Muloghonto Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 (edited) 6 hours ago, Tibarn said: 40 years is hardly a representative sample size of the human species, and in no way a descriptive one. On the point of the nuclear family, humans have had roughly 200,000 yrs of development. During the vast majority of this time bonds like family and marriage have been bedrocks of civilization. In biology, (and in psychology/ecology), we make the assumption that when a trait or trend is observed throughout a species, that means that that trait is of evolutionary significance. The trait of human society having and being based around marriage and family is therefore a biological and psychological fact. My sample size of over 6 billion current and multiple billion now dead members of the human species far outweigh your minuscule "evidence" of a declining West that you seem to hold as the standard bearer for all thing right in the world. Your idea stems from Marxist social theory and moral relativism deriving from some post-Enlightenment ideas, not science. You are completely mistaken actually. We have plenty of evidence that 'nuclear family' is a relatively recent creation amongst species homo sapiens and the fundamental form of sexual propagation of homo sapiens is various forms of polyandry (or di-andry). We have clay seals from Sumeria, where king Urukagina of Lagash outlaws the 'widespread prevalence of polyandry' amongst the citizens of Lagash, 4400 years ago. Many of the hyper-backwards places in India, such as tribals in Andaman, tribes in Lahul-Spiti, polyandry has been a dominant form of marriage (practice is declining in Lahul-Spiti in the last 50 years). As recently as 100 years ago, the predominant form of marriage in Bhutan is polyandry. The Nivkh still practice polyandry. Amongst the inuit, the bulk majority of amazon tribes, etc. we see polyandry as the defaut form of propagation. So you see, your historical assumption is wrong. Nuclear monogamous family is not the bedrock of civilization, nor is it a bedrock of our biology. Polyandry is. Infact, we see a clear & categoric rise in monogamy (correlating decline in polygamy) with the densification of static, intensive farming (rather than slash & burn shifting farming). This is because, static farming is fundamentally dependent on propagation of property. You are no longer wandering around and doing slash & burn, you are passing your lot to the next generation. And this is where inheritance comes into existence. My ideas don't stem from marxism, but it does incorporate the scientifically consistent idea of moral relativism, instead of absolute moralism. Quote You have low standards for the term fact. The West rose in the 1800s when they still had nuclear families. The lone superpower of the last 60 years, the US had strong family traditions even in the 80s. Their rival, the USSR was proud of its high divorce rates, yet it collapsed. You seem to be doing a common fallacy of wrong association; your post repeats that the West is some standard bearer for all human progress and achievement, but then you pick and choose what you want to associate the success with, in terms of causality. The success of the West by your statement could also be associated with their Christian background, their European origin, or even other things like cold weather in Europe, their diet composition, or surplus caloric intake. If I drew a correlation between the rise of the West and their Christian heritage, you would rightly think I was daft. Name a reason why your correlation leads to causation of Western progress. The West's progress is correctly attributed to economic freedom, that which actually impacts the standard of living of common Western citizens. There is a basic chart that we use to teach undergraduate science students, it is a correlation between the decline of pirates and the rise of global warming/climate change. If someone uncritically comes to the conclusion that the pirate decline is the cause of climate change, that is indeed bizarre. You are doing the same thing here. I assure you, you won't find people more OCD than control systems engineers. Neither do i have a low tolerance towards those facts. What i will point out is this: The west didnt rise in 1800s, the west was already the foremost civilization in the world (technologically and by income) as early as 1600s AD. Neither is the US representative of the west, since 'western civilization', for the bulk majority of its existence is of Europe than North America. We are to western civilization what 'Suvarnabhumi' (i.e., South-East Asia) is to India: a colony. Further, the progress i speak of, is not in terms of GDP or military power, it is in terms of social progress. Parameters like GINI coefficient, HDI, education levels, etc. are the benchmark. On that score, the effects of colonialism, economic freedoms, etc. are irrelevant: Finland, Sweden, Germany, Canada, etc. have far less levels of economic freedom than the US and we are doing far better than the US in practically every measurable parameters, except for GDP per capita and number of millioniares/billionaires in our societies. These countries i named, have gone from extremely low GINI, HDI, etc. from 1940s to leading the world in those regards today and these are the nations with less than half the people following a religion. Quote Social justice, social cohesion & social acceptance are mostly political terms and there is certainly no evidence that divorce leads to any of the three you mentioned. I will present separate paragraphs for each of the three phrases in bold. These are not just political terms, they are also economic. Social justice, social cohesion, social acceptance is represented by GINI, HDI indexes, social acceptance by the level of non-materialistic crimes (i.e., crimes caused by people's behaviour, such as adultry, insult, etc. and not because someone wants to steal something/break something). Yes, they are hard terms to quantify in a level of numerical accuracy I'd love. That much, i'd grant. But the data definitively shows enough variance to suggest that there is no fundamental link between: a) divorce & happiness b) divorce & child empathy, criminality, potential for suicide, etc. Quote Please prove that contracts were the reason for marriage. This is again a derivative of Marxist social theory that you are passing off as proof. The proof is very simple. In societies such as the Hmong, Inuit, tribals of Andamans, tribals of Bhutan, tribals of the Amazon, the dominant form of procreation is polyandry. These societies also lack a landed culture (i.e., ownership of land & inheritance of land down the generations). King Urukagina's seals are decisive evidence that Lagash, a less developed, newer and more sparsely populated city than Ur or Eridu, decreed a transition from polyandry towards monogamy, precisely due to inheritance issues. Similar evidence is found from Marri, Sippar & Eshnunna. The transition happening around 4500 years ago is also interesting, since the latter Sumerian/Akkadian empire period (2300s-1900s BC) is the period of exponential growth in landed farming & inheritance becoming the major legal focus of day-to-day dealings with the king's court. ( TBC...) Edited October 26, 2016 by Muloghonto
Crookbond Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 11 hours ago, zen said: In thst case, even whether to work or not or star a new business is a personal choice. Btw, my point is not related to starting a family but once there is a family, it should have the means at its disposal to be able to support it esp in the absense of social welfare programs including free basic medical care, primary education, etc. Provisions such as HUF help families to save on taxes so the additional income could be put to uses such as supporting the family in various ways Do we need this in India?
zen Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 23 minutes ago, Crookbond said: Do we need this in India? Yes
Muloghonto Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 (edited) 7 hours ago, Tibarn said: Firstly, this is again, you coming to a conclusion first and then inventing evidence afterwards. Secondly, I doubt you are a scientist; I am on the other hand. Science doesn't conform to whatever random belief that you have, don't use it as a buzzword to lend credence to your argument. Science is a process not a political belief. I am not going to obfuscate with the 'chicken or the egg' syndrome. You can assume that i am coming to a conclusion first and then inventing (data-mining) evidence afterwards. Except,i am not. True, i have presented a claim first, not the evidence for the claim, but this is not a peer review scientific forum, this is a chit-chat forum. The default mode is to make a claim first, as the bulk majority of discussions are based that way. In such a mode, if one wants justification (evidence), they will be suitably provided (or should be, in good faith). I have done so in some previous threads you may have been a witness to (for e.g., the thread about God). I assure you, it is not in my nature to draw conclusions first. It is my nature to try find conclusions for a pattern, behaviour, etc. that i can quantify in some sort of multi-dimensional array of variables. THAT is where i come from and human dynamics is an interesting topic, because it can be modelled in such an array very well, yet also fail spectacularly (several such evidence exists where populism has been wrong in the past, for e.g.) due to lack of knowledge of the total universal set of data. It is true, science is a process. Not a political belief. But it is also true, that political belief can stem FROM science, using scientific theory & principle of data driven analysis as its fundamental litmus. Quote Please prove that contracts were the reason for marriage. This is again a derivative of Marxist social theory that you are passing off as proof. I am afraid, a 'hard proof' over the genesis of human sexual norms is impossible to provide now, one way or another. However, history definitively shows us a greater prevalence of polyandry & non-monogamous relationships to be present in a non-static society. Based on the fact that all evidence of farming points to a 'not greater than 20,000 years prior' date to it, even for the loosest of definitions of 'faming' applied towards flora and fauna (which would be, corralling wild animals in giant pens seasonally & slaughtering them over time/collecting a bunch of wild wheat/rice etc & never planting the seeds, etc), it'd mean that what is 'physiologically/evolutionary norm for us' lies with the practices of hunter gatherers & non-sedentary people. Note: This does not imply that we haven't subsequently evolved to have different paradigms of sedentary society applied towards us, either. If is interesting, that of all the ultra-old farming societies, its the societies of middle east (Iraq & southern Turkey/N.Syria to be more precise & parts of Israel/Palestine) that were the first, by far, to leave us numerous historical evidences of their writing. Because they wrote a lot on a particular consistency of clay tablets, with cuneiform (line etchings). Do you know, for e.g., that we have more writing from Sumeria, circa 2500 BC Iraq, than we do for the Gupta period India, that is 200s-500s AD ? or that the Sumerians have far, far more writing remaining than warring states period China, which is 500s-250s BC ? What we do see in their writings, is a very early strata of persecution of polyandry in its fringes, indicating that it was more common in days where humans went through a mobile-to-static transtion on a mass scale, as what happened in the early days of Sumeria. Soft evidence does exist historically that 'traditional marriage', i.e., monogamy, became a LOT more popular when humanity became a static entity (tied to land) than a much more mobile entity. Of that, historically,i will defend that opinion, as we see a trend throughout history of ascension of monogamy hand-in-hand with ascension of agriculture, even through medieval times. Quote Did you know that women incorporate DNA of sexual partners into their own? Probably not. Did you know that women have different sexual functions, different hormones, and different tendencies to both behavior and pathologies to men? Obviously. I am not ignorant on basic physiology. Yep, women incorporate DNA of sexual partners. So do men actually, especially if you are into 'eating her out'. Duh. Quote You don realize that Abrahamic faiths also consider eternal damnation a punishment for lying with another man's wife, right? You do realize that nobody wants their daughter to associate with a guy that gets around in Abrahamic societies? Nobody, but the West you are idolizing, puts great emphasis and respect on hedonism of males, let alone females. Actually, not true, since as i said, we have evidence from human pre-history to suggest that 'hedonism' was the default mode for most of the existence of species homo sapiens. And obviously : you can't expect to totally control women's sexuality and not give something up from the man's pile either. Women are not stupid. You are going to have a tough time selling a religion where it explicitly says that its okay for men to go see prostitutes but women better have sex with only 1 man ever, aka, husband. But de-facto, its been the case for most of religion's existence as well, ironically. Quote Coming to Ramayana. There is debate whether the agni-pariksha was in Valmiki's Ramayana, but I haven't read it, so I do not wish to make a claim regarding that. Coming to the question. You are betraying your own lack of knowledge on the Ramayana. Ravana was a notorious rapist, there is infinitely greater chance of a rapist raping even a woman who is a paragon of virtue than a man, who is also a paragon of virtue, ever lying with another woman. Even if what I said wasn't true, the pariksha is still morally justified, as the honor of the country is more important than any personal relationship. If the citizens had doubts, the prerogative of the King is to relieve their apprehensions. Ram and Sita's personal love do not come before a Raja's duty to his Desh. That is a key part of Kshatriya Dharma. Ram was of course Karmic-ly punished by being killed by his own sons later in life of course, for not fulfilling his Dharma as a father and husband. You are missing the point. Its not like Rama woke up one day, went over to Sita and said 'hey whats up?' and suddenly picked her up, ran outside, chucked her on to a bonfire, Sita went 'WTF you doing !?' and Rama going 'SEE PEOPLE ! she didn't burn !! she is pavitra !!'