"... this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: 'The Coddling of the American Mind.' Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was 'Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.' He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title. After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse...."
I'm reading "Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest/Evidence for Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis," by Jonathan Haidt.
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
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134 comments:
I was very confused how all of this related to CBT (Computer-Based Training) until I opened the link to realize it was a different CBT.
American women have had a quota preference in jobs and education for every one of my 73 years on this earth.
They’re depressed because after puberty, they’re facing 20 years of treading water with no prospect of marriage, family and religious grounding. Increasingly, the young men don’t even want them because they’re full of the stupid, completely baseless complaint you helped build into the educational system. Blue collar and middle class men don’t want to marry and have children with a woman who spent 20 years whoring.
You’re the culprit, prof. Your fabricated victim hood is the young women’s problem. Your feminism was the first completely fabricated victim identity politics movement. You were born into fabulous wealth and opportunity and you can’t stop the spoiled brat bitching. It’s shameful.
You’re the enemy of my granddaughters. Your feminism is an evil lie that they need to be protected against.
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
Fox Butterfield, Is That You?
I think back to the Learned Helplessness debates of the 90s: Clinton's argument that our generous welfare system had robbed generations of their opportunity to thrive thru struggle.
Same here. One may encounter discrimination in their life, but we're teaching our kids that the response is to unravel like a cheap pair of jeans.
I had to think about your hypothesis for a couple of moments to grasp its meaning. I like it.
"The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world"
Keep screaming into the void. It wasn't men that made women. And it wasn't men that made them virtually helpless in a world filled with things that can kill us. It wasn't men who made them less able to manipulate the physical world.
Sorry ladies, you're pointing your finger at the wrong culprit. Maybe all women could go to a desert island or something and create their own society free of the subordination of men. I know it's been tried before with disastrous results, but 197th time's the charm....
The radical feminist hypothesis is the problem, not the solution. It's exactly what Haidt is arguing against even if he doesn't state the thesis the same way you did.
It completely ignores conservative females have consistently and significantly lower depression scores than liberal males and until recently scored lower than conservative males, too. This divergence is present in virtually every chart presented in the article.
You can do whatever neo-Marxian hand-waving you want about 'false consciousness' but that doesn't explain the consistent divergence of liberal and conservative men, nor does it explain why the entire Zoomer generation is significantly more depressed than the preceding Millennials.
It also doesn't align with Haidt's first solution to the issue which is pointedly to stop trying to 'protect' all college age adults. The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.
Telling people they have no agency and are at the mercy of powerful forces, even in the smallest details of their life, is very empowering to the people who are driving that narrative but at the cost of the mental health and stability of people who get sucked into believing it.
The phone call is coming from inside the house, radical feminists! By their actions (which is how CBT suggests we evaluate the world), your "allies" are not trying to help you - they're trying to discourage you from considering yourselves to be strong, competent, and capable.
So, ironically, your hypothesis is correct, with regard to your "allies."
The people who expect you to compete and, if you can, succeed on your merits - those people are not subordinating you, except insofar as any individual may end up subordinate to another in a particular setting because the subordinate one is of lower rank in a hierarchy, has lesser ability or experience, or doesn't possess some necessary attribute (height, physical strength) to rise to the top. If you don't succeed, consider that it may be not because you're being held down, but simply because not everyone succeeds.
Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson correctly rang the bell on this more than 5 years ago. They were once both described as members of the 'intellectual dark web' -- aka establishment/left academic heretics. Peterson also strongly came out against forced speech and transgender dogma, so he had to be cancelled by the left even though he was always a grounded moderate.
Left-wing Haidt was largely ignored during the Trump era...as most politically minded people seemed to be suffering from the mental seductions and distortions caused by social media...including and especially "Covfefe" Trump.
Society can either listen to this and have a relatively easy way out, or continue as they have since cancelmania began. Do we learn the easy way or the hard way? Do those with grossly dysfunctional world views win Darwin Awards or can they be saved from themselves? When does Greta Thunberg get the Nuclear Football?
"and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination"
If it weren't non-touchable by the PC-crowd, ya might consider starting with Islam.
Women and minorities hardest hit!
It all started in 1968. Improving prosperity made the proletariat capitalistic consumers and labor unions were not for the revolution, but for getting higher wages than office workers. So what were the leftists going to do to achieve control? They had to reverse. Instead of a vertical plan, rich against the poor, they had to go horizontal. Pit women against men, pit races against each other, pit gays against straights. It no longer matters who is bourgeois, it is physical human characteristics that you hate.
And with the help of the college students of the day, this was a winning strategy. Now the left is in power, the left is the elite rich, like Beiden, and the poor are being paid piddling bribes to shut up. The government keeps people down by promising cash that they never quite deliver, but keep for themselves. Neocommunism is our current incarnation of rule by overlord. And equity in college admissions is just a way for the ruling class to admit their dumb kids like Hunter into elite colleges using the fuzziness of controlled non transparent admissions.
See also, "Are stay-at-home moms unhappy?"
AA : "...we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination."
Ouch. A little over the top, dontcha think? Perhaps the patriarchy should simply move on and forget the real/imagined problems of the weaker sex. Y'all work it out best you can.
I'd tie it all back to the Clinton impeachment. Bill Clinton was the clearest example of the kind of problems which feminists were supposed to be concerned about, and they abandoned their principles in order to defend him. Ever since then, leftwing women have been increasingly unhinged as they try to reconcile professed beliefs and real-world actions.
CDT is computer design trainee but don't know CBT. Probably it's the same program but with more women in it.
A program to teach girls what the nagging instinct is and how it transforms in a working system would be nice.
Happy people don’t want the system overthrown.
So people wanting to overthrow the system first need to make people miserable.
I'm more inclined to believe Shouting Thomas' reasons (the first two paragraphs only) than I am Haidt's. What Lukianoff describes as depression triggers are counterargued by faith. Without religion it's much easier to go down the rabbit hole. Add social media, covid lockdowns, the economic downturn, and the TRA redefining of female, it's a wonder any young woman can resist depression.
School choice seems to me to be the only hope for our kids to be protected against the evil religion of feminism and gay worship. This is the one religion that can be forced on our kids in the public schools. Traditional Christianity and Judaism are taboo.
My grandkids are being taught in the public schools that sexual “Pride” is a virtue. Christian theology teaches that pride of any sort is a sin. The public schools are directly rejecting my family’s religious beliefs and supplanting those beliefs with their religion of feminism and gay worship.
Getting the kids back in traditional, orthodox churches and temples has to be the first step toward reclaiming them from the Satan worship. I’m seeing signs that tiny movements are occurring taking us in that direction.
