Camille Paglia has famously argued that “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Yet even this is likely too optimistic. As the New York Times explains, the patriarchy can be traced back to the mastery of fire:
Negative cultural consequences came with fire, too — and continue to leave an imprint. Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking. Humans have long used fire to modify their environment and burn carbon, practices that now have us in the throes of climate change. Fire is even tied to the rise of patriarchy — by allowing men to go out hunting while women stayed behind to cook by the fire, it spawned gender norms that still exist today.
Even literacy is patriarchal, as Leonard Shlain argues in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.
The Booknews editorial review of the book explains that literacy leads to logical thought, and logical thought is patriarchal (emphasis mine):
[Shlain] Proposes, rather than argues closely, that the shift from apprehending the world from images to writing–especially alphabetic–contributed largely to the suppression of goddess worship and the decline in the status of women in society. Shlain is a neurosurgeon, and begins by explaining how reading and looking at pictures or listening to speech use different parts of the brain and indeed can influence the development of children’s brains. Then, rejecting the linear, sequentialist, reductionist thinking he associates with both writing and masculine values, he offers a long series of essentially independent essays, each evoking an example of his thesis.
H/T DeNihilist
Update: Instapundit links to another blog making the same observations.
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And of course Shlain explains (mansplains?) all this in writing, rather than just through pictures.
And I expect that Yin still heats his house and drives his car.
Camille Paglia is a feminist, but an old-line feminist. She has no patience with the modern “snowflake” sort.
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Hmm, you called it.
“rejecting the linear, sequentialist, reductionist thinking” that he didn’t use to write his book.
I expect the doctor has societal prominence and a boatload of money. I always heard that was enough to get a trophy wife without having to publicly support feminist ideals.
The old ways just aren’t cutting it anymore.
Let us raise funds for a charity: The Society For the Support of Satirists in Penury.
These were sensible men who chose the ancient and honorable profession of Satire, who could never have predicted the March of progress rendering their profession obsolete.
Save the Satirist!
Shlain is a neurosurgeon,
While long aware that the standards of the medical profession had fallen precipitously, I was wholly unaware of just how far they had fallen.
Imaging a sammich I am.
Mrs. Yoda soon implement the image she will
This is magnificent! ‘Feminists’ have now openly admitted that if women ran things, we would still be in caves.
‘Feminists’ have provided us with perfect explanations to hurl back at them when they whine about not enough ‘women in tech’. Frankly, most women should just move to the Congo and hope to be taken in by tribes of chimpanzees and gorillas. The human females will be happier.
While long aware that the standards of the medical profession had fallen precipitously, I was wholly unaware of just how far they had fallen.
It is not surprising, given that :
a) Medicine is a very beta-male profession. This was not penalized in society much until recently, so this weakness was not exposed.
b) MDs think that they are the pinnacle of all thought, and hence are untroubled with how little they know in fields outside of medicine. No other knowledge is important, you see.
c) Combine a) and b), and the pressure to virtue-signal leads to embarrassing statements.
Expect more such statements from ‘feminists’ and manginas about how 11,000 BC was so much better than today. I am seeing this point pop up with some frequency now…
Then they can move to the jungle or forests without any of this “oppressive patriarchal” male epic that is civilization. As if they’re actually going to put their money where their mouth is.
…”the shift from apprehending the world from images to writing–especially alphabetic–contributed largely to the suppression of goddess worship”…
If this is so, then it’s little wonder the Western world worships women as if they’re not human but goddesses. We’re chock-a-block full of imagery.
“Is it A Newspaper or The Onion?”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Off-topic but if you want an easy target to write about, check out Bad Moms (just released in theaters). It’s a secular version of Moms’ Night Out mixed with some divorce porn. It is just beyond bad. The main character, a mom who “works too hard,” lectures her middle school aged son about how if he doesn’t stop being lazy and stop getting bad grades, he’s gonna grow up “to be just another entitled White dude.”
The movie is trash and it’s probably too easy of a target, but the movie expects us to see the moms as “bad” (but actually bad-ass) because they stop the obsessive helicopter parenting insanity and start going out drinking. The movie does NOT expect us to see the moms as bad for openly lusting after men who are not their husbands (‘he cheated first, so it’s okay’), cheating on their husbands, and having drunken make-out sessions with other women. There’s even a character who is the stay-at-home mom who finally stands up to her cruel, controlling husband… by being cruel and controlling. Clearly the audience is supposed to cheer at this.
