Posts for Warp


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Lex wrote:
"Cosmos" can be said to essentially mean "deterministic system".
I'm not certain that quantum mechanics supports that assertion.
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Bobo the King wrote:
Because it is full of straw-man arguments from people who seem to know next to nothing about feminism aside from what they read on Men's Rights forums.
Be careful, you are getting out of line, and too personal.
I find your views to be thoroughly out of line with reality.
I would find it genuinely surprising if you weren't aware of what has been happening eg. at many universities in the United States during the last couple of years. And it's not something that is just remaining within universities. We are getting more and more things like a law proposal in New Zealand trying to reverse the burden of proof, or the BBC engaging in blatant racial discrimination in hiring. My objections are perfectly in touch with what has been happening in the real world.
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Bobo the King wrote:
This thread is an embarrassment to this website.
People having an actual discussion about a topic is an embarrassment to this website... Why, exactly? Because the subject is feminism?
Men (since there seem to be quite a few vocal men in this thread), please heed my advice: stick your necks out just a little bit for women. Try to recognize some of the difficulties that women face in your communities. Ask them what you can do to help.
I think that's called white knighting?
but most of the critiques I see here (I'm looking at you, Mitjitsu and Warp) are far off-base or paint it with too broad a brush.
Criticizing the part of the movement that has the most influence in society, the part that has the loudest voice and which can do the most harm to society, is completely warranted. "Not all X are like that" is not an excuse to deter criticism of that loud minority. That's the portion of the movement that causes changes in policies and laws, changes that are often veering towards the unconstitutional, and are against the fundamental human rights. The part that promotes and engages in gender and racial discrimination, and would want to enforce it by law. Criticizing this portion of the movement is completely warranted, and even urgent, even if "not all" feminists are like that. I have, in fact, some time ago written a more or less formal statement of why I oppose modern "progressive" feminism, and rather than repeat it here, I'll just link to it: http://grindedgear.blogspot.fi/2016/01/why-i-oppose-progressive-feminism.html
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The problem with feminism is that it refuses to acknowledge that we are a dimorphic species. It's one of its (mostly unstated) core tenets. Therefore, if there is any difference in averages between men and women, it absolutely must be because of discrimination. They will not hear any other explanation; they will not accept any other explanation. They will put their fingers in their ears and shout "lalalalaa! I can't hear you!" On average, men and women think differently, and have different interests. This is both innate, and because of biological differences (such as differences in hormone production). But feminists cannot and will not accept this. They will take any difference they can see, and use it as "proof" that there is discrimination, no matter what. Directly related to that is that they just cannot accept that men are, on average, naturally more stoic, competitive, prone to taking risks, and aggressive. They will blame society and the "toxic culture of masculinity" for that. They are reversing cause-and-effect here. (It's not culture that makes men stoic and competitive. It's the other way around. It's men being stoic and competitive by nature that shapes our culture.) Ironically, and contradictorily, they hold the view that everybody should be accepted as they are, and their wishes respected, while at the same time trying to force everybody onto the same mold. They want to, for example, force women into becoming interested in the STEM fields, even if they don't want to (and, hypocritically, without leading by example and going into the STEM fields themselves.) Likewise they want to force men to act against their own innate personalities and become less stoic.
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Patashu wrote:
http://latining.tumblr.com/post/141567276944/tabletop-gaming-has-a-white-male-terrorism-problem
You are seriously using a blog post, on tumblr of all places, as evidence of... well, anything? And a blog post that uses the word "terrorism" in its title? The problem with ideologues is that when they have been trained, and trained themselves, to see sexism and racism everywhere, they will see sexism and racism everywhere. Everything, no matter how minor, will be blown out of proportions in their minds, and they will actively seek out such examples, and filter everything else out. It's the same thing that happens with news reporting: If the press suddenly starts reporting even minor cases of some particular crime, perhaps because such reporting has become popular for some reason, people easily get the impression that said crime is on the rise, that significantly more cases are happening now than in the past. When the reality is more probably that the crimes are publicized more by the press than before, giving it more prominence and visibility. It's the reason why we believe that eg. violent crime is nowadays more prevalent than it was decades ago, even though statistics show the exact opposite trend. Nowadays violent crime is reported by the sensationalistic press more than before, which is why we get the false impression that it happens more than before. It's the reason why we think that women are more likely to be assaulted when walking alone on the street than men, even though statistics show the exact opposite. If you have trained yourself to see sexism everywhere, you will see sexism everywhere, even in situations where there is none. You will interpret events as sexist because you will have a biased perspective. I don't believe for a second that propaganda against the board gaming community. It sounds no different than the propaganda against the video gaming community. (Sure, individual cases probably happen. They happen in all communities in existence. But judging the entire community by a few examples is just propaganda.)
