Messages

Any country under Islamic law, remove Islamic law, give people a choice on what they want.

What do you do if or when they want Islamic law? (To take Egypt as an example, the Muslim Brotherhood are doing better now that there are free elections in the country than they were when the country was a dictatorship.)

I disagree that many Muslim terrorists have links in the west.

You can disagree that Western countries produce Islamic terrorists all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that they do. 5 7/7 bombers, 5 21/7 bombers, 2 shoe bombers, 4 of the 5 who planned the attacks on Glasgow airport, to name just some high profile cases, have links with, either citizenship or long-term residency in, the UK.

IF the countries (more certain parts of countries really) keep producing terrorists, level them

Are you going to expand this to any country which produces any terrorists, or is it merely Muslim terrorists? If the former, it's unworkable: you'd have to start with the US, and good luck with that. If the latter, you're not doing anything which will actually protect us. Just killing in the name of Islamophobia. In the UK since 2010, there are 5 successful terrorist attacks listed on Wikipedia. 4 were against Mosques From 2000-2010, there were 7 successful IRA bombings, and 4 successful Islamist attacks. This excludes Northern Ireland, and so most IRA activity.

Which countries would those be then? Many Muslims associated with terrorism do have links with the West. The 7/7 bombers were all Brits, for instance.

Assuming you limit your attentions to Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, that's still a population of 175,000,000 people you want to kill off. Including the West's second most powerful ally in the region, after Israel. That's a terrible idea from a practical as well as an ethical perspective.

Say you've just been in a skirmish against (everything is hypothetical and slightly ridiculous, but I hope it illustrates a point) the IRA. You capture one guy that hid in a bathroom as you were doing a floor sweep. However these guys have three of your SAS buddies who were injured by an IED who you assume have either been killed or taken somewhere. You have probably only a couple of hours at most to get this guy to talk. Making friends will take too long, so you shoot out one of his kneecaps and remove the nails from three fingers all the while asking where they were heading tonight and if they've seen any other of your guys. That might just get you an answer, even if it's not the one you're looking for at least you've done all you could for your mates.

The only answer that will get you is the first location he can think of which is as far away from where he's been as possible. Clearly you have no moral compunction against torture, so he has nothing to lose by telling you a pack of lies -- you may torture him anyway if you defuse the bomb, for all he knows. And that's if his information is useful in saving your friend, which you cannot possibly know.

Meanwhile, if he lies to you, he gains the benefit of killing one of the enemy, and doesn't lose anything.

The way I see it is that there will be a war, sometime, between Islam and pretty much everyone else. I'd rather nip it in the bud now than

There are ~1.6bn Muslims in the world today. Killing them all off in order to prevent global warfare is not a workable alternative in any conceivable reality.

perhaps those extremists, which I believe are growing in number by the day and have not even begun to reach critical mass, getting nuclear weapons from neighbouring Israel or Pakistan.

You're prepared to advocate quite a serious, costly, morally indefensible, strategy in order to prevent Islamist extremists getting hold of Israeli nuclear weapons!?!?!? Ways to ensure that Islamic extremists get hold of nuclear weapons in the shortest possible amount of time:

1. Make it the only possible way they can avoid genocide against Muslims.

2. Make it the only possible way they can avoid genocide against Muslims.

3. Make it the only possible way they can avoid genocide against Muslims.

The first effect your policy would have would be to send the death toll from Islamic terrorism through the roof.

More positively...

So indictments of police officers are still possible...

Agreed, I don't understand how they managed to reach this decision

Systemic racism looks like the most likely reason...

Having said that, I've now heard analysis that says he was resisting arrest. Restraining someone who doesn't want to be restrained is damn hard, and supposedly the methods they used are approved methods. It was suggested that perhaps they should have paid more attention to his claims that he couldn't breathe. In all the situations being brought into the public eye there is some confrontation with police officers, perhaps the focus should be on why these conflicts happen?

