Rowan Thorpe

This little exchange felt so wholesome in a deliberately counterintuitive way. :-D

I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an “information revolution” on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don’t think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.

This is utterly heartbreaking. Only 11 years old.

Also, pondering again your comment which spawned this slightly lengthy subthread, namely:

If we say “males and females” and use the equivalent terms for both, is there a problem with this? Because it’s not treating them differently so I don’t really understand

I am not a linguistics expert so I’m probably not using exactly the right terminology here, but I think the bit that matters is using:

1. adjectives as reductionist/caricaturing pseudo-nouns

2. when any such words are used merely as labels vs as signifiers for emphasis

Namely:

A. Calling someone a “human” or “person” is using a less common noun as ambiguous label

B. Calling someone a “woman” or “girl” or “man” or “boy” is using a common noun as general label

C. Calling someone a “female human” or “male human” or “female person” or “male person” is using an uncommon adjective-noun combination as explicit signifier

D. Calling someone a “female” or “male” is using a usually unwelcome adjective-as-pseudo-noun as reductionist signifier

In this context “reductionist signifier” means “reducing the value, worth, and significance of a person to only that defined by a single abused adjective”. So a line in a book which says “The bar full of people fell silent when a female entered the room” is implying that the “people” (probably primarily/entirely male, by inference) are “whole people” (with hopes, dreams, struggles, character arcs), while the “female” is as far as the writer cares merely a one-dimensional representation of a (different) gender, and not “a whole person, who happens to be female”. I remember reading long ago (but can’t remember attribution): “Never trust an author who shows you they don’t care about their characters”. I think the application of that can be extended from authors to people in general, based on how they speak.

If I’ve read your comment correctly I think we actually agree on all points, but my hurriedly written comment didn’t communicate two of them as clearly as I would’ve liked.

1. We concur that consistency of terms matters, words are the skeletons of thought-processes and therefore biases, etc.

2. I realise my emphasising the phrase “biological descriptors” was a bit misleading and strictly speaking actually wrong, but in my partial defence I was trying to avoid more scientific words when not necessary (not wanting to drift into pretentiousness). In light of your observation about biology vs gender identity (which I agree with), probably my point would be more correct if I’d used a phrase like “reductionist differentiation descriptors”. Even if accurate that sounds a little pretentious so I’d love any domain-expert to chime in with a more accurate-yet-concise phrase.

3. I used the rat example purely as an example of a research context divorced from social/political connotations, not as a human-animal vs non-human-animal differentiator (not implying any double-standard there), hence why I followed it with the example of how paramedics also use it. My point could equally have used a “10 humans…” example.

I think, as with many things, it is about context. When doing a scientific reproductive study about “rats - 5 male, 5 female” it makes sense to use biological descriptors, and when paramedics do it in a biological emergency, etc. A good way to understand it is via other similar trajectories, like racism. Would you consider it reasonable to refer to a “white man” while referring to another “man who’s a black”? For example only a few decades ago you might have heard a cop in the US (or South Africa, in Afrikaans) say e.g: “I saw 5 men leave, and 2 of them were blacks” vs what you would (hope to) hear now: “I saw 3 white men and 2 black men leave”. Look at those 2 sentences substituting “white, black” -> “male, female” and “men” -> “people”, and that should highlight the point (in a slightly grammatically clunky way though because I don’t have time to come up with a more elegant example).

I understand your point and to avoid two apparently valid points talking past each other I suggest these both look like cases of suffering under the general “stay in your lane” mentality. In that context the “counterpoint” you are replying to seems to support the initial point rather than conflict with it. To clarify, that context is the very outdated mentality of “Women ‘should’ raise the kids and keep the family healthy, while men ‘should’ go out and do society-stuff. Girls ‘should be’ raised to handle interpersonal challenges and ignore other stuff, while boys ‘should be’ raised to ignore interpersonal challenges and handle other stuff”.

…and not just movies. My partner and I steadfastly try to do all “interacting with kid’s school, extracurricular and social groups” stuff 50/50. We always strive to go to (and host) such important events together. We always indicate we should both be added to mailing lists, and give both our phone numbers as contacts, etc, etc. However, much (sometimes most) of the time people only ever call her about kids playdates, medical professionals default to discussing his issues with her exclusively even though I am sitting next to her and commenting too, when there is a parents’ chat/mail group for his classes or other activities usually she gets added and then has to help me muscle my way in to the group (and the groups are often all women). Once at a preschool party a parent saw me interact with my kid, came and asked me to point out his mother, then went to her to invite our kid to a birthday party. It’s never-ending for a father who strives to be a “caring father”, and not just an infantile “toxically masculine, one-dimensional, emotionally stunted cliché” in terms of “role model”. It is exhausting for both her and me, but is also extremely demoralising for me because trying to be what you believe to be the right kind of role-model is one of the most important yet virtually undocumented parts of parenting, and even more demoralising because it still happens even after I hugely reduced my external workload in order to be the primary “stay at home” parent. One small positive step is that the country we live in introduced “paternity leave at child-birth” legal requirements (much smaller than for maternity leave though, and only introduced after my kid was born [sigh]). In popular culture it has become a trope that women suffer endlessly trying to play the role of both parents to compensate for idiotic (or selfish prick) fathers, but it glosses over the fact that a man who actively tries to “be the change” (and any woman who tries to facilitate that change in solidarity) are so often tripped up at every step by this pervasive (and often subconscious) intellectual and emotional inflexibility. One other small positive is that I occasionally find another father who feels the same way (and who is often just as frustrated and burned out by the state of things) …sometimes - just one or two. Having previously lived in many countries/continents I also know that the country I live in is far from the worst offender for this, which makes it even more pathetic globally.

Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?

Oh yeah, you are so right. It feels at times like - when I’m not teaching him to play football (violently), and not egging him on to emulate (violent) action figures, and not buying him fake guns to play with (violently), and not telling him to “man up” instead of taking time to understand his feelings, etc - there seems to be a degree of subliminal judgmentalism directed at me for not “sticking to the job description”. It seems many people will prefer to see the world burn in preference to accepting someone disregarding parts of the “normality” rulebook based on rational introspection, including those who would never admit it out loud, and even some who haven’t yet consciously realised they are standing on that side of history - perhaps because it holds up a mirror to them not doing so (out of fear?, laziness?, bitterness-fueled pulling-up the ladder?).

Yes, I’ve had that a few times. Although being substantially older than your manager is externally no big deal unless you make it so, in the cold dark recesses of your own mind it can really start to grind some gears if you let it.

Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).

In my case not so much “lagging behind” as “stopped caring, ignoring, life’s too short for so much churn over nonessential filler”.

EDIT: This turns out to just be a folklore factoid after all, see the comment replying to this one

Forgive the tangential side-note: Although I get that “news” vs. “olds” was justified punning, I still want to mention what I think is interesting about the term “news”, and seems to be in danger of being forgotten. I remember learning in school (pre-internet so I couldn’t easily verify) that the origin of the word “news” was “North, East, West, South”.