I’m struggling to follow your point. The article isn’t giving a major thesis on why medieval people thought Matilda couldn’t rule England. From the perspective of the barons at the time, Matilda couldn’t be queen in her own right because women can’t rule. They didn’t think any deeper than that.
Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.
Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.
I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.
I do think it’s fair to point out that both of these postage Matilda by a few hundred years. I’m actually struggling to think of many Christian European kingdoms that would have at this point.
France only had kings at that point (in fact, Matilda’s son Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Acquitaine comes about because she didn’t give the king of France a son!)
Germany (HRE) selected their emperor so didn’t have succession problems in that sense.
Italy was a collection of city states, Naples was yet to form a kingdom.
Maybe Poland had an earlier queen? But then I don’t know if English nobles paid much attention to Poland, to be honest!
it seems like the rest of the world (India, China, Thailand, Egypt, ...) had female monarchs of various sorts ('queen regnant' seems like a relevant terminology here, I'm not sure).
The closest ones to Europe (discounting ancient Egypt?) might be:
So there were some texts later discussing the problems of Elizabeth I being Queen Regnant when all laws and customs referred to a “King.” We also see a lot of her father’s behaviour (Henry VIII) being driven by his need for a male heir. It’s why he tries to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Further, there were specific reasons why Elizabeth I was treated differently to her father. For example, Henry VIII used to meet with counsellors when he woke up in the morning, still in bed. For obvious reasons, this was not done when his daughter reigned.
I don't think that's why it's called a "Privy Council". Just because the only meaning for privy that you know, today, is a toilet, does not mean that the word in another context means toilet, any more than the fact you know the verb "do" in English can be slang for sexual intercourse means that when Marlo says "Do it or don't" in The Wire he means for his soldiers to have sex. He's indicating that he doesn't care whether they murder Bubbles.
"Privy" more generally means private or personal, which explains its use for a group which advises specifically the monarch alone.
> According to the Oxford dictionary the definition of the word "privy" in Privy Council is an obsolete one meaning "Of or pertaining exclusively to a particular person or persons; one's own",[3] insofar as the council is personal to the sovereign.
My point is the article claimed it would show evidence of something when in fact it did not. It should either not have bothered to include evidence or found better evidence
Er… no it didn’t? It just said the criticism being based on her womanhood was evident because of <reason>, it never promised to prove it, it was just a rhetorical device and they expect the reader to know the information already.
If you want to learn more about early medieval attitudes to women and power in England, it’s on you to learn, not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
> not on the article to triple its length to prove every minor claim.
Yes but that is my point. They're making the article longer by including evidence that undermines its claims. They should have either made the claim and let it stand without evidence, or they should have aligned what they said to the evidence they felt was worth including.
If they're going to claim gendered criticism then hold up generic criticism as the best example of criticism it confuses the picture. Assuming that there was gendered criticism happening somewhere off to the side out of sight, was that the decisive criticism? Or was it the criticisms that the article writer felt were important enough to include in the article?
Because the impression the article is giving is that people weren't complaining about her gender, but the fact she was behaving arbitrarily and arrogantly. That is good reason not to put a man in charge too - if you see a man acting arbitrarily and arrogantly it is also a mistake to put him in charge of anything and he would be criticised for it. I do that all the time, there are a lot of unprincipled men in politics who should be called out for their hubris. And they are.
Now it may be that what she was doing wouldn't be considered arrogance and hubris in a man (we don't know exactly because the article is short) but "double standards" and "sound ludicrous if aimed at a man" are simply not true. We hold men to the same standard and make the same criticisms of them.
The substance of your objection is “these criticisms are regularly levelled at men today,” and you skip the part that 900 years have passed since they were levelled at Matilda. You then demand the article provide evidence to overcome this comparison you have been 12th century norms and 21st century norms? Really?
