Sometimes they need a slap!
We named the dog Indiana...
Hm so yeah
Sean Connery was quite the icon. Of course the past that he represents was riddled with sexism, racism, toxic masculinity, and whatever else you want to call it. Back then, this was celebrated, and today it is shunned due to the liberal swing of events such as the #metoo movement, cancel culture, antifa, and all that other Jazz.
This guy isn't too pleased that so many people are pissing on his grave the day of, and neither am I. We don't just get to take all that negative energy and then thrust it on a dead guy like it was all his fault. Saying you're glad someone's dead because they did some misogynist stuff back in the day doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a hypocrite. It's the same as all those religious folks who run around claiming they respect the teachings of Jesus while justifying their own hate and rage against insert_topic_here.
The idea of feminism is tainted.
I think if we were to ask a lot of people they'd tell us a feminist is an angry woman who hates men and thinks she can do anything a man can do. This is wrong on all counts. Feminism is a subset of equal rights. If you believe in equal rights and stand against slavery and the concept of second class citizens (and class in general)... that makes you a feminist. That makes me a feminist. Lots of people out there are feminists and don't even know it because they have this other abomination of an idea shoved down their throats on a daily basis.
No, a women can't do anything a man can do.
And it's stupid to even attempt to make that claim. What's next? Are we going to claim that hammers are equivalent to screwdrivers and a screwdriver can do anything a hammer does and vice versa? What an idiotic thing to say. Seriously, just stop.
There's a reason why women have their own sports leagues. The answer to that question is obvious. Women can't compete on the same level as men in pretty much every sport their is. The issue doesn't have anything to do with who can do what. The issue at hand is a matter of respect and societal values.
There is a bunch of stuff women can do better than men, but as a whole, society doesn't value those skills very highly and they get swept under the rug as second-class citizens.
My opportunities in this world have been greatly exaggerated by the left.
Even more annoying, none of this stuff is black and white and it all exists on a spectrum. So people like me who are white straight males get told to "check our privilege" like we have it so good. Spoiler alert: I make $12,000 a year in California, one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the world. My health insurance is shit and/or non-existent. I've been on food-stamps for over a decade. I've even been the victim of racism one time which was pretty weird.
That's right!
I basically don't have a computer science degree right now because of the color of my skin. I was essentially told by the Vice Dean of San Diego State University that because I was white and from an affluent area that I was not allowed to come back to the school after dropping out. She literally had me pin my hometown on a map and heavily implied if I had been black and/or from a poor neighborhood she would have helped me out. What the actual fuck?
So after writing this scathing letter about the whole thing and determined to take it to a higher authority, I eventually decided that it wasn't worth my time to maybe get back into school so I could become another mindless drone code monkey making some corporation rich. Time vampires are the worst.
The entire trajectory of my life was changed by that moment. It's possible that if that hadn't happened I would have never even gotten interested in crypto, so these days I look at it like a silver lining.
Checking my priv
So yeah I came to realize that for other marginalized groups... they don't experience this kind of thing once in their life, but rather dozens. Sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. run pretty rampant when allowed, and when it isn't allowed it doesn't disappear, it simply hides underground and becomes passive-aggressive.
For a while my girlfriend was giving me a hard time about "not liking" the movie Black Panther. I gave it a C+... offense was apparently taken. I'm allowed to "not like" a movie if I feel like it. You know the best part of that movie for me was that the token white guy almost dies and I was like, "Ha, so this is what it feels like... kinda."
Also I found out somewhat recently that that Broadway play Hamilton has essentially an all black cast playing the founding fathers with the one white guy being the literally crazy king of England. Just the knowledge of how many people must have been offended by that tickled my inner troll. I'll probably have all the songs memorized soon because my girlfriend and roommate work from home now in the same room that I write these posts. Random stuff like that gets played a lot round these parts these days. No complaints... yet.
While were on topic...
Back in August I read this very sexist article about how female Viking warriors (shield-maidens) are an absolute impossibility. I've kind of been dreading writing about it and keep putting it on the back burner but I guess now's the time.
https://www.hellulandnews.com/talk/2017/9/9/questions-to-shield-maidens
How did you, bad ass woman warriors, manage to prevail against male enemies, with 40% less muscle mass than men in the upper body, and 33% less in the lower body? Or with less dense bones and weaker tendons and ligaments? How did you handle impacts, blunt force, and trauma to the face, with a weaker facial bone structure than your male assailants? Without activation of the right amygdala of your brain, how on earth did you manage to not be more reactive to pain than your male adversaries?
