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Eich leaving Mozilla was absolutely not voluntary and I wish people would stop saying it was.

He "voluntarily" resigned in response to coercive threats against the company he founded and spent 15 years building.

It's not speech but coercion that forces people to lose their jobs. Threats of boycotts and premanent brand destruction involve speech but it's an overly broad definition if you classify political action as speech.

> I think that’s something you have to allow groups of people who were oppressed and specifically excluded from science for centuries, you know.

I disagree with this on so many levels. He wasn't attacked by women, in your argument only women have "earned" the right to be abusive to him because it's somehow reasonable to punish him for things done by men who are no longer around? Either way, he was attacked by the social justice movement and last I checked there has not been a concerted effort to exclude them from science.

In general, you get special concessions to fight back against people who have oppressed you directly, by the time you start attacking a group's grandchildren for what they did to your grandparents you're just being a jerk.

> just to complain about bad feminists or some similar misogynist bullshit

Have I oppressed you? Have I excluded you? This is not an appropriate way to talk to somebody who simply disagrees with you.

Here you show your difficulty perceiving men as victims. He didn't just apologize, he broke down crying. He was being tried in a court of public opinion where he was not allowed to explain or defend himself. Look at what happens to men who refuse to prostrate themselves to the social justice mob: they lose their jobs (even if they founded the company: Brendan Eich, even if the have a Nobel Prize: Tim Hunt.) Threatening somebody's career for an honest mistake and then celebrating their tears is, in a word, scary. It's bullying and I'm touched that others have come together to show him support (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/matt-taylor-rosetta-proje...)

The reason I bring up victim-blaming is that even when it's pointed out to you, you don't see it. Benefit of the doubt suggests it's because you don't believe that what happened to him was wrong.

An aside: nobody asks what the effect this charade has on young boys looking at a career in science. It tells them that an undergrad in physics (which is 10x the work of most degrees), and a PhD in magnetohydrodynamics (which would be literally impossibble for most people), and 10 years hard work as a scientist still won't be enough to earn them the benefit of the doubt.

> Also, it's not clear to me that he was the lead scientist, and he only joined Rosetta in 2013.

True, apparently Taylor joined Rosetta in 2013. He joined the ESA as a project scientist on different mission in 2005 before getting the Rosetta job. Notice that here (http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/43058-mission-team/) his name is second from the top. He's a superstar.

All of this is so far blown out of proportion that the fundamental argument isn't being challenged, is "casual sexism" really what's keeping women from careers in science? I'm not convinced.

Since you're calling people out for being anonymous in this conversation just remember you get to have your name attached to your arguments without risking your social life and career.

When it's the lead scientist of a 10 year project to land something on a comet 100 million miles away and he decides to wear a shirt a friend made for him, yeah his feelings are important. But that's not the point, the point is the group saying others must be held responsible for their public actions refuse to take responsibility for their own.

It was a tactless showing of power based on a skewed sense of social justice and it overshadowed a momentous occasion.

It's ironic as anything that the excuse for the abuse he took is literally "he shouldn't have worn that if he didn't want that to happen."

He wasn't internationally labeled as an inappropriate dresser, he was internationally labeled a sexist. That crossed a line and the fact he had to give a tearful apology on one of the biggest days of his career without making that distinction or defending himself in any way is disgusting.

> The only real rule is Don't be a douche.

The fact that you use a gendered pejorative[0] that refers to men while claiming to have a "healthy diversity of cultures" is both ironic and representative of modern PC-culture.

[0] - https://medium.com/human-parts/douchebag-the-white-racial-sl...

Your point couldn't be that biological underpinnings are being socially reinforced because you didn't mention the biological underpinnings at all.

Your 4-point history is also off because it implies there was a gender neutral computer science that was then taken out of balance by socialization. The only thing you seem intersted in addressing is that girls aren't encouraged to tinker with things - that in and of itself is a fair point. You don't need to create a false history and a false biology to address it.

Focusing purely on socialization, while it will make you friends, will also prevent you from seeing the other reasons STEM fields are predominantly male.

Do boys tinker because they're socialized to tinker, or is the socialization process built around natural tendencies of boys to tinker?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

I provided a link to the definition I'm using.

I agree the number is probably a coincidence and it looks bad to focus on it. But the lawsuits in her husband's past are important to keep in mind due to the similarities with her current case.

Since you open with an inflammatory ad hominem attack and never really move beyond it I'm not sure how much you get to talk about civil discourse.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

It's a good try to connect it to the two-slit experiment but it doesn't work for several reasons: double-slit is about a particle passing through two holes at the same time and the waves go in the direction of the motion instead of perpendicular to it.

You get a good consolation prize though, because it is a little like quantum tunneling which is in the same neighborhood as the double-slit experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling

In the tunneling case what's "waving" would again be (I believe) the probability density function, but it's definitely a case of a particle using some sort of waviness to pass through a classically impossible boundary.

The backwards bicycle one is awesome because he actually spent 8 months learning to ride the ridiculous thing, and then filmed himself trying to ride a regular bike: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0

Professors are supposed to challenge the thought processes of their students so this is more like a trash collector facing lawsuits for dealing with trash in a way that makes a few people angry. It does students no favors to coddle them throughout college instead of preparing them for the real world where nobody cares if it's inconvenient for them to deal with other people's opinions. College is meant to prepare people for the real world.

It's morally wrong to subject others to unfair lawsuits, as noted elsewhere in this thread in some jurisdictions it's even codified in law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barratry_%28common_law%29

It's not awful for me to point out that I see people who are the victims of morally wrong actions being blamed for what's happening to them. Who's doing the blaming just makes it ironic.

