薔薇語

You forgot "doze." 
 
 
At least for Cancer's three, I think you need to swing by New Yawk some time.  Head down to Toity-Toid Street.  Anybody dere will tell you dey don't need none of dem electrocution coaches to correct deir speakin'.
 
The internet really, really needs a sarcasm font.

We do have a genderless pronoun - it/that. That should solve the problem neatly.
 
cheers, Mark

Obviously, we need a genderless pronoun to continue having a full discussion of robot sexuality.  That way, we can avoid saying "she," "he," or "it" and just use something like "s/he-it" (for example).
 
After all, when you really get down to it, I think most of us here, myself included, are full of "s/he-it".
 
I think many people on both sides of this issue should keep that in the forefront of their brains -- in other words, have "s/he-it fore-brains."  The problem is, the various posters think their own "s/he-it" doesn't stink.
 
(Okay, I'll stop now, and take myself out back to be beaten profusely.  Maybe I'll get the "s/he-it" knocked out of me.)

Is there a huge difference between 5.5.2 and 7.5.0? Even if the robots count as male, I don't think it matters much.
 
It's the quality of the female characters that should be the measuring stick. I don't see any of the characters going too far out of various stereotypes, but I don't see anything immediately offensive about any of the female characters, either.

Actually, one of the robots is trans-gender.  It was booted with Windows 8, but self-identifies as Apple OS X.

I'm pretty sure the robots lack chromosomes, so it seems a moot point...

Well, for an educated defense of the gamergate group

 
That's Christina Hoff Sommers, a democrat working for the AEI (With conservative backers) so I guess that makes her a centrist? She's written books like "Who stole feminism" and so on. She's got a PHD, has written for the Huffington post and other places so I don't think folks should dismiss her as a sockpuppet or anything straight off. Agree or disagree with her, she's worth a moment of listening to I think. Unfortunately, she falls into a trap of sounding too snarky, but it's a trap both sides of the debate have gone into imo.
 
Oh, if interested in her previous video about video games that's here

Back in August, a Fields Medal awarded to a woman for the first time, to Maryam Mirzakhani. The Fields Medal has been described as being "the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics".

Ranxerox, you're a nice guy, and a thoughtful member of our little community here. Rather than argue with you, I'm going to bow out. Suffice it to say we disagree on Sarkeesian's motives. I think she's a sophomoric attention whore, and that's the last word I'm going to post on the matter.
 
It could be that I'm being unfair, but I haven't yet seen anything to convince me otherwise. I do think it'd be bad form to argue about that opinion given the topic of this thread and the fact that she isn't here to defend herself.

It is extremely oversimplified. It is contentious. And her "toxic masculinity" shtick is less oriented in "not seeking help" and more in "men hate women". So, it is an unrelated issue unless one does some mental gymnastics to try and reason her out of the corner she built up. And I am just going to quote myself, 
 
"[W]hile I understand she has a predisposition to think men and masculinity are the great evils of this world, she is jumping the gun on her conclusion. The presupposition that somehow these mass murderers are driven by sexist intentions or that masculinity is to blame, is a big leap of faith. While I can understand her concerns about the unfortunate prevalence of these individuals being male, that does not mean that masculinity, or more aptly, society's concept of masculinity is the root or even most compounding factor. Rather there may be more ingrained biological reasons for it that far outweigh any social constructs"
 
Lastly, believe it or not, not every issue needs to be hashed out on Twitter. Twitter does not provide the ability to make nuanced arguments - the kind this topic needs. So, given the choice of rampant over simplification of an issue for the sake of stirring up controversy, and of fully articulating one's case for the sake of clarity, Ms. Anita chose the former. Again, trolling behavior. 
 
La Rose. 

Since it is a bit harder to respond in-line, I am going to keep the whole quotation below and then also break our your quotes as needed for my response.
 
"But as a nation we aren't grieving... not compared [to] how a parent feels over the death of a child."

You are most certainly correct in your assesment that the kind of grief that we feel on an individual level and the kind we feel on a social  / societal level are not the same. That, however, does not mean that we as a society do not grieve. After 911, the nation as a whole grieved. The nation as a whole had to come face to face with the reality that bad things (terrorist acts in this case) can happen to us when we least expect it. The nation as a whole struggled with this. And while on a personal level you (maybe?) or I did not lose anyone in 9/11 and thus didn't feel the sting of the event, we as nominally empathetic beings who were part of the greater American society felt the impact of the event. 