The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
Above anything else, I just want my 23-year-old daughter to be happy. I do have protective instincts for her, but that's because I'm her dad.
Is picking up the bar and dinner tab on a date a mechanism of subordination? I remember taking a girl in the summer after 7th grade to a hot dog stand, and I paid. I wasn't trying to make her subordinate. I was thrilled she wanted to hang out with me.
The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
Can we assume that the female dominated education system, both public schools and colleges, are new mechanisms of subordination? Women dominating other women?
Women driving younger women into massive student debt?
Telling people they have no agency and are at the mercy of powerful forces, even in the smallest details of their life, is very empowering to the people who are driving that narrative but at the cost of the mental health and stability of people who get sucked into believing it.
Yup!
I kind of like the accusation that male supremacy is the big culprit. Thanks for the complement. We do try our best to be benevolent dictators. That’s in the Bible.
One thing young women have going for them is that it is highly qualified, eminently trained professionals fucking them up.
Look at the bright side.
The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world,
Might we stop to consider that maybe there is a reason for this beyond "men suck"?
and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
Like perhaps the Feminist Movement itself?
My 3 year old grandson is starting to read. At breakfast he asked what facts and free meant. Boy, how do you handle that? Outsourcing those ones to his other grandparents, both staunch conservative Harvard Law School grads.
Oh Yea said...I was very confused how all of this related to CBT (Computer-Based Training) until I opened the link
Different worlds. I've heard of computer-based training, but I've never heard the acronym CBT used to describe it. I would think context is enough to tell you they mean the far (far) more common cognitive-behavioral therapy.
The modern world is built entirely around women's priorities (classrooms and offices are a fully feminized spaces). The predictable result is that men are hamstrung, stunted, prevented from developing as healthy men. That much is predictable. Much more interesting is that so many women are miserable. Much less happy than they were living under the hated patriarchy.
I've known since my 20's that if you want to know what women want, the last thing you should do is ask women. If you want to know what women want, look to their behavior. It tells a very different story.
Has the liberal need to fabricate an ever weirder victim so as to enjoy denouncing the bigots hit rock bottom?
The International Women’s Day parade of stocky, ugly men taking all the rewards while dressed in drag… how do you top that?
At what point do you just throw in the towel and return to traditional, orthodox Christianity and Judaism?
"Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis"
Let me add the progressive exploitation hypothesis. Progs manufacture female unhappiness and discord the better to promote their causes as "solutions." They are victims! They are unsafe! They need need protection from toxic masculinity!
"we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination"
In this case, sneakily, by women subordinating women in the ongoing feminization of academia.
Haidt and Lukianoff are good guys. But they try to be nice liberals by reading a political phenomenon as social-psychological error.
Feminism is dead because they have allowed trangenderism to supplant women
Yes, saw this article yesterday, and this is a wholesome, helpful take that makes sense.
Carl Jung talked about male and female minds, animus and anima, and that both had distinct ways of being and of imbalance. I remember one example being that women with too much animus going for them were chronically Off-the-Point. (the performance by that congresswoman grilling Matt Taibbi yesterday is a fine example female muddle, sigh)
The women's movement marched "off the point" when they declared they were not only equal but Much Better than mere Men and they have been leading us up into a dry creek canyon ever since. tragic for our young women!
The good news is we are only in the fourth generation or so since "the Pill" suddenly empowered women, giving them extraordinary agency never before available in any civilization up to now. It has been a wild ride off that leash, crazy, and seems worse now than ever. But give it another 20 generations to find the right groove.
Meanwhile, I have to champion Men until silly women get real.
The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world
The feminine technique of using vulnerability and innocence to manipulate the shit out of men is also the "age-old way of the world."
Feminists used Marxist word deconstruction techniques (i.e. lies flowing from Satan) to convince the world that unborn human beings are not a thing.
Now these same damn feminists complain when the kids say that woman is not a thing.
I'm just happy the kids made it out of the feminist gulag (a.k.a. "the womb") safe and relatively sound
that is before the doctors who have been brainwashed into avoiding reality started trying to "make the customers happy" by castrating little boys and pumping steroids into little girls
when I was a little boy, I was warned by mommy figures that steroids were dangerous
those same damn mommies are pumping steroids into little girls left and right
what could go wrong with that?
shoot at patriarchy, kill fatherhood, and bitch and moan when the world seems to get a little worse
"It completely ignores conservative females have consistently and significantly lower depression scores than liberal males and until recently scored lower than conservative males, too."
Well, as W.B. Yeats put it:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Haidt is right. It's still important work.
And Shouting Thomas can't count. In 1980, a mere 43 years ago, not 73, when I first worked as a grocery cashier, the males my age and considerably slower and stupider than me were started at a higher rate for the same fucking job; were too lazy to work; were nonetheless immediately promoted above me and, worse, above competent women in their forties and fifties who had been there for decades, and then spent their time yelling at us over the intercom while smoking pot in the manager's office with all the other over-promoted useless male losers.
I found conditions much unchanged in similar blue collar work in 1988-93 and 2019. So, you're just incapable of holding two truths simultaneously in your mind: I'm twice as conservative as you and have done ten times more to end affirmative action for everyone, but, also, it's not "women" but only certain white collar, corner office, and, especially, academic and political girlies and minorities in complete collusion with their men who have benefited in any way from affirmative action and feminism.
Most working-class service position women still are at a disadvantage to equally qualified men. And now the same social forces are emasculating young men too, so don't be too surprised when your grandsons start changing sexes and whoring it up.
I hate to quote commies, but there really is no war but the class war. I would add the war against the family, from my political corner.
Mr Wibble said...
I'd tie it all back to the Clinton impeachment.
As Haidt points out regarding the Obama election, this time frame doesn't align with the changes.
Clinton was impeached in the late 1990s. Haidt's charts don't go quite that far back but they do show consistently lower levels of depression for both sexes and political outlooks all through the early 2000s. The first iPhone was introduced in 2007. FaceBook launched in 2004.
Rolling through the generation birth years
GenX - 1960 - 1980 (approx)
GenY/Millennials - 1980 - 2000 (approx)
GenZ/Zoomers - post 2000
Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous access to social media, and the spike in depression tracks to their entrance into late childhood.
Social media and smartphones didn't necessarily cause the spike in depression but they were the technology that allowed wide distribution of the messages being generated by early adopters. One can draw an analogy to the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The printing press didn't cause it but the ability to easily produce printed material to spread Reformation ideas encouraged it in ways that would not have been possible a century before.
