If Mort Divine ruled the world

[HamburgerBoy]

Yes, a right to a family is a basic principle of most of the world government's social policies.

[citation needed]

 

[crimsonfloyd]

To perish it must exist to begin with. Rights is just a term we use to dress up our power and/or power wants.

If that's how you see the world, that's how you see the world. It's a valid, though very reductionistic, (and thus resultant in problematic consequences) point of view. However, even if rights are rooted in power, that still would not demonstrate that rights do not exist; it would just articulate what their nature was.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

[citation needed]

Research the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 16 and the European Convention on Human Rights Article 8 for starters.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

How many countries supposedly agreeing to those have legalized incest?

 

[Dak]

If that's how you see the world, that's how you see the world. It's a valid, though very reductionistic, (and thus resultant in problematic consequences) point of view. However, even if rights are rooted in power, that still would not demonstrate that rights do not exist; it would just articulate what their nature was.

Why wouldn't more "problematic consequences" come from those who can steamroll right over people while patting themselves on the back about "muh rights"? Maybe rights are something: an ego defense mechanism.

I didn't say rooted in, but let's go with that for a second - you won't like it. For example: All genocide perpetrators were merely acting within their rights.

I used to be very keen on the idea of rights, until I was disabused of the idea by the entire gamut of leftists, from the freestuffers to the Maos. Guys like TB bash the left up and down, and I find that to be ignorant. A lot of intelligent men did a lot of writing for the left, and the greatest contribution was to clear up misconceptions about things like "rights" - that there are no rights, there is only what you can grab and hold. In taking another look at history it's pretty obvious, and what has leftist academia and philosophy been if not historically rooted. Just look at US history: The Declaration of Independence listed off (grabbed) some "basic human rights". Immediately had to fight a war to hold them. Later on, you had a war over "states rights" (to secede, hold slaves, whatever). The states lost the war, and lost those rights. You might say they never even really had them since they couldn't hold them. Then we have the "Civil Rights Act", where people had to march in the streets all over the country - sans guns, which is only one step removed from with guns - which is the point of marches, to insinuate what the next step is.

 

[Einherjar86]

The hell, I didn't realise you replied to me, sorry about that I'll get straight on a rebut of some sort.

Just came in here to drop this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROjOjDMr43M

Jeez, she does herself no favors by using the phrase "Mother Nature." Give me a break Camille.

My problem with Paglia is that she criticizes pop feminism and pretends to be criticizing academic feminism. The two aren't the same. Academics generally don't believe that gender is imposed by oppressive institutions. When intelligent feminists say "patriarchy" they aren't envisioning a group of old white men in suits sitting around a table in a remote mansion smoking cigars. They're commenting on an effect of social systems.

If students even bother to take gender studies courses in the first place, who do we find on the reading list? Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and (gasp!) Camille Paglia. Students aren't being taught "rot," they're being taught the state of the field.

Camille Paglia has leveled ad hominem attacks at Butler, calling her a "super-careerist Foucault flunky." Butler has had the audacity to remain silent (how dare she).

I do not know of a single social scientist who would teach her students that women aren't influenced at all by biology. The point of cultural critique is to put pressure on the absolutism of values associated with biological aspects. For example, women can give birth, therefore they must be motherly; and a woman who isn't motherly - who leaves her children with a nanny, for instance, while she goes to work - is somehow heartless. That is a "real" cultural belief, and it's what social scientists and cultural critics want to overturn. Not that "women can make the men bear children if they want!", which is the essence of what Paglia is suggesting.

Now, here - "If history had been left to women then we'd all still be living in grass huts." She complains that people misinterpreted her, that what she meant was simply that history has largely been shaped by men. Her logic here is practically invisible (i.e. she's not using any). The logic of her statement was that, all things being equal, women could not achieve what men did: "If history had been left to women," she said; not "Speaking contextually and historically, men have made most of our cultural advancements." There is no way to prove, nor is there any reason to assume, that if we reeled history back to the beginning it would peel out the same way. Maybe there's evidence that it would - women would likely still be caregivers for most of human history. But there's no way to prove it, and she should know better when making that statement.

I can't keep listening to this video. It isn't offensive or outlandish, it's just boring. I actually think she has nothing to say and so she's screaming at the top of her lungs to make up for it.