The interview in question was with an ex-MET police officer from the UK, it was on tonights PM programme on radio 4 at around 45 minutes in. Don't know if international people can access that in any way, but if you can I recommend it.

Here is a source that claims that both the Medical examiner concluded that Garner's death was due to a chokehold, and that chokeholds are forbidden by NYPD as a restraining tactic.

Unless anyone can find any evidence that the method used was not a chokehold, I'm going to continue to act as if it was.

The footage here shows the police officer attacking the neck, which is ridiculously easy to portugal up and put pressure on the windpipe or arteries, even if you are not intending to, and shows Garner saying "I can't breathe" twice. Even if it came out in court that technically they hadn't done anything wrong, refusing to take it to court at all looks ridiculous.

CG: I don't normally watch Family Guy, but that's worryingly on point these days...

Agreed, I don't understand how they managed to reach this decision

Systemic racism looks like the most likely reason...

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

Unlike in Ferguson, this looked like pretty much the perfect case, too: the officer was on video trying to restrain Garner in a way that he had been specifically trained not to do because it is dangerous; he was overweight, middle aged, and asthmatic; unarmed, and not a threat in any concievable way.

Reading through that thread made my head hurt.

No one's making you read it if it doesn't interest you.

Just found something on iFunny I though I might put up here.

I know you're being facetious, and that I'm just a humourless feminist(tm), but you can see the difference between the two scenarios, right? Starting with the fact that no one was suggesting that we judge Matt Taylor, just that we point out how problematic what he was doing is.

(I thought it was a case of buy nice cheeses and crackers and grapes)

Congratulations, you have passed the cheeseboard tutorial.

(There's a little more to it than that, but yes, that's pretty much it...)

Also in the news at the moment.

portugaling hell.

[Balance Fallacy]

A few more:

Balance Fallacy

The balance fallacy is a fallacy which states that all sides in a debate necessarily have things to contribute of relatively equal values.  This is a fallacy when one side actually has a far stronger position.

Example:

$Professor of Ancient History: the term "pagan" to refer to non-Christians of Late Antiquity is generally agreed to be problematic because of X, Y, and Z.  However there is no generally agreed upon better alternative.

$J. Random Conspiracy Theorist: well, actually we know that what early Christians called pagan was actually the Lizard-People from Mars.  Therefore we should refer to early non-Christians as Lizard People.

$Moderator: Both sides have something relevant to say in this important debate.

Obviously, the historian is much more qualified to discuss the topic, and the evidence given by the conspiracy theorist is... lacking, to say the least.  The moderator, then, is in this instance guilty of the Balance Fallacy: only one of the two interlocutors has anything even vaguely valuable to add to the discussion.

Appeal to Moderation (The Fallacy of the Golden Mean)

Related to the Balance Fallacy, this is when a debater assumes that because there are two extreme positions in the topic, the correct answer is the middle ground between them.

Example:

$Professor of Ancient History: the term "pagan" to refer to non-Christians of Late Antiquity is generally agreed to be problematic because of X, Y, and Z.  However there is no generally agreed upon better alternative.

$J. Random Conspiracy Theorist: well, actually we know that what early Christians called pagan was actually the Lizard-People from Mars.  Therefore we should refer to early non-Christians as Lizard People.

$Moderator: We should clearly look for the middle ground here.  Can we all agree to call early non-Christians "Pagan Lizard People"?

The fallacy in this argument should be obvious.

Slippery Slope Fallacies

Slippery slope fallacies are a category of fallacies which take the form "If x, then y" where y is an obviously undesirable result.  They are so named because the argument often comes in the form "allowing x is a slippery slope to y".

Possibly the most famous example of a slippery slope fallacy was the argument put forth by Rick Santorum that legalising homosexuality would lead to "man-on-dog sex".

The argument is only fallacious if the negative consequence postulated cannot be shown to follow from the original position.  A statement like "if we don't do anything to curb greenhouse gas emissions, then global warming will result" is not fallacious as there is a generally agreed upon mechanism by which human actions can lead to global climate change.

