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I got thinking about this after watching an interview with Steven Pinker, one of my academic crushes, and then another interview with Jordan Peterson. Both referred to biological differences between men and women, although in different ways, and I wanted to do a post exploring my own take on sex and gender differences, and the… Continue reading Separating Out Sex/Gender, Biology and Social Construct
Political correctness drives some people crazy, while others think that being careful about language is necessary to keep from causing offence. There are all kinds of people out there being intentionally offensive (just look at Twitter), but to what extent should we as a society go hunting for it when it's not intended? I don't… Continue reading Is Political Correctness Helpful or Ineffective?
BC Ministry of Transportation On May 27, Canada was shaken out of its coronavirus haze by a press release from the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops Indian Band) stating that the remains of 215 children had been found buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The school, operated by the Catholic Church in… Continue reading Indian Residential Schools: Canada’s National Disgrace
I recently saw a post by The Opinionated Woman titled The World Is Built for Extroverts. My comment was that the COVID world is build for introverts, and I thought I'd elaborate on that a bit. To start off, let's consider what introverts and extroverts are. Introversion and extroversion lie on a spectrum, with most… Continue reading The COVID World Is Built for Introverts
As human beings, each of us is more alike than we are different. In fact, we all share 99.9% of the same genes, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Despite all of this sameness, we pay a lot of attention to differences... but only some differences are socially relevant, and the rest we… Continue reading Why Are Only Some Differences Socially Relevant?
Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazi regime and their collaborators systematically rounded up and murdered approximately six million Jews. Sadly, there were genocides before, and have been genocides since, but this one was particularly atrocious, both in number of people murdered and the cold-blooded, systematic nature of it. The museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has… Continue reading International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Image by Emiliano Gaudiello from Pixabay Today is Blue Monday, supposedly the saddest day of the year. This idea originated as a PR stunt by Sky Travel in the UK back in 2005, but it's picked up steam since then, probably because it seems reasonable on the face of it. After all, it's not a pretty time of… Continue reading Words of Wisdom from MLK for Blue Monday
There are some significant barriers that people living in poverty face when it comes to managing their finances. However, these may not always be obvious, so let's talk about them. Let's consider what it might look like to be living in poverty here in British Columbia, Canada, where I live. Provincial income assistance payments, including… Continue reading Poverty Can Be Very Expensive
Ceponatia of Dogmatic Panic wrote a while back about social media claims that a film was whitewashing. It reminded me of a conversation about on-screen representation of marginalized groups that I'd had with someone not long before that. The beginnings of this post languished in my drafts folder for quite a while, until I saw… Continue reading Marginalized Groups and On-Screen Representation
Every year, Google Trends releases its Year In Search data, with the most searched for terms in the past year in different countries and for different categories. Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 dominated the year in search. One of the things I find fascinating is how it's influenced our vocabulary. It's also spawned some odd phenomena, like the… Continue reading 2020 Year in Review: Google Trends