Who? Whom?
For some reason I don't feel disgust towards pigeons or consider them filthy animals, even though I have understood that some people do so. It's very interesting that the exact same animals are called either "pigeons" or "doves" depending on whether they live in slums and eat garbage. I wonder if there is some useful analogy to humans to be found here.
The old posting "Humans Have Been Polygamous For Most Of History" of FuturePundit is a bit like announcing that water is wet, since the simple fact that men are bigger and stronger than women already shows that the claim made in the title is true. Throughout the prehistory, women chose the strongest and most violent males to breed with, or perhaps they didn't get a choice. However, what I particularly noticed was this paragraph, which in both style and content is almost like something that The Danimal would have written:
My guess is that the legalization and increasing use of divorce has increased the gap between what percentage of women and what percentage of men manage to reproduce in each generation. The most sucessful men have a legally sanctioned way to have a series of wives while the least successful men become street people. Nature is harsh. Why we refer to such an unforgiving and brutal reality as mother nature is beyond me. What is loving and kind about natural selection and evolution in action? Nothing that I can see.
My wife is tonight with her parents in the Toronto Film festival. I don't feel like standing in line for hours to get tickets for some sensitive and touching drama about the sexual awakening of two gay cowboys, so I will rather stay home with my friend Jimmy Beam. [Note: I wrote this in November 2004]
Let this be the theological pondering of the week: what would a religion be like that otherwise had essentially the monotheistic God of Christianity, but whose holy books explicitly denied the existence of the immortal soul so that death would be the end for each person without the slightest hope of spending the rest of the eternity in Pie Heaven?
When I quickly checked the weather report on the CityPulse channel, I started to watch the program "Rewind" shown taking two thirds of the screen next to the weather information. The show repeated evening news from 1979. The whole thing felt like watching something out of The Simpsons, when the same guy who still reads the evening news sat there 25 years younger. The headline news was the new and great Eaton Center mall being opened in downtown Toronto. In the weather report, there was a cardboard map in which the weather girl used a black marker to draw temperatures, clouds and wind directions. Too bad that Rewind doesn't play authentic commercials from the past, but comes back to the present day during the commercial breaks. Yet another great example of how copyrights limit the life of decent people.
In some old Judge Dredd book there was a story where the recurrent character Otto Sump started a successful food factory that used all kinds of disgusting ingredients to manufacture the food product. These President Choice products of the future included wine made in old boots, hair-o-bars and worm paste. The moral majority types of the city organized riots and demonstrations annoyed from the fact that people voluntarily eat such filth, even though physically and medically it was perfectly safe and even healthy to eat. Rioting escalated so badly to threaten the city that Dredd finally confiscated the factory for the city to run and changed it so that the products were kept the same but put to essentially unmarked packaging that no longer included a list of ingredients. In the last panel of the series, the moral majority types were sitting in a jail cell eagerly eating this unmarked pure food, happy that their resistance had not been in vain.
The reality show "Amish in the City" starts here today. This show has caused some opposition and uproar in Christians since it tempts the well-behaved Amish youth to give up their community and join the sinful life of the big city. But what would the people who are critical towards this show have said if in the 80's, somebody had made a similar reality show "Soviets in the City", in which youth of some communist countries would have lived for a month in the abundance of America? How exactly would this have been different?
Regarding polygamy in history: I sometime write posts that provide scientific evidence that proves the obvious because so many people deny the obvious.
Posted by FuturePundit | 5:42 PM
I sometime write posts that provide scientific evidence that proves the obvious because so many people deny the obvious.
Of course. When I wrote that saying that polygamy has been common is like saying that water is wet, I didn't mean to imply that you were in some kind denial. Indeed, the strange thing is that so many other people are in denial.
Posted by Ilkka | 7:33 AM