Study: Everyone hates environmentalists and feminists

[Wilikon]

http://youtu.be/FWxAljFlb-c

 

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[Spendulus]

In order to halt global warming, people have to freeze to death... or ask their government for permission to survive?

[/quote]Well, couple things wrong there.  Burning wood is what greenies consider "carbon neutral".

[darkmule]

In order to halt global warming, people have to freeze to death... or ask their government for permission to survive?

Well, couple things wrong there.  Burning wood is what greenies consider "carbon neutral".

I consider myself an environmentalist, but environmentalism and the EPA are two different things.  One is a general philosophy and the other is an utterly corrupt government agency.

Incidentally, this is not about carbon, but about particulate pollution.  Doesn't really matter, though.  It's an absolutely stupid way to make enemies out of a lot of people simultaneously, and at the same time, a retrograde tax on poor people who can little afford it.  At the very least, any currently existing fireplace/wood heater/water heater should be grandfathered in out of basic decency.  At best, though, this whole stupid policy should be reconsidered.

I can't think of a more ridiculous thing to go after.

I guess it's easier to do this than go after 70 year old coal-fired power plants dirtier than 100,000 homes.  After all, poor people don't have the money to fight back in court.

[Spendulus]

In order to halt global warming, people have to freeze to death... or ask their government for permission to survive?

Well, couple things wrong there.  Burning wood is what greenies consider "carbon neutral".

I consider myself an environmentalist, but environmentalism and the EPA are two different things.  One is a general philosophy and the other is an utterly corrupt government agency.....

But that illustrates nicely the point, that when well meaning individuals attempt to change government through creation of laws, agencies and regulations, they presume....wrongly...that the agency will inherit their well meaning.  Quite the reverse, usually.

Which is why it's often said that radical environmentalists were more socialist/communist than environmentalists.  The impression is they want the rules and the controls on the populations, results be damned.

[darkmule]

Which is why it's often said that radical environmentalists were more socialist/communist than environmentalists.  The impression is they want the rules and the controls on the populations, results be damned.

Well, you might recall that the progenitor of American environmentalism, and arguably modern environmentalism (in its rational state) was Teddy Roosevelt.  The common term for the philosophy then was "conservation."  It's difficult to imagine anything more conservative than conservation itself. 

It's quite easy to see the flaws with going after family (and individual) use of things like fireplaces and stoves, which are a very traditional means of generating heat and are usually used in relatively remote areas where they pose little threat except theoretically in the aggregate. 

Suppose you get equal results from shutting down, say, an old coal-fired electric plant, one that couldn't possibly ever even get near compliance with even loose regulations, and in fact belches gigantic clouds of smoke and particles that are actually making people sick.  There are, in fact, many of these kinds of plants.  Most of them have been grandfathered. 

On the other hand, suppose you have a similar amount of smoke generated over 100,000 square miles in some remote area, by tens of thousands of mostly poor people.  On paper, the environmental impact looks the same, but if you visited this remote area, the air would be clean and you would see no health issues whatsoever.  It would be the equivalent of someone smoking a cigarette a mile away from you once a year.

So you can take on the coal plant that's actually causing problems.  Okay, they hire a bunch of lobbyists and obstruct everything for years or decades.  You have a fight on your hands.

Or you can, relying on bullshit numbers, go after poor people who can't fight back.  If you're a politician, this choice is easy.

But if you actually care about the environment, you've just created an entire generation of people who hate your guts, and think you're a bunch of fascists, and actually, they're right.

Extremists serve no purpose but their own.  Beware whoever claims to love humanity.  Because they don't like YOU.

[Spendulus]

....

But if you actually care about the environment, you've just created an entire generation of people who hate your guts, and think you're a bunch of fascists, and actually, they're right.

Extremists serve no purpose but their own.  Beware whoever claims to love humanity.  Because they don't like YOU.

I see the causative factors of rule making like this quite differently.  There is no need to ascribe it to extremists, who are yes, quite interesting, but rare.

Suppose we envision two possible futures. 

(1) 100,00 people getting college degrees that serve no purpose in the open society and free market, but who find that with those degrees, they can get jobs with the EPA. 

(2) 50,000 people getting similar degrees and similarly getting jobs with the EPA.

(2) will yield twice as many rules and regulations, won't it?  It's all pretty simple, really.

Assume there was a floor of some building in the District of Criminals where "particular emission specialists" slithered around.  Budget grew, they got two floors and staffed the cubicles.

What the hell would you expect?

