TychoCelchuuu

This is the best article on the topic of what feminism is. As it points out, and like others have pointed out, feminism is not one thing any more than any social movement is ever one thing. If we must have definitions, though: bell hooks' definition of feminism: "Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression." (From her book feminism is for everybody) Cheris Kramarae's definition of feminism: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Google's definition of feminism: "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men." So there you have it. That's what feminism is.

The differences between people in each gender are not differences that are entirely socially constructed: if you and I were the only people alive, and we were in different genders, then of course many of the gender differences (height, weight, age, etc.) would not be socially constructed. However, because the genders themselves are socially constructed, although any construction of gender necessarily creates differences, there is no necessary gender construction based on any specific difference. An obvious way to construct genders is to try to match the sexes, but that of course breaks down when it comes to intersex people, transgendered people, and so on. You could construct genders however you want (theoretically) just like you could construct a religion or a government however you want: it's all just social phenomena. If I'm putting across the "good" side of feminism and that's unreasonable because feminism has to include whoever the "bad" feminists are, then surely you're putting across the "good" side of whatever the fuck it is you believe and there's a shitton of godawful bullshit that I could lump in with you if I felt like it

Ugh, just... okay, listen, you're wrong. First, it's not clear that you understand the distinction between sex and gender. Sex is a biologically determined characteristic of individuals, and with the exception of intersex people, basically everyone neatly falls into two categories: male and female. Feminism does not deny this, it does not want to eliminate this (how could it, short of crazy genetic engineering?) and it doesn't want to say that people in the two sexes are literally the same or should be viewed the same. Humans exhibit sexual dimorphism, which means there are differences between the sexes, like what people have between their legs and so forth. Gender is a different concept. Gender describes the ways people view, think, and act when it comes to dividing people up based on various characteristics, including (most prominently in Western society) which sex they appear to belong to. In Western society we have two genders, male and female, but in other societies at other times there have been more genders, like three or four. Feminists want genders to be treated equally - if you are a woman in the world today, right now things are pretty shit for you in a lot of ways they aren't shit for men. There are also things that are shit for men that aren't shit for women, but on balance, it sucks more to be a woman. This is why feminism is called feminism. Equality requires making things better for women. Does feminism want to eliminate gender completely? No. Gender is just a way of viewing the world like any other social construction humans have. Many feminists do argue that the constricting nature of the gender attitudes prominent in Western society causes quite a bit of pain and suffering: look at what transgendered people have to go through, for instance. They are raped and murdered much more so than cisgendered people, and we might think a large part of this is that they fail to conform to traditional gender norms. So perhaps altering our traditional gender norms would make our society more inclusive and less rapey and murdery. Do feminists think all the genders are the same? Obviously not - one key difference is that they are treated differently by society. Gender is a social construction, so simply by choosing to call one group of people gender A and another group of people gender B we've created a real difference. So feminism does not deny that there are differences between the genders. All it denies are that these differences should be an excuse for society to treat any of the genders badly, or worse than the other genders.

Mostly they believe what they learn as kids, which, if you think about it, is the way it works for 99% of everything we believe, not just our religious beliefs or lack thereof. If you think Christians are the only ones who have ever disagreed about anything, wait until I introduce you to theoretical physicists...

If the issue is all the shit they did to keep bringing it up, clearly the best option is not to then bring it up again after it has all died down...

2,300 years ago Plato argued that in the ideal state men and women would be equal. Feminism might not be very young, as ideas go.

Happy Dishonored Shemini Atzeret!

"At least we blew IGN away."

It's inherently silly to get offended by any word because the notion of "offense" is a silly thing and there's nothing inherently offensive, just stuff that society has deemed offensive. Offense is silly because why should you care what someone else said? Sticks and stones, etc! But humans are inherently silly creatures, and 90% of what we do on any given day is silly, so you either learn to live in this silly, silly world of ours, or you construct a fantasy land in which everything works rationally and logically and then you castigate people for failing to conform to your Vulcan conception of life even though if you thought about it you'd realize that you yourself are hardly Spock.

Well, you might think that offending people generally isn't good, because to feel offended isn't fun, so to the extent that we can refrain from offending people by doing simple things like not saying fuck around them, maybe it's worth doing that instead of saying "unless you can give me a logical reason that convinces my robot brain to stop making you feel bad, I'm just going to keep making you feel bad, beep boop, deal with with it." Or you might agree with Stephen Fry and not give a shit. Much depends on whether you care about people feeling bad because of what you've said or not, I think. What I thought you (and Twig) were saying is that because there's no logical reason to be offended, it's their fault they are offended and not your fault. My point, though, is that it's nobody's fault. Or more accurately it's society's fault. Society made these words offensive, and you don't have to like it, but you do have to accept that you will offend people sometimes if you use them in certain situations. That's life!