Let me repeat: this is not intended as a thesis. It’s a small historical tale to explain the background of a period of time in early mediaeval England. It assumes you know how women were viewed during that time period and the example provides flavour. If you want to contradict its claims, just post the articles that shows differently.
That's not sexist though, it is just equivalent to noting she's a woman (like calling her "her" and "she") because we can reasonably offer the same criticism about a man. A man can have an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the controlled gait and bearing proper to the stronger sex. And adjusting for language drift people do make that sort of complaint of men, I remember one criticism of Biden being that he walked in a frail way and fell over a lot - literally complaints about his gait and bearing giving a bad impression. Not a very strong criticism but he was male and it was made.
We might reasonably infer that she got called arrogant for doing something that wouldn't be considered arrogance in a man, the article has unhelpfully elided that detail (maybe the original author did as well). But we've also got to admit she might have actually been unusually arrogant, that does happen from time to time. If I were in charge of a military I'd be standing around even more arrogant than I already am.
pjc50 offered a good example of something that was actually gendered - women not being able to own property in their own right for whatever unfair reason. The quote isn't that sort of out-and-obvious sexism. Said quote could almost be modern political whinging.
PS I'll add in an acknowledgement that words did mean different things back then so possibly at the time the only reasonable reading was with an "[as with all women]" on the end, but the fact is that as written this quote is making specific accusations of arrogance and arbitraryness that are not contained to either gender and are bad in all leaders, female or otherwise. He didn't write "women are all arrogant" or "women are all arbitrary". If anything the thrust of the quote is most women weren't either of those things. It doesn't support the idea of double standards or ludicrous criticism that would never be made of a man.
Ok, I suppose I understand but I really do not agree. Modern criticism of the US president is so far removed from medieval criticism of a female monarch as to be nearly irrelevant.
To address your question, though, yes I absolutely read "proper to the gentler sex" to be a statement about how Queen Mathilda _ought_ to have behaved. Also I have strong doubts that men (especially male rulers) at the time would have had the same standard set for arrogance. Of course a King could be in fact arrogant and then critics might point that out, but I do not see why they would bring his sex into it.
One thing we might agree on is that all political criticism can be false, and whether or not she was _actually_ arrogant is difficult to say. In the context of a bitter civil war, any record of events will have the strong bias of the author. The modern world did not invent fake news.
Arguing that a criticism focusing on her behaviour allegedly not being "proper to her sex" isn't gendered whilst handwaving away all the well established historical context about how women were treated to invent new context where she deserved everything she got is bold, I'll give you that...
No, they’re not examples of corruption. Did Bush or Biden seek to profit from their actions financially? Not that I know of, unless you have proof showing what and how.
Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.
That’s not an answer to the question. How did any of these presidents profit, financially or not, from their actions regarding Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis? What was the quid pro quo they received?
Well, the question primarily seemed to contest the scope of corruption, so I responded in view to that.
The big banks were one of the top donors to Obama's 2008 campaign. The fact that none of the banks were prosecuted or even held accountable for the crisis raises big questions how much the campaign funding influenced the way the bailout was structured. It also doesn't help Obama that he was famous for going after private funding after backtracking on his pledge not to do so.
Bush's story is similar but with energy companies the most famous being Halliburton who funded his election campaign and turned out to be the biggest beneficiaries to profit from the Iraq war. It probably wouldn't have upset people as much had it not been that the Bush family had close ties to this company and where Dick Cheney also happened to be the CEO. It was a big scandal at that time you can go read back on, but as is with many of these scandals everything seems to be forgotten or forgiven with time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with Trump 20 years from now.
- Bush invaded Iraq because an oil company funded his campaign?
- Obama bailed out banks (a thing every government worldwide was doing) because banks funded his campaign?
There’s no evidence of these claims, compared to the evidence of a fucking private jet being bought for Trump in comparison. Also Trump has enriched himself, personally, more than any president in history by quite some margin, using the office of President. I just wanted to show what you’re equivocating about, here.
