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You sound like a male who is threatened by change. Fear is not strength, and sexism is not masculinity. Just my personal analysis.Originally Posted by wiltondeportes
Adapt or die, Wilton.
By the by, I'm not white knighting. I'm defending my own deeply held beliefs. It is actually possible for a man to be rational, logical and even self-interested, and believe in gender equality and tolerance. The fact that women responded positively to this, while nonessential to my arguments, might tell you something about how you come off to roughly half the population, who by the way have viewpoints that are exactly as valid as yours.
And I have all the power I need in my life, which is power over myself and the respect of those I care for. Anyone who feels they need more than that is on the path to becoming a tyrant, in my opinion.
Citation. Needed. You need to demonstrate, with actual, reliable data, 1) that women hold a disproportionate amount of power over our laws and/or culture compared to men and 2) that this influence has and/or is currently being used to "feminize" the male populace. This would also involve defining your terms well enough that feminization could be actually measured and compared to some sort of historical standard. Good luck!
I argue that aggression, which by most definitions involves the initiation of force or threats, is never necessary. Violence is only ever justified in defense against aggression. If you are trying to say that you believe the use of physical force, or the threat thereof, is sometimes the best solution to aggression by others, then I am happy to agree with you on that score. I never claimed otherwise. All men and women should be prepared to fight force with force--to behave otherwise is to invite attack and exploitation.
Putting aside the fact that physical labor capacity is largely irrelevant in a society where the number of occupations requiring significant physical strength is decreasing as machines steadily replace humans in these roles, and is already very small, your idea that women are less rational, less innovative, less capable as leaders and less ambitious as a group is another big-ass unsupported argument. Again, citation needed. Prove to me that these stereotypes are something inherent about women and not an unfortunate relic of a culture that has only recently decided women should be allowed to do much of anything at all--women couldn't even vote in this country when my grandmother was born! Just look at the relative poverty rates of American blacks compared to American whites, 150 years after slavery ended, to see how long these kinds of historical inequalities can keep affecting the descendants of those oppressed--unless you'd like to claim that blacks are inherently less rational, capable and ambitious, as you already have for women? We shouldn't be surprised to see gender inequalities in traditionally male-dominated fields--which until very recently, as in since you and I were born, was ALL professional fields--even if women would be equally capable and willing to pursue them in some imaginary world free of gender bias.
No, I'm not going to give you a break, because you just brought the stupid again. Regardless of whether the Middle East hates us (which, while it may be the case now, was not always, and I think you vastly underestimate the radicalizing effect half a century of our violent meddling has had on the region--look up the WWII and Cold War-era history of Afghanistan and Iran, for instance), they are by and large not a credible threat to us or any of our allies, with the possible exception of Iran in the case that they manage to complete their nuclear program. If any Middle East country wanted to start a real war with the Western world, they would be blown off the map in a few hours. The force capabilities of the two groups are not even comparable. You are essentially arguing that it's permissible to lob an active grenade at a child who is throwing a tantrum and bit your leg because "he started it". Grow the fuck up.
As for "courteous occupiers" bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Let's talk about Iraq. We invaded this country on false pretenses and blew up all their major infrastructure, killing tens of thousands of completely non-violent civilians in the process and crippling the economic prospects of millions more. We then engaged in years of brutal ground warfare, killing tens or hundreds of thousands more Iraqis while losing "only" a few thousand men and women on our side. Of course many previously non-violent people took up arms to resist our invasion, as I expect I would do in their place--we were destroying their homes and killing their families in an unjustified war of aggression. Sure, we've been helping them rebuild their roads and government, but what recompense could we possibly offer to the families of the multitudes we've killed? Nothing we do will ever bring back their loved ones, and for that many of them will justifiably hate us, likely for generations, where they might not have done before.
So yeah, I'm sure they're just chuffed that our oh-so-courteous soldiers were so downright decent as to follow the rules (sometimes) when they were slaughtering children by machine gun from a helicopter in the name of freedom and democracy.
"Society", of course, is made up of many individuals. Each of whom, I believe, is entitled to behave in whatever way they see fit in their own lives. If these individual changes add up to a wholesale shift in societal expectations and behavior, so be it. It's happened a million times before and it will happen a million times more, if we're fortunate enough to be around that much longer. Constant cultural change hasn't killed us off yet and I don't expect it will.
The world is not the same today as it was yesterday, and it will be different again tomorrow. You are yearning for a golden age that never existed. As I said before, adapt or die. This is evolution, and you can't go backwards, but you can get left behind.
