Delta1212

The point here to consider is that men are, by and large, the only ones in a position to discriminate. The places where women have the power to do so are much fewer and and generally less critical to anyone's personal well-being or ability to get ahead in life. That's not to say that every man in a position to do so automatically discriminated against women. But some of them do. And because women don't have the power to respond in kind on a similar widespread/institutional level, the discrimination can't have reversed. There may be less discrimination now than there was in the past, but the net effect is still pointing strongly in the direction of harming women far more than it harms men. We're nowhere near a reversal existing on a societal level. The main reason that I don't find this argument convincing as far as "well, maybe it's not happening now but that's the direction we're heading in" is that we're trying to reach destination X where there is no discrimination (or, more realistically, because people are assholes, nobody is disproportionately affected by discrimination because of things they can't control). On the side of X that we're on right now, men have an advantage. On the opposite side of X, women have an advantage and men are disadvantaged. Most of the arguments for "reverse" discrimination (and this applies to arguments for all sorts not just gender) mostly amount to "We're heading towards the opposite side of X and we're getting mighty close to it. This is the closest that society has ever been to X. Maybe it would be better if we just stopped where we are now instead of risking going past X and winding up in a bad place on the other side." The problem, of course, is that the only fair place to be as a society is dead on X. To say that we're close enough now and don't need to actually get there is to tell other people "Sorry, my fear of the possibility that I might be put at a disadvantage outweighs the fact that you currently are actually at a disadvantage, so it isn't worth it to me to try to push society any closer to an ideal state of fairness."

You are confusing "finite" with "bounded." It is possible for a space to be finite but unbounded, in which case there is no center.

Deep breaths, Raider. One of the things I really respect about you is that you're generally pretty willing to listen to counter-arguments and to think about and accept points that refute your starting position instead of digging in in the face of contrary evidence. That's a useful trait to have and not an especially common one. But it's much harder for anyone to do that when they get frustrated and start letting the argument feel personal. I understand the frustration of feeling like you are being misunderstood or your arguments are being misconstrued, but try not to let yourself get upset when that happens. That's a good way to get emotionally attached to a position, and that's not a good place to argue from. Try instead to look at it as an opportunity to find a better way to express your ideas so that they are easier to understand or harder to apply improperly for someone else's argument. Don't allow yourself to get defensive and entrenched in a position.

Something along those lines. It was easy to think in middle school "smoking is unhealthy and of course I'm never going to do it. Obviously, none of my friends are going to do it either." And I never did smoke. But by high school, I knew plenty of people with the same education I did who were smoking like chimneys between classes. Same goes for general drug use. One of my best friends in elementary school was basically an alcoholic by high school, got into other things and I'm fairly sure the last I heard of what was going on with him, he had just gotten out of jail. There is a trap that it is easy to fall into that because you have a particular belief and it seems objectively correct, and because it gets espoused from positions of authority without a lot of pushback that everyone, or at least most "normal" people are operating from the same assumptions. I can absolutely guarantee you that you personally know people whose opinions on certain things would surprise and/or shock you, and that includes the role of women in society. That's not a statement about where you live or the specific people you know. That's a general statement about people. A lot of things you assume are baseline assumptions for any reasonable person are actually not, and this spans all generations and regions. There may be regions and age brackets where certain shared ideas cluster more than others, but pretty much none of them are universal, and you disagree about a lot more things with a lot more people that you interact with on a daily basis than you probably think you do.

This is going to see kind of random, but humor me for a minute. What are your thoughts on smoking?

It may be solved in the future, but it is not now. There is a tendency to assume forward progress as a natural and somewhat inevitable process. But it isn't. It takes effort to push the boulder up the hill. Getting lax and saying "Well, the boulder has been going uphill since I've been alive and has been for years and even decades before that. At its current pace, it'll reach the top of the hill by the time I'm an adult, so I don't understand why anyone is still bothering to push it" is a good way to let things slide backwards.

The problem is that this is an ideal that is still not actually realized. It certainly looked like it was when I was in school. Then I graduated and got a couple of jobs and made friends with women who have careers and the environment is absolutely not the same as it was when I was in school. It certainly isn't nearly as bad as it used to be in most places, and it varies from company to company. Some companies are better balanced than others, but even within the best companies there is an external imbalance, because men generally have better options available to them by virtue of other companies existing where that balance doesn't exist. The job market and career experience for men and women is simply not the same. The fact that the prevailing opinion has shifted toward equal opportunities for everyone as the "correct" state of being and that most people and our school systems usually try to instill this value in our students is a good thing, but don't mistake this for everything now actually being equal. It isn't. And it's hard to imagine that anyone who has spent more than a couple of years in the work force wouldn't be able to see the difference in treatment that does still exist.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about Probably the best article I've seen on Cracked in years if not ever. It pulls together a lot of thoughts that I've had myself but lacked the personal experience to tie them together so well and infuses it with some personal experience that I think is important for context.

