FrankL

They should remember this is GIRL power not GRRL power (how I heard Batgirl in a recent animated described). Supergirl embraces the fact that she is a girl (after Cat Grant helped her with that). She owns it. She doesn't hate herself for not being male. Recognizing that there are differences is not feminism (in fact, it's rather the opposite of feminism).

In response, someone created this image:
 

And I thought the local favorite of a cheeseburger topped with pastrami was an abomination....

Why can't vampires stop drinking coffee?
 
 
 

I talked to my school's library guy today to see if they had that new book about Pavlov's Dogs and Schrödinger's Cat. 
 
He said the description rang a bell, but he'd have to look to see if they actually had it.

Why can't vampires stop drinking coffee?
 
 
 

Texas? if so, I can understand where you and him are coming from.
 
(Aside to LM: remember the ep where Sheldon Cooper goes to Texas and has a disagreement about evolution with his mum?)
 
No worries.
 
Write him off, that is fair, for the most part. I've been wavering in doing do. He wrote a monograph on cosmology which seems to a standard text on the subject which looks interesting.
 
I'm not against science, I'm against the philosophy that underpins it, mainly, scientism (belief that the scientific method is the only viable tool to give reliable knowledge) and anti-realism (disbelief in nonmaterial realm & intelligibles). I've recently come to the point of view seeing the natural science along the lines of journalism. I'll explain that in a later post. That i can discuss this with you shows that science is worthwhile. I may be a fool, but I'm a wise fool.

Barry's differing intellect does throw me. Several times I've said to myself, hasn't he already learned that lesson? Shouldn't he have figured this one out?
 
I'm looking forward to seeing Jay get his speed back, too.

I suspect Un-Durkon is going to retreat. Or try to. I also suspect we have a seriously peeved Belkar waiting somewhere in the wings.

Just made this one:

Everyone in Oklahoma and Texas knows that the chicken crossed the road to show the armadillo it could be done.

Everyone in Oklahoma and Texas knows that the chicken crossed the road to show the armadillo it could be done.

One thing I liked a lot was the look/vibe of the AU setting shown at the end of the episode. I'd love to see a -- oh, let's say, JSA series -- in that setting.

This is just introverted gibberish. Change a few pronouns and a few activities and the article could have been written by a woman. In fact, I've read very many, very similar articles that were written by women, except they were about societal pressures to be feminine. Which makes the point, that it isn't about masculinity - or femininity, or even gender roles, for that matter: I've also read similar screeds on being Catholic (or not, in a catholic environment). It's about how we react to social pressure to conform to a specific role (or roles, because we are all expected to assume multiple roles).
 
It's a pity. The author starts out promisingly, writing "Speaking for myself—the only person I can reasonably speak for—being a Man never seemed like an attainable goal, let alone a desirable one. This has something to do with me and who I am, certainly ..." and then goes on to ignore his own starting premise and write as though his own experience is universal. I understand his experience, because it's very similar to my own. But his conclusions and his reactions - even though entirely understandable to me, based on shared experience - are diametrically opposed to my own. So his own experience is not universal. Nor is mine – nor are the experiences of my many geek friends that run the spectrum. They are all equally valid … and only a tiny subset deal with anxiety issues. And it is a pity, because there are a few insightful comments mixed in with the gibberish.
 
So masculinity isn’t an anxiety disorder. He has an anxiety disorder about his masculinity. That’s an issue he’s going to have to solve or learn to accommodate himself. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but locating the real root of a problem is the first step in resolving it. Trying to externalize it, the way he does here is actually only going to deepen his issues, because the world is not going to change to accommodate his personal problem.
 
Cheers, Mark

My issue with the narrative about online harassment is that they don't bother to reference the numbers. Almost all studies to date show higher male reporting of online harassment than female reporting. Pew, for instance, put the numbers are 44% of male internet users and 37% of female internet users. Similar ratios play out in several reports. The average ratios of abusive tweets, for example, was that 2.54% of 2 million aimed at men, and 0.94% of 2 million aimed at women. This is despite the fact that female adoption of social media is 10+% higher than their male counterparts. Now, this does not alter the fact that roughly 75% of internet abuse is linked to male users. But, by that same token, women are significantly more likely to harass other women, than men, online.
 
The one unique factor about the online harassment of women is that it does disproportionately reference their biological sex and/or gender. Women do report greater levels of upset over online harassment than men, but that doesn't mean more women are harassed. Also, the actual numbers of people who faced realistic real-world threats from their online harassers is less than 2% of those harassed. We should do something about the problem, but lopsided-gender profiling and grotesquely sexist assumptions about threats and violence ignores the big picture while not solving either part of the problem. What is more, in terms of violence, its great that we want to stop violence against women. But, what about violence against men?
 
Women are more likely to be raped, stalked, or the victims of domestic abuse (though the gender gap on the latter isn't nearly as wide as people like the think). But, most (and its a big gender gap) victims of serious street violence and MURDER are male. Also, far more men commit suicide or face homelessness than women do. Men also have issues society is morally obligated to address. Men are also victims. Focusing on women's issues while excluding male issues - and male victims - is also the mindset of a mob of vile sexist pigs. Gynocentrism is just as detestable as phallocentrism. We have to take care of everyone. Men and women alike.
 
