The UCSB shooter--an Aspie with a rant against women

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Fine, I'll put it back.



You're missing the point. You couldn't have done your work at all, and neither your company nor your markets would exist, without a mountain of existing basic science funded by NSF (and slightly less basic research funded by the other agencies).



The niceness of autodidacticism notwithstanding: Had you studied economics with people who do it for a living and aren't prone to crank misreading (the big problem with autodidacticism), you might've learned some things about the value of local inefficiency in social systems. As it happens, inefficiency has its uses in biology, too. (Biology: seldom simple/straightforward, massively redundant, works most of the time.)

Much of American universityland is going away because the money that sustains it has gone away. Dead man walking. It'll be replaced by other inefficient systems, many of which are far more predatory than universities are, and generate even less good. But inefficiency is the tradeoff for stability when many people are involved, and the stability is worth something.

The social systems that produced the sci/eng you work with are and always were, likewise, massively inefficient. Tremendous waste.



Respect from me. I think it's left you with a rather skewed view, though, of how the social pieces are hooked together. Universities turn out to be important in that.



Hooray, sides.



And you think what, that feminists and mothers (overlapping sets) read only radical feminism, young-adult novels, and mom manuals, and think about nothing else? (I suspect the major problem with the integration of mil women isn't to do with equipment, btw.) It occurs to me you ought to put TH White on your reading list.

On the work thing - see, you keep bringing this 'my work is unappreciated' thing into talk about women and/or feminism, and I'm really not sure what you're trying to do. Such things are an issue of capitalism - under that system, you got paid for your work, and if you wanted a pat on the back as well, you should have put it in your contract. That's how social and interpersonal relations under capitalism end up. I'm a Socialist. Labour shouldn't be a commodity. Passion in one's work/vocation is a good thing, exploitation of one's labour and passion a bad thing. If those things piss you off, go yell at the capitalists. On these matters at least, I'd have your back.

On the 'negative' thing - pretty meta.

On the 'stupid' thing. She said her son was 'quirky', and was 'stupid about dating'. You clearly had a rough time with your mother, and you do have my sympathies for that. But I see good natured, loving honesty here. Her son just is 'stupid about dating', and she loves him for it, presumably hoping (and trying to help) to make him less stupid about dating.

My Grandad would call me daft (adj: silly; foolish; insane) often, and he would say it with sincere, endearing love.

Somehow I missed all those criticisms and I guess I should respond.

On the first, why am *I* being negative to say that I can spot a negative, self-absorbed guy? If someone who has just met me wants to start spewing hate towards the world, *I* am not the one being negative by politely walking away. We were talking about the guy in the news, and everything he wrote showed how negative he was. Your comment sounds rather backwards to me. Is the problem that you are assuming I call it that way often? If so, you are reading far more into what I wrote than I said or even came close to implying; you must be putting your own assumptions on top of my words. I can promise, I don't feel that way about very many people at all. It is very rare that I meet people I consider negative and overly self-absorbed. For the most part, I find all sorts of people interesting, and like even the crankiest of clients.

As for my son, I used the word that HE uses, and the word that describes how some of the members here feel about their dating abilities, because I was trying to make the point that it can be OVERCOME. IT DOES NOT MATER if someone is "stupid" in dating if they are true to themselves and positive. And, be clear, my son does not use the word in a "oh no, I'm hopeless, I'm so stupid at dating" way. He uses it in the manner of "oops, just more proof of how stupid I am at dating," (laugh) kind of way. As did I. The kid agreed to take a girl to Homecoming and it never occurred to him to do anything other than just meet her there. Or tell us he had a date anytime sooner than an hour before he had promised to be there; he had absolutely nothing appropriate to wear (he never considered there might be a dress code, either). He laughs about it when we point out to him how, um, that isn't exactly how it is usually done. And he survives the faux paux's because he doesn't let them ruin his attitude or his time on the date. He apologizes, admits it isn't his skill, asks people to just tell him when he is doing something "wrong," and moves on. People LIKE that. They don't WANT you to turn these things into a drama production.

He reads over my shoulder occasionally when I post on WP and in the past when I've asked him how he feels about it, he responded that he thinks I write in the way that best suits the goal, which is to help the reader, and he is cool with that. He still tells me pretty much everything, unlike most boys his age, so there must be a decent amount of trust there and belief that I handle things OK.

