But really, let’s be honest here: the stereotypical Broadway show tune is a pretty hideous thing.
It's less a 'hideous thing' than 'a musical style stuck in the 30s which is completely unknown outside of theatre and hence sounds really stupid to modern audiences'.
Even *modern* musicals often do this. I finished that that sentence with 'for no explicable reason' at first, but there actually is a reason. Namely, musicals are written by people who watch musicals, and hence those people are familiar with that style of music and it no longer sounds odd to them.
I admit, I am one of those people. I like showtunes...but I am aware enough to notice they are *damn odd*. Like really boring jazz or something.
And while some modern musicals have managed to move away from this, it doesn't help that the audience of musical theatre as a whole appears to be trapped in the 1960s (Which, yes, still have 1930s music in them.), demanding rerun after rerun of the shows they grew up with.
But all art has its odd self-referential quirks. I'm reminded of those songs that certain pop singers sing about how hard it is to be rich and famous, or, rather, assuming we already *know* how hard it is to be rich and famous.
@wrong, you're wrong. (Hrm. Seems obvious, now that I say it.) WWE is a performing art, although one that's not really well studied. Sort of an improvised, *very demanding* dancing, combined with melodrama, best as I can figure it.
NASCAR, however, is a sport. I suspect you're trying to claim that *physical* competition is a requirement for a sport, and argue that NASCAR doesn't met that requirement it. And thus NASCAR, like chess, is thus a 'game', not a 'sport'. (What that has to do with WWE, which clearly *is* incredibly physically demanding, but is not a sport, or even a game, because it's not a real competition at all, is unknown.)
However, a) that definition is only one possible way to define 'sport', and b) NASCAR is pretty physically demanding, even if the equipment (a race car) is more than in many other sports. Equestrian competitions have been generally regarded as sports throughout history, and the basic concept is the same.
@jm3z-aitch For my part, I think the distinction between art and sport just highlights the assumption being made, that people ought to be liking this thing we call art, but without a similar assumption for this thing we call sport. I want to question that assumption, so I’m looking another level up–art and sport are both cultural artefacts, so why is it we care about group A not liking this-here cultural artefact, but don’t care about group B not liking that-there cultural artefact? If the response is along the lines of “because this-here artefact is art,” then we can ask for a justification for why we should care in particular about certain groups not liking art, but at least then we’re actually trying to justify it, rather than assuming it.
If you want to get into that, as an aside, I will argue that there really is a good reason to care fiction more that competitions. Namely, that we create stories as a reflection of what we think the world is like, so what happens in fiction is more meaningful, culturally, than what happens in sports. Or at least *explains* more. (Note this applies to 'narrative fiction', not art in general.)
Now, we do create *sports* also, but we do that a lot less often, a lot of them are fairly old. And you can understand the basics of a specific sports without having to see them more than a few times. I mean, I'm sure there's some cultural significance to the new-ish popularity of roller derby, but I'm not sure I need to be a roller derby frequent viewer to understand what that is, or if even *being* such a viewer would cause me to understand it. You might need to attend one or two to understand the audience and the energy, but that's about it. Whereas it's fairly hard to understand what a work of fiction is about without learning the fictional narrative. (Granted, it could be summarized or put in another medium, but normally people just experience it.)
Or to put it another way, almost all sporting events are nearly identical to other events in their genre. Sports do not demonstrate much internal variation. Yes, sports *slowly* do evolve, and different teams have different ways to play the game, but there is a very tight framework.
It's like, if narrative art was sports, a play would only allow 5 characters, two women three men, and ten specific scenes in the same order, and just allow some dialog changes and a different ending. And a TV show had different rules, with 10 characters, only 8 of which could appear an episode, etc, etc. And all these rules were *decades* old, with only slight tweaks over time. That might be interesting as some sort of experiment, but it's sorta limited in the amount of information it can tell us about us.
That said, just because something is more important about what it says about society, doesn't mean people should like it because it's important, or not like things because they're less important. I like plenty of things that aren't important.
But I'm not sure there's anyone here arguing that Broadway is objectively more important to save than NASCAR. Both of those are businesses *around* certain cultural artifacts. While people who like those things don't want the business to fail, because that would cause less of them to be around, but neither 'car racing' or 'plays' can disappear. (Although if we were in some sort of apocalyptic situation where all human knowledge of one of those things disappeared, as I said above, we'd lose less with losing car racing.)
I think people here are just mostly suspicious that more people would like plays if there was not a bias against WRT men, and to examine said bias and what we can do about that. And, like I said, it's a perfectly valid claim that more people would probably like NASCAR, or even sports in general, is there wasn't some cultural bias against that and what we can do about that. That's not really a 'counter' claim as much as an additional claim, and it's certainly possible to be in favor of fixing both.
Not because we particularly want more people to watch NASCAR *or* want more people to go to plays, but because we don't want bias randomly floating around. Gender or cultural.
@kolohe However, I am not willing to completely discount any and all behavioral differences based on biological sex. That is to say, even with some ideal of socialization, where gender norms are not in fact normative, there still may be a biological gender gap in the attendance profile of any particular genre of entertainment.
Meanwhile, I am willing to discount those. ;) Maybe not entirely based on genre, but that's the wrong word there. Genres are standards of tone, technique, premise, etc.
Theatre is a artistic medium, not a genre. If you squint really hard, you can call 'musicals' a genre of theatre, but generally the term 'type' is used for that. A theatre genre is like 'mystery' or 'horror' or 'farce'. Musicals and straight plays both generally share the list of genres, although there are a few combinations you're unlikely to see. (Tragedy musicals, for example. Although mostly that's because no one writes tragedies anymore.)
But, anyway, if you want to stand there and tell me there are biological reasons that men prefer comedic movies instead of romance movies, okay, I think you're wrong, but you can come up with some sort of plausible justification for that.
But do you really mean to stand there and tell me there's a plausible biological justification that men like comedic movies instead of comedic plays? What could that possibly be?
Or a biological reason that men don't like narratives and music at the same time, when they appear just fine with narratives and music separately, or even music that tells a narrative outside of theatre? (Men don't seem to particularly dislike Bohemian Rhapsody, for example.)
@johanna I find the idea that men are embarrassed or hesitant to be interested in theatre more of a thing of the past and a sad commentary on how a small mostly conservative town has a far more progressive view of theatre than New York may have interesting.
As someone else involved in a theatre in a small town, I also find a lot of support of the theatre. Sometimes small towns will surprise you, especially when they feel 'they', meaning the town in general, is accomplishing something.
A victory for a theatre in the town is a victory for the town. They aren't spending that much for coffee, but hey, we've now got a Starbucks. And they don't really ever go there except a few years ago to see the fake Johnny Cash guy's concert, but we've got a real theatre putting on shows and everything. Some guy at the college is filming an indie movie about zombies or something, not going to see that, but neat, huh? Etc, etc.
And then sometimes I wander too far outside the bubble, and get a rude awakening. Or hear people talking about those *other* theatre folk. (Which, of course, are not the normal people we have in our town doing theatre.)
@jm3z-aitch Why doesn’t Saul like NASCAR? Should we care that people like him don’t like it? Surely there’s nothing but sociocultural reasons for that, right, so presumably if the Broadway question is important, so is the NASCAR question? Or are we beginning the conversations with a bias that dictates the outcome, an assumption that Broadway should be more broadly liked, but not NASCAR?
First, I'm not sure that Saul doesn't like NASCAR. At least, he didn't say so in his post.
Second, NASCAR is not an art. It's a sport. You're not comparing apples and oranges here, you're comparing apples and tuna.
Third, I'm not even really sure it's a sport...I mean, it technically is, but it's a sport that seems to mostly be enjoyed as an event, instead of the sport itself. From what I understand of how it's watched, It seems to be roughly akin to going to football games to tailgate. It's not treated as a sport as much as an excuse to hang out. (And, I must emphasize, I'm not judging or anything. Hell, that's how I treat *all* sports, I can't get emotionally invested in anything till near the end, so until then, I'm just hanging out. Not that I go to sports often, and I've never been to NASCAR.)
Fourth...do you have a theory that certain groups of people don't watch NASCAR, or possibly sports in general, due to biased assumptions about gender?
Presumably, it would be *women* discouraged from NASCAR, as they are from sports in general. Except I thought that women were actually pretty well represented in NASCAR attendance, at least compared to other sports. Being treated as an 'event' instead of a 'sport' mean families often make a day of it, at least so I've heard.
Or are you talking about biased assumptions, and, if so, do these assumptions hit at deeper problems like the problems with gender and theatre? Like, are black people staying away from NASCAR because if they tried it out, they would be thought of as not black enough? (This is just a wild guess as to what you're saying.) If so, that clearly *is* a problem, or, rather, a symptom of a problem.
