Down with C!
Up with Python!
This thread has offered a lot of excuses to rationalize or mimimize unliked behaviour when it’s based in a kind of creepy sexism.
I’ve never heard any of these excuses used to explain why any person who’s thought of as “difficult” for being too progressive, or too feminist, or “too mouthy about her opinions” should keep her job.
This argument always comes up when an important artist/thinker/comedian is a guy who gets caught doing something gross. It’s a lot rarer to hear the argument for women who are “difficult geniuses” who have unpopular experiences. We’re rarely asked to give women fifth chances.
(Maybe Roseanne, but even there I feel like the arguments for her weren’t that she was a genius that needed to be indulged; it was a mass of right wingers saying she was right, not that her personal life didn’t matter to her Art.)
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A guy doing something gross to women, of course. A certain banned-from-a-furry-convention individual was extremely quickly disavowed when saying gross things about boys instead of girls.
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“The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”–Elbert Hubbard
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I’m glad the right conclusion was reached here, at least. I predicted that RMS, in RMS style, would stand his ground to an absurd degree and refuse to step down in either or both places (MIT and FSF)… so that’s a measure of progress.
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On a few narrow topics such as privacy and information technology the man has been right a lot but …
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I suppose this is relative to USA ans Silicon Valley area. And as engineer you’re not referring to traditional engineering like civil or railway engineering. Most of these are conservatives and liberal, if not squarely far right, like these engineers turned politicians.
In the US, capital-L Libertarianism is RW.
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There aren’t many engineers among US politicians.
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Engineer’s Disease isn’t a left/right thing.
It’s the phenomenon of a person trained in one discipline convincing themselves they have the same level of understanding of a not-directly-related discipline.
Like Roberto Castelli thinking he was a high-level expert in the rules of parliamentary procedure, because he was good at engineering, perhaps.
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Abusers are literally everywhere, in all walks of life. No assumptions whatsoever can be made given socio-economic or intellectual standing of perpetrators or their apologists.
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That needs to be on a tee shit.
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How do you feel about Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes?
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I don’t find figures from the past to be compelling arguments – we’re supposed to do better at this stuff over time, not worse.
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I’m sorry, your question is unclear to me. Are you asking me to describe my specific feelings about each of those philosophers, or are you asking me to describe my feelings about a petition to decriminalize sex between adults and children? Your text suggests one thing, but your link suggests another. If it’s the former, then that is a long discussion, which is unrelated to the topic of this thread. If it’s the latter, I think it’s obvious that I disapprove of sex between adults and children.
I believe what you are asking is the latter, because of the wikipedia page you linked to. What is most puzzling to me is the way you wrote your post—especially how you failed to express how you feel about the petition. The manner in which the post is written makes it seem, to me, that you are actually (absurdly) in favor of decriminalizing sex between children and adults, despite the obvious power differential between the two (a power differential which, ironically, most folks versed in said philosophers would be quick to recognize as preventing children from legitimately giving consent).
If you are indeed arguing for the decriminalization of sex between adults and children, you should say so, rather than questioning me about how I feel about it (I feel about it the way most non-creeps do: disturbed—which ought to go without saying). If you aren’t arguing for that, then what, exactly, are you trying to get at?
It really seems to me like you are expressing approval of decriminalizing sex between adults and children, so I will proceed as if that is the case, and thus point out that the invocation of these philosophers’ names while linking to a wikipedia article about a petition they signed is a form of argument from authority, something that all those philosophers (and you, I would hope) would know is fallacious. You should tell us your reasons why you think adults should be allowed to have sex with children, instead of mere name-dropping.
BTW, you forgot Deleuze, Guattari, Althuser, and Lyotard, who are all worth reading (as is Ginsberg).
I’ll tell you something about myself: I don’t approve of cigarettes, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the works of heavy smokers, such as The Second Sex, Being and Nothingness, or Of Grammatology. I also don’t approve of Nazism, but that doesn’t stop me from appreciating Being and Time (nor did anti-Nazism prevent the aforementioned philosphers from appreciating it). Big surprise: I’m allowed to be disappointed in the people whose work I find admirable, despite the fact that they did things I disagree with (or find downright reprehensible).
So what are you trying to accomplish with your question? What do you believe? That adults should be allowed to use their inherent power over children to “convince” them to say “yes” to sex, because a bunch of French philosophers signed a petition to get rid of age of consent laws in France?
(Also, you should know that there’s more to philosophy than the work of those who studied at L’ecole Normale Superieure.)
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Yeah, thanks for this. It’s been an education, reading all this.
I seeing now the “aspie” thing just adds a layer of mystery that gives more excuse for a larger phenomenon of going “maybe the objectionable behaviour is the source of all that genius”. The “use it as an excuse” life-strategy rings true for a few people I know with various problems friends make allowances for.
Could have been worse. I can name a zillion-dollar organization that figures, “Hey, maybe the car crashes, bar fights, and spousal abuse are what enable him to play such great football”.
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Thanks, that helps!
I thought it was Electro-Static Repulsion.
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Which is why Windows NT was based on Xenix?
And Bill Gates literally stole DOS?
And OSX is built on BSD?
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I’m not super comfortable with it. I’m not really sure anymore what to do with Michael Jackson’s music for example. I don’t society has a clear solution at this time, if one is even possible.
I’m an Ex-Googler. Several of Silicon Valley’s most famous companies run that way. Some of them were never like that, but are less famous. (perhaps being normal and professional fails to attract a lot of attention)
Man! I was never offered severance in the last 20 years working in SV. Sometimes “fired” sometimes an official layoff. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I think unless you have some dirt on a company you won’t get the sort of attention that translates into severance. I managed to get enough attention from Amazon to get their lawyers to send me some nasty letters that I basically ignored.
That’s pretty cynical. Not totally wrong either.
I dunno, most of the startups I’ve worked at (5 out of 7) were founded by Indians. There is a lot of Stanford start-ups in the Bay Area as well. I’m not sure how that contributes for or against the toxic culture you mention.
Does me no good. I can’t really do much with hearsay. It’s interesting, but not actionable from my end nor should it influence my opinion.
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