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“mastery of fire”
The New York Times appears to be confusing fire with beer. The controlled use of fire was discovered like a million years ago. The agricultural revolution began around 10,000 years ago, around the same time the Sumerians started harvesting grains for their primitive fruit and honey beers. Early brewers were primarily women since it was considered a woman’s job (the Sumerian goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, was a woman).
So maybe beer is a tool of the patriarchy? I’ll drink to that!
To add what others have said, the domestication of fire predates modern man. Neanderthals used fire quite well, as did a couple of species before it. One has to go back about three species to find the first one that used fire : Homo Erectus :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans
Fire was domesticated by a hominid that does not even look like the humans of today.
So ‘feminists’ are not content to merely undo everything that Cro-Magnon man did, but everything done by the previous two species as well. I am surprised they didn’t throw in the fact that chipping a stone into a sharp spear point was something males were better at than females.
Yet, women still claim the most absurd projection :
“Women are more evolved than men”
“Men are Obsolete/The End of men”
“Women should be half of the tech industry”
‘Feminists’ have finally proven, with this alphabet and (worst of all) fire stupidity, that women are catastrophically obsolete relative to the direction civilization is moving. A knowledge-based economy is by definition one that has no useful female participants.
“… literacy leads to logical thought …”
Building things that don’t fall down requires logical thought. I think that making tools where none existed before requires logical thought. If so, then logical thought existed well before literacy. It makes more sense to claim that logical thought led to the development of the alphabet, which led to literacy. Seems silly to think that logical thought did not exist before literacy appeared.
b) MDs think that they are the pinnacle of all thought, and hence are untroubled with how little they know in fields outside of medicine. No other knowledge is important, you see.
If my own recent experiences with both GP and emergency medicine are anything to go by (and I can’t believe they’re unique), most “doctors” today really don’t even know very much about medicine. My experiences have convinced me that med schools have all but stopped teaching actual diagnostic medicine. It’s as if doctors now carry around a printout of an Excel spreadsheet in their white coat pockets with a list of about 50 symptoms that match between 50 and 75 known diseases. You had better hope that your symptoms match some part of the template list. If they don’t, the doctors will just randomly assign a condition to you that matches the closest thing the template list contains, push some drugs (those preferred by their Big Pharma sponsors, natch) down your throat, and send you on your merry way assuming that maybe you’ll survive.
This is no doubt a by-product of the dumbing down of med schools, which are most certainly as plagued by PC in their admission standards and cucrricula today is as every other other institution of higher “learning.”
Expect more such statements from ‘feminists’ and manginas about how 11,000 BC was so much better than today. I am seeing this point pop up with some frequency now…
Were I a man of wealth, I would gladly charter as many one-way flights to the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi, and various other shitty, savagely backward, impoverished, and violent parts of central sub-Saharan Africa as necessary to resettle as many feminists and their mangina enablers as wanted to escape the plague of masculine-dominated western civilization.
In addition to ridding western civ of its destructive virus (and paying Africa back tenfold for the destructive virii it has sent here), I also see an opportunity to dispose of passenger aircraft that are at the end of their service lives. Given all of the nasty infectious life forms that seem to love to call Africa home and that have migrated westward via passenger aircraft, I would not want to see the aircraft used for these one-way flights returning west again. Killing two birds with one stone, as they say.
Early brewers were primarily women since it was considered a woman’s job (the Sumerian goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, was a woman).
That was also true of the Germanic and Slavic tribes of the pre-medieval/Roman era, when brewing was mostly done by women to supply beer for their immediate families. It wasn’t until brewing started to become a commercial endeavor in the early Tenth Century that men took over the process. Apparently even during the so-called “Dark Ages” it was readily apparent and obvious that women weren’t capable of doing anything on a large and complex scale.
You can’t make this stuff up. Both Shlain and Yin are academics* who write garbage but take no responsibility for the repercussions of how their garbage is interpreted by the rest of society, particularly working class people. Pretty soon under-educated people will think that learning to read and basic numeracy are a waste of time, because…Goddess…
*Yes, Shlain is a neurosurgeon. But garbage written by intelligent people without good judgement is still garbage.
A knowledge-based economy is by definition one that has no useful female participants.
Well, I guess that depends on the “knowledge” that one is talking about. Women will try with all of their might to convince us that knowledge of the latest celebrity gossip, or the knowledge of how to interpret feeeeeelings are essential to a functioning economy (alas, an argument can actually be made that this is TRUE for what currently passes for an “economy” – while it lasts). Otherwise they indeed have no role to play in such an economy at all.
Seems silly to think that logical thought did not exist before literacy appeared.
The fact that this blog targets who/what it does and that we’re responding to the type of article that is the center of the OP provides fodder for the argument that logical thought may actually have DIMINISHED with the emergence of literacy.