@kolohe But I’m not worried that a customer base that is majority women and/or gay men is in any way a negative thing, the way a gender segregation of the broader arts&culture establishment (public and private, popular and boutique) possibly would be.
I'm not sure how you're using the term 'gender segregation' here. Broadway does not, in any way, attempt to separate by gender.
But is this a larger sociological problem? No.
The question is this a *symptom* of a larger sociological problem:
Are men avoiding theatre simply because men don't like theatre for some (really hard to explain) difference between the genders? I argue there's no possible way that makes any sense...there's all sorts of nonsense explanation as to why women and men are biologically predisposed to certain roles (Ignoring the fact that said roles have repeatedly changed throughout history.), but I think it's pretty telling that, in this entire discussion, no one has pieced together some sort of bogus caveman explanation of why women evolved to like musical theatre more than men.
Are men avoiding theatre simply because they weren't exposed to it as much as women when younger? That is, indeed, possible, and that seems to be what a lot of men here thing...except somewhat falls apart when you look at it. I suspect that slightly more little girls than little boys are involved in theatre, but that just sorta begs the question...why?
Are men avoiding theatre because it's something that 'real men' don't do? If that is the case, we need to fix that entire idea...not because we need to save theatre for some reason, theatre is never going away. Broadway might collapse, but whatever.
No, we need to fix it because such complete nonsense about gender is very toxic to people who fall outside such dumbass 'norms', much less men who fall outside other gender roles, or are genderqueer in some manner.
@alan-scott You know what will actually get men into the theaters? Comedy. I’ve seen four or five stage musicals.
If we want to seriously discuss what will save theatres, okay. Yes, comedy is a really good start.
My local community theatre just did Moon Over Buffalo, which for people that don't know is a comedy that descends into outright farce, and the young people loved it.
All 800 of them or whatever amount attended. In our 250+ house. Over nine performances. Ouch.
Put on a classic musical like Oklahoma!, and we'll come close to selling those performances out. But selling them out with an audience where the average age is 60. This is, rather obviously, not sustainable.
To save theatre, people need to be introduced to theatre young. But it's become a negative feedback loop...young people are not the market for theatre, and hence no one markets theatre to them, and hence they don't attend. Better just go with the assure crowd of older people who want to watch reruns of 1940s-1960s musicals they grew up with.
Which would be all well and good, except, at some point, there will be nothing *but* young people, or rather people who are young *now*.
Heck, we're not even talking about actual 'things that don't exist in reality', we're talking about *medium rules*.
Seriously, I think the fact the characters in a musical, instead of actually moving from place to place, have people dressed in black run out and rearrange the furniture while they're not looking, a much harder thing to suspend disbelieve about then their *singing*. I mean, I've actually sung in real life, I've never stood there while ninjas turn my living room into a painted representation of the town and then thought I really was in town!
And all those people *staring at them*. That would creep me the hell out, but they just ignore them!
@kolohe Are not movies & TV ‘performing arts’? They are not live performances, (for the vast majority) and they may lack the intimacy that a in-person stage production possesses, but they are conceived and executed by performing artists (and Chuck Lorre)
To be 'performing arts', they have to be viewed as performed.
The performing arts don't have editors, retakes, location shots, or out-of-sequence shooting, stitched together and rearranged before viewing. Doing that changes the 'artists' from 'the actors' to 'the people who did all that, aka, editors and directors and whatnot', and changes it from 'performing art' to 'visual art'.
@stillwater Why isn’t that a sufficient answer to the question? I mean, is the suggestion that people’s behaviors aren’t influenced by how they think others will perceive them? If that’s the case, then the theory of signalling can get tossed in the dumpster, yeah?
Why...would that make any sort of sense as a conclusion? Seriously, I have a hard time even responding to that.
The rather obvious reason is that a) one person is not everyone, so obviously one person able to ignore what others think about him is not actually that helpful, and b) as I think I've said fairly clearly, my concern is not for *theatre*. I, personally, like theatre, but trying to structure reality so it succeeds, or even so it fails 'fairly', would be incredibly egotistical of me.
My concern is for toxic ideas of 'masculinity', the entire concept that men need to be careful and stay away from 'non-masculine' things, and prejudices that result from that. Men staying away from theatre is a symptom of that. Men being pressured to stay away but not actually doing it is also a symptom.
@jm3z-aitch Hmm, I like musicals, and I’ve never felt any pressure not to, and I’m a cis hetero race car watching wilderness camping whiskey drinking kind of guy. My friend R, a devout Republican and a guy guy, loves musicals and isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not persuaded by the claim.
I'm actually rather wondering if it has to do with where people live. I live in a small town in Georgia, and the theatre *here* is a tiny community theatre that the town loves. (The town is very tourism oriented.) So *here*, it's all 'Oh, you volunteer at the Holly? That must be fun.'.
It's when I get *outside* the town, or when people talk about theatre in other contexts, that I hear whispering.
@kim Science is pretty conclusive on the whole idea of two genders being pretty much bunk (yes, most people fit pretty neatly into those two buckets. I wager most folks around here don’t, though).
Well, yes, you think that, and I think that, but you're going to get a lot of argument and people ignoring you if you state it that way. A better way to state it in this discussion is, no matter how much people think there are inherit gender differences in nature, liking or disliking a *medium of expression* would be a pretty surreal thing for our hormone to control.
I mean, what other assertions are there we should invent? Men like oil paintings while women like water colors? Women prefer black and white photos and men prefer sephia-toned ones? Men prefer six-act structures and women prefer five? What? Huh?
If people want to stand there with a straight fact and tell me the reason women prefer romances and men like action movies is *genetics*, look, those people are wrong, but at least they can come up with some *theory* for their wrongness. The idea that men don't like musical theatre...when men do like singing and dancing in other contexts, and like those sort of stories in other context, but just don't like them *together*...seriously? This is somehow *genetic*?
And, of course, there's all sorts of data to contradiction this, considering this is an incredibly new prejudice we've invented. In almost all of human existence where 'theatre' existed, (as narrative musicals, non-narrative singing and dancing, or straight plays) it's the *men* who mostly attended. (Of course, it's that's generally because only men were free to do so.)
And then, on top of that, that men who *do* like those sort of things are somehow lesser men? That's just completely idiotic.
@j-r I certainly feel “allowed” to like musicals and I pretty uniformly hate musicals. Saul doesn’t care much at all for doing those things labeled traditionally masculine and he doesn’t like most Broadway musicals either.
It's easy to feel *allowed* to like something if that's not something you actually do like.
And Saul specifically gave an example of someone saying that they were glad he didn't like musicals.
But that doesn't change the fact that there is a wariness on the part of guys towards liking musicals. Maybe they wouldn't like them *anyway*, but until that bias is gone, it is *really* hard to judge that fairly.(1)
If you want to find whether or not guys are looked down on for liking musicals, you have to find *some guys who like musicals* and ask them, not stand there from safe 'not liking musicals' ground and say 'I'm sure it's fine over there'.
Like, oh, me. Someone who is actually involved in theatre, in fact.
And, yes, I've gotten a few comments once or twice. Long hair probably doesn't help.
In the absence of actual evidence, these are all just assertions.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to bring up the *other* biases against mediums that exist, to point out how hard it is to get judged fairly. Until recently, and still to some extent, video games were not looked at as a medium. Better example: Comic books *still* aren't.
Do comic books have the correct audience? That is, is everyone who *would* enjoy reading comic books actually reading them? Or have some people never bothered to try them, sure that if they did, they wouldn't like that, and even if they did like them, they're *comic books*, they can't be seen reading comic books!
It seems pretty intuitive that because of certain opinions people have about comic books, and about people who read comic books, comic books have a smaller audience than they would have in some sort of hypothetical world where comics books were invented a decade ago and no one had any preconceptions.
But apparently throw *gender* into that and people can't make same rather obvious conclusion. How crazy to suggest that something invented only a few hundred years ago and the major form of entertainment for centuries for men and women alike is not now something genetically encoded to be different among the genders, somehow!
Also, you may feel that masculinity is absurd and have no use for the concepts of masculine and feminine, but lots of people do. I ask again, what is the ethical justification for enforcing your idea of gender over my idea of gender or for either of us to force our respective ideas on others?
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not trying to 'force' my ideas of gender on anyone. There is a difference between judging someone and saying 'don't judge'.
If men generally don't *like* musicals for some reason, that would be one thing.
I mean, men appear to like *music* just fine, like drama just fine. They've even tried to do musicals *based on action movies*, and those don't get men either. Admittedly, a musical is probably not the *best* format for that, but it's not a horrible one. Men will play video games about guys who fight people, watch movies about guys who fight people, read comic books about guys who fight people, even read books about guys who fight people, so why won't they watch musicals about guys who fight people?
Because we appear to be in a world where men don't feel *allowed* to like musicals, or even try them to see if they like them.
