hacker789

> It is not necessary to know what language a program is written in when executing it and shell doesn't require an extension so we prefer not to use one for executables.

I disagree with their recommendation against using file extensions for executables, and I'd love to have my mind changed about this.

Using an extension gives you automatic syntax highlighting. It also lets you quickly glean the type of a file when exploring a directory for the first time, which is more helpful than simply knowing whether the file can be executed.

Why does a lack of necessity override those two benefits?

That's wild. How on Earth did you zero in on your issue? Was it a case of "literally nothing else would explain things, so I may as well get this blood test"?

And what do you eat on a typical day?

But to directly address your point, the OP's argument isn't a strawman. I could compile a list of fifty feminist articles, blog posts, and comics espousing minor variations of:

- "Men can be oppressed, but not for their maleness"

- "Misandry isn't real"

- "Anything that systemically hurts men is simply their privilege backfiring"

But someone will still say that those examples don't represent true feminism.

No. (?) All adults should have the right to vote.

> Looks to me like in both absolute numbers and percentages, there are more women than men at the "bottom of society".

You're not looking low enough.

Look at the homeless. Look at homicide victims. Look at workplace deaths (including and excluding the military). Look at high-school dropouts. Look at suicide victims. Look at prisons (both violent and non-violent offenses). It's possible that men are biologically predisposed to violence, but they also live in a culture that coddles women to the detriment of men in need.

> We spend a lot of time and effort on women's issues because, historically, they have been discriminated against and prevented from holding positions of power,

Historically, almost everyone has been prevented from holding positions of power. The tiny circle of powerful people in each country had penises, but that doesn't mean the lives other penis owners were cushy.

Historically, men received significantly more severe punishments for the exact same crimes (still the case), women were given priority over men when provisioning protection and aid (still the case), and men were expected and often forced to perform significantly more brutal and dangerous labor on a daily basis (still the case, though to a lesser extent). As a result, men lived significantly shorter lives, even taking deaths from childbirth into account (still the case, though to a lesser extent).

Interestingly, the fact that men live shorter lives doesn't matter to most people. In fact, it's become the expectation: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/04/life-expecta...

Here's a direct quote:

> In the U.S., women live longer—81 years on average, 76 for men—but a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveals a troubling trend. Though men's life spans have increased by 4.6 years since 1989, women have gained only 2.7 years

"Surreal" is again the most fitting word.

> they still make less money for the same work as men,

False: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gende... and http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/11/220748057/why-wome... and http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2013/jul/15/te...

> and they are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic violence.

False, and we've known this for some time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#Violence_agai...

However, women are overwhelmingly victims of serious injury from domestic violence, as that source does indicate.

Women and men violently attack each other equally; men simply hurt the women more when they do so.

> Please clarify, then, about who exactly is being "silenced"

"Check your privilege!" and "stop mansplaining!" are almost exclusively hurled at men discussing gender, not at women discussing gender, though it is equally applicable to both. Hence my phrase "targeted weapon".

Of course, the notion of "privilege" could be useful. It could be useful to discuss the specific advantages different people have in specific situations, such as female privileges at universities vs male privileges at universities.

Unfortunately, it's almost exclusively employed to bully men into feeling that their objections are automatically invalid and unwelcome unless they conform to specific set of views.

> and what you mean by "silenced" if it doesn't mean that the person is unable to speak publicly about the topic.

Bullying is silencing -- it's one of the reasons that the bullying of the girl in the linked article is a problem.

Bullies don't have to literally sew anyone's mouth shut to dissuade their victims from wanting to speak out again.

The verb "silence" is not restricted to scenarios in which someone is rendered literally incapable of speech. It never has been.

> Always been, hm? So they were privileged when they were denied suffrage until less than 100 years ago? They were privileged when they were denied admission to some of the country's top universities until just 30 years ago?

Definitely. The members of the anti-suffrage movement, both men and women, pointed to those female privileges as the primary reason women shouldn't be allowed an equal say in setting the course of government.

