Ineth

If we're talking about Marxism as in what Marx wrote, that isn't really the case. If it did, PC would be advocating an overthrow of the oppressors followed by dictatorship of the previously exploited which would lead to a raceless society. PC is more akin to Puritanical standards of social interaction, in that it's less about making radical changes to a system and more about presentation of ideas and standards of social interaction. I do think "take a lot cues from Marxism supplanting class with race" (and gender) is a fair description. Not the parts of Marx's theories where he fantasized about the "inevitable" transitions towards Communism that societies would be taking, sure. But they did borrow much of his approach to analyzing the status quo. E.g. the whole obsession with sorting people into (social/racial/gender) "classes" and then assigning the absolutist labels "oppressed" or "oppressors" to each class, in stark contrast to the liberal worldview of treating justice, morality and desert as a matter of individual choices/actions/circumstances. SJWs may use a different vocabulary than traditional Marxists, but the actual concepts behind the words are often very similar (e.g. "internalized misogyny" = "false consciousness").

Interesting theory. Do you think he's right?

Cheong really has made a 180, hasn't he

That was some amazing advice by her dorm counselor there, hah. Yeah this seems to be a common pattern among many of the cases where the guy is now suing the school, i.e. a sexual encounter that was either symmetric (e.g. both slightly drunk and equally active), or in which the woman was the active party, ...which the woman felt awkward about in retrospect, but didn't see herself as a victim (or in some cases even realized that she had wronged him), ...until she is later coached by a feminist "dorm counselor" or "professional victim advocate", and reports it as rape. I think this underpins the assessment that the problem is with the system, and can't just be chalked up to "millennial student culture". It also reinforces the comparison to the 80's child-care abuse moral panic, where over-zealous psychologists/counselors got the children to produce "testimony" about abuse that had not in fact happened. The problem is that as long as the OCR's official Title IX interpretation mandates an illiberal and unjust system, schools may get away with such injustice by claiming "we just followed the laws and regulations; take it up with the government if you think you were wronged". And of course, "taking it up" with the executive branch of government is utterly futile for a 23 year old guy who's life has just been ruined, if not even the Harvard Law School professors can do it.

Don't let Alu hear you talk like that, he'll brand you "anti-intellectual"... Kidding aside, I do think that colleges were meant to be - and have the potential to be - places that foster rational discourse and a tolerant exchange of ideas, and that the fact that many college communities are throwing away that ideal in the name an infantilizing authoritarian conception of "safety", is a loss for society. How are people who feel "unsafe" and need a "safe space" because someone dared to calmly confront them with the fact that their favourite advocacy data/statistics are unsound, supposed to become the leaders of tomorrow? How can people who believe in banning (or violently preventing) those outside of their ideological in-group from speaking (while never actually having listened to their arguments), uphold a liberal democracy? I do think this is related, yes. As TN says, other comedians/performers/speakers have come out with similar assessments. As for derailing this thread, don't worry, Sharp_one is already doing that masterfully (that guy has got to be a troll, right?)