That is a bit more problematic. And this feeling that they aren't 'allowed' isn't just something they've invented in their head. There really *are* people who think men who like theatre are not real men.
So the question is less 'How do we get men to like theatre?', and more 'How do we get society to stop inventing completely absurd ideas of masculinity and looking down on men who stray outside them?'
I think very little of the concepts of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', almost all examples of behaviors under those groups are stuff we invented for this specific society and almost all the gender-expectations people think is built-in is just learned behavior.
*However*, even if you disagree with me, even if you think a some of these differences is biological, the idea that somehow what *medium* you like to watch fiction in somehow says anything about gender at all is absurd. I mean, *maybe* I can buy the idea that somehow men are pre-programmed to like punch-the-bad-guy stories more than relationship drama stories. I don't believe it at all, but it's a possible argument.
But saying they're programmed to like a movie more than a musical...when the hell did either of *those* get in our genetics?
@mad-rocket-scientist Now, IANAL, but the bolded statements each lack the keyword you focused on, that being persistent. The list is not comma seperated, but semi-colon seperated, which tells me each item in the list stands alone. Which leads me to conclude that, if one were to split hairs, the bolded items do not need to be persistent, but could be single instances. This is problematic.
No, that's not what I was saying. That paragraph defines 'specific examples' of sexual harassment. But single examples of 'sexual harassment' *aren't against the rules*. (I know it just seems obvious that if someone says 'that action is sexual harassment', they mean 'and thus it's not allowed', but that is based a fundamental misunderstanding of what 'harassment' actually is.)
What is against the rules is '[A]ny unwelcome action, verbal expression, usually repeated or persistent, or a series of actions or expressions that have either the intent, or are reasonably perceived as having the effect, of creating an intimidating, hostile, or demeaning educational, employment, or living environment for a student or College employee, either by being sexual in nature or by focusing on a person‘s gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.'
The first paragraph rules are saying 'Don't sexual harass people constantly to the point of creating a hostile environment' and the second paragraph is saying 'And here are some examples of things that can be sexual harassment'.
And, more to the point, FIRE entirely left out the relevant paragraph of:
The perception of a conduct or expression as harassing does not necessarily constitute sexual harassment. Such perceptions must be carefully examined to determine whether they constitute quid pro quo harassment or hostile environment harassment (as described in Sections B.1 and B.2)
https://web.archive.org/web/20130530202117/http://www.swarthmore.edu/equal-opportunity-and-title-ix-office/sexual-and-discriminatory-harassment.xml (I'm fairly certain this is the version of the rules that FIRE is talking about. Their link is dead.)
I.e, if you don't create a hostile work environment (Or it falls under quid pro quo harassment, which is the 'power differential' form of sexual harassment between employer/employee or teacher/student, and not what we're talking about here.), Starthmore college doesn't consider it actually sexual harassment. *Period*.
FIRE...does not seem to grasp this at all. Or, instead, they do grasp it, and then deliberately misread the policy.
Keep in mind that university policies are interpreted by the faculty & administration, and that generally students have little in the way of legal recourse in the moment when falling victim to such policies. There is no right of Due Process, no right to face the accused, no right to be convicted beyond all reasonable doubt, etc, unless the school has written policies explicitly saying so.
You'd think such a thing would be relevant for FIRE to inform people about, wouldn't you? But, then again, they're pathologically biased, so pointing out that there *is* such a procedure at Swarthmore would not be something they care to do.
(Please remember, folks, I have no idea if Swarthmore is a good school or not, I've never even heard of the place before last week, I couldn't even tell you what state it is in, and I didn't pick it as the example. I can discover FIRE's bullshit on literally any of their nonsensical posts criticizing schools, when they randomly cherry pick sentences to mean whatever they want them to mean.)
I always find it particularly surreal when supposed Christians used the Old Testament to justify biases against gays, for two reasons.
One, almost all parts of that, especially the parts giving out the Laws, start with 'Say to the Israelites...', or something to that effect. Seriously, check the start of any chapter in Leviticus. The Laws pretty explicitly are for the Jewish people. Guess what, most Christians? You're not Jewish. You don't *have* to be Jewish to be Christian. Christians actually had a pretty nasty drag-out fight about whether you had to be Jewish at the *start* of Christianity, and decided, officially, the answer was 'No'.(1)
Second...Jews do not follow the 'Old Testaments', or rather the Talmud, by randomly reading verses in it. The way to follow the Talmud is via teachers, aka, 'rabbis'. So even if Christians *were* supposed to follow Jewish law, they're probably supposed to do it via *the method in place at the time of Jesus*, not some random proof-texting method that's less than 500 years old. (In fact, Jesus disapproved of people attempting to proof-text certain things. Check his response to him him being criticized for healing people on the Sabbath.)
I.e., the actual people *officially* covered by The Law of the 'Old Testament', and operating under a system *Jesus himself acknowledged* (2), said that despite what it looks like, there's nothing in there against loving homosexual relationship. If you must *pretend* Jewish Law applies to Christians for some unexplained reasons (And I don't see any of these people refusing to shave the edges of their beard, or following rules about leprosy.) then the obviously correct thing to do is to listen to the people who are *supposed to be in charge* of Jewish Law, which are Jewish rabbis.
1) There are a *few* Christian faiths that follow Jewish traditions also, that claim to be 'Jewish' and 'Christian' at the same time, so possible *those* people are supposed to follow Jewish law, but those groups are fairly rare.
2) As far as anyone can tell, Jesus was an observant Jew, or that charge would have been leveled at him. He debated with the rabbis when they had gotten something wrong, he never asserted their authority was invalid.
@will-truman This may be the best comment in either related thread.
That seems very unlikely. ;) But I was just getting a little annoyed with "Democrats don't believe polls! Democrats are becomes as irrational as Republicans!'.
There's a difference between 'really disbelieving believing polls' and 'saying you don't believe polls to keep morale up', and heck, there's even a difference between 'really disbelieving believing polls' and 'disbelieving actual factual things'. Asserting that 'Democrats now say they don't believe the polls' is a indicator of looming irrationality on their part makes no sense at all. No one, absolutely no one, admits they believe negative polls about them. Ever. In the entire history of ever.
In fact, almost all the 'looming irrationality on part of the Democrats' that *anyone* has posted here been completely and utterly without any sort of basis at all. It's getting a little silly.
Especially by using left-based all the Nate Silver punching as an example. Almost all the attacks on Nate Silver are pointing out that 'data' does not actually replace either political journalism or opinion pieces, and the problem with politics is *not* the lack of data. That wasn't even the problem in the election coverage he was so hailed for in getting right!
The problem there, and in general, was people who are persistently, completely, utterly wrong in everything they say and do being taken seriously, and a media that is completely captured by those people.
If Nate Silver wants to provide more facts to use as weapons to attack those people, fine, but there's already plenty of facts, and yet those idiots keep getting allowed to open their stupid face on TV and write their idiotic opinion pieces and be wrong about everything, forever, in all possibly ways. Total batshit insane people, being taken seriously and being allowed on air as if their words mattered at all.
The attacks on Nate Silver is because is he naive and a little presumptuous about how the system works. 'Oh, I just need to throw some FACTS in there!'. The attacks aren't not anti-facts, they're anti-facts-will-solve-the-problem.
Kos has a slightly different view of the election than Nate does, but I’m not sure who’s got better data (I think kos gets more reports from local party activists — he’s been pretty good in the past at finding folks like Tester and Webb, so I think he’s better at handicapping the unknown challenger than Nate is.)
And Kos is, fundamentally, pro-Democrat. There's a lot of times to talk about 'objectivity', but when people on reporting on the chances of 'their side' winning, I really think we need to understand that they might be deliberately hyping things a bit.
I have a rather serious problem with treating *optimism* as 'fact denying'. This is not an example of 'the left denying facts', and it's not an example of the same thing on the right, either.
This is how politics has always worked. Everyone claims they can win, and even manages to delude both themselves and others to some extent. Almost no one has ever walked into election day publicly saying 'Well, I guess I'm going to lose'. (I'm sure that has happened, people who run to make a point or protest or something, but not actual *real* candidates.)
At least among the *party and supporters*. The amazing and mockable thing last election was when it infected an entire network...but, then again, I think we've all know that Fox News wasn't actually a news network anyway, but actually a branch of the Republican Party, and their nonsense about skewed polls pretty much proved it. In fact, I would suggest that a way to figure out if a 'news' organization is politically biased or not in their news would be to check how they respond to voter polls.(1)
Anyway, people can talk all they want about all the other criticisms of FiveThirtyEight. Complain about how they respond to climate change stuff, or whatever.
But trying to complain about liberals going 'Lalala, we don't want to hear that we won't take the House' is sheer nonsense. Everyone has done that, always, for the entire history of the Republic.
