We’ve already heard from the so-called Thinking Housewife on the subject of Sally Ride. Meanwhile, over on The Spearhead, the regulars also have opinions about Ride. Regular commenter Keyster has this to say about Ride’s work in promoting science and technology education for girls:
She was supposed to have inspired a generation of girls to take science and math. While she may have inspired the “Grrl Esteem” movement, very few girls went on to get degrees in math and science as a result of Sally Ride … .
She was frustrated by the fact young girls were very interested in math and science initially, “…but for some reason we lose them around the age of 13.” MMmmm…I wonder why that would be. Because they discovered an interest in boys? Not surprisingly, Sally was able to keep her interest.
That’s right: girls are incapable of thinking about both math and boys. Lesbians are the only women who can sustain an interest in math, because their brains aren’t cluttered with thoughts of Justin Bieber. (Ok, bad example.)
In another comment, Keyster expresses his annoyance at the fact that Ride turned out to be capable of astronautery despite being a woman.
Sally Ride proved that a woman can have “the right stuff”, like Amelia Earheart proved a woman can fly long distances.
OK so now that we know she won’t become hysterical during her period while in outerspace and allow her used tampons to clog the toilet, what do we do with this information? Just because a woman accomplishes something normally associated with men, is this inspiring young girls to spontaneously excel en masse and compete against men in male dominated arenas? Or are women like Sally Ride the exceptions that prove the rule?
You know, “exceptions that prove the rule” aren’t actually a thing. The fact that Ride was a capable astronaut doesn’t actually “prove the rule” that women aren’t capable as astronauts, but instead suggests that this particular rule is not a real rule. You would think that Keyster, as a logical male, would understand this.
Stalinist? HAHAHAHA.
Let me guess-you’re a raging jacknut offline.
Nommie… dude.
What nonsense is this?
You are angry at people with relative privilege over you being mean, so you insist on punching down at people with less privilege? Yep, that’s exactly what it is.
Passing mistreatment on is letting those who mistreat win, letting their view of the world win, letting them set the tone, the rules, the life.
Trust me on this.
What, you think our lives have been just bunches of flowers and sunshine?
Duuuuuuude.
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude.
I have some awesome stories to share with you.
So tell us all how bad you had it. Go on. Amaze us. Swing out all the total ugliness of existence that convinced you the human race is unredeemable.
Howard, please don’t encourage the little wankstain to go on and on about how hard he’s had it. He’s done it before, and it’s really not that interesting.
Aw, really? Here I was hoping for hook-for-hand stories! It’s just another round of ‘I’m short and my eyes aren’t quite straight,’ isn’t it.
RIPOFF.
Pretty much, Howard, pretty much.
Ugh: That link you posted said nothing about a connection to wealth and misanthropy/”hating the word”. It suggests that rich people are more likely to behave unethically. There is an explanation for this though that isn’t overly complicated….Rich people can get away with violating societies rules because they are high status and the rules of society always apply differently to different people. Those who are from the lower classes are punished severely whenever they break the law or behave in a socially unacceptable manner. That’s why rich killers like OJ and Casey Anthony got away with their crimes whereas poor killers get put on death row.
A lot of poor black people I’ve talked to also feel extremely angry at the world. That kind of anger comes from feelings of powerlessness. If you are a person with wealth and power, you can use those 2 things as tools to get what you want and forcibly impose your expectations on your environment.
Okay. I got work. I’m gonna run out now… should Nommie respond to my stuff with more of the same, I’ll just preemptively answer all his arguments.
Douchecanoe.
Okay, we’re good to go!
oh god now he’s pretending to care about poor people. this is a fucking trainwreck.
Not to MY children, you don’t!
I used to consider myself a transhumanist because I believe in working towards a future where we’ll have solved the problems of institutional inequality, disease, poverty, crime, etc. and no longer constrained by the struggle to survive our art and technology would flourish in novel ways and because natural selection would no longer shape our species we would be in charge of reshaping ourselves if desired. It’s an insanely optimistic view of the future but why not dream big? The problem is that transhumanists ruin it all by being sexist, eugenic, libertarian assholes.
Casey Anthony wasn’t acquitted because she was rich, you dolt, she was acquitted because she was overcharged and prosecution couldn’t meet it’s burden.
@MSN
Nope, they controlled for that. Their study included thousands of negotiation games where it was very clear that there were no consequences for cheating. Upper class people cheated more.
I suppose it does depend on what we mean by “hating the world.” Rich people are less likely to have mood problems. However, they are more likely to express their mood problems in ways that are harmful to other people. So, I get that you being upset at discrimination is valid and normal. However, your desire to go on the internet to call half the human race stupid is a sign of ridiculous narcissism and privilege.
And how many of these people came out and said they hated women as a group?
I think transhumanism is like believing “wouldn’t it be nice if space aliens landed and gave us the cure to mortality?”
Um, yeah, it would I guess, but you can’t really make a lifestyle or set of political beliefs out of thinking that would be nice.
Everybody wanted to be an astronaut, a rock star, an olympic athlete, ect. Well all that stuff takes hard work and dedication. We live in a society where equality of gender trumps ability. If a woman get’s to be a CEO, (facebook), or an astronaut, (sally ride), who is simply the best of her gender but not the cream of the crop, it’s a quota.
Was, Sally the best of the women candidates? No doubt she was. Was she the best candidate? Not a chance.
Austria is taking the lead in the new equality.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/austria-med-school-gives-women-grading-edge/
“As a hypothetical example, if a man and a woman both score 130 points, the woman would be given a test grade of 117.7 compared to 114.8 for the man, based on separate averages of 102 points for males and 97 points for females.”