And, for the record, the UN statement on the matter was ludicrous and read like it had been written by a lunatic.
 
Get a grip already.

The phrase was, yes. I was objecting to their language. And to the UN in general, really. I never said there wasn't a problem, so don't imply that I did.
 
Here's the real issue: Why isn't law enforcement tracking these people down and arresting them? It's not really that difficult to catch someone who posts threats online. Hell, when my wife was a teenager, her cousin posted a vaguely suicidal poem on her Prodigy account, and the authorities were out the next day asking her about it. But death threats seem to be ignored. Has any law enforcement agency made any example out of anyone for this yet?

"t really does not matter how they define harassment as long as they define it the same way for both "male" and "female" bots"
 
Yes, yes it really does matter. And despite my comment above about how definitions matter, you seem to be willfully ignoring that point. 

When we are discussing this topic, a topic that has been highlighted in the last few years, it is very important to keep in mind what things are being counted. A violent threat, akin to those that we have seen promulgate the internet with individuals like Anita are wholly distinct from "feeling horny". And to liken the two as somehow being the same is to severely distort the image that is trying to be conveyed. 

The common notion of the harassment endured is one of violent aggression towards women entering the online world. One in which individuals like Anita receive real and credible threats of violence on a regular basis. That is the image that is being pushed and is claimed to be gendered. It is on this point that the critics of this assumed gendered violence raise the question: is it gendered? Is the violence or threat of violence woman receive online in keeping with the violence or threat of violence men receive? This is the ignored point that the supporters of the common message need to deal with. And by obfuscating it away by including extraneous amounts of non-comparable information, the message gets diluted and the integrity of that side gets drawn into question. 

---
 
Now, having my intellectual honesty called into question by you, Ranxerox, is not quite kosher. But since you seem to be screaming at the wind for me to address this point of yours, allow me to. 
 
 
Bots with female names received, to a higher degree than male named bots, messages of a sexual and or threatening nature. Looking at your link I do not see any source for the original data, so I can hardly confirm what they were including in those messages, so I have to make a good deal of assumptions based on less words than an average tweet on twitter.  It would seem that any message that could be construed to have a sexual or suggested tone to it was taken to be part of that 'Sexually explicit or threatening" group. The fact that no examples of the "threatening" messages were given gives me pause. And the fact that this group also engaged in practice of intermingling the two is also gives me pause. I would wager that the messages rising to "threatening" status were far more infrequent than those of a sexual nature. And it is the desire to see those numbers highlighted and compared that gets shouted down by your side, Ranxerox. 
 
 
So why is it that messages of a sexual nature must be taken differently than those of a violent nature (really? I need to explain this?)? Well, at the most basic level, everyone who has lived a few days as an adult most anywhere knows that one of the key distinctions between men and women is the classic "predator : prey" analogy. Be it due to purely cultural reinforcement or purely biological need, or a mix of the two, Men feel the need to pursue sexual congress while women feel no particular need (or so the trope goes). The roll of 'gatekeeper' has afforded women the ability to not need to be forward with their explicit sexual desires / requests. 

To put this into more context, when we look at a bar or nightclub, I would expect that the proportion of men initiating first contact with the goal of developing some layer of intimacy to be easily in that 25x range. Indeed, I would be surprised if it wasn't. Think back to your own personal history when dealing with the opposite sex. How often do you think men have felt  pressure to initiate first contact versus women? Think back to the number of occasions you have actually seen women initiate first contact. Without doubt it does happen, but the proportions will heavily skew in one direction. Now take that bar context and reduce it to simple Chat-Room interactions. Seeing more men initiate any conversation between opposite sexes and for those initiations to have a sexual component is not out of the realm of reason. Indeed, I would say it is to be completely expected. 

So, I feel lumping in my innocuous but sexually charge phrase of "Hey, Beautiful! How you doin'?" with threatening statements such as "I will kill you" is completely ignoring the reality of human interaction. One must not forget the context in which we live and operate when looking at things. This is something the advocate of the gendered nature of online activity seem to conveniently forget. 
 
--

Now setting aside that petty squabble you want to have, lets get back to the real issue: Is online violence gendered?

Do women experience more semi-credible and/or credible threats of violence or suffer from more committed acts of violence than their male counterparts? 

I do not know the answer to that question. It could easily be the case that the issue is truly gendered. It could be as night and day as some would seem to claim it to be. But before committing myself to accepting that truth, I would like to actually see some hard evidence. And not ill designed and over inclusive wastes of time. 
 
Foreign Orchid. 



 
 
 
 

So, here is an issue I have with people asserting that online harrasment is a gendered issue: what makes the cut? Most studies I have heard of list all unwelcomed experience into the same category. And while I think there is value in that kind of undistinguished macro level research, it isn't getting quite at the issue that people are discussing, or so I think. When others question the veracity of the claim that it is a gendered issue, I think most individuals are wanting to single out credible / semi-credible threats of violence AND actual attempts of violence from what they considered every day trolling. To help highlight this difference, me saying something to the effect of "I hope John Doe gets run over" or "Good Gosh I'd love to 'copulate' with Jane Doe" is substantively different from "I am going to go to John Doe's house Tuesday and slit his throat" or "If I ever get close to Jane Doe, I am going to rape her". 
 