If you follow the way the private jet thing is done, it is structured as a gift to the government and not the president. It is perfectly legal and you won't be able to find any "proof" of corruption over it. This is how most corruption is done, in an underhanded manner, but everything by the book, with enough plausible deniability.
In many cases corruption is only known to the perpetrator, because it is a matter of intent. One can always proffer a different reason for what they are doing than what they actually intended and when those reasons later turn out to be false, you may never really know whether they acted in good faith in the first place.
So corruption largely comes down to perception end of the day. It is ultimately a matter of trust and when that trust is eroded, the perception of corruption grows. There's no smoke without fire. When we see smoke in a building, we do not go searching for proof of fire, we just gtfo because the risk is too much. We should do the same when we see red flags in people in powerful positions.
These people are also all wealthy with stable fortunes - they don't need a lot of cash because they have everything. Trump is also a rich guy, but he has a lot of debts and legal troubles and worries about leaving office, so he urgently needs cash to bankroll and bribe and attract likeminded individuals to help him.
One way I’ve thought of it is to ask what happens if the function is blocked, how is it enabled mechanically and why would that be changed? Once you answer these, you start to see the groupings more clearly, I’ve found.
I 100% agree with everything you said and more. I spent a significant amount of time at my job arguing constantly with the entire engineering department that “Feature Flags” are not all the same thing and had to push back on efforts to mix them all up.
Examples:
Experiment flags for A/B testing
Permission checks at a user level
Product flags for feature gating by plan
Rollout flags to launch a new feature gradually
Configuration for an account/system/feature
The number of times I had to push against the “just put it behind hasFeatureFlag(user, flag)” is more than I can count at this point! I think it comes from a misunderstanding of the DRY principle, to be honest.
entitlements is a huge one. Sooooo many orgs are in an absolute rats nest of confusion because half their entitlements are in something like an auth system, half are in something like billing and the third half is hacked into feature flags.
One particular pain point is that finance or something "do users with access to feature X retain better and it's super hard to figure out.
My overall feel is that developers are trying to solve a problem and that it turns out the configuration is as fundamentally as important as the software itself. I define "dynamic configuration" as "a key value store which takes context and has rules based system to give you a value". This primitive turns out to be extraordinarily useful and powerful. Rather than try to split it into N different systems, each custom / don't have telemetry / aren't available to all services SDKs. What if you have ONE BIG CONFIG system that really does a bang up job.
By focussing on one terrific system, you can put all your eggs into the basket of making that reliable / comprehensible / flexible / strict.
The one on your list that I think DOESN'T belong would be permission checks at user level. The N of that is not a good fit for config (though when you look at the facebook paper, it's pretty wild how they've scaled it (but it doesn't do permissions afaik)).
Having worked at a large company that misuses feature flag service for everything, here are some examples why you shouldn’t:
- one team uses feature flag for product gating. Feature flag service goes down. Users temporarily got locked out of the features they paid for.
- one team uses feature flag for dynamic pricing by leveraging targeting rules (how hard is it to write a bunch of if else in code?). It’s evaluated against all users, even if they are not active (for analysis reasons). Feature flag service charges by MAU. We have millions of users. Our feature flag service bill is now 6 digits per year.
- one team uses feature flag as literal json store instead of a proper db (god knows why). Someone updated the value but the “schema” is wrong. Shit breaks.
> - one team uses feature flag for product gating. Feature flag service goes down. Users temporarily got locked out of the features they paid for.
That could happen if they used a separate service. In this case you need to build defaults; open or closed, as the case demands.
> - one team uses feature flag for dynamic pricing by leveraging targeting rules (how hard is it to write a bunch of if else in code?). It’s evaluated against all users, even if they are not active (for analysis reasons). Feature flag service charges by MAU. We have millions of users. Our feature flag service bill is now 6 digits per year.
This is a valid reason if you don't own the service, as it seems you don't. If you did, you should have asked your internal customers what their requirements were.