Being forced to confront the idea that any one of our children could be shot and killed by another young adult is a frightening realization. One that even despite the luxury of distance, spacial and relational, we feel and must face. 
 
"So, I don't see her comments as being disrespectful to the parents." 

But the issue isn't "did the parents hear her comments" but that she made them in the first place. I am never likely to meet one of the victim's family members and nor are any of my comments ever going to reach their ears, but if I were to say something ill of the victim, we here would all be rightfully enraged by my repugnant comments. Moreover, the assumption that the only victims of the tragedy are the  literal victims plus their parents is to misunderstand human nature. 

Ms. Sarkeesian's comments were rude because they sought to use the deaths of these victims to generate sympathy for her pre-existing belief; a contentious belief at that. And to so casually disregard their (the victim's) humanity and use them as mere prop pieces to push an agenda is morally repugnant. 
 
"So, after the tragedy in Benghazi FOX news pushed their agenda... It may be unbecoming..."

So, you can I can easily agree that using the deaths of individuals to push a contentious agenda is "unbecoming", right? Perhaps you won't go so far as to join me in saying it is morally repugnant, but certainly unbecoming / rude. So, since you and I can meet at least on this point, can you understand why I and PatternGhost called Ms. Sarkeesian's actions out as being bad? 

"It may be unbecoming but it is a game that everyone plays..."

Is it a game anyone should play is the question. The fact that an action occurs is by no means evidence that it should occur. 

"[A]nd singling Ms Sarkeesian out... for playing the game strikes me as arbitrary."

While you are free to feel such, I think you would find yourself hard pressed to claim such is true. If you think there is some hypocrisy on this issue, then feel free to find evidence for it and state that case but I think you will find yourself struggling with an uphill battle. Moreover, and certainly more relevant, it is not the character of the people making the claim that Ms. Anita's actions were in bad-taste, but statements / arguments that Ms. Anita's actions were in bad taste that is important
 
Moving beyond your exact quoted text, allow me to give an example of why we should not yield to such comments like Ms. Sarkeesian's. Pre-911 there were many bills put forth to expand state power. But they could never generate support because wiser-minds prevailed. But in the aftershock of 911 the same bills that were shot down before passed. Why? Because the people pushing them fed on the public's grieving and fears. They understood that in such situations people find it harder to make good-rational decisions. 
 
While there is most certainly a difference in scale between between pushing forward federal law and the potentially insidious idea that masculinity is the root of these issues, they ultimately operate on the same idea: take a tragedy such the horrid deaths of individuals and use it to push a pre-existing and / or unrelated agenda through the public conscious. Ms. Anita has her beliefs about men, manhood, society, and masculinity and she is welcome to them. She has even made a career of talking about them. But the moment she tries to hijack the deaths of 2 young individuals, she is being a troll. And we should recognize that and yield to our better sides and not feed the troll. 
 
La Rose. 

She's trying to appropriate a tragedy for her unrelated cause. That's low. It's also a gross oversimplification of a serious problem that can't be summed up with a pithy buzzword.

I would apply another, more brutal if lexical, criterion, as well. For any writer, is "toxic" a modifer on "masculinity", or is "masculinity" a subset of "toxic"? If the latter (and I have encountered writings for which the latter was true), then that flips the bozo bit.

Is it not rude to do it in some of the cases you listed? People seem to generally accept that we need to show deference to the dead and grieving after tragic events; the length of that deference can vary of course, but surely even waiting 1 day is a bare minimum. Next, on the occasions where we do move into discussions about the tragic event while people are still in critical condition and / or grieving, there tends to be a very widespread agreement on the issue. It is not a contentious position to say that air travel ought to be safe, that terrorist acts are not acceptable, or that we should stop epidemics. It is a contentious position to say that we ought to monitor all Americans, that masculinity is the root of evil, that gun laws are too lax / strict, and so forth. Given that there isn't a sense of widespread agreement, people pushing forward such points are seeking to capitalize on the raw emotions of the public rather than simply appeal to better judgement. The idea that 'no crisis ought to go to waste' is a toxic idea because it enables individuals to push forward ideas that we otherwise would look down upon. 
 
Ms. Anita is being disrespectful to those who have passed by trying to use their deaths as a way of galvanizing support for a contentious position. It flies in the face of one of the basic principles that Kant put forward about treating people as people and not mere means to get what you want. It is akin to a life insurance agent trying to get a family to shove out lots of extra money for life insurance right after one of their children dies. We instinctively know that the parents are not in the best state of mind to make decisions and the insurance agent is being a morally repugnant predator. 
 