Leave civilization behind? Who are they kidding? Women can’t survive without their iPhones or Facebook.
To somewhat rehash what I wrote yesterday: why should the invention of Fire (if that is what happened) and the invention (it came in slow steps beginning with Egyptian Heiroglyphs, proceeding to Phoenecian consonants and achieved maturity when the Greeks added Vowels) of the alphabet have led inexorably to male oppression of women rather than female oppression of men – that is if you are an equality theorist or even a believer in female superiority?
I have got to say, also (as a fence sitter on the notion of man-made climate change never mind Darwinian Evolution) that articles like the above show that the writer has far greater faith in things for which there is zero evidence than Christians require for Genesis (where there is at least a written record whatever one may make of it).
Perhaps this explains why the female dominated education system no longer teaches cursive writing, complex math or any other worthwhile subject – they want ignorant masses to stop thinking and just worship the goddess.
Patriarchy = Civilisation
While long aware that the standards of the medical profession had fallen precipitously, I was wholly unaware of just how far they had fallen.
This has nothing to do with medicine. It is more reflective of societal decline. The man could have been a politician or a lawyer (e.g. Barrack Obama), or a preacher/university founder (e.g. Dennis Prager), or a nonentity (e.g. David Futrelle), and the result would be the same.
Medicine is concerned with healing the sick, and keeping the well in health; it is not a feminist-oriented profession (yet), though the charge of it being thoroughly beta is well deserved.
b) MDs think that they are the pinnacle of all thought, and hence are untroubled with how little they know in fields outside of medicine. No other knowledge is important, you see.
Their ego is such that they think they know that non-medical knowledge, whatever it is. Every non-doctor who has talked to a doctor has, at some point, had the experience of the doctor making a complete ass of himself challenging you in your own field of non-medical expertise.
A knowledge-based economy is by definition one that has no useful female participants.
This is irrelevant because we are moving to a feelings-based economy. You have money and I don’t? Give it to me because muh feelz!
On the subject of different parts of the brain being used in reading letters vs. seeing pictures. Chinese is a symbolic written language, not phonetic alphabet. As far as the Chinese brain is concerned, it is still looking at pictures. Also, Chinese men like small feet and bound their women’s feet. Symbolic patriarchy doesn’t care about silly science.
Medicine is concerned with healing the sick, and keeping the well in health; it is not a feminist-oriented profession (yet)…
Maybe in the utopia where you live that’s true, but here in the current real western world, medicine is mostly concerned with extracting as much money from everyone as possible, in return for providing as little actual care, “preventive” or otherwise, as it can get away with. This is largely the inevitable result of nearly a century of Socialism, a system that embodies the feminist attributes and goals of envy, wealth redistribution, egalitarianism, and zoological ignorance of the fundamental laws of economics.
BTW, whenever anybody pontificates on how much better it would have been to live in the past, I offer only one word: “dentistry”.
Feeriker:
Your comments about template (and I add flow-diagram/flow chart) diagnostics are nothing new. My first job out of school was Apprentice Technician (Telecommunications) with Telecom Australia. Four full-on years of in-house training (real training) and field station appointments.
As a fully-fledged Technician with 7 years experience, I and my colleague were installing a heap of temporary telecommunications equipment at RAAF Base Darwin for the inaugural military exercise “Kangaroo ’89”. We were installing some gear in a building perhaps only 100 metres adjacent to an apron upon which was parked a USAF Galaxy aircraft. We finished the job and came outside the building.
A couple of men emerged from the aircraft and called out to us. We went and greeted them. They said they had a technical problem with the aircraft air conditioning and weren’t going anywhere till it was fixed. They said they’d been working hard to find the fault, but couldn’t fix it. They invited us aboard to help. We gladly accepted.
On board, they showed us how they had been flicking through large files of flow charts to try to identify the fault. After giving us a good explanation of the nature of the fault, we located the fault in quick time, using nothing but our heads and and a Fluke digital multimeter.
I’m not blowing my trumpet here, but these things come down to real training; something sadly lacking in our modern age. There are not even real apprenticeships these days, not as they used to be known, anyway. It really is as you say these days all about referring to the templates, flow charts/flow diagrams, with no real knowledge. The real knowledge is not being handed down to the upcoming apprentices, interns, etc. It’s a sad state of affairs.
I have come to the conclusion recently that if all male attention focused solely on women who actively practice what is advantageous to society feminism would be demolished within 6 months. Any attention is good attention to these people (male and female) and it is the only way they can have access and engagement with worthwhile men.
