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> Antartica: Is the harsh conditions and weather actually a form of redlining?
For some people that sounds like an awesome adventure. For others its incomprehensible why anybody would even consider it. And these sort of interests, for both genetic and cultural reasons, are not going to be evenly distributed. It doesn't mean that e.g. hiphop or basketball is excluding non-blacks anymore than death metal and swimming is excluding non-whites.
It’s absolutely incredible that you’re ascribing this as a cultural phenomenon!
As for the sexism angle - yeah I can 1000% percent see being suck in a base for 6 months with nowhere else to go can be an extremely daunting prospect
But moreover yeah, richer families can do more outdoorish activities like mountaineering and that feeds back into the loop of even being interested in something like this.
Programs like ROTC/JROTC also offer countless outdoor opportunities alongside other possibilities for personal enrichment. I'm vehemently antiwar/hegemony, but I think training offered by ROTC/JROTC is extremely valuable for anybody and everybody. It's also completely free.
i can show you plenty of anti-white racism in the crime statistics, especially from people who are ungrateful to be allowed into the greatest countries where they're given better opportunities than 99% of the world population, isn't that crazy?
and all you talk about is exclusion
This does not make sense to me. I've experienced poor treatment from whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays. Should I have a poor opinion of whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays?
It seems a similar leap from her own experience and anecdotal reports from coworkers to tarnish the 700-ish strong male pop of McMurdo as "mediocre."
She is talking from her experience, sure, but she's certainly going well beyond that!
>There’s a phrase I heard tossed around that I think is pretty accurate: Antarctica: Full of badass women and mediocre men.
But even more than epistemology, this is uncivil. Polite society is made up of small restraints for the sake of others. This represents one more crack in that.
If you have to get mad about something, be mad about the guys who decided to behave like assholes. Part of the problem is that when that happens the rest of us don't do anything about it.
Subjective judgements on behavior, from someone who complains that there are too many white scientists.
Pardon me if I take their judgement with a grain of salt.
The entire article is incredibly poorly written, to boot. I was expecting to see a credit card advertisement any second. “Use my referral code and you too can fly to Antarctica for free!”. Actually - the majority of points/credit card referral sites have higher quality writing.
I also charitably don't think there's anything wrong with being suspicious of a very obvious lacking in racial diversity. Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip. [edited to add: a commenter below clairified this particular station is operated by the US, which is majority white, and scientists even moreso. I was assuming stations are operated with international cooperation :) ]
This was a trip to McMurdo Station, which is operated by the US, which is majority white as of the 2020 census (58.9% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino"). In 1956, when McMurdo was established, the US was nearly 90% white. If anything, it would be a statistical anomaly if there were too few white people, considering that the science community is whiter than the country as a whole.
The GP's point stands, still: though the OP's article doesn't explicitly say that the lack of racial diversity in McMurdo is a problem, it's implied. Why is it a problem? I don't think anyone at McMurdo is complaining about minorities coming in.
The only winning move is not to play these shitty games.
"Too many white scientists" carries exactly the same amount of meaning as "too many black NFL players" (over half are black, compared to 13.6% of the population) or "too many male roofers" (95% are male) or "too many female special ed teachers" (84.2% are female); that is to say, it carries no meaning at all.
Once you free yourself from the plausible-sounding but false idea that the composition of subgroups must necessarily reflect the composition of the whole, a lot of today's racial divides and those who fan those flames are evident for what they are: those with agendas that benefit from pitting people against one another.
Why exactly should the expectation of justification go one way but not the other?
Frankly, I’ll take the same standard and apply it the other way. The author is sexist, the article is hot garbage
The existing conditions in Antarctica.
The idea that sexism is an absolute abhorrent behavior (with a focus on either or both genders) is not something to promote, despite the fervor in recent years. The sexes have a different representation in the arctic and pointing them out is akin to pointing out that a lot of left handers apply to NASA. I wouldn't call something garbage because I'm offended someone held up a patch that says "Only left handers are in their right mind".
Getting upset at this writer/article/situation is not constructive. Nor is the condemnation a fair editorial critique, imo.
It’s like if you say “my job sucks” — not all parts of your job may actually suck, just the parts you hate. Or “the government is corrupt” most folks would infer that you are talking about a specific subelement.
If we lived in a society where women routinely mistreated men then flipping the statement wouldn’t be offensive. What makes it offensive flipped is mostly that generalizations about women typically encode harmful falsehoods that come from generations of patriarchy. You could not flip her statements in good faith because women do not treat men the way she described anyway.
As a progressive I hate that it isn’t simple as much as everyone else. But to fight for equality is to understand that the origins of the fight come from unwanted asymmetry and of course that’s going to be reflected in discourse.
How would you know?
This is what happened in the comments?
She gave context in the post. Did you read it?