La Rose. 

While the vileness of her attackers disgusts me . . . she's a moron, and also a bit sleazy in trying to use a shooting to boost her cause.

I am not sure I have seen so much clueless smug self-congratulatory condescension directed at an older generation, and a willful gross disregard of relevant material circumstances, since some of the flamboyant excesses of the late 1960s.
 
It was a drunken riot in a ball park in Chicago. Bill Veeck, owner of the White Sox, could have declared you were going to burn, oh, Barbie dolls, or Dallas Cowboy t-shirts, or copies of Billy Budd Foretopman, or California state flags, or maps of Helgoland, and it would not have mattered. Cheap admission given to people who brought the designated artifact ... chosen for marketing purposes to attract what Bill Veeck thought would be a maximum number of butts in the seats ... explicitly to destroy said artifacts. And things kinda got out of hand, what a surprise. Kinda the same thing happened as in the public book-burnings in the 1930s, with the exception that the latter were actually intended to spur violence against a chosen target.
 
A few years earlier also in the 1970s though in Cleveland rather than Chicago, there had been another predictably stupid promotion idea -- Ten Cent Beer Night -- and which became, sure enough, another drunken riot in a ball park. And there, too, the riot was composed mostly of young white men. Why is that? Could it possibly because traditionally young white men just happen to like the idea of gratuitous random minor violence, when they can get away with it? And cheap beer is a pretty clear invitation to get loaded and get rowdy in public, yes?
 
In neither riot were there deaths, and no evidence of homicidal intent, just stupid rowdies going too far.
 
Reading a premeditated tapping of a groundswell racial backlash into Disco Demo Night is taking Bill Veeck to be a master social-political manipulator of mainstream American culture ... and if you you sincerely believe that, or expect others to because you say so, then don't go to New York; you'll end up buying a nice bridge there.
 
If you want to argue that Veeck's choice of disco records came at least partially from racist attitudes, I'd be willing to buy that, though Veeck was not the kind of ax-grinding deep thinker to have framed his strictly-for-profit promotional event to launch a white supremacist movement. If you want to argue that it was young white men dominating the rioters because of the whole sex-race privilege package, I'll buy that too. But the argument framed by the author just drips of a self-congratulatory sneer by someone clueless enough to read deep meaning into a dime novel.

Tech careers, not gaming-related.
 
Bias in performance reviews
 
EDIT: Not mentioned in article, but something I have heard anecdotally from female colleagues, is that this bias in performance reviews is present even when the reviewers are female. I am not aware of any study that proves this, but I have heard it from multiple people in multiple fields.

Even if we assume the victim is telling the truth (she probably is, I'm just pointing out that the allegations are still at the allegation phase), this is one comic book shop. It's a single point of data. A disturbing point. But it doesn't give us a wide enough view of comic shops in general to merit the title the piece is given.
 
I can list several stores here that have happy female employees, and a few in California. In fact, I could say that the majority of the comic shops I've visited in the last ten or fifteen years had female employees that seemed to be being treated well, the evidence for that being a postiive demeanor and low turn over rate of said employees.
 
I think it's good to bring this stuff to light, but the headline is clearly click bait, and points with a broad brush. Yes, there are clearly problems in all levels of the industry, and they should always be called out, but can it be done without sensationalistic headlines and hyperbole? 

Okay, so I am going to put on my crass and cranky MRA-ish hat on for a bit now. 
 
First, the problem with "the casual cruelty" against women is that people seem to think that just because the problem affects women that is important and seem to be ignoring that it is a feature that is pervasive and non-discriminating. By ignoring half of the equation we deny ourselves any chance at real progress. It is like saying "The problem with lung cancer in women" 
 
Second, the existence of casual violence is not new. Indeed, we have all watched countless times as people whose sole reason for being is to die dramatically, die. Indeed, so much so that we have given given this troupe its own name: RedShirt. But if we were to really look into the pure numbers of characters who are violently dispatched (killed or otherwise) in media (TV, Movies, Games, etc) we would likely find that men by FAR are the majority. Yet despite it happening all the time to men it is not an issue. And why is it not an issue? 
 
The simple answer to the above quandary is this: women have inherent value for existing and men don't. Why is it that there exist a trope of doing harm to a female character? Because people find such acts emotionally evocative and in a way that the mere switching of genders would greatly lessen. Why? Because women have value in their existence. It is an accepted state of affairs  that by merely existing a woman has some kind of basic value that ought to shield her from terrible outcomes. And that is a good thing. It is something that should exist. But it is something that should exist for all people regardless of sex. But sadly it doesn't. 
 
