This is a follow-up post to Tuesday’s “Society vs. Individual Choice”.

It’s not entirely unreasonable to conflate ethnic and gender discrimination under a common term “genetic discrimination”—you have no control over your ethnicity or sex¹, and you may be discriminated against because of either. In the past, such discrimination was institutionalized, and your choices were limited because of the results of your birth lottery. In the present, such discrimination is…still practiced, and your choices are limited because of the results of your birth lottery.

Let’s take this out a bit farther: when would such discrimination be…

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The Last of the Mohicans has a couple of standard tropes; one in particular is the Female Who Proves Herself As Brave As A Man. (Sorry, can’t find the official TV Tropes name for this.) It brought up an issue for me that I’ve thought about a little before: if in our modern society we try to make things gender-neutral, opening traditionally-female jobs to men and traditionally-male jobs to women, why were they ever gender-specific in the first place?

Unfortunately, I can think of a good answer. Pretty much every society has jobs people would rather not be doing, whether…

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Wong Fu is an indie video production company started by students at UCSD. Actually, they do a bit of everything these days, from music videos to vlogs, and they’ve helped a lot of aspiring artists get a little more traction. They’re pretty awesome.

But…I never got into their videos. Why? It all goes back to their first big hit. “Yellow Fever” is a humorous take on the stereotype that white guys like to date (East) Asian girls and vice versa, presumably to the detriment of Asian-American guys, white girls, and Indian guys. The stereotype definitely has a basis…

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