. The point is, Sita's word was not enough. NEVER did she imply that she slept with Ravana or anyone else, she was mighty offended and STILL had to do it. Ie, woman's word is not enough. Meanwhile, Rama's is not required!! Whether Ravana is a rapist and how likely Sita was raped is an irrelevant question given that Sita wasn't killed in captivity, she returned and she said nothing happened. The entire reason Rama is punished, can be argued that because he was a double-standards ar$e who chose to subject his wife to humiliation about her chastity but did not take the same bloody test himself. The point is, it is a decisive double-standard in hindu culture about the value of word regarding sexuality of man vs woman. And this exists for a reason. Quote Morals are hard-wired into people which is implied by the conserved nature of morals across humanity. You are once again engaging in moral relativism. You are likely inspired by 300 year old gibberish from the "Enlightenment" where nonsense like tabula rosa and such were propagated as "rationality." Heh. 100% wrong. As a parent, let me tell you, children are blank slates. Sure, if you mean morals as in treatment of others, such as killing others/animals/hurting them, being nice when happy, crabby when in pain, etc. yea, those are hard-wired since birth for overwhelming majority of people. But when it comes to sexuality, it is 100% blank slate. I know this, because I live this. I live in what is quite easily THE most liberal city in N.America (Vancouver. Do some research. We are to N.American liberal culture what Mumbai is to Indian Cinema, Kolkata is to Indian book stores, etc). Most people i know personally, are in to alternative lifestyles. And the ones who have children, it follows a very distinct pattern: the religious ones teach their kids its wrong to have sex without love and its wrong to have sex with multiple people at the same time, their kids think the same. The non-religious ones teach their kids 'find your own sexuality. Be safe, but enjoy it,make sure the partner enjoys it too and its consensual'. Thats it, beyond that, many of my non-religious friends don't teach any more 'morals'. And many of their kids have identical morals. I've been living here a while, i've seen atleast 2 generations mature under these paradigms and currently undergoing gen 3 ( my children) in this. So if you wish to tell me species homo sapiens has a hardwired 'morality' pertaining to sexuality, i'd say you are decisively wrong as far as clinical evidence goes. Once you become a parent or actually talk to/live amongst parents who've been taught liberal values by theirs and teach their kids the same in turn, you may have a better understanding that your assessment on morals being hardwired is decisively, scientifically and empirically, false. As per engaging in moral relativism: of course i am, since the only quantifiable, empiric evidence i have, both via clinical studies and history of human sexuality, is that it is a relativistic scale. Edited October 26, 2016 by Muloghonto
mishra Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 On 25 October 2016 at 11:41 PM, Crookbond said: Starting a family is a personal choice - the government has no business to provide incentives for a personal choice. Yes, all single parent kid grow up to be Barack hussain Obama. And child care , child poverty, child upbringing is not governments responsibilty
Muloghonto Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 (edited) 9 hours ago, Tibarn said: Sons can be traced via Y chromosome, which is unique to males. There are also other minor factors that are able to help people recognize paternal origins. Nevertheless, even if chastity was only to maintain inheritance, that is a key part of society. Families have always been the bedrocks of successful societies and hedonism has been a sign of societal collapse. Please read about Roman society before Rome's decline and read about Sparta's society before it's decline. I also mentioned the Soviet Union as well, so that is a third society that was destroyed via the social behavior you are advocating. Please do read up on them. It was a key part of society. Human history proves, that our entire moral-economical-inheritence parameters are dictated by technology & material availability. It is also of no coincidence that cultures such as ancient Rome ancient northern Europe, ancient Greece, ancient India (with ancient China being the only anomaly of this subset) were far more liberal in their sexuality, while cultures arising in Iranian plateau, mesopotamia & Egypt were far more anti-women's sexuality. Its because in the former group of countries, the social breakdown from 'woman banished from home because of kids before marriage' is not immediate, in the latter it is immediate. Reason being even though both are farming societies, the former group has some wiggle room due to geography (we have stories of woman & her kids growing up in the forest in all these cultures) that the latter group does not (we have ZERO stories from Sumeria or Egypt or Babylon of woman surviving in the desert chucked out of society with her kids). In any case, i agree, this WAS a key part of society. One needs to find out about lineages successfully if one wishes to pass property socially. Prior to 30 years ago, there was no way of guaranteeing lineages, except guaranteeing sexual access to women. As with technology changing paradigms, this one is in the nascent stage, but it too shall change, as the fundamental reason to curtail women's sexuality & thus, preserve the nuclear family, has ceased to exist. As per your assessment on Roman or Spartan society, all i got to say is, you are 100% wrong historically. Rome & India was the definition of sexually liberated society by ancient social standards (and even then,nowhere as sexually liberated as modern west-USA is). But saying that Rome collapsed due to its hedonism is as ignorant as saying 'India got conquered by muslims because half-naked hindu couldn't fight well against real warrior on horse & chainmail'. Like i hope you realize that Pompei was abandoned in AD 79 due to Volcanic eruption and Roman Empire, in the eastern half, didnt even begin to collapse till Emperor Honorious around 400s-420 AD. If you see the ruins of Pompeii, there is absolutely no doubt that sexual liberalism was widespread in core Roman Empire territory by 79 AD. Not to mention, from all indications,historically, Roman liberalism has been a part and parcel of their social structure from atleast the time of Julian conquests of Gaul and massive expansion in the Roman citizenry & senatorial class circa 40s BC. So yeah, hedonism caused collapse after 400 years of establishing itself...when it happens to be one of the all-time champions of ultra-stabile empire ? (Since Hannibal to Atilla, NOBODY foreign ever stood in Italy with an army and lived. That is approx 600 years and greater stability than any empire in pre-modern history, barring the Brits). That doesn't add up. No, Rome collapsed for several factors working in conjunction : a) Crisis of the 3rd century where Roman political class tore itself apart in 3 separate empires,leading to it 'never being the same again' b) saturation of farming & land in the Roman empire, leading to its economic decline: This is a vast subject and i will be happy to point you towards sources, but in short, it is this: Roman expansion model was world's best infantry, motivated by the idea of land being given to them after 15-20 years of service. This fuelled Roman conquest from the time of its city-state (Samnite wars for e.g.) all the way through Roman-Carthaginian, Roman-Gallic, Roman-Greek, etc. wars, culminating with approximately the time of Trajan, when Roman Empire reached its maximal extent. Then it stagnated (there was nothing more to conquer. Persia was too hard, rest of Europe was mostly jungle & patchy farmland and violent barbarians). This lead to an institutional breakdown in Roman economic system : the cycle of 'raise army, conquer land, give land to army to settle & farm, then get more Romans down the road to conquer more' culminated in a success story unparalleled in ancient history, that lasted 400 years but then it ran out of steam. c) concurrent exhaustion of Roman silver mines in Spain, Greece & Italy also lead to a massive decline in Roman import-export wealth, which, ironically, affected us adversely. Rome-India trade represented over 70% of Asia-mediterranean trade and it is of no coincidence that when the Roman Empire dies around 420s and Gupta-Vakataka era receives its fatal shock 50 years later. The amount of trade we lost out on, was of civilization altering impact to us. d) Plague. Self explanatory. The plague of Cypran fundamentally weakened the state and had a noticable impact on Roman life. The fact that it occurred approx 100-150 years before the final fall, conurrent with the crisis of the 3rd century played a huge part in structurally weakening Roman civilization. Now, Sparta is far easier to explain. Spartan glory isn't actually opposing Persia in Thermopylae, it was actually being Persia's chamcha and ruling Greece as Persian proxy as the leader of Peloponnesian league. It was the only Greek city state to not give in to Alexander and gave him the middle finger throughout the entire Alexandrine era, did you know that ? (There is a famous Spartan saying in history, that Alexander, frustrated at Spartan refusal to join him, angrily said to the Spartan representative in his court that if he, Alexander, ever went to Sparta, he will raze it to ground, to which the representative calmly said 'if'). It survived as the Achaean League till it tore itself apart in the whole 'Battle against Nabis and Philopoemen' episode, ending with crushing defeat after crushing defeat against the Romans. The Laconian war in 195 BC cost sparta ALL territory outside its city walls and over 30,000 dead. Then it lost to Rome again in the siege of Corinth & after utter devastation of Corinth & spartan fighting population, sparta became a shell of a city & tourist attraction to the Romans, then faded from history. Where you get 'cultural/sexual practices as leading to downfall', i don't know. Sparta suffered what virtually everyone in the mediterranean, Europe & western portions of middle east did, during the whole 300 BC-200 AD period: You oppose Rome and you die. Edited October 27, 2016 by Muloghonto
Muloghonto Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 10 minutes ago, mishra said: Yes, all single parent kid grow up to be Barack hussain Obama. And child care , child poverty, child upbringing is not governments responsibilty It most definitely is. Or rather, societies that treat it as such, often attain far greater level of social progress than ones that don't. Child care, child poverty, child upbringing are ultimately, the obligation of society. In societies that provide tax funded healthcare, education, daycare, etc. it is a moot point anyways because it is the govt. that is providing 90%+ of the economic cost of children. And ironically, those societies are doing far well than USA or any other hyper-capitalistic societies.
