Poll: Are you a MRA?


  • BINNED

    Continuing the discussion from Hipster or Civil War Soldier?:

    @Arantor said:

    The thread about how we're all mens' rights activists is 🔄 over there somewhere.

    Are you a Men's Rights Activist (MRA)?

    • Yes
    • No
    • Can't we all just get along?
    • FILE_NOT_FOUND



  • ♿ (Parody)

    Because you only give 10 cent tips?



  • What a minute... is it "a MRA" or "an MRA"? If it's supposed to be "an MRA", this poll is null and void.


  • BINNED

    I'm not sure that it matters. I'm in the "can't we all just get along?" camp myself.



  • @antiquarian said:

    I'm in the "can't we all just get along?Dirty worthless hippies that deserve to get gang raped by a pack of silverback gorillas" camp myself.

    FTFY



  • @antiquarian said:

    Are you a Men's Rights Activist (MRA)?

    "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of sex is to stop discriminating on the basis of sex..."

    etc. etc..




  • BINNED

    Just another sockpuppet. Nothing to see here. Please move along.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @PJH was testing group stuff. You can find that stuff over on meta.d.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    What

    Problem Ben? Or have you finally realised not all of my 'puppets start with 'PJH'?

    (Corrorally, not every id starting with, or containing, PJH is necessarily one of my 'puppets)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    @PJH was testing group stuff. You can find that stuff over on meta.d.

    Here:

    https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-alias-and-user-id-namespace-problem-autosuggest/18620


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Bort said:

    What a minute... is it "a MRA" or "an MRA"? If it's supposed to be "an MRA", this poll is null and void.

    Strictly, whether you use “a” or “an” as the indefinite article in front of a word in english depends entirely on how you pronounce it. If the following word begins with a vowel sound, you use “an”, and if it begins with a consonant sound, you use “a”. Thus, “an hotel” (yes, to me the “h” is silent, but YMMV), “a yacht”, etc.

    In the case of an abbreviation, there is very mixed opinion on whether to expand it to the words or just say the letters, so much so that neither can be considered to be the canonical treatment. For “MRA” that makes a fundamental difference as to whether it is “a MRA” or “an MRA”; I personally favour the latter, but that's because I just use the letters and not what they are an abbreviation of.

    Filed under: I keep reading that as “MRE”, for additional confusion…


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    An unicorn, with a umbrella:



  • I personally prefer a(n), such that the sentence remains grammatical irregardless of if the reader chooses to expand the acronym.

    Also, I've been meaning to ask, how do you get a thread closed ‘with prejudice’?

    Filed under: Badge Hunting


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Buddy said:

    Also, I've been meaning to ask, how do you get a thread closed ‘with prejudice’?

    Step one: hire a racist moderator.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Step one: hire a racist moderator.

    Step two: belong to a racial minority.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Keith said:

    Step two: belong to a racial minority.

    Not necessary online.


    Filed Under: no one knows you're a dog


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I only have a minimal understanding of MRA stuff, but if they're pissing off groups with names like Revolutionary Student Movement, the Proletarian Feminist Front and the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee, they are probably doing something good.

    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/08/11/robyn-urback-protesters-fail-to-shut-down-mens-issues-lecture-celebrate-anyway/


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Buddy said:

    Also, I've been meaning to ask, how do you get a thread closed ‘with prejudice’?

    With difficulty. It very rarely happened on the old boards. Search for MasterPlanSoftware sometime.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee

    They should have been the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Taskforce…


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dkf said:

    They should have been the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Taskforce…

    Actually, I was thinking the Committee for Revolutionary Proletarian Action has a better ring to it. But it's already taken, and those guys are total dicks.

    Also, taskforce implies that something should happen. Committee, OTOH, is perfectly consistent with stoned dorm room bull sessions.



  • Ok I'll be more direct:

    1. are you able to take an action that would result in someone getting a badge from the Closed category?
    2. can I persuade you to do that to my 500+ post thread?

  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    1. Yes (in that I can close a topic) but...
    2. No... Justifying it would be problematic, negating the point of the badge.

    I really don't expect many, if any, of that set to be handed out.


  • BINNED

    He clearly wants to be a special snowflakeTM, so maybe give him that badge instead?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Maybe we need more in that series. "I'm a special hailstone, " "I'm a special raindrop... "



  • There's a different, but related subculture I do vaguely relate to.

