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What do you think of the Allan Bloom critique of the teaching of humanities--that most texts are taught not as things that argue for ideas, but rather as historical documents that should be looked at almost anthropologically (i.e. Bernard Williams on the Iliad)?
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Apr 1, 2016 00:34
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Mortley posted:"Would you please elaborate on this?" is what I decided to write, instead of trying to find the barfing smilie barfing smilies. Here's a version of the poem, slightly rewritten, by Joni Mitchell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m78cSts3tJw Stripped of some of its outdated language, it works quite well as a "Keep your poo poo together, don't treat anyone like poo poo yourself, do your work, don't make excuses, you can get through this, you're strong enough, gently caress anyone who says otherwise" type inspirational message and code of conduct. It's nowhere near as bad as "White Man's Burden". The poem also has a great deal in common with Polonious' speech to Laetres from Hamlet.
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Apr 1, 2016 21:18
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rock rock posted:So I haven't read the thread so forgive me if this has been covered. If you're talking about a historical dictionary, the New Oxford American basically refactors OED entries so they're indexed by their US spelling and specifies whether usage is e.g. US or British. Historically, the Century Dictionary is an interesting artifact, too -- it can tell you what people in the U.S. c. 1890 saw fit to include in their shot at something like the OED. If I remember right, a lot of material from the Century ended up in the OED during the early 20th. c. quote:Also for context, are you American? Context: I am American. Like, so American I was driving a 20 year-old pickup truck until two or three years ago.
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Apr 4, 2016 00:51
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Stagger_Lee posted:I'd be interested to know more about your approach to teaching digital humanities, Brainworm, as someone with a history of knowing what they're talking about when they talk about something. (That was not supposed to be a reference to that short story.) Yeah, that stuff is the worst. Look at me, I had a wage slave plot every location in Ulysses into this GIS software. I got grant money for it. So let's talk about the things that make a good DH project. Obviously, it needs to use digital tools to do something that would be either impossible or impractical without them. A lot of GIS projects don't do anything you couldn't do just as easily with a paper map. But good DH projects also have other things going on: 1) They're naturally collaborative. 2) They have a well-bounded and clearly-defined mission that 3) Informs thought or debate about a significant issue and is also 4) Designed by the digitally and technologically literate (e.g. people aware of the limitations and conditions of the available digital tools). Right now I'm having a conversation with Michael Drout (at Wheaton). MD has done a bunch of work on the "tall elf conjecture" in Tolkien Studies. In case you missed it, the tall elf conjecture (TEC) is that Tolkien's elves are tall. The TEC is hotly disputed -- some Tolkien scholars think that only some individual elves are tall, or that only some types of elves are tall, and so on. So let's say we build a DH project around that. First: a sane DH project can't either confirm or disprove the TEC. The TEC is an interpretive conjecture, not a factual one. But a DH project can gather data that inform interpretation. That's just the nature of the tools, since most of what you can do involves discovering, packaging, and refactoring information. For instance, it's pretty easy to write a script that flags the name of every elf in Tolkien, looks for "tall" (or synonyms) at a one, two, three, or ten-word remove, then plots the results so that you can see whether some elves' names occur close to "tall" more often than other elves' names do. It's similarly easy to figure out whether "tall" is more often proximate to "elves" than, say, "short" is proximate to "hobbits." Likewise , you can easily tell whether the word "tall" occurs in the same sentence as "Legolas," but it would be very difficult to write a script that tells whether "tall" refers to "Legolas" at any given point, or accounts for e.g. antecedents to pronouns (parses who "he" refers to in "he is tall") and so on. If I said "I want a script that will tell me which elf is tallest," I won't get anywhere. There may be something in Tolkien I can use to figure that out, but I can't imagine how to write a script that would help me find it. There's going to be a lot of grunt work, too. Discovering and repackaging information is always grunt work. Someone needs to find the names of all the elves, track down articles that discuss the TEC to see which texts to focus on, prep the texts for the script, find as many synonyms for "tall" as we can, and so on. The grunt work is important for another reason, though: it tells us whether a project is viable. If we can't identify what tasks need to be done and how we'll know each one is finished, we have a problem. A project that can't be broken down into discrete pieces isn't yet well-bounded or well-defined enough to go anywhere. And the work needs to be relevant. There's no point in mapping proximity of "tall" to "elf" if there's no tall elf conjecture to debate. It's the same thing as research. You can explore if you want -- it's fun and helps discover interesting questions and topics -- but doing anything intensive and focused means you need a reason to think it's useful. That's what makes a good project, I think: collaborative, well-bounded, significant, and tool-attentive. Good DH teaching involves a process friendly to that kind of project. Something like: 1) Students learn enough about a tool -- or a suite of tools -- to understand what they can or can't do. 2) They use that understanding to design a project that pertains to an issue. 3) They identify the things they need to learn to execute the project, and schedule that learning (and the actual work) out so the project fits whatever constraints they're working under. 4) They do the project and it either works or doesn't, and can either be made to work or can't. 5) They reflect on or analyze the project to identify what they learned from its success or failure. I know that's a ramble, but you get the idea. An educational project needs to have students involved in design, not just grunt work. It needs to put students in a position to understand the significance of their work, and to define their own, project-relevant goals (like "I need to learn how to strip a text of punctuation"). And it needs to be equally (but not identically) educationally valuable regardless of whether it succeeds or fails to deliver what it intended. That pertains to most projects, I think, but the "Digital" part of "Digital Humanities" gives some faculty strange ideas. They think students need to know all the fiddly bits of a tool before they design a project, that a project is worthwhile just because students learn to use whatever tool, or that the quality of a student's learning experience on a project can't be meaningfully separated from the quality for the product it produces.
