Delicious LiveJournal Links for 3-17-2009

[andrewducker]

• The Great Movie Experiment
  Vote for movies, head-to-head, and help rank the best movies in the world. Great time-waster. Which is better - The Aviator - or Congo?
  (tags: movies voting)
• Six years after New Zealand legalised brothels
  According to Catherine Healy of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC), better and safer working practices are now the norm. Across the industry, she says, women are now aware of their rights and exploitative brothel owners are becoming marginalised as a result of the reform. "Sex workers say: I can work across town," she says. "The dynamic has altered." Anna Reed, who was a sex worker in Christchurch for 23 years and is now NZPC's local spokesperson, agrees that exploitative practices have become rare.
  (tags: NewZealand prostitution)
• 10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse
  Thankfully Julie is just as guilty as I am!
  (tags: funny geek culture)
• Feminism 101
  Nothing here I didn't already know. But definitely a good starting point.
  (tags: politics feminism gender)
• Equal pay claims: Who is worth more to society, a classroom assistant or a gravedigger?
  Anything perceived to be a caring role, looking after children and old people, has always been rewarded less well than the predominantly male jobs, partly because the skills women bring to the work are regarded as innate, rather than qualities they need to be specifically rewarded for.
  (tags: UK feminism equality)
• Why setting goals can backfire
  Actually very pertinent for why there have been all sorts of problems in the economy recently.
  (tags: business goals)
• Why Gandalf Never Married
  A rather nice speech on sexism in fantasy. By Terry Pratchett. Written in 1985.
  (tags: fiction gender fantasy magic pratchett)

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

re: F101 - It's not even really about being a starting point. It's mainly an attempt to stop discussions getting repeatedly detailed by newbies/malicious commenters. The newbies go away, read it and hopefully clue up. The malicious commentators continue unchanged after being given the link, are clearly identifiable after that point as malicious commentators and can be ignored.

That said, it's not a bad starting point...

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

As an FYI: there's not one of those I would consider unsuitable for linking to from LC.

[andrewducker]

Movies and Geeky Spouses didn't seem terribly appropriate, but I see your point :->

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Geeky spouses is especially appropriate IMHO, but only because I am one and I've got one.

[andrewducker]

It was good fun going through that and having Julie tick just as many boxes as me :->

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

I've only seen The Aviator once but I've seen Congo twice. Therefore Congo must be the better film.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

JOOI: Is someone who disagrees with you even after reading the blog necessarily a "malicious commenter"?

Suppose I'm on a Christian forum, and some new people come along and derail debates by asking basic questions. We could point them at a simple tract like Two Ways To Live (http://www.peacewithgod.co.uk/two-ways-to-live.html). A very few, perhaps, would read that and be converted. Others would read it and come back and say trollish or abusive things, and not be interested in genuine dialogue - the "malicious commenters". But I strongly believe there would be a third group, probably the largest group: honest atheists/agnostics who would read the tract and still not be convinced, and be interested in a debate about whether God exists or not.

[andrewducker]

Of course, you could argue that Christian forums are _not_ the place for debating the basics like "Does God exist?"...

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Sure. If the objection is "This isn't the right place for debating the basics", then fine. But I wasn't sure if the objection was "If you want to debate the basics at all, you must be either ignorant or malicious."

[meihua.livejournal.com]

JOOI: Is someone who disagrees with you even after reading the blog necessarily a "malicious commenter"?

Actually, I think they are! Let me explain myself. I'll start with a quote straight out of F101:

"The first reason FF101 exists is to help ensure that discussions between feminists don’t get continually derailed by challenges from newbies and/or antagonists to explain and justify our terminology and conclusions to them, right now! Substantive challenges can be valuable, but constantly having to explain basic theory over and over, when an interesting discussion was underway, gets really frustrating. There’s a time and a place for discussing the basics, and disrupting a discussion on other feminist topics is not that time and place."

Let's say I'm having a discussion on a feminist blog about a feminist topic, and someone comes along and wants to "debate the basics". I say to them, "Hi, we're having quite an in-depth conversation here - can you check out F101 for this, please?"

They come back and want to carry on debating the basics in the middle of a discussion. That discussion will get derailed.

If I've linked someone to a resource explicitly saying, "Don't derail in-depth conversations by wanting to discuss the basics", but they continue to discuss the basics, to my mind that's malicious (or stupid) behaviour.

Please note, I agree that there's nothing wrong with wanting to discuss the basics, especially if one's already read a FAQ like F101 and still doesn't get it. But wanting to discuss the basics in the middle of an ongoing debate is derailing, incredibly common and fantastically annoying.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

OK, so you do mean disagreeing in an inappropriate discussion-derailing place, not just disagreeing in general. That's OK then.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Yep! :)

Actually, there was a typo in my first comment - I said "detailing" but I meant "derailing" - that might have made it clearer...

