A new group

[Tomhargen]

A post from the commentary of the debate.

I think Dan's post is well reasoned, but Samadhi has chosen four qualities of all of which are problematic at the get go

Nurturing: Sample your neighborhood for the modern woman, she is not nurturing by any means, she uses sex as a tool to advance her aims and is competitive and egoistic and incredibly shallow.

Receptive: Again few are receptive, and it is a hard work to be receptive. Is woman receptive by default? A big no? Again sample the women around you for proof.

Sensitive: This is a quality that a person develops with great practice. It requires peeling of layers of conditioning. To say that women are sensitive by default is very disingenuous.

Intuition: By which you mean acting without thinking, or decide on a whim. This quality is of course present in the modern woman in dollops. But isn't it a big hindrance to enlightenment?

Alot of people with whom I talk with about subjects pertaining to the feminine always say something like this. We are in all honesty referring more to femininity than women. There are masculine women. Women and femininity, in the contexts that we use them in, are not the same thing. So I would like to assert a new term into the proceedings. Masculinity, femininity, and adolescence. I belive that many people may attribute many of the aspects of a child to those of a woman. I believe also that many people never become true adults. It's possible to have a 50 year old child. So the neighborhood women he refers to, don't necessarily need to be feminine, that can simply be adolescent. That way, all the people who aren't very intelligent, or have bad judgement, or are lazy, or can't hold themselves responsible for their own actions don't get just stuck into the feminine group. This would also make defining femininity alot easier.

[Dan Rowden]

Hey borromakot,

The attributes you give to "adolescence" would really only be attributed to the "feminine" if they stemmed directly from unconsciousness. "People who aren't very intelligent, or have bad judgement, or are lazy, or can't hold themselves responsible for their own actions[...]" aren't really persons that I would automatically designate feminine. It would depend on the causes of those characteristics.

[Tomhargen]

That makes alot of sence. I'm going to think alot about that.

I just don't think we can immediately say that feminine and any of the attributes I listed are automatically linked. Or even that woman and feminine are linked in any way. He assumed that because many women acted in that fasion, that it was automatically a feminine thing. Those words should not mean the same thing anywhere that the word feminine is used in philosophic contexts.

I guess I really just need to think more about exactly how I define feminine.

[Dan Rowden]

Well, sure, but that's true of anything talk about. I define the feminine in a particular way. How I see it manifest in people varies. One can only speak in generalisations about it (as with most human behaviour and psychology), but such generalisations can be instructive nonetheless. Inferences regarding human behaviors and the psychology underpinning them are notoriously slippery. One might, for instance, see the outward characteristics you attribute to "adolescence" in a group of men and in a group of women and infer different causes in each. How do we know the differing inferences are correct?

[Tomhargen]

I was making it simpler than it actually is. I saw femininity and masculinity as simply a persons actions. But if they are expressed in terms of motives, than you can't prove that someone is feminine based only on their actions, no matter how much a seemingly lazy person seems feminine.

I still couldn't bring myself to categorize a child or even a teenager into one of those categories. They aren't done growing up yet. Some people never grow up.

[DavidHenry]

It seems to me we need qualities from each category, eg, if we loosely define masculinity as strength/reason and femineity as caring/sharing, then anyone with all 4 basic qualities would strike me as being very wise, at least from a theoretical perspective, however, the world isn't like that.
I agree that many women these days are obnoxious and conceited/trivial, but then again, as soon as you get stuck into philosophy, everyone's short comings are exposed.

[Tomhargen]

I just think that feminine should be described as "not masculine" so anyone who wasn't considered masculine was justput there. I think maybe there should be another way of talking about normal people who don't care about any of these matters and just want to get through life with as little work as possible.

[DavidHenry]

I think maybe there should be another way of talking about normal people who don't care about any of these matters and just want to get through life with as little work as possible.

Try this word...."idiot"

[tek0]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector



I realize most of you folks do not give a rats ass about wiki but I think you will find that this applies to many aspects of life these days and that not all of us feel like "idiots" for not participating in the "mental masturbation" some people feel needs to be engaged in in order to feel enlightened.

Including contributing to a society that unfortunately no matter how you try to justify it is unrepresentitive of what humans are fully capable of in terms of societal structure.


True "enlightenment" is obtained through technological advancement the likes of which most of us will die before being privy to.


A good nannny could teach us alot.

[DavidHenry]

True "enlightenment" is obtained through technological advancement the likes of which most of us will die before being privy to.

In what sense?

[Dan Rowden]

In no sense whatsoever. I don't think I've seen a more silly statement than that one.

[maestro]

It is possible Dan, through rewiring of the brain by nanotechnology (for example).

[Dan Rowden]

Well, ok, I think I'm prepared to accept the remote possibility of that. Wake me up from my slumber beside Walt Disney when society accepts enlightenment sufficiently to have scientists, who are themselves enlightened, doing such work. Or, conversely, wake me up when it's definitively shown that enlightenment is an emergent property of brain states.

[brokenhead]

It is possible Dan, through rewiring of the brain by nanotechnology (for example).

Or by LSD.

[JustinZijlstra]

True "enlightenment" is obtained through technological advancement the likes of which most of us will die before being privy to.

In what sense?

"Understanding the world through science and applying it blah..."

Reminds me of:

"Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[37] A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane. When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.[33]"

Also technology,

I'm curious when humans become technical in that sense and if we become technology in another sense...

*dives in canetti book*