Honestly, as a European, there is no such thing as democratic socialism here. There a handful of countries with a decent welfare system, others who used to have a decent one but which are demolishing it bit-by-bit since the 80s/90s.

There are way less differences between the US system and European systems than between European system and what a Democratic socialism looks like.

Those money are numbers on computers. I guess this is what OC referred to as making money out of thin air.

on someone else’s experience in life based on a single forum comment

You keep insisting on this point. I am not doing any of that. I am challenging the generalization of the analysis of those episodes to the whole sector. I am not interested in discussing or disputing your personal experience.

You don’t work for my company so I’m not sure why you are acting like the culture at your company where you can’t get promoted contradicts anything.

From how you wrote it, I did not understand it was specifically a statement regarding your company. In general I think that’s not the experience of most people especially in the last 2 years (given the layoffs), but obviously, if that’s what happens in your particular company, I have no way to dispute it. It is not representative of the general environment though, I hope we can agree that people are not thrown promotions generally out of nothing, and that employers try to squeeze employees as much as possible, even if men.

You are free to discuss your grievances, but for some reason these things only come up when women start talking about their experience…

I speak about these topics almost everyday, with colleagues and people in general. Not sure what are you trying to imply.

It’s just another “what about the men” comment that always comes up when women try to have a discussion. It’s a pattern of behavior that actually backs up my experience rather than refutes it.

My comment has nothing to do with this argument. This is just a strawman that you are using to win internet points, falling back on cliches. My argument is “the workplace is a warzone, full of conflict and discrimination. Certain behaviors that you describe can be sexist bu can also not be, and instead be classist, ageist, racist and also the result of distorted incentives for workers that end up fighting each other”. In fact, I would argue that ageism in tech is a problem as big as sexism, but apparently you are not interested in having this kind of conversation.

It contradicts a ton of research

Research shows a lot of ageism in tech. So actually refusing to acknowledge that certain behavior can be the result of other form of discrimination as well or even not a result of discrimination at all, but the result of the way power structure is, seems to be contradicting research. My statement is far from being absolute. I am not saying that sexism does not exist in tech, I am not blind, I am saying that those two very specific common patterns that you described (and that I challenged) are not inherently sexist (but can be). My overall intention is to expand the critique to the toxic working culture in tech looking at it from multiple angles, but again, it seems you are not interested and you really want to only look at this through the lens of gender discrimination.

To me, this seems shortsighted, partial and, if I may, also oppressive towards the many who are discriminated in the very same way but from different reasons. It is detrimental to the overall effort that us -workers- should do to shape the culture in tech in another way, that should push for structural change that would drastically modify the incentives people have and so on.

Also, as a man, when I am mostly ignored because people are too eager to speak rather than listen, my first assumption is that those people simply suck at meetings. I have the privilege of knowing that it is not discrimination.

But it might as well be. I was discriminated/bullied for quite some time after I joined a company. People assumed I knew nothing and disregarded almost anything I said, and generally didn’t even ask me. I was one of the two people in a department. Those people did not suck at meetings/conversations, it was an active discrimination based on their preconceptions. I don’t think gender is by far the only discrimination that can happen within the workplace. But yeah, I definitely agree that I will most likely not being discriminated as a man, in the sense that sexist discrimination in tech happens almost exclusively to women.

There is a lot of competition of ideas going on in tech, very little positive feedback, and a lot of talking over people, because this is just how a lot of men are unfortunately. I fully understand why people who are more likely to be prejudiced against would perceive all sort of false signals in there.

I agree. I - like many others - do my best to change the culture overall, to ensure that people who get promotions have fill leading positions are not those kind of people who will reinforce all of this. Also, I did not work in the US startup environment (and I consider myself lucky), which means I might also be missing real experiences on places much worse than the ones I have been in (the loner-tech-bro-genius hacking culture of the Silicon valley is something I greatly despise).

Sexism isn’t sexism because it only happens to women.

I mean, if a behavior is not related to being discriminated based on gender, it’s not sexism. It can be mobbing, it can be simply a toxic competitive environment, but that doesn’t make it sexism, that is my point. “IF” being the keyword.

Implicit bias is a thing

I totally agree, and this is why I do think that for someone shutting down a woman, because implicitly there is the though “this is a woman and therefore doesn’t know what she is talking about”, can be sexist, but that behavior is not inherently sexist. There are multiple (bad) reasons why people might do that. People might assume I am not competent, too young/too old to know better, too recent in the company, I went to the wrong university, and many other reason. This is not inherently linked to gender discrimination, that is my point. It can be ageism, hazing (hopefully the translation is accurate), classism or even racism, if not just the behavior of people who just want to gain advantages at expense of others (which is not a form of discrimination per se). All these exist in the workplace, and that’s why I was challenging your conclusion that this is sexism by definition. Now if in your experience you think sexism was the root cause, sure, whatever. But if we want to move the conversation to a more generic “tech” environment, I think it’s worth to expand the analysis.

Thanks for writing an entire essay trying to disprove my experiences though.

Well, with this I guess I understand you are in bad faith. I did not try to disprove your experiences (in fact, I explicitly wrote that for one specific instance), I challenged some of the arguments you made. Trying to imply that I tried to disprove your experiences is extremely dishonest.

Why is it so hard to just listen to women?

Are we not allowed to have different opinion? Do I exist in the workplace as well? Also, expressions such as “And men are just blessed with raises and promotions they didn’t even ask for” are hard to relate for me and for any other working class man who struggle in the workplace I know. I understand you were trying to get your point across, but if that’s your perspective, then we simply live in two different worlds (which is totally possible, given that we probably live in very different places and companies).

I listened (well…read), and I questioned some of your conclusions. If this for you means “not listening to women”, then I suppose we have different perspectives.

