You would think so. As time has gone by, even basic common sense stuff is not being accepted anymore.

It is basic stuff to most people. For whatever reason, certain sections of academia and “good liberals” have decided to rail against reality.

Interestingly, he claims to be 37 but already retired.

I would accept this as true, with a couple of caveats.

First, the biological differences are easily overplayed. Men have testosterone and women have estrogen, but women also have testosterone and men have estrogen.

Second, femininity and masculinity are social constructs that are linked to biology but not entirely defined by biology.

Thirdly, because gender is universally visible, and part of our identity, it becomes easily malleable for political ends.

Lastly, it's useful to note that the social construct of gender varies wildly according to different cultures. While the experience of gender has been homogenising in the global north, the rest of the world and history even has plenty of examples of far more overall gender equality, and even matriarchy.

Human nature itself does not vary significantly according to gender. Males might have more of a predisposition to violence, and women to caregiving, but we've heaped a ton of social constructs on top of them, and if you're not careful unpicking what's from what, you end up at gender essentialism.

As time has gone by, even basic common sense stuff is not being accepted anymore

I agree with your post Wazz. The problem is that some people are so desperate to avoid any whiff of gender essentialism, that they end up espousing some very dubious claims. Obviously some people go way too far in the other direction as well.

The 'common sense test' is a mostly pretty useful tool, but what you're talking about is not that, it's more 'cultural norms' or 'received wisdom'. It's not 'common sense' that men should go to war and women should stay at home making babies. It's not 'common sense' that even those women who choose not to have children get paid less. It's not 'common sense' that the vast majority of perpetrators of violence are men. Traditional gender roles are bullshit, but the answer is not to make women more like men, it's to make men more like women. Instead of emotional repression, emotional expression. Care and love over anger and violence.

Probably a good place to add that the conservative ideal of a nuclear family is also total and utter bullshit. Before ~150 years ago, pretty much the only nuclear family was the royal family. Everyone else lived communally. The nuclear family is also the biggest source of child abuse, whether overt physical or sexual abuse, far outstripping the church, or simply manipulation and gaslighting. If you wanted to end 95% of child abuse overnight, you could do it by abolishing the nuclear family and instituting the attitude of 'a child raised by a village' rather than the traditional patriarch getting drunk and hitting his kids because he didn't get enough love for himself when growing up.

I have far more patience for those with the attitude of enforcing equality over those who wish to enforce inequality, though I disagree with both.

While I can sort of get behind some of your points, this is just out there. Yes, it is.

Yeah, I really liked every other part of his post.

Men will always be more prone to violence than women. We can only hope that the level of violence by both sexes continues to drop, as it has it has for thousands of years.

you think humans are less violent now? bruv Israeli Supremacists just murdered like 20k people in a month and show no signs of stopping.

and how many are dead in Ukraine the last 2 years?

Can we possibly have one thread where you don't push this dogshit narrative of yours?

those are facts. theres no narrative.

you can draw the conclusions that you want.

None of this is true. There is no scientific or natural examples to support any of these arguments. All the actual data points directly the other way.

For example, in literally every mammal species the main perpetrators of violence are men. And it is directly tied to testosterone levels. Male elephants actually go through a version of heat where their testosterone spikes and all they can do is fight and ****. Your ideas concerning male violence are pretty equivalent to flat earth theory, it is just so obviously wrong, and easily disproven.

As someone with a background in biology (and science in general) it always amazes me just how ignorant 'blank slate' far leftists are when it comes to basic first principle scientific facts.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a fabulous american anthropologist, wrote a book called 'blood rites' where she talks in anthropological terms about the roots of war. One of the things she did was if not come up with the term 'social reproduction', use it extensively, to show how institutions reproduce themselves. The institution of war and violence is a good example.

The point here is it can be true that men are more prone to violence than women at the same time as the idea that the extent to which men are violent in our society is a social construct moreso than it is a genetic predisposition.