 

[CiG]

Relevant to the debate with Omni.

Laws and policies:

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed in 2004, defines a fetus as a "child in uterus" and a person as being a legal crime victim "if a fetal injury or death occurs during the commission of a federal violent crime." In the U.S., 36 states have laws with more harsh penalties if the victim is murdered while pregnant. Some of these laws defining the fetus as being a person, "for the purpose of criminal prosecution of the offender" (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2008). Laci Peterson, murdered in 2002, is one of the more high-profile homicides.

Currently in the North Carolina Senate, a bill called the SB 353 Unborn Victims of Violence Act is being considered for legislation that would create a separate criminal offense for the death of a fetus when the mother is murdered. The North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence does not support this law for numerous reasons including failure to see violence against the mother as the cause of the fetal death.[15] The Coalition does, however, support the position of the National Network to End Domestic Violence regarding the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

Arg complaining about his hard earned taxes going to support the disabled and special needs population while he simultaneously pays out the ass for sex seems to me the very height of biological selfishness, easily the best poster in this thread so far, rock on man!

I don't think gender pre-dates human society. In fact, I think saying that chimps play with sticks like dolls imports an anthropocentric brand of thinking onto behavior that has no concept of "doll." There may be biological reasons why female chimps play with sticks a certain way, but this doesn't amount to gender. I think that biology is at play in both humans and animals, but I think that humans have developed a complex social system of gender and gender roles that animals have not.

Gender is a particular kind of communication, a social language that registers heavily with identitarian beliefs, raising it to the level of, in my opinion, a third-order system (meaning it appeals to language in order to engage its environment). Seeing as animals don't talk to us using language, I don't think animals have a gender in the sense we mean.

Finally, I'm not sure what definition of gender you mean, but I find myself attracted to Judith Butler's definition (for the most part). This is a fairly influential and well-established definition.

The studies I saw weren't about sticks and our (human) imagined intentions of the relationship between the chimps and the sticks, it was actual human child toys.
Obviously humans have developed complex gender roles in comparison to animals, but these gender roles still stem from biology and once you reduce it to biology, it's quite easy to see similarities across a broad spectrum of animal societies.

The first part, the second part is the study you already mentioned.
http://animalwise.org/2012/01/26/born-this-way-gender-based-toy-preferences-in-primates/

I just use the universal definition myself, I don't faff about in too much social science stuff, I know of Judith Butler but I'll have to do some quick research.

 

[rms]

Now, here - "If history had been left to women then we'd all still be living in grass huts." She complains that people misinterpreted her, that what she meant was simply that history has largely been shaped by men. Her logic here is practically invisible (i.e. she's not using any). The logic of her statement was that, all things being equal, women could not achieve what men did: "If history had been left to women," she said; not "Speaking contextually and historically, men have made most of our cultural advancements." There is no way to prove, nor is there any reason to assume, that if we reeled history back to the beginning it would peel out the same way. Maybe there's evidence that it would - women would likely still be caregivers for most of human history. But there's no way to prove it, and she should know better when making that statement.

Wasn't her point that men inherently try to prove to themselves/others/society more than women and that's why we as "humans" progressed to where we are today?


Edit;

CU Boulder Gender/Women's studies degree requirements, spoiler alert no biology.

http://wgst.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/WMSTMajorReq_Jan2013.pdf

 

[CiG]

Yeah, I think she was more or less spot on there, especially from an evo-psych perspective, though she fails to mention that without women men would probably be just as content with less, much of the male drive to challenge themselves, innovate etc is directly related to the biological need to court women and protect women.

In fact, it's all piffle in the end because there is no reality in which a woman can exist without a man and vice-versa.

So yes her opinion is slightly hamfisted, I don't advocate the woman, just posted out of interest as I love ideological in-fighting.

 

[Einherjar86]

Wasn't her point that men inherently try to prove to themselves/others/society more than women and that's why we as "humans" progressed to where we are today?

Inherently? I certainly hope not.

CU Boulder Gender/Women's studies degree requirements, spoiler alert no biology.

http://wgst.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/WMSTMajorReq_Jan2013.pdf

I never said she was wrong about that; but I do think she's wrong to claim that an instructor in Gender/Women's studies would suggest that biology doesn't matter.