The Stephen Fry video doesn't say anything relevant. He's just saying "who gives a shit if you're offended?" That has nothing to do with whether and why people get offended about certain words, and whether they are right to do so. If we take SecretAsianMan's example, think about why a "fuck" would accidentally end up in what he's saying in a conversation with his friend. It's because SecretAsianMan is the kind of guy who goes around saying "fuck." (Like me, and like a lot of other people.) Why are there people like this, who go around saying "fuck" even though they are perfectly aware that some people find it offensive? Well, it's very complicated! It's also different for every person. Some of us agree with Stephen Fry and don't give a fuck if we offend people. Some of us are edgy and want to offend people. Some people started saying "fuck" as teenagers to be edgy and have picked up the habit. Some of us hang out around people who say "fuck" and thus picked it up for no reason other than it's just a normal word that shows up in conversation. Some people like the way the word sounds. Most people are a mix of some or all of these reasons. Now, look at it from the other point of view. Why do people take offense at the word "fuck?" Some people take offense because they were brought up to think that nobody should say that word because it's impolite to use it in conversation. Some people take offense because the word (like most obscenities) has an "edgy" connotation and they want to take the edge off of life, or at least not be exposed to it. Some people think that certain words are "curse" words and that cursing is a sin. And so on and so forth. It's simply ridiculous to go around saying people ought not to get offended at certain things because your super logical perfect nerd Vulcan brain sees words only as antiseptic tools for communication of rational ideas rather than culturally charged things that convey much more than their bare dictionary definitions. So what if SecretAsianMan didn't intend to offend his friend when he said "fuck?" What are you, the offense police? Does it offend you when people get offended for reasons you don't agree with? Why don't you just leave people alone and let them get offended about whatever the fuck they want to get offended about? Taking offense to things is not a perfectly logical process, and the words that cause offense do so not necessarily because they are calculated to do so but because they exist in a complex web of cultural meaning that far exceeds anything you'd ever find in a dictionary. It's not logical or rational but nobody claims it is. You can't just go to a dictionary, look up the implication of "fuck," say "look here, it doesn't mean anything offensive unless you misconstrue SecretAsianMan's intentions!" and call it a day. Some words offend regardless of whether the person saying them intends to offend or not - I'm sure you can think of lots of examples, some of them racially charged and hostile, others very innocent, like fuck. I'm not saying it's a good thing that the world works like this (or that it's a bad thing). I'm just trying to say it's ridiculous for you to come in and tell people what they should and shouldn't get offended at on the basis of a completely bankrupt theory of what words are. Words aren't tidy parcels of meaning. "Fuck" is not the same as "frig" even though you can swap one in for the other and get basically the same sentence. Some things just are the way they are. It's no use saying "fuck" shouldn't be offensive, because if it weren't, there would be some other word that served its offensive purpose. In fact, we have a non-offensive word for fuck! It's "frig." You can use that if you want to say fuck without offending people. "But Tycho," you say, "if I said frig I'd sound like a goofball!" Well yes. Frig is a baby word for baby people. Fuck is a grownup word for people who mean fucking business. You know why? Because it's offensive! The fact that fuck is offensive, and that only adults get to say it without getting in trouble and even then not in all circumstances, gives "fuck" the power that makes it a word you want to use when you say fuck. If fuck wasn't offensive, it would be frig. And nobody is satisfied with frig.

He's had the luxury of being quiet and soaking up a lot of information! Between the original comic, the response comic, the T-shirt, the controversy over the T-shirt, multiple news posts, and the many many months that have passed since all that, he has had time to think about it! If you were in his position I would hope you would've come to the conclusion that when asked about the biggest mistake you've ever made, "a tiny concession to rape survivors and their allies that I have offended because I'm a fucking idiot" wouldn't jump to the top of your mind!

The only reason you say "that movie was fucking great" in the first place rather than "gee golly gosh, that movie sure was dandy!" is because "fuck" as a word has a certain context in our culture, a context which includes causing people who dislike the use of lewd/bawdy/rude language to take offense. If you do not understand this, you're welcome to study linguistics and sociology until you do (it's a very complex thing!) but the classic nerd move of saying "my logical Vulcan brain doesn't understand why two words with similar definitions are not interchangeable in all contexts" is pretty ridiculous. Language means more than just bare translations. It's a complex social phenomenon that communicates attitudes and feelings as much as it does simple meanings. "Fuck" is a word that offends some people, not because there's a magic combination of letters that is automatically offensive, but because English is a language with certain words that are just by default offensive, and fuck is one of them. Such is life! In fact, it's not even the English language itself that's responsible for this, but the culture around it. See, for instance, the massive difference in how offensive "cunt" is depending on whether you are in America or the UK.

