Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

You know, I felt better about the 19th Amendment before I knew that women, given a choice, would let Hitler live.

Glenn Reynolds
April 9, 2015
THAT’S BECAUSE WE’RE GIVERS
[This arose out of a hypothetical situation where you could go back in time and kill Hitler, if you wanted to. Men were more likely than women to choose that option as opposed to letting him live.

This is very interesting to me. One could claim that men are more rational and see the benefit of killing one tyrant so that, perhaps, millions may survive. And furthermore claim women tend to see the murder of Hitler as morally wrong and are unable to see there are exceptions to the morality code against killing.

But there are lots of other ways to look at the results of the study:

  • Perhaps women tend to respect rules more than men.
  • Perhaps the social norms in this country are such that women are taught it is better to be a victim than an aggressor even against a villain.
  • Perhaps women have a greater tendency to weigh the many different possibilities and come to the conclusion that maybe it might have turned out worse had someone else come to power instead of Hitler.
  • Perhaps women have developed a tendency toward pacifism not developed by men. This would give them an evolutionary advantage by being less likely to kill their own children because the biological cost of them creating another child is much higher compared to the biological cost for a man to create another child.

This study would seem to have implications for self-defense as well.

Other thoughts?—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

  1. Testosterone causes more aggressive behavior. Men are about six times more likely than women to commit murder. Men are more likely to find a forceful solution to a problem rather than suggesting we all need to hold hands and talk this out in a peaceful manner.

    While we might prefer that things could be worked out without violence, the real world is a dangerous place where the most aggressive and violent are often the winners.

    In the case of Hitler and the Nazis, pacifism was not the solution. Extreme violence like the world had never known before was what ultimately brought them down.

  2. One doesn’t go back in time and kill Hitler. One goes back in time to ensure he goes to a decent art college and introduce him to a nice Jewish girl.

    That way the Führer never existed, and Adolph is a name reserved for wacky Bavarian bohemians.

    One could alternately go back even further and prevent the Treaty of Versailles from being to punitive, but that would take a LOT of work.

  3. I tend to agree that offing Hitler may not be the best idea. First off, without WWII, the U.S. and Russia would have likely gone at it in a hot war that would have made WWII look like a playground spat. Of course that’s assuming that Germany wouldn’t have caused problems anyway. They were in a bad state. Hitler came along and promised them a lot, and he actually delivered in a lot of ways. His methods were horrific, but from the point of view of those keeping him in power he was doing what they wanted.

    With Hitler gone, someone else could have come along and done much the same thing and used the same methods. The problem is that Hitler was arrogant, self obsessed and unstable. You didn’t tell him anything. He had total control and you didn’t interrupt him or wake him up. That’s why D day was a success. Germany could have likely turned that landing back but Hitler was the only one with authority to move forces and no one wanted to risk execution for waking him up.

    Without Hitler, WWII MIGHT not have happened, but without Hitler, if it did happen it almost certainly would have gone much worse for the allies.

  4. Y’ all are overlooking the genesis of the Soviets, and the factors that initiated the start of the European wars in the 30’s.
    I would go back and kill everyone here in the US associated with the origin of the Progressives. It all pretty much started with them. It turns out that they were responsible for training the actors that went back to Russia and fomented the overthrow of the Czar. Why do you think our high level domestic Progressives (FDR and buddies) were so fond and supportive of those Soviet idiots?

    FDR promised the Euros that the US would back them up if they would just stop Hitler from invading Poland and the Ukraine, since he knew that the Soviets intended to do the same thing, as neither could feed their respective groups with what land they currently held. (that area was called the “breadbasket”)

    The Euros foolishly thought FDR could follow up on his promise, but Congress told him to pound sand. This was why England and the others made the threat to Hitler, even though they (and we) knew that they were years away from being the military equal of Germany. This info only recently came to light from documents found there. I always wondered why England in particular had been so stupid, but this clears it up.

    I also wondered why FDR had instigated the war with Japan. The stated reason for cutting off our oil and scrap metal sales to Japan was that he was worried about our markets in China, and wanted to force the Japanese out of there. Made no sense, as the ONLY logical response was for Japan to widen the war to include hitting all the Euro colonies in the Pacific to obtain the needed oil and other material required to prosecute a war.( We were their only source of oil, and their economy was going to tank in 18 months when their stocks of oil ran out.) Also made no sense for them to not attempt to destroy our navy, as we were the biggest naval threat to them, along with our “strategic” Army Air Corp B-17’s based in the Philippines (another MacArthur screw-up).

    Turns out it was directed to take the pressure off the Soviets, so they could focus on Germany, and we could keep Japan from taking the Eastern Soviet (and Northern Chinese) lands with all their natural wealth. We fought, and funded, a two front World War just to prop up that Progressive Bastion of Hope, the Soviet Union! If that doesn’t piss you off about the f’ng Progressives, nothing will.

  5. Some people make a good point about how women, as a group, vote for socialism. How do you counter that? I see only three avenues to combat it:
    1) Don’t give them the vote.
    2) Make any form of socialism illegal/unconstitutional.
    3) Extreme focus on education that teaches that socialism leads directly to failure of the family and the existing government and nation.

    1) How the hell do you put the genie back in the bottle?
    2) Sure would have helped if the founders had been more careful on this subject. This would require some real teeth to back it up, like dismissing, fining, and hanging anyone in a political position that proposes any law or regulation that promotes it.
    3) This would also require punitive measures as in #2, to fix the problem with the Progressives as we have had in schools for the last century.

  6. The KISS answer? In our current culture, women are slightly more likely than men to view themselves as victims, which, the way it’s been inculcated, makes them slightly less likely to see themselves as problem solvers.

    And certainly; there is no simple answer to the problem of Hitler, being that he was a mere product of the tide of Marxist thinking that was sweeping through the world at the time. Kill that little shitweasel, and a smarter, more patient socialist might have taken his place.

    Just like today, killing one Progressive figurehead back then probably wouldn’t have made much difference for the good, and it might have made things much worse. Take one player off the board, and there are a thousand more waiting on the sidelines to take his place.

    I therefore maintain that it is not this or that individual person, but a tide of sentiment that we face. A disease. You may be able to contain a disease by a “quarantine” of some individuals, but probably not.

    Much better is to endeavor to understand the disease itself, it’s source and it’s transmission vectors. Focusing on this or that individual host (the Hitlers, FDRs, Bushes or Obamas) is likely to miss the point.

    Or as it was put in the Bible; we struggle not with flesh and blood, but with Principalities…

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