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Apr 4, 2016 03:14
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Mortley posted:"Would you please elaborate on this?" is what I decided to write, instead of trying to find the barfing smilie barfing smilies. So people give bad advice. Poets especially. That's specifically true when they (people or poets) say "I'm going to tell you how to be a man." The next thing they say's going to be insipid (like "here's how to shave") or toxic (like "there are sheep and wolves and sheepdogs"). It's that way with most advice, really. The people willing to give it are either pretending to be certain, or they're certain about all the wrong things. The upshot's that most advice poems are equal parts hand-waving and dysfunction -- sort of like when one beer too many turns Thanksgiving dinner into an immigration debate. Here's an inoffensive example, courtesy of hellopoetry.com author DykeNextDoor (the first hit when I googled "good advice poetry"): quote:Although I'm not old, Like, sure. It's hard to argue with that, but it's also like what Pauli called "not even wrong." I mean, I could barrel a rented Mustang through a school zone while a teenage runaway pounds the gas pedal with an empty vodka bottle and undoes all kinds of zippers with her teeth. I could be have a romantic dinner with a one of those giant stuffed teddy bears you win at a carnival pitching booth. I could just do butt stuff in my office. That's all love, padre, and good advice probably ought to rule it out. So this isn't what I'd call real advice. And if it is advice, it's bad advice because it lacks a precision accountable to the complexity of human experience. The problem's rarely knowing what you ought to be doing. It's actually doing it. And that's especially true with love, right? There are times it's hard to understand what loving someone means, like when you need to not let them overdose or need to kick them out of your life because they're just spreading pain around. That's the real problem. I could use some advice about that. That's what makes "If" so interesting. Each piece of advice positions itself as a path of moderation between courses of action that are both either defensible or specific and common human experiences. Like this: quote:If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, In other words, "trust yourself when other people think you're wrong, while recognizing that they (a) think you're wrong and (b) may be right." That's useful stuff right there, and different from something generic, useless, and potentially toxic like "trust yourself" because it gets at the real problem: how you conduct yourself in the midst of overwhelming disagreement. You trust your judgement, understand that you may be wrong, and accept the legitimacy of other people's positions. Those last two are where people get into the poo poo, right? Any idiot can insist on not changing his mind or his principles, and discount anything that says he should. And there's some amount of mainstream thinking that confuses that practice with integrity. Likewise, you don't win an argument by proving that you're right. To the extent it's done meaningfully -- that is, in a way that changes people's behavior -- it's done by acknowledging the validity of their perceptions in a way that goes beyond "yes, but..." You know. Listening to understand rather than listening to respond. So this is useful advice in the sense that a great deal of it is non-obvious to its proclaimed audience of young men. And it's perceptive advice in the sense that it doesn't just wave away complexity in favor of giving people simple answers to easy questions. That's what makes "If" work for me. There are some other things about it, or about Kipling, that I'm happy to dismiss too lightly. For one, this poem's about masculinity. I don't think there's any problem with writing a poem that isn't for everyone, but some people do. And Kipling as a person -- and his poetry as a project -- is often on the wrong side of history. There's nothing wrong with that either, at least in the sense that most people end up that way less by intent than chance. None of us have a secret window into the future or its prevailing morals. At the same time, I wouldn't insist that everyone like this poem, Kipling's poetry, or whatever we imagine of Kipling as a person. Just that when he put his hand to an advice poem, he got a lot right.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:37
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Very cool, thanks Brainworm! 
