PeakOil is You
polite overcrowding
Re: polite overcrowding
by Raxozanne » Thu 09 Mar 2006, 03:20:32
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', ' ')The main thing that I tried to get across is that in the 1st world at least, women are being brought up on one hand, empowered, and on the other, taught not "to fight". Against something as powerful a driving force as reproductive biology the fight never lets up. And I think the absence of consistency in that fight is the reason that the 1st world feels Africa is a lost cause and abortion rights are threatened domestically.
Yeah I understand where you are coming from in this sense. Especially when you mentioned something about '1st world women having babies for self-actualization purposes'. I think you were spot on about that. I see all these suburbian middle aged women smiling at each other as they cart their babies around. What really gets me is how they can bring a baby/babies into this world and have no idea about how their current way of life came about/ what is fueling it/ how it is going to end. If they did they chances are they wouldn't be smiling anymore.
When I was a little kid I used to think that my parents knew everything, that every nation state in the world was working together in harmony and that people only got married if they loved one another. Boy was I so wrong.
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Re: polite overcrowding
by Doly » Thu 09 Mar 2006, 08:44:56
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Raxozanne', '
')When I was a little kid I used to think that my parents knew everything, that every nation state in the world was working together in harmony and that people only got married if they loved one another. Boy was I so wrong.
')When I was a little kid I used to think that my parents knew everything, that every nation state in the world was working together in harmony and that people only got married if they loved one another. Boy was I so wrong.
That about sums it up.
Maybe if people weren't in the habit of telling lies to kids, that they figure out by they become teenagers, and drive them to believing all sorts of opposite things to what their parents said, and it takes them until their late twenties to start getting a grip on reality... Maybe people would be less likely to be in the current mess.
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Re: polite overcrowding
by Jake_old » Thu 09 Mar 2006, 11:02:47
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')oung women in our current culture are alarmingly anti-intellectual.
It worries me the everyone in our culture is anti-intellectual, women or men.
None of the people I work with vote, or have any idea about the world around them, mainstream or otherwise.
I hear my collegues saying sumfink (something) and pecific (specific). They know how to speak properly, its just not cool.
The boss called me gay the other day. (I was reading a book, shock horror). Mind you some one told me there printer was gay. I don't get it, don't want to get.
I don't claim to be intellectual btw, I do try though, but it is as if that should be something to be ashamed of.
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Re: polite overcrowding
by BlisteredWhippet » Thu 09 Mar 2006, 14:28:37
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RedJake', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')oung women in our current culture are alarmingly anti-intellectual.
It worries me the everyone in our culture is anti-intellectual, women or men.
For sure. I can't say every man is intellectual, but in my experience, for most guys, when they talk, they can patiently listen to a longish, complex argument about something, consider it, take a different opinion in stride, and generally respect ideas as something potentially useful in an impersonal sense.
With many women I've met, I feel they take things personally, check their emotions against what they're hearing, will form arguments and base opinions on what they feel subjectively, who they're talking to, or who is listening, or how it reflects on their reputation. All this ancillary reasoning serves to alter their evaluation of argument in a very subjective way. Ask any woman what the word 'argument' means to them and they will think, trauma.
I think a lot of it goes back to childhood. Girls have to go through the learned helplessness ordeal, the essential victimhood training, the rumor mill and gossip gauntlet, etc. making them hypersensitive to criticism, judgement, and individuality. These are damaged egos that cannot form adequately form a protective concept of self-worth independent of the external world. The wounded ego is a fortress that has does not discriminate between friend or foe. The richness of a life of experience is denied access to a woman's inner world because she was taught to fear it.
I feel like I go back and forth between arguing for one concept of women's "empowerment" and on the other hand women being victimized. Its not entirely a duality. I think what I'm trying to say is that women's "empowerment" has become what Freud might have called a 'reaction formation'- in response to oppression, become an oppressor.
Earlier, a woman is given inequality and inequity and told to be happy with what she has. Later, she is given a parody of equality and empowered to exercise the tools of oppression herself and taught, this is what happiness is. Kind of like letting the prisoners out of their cells for a few hours a day to sew bedsheets and clothes for the other prisoners.
The women's movement was subverted by giving them a little taste of the action. If there were higher ideals about social and political concepts, its been lost in a cascade of materialism. The essential concept is that inequity exists, war exists, and struggle exists fundamentally because we feel a desperate need for all this stuff.
I think what the women's movement was really about at its core, was empowering women to bring to bear their unique powers of perception toward higher virtues of peace and love. It floundered on the rocks of cold biological imperative, like other versions of starry-eyed idealism.
Its fascinating to me, how people transform from one mode of thought and behavior, to the polar opposite. I don't quite agree with the conventional view that it is a process of going from 'immaturity' to 'maturity' because it implies that the process of socialization is inherently good. I see no objective improvement from burning bras and persuing idealism on one hand, to capitulation to conventional social roles, a job in real estate, and an SUV on the other.
Subtext of the American message is: growing up is hard to do; you yearn for the 'good old days'. Social pressure is toward conformity and compliance. None of the prisoners wants to see you walking free outside the gates.
It reminds me of a song by Jane's Addiction:
Of course this land is dangerous!
All of the animals
Are capably murderous.
When I was a boy,
My big brother held on to my hands,
Then he made me slap my own face.
I looked up to him then, and still do.
He was trying to teach me something.
Now I know what it was!
Now I know what he meant!
Now I know how it is!
One must eat the other
Who runs free before him.
Put them right into his mouth
While fantasizing the beauty of his movements.
A sensation not unlike
Slapping yourself in the face...
Slapping yourself in the face...
Slapping yourself in the face...
But what does this have to do with overpopulation? Simply that having a baby is just an objective goal, and nature has made it so because nature favors the efficiency of it. It would not produce primates that make ponderous, reverential decisions about reproduction. It would design reproduction as a side effect of the simplest desires. Kind of like how one one hand, a baby is considered a "miracle" and on the other hand, even the dumbest, most heedless morons can produce such a "miracle" without even giving it a passing thought.
Overpopulation will be difficult to thwart because the biology of men and women are engineered to make it easy to conceive and difficult to abort.
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