Vivat Libertas

Dear reader, whoever you are, I want you to know this: women aren't stupid. If you know me, you might be slightly confused because I'm constantly ranting about how stupid humanity is, so I might as well amend that statement: women are not some special kind of magical, sparkly, feminine stupid that somehow manages to make other genders look cleverer by comparison. We are just as intelligent (or as stupid) as you are. At this point, if you're going to trot out men having bigger brains than women or having higher IQs than women, I have this to say to you: firstly, men are physically bigger than women. This is why their brains are bigger. Relative body size has to be factored in when talking about relative brain size. As to men having higher IQs than women? Laying aside the debate about whether IQ is a decent measure of intelligence (because there is a debate, and because once you get past a couple of standard deviations it does break down quite spectacularly when it comes ...

Polemics make me really, really, really, really uncomfortable. Now, there are probably a lot of people who think I'm a spineless, easily scared little shit for saying that - and they may be right. I don't know. The thing is, I dislike polemics of any  kind - I even dislike polemics that agitate for causes I support. It's a strange thing to say, and maybe one that will end up undoing something or other - but I have set it out and I might as well defend it. Polemicists and polemics - even polemicists and polemics for causes I agree with - make me uncomfortable because they don't seem to care about the truth, only about pushing their agenda. Even if they say their agenda is the truth - is it really? I doubt it. I consider myself a seeker after truth; a very bad seeker after truth, but a seeker nonetheless. I know that little if anything is certain and that my model of the universe could change any time. I doubt and question everything. But in polemics, there is no ...

Balance very much seems to be something people strive for - or at least pay lip service to striving for - whether in their personal lives, where people stress themselves out trying to get their perfect stress-free life, or in their viewpoints; when talking about journalism or weighing up evidence there's sure to be some mention of balance somewhere, even if the people involved are rabid polemicists who would sooner run away from any kind of balance than ever temper their opinions. (Yeah, I don't like polemicists. Bite me.) I personally seek truth, not polemics, rhetoric or verbal fireworks - and thus I appreciate balance. No, I don't just appreciate balance - I get incredibly pissed off if I can't find this balance because some stupid, lazy, ignorant, agenda-driven person doesn't want to give me other sides of the argument. Even if I agree with them - say if it's an article about how evolution is right - I'll still get pissed off. Now can you see why I...

I am one sick, tired, ill, disillusioned fucker. It's not a pleasant thing to admit to, and it's not one that I would have wanted to admit to. A little over a year ago, as a bright-eyed, enthusiastic, in retrospect still rather naive girl of fifteen, I couldn't have imagined this happening - but that's stupidity for you. And then school and depression and critical thinking and not being able to do as much as I would have liked to have done got in the way, and now (though I'm on the mend) I ate so much cynical I turned into some kind of broken machine. It makes me feel quite bad; other people tell me to never give up hope. I'm not very good at that. Other people, too, stick to blind ideology. They think that killing for a pet cause is fine, or that putting all their faith in one group is a good idea. I've seen too many groups turn out to have very, very, very bad parts, though, to reasonably be able to do that. I'm too wary of putting my trust in a...

I'm really sick of elitism. I know other people are, too. I don't expect to be making any groundbreaking statements - I never do; I specialise in common sense. But I'm really sick of people who complain about how the ordinary person on the street isn't sufficiently advanced and enlightened for any kind of free society. Instead, they say, we should all be subject to someone else's authority for a strong society - or who knows what could go wrong?! Heavens, people might agitate for things like equality and a society that doesn't exploit people! Well, quite apart from the morality of an autocratic state, there are obviously problems with the idea that a despot makes for a better ruler - namely, there is no evidence that a single ruler, or a few rulers, are better than letting everyone weigh in on an issue. In fact, concentrating all the power in the hands of just one person is probably not  a good idea, as the needs of an entire state are then subject to the ...

As I write this I'm busy sitting here eating total crap. Now, I don't like eating total crap, normally; I eat more healthily than that most of the time. I try to cut down on how much I eat and things like that. Neither - for anyone who cares about these sorts of things - do I get them from giant, soulless corporations...well, not directly at least. The ingredients are sourced from giant, soulless corporations (and full of people too, which doesn't exactly do wonders for my misanthropy), but fuck it, if I'm going to increase my risk of all sorts of serious conditions and illnesses I'm going to prepare my doom for myself. Tonight, I'm eating total crap because, well, fuck it! I've been craving it for hours and a little bit won't hurt. And as for why I'm writing this? Because I love being lazy. At this point some people are going to get confused and wonder what exactly I'm on about. Why would I enjoy being lazy? Why wouldn't I instead wo...

I have a big, big mouth that I need to shut, I think, but something's been getting on my nerves and I feel I have to say it... ...The upshot is, I've met a lot of people who say they're trying to do good in some way or another, but they're not. They're either doing nothing or actively harming others, and I'm sick of it. Let's start with the people who do nothing - the people who sit around saying things but don't even take the smallest of actions. I'm quite sick of us. I'm quite sick of people who think all it takes to be good is to act outraged on Twitter, because words and petitions will only get you so far - then you need to get something done. All the same, I prefer the people who get nothing  done to the people who set us back - and there are many. I don't say this because I want to start drama or make people paranoid, but I've seen too many do-gooders who end up doing some quite horrible things. So you say you want to do goo...

Ah, the false dichotomy, a favoured tool of people who somehow think it'll get you on their side...which normally means idiots. It's probably older than dirt, and while I haven't been around for that long I've definitely been around long enough to get sick of it. I first learned about the false dichotomy in a quasi-academic manner - by looking it up on Wikipedia, in fact, out of curiosity. Being a shy person and not really being around people who liked to argue (well, except for me), I didn't really get much of a chance to do any fallacy-spotting until I was a bit older and more social. And now that I am actually older and more social, I don't regret that I've done my fallacy-spotting. I don't regret that I've seen a lot of stupidity and cruelty. I just truly wish that I could do more than just sit on my arse and whine all day, and sometimes I can't even do that... ...As to why I'm so sick of it? Because I'm sick of people having thei...

In light of Caitlin Moran's incredible stupidity and in light of seeing so many other privileged white, cis feminists be racist, transphobic, ableist and other such things - whether out of malice or privileged ignorance - I have had an idea, and one that I think might be worth a try. In a conversation about this with @WeekWoman (who is well worth a follow) she mentioned that all feminists have different experiences and because of that it's so important that we all listen to each other, otherwise we're not promoting feminism: we're promoting individualism in the sense of doing what's best for ourselves, rather than for all women. Now, infighting pisses me off, as does lack of understanding. It angers, upsets and sickens me when people end up working at cross-purposes; it upsets me even more when it's because people don't understand each other. For those of you who don't get this: we could be busy tearing down the kyriarchy, but instead we're te...

Because equations are awesome. So, as most people might not know were it not for the Google Doodle, today's the 127th anniversary of Niels Bohr's birthday. I'm not going to talk about his life (mostly because I'm lazy, partly because the internet's got a wealth of information about him already), but I am  going to talk about the influence him and the other greats of physics have had on me. You might wonder how a bunch of dead white males from the first half of the twentieth century could possibly influence a sixteen-year-old girl - a sixteen-year-old girl, mind you, who hasn't even gone to university yet and whose knowledge of theoretical physics, and the maths behind it, is thus very limited. Moreover, that physics is relatively old - even the positron, the first evidence of antimatter, was discovered in 1932; the modern theory of antimatter itself originates in a 1928 paper by Paul Dirac . Even something as exotic as antimatter is ancient (not that it...