The current state of affairs Imagine this scenario: John, having gotten blind drunk, is escorted back to his dorm room by his friend Jane. Once there, John blacks out. Jane takes advantage of the situation, and performs oral sex on him. After leaving, she realizes she's done something wrong, and sends text messages to two other friends expressing her guilt. Later, when John hears what's happened, he breaks off his friendship with Jane. ... ...Two years pass; Jane gets in with a radical "all men are rapists" feminist crowd... ... Jane goes to the college's Title IX coordinator, and reports John as a rapist, referring to the above encounter. After revising her initial incoherent story a few times, she settles on claiming that while she did initiate the sexual encounter, she silently "withdrew consent" at some point during it, and John failed to get "affirmative consent" from her in accordance with the "Yes means Yes" principle. John finds himself in front of a kangaroo court where: He's not allowed to have a legal advocate (while the accuser does have one). He's not allowed to present evidence against the accuser. He's not allowed to face or cross-examine the accuser. The "court" is made up of people without legal training, who were only prepped using feminist activist material which claims that "women almost never lie about rape". Said kangaroo court rules to expel John from the college on the charge of rape, because he failed to prove that he complied with "affirmative consent". The fact that he couldn't, because he was blacked out? Doesn't matter. They lecture him that "being intoxicated or impaired by drugs or alcohol is never an excuse." The fact that she failed to get his consent? Doesn't matter. Women are victims. (Male + sex + no proof of affirmative consent) = rapist, simple as that. Sounds like it must be from some weird dystopian novel or something, right? Well, unfortunately it's the reality of US college campuses in 2015: Amherst Student Was Expelled for Rape. But He Was Raped, Evidence Shows. The guy is suing the college now. As are many other male college students who were treated similarly unjustly by Title IX courts across the nation during the last two years. Before that, such things were unheard of. But wait, the Kafkaesque machine is not content with merely destroying the lives of male students who were unfortunate enough to have ever had sex with a female co-ed who later goes on to become a feminist activist, or gets vindictive when he later breaks up with her, or is pressured by conservative parents who found out about the sexual encounter and are in denial about the fact that their pure little angel chose to have sex before marriage, etc. No, it's also going after free speech now, as one female professor (who, ironically enough, is herself a feminist) had to learn the hard way: She writes an essay in which she criticizes aspects of the Title IX-enabled victim culture. In response, she's promptly charged with a "Title IX violation" herself. She's told to appear before a Title IX court hearing, while the actual charges against her are kept secret (because apparently, being told the charges one is faced with, is another civil right that just doesn't have a place in this bright new college world anymore). At the hearing itself, she learns that her essay was accused of having a "chilling effect" that could contribute to women feeling less "safe" on campus, but she is neither told the identity of her accuser nor how she may defend herself against the charges. She's not allowed to have a lawyer with her at the hearing; only a "support person" who may not speak. The next day, a new anonymous "Title IX violation" charge appears against the support person she brought. (...see her op-ed My Title IX Inquisition for the full ordeal.) Being a female professor, she had infinitely more institutional power and support in that college setting than a male student, so unlike them, she was luckily able to fend off her Title IX show trial - barely. At this point, even left-wing news outlets started taking notice of the absurdity that the whole Title IX and "safe space" situation has become. Again, none of this was the case just a few years ago. So, what has changed? The answer is: "Title IX" and the "Office for Civil Rights" Title IX is a federal law that was passed 43 years ago, with the good intention of preventing gender discrimination in the education system (or at least the parts of it that are publicly funded). The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is part of the Department of Education, was tasked with overseeing the enforcement of that law. For that purpose, it was given the power to sanction colleges which had discriminating policies, up to the point of cutting them off completely from government funding (which would be absolutely devastating for most colleges). So far, so good right? The problem though, is that it the OCR was quickly hijacked by feminist activists, and over the decades they continuously widened the scope of the "official" interpretation of Title IX, and abused the agency's sanctioning power to force those interpretations on all colleges: At first, they only used it to sanction discrimination against female athletes in college sports programs (i.e. what the law was meant to do). Then they went further and started to use it to force colleges to engage in "positive discrimination" against male athletes. ...and so on. (See this excellent - but unfortunately paywalled - article for a thorough historical outline: How Title IX Became a Political Weapon) And now, under the 2nd term of the Obama administration, they went full McIntosh and started using it to force colleges to set up feminist kangaroo courts for adjudicating alleged sexual assault cases on-campus (and for silencing free speech). Before then, some colleges had already their own infrastructure for dealing with internal sexual assault allegations (but they applied the liberal "innocent until proven guilty" principle), while other colleges directed their members to go straight to the police & legal system (which also operates under the "innocent until proven guilty" principle). Under the OCR's new Title IX "interpretation", all colleges must now have an infrastructure for dealing with these cases internally, and said institutions are forbidden from assuming "innocent until proven guilty", and they must adopt procedures that completely defy the classical liberal conceptions of "justice" and "rule of law" and look like they're taken straight out of Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial". Obviously, none of that is legitimized by the original Congressional mandate behind Title IX (a.k.a. "stopping gender-based discrimination"). It's a shameless abuse of executive power by anti-democratic and illiberal gender-ideologues. Pushback The Democratic Party seems in no hurry reign in the OCR's illiberal and un-democratic actions which happen in the name of its administration, because doing so would undermine the election campaign of Hillary Clinton who has thoughtlessly and opportunistically jumped on the "rape culture" hysteria bandwagon and will have trouble climbing off it again. The conservatives, in turn, secretly love how all that "sinful" pre-marital sex on college campuses is being criminalized, and don't really feel compelled to do anything about it either. So it falls to independent liberals and libertarians, and anyone who still has a sense of justice, to stand up for civil rights and constitutional values. The professors of Harvard Law School adamantly fought against having to implement the OCR's new Title IX interpretation, because they believe that it goes against everything that they teach their students about fairness and justice and law. They lost the main battle (the OCR, being part of the executive branch of government, simply has the bigger guns), but apparently they haven't given up: A Call to Arms Law School professor Janet Halley is pushing back against Harvard and the government's approach to Title IX. Hopefully it will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Various liberal professors and college staff have also started to speak out: I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me A moral panic While the feminist-hijacked OCR may be the instigator of the kangaroo courts, its executive actions did not happen in a vacuum - they fell on fertile ground among the larger movement of third-wave campus feminism, which fetishizes victimhood and aggressively denies any agency and self-responsibility of women in both everyday life and in the realm of sexuality. Emboldened by propaganda such as the bogus "1 in 4" or "1 in 5" statistics, its foot soldiers are quick to show up en masse and rabidly attack and shout down any voice of reason with histrionic accusations of "being a rape supporter", and they have no qualms about abusing any positions of institutional power they may hold (such as college committees), to silence and destroy dissenter. When the ever polite and well-reasoned Christina Hoff Sommers gave a guest lecture at Oberlin college in which she calmly dismantled some of the dishonest and illiberal aspects of third-wave feminism and called for a more fact-based "equality feminism", the local third-wave college feminists - who had unsuccessfully tried to get her lecture banned - went so bat-**** crazy that campus security insisted on providing Sommers with bodyguards while she was there. This has all the makings of a full-swing moral panic, and in many ways resembles the "Day-care sex-abuse and satanic rituals" hysteria of the 80s: the bogus statistics the unwillingness to fact-check the indifference towards false accusations the politicians opportunistically jumping on the hysteria band-wagon the abandonment of liberal principles like due process and free speech the silencing of any voice of reason using aggressive slander or abuses of institutional power. Colleges are supposed to places of enlightenment and reason. It's sad that they are so susceptible to this. Conclusions / Advice If you're (a parent of) a guy considering to go to college in the US, be very wary. Since the kangaroo courts tend to be filled with volunteers from college staff, and feminist ideologues love to volunteer for such positions, avoid colleges that have a "Gender Studies" department (where such ideologues thrive). The system will still be stacked against you, but at least it will be administered by people who don't get off on destroying you. If you're a guy who is already in college, only date off-campus. It won't protect you completely, as the story at the top of this post shows, but it very much reduces the likelihood of being targeted with a Kafkaesque Title IX charge that will leave you stranded without a degree and in debt. If you're a voter, be wary of voting for politicians that identify with third-wave feminism. The "pink police states" which college feminists have erected on campuses with the help of the feminists in the OCR, is a microcosm for what a feminist-run nation might look like. And quelle surprise: Liberal values like due process, "innocent until proven guilty", and free speech are not a part of it. Don't let the kind of feminists who control the OCR, also gain control over other more important and more wide-reaching government agencies.

