I don't want to know your gender. I don't care. It's your thing. It's non of my business, and it makes no difference to me whatsoever.
If I do want to know your gender, then things between us are starting to become intimate.
To sum things up: I would say it's rude if someone shares his gender identity with me without being asked. On the same level as if someone shares his/her dick size without being asked.
I agree, "They" is perfect. If you're offended then so be it. I don't really care if you're a man, woman, transgender, gay, lesbian, whatever.
We are in a society that demands special treatment and we've become so afraid of offending people.
To the offended - Don't be, assume the best of everyone and things will be fine. The problem starts when people are offended and they require special treatment. Malice, racism, segregation and other forms of abuse is not part of this clause. Those are universally inexcusable.
You, and most of the commenters in this thread, seem to have somehow missed that the author specifically objects to using the singular "they". Perhaps people are skipping to the comments and/or jumping to stock reactions to the topic of gendered pronouns instead of reading and responding to the content of the linked post. Otherwise, I've no idea why so much debate is ragimg around, for example, "custom pronouns" (ze/xir/etc), when the original author doesn't mention them at all.
There are two ways of avoiding dealing with gender in written communication in English. You can use singular "they", or you can write in such a way gendered pronouns or singular they are not necessary. The author seems to prefer the second one as a stylistic choice, expressed that preference, and apparently this was what got said author fired.
The way this decision and surrounding information about the new CoC can be read, is that it's no longer about avoiding misgendering people. It's about having to pay fealty. Writing around gendered pronouns means weaseling out of having to make a stand on the issue, which labels you as the enemy.
Many discussion threads here seem to be losing sight of the fact that these are internet forums. 99% of the time one doesn't have a clue what gender, race, species etc one's interlocutor is.
There is a perfectly good third person pronoun for this situation. Some might decry it as a neologism, but I suggest it has been around long enough and has firmly entered the language:
Would you be offended if someone shared their name without being asked? The issue here is that names and pronouns come up in ordinary conversation quite frequently.
I don't get offended when someone is rude, it just makes that person an asshole in my mind.
But of-course I don't think sharing the name is rude, it's a basic personal reference. It would be rude if it's followed by "I'm straight" or "I'm a woman". As for pronouns, in most languages, you can know the [grammatically] correct gender automatically from the name. And if you don't, most grammars have middle or neutral gender, so that can be used. The issue here is that we shouldn't bother other people with our gender identity.
What if you ask what somebody does and she explains she’s a mom? You don’t obtusely ask, “But I didn’t ask if you were a mom. I didn’t even ask about your gender.” Life is gendered. It’s okay to reveal gender. And in the workplace, or even church or social gatherings, people are definitely thinking of sex and sexuality all the time — who is surprised when coworkers start dating?
It’s no more rude than having baby pictures or a wedding ring or a cross around your neck. These are all examples of intimate disclosure which have little or nothing to do with some idealized cold professional relations. People wear their identity in many ways and the rest of society is perfectly okay with it.
> As for pronouns, in most languages, you can know the [grammatically] correct gender automatically from the name.
But what if you can’t? Or there aren’t enough context clues to determine this? For example, my username contains my name in it; do you have any idea what my gender is? Or what I’d I had a “gendered” name but actually had a different identity personally?
But really the problem is that gender comes up in conversation a lot more than orientation. You can get a lot further in a conversation without the latter than the former, so some people see it fit to frontload that information.
Well, since I generally don't care about your gender identity, I would be quite satisfied if I use the grammatical gender that corresponds with your gendered name. BTW in my native language all nouns are gendered, even the surnames, and it would be grammatically incorrect to refer to a feminine or masculine name with pronouns from different gender.
I disagree that personal gender is often relevant in that kind of discussions (SO, or similar general topic forums), and when it is, then it's perfectly normal to share it. The same goes for dick size. But why to mention it if not necessary?
