Male to Female Ratios (Page 3 of 4)

Dill, you're growing on me. That comment was sarcastically humorous, and I, in my emotionally dysfunctional state, laughed.

I'm not so sure about that.

There's a true story, a case out of the 1980's, when some hundreds or low thousands of Hmong people were quietly evacuated from Laos as refugees from the Communist takeover.  (The French called them Montiagnards, and I apologize for my poor spelling.)  They had many problems adjusting to American culture.  Some problems were mostly comic with a whiff of tragedy, like trying to grow rice in living room carpets.  Others were more severe.

One young man of the transplanted Hmong took a shine to an American girl and tried to get her interest.  She had no interest in him, so he did what he would have done back home in Laos: he got together with a bunch of his male friends and they kidnapped her.  They helped him rape her, in order to 'claim' her.

Not understanding their crime under Western culture and American law, they let everyone know what they did.  It was not difficult to convict them.

No rapist from within Western culture would advertise his act, or expect it to be approved by society.  He will know that his act is regarded as deeply wrong, even if he feels justified in it.

Social workers who were trying to help the Hmong assimilate approached the victim and she allowed them to explain things.  In what must surely represent a case for sainthood, she spoke at sentencing after the conviction and asked the judge to imposed a sentence recognizing  the moral and cultural ignorance, a sentence of mercy (which is often harder than simple leniency).

The Hmong culture fulfilled the first and indispensible requirement for a culture: it allowed the Hmong to survive through the centuries, as individuals and as a people.  And if we look carefully, we can find that things like the Stockholm Syndrome are likewise essential to survival of individuals and the human species when only that lowest of cultural requirements is filled.

I hope by this time you are screaming "WE KNOW BETTER!"  Yes, we do.  Not all cultures are equally good and moral, even though some 'lower' cultures may emphasize virtues that we have largely forgotten, or that we revile (the kind of courage necessary to challenge  and defeat a desperate food animal, for instance, or to defeat a neighboring clan's aggression).

Some cultures are better than others.  But all cultures face that indispensible first requirement of self-perpetuation.  A culture is not, and cannot be, a suicide pact.  The only cultures we know are the ones that survived long enough for us to see them, or to see their artifacts.

A clash, yes, but not of the same sort as the fellow who doesn't know how to use a western toilet.  That involves techne and things, not people and deep moral conviction.  We would not condemn someone who had a squat toilet installed in his home (except that it might not meet the sanitary plumbing standards).  But we would condemn, and do condemn, people who sell women as sex slaves in our midst (and I'm not speaking of truly voluntary prostitution, and yes, there are some who'd argue there's no such thing--but I think we can make the distinction).

No.  He followed his culture, but his culture is morally inferior to Western culture.  He believed himself in the right within that cultural framework.  But a stereotypical rapist knows that he is regarded as being wrong in his act, even if, like Saddam Hussein, he can defy that cultural authority.  Saddam, or Mao, held the power of force that allowed him to escape his culture's judgement, but those that do not have such power act in secrecy and try to escape the consequences.  The Hmong youth believed that culture would support and affirm his act.  He was mistaken.

In the language of anthropology, both are considered 'mutilation'.  Ear piercing and tattoos are also considered mutilation for this definition.

A great deal of polemic mischief is done by deliberately conflating the specialty (anthro.) meaning with the general meaning.

Language can conceal a lot of specious argument.  C.S.Lewis makes a point of this towards the end of Out of the Silent Planet, inspired in part by his education with 'Kirkpatrick'.  See Surprised by Joy, if you don't mind a long read for a single point.

You don't feel you are following in the footsteps of the Dennis Conner argument?

Dennis Conner, back in the day, was the U.S. representative for America's Cup in sailing. He ran into a particularly troublesome foe with a better designed New Zealand boat that he just couldn't overcome. His solution was to go back to the descriptions of the rules stipulating the sizes of the boats to compete and so used a Catamaran, thereby winning by a ridiculous margin against the New Zealand boat. When the issue made its way into court, the judge admonished DC for looking to use the literal statements of the rules while intentionally ignoring the spirit and intent of the competition.