@Christoper B
Althouse's hypothesis is further proven in your case. Conservative women don't take the bait of the "new" ways to help women, thus they are happier. Girlbossing is not the answer for most women.
"... we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of
subordination."
Please. They're from the Government. They're only trying to help.
we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination
I think that's a valuable insight
What's unhelpful is the (implicit) idea that men are to blame for everything bad that happens to women
So I would ask feminists, radical or otherwise, whether their attempts to "protect or help women" are actually "new mechanisms of subordination."
In other words, maybe apply your anti-male insight to the feminist world that we are currently in.
People obsessed with money -- and much of feminism is money-obsessed -- object to the idea that we're in a "feminist world" because "men make more money than women" and so forth.
But the areas that women have traditionally ruled -- child-making and child-rearing -- is what is seriously fucked up at the moment.
Feminism sees men as a paycheck and nothing more.
Feminism is overtly hostile to fathers, and babies, and is now implicitly hostile to their own little girls who don't know what a woman is.
And I further insist that the failure of the overwhelming number of women to identify as "feminist" is a rebuke of feminist rhetoric and feminist ideas about men, babies, and families.
So while I think Althouse's comment about "coddling" is right on the money, I would reject the idea that this is a "male plot." (Which she didn't say, obviously, but the use of the word "feminist" implies a gender-specific bad man).
While men do our fair amount of plotting -- I'm a plotter, I admit it -- much of our plotting vis-a-vis women is how we get laid.
So if coddling children gets us more pussy, we will coddle the fuck out of children. You silly girls might put your pussy hats on and think about that one.
So far I'm not a patriarch yet, but I'm working on it.
I think the mental health of single, college-"educated" liberal girls is going to sink even more in next decade as the jobs they expected to get on the strength of their writing abilities are largely eliminated by ChapGPT and the like.
I look forward to Althouse's new book, The Vulva Monologues, even as I suspect low readership due to branding issues.
My 3 year old grandson is starting to read. At breakfast he asked what facts and free meant. Boy, how do you handle that?
Facts: Everything God has made
Free: The human beings that God has made
I suppose CBT means Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I would have thought that the blind faith in therapy did much to get us into the mess we are in. Bringing more therapy into education sounds vaguely Maoist, with the sort of "struggle sessions" that Critical Race Theory made common, but perhaps if you have a problem-solving mentality and deal with immediate real world problems you will be happier than if you get into the weeds of endless rumination and speculation.
I don't see the relevance of the "radical feminist hypothesis," but proposed roads to freedom often lead to new forms of domination. How often do revolutions result in less government and more freedom in the long run? 60 years ago, big business dominated the country (it does in some ways), and there was reason to develop public interest groups to counter the power of corporations. Now those advocacy groups have become part of the system and a new source of repressive power in the country.
In a very strange coincidence, yesterday I finished Martin Seligman's "Learned Optimism," an old book (maybe his first?) about the Positive Psychology movement he helped found. I tend to pessimism and found the last chapters, a kind of CBT-light, to be pretty helpful. I'm planning on trying out his recommendations this week.
And then this post--what an interesting take. It aligns very much with what Seligman saw as a possible future back in the early 90s when he wrote his book. And for those, like Shouting Thomas, who say this has always been the case, it emphatically has NOT. Something changed radically right around 2012. The graphs are too remarkable to ignore. Yes, women have always tended toward depression. Seligman speculates that it's our tendency to ruminate...that feels right, at least in my case.
Gusty, your desire for your daughter to be happy is admirable as long as you remember that happiness isn't really a goal. It's the side effect of a life well-lived, and it's sometimes transitory. Lots of people on drugs are happy in the moment and I don't think that's what you really want. We need to be raising people capable of being productive and happy over the long term as full-fledged adults. It often feels like parents get so consumed by their children that they forget that childhood itself is not a permanent condition and we shouldn't want it to be.
Super interesting. I really appreciate your sharing this.
"Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis"
"Radical feminism" stopped being a valid way to look at the world the day the "radical feminists" decided that protecting female user and abuser Bill Clinton was more important than any actual feminism.
It's been dead for 3 decades. The fact that the majority of college students, and college graduates, are female just goes to show the many ways in which not only is it dead, but it has no grounds for any of its complaints.
And as others here have noted: the fact that TERFs aren't 90% of "feminists" is just another example of how "feminism" is just left wing propaganda in drag
There’s an interview with Mary Harrington (she calls herself the reactionary feminist) on the Triggernometry podcast. She blames the birth control pill for many of our problems including gender fluidity. Different and interesting - especially toward the end of the podcast.
I myself have laid out several clear steps for the women in my life to follow that would lead to their enduring happiness. Sadly and perversely they have refused to follow them.
We're finally winning the "War On Women." All it took was a little bit of Tumblr and Twitter, a lot of Instagram, followed by the decisive blow from TikTok.
It completely ignores conservative females have consistently and significantly lower depression scores than liberal males and until recently scored lower than conservative males, too. This divergence is present in virtually every chart presented in the article.
I suppose the radical feminist hypothesis explains this away by asserting — without evidence — that conservative women want to be subordinated, or something like that. Or perhaps conservative women understand that women and men bring different things to that special partnership called marriage? Maybe if young women knew how to look for a good man with whom to share their lives instead of presupposing that all men are bastards, they might be happier? Two things both my daughters in law share are that they are conservative and religious. They also both have good careers, one as an engineer who recently received a corporate award for her work, the other is a scientist leading a team of subordinates.
@Althouse, perhaps conservative women know something about happiness and success that you and your radical feminists don’t? One alternative, though related, hypothesis to consider is that women become radical feminists by being losers to begin with.
If I had to speculate about why liberal/progressive women may be more unhappy, I'd say that it's because they are told that they "can have it all." They either brood and stew about not having it all or react angrily against the people, institutions, and concepts that they believe are keeping them from getting everything. That could be a case for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy -- or for critical thinking without the trendy/cultish label -- but in today's world, everything is ideological, and reasoning that doesn't support one's beliefs is unlikely to be convincing.
I must see the world wrong. I see women running things. Maybe its just rural America where the matriarchy is on full display. I learned early on, of I wanted to make a good first impression on a farm, make contact with the woman, and always respect and support their ideas and address their concerns. Even a woman's neutral opinion of me was a plus. Getting on their wrong side meant I would not be welcomed, and shunned by the men. No man is going to waste time trying to defend a salesman to his wifes negative takes.
You were born into fabulous wealth and opportunity
All Americans were. But "Give me money and power so I can keep things the same" isn't a very effective message.
