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Admin
"Accept" and "except" are two different words. You're using the wrong one.
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Woooosh. The article did suggest that it might not be wrong, and explictly so - in the text that was quoted to illustrate the point. She's not mad about historical attitudes, but at the attitude of the article author, who suggested that the attitudes may be "right.. or wrong".
There's no real debate here; the author suggested the attitude may be right. Poor choice of words, maybe, but she's not mad at what you said she was mad at.
And you added an incredibly bizarre straw man about rape, just to add sensitivity. Nice going.
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TRWTF is TOFU
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This.
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The comments here have been much more enlightening than the story every could have been. Corinne and Torben, than you for entertaining me this morning with your stupidity.
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: That's not funny!
Admin
I'm even more surprised that they didn't bother interviewing the candidate just because the broker was a dork. Stupid.
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A majority of the people here understood "right or wrong" to be a common turn of phrase to say that the morality of the situation was immaterial to the larger story. That you, Corinne, and Torben chose to assume that it meant snoofle approved of the situation or did not personally find it deplorable has no bearing on how it is commonly understood. The fact that you all continue your protestations despite snoofle clarifying his/her personal opinion on the subject show you all to be a small group of self-righteous prigs who look for things to be offended about and who have little regard for facts or reality.
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That's why you should bottom post; you would trim away anything not relevant to minimize how much scrolling needs be done.
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Women aren't objects?
You mean they're stuck back in the procedural era and have never upgraded?
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What are you doing posting here? Shouldn't you be in the kitchen making sandwiches?
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I think it's really sad that people are not able to accept that "Right or wrong, ..." can very well be understood as "I don't know if it's right or wrong, but..." or "I don't care if it's right or wrong, but..." and that this implies that it might be right and/or the author is undecided about that.
It is perfectly valid to use that phrase if it is actually hard to judge, e.g. in cases of moral dilemmas. But if something is clearly wrong (at least today), I don't know why you would want to use it.
It also does not matter if the author meant it this way or that way. No one actually said that the author meant to offend people. But he/she did. When some people point out that it is offensive, it obviously is (at least to them). And I haven't read any compelling argument, why being undecided/open about sexism would be acceptable today.
(Besides that, I think the whole story does not belong on TDWTF, it's something that could have happend anywhere else, there is nothing IT specific about it.)
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So.... TRWTF is topic drift, right?
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Depends on whether she's hot.
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[quote user="eViLegion"][quote user="Corinne"]
Way back in the day, in some places, it was considered acceptable for the local lord to shag the newly wed wife of one of his subjects. Now, no-one is suggesting that is acceptable today, but should you be super offended by some medieval shit that used to go down?
How about back when we had no language, but we did have bone clubs with which we could twat other proto-humans on the head with, so we could drag them back to our cave for an evening of pleasant raping. Is that offensive?[/quote]
You may be trying to stretch your anti-presentism further than it'll go. Yes, it's idiotic to apply moral judgements to people who are long dead and can't suffer our righteous or self-righteous indignation. Gotcha, I'm right there with you. However, it is no unreasonable to be offended by a claim that this was "right" - that is, that it was a positive good. (which is another moral judgement applied to long-dead people who can't benefit from your high-minded approbation)
This position of yours actually becomes a species of moral relativism, since if we accept it then any behavior at all becomes justified after a sufficient time has passed. The Holodomor, for example, becomes just another fact of history, which we are not allowed to judge. ("That's just how they did things then") If we want to learn from history, we have to make some moral claims about the situations we encounter there - otherwise, we end up in a bizarrely autistic sort of history where "Mussolini made the trains run on time", if true, would justify fascism.
So, yes, claiming that it was "right" that casual rape was the order of the day at some time in the past is offensive. Rape is evil whenever it occurs, and the judgement that it is evil is one of the ways we can say that fascism and absolutism are morally bad species of government: to the degree that they license evil, they are evil.
(obviously, making moral claims about the actions of individuals in those situations is another matter entirely, but the claim in question is about a situation, not about a particular individual's response to that situation)
Admin
I think what they were trying to convey is that for the time it was the "norm", that that it was okay.
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welcome to the "new" cave. same old clubbing, rent-a-masterpiece on the wall instead of spear, bear, fire.
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You people are seriously idiots. Holocaust != misogyny or sexism. Two completely different animals. Granted, I could give two shits about any of those things...
