starkred

Teach your damn boys for once.

> Tell her it's OK to work somewhere else if the only way to get there is to fuck the interviewer

Tell her that if that happens then she is strong enough to report it until something is done about it. Don't give in to bullies.

> I'm suggesting you should outright tell them that it's very likely that at some point some guy will try to demand sex from her

If I had heard that growing up I would have avoided men under any and all circumstances. Since I am posting here, you might imagine what a detrimental effect that would have had on my life.

Seriously, all you are going to teach young women is that the world is a terrifying place and they should hide themselves from it. I don't think you can imagine how awful that advice is. I easily can.

Re my last statement. If you told everyone of either gender that they should avoid situations where they have to rely on older men for their advancement, no one would have any job.

Serious question: if there were competing companies involved in Cheerleading - Varsity vs. Nike or something - do you think sexual predators goes away? I have trouble believing that.

> There's no wide ranging cultural acceptance of sexually predatory behavior

There is as long as the solution is "keep women away from sexual predators" instead of "keep sexual predators away from women". Keeping girls away from competitive sports is yet another example of "boys will be boys".

Are you seriously suggesting that we keep our daughters out of fashion, academics, sports, and movies as that is the only way to keep them from being raped?

> Do not ever put your daughter in a situation where she can be pressured by older men to do what they want in order to advance

Are you also suggesting that we don't let her work at a FAANG company? Many of us are 'pressured' by older men to advance, if you extend 'pressured' to mean 'doing the job that you've been hired for.

> I don’t know how much Varsity was involved here, but I suspect, at the very least, that Varsity execs were turning a blind eye to what was happening.

As far as I can tell this is the sum up of his assertion that Varsity is responsible for sexual predators in cheerleading. Everything else is about Varsity having a monopoly on cheerleading and monopolies are bad - both of which are arguably true but I think dodges the question of why sports like this are full of sexual predators, who is actively allowing this, and how can they be stopped.

Sexual predictors aren't going to go away if monopolies are busted up. I think conflating the two is more about headline grabbing than a serious examination of a real problem.

My usual answer is 'by example'.

I like to think I'm teaching my kid to think. Last night we started wondering why fish can swim near sharks and not get eaten. We talked, we speculated, we joked, we researched and discussed what we had found.

I wasn't trying to teach her to think. I had no ulterior motives at all, I was genuinely curious about shark feeding behavior. As I look back on it now I feel like I was teaching her to think by encouraging her to think, sincerely considering her ideas, showing her how to test them, and coming away with more knowledge than we started with.

That is a much more interesting question than I originally thought!

You can plug into a happy room surrounded by your family and friends and it will be as though you are all together instead of thousands of miles apart. You can spend time with the children you miss, the grandchildren you hardly know, and it all comes for free.

You know that there will be commercials, of course, but that doesn't worry you too much. So what if every so often a handsome man comes in and tells you how delicious Coca Cola is? You've been around commercials before, you don't expect this time it will be much different.

But there are darker agencies at work. They suss out facts about your life, your joys, your fears, and they prey on them.

If you are a left-leaning person in a blue state they fill you with horror stories of religious fanatics who are determined to create a theocracy.

If you are a right-leaning person in a red state, they tell you of radicals who want to take away everything you've worked for and destroy everything you believe in.

It fits so neatly into what you already suspect that you never question it. Each new story becomes more and more outrageous, but you are a boiling frog at this point, you'll believe anything about 'the other side' no matter how outlandish.

So now you are a tool, a soldier, a person who can be manipulated in any way to support any cause as long as you believe that you are standing up to 'them'.

If it's not a PKD story, it should have been.

Should it be 'allowed'? I'll have to think on it.

> Hypothesize a machine that allows you to change people's emotions directly, one that has seen mass adoption.

There absolutely are such machines and we call them computers.

> Should people be allowed to install it?

Communication is the powerful 'technology' that changes people's emotions directly. The mode of communication is a side-note. Tear down FB and none of this goes away - not because something rises from FB's ashes but because communication is a central facet of humanity.

> There should be standards, even if they aren't defined by law

I don't necessarily disagree and I'm sure there were plenty of reputable publishers who wouldn't touch the protocols.

But should the agency who did published it have been hauled up before a congressional investigating committee?

I still don't get it and I can't get away from 'printing press' analogies.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" resulted in countless deaths but who owns that responsibly besides whoever wrote it, read it, and acted on the information within? You could blame it's publishers but that seems pretty off-track.

Also every company I've ever worked at has angry, self-righteous employees who disagree with upper management. We all think we're smarter than everyone else and most of us aren't afraid to share it.