Muloghonto Posted October 26, 2016 Posted October 26, 2016 (edited) 9 hours ago, Tibarn said: You are close to repeating the Marxist statement that marriage is oppression of women, this is based in their false theory known as conflict theory. Marriage is actually oppression of both man & woman, in the traditional definition of a monogamous marriage. Just that women are opressed far more in that equation. Quote Furthermore, you are making the mistake in thinking that the conditions that are prevalent in the West today are the pinnacle of human achievement, that this type of society was not present before, and that "history is over." You are assuming a static state where the current level of morality and behavior in the West is sustainable. In virtually every measurable field, what exists in the western world (of which, i remind you once again, USA is an anomaly, not a default paradigm), is the pinnacle of human achievement tell date. Its obviously not over and the rise and fall of civilization is something someone who has read history as well as many discourses in philosophy on the same topic, is well aware of. You are assuming that morality & behaviour are the only components of rise & fall of a society in a dynamic, multivariate system. That is a false assumption. Quote Demographics: This works on multiple levels. The demographic trends in many Western countries are negative in multiple ways. Certain countries, like Belgium, are undergoing massive ethnic change in terms of percentages. Where will your great, "progressive" society be when it is 25% middle eastern, or 50% middle eastern. Will Belgium have the same laws and values as demography changes? Demographics also affect on the economic level. An old population in Western societies lead to overburdening of social welfare systems and increased debt. The West has a declining native workforce, in terms of ethnic Europeans. If they import workers from the Middle East, what will your beloved West look like in 25, 50 years? I guess history isn't over. Yes, well known human problem: smart people have less kids than stupid people in general, rich people have less children than poor and the demographic wave of humanity and its progress timeline has been two steps forwards and one step backwards. This is largely why i am anti-immigration from middle east & muslim religions, simply because they are too dogmatic to change. I didn't imply that the western system cannot be doomed in the future due to certain choices it makes down the road. However, if the west keeps immigration imports to hindus, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, we have reasons to be optimistic. If we keep throwing the door open to muslim nutters, we are all f*cked. Quote Ecology: The West is the ecological burden on the planet. An average American, for example, has a Carbon cost of around 22 times the cost of an average Indian. Do you think they are willing to become Carbon neutral if it affects their lifestyle? No, they won't. The problem with hedonism, is that it breed people who take no personal responsibility for their actions and always want others to solve their problems with no cost to them. North America is not the paragon of ecological or economical model of the world. Western Europe/Scandinavia is. Countries like Germany, Holland, Sweden, Finland, etc. are the way to go. There is a false strawmanship about sexual liberty & personal responsibility. Because actually the most sexually liberated people i know of, are the hippies who have free sex all over the place and they are also the most militant ecologists. You are yet again conflating hedonism with sexual liberalsm. It is not. It really, is not and it is a classic mistake non-liberal people make. I know i did too, almost 25 years ago. Sexual liberalism is about respect, honesty, consent and choice. Not about 'do whatever you want'. Otherwise, you would not have a pan-western phenomenon of consistently seeing people who are the most militant eco-conservationists also being extremely sexually liberal people. Edited October 26, 2016 by Muloghonto
coffee_rules Posted October 27, 2016 Posted October 27, 2016 One thing I am very curious about. Are you guys typing reams of pages or copying them from somewhere?
Muloghonto Posted October 27, 2016 Posted October 27, 2016 5 minutes ago, coffee_rules said: One thing I am very curious about. Are you guys typing reams of pages or copying them from somewhere? typing. coffee_rules 1
mishra Posted October 27, 2016 Posted October 27, 2016 14 hours ago, Muloghonto said: It most definitely is. Or rather, societies that treat it as such, often attain far greater level of social progress than ones that don't. Child care, child poverty, child upbringing are ultimately, the obligation of society. In societies that provide tax funded healthcare, education, daycare, etc. it is a moot point anyways because it is the govt. that is providing 90%+ of the economic cost of children. And ironically, those societies are doing far well than USA or any other hyper-capitalistic societies. That was sarcastic comment Muloghonto 1
coffee_rules Posted October 27, 2016 Posted October 27, 2016 http://www.hindustantimes.com/jaipur/jaipur-woman-files-rape-charges-against-husband-friend-after-forced-halala/story-FV72pSsyPnTiPtQY4h1X6O.html What a mess! Triple Talaq, and then Halala if they want to get back. Meanwhile third parties are simply involved for temporary fun. Is it as bad as it sounds?
maniac Posted October 27, 2016 Posted October 27, 2016 Usually this is the way it works. Step 1We need to escape the archaic rules of our islamic country,we are getting persecuted- Step 2-Take refuge in the western/secular countries-request for Halal food,no pork/alcohol in places where they have significant population as it interferes with right to religion pointing out the constitution of those countries which states freedom of religion Step 3-Request the majority to make accommodations for them....like excuse to skip important meetings as it is time for Namaz or refusal to wear sponsors associated with alcohol etc etc or ensure halal food is available Step 4-Try to get an official law passed which supports sharia. In India it is a step ahead-These same dirtbags have accepted uniform civil code in US,Eng,Aus and other European countries but they flaunt some constitutional point to get these extra perks. Time to stop catering to these assoles. SLICKR392 and Ironhide 2
Crookbond Posted October 28, 2016 Posted October 28, 2016 On 10/27/2016 at 0:09 AM, zen said: Yes On 10/26/2016 at 0:37 PM, zen said: In thst case, even whether to work or not or star a new business is a personal choice. Btw, my point is not related to starting a family but once there is a family, it should have the means at its disposal to be able to support it esp in the absense of social welfare programs including free basic medical care, primary education, etc. Provisions such as HUF help families to save on taxes so the additional income could be put to uses such as supporting the family in various ways In that case, social welfare programs should be bought in over the longer term and tax benefits could be a short term solution with a clear defined cut off date..
Tibarn Posted October 28, 2016 Posted October 28, 2016 (edited) On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: I am married for over 10 years, have two beautiful girls and my wife is a therapist/counsellor. I must apologize for both responding late, I have a research proposal due, so I will be swamped for at least the next week, and for, I think, implying the wrong tone with my response. I was attempting to use the informal, impersonal you/your, but obviously tone is not conveyed through forum text. I was not trying to say you, as in Muloghonto, are hedonistic, etc. You don't have to explain anything about your family to me. I am happy for you that you have a great family, and may you all live 100 years. Again, my apologies for the miscommunication. I will say my brief history to make this even. I was born and raised in Gujarat. I have been in the US for school for most of the last ~6 years, going back some off-seasons, for both undergrad and graduate. I did my Double Bachelor's in Biology+Ecology. I am a few months from being done with my Masters in Biomedical Science. Afterwards, I am not sure if I will pursue further education immediately, or spend at least an entire year back in India. You can probably guess I am in my mid-20s. That's enough about me. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: It is true, science is a process. Not a political belief. But it is also true, that political belief can stem FROM science, using scientific theory & principle of data driven analysis as its fundamental litmus. For a political belief to be based on science one would have to have proof for it. This is usually not the case when people claim their belief is from "science." On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: 1. You are mistaken. Beastiality is not legal in Canada and cannot be legal till you can communicate with the animal in question to get consent. Having sex with a cow is wrong, not because it is a beast, but because you are raping it (you have no way to gauge consent). This is the official position of the supreme court of Canada. This is from June the current year: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bestiality-legal-canada-supreme-court-a7073196.html Unless it has changed in the last few months. On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: 2. The west doesn't have higher prevalence of rape, we have higher prevalence of reporting a rape. This is because in India there are many, many parents who will disown/kill the girl for getting raped, while in Canada, except for a few Sikh & Muslim nutters, nobody has done that in over 30 years. We shall proceed under your parameters, however, some statistics on America. The divorce rate for first time marriage usually is between 40-50%. The atheist/agnostic percentage is ~8%. The unaffiliated are ~20%. Numbers are from Pew. On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: If you wish to get into 'correlation & causation' discourse, i can fill up entire forums with it, because the fundamental work of a control system specialist is to discern correlation & causation. The above from you, is a fundamental error in mistaking correlation with causation. Greater than 40% of US college students use antidepressants today and less than 5% used it 40 years ago, not because of rising divorce rates in the US but because 90% of anti-depressive medication has come into existence in the last 40 years, people have become far more accepting of seeking treatment for mental disorders today than 40 years ago, etc. tu quoque, you are avoiding the accusation of the correlation and causation fallacy you committed by stating that you can fill an entire forum filled with them. That doesn't answer your failure to address the causality of the correlation you are proposing. There was a partial error on my part here. I posted the same statistic later correctly. What I meant to post was that 40% of American young adults have shown symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). There are only some 20% on Antidepressants. Some 5% of children and 60% of adults also seem to be taking these medications. I am aware when most antidepressants were made. The increase is because it became profitable to make the medicines, while earlier it was a low return endeavor. This doesn't change that diagnosis and treatment of MDD occured even in the 19th century, through herbs like St. John's Wort. The increased prevalence logically leads to increased rate of diagnosis which leads to the increased demand which leads to increased benefit to research/create such medicines. Using your number of 5%, please provide evidence that a simple increase in willingness to get treated has led to an 8-fold increase in prevalence of symptoms of MDD in college age Americans and an around 4-fold increase in having such medications administered. On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: 2. The west doesn't have higher prevalence of rape, we have higher prevalence of reporting a rape. This is because in India there are many, many parents who will disown/kill the girl for getting raped, while in Canada, except for a few Sikh & Muslim nutters, nobody has done that in over 30 years. 