ah you've caught me at lunch, i'll bite.

You've said the same thing three times now. Here are some things you should consider:

1. sometimes words are used by different people to mean different things!

For instance, “patriarchy” was used by me above to fill in the missing actor in your original post, with a rough definition given above. The word can also be used to refer to the patrilinial systems of property or government that existed in Europe before modern systems of law. It can also be used to describe systems of government in general in which power is largely in the hands of men. It is also sometimes used in a more theoretical sense to describe a system, process, or tendency that causes these other forms to sustain themselves. One time, some woman on the internet used it to refer to “an ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything” but seeing as this is not a definition used by anybody else it's pretty clear that it was a straw man designed just so she could write a huge screed about how it is an unfalsifiable theory.

You seem completely unconcerned with which of these is being discussed when you call it an unfalsifiable theory, despite most of them referring to observable tendencies or things, or even formalized systems of law.

Please don't lecture people on definitions when you don't understand how words work.

2. maybe you should think about reading the criticism section of that wikipedia page you linked instead of holding up a concept not generally accepted by philosophers (of science or otherwise) as the End of All Arguments?

3. If you are really so worried about being bullied and called names, as mentioned in the first post, I would invite you to consider that maybe the lack of support you say you receive could be connected with the fact that when people try to apply their own tools that they find effective for fighting oppression in order to explain, address, and ideally point a way to resolution of the ”ghettoization” that you describe yourself in, you seem most interested in chasing them away with unrelated wikipedia links, a patronizing tone, and a tremendous chip on your shoulder.

Like, what is the correlation between being called a neckbeard and telling people they are wrong about things they clearly understand better than you?

4. bonus round: maybe if you are going to hold every response up to a ridiculous standard of logical completeness you shouldn't lead with a rhetorical strategy of ”that's what they want you to think” by listing some actions that you seem to want to attribute only to an unnamed ugly, self-sustaining, omnipotent invisible force that explains everything. Because that sounds an awful lot like an unfalsifiable theory.

Or maybe you know, don't complain about things you clearly don't want to change?

lol no i'm not. I knew it wasn't worth my time to type a definition of how I used the word because sure enough you didn't read it.

in the meantime, i'll be sure to tell everyone i know in the humanities about Karl Popper and how you can read about him on wikipedia I don't think any of them has ever thought to do so before nope not even once. ciao.

I don't care if you like the word or not: you didn't use any term to describe who is performing the three steps in your post:

so I offered the one that seemed closest to hand and is often used to describe a similar abstract group that seems to directly or indirectly pull the strings of our society.

Why is this an OR? Power functions in multiple directions at the same time; if one barrier can negatively impact the mobility of non-conforming men as well as simultaneously push women even farther away from economic power that seems like a tremendous win for the patriarchy.

Parent post: women "feel" assaulted. That doesn't mean they actually were!

This post: other people say women were assaulted. That doesn't mean they feel assaulted!

Damned if you do/damned if you don't.

No, “First Nations” does not refer to Inuit peoples, nor does it refer to the Metis. These three groups collectively make up what are called Aboriginal peoples in Canada by the constitution act of 1982. The other broad term you might use if you are not sure about, or are talking about several sub-categories or nations, is indigenous people(s). Or you know, just ask people how they want to be referred to.

"Indian" still has weight as a legal term in Canada because it is the word that was generally used in law prior to 1982.

In any case, the Inuit are fairly clearly not "first nations" because they are clearly not the first people to live where they live now; they displaced the Dorset peoples from most of Canada's arctic relatively recently when compared to the settlement of the Americas—recently enough for the Dorset to have had contact with viking traders, for instance. Inuit tradition calls the Dorset "Sivullirmiut" or "First Inhabitants".

In Swedish law, yes. The UK agreed to extradition even though he hasn't been charged because they considered the request for questioning to serve an equivalent purpose under Swedish criminal law, and that the authority to call him in was real—because the actual laying of charges comes later in the process than it does in Anglo-style criminal systems.

The Globe and Mail endorsed the Conservatives in the last three elections. So I'm not sure in what circles they are known for disliking them.

Elective or cosmetic surgery isn't necessarily a natural monopoly: unlike, say, emergency care where you tend to go wherever the ambulance takes you, or GP care where quality is difficult to judge without spending years with a particular service, or even insurance where you suddenly find out that the service sucks when your life, or at least your quality of life and your employability, is on the line and they drop you or screw up your coverage. People getting cosmetic and elective procedures have plenty of leisure time to shop around, and because they aren't things that you need to have to live, they do marketing and directly compete on price. It's part of why lots of countries with nationalized care (single-payer or otherwise) make exceptions for those services and they are covered by out-of-pocket, private insurance, or maybe only a partial subsidy.

Eye care (and sometimes dental) are often caught in the middle ground between true electives and the core system. I wish they were better covered here in Canada, because they seem necessary enough to me, but I recognize that not everyone agrees with that—and that in both cases there are lots of tricky aspects that shade between necessary and elective, like when your orthodontist is trying to upsell you to “improve” your jawline when really you just want your gums to the healthy.

He's interested in researching the topic that he is in fact researching—how damning. What?

I'm not sure what kind of detail you read the article in then, because it describes the students being given an essay-question test. And if you read the links given you'll find out how the test was blindly scored looking for certain specific techniques as evidence of critical thinking: “observing, interpreting, evaluating, associating, problem finding, comparing, and flexible thinking”. They even built in a test for their system, having separate researchers score overlapping samples so that they could make sure they were producing consistent results.

And here's a little bonus:

A large amount of the gain in critical-thinking skills stems from an increase in the number of observations that students made in their essays. Students who went on a tour became more observant, noticing and describing more details in an image. Being observant and paying attention to detail is an important and highly useful skill that students learn when they study and discuss works of art. Additional research is required to determine if the gains in critical thinking when analyzing a work of art would transfer into improved critical thinking about other, non-art-related subjects.

I'm not sure why the summary doesn't include a direct link to the study, as is present in the NYT article, but there you go. There's more detail in there about what they mean by empathy and tolerance (specifically including a measurable decrease in the student's support for government censorship).

I would assume that the theory here is that other things affect the demand for books as well. By protecting publishers, authors, and local booksellers with connections to their community, they are hoping to create cultural value on books that will encourage reading despite the prices. Those seem like reasonable goals to me.

OK good thing that the person you are arguing with said exactly that and nothing else. Certainly not anything about unclipping his pedals on an almost completely different topic.

I guess you must be really are annoyed by some cyclists who run red lights sometimes and since you can't argue with them on the streets you want to do it here.

Did you not understand the comment? The annoying thing is that the author has already stopped at the stop sign and has to awkwardly stand there waiting for the driver who has right of way before eventually determining that the driver is waiting for him. Cars thinking that cyclists are unpredictable is annoying at best for the cyclists, at worst dangerous. But at least they see us, which is more than I can say for lots of drivers.

Yeah, you are assuming that the poster is making excuses for breaking the law when in fact they are going out of their way to explain to you that they don't approve of doing so. It's not a false equivalency to point out that two people running red lights are both running red lights. It's not an excuse, it's an observation.

As it happens, walking is more dangerous per-mile than cycling.