If men ignored them completely and instead complemented and encouraged anyone doing the right thing I think not only would men and women of value stampede to doing that which is good and right, but those on the fence would have a clear line of demarcation for which way they should go. Plan a….smear blood on my face and post it on instagram and no one cares. Plan b, post pictures of myself in a lovely dress baking cookies and get 1000 likes.
In this case, engaging the enemy is making them stronger and weakening your own troops. Starving the enemy and lavishing your own troops would possibly lead to breakneck abandon rates for the enemy and swelling the ranks of the newly recruited.
Just a thought. I no longer engage feminists. I shoot them pitying looks while hugging my children, flirting with my honey and wearing my nice jewels and clothing. My daughters are told you can be the angry chick waiting on us or a Queen like me. Make your choice. I can assure you, it speaks to them more then a Milo lecture or judybitch article.
They get it. Just a thought.
Perhaps this explains why the female dominated education system no longer teaches cursive writing, complex math or any other worthwhile subject – they want ignorant masses to stop thinking and just worship the goddess.
Primary education of children devolved into a female responsibility because, as anyone who has ever homeschooled a child can attest, training children in the “Three R’s” is really a very simple process, one that does not require any sort of advanced education of training to accomplish. Indeed, the more education –or rather, “indoctrination,” to use a more appropriate word– that one has, the more detrimental to the child’s learning process.
Prior to the modern “Progressive” era, children spent relatively little time being formally educated. The basics laid down by instruction in the “Three R’s” could be expanded upon and scaled without the need for wasting consecutive life-years in a classroom setting, life being much more productively spent applying knowledge to the real world, with follow-on formal instruction supplied on an as-needed basis, depending on what the indiividual chose to do with their basic functional knowledge.
At some point women realized that the field of “education” needed to be invented in order to convince society that what most children had always done on their own as a matter of instinct after the minimal initial effort by women to set them on course was something much more complex than what it was, something that needed a complex (and convoluted) paedagogical bureaucracy to function (one conveniently dominated by women). A functioning education “machine” also needed to ensure that children (especially MALE children) were prevented from doing useful, civilization-enhancingthings during their most formative years, things that developed them into productive and independent adults as soon as possible and that maximized their years of value to society. Better to “shelter” them from life for as long as possible while filling their heads full of useless, if not destructive, nonsense that reinforced feminine imperatives while elevating women’s importance to levels wholly out of proportion to any of their actual accomplishments.
Any Neil Postman fans out there will love this guy Shlain’s mistake. It’s an amusing one because of how it developed. He starts out accurately enough in that male thinking is more rational (written progressions of logically following thought) and women are image-based (snap, shallow emotion, superficial hindbrain). But he’s so blue pill that at that point he’s locked in. Now he is forced to appraise the female way of thinking (image) as the superior, blameless one…’holistic’ and pure. Oh yeah, it involves ‘Goddess Worship’ too (Somehow he shoehorned that into the discussion) That’s a whole lot of credit being given to communicating at the cavemen level.
Next up is male thought, which he is contractually obligated as a blue pill man to denigrate. He hamsters his way into viewing male thought (written) as ‘reductionist.’
I think that his idea is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read:
—Written thought is ‘reductionist’ while image-based thoughts are ‘holistic.’
It’s so absurdly reversed. His theory is the purest and most obvious opposite of what is true. Images are as reductionist as possible in terms of communication while writing can be as endlessly complex and layered as human thought itself. But he was locked in and the blue pill is damned potent.
Neil Postman accurately predicted that the replacement of books by TV as the main cultural medium would shift how people think. People would shift from thinking with logic and coherence (writing must be coherent), to thinking via images which are not beholden to logical chains. I might be summing it up too simply but it’s along those lines. Anyway, he was right. It’s no coincidence that feminism and all leftist incoherence took root not longer after TV blew books away. Now our culture is pure image-based emotional thought. Occupy Wall Street was a great example. There was no logic, organization or coherent explanation for why those people were out there. That doesn’t matter though. The image of protest was successfully attained and that is all that matters to minds that think in images, or at least, minds that developed under an image-based medium (TV).
Hopefully all the text and written interaction that the internet provokes will shift things back again someday.
What Shlain doesn’t understand is how viciously he insulted women here.
@Kaminsky
Interesting. Bradbury made the same point in Fahrenheit 451. He also foresaw how this would lead to censorship based on hurt feelings.
