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Feminism
No, we've not won yet. I'm not going to link to the video on which a male spewed out the bitter resentment festering in his inferior mind in the form of a claim that Hermione, in Harry Potter, is a "terrible role model" because she's competitive, defensive, and a good student.
I am going to say that Hermione is a good role model for girls, many of whom have very little choice about being at the head of every class during the years when schools are required to spoon-feed the three R's to those wretched boys who can't see the print yet. Defensive? Inevitably so. But she matures and works through it. Hermione's a best-case role model because, through friendship with Harry and Ron, she's able to preserve some sympathy for other humans, even males. Hermione, who does want a child, doesn't have to spend her best childbearing years processing her feelings about the ickiness of having to spend time around a male body in order to have a baby "of her own." Better yet, Hermione is able to appreciate Ron as a man, rather than feeling that the two boys she can stand are "more like brothers" or "more like girls," and vice versa, so Hermione's not going to be one of the even larger number of twenty-something girls who don't realize how deeply icky a lot of twenty-something boys are until they've become single mothers. Of, in some cases, AIDS babies.
What happens when a woman's not locked herself into a single "career path" at seventeen, does well in most or all classes, wants to be a mother, and does not have Hermione's incredible good luck of finding a mate right in the classroom? First of all, we need to watch that assumption that all or most women want babies. I was a young woman once, and between a baby and a broken knee I would without a second thought have chosen the broken knee. And common reasons why young women don't want to have babies are not that they have any kind of gender confusion, or lesbianism, or "gender dysphoria," but simply that they know more than Little Miss Just-Want-To-Be-A-Mommy knows about what pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are like. They are likely to have younger siblings who were born after they were old enough to know what was going on. They have already had the experience of changing a diaper, and are not in a pathological hurry to spend a year doing nothing else than that.
Young women who think they want babies have their heads stuffed full of unrealistic Hallmark Channel images of adorable pastel-colored bassinets that actually contain dolls. Young women who think they don't want babies usually have practical, sensible reasons related to some experience of seeing how much damage having babies can do to women and their lives. The male on the video claimed to know women who felt bored with their jobs and wanted babies. Women like that exist but I've known more women who had babies first, felt bored with the babies, and wanted jobs.
History
Yup. Of course some of these things really were bad ideas even in the 1960s. Others could usefully be brought back: The primary hazard of school-aged children being at home alone is that it may cause busybodies to hyperventilate. Hyperventilating busybodies might pass out and collapse against sharp objects, reducing the population of busybodies. Reducing the population of busybodies would not be a bad thing.
Technology
Of course AI programs are biased. That's not news. They're built by humans; humans are not capable of unbiased thought.
For example, my bias is that people who use a computer to do thinking or writing deserve what they get.
Google could hire diversity consultants to ensure that not only are White men's faces shown in scenes where everyone knows White men were present, and not only did writing samples blended-and-spun together include Republican campaign rhetoric, but also writing samples included PRODUCT-UNFRIENDLY documents. Has anyone checked yet to make sure that computer-generated writing about the coronavirus vaccine debacle always mentions vaccine-related illness? That every mention of "medications" for "depression" includes a reference to the long and well documented fact that serotonin boosters produce some degree of dementia in 3 to 7 percent of users, and that that specific type of dementia causes homicide-suicides? That references to "pesticides" always work in a relationship to the correlation between glyphosate exposure and chronic internal bleeding disorders, and related fatalities?
Hoot.
I discovered something about Google while doing the research for those moth posts. Few people have ever really wanted to write, read, or look at anything about stingingworms. It is a very small research niche. While a search for a butterfly or flower now generates tens of thousands of results, a search for Hemileuca hualapai still yields, from less censored search engines list every post to Bugguide.net separately (from the "Can anyone tell me what this is?" to the "Thank you"), only about five thousand hits. Google (1) recognizes only about 1300 of the 5000 posts (on the same day Google reported 1320, 1507, and 1070 hits) and (2) refuses to show links to much more than 100 of them.
It's not that 100 posts about stingingworms aren't more than the average person would ever want to read. It's that researchers are not the average person. We do need at least to scan all 5000 links and decide for ourselves which ones aren't relevant. And, yes, some of the links Google suppressed provided some of the most interesting information, like the video of the moth under artificial light that showed under what circumstances H. hualapai looks completely different than it normally does.
And a search for how to get Google to show the full search results turned up a forum post in which someone from Google admitted that advertisers wanted Google to shorten searches, and prevent scrolling down through a long search, because if people could see everything at the bottom of the list they wouldn't be funnelled direclty onto profitable corporate "landing pages." The advertisers probably were not thinking about obscure nuisance moths so much as electronics, used car deals, and food catering services...but they got Google to implement a policy of never showing people the full results for what they're looking for. The forum post about this disappeared fast and did not turn up in search results again.
Do you trust...any tech company to think or write for you? Ha. Ha. Be sure you're paying them more than any of their other blindly trusting clients do. No matter how many people computers displace from jobs, computers will never really replace the human brain.
Zazzle
I'd put the tomatoes on the back, but whatever.
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