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Normally posts can be expected to be at least remotely on topic.
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feos wrote:
Anything regarding science is random here? Are you completely sure about that?
It is, if you aren't going to state what your point is. What is it that you are trying to say.
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feos wrote:
I literally just posted a link, what's there not to understand, lol?
You simply posted a random link to a thread named "Religious Debate Thread", with no message, no purpose, no point? Why? Seems like such a random thing to do.
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feos wrote:
Just leaving it here: http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970
I don't understand what you are trying to say.
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Patashu wrote:
The problem is that just 'seeking equality of opportunity' is not going to bring it about.
That's a really old, tired, and completely contradictory argument. "Seeking equality of opportunity does not work because there is no equality of opportunity currently." Uh... That's exactly why we should aim for equality of opportunity. You saying that there still exists inequality of opportunity in no way invalidates the goal. On the very contrary. It's a silly argument. It's like saying "seeking for women's suffrage is useless because there are still countries where women can't vote." That's a completely nonsensical argument.
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Fortranm wrote:
"Equality does not mean everyone gets the same thing because we are all inherently different. Equality is recognizing differences and making sure everyone gets the same opportunity based on those differences, which isn’t always 'equal'." This is something I saw on the Internet some time ago, and it's one of the best arguments I have ever seen. "Equality" is surely an overused term. Sometimes it's used to mean "fairness", and at other times it's used to mean "being the same." These two things are completely different.
Humanism seeks equality of opportunity. Feminism (the modern "progressive" "intersectional" kind) seeks for equality of outcome. It looks at outcomes, sees differences, and then seeks to forcefully equalize them, even if that means resorting to favoritism, discrimination and quotas bases on gender and race. Thus you get things like this. Somehow racial discrimination has become acceptable in the last few years, even though as a society we fought for decades to get rid of it.
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andypanther wrote:
Do you really want reduce all differences between men and women to something purely biological? Don't you think society has an influence? When people tell me "almost all great inventions were done by men", I ask them if women really ever got the same chance to make those inventions. Because I don't think that's the case.
Is it possible that, on average, men and women have different interests and different psychology? It may have a biological reason behind it. Men are, on average, more stoic, more propense to taking risks, more competitive, and more aggressive. This is not a cultural thing, but a biological one. Innate instincts and hormones, and probably has an evolutionary cause behind it.
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andypanther wrote:
If there actually is no more imput required to reach the end, why not?
I suppose it all comes down to the question of how you measure the length of a speedrun. My understanding (although I haven't checked) is that in unassisted speedrunning timing is based on when a certain point in the game is reached. It doesn't matter if the runner stops touching the mouse and keyboard (or gamepad) before that moment. Our way of measuring the length of the run is practical because it's very easy and unambiguous to automate, but it has the unfortunate consequence of allowing making some runs slower than they could be. If it were an unassisted run, it would never be accepted as "faster" than another run that reaches the end of the game in a shorter time. Measuring the length of the run by its input file is practical, but I'm not sure this should be "abused" in this manner. Sure, it can be technically interesting and amusing... but is it really the fastest completion of the game?
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andypanther wrote:
And not all critics argue in a civilized manner with actual arguments, there are many people on the internet, as well as the real world, that are nothing but misogynists or trolls.
