71–80 of 104 posts
It's interesting to see Birmingham in 8th place given that it's the 2nd largest city in the United Kingdom. It would be weird if you saw a similar list of American cities and Los Angeles came that far down.
What's the equivalent Birmingham has to make it famous? UB40? The Selfridges?
Even Ozzy Osbourne lives in Los Angeles nowadays (I pressume)
Australian comedian John Safran (and all-round crazy person) made a pretty good point about this concept that Americans are uniquely ignorant of geography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z27xVjXBbk
Well, compared to what Australians? They are similarly insular. A better comparison would be with Europeans. The things he mentions as extremely insightful stuff people wouldn't know, e.g Zaire, Congo, Republic of the Congo, the civil war there, etc are all quite common knowledge.
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As a belgian european I often wonder if the United States seems as big to americans as Europe seems big to me. I wonder if it feels different to be a citizen of a small country or a citizen of a continent-wide country such as the United States. Or maybe americans feel they are californians or new-yorkers before being american ?
Citizen of small country adjoining a very large country here. People of small countries tend to understand that other cultures exist, because when they travel a couple of hundred miles (or less) in any direction they're in another country. I suppose for people living in the central regions of a very large country, it's your country and your people in every direction for as far as you can imagine. Then you tend not to…
I'm interested in what happens elsewhere in the world, but it feels impossibly far away, and ultimately it doesn't affect me here (at least not directly). Whenever I've checked, a roundtrip ticket anywhere out of the country has cost about $2000 and it takes a full day to get there. Then you're jet lagged. So, short vacations are out of the question. But it also takes me a full year of work to earn just 2 weeks vacation time, assuming I don't use any for special occasions. I didn't even bother getting a passport until two years ago, and I still haven't used it.
So yeah, even if an American desperately wants to travel somewhere out of the country, it's expensive and vacation time is scarce. So most never will. And at that point, knowing a list of English cities is purely trivia.
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I just tend to tune out whatever is on the sidebar of a website as it tends to be ads or other things I probably don't care enough to read. As for the "by Stacy", well it is rather small and gray. Of course I have a feeling the poster of the comment that sparked this little flame-war didn't read the article.
defending a sexist assumption by claiming a lack of attention to detail and an unwillingness to read the whole pages feels sub-optimal.
From Merriam-Webster:
1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women
2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex
I can understand an argument that the author of the comment said "he" because of some assumption that anyone doing stats must be a man. However I'm making the counterargument that using "he" is a standard default in English and that such usage is not sexist, but rather as a result of how the English language is used.
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defending a sexist assumption by claiming a lack of attention to detail and an unwillingness to read the whole pages feels sub-optimal.
Again, I don't really see using "he" as sexist. It's just the English language. From Merriam-Webster: 1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women 2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex I can understand an argument that the author of the comment said "he" because of some assumption that anyone doing stats must be a man. Howe…
You are saying that using he as a default isn't sexist because it is a default.
However saying that a default position is a default position tells us very little indeed and nothing whatsoever about if that default position is sexist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
defending a sexist assumption by claiming a lack of attention to detail and an unwillingness to read the whole pages feels sub-optimal.
Again, I don't really see using "he" as sexist. It's just the English language. From Merriam-Webster: 1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women 2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex I can understand an argument that the author of the comment said "he" because of some assumption that anyone doing stats must be a man. Howe…
And it's not that hard to just use "they" instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, I don't really see using "he" as sexist. It's just the English language. From Merriam-Webster: 1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women 2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex I can understand an argument that the author of the comment said "he" because of some assumption that anyone doing stats must be a man. Howe…
That's an astoundingly crap argument. You are saying that using he as a default isn't sexist because it is a default. However saying that a default position is a default position tells us very little indeed and nothing whatsoever about if that default position is sexist.
Honestly, I caught myself using "he" several times writing this response but went back and "refactored" my response. Does the fact that I use "he" automatically make me a sexist? No. That's just how everyone around me spoke English and thus how I learned to use it.