If anyone was wondering what’s going on at LiveJournal since they moved their servers to Russia,

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minimoonstar:

snarp:

here’s an article about the revised ToS they released yesterday (April 4, 2017). You can read the current ToS in full here, and the previous one here. Basically, LiveJournal no longer permits political fundraising, and it’s probably related to other recent efforts to mess up Putin’s enemies’ fundraising efforts.

So, that happened! And something else also happened, which that article doesn’t mention:

9.2.6. The user may not, without the Administration’s special permit, use
automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the
Service and/or to interact with the Service;

…if they’re actually serious about this – which seems unlikely – then this new ToS is a suicide note, because:

* This policy would remove LiveJournal from Google and other search engines’ results. And yeah, it’s really easy for them to make that happen – they could just alter their robots.txt file to reflect this bizarre new policy, and Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc would immediately automatically remove all results on *.livejournal.com domains.

* This policy would ban all third-party clients, including those which use the official
LiveJournal API. (Which, in its current form, they’d probably have to get rid of.)

* This policy would ban all backup clients. LiveJournal doesn’t have an official one, they’re all third-party.

* If they’re serious about it, and they edit robots.txt to reflect it, this policy would make the Wayback Machine’s LiveJournal archives inaccessible. The Wayback Machine automatically blanks out all earlier archived material when robots.txt tells them to get lost.

…now, LJ does not at this point appear to have updated robots.txt, and the API does still seem to be in operation, and literally fucking hiding from Google seems a little too dumb even for them? So, I’m going to assume for the moment that they’re not serious.

Nonetheless, the fact that they even put this line in there is alarming, because it indicates they’re dumber than we thought!

So, I’d personally be extremely grateful if some people with a few spare terabytes of space would get copies of the Wayback Machine’s LJ archives before my fucking heart gives out? That’s a LOT of fucking data that could be lost if they’re dumb enough to enforce this.

…how long has their HTTPS been broken, christ.

Sooo, by the way, guys? Backing up and moving your LJ to DW itself is against the TOS, unless you want to manually copy every entry over.

(This is targeted at Russian dissidents who might want to get off the platform, of course, but it seems to me to put DW in a difficult position.)

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drferox:

tkdancer:

uteropolis:

maxofs2d:

darksnowfalling:

warpedellipsis:

quasi-normalcy:

meariver:

huntokar:

quasi-normalcy:

No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.

Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.

None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.

This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.

Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….

I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.

Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item. 

People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”: 

• Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity. 
• Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
• Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.

The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.

Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.

This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.

Let’s examine a traditionally male-dominated role that is very well-respected, and well-paid, in many parts of the world — that of a doctor. In the UK, it is listed as one of the top ten lucrative careers, and the average annual income of a family doctor in the US is well into six figures. It also confers on you significant social status, and a common stereotype in Asian communities is of parents encouraging their children to become doctors.

One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?

The answer is crushingly, breathtakingly simple. In Russia, the majority of doctors are women. Here’s a quote from Carol Schmidt, a geriatric nurse practitioner who toured medical facilities in Moscow: “Their status and pay are more like our blue-collar workers, even though they require about the same amount of training as the American doctor… medical practice is stereotyped as a caring vocation ‘naturally suited‘ to women, [which puts it at] a second-class level in the Soviet psyche.”

What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/12/13/patriarchys-magic-trick-how-anything-perceived-as-womens-work-immediately-sheds-its-value/

“Men may cook or weave, or dress dolls or hunt humming birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important (Mead, 1949, p. 159).”
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-19279160/in-a-complex-voice-the-contradictions-of-male-elementary

“The wage gap is a myth”

The entire field of veterinary medicine says hello.

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I wish I was a bit more excited about Spider-Man: Homecoming. So far it’s all “don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up”