I’ve just been reading this critical work on Chekhov, the Russian author, and the woman writing this talks about how a 9 year old could not have such complexity of thought. Which reminded me of my idea of how ideas evolve and develop near enough for it to be understood and accepted as true, it achieves what others might call a quantum leap, which is definitely not what the concept, or idea, I am trying to convey should be called, because I want to refer to a macro world event where enough people believe something then suddenly it’s like everyone in a society always knew it (I think). (I think gestalt may be a word people might use to describe this phenomena, but it is also wrong). So why think of a 9 year old boy and complex ideas? Because everyone must come to understand things for themselves, and it may be that it takes so much time for people to be exposed to an idea to be able to absorb it/understand it.

Ideas need a critical mass before they can meet the criteria of making it into the minds of everyone in a society. Things just seem to arrive. I am trying to think of examples…

All that comes up is political, like revolution. For a revolution to occur a critical mass of society must want the revolution. But perhaps it’s like that episode of ‘mad men’ when they have a picnic and just stand up and get back in the car without cleaning up after themselves and leave their mess behind. I only vaguely remember what seems like such a luxury now. We’d never dream of doing such an awful thing now.

This makes me wonder why I used the word luxury. Luxury to be so ignorant of the idea of cleaning up after ones' selves needing to be done at all? For instance, the very rich never wanting to clean up the mess they make. I guess the nanny and maids always rush in to clean up rich peoples’ messes before they ever even realize that someone must be cleaning up after them. Or when the messes get really nasty, daddy gets someone else to clean up the mess. These days the rich spend all kinds of money in propaganda campaigns so they don’t have to spend money to clean up after themselves. I think this was especially true of the Koch brothers. Ideas like government is inefficient but corporations are not… no such thing as global warming… these lines are all propaganda, all lies… I remember believing government is inefficient but came to realize it was corporations who were truly inefficient…

The important thing I’d like to remind people of is all things are connected, so when you pollute here, eventually that pollution will make it’s way into our water, our oceans, our homes and our bodies. We see that with plastics, micro plastics are turning up throughout our bodies, throughout our planet, from Antarctica to the deepest parts of our oceans people seem to think we live in a Newtonian universe, where you can shut the door on one mess and still have a pristine environment in the next room. While the environment might try to separate one disaster from another, eventually if you pour enough stuff in, it’ll result in massive deaths of important insects, important vegetation, important environment that we need to sustain us here on earth.

Another possible example is abortion, how quickly did we forgot how dangerous child birth is. Some women are extremely lucky and baby’s just seem to fall out of them, but it is not always the case. I guess this is the example that proves the rule, we as a society just assumed it was so easy. Most of us are spared the horror of childbirth so we get to ignore the complications. Besides much of our medical technology is that we can provide safe abortions and can recognize when the genetic experiment, aka fetus, isn’t going to work and we as humans should try again. No living thing is considered a biological success until it itself reproduces, thus it survives birth, lives to sexual maturity and then successfully mates.   We as highly social humans have set a very high bar in our society to achieve successful mating.

Given the difficulties associated with getting married in our society and then to have children. Because this it what it truly means in our society to breed successfully. It is possible for teenage girls to get pregnant of course but this is hardly deemed successful in many human societies.

We seem to have realized war is messed up and dangerous but ignore how dangerous childbirth is. Given there is a high rate of miscarriages
About 8 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. The total number of actual miscarriages is probably higher because many women miscarry before they even know that they're pregnant.

So the take away message is all things are connected and it takes awhile for ideas to spread though society but once they do they feel like we will never forget them until we do.
Another of these ideas is perspective. It is very easy to think I am the only one that matters and no one else has a valid perspective. In my experience everyone has a some piece of wisdom, they are human beings who observe the universe too, everyone knows something no one else does so no one is more important than anybody else. We’re all connected after all and we have no more than to remember how quickly covid 19 spread through the human population.
All this reminds me of being told I was wrong about the subjectivity of reality. We can argue about the abstract reality go the chair in the corner of the room. It is currently there but will it always be there? Has it always been there, no. perhaps science is really about trying to understand what reality really is, laws that describe a universe that is always changing.
Another example is the brutality in society, such as when we had public executions whether it was for witches or other criminals. Now we keep our brutality pretty much indoors and well out of public viewing.
Finally empathy is about the most salient example of the phenomena I and thinking of, it wasn’t long ago that empathy just did not exist as a concept but now everyone is using empathy as away of being able to explain other concepts, such as psychopaths.
I remember in school we read 1984 and were asked can you think a concept if you don’t have the word for it? And the answer is yes. But the concept will be forgotten like knowing how dangerous childbirth is.