 

[SentinelSlain]

I don't have the energy to argue about but I pretty strongly dislike a lot of feminism. I swear it's just some bullshit attempt to trigger men, so women can get some kind of none sexual orgasm out of denying men sex, or feeling like they are. I know how insane that sounds, but think about how much women enjoy being in control of who gets to fuck them. They turn everything into being about that.

 

[CiG]

@Ein: Question, have you done gender studies?

 

[Matt]

Haha, none chance there ^

 

[Einherjar86]

@Ein: Question, have you done gender studies?

If you're asking whether I have a degree in gender studies, the answer is no.

I've taken classes cross-listed in gender studies, meaning they fulfill requirements for literature and gender studies. Furthermore, a professor from the English department whom I'm acquainted with also serves on the faculty for the Gender Studies program.

Assuming that women in gender studies deny biology is simply asinine. Female grad students know that they have ovaries. Paglia just makes everyone in academia today sound like morons. It's quite an inflammatory description.

 

[CiG]

Do you deny that there's an anti-scientific mentality coming out of the feminist and social activist movements?

 

[rms]

Ein separates the reddit/imgur "activism" and academia, I do believe.

 

[Einherjar86]

This question is far more difficult to answer than you might think. Being as brief as possible, I do not deny that historically there has been an academic culture war between science and the Humanities (or between the "hard" and "soft" sciences); but I think that the disagreements between the disciplines stem more often from misunderstandings than from genuine refusals, and I think that strong efforts have been underway over the past decade and a half to institutionalize cooperative discourses between them.

That said, I do not deny that frequent misreadings by the uninitiated (joke, folks...) tend to misrepresent the Humanities as "anti-science." It also doesn't help that blowhards like Steven Pinker still insist upon the Humanities' subservience to science, as though science is the dominant discipline and the Humanities are just something for our spare time.

EDIT: rms said it more briefly...

 

[crimsonfloyd]

Why wouldn't more "problematic consequences" come from those who can steamroll right over people while patting themselves on the back about "muh rights"? Maybe rights are something: an ego defense mechanism.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

I didn't say rooted in, but let's go with that for a second - you won't like it. For example: All genocide perpetrators were merely acting within their rights.

No, I'm well educated in the history of genocide and am aware that from a legal perspective, the executors of genocide usually have a legal right to do what they do. That's one of the reasons for the increase in international human rights laws in the post-WWII world: the global community realized we needed some basic principles that transcended the authority individual states.

How about this: when rights are unequally distributed, they can become a tool of oppression and discrimination.

I used to be very keen on the idea of rights, until I was disabused of the idea by the entire gamut of leftists, from the freestuffers to the Maos. Guys like TB bash the left up and down, and I find that to be ignorant. A lot of intelligent men did a lot of writing for the left, and the greatest contribution was to clear up misconceptions about things like "rights" - that there are no rights, there is only what you can grab and hold. In taking another look at history it's pretty obvious, and what has leftist academia and philosophy been if not historically rooted. Just look at US history: The Declaration of Independence listed off (grabbed) some "basic human rights". Immediately had to fight a war to hold them. Later on, you had a war over "states rights" (to secede, hold slaves, whatever). The states lost the war, and lost those rights. You might say they never even really had them since they couldn't hold them. Then we have the "Civil Rights Act", where people had to march in the streets all over the country - sans guns, which is only one step removed from with guns - which is the point of marches, to insinuate what the next step is.

Again, I don't disagree that power is always at play when rights are at play. I 100% agree with that statememt. What I disagree with is that rights are reducible to power. How would you explain:

-people defending the freedom of speech of those who have oppositional views to their own?
-whites who risked their lives during the civil rights movement to help blacks get equal rights- as well as any other allie or upstander who risks their own well being/priviledge/power to defend or expand the rights of the oppressed? To reduce these acts to power, it seems to me that you are going to have to rely on some highly speculative psycho-analysis.

 

[Zephyrus]

If anyone wants to change the topic, here's something that hits closer to home:

http://decibelmagazine.com/blog/201...ybe-not-treating-women-like-sperm-receptacles

 

[The Ozzman]

'He treats objects..like women, man'