Seriously, Richard? Dawkins Pushes TERF Declaration

I honestly wonder sometimes if those articles are actually meant to be left-wing propaganda. And then I realize probably not, they're insufficiently smug about that, and it's actually just the producers know that this content brings in a lot of rage clicks.

I don't make the claim that, if the circumstances were different, he'd be just as wealthy. He was well-positioned at the time and place a big opportunity arose. If he'd been born 5 years later or 5 years earlier, he'd probably be a moderately successful unrecognized lawyer or somesuch today, not a billionaire.

Yes, Gates and co. did buy the operating system, but they still ported it and updated it for the IBM PC. You may consider him a "middleman," but he was well-positioned to be that middleman. He still took the requirements from IBM and delivered a product they wanted.

I've always known Bill Gates was a genuine code writer--he was preciously programming when he was 13--but I've always wondered: was he really that special? Would he have stood apart from any of a number of other nerds writing code at the same time? But I learned this about him (emphases mine)...

So, yeah. He had some real talent.

Holy shit, no they fucking don't. Not when righties praise and defend the white conservative assholes practicing civil disobedience and rant about refusing to follow "unjust laws," then defend cops killing or assaulting minorities over minor infractions by saying "shouldn't have broken the law/resisted arrest/been rude."

Oh, and it's been pointed out countless times that the right to a fair trial confers obligations onto others.

I assume those articles are thinly veiled boomer rants. Some out of touch editor says "I paid my first mortgage off quickly with my minimum wage job in 1961, the kids complaining today are just lazy!" then demands their writers put together something about a modern homeowner that accomplished the same thing somehow.

I've also seen the ones about young people that manage to spend most of their lives travelling the globe and how it's easy if you really want to... and then at the end of the article they're living off massive amounts of investment income, and staying in their parents guest houses whenever they stop back home for a bit.

Not sure what point you're making here.

And, as is always my response, such obligations are part of the Constitution and are inevitable. Other obligations cannot be added willy-nilly.

I could accept that for the first dozen. Now I think it's got to be rage clicks. You can almost set your calendar by when CNBC puts one out.

My bad, I was referring to this statement:

It's a bullshit statement for the reason I pointed out above.

"The Constitution" isn't a holy book, it's a glorified RPG guide that some ordinary human beings wrote. An obligation isn't special just because it was written down in a particular document.

We apparently mean different things by "rights."

People have differing views on what is just, moral, and even legal. That doesn't change what people's rights are.

Yes, it is. The Constitution is the highest law in the land, and it spells out (1) our rights and the (2) the defined role of government. These things are of supreme importance to every citizen, whether they recognize it or not.

It isn't a holy book, no, but it protects the freedoms that are very important to many of us. If someone disagrees with the Constitution, they're welcome to try to change it. It's difficult--by design--to do so, but it can be done if enough people agree.

I love how we've gotten from "Richard Dawkins is a transphobic piece of shit" to "Bill Gates's rich-magic is real!! It's real!! It's reee-heee-hee-heeeaall!! ".

Ah, Wordforge.

Low effort quoting is not proof. Try again.

You basically have to pick UA up like a big heavy baby, and shove the comprehension into his head like a big spoonful of pudding.
And he'll squirt it out the corners of his mouth, so you'll have to scrape it off the sides of his face, and shovel it right back in a couple times.
It's a frustrating process with little reward.
My condolences if you attempt it.

So you're treated worse than everyone else is treated by everyone, particularly authority figures, around you? Seems unlikely. Privilege, in this context, isn't about what you've got, it's about how much harder other people make it for you to get what you have. Now I don't hold to the ideas (contra some) that having privilege inherently imposes obligations, or that not having privilege inherently gives you a better view as to how to justly improve material conditions for those who have less as a result of missing that privilege or how to justly get other people to treat them better, but unless you're the worst-treated person in your locale, or everyone there treats everyone else equally (which seems extremely unlikely), you've got some privilege. Concede the fact, but not the implication, and you'll be arguing from a much stronger position.

Facts can be proven. Facts can be supported by evidence and logic. Beware anyone who insists their "facts" must be assumed by default, because that person is pushing an agenda they know will not hold up to even the most half-assed objective scrutiny.

So no 2+2=4?
Rats, I was out to trick you with that shit.
Good thing you caught me, Scooby-Doo.

