child abuse and society

Yes, I realize that doing it from a car window is not the most precise way to find the people who need it the most. Unfortunately (for the poor) I'm working in a suburb now so the only time I see panhandlers is when I'm driving through an urban area. It was easier to target the genuine poor when I was walking through an urban area. The people with the shopping carts who were talking to themselves were easy to spot, and in fact they're almost never the ones actively panhandling.

For reasons I've covered in other posts and/or threads, many of these hard-core poor will never rise out of hard-core poverty. They'll never be in a position to pay it either back or forward.

There was a recent report on an experiment that is spreading across the country: Putting the homeless in actual small apartments instead of shelters. Something about being handed a key and told, "This is your home, the kitchen is over there and the bathroom is through that door," seems to flip a switch in human consciousness. Within a few weeks they stop sleeping on the floor and start showering and doing laundry. Before long they start looking for work, and with their new well-groomed look, odor-free aura and self-respecting attitude, they eventually find it. Municipalities that have tried this find that virtually everyone moves out into a larger place that charges rent within less than a year. The total cost to the taxpayers is about ten percent of a shelter.

I've pointed out a few subtle changes in our hard-wired instincts since the end of the Paleolithic Era. One glaring change appears to be that we now identify with a home, and without a home we don't feel like we're part of humanity. Obviously the entire concept of "home" was not part of the life of hunter-gatherers, although Jean Auel depicts hers as having permanent encampments to which they return after every hunt.

Uh... They're both artifacts of previous eras in the evolution of our species? Honor goes back to the Stone Age. It's most effective as a control in small communities in which everybody knows everybody and glaring is an effective rebuke. Communism was thought up in the early decades of the Industrial Era, which is fading fast. Like honor, it is also effective only in small communities, although larger than the communities of the Stone Age. (Some communists insisted that communism was the economic system of the Stone Age, and I don't think that really won a lot of people over to their cause.

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The Post-Industrial Era is just beginning, and our descendants will have to come up with their own type of culture for communities which are becoming increasingly virtual.

If you find my rhetoric that offensive, I'm surprised that you can bear to spend more than five minutes on SciForums. Fortunately the subforums I moderate (Linguistics and Arts & Culture) tend not to generate passionate flame wars, but the other moderators have to set the disciplinary bar very high and let things slide that set my screen on fire, in order to avoid banning half the members.

As for sexism, I was simply describing gender roles that evolution stuck us with, not campaigning for their continuation.

Do you also consider it an insult when biologists tell you that your eyes are better suited for distinguishing subtle differences in colors, while ours are better suited for noticing motion? If you're like most women you're probably proud of that, and make fun of your husband when you're in a paint store or a fabric store and he insists that "eggshell" and "navy blue" are conspiracies to charge more for "white" and "black."

The Wikipedia article hardly makes your point. Sure, the original organisms with barely enough cells to manifest sexual dimorphism were too simple for it to impact any aspect of their existence except reproduction. But as they evolved from algae (I'm guessing algae, maybe it was fungi, but probably not bacteria--so far the article hasn't even told me where in our evolution sexual differentiation first occurred) into plants and finally into animals, there was a lot more DNA for the dimorphism to impact, and their lives were complicated enough for the dimorphism to affect behaviors that have no first-order connection to reproduction.

Actually I'm rather large. My big head probably accounts for a lot of that.

More seriously, as I've noted before, the standards of courtesy on the internet are very low and I'm just doing as the Romans do when I'm in the silicon world. I don't talk this way in the carbon world. As I noted earlier, the "etiquette" of a virtual culture will probably set your hair on fire. We don't even know each other's names, much less an address we can drive to throw rocks at to punish each other for breaches of etiquette. As we've already seen, we don't even necessarily know each other's gender! I don't think anyone has yet been able to figure out "Wynn."

If I had any idea what that was supposed to mean, I would certainly consider doing it.

I'm sorry that I thought you were a man, but reviewing both your screen name and your rhetoric, it was an honest mistake. I'm sorry you were offended by my statement that one of a mother's jobs is to weep, but women I have presented this to said that this actually is one of their jobs, because their damn macho husbands won't do it!

I cry, and I get nothing but s**t for it from 80% of males and 70% of females. But my dogs appreciate it so it must be okay. Lhasa Apsos are much better judges of character than most humans.

So insults are okay if immediately followed by an emoticon?

