Dlaw wrote: ↑January 17th, 2018, 1:16 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑January 17th, 2018, 4:16 am
Going down this route of pointing out how much more destructive men are, on average, than women will simply invite the assertion that men are also more constructive. It just feeds into this pointless narrative of men as active and women as passive. It's needlessly divisive. I agree with Greta on this one in pointing out that nobody, male or female, is a saint or a devil. We're all individual human beings with individual characteristics, and we're all, equally, in this together. We try to solve the world's problems together or not at all.
The thing is, the jury is still out on whether men are, in fact, more constructive.
Take the medical field. As women have moved towards equality in this field, some areas have actually become majority female. There's no evidence that productivity drops off at all. Quite the opposite.
I think there's a fetish about the benefit of risk-taking in the economy which is increasingly untrue. For example, low-risk, low-marginal-return investment strategies now dominate that business with High Frequency Trading and the dominance of the indices.
So, Dlaw, you claim that the question of whether males, - let's use, say, white,
Europid, Western males, for example), - are more constructive and creative than their female counterparts is still
sub - judice? That's interesting. I thought that big jury that is constituted of all sound-minded human beings living on planet Earth today had already decided the issue in favour of these white males so considerable time ago? oreover,I was told that their verdict was based on the following evidence...
(1) The history of Western culture/civilization is demonstrably, predominantly the history of the Western mind, and the history of the Western mind is incontrovertibly the history of white
, Europid males from Aristotle and Socrates to Copernicus, Kant, Darwin and Einstein and Hawking. In short, generally speaking, the whole Western intellectual tradition has been the tradition of thousands of extremely brilliant men like these; innovating men writing for other men in a patrilineal cultural tradition that began around 500 BC in classical Athenian antiquity and continues to this day in the current collection of advanced industrialized Western democratic societies ( such as the US, UK and America, etc.) that collectively represent modern Western civilization. Taken together, the positive, constructive, creative contributions that Western males have made through their physical and mental labour and sacrifice in the struggle to advance human progress to date, far outweighs the negative, destructive ones, and are the reasons why no sane person alive on on this planet today would disagrees that contemporary
Western culture is objectively superior, by far, to any other culture in any region of the world. Here are some items on the list of positive, constructive, life-affirming values, liberating entitlements and material benefits that have been developed and contributed by White
Europid males to Western civilisation:
* freedom of speech, freedom to read what we like and freedom believe what we like, freedom of expression, freedom of the print and electronic mass media to publish/broadcast what like , freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, political freedom.
*liberal democracy
* an open and flexible political process that involves "trial and error", open discussion, criticism and self-correction
* the recognition and honouring of man's nature as a rational being who needs to determine and create the kind of circumstances that his survival and flourishing require.
* individualism
* the need for limited representative government and respect for the rule of law
* unparalleled access to economic opportunity in the system of free-market capitalism
* the promotion of reason, the rules of logic and the notion of causality in a universe governed by natural laws that are intelligible to man
* the establishment of levels of health, wealth, productivity , innovation, satisfaction, comfort and life expectancy unparalleled in 6000 years of human history
* stunning scientific and technological achievements, with the West being responsible for every major scientific discovery of the past 500 years from heliocentrism to the telescope to electricity, nuclear fission, the theory of General relativity, space travel and quantum computers. The whole ediface of science and its derivative technology is, in sum, one of the greatestest gifts the West has ever bestowed on humanity.
* the ideas of self-reliance and self-determination based on free will and achievement that have provided freedom to individuals to set the goals and define the contents of their own lives, and decide what meaning to give to their lives
* unprecedented levels of social mobility
* language, art and literature depicting man as efficacious in the world
* the creation by the West of the novel and the sympohony, the West's engendering of the magnificent spiritual creations of Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Van Gogh, Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Schubert
* a valuing of the quest for knowledge and the pursuit of truth for its own sake conducted in a spirit of dispassionate enquiry, free from any political influences or pressures that led to the creation of high quality libraries , research institutes and the an institution that is rarely equally outside the West : the University( including such prestigious, world renowned examples as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Heidelberg and the Sorbonne that attract students from all over the world to enrol in the underdraduate and post-graduate degree programs).