I am sorry your mother talked behind your back in ways that you felt were negative. That is not what I am trying to do here, but point taken on how it obviously easily came across that way.

The level of hatred for women on from so many posters on this thread alone is so very depressing. It makes you wonder where it comes from. Aspergers/autism comes with challenges in the social arena, but it's maddening to see how clearly this false and terribly harmful social message has come through for some. The male privilege is revolting and just so sad.

I have sent a letter to Alex Plank about all of this misogyny. I want the women on here to feel safe. I received a response asking me for examples. I sent him some examples and have yet to receive a 2nd response. Please send more examples to his email address at alex@wrongplanet.net. There is to much injustice in this world and I'm tired of being told that I must accept things as they are and life is unfair. If I can make our part of the world a bit safer, bit more just and more fairer I'm going to do it.

Check your pm.

There are plenty of men out their with no mental problems or neurological differences that hate women,and others.They are simply ass holes.They may never kill anyone but they still inflict psychological damage on people.

Not true. Not true at all. I'm often thought of as "creepy" in the exact same ways as aspie men are. I'm empathetic towards autistic men, but do not delude yourself into thinking you are the only one who doesn't quite get how to be social. Also, of course having a nice car won't necessarily get you laid. You should NOT expect it to.

My mental health problems and being overweight makes it even harder for me. I can't even count how many times they have been brought up because males think they have an obligation to rate my hotness in a group setting. These are men who are not my friends or husband, yet they sit there and judge my body and my mind.

What exactly do you want Alex to do?

I detest misogyny and misandry,
but I detest censorship far more than either.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp6071023.html#6071023

I've made a counter point to censorship as being a reason. I will admit though on the macro level I can refute my counterpoint but in this case, my counterpoint stands. With exception, I stand by what I say. The exception is beyond the scope of my discussion here.

There are those who say you don't have the right not to be offended. In the constitutional and governmental sense, this is true but in the social and private sphere if one can vote with his feet then it is false to say that one does not have the right to not be offended.

Any private individual can censure you. If you're in my home, I reserve the right as a property owner to tell you not to curse if I do not like nor approve of cursing do I not? If Alex agrees with StarvingArtist and I and chooses to take our side and agrees with the email I wrote to him then he reserves the right as a property owner of this community to limit whatever speech he sees fit to limit.

You do not have the right not to be censured on wrongplanet since it is private property owned by him.

I dont get the whole peer pressure BS idea primarilly from NT males that if you dont get laid your a loser!

My guess, then, is that your life has never been significantly disturbed by either misogyny or misandry. And if you're a guy, that's not surprising. Have a good look around #yesallwomen and http://whenwomenrefuse.tumblr.com , and see how the lives of women are controlled by misogyny.

Go ahead, take a few minutes. I'll wait.

Think about how many murders and assaults there are on the tumblr -- this is a brand new tumblr, exclusively about violence against women who said no to sex, and the stories are rolling in, it's growing fast. Listen to how many women have to walk around in fear, because even if not every man out there is a horror who'd attack her, enough men are that we have to worry. This is just talk about violence, mind, has nothing to do with job discrimination, opportunity discrimination, or just the general misery of walking around being the subject of vicious rhetorical attacks from everyone from high-ranking politicians to internet trolls.

I've been thinking about that the last few days. I live in a town that's heavily dominated by both a polite culture and a liberal mindset, and is pretty well off, and is populated heavily by college students. There are few places I go where I walk in fear...but that's because my routes are pretty well marked out, and I'm not walking around at night. In the last year, just as at many other colleges, everyone in the campus community has received many emailed reports of rapes. We get these reports because of the parents of a girl who was at college back when I was: she was raped and murdered in her dorm room by a guy she'd turned down. The university tried to cover it up, and her parents went ballistic; they were also wealthy, and fought hard, and got a federal law put through that requires colleges and universities to report when there's a violent crime in the campus community. It isn't safe for us still, but at least we have a clearer sense of how dangerous it is. I realized yesterday that I feel safe only because I've lived in much more dangerous places, where every time I went outside, I had to worry about who was around me. It was a long time before I wore dress shoes regularly, because you can't run in those.

Just yesterday, another friend told me about her rape. At lunch.

