From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Fri Sep 17 1999 - 11:56:17 MDT
>> Here are some more extropic sites of interest:
>> http://www.panix.com/~jk/antifeminism.html
>> [Further excerpts of pretty hideous stuff]
Yep, that stuff is pretty stupid and entropic. The label
"Neandthal" bothers me a bit though: Neanderthal man was
Homo Sapiens, so we /are/ Neanderthals. Some of us have
learned that those innate capacities and predispositions
that served us well during our evolution don't work as well
in modern society, and have rightly abandoned them. But
one shouldn't be surprized to hear them popping up now and
then from the mouths of those less capable of overcoming
them. To fight these ideas, though, it is important to
first understand them and why they worked so well for so
long, so that you can demonstrate the conditions that are
different now and why we have to adapt.
Societal norms change with technology. The technologies of
agriculture, education, birth control, personal defense,
and many others have completely changed the economics of
interaction among men and women. Screeds like the one
quoted fail to recognize this when they resort to historical
arguments to justify their sexism. The screeds of some
feminists fail to acknowledge the history and its impact on
our minds, and while they may have noble motives, this
irrationality leaves them open for attack (I'll leave alone
for the moment those rare cases of explicit questionable
motives like Dworkin and McKinnon).
Let's not forget the target: the goal is to be rational,
not egalitarian. In most cases, egalitarianism is rational,
but sometimes it's not.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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