Just as a head's up, I just learned they're working on a revised version of the GNU Public License. The GPL is pretty much what made Linux, Linux, so this could be big.
I just realized something chilling about the infinite cruelty of Mother Nature. I was thinking about a drawing I saw once, where some aborigines were gathering food, and the female was holding a baby while she did it. That got me thinking about the notion of hunting and gathering, which is supposedly what the species did before it invented agriculture. You can't hold a baby when you hunt, you know? I chuckled at the thought of some male in the bush, using a child as a hurled weapon to take down a boar or something. Then I realized.
Hunting is more dangerous than gathering. People get hurt, even hunted themselves. You can't hunt in large groups, because your quarry will detect you, whereas gatherers can stay in line of sight of each other, and aurally warn of danger without risking the plants running away. You can carry a baby when you gather; you can converse when you gather. Now why is it that in all our studies we have universally shown that males hunt, and females gather, in hunter gatherer societies? Is it all our misogynist culture's bias? Wouldn't the males want to gather so as not to risk their lives?
Compare the gender ratio of male to female in human births. It's nearly 50:50. Now consider the frequency a male can produce sperm, versus the frequency a woman can have a child. You might see where I'm getting with this. I always get chills when I hear the experiences of polygamous families, and now I know what's bothering me. One male can probably fertilize at least 10 females, and their birth rate won't change one bit. Maybe not all males can do that, but I'd say there's 1/10 males at least, virile enough to accomplish that task.
So then why don't females have 10 male babies for every female baby, or some other disproportionate ratio? And why do males engage in dangerous hunting at the exclusion of females, and females in gathering at the exclusion of males? The only answer I can think of answers both those questions: human males are expendable.
Human males are designed for the most part, to die. That's why males engage in war and hunting, not because they are stronger, not because they are more capable, but because deep down in our instincts we feel better if a male dies than a female or a child. Women and children first, how could we be so cruel? And what about male instincts? How could anyone possibly instinctively want to die, while still being able to exist as a living being at all?
In our modern society, we don't have to hunt, and we don't for the most part have to gather. We've changed that dynamic that favored the notion of tribes of females exclusively reserved for one alpha male, while the other males were sent out eagerly to risk their lives for the tribe. I wish I could say the problem is over now, but our culture changes so slowly, and our instincts change even slower. Much of our societal problems today come from the fact that males engage in risky behavior.
Take for instance chivalry. Among other horrible notions in that misbegotten cultural dinosaur like "Thou shalt believe all that the Church teaches, and shalt observe all its directions," the code is rife with anti-male teachings, stuff designed to kill off the superfluous males for the benefit of the community as a whole. "Thou shalt make war against the Infidel without cessation, and without mercy," for instance is a war based on completely imaginary wrongs, yet it has killed more males in history than any other activity except perhaps miscarriage. "Never use a weapon on an opponent not equal to the attack," is supposedly a statement of the ideal of fairness, but it's also a statement that the chivalrous feel good when they risk their lives by facing dangerous enough opponents to kill them.
Or how about sports? Race car driving? Football? Rugby? Gladiators? The deadliest sports are almost exclusively male populated. Even the sports with females in them like football are carefully regulated, with the females separate, playing a no less fierce, but much less casulty ridden game. In a way, sports are an attempt to overcome this death instinct superfluous males have in them, by taking out their aggression in (mostly) nonfatal activities. Maybe that's why males like watching sports more; because they can appease their instincts virtually, without risking their lives at all.
It's a bad thing for most males to want to die in modern society, that much is true. We have agriculture now, and industry, and technology. Three revolutions in our history that change society immeasurably. Now there is no reason for people to go out alone in the brush seeking some hapless creature while trying not to get seeked themselves. There are some reasons to risk still, true, and you see those reasons vastly populated with suicidal males, but for the most part males have become more valuable, able to do more than go insane from lack of breeding and kill things in dangerous situations.
Many of our traditionally male institutions are themselves becoming less risky and more valuable. The military for instance, ever since the second world war, we've been trying desperately to increase our defenses enough to cope with the immeasurably destructive offenses we brought into the world. Bomb shelters, gas masks, body armor, all these inventions were direct responses to the invention of their corresponding weapon. We have no justification to invent a new weapon anymore, because we can already destroy each other utterly, but we have plenty of reasons to invent defenses.
In the Iraq war much has changed since Vietnam. 5 times as many people are coming home injured than are dying, and unprecedented rate of survival from war not seen since we invented machine guns. The people who run the military have instincts to murder males more than females, but they feel the risk is small enough that females are too valuable to pass up sending into combat positions in Iraq, so the military has increasingly adopted female members, just like any institution whose risk of fatality is reducing. People just think it's more valuable to pick up a gun and obey an imaginary entity's orders, than the risk of dying as a result. Since people are more willing to enter males into fatal situations, the less fatal the risk, the more females will be encouraged that way.
It's a sad fact that our history has regarded females as property, a measure of success by how many females a male controls and breeds. Even in modern society, women are not as subserviant or denigrated, but they are still valued for their beauty, still treated delicately and protected, still just like valuable property. Only difference now is it's considered a compliment for a woman to be the property of another, not an obligation. There are many things sick about our society. But one of the overlooked tendancies that we should be guarding against is not the oppression of females, but the ease at which we kill males.
Cindy Sheehan selflessly protested in vain, against the President's actions, but she ran up against society's disregard for the value of her son's life. It was his duty to die, was it not? He was protecting his country (i.e. his females) and it isn't her place to protest his loss. Aren't we falling prey to that sort of advertising, because we have the irrational impulse to think of the death of an otherwise nameless male soldier as not that big a deal? Now that she's active in the anti-war movement, people cry hypocrisy, say she's reactionary, and gold digging for media attention, when the reality is it's the very media supposedly supporting her that is claiming she is such an unworthy person. It's that very media who is gold-digging, trying to demonize some and deify others so that we'll keep reading their news like good little drones, and they blame it so easily on Cindy Sheehan. They blame it so easily because the media is exploiting the inappropriate instincts human beings have today, that males dying in war is nothing to complain about, leaving her at a disadvantage to argue for reason and compassion.
How many of you males feel good when you say how many people you would kill to protect your girlfriend? How many of you females would feel the same way about protecting your boyfriend? I sure know that my friends are almost bipolar in their gender stereotypes; even to the point it just gives me the willies watching them caricaturize themselves. I know in person a male who is a "knife fighter," a "ex-Marine", a "potential terrorist," and um... a few video game freaks and computer geeks. I know in person a female who is a "compassionate Christian," another who is "an ex-Marine's girlfriend," and another who is "an avid knitter" but none of them have insane and crazy suicidal ideals like the one guy going off excitedly as he described the feel of a knife penetrating his abdominal cavity. He was probably talking out of his ass, but what struck me was the respect and admiration people had for such an act, but only in males, never females. *shudders*
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