Anthropology is both a politically hotly-contested area, given that identity is so important to us, and 'who we used to be' feeds fairly clearly into our current day identity, as well as a difficult to understand / easy to obscure and mislead subject. The Hobbesian view that life outside of civilisation was 'nasty, brutish and short' was little more than propaganda to convince the equivalent of liberal europeans at the time that the colonizing project was a civilizing one that would be a favour to those living still as hunter-gatherers. In actual fact, hunter-gatherers, the dominant way of life for humans for the vast majority of the time since we've been called modern humans, and even for the vast majority of the time since we developed speech and communication and working together, was one of relative peace. Violence was still a part of life, but just wasn't a bit part. Population density was relatively low, and if there were a nearby tribe, game theoretically, trade and good relations were better for both parties than just attacking them for no reason, particularly given there were plenty of resources everywhere.

So what happens in anthropology sometimes is that people make up that our ancestors were incredibly violent, when it was only the neolithic - where we settled, and now we had land to protect, and efficiency gains meant that some people could give up their hoes and take up arms and specialize as soldiers, and mothers started having more kids, because they could support them, and they would be useful farmhands etc - that we started actually properly going to war. Part of the reason they make this up is so that they can go 'look, it's in our nature to be violent, and that justifies this violence today'. The same is true with the concept of 'selfishness'. The libertarian economic project would have you believe that **** economicus is inherently selfish. That's kinda dumb. We are not at all naturally selfish more than we are co-operative. We are slightly selfish, sometimes, but 'what's good for the group is good for the individual' is far more often true than 'what's good for the individual is good for the group'. Whether you look at it on a gene level, a tribe level, a social reproduction level, whether it's hunting, or cooking, we've got to where we are as a species not because we're top of the food chain - we've taken ourselves out of the food chain, effectively - and not even because we're smarter, but because we're collectively smarter, by virtue of extreme sociality. In a tribal setting, selfishness would often just be met with exile, which would usually have been at least a death sentence, if not on top of that the chance for your genes not to get passed on. We're not mountain lions.

Wazz - while an interesting view and worth exploring in its own right, none of your post contradicts what I asserted, which is that it is common sense that men are more predisposed to violence than women. I did not opine on whether modern society is or is not more violent than other periods in history, although I believe others did.

You're attacking claims I didn't make, then. I accept that the biology of gender includes higher testosterone for men which predisposes them to more violence. I do not accept that that is the sole explanation for why men today are far more commonly the perpetrators of violence than women. It is obviously hard to be able to say with certainty how much of it is explained by biology and how much by society, but it's at least true to me that some of it is explained by society, including a strong tendency to pervert the study of history / anthropology / biology into justifying more violence than is in our nature.

Common sense must be handled with care, because cultural norms / received wisdom can bleed into it so easily. Common sense is a great test for whether 2 x 2 = 100 or not. It is not such a good test for teasing out the difference between very subtle but very strong cultural indoctrination, and our 'true nature'.

Big part, not bit part.

And lol that the profanity filter removed 'h0m0'.

Do you not think there has always been war? A smaller proportion of people die by violent means than at any time in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Be..._of_Our_Nature

All of society is determined by biology. What else could it be determined by?



OK, I guess it is also partially determined by the environment (both biological and climatic) and possibly by chance. But nothing cultural is independent of biology.

Obligatory xkcd

The concept of 'emergent properties' is pretty valuable here. Maths is applied philosophy, physics is applied maths, chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry, culture is applied biology. Emergent properties aren't easily predictable just by going back up a level. In evolutionary biology, I believe it's Richard Dawkins (don't have the details here) that talks about animals evolving features that are otherwise not just useless but actively harm survival chances mildly, but to do so demonstrates to resilience to a potential mate. Think the elaborate mating rituals of a lot of birds, or the big tusks of reindeer.

The point here is that while culture comes from biology, it can build on it and go against the original. Culture is indeed not possibly independent of biology, but that doesn't mean that the original biology, evolutionary tendencies, and so on, are fixed and not subject to cultural pressures that don't serve obvious evolutionary or survival goals.

I don't disagree with anything you said here. I hope cultural pressures will continue to reduce societal violence over the long run. But it's still going to be men who are more violent than women (or, best case, need to rely more on cultural pressures to keep their violent tendencies repressed).

Does "common sense" just mean "priors I'm unwilling to challenge" here?