GENIUS FORUMS

I'm having a psychic premonition, it's spooky, Alex will not be able to manage truthfulness and Being will not stick around.

Alex Jacob wrote:Is this a comprehension, truth impairment, or just not paying attention skill to cause the conversation to dissolve into ubsurdity?"

They are both the same thing isn't it? One of the attractions of reading this forum is to study in depth how this 'impairment' is the most common method applied in conversations with the goal of keeping the issue of truth out of it. It's how the active side of ignorance works.

But at the same time, following your own 'Rise of the Shadow' phenomenology - we have to keep on wondering if we are paying attention to all aspects of our own conversations yet.

Pye wrote:I completely grok the role-model mimesis thing, but this is not enough.

I've noticed of late that women seem to do better if they have a role model - they will see that something can be done by women - and so, can be done by them - if they know that a women has already done it. Men don't seem to need that, or perhaps it's just assumed that men can do things, or there are plenty of male role models. (No idea if this is cultural, innate, my imagination, or just some particular women I happen to have noticed.)

If this is true, then perhaps reading "women's history" - stories of women who have done tremendous things - could be very liberating for many women.

DHodges wrote:

Pye wrote:I completely grok the role-model mimesis thing, but this is not enough.

I've noticed of late that women seem to do better if they have a role model - they will see that something can be done by women - and so, can be done by them - if they know that a women has already done it. Men don't seem to need that, or perhaps it's just assumed that men can do things, or there are plenty of male role models. (No idea if this is cultural, innate, my imagination, or just some particular women I happen to have noticed.)

If this is true, then perhaps reading "women's history" - stories of women who have done tremendous things - could be very liberating for many women.

Without question this is true. The herd mentality doing a positive thing. Men do not need that, you are correct, and it is not your imagination. Because if men weren't doing the thing, either, then nobody would be doing it, and it wouldn't even be noticed or discussed. I guess you can imagine a zillion things that nobody is doing, but then that would be just your imagination.

I am sure you are grateful that you have me to clarify things for you.

Men's history is everywhere. Men don't even have to be conscious to have a wide variety of role models - both real and fictional - to choose from. Women have to look harder to find role models, if they choose to seek them out. Men don't have to do any seeking, and may not even be conscious of their role models.

Shahrazad: You're an asshole, prince.

He’s just crippled by misogyny. Brings out his poo-poo mouth and smears itself over his mind’s eye.

Hi Dave.

I've noticed of late that women seem to do better if they have a role model - they will see that something can be done by women - and so, can be done by them - if they know that a women has already done it. Men don't seem to need that, or perhaps it's just assumed that men can do things, or there are plenty of male role models. (No idea if this is cultural, innate, my imagination, or just some particular women I happen to have noticed.)

Men have been monkey-see and monkey-doing for eons. It’s simply that a collective men’s culture gets formed vaster and faster, embedded in time, such that we might make overblown assumptions about the a priori nature of this. Further, each human that emerges has to monkey-see monkey do (mimesis) and does not come ready-made with these “independent” qualities.

DHodges: If this is true, then perhaps reading "women's history" - stories of women who have done tremendous things - could be very liberating for many women.

The obvious problem is that not much of the things women have faced or rejected is bothered to be preserved in history. Further, most of what we can learn from it is what NOT to do.

brokenhead: Men do not need that, you are correct, and it is not your imagination. Because if men weren't doing the thing, either, then nobody would be doing it, and it wouldn't even be noticed or discussed.

more clueless blustering.

You're a little paranoid, Beingof1. You asked me if I knew you, and the only thing I could think of to say is where would I know you from?

brokenhead: Men do not need that, you are correct, and it is not your imagination. Because if men weren't doing the thing, either, then nobody would be doing it, and it wouldn't even be noticed or discussed.

pye: more clueless blustering.

I was joking. Er..., clueless.

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:Men don't have to do any seeking, and may not even be conscious of their role models.

I'm not aware of ever having had a role model. To me, having a role model seems very limiting and mediocre. I do have some admiration and respect for certain individuals and particular achievements, and I have taken various techniques, ideas and attributes from others that I thought were useful and valuable, but in no way did I ever want to emulate another specific human. For me it's always been a lot more abstract - I seek truth, to be the best, to achieve, to win, to embody greatness, to bring my dreams to reality. Trying to follow in the footsteps of another person would be setting the horizon for achievement very low, I'd rather reach for the stars.

I'd be interested to know if anyone here has, or has had, a role model, or if they identify more with what I've expressed. Might be an insight into the mentality around here.

You weren't joking, broken. You were being sarcastic.

A role model is just a launching point. Trying to be exactly like someone else is more in the realm of mental illness... And all humans have role models as children; it's the natural way that we learn a lot.

