$ jlc (10,306)

Ha! I believe that. It is just absurd enough to be true. I have actually read articles on drop in sperm counts. The problem with a facile answer explaining that observation is that there are so many things that have changed in the time period stated...and people like simple, one sentence 'answers'.

For example, as of 1900, the number of people in the US employed in farming dropped below 50%; this has decreased to 2% today. How do we know that this increasingly sedentary lifestyle is not responsible for the drop in sperm counts? In that period of time, life expectancies have approximately doubled. How does that affect us?

Jan

The problem is real, but the article that is linked is bad because it conflates issues that have nothing to do with its thesis. For example, the mention of the shooters being men: men have (in all societies at all known times) been more prone to violent crimes than women - by about a factor of 10.

Insofar as suicide is concerned, if it were due to cultural emasculation, then suicide would be expected to be highest in the coastal states and lower in more traditional states. The opposite is true: NY, Hawaii, CA are all low on the chart and Alaska, Wyoming, and New Mex are all high.

I have noticed and discussed the need for masculine liberation with male friends. I try to support them in their reveling in their size and strength and competitiveness. I think that this is a problem that actually transcends gender, however, and that the social attack is on strength and competence and independence per se; since the traditional embodiment of these characteristics is 'men', then they become the target.

While I enjoy seeing movies (at last) that have strong female heroes, and reading books with active female protagonists, it is obvious to me that one does not have to make others weak in order to be strong.

Jan

I am really not sure. In my view, the article stated a premise, then presented a bunch of unsupported claims, then concluded that they had proved their premise.

So do I say that the premise may still be correct or that their conclusion is?

Jan

I think that CircuitGuy is correct, but that the kudos go to Abaco, who hit the nail on the head: This article is worthless. It is just a set of spurious, unsubstantiated allegations which attempt to play on one's paranoia.

Its premise may, in spite of that, be accurate. (Just because one individual's arguments are poorly stated and irrational does not mean that his premise is wrong...it just means that he is not good at arguing on a logical basis. There is probably someone else who has stated this case in a rational manner.)

Jan

We have to do better at making accurate decisions regarding innocence/guilt. While I am not opposed to the death penalty for those who have dealt in that coin, I think we should hit the Pause button on it until we do a better job.

Jan

Hmmm. "Age out of crime..." I like that phrase.

Jan

I will add that time does change minds in the context of 'maturity'. You can also argue that 'maturity' is a replacement idea - and I would not argue except to point out that it is one that can come with little intervention other than time passing.

I would also agree that prison is not the best place for maturity to occur. I think that Sundowning is probably a great idea in such instances.

Jan

I don't think that is a realistic proposal. We are increasingly discovering that criminals on death row have been put there - or not - by good lawyers, not by truth. Reassessment of their cases comes up to a high number of reversals. The death penalty does not have an Undo button.

Jan

I find them an excellent tool, and not unduly biased when it comes to chemical structures or Sumerian research.

Jan ;>)

Thank you for providing the links, but - while I do consider that Wikipedia has a liberal bias on many contemporary issues - I did not find the links particularly convincing on the topics they addressed.

For example: the fact that some remedies, which work via known mechanisms (ie immunology) are endorsed by both science and homeopathy does not mean that homeopathy is an equally accurate model as science.

Jan

Trehalose is not an artificial substance - many plants and animals store energy as trehalose; it is how a honey bee gets the energy to buzz its wings so rapidly. Humans, and most mammals, can metabolize trehalose but we store our energy as starch and not trehalose (starch is less efficient, hence the honey bee).

The experiments are essentially saying, "If you give C. difficile more nutrients that it likes, it grows better."

C. diff is a major problem and one that is often overlooked or downplayed; it has spores that are resistant to alcohol-based cleaners (typically used in hospitals). These spores are light and easily airborne, contaminating a ward or even a whole hospital if one person has this bacterium.

I don't think there is any mystery about the C diff plague; it's just a really hard job to fix the situation and a lot of people would prefer to downplay it.

Jan

I think it is less important that the 'slaves' be left behind than that the 'masters' be. The reason Hollywood was established - on the opposite coast from NY Broadway - is that NY entertainment industry was gridlocked by an ol'boy's club. Now we have E Europe and New Zealand growing as movie producers need to move out of the new ol'boy's club of Hwood.

