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[pisskop]

Race is arbitrary. We spent a good portion of the semester being taught that.

People in class thought that it was synonymous with heritage and culture, despite all three being different things.

Sociology intro is basically taking a chisel to a stone, trying to hit it with a hammer a few times, and then throwing the chisel aside in favor of smashing the rock.

Do you think the split between race is usefulin any capacity?

[Aslandus]

Race is arbitrary. We spent a good portion of the semester being taught that.

People in class thought that it was synonymous with heritage and culture, despite all three being different things.

Sociology intro is basically taking a chisel to a stone, trying to hit it with a hammer a few times, and then throwing the chisel aside in favor of smashing the rock.

Do you think the split between race is usefulin any capacity?

No, splitting the races doesn't seem to actually benefit anyone apart from not having to explain why the person next to you has a different skin color... But I've never understood racism or any sort of "One person is inherently better due to an arbitrary characteristic" beliefs...

[pisskop]

Race is arbitrary. We spent a good portion of the semester being taught that.

People in class thought that it was synonymous with heritage and culture, despite all three being different things.

Sociology intro is basically taking a chisel to a stone, trying to hit it with a hammer a few times, and then throwing the chisel aside in favor of smashing the rock.

Do you think the split between race is usefulin any capacity?

No, splitting the races doesn't seem to actually benefit anyone apart from not having to explain why the person next to you has a different skin color... But I've never understood racism or any sort of "One person is inherently better due to an arbitrary characteristic" beliefs...

Thats a fairly narrow approach to that.  Italians have a myriad of 'colors', for instance, and although the US currently defines hispanics as 'white' many are anything but in skin tone. 

These are ethnicities, true, but ethnicities are sub-sects of race.

[Urist Tilaturist]

What do you mean by race being arbitrary? There are clearly some characteristics, like height, which are partly determined by it.

[BlackFlyme]

What do you mean by race being arbitrary? There are clearly some characteristics, like height, which are partly determined by it.

It's an argument of semantics, and I regret bringing it up.

It started with me bringing up sociology.

[AlexanderTheIncompetant]

 Sorry for going back a bit, but look Deboche, bad education, illiteracy and monogamy (or whatever it is you said) does not equal patriarchy (or matriarchy for that matter). In real life it is associated with that, because most early societies were patriarchal AND uneducated (except higher orders of society) and rather conservative about sex (think medieval Europe) or because other patriarchal societies applied these things more or less exclusively to women (or the opposite for a matriarchal society) to control them, while men were educated and could be polygamous (like sharia law)
 TL;DR, those characteristics are often traits/tools of patriarchal societies, but not causes.

 Also, where are we told that dwarves aren't educated? There aren't any schools or anything, but at the same time we don't know what they say to each other, and they engrave pictures of events that took place in early history of other civilizations.

[pisskop]

Shhh.  Part of 'progress' is making fringe views mainstream with little scientific evidence.

Which reminds me; is the world a patriachy or matriarchy?

[Urist Tilaturist]

Sorry for going back a bit, but look Deboche, bad education, illiteracy and monogamy (or whatever it is you said) does not equal patriarchy (or matriarchy for that matter). In real life it is associated with that, because most early societies were patriarchal AND uneducated (except higher orders of society) and rather conservative about sex (think medieval Europe) or because other patriarchal societies applied these things more or less exclusively to women (or the opposite for a matriarchal society) to control them, while men were educated and could be polygamous (like sharia law)
 TL;DR, those characteristics are often traits/tools of patriarchal societies, but not causes.

 Also, where are we told that dwarves aren't educated? There aren't any schools or anything, but at the same time we don't know what they say to each other, and they engrave pictures of events that took place in early history of other civilizations.

Mediaeval Europe was not that conservative. In London there were brothels right outside Southwark Cathedral, and the bishop only closed them temporarily when important guests arrived, to keep up appearances! Many members of the clergy frequented these places. Sexuality was only really restricted for respectable married women, because of the need of men to know that their heirs were legitimate.

