A Crash Course in Feminism Mk. II (or, why everyone should be a feminist)

[scadugenga]

Dentist's decision to sack a woman for being too attractive has been upheld as legal by the all male supreme court in Iowa

[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/iowa-supreme-court-attractive-woman-firing_n_3586861.html[/url]

The only two good things I know about Iowa are the two people I know of who left that state.

Ridiculous.

This...this is what happens in my country when the political parties brain-fart and suddenly think that there is no such thing as "too far right" or "too far left" and anyone remotely moderate is "a traitor to the party."

I wonder when we'll have the next McCarthy show up?

:/

[eldargal]

[URL="http://elizabethsampat.com/the-truth-about-zoe-quinn/"]Good/horrifying article on the impact the Zoe Quinn/Anita Sarkeesian[/URL] stuff is having on women in the industry. Can't find it now but there was something floating around how the smear campaign against Zoe Quinn being an abuser herself and 'SJWs' shouldn't support her is part of a campaign orchestrated on 4chan to split the SJW community, there are IRC logs and such. They also show her ex colluding with people on 4chan.

[Mr Mystery]

I think Political Correctness has become a buzzword like Health and Safety, where people's conceptions are entirely born from stupid places like The Sun, and thus when you bring it up they roll their eyes and go, "ah that bloody 'elth n'n safety/political correctness tripe! Bloody waste o' time!"

As someone who works in an extremely HSE aware industry, I know that Health and Safety as a concept is a genuine system that saves lives and prevents life-ruining accidents. Guys who whine about putting dust masks on before sanding fibreglass, or wearing their safety boots in the warehouse get no shrift from me, especially when they pull out that bullcrap conkers story as an example every frigging time. (Easiest way to tell if someone's ever worked at a real company before is to see them bring that up as an example of Health and Safety.)

Same as how people always bring up fairy lights being renamed to stop gays getting offended, or Christmas being renamed to stop Muslims being offended, despite these surfacing when I was in high school and never happening.

Jeremy Clarkson is an example of a man/character who constantly derides PC, but whether he's imitating ijits who don't understand what it is or whether he genuinely believes it is another thing. I'd say half the stuff he gets pulled up on is petty, like his comment about the air-con on a car being like an asthmatic blowing at you through a straw. That said, I'm not asthmatic, so I can't claim to understand if that'd offend - I haven't met anyone who was offended, but I know a small number of people. Other things like the comment about truckers murdering prostitutes and the racist one most recently really aren't things even I would find funny.

Also, this article on Friendzoning reminds me why I still read Cracked:
[URL="http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-reasons-never-to-use-term-friendzone"]http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-reasons-never-to-use-term-friendzone[/URL]

I have to admit, this whole "Friendzone" fad really gets on my nerves,I can't imagine how irritating it is for a girl to deal with.

I'm always amused at how those deriding Health and Safety seems to miss it's all been caused by an overly litiginous society.

Take cups of Coffee having 'CAUTION - CONTENTS MAY BE HOT' printed on them. Why? Not because they're treating us all as idiots, but to stave off the sort of successful, but still ludicrous lawsuit where someone scalded themselves having just bought it. Ditto packets of Nuts warning they may contain Nuts etc.

[Gotthammer]

Take cups of Coffee having 'CAUTION - CONTENTS MAY BE HOT' printed on them. Why? Not because they're treating us all as idiots, but to stave off the sort of successful, but still ludicrous lawsuit where someone scalded themselves having just bought it. Ditto packets of Nuts warning they may contain Nuts etc.

That’s what the media smear campaign against her would have you believe, anyway. The truth of the matter is that the McDonald’s in question had previously been cited - on at least two separate occasions - for keeping their coffee so hot that it violated local occupational health and safety regulations. The lady didn’t win her lawsuit because American courts are stupid; she won it because the McDonald’s she bought that coffee from was actively and knowingly breaking the law with respect to the temperature of its coffee at the time of the incident.

So they can still legally serve you something that could sear off the end of your tongue or permanently demolish the front of your gums and just give you a big fat middle finger in court. “The label SAID it would be HOT, STUPID.”

The woman injured in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants was 79 years old at the time of her injuries, and suffered third-degree burns to the pelvic region (including her thighs, buttocks, and groin), which in combination with lesser burns in the surrounding regions caused damage to an area totaling a whopping 22% of her body’s surface. These injuries that required two years of intensive medical care, including multiple skin grafts; during her hospitalization, Stella Liebeck lost around 20% of her starting body weight.

She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation. The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.

Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.

The Liebeck case was absolutely not an example of litigation-happy Americans expecting corporations to cover their ***** for their own stupidity, but we seem determined to remember it that way. It’s an issue of liability, and the allowable lengths of capitalism, and even of the way in which our society is incredibly dangerous for and punitive towards the uninsured, but it was not and is not a frivolous suit. Please check your assumptions and do your research before you turn a burn victim’s suffering into a throwaway punchline.

So someone mentioned the documentary Hot Coffee, which I watched just last night, and I want to share some tidbits with you:
In the US, people’s right to sue has been getting steadily eroded and things like making people believe the hot coffee case were frivolous are part of it. That’s how they get people to actually vote for limitations on their own rights to sue, or for caps on damages, when in fact ‘tort reform’ laws usually end up, e.g., reducing the amount you can get in a malpractice suit.

