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Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

paranoia.dubfire.net

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Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#31

Post by peterwwillis »

mistercow wrote: post #19
rimantas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, throwing the term 'sexist' around carelessly > undermines genuine claims of sexism. The same goes for rasism. We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. Too bad.

>We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. That in itself is too broad a generalization though, because there are many times when mentioning someone's race/sex is, due to context, subtly racist/sexist. Generally, if you mention someones race or sex and that information is not actually relevant in any way to what you're saying, you are helping to perpetuate stereo…

Wow. The irony of discussing prejudice and in the same breath calling skinheads racists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead

Please, please, please, read that page. Not only to save yourself and others the ignorance of believing skinheads are racists, but also because there's a culture and a people that will be forever denigrated because the media and parroting readers will continue to perpetuate this stereotype.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#32

Post by mistercow »

peterwwillis wrote: post #31
mistercow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. That in itself is too broad a generalization though, because there are many times when mentioning someone's race/sex is, due to context, subtly racist/sexist. Generally, if you mention someones race or sex and that information is not actually relevant in any way to what you're saying, you are helping to perpetuate stereo…

Wow. The irony of discussing prejudice and in the same breath calling skinheads racists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead Please, please, please, read that page. Not only to save yourself and others the ignorance of believing skinheads are racists, but also because there's a culture and a people that will be forever denigrated because the media and parroting readers will continue to perpetuate this stereotype.

My apologies. I should have specified "neo-Nazi skinheads". This is not in the same category as racial or gender prejudice, however. It is simply a matter of mislabeling.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#33

Post by tomrod »

tomp wrote: post #20

Being sexist is bad. Accusing a man of sexism just because he doesn't agree with a woman is worse.

This. US culture on the whole is overly sensitive to criticism in my view. If someone criticizes another, the typical response is to give a "No way, you're judging my unchangeable characteristics!" rather than "Hey, let me think if this has any merit." Mountains from molehills, methinks.

I think the blog author did a great job handling the ad hominems though.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#34

Post by 0x36 »

Unfortunately, a lot of "tech journalists" are amateurs with exaggerated notions of self-worth because they have some readership. Like the hacked guy at Wired who was so clueless as to keep important data in one place (his Apple acct), but blames everybody else for his loss.

If you keep all your data on your MacBook and believes Apple will take care of the rest, you are not an expert, you are a fanboy that has no right to state your opinion publicly.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#35

Post by yummyfajitas »

pi18n wrote: post #29
synth wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually believe that calling someone a sexist (however 'careless' it might be) is an attack on the male gender as a whole? Really? Try swapping sexism with homophobia or racism, and see how ridiculous you sound. (Note: I agree with your first assertion.) First, throwing the term 'racist' around carelessly undermines genuine claims of racism. Second, it attempts to not only target an individual as racist, but…

Point one and the latter part of three make sense to me. Point two should be, "it's an ad hominem attack and intellectually bankrupt." This applies if and only if the target of the term is not actually prejudiced. I don't think males as a whole are being attacked when one gets called sexist, but I also don't know what you mean by "position in society". For the majority of men in the US that position is that they're m…

Point two should be, "it's an ad hominem attack and intellectually bankrupt." This applies if and only if the target of the term is not actually prejudiced.

Even if they are prejudiced, it is still an ad hominem. A biased person (i.e., nearly all of us) could still make a correct argument, as could an unbiased bayesian with a strong prior.

There are very narrow categories when ad hominem is justified - specifically, if one is attempting to appeal to authority, then attacking the authority is justified. In all other cases that I can think of, it's a logical fallacy.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#36

Post by peterwwillis »

mistercow wrote: post #32
peterwwillis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. The irony of discussing prejudice and in the same breath calling skinheads racists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead Please, please, please, read that page. Not only to save yourself and others the ignorance of believing skinheads are racists, but also because there's a culture and a people that will be forever denigrated because the media and parroting readers will continue to perpetuate this stereotype.

My apologies. I should have specified "neo-Nazi skinheads". This is not in the same category as racial or gender prejudice, however. It is simply a matter of mislabeling.

No apology necessary. It's just incredibly frustrating that the label has been taken to such an extreme to the point that a whole subculture is guilty by association.

It's definitely not the same thing as racial or gender prejudice, but it can be just as damaging to the people who live under the label and deal with its unintended consequences (like getting beaten outside a club for shaving your head and wearing doc martens). We Hackers are lucky that we live in a world where geeks are now the popular cool kids and we can take back a word that used to get us expelled.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#37

Post by freehunter »

mistercow wrote: post #19
rimantas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, throwing the term 'sexist' around carelessly > undermines genuine claims of sexism. The same goes for rasism. We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. Too bad.

>We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. That in itself is too broad a generalization though, because there are many times when mentioning someone's race/sex is, due to context, subtly racist/sexist. Generally, if you mention someones race or sex and that information is not actually relevant in any way to what you're saying, you are helping to perpetuate stereo…

I would argue there's some work that needs to be done on the other side of the coin, too. There are too many people making money off feeling oppressed. I personally don't feel the answer is making honest people go out of their way to carefully word their sentences to avoid mentioning a characteristic of a person, I feel the answer is understanding that saying "that is a person" is nowhere near as descriptive as "a black man from Chicago".

And herein lies the difficulty with reconciling language (which is a way to communicate descriptive experiences) with political correctness. Is his race relevant? Is his gender relevant? Is his city relevant? Maybe, maybe not. But the point is to describe the scene as it exists. The mere mention of descriptive words are often taken as prejudice when that's not the intention. Let's flip that back around. When I say "that person from Chicago", who do you picture in your mind? If you picture a man/woman, black/white/latino/asian, tall/short/fat/etc, you're being "prejudiced". Because I never mentioned any description of the person. But without that information, your mental picture of the scene is incomplete and your brain is going to fill in those blanks. Language has words you can add or omit to imply discrimination. "That black man from Chicago." "Another Asian from Chicago". "Of course, he's white." In absence of these deliberate hints, it's asinine to assume anyone is taking any sort of position.

When I go camping I don't say "I stayed somewhere with plants", I say "I slept in my tent on the ground in the Yosemite forest." That's not prejudiced against trees just because I called it a forest, nor against the Earth because I mentioned the ground. The more prevalent problem is not people being prejudiced, it's people feeling prejudged just because they expect to be prejudged. Why should someone go out of their way to reword and complicate their story when you're (hypothetical "you") are going out of your way to unword and read more into their story than they actually said?

(This isn't in response to the linked story, merely to mistercow's point)

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#39

Post by snowwrestler »

To me the Wired piece reads like the sort of defensive rebuttal that is usually best to put in a drawer for a day or two before sending (or in this case publishing). It's long, wandering, needlessly emotional (appeal to sexism), and in places reflects an inaccurate reading of Chris's piece.

Re: Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job

#40

Post by cyber »

Sadly, there is a growing contingent amongst the computer security/hacker scene who, instead of actually looking to improve things, are looking to be indignant about something.

A major conference has recently had to deal with issues stemming from a complaint about harassment that wasn't actually a complaint. It was never reported to staff, nor venue, nor law enforcement. Instead, twitter and blog posts were used.

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