You're conflating nurturing and protection with birthing and nursing.
I also don't understand why this opinion is so controversial. Humans, including men are one of the rare species that nurture and protect babies (consciously and beyond symbiosis) of other individuals or even species, including wild animals. Why is it so surprising then that men are good at nurturing their own babies?
Sure, but "every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother" is indeed an overstatement if you believe, as Donald Winnicott did, that there's something qualitatively advantageous about what a mother can provide, namely breastfeeding. Bottle-feeding, if done in an attuned, consistent, and emotionally present way, can support the same psychological processes as nursing does, but it is certainly less likely to unfold so favorably. Breastfeeding can make the integration of bodily and emotional attunement easier. Things can still go wrong, of course, but it is a unique situation.
The distinctive qualities of the mother's womb are not as easily studied, but on the other hand it's pretty obvious that there are functions provided by the mother and her womb that cannot easily be replicated (i.e. replicated by a father).
None of this to say that fathers cannot or do not nurture and protect. It's just that replicating certain things is difficult and we shouldn't be so sure of ourselves yet. It's like trying to grow a plant without sunlight: possible, but only very recently, and still apparently too challenging to do at absolute scale.
You are still ignoring the only distinction I made - the one between nurturing and nursing. I always understood them as having widely accepted distinct meanings, and the author of the article seems to follow it too.
You can either argue that their understanding of 'nurturing' is wrong, or that men can't nurture as well as women, without conflating the two. You can't have it both ways. Labeling it as an 'overstatement' after completely ignoring their definition of the terms is a disingenuous argument.
The author does not lay out their definition of nurturing explicitly. The most complete definition I can derive from the article is that nurturing is engaged caregiving marked by responsiveness and physical closeness that is supported by hormonal changes in the caregiver.
They have nothing to say about nursing other than that it involves oxytocin release (presumably an instance of nurturing).
In your short comment, you didn't make any attempt at determination beyond saying the names "nurturing and protection" and "birthing and nursing". OK, so what is the distinction? Are you claiming that birthing and nursing are mechanical acts that secure existence of the organism, but fail to secure some other thing that is called nurturing and protection? Or are birthing and nursing mere instances of a homogenous nurturing and a homogenous protection, and so one's quota for nurturing and protection are filled in the same way experience points fill up in a video game?
So it's the opposite: your OP and I are the only ones here making a concrete distinction between nursing and nurturing (although your OP didn't really say much, either).
Like I said, Donald Winnicott explores this question at length. Unfortunately he is not a good Marxist who historicizes these categories; he works squarely in post-war British society and so obviously has his limits. But he has the courage to criticize the emptiness of medical empiricism and the fear of determinateness of people like the article's author.
Here's Winnicott in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World:
> The infant who has had a thousand goes at the breast is evidently in a very different condition from the infant who has been fed an equal number of times by the bottle; the survival of the mother is more of a miracle in the first case than in the second. I am not suggesting that there is nothing that the mother who is feeding by bottle can do to meet the situation. Undoubtedly she gets played with by her infant, and she gets the playful bite, and it can be seen that when things are going well the infant almost feels the same as if there is breast feeding. Nevertheless there is a difference. In psychoanalysis, where there is time for a gathering together of all the early roots of the full-blown sexual experience of adults, the analyst gets very good evidence that in a satisfactory breast feed the actual fact of taking from part of the mother’s body provides a ‘blue-print’ for all types of experience in which instinct is involved.
Personally, this aligns with my own observations of my daughter. The sensuous conflict of breastfeeding is a negotiation of the psychic and physical line between self and other where everything is at stake and desires are understood and worked out at the level of the skin. It's practically impossible to make a bottle (or anyone/anything else!) fulfill this function.
Anyway, Winnicott goes on in great detail for chapters. Also relevant is a draft of a talk he gave titled This Feminism, which is probably more relevant to the underlying tensions in these comments:
> This is the most dangerous thing I have done in recent years. Naturally, I would not have actually chosen this title, but I am quite willing to take whatever risks are involved and to go ahead with the making of a personal statement. May I take it for granted that man and woman are not exactly the same as each other, and that each male has a female component, and each female has a male component? I must have some basis for building a description of the similarities and differences that exist between the sexes. I have left room here for an alternative lecture should I find that this audience does not agree to my making any such basic assumption. I pause, in case you claim that there are no differences.
Again, he's unfortunately not interested in how psychic development might be a historically limited category; he naturalizes "nurturing" (he doesn't use this word often, actually), but at least he acknowledges the concrete limitations of mother and fathers (and all the other characters) as they actually exist. And he does this without ever invoking the name of a hormone once.
> It’s probably unnatural for adult men to spend much time with tiny children in the first place.
Sorry, what? The framing of this sentence alone has a very creepy vibe. I can't speak for all of us, but most us have strong protective instincts towards kids of all ages, especially the youngest ones.
> This is why many men find it difficult, it is contrary to instinct.