Personally I believe it is no simplification of reality to assert that cutting staff and budget of an agency such as the EPA by 75-90% will do no harm and will do considerable good.  Might need to tell them which areas to cut the staff in, instead of leaving it to them to decide.

[darkmule]

....

But if you actually care about the environment, you've just created an entire generation of people who hate your guts, and think you're a bunch of fascists, and actually, they're right.

Extremists serve no purpose but their own.  Beware whoever claims to love humanity.  Because they don't like YOU.

I see the causative factors of rule making like this quite differently.  There is no need to ascribe it to extremists, who are yes, quite interesting, but rare.

Suppose we envision two possible futures. 

(1) 100,00 people getting college degrees that serve no purpose in the open society and free market, but who find that with those degrees, they can get jobs with the EPA. 

(2) 50,000 people getting similar degrees and similarly getting jobs with the EPA.

(2) will yield twice as many rules and regulations, won't it?  It's all pretty simple, really.

Only if you assume there's some constant that correlates number of people getting degrees with pages of regulations.  That isn't actually the case, nor is it even the case that rules and regulations themselves directly correlate to evil, assuming evil is some measurable value.

A lot of what is called "deregulation" isn't.  A lot of times, some measure is proposed as "deregulation" and after it's done, if you count up the pages of "regulations," they're much larger.  What was called "deregulation" was simply a list of exceptions for the purchasers of the "deregulation."  When corporate sponsors purchase "deregulation," what they generally mean is deregulating THEM.  Not you or me.

Also, extremists themselves may be rare, but they're often influential or at least used as tools by the more powerful. 

The Sue-and-Settle Racket, an article by Forbes (yes I know) on the practice of setting policy you can't get through the legislature by having a "friendly" group sue you, then settling out of court on pre-arranged terms allowing you to do what you can't get passed into law.

I actually sometimes agree with policies that get enacted with this kind of shit, but it is obviously pernicious to have policy set in what amounts to a corrupt bypass of democracy.

[Spendulus]

....

But if you actually care about the environment, you've just created an entire generation of people who hate your guts, and think you're a bunch of fascists, and actually, they're right.

Extremists serve no purpose but their own.  Beware whoever claims to love humanity.  Because they don't like YOU.

I see the causative factors of rule making like this quite differently.  There is no need to ascribe it to extremists, who are yes, quite interesting, but rare.

Suppose we envision two possible futures. 

(1) 100,00 people getting college degrees that serve no purpose in the open society and free market, but who find that with those degrees, they can get jobs with the EPA. 

(2) 50,000 people getting similar degrees and similarly getting jobs with the EPA.

(2) will yield twice as many rules and regulations, won't it?  It's all pretty simple, really.

Only if you assume there's some constant that correlates number of people getting degrees with pages of regulations.  That isn't actually the case, nor is it even the case that rules and regulations themselves directly correlate to evil, assuming evil is some measurable value.....

I actually do lean in this direction quite a bit.  And why isn't it reasonable to presume that if you have x number of people "doing a job", then if you have 3x or 4x number of people "doing that job" it will be that much more objectionable and intrusive?

[darkmule]

I actually do lean in this direction quite a bit.  And why isn't it reasonable to presume that if you have x number of people "doing a job", then if you have 3x or 4x number of people "doing that job" it will be that much more objectionable and intrusive?

So you presume that if it takes a man a minute to dig a post-hole, that 60 men can dig a post-hole in one second?

[Spendulus]

I actually do lean in this direction quite a bit.  And why isn't it reasonable to presume that if you have x number of people "doing a job", then if you have 3x or 4x number of people "doing that job" it will be that much more objectionable and intrusive?

So you presume that if it takes a man a minute to dig a post-hole, that 60 men can dig a post-hole in one second?

If the US Gov is on the job....

and it takes one man one minute...

then with 60 men each working one minute...

they'd have produced a decision to form a committee to write a report on the environmental consequences of digging that post hole...

I guess what I think is that you can't hardly go wrong arguing for an abstraction such as "small government"...

[Wilikon]

[...]
They don’t lead to better hiring outcomes, as Google learned. Its senior vice president for people operations, Laszlo Bock, said last June in an interview with New York Times, “…we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

Such hiring practices also disadvantage women. They hurt the employer by limiting the talent pool.  They fortify the male-dominated, frat-boy culture that Silicon Valley is increasingly being criticized for.