The talk is not disconnected from the action. Men who are violent against women, or deny them jobs and opportunities, or simply abuse them at home by controlling them and keeping them feeling stupid, don't suddenly wake up one day and decide they're going to be horrible to women. They learn -- from stories, from speech -- that women are sluts, b*****s, not really people, that it's best to maltreat them, that they like it if you do, that you have to show them who's boss, that they're stupider than men, that they come by their sexual powers totally unfairly and they want to dominate men...all kinds of things. Things that make it okay, in a guy's mind, to treat a woman horribly. Talk is powerful stuff. Which is why hate-crime and hate-speech laws exist here and abroad. Germany's well aware of what happens when you let that garbage flourish. So's the American South. When hate speech makes it into polite conversation, your society is in big trouble.

I want to go back to the rape-and-murder business, because it's where the focus generally is, maybe because the news is still run mostly by guys who like big violent stories. But it's everyday misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. that do most of the damage. I'm a single mom. A long time ago I stopped reading stories about single mothers, for instance, because invariably the comment sections would be full of astoundingly vicious remarks, nearly all made by men, about the sluttiness, evil, and malice of single mothers. Dozens and dozens of men would show up to attack the single mom in the story, who was usually some beleaguered soul trying to make ends meet and do right by two or three kids after the guy ran off or died. Do I need to read those, no, but I know that those attitudes are out there. They exist, they affect how people treat me, they affect pieces of legislation that affect my life and how my child grows up. Fortunately, in my state, there are enough smart women around that they don't affect child custody rules too far, but in other states, single moms are still suspect enough that a judge will take her children away and hand them to a newly remarried ex-husband, saying it's a better environment for them. And yes, it has an effect on me. Because it's not hard enough actually doing the work of making nearly all the money and doing nearly all the childrearing; I get to know that there are people out there who hate me for it, too. Just like there are men who hate me for actually having a job when they don't. (Although if I didn't have a job, they'd happily hate me for being on welfare with a child.)

Like I said, I've been in much worse environments. I know what it's like when hate speech calms down, isn't allowed in this space or that. It's a blessed relief. It changes the way you feel about yourself, your life, your possibilities. It's like a cage is gone.

If the message that a certain group receives, over and over again, is that it's stupid, worthless, evil, etc...you know, you can say "shake it off" all you like, but if that's a large part of the social message, you're kidding yourself if you think people can do it. It's not a reasonable thing to say. Pervasive abuse has an effect -- a very bad effect. It engenders depression, despair, shame. And it encourages others to go on attacking that group.

That's why we moderate speech. Freedom of speech is not a religion; it's a political instrument. It's in the first amendment because the people who wrote the first amendment were much preoccupied with governments that imprison and/or kill citizens for political speech against the government. (Booksellers and publishers often have overbroad ideas about the 1st, too, and take it to mean that there should be subsidies and guaranteed audiences for unpopular speech.) It had nothing to do with license to be an abusive horror about women, or children, or minorities, or Jews, or any other group. We've long had laws against harmful speech, and long refused to allow vicious, uncivil talk in public places. We just have more, and much larger, public places now.

I think the main reason that you see so much "free speech" rebuttal to moderation on US sites populated by young men is that in general they're not the ones badly damaged by vicious speech. They don't feel it, therefore the damage doesn't exist or isn't important. Pair it with libertarian/Randian I Am A Superhero of Self-Made Autosufficiency and Power, and free speech does become a religious thing, in some people's minds.

I've never gotten this either, but I've seen otherwise nice guys pressured into talking that way. But then I've never really understood the intense, like ferocious, need so many guys seem to have to police other men's masculinity. It really struck me a couple years ago when there was a story in NYT, I think, about a little boy who identified strongly as a girl, loved wearing dresses, wanted to play the girls' games, use the girls' bathroom, etc. The girls and women had really very little problem with this (and I remember seeing a similar thing in my daughter's playgroup -- beautiful little boy used to come in wearing a dress, and he identified as a girl, and the girls accepted him). But holy crap, the comments from grown men, and so many of them...you'd have thought it was the end of civilization. The heat and nastiness filling up that comment sections...and I was thinking, what the hell, why are all these grown men so heavily invested in what one little child does? And why on earth do they think they have the right to say such horrible things about a little child and these parents, who sound really very sweet and a little bewildered?

But in the end I think it's no different from all the homophobia I used to see in the 80s, or other such things. The thing is -- and I think it's instructive -- things change when it becomes socially unacceptable to behave in these horrible ways. I cannot imagine people talking here, in my town, the way people used to 40 years ago about gay couples. Or physically attacking men who're holding hands. It's just not on. And it does make a very big difference. Incidentally, for the young'uns, there's a lot of coverage lately about the fights that made those changes happen, because there's a revival of "The Normal Heart", a play about those AIDS/ACT UP days.