1) Now, news organizations will always treat the presidential election as a horserace, no matter how clear the winner is in advance. But that's not due to political bias, that's due to them trying to invent news. So you'd have to figure out how to ignore their 'newsiness' bias.
I suspect that the long-term uninsured, people who've never had insurance, do not actually know how to use the medical system correctly.
And, hell, I'll admit it. I'm one of them. I haven't had insurance for more than a decade, due to insurance companies denying me based on a preexisting condition. I have no primary doctor. Although I was lucky in that I could actually *pay* my medical bills. So if I had a medical problem I'd try to figure out correct doctor, and just go see them. And I saw a cardiologist for my pre-existing heart conditions every few years, semi-randomly.
Now I have insurance, for functionally the first time in my adult life (I think I had my mom's insurance until 22, but at that point I was in college and I just did whatever my mom said and she paid the bills.), and I really have no idea how this is supposed to work. I am planning to find a doctor and get a physical at some point, figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm pretty sure I'm due a few immunizations.
But I'm fairly well informed. I can see people who are not informed basically operating the same way as before. Get sick, go to the emergency room, except now you give them your insurance card and hope that reduces it to where you can pay for it.
Incidentally, we've all seemingly forgotten that a lot of these people have large medical bills at emergency rooms already. Which means that some of them can *only* go to the emergency room, because other places might turn them away. (As with all the consolidation going on, the local places might very well belong to the same system that owns the emergency room, and not be willing to accept patients that already owe the system money.)
No, you are indeed thinking of Hobby Lobby. They 'accidentally' provided contraceptives without noticing. Or, rather, didn't care until the Republicans wanted to invent an issue.
Not to mention that *more than half* the states already required contraceptives in health insurance, including some rather red states, like my state of Georgia. My state didn't even offer a *religious exemption* from that. (O.C.G.A. § 33-24-59.6, look it up.)
Granted, no one had to *have* insurance in the first place, but you didn't hear companies that provided it complain.
I often find myself completely amazed how easily history is rewritten, and something that was commonplace suddenly becomes outrageous.
Oh, and be aware that a lot of their complaints are presented without comment, even ones they rate as 'Red'. They quote the speech code, and that's it.
While these ratings are often stupid and sometimes I can't even figure out what they object to (They appear to object to the idea that Arkansas State University students are expected to be civil, for example.), they aren't 'lying', because there is literally no facts written on their part. Just a 'don't like' opinion.
I am talking about when they *do* offer commentary on the speech code. They will always interpret things in completely nonsensical ways, ignoring context or sane readings of the code. They're playing a game of 'Let's see how we could possibly twist these words into being a first amendment issue?'.
Ideology is the enemy…again. There’s always something special about lying about other people being liars.
Here’s a case from FIRE’s pages that even you can grok.
I have the feeling you missed that I said they were liars 'who are clearly misrepresenting the actual speech guidelines they claim to be quoting'.
The page you are talking about...is not about speech guidelines. It is, in fact, a summary of events.
So, yes. They are not lying on that page. And presumably not lying on their 'About Us', or any random page on their site. I didn't say they were. I said they were lying whenever they talk about *speech guidelines*.
Although, if you're going to nitpick, I guess I should clarify in advance: They're lying when they *criticize* speech guidelines. As opposed to the times they present guidelines without comment or when they're not able to invent a problem with them so rate them acceptable. Those pages, as far as I know, do not contain lies.
However, I've never read a single article there that *criticized speech guidelines* without containing some obvious untruths, although I will admit I have once or twice run across a valid criticism, or at least one not based in lies. But they can never leave the article at just that.
And I obviously haven't read all of their criticism. But I have read at least 50 or so, at one time, solely because I couldn't believe the nonsense they were sprouting.
I took high school students to a lynching exhibit at a Chicago museum. No trigger warning. They all got real quiet, real fast.
Ah, yes. They must have be completely startled, having not gotten on a school bus and ridden to a museums and walked into an exhibit about lynchings.
Just *poof*, a Chicago museum's lynching exhibit, right there in the classroom. No warning at all.
Christ Almighty. Do people literally not understand what a 'trigger warning' is? It does not have to include the word 'trigger', you know, nor does it have to say anything like 'This topic may trigger some people'.
A museum exhibit about lynching is rather obviously going to include images and depictions of lynching. That, in itself, is a warning!
It’s a college class. You think there was nothing in the syllabus or anything the professor said that gave students some forewarning that the day’s topics included torture?
Uh, no, the complaint wasn't a *discussion* of torture, the complaint was *images* of torture. I have a feeling the syllabus did not list that day as 'Viewing images of torture day'.
Which, again, I point out we, in this society, have a general rule not to show graphic imagines to people without warning. Before we show people disturbing images, we *warn* them. This is not some new 'political correctness' thing, it is not asking for a 'trigger warning', it has nothing to do with colleges.
We've been doing that for as long as we've had fricking visual media.
If you fail to do that, if you show people such images without warning, people *will* complain.
Now imagine a claim of sexual harassment or psychological trauma caused by a rape flashback.
And the way this intersects with trigger warnings is...trigger warnings would allow you to *avoid* the complaint, or at least have a reasonable defense against it.
If students are assholes who complain about random things, and so teachers attempt to avoid those things, whatever.
This has precisely zero to do with the left demanding 'trigger warnings' or 'speech codes'.
If anything, it rather indicates that *even if* academia is implementing such things, it's not due to academia wanting to, it's due to students forcing the issue.
In my opinion, faculty are becoming more gun-shy because administrators are becoming more gun-shy, because (I suspect) college lawyers are becoming more gun-shy. Whether we’re really becoming an even more litigious society, or that’s just the perception, I think it’s what’s driving the problem.
That *might* indeed be the problem, I don't know.
What I do know is that has very little to do with 'the left' or 'trigger warnings'.
Sure, sure, he’s going after a racist white dude on behalf of Native Americans, but he’s using Asian-Americans to do it.
Not really. He's using a running gag on his show. He didn't just invent for that episode 'Ching-Chong Ding-Dong', that clip has existed for years.
In this running gag, he pretends that years ago he was caught making an absurdly racist (And very strangely outdated racism, at that.) mocking Asians when he didn't realize he was being recorded. I *believe* this was because Rush Limbaugh was caught doing exactly that.
And every time someone else in the media, he brings this up, and then he 'apologizes' about having said those things without actually apologizing, and in fact manages to say things even more racist during his apology.
This is a fairly long-standing running gag on his show, dating back to, I believe, 2005. The gag, IIRC, is also that each time he brings it up, he has to apologize for what he said *last time*, too, so it keeps getting longer and longer.
Although until now, he's had to *invent* complaints about the outrage last time. This time, oddly, people actually and rather surreally *did* complain. So the next time he uses the joke he can talk about how the last time he tried to apologize people tried to get the show cancelled.
Although it appears that they were outrage by the *tweet*? Really? That is literally astonishing to me. I cannot even conceive of a world where people would get upset about a context-less tweet from a *satirical* account.
Why is a joke by a white guy for mostly white guys worth the discomfort of non-whites?
That sentence has a whole lot of assumptions in it.
College students complain about all sorts of complete nonsense. Professors do not live in terror of such events. And I would wage that things that effect *grades* are giant causers of that, and a few people saying 'The professor showed us something that bothered us' wouldn't even make the list of top fifty categories of student complaints.
However, everyone does realize this completely *disproves* the premise of Freddie's article, right? Because it implies that *college students* are the ones running around bullying *the left* (aka, the college administration and professors) into doing things.
I.e, such a claim is making exactly the *opposite* point of the 'the left' wanting speech codes. It's saying that *other* people are making the left *conform* to speech codes.
No one in the administration *asked* her to provide trigger warnings, much less created any sort of policy as deliberate red tape.
The story linked to is a story about students apparently want warnings of disturbing content, and complaining if they don't get said warnings.
Actually, no. Not even that. The first incident quite clearly said that the young people were *suggesting* a trigger warning. It sounds like a friendly warning that the professor was doing something that might cause problems for some other people, not a complaint.
And the second incident was, in fact, objectively disturbing. It was pictures of *torture*. That's not asking for a 'trigger warning', that's asking for a warning on something the *news* warns about!
Or have we decided that *all* content warning requests are outrageous all the sudden? *embeds the goatse image*
And the professor, far from being *required* to do anything, has apparently decided to stop showing such things out of spite, or something.
None of this has anything to do with the left, unless 'some random college students' are now 'the left'.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Men Don’t Go To Broadway: Should We Care?”
But really, let’s be honest here: the stereotypical Broadway show tune is a pretty hideous thing.
It's less a 'hideous thing' than 'a musical style stuck in the 30s which is completely unknown outside of theatre and hence sounds really stupid to modern audiences'.
