your least favourite shakespeare play ?

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Morph you are the one making a claim here so you're the one who needs a real source to verify it. I'm just explaining to you that market forces would absolutely destroy any huge pay gap between men and women (for the same work) because all businesses would prioritize hiring women to save money. All of them, not just one Morph.

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I posted a source and I never said there was a "huge pay gap," I said there was a gap. 5-7% is nothing to sneeze at over a long period. Very few businesses could get away with hiring only women. For one thing, it would be a clear case of gender discrimination and, for another, they'd quickly run out of women to hire!

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Though I wouldn't expect someone who posts the "make privilege checklist" as a serious citation in an argument to be able to reason or think clearly so I understand that you won't be able to understand what I'm saying.

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I posted that because it had several references all in one place. It's one reason so many link to Wikipedia. It's not the source, the references are.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

The pay gap myth

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Not a myth, and I gave you a statistical link that verified it.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

As far as male vs female dominated positions, frankly a lot of the higher paying jobs which are dominated by men are extremely dangerous, carry with them long term health risks (labour positions) and a very low level of job satisfaction. I don't think a female elementary school teacher would be happier making a higher salary in Fort Mac as a rig driver for the oil patch, working a Godawful, dangerous job and doing Godawful shifts.

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You really think manual labor are amongst the higher paying jobs in this day and age? :skep:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

By the way, I believe women live longer and happier lives and tend to report enjoying their jobs much more when surveyed. Sounds like a good deal to me.

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Still doesn't justify a paygap. Men are perfectly free to go get jobs they like better. Women can't insure they're getting paid the same as the same jobs.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Men can be raped too, only it's usually funny to people, or not really a big deal.

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Of course they can and of course it shouldn't be funny and it should be a big deal. However, there is hardly a culture that promotes and facilitates like there is with women.

The suicide stats are pointless unless you can point to something in our culture that's driving all men to suicide and then insist on having it changed. We don't live in a culture that pressures men into committing suicide. Personally, I don't even object to suicide morally as I believe people have the right to end their own life if they choose too. However, if suicide became epidemic like it appears to have in the UK, then I'd seriously be wanting an investigation into why it's becoming so common and see if there is something that should be culturally fixed. So, yeah, I do care, but I don't live there. Go cause the public outrage yourself (I mean this genuinely). The problem is that you don't know what in UK culture needs fixing to stop the suicides like we know what needs fixing to stop the wage gap.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

No Mortal you don't understand. Men are all over privileged patriarchs who can't possibly face any problems, and who honestly can't even walk down the street without being showered with unequal pay or being offered high powered jobs and political positions of power!

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All this snark is doing is proving you don't understand privilege. It's like the stupid argument that if you can name a successful black person and a struggling white person that white privilege doesn't exist. Privilege doesn't mean you face no problems, what it means is that you don't face certain problems OR have certain advantages over other people. In some cases, this is natural and can't be helped (there's a privilege in being born with a higher IQ, eg); but in some cases they are cultural artifacts and CAN be helped. The latter are what we need to identify and eradicate in ALL cases.

So, now that we've cleared up that misconception you can understand why the rest of your post is utterly irrelevant.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

If you think Kubrick, Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa aren't better than Murnau, Dreyer, and Eisenstein perhaps you either like weird stuff or have bad taste. As I recall, you like Stan Brakhage, Bela Tarr, and other crazy avante garde stuff. How can you like film while disdaining narrative, color, and sound? If I don't like the early beginnings of film, it sounds like you don't like the majority of film production, ie mass market films, blockbusters, narratives, or commercial films.

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To get the easy stuff out of the way first: I don't disdain narrative, color, sound, mass market, blockbuster, or commercial films. I don't know where you got that from.

For the record, Kurosawa and Bergman are my favorite filmmakers behind Hitchcock; I have Dreyer ahead of Kubrick and Fellini, but Kubrick and Fellini ahead of Murnau and Eisenstein. I think you misunderstand what I mean when I say no filmmakers were definitively better. What I mean is that the latter reached the pinnacle of film artistry, but there's more than one way to scale that pinnacle, and some filmmakers did it more than they did. If Dreyer had made 60 films and most of them were of the same or similar quality to The Passion of Joan of Arc, then I think we'd have a definitive greatest director ever, period. The problem is that Dreyer was a selective perfectionist who, like Kubrick, chose to perfect the few films he made rather than being prolific. I think pretty much everything he made after Joan of Arc is a masterpiece of varying levels, but he just didn't make enough. That's one reason why I have Hitchcock, Bergman, and Kurosawa at my top, because they were prolific AND consistently great.

The key point you seem to be missing is that film, like music, has a few fundamental elements that can be perfected. The two constants are editing and mise-en-scene. If you master these, then you master film. Period. Griffith was the first to do it; Dreyer, Murnau, and Eisenstein innovated in several different ways. Between them you basically have the foundations for every filmmaking style after them. The only thing "original" left to do was to find variations on what they did and ways to mix them. Color adds a different visual texture, but doesn't create a new fundamental. Music turns film into a hybrid medium, but still doesn't change the fundamentals. So, yes, those elements gave filmmakers more to play and innovate with, but they still had to master the basics, and mastering the new elements didn't mean doing more than the early greats did, it just meant doing something similar but different. You can dislike them all you want, but I maintain you can not genuinely love film as an art-form and dismiss or downplay Griffith, Murnau, Eisenstein, and Dreyer, because to do so is to dismiss and downplay the fundemantal elements of what makes film a unique art-form.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

I'm talking about the nature of justice and how we punish people or maintain order in this country, from the felon or terrorist, which you have frequently mentioned, to the pet or child as I have frequently mentioned.

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Yeah, but I don't see what you think this has to do with TOTS.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Fair revenge in Shylock's case would be insulting Antonio back, charging him high interest on his loan, or not loaning to him at all. Tricking him into a bargain that endangers his life, and then insisting on his blood instead of cash repayment is villainous.

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The problem is that Shylock is living in a culture where nearly everyone demonizes him because of his religion. When you're an outcast and perpetually made to feel like it, your insults hardly "sting" to begin with. It would be the equivalent of the nerd calling a bully a A-hole.

There you go again with your imaginative interpretation: how pray-tell does Shylock "trick" Antonio? I wasn't aware that he put the "pound of flesh" in super small print. Anyway, I already agreed that him insisting on his blood rather than cash payment was villainous, but, again, to me this is a case of a reasonable emotion (revenge for wrongs done) pushed to the extreme (unreasonable), but in a manner that is understandable, especially in an age where we've become more sympathetic to what constant bullying does to people.

Again you want to argue that Shylock is a "stock character," but I keep telling you that if Shakespeare only wrote stock characters (instead of using stock archetypes and enriching them into 3-dimensional human beings) nobody would care to begin with.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

But she's subjected to the same societal pressures as Katherine while maintaining a good attitude.

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Just because some women can adjust to and even thrive in a patriarchal soceity doesn't mean they all can or that any should be forced to.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Then neither did Falstaff or Malvolio.

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Falstaff was a liar, drunkard, braggard, and thief, who wanted to have as much fun and be as wealthy and well-thought of as possible while doing as little as possible. The notion that he didn't "deserve" the ribbing he got is nonsense. Malvolio is a moralist prude who probably deserved to get prank, but I do rather feel that the prank was overly mean given the circumstances. If anything, Falstaff's prank was underdone and Malvolio's overdone.

Katherine might've deserved something in between if she just had a bad attitude in general that had nothing to do with patriarchal oppression, but the point is that there's no doubt that Petruchio's "taming" is WAY overboard, especially when the end goal is to make her conform in a completely unjust society. This wasn't the case with either Falstaff or Malvolio. Neither were tortured. Falstaff was (rightfully, and playfully, and of his own doing) embarassed; Malvolio was, IMO, overly humiliated; Katherine was tortured. There's big differences in all three scenarios.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Clopin made a very good point about male/female equality in the job market with those videos showing how the wage gap is actually about 5-7% and not 23% when adjusted for various factors. The videos Clopin posted also made an interesting point that the 5-7% wage gap may be due to men being more willing to ask for a raise.

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Clopin made a good point against a strawman, i.e., a point I never made. I said there was a wage gap, I never said how much. He assumed I got my numbers from Obama. Even if the gap WAS caused by that, it still wouldn't make it OK. Why do you think women would be more reluctant to ask for raises anyway?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Men get the short stick in this society all over the place, like Clopin showed with that list on the last page. The draft! Are you kidding me? All us men gotta die so the women can stay home and do their nails. Uh uh. No. You want that wage equality and the vote you pick up a gun. Gonna' leave everything on our shoulders? You gotta be kidding me. Israel's got it right.

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The areas where men do get the "short stick" in society need fixing too. I never said otherwise.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Idealism needs to give way to pragmatism in the real world. Here we do what works, not what we wish worked.

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I have no idea what you think this has to do with racial profiling. The crime that happens and has happened in corporate America is far worse and affects far more lives than what goes on in poor black neighborhoods. Pragmatically it would be far better to "profile" and "police" that than it would be to take tax dollars and having police trolling for people driving while black.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Lot of rich women out there.

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Yeah, you think if you take the richest women and the richest men and then put them on a pie chart it will be nearly equal?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Or I'm highly skeptical of the source of that information, and think it would be a waste of my time to read it.

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This is known as disconfirmation bias.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Tell that to Howard Stern, George Carlin, or Opie and Anthony.

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Yeah, because, afterall, trying to censor these people absolutely devastated their careers. Howard and George who?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

You said that you enjoyed the romcoms where men were abused. Then you said that it's okay to abuse men because they are a privileged class.

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1. I said I enjoy old romcoms, I never said I enjoyed them because men were abused.
2. Men aren't abused in old romcoms.
3. I never said it was OK to abuse men.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

So you don't have a problem with violence. You have a problem with compulsion or patriarchy.

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Where do you get this stuff? Of course I'm not OK with violence, BUT FAMILY GUY IS NOT PROMOTING OR DEPICTING REAL VIOLENCE. It's absurdist exaggeration of typically non-violent conflicts.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

You don't know what kind of options he had to leave Othello's employ. He mentions at one point that creditors are eating him to death. He has a wife to consider. He might have some real financial problems. Remember back in those days, there was no social safety net. You couldn't pay your debts you'd go to debtor's prison, or become a beggar. Also, with the patron system of the time Iago probably needed a good reference from Othello to change employment. Personally, I think poverty and classism can sting as much as racism, or sexism.

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Othello isn't one of my favorite Shakespeares, so I'll admit you may remember more of the details of why Iago hates Othello than I do, but I still think there are some KEY differences between the Iago/Othello relationship and the Antonio/Shylock one. Firstly, there's no indication that Othello has been knowingly malicious towards Iago. Perhaps he's mistakenly overlooked him, but there's no indication that he actively saught to hurt him by not promoting him or paying him more. You can't say this about Antonio and the whole of Christian society demonizing Shylock and other Jews. Secondly, Iago secretly undertakes the revenge, while Shylock tries to get his revenge in plain site by a contract that Antonio enters willingly. I think these are two KEY differences.

However, I absolutely agree that classism is as much a problem as racism or sexism. In fact, the latter two are often exasserbated by the former.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

I don't think it is. I think Kate spells out an obligation to love one's husband, and as a natural consequence of that love you will want to serve him, just as he in his turn will want to serve his wife, for love. The language may be couched in feudal terms of lords and vassals but it's just as true today. We gladly serve those whom we love and a house divided against itself cannot stand.

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There you go creatively interpreting again. :/

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

The suicide stats are pointless unless you can point to something in our culture that's driving all men to suicide and then insist on having it changed. We don't live in a culture that pressures men into committing suicide. Personally, I don't even object to suicide morally as I believe people have the right to end their own life if they choose too.

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It's not that men attempt suicide at several times the rate of women. The problem is that men are several times as successful at it do to the nature of how they go about it. Men tend to use more violent methods like guns, knives, or jumping from high places. Women try to overdose on pills or drown themselves.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

However, if suicide became epidemic like it appears to have in the UK, then I'd seriously be wanting an investigation into why it's becoming so common and see if there is something that should be culturally fixed. So, yeah, I do care, but I don't live there. Go cause the public outrage yourself (I mean this genuinely). The problem is that you don't know what in UK culture needs fixing to stop the suicides like we know what needs fixing to stop the wage gap.

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There is a correlation between suicide and secularism. Religious societies tend to repress suicidal urges more.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

To get the easy stuff out of the way first: I don't disdain narrative, color, sound, mass market, blockbuster, or commercial films. I don't know where you got that from.

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Because you said in this thread that sound and color aren't important parts of film, and you've mentioned in a past discussion that you don't think things like plot or subject matter to a story. There are some major vital elements of various mediums that you don't think are relevant, but which to most people are as important as wheels on a car.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

For the record, Kurosawa and Bergman are my favorite filmmakers behind Hitchcock; I have Dreyer ahead of Kubrick and Fellini, but Kubrick and Fellini ahead of Murnau and Eisenstein. I think you misunderstand what I mean when I say no filmmakers were definitively better. What I mean is that the latter reached the pinnacle of film artistry, but there's more than one way to scale that pinnacle, and some filmmakers did it more than they did. If Dreyer had made 60 films and most of them were of the same or similar quality to The Passion of Joan of Arc, then I think we'd have a definitive greatest director ever, period. The problem is that Dreyer was a selective perfectionist who, like Kubrick, chose to perfect the few films he made rather than being prolific. I think pretty much everything he made after Joan of Arc is a masterpiece of varying levels, but he just didn't make enough. That's one reason why I have Hitchcock, Bergman, and Kurosawa at my top, because they were prolific AND consistently great.

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There's always room for improvement. Perfection doesn't exist in human labor. The Passion of Joan of Arc may be one of the best films of all time but there are other better films and I think Kubrick, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Scorsese, and Lang made most of them.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

The key point you seem to be missing is that film, like music, has a few fundamental elements that can be perfected. The two constants are editing and mise-en-scene. If you master these, then you master film. Period.

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No. Sound and color are essential parts of film too.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Griffith was the first to do it; Dreyer, Murnau, and Eisenstein innovated in several different ways. Between them you basically have the foundations for every filmmaking style after them. The only thing "original" left to do was to find variations on what they did and ways to mix them.

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You think that Jean-Luc Godard would agree with that? I don't care for his work but he found dozens of ways to innovate and experiment with film. And he wasn't the only one.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Color adds a different visual texture, but doesn't create a new fundamental.

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Tell that to a painter. The combination of colors, their balance, harmony, and interaction are sometimes the whole reason for a film.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Music turns film into a hybrid medium, but still doesn't change the fundamentals.

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Film, like opera or ballet is a hybrid medium.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

So, yes, those elements gave filmmakers more to play and innovate with, but they still had to master the basics, and mastering the new elements didn't mean doing more than the early greats did, it just meant doing something similar but different. You can dislike them all you want, but I maintain you can not genuinely love film as an art-form and dismiss or downplay Griffith, Murnau, Eisenstein, and Dreyer, because to do so is to dismiss and downplay the fundemantal elements of what makes film a unique art-form.

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Even the so called "silent" films weren't silent. They have scores, and they were often edited to specific scores. I'm thinking of course of how modern versions of The Passion of Joan of Arc are accompanied by the track Visions of Light, written for the restored film. Or Giorgio Moroder's modern rock score to Metropolis, and how Prokofiev collaborated with Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. Griffith's Birth of a Nation has an original score by Joseph Carl Briel. Do you know where Kurosawa learned to love film? His brother was a pianist for a movie theater. They had score sheets written for the movies and would even do sound effects when called for. Even the early films of the Lumiere brothers were accompanied by musicians.

You are forgetting two other important aspects of film Morpheus: the writing and the acting. Griffith, Murnau, and Eisenstein were sometimes lousy storytellers. They might compose a good shot or edit two shots together splendidly but they'd be filming a lousy actor, playing a lousy character, in a lousy story. Some of the stuff I've seen by them is just melodramatic and silly.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Yeah, but I don't see what you think this has to do with TOTS.

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Then I don't see what Abu Grahib has to do with it either.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Falstaff was a liar, drunkard, braggard, and thief, who wanted to have as much fun and be as wealthy and well-thought of as possible while doing as little as possible. The notion that he didn't "deserve" the ribbing he got is nonsense. Malvolio is a moralist prude who probably deserved to get prank, but I do rather feel that the prank was overly mean given the circumstances. If anything, Falstaff's prank was underdone and Malvolio's overdone.

Katherine might've deserved something in between if she just had a bad attitude in general that had nothing to do with patriarchal oppression, but the point is that there's no doubt that Petruchio's "taming" is WAY overboard, especially when the end goal is to make her conform in a completely unjust society. This wasn't the case with either Falstaff or Malvolio. Neither were tortured. Falstaff was (rightfully, and playfully, and of his own doing) embarassed; Malvolio was, IMO, overly humiliated; Katherine was tortured. There's big differences in all three scenarios.

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Katherine was definitely not tortured. She was treated better than either man. And going overboard is called comedy.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Clopin made a good point against a strawman, i.e., a point I never made. I said there was a wage gap, I never said how much. He assumed I got my numbers from Obama. Even if the gap WAS caused by that, it still wouldn't make it OK. Why do you think women would be more reluctant to ask for raises anyway?

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Testosterone makes men more aggressive and assertive, thus more likely to ask for a raise than women.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

The areas where men do get the "short stick" in society need fixing too. I never said otherwise.

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You definitely said otherwise when you implied that you were happy with the double standard and talked a lot of nonsense about privilege and how men are just getting what they deserve when people harm them but women are all helpless victims who need saving.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Yeah, you think if you take the richest women and the richest men and then put them on a pie chart it will be nearly equal?

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I don't know. There are a lot of super rich billionaire women.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

This is known as disconfirmation bias.

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Otherwise known as common sense.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Yeah, because, afterall, trying to censor these people absolutely devastated their careers. Howard and George who?

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Howard Stern went from having an audience of around 25 million on terrestrial radio to having an audience of maybe one million on satellite radio. It drastically harmed his brand and how relevant he was to society. To a lesser extent this applies to Opie and Anthony for chasing them to satellite radio, getting them fired several times, and do to contractual obligations they weren't even allowed to work for a year. As of about a year ago, Anthony Cumia was fired from satellite radio and broadcasts a podcast from his house. If you don't think that hurts his revenue, the guests he can get, or how many people his program reaches, you're crazy. George Carlin was arrested for doing his act and then dragged through the courts like Lenny Bruce.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

1. I said I enjoy old romcoms, I never said I enjoyed them because men were abused.
2. Men aren't abused in old romcoms.
3. I never said it was OK to abuse men.

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I disagree. I believe you did, except you don't think the men are being abused because they come from a privileged class that it's okay to abuse with impunity.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Where do you get this stuff? Of course I'm not OK with violence, BUT FAMILY GUY IS NOT PROMOTING OR DEPICTING REAL VIOLENCE. It's absurdist exaggeration of typically non-violent conflicts.

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Then so is Taming of the Shrew.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Othello isn't one of my favorite Shakespeares, so I'll admit you may remember more of the details of why Iago hates Othello than I do, but I still think there are some KEY differences between the Iago/Othello relationship and the Antonio/Shylock one. Firstly, there's no indication that Othello has been knowingly malicious towards Iago. Perhaps he's mistakenly overlooked him, but there's no indication that he actively saught to hurt him by not promoting him or paying him more. You can't say this about Antonio and the whole of Christian society demonizing Shylock and other Jews. Secondly, Iago secretly undertakes the revenge, while Shylock tries to get his revenge in plain site by a contract that Antonio enters willingly. I think these are two KEY differences.

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Thoughtlessness is probably better than outright malice, but the injustice is still greater. And Shylock does trick Antonio by saying that he'll lend him the money without interest in a spirit of friendship, and that the pound of flesh clause is just for sport.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

However, I absolutely agree that classism is as much a problem as racism or sexism. In fact, the latter two are often exasserbated by the former.

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There we'll agree.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

There you go creatively interpreting again. :/

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I don't think it's a creative interpretation at all. I think it's as plain as the nose on your face.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

It's not that men attempt suicide at several times the rate of women. The problem is that men are several times as successful at it do to the nature of how they go about it. Men tend to use more violent methods like guns, knives, or jumping from high places. Women try to overdose on pills or drown themselves.

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Ok... so what do you suggest we change in society to remedy this?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

There is a correlation between suicide and secularism. Religious societies tend to repress suicidal urges more.

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Again: OK... so what do you suggest we change in society? Start forcing people to be religious?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Because you said in this thread that sound and color aren't important parts of film, and you've mentioned in a past discussion that you don't think things like plot or subject matter to a story. There are some major vital elements of various mediums that you don't think are relevant, but which to most people are as important as wheels on a car.

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Sound and color are important parts of films that have sound and color. They do not innately make film better, just as having a drama (as in opera) does not make music better. Plot and subject matter matter to a STORY, they do not matter to the art of filmmaking. You can make great films with poor "stories" just as Shakespeare made great plays from what were traditionally stock characters and plots. It's all in how well it's done.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

There's always room for improvement. Perfection doesn't exist in human labor.

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This assumes a kind of Platonic ideal towards which art aspires to, but this is a fallacious notion. Color is not innately better than B&W, sound is not innately better than silence. Art is a long history of things changing rather than getting better and better. In many respects, we haven't bettered Homer in literature. You're free to PREFER color and sound. To me, they're just additional tools that can be used well or poorly. Frankly, I think most directors use color poorly and would've been better served in black & white. There are exceptions: Kurosawa, Bergman, and Fellini amongst them, but few directors have their painterly eyes.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

No. Sound and color are essential parts of film too.

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No, they're essential to color films and sound films. Removing sound and color does not make a film not a film, ergo they are not essential parts of film. What makes a film not a film is removing editing and mise-en-scene.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

You think that Jean-Luc Godard would agree with that?

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Probably. Godard knew the history of film as much as anyone. He KNEW he was experimenting with what had already been done. Most of Godard's innovations (not all, but most) were about subverting the expectations that had been created by classic filmmaking standards. He was not innovating at a fundamental level but rather innovating in how those fundamental elements were mixed.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Film, like opera or ballet is a hybrid medium.

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It's a hybrid medium once you add sound, not before.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Even the so called "silent" films weren't silent. They have scores, and they were often edited to specific scores. I'm thinking of course of how modern versions of The Passion of Joan of Arc are accompanied by the track Visions of Light, written for the restored film.

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Most of them did not have scores but were accompanied by theater orchestras. Dreyer explicitly stated his preference for POJOA being seen as a silent. I've seen it both ways. Frankly, Voices of Light is an anomaly in that it's one of the very few scores written (long) after a masterpiece that doesn't detract from it and, in many respects, does make it (IMO) better. However, I still think Dreyer's unadulterated film is transcendentally powerful and beautiful without the score. The score makes it a different experience, and a valuable one, but not an essential one. POJOA would still be in my top 5 either way.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Prokofiev collaborated with Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.

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Those aren't silents.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

You are forgetting two other important aspects of film Morpheus: the writing and the acting.

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These are important aspects of theater that was carried over into film. Early on, nobody had a clue how to use the medium of film to actually narrate stories. The vast majority of pre-Griffith film is like theater in front of a static camera with editing done only when necessary. Again, the ART OF FILM is in how to use the medium (mise-en-scene and editing) in order to narrate a story (or non-stories). So the question becomes do you love stories or do you love film? If you place stories above film then you might indeed deride Griffith and Eisenstein and Murnau for having poor stories, but if you love film then you love the ways in which they used the medium to tell these poor stories.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Then I don't see what Abu Grahib has to do with it either.

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I mentioned Abu Ghraib in passing in a passage where I was clearly being sarcastic and exaggerated, I wasn't drawing a 1:1 analogy: "Awww, the poor misogynistic torturer is tired for his hard day of torturing. Surely what he's suffering is on equal grounds with her. Why, I bet the guards at Abu Ghraib were drop-dead tired after a whole day of waterboarding!"

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Katherine was definitely not tortured. She was treated better than either man.

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You're delusional. Falstaff causes his own downfall when he runs away from the robbery and then lies about it. Malvolio is humiliated into believing Olivia loves him and his humiliated when wrong; KATHERINE IS TORTURED INTO CHANGING HER ATTITUDE ABOUT HOW WOMEN SHOULD BE SUBSERVIENT TO MEN. You'd REALLY prefer that someone starve and deprive you of sleep until you changed your whole way of being instead of making a fool of yourself?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Testosterone makes men more aggressive and assertive, thus more likely to ask for a raise than women.

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And men are also encouraged by society to BE aggressive and assertive, while women get called *****es and shrews.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

You definitely said otherwise when you implied that you were happy with the double standard and talked a lot of nonsense about privilege and how men are just getting what they deserve when people harm them but women are all helpless victims who need saving.

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I never said any of this, so you're arguing against a strawman as well. Please go back in this thread where I ever said a double standard is OK and that "men are just getting what they deserve" when they're harmed. When you can't find it, I expect an apology.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Otherwise known as common sense.

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Common sense is riddled with cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Howard Stern went from having an audience of around 25 million on terrestrial radio to having an audience of maybe one million on satellite radio. It drastically harmed his brand and how relevant he was to society. To a lesser extent this applies to Opie and Anthony for chasing them to satellite radio, getting them fired several times, and do to contractual obligations they weren't even allowed to work for a year. As of about a year ago, Anthony Cumia was fired from satellite radio and broadcasts a podcast from his house. If you don't think that hurts his revenue, the guests he can get, or how many people his program reaches, you're crazy. George Carlin was arrested for doing his act and then dragged through the courts like Lenny Bruce.

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Like I've said before, I don't support censorship in any form, so I don't even really know what your point is of continuing to mention how these people were hurt by censorship.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

I disagree. I believe you did, except you don't think the men are being abused because they come from a privileged class that it's okay to abuse with impunity.

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Then prove I did. It's easy enough to do. Just go through my past responses to you and quote where I said anything remotely resembling this. Also, it might be helpful to show how any of the men are "abused" in old romcoms. How is Grant abused in His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby?

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Then so is Taming of the Shrew.

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Except it's not. What "typical non-violent conflict" is Shrew exaggerating? Are you suggesting that the closing speech is NOT meant to be taken as the ideal to which the torture aimed at? Because Family Guy certainly never closes with any idealistic speeches that justifies the violence in real life to achieve that ideal.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Thoughtlessness is probably better than outright malice, but the injustice is still greater.

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I couldn't disagree more with the later. There's not even evidence that Iago ever mentioned his troubles to Othello and Othello refused to help him.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

And Shylock does trick Antonio by saying that he'll lend him the money without interest in a spirit of friendship, and that the pound of flesh clause is just for sport.

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Antonio still makes the agreement of his own free will, and if he believed Shylock then he was a moron seeing as he had only known Shylock as an enemy. It's still not the same situation as Othello had no reason (in his mind) to suspect Iago of such treachery.

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

I don't think it's a creative interpretation at all. I think it's as plain as the nose on your face.

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Of course you think this, but you're a misogynist with a bias to see blatant misogyny as the ideal.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Not a myth, and I gave you a statistical link that verified it.

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Well fair enough. When most people talk about the pay gap they are referring to the oft cited 23% which is definitely a myth.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

You really think manual labor are amongst the higher paying jobs in this day and age? :skep:

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Uh... yes? I mean you won't be raking in the same as a successful lawyer or CEO, but if you're working in the right place you can make six figures as a welder, pipe fitter or even rig driver. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, all make decent salaries as well. I mainly brought up manual labour/trades because these jobs are overwhelmingly occupied by men, they are dangerous and unpleasant, they carry reasonable salaries, and I think it's very illuminating to see how men and women voluntarily work in different fields for different salaries, perquisites, job satisfaction, etc, when it comes to discussing pay gaps and gender discrimination.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Still doesn't justify a paygap. Men are perfectly free to go get jobs they like better. Women can't insure they're getting paid the same as the same jobs.

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Wait what? Aren't women perfectly free to get jobs in traditionally male dominated fields? Women can ensure they are paid the same by negotiating for raises and positions at the same rate as men do. I mean if societal pressure is the only thing keeping women from pursuing careers in labour or STEM subjects then doesn't this go both ways? Mightn't men feel societal pressure in many different areas of their lives which may prevent them from seeking careers in, say, childcare, or other female centric careers? Is it really reasonable to say "oh, women are underrepresented in X and Y, we need to do something about it, but all those areas where men struggle, well, they're perfectly free to just behave differently and solve their own problems". Do you see the contradiction? I have no issue with telling someone they can solve their own problems, but I don't appreciate the double standard.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Of course they can and of course it shouldn't be funny and it should be a big deal. However, there is hardly a culture that promotes and facilitates like there is with women.

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Oh dear, now we're on to "rape culture". Polly want a cracker? Bleat bleat, buzzword, bleat. Please, oh please, let me know how you can honestly believe that Western society "promotes and facilitates" rape. I would love to hear how you can honestly defend that ridiculous absurdity.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

The suicide stats are pointless unless you can point to something in our culture that's driving all men to suicide and then insist on having it changed. We don't live in a culture that pressures men into committing suicide. Personally, I don't even object to suicide morally as I believe people have the right to end their own life if they choose too. However, if suicide became epidemic like it appears to have in the UK, then I'd seriously be wanting an investigation into why it's becoming so common and see if there is something that should be culturally fixed. So, yeah, I do care, but I don't live there. Go cause the public outrage yourself (I mean this genuinely). The problem is that you don't know what in UK culture needs fixing to stop the suicides like we know what needs fixing to stop the wage gap.

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But when people like you argue you argue from result. Women are underrepresented in certain fields? Well there must be discrimination against them. How do we know that there is discrimination against them? Why because they are underrepresented of course! And around and around we go. Now i would be fine (well not fine, but a little less offended) with this horrific logic if you applied it evenly, you know to everything, but you don't. You can look at a statistic like how men are vastly overrepresented in suicides and other unpleasantries and say "well, how can we possibly know what is causing that!" Pick one. Either we accept that men and women are naturally very different and come to terms with everything this entails or we look at every imbalance of result between the genders as the fault of "society" and "social construction" and we try to deal with it. But if we choose the latter we do not discriminate in favour of women and we do not downplay the real problems men face. Deal?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

All this snark is doing is proving you don't understand privilege. It's like the stupid argument that if you can name a successful black person and a struggling white person that white privilege doesn't exist. Privilege doesn't mean you face no problems, what it means is that you don't face certain problems OR have certain advantages over other people. In some cases, this is natural and can't be helped (there's a privilege in being born with a higher IQ, eg); but in some cases they are cultural artifacts and CAN be helped. The latter are what we need to identify and eradicate in ALL cases.

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That's right, white privilege does not exist. None of these "privileges" exist. What privileges people are things like money and opportunities. A black person could be vastly more privileged than me, and I could be vastly more privileged than another white person. It would be absurd to say that the average Romanian is exceptionally privileged or that the Irish have historically been a privileged group. There is no such thing as "privilege", and you discredit yourself every time you fling around these ridiculous, meaningless phrases. Rape culture? My God! Look, just stick to watching movies okay? You are not intelligent, or capable of critical thinking.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Ok... so what do you suggest we change in society to remedy this?

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Get rid of guns.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Again: OK... so what do you suggest we change in society? Start forcing people to be religious?

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Not force, but encourage and promote publicly from a cultural, public health, and social capital point of view.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Sound and color are important parts of films that have sound and color.

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Which all films have even silent films. Silence and musical scores are sound. Black and white are colors.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

They do not innately make film better, just as having a drama (as in opera) does not make music better.

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I think they do. If you are trying to excite and stimulate an audience that is one more way to do it. I think eventually when we get 3D down, and add smell and touch, things are going to be even better.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Plot and subject matter matter to a STORY, they do not matter to the art of filmmaking.

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Almost every film ever made is a narrative. Hard to say the story doesn't matter when almost every single film in history has a story. Find me a great film without a story. There aren't any.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

You can make great films with poor "stories" just as Shakespeare made great plays from what were traditionally stock characters and plots. It's all in how well it's done.

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I don't think that you can. Or if you can, the film is flawed and not as good as it could be, or as good as other examples of the medium which don't have those flaws. Shakespeare retold stories that were already popular and well constructed. He relied on stock characters because Commedia dell'arte had streamlined the use of them into a brilliantly effective recipe. The characters aren't bad characters just because they are stock characters. They are stock characters because they are popular and work consistently.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

This assumes a kind of Platonic ideal towards which art aspires to, but this is a fallacious notion.

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You said that Griffith and Eisenstein's films were perfection. I told you nothing is perfect.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Color is not innately better than B&W, sound is not innately better than silence.

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Be aware that you hold a minority view in this respect. In painting there are two color or even single color paintings, but few are as great or well liked as others with a wider pallete. Michelangelo, Raphael, Carravagio, Rubens, Rembrant, and Van Gogh used all the colors at their disposal.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Art is a long history of things changing rather than getting better and better.

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Sometimes they do get better though. Sometimes they go from crummy eras to golden eras and golden eras to crummy eras. Most people wouldn't say that Mannerism is better than the High Renaissance. And most people would prefer the work of the High Renaissance over the work of the early middle ages.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

In many respects, we haven't bettered Homer in literature.

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That is true.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

You're free to PREFER color and sound. To me, they're just additional tools that can be used well or poorly. Frankly, I think most directors use color poorly and would've been better served in black & white.

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And I think that a lot of early directors used black and white poorly. They are colors just the same as red, green, or blue and they have a gray scale to work with too. Eisenstein and Griffith's films have definitely been bettered in the use of color. Pretty much every film where Vittorio Storaro, Sven Nykvist, were cinematographers were better for light and color.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

There are exceptions: Kurosawa, Bergman, and Fellini amongst them, but few directors have their painterly eyes.

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Kurosawa was a painter. Fellini drew caricatures and cartoons. Bergman however was not responsible for the visual style of his movies. That was Nykvist. Bergman was a writer of plays and his early films have no visual style worth noting. But James Cameron was trained as a painter, and so was Ridley Scott. Kubrick was a photographer, etc. The Cohen Brothers owe their visual style to Roger Deakins. I also have to wonder how much Wong Kar Wai owes Christopher Doyle since he uses him for every film.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

No, they're essential to color films and sound films. Removing sound and color does not make a film not a film, ergo they are not essential parts of film. What makes a film not a film is removing editing and mise-en-scene.

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If you remove color and sound you have black and white photography. Remove narrative and it's abstract photography. Without color is it even photography? Or is it concept art? It ain't film. I think your argument is reductio ad absurdum. It's like John Cage saying you don't need sound to make music.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Probably. Godard knew the history of film as much as anyone. He KNEW he was experimenting with what had already been done. Most of Godard's innovations (not all, but most) were about subverting the expectations that had been created by classic filmmaking standards. He was not innovating at a fundamental level but rather innovating in how those fundamental elements were mixed.

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I don't think the early guys thought of everything. I don't think they could have. Besides with their technological limitations there were plenty of things they simply couldn't do.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

It's a hybrid medium once you add sound, not before.

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It's a hybrid medium because it combines photography, writing, acting, painting, and music. Sometimes it includes fashion, and architecture.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Most of them did not have scores but were accompanied by theater orchestras. Dreyer explicitly stated his preference for POJOA being seen as a silent. I've seen it both ways. Frankly, Voices of Light is an anomaly in that it's one of the very few scores written (long) after a masterpiece that doesn't detract from it and, in many respects, does make it (IMO) better. However, I still think Dreyer's unadulterated film is transcendentally powerful and beautiful without the score. The score makes it a different experience, and a valuable one, but not an essential one. POJOA would still be in my top 5 either way.

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I don't think I'd enjoy silent films as much without the scores.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Those aren't silents.

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There's no such thing as a silent film or a film without color. Now that I think of it, I seem to recall Lang and Murnau using colored tints in their films. And some silent film guys would hand paint certain scenes to inject color into them.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

These are important aspects of theater that was carried over into film. Early on, nobody had a clue how to use the medium of film to actually narrate stories. The vast majority of pre-Griffith film is like theater in front of a static camera with editing done only when necessary.

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You don't think that film acting has come a long way since then? Don't you think that a great performance by Peter O'Toole, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, or Robert De Niro can improve a film?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Again, the ART OF FILM is in how to use the medium (mise-en-scene and editing) in order to narrate a story (or non-stories). So the question becomes do you love stories or do you love film? If you place stories above film then you might indeed deride Griffith and Eisenstein and Murnau for having poor stories, but if you love film then you love the ways in which they used the medium to tell these poor stories.

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I love film and I love stories. I don't know how I feel about sequential photography or flip books which is what you are describing.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

You are not intelligent, or capable of critical thinking.

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For what it's worth, I think he's intelligent. He's just really liberal which comes with as many crazy biases as being really conservative does.

Falling for a bunch of idiotic biases doesn't do his critical thinking faculties much credit. He seems knowledgeable about a few things, but not really able to think. Which is quite common. I mean his argument is diarrheal spew parroted from social justice blogs and "male privilege" checklists. It's not really possible that an intelligent person could swallow something like "rape culture" hook, line and sinker.

Also I loved his dig at you earlier about how "if you had posted what you're saying on a different message board all of his liberal friends would tear you to shreds". Of course they would absolutely make you out to be some sort of monster for questioning their unquestionable dogmas about "privileges", "rape culture", wage gaps", et al. It's interesting that he considers this sort of censorious, dialogue destroying tactic to be a positive thing, or an acceptable given, however.

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Privilege : a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor : prerogative; especially : such a right or immunity attached specifically to a position or an office

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Clopin: That's right, white privilege does not exist.

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Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. However, in the American South of 60 years ago it existed, based on this definition (white people had the legal "right" to sit in the front of the bus, for example). Based on this definition, I consider myself "privileged" to be born an American (instead of, say, a Ruandan) and you to be "privileged" to be a Canadian. We enjoy "rights and immunities" and "benefits and advantages" that others do not, based on our "positions" as citizens.

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Clopin: But when people like you argue you argue from result.

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Clopin:
You are not intelligent, or capable of critical thinking.

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Aren't you "argu(ing) from result"?

'Canadian' and 'American' are nationalities and not colours Ecurb. I am immensely privileged to have been born an English speaking citizen of a first world country. However, there are citizens of Canada who represent every ethnic background you can think of, and who enjoy the same rights and freedoms as i do regardless of their skin colour. Remember when I said:

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What privileges people are things like money and opportunities.

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Both of these things are afforded you in spades simply by being born in the first world. But this comes back to class and wealth before it comes back to race.

And Morpheus pointed out that people are also privileged or not so privileged by their natural abilities. Someone who is a spectacular genius is, all else being equal, richer in opportunity than someone who is of sub average or very low intelligence.

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Ecurb: Aren't you "argu(ing) from result"?

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No, from observation. The basic logic behind a sequence like:

-If women are underrepresented in X it is because they face overwhelming discrimination
-Women are underrepresented in X
-Therefore women face overwhelming discrimination...

Is just wrong.

And if everything is determined by privilege and racism why is it that in countries like America and Canada ('white' countries) citizens of East Asian descent are vastly underrepresented in crime figures and vastly overrepresented in academics? Are we really supposed to assume that the police, judges and schools are granting Asians special favors because the state is racist against Whites and other ethnicities in their favour? That just doesn't make any sense.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Falling for a bunch of idiotic biases doesn't do his critical thinking faculties much credit. He seems knowledgeable about a few things, but not really able to think. Which is quite common. I mean his argument is diarrheal spew parroted from social justice blogs and "male privilege" checklists. It's not really possible that an intelligent person could swallow something like "rape culture" hook, line and sinker.

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I know a lot of smart people who think some pretty wacky things. There's no such thing as 360 degree intelligence. We are all strong on some fronts and weak on others.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Also I loved his dig at you earlier about how "if you had posted what you're saying on a different message board all of his liberal friends would tear you to shreds". Of course they would alsolutely make you out to be some sort of monster for questioning their unquestionable dogmas about "privileges", "rape culture", wage gaps", et al. It's interesting that he considers this sort of censorious, dialogue destroying tactic to be a positive thing, or an acceptable given, however.

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Yeah, he's right too. Sometimes I move in very liberal circles and I catch a lot of flack for things which I don't in moderate or conservative social groups. There are some people who live in those bubbles where everyone thinks like they do and it reinforces their ideas about how things are or should be, and since nobody questions them in their group they just assume that everyone holds the same beliefs.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

No, from observation. The basic logic behind a sequence like:

-If women are underrepresented in X it is because they face overwhelming discrimination
-Women are underrepresented in X
-Therefore women face overwhelming discrimination...

Is just wrong.

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Yes. That would constitute "assuming the antecedent" (if that's the right name for the fallacious logic that suggests that if the conclusion is correct, the axioms must be correct). I'm not sure that's what Morpheus did, though (although I haven't read the thread very thoroughly). It's perfectly reasonable to suggest possible reasons why women get paid less than men, one of which is discrimination (there are doubtless multiple factors).

Discrimination itself can be a secondary factor: discrimination against a group might change the culture of that group. IN the U.S. (for example) it seems reasonable that African American subcultures would have less respect for America's laws than many white subcultures (because the subcultures developed in a time when legal discrimination existed). For women, specific discrimination limiting their participation in certain professions in the past may no longer exist, but culturally constituted norms about women's role in child care, about whether drive and ambition are attractive qualities in men or in women, or about what professions are consistent with femininity might have developed as a result of discrimination.

I figured I'd reply to your comment in two separate posts since the first was getting long and dealt mostly with film. I hope that's okay with you.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

I mentioned Abu Ghraib in passing in a passage where I was clearly being sarcastic and exaggerated, I wasn't drawing a 1:1 analogy: "Awww, the poor misogynistic torturer is tired for his hard day of torturing. Surely what he's suffering is on equal grounds with her. Why, I bet the guards at Abu Ghraib were drop-dead tired after a whole day of waterboarding!"

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Alright, you were just exaggerating. Understood.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

You're delusional. Falstaff causes his own downfall when he runs away from the robbery and then lies about it. Malvolio is humiliated into believing Olivia loves him and his humiliated when wrong; KATHERINE IS TORTURED INTO CHANGING HER ATTITUDE ABOUT HOW WOMEN SHOULD BE SUBSERVIENT TO MEN. You'd REALLY prefer that someone starve and deprive you of sleep until you changed your whole way of being instead of making a fool of yourself?

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No, I'm talking about when Falstaff was hiding in the tub of laundry and everyone beats him. Or when the sprites and fairies pinch and smack him.

Katherine isn't tortured. She just skips a meal, is kept up late, and has a dress torn. Honestly, I've had much worse days. And in the past, when people made me uncomfortable, I usually complied a lot quicker than Kate, instead of holding out and being stubborn or pig headed. Although, sometimes I don't change and just continue to suffer, and after a while you blame yourself for your troubles more than other people. Thinking "Man, I could have changed this and this a long time ago, and things would have been so much easier." It's frustrating, when you look back on all the time you've wasted being angry, or obstinate, lacking social graces, when you think of all the things you didn't do or people you hurt because you didn't know better. I can sympathize with Kate. I struggle with my own shrewish nature all the time. It's an uphill battle. I have to remind myself all the time to be nicer to people, but I think I'm getting better.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

And men are also encouraged by society to BE aggressive and assertive, while women get called *****es and shrews.

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Sometimes. Although, there's a lot of backlash lately, trying to make men act like women or women act like men. I think that tends to go against biology, but there are advantages and disadvantages to being either sex. Also, there's a fine line between being assertive and aggressive and being a ***** or an *******. Some people can't see the line. Occasionally, I have that trouble. I'll think I'm being frank and honest when I'm really being rude and tactless.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

I never said any of this, so you're arguing against a strawman as well. Please go back in this thread where I ever said a double standard is OK and that "men are just getting what they deserve" when they're harmed. When you can't find it, I expect an apology.

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Alright, you didn't say that men are just getting what they deserve when they are beaten in romantic comedies. What you said was more like it's more socially acceptable, or it's less of an injustice to beat and humiliate men than when women go without food or sleep for a day.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Common sense is riddled with cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

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Even logic breaks down at some point when applied to the real world.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Like I've said before, I don't support censorship in any form, so I don't even really know what your point is of continuing to mention how these people were hurt by censorship.

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You said that there isn't any censorship anymore and I said that those men would disagree with you.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Then prove I did. It's easy enough to do. Just go through my past responses to you and quote where I said anything remotely resembling this. Also, it might be helpful to show how any of the men are "abused" in old romcoms. How is Grant abused in His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby?

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Page six post 96 "this is where privilege becomes an important factor. When you have one group that has historically been in the privileged position, making light of them does not have the same affect that making light of those who are in a much weaker position does. It's like suggesting that both slaves and slaveowners should be equally subject to ridicule. Well, no, they shouldn't. Your "double standard" presumes a level playing field in real life, when the truth is that there is no level playing field, and the playing field back then was far more unlevel then than it is now. Besides, as I suggested above, in those RomComs the women are not TORTURING the men by any stretch of the imagination. "

How are men abused or humiliated in screwball comedies? How about this threatening line of dialogue in His Girl Friday "I'm going to walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours until it rings like a Chinese gong." Hildy also kicks Walter under the table. Then there is the character Bruce who is a classic milquetoast, the opposite of the female shrew, who's constantly emasculated and subjected to put downs.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Except it's not. What "typical non-violent conflict" is Shrew exaggerating? Are you suggesting that the closing speech is NOT meant to be taken as the ideal to which the torture aimed at? Because Family Guy certainly never closes with any idealistic speeches that justifies the violence in real life to achieve that ideal.

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It's exaggerating the domestic squabbles every marriage has for comedic effect. Plus, Family guy justifies violence and other stuff all the time. Remember the time they panned over to Lee Majors who says "What, women are things?" or the time they showed Ralph knocking out Alice from the Honeymooners, making good on his old "One of these days Alice, bang, pow, straight to the moon!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKDNKI0--s
I thought this next one was from Family Guy too, but I misremembered it and it's actually from the Simpsons. Ricky Ricardo beating Lucy from I Love Lucy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x46GfkTN8vE
Homer: Ha ha ha. He hit her again!

Found another from Family Guy, a Horton Hears a Who parody:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20knMq7_JZY

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

I couldn't disagree more with the later. There's not even evidence that Iago ever mentioned his troubles to Othello and Othello refused to help him.

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That's because he's too afraid to ask Othello for help. He's been victimized so long, held under his abusers thumb, that he doesn't even dare to show displeasure or object. Classic authoritarianism.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Antonio still makes the agreement of his own free will, and if he believed Shylock then he was a moron seeing as he had only known Shylock as an enemy. It's still not the same situation as Othello had no reason (in his mind) to suspect Iago of such treachery.

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So you think Antonio deserves what happens to him because he's an idiot and Othello doesn't deserve what happens to him because he's oblivious?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Of course you think this, but you're a misogynist with a bias to see blatant misogyny as the ideal.

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Ie, a man.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Uh... yes?

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Uh... no. 6-figures is piddly-squat when you look at how wealth is ditributed in the US (at least in the US; I don't know about the rest of the West).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I mainly brought up manual labour/trades because these jobs are overwhelmingly occupied by men, they are dangerous and unpleasant, they carry reasonable salaries, and I think it's very illuminating to see how men and women voluntarily work in different fields for different salaries, perquisites, job satisfaction, etc, when it comes to discussing pay gaps and gender discrimination.

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And you seriously think that cultural biases play no role in what jobs men and women consider appropriate for their sexes?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Aren't women perfectly free to get jobs in traditionally male dominated fields?

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In the strictest sense, yes, they're free, but neither encouraged before to pursue them or encouraged while pursuing it to continue. A great many women have written about terrible, misogynistic treatment after breaking into the "mens' club" atmosphere of any number of professions. Even in my own profession of poker I've seen it (even though I don't play live that much).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I mean if societal pressure is the only thing keeping women from pursuing careers in labour or STEM subjects then doesn't this go both ways? Mightn't men feel societal pressure in many different areas of their lives which may prevent them from seeking careers in, say, childcare, or other female centric careers? Is it really reasonable to say "oh, women are underrepresented in X and Y, we need to do something about it, but all those areas where men struggle, well, they're perfectly free to just behave differently and solve their own problems". Do you see the contradiction? I have no issue with telling someone they can solve their own problems, but I don't appreciate the double standard.

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To answer you first and second questions: ABSOLUTELY! Again, you and Mortal keep assuming this "double standard" where none exists. I've already admitted that there are, indeed, social pressures that are biased against men on many fronts as well, and they need remedied as well. Bringing up the fact of male privilege does not mean that there aren't areas where men don't struggle more and don't need society to change as well. One reason we don't see these addressed is that far too many men (like yourself) are out there trying to "debunk" the problems that women face (rather than remedying them) instead of focusing on the problems men face (and trying to remedy them as well).

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Oh dear, now we're on to "rape culture". Polly want a cracker? Bleat bleat, buzzword, bleat. Please, oh please, let me know how you can honestly believe that Western society "promotes and facilitates" rape. I would love to hear how you can honestly defend that ridiculous absurdity.

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Oh dear, now we're back to you being all reactionary at hearing another term you don't like.

Rape culture is fairly easy to prove. Just look at the statistics for one thing: it's one of the most under-reported, under-prosecuted, under-convicted crimes. Whenever it is reported, victims are held up to more scrutiny than the perpetrators and are frequently accused of making it up (or changing their mind) for "revenge" (never mind that the statistics suggest such false accusations are extremely low). How common is it in our society to use alcohol to try to incapacitate women so they're in no position to consent? How in the world do you think Bill Cosby got away with what he did for so long?

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Originally Posted by Clopin

But when people like you argue you argue from result. Women are underrepresented in certain fields? Well there must be discrimination against them. How do we know that there is discrimination against them? Why because they are underrepresented of course! And around and around we go.

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Except it's not just the statistics, it's also hundreds of thousands of anecdotes of women talking about how they've felt going against what society encourages women to pursue and trying to break into male-dominated fields, and every time they raise a complaint it provokes the ire of misogynists like yourself and Mortal who just dismiss what they have to say. "Elevatorgate" was a perfect example of a woman talking about what it felt like to be so "pursued" because she was one of the few women at atheist conventions, and how scary that could be, only to get lambasted by Richard Dawkins who went on a non-sequitor rant about women facing harsher problems in African countries (as if that lessens the problems women face here).

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Now i would be fine (well not fine, but a little less offended) with this horrific logic if you applied it evenly, you know to everything, but you don't. You can look at a statistic like how men are vastly overrepresented in suicides and other unpleasantries and say "well, how can we possibly know what is causing that!" Pick one. Either we accept that men and women are naturally very different and come to terms with everything this entails or we look at every imbalance of result between the genders as the fault of "society" and "social construction" and we try to deal with it. But if we choose the latter we do not discriminate in favour of women and we do not downplay the real problems men face. Deal?

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Other than their physical traits, men and women are far more similar than they are different, so the extreme differences we see are predominantly sociological and, yes, they need changing and, yes, they need changing when they unfairly hurt either side. Again, I don't know where you're getting this "double standard" from as I have not suggested that societies are perfectly fair to men.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

That's right, white privilege does not exist. None of these "privileges" exist.

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So you have a deep fear that the cops will pull you over for no reason? Or a fear they'd shoot you in the back if you dared to run from them and then try to plant a gun on you?

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Oh What privileges people are things like money and opportunities.

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Wealth privileges are merely one type of privilege and, as I already said to Mortal, I agree they are arguably an even bigger privilege that tends to exaserbate the problems of white and male privilege (because white males are also predominant amongst the richest people, and because money equals power, and because people are selfish by nature so they use that power to benefit themselves and others like them).

I'll take a page out of Mortal's book and use a popular TV show as an example. Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the episode where Will and Carlton are arrested in a small town for driving a fancy car that was loned to them. They're held in prison for hours without cause or without representation. Of course, Carlton's dad (Will's Uncle) is a rich, black, judge, and when he finds out and goes down there he rips into the blatantly racist cops and gets them out of jail. This is a case of illustrating both the negative effects of white privilege (two blacks being arrested for no reason) and how wealth privilege helped mitigate the damage. However, the presence of the latter doesn't erase the former in principle. What happens when you aren't related to someone who's rich and you happen to black? Well, you spend the night in jail for no reason (at best) and, at worst, you can end up like Walter Scott.

Privilege is not something you consider on a case-by-case basis, it's something you consider on a statistical average level. If you think statistics are in favor of women when it comes to wages, or blacks when it comes to... just about anything, then you aren't living in this little place called reality.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

There is no such thing as "privilege", and you discredit yourself every time you fling around these ridiculous, meaningless phrases. Rape culture? My God! Look, just stick to watching movies okay? You are not intelligent, or capable of critical thinking.

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There is such a thing as privilege (statistics prove it) and you discredit yourself everytime you fling around these ridiculous, reactionary claims. I have a 150 IQ so I have zero doubt I'm intelligent and quite capable of critical thinking; you I have my doubts about.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

It's not really possible that an intelligent person could swallow something like "rape culture" hook, line and sinker.

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What's impossible is for an intelligent person to look at statistics on rape, the wage gap, or anything having to do with blacks, prison, and the justice system and deny privilege. You seem to have swalled Fox News's lies hooks, line, and sinker by comparison.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Also I loved his dig at you earlier about how "if you had posted what you're saying on a different message board all of his liberal friends would tear you to shreds". Of course they would absolutely make you out to be some sort of monster for questioning their unquestionable dogmas about "privileges", "rape culture", wage gaps", et al. It's interesting that he considers this sort of censorious, dialogue destroying tactic to be a positive thing, or an acceptable given, however.

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That's not actually what I said. I was thinking of posting it on any huge public forum, not one with my "liberal friends." What they would do would be precisely what was done to me when I used to be in an insular bubble like yourself and Mortal: they'd throw out so many facts and statistics that you'd either have to illogically twist and contort them to justify your reactionary Fox News nonsense about "no privilege," or you'd do what I did (what any intelligent, rationalist would do) and accept the facts that were staring you right in the face. If you did the former, then I'd say let the censorious bashing begin. Of course, if you think you can stand up to those facts and come out in the end a winner, I'd be more than happy to point you in the direction. It would be amusing for me, either way. Hey, you never know, you might actually be right and get me to change my mind again. The good thing about us intelligent people who care about the truth is that we can always be swayed by evidence. Of course, all you've offered so far is vacuous bluster, so that's not a good start.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

Yes. That would constitute "assuming the antecedent" (if that's the right name for the fallacious logic that suggests that if the conclusion is correct, the axioms must be correct). I'm not sure that's what Morpheus did, though (although I haven't read the thread very thoroughly). It's perfectly reasonable to suggest possible reasons why women get paid less than men, one of which is discrimination (there are doubtless multiple factors).

Discrimination itself can be a secondary factor: discrimination against a group might change the culture of that group. IN the U.S. (for example) it seems reasonable that African American subcultures would have less respect for America's laws than many white subcultures (because the subcultures developed in a time when legal discrimination existed). For women, specific discrimination limiting their participation in certain professions in the past may no longer exist, but culturally constituted norms about women's role in child care, about whether drive and ambition are attractive qualities in men or in women, or about what professions are consistent with femininity might have developed as a result of discrimination.

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Even not having read the thread thoroughly you'd right on the money, Ecurb (and I never did what he said I did, btw; I suggested precisely what you did in your second paragraph).

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

IThere are some people who live in those bubbles where everyone thinks like they do and it reinforces their ideas about how things are or should be, and since nobody questions them in their group they just assume that everyone holds the same beliefs.

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Trust me when I say this doesn't describe me. In fact, I hunt out places where there is huge debate on both sides on issues I'm unfamiliar with and then I use my "critical thinking" to see who has the most facts and reasons the best from them. Having actually studied rationality I've gotten to be a pretty good judge when it comes to issues where one side is clearly wrong and another is clearly right. There are still those where it's uncertain. Like I said, if Clopin is certain he's right then I can point him in the direction of the people that convinced me.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Uh... no. 6-figures is piddly-squat when you look at how wealth is ditributed in the US (at least in the US; I don't know about the rest of the West).

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haha okay buddy, only twenty percent of households make six figures in the States, and that includes everyone who works in the family.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

And you seriously think that cultural biases play no role in what jobs men and women consider appropriate for their sexes?

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I'm sure that it does, but probably less than you might think. I know that men are genuinely more fit for labour positions regardless of cultural bias and I believe it's pretty much incontrovertible that women generally are simply more patient and better with children, as taboo as that is to say nowadays.

I mean take something like Chess. Women simply do not play it. The ratio at any given chess club will likely be something like ten to one (and I'm being generous) men to women. This is despite decades of serious effort by organizations like FIDE, The USCF and The CFC to generate interest in Chess amongst girls and women. There are female exclusive titles, female tournaments, female clubs (so none of that nasty make atmosphere turning women off from Chess), female leagues online, female mixed doubles prize pots (as in a team event where one entrant must be female and one must be male). And scholastic Chess programs and events are targeted evenly at both genders. I mean what's more likely at this point? That men are going out of their way to make Chess unpleasant for women or that women simply aren't as likely to develop an obsessive interest in Chess?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

In the strictest sense, yes, they're free, but neither encouraged before to pursue them or encouraged while pursuing it to continue. A great many women have written about terrible, misogynistic treatment after breaking into the "mens' club" atmosphere of any number of professions. Even in my own profession of poker I've seen it (even though I don't play live that much).

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I believe this happens but I don't know what to tell you. Attitudes are changing. I'm not trying to suggest that misogyny does not exist, I'm just outlining why I don't think women are systematically oppressed compared to men.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

To answer you first and second questions: ABSOLUTELY! Again, you and Mortal keep assuming this "double standard" where none exists. I've already admitted that there are, indeed, social pressures that are biased against men on many fronts as well, and they need remedied as well. Bringing up the fact of male privilege does not mean that there aren't areas where men don't struggle more and don't need society to change as well. One reason we don't see these addressed is that far too many men (like yourself) are out there trying to "debunk" the problems that women face (rather than remedying them) instead of focusing on the problems men face (and trying to remedy them as well).

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One of the reasons we don't see endemic rates of male suicide addressed is because people argue about male privilege on the Internet? Oh okay.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Oh dear, now we're back to you being all reactionary at hearing another term you don't like.

Rape culture is fairly easy to prove. Just look at the statistics for one thing: it's one of the most under-reported, under-prosecuted, under-convicted crimes. Whenever it is reported, victims are held up to more scrutiny than the perpetrators and are frequently accused of making it up (or changing their mind) for "revenge" (never mind that the statistics suggest such false accusations are extremely low). How common is it in our society to use alcohol to try to incapacitate women so they're in no position to consent? How in the world do you think Bill Cosby got away with what he did for so long?

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First of all no, you can't prove that "rape culture" exists because "rape culture" is a totally meaningless phrase. And okay with rape the statistics suggest that there are few prosecutions but it's probably not because all of the judges, jurors and police officers in the world have conspired together to make sure rapists always walk and women can be raped without consequence. Have you considered the nature of the crime? Perhaps it's difficult to prosecute. Let's imagine a situation Morpheus:

You and I, alone together, decide to engage in some mutually consensual sex. After we finish I walk to a police station and file a report saying that you raped me.

And compare it with:

You and I are alone together, you force yourself on me and rape me. After you leave I walk to the police station and file a report saying that you raped me,

Assuming there were no witnesses these two incidents appear exactly the same to any outsider so what do you do? You can't prosecute a man because he is likely to have raped someone, you actually have to prove it. False rape accusations may make up a small number of reported rapes but they do occur and even of there had never been a false rape accusation due diligence for the accused is the bedrock of our legal system.

And I mean isn't the notion that because the accuser is cross examined we live in a literal "rape culture" a bit nuts? How else are you supposed to proceed with the case? Just lock the guy up? No questions asked? It's very unfortunate that rape is as difficult to successfully prosecute as it is, but can you suggest a better method? When the only evidence you have that a crime has taken place is the word of one person then you just can't prosecute right? So I'm genuinely curious about what your solution would be.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Except it's not just the statistics, it's also hundreds of thousands of anecdotes of women talking about how they've felt going against what society encourages women to pursue and trying to break into male-dominated fields, and every time they raise a complaint it provokes the ire of misogynists like yourself and Mortal who just dismiss what they have to say. "Elevatorgate" was a perfect example of a woman talking about what it felt like to be so "pursued" because she was one of the few women at atheist conventions, and how scary that could be, only to get lambasted by Richard Dawkins who went on a non-sequitor rant about women facing harsher problems in African countries (as if that lessens the problems women face here).

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I feel like I've woken up in Bizarro World. Elevatorgate is going to be your citation for male privilege? What next, gamergate? I mean come on. But okay, if some unwanted attention from the opposite sex is so horrendous then I've been sexually harassed (groped unwillingly) and put into awkward situations myself. I survived.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Other than their physical traits, men and women are far more similar than they are different, so the extreme differences we see are predominantly sociological and, yes, they need changing and, yes, they need changing when they unfairly hurt either side. Again, I don't know where you're getting this "double standard" from as I have not suggested that societies are perfectly fair to men.

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The double standard is that you presume men are systematically elevated and women systematically oppressed. I don't think this is true, and I think gender makes up a larger biological difference than you seem to be suggesting.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

So you have a deep fear that the cops will pull you over for no reason? Or a fear they'd shoot you in the back if you dared to run from them and then try to plant a gun on you?

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Yeh, the cops are all KKK dragons just looking for cherubic black orphans to murder. By the way, white and black are not the only ethnicities. Can you tell me why Asians outperform whites in school and under commit crimes if whites are the privileged group?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

I'll take a page out of Mortal's book and use a popular TV show as an example. Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the episode where Will and Carlton are arrested in a small town for driving a fancy car that was loned to them. They're held in prison for hours without cause or without representation. Of course, Carlton's dad (Will's Uncle) is a rich, black, judge, and when he finds out and goes down there he rips into the blatantly racist cops and gets them out of jail. This is a case of illustrating both the negative effects of white privilege (two blacks being arrested for no reason) and how wealth privilege helped mitigate the damage. However, the presence of the latter doesn't erase the former in principle. What happens when you aren't related to someone who's rich and you happen to black? Well, you spend the night in jail for no reason (at best) and, at worst, you can end up like Walter Scott.

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I see. So you're going to argue based on an episode of a TV show?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Privilege is not something you consider on a case-by-case basis, it's something you consider on a statistical average level. If you think statistics are in favor of women when it comes to wages, or blacks when it comes to... just about anything, then you aren't living in this little place called reality.

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But the statistics suggest that women live longer and happier lives. I don't consider that underprivileged honestly. As for blacks, well, I don't think all of their problems are entirely due to systematic oppression. Sorry. Just like I don't think the relative success of Jews (in nobel prizes, world chess champions, etc), or East Asians (much higher attendance at top tier schools, and academic success) is due to systematic elevation. I mean why is white society tying itself into knots to make sure blacks are extremely underprivileged and Asians and Jews are overrepresented at the top. What's in it for the white folk who "run society" to orchestrate this massive conspiracy? I just don't see it. Are blacks also socially encouraged to play sports more than Asians? Or do they just naturally have a tendency towards a better physicality for pro sports.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

There is such a thing as privilege (statistics prove it) and you discredit yourself everytime you fling around these ridiculous, reactionary claims. I have a 150 IQ so I have zero doubt I'm intelligent and quite capable of critical thinking; you I have my doubts about.

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Ah, and now we bring IQ into the mix. Well I have an IQ of 185 so there tough guy!

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

I figured I'd reply to your comment in two separate posts since the first was getting long and dealt mostly with film. I hope that's okay with you.

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Tell you what; since these replies are getting so long and I'm also replying to Clopin as well, why don't you choose one of the two discussions to continue (film VS TOTS/Shakespeare) and we'll trim it to one. I'll let you decide.

The fact that Richard Cory "put a bullet in his head" cannot logically demonstrate that he was not "privileged". (Not that anyone said it does.)

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I mean take something like Chess. Women simply do not play it. The ratio at any given chess club will likely be something like ten to one (and I'm being generous) men to women. This is despite decades of serious effort by organizations like FIDE, The USCF and The CFC to generate interest in Chess amongst girls and women. There are female exclusive titles, female tournaments, female clubs (so none of that nasty make atmosphere turning women off from Chess), female leagues online, female mixed doubles prize pots (as in a team event where one entrant must be female and one must be male). And scholastic Chess programs and events are targeted evenly at both genders. I mean what's more likely at this point? That men are going out of their way to make Chess unpleasant for women or that women simply aren't as likely to develop an obsessive interest in Chess?

!

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We're straying from Shakespeare, but I'm curious: why do you think women aren't as good at chess as men? I've read theories about "spatial intelligence" and perhaps competitiveness is a factor.

I've never played chess at a high level, but I play tournament bridge. More women play bridge than men (bridge is an aging game, and I am one of the youngest competitors in some tournaments, despite being in my 50s). At the level on which I play, the women are just as good as the men. Nonetheless, women have never won world championships in bridge. (There are several forms of world championships in bridge, and perhaps women have won one or two pairs titles, but they haven't won in the Teams Championship, which is the most prestigious title. Two or three women have been on second-place teams.)

The world team championships have been around for 65 years, and each team consists of at least four and usually six players (you need four, because each "team" plays the North-South cards in one room, and the East-West cards of the same hand in another and six allows the team to substitute and avoid getting tired). So that's 300+ players, all men.

Of course it is also true that most experts think that at least half of the champions cheated (the famous Italian Blue team, which dominated bridge in the 50s, 60s and 70s was caught cheating a couple of times, and probably cheated when they weren't caught, too). The famous British team of Boris Shapiro and Terrence Reese was busted for cheating. So maybe women are more honest and honorable than men. (It's harder to cheat today, because the players use "bidding boxes" to signal bids, and screens prevent you from seeing your partner.)

In the lower levels at which I play, many of the men (not me, of course) are more "competitive" than the women, but it doesn't help them much. In fact, since bridge is a team game, cooperating with and encouraging one's partner generally leads to better results than being TOO competitive. Maybe women have better things to do than waste their time on games. What's your theory, Clopin (and since Morpheus is a professional Poker player, perhaps he can chime in, too.)?

Gah, had most of this post typed, took a little break, came back to a "token expired" message from the forum that erased it. Sorry if this one isn't nearly as good.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

haha okay buddy, only twenty percent of households make six figures in the States, and that includes everyone who works in the family.

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The bottom half own less than 1% of America's wealth, so mentioning that only twenty percents of households make six figures isn't saying much. The immense gap is between the wealthiest 10% (even wealthiest 1% of 1%) and everyone else. I'll give you three guesses as to what demographic predominantly makes up the latter groups.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I know that men are genuinely more fit for labour positions regardless of cultural bias and I believe it's pretty much incontrovertible that women generally are simply more patient and better with children, as taboo as that is to say nowadays.

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Men are, on average, physically stronger than women, which would make them better at manual labor jobs. However, given the obesity problem in the US, a 400-lb man is far less fit for manual labor than a healthy, muscular woman. I'm open to the possibility that women might be generally better with children, but I don't know of any studies corroborating this (not that I've looked).

I still think this is missing the point. Other than the physical differences, men and women are far more similar than dissimilar, especially when it comes to cognitive abilities. The vast majority of the wealthiest in this country are wealthy because of their mental faculties (investors, software engineers/designers), not because of their physical strength. Men have slightly better spatial reasoning, which might explain the absence of women in Chess. But take something like the NFL. Decades ago, the majority of women didn't watch. Now, women are the largest growing demographic and have contributed immensely to the huge growth of the league's popularity. What else can you possible chalk that up to other than cultural norms? The notion that, for years, football was thought of a man's game for men; and now that it's become more acceptable for women to like sports we see far more women, well, watching sports.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

First of all no, you can't prove that "rape culture" exists because "rape culture" is a totally meaningless phrase. And okay with rape the statistics suggest that there are few prosecutions but it's probably not because all of the judges, jurors and police officers in the world have conspired together to make sure rapists always walk and women can be raped without consequence. Have you considered the nature of the crime? Perhaps it's difficult to prosecute. Let's imagine a situation Morpheus:

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First of all, I don't know why you think "rape culture" is a "meaningless phrase." It describes how culture normalizes and trivializes rape through a variety of means. You can argue that those things don't happen, thus the rape culture theory is wrong, but it's certainly not meaningless.

Secondly, nobody is suggesting that all judges, jurors, cops, etc. have conspired against women and for rapists, but this isn't how the effects of rape culture (or privilege) happen in general. You don't even need a majority of society to be racist, or sexist, or harbor rape culture beliefs, in order to see the deleterious effects on a statistical level. Take a meta-study like this http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/11/2010 that positively correlated acceptance of rape myths (things like, eg, the frequency of rape, the statistics on false-accusations, etc.) with hostility towards women, racism, heterosexism, classism, and ageism. By the time it gets to, say, a judge, a judge doesn't even have to be consciously or unconsciously sexist in a way that favors men overall, but such myths are held by him (or even her; women can believe the same myths) then they are far more likely to do things like victim blaming, of which there are many documented cases of. By that I mean cases of judges focusing on what the victim did wrong: what they wore, who they were with, how they acted, etc., usually things which are neither legal or moral justifications for rape, and that, if we weren't in a rape culture, a judge wouldn't feel compelled to point out when the woman did nothing wrong but enjoy the right to wear what she wants, be with who she wants, and act how she wants (within the bounds of the law, of course).

Finally, yes, rape is a difficult crime to prosecute in general anyway. If there is no physical evidence or witnesses (like there is in most forcible rape, but isn't in date rape or other forms of intoxication, or coercian where the rapist is a family member or friend) then it's entirely a he-said, she-said scenario, and I absolutely agree we can't just believe every claim and arrest, prosecute, and convict every accused man. We absolutely need the evidence. However, because of the effects of rape culture, amongst them being things like victim blaming and the non-education on what actually counts as rape (eg, having sex with an intoxicated woman is rape; she is not capable of consenting) and the social pressure put on women to not be open with their sexuality (most women report feeling "shame" after rape; where do you think that comes from?), we often end up in a situation where women don't even report it to present the opportunity for getting that evidence. When you combine the under-reporting with the difficulty of having evidence, prosecuting, convicting, the perpetuation of rape myths amongst authorities, and the statistics that show that false reports are in the minority, you're in a situation where the vast majority of rapists go free, and most never even spend a day in jail. That's a horrible reality, and there's no way it couldn't be helped by fixing various elements about how we, as a society, think about rape and treat potential victims.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Elevatorgate is going to be your citation for male privilege?

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It wasn't used as a citation for privilege, but a citation for how men regularly dismiss the anecdotal experiences of women expressing their discomfort in a male-dominated area. Whether you agree with her or not (and, frankly, I think she was a bit over-sensitive as it's hard to imagine a reality where no men will ever approach women in a vulnerable situation), you can't deny that that's precisely what happened.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

The double standard is that you presume men are systematically elevated and women systematically oppressed.

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This isn't a presumption, it's an inference drawn from a wealth of statistical data. BTW, I'd hesitate to use the word "oppressed" as women have achieved a far closer-to-equal society than what we once had. I'd say they're still, on average, disadvantaged compared to men. This is mostly what privilege is anyway; not necessarily oppression, but the recognition of arenas in which one group has an innate advantage over another because of society.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Yeh, the cops are all KKK dragons just looking for cherubic black orphans to murder. By the way, white and black are not the only ethnicities. Can you tell me why Asians outperform whites in school and under commit crimes if whites are the privileged group?

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Firstly, as I stated above about rape culture, it is not necessary for all (or even most) cops to be racists in order to see the deleterious effects of those that are, especially when those that are are concentrated in certain places.

Secondly, the reason for the success of Asians probably has a lot to do with the completely different backgrounds, histories, and cultures of Asians compared to blacks. Besides the temporary internments of Asian Americans during WW2, America has generally had a peaceful relationship with the Asian community (they were never slaves, eg). After WW2 many Asian countries radically Westernized before immigrating (this was well-documented in post-WW2 Japanese cinema) so there was less of a culture shock. This history is quite different than the one where a little over a century ago whites were buying, selling, and owning blacks; or one where even half a century ago, blacks were segregated from the rest of the population and had to struggle and fight for equality.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

So you're going to argue based on an episode of a TV show?

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No, I used the episode to illustrate how both black and wealth privilege can co-exist, and even if the latter can mitigate the effects of the former in certain situations, those situations are rare, especially when blacks make up a larger percentage of the poor in this country and a miniscule minority of its wealthy.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I mean why is white society tying itself into knots to make sure blacks are extremely underprivileged and Asians and Jews are overrepresented at the top.

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Not all white society is. In particular, blacks thrive more in states and cities where there is a much higher degree of multi-racial integration (ie, not the south). However, most of those states and cities also have a higher cost of living (ie, not the south) and blacks make up a large percentage of the poorest. When you're poor and live in a part of the country where you are much more highly likely to face discrimination it makes it extremely difficult to overcome that initial disadvantage without having some extraordinary talent (intellectual, physical, etc.), luck, or something else. It's not so much that white society has to "tie itself into knots" to keep blacks underprivileged, it's more like we're engaged in a vicious cycle made worse by the fact that the majority of whites are completely ignorant about (as the saying goes, one of the effects of white privilege is not knowing about white privilege).

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Originally Posted by Clopin

What's in it for the white folk who "run society" to orchestrate this massive conspiracy?

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What's in it for the wealthiest 10% to keep themselves the wealthiest 10% and make the poorest even poorer so they'll have an even greater share of the wealth? Hmmm, let me think about that brain teaser.

Beyond the actual money/power element, there's also the simple fact that racism is a byproduct of humans being a species of tribal primates. We unconsciously create "us" and "them" groups, and there's no more obvious way to group than by race. We need to recognize that this is an innate aspect of our cognition and not ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist, etc., but rather address it, consciously acknowledge it, and then consciously override it. It's the old thought that you aren't responsible for what thoughts your brain conjures, but for how you act and reason based on them. We might can't reprogram humans, but we can teach them how to better deal with that programming. When you combine that natural proclivity with the well-documented history or racism you end up what we have today; a situation that's better, but where racism is still prevalent in both obvious (the shooting and race riots) and less-obvious ways.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Ah, and now we bring IQ into the mix. Well I have an IQ of 185 so there tough guy!

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Firstly, you brought up intelligence, not me.

Secondly, good, now that we've compared brain penises can we agree that we're both adequately well-hung and dispense with the juvenile strategy of suggesting the other has a major mental handicap by comparison? While you're at it, stop with the Pavlovian somersaults every time I mention a term you understand vaguely enough to dislike but not well enough to actually understand.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

What's your theory, Clopin (and since Morpheus is a professional Poker player, perhaps he can chime in, too.)?

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Well, again, I've read women poker players talk about how they've been made to feel uncomfortable when playing at a male-dominated table, and I've witnessed this first-hand myself. However, because of the pioneering of players like Jennifer Harmon, Annie Duke, Vanessa Selbst, and even Jennifer Tilly, there have been many more women coming to the game now than before the exposure. I suspect that many women would like to, especially those that are good at math and problem solving, but are then turned off by the sexism they're bound to face from the more boorish players. Really, since the advent and popularity of internet poker I'd guess that there have been even MORE women playing poker and we just don't know about it. Selbst was one of the first to make a huge name for herself as a dominant online player (enough to reach the #1 ranking by the Global Poker Index, which is extremely impressive) and she's since made the transition to live games as well (though at a much higher level where there are probably fewer drunken, misogynistic, testosterone drenched idiots). So women are certainly more than capable.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

We're straying from Shakespeare, but I'm curious: why do you think women aren't as good at chess as men? I've read theories about "spatial intelligence" and perhaps competitiveness is a factor.

I've never played chess at a high level, but I play tournament bridge. More women play bridge than men (bridge is an aging game, and I am one of the youngest competitors in some tournaments, despite being in my 50s). At the level on which I play, the women are just as good as the men. Nonetheless, women have never won world championships in bridge. (There are several forms of world championships in bridge, and perhaps women have won one or two pairs titles, but they haven't won in the Teams Championship, which is the most prestigious title. Two or three women have been on second-place teams.)

The world team championships have been around for 65 years, and each team consists of at least four and usually six players (you need four, because each "team" plays the North-South cards in one room, and the East-West cards of the same hand in another and six allows the team to substitute and avoid getting tired). So that's 300+ players, all men.

Of course it is also true that most experts think that at least half of the champions cheated (the famous Italian Blue team, which dominated bridge in the 50s, 60s and 70s was caught cheating a couple of times, and probably cheated when they weren't caught, too). The famous British team of Boris Shapiro and Terrence Reese was busted for cheating. So maybe women are more honest and honorable than men. (It's harder to cheat today, because the players use "bidding boxes" to signal bids, and screens prevent you from seeing your partner.)

In the lower levels at which I play, many of the men (not me, of course) are more "competitive" than the women, but it doesn't help them much. In fact, since bridge is a team game, cooperating with and encouraging one's partner generally leads to better results than being TOO competitive. Maybe women have better things to do than waste their time on games. What's your theory, Clopin (and since Morpheus is a professional Poker player, perhaps he can chime in, too.)?

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I think I have a pretty good grasp on why women don't excell at Chess. First of all women have weaker spatial awareness compared to men and spatial awareness is basically all Chess is when you get down to it. By comparison women have stronger verbal reasoning and possess a mental skill set which advantages them in schools. It's my opinion that women grossly outperform men at school because they are simply better suited for it. I mean what's more likely, the idea that society is arbitrarily choosing to disadvantage boys and men in the classroom but then also turning around and holding girls and women back in certain STEM fields, Chess, and videogames, or that men and women really do just naturally excell in different areas (generally). The former inference showcases the sort of logic you have to accept when your position is to immediately assume that if women (or any other group) underperform in any area it must be due to discrimination or sociological factors. I'm pretty thoroughly convinced myself that men end up in prison more often than women because men are more aggressive and often tend to be stupider (yes, stupider, the vast majoroty of people who comprise the lowest and highest ends of the inteligence spectrum are men, this is an important point), and not because men are "pressured by society" to be more violent and aggressive. Testosterone is a real enough thing guys. It would be nice if everyone were equal but i don't see why it would be true.

Anyway women actually aren't much worse at Chess at the club level, and in fact I'm not even sure if their aggregate rating is lower. Basically where you see the real disparity between women and men in Chess is at the very top, where you need to be a very specific type of genius to excell. World chess champions routinely clock in at 190 IQ's and frankly there are just more male geniuses. I have no idea why, but there are more.

As to why fewer women play Chess? I have no idea, but it's quite a niche anyway right? I live in a town of ten thousand inhabitants with maybe another few thousand seasonal guests at any time and our chess club sees a turnout of between three and eight players per week! You need to be a little obsessive to play the game well and it's my own experience that men are much much more likely to develop obsessions around niche hobbies. Chess is also a competitive game and men are more competitive.

By the way I've taken a couple of tests (some quite reputable and some not so much) which have consistently indicated that my weakest intellectual attribute is the exact spatial awareness which is of such enormous importance in chess and apparently so lacking in women. Despite this when I was serious about the game eight years ago I went from a 900 elo rating (absolute beginner) to 1800+ (class A and very respectable, even amongst tournament players) in about eighteen months. I don't think there is anything hindering most women from doing something like this as well, except they have to play chess for maybe two hours everyday for well... eighteen months. The point is that I can never be Magnus Carlsen, in fact I might not even have it in me to reach GM level, even if I had started early (say five) and studied hard for my entire life. It might not be possible for me to ever attain the grandmaster chess title because I think I'm a little deficient in the area where you need to be strongest to play Chess really really well. For this reason i think we see fewer women at the peak of Chess.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

The bottom half own less than 1% of America's wealth, so mentioning that only twenty percents of households make six figures isn't saying much. The immense gap is between the wealthiest 10% (even wealthiest 1% of 1%) and everyone else. I'll give you three guesses as to what demographic predominantly makes up the latter groups.

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At the absolute elite/billionaire level, fine, white men rule the world. But it's a bit absurd to suggest this helps me out any. It doesn't. These wealthy billionaires are not helping out other white guys like themselves anymore than they are helping out black or Native American women. And I believe you have a higher chance of winning the lottery than becoming a billionaire anyway, no matter how white and male you are.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Men are, on average, physically stronger than women, which would make them better at manual labor jobs. However, given the obesity problem in the US, a 400-lb man is far less fit for manual labor than a healthy, muscular woman.

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O... kay? Why are you comparing four hundred pound men with healthy, muscular women?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

First of all, I don't know why you think "rape culture" is a "meaningless phrase." It describes how culture normalizes and trivializes rape through a variety of means. You can argue that those things don't happen, thus the rape culture theory is wrong, but it's certainly not meaningless.

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Culture doesn't normalize and trivialize rape. We do not live in a society which accepts or encourages rape. Morph I've seen people cite the fact that precautionary methods for women have been encouraged to help prevent rape as evidence of this so called "rape culture", with the idea being that society should teach potential male rapists "not to rape" before it teaches women not to accept random drinks from strangers or to walk down a dark alleyway alone at night. Do you believe this is indicative of normalized or trivialized rape yourself? When I was a child a not insignificant amount of classroom time was spent on "stranger danger", when we were taught not to accompany strangers to private locations, not to enter the cars of strangers, and basically not to allow ourselves into situations where we could potentially be victimized, murdered, raped, kidnapped, or otherwise abused. Isn't this indicative of "child predator culture"? A society where children are taught to protect themselves instead of potential predators simply "taught" to not a abuse or molest children? The notion is absurd right? Do I live in a thief culture because I've been taught to lock my valuables up when I go to the gym, let's say? I mean shouldn't people simply be taught "not to steal" my things? Why is the onus on me to defend myself and my property? Sure in a perfect world there would be no rapists, murderers, pedophiles, kidnappers, thieves or gangs but all of these things exist and educating people not to rape, murder and steal can't erase rapes, homicides or thefts, it just can't.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Secondly, nobody is suggesting that all judges, jurors, cops, etc. have conspired against women and for rapists, but this isn't how the effects of rape culture (or privilege) happen in general. You don't even need a majority of society to be racist, or sexist, or harbor rape culture beliefs, in order to see the deleterious effects on a statistical level. Take a meta-study like this http://jiv.sagepub.com/content/25/11/2010 that positively correlated acceptance of rape myths (things like, eg, the frequency of rape, the statistics on false-accusations, etc.) with hostility towards women, racism, heterosexism, classism, and ageism. By the time it gets to, say, a judge, a judge doesn't even have to be consciously or unconsciously sexist in a way that favors men overall, but such myths are held by him (or even her; women can believe the same myths) then they are far more likely to do things like victim blaming, of which there are many documented cases of. By that I mean cases of judges focusing on what the victim did wrong: what they wore, who they were with, how they acted, etc., usually things which are neither legal or moral justifications for rape, and that, if we weren't in a rape culture, a judge wouldn't feel compelled to point out when the woman did nothing wrong but enjoy the right to wear what she wants, be with who she wants, and act how she wants (within the bounds of the law, of course).

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I would love to see a citation for say, ten (if this is endemic, ten should be laughably easy to find!) court cases where the rape victim's clothes have been cited by the judge as a mitigating factor in the rapists defense.

[QUOTE=MorpheusSandman;1301399]Finally, yes, rape is a difficult crime to prosecute in general anyway. If there is no physical evidence or witnesses (like there is in most forcible rape, but isn't in date rape or other forms of intoxication, or coercian where the rapist is a family member or friend) then it's entirely a he-said, she-said scenario, and I absolutely agree we can't just believe every claim and arrest, prosecute, and convict every accused man. We absolutely need the evidence. However, because of the effects of rape culture, amongst them being things like victim blaming and the non-education on what actually counts as rape (eg, having sex with an intoxicated woman is rape; she is not capable of consenting) and the social pressure put on women to not be open with their sexuality (most women report feeling "shame" after rape; where do you think that comes from?), we often end up in a situation where women don't even report it to present the opportunity for getting that evidence. When you combine the under-reporting with the difficulty of having evidence, prosecuting, convicting, the perpetuation of rape myths amongst authorities, and the statistics that show that false reports are in the minority, you're in a situation where the vast majority of rapists go free, and most never even spend a day in jail. That's a horrible reality, and there's no way it couldn't be helped by fixing various elements about how we, as a society, think about rape and treat potential victims. [QUOTE]

Well if bolded is all you need for a rape to have occurred then I am both a rapist and a rape victim! Okay if every time sex occurs and both parties are drunk this counts as rape then I guess we do live in a rape culture! This only applies to women? Why? If I get really drunk and have sex I've not been raped, yes? I had better turn myself in, lol, I'm a rapist by your definition.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

It wasn't used as a citation for privilege, but a citation for how men regularly dismiss the anecdotal experiences of women expressing their discomfort in a male-dominated area. Whether you agree with her or not (and, frankly, I think she was a bit over-sensitive as it's hard to imagine a reality where no men will ever approach women in a vulnerable situation), you can't deny that that's precisely what happened.

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Look I've dated a couple very beautiful girls and the amount of attention they can get at all times is astounding, and it can obviously be uncomfortable. However, on the flip side of the coin I am friends with several (three at my current count) young men, in their early to mid twenties, who have literally never had sex and not for any lack of desire or inclination to celibacy. I was reading some sort of analysis of T.S Eliot's The Wasteland and at the beginning of section III (Death by Water) the analyst remarks that the title is interesting in that death by water can occur in two ways: you can die by drowning as the Pheonician experiences in the third section or you can perish for lack of water, as can be seen in the landscape of the entire world in the second half of the first section. Basically I can understand female complaints about male attention being uncomfortable and unpleasant, they are literally drowning in it, but I think people need to understand that for a lot of men there is no water, there is no sexual attention, and this can be a very, very unpleasant thing to deal with in your life. It's easy to lack empathy but I will say that if I could reverse the male/female sexual dynamic (making women the pursuers and men the gatekeepers) I would hesitate for quite literally zero seconds before making the switch.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Secondly, the reason for the success of Asians probably has a lot to do with the completely different backgrounds, histories, and cultures of Asians compared to blacks. Besides the temporary internments of Asian Americans during WW2, America has generally had a peaceful relationship with the Asian community (they were never slaves, eg). After WW2 many Asian countries radically Westernized before immigrating (this was well-documented in post-WW2 Japanese cinema) so there was less of a culture shock. This history is quite different than the one where a little over a century ago whites were buying, selling, and owning blacks; or one where even half a century ago, blacks were segregated from the rest of the population and had to struggle and fight for equality.

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I agree with your first sentence. Asians succeed because Asian values are conducive to success. I think blacks are overrepresented in crime statistics because they actually commit more crimes, and not because they are being picked out by racist cops. I noticed you decided to sidestep replying to my comment about Jews, however, so I'll repeat it. Why are Jews so successful as a minority group? Are Jews supposed to have a heavily privileged history or recent past? Was antisemitism not endemic as recently as, say, 1940?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Not all white society is. In particular, blacks thrive more in states and cities where there is a much higher degree of multi-racial integration (ie, not the south). However, most of those states and cities also have a higher cost of living (ie, not the south) and blacks make up a large percentage of the poorest. When you're poor and live in a part of the country where you are much more highly likely to face discrimination it makes it extremely difficult to overcome that initial disadvantage without having some extraordinary talent (intellectual, physical, etc.), luck, or something else. It's not so much that white society has to "tie itself into knots" to keep blacks underprivileged, it's more like we're engaged in a vicious cycle made worse by the fact that the majority of whites are completely ignorant about (as the saying goes, one of the effects of white privilege is not knowing about white privilege).

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You've very crucially missed my point here. I'm not asking why a predominantly white society would want to underprivilege its black citizens, that would be perfectly logical. I'm asking why a predominantly white society wants to underprivilege its black citizens while simultaneously over privileging (if results are an indication of privilege as you probably believe) other minority groups like Jews and Asians over white people themselves.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

What's in it for the wealthiest 10% to keep themselves the wealthiest 10% and make the poorest even poorer so they'll have an even greater share of the wealth? Hmmm, let me think about that brain teaser.

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More wealth and power! Was that a trick question?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Beyond the actual money/power element, there's also the simple fact that racism is a byproduct of humans being a species of tribal primates. We unconsciously create "us" and "them" groups, and there's no more obvious way to group than by race. We need to recognize that this is an innate aspect of our cognition and not ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist, etc., but rather address it, consciously acknowledge it, and then consciously override it. It's the old thought that you aren't responsible for what thoughts your brain conjures, but for how you act and reason based on them. We might can't reprogram humans, but we can teach them how to better deal with that programming. When you combine that natural proclivity with the well-documented history or racism you end up what we have today; a situation that's better, but where racism is still prevalent in both obvious (the shooting and race riots) and less-obvious ways.

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And yet this racist society has elected a visibly black man to be their president. White people are shot by the police too you know, it's not always a race thing. You're white I believe? And American? How about you go charge a police officer and if he doesn't shoot you come back and tell me about it. This is where confirmation bias plays a strong role in how you're perceiving data. If every single time a black person is shot and killed by the police you assume it's a race issue I have a lot of problems with that rationale. Like I said, white people are shot by the police as well, but when they are it's not a race issue right? The police must have had motives other than race when they pulled the trigger on the white guy, but every time a black person is shot it absolutely must be racially motivated? I mean... what?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Secondly, good, now that we've compared brain penises can we agree that we're both adequately well-hung and dispense with the juvenile strategy of suggesting the other has a major mental handicap by comparison? While you're at it, stop with the Pavlovian somersaults every time I mention a term you understand vaguely enough to dislike but not well enough to actually understand.

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No. Phrasing like "privilege", "rape culture" and "victim blaming" are pretty much the liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck and Donald Trump. That's what you look like to reasonable people when you spout this kind of drivel. You look like Glenn Beck and Donald Trump.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Tell you what; since these replies are getting so long and I'm also replying to Clopin as well, why don't you choose one of the two discussions to continue (film VS TOTS/Shakespeare) and we'll trim it to one. I'll let you decide.

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Don't worry about it. It's just a friendly discussion and you don't have to answer any questions you don't want to or which make you uncomfortable. We can just drop it. I'm sorry if things got a little heated and tense. I wasn't trying to team up against you with Clopin, or make you feel bad about your personal beliefs. For my part, I've been enjoying our debate very much. It's so rarely I find people I can talk to about Shakespeare or silent films that it's actually quite the treat.

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Originally Posted by Ecurb

We're straying from Shakespeare, but I'm curious: why do you think women aren't as good at chess as men? I've read theories about "spatial intelligence" and perhaps competitiveness is a factor.

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That is weird, but born out by my experiences when I used to play chess. The girls I played were always weaker than the boys. I was never more than average or novice level, generally rating in the mid to low 1200s out of 2700+ but I always beat the girls I played. Things did get very competitive in my high school chess club, since we played other teams, and two of the players went to state level or something. I quit when they threw our two girls out for being the weakest on the team. For me it was always a social thing for fun, and I guess I didn't have the discipline for it either at the time.

I played a cute girl in college, who had her own board and was asking people to play her. I figured if she had her own board, then she must be really good, and she was just hustling me. But then I crushed her and she was sad. And that was the end of that. Another time, I'd just seen that movie The Joy Luck Club and thought every little Asian girl was a chess prodigy who played world class violin. So when this ten year old offered to play me, I thought "Sure, why not. Let's see what you got." And then I tore this little girls world apart. "It's like you're reading my mind," she cried. Oops. Come to think of it, I beat my older sister too.

I wonder if there are more women playing Go or Shogi than chess? Whenever I watch an Asian movie the women are always playing Mahjong. The popular games like the popular sports vary by region and time. Chess is probably a lot bigger in Russia than the US for instance. I was just reading a book about medieval sports and games. It was really surprising that I'd played most of the childhood games like duck duck goose, ring around the rosy, blind man's bluff, leapfrog, tag, etc. But what was really cool were all the variants of chess and checkers they had like Rithmomachy a chess like arithmetic game which is supposed to be even harder to play. The book mentioned that Romans were fond of dice games, and the Norse were fond of board games; so when they met we got board games with dice like say Monopoly though that came out in 1935. Apparently, in contemporary game construction Germans lead the field and have a different philosophy than American board games. American board games tend to be more adversarial, whereas the Germans are more cooperative. The American games are frequently martial or violent, whereas the German games are constructive about farming (Agricola), trains (Ticket to Ride), or building castles (Carcassonne). Oh, and American games are generally more luck based.

This is becoming a bit of a tangent, and I apologize, but I wonder if games have their own periods the way that literature does? I mean I can see early Tarot card games developing into Poker, Blackjack, and morphing into card games like Magic the Gathering on the way to something else.

I've played lots of board, card, and video games, plus whatever the Dungeons and Dragons type games count as with women at social gatherings with my friends, so they don't seem to be excluded like they may be in chess. However, a female friend of mine likes farming and fishing games, whereas I'm more fond of first person shooters. That may be a gender preference. I don't know anything about Gamergate, but I have a male and a female friend who build their own board games for us to play from time to time. And another friend of mine who worked on the Batman series of videogames is always taking pictures of himself at videogame exhibitions with his female coworkers. Anyway, it looks like women are involved in making the games, even if perhaps they don't play them as much or don't play the same kind as men do.

Hahahaha, German people playing German games! Looks a little like:

http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Pun...8a_4651138.png

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Originally Posted by mortalterror

Don't worry about it. It's just a friendly discussion and you don't have to answer any questions you don't want to or which make you uncomfortable. We can just drop it. I'm sorry if things got a little heated and tense. I wasn't trying to team up against you with Clopin, or make you feel bad about your personal beliefs. For my part, I've been enjoying our debate very much. It's so rarely I find people I can talk to about Shakespeare or silent films that it's actually quite the treat.

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Oh, don't get me wrong, I do consider these friendly discussions (the only "uncomfortable heat and tension" is between Clopin and I; not you and I). I just suggested we trim it to one discussion because the posts are getting so long and I don't always have time everyday to respond to everything. In my early 20s I had boundless energy and could face down entire message boards while standing alone like a conquering Achilles bathed in the textual blood of my Trojan adversaries... these days I'm closer to the grumpy old man in Up! If you really want to continue both I may have to limit myself to typing one lengthy response every day. We'll see. Real life can get busy sometimes (hence my periodic absences from this board). :)

Short on time today, but let me address this:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

No. Phrasing like "privilege", "rape culture" and "victim blaming" are pretty much the liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck and Donald Trump. That's what you look like to reasonable people when you spout this kind of drivel. You look like Glenn Beck and Donald Trump.

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Yes, they certainly CAN BE when they're parroted by people that are ignorant of the actual research that's gone on surrounding the terms. In fact, when I first started reading discussions centered around those terms I encountered plenty of liberals that couldn't make a coherent rational argument without huge gaping holes and an inability to fill them with factual data. As someone who stresses the importance of rationalism in forming beliefs, I try to only be swayed by evidence and not rhetoric. It wasn't until I found some who were actually educated on the studies behind the terms that I came to see them as having substantial evidence supporting them. My offer to introduce you to the forum where I learned about them is still open, as there are definitely people there more educated than myself on the topic, but I hope you can agree that when discussing the issue I don't seem as irrational as Beck and Trump.

I don't agree at all. What we've determined from statistics does not support your conclusions and you still haven't given my satisfactory answers to the following simple questions.

1. If men are privileged how are they privileged? There doesn't seem to be much disagreement around a few stats in this thread so let's look at them:

Men earn about 5% more salary for equivalent work.
Men make up the vast majority of elite positions in fields like finance and politics.
Women are underrepresented in STEM subjects and a few outlying interests like chess and video games
Men are underrepresented in nursing, childcare, teaching, etc.
Women live about a decade longer than men.
Girls and women highly out score men and boys in school all the way up to university graduation.
Men make up the vast majority of suicides.
Men make up the vast majority of prison populations.
Men make up the vast majority of combat deaths.
Men make up the vast majority of people who are homeless.

So none of that is open for debate right? All of those statements are simply factual. What I struggle with is your interpretation of the data. It seems clear as day to me that the facts suggest men are not, generally, privileged at all, but in fact seem to be quite disadvantaged in many areas of life, especially when you get down to the really lower classes of people. I know the standard social justice warrior tactic here is to say something like "well all of this can be explained by "patriarchy" (more buzzwords for you to use later if you want) and "gender roles" which negatively impact men as well as women". Fine, whatever, we can discuss that later if you want, but for the here and now I'm trying to convince you that your average, run of the mill, guy is not particularly 'privileged' compared to your average female. The elite of course, are white (or Jewish) and largely male, but that's pretty irrelevant when we're talking about the daily lives of average men.

2. If white privilege exists then why are whites consistently outperformed, in school and out, by Asians and Jews in predominantly white countries? Shouldn't white privilege lead to a system where whites are academically and socially elevated above all other races? Or are whites so genetically inferior that we only do as well as we do because of this privilege in the first place?

3. Well when you respond about rape culture we might have something here.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

I don't agree at all. What we've determined from statistics does not support your conclusions and you still haven't given my satisfactory answers to the following simple questions.

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I'll address this post and your last in more detail when I have time. My point, however, was that I think you can agree that the arguments I've presented are not as irrational as Beck and Trump. It's entirely possible that after we flesh out the statistics that we might come to different interpretations since reasonable people can disagree and, frankly, I didn't save every study I was linked to when learning on the subject. I was just trying to establish a mutual agreement between us that the discussion isn't an intellectual titan (you) VS a pea-brained parrot (me), but rather two adequately intelligent, critical thinking people that may have different levels of experience/knowledge on this subject, have come to different conclusions, and are now trying to parse how that happened by rational argument. You entered this discussion very hostile with the seeming assumption that I was an idiot that was mindlessly parroting buzzwords, when in actuality I was someone who was previously resistant to such terms myself and only came to accept them once statistics and rational arguments were presented. If you're actually after a constructive discussion it's generally not a good idea to start with such hostility and an air of superiority.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

You entered this discussion very hostile with the seeming assumption that I was an idiot that was mindlessly parroting buzzwords, when in actuality I was someone who was previously resistant to such terms myself and only came to accept them once statistics and rational arguments were presented. If you're actually after a constructive discussion it's generally not a good idea to start with such hostility and an air of superiority.

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Bolded: And I haven't changed my mind there.

Anyway when you're talking to a social justice warrior it's not important that they feel comfortable or that you convince them of anything. Hardly anybody will change their mind on this sort of thing despite overwhelming evidence that "privilege" (especially make privilege) is total nonsense (not the word, the concept as understood by modern social justice warriors). Once you let loose that you honestly believe Western society is a "rape culture" you became as impossible to take seriously as Beck and Trump.

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Originally Posted by Clopin

Anyway when you're talking to a social justice warrior it's not important that they feel comfortable or that you convince them of anything. Hardly anybody will change their mind on this sort of thing despite overwhelming evidence that "privilege" (especially make privilege) is total nonsense (not the word, the concept as understood by modern social justice warriors). Once you let loose that you honestly believe Western society is a "rape culture" you became as impossible to take seriously as Beck and Trump.

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Then I'm honestly not even sure what the point of continuing this discussion is. You seem completely intent on stereotyping me, dismissing every bit of evidence I offer, while simultaneously insisting you have "overwhelming evidence" (while offering none) that these terms are nonsense, and then displaying a gross ignorance of what the terms you vigorously object to even mean or describe. Your actions are not indicative of anyone I've ever met with a high IQ and critical thinking ability; they're indicative of people suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Offering none? Well when you stop replying to my arguments it can seem like that I guess ;)

You can leave whenever you want though; why would I care?

I haven't "stopped replying to your arguments," I said I don't have time to type a full reply to your last post right now; but up until the last one I've read the only "evidence" you've offered is laughably irrelevant to the topic and only displays you don't understand the terms to begin with. In light of this, your hostile, reactionary responses make sense as they bespeak a combination of ignorance and insecurity, which makes your ridiculing of my intelligence all the more ironic.

Uh huh.

Yes, and it's extremely easy to demonstrate, like when you brought up the fact of women living longer. This demonstrates your ignorance on two levels:

1. Privilege is about social equality, not biological equality.
2. The existence of certain female privileges, even if you could conclusively demonstrate them, would not disprove male privilege. This ignorantly assumes that the two are mutually exclusive.

You arguing nonsense like giant conspiracies where everyone is racist/sexist is an example too, as it is not a requirement for everyone to be racist/sexist for white and male privilege to exist on a statistical level. Hell, even knowing the first thing about statistics would tell you that.

So you have literally and repeatedly argued points that have nothing to do with what privilege even means or is and wouldn't disprove it even if you were right.

So if men and women are privileged in different ways and you can't conclusively show that men generally have a higher quality of life as a result of being male then what exactly is male privilege? Couldn't you just say that men and women enjoy different perquisites and pitfalls due to a huge number of reasons, some biological and some sociological? Where is this huge advantage in being male really being felt in the lives of average men? And if there is no huge advantage what is male privilege?

And why can we easily accept that women live longer due to biological factors, but it's impossible for men to actually be biologically hard wired to excell in certain areas where women may be deficient? Maybe I'll take a page from the SJW handbook and argue that men live shorter lives because "society" places more stress on men, I mean it's the exact same as arguing that women don't succeed in chess because "society" is holding them back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Clopin

So if men and women are privileged in different ways and you can't conclusively show that men generally have a higher quality of life as a result of being male then what exactly is male privilege? Couldn't you just say that men and women enjoy different perquisites and pitfalls due to a huge number of reasons, some biological and some sociological? Where is this huge advantage in being male really being felt in the lives of average men? And if there is no huge advantage what is male privilege?

And why can we easily accept that women live longer due to biological factors, but it's impossible for men to actually be biologically hard wired to excell in certain areas where women may be deficient? Maybe I'll take a page from the SJW handbook and argue that men live shorter lives because "society" places more stress on men, I mean it's the exact same as arguing that women don't succeed in chess because "society" is holding them back.

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I have no idea if men are (in general) more "privileged" than women in the modern West. Nonetheless, Clopin, I agree with Morpheus that some of your statistics suggesting that they are not are irrelevant.

Perhaps we can agree that in (a hypothetical) polity where only white men have the franchise to vote, that constitutes a form of white male privilege. In addition, perhaps we can agree that in such a society, women might live longer than men, commit suicide less often than men, and die in combat less often than men (etc., etc.). They might do better in school than men. None of this is relevant to whether voting rights constitute white male "privilege".

Think of Muslim societies where women are denied the right to work outside the home, the right to vote, and the right to go to school. Clearly, men have access to some of these "privileges" and women do not (although, of course, it would be reasonable to say that not having to work outside the home also constitutes a "privilege"). Nonetheless, it's certainly possible that Muslim women live longer, are imprisoned less frequently, and are homeless less often than men -- in fact (without any special knowledge) I'd bet this is the case.

At the same time, I agree with you that salary statistics (etc., etc.) don't PROVE "male privilege" (although they may be "consistent" with it). There could be any number of reasons for the statistical differential in salaries.

Also, "social equality" (to use Morpheus' term) is complicated. Your six-figure-earning welder on the pipeline makes as much money as a Harvard professor, but their social and cultural status is quite different. The professor enjoys cultural and social "privileges" that are difficult to prove or quantify. Charlie Rose never seems to interview the welder.

In addition, both women and black people enjoy certain "privileges" that white men do not (the NFL, for example, suspends players who hit women, but gives them salary increases for "hitting" men). The legal privileges that white men used to enjoy in the U.S. no longer exist; the cultural attitudes on which they were based and by which they were justified may constitute more subtle "privileges", and may change more slowly.

One more aside: the popularity of the notion of White Male Privilege is itself a sort of cultural privilege. The salary differentials Morpheus (and others) refers to as supporting the notion of White Male Privilege suggest that we place some sort of cultural value on wealth. I don't hear people arguing that women are "privileged" because (as a possible example) they work shorter hours than men (if they do). It's sort of a chicken and egg question -- do men strive for what is culturally valued, or do we culturally value what men strive for?

Good post. I'm only referring to the Western world, by the way. I am aware that women are grossly oppressed in other parts of the world.

My statistics are at least as valuable as his. If you're going to equate privilege with equal rights and freedoms then we can end the discussion right now as women have absolutely no fewer legal rights than men do. When he argues that male privilege exists I believe he is suggesting that society harbours a climate more conducive to male success than female, and in my opinion this is not true (Assuming your metric for determining success is not entirely based on salary. As you said the Harvard professor and pipe fitter are probably not going to be considered equally 'successful' despite earning a comparative wages).There are also affirmative action quotas for schools and job positions. Sometimes these aren't only a problem for white people either. The average disparity between an Asian applicant being accepted to Harvard and a Black applicant receiving the acceptance slip is something like 400 points on the SAT. So who's privileged here? The black guy who can get into an elite school with a much weaker score, or the Asian guy who might not get in, but gets to see more of his racial group represented at elite schools?