Interestingly I would use the use of "the patriarchy" as a term as evidence against the belief of the transformation of the meaning of the phrase "toxic masculinity". The patriarchy doesn't have a qualifier: that a patriarchy exists is considered bad innately, and so the term doesn't need its own "toxic" prepended. Masculinity, on the other hand, is not considered innately bad, and so requires the "toxic" qualifier to narrow the target to the portions of masculinity which are... well, toxic. If the "toxic" was superfluous (due to masculinity being seen as inherently evil, for example), surely people would have dropped it ages ago.
This is, of course, based on my personal experience with these phrases. When my friends and I use "toxic masculinity", we can see the difference between it and "masculinity", and when I see the phrase used by strangers online, I assume that they're using it as "the part of masculinity that is toxic". I can't remember any situation where that assumption has misled me, although maybe I wouldn't remember something like that.
You're certainly right about some people using the "toxic" as an adjective, insofar as I believe this author has done exactly that in this article. If I was feeling cynical, I might argue that the author may have deliberately conflated all of masculinity with its elements that get called "toxic", in an attempt to make the two seem inseparable. I think the good faith interpretation is simply that this is how the author has seen the phrase used before, and that, somewhere between my circles and his circles, the phrase's meaning has been changed or accidentally misinterpreted.
> All that striving for greatness is indivisible from the selfish need to inflict cruelty on your dominated foe. Take away the latter and there is no sports. It’s just exercise.
I cannot empathise with someone that has this mindset.
It seems like the author thinks that all masculinity is toxic - or, at least, that it's called "toxic" by progressives or whatever - and I would strongly disagree with this. When people use the phrase "toxic masculinity", they don't mean "masculinity (which is toxic, by the way)": they mean " the parts of masculinity that are toxic".
There's also a whole paragraph dedicated to saying that women aren't at the peak of sports excellence, and shouldn't be covered by Nike's clothing range. I don't think the author has watched any women's sports games before writing this piece.
I have plenty more issues with this writing, but I'm gonna stop here because I feel like I might be falling for a rage-bait article.
I'm sorry, are you dismissing all psychology papers?
> A field currently drowning in a reproducibility crisis
My peers have told me that chemistry and biology also suffer from results that are difficult to reproduce, and I've certainly read a number of articles here that decry the lack of reproducibility in computer science too.
> a group who believe that lying and slander is not only okay but should be actively utilised in every goal they pursue.
I'll be honest, I'm not really sure what this is in reference to. If it's in relation to psychology experimental methods, then I believe you're incorrect. Methods that involve actively deceiving subjects would be rejected by ethics boards (at least, it would in the UK). On top of that, there are many papers that do not use observations of human behaviour, and so would not find use in lying to them - for example, many neuropsychology papers discuss the physical makeup of body parts.
Psychology has been around for a long time, and some psychology results have deeply influenced society. Some of these papers cover the placebo effect, and various mental health conditions. If you are dismissing all psychology papers, do you also reject these influential papers?
I'm sorry if this reply is a bit full-on, but dismissing a claim's provided evidence by dismissing an entire academic field seems a bit extreme to me.
> The side project myth is getting out of control.
I was rejected in an interview last year within seconds of the interview starting because my answer to "what would you do if you suddenly had a bunch of free time" was not relevant enough to the job.
For the record, my answer was that I'd learn basic 2D animation, because I have a deep respect for the people who do it, and I have no real clue how it's done. I also had relevant education on my CV, and the interview was for a graduate position.
That most places are looking for side projects may be a myth; there certainly are, however, at least some places that look for them.
Do you have an example of a situation in which you'd want to cast the result of arithmetic intptr_t values to a pointer? The situations I can think of off the top of my head would be better done as arithmetic between pointers.
> [...] ultimately in this new era there is no path to redemption, no mechanism by which an apology can be accepted.
I'm pretty sure the mechanism is: backing down from your position of power, apologising, being quiet in the community, and finally reintegrating once you've shown that you've learned from your past mistakes. Prison is (ideally) a non-voluntary version of this, and many countries rely on prisons to rehabilitate people.