That last sentence is what caused the outrage in the wider public. It was amplified by the manipulative post of Selam Jie Gano and the media that parroted it, but his original claim did hit the nerve (that it shouldn't be called sexual assault if no physical force was used in the sexual act).
Actually, his claim was that it shouldn’t be called assault if no force or coercion was used by the older man, and the older man couldn’t be expected to know that his partner was being coerced by someone else.
People should be outraged that a nobody working on automated vehicles for the US military (AKA drones) believes she on a higher moral ground than Stallman, that never hurt anybody.
People should be outraged that said nobody wrote "Remove Stallman and all the other toxic people in tech" like if "removing" people is ok, like she knows who they are, 'cause she's the ultimate judge, and as if building weapons is not toxic...
BTW
RMS has been much more brave and clear than that.
He wrote
"if someone in csail says in this discussion group that Minsky was accused of sexual assault, a very serious accusation, and someone else in csail thinks that he was not, should the latter person refrain from saying so in this same discussion group out of concern that the conversation will leak and be misconstrued by the press?"
The in stands for "science". The job of scientists is to evaluate evidence and seek truth. We have a social responsibility to do that as well. I hope that we scientists will never evade our social responsibility to seek and defend the truth out of fear that the press will misconstrue our search. That would not be a reputation I would like attached to my affiliation.
I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term "sexual assault" is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone.
He did what he believed was the right thing to do.
He was doing it to protect the movement and the protest from
a - leaks to the press
b - bad PR, if they used sexual assault people could spin it as "but he didn't assault her, it was consensual sex" like they usually do: they shoot the messenger or the form of the message to not address the real issue and divert the attention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts)
c - he was UNDOUBTEDLY right! nobody is talking about the protest against Epstein-MIT involvement.
> working on automated vehicles for the US military
Somehow I missed this, so a person literally working on helping the government kill people was the one asking to remove RMS? Interestingly enough, such hypocrisy came up in all the deplatforming cases too, where they removed some relatively innocent stuff claiming it had bad impact on people, but ignored and keep ignoring all the weapons promoting content, war propaganda, etc. that literally causes death and destruction.
"Passionate about using engineering for a positive impact on the world." -
well most of us think we are not the bad guy but the cognitive dissonance is strong here.
"Mission accomplished." Reminds me of the women who accused Assange. Then there is the witchhunt against Jacob Appelbaum. Sense a pattern?
Regardless of whether these allegations are true or false, there is a lesson to be learned here. The lesson here is that [some] men have a severe weakness related to their sexuality. I'd assume US HUMINT knows about this lesson, very well.
Assange after he was accused of rape escaped from the process and started rambling about a “radical feminist conspiracy”
Stallman is not accused of anything, never escaped and if you write to him (he still answer to everybody) will ask you to support the FSF because it's important
And this is the man women and students should be afraid of...
> As regards offence 1, AA said in her statement that she had offered the use of her apartment to Mr Assange from 11-14 August 2010 when she was away. She had returned on 13 August 2010 earlier than planned and then met him for the first time. They went out to dinner and returned to her apartment. As they drank tea, he started to fondle her leg which she welcomed. Everything happened fast. Mr Assange ripped off her clothes and at the same time broke her necklace. She tried to put her clothes on again, but Mr Assange had immediately removed them again. She had thought that she did not really want to continue, but it was too late to tell Mr Assange to stop as she had consented so far. Accordingly she let Mr Assange take off all her clothes. Thereafter they laid down on the bed naked with AA on her back and Mr Assange on top. Mr Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina, but she did not want him to do that as he was not using a condom. She therefore squeezed her legs together in order to avoid him penetrating her. She tried to reach several times for a condom which Mr Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without a condom. Mr Assange must have known it was a condom AA was reaching for and he had held her arms to stop her. After a while Mr Assange had asked AA what she was doing and why she was squeezing her legs together; AA told him she wanted him to put on a condom before he entered her. Mr Assange let go of AA's arms and put on a condom which AA found for him. AA felt a strong sense of unexpressed resistance on Mr Assange' s part against using a condom.
