Just considering the possibility isn't too conspiracy theory-ish, but considering it based solely on a single anecdote that could have alternate reasonable explanations (for example, a guard actually was near the car and they just didn't notice) is a little ridiculous, especially when there clearly is a serious issue to be discussed here.
The article only touches on it briefly but I think the difference between most issues and the few "gold-plated issues with megawatt cultural significance" is key. People saw Actions Comics #1 and Amazing Fantasy #15 selling for huge amounts and got the idea that #1 issues and first appearances were somehow inherently worth a lot of money, when in fact it's the cultural importance of Superman and Spider-Man that gave them their value.
Even if there weren't a million bagged-and-boarded copies of Rob Liefeld's Bludd Gunn McShootDeath and the X-Murder Y-Bunch #0.5 sitting in people's basements, it still wouldn't be worth anything because hardly anybody cares about those characters. Even classic runs from the 80s and 90s (Walt Simonson's Thor, Morrison's JLA, Sandman, etc.) haven't had anything like the cultural impact and recognition that major Golden and Silver Age titles did outside of comic circles.
What do you mean by "outdated"? Scientific theories don't go off with age, they depend on evidence and the scientific evidence continues to point to evolution as the best theory. Modern biology might be more advanced than it was in Darwin's day but nothing's disproved the fundamental ideas. That's like saying that the discovery of the Higgs boson makes the Earth orbiting the Sun obsolete.
And as for your second point, it's true. God could use evolution as a tool. God could hide fossils as a joke. God could just be having fun by letting us build up our quaint little theory of evolution before suddenly dumping a herd of unicorns in the savannah. God could, if he existed, do pretty much anything for any reason completely incomprehensible to us. And that's precisely where creationism falls down as a scientific theory - any flaw is just covered by "maybe God did it just because" and it can't be disproved.
Scientific theories do go off. They should also provide predictions and explanations of unknown events. In modern biology even term 'species' is pretty much outdated. Same way we no longer use Newton equations for space navigation.
BTW: Earth does not orbit around sun. It orbits around center of gravity, which is not even inside Sun.
The same difficulties with identifying individual species today were faced by Darwin in the Origin of Species. That is in fact exactly what the title of the book refers to.
>>BTW: Earth does not orbit around sun. It orbits around center of gravity, which is not even inside Sun.
The center of gravity of the sun-earth system is most certainly inside the sun. If it wasn't, the sun would perceptively move as the earth orbited it.
The center of gravity of the entire solar system (the solar barycenter) wanders around and is currently located inside the star. It will be outside of the sun in 2017.
Jupiter, Neptune (edit: and Uranus) serve to create a giant spirograph.
I found this article - http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/02/the-end-of-... - which mentions some other cases and claims that Paul Kern didn't sleep... but did close his eyes and rest for a couple of hours each day. The whole thing's setting off some skeptical alarms in my head. I think it's pretty telling that all but one of the examples are unverified and from before 1950, when things like EEGs weren't available to verify if someone was sleeping or "just resting their eyes". The only modern case was followed for just four days, which is a long time to go without sleep but certainly not impossible.
It reminds me of credulous studies of people who claim they don't need to eat and drink, surviving off sunlight or air or something mystical. Dig into them a little and you invariably find that they were only monitored for a few days or they were left alone to bathe or pray or whatever else provided some gap where they could go and get food.
EDIT: Did a little more research and I came across a possible explanation that does seem to have some decent scientific studies to back it up (more than any of the non-sleeping examples, at least). "Sleep state misperception" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_state_misperception), where a patient doesn't think they've slept much or at all, even though they actually have.
Prahlad Jani has yet to be debunked and he was observed twice (in 2003, 2010) round the clock for up to 15 days without food and water intake or waste movements.
That's probably the one I was thinking of when I mentioned people going without water being allowed to bathe. There's quite a few red flags there - just one researcher doing the experiments (despite offers from other teams and noted skeptics like Sanal Edamaraku to investigate), the research never being published in a journal, the fact that he noticeably lost weight over just ten days, the CCTV coverage being incomplete... The "Reactions" section of the article covers a lot of them, enough to say that the studies are pretty much worthless.
In a case like this, it's up to the ones making the extraordinary claim to provide the evidence, not up to anyone else to debunk it.