Why do I bring up the above distinction? Because I think it is far too common a practice by supporters of the gendered view to lump both sets together and thus imply the interchangablity of the two sets. I do not personally think and would imagine that most individuals when pressed would also not think that they are interchangable. I was triggered to bring this up because the third line of the article you linked has this gem of a statement "threats and sexually explicit messages". I think most individuals who think the bare claim of the gendered nature of the online treatment of folks would find it puzzling that "Sexually Explicit messages" and "Threats" are lumped together as mutually interchangable ideas. And lets keep in mind that if a 'sexually explicit message' has a threat of violence (i.e., I will rape you!), then it has already risen to the level of "threat" and does not need to be mutually listed as the mutual listing only distorts numbers. 
 
But perhaps I am being too pedantic in my reading. Perhaps the author's intent was to say "threats and threats with a sexual undertone / overtone to them". Since I could easily be engaging in biased reading, it behooves me to check the link they provided. Luckily they did provide an actual link as most places parroting such messages rarely do. So clicking on the link to the University of Maryland, I find that it just takes me to a department homepage and that page is not directly linking me to any study. This is concerning as the source you linked to was trying to bolster their point using some still unidentified study. How am I suppose to confirm the veracity of their claim and the validity of the original study if no link is provided. And the fact that they implied a link to the original source while actually providing none suggests a level of deception on their part that is not acceptable. But again, perhaps I am being too critical. Lets continue forward. 
 
They actually link to WHO@ (Working to Halt Online Abuse) to help bolster their claims. That was nice. And the fact that there are links to actual data sets is nice. But I actually have no knowledge of who this group is and am at least a bit reluctant to take their word as truth. And their data sets suffer from some limitations in who is involved. Thus the ability to draw strong and reliable inferences from their small data sets to the population as a whole is limited at best. But lets at least hear them out on this issue. The article says:
 
In 2007, 61 percent of the individuals reporting online abuse to WHOA were female while 21 percent were male. 2006 followed a similar pattern: 70 percent of those reporting online harassment identified themselves as women. Overall, in the years covering 2000 to 2007, 72.5 percent of the 2,285 individuals reporting cyber harassment were female and 22 percent were male. 70 percent of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 40 and half of them reported having no relationship with their attackers.
 
 
Interesting numbers for sure. But let me take this moment to cue you all into a terribly deceptive trick used to prove points - choosing your data sets and ignoring ones not proving your point. I know this sounds obvious but it is extremely important. If you ever hear of a study that discusses school performance or under performance of any particular group that doesn't cover an entire life chapter (until the end of Primary school, until the end of secondary school, until the end of college) be extremely weary of what is being fed to you. More likely than not, all their strong data gets destroyed in the remaining year or two. For example, you will occasionally hear how students who attend preschool out perform their non-preschool-attending counterparts. And those claiming this who have seen the data and have some desire to be honest will usually add on the caveat of "until third grade" or so. Why? Because after that point, the major differences between pre-school attending students and non-attending students starts to be wiped out. The effects of that extra education have a shelf life of only a few years. So when I see this article use only a portion of the data to prove a point, I am reminded of those statistical tricks. But does this author engage in those kinds of deceptive practices? Let's see. 
 
To aid in this I have created a Google Doc spreadsheet with the relevant data that can be found here. The highlight is that the values this person used are accurate on whole and hold up over the whole set, there was an interesting omission from the article: the perps. I found this data quite interesting. It suggests that in the author's established time frame, known male and female perps were in neigh equal proportion. Over the whole of the available data, known male perps were at about 41% and known female perps were at 36%. I would think that this kind of revelation would help open up a new dialogue about 'gendered' harassment. While it is true that a member of a group can be prejudice against that same group, it isn't exactly in keeping with the common belief of online harassment that both men and women are, in largely equal proportion, harassing others. That really goes against the generally held notion that Online harassment is an act that men perform against women. 
 
So, my ending conclusion on this whole issue (the issue raised in the link) is that the link really proves nothing and adds nothing. I think this for a number of reasons:
 
No links to reliable and trust worthy data.
Only provided data is from self selecting individuals and the information is subjective at best
The distinction between harassment and 'threats of violence' is not made clear in any data and that goes to the core issue at hand. 
The data set provided is extremely small. Over the course of 13 years they only garnered just over 4,000 entries.
 
Foreign Orchid. 

Cut me off a non-Euclidean slice.

What happens when Edgar RIce Burroughs and Gene Roddenberry gets plastered at the bar and write a story together?
 
 
James T. Kirk of Mars

Listened to this several times when I was working from home the other day.
 
South of Santa Fe, Brooks and Dunn
 

 
This one, too.
 
Big Iron Horses, Restless Heart
 

There are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works. 
- Will Rogers

I tell you, remove the warning labels, and let nature do what it's supposed to.