Contrary to whose instinct? If I had a kid, I would want to ensure his/her safety and success. Men in general yearn for it. And there's nothing that suggests men are incapable of it. Research indicates good outcomes. And I know fathers who are the sole care givers for young kids when life makes it inconvenient for the mother.
> Do hunter gatherers split care of tiny children? Whatever they do is what we’re wired for, mostly.
Hunter gatherer culture is at least ten thousand years old - plenty of time for social behavior to evolve. Modern humans, including men are very heavily invested in kids because humans can't have a lot of kids. Ensuring each one's safety becomes important.
Heck! Humans, including males are very nurturing and protective towards even children of other men and other species. Plenty of evidence that your assertion doesn't hold at all.
Sadly, we are barely civilized. A hundred-thousand of years need to pass to make hormones civilization compatible. We have prehistoric hardware -hormones- and modern software -law, rites, supposed behaviour. Current law is like a dog slow virtual machine running under a Pentium MMX and some software on it. Picture subleq/muxleq running Eforth under 233 MHZ based CPU running an ASCII Art Mandelblot with integers. At least you will need a minute or two to render it.
Biology it's the same, hormones run much faster than social customs.
We tried with religion/law, which the 'original sin' it's just a metaphor on hormone drived behaviours VS the learned behaviours in order to create a successful civilization/trive/society without wars. Probably that happened after last big ice defrosting.
Geologically speaking, we are civilized beings since 'yesterday'.
We tried that by force: Stalinisms, religion based totalitarian states, nazism creating a demon scapegoat... they failed. You can't drive changes on decades. It's impossible. Humanities' people fail to understand this.
You need an effort of millenia in order to get some visible results.
Speak for yourself, it seems like you’re really invested in something biological being “at fault” for something. You’re thread sitting which is never a good look, but worse still when you are spouting some kind of personal philosophy held up as science.
Now keep your Humanities away from actual facts, please.
BTW, my favourite pop-science Mathematician it's a woman and the subject she loves most it's DIscrete Math, something directly related to my beloved computers too. She has no issues with the rest of branches but as I said the one she feels more confortable with it's graphs, nodes and whatnot.
> I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but my default reaction to people who say things like this is that they probably don't have kids,...
I don't have kids and it still sounds nonsensical. As a man, my instinct isn't to run away from my child if I had one. If life keeps men and their children apart, that's a different matter altogether. But I have seen other men yearn to be with their little kids. My father did the same when I was young. Some of them are their kids' sole caregiver for the majority of the time because life keeps the mother away from the child. And in all instances, I see strong paternal affection and instincts at play. I'm baffled by an assertion otherwise.
I'm not the author and I can't find what you're looking for. But you could make it easily if you prefer it.
The documentation [1] seems to be in texinfo format that's commonly used for making info files used distributed with GNU and Emacs. It is converted into multipage HTML using two commands in the Makefile. You could modify them trivially to build what you want. I use it along with Sigil (epub editor) to build EPubs of user manuals for my EReader.
Absolutely agreed. These two big corporate players with the biggest market-share are actively ruining the email ecosystem for their profit. I wish people would drop them and stop choosing them. Hopefully, the EU may soon do so.
As of when I'm writing this, three stories on the front page of HN (17, 18, 19) are about two bigtech companies dissing (for the lack of another polite word) their customers and third party vendors. I don't know how long it will take for the world to realize that these companies have nothing but at most contempt for you, except for your money which they want all for themselves. I'm not going to hold back on the fact that these multi-billion and trillion dollar MNCs lack any sort of scruples or integrity and their relationship with you is purely parasitic in nature.
I know that jailbreak is an option. But that's a rapidly closing avenue. Devices are getting harder by the day to jailbreak. The only correct solution is to vote with your wallet in favor of your own self-respect and independence. To not be their economic slaves. Consistently choose products that value your freedom, even if it's inconvenient and costly. Choose local stores, even if that requires you to walk to the nearby shop. You stand to gain a lot for those sacrifices. In fact, those gains may be things you can't afford to lose in the first place - like the democracy. (It's not a big secret that many of them have fascist ambitions.)
But whenever I raise this point here, somebody or the other rebukes that with some nonsensical argument about 'market demand' or something similar. First of all, market demand is decided by the consumer, unless we concede that right to the market manipulators. Secondly, this isn't something novel. Boycotts and preferential consumerism have been practiced successfully for ages and is in full effect as we speak. Can't you see how the citizens of entire nations are resisting fascism and hegemony through their shopping preferences? Due to this, I have serious reservations about people who make such counter arguments.
The technically proficient people like the HN crowd are the ones who should raise the alarm about technological exploitation and techno-fascism among the larger population and suggest the solutions. Instead, these people are out to defeat all such efforts and expose the population to the greedy cabal. I don't know if it's nihilism or outright betrayal. But don't be like that, please! Your knowledge and voice are valuable and they command respect. Use them to free your society and yourself from this economic exploitation and hegemony. Please start preaching publicly for the sake of all of our future.