The first time he was tested, he dropped a small amount of weight and the second time he didn't. Neither test was only done by one scientist and the second test was a much larger fanfare with Indian defense/government researchers present.
Bathing was also observed as was gargling (what he spit out was also measured). Even so - these "red flags" come from the same scientists that you don't trust. So, they should not support your cynicism in any way.
What are we left with?
- Not published in a journal.
- Incomplete CCTV coverage.
Also, it should be stated that according to many cynics, the CCTV coverage is incomplete because Jani moved out of view for moments at a time. He also received visitors and was allowed to take sun baths.
Anyway, I'm not really here to debate this case. I am just being an anti-cynic because it's been shown time and again that even the smartest people in the world have been dead wrong about what they think they know. Here is a terrific video that sums up this point very well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8V8rtdXnLA
Most of the issues with the experiment were identified by other scientists, not the ones involved in the study. That's probably why it was never released in any reputable journal - the study design wouldn't pass peer review. Incidentally, releasing your results to the press before you've published academically is also a fairly reliable warning sign of pseudoscience.
When the entire experiment is based around constantly monitoring someone, any time where you can't see them is a pretty serious flaw in the experiment design. Even if he was only out of view for a few seconds (and I wouldn't mind a source for that), that's all it would take to drink some gargling/bathing water or quickly have a snack that some devotee left hidden.
Smart people can certainly be wrong and often have been. Sometimes due to their own preexisting beliefs and prejudices, sometimes because they were limited by the knowledge and technology of their time, and sometimes even because they're being deliberately deceived and their particularly expertise isn't suited to catching it (I cited Project Alpha in a comment below and there are many other examples).
The key thing about science, and remember that organised science is a relatively new idea in the span of human history and one that's made tremendous advances possible in a short time, is that it's about a consensus backed up by the evidence, not any single scientist's opinion. Sure, sometimes one scientist or a small team will come up with a radically new opinion in some field. When their evidence is examined and their experiments repeated by their peers, sometimes they're a Gallileo. More often they're a Pons and Fleischmann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Fleischmann.E2.80.9...). But if, and quite rightly only if, they've got good evidence and a theory that fits the facts better than any other, the consensus will shift.
It's not about cynicism, it's about rationality and skepticism. As the old saying goes, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Einstein
The chief scientist, Sudhir Shah, was the same each time and you're right that he is "an ardent proponent of Jain philosophy" according to his wikipedia page.
However, both tests were done with other researchers (in 2010, with "a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) as well as other organizations") in the largest hospital chain in one of the most industrialized states in India.
So, still very believable to my mind, despite the reaction of the scientific community at large. Many are quick to say "impossible", citing what they know based on their own observations. It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics. History has proven that "impossible" is just a point of view and that many things widely believed to be impossible in the past are completely doable.
India on the whole has a lot of trouble with this sort of thing. One of the skeptics who criticised the Prahlad Jani experiments, Sanal Edamaraku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku), had to leave the country to avoid arrest under outdated blasphemy laws for pointing out that the supposedly miraculous tears of a statue of Jesus were actually from a leaking sewage pipe. More recently, another noted skeptic, Narendra Dabholkar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Dabholkar), was shot dead shortly after making significant progress towards outlawing some very lucrative "mystical" practices.
And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.
When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).
Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.
> "...both tests were done with other researchers (in 2010, with "a team of 35 researchers from the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS) as well as other organizations") in the largest hospital chain in one of the most industrialized states in India."
But this is exactly the problem, scientists in general are not trained to investigate cases where the phenomena studied is adversarial and has an interest in a given outcome. I am not saying that the man is a fraud, I don't know, but the mindset that you need to spot it will be very different from what most scientists hold. This is why I personally think that these kinds of people should at least initially be analysed by magicians and others who are trained in misdirection and illusion.
> "It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics."
The amount of evidence required is usually proportional to the strength of the claim. In this case the man is asking us to suspend close to everything we know about how the human body processes waste and its energy requirements. Claiming that this is possible due to a deity. These are very grandiose claims and I think a lot of people are rightfully sceptical rather than cynical.
>It saddens me that modern scientists are such cynics. History has proven that "impossible" is just a point of view and that many things widely believed to be impossible in the past are completely doable.
