In the US, women are 0% of presidents and 30% of congress, but a full 60% of voters. It's not that men won't vote for women, 40% of men voted for Kamala, it's that women won't. If women don't have enough representation, they have nobody to blame but themselves. #gender #politics #feminism #election #voting

Thank you MLK for your contribution to humanity's progress and enlightenment. MLK day is usually marked as a celebration of progress on racial inequality, but we should also see it as a poignant reminder of the danger of government, particularly when it is allowed to act in the shadows. And that one person can change the world. It is worth remembering: - MLK's alleged assassin pled guilty immediately and therefore never received a trial. Immediately afterwards, he recanted his guilty plea and said he didn't do it. - The US's own congress investigated his assassination and concluded it there was a high "likelihood of conspiracy" and that the guy they nailed for it was likely a patsy, motivated by money. They also admonished the FBI for failing to properly investigate the crime - His assassination happened among the backdrop of COINTELPRO, a massive government program aimed to silence dissenting voices in the US through surveillance, harassment, blackmail, and worse. At one point, the government sent MLK threatening letters in an effort to get him to commit suicide. Today's government has more unchecked power, more ability to surveil, and has not stopped engaging in programs like this. It is our duty as citizens to oppose and remember them. Because they really, really want us to forget. It's why you've never seen a full color picture of him, even though there are plenty of them. MLK would be 97 years old this week. Thank you MLK for your vision and you sacrifice. Onwards. Freedom is the goal.

COINTELPRO - Wikipedia

There is an explanation aside from bias and sexism as to why you don't see many women in leadership positions, sitting on corporate boards, running the legislature, or being the "best in their field". Uncomfortable, but let's go there. Let's start with a controversial statement: even in skills where women are on average better than men, the best person at that skill is likely to be a man, and the top 10% of people in that skill are likely to mostly be men. Let me explain. Step 1. Take pretty much any trait: height, speed, risk aversion, IQ, EQ, ability to rotate a 3D object in your head, political views, whatever. Step 2: Take a random sample of 1000 people (500 men, 500 women) Step 3: Look at your top 10 and bottom 10 in that sample. Who have the most of that trait? The least? It's almost all men. The smartest person in the room is likely to be a man, so is the dumbest. Why? Because when you plot out most traits, women tend to cluster together whereas men tend to spread out more. You will find more men at the extremes. Are there women at the extremes? Of course there are, there's just less of them. This is called the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis. This is present not just in humans, but in many other animals as well including our closest ancestors. Not all traits are subject to this, it tends to be traits that are linked to sexual selection. And while this variability can be impacted by things like culture, it's clear that it has an underlying biological basis, that's why we see it elsewhere in the animal kingdom. So when we are looking at any system you have that selects for a particular trait, even traits where women and men are generally expected to have similar abilities on average, and you'll find that the top positions for those traits tend to be held by men. It's why even in places where you expect women and men to not have any key differences in ability, like scrabble tournaments, the winners tend to be male. That's true even when you control for things like the number of hours played in preparation for the tournament. Unless some ground-breaking research comes out, men are not inherently better at scrabble. Biology does not grant scrabble ability to only men for some reason, in fact, women tend to do better at language tasks than men. But in any sample, you will have a few men who are extremely good at language and extremely poor at language and there will be more of them than women at the tail end of that distribution. Does sexism exist? Absolutely, and studies shows it goes both ways depending on where you're looking and how you're measuring. Look at the "women are wonderful" effect if you want to see an extremely well documented gender bias that works in favor of women. This is complicated, there are obviously a million factors that go into something like picking the best 10 scrabble players in the world, trait variability does not explain all of it. But because this thing of men being more widely varied in traits permeates pretty much everything, it's worth keeping in mind when looking at why certain systems are primarily run by men instead of women. Another major factor that plays into all the systems we mentioned above is men in general being more prone to risk-taking. Awareness of this bias is important. If people assume everything is biased against women or other subgroups of the population, they design systems to correct for it which are based on poor assumptions. An example of where a lack of awareness of this bias made things worse is when major orchestras started having blind auditions in the name of increasing diversity only to find out that blind auditions exacerbated the problem: instead of taking into account the desired diversity of the group they had to go off only playing ability and guess who the top players tended to be? White men, followed by white women. And so now, in the name of diversity, they are getting rid of blind auditions. Instead of picking players based on their performance ability with no knowledge of their gender or race, they are now choosing to explicitly choose gender or race over performance ability because it still wasn't equal enough. It sounds like an onion headline, but it's real life. Again, it's not that the average man has any more ability to play an instrument than the average woman, but that if you take a sample of men and women and look at top 10% and bottom 10% of players, most of them will be men. A few might be women, but most will be men. And that effect will hold true even if the average woman is better at that skill or has more of that trait than the average man.

The irony about debt is that you want to live with as little of it as possible, but die with as much of it as possible. How do you navigate this nostr? #asknostr #finances #debt #personalfinance

Idk who decided a sandwich should be $18 but I will not comply.

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I will never not find it hilarious when men are worried about women using them for their money. My brother in Christ, just don't spend money on them and don't give them money. It's really not that hard. If you start things off by paying for dates and end up being treated like a checking account, congratulations, you played yourself. #relationships #dating

A lot of people on nostr came here to "speak freely" and "not be cancelled" but it turns out they actually just wanted a safe space where nobody would challenge their unhinged anti-social viewpoints

Thinking everything is a spectrum, and everyone lies somewhere within it, is a quick and powerful way to a more compassionate world. The danger comes from designing policy and cultural expectations around the notion that those spectrums are normally distributed, because they are not. Systems built on false assumptions do not perform well and become unstable when pressure is applied to them.

GM been using nostr as a budgeting tool. How has nostr improved your life in unexpected ways? Every time I eat at home instead of eating out, I figure I save at least 3000 sats. So to help motivate this, I tell myself I can donate 1000 sats to a random nostr user every time I do. Much more powerful motivator than knowing I saved money. Love bringing a smile to so somebodys face and getting to pick valuable projects to send zaps to. #asknostr #gm #pv

I love the snappiness and minimalism of #xfce, but I'm partial to the big dock icons like macos or Ubuntu unity has instead of tiny text on a taskbar menu. Is there a way to get this feature in xfce or otherwise in Linux #mint? #linux #asknostr