Re: Promoting the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines?

[HiPhish <hiphish@posteo.de>]

On Wednesday, 31 October 2018 15:14:53 CET you wrote:
> This confused me. You mean collectives of people are made up of people,
> and therefore associate with other people?
More like "I scratch your back, you scratch my back" or "oh, I know just the 
right guy for the job". You let that happen often enough and you end up with 
several groups all being "in bed with each other" so to speak. This is not 
limited to feminism, it happens in all areas of life of course.

> The problem is not only Steve making a stupid joke; the problem is the
> environment that led to Steve thinking it is okay to make statements
> like these in the first place. The only way to 'fix' this problem is to
> change the environment so that people are less likely to slip up, and to
> keep each other honest about (tiny) mistakes that everyone inevitably
> makes. To be honest, your recurring statement about people being more or
> less likely to slip up is not really coherent; I think we can all agree
> that every on slips up sometimes.
Agreed, but the punishment should also fit the crime. You can have a quick talk 
with Steve and then everyone shakes hands and is friends again. The problem is 
that there exist groups who want to exploit Steve's slip-up for their own 
gains by blowing it issue out of proportion. They cannot justify their 
existence and their bills if the issue can be sorted out with a short 
conversation, so Steve has to be punished properly.

> This seems like a question to ask the researchers, but because you have
> a concern regarding methodology does not invalidate the by now seemingly
> irrefutable clues that these issues do exist.
The issue exists, but how prevalent is it? Remember "manspreading"? Take a 
photo of a man taking up three seats in an almost empty subway, crop the photo 
so you cannot see that the subway is mostly empty, write an academic paper on 
the issue you created, sell the solution in the form of an awareness campaign, 
finance it with taxpayer money, and in the end people even get arrested because 
no matter how dumb the rules are, they have to be enforced. When my sister 
told me about manspreading she couldn't stop laughing, because even she sits 
like that when there is enough space. And why wouldn't she?

I view the catcalling issue the same way: go through the bad part of town, 
make an issue out of it, sell the solution. I am confident if you were to do 
this experiment in an area closer to Belgian standard of living none of this 
would happen.

> Your text seemingly goes from `ethnically diverse' -> `[lower] standard
> of living' -> `bad part of town' -> `ghetto'. I will assume you acted,
> and will continue acting in good faith, but I implore you to critically
> have a look at your thought processes and see how incredibly rude this
> might come across. If this was not your intention at all, then I
> apologize and hope you can still take my comments as a constructive
> critical note on parts of your writing style.
I got carried away, I was not controlling my emotions enough I guess :) My 
problem is when people like Mr Sassmannshausen take accusations at face-value 
without any shred of scepticism. People have had their lives ruined by false 
accusations and this sort of injustice is what makes my blood boil. Listening 
and believing benefits neither the innocent nor the real victims, it only 
drives a wedge between people. Who profits? Those who thrive on conflict, 
creating problems and selling solutions. (I had a much more polemic response 
to the previous mail, but I deleted it, so I guess I still had some emotional 
control)