From what I've heard now, the hullabaloo is over the fact that after getting a new CEO who happened to be a feminist, reddit announced to crack down on "harassment", but then: Began by banning 5 subreddits which didn't harass anyone, just hosted very childish / politically incorrect content (e.g. posted memes ridiculing fat people in general, but without actually contacting or even harassing any particular real-life fat person). All the while, the radical-feminist and SJW subreddits which exist purely for organizing targeted harassment campaigns against real-life individuals (e.g. sending threats to their homes; calling their neighbors/landlords/employers to badmouth them; etc.) continue to enjoy the full protection of reddit. When called out on that, reddit admins responded with silence, except for one brief statement explaining that those feminist subreddits won't be banned because "We ban behaviors, not ideas" - which is pretty much the opposite of what they've been doing (see previous 2 points), and thus came across as a slap in the face to many redditors who were seeking clarity about the new rules. And thus, outrage ensued. In other words, its not about the loss of some fringe anti-fat-people subreddit which probably hardly anyone knew about or visited anyway, but rather the hypocrisy and slanted politicization of reddit's new "anti-harassment" rules (and the way they're implemented) by the company's new leadership. Although I'm just looking at this whole thing from the outside, and don't hold any stakes in the reddit community. Even if reddit becomes a SJW-only safespace, nothing of value will have been lost imo. PS: Though the "It's all about the Ad money" theory posted by Meshugger above is probably more credible than the "It's a feminist purge" one.

