What a cesspool of a thread. Why is HN consistently at its worst when gender issues are brought up?
We were wrong
221–230 of 546 posts
Re: We were wrong
#222I don't respect this. I acknowledge that as it is their playground they can make this kind of judgement call, however I have always believed that freedom of speech also protects the freedom to hate and be a terrible person. There are countless texts, movies, and other 'creative works' which both condone and encourage violence against women, mass murder, torture, and other things I find abhorrent, but I don't get to b…
A couple of points: 1) The project creator has freedom of speech to a point. For one, he cannot yell "Fire" in a crowded theater unless there actually is a fire. He also cannot advocate or call for illegal activity by others (such as "Go and mug that guy walking down the street"). This is where the line of protected speech gets blurred. Reading some excerpts from his works it's clear that he advocates for aggressive…
1) I think you may be incorrect about the advocating of illegal acts thing, but neither am I a lawyer so lets agree on "they could get sued out of existence." Totally valid.
2)A larger point is that the public/private divide is a false dichotomy. We have our lives and we want to be able to express ourselves. So my point is that the difference between the government and kickstarter banning something is one of degree but not in kind. It is a restriction on expression within a space. Granted, a much smaller space.
Re: We were wrong
#223I am a fan of "I'm sorry" posts, though they have become frequent enough to become cliche. When they put a $25K donation behind the apology, then it's a lot more than false humility.
"Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged."
Well done!
Re: We were wrong
#224I don't respect this. I acknowledge that as it is their playground they can make this kind of judgement call, however I have always believed that freedom of speech also protects the freedom to hate and be a terrible person. There are countless texts, movies, and other 'creative works' which both condone and encourage violence against women, mass murder, torture, and other things I find abhorrent, but I don't get to b…
I've been tweeting jeers to @DoSomething (the group that garnered the petition) and kudos to Perry Chen and Kickstarter for not having ceded to censorship. To be fair, the book is ugly. The passages quoted are disgusting. I would never buy this book, nor endorse that anyone else buy this book. If asked, I would state that I think the book is disgusting and that you probably should not buy it. What is even more disgus…
You're confusing censorship with boycotting. I don't care if his book gets published...just by nobody I do business with.
Re: We were wrong
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
sure! “Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.“
Don't bother including the context of that, it would ruin the 'rapey' narrative.
Not even a bit.
Re: We were wrong
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have some context: http://pastebin.com/zwHYzCZe Sincerely, A HNer who is ashamed of the lack of reading comprehension of this community right now.
Woah, really big difference here. I wish this was up towards the top of the comments so people got both sides of the issue before pointing fingers.
To my understanding the two sides of this issue are whether or not Kickstarter has the right to choose what is on their site. I say they do. I do not understand the position that they must allow any project even if they don't want to (as long as they comply with the law)
The issue of whether this book is misogynist or not doesn't really matter. You can still buy it if you want or any other legal material you want to buy. Just not on Kickstarter. There are many stores that don't sell things I want to buy.
Re: We were wrong
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah, really big difference here. I wish this was up towards the top of the comments so people got both sides of the issue before pointing fingers.
To be fair, it could just be some other random jerk on 'net writing something sympathetic. Without the source document, though, it's not really easy to say either way. I'm also not impressed with the author's writing in any event.
> To be fair, it could just be some other random jerk on 'net writing something sympathetic.
Nope. The author of the book who was promoting his project on reddit provided the linked the above pastebin text himself.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/1dvnem/above_the_...
Re: We were wrong
#228This book will sell more copies now that it's been banned by Kickstarter. I'm curious how the funding was going before this, I can't imagine it was getting much traction. I quantify this as a paranoid over reaction by Kickstarter, if the post wasn't breaking any of their terms of service.
>I'm curious how the funding was going before this, I can't imagine it was getting much traction.
The kickstarter blog post mentions that they couldn't stop the project from receiving funds, so the project must have been fully funded for that to happen. I don't know how much they were asking for, and whether or not they got more funding than they requested, though.
EDIT: It seems they made $16,369 pledged of $2,000 goal.
Re: We were wrong
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The more dangerous precedent is that they are willing to cave to a vocal group who may or may not be right. Without defending the material, because I frankly can't, I am troubled to see Kickstarter imposing its own value judgements on projects, and even worse than that, now subject themselves to the value judgements of whichever populace can prove to be the most vocal.
Private company. They are free to cave in to demands from a vocal minority if they so choose. They are free to ban anything remotely non-religious or atheistic, if they so choose. If you feel so strongl about it, start your own company that will publish and market products in line with your values, get together with like-minded people to start an advocacy group and most importantly, vote with your dollars and encoura…
I'm a pretty staunch civil rights advocate, so I acknowledge that it is hard, but that shouldn't stop me ignoring that Kickstarter's value judgement here has, at least in my opinion, erred on the side of draconian.
As someone who occasionally consults for other political groups and startups, I don't necessarily need to start up a new project to spread my message, IndieGogo already serves the more avant garde fairly well -- but my course of action will be to stop advocating the use of Kickstarter and instead start recommending IndieGogo and its ilk.
For the record, I am not trying to assert that Kickstarter did not have the right to do what they did. Obviously it's their site, their servers, etc., etc.; I just really wish they hadn't chosen this course of action because I feel that they went the wrong way, and I will act accordingly.
But again, even more sad than that is that there are 50,000 young people (at least according to @dosomething) that were so eager to see a project censored.
Re: We were wrong
#230Dear fellow HN dwellers, If you read the writings of the Guide's author and do not recognize that it is misogynistic and advocating sexual assault, you have a problem. That problem is that you are mistaking sexual assault for "taking the first step." You do not need to resort to pulling out your dick and forcibly placing the woman's hand on it in order to "make a move." There's literally hundreds of other things that…
Ask 100 women if they find it romantic to be kissed without being asked or if they want to be asked first. I'm pretty sure the answer is: being kissed, don't ask. The author writes on reddit: IMPORTANT NOTE ON RESISTANCE: If at any point a girl wants you to stop, she will let you know. If she says "STOP," or "GET AWAY FROM ME," or shoves you away, you know she is not interested. It happens. Stop escalating immediatel…
This is such a load of shit. There are so many circumstances in which someone may feel powerless to say something or engage in a resistive act, or may be physically incapable of doing so that the time. Rapists use the justification of lack of "acceptable" resistive force all the time, there is no place for this kind of comment.