Friday, December 13, 2013

Dear Arielle Schlesinger, STEM and the Liberal Arts Don't Mix

For the Patron Saint's Name of Frick.

Really??

REALLY??????

"Feminist coding????"

Somebody buy her this book!

39 comments:

Stand Watie said...

"I decided to explore feminist logic such that a feminist programming language could be derived."

Wow. Just wow. This makes me so angry that I am like literally screaming at my computer screen, and I want to vomit because it is so disgusting. Because matriarchy. I don't need to listen to this womansplaining.

Besides, programming languages are for losers who need to manipulate machines. Computers respond to real users just for being who they are.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Her first paragraph is a perfect example of "if you cant dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit"

Big, bloviating wall of text to fill a thesis and get a grade, and having absolutely NO application to the real world.

Future professional academician, and blowhard. How nice of the internet to keep a permanent record of these kinds of people for future reference.

John VI

Xtrasweettea said...

The level of fail is astronomical.

The comments are also "golden".

Here's one line from the comments that just caused my brain to short circuit.

[i] [...]I still believe that the construction of a programming language informed by (intersectional) feminism, queer (of color) theory, critical race theory, and disability studies is a worthwhile experiment that has not yet been undertaken.[/i]
This is the same commenter who suggested the article writer to try a "Queer Programming Anti-Language." Programming languages have no gender to begin with. How the hell can people think like this?

Just thinking about this stuff makes me want to chop wood or go work out on the punching/kicking bag.

Xtrasweettea said...

The level of fail is astronomical.

The comments are also "golden".

Here's one line from the comments that just caused my brain to short circuit.

[i] [...]I still believe that the construction of a programming language informed by (intersectional) feminism, queer (of color) theory, critical race theory, and disability studies is a worthwhile experiment that has not yet been undertaken.[/i]
This is the same commenter who suggested the article writer to try a "Queer Programming Anti-Language." Programming languages have no gender to begin with. How the hell can people think like this?

Just thinking about this stuff makes me want to chop wood or go work out on the punching/kicking bag.

Anonymous said...

#include
main()
{
while(forever)
{
shame(men);
blame(men);
blame(patriarchy);
blame(everybody);
blame(everything);
}
}

Wraith said...

Dude! It's like I'm drowning in an ocean of buzzwords. My brain hurts now.

Pax Empyrean said...

"A non-normative paradigm would be something that does not reinforce normative realizations of what a programming language is."

Translation: "I am going to reinvent the wheel, and it's not going to be so fucking round this time."

Compulsive Liar said...

This sounds like a really good idea.

Carnivore said...

Actually, she might be on the right path to a highly paid government job in Washington DC or New York.

If you'd like some more feminist entertainment, try some of the videos at FemTechNet:
http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/video-dialogues-topics-schedule/

This one's good for a laugh:
http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/groups/docc-2013-video-dialogs/forum/topic/machines-wendy-chun-and-kelly-dobson-as-vibrant-matter/

Anonymous said...

There might be something interesting or constructive there but if there is, it's getting crushed under the weight of the jargon. I wonder if you would still be able to use "Y" as a variable in a feminist programming language.

The comment regarding Queer technology got me thinking. Now that "queer" is an official category of person in the LGBT etc alphabet soup, if you call a gay person "queer" are you guilty of hate or merely inaccuracy?

Elusive Wapiti said...

What the devil is a "student of technology and social change"? What does she plan to produce? What market need does she fill?

The answer is, sports fans, nothing. She is attempting to leverage technology to more effectively impose the noose of Gramscianism around your neck.

She desires a world where

"...this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1."

WTF? I don't think a system where no logic applies at all would be very useful.

Then there is this, from the comment section:

"A feminist programming language is a language that respects the agency of objects, acting upon them only upon mutual consent."

Prevent programming language rape!

Anonymous said...

Another joke language to take its place beside the likes of brainfuck and Malbolge. Only, the others were jokes on purpose and not by accident.

Anonymous said...

Coming soon: feminist UNIX.

The man (1) command is hereby rendered obsolete and deprecated, and will no longer be used to access the manual pages, as it tends to imply that the only source of correct information on using the system, utilities and hardware is a man, which validates the oppressive practice and culture of mansplaining. The woman (8) command will be used. The command will no longer accept as argument the name of the utility or program the oppressive user wishes to read the manual of. Instead, the program will output whichever manual the program feels is most appropriate to what the user has most recently been doing on the system. If the user has been particularly oppressive in the recent or not so recent past, the program may output a completely irrelevant manual, to teach the user the importance of respecting the system's feelings. In cases of extreme abuse, such as demanding that the system behave in an oppressively male-logical way e.g. always provide the same output for the same input and initial conditions, the woman (1) program may output the contents of any random text file on the system, or escalate to barfing the contents of any random binary file on the screen (with the express purpose of screwing up the user's terminal, to teach them proper respect), or provide no output at all, optionally without returning their command prompt. Or it may throw the user out of the system altogether and lock them out for a time interval of random length.

