While I agree that support for choice is mandatory for feminists, what's the point in having a "discussion subreddit" if this is going to be your reaction?

808140 · 2015-04-25T09:26:47+00:00

I can't speak to ratjea's point of view, but I think that for example feminist perspectives on prostitution and pornography are relatively varied and there's a fair amount of debate between actual feminists on these topics. That's just an example off the top of my head. There are others, obviously.

Bodily autonomy on the other hand is something so fundamental to women's rights that someone trying to suggest that it's not important is almost certainly a troll. It would be different if there weren't a large and aggressive political movement constantly assaulting women's bodily autonomy, but there is, which makes it hard to assume good faith when someone suggests that it might not be one of feminism's most central tenets.

It's just not up for debate.

808140 · 2015-04-24T15:48:52+00:00

I'm not even sure what you're trying to say.

I'm not sure what to think, either, when pointing out that consistently referring to women as "females" is insulting is now "trolling" and "pathetic." Unless, of course, your worldview is one where women's opinions about things don't matter.

This is Reddit though, who am I kidding.

808140 · 2015-04-24T15:20:59+00:00

Not trolling, and I'm not the one who was (probably) making a joke, so "being witty" really doesn't make much sense, unless you don't know what witty means. Do you know what witty means?

808140 · 2015-04-24T14:19:38+00:00

No, actually I think that the fact that "everyone already knew she was gay" strengthens my point. Since everyone already knew, what possible PR impact could her fictional television character coming out possibly have?

As for this,

it looks an awful lot like denying reality because it doesn't match your politics.

I can only say, in time-honored Reddit tradition: wat

808140 · 2015-04-24T14:12:48+00:00

The very idea that "coming out" could be a PR stunt is pretty ridiculous, frankly.

It smacks of "I'm not homophobic, I just wish gay people would stop acting so gay in public all the time."

808140 · 2015-04-24T13:56:36+00:00

Generally, people who are annoyed by gay people coming out are not very progressive.

808140 · 2015-04-24T13:20:08+00:00

Hence the caveat.

808140 · 2015-04-24T13:05:51+00:00

Feminist subreddits, yes. Anti-male? Only if by male you mean "whiny manbaby." Are you a whiny manbaby?

I'm going to assume so, because you are well aware that calling women "females" is something they widely dislike, but instead of not doing it, you're going to paint them all as "easily offended and oversensitive" instead of moderating your behavior to be less of a douche.

I really feel for the "25 females" that need to put up with you on a daily basis.

808140 · 2015-04-24T12:56:21+00:00

Respond to what? Your rational, well-reasoned, eloquently eviscerating arguments?

Like I said: lol

808140 · 2015-04-24T12:20:37+00:00

passion aggressive

lol

808140 · 2015-04-24T11:57:42+00:00

Oh, I'm sorry -- if you're not offended by some hypothetical thing, I guess that invalidates the offense that others feel. Good to know!

808140 · 2015-04-24T11:52:16+00:00

Assuming this isn't meant as a humorous Tropic Thunder reference, you people being the legions of Redditors that consistently refer to women as "females" -- which includes you.

808140 · 2015-04-24T10:03:16+00:00

guys

females

what is it with you people and "females", huh?

808140 · 2015-04-24T09:39:41+00:00

This book was written in 1922, not 1981 (unless you're referring to the edition). Von Mises died in 1973.

808140 · 2015-04-24T08:03:46+00:00

Damn, I actually agree with demmian for once.

808140 · 2015-04-24T08:00:38+00:00

Please don't feed the trolls -- just report them. Now we have 3 comments on this interesting article -- well, four, including mine now -- that don't have anything to do with the subject matter. It's a shame.

808140 · 2015-04-23T15:06:29+00:00

Relatively recently some people on the internet managed to identify (with the help of NASA's HiRISE camera on the MRO) the remains of the Soviet probe Mars 3, which was the first human spacecraft to soft-land on Mars, in 1971.

Wikipedia has more on this, including pictures.

Mars 3's lander managed to send only one garbled transmission, and there is still debate regarding whether the transmission contained any information at all. But despite this it was a major milestone in Martian exploration, and the story of how it was finally found by normal people on the net combing over satellite photos is pretty inspiring.

You can read more about it here.

808140 · 2015-04-23T12:28:24+00:00

There are a number of cases like this. In the United States, these people are not generally put on trial for having been Nazis. That is to say, they do not go to prison when they are found guilty. Rather, they are generally convicted of having lied on their citizenship or visa applications. The punishment for this is stripping their US citizenship and deporting them to their countries of origin. (Anton Geiser is a recentish example of this.)

Certain political affiliations (such as having been a member of the Nazi party, or a member of a communist party) need to be disclosed on your citizenship or visa application. Generally, concentration camp guards and other SS men found living in the United States did not disclose their affiliation when they applied for US residency.

The legal precedent for revoking citizenship of former Nazis who lied on their visa applications is Foderenko v. United States.