3. You have also altered my argument (basic strawmanship): I said there is a causal link between higher acceptance of divorce rate & lower rates of domestic violence. It is not to be construed as a point towards overall violence against women, it is simply about domestic violence. 2) This is something you have to prove. The reported rates of rape: India: 1.8 Sweden: 63.5; Germany: 9.4; Belgium: 27.9. India would have to have over a 5-fold increase just to reach German levels. This is possible, but it has to be proven. Otherwise it can't be taken seriously. Also, India's law and order problem, as you partially implied(I think), is attributed to high Islamist population. They are concentrated in UP/Bihar/Bengal, which are also the lower states in law and order. The West, South, and North for the most part are stable law and order wise. Therefore, one could state that the rate difference would have to come from those three states/eastern region; that may be possible, but it has to be proven. I will state that I do believe the prevalence is higher than 1.8, but, again, that is just the feeling I get. I certainly can't prove a 5-fold increase. 3) Fallacy fallacy, I didn't state or imply that you said that the higher divorce leads to lower overall violence against women. This turns out to be your strawman. I stated, in response to your implying the West is "progressive" That it also has higher rates of rape and murder. I did not state murder of women, let alone rape of women. I purposely used the gender neutral varieties. To your point about divorce rate, again you are avoiding proving what you say. What you see is what you want to see. Provide evidence that the lax divorce laws or high divorce rate is causally linked to lower rates of domestic violence against women. You also should prove what effect the divorce laws have on domestic violence against men, which is prevalent at significant levels, I have data for the US, but you seem to have a bias against the US, so you will probably want me to see the rates in Western Europe. Law and order or economic development are possible/likely more valid indicators of lower violence against women. On 10/26/2016 at 4:57 PM, Muloghonto said: You are completely mistaken actually. We have plenty of evidence that 'nuclear family' is a relatively recent creation amongst species homo sapiens and the fundamental form of sexual propagation of homo sapiens is various forms of polyandry (or di-andry). We have clay seals from Sumeria, where king Urukagina of Lagash outlaws the 'widespread prevalence of polyandry' amongst the citizens of Lagash, 4400 years ago. Many of the hyper-backwards places in India, such as tribals in Andaman, tribes in Lahul-Spiti, polyandry has been a dominant form of marriage (practice is declining in Lahul-Spiti in the last 50 years). As recently as 100 years ago, the predominant form of marriage in Bhutan is polyandry. The Nivkh still practice polyandry. Amongst the inuit, the bulk majority of amazon tribes, etc. we see polyandry as the defaut form of propagation. You are 100% Incorrect. You are using micropopulations to generalize the larger human population. If these micropopulations are your evidence, then you are making a fundamental biological/ecological mistake. Let me take each instance one by one: Sumeria: There was widespread polyandry. There is no indication that it was the preeminent form of marriage. Widespread could be any percentage that is significant in Urukagina's view. Someone who hates homosexuals may view a 5% homosexual population as being widespread and ban it. That doesn't show that homosexuality is anything but a significant minority. India: You are mostly mentioning tribals, who are among the earliest migrants out of Africa and earliest settlers in India. They are minuscule population wise. Their behavior in no way indicates the behavior of other populations. Africa is known as the source of modern human populations, at least according to the dominant theory. Therefore Africa has the largest diversity, the founder effect. The original migrants out of Africa would also likely have been fairly diverse, but that doesn't imply that all of them were polyandrous as they populated the other regions of the globe. It doesn't even prove that within India that tribals followed such a practice uniformly. Americas: The populations that first settled here were subsets of migrants from Eurasia. Thereafter they experienced genetic isolation from the rest of the world and even from each other. Many tribes developed all sorts of unique practices. The Iroquois were a matriarchal confederacy for example. That doesn't prove what you claim. On the other hand, the major empires of the Americas, the Inca, Aztec, and Maya were all patriarchal societies. The trait of them being empires necessarily describes that they had large populations. One could wager that the Inca could have had a larger population than the entirety of the Amazon tribes you mentioned. You are also failing to prove that the Amazon tribes all independently formed. If they all were derived from the same ancestral population, then they are expected to have similar social structures. It would help your argument more if you could prove they were unrelated and still developed this social structure. This is basic convergent evolution theory. Here is some general information. Polyandry, has always been associated with low amounts of fertile land/overall resource scarcity. These polyandrous micropopulations were never able to expand, therefore your claim is almost certainly false. There are no, or at best little, examples of large populations being polyandrous. On the other hand, the world populations fall into 3 general bone structures: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Both Caucasoid(Europe, South Asia, Middle East) and Mongoloid(East Asia, SE Asia, Native Americans) groups have had consistent patriarchal systems with either monogamy or polygamy. The Negroid population is a misnomer, because, as I mentioned before, "Africa" has the most diversity of any region. All human variations can be found in Africa genetically. Therefore, one can expect that one could find all sorts of human social structure in Africa. On the other hand, there is little difference between Caucasoid and Mongoloid populations. This implies that the social structure is conserved in these two groups, who are consistently patriarchal. Now for some actual evidence. The mutation rate, based off the cycles of recombination of human chromosomes in meiosis, was examined over half a decade ago. Based on the comparative rates of meiotic mutation between sex chromosomes of X and Y and the autosomes. Geneticists were able to prove modern human mating structure. This is known as the breeding ratio. The number of women to men breeding in 3 different regions. The values by region were Africa: 2.792 Europe: 2.048 East Asia: 1.168 Thus they concluded, based on DNA evidence, over hundreds of thousands of years, that humans were either Monogamous or Polygamous in all three major regions of the world. If you want, I can send some of the data. To add to this, our closest common ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which, like humans, has shown to have its evolution male-driven. This means that reproductive strategies were patriarchal. Once again, polyandry has no evidence. Having said all of that, I never said that monogamous marriage is sacrosanct. I said that marriage is. I personally don't see anything wrong with polygamy or polyandry. As long as the parties agree. There even occurs polyandry in Haryana today. On 10/26/2016 at 4:26 PM, Muloghonto said: Suffice to say, I too am a scientist and i know why i used this example. It is because scientific progress gives us practical options, some of them often overturns social order due to it. Feudalism died due to science, because there is no point having a warrior class when any damn fool can point a gun and pull a trigger. There is nothing sacrosanct about marriage or it being a bedrock of civilization and i will demonstrate it. Feudalism died because of a change in economic system. It can reappear anywhere based on another change in economic system. Communist/Socialist societies are just as feudalistic as those from decades ago. The single party makes all the decisions, there is a wing of usually hereditary administrators/military/goon class and a large impoverished peasant class. A rose by any other name... On 10/26/2016 at 6:56 PM, Muloghonto said: Rome & India was the definition of sexually liberated society by ancient social standards (and even then,nowhere as sexually liberated as modern west-USA is). But saying that Rome collapsed due to its hedonism is as ignorant as saying 'India got conquered by muslims because half-naked hindu couldn't fight well against real warrior on horse & chainmail'. I'm not claiming a 1:1 causality between Rome's decline and hedonism. Hedonism is only a mindset so it can't directly cause such a thing. However do read Catherine Edwards works on Ancient Rome as well as Edward Gibbon. The gist of it is that hedonism is associated with the decline in birth rates, the decline of community, and the overvaluing of the self. The Roman population declined and the Christian population grew until a Christian emperor got in power and sent Europe into the dark ages. One need only read the marriage laws of Julian to see how dire the situation was in Rome. The Romans would even hire non-Roman mercenaries to help defend the empire. The Spartans and Mongols also experienced declining birth rates before their falls. For a pair of "civilizations" based on warfare, the lack of soldiers is definitely a contribution to decline. When the Spartan war machine began to collapse, a declining birthrate was a trend. They particularly lost their population of Similars which declined from 9000 to under 2000 in ~300 years. The Soviets were always going to collapse because they had a false economic theory, but they also experienced a declining birth rate near their collapse. A declining population attenuates economic growth. Once again, I did not say that this was a single factor, it was a cofactor in decline. On 10/26/2016 at 7:13 PM, Muloghonto said: Marriage is actually oppression of both man & woman, in the traditional definition of a monogamous marriage. Just that women are opressed far more in that equation. Again, this is Marxist social theory, aka pseudoscience, not fact. Human marriage is a biologically conserved behavior across societies, across time. This is because it improves fitness of the individuals and offspring. On 10/26/2016 at 7:13 PM, Muloghonto said: In virtually every measurable field, what exists in the western world (of which, i remind you once again, USA is an anomaly, not a default paradigm), is the pinnacle of human achievement tell date. Its obviously not over and the rise and fall of civilization is something someone who has read history as well as many discourses in philosophy on the same topic, is well aware of. You are assuming that morality & behaviour are the only components of rise & fall of a society in a dynamic, multivariate system. That is a false assumption. You are not the only one who has read history, as you seem to be implying. Of course civilization is a complex system, but you, for whatever reason, associate what you believe is the pinnacle of civilization, as fact, with a noticeable lack of evidence. You also haven't provided a causal link. Prove, by some objective measure, that the subset of countries you are promoting are the pinnacle, and prove that, as you are implying, their social customs have anything to do with it. You yourself are trumpeting "moral values" as some indicator of progress, yet seem to imply that morals can't have a role in decline when I state the same? Your constant trashing of America is funny as America is also the Science and Tech superpower of the world. Most of the modern inventions and tech progress is centered around a handful of countries, with the two largest contributors being the Anglo-Saxon superpowers of the US and the British Empire. You are aggrandizing a small section of countries with very unique circumstances such as high homogeneity, low military expenditure as some model for the rest of the world. Many of these countries live under an American Umbrella where American citizens subsidize, in part, their government's welfare spending by mitigating costs relating to ie defence. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: I am afraid, a 'hard proof' over the genesis of human sexual norms is impossible to provide now, one way or another. However, history definitively shows us a greater prevalence of polyandry & non-monogamous relationships to be present in a non-static society. Based on the fact that all evidence of farming points to a 'not greater than 20,000 years prior' date to it, even for the loosest of definitions of 'faming' applied towards flora and fauna (which would be, corralling wild animals in giant pens seasonally & slaughtering them over time/collecting a bunch of wild wheat/rice etc & never planting the seeds, etc), it'd mean that what is 'physiologically/evolutionary norm for us' lies with the practices of hunter gatherers & non-sedentary people. Note: This does not imply that we haven't subsequently evolved to have different paradigms of sedentary society applied towards us, either. If is interesting, that of all the ultra-old farming societies, its the societies of middle east (Iraq & southern Turkey/N.Syria to be more precise & parts of Israel/Palestine) that were the first, by far, to leave us numerous historical evidences of their writing. Because they wrote a lot on a particular consistency of clay tablets, with cuneiform (line etchings). Do you know, for e.g., that we have more writing from Sumeria, circa 2500 BC Iraq, than we do for the Gupta period India, that is 200s-500s AD ? or that the Sumerians have far, far more writing remaining than warring states period China, which is 500s-250s BC ? What we do see in their writings, is a very early strata of persecution of polyandry in its fringes, indicating that it was more common in days where humans went through a mobile-to-static transtion on a mass scale, as what happened in the early days of Sumeria. Soft evidence does exist historically that 'traditional marriage', i.e., monogamy, became a LOT more popular when humanity became a static entity (tied to land) than a much more mobile entity. Of that, historically,i will defend that opinion, as we see a trend throughout history of ascension of monogamy hand-in-hand with ascension of agriculture, even through medieval times So you agree you are just making an argument without solid proof. You may want to propagate whatever you want to, but, in the absence of anything solid, I'm not particularly interested in flimsy anecdotal evidence. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: Obviously. I am not ignorant on basic physiology. Yep, women incorporate DNA of sexual partners. So do men actually, especially if you are into 'eating her out'. Duh. Please refrain from crass language. Anyway, incorporate means to become part of in this sense. There is growing evidence of microchimerism between a woman and her sexual partner(s). This isn't simple fluid exchange and there is no evidence of female to male microchimerism. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: Actually, not true, since as i said, we have evidence from human pre-history to suggest that 'hedonism' was the default mode for most of the existence of species homo sapiens. And obviously : you can't expect to totally control women's sexuality and not give something up from the man's pile either. Women are not stupid. You are going to have a tough time selling a religion where it explicitly says that its okay for men to go see prostitutes but women better have sex with only 1 man ever, aka, husband. But de-facto, its been the case for most of religion's existence as well, ironically. Please give substantial evidence. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: The point is, Sita's word was not enough. NEVER did she imply that she slept with Ravana or anyone else, she was mighty offended and STILL had to do it. Ie, woman's word is not enough. Meanwhile, Rama's is not required!! Whether Ravana is a rapist and how likely Sita was raped is an irrelevant question given that Sita wasn't killed in captivity, she returned and she said nothing happened. The entire reason Rama is punished, can be argued that because he was a double-standards ar$e who chose to subject his wife to humiliation about her chastity but did not take the same bloody test himself. The point is, it is a decisive double-standard in hindu culture about the value of word regarding sexuality of man vs woman. And this exists for a reason. We do not know if Sita's word is enough for Ram or not. The point of the test is for the country. The honor of a country is more important than whatever personal feelings or trust(or maybe lack there of) Ram has. A king's first duty is to his people. Again, one can easily say that he failed in his dharma as a husband/father, but, once again, he was punished for that. One can easily argue that he was going to be punished either way, as if he didn't consent to the examination, he wouldn't be fulfilling Raj Dharma. The point is that he set the example that one should be willing to put country above all else, even if this leads to their own personal downfall/displeasure. On 10/26/2016 at 7:13 PM, Muloghonto said: Yes, well known human problem: smart people have less kids than stupid people in general, rich people have less children than poor and the demographic wave of humanity and its progress timeline has been two steps forwards and one step backwards. This is largely why i am anti-immigration from middle east & muslim religions, simply because they are too dogmatic to change. I didn't imply that the western system cannot be doomed in the future due to certain choices it makes down the road. However, if the west keeps immigration imports to hindus, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, we have reasons to be optimistic. If we keep throwing the door open to muslim nutters, we are all f*cked. Muslims are only the extreme of the example. There is enough evidence that any diversity, even from Model-minorities can be problematic for social harmony. On 10/26/2016 at 7:13 PM, Muloghonto said: North America is not the paragon of ecological or economical model of the world. Western Europe/Scandinavia is. Countries like Germany, Holland, Sweden, Finland, etc. are the way to go. The US is one of the handful best economies in the world, superior to any you mentioned system-wise. The EU is one of the top polluters in the world. Countries like Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium are among the highest per capita emitters.The EU member countries also all are among the top consumers of meat, with consumption increasing uniformly across Europe. Meat production is a top source of carbon emissions. The Europeans simply have garbage land and buy all their food from Americans, so their carbon footprint is artificially low, although still high. They are not an ecological model for anyone. On 10/26/2016 at 7:13 PM, Muloghonto said: There is a false strawmanship about sexual liberty & personal responsibility. Because actually the most sexually liberated people i know of, are the hippies who have free sex all over the place and they are also the most militant ecologists. You are yet again conflating hedonism with sexual liberalsm. It is not. It really, is not and it is a classic mistake non-liberal people make. I know i did too, almost 25 years ago. Sexual liberalism is about respect, honesty, consent and choice. Not about 'do whatever you want'. Otherwise, you would not have a pan-western phenomenon of consistently seeing people who are the most militant eco-conservationists also being extremely sexually liberal people. Fallacy fallacy once again. You are actually strawmanning my argument. Personal responsibility is not the same thing as community responsibility. Throwing your trash in a bin is not the same as picking up litter and disposing of it. This is simple. Hedonism is characterized by individuals pursuing their own pleasure, with little sense of responsibility. What about a hedonistic person makes you even begin to think they would be willing to sacrifice anything. You yourself stated that you have 1 life and you should be able to do anything you want with it. What about that statement lends credence to the idea that one would feel responsible for anything other than having fun. You are conflating what you call sexual liberalism with conservationists. Please provide evidence. Anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. Eco-activists achieve nothing. They have hurt the battle against climate change more than helped. Militant conservationists do not represent ecology or scientists, the actual people involved in fighting climate change. Their hijacking a cause to give themselves an inflated sense of importance is not helpful. On 10/26/2016 at 6:12 PM, Muloghonto said: Heh. 100% wrong. As a parent, let me tell you, children are blank slates. Sure, if you mean morals as in treatment of others, such as killing others/animals/hurting them, being nice when happy, crabby when in pain, etc. yea, those are hard-wired since birth for overwhelming majority of people. But when it comes to sexuality, it is 100% blank slate. I know this, because I live this. I live in what is quite easily THE most liberal city in N.America (Vancouver. Do some research. We are to N.American liberal culture what Mumbai is to Indian Cinema, Kolkata is to Indian book stores, etc). Most people i know personally, are in to alternative lifestyles. And the ones who have children, it follows a very distinct pattern: the religious ones teach their kids its wrong to have sex without love and its wrong to have sex with multiple people at the same time, their kids think the same. The non-religious ones teach their kids 'find your own sexuality. Be safe, but enjoy it,make sure the partner enjoys it too and its consensual'. Thats it, beyond that, many of my non-religious friends don't teach any more 'morals'. And many of their kids have identical morals. I've been living here a while, i've seen atleast 2 generations mature under these paradigms and currently undergoing gen 3 ( my children) in this. So if you wish to tell me species homo sapiens has a hardwired 'morality' pertaining to sexuality, i'd say you are decisively wrong as far as clinical evidence goes. Once you become a parent or actually talk to/live amongst parents who've been taught liberal values by theirs and teach their kids the same in turn, you may have a better understanding that your assessment on morals being hardwired is decisively, scientifically and empirically, false. As per engaging in moral relativism: of course i am, since the only quantifiable, empiric evidence i have, both via clinical studies and history of human sexuality, is that it is a relativistic scale. I continue to repeat myself, but please provide actual evidence. I am not interested in anecdotal evidence from your life, my life, or anyone's life. Blank slate is scientifically false. If you believe in such a thing, I am sorry, but it's better we stop the conversation here, or I will shatter your worldview. Genetics have shown an astounding amount of traits are deterministic and out of any control of people or the environment. Even on the non-scientific level, hardwired morals are evidenced by their conservation across cultures, across continents. You must provide something more than your personal stories. Now, after all of that, I will provide evidence against your original claim that divorce doesn't affect children. I will also so you that the atheism in the countries you named is not significant in their happiness. You listed Scandinavian countries and W Europe such as Germany and Belgium, I can provide tables/charts on request: Sweden Gauffin et al. Quote Parental divorce has a similar effect at causing Alcohol related illness and death in children as parental death and growing up in a low income home. Canada(North America) Bolgar et al. Quote Young adult children of divorce reported more problems with submission/control. Children of divorce experienced problems with intimacy. Finland Palosaari et al. Quote 24% of boys who experienced divorce at ages 7-12, 9% between 13 to 16, and 6% in young adulthood were depressive. Girls the impact was standard regardless of age. France Roustit et al Quote Children of divorce, as adults, report worse perceived General Health and Mental Health than children of interparental violence. A child of divorce is more likely to report a very poor/poor/ fair self health assessment in terms of general, physical and mental health than a good self assessment. Belgium Donath et al Quote Parent separation/divorce has a significant relationship with adolescent suicide attempts