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Roderick

Feminism

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I have started to become annoyed by the idea that all we need to do is have more female CEOs, more women in government, a female president etc. Was Margret Thatcher's government great for women? Is Sheryl Sandberg a feminist? Obviously equality is extremely important, but equality at the top won't solve everything.

 

A lot of the ideas I hear seem to have fallen into the classic liberal, middle class white women trap of earlier eras. It also feels like trickle down feminism. A higher minimum wage, universal healthcare and a better education system would in my mind do far more than a few more female business leaders.

 

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From WebMD (great source I know)

 

Q. How do scientists obtain fetal tissue?

A. According to federal law, a woman must give written consent to donate fetal tissue, and only after she has requested an abortion. Paying for anything beyond “reasonable” costs related to obtaining fetal tissue is illegal. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) coordinates a network of six fetal brain and tissue repositories across the country. The NIH brain bank supplies tissue to qualified researchers who apply for it.

 

So "buying" fetal tissue (or any human organ) is illegal, but paying for the medical costs to extract and ship it isn't. Thus, any financial bargaining above base costs puts you pretty solidly in the illegal camp.

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So how do researchers in the US get hold of foetal tissue?

From my recollection when I looked into this when it was starting, the material itself is donated to researchers, and the people who are donating it may ask for a small amount of money to cover transportation costs.

(Right now, PP isn't even asking for transportation costs to be covered because a bunch of people were pointing to that tiny amount of money and acting as though that was a violation of the ban on selling fetal tissue even though it wasn't.)

Pretty much, you violate the ban on selling tissues if you end up making money out of the deal, and you violate the ban on buying tissue if you offer any money beyond covering the costs of transport.

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I have started to become annoyed by the idea that all we need to do is have more female CEOs, more women in government, a female president etc. Was Margret Thatcher's government great for women? Is Sheryl Sandberg a feminist? Obviously equality is extremely important, but equality at the top won't solve everything.

 

A lot of the ideas I hear seem to have fallen into the classic liberal, middle class white women trap of earlier eras. It also feels like trickle down feminism. A higher minimum wage, universal healthcare and a better education system would in my mind do far more than a few more female business leaders.

 

I don't think anyone is going to say arbitrary diversity is a good thing. It's patronizing, and yeah, it'll put unqualified people in the wrong positions. But that's a lot of the language feminists are clear on; equally qualified women passed up on jobs because there's an equally qualified male. Hillary Clinton's campaign is an example of arbitrary diversity. It's all she's got and it's a shame because she's hurting women in the long run.

 

All that said, for every bad woman in a leadership position you can name, there's thousands of men that can be named.

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Every weekend, for the duration of this year, my wife is hosting an online movie-night featuring a female directed film. We use a service to synchronize the video, allowing us to enjoy the film simultaneously, and chat if you want to.

Each show includes a relevant pre-show, a post-show, and discussion of the film is encouraged!

Anyone interested in joining us?

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So how do researchers in the US get hold of foetal tissue?

 

Well I've never worked in a lab that used human tissue, but i would imagine it's similar to other labs that use biological materials.  Really the process involves a whole bunch of steps, and for the most part any money involved goes to transportation and administrative fees.  For example, when we used to get mice for tests we would first have to find a source, in the case of the labs I've worked in a company that breeds the mice with specific genetic markers, with a particular affliction, etc.  I don't know for certain, but I would imagine it is the same for experiments involving stem cells, in that certain studies would be interested in stem cells from certain parts of the fetus.  Now granted the planned parenthood videos are nonsense, but there is one truth in them where the doctors describe needing to keep the sample intact for this reason.  Second you need to transport the material to the lab that will use it, which will require usually someone to maintain contact with it at all times to preserve the chain of custody and have the necessary authorities be aware of the shipment.  Really the issue here is that you can't just send biological (considered hazardous) material through the mail like you would a regular package.  Next you'll need someone at the facility who is responsible for receiving and monitoring the samples once they get there, as there are a number of federal regulation related to the use of that material and it's generally a good practice to do this in research.  

