So this is what that hug everyone needs feels like.

Seriously, you're awesome for this. Good show.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 10:46 PM on August 6, 2008

If you're still struggling with the problem of "men are oppressed too!", it goes something like this: the patriarchy hates women, but the kyriarchy hates everyone. Which is to say that male oppression at the hands of other males is not misandry and it's absurd to claim that it is, as others have pointed out. That doesn't mean that it isn't oppression, and it isn't worth talking about, but it does mean that it isn't a form of sexism, even if it appears to apply to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:04 PM on August 6, 2008

I'm not sure what - if anything - this reveals, but I note that my ironic, sexist, throwaway line "you're a guy, right? (coz it's obvious that you've bottled those emotions up for way too long)" didn't attract one jot of criticismn that I saw

I completely misread that line and came away with something like "it's obvious that you are a guy because of how worked up you are over what are, in reality, not very good examples of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:43 PM on August 6, 2008

Who cares about football? Me, I'm currently taking bets on the Puppy Games.

!!!

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

The goldfish judges are the best thing ever and they better be on the actual show.

My money's on the westies. There are four of them, so one of them is bound to win something. Or possibly Pugsley, because that is the best name you could ever give a pug.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 10:02 PM on August 6, 2008

No.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 3:13 PM on July 30, 2008

All of these ideas sound awesome.

Well, maybe not the las vegas thing. I am not a fan of that place.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:47 PM on July 15, 2008

I am super jealous you get to see AGSFB live. For free.

Now I need to go listen to them.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:06 PM on July 15, 2008

I'm interested in getting in for the next round.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:55 PM on July 13, 2008

Have there been enough hugs yet to cover everybody? Should we keep hugging?
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:52 AM on July 4, 2008

tacked on pony: can there be an rss feed for mefi twitter?
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 2:48 PM on July 1, 2008

Makes good sense. Thanks.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 7:13 PM on July 2, 2008

Hacking sex.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:39 PM on June 30, 2008

I tend to pretend turn and wander a different direction, pretending I'm not actually interested in crossing the street. It works pretty well.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 9:22 PM on May 31, 2008

I think the most frustrating part of the whole mess is the repeated claim that no mefite has given any rational reason why the post got deleted. It's like talking to a brick wall.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 1:52 PM on June 17, 2008

mattamyntexca.

mattamyntexcap?
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:16 PM on May 19, 2008

As other people are point out here, the problem with your argument, CPB, is that no form of sex is completely safe, which is why some groups have ditched the 'safe sex' label for 'safer sex'. You seem to be arguing that any form of less than perfect safety is reasonably conflated monolithically as unsafe, and taking offense to anyone who wants to put a gradation on that. Your murder-charge analogy seems more analogous to say, unprotected internal ejaculation than it does to what actually... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 1:50 AM on May 18, 2008

Effigy2000:

Does it count if I de-contact you and then re-add you? Because you got that contact in the first place because of the Agent Howie stories, and I feel cheated now that it doesn't count towards getting more of them, just because I was ahead of the crowd.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 1:35 AM on February 29, 2008

I'm still more of a fan of Duckroll.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 7:29 PM on February 3, 2008

since the sexism thread is getting talked about here, I'll throw this in here rather than start a new one about it: did It's Raining Florence Henderson leave because of that last thread? He's gone, and his last activity was there as far as I can tell, but no one mentioned anything about him leaving before the thread got closed. Anyone know?
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:11 AM on January 28, 2008

This is awesome.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:45 PM on January 22, 2008

Metafilter: shadowy statisticians lurking in the middle distance

I have some number crunching I want to do here myself, which will happen as soon as I'm less asleep. In the meantime, I couldn't resist.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:39 AM on January 23, 2008

A request, inspired by this comment in the most recent sexism thread: can someone cook up a graph for final site participation by a user by the length of the thread that they participated in last? You'd probably need to make a cutoff of recent user stuff by eyeballing the final participation by date chart so as to not let still potentially active users muck up the data.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 8:05 AM on January 28, 2008

scripts.mefi and styles.mefi give you some nice Hooray, you've installed Apache! pages. This is probably because matt never thought to drop a little redirect in there more than anything else, but still.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 12:37 PM on January 12, 2008

