New report warns of dangers of trashy avatars

I know I requested this thread get back on track with trashy AV pictures. Come on people. Scylla, give us a panty shot.

Yeah, Amity!

(This little pic nicely summarizes one of the great Canadian paradoxes.

I mean, of course, that it's so effing cold up here, but we still wear teeny undies, instead of big warm cotton briefs

)

Here is Learjeff looking terrifically trashy.



This girl looks like she is ready for the trash.



But this lady is here to show that it is nothing a good scrubbing and a few spare parts can't fix.



Or did you mean trashy like this?

Now this has got me wondering if Canadian girls shave their legs...........Something to ponder on. I had always figured Canadian girls for union suits, so this sheds a new light on things.


Rhonda, more of the last please. And if you want, you can explain why you should not wear that to an inworld meeting with your boss or supervisor.

Hell no - in many ways we are "naturally" SUPERIOR to me.



You are correct in that many times it is a Catch-22 situation -- damned if you do and damned if you don't. There really ought to be some better way to deal with the few assholes still left that perpetuate the various sexism and racism thoughts.

Personally, I sort of like the idea of hanging them up by their toes and feeding them Ex-Lax.

LOL

Uhhh, yeah, they do a brisk business in razors, waxing strips, and other depilatories up here. Union suits can be uncomfortable if your legs are stubbly, eh?

Someone has to clean up the trash:


.

LOL,

(I suppose it would be more diplomatic if we just said "different" . . . )


Oh, wouldn't it, though? If you get any ideas, let me know!


Some of them would enjoy that too much!

In certain areas as a general rule, yes. Go to any gym in the country, the weights males warm up with will be what females lift at the top of their strength. Sure you are going to have females on the far right of the bell curve who can out lift a man, but most fall well short.
But there are also areas in which females are superior to males. After all we evolved or were created for two different tasks, why would we share the same strengths and weaknesses?

We compliment each other, boiled down to basics, women provide the civilization while men provide the protection.

Edit:
About the "equal oppourtunjtes, that is fine as long as both have the same standards. When I was in the service, females had lower physical standards, cheater bars on obstacles and didn't have to carry as heavy loads as the males. They couldn't.

I was in a store the other day and there was a group of firefighters, one of them was a small female. My first thought is "No way in hell could she drag me out of a burning building." I was probably 2 1/2 to 3 times her size. She might be a wiz of a paramedic, a great truck driver, a wonder with the radio, but when I am face down in a burning building I want the biggest hairiest assed male around coming in to get me.

Well, this is something of a separate issue, I suppose. I'm afraid I share neither your absolute faith in the empirical method, nor your conviction that things like philosophy are credible foundations for action. I think science itself come to doubt its own access to "objective" truth since at least the development of theories of quantum mechanics. And I think you need to differentiate between "facts" and "truth." Science does not a bad job of revealing the former, but is a pretty lousy means of approaching the latter.


This is not at all true. Both "men" and "guys" are terms that refer, at a denotative level, to adult males of the human species, but the connotations built into these terms are entirely quantifiable and as generally understood as any denotative definition.


Again, I generally agree, but I don't think you address my rejoinders to this view, as I gave them in the previous post. I also think that you living in Cloudcuckooland if you think that you can, in a practical sense, make language actually function as the transparent medium that you seem to think it is. Connotation exists; language IS slippery, frequently near-opaque, and an important influence on the way in which we think. Railing against its imperfections is a bit like lamenting The Fall: the machine is broken, and regret ain't gonna fix it. Far better that you learn to use it to good effect instead.

I can agree with most of this, except for the last sentence. If women "provide the civilization," why have we been excluded from full participation in it for most of history?

As for the notion of men providing "protection," I have two objections. First is that women now relatively rarely need PHYSICAL protection in Western society. So, your "function" in that regard is on the way out.

Second is, that when we DO need physical protection, it's not usually from the sabre-toothed tiger stalking the cave entrance. It's from OTHER men, who are employing precisely the same physical tools that you suggest are for "protection" to intimidate, abuse, or sexually assault women. In other words, the very thing you suggest is supposed to "protect" us is far far more likely these days to be used AGAINST us.


Of course. But then the same thing goes for nongendered characteristics too. I'd hope that the person teaching at a university, for example, has been employed because she or he has demonstrated the mental capacity necessary to do so. Just as I too wouldn't want to be rescued from a burning building by a woman who may not have the physical strength to do so safely, so too would I not want to be taught by someone who didn't have the intelligence necessary for that job.

