From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 19:45:16 MDT
Ah, good. Now we are back to the "it's ok to force
other people to pay for my babies," and the personal
attacks, which is where some of the women on this list
invariably take these discussions to avoid facing
unpleasant truthes.
Thank you Amara, for your little snit. Note that I
never said that there were not women who were
individually much better than the average man. My
position is strictly that on average, women are less
valuable, and I further restricted that to present day
America. (It would be highly unlikely - and, in fact,
probably literally impossible - for the average
quality of any two different groups to be the same.)
In this country, (the U.S.A.) we have had about 80
years of women's rule (they constitute 60% of voters).
The majority of women have voted in candidates who
have promoted all the most vicious policies (usually
labeled "progressive," especially all the various
forms of socialism and institutionalized sexism that
we see today. What? You can't think of any????
Ever heard of Selective Slavery - sometimes called
Selective Service - which in many ways is worse than
what the black slaves of anti-bellum days endured.
(Slaves were generally not asked to put themselves in
the line of fire.)
Or, what about all the laws that virtually guarantee
that in a domestic dispute, it is the man who will be
sent to jail - even though the largest study to date,
involving some 20,000 couples, showed that the
majority of physical assaults in domestic violence
cases are instigated by women. When the researchers
examined the societal means provided to support
victims of domestic violence, they found that of the
tens of thousands of shelters, only 7 in the entire
U.S. would even accept men.
Those poor underprivileged women, who own 70% of the
real property, live 13% longer than those evil
exploiting men, and only make up a tiny fraction of
the incarcerated in this free country (which has the
highest rate of incarceration of any nation on the
planet) - due, no doubt, to the poor character once
again of those wicked men, not to the makeup of
juries, or any prejudice against punishing women.
Let's examine something that Samantha said in a prior
posting,
Me: > To replace a lost infant, the cost, then, is on
the
> order of $10,000 to $15,000. On the other hand, to
Samantha: >You have utterly ignored the emotional
costs....
...This is a head trip that has nothing in the least
to do with the question at hand. Human lives are not a
manner of balance sheets. Neither are which lives of
which biological humans are indeed human lives.
Doesn't the question seem silly on the face of it?
You are talking about killing infants and any others
you judge to not meet your standard of human, as being
perfectly acceptable. I continue to see this as
monstrous.... >>
REALLY? I take it that you are a Janist then? I
definitely judge cows not to be human. Similarly for
dogs, cats, crows, and, in fact, the whole rest of the
animal spectrum, with the possible exception -
depending upon circumstances and better evidence - of
certain cetaceans and apes. Just about any grown
mammal or bird is more intelligent than a newborn
infant, but I have no qualms about killing and eating
them if it is otherwise in my interest. (Oh, God! Now
he's talking about EATING infants!!)
But, sarcasm aside (for the moment), the interesting
thing among all the torturous trails of hostility in
your posting was the section above. In fact, I would
guess that here is the very heart - so to speak - of
the matter. Are emotions an absolute that exist
independent of our rational knowledge? Are they a
immutable force, a genetically coded unknowable God
before which reason must bow?
How is it that after we sum up the actual measureable
losses of the loss of an infant - or a car - that then
we also have to factor in this unknowable,
unchallengeable factor of "emotional loss?" I had
this idea - from Rand, Branden, the rational emotive
people (and myself) - that emotions flowed from the
perceptions of VALUE, and that VALUE came from
EVALUATION, which can and should be a matter of
rational choice. What we think and choose to act in
pursuit or avoidance of structures our values -
explicit or implicit - which in turn determine our
emotions in a particular value context.
If we were talking about a human life, in the context
of what is ethical, then certainly we would not
normally bring up the issue of a person's relative
worth to society in $ - at least I would not.
However, it is most certainly begging that question to
apply that stricture to the discussion at hand, in
which you as much as admitted to what I had already
stipulated - that the point of birth is simply a
convenient legal point.
In my next posting, I hope to have the time to
demonstrate how this leap into irrationality is itself
a direct offshoot of the memetic heritage that
continues to enslave so many women and reduce their
value to themselves and to others in society.
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