Perhaps you should take some time to think about what about this conversation is so upsetting to you that you feel the need to yell on an online forums. Also, being annoyed at what someone else is doing is not the same thing as discrimination.

Honestly? As much as I agree with the difference in the terms, I think it's the wrong tack to take. When you're still in school, it all just feels like name calling, because at that level it mostly is. There are some larger societal things going on that impact boys and girls differently, but the power imbalance between male and female students, while they are students, is usually negligible and so it doesn't feel all that different when a girl says something mean about boys vs when a boy says something mean about girls. It wasn't until I got into the workforce that general "out of school" age bracket that I really started to see the difference in the effects that this stuff has. I got to see the difference in how I'm treated vs how my girlfriend is treated both professionally and just walking around on the street, and the difference between what happens when my girlfriend is taking a walk or going to the gym by herself compared with when I'm with her. I've gotten to see professional differences that range from subtle to overt. The more overt, along the lines of ignoring the contributions of female employees in favor of those of male employees regardless of even fairly wide and obvious gaps in relative competence, seems to be more common in smaller businesses without large human resources and legal departments. But on the subtle end I can think of at least one instance where I've personally benefitted from a level of presumed competence that I did nothing to actually demonstrate, and which based on experience probably not would have been so easily afforded to someone who wasn't a white male from an upper middle class background. As with a lot of things, while still in school, I knew what racism and sexism were and that they existed and that there was a history of each, but, again, especially as a white male, a lot of it felt like "in this day and age" it was mostly "name calling" and while I got to a point where I accepted that there was a difference in the kinds names that you could call a historically oppressed group versus what someone could call me, I didn't really "get" the why of it, nor the weight off it that still existed, until I was older and had developed relationships with a larger and more diverse group of people and had gotten a look first, or in some cases at least second hand, at the differences in how I was treated in situations i would otherwise have taken for granted versus how people I knew had been treated in similar circumstances. When I'm called a name, it's just a name. Doesn't mean that it's a good thing or that it's fun for me. But that's where it ends. There are lots of people for whom certain names aren't just names. They are labels that are used to create an environment with real and serious consequences for them as people that can't easily be brushed off the way hurt feelings can.

Of course they can get along. I work in NYC and am personality surrounded by people with all of the qualities you just mentioned who get along with each other very well in both personal and professional capacities on a daily basis. There is no inherent conflict between anyone with any of those traits. The problems arise when there is a conflict between people's ideas of how the world is supposed to be. And by conflict I don't mean simply different ideas, but ideas that actively get in the way of each other such that they cannot both be implemented at the same time. To pick a silly non-politically charged example: "I prefer cake" and "I prefer pie" are different ideas but they aren't in conflict. "I prefer cake" and "cake should be banned" are conflicting. Or more subtly "Peanut oil is the primary cooking oil that should be used in all restaurants because it is the healthiest and most flavorful" and "I'm allergic to peanuts." I'll come back to that last one. As a white male, I will 100% cop to having stumbled into conversations and communities online where the topics, language used and rules caused a sort of knee-jerk reaction of intense discomfort, annoyance or even anger at feeling like I was being discriminated against and my opinions were unwelcome because of my race and gender. But I used knee-jerk for a reason. I know a lot of people who hit that initial wall and those first emotions and that's it. They stop right there because it is uncomfortable and nobody likes feeling uncomfortable. But you can't stop at that point. That sort of vague feeling of being under attack? That's where you need to start if you want to contribute to an ultimatum resolution. The next step involves some introspection. What, exactly, is it that is making me uncomfortable? Why is it making me uncomfortable? And most importantly, could there possibly be a valid reason for someone to go about doing things in this way that is making me uncomfortable? That last question, asked honestly, is, in my experience, essential to getting past a negative emotional reaction in order to really listen to what someone is saying and get down to what the deeper problems are. In my case, forcing myself to do this, to really listen, is what helped me understand that a lot of those initial negative feelings and experiences I was having are the feelings that some people have every single day and, unlike me, they don't have the option of walking away because those issues don't only crop up when somebody brings up the subject. They follow them around and are an inescapable part of daily life. But there is a lot to understand and the only way to get there is to open yourself up to being exposed to the thoughts, ideas and experiences of the people who are trying to make these points. It's easy to get caught up in a critique of how these ideas are being expressed, but the blunt truth is that someone who is drowning is going to have to scream and flail in order to draw attention and get help, and telling them that they're being an asshole an could have just quietly tried passing a note along to the lifeguard that would have been taken under advisement instead of disturbing everyone else in the pool does nothing to get them out of an immediately harrowing predicament. I am not saying you have to blindly accept everything that someone says or that you will come out of an experience agreeing with absolutely every point that someone makes, but the only way to solve the problems that we have is for people to really listen to each other. And the only way to listen is to check your ego at the door, accept that you're there to listen for a bit and hold off on contributing yourself for a while and to open yourself up to the possibility that everything the other person is saying is correct. I'm not saying that it always will be, but if you're closed off to the possibility, you'll stop hearing what is being said. Ultimately, this is something that everyone of every background needs to do, but the only person you have any direct input on the behavior of is yourself. You can't insist that other people have to open themselves up to listening to your perspective before you will listen to theirs, or that it's unfair that you have to listen to people who aren't interested in listening to you. That's the attitude that will keep anyone from listening to anyone else at all. But if you do take the time to listen and to understand, you might find it easier to then get your point across to others because you'll have a better understanding of where they are coming from and what will speak to them, and you may also find that some problems that you had have different sources than you thought they did.