If Hillary wins in November, the feminists will really long for the good old days. The Senate a few weeks ago got the ball rolling on making it legally required for women to register for the draft ; And if Hillary wins, it will be nothing but war leading up to World War Three, which is what the Feminist Hillary is drooling for, to start World War Three ; And Hillary is going to draft women into the service and put women on the front lines. This Upcoming World War Three, women are going to be on the front lines, and then the feminists will really long for the good old days.
“Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking.”
The discovery of fire led to the discovery of coughing. And later to Civilization.
Snowy @ 8:01 am:
“I’m not blowing my trumpet here, but these things come down to real training; something sadly lacking in our modern age. There are not even real apprenticeships these days, not as they used to be known, anyway. It really is as you say these days all about referring to the templates, flow charts/flow diagrams, with no real knowledge. The real knowledge is not being handed down to the upcoming apprentices, interns, etc. It’s a sad state of affairs.”
Word. I’ll go a step further and say such knowledge is being intentionally phased out. I was fortunate to receive the nuts & bolts type of education but every new gadget that comes along in my work is less amenable to being understood. Tech that replaces drudgery is a good thing, tech that is black box trust-me voodoo is reaching the point where I’m not permitted to understand my own work.
The conspiracy theorist in me says the Elites want most of humanity to be a cargo cult regarding science and tech. The realist in me says they’re struggling to make women equal to men by reducing all male work to “push the button”. Look, Bambi can do it too! And when pushing the button doesn’t work, both she and I have to call tech support. Equality has been achieved.
The conspiracy theorist in me says the Elites want most of humanity to be a cargo cult regarding science and tech. The realist in me says they’re struggling to make women equal to men by reducing all male work to “push the button”. Look, Bambi can do it too! And when pushing the button doesn’t work, both she and I have to call tech support. Equality has been achieved.
Casual observation and experience both tell me that you’re onto something here. With the emergence of each new specialized piece of technology, the half-life of which is fleeting relative to its essentiality to the infrastructure it serves, essential knowledge becomes more arcane and specialized, and thus is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This makes perfect sense in a world where mass de-population is one of the primary agenda items of the Ruling Classes.
The discovery of fire led to the discovery of coughing. And later to Civilization.
You probably just recited, verbatim, the entire doctoral dissertation of some feminist anthropologist. Be prepared for the target of someone whining about your not crediting your sources.
“Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West. Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word.”
Perhaps that explains the concerted effort to destroy language and the meaning of words.
https://anarchistnotebook.com/2014/11/04/language/
“Language is the means by which people exchange thoughts and feelings, express their emotions, and exchange ideas. This is why governments have always tried to control the written word, and why in occupied countries the occupiers banned the native tongue of which they themselves did not speak. If you control a people’s language, you control them.
Many people know they misuse words. It allows them to communicate ideas and thoughts covertly. Words like “tolerance” and “diversity” do not mean in common conversations what they mean in the dictionary. But those who use them pretend they do, and hardly anyone challenges them on it.”
We see this in how feminists blatantly misuse the word “consent.” Their definition is entirely separate from what it actually means and what most people think of when they hear the word. Feminists know it, and misusing it gives them power through deception.
Their hatred of logic, reason, and evidence also reveals their belief in solipsism and rationalization as the means of determining truth and facts.
Funny, I immediately thought of this too, but imagined it too abstract to post about.
Bear in mind that the transition from conceptual to imagistic communicative praxis isn’t really the fault of feminists or manginas. Ezra Pound wrote about it (he was an early theorist and adopter of the idea that communication should be via the image — and his fans would like to pretend he was the beginner of the trend). Postman himself discusses this, briefly, someplace. I’d argue that it’s more likely the result of technology. Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art, Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility and Spengler’s Man and Technics all point to the side effect of imagism as human beings began entertaining themselves through ever increasingly realistic portrayals. The painted portrait gives rise to photography, which gives rise to cinema. Pretty soon, the notion of reality vs. special effects is blurred enough to throw the conceptual life into question.
Boxer
OT a bit, but a counter-take on the “Lost Boys” First Things article:
http://www.millennialevangelical.com/will-evangelicals-stop-using-video-games-scapegoat-inability-disciple-millennials/
@Hmm
It really can be summed up as follows: The farmers did a terrible job planting their corn and now are blaming the stalks for not growing up.
A bad craftsman blames his tools; a bad farmer blames his crops.
All these “lost boys” articles are projecting culpability and responsibility from the same generation that obsesses over whether or not “In God We Trust” remains on our devalued currency while shoring out $30,000 to have their daughters deflowered in college dorms and brainwashed by feminism.
@The Question
lzozozzozol! Bernankified
I took my feminist wife backpacking. As I went for firewood, leaving her in the dark, alone, she realized that having a man who carries a gun was not so scary, compared to the alternative.