    Are you tired of people telling you what a "real man" is? What a "real man" does? That you have to "man up" in times of massive economic crisis, and find a job? Get married? Do what they say, or else?

    If so, you might be a MGYOW (Man going your own way).

    Honestly, this is more about Millennials than men, but male millennials are just screwed. 20% unemployment. 40% underemployment. Aggregate demand in decline. No jobs getting made. Suicide rates going through the roof.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Captain said:

    There's a different, but related subculture I do vaguely relate to.

    Sorry.. were you trying to drag this thread back on topic?

    Good luck!



  • What are the criteria for the series? More importantly, for those happy few of us that are already special, what would we have to do to qualify? Inquiring minds need to know.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said:

    What are the criteria for the series?

    Well for Snowflake: whimsy. Normally mine.

    No real idea how that could be extrapolated or included in a series of such badges.


  • BINNED

    Millennials in general are screwed, especially the ones who took the traditional advice to get a college degree, and after paying six figures for one have to try to repay a six-figure student loan working at Starbucks.


  • BINNED

    @Captain said:

    Are you tired of people telling you what a "real man" is? What a "real man" does?

    s/real/True/g
    s/man/Scotsman/g

    It's really just another way of moving the goalposts as needed. Normally, moving the goalposts so far that you're effectively kicking for the other team would raise some questions. For some reason it rarely happens in this case.



  • @antiquarian said:

    Millennials in general are screwed, especially the ones who took the traditional advice to get a college degree, and after paying six figures for one have to try to repay a six-figure student loan working at Starbucks.

    It's still a valid advice - not because it'll put you ahead, but because it won't put you behind.

    At least here, where the colleges are mostly free of charge, you really need that Master's. It's really hard to score entry-level work experience without at least some college, and when your technical interviewer for the day is a lovely old lady from the reception desk who's sacrificing her coffee break for you, it's not making things easier.

    It used to be that having a college degree actually made you a highly-qualified employee. The times have changed, the companies' hiring policies mostly didn't.



  • PPPPPPPPPP

    No, it only put the "smart kids" behind the high school graduates who went straight into construction and now make three times as much...



  • @Captain said:

    PPPPPPPPPP

    Good point.

    @Captain said:

    No, it only put the "smart kids" behind the high school graduates who went straight into construction and now make three times as much...

    In the civilized world, perhaps. Here, a construction worker's pay just barely covers the cost of living, while developers still earn some serious money.

    The problem is that you're effectively sacrificing five years of your life to finish a course, which ends up really damn useless in your actual job. You need to catch up to new technologies by yourself anyway, you need to develop logical thinking by yourself too, so for most CS graduates, it's just a waste of time - but a necessary one, since sending a blank CV would rule you out somewhere between the router and the mail server.



  • Isn't working with computers without being able to think logically doing it wrong™ ?


  • BINNED

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    The problem is that you're effectively sacrificing five years of your life to finish a course, which ends up really damn useless in your actual job.

    Been there, done that. It's great when you study from a book that still mentions such advances as the Pentium processor...



  • That's funny. See, here, people with college degrees are "overqualified" for high paying work. Or, really, any work at all.

    Of course, that's what I get for studying math right before thousands of quants got laid off in New York and London, flooding the software development and analytical markets with people who specialize in what I specialize in.



  • @Onyx said:

    It's great when you study from a book that still mentions such advances as the Pentium processor...

    Let me introduce you to wiring up a robot with an explicit requirement on being driven via parallel port. Directly. We had to get a machine that would run actual, honest to God, MS-DOS 6.22 and give you access to the control registers.

    Or the magic 8086 box, with a DMA controller, and every pin of both wired to either a switch or a diode. Programming the thing involved translating assembly to op-codes, writing them down in binary, and then clocking the DMA using a push-button while you set up the address and data lines with simple switches.

    Or a CS in Medicine course, where we learned that apparently 40-years-old data structures are alive and kicking.

    Or any of the courses that are perhaps pretty interesting and maybe even useful, but also impossibly esoteric for a regular developer (distributed programming with PVM, compiler theory with YACC and LEX, declarative programming with Prolog, artificial intelligence with PDDL, digital technology with FPGA boards), while the things that you're likely to use one day (Java, Oracle DB, web tech [yep, that's a single course for ASP, Ruby, PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS], software engineering [VCS, CI, programming patterns, project management, Scrum, and way more]) get 30 hours each, maybe.


