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Is There Anything Good About Men?

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Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#211

Post by bergie »

ohashi wrote: post #183
scythe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Generally it seems natural resources only stunt the state of a country and benefit very few. Norway appears to be one of the only places with rich natural resources and a working society.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#212

Post by ohashi »

bergie wrote: post #211
ohashi wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But may be soon with all those natural resources!

Generally it seems natural resources only stunt the state of a country and benefit very few. Norway appears to be one of the only places with rich natural resources and a working society.

Australia? USA? Canada? There are many different resources besides simply oil (I am making an assumption that's what is in your mind because of the Norway example). Mongolia doesn't simply have oil (and they rank #92 in the world for oil production - so they don't even have much of it), they have richer mineral deposits.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#214

Post by chakde »

scythe wrote: post #81
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…

>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. Wiki doesn't agree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Technological_and_e... >India's per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it had increased to $618 by 1947 I'm not sure whose dollars those are... but it certainly doesn't sound like the Mughal…

25% is about right for indian gdp around mughal period. http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/history-of-world-gdp/

these early wins were against muslim rulers who did not have that much support of their majority populace because of taxation issues and also suffered from lost revenues due to the new trade routes.

the hardest wars were against the hindu/sikh rulers - marattas, rajputs and sikhs who were not subdued until 1850s with great effort.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#215

Post by westicle »

forensic wrote: post #69
sliverstorm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing to live in a world where instinct in animals is readily accepted as heritable, and yet whether or not humans can inherit behaviors is hotly contested. Almost seems like another round of people looking to maintain the illusion that humans are separate from animals. What was the last one we had, tool use?

Instinct is by definition inherited genetically. All experts in this field agree that humans inherit behaviour genetically. For example, the rooting reflex.

I wasn't familiar with the rooting reflex and had to wiki it.

Good thing I did, in Australia "rooting" is common parlance for sexual intercourse. Which I suppose would also qualify as an inherited instinct.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#216

Post by westicle »

ohashi wrote: post #212
bergie wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally it seems natural resources only stunt the state of a country and benefit very few. Norway appears to be one of the only places with rich natural resources and a working society.

Australia? USA? Canada? There are many different resources besides simply oil (I am making an assumption that's what is in your mind because of the Norway example). Mongolia doesn't simply have oil (and they rank #92 in the world for oil production - so they don't even have much of it), they have richer mineral deposits.

Those examples don't necessarily refute grandparent's point.

See link below regarding "two speed economies" in which resource booms can actually have a negative structural impact on production.

http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell.asp?...

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#217

Post by Natsu »

wvoq wrote: post #206
Natsu wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's a perfectly reasonable statement. That which truly proves anything would be able to prove a statement and its own converse, creating a contradiction. Evolution, of course, is true, but that doesn't mean that everyone who tries to claim that X is an effect of evolution is correct. There are other causes for things, after all and people are right to be wary of easy explanations trotted out without any di…

converse Negation. There are plenty of true conditional statements whose converses are also true.

Oops. You are correct.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#218

Post by saturn »

EGreg wrote: post #204
tel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No on many counts. Evolution theory is an umbrella term for a number of predictions including common descent, mutation, natural selection which is sufficient in theory and observation to create genetic and then physical changes in a population. We have observed macro evolution countless times in bacteria and viruses. It's not even difficult. I'm not sure why you'd call Evolution a loaded term in a scientific domain.…

1) re evolution: when I say it's a "loaded" term, it's because it is sometimes by people who seem to make the additional assumption that mutation and natural selection are sufficient to produce the results we see today. I think that assumption is unfounded and seems to be more like a wish to keep things simple. I don't for example see how gay people could be genetically predisposed to be gay, since they would have a…

I gave up arguing with creationists long ago, but on the off chance you actually do want to improve your understanding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroevolution#Misuse

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#219

Post by saturn »

mannicken wrote: post #200
saturn wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argum…

>Society demands a man gets out of bed and goes to work; against his sleeping instinct, man complies. The only case where society actually does demand a man to get out of bed is jail. Usually, a man gets out of bed not because he is dragged out like a pet but because society offers something in return -- employment, company, money, food, purpose, etc. He can stay in his bed if he really wants to, or he can choose a m…

> It's a system of symbiosis; the man is making a fucking choice.

Ridiculous. A "choice" between working and eating, or not working and not eating, is no choice at all. Hey, how about you choose to give me all your money and live, or you choose to get shot with my gun and die? Wow, symbiosis!

Thanks for providing some creative explanations for why people might propose that 1+1=3 but you have entirely missed my point. My point was that some things are demonstrable, objectively false and when people state them - as did a great grandparent of this thread - and are then thoroughly demonstrated to be completely wrong, they should have the basic decency to admit it, and pledge to not waste the group's time with such nonsense in future.

There is of course one grim possibility, which is that the OP was actually category 2 - a child, knowingly stating misinformation to "get a rise" - in which case I would really like you to both leave HN; there are plenty of sites for your lulzy trolling, it's not appreciated here.

Re: Is There Anything Good About Men?

#220

Post by jordan0day »

saturn wrote: post #135
sliverstorm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never seen a dog overcome instinct? It's not a uniquely human ability.

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…

Wait, what? What was I wrong about? Finding something amusing? I really don't think I made a very controversial statement, and I certainly wasn't making an "argument". I never said I disagreed with silverstorm's point -- re-reading it, "I'm on the opposite side of that" could sound that way, but I meant "looking from the other direction". silverstorm's point was w.r.t. people thinking that "can behaviors be inherited" hasn't been settled. I presume that it has been.
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