I have never met an actual misogynist, not in real life nor online. I'm sure they exist, ie. men who think that women are somehow mentally and physically inferior and should be treated differently, like second-class citizens, that women are incapable of many things that men are, that women shouldn't hold positions of power, and so on. But I have never met any such person. Feminists really love to use the word "misogynist" as a generic insult. But in their parlance it's pretty much a synonym for "someone who doesn't agree with me". Basically invariably when I know or find out what the target of the insult has said to earn that classification, it has absolutely nothing to do with hating women or considering them inferior or anything even remotely of the sorts. I have yet to encounter an example where the word is actually being used accurately. (Again, I'm sure there are, but I have yet to see such cases.) If there is anybody who is misogynist, it's those feminists who infantilize women and remove all agency and independence from them, who think that women need "safe spaces" that are pretty much kindergartens, and who make them fear their own shadow using distortions, false statistics and exaggerations. That is the kind of attitude that says that women can't stand up for themselves nor handle their own life, and need special treatment and pampering.
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andypanther wrote:
A good example of this is the fact that in most countries, only men are required to serve in the military. I find this unacceptable in a modern society, it should either be mandatory for anyone or no one. Everyone is well aware that this is obvious discrimination, yet it's still ignored around the world, it's just that one thing that "doesn't count".
To my knowledge, to this day not a single woman has passed the physical tests for the United States Navy Seal training. And it's not for the lack of trying, or some kind of discrimination. It's simply because even the fittest and strongest women lack the stamina that the fittest and strongest men have. They simply can't keep up; at some point they run out of strength and stamina, and fall back. We are a dimorphic species. That's just a fact of nature, and there is no way around it. The strongest men are capable of physical feats that the strongest women cannot. In fact, even more average men are physically stronger than fit women. It's just how our biology works. I think a pragmatic approach should be taken in things where the strength of men can be used more effectively. It's not a question of discrimination or prejudice; it's a question of practicality. Sometimes it can be a question of life and death. For example, a firefighter who can work for hours on end in a highly physically stressing situation is better than a firefighter who cannot, because the first one will ostensibly save more lives and be more helpful. I don't think that identity politics should be introduced where lives are at stake, and where the disparity in genders is due to practical considerations, not discrimination or prejudice.
No, feminism hasn't become "obsolete" yet, there's still more than enough reasons to keep fighting for equality.
Is there any situation where women do not have the same legal rights as men?
Just the fact alone that feminism is still met with that much hate in our society, proves this.
Justifying the existence of something by the criticism that something receives is a rather silly argument. Modern feminism is criticized because of all the anti-constitutional things that it promotes. It seeks to silence, censor, ban and criminalize dissenting opinions and criticism, and to stop people from peacefully congregating to discuss those opinions. It divides people into groups based on gender, race and sexual orientation, and assigns rights, privileges, responsibilities and shared guilt onto people based on which such group they belong to, completely disregarding personal merit or guilt. It promotes gender and racial segregation. It promotes discrimination in hiring. It promotes reversing the burden of proof with certain crimes. You may disagree that "true" feminism does any of that, but those are the things that feminism is hated for, because those are things that many vocal and influential feminists do. How is opposing and detesting those things proof that feminism is needed? It certainly is not.
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z1mb0bw4y wrote:
Any time anyone complains about a wage gap, I thoroughly enjoy reminding them that men make up 92% of all workplace fatalities. If I wanted to apply wage gap logic, I could say that men are nearly 12 times more likely to die on the job performing the same work as a woman, but obviously that's ridiculous.
There are actually several examples of injustices suffered more by men than by women, which go largely ignored or belittled by society. In most countries men are more likely to commit suicide than women. The vast majority of people aren't even aware of this statistic, nor care about it even if they are. AFAIK no social movement or funding is done to find the cause and try to fix it. In some (even many) western countries men are given harsher prison sentences for the exact same crime than women. You could say there is a "sentencing gap" based on gender. Again, most people aren't aware of this, and don't care very much even if they are. I don't see many advocates to end the disparity. (On the contrary, there are a few who would want to widen it even more.) In many (perhaps most) western countries, in cases of domestic violence, the cases where it's the woman who is the victim, and the cases where it's the man who is the victim, are surprisingly close to 50-50. And again, almost nobody cares about one half of those cases, only the other half. (There exists a few associations to try to help men who are being abused, but they are really, really rare.) This is not meant to diminish the gravity of injustices committed against women. My intent is to point out the clear double standard in our society. We, as a society, are more protective of women, and thus we pay more attention to and care about cases where women are being mistreated, and pay little to no attention to cases where men are being mistreated (especially when the perpetrator is a woman). The existence of this double standard is seldom even acknowledged, or taken seriously. On the contrary, it's often claimed to be in the other direction.