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Okay, on consideration I realise that the latter meaning was intended - but I had to re-read several times to decide.
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Chris is a dick.
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The Real WTF is a woman in the workplace instead of the kitchen. The Quran says so.
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The fact that you're so easily offended that a statement like that offends you truly offends me.
On the more serious side, I'm pretty sure all those negative connotations that you're complaining about are imaginary. I find that often people who "get offended" at something tend to actually be offended at some aspect of the offender that doesn't actually exist except in the mind of the offended. This appears to be the case here. Nothing more to see, move on people!
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TRWTF is TheDailyWTF.com editor for not allowing snoofle to edit the "right or wrong" part of the story and let us focus on important shit, like: where are those photos?!?.
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Alright - I'm tied for time, so I'll just respond with a single question.
Ducks rape. Are ducks evil, or just ducks?
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It's not drifting, it's being towed.
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They are both evil and tasty, which is convenient.
(sorry, I hope you weren't expecting a serious answer to a stupid question)Admin
Presumably the right or wrong bit was about the off-color jokes being passed around discretely not about the objectifying of women in decades past.
You are right about the story being weird and boring though.
Admin
I find it offensive that you and your ilk come to this forum and play semantic games and refuse to take snoofle's sincere explanation of his/her meaning and condemnation of the behavior that you abhor in subsequent comments at face value. Now, I demand you address my feelings and denounce those who have offended me.
Admin
So someone is offended. Is that a big deal for you? Why would it be? Seriously - what is wrong with someone pointing out that the use of the word "right" with regards to casual sexism to be questionable? I mean, nitpicking is really the point of this whole site, isn't it? So why all the rending of garments over this?
Admin
The key to understanding Corine's point is the use of the phrase "right or wrong".
You just admitted that it's wrong, yet the article suggests it could have been right.
What did "right or wrong" even add to the statement, if it's so obviously wrong?
That's the point. No one has a problem with the fact that it was "just the way it was" back then, and if they are, they aren't making the same point as Corine.
Admin
It is quite amazing to me as Indian programmer that you have such little things to talk about. Here we are being quite concerned here with outcome of George Zimmerman trial, and it has occasioned much discussion about the watering cooler.
Admin
So if I say that something done in the past was morally wrong regardless of how widely accepted it was at the time, would that statement be "wrong"? What if I make that statement at a time and place where the consensus of the people is that such judgments are right?
You say that it's wrong to say that what someone did in another time and place is wrong. But who are you to judge me? If you believe that it's wrong to judge others, than fine, don't. But don't impose your morals on me! I'll go around judging anyone I like. And if you criticize me, you are a hypocrite. You don't even live up to your own standards of morality. Who are you to critique mine?
Some actions are right and others are wrong. Murder is wrong. I don't care how many people say that it's okay. They are mistaken.
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The holocaust was not widely accepted by whom? It was clearly widely accepted among the ruling elite of Germany at the time. If morality is to be decided by a popular vote, who gets to vote? Your standard seems to be, "everyone who was alive in the world at that time". Actually I'm not sure if the holocaust would have failed a popular vote even by that standard. Presumably Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Arabs would have voted for it. Americans, Britons, and French would have voted against. Sure, there were Germans who opposed Hitler, but there were many Americans who supported him. Etc.
Maybe you have some surveys, but I don't think it's at all obvious that more people in the world in 1935 would have voted against killing Jews than would have voted against being rude to women in the workplace.
But why shouldn't it be "everyone alive in the world at the time". Why not "everyone living in that particular country at the time"? Or "everyone who has ever lived for all of history"? Or "everyone who has demonstrated a minimal level of intelligence by passing a literacy test"? You make up an arbitrary rule and don't even try to give an argument why we should accept that as the standard.
And by the way, there is zero evidence that cavemen routinely clubbed women into unconsciousness and raped them. This is a cartoon picture invented in modern times. Show me one contemporary historical document describing such an event, or one cave painting depicting such an act. You can't just make up events that you suppose might have happened based on your theories about human nature and then use your made-up facts as evidence to prove your theories about human nature.
Admin
So what's the point here? It is serious oversight no doubt, but you passed on a potentially good candidate just for that?? The CTO forwarded the candidate over to you thinking he / she might be a gr8 fit - which is what I would hope he was expecting you to assess. But instead you decided to read the full chain. Did you enjoy these so called juicy vacation details and pictures by the way? Moron.