@Dalrock – I recommend taking any prospective wife hiking and time how long until she complains, feigns an injury, or quits. If she continues her great attitude, the second test is to repeat after engagement. Doing so, of course, will rule out any ladies of larger carriage, which of course is a bonus.
I believe it was a Jew who lived about 2,000 years ago, who coined the phrase, “the Truth shall set you Free”.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/08/sexist-suicide-squad-grosses-one-weekend-ghostbusters-month/
“The newly released superhero (or supervillain, to be precise) movie Suicide Squad has already outgrossed the feminist-friendly remake of Ghostbusters in its first weekend, despite Ghostbusters now being released almost a month ago.”
” Despite allegations of sexism, the film performed exceptionally well amongst women. As The Hollywood Reporter reveals: “The biggest surprise in terms of audience makeup was the strong turnout among females, who made up 46 percent of Friday’s audience, according to exit poling service CinemaScore. That’s unusual for a superhero film.” ”
Short read and well worth it.
Dalrock – “Update: Instapundit links to another blog making the same observations.”
Love Mr. Ed’s closer – ” Hey, I understand the left’s Rousseauian lust for re-primitivization by casting off, oh, fire, language, history, hygiene, etc. But doesn’t part of that desire require at least getting off the Internet first?”
I always found Teachers to be the people who know or think that they know everything about everything and especially of those things of which they know precisely nothing. Women tended to be arrogant in that regard and men (knowing that they are not performing brain surgery or the like) acquire an inferiority complex.
I always thought that I began to go backwards when I was sent off to school at the age of five and a half; most of what I can do I learned through trial and error and not through being trained, (I wasn’t) but that is not the better way to achieve mastery.
“Because of allegations of sexism, the film performed exceptionally well amongst women. ”
FIFY
I always thought that I began to go backwards when I was sent off to school at the age of five and a half; most of what I can do I learned through trial and error and not through being trained, (I wasn’t) but that is not the better way to achieve mastery.
Exactly. Like I said upthread, teaching children the basics with which they can eventually educate themselves is really just an application of common sense (admittedly an almost non-existent commodity in today’s world). No magical abilities or superior intellectual skills involved whatsoever.
For a rather more pointed and impolite expansion on this theme, I recommend a read of the following:
http://fredoneverything.org/a-taste-of-realism-yuck/
and if your craving still is not satisfied, this:
http://fredoneverything.org/1955/
Bad News For Feminists: Cat Owners More Sad and Lonely Than Dog Owners
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/08/09/facebook-study-cat-owners-more-sad-and-lonely-than-dog-owners/
I call confounding variables, here. Let’s see the numbers on: fraction of dog owners who are “feminists”, dog owners who are anti-“feminists”, dog owners who are meh about “feminism”; fraction of cat owners subdivided similarly.
I bet a bag of cat-kibble to a bag of milk-bones, that it’s entirely the disproportionate number of 45-year-old cat-ladies with bad feelz, that explain all of this.
So: cause <——-> effect? Miserable “feminists” are more likely to get a cat. a cat. a cat. a cat.
Sorry: keyboard jammed there for a moment. ;^)
Just sayin’
Just a thought: what if Leonard Shlain is merely trolling us all?
Being somewhat associated with medicine, in doctors defense they have had to increase their pts by about 200-300% in the last decade with a 1000% increase in government paperwork and insurance paperwork to justify their work. They no have little time to sit and think about tough cases and so are largely reactionary in their approach to diagnosing pts. It is a very sad state where doctors are unhappy because they cannot spend the needed time with pts and pts are unhappy because docs cannot spend time and suck. All while docs pay goes down as pts cost skyrocket. It’s all madness in the US. I have no insight into other countries.
Large portions of medicine are ripe for replacement by software if we can get around the governement regulations.
not only did my daughter go to the sexist movie, she bought this t-shirt to wear to the movie:
http://www.hottopic.com/product/dc-comics-suicide-squad-harley-quinn-daddys-lil-monster-girls-raglan/10591713.html
note “daddy” is the joker
@Dalrock:
Even with GBFM gone… he’s never gone from our hearts.
A functioning education “machine” also needed to ensure that children (especially MALE children) were prevented from doing useful, civilization-enhancingthings
Yet another example of how women ruthlessly obstruct anything that advances civilization.
I mean, the domestication of fire was not even done by modern humans, but by Homo Erectus, 3-4 species before modern humans. If you saw a Homo Erectus today, you would not think of it as a human. This is what women consider to be too advanced for them, since he domesticated fire :
Every time I surrender my romantic relationship to God and Mary, it ends.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1020784
How to handle wife’s bad moods? and not get resentful??
