Segregated Buses in Jersusalem

[Glen.Nogami]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7361060&sc=emaf

I...don't know what to say, really. Also of note:

Last month, senior Haredi rabbis in Jerusalem led a public burning of see-through stockings and other allegedly risque dress.

Perhaps the sense of irony was surgically excised from their brains?

Edit: It gets better!

And in a major decision last month a committee of leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis here ruled that Haredi women should no longer be allowed to get academic degrees beyond high school.

It's a potentially devastating edict in a Haredi culture where many women are the main family breadwinner while the men study Torah full time.

 

[Luciano]

Every time I read this kind of news I don't know if to be happy or sad.
Sad for how people can be mean and stupid, happy because that's the best way to make the "not completely fundified" think about their religion.

In Italy the Catholic Church is once again on the offensive against immorality. So, instead of attacking corruption, greed, organized crime, etc, they are attacking homosexuals and same sex marriage laws (and we still haven't them!). This kind of behaviour is, at last, pissing off even many catholics.

Luciano

 

[Glen.Nogami]

Ah, that's a good point. I hadn't considered it from that angle, but maybe it'll help.

 

[baron]

"Today in Israel, women go around sometimes as if they're at the beach," she said. "It's really very undignified and it's erotically stimulating and it's also just distracting.

So these baboons aren't just nutters, they're perverted nutters.

 

[supercorgi]

So these baboons aren't just nutters, they're perverted nutters.

That was my reaction. That spokes woman said:

And that's a form of coercion — I call that non-religious coercion. I call that coercion of eroticism. That's a much more serious problem: the creeping degradation of the public square."

The de facto Haredi bus restrictions, she says, help men focus on their family — and their wife — and avoid distractions.

It's amazing how the men in the majority of the world get any work done with all the female distractions around them. And these men are so holy and god focused that they don't have enough self control to avoid looking at an indecent female?

But opponents call the lawsuit an attack on Haredi religious values and culture. Israeli educator and writer Shira Leibowitz-Schmidt, of the Haredi College for Women,

Would the new regulation not to educate women past high school level put this woman out of a job? How can she defend such idiocy?

 

[Beerina]

It's a potentially devastating edict in a Haredi culture where many women are the main family breadwinner while the men study Torah full time.

Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Emphasisiz mine.


This reminds me of those National Geographic films of lions in Africa, where the lazy male lion lies around and waits for the females to go kill something. Then it saunters up and drives them away and eats, then they eat later.

Methinks "social anthropologists" trying to understand things with an evolutionary analysis will choke on this one a bit -- the assumption that human behaviors such as this are "beneficial, otherwise they wouldn't have developed" is clearly faulty. It's clear the human mind and society can develop degrading behaviors that may take hundreds or thousands of years to winnow out via selective pressures. The warped human mind can whip a massive change into place at a rate that biology never could (and propagation via memes rather than genes), which is probably the driving force behind intelligence rather than "figuring things out", now that I think about it.

Someone go write a paper and credit me as backup author, thnxbye.

 

[Cello Man]

...Methinks "social anthropologists" trying to understand things with an evolutionary analysis will choke on this one a bit -- the assumption that human behaviors such as this are "beneficial, otherwise they wouldn't have developed" is clearly faulty...

Exactly. This is not like biological evolution, in which organisms best suited to their environments reproduce and eventually drive those ill-suited to their environments into extinction.

This is societal evolution, governed by ideas. The ideas that survive are not necessarily the most beneficial ones, they're just that: The ideas that survived.

Some ideas that have taken a lot of time to develop have certainly helped society as a whole. The scientific method, agriculture, trade, and medicine are a few I can think of. On the flip side, there a lot of ideas that have thus far survived that we could do without, such as divine right, racism, sexism, and nationalism.

 

[This Guy]

Exactly. This is not like biological evolution, in which organisms best suited to their environments reproduce and eventually drive those ill-suited to their environments into extinction.

This is societal evolution, governed by ideas. The ideas that survive are not necessarily the most beneficial ones, they're just that: The ideas that survived.

Some ideas that have taken a lot of time to develop have certainly helped society as a whole. The scientific method, agriculture, trade, and medicine are a few I can think of. On the flip side, there a lot of ideas that have thus far survived that we could do without, such as divine right, racism, sexism, and nationalism.

And charging for beer! Don't forget charging for beer! That was an idea we could do without!

 

[CapelDodger]

Exactly. This is not like biological evolution, in which organisms best suited to their environments reproduce and eventually drive those ill-suited to their environments into extinction.

This is societal evolution, governed by ideas. The ideas that survive are not necessarily the most beneficial ones, they're just that: The ideas that survived.

I agree. The environment we've evolved to prosper in isn't the one we live in now, not by a long way. Gender differences, such as size and strength, were obviously appropriate to a hunter-gatherer-scavenger lifestyle, but they're not obviously appropriate to the environment we've created for the vast majority of humanity. And we've hardly evolved at all, biologically, while that's been going on. Male dominance was presumably a winning strategy in the old environment but there's no reason why it should be in the current one. It has only been maintained along the way by the introduction of religions and ideologies and male-dominated power-structures. So we see examples such as the one under discussion, where women must be prevented from gaining an education they're perfectly capable of benefiting from in the modern (relatively modern, in this case) environment because it would allow them to compete equally with men. The sad thing is that so many women go along with it.

Some ideas that have taken a lot of time to develop have certainly helped society as a whole. The scientific method, agriculture, trade, and medicine are a few I can think of. On the flip side, there a lot of ideas that have thus far survived that we could do without, such as divine right, racism, sexism, and nationalism.

These are ways in which our evolved instincts manifest in our artificial environment. Inherited status, for instance, can be seen in chimpanzee groups and human societies. Even supposedly egalitarian societies such as the US. It's concealed behind inherited wealth but the same instincts are behind it.

 

[CapelDodger]

And charging for beer! Don't forget charging for beer! That was an idea we could do without!

Brew your own, and smash the system!

 

[Glen.Nogami]

IIt's concealed behind inherited wealth but the same instincts are behind it.

Aristocracy: Because it's more honest.

 

[CapelDodger]

Someone go write a paper and credit me as backup author, thnxbye.

I can't be bothered either, but I agree with you whole-heartedly.

Most of the world's work is done by women. Women make the small decisions - what the family eats, what the kids wear and how they get to school, trivial stuff like that - while men make the big decisions - how to solve Global Warming or sort things out in the Middle East. Men make policy, women make the coffee. It's only right and proper, innit?

 

[Darth Rotor]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7361060&sc=emaf

Perhaps the sense of irony was surgically excised from their brains?

Like yours?
Jersusalem

Jerusalem.

If you are going to take the piss out of someone for being stupid, it is best not to display stupidity, or more probably carelessness, in the title of your post.

Hurts the street cred, mah fren.

DR

 

[Glen.Nogami]

Like yours?
Jersusalem

Jerusalem.

If you are going to take the piss out of someone for being stupid, it is best not to display stupidity, or more probably carelessness, in the title of your post.

Hurts the street cred, mah fren.

DR

Fallibility hurts my credibility? I don't see how, seeing as I believe we are all fallible (please, correct me if I am wrong.)

I would not choose to equate a typo to public burning of "allegedly risque dress". You certainly may, but I think would question the validity of such a comparison .