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Shut Up and Listen

whatever.scalzi.com

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Re: Shut Up and Listen

#41

Post by rmc »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #32
paranoiacblack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think the biggest privilege one can have is a fair start. Being able to live as you'd like without picking up hundreds of years of stigma and injustices or having to work extremely hard to distinguish yourself as someone that can be trusted. > I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who strug…

If you have a low IQ, the amount of extra work you have to put in in order to successful in a well paying career will be far higher than someone of high intelligence. Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas, being dumb will work against you in any industry.

Privilege isn't just your job. It can refer to where you live and shop and hang out. You might work in an industry that has no stigma against gay people. But if your local town does, then you're disadvantaged.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#42

Post by 127 »

mistercow wrote: post #28
127 wrote: post #25

This is silly. Just because Scalzi has problems with listening to what people are saying, does not mean that everyone else has. Also, just because it's good to listen, emphatize and understand where people are coming from, it's not good for anyone to just stand there and take abuse. Nip it in the bud. Don't feed the trolls. Respect people who respect you. If people are silent and don't share their feelings and opinio…

>Just because Scalzi has problems with listening to what people are saying, does not mean that everyone else has. Yes, but I can assure you that when it comes to discussing privilege, well, yes, everyone else does have.

Privilege is a heavily loaded word that is difficult to use in context of contructive discussion. You are by default swallowing the feminist bait and playing by their rules. Making it impossible to gain any ground because of fallacious, circular logic.

I'm not denying that privilege exist at all. I'm just saying that how it's understood and used is heavily biased and politicized. It would be much more productive to discuss about topics without resorting to feminist dogma.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#43

Post by gadders »

jellicle wrote: post #4

That's a good old post by Scalzi, but the people who most need to pay attention to it are the ones least likely to pay attention to it. EDIT: He also has a current post: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/21/two-simple-observation...

Well der.

New observations: Don't put your hands in a fire, water is wet, etc etc.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#44

Post by unalone »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #32
paranoiacblack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think the biggest privilege one can have is a fair start. Being able to live as you'd like without picking up hundreds of years of stigma and injustices or having to work extremely hard to distinguish yourself as someone that can be trusted. > I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who strug…

If you have a low IQ, the amount of extra work you have to put in in order to successful in a well paying career will be far higher than someone of high intelligence. Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas, being dumb will work against you in any industry.

Yes, which is why plenty of people think that capitalism is inherently flawed. A system which rewards production over anything is a system in which those who can't produce as effectively will be punished. Unless you truly believe that production is the end-all be-all of human existence, that's not a fair system. (There's also the problem of capitalism being really bad at properly valuing things but that's neither here nor there.)

But what you're missing, Mr. Jiggy, is that the biases we're talking about extend way beyond "industry". They infiltrate every part of our culture. Politics, media representation, religious attitudes, the values we teach our children, on and on and on.

This incident with Adria is happening the same week that a number of news organizations were criticized for reporting on a rape trial and sympathizing with the rapists. CNN, NPR, Fox News all ran stories about how much it sucks to have your life ruined for raping somebody. Some even disclosed the name of the 16-year-old victim, so that people could email her rape threats the same way they've been writing Adria. And this wasn't an ambiguous case of "did they rape this girl" – the people shot video of the rape and posted it to YouTube with the tags "rape" and "offensive". Still we had people asking if the raped girl "was asking for it", and writing hatefully that she's just a "slut who ruined two good boys' lives".

I get that you feel there are other imbalances at play in society, and believe you me there are! But please don't make this about which particular imbalance is the outright worst one. Ours is a hugely misogynistic culture, and this unfortunate incident is triggering not only a huge bout of anti-feminist sentiment, but also convincing a lot of people that feminists are just assholes who need attention at the expense of innocent men. Which is about the opposite of true.

Again, if you want to start a thread to discuss other flaws in the system, be my guest! Hacker News doesn't see nearly enough of that conversation, in my opinion. But that's not really what this post is about.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#45

Post by potatolicious »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #32
paranoiacblack wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think the biggest privilege one can have is a fair start. Being able to live as you'd like without picking up hundreds of years of stigma and injustices or having to work extremely hard to distinguish yourself as someone that can be trusted. > I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who strug…

If you have a low IQ, the amount of extra work you have to put in in order to successful in a well paying career will be far higher than someone of high intelligence. Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas, being dumb will work against you in any industry.

