I’m not sure you can triple the rapes of 15th-century Britain.

The big one for me is to raise men properly.

Just as a side note, but there is a point to it, when I pass by my compound’s little park, there’s always a bunch of children (12 and under) playing. And I always laugh at how the girls are some of the most vicious when it comes to competitive activities with the boys. Whether it’s ball games or just roughhousing the girls are in the thick of things, swinging fists, throwing stuff, even kicking with gay abandon when things get rough.

But a handful of years later this is not the case. Something between the ages of 12 and 18 (which is where I got them when I was teaching) transformed them utterly into these meek, non-physical, non-confrontational people.

The way almost all societies are right now, women are raised to serve others (husbands, yes, but also society) and boys are barely raised at all, allowed instead to effectively run wild. (“Boys will be boys.”) This means that we’re raised to be wives, but they aren’t raised to be husbands. (For the situation, natch, where we have “traditional” nuclear pairing.)

We need to change the culture. We need to raise boys to be functional elements of society. We need to instill in them the expectation that they too serve: their wives and society at large. All the other solutions to the violence against women situation are temporary stopgaps (though obviously still desirable): easily accessed shelters, better economic support, reproductive rights, easily accessed (and attentive) mental health support, etc. But for something that is effective in the long term we need a change at the societal level, and it needs to begin with the men.

Actually that’s not an angle I’d suspected. Nice.

Yes, I noticed it. It’s really repulsive.

It does, doesn’t it?

It won’t stop them from being really annoying sex pests though. 😩

Wait, you mean MEN, in TECH, have problems with CONSENT and women saying “NO”?

This is my surprised face: 😐

5:30 on workdays, anywhere between 7:30 to 11:00 on weekends.

🤮

O Brother was brilliant and introduced me to a bunch of musicians I’d never known before.

Ooh! That sounds like fun! Make a bunch of bingo cards and see how quickly we can fill them all!

Instead of that free one in the middle we’ll put #NotAllMen because that’s guaranteed to be referenced every time.

Ugh. Another topic that brings the rats out of the corners. This seems to be almost as bad as #ManOrBear.

The fact that you don’t know the answer to that question yourself is pretty much clinching evidence that it’s AI code.

I’m pretty sure that entire message was provided by degenerative “AI”. It just reeks of the format and language of an LLM chat bot.

Could people who have actual technical skills check something for me? Does this code even work?

“Boom, baby, BOOM! I’m the Evil Midnight …”

Never mind.

For those hitting Wired’s paywall: https://archive.is/fMTwf

Looking at the URL, yes, there’s a very simple pattern to Kaptain Ketamine’s broken promises: if he opens his mouth he’s lying.

The year is 1999. The tech scene, where I did most of my marketing work at the time, is collapsing in Ottawa. I’m getting tired of the disrespect I doubly get for a) not being a techie, and b) not being male. I decide to go for the money instead.

A company in Houston is hiring and I get headhunted. The salary hinted at is almost double what I’m making now, plus some very generous bonus and stock schemes. I get flown down to Houston, kept in a really nice hotel room for two days as I go through several interviews with different departments and managers. When I’m finished and on the flight back home, I have my pick of four jobs. Feels good, right? To be wanted that much?

Yeah, except that the final interview had already settled which I’d take: none.

Before that final interview I’d already had a few red flags:

1. Houston is a lovely city and far more cosmopolitan than I’d imagined I’d ever find in Texas, of all places. But … there’s still billboards left, right, and centre for churches, religious radio stations, etc. It may be surface cosmopolitan, but that general feel of fundamentalist Christianity is everywhere.
2. The salary is high but digging into the paperwork for the proffered health plan leads me to believe that if I have any kind of a major health problem or accident or the like I’m not going to be seeing the benefits of that for long.
3. As cosmopolitan as Houston itself looked, the company was whiter than white.

None of these was a showstopper. Hell, all three were just a mark in the “minus” column of my PMI¹ analysis and had not yet outweighed the “plus” column.

But that final job interview… Yeah.

I was talking to the final hiring manager (the pattern was in each department first a group interview with HR plus a few potential coworkers, and if I passed, directly with the hiring manager) and I noticed an intriguing sculpture on the shelf behind him. It was a smooth rock (a river-smoothed piece of granite, it looked like) and on it was mounted some pieces of shiny metal with weird dented-in spots that looked half-melted with the metal melting into weirdly-shaped blobs. So I asked about it. I couldn’t see how the metal was formed the way it was, melted so it sagged, broke through, and also pooled in the hole.

“Oh, that? That’s the platters of a hard drive that failed. I took it to the range and shot it with this.”

And he pulls out a revolver from his desk. Nothing special, just a silver .38 special revolver, like the kind cops used to carry. Loaded. He waved the handgun around in ways that would have my father (a retired CWO) leaping across to him and buttstroking him to unconsciousness for the sheer lack of trigger and barrel discipline. I can’t get across just how unsafe this guy was being. He was in an office full of people, he was waving around a loaded handgun that he’d taken from his office desk, paying no attention to if the barrel ever pointed at someone or not. I was too stunned to look, but it would not have surprised me to see that he’d placed his finger on the trigger too. This was just reckless.

And. Nobody. Else. Around. Me. Thought. This. Was. Unusual.

In the middle of a job interview, an interviewing manager thought it was OK to pull out a loaded handgun and wave it around. And nobody around him thought it was even slightly off.

That by itself would have been a hard “no” for accepting any kind of a job. I didn’t need the other red flags in the slightest. I had four offers in my pocket and my answer to all four was “sorry, I’ve decided I’m never setting foot on US soil ever again”. And I’ve stuck with it ever since.

¹ de Bono’s “Plus/Minus/Interesting” technique.

Why do I feel a #notallmen hashtag forthcoming. Because of course every meme is targeted at every man (who is posting in a women’s only group, but is a proud, hard-working feminist…) individually, duh.

This shit is why we can’t have nice things.

Why did you cross over the part that was right? 😮

I have a very few items of clothing that I’ll iron (but usually just steam). But I hardly ever wear them. This is to the point I have no idea where my iron is.