Non Sequitur

Latin for "that which does not follow", non sequitur refers to a logical fallacy where someone states a set of premises, and draws an inference from those premises -- except that that inference does not follow in any reasonable set of logical axioms.

An example, formulated by Alan Turing:

P1: If each man had a definite set of rules of conduct by which he regulated his life he would be no better than a machine.
P2: However, there are no such rules.
C: Therefore, men cannot be machines.

This does not follow for two reasons:

Firstly, P1 has nothing to say about whether men are machines, only whether they are better than machines.

Secondly, P1 doesn't state that if there are no such rules, a man is better than a machine; only that with the rules he cannot be.

Such fallacies as ad hominem, circular argumentation, and the appeal to popularity are all special cases of non sequiturs.

[Your position:]

@Joek. I'll need proof of lack of autism. This is a heavily exaggerated example of what you've been asking from me. You're asking me to find people for evidence whose voice I'm...voicing, those with no opinion on the matter, those who don't give a portugal.

The things I have asked for evidence of, by my count:

* Your assertion that there are a group of "feminazis" that have accused Matt Taylor of being a woman hater.

* Your assertion that there are "SJW" forums where SJWs go to plot against gamergaters.

* That your various misrepresentations of my arguments are in any way supportable and not disingenuous strawmanning.

These three things are literally every single time I've asked you for evidence at all.  It is self-evident that the burden of proof is on you to support all of those statements, especially since they are all unfalsifiable.  If you think that asking for evidence of these statements is unreasonable, then you should retract them.

Your analogy also fails on one further point: your assertion that I am autistic would hold the burden of proof.  My neurotypicality should be the null hypothesis.

Oh, and if it were meant to be a rhetorical point, maybe you should have made that clearer to start with.  Asserting it now stinks of backpedalling.

This is one of the reasons why I have a problem with how you're going about all this. The 'proof' you show is nothing of the sort, there are no counterpoints included, the data is held in isolation. You can't just analyse things and call it proof. It's data. I don't think you're autistic at all, I was just using a gross example to illustrate a point.

I don't know what your point is, here.  As seems to be so often the case.  As best as I recall, the only thing I have described as anything even approaching "proof" is the fact that people saying that the shirt was problematic proved that people thought the shirt was problematic.  If you don't accept that as a proof, then, well, I don't know what to say.

No, I'm allowed to use the word, because it's both technically meaningless and useful in this context where I differentiate between a person with realistic feminist goals and agenda, and a person who hates men and thinks women are superior as opposed to equal.

Yeah, saying that you're allowed to use offensive terminology to argue against a strawman position which you have utterly failed to show that anyone even holds does not make your use of the word any less offensive.

I'm not saying you aren't allowed to use it, I'm saying the use of the word is reprehensible because it minimises the suffering of people who actually endured Nazi rule.

Whether you agree or not, idgaf, this is how I've used it, it's shorthand, get it? The rest of that was because it seems your delicate eyes can't bear to read something distasteful so how would you cope dealing with something even more grim but also as important to talk about? Nothing to do with me being Jewish in particular, saying 'my people' was just me identifying with another group of oppressed people.

I mean, this is just meaningless personal attacks, but if it makes you happy...

Objectifying people as in thinking they are an object is not even a thing. Nobody without a basis in slavery looks at a person like they are a thing and not a person. It just doesn't happen, how the hell could it even happen, you'd have to ignore everything about them other than their existence. It just can't be done by a normal person. If you think it is so commonplace, you've not lived. You've not met enough people.

You are just being disingenuous here.  You know what objectification is, I've defined it enough times.  It's not just thinking of people like they are things, it's treating people like you think they are things as well.  For example, treating people like they are only valuable for their looks.

You seem to always take the stance that someone is either a feminist or anti-women. Only the Sith deal in absolutes (which I think is an absolute in itself...).

1. No, I'm not.  I'm taking the view that your arguments, here and now, are anti-woman.  I've made no comment as to whether it's possible to not be feminist and not be anti-woman.

