This YouTube creator is like no other. He usually shares bizarre music tracks, like a sample of a news report and then plays it through a MIDI program, for example.
He’s messing around with a program called ‘NetLogo’ – I am not familiar with it myself. From what I could gather, the two groups (heroes/cowards) in the program are all individuals and I think they are given set variables that are taken into account for each movement depending on the distance from other sprites on the screen.
The heroes cluster together and the cowards scarper and never organise, but when they are played together, chaos occurs and the results are less predictable. Some end with clusters and dots with a ceasing of motion, whereas other movements continue to move across the screen where heroes behave more like cowards and cowards more like heroes!
The “Heroes and Cowards” game, also called the “Friends and Enemies” game or the “Aggressors and Defenders” game dates back to the Fratelli Theater Group at the 1999 Embracing Complexity conference, or perhaps earlier.In the human version of this game, each person arbitrarily chooses someone else in the room to be their perceived friend, and someone to be their perceived enemy. They don’t tell anyone who they have chosen, but they all move to position themselves either such that a) they are between their friend and their enemy (BRAVE/DEFENDING), or b) such that they are behind their friend relative to their enemy (COWARDLY/FLEEING).This simple model demonstrates an idealized form of this game played out by computational agents. Mostly it demonstrates how rich, complex, and surprising behavior can emerge from simple rules and interactions.
HOW IT WORKS
The rules of this model are that there are two basic personality types. All agents in the model choose a friend and an enemy. If their personality is BRAVE, then the agent tries to stay between their enemy and their friend, protecting their friend. If their personality is COWARDLY, then the agent tries to keep their friend between them and their enemy, hiding behind their friend.HOW TO USE ITChoose the NUMBER of turtles you want to examine, and choose whether the turtles should act COWARDLY, BRAVE, or MIXED. Then press SETUP followed by GO to observe the patterns of behavior formed.
THINGS TO NOTICE
Run the model many times and observe the different patterns of behavior. INSPECT or WATCH some turtles so that you can see their individual behavior.
THINGS TO TRY
Can you find new cool configurations with 68 turtles? How many different type can you find? What happens when you vary the number of turtles?
EXTENDING THE MODEL
There is a bug we deliberately introduced in the SETUP of the model. Can you find it and fix it? Once you have fixed it, how does it affect the preset configurations? Can you find new presets?Modify the code to add more control over how many of each type of behavior there is.Change the world wrapping rules to see how that effects the results.You can create buttons that capture interesting patterns of behaviors by using the RANDOM-SEED function in NetLogo. First set the RANDOM-SEED to different values. PRESS SETUP then GO and observe the behaviors. We created a preset procedure that makes it easy to create your own buttons that produce interesting behaviors. This procedure assumes a population of 68 turtles with “mixed” behaviors, but you could modify it to allow different settings. Create your own buttons that produce interesting behaviors.
NETLOGO FEATURES
RANDOM-SEED initializes the NetLogo random number generator so that it always produces the same set of random numbers, enabling exact reproduction of model runs.CREDITS AND REFERENCESVersions of the Model are described in:Bonabeau, E., & Meyer, C. (2001). Swarm intelligence. A whole new way to think about business. Harvard Business Review, 5, 107-114.Bonabeau. E. (2012). http://www.icosystem.com/labsdemos/the-game/ .Bonabeau, E., Funes, P. & Orme, B. (2003). Exploratory Design Of Swarms. 2nd International Workshop on the Mathematics and Algorithms of Social Insects. Georgia Institute of technology, Atlanta, GA.Sweeney, L. B., & Meadows, D. (2010). The systems thinking playbook: Exercises to stretch and build learning and systems thinking capabilities.HOW TO CITEThis model is part of the textbook, “Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling: Modeling Natural, Social and Engineered Complex Systems with NetLogo.”If you mention this model or the NetLogo software in a publication, we ask that you include the citations below.For the model itself:
[list]
[*]Stonedahl, F., Wilensky, U., Rand, W. (2014). NetLogo Heroes and Cowards model. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/HeroesandCowards. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
[/list]
Please cite the NetLogo software as:
[list]
[*]Wilensky, U. (1999). NetLogo. http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/. Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
[/list]
Please cite the textbook as:
[list]
[*]Wilensky, U. & Rand, W. (2015). Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling: Modeling Natural, Social and Engineered Complex Systems with NetLogo. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
[/list]
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSECopyright 2014 Uri Wilensky.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.Commercial licenses are also available. To inquire about commercial licenses, please contact Uri Wilensky at [email=uri@northwestern.edu]uri@northwestern.edu.[/email]
@Rubsy requested this be uploaded, we have some ideas about Shakespeare that we may create across the forum soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCC97yf7dys
I am not particularly interested in the first section of this video, apart from the part about how the blaming of Islam and Muslims for terrorism by Islamophobes is overly reductive and excludes historical context, for example, there have been more IRA Catholic bombings and terror incidents confirmed in the UK than ones pertaining to Islamic terrorism, but most importantly, they assert that it’s only about the teachings of the Quran itself that causes such problems. Garrett points out various coup de tats in Syria and Iran to name two examples where secularism and western-inspired democracy was interrupted due to western intervention as opposed to Islamic terrorism and ideology.