There's an endless cycle of objections that feminists have to go through. At the very base level you just have people who hate feminists and want them to go away forever, without listening. You can either let them tire you out, because they are everywhere and they are loud and they have power and they will never stop hating you, or you can fight them endlessly. Then you have the very large group of people who doesn't understand feminism at all and, whenever they see a feminist get angry (or, in your words, "offended") about something, they'll misunderstand and think you're wrong. There are an endless number of them and no matter how much you explain feminism throughout your life you will never be able to educate all of them. But, you can spend your entire life educating. Then there are people like you who are more or less willing to hop on board for some (maybe most or all) of the basic feminist positions but they're concerned about the way feminists argue, because we don't spend enough time being conciliatory or accepting or understanding or patient. This is because they (you?) fail to realize that for every feminist patient enough to spend their entire life dealing with the first two sets of people via arguments that don't eventually get snippy or strident or dismissive or frustrated or curt or taciturn, there are plenty of feminists who, after days or weeks or months or years of getting into an argument every time they want things to not be shit for women, just get tired, and give up being nice at one point or another. Just listen, read, learn. You'll start to see, sooner rather than later, just how often people try to dismiss feminist arguments not because they're wrong but because they don't like the tone. You say that you "can't shake the feeling that a lot of the barking is just defensive posture over an unfortunate misunderstanding" but the best way to shake the feeling isn't to force us to convince you, it's to go out and learn on your own. If people did this instead of expecting feminist to do all the work, feminists would stop getting angry and we'd bark less.

Like, the first letter of his first name plus what his last name sounds like. Creamo sounds like some sort of pastry. I'd like two bear claws, two creamos, and an éclair please.

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

please note it is a puzzle game not a fucking game, those looking for a sex sim for their oculus rift dev kit keep looking

I have a Blue Yeti I got from Woot.com for sort of cheap. It works quite well.

Rabbi Stone is no spring chicken. The protagonist in Dear Esther might be old. You can roleplay old people in stuff like the Fallout games. The unseen avatar that represents you in most strategy games is potentially pretty old, given that you're old and experienced enough to be given command of entire armies and so on. You can play as old people in a game like Crusader Kings. Some of the characters in The Ship are pretty old I think. You, the evil genius in Evil Genius, are at least somewhat old. You can get pretty old in Tropico. Mount and Blade lets you get old (I think your stats go down).

Am I the only one who hangs out in this thread and secretly rates new people on a scale according to whether they refer to themselves as "listeners" or "readers?" Does anyone else do that to?

The Back to the Future series is so great with ties. I'll never forget watching one of the movies with my cousins, and one of my cousins laughed and said something like "I never noticed he was wearing a transparent tie:" It's the little hilarious details like that which set movies like this and Ghostbusters apart. They're goofy sci-fi comedies that are full of cheap gags, but there's also some genuinely good/funny/intriguing design in there. Serious work went in to every aspect of the films, and the sheer physicality and believability of the Delorean time machine or the proton packs help sell the film just as much as any individual joke does. Doc Brown's transparent tie - one more subtle, wacky thing to highlight how strange he is, and one more joke in a movie that could've coasted on '50s references and obvious time travel humor.

Dota Today 7: Sean/Nick Miss After a brief and unplanned hiatus, Sean and Nick return to talk about their time watching and attending The International 3! Game Discussed: Dota 2 Listen on the Episode Page Subscribe and rate us on iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

You can always hit up my YouTube channel for NS2 casts. One thing about NS2 and about most video games other than something like Dota 2/SC2/LoL/Call of Duty/etc. is that even the competitive players aren't all at their optimal best - unless there's enough money in the scene to attract really good people and make dedicating tons of time worth it on a level beyond just "it's fun to be good," you tend to get teams composed of people who aren't all superhumans. The good NS2 clanners are a million times better than anyone else and have clocked way more hours (many can get ~72 kills for every death on a public server, for instance) but the vast majority are far from what the "best" NS2 player looks like. The community is just so small and the game is so niche that to be one of the best in the world doesn't require bionic reflexes. Competitive NS2 is much more like what the ideal of the Olympics used to be: non-professional people competing in something they are good at but that they don't devote their life to. I have to admit it's slightly less interesting than something like Dota 2 or SC2 where the people playing are basically superhuman, but on the other hand it's nice to be able to understand what's going on and picture doing it yourself, rather than to have to just sit back and imagine what kind of gods are playing, as is the case when I watch SC2 or Dota 2 generally.

Holy shit I agree with you on something. Like seriously, the shirt is basically "Team Rape." What kind of a shitlord do you have to be to have more regret over fanning the flames of controversy than about doing something that's antagonistic towards rape survivors in the first place? And the fucking cheering. Good lord. I went to the first three PAXes, and the next few I couldn't go to, but I've never really regretted missing out and as time goes on I've been less sanguine about the prospects of going to one of those things even if I had the opportunity. "Gamer" culture is just a fucking poisonous pit of hate and bile and the last thing I want to do is make the trip to gaming Mecca. The Fullbright Company's decision not to go to PAX is precisely where I'm at now, and probably where I'm at forever. I don't think I'd feel comfortable in a convention full of people who'd cheer at someone who regrets the time he made even a tiny concession to doing the right thing.

I've heard mixed things. Some people say it's linear and bad, others say it's linear and fun. So far this review has been the most helpful: