It’s a proud day for the dudes over at A Voice for Men, which is celebrating the landing of the Curiousity rover on Mars by giving dudes everywhere serious dude credit for the event, which apparently involved no women at all. Well, maybe a few. But it certainly didn’t involve any of the women in the women’s studies department at Columbia University!
Actually it would be rather difficult for that to be the case. Impossible, really, as there is no women’s studies department at Columbia. Instead, Columbia has an Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an interdisciplinary center that works in cooperation with the Barnard College Women’s Studies department.
In any case, that once sentence is the entire text of the post, which linked to a live feed of the landing.
But to make sure everyone understands the MAN-significance of this MAN-vent, the AVFM dudes promoted it with this MAN-tastic blurb on the front page. (I mean the blurb on the right, of course, celebrating MEN and their UTTER MASTERYof technology. Just ignore that bit on the left about the technical glitches that AVFM has itself been having lately.)
The comments are more or less what we’ve come to expect from the AVFM crowd. I especially liked these two, from a manly fellow calling himself ActaNonVerba.
His followup is a bit Anthony Zarat-esque in its utopian grandeur:
The point about Ada Lovelace is that (unlike babbage), she saw the theory of how to use the device of which he saw the mechanism. The theory worked, even in absence of the device.
I was at work thinking today about Varpole’s declaration of his Objectivist ideals. It completely destroys most of his complaints, esp. about things like women expecting men to pay for dates.
If, after all the Prime Duty of a person to look after that person’s interest (as that person sees it) then a woman trying to get her date to pay isn’t being Misandrist, she is, Objectively, deciding it’s in her interest to see is she can get another person to pay.
One could argue it would be immoral her to not make the attempt, as she needs to know if the person she is dating is morally strong enough to stand up for himself. She might, quite reasonably, not want to further date a person to whom she isn’t morally superior. In a more limited sense she could argue she is making him pay as a recompense for her time. The more interesting he is to her, the lower the bill. Not so much because her present time is valuable, but to inhibit those whom she finds tedious from attempting to further waste her time in the future.
This is, of course, the underlying failure of Objectivism. If one is being truly, Objective, one can’t object to someone else treating oneself as means to an end. Because the real root is that the Randian Objectivist isn’t being objective about the world, but rather reducing all other people in it to objects.
Crap, wrong thread.
Not true. It was impractical, but its basic design would be used a century later in working machines. Her theory was not entirely original either.
However, I give full credit were credit is due: To Madame Curie and Sophie Germaine.