 

The specialty of evolutionary biology is only about 80 years old. It only reached critical mass (i.e., became a common course in universities) about 35 years ago. That's not even two generations of scientists. I respect scientists as much as any fellow who once aspired to be one, but I know that they'll be the first to admit that a huge portion of a canon that's only a few decades old is bound to be greatly revised, and some of it will be simply falsified. Look at "modern medicine," founded more than 100 years ago. On the balance it certainly accomplishes more good than harm, but nonetheless it's still undergoing major overhauls. Remember when they told us to eat transfat-laden margarine instead of butter?

If Carl Jung were alive, he'd take this guy out into the woodshed for saying something so stupid. When movies were first invented, some enterprising businessman screened a movie about lions in the jungle... in Africa, where lions were a real threat. When the audience saw lions charging at them on the screen, they all jumped up and ran out the door, even though the rational part of their brains knew they weren't real. We have to take our inner caveman into account when we build our artificial environment, or one day he'll go on a rampage and destroy it.

Well gosh, that sounds like a quote from one of my own posts. Duh?

But what they don't point out is something that Jung would lecture them about in the woodshed: When you violate an instinct, you're building up some anxiety. Eventually it's going to come back and kick you in the butt. For example, this is why team sports are so perennially popular, particularly the most violent ones. For a couple of hours the two bands of cavemen get to beat the crap out of each other, but nobody dies.

It doesn't seem that he's denying these assertions, simply saying that we can overcome them. I've got no problem with that. Some women have become excellent hunters by honing their ability to perceive motion, and if you go into any paint store you'll meet men behind the counter who can see the difference between "ecru" and "Navajo white."

Something else we'll disagree on. I don't see pacifism as a political strategy, but as a philosophy. Like any philosophy it has exceptions.

I'm sorry it came across that way. Nonetheless, other women I've discussed this with think you're full of doodoo. Either that, or you have a husband like me who does his share of the weeping.

As for all those quotes you extracted from my posts, they may be dramatized and exaggerated, but there's truth in all of them. Maybe I'll copy that nice little digest you so kindly compiled, and put it on my Facebook page.

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Okay. If you want to debate the subtleties of words I'll meet you on the Linguistics board.

I'm not talking about just one woman. Most of my friends are female. I seem to have had trust issues with men ever since my best friend ran off with my first wife in 1968. The fact that in my lifetime all wars have been started by men hasn't helped. (Unless I missed one.)

In Western culture, most of us are uncomfortable to see an adult of either sex cry. Maybe it's because we're all exorted to be strong so we don't like displays of "weakness." Or it could be something kinder, a feeling of powerlessness when a fellow human is in emotional pain, since most of us were not taught how to handle it. Our leaders are happy to teach our children to kill, but not to comfort.

But it's okay in specific circumstances. Like 9/11, or because one of your children decided to become a paid professional killer.

You keep dodging the fact that what I was reacting to was the portion of your post in which you said you had some uneasy feelings about your son joining the military. Sorry, it would take too long to find your exact words but I don't think I'm misquoting you. Pardon me for over-dramatizing whatever verb you wrote into "weeping." I have on one or two occasions been criticized for a tendency to exaggerate.

Nothing better has come along, at least according to my wife, whose judgment you presumably will respect because she has two X chromosomes. She has sent us both to Jungian therapists, and Jungian analysis of literature made her a star in her master's program.

I sense something serious and interesting in that passage, but I can't quite capture it because it's buried in snark. Could you restate it a little more plainly so we can have an actual discussion? If this thread continues to become nothing more than a flame war the moderator will close it.

 

Mod Note

There is an unwritten and written rule on this site and that is to attack the argument and not the poster. Yes, sometimes we all slip and we insult the poster. We are all human and I have delved into that dark abyss on several occasions out of sheer frustration.

That said, there is a giant unwritten rule that we do not go after the family's of our posters in our insults. We certainly do not insult and post abusive comments about the children of our fellow posters.

We do not determine, incorrectly and unjustly, that the children of our fellow poster and member has decided to become a trained murderer or killer. For all we know, that person may be joining as a medical professional, engineer or as what one very close friend of mine did, was to join to disable mines and unexploded IED's. He went back, voluntarily and repeatedly, not because of a desire to kill the enemy, but to ensure that children would not have their limbs blown up while walking to school or while playing in the fields. He left his wife and his two babies behind and did this for the specific reason that his children can play without fear, then it is only right that he did what he could to ensure the children in Afghanistan did not have their limbs blown off. However, because he was in the air-force, to someone like Fraggle, he was somehow a paid professional killer by choice. It is insulting, degrading and abusive.

To make such an accusation against a boy's parent, who is enduring the stress of her son enlisting in a time where he may likely be posted overseas and see combat, is insensitive, abusive and insulting.

Since this thread has become nothing more than a flame fest, I will be closing it.