Tag Archives: terrorism

The Fist, and how to deal with it.

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I have been proud for some time that I knew Lydia McDonald back when she was a total goofball, before she became the sort of person who writes a thoughtful, well-considered response to the violence in Norway. Here’s one of the nut sentences:

Would you not rather suffer the pain of the innocent than wonder if something you have said or done stole enough joy from another human being that they passed the pain onward until it found you again?
It is that culture that mocks love and empathy and praises violence in whatever form, from unkind words to machismo to enslavement to war, that allows for the construction of human monsters at all.

There’s more, and you really should read the whole thing, now.
When you get punched, and I speak from a long history of inspiring violence in others, most people focus in on the fist. “I just got punched! What the hell? Why did they hit me?” The key question is not the fist, but what to do about it. Are you going to wrap yourself up in a fight or are you going to get out of it?

Lydia’s response, and mine, is that we can dissolve the fist before it ever reaches our nose. This doesn’t always work – but neither does anything else.

Satoshi Kanazawa cannot think.

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That this has not proven to be a handicap for someone employed by the London School of Economics is astounding and reflects poorly on them.

I found him through the stupidest, most sexist article I have read this year.

He argues:

The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex: there are no women in their relationships to say no.

This is the the point where I immediately knew Kanazawa cannot think. 1  Does he think that gay men do not hold jobs or have careers?  That they get nothing done?  That women do not want to have sex? 2   It takes but a moment’s reflection for any thinking person to look at that paragraph after having written it.  In a room where candles are going out from lack of oxygen one should still see the contradictions and quickly delete it.

Kanazawa cemented my opinion in the next paragraph.

This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software, in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.  There would be no civilization, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice.

Surely he is aware that gay warriors, musicians, authors, poets, artists, scientists might be a slight rebuttal to his idea?

I no longer believe that he is aware of this.  I read another article where Kanazawa advocates killing every human being in the mideast as a solution to terrorism.  His list of articles is a grand collection of logical fallacies.

I do not approve of ad-hominem arguments. However, if  Satoshi Kanazawa makes any statement, I would be biased to think the statement is wrong.

  1. I would also guess that he does not or cannot read the news, let alone know any gay people.  How else could he have missed the great number of gay men struggling for the right to marry?   (back)
  2. Later in the article he reveals that his problem is small sample size.  Women do not want to have sex with Satoshi Kanazawa, and he generalizes from that.   (back)