And there’s also a lot of sneaky **** like people unknowingly signing away their right to sue in the fine print (or being told they have in a ‘supplementary package’ of fine print delivered to them AFTER they signed the contract), and ending up in ‘binding mandatory arbitration’. You’ve probably signed dozens of contracts like this, e.g., for your cellphone and credit card. You have basically ‘agreed’ that is you have any dispute for any reason you cannot sue for damages, you have to have a secret meaning with an arbitrator hired by the person / entity that harmed you to act as judge.
There was some really striking examples in the documentary. One was a kid born with severe brain damage because he wasn’t delivered properly, resulting in oxygen deprivation for about 8 minutes during birth; professional estimates for his cost of living (including numerous surgeries and physical therapy, starting at just one year old) for the rest of his life was about $6 million. The jury awarded $5.6. That’s doable, right?

Well, except in that state (Nebraska) there was an award cap of $1.25 million, which, after paying legal bills and the already accrued medical expenses, left the kid with just a few hundred thousand. So, he’s now on medicaid to pay for his therapy, surgeries, and basic living expenses. The cost of his treatment has basically been transferred to the taxpayer, and should anything happen to his parents they have no idea what would happen to him or who would take care of him.


Another was a Haliburton employee who went to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Miss Jamie Leigh Jones. (Warning for the next paragraph: discussion of rape.)

Long story short: she was lied to about her accommodations and ended up housed in barrack with 400 men. She was sexually harassed and threatened. She complained about it, twice, and was told she’d ‘get over it’. She ended up being drugged and gang raped. She needed reconstructive surgery for anal and vaginal tearing. What do you think happened next?
She was locked in a shipping container with two armed guards for days, until one of them, out of sympathy and in defiance of orders, let her borrow his cellphone. She called her father who called some congressman and got her out of there.
She then spent 4 years fighting for her day in court, because unbeknownst to her she’d signed a binding mandatory arbitration agreement. She was 19 when all of this happened.
So, conclusion: the myth of frivolous lawsuits is kinda like the myth of the welfare queen. There have probably been a few that occurred sometime, somewhere, sure, but I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find them. Most people who file a suit have damn good reasons, and if they don’t the suit usually gets thrown out of court by a judge before they even waste time assembling a jury.

(Oh, another bit of shady **** discussed in the movies: big businesses trying to influence judge elections, or defame / dethrone already elected judges, if it seems they’re actually in favour of the common people’s right to civil litigation. During Judge Oliver Diaz’s election, he was subject to a massive, multi-million dollar smear campaign. When he won anyway, he was subject to another smear campaign: because a friend had co-signed a loan with him, he was accused of accepting a bribe, even though he had never presided on any case having to do with this friend or his law firm. In effect, his reputation was ruined and he couldn’t get elected again. This was not an isolated incident.)

Meanwhile, laws and ‘reforms’ to curb ‘litigation abuse’ do more harm than good. If you hear a politician talking about ‘lawsuit lotteries’ and a need for ‘tort reform’, think of Reagan talking about ‘welfare queens’; think about how the vast majority of people on welfare do, desperately, need it.

What we’re really looking at is people eroding our social safety net, because they’re lucky / wealthy enough to view it as inconvenient.

[URL="http://www.hotcoffeethemovie.com/Default.asp"]the docco mentioned[/URL]

[Mr Mystery]

It appears I stand corrected!

[eldargal]

I saw of the photos of her wounds like a year after the incident and they were still horrific. I think it would be nice if the media ran some stories about her, cos the onl reason I don't think that case was stupid is because I saw some stff on tumblr 18 months ago.

[Wildeybeast]

I don't know about the US, but over here those warnings and even signed waivers do not guarantee protection from a lawsuit. Any negligent, reckless or unlawful behaviour can still see you stumping up the dosh, no matter how many warning notices you put up.

[eldargal]

[URL="http://robothugscomic.tumblr.com/post/96662461485/new-comic-thank-goodness-he-messaged-me-id"]Source[/URL]

[CoffeeGrunt]

Huh. That's pretty much what my G+ inbox is full of.

[Psychosplodge]

Excellent article about why the people attacking Anita Sarkeesian are full of s***.

[url]http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/08/tropes-vs-anita-sarkeesian-passing-anti-feminist-nonsense-critique[/url]

Honestly, I have yet to see a single thing she's stated yet that I could disagree with; everything she says is well argued, and supported with plentiful evidence. The only counterarguments I have seen so far have been embarrasingly stupid drivel from men (not seen any female critiques yet) who have no idea what cultural critique or reasoned debate are, nor how to do either effectively. If someone could show me the gaping holes in Sarkeesian's logic, I'd have to agree with them, but so far there haven't been any I can see.

There's plenty of genuine criticism Yorkie. You just have to look between both sides screaming abuse at each other.
[URL="http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s644c0"]This[/URL] was interesting. If essentially source less.
But there is a genuine case for corruption in gaming, the writer of the guardian article has "quit" following revelations that she was a patron of Ms. Quinn, and Ms. Quins PR manager was a patron of hers.
And one of the nosiest people shouting down suggestion of corruption, [URL="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.860017-IGF-and-Indiecade-Possible-Racketeering"]Phil Fish[/URL] apparently possibly has his own reasons for not wanting any corruption investigations.

[URL="http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/13/on-anita-sarkeesian-sexism-in-video-games-and-why-we-need-to-have-the-conversation-even-if-it-feeds-the-trolls/"]This[/URL] seems a reasonable article.

Can't find it now but there was something floating around how the smear campaign against Zoe Quinn being an abuser herself.

You mean[URL="http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s6j3sh"] this[/URL]? I'm sorry EG but it makes sense. There's plenty in the various released screenshots that support that view.