"Facts: Everything God has made
"Free: The human beings that God has made"
MYTH: A god exists and made everything.
It's been reported that 20% of white college educated suburban women are being treated with consuling and drugs for depression and anxiety. That means 80% are going undertreated. ;-)
"... any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination."
Yeah. Like the W.Va. law, passed by mostly (evil, white) men and going to SCOTUS, protecting womens' sports from biological male usurpers pretending to be women.
Honey, we're having a baby.
Baby, the fetus... fetal-baby is a "burden" that will harsh my mellow, cramp our style.
Do you love me? Will you stay?
Baby, stay affordable, available, and taxable, and I'll Spring to abort my... your "burden".
Government under the Pro-Choice ethical religion is the loser boyfriend that has friends with "benefits".
Men, women, and "our Posterity" are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus. The progressive gender dysphoria is collateral damage from the war of the worlds.
Interesting article. RH Hardin has been commenting on the mental illness of liberal women here for years. LOL!
"Ouch. A little over the top, dontcha think?"
No. It's a hypothesis — a test. Whatever you're proposing to do, put it through this test: If you had to argue that this would perpetuate/increase the subordination of women, what would you say? Take it seriously. Go through the exercise. Then judge the results. It's the same thing Critical Race Theory requires: Given the history of subordination, presume, for this analysis, that what you are looking at causes/preserves/worsens the subordination, and see what you come up with. That doesn't make it correct. It just smokes it out into the open where it can be judged.
The fear of doing this is a fear that you will have to see that your well-intended policies are not doing what you flatter yourself to think they will do. You might not be the good person that you think you are. I'm saying that if you don't go through the exercise of testing your ideas, you really aren't very good. You're lazy, complacent, smug, and fearful.
perhaps conservative women know something about happiness and success
Life in moderation. You can have it all, but not all at once, set your priorities, then reconcile. We're not children anymore, and children are the hardest job a man and a woman will ever love.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) asserts diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) that denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs (e.g. "people of color"), color quotas, and affirmative discrimination as religious dogma to socially justify subordinating people under an authoritarian model.
While it may be argued that the mental health of liberal girls sank first, it's probably only because no one pays attention to the boys, and boys, both by nature and by societal teachings, are not supposed to show depression. Or at least that's how it was.
Today entire generations of boys and girls are depressed, see no future, cannot envision a world that works for them, and many even think that world is coming to an end via climate catastrophe, within a year or five or twelve- depending on who they listen to.
The disease is a highly infectious liberalism and it's rapidly evolving variants under the umbrella of 'progressivism', which is neither progressive or liberal, in any classical sense of the words. These kids did not just become depressed and fraught with emptiness. We taught it to them. We have school plans to insert this into them. Consider this has been ongoing for 20-30 years now. How are the results looking?
Blogger Mr Wibble said...
I'd tie it all back to the Clinton impeachment. Bill Clinton was the clearest example of the kind of problems which feminists were supposed to be concerned about, and they abandoned their principles in order to defend him. Ever since then, leftwing women have been increasingly unhinged as they try to reconcile professed beliefs and real-world actions.
Very true. At that point I concluded that feminists were bullshitters. For 500,000 years men hunted and defended the family while the women had babies and collected food items as the "gatherers" in that culture.
That culture continued well into modern times. My great grandparents were farmers and my great grandmother had 12 children, 9 of them boys. My father was one of 10. My mother was one of only 4, of which one died in infancy, but her father died when she was 18 months old. Until quite recently the nuclear family could get along with one income and the mother could stay home with the children. What gave birth to "feminism" was inflation and the Pill. Lyndon Johnson set off inflation with his Vietnam War and War on Poverty. Nixon let the creature loose by ending the gold standard.
Pretty soon it took two incomes to maintain a middle class life. Women were lured into the workforce by the feminists and by the corporations that convinced them that a "career" was better than motherhood. Even today, corporations offer to pay for abortions to get women back to work. Depression in liberal girls is understandable. My oldest grand daughter is a sophomore at U of Alabama and loving life. She has been that way since early childhood. Her parents are conservative and were regular churchgoers until the pastor got "Woke."
Go through the exercise. Then judge the results.
When I have the opportunity to teach persuasive writing, I teach my students that they must spend at least one paragraph addressing what they believe to be their opponent's best or most likely argument against them. I model the strategy by constructing an argument with the class as a whole. After I finish writing the argument that we agreed on as a class on the board, I slip it behind a new white board, and we construct the opposing argument.
At the end, I have them side by side and we argue over which one wins.
But there are limits to this strategy. What do you think would happen if I asked my students to make an argument that slavery was good for Black people? Or that Hitler was right about the Jews?
The real issue isn't whether this is a good strategy, it is. The issue is, when is it appropriate, and who gets to make that determination?
Why can’t schools just concentrate on reading writing and arithmetic? Phonics and rote memorization have to have a place in the classroom or the effort is doomed to fail.
MYTH: A god exists and made everything.
What is your conclusive proof that a god does not exist?
For instance, would this prompt be appropriate, and for whom?
Assume that women have been purposefully subordinated throughout history, by both informal and formal processes. Further assume that this was correct and for a good reason. Defend your assumptions.
"Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis"
Here's another hypothesis for consideration:
Radical Feminism + Cruel Neutrality => Radical Neutrality + Cruel Feminism
Discuss among yourselves.
spoiled child syndrome (e.g. the girl that never grew up)
Why can’t schools just concentrate on reading writing and arithmetic?
Because people do not respond equally... equitably to learning, and other performance critical exercises, thus the proffering of Critical Racists' Theory (CRT) and other emanations from class-disordered ideologies to reduce human dignity and agency, and abort individual discrepancies, in color blocs for leverage.
Radical Feminism
Cecile's scalpel leads us to appreciate that radical chauvinism harbors a critical lack of empathy for abortion victims, "warlocks", and "witches", too.
As one who dealt with anxiety/depression for some 20 years (most of which without knowing it), that all made a lot of sense, especially the catastrophising and internal vs. external stuff.
Subjugation of women is one of the goals of transgenderism. Trans-women, aka men, make better women than real women. Hence the awards designated for women going to fake-women, fake-women (males) athletes beating the pants off of women athletes, fake-women (men) invading women's locker rooms and restrooms under the cover of being transwomen. There are convicted sexual predators who suddenly declare themselves to be trans-women and demand to be placed in women's prisons so they can continue to prey on women.
narciso said...
