1,968 karma · joined July 19, 2010
> If they identify with the feminist cause and support it, they don't need to prove it to you or justify how their campaign is or isn't feminist.
We've seen that many times organizations that claim feminism or feminist principles often don't act in a way that is supporting of women, so being critical is fully warranted when an organization says one thing but does something that seems to do nothing but perpetuate existing stereotypes and problems. Moreover, they made the claim, not me, so asking "why is what you are doing feminist" is important.
I don't see how your company could describe itself and feminist while also making a campaign that relies on some of the structural sexism of the Valley and tech. How did that campaign challenge the existing power structures and stereotypes/mythology of tech?
Uh, there are totally such things as a bad marriage. If, say, your spouse became abusive over time from the perspective of the abused spouse it most certainly a bad marriage.
Marriage isn't a one time negotiation and you are stuck with whatever happens after that. Relationships require constant work and growth over time. If two people find themselves in a place where that relationship isn't working for them and even is outright harmful to their well being, they have all rights to end that relationship.
Not everyone views marriage as a contract or as something that cannot be broken ever. The legal status of marriage in a jurisdiction != how people feel about and treat marriage.
> Divorce means your word is worthless, and that your own wants are more important than your word.
Giving your word on something isn't a clause that requires you to give up your own wants and needs. For example, if you married someone and one day they become abusive, you are not obligated to stay and take said abuse.
> It IS a personal failure, but go ahead, rationalize all you want.
This attitude is so unhelpful and smacks of a superiority complex.
There have been plenty of stories over the years of non-profits that do shady things with donations or engage in activities against parts of the population, should this site ever accidentally pick one up, that is where the problem will be.
The problem would be two fold: there are numerically few black developers due to problems with the pipeline for education, which disproportionately affects black people, and in general hiring practices have a bias against black people.
The impression that IT is more open and socially conscious is just that, an impression. There is nothing that demonstrates IT as a profession or as individuals are more socially conscious than any other group of people. In fact, many of the current problems with regards to IT culture mirror the same problems in other aspects of business in society.
The poverty cycle IS a part of the continuum of oppression for black people. Economic advancement has been denying and outright destroyed for these folks ever since being forcefully brought to the US as slaves.
> White flight is another problem. Peer effects (black kids bullying black kids who "act white") is a problem. These are not racial oppression.
White flight is entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. Peer effects are also entirely about anti-blackness and racial oppression. These have been studied in such great detail.
> Prejudice and oppression (from teachers, employers, police) is still a problem, but it's not the big one. And pretending it is will encourage people to fight black poverty in ways that probably won't actually work very well.
This is total nonsense and is entirely divorced from the reality of racial oppression in the United States, both in the past and today.
This is highly dependent on which kind of APIs you are interacting with. Most API families are part of Google Play Services now which means they are generally available back to 2.3. Framework API differences between platforms are generally small and haven't been much trouble to work with, although some types of hardware interaction changed significantly between some platform levels (e.g. audio).
You do realize that when people talk about men as a class, that isn't the same thing as a personal accusation, right?
This is just another not-all-men complaint. Certainly if you are a man who doesn't do the things someone is complaining about, then you have nothing to worry about. Unless, of course, the things you are doing on the internet are wrong and misogynistic, in which case people are sending you articles and comments for a reason.
When you sign into Google+ or Dropbox (among others), you are presented with a screen where you can enable photo uploads to those cloud accounts.
An even better question is, why aren't businesses and start-ups today employing veterans and single mothers?
The water issue is much greater than just a few people experiencing water cut offs because of bills. Nearly 70,000 residential accounts are going to have their water cut off through the end of September. Why should such a huge portion of a cities population have their water cut off because of financial hardship? Water is essential to survival and removing access to water for these people is extremely cruel.
"Among all men and women, including smokers and those with preexisting disease, there was a U-shaped relation between current BMI and the risk of death, with the highest risk in the lowest and the highest categories of BMI. Overweight was not associated with an increased risk of death among men but was weakly associated with an increased risk of death among women."
Note that the highest and lowest categories were extreme values of weight for an individual and there were significantly fewer people in those categories compared to the others.
Moreover, the authors of this study even talk about being overweight vs. obesity in the discussion section:
"However, whether moderate elevations in BMI (i.e., overweight) truly increase the risk of death is controversial.2 Several studies reported no increase in the risk of death among overweight subjects even after those who died during the initial years of follow-up were excluded or subjects were stratified according to smoking status.25-29 Recently, Flegal et al. reported that overweight was not associated with an excess risk of death in the nationally representative samples of U.S. adults drawn from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey."
They go on to talk about possibilities regarding smokers with the data from this study.
Finally, it is worth nothing that this study follow those aged 50 and older and did so through the AARP's health survey and is specifically focused on the health of older people and that is only looking at correlations for individuals who are already at a higher risk of dying in the first place.
This is not true whatsoever. Weight and health have only limited correlations, to say that being overweight means you are unhealthy is ludicrous. This is well studied and known.
I've been in a similar boat. The way storage partitions were handled on 2.x era devices makes the larger sizes of apps and Google Play Services really noticeable.
It's not a blame thing or a "tut tut shame on you". The fact is it is a misgendering and that is harmful to people even if unintended. You don't need to apologize to me, but I think you should do the right thing and edit your original post and change the pronouns.