It hurts that you think so low of me, as to believe I would be a member of any part of Reddit.

Lol, so the hundreds of racist, misogynist, misandrist, and other hate-group-oriented subreddits are tolerated, not to mention the ones organizing targeted harassment campaigns against real-life individuals -- but if there's even the weakest possibly of "fatshaming", the censorship hammer falls? Sounds like someone on the reddit staff has a chip on their shoulder regarding this issue... :D

Alright guys, fill me in... What are the trending conspiracy theories conjectures about the reasons for his leaving?

Yeah, being a Jewish Holocaust survivor is pretty darn central to Magneto's character. I mean sure, they could give him a completely different identity - but at that point, even why keep the name?

Well, unlike the second video and the one linked by Kirottu, she does not provide a single link or mention a specific study to back her claims. "Most workplace pay gaps narrow to the point of vanishing when one accounts for all of these relevant factors". Come on now, the fact that she doesn't go into detail on the individual statistics and studies in this introduction video to the topic, doesn't justify accusing her of "outright lies, malicious misuse of statistics". No one is saying that that video should be taken as the be-all and the end-all on the topic of wage gaps. Rather than trying to teach people about The One True™ statistic or study, it seems to be more intended as an appeal to common sense, and to confront people who have until now simply believed the feminist narrative without really thinking about it, with these two points: The 77% statistic is grossly misleading; don't let it convince you you're a victim (if you're a woman), and don't let activists and politicians (even when they're the president) get away with using it as a justification for anything. When you're presented with other statistics that claim to account for differentiating factors other than gender, look closely at what factors they included - and which they didn't. I don't see how those two points can be controversial among reasonable people, really. But maybe that's exactly what drives Alu so mad: If she had gone Fox News style "Don't think about these things critically; just believe this particular study here, it has been vetted by Rush Limbaugh and Jesus Christ!!!" it would have been very easy to reject her on a factual basis. But seeing how she's so damn reasonable, I guess ad-hominem attacks (Don't listen to her, she works for a conservative employer!) and unsubstantiated blanket accusation of "lies!!!!", will have to do. PS: She does go into the details of the individual statistics and studies elsewhere, for example in her books and lectures.

So no citation then, for your harsh slander of a very level-headed, polite and sincere woman who happens to have a different world view than you.

