I guess this may seem insensitive, and I admit, I will never understand, as I'm a young, single, childless male.
Why do you need to post these pictures? It's not that I find these pictures offensive, but the odd time I see somebody breastfeeding in public, I do catch myself being slightly thrown off. It seems like a very private thing. Why do you WANT to post these pictures online?
Do you find eating a private thing? These women don't either. Breastfeeding is a baby eating. Something they have to do a LOT of times a day.
Would you like to eat in bathrooms? In tiny little closets? Under a blanket in the dark? These are all places baby feeding alarmests try to make babies eat.
How would you feel if any picture that had a bit of a plate in it was censored off facebook because a group of mostly childless and old men found it offensive?
Think about changing your atitude. Just because you're not used to seeing something doesn't mean the issue is with where it's happening, perhaps you're just not used to it.
I think part of the point they're protesting is the notion that breastfeeding should be a private, personal thing. These women believe it's normal, natural and there's no reason it shouldn't be public - like if you were to kiss or hug your child in public.
I'm torn on the subject. There's plenty of normal, natural things that still should be private, but is nurturing our children one of them?
Even a single, childless male can think through the differences between conceiving a child and supplying that child's frequent, urgent nutritive needs. If you miss a meal, you may feel a little hungry or tired or cranky. As best I can represent it, a baby not being fed on his schedule is much like an adult not being supplied with oxygen. It's far worse than feeling a hunger pang. And women are equipped with a constantly available, sustainable, low cost, environmentally friendly, and energy efficient answer to this problem. So wtf is the problem?
There is a public interest at work here. Breastfed babies are said to have fewer short and long term medical issues. Breastfeeding might be as important to our health (and crippling healthcare costs) as a people as bike paths, sidewalks, healthy foods, preventative medical visits, and any of the other many small lifestyle improvements which we are willing to spend many millions of dollars creating and promoting. And it costs us...a worldview adjusted ever-so-slightly back to what has been for most of our species' history perfect normalcy.
This is an important issue. Encouraging breastfeeding, which does appear to be the superior form of infant nutrition, requires that we normalize it. If we're all too delicate to see tiny thumbnails of women breastfeeding floating by in our newsfeeds, how will anybody ever survive the rather more "graphic" occurrence of it happening next to them on the bus?
I'm willing to accept bikers in far-too-revealing spandex. I have similarly learned to accept women breastfeeding. it's really not so bad once you actually encounter it...which is not something you'll ever know if you're being shielded from it by "decency" filters like Facebook's, or hearing the implied judgment that it's indecent.
I prefer to interpret the opposing party in such discussions as serving a vital function in a Socratic dialogue. Whether or not IHBT, it's useful to argue the issue with an opposing viewpoint.
It's the - feeding a baby in public - part that is naturally part of normal civilised society. Urinating in private is similarly a part of normal civilised society.
It's confounded by the multiple definitions of natural: here it just means commonplace and ordinary.
I think they call it "bonding with mother nature" or something, and nothing is really worth doing nowadays unless you can post it to Facebook for the whole world to see.
They're not "feeding their children", they're making some sort of statement, which is entirely within their rights, but it has nothing to do with survival. When I eat I don't post action photos online.
You don't; millions of Facebook users exercise the right to do so without having their photos removed. Look at the photos you do post of you doing whatever activity you consider central to your life and how your friends and family perceive you. Now imagine that Facebook prevented such photos. Wouldn't you find it annoying enough to raise a public outcry?
Now imagine that what Facebook has decided to censor is not just some hobby of interest mainly to you, but a cause about which you care passionately and which profoundly affects every single member of every generation. It's a legitimate "think of the children!" situation.
I don't mind Bill Gates working to eradicate malaria, just don't let him post pictures of filthy people in attire Westerners would consider improper. Ewww.
Breastfeeding is coming back, and children are reaping the health benefits, precisely because concerned women have been dragging our culture back from its neurotic denial of it for over half a century now. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Leche_League.
