Oh dear. Fantasy author and garbage person Vox Day is having one of those (vox) days, and has decided to take it out on, you guessed it, feminism, pounding out an overwrought little rant on his Alpha Game blog.
Never give feminists an inch. Don’t agree with them, don’t tolerate them, show them no mercy whatsoever. Feminism is a Satanic, anti-Christian, anti-reason, anti-science ideology that destroys literally everything it touches and everyone who embraces it.
Wow. He’s so mad he’s practically plagiarizing Pat Robertson’s famous quote about feminism being “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” I’m not sure how Vox managed to forget the lesbian witchcraft angle.
Reject it and its adherents the way you would reject someone offering you plutonium on their bare hands; to accept it is to begin to die a slow and painful death.
Might I offer you some notes, Vox? This bit seems a little understated. I mean, the plutonium thing is pretty good, but a person handing you plutonium isn’t anywhere near as scary as having, say, a bear do it. Or a shark. Or a bear-shark. Or a bear-sharknado.
The problem isn’t merely that feminists are ugly and hateful, or that their ideology is incoherent and deluded, but that by mere toleration of them, through mere intellectual contact with it, you are permitting your life to be infected and degraded.
Clearly Vox, a dude who clings to memories of his D-list celebrity as a former member of an angsty dance band two decades ago, and who devotes much of his life to pounding out hateful and unintentionally self-parodic rants on the internet, offers us the very model of a healthy and happy life well-lived.
Reject all of it. Reject their appeals to equality. Reject their pretense to intellectual standing. And most of all, personally reject all of those who subscribe to it in any way, shape, or form. Any man who calls himself a feminist is ideologically transgender and mentally unstable.
Ideologically transgender? Wow. He’s come up with an even more obnoxious way to call someone a “mangina.”
Vox, you’re so cute when you’re angry!
And by cute I mean a you’re a pathetic, hateful, disgusting excuse for a human being.
Yeah, probably a little from PoM’s column A and a little from davidknewton’s column B and some extra bits lobbed in at the end.
I contracted for a while with a company that makes a product which is virtually ubiquitous in the US and had a pretty big staff of engineers and developers. I specifically worked on fail testing and documentation, so I had the opportunity to come into contact with most of them at one time or another and while more than a few were like the ones davidknewton works with, many more were sadly more stereotypically techie. It makes me curious whether it’s a product more of personality or some aspect of training. Like I said, we all have the tendency, it just seems expressed more in certain CS fields.
Viscaria, I’m sure you were devastated to come to that realization!
Almost every code monkey I’ve talked with feels the same way.
Like, there might be a person or two whose code they appreciate, but everyone else is doing all of this wrong why don’t they notate or not notate and there’s a more elegant or more sure or more structured or less binding way to do this ohmygod.
re: software dev and idiosyncratic but tightly held beliefs: See above.
That, and code does what you tell it to do – if it’s effing up, it’s because you didn’t do something correctly.
Some piece of syntax is wrong and it’s become goobledygook or the logic is wrong and you’ve made a nice little recursive sequence, but whatever it is the input directly determines the output – why shouldn’t the rest of life be that way?
If I eat right and exercise and believe in myself, I never need to see a proctologist – all of my inputs have been correct, there’s no reason for a bad output.
I think that’s part of why so many of them tend towards libertarianism, too. Code’s fair, mercilessly so, and such is life and the way of the world.
And this:
I guess CS has been kind of a perfect storm of environments that really nurture logical narcissists. Coding tends to be an individual activity, it’s a profession that’s stereotypically for “smart” people, and it requires being able to work in a head-space of strict rules and constructs.
So a person could start to learn that things follow strict patterns, stay unexposed to the wide variety of human experience, and be convinced that their profession means that they have a high IQ, and are therefore better thinkers than most. Therefore all their preconceptions must already be validated.
Most of the CS folks I know in real life, both as friends and at my job, are wonderful people. There just happens to be this really terrible subgroup that hopefully will get weeded out as computer literacy as a whole increases and CS becomes a more social profession.
^ I do want to echo kirby’s sentiment.
Most of those who I know who work in CS are great people. My observations are for a subset characterized primarily by the lack of diversity in interests.
I’m fact, I’d go so far as to say that a knack for creative problem solving and a general neural elasticity separate people who are good at coding from those who are great.
Well, that and genuine, burning interest – I’ve met more and more people who’ve gotten CS degrees because they figured that it was a good way to make money but are without – excuse me if this sounds hyperbolic – passion. Many are completely competent but most lack that spark that drives them to innovate and explore.