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Apr 14, 2016 21:31
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Adrenalist posted:What do you think of the Allan Bloom critique of the teaching of humanities--that most texts are taught not as things that argue for ideas, but rather as historical documents that should be looked at almost anthropologically (i.e. Bernard Williams on the Iliad)? I think Bloom's critique is partly justified in the sense that it's a sweeping generalization that applies to some number of programs and not at all to others. It also makes a facetious all-or-nothing argument about what I'm going to call Cultural Studies approaches to texts. Bloom's critique, at least as I understand it, is in wide circulation. Basically, it says that literary theory is a marriage between Linguistics and Cultural Studies, and therefore focuses on (a) abstract interplays of symbols and (b) abstract and non-falsifiable theories about cultural mechanics that are properly the domain of social scientists. What gets lost in that, the critique goes, is a focus on the right kinds of values and ideas. Maybe that's capital-T truth, or maybe its the mechanics of citizenship. Either way, they use the word "values" a lot, or sometimes "meaning" or "big ideas," and they lay a lot of blame on Deconstruction for some reason. On one hand, there's something right about this. There's nothing particularly valuable about reading, say, Moby Dick to catalog the ways it re-represents the ideological relationships peculiar to nineteenth-century Nantucket's whaling economy, just as there's nothing particularly valuable about, say, cataloging all of its allusions to Shakespeare. Of course nobody stops there. I think the kind of course Bloom has in mind in his critique either does stop there, or extends discussion into what's basically either politics or wankery. You know: using the fictional past to indict the actual present, or creating traffic between cultural theory and literary texts in which each illuminates some meaning in the other but never touches anything like real human experience. I've been in that class before, and I've had those students, too. They're not bad people, but they think that you can do social justice with the right mix of jargon and passion, and insist that art, culture, and politics are all different ways of spelling the same word. That's the caricature that Bloom and others take their shots at, and I think rightly so. I don't have a problem with social justice or cultural theory. Both are worthwhile, and it's irritating to see them done badly. But the real problem is that neither of them substitute for conscientiousness or empathy or wisdom. Those are the muscles that literature (and the broader Humanities) are supposed to exercise. But Bloom -- at least as I've read him indirectly -- also misses this. He's into big ideas, the pursuit of truth and so on, and his biggest gripe seems to be that a culture that doesn't embrace those things on his terms must be intellectually and spiritually sterile. From where I'm sitting, he makes the same mistake as the Humanities caricature he takes shots at: he thinks that art and literature and philosophy -- the human experience as broadly written -- are about ideas. You know. Good art wrestles with big ideas and big questions, so Hamlet is really about death and The Thinker is, I don't know, about the still pursuit of eternal truth. You might as well say Hamlet is about oppression and The Thinker embodies a phallogocentric and therefore racist, ableist, etc. approach to meaning. It's wrong in the sense that it's only even technically correct inside an ideology that's maximally exclusive and minimally useful. Really, human experiences are about ideas in the same way that relationships are about sex. It's important but it's not the whole thing, even though there are shrill, humorless subgroups who insist it must be and then build a theology of details that misses the point entirely. It sort of reminds me of the "how you ought to shave" crowd, at least the ones who think they can get a handle on their masculinity by obsessing over incidentals: they don't recognize (or maybe don't value) the differences between wisdom, knowledge, skills, and orthodoxy.
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Apr 21, 2016 16:01
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Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 It's been a very interesting experience, and has shown me just how shielded from direct, overt sexism I've been most of my life. Feel free to tell me to leave if this is off topic.
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Apr 21, 2016 16:13
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. You could try JSTOR.
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Apr 21, 2016 20:11
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 I don't think you're off topic, but I also think I'll take this in two parts. The first part is that thread. In this community, verbal aggression is a kind of spastic, inbred performance art. That doesn't mean it's insincere. It just makes it hard to tell the difference between active bigotry, goon rage, and kind of conspicuous, nuanced sociopathy that -- in this little world -- counts for cleverness. Mix that with a handful of echo chambers for seriously bad ideas and you get everything from your thread to someone thinking it's perfectly normal to play World of Warcraft during the birth of his first child. I'm not out to minimize sexism and hostility. But pointing to those things here is sort of like going to a dog fight and complaining about the nachos. So I think what I mean is that you're unlikely to encounter goon-levels of sexism in the real world unless you wander into an amphetamine-dealing chicken farm, exactly the wrong condo, or a suburban swamp McMansion that looks like it's missing half-a-dozen chromosomes.
