Tree
15d ago
The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.
Tree
15d ago
The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Complete non sequitur.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.
Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.
I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.
“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:
Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”
Tree
15d ago
That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.
Tree
15d ago
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.
Tree
16d ago
Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.
Tree
16d ago
Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
Tree
17d ago
Trump on his assassination attempt:
"They briefed me and I'm satisfied with it," Trump said. "They should have had someone in the building, that was a mistake, they should have had communications with the local police—they weren't tied in—and they should have been tied in. So there were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened."
"But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot," he continued, "I have great confidence in these people. They're very talented and very capable—they had a bad day, I think they'll admit that." "This is a very dangerous job being president,"
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
Tree
19d ago
I don’t know what the flippered mutants are referring to, but it can’t possibly compare to the reduction of infant mortality from 50% to 0.5% in the west (4.3% globally).
Tree
19d ago
Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"?
Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.
Tree
19d ago
Very interesting, thanks. I can feel my stance softening.
Also bothersome. I was gonna sell my 5-minute parenting per day course next to the 6-minutes abs program.
Okay, how do I salvage this. Those daycare kids seem primarily stressed out by having to fight other irrational creatures. Hell is other babies, as they say. My proposal to keep the parenting costs to a minimum: put them in cages.
Tree
19d ago
I don't think budget daycare is serious abuse, though. That is within that western context where my statement holds and parenting does not matter.
Tree
19d ago
Sure, my statement is implicitly limited to the context of the modern western parenting debate.
Tree
19d ago
I don't think those underfed, diseased romanian orphans can tell us much about the effect of letting your kids cry. I do agree that extreme malnutrition, physical trauma, lack of hygiene do matter to kids' outcome. I don't think modern daycares are anywhere near that level.
Tree
19d ago
Raising a good, happy, productive human. People have been looking for this magical parenting style that explains why Joe is good and Jack Y is bad for centuries, and they haven't found it. It's genetics or it's random.
Tree
19d ago
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage? A lot of parents, starting from month 6, try to ignore their kids crying, so that they cry less and become less of a burden (they are far more coddled now than they used to be). And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
Tree
20d ago
Let me make myself perfectly clear: I am not trolling. I genuinely think darwin should not have been banned, and that there’s a good chance goodguy was not darwin. You insisting on this being "trolling" is a failure to model the mind of others. Maybe you always end up changing your opinion when multiple people downvote you and tell you you’re wrong, but I don’t. I usually just hold onto my opinion, argue it, clarify/repeat it.
I’ve left enough comments. If I am a troll, why are my "trolling positions", seemingly “to get a reaction”, always pro-free speech, classical liberal ones?
Tree
20d ago
Why? Because I don’t bow to the consensus? At one point in time, this place prided itself on its free speech ethos. We were like ‘progs don’t dare come to this place, but of course they’re welcome to try’. Now look at us. Are we men? “Bring it on” is treated like some absurd must-be-trolling position.
Tree
20d ago
Not everyone who disagrees with this place treatment of dissenters is a troll or darwin or both. I’ve been robbed of the opportunity to fight a worthy adversary because people here couldn’t lose gracefully.
Tree
20d ago
Thank you for providing an example of how silly and far-fetched the accusations of being darwin got. You don’t seem to know anything about darwin, impassionata or me. This basically confirms guesswho wasn’t darwin, he was just annoyed, I get it.
As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
That’s called being innocent of any wrongdoing and losing fair and square, respectively.
Tree
27d ago
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
Tree
27d ago
You: show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
Me: His AAQCs
You : sure, he made AAQCs....
ez win.
I'm not convinced guesswho is darwin, because guesswho was treated antagonistically, and constantly accused of being darwin, and if you are to be believed, a 'bad faith' poster.
Tree
27d ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.
Tree
27d ago
I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
-
he was the most progressive commenter
-
he was a capable debater
-
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’. You say most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm, but in numerous cultures it was normal to beat women. In honor cultures, even related men can kill them for a smile. Obviously rape was widespread, etc. This isn’t the feminist litany of oppression, men suffered terribly too. I just don’t think you can look at all that and see the instinctive urge to protect women. And I personally don’t feel the discriminatory urge to save a random woman over a random man.
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple. Doesn't have anything to do with the inherent biological value of women.
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