Legally in Sweden? Sure, but in everyday speech rape implies a lot of things which did not happen in the Assange case. I would say that Stallman's argument about sexual assault would apply perfectly here.
Legally in the UK. If Assange wants to use the "it's not rape in Sweden" defence the place to do that is in the courts, which he has spent considerable effort avoiding for the past decade.
> Rape implies... rape. He is just accused of removing a condom
Was Stallman right (again!) when he wrote
"I think it is morally absurd to define 'rape' in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17,"
?
Of course he was!
According to Swedish law, that's rape.
Welcome to the rest of the world, where the US laws do not apply.
> Wasn't that due to the (rightful imo) fear of being sent to the US?
Still escaped and blamed "feminists"
Would Epstein be right to escape because US wanted to prosecute him on the account of trafficking young girls?
You're arguing that defending a statutory rapist isn't supporting pedophilia BUT working on the guidance systems for an autonomous ground vehicle is "help the government kill people"?
> You're arguing that defending a statutory rapist isn't supporting pedophilia
Wrong.
I'm saying that Stallman never defended a statutory rapist.
He tried to defend the protest from the backlash of using the wrong terms and a dead person from an accusation that is hard to prove anyway now that he's dead.
Statutory rape is just a safer option given the circumstances.
BTW defending a statutory rapist is not supporting pedophilia or any attorney who defended an alleged (there is no official accusation yet) statutory rapist was also supporting pedophilia?
> for an autonomous ground vehicle is "help the government kill people"?
> by using inaccurate, disparaging, and dismissive language to attack the character of a critic.
> Your comment reminds me of the people who come out in defense of the Catholic Church whenever someone claims they were sexually abused by a Priest.
Isn't this ironic?
You're using the same language of the weapon's builder to try to accuse me of defending child molesters.
Why are people like you constantly at war with the world?
It's not my fault if she is a nobody (she really is) that builds weapons for the US military (she really does) and if she distorted RMS emails to make it look he was defending a rapist (he wasn't). It's not even my fault if RMS never molested anybody (he really didn't), never raped anybody (he really didn't), never hurt anybody (he really didn't) and never committed a crime (he really didn't).
Looks like I'm defending the reputation of a good man after all.
I'm really sorry you have a problem with reality, I swear.
What would you think if someone leaked this post[1] you wrote with the title "TOXIC WHITE PRIVILEGED MAN SAYS KIDS ARE TERRORISTS"?
> You're using the same language of the weapon's builder to try to accuse me of defending child molesters.
Drawing parallels between the way you attack the character of someone rather than the merits of their argument is accusing you of defending child molesters? Are you implying Stallman himself is a child molester? I'm thoroughly confused.
It was my understanding that Stallman was imploring people to use a more accurate term in describing his friend's actions because he felt the other term invoked harsher connotations. How does that make him a child molester?
> It's not my fault if she is a nobody (she really is) that builds weapons for the US military (she really does)
What does any of that have to do with what she said? You're not arguing the merits of what she said but rather that we shouldn't listen to her because of her notoriety and career choice.
> > It's not my fault if she is a nobody (she really is) that builds weapons for the US military (she really does)
> What does any of that have to do with what she said?
Person with questionable morals [1] making moral judgement claims suggests that the whole thing was manufactured. I wouldn't even exclude a possibility that she received some money to publish the things that she did.
[1] as her career choice clearly shows she has no problem with wars, which are known to cause death, including death of children, actual rape of young girls, organ harvesting and pretty much anything awful you can think of in this world wars have
As was the atomic bomb at one point in time. There may be exceptions for unintended uses of the technology you develop (a la Alfred Nobel), but there's not a lot of wiggle room when you work for the DoD.
You were hired to develop things that will eventually be used to kill people. That's the end goal of the job. Whether you make anything usable or not is somewhat beside the point, the intention is still there.
