her reaction is invariably: "if you can't drive, just get a nornal-sized car!".
As this happens again and again, with caring frequency etc, occasionally we talk about it ans wonder about this pattern and what may cause it, or whether it is real. My wife's theory is that some women feel unsafe in a car and solve the problem by buying a bigger car instead of getting some practice.
And here we are spreading crappy anecdata. But that's life, that's how human interact.
Now sure, the smaller percentage may still add up to a significant number. But people do a crap job of limiting their mental tallies to only the people they actually verify. If they assume someone is say drunk their going to add that as evidence even if they never actually have any direct evidence for drunkenness/age/gender/ethnicity etc.
Anyway, as a simple test try and count how many cars you can see next time you go for a drive, how many people’s gender you can infer, and how many you can positively identify based on their looks. It’s significantly safer to try this as a passenger.
Might be interesting to try, but I think in a situation where I notice a bad driver I'm much more likely to identify their gender than in a random passing car.
But I live in a comparatively small Austrian city riddled with traffic lights, weird intersections, crosswalks, and way too much traffic in general, so I get ample opportunity to look at slow moving cars. If you're American your culture around cars is probably very different and that might explain why we seem to have a different intuition about this.
On reddit, this style of hypothesis adjustment was common about weed until it was legalized.
You: > From personal experience...most...almost always...usually
c’mon, try harder
Race. Gender.
I see this pattern where you define a class so broad any proposition becomes a truism, and productive discussion becomes impossible.
The media have started to act in the best interest of their clan vs society as a whole. The Media has fragmented and serves their niches but not society as a whole.
So talking about the media as a whole is possible without having to identify tribes within.
I'm not saying you are not making a point - it's just a unnecessarily broad point that is difficult to discuss constructively.
Also, the media does not exist outside of society. The media sucks because our culture in general sucks.
Same thing with politicians. We don't get shitty politicians out of nowhere. They come from the people, they optimize for what people want, and people vote for them.
It can be tempting for others to try to call this an example of the Prisoner's Dillema, but the Prisoner's Dillema doesn't apply because there isn't even a marginal upside to "defecting" when your counterpart "defects". We're personally better off when we choose to not participate in this stuff, regardless of what other people do, and we're all more better off as more people choose to not participate.
Jokes are (almost?) always political because it only works if you share similar views about what the world is like and how it should be. In this case the joke is that women are unfit to be captain, the setup is that "they" eventually "let" a woman be captain and the punchline is that she went on to cause one of the most economically disastrous incidents in recent history (ba-dum-tiss). If you don't think women are unfit to be captain (or at least "intrinsically less fit" or whatever) the punchline doesn't work.
You seem to have a rather linear view of humor. People laugh at (and enjoy) comedians they disagree with all the time - a well crafted joke can be considered well crafted and funny by many people, regardless of the target or the listener’s personal beliefs.
Having watched hours and hours of comedy roasts and heckler takedowns on youtube over the years, I just don't see this in practice. The butt of the joke never gets it.
The problem with shock humor is that it can still be funny to people who agree with it and can help normalizing the views it's meant to make fun of. You can see this play out in real time on websites like 4chan that always shift from "transgressive humor" to genuine far-right talking points.
If the joke is "women are bad drivers", you either have to agree with the premise (so the joke is likely about the humorously exaggerated extent to which this is confirmed by an anecdote), or the joke is that someone holds this view while presenting evidence to the contrary (so the joke is that the character doesn't understand he's wrong), or the joke is that the view is extremely inappropriate and doesn't follow at all from what is laid out before (so the joke is that the character is so absurdly bigoted they just bring up their prejudices all the time).
Examples for the three structures would be:
1. <statement that Egypt now has a female captain> <statement that the Suez Canal was blocked by a massive ship>
2. <statement about female drivers presenting them positively> (optional: <statement about one minor data point that could be construed negatively>) <assertion that women are bad drivers>
3. <statement about some scenario involving a woman that could be a strained analogy for driving a vehicle> <assertion that women are bad drivers>
There are probably a few more of these patterns, but they still work by presenting a position that either agrees with your views, follows logically from them or intentionally contradicts them.
Do you have to force people into roles they don't want just to create a statistic to suggest equality?
And if so, how do you account for the fact that a) people working in the industries themselves cite that there is work to do on gender diversity and b) that the disparity remains even when you control for manual/heavy physical work (i.e you account only for people working in desk / design based AEC roles)?
Suppose I'm a doctor/refuse collector, but really wanted to be a ship's captain, am I 'behind'. I guess it's that there's an implicit hierarchy of roles implied .. if I'm ship's engineer, but really want to be engineer, am I 'behind' the captain?
I just don't know what's really meant by this: is it about competitive roles, is it about access, is it about status. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I don't know that the parent means by 'behind'.
It seems all the responses have assumed I did know what they meant and had taken a particular view on it.
FWIW I'm not in the slightest denying that in some countries women/men are excluded from (or find it more difficult to get) some roles for sexist reasons.