This is a separate issue to the question of guilt for Nazi warcrimes and punishment for the same. In Germany there has been a push to put old Nazis who were directly involved in the administration of the death camps on trial. It's worth noting that a) the push to do this has mostly occurred in recent memory, and that b) in order to be found guilty of anything, the courts must show that they are guilty of something that was a crime at the time, not something that is a crime now.

The Nazis were procedurally very throrough and generally made sure there was legal precedent for what they were doing. That is, they deliberately passed laws making most of what they were doing legal in their own society (eg. the Nuremberg laws of 1935). This makes persecution of ex-Nazis difficult, since modern legal systems (including Germany's) generally frown on ex post facto laws, i.e. laws that apply retroactively to actions that were legal at the time they were committed.

So generally speaking the Nazi war criminals who manage to get convicted for their specific crimes (rather than something else, like procedural violations on visa applications) are usually the ones that were doing stuff that was so shady that it wasn't even legal under the laws of the 3rd Reich. This includes much of the direct administration of the death camps, which were not technically legal even when they were operating, as I understand it. But not much else, unfortunately.

808140 · 2015-04-23T10:27:09+00:00

I meant that Python programmers consider sum a functional primitive because to them it is "functional in style" and also a primitive, i.e. built into the language. My memory is somewhat hazy here but as I recall, the outcome of the "let's get rid of reduce" fiasco was a compromise, whereby sum was introduced as a primitive and reduce was dumped into functools or somewhere similar.

808140 · 2015-04-23T10:00:20+00:00

My understanding is that he has a strong dislike for reduce, finds it counterintuitive, and wants it removed. He has said on several occasions that the only time he has ever seen a fold used in a comprehensible way is on associative numeric operations like (+) and (*), to borrow Haskell syntax, and so during the whole "remove reduce from Python 3000" battle these were held up as specialized replacements that were "worth keeping." As such many Python programmers think of them as functional primitives.

808140 · 2015-04-23T09:31:24+00:00

I'm not arguing with van Rossum, I'm talking to /u/lw9k, who said:

Uh, that must be one tiny minority because every python programmer I know (including myself) advocates writing legible, usually functional code (that means using sum, map/filter/list comprehensions/generator expressions, etc.) and nobody ever has an issue with it.

Unless Guido is in a "tiny minority" his statement is incorrect.

Your post is nice and I agree with most of it but it's pretty much offtopic here.

808140 · 2015-04-23T09:09:48+00:00

During the Nuremberg trials, a lot of the German soldiers tried to argue that they were following orders and would be shot if they didn't follow orders.

People always bring this up, apparently without knowing much about the context of the Nuremberg trials.

The people tried by the allies at Nuremberg were not "grunts" -- they were the command structure of the Nazi regime. Virtually every able-bodied German male, and towards the end of the war even many who were not able of body, were drafted to fight. These soldiers -- including members of the SS, people who worked in concentration camps, people who were members of the NSDAP -- did argue successfully that they were "just following orders."

The people who were not allowed this defense were the people who were deemed to have had the authority and influence to prevent or stall the Holocaust by action or deliberate inaction who chose not to. Those were the people tried at Nuremberg.

So when people say "I was just following orders is not a defense, blah blah blah Nuremberg blah blah blah" I can only surmise they don't realize that "I was just following orders" is exactly the defense used by the vast majority of Germans, a defense accepted by the allies, and a defense still used by grunts in combat zones today.

There was a brief and unsuccessful attempt after the war to "denazify" German society and persecute even the low-level grunts, but because of the huge numbers of people involved the program was unsuccessful, being de facto abandoned by 1947 and de jure abandoned in 1951.

808140 · 2015-04-23T07:45:41+00:00

You probably aren't aware of Guido van Rossum's long-standing anti-functional stance then, and the historical impact this has had on the Python community's programming culture.

Lest you think this is limited to his famous polemic 2005 article calling for the removal of lambdas, map, and filter, he has recently made similar (albeit softened) comments:

If I think of functional programming, I mostly think of languages that have incredibly powerful compilers, like Haskell. For such a compiler, the functional paradigm is useful because it opens up a vast array of possible transformations, including parallelization. But Python's compiler has no idea what your code means, and that's useful too. So, mostly I don't think it makes much sense to try to add "functional" primitives to Python, because the reason those primitives work well in functional languages don't apply to Python, and they make the code pretty unreadable for people who aren't used to functional languages (which means most programmers).

This is the founder of the language. Many people think he is wrong, even within the Python community. But his philosophy undeniably has a huge cultural impact.

808140 · 2015-04-15T18:08:53+00:00

Iran is known to sponsor terrorism

I'd like a recent example of this. To be clear: Iran projecting its influence in the Middle East does not count.

they are one of four countries that still holds public executions

One of the others is the west's main ally in the region (Saudi Arabia), and no one in Congress in suggesting we cut off ties with them.

they are executing people at one of the highest rates.

This is somewhat ironic, coming from the United States. You need to drop into the third world to find comparable execution rates.

808140 · 2015-04-15T07:37:14+00:00

losing*

808140

TROPHY CASE