> Drawing parallels between the way you attack the character
I didn't attack the character, I only portayed the character for who she is.
No judgment attached, just the crude reality: she builds weapons for US military and uses a very aggressive and dehumanizing vocabulary.
I would never use "remove" when referring to another human being, alive or dead.
> It was my understanding that Stallman was imploring people to use a more accurate term in describing his friend's actions because he felt the other term invoked harsher connotations
He was concerned that the term "sexual assault" would be disputable by critics.
because legally and in layman's terms has a completely different connotations (people associate assault with physical violence, the law doesn't)
> What does any of that have to do with what she said?
I think it's interesting that a person who would like to "remove" other people ends up building weapons instead of schools for refugee kids.
Sorry, but what is wrong with working for the US military in the grand scheme of things? Would Russian or Chinese military be a preferred option?
Certainly seems to me to be far preferable to working for Facebook or Google or something like that.
Whether she is a nobody or not, it should not come as a surprise that for 99.(9)% of humanity, all of us here, as well as RMS are just as much nobodies.
> It's not even my fault if RMS never molested anybody (he really didn't), never raped anybody (he really didn't), never hurt anybody (he really didn't) and never committed a crime (he really didn't).
Not having committed a crime is your bar for "a good man"? Working for you must be pretty chill. Yeah, people can be unfit for their job even without having committed crimes (caught and found guilty, to be more precise). Especially in leadership roles.
I don't disagree with any of that, I'm simply point out that your remarks about this woman's notoriety and career choice are ironic.
You're attacking her in much the say way the media is attacking Stallman when they attribute his appearance and proclivity for eating shit off his foot as clear evidence he's a pedophile.
I'm not attacking her, but I understand why you think that.
Where do you think you might find sexism, misogynism, unsafety, threatening situations, in the US department of defence working with military personnel or in the office of RMS at MIT?
I think the odds are all in favour of the military, but this girl is happy to build drones for the military, while supporting the idea that RMS is a toxic man that need to be removed immediately.
Isn't that amusing?
If I didn't already know, I would have wanted to know about it!
Aren't instances of sexism, misogynism and threatening situations coming from RMS himself and going back decades numerous and well-documented at this point?
> that it shouldn't be called sexual assault if no physical force was used in the sexual act
The fact Stallman doesn't understand what assault means, and then used his lack of understanding of the word assault to defend Minsky, is exactly why people are annoyed with him.
> The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.
> The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. (See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef... records-unsealed.) Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
> The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.
Read this last paragraph.
Now read an English definition of assault. English words have several meanings. Stallman is ignoring the every day English meaning of the word assault because he doesn't understand how English works.
> Assault:
> 1) violent physical or verbal attack
> 2) any act that causes someone to feel physically threatened, which is considered reckless or intentional, and which need not necessarily involve any physical violence
> 3) rape or attempted rape
I don't understand why you'd say this...
> One could quite reasonably object to the use of a term whose legal definition is very different from the everyday meaning or connotations.
The legal definition isn't different to the everyday meaning, but even if it is Stallman needs to understand which definition is being used before he launches into his rape-apology, and he made no effort to do that, did he?
But assault in law and English does not require use of force, and if Stallman meant to say "let's call Minsky a statutory rapist" he could have said that. He didn't, he went on to say that we shouldn't define rape by age -- clearly trying to prevent people calling Minsky a rapist.
I'm totally expecting from Google to discontinue, restrict or change the API for Google Sheets at one point. It will likely be in the moment when it's hardest for you to timely update your app.
By not knowing which peers have verified numbers, the risk of getting caught that you're in the middle is very high, so that big cost for getting there will be for nothing (and actually get way more costly because you alerted the subjects).
I'm wondering why the article fails to mention that there is a sufficiently good and easy mechanism to compare and verify the new safety numbers. You just talk to your peer and read the numbers - and the peer can verify them.