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1020782
Christine Gudorf’s proof that traditional sexual ethics is mistaken
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1016243
This is what women consider to be too advanced for them, since he domesticated fire :
Other than maybe the hair on his back and shoulders, that’s probably what also gives women the tingles.
“I have come to the conclusion recently that if all male attention focused solely on women who actively practice what is advantageous to society feminism would be demolished within 6 months.”
To expand on this, if (especially Western) men could find ways to relieve their sexual urges without having to seek the participation of (especially Western) women, those same women would have a serious problem on their hands. That’s why so many of them have issues with things like prostitution and sexbots – they’re “competition.”
feeriker:
…here in the current real western world, medicine is mostly concerned with extracting as much money from everyone as possible, in return for providing as little actual care, “preventive” or otherwise, as it can get away with…
That is your insurance company, not the doctors. Believe it or not, the doctors’ income as a percentage of healthcare spending has not changed much since more than 50 years. It is the middlemen that’s been siphoning money from healthcare. You can reduce your healthcare costs substantially by dealing with your doctors directly.
@feeriker
Thanks: I enjoyed those two essays from Fred. It is of course easy to bemoan present standards (of both master and pupil) and wax idyllic about the past*, yet even then there were horror stories – such as my Spanish teacher who was neither Spanish nor comprehensible in English – which hardly aided confidence, and my school’s self-appointed (he doubled as head master) choir-master who was musically illiterate (by which I mean he could not read music nor for that matter perform on any instrument) which perhaps accounted for his gratuitous jealousy towards me.
Education is and was expensive (it thus made sense for most of that money to be spent on boys) and there was always more potential talent than there was money for education. We seem now to have reached and indeed overreached that natural supply of ability even as the probability of expanding education appears infinite.
*An acquaintance of mine told me that the words ”used not to’ was crossed out by his son’s lady teacher and replaced by ‘didn’t used to’ – my acquaintance crossed that out and reinstated what his son had originally written.
Dave that graph says it all. And it was done on purpose by government policy to get elite control.
@Dave
Don’t overlook the fact that this was the system the doctors insisted on. Doctors see themselves as above the competitive market, and it is strongly discouraged for doctors to publish their fee structure. Doctors have set up a de facto guild and effectively eliminated price competition. In return, consumers have to purchase medical care through insurance companies that can (unlike consumers) negotiate for set prices in advance.
You know, God may do the work of Salvation, but that doesn’t excuse us from doing all the rest of the work (“I prayed to God to make my bed / but God would not / so God Is Dead …”), and that includes the work of finding and screening potential Life Partners (prospective spouses), and so this sort of thing (not Marcus’ sharing of the link, but the stuff you can predict is on the other side of the link he shares, there) drives me nuts.
I can understand praying for guidance while spouse-hunting (how could a Christian not ask for Wisdom in such an endeavor, in that way?), but building and maintaining the relationship once it seems to be underway, is not God’s job.
Love is Work. Rubbish like that, is just (romantic) laziness buried under several wheel-barrows’ full worth of ersatz religiaceous sentimentality. Same with this cr@p about finding one’s so-called “Soul-Mate”. There might be easily a hundred thousand or more people within 100 miles of where someone lives, with whom they could have a pretty decent marriage … IF they (both) did the Work. Looking for one’s “Soul-Mate” is just a quest for a (totally imaginary) zero-work marriage. Talk about your romantic fantasy. (And men are at least as guilty of this as women, if not more, because through pedestalization they’ll pretend she’s that “Soul-Mate” even after the evidence that ought to bring a healthy disilusionment has piled up around their ankles …)
Don’t overlook the fact that this was the system the doctors insisted on. Doctors see themselves as above the competitive market, and it is strongly discouraged for doctors to publish their fee structure. Doctors have set up a de facto guild and effectively eliminated price competition. In return, consumers have to purchase medical care through insurance companies that can (unlike consumers) negotiate for set prices in advance.
Thank you, Dalrock. Your response made the point even more clearly than mine would have, which is that doctors and the insurance/acounting industries are now inseparably intertwined. It doesn’t matter whether or not your docor, if he or she had their way, would practice “healing the sick” to the exclusion of the nonsense that now takes priority over such. They’re part of the current system, like it or not, and go along with it, destructive bureaucratic ugliness and all, if they want to continue practicing.
There are both doctors and dentists in my family, and the dentists seem much happier.