The context of the examples that male circumcision was daisy chained together with was clearly meant to cast it in an abhorrent light. I stand by the validity of my objection, although I will yield to any counter of it's very likely few reading this will be in the near future deciding on circumcision of their newborn son. If that is the case, then I've simply been crying my Paul Revere warning from horseback for no good reason It was, however, a frequent sore point back in the insurance days from the customer base who would ask, "My friend says the procedure will maim and half-kill my newborn if I do this?", "I heard only a monster would do this to their own child?" Etc. I'm not saying Dill spoke to each and everyone one of these parents back then, but if you put enough Dills together on the subject, you get a 5,000 pickle count bucket at McDonald's

Depraved\deprived damn spell checker....

I did stress 'circumcision for non-medical reasons several times,' so I was talking explicitly about the act in the context of traditions and rituals.

However, I would state that I come from a long line of people from an ancestry of large families in the British Isles and I don’t know of any male (none of whom to my knowledge were circumcised), who suffered health problems as a result of having a foreskin. That is a lot of males and a lot of lifetimes free from foreskin related medical problems.

In certain circumstances the amputation of a limb can have health benefits as can the removal of a lung or the clipping of an ingrown toenail…. Are you advising me that my health would tangibly improve if I underwent a surgical process to remove my foreskin?

Female circumcision is a savage, brutal and inhumane mutilation (IMO) but once again, my only point was that it is a ‘normal and accepted’ tradition within some cultures and completely abnormal and abhorrent practice from the point of view of other cultures within which there is no such tradition.

As is male circumcision as a religious tradition from the point of view of other cultures within which there is no such tradition.
I’m only talking about POV. Different cultures have different perspectives and things can look very different when one is viewed and judged from another.

Belgians will defend eating horse flesh because to them it is normality just as the arbitrary stoning of a woman to death for a perceived religious indiscretion is perfectly acceptable to another culture; just as the eating of beef is widespread in America where in Hindu and Sikh cultures across the Indian subcontinent it is considered an abhorrent and sacrilegious practice; just like cultures that practice female circumcision will defend it whereas they might consider male circumcision to be a mutilation, whilst you condemn female circumcision but promote male circumcision as advantageous….

I’m not judging any of that merely pointing out that what is normal in one culture can be totally abnormal within another.

We can all stand up to support and justify the practices and traditions within our own cultures whilst maligning the practices and traditions of other cultures. That’s what human tribes do. My point was only to mention the gulf of what is considered acceptable or normal between these various tribes, not to assess the purpose or perceived value of those traditions.

By no means, Dill, was I commenting on your possible health benefits. It was an observation contrasting the two gender "circumcisions." One does have benefits, though not always. But neither does it harm a man unless it's a botched job, which is rare. The other is completely without benefit except to keep women in line, away from any possibility of unfaithfulness.

I read about an interesting study from 2012 that found that psychopaths had observable differences in their brains, with less grey matter in those areas related to empathy, self-control, fear of punishment, etc. In other words, stuff that would stop a normal human from commiting atrocious acts, especially violence. They distinguished people with anti-social personality disorders ("hot-headed") from psychopaths ("cold-hearted"). Unless they're also psychotic, psychopaths generally meet the criteria for sanity in the U.S. (they know right from wrong), but they're incapable of giving a damn. If one doesn't have the ability to stop a negative impulse, that seems like a damn good case of mental illness to me. It's too soon to know if there can even be a treatment for people with such brains (e.g., early intervention or medication). And jurors are afraid to put them in psychiatric hospitals, fearing doctors will let them out too soon. It's easier to declare them evil. Interestingly enough, people locked up in hospitals usually spend more time incarcerated than do their jailed counterparts for the same crime. And since prisons are notoriously bad at treating the menally ill, the jailed offenders get out sooner, and with virtually no psychiatric support. Duh!

That wasn't covered in the study.

The suspension of disbelief? The degree of which the quality of the story telling induces, being the X-factor.

If our characters are believable, then they live and anything is possible when the quality of writing supports those characters.
I read the Ken Follet’s the century trilogy, which is a serious investment in terms of time and effort. Over the course of the 20th century it follows a handful of families from different nations. Somehow family members are all interwoven in all of the major historic events of the era. The coincidence factor is completely off the scale; billion to one odds over and again. And yet it is an extremely successful series of novels and a decent read (if I say so myself).

Once we believe, we’ll believe anything. (Les Misérables, Moby Dick? Try the Old Testament of the King James Bible for the wildest and most irrational plots within any literature).

On the other hand I’ve read works with a totally plausible plot/storyline that I’ve put down part way though because I’ve lost my belief or never believed from the off. A wooden character, a cardboard cut-out character will do that for me as quick as you like.