Even *modern* musicals often do this. I finished that that sentence with 'for no explicable reason' at first, but there actually is a reason. Namely, musicals are written by people who watch musicals, and hence those people are familiar with that style of music and it no longer sounds odd to them.
I admit, I am one of those people. I like showtunes...but I am aware enough to notice they are *damn odd*. Like really boring jazz or something.
And while some modern musicals have managed to move away from this, it doesn't help that the audience of musical theatre as a whole appears to be trapped in the 1960s (Which, yes, still have 1930s music in them.), demanding rerun after rerun of the shows they grew up with.
But all art has its odd self-referential quirks. I'm reminded of those songs that certain pop singers sing about how hard it is to be rich and famous, or, rather, assuming we already *know* how hard it is to be rich and famous.
"
@wrong, you're wrong. (Hrm. Seems obvious, now that I say it.) WWE is a performing art, although one that's not really well studied. Sort of an improvised, *very demanding* dancing, combined with melodrama, best as I can figure it.
NASCAR, however, is a sport. I suspect you're trying to claim that *physical* competition is a requirement for a sport, and argue that NASCAR doesn't met that requirement it. And thus NASCAR, like chess, is thus a 'game', not a 'sport'. (What that has to do with WWE, which clearly *is* incredibly physically demanding, but is not a sport, or even a game, because it's not a real competition at all, is unknown.)
However, a) that definition is only one possible way to define 'sport', and b) NASCAR is pretty physically demanding, even if the equipment (a race car) is more than in many other sports. Equestrian competitions have been generally regarded as sports throughout history, and the basic concept is the same.
@jm3z-aitch
For my part, I think the distinction between art and sport just highlights the assumption being made, that people ought to be liking this thing we call art, but without a similar assumption for this thing we call sport. I want to question that assumption, so I’m looking another level up–art and sport are both cultural artefacts, so why is it we care about group A not liking this-here cultural artefact, but don’t care about group B not liking that-there cultural artefact? If the response is along the lines of “because this-here artefact is art,” then we can ask for a justification for why we should care in particular about certain groups not liking art, but at least then we’re actually trying to justify it, rather than assuming it.
If you want to get into that, as an aside, I will argue that there really is a good reason to care fiction more that competitions. Namely, that we create stories as a reflection of what we think the world is like, so what happens in fiction is more meaningful, culturally, than what happens in sports. Or at least *explains* more. (Note this applies to 'narrative fiction', not art in general.)
Now, we do create *sports* also, but we do that a lot less often, a lot of them are fairly old. And you can understand the basics of a specific sports without having to see them more than a few times. I mean, I'm sure there's some cultural significance to the new-ish popularity of roller derby, but I'm not sure I need to be a roller derby frequent viewer to understand what that is, or if even *being* such a viewer would cause me to understand it. You might need to attend one or two to understand the audience and the energy, but that's about it. Whereas it's fairly hard to understand what a work of fiction is about without learning the fictional narrative. (Granted, it could be summarized or put in another medium, but normally people just experience it.)
Or to put it another way, almost all sporting events are nearly identical to other events in their genre. Sports do not demonstrate much internal variation. Yes, sports *slowly* do evolve, and different teams have different ways to play the game, but there is a very tight framework.
It's like, if narrative art was sports, a play would only allow 5 characters, two women three men, and ten specific scenes in the same order, and just allow some dialog changes and a different ending. And a TV show had different rules, with 10 characters, only 8 of which could appear an episode, etc, etc. And all these rules were *decades* old, with only slight tweaks over time. That might be interesting as some sort of experiment, but it's sorta limited in the amount of information it can tell us about us.
That said, just because something is more important about what it says about society, doesn't mean people should like it because it's important, or not like things because they're less important. I like plenty of things that aren't important.
But I'm not sure there's anyone here arguing that Broadway is objectively more important to save than NASCAR. Both of those are businesses *around* certain cultural artifacts. While people who like those things don't want the business to fail, because that would cause less of them to be around, but neither 'car racing' or 'plays' can disappear. (Although if we were in some sort of apocalyptic situation where all human knowledge of one of those things disappeared, as I said above, we'd lose less with losing car racing.)
I think people here are just mostly suspicious that more people would like plays if there was not a bias against WRT men, and to examine said bias and what we can do about that. And, like I said, it's a perfectly valid claim that more people would probably like NASCAR, or even sports in general, is there wasn't some cultural bias against that and what we can do about that. That's not really a 'counter' claim as much as an additional claim, and it's certainly possible to be in favor of fixing both.
Not because we particularly want more people to watch NASCAR *or* want more people to go to plays, but because we don't want bias randomly floating around. Gender or cultural.
"
@kolohe
However, I am not willing to completely discount any and all behavioral differences based on biological sex. That is to say, even with some ideal of socialization, where gender norms are not in fact normative, there still may be a biological gender gap in the attendance profile of any particular genre of entertainment.
Meanwhile, I am willing to discount those. ;) Maybe not entirely based on genre, but that's the wrong word there. Genres are standards of tone, technique, premise, etc.
Theatre is a artistic medium, not a genre. If you squint really hard, you can call 'musicals' a genre of theatre, but generally the term 'type' is used for that. A theatre genre is like 'mystery' or 'horror' or 'farce'. Musicals and straight plays both generally share the list of genres, although there are a few combinations you're unlikely to see. (Tragedy musicals, for example. Although mostly that's because no one writes tragedies anymore.)
But, anyway, if you want to stand there and tell me there are biological reasons that men prefer comedic movies instead of romance movies, okay, I think you're wrong, but you can come up with some sort of plausible justification for that.
But do you really mean to stand there and tell me there's a plausible biological justification that men like comedic movies instead of comedic plays? What could that possibly be?
Or a biological reason that men don't like narratives and music at the same time, when they appear just fine with narratives and music separately, or even music that tells a narrative outside of theatre? (Men don't seem to particularly dislike Bohemian Rhapsody, for example.)
"
@johanna
I find the idea that men are embarrassed or hesitant to be interested in theatre more of a thing of the past and a sad commentary on how a small mostly conservative town has a far more progressive view of theatre than New York may have interesting.
As someone else involved in a theatre in a small town, I also find a lot of support of the theatre. Sometimes small towns will surprise you, especially when they feel 'they', meaning the town in general, is accomplishing something.
A victory for a theatre in the town is a victory for the town. They aren't spending that much for coffee, but hey, we've now got a Starbucks. And they don't really ever go there except a few years ago to see the fake Johnny Cash guy's concert, but we've got a real theatre putting on shows and everything. Some guy at the college is filming an indie movie about zombies or something, not going to see that, but neat, huh? Etc, etc.
And then sometimes I wander too far outside the bubble, and get a rude awakening. Or hear people talking about those *other* theatre folk. (Which, of course, are not the normal people we have in our town doing theatre.)
"
@jm3z-aitch
Why doesn’t Saul like NASCAR? Should we care that people like him don’t like it? Surely there’s nothing but sociocultural reasons for that, right, so presumably if the Broadway question is important, so is the NASCAR question? Or are we beginning the conversations with a bias that dictates the outcome, an assumption that Broadway should be more broadly liked, but not NASCAR?
First, I'm not sure that Saul doesn't like NASCAR. At least, he didn't say so in his post.
Second, NASCAR is not an art. It's a sport. You're not comparing apples and oranges here, you're comparing apples and tuna.
Third, I'm not even really sure it's a sport...I mean, it technically is, but it's a sport that seems to mostly be enjoyed as an event, instead of the sport itself. From what I understand of how it's watched, It seems to be roughly akin to going to football games to tailgate. It's not treated as a sport as much as an excuse to hang out. (And, I must emphasize, I'm not judging or anything. Hell, that's how I treat *all* sports, I can't get emotionally invested in anything till near the end, so until then, I'm just hanging out. Not that I go to sports often, and I've never been to NASCAR.)
Fourth...do you have a theory that certain groups of people don't watch NASCAR, or possibly sports in general, due to biased assumptions about gender?
Presumably, it would be *women* discouraged from NASCAR, as they are from sports in general. Except I thought that women were actually pretty well represented in NASCAR attendance, at least compared to other sports. Being treated as an 'event' instead of a 'sport' mean families often make a day of it, at least so I've heard.
Or are you talking about biased assumptions, and, if so, do these assumptions hit at deeper problems like the problems with gender and theatre? Like, are black people staying away from NASCAR because if they tried it out, they would be thought of as not black enough? (This is just a wild guess as to what you're saying.) If so, that clearly *is* a problem, or, rather, a symptom of a problem.
"
@kolohe
But I’m not worried that a customer base that is majority women and/or gay men is in any way a negative thing, the way a gender segregation of the broader arts&culture establishment (public and private, popular and boutique) possibly would be.
