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Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

theguardian.com

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Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#151

Post by BlackDeath3 »

mbreese wrote: post #147
BlackDeath3 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was under the impression that he leaked information on the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East by soldiers/mercenaries. My familiarity is clearly cursory.

Along with a ton of other stuff that wasn't germane to that incident. Manning's big issue was that they released a bunch of classified material without much regard for what it said. It was very broad in scope. Had it been a narrow subset of the data, Manning would have had a better chance of being considered a whistleblower.

OK, that is what I had heard.

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#152

Post by CWuestefeld »

king_jester wrote: post #143
CWuestefeld wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I really do tend to lean in the direction you suggest, I don't think it's quite a cut-and-dry as you claim. Here are a few things to consider. First, we're only talking about language. We get those gendered pronouns not because of a need to distinguish between how a person views his gender (or how the world views it), but because of stupid linguistic convention going back to English's Indo-European roots. You'l…

> These genders have absolutely nothing to do with sexual identity, they're essentially randomly assigned, conferring no additional meaning (but providing a parity check in communication, helping ensure clear transmission). Sexual identity != gender identity. Gendered pronouns do have a long and interesting history in languages that have them, but that is besides the point. We are talking about an individual who has…

So please, don't try to justify your disrespect of someone who clearly identifies as a woman as Manning does.

Now wait just a moment. Surely if Manning's own identity can only be understood from his/her own perspective, then my own meaning -- whether I am being disrespectful -- can only be seen from my perspective. How dare you project disrespect into what I am communicating.

You are trying to make it sound like trans women aren't women, when they in fact are.*

I never said anything of the kind. What I said was that someone who is not transgendered might claim that they are in order to get some sexual kicks, or to subvert legal protections afforded to women. I'm not trying to take away from the genuinely transgendered, I'm saying that the claim of being transgendered can be misused.

That you aren't familiar with it is not an excuse to make a bunch off the cuff remarks that, whether you realize it or not, are transphobic.

I believe that I made clear in my post that I was largely in agreement, but was playing devil's advocate in order to draw out some deeper understanding -- just vanilla Socratic method stuff. Your reply seems to indicate that someone who is not fully up to speed ought to just shut up, and accept what his betters are telling him.

that history is not immutable

Ummm. How is history mutable?

As a society we generally honor people's personal decisions about their identity. We do so for religious change, name change, adoption, interracial marriage and dating, and so on.

Something I don't get here. I'm married to someone of a different race. I don't see what that has to do with my identity. The fact that my wife and I are married and of differing races, has nothing to do with who I am or who I expect people to see me as. She's my wife, I'm her husband, and that's all there is to it. I fail to see how this is expecting someone to change, or even have, any view of my personal identity.

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#153

Post by alex-g »

xaa wrote: post #126
Pxtl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it. Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning. I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it…

My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it. When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and co…

Which definition is being blurred, exactly? Definitions may be being changed, but that's in order to make our words more accurate and more practically useful.

It's actually quite hard to determine who is the intended target of a word like "he", since experience presents us with all kinds of difficult cases; appeal to appearance or behaviour or even chromosomes doesn't work universally. At some point, we either have to let people decide for themselves what they want, or impose our own arbitrary classification on them. Someone is making a judgement and I'd rather it be "I feel I am male" than "I feel you look male".

Sure, it might be nice if there were a simple flowchart, based on only objectively observable data, that we could follow to end up with either "he" or "she" in the end. But no such flowchart exists. I propose to drop the "objective" criterion and just ask the person what they prefer - especially given that the only reasons for having a he/she pronoun system are historical and social. If you want to talk about what's going on biologically, in great detail, then feel free, but the pronoun system doesn't have to correspond to that.

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#154

Post by pfarrell »

dharmach wrote: post #111
kaffeinecoma wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being Man of the Year isn't necessarily an honor. From Wikipedia: Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States newsmagazine Time that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

2001 title should have gone to OBL then.

"Though we spent hours debating the pros and cons of naming Osama bin Laden, it ultimately became easy to dismiss him," said managing editor Jim Kelly. "He is not a larger-than-life figure with broad historical sweep ... he is smaller than life, a garden-variety terrorist whose evil plan succeeded beyond his highest hopes."

They chose Giuliani instead.

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/12/23/giuliani.time/

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#155

Post by rdl »

timsally wrote: post #70
ck2 wrote: post #25

Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years. I saw a "free Snowden" sign the other day which I thought was asinine.

> Everyone has already forgotten Pfc. Manning rotting away for 35 years. Please represent the facts accurately. Manning is eligible for release in 7-8 years. I'm willing to make a long bet ( http://longbets.org ) for $300.00 that Manning does not serve 35 years, or "rot away for 35 years" as you put it. Are you up for it?