* the development of an exceptional capacity for self criticism, as instanced in the initiative to abolish slavery in the West during the 19th century
* the remarkable achievement that was the ratification of the United States Connstition - the oldest written and codified Constitution in force in the world ( which entrenches, among other things the doctrine of the separation of powers). It is a document that has to date and over many years served as an exemplary model for governments all around the word
* the West has also given us the RSPCA, Amnesty International, The Red Cross," Doctors without Borders", Human Rights Watch, and many other manifestations of the humanitarian impulse, including billions of dollars worth of foreign aid dispensed each year by Western governments to needy persons in the developing world and the provision of safe refuge for those untold thousands of victims of violence, torture and psychological abuse continually fleeing from persecution in brutal, foreign theocracies and totalitarian regimes every year.
Quite an impressive list, isn't it ? Not bad for a group of regressive, unenlightened, conservative, logocentric , phallocentric, patriarchal , "violent", "destructive" male morons !
All of these positive , constructive contributions to civilization were made, as I say, in the overwhelming majority of cases ,by white Western
Europid males.
THEY , not women, were the principal actors , shapers and determiners of all this cultural, political and economic progress that we take so much for granted today in 2018;
THEY, not women, were critical agents of change who struggled to secure these victories. (And) each one of them was hard fought and won through the selfless sacrifice of their collective blood, sweat, tears (and often lives) of Western men on the battlefields both physical and mental of the past 400 years of history.
Throughout over 90% of this four centuries - ( the past 50 or so years being a notable exception, when the influence of intellectually and morally bankrupt feminist academics and political activists succeeded in largely undermining the traditional institution of monogamous, heterosexual and in so doing unleashed catastrophic damage upon the fundamental social fabric which is now indisputably manifesting in a widespread cultural decline of Western civilization ) - the vast majority of women, in contrast, devoted all their physical and mental energies - as rightly they should have (!)- to the business of : caring for their husbands; pregnancy; nursing, childrearing, domestic chores and other family duties.
Of the small minority of women who have made substantial, enduring , constructive contirbutions to Western culture in the modern era ( in the arts, sciences, politics, economics, etc. they tended to be either lesbians, childless or have had recourse to private wealth sufficient, at least, to hire, wet nurses, nannies, governesses, baby-sitters etc; in order to minimize or eliminate the energy sapping and time-consuming details of motherhood and childrearing ( for example, Sappho, Simone de Beavoir, Elizabeth I of England, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa, Queen Victoria, Amelia Earhart, Barbara Streisand, Catherine the Great, Hillary Clinton and such like).
While I do agree that women have been unjustly excluded from some careers and fields of study, nonetheless, male domination of arts and culture is, I believe, far better accounted for as a consequence of men's innately more "Apollonian" ( logical, rational, critical, analytic, reflective, cerebral ,intellectual) - as opposed to "Dionysian") mental attributes/personalities - ( and I will be happy to explicate this in further detail in a separate post, as it involves presenting and explaining a sizable quantity of exciting new research findings concerning the cognitive effects of testosterone on the Executive Functions located in the human frontal lobe's prefrontal cortex, PFC) -
than it is by the strong Marxist and social constructionist claims of second wave feminism, which tend to largely deny/ignore basic science and biology.
Finally, while it is true that women have been historically discouraged from entering certain genres, like sculpture , that require intensive studio training or expensive materials. In academic fields like philosophy, mathematics, theoretical physics and, say, literature, the only materials needed are a pen and paper.
Male conspiracy theory cannot explain all female failures, and I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even without restriction there would still never have been a female Isaac Newton or William Shakespeare, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. Genius is not checked by social obstacles : IT
WILL OVERCOME !
Regards
Dachshund.