> How does it portray them in a negative light? Is Muhammad Ali portrayed in a negative light when he's referred to as Cassius Clay in the past? In what ways is that different? Is it different just because of the current state of social acceptance of transgender people? Does that imply that at some point in the future it won't be different? Does that strengthen the scheme of the status quo, or is it an argument towards a more normalized usage in past tense?
This has to do with how trans people are reported on and represented in media. Often media will explicitly draw attention to someone being trans while at the same time misgendering or attempting to paint the person as being abnormal or unbalanced. More subtly, often times media and comments will always draw attention to a person's gender before transitioning and it makes it difficult for someone to live as their current, actual identity and gender.
> Well, obviously people are confused, because I just was when I first read the headline of this article, meaning there's at least one person in the world that's been confused by this. Do we need to argue this, or can we move on to something more useful, like trying to figure how many people are confused, how often, how likely they are to fix the confusion, if it's more or less confusing than other schemes, and other pros and cons?
I'm just pointing out that people change names and aliases all the time and we manage to do just fine. There isn't a problem with continuing to use the name Chelsea Manning and the proper gender pronouns.
> The issue here is, I think, that you label referring to someone in the past tense as they were in the past tense as misgendering, while I'm not sure I accept that. I think people can be expected to and have a right to control their current state, I'm not so sure I would extend that to them being able to change their past state.
It's not about the past state. It's that their present state is always reduced back to that previous state. A trans person doesn't take to take their gender for granted and being misgendered is common. That misgender often goes beyond and uncomfortable social situation, that misgendering can challenge your medical access, identification documents, your sexual orientation, and lead to direct violence against your person.
The point I'm making is that there is not need to fret or worry about "historical accuracy" or anything of the sort. Just use the name and pronouns this person explicitly announced to the world as what to use.
I am not accusing anyone of being a bigot. However, it would be silly to assume that there are not cultural and social biases about gender that you and I grow up with and have, even if we don't realize it. That is what I am getting at: this isn't some accusation, but that statement definitely has a connotation about what it means to be a particular gender.
> This place is full of engineers. There are only two ways you can say there is no true gender. The first is to take the anti-science position that males and females have the same chromosomes with all that entails and the second is to redefine "gender" to mean something outside of what most people understand it to mean.
Gender is not your genes and there is a difference between sex and gender. The view that sex and gender have difference is not an unusual understanding of what gender means. Moreover, there is a lot of assumptions and stereotypes in culture and society about gender. Even if those assumptions are common, that does not mean they are valid or that they are not harmful.
> It's completely understandable that members of a community where making subtle distinctions are important would want to redefine relevant words to make their meaning more clear to one another.
You are implying that trans people being able to define their identity and having their identity accepted is a niche thing that isn't relevant to society as a whole when it most certainly is. Being able to have an identity and exist without facing violence and hardship is important no matter how numerically small a population is.
> But becoming indignant when other people won't adopt your Newspeak is just contributing to the political inflammation of the situation.
I think you missed the point of what Newspeak is. Correcting false assumptions and stereotypes about gender is not about limiting discussion or dialog. Further, there is no way that trans communities are even close to being in a position of political power and influence, being able to have their identity without that identity being challenged just because they exist isn't an attempt to suppress people.
There is a lot to unpack in this statement. First, you should absolutely edit this to change the name and gender pronouns, you are clearly misgendering this person. Secondly, being trans isn't about gender association, it is expressing and living as your gender, period. 'Gender association' implies that there is some true gender rather than what Chelsea Manning has stated and that is very transphobic whether you realize it or not.
> What's considered the current best way to describe this, that Bradley Manning released the documents (past tense) and now Chelsea Manning needs support (present tense), or that Chelsea Manning released documents and now needs support?
The latter. Chelsea Manning released these documents and now needs support. If you are speaking to specific historical information, sometimes you may need to refer to the previous name. However, it is rare to need to phrase something this way and usually such phrasings serve to portray being trans in a negative light.
> The first way feels like it's more useful for expressing the situation to those that lived through it, but may be ignoring the identity of the person in question. Referring to the person through the later moniker in all instances may be confusing to those that miss the change as it happens, but may be less confusing to future generations.
It is not confusing whatsoever. People change names and aliases all the time for a variety of reasons but the world doesn't end and future generations aren't confused as to who someone is. Moreover, misgendering someone isn't just ignoring their identity, it is a slap in the face and challenges the validity of their existence.
That a community has solved a problem is no different than the problem being solved (unless of course you don't believe in the validity of trans people). Chelsea Manning has clearly stated that she is a woman and should be referred to as a woman.
> I ask because I'm torn between wanting to respect the individual, but also as a computer scientist feeling somewhat offended that someone's later choice of how they want to refer to themselves caused altered accounts of historical information, which to my eyes is more confusing (and possibly less accurate, if that confusion isn't addressed promptly and often).
If you say you are feeling torn, then you are not wanting to respect this person at all, so you really aren't feeling torn. Bottom line, Chelsea Manning is a woman and should be referred to as such. You say you are offended, but what you are really saying is that you feel that you know her gender better than she does. You don't. Your discomfort with trans folks is your own issue and to misgender someone is hugely disrespectful.
> I'm not really sure how to square that with myself, but I think I lean towards preserving the data integrity of the public record. If someone referred to themselves in a specific way and identified themselves a specific way in the past, I think that's how they should be referred to when discussing that point in time.
There is a difference between talking about past events and continuing to insist on misgendering someone in the present.