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Chess

Kepler said:
I know basically nothing about gamer culture, but I was under the impression it was all about Koreans, boys, pimples, and Korean boys with pimples.
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Games like Starcraft and League of Legends are dominated by Koreans (the current world champion for LoL is, not a joke, Samsung Galaxy White) although they have large followings in N. America, Europe, and China as well. A lot of top teams and players have sponsorships and winnings (and earnings from online streaming channels) at a level to make them full-time professionals. Definitely not boys with pimples.
 
Re: Chess

LynahFan said:
Yeah, it was surprising to me, too. It may also be important to distinguish between Bavaria (Germany's Texas) and the Nordlanders. In the US, I was used to roughly 15% female engineers, but when I worked at Dornier (in Munich) there was one female engineer out of 200 in the section - and she was a new college grad.

The difference is that harassment of women in the US tends to be more overtly sexual (e.g. construction workers' whistles and quid-pro-quo "arrangements") whereas in Europe it is insidiously based around gender roles instead. My wife even received an extra monthly "stipend" in her paycheck because she was married - a rule that was put in place generations ago to compensate men for the trouble of supporting that burdonsome wife at home. Their idea of moving toward gender equality was not to get rid of the stipends, but simply to offer it to married people of both genders.

Edit: also, it wasn't so much that they assumed she would *want* to leave work early to make dinner - it was that they honestly felt that she OUGHT to leave work early and tsk-tsked the fact that she routinely chose not to.
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Bavaria is also heavily Catholic, which subtracts 500 years from women's rights. I suspect the Poles suck too for that reason. There are knuckledraggers the world over, but I really thought the other peoples around the Baltic not only had figured it out, but had figured it out long before the Anglosphere.
 
Re: Chess

Jimjamesak said:
Definitely not boys with pimples.
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Like I said, what little I know comes from sites like io9, which tend to concentrate on the sci-fi, fantasy games. I do know that in Korea they can fill soccer stadiums for big events and that the money is becoming competitive with professional athletics.
 
Re: Chess

Kepler said:
Bavaria is also heavily Catholic, which subtracts 500 years from women's rights. I suspect the Poles suck too for that reason. There are knuckledraggers the world over, but I really thought the other peoples around the Baltic not only had figured it out, but had figured it out long before the Anglosphere.
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What are you defining as "around the Baltic"? Things vary quite a bit depending on how big of a range you're looking at, especially if you start going inland to the S/SE.
 
Re: Chess

XYZ said:
What are you defining as "around the Baltic"? Things vary quite a bit depending on how big of a range you're looking at, especially if you start going inland to the S/SE.
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I was thinking of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland. I knocked out Poland because religion, and Russia because Russia.
 
Re: Chess

Kepler said:
I was thinking of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland. I knocked out Poland because religion, and Russia because Russia.
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Ok, so the real Baltics. No real purpose for asking aside from curiosity. I'm not overly familiar with the Scandinavian nations + Finland, but am moreso with the rest. Generally speaking, it seems the father one wanders south from Estonia and wraps through the old Eastern Bloc states the worse it gets. Right in line with Lynah's observations of a different region: it has little to do with overt sexual overtones but far more to do with applied gender roles. In some cases it gets pretty ridiculous per what some of us are used to.

So no real argument. Just wondered what you considered the Baltics since some (mistakenly) consider every former Soviet republic a Baltic and things vary wildly depending on where you are. Romania is a real gem :).
 
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Re: Chess

LynahFan said:
Yeah, it was surprising to me, too. It may also be important to distinguish between Bavaria (Germany's Texas) and the Nordlanders. In the US, I was used to roughly 15% female engineers, but when I worked at Dornier (in Munich) there was one female engineer out of 200 in the section - and she was a new college grad.

The difference is that harassment of women in the US tends to be more overtly sexual (e.g. construction workers' whistles and quid-pro-quo "arrangements") whereas in Europe it is insidiously based around gender roles instead. My wife even received an extra monthly "stipend" in her paycheck because she was married - a rule that was put in place generations ago to compensate men for the trouble of supporting that burdonsome wife at home. Their idea of moving toward gender equality was not to get rid of the stipends, but simply to offer it to married people of both genders.
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What you call as European harassment is an outcome of much more distinct gender roles in Europe. I've always thought of women and men being pretty much interchangeable regarding most societal norms. But many women prefer to have a distinct gender role. And its more pronounced in Europe. They see it as a natural thing to have children and raise a family rather than be a breadwinner like often women in the US. Ultimately, the outcome of this can't but naturally show up in the workplace and probably be interpreted as harassment by outsiders.
 