I'd bet on released at first parole hearing as long as Manning is willing to be "quiet" and just goes on to enjoy life. Which would probably be a desirable outcome, given age. It's pretty easy to make an argument for leniency based on age, irresponsibility-when-committed, and complete life changes (I mean, sex change, the Snowden revelations, by then no troops in Iraq/Afghanistan (hopefully!), stepping down from perpetual war (if for no other reason than economics), and at least one change of President.

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#156

Post by Pxtl »

xaa wrote: post #126
Pxtl wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it. Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning. I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it…

My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it. When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and co…

Look, we're all coders here, I get the instinct to be precise with our words. But what about the cost/benefit trade-off? Is a small matter of personal policy related to definitions really worth hurting somebody who's already a member of easily the most downtrodden and crapped-upon group in modern society? Is preventing a tiny incremental shift in vocabulary really worth kicking somebody while they're down? I mean, I'm as grumpy as the next geek about the literally/not-literally thing, but this?

Also, think of it like an interface - the idea is that you should treat the transgendered person as their identified gender. So if you're planning on treating this person as a woman in every way in respect for her situation, wouldn't the pronoun/terminology actually make the matter clearer?

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#157

Post by nickik »

valarauca1 wrote: post #100
nivla wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe Bush was nominated repeatedly. Ha even bizzaring, Adolf Hitler was once nominated. [1] [1] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/facts/peace/

Hitler was TIME magazine man of year, and for a decent while in America Fascism was mildly popular (circa 1930's). Its strange looking back on a that time (Post Holocaust and WW2). American Newspapers applauded the works of fascists claiming, "They got the trains to run on time."

> mildly popular

Not that mild.

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#158

Post by rdl »

king_jester wrote: post #143
CWuestefeld wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I really do tend to lean in the direction you suggest, I don't think it's quite a cut-and-dry as you claim. Here are a few things to consider. First, we're only talking about language. We get those gendered pronouns not because of a need to distinguish between how a person views his gender (or how the world views it), but because of stupid linguistic convention going back to English's Indo-European roots. You'l…

> These genders have absolutely nothing to do with sexual identity, they're essentially randomly assigned, conferring no additional meaning (but providing a parity check in communication, helping ensure clear transmission). Sexual identity != gender identity. Gendered pronouns do have a long and interesting history in languages that have them, but that is besides the point. We are talking about an individual who has…

My difficulty with referring to Manning now as female is that most of the actions which I care about were from when it was PFC Bradley Manning. It's like anyone who changes name partway through a major news story. Chelsea Manning is in prison now, but saying "As an intelligence analysis, Chelsea Manning had access to classified files and got into disputes with her chain of command over both work-product issues and personal conduct." seems incorrect.

If this had been known before the news story, no problem at all. It's just hard to use "Chelsea Manning" or even "Private Manning" to refer to actions undertaken far prior to this.

Ironically I think this was one of the things bradass87 brought up in chats with Adrian.

PFC vs. Private is just as complex. I think there's a military way to deal with that (because ranks usually do increase); e.g. in some contexts is it "Captain (now Major) Snuffy..."

Re: Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel peace prize

#159

Post by Cushman »

xaa wrote: post #148
LukeShu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "sex" refers to physical realities; "gender" refers to social constructions. By conflating the two words, you are the one diluting our vocabulary. Now, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable for you to assert that pronouns should be tied to sex, not gender; but that's not what you're saying here.

@LukeShu I'm well aware of the current usage of "gender" in educated circles. That's why I chose it as an example. "Gender" previously was essentially a synonym for "sex" (except in the field of linguistics). But now that it has been repurposed in some circles, half the American population thinks it refers to a state of mind and the other half thinks it refers to biology. The result: confusion and miscommunication. I…

There is no debate, because this isn't about correctness. It's about respect. Let me throw out some hypotheticals here:

My given name is Jonathan. I think this sounds childish, so I tell you that I go by Jack instead. But you've seen my birth certificate, so you keep calling me Jonathan.

I got married and changed my last name to my husband's. You think it's confusing to change names, so you continue to write me using my maiden name.

Although I'm married, I don't want to be defined by my marriage, so I go by Ms. You think that inaccurately reflects my relationship status, and introduce me as Mrs. instead.

I have told you that the use of the male-gendered pronoun "he" makes me severely uncomfortable, and ask you to call me "she" instead. You flip up my skirt, take a good survey, and decide it would be dishonest to represent me as if I didn't have a penis.

The issue in all of these scenarios is a moral one: Do I have the right to define my own linguistic identity, or am I stuck with the one I was assigned at birth? Are you going to be an agent of my liberation, or my oppression?

You can make a good case that each of these blatantly disrespectful behaviors is, by some robotic standard, "correct". To paraphrase a great man, maybe you aren't wrong, but you're still an asshole. You can say this is something you would like to debate, but you don't respect me and I don't like to spend time around you, so go ahead and debate by yourself, thanks.

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