Science is based on skepticism, you can't believe something just because somebody tells you to or because you hope it is true, and you can't trust all sources of information. This is why there is a system (we can admit it is improvable) where experts on a certain area review the quality and reproducibility of a work to ensure it reaches a certain/minimum level.
Obviously, something that we consider true today can be accepted as false tomorrow (even though usually in science more than false, the change is to not complete). And that's precisely the power of science.
Some people may not realize that rational folk are just humoring spiritual scam artists when we offer to test them. We don't actually waste our time investigating the results of some shoddy trial that doesn't catch them cheating.
The bomb detectors (if it passed through any) were more likely trying to detect actual chemical signatures of explosives rather than just a bunch of wires that might be a detonator. So something like this would pass fine, as it should.
Natural selection isn't something that's applied to individual animals, it's something that exerts pressure on whole populations over many generations.
To go with your Arctic tern example, just because one bird can dive deeper doesn't guarantee it's survival. It might still get eaten by a predator or catch a disease or just have a run of bad luck that causes it to starve. However, the birds that can't dive as deeply run the same risks (assuming there's no additional risk to diving deeply) and, over a long time and with a large population of birds, those that can dive deeper will survive to breed more often, until eventually the whole population carries that trait.
If you were a rape victim, how would you feel knowing that images of your rape were being distributed around the internet and used as porn? In a situation like that, there's a clear victim protection argument for making distribution of such images illegal.
Now, that's a very different situation to either someone recording a crime for evidence which should obviously be legal (and I doubt anyone would want to hang on to the images/footage after providing it to the police anyway) or to actors enacting a fictional fantasy scene, which I feel should be legal with reasonable parental controls in place to stop minors accessing it. The law should be capable of differentiating between these situations, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
I agree that protecting victims is a noble goal, but I still don't think it is a criminal matter. If anything, victims should be able to sue people for distributing such materials, but even that brings up a troubling slippery slope.
The problem is that you end up censoring material because it offends someone. Never mind that in this case the offense is truly terrible and unquestionably legitimate, the principle is still the same. And if we censor something because one person is offended, how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?
If it's not illegal to distribute them, there's more of a black market incentive to produce them.
Also, your argument about a slippery slope with respect to limits on free speech is in the classical form of a "slippery slope fallacy" because you imply there is no reasonable middle ground without providing compelling evidence. Plenty of countries set limits on speech and function just fine - most or all of the G8 besides the US I believe. (And even the US in this instance.)
It's not a slippery slope to limit speech. It's a slippery slope to limit speech based on that speech being offensive to a person or group. There is plenty of evidence for this, just look at the Muslim world, or the world as hardline American Christians would like to see it. There are a million groups and individuals who are genuinely and actually offended by some bit of content that is currently legal. Open the floodgates just a little and they will all try to shove their way through.
I know you meant limits on hateful or offensive speech. However, for your slippery slope argument not to be a fallacy, you have to demonstrate that there is no possibility of a middle ground. But such a middle ground already exists, in just about every western democracy besides the US.
You can keep your footing on a slippery slope for awhile, but I personally believe that it is an unstable equilibrium in this case. I will admit, though, that in some sense all societies are just in temporary equilibrium, so maybe it's all a moot point. I still feel that it is better to remain firmly at the top of the hill rather than bet that you can keep your footing on the slope.
As for examples, France is in the news for the ban on certain Muslim attire and Turkey is apparently sliding toward theocracy. The argument I'm making is similar to the argument against letting people have all the guns they want (which of course the US does, to terrifying effect): if you don't give people the tools to commit violent acts easily, they will commit fewer violent acts.
This is a bit of a caricature, but the way I see it is there is a valley between two hills. The free speech guys are at the top of one hill, and the social conservatives are at the top of the other. Neither group realizes that the other group lives exclusively on the opposing hill, because to them, anybody they've ever met from the valley seems just like the people who live on the other hill. So they're both afraid of sliding down the slope into oblivion. (Imagine what will happen if we let our girls go to school! Imagine what will happen if we don't let people advocate genocide!) Meanwhile a lot of us are calling up from the valley and saying, "Hey, it's really pretty nice down here, and your hills don't seem that big anyway, so why don't you join us?"
