Re: Meditations on the Tragedy of Human Existence

On Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:44:22 -0700, Rebecca Rice
<rebecca_rice@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Quadibloc wrote:

A Utopia, in which everyone is _reasonably_ content, would require
that everyone have enough to eat, a shelter with central heating, and
also access to entertainments that provide mental stimulation - books
to read, television, the Internet. Political freedom and democracy is
assumed, as without this means to defend one's share of the world's
wealth, people usually end up being enslaved by evil men. Also, I
assume that while there is a "world government" which outlaws both war
and tyranny, nations exist as political units - and they are so
structured that few people have to bother with learning a foreign
language merely to earn a living. Thus, speakers of Cantonese, of
Welsh, of Basque, and so on, all have their own countries.

If the Welsh, Basque, and Cantonese have their own
countries, why not the Lakota, Palestinian, and Aborigine?

Palestinian isn't a language, and Aborigine is a family of roughly 600
languages (many virtually extinct).

For that matter, why the Welsh? Do they WANT their own nation? And
how do you sort out the Welsh-speaking Welsh from the English-speaking
Welsh, given that they often live in the same village?

And how do you define "language"? The differences between Serbian and
Croatian consist of which alphabet you use (Serbian uses Cyrillic and
Croatian uses Latin) and the pronunciation of some genitive endings;
they used to both be considered a language called Serbo-Croatian until
that became politically inconvenient. The only people who can tell
Serbs and Croats apart are Serbs and Croats and Bosnians. (Bosnians
were considered Serbs who happened to be Muslim rather than Orthodox
right up until THAT became politically inconvenient; they generally
speak Serbian.)

So we need to put something in the water so that the human sex ratio
is 100 males to 104 females as the final step in achieving a stable,
peaceful, and sustainable social order which does not rest on
depriving women of the freedom to choose a life not centered around
marriage and children.

This may be a shocking thought to you, but there is not some
fundamental right that guys get married. And there is no
way that your "we just need to increase the number of women
available" is going to change that. For an extreme example,
take a man who is overweight, ugly, addicted to alcohol and
drugs, gambles away the rent money, physically violent, and
a pedophile. Simply increasing the number of women is not
going to make any of them want to marry this guy. And yet,
your basic premise seems to be that simply being able to
marry is going to make him a decent human being.

Arguing with him about this is completely futile, but as long as
you're at it, allow me to mention that in several times and places
there have been shortages of marriageable men -- post-WW1 Britain,
19th-century New England seaports, etc. The response of the surplus
women has NOT been to marry unfit, undesirable men, but rather to turn
to one another for companionship -- see the term "Boston marriage."







--
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