I take it as a given that "equal opportunity" does NOT mean putting someone in a job that they are incapable of handling.

Fixed it for ya!

Pep (Oh, that's right; I didn't need to. )

The Heisenberg principle is often misunderstood. It is not that the presence of the observer alters what is going on, it is that the limitations of the observer make it impossible to gather all of the information about what is going on in the same instant. We can know the velocity or the location of a particle at any given moment, but not both. Nonetheless, at every given moment, the particle has both location and velocity. The fact that truth is strange does not make it any less true.

And, no, I'm not one of those people who believes that truth is subjective. The truth about any given thing may turn out to be unknowable at a particular time and place, but it exists nonetheless, waiting to be discovered.

I suspect if you conducted a proper experiment, wherein you gathered a statistically significant and truly representative sample of people and asked them to define "men" and "guys", you would get results that fall into 4 or 5 distinct categories. One category would have a plurality, perhaps even a majority, of the responses and the rest would have significant minorities. The only thing that all respondents would be able to agree upon is that both terms denote (at least) male humans.

You have asserted a central tenet of deconstructionism, a philosophical opinion rather than a testable or proven theory, and naturally therefore have not offered any evidence in its defense other than the fact that you continue to hold this opinion. And you have introduced an ad-hominem attack, which is unfortunate.

The hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics has been pretty much exploded by the various tests of the Bell Inequality starting with Alain Aspect's experiments in the early '80s. The particle has neither position nor velocity, but is rather represented by a function describing the probability of its position and velocity being measured at any given moment. The parameters to this function, the state vector, are a complete description of the particle.

Extending this as a metaphor into the macroscopic world, however, is of little value.

I knew I was gonna get in trouble with this. *L* The particle may not be matter at all, but energy, or something in between. But the fact that science can still completely describe the little bugger, whatever it is, bolsters my position, to my relief.

I think saying that "science can still completely describe the little bugger" is overstating the case slightly. The latest models of particles are a queer beast indeed:

Identify them, instead of just dismissing them.

Edit: Actually, I don't care. I'm not here to win or show superiority to anyone or to trade barbs or anything like that. Discussion I like, but anything else, I really don't care.

Oh, if you only knew the half of it. But I'm not telling, and you probably wouldn't believe me anyway



I am a very emotional person. However, I have come to realize many years ago that allowing others to manipulate my emotions or allowing circumstances outside my own head dictate my emotional state was not serving me. Nor do I think it serves anyone. I am not saying "don't be emotional" as one of my buddies here might say. I am saying that most people will not achieve their purpose here on Earth if they get so easily distracted by this kind of "noise."



I just don't see it that way at all. Anyone who does not view other humans as human is a sociopath.



What needs to change most in my opinion is any individual's idea that he or she is helpless or subject to conditions of oppression (when in modern societies I do not believe this is the case, nearly always). I have seen nothing that proves that these statistics so often cited of discrepancies in women's salaries and etc. do not stem from their own thinking (lack of salary expectations or accurate appraisal of their own work's worth) or their own actions (not actually asking for raises, etc.).... Well, basically, their own thinking, because thinking leads to action (or inaction).

Well that definitely beats the crap out of the little silver car I use when I play Monopoly.

If one is brought up thinking that she should just expect less and be happy with it, then she may just live up to the lowered expectations. Of if one is brought up thinking that her self-worth should be measured primarily by the sacrifices she would make to spend time with her children, then she will focus more of her attention on children and less on work (as compared to someone brought up to measure self-worth as a financial provider; he will spend far more energy aggressively seeking raises and promotions.

Further, getting a raise, for example, often depends on the boss's willingness to provide a raise more than the worker's desire to obtain a raise. And what does one do if the request for a raise is denied? If all companies are paying women 60% of what men are making for the same work, it isn't as if there are a lot of options out there.

One can only make meaningful choices when one has meaningful options.

