We all know thoughts lead into each other, it's like one tangent leads to another, so it's pretty much impossible to say where anything begins or ends, and perhaps all things echo throughout the universe endlessly... in light cones (aka Einstein), but we know vibrations do end and so we're left with the impression that things do separate into distinct units, but at least on a quantum level they don't and perhaps because our experience is pretty much limited to friction world, a planet spinning seemingly endlessly in a frictionless environment. oh the irony.

I digress (of course).

So I was thinking about the cruelty of small children, and/or adult men.

But men are the ones who get to re/write history because women don't get much downtime and it takes a specific kind of person to do the writing. Then my mind slipped off to Austen's Mansfield Park were she likens poor dependent (female) relatives to slaves. After all she wrote about women, their status and how females gain employment, aka get married (and then possibly die, a lot of Austen's mothers die). But this is pretty much irrelevant to men because they are looking at the younger women anyway. (Is this why women go through menopause so they wont die in child birth? Although menopause comes too late for many women.) Anyway men live on to write the books because they are alive and have time and enough status that what they write matters. But I digress again.

I was thinking women have always been treated as slaves, and it's not just poor dependent female relatives. Women get to do so much of the scut work, cleaning house, toilets, kitchens, then meal prepping... and it's mostly very low paid/unpaid. Then they give birth to the next generation, raising that generation into the inheritors of the mess some adult men leave behind. I generalize of course. Some men do clean house and are paid well to do so, and there are women who refuse to do the scut work of cleaning and having children.

I like books and as such I spend some part of my day getting free books from Amazon and I have noticed that when men write a love story it's deemed literature (thus lofty and noble), but if a woman writes one it's chick lit (at best) or a romance. All signs of: run away, run away! (The equivalent of other culture - you know like mainstream culture is for a white male audience, and how white people don't watch other cultures' TV...)

Austen is often declared to be a romance writer. This infuriates me. She wrote about the female economic situation, not always but often. Men who write about economics are exalted (because they turn what is truly luck into a magic 8 ball with ridiculous formulas), but women, it's romance (which is so easy to dismiss). Austen wrote about more than getting married, and her books weren't morality tales either.

I realized that 'systems' is a kinda huge buzz word amongst scientist-wannabes, along with 'AI', 'quantum', even 'computer'... and apparently a Nobel prize was recently awarded for these dour faced men (as these men are always dour faced - seemingly so beyond us they don't have emotions, if a woman won a Nobel prize she'd be smiling) for systems.

My eyes roll.

If you want systems, go ask a woman who works in the home about systems.

It has occurred to me that men just can't think in systems. My husband has been carrying the housework load for a little while for us and he just can't get his head around the idea of multitasking - a concept so fundamental to women who manage a household. My husband is a super smart guy, he has a PhD in astrophysics, but he just doesn't manage multitasking when it comes to solving housework problems. Although he is getting better.

My guess is he has learned the importance of optimizing time with the multitude of tasks that need to be performed.

I know I have read these accounts of emotional labor and men's helplessness when it comes to doing housework. Perhaps some of it is men feeling annoyed they have to contribute during what they thought would be their downtime, housework is beneath them - besides there is a really interesting game on TV and here he is in the laundry, so they put the clothes in the washer and never turn the machine on... then he can say he put the clothes in the washing machine (literally. Of course that'd be extremely passive aggressive if it's intentional. But my husband is nothing like this)... I think it's more likely men just do not understand the problem.

Men seem to have a really hard time managing systems. Whereas women think men can do systems as well as they can because hey - all she is doing is housework... anyone can do this - right?

Well I think we've bought the lie that women have to live up to men's ability and standards. We think men can do all the things, and women have to prove they can.

The idea that computer software must have a bug in it is based on men writing the code for a system and the problem is men just can't do systems. I have written heaps of bug-less code. And I am talking about telephone systems and neural networks, symbol translators, code that writes other code... all completely bug-less, easy to maintain and upgrade.