Many years ago I acquired a Mary Wollstonecraft reader and thus I read some of what she wrote which included an introduction to one of her books, Maria, or the wrongs of women. In the introduction she wrote, and I paraphrase, how in fiction women can only go from a state of purity/perfection/innocence and then, no matter what, they descend in the eyes of society.

It’s one of those dramatic laws, like how women in movies only ever talk to each other about a man one is romantically attracted to, unless they are making a point about the Bechdel test. (Of course, movies/tv assumes their audience is pretty much all male because the director, producer, writer..., investors, studio owner ... are all male, in general.

I always thought Jane Austen must have read Wollstonecraft’s Maria introduction too and decided to write Pride and Prejudice as a result, Austen's book about women gaining full time employment, literally. Most people only see Pride and Prejudice as a romance. It has some romance but generally this is a deeply political novel about women gaining full time employment in a time when many women died in child birth, for example Mary Wollstonecraft died soon after childbirth (giving birth to her famous daughter, the one who wrote Frankenstein and who we know now as
Mary Shelley) and Emilie du Chatelet who knew she’d die after finding out she was pregnant to name just two women.

So, getting back to the idea of women falling from grace being an historical artifact that I assumed was over. I stupidly thought women could pass through life making mistakes, being forgiven and those mistakes would be forgotten in due course. But I was wrong.

I think I always knew that. But I thought it was true in general for everyone, male or female. Of course, when Wollstonecraft originally wrote her introduction she was talking about the standard literature of the day, where women were constantly being warned of all the dangers of being thrown out of good society because they were too casual with the other gender, the one where getting a notch on their belt is a bonus... the gender whose transgressions are truly forgiven and forgotten. It was Elizabeth Bennett's aunt who suggested Lydia Bennett’s fall from grace could all be covered up and forgotten, Austen wrote this about 20 years after Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her introduction.

But a female friend of mine who is a co-leader of a very male gamer group found out recently, that 200 years might fly by but very little has changed. And everything that might be construed as a mark against her character had been written down, taken to extreme and held firmly against her. And definitely not forgotten. Ironically said co-leader stepped into a verbal sexual innuendo mess and that was probably her worst offense.

For some reason women have their legacy erased because of sex. I am thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft having her named banished from all good society for over a 100 years because of her love letters; Hillary Clinton, yes people actually believed pizzagate; I knew about Catherine the Great’s horse before I knew who she was. Why is sex definitely not for women and their reputation so easily damaged because of it? Yet we struggle to remember the names of men who have been found out to be sexual predators or violent with their partners? We forget so easily why Madonna divorced Sean Penn, why that black dude who gave those women date rape drugs, Bill something, ah yes Cosby. And the guy who basically raped all those actresses, Weinstein? Are they all out on jail yet? Does anyone care? Yet Monica Lewinsky’s name flows off my tongue so easily, but she didn’t do anything wrong, not like Cosby, Weinstein, Pitt, Depp, .... and Penn did.

We seem to remember Sudusky’s and Kevin Spacey’s name (although I used google to look up Spacey’s name and it seems like google erased his name from the usual suspects, but they couldn’t from moon). Perhaps it's more about the victims?

But why do we over look the wrongs of these men and yet I can’t imagine what Monica Lewinsky is doing? Apart from having a relationship with a married man she didn’t do anything wrong. She was a consenting adult with a crush on a president. Is there a woman in her stage of life who hasn’t done something stupidly similar? Fortunately for most of us, it is never known and it’s covered up and forgotten. Fortunately some men stood up for my co-leader friend. Nevertheless when she gets the highest score in war it is never acknowledged, yet when a man does, he is acknowledged applauded and congratulated.

No matter how things change, most things stay the same.

I think there is an idea things remain unchanged as we age from the time when we first learned about the world. 

I remember when I was young being chased by men who felt it was their right to determine I should be available sexually to them and when I informed them otherwise they felt it was their right to correct my understanding of the situation. 

This would cause me to run like hell through traffic to avoid these men, sometimes running towards police cars only to have the police car to drive off while I was on foot. 

In these cases I evaded these pursuers. Most men will take no for an answer but it is nevertheless extremely unnerving. 

