White males are the one group that it's tacitly deemed "okay" to discriminate against. Especially if they happen to be Christian, and even more so if they're Protestant ("WASP").

You just can't have a civil, enlightened society if there's ANY grounp it's okay to fuck with. Even if you think they deserve it. Even if retaliation, based on group identity, against those who didn't personally decide historical events (with their enduring consequences) is somehow your idea of "justice", and simultaneously not your idea of "vengeance". Reversing the tide doesn't cause the state of "tide-free". And it isn't going to.

Otherwise, like if a single individual -- or single institution -- or small group of institutions -- made all these bad decisions, I would be perfectly fine with shunning and refusing to trust that person based on an observed track record. But what you have with the group-guilt scenario is this implicit idea that a large group of people, including those who had no input into the process, should bear some guilt for it. That's a total flat-out rejection of any sort of accountability or individuality.

If you want some kind of one-ness or collective, you don't get it this way. Dystopias are created by trying to find more efficient ways of doing it like that. No, you start by honoring the individual and letting those flourish, interact, and coalesce as they will.

I've yet to witness a Majority which was truly Moral in both word and deed.

I prefer red wine, myself. Like maybe a good, dry cabernet sauvignon. But to each their own! Enjoy that beer, my friend. Salud!

I wouldn't hire them anyway, based in sheer incompetence. The most readily observed incompetence: calling oneself an "editor" while remaining unable to spell-check or understand and apply the 5th-grade English grammar in which most news stories are deliberately written.

The problem is, the workaholics and institution types effectively have forced their ways on everyone else. Worker productivity has steadily risen since at least the 1950s, meanwhile wages (indexed against inflation) have remained relatively stagnant. That would be equitable if the number of hours worked per week had been reduced, but it hasn't (that, by the way, is what steadily improving technology could have brought us, but it's never enough, the owners want more, more more).

That means someone's getting screwed, and unless most of your revenue comes from investments or other unearned income, that includes you. If you don't work the overtime and place your corporation above your family, you're "not a team player". Because these are conflicting goals, they cannot all be simultaneously satisifed. One must be chosen at the expense of all others, meaning some group who want it one way are going to force this upon everyone else. Currently, in so many work environments, this favors those who want more work and less free time.

Rather than call it pure coincidence, which I deliberately and knowingly stopped short of saying, I was implying that it is not. I simply didn't care to get into the minutia of precisely how that happened and what the exact sequence of events were, since my point did not depend on the details, only on the truth that things happened in this manner.

He probably should have molested a bunch of kids instead. Then the BBC would have kept the entire incident covered up.

One would think that if you were to comment on such an obvious omission, that you would have explained it yourself.

Short answer: It's a tabletop gaming convention.

Whether or not something is morally right or not doesn't change the fact that it may not be a really bad idea given the reality of the situation.

I doubt that even you would decide to walk alone through a bad neighborhood at night while advertising that you have valuable items in your possession. In an ideal world there wouldn't be a problem with that, but we don't live in such a world. The people who will do you harm do not care about your rights, the morality of the act, or your feelings on the matter.

As a rational individual you should be able to recognize that many other individuals are not moral based on your definitions and that it's utterly, utterly foolish of you to suspect them to act in accordance with your moral code. So while you might argue that it would be wrong for you to be accosted on the street at night and deprived of your property, you still know damned well that you shouldn't put it to the test. If you knowingly do something foolish, you'll have a hard to convincing people that you're completely blameless in the matter.

Pontificating on the matter doesn't actually do anything to address the problem, regardless of how sound your principles may be. I'd rather avoid bad situations entirely than worrying about attributing blame after the fact.

Perhaps this was true at a time when Apple's user base was rather small, but they're shipping hundreds of millions of phones and far, far more computers than they ever had before. In the U.S. they have something near a 50% market share for smart phone purchases. Calling it a cult at that point seems more than a little disingenuous.

If Wikipedia wants more women to contribute, they really need to change the way that it works. All too often a single person will essentially take control of a page and reject any other contributions (and even improvements) from other people. That kind of adversarial behavior isn't something that most women tend to like working around. Even if their efforts to promote women to join are successful, I don't think it will have any long-term success as they, like many others will run into some asshole that won't work collaboratively.

Wikipedia really needs to change the way it operates and remove the ability for individuals to monopolize and control a page. I think if they moved to a system where multiple editors would work together to collaboratively make changes to a page over several weeks before pushing out the changes to the live version. While that isn't going to eliminate the petty squabbles, it at least results in a less hostile environment that prevents one power-tripping idiot from reverting all of your changes and trying to ban you.

Pandering to women while keeping the same environment that has been shown to drive so many women away isn't going to fix the problem. It's just trying to slap a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. Worse, it's a waste of resources that could otherwise be spent actually addressing the underlying cause of the problem.

I think it really demonstrates the importance of having those independent sources (even if a few of them are going to be cranks or pure propaganda) simply because if there's only a single source of information, it becomes trivial to control perceptions. It also suggests that Wikipedia needs to do a better job at fact checking, which is difficult given how many power users treat certain articles like their own little kingdoms and actively prevent others from changing them.

It's a noble goal to provide information freely to those who might not otherwise have access, but it also means that there's a responsibility to ensure that the information you're giving to these individuals is actually good and to ensure that those people who would attempt to subvert the platform to twist the truth or to spread lies should be removed from power.

I urge you to consider that Occam's Razor does not apply in the social realm, where motives are often hidden. This makes "paranoia" difficult to distinguish from "foresight".

In my personal unqualified opinion, it's like using alcohol. If there is no sign that it harms your well-being or reduces the quality of your life, then you do not have a problem. If there are such signs, then you do. In the absence of such signs, I would call it "caution".

What constitutes "you" though?

The body is constantly churning through most of the cells that it is composed of so it's not as though the sack of meat we occupy is terribly important. Even our unique DNA is unimportant given that we will soon be able to create exact clones based on it, who are also not "us".

We're already a ship of Theseus, so does it really make any difference if we slowly replaced our entire brain with artificial parts until we have replaced everything that was originally there so long as the stream of consciousness is uninterrupted? If we can do it gradually over time and still be ourselves, does it really matter if we could instantly accomplish the same?

It's a terrible metric. The test would pass if a female developer wrote a simple function and other female developer called it somewhere else. The function need not even do anything at all or be in anyway important to the project. The simple function and the call to it may be the only code contributed to the project by those individuals.

Do we get to feel good about our project and pat ourselves on the back for being progressive after passing this test even though it's utterly meaningless?

Why? The logging industry isn't likely losing any sleep over the lack of female lumberjacks and I doubt the child daycare industry cares one iota about the lack of male workers. No one seems to be jumping on their backs about any kind of sex-based disparity and trying to shove inane tests like the above down everyone's throat is going to do more harm than good because it just serves to alienate people.

Men and women are inherently different in some aspects and have different interests. That practically guarantees that there are certain jobs, activities, etc. that are going to appeal to one group more than the other. Unless we have a case of blatant (i.e. no women allowed) discrimination, there's no reason to expect that everything will have a perfect 50-50 balance.