I'm not sure how you're using the term 'gender segregation' here. Broadway does not, in any way, attempt to separate by gender.
But is this a larger sociological problem? No.
The question is this a *symptom* of a larger sociological problem:
Are men avoiding theatre simply because men don't like theatre for some (really hard to explain) difference between the genders? I argue there's no possible way that makes any sense...there's all sorts of nonsense explanation as to why women and men are biologically predisposed to certain roles (Ignoring the fact that said roles have repeatedly changed throughout history.), but I think it's pretty telling that, in this entire discussion, no one has pieced together some sort of bogus caveman explanation of why women evolved to like musical theatre more than men.
Are men avoiding theatre simply because they weren't exposed to it as much as women when younger? That is, indeed, possible, and that seems to be what a lot of men here thing...except somewhat falls apart when you look at it. I suspect that slightly more little girls than little boys are involved in theatre, but that just sorta begs the question...why?
Are men avoiding theatre because it's something that 'real men' don't do? If that is the case, we need to fix that entire idea...not because we need to save theatre for some reason, theatre is never going away. Broadway might collapse, but whatever.
No, we need to fix it because such complete nonsense about gender is very toxic to people who fall outside such dumbass 'norms', much less men who fall outside other gender roles, or are genderqueer in some manner.
"
@alan-scott
You know what will actually get men into the theaters? Comedy. I’ve seen four or five stage musicals.
If we want to seriously discuss what will save theatres, okay. Yes, comedy is a really good start.
My local community theatre just did Moon Over Buffalo, which for people that don't know is a comedy that descends into outright farce, and the young people loved it.
All 800 of them or whatever amount attended. In our 250+ house. Over nine performances. Ouch.
Put on a classic musical like Oklahoma!, and we'll come close to selling those performances out. But selling them out with an audience where the average age is 60. This is, rather obviously, not sustainable.
To save theatre, people need to be introduced to theatre young. But it's become a negative feedback loop...young people are not the market for theatre, and hence no one markets theatre to them, and hence they don't attend. Better just go with the assure crowd of older people who want to watch reruns of 1940s-1960s musicals they grew up with.
Which would be all well and good, except, at some point, there will be nothing *but* young people, or rather people who are young *now*.
"
Heck, we're not even talking about actual 'things that don't exist in reality', we're talking about *medium rules*.
Seriously, I think the fact the characters in a musical, instead of actually moving from place to place, have people dressed in black run out and rearrange the furniture while they're not looking, a much harder thing to suspend disbelieve about then their *singing*. I mean, I've actually sung in real life, I've never stood there while ninjas turn my living room into a painted representation of the town and then thought I really was in town!
And all those people *staring at them*. That would creep me the hell out, but they just ignore them!
"
@kolohe
Are not movies & TV ‘performing arts’? They are not live performances, (for the vast majority) and they may lack the intimacy that a in-person stage production possesses, but they are conceived and executed by performing artists (and Chuck Lorre)
To be 'performing arts', they have to be viewed as performed.
The performing arts don't have editors, retakes, location shots, or out-of-sequence shooting, stitched together and rearranged before viewing. Doing that changes the 'artists' from 'the actors' to 'the people who did all that, aka, editors and directors and whatnot', and changes it from 'performing art' to 'visual art'.
"
@stillwater
Why isn’t that a sufficient answer to the question? I mean, is the suggestion that people’s behaviors aren’t influenced by how they think others will perceive them? If that’s the case, then the theory of signalling can get tossed in the dumpster, yeah?
Why...would that make any sort of sense as a conclusion? Seriously, I have a hard time even responding to that.
The rather obvious reason is that a) one person is not everyone, so obviously one person able to ignore what others think about him is not actually that helpful, and b) as I think I've said fairly clearly, my concern is not for *theatre*. I, personally, like theatre, but trying to structure reality so it succeeds, or even so it fails 'fairly', would be incredibly egotistical of me.
My concern is for toxic ideas of 'masculinity', the entire concept that men need to be careful and stay away from 'non-masculine' things, and prejudices that result from that. Men staying away from theatre is a symptom of that. Men being pressured to stay away but not actually doing it is also a symptom.
@jm3z-aitch
Hmm, I like musicals, and I’ve never felt any pressure not to, and I’m a cis hetero race car watching wilderness camping whiskey drinking kind of guy. My friend R, a devout Republican and a guy guy, loves musicals and isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not persuaded by the claim.
I'm actually rather wondering if it has to do with where people live. I live in a small town in Georgia, and the theatre *here* is a tiny community theatre that the town loves. (The town is very tourism oriented.) So *here*, it's all 'Oh, you volunteer at the Holly? That must be fun.'.
It's when I get *outside* the town, or when people talk about theatre in other contexts, that I hear whispering.
@kim
Science is pretty conclusive on the whole idea of two genders being pretty much bunk (yes, most people fit pretty neatly into those two buckets. I wager most folks around here don’t, though).
Well, yes, you think that, and I think that, but you're going to get a lot of argument and people ignoring you if you state it that way. A better way to state it in this discussion is, no matter how much people think there are inherit gender differences in nature, liking or disliking a *medium of expression* would be a pretty surreal thing for our hormone to control.
I mean, what other assertions are there we should invent? Men like oil paintings while women like water colors? Women prefer black and white photos and men prefer sephia-toned ones? Men prefer six-act structures and women prefer five? What? Huh?
If people want to stand there with a straight fact and tell me the reason women prefer romances and men like action movies is *genetics*, look, those people are wrong, but at least they can come up with some *theory* for their wrongness. The idea that men don't like musical theatre...when men do like singing and dancing in other contexts, and like those sort of stories in other context, but just don't like them *together*...seriously? This is somehow *genetic*?
And, of course, there's all sorts of data to contradiction this, considering this is an incredibly new prejudice we've invented. In almost all of human existence where 'theatre' existed, (as narrative musicals, non-narrative singing and dancing, or straight plays) it's the *men* who mostly attended. (Of course, it's that's generally because only men were free to do so.)
And then, on top of that, that men who *do* like those sort of things are somehow lesser men? That's just completely idiotic.
"
@j-r
I certainly feel “allowed” to like musicals and I pretty uniformly hate musicals. Saul doesn’t care much at all for doing those things labeled traditionally masculine and he doesn’t like most Broadway musicals either.
It's easy to feel *allowed* to like something if that's not something you actually do like.
And Saul specifically gave an example of someone saying that they were glad he didn't like musicals.
But that doesn't change the fact that there is a wariness on the part of guys towards liking musicals. Maybe they wouldn't like them *anyway*, but until that bias is gone, it is *really* hard to judge that fairly.(1)
If you want to find whether or not guys are looked down on for liking musicals, you have to find *some guys who like musicals* and ask them, not stand there from safe 'not liking musicals' ground and say 'I'm sure it's fine over there'.
Like, oh, me. Someone who is actually involved in theatre, in fact.
And, yes, I've gotten a few comments once or twice. Long hair probably doesn't help.
In the absence of actual evidence, these are all just assertions.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to bring up the *other* biases against mediums that exist, to point out how hard it is to get judged fairly. Until recently, and still to some extent, video games were not looked at as a medium. Better example: Comic books *still* aren't.
Do comic books have the correct audience? That is, is everyone who *would* enjoy reading comic books actually reading them? Or have some people never bothered to try them, sure that if they did, they wouldn't like that, and even if they did like them, they're *comic books*, they can't be seen reading comic books!
It seems pretty intuitive that because of certain opinions people have about comic books, and about people who read comic books, comic books have a smaller audience than they would have in some sort of hypothetical world where comics books were invented a decade ago and no one had any preconceptions.
But apparently throw *gender* into that and people can't make same rather obvious conclusion. How crazy to suggest that something invented only a few hundred years ago and the major form of entertainment for centuries for men and women alike is not now something genetically encoded to be different among the genders, somehow!
Also, you may feel that masculinity is absurd and have no use for the concepts of masculine and feminine, but lots of people do. I ask again, what is the ethical justification for enforcing your idea of gender over my idea of gender or for either of us to force our respective ideas on others?
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not trying to 'force' my ideas of gender on anyone. There is a difference between judging someone and saying 'don't judge'.
"
If men generally don't *like* musicals for some reason, that would be one thing.
I mean, men appear to like *music* just fine, like drama just fine. They've even tried to do musicals *based on action movies*, and those don't get men either. Admittedly, a musical is probably not the *best* format for that, but it's not a horrible one. Men will play video games about guys who fight people, watch movies about guys who fight people, read comic books about guys who fight people, even read books about guys who fight people, so why won't they watch musicals about guys who fight people?
Because we appear to be in a world where men don't feel *allowed* to like musicals, or even try them to see if they like them.
That is a bit more problematic. And this feeling that they aren't 'allowed' isn't just something they've invented in their head. There really *are* people who think men who like theatre are not real men.