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Apr 21, 2016 22:56
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Brainworm posted:In this community, verbal aggression is a kind of spastic, inbred performance art. That doesn't mean it's insincere. It just makes it hard to tell the difference between active bigotry, goon rage, and kind of conspicuous, nuanced sociopathy that -- in this little world -- counts for cleverness. Mix that with a handful of echo chambers for seriously bad ideas and you get everything from your thread to someone thinking it's perfectly normal to play World of Warcraft during the birth of his first child. Brainworm, dude, you've been pulling this poo poo off for like 300,000 words. This thread got me through grad school and teaching freshman comp/creative writing and literally got me a well-paying job as a tech writer - in my interview, I used your bit about how the skill is basically about breaking things down into easily digestible chunks, and that line got the laughs that got me hired. And, like, almost seven years after starting this thread, you're still dropping poo poo off-hand like that quote above that'd take me goddamn loving hours to articulate. Seriously, this thread is probably the most important thing about my field I've ever read in my life, no exaggeration at all. It's exactly the kind of stuff I wish I'd learned in college and grad school. So let me ask you - like half ironically here and half totally serious, because I've been wondering this poo poo for years: how do you think so well? Is there like a series of questions you ask yourself? Asbury fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Apr 22, 2016 |
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Apr 22, 2016 01:21
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 Hi Jessica, I'm Microwave's Mom.  I'm not sure but I think you may be trying to steal my limelight and I don't appreciate that. We may have to take this to the streets and I'll let you know when it comes to the streets I'm the toughest streeter around.
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Apr 22, 2016 17:45
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Brainworm posted:I don't think you're off topic, but I also think I'll take this in two parts. The first part is that thread.
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Apr 22, 2016 17:45
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 You should probably stop trying to create drama and sexism where it doesn't exist.
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Apr 22, 2016 18:19
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 If you really want to learn about satire in online discourse you should post in GBS. Also you should post in ladythread if you want to learn about feminism. I'm sure they would be happy to meet you.
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Apr 22, 2016 19:22
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 Oh also what kind of shoes do your friends find scary because we've been speculating and are hard pressed to imagine what "scary footwear" might entail.
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Apr 22, 2016 19:31
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Brainworm posted:In this community, verbal aggression is a kind of spastic, inbred performance art. That doesn't mean it's insincere. It just makes it hard to tell the difference between active bigotry, goon rage, and kind of conspicuous, nuanced sociopathy that -- in this little world -- counts for cleverness. I love that a supposedly educated, literate, humanities professor would need to be told that text is open to interpretation on multiple levels.
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Apr 22, 2016 21:09
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So when did the sexism pop up? Mostly it looked like people mocking the author's professed relationship with forums superstar my dad and the whole robot fetish thing. Did I miss some gendered slurs somewhere?
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Apr 22, 2016 21:26
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JessicaDupre posted:Hi, I'm new here, also a humanities professor like other people on this thread. I'd like to hear your thoughts on voice in writing, feminist satire, and sexism in online discourse. Case in point, I tried to start a thread elsewhere on this forum: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005 You're welcome to post here. Usually new posters make a thread here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=26 to introduce themselves to the rest of the forums.
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Apr 22, 2016 21:28
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JessicaDupre posted:Cuck That's cool. I'm gay and have probably been drinking too much as of late. Good luck with the overt sexism.
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Apr 22, 2016 22:52
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the JJ posted:So when did the sexism pop up? Mostly it looked like people mocking the author's professed relationship with forums superstar my dad and the whole robot fetish thing. Did I miss some gendered slurs somewhere? Really? I thought she was just talking about her literal IRL father, because she misunderstood the purpose of D&D after seeing it contained a general/off-topic thread called "dadchat".
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Apr 22, 2016 23:01
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I'm sure no goon would ever troll our fine forums on a topic they knew would get them derided!!
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Apr 22, 2016 23:09
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i like nice words
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the JJ posted:So when did the sexism pop up? It didn't. People barely insulted her, they just were kind of playing along and giving her poo poo for being a garbage poster who was advertising her kink erotica blog in the politics forum
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Apr 22, 2016 23:17
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Applewhite posted:
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Apr 22, 2016 23:18
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BTW, here's her Dear Richard letter: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773186 And the thread that she posted in D&D to shill her blog: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3773005&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Apr 22, 2016 23:22
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Defenestration posted:There's a ladythread? I would go to there. There's two. One in GBS that's ok and one in 4C that has really bitter and angry people.