It didn’t matter what I was wearing, how much I weighed, what time of day, men have asked and harassed me for sex. I genuinely hope it is no longer like this for younger women but sexism was everywhere when I was younger, including and especially in the workplace, but I don’t know what it’s like now because it’s been awhile since I worked for a business as a computer programmer. 

I understand why computer science is worried about losing women but we are chased out one at a time, with obsessions about who our love interest may or may not be, threats and jokes… men can be all kinds of awful/horrifying in private… when no one else can see what they are doing or hear what they are saying. 

I know men will often say: but not all men. But you have to wonder which are the good ones? It might take a long time on the internet to find out. But you have to if you plan to marry one of them and hope to be treated well.

I hope it’s not like this anymore for young women but I have no idea and I doubt it.

I try to keep up with all the latest health information but, to be honest, I often wish I didn't. One of the worst ones is how much quality sleep are you getting. This really bothers me because they want you sleeping in complete darkness, for more hours in a row than you can poke a stick at and if you don't, then horror upon horrors will descend. You will get cancer, diabetes and Alzhiemers, you'll get fat and if you can think of anything worse than getting fat then you will no doubt get that too.
These various health fads/concerns are the worst because ever since I've not gotten a good night sleep since I started reading how important sleep is because now I can no longer sleep. So now I tell myself I won't go to sleep at all, and next thing I know I am waking up 30 minutes later to use the bathroom. But then they think that's also bad because it means I am too tired.
Another of these fads was alcohol. I was quite happy not drinking and then if you wanted to live forever you had to drink a glass of red wine everyday. My best guess was if you drink moderately you probably do all things moderately. But what they didn't say was this study only contained men, and their best guess was women did much better not drinking any alcohol at all. I was quite happy to give up alcohol again.
Then there was the walking fad. How many steps you did in a day was of vital importance to your longevity. I don't doubt the importance of exercise but then there were all these other insane claims that went with it, like the smartest people were also the fittest, so if you are looking for the next Einstein, I suggest you look to those African women who walk miles everyday for fresh drinking water.

I’ve never been pregnant myself but there is so much to pregnancy I had no idea about. Like I only just learned after birth a woman’s belly doesn’t immediately go down to the size it was before. I only learned that after seeing a photo of the brave Kate Middleton who appeared in a revealing dress on leaving the hospital after the birth of her first baby. 
But recently I also found out that drooling can be caused by pregnancy, all kinds of spinal problems and no doubt we’re all familiar with the vomiting and fainting especially in older movies. Once a woman has given birth in the traditional fashion she cannot sit right away.
Pregnancy can be very debilitating yet we expect women to endure this debilitating condition on a dime based on some people's beliefs, and especially that she is less important than the genetic experiment going on in her belly.
In the movie “where did you go Bernadette?” we learn about a wanted pregnancy going terribly wrong time and time again but the mother put that all away once her wanted baby was born, but even then her baby needed operations to allow her baby to survive. My mother wanted more children but miscarried often. Pregnancy most definitely does not necessarily turn into living babies.
I want to applaud these women for letting us know about the constipation and how awful pregnancy can be. (See 8 and 9.) There are women obviously want to be mothers, why force any woman who falls pregnant to be a mother when pregnancy can be so awful?
Surely we should let women decide for themselves whether they want to be mothers or not, yet all these pro-lifers think it is okay to lie about whether a woman is pregnant or not? How dare you lie to women about something so debilitating. Why do you think it is okay to lie to women and treat them like children - like we do when we tell children about Santa Claus? Indeed it seems we have turned pregnancy and child birth into yet another Disney movie.
​Why is there so much secrecy about women and their bodies? Why do we constantly want to ignore how much horror there is associated with reality? Giving birth is an ugly messy business and extremely dangerous for both mother and her child.
​These new laws against abortion is nothing more than men punishing women for something they want to do but know they never can. 