On a smaller scale, I've seen this happen in friend groups: friend does bad thing, everyone tells them they've done a bad thing and that they need to absorb that, friend disappears for a year or two, keeping in touch with some of the group, and when they return they have the people they stayed in touch with to vouch for their personal improvement. There's plenty of movies where this happens to the protagonist near the end (although usually the format mandates that their transformation takes less than a year).
> [...] RMS would rightly be considered a saintly figure for his contributions to the world.
Good people can do bad things; the best people improve from them (see the above movie-protagonist analogy). Returning someone to a position of power without adequate evidence that they've changed their ways means that they have no personal incentive to put in the effort and improve themselves - they can return to the status-quo, which means the people that were disadvantaged before remain so.
> No, the point is to exercise power, to show any straight white (or white-presenting) male that they are vulnerable, [...]
People do use power when they attempt to de-platform someone, but I don't think that it's being used here for the sake of it. This person has done some crummy things, and refusing him his position should be a wake-up call to him that he has misused the power he was trusted with (this is the "everyone tell them they've done a bad thing" step in the friend-group analogy). It would also prevent this person from misusing the position's power further.
Making people feel vulnerable might sound bad at first, but the alternative is that some people are invulnerable, which (to me) is a terrifying prospect. Being able to do anything with no social consequences would allow people to serially commit to doing horrible things, without ever losing their ability to continue doing them.
> [...] and to ensure that more and more of us hide our heads lest we be the tall blade of grass that gets the scythe.
I'm not totally sure how this metaphor works, with respect to what the length of a grass blade represents. If it represents how poorly the person treats women then the metaphor works, but doesn't really seem to support your rhetoric.
I don't use sudo to improve my security; I use sudo because it's what I've become familiar with.
I don't want to come across as pedantic - the point I mean to make is that I think a lot of people use sudo without thinking about it much. Sudo's just "the way to use linux" for a lot of people I know.
I don't think the sudo contributors should be labelled as irresponsible, because everything they've added to the project is available for the public to see and scrutinise. I don't think they've ever mislead people; rather that people have assumed things.
Maybe people who care about security will notice now that sudo doesn't have comprehensive testing, and will make their own alternative.
As far as Zachtronics games go, you've been able to save multiple solutions since IIRC Infinifactory, and those games all have two or three optimisation goals.
I think Silicon Zeroes only remembers one solution per puzzle, however in most of its levels its goals are quite closely related.
OCTOPTICOM also only saves one solution per level, but only has one optimisation goal, I believe.
I don't believe your assertion is true; at the least, it is not true in my experience.
"Fresher's flu" is the name given to the phenomenon of nearly everyone at uni getting a cold when returning for the new academic semester; everyone congregating from across the country/planet brings their own strain and gives it to everyone else.
We know that this happens every year, so we knew that it would happen this year too.
There's a short sci-fi story (whose name escapes me, but is mentioned in Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to be Free) in which the human race is given matter duplicators that can perfectly copy an item, including the duplicators themselves. It's basically a more fully-explored version of the "what if I can copy a car" thought, in which I think the conclusion is that creativity would flourish because less effort is put into making many of the same item. It's quite a far-reaching hypothetical, but it has strong parallels with digital rights issues.
I just changed my PayPal password today; they restrict the length of a password to between 8-20 characters. Why the upper limit? Once you're at 20, you're likely using a password manager, so another 20 wouldn't hurt.
This is, of course, based on my personal experience with these phrases. When my friends and I use "toxic masculinity", we can see the difference between it and "masculinity", and when I see the phrase used by strangers online, I assume that they're using it as "the part of masculinity that is toxic". I can't remember any situation where that assumption has misled me, although maybe I wouldn't remember something like that.
You're certainly right about some people using the "toxic" as an adjective, insofar as I believe this author has done exactly that in this article. If I was feeling cynical, I might argue that the author may have deliberately conflated all of masculinity with its elements that get called "toxic", in an attempt to make the two seem inseparable. I think the good faith interpretation is simply that this is how the author has seen the phrase used before, and that, somewhere between my circles and his circles, the phrase's meaning has been changed or accidentally misinterpreted.