This is human nature, not Hollywood; it applies to science and industry and politics as well; escaping it and letting the people who do not chose to leave stay with the culture they have made is an ethical decision.

Jan

Unfortunately, there are just a lot of swamp creatures! I don't think that the cliche "absolute power generates swamp creatures" will ever catch on, though.

Jan

The earliest study I know of of the heritability of complex factors is the Minnesota Twin Study. (https://www.livescience.com/47288-twi...) There have been hundreds of subsequent studies that substantiated this.

Jan

The qualification for a person to perform a role has nothing to do with their willingness to have sex. Would you want a woman as your surgeon who got good grades for having sex with her professors? Should a woman who has a 3.8 gpa not be allowed to go to medical school if she refuses to have sex with her professors?

If you exchange sexual favors for an emerald ring, that is a transaction, but if you exchange sexual favors for being placed in a position you have not earned, or barred from it when you have earned it because you refused sex, then this is a lie.

Were it just Weinstein, were he unique in this respect, you would have a point. But it was not: the entire culture of the Industry was built around this. If you wanted a part in a movie, and you did not have any powerful connections (money/family) then it was 'his way (the bed) or the highway'. The whole point is that this culture did not represent a free society.

Jan

I was talking about this with Wm yesterday and while it is a given that the male sex drive is different than the female's and that people in power will always try to acquire perks, I think it is essential that sexual abuse of women as part of gatekeeping to jobs not be socially condoned. This has been accepted, especially in Hollywood, as 'how the system works' (wink, wink; nudge, nudge). Making this culturally unacceptable is essential: a person's ability to be a part of the workforce and excel in a career should not be contingent on her willingness to sleep her way to the top.

There will always remain people in power who are drunk on power - we will have to fight that demon forever. But we can curtail this one aspect of it, and it is good to see it happening.

The military has long had the Old School precept that you cannot have an affair with anyone in your chain-of-command. I think implementing this in civilian life is a realistic place to begin.

Jan

The abuses are there. They are just so institutionalized that they have become invisible. Now that the bit has flipped and these 'typical' actions are no longer acceptable, there are literally generations of women who are coming forward. What we are seeing is no less then the lancing of an abscess that has been with us for generations - there is going to be a whole lot of 'stuff' before we can start to heal.

Incidentally, there is a statute of limitations on these claims, but since we are dealing with 'influence' and not 'authority', no limitation applies.

I consider this to be part of the adolescence of our society as we try to make a transition from our inherited tribal instincts to a civilized modern society. Women in workplace double the capabilities available to a society without increasing its overhead. In order for women to climb upwards to their individual levels of competence, there cannot be a bottleneck of having to have sex with powerful men above them (so to speak).

Jan

Here is a non-Forbes non-adblock adverse article on the same topic: https://kopitiambot.com/2017/11/29/am...

Technical magazines have been doing this for as long as I have been receiving them. Their ad value is in proportion to their subscription rates, so it is difficult to un-subscribe from them. They will ask you to pay expensive subscription prices, but if you do not, then they will ask you to pay discount subscription deals, but if you do not they will ask you to officially subscribe for free, but if you do not they will send you their trade journals anyway. If you directly contact them, and ask that you be removed, they will eventually remove you...but it is more important for you to count for ad value than for you to pay for the magazine.

Jan

Five: Academia.

Jan

ewv -

Our difference in perspective is that I do not agree with your initial premise: "There are no innate ideas in an inevitable 'span of human character'."

That is what I consider a 'blank slate' premise which attributes most or all of character to environment. I think that genetics has a lot to do with character. Per Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawson and others, I think that we have 'onboard' a number of basic 'software modules' that are genetically loaded into our brains: Linguistic aptitude (but not language per se), fair trading, social conformity, counting 1-2 or 3,...there are several others postulated.

I think that most people have a much higher innate tendency towards 'social conformity' than the people in the Gulch. Were there a whole lot of us, then we might be able to swing the 'conformists' into 'our camp' the way the liberal education system has swung the recent generations from the political views of the 1950's to the current POVs (good and bad). But that would not make these people independent thinkers; they would just be another flavor of conformists.