For those playing along at home, what I pointed out here is now no longer the case.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 12:44 AM on January 16, 2008

The tacked on "plus she's hot!" was indeed superfluous, and yes, sexist; chuckdarwin's post really was worse than this one; but the thing that's standing out most to me here is how much of a ridiculous trainwreck of a thread this is. Seems to be settling down a bit and getting better now.

To tie in something from way upthread to something more current: I don't quite agree, languagehat, that the determination of sexism is properly and entirely the province of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 5:04 PM on December 30, 2007

LH: my point isn't really one that hinges on the logic of the statement. I can rephrase it like this: there's a possible reading of "men do not define what sexism is" that comes off something like "men cannot participate meaningfully in discourse regarding what is/isn't sexism", which is something I can't affirm at all. The point I was trying to get at that men telling women that something isn't sexism is the most fraught part of this discourse, and the part that needs to be... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 4:16 PM on December 31, 2007

You've now got the number one hit for "dented can store", jessamyn.

No one can mess with you now.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 9:20 PM on December 28, 2007

My comments on things from various points at this thread:

five fresh fish wrote: those who think men's and women's brains function identically.

I think you'll find this is something of a strawman, in general. I'm way into the social constructionist side of things, and I wouldn't make that statement, because I don't think the brains of any two people function identically. The idea that it's a faux pas to make generalizations... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 2:55 AM on December 7, 2007

Probably some amount of word nerd as well.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 3:00 AM on December 7, 2007

Speaking only for myself, I don't get the "butch lesbian" part of this question, unless you're proposing that butch lesbians emerge fully formed from their dad's foreheads, shield up and spear aloft, yelling "THIS IS ATHENS!".

Not at all, but I see where I was unclear. My intention was to hold up not only extremes of paths to womanhood, but also expression and presentation once there. I get that I didn't give enough variety to make... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:02 AM on December 7, 2007

thehmsbeagle, languagehat: you're absolutely right in me being a guy, and that I don't know what it's like to be a woman. That's why I asked. I thought I was being pretty clear in framing what I was saying as my personal perception of these things, contrasted with what thehmsbeagle, in her experience as a woman, had to say, and that my question came from there, but I guess not clear enough. I'm absolutely not trying to override your experience, or any of that. zebera3 was pretty spot on in their... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 5:33 PM on December 7, 2007

Nah, I'm not about to bow out, don't worry about that. Just trying to recalibrate how I talk about this and maybe stepping back slightly. I'm certainly not going anywhere though.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:48 PM on December 7, 2007

Damn, now I'm really sort of glad I started this whole derail, because this is all rather interesting and thought provoking.

I feel like I should give some more context for how I approach this stuff and where I was coming from in asking for more on that point, especially now that I've had a bit more time to think about it. Like I mentioned in one of the other threads on this, I've come to feminism in more than a vague abstract "let's treat women right/women are... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 3:26 PM on December 8, 2007

Oh, and I should tack on a bit about the sense I'm getting from what I'm hearing about that "how it relates to the edge cases", so I can check understanding. It seems like what I'm hearing is more or less that it works out well enough on it's own that it's not terribly remarkable from within the experience of it, and it's not necessary to carry out a strong examination of it and/or the edge cases where it breaks down are rare enough that it's not worth dealing with in the same framing... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 3:42 PM on December 8, 2007

thehmsbeagle: Thanks for your response, and what you're saying makes perfect sense to me. I don't have any other thoughts on the matter right now, so I'm going to let what you've said sit, and come back to it tomorrow maybe.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:26 PM on December 8, 2007

For all those ditching firefox for safari on OS X, can I suggest you check out Camino? It won't get you your plugins back, but it uses the mozilla rendering engine, is a bit more flexible than safari, and is very well integrated with OS X in general, which was my biggest issue using firefox. It's just not actually made to play nicely in the mac environment.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 5:45 PM on December 7, 2007

If this was a week later, I'd be 40 minutes away and could maybe show up. As it stands, I am too far away and lack transportation. Oh well.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 5:37 PM on December 7, 2007

This comment makes a lot less sense now.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 7:19 AM on December 5, 2007

nonono

We of MeTa dislike AskMe because it's all drama that is about people we can't mock properly. Proper drama involves a flameout and insults all around.