2. Saying "only the sith deal in absolutes" completely fails to demonstrate anything.  And is, you know, demonstrably wrong.  Saying "the earth is 4.5bn years old" is an absolute statement.  That doesn't stop it from being correct.

Why don't you tell me then what counts as objectifying women in real terms?

Appearing on television in front of millions of people wearing a top with pictures of women in anatomically improbable positions wearing leather fetish gear?

The entire porn industry maybe?

Not all of it, no.  There does exist such thing as feminist porn.  Lots of it, though.

What if actually nobody is asking you to 'save' them and you're hopping on a bandwagon because you read something by a journalist online.

What if you actually read what I was saying and realised that actually many women had complained about this?  What if you either started arguing in good faith or at least stopped armadilloting all over feminists?

I'm not saying you are, I don't think you are at all actually, I think you're naive as to how the world works. Not everything is black and white, people aren't put into boxes, nobody is 'just' this that or the other, peoples beliefs are malleable and *everything* is dependent on criteria being met.

Relevance. This point doesn't have any.

On the shirt: It's clearly a piece of artistic design, designed by a woman I'm sure you're aware,

This is utterly irrelevant.  As I pointed out in my last post women are not a monolith and the fact that one woman, whether or not she designed the shirt, doesn't see the problem with it has no bearing on whether a) other women do (some did!) or b) whether there is a problem.

saying he shouldn't have worn it is trying to censor it.

No it's not, and you know it.  It's not even trying to censor him.  It's asking him to show a modicum of forethought before appearing on TV in a way in which he will have more impact on the general population than a single other thing he does in his life.  It's asking him to be a reasonable person.  What it absolutely is not, is censoring him.

Even if the interviewer had said that he couldn't come on air wearing that, it still wouldn't have been censorship, because freedom of speech does not require everyone to give a platform for your views.  If Jubal became sick of my going on about this and banned me, that also wouldn't be censorship for the same reason.

Start censoring art and you're on shaky ground.

Not censorship.

The only people it offends are people that are *looking* to get offended by anything and everything. If there are people that have so little going on in their lives that they feel the need to get angry over a shirt then yeah, they have too much time on their hands. 'They' did not tell you, some of them wrote something online.

This point is as irrelevant as it was when I dismissed it last post.  You have asserted that anyone who finds anything that you don't find problematic, only finds it problematic because they are looking to get offended.  It's from your point of view extremely convenient, because it absolves you from having to think about why there might be a problem, but it's fundamentally intellectually dishonest.

Suggesting that posting what you feel about something online is different from telling people what you feel about something is at best self-evidently ridiculous.

Many, many, many more don't give a portugal about the shirt.

Enough people in Germany didn't give a portugal about Jews, the disabled, gypsies, queer people, communists, socialists, and trade unionists that the Nazi party were able to spend 12 years trying to get rid of these groups with increasingly severe methods.  By your logic, the Nazis were absolutely right to do those things because most people didn't care that they were doing them. 


CONCLUSION

Your position:

* You have throughout this debate failed to give any evidence of any of your assertions.  When pressed, you have suggested that asking for evidence of your assertions is unreasonable.

* The only harm that you claim feminists to have done to you when talking about Matt Taylor's sartorial choices is talking about Matt Taylor's sartorial choices where you might have a chance of hearing about them.  I have contended that your right not to hear about it does not trump their right to talk about it, and that furthermore you could trivially have avoided hearing about it.

* You have multiple times misrepresented my views, and when pressed failed to either acknowledge that or show where I have held that view.

* You have claimed that because some people don't care about the shirt, therefore the only people who care about it are "looking to get offended" and don't matter.

* You have further claimed that I want to censor Matt Taylor's shirt.

My position:

* The backlash against those who made comments about the shirt was far out of proportion to the original comments, including death threats and the attempt to get a woman fired.  Both of which claims I gave examples of.

