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Is There Anything Good About Men?

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Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#181

Post by naveens »

forensic wrote: post #151
wooolf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British are given too much credit for things they never did. As for doing good in India, even under the Mughal empire, India is estimated to have a share of 30% of world GDP until the 18th century. When the British left in 1947, that share was less than 1%. The Brits de-industrialized India, used Indian raw materials and taxes to fuel their own industrial revolution and used India as a captive market to hawk thei…

When it comes to world-spanning Empires, the British were one of the more benevolent -- and this especially applies for India. It's worth noting that the most powerful British Empire builders like Cecil Rhodes were planning for Indian swaraj decades before it became a popular idea among Indians. Hindu culture was not going anywhere, it desperately needed an injection of rationality and a forced demonstration of good…

The British don't deserve the sole or even major credit for the cultural changes you talk about. Reformers like Rajaram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, Gandhi, Ambedkar deserve most of the credit. Cultural changes can not simply be forced by external forces. The British just wanted to organize the Indian society the way they idealized so that they could reap the surplus.

The India of today would be unrecognizable from British India. Many former British colonies in Africa continue to be only slightly better than Somalia. You are giving the Raj too much credit.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#182

Post by nagrom »

chakde wrote: post #176
nagrom wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, are you angry. 1) The British GDP increased dramatically with the (British-led) industrial revolution, regardless of any effect the British had on India. Comparing the two and claiming that it is entirely due to Britain's involvement with India is ridiculous. 2) Famines have a long history in India. During the British-led period, they were particularly bad. However, the strong system of government instilled by t…

A few points 1. There is a much bigger correlation with India than you suppose. You can a. build universities and schools to train people b. create favorable tax and corporate structures to foster industry c. capture markets to make a and b and c into a positive feedback loop that makes rapid advancement possible. Guess which of these is the hardest. It is c - having a captive market. The british captured the Indian…

I'm not for a second claiming that Britain didn't exploit India - I'm merely refuting the idea that all of the British acts were purely negative.

1. Well, I don't necessarily agree that your point c. is the most difficult and I would guess (without knowing) that in many countries the proportion of British-made goods increased dramatically during the 19th century. Is it possible to explain any of the growth in manufactured goods in terms of increased quality, reduced price, improved shipping and transportation and a large immigrant population with massive comparative economic power?

I also disagree with the implication that industrialism and capitalism in the west are purely due to GB's exploitation of India. I'm certain that the influx of money and goods from India to GB helped. I find it beyond reasonable to claim it the sole cause. Britain was already a strong (the strongest?) world power before it became dominant in India.

2. Yes, I agree. The British did the same thing in Ireland. However, as with slavery, the empire seemed to learn from its mistakes and had reversed this inhumane policy towards the end of its life. British rule did unite an historically divided country and thus set the course for a country that looks to ascertain status as an economic superpower today.

3. The fact is that all around the world, being a peasant during the 18th and 19th centuries was awful and that it is only in the last 20-30 years that we have come to understand and abhor racism - in fact, in most countries, that statement is still not true. Blaming the British Empire for racism is misleading - racism wasn't a particular trait of the empire. You'd as well blame the empire for female subjugation. It was specifically bad in India because India was in a unique situation as having a mix of ruling whites and a large population of native peoples, but it could have been worse. See, e.g., America of the same time period.

4. My point was that the division between India and Pakistan was not something that could be laid solely at the feet of the Brits as the OP seemed to do. I accept that it is simplistic to label the divide simply as Muslim-Hindu.

I wouldn't claim that the Brits were hugely beneficial for India. I would claim that they were not entirely negative and that there was some good to the empire as a whole. I'm not regularly exposed to points of view that see the empire as a positive anywhere - quite the opposite, actually. In my part of the world, the empire is viewed as a terribly shameful, hateful thing (something the OP seemed to claim) and I disagree with that.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#183

Post by ohashi »

scythe wrote: post #29
lionhearted wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some good points, but the parts about the British Empire are off. I'd strongly recommend "Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress" by Jan Morris for a piece that looks at all the good and bad that the British Empire did under Victoria. To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. For instance, eliminating the Thugee strangling cult: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thugg…

>To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. Uh, okay, so... I'm bad at explaining things, because that is the point of what I wrote about the British. The British were successful not by being cutthroat but by being fair. The author characterizes such 'cooperative' strategies as ineffective, and says that they don't tend to succeed: >The essence of how culture uses…

But may be soon with all those natural resources!

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#184

Post by saturn »

mannicken wrote: post #144
saturn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sliverstorm's point is valuable and it is annoying to see it ignored. Dogs and other pets routinely overcome instinct to win favour by their human masters. And what are humans but pets of society? It pisses me off when people don't concede that they were wrong and promise to do better next time. jordan0day, admit that your simplistic argument was flawed, and vow to re-examine your assumptions. Damn but 99% of argumen…

"It pisses me off when people don't concede that they were wrong" In this case, we have saturn exemplifying a pure animalistic instinct of rage. You being pissed off is not an argument that helps the conversation. Humans are not pets of society because humans are a part of society. You're trying to personalize society, in a similar way that religious freaks try to personalize the universe. In reality, society is bett…

Your example, though "dumbed down", makes no sense to me at all.