> "Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas"

Racial and sexual discrimination goes much, much further than industries with strong, institutionalized stigmas.

The problem with discrimination is that sometimes it's so casual and so subtle. You do not, for example, have to hate black people to contribute to discrimination.

The struggle for being black or homosexual isn't so much being kicked out of a store, or barred from membership in an organization, or being actively hated in an environment - it's the subtle, everyday, casual things that stack up quickly. It's the furtive look, the different way people treat you, that little flicker of fear when they see you, etc etc.

This is the problem with explaining privilege - there are very few big, ugly examples you can point at (say, a cross burning on your lawn), but instead there is an avalanche of little things, each one of which is insignificant by itself. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#47

Post by 127 »

unalone wrote: post #34
127 wrote: post #25

This is silly. Just because Scalzi has problems with listening to what people are saying, does not mean that everyone else has. Also, just because it's good to listen, emphatize and understand where people are coming from, it's not good for anyone to just stand there and take abuse. Nip it in the bud. Don't feed the trolls. Respect people who respect you. If people are silent and don't share their feelings and opinio…

> Nip it in the bud. Don't feed the trolls. Respect people who respect you. I would agree with you entirely. The problem is that a lot of people in this current PyCon discussion are assuming that certain other people are trolling and disrespectful when, in fact, they're trying to talk about a serious issue that deserves attention.

Yes, jumping to conclusions, arguing with pure conjecture, having no patience nor empathy. Those are things that I often bump into when discussing about various things in the internet. It's hardly new.

Claiming that someone is a troll requires evidence. Simply because someone disgrees with you does not make them a troll.

Recognizing when someone is being disingenuous is an art, I think. Human beings have evolved complex mechanism for it through body language and facial gestures, which all are missing from internet discussions.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#48

Post by mikecane »

nollidge wrote: post #38
unalone wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy this weird HN approach of taking ordinary life, applying weirdass labels to everything, and then trying to somehow "optimize" all of the various little categories. This is about treating other people like their grievances are legitimate, and accepting that your own perspective on the world is not the only one that exists. "Social Engineering"? really?

Viewing the world through cynicism-colored glasses.

OK, I object to the misuse of the term "cynic."

http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/in-praise-of-th...

Cynics would point to the very things Scalzi does.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#49

Post by unalone »

mikecane wrote: post #40
unalone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who talk a lot about "patriarchy" will point out that a society in which men are made out to be strong and aggressive and dominant doesn't just hurt women. It hurts all the men who would rather be reasonable and mild-mannered and effeminate too. That's not evidence against there being a systemic imbalance. It's further proof of it.

>>>That's not evidence against there being a systemic imbalance. I never said nor intended to imply there wasn't. But there's imbalance in every system too. Which now makes it sound like I'm saying "Just shut up," which is really why I tend to avoid discussions like this because they become No Win. For everyone. Gah.

Haha, indeed. Nobody here feels victorious. It's a lot of trekking through mud all around.

Anyway, I think that the fact that systems have imbalance is why we need to talk frequently about what imbalance exists, and how we might fix it. It's also why we should stop this irritating habit of turning everything into a system of processes and functions that don't allow for human error. Plenty of people in the tech community think that a series of rules is the end-all be-all cure to every problem, and refuse to admit that rules often cause as many problems as they solve. Learning to listen and empathize with other people is a more valuable trait than ever, because there are more ways than ever to get away with not doing it.

Re: Shut Up and Listen

#50

Post by rdtsc »

When our brains encounter certain issues (politics, religion, racial issues, favorite editor) it automatically goes on the defensive and start filtering out everything and starts immediately thinking how to come up with bullet points to deflect the arguments. That prevents us from listening.

With respect to those kind of topics there are very few if any who can approach it with a clean slate. So it takes considerable effort to try to ignore all that baggage and listen.

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