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I'm not sure I like the notion of making the playthrough be significantly longer just for the sake of making the input file slightly shorter. After all, the goal of speedrunning is to reach the end as fast as possible. This doesn't reach the end as fast as possible. Thus, in that sense, I would consider this suboptimal. I think this is a rather unfortunate consequence of us measuring the length of the TAS by looking at the input file, rather than at the game. This is one of the rare cases where I would actually vote "no" for publication. But since the poll question isn't asking that, my only recourse is to abstain from voting.
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grassini wrote:
-motherhood takes women out of the job market,reducing their education significantly.
This is, in fact, often a deliberate choice by the mother herself. Can you really blame a woman for wanting to spend time with her kids, and raise them, rather than running a corporation and being away from home for most of the day, almost every single day of the week? Many women choose the former, even in situations where they could perfectly well choose the latter. They just want to be mothers, they want to be with their kids. They consider parenting more important than working at or running some corporation. And can you really blame them? Isn't it understandable, and even commendable? What kind of good-hearted mother wouldn't want to spend time with her kids? And if it's their choice, who would tell them that they are doing something wrong? Sure, some women become career moms, but they tend to be a minority among all women.
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OmnipotentEntity wrote:
There is actually a good deal of research on this subject. The factors that cause women to be paid less in the same job is due to primarily two reasons: 1. Women are taught to be less pushy about things (including, for instance, negotiating wages.) 2. Women are expected to take a few years off to have children, and are seen as less valuable (higher risk) and/or less experienced as a result. These are caused by pervasive cultural differences in western society which normalize this sort of discrimination. You might not believe this is any single person's responsibility, and it's really not, but it's still the product of a sexist society. And we should address it.
I would, once again, ask for concrete examples. Name an actual company, with concrete proof, that they systematically pay women significantly less hourly salary than men for the exact same position. If the wage gap claim is true, there should be tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of companies out there paying women significantly less than men (even less than the mythical "77 cents per dollar", because we know for a fact that many companies demonstrably pay the same, which means that some companies need to pay significantly less than that for the average to be that.) What you are writing sounds to me a lot like looking at global statistics and then hypothesizing on causes, with zero evidence that these hypotheses are true. Could there be other factors at play? Are the jobs really the same? Are they really doing the same amount of hours per year? Have they been on the job the same amount of time (because many companies give salary raises based on how many years you have been working for them)? And so on and so forth.
Post subject: Re: State of the Current Gaming Industry
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jlun2 wrote:
These 3 points + the massive amounts of online content nowdays makes me actually wonder how the hell will future generations play back old (this decade) games. Even if say people somehow make private servers, and somehow get all the patches/microtransaction via hacks, how will that solve the problem of multiplayer needing other people? While some popular games might have tons of people on the servers, obscure games are going to be near impossible to have an "authentic" multiplayer experience :|
Servers shutting down is actually a problem with some relatively recent games (and a common cause for users getting upset). For some reason many game developers don't want to support user-controlled servers, and want to have a tight grip on that part, and will thus maintain their own servers. And when they decide to shut them down... well, if the game is multiplayer-only, you are left with a useless disc.
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andypanther wrote:
I can't point at a specific example or personal experience, it's just something that can be seen in worldwide statistics. To this day, a part of the wage gap can still not be explained by anything else than discrimination (numbers vary on how large that part is). I trust those statistics because they aren't just coming from obviously biased sources. At least in my country, it's the official statistics of the government that proof this discrimination, and I doubt they would just make those numbers up, considering that they aren't exactly enthusiastic about regulations.