The main part of the video that interests me, is the definition of feminism. Many will go to Google and find the ‘fight for the equality of the sexes of genders’, which Garrett, in my opinion, rightly rejects this definition as over simplistic. It ignores proto-feminist individuals and groups in various cultures throughout history across the whole world, it wasn’t until recently that feminism united as a movement and the first wave was primarily about suffrage. The second wave was about changing attitudes of the private sector towards women. He makes a good point about how if gender equality was achieved, there would still be feminism. Feminism may advocate rights, but it is not the central subject of feminism. It has a cultural critique, a literary tradition, a commentary on art and has made an impact on philosophy too.
Where I will disagree with Garrett in this video however, is the part where he challenges political correctness, which has become one of the main criticisms of feminism by those who oppose it. It’s not that Garrett is challenging political correctness, I agree with him that it is a non-existent problem, or at the very most, an insignificant problem where I disagree with him. It’s when he says ‘how can feminists enforce if they have no laws’, which is to say, how can feminists enforce things like censorship when they don’t have the law behind them to do so at their command. While I agree with him on the point that this is a non-issue, I disagree that groups in society need laws to enforce what they believe to be true.
Norms can be just as powerful and forceful as laws, they are the unwritten and unofficial rules that are enforced by any member of society who is part of a group that holds certain beliefs and values to be right or wrong and they don’t need a law and force that enforces those laws to impose sanctions and rewards – norms can do that just as effectively, if not more effectively than laws themselves.
Just to be clear – I am not saying that feminists are using norms to enforce political correctness in the form of censorship, I am opposing his claim that a group or individual needs laws to enforce their beliefs, values and desires.
Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say in regards to this video.
Introduction
There are three main empirical features of gender relations in employment that feminist writers have addressed.
[list=1]
[*]Why do women typically earn less than men?
[*]Why do women engage in less paid work than men?
[*]Why do women do different jobs from men?
[/list]
Objectors to claims of structures of Patriarchy often list these features as reasons, but seldom ask why. They are put forward as reasons and not as questions. The reason why the wage gap is presented as one of the first, if not the very first, presentations of the existence of patriarchy, is because it is the easiest and simplest way for everyone to see it. It requires a historical context too, something that will become more and more important to understand when we progress towards post-structural feminists like Judith Butler who speak of repeated performance.
Note that some of the figures in this post will be out of date, the purpose of this post is to demonstrate how we can show Patriarchal structures in paid employment. Please feel free to post updated figures in the following posts. I will add them as this thread progresses.
In 1986 women earned 74% of men’s hourly rates. The gap widens if we consider average gross weekly earnings, when women earn only 66% of men’s pay. This increased gap reflects men’s longer working hours and greater likelihood of shift and overtime premia. The disparity is even greater for part-time women workers, who earned only 76% of full time women’s rates of pay in 1986.
In 1988 women constituted 46% of the paid workforce. That percentage rose steadily since WW2. However, if we go back to the middle of the 19th century, we find that the female activity rate (the percentage of women employed or unemployed as a percentage of the total number of women) was which in 1861 as it was in 1971, at 43%.