This will fail when AI software gets really good at imitating voice in real-time during casual talk, but we're not there yet (or - if that is my threat model, I'll find an out of band way to verify)
You're right that it's not exactly complete. Time-translation symmetry is what would make an experiment "not depend on when the experiment took place," but time-reversal symmetry, another "time symmetry," would mean that it did not matter whether a VCR tape of the experiment was playing forwards or in reverse, so that both directions appeared to be completely reasonable events. (For example a car driving forwards is just as reasonable as a car driving in reverse.) Time translation symmetry appears in real life, but time reversal in general does not.
On the contrary, it is a pretty fundamental assumption in all of our fundamental theories (with some bows and whistles).
A point of confusion might be that the surroundings of the experiment might influence it and the surroundings would depend on whether it is a workday or a weekend, etc. But this is a bad experiment. The correct interpretation is "if my experiment is isolated so that external events do not influence it (like all good experiments), then I will get the same results no matter whether I do it today or wait until tomorrow". Another way to phrase it is "there is no dependence on the variable 't' in the fundamental laws".
This is correct and leads to conservation of energy — to see why, imagine a frictionless pendulum. If you prove that it returns to original position once, you know that it will swing for eternity because if the system is in the same state and only the time has changed, it do exactly what it did previously. Which is to say that the energy of the system will remain constant.
No, Slav Macedonia was acceptable to us. But not to the Albanians, and we changed our constitution in 2001 to allow them to veto this kind of things (under strong US/NATO pressure).
Modern Greeks have as much in common with Alexander as anybody else here. There are many historic clues that the ancient Greeks didn't understand the ancient Macedonian language, and that the Macedonians coudn't figure out how to write their language with the Greek alphabet, so they gradually (but not fully) adopted the Greek.
(Peoples) Republic of Macedonia was formed on August 2, 1944, as federal unit in Yugoslavia, hence the provisional name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In 1991 independence was declared, but the only real change was loss of economic integration and military protection.
There was (is) a substantial ethnic (Slavic) minority in the Greek park of Macedonia that identified themselves as Macedonians, which was treated pretty terribly by the right wing Greek authorities after the Balkan Wars: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/greece-apos-macedonian-slavic-heri... (My father was not allowed to visit his birthplace in the Greek part of Macedonia because his Yugoslav passport had the slavic name of the town).
It is this issue that is the real reason for the dispute, not Ancient Macedonia. The serious Macedonian academic institutions (and almost all of the people that I know) don't claim that we have any cultural relation with them.
> Not sure if I'm 100% right here, but knowing all my contacts and when I communicate with whom is an awful much.
Signal actually doesn't know all your contacts - you can check the source code to confirm that it doesn't know about any contacts that you don't message using Signal, for example.
Signal also doesn't store most of the metadata that it could, so it really knows incredibly little about its users. It knows (for example) the last date that it was able to talk to a particular device, but they don't store historical data for that, so if you received a message on Signal today, they don't (anymore) know that they sent you a message yesterday, or last month.
Of course, that second part all runs server-side, so you do have to trust Signal when they describe their internal architecture. But to be frank, who do you trust more with that metadata: Moxie Marlinspike, or the government that is essentially the "sixth eye" in the Five Eyes alliance[0]?
>Signal actually doesn't know all your contacts - you can check the source code to confirm that it doesn't know about any contacts that you don't message using Signal, for example.
I get a message in the app when a contact starts using Signal, so it has to know them server-side.
The other part of the comment was reffering to what the server could know (in the gov. case - will know), and that IS quite a lot (assuming Signal style service).
And I do trust Moxie nominally, but I also believe that he will obey US courts.
I don't want to know your gender. I don't care. It's your thing. It's non of my business, and it makes no difference to me whatsoever.
If I do want to know your gender, then things between us are starting to become intimate.
To sum things up: I would say it's rude if someone shares his gender identity with me without being asked. On the same level as if someone shares his/her dick size without being asked.