How did you achieve, oh mighty shield maidens, to rewire your brain so, when faced with a threat, you didn’t tend and befriend like women have been programmed to do by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, but instead, did flight or fight like men? With less white matter in your pre-frontal cortex than men, how did you compensate for analyzing dangers and situations slower and less efficiently than your male enemies? With a thicker paretial section of the brain than men, how did you manage to beat your male opponents when it came to visualization of multi-dimensional objects, such as an axe about to land in your (softer) skull?
OMFG it just goes on and on.
The sarcasm is offensive, and the conclusions are silly.
How did you handle impacts, blunt force, and trauma to the face, with a weaker facial bone structure than your male assailants?
Really? If you get hit in the face with a mace, you're dead... end of story. Silly.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/viking-shieldmaidens
This post on the subject is a lot less offensive.
So apparently they found a grave of a Viking warrior that ended up being a woman and there's a lot of speculation on the issue. On one side of the coin, lying or exaggerating about such a thing fits in with the whole left wing tainted feminist agenda that a woman can do anything a man can do. But is it really so ridiculous?
Female warriors seem to be a thing that people want to see these days on screen and fantasize about. As it pertains to the whole Viking shieldmaiden thing, I have some thoughts.
I've already admitted that of course men would make better warriors than women on the average. Men are better at all sports on average which is why women need their own leagues. However, some very interesting things come out of women who play male-dominated sports.
As a poker player I can tell you first hand that we see very few women in the field. Less than one out of ten, perhaps even closer to one out of a hundred. Think about that for a moment, that's somewhere between 1% and 10%. So what's my impression of female poker players?
On average, they are must better than men.
Correct, the average female poker player is way better than the average male. That's because poker is such a male dominated sport, the only women who stick around are the ones who take it super seriously. They also tend to get underestimated a lot which turns into a pretty big advantage for them.
So even if men on average are better than women at something like poker, that doesn't matter, because the subset of women actually playing the game are way better than the average. This same concept also would apply to Viking Shieldmaidens.
If only 1% of Viking women were interested in combat, you can be damn sure that top 1% of women would be better at it than the top 50% of men. Sure, none of them would be the best fighters, but the grave in question also found a battlefield strategy board, so there is also an aspect of battle strategy that is overlooked.
The whole situation kinda reminds me of a friend I had way back in the day in San Diego. She was a pretty physical person. Did a lot of rock climbing and bike riding. Things like that. One day I went on a bike ride with her on my 10-speed and she kicked my ass on her little fixed-gear. Again, she was taking it seriously on a day to day basis, and I was the green newbie getting my ass kicked.
A guy can't just jump on the scene with zero experience and expect to kick a girl's ass.
Considering Vikings were smash-and-grab raiders, would it really be so ridiculous that a female warrior would be superior to the randoms that attempted to defend against their pillaging? I'm guessing not, and it's not like they left a lot of survivors to tell the tale. Even if they did know for a fact that Vikings had women warriors, who would want to report that they "lost to a girl". That kind of story back in the day would have been the end of you.
Vikings were already more fierce warriors than most of the resistance they ran into. Even if they just had a few women in their to pad the center of a shield wall that could be enough to have a numbers advantage to allow the stronger warriors to flank from the sides and dominate the opponent.
So a lot of skeptics out there ask why there weren't any eye-witness accounts of these mythical female warriors. To which I would ask, "How would they have known?" Are we assuming that shieldmaidens would have looked like their Hollywood counterparts?
Get real!
Long hair is a liability. Large breasts are a liability. Being a woman is a liability. Shieldmaidens would have looked absolutely NOTHING like how we portray them on screen. They would have looked like men by design. Anything less would make them a bigger target.
Again, I'm skeptical if Shieldmaidens actually existed, but to deny the possibility completely is a really foolish thing to do. Raw strength is only one component of many variables in combat. It's just as much about strategy, form, grace, and precision. It doesn't take a whole lot of strength to fire an arrow into someone center-mass.
When you're training with the best, I don't think it would be that hard for a Viking woman in the top 1% to dominate the average opponents they were running into. Just like poker... just like other sports where the men take it far less seriously. You can't just take a look at the top of the pyramid and make a decision based on the fact that obviously the best of the best warriors were men. Something to think about I guess.
Conclusion
Ah, what was this about again? Right! RIP Sean, apparently you won't be missed. Ironically that is somehow more offensive than your sexism and toxic masculinity ever will be.