> - one team uses feature flag as literal json store instead of a proper db (god knows why). Someone updated the value but the “schema” is wrong. Shit breaks.
Separating the services would not help here. They are simply using the wrong tool.
Golden rule of large scale software dev: any system you expose that allows other teams to write text to it will eventually be used by another team as an ad hoc JSON database
I explained: they’re all doing different things, they have different behaviours, they have different performance and uptime characteristics. The reason that the values change are completely different, so how that information is set and read will be completely different. Who sets it, who reads it.
An example: at my current job, we’re using LaunchDarkly for config management, not just rollout. This means an incident on LaunchDarkly didn’t just stop a rollout, it caused the system behaviour to change for a large number of customers as it reverted to the default.
While you might hate them, you don’t want your data to be removed from their systems. If you’re having a hard time accessing credit with them, imagine what happens when you try to access credit as a ghost.
Right. The problem is, I do not need credit, but in Germany most landlords ask for this SCHUFA report to consider a rental application. They get 100s of applications (there is housing shortage), so not having any report is not working. And if you are a new expat without a permanent address, or you didn't know and tried to check how much something would be with installments (which triggers the application procedure and the rejection - all in one click often), or you just didn't like your first apartment and moved, or you didn't like your first bank, didn't close your credit card, and opened another bank with another credit card - your score is going to go down the drain. Thankfully now at least they have a report on "why" you have a low score. Before Sep 2025 it was just "low" and no explanation. You can check here https://www.schufa.de/en/scoring-data/new-score/index.jsp
I’m not here to defend credit agencies but I will point out that the GDPR does put the onus on them to make sure the information is accurate. This is a net positive.
The power to delete your data with them would actually result in exactly the situation you described, likely without the requester knowing that’s what’ll happen!
> GDPR is easy to implement once, but it is constantly changing every year.
No it’s not. If you’re running an online store, compliance is pretty straightforward. Most of the PII you collect has a good reason: payment, fulfilment, fraud prevention, etc. so you don’t need consent for that.
If you’re collecting marketing data, you need to ensure it’s clear that you’re using it for that and keep your records accurate if you’re informed they changed.
For store analytics, your cookie banner covers you, the major players all integrate into standard tools, and they keep their compliance up to date, so you’re fine there.
Small mistakes are very much not punished. Your country’s Data Commissioner equivalent will want to see you try to be compliant first. You’re only going to get put out of business on a first offence if you’re taking the piss. I guarantee any example you provide me as evidence will be exactly that, but feel free to try.
By “major player” I meant the analytics companies that you pay, not you.
> Yet more extra work!
If “customer asks me to update my records on them, so I do it,” is too much work then you really shouldn’t be in the business that requires it.
> Sounds like work for extra GDPR officer!
Or you just ask “what do I need to do?” The official tells you, you do it, they say “thank you.”
Seriously, all your answers here tell me you’re trying to do some shady shit and not even making money from it. If you were a simple retailer, as your original post implied, you would not be worried about the complexity of handling GDPR.
just because I have small profits, does not mean i sell drugs! (But drug dealer would probably get better deal from police for breaking GDPR). I am worried about several thousands euro fines!
I have my own eshop, i do not use "major player"! Too expensive.
> Or you just ask “what do I need to do?” The official tells you, you do it, they say “thank you.”
And than you get different offical, with different opinion. Their advice have same weight as weather forecast!
You said "shady shit"! Deleting some data a few days/weeks or months latter too late is not "shady shit"!
You obviously have no idea how business here works! Some gov offical will tell you to delete data for GDPR. Some other gov offical will ask for the same data latter, to prove tax records or people complied with vacine mandates! You get fined from both sides!
Every two years there is a big law reform of some area, while other areas with conflicting laws are still in effects. And small eshops are easy targets for fines. Large corporations are untouchable.