Telle Whitney, CEO of Anita Borg Institute, which is working on getting more women to study computer science and have more women fully engaged in creating technology, says its research shows questions such as these cause women to get screened out more often than men. As an example, the superhero concept is going to resonate much more with men, as demonstrated by the demographics of the superhero movie attendance.  Whitney cites research which shows that a strong and pervasive stereotype of computer professionals as devoid of a social life alienates women. Subtle cues in the physical environment of companies such as Star Trek posters and video games lead to women being less interested in being a part of an organization when compared to a neutral office environment. This causes women to self-select out of technology jobs.

Indeed, the trend is getting worse. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were women. By 2011 this proportion had dropped to 18 percent. Most technology firms refuse to release gender and diversity numbers. Data collected on Github explains why. Dropbox, for example, had only 9 women in its 143 person engineering team as of October 2013. That’s 6.3 percent in an industry in which 18 percent of the hiring pool is women.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/16/dropboxs-hiring-practices-explain-its-disappointing%E2%80%8B-lack-of-female-employees/
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The comments say it all.

[Spendulus]

.....Anita Borg Institute, which is working on getting more women to study computer science and have more women fully engaged in creating technology.....

That is such total bullshit.

Another example of some I-know-better-than-you-what's-best-for-you liberal controller targeting a convenient group of exploitation.

[Rassah]

Not sure it's good to make some people uncomfortable by having them take down their Star Trek posters, just to make someone who is not into that culture feel more comfortable. Wouldn't it be better to get women into Star Trek and videogames instead? I say we need more nerd women, not force our nerd men to be less nerdy

[Snorek]

Parity is wrong. Women are not equal to men, that does not mean they are inferior. Just let people do things they can do good.

[Wilikon]

Not sure it's good to make some people uncomfortable by having them take down their Star Trek posters, just to make someone who is not into that culture feel more comfortable. Wouldn't it be better to get women into Star Trek and videogames instead? I say we need more nerd women, not force our nerd men to be less nerdy

Nerd women are hot. But that's just me.

[Rassah]

Parity is wrong. Women are not equal to men, that does not mean they are inferior. Just let people do things they can do good.

I disagree. For the most part, I think they are equal, or rather the ranges of "womenism" greatly overlap the ranges of "manism" with only minor bits on the fringes of the ranges being actually different. I think majority of the difference between men and women comes from nurture - the way they are raised and the culture they grow up in. Boys and girls are treated differently by their parents from birth, typically following established stereotypes, and the effect is compounded when boys and girls form groups in preschool and school, where they combine and magnify the effects of those stereotypes. In any case, any scientific result claiming that they are similar or different is likely so tainted by our culture as to be worthless.

Not sure it's good to make some people uncomfortable by having them take down their Star Trek posters, just to make someone who is not into that culture feel more comfortable. Wouldn't it be better to get women into Star Trek and videogames instead? I say we need more nerd women, not force our nerd men to be less nerdy

Nerd women are hot. But that's just me.

It is very very much not just you.

[Rassah]

What is the opposite of "antifragile" (like bitcoin)? Because reading BitChick's post, I'm led to believe that religion is the opposite of antifragile. The more you try to fix, the worse it gets.

[Spendulus]

Not sure it's good to make some people uncomfortable by having them take down their Star Trek posters, just to make someone who is not into that culture feel more comfortable. Wouldn't it be better to get women into Star Trek and videogames instead? I say we need more nerd women, not force our nerd men to be less nerdy

Nerd women are hot. But that's just me.

Hell ya.  Nerd women also make lots of money, degrees like cs, petro eng, mechanical eng.

You can have your soft sci wannabe women, them with psych, soc, women's studies, blahblahblah.

[Kaligulax]

I don't hate feminists. Real feminists where the women that fought for their right to vote, and have an equal chance for success in our society. They stood up for their rights when it was insanely difficult to do so. They lived in a world that looked down on them because of their gender from the day they were born and fought tooth and nail for equality.

Modern day feminism is just a bunch of whiney self-aggrandized emo 20 somethings who subscribe to a philosophy that is as pseudo-intellectual as religion for the most part. There are a few people left who knew what it was originally about but not many. They make a mockery of the sacrifice and work their parents did.

[Spendulus]

I don't hate feminists. Real feminists where the women that fought for their right to vote, and have an equal chance for success in our society. ......

Modern day feminism is just a bunch of whiney self-aggrandized emo 20 somethings who subscribe to a philosophy that is as pseudo-intellectual as religion for the most part. There are a few people left who knew what it was originally about but not many. They make a mockery of the sacrifice and work their parents did.

So the phrase and it's meaning have been hijacked, and we have to deal with the current meaning and the current intent....