> But that's a rapidly closing avenue. Devices are getting harder by the day to jailbreak. The only correct solution is to vote with your wallet in favor of your own self-respect and independence.
Sorry, "vote with your wallet" doesn't work on technical topics that average consumers don't experience viscerally on a regular basis. The only correct solution is political action that results in legislation and regulation.
The market is not a mechanism for maximizing consumer benefit, it's a mechanism for minimally meeting it. That's why enshitification happens: it's MNCs figuring out how much they can get away with, or part of a pot-boiling exercise to allow them to get away with more.
You are making the exact same defeatist argument that I consider harmful. The reasons are further down my comment above. There are better answers than 'it's doesn't work'.
> And this is what's informing the thought-leaders in the US administration.
More like them choosing what to listen to. There are a lot of pacifist preachers around. Why don't they ever catch these people's attentions?
The 'thought-leaders' don't form their beliefs around their spirituality. They form their spirituality around their beliefs. They choose what's convenient to them, so that they can claim divine authority to justify their bigotry and the atrocities they commit.
> about a person that, say what you will, is nowhere near the list of planetary "really bad guys". Even if we limit it to tech, the list starts with someone way richer, then goes through four or five way-shadier people.
You really don't need to go that high up the ladder to find members of the 'list of planetary really bad guys'. Sam Altman is single-handedly responsible for starting the current DRAM crunch - that too based on an untenable economic framework. He's also an enthusiastic participant in the AI bubble that threatens to cause a massive global economic depression when it pops. He's also involved in the cabal that wrecks the labor market (wages) by hyping up the 'AI will replace labor' narrative. On top of all that, he and his ilk are on a building spree of data centers that will guzzle huge amount of energy and dump tonnes of extra CO2 into the atmosphere, as if there's no tomorrow. This wrecks all the hard efforts of millions of others before him to rein in the damages caused by the climate change. Needless to say, all of these have pretty deleterious effects on the economy, biosphere and the welfare of ordinary people, including loss of innumerable lives.
But does he care? He is one of those people who simply ignore the trail of serious damage and enormous suffering they leave in their wake, because they don't see anything beyond money - more money than they can spend in a hundred lifetimes! Nobody needs a justification to see him as one of those 'planetary bad guys'.
> What does it say about your viewpoint?
As someone else here said, it goes without saying that lobbing Molotov cocktail at anyone is a no-no. I don't support physical violence in any form. Having said that,...
> If you're OK with victim-shaming here
It's sad that the aristocratic society didn't learn anything from the murder of Brian Thompson. The 'victim' had caused thousands of preventable deaths per year, and his death saved thousands by forcing the industry to deal with the problem. Suddenly, even the pacifists (like me) are left wondering if the death was unethical. If true justice existed, the state would have stopped them from their crimes (aka professions), if not outright execute them for the lives lost. Whom will you choose when they pitch their own lives against thousands of innocent lives? You can't claim victimhood after putting yourself in that position.
I read the New Yorker article like most people here. I didn't find anything incendiary enough in it to provoke a Molotov attack. I wouldn't put it past him to have arranged it himself, given how much he lies and what he stands to gain from it. But let's assume that the attack is real and is connected to the report. The reply seems overly dramatic and self-righteous, given that the attack was against his iron gate! He's milking the situation to indulge in virtue signaling, sympathy farming and gaslighting the critics. This is one hell of a victim posing! But I have no sympathies to spare if it distressed him so much. He shouldn't be able to sleep anyway, if only he had a conscience. Advocating sympathy for the unsympathetic super-privileged is a bit tone deaf under such circumstances. Evidently, nobody is in a mood to oblige to such manipulations.
All of those are false equivalences. Let me give you a few better analogies.
Selling an axe that's known to be so defective that it breaks upon use and impales anybody nearby. Even worse, it is sold as great for axe murders.
Or a big tech company like Microsoft selling a software for planning a mass murder, including indoctrination material and the checklists of things to be done.
Or an auto company like Toyota selling a car that is known to accelerate uncontrollably at inopportune moments and advertising it as great for hit and run campaigns.
Now let's consider a few relevant examples.
An AI model sold for planning military attacks, knowing that it sometimes selects completely innocent targets.
Or an AI model sold to families, claiming that it's safe. Meanwhile, it discreetly encourages the teenage son to commit suicide.
Or selling a financial trading AI that's known to make disastrous decisions at times.
Or selling a 'self driving' car, knowing that its autopilot frequently makes fatal mistakes.
I know that I'm supposed to assume good intentions and not make any accusations on HN. Therefore let me make this rather obvious observation. Some people here are dismal failures at making arguments that are consistent and free of logical fallacies - especially when it comes to questionable practices by the bigtech.
I didn't name any single AI. But who is providing the AI used by the Pentagon and Israel to plan the mass killings in Iran and Palestine respectively? I'm surprised that people can't see the obvious danger.