* There is a demonstrable negative effect on women when they perceive themselves to be being objectified.  I linked to a peer reviewed study demonstrating this.

* That at least some women feel that they have been objectified.  This follows from the fact that there has been a debate about the shirt caused by some people making blog and social media posts about the fact that the shirt can be read as objectifying women.

* That therefore, from the two above points, the shirt has caused some level of harm.

* That therefore, from the above, Matt Taylor should have thought about what shirt he was wearing.  That furthermore, his bosses in ESA should also have thought about the shirt that he was wearing.  One of them should have realised that the shirt was problematic.

* That the fact that either no one thought about whether the shirt was problematic, or predicted that some people would think that the shirt was problematic, is itself evidence of a culture at ESA which is not friendly to women in STEM fields, and that this is a problem.

I haven't yet claimed explicitly, but am going to now:

* Your consistent use of the language of objectification "assets", "sexual object" and so on is anti-feminist and anti-woman.  Your claim to think that feminism is important does not align with your other words and actions.

* Your consistent misrepresentation of my point and unwillingness to deal with the substantive points of my argument is indicative that you are arguing in bad faith.

Unless you actually engage with the substantive points I have made, this is the last I have to say to you on this topic.

[Tone Arguments]

Reviving the zombie thread.

I was inspired to contribute a few more fallacies.  The first and third especially are seen quite often in debates on the internet.

Tone Arguments

"The tone argument is to dismiss an opponent's argument based on its presentation: typically perceived crassness, hysteria or anger." ~ The Rational Wiki on the Tone Argument.

Tone argumentation is a fallacy as it is used to dismiss an argument based on how it is presented, rather than whether or not it is correct or relevant.  It is frequently used by those who are less emotionally connected to a debate, as a way of presenting those who have a stake in the debate as irrational.

Users frequently try to position themselves as having an in some way "respectable" or "objective" position because they do not use curse words, or are arguing about something which doesn't personally affect them.

Example (proposed by Patricia Williams in Teleology on the Rocks (1991)):

Cain: Abel's part of town is rough turf.

Abel: It upsets me when you say that; you have never been to my part of town. As a matter of fact, my part of town is a leading supplier of milk and honey.

Cain: The news that I'm upsetting you is too upsetting for me to handle. You were wrong to tell me of your upset because now I'm terribly upset.

Abel: I felt threatened first. Listen to me. Take your distress as a measure of my own and empathize with it. Don't ask me to recant and apologize in order to carry this conversation further.

In this example, Cain is resorting to a tone argument rather than engaging with the substance of Abel's point: that Cain's original comment was offensive and unsupported.

Appeal to Common Sense

Common sense is something which intuitively looks like it should be true, or at least that a particular disputant suggests that everyone should be able to trivially see to be true.

Arguing from "common sense" can be fallacious because not everything that looks like it should be true necessarily is.  It's common sense that light shouldn't be able to act as both a particle and a wave, or that it is possible to know both where something is and how fast it is going; Quantum Mechanics has proved, however, that both of these things are true, regardless of what common sense has to say about it.

Equally, for instance, common sense fails when it comes to logical problems like the Blue Eyes problem or the Monty Hall problem.

No True Scotsman

No True Scotsman is a fallacy by which an individual tries to avoid a group with which they are associated being implicated in doing something unpleasant by claiming that no true member of that group does that thing.  It is a fallacy of redefining a group to exclude members of the group who are also members of another, more negative group.

If the group is defined narrowly to begin with, rather than changing the definition to be more narrow, then that is not this fallacy.

Example:

$a: This bag contains only red counters.

$b: I just drew a counter from the bag and it was blue.

$a: That counter can't have been in the bag: all the counters in the bag are red.

This example is extremely obvious, but real life examples can be much more pernicious.  Real life examples include the term "RINO", for "Republican in name only", the implication being that despite being a member of the Republican party, someone is not a "true" Republican because they disagree with the speaker on whatever issue.