Can you find a source that doesn't show the UK having 5-10 times more violent crime than the US, per capita? I couldn't believe the numbers at first, so I tried but couldn't find anything saying otherwise.
I think the UK is a great example that violent crime will happen despite restricting weapons.
Please cite an example of how the number of guns a US citizen can have creates a terrifying effect? Or did you mean simply that you are terrified of guns?
how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?
Y'know this is Europe, not USA. We already have decent laws (going back decades) about lots of things that would not pass the free speech thing in the USA (e.g. privacy law, hate speech law). Claiming slippery slope isn't really a persuasive argument.
Porn is fiction and there's no victim. A depiction of a real illegal act is not what you would call porn, it's snuff video perhaps, and distributing it is already or should be prohibited under different laws.
This is an unreasonably strong statement, and very likely untrue. There is no way for end-users of porn to reliably verify that performers in a specific video aren't under duress, aren't being trafficked, etc. Yes, if one knew that a crime was being committed, one could call it a crime, but this is effectively impossible for the vast majority of porn. At best one can hope that no one was harmed.
My model of Paul Graham assigns that a very low probability.
The parent's argument hinges on being able to clearly distinguish what people call porn from criminally-produced media. Essentially the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
My point is that it's basically impossible to do that, in practice. Sure one could imagine a conscientious porn consumer who only goes to certain trusted producers. Maybe that's what you're getting at with your PG reference?
I don't. But, as opposed to porn, in case of pg the incentive structure seems not to be there.
I remember reading some articles about sex trafficking and porn production, but would have to dig them up to find some actual data.
I somehow doubt porn industry works like IT; I don't think you get to dump your video studio because the formerly free sodas you used for refreshment after the act now cost $.50.
The ancillary crimes happen when the core product is criminalized; that is, you get drive-bys and chemical plant and pharmacy robberies when drug production is illegal such that the only way to compete in the drug world is to commit other crimes to defend your market and get raw materials.
When the product is legitimized, as happened with alcohol in the US in 1933, the criminal element moves out because it can't withstand the scrutiny a legitimate business is put under as a matter of course. Any legitimate brewing or distilling operation is being looked at from too many angles related to food regulations and taxes and OSHA and so on to be able to risk having undocumented workers make bathtub gin in a basement while killing off their competition.
From this, we can predict that outlawing porn, or making some kinds of porn illegal, will only serve to make the production of that porn a nastier, more illegal business which does more overall harm to society.
I understand your argument as it applies to drugs, but the problem when it's applied to porn is that while nobody is harmed by growing drugs, some people are harmed in some porn productions. So it's not an accurate analogy. As an extreme, do you believe it would be better if we could sell snuff films legally?
Innocent people's lives are ruined by drugs every day. One example off the top of my head is people coerced into being drug mules and end up getting caught by Customs. If (violent) porn is legal, the producers will be under much greater scrutiny than if they were forced in to the black market.
I'm not talking about violent porn, I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce. The drug mule problem would go away if we just legalized drugs completely, but the non-consent problem wouldn't go away if we legalized porn completely.
An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
> I'm talking about non-consensual porn that has no chance of becoming legal to produce.
This can be replaced by simulations using acting and special effects. Porn is about the fantasy anyway.
> An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
This can also be replaced by simulations, to some extent, but not like porn can be, because it's easier to tell fake ivory from fake porn, for example.
Ultimately, there will always be violence. Some of it will even be recorded for others. But outlawing stuff will just cause more and worse illegal acts to occur.
Yeah, I don't have nearly such a problem with simulations. You don't have to hurt somebody to make them, you're not embarrassing anybody by distributing them (it's typically illegal to distribute any private photograph that the subject does not want distributed), it's not at all clear that simulations increase the likelihood of acting stuff out in the real world, and they may even have a net positive effect over no porn at all. In my own experience with child sexual abuse, if the perpetrators had had access to simulated porn, it's quite reasonable to think that maybe there wouldn't be as much of a problem.
Although I believe that it's harder to detect fake ivory than it is to detect fake child porn, below a certain age.
And I also believe that legalizing videos of illegal acts encourages the illegal acts, provided the videos are willingly being made by the criminals and they are being used for entertainment as opposed to journalism or analysis. But this is really just a belief, and I do understand that you have the opposite belief.