I reject the feminist narrative of history, the feminist view of gender and the feminist idea of patriarchy. Basically the majority of the social critique that is the backbone of feminism. I'm also deeply suspicious of the notion that feminism as a movement is interested in equality and not power.

Being called feminist because I believe in social and political equality is like being called a Christian because I think heaven sounds like a wonderful place. But IMHO if you don't believe in Jesus you're not a Christian and if you don't believe in the feminist social critique you're not a feminist.

So, the university was asking for it?

> I am one survey point for you. I believe women should have equal political and social rights, which makes me a feminist.

I also believe women should have equal political and social rights, yet I'm not at all a feminist.

The social justice movement demands we be sympathetic to poor people. Using the word 'poorly' might arouse that sympathy before it's established that the subjects of the article are dog-fighting degenerates unworthy of it.

To a moderate leftist in a fight with radical leftists, libertarians are "far right" which roughly translates to non-mainstream right.

The point is the policing powers of the radical left are such that when a member of the moderate left is chosen for public castigation their peers don't want to get involved. Like the author said, she's getting a lot of silent support from people who aren't daring to go public with their support. The reason libertarians are happy to get involved publicly is they're far outside the political left so the radical left holds very little power over them.

A moderate leftist reaching out to Ken White for help would be like a centrist republican contacting the ACLU, that's a lot of trust to place in people that you normally disagree with.

edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here, just trying to explain why it might be difficult for the author to find pro-bono legal help from within her existing social network.

And that's the problem of being a moderate leftist trying to defend yourself against radical leftists, unless you can get the ACLU to pick up your case you have to turn to outside groups like the far right, who you don't understand, for help.

This would be a risky case for a leftist lawyer to take pro bono because they may face a severe political backlash for it.

If you look at ex-feminists who have strayed from the group they're treated much like (many) Christians treat ex-Christians.

People who "knew the truth but turned their back on it" get a special level of disdain from groups with strong ideologies, in their eyes it's worse than being ignorant of the truth.

That being said it's hard to imagine the author receiving more venom than all the men who wouldn't have dreamed to write such an article.

That only works if this issue is isolated to NWU, but it isn't. Members of the social justice movement using claims of victimhood to stifle free speech is a national and in some cases international problem.

Since the political beliefs involved are common across cases they becomes a prime suspect. Bureaucracy exists in many of the cases as well, but it's only one tool that this group uses to further their agenda.

> Unfortunately, as you point out, it's hard to reform those laws, because when you have people who want to repeal progress entirely, it's hard to distinguish (and, practically, there might not be any difference) between "reform" and "repeal."

As somebody who often takes the "reform" side I'd say it's not an accidental misunderstanding when people think I'm saying "repeal". FWICT it stems from a deep and fundamental disrespect for the views of others. It's a common pattern: the default response to someone being critical of any social justice movement is an accusation of racism, sexism, bigotry, etc. Honestly it's why I try to only discuss these things anonymously on the internet where it isn't so risky.

Why do you think society gave them that badly written law?

I've noticed this with other services, apparently it's difficult to distinguish between "love thing X so much you share it" and "hate thing X so much you complain about it"

Almost an interesting except the author found it necessary to (attempt to) shoehorn it into a feminist narrative.

> "The dead hand of male domination is a problem for women, for society as a whole—and for men like those of Tallulah. Their ideas of the world and their place in it are shaped by old assumptions about the special role and status due to men in the workplace and in the family, but they live in circumstances where those assumptions no longer apply."

The author says this right after explaining what these men lost to time are jobs in factories and fields. They didn't lose a privileged place in society, they were at the bottom being worked to death and now they don't even have that. But right next to this is an infographic showing the male share of new billionaires which has nothing to do with the uneducated men the article is talking about. It only serves to help the reader keep in mind who the real victims are. (The infographic of the male share of prisoners appears later)

The author tries to give a balanced picture but to me this is a great example of how feminism struggles to talk about men's issues in a meaningful way. The first word of the article is a woman's name, the first statement is a woman calling men lazy. By the end of the second paragraph the author has painted a picture of the men the article is about as lazy, gambling and unemployed.

I can't imagine an article ostensibly about women's issues that opens up with a man explaining these particular women are good for nothing and then the author trotting out various ideas of why that's the case.

edit: This is just ridiculous. The author suggests that these men need to do more housework, like maybe that's their real problem, they just can't get with the program because they're clinging to pre-feminist revolution gender roles.

It's almost a dangerous view, mass unemployment is an economic problem and instead of discussing it frankly the (anonymous) author would have us focus on how backwards men are now that the patriarchy isn't showering them in privilege anymore. It's sad to see thinking this shallow appear in The Economist.

Getting hands dirty == interfacing with reality where mistakes are possible

You could hold Proust's greatest work upside down and read it backwards but nothing bad will happen. If a neurologist makes a mistake they could kill their patient, their hands are dirty because part of their job is making mistakes that hurt people.

Wouldn't that make all microeconomics bad economic thinking?

> It's like neurology. Yes, it's a terribly interesting field, but you'll learn more about the human mind from reading Proust.

I think this is a great metaphor but for very different reasons than you. Reading Proust will help somebody who sits on the sidelines take in the scene of somebody's neurological condition degrading. Studying neurology will help somebody find and (hopefully) cure the disease.

Neurologists save lives, people who sit in armchairs cherishing Proust may enrich themselves but they have no grounds to look down upon those who are getting their hands dirty.