Sweden Laftman et al Quote Adolescents in non-traditional family types report worse subjective health than adolescents in intact families Norway Paananen et al Quote Despite a 6.8% increase in divorce rate between 1997 and 2009, indicating a greater social acceptance, no signs of attenuated effects on mental health were observed. Sweden Lindstrom et al Quote Parental separation/divorce in childhood was with few exceptions significantly associated with ever having had suicide thoughts with the highest odds ratios for those who had experienced parental separation during ages 0–4 years. Parental separation/divorce in childhood was significantly associated with suicide attempts among men who had experienced parental separation/ divorce at ages 0–4 and 15–18, and among women at any age 0–18. Sweden Bergström et al Quote Living in a nuclear family was positively associated with almost all aspects of wellbeing in comparison to children with separated parents. Children in joint physical custody experienced more positive outcomes, in terms of subjective wellbeing, family life and peer relations, than children living mostly or only with one parent. Denmark Nielsen et al Quote Childhood exposure to SFLE, especially parental divorce seems to increase the risk of infectious disease hospitalization. Sweden Rosen et al Quote even when a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances are included in multivariate models, children of single parents still have increased risks of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury. Norway Størksen et al Quote Parental divorce was prospectively associated with a relative change in anxiety and depression, subjective well-being, self-esteem, and school problems. Considering boys separately, parental divorce was prospectively associated only with school problems. Amongthe girls, divorce was prospectively associated with all variables. The effect of divorce on relative change was partially mediated by paternal absence. Finland Korkeila et al Quote Major events such as divorce can negativelly effect optimisim at adult age even if education, living alone, recent life events, somatic health and depressive mood were taken into account. That's all I will post for now. I will say that America produces far more research, so it is easier to prove with American data. Now the final part. You claimed that Atheism of society was the cause of happiness in your subset of countries. I ran a simple regression analysis and a 99% significance test. Comparing two sets of variables: Percent Atheist vs National Happiness and GDP/Per Capita(PPP) vs happiness. There were 20 countries, the countries of Western Europe, in the analysis. The Happiness values were from the 2016 World Happiness Report The GPD/Capita (PPP) was from the IMF The % Atheist by European country was via Pew Research. 99% CI Atheism vs Happiness r= .4666 p=.0380 Significant = no GDP/Capita(PPP) vs Happiness r= .5902 p= .00615 Significant = yes Therefore there was not a statistically significant relationship between the Atheism and Happiness in West/N Europe. There was however, a statistically significant relationship between GDP/capita (PPP) and Happiness. The countries analyzed were: France Sweden Netherlands Norway Germany Belgium United Kingdom Luxembourg Denmark Finland Hungary Spain Iceland Portugal Austria Switzerland Ireland Croatia Italy Greece Henceforth I will only respond to posts with data. Cheers. Edited October 29, 2016 by Tibarn zen 1
Muloghonto Posted October 31, 2016 Posted October 31, 2016 (edited) On 10/28/2016 at 0:40 PM, Tibarn said: This is from June the current year: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bestiality-legal-canada-supreme-court-a7073196.html Unless it has changed in the last few months. If you read carefully, it is not a 'moral' decision or reflective of morality, since legalism is not necessarily a reflection of moral 'right/wrong' paradigms only, it also incorporates facets of legalism, where the law is law unto itself, must be respected as a concept. The judgement clearly mentions that since beastiality in Canadian law is specifically tied in with buggery, it applies specifically to penetration only. It didnt say 'beastality is okay in certain forms', it simply came to the conclusion that as our law is framed, its a case of 'technically, its beastiality if and only if there is penetration'. I am not sure exactly what you can conclude from this, except for the fact that turns out Canada's beastiality law is 'incomplete' from a 2016 view. Which is a continuous and normal facet of a representative democracy over a long period of time. Quote I am aware when most antidepressants were made. The increase is because it became profitable to make the medicines, while earlier it was a low return endeavor. This doesn't change that diagnosis and treatment of MDD occured even in the 19th century, through herbs like St. John's Wort. The increased prevalence logically leads to increased rate of diagnosis which leads to the increased demand which leads to increased benefit to research/create such medicines. I am sorry, but i find your conclusions unscientific. Increase in diagnosis rate, does not imply increase in prevalence, especially about non-pathological diseases. There is a very real component of acceptance, which is a component of 'acceptance of disease by individual and society', effectively demonstrated by the clinical British denial of shell-shock due to WWI as a psychological condition. http://www.simonwessely.com/Downloads/Publications/Military/historical/Jones 2007 - shell shock mtbi.pdf As such, a clinical assessment that 'increasing prevalence of psychological disorders have been noted in species homo sapiens for the last 150 years' requires a demonstration that acceptance rates (i.e., propensity of subjects to seek medical help over the said issue) has been constant or near-enough to be considered 'unaccountable' for the data leading to rise in diagnosis. These links demonstrate the wide disparity in viewpoints of acceptance of mental Illness, thus demonstrates that your conclusion, that mental illnesses have risen by orders of magnitude in the last century to be false. Instead, it demonstrates that while our overall rate of mental illness is rising, the overwhelmingly huge diagnosis of mental illness currently compared to 50-100 years ago is due to social acceptance of mental illness in progressive nations (west): http://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/Mental_Health_Reports/pdf/BRFSS_Full Report.pdf http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-attitudes-mental-health/ http://www.indiana.edu/~icmhsr/docs/Americans' Views of Mental Health.pdf https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/sites/default/files/Attitudes_to_mental_illness_2014_report_final_0.pdf I can quote more articles from Jstor, but they are useless to quote in a public forum. Quote please provide evidence that a simple increase in willingness to get treated has led to an 8-fold increase in prevalence of symptoms of MDD in college age Americans and an around 4-fold increase in having such medications administered. There is ample evidence that attitudes towards mental illnesses have changed significantly in the last 20 years, with greater variance found between survey points further apart in time. Extrapolated to 100 years ago, in deeply christian countries, the rate would be equal to attitudes towards mental illness in the third world today, which is to say, far less accepting than in the modern west. If you wish to contend the point that 8 fold increase in symptoms of MDD in college age Americans is not due to already evidenced improvement in reporting and data gathering methods, the onus is on you to prove a causal link with any phenomenon today. Quote This is something you have to prove. The reported rates of rape: India: 1.8 Sweden: 63.5; Germany: 9.4; Belgium: 27.9. India would have to have over a 5-fold increase just to reach German levels. This is possible, but it has to be proven. Otherwise it can't be taken seriously. I a sorry, but you do realize the difference between empirically driven pure sciences and far less empiric standards of social sciences ? Given that far more women are killed in India due to loss of sexual honour, compared to the west, it stands to reason that the rate of reporting rape would be far lesser in India than in many western countries. Quote I stated, in response to your implying the West is "progressive" That it also has higher rates of rape and murder. I did not state murder of women, let alone rape of women. I purposely used the gender neutral varieties. Err no. India does not have lower rate of murder than the 'west'. It does so than USA, sure. But as i keep saying, USA is the anomaly of the west, not the representative of it. Its homicide rate is orders of magnitude greater than virtually every other nation. As for rape, I've already said that India's reporting of rape rate is far lower than in the west and that is well documented as well. Quote Sumeria: There was widespread polyandry. There is no indication that it was the preeminent form of marriage. Widespread could be any percentage that is significant in Urukagina's view. Someone who hates homosexuals may view a 5% homosexual population as being widespread and ban it. That doesn't show that homosexuality is anything but a significant minority. Pedantry. The word actual translation of the Sumerian word in Urukagina's seal is 'common'. For something to be considered common, it has to be present in significant percentage. Either a significant minority or an actual majority. You need to show any government decree using the word 'common' towards something that is actually not a statistically significant rate to have a case. The point is simple- in ancient Sumeria we see greater prevalence of polyandry than we do in Iraq today. Showing a correlation between intensive farming and decline in polyandry. Quote You are mostly mentioning tribals, who are among the earliest migrants out of Africa and earliest settlers in India. They are minuscule population wise. Their behavior in no way indicates the behavior of other populations. A tribal population that has been following the same lifestyle paradigm of species homo sapiens from >20K years ago is far more representative of evolutionary behaviour of species homo sapiens than the behaviour of the people who live off of farming, even though they represent a far greater population percentage today. Your argument is circular. In order to justify the behavior of humans who follow a farming culture as the 'evolutionary one', you use demographic weight, despite the fact that this demographic weight of farmers didn't exist for over 90% of human timeline in the first place. Quote The Iroquois were a matriarchal confederacy for example. That doesn't prove what you claim. On the other hand, the major empires of the Americas, the Inca, Aztec, and Maya were all patriarchal societies. Ofcourse it does. Iroquois were not a farming society. Inca, Aztec, Maya were farming societies. The entire point is the correlation between rise in farming and rise in monogamy, since monogamy helps propagate farming practices by streamlining inheritance laws. Quote Here is some general information. Polyandry, has always been associated with low amounts of fertile land/overall resource scarcity. 