Employment trends in Great Britain, 1961-88
[table=95][tr][th]Employees in Employment[/th][th]1961[/th][th]1966[/th][th]1971[/th][th]1976[/th][th]1981[/th][th]1986[/th][th]1988[/th][/tr][tr][td]All male[/td][td]14,202[/td][td]14,551[/td][td]13,424[/td][td]13,097[/td][td]12,278[/td][td]11,643[/td][td]11,978[/td][/tr][tr][td]All female[/td][td]7,586[/td][td]8,236[/td][td]8,224[/td][td]8,951[/td][td]9,108[/td][td]9,462[/td][td]10,096[/td][/tr][tr][td]% female[/td][td]34.8[/td][td]36.1[/td][td]38.0[/td][td]40.6[/td][td]42.6[/td][td]44.8[/td][td]45.7[/td][/tr][tr][td]% full time female[/td][td][/td][td][/td][td]25.3[/td][td]24.3[/td][td]24.7[/td][td]25.2[/td][td]26.2[/td][/tr][tr][td]Part-time female as % of all female[/td][td][/td][td][/td][td]33.5[/td][td]40.1[/td][td]41.9[/td][td]43.8[/td][td]42.8[/td][/tr][/table]
Unemployment rates for both men and women are approximately the same. 1984-6, 10% of women and 11% of men were unemployed which is higher than what was shown in the official government statistics, since the latter includes only unemployed people who are also claiming benefits, this excludes many married women who are only allowed to access benefits via the claim of their husbands.
While male unemployment continues to fall from its high point in 1965, female employment, especially in part time, continues to rise.
Different jobs
Men and women typically do not work in the same occupations or industries.
Socio-economic groups by sex, 1981
[table=95][tr][th]SEG[/th][th]Men %[/th][th]Women %[/th][/tr][tr][td]Employers and managers[/td][td]78[/td][td]22[/td][/tr][tr][td]Professional[/td][td]89[/td][td]11[/td][/tr][tr][td]Ancillary[/td][td]44[/td][td]56[/td][/tr][tr][td]Supervisory non-manual[/td][td]52[/td][td]48[/td][/tr][tr][td]Junior non-manual[/td][td]29[/td][td]71[/td][/tr][tr][td]Personal service workers[/td][td]13[/td][td]87[/td][/tr][tr][td]Skilled manual[/td][td]68[/td][td]32[/td][/tr][tr][td]Semi-skilled manual[/td][td]68[/td][td]32[/td][/tr][tr][td]Unskilled manual[/td][td]58[/td][td]42[/td][/tr][tr][td]All employees[/td][td]61[/td][td]39[/td][/tr][/table]
Source: Census of population 1981.
Changes in vertical segregation by sex, Britain 1971-81
[table=95][tr][th]SEG[/th][th]Men %[/th][th]Women %[/th][/tr][tr][td]1[/td][td]41.88[/td][td]101.98[/td][/tr][tr][td]2[/td][td]10.08[/td][td]35.10[/td][/tr][tr][td]3[/td][td]2.78[/td][td]22.99[/td][/tr][tr][td]4[/td][td]6.33[/td][td]12.59[/td][/tr][tr][td]5[/td][td]28.21[/td][td]40.45[/td][/tr][tr][td]6[/td][td]-22.28[/td][td]8.17[/td][/tr][tr][td]7[/td][td]11.49[/td][td]5.19[/td][/tr][tr][td]8[/td][td]-0.75[/td][td]19.85[/td][/tr][tr][td]9[/td][td]-14.34[/td][td]-28.58[/td][/tr][tr][td]10[/td][td]3.63[/td][td]-10.21[/td][/tr][tr][td]11[/td][td]-25.87[/td][td]-0.33[/td][/tr][tr][td]12[/td][td]16.93[/td][td]2.51[/td][/tr][tr][td]13[/td][td]-13.68[/td][td]-18.19[/td][/tr][tr][td]14[/td][td]-21.04[/td][td]-35.23[/td][/tr][tr][td]15[/td][td]-20.26[/td][td]-12.59[/td][/tr][tr][td]16[/td][td]-1.71[/td][td]50.04[/td][/tr][tr][td]17[/td][td]98.21[/td][td]9.46[/td][/tr][/table]
Horizontal segregation shows an extreme segregation of men and increase in extent of mild horizontal segregation of women.
Ethnicity and of women show significant divergence in both economic activity and unemployment rates.