The mount (8) command is hereby rendered obsolete and deprecated and will no longer be used to make filesystems accessible, as its name implies that for a filesystem to yield useful data, the oppressive male reproductive activity of mounting must first be carried out on it. Instead, the envelop (8) command will be used, which suggests that useful data can only be extracted from a filesystem once it is properly enveloped in the feminine system. The command will no longer accept the name of the storage device on which the filesystem resides as argument. It will refuse this kind of oppression by the user, and instead envelop a filesystem on whichever device it feels like enveloping at that particular time. Having enveloped a filesystem, the program may at any subsequent time decide that that action of enveloping was actually carried out without its consent, and was actually an oppressive act of forced mounting, for which see the woman (1) page for the obsolete and deprecated mount (8) command, and in particular the section on the violently oppressive option -f, --force. The program may at its discretion retroactively withdraw consent and deenvelop (8) the filesystem, severing all contact. The program may also cause the prisonrape (8) command - consult woman 8 prisonrape or see below - to be executed on the offending filesystem.

- The fsck (8) command is hereby rendered obsolete and deprecated, and will no longer be used to check filesystems. Instead, the prisonrape (8) command will be used, because prisonrape is the approved method by which it is possible for a feminist system to fsck any target at will.

Et cetera ad nauseam.

Glen Filthie said...

Well now Captain - don't be hasty! Let's think about this a bit. Maybe feminist coding has merit.

Then we could expand the concept: why not feminist boot polish? Feminist dish soap? How about feminist floor wax? Dare I say it - feminist gun cleaners and bore solvents? Oh man, life should be so good having a woman clean my guns too...!

HAR HAR HAR!

Anonymous said...

Do they not teach Searle and Kripke to students in "liberal arts" core curricula, even when they're studying Comp Sci?

You'd think that the arguments against "private language" would be strong enough to avoid this idiocy.

BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG! There would be no FEELING in such a patriarchal viewpoint -- after all, Searle and Kripke are both guys .....

HOW DARE YOU reduce the feminist struggle to something that resembles Chomsky's minimalist programme!

Eric B said...

So just like real life feminism, will this code scream grrrl power and brag about how independent it is while all the while forcing the other coding languages to support and subsidize it?

Anonymous said...

O/T Alert!

Since you're a huge fan of Mike Rowe, this should interest you:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/12/dirty-jobs-mike-rowe-on-high-cost-of.html

kurt9 said...

This is so dumb that there is no response to it.

Southern Man said...

Do you really think that feminist programmers could ever, in a million years, put this together themselves? The implementation for such languages will be written in assembler and C by old-school programmers like me. But I hope the feminist programmers can afford us; I charge extra when contracting for female bosses.

Merlin said...

Of course they mix. Just in interesting ways. Have you seen: https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equality ?

Dr. Coyote said...

I'll take a shot of Fortran with a rye chaser. (flips a pre-64 silver half-dollar down on the bar) I've been programming computers for 35 years and can't make a lick of sense out of what this bint is saying.

Anonymous said...

That was written by one thousand monkeys trying to replicate Shakespeare. Some of the words are english, but none of the actual sentences are. "reifies normative subject object theory" WTF??

Anonymous said...

"This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements "

As someone who makes a living untangling bad code and obscure logic, I find this hilarious. Programming languages are rooted in how the universe works. Mizz Schlesinger is looking for validation of broken feminist thinking in math, physics, and programming, but there is none. Nobody has use for a computer that does whatever it feels like at the moment - not even feminists.

Anonymous said...

Anyone who uses sludge-jargon word-strings (I cannot refer to such as language) like: "reifies normative subject object theory", "create entanglements", and Posthumanist Performativity" is not speaking any language known to sentient creatures on this planet.

"Decomposition" indeed.

Anonymous said...

Her jargon screamed "could someone please buy me a pink computer".

Anonymous said...

Well, just maybe, it will keep her away from politics and public schools. She can spend the next 20 years spinning her wheels trying to square the circle and stay out of my face.

What I find the saddest is the comment from what appears to be a male (damned if I'll call him a man): "Oh my gosh yes this is awesome."

"Oh my gosh yes"?????

DC said...

Heh. That's not even the tip of the iceberg...using the wrong pronoun in documentation is now a firing offense...

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-war-on-grammar.html

http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Technical skills be dammed...full speed ahead on the PC!

Anonymous said...

