This Creature is Lore

I was thinking of posting this rant on the t-place, but I can predict how well that would go.  So the smaller, but generally saner and more responsive LJ community, gets to hear it instead.

I decided that visiting the actual novel The Silence of the Lambs was in order.  It's engaging enough, BUT: I have a big issue with the arguable transphobia happening in this book, which this blog expresses better than I could.  I'm not done with it yet so I'm unclear whether this unsavory overtone is couched in the author's own attitude, or that of the majority of his characters.
There is a character, Dr. Danielson, who appears briefly and seems to be a voice of reason and compassion; apparently his scene[s] was cut from the 1991 film version *figures*.  Dr. Danielson was played by Philip Bosco in the film.

The thing the blog I linked doesn't touch on much, which I found quite ridiculous as well as dangerous, was the idea that there is an archetypal transgender psychology, and that anyone who doesn't conform to it can't actually be a "real" transgender person; this is probably a reflection of the times (the book was written 25 years ago), but it still makes me livid.

"Misogyny isn't caused by male horniness."
I like this article because it addresses a few points I have strong opinions on myself.
I especially liked the author's inclusion of the Nice Guy trope.  Permit me to go off on a tangent about the Nice Guy that is not quite related to the author's point.  A guy who complains in the hearing of a woman that women don't really want Nice Guys (meaning, of course, himself) has just generalized and made insulting presuppositions about a member of the gender he supposedly wishes to attract; in thus doing, he actually is not coming of as a Nice Guy at all.  I've met a few Nice Guys, and they've been arrogant, condescending jerks.

Re: The True Size of Africa.
A response to that image of Africa with the US, China, about half of Europe, and other localities nestled inside it.
I appreciate the effort to educate people as to the actual relative sizes of places on earth, but I also fear that the way the "True Size of Africa" graphic is presented encourages the reactionary idea that (Caucasian) cartographers draw maps this way because of some subjective and ethnocentric way of weighing the importance of places.
The Mercator projection is the standard for most 2-dimensional maps.  The technique involves greater distortion the closer one moves toward the poles, thus land areas nearer the poles take on an exaggerated size.  Hence, let us be clear that the reason Europe and North America are enlarged on most maps is because they are further from the equator than Africa, which actually intersects it.