But this brings us back to where I got involved in this discussion, which was the suggestion that it was more gender sensitive to use a word like "humankind" instead of "mankind." Individually, it seems like a small thing. But the lingering cloud of gender equality is made up of all of those little things that reinforces stereotypes and just really suck the emotional wind out of anyone who wants to change those stereotypes. It's a word here and there that reminds one that women aren't considered fully human. It's a joke about wife-beating. It's all the damsels-in-distress in those action television shows and movies. It's every time a co-worker enters the office, and complimenting one person on the way she works and another person on that great idea in the last staff meeting. It's when everyone in the room, without speaking, just knows who is expected to make the coffee. Or when the guys at the office have that collective sigh of disappointment that they can't have lunch at the strip club because you-know-who would be offended. Or getting the stare of "it's your fault" at the mandatory sexual harassment training. It's every time one partner says, "I'd love to help you with the housework, but you know how lousy I am with it, and you're so good at it."

All those small things just add up and make a lot of people just accept their situation.

And that's why, until I finally just give in to my fate, I will make a big deal out of the small things.

Oh Smify, you can't be serious???

On the one hand, you are implicitly complaining that there are women who are trying to address gender inequalities by introducing inclusive language. On the other, you criticize us for being passive victims? Which are we?

I don't even know where to begin addressing your suggestion that there is "nothing that proves that these statistics so often cited of discrepancies in women's salaries and etc. do not stem from their own thinking." I have also never seen a study suggesting that these inequalities don't stem from the toxicity of nail polish, or evil beams sent by aliens seeking to undermine women either. What else do we need to disprove as the cause before you will accept that, just maybe, there IS still systemic inequality at work here?

Honestly, this is called blaming the victim. Do you REALLY believe that these very well-documented cases are the result of passivity? CAN you really believe that every woman on the receiving end of such inequality is victimizing herself through her mental attitude? Is this true of Jane Doe, in the cubical next to you? Maybe. Is it true of ALL of the literary millions of women affected by these disparities? Come on!

If, by the notion that truth is subjective, you mean that all "truths" are equally true, then I would agree with you. But it is one thing to argue that there IS a truth; it is quite another to suggest that it is knowable. And THAT is what the Heisenberg Principle is really about. Empiricism doesn't merely argue that truth exists: it is explicitly built on the belief that it is accessible. The Heisenberg Principle, and other developments in science and mathematics since at least the 1920s, all undercut that belief.


By which you are suggesting that all of these connotative meanings are invalid?

Meaning (as opposed to "truth" is a human function: it is the way in which humans process information. Signs are arbitrary human constructs designed to communicate meaning: they have no objective reality outside of the human minds that conceive them.

Yes, it is true that saying that Mars is green doesn't make it so. But then Mars isn't an artificial construct; it wasn't created by humans. Our sign systems, our language, was. If humans disappeared tomorrow, so would language, signs, and indeed "meaning" itself. Equally, if humans decide that a word "means" something, it does.

I will go so far as to agree that purely subjective meanings, in the context of language systems, make no sense. But the existence of multiple connotations doesn't mean that these are subjective and singular: merely that language is enormously complicated and multivalent.


I don't think I need to rely on deconstruction here. Logical Positivism of the sort that you seem to be advocating was being attacked by people like Karl Popper long before Derrida or Barthes put pen to paper. And I will again suggest that one of the unfortunate effects of this kind of "naive empiricism" is precisely that it can blind one to the existence of other kinds of truth than those accessible only through scientific measurement.

BTW, I am sincerely puzzled as to how you find an ad hominem attack in this passage. Certainly none was intended, nor can I see how you can read one into a statement that, on a denotative level, merely suggests that "you are wrong if you think this . . ." Is it the reference to Cloudcuckooland that dismays you? That was nothing more than a (very) mildly clever allusion to Aristophanes' dystopic comedy The Birds, about the creation of an ultimately untenable "perfect" society. It seemed not inappropriate given your (I believe) naive belief that language can be nailed down and stabilized. It was certainly not designed to offend or to attack you personally, and I remain frankly at a loss as to why you should think that it was.

This.

This is a two way street, that is nothing I've ever said to my wife.
I have heard from her, "I'd love to get a job, but you know how lousy I am with it, and you're so good at it." despite the current economic times making it practically impossible for any family to exist without 2 incomes.

I am all for equality, I am all for gender neutral language, where negative connotations exist.
But I refuse to accept that this problem is wholly on the heads of men and their attitudes. Yes there are men who are bigots and worse, but there are also women that are happy with the inequalities the way they are.

I'm not picking on you Amity, that comment just struck a chord in me because I have experienced the exact opposite of that from the other side and couldn't sit back and say nothing.