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Is There Anything Good About Men?

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Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#161

Post by sliverstorm »

run4yourlives wrote: post #68
mitcheme wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's very little actual substance there to invalidate, and I did discuss some of issues. His analysis of women's creativity is wrong, and is his talk about relative sex drives is spurious. I also think it's a huge mistake to label cultures who have persisted by making over half their population miserable (women and low-status men) as "successful". If you wanted me to take it apart line-by-line you will have to be…

> over half their population miserable Do you have any data to support the assertion that everyone that isn't occupying a high-status leadership role within a society is "miserable"? You're personalizing the argument and then missing the point.

You don't need to prove a statement like that. It's common knowledge the only people who are not miserable in the world have a net worth over $1B. Money, after all, is the one and only ingredient to happiness.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#162

Post by anthonyb »

jtheory wrote: post #138
lmkg wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I mean is that I can clearly see the logic here, but I'd love to see a discussion for instance on the continual existence of evolutionary destructive traits such as homosexuality, which by all accounts has not only been around for a great deal of human existence, but also other species. It allows excess parents without having excess children. Assume your objective function is to pass along genetic material tha…

Exactly; in short, "The Selfish Gene" is not called "The Selfish Individual" for very good reason. It's not about individual reproduction; it's about the survival of genetic material. Furthermore, genes aren't a rigid blueprint; they're highly affected by the environment and by simple chance; it's not as if "oops, this family evolved a gay gene and now all of their kids will be gay and they will all die out".

That's even assuming that there's a gay gene and it's not also affecting something else (eg. the Russian tame foxes which started to look a lot like sheepdogs, despite only being bred for tameness)

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#163

Post by yters »

saturn wrote: post #139
yters wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If evolution explains everything, it explains nothing.

A meaningless platitude.

No, it's good science. If a theory is supported by both a piece of evidence and its contrary, and it can predict one thing and its contrary, then the theory doesn't explain anything, nor is it falsifiable. Geez, I wish they'd teach kids science in schools today.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#165

Post by thomasz »

lionhearted wrote: post #39
bh42222 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wikipedia entry only very briefly touches on some of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boer_Wars#Controversy_and_signi... But saying only that To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. is VERY simplistic. No sentence describing the British empire should start with "To make a long story short".

> To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. is VERY simplistic. No, it's not. By pretty much any reasonable metric, the British Empire has contributed more net good to humanity than any other nation in history. Plenty of bad, too. But overwhelmingly more good than bad. Much of the good is taken for granted until you realize all the mess they cleaned up that isn't…

> By pretty much any reasonable metric

Name one.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#166

Post by thomasz »

forensic wrote: post #152
bitwize wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to organize isn't really an indicator of the good or harm you do. Do you know what another regime is that had a legendary ability to organize? NAZI GERMANY.

The difference is that the British, instead of killing the "lower races", sought to reform them with what history indicates was a genuine sense of altruism among British Empire-builders. Hitler put the minorities in gas chambers. England invited minorities to Oxford and taught them everything they knew.

> The difference is that the British, instead of killing the "lower races", sought to reform them with what history indicates was a genuine sense of altruism among British Empire-builders.

The Empire understood that collaborative local elites were beneficial for the plundering of the colonies, and where necessary, it invested in them. That's all.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#167

Post by thyrsus »

yters wrote: post #163
saturn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A meaningless platitude.

No, it's good science. If a theory is supported by both a piece of evidence and its contrary, and it can predict one thing and its contrary, then the theory doesn't explain anything, nor is it falsifiable. Geez, I wish they'd teach kids science in schools today.

Good science accepts all non-fraudulent evidence. In the case of evolution, we're dealing with large, highly variable populations. Thus, no individual observation will falsify the theory. Evolution is almost tautological in predicting that traits which increase the likelihood of reproduction in a population will become more common in that population. To falsify evolution, you would have to observe a population in which traits that increased the likelihood of reproduction became less common.

There is an important subtlety with social groups: a trait that decreases the likelihood of an individual's reproduction may increase the likelihood of the group's reproduction. For instance, worker ants have near zero probability of reproducing, yet they highly increase the likelihood of the group's (colony's) reproduction.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#168

Post by chakde »

untog wrote: post #79
eliasmacpherson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury he was placed in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine in the 1840s. In the middle of that crisis Trevelyan published his views on the matter. He saw the Famine as a "mechanism for reducing surplus population". He described the famine as "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be t…

Right, no-one was disagreeing that the British did many bad things in their colonies. But the point lionhearted is making is that they did more good, overall. Picking a specific example of bad doesn't counter that argument effectively.

There are entire generations of british historians since WW2 dedicated to the PR propaganda of how good the british were for the colonies and until very recently the western opinion has been entirely shaped by this propaganda - almost any book written by a British historian of which you'll find countless in your library have the same basic point of view.

Opposing viewpoints are not hard to find if you actually take the time to look. See Mike Davis' Late victorian holocausts and the making of the third world which I think is the best explanation of why the differences between east and west are now so great.

Or R.C.Dutt's "Early economic history of the british empire". It's seriously astounding how much money was funnelled out of India and used to build modern Europe and America, while the native Indian industry was killed off.

All this makes the British PR effort entirely justified of course.

Indians came across the 3 monotheistic religions in reverse of order of their birth and their ethos being completely different from their own, did'nt realize their aggressive nature - India had become pacifist since the time of Buddha and Ashoka. By the time the british came, India had already been weakened by the Muslim rules which itself had fallen out of dominance because of new trade routes. So India was doubly weak and this allowed the British to use their resources to easily win and weaken India even further.

The fact that a few Indians were able to leverage the internal dissensions within Europe to their advantage gets very little coverage but was the real story of how the course of history was overturned.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#170

Post by yxhuvud »

forensic wrote: post #152
bitwize wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to organize isn't really an indicator of the good or harm you do. Do you know what another regime is that had a legendary ability to organize? NAZI GERMANY.

The difference is that the British, instead of killing the "lower races", sought to reform them with what history indicates was a genuine sense of altruism among British Empire-builders. Hitler put the minorities in gas chambers. England invited minorities to Oxford and taught them everything they knew.

If you believe England didn't gas minorities, then you should read up on what Churchill did to the Kurds during the 20's.
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