I say this as someone who has, at best, mildly functional coding knowledge, so it’s admittedly an outsider’s perception.
@gillyrosebee:
Same. His beliefs trend towards the really abhorrent, but it doesn’t have the same malice or bitterness behind it that other horrible people tend to have. I could easily see him growing up, talking to real people, then looking back on the blog with shame.
It feels like all he needs to do is to start talking and listening to other people, have an existential crisis and worldview collapse or two, and he’ll be fine.
What made me laugh was Matthew starting a post with “As part of my ongoing crusade to convince people to stop having sex…” If you’re ace, that’s cool. I have no experience with it and my imagination kind of freezes up trying to comprehend it, but I can imagine that it would complicate life/relationships, and I have so much sympathy for that.
At the same time, I cannot imagine a more effective way to alienate most people than to say “as part of my totally correct and inarguable view of how the world should work, you really need to quit having sex. Have you tried cuddling instead? Not naked cuddling, that is improper. Clothed cuddling. Where are you going? Don’t walk away from me!”
@proxieme:
CS definitely has a creative side that people undervalue just as much as I feel they overvalue the logical side. CS asks you to create systems that solve problems, and it takes vision to conceptualize that system. Of course, that’s also the part that I’m personally most interested in. There definitely is a place for algorithm design, complexity analysis, and all that, but I’m pretty rubbish at it. Luckily, in practice, that sort of stuff is already implemented in a library that you can just import and use.
@Mouse Farts:
He does that a lot. Starts off with some sorta-ok premise that’s rooted in counterculture and anti-authoritarianism, then ramp it up to the absurd by dictating what those things should actually be like. The media is lying to you, you don’t have to wear skimpy clothing! Instead, you have to wear modest clothing, as I define it.
Then there’s just the plain bizarre, like the “Dignity or Pain” post where he muses whether it would be best to endure pain and keep dignity, or forfeit dignity to relieve pain. Except, he isn’t the hypothetical one in pain, it’s his hypothetical wife/girlfriend. If she needs to see a doctor, would he let her? How much of her pain would he be willing to handle?
I wanna reach through cyber space, out of his monitor, and give him a good slap on the nose for that one. “No, bad Matthew. Bad! No making decisions for other human beings!”
Probably because it would puncture his worldview like the thin-skinned, overinflated balloon that it is…and that would be “spiritual death”! One wonders why he decided to come here with his copy-pasters, then.
I…hadn’t read that one.
And now I have.
I guess it’s good that he’s so incredibly out of touch with reality? Because his ideas are so very off-putting that, fortunately, it’s hard to imagine anyone signing up to marry/date him. And that’s a good thing. Not that I’m going to say anyone deserves to be alone, but that no one deserves to be with a controlling jerk who thinks it’s better for her to die than to see a damn doctor, and who apparently doesn’t think she gets a say in that decision.
I think I’m done with Matthew. He makes me sad.
Obviously, Matthew saw we poor, struggling souls and swooped in to save us all with his profound wisdom, and then sped on his way because he knew we would all throw ourselves at his feet in our gratitude, and planned to spare our dignity.
You know, while Satan and I were out corrupting science and destroying everything we touched I asked him why I had not yet been destroyed by feminism. He remarked my patience with misogynist trolls had certainly been destroyed. We laughed and laughed. Then we went for ice cream.
Mmmm, ice cream.
*sheepishly sets down bowl of gravel she’s been snacking on*
*eyes bowl* You gonna finish that?
Bariaur?
http://uo-planescape.wdfiles.com/local–files/gallery-bariaur/Bariaur_by_Ben_Thompson-D%26D_3ed_(2000)_WOTC_25ed_-_Libro_delle_Imprese_Eroiche.jpg
Oh my LORD, katz, that is obviously a goat. Don’t you even know what a sheeple looks like?
You are embarrassing us.
As the old saying goes, better to be alone than in bad company. Anyone who thinks it’s more dignified to die than get a treatable illness seen to by a competent medical professional (NOT one’s own hyper-jealous husband!) is bad company. Period.
IT IS A BIGHORN SHEEP.
is this a sheeple?
http://www.alt-market.com/images/stories/sheeple1.jpg
Speaking of centaurs I read about them that they are the symbol of violent lust, adultery, brutality and vengefulness. I just thought that I might share that for some reason.
Anyone who thinks it’s okay to make rules about what kind of medical care another person is allowed to have is a bad legislator.
IT IS A BIGHORN SHEEP WITH SCIMITAR AND SHIELD SPIKES
IT CAN BE WHATEVER IT WANTS TO BE
DON’T BLAME ME, I’M ONLY A FIRST-LEVEL COMMONER