December 2011
Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy (via buzz)
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This explains so much.
It took me most of the entire day, in inner rewriting and finding the right tone and voice for everything.
I think it was worthwhile though.
Excellent comic by David Willis on the sexual objectification of female comic book characters.
Short URL: http://farukat.es/p630
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Anil Dash’s list of questions to ask Republican Candidates is nothing but stellar. E.g.:
What Sharia laws do you support other than criminalizing homosexuality, shaming assault victims &…
Rob Delaney:
So far, the greatest quote I’ve heard in my 34 years is this: “Hatred never ceases by hatred in this world. By love alone it ceases; this is eternal law.” Gotama the Buddha said that…
Last week, Marco Arment wrote a small piece about Firefox’s uncertain future, a result of Google ostensibly reconsidering their partnership terms that provide roughly 84% of Mozilla’s income; then…
Jill Filipovice for GOOD magazine:
In my two years on OkCupid, I’ve gone on a handful of dates and been treated to hundreds more hilarious, offensive and often bizarre messages. I’ve noticed the…
Former N.Y. Governer Eliot Spitzer:
If ever there was an event to justify the darkest, most conspiratorial view held by many that the alliance of big money on Wall Street and big government…
Edmund Scientifics, after receiving negative feedback over the gendered nature of certain products:
Our original intent was not to project gender bias, but to organize our product selection in a…
Husband ordered to pay wife for lack of sex
Withholding sex from your spouse can lead to financial ruin.
(via thunderdolt)
But honey, which came first? The financial ruin or the withholding of sex? (Trick question because nobody is coming, ever!)
——— Faruk: ———
Interesting role reversal; in most Western cultu… okay, no, in the U.S.A. the courts are still likely to rule that a man deserves to have sex whenever he wants it from his wife, once married, and that she should submit to that.
Can’t say I agree with the French court, or the wife for monetarily suing her ex-husband over not providing sex, unless they both (or the wife alone) paid for extensive couple’s therapy for a long period of time prior to the divorce, and this lawsuit is to recuperate on the financial loss of that. But the article does not suggest anything like that took place, nor provide enough details to do a deeper search (and my French is virtually absent, to boot).
That said, whilst I may not agree, I also don’t feel bad for the guy; women have been imprisoned, beaten, and even killed in reverse-gender versions of this situation for as long as history has records on this. Perhaps this will get men all around to be more aware of gender disparities.
November 2011
A 2007 report regarding Stereotype Threat: the effect where demographics that have a stereotype about them will perform worse simply by being reminded of it. Though dated, the report is just as…
Sady Doyle:
What matters is not which guys said it: What matters is that, when you put their statements side-by-side, they all sound like the exact same guy. And when you look at what they’re…
Sindelókë:
Having privilege isn’t something you can usually change, but that’s okay, because it’s not something you should be ashamed of, or feel bad about. Being told you have privilege, or that…
Perfect correction to a highly flawed Harvard Business Review article.
Short URL: http://farukat.es/p615
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October 2011
One of the ideal times to start a company is when you’ve come up with an idea for a product that has the potential to really scratch an itch that people have in both work and play; an itch that some…
One of the ideal times to start a company is when you’ve come up with an idea for a product that has the potential to really scratch an itch that people have in both work and play; an itch that some have today, but that you know many more people will have in the years to come.
I believe I have a great product in the making just like that.
Yours truly is embarking on a new adventure.
The more I think about how things have developed, the more I suspect that Hillary Clinton would’ve been a better outcome for the U.S. than Obama was.
Don’t get me wrong: I disagreed then with a number of Clinton’s policies & plans that she had in the election year, and I still disagree with them now. But she was hardly all bad, like McCain was. Conversely, I disagreed with far fewer policies of Obama, but in retrospect it seems so naive of us all to think that the powerful yet overly privileged white-male Americans would actually accept a black President as their leader, or that they would show him any respect at all. Of course their racist tendencies would take over!