What a terminal moron. She simply demonstrates that she has no idea whatsoever of what a programming language is, what programming is, or what a language is.

Let her attempt to put her daydream in application, she'll drop it at the first stage of conception, upon discovery of how non-functional her babble is.

Unknown said...

Remember the audience - she's talking to feminists. How many feminists have you ever come across that have STEM degrees?

She doesn't need to make sense, as long as the audience thinks she knows what she's talking about - It's like listening to a Marketing person in a tech company - they pick buzzwords from a four column chart and pretend that the result means something.

The audience is too technologically illiterate to have a clue that nothing she says makes any sense.

I think she heard the terms Fuzzy Logic and Artificial Intelligence then had a self induced orgasm - that article was the result.

(coding since 1974)

sth_txs said...

At first, I thought it really was from The Onion, but as they say, you can't make this sh-- up anymore.

bobn said...

At first, I thought it really was from The Onion, but as they say, you can't make this sh-- up anymore.

I keep waiting for somebody to say that the infamous ads at http://doyougotinsurance.com/ are satire too - but it keeps not happening. We Are So Screwed!

From her comments of original article:

What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months thinking about and researching. - good luck on that, "sweetie".

I think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

So "sweetcakes" is, all by herself, going to find/make not just a philosohy, but a computer and a programming language that negates Aristotelian Non-Contradiction?

As for the rest pof her verbiage, omfg, the Leftist, Cultural Marxist nonsense just flows.

Separately, I'm a guy who doesn't get all that excited about who does what with whom, as long as it's all consenting adults. But: Does every-fucking-thing REALLY have to have a reference to Queer- LGBT?

(some say "QUILTBAG" covers all the possibilities)

Amy said...

bobn,

QUILTBAG. Like it. 'Bags could be a new shorthand for referring to such individuals.

"Feminist logic." That exists? How is she going to redefine 2+2=4?

I had to take two Women's Studies classes at Uni, requirements of the school not my choice. Every text was written just like Arielle's article - full of jargon that amounted to a huge pout about not being TakenSeriously. No one takes pouty toddlers or teenagers seriously. Feminists might use grown-up words but their attitudes and ideas are hopelessly juvenile.

Son of Sarek said...

If you could impress feminist thinking onto a computer the resulting torrential flow of illogic would be most entertaining.

Tom the Impaler said...

And in a flash, I realized it had already been done. This woman has already begun her experiment. Nothing else explains the Obamacare websites' absolute failure

Twenty said...

ikI think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

I've had some time to think about it, and this statement still offends me on every level as the pseudo-intellectual pretentious babbling of a delusional, self-important twat.

Just to begin with: The mixture of logical notation ("¬") and programming conventions (primarily "1" for "True"). Here's a tip from clue-ville, sugartits: "¬" will never feature in a new major programming language because there's no damn key for it on the keyboard. Perfectly good alternatives include the "!" and "not" operators from various languages. Or, perhaps you were trying to write something in symbolic logic? Then why not use the proper symbols all the way through, i.e. "∧" for "&&". Mixing C operators with logical notation gives the overwhelming impression that you don't know what you're talking about.

And that's just notation. Now, let's talk about substance.

The statement "(p && ¬p) == 1" is not "explosive" -- it's FALSE. Try it. Go ahead, I'll wait. (Yes, you'll have to use a real negation operator from an actual language, but we already covered that.) See? Evaluates to false. No boom. Just false. The LHS evaluates to false, and then the equality operator evaluates to false.

One can't shake the feeling that everything the most sexist man ever said about women's inherent inferiority in the realm of logical thought is borne out daily by "feminist" interpretations. This chick is claiming that this gibberish is distinctively feminist, after all.

Anonymous said...

The preachy, humorless last comment on her (closed) thread tells the whole tale. It is by Cathy Davidson, co-founder of that website, who also served as "Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University" and is the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies. From her bio, She was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities in 2011 and is the first educator to join the six-person Board of Directors of Mozilla.

--Jimmy don\'t play that

Peregrine John said...

This is the funniest goddamned comment thread I've seen in a long time. I should have known when I read Stand Watie's parting shot:

Besides, programming languages are for losers who need to manipulate machines. Computers respond to real users just for being who they are.

I am absolutely quoting that at every opportunity, by the way. But man, the stuff that followed... cupcake put her foot in it this time.

Anonymous said...

what a fine feminist 'hello world' program it is!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program

Such a language could be used for elevator control: after punching the button, you get an unpredictable ride to a floor better than the one you chose. Banking: you deposit your money and are paid some kind of interest and the check book never runs out of money.

Anonymous said...

When I write user documentation, I am now encouraged to imagine Lindy West in a duck suit, and to revise accordingly ...