And popcorn.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 7:54 PM on November 30, 2007

I'm not blind in one eye, but I'm sort of close. I have a pretty strong case of Amblyopia in my left eye, meaning that while the eye sees perfectly well (better than my 'good' eye, in fact), the signal isn't processed correctly and is mostly discarded. I don't see in stereo and it's nearly impossible for me to read with that eye. It also gets worse if I try to use it for any amount. Modern 3D movies can force stereoscopic vision on me, which makes them a rather nice novelty, but not actually... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 7:41 PM on November 30, 2007

geekyguy: It's not one thread. If anything, it's two metatalk threads, two deleted threads on the blue, and a slew of memails and other external communications which were discussed inthread. The two meta threads comprise the bulk of it, but are also combined at 1600+ comments right now. Over the course of this, we had a large number of female members of mefi speak up about their experiences here and the common thread of feeling alienated from participation on the blue by the culture of casual... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:29 PM on November 23, 2007

That last bit addressed at p&k refers to here. Fast moving thread.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:35 PM on November 23, 2007

What I'm saying is that there's no need to add anything to offensive tag. If some asshole makes a sexist comment and if offends you, flag it as offensive. There's no need to add anything to the offensive tag.

The reason why it was necessary to add to the offensive tag is that many people, in the big threads and here if you'll look upthread a bit, expressed that they didn't know that sexism that wasn't on the level of "christ, what an asshole"... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:39 PM on November 23, 2007

er, metafilter.

Meatfilter is somewhere else entirely.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 11:40 PM on November 23, 2007

puke & cry: I might be. The intention was more that you were using a sarcastic exaggeration of the position being staked out by TPS which seemed to fail to capture any actual detail of the position being staked out. Not really a straw man, in that you didn't mean it seriously, but eh.

And no, I don't think that this flag is corrective measure in and of itself. But it is a consciousness raising measure, not for people making blatantly sexist/racist comments, but... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 12:00 AM on November 24, 2007

A bit from one of jessamyn's comments that does a better job of explaining why the flag was changed than I did:

What mathowie and I have been talking about is changing the offensive flag to be some variety of offensive/sexist/racist. I know it seems like a small deal but I think it serves two purposes

1. indicates that sexist sort of behavior is at some level against the guidelines and a flaggable offense (like people seem to know that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 12:14 AM on November 24, 2007

So, it took me a while to catch up, and in the process I've forgotten most of the bits I wanted to respond to. The ones I can still remember:

-On transphobia/homophobia: I'm of the opinion that these are properly subspecies of sexism, as evidenced by the alternative formulations of heterosexim and cissexism. At their core, both of these seem to stem from an anxiety surrounding gender transgression. This causes a stronger reaction than that of sexism against women, as... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:39 PM on November 30, 2007

Additionally: As I've done nothing on mefi but follow these threads since it all started, the top four threads on my recent activity page are these three and then the atheism thread that nearly got to 700 comments, from a month ago now. The 'Hysterics' thread is the shortest of these.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:43 PM on November 30, 2007

So it seems like we've got pretty broad consensus about the changes to make coming out of this thread, and I wanted to say that I think they all sound great, and I'm going to do my part to try and call out sexism as I see it more often. I also think klang is right to start thinking about a new meta post to introduce these ideas to the broader mefi population.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 2:11 PM on November 23, 2007

That is a perfectly bad idea.
posted to MetaTalk by Arturus at 6:24 PM on November 30, 2007