The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

All that effort nature put into evolution would be for naught

Can we just return to the part about self-fulfilling prophecies and leave it at that? Scientists have been having this sort of discussion for ages, and if they can't get a simple one-liner solution, do you really think we can?

We shouldn't stumble into the pitfall of self-fulfilling prophecies, where expectations of women and men create the statistics that fuel said expectations.

Nor should we want to homogenize everything to fulfill some arbitrary aesthetic goal. People are different, and that's a good thing.

Self fulfilling prophecies are not necessarily bad evils to be exterminated.

Maybe I'm a criminal looking at statistics showing that criminals go to jail, thus changing my behaviour into a law abiding citizen.

Or maybe every morning I wake up and tell myself how sexy I am, making me more confident and thus even more sexy. (thanks for the tip xankar)

If the only think stopping you from committing crimes is fear of punishment you'll never be a law abiding citizen.

Then it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, is it?

I love how you say they *fall victim* when their elders are essentially teaching them to be really good at something they are already naturally talented for. Exceptions exist, as always.

And no. A culture change of us repeatedly saying that girls are generally stronger than guys will not change the fact that guys are, in fact, biologically suited to be stronger than women. It's not a bad thing.

sigh you know what i mean. a person who is naturally inclined to criminal acts. You're just picking words at this point.

No, that's all anyone here has been doing.

I've honestly never seen any clear proof that men are better at math and woman are better at languages. However I do remember how I was in grade school and was told just that: "You're a boy, boys are good at math". It made me try hard to fulfill that demand I felt from the world around me to understand math and be lazy when language-related stuff came up to the point that I had to take extra classes on proper German spelling for a while.
Yes that's just my personal experience, but the fact stands that I've never seen any proof that would explain why the male brain is better at math than the female one.
All you have is studies that somehow statistically more men are good at X, but there is no way to clearly tell why exactly.

Of course the biological facts would remain, but if your culture makes woman do lots of sports and pushes men towards not doing much sports you'd see a lot more woman outperforming men.
A well trained woman can easily outperform a "not-so-well-trained" men.

Yea you got a bad teacher. They shouldn't be proscribing to a kid what they should or should not be good at. Talking on a large population level is different from an individual level.

There was a study I listed before where men were found to have more brain connectivity front to back and women left to right between the hemispheres - also differences in grey/white matter. Evolutionary drivers related to survival also explain why men might be more calculating, spatially aware, risk taking, and physical. Maybe it's not biologically programmed, but it is certainly biologically influenced. Afterall, it's hard to go hunting and fighting when you're pregnant, and likewise for men it's hard to raise babies if you don't have boobs.

That's a big issue with progressive thinking. They come up with ideologically derived social values and use artificial methods like affirmative action to get people to make decisions they might otherwise not choose. Kind of like going into a fruit market and instead of letting lots of buyers and sellers naturally discover a price for apples they say "The price of apples should always be the same as the one for oranges!".

It's weaponised marxist egalitarianism aimed at creating societal divisions through identity politics. It's constantly trying to trick us into forgetting that people have free will and self agency to choose what makes them happy all by themselves. Like all their other stuff, it's short sighted, immature, and hella biased.

Their anti-racist rhetoric is racist, anti-sexist rhetoric is sexist, anti-establishment rhetoric is establishment, anti-authoritarian is authoritarian etc. This stuff can legit be traced back to soviet cultural warfare policy from the cold war in our recent past but that's another interesting topic for another time. We're fortunate to still have interviews on record from ex-kgb agents.



Anyway, more important are the studies done on the effects of feminisim artificially pushing women away from starting families and into careers. There's good data from pew on diminishing birth rates, marriage rates, increasing age at which people have children etc. Over the last half century, all of this has been accompanied by dramatic and consistent erosions in happiness among women as documented in this famous study by Stevenson and Wolfers.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969.pdf

You overestimate people's ability to communicate properly via text-only. Besides, no matter how you spin it, what you said wasn't a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hence my comment


The risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy is that we expect certain behaviors from men and women and everyone who doesn't fall within that statistical average falls outside the boat. After all, things like "men are stronger than women" is an average statistical observation. It's not like every random man is stronger than every random women, and even then there's more of a bodybuilder culture among men than women (which means a man's strength is closer to it's natural limit than a women) which distorts the picture further. If we created a society where women are fanatic bodybuilders and men aren't, this easily flips around.

Wasn't a single teacher, more the general consensus that everybody seemed to agree with. Well it's my memory from being ~6 year old. What do I know. Probably not the best base for an argument

There are also studies where they cut the connection between the brain and eyes of ferrets and then reconnected the eyes to the audio-processing part of the ferrets brain. The ferrets learned to be able to see with that part of their brain instead. Ofc one could not ask them about their vision quality, but it was high enough for all sorts of vision based tasked given to them.
The point? The brain isn't exactly perfectly understood, but seems to be extremely adaptable.
So while studies showcasing potential differences are interesting I'd not make them a basis for how to raise children.
Tell all children they can be good at math and when half of them turn out to suck at it, fine, so be it.
Let the actual performance decide, not some from of preconception.