Fine! Breast milk for everyone! I'm in favor. Like I said in my original comment, I think both sides are idiotic. Facebook is idiotic for censoring annoying but harmless propaganda (you said it) photos of women feeding their children in the semi-nude, and the women are idiotic for caring what 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg thinks of their beautiful exposed breasts.
Yeah, I may find it annoying if Facebook disapproves of any activity I'd like to publicize to the world, but thankfully, we've got tumblr and other sites where we can post photos of us doing (almost) whatever the hell we want. I'd just go to tumblr (Note: I am in no way affiliated with tumblr, nor do I have a tumblr blog, or a Facebook account for that matter).
I take absolutely no part in the argument, and all I'm saying (for the last time) is: the way this protest is expressed, its origin and its target are interesting.
You can post whatever you like on your own blog, but I think what these women want is the ability to have their posts seen by their friends and family. For a huge majority of the people I know, Facebook is the only way to do that.
I don't think either side is idiotic. I believe Facebook has a real need to improve its system so that it doesn't have to hold the entire world to a single parochial standard of propriety. And these women are encouraging it to do so. The only measure of their approach that matters to them is whether it is effective. Time will tell.
What would be interesting to me is your proposal for a better way to achieve their goals, and why you believe it would be more effective.
Well, if I were approached by such a woman, I would tell her that she should post her photos on posterous, tumblr, flickr or other similar services, and link to them from Facebook.
But I'm really not looking for solutions. Just enjoing the moment when "in 2012 an idealist group of women took to the streets of the Western world in anger, with bare breasts and suckling babies in their arms to protest the actions of 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who runs a large, popular communication/vicarious-living/ego-stroking/stalking website (or 'virtual social networks' as they were called) to demand of him to allow them to publish photographs of them breastfeeding their newborns."
The best part of this was the concept of banding together as group of "thousands" in this blackout. As of 2007 (the latest numbers I could easily find), Wikipedia as a whole has > 2500 views per second. Of course, the English Wikipedia is the only one being blacked out as far as I know, but I expect it also is a large portion of that 2500 views/second.
And that's just Wikipedia! Seems to me that a few more people will be affected this time around.
I've gotten by just fine wearing what everyone else is wearing. hackers aren't some "mythical beast". We're just like everyone else. Sure, there's some features I thought that would be nice on articles of clothing, and could be considered "hacker friendly". But these ideas would generally be viewed as useful to anyone who lives in a modern technology-filled world, not just hackers.
I like news:yc on iOS. I've only used it on an iPhone, so I can't speak as to how it works on an iPad. Even if it was just scaled up, though, I think it's still a great app.
I'm a young student who was paying membership fees at a local hackerspace over the last six months. I feel like I'm almost exactly the type of person you're talking about; I went there and worked on assignments for my C.S. classes as well as solo projects.
One thing I have to say is, I think it's important to encourage interaction. My primary goal of going was to make connections with people. I would go, there would be maybe ten people there, and everyone was plugged in to headphones and I think I actually spoke with people a small hand full of times. The times I did, I approached them and was treated as an intrusion.
Of course, it's very possible I was an intrusion and they wanted to be left alone, or I approached them in the wrong way, who knows?
Anyways, this turned in to a bit of rambling, and I'm not positive I've helped at all, but... Hopefully I did.
I agree with kipsfi completely, if the connecting part of the equation was built into the experience we would see a lot of added value.
I would love to see some kind of skills exchange enter the equation so everyone feels like they can contribute. Hackerbuddy.com tries to do this virtually, but I could see the physical world giving this idea plenty more oomph.
This doesn't really seem to be an "Ultimate developer & power user tool" list. It seems to be more of a "this is what I use".
According to you, your ultimate setup for Rails development includes a machine that loads the Rails stack slowly (!), a 24-inch monitor (while you say you'd love a 27-inch), and headphones that sound "ok".
Why do you need to post these pictures? It's not that I find these pictures offensive, but the odd time I see somebody breastfeeding in public, I do catch myself being slightly thrown off. It seems like a very private thing. Why do you WANT to post these pictures online?