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Re:"Lighten up" by yummyfajitas on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @07:16PM (#3737318)
We want to come up with rules for things: either this statement is "sexist" or it is not, and here is the objective reason for that decision.

Um, yes - geeks want objective rules which allow us to figure out that an activity is either legitimate or not. This principle is called the "rule of law".

Are you advocating that we should abandon the rule of law in cases of sexism?

Re:"Lighten up" by apenwarr on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @07:34PM (#3737399)
Laws are the bare minimum set of rules for your moral behaviour - the stuff that's so bad we have to punish you if you do it. If you can't do better than the bare minimum, then you're doing very poorly at morality.

Not all good behaviour can be written down as clear-cut rules. I sure wish you could, but you can't. It's a bit like the story of what happens if you try to measure programmer productivity: whatever measurement you use (eg. lines of code), someone will find a way to game the system. Yet people can still be "obviously" more productive even if we don't have a numerical way to prove it.

Re:"Lighten up" by jdp23 on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @07:53PM (#3737459)
What apenwarr said. Also the "rule of law" is nowhere near as objective in the geek sense as you seem to think. It's filled with concepts like "the reasonable person" and "mens rea" which are heavily contextual and subjective.
Re:"Lighten up" by brown9-2 on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @08:54PM (#3737745)
Attempting to find nature's law governing complex social interactions sounds like a fool's errand.