Admin
Yeah, maybe I'm missing something in the story here, but the logic seemed to be that because A and B had an inappropriate conversation in the workplace, that therefore we should not hire candidate C, who did not participate in that conversation in any way. Is the idea that because the broker is an immoral person, and the broker thinks this person is a good candidate, that the broker's judgment is so skewed that we should reject anyone that he approves of? I'm baffled by the logic here.
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This story needs more pics.
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But it must be true! I saw it on TV with my own eyes!
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Heheh... no its a fair answer, since there obviously is no correct answer (to the evil part... that they are tasty is simply a fact). I would contend that it's not a stupid question though, just an open question.
My point was that over the timeline of history, there has been a constantly shifting sliding-scale-of-cognitive-ability amongst all species. And it is only recently that the top end of cognitive ability has allowed one species to develop a mind sophisticated enough to even consider the concepts of good and evil.
Therefore for good and evil actions to actually be good or evil requires, at least, a theory of mind capable of describing them as such. If you are not able to comprehend that others will be damaged by some action, can it be evil if you perform such an action, or is it just the inevitable deterministic outcome of a dumb creatures thinking?
Ok, so if you're in the 1950s, and you have been brought up in a culture where these isn't pervasive awareness of the hurt and damage caused by sexism, can you be held responsible for such hurt as is done. If you're completely oblivious, can it truly be evil, or again, is it just an inevitable outcome?
Admin
Why does the Zimmerman trial lead you to have discussions about the water cooler? What does a water cooler have to do with Mr Zimmerman?
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Tell you what guys.
Concentrate on the specific examples, that were suggested light heartedly (lord boffing serfs wife, and cavemen raping cavewomen... I could have just as easily suggested stoning-people-to-death-for-adultery and shooting Scotsmen in the vicinity of various English towns), and ignore the substance of the argument, which still stands, eh?
Basically, there is no such thing as good and evil, and anyone who makes statements to the contrary is just daft.
Admin
I don't say its wrong... I say its foolish. I don't believe there is such a thing as morality. So, make whatever moral judgments you want about anything, any time, but don't expect any kind of useful conclusions from those trains of thought, as they're incoherent and don't stand up to any kind of logical scrutiny.
Murder is inadvisable. It's not wrong. It is simply what it is.
Admin
I think TRWTF is meant to be Chris. It is supposed to be evident to us readers that Chris is acting like an idiot when he passes on a qualified candidate because of the "package" that the resume arrives in, since it should be clear that the candidate himself had nothing to do with the package. I think, though, that it is hard to see Chris as TRWTF right away because he is set up as the protagonist of the story. I expected something WTFy to be done to Chris, not have him be the WTF.
Regarding the conversation around this sentence.
"Right or wrong, it's just the way the business side has always been in large financial firms."
I have to admit, this sentence gave me pause (saying that I found it "offensive" is too strong), but not just because of the phrase "Right or wrong". Instead, it was "Right or wrong" combined with the word "just". If I had to continue the thoughts that the sentence seemed to imply, it would be something like this:
Now, snoofle effectively said that this is not what he or she meant to say, but when I originally read the story, this is what I saw implied. It led to an interesting discussion, though.
Admin
There is also no such thing as daft.
Admin
We had: A story about a long chain of emails (describing human behavior).
We now have: A chain of postings about human behavior.
Is there a difference?
In both we note that some people behave really badly! I hope that we don't in the future.
Life goes on.
Admin
I think it's super DUPER offensive! AND I'm offended that you think it's only super offensive!
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"don't you dare suggest that I am playing the Hitler card"
Immediately plays the Hitler card...
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It seems to me that TRWTF is the comments on this article...
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The author of this article asks, "how many times have each of us simply kept replying to an email, long after the conversation has changed from the original subject matter? Or forwarding it to others?"
Never. This sort of poor email hygiene under the pretense of keeping context for later does not achieve its goals, and in fact makes it more time-consuming and difficult for people new to the thread to really get up to speed as they have to wade through the poorly piled detritus of what has gone before. It is tiresomely redundant and unnecessarily bloated.
Learn to edit. Stop top-posting. Make mail better.
Admin
Is the WTF here supposed to be that someone passed on a candidate because of information he acquired while being nosy and reading a conversation he knew was supposed to be none of his business?