[Deboche]

Sorry for going back a bit, but look Deboche, bad education, illiteracy and monogamy (or whatever it is you said) does not equal patriarchy (or matriarchy for that matter). In real life it is associated with that, because most early societies were patriarchal AND uneducated (except higher orders of society) and rather conservative about sex (think medieval Europe) or because other patriarchal societies applied these things more or less exclusively to women (or the opposite for a matriarchal society) to control them, while men were educated and could be polygamous (like sharia law)

We can argue about the cause and the effect in this case. My point is that monogamy is a trait of patriarchal societies. I'll refer you to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_impact_of_female_education

Excerpt: "Recent research in human development has established a strong link between women's education and international development.
(...)
 In particular, researchers seek to determine what factors explain differences in rates of development. Women's education is one of the major explanatory variables behind the rates of social and economic development, and has been shown to have a positive correlation with both"

[pisskop]

Thats not because women are suddenly free from their opresson, thats a correlation that corresponds to half the human race begining to take a more active partin research, labor, and academic work.

I could likely tie the rate of food production in with those variables, or the average lifespan.  egh, nothings worse than somebody who delicately slices the data they want out of history.  And, you know, the social sciences are just known for their objective truths.  Cherry got picked, aye

[Deboche]

You obivously didn't read the article. But I need to ask if you have a point or argument to make.

[Urist Tilaturist]

That article says that women's education helps societies prosper, which it does, of course; having a lot more educated people does tend to do that. It also says that educated women marry later and have fewer children, stopping excess population growth.

If a society only educates its men and not its women, it is a patriarchy. If men are not educated either, then that society is like one of the tribes that deboche likes so much, and may be patriarchal or not.

Since that article does not even mention monogamy, unless I missed something, it seems an odd source to support that argument.

[pisskop]

thanks.  Im on a phone. . 

my next questions would be how technlogy impacted education, how technology [did] fare w/o the majority of women being educated, how technology fared before female education, and where we have examples of proper matriarches.

[Deboche]

It's not meant to support polygamy. My point from the beginning was that DF was a patriarchal society because of several factors, including monogamy and low literacy. So I tried to establish the link between these things.

I believe patriarchy and monogamy both started with agriculture, when people went from being hunter-gatherers to settling in one place. With agriculture came wealth, cities, war, and so on. The hoarding of wealth made it important to identify who your descendents were so women were forced into monogamy and to a degree became possessions as well.

I don't think an economic system needs to be tied to patriarchy or oppression of women but I also believe in a society of equality between the genders, you often find polygamy and sexual freedom.

To answer pisskop, I don't think there are any records of matriarchal societies. It's been argued that either they never existed or they didn't trouble to leave great structures that endure through time.

[LMeire]

In DF it's a universally low literacy though, and there's nothing in place to stop a woman who knows how to read from continuing to further her education. It's certainly a historical tool of oppression; but it was very rare for a society to put ideology over economic dominance so the oppression was mostly passive in nature.

And agriculture had nothing to do with hording, all mammals have hoarding behavior to deal with winter. Tribes would carry everything they made themselves and leave nothing behind when the food ran out; that's why, despite some 10,000-20,000 years of human tool-use we've only found a few artifacts in extremely out of the way places- usually near the remains of the tools' probable owners. Agriculture actually made it harder to survive at first, since we didn't know what we were doing and didn't get as varied a diet as our hunter-gatherer neighbors did. The only reason anyone put up with the back-breaking labor was to get our otherwise impossible alcohol fix on a regular basis, nomadic tribes had to either stumble on fermenting fruit by chance or wait long enough without food than was safe or comfortable.

Finally, warfare is really just organized violence against an "other". If you seriously think we invented that then I invite you to look up what happens when two different pack-predators claim the same stretch of hunting territory.

@pisskop: The Iroquois Nations were known to have chosen their representatives using a council of women whenever the nations met to discuss something of importance to the alliance. Genghis Khan also had a habit of appointing older women to govern cities he left intact, since most of the able-bodied men and a lot of the able-bodied women were recruited before the horde moved on. It's also generally accepted that the nomadic groups of the western Steppes were matriarchal, as the Greek myths of amazons and centaurs sound a lot like Scythians and Huns from a point of view uninterested in properly studying anyone not-Greek/trying to kill them.