NOTE TO AVFM READERS: See UPDATE 2 at bottom of post.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, a dude named unkleman wants us all to remember the debt of gratitude we owe to the white men of the world:
This message went over pretty well with the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly self-pitying and self-congratulatory and maybe just an eensy teensy weensy bit racist demo in the Men’s Rights subreddit. I guess it pays to know your audience!
Men’s Rights and White Supremacy: two … tastes that go together.
Thanks to the folks in the AgainstMensRights subreddit for pointing me to this lovely comment.
UPDATE: Apparently, Unkleman’s comment was meant as sarcasm. That is, while he seems to think that his version of history is accurate, he thinks that the notion that individual white people today deserve credit for things other white people did in the past is stupid.
Interestingly, when he pointed out that this was what he actually meant, he got downvoted below zero, a stark contrast to the reception his original comment got. Take a look:
![ishm 5 points 1 day ago (10|5) I am in agreement with the majority of your statement! But the "owe to white men" stanza going on for a multitude of sentences triggered negative feelings in me. I do not believe we "owe it to white men", yet I would be much more complacent with "we should appreciate the MEN and WOMEN who discovered them". Owe should be excluded as there was no damned contract signed. Minorities and other whites do not owe anything to whites who discovered various technologies. Appreciate is the word you meant I hope. permalink save parent report give gold reply [–]unkleman -1 points 1 day ago (4|5) Yeah, it was entirely meant to stir negative feelings and the premise is ridiculous. It is just the other side of the coin of the thought process for people who use such excuses to be "politically correct" racists and meant to show that their justifications should lead to a reverse conclusion. If I actually believed I am owed kudos for racial reasons, one should assume that I literally have nothing else going for me in life and that would be sad.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/unkle2.png?resize=533%2C445&ssl=1)
Evidently, the Men’s Rightsers liked his comment much better when they thought he totally meant it.
UPDATE 2: Evidently my point in posting a picture of King Leopold of Belguim was a bit too subtle for the not-so-great minds at A Voice for Men to understand. So here is the point, in plain English: If you’re going to talk about all the good things done by white men in history, which have been considerable, you should also be prepared to talk about the bad things they have done, which have also been considerable. Since the fellow I quoted gave examples of the good things he sees as white male accomplishments, I thought I would provide an example of a white man who was not such a good fellow as a counterexample. I hope this helps!
RE: ollyoxen
However, both Chinese and Korean are languages that have thousands of variable characters, making printing presses nice, but not that useful.
Um, I was under the impression that Korean had a finite set of phonological radicals, combined to make syllabic sounds. You could rig up a printing press system using interlocking radical stamps without too much trouble, I think. So yeah, I don’t buy that.
(Seriously, Korean seems to be one of the best designed alphabets around. Damn!)
LBT, the Korean alphabet is an interesting case, as it was developed relatively late in history (1400s, I think?) relative to pretty much all other alphabets, and was tailored to be relatively simple and to specifically suit the Korean language, as opposed to other alphabets that (I believe) developed alongside languages and tend to have some weird discrepancies and foibles.
Prior to this (and through a lot of Korean history- hangul [the alphabet] has only really been in universal use since the early 1900s I think?), the Chinese alphabet was used instead, because the Chinese culture was such a behemoth in Asia for a large chunk of recorded history, and there was a lot of borrowing from it by surrounding countries (as well as invasions and whatnot). So when the printing press was invented in Korea, it’s likely they were using chinese characters.
This sharing of Chinese alphabet is also why Japanese is such a mess when it comes to alphabets- they used chinese characters for the longest time when their language is really not suited for it (a more phonetic alphabet like Hangul would work much better), and then they supplemented the chinese characters with TWO MORE alphabets (hirigana and katakana) to try to compensate for the shortcomings of the borrowed alphabet.
Excuse any errors in this, I’m not a historian in the slightest.
But yeah, everyone knows only white people did anything historically significant or interesting, right?
The confusion may be from the habit of writing Korean names using Chinese characters? But yeah, Hangul is pretty printing-friendly.
Sanskrit is another really elegant (and pretty) one.
My favorite alphabet is the Arabic alphabet. Cursive Arabic is very easy to grasp and it almost always looks pretty. I also used to do Arabic calligraphy, which unfortunately I’m not very good at but I made some interesting pieces, I guess. Most of them were just invented by 15-year-old language-obsessed me who thought it was cool to write old philosophical sayings in Arabic calligraphy. (The one that makes me cringe the most is basically a Confucius saying translated into sloppy Arabic.)
