The BBC has gotten markedly more consevative over the last year or so (after a number of scandals, though not necessarily in response to those scandals.) I wouldn't go so far as to call them right wing - if anything, I thing the stronger trend has been towards lower quality reporting and more heart warming stories of this or that (ugh). But the change in political slant has been notable, even if it's been smaller than the change in quality.

Of course, I've noticed a smaller though similar trend towards more conservative reporting with The Economist, so I wonder if there's a social shift in play? I really need to find more international internet radio news for my workout and commute, because the BBC used to be one of my standbys, and these days I spend too much time being annoyed at their interviewers. "Oh, so your home is destroyed, half your family is dead and most of the rest is missing - how do you FEEL about that?"

It's more visible, and culturally, trying to get someone from Seattle proper to go to the eastside has always been a bit of an uphill battle, even moreso with the general cuts to public transportation.* I moved from Wallingford to Woodinville while I worked at Microsoft**, and was always impressed by the extent to which eastsiders think little of going across the lake for a show of a class, but westsiders (at least, those who don't already work on the eastside) are loathe to head in the other direction without mounting an expedition.

* Though in fairness, while I'm still spending several weeks in Seattle each year, I'm not spending much of that commuting back and forth to the eastside, so I don't know if those systems have been hit as hard as Seattle Metro.
** My logic being that in fact I didn't really live in Wallingford, I lived on the 520 bridge.

Though in fact a lot of my male friends are all "What the flying fuck is with all the misogyny?"

Oh, bloody hell, of course this comes in as I'm heading out the door. But this is rather in my field, so at least a short reply.

So, first off, please be very careful when generalizing from studies of gender differences. They are generally smaller in effect than most people understand (and this is often not well characterized in popular reporting) and there's a long history of confounding factors being ignored (for instances, differences that have to do with body size rather than gender). Even when you can say that there is a statistically significant difference between the means of different populations, that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot more overlap than difference. ...and then you go on make a number of assertions about behavior, without citation, and without talking about origin. Because, yo, culture. (And, of course, the situation in Medieval times, when there wasn't much in the way of reliable birth control also presented a very different social picture. Pregnancy and lots of kids can mess the hell out of your social options.)

So, I'll leave you with this, because I thought it was a fairly brilliant discussion of one of the more decent studies of gender differences in brain structures, which is still accessible to the layman: https://theconversation.com/ne...

I have been following this as the story has unfolded - not obsessively (I have work to do) but not that distantly, either. So, no, I don't think so.

At some meta-level, I do wonder if there are some basic subcultural differences in communication going on here. I mean, I see, for instance, the infamous screen cap, and think, gosh, I always have at least two different browsers open (sometimes more, though I realize this is somewhat idiosyncratic) I often browse privately, and if I were doing a similar screen grab, I'd almost certainly not pull it from instance in which I was logged in. (I mean, like I need more shit, this shouldn't be about my login, it should just be about what's being posted.) So I look at the so ofte cited screen cap and think "Why do you think I'll care?" I see a lot of quotes being taken pretty blatantly out of context. And, of course, I see a lot of really misogynist crap being posted. It certainly is comforting that a number of my male friends are at least as creeped out by these discussions as I am.

Then again, I'm not at all sure I'm not a social justice warrior. I mean, I'm a mild mannered* neurobiologist and martial artist, with a pretty heterogeneous (if rather inclined towards the geeky) social circle, but I'm certainly willing to speak up when I see people being treated poorly.

* Well, okay, when I asked a couple of my students if I were mild mannered, they didn't really answer, but mostly because they were laughing too hard to speak. So maybe not.

So much depends on what you mean by chivalry. I mean, for all the good press it gets - and for all that it could be honestly better than many alternatives - you are talking about a system that encodes some major inequalities in class and not a hell of a lot of mobility* - and some major discrepancies in power between men and women.

For some folks, it means being a decent, honorable individual. For others, there notion is all wrapped up in ideas of having the woman be weaker, and be supported, and protected, and for the man to be in charge. ( And for the woman never to be smarter, more accomplished, or god help you stronger or a better fighter.) (Yes, I'm a tall muscular martial artist, and a lot of guys think they are attracted to that... But in fact are only attracted to that if they are stronger and can fight better. Though don't seem to want to put in the decades of training, and, seriously. Other guys? Are totally fine, and her, sex and soaring go together great.)

These are inherently different things. I have a pretty strong personal sense of decent behavior and honor, though I don't end to talk about it much, and seriously I need that in a partner. So if a guy who is that short of chivalric, hey, that might work out.

A guy whose self image is dependent on me being weaker, making less money, not as good in a fight... Yeah, not so much. (I have no problem with someone opening doors for me. I open doors for people all the time. Someone who freaks out about that... Yeah, no.)

* no serfs or peasants welcome here, this only applies to the gentlefolk

10-20 being in a school, and one person being one of the easy marks seems pretty plausible to. I wouldn't read it as being 10-20 people picking on any one person at one time. I would suspect that there were more than that number of people in my middle school who didn't feel satisfied with their day if they hadn't hit anyone.

