All Thoughts Being Equal

Can't remember how I came across this post— We Are Not Things: Mad Max versus Game of Thrones —but I think it's worth talking about at some length, if not a full post length. Two portrayals of a world where women hold dubious power and are seen as “things.” One of these is roundly criticized for it. One of them is roundly celebrated for it. Game of Thrones catches hell for its portrayal of women and this subject. Mad Max is wreathed in a garland of bike chains and hubcabs for it. What, then, is the difference? Here we go. I'll just come out and say that I think the article misunderstands how the themes of Mad Max and Game of Thrones are different: Max Max is about liberation , while Game of Thrones is about the nature and abuse of power. The article focuses on frequency and point-of-view as two points of contrast between MM and GoT . I'm not sure of the author believes that sexual assault should never be depicted, or if depicted, only once? Frequ...

Fact: Ancient Carthage was 300x more metal than the modern day Here's a quick thought on the eve of the new year. In mathematics it's common to take a space or a structure and examine an interesting subspace or substructure of it. For example, when thinking about the integers {..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ...} we can consider the odds, the evens, multiples of 7, and so on. Things get interesting when we can, for example, note that any two multiples of 7 add together to get another multiple of 7, and we didn't have to make up new rules about addition to achieve this. So the "multiples of seven" are a subspace of the integers. So far so elementary. But now consider a bit of geometry. Imagine a two-dimensional rectangle sitting inside three-dimensional space—like a floating rigid sheet of paper. We could draw a circle on that sheet of paper and fill it in. Call the filled-in space A (because mathematicians like naming stuff). Now we might want to know something...

At the end(?) of a heated debate about whether taking up-skirt photos of women in public places counts as free speech (my short opinion: if wearing clothes over them doesn't count as a reasonable expectation of the privacy of your underwear, we're all fucked), a friend of Katrina's said this: [Women] face threats and rude encounters on an almost daily basis. It gets exhausting. We can't go out by ourselves at night from fear of rape or kidnapping. No such thing as late night jogs/walks by yourself. We are careful walking to our cars, often with keys in hand in case something happens. We must always watch anything we drink in public, in case it is spiked. We must watch what we wear, lest we want people seeing it as invitation to touch us everywhere. We have to watch what we say every now and then because we don't want to offend someone who is a lot stronger than we are and could probably hurt us. Simultaneously, we have to meet societal standards of bea...

Matt Yglesias at Slate reports that there's a new dating site on the block, where "generous" guys can bid on first dates with "attractive" women. From the site itself: WhatsYourPrice.com is the only online dating website where money can buy you love or at least a first date. Based on our patent-pending dating system, WhatsYourPrice.com provides the platform for generous members to bid on a first date with attractive members. By offering a little incentive, attractive members are more inclined to take a risk on someone who isn’t their usual type, and if the date goes sour, at least they won’t be going home empty handed. Once you get past the socially squicky concept of bidding for love, I'm a bit confused as to the gender-norm setup here. On the one hand, the site's graphics make it pretty obvious that men are the "generous" ones and women are the "attractive" ones, but in that "About" blurb they try for a little ...