"Feminism is dead because they have allowed trangenderism to supplant women"
Don't worry. They are already working to make that men's fault because men won't rise to protect the old-fashioned women who have spent the last 60 years telling men they can't have male-only spaces, sports or whatever.
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.
In nature there are two primary male-female social structures:
1: Pair bonding
2: Dominant male harems
If you are always whining about how everything is against women you will not see the entire picture.
There are systems built within each species to support one or the other. Humans are somewhat unique in that they have used both.
Pair bonding is obviously better for women and almost all men. It is only a small subset of men that prefer dominant male harem structures.
But the Elites convinced women to "Fight the Patriarchy" and women stupidly killed the pair bonding model with a variety of antics.
Now women find themselves with kids and no male support or affection. This also leaves a large number of men masturbating to porn online.
So women are reduced to begging for government handouts and attacking men in court to get money.
Good work Ann.
Robert Cook said...
"Facts: Everything God has made
"Free: The human beings that God has made"
MYTH: A god exists and made everything.
According to Cook, if you believe in God you are a heretic.
His religion requires him to challenge other faiths.
I'm unclear as to whether you are hypothesizing as a "radical feminist" or in the voice of other people who are "radical feminists."
I think it's the latter. I'm not fully versed in the many varieties of feminism but according to Wikipedia "radical feminists" are foolish people with foolish beliefs and my hypothesis is that you are not one of those.
Also, I think it is improper to assert that a true radical feminist has ever has a hypothesis about anything. That would assume uncertainty.
Robert Cook said...
"It completely ignores conservative females have consistently and significantly lower depression scores than liberal males and until recently scored lower than conservative males, too."
Well, as W.B. Yeats put it:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
You do realize you are one of the most convicted people on this board right?
Of course you don't.
You aren't really that bright and your self awareness is zero.
What do you think would happen if I asked my students to make an argument that slavery was good for Black people?
I agree but slavery has been the subject of myths for centuries.
First, slaves were losers in tribal wars. They were captured and sold by the winners to Europeans. There were "barracoons" in small forts along the coast of west Africa where slaves were brought by their black captors. The alternative was death but those slaves taken by the Portuguese and sent to Brazil were no better off as 90% died. Slaves sent to America mostly survived (only 3% of all slaves from Africa went to America.
The Muslims had more slaves, mostly from east Africa, but the north African Muslims, called "Barbary pirates" took thousands of white slaves who mostly did not survive. They were often used as rowers in galleys used in raids. The raids went as far as Ireland.
R C Belaire said...
AA : "...we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination."
Ouch. A little over the top, dontcha think? Perhaps the patriarchy should simply move on and forget the real/imagined problems of the weaker sex. Y'all work it out best you can.
The problem of building a society that creates the most positive happiness and fulfillment for people in the population includes complex problems like male-female relationships.
The people who order our society need to understand how people think and communicate and live and work together. Unfortunately our social contracts and discussions are dominated by "experts" who are terrible at this.
But "experts" cannot do a good job finding solutions to these kinds of societal problems because it requires a broad knowledge base and the ability to question what you know.
By definition the "expert" knows everything about a subject. And thus the result was Feminism. Feminists had all the facts and all the proof of discrimination and they had all the ways to fix these problems.
And the Feminist experiment led to poor outcomes for women because they did not have a basic understanding of basic relationships in the natural world. They couldn't even do basic "if we do this people will do that" exercises.
Their focus was narrow and their failure absolutely predictable.
But just like affirmative action and DEI the people that funded them and pulled their strings knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what this would do to society.
MYTH: A god exists and made everything.
I'll play. What, then, made everything?
And how can this Creator be anything less than godlike?
"What is your conclusive proof that a god does not exist?"
I don't have to supply proof for something that is not and has never been in evidence. The absence of a god is the default position. Those who make the extraordinary claim for the existence of a god have the burden of proving their claim.
One need spend as much time testing a radical feminist theory as one spends testing flat earth theories.
To be insulted by someone as they try to force you to do their intellectual work for them is one of the most radical feminist things ever.
Interesting hypothesis. Not sure if it is true or not, but I've seen some evidence in support. Moreover, my observations support a modification in line with the hypothesis, that many new efforts to give equity to the less privileged is actually doing more to subordinate them. We moved away from soft bigotry of low expectations to fully identifying people using superficial measures, such as skin color or genitals or sexual desire, to then determine what it is they can't do and thus need help doing.
The default position is not atheism but agnosticism: thinking that there may or may not be some sort of God or gods, and there is no way to prove either theism (mono- or poly-) or atheism. Very much like the default position on who blew up the North Sea pipeline, and who killed Daria Dugina: I don't know, and neither do you, unless it was you who did it.
Those who make the extraordinary claim
The miracles Jesus did were all extraordinary. Everything amazing in life is extraordinary. If you look around and all you see is ordinary and you cannot conceive of extraordinary than you are hopelessly bound by your tiny little body in its hear-and-now.
You'd have to have a little mind to assume that humanity created God.
Who created comets? Who created all the stars in the sky? Who wrote human DNA?
Most of what we brag about as human "invention" is actually a "discovery" of a pre-existing truth in the universe. If everything is an accident and chaotic -- the atheist claim -- then why study it? Why are we looking for order, logic, reason in a godless universe with no rules whatsoever?
Science is not a rational pursuit at all unless there are scientific laws, rules, and principles that can be discovered because they exist, and pre-existed the people who are studying them.
Bad scientists pretend like they are authorities and are above the rest of us. "Humanity is to blame for the climate change!"
Good scientists recognize that there were five ice ages before humanity existed. That's a radical reshaping of our planet's climate, and humanity (obviously) had nothing to do with it.
It's a very small scientist who thinks humanity is the center of the universe. And now some scientists (ha!) allege that biology itself was created by human beings.
Next we'll be told that human reproduction was a male plot to get laid!
Those who make the extraordinary claim...have the burden of proving their claim.
Woman to Cookie: "I love you!"
Cookie to Woman: "That's an extraordinary claim. I do not believe you. Prove it."
Can she "prove it"?
Life is sad and small when we cannot take a leap of faith.
When I was in college I sought out experiences that would toughen me up. Guess that is not popular these days.
One of many things that feminists do not understand is that most men will do anything to defend their wives and make them happy. Paint the house? Sure. Commute 90 min each way so we can live in the suburbs? Sure. You want to stay home with the kids? Sure. But feminists, many of them lesbians, call this oppression. It is not oppression. And if you see oppression everywhere and are convinced you cannot succeed, you will be miserable.
Those who make the extraordinary claim for the existence of a god have the burden of proving their claim.