This realization came to me when I saw on brain-games a segment about men having better spatial reasoning, that they can pack a car trunk for an outing more quickly and efficiently than women can in general. And perhaps that's true - if you don't mind the diaper pail next to lunch. Perhaps the women on the segment were solving the real problem - if you are going to access food during the journey, perhaps you don't want to have to pull out everything to get to a squashed lunch, to get to the diaper pail, or to find where the clean diapers were stored in the first place.

In my opinion, men are basically peacocks who love showing off, and tell how wonderful they are at showing off. In general, women prefer to just get the job done and hopefully get some recognition for it. Perhaps our assumption is wrong, that men cannot do everything as well as women can.

I heard somewhere that the best looking face is the average face. It is possible, because as Jane Austen said, people's appearance improves on getting to know someone (Persuasion). So if you see your spouse's face more often than anybody else's face, then their face will become more and more attractive to you. (Their face approaches the average face, for you.)

And this is the idea behind artificial neural networks, we hope the neural network will learn something of an average of what it's learning, and this idea is probably behind the Platonic ideal, because we all know what a dog is when we see one but as we know, there is much variation behind members of the canine species.

We each of us hear about things we don't know much about, we build idealized images of what we have no firsthand experience of in our heads. So if you grew up with stories of how dangerous a forest is, that it is full of big bad wolves or lyme disease.... you will probably not want to visit a forest. If every representation of a group of people you hear of is fear inducing, you will no doubt believe all people of this group are the same. Similarly, if you only see wildlife on nature shows, you'll probably have an idealistic (Disney-fied) impression that nature. I think it's the same for (human) babies.

If you know few women then how they are represented on TV becomes extremely important as Dr King understood when he convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek. While it was important to see black women as something other than house maids, women on TV had primarily been on TV purely as decorative. Even relatively recently a 37 year old actress was deemed too old to play the love interest of a 55 year old man. Seriously! (I have often thought mainstream media assumes the audience is all male so old men are making TV or movies for men.)

Men are routinely portrayed in a variety of roles, doing all the interesting things, yet women's primary function is to be an ornament or a prize for a man. While this is becoming better for movies and TV ocassionally, if you turn on the channel ID (I call them the murder channels) you quickly get the impression that the only good woman is young, pretty and dead. On ID we are told, women will say pretty much anything and are always to blame - whereas men are portrayed as good, the victims even if they are the murderer.

but, in general, too often the bad things men do are described as being done by 'people' whereas if we are talking about nobility in quotes it is often ascribed to 'man', 'men' or 'mankind'. Like the above quote, no part of that includes women. Do a google search on 'man' and 'nobility' - the quotes refer to pretty much any man - all men can be noble - whereas 'nobility' and 'women' will bring up paintings of queens - a very rare status that a very few women luck into.

Some while ago I wrote a blog entry about how 'crazy trump' or 'crazy republicans' were almost entirely accompanied by pictures of women. 'Crazy' is a word applied to women. So what do you think of when you hear the word 'crazy'? I feel annoyed when women say women can be as bad as men - yes indeed they can be, but on average they are not.

Look for the statistics of people who murder and yes, people who murder very much tend to be male, murder victims also tend to be male, yet the murder channels would have you think murder is a woman thing, that only women murder and they murder women. it happens, but on average it doesn't. Look at the statistics of women in prison for violent crimes verses men in prison for violent crimes. Then compare the numbers of prisoners, 97% of prisoners are male, 60% of those male prisoners are in prison for violent crimes. Yes outlier women can be as violent as men, but they are rare exceptions. And judges may have some bias but I doubt they are that biased.

Of any group of people there are good and bad examples, but when you see pictures of serial killers, there is one Aileen Wuornos for a whole raft of male serial killers. For example I recently watched this series on HBO about serial killers, and Wuornos was described as 'evil' while no such description was given to Gacy, Dahmer or Bundy....

The sciences are working hard to find historical women scientists yet still underplay women's achievements. For example if you read about Grace Hopper you will find she had something to do with developing COBOL and coining the term 'bug'. Whereas it was her team that invented the first compiler (if there had been no compiler there would be no internet, and there would be no computer in your home now). A man in a similar position probably also had a team but it'll never be mentioned.

