Hi Lexi,

Last I heard, the US was financing the schooling of hundreds of thousands of girls, among other financial support mechanisms, uni scholarships, women's programs in training and employment, etc. Where do you get your figures from ?

And all of it would be for nothing if the Taliban ever return to power.

Sometimes, in a particular situation, none of the options available are squeaky-clean perfect, immaculate, without blemish. But I would far rather the US stay and build up the influence and power of Afghanistan's women than to leave the place to a bunch of troglodytes and mullahs. I frankly don't give a toss for male-dominated power systems, in the guise of 'culture', anywhere. Away with all rubbish like that.

Love,

Joe

OTB, to be honest I'm interested mostly in the sociological impacts of social psychological interactions. An understanding of what makes the bulk responses happen, if you like.

I'm hoping to do some sociology units focussing on modelling. It seems to me that while understanding individual motivations is important, the system is ultimately understandable in terms of its bulk properties, which I've analogised to thermodynamic variables, although I'm sure that like mechanics, a greater understanding will lead to more complex models and that integrating the individual interactions into a complete model will be very complex. Dynamical systems analytical approaches are the big thing in the field at the moment.

Joe, history is certainly important to know, but politics emerges from the culture and the social order. I'm not sure if I need to know more than I do, because it's a derivative rather than primary property.

Poirot, that's instructive. As I've suggested several times previously, the feminist model requires a high level of social order and a large amount of energy to make it possible. When the business of survival is more important than how people feel, then it makes sense to have a traditional set of gender roles.

I do hope that our politicians don't allow feminist agitators to make them hang on to the support structures and subsidies as our economy runs down. It would be madness.

It's also instructive that the Western effort in Iraq was such a failure in so many ways. While the imposition of a foreign structure through force might work for a while, as soon as the force is lifted the local influences and cultural structures reassert themselves, especially in a reasonably homogeneous population.

Lexi, in my view that would be the worst possible thing to do. It's simply going to be viewed as trying to steal their women, which their social arrangement has evolved to prevent. It won't lead to a better place, just more instability and more dead women.

Activists aren't good advisers.

Antiseptic,

Fascinating.

While out in the real world, in Afghanistan, young girls are daily dodging the acid attacks and women are being blown up for daring to try to participate in the running of their country, and out in the villages they are being stoned for being raped, somebody goes all academic and compares them to clay and crystals and relates the forces at work violently against them to fluid mechanics.

Perhaps there is an academic career for you, after all, Antiseptic, keep at it. But there is just a touch there of, at least, Asperger's, that amazing unfeelingness for other human beings - and I apologise to all those Asperger's sufferers on this thread.

Joe

Perhaps you shouldn't be quite so precious, Joe, there's more than one way to look at things.

After all it's the Asperger-type mind that usually makes the breakthroughs that elude the ever so empathetic (not) minds of the general population. That's why it took someone like Einstein to realise that the bloke falling out of the window through the air was the one whose body was "not" feeling the effect of gravity, while all the people watching him fall, were....General Relativity.

Don't you ever take an utra-macro view of the whole kit and kaboodle of humanity on earth?

We're a clever and widespread organism who builds it's own caves - even highrise one's. We mix stuff and pour stuff and that stuff hardens into stuff we can live in and stuff we can roll over the countryside in wide bands. We can then get inside other stuff that's poured and molded and hardened into capsules and roll ourselves over the black hardened bands that roll over the countryside to go places. and when we've gone to places, we get to come back...off course, there's so much more to humanity, but if one's species was being observed from afar?.....well you get my drift.

While your here, I'll just mention the wonderful empathy that must take place in those rooms where men get to play video games with people's lives in Pakistan...talk about unfeelingness. Real people reduced to targets, over 3,000 dead for 47 high profile targets.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/04/01/infographic-tool-offers-detailed-look-deaths-by-u-s-drone-attacks/

Strange old species, us humans.....

Joe, perhaps I am somewhere on the Aspergers spectrum. You're not the first one to take offence at a perception of me as lacking empathy and to try to offend by using an accusation of Aspergers.

From where sit, I think you can see that the suggestions I have made are of some validity and you don't like the implications, based on your perception of yourself as a good person who has great concern for the welfare of others. The implication is that your goodness might be misdirected and cause bad outcomes, so you choose to try to shoot the messenger instead because you don't like the message.

The thing is that a real understanding of how to manipulate the physical world was derived from a realisation that while individual atoms behave in an unpredictable way, a collection of atoms will have a set of properties that can be measured and used to predict the overall outcome for the whole system. We don't need to know what happens to every atom of petrol in an engine to know that we need to have the right air-fuel mixture for the engine to run properly or to predict how much power it will produce at a given speed.

It is the focus on irrelevant detail rather than the overall outcomes which has meant social interventions have so often failed to do as promised. You have mentioned the Aboriginal industry before and that's a perfect example.

Wouldn't you rather have a genuine understanding of how to make the things you regard as "good" actually lead to good things, or do you simply want to make yourself feel good for having good intent?

Hi Poirot,

Well, none of us feel that we live in the 'far away' or that we are embedded in the long-term flow of history - magisterially floating above the fray - we all think we live in the here and the now. I hope I never take the ultra-macro viewpoint ever again.

Hi antiseptic,

Neither do we, each of us, live and feel our individual atoms consciously, or relate to each other on that level.

We are individual humans, with our own assemblages of infinite numbers of atoms, but within a world of seven or more billion individuals. Normally, none of us consciously operates at the atomic level, and nor do we operate at the 'ultra-macro' level. We operate as individuals, relating to other individuals in greater or fewer numbers, sharing their pains and pleasures, regardless of our atomic structure or our micro-place in the vast cosmos - in the manageable here and now.

I didn't mean to try to offend you, Antiseptic, but i was reminded of the vogue for something called 'sociobiology' back about thirty five or forty years ago, which compared humans to flies and bacteria and fruit and chooks - all very entertaining, but not to be taken seriously. Your socio-pedology, if we are meant to take it seriously, falls into a similar category of armchair musings. All you need is to find a French philosopher who concurs with you.

Joe