I Must Be Doing Something Right....

[tcpip]

The past few days I have been receiving accolades from several UN staff in vastly different sectors throughout the country for various bits of IT advice I've been giving out. Whilst it hasn't seemed like hard work to me, sometimes I forget that I actually do have very good research skills, the capacity to write an dense but logical and clear papers, and that I have moderate knowledge in a range of IT issues and how it all hangs together rather than extremely good specialist knowledge.

In other news, I have two days to finish the final version of my version of events in the great ccTLD war. Seven months of me giving out all the warning signals and finally the people in charge start to wake up on the issue. I'm going to find it very difficult to forgive the political elite here if they stuff this up.

Oh, almost forgot to mention. The Age published a letter I sent in today concerning Islam's early (perhaps too early) capacity for enlightened thinking.

Unsworn has been very tricky for the second question. He's pinched a comment I made in another journal namely:

There is one universal standard for morality (nota bene: I'm an aesthetic relativist and a moral universalist); when all participants know what they're doing and all participants agree to participate. If you want to do what other people may consider (aesthetically) kinky but you and and your fellow participants want 'in' (is that the right word?) then it's a moral act, and quite frankly, noone else's damn fscking business.

It seems that he wants me to elaborate on this... Well, I'll write that up tonight..

Call this "A Contribution to An Attempt To Resolve the Question of Universal Morality and Cultural Relativism using the Sambian Cock-Suckers of New Guinea As An Example"

... and with that rather unusual and complex example, I suspect that a lot of people will be interested in my answer.....

Comments

[angel80.livejournal.com]

That was quite fascinating. Personally, I find the 5% who fail to conform to be the most interesting. I wonder how they get on in life.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, seeming that the acts are likely to occur in private one could imagine that it would be somewhat similar to the lives of homosexuals in our society before decriminalization. So there would be some "private freedom" (for what it's worth), public disrepect and condemnation for real or suspected "deviants" and outright expulsion and/or punishment for anyone caught in the act.

Re:

[angel80.livejournal.com]

If one assumes that some degree of homosexual feeling and/or activity during teenage years is the norm, then the difference is that where we either try to repress it or sweep it under the carpet, the Sambians have turned it into a requirement. We have developed 'explanations' of such behaviour that describe it as deviant and counter to the requirements of reproduction, whereas they have developed an explanation which makes it a necessary part of reproduction. There are other societies that seem to put it somewhere between these extremes.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Of course, both explanations miss the point entirely. Either describing homosexuality as counter or necessary to reproduction is an unnecessary elaboration to what it is. People engage in it because they like it. Interpretated from a moral perspective, that's the only part that should be considered relevant.

Re:

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Yes, but a characteristic of ALL human societies is that individual freedoms are circumscribed by the rules that the society develops in order to maximise its chances of successful social reproduction (which of course includes biological reproduction). If you want to tackle one aspect of this moral code, then you must understand first how power is structured. Fundamentalist christians have not changed their morality on account of the discovery of a gene that is associated with homosexual preference (they don't even open their minds to the possibility). Scientists have consistently ignored evidence that homosexual behaviour is as common in non-human species as it is in human species. The Sambians are unlikely to change their rules, just because they learn that the tingu doesn't really exist.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

... how power is structured..

Of course, herein lies a problem. Power, being the institutional capacity to "steer" societies is inhabited by individuals. And it does take a certain individual to voluntarily change such a system that weakens their own hold on said power or voluntarily give it up. Most of the time the status quo hangs on because of vested interests - regardless of how damaging it may be to the society as whole.

An interesting example of a group that didn't attempt to hold on to power once having achieved it was the military coup in Costa Rica in the 1940s, which after giving blacks and women the vote, promptly abolished itself making Costa Rica the only country in the world without an army.

I imagine however if they kept themselves in power for any real period of time, then the same old problems would have arisen.

Re:

[angel80.livejournal.com]

A rare case indeed!