Why do people still think republicans are better at handling the economy when we're seen the awful results of their economic policies time and time again?
The previous two republican presidents sent the US economy, both times, into a downward death spiral and we've needed democrat presidents to fix the mess republicans left behind.
In the past republicans have always been pro-big business but I am astonished by the problems Ron DeSantis is having with Disney, a very conservative corporation, who nevertheless knows the sign of the times. Disney is so annoyed with DeSantis that they are suing him, and moving further developments away from Florida. Not even Chick-fil-A is safe from being classified as too 'woke', a word republicans throw around by conservatives as an abhorrent smear, but few can define. However I define 'woke' as 'the acknowledgement that other people (than (rich old) white men) are people too'. These are the kind of men who do stuff in the dark and in private, that never happened...
While DeSantis may feel no one is watching, an assumption most republicans make when they are doing whatever they do, people are watching, including and especially corporate America.
With the current fix to the debt ceiling behind us, we have to wonder why republican presidents never have to worry about debt ceilings when it's been proven time and time again that they do more to increase the national debt.
The people who always suffer most with the debt ceiling are those with the least, the poorest amongst us, and that is the cruelty of republican economics.
The idea of a small government is ridiculous when we have a government so small it fits inside every woman's uterus and in the underwear of every child making sure that they all remain asleep regarding their identity and gender.
I was told about gender spectrum when I was a child and I remained an aware cis-hetero-woman. But the republican approach to child care is keep them ignorant because otherwise we'll all be forced to have gender reassignment and divorce our hetero-spouse and marry someone of our own gender? Which I have to say is extremely amusing and no one's intention.
Everyone sees these book bans in school libraries, everyone knows there are people who are so out of touch with the universe they think their children will never find out about gender. And in my mind it is so embarrassing.

Some number of years ago I was talking to a libertarian who was writing some kind of manifesto on how the economy should be organized and when I asked him about women's access to money he said women should have children for love.

I wonder what the landlord/lady will say in response to "I am paying my rent with love." Or groceries, clothes... love baby. Of course, that may be code for prostitution? People may assume she may not have gotten married before popping out babies, and I say that men die, divorce and get sick too. And I have said that many times before.

But the reality is men don't like considering women as workers, they are really treated like their labor is not paid for, and they like to say they are doing the work they do for things like 'love' but the reality is it's free labor.

And now republicans are making it impossible for women to get an abortion, their only solution is that women should not get pregnant and when i have questioned on them on this, that is their only solution for me not to get pregnant.

If we lived in such a state my husband would get a vasectomy but what if we decide we want a child and things go wrong? I've read so many stories of things going wrong - and I know from first hand experience how fragile pregnancy can be. My mother miscarried three times and she really wanted those babies. 

Without any understanding or consultation with a medical doctor it seems these 'law makers' went gungho into the destruction of women's lives. Women's lives are inferior to the lives of the fetuses that dwell in their bodies, because while they may nod to incest and rape and the health of the woman, even if it is deemed necessary to have an abortion there are few hospitals willing to do it for fear of legal problems.

Pregnancy can be seriously debilitating, despite the nonsense that women's bodies are designed to have children. women can get gestational diabetes, break bones during labor, often die because they are pregnant. But those who want to prevent women gaining access to abortion conveniently lie about this reality or ignore it preferring the Disney version of storks arriving with freshly minted babies... and no women has any swollen ankles and experienced hours and hours of excruciating pain.

Yet men couldn't wear masks at the height of COVID because of their rights to freedom? Clearly men have rights women do not and that is nothing but injustice.

Every movie which has any police procedural in it is using facial recognition software and while there are companies who offer this 'technology' for sale to law enforcement, this 'tech' is not science. 

If it was science those providing this service to law enforcement should publish the data they use to train the neural network (a kind of AI) with, they would publish the network architecture and they would publish the error bars in their results. My guess is they are too ashamed or embarrassed to admit the likely error bars. But more likely, they just do not know themselves what the error bars really are.

For a start, neural networks produce a number between 0.0 and 1.0, with a range of computer based on floating point numbers in between. My understanding is (because when I've asked I got no answer) that any number greater than or equal .5 is a hit anything less is a miss. 

Let me put this in perspective, if the network produces .500000 then it's a hit, .49999999 is a miss. And if you don't know how computers handle floating point numbers you'll love to find out it pretty much rounds, so .4999 is very likely to become a .5 which will become a hit. So if you were at work surrounded by 50 of your work mates and the facial recognition software came up with a .4999 for killing someone's grandpa, too bad, it's prison time for you.

Unfortunately that .4999 is not statistical, it is based on the error the neural network has in it's comparison with the (usually) random numbers it's weights were set to before training began, and the input values (images) it was trained on. I have heard people gushing about how well 'deep' neural networks differentiate between images. Perhaps, but I think they are giving more credit to the network rather than actually understanding what the difference is that the network is doing. 

I don't know how long the network is trained on each image, or even if there is a single output or even multiple networks. And this were science comes in, a company offering this tech must publish this information, because science needs to meet the reproducibility requirement. Company's cannot hide behind in-house IP secrets. Because the tech is in the public domain on how to do this in broad brush strokes.

