'It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be'

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2013-12-16 19:04

Article here. Excerpt:

'If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.
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After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!'

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Well, every now and then, a cat barks. But not too often.

Speaking of apocalypses, I have been thinking about just what might be The Next Big Party-Pooper for the planet Earth. Of course we have lots of candidates: nuclear bombs going off, leading either to one big one-hour Armageddon or a longer, more drawn-out, a-nuke-here-a-nuke-there kind of thing, until there are no more coffee shops left standing in any city in the world you may have wanted to visit or live in. But really, that's too obvious, and no one with enough nukes to make it a real possibility is willing to go there. After all, when you're at the head of your nation's gov't, do you *really* want to have to stop golfing outside unless you can help it? None of the heads of any nuclear state has this inclination. As for the crack-pots trying to develop them, well, let's just say, I have my suspicions about just exactly how far they can go. Consider that almost every scrap of tech they are using comes from one or more advanced nations whose leaders really don't want to stop golfing outside. Follow me? I have a sneaking suspicion in fact that any time either the US, China, Russia, or the EU in general wants to de-techify N. Korea, Iran, or any number of other piddle-twinkie countries like those, all they'd need to do is flip a switch. Those countries however serve an important political purpose to the Big Players: they keep attention on something other than them.

So I really doubt WWIII with nukes is in the "Most Likely" column.

How about Earth-bound asteroids? Hmm, well, I suppose it's possible. Hard to say, it's one of those we-really-can't-control-or-predict-it things, so I am inclined to just drop this one. Really, if it happens, it happens. But as Paglia mentions, it'll be men who are back doing the hard work (as usual), but in a far-more close-to-nature sense. [Meanwhile, the nasty feminists who complained bitterly about maleness will suddenly go from being committed misandrists to born again you-know-whats. Not to suggest all or even most female feminists are... not heterosexual/bisexual, but those that aren't will suddenly have the acronym "LUA" applicable to them: "Lesbian Until Apocalypse". :) ]

Next, well, the 800-lb. gorilla: global climate change. At first, I was very skeptical that such was even trending, much less Man having much to do with it. After all, how long have weather data been scientifically recorded? Less than 200 years? And even then, most of that time, from isolated sites. But looking into it more as time goes on, it seems to me that a case *can* be made for global climate change ("GCC") occurring, if not now, then inevitably, some time. Worse yet, a case can be made, and I feel it's a stronger one than is currently made about humans' activities, that GCC occurs with or without Man adding CO2, etc., to the air. It has to do with the amount of energy the planet is getting from the sun. The sun's output has been dropping of late, and it appears largely to operate cyclically this way. Consider the last ice ages the planet had came into being without CO2 contributions from people. In addition, natural processes such as ash- and CO2-discharging volcanoes used to be much more active in the past and still, Earth still had ice ages at different times.

Earth gets nearly every single watt of energy it has from the sun. The source of all energy worth mentioning for Earth comes from the sun. There is, relatively, only a very small amt. that is stored in the Earth and accounts for the magma in the center of the planet, which sometimes causes volcanic or other magama-ejecting eruptions. But consider that if the sun disappeared by magic this entire planet would quickly freeze down to a surface temp of zero. (See here.) Every form of cellular life not buried deep in the Earth would perish. The only forms of life that would remain are in the Earth's crust, living near the liquid core or its channels upward through the crust, where it can get some heat.

As the sun moves into a less-energy-producing phase, Earth gets less energy, and its weather is heavily affected by that, as are Earth's species. When Man was organized into small bands of hunter/gatherers, we were a lot more industrious and hearty creatures, and a lot physically stronger. (The typical human female of that time could pretty much wallop the hell out of any given modern man she may meet today, despite being pretty small in stature-- as were the men.)

Currently, the Earth is in fact in an ice age (see here). The closing lines of that reference are a bit ominous but ought to be considered carefully:

'Studies of isotopic composition of the ice cores indicate the change from warm to frigid temperatures can occur in a decade or two. In addition, the ice cores show that an ice age is not uniformly cold, nor are interglacial periods uniformly warm (see also stadial). Analysis of ice cores of the entire thickness of the Greenland glacier shows that climate over the last 250,000 years has changed frequently and abruptly. The present interglacial period (the last 10,000 to 15,000 years) has been fairly stable and warm, but the previous one was interrupted by numerous frigid spells lasting hundreds of years. If the previous period was more typical than the present one, the period of stable climate in which humans flourished—inventing agriculture and thus civilization—may have been possible only because of a highly unusual period of stable temperature.'