'fertile land' is not a factor in species homo sapiens' existence for 90% of its existence. Low amounts of fertile land & overall resource scarcity is the basic geological reality of ice age world and as such, completely consistent with polyandrous societies. Quote Now for some actual evidence. The mutation rate, based off the cycles of recombination of human chromosomes in meiosis, was examined over half a decade ago. Based on the comparative rates of meiotic mutation between sex chromosomes of X and Y and the autosomes. Geneticists were able to prove modern human mating structure. This is known as the breeding ratio. The number of women to men breeding in 3 different regions. The values by region were Africa: 2.792 Europe: 2.048 East Asia: 1.168 Thus they concluded, based on DNA evidence, over hundreds of thousands of years, that humans were either Monogamous or Polygamous in all three major regions of the world. If you want, I can send some of the data. Completely incongruous & incorrect analysis. DNA mutation rates signify the overall Reproductive ratio of homo sapiens. Which is related to brood size, infant mortality rate, etc. Since we are not a species who gives birth to a large litter, your DNA analysis is irrelevant towards determining the nature of polyandrous or monogamous reproductive rates. Because whether a woman has sex with 30 men or 1, the average child will still carry the DNA of 2 parents only and the average brood will propagate the X and Y chromosomes with the same rate in either case. Your reconstruction is an invalid scenario and i would like to see a peer-reviewed article on it, since the only way you can prove reproductive ratios by Chromosomal analysis is in species that can do multiple congruent pregnancies (i.e., the female can have offsprings of multiple males in the same breeding cycle). Quote Feudalism died because of a change in economic system. It can reappear anywhere based on another change in economic system. Communist/Socialist societies are just as feudalistic as those from decades ago. The single party makes all the decisions, there is a wing of usually hereditary administrators/military/goon class and a large impoverished peasant class. A rose by any other name... No, feudalism died because of obsolescence of the warrior class. That is basic history 101. Quote I'm not claiming a 1:1 causality between Rome's decline and hedonism. Hedonism is only a mindset so it can't directly cause such a thing. However do read Catherine Edwards works on Ancient Rome as well as Edward Gibbon. The gist of it is that hedonism is associated with the decline in birth rates, the decline of community, and the overvaluing of the self. The Roman population declined and the Christian population grew until a Christian emperor got in power and sent Europe into the dark ages. One need only read the marriage laws of Julian to see how dire the situation was in Rome. The Romans would even hire non-Roman mercenaries to help defend the empire. Reading Edward Gibbon in history is as relevant as reading Freud on psychology. Primitive, largely refuted and irrelevant. My point is very simple. What you describe as 'hedonistic values', cannot be held as reason for Roman decline because it shows presence for over 400 years in Roman history and it happens to be more stable than ANY other pre-modern society, hedonistic or otherwise. As for Julian laws, you are completely mistaken. The mediterranean experienced a 2 fold increase in population between 100 BC and 300 AD at the very minimum, thanks to Roman census keeping. Quote The Spartans and Mongols also experienced declining birth rates before their falls. For a pair of "civilizations" based on warfare, the lack of soldiers is definitely a contribution to decline. When the Spartan war machine began to collapse, a declining birthrate was a trend. They particularly lost their population of Similars which declined from 9000 to under 2000 in ~300 years. Absolutely false. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Mongol empire experienced a declining population, nor that of Spartan decline in population. Every single historian pegs Spartan decline as the war against Nabis and the Achaen war, both against Rome, being extremely expensive for Sparta in both manpower and material, with subsequent failure to recover. Similar to what happened to Carthage. Quote Again, this is Marxist social theory, aka pseudoscience, not fact. Human marriage is a biologically conserved behavior across societies, across time. This is because it improves fitness of the individuals and offspring. And the overwhelming evidence for pre-agricultural society shows us that the conserved behaviour of human reproduction is polyandry. It is also a mating strategy widely persued in animal kingdom by species with small litter sizes like us. Quote You are not the only one who has read history, as you seem to be implying. Of course civilization is a complex system, but you, for whatever reason, associate what you believe is the pinnacle of civilization, as fact, with a noticeable lack of evidence. You also haven't provided a causal link. Prove, by some objective measure, that the subset of countries you are promoting are the pinnacle, and prove that, as you are implying, their social customs have anything to do with it. So you think there were more successful civilizations than modern western world ? In what benchmark ? not in terms of material wealth, education of the average human being, the access of technology to the average human- virtually every benchmark, western world is the best mankind has done till date. That is irrefutable. Quote You yourself are trumpeting "moral values" as some indicator of progress, yet seem to imply that morals can't have a role in decline when I state the same? Ofcourse they can. And they have. Just that your examples were false. Quote Your constant trashing of America is funny as America is also the Science and Tech superpower of the world. Most of the modern inventions and tech progress is centered around a handful of countries, with the two largest contributors being the Anglo-Saxon superpowers of the US and the British Empire. You are aggrandizing a small section of countries with very unique circumstances such as high homogeneity, low military expenditure as some model for the rest of the world. Many of these countries live under an American Umbrella where American citizens subsidize, in part, their government's welfare spending by mitigating costs relating to ie defence. I am stating that America is the anomaly of the west. Its one nation that has zero social programs worth stating, yet there are 2 dozen western nations with extensive socialism and are the pinnacle of human development in every measurable criteria. The EU+ Canada+ Australia represents a greater GDP & population than USA and they have far more in common with each other socially than USA. EU has exceptionally huge diversity and with the Shengen Zone laws being in place for over 40 years, also one of the highest worldwide levels of heterogeneity, As for 'American umbrella', that is more or less irrelevant for the last 30 years. I hope you realize that EU's military budget, manpower and hardware is of greater capability than any other entity, barring the USA. So this whole 'living under the American umbrella' is aggrandizing of the fact that USA-EU alliance puts it in a dominant position of countering any outside interference, given their non-conquest & economic hegemony angle, perfectly desirable. But you kid yourself if you think EU needs USA to protect itself. It is more than capable of doing so, given that it has a military budget 5x bigger than Russia/China with sufficient manpower (over 1 million strong) to take a defensive posture. As such, EU military capabilities are perfectly in life with a self sufficient but defensive military. Quote So you agree you are just making an argument without solid proof. You may want to propagate whatever you want to, but, in the absence of anything solid, I'm not particularly interested in flimsy anecdotal evidence. What i am saying, is that there is no decisive proof towards the evolutionary reproductive stance of species homo sapiens. Circumstantial evidence points strongly towards non-monogamous models of propagation, as we see to be in the case of our closest relative, the bonobo. Quote We do not know if Sita's word is enough for Ram or not. The point of the test is for the country. The honor of a country is more important than whatever personal feelings or trust(or maybe lack there of) Ram has. The point is, Ram had to satisfy the same criteria as Sita, if the system was fair. Whether the honour of the country needs to be satisfied or not, it is still the same scenario for Ram. The fact that the standards didn't apply for Ram, is the evidence of inequality of sexuality of man and woman in hindu literature. Quote The US is one of the handful best economies in the world, superior to any you mentioned system-wise. The EU is one of the top polluters in the world. Countries like Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium are among the highest per capita emitters.The EU member countries also all are among the top consumers of meat, with consumption increasing uniformly across Europe. Meat production is a top source of carbon emissions. The Europeans simply have garbage land and buy all their food from Americans, so their carbon footprint is artificially low, although still high. They are not an ecological model for anyone. The USA is not economically superior to the EU for the average person, not even close. As for EU,i didnt say it is utopia, i said its the closest to Utopia we have. In the last 10 years, its only some of the EU nations that have managed to transition to over 80% of Energy provided by renewable sources (Denmark, Nederlands, Germany). As for EU buying food from the US, i take it you are not aware of the fact that in 2012, USA exported 12 billion dollars worth of food to EU and imported 21 billion dollars of food from the EU. If you include other non-EU western countries, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the ratio of import to export in foods for the US gets even larger. Quote This is simple. Hedonism is characterized by individuals pursuing their own pleasure, with little sense of responsibility. What about a hedonistic person makes you even begin to think they would be willing to sacrifice anything. You yourself stated that you have 1 life and you should be able to do anything you want with it. What about that statement lends credence to the idea that one would feel responsible for anything other than having fun. What you are saying is nonsense. Sense of responsibility towards children/society/planet is not related to sexual behaviour. Doing anything you want with your life does not equate it to being hedonistic, otherwise saying that i am a married man in a free world is also hedonistic, since i am doing whatever i want, too. Quote Eco-activists achieve nothing. They have hurt the battle against climate change more than helped. Militant conservationists do not represent ecology or scientists, the actual people involved in fighting climate change. Their hijacking a cause to give themselves an inflated sense of importance is not helpful. If you want evidence of something that is not tabulated, you will have to go by the anecdotal evidence. It is a simple fact that hippies are the most caring about ecology and are the most liberal with sexual practices. Whether their methods are productive or not is irrelevant to that fact. Quote Blank slate is scientifically false. If you believe in such a thing, I am sorry, but it's better we stop the conversation here, or I will shatter your worldview. Genetics have shown an astounding amount of traits are deterministic and out of any control of people or the environment. Even on the non-scientific level, hardwired morals are evidenced by their conservation across cultures, across continents. You must provide something more than your personal stories. There is no such evidence whatsoever about human sexual behaviour. Your claim that human sexual behaviour is hardwired, is scientifically unsubstantiated and all data that exists (such as sexual practices of prehistoric populations) points to the opposite conclusion as you are driving at. Quote Now, after all of that, I will provide evidence against your original claim that divorce doesn't affect children. I will also so you that the atheism in the countries you named is not significant in their happiness. My original point actually, was that divorce affects children less badly than parents who are in emotional & physical violence with each other. Ie, your kids are better off if you and your wife are divorced, as opposed to you and your wife fighting all the time and living in the same house as them. Or you and your wife being miserable, living in a joyless marriage. On that, i don't think you want to dispute that point-for the amount of evidence for that fact is monumental and well documented. Edited October 31, 2016 by Muloghonto
Texan Posted October 31, 2016 Author Posted October 31, 2016 Man, there are some mammoth posts here. I didn't realize I opened a can of worms with this thread sandeep 1
Muloghonto Posted October 31, 2016 Posted October 31, 2016 24 minutes ago, Texan said: Man, there are some mammoth posts here. I didn't realize I opened a can of worms with this thread Unfortunately, most of it is not relevant to the thread. Perhaps mods would want to chop this one too and create a separate thread....what the title would be, i dunno.