So the question is less 'How do we get men to like theatre?', and more 'How do we get society to stop inventing completely absurd ideas of masculinity and looking down on men who stray outside them?'
I think very little of the concepts of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', almost all examples of behaviors under those groups are stuff we invented for this specific society and almost all the gender-expectations people think is built-in is just learned behavior.
*However*, even if you disagree with me, even if you think a some of these differences is biological, the idea that somehow what *medium* you like to watch fiction in somehow says anything about gender at all is absurd. I mean, *maybe* I can buy the idea that somehow men are pre-programmed to like punch-the-bad-guy stories more than relationship drama stories. I don't believe it at all, but it's a possible argument.
But saying they're programmed to like a movie more than a musical...when the hell did either of *those* get in our genetics?
On “And then there were two…”
@mad-rocket-scientist
Now, IANAL, but the bolded statements each lack the keyword you focused on, that being persistent. The list is not comma seperated, but semi-colon seperated, which tells me each item in the list stands alone. Which leads me to conclude that, if one were to split hairs, the bolded items do not need to be persistent, but could be single instances. This is problematic.
No, that's not what I was saying. That paragraph defines 'specific examples' of sexual harassment. But single examples of 'sexual harassment' *aren't against the rules*. (I know it just seems obvious that if someone says 'that action is sexual harassment', they mean 'and thus it's not allowed', but that is based a fundamental misunderstanding of what 'harassment' actually is.)
What is against the rules is '[A]ny unwelcome action, verbal expression, usually repeated or persistent, or a series of actions or expressions that have either the intent, or are reasonably perceived as having the effect, of creating an intimidating, hostile, or demeaning educational, employment, or living environment for a student or College employee, either by being sexual in nature or by focusing on a person‘s gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.'
The first paragraph rules are saying 'Don't sexual harass people constantly to the point of creating a hostile environment' and the second paragraph is saying 'And here are some examples of things that can be sexual harassment'.
And, more to the point, FIRE entirely left out the relevant paragraph of:
The perception of a conduct or expression as harassing does not necessarily constitute sexual harassment. Such perceptions must be carefully examined to determine whether they constitute quid pro quo harassment or hostile environment harassment (as described in Sections B.1 and B.2)
https://web.archive.org/web/20130530202117/http://www.swarthmore.edu/equal-opportunity-and-title-ix-office/sexual-and-discriminatory-harassment.xml (I'm fairly certain this is the version of the rules that FIRE is talking about. Their link is dead.)
I.e, if you don't create a hostile work environment (Or it falls under quid pro quo harassment, which is the 'power differential' form of sexual harassment between employer/employee or teacher/student, and not what we're talking about here.), Starthmore college doesn't consider it actually sexual harassment. *Period*.
FIRE...does not seem to grasp this at all. Or, instead, they do grasp it, and then deliberately misread the policy.
Keep in mind that university policies are interpreted by the faculty & administration, and that generally students have little in the way of legal recourse in the moment when falling victim to such policies. There is no right of Due Process, no right to face the accused, no right to be convicted beyond all reasonable doubt, etc, unless the school has written policies explicitly saying so.
You'd think such a thing would be relevant for FIRE to inform people about, wouldn't you? But, then again, they're pathologically biased, so pointing out that there *is* such a procedure at Swarthmore would not be something they care to do.
(Please remember, folks, I have no idea if Swarthmore is a good school or not, I've never even heard of the place before last week, I couldn't even tell you what state it is in, and I didn't pick it as the example. I can discover FIRE's bullshit on literally any of their nonsensical posts criticizing schools, when they randomly cherry pick sentences to mean whatever they want them to mean.)
On “Vision of Hate”
I always find it particularly surreal when supposed Christians used the Old Testament to justify biases against gays, for two reasons.
One, almost all parts of that, especially the parts giving out the Laws, start with 'Say to the Israelites...', or something to that effect. Seriously, check the start of any chapter in Leviticus. The Laws pretty explicitly are for the Jewish people. Guess what, most Christians? You're not Jewish. You don't *have* to be Jewish to be Christian. Christians actually had a pretty nasty drag-out fight about whether you had to be Jewish at the *start* of Christianity, and decided, officially, the answer was 'No'.(1)
Second...Jews do not follow the 'Old Testaments', or rather the Talmud, by randomly reading verses in it. The way to follow the Talmud is via teachers, aka, 'rabbis'. So even if Christians *were* supposed to follow Jewish law, they're probably supposed to do it via *the method in place at the time of Jesus*, not some random proof-texting method that's less than 500 years old. (In fact, Jesus disapproved of people attempting to proof-text certain things. Check his response to him him being criticized for healing people on the Sabbath.)
I.e., the actual people *officially* covered by The Law of the 'Old Testament', and operating under a system *Jesus himself acknowledged* (2), said that despite what it looks like, there's nothing in there against loving homosexual relationship. If you must *pretend* Jewish Law applies to Christians for some unexplained reasons (And I don't see any of these people refusing to shave the edges of their beard, or following rules about leprosy.) then the obviously correct thing to do is to listen to the people who are *supposed to be in charge* of Jewish Law, which are Jewish rabbis.
1) There are a *few* Christian faiths that follow Jewish traditions also, that claim to be 'Jewish' and 'Christian' at the same time, so possible *those* people are supposed to follow Jewish law, but those groups are fairly rare.
2) As far as anyone can tell, Jesus was an observant Jew, or that charge would have been leveled at him. He debated with the rabbis when they had gotten something wrong, he never asserted their authority was invalid.
On “Nate Silver’s Actual Problem…He’s No Longer an Adult Fighting Children.”
@will-truman
This may be the best comment in either related thread.
That seems very unlikely. ;) But I was just getting a little annoyed with "Democrats don't believe polls! Democrats are becomes as irrational as Republicans!'.
There's a difference between 'really disbelieving believing polls' and 'saying you don't believe polls to keep morale up', and heck, there's even a difference between 'really disbelieving believing polls' and 'disbelieving actual factual things'. Asserting that 'Democrats now say they don't believe the polls' is a indicator of looming irrationality on their part makes no sense at all. No one, absolutely no one, admits they believe negative polls about them. Ever. In the entire history of ever.
In fact, almost all the 'looming irrationality on part of the Democrats' that *anyone* has posted here been completely and utterly without any sort of basis at all. It's getting a little silly.
Especially by using left-based all the Nate Silver punching as an example. Almost all the attacks on Nate Silver are pointing out that 'data' does not actually replace either political journalism or opinion pieces, and the problem with politics is *not* the lack of data. That wasn't even the problem in the election coverage he was so hailed for in getting right!
The problem there, and in general, was people who are persistently, completely, utterly wrong in everything they say and do being taken seriously, and a media that is completely captured by those people.
If Nate Silver wants to provide more facts to use as weapons to attack those people, fine, but there's already plenty of facts, and yet those idiots keep getting allowed to open their stupid face on TV and write their idiotic opinion pieces and be wrong about everything, forever, in all possibly ways. Total batshit insane people, being taken seriously and being allowed on air as if their words mattered at all.
The attacks on Nate Silver is because is he naive and a little presumptuous about how the system works. 'Oh, I just need to throw some FACTS in there!'. The attacks aren't not anti-facts, they're anti-facts-will-solve-the-problem.
"
Kos has a slightly different view of the election than Nate does, but I’m not sure who’s got better data (I think kos gets more reports from local party activists — he’s been pretty good in the past at finding folks like Tester and Webb, so I think he’s better at handicapping the unknown challenger than Nate is.)
And Kos is, fundamentally, pro-Democrat. There's a lot of times to talk about 'objectivity', but when people on reporting on the chances of 'their side' winning, I really think we need to understand that they might be deliberately hyping things a bit.
I have a rather serious problem with treating *optimism* as 'fact denying'. This is not an example of 'the left denying facts', and it's not an example of the same thing on the right, either.
This is how politics has always worked. Everyone claims they can win, and even manages to delude both themselves and others to some extent. Almost no one has ever walked into election day publicly saying 'Well, I guess I'm going to lose'. (I'm sure that has happened, people who run to make a point or protest or something, but not actual *real* candidates.)
At least among the *party and supporters*. The amazing and mockable thing last election was when it infected an entire network...but, then again, I think we've all know that Fox News wasn't actually a news network anyway, but actually a branch of the Republican Party, and their nonsense about skewed polls pretty much proved it. In fact, I would suggest that a way to figure out if a 'news' organization is politically biased or not in their news would be to check how they respond to voter polls.(1)
Anyway, people can talk all they want about all the other criticisms of FiveThirtyEight. Complain about how they respond to climate change stuff, or whatever.
But trying to complain about liberals going 'Lalala, we don't want to hear that we won't take the House' is sheer nonsense. Everyone has done that, always, for the entire history of the Republic.