When I was young I chose Spock from Star Trek as a role model. I didn't really think so much in terms of gender, so I didn't eliminate males as possible role models. Most humans limit their idealization to people of their own gender, even if they don't limit their role models to actual people rather than fictional characters (and yes, I did realize that Spock was fictional. I just didn't see any real people that were as good as the fiction).

All humans? How do you know that? Like I said, I don't remember ever having a role model. The closest thing I can think of, is that I had a lot of respect for science and reason as a kid.

I know that because I am looking at this rationally. It is part of the development process. Even if a human didn't have any contact with any other human beings, it would still use something as a role model - be it an animal, robot - whatever was taking care of it. Humans are born helpless infants, and imprint other things on their minds.

I am taking the term "role model" to mean essentially the same thing as "example"- and as such, am sure that I had other role models that I did not actively or intentionally incorporate into me - but did anyway. Sometimes it has shocked and disgusted me when I have recognized that as a child, I was poorly influenced by a role model such as a parent. I endeavor to remove the effects of such negative role models, though. That is part of the difference between a conscious person and someone just allowing the world to program them.

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:I know that because I am looking at this rationally.

How very Spockian of you.

I am taking the term "role model" to mean essentially the same thing as "example"- and as such, am sure that I had other role models that I did not actively or intentionally incorporate into me - but did anyway.

Ok, I was thinking of a "role model" as being a figure that is more consciously recognized and emulated.

brokenhead: I was joking. Er..., clueless.

oh. sorry. I just got back. I don't know you well enough to tell.

Jason, I think Elizabeth is onto it about the modeling that is all around us, to which we immediately begin our adaptions. When I think of the phrase "role model," I think of those that are consciously chosen. You've just probably never seen an individual you thought of highly enough to want to mime. But you've internalized the thoughts and behaviors of millions of them, along with their collective noise known as culture. That very culture contains what might have taught you that the best way to be is autonomous and self-determining (just as an example, and not necessarily the case). There is no escape.

Here is the mistake that I think is generally made. We look back on a history of human things-done and things-valued and ways and means that have settled into a pattern, and we assume that the authority of that pattern alone speaks for some sort of destiny of fulfillment of a priori notions about ourselves/social order. This is an incorrect view of reality, in my estimation. Those patterns emerge from lived interactions, each and every one weighing in in their own way, creating itself as it goes along. It's like the difference between Plato - saying that there is such a thing as gravity-itself; preexistent of things displaying gravity // and Aristotle, whose things have to exist first; whose interaction of things in lived experience create the gravity a posteriori.

This is how I view humans, too. To speak of that which is hard-wired into human nature is to speak of that which is natural to us. And anything that is natural to us is just that - it's natural, like your busy pancreas; your growing hair. It takes care of itself generally, and without our concern. Why would we be troubled when it's just "our nature"? No, we are misnaming what is our "nature" when we use it this way.

The moment that there is more than one (human), there is society, and this moment is the movement of creation of all that comes after it. Just like the object and the gravity - we possess no innateness of any kind; we have no "properties" until we come into existence and are modeled by our interaction with other things. If those things are reduced to an environment empty of humans, then we shall model along with whatever else is there, empty of what we generally consider 'humanity' ourselves.

Whyever would I want to concern myself with that which is natural to us? No one does. Everything else we are doing is trying to transcend. And that means that every bit of it is up for our conscious (re)configuration.

Shahrazad wrote:You weren't joking, broken. You were being sarcastic.

Then my bad, Shah, if it came across that way. Because it was not intended to be sarcastic, but rather logically true in a smart-ass way. I'm simply agreeing with Hodges. I find I often do. Hodges usually makes good sense. IMO.

Pye writes:

"You are answering for me :) Men also have these opportunities to partake in activities of transcendence, but most of them blow it off, too. And entry for women into these worlds does not smooth-sailing make. The woman who just ran for U.S. president (law-making is the stuff of transcendence) was treated to an unprecedented amount of sexist analysis, from the tasteless to the absurd. And yes, from both men and women."

Might have been 'sexism', might have been absurd, and might have been tasteless, but there might also be other 'reasons' and reasonings as to why Hilary Clinton gets the reception she does. I am just speculating because I do not, myself, participate in the electronic culture so as to have seen and witnessed her---except in some of the youtube vids. Her 'victory speech of her failure', I felt, was pretty basically the internalized assumptions of 60s and 70s feminism. It is quite possible that another sort of woman might capture the popular imagination, and be thrust right to the top. With Clinton, though, it might have been 80% due to other reasons, not related to her womanhood. But here is a possible truism: no men will elect a woman who runs on a pure feminist platform, and in her 'victory speech' it was only then that she really made clear her agenda: I deserve to be president and should be president because I am a woman. All the assumptions of post-war feminism, fueled by ressentiment for the structure of things. It all seems weird to me.