(I believe my middle school had about 800 people. I wasn't a great target, since I was perfectly happy to fight back if faculty weren't around, but I was quite tall, part of the gifted program, did not dress to fit in, and was fairly outspoken. At least three people were suspended for attacking me while I was there. But then, the school was generally pretty fucked.*)

* So, take a school from a poor mostly black neighborhood and then put a couple of magnet programs that attract mostly more affluent white and asian kids... and then keep all the classes for the different programs separate. Yeah, that's a great idea.

The standards of evidence are particularly bad. I mean, if you're going to manufacture it, you should at least manufacture a variety of sources so people aren't all pointing to the same infographic. (I mean, really, this stuff is laughable when Fox does it. I expect geeks to at least be more competent.) And yeah, I think that whole perceived loss of privilege - why isn't someone showing up to make them into the next software billionaire, and where are all the babes the universe owes them?

I guess the one up side is that they're doing a pretty good job of making this line of thinking look really, really gross.

"We" is first person plural, not third person. So the implication is that the OP identifies themselves with a group that they are aware hold similar views. (Or alleges such.)

"They think..." would be third person.

Thank you for fighting the good fight.

I almost didn't even look at the comments here, especially since I'd burnt through the last of my mod points last night, and especially the first wave of really offensive shit that gets posted any time the treatment of women in geek culture comes up just depresses the hell out of me. (I'm trying to stick to the optimistic version opined by another friend, wherein there's a really grim whiny ass first wave, which mostly gets modded down over time. Over course, the friend wrote to me a couple of days back to tell me he'd decided that no, he took it back, anything involving women was getting a fair bit worse.)

The creepiest bit is that half of my social circle, roughly, are male geeks* and they generally seem like a decent bunch, individually and in groups. My students are an amiable bunch, even in those final crunch days as they're trying to wrap up an experiment or get a paper in. Is the first wave of /. comments overwhelmingly from bitter seventeen year olds? Are these some other geeks who I have managed to distance myself from over the years.** Is it possible that some of the entertaining, amiable geeks that I spar with, party with, code with and blow things up with turn feral and run in packs when I'm not around? Eesh.

* Well, okay, that assumes that the martial artists are predominantly geeks, which might get into some kind of definitional argument. *Many* clearly are.

I'll grant you the not related to video game fantasy (any more than playing D&D turns folks into Satanists or whatever).*

But I do think death threats, especially death threats combined with personal information, are a lot more than immaturity. Posting things like "Your ugly and stupid" (misuse intentional) is immaturity. Death threats are a fair bit worse, even aside from the illegality. Kind of the way that writing to a stranger about how sexually attractive you find them is creepy and immature - yo, there are ways to approach the subject, but if they're still a stranger this is not one of them - but writing to them about how you want to rape them goes far beyond immature.

* Of course, I can think of at least one guy I knew back in my teens...

Of course, musing on this, it occurs to me that there's nothing that marks my wikipedia account as female.

I think I will start cruising through the areas related to my current work, though, and see if there's anything useful I can contribute. (Not that I'll necessarily stay with it if it doesn't look productive, but it's worth trying again, anyway.)

I'm a woman, I've edited wikipedia. But not frequently.

If I happen to run across something that I know is incorrect and which I can find the sources for fairly quickly, I probably will again. I do recall another female wikipedia editor, a colleague when I was still in computational biochemistry, who avoided our particular area on wikipedia because she'd gotten tired of the acrimony. (I was really working more on the computational side, where she was a far better biochemist, but she didn't correct mischaracterizations about the feasibility of the work we were doing and had been doing for many years because the people who frequented that area were too "mean". And she wasn't exactly your shrinking violet; more, I think, that it met it less something she was willing to invest time into.)

Only inasmuch as it's not trivially traceable back to a RW individual.* But at least for many people, nyms are used consistently over a long period of time, and not infrequently across a number of sites. Things posted under a nym as still connected to an identity, even if it's not a legal identity, and they can have social consequences. (And, of course, there is, often as not, an accumulation of information about an individual. Tylikcat, and a couple of variations of the same, is highly traceable, and I haven't made any attempt for it not to point back to my legal name. I've been using the root form of it for better than twenty years now. But even if you were just mining this site, it's trivial to find out I'm a neurobiologist, former computational biochemist and former software engineer, a martial artist and martial arts instructor, that I live at a zendo, speak Chinese, hunt mushrooms and enjoy hacking electronics. And usually have a collection of research students I'm "educating" for fun and profit. Well, mostly fun. We're poor.)

Yes, there are various sockpuppets and accounts that are made and discarded, and in those cases a nym is pretty close to posting as AC - though even using one nym several times in a single conversation gives you a lot more context than posting anonymously.

* I'd personally hold that in many cases there's as much a social prohibition as a technical one. Even if we can, it'd good manners not to.

Right until the power fantasy turns into actual death threats.