> Awful generous of you to round down to "no one." If no one cares, why have you heard about it? Wouldn't people who don't care not be writing articles about it? There are plenty of people who care, who are concerned about this, who write about it and worry about it. That's not "no one" caring.

You got me. There aren't literally zero people who care about the myriad of ways men are disadvantaged to women. Unfortunately, there are close to literally zero people with power who seem care about men's issues, which is why society allocates an outrageously disproportionate amount of attention, money, time, and energy toward women's issues.

> However, despite all of that, there are many fewer women in technology, and fewer still are programmers. Just because there might be other biases in other fields, doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about biases and harassment in our own.

Agreed, but we need to realize that attention, money, time, and energy aren't limitless.

> You sound fairly threatened and insecure; it sounds like you're worried that women might do better than you at technology

Cut it out.

I'm not worried about myself at all. Like many of us, from a young age, I make more money than I'll ever know what do with. I have a growing a set of skills that are almost guaranteed provide me with gainful employment for my entire life.

I'm worried about the men at the bottom of society who are always marginalized by feminist policing and hand-wringing.

Feminists always point to the top of society, notice that there are more men than woman, then use that as evidence that men are more privileged.

However, they never point to the bottom of society, notice that there are more men than women, then use that as evidence that women are more privileged.

Never, never, never.

That's because they have a particular agenda. And that's fine. But it's also fine for people like me to point out that we are allocating an outrageously disproportionately amount of attention, money, time, and energy to women's issues.

> ALL of your comments are about men's rights.

Yes, most of my comments are about gender issues. And interestingly, despite the vast majority of comments in any given thread disagreeing with my own, my median comment score when discussing those issues is around 10 to 20.

Clearly, there are quite a few people here who don't feel comfortable speaking out, and for good reason! They don't want to be bullied for weeks, having their names permanently dragged through the mud: http://acko.net/blog/storms-and-teacups/

I don't want like-minded visitors to this site feeling like they're not welcome to speak their mind.

> [T]he caricature of sexist tumblr-warrior "feminists" (that do indeed exist) are a distraction. The fact that people like this are taken seriously probably bothers me as much as it bothers you. However, these people are misrepresenting feminism.

Let's ignore the social justice bullies on Tumblr. The top (western) feminist websites are probably Jezebel, Feministe, and Geek Feminism. All three of those are notoriously bigoted against men. Yes, those three websites lack the "I want to watch men burn to death" comments, but that's not saying much.

Every time I hear someone claim that real feminists aren't like that, I must ask: Where are the real feminists?

This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics has to stop.

Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.

No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and university graduation, and even high school graduation. No one cares that young women without children (i.e. the majority) earn more money their male counterparts. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the bottom of society.

Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.

This use of "privilege" as a targeted weapon to silence specific demographics has to stop.

Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. This entire thread, in fact, has been a shining example of female privilege.

No one cares that women soundly outnumber men in university admission, and university graduation, and even high school graduation. Heck, no one cares that it is men who overwhelmingly make up the bottom of society.

Instead, we're having a collective anxiety attack because a hyper-privileged white woman is upset that her hyper-privileged white daughter might have had her feelings hurt in high school. This is surreal.

I don't believe in "natural rights", nor do I believe concept has any real value. That said, you're misconstruing their argument.

Someone who believes in natural rights would say:

> You have a right to own property, but you aren't entitled to be given property. Similarly, you have the right to get an education, but you aren't entitled to be given an education.

Nonsense.

If those ads were for medical services, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for managerial consulting, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for educational services, they'd look like spam.

If those ads were for fitness services, they'd look like spam.

Advertisers all over the world learned that generic pictures of pretty women sell product more effectively than generic pictures of pretty men—even when selling to women.

That's why the internet is full of cheap-looking ads with generic pictures of pretty women pasted next to lazy, attention-grabbing text.

