People cannot imagine a world where LGBT people are fully assimilated into and accepted by religious movements, and where unmarried and “promiscuous” women are still demonized and face moral and legal sanctions but alas that world is at least somewhat likely.

Like many things, those two cluster of ideas being convergent are only truly connected by historical association. Historical associations can be broken, and often are. Divergences and convergences of other ideas are more likely than not.

Not to be bleak, but rather taking realism to its tenebrous conclusion, misogyny and demonization of women seems a historical constant, while other beliefs not as much.

Thus the obvious suppositions and postulations leading to the somewhat large probability space above.

I don’t like it, but rather than evicting it from my mind I prefer to realize turns that can be taken given the data that is available.

Ed feels the same way I do about the Israel-Palestine slaughter.

Reporting on the conflict also tends to the ridiculous extremes: the virtuous Israelis defending themselves against subhuman terrorist child-killers, or the poor, defenseless, blameless Palestinians minding their own business until Israel decides to start killing people en masse. On balance, in recent years my sympathies are probably more on the Palestinian side but I want to be emphatic that I see no Good Guys and Bad Guys in the conflict.

Agreed. The reality is that if the Palestinians were dominant, they would be slaughtering just as many Israelis as the Israelis are now murdering on the Palestinian side. Very likely more.

Neither side is right or unsullied. We love underdogs, and the Israelis are pure evil for murdering innocents, but it is hard for me to have much sympathy in general for religious nuts and right-wing fascists killing each other.

The individuals who want to just live their lives, who are caught in the middle, that is another story.

How good is my mind?

The technology industry is the only one I am aware of where white men experience extremely significant discrimination after the age of 40-45 (and in some places much younger).

Yeah, to some extent age-related discrimination occurs in every field. But nothing, nothing like in the tech industry. In some geographic areas and fields in the tech industry, if you are beyond 30, you are over the hill. If you are older than 35, you are a doddering, senescent incompetent, and if you dare pass 40, you are dead.

Your actual skills, abilities and experience don’t matter at all; nor the fact that you are much better, faster and more knowledgeable than your younger peers. It’s a religious belief that management likes and condones because younger people are easier to exploit and demand less money.

1) Unlike in the movies, for the most part members of the military do not salute indoors or on battlefields or in combat zones.

2) About people racking shotguns or racking the slides on guns in movies: if you have to rack a weapon, the chamber was empty before! So that means in all these dramatic scenes where someone is in grave danger and holding a weapon, if they have to rack before the pull the trigger, the weapon prior to that was not functional.

3) The word “cool” – meaning detached smoothness – first started being used in that sense in the 16th century.

4) All tea varieties – black, green, white &c. – are produced from the same species, Camellia sinensis. They are just processed differently.

5) Airplane’s black boxes are orange.

6) Most bacterial infections of the skin that people identify as “spider bites” were not caused by spiders, as spiders do not commonly bite humans.

7) Many etymologies of words, even those found in dictionaries, are little better than codified urban legends.

8) Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, savoy, kohlrabi and Chinese kale are all cultivars of the same plant, Brassica oleracea.

9) Humanity very likely experienced a population bottleneck in the Late Paleolithic during which the population may have been as low as 2,000 individuals.

10) If the solar system could be filled with air (same as earth’s atmospheric composition) out to Neptune at the density of atmosphere on earth at sea level, and if it could somehow be made not collapse, it would still be a black hole with only that density.

Approximately 42% of English words are loaned (aka “appropriated”) from other languages.

Since so many of the words we use every day are in fact appropriated from other languages and thus other cultures, under the logic of resistance to cultural appropriation, most Tumblr SJWs and their ilk who demand the immediate desistance from cultural appropriation should cease speaking English immediately as they will not likely have the linguistic skills to determine which words are appropriated and which are not.

Or they could learn one of the many varieties of “pure” English – or one that befits their particular culture’s specific English argot – and omit all the rest.

Somehow I doubt a lot of SJWs are going to be learning Anglish or its variants any time soon.

(Yes, I am being a bit mordant and even though I agree with many of the goals of this sort of social justice, I think a lot/the majority of these people are relatively uneducated, intellectually stunted and use this sort of thing to gain attention and demonstrate their worth and status than for any other actually-helpful goal.)