naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
There are very significant differences in temperament, personality, hormonal distribution, etc., between men and women.
I am not a soldier. But I am on the far end of the distribution for ‘ability to deal with killing’. I’m not a psychopath, I don’t like slaughtering animals though nor do I find it burdensome, but there is a surprising number of full grown men- and an unsurprisingly huge number of women- who can’t directly kill a complex mammal. I have watched full grown and not effeminate men have crying fits over slaughtering lambs and hogs; talked to toughened older men with no shortage of trauma who recounted near tears in their eyes that, working at the slaughterhouse when younger, they insisted on moving from the kill side to the cut side because killing cattle was too difficult to deal with psychologically.
And the biggest correlate of the ability to just put a gun up against an animal’s head, pull the trigger now it’s dead, eat it for dinner or send it to the freezer, is having a beard along your whole jawline. I presume this has something to do with testosterone. And obviously people aren’t animals, I hope I never have to find out whether I can kill a person without flinching. But regardless, ‘difficulty with killing an animal in a calm, cold way’ is probably very strongly correlated with ‘inability to kill your enemies without panicking and doing stupid things out of instinct’. And I suspect the distribution between the two sexes is such that 99.8% of humans with the latter ability are male.
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
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Notes -
I am not a soldier. But I am on the far end of the distribution for ‘ability to deal with killing’. I’m not a psychopath, I don’t like slaughtering animals though nor do I find it burdensome, but there is a surprising number of full grown men- and an unsurprisingly huge number of women- who can’t directly kill a complex mammal. I have watched full grown and not effeminate men have crying fits over slaughtering lambs and hogs; talked to toughened older men with no shortage of trauma who recounted near tears in their eyes that, working at the slaughterhouse when younger, they insisted on moving from the kill side to the cut side because killing cattle was too difficult to deal with psychologically.
And the biggest correlate of the ability to just put a gun up against an animal’s head, pull the trigger now it’s dead, eat it for dinner or send it to the freezer, is having a beard along your whole jawline. I presume this has something to do with testosterone. And obviously people aren’t animals, I hope I never have to find out whether I can kill a person without flinching. But regardless, ‘difficulty with killing an animal in a calm, cold way’ is probably very strongly correlated with ‘inability to kill your enemies without panicking and doing stupid things out of instinct’. And I suspect the distribution between the two sexes is such that 99.8% of humans with the latter ability are male.
I think you need to differentiate killing humans versus killing animals. I think it's common for people to be more disturbed by videos of animal cruelty than even the most gruesome tortures and executions of human beings. I wouldn't assume that someone who has difficulty killing an animal would have difficulty killing a person that they felt justified in killing.
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That is extreme claim, and I doubt that it is true (from proxies like violently abusive women).
1:499 seems way too extreme to me.
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