I'm going to go ahead and say you're probably autistic. You continue to display such characteristics. I'm sorry for that but hey, you still got to try at least buddy!

I'm at least slightly impressed that you've managed a personal attack, an incorrect armchair diagnosis based on no evidence, and being patronising all in 166 characters.  I mean, it's the mark of someone in bad faith, but you've managed to do concisely, at least.

I am actually allowed to use the word 'femenazi' I get offended by atrocities committed to my people as well, but it's an important topic to talk about so words that are distasteful must be used.

Wow.  So your argument is that because you are (presumably?) Jewish, you're allowed to minimize the deaths of 11 million people in concentration camps and extermination camps, and the worst war the world has ever known, by comparing a group who were attacked by the Nazis to Nazis.  I'm glad we've got that sorted.

No. See this is why you can't have nice things. Saying someone looks good is objectifying their looks (again, more common use of the word). You can also revere them as a deity of humour, an epic beatbox. Saying someone looks good does not mean you can't have any other opinions about them. I think this is where we're finding the most trouble.

This is, by my count, the third time I've explained this.  Pay attention.

Saying that someone looks good is not objectifying their looks (which is meaningless), nor even objectifying them.  It's paying them a compliment.  You keep asserting that "objectifying their looks" is a "more common use of the word" but not only is it not (I've never heard anyone other than you use it), we are discussing objectification in the context which it was originally being discussed in, and in that context it's pretty clear that the definition I gave in my last post is the relevant one.

You can in fact feel more than one thing towards a person. You can think more than one thing about a person.

As I've never denied this, this is irrelevant.  Unless you are suggesting that it's my position on the back of no evidence, in which case it's merely intellectually dishonest.

You're getting so het up on terminology, you're missing all of the picture.

Classic tone trolling.  My emotional state (which you are doing an excellent job of inferring from little evidence, btw. Keep it up!) has no relevance to the correctness or otherwise of my views.  Please try to keep to the substantive points.

If I try to explain further, I'll just be treading on ground already crushed. I have considered what you've said, I have tried to be in your shoes and decide that any picture of a woman not covered from the ankles up is objectifying women and that sex is such a foreign concept that there is no difference between wanting to have sex with a woman and thinking of her as only useful for that. I've tried darn it, but I just can't. What can I say, common sense is such a curse.

And this is a strawman.  My position is not that any woman not covered from her ankles up is objectifying women.  My position is not even that any image of a woman ditto.  Either you've genuinely misunderstood what I thought was a very clear part of my position (in which case it would have been more helpful to ask for clarification) or this, too, is arguing in bad faith.

Also, me disagreeing with what conversation should be where is not the same as me policing it. Am I writing a letter to youtube HQ telling them how the mean femenazis were spoiling my fun? No. No, I'm not doing this because everyone has the right to free speech (Myself included! Yay! That means I can say things like this!), what I am doing is saying why I hate all the bullarmadillo that goes hand in hand with hard-line feminism. Stuff that ironically, you should hate too as it's slowing down the process of equality!

If you can't see how your actions are problematic even if you aren't actually censoring anyone, maybe you should go back, read my argument again, and think about it slightly harder.  The point is that you telling feminists where they should and should not make their arguments is reminiscent of the thousands of years in which women literally were not allowed to make political points or speak in a political context.  To give an analogy which might hit closer to home, it's as if I were to tell you that I was sick of seeing Jews wandering about the streets where I live and I wish they stuck to the ghetto.  A view which is utterly repulsive.  Does that help?

Similarly, youtube commenters can all say what they want.  Personally I think that 9/10s of youtube comments are at best inane drivel, and frequently hideously offensive.  I survive by not reading the comments on youtube videos.  You can too.

'HALP HALP! I'm being oppressed!' Would be a bad reaction to what you've just said. Me saying 'The comments are for people to share what they like and dislike about a video and to discuss the topic, not for the promotion of entirely separate agendas.' would be a better reaction.