I'd say traffickers are not victim of porn but victims of their producers.
It would be the same case for Nike shoes made by underage children, harvested donor parts masqueraded as ethical donations, fur mantles made with illegally hunted animals, black tuna fished from illegal waters etc. The product is not the problem, the process is to be condemned.
I understand there are some product more prone to abusive behaviors than others, and porn is not the industry with the cleanest image. But assigning the abuses on the products/industry itself is not looking at the root issues (the scumbags doing illegal/immoral things for money. They'd just do other scumbaggy things if porn wasn't worth it).
PS: for clarity, I think less stigma around porn would make it a healthier industry, and I believe there should be more checks to minimize the abuses we see today. It's unfortunate there's so many of them, and I wish porn could become a simple subset of entertainment contents in every way. For now game and anime porn would be the closest to this ideal, with people just doing their jobs in a professional matter with lesser social stigma.
Even focusing on real rape only it's a delicate question.
Perhaps the focus on movie recordings is misleading. It's the same issue as photography, and on the still image side it has been and still is discussed to death: should image of victims be banned ? What can be broadcasted and what can not ? Shouldn't a rape victim's identity be always protected ? Or is it OK if he/she agrees with the publication of convicting pieces ? Or what if he/she kills the assaulter afterwards ? Is it OK to have private shots of events other people don't want published ?
There's hundred of questions we could think of in the lapse of a conversation, just making 'films' illegal won't answer them all.
There are a lot of societal differences between first and third world countries and they exist for a lot of reasons. I really don't see why you would pin this particular one, if it even exists, on feminism.
Yes, men do tend to be highly valued in some countries. And women in such countries tend to be treated as property. What does that have to do with suicide rates of men in the US? And what does any of it have to do with your original point about feminism somehow causing media scare stories?
It's unfortunate that politics can have such an influence on science and psychology and sociology are far from the only fields it happens in. But, again, that doesn't somehow prove feminism wrong or your original point correct.
Did you even read that link you provided about Margaret Mead? Freeman was accusing her mostly of incompetence (taking jokes/lies as fact is the main example) and Freeman's attacks on Mead's work have themselves been heavily criticised.
And even if they hadn't... so what? You're going to condemn the entirety of feminism (and the field of sociology, I suppose) because one person early in its history may have lied?
>I condemn the parts of it that are transphobic, and I wonder why nobody mentions it
Because it's BS? I know people in politically correct societies wont even consider it (if anything, to avoid being labelled), but mutilating yourself is not exactly, well, alright.
A society has to draw a line at what it considers normal/desired behaviour and what not. Regardless if said behaviour is any harm to others or not.
For example, showing you genitals in a mall doesn't harm anyone, but we still don't consider it kosher. And we wouldn't think twice to say people should not use meth (despite them being able to afford it).
In this sense, this "transphobia" thing is a little too much to take. What's next? Respect for self-amputees-for-fashion?
If folks want to change their gender, then let them. Much like someone being black or gay, it's quite litetally none of my, or nyone elses, business. If people want to chop off their leg for fashion, who cares?
And I'd say, slippery slope is not a terrible argument by itself, just because there are "fallacy" list saying so. It is quite appropriate as an argument in an awful lot of situations. Matter of fact, the "broken window theory" is an example of the slippery slope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory "Overton Window" is another: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
>If folks want to change their gender, then let them.
I did not say "don't let them".
I said labelling those that are not Ok with this "phobics" is taking it too far. Are those not OK with people doing meth, meth-thobics? Are those not OK with women content to be in an abusive relationship abuse-phobics?
>Much like someone being black or gay, it's quite litetally none of my, or anyone elses, business.
Waiving our genitals in public is, by all means and with the same reasoning, none of yours or anyone else's business. And yet, we do (and perhaps you too) frown upon it.
Thing is, we don't base a society only on "whatever rock's one's boat", but also on general principles. That's why it's a society, and not a jungle.
>If people want to chop off their leg for fashion, who cares?
I care. And "who cares" is not an attitude to base a society on. An egotistical dystopia, maybe.
Margaret Mead provided the foundation for feminism to advance by "proving" that culture drove society, not genetics.
Unfortunately that isn't true. Genetics shapes culture. One of the interesting things from Mead's "research" was that Samoan women were having a lot of premarital sex in the 1920's. Yet somehow none got pregnant but that was overlooked.