"And I'm not so sure the social conditioning to immanent roles is not just as keenly aimed at males, whose sexual appetites are pandered and propped, and whose social identity is so often tied to his sexual success. Not to mention the patriotic notion of being the good family man; the loyal working stiff."

Interesting---telling?---that you put those two phrases so close together: The patriotic 'good family man' and [;] the loyal working stiff. We must be reading very different texts. I can honestly think of nothing---in a sane society---that needs more support and energy than a good, sane, family ethic (something more than mere Focus on the Family values), and lots of people need to get ahold of some ammo to defend what is liley the most precious thing in their life from flippant assault: this mockery of what is the foundation of culture, and the strength of culture. Same for the 'working stiff'.

I may be over-emphasizing these points here, and I do agree that there is a great deal of distortion and 'pandering'---of both sexes---when it comes to sexuality, sexual images, etc. I know lots of non-intellectual, 'normal' people who see mass-culture as an enemy that means to do them harm.

"The part in your quote bolded above, though, I take exception to, on grounds I have repeated here so often. I know from living fact that when the right conditions are set, females are fully capable of handling reasoning both subtle and complex, to every degree as that of males. To be sure, the "laboratory" (classroom) is only 90 minutes, twice a week; and these women emerge immediately into the world at large - a college campus - in tune with its immanence expected. But with the right conditions set; the expectations high; the language laid out; the concepts ready for take-off, there is no way in the world I could possible come away from my experiences with higher thinking and say that women are less capable of it than men. It's the conditions, not the nature of things. And it's just plain rare everywhere."

There are surely people who want to construct a 'sexism' along physiological lines, and perhaps there is some degree of pertinence to those physiological differences. But it seems to be a missing of the point. You could have two men with the same basic equipment (and they say that we all generally do), but one man uses what he has in a different way, and his success (in whatever arena) separates him from the other. My personal, intuitive understanding contradicts what you assert. Given all the opportunities, all the 'role models', women may turn out to have radically different agenda as to what they determine is valuable and worthwhile to achieve. There are so many things---simply intuitively---that one might suppose they would never do, like network for decades on a plan to make a trip to the moon. There seem so many different goals and agendas that women simply do not conceive as relevant. Does this mean that women are not capable of reasoning? What does one mean by that? The peculiar and specific way that men reason? I don't think it would be a woman's wish to reason in this way, and because that is so, it is likely that thousands if not millions of other goals and aspirations...would simply not be relevant to her.

Therein lies an essential difference, and it ain't IQ, it ain't aptitude.

Also, the 'nurture' assertion generally is deeply problematic. Culture can indeed dramatically influence 'nurture'. Advertising and culture can provide women with radical new ways of being, and in that peculiarly Aristotelian sense, they can all be molded and modelled by a defining force. You can actually really push the envelope and create mannish women, and in a specific sense dramatically alter their own relationship to what is 'female' Sure, it can be done. But what happens then? What is gained? Is something really gained?

It seems that there are biological limits, or that biology (and physiology) provides a general framework. True humans are culturally very adaptive, and anthropology points to the radical differences of adaptation in culture---but what sticks in the end? What 'meets human needs'? What is really the best adaptive?

I am not precisely sure this question has been definitively answered.

"I reject every brain-study that's come down the pike that sets its cap to explain these fundamental differences between men and women - this determinism set about its own determination. Because every living human becomes its immediate conditions instantly, and it starts even earlier in the womb. I heard a scientific rumor that if you tell the sex of the child to the pregnant mother, she starts producing the corresponding hormone (testosterone/estrogen) in an amount significantly more abundant than women without this knowledge. We are stunningly malleable; infinitely dependent upon our conditions. You cannot study feral children and come away with any other conclusion than this."

So, tell a woman that she's got a boy when it's really a girl, she'll churn out a 'balancing' hormonal sauce, and all will be well!

You're repeating it seems the basic predicates of feminist theory. Just like so many predecessors in academic environs. It is oddly artificial. It smacks of pretensions to social engineering. Things seem to function differently though, on the ground.

"People have many many cherished things they think belong to their nature (walking on two's, talking, loving, smiling, sociability, natural modesty, natural superiority, etc.) that make no appearance until the conditions are there to mimic them. And sometimes, if these conditions aren't there at the right time, some of those cherished aspects of humanity never emerge."

True, as it pertains to the feral children. But though that example seems to definitively prove your point (that nurture is the prime and deterministic factor), there are many other parts to the puzzle that you perhaps are not taking into consideration.

