Comment by madaxe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe | Hacker News Reader

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Child gets bullied (shock horror), mother assumes it's sexism (it ain't, it's bullying. I'm a dude. Got bullied at high school. Does that make my tormentors homosexual autosexists?), rants.

I'm so bored of this sort of thing. Yes, there are man-children who post stupid and hurtful crap on the internet. Yes, there are cretins who make dick jokes on stage at conferences. There are also women who are complete and utter asses to all men because "all men are rapists", which IMHO is a far more misandric view than the kind of offhanded misogyny of "sudo make me a sandwich" shit nerd guys come up with.

People are dicks. People do stupid crap. People hurt each other.

People who use gender as an emblem and weapon are also dicks, because they create a line of demarcation and balkanisation where there IS NONE. We are PEOPLE. Not "Men" and "Women" who are some kind of antagonistic polar-opposite species.

Edit: Rape jokes. Interesting one that. I recall being 12, on a school bus on a trip to some camp in Michigan (am mostly schooled in the UK, spent a year in 7th grade in the US, loathed it), and being astounded at the fact that the gaggle of girls sat behind me were all cracking rape jokes. I actually couldn't parse at first what they were talking about "rip? ripe? rope?", until I clocked the macabre subject of their humour.

It took the (male) bus driver to ask them to all kindly shut the fuck up.

Two things stood out in particular: Bullying and sexism can coexist and feed off each other; and 'all men are rapists' feminists are actually extremely rare - far, far rarer than the 'man-children' you reference.

I sorry you had a bad school experience and absolutely agree with your point that things shouldn't improve and we should do nothing to help.

"We have to do something! This is something. Therefore we must do it."

... hello wilful misinterpreter? You don't fix a gas leak by buying a new sofa. I'm just saying that the thing being posed as an issue isn't the actual issue.

Your comment boils down to, "It was this way for me. Life's tough. Suck it up."

How can a situation where a child enters a classroom full of enthusiasm and leaves a year (term?) later depressed not be an "actual issue"?

Either you have serious reading comprehension issues, or you make a habit of deliberately misconstruing others statements - or you're a troll, and I'm stupidly feeding you.

I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks - and you can't combat it purely on gender lines as all you're doing is treating a symptom rather than the disease.

The problem in and of itself is a valid problem that can be worked on. By lots of small, manageable efforts we can make the world a better place. Abstracting problems away - making them more generalised - only turns manageable problems into philosophical debates.

Btw, you need to get away from the habit of directly attacking the author and focus instead on attacking the argument.

Oh, pot, kettle! C'mon already.

You're right that by abstracting things away you can just create a philosophical point with no path to resolution, but you can also actively inflict harm by tackling an issue in isolation without evaluating and understanding the root cause.

This is the same philosophy (general problem, specific problem within that general problem that we think we can act on, so act, without looking at the general problem) that lead to rampant mercury poisoning and insanity across the globe in the late 19th c., as a poultice of mercury nicely clears up the sores from syphilis - but does not cure syphilis.

I don't understand your point. The syphilis example is, as you say a specific cure to a specific problem. Good. It's also good science. This is the opposite of what you were arguing earlier.

>I am saying that it IS an issue, but that the issue is not one of gender discrimination, just one of kids, and humans, being dicks

Wrong. You're assuming that all forms of bullying are equally bad. This is patently false. Bullying based on traits that already set you apart can reenforce imposter syndrome. Specifically in the case of programming, a woman in a male-only class will already feel isolated and like she doesn't belong. Being bullied with gender-specific insults is much more harmful to this persons potential as a programmer than being bullied with gender neutral ones. So addressing specifically the sex-based bullying is necessary in addition to bullying in general.

All bullying is based on traits that set you apart. People don't bully "one of the crowd". They bully the outliers, the different ones, the ones who are female, or fat, or thin, or clever, or stupid, or black, or white, or old, or young, or even the kid that wears last season's "cool clothes".

It's not about gender. It's about ostracism. You don't have to be female to be ostracised. You just have to have something, anything, that sets you apart from the crowd.

This is the societal control mechanism we have culturally evolved to ensure conformity and "strength" in groups. It is really, really, really fucking dangerous, and leads to fun shit like Nazism. It's also really powerful, and is the basis of nation states.

Ergo, the problem needs treating at its cause, which is a cultural illness, and is far from simple to treat. You cannot simply resolve one emergent aspect of it and then expect to treat each aspect the same way. You do not cut down a tree by plucking at its leaves.

>All bullying is based on traits that set you apart.

This is certainly true. What I meant to convey was that in the context of a programming class, being bullied for a trait that is itself already suspect within oneself reenforces it and thus is more damaging. If that girl had been bullied in the programming class because she was fat, it may not have had as much of an impact on her decision to pursue the career. Being bullied because she's a girl on the other hand, had the secondary effect of reenforcing the idea that she doesn't belong in tech.

That's a fair point, and I agree that in the circumstance due to the framing of the situation it could be more harmful - but it doesn't change the fact that the root cause is bullying.

We as a species have a remarkable proclivity to be very unkind.

Your deliberate misrepresentation of the posts you are replying to is simply dishonest. There is no way for a constructive conversation to come out of that.

What?

"Life's tough." is a truism, whining about it or demanding everyone "be nice" is fail. You have control over yourself, believing you have/can control others is delusional and dangerous (to society).

The way to deal with it is "Suck it up." i.e. have self-confidence and act you, yourself, personally, better than others. Lead by example, not legislation.

This is fundamentally wrong. During development, security and self-confidence come from the environment you're brought up in.

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