The point is that women need to be represented in many ways, not just as ornaments instead of being stereotyped and set up for even more misogyny.

No one likes to feel trod upon, no one likes to feel crushed under the weight of another person's metaphorical foot, and I think that is the basis for all our -isms. Racism, sexism, body-ism... whatever the -ism, it's based on feeling better about your life and making others feel bad about .. whatever.

If you don't feel bad about whatever dishes up to you, it means you probably haven't been crushed by others as much as others often are.

When I drive with my husband he is unperturbed about winning at traffic lights, feels no need to drive superfast, does't care about overtaking or being overtaken, and whatever goes on in the minds of the oppressed when they feel the need to win at stupid stuff like traffic lights and overtaking the slower cars.

My guess is when you see a white supremacist you see an abused child, or a nurse who looks with derision at the disabled, you see someone who has been treated badly by the medical system.

The thing with a group of people in a minority is that they make a group of people you can get away with giving a hard time to. The people you don't give a hard time are people who you probably won't get away with it, like rich people, the good looking, the famous, older men, white in the west (or otherwise depending on where you live) rich old powerful men will get away with more because they'll be the ones who get away with bad behavior. Have you seen the lengths people had to go to to bring Weinstein to justice and these were powerful women he was raping/assaulting, indeed it seems like it was easier for them to bring Sandusky to justice despite the layers of belief society had to cut through. How many more women are routinely being assaulted/raped that society is still indenial about given how hard it was to bring down Weinstein?

Believing boys over women seems to be part of social hierarchy.

Men benefit from their reputation violence even if they personally aren't violent, because a random stranger doesn't know in advance if this man is violent or not, whether the man is litigious, how violent/dangerous his friends might be... same with women with a man/men, she gains their power via the same assumption. Perhaps this is the basis for the mother/son relationship that Fraud mythologized. Perhaps a woman's son was the first male she knew would truly be on her side and go to extraordinary lengths to protect her.

It's probably safe to give a woman by herself a hard time, she will probably have to suck up being the victim of bad behavior, she will have the choice to get litigious, but a lawyer will probably tell her to get over it, she could get violent, but society seriously frowns on female violence, besides she was likely raised to feel guilty so she will blame herself for whatever you might do to her. (If you don't believe me, just watch 'deadly women' on ID. Other shows on this channel will tell you women who are routinely beaten at home will deny it, so any woman who says she is beaten is therefore lying. (I kid you not!) and they paid a woman to say this piece of disgusting nonsense. So according to this logic, never believe a woman - wtf?)

Fortunately things are shifting. The important thing is remembering everyone is equally important despite possibly belonging to a minority. In any group of people there will be people of all kinds. One example doesn't necessarily apply to all people with a type of characteristics, e.g. degrees of melanin in their skin doesn't mean it's okay to give these people a bad time just because you have been made to feel put upon at some stage in your life. That is the characteristic of a bully.

When we recognize all people as equals we will suddenly be so much less stressed. There will be no need to win at traffic lights and make ourselves feel better at someone else's expense. People don't choose to have how much melanin they have, their disabilities, their gender... just to make other people's lives more difficult. And it should only be a difficulty for you if you choose to see it as such.

Don't men know stopping birth control while continuing to have sex could lead to pregnancy? I was just reading this book Zikora by Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie where it was claimed that it was normal. That men are feed a diet of porn where women are shaved and that was all men know about the female anatomy.
Google is not forthcoming about what men do and do not know so, perhaps one of their problems since they probably don't employ many women.
She does say that some republican man said women can keep their period in, kinda like needing to urinate while sitting in the car but waiting til you can home to use a restroom.  But republican men are well known to be utterly ignorant about women... given how little they know about women's reproduction in general. In my opinion, it's okay to not know something so long as you are prepared to admit you don't know and are willing to learn, yet republican men routinely think they know more than they do. (Can you imagine having Rand Paul as your doctor? And how embarrassing for Yale that he did his degree there?)

I am a huge Star Trek fan and as I watched some TOS the other day it occurred to me that the 'probably' best looking woman on the show was basically a servant, yet the 'probably' best looking man on the show was in-charge.