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Apr 22, 2016 23:25
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I guess it's kind of funny that she went from being outraged about sexism (because Defenestration called her out on being a lousy writer) to going into hiding because of harassment (because Lowtax wrote a stern reply to her Dear Richard letter) over the course of like 3 hours. Also hi humanities people, sorry about your thread.
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Apr 22, 2016 23:25
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Brainworm posted:I don't think you're off topic, but I also think I'll take this in two parts. The first part is that thread. This sure is a post.
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Apr 23, 2016 00:00
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Brainworm, how many goons does it take to correct a woman who believes she might have been subjected to gendered hostility? edit: also: at what volume of nachos can we start to consider the possibility that they have actually become the worst thing about the dog fight? Stagger_Lee fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Apr 23, 2016 |
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Apr 23, 2016 02:17
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Stagger_Lee posted:Brainworm, how many goons does it take to correct a woman who believes she might have been subjected to gendered hostility? Woman thought that Editing was a tool of the patriarchy.  I suggested audience awareness because she showed none. I care about that sort of thing, and I find it disturbing that a humanities professor might have such contempt for the concept of critique.
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Apr 23, 2016 04:54
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nm
Absolute Lithops fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Apr 23, 2016 |
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Apr 23, 2016 07:27
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Dear professor, is cinema art?
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Apr 23, 2016 07:49
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Hogge Wild posted:There's two. One in GBS that's ok and one in 4C that has really bitter and angry people. Tbf they're really only bitter and angry about once a month and other times they're pretty chill.
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Apr 23, 2016 13:58
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Stagger_Lee posted:Brainworm, how many goons does it take to correct a woman who believes she might have been subjected to gendered hostility? When the volume of water shooting out of your colon exceeds that which you drank that day
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Apr 24, 2016 09:58
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So hey, let's keep talking about lit! I recently got sent this video from a friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVLpdzhcU0g and I would like to hear your thoughts on his "Criteria for a Classic" segment (starts at ~9:30), Brainworm! Do you agree or disagree with his criteria, and what, if anything, do you have to add to the conversation about Classics (the reading of them, the classification of them, etc)?
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Apr 26, 2016 21:06
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Well, that was a thing.3Romeo posted:Brainworm, dude, you've been pulling this poo poo off for like 300,000 words. Linguistically, I use a lot of what W.K. Wimsatt would call "Concrete Universals" (what other people would call "evocative details") along with a boatload of tropes. It's all emphasis, really: a detail that represents the emphatic quality of a class of things, or a trope in which the tenor (the abstract similarity between two unlike things) is the emphatic quality. So since we just had an adventure in misogyny (or "misogyny"), let's say we're talking about the champ Redditor Lowtax just trophied for GBS. One way I'd describe him is with a concrete universal-style detail -- one implication-heavy sentence from an imaginary biography, if you will: * Rage boner at his mom's funeral. * Lost his virginity to a Sailor Moon pillow. * Never finished Tomb Raider because he jacked off every time Lara Croft drowned. * Hid a camera in his stepmom's bathroom. Whatever, right? It's just got to be specific enough to suggest a way of thinking and living, like how the dorsal fin suggests the shark in Jaws. Another way is with a comparison to an unlike thing. So how would an MRA treat a girlfriend if he got one somehow? She'd be long-distance or maybe imaginary, for starters, but the real answer is probably the same way he treats other objects to which he believes she has some affinity. Therefore: * Keeps her "yearbook photo" next to his mom's ashes. (Tenor: women are absent and venerated; yearbook photo is either before she ballooned into a basement-dwelling Hindenberg or whatever picture came with the frame). * Grooms her like he dusts his Gundam figures (Tenor: carefully, since women are treasured, fragile possessions; wordplay says GF is a child, so secondary tenor is "small.") * Made a Tomb Raider skin from her Second Life avatar. (Building on his "drown Lara Croft" thing. Tenor: he sexualizes pleasure and pain responses because he focuses on what women do without thinking about how they feel). * Wants to get laid the same way he wants to win the Lottery. (Tenor: without learning or changing or difficulty. Also improbable.) And so on and so on. It's just focusing on details that imply the right kinds of complex things rather than describing those complex things in all their horribly boring detail. You can supply the detail later, but people work better when they have a memorable frame for all the complicated fiddly bits.