5mn_Major said:
What you call as European harassment is an outcome of much more distinct gender roles in Europe. I've always thought of women and men being pretty much interchangeable regarding most societal norms. But many women prefer to have a distinct gender role. And its more pronounced in Europe. They see it as a natural thing to have children and raise a family rather than be a breadwinner like often women in the US. Ultimately, the outcome of this can't but naturally show up in the workplace and probably be interpreted as harassment by outsiders.
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Yeah, none of the European women I met minded being treated as second class citizens at all. Not one little bit. :rolleyes:
 
Re: Chess

LynahFan said:
Yeah, none of the European women I met minded being treated as second class citizens at all. Not one little bit. :rolleyes:
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I'm going to give 5mn_Major credit on this, though. For one thing, he had to know that voicing that thought was going to get hooted at by much of the Cafe. For another thing, there is some truth to the general statement that comfort with gender role differentiation is strongly cultural. Mrs. Kepler, she of Women's Studies expertise, is always very impatient with the Whiggish notion that history has been proceeding resolutely from a "bad" past of gender roles to a "good" present of gender interchangeability. The scholarship that's out there doesn't support it. De-linking role from gender is not seen as an ideal social outcome in most of Asia, for example, by women themselves, and even education and some degree of western acculturation hasn't changed that. The same women who campaign bravely and loudly for equality before the law in these countries do not see that as gender equivalency. They would say that's conflating two very different things.

Let's take all the numbnuts from Muslims to Catholics to, well, pretty much every rural society in world history, who believe women are by divine decree "lesser" than men and toss them in the dumpster. The point is, once you strip away the hierarchical garbage those people believe in, which is pure rubbish, the people who are left who aren't misogynist still don't agree whether people aren't more fulfilled by tending towards gender-defined roles. We as predictable products of the tier 1 school conveyor belt think that's insane, but that actually is a cultural imposition, and to that extent... 5mn_Major is actually kinda right (though I don't think he's all that right about the countries we're talking about here).
 
Re: Chess

Those outcomes of gender differentiation exist worldwide. East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern & Southern Europe. Americans see it differently because we're at one end of the spectrum (with Germanic Europe is somewhere in the middle). Even as a serious progressive I must say, the worldwide model (of which global women largely approve) is actually the more natural state of the gender relationship.
 
Re: Chess

Kepler said:
Catholics ... who believe women are by divine decree "lesser" than men
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you mis-state Catholic doctrine here. Women and men have different roles, not because women are "lesser" but merely because women have the biological capacity to bear children. If anything, women have an elevated role in Catholicism (see the special reverence given to Mary for example, she is higher than any mortal male in the Catholic "pantheon"). Priests are male because they cannot bear children and they are celibate so that they are not tempted to divide their loyalty between their own offspring and their "flock" in general. If women were priests then, given their capacity to "be fruitful and multiply," they would then "inevitably" be placed in a position of divided loyalty between their own offspring and their "flock."



Weird, how this discussion came about in this thread.
 
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Re: Chess

Quite a bit has happened since the last update I posted.

Can find the full standings here, but at last mention Caruana was 2/2 to start and Carlsen was struggling. Enough so that many openly suggested Carlsen had peaked and his interests in other things in life would prove his chess downfall. Ten days later, Caruana and everyone else have been up and down while Carlsen rattled off six straight wins before a quick 17 move draw with Ivanchuk ended the streak. Not only did Carlsen go on a tear but his wins have been crushingly methodical. He has continually worked players into complex games and then destroyed them from those positions -- his specialty. His win with black over Caruana was especially interesting as everything made sense up to move 11. After a conventional opening Carlsen moved his kingside knight to h5, which is anything but conventional and led to a game Caruana could not control -- no matter how well his opening lines were prepared. Admittedly, after that knight hit the outside the game was outside of my scope of full understanding so I can't add much more aside from the fact it became so complex Caruana ended up feeding himself to Carlsen.

Long story short, Carlsen is anything but over the hill. His performances over the past week+ have people flat out conceding he is a machine. Standings are linked above but he's a point up on two players with three rounds to go. All told, six players are within 1.5 so the last three days at least hold some potential for drama, though if Carlsen manages to win out his rating will dance with 2900 which is unprecedented.

As a side note, one of the more notable stories thus far has been the play of 21yo American (by way of Philippines) Wesley So. He's one of the two just a single point back of Carlsen. Slim odds to catch him but a great performance nonetheless. It's nice to see another very young up-and-comer join Giri, Caruana, etc. as fresh faces who will be in the mix for the next decade.
 
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