The miracle of life and the wonder of creation isn't enough for you?
@Althouse wrote: "No. It's a hypothesis — a test. Whatever you're proposing to do, put it through this test: If you had to argue that this would perpetuate/increase the subordination of women, what would you say? Take it seriously. "
I agree with the need for testing hypotheses, but your framing of 'subordination' is absolutely packed with uncertain ideological views originating with Women's Suffrage in the last 100 to 150 years. Humans are animals with millions of years of relevant history, two biological sexes, and have evolved in parallel with other mammals and apes. We require a symbiotic male-female pairing with some inherently different functions. Full stop. Self-awareness and 'subordination' is a post-Greece, post-Descartes filigree on top of essential animal functions and reproduction. So, all recent power/justice/privilege ideologies involve just 100 to 2,500 years against millions of years of raw and blind biological back pressure. The old and simple animal methods are proven to be sustainable, while the new intellectual ones often struggle.
You may not like that male elephant seals are 16-20 feet long and keep harems of 10 foot long females on their private beaches. But evolution. But no self-awareness. But no ideology at all. Just animals evolving under environmental pressures. Tough, strong males grab the best beaches and kick off all other males. They allow many females and their babies on the beach. So, the males evolved into giants. Sexual dimorphism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_seal
You may not like that male apes tend to be much larger than female apes. But they are. Evolution. No self-awareness. Sexual dimorphism. Are human relationships any different than other ape relationships? Can any of us avoid the biological back pressure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape
You may be disgusted that a species of louse eats the tongue of a specific fish and then lives its life in a fish mouth as a fake tongue. But they do. Evolution. Adaptation. No ideology. No malice. No subordination. Just a random reproductive niche that's sustainable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua
The absence of a god is the default position. Those who make the extraordinary claim for the existence of a god have the burden of proving their claim.
How do you explain the existence of the Universe, Cook?
If you say "the Big Bang Theory" I have to laugh because one has to suspend all known laws of physics to ascribe to that theory.
It's OK to say you don't know how all this came into existence. It's also OK (in my mind) to say that there is a Supreme Being that created it all. (And may be laughing at us at this very moment).
Trina, you kinda lost me at "..the males my age and considerably slower and stupider than me were started at a higher rate for the same fucking job."
Those who make the extraordinary claim for the existence of a god have the burden of proving their claim.
First of all, it has been the default position throughout human history that there is a God or set of gods. Every civilization has had a "creation story" that features their deities. So your position, although more popular today, is historically atypical.
Secondly, you ask for proof of God. If you were to be shown a "God Proof" and read it you would still reject it for you have staked out your own reasoning as the arbiter of what is and is not. Even some witnesses at the crucifixion and resurrection (including some Greek historians who recorded pieces of it) and some witnesses to Jesus' miracles denied His deity, for we humans are exceptional at rationalizing away what we see and hear and experience. So let's not play the "If you just showed me proof," game. God said faith is the only way to know Him. If it is not your personal journey and decision then you do not have free will. You are free to reject Him and free to demand from Him proof He exists. Many who have made that request in sincerity have been surprised at the results.
Men who reject God are always surprised when they turn out to have been mistaken.
Who invented math?
"The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world..."
At this point, one has to assume that the radical feminists espousing this conception of the world have precisely zero experience of it outside their own delusions.
Precisely who is it that's getting "subordinated", here? Is it men, who are supposed to be yoked to a wife and kids in traditional societies, expected to work himself to death over the course of decades for their benefit?
Sad news for Ms. Radical Feminist: The unpleasant reality is that everyone was getting screwed, is getting screwed, and will continue to get screwed on into the unending future. The only difference is really in the how/when/what of the screwing. The real deal here, however, is that the RadFem types want all the gravy while sucking up none of the unpleasant bits and bobs from the sexual role auction.
Ah, well... It will be interesting listening to all of them whine during the aftermath of their choices.
Alpha move: "I am the father of geometry!"
(That's a lie, though, because you did not fuck that triangle)
"I'll play. What, then, made everything?"
That's a good question, one I certainly cannot answer, as no one can. There are many hypotheses, the most favored at this time being a "Big Bang," which may eventually end in a "Big Crunch," which posits gravity will cause the now-expanding universe to slow, then stop, then contract back into an infinitesimal dot, which will then expand in a new "Big Bang." The "Big Bang" which theoretically gave birth to our current universe is but the most recent of many that came before and of many yet to come, on, presumably, into infinity. Of course, there are also theories of multi-universes existing simultaneously along with ours. What causes these "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", (assuming they actually are occurring), or alternate coexisting universes? Still a mystery. If NOT a Big Bang, what else? Still a mystery. But then, substituting in a creator god to explain existence is just a convenient plug-in, to be referred to in lieu of Still a mystery, but no more useful or helpful in answering these possibly never-to-be answered questions.
"And how can this Creator be anything less than godlike?"
If there is a creator, if the universe must have had a creator, how did this entity come into being? What can explain a creator's existence? Defaulting to the notion of a creator god as the originator of our universe is simply begging the question of how existence came to be, and offers no answer at all.
Oddly, at least one worldly religion has long seen the existence of existence as current cosmological theory sees it. As I learned in my "Comparative Religions" class in college nearly 50 years ago, the Hindus believe the universe undergoes "repeated cycles of creation and destruction (pralaya). A variety of myths exist regarding the specifics of the process, but in general the Hindu view of the cosmos is as eternal and cyclic." Maybe the ancient Hindus were actually astronomers and cosmologists, using whatever tools of discovery available to them at the time. Perhaps they were informed by visiting extraterrestrials. Perhaps they (and we?) were descendants of of visiting extraterrestrials. These are fascinating imponderables less satisfactorily answered by "creator god" myths than by our own present degree of knowledge.
Achilles Heel said:
"You do realize you are one of the most convicted people on this board right?
"Of course you don't.
"You aren't really that bright and your self awareness is zero."
I know you are, but what am I?!
MYTH: A god exists and made everything.
God, gods and goddesses, mortal gods and goddesses, or experts in nominally "secular" societies?
Myth does not mean something is not true. The "Big Bang" is a myth. Evolutionary creationism is a myth. [Catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling... warming... change is a myth. The age of viability (the "big bang" of human evolution) in feminist cosmology is plausible, but improbable, and, in fact, false, a residual faith and religion of an ancient, forward-looking narcissism. At best, at worst, science cannot discern origin and expression, but a correlation with granny from six weeks does exist.
class-disordered ideology
The feminist/masculinist adoption of the Pro-Choice ethical religion, support for diversity [dogma], aiding and abetting conflation of sex and gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) for political congruence and inclusion of the transgender spectrum, are first-order anthropogenic forcings of forward-looking collateral damage to girls, boys, and "burdens" of no consequence, too.
"Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination."
Yes. There was a meeting.
"Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career." (emphasis added)
These children have been robbed of the joyful part of growing up. I suspect the cause is the parenting they received.
Achilles said about Robert Cook..
His religion requires him to challenge other faiths.
Isn't that Interesting? Atheists like Robert are Evangelical Atheists (Proselytizing Atheists?)
It is Not Enough for Cookt to believe in the absence of GOD.. He has to go door to door; saying:
"Have You Heard The BAD News?" "There IS NO GOD!"
He is not content to let other folk mis out on his BAD News.. EVERYONE MUST Know; there is nothing to live for
Kinda makes you think, doesn't it?
Robert? When Did you receive your calling; to spread the BAD news?
"Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination."
*******************
A perfect expression of paranoid wokeness: for thousands of years all men everywhere have worked conciously to subjugate women. IOW:
For thousands of years men have had it easy, while women have done all the hard and dangerous work in society. That's why "It's man's world".
For thousands of years men have sent women into war, while the men stayed home to tend the kids.
For thousands of years, it was women who came up with the key inventions, who worked in mines, who built the roads and dams, who constructed the railroads and the locomotives they ran on, who invented AC electrical current and electrified the world, who invented and built airplanes, cars, computers, the Internet and WorldWideWeb....while men stayed home doing "unpaid" labor----except for the wages their wives generously doled out to them.
And, of course, it wasn't women who gave birth over the centuries, but rather claim-jumping trans-women who delivered babies through non-existent birth canals. Male midwives---secretly the norm---kept that info from "women", who they conveniently claimed not to recognize as such.
Yeah. Makes perfect sense.
Blogger Kevin said...
"Happy people don’t want the system overthrown.
So people wanting to overthrow the system first need to make people miserable."
That explains so much of current events.
Blogger Mike of Snoqualmie said..."Subjugation of women is one of the goals of transgenderism. Trans-women, aka men, make better women than real women. Hence the awards designated for women going to fake-women,…"
I don't know if it's a 'goal', but it is amazing that women go along with this crap. Talk about subjugation.
"I'll play."
The only winning move is not to play.
"What, then, made everything?"
Nobody knows. It's very likely we'll never know.
(Oh, noes. Am I playing?)
Robert, you seem enamored with the Big Crunch. I don't believe there is much current evidence for the Big Crunch (I am open to being educated otherwise).
"If you say "the Big Bang Theory" I have to laugh because one has to suspend all known laws of physics to ascribe to that theory."
I think you have it backwards. The big bang comports to the current laws of physics. That's where it comes from.
However, physicists are the first to admit that the laws of physics as they currently stand are uncertain and incomplete.
Perhaps I spoke too soon, Robert.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.09010
The PDF is available without subscription:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.09010.pdf
I'm with Cook (and Richard Feynman) on this one. There is far more wonder in the world if you take it as it is rationally (I don't mean to imply that we humans are all that rational, only that we should do our best within our many limitations), and do not simply explain it all as a creation of God. Invoking God to explain everything is a cheap trick. I'm not saying we are better than that sort of thing as a species, but we should try.
That said, I wish more people believed fervently in a vengeful God. They might behave a bit more carefully.
God damn it! I swore I would not be drawn into this silly topic...
First, let me quote Cook and comment:
"Blogger Robert Cook said... (in reply to Achilles)
I know you are, but what am I?!
I would like to nominate this for Best Use Of A Playground Taunt to make an accurate and fair point. Well done Robert!
Second, for such an apparently (it is often apparent among some) smart bunch of people, you are making fools of yourselves arguing for faith as if it had any relevance. If you have faith, you needn't explain yourself. It is counterproductive, in fact.
Robert Cook is only arguing in favor of humility (correct me if I am wrong). None of us has a fucking clue where it all began or where it will end up. Making up fairy tales or believing in myths may have very useful roles in a human society, but to believe this is truth is counter to any sort of rationality.
It doesn't lessen a person or take away from the wonder of the universe to acknowledge our own ignorance. If anything, it makes everything much more amazing. If the Big Guy made it all, then that's that. But let's all be honest here, the notion of God is entirely a human creation with no basis in observable reality. It may be very beneficial in the success of a culture, but it is indefensible as a thought.
As a soldier--69-71--I was particularly taken with Kipling' poem "Tommy", particularly the veiled THreat in the last two lines:
"An' Tommy ain't a bloomin'fool
"You bet that Tommy sees."
I would like to help a strange woman who's in difficulty, even if I don't have a woman of my own family along as a potential witness.
I don't want my athletic and ambitious granddaughters to be crippled by some clown who's mad he did not make starting fullback.
Invoking God to explain everything is a cheap trick. I'm not saying we are better than that sort of thing as a species, but we should try.
Sorry but you are mistaken about Feynmann. When Herman Wouk was writing his history of WWII, he asked Feynmann for an interview. As he was finishing the interview, Feynmann asked Wouk if he knew Calculus.
In swift strokes Feynman brought the entire Manhattan project to life, the excitement and the perils alike, mentioning that once in a laboratory corridor he passed uranium materials stacked so carelessly that a chain reaction was within a whisker of going off. His main point was that the whole enterprise was gigantically messy, and that the atomic bomb was by no means at a frontier of science. He put it so: “It wasn’t a lion hunt, it was a rabbit shoot.” There was no Nobel prize, that is to say, in the concept or the calculations; it was just a challenge, if a huge one, to audacious innovative technology and brute industrial effort.
This formidable fellow walked out of the building with me, and said as we were parting: “Do you know calculus?” I admitted that I didn’t. “You had better learn it,” he said. “It’s the language God talks.”
Well, to be fair, this was not directed particularly at women. They wanted to undermine the men as well. It's just that liberal women are especially vulnerable to this garbage.
I have only read the first 60 comments or so, but at least to that point the ENTIRE THREAD seems to be based on a misreading of what Althouse is saying. Maybe I've missed something, I don't think her comment is directed at Haidt and Lukianoff; it's directed at all the stuff that H&L are criticizing, the point being that all the weird modes of thinking that colleges (and now all educational institutions) are doing to putatively "protect" girls are in fact keeping them down by causing mental health crises. I honestly can't see any other way to read what Althouse wrote, and it seems to me that a few commenters let their personal animus get in the way of their reading comprehension.
