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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Last night I had a dream that one of my friends had a pair of bike wheels, and asked me a question:

“Which of these two wheels has more spokes?”

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When it comes to sexism in language¹, there are all sorts of examples. On the one hand, you get the male/female differentiation in occupations. Sometimes this is well-established (waiter/waitress, actor/actress), sometimes still accepted but on the way out (stewardess—there are no “stewards” anymore but the right term is now “flight attendent”), and sometimes it just sounds ridiculous (there are no “aviatrices” any more, although to be fair there aren’t really “aviators” either.²) For my part, I try not to use the -ess forms of the words; I don’t see a reason why “waiter” or “actor” shouldn’t…

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