Doug Wilson and his schtick

[Ken]

Men are more violent by nature. For example, Men are about 9-times more likely to commit murder and violent crime than women. That's a fact.

I'm not sure that measuring murder and violent crime rates and comparing them, really can be extended to heads of state and war. Just because heads of state are not personally wielding a weapon, but instead sending others.

It is just a data point. I do think men are quicker to employ violence, both at the personal level and at the national level. I don't think it is a coincidence that the leaders of Hamas, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Russia, etc. are all men. And that political ideologies of violence tend to be created by men. Whether it is Nazism or violent extremist Islam.

[ken_sylvania]

Men are more violent by nature. For example, Men are about 9-times more likely to commit murder and violent crime than women. That's a fact.

I'm not sure that measuring murder and violent crime rates and comparing them, really can be extended to heads of state and war. Just because heads of state are not personally wielding a weapon, but instead sending others.

It is just a data point. I do think men are quicker to employ violence, both at the personal level and at the national level. I don't think it is a coincidence that the leaders of Hamas, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Russia, etc. are all men. And that political ideologies of violence tend to be created by men. Whether it is Nazism or violent extremist Islam.

Probably a coincidence though that Ghandi was a man.

[R7ehr]

I'm not sure that measuring murder and violent crime rates and comparing them, really can be extended to heads of state and war. Just because heads of state are not personally wielding a weapon, but instead sending others.

It is just a data point. I do think men are quicker to employ violence, both at the personal level and at the national level. I don't think it is a coincidence that the leaders of Hamas, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Russia, etc. are all men. And that political ideologies of violence tend to be created by men. Whether it is Nazism or violent extremist Islam.

Probably a coincidence though that Ghandi was a man.

And the Prince of Peace.

[Ken]

Probably a coincidence though that Ghandi was a man.

It would be more accurate to say that Gandhi was very a-typical, especially in his relationship to women: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/93/1/186/6573241

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s relationships with women, and women in Gandhian politics and the Indian independence movement, have been important subjects for South Asian historians. Gandhian politics enabled Indian women to enter the nationalist movement, in which their participation was often articulated in terms of service to the nation, community, and family. Women in Gandhian politics were expected to be chaste, selfless, pure – the incarnation of the ideal Indian woman. For Gandhi, women, or more accurately femininity, were the embodiment of ahimsa – nonviolence – and he advocated chaste and nonviolent womanhood for women in his ashrams and beyond.

However, his personal relationships with women were often fraught with contradictions and tainted with the coercion implicit in paternalism and patriarchy. His relationships with his wife Kasturba, his spiritual wife Sarladevi Chaudhrani, his great-niece Manu Gandhi, and a host of other western women, reveal these tensions. Historians have generally analysed these relationships in relation to nationalist politics and/or philosophical discussions of sex in Gandhi’s life and thought. What has been left underexplored is the place of these interpersonal connections as they played out in Gandhi’s psyche, that is, the relationship between Gandhi’s self and these ‘others’.

Gandhi spent his life perfecting a nonviolent self, but he did not spend it alone; he was surrounded by women who bathed him, massaged him, fed him, and took care of his body at his ashrams in India. While he was intensely busy leading reformist movements, attending international meetings, and perhaps travelling more widely than anyone in India at the time, he was also a man who lived inside ashram communities with other people, mostly women. His own words and actions tell us much about his political ideas and public actions, but we may also gain new insights about him through an analysis of his nonviolent self as shaped by his quotidian interactions with others. Further, if, as Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests, ‘Gandhi’s body and the geo-body of the nation [were] inseparable’, then the domestic aspects of his body and self must focus also on those who cared for his body. I am not arguing that the personal superseded the political, but rather suggesting that these relationships offer another window onto Gandhian politics and philosophy, and by extension, the place of women in Indian nationalism.