There are considerable inequalities between men and women in relation to access to paid work and the wages received.
Explanations
The schools of thought that attempt to explain these inequalities:
[list]
[*]Functionalist (economic and sociological)
[*]Liberalism
[*]Marxist and Marxist feminist
[*]Dual systems theory
[*]A small amount of Radical feminist analysis
[/list] Functionalist explanation
[list=1]
[*]Women get paid less due to less skill and labor market experience relative to men
[*]Women have less ‘human capital’ than men because of their position in the household
[*]The household is the unit of rational choice in decision making
[/list]
The theory predicts certain outcomes for differential wages for men and women and for the extent of women’s and men’s comparative participation in paid work. Women are the home-makers, so are less likely to earn as much as men, or acquire experience on the market. They are more likely to take jobs with less hours and so certain jobs, such as in the cleaning industry and seen as a ‘woman’s job’.
The main problem is that the theory of human capital rests on the assumption of a perfect labor market in which employers pay employees according to their worth. This assumption has been challenged in a number of ways. It is both technical and social. Unions and powerful workers are more likely to get to get jobs designated as highly skilled despite their actual skills.
Women might be skilled in the technical sense, but in the social sense, they are disadvantaged, as they may not be recognized in the same way a man will be for better paid jobs with longer hours.
This is the simplest way to understand the pay gap/wage gap – over time, we have repeated a performance that sees certain jobs as acceptable for men but not for women, even though they are just as capable.
Liberalism
Liberal approaches focus on small-scale processes which differentiate women’s position in work from those of men. They draw on role analysis, broad cultural differentiation of men and women. They analyse dual roles and the relationship between paid work and the family. Women play the role of mother and paid worker. They expose the conflicting demands of motherhood and their time and labor.
the sexual division of labor becomes its main subject. Women face disadvantages in corporations and they describe the proximate mechanisms through which this takes place. The cultural pressures and organisational features which lead to the less success of women than men in reaching the upper echelons of these institutions. Liberals perceive the management ethic as masculine, job hierarchy is the ideology that determines decisions of available job slots, which are gender specific. Male friendship in workplaces were shown to exclude women for instance.
Marxist and Marxist feminist
True to all Marxist analysis – capitalist relations are the determining factors which explain the pattern of women’s employment. Lower pay and lesser participation are shaped by the capital-labor relation. Women are seen as subordinate and marginal as a category of worker whose greater exploitation benefits employers, although a sub-group of this school sees women’s position in the household, rather than paid labor, as an achievement rather than failure of the working class.
[list]
[*]There is the progressive ‘de-skilling’ of jobs in contemporary monopoly capitalism and that women take most of these new less-skilled jobs
[*]The household tasks shift to the factory, reducing the amount of labor to be done in the home and releasing women for waged labor
[/list]
De-skilling is supposed to increase profits at the expense of the workforce. The amount of housework has decreased as a result of the household buying from the market goods it would previously have produced itself. This is considered to release women from the household to waged work.
Although this has consequences where men are supposed to become more unemployed and housework was supposed to decline, only the latter came true.
Reserve Army Theory
Women are long term labor reserves which is now being bought into employment by the development of capitalism. The function of a reserve, according to Marx himself was to prevent workers from bargaining up their wages and conditions of employment. Married women suit this idea, as they have somewhere to go when employers no longer need them.
There are other elements to Marxist feminism which we can discuss later in this thread, but for brevity, I will quickly cover the other explanations.
Radical Feminists
Only a small amount exists on their literature on this subject. Their answer is that women are subject to sexual discrimination and harassment on workplaces. This has an adverse effect on women in the workplace.
Dual-systems
This combines capitalism and patriarchy and they focus on job segregation by sex. Men have an organisational ability to exclude women from better kinds of paid work and keep them at a disadvantage. Trade unions historically, have excluded women.
In the next thread, I will discuss the more recent new approaches towards paid work.
Basic Definitions
When I ask people what Patriarchy means, some basic definitions come up. Here are just a few of them:
[list]
[*]Sexism towards women (Misogyny)
[*]Wage gaps
[*]Rape Culture
[*]Expropriation of womens’ labor by men in the household
[*]Segregation of the work force
[*]Man of the house
[*]Denial of right to own property for women
[/list]
So with that in mind, let’s see if we can better define Patriarchy. The most general definition if we turn to Wikipedia is.
