I think a crucial thing in tabletop is not that it's objectively better/easier. Tabletop is also primarily a social activity. So network effects really matter. Getting a friend into tabletop is often D&D; you can write stuff for them and let them pick up on their own pace while they try out wacky fun stuff like be 2 feet tall and roll intimidate vs a dragon.
I don't doubt there are other, easier, more fun tabletop systems. But a system your friends are playing vs a system you'll have to make new friends in is a comparatively massive bar to entry.
It makes sense to me because the article says that they used fingers and clay to make the drawings. The Chauvet cave is regarded as fairly unique in that outlines were scratched out and the cave wall itself was cleared out before starting the artwork.
I think it's difficult to dissociate this from the "how much can a banana cost?" style harmful ignorance. It makes sense to me that a woman who feels like she experienced sexism at the workplace from men have a poor opinion of the men there. Should she not say as such to make an appearance of neutrality, when she didn't experience a neutral or egalitarian environment?
>It makes sense to me that a woman who feels like she experienced sexism at the workplace from men have a poor opinion of the men there.
This does not make sense to me. I've experienced poor treatment from whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays. Should I have a poor opinion of whites, blacks, men, women, straights, and gays?
It seems a similar leap from her own experience and anecdotal reports from coworkers to tarnish the 700-ish strong male pop of McMurdo as "mediocre."
I mean, this is also obviously an anecdote. In her experience, she worked with mediocre men. I think we're all intelligent enough to recognize that she's obviously talking from her experience.
>I think we're all intelligent enough to recognize that she's obviously talking from her experience.
She is talking from her experience, sure, but she's certainly going well beyond that!
>There’s a phrase I heard tossed around that I think is pretty accurate: Antarctica: Full of badass women and mediocre men.
But even more than epistemology, this is uncivil. Polite society is made up of small restraints for the sake of others. This represents one more crack in that.
It's curious to me, that you're concerned she's extrapolated her experience to some set of men in Antarctica, and you've extrapolated her behavior to a crack in all of polite society in turn.
I mean, let's view this charitably. It makes total sense for a woman, who feels like she received misogynistic comments from men at her workplace, to have a poor opinion of the men there. I also don't know if it's really good faith to dismiss a woman saying something was misogynistic as subjective. Of course being a bigot is kind of subjective-- the bigot just thinks their prejudice is normal/true. I wouldn't trust any of the male scientists to say "no of course misogynistic comments didn't happen"; they're guys and, speaking as a guy, it's a blindspot for most men when they make women uncomfortable.
I also charitably don't think there's anything wrong with being suspicious of a very obvious lacking in racial diversity. Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip. [edited to add: a commenter below clairified this particular station is operated by the US, which is majority white, and scientists even moreso. I was assuming stations are operated with international cooperation :) ]
> Globally, white people are a minority of people, and they're likely not the overwhelming majority of all scientists even. So it would obviously be a statistical anomaly if only white people were on a specific research trip.
This was a trip to McMurdo Station, which is operated by the US, which is majority white as of the 2020 census (58.9% "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino"). In 1956, when McMurdo was established, the US was nearly 90% white. If anything, it would be a statistical anomaly if there were too few white people, considering that the science community is whiter than the country as a whole.
The GP's point stands, still: though the OP's article doesn't explicitly say that the lack of racial diversity in McMurdo is a problem, it's implied. Why is it a problem? I don't think anyone at McMurdo is complaining about minorities coming in.
Not only that, but racism/sexism is too good to let go. People will always find another casus belli. White people still have most of the world's wealth, so, even when whites are the minority, they still deserve to be subalterned. And hey, they did that to other races for most of history, so it's all fair!
The only winning move is not to play these shitty games.
Oh okay, I thought this was a station that was hiring internationally or something like that. I guess I'd be curious then if the station was significantly whiter than the science population of the US. Again, this is trying to observe this in a good faith as a reasonable thing to say/do. I'm assuming this is a reasonably competent person, and I can definitely see in modern day it might be something worth commenting as noticeable to be in the company of almost exclusively white people.
In America, several protestors and advocates have been mysteriously disappeared by the justice system as well. Of course, we know what happened with the Black Panther Party but similar tactics are still happening in current day.
More topically, police in Georgia are filing RICO charges against 61 activists who are protesting a police training center down there. They've also filed money laundering charges against a group who tried to organize a bail fund: https://apnews.com/article/atlanta-cop-city-protests-rico-ch...
This is a pretty big accusation without any kind of sources or links or whatsoever, you could at least name them or their cases so one can research on their own...
It's super weird to me to claim CFS is caused by psychological issues. Imagine all the people who were whining about COVID shutdowns and isolating for 14 days or whatever, with people frothing at the mouth about how depressing and how stunted their children are for not going to school. Okay, wow, looks like CFS forces you to do all that isolating/missing school/etc, maybe that causes mental illness the way it caused that for the broader population...
It's the difference between a woman with a worm in her head experiencing depression and brain fog (because, y'know, a parasitic worm was in her head) and claiming her depression had caused a parastic worm to appear in her head
I dunno, the most people I know with psychological distress over catching covid are people who would be greatest at risk of long covid. People with a history of weak hearts or lungs, athsmatics, people who have existing post-viral infection type diseases, people who are too poor to afford to take off work...
There's a massive difference from saying "yeah, this thing has keyword search already, we just didn't turn it on yet" during a software from giving a diabetic saline while claiming it's insulin. Holmes did the latter. People actually expended additional bloodwork and treatment due to the false testing.
I think it's actually more complicated, because a lot of the construction, etc. is caused by demand from the western countries. Also, western countries consume proportionately more flights, cars, electronics... pretty much all the actual major industry-sized consumption is disproportionately consumed by the west, even if a portion of individual westerners (certainly not all) are eco-conscious, no-waste, plastic-free vegans.
I don't doubt there are other, easier, more fun tabletop systems. But a system your friends are playing vs a system you'll have to make new friends in is a comparatively massive bar to entry.