You guessed wrong. I would elaborate, but I promised my friend's secrecy.

I feel hurt by comments too. (I would list examples, but the most scathing were in PMs and I'd rather not bring that up here.) The difference is I don't see it as the responsibility of the forum and the moderators to preemptively protect me from anything that might seem offensive, because as an adult I take responsibility for my own emotions.

I see you brought lots of anecdotal evidence showing violent speech and violent acts. I do not deny some degree of correlation between the people who espouse violent speech and those who commit violence. BUT, the question remains: Would censoring them really prevent those acts from taking place? That may very well be the case, but I have yet to see sociological or statistical evidence to back that up. You may say it's intuitively obvious, but it's intuitively obvious to some people that gang violence is exacerbated by gangsta' rap, that mass shootings are inspired by violent videogames, and that acts of terrorism are inspired by the Koran. (I do not condone any of those beliefs, I'm just stating what others say they believe.) Giving credence to those arguments and acting upon them by banning things leads us down a slippery slope, the same kind of slope wrongplanet would be going down if they expand their rules to cover everything that might be interpreted as misogynistic.

The wrongplanet conduct rules are laid out as follows:I think it does a fair job of covering most hate speech. Anything more and we stray into dangerous territory.


That still doesn't answer my original question.Do you want him to expand the rules for what is considered hate speech? Do you want him to hire more moderators to enforce the rules? Do you want the moderators to preemptively censor anything that might be offensive to you? Do you want to have a personally rubber stamp to censor anyone you think might offend others?

Lastly, however harsh I may sound. I am not callous to your emotional concerns about abuse. I spent the majority of my childhood the loner, fending off verbal abuse for my height, my mannerisms, my behavior, etc. For a significant duration of time, my perception of the abuse made me consider suicide. BUT, I never blamed the teachers for not supervising and censoring them, and I don't blame the mods of this website for permitting controversial material that fits within their rules.

I think posters would like a set of examples of what is acceptable and what is not. Re-reading the guidance I posted years ago, it is pretty sparse, and while *I* know what it means, that doesn't mean anyone else does, and since I am long retired from moderation, what I think I know is, at this point, pretty useless.

Fatal-Noogie, I forgot to answer that question. I meant to. Sometimes my thoughts run a mile a minute and my thinking goes faster than my typing and I think I type it but I don't.

I do not feel privileged to answer this question. It would have to be the women of wrongplanet who would have to answer this question. To answer this question I would have to know what it was like to be a woman and walk in her shoes. The problem is I do not. I don't have the wisdom to know what it is like for them. My wisdom and knowledge is limited by my own ignorance.

What I desire is for the women to be able to post and feel safe doing so. I can't define that for them because I could define it and think I'm doing good when I am truthfully not. You're asking me to answer a question that is not in the realm of my authority to answer.

Tarantella is right about everything she has posted about this and I will reiterate.

If we're in a private setting one does have the right to moderate speech on his own property. For example, some people do not like to curse and they refuse to allow cursing on their property. Does the 1st amendment apply to someone's property. I think not. The idea of censorship does not apply here. Alex reserves the right to moderate our speech on here because wrongplanet is his property.

The 1st amendment was designed to protect the citizenry from dissent against the government or any other encroachment by the government. It wasn't meant to have this broad interpretation in which anyone could say what they wanted. All it meant was the government could not be involved in it. That's it. Really, before the civil war it applied to the federal government more specifically congress anyway. This was because Congress and only congress is supposed to have the power to make the laws. The 1st amendment limited what Congress could do with their law making powers.

Whomever decides to implement political correctness and moderate speech in their homes, private property, in their group, and what not reserve the right to do it. So, whomever claims censorship and free speech, you're dead wrong on this one. Whomever claims censorship is so full of it and needs to re-read the 1st amendment. Really, it is part of our Bill of rights which really a bill of prohibitions. They state what the government is not allowed to do or encroach on and the constitution is the document that authorizes certain powers that are only enumerated in the document.

If StarvingArtist and Tarantella wanted to they can form their own board and limit what speech is allowed. Does anybody have the right not to be offended. Those who say we don't, I object. Yes, we do. We have the right to take steps to get policies changed or we have the right to vote with our feet.