Humans are pattern matching machines, and those ads [EDIT: they just removed one of the ads from the post] look just like spam. That's all there is to this story. They make the LinkedIn website look cheap.

> Note that LinkedIn wasn't concerned that they might be spammers. If that were their concern, then LinkedIn wouldn't have offered to reinstate their account in exchange for changing their profile pictures. So the issue is strictly one of physical appearance / stereotypes of female engineers. Hence LinkedIn's concern seems to be that the attractiveness of the photos are either giving an unfair advantage to the profile, or contributing a "noisy" feeling to the results of searches. Yet we wouldn't bat an eye at a similar picture of a handsome male engineer.

LinkedIn wanted the pictures in those spammy ads changed because they don't want their site looking spammy. That's it.

Should companies now fear a western feminist backlash when considering whether to reject advertisements that have generic pictures of pretty women on them? What might be the end result of that be?

For the next 30 days, the Indiegogo brand will be mentioned nearly every time Ubuntu Edge is discussed. That publicity alone is worth something.

But if this campaign somehow succeeds, Indiegogo will receive more than just another dose of (outrageously positive) publicity—they'll be forever known as the platform used to launched Ubuntu Edge.

Stop it. Feminist bigots like you need everyone to view women as the "true victims" in society, so any discussion of men's issues is inevitably and swiftly met with that bullying phrase.

Women in the western world have always been among the safest, most privileged people on Earth. Being a man has sucked throughout history, but modern western feminists furiously point to the men at the top of society as evidence that things were worse for women, completely and conveniently ignoring the men at the middle and bottom of society.

Predictably, modern western feminists fight tooth and nail to preserve female privilege.

Despite their rhetoric, western feminists give hyperagency to men—they try to hold men responsible for the behavior of women. At the extreme, you get posts like this (hopefully satire, but apparently it isn't):

http://i.imgur.com/FkVKqJH.png

It's sickening to witness the absurd mental gymnastics western feminists perform to absolve women of all responsibility for their actions and failures, with the blame almost inevitably falling on a man or on men in general.

On the flip side, to justify their own existence, western feminists do everything they can to make women feel helpless, scared, and powerless. The western world is a warzone for women, if you listened to their rhetoric. And any potentially empowering advice you give women for avoiding dangerous situations is considered "victim blaming".

These attitudes are not only ingrained in our legal system; they're completely ingrained in society at large. If a woman is struggling, men and women (and feminists) eagerly rush to save her and scold the mean men put her in that situation.

If a man is struggling, th—WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ?! Why are we even talking about him?!

Nope. And neither are the societal structures that privilege women.

Western women have always been among the safest, most privileged human beings on the planet. Predictably, and unfortunately, modern western feminists never compare the plight of the average man with the plight of the average woman when determining who wins the Oppression Olympics; instead, they look jealously toward men at the top of society and declare that because women aren't a part of that, they're more oppressed.

And sadly, it gets more ridiculous than that. I've seen people on this forum actually say, with similar words:

Institutionalized misandry cannot exist, because most people at the top of society are men. Women don't have the institutional power to oppress men. Any oppression men face is a result of The Patriarchy.

Ignoring the fact that oppression can come from outside of congress (university policies, for example), those people are defining patriarchy to simply mean "Oppressive policies written by people with penises, even if feminists support those policies".

And that's what makes it dogma.

That being said, the largest factions don't exactly cover all sides of an issue, to put it mildly, so the existence of factions doesn't make anything better.

For example, the argument over transsexuals (mentioned by @rmc) has two main factions within modern western feminism:

1. "Transsexual women aren't real women; they're just men who are co-opting the brutal oppression real western women face, drowning out real women's voices."

2. "If you feel that you are a woman, then you are a woman. You do not need to present yourself as a woman, you do not need to be a woman every day, and you do not need to chose between being a man and being a woman at any given moment—you can be both. Anyone who questions your womanhood is a misogynist, because they are oppressively forcing their definition of womanhood onto a woman."

