Zaryi wrote:
It'd be a great idea to allow women to sign up for selective service, let's just fix those pay discrepancies and the 'mommy tax' while we're equal.
There is no "mommy tax". There is only the reality of human biology. Life is a stream of mutually exclusive choices.
Zaryi wrote:
The patriarchal society is slowly dying out - something western civilization has never experienced, but changing norms are generally ever a bad thing, especially when social rights/equality are concerned.
False. This sort of thing was seen during the decline of the Roman Republic: very high divorce rates, exaggerated influence and pampering of women, etc.
And yes change for the worse has happened, besides in Rome. Lao Tzu wrote about "when true values are forgotten, false substitutes take their place". The Dark Ages, or more recently errors of human wisdom in the form of "scientific" bigotry and psychiatric pseudoscience, or the mindless worship of technology - there have been many digressions in the wrong direction through history.
Zaryi wrote:
It's a shame feminism as a denomyn has become so widely associated with the absurd minority (inb4 'ironic from zaryi). We're not all manhating, unshaven hippies, lol. Not even close. The vast majority of feminist merely believe that gender-identity/biological sex should have absolutely no baring on the rights afforded to us by employers or the state (or even other people). It's a pretty humanist philosophy.
Which most men would agree with....and most women would disagree with.
Feminism is as feminism does, and what feminism does is institutional inequality grossly and hypocritically balanced in women's favor.
You make reference to the "mommy tax". The only way to correct that "tax" is institutional inequality. And reality being what it is, perhaps equitable inequality is a necessary evil. Were women really worse off when their place was the home?
Zaryi wrote:
Secular humanism ftw.
The Jedi code is also a good substitute.
You know, my grandparents were members of a Jewish Socialist group called the Workmen's Circle. We still have memorabilia from the group laying around. The group gradually faded in relevance, but the underlying values of compassion and paying forward still influence my now-affluent family. What really killed the group, though, said my grandmother, was, "It needed more than secular humanism. It needed God."
I don't believe that we need a bearded man in the sky, or a myth thereof, to tell us what to do or give life meaning. But I agree with Nietzche that some human god is necessary for life to have structure and purpose. Hence my belief that we need ancestor worship and some real evolution of monotheism into something more abstract and sophisticated. This is, of course, a very typically Jewish belief; Jews have spent the last three thousand years making their vision of God ever more abstract while sharing that vision with the world.
God is a creation of mankind, and I think that man must mature to master his creations, be they cultural or technological, not the other way around. To build them in his own image, not the other way around.
I reject the Jedi code, from a philosophical point of view, because like most men I firmly believe in an agonist vision for life. I believe that conflict is both inevitable and desirable, and reject the concept of tranquility and conceptual pacifism. I believe that conflict, anger and even hatred are useful emotions, and that the focus of human philosophy and institutions should not be to diminish those things but to put them in the proper context.
As the Christians say, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." Make no mistake, the expression is rightly literal, not metaphorical.