No doubt she would have been thought to wield soft power, she would have had access to the captain, and figured out a way of getting him to do what she wanted/needed - the kind of power that Joan Harris on Mad Men wielded rather than the power that Peggy Olsen wielded when she sacked the guy who annoyed Joan Harris in one of the earlier seasons (I gave up watching the show - it was boring.)

Regardless, the yeoman on Star Trek didn't last long, no matter how much soft power she wielded and also Kirk said he wasn't interested because he was already married to the Enterprise (the star ship he commanded). So perhaps she was able to get what she wanted sometimes but it was always via some kind of manipulation on her part.

And then one of my moderators was telling me about what modern female engineers look like and I pretty much lost it. I told my husband and even he said: what!?

In my opinion telling me what anyone looks like is the equivalent of racial profiling or some other form of stereotyping. Figuring out the appearance of what a female engineer or scientist looks like means you will necessarily be limiting the amount of science being done, because you assume anyone who doesn't meet your stereotype cannot do science.

I was watching a documentary 'Picture a scientist' where the women complained how much science they couldn't do because they were fighting discrimination. Initially I thought well all scientists are fighting down time, we all need to spend time doing the stuff of being human, like eating, showering, sleeping... But then I thought that what these women were missing out on instead was networking time, something the guys don't have to miss out on when they have downtime.

My husband's day starts by putting on the first t-shirt and shorts (it's summer) he can find and he doesn't even consider whether the colors clash. I start by brushing my hair, selecting matching clothes, checking my face in the mirror, applying moisturizer... who has the jump on the day?

And while I have way more hair than my husband, the yeoman has a very fancy hairdo that would've taken quite awhile longer to assemble than me brushing my hair. Perhaps things are getting better, but as I have gotten older I have noticed the soft power I may have wielded when I was younger only exists in my home when I get my husband to do my bidding. And that is lucky for me but it is useless for many other women who do not have husbands to help them, whether it's because they don't have one, don't want one, he's sick or he left for whatever reason (for instance working away from home).

Why shouldn't all women be able to afford to pay someone to do what she needs doing? But over the centuries money has been deliberately kept out of women's hands - indeed women are still being discriminated against in the workplace by doing the same job but being paid less for it. Of course over the centuries women weren't able to do many of the jobs they are permitted to do today.

Jane Austen, someone who was said to write romances, wrote a lot about the gaining of a living wage for women. The only real way for women to access money at the time, was by risking her life constantly in child birth to give her husband an heir or even cheap labour. This was in a time when women could not refuse her husband sex. When women ever tried to make money independently especially as a prostitute she was constantly labeled, never the man, using her services. Indeed I was reading a meme the other day about women sleeping their way to the top - she gets the label, yet the man favoring a woman with promotion because he wanted sex from her was - what? completely innocent - unable to control himself?

Why do we always give men the pass on sex and women always get the blame? I think this is away of undercutting competition down who might have some soft power. Indeed misogyny is everywhere, even including among other women. 

Essentially women are raised to be cheap or free labor.

I recently finished David Goggin's book Can't hurt me, an excellent book which I recommend everyone read.

He like so many many others has come from a violent home and presumably did not go on to beat up his various wives or kids.

Which made me think about that poor guy who decided to talk to me on twitter one night where he told me his story of his violent father and how he would get between his father and mother to protect her from his father's violence, and that night he was struggling with the same issue.

You can blame the woman for staying - but she and her kids need a home - but why doesn't the father leave if he hates his wife and kids so much?

Clearly the issue is complicated.

Lonnie Athens, a criminologist who also came from a violent home, wrote about the stages of violentization. His work became the basis for a documentary called why they kill based on a book by Richard Rhodes.

Basically individuals develop as a small child five personalities which they call upon, so it is vitally important to have positive role models available to all small children especially if they live in a home where violence is common. Not much of these personalities was discussed in the documentary I saw and whether they evolve in the individual's psyche, whether new ones can replace old ones, whether the personalities can evolve or mature. Perhaps Athens hasn't studied it enough to know, nevertheless, I assume we all probably have these personalities.