Using this system a woman can score much lower and still be placed above a man. Europe already has quota’s for CEOs and soon, politicians as well.
We have Title IX, AA, VAWA and hosts of other things. This, positive discrimination is everywhere. To actually get a woman whose commited a crime imprisoned is practically an act of congress. Then feminists turn around and give stats about men being in prison and women are so damned angelic. What a laugh!
DV? Forget about, women don’t commit DV as far as the media tells it. If a woman ever does get caught hitting a man, only because it’s been filmed, The UNs official stance is, when a woman hits a man it’s to control the situation, when a man hits a woman it’s to control the woman. Another comical joke.
Yet the poor ladies are all still screaming oppression.
@cliff
that’s kind of what i was trying to say before. like before you can devote time to that shit, you have to be pretty sure youre not going to have any actual problems in your life that require real world solutions anytime soon.
Quite often, these people [i.e., successful mathematicians] are direct, logical, emotionally stable, often conventional, and not fickle, flighty, or manipulative.
Are you shitting me? Seriously? Do you KNOW any of these people? Fuck that, do you watch Big Bang Theory?
Many of my best friends are very talented math people. Some of them are direct, logical, and stable. Some of them are bugfuck nuts, in a variety of thrilling ways. Some of them are men, some of them are women. Life’s funny like that.
Your bullshit, though, is just ridiculous.
@sharc
That’s definitely the strongest explanation I’ve heard for it. I think also transhumanists like to think of themselves as the heros of a new revolution, paving the way for the next stage of humanity one Youtube comment at a time, so they see anyone who wants to make things better in the here and now as hogging the heroism spotlight.
I’d just like to point out that, though many transhumanists can be awfully sexist (Monsieur Sans Nom right here being a prime example of that), transhumanism and techno-progressive people in general are often more open-minded than average when it comes to alternative gender identities or re-thinking gender in general. The IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies), though not itself transhumanist, has strong ties to the transhumanist community and regularly features articles about gendered issues, often quite intelligently (though not always, I admit having came across particularly awful ones). Also, Donna Haraway’s « Cyborg Manifesto » is considered a classic by many feminists I know, transhumanist Martine Rothblatt is the author of « The Apartheid Of Sex : A Manifesto For The Freedom Of Gender », and feminist hacker Jude Milhon (aka St. Jude) is considered to be an important figure in early transhumanist thought.
My point is not that transhumanism is necessarily a realistic philosophy (I’m myself pretty skeptical of many transhumanist ideas), but dismissing transhumanists as being « over-privileged hateful twerps », « sexists » or « assholes » seems kind of unfair (although I am not denying that sexism can and does exist in transhumanist communities !).
I get leery around people who call themselves transhumanists in the same way I get leery around people who call themselves libertarians. I’ve known some really fantastic people who call themselves libertarians, people who care deeply about others and want to make the world a better place. At a fundamental level, I share a lot of the same goals with those libertarians, we just disagree about how best to achieve them, as I think that certain aspects of their ideology are unrealistic. And yet, despite the existence of those libertarians, the libertarian movement as a whole is dominated by bigoted right-wing ass hats who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. So whenever anyone declares themselves a libertarian, I tend to get worried, as even though they could be a wonderful person, that usually isn’t the case.
The same is true of transhumanists, in my experience.
@http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3707569.ece
Lol. The poison of feminism was injected into India barely 10 years ago. Already the family is destroyed and wealth is transferred from men to women.
Don’t they know that a parasite sucks the host dry until it can give no more? Poor India. If only they knew their society will now collapse. Who’da thunk women would bring about the end of the world? Oh well.
^^^THIS.
I went to school with some stunningly brilliant people, and I see no correlation between brilliance and emotional stability, even less between brilliance and being “conventional”. Quite the contrary, most brilliant people — including scientists and mathematicians — are brilliant by virtue of their tendency to think UNconventionally. As Erl has noted, some of these people fit the stereotype of “emotionally stable” and “conventional”, some are mightily weird, and some are seriously messed up; and interestingly, not too few of them experience their most intensely productive and successful periods of activity when they are most messed up. I don’t know, take Tesla, since MRA’s love him so much. Not exactly a poster boy for emotional stability and conventionality, was he? And Edison was manipulative as hell. Newton had MASSIVE personality problems, as well as problems in his scientific thinking. The list is endless.
Also: If you believe that emotion is the opposite of logic, you don’t know the first thing about logic. I’ve known people who have an ironclad grasp of logic, and yet are highly emotional. Emotions and logic are simply different things.
Noadi,
Those transhumanists you describe are people looking to improve the human race, whereas I believe that the human race cannot be improved and the only way to truly make this world better is to replace people completely with machines. I will concede that transhumanism may not exactly be an -ism that covers my beliefs and dreams of the future. To me, those who believe that we humans can truly improve the world just the way we are are the ones who are overly optimistic.
Hey, another transhumanist, I’m one too, however I believe that it’s probably best to just let people go about their business, and that it’s not necessarily the only way to transcend humanity, just that the option should be available for those who might want to.
Exactly. Which is infuriating because we aren’t going to get the really cool fantastical future stuff if you don’t fix the problems here and now? How can our species fully reach it’s potential when we still have people living in famine conditions, many people, especially girls, never learn to read or write let alone have a chance at higher education, disease kills and maims millions? Malaria for example actually causes brain damage and it’s endemic in much of the world, millions of children have multiple bouts of the disease leaving them unable to learn at the level they would have if they’d never been infected. Imagine if all 7+ billion people on this planet had the opportunity for real education and were healthy enough to take advantage of it. That can’t happen if you focus on the far future instead of the near.