We live in a society where woman have value and men must earn it. What makes the death of a male character important is the fact that that character did, is doing, or reasonably could do something important. Indeed, his life is never given importance, only his actions. That is why we don't care about no-name RedShirts - it was their role to die and in performing that action, they attained the only value they could earn.  
 
Lets bring this into a bit of a trivial but hyper game related example: Why is any death of Mario important? Because if he dies, the princess can't be saved. Not because some person is dying, but because some deed can no longer be accomplished; thus the disposibility of man. Why would the death of Princess Peach be important? Because P.Peach is important in and of herself. Enough so that the death of countless male-commoners and the perils of our titular heroes is not enough to outweigh her value from purely existing; again, only the actions of the heroes are important, not their lives. 
 
This is why when we hear of some tragedy where people die, we always feel the need to highlight the number of women and children who die. Because doing so evokes greater emotional connection - Men die, such is life. About the only way a man gets highlighted is if he has done something worth noting like being a father. 
 
And now that we have some outcries to protect women from casual violence in video games and other media, I can't help but wonder where the concern for humanity as a whole is. And given that it is an issue being raised by people who would like to claim they are fighting for equality, I can't help but find their interest purely self-serving and demonstrably out of sync with their own stated goals. 
 
Anyway, that is my rant for the night. Just remember, just because it is a man dying doesn't mean it isn't important. 
 
La Rose. 

Some more nerdity:
 

I think some of these are kind of missing the point. Men and women are different and that shouldn't surprise anyone. Nor should the fact that men and women and more importantly the idea of masculinity and femininity are portrayed differently. The fact that they are portrayed differently doesn't seem shocking nor bad. Now, we could and should argue over how any given portrayal is bad and not just that men and women are not portrayed in the same way. 
 
How does that relate to the Cracked article (By the by, who uses Cracked for anything other than off-beat humor?):
 
#31 - men are not judge so much on the clothing we wear as it compares to someone else wearing the same outfit. We are judged by it all the same as it is a sign of our wealth, class, and prestige. 
 
#28-26 - These three have a running theme of making men look like sex objects for female amusement. This is somehow suppose to be shocking but seems to forget that men are already portrayed like that - Have you seen any number of underwear or diet-soda ads? Men are blatantly sexualized all the same. 
 
#25 - So, the issue here is that women are assumed to not be handy with cars. I can understand the trouble that can cause. But lets be real, men are assumed to be incompetent with: housework, children, tests, directions, decision making, dealing with emotions, and a plethora of other issues. Indeed, the Hyper-Competent mother and Hypo-Competent father is the most basic troupe of modern family-sitcoms. 
 
#24 - Male tits are not sex objects yet female ones are: Oh the humanity! Okay, I get it, we don't want to over sexualize a fairly basic part of our body - especially one not needed for procreation anyway. But the not being able to show breasts bit has been laxing more and more every year and we are likely to see it not being so taboo in my generation. Yet still, men can't go around showing off our groin section - which is the male equivalent. Once again, the gotcha pick fails to understand that men and women are different and so our sexualization will be displayed differently. 
 
#20 - There are male strip clubs and dining establishments that cater to female audiences. For those interested in seeing some beef-cakes on display, feel free to visit Chippendales.
 
#17 - There are countless male characters who are purposely designed to be modern Apollos. 
 
#15 - Spreading awareness about the potential of sexual violence is good. I think the ad, as they have it, is a bit too in your face but perhaps that is a good thing. Secondly, spreading awareness should not be limited to one group alone as both sexes can be and are victims of sexual violence. 
 
-------------
 
All in all, I think we have issues to solve but this "if it were men" ads are stupid and meaningless because they don't get the point. I think places like Cracked are the perfect place for such things because these 1 for 1 swaps ought to be relegated to where they belong: cheap comedy. 
 
La Rose. 

"The bigger they are the harder they fall" was a piece of propaganda perpetrated by various villains. It should read "The bigger they are, the harder they hit!"
 
La Rose. 

I have never understood trolls. Why waste your time just to annoy another person? And I especially don't understand these kinds of trolls who go through a good deal of effort to mod the game for the big benefit of ruining someone else's experience. Surely they could be doing something more with their lives. 
 
La Rose. 

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