1) Now, news organizations will always treat the presidential election as a horserace, no matter how clear the winner is in advance. But that's not due to political bias, that's due to them trying to invent news. So you'd have to figure out how to ignore their 'newsiness' bias.
On “Subsidized Birth Control and Matt Walsh’s Dubious Theory of Rights”
I suspect that the long-term uninsured, people who've never had insurance, do not actually know how to use the medical system correctly.
And, hell, I'll admit it. I'm one of them. I haven't had insurance for more than a decade, due to insurance companies denying me based on a preexisting condition. I have no primary doctor. Although I was lucky in that I could actually *pay* my medical bills. So if I had a medical problem I'd try to figure out correct doctor, and just go see them. And I saw a cardiologist for my pre-existing heart conditions every few years, semi-randomly.
Now I have insurance, for functionally the first time in my adult life (I think I had my mom's insurance until 22, but at that point I was in college and I just did whatever my mom said and she paid the bills.), and I really have no idea how this is supposed to work. I am planning to find a doctor and get a physical at some point, figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm pretty sure I'm due a few immunizations.
But I'm fairly well informed. I can see people who are not informed basically operating the same way as before. Get sick, go to the emergency room, except now you give them your insurance card and hope that reduces it to where you can pay for it.
Incidentally, we've all seemingly forgotten that a lot of these people have large medical bills at emergency rooms already. Which means that some of them can *only* go to the emergency room, because other places might turn them away. (As with all the consolidation going on, the local places might very well belong to the same system that owns the emergency room, and not be willing to accept patients that already owe the system money.)
"
No, you are indeed thinking of Hobby Lobby. They 'accidentally' provided contraceptives without noticing. Or, rather, didn't care until the Republicans wanted to invent an issue.
Not to mention that *more than half* the states already required contraceptives in health insurance, including some rather red states, like my state of Georgia. My state didn't even offer a *religious exemption* from that. (O.C.G.A. § 33-24-59.6, look it up.)
Granted, no one had to *have* insurance in the first place, but you didn't hear companies that provided it complain.
I often find myself completely amazed how easily history is rewritten, and something that was commonplace suddenly becomes outrageous.
On “And then there were two…”
Oh, and be aware that a lot of their complaints are presented without comment, even ones they rate as 'Red'. They quote the speech code, and that's it.
While these ratings are often stupid and sometimes I can't even figure out what they object to (They appear to object to the idea that Arkansas State University students are expected to be civil, for example.), they aren't 'lying', because there is literally no facts written on their part. Just a 'don't like' opinion.
I am talking about when they *do* offer commentary on the speech code. They will always interpret things in completely nonsensical ways, ignoring context or sane readings of the code. They're playing a game of 'Let's see how we could possibly twist these words into being a first amendment issue?'.
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Ideology is the enemy…again. There’s always something special about lying about other people being liars.
Here’s a case from FIRE’s pages that even you can grok.
I have the feeling you missed that I said they were liars 'who are clearly misrepresenting the actual speech guidelines they claim to be quoting'.
The page you are talking about...is not about speech guidelines. It is, in fact, a summary of events.
So, yes. They are not lying on that page. And presumably not lying on their 'About Us', or any random page on their site. I didn't say they were. I said they were lying whenever they talk about *speech guidelines*.
Although, if you're going to nitpick, I guess I should clarify in advance: They're lying when they *criticize* speech guidelines. As opposed to the times they present guidelines without comment or when they're not able to invent a problem with them so rate them acceptable. Those pages, as far as I know, do not contain lies.
However, I've never read a single article there that *criticized speech guidelines* without containing some obvious untruths, although I will admit I have once or twice run across a valid criticism, or at least one not based in lies. But they can never leave the article at just that.
And I obviously haven't read all of their criticism. But I have read at least 50 or so, at one time, solely because I couldn't believe the nonsense they were sprouting.
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I took high school students to a lynching exhibit at a Chicago museum. No trigger warning. They all got real quiet, real fast.
Ah, yes. They must have be completely startled, having not gotten on a school bus and ridden to a museums and walked into an exhibit about lynchings.
Just *poof*, a Chicago museum's lynching exhibit, right there in the classroom. No warning at all.
Christ Almighty. Do people literally not understand what a 'trigger warning' is? It does not have to include the word 'trigger', you know, nor does it have to say anything like 'This topic may trigger some people'.
A museum exhibit about lynching is rather obviously going to include images and depictions of lynching. That, in itself, is a warning!
It’s a college class. You think there was nothing in the syllabus or anything the professor said that gave students some forewarning that the day’s topics included torture?
Uh, no, the complaint wasn't a *discussion* of torture, the complaint was *images* of torture. I have a feeling the syllabus did not list that day as 'Viewing images of torture day'.
Which, again, I point out we, in this society, have a general rule not to show graphic imagines to people without warning. Before we show people disturbing images, we *warn* them. This is not some new 'political correctness' thing, it is not asking for a 'trigger warning', it has nothing to do with colleges.
We've been doing that for as long as we've had fricking visual media.
If you fail to do that, if you show people such images without warning, people *will* complain.
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Now imagine a claim of sexual harassment or psychological trauma caused by a rape flashback.
And the way this intersects with trigger warnings is...trigger warnings would allow you to *avoid* the complaint, or at least have a reasonable defense against it.
If students are assholes who complain about random things, and so teachers attempt to avoid those things, whatever.
This has precisely zero to do with the left demanding 'trigger warnings' or 'speech codes'.
If anything, it rather indicates that *even if* academia is implementing such things, it's not due to academia wanting to, it's due to students forcing the issue.
In my opinion, faculty are becoming more gun-shy because administrators are becoming more gun-shy, because (I suspect) college lawyers are becoming more gun-shy. Whether we’re really becoming an even more litigious society, or that’s just the perception, I think it’s what’s driving the problem.
That *might* indeed be the problem, I don't know.
What I do know is that has very little to do with 'the left' or 'trigger warnings'.
On “Is this weird, funny, or sad?”
Sure, sure, he’s going after a racist white dude on behalf of Native Americans, but he’s using Asian-Americans to do it.
Not really. He's using a running gag on his show. He didn't just invent for that episode 'Ching-Chong Ding-Dong', that clip has existed for years.
In this running gag, he pretends that years ago he was caught making an absurdly racist (And very strangely outdated racism, at that.) mocking Asians when he didn't realize he was being recorded. I *believe* this was because Rush Limbaugh was caught doing exactly that.
And every time someone else in the media, he brings this up, and then he 'apologizes' about having said those things without actually apologizing, and in fact manages to say things even more racist during his apology.
This is a fairly long-standing running gag on his show, dating back to, I believe, 2005. The gag, IIRC, is also that each time he brings it up, he has to apologize for what he said *last time*, too, so it keeps getting longer and longer.
Although until now, he's had to *invent* complaints about the outrage last time. This time, oddly, people actually and rather surreally *did* complain. So the next time he uses the joke he can talk about how the last time he tried to apologize people tried to get the show cancelled.
Although it appears that they were outrage by the *tweet*? Really? That is literally astonishing to me. I cannot even conceive of a world where people would get upset about a context-less tweet from a *satirical* account.
Why is a joke by a white guy for mostly white guys worth the discomfort of non-whites?
That sentence has a whole lot of assumptions in it.
On “And then there were two…”
Okay, I'm sorry, I have to call bull on this.
College students complain about all sorts of complete nonsense. Professors do not live in terror of such events. And I would wage that things that effect *grades* are giant causers of that, and a few people saying 'The professor showed us something that bothered us' wouldn't even make the list of top fifty categories of student complaints.
However, everyone does realize this completely *disproves* the premise of Freddie's article, right? Because it implies that *college students* are the ones running around bullying *the left* (aka, the college administration and professors) into doing things.
I.e, such a claim is making exactly the *opposite* point of the 'the left' wanting speech codes. It's saying that *other* people are making the left *conform* to speech codes.
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Erm, no, it's not an example of that.
No one in the administration *asked* her to provide trigger warnings, much less created any sort of policy as deliberate red tape.
The story linked to is a story about students apparently want warnings of disturbing content, and complaining if they don't get said warnings.
Actually, no. Not even that. The first incident quite clearly said that the young people were *suggesting* a trigger warning. It sounds like a friendly warning that the professor was doing something that might cause problems for some other people, not a complaint.
And the second incident was, in fact, objectively disturbing. It was pictures of *torture*. That's not asking for a 'trigger warning', that's asking for a warning on something the *news* warns about!
Or have we decided that *all* content warning requests are outrageous all the sudden? *embeds the goatse image*
And the professor, far from being *required* to do anything, has apparently decided to stop showing such things out of spite, or something.
None of this has anything to do with the left, unless 'some random college students' are now 'the left'.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.