[dwar0123]

barmar, on 2012-November-20, 11:18, said:

Rational or not, I like to believe that we've evolved beyond this. Thousands of years of history also indicate that war (and other forms of violence) is inevitable, but society has made much progress in reducing this.

FYP

[kidd2012]

I think war is as prevalent as it has ever been. There are currently 13 armed conflicts causing at least 1,000 deaths each year.

[barmar]

kidd2012, on 2012-November-20, 18:25, said:

I think war is as prevalent as it has ever been. There are currently 13 armed conflicts causing at least 1,000 deaths each year.

Read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

[cherdano]

kidd2012, on 2012-November-20, 18:25, said:

I think war is as prevalent as it has ever been. There are currently 13 armed conflicts causing at least 1,000 deaths each year.

The 30-year war in Europe killed a third of the population.

[Zelandakh]

While the proportion of Germans killed in thde 30 Years War was somewhere around a third, perhaps even higher, you would be hard pushed to show that a third of the entire European population was killed. The majority of deaths were caused by disese and the like which are generally not included in the casualty rates of other conflicts. If you do then World War One is probably the deadliest conflict due to the Spanish Flu. It also had a far wider reach, the flu alone killing somewhere in the order of 4% of the world population, about 75 million people give or take, although estimates vary enormously.

[JLOGIC]

helene_t, on 2012-November-20, 10:12, said:

The evolutionary explanation for the fact that men are more eager than women to reach powerful positions is that it increases their expected number of sex partners. In most if not all social mamals, alpha males have more sex than the underdogs and humans are no exceptions.

So expecting powerful men to show sexual restraint is very naive.

Post of the year, well done.

[kenberg]

helene_t, on 2012-November-20, 10:12, said:

The evolutionary explanation for the fact that men are more eager than women to reach powerful positions is that it increases their expected number of sex partners. In most if not all social mamals, alpha males have more sex than the underdogs and humans are no exceptions.

So expecting powerful men to show sexual restraint is very naive.

We gamma males just aren't getting our fair share.

[mike777]

There is a big difference between being naive and society accepting or just not caring if men in leadership roles cheat on their wives.

This mainly comes down to does society for reproductive and stability issues want to encourage marriage or is a stable marriage not really that important to social order.

Sort of the same issue with out of wedlock births. If you dont think there is a direct link between out of wedlock births and poverty then the issue is rather moot.

To put it another way, do you feel that maritial norms serve children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor?

If the answer is no then marriage and maritial norms are not really an important issue for society.

[kenberg]

And a difference between what we accept socially and what we accept professionally. I mentioned earlier that my colleagues in academia would not think highly of an adulterer, but it would not affect salary decisions or tenure decisions. Of course it is not really so black and white,, everyone has his/her own mix of motivations when making a decision, but I have never been at a tenure meeting or a salary discussion where the matter of a person's fidelity to his/her spouse was brought up. I have no idea if it would be legal to bring it up, it just isn't.

I also posed the question: Is it different for a president and for a CIA chief? Do they both have to resign over an exposed adulterous relationship? Or does neither have to? If one does and the other doesn't, why is that?

This s not just a matter of minding, or not minding, our own business. It is also a matter of not shooting ourselves in the foot. We lost the services of a very capable individual with the Petraeus resignation.

I gladly confess I am not at all clear on the answers here.

[mike777]

Ken would it be fair to say that being known as an adulterer used to matter when it came to matters such as keeping your job or a promotion?

Just as it used to matter if you had a baby out of wedlock for your job?

I do agree that many if not most think it is a good thing that society just does not care when it comes to these matters.

Not sure how the spouse and children feel.

[PassedOut]

I graduated with my math degree in 1969 and immediately started in the corporate world as a computer programmer. After five years I moved into management. In my experience, evaluations and promotions were based on job performance, not on a person's private life. In the 1970s (before the AIDS epidemic) lots of folks "committed adultery," and even though things calmed down a bit later, I'm sure it's never been uncommon. Work is where you spend lots of time with people, and some relationships are bound to arise from that. I don't remember any adulterer being held back on that account.

My recollection is, rather, that some things that should have been taken into account as part of job performance tended to be swept under the rug back then, particularly things such as repeated unwelcome sexual advances. I've been free of the corporate world for decades now, but I gather that such matters are dealt with more effectively these days.

[mike777]

Perhaps the notion of having a "private life" is also becoming outdated.


I hear that employers are looking at internet stuff in hiring...and promoting


Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past' warns Google's Eric Schmidt
The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has


http://www.telegraph...ic-Schmidt.html

[kenberg]

I'm not sure how much attitudes have changed toward adultery. Perhaps there has been some commonsense understanding that whatever the men were doing, it required women to do it with. And not just one or two very busy women. In the 1940s Kitty Wells sang "It's a shame that all the blame is on us women. It isn't true that only you men feel the same.". There has always been a battle between the ideal and the actual. I don't imagine it will ever be different.

[kenberg]

Speaking of plus ca change, which actually no one was, I learned from reading Ken Follett's Winter of the World that Sumner Welles, Undersecretary to Cordon Hull and a major foreign policy adviser to FDR, eventually (and it was pretty eventual) resigned over charges that he solicited sex from two porters on Roosevelt's train. Of course Senator Joe later explained this, the man was a Communist.

[blackshoe]

Quote

From wikipedia: In September 1940, Welles accompanied Roosevelt to the funeral of former Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead in Huntsville, Alabama. While returning to Washington by train, Welles solicited homosexual sex from two African-American Pullman car porters.[36] Cordell Hull dispatched his confidant, former ambassador William Bullitt, to provide details of the incident to Republican Senator Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster in turn gave the information to journalist Arthur Krock, a Roosevelt critic, and to Senators Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would not release the file on Welles, Brewster threatened to initiate a Senatorial investigation into the incident. Roosevelt was embittered by the attack on his friend, believing they were ruining a good man, but he was obliged to accept Welles' resignation in 1943. FDR particularly blamed Bullitt.

In 1956, Confidential, a scandal magazine, published a report of the 1940 Pullman incident and linked it to his resignation from the State Department, along with additional instances of inappropriate sexual behavior or drunkenness. Welles' explained the 1940 incident to his family as nothing more than drunken conversation with the train staff.