It is possible at times to negotiate your own healthcare deal. For instance, if you have no health insurance and your wife is pregnant, call every hospital in your city and see what kind of deal you can arrange. This is what adoption attorneys do when the birth mother is not covered by Medicaid or other insurance. If you just show up at the hospital in your hour of need with no prior arrangement and no health insurance, they will take you to the cleaners.
Dalrock@ 11:41 am:
“Don’t overlook the fact that this was the system the doctors insisted on. Doctors see themselves as above the competitive market, and it is strongly discouraged for doctors to publish their fee structure.”
I’ve always wondered why doctors never give price lists. Because I refuse Obamacare, I’ve gotten in the habit of asking for cash discounts. Turns out a lot of docs are frustrated enough with insurance companies to give one. Once I even got 15% off an ER trip.
…
greyghost @ 10:53 am:
“Dave that graph says it all. And it was done on purpose by government policy to get elite control.”
The graph shows what those 70s flower girls grew up to be instead of housewives. It’s a good find indeed, Dave.
Doctors have set up a de facto guild and effectively eliminated price competition. In return, consumers have to purchase medical care through insurance companies that can (unlike consumers) negotiate for set prices in advance.
That is true, but things are changing fast. Many doctors, having been burned by the smarter businessmen who have invaded the industry, have gone back to doing business the old way: directly with their patients. The AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) has a section of their website dedicated to this issue.
@feeriker:
They’re part of the current system, like it or not, and go along with it, destructive bureaucratic ugliness and all, if they want to continue practicing….
I know it sounds unbelievable, but the doctors, especially the younger ones, are just as much victims as the public they try to serve. The average doctor is thoroughly frustrated by the entrenched interests in the medical profession, most of whom are not doctors themselves.
I have had several young doctors told me they are actively looking for alternative professions. Many of them saddled with humongous debts.
Burnout is rampant among doctors. See here
Many doctors quietly commit suicide because they could not find a way out of their frustration. Up to 400/year die this way.
Even respected publications are helping those who cant handle the profession anymore to transition into something else.
Please don’t let the media fool you. Doctors are some of the most stressed out people in this country and in many parts of the world. And their pay is next to nothing, when compared to the demands of their jobs and the costs of their trainings.
Other than maybe the hair on his back and shoulders, that’s probably what also gives women the tingles.
Well, he is their equal in civilizational terms, so that would make sense. I have no problem saying that men are the only humans that evolved as Homo Erectus transitioned to Homo Neanderthalis and Homo Sapiens. Women evolved only in appearance (in most cases), but not psychology.
Other pluses in his favor :
a) One word Game
b) The word ‘Erectus’
@Carlotta
>If men ignored them completely and instead complemented and encouraged anyone doing the right thing
I do this. In the general public, I am unfortunately only able to give complements about once a month.
So wait, women were in charge of raising and teaching children, how could children learn to read if the man was always gone making sure there was food, fire wood, and a good shelter?
RichardP says: August 9, 2016 at 1:47 am
Seems silly to think that logical thought did not exist before literacy appeared.
you are surprised that people fixated on emoting and feelings fail to have logical thought process about the history of logical thought process?
Feminists love it when I mention deficiencies in the modern man. When I bring up deficiencies in the modern woman though, it’s like battery acid to the face.
Feminists love it when I mention deficiencies in the modern man. When I bring up deficiencies in the modern woman though, it’s like battery acid to the face.
You obviously didn’t get the memo. Only modern men have deficiencies. Modern women only “evolved”, finding their groves back through “Eat, Pray Love” cycles.
Major Styles says [August 13, 2016 at 10:10 am]:
I think it’s like this: if the SMP/MMP can be thought of as a store, then in the part of the store where single straight men go looking for women, basically the shelves are bare and the remainder bins are full. Maybe it’s as bad elsewhere in the store, and I suppose this is where someone posts a link to the “Man Store” joke in reply, but — basically, if you are looking for a woman in the 2016 SMP/MMP, the shelves are bare and the remainder bins are full. There it is.
Literacy patriarchal? Only if its purposely kept from women. Otherwise what’s patriarchal about reading and writing words?
“[Shlain] Proposes, rather than argues closely, that the shift from apprehending the world from images to writing–especially alphabetic–contributed largely to the suppression of goddess worship and the decline in the status of women in society.”
Ridiculous. The world’s first and longest prose comes from South Asian Hindu civilization and til this day that very same civilization worships Goddesses.
Daily Llama says [August 14, 2016 at 11:49 pm]: …
And others up-thread have made similarly self-evident and damning observations about that article, such that I am forced, I think, to restate my earlier point here: maybe Shlain’s original article is all just One Big Glorious Troll?