So since all people have free will and self agency there is no need to tell what who should be best at based on gender. Let them find it out for themselves, it might surprise us in the end what they chose.
Just realize that a 6 year old might not have as much free will and self agency as you think, they might be very easily influenced by their environments expectations.

Remembers me of reading articles that basically state: People who start a family are the most happy.
So from that my first thought is:
Yes, if woman feel encouraged to go do a career life instead of a family life that might actually be a stupid idea. Because it might be a stupid idea no matter your gender.

The important thing about all this, and you said that as well, free will: Let people do what they thing is best, without creating any preconceived expectation.
Now that's incredibly hard to do right. Like for example if you start fighting for women right to be able to make a high profile career, instead of being a house wife, then that's good. Provide more options.
But it has the high risk that you make it look like "all women should do this, and the other thing they were expected to do before by society sucks", which isn't exactly the point of having more options.

try this : http://trumporjesus.com/

abusing the bible (and religion in general) for your political is pretty old. The bible itself is only a few years older.

I'm not sure what that's trying to say - calling the stereotypical 'christian republican' who votes for trump a hypocrite? You realise Clinton is pretty much the same though right?

This current election left the station of voting for your ideological image long ago for many people - including the christians ever since cruz. It's been largely about an anti-vote either based on systems or personality for a while now. If you value systems more like rule of law and less corruption, you go Trump. If you value personality more ("Trump is racist lalala" etcetc), you go Clinton.

What the ****?

Trump is not going to reduce corruption. Not even close.

Well, here's the rationale.

Trump, is a loud-mouth. If you disagree, then I pity you and we have nothing further to discuss. He is such a loud-mouth and NOT a "politician", that he can hardly abuse the "legal loopholes" and will be stupid enough to act in an open and transparent manner, in which Congress can control by not allowing. Compound this with voting against incumbents in every office nationwide, and you get rid of a lot of rigged systems. My kingdom for a congressional term limit.

Hillary, has gotten away with the political equivalent of drunk driving manslaughter, and acquitted on "lack of intent". Man, I wish I could wipe a family minivan off the face of the planet, and say "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I just meant to make it to my driveway", and be acquitted. Alas, I am not rich nor powerful nor female... Carrying on.

It's safe to say, with Hillary, she knows how to legally do things under the table, in a way which threatens her doing some very dirty activity and simply "not asking, trying not to get caught", and if it's too bad or ever is caught, it can cause a lot more harm than stupid "edgy racist dribble" Trump can "say" or "suggest".

That's the jist of it. Except the family. I actually value human life. Unlike Hillary. I'm easily more "stick it to the establishment" than I am "personality". Nothing Trump can say is stupid enough, to make me vote Hillary, though I wish third parties were more viable, but electoral college means Ohio and Florida gets to decide presidents for the rest of our country, and "conventions" mean some candidates aren't even democratically chosen (again, Hillary) but are the only ones that show up on ballots and some of us aren't even allowed to vote otherwise. This system, CAUSED the Civil War in 1861 (not slavery), and it was only marginally better afterwards because military victory and then rule without representation over the southern states for a stretch of time. We really need a direct democracy or a more direct republic than this, of all those assanine ways Europe and America want to compare, a pittance on anyone that doesn't mention the crummy election system itself, which makes this a farce banana-democracy from getgo.

I didn't say reduce corruption while in office (although that is arguably going to happen because clinton won't be holding any staff position). I said less corruption in the context of an anti-vote. From experience, the best way of figuring out the medium to long term trend of a system is to look at incentives. What drives Trump? What drives Hillary?

Trump: Ego
Hillary: Money

Which of the two is more susceptible to crony capitalism, compromised principles, and underhand bribery in forms such as 'speaking fees'?

Trump's ego is tied to making 'america great again' (whatever he thinks that means). His image is important to him and thus it is only as strong as his word. Hillary will say anything and change any position given enough green notes.

Trump also likes to wildly jump around in his opinion, doesn't he? Just that instead of a bit of green paper you need to give him the feeling that some parts of the population will like what he says. As long as it gets him a cheering mass of people when he gives a speech he'll say and promise whatever they want.

To me it looks like Trump is only doing this to prove people he can win. I don't think he's really interested in the position (seems to be delegating 90% to his VP).
So I don't think he'll do much at all. So you'll probably best at looking what the VP's stance is on things.
But I'm sure Trump will do all he can to make himself richer / and important looking in the media.