The Statue Wars Begin

What's so sinister about war memorials? Why should we read something sinister into them that isn't there? All countries have them.

Politics. * sigh * No wonder I'm depressed.

Nothing Bill but then you probably don't agree with the concept of toxic masculinity.

I regret that my reply is so long.

"Toxic masculinity," eh? Actually, I've come across that term many times. Especially at Good Men Project. The thought has just now occurred to me that "toxic femininity" has not been coined as its equivalent.

I’m not sure I know what it really means. Different people react differently to certain political slogans and labels. It helps to know why different people believe the way they do. That’s why, for example, in the United States, incredibly decent people are found in both of the major political parties as well as scoundrels and criminals.

From my own point of view, the term “toxic masculinity” has caught my attention because I’ve been concerned about the way boys and men are judged according to certain standards of masculinity that may or may not be valid. I get tired of those who incessantly label other guys as “alpha males” or “beta males.” In my opinion, their standards frequently are superficial.

I became aware of this issue when I was in my twenties. My sister and I were visiting a friend of hers when I noticed a paperback in her living room. My sister’s friend said she didn’t agree with the author’s views. The book was entitled The Feminized Male; and it was written by Patricia Cayo Sexton, a New York City sociology professor who was on the political left and considered herself to be a feminist. She spent considerable verbiage expressing a spiteful, bigoted view of quiet, studious boys who had no interest in sports and nonathetic guys in general whom she deemed to be effeminate. She demonized “feminized” males as a supposed threat to society. She claimed that the assassins of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy were “feminized males” who had been enraged by the “virility” of the Kennedy brothers. She also blamed the riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention on “feminized males” (i.e., anti-Vietnam War demonstrators) who were enraged by the “virility” of the Chicago cops. Baloney, I say!

I am in debt to her for showing me how a black feels while looking at white supremacist literature and how a Jew feels while looking at antisemitic hate literature. Since I happened to be a guy who had never had an interest in sports, I deeply resented this woman who would personally attack me even though I was a complete stranger to her and would regard me as an inferior and ascribe negative traits to me on an incredibly superficial basis when, in fact, I was (and have been) traditionally masculine in many ways. (When I was a boy, I had no interest in sports or westerns; but I loved snakes and monsters. I still like horror stories. I’m working on a bodybuilding program as a guy in his sixties, but I’ll never have an interest in sports as a fan. It’s just my preference. No big deal.)

So, I’ve been interested in certain standards of masculinity such as the notion that all boys must participate in sports and the notion that boys and men should never cry. Not surprisingly, I was receptive to the notion of toxic masculinity on the basis of my own personal observations and experiences. But I now realize that this term may mean something that is entirely different from my own beliefs and attitudes.

I have sympathized with feminists on many (but not all) issues, but I do realize that some feminists are anti-male while some men are misogynists.

What is my own view of masculinity? I believe there are different paths to masculinity.

In just the last ten years, I’ve learned that men are an incredibly diverse group (which should surprise no one); in other words, stereotypes are shattered left and right. For example, there are rugged men who are pacifists. There are bodybuilders and Navy SEALs who don’t like sports. There are homosexual men who are in far better shape than most heterosexual men. There have been instances of bullied nonathletic boys who, instead of learning from their experiences to place a high premium on empathy, grew up to be monsters (such as Timothy McVeigh and Heinrich Himmler).

So, I guess I don’t know how “toxic masculinity” has been defined.

I also guess that I wrote too much and that I’ve made myself look silly. Oh, well.

Nah. You wrote just enough.

There is black and white, there is hot and cold and there is femininity and masculinity.

Within each of these archetypes, there is shading but it is absurd to argue one is better than the other or one is "toxic"

Thank you, roger.

Indeed, I have never argued that one was better than the other or that one was "toxic." My sister has been a hero of mine because of her compassion and courage, but she never was a substitute for my stillborn brother. My relationship with him would have been different in some ways.

I had never construed that the term "toxic masculinity" was a putdown of boys and men. I had believed that reference was being made to certain behavioral patterns that are actually or supposedly harmful to them.

One of the reasons why I so strongly support traditional marriage (a position that is likely to result in my being condemned by well-meaning people) is because I realize that men and women (aside from the physical differences) are not the same, which is not to say that one is superior to the other. A child needs both a mother and a father. When one or the other is absent, the child does not receive the benefits of male/female dynamics on the part of his parents. It's bad enough when the relationship a child has with his father or mother has not been fully developed. Of course, some people would consider me to be a bigot for believing this, despite the fact that I've had a compassionate disposition since I was of a very young age. Of course, being a flawed human being, there have been times when I've failed in that regard.

I didn't accuse you of arguing anything.

I know that. There's no problem.

The people who present these figures are reputable scholars, and their figures are backed by reliable data. It isn't fair to them to place the term historians in quotes as if there were something questionable about their standing.



It's been awhile since I studied WWII conventional firebombing but I thought incendiaries like this were used in Hamburg and a few other cities earlier in the war.



25,000 dead and 10,000 missing and later found. 35,000 was a total of the two figures.



More than three million names have already been counted:
http://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=32961

However, the number of dead can be reliably expanded beyond the number of counted names because documents from Nazi Germany recorded the number of people that they killed:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/qar/qar01.html

It's not "part of history." It's spite commemorations of racist hatred.

Must maintain genetic purity so we can be as perfect as this specimen.

Let's cut your attempt to turn this into a reductio ad absurdum argument using the holocaust short right here where the brainfart began.

You somehow seem to think that the 25,000 number is a body count, but it is an estimate from city officials at the time. The dramatically inflated number of 200,000 was ordered by the German government to be published by the press at the time and well with people like you using that propaganda generations later I can see why they might do that.

To what "office" (> officially) are you referring?

Besides that, Dresden had 630,000 inhabitants in 1939.
Many think that the number was higher in 1944/45. (Refugees and deported are not included in these numbers.)

Bullshit. The Nazis were killing people as fast as they could in the camps at the end of the war because they wanted to maximize the number of dead. Their aim was to murder Jews, Roma, and other folks. That was their goal and they did it with gusto. There are plenty of people who witnessed this.

Don't rewrite history for your personal anti-semitic agenda.

My sentiments exactly.

Shalom,

Why having the Nazis grouping people, filling up trains, taking them to concentration camps, and killing them?

Why such a waste of war logistic?

If the intentions of the Nazis was to kill Jews and others, just shooting them where they were found was the easiest way, the practical way.

At that moment in the war, nobody was going to Germany to visit Hitler, no one was making films about how well Nazis treated the detainees, neither the arrest of detainees. The Nazis had all the opportunity of killing anyone, even their deserters in the middle of the streets and no one to impede them for doing so.

The fable of having Nazis collecting people from one place to send them to other locations for the sole purpose of killing them is laughable from the point of view of strategy of war.

Hitler might have been a very bad guy, but he wasn't an idiot to plan such a ridiculous strategy. If you call Hitler the worst enemy ever, then you are saying the right definition, but if you are calling him a "war criminal", then you are insulting him and he doesn't deserve such an insult because he never ordered such mass murdering.

Our new generations don't deserve receiving a twisted history of the WW2 events, just because the Allies decided to input crimes to Hitler, crimes that Hitler never committed.

In this matter, I won't marry to anyone but the truth, and the truth is that millions died because collateral damage, millions died by friendly fire, millions died because the Allies bombed Germany and Nazis conquered lands with thousands of airplanes 24/7 for more than 4 years.

Unless you prove that the bombs of the Allies were sent with such an excellent aim that killed German troops only... so your fable will be complete at last.

My first experience with a Holocaust Denier.