I hesitate to copy and paste the entire comment, lest I be flagged by an algorithm for spamming, but it uses Latin-like characters to write some typical spam about making money from home. Then, it has a link to the following site:

    viewmore------------------------------------------.qr.net/kkEj

    We replicated the results of a 
    similar experiment in a class I took in 1976, and also another one 
    that's even stranger. We trained planaria, killed them, dried them, and 
    fed them to untrained planaria. The training times for the untrained 
    planaria were shortened. Our experiments used planaria reactions to 
    light and subsequent electric shock, not food-finding behavior.

The United States is just saying, in fewer words:

> The United States and Hong Kong have a treaty—an agreement under international law. We are confident that our request for Snowden is covered by the treaty. If Hong Kong doesn't uphold its side of the treaty by complying with our request, it will raise questions about their commitment to the rule of law—international law, in particular.

That could be instructions for rape. Or it could be instructions for the kind of a sex that millions of straight couples have every day. It all depends on the quote's context, right?

Right?

So stop taking quotes out of context from the author.

> If women are loudly saying "This is assault.", you need to take them at their word, because it is their judgment, it is their consent that matters. Not yours.

Your language is intentionally misleading. What matters is the woman with whom you're interacting. Feminist internet commenters can neither give consent nor take it away. And the author is severely explicit about respecting consent. His quotes are being butchered.

If it becomes necessary to take a few quotes out of context in our noble quest to protect the fairer sex, so be it.

Kudos to Kickstarter for adhering to feminist principles.

> The thing that the commenters on social media are leaving out is that the advice was taken from a section in the guide offering advice on what to do AFTER a man has met a cute girl, gotten her phone number, gone on dates, spent time getting to know her, and now are alone behind closed doors fooling around. If "Don't wait for signs, make the first move" promotes sexual assault, then "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid was a song about rape.

http://pastebin.com/zwHYzCZe

I'm at a fairly small club downtown. A woman is walking toward me, so I make eye contact and say "hi!".

She sits down next to me, and we begin to talk. She's very nice, but after a few minutes of conversation, I'm not attracted to her at all, and it's clear we have very little in common.

"Hacker789, you have a really cute smile. I'd love to get your number."

"Ah..."

I look down, and out of the corner of my eye, I see her nervously twisting her hair in her fingers.

I cringe just thinking about that, because it's happened to me before! But I would never shame her for asking me, and I would never charge her with making me feel "unsafe". That would make me into a villain.

And let's be clear—it can be dreadfully awkward to leave the table at a small club, often taking more than a minute to politely finish the task without hurting the other person's feelings too badly. It's even worse if your friend is at the table, happily talking to an acquaintance of the person you just rejected!

At least in an elevator, you're automatically free after the doors open.

Would I ever ask someone at the beginning of a long elevator ride a question that might make them uncomfortable? No, not if I could avoid it. In fact, I wouldn't ask anyone an uncomfortable question at the beginning of a long bus or train ride, either. But not every situation that has the potential to create discomfort is socially unacceptable; part of being a social creature is to take minor discomfort in stride, giving the other person the benefit of the doubt.

And the more frequently an uncomfortable situation happens to you, the better you get at handling it.

I'll ask you again. What's so wrong with calmly asking someone in an elevator for coffee? I remember these discussions after Rebecca Watson publicly complained about it—the vast majority of people felt she was vastly overreacting. So it's definitely not an "established societal norm".

Despite their rhetoric, radical feminists love infantilizing women. They treat women as fragile, triggerable, sensitive creatures who won't feel safe unless they're handled with kid gloves.

> they want avoid responding to one or more points they know the other person is trying to make, so they lazily hide behind extraneous non-arguments to avoid confronting any substance.

What's so wrong with asking someone in an elevator? I'm all ears. Is it because you think women will cower in terror because they're an enclosed box with a man?