Tibarn Posted November 4, 2016 Posted November 4, 2016 On 10/31/2016 at 1:12 AM, Muloghonto said: If you read carefully, it is not a 'moral' decision or reflective of morality, since legalism is not necessarily a reflection of moral 'right/wrong' paradigms only, it also incorporates facets of legalism, where the law is law unto itself, must be respected as a concept. The judgement clearly mentions that since beastiality in Canadian law is specifically tied in with buggery, it applies specifically to penetration only. It didnt say 'beastality is okay in certain forms', it simply came to the conclusion that as our law is framed, its a case of 'technically, its beastiality if and only if there is penetration'. I am not sure exactly what you can conclude from this, except for the fact that turns out Canada's beastiality law is 'incomplete' from a 2016 view. Which is a continuous and normal facet of a representative democracy over a long period of time. I am sorry, but i find your conclusions unscientific. Increase in diagnosis rate, does not imply increase in prevalence, especially about non-pathological diseases. There is a very real component of acceptance, which is a component of 'acceptance of disease by individual and society', effectively demonstrated by the clinical British denial of shell-shock due to WWI as a psychological condition. http://www.simonwessely.com/Downloads/Publications/Military/historical/Jones 2007 - shell shock mtbi.pdf As such, a clinical assessment that 'increasing prevalence of psychological disorders have been noted in species homo sapiens for the last 150 years' requires a demonstration that acceptance rates (i.e., propensity of subjects to seek medical help over the said issue) has been constant or near-enough to be considered 'unaccountable' for the data leading to rise in diagnosis. These links demonstrate the wide disparity in viewpoints of acceptance of mental Illness, thus demonstrates that your conclusion, that mental illnesses have risen by orders of magnitude in the last century to be false. Instead, it demonstrates that while our overall rate of mental illness is rising, the overwhelmingly huge diagnosis of mental illness currently compared to 50-100 years ago is due to social acceptance of mental illness in progressive nations (west): http://www.cdc.gov/hrqol/Mental_Health_Reports/pdf/BRFSS_Full Report.pdf http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-attitudes-mental-health/ http://www.indiana.edu/~icmhsr/docs/Americans' Views of Mental Health.pdf https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/sites/default/files/Attitudes_to_mental_illness_2014_report_final_0.pdf I can quote more articles from Jstor, but they are useless to quote in a public forum. There is ample evidence that attitudes towards mental illnesses have changed significantly in the last 20 years, with greater variance found between survey points further apart in time. Extrapolated to 100 years ago, in deeply christian countries, the rate would be equal to attitudes towards mental illness in the third world today, which is to say, far less accepting than in the modern west. If you wish to contend the point that 8 fold increase in symptoms of MDD in college age Americans is not due to already evidenced improvement in reporting and data gathering methods, the onus is on you to prove a causal link with any phenomenon today. I a sorry, but you do realize the difference between empirically driven pure sciences and far less empiric standards of social sciences ? Given that far more women are killed in India due to loss of sexual honour, compared to the west, it stands to reason that the rate of reporting rape would be far lesser in India than in many western countries. Err no. India does not have lower rate of murder than the 'west'. It does so than USA, sure. But as i keep saying, USA is the anomaly of the west, not the representative of it. Its homicide rate is orders of magnitude greater than virtually every other nation. As for rape, I've already said that India's reporting of rape rate is far lower than in the west and that is well documented as well. Pedantry. The word actual translation of the Sumerian word in Urukagina's seal is 'common'. For something to be considered common, it has to be present in significant percentage. Either a significant minority or an actual majority. You need to show any government decree using the word 'common' towards something that is actually not a statistically significant rate to have a case. The point is simple- in ancient Sumeria we see greater prevalence of polyandry than we do in Iraq today. Showing a correlation between intensive farming and decline in polyandry. A tribal population that has been following the same lifestyle paradigm of species homo sapiens from >20K years ago is far more representative of evolutionary behaviour of species homo sapiens than the behaviour of the people who live off of farming, even though they represent a far greater population percentage today. Your argument is circular. In order to justify the behavior of humans who follow a farming culture as the 'evolutionary one', you use demographic weight, despite the fact that this demographic weight of farmers didn't exist for over 90% of human timeline in the first place. Ofcourse it does. Iroquois were not a farming society. Inca, Aztec, Maya were farming societies. The entire point is the correlation between rise in farming and rise in monogamy, since monogamy helps propagate farming practices by streamlining inheritance laws. 'fertile land' is not a factor in species homo sapiens' existence for 90% of its existence. Low amounts of fertile land & overall resource scarcity is the basic geological reality of ice age world and as such, completely consistent with polyandrous societies. Completely incongruous & incorrect analysis. DNA mutation rates signify the overall Reproductive ratio of homo sapiens. Which is related to brood size, infant mortality rate, etc. Since we are not a species who gives birth to a large litter, your DNA analysis is irrelevant towards determining the nature of polyandrous or monogamous reproductive rates. Because whether a woman has sex with 30 men or 1, the average child will still carry the DNA of 2 parents only and the average brood will propagate the X and Y chromosomes with the same rate in either case. Your reconstruction is an invalid scenario and i would like to see a peer-reviewed article on it, since the only way you can prove reproductive ratios by Chromosomal analysis is in species that can do multiple congruent pregnancies (i.e., the female can have offsprings of multiple males in the same breeding cycle). No, feudalism died because of obsolescence of the warrior class. That is basic history 101. Reading Edward Gibbon in history is as relevant as reading Freud on psychology. Primitive, largely refuted and irrelevant. My point is very simple. What you describe as 'hedonistic values', cannot be held as reason for Roman decline because it shows presence for over 400 years in Roman history and it happens to be more stable than ANY other pre-modern society, hedonistic or otherwise. As for Julian laws, you are completely mistaken. The mediterranean experienced a 2 fold increase in population between 100 BC and 300 AD at the very minimum, thanks to Roman census keeping. Absolutely false. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Mongol empire experienced a declining population, nor that of Spartan decline in population. Every single historian pegs Spartan decline as the war against Nabis and the Achaen war, both against Rome, being extremely expensive for Sparta in both manpower and material, with subsequent failure to recover. Similar to what happened to Carthage. And the overwhelming evidence for pre-agricultural society shows us that the conserved behaviour of human reproduction is polyandry. It is also a mating strategy widely persued in animal kingdom by species with small litter sizes like us. So you think there were more successful civilizations than modern western world ? In what benchmark ? not in terms of material wealth, education of the average human being, the access of technology to the average human- virtually every benchmark, western world is the best mankind has done till date. That is irrefutable. Ofcourse they can. And they have. Just that your examples were false. I am stating that America is the anomaly of the west. Its one nation that has zero social programs worth stating, yet there are 2 dozen western nations with extensive socialism and are the pinnacle of human development in every measurable criteria. The EU+ Canada+ Australia represents a greater GDP & population than USA and they have far more in common with each other socially than USA. EU has exceptionally huge diversity and with the Shengen Zone laws being in place for over 40 years, also one of the highest worldwide levels of heterogeneity, As for 'American umbrella', that is more or less irrelevant for the last 30 years. I hope you realize that EU's military budget, manpower and hardware is of greater capability than any other entity, barring the USA. So this whole 'living under the American umbrella' is aggrandizing of the fact that USA-EU alliance puts it in a dominant position of countering any outside interference, given their non-conquest & economic hegemony angle, perfectly desirable. But you kid yourself if you think EU needs USA to protect itself. It is more than capable of doing so, given that it has a military budget 5x bigger than Russia/China with sufficient manpower (over 1 million strong) to take a defensive posture. As such, EU military capabilities are perfectly in life with a self sufficient but defensive military. What i am saying, is that there is no decisive proof towards the evolutionary reproductive stance of species homo sapiens. Circumstantial evidence points strongly towards non-monogamous models of propagation, as we see to be in the case of our closest relative, the bonobo. The point is, Ram had to satisfy the same criteria as Sita, if the system was fair. Whether the honour of the country needs to be satisfied or not, it is still the same scenario for Ram. The fact that the standards didn't apply for Ram, is the evidence of inequality of sexuality of man and woman in hindu literature. The USA is not economically superior to the EU for the average person, not even close. As for EU,i didnt say it is utopia, i said its the closest to Utopia we have. In the last 10 years, its only some of the EU nations that have managed to transition to over 80% of Energy provided by renewable sources (Denmark, Nederlands, Germany). As for EU buying food from the US, i take it you are not aware of the fact that in 2012, USA exported 12 billion dollars worth of food to EU and imported 21 billion dollars of food from the EU. If you include other non-EU western countries, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the ratio of import to export in foods for the US gets even larger. What you are saying is nonsense. Sense of responsibility towards children/society/planet is not related to sexual behaviour. Doing anything you want with your life does not equate it to being hedonistic, otherwise saying that i am a married man in a free world is also hedonistic, since i am doing whatever i want, too. If you want evidence of something that is not tabulated, you will have to go by the anecdotal evidence. It is a simple fact that hippies are the most caring about ecology and are the most liberal with sexual practices. Whether their methods are productive or not is irrelevant to that fact. There is no such evidence whatsoever about human sexual behaviour. Your claim that human sexual behaviour is hardwired, is scientifically unsubstantiated and all data that exists (such as sexual practices of prehistoric populations) points to the opposite conclusion as you are driving at. My original point actually, was that divorce affects children less badly than parents who are in emotional & physical violence with each other. Ie, your kids are better off if you and your wife are divorced, as opposed to you and your wife fighting all the time and living in the same house as them. Or you and your wife being miserable, living in a joyless marriage. On that, i don't think you want to dispute that point-for the amount of evidence for that fact is monumental and well documented. I will repeat myself, please provide evidence for any of the claims you make. You are not giving a good faith effort to this conversation, and I am not interested in continuing with your Circular argument. If you decided that God exists, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise, especially when you have to provide none of your own.
Muloghonto Posted November 4, 2016 Posted November 4, 2016 (edited) 1 hour ago, Tibarn said: I will repeat myself, please provide evidence for any of the claims you make. You are not giving a good faith effort to this conversation, and I am not interested in continuing with your Circular argument. If you decided that God exists, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise, especially when you have to provide none of your own. I have already provided links for the discourse. Here are some more: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/06/15/parents-fighting-may-have-long-lasting-effect-on-kids http://www.webmd.com/women/news/20060209/kids-harmed-when-parents-fight#1 As you can see, there is strong medical evidence that kids are better off with divorced parents who are civil with each other than parents who don divorce but fight endlessly. This also goes on to prove that since kids behaviours are affected by conflict (or lack of it), there is no connection between marriage/divorce and mental health of children. Ergo, Children who are not in a married household (i.e., parents never got married) but are good to each other are better off than children who are in a married household with acrimonious marriage. Therefore, the notion that 'marriage is sacred' is unscientific, religious nonsense. PS: Circular argument implies that i am using argument A to bolster argument B, when B leads to A. There has been no such thing at all. Infact, you are the one here in error, since you have claimed several things not true here: A) marriage is sacred (see above) B) Europe is 'socialist utopia because Europe needs USA to protect itself (EU's combined military strength is comparable to that of Russia, its only legitimate aggressor threat) C) Europe's carbon footprint is artificially low since it imports food from the US ( US is a net food importer, not exporter, from the EU) D) Rome, Greece & Mongol Empire collapsed due to population collapse (we have categoric census info from Roman & Greek periods to refute this) E) Human sexual behaviour evolutionary has been monogamous or polygamous (we have evidence of polyandry & di-andry being far more prevalent in non-farming cultures, which represents over 90% of the existence of species homo sapiens) And above all, none of those arguments are inherently interlinked to cause a scenario of 'circular argument'. Edited November 4, 2016 by Muloghonto
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