I have been wondering, given that I have written a number of times about how sex is used as a substitute for affection, I was wondering whether violence is also a substitute for affection, except for men it is okay to have sex and be violent, it is not okay for manly men to need affection. We are mammals, we need to touch and be touched; kind of like love and hate aren't opposites, the opposite of love is indifference.

Regardless of your childhood and the cruel hand the universe gave you, read Goggin's book, rather than hurt others as you have been hurt. Find a good role model, talk to that person in your head and ask them what they would do in this situation when you feel driven to purposely hurt another person. What gives you the right to hurt someone else?

Violence is a choice you don't have to make.

Goggin's at the end of his book says that life about suffering. While that may be true, the Dalai Lama says:

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them.

I believe with all my heart that we find everything in other beings, happiness, a reason to exist, and helping them is our only real reason for everything that we do.

Connection is really the opposite to loneliness and even if we have some connection, work, bosses, colleagues, it doesn't mean we aren't desperately lonely. I was listening to a story of a serial killer who'd invite people back to his place and murder them because he didn't want them to leave - essentially he was so lonely. Narcissistic parents are inclined to raise extremely lonely children.
Nevertheless however you were raised it's unacceptable to behave thus.
Lonnie Athens is a criminologist who developed theories on why people become criminally violent. I thoroughly recommend this documentary. But I think we all have these 5 personalities it's just violent people develop violent ones.

In the past I have said 'everything is connected' and I think I have been misconstrued. Chaos theory originally stated that the butterfly flapping its wings in New York caused tsunamis in Beijing or something like. Apparently the proponents of chaos theory have walked this back some because butterflies flap their wings all the time and don't cause tsunamis anywhere. 
I am always surprised no one tries to walk back this parallel universe theory and I am always aghast when people take it seriously. After all we are constantly making decisions, do I watch another episode of the x-files or do I go to bed? and we are constantly making such decisions all day long. If each decision indeed spawned another universe then where would they all go - after all, dogs and cats and other animals too are also making decisions - is a separate universe spawned for all my decisions, all your decisions and every other being on the planet? So every moment a new universe is spawned for every living creature on earth - or in the universe - every single moment of time. so even if we are talking about seconds - but decisions are quicker than seconds - so we are talking about the size of the universe x the living beings x instances of time. where are these universes stored and this is densely populated. It is born of male solipsism no doubt. It is seriously an embarrassing idea- yet people seem to believe it.
In a classical Newtonian world we live in a universe where everything is abstracted and things aren't connected. This is a frictionless world were experiments happen in isolation from everything else that is happening in the universe. And we have to admire Newton for being able to imagine a world without friction, because here on earth we live in friction world. Friction allows us to walk for example and the air we breathe protects us from cosmic radiation and a lot of space debris.
But we also live in a quantum world where everything has a de Broglie wavelength, even you and I. So while the impact of your radiation may be insignificant at a distance, I am still impacted however insignificantly.
While you might think this is a bit weaselly to say that all things are connected in quantum mechanics when applying it to the world we live in, but the reality it is.
if we can learn, then the universe can learn because we are fundamentally connected to the universe. IE if the universe didn't exist then we wouldn't exist (in this universe). Also we are a product of this universe and we evolved, which is a process we know is fundamental to the universe - because we know the universe evolved, galaxies evolved, stars evolve... we evolved. is there anything - seriously - that did not evolve? we even evolve technology. And we evolve in so so many ways. socially, intellectually, our understanding of the universe... we are not distinct from the universe. indeed, i have not read the article, but i'd say that the way the universe learns is by evolving.
No one builds anything by themselves. A society is only as good as how the least of us is treated. When each of has enough then all of us are better off because, simply, I don't have to worry about my neighbors trying to break into my house to steal my stuff if they already have enough. The single mother who doesn't have to work 3 jobs to feed her family is able to care for her kids herself rather than hope someone else is taking care of them instead.
The pollution in the river is eventually going to make it into the water supply and while the owner of the business polluting the river may be able to afford bottled water, can the employees? can their kids?
Everything is connected.