Yay! I just love being told how to think & what is funny by men!

[wicket]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1440954

:eyes:

[mrreowwr_kittty]

1. Yeah, they sure used a lot of time and bandwidth

To let you know that you were wasting time and bandwidth, didn't they? That email was not funny at all.

I just love how "politically incorrect" humor never contains anything to offend the white males who are nearly always its target audience, don't you? Oh but the rest of us just need to lighten up about it because whatever white dudes find amusing is what we should all be laughing at. They're so inclusive, those white dudes, aren't they? :sarcasm:

[wicket]

2. Thank-you

Check your PM :)

[musette_sf]

3. in a bit of synchonicity,

i received an email today from a woman who writes about verbal abuse of women by men. the following quote from the email seems especially salient:

VERBAL ABUSE-SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

I have noticed that when it is a male who is abusive to his partner, that the male who presents himself as most macho, powerful, dominating and even in some places most violent, this male acts like he is his partner, a woman.

He pretends to live within her, or be her!!! when he tells her what she is thinking, as if he were her. For example: "You think you know it all."

He pretends to live within her, or be her!!! when he tells her what her motives are. For example, "You're trying to start a fight."

He pretends to live within her, or be her!!! when he tells her how to do what she does. For example, "You have to do it this way."
And so forth.

One wonders if he might decide to change, be a man, and stop pretending to be a woman, his partner.

[wicket]

4. I printed that out to keep

Thanks for sharing it :hi:

[ismnotwasm]

5. Yuk.

Bigoted, sexist and racist. And people stick up for that bullshit. (That babble about it "not being racist" OMG)

I was just reading an essay on Islamic women, and "Hadith", which is considered "officially sanctioned word of the prophet". In this feminist essay, I found out that all Muslims can challenge Hadith on the basis of "the soundness of the transmitter" which includes proximity to the prophet, accurate memory, and certain moral criteria. It's a long essay, the author examines a challenge of the Hadith of women being excluded from public life using these criteria.

I'm not even sure I'm putting that right. But it's interesting, and challenging reading.

I didn't know all Muslims, including Muslim women had this right to challenge. The essay is entitled "On their own Ground; Strategies of Resistance for Sunni Muslim Women" by Teresa Weynand Tobin--it's in the summer quarter of Hypatia. The author points out that poverty, colonialism and a patriarchal society have prevented Muslim women from doing so.

I can't pretend to understand Islam, or even some of the philosophy I've been trying to read lately, but emails like this irritate me no end when I at least make an attempt. To me they just aren't funny.

And I laugh loudly and a lot at a lot of things, dammit

[mrreowwr_kittty]

6. People tell me I'm one of the funniest people they know all the time

But according to numerous blog foes I've tangled with, I'm a dour, humorless hag. What strikes me is how angrily these guys tell me I have no sense of humor. :rofl:

I manage to make people laugh without resorting to easy stereotypes and bigotry, and generally without the apologetic self-deprecation that is expected from females. I mock the people and institutions who deserve to be mocked and who are powerful enough not to be harmed by it. In the U.S. making fun of the Christian fundies is okay because they are an extremely well-organized, well-financed, and politically effective force. Making fun of Muslims in the U.S., like that email did, is not cool because they do not, as a group, have that kind of clout and have been the recipients of some pretty scary harassment and outright violence in their communities. Same with Jews and other religious minorities, ethnic minorities, and yes, women. It's really not that hard to figure out but a lot of so-called progressives seem flummoxed by the whole thing.

[iverglas]

8. ditto

My co-vivant and I met on line, emailed for a week, talked on the phone, emailed some more, got together about 3 weeks after the first email.

What struck him about me most: that I was even funnier in person than in print. I guess he didn't think it was possible. Now obviously, he's pretty damned funny himself. And I can't think of when he's ever thought that I'd find something racist misogynist whatever amusing. Or thought me humourless because I wouldn't.

But then, he's almost as smart as I am. Not like the morons that infest this place.

Please, I need to share this once again. It tends to get deleted if I do it in public.

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
Cached html version for those who hate pdf like I had pdf:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:vlX_V9SqScUJ:www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf+%22unskilled+and+unaware+of+it%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca

(It's long, so this is just a fair use/dealing bit, but reading the whole thing is worth it)

Unskilled and Unaware of It:
How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Cornell University

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.


"It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense." (Miller, 1993, p. 4)

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken.from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three points. The first two are noncontroversial. First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study. Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991; Story & Dunning, 1998), with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others, like the lemon juice hypothesis of McArthur Wheeler, are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or dysfunctional at worst.

Perhaps more controversial is the third point, the one that is the focus of this article. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).

If only DU were equipped with surveillance cameras and people could be carted off for thinking the lemon juice they were spewing defeated facts and arguments ...

[ThomCat]

7. I'm very glad I missed that thread.

I agree that it was a very offensive e-mail for anyone to send.

It's sad, but no matter how blatantly offensive and bigoted a "joke" is, some people will think it's harmless because it's supposed to be funny. And they'll bash you for daring to think it's not funny.

[bliss_eternal]

9. May I offer my opinion on this...?

...at least based on what I've seen. Some people think it's harmless not because it's supposed to be funny, but because it isn't about them.

They can dish it out but they certainly can not take it, as the experiments of a few of us on this board have shown. ;)