 

Those were basically the steps for procuring mice we used in a sleep lab back in the mid 2000s, and there have been a number of changes to the regulations regarding those since then.  I know particularly under Bush these regulations were tightened, at one point there were only something like 4-5 sources of stem cells that were even available to use, and given that these studies involve human tissue I can't imagine there would be less regulation than we experienced using mice.  This is a bit of a cursory explanation of the procurement of these samples, but if you are more interested in learning about those processes I'd say just go ahead and call or email a lab.  They have to make that information available to the government so I don't imagine they would have a problem going into more detail on how their lab operates.

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I thought this story of how Texas has destroyed their women's health infrastructure because they want to destroy Planned Parenthood was really interesting.
 

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Bleh, that article made me upset. Texas is bullshit. People want to make grand political gestures here but never seem to stop and think about how it impacts the people around them.

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The numbers on women attempting to self induce an abortion in Texas are staggering if they are anywhere near accurate.  Which, they're so big they do set off my skeptic alarm.  It's a small sample extrapolated to the whole state.  But, even if the whole numbers aren't accurate, it does point to what should be a very disturbing trend to anyone in Texas, which is that the rate of attempted self abortions is going up as clinic access goes down.

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“I said it before and I’ll say it again: I was there for Bernie, not for the boys,” she said. “It is too bad that feminism hasn’t progressed to the extent that women can support other women not based on gender or race, but because of ideas.... I think if you are a public figure, you have a responsibility to say something for a cause you truly believe in and help it on its course,” she said. “It’s incredibly frustrating that society somehow feels that women can’t manage to be political, feminist and a sex symbol.”
- Emily Ratajkowski

 

Not sure I can remember a model being this political, but its really cool that she is willing to use her position of pop culture fame to say something important. You go girl!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/fashion/fashion-week-emily-ratajkowski-bernie-sanders.html

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Good video!

 

I'm not sure if this is an appropiate place to post this, but I can't think of a better one (since the Ethics in Gaming Journalism thread was closed rightfully):

 

"Nintendo fires harassed staffer but denies caving to trolls’ demands"

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/nintendo-fires-harassed-staffer-but-denies-caving-to-trolls-demands/

 

Seems shameful.

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This might be the most brazenly cynical harassment campaign yet. But it has been awhile so I'm sure there is horrible stuff I'm forgetting.

 

Nintendo is awful for capitulating like that.

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This thread has become unhealthy, please close it.

 

Ben, I'm really tired of you posting this. 

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I'm really tired of people in general posting it. My point is, why have the gamergate thread "rightly" closed, just to start posting the same stuff here?

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lmao

 

You're the only person who's said it more than once on these forums.

 

That gamergate thread was basically just obsessing over everything happening in that area of the internet. Every other post was an incredibly smug "look at what these fuckers did THIS week! let's all laugh at them now!" It wasn't helpful. It wasn't constructive. It wasn't even all that often about identifying the people HURT by gamergate - the vast majority of it was about identifying the people BEHIND gamergate and pointing out what dumb thing they recently did.

 

It was an unhealthy obsession. It's not that hard to see how it had runs its course.

 

But, sure, you can continue to be an immature baby about it. Go right ahead.

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Ben, I'm really tired of you posting this. 

 

I agree. Ben, it is really, really unhealthy to interrupt every conversation that goes in a direction you don't like with pointless requests to lock the thread. It's neither useful nor funny, I have no idea why you're doing it, besides maybe a long-term project satirizing the supposed tendency for small internet communities to become self-policed echo chambers.

 

This might be the most brazenly cynical harassment campaign yet. But it has been awhile so I'm sure there is horrible stuff I'm forgetting.

 

Nintendo is awful for capitulating like that.

 

It definitely seems like an object lesson of how risk-adverse companies can be harmful to women's and LGBTQIA rights. Ultimately, protecting the bottom line means protecting the status quo, which is always somewhere between indifferent and hostile to the condition of the oppressed.

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I agree. Ben, it is really, really unhealthy to interrupt every conversation that goes in a direction you don't like with pointless requests to lock the thread. It's neither useful nor funny, I have no idea why you're doing it.

 

He's doing it because he's mad that I made a post with the text "This thread seems unhealthy." in the let's-all-laugh-at-GG thread. That post led to the thread being locked, and it upset him for some reason.

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I think it's different to report an action taken by a corporation as opposed to harassment done by GamerGate. If this post had been, look at what GG did to this lady with a link to one of the articles about the harassment, I wouldn't find it particularly helpful. But since Nintendo took action, and the post is focusing on that, I think it's useful information to know.

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