u/SeriousAvocado2727

Hey all!

I'm going to be getting a coffee and reading over at Jackson Brothers downtown at 1 for a few hours. Come on by if you want to chat!

In many math classes I've taken, I notice that sooner or later the professor will feel the need to mention operations with no effect. Common examples would be adding by zero, multiplying by 1, or multiplying a matrix with the identity matrix.

This is always brought up with a lot of pomp and circumstance, and we've even had to use identity matrices on assignments and exams, but I still don't quite understand what motivates these operations, which often end up feeling like trivia.

For context, I'm studying EE, rather than pure mathematics.

Disclaimer: this point has nothing to do with taking a moral stance on the act of abortion. This is about the motivations of the people involved in the debate.

Regardless of one's stance on the abortion question, if you participate in these discussions you eventually hear a pro-lifer labelled with the term "misogynist." There is, however, no inherent correlation between a person's view on abortion and their attitudes toward women.

The broad stance of many pro-lifers is something to the effect of: A fetus is a human person (in the moral sense). Human persons have a right not to be murdered (murdered ≠ killed). Abortion is the murder of a fetus. Therefore fetuses have a right not to be aborted.

Within this argument, you'll notice that nowhere are women mentioned at all. Now, you could say I'm being deliberately bad faith, abortions *necessarily* involve a woman, therefore any attempt to ban abortions is an attack on the freedom of women, hence, it is misogynistic.

This is, I think, the best argument that it is misogynistic in motivation. It's deceptively difficult to parse the ethics of the fact that only women can have abortions. I don't see enough evidence, though, to conclude that the pro-lifer merely hates women. It seems moreso the case that they hate abortion due to concluding it is the murder of an innocent life, and that in a world where men could be pregnant they would still oppose the practice.

A brief note: I'm going to have to put my foot down and preemptively say I'm refusing to get into it with anyone about the ethics of abortion as a whole on this post, it's simply out of scope. I'll just debate this more narrow point.

Will have a pretty light semester when I come back from co-op due to having a long first co-op putting my schedule out of whack.

I love learning anything and everything. Computers, math, history, philosophy, whatever, but have absolutely no interest in taking a minor long-term while in electrical engineering.

Any classes you guys think could be fun to just show up to lecture and do the readings for?

With so much doom and gloom about the job market today I'm curious to hear from some people who love their job. What do y'all do and why do you love it?