You just accidentally supported an objectively verifiable standard. Good job undermining your own clown ass there, champ.

Even if one may be said to have some privilege in one dimension, there are infinitely many dimensions, so any absolute ranking of individuals by privilege is impossible. This is without even considering that privileges can evolve over time and that some privileges will be more or less beneficial in different contexts.

Consider two people, A and B.
A is male and B female.
A lives in Appalachia and B is a tech company CTO.
A's white and B's black.
A is 58 years old and B is 30.
A is straight and B is gay.
A's in a wheelchair and B is in very good health.

This could go on ad infinitum. We'd eventually get to things like "doesn't need glasses to read" and "is lactose intolerant."

Any single dimension of privilege wouldn't tell you anything about these two hypothetical persons' relative positions in life or about their relative quality of life. And many dimensions makes their relative privilege levels difficult to establish, and, ultimately, a matter of one's own subjective weighting of the factors. And, since it's subjective, people can greatly disagree about it about that weighting.

The idea that you can rank people's quality of life by one or two dimensions of privilege is absurd.

No, he just illustrated the distraction. What you are talking about is not a proof, it is an assumption by people who know math. The proof is to take 2 apples, and then add two more, then count the four apples that are there. That is how we prove that math to a toddler. You have just learned the symbols of math.

For instance, 2+2 does not equal four if you are adding ascii values because that is a different way of interpreting the symbols. 2 is an ascii symbol representing two objects. If you were to actually look at the way a computer processes numbers it looks nothing like 8+8=16 because the computer processor works in binary, and numbers like 8 and 16 do not exist as tho0se symbols in binary.

But this is the point @Amaris is trying to make about UA. He is a fucking moron. the real reason people like UA want the proof has nothing to do with proof. It is because it fills up endless pages of discussion with the intellectually dishonest request to prove something everyone else knows exists. That wastes time and draws attention away from UA's completely fucked up idiocy by forcing a circular discussion that constantly requires the opponent to prove the same thing over and over again.

UA cannot even make his own point properly here because UA is not capable of proper thought. He is parroting things he has heard from other people he thinks is clever. He does not know the end of the argument because he does not care and cannot grasp it with the fucked up ganglion in his head. It really does not matter because he is only trying to distract like a five year old interjecting into an adult conversation with absurd questions.

This is why I do not think democracy works because UA is not alone. He is the fucking majority of talking monkeys who think they are advanced. There are at least 75 percent of people on UA's level. They are all semi functional because they have been taught to copy things they do not understand. When we allow their heads to be filled with lies and bullshit we get garbage out.

As for my proof I give you the fucking internet. That is the biggest compilation of human behavior and it is full of idiocy.

*sees nothing wrong with this post*

vreenak.gif

Nope.


(I'd explain further, but you just wouldn't get it)

Is anyone even trying to create such a ranking, or is that just a strawman?

Fortunate that's not something that's happening, then.

You're right. White, straight and male is THREE!!111 It's practically axiomatic at that point.

Fucking hell.

I clicked opened this post, and scrolled back expecting there to be a post that matched this reply, and it wasn't there.
You really are fighting a boogeyman in your head.


I could see if you had PTSD.
Y'know, if you fought in a war, and the other side were pink-haired feminists, and their man-bunned allies, and they caught you, and put you in a tiger cage, and fed you on chai lattes, and tofurkey, and you escaped, and got on a chopper, and still have nightmares of the cage.

But you just listened to right-wing morons.
Why is this so fucking REAL to you??

It's the post right above mine, you fucking muppet twatwaffle.Dimensions of privilege.

And stop presuming to speak to my influences and motivations. You don't know a goddamn thing about me, and you're not nearly clever enough to fill in the gaping blanks with your own suppositions.

Well, that's where your premises fail.

What's the distinction? A collective right IS an individual right.

You've probably heard of the "Piggie Park" civil rights case, in which a guy who owned a BBQ joint claimed his religion forbid race mixing and thus he could refuse to integrate his dining room.

He lost.

So he had to allow black (collective) and other non-white customers dine in the same space as whites - but who exercised that right?

Individuals.

So where is a collective right recognized that doesn't in fact affirm the rights of the individual?

It's a fine word. It will be swell when we start one (or even agree how to define "merit")

one wonders what any of this shit has to do with Dawkins pimping TERF bullshit though.