Quote of the Day: Staring at women's bodies

Should women take it as a compliment when men catcall them or stare at them? No!

In response to this comment, SRSister Kelderwick replied:

Not sure if “subjugate” is actual transcribed word or a totally clueless yet perfect mis-remembered “objectify”. (Despite shitthatneverhappened.txt)

But okay really dudes. Thought experiment thing time yeah? You are at the gym, running, and your workout clothes are somewhat showy and fairly form-fitting. In the mirror you notice Jane Random Runner inspecting you – awesome, says you. Okay sure, whatever. What if JRR is still staring at you ten minutes later – are you still fine? That’s not intrusive at all? Now pretend her expression isn’t neutral – she’s obviously interested. Doesn’t say a word, just stares at you or takes long glances. The whole time. You are still not affected at all by this? She keeps watching you.

Sure. Now, it isn’t just JRR anymore. Now she has 10 peers all using machines behind you. Some of them don’t look, one of them stares like JRR, some of them take the odd glance. One of them wrinkles her nose in disapproval because she doesn’t find you attractive, or so she whispers to her friend beside her. Thinks she’s being quiet, probably, but maybe not? Wait, was that a camera her friend just slipped away? Hmmm. Oh well.

But now it’s not just JRR and her peers, it’s your female co-workers. Most of them are decent enough folks and don’t bother you. But Gwen does. She leans in too close when you talk, she watches you a bit too long when you wear shorts. Whenever you go to office parties Gwen always corners you and tries to make conversation. She doesn’t take well to rejection. But she’s nice enough most of them time, right? And she’s never, you know, said anything – she is married, after all. Definitely hasn’t done anything either. Well okay there was that one time she put her hand… It doesn’t matter, she was a bit upset that day (home stuff and all that). Besides, you talked to Stephanie and she figures you just over-analyzed the whole thing.

Okay. But now it’s not just JRR and her peers and your female co-workers and Stephanie. Now it’s women on the street. Some of them whistle at you. Some are rather more lewd. Usually you’re too tired or too determined and just ignore them. But if you flip them off and reject them, sometimes they get mad.

They get real mad.

And their friends get mad too.

Now listen, you bunch of shitlord smugfucks who’ve never experienced fucking anything like this, who have no comprehension of the experiences of women who are subjected to this very predominantly male behaviour, get a fuckin’ clue: they are people out there. They have to fuckin’ live a whole life in this context. You, you who felt so stung about getting called out, or vicariously felt so, or were so morally stoked by the thought of such happening that you made it up to circlejerk with your like-minded shitlord friends like a bunch of fucking leeches writhing in a pool of liquid fucking manure, fuck off. Your little sting, that was nothing – one hair pulled out from the arse of an elephant. There is no thing, no habit from women or overbearing cultural narrative and tropes, there is no thing that gives you any fucking perspective on this.

P.S. You, shitlord, do not think this means that gender-flipping situations will be a good tool for analyzing every situation. It is not.

This is actually a very common complaint from men and a prime example of how male privilege works. For us that we have never experienced anything like this in our day-to-day lives, it’s impossible to intuitively comprehend why staring/leering/creeping at random women is not flattering to them. The thought process above is exactly what is meant when one asks us to “Check our Privilege”.

/inb4biotruths

Quote of the Day: Hipster Racism

Quoth Shattersnipe:

So straight off the bat, anyone who says they refuse to get angry about rape culture because that’s what everyone else is doing – or, to use Tycho’s words, because they “don’t do compulsory” –  has, much like the hipster racist, completely sidestepped the issue of whether bad things are genuinely happening in order to try and look cool. Which, yeah, no.

On a related note, reddit is still shit (surprise, I know). I think my comments got in the negative hundreds in /r/games when I posted this article for discussion. Redditors were falling over each other trying to explain how not-offended they are. Ugh.

Quote of the Day: Opportunity Costs

Biowar

Quoth powernut

Companies will shut down profitable branches simply because they aren’t as profitable as they were pitched to management, or as profitable as the competition. From a capitalist economic theory standpoint, they can argue that they are losing “opportunity cost”, but the difference between opportunity cost and reality is the difference between a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and a doubloon in your pocket. When leprechauns are your financial advisors, you’ve got problems.

In related news, it seems that the TORtanic is continuing its steady sinking. They try to pass off the downsizing as business as usual, but they forget that the internetubes have a long memory and we remember when they said:

Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content.

Uh-huh

They should have made KOTOR3 with co-op instead. I would have bought that.

I now wonder if Bioware will eventually suffer the same fate as many of the other companies that EA bought. To paraphrase:

The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Game companies rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished. Bioware is not the first. By utilizing our funding, game companies develop along the paths we desire. They exist because we allow it, and will end because we demand it.

The eventual fate of Bioware?

Παράθεση της ημέρας: Ο Ελληνικός Λαός

Είπε ο Βα.Αλ.

Αλλά την Κυριακή δεν ήταν σοφός. Την Κυριακή αποδείχτηκε ότι σκέφτεται με βάση το συμφέρον του… Και ότι είναι μικρόψυχος και συμφεροντολόγος! Τι;!;! Είναι ο ελληνικός λαός τέτοιο πράγμα; Δηλαδή, 30 χρόνια ήταν ιδεαλιστής του σοσιαλδημοκρατικού τρίτου δρόμου ή οπαδός του νεοφιλελευθερισμού και ξαφνικά μεταβλήθηκε σε στυγνό παρτάκια συμφεροντολόγο; Τι μου λέτε; Κοίτα να δεις πως αλλάζουν οι άνθρωποι…

Όλο το κειμενάκι σωστό. Διαβάστε το.

"You deign to reply to me?"

“I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain.”