That's great, first Meshugger fails at lit 101, now you do the same with grammar. "Vicious" was a qualifier of the backlash. I didn't accuse anyone of "vicious motivations". The "qualifier" you chose intrinsically refers to motivations. From Oxford Dictionaries: Definition of vicious in English: adjective 1 Deliberately cruel or violent

Hm, lemme get out my Progressive-to-English dictionary to help me parse that sentence: wingnuttery: Holding political or philosophical views which, despite being moderate and centrist in the greater political spectrum, are far enough away from radical progressivism that most progressives are completely and utterly unable to understand them or muster any tolerance or empathy for their advocates. anti-intellectual: Refusing to tow the party line of the radical left-wing politicization which has taken a hold of many social 'science' institutions. conspiracy theorist: Someone who dares to oppose harmful social and economic policies championed by the Democratic Party, by pointing out their long-term harmfulness. Which leaves: "outright lies" "malicious misuse of statistics" ...which scream for [citation needed]. Can you substantiate these two claims?

And yet you keep defending one side, and accuse the other side of "vicious" motivations.

To be fair, if Peter Jackson hadn't invented female characters which weren't in the book, his Hobbit trilogy would have been a total sausage fest.

Admit it, you just loathe Sommers for her involvement in GG. Although the second video does get more to the point of the economics of it (not surprising, since it was made by a libertarian). Do tell: How is a guy allowed to respond to repeated confrontation with misleading and untrue claims by women who have believed feminist propaganda? Don't you see that "job title" and "qualifications" are only two of many relevant factors? This is exactly what Sommers complains about in the first video in the OP - that the people who want to keep believing in the wage gap myth for ideological reasons, cling to statistics which have factored in some differentiating factors, and then pretend like that settles everything. Not to mention that feminists always keep regurgitating the 77% statistic (which does not consider any differentiating factors, and is thus completely useless) in bad faith. That's what makes this topic so tiresome, it is an endless loop of: feminist (addressing person A): Women are so oppressed! As proof, take the fact that women get paid 23% less than men! person A: No, that's just a statistical average across the workforce, it does not measure wages for equal work. feminist: Well OK, but take this other statistic which considers 3 differentiating factors and still finds a gap of 8%! person A: That's only 3 of many relevant factors, not all of which can be easily measured. feminist: MANSPLAINING!!!! MISOGYNY!!!! ...next day, same feminist... feminist (addressing person B): Women are so oppressed! As proof, take the fact that women get paid 23% less than men! person B: ...

It was represented in AOE2. I guess other games group them together with the Western Roman Empire as "Romans".

It doesn't? Then what does the doctrine of capitalism say? "Pursue happiness in whatever way you wish, as long as your interaction with others (be it cooperation, trade, etc.) happens on a voluntary basis and respects everyone's civil and property rights."

While that is true, as you have pointed out, it's a process with multiple steps, where, with sufficient awareness of your own biases, you can catch yourself and mitigate the effect on your behavior. Or, instead of sober self-awareness and level-headed self-correction, you could just: Join a political ideology that tells you what (and how bad) your biases are simply based on your gender and race. Listen & Believe. Frantically over-correct your behaviours sans common sense, in order to gain status with the other believers and feel good about how you're "one of the good ones". End up with new biases and intolerant behaviors, that are several orders of magnitude more severe than any you might have had to begin with.

So it's about thought control. Yes. Exactly. Congratulations, you have grasped the issue perfectly. That's what it was about all along. Moron. Lol dat snark - having a bad day? On topic, what else would you call McIntosh's and Sarkeesian's (and more generally, the authoritarian left's) obsession with other people's alleged "unconscious attitudes" and the idea of 'correcting' them by lobbying for enforcing ideological purity on the media which those people consume?

That's exactly what the SJW's resent though. They don't want games to be entertainment products subject to competition and supply & demand; they want them to be just another medium for the political "education" of the masses. Really, the various responses to the new Steam refunds policy show quite clearly the difference between: reality-grounded developers, who do what they do as and for gamers and out of love for gaming... and economically-illiterate, anti-gamer, narcissistic, SJW hipster developers...

So it's about thought control. And when that cultural criticism is narrow-minded and embarrassingly americentric, it's fair to criticise the criticism.