How do you know if women are earning less than men, rather than being paid (hourly salary for the same job) less than men? Sure, the statistics may be somewhat accurate, give or take, but they don't tell why total earnings are less for women than men. It could well be due to personal choices, different career paths, and so on and so forth. There are many jobs where genders are not equally represented, and it's not because of discrimination, but simply because the distribution in applicants is not the same. (As an example, an overwhelming majority of applicants for becoming a miner are men, so employers don't even have a choice.) This notion is supported by the fact that discrimination in pay is explicitly illegal in most western countries, yet you seldom see court cases on this, even though if what the pay gap claim says is true, there should be thousands and thousands of companies out there blatantly discriminating against women. People making the claim seldom seem able to point to specific companies or employers doing this. The claims are always based on general statistics, not on specific examples. (I'm sure there are specific examples, but they seem to be exceedingly rare, even though if the claim is true they should be really commonplace.) On the contrary, when unbiased studies are made, invariably it is found that the difference in total earnings is explained by different career options, different yearly total working hours, and so on and so forth. (Ok, I can't point to any such study off the top of my head, so take this with healthy skepticism, as you always should.)
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andypanther wrote:
Women are still getting paid less, that's a problem!
Any specific examples?
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Pokota wrote:
The propaganda has been so pervasive and so virulent that even many gamers have started believing it.
Maybe because they took a moment, evaluated themselves, and realized it was true? Because I know several people - including myself - where that was the case.
Well, I for one am not sexist nor racist, I do not hate women, and I respect women exactly as much I respect everybody else, and women have the exact same right to play games as everybody else, and I don't believe for a second that the vast majority of gamers feel otherwise. I find any insinuation of the contrary personally insulting.
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Pokota wrote:
Warp, the issue is that those same toxic people that aren't representative of the whole are the most vocal, the most visible, and the most likely to be in an echo chamber. Disregarding traditional media's bizarre need to blow things out of proportion, because we're not rooting them out ourselves they will continue to be cancerous. What's worse is that because they toxic ones are the most visible and vocal, young kids are going to enter the world of gaming with the assumption that that's how they have to behave in order to fit in. Even if it's not the norm now, it has the frightening potential to become the norm.
Even if that were true, I don't believe for a second that it's the video games themselves that are responsible. Yet most of the current attacks against gaming is precisely against the video games themselves. The games are being accused of "sexism" and all kinds of things, and game developers are being pressured into bending over backwards to placate to the complaints. But since video games are demonstrably not the cause of some people being a-holes, "fixing" the video games is not going to "fix" those people. What saddens me is that during the past 20 years or so, gamers have slowly but steadily gained the acceptance of the general public. No longer are gamers seen as anti-social no-life nerds playing in their mom's basement. And all that has now been flushed down the drain during the past couple of years, by a vicious attack on them and their public image, mostly via distortions and outright lies, just to promote an agenda. The propaganda has been so pervasive and so virulent that even many gamers have started believing it.
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Ok, let me elaborate on my comment, in a reasonable and civil manner, and trying to connect it to the original topic at hand. During the last couple of years a very negative narrative has been pushed by a significant portion of the media, especially the gaming media, and also several famous individuals, about video games, their developers, and gamers. They are being accused of all kinds of heinous things, like sexism, misogyny and racism. This attack on games, and the gaming culture, has been really vicious at times. These claims are gross exaggeration and distortion. Video games do not cause sexism nor violence (as has been found by several studies), and both the presence of "sexism" and "misogyny" in video games, and their impact, is greatly exaggerated. More egregiously, the attack has been especially vicious against gamers themselves. They are depicted as anti-social woman-hating sexist no-lives, and accused of all kinds of heinous things. As a gamer myself, I find these accusations preposterous and personally insulting, and it irks me whenever I see somebody repeating them like they were somehow a self-evident fact, against all evidence. Sure some gamers are a-holes and trolls, but that's true for every single group of people in existence; it's not somehow exclusive to, or unusually prevalent, in the world-wide gaming community in particular. This particular topic only affects the gaming industry because of the attacks against it. The alleged "sexism" and "misogyny" and "toxic masculinity" is not even nearly so prevalent as to itself shape or affect the industry. Unfortunately the attack against the gaming industry is so strong and so successfully that it is having some effect on it. Some companies are self-censoring, and a few of them are even introducing identity politics into their games. To address complete non-issues.