Look, I don’t think English is your first language, so I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt but it’s getting really tiring having to explain basic things like “context” to you. I’m obviously meaning in the context of data governance. I’m accusing you of selling customer data to unscrupulous characters, to be precise.
> You obviously have no idea how business here works! Some gov offical will tell you to delete data for GDPR. Some other gov offical will ask for the same data latter, to prove tax records or people complied with vacine mandates! You get fined from both sides!
Either you’re bullshitting me or you live in Eastern Europe and need to give kickbacks to stay in business. If the latter, that’s not the GDPR’s fault. It’s the fault of your government for not being able to draft law.
> Every two years there is a big law reform of some area, while other areas with conflicting laws are still in effects.
That’s not the GDPR, that’s your country having a poor grasp of how to make law. It’s a different problem and I’d recommend either lobbying your local representative or just leave to a sane country which will let you do business.
> So first you tell me to blindly trust officals, now i should leave country! Great advice!
Again, context. I’m bored of explaining it to you like a toddler so I’ll just tell you to reread my comments very slowly and figure it out.
> GDPR is drafted by EU. They went way too far, and made it imcompatible with local laws!
This is just a nonsensical statement. GDPR has been in force for 7 years. You haven’t given an example of where it changes, because it fundamentally hasn’t.
How about if someone asks for copies of all their data?
I thought that was not complicated, but then there was that post here a while back where someone asked McDonald's for their data.
It included a vast amount of things that the company had inferred from the data. I hadn't realized that would be in scope, and did some Googling on just what has to be included.
According to a few sites I found, and Google's LLM concurred, it is basically everything I have about them, regardless of if I got it from them, a third party, or produced it internally.
Customer service rep sends an email to their supervisor saying the customer won't take reasonable advice and then gets abusive and asking the supervisor how to deal with future calls from them? That should be in the GDPR response (I can redact the names of the rep and supervisor).
I make a list on my computer of customers that I think are exploiting a bug in our billing system to get a lower price, print out that list and assign it to someone to investigate and fix the bug if it exists. That's supposed to be in the GDPR data, if the sites I found are to be believed.
Heck...if some customer calls to update their credit card and calls the wrong number, and leaves a voice mail where they include "my new credit card number is <xxx> with security code <yyy> and expiration date <zzz>", that's supposed to show up in their GDPR data. (If they call customer support and leave such a message it would go to a number handled by the expensive outsourced customer service system, which has voice transcription software that looks for things like that and deals with it, but the internal phone system used by other departments doesn't so if the wrong number went to some random person in some other department it won't have that automated handling of this).
If that's right than handling a GDPR data request 100% according to the rules would require having some way to search nearly every computer we've got looking for anything concerning any particular customer.
I'm hoping the sites I found and the LLM were wrong and it is not this bad.
> If that's right than handling a GDPR data request 100% according to the rules would require having some way to search nearly every computer we've got looking for anything concerning any particular customer.
You’re only half right. If you habitually store data and never delete it from those stores, yes, you have to find and provide it. If they’re temporary (voicemail, fixing a specific issue) and you remove it as soon as it’s no longer needed, you’ll be fine.
> It included a vast amount of things that the company had inferred from the data.
If you’ve tied it to that person, it’s in scope. It’s literally part of GDPR.
> Customer service rep sends an email to their supervisor saying the customer won't take reasonable advice and then gets abusive and asking the supervisor how to deal with future calls from them?
Possibly but you could argue not because that could be business risk.
> I make a list on my computer of customers that I think are exploiting a bug in our billing system to get a lower price, print out that list and assign it to someone to investigate and fix the bug if it exists.
No, you have a valid reason to not share that, as long as you remove the PII once you’re done.
> leaves a voice mail where they include "my new credit card number is <xxx> with security code <yyy> and expiration date <zzz>", that's supposed to show up in their GDPR data.
If you’re deleting voicemails as you address them you’re fine, you won’t need to include this just because you didn’t get round to deleting it yet.
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