What is a pet? It's a subordinate part of a larger whole. I would submit that the vast majority of men meet this description, where society is the larger group. Society demands a man gets out of bed and goes to work; against his sleeping instinct, man complies.

> a pure animalistic instinct of rage

I would like to think that my annoyance that good arguments did not seem to be carrying the day is more than dumb animal rage? If you heard a group of people agreeing that 1 + 1 = 3 then surely you'd also be guilty of an instinctive opposition. Something has to be true.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#185

Post by redsymbol »

lkrubner wrote: post #87
JonnieCache wrote: post #4

The problem with this essay is that is paints us as slaves to our genes. Since Dawkins became fashionable, it is now normal to portray human beings as nothing more than meat-based mechanisms for storing and transporting DNA. This idea is dangerously embedded in society now, and it risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of barbarism. What possible motivation does one have for behaving in a manner other than that of…

>Since Dawkins became fashionable I am curious why people keep taking this attitude to Dawkins. And Dawkins himself was also curious why people had this reaction to his books. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he says: "We can rise above our genes, indeed, we do every time we use contraceptives." As he makes clear, several times, in the book, our evolution allows a range of behavior that allows for more than simplis…

Very insightful write-up. Thank you for taking the time to compose it.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#186

Post by jfriedly »

tariqk wrote: post #55

First off, the author misrepresents the idea of patriarchy as a "conspiracy of men to subjugate women". That's not how I've heard how it's been defined. Patriarchy/kyriarchy, roughly put, is a series of assumptions and privileges provided to a segment of the population, often at the expense of everyone else. It's not, as far as I can see, a conspiracy -- i.e. a secret plan hatched by a clandestine group that goes aga…

the statement "the British Empire did a lot more good than harm" is a disgusting, privileged statement...

Where was this quote even in the article?

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#187

Post by seigenblues »

bermanoid wrote: post #78
tariqk wrote: post #55

First off, the author misrepresents the idea of patriarchy as a "conspiracy of men to subjugate women". That's not how I've heard how it's been defined. Patriarchy/kyriarchy, roughly put, is a series of assumptions and privileges provided to a segment of the population, often at the expense of everyone else. It's not, as far as I can see, a conspiracy -- i.e. a secret plan hatched by a clandestine group that goes aga…

Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that the reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences. The author may not have gone into it, but the argument exists, b…

First, i agree with basically all of your logic & reasoning as you've laid out. However, you lost me at the conclusion:

  If you accept a) (which is not much of a stretch - sleeping with other men's wives 
  is definitely a risk-seeking behavior that increases genetic success for men)
The reverse is true as well: sleeping with people not your husband is a risk-seeking behavior that also increases genetic success for women. But the way you've phrased it is so loaded in "the way things are" that it's hard to see just how prevalent the cultural norms are ingrained.

For instance, imagine a world where it's all switched around: women are assumed to be the risk-taking, sexually aggressive gender, and society is organized in a pretty clear matriarchy, women make 30% more than men, etc. A woman who sleeps with another woman's husband, while certainly "more obvious" ("how is she pregnant, again!") could be just as 'culturally accepted' as men sleeping with other men's wives are here. There are certainly examples in the animal kingdom -- female dominant, where females maximize their genetic 'success' by successfully having children of many males. "female dominant animals" is a very rich google vein ;)

So a better question to ask is "why did that not happen with homo sapiens sapiens?"

Please note also the huge amount of cultural assumptions about behaviors, norms, & risks, in the tiny sentence fragment "sleeping with other men's wives". Which implied pronouns are the active ones there, which are the passive objects acted upon, etc.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#188

Post by seigenblues »

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.

sure, but what would counter that argument effectively? How would you do it? How do you say that all of the histories of all the other peoples touched by the British Empire would have actually been just fine, thank you very much. Many of lionhearted's plusses are assumed to have come from the Brits delivered as if into a vacuum. Who's to say that these plus' wouldn't've naturally developed, given enough time, or maybe in ways that don't end in millions of colonized peoples dying? All those other alternate histories are silent.

I would suggest that picking a specific example -- a whoppingly large example, in this case -- is a very good beginning of a counterargument.

Lionhearted saying "here is all the good that happened" needs to be weighed against a reasonable summation of all the good that would have happened. And a "here are all the bad things that happened" likewise should be totaled against the bad things that would have continued to happen.

They're both very, very hard positions to make briefly.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#190

Post by jkic47 »

reirob wrote: post #128

Very nice article. It is centred about observing the past. But as evolution is going on, things change and I think that we are living in an era where things are changing and society will less favour the capability to compete but more to cope together. Think about the globalization, about global political institutions like UN, IWF, etc. Think about the fact that mankind is reaching limits of resources - oil, water, so…

As resources get scarcer, societies that do not share are more likely to survive. Either it, or the competitor that overcomes it will survive to the exclusion of others. Either way, the victor will likely not share hard won spoils.
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