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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6869660" data-attributes="member: 4937">You don't understand.  This issue here is not whether or not you believe these things happen.  I quite clearly - even in the assessment of the person I'm not agree with - believe these things happen, that they are serious, and that they should not happen.This hasn't dented your confidence in the simple binary narrative of either you believe or you don't believe in the slightest.  Why?Now we get down to the real brass tacks.  This is where almost all the disagreement actually is.I mean, to put a trivializing spin on this, one could argue from what I've said that the 'solution' to this problem is simply for men to beat the living tar out of any man they see doing this at a con or a gaming store, and then for the whole community to applaud that as the (as I put it) "human filth" were thrown out the door a bloody mess.  But, it should be obvious at some level that not only was I not seriously advocating that as a solution, but speaking out of my anger at the whole idea this would happen, but such a 'solution' would have more than a few problems of its own.  It certainly doesn't have the problem of not stepping up and tolerating this crap, but it has its own problems.   And while I am trivializing my own words on this subject here by giving a straw man example of behavior in response to this, ultimately when we get down to pragmatics, a lot of the things we'd try to do have serious issues.More over, there is a deeper level that we don't agree on, which for lack of a better term lets call 'alignment', and even all of us in the "not evil" camp that are like, "This is a bad thing", don't construct our view of the world, society, or even the idea of identity in the same fashion.  The only thing we basically agree on is, "Don't be a jerk", but when we try to implement that I think we are going to be immediately shocked by what different people put not just in the jerk category but in the down right "not good" category.   To be quite frank about how deep this divide goes, there have been responses in agreement to me that I consider morally equivalent to a KKK ranting about racial superiority, and I feel pretty sure that other people have probably got the same view of things I'm saying.  Even speaking in a common language that the other won't because of culture differences and assumptions won't find offensive is very hard, even when everyone in the conversation is committed to "doing something about" sexual harassment.Unfortunately, they are not, and this thread is a good example of why.  For example, after saying that, you go right back to:You can't engage in a productive conversation on this topic if your assumptions are completely obdurate to what anyone is saying.  Get through your head, the source of what we disagree over has nothing to do with whether or not this stuff happens or whether I believe it happens.  Consider, you've decided to construct the argument that you just did, directly quoting a conversation between me and someone else where we both agree that the incidents in question happen, and yet you still constructed an argument based around a binary of whether or not someone believes this stuff happens.  You had to have read the thread and paid close attention, or you couldn't have quoted it.  But what you read had to figuratively bounce off your presumptions about this subject in order for you to respond the way you did.The remainder of your argument is equally insulting and oblivious, so I won't even go to the trouble of responding to it.  Why would I bother when its so completely clear that there are more fundamental problems here that you are still framing the debate in this manner?Again, if we have to get our world views to line up in order to solve this, then we don't have much hope.  If for example, whether we can work together to stop sexual harassment is predicated on us both constructing the notion of identity in the exact same way, and we first have to hash that out and if we can't we are reduced to shouting that the other is a "terrorist", then yeah, let's just close the thread.</blockquote>

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