Except in this case, where the explanation does in fact explain exactly what causes it. You're just ignoring the explanation.

I'm pretty sure that human skulls have been found that are more similar to human skulls than Cro magnon skulls are. If we're classifying the most similar thing to something as being the same thing, then wolves are dogs.

Well sure, it could. But there could be an actual Santa Claus outside of the observable universe as well. There's presently no evidence for either.

On the other hand, it's not like a bad outcome in sports has never caused a riot in places where people were particularly passionate about it.

I think the cyanobacteria responsible for the Great Oxygen Event 2.3 billion years ago beat us to the punch on being first there, actually.

They did. That's what made him popular in the first place.

Fair enough.

People have been criticizing Trump for his immoral personal life since before the sexual assault allegations became an issue. If MigL was referring specifically to the sexual assault claims and not making a broader statement, then I agree with you.

Personally, I think Trump's affairs and such are amusing because he's the candidate of the people who railed against Bill Clinton so damn hard for exactly the same thing, but I don't think they disqualify him as President. The sexual harassment/assault bits are a bigger issue if they are true, and would be for both men in my eyes. Neither is proven at this point, however, there is audio of Trump joking about sexually assaulting women, which does lend some credence to the accusations being leveled, but even were none of them true, the tape alone displays an attitude towards women that I'd find troubling even if he was just "joking" about it. In a worst case scenario, he has repeated committed sexual assault. In a best case scenario, he was making things up but thinks getting away with sexual assault would be something to brag about that would make him look good. That's a bit different to me than merely having an affair, which hasn't been a secret at any point so far in this election.

In fairness to MigL, he was comparing the time that Bill was President to the current time with Trump, so in that sense, it's not an unfair comparison to make. It's something I've noted too, in that there have been quite a lot of role reversals between the parties as far as what arguments are being used and even some general relatives being espoused and the pangeantry of certain events as far as patriotic symbology, isolationism vs American foreign policy strength, etc. I think there are some important differences between the situation with Bill Clinton and Trump's current situation, but I still do see where MigL's coming from here. Trump even went so far as to blame the current allegations on a global conspiracy today, which is amusingly close to taking issue with a "vast left-wing conspiracy" and makes the parallel that much more bizarre.

The thing they're guilty of is usually not sexual assault, though.

Yeah... Talking around a question and giving an answer that seems to imply an answer without actually stating it outright three times before giving a straight yes or no is one of those really classic "This person is lying" tells. I don't normally like to read into that kind of thing, but this was weirdly blatant.

Heh, beat me to it.

Based on the sources provided so far in this thread, it looks like Clinton requested a psych evaluation. The request was denied and no psych evaluation took place. Nine years ago, a reporter informed the victim of the psych evaluation request. Some time after that, this was incorporated into the victim's memory of the trial such that she remembered a psych evaluation that never actually took place, which while sounding a bit "out there" lines up very well with current research into how memory works. Inserting information planted after the fact into old memories and being unable to distinguish between the old memory and the newly introduced information is extremely common. There is much more fiction in your memories than you realize.