Because that .4999 may refer to the fact that the network just does not know, it is insufficiently trained, or just another random number. 

The results of lie detector tests are not admissible because they can be fooled, the results of facial recognition is even less credible. But try telling the punitive right that this tech is a complete failure when there is so much yellow journalism about AI. 

Why is it ‘love’ and ’sex’ are the ways we use to get our basic human needs met? Perhaps love is really about our necessary connections with others? We need each other so much, we like to call it by its own mysterious word 'love'. What does 'love' mean anyway? We do know we need to be needed, we do know we need our lives to be meaningful. Pair bonding means we're socially prioritizing this one person over all other people? And society acknowledges that this is your right. And I have said many times that sex is a socially sanctioned method of getting affection. Unfortunately, sex has equated with the long term success of your marriage rather than affection. This has translated into a covert method for men to get sex pretty much on demand (if you want to stop your husband wandering...). We all need affection, but only parents and their very young children are allowed to be affectionate without a sexual context, and this, I think, is a serious problem for society.

And while we might need to satisfy our sexual urges, we don't need to only have sex with another human being, we can manage this by ourself. (Do you need help in the bathroom?)

Anyway this is where I started and then I saw this article from the Guardian. You might agree, women should go home, lock the door and stay safe inside her home alone until some guy decides he needs to break in and use her for sex (rape) and potentially murder her.

Or we could call it what it is: men can be extremely dangerous. Even to other men. Did you notice in there that men are more likely to be murdered by a man? And if a man is raped he is much more likely to be raped by a man. Men are more likely to beat each other up. Let's face it men and women both have a man problem. Yes let me repeat myself, there are scary women out there but their numbers are vastly fewer than the number of dangerous men. And if you want further proof check out how many women verses men are in prison for violent crimes.

And why must a woman need a man to chaperone her? Why can't women go out together? To me it's a case of men opening up opportunities for each other to gain access to that most desirable asset, a woman.

It's easy to decide we are a horrible species if you listen to our complaints about ourselves. Most of us dismiss the rest of the population as being a bunch of idiots or nasty, and while this is possibly true, it is also a matter of perspective.

So I asked google, the font of all wisdom, what men are. It suggested search terms of (among other silly things)  waffles and lonely. When I asked it what women are, it suggested, more curiously, are talking, werewolves, blind to male advances, from Venus, hypergamous (I'd not heard the word before) and finally I found this, women are wonderful effect. I've not heard of this effect before, but compared to men... yeh. Women don't start wars, women don't do most of the violence. I am not saying there aren't women out there who aren't awful people but I don't know how many centuries ago a woman started a war, as opposed to defending her country in a war. And yes some women might be violent in that she slaps a kid or a man but is he genuinely afraid for his life when she slaps him? How many women go on these shooting sprees without a man? Yes I know a very few have but men do most of the killing sprees.

I found the google suggestions curious. Women as seen from a male perspective and men as individuals. It became even more so when I searched on 'older women'.

Anyway I digress.

I guess our introspection is proof we are trying to be better, trying to understand ourselves. And we have improved. It wasn't many centuries ago the government would hold public executions (the last public execution in the US was 1936! not even a century ago) are the people brought picnics to watch people die, although this was the 1600s. Also there were 'witch' killings. Pinker's book 'the better angels of our nature' puts forth this idea, but in my opinion society has gotten better because women have gotten more power. Even children have gotten more power. And society will be at it's best when everyone and their time is treated as equally important.

Men have a habit of basically saying, men aren't bad but humans are not good, which is away of putting the blame on everyone in our society rather than taking any blame for their own behavior. And men like to narrow themselves down to a uniform block. Uniform blocks exclude so much of who we are. But humanity is anything but a uniform block. We are extremely diverse. We are not all bad and we are not all good either, and no one is exclusively either. There are probably many more good men than there are bad, and similarly we shouldn't Disney-fy all children as being pure innocents. There is no doubt there are probably many very awful women too. But I think we need to see the spectrum of who we are rather than seeing a pigeon hole, or a generalization, because that is a lazy thinkers primary method of dismissing the differences - and to some extent I think we need to call ourselves humans rather than 'men' because we are a multitude (not just humans but our environment) and we have a multitude of responses.

At the same time some people like to magnify differences so we can dismiss whole portions of society as not being worthwhile. This is also lazy thinking.

We have distanced ourselves from our violent past, but we should never forget it. We need to marvel at how far we've come as a species. We do amazing things to help each other and other species all the time.