Oh Gawds, the arrogance is over nine thousand!

The title quote from a right-libertarian redditor named “Libertarian Atheist” who fancies themselves as some kind of anarchist. They got a bit upset that I declined to include /r/agorism in the confederation of anarchist reddits and apparently tried to educate me on their personal ideology. The discussion soon after degraded, until they said this particular sentence, and I just had to bow out. What more can you say to that, that is not said by itself.

For posterity, I’m going to quote in full their latest reply. It’s that amazing.

You mistake arrogance with intelligence, knowledge, and an ability to convey ideas in an effective manner. “Arrogance” is a term dumb people with false ideas and impressions use to describe other people with better ideas. A smart man with false ideas and impressions who comes across another person with better ideas will not call that person “arrogant,” he will try to better understand what the other man is saying and be on the ready to throw out his own follies. What you laughably call a “combin[ing]” of “ideologies” is not so, it is the end result of years of study and reading, throwing out weak ideas (like “gift economy”) and championing the strongest. This is what I have been doing all my life and it does not bother me in the least that you (or anyone else, anarchist or otherwise) can’t understand. Luckily opinions are not measured by how many people “take [it] seriously” (if that were the case Christian and Muslim opinions would be the best) and a man seeking the best opinions does not care who “takes [him] seriously”, what matters is reaching as close an approximation of the truth as is humanly possible.

The funniest part is where you claim to be able to teach me anything. I’ve got more knowledge in my left testicle than you’ve got in your whole brain. You’re barely fit to teach a dog. You deign to reply to me? What a laugh! This back in forth with you is the greatest waste of my time this year so far. . . we’ve got quite a bit to go but you’re in a very high running at this point.

I just love that they also italicized the “me”, making that phrase totally sound like Invader Zim. Adorable!

Quote of the Day: Online Christmas Gifts

..is borderline torture.

To quoth Mac McClelland

I feel genuinely sorry for any child I might have who ever asks me for anything for Christmas, only to be informed that every time a “Place Order” button rings, a poor person takes four Advil and gets told they suck at their job.

This article shows just why wage slavery is called exactly that. That it’s not “voluntary” as vulgar libertarians would like to delude themselves.

Reading this post was just so depressing…

"Here's the problem Bro, sounds like you've never been outside of America."

The Privileged and the Masochists are the biggest moralizers online.

Oh gawds, this is the phrase I could say to most of the people I see moralizing against various stuff in Reddit. It’s especially relevant when people criticize video game piracy. In specific, this is the phrase that someone used to put some anti-piracy moralizer in his place. The moralizer said.

They can spend hundreds of $$’s for the original console but can’t afford $10 for a used game?

If it costs an arm and a leg for a new legit game, it must cost them several bodies for a console itself.

It all comes down to buying games you can afford. If they can’t afford MW3 because it is $60, buy older games that are $10.

To which the user pikatu replied:

Here’s the problem Bro, sounds like you’ve never been outside of America. Games in Australia are $100. Do you know how much games in Brazil Cost? 6 month old games are USD$140 [Citation]. What does the average person make in salary in Brazil at USD?

The minimum wage set for the year of 2011 is R$7,080.00 or R$545 per month plus an additional 13th salary in second half of December. Wikipedia

This is why piracy will never go away. Most people play games, will not have money to buy a new game Finally, seeing as how the xbox 360 costs them 581.1743 US dollars Walmart. 4 games cost as much as 360. Older games. With the income they make, they cannot afford it. Piracy is huge in Brazil AND in China, and other third world countries. You talking complete shit while ignorant of how economics works isn’t going to help at all.

So succinctly said and such a great example to point out where most of the piracy is coming from and why.

This kind of mentality – of the clueless First Worlders who projects their own social status on the rest of the world – is frustratingly common. I encounter it almost daily online, and most often than not, it comes from the most moralizing and least empathic people available.

The original commenter then replied

I’m from New Zealand actually. Games here are between $120 and $150.

I’m a student, so I buy games that I can afford. The only brand new game I’ve actually ever bought was Starcraft 2, which I saved up for over 4 months.

I make about $4,000 a year so I don’t buy new games, I buy old games for $5 or $10, and I make less than the average wage of a Brazilian. Granted, though, the games are easier for me to procure in New Zealand.

Which points out the second class of people who like to moralize. The masochists. And if there’s anyone better at moralizing than the privileged, it’s the tools. The 53 percenters and the oppressed who can’t tolerate those more oppressed by themselves jumping up the privilege ladder. Here is someone who had to pay something like half his allowance to buy one game and instead of thinking there’s something wrong with that, and how they’re being excluded from popular culture just because of their economic situation, they’d rather that everyone else is excluded as well, only more so.

It’s the absurdity of not finding ways to improve your own shitty situation, but making sure those in a shittier one don’t get to bypass you.

On why rape jokes aren't funny

If this doesn’t convince you that rape jokes aren’t funny, I don’t know what will.

I quoted in the past about rape jokes and how they reinforce rapists, but now I’ve found an excellent post which goes in length into this, speaking from a personal experience as a rape victim, no less, and how it affects them.

laughing at/telling rape jokes is a pretty clear indicator of how little you can personally identify with the very real consequences of a very real act, just like laughing at/telling lynching jokes is a pretty clear indicator that you’re so so so white, and have never known and will never know somebody who was lynched (though you might know somebody who did the lynching).

Wholeheartedly suggested.

Also this.

So, here is my challenge for those who want to tell rape jokes:

Ask every woman in your life if she has been sexually assaulted. Ask her to tell you her story. This means your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your grandma.

Once you have heard all their stories, go watch a movie with a rape scene in it. One you didn’t mind before. One you thought people were overly offended by.

Now tell me a joke.