From personal experience I can tell you that the mental health crisis started to hit college students bad around 2013 seemed to reach a peak of angry self-righteousness in 2017, and is now overall much worse, but that students are less angry and more frightened and ground down. That's consistent with what Lukianoff says, and the mechanism proposed in the book makes sense: just as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can help the mental health of a decent fraction of the patients who try it by guiding them to fix faulty thinking patterns, this "Inverted" Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which students would be encouraged to DEVELOP faulty thinking patterns, would harm their mental health. And much of the most egregious faulty thinking--endless revisions of nomenclature, language games that trap unsuspecting good-faith speakers, asserting that feelings trump facts, celebrating victimhood, etc.--has been promoted as an effort to "protect" or "support" "women, minorities, and people of color."
And I think Althouse's radical feminist point is that these things maybe SOLD as working to "protect" women, but their actual effect is to subordinate women (in this case by damaging their mental health to the point where they are not able to be "strong, independent women"). I think it is unfair to Ann to interpret her comment the way commenters at the top of the thread have been.
Where I imagine Althouse and I might disagree is that I am about as certain as I can be that these things being done TO women are being done BY women, particularly by self-described feminist women. The "patriarchy" don't care. The older, wealthier, higher-in-the-hierarchy women--the ones running the education system from top to bottom--are ruining the lives of young women with their terrible ideas, though often the ones at the top don't actually believe in the terrible ideas
(in my experience, zero women in the upper leadership class [i.e.,in their 50s or 60s], actually believe that people with male genitalia should be in locker rooms or winning 'woman of the year' awards, but these women--who have absolutely no worry about being displaced by male colleagues or competitors--viscerally fear that younger "BIPOC" women with which they have filled the lower echelons of the institutions. And those women in turn have no respect for or loyalty towards these upper-level women and will depose the at the first opportunity).
No. It's a hypothesis — a test. Whatever you're proposing to do, put it through this test: If you had to argue that this would perpetuate/increase the subordination of women, what would you say? Take it seriously.
It’s tough to take your challenge seriously without some agreed-upon definition as to what “subordination of women” actually means. For instance, is it “subordination of women” to demand that engineering classes have a hefty math content even though many co-eds don’t like math and aren’t very good at it? Some feminists have made that argument, and for all I know you’re one of them. But then, would you be willing to live downwind of a chemical plant certified as safe by a chemical engineer who is adverse to math? Would you stand on or walk under a bridge designed by a civil engineer who is adverse to math?
“The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.”
That’s why if I see a woman being assaulted on the street, I don’t intervene. Chicks might get the impression I’m just another tool of the patriarchy, and that would make it harder to get laid.
Atheists on the thread, you're arguing against a strawman - that believers in a Creator necessarily supplant belief for scientific inquiry.
Some do. I don't. I believe in a Creator (I happen to believe in the Judeo-Christian God), and I believe that Creator is responsible for setting up natural laws - bit of a hybrid clockmaker God, because I also believe God is an active presence in my life, not necessarily going around clearing my path of dangers and obstructions, but at minimum always present.
Scientific discovery and invention, to me, are miracles wrought by human hands because of our God-given intelligence and curiosity, and because of the way God-created natural laws work.
You are most welcome to view my belief system as substituting the concept of "God" for an unknown and unknowable Mystery - that's actually pretty much exactly how God is described in my faith. It's unfalsifiable either way. Your claim that agnosticism is the proper default position is just as biased by your "faith" (that there is no God) as my position that belief in a creative force that exists outside of and untrammeled by time and space is a reasonable default position is biased by mine (that there is no god but God, to coin a phrase).
Sorry, I think I said "your claim that agnosticism..." when I meant "your claim that atheism..."
Whoever commented above that agnosticism is the real default would seem to me to be correct.
Jamie, excellent thoughts at 12:16!
Whoever commented above that agnosticism is the real default would seem to me to be correct.
When you talk about "default," I think about how it started. So I think about babies.
What we learn as babies is pain (hunger) and redemption (love from above).
Of course pain causes doubts, but pain is not the only thing inherent to the human condition.
There is no humanity without love!
In fact, mother-child bonds are visible in any number of species. Puppies cry and mothers feed them. If we were to snap our fingers and make those bonds disappear, species would die out.
What feminists have done to women, girls, and babies.
Atheists on the thread, you're arguing against a strawman - that believers in a Creator necessarily supplant belief for scientific inquiry.
Atheists are prone to conflate logical domains. That said, judge a philosophy by its principles, not principals.
Whoever commented above that agnosticism is the real default would seem to me to be correct.
The null hypothesis. Agnostics are, in principle, less vulnerable, but bias is intrinsic, prejudice is progressive, and liberal states are divergent.
Michael K, I am familiar with the Feynman quote you posted, but it does not mean that he was a believer in a divine God. He was quite the opposite, as he made clear in his writing many times. He writes at some length about his conversations with rabbis and other religious people regarding the wonder of the universe and its workings.
Prof. M. Drout said...
... the point being that all the weird modes of thinking that colleges (and now all educational institutions) are doing to putatively "protect" girls are in fact keeping them down by causing mental health crises.
I belated realized that is a plausible reading of what Ms Althouse wrote. I don't know that I would say it's the only way to read it as it seems to be ambiguous as to the actors and causation of the subordination. It also does not fully align with the data presented by Haidt. He repeatedly points out in the article that the impact of 'protection' is evident in all students, though not equally, and is more pronounced in liberal students of both sexes. I would expect if the radical feminist theory were the one in operation that the impact would be more easily bifurcated by gender, with liberal men not just less impacted than liberal women but also potentially less impacted than conservative women. Towards the end of the time period in some graphs there is a suggestion this could be happening but it doesn't appear to be a primary mode of operation.
Blogger Old and slow said..."Michael K, I am familiar with the Feynman quote you posted, but it does not mean that he was a believer in a divine God. He was quite the opposite, as he made clear in his writing many times. He writes at some length about his conversations with rabbis and other religious people regarding the wonder of the universe and its workings."
I speak about "God" all the time when referring to nature/physics, but it's metaphorical. I don't really believe in an actual God.
Professora says ///
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination
=========
so what about 'FEMINISTS' [X/Y chromosomes] who seek to provide EMPOWERMENT
Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination
=========
with that addition is Professora attempting like reverse CBT or straight CBT?
Old and slow,
"Invoking God to explain everything is a cheap trick"
Good thing nobody here is doing that.
"Old and slow,
'Invoking God to explain everything is a cheap trick'
"Good thing nobody here is doing that."
Well, invoking God to explain anything is a cheap trick.
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