I'm aware there are disparities in all areas (in UK), one of the biggest is teaching - very few men are able to get roles in primary (5-11yo) teaching. In other areas it seems you're more likely to get a job if qualified. Where I work women are being offered jobs at about equal rates to men (higher rates of women, actually), but the pool of qualified people is heavily male as women don't choose to take the degrees that feed into that pool. None of this proves anything, except that I know senior management were lauding the offering of more jobs to women, as opposed to just to qualified people regardless of sex [I can't cite this, internal stats, sorry].
I'm interested in your (b) do you have stats to cite on that?
you are assuming that there are not many women in this field because they don't want to be. but the reality is that there are not many women because they are not welcome. 50% parity is not the goal here. (though in some fields like teaching children, it actually should be) but the removal of all barriers so that all women (or men, if that's the case) that want to work in this field and are qualified, can.
Male teachers are nevertheless underrepresented, due to other biases.
And clearly there is some issue of implicit bias, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place.
You may never get to 50;50 but there is no reason for the disparity to be as large as it is - any more than women (or any any other immutable characteristic) don’t self select not to be CEOs or similar.
And articles like this tell you you don’t have to look too far to find out what the real reason is.
Networks are local. Speaking and making negating cases based on far-away, low-connectivity areas makes little sense and serves no one except those favouring inaction or an abundance of caution (for whatever reasons).
Anyhow, I'm saying the above respectfully. Not attacking you as a person, but your way of seeking perspective i feel quite opposed to. I'm content to be in amicable disagreement though, and have no sense that you're compelled to agree with me
I honestly don't know if this reply represents sanity at all. Literally nothing in the reply even appears to relate to a single word I said. The entire reply appears to be based on a completely different post?
EDIT: ok, against my better judgement, i'll engage and try to communicate better -- the leap where i may have jumped off your train of thought (and it was a jump, but is always very evident to me) is this: i disagree that it's productive to use a relationship between men in china (compared to women in America?) as some sort of measure with which to determine actions that those in other countries should take. I mean this in regards to repairing relationships with women (in the "network of relationships" sense). It's a trap and a red herring to think that way with those comparisons. To continue with that way of rationalizing: if there's some minimum trough of ethics anywhere, we'd always lose energy to do better elsewhere (outside that minimum) until we somehow drag that far-removed minimum up. And since that minimum is likely far away, non-local and hard to affect, then operating this way is a recipe for the least productive mode of using our limited energies for change. This isn't a "women's rights" point I'm making, but about anyone affecting change on anything.
Comparison of how women are treated in their local communities [elsewhere] with how men are treated in China is completely irrelevant and counterproductive imho. Unless someone doesn't want to do anything about it or have responsibility put on them, and wishes to paint a blanket rationale for that -- in which case it's a helpful framing. (Ps, it's totally ok to not work on these things. Life is busy. But it feels particularly unhelpful to rationalize it with weird intentional logic.)
I'm a very network-centric thinker, so this is how I speak and process (at least on HN, if not in real life)
Again, despite you not receiving my message well before, I state again: I say the above kindly, and not with any sort of "argumentative" or "gotcha" style of engagement. I tried to state these as my beliefs, and not some truth of the universe, though maybe i slipped in my language a few times * shrug * Anyhow, hope you're well
I would charge that your "network centricism" is a buzzword to help you rationalize ignoring bad things in our world. I would charge that it appears to be nothing more than "Completely ignore things you can't change", which is a honestly horrific ethos to live by.
"Comparison of how women are treated in their local communities [elsewhere] with how men are treated in China is completely irrelevant and counterproductive imho"
It's only irrelevant if Chinese people are irrelevant. Sorry to state hard facts, but this comparison is only irrelevant if the plight of the Chinese person is irrelevant.
To you, maybe.
I don't take offense to how you write, I think you use 100 words where 15 would work, and I think you enjoy the concept of ideas more than thinking them through to their endpoints. I amount all of this response to nothing more than justifying not giving even 1% of thought to the plight of people who are oppressed in the world. The highest IQ "Out of sight, out of mind" I've ever witnessed.
I think you're clearly smarter than me, but I think you have some very immoral ideas. I don't mean to offend, I just think it's shocking how one can compartmentalize so efficiently that you think it's a "red herring" to bring up real oppression in the world because, basically, you can't do anything about it. Reality isn't a red herring and to even suggest that real situations happening right here today right now are "red herrings" is just such a feat of smart stupidity to me.
Thanks for replying. But I fear your opinion is why it's so easy for genocide's like the one happening there to happen. Out of sight out of mind, it's a red herring and trap to think about it!
Women here can run for president, own newspapers, vote and own guns and property. That's more free than most people these days.
We should celebrate that best of all time freedom for women. Never in history have women been as equal and empowered as right now and right here.
We should care more about our chinese and other brothers and sisters who live an oppressed life of authoritarian rule.
All people deserve what american women have, and all Americans deserve more than we've achieved, and american women deserve more. All of these can be true.
'It could always be worse' is an agent of the status-quo.
This place maybe the least-worst, but we can still strive for actually good.
Edit: you're completely right that we should balance our efforts domestically with our efforts universally. The latter is unfortunately a much more intricate web to unweave than the relatively simple issues we've got here. It sucks.
win some, loose some. not really helpful to compare that.
But I'll take your word for it, perhaps there are american women who would trade their right to vote and speak freely in exchange for more of their gender at work with them
More manufactured outrage..m How's that working out for you?