Here is why Hillary would have had far less trouble dealing with Republicans: not very many of the cretinous Republican leaders are married to a person of colour, but almost all of them are married to a woman.
The voracity of Republican’s disagreement over policies has been fueled subconsciously by the deeply-rooted beliefs of white superiority of these Confederacy-loving maniacs; but as much as they may try to treat women’s bodies as if mere objects they have any say over at all, they would never have gotten away with so much of their bellyaching about the President’s actions—their wives would’ve reigned them in some.
Also, there are far more women in America than there are, say, black people. And virtually no white male, no matter how bigoted and racist he is, thinks he’ll have a better life if all women were driven out of the country. If anything, his sex life would be much more troublesome to deal with for his narrow-minded brain.
Sure, some of the craziest people the Republicans and Tea Party have brought forward are white women — Palin, Bachmann, O’Donnell — but imagine for a moment how the average Republican male talks about his opponents at the dinner table or in bed late at night with his wife, and how it is subliminally received by her:
- A dislike towards Democrats? That’s fine, she hates Democrats too
- A dislike towards black people? That’s fine, she has racist tendencies too
- A dislike towards women? “Excuse me, what?!”
That sort of nonsense won’t always go over well with her, if at all.
There are many Republican women who will readily support their husbands because they still think in 1950’s-era roles themselves. They aren’t emancipated, and that’s fine. But plenty Republican women are more modern than that, at least when it comes to self-worth and identity. They have jobs. They don’t like getting second-class treatment anymore. They may not have any socialist tendencies like empathy for people who are different than themselves, but they at least recognize when they are being gradually attacked through misogyny.
Where their ambivalence towards Democrats and non-white demographics would let them ignore the bigoted underpinnings of their husbands’ political attacks and efforts, they would far less often permit them to get away with misogynist behavior. Certainly they wouldn’t let the misogyny get completely out of hand—because what would that say about themselves?
When it comes to individuals, I still think Obama is a more stand-up person than Hillary Clinton. But when it comes to the psychological affects of a black President versus a female [white] President applied to the American people at large, across the entirety of their political spectrum, I think Hillary would have been much better. She’d been attacked less for reasons that had nothing to do with politics or agenda, and all the hatred or incompetence she’d have gotten for being a women would’ve been disagreed with by a much larger share of the population. After all: women are 50.5% of the population, versus only 12.6% of black people. (source)
Hindsight is 20/20? Maybe. And I could easily still be wrong. But bigotry is reduced by exposing bigoted people to those whom they fear or don’t understand, by introducing them those whom they don’t know so that prejudices are slowly eroded. There are a lot more women to expose men to, everywhere, than there are black people. Plus, a female President would have been a role model to women of both parties, and that is a much bigger group than black Republicans.
Unfortunately it is impossible for anyone but The Doctor to go back in time and change history. But hopefully we can all learn some things about bigger picture thinking from the recent past.
- QR
Feminism++
This reminds me of that research that showed that the best way to combat environmental decline was emancipating women so that they’d get jobs, rather than start families prior to the age of 30+.
Wait… don’t important people pass in threes?
No, that’s celebrities.
Celebrities are not necessarily important.
I’m so lucky my girlfriend likes knee high socks as much as I do.
September 2011
It’s been a long time coming, and after umpteen attempts to make it happen today was finally the day: I was a guest on the Big Web Show with Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman, talking about Modernizr…
August 2011
The other morning I had some time to kill at SFO, waiting for my flight to start boarding, and I decided to seek out the Google Chromebooks that were on display at Terminal 2. I’d been meaning to…
The video of my talk on designing future-oriented websites and web applications, as given at the DIBI conference in Newcastle Upon Tyne this June. The presentation slides will be available online…
MG Siegler, writing for TechCrunch:
Apple now controls over 66 percent of all the profits amongst the major players in the mobile space. HTC, RIM, LG, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung Motorola, and…
TextMate for most all my purposes; Scrivener for actual story writing; TextEdit for RichText backups of posts I write in my browser that wind up becoming longer than expected.