I wonder, though, that the number of discussion-derailing places is larger than it might appear. Some of the issues discussed, let's say, in racism, are about an ongoing debate; and that debate is conducted in a distributed way.

I think a good example is what recently happened in this journal. The debate on, "Why do some POC express themselves with such anger when discussing racism" is conducted all over the internet; and in a way, the more people post statements saying, "This isn't ok", the more that debate shifts to a conclusion of, "Expressing anger when discussing racism isn't ok".

So, even a post in one's own journal can be "derailing", in a way...

Hmm, noodling on this a bit. I'm not sure if I'm right or not. What do you think?

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Err. Not convinced by that. If you have a dissenting view you shouldn't even express it on your own journal?

Are we meaning the same thing by "derailing"? I was taking it to mean something like "an interesting in-depth discussion is happening, already, and the dissenter is obstructing that discussion taking place, by questioning things which the existing participants are taking as given for the purpose of the discussion. This is bad because if they have to spend all their time debating the basics with the dissenter, they'll never get to debate the high-level topics with each other. The dissenter should go and question the basics elsewhere - in a forum for that purpose, or on their own journal."

But from your latest comment, it sounds like you're using it to mean something like "influencing global opinion on a topic towards the dissenter's view."

The first is a valid practical objection, necessary to ensure certain discussions are able to happen at all. The second is a serious restriction on free speech.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Mmm, maybe you're right. I'm not 100% convinced either...

I do mean your first definition of derailing - but I also want to add... I don't know how to put it. Something like:

"Writing uninformed stuff in one's own journal which could be corrected by more study."

Oh, here's a good analogy - documentaries which question global warming, not based on thorough research but based on pseudoscience. I'm trying to get at the times where expressing an uninformed opinion, in the face of lots of opportunities to inform oneself, is a pain.

I don't know how to distinguish those times from the times when someone has genuinely tried to inform themselves and didn't get it, though.

Hmm, I'm wandering a bit.

Condense down, maybe, to: "Posting a dissenting opinion in one's own blog can still be derailing, if you haven't bothered to read up properly and you don't listen or correct yourself once people link you to resources in the comments - this is because your blog post increases the noise/signal ratio on that topic on the internet."

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

OK, the global warming analogy and the noise/signal ratio explanation make sense. I see how a post on one's own journal could be "derailing" in an extended sense.

But I can't tell if you're making the assumption that anyone who disagrees must be insufficiently informed and could be brought to agree by further study, or not. With your global warming analogy, "documentaries which question global warming, not based on thorough research but based on pseudoscience" suggests there could at least theoretically be documentaries which question global warming and are based on thorough research. Whereas "if you haven't bothered to read up properly and you don't listen or correct yourself once people link you to resources in the comments" suggests an assumption that the only valid response to reading such resources is to "correct yourself", presumably away from your original dissenting opinion.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I can't tell if you're making the assumption that anyone who disagrees must be insufficiently informed and could be brought to agree by further study, or not.

You're right, there's a shade of that assumption in how I think about this stuff. Which isn't ideal, I know.

I suppose, I feel that the burden of proof is on the dissenter, but is very rarely taken up in full.

There's lots of, "Feminism is sexist and its time is done", and not much of, "I've been reading up on this stuff for some time, I'm well informed, here are the sources I will reference in my detailed argument as to why we should rebrand feminism as equalism."

There are lots of people who march into these debates without being well informed, but whose privilege makes them think their "I think x" is somehow an argument which carries more weight than, "I don't think there's such a thing as global warming".

If someone disagrees with me about global warming by only saying, "I don't think there's such a thing", then, well, I do think they are insufficiently informed and need to up their game.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I've re-read what I just wrote and it's a very rambling comment. I'm rather tired today. Let me know if it doesn't make much sense, and I'll come back to this another day or when I've had more coffee!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

You wrote: JOOI: Is someone who disagrees with you even after reading the blog necessarily a "malicious commenter"?

I wrote: Actually, I think they are!

Hmm, I think I was wrong there. You're right, they're not necessarily a malicious commenter. However, on balance, they often seem to be.

And, malicious probably wasn't the best word for me to use really. Maybe malicious/arrogant/failing-to-check-privilege.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

No, that does make sense. Thank you. I feel like we understand each other better than at the start of the thread.

"I feel that the burden of proof is on the dissenter" is a reasonable position IMO and different from what I feared you might be saying.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Thank you to you too. This has helped me a lot to think about what I think - and about how to articulate it. (Something I often do pretty badly online.)