As existing historiography on gender and nationalism has argued, women as mothers, wives, and caregivers were central to the project of national regeneration and independence in colonial India. For upper-caste Hindu women, conjugality was constructed as a national and patriotic duty, thereby making the Indian home itself a marker of difference from the West. At the same time, women were expected to become companions to their husbands, and to be well-read and trained in the science of home management and domesticity so as to raise a healthy family. While women gained a degree of freedom to pursue independent careers for themselves in India’s emerging urban centres, the domestic space to which women belonged was simultaneously and thoroughly politicized. Sexual relations, changing family dynamics, reforms in food and the kitchen, dressing styles – nothing can be relegated to a secluded, personal sphere in the history of colonialism and nationalism in India. Being a nationalist woman in India might have meant organizing and politicizing, but equally and perhaps more forcefully it entailed performing the physical and emotional labour of becoming an Indian wife and mother, which was undertaken as often within the domestic or household sphere as in the public marches and demonstrations. The women who entered Gandhi’s life and ashram were also expected to perfect their roles in the political and the domestic sphere as ideal Indian women.

[Judas Maccabeus]

Probably a coincidence though that Ghandi was a man.

It would be more accurate to say that Gandhi was very a-typical, especially in his relationship to women: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/93/1/186/6573241

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s relationships with women, and women in Gandhian politics and the Indian independence movement, have been important subjects for South Asian historians. Gandhian politics enabled Indian women to enter the nationalist movement, in which their participation was often articulated in terms of service to the nation, community, and family. Women in Gandhian politics were expected to be chaste, selfless, pure – the incarnation of the ideal Indian woman. For Gandhi, women, or more accurately femininity, were the embodiment of ahimsa – nonviolence – and he advocated chaste and nonviolent womanhood for women in his ashrams and beyond.

However, his personal relationships with women were often fraught with contradictions and tainted with the coercion implicit in paternalism and patriarchy. His relationships with his wife Kasturba, his spiritual wife Sarladevi Chaudhrani, his great-niece Manu Gandhi, and a host of other western women, reveal these tensions. Historians have generally analysed these relationships in relation to nationalist politics and/or philosophical discussions of sex in Gandhi’s life and thought. What has been left underexplored is the place of these interpersonal connections as they played out in Gandhi’s psyche, that is, the relationship between Gandhi’s self and these ‘others’.

Gandhi spent his life perfecting a nonviolent self, but he did not spend it alone; he was surrounded by women who bathed him, massaged him, fed him, and took care of his body at his ashrams in India. While he was intensely busy leading reformist movements, attending international meetings, and perhaps travelling more widely than anyone in India at the time, he was also a man who lived inside ashram communities with other people, mostly women. His own words and actions tell us much about his political ideas and public actions, but we may also gain new insights about him through an analysis of his nonviolent self as shaped by his quotidian interactions with others. Further, if, as Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests, ‘Gandhi’s body and the geo-body of the nation [were] inseparable’, then the domestic aspects of his body and self must focus also on those who cared for his body. I am not arguing that the personal superseded the political, but rather suggesting that these relationships offer another window onto Gandhian politics and philosophy, and by extension, the place of women in Indian nationalism.

As existing historiography on gender and nationalism has argued, women as mothers, wives, and caregivers were central to the project of national regeneration and independence in colonial India. For upper-caste Hindu women, conjugality was constructed as a national and patriotic duty, thereby making the Indian home itself a marker of difference from the West. At the same time, women were expected to become companions to their husbands, and to be well-read and trained in the science of home management and domesticity so as to raise a healthy family. While women gained a degree of freedom to pursue independent careers for themselves in India’s emerging urban centres, the domestic space to which women belonged was simultaneously and thoroughly politicized. Sexual relations, changing family dynamics, reforms in food and the kitchen, dressing styles – nothing can be relegated to a secluded, personal sphere in the history of colonialism and nationalism in India. Being a nationalist woman in India might have meant organizing and politicizing, but equally and perhaps more forcefully it entailed performing the physical and emotional labour of becoming an Indian wife and mother, which was undertaken as often within the domestic or household sphere as in the public marches and demonstrations. The women who entered Gandhi’s life and ashram were also expected to perfect their roles in the political and the domestic sphere as ideal Indian women.

I think that to be more like downright weird.