All I see lately is people complaining about the violence on Game of Thrones, how it’s not “realistic.”

Well, dumbasses, the books and TV series are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses which were extremely violent. So violent that 28,000 people died in one battle alone.

If anything the violence on the show is somewhat understated.

Check this out. As mentioned 28,000 people died in one day in one battle alone in the Wars of the Roses. This was one percent of the entire English population in 1461. Did I mention this was in one battle?

This is the equivalent of 3,200,000 people in the US dying in one day.

Or if everyone in Chicago and Minneapolis dropped dead right this instant.

So tell me again how horribly, unrealistically violent Game of Thrones is? So, yeah, what do you say?

I get so frustrated with how clueless Americans are about basic history. Just can people really be this moronic? How is this possible?

Hell yeah, someone who is not a fucking moron writing about Supergirl.

The whole piece is great so it’s hard to pull a quote. Just read it. But this part is an easy pull for me because I tend to appreciate someone who actually knows the history of anything. That is very, very rare.

The point to remember is that riffing on existing tropes isn’t inherently bad. It’s the combination of teenage-girl high school tropes and superhero action that helped make Buffy The Vampire Slayer the glorious piece of genre television that it is. I’m not saying Supergirl will definitely be the next Buffy, but the potential is definitely there. It isn’t automatically bad that it looks familiar.

And the thing about superheroes is that romance is baked into their DNA. Hardcore comics nerds will know that when superheroes became popular in the 60s, it was off the back of writers and artists who had been working in the romance genre for years beforehand. Pick almost any 60s Marvel book off the shelf – Daredevil, Spider-Man, X-Men, Thor, Iron Man – and you’ll probably find a romance subplot inside. After creating Captain America in the 1940s, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby literally invented the Romance comic genre with 1947’s Young Romance #1, and that visibly fed back into Kirby’s Marvel work in the 60s – and you’ll struggle to find a Marvel Studios movie that doesn’t in some way rest on Kirby’s work.

And this.

The problem with this complaint is that the phrase “strong female character” has been misapplied so long to mean “physically and mentally without weakness” rather than “well-defined” (as it briefly, originally meant), that sometimes people hoping for a strong female lead get disappointed if a woman has personality traits that might be seen as in any way weak or frivolous.

Most feminist complaints seemed to amount to, “She’s not being a badass every single second of her waking life. She has doubts and fears and sometimes feels weak or unsure. Therefore the show is a failure!”

What a ridiculous grievance. I don’t even have words for how worthless that sort of criticism is, or how terrible and un-fun watching that sort of character usually is.

The show might end up being terrible. I don’t know. But most of the criticism about the trailer and the show seems to be some of the most clueless and unintelligent that I’ve read about anything.

BMI is a bad measure. All the fat acceptance nutters will tell you that.

And they’re right. The evidence indicates that it actually under-reports obesity.

A smaller scale study (1,691 persons) using DEXA scans (seen as a valid body fat measuring device) found that there was a 34.7% discrepancy between BMI and DEXA for women and 35.2% for men.^[7] However, BMI appeared to misclassify women as less fat as they were by DEXA; notable misclassifications include 20.3% of women being obese via BMI while DEXA showed 37.1%, 24.8% of men being obese via BMI compared with 38.4% of men being obese via DEXA. These results have been replicated in which persons in the normal BMI range were actually obese according to body fat percentage (20% of men, 9.2% of females) and more persons in the overweight BMI range were actually obese by body fat percentage (67.2% of men, 84.2% of females).^[8] High obesity rates in this study may be partially explained by socioeconomic issues, as it comprised Mexican persons (n=538) living in the southern USA. Finally, another study utilizing DEXA on a sample size of 1,393 persons found that 26% of persons were classified obese by BMI while 64% of persons were obese by DEXA; a misclassification rate (false negatives) of 25% for men and 48% for women was noted.^[2]

While I am certainly biased against the FA movement and all their ridiculousness and thus more likely to favor evidence that benefits “my” side, there is hardly any evidence in favor of their claims and loads of evidence against them.

Back where I grew up these people would have been called “powerful stupid.”