So, if you reason from a 'blank slate' perspective, your approach is logical. If, like me, you think that there is innate inherited tendencies, then the metaphor to the bee-scouts stands as a paradigm. (Yes, there are a lot more shades of grey than I am painting, but these emails are pretty long already.)

Jan

I think that we are not going to convince others to think the way we do - and probably should not. There is genuine variability in the span of human character and I think that is a reality that politics tries to deny. I think that about half of humanity would be happy in an affluent socialist environment - one that had a totalitarian ruler who assigned them their work and made sure that they never did without. I think about 30% more would probably enjoy living in a high-tax re-distributive democracy, where they elected their leaders but had a daddy-state as a safety net.

If you look at the history of the world, you will see that populations that did not compete for favored environment remained Paleo, Meso, Neolithic up to modern times. It is an error of perception to think that people inherently want to advance; they want 'their lives' to be like the ones before; they want their children to be like them.

There is a skeleton of a young boy found in Southern Siberia. His genes are ancestral to the Proto Indo Europeans (who traveled west) and to the American Indians (who traveled east). I think that there was a mutation that said "move" and that this low-incidence genetic trigger produced two major peoples who were unlike everyone else in that they wanted to see over the next hill.

The world does not need 'a lot' of us. They only need a few. In a beehive, 98% of the bees are workers; some fraction of the remaining 2% are scouts. We are the scouts.

The role of communication is not to try to convert the worker bees, it is to be sure that the other scouts hear a philosophy that matched their character, so that they do not blindly accept a life that is not meaningful to them.

So continue to communicate. We are all people who have been the recipient of someone reaching out and saying, "Try this philosophy - it's different from what you have heard before." But do not expect the population to convert. They should not. This is genuinely not what they want.

Jan

You are referring to the Sumerian myth of Innana in the underworld, which was written down in around 2,500 BC. (Proto-writing in that area dates to about 3KBC but the earliest examples are bookkeeping and tallies.) Opinion seems to be divided whether she was visiting the underworld to try to take it over from her sister (the then-ruler) or if she was actually trying to go to the funeral ceremonies for her brother-in-law (the Bull of Heaven, whose death she had caused). The Sumerian myths were adopted by the Babylonians - in whose tales it was Gilgamesh who killed the Bull.

I would expect to see some indication that these finds were linked to the myth in order to consider that we were dealing with more than a modern association between the two.

Jan

A friend of mine had something similar happen at his college: the victim turned out to also be the perp.

Jan

Ha! I am quite focused on the present with respect to the entry above. I am aware that historical literature is full of sad stories: Have you tried to find a 'happy story' in the Icelandic Sagas? At least some of these tales exist to keep bad things from happening.

In one saga, a man strikes his newlywed bride the day after they are married. She says, "Someday, you will regret that." Years pass and he is now very in love with her, and she with him. Enemies attack their home; he is an excellent bowman and can keep them all at bay. His bowstring breaks. He turns to his beloved wife and asks her for some strands of her beautiful knee-length hair to use as a bowstring. She says, "No. You struck me. I will not give you my hair." (In this culture, pride is more important than love.) He will not lower himself to take her hair by force, and he fights with a sword until his enemies kill him. Moral: Don't beat your wife.

I study the sagas for the info they contain, but I avoid reading them as stories...because they are almost all mega-downers. I accept, philosophically, that stories about the bad times that other people have can lead to empathy that crosses lines of class and race and religion. I accept that these stories are good things to have for this reason.

I do not accept that our culture should magnify and glorify the negative side of our present civilization in order to make us feel as if we were subject to a modern version of 'Original Sin'. We are not born guilty of inherited blame for slavery and prejudice and genocide just because we now live in a flourishing high tech culture. This is what the negative media is trying to push on us psychologically, and I reject that meme.

Jan

I think that the rise of the antihero and dystopias, especially in fiction, is dangerous because people do not just magically 'become' socialist or depressed: they are trained to these world-views. This has been very successful in the last 30 years.

Young people are methodically trained in socialist doctrine and in the inevitable immediate collapse of Western Civilization. This is reinforced by movies and books. When these world views are noted by the press, it is as if they had sprung up of their own accord (news article today on Millennials overturning capitalism). Depression is on the rise in Millennials...what a surprise.

Jan