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Apr 28, 2016 18:33
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the JJ posted:So when did the sexism pop up? Mostly it looked like people mocking the author's professed relationship with forums superstar my dad and the whole robot fetish thing. Did I miss some gendered slurs somewhere? There are at least two kinds of race/sex/class/able/other isms. One is the kind of slur-driven bad behavior most people think about when we think about -isms: race and gender supremacy, or basically actively disliking people on the basis of their race, sexual orientation, or blah blah blah on the basis that these things have inherent and different human values. That kind of -ism is easy to spot, because you can locate it in a single thing that a single person did, and draw a straight line from there to its effects. The second kind of -ism has to do with people's understandings of pre-existing power relationships and communities' conscious or unconscious processes of exclusion. Just for instance, imagine a woman who for some reason needs to work alone in her office building after dark. She may or may not feel that her safety is threatened or that her childcare schedule is inconvenienced. Maybe she's not afraid of people, and maybe she doesn't have kids. But she'll also be aware that the company she's working for isn't considering those specific aspects of women's lives, right? That's a different kind of sexism. It's exclusivity. It could be that the company needs a project done by morning and the woman's the only person who can do it. Or it could be that the woman's a security guard. The nature of the need doesn't change the policy's exclusivity, and so it's reasonable to say that jobs where people work alone in office buildings after dark are sexist in an exclusive way. But here's the thing: groups are totally allowed to be exclusive. It's what makes them groups, and -- with rare exceptions (like workplaces) -- exclusion is as morally neutral as eating a sandwich. There are exactly zero things wrong with a movie that appeals only to middle-aged Latinas, a dating app that excludes fat people, a women's-only gym, or a college that only admits students whose skin is darker than a paper bag. I think where our author and I differ is over which groups have the right to be exclusive. Some people think that every community ought to be open to everyone. Some think that exclusive communities are fine, so long as they aren't dominant groups excluding oppressed ones. Some people think that public-facing groups should be inclusive but private groups can be exclusive, or that some types of exclusion are legitimate while others aren't, and some people think that the right to exclude is included in rights to e.g. free speech or property. That's the spectrum, basically, from SJW to libertarian. So SomethingAwful is exclusive. It's in print and on the internet, and you pay to join, so the illiterate and the megapoors stay out. It's in English, too. And our English. That's where we get into the "working alone after dark" situation: the digs and direct talk that Goons read as mutual respect (sometimes) is going to look unfriendly to outsiders and to most women. SA is classist and Anglo-centrist, and probably sexist and other -ists, too. We don't welcome everyone and that's fine.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:59
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Brainworm posted:There are at least two kinds of race/sex/class/able/other isms. Oh, to be sure. I was just wondering if I'd missed something. I guess I know many a ladygoon and I've seen the wolves descend on males who showed weakness. I don't doubt that SA is predominantly male but I have to wonder how much of that is due to underlying demographics and how much is due to push factors from inside the forum. And, to dither a bit off topic, morally a group can be a group, but I think there's a pragmatic case to be argued for fostering inclusivity and a multitude of opinions, as well as second order hazards arising from insulation. the JJ fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 20:36
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the JJ posted:And, to dither a bit off topic, morally a group can be a group, but I think there's a pragmatic case to be argued for fostering inclusivity and a multitude of opinions, as well as second order hazards arising from insulation. Totally. If you're running a college, your faculty need to reflect the composition of your student body. If you don't have any female physicists, you won't have many female physics majors. Whether things ought to be that way is a separate issue. I'm doing a lot of hiring right now, so this is also on my mind: the composition of your hires probably reflects the composition of your applicant pool, so non-diverse hires probably means a non-diverse applicant pool, which in turn means you have a problem with your search process. That's true for any kind of diversity you care to name: if all your applicants are Ivy Leaguers, straight out of graduate school, or part of a single subspecialty, you've got good people who either don't know about the position or have decided it's not for them. Not great.
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May 2, 2016 16:50
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In the ancient history thread, we've been talking about Marc Antony, and this question came up:NikkolasKing posted:On a similar note, why isn't Antony and Cleopatra famous like Romeo and Juliet? We should have had to read the former in high school, not the latter. I thought it was an interesting question and thought I'd pass it along to this thread, since you seem to have a lot of ideas about questions like this.
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May 13, 2016 16:41
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