I might try writing people’s names in Arabic calligraphy again, though. People seem to be more interested in those, and I don’t have to fear the possibility of being extremely pretentious. (Let’s just say I’m glad I’m no longer 15.)
The only thing about the Arabic alphabet that bothers me is the difficulty involved in mastering certain consonants. Anyone who has tried learning the Arabic alphabet (as a non-native speaker of Arabic) knows how hard it is to pronounce ‘ayn, qaaf, and 7aa’.
My sister knows Hindi and her Sanskrit writing is just gorgeous. I envy her. x_x
As far as alphabets that are just really pretty to look at, I also like Arabic, and Thai.
I used to have trouble with my throat after my arabic lessons, which is odd since I’m Dutch and we’re stereotyped as having a language with many throat sounds.
Ooh, Thai. They’ve got a great alphabet. A lesser known but awesome one: Tifinagh. Everything looks like a secret code.
Since we’re on alphabets, fun fact: the Hebrew alphabet used by Jews (both in modern Israeli Hebrew and in the Tanakh and other sacred writings) is actually the Aramaic alphabet. The only people still using the original Hebrew alphabet are the Samaritans.
@Leum
Wow, I had no idea. I have always believed that Hebrew was kind of a long-standing, relatively independent language and that it was in fact Arabic that was largely influenced by Aramaic.
I would love to learn Aramaic if the opportunity ever presents itself. It sounds beautiful – like a soft combination of Hebrew and Arabic. Too bad I don’t know any decent texts on Aramaic.
RE: Catalpa
LBT, the Korean alphabet is an interesting case,
Yes! Its history is fascinating! And King Sejong = teh awesomez.
I know a bit about this, since I studied linguistics back in the day and was a Japanese minor. So this stuff is pretty much stuff I already know, but it’s still really cool anyway.
RE: katz
Sanskrit is another really elegant (and pretty) one.
I unfortunately know next to nothing about Sanskirt. *shame*
“I unfortunately know next to nothing about Sanskirt. *shame*”
That typo cracked me up. Read it as “without a skirt” and that u know nothing of being sans skirt. Hehehe.
@Kootiepatra
And that’s leaving out the small detail that that ALL OF CAIN’S DESCENDANTS (according to the Bible) DIED IN THE FLOOD. Seth is the ancestor of Noah and therefore all humanity. They can’t even get their shitty mysticism right.
Aaaarrrggghhh. And it’s not just that; it comes with this notion that science and inventions are done by solitary Eureka moments ex nihilo. There’s no such thing as precursors or parallel research.
Usually Einstein is cited as a prime example, when people forget that other scientists, such as Lorentz and Poincaré, were working on the same problems at the same time, and laid the groundwork for Einstein’s theory. Another good example was the invention of the airplane, usually cited as a stroke of genius by the solitary Wright brothers, when in fact a ton of people were racing to be the first to invent heavier-than-air flight, and it was achieved at least one more time independently before the Wrights claimed their invention.
“Eureka is Greek for ‘this bath is too hot'” – the Doctor
[blockquote]Re: the OP, there seems to be a very widespread idea – not just with MRAs, but with the general public – that if the person widely credited with inventing X hadn’t done so, X would never have existed. That ONE AND ONLY ONE person could ever have had the stroke of genius that enabled them to create X.[blockquote]
The jet aircraft is a fine example of why that’s wrong, I think. I can remember two inventors for that, but I think there was a third one as well.
As Isaac Newton, inventor of the catflap, said
I always love that Newton invented the catflap.
Then I wonder … what was the real reason that apple fell out of the tree?
Well, buggrit. The story about Newton may be urban myth. There are different versions of it, anyway.
I found this piece about it – it’s not the article so much, it’s the comments, which are really funny, especially the ones about Schrodinger’s Cat.
http://io9.com/the-legend-of-isaac-newtons-most-foolish-and-cat-frie-511737218
@kittehserf, I’m going with this one (‘cos I want to)
That was my favourite, too!
Though the idea of the cat/s just refusing to use the first door works as well. They do it with cat beds, can’t you just see them doing it with doors?
Especially if they think they can make a human open the door, instead. *glares at witchy kitty*
Open the door so they can then not go through it.
But hang around glaring, or gazing wistfully, at you with unbounded pity that you’re too stupid to work out what they really want even though they’ve not yet thought of it themselves.