patriarchy.

it might at first seem rather remarkable that the word appears nowhere in the show, but then why would it in a panel on sexism composed of four men and one completely drowned out woman?

(although i should add that there is an attractive european woman invited to every panel i've ever seen this show put on, and she is always ignored and belittled by the host, so that's very much expected on the stream)

the mansplainers collectively display great difficulty grappling with why women are presented one way and men are not, unable to parse it through their concepts of egalitarianism. the sole female was given a brief chance to get to it, but was cut off before she could finish her thought.

to be fair, it's more reasonable to speak of the remnants of patriarchy. but, the remnants of patriarchy is the answer nonetheless. where women were once sold by their fathers to their husbands with little say in the matter, today they are given almost full autonomy over the process. yet, the market relationship between buyer and seller has not been abolished. the idea we have in our head is objectification, but the more accurate idea is commodification. the market is designed so that men are buyers and women are sellers. buyers do not need to advertise a product that they do not sell; sellers must advertise to be successful.

this is clearly an unequal situation, but it's roots are not in the media. what the marketing guy was trying to explain is that it's all about tapping into desire. the media may uphold the status quo, but it's the underlying culture that enforces the market relation.

true egalitarianism will not come when women stop selling, it will come when women start buying, which will be a function of their economic power.

so, be patient with this.

why do so many people have so much difficulty in confusing maturity with conformity?

i suspect it's a lack of maturity, actually.

but there's a lot of pressures coming down from the top, too.

i don't really want to come down particularly hard on conformists, whether it's genuine or strategic. i recognize the value of conformity as a survival tactic. i always have...

...but let's not confuse that with maturity. k?

"while generally regarded as a text on political philosophy, leviathan is also a treatise on the natural sciences that was written before newton, einstein, freud, jung, darwin and gauss. further, while hobbes may have been friends with bacon, he shows no interest in the scientific method, preferring to emulate the synthetic philosophy of geometers past. worse, he builds his politics out of his understanding of the natural sciences using a method then referred to as materialism (which is related to but quite different than what we think of as materialism today). the result can only be described as a lot of nonsense, written from a point of extreme ignorance."

from time to time, hobbes surprises but these surprises are a function of my own ignorance rather than hobbes' insight. the most important thing i've learned reading hobbes is that a number of ideas that i thought were attributable to newton are in fact older (and mostly attributable to galileo).

they need to stop interviewing kissinger. he's completely out of touch. clinton bombed him into history.

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/05/10/kissinger-putin-likely-didnt-plan-to-bring-ukraine-situation-to-a-head/

and people wonder why i just don't bother engaging with western media. it's a waste of time...

http://rt.com/news/158252-ukraine-pakistan-cnn-mistake/