  • BINNED

    You know, this might sound like a Monty Python sketch at this point but... Luxury!

    Actual practical assignments, however anachronistic and stupid? Bah! You might get to do that for a thesis. Other than that it was a piece of paper, a pen, and an expectation that you will produce a working program just using that. Oh, and SQL. Yeah, SQL, on paper, from a schema that was reinvented for every exam. With the limitation of "it all has to be a single query". No views or stored procedures allowed, unless that's the question of course. One mistake will cost you at least half the points. Silly DBAs, writing SELECT statements before DELETE to ensure the data is correct. We did it in one go without a computer. Woo!

    Most of the actual programming work was done at home, meaning it was mostly C (so it can be verified easily without expensive tools, you see), and then verified when you turned it in.

    OOP? Don't make me laugh. There was an optional course on that, but they removed it from the curriculum due to... I don't know, reasons.

    YACC? LEX? Can't have that, that might actually be used! Nope, here, have a random assignment, here's your grammar, implement a parser and simulator for that. Not a general one mind you, just the one that satisfies the conditions. Easier to grade, you see.

    I'll stop now because it's making me angry, and I should go to sleep now.



  • I have a CS degree and my gross pay is much higher than my non-college-educated friends. But once you factor in that I have a ton of student loans and a higher tax bracket (not to mention the ObamaCare mess), most of them are better off than me.

    Eventually, once debt is paid off, I'll finally be ahead...meanwhile they're living it up in their 20's and I'm often living on pocket change lol.



  • @Onyx said:

    Other than that it was a piece of paper, a pen, and an expectation that you will produce a working program just using that.

    Liked out of misery. Man, at least we had computers in our Computer Science studies.

    Obviously, all exams are done on paper, but at least the questions are kind of sane (what output does this 6-line snippet [with an obvious C trick] produce, etc), instead of putting you in the role of a compiler, runtime and executer.



  • @Captain said:

    Are you tired of people telling you what a "real man" is? What a "real man" does? That you have to "man up" in times of massive economic crisis, and find a job? Get married? Do what they say, or else?

    If so, you might be a MGYOW (Man going your own way).

    What I'm tired of is being given unrealistic expectations and conflicting directives. Hollywood promises us that the unattractive male/female protagonist always gets the attractive guy/girl in the end, but my experience has always been that the other never wants to be more than "just friends."

    The PUAs and Manly Men™ insist that to win over such attractive women, one must be a sociopath and play mind games (because mind games are a great way to build trust for a relationship meant to last a lifetime). The feminists decry such tactics because those tactics objectify them and frown upon their agency (not to mention such tactics are sociopathic). Also, men are expected to be initiators and aggressive, yet at the same time they're told that NO MEANS NO. Which is it?

    Someone (or some group) needs to come up with a book detailing appropriate behavior in all these instances, because all I'm seeing is a minefield, and we're all wearing snowshoes.

    @antiquarian said:

    It's really just another way of moving the goalposts as needed. Normally, moving the goalposts so far that you're effectively kicking for the other team would raise some questions. For some reason it rarely happens in this case.

    Perhaps because such questions are uncomfortable and not easily answered.



  • The PUAs and Manly Men™ insist that to win over such attractive women, one must be a sociopath and play mind games (because mind games are a great way to build trust for a relationship meant to last a lifetime).

    There's no need for mind games. You just need to know what you're good at (in life), and not hesitate when the right opportunity comes. If a woman you've been friendly/flirty with gets bitchy at you for no reason, ask her out the next time you see her. She'll say yes. (Ideally, ask her before then... the bitchiness means she's getting tired of waiting for you to ask)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Captain said:

    Are you tired of people telling you what a "real man" is?

    No, but I'm kind of tired of having to tell young males what a real man is.


    Filed Under: get off my lawn




  • BINNED



  • @dkf said:

    I keep reading that as “MRE”

    +1



  • @Captain said:

    Are you tired of people telling you what a "real man" is? What a "real man" does? That you have to "man up" in times of massive economic crisis, and find a job? Get married? Do what they say, or else?

    Sounds like my ex-wife.


  • BINNED

    @dkf said:

    Filed under: I keep reading that as “MRE”, for additional confusion…

    Like most of the flavors. The "Ham Patty" kinda sux when you're neck deep in Alaskan snow and to keep your position hidden you can't use fire...


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