"Whilst the scientists are creating their paradigm, and the social psychologists are writing their copious best sellers about irreconcilable men and women, I am living on the edge of existence, it's immediate edge, where malleable conditions stand taller in evidence than any brain scan they can show me. Time's a'wasting anyway, while they fiddle around."

But it isn't scientists of social psychologists who decide these issues. It tends to get worked out and decided much more closer to the ground. But combine scientism with social psychology with feministic docrines dreamed up in specifically university settings among oddly disconnected white chicks---and well: stand back and watch out!

Its a great deal of what we are now seeing in front of us.

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brokenhead wrote: I'm simply agreeing with Hodges. I find I often do. Hodges usually makes good sense. IMO.

So I guess you could say Hodges is a sort of role model for you.

I think everyone is a role model, and if we are sensitive, every thing (like, water, how it flows, shows a teaching). Everyone models a role, and from them we learn. We learn how to be, and how not to be, according to our nature. We learn subconsiously and consciously, we concur or disagree with what we are presented with, we absorb or repel, on a more or less continuous basis. We are the product of everything we come in contact with, and a lot more indirectly. And we model for others in the same way.

Alex,

My personal, intuitive understanding contradicts what you assert. Given all the opportunities, all the 'role models', women may turn out to have radically different agenda as to what they determine is valuable and worthwhile to achieve. There are so many things---simply intuitively---that one might suppose they would never do, like network for decades on a plan to make a trip to the moon. There seem so many different goals and agendas that women simply do not conceive as relevant.

As a general rule, women might have different priorities than men, and even more importantly, we seem to be less ambitious. This lack of ambition stems from the fact that we are content, while men are so discontent that they have to keep pushing to change their circumstances. You have correctly stated that IQ is not the reason for the difference. There are also other factors that come into play, such as our desire to pursue romantic relationships, and raise children. Men are less concerned about that.

I think my personal case is an example of this. An IQ test and observation would indicate that there is no real IQ difference between my brothers and I. We were born with the same genetic makeup, given the same education, opportunities and inheritances. Yet in the end my brothers ended up achieving more than I did. Our priorities were different. They were not content to be middle class, while I would have been happy to move down the ladder to poor. I had peace and tranquility as my main goals; they wanted status and power. I wanted romance and family; they wanted one-night stands. I devoted most of my resources to raising my children; one of my brothers chose not to have any contact with his (thus freeing up his resources for his own “advancement” in life), while the other postponed fatherhood until a ripe old age.

I also have a younger sister, and she seems to have the same attitude I have towards financial success. She is a Pediatrician who sees her profession as a way to help people in need or distress; she does not see it as a means to make herself rich. All the choices she has made stem from that distinction.

If women became like men in their priorities, we would go extinct in about four generations. Unwanted children would be either neglected or aborted, and wanted children would be few and far between. That is one of the problems with this masculinity philosophy.

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Carl G wrote:

brokenhead wrote: I'm simply agreeing with Hodges. I find I often do. Hodges usually makes good sense. IMO.

So I guess you could say Hodges is a sort of role model for you.

Except that he laughs at Christians and sees no value in the concept of God.

Just a little matter.

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Shahrazad wrote:If women became like men in their priorities, we would go extinct in about four generations. Unwanted children would be either neglected or aborted, and wanted children would be few and far between. That is one of the problems with this masculinity philosophy.

Given how incredibly deluded we are as a species, it doesn't make a great deal of difference if we go extinct or not. From the point of view of wisdom, it makes little difference whether the human race, in its current form, exists or not.

I think the only way forward is to either breed women to be even more backward than they are now and turn them into a separate slave race, or else breed them into a male-like race capable of higher endeavours and at the same time breed, say, chimpanzees into a slave race. The way it is now, where women are neither animal nor human, with their allure serving to keep men's minds firmly focused downwards, it is virtually impossible for the human race to move forwards.

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[laughs] Whoever said you didn't have a sense of humour, David!

I think the only way forward is to either a.) breed women to be even more backward than they are now and turn them into a separate slave race, or else breed them into a male-like race capable of higher endeavours and at the same time breed, say, b.) chimpanzees into a slave race.

I just have one (rhetorical, really) question, which one ( a. or b.) would be having the babies and why...

David Quinn wrote:The way it is now, where women are neither animal nor human

So do you now consider women higher or lower than animals?

David,

You understand exactly nothing about genetics. I had been giving you more credit than that.

Women and men have the same genetic code, except for one chromosome, the y, which is very defective compared to the x chromosome. Even if you figured out a way to breed men with men, nothing at all would be changed, except for a huge increase in hemophilia, Daltonism and other y chromosome related diseases.

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