Maybe it's difficult for you to understand, but the inappropriateness of Matt Taylor's shirt is actually relevant to the video in which he is wearing an inappropriate shirt.  (There's also the fact that I just searched "Matt Taylor" on Youtube, and the top 5 videos were one of his apology, and 4 with pictures of the shirt and anti-feminist titles.  And then a number of others with such titles as "a rant about feminists insulting Dr. Matt Taylor").  If your issue is with youtube being "polluted" with political opinions, you should be complaining about MRAs and anti-feminists.

Look, one of the major problems that feminism has historically faced is the systematic silencing of women's voices.  In Classical Athens, women weren't allowed to speak in the Assembly, or in law courts, or even to give evidence in court cases.  It wasn't until 1893 that women gained the right to a voice by voting in New Zealand, the first country where this was permitted.  British women didn't have the right to sit in parliament until 1918 and didn't get the right to vote on the same basis as men until 1928.  Your saying that feminists should shut up and not speak where you, a white man, might hear them, is part of a historic pattern of oppression.  Do you understand the problem, here?

So once again you've missed the point again, too stuck in your own head. It's kinda like... Ah wait no I already said that at the start.

Please tell me what point I've missed.  Just asserting that I've missed a point is not helpful.

The problem is not difficult to understand. However that's also not what I'm saying, once again using typical lefty tactic[...]

Is this relevant?  My being a lefty doesn't effect whether or not my position is correct.

[...]of putting words in other peoples mouth. Don't you guys have like, another trick? What I am saying is this: Please keep the discussion where it's relevant. It's an open request to nobody in particular. Hell, nobody who this is even aimed at is going to read it.

Show me where I've put words into your mouth.  Implying I'm arguing in bad faith without evidence is hardly a good way of making your point.

And if you can show me any example of me (or anyone I'm agreeing with) taking this discussion somewhere where it's not relevant, I might accept you have a semblance of a point here...

I agree that the most important thing stopping true gender equality is that white men don't want to give up on their position of power.  Guess what: that was even more true in all the historical examples I gave.  You know how equality wasn't achieved?  Women, people of colour, queer people, trans* and gender-non-binary people, non-Christian people sitting back and waiting for straight white cis-hetero Christian (and increasingly atheist) middle-class men giving up their own power out of the goodness of their hearts.

You say it will happen naturally eventually, but I'm not content to wait for it to happen naturally, eventually.  I want to do what I can right now to improve the position of people who have been historically disadvantaged, and the largest group of those, by far, is women.

Again, you go for the extremes. There is this nice, grey, comfy patch of land called 'the middle ground'.

Here is a shocker: just saying "there's a middle ground" is irrelevant and does nothing to demonstrate that the middle ground is the position we should take.  It's the fallacy of the golden mean.

Here is a shocker: Men can.....Work *with* women on this!

Here's another shocker: no where did I say that they couldn't.

I do disagree that you can force it to happen quicker, I believe that forcing the issue will create more resistance but that's just an opinion, there is no way to know the right answer there and I'm sure you can accept that.

This is true, but I think you'll find that history is on my side here.  It's never happened before that equal rights have been achieved by not campaigning; I don't see why we should believe it will now.

Having a shirt with women on also does not alienate women or anyone else.

Except that we know, for a fact, that it does alienate some, because they told us so.  Why else do you think we're having this discussion?

It alienates people with too much time on their hands.

Dismissing valid concerns by asserting that people who have them just have "too much time on their hands"?  Classy.  And, you know, intellectually dishonest.

Am I alienated because I wanted them to be guys with pecs as large as my face? No.

Are you someone who is part of a group which has been historically treated like it is valuable only for its looks?

Is this relevant to the fact that clearly some people do have concerns about the shirt?

Was my friend alienated because she likes science and also has a vagina? No. Her words: 'He doesn't look much like a scientist, cool shirt'.

Does the existence of one woman who didn't personally feel alienated by the shirt negate the existence of other women who did?

Is this relevant to the fact that clearly some people do have concerns about the shirt?