It's true humans are adding to the Earth's CO2, but not by that much; a small amount in fact as compared to what natural processes and volcanoes do. However that continuous, on-going small amount added can have dramatic effects when it goes unchecked. Think of it as working a bit like compound interest-- but on your credit card, and alas, not on your savings account. But while that may be a cause of interest or concern, the added CO2 contributing to potentially warmer planetary conditions is a lot less influential than how much energy the sun sends our way. There may well come a time when we wished we had produced *more* CO2 than we have been, given how incredibly cold this planet can get when the sun decides to lean back and take a break from quite so much nuclear fusion.

Wikipedia has a good discussion of the sun here. While it is comforting to see that the sun will not be going out of business any time soon, and is predicted to become hotter as time goes on, at least for a time, it still has its phases. As a species with a questionable tenacity for its mortal coil (humans are not nearly as resilient as, say, dung beetles or amoebas), we ought to be very worried less about the sun's long-term plan to get hotter and more about its short-term tendency to cool off with little advance notice to the creatures on this planet that have grown to count on it doing its thing.

In short, I would like to believe that Man is responsible for GCC and thus can control it, even if we start at it a bit late. But I am increasingly of the opinion that while indeed, Man may be contributing to GCC in some way, I think the relationship between the Earth and the sun as well as the sun's energy-producing cycles may have a whole lot more to do with what is happening. That is in fact something I would prefer not to think is true, because that, we can't control. And I am in no hurry to suddenly become more "relevant" to women or anyone else because now, my gender-role-designated job has just become "Go out there into the frigid cold and club something to death so the rest of us can all live one more day." Frankly, that deal sucked 20,000 years ago and would still suck today if it happened again. I am glad not to be part of it. So I hope if/when it all comes crashing down one day, it won't be because of a sudden ice age - or sudden onset of Arabian desert-like conditions all over the damn place. But only time can tell.

As for other "worst-case scenarios"-- I dunno. I think asteroids, nuclear bombs, and global weather catastrophes are enough for one night.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2013-12-17 02:57

totally agree about the warming stuff. the sun is now in a deep cooling stage. the phases are cyclic, but this one is a deep, dark doozie. odd how the warmers don't seem to want to give the sun the credit it obviously deserves.

about asteroids: what bothers me most about these bad boys is that there is an entire belt full of them stuck in a gravity well between Mars and Jupiter, possibly the remnants of an exploded planet. evidence that they hit every planet, moon, and other asteroids regularly are everywhere on their surfaces. that last comet, ison, last month went right thru the edge of that asteroid belt as it headed toward our sun. it was estimated to be well over 3 miles across and moving incredibly fast. what if it dragged a few slowly into our orbital path? some asteroids are the size of small moons.

comets are usually described as large, fast ice balls. still others see them as large, fast balls of ionized, magnetized metals. either way, comets and other heavenly bodies are constantly disturbing these asteroid killers. the one that passed close (18k mi.) to us last year was worth an estimated $750 billion in ore. there are millions of them out there, and fairly close by. those people on t.v. who hunt them near impact areas sell small ones for thousand$. I believe N.A.S.A. finally is on the right course by attempting to catch one. theories abound on how to possibly divert one. I like the idea of a space mirror directed at one, heating it up and letting that heat energy divert its deadly path. probably needs to be done far out to make the small change in trajectory count.

lately we have seen what appears to be a rash of asteroid strikes and near-misses, and they all appear to be coming from the same area of space, the ort cloud. one relatively small one recently missed us and hit the moon face toward us traveling at an unbelievable speed. like the one in Russia it was unexpected. it hit with such force that it literally melted the surface of the moon where it hit, and was visible from earth w/o the aid of any magnifying devices. 10x bigger explosion than anything ever observed before hitting our moon. to hit the side toward us it had to pass pretty close to earth. we also have comets flying all over the place. I believe we had 4 observable ones at once last year (telescope). so you can maybe start to see why I am wary of these bad boys.

don't mean to be overly critical w/ hindsight and such, but I sincerely hope we are not some day wishing we had been chasing asteroids and comets all along instead of posing for pixs on the moon.

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Submitted by daveinga on Wed, 2013-12-18 03:44