When you force people too far out of their natural roles, bad things happen. There's a whole lot more to this and its fascinating to see how people don't realise it.
I respect that feminism is the moral case. Genetics is the scientific one, which currently is not respected. There's a balance between the two
And all that would mean something if (a) all of sociology was somehow based on the work of Margaret Mead, (b) Margaret Mead had been proven fraudulent, (c) proof of bad evidence on one side automatically meant the correctness of the opposite, and (d) you provided any evidence of your claims that genetics somehow drives society towards an ideal that coincidentally lines up perfectly with your preferred gender roles.
Since none of those things are true, I'm left to ask again - what the hell does any of this have to do with men getting weird looks in parks?
margaret mead effectively founded "cultural anthropology" which basically means "research which makes people feel good". many people have followed her:
this ties into funny looks for men in parks because men as a gender have been devalued into being potentially dangerous, rather than as a source of strength and value for communities.
challenging feminism is a little like investigations into wall street executives after the financial crisis, it just hasn't happened.
things are starting to turn - we have the internet now so we're much better informed...
either that or the USA economy continues its downward slide.. i really don't care either way.
the truth is that as the left becomes too strong, whether it is socialism, feminism or whatever, the economy gets destroyed. this is likely why rome collapsed, too.
the moral case is very important. so too is the economy.
> Radical feminist Janice Raymond's 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, was and still is controversial due to its unequivocal condemnation of transsexual surgeries. In the book Raymond says, "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves .... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive."
> In 1999, the book the whole woman, Germaine Greer published a sequel to The Female Eunuch. One chapter was titled "Pantomime Dames", wherein she states her opposition to accepting transsexuals who were assigned male at birth as women:[3]"Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males."
and:
> Gloria Steinem has questioned transsexualism. In 1977, she expressed disapproval that the heavily publicized sex-role change of tennis player Renée Richards had been characterized as "a frightening instance of what feminism could lead to" or as "living proof that feminism isn't necessary." Steinem wrote, "At a minimum, it was a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality."
It goes on. And on. And on. And on. And now watch this issue get ignored again, as it usually is, and me be accused of 'derailing' for bringing it up in this context.
Generally, Freeman's critique has not been accepted in the anthropological community. Several Samoan scholars who had been discontent with Mead's depiction of them as happy and sexually liberated thought that Freeman erred in the opposite direction [1]
Much like Mead's work, Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint [2]
you can see my link above to the NYtimes and the lack of research for the right in academia. there will be 10,000 papers supporting the left position to every 1 paper supporting the right position. they're just forced out of academia. this is a huge blind spot for society and is a little like how wall street wasn't prosecuted after the financial crisis.
that derek freeman was successful in what he did (and he was, mead was dropped from anthropology) was a minor miracle. if you want to learn more, watch this movie:
"He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals."
Well, as far as anyone can tell the idea that women are naturally better parents than men was originally e feminist one, and for the most part feminists are so attached to the idea they never even seem to really question it - after all, it's about doing what's best for the child, and why would you want to get in the way of that? (That's an actual, widely used argument mainstream feminists justify their support for the status quo with.)
I've also seen, for example, feminist mums argue that their kids' stay-at-home-dad is unfairly dumping work on them because they have to organise playdates and other social events, when that's almost certainly the result of sexist bias against dads - apparently mums are uncomfortable letting dads get involved in this, it's a common complaint of single dads. They don't even think about whether there may be gender-based reasons why their partner doesn't have access to the social circles they do.
Basically the whole conversation turned into a men's rights/anti-feminist/heterosexist maelstrom. Somewhere in here some guy defended the claim that china was a matriarchal society (in the sense of having few problems with sexism) and then turned around and complained that stay at home dads are discriminated against.
I guess it shouldn't be terribly surprising because our industry is uniquely filled with people that are both highly privileged and more . . . limited on the empathy front. But it is sad. Hopefully, fifty years from now this conversation will be an outlier rather than the standard occurrence.
Really? Is there some army of women out there extorting money out of men somehow by accusing them of being creepy and I've somehow missed it? Because it seems like that would be big news.
Generally the only "demand" I ever see follow accusations of creepiness online is "please stop".