I agree with what you said for the most part, except the fact that I wouldn’t define sexism in the majority of cases having people “stealing” your ideas, nor shooting down ideas.

In the first case it seems a common practice in competitive environments, where workers have no incentive at all to cooperate and all the incentive to screw each other to look better and chase promotions. I think people who do that regularly do that with everyone. Appropriating ideas and work of others is how middle managers in many cases got there and how they climb the ladder, even though everyone knows what they are worth.

The second is an extremely common occurrence in tech, ideas are shot down all the time. I have seen it occurring countless of times, I don’t think is a sexist practice inherently, although still something extremely annoying within tech. It is sexism when ideas are shot down “because a woman is saying it”, though.

My final remark is about the part about “males getting raises without even asking” (paraphrasing). Now, this may have been true in your context, I have no way to dispute it. However, I just want to reinforce that the narrative of “males being somewhat on the same side” disregarding the conflict within workers and owners (I.e. those who get the raises and those who give them) seems to be completely fabricated (based on my experience) and also extremely damaging to workers solidarity. The narrative that somehow gender prevails over class as a factor of unification is very dangerous and plays right in the hand of those who benefit from gender conflict as an obstacle for class unity.

Then you will get all the top tournaments with maybe a few women, none of them will likely win (based on current ranking), which will cause possibly even less women to try chess and reinforce the vicious circle (less win also equals less money, less sponsors). Basically, after that you will get protests as well.

Not really, and I would deserve issues, as I usually randomly update apps from whatever store I happen to open.

Same phone, same OS. For me NFC works fine, I routinely use it for yubikeys.I also use Aurora store, in addition to f-droid and the app lounge.

Orwell wrote a critique of modern society, soviet Stalinist society in particular, in animal farm. It’s not an anthropology book, it’s political satire that came from a socialist (!). I am not sure your induction that it applies to all humans under every circumstance was therefore intended by the author (lord of the flies might be a much better example in this case).

Graeber is actually far for boring, and as an anthropologist his writing tend to be a bit more general.

Either way, of course I’ve read Animal Farm.

I think that at least some of it is a knee-jerk reaction to the narrative that is pushed. There is no analysis, no debate, at the moment NATO is sold like some kind of NGO, countries that until yesterday were bombing others with zero concerns today are standing in (justified) horrors for the Russian war crimes, like if we discovered war in 2022. For some, this narrative is simply unacceptable, even if it ends up in the right place (i.e., supporting Ukraine in defending itself from an imperialist nation). The problem comes with the NAFO-fellows and the likes, where immediately as soon as you say anything to bring up these very contradictions, you are a genocide denier/enabler/supporter.

I am sure that for others is a matter of countering the US, or the mainstream media or whatever, though.

human nature

Every time I read someone expressing this view, I feel like encouraging to read something from Graeber, for example “Debt”. Not for the discussion on debt itself, but mostly for the different ways societies were organized over millennia.

I confirm what the other comment said, with microg it works fine. I am using /e/OS and I regularly use yubikeys with Firefox, bitwarden and the yubico app.

“Some” obligations may perfectly work this way . Not sure I would take a military handbook as a reference for international right (especially from one of the countries that doesn’t even recognize the ICC), but either way, I strongly doubt the meaning is “if they start torturing their prisoners, we should torture ours” or mirroring other war crimes. I am no expert, but I think that the motivation “the enemy did it before us” wouldn’t hold much in the ICC.

I don’t generally agree with the idea because I believe it doesn’t incentivize (actually, it goes in the very opposite direction) the cultural shift which is needed. That is, you are the platform, you are not buying anything, you are simply supporting the platform(s) you care about unconditionally.

Turns out you don’t even have the decency to admit your own misunderstanding, despite it was unequivocally clear from the previous comment. Instead, looking at your history it seems you just have the habit to shout at people (often insulting, with a very bully attitude) and to tell what other people’s opinions are (surprising to see at least a few instances of this in less than 20 comments).

I am blocking you in the meanwhile because I can do without lunatics shouting their hatred online, especially when there is not a gram of rationality in the debate.

Shame on you.

I did definitely hear about this, but I don’t think I can say I understand it in all situations. Specifically about this, I quote:

They [conventions] are coming to be regarded less and less as contracts concluded on a basis of reciprocity in the national interests of the parties and more and more as a solemn affirmation of principles respected for their own sake, a series of unconditional engagements on the part of each of the Contracting Parties ’ vis-à-vis ’ the others.

As a commentary to the Article 2 of the 4th Geneva convention.

It brings the fight closer to Putin and requires them to divert forces.

Realistically, Russia seems to be perfectly content in having its own population die. These advantages might be true, but they depend a lot on how Russia reacts to this. As far as Putin is concerned, I am quite sure he has a permanent residence in some bunker somewhere anyway.

It also makes the Russian people more likely to revolt against the war.

I think this is a legitimate opinion, but I think that history showed us over and over that attacked populations tend to unite. I don’t know if you have any particular example in mind.

Karma farming even on Lemmy? Or what is the point of such comments? I am interested about what part I don’t understand, in particular of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention

Quite frankly also a lot of broken people that just saw one too many of their relatives dying under russian rocket barrage…

And I would definitely not expect them to make balanced judgement calls with morale and humanity in mind, of course.

I really hope it does not happen for Ukraine’s sake, but at the same time I would understand if it did.

Yeah, I think those are two very distinct concepts in fact. I have this kind of conversations on a weekly basis, where I end up usually disagreeing at some point with my fiancee (who is Ukrainian) about certain topics. I do understand of course that the hatred is real and justified. These analysis are of course a privilege for people who can do them with a certain level of detachment.

Yeah, I got lost in one of the many threads :|