[list=1]
[*]a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line.
[*]a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
[/list]
Both of these form of Patriarchy exist today in society. Jewish families are not Patriarchal by the first definition when it comes to descent, they have a Matrilineal form of descent, but other than that they are still Patriarchal as are other religious, tribal and secular communities.
The most recent definition of Patriarchy in terms of Third Wave Feminism:
Patriarchy is a social system in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. In the domain of the family, fathers or father-figures hold authority over women and children. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.
Usage in social science prior to feminism
Max Weber in 1947 used it to refer to ‘a system of government in which men ruled societies through their position as heads of households’. This usage has a historical context and, the domination of younger men who were not household heads was as important as, if not more important than, the element of men’s domination over women via the household.
The definition has evolved since Weber as some radical feminists who developed the element of the domination of women by men and who paid less attention to the issue of how men dominated each other, and by dual-systems theorists (a mixture of Marxist and Radical Feminism) who have sought to develop a concept and theory of Patriarchy as a system which exists alongside capitalism (and sometimes racism too).
Incorporation of generational element
The practice of incorporating a generational element into the definition of Patriarchy is viewed by some to be a mistake. It implies a theory of gender inequality in which this aspect of men’s domination over each other is central to men’s domination over women. Heidi Hartmann, one of the proponents of this theory, uses a definition which incorporates generational hierarchy among men, this is not central to her theory of Patriarchy, which focuses upon men’s organisational ability to expropriate women’s labor in paid work, and hence in the household. Inclusion of generation in the definition is confusing. It is a contingent element and best omitted, according to Sylvia Walby.
Walby defines Patriarchy as :
A system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women.
The use of the term social structure is important here. It implies the rejection of both biological determinism and the notion that every individual man is in a dominant position and every woman in a subordinate one.
Abstractions
Patriarchy needs to be conceptualised at different levels of abstraction.
[table=95][tr][th]Most abstract[/th][th]Least abstract[/th][th][/th][/tr][tr][td]System of social relations.[/td][td]Patriarchal Mode of Production.[/td][td][/td][/tr][tr][td]Capitalism.[/td][td]Patriarchal Relations of paid work.[/td][td][/td][/tr][tr][td]Racism.[/td][td]Patriarchal relation in the state.[/td][td][/td][/tr][tr][td][/td][td]Male violence.[/td][td][/td][/tr][tr][td][/td][td]Patriarchal Relations in sexuality.[/td][td][/td][/tr][tr][td][/td][td]Patriarchal Relations in cultural institutions.[/td][td][/td][/tr][/table]
More concretely, in relation to each of the structures, it is possible to identify sets of Patriarchal practices which are less deeply sedimented. Structures are emergent properties of practices. Any specific instance will embody the effects, not only of Patriarchal structures, but also of capitalism and racism as well.
The six structures have causal effects upon each other, both reinforcing and blocking, but are relatively autonomous. The specification of several rather than simply one base is necessary in order to avoid reductionism and essentialism.
That concludes the basic definition and how to conceptualise Patriarchy. We will focus on the household next.
What do you think of this theorem by Crowley?
OPF allows you to embed music in your Soundcloud account – here is a track I made today for background music for a video I am creating.
She is perhaps one of the most contraversial performance artists of our time. She is perhaps the best example of what Kristeva means in regards to Abjection and what Derrida would see as a ‘monstrous arrivant’.
She brings up many questions from art that infect philosophical questions of an ethical nature – action without consequence being one of the main subjects, but before we grasp her body-in-pain performative and constantive acts, we first have to herald her arrival and accept what is revealed and comes to presentation to consciousness. By removing consequence, it being absent, she uncovers the horrors of human actions, she suspends consequence, only to re-present it to consciousness through tragedy.
His politics piss me off, but when it comes to magic and the occult, Thomas is interesting.
What are your views on rights? Are they innate, or are they constructed? Do you think rights are a good thing to have in society, or do you believe they cuase problems?
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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.Commercial licenses are also available. To inquire about commercial licenses, please contact Uri Wilensky at [email=uri@northwestern.edu]uri@northwestern.edu.[/email]