Beyond Feelings

CHAPTER 4 What Does It Mean to Know?
a hostile habit. If you keep quiet about momentary irritations and
distract yourself with pleasant activity until your fury simmers
down, chances are you will feel better, and feel better faster, than if
you let yourself go in a shouting match.” 3
4. Although the Puritans did hold that sex is rightly reserved for marriage,
they did not hesitate to talk openly about the subject and were
not prudish within marriage. The problem seems to be that people
confuse the Puritans with the Victorians. 4
5. This is pure myth. Few tribes were completely peaceful, and many
not only were warlike but slaughtered women and children and tortured
their captives. Some tribes also offered human sacrifices, murdered
the elderly, and practiced cannibalism. As to their alleged
harmonious respect for nature, many tribes deforested the land and
wantonly killed whole herds of animals. 5
6. Alfred Kinsey’s work on human sexuality has been regarded as
objective, scholarly, and definitive for more than half a century. In
fact, it has become a foundation of psychotherapy, education, and
even religion. Amazingly, in all that time no one read it critically
until Judith A. Reisman and Edward W. Eichel did so. They document
that Kinsey approached his work with a firm bias that significantly
influenced his conclusions. He sought to establish that
exclusive heterosexuality is abnormal and results merely from conditioning
and inhibition; that sex between a man and a woman is no
more natural than sex between two men, two women, a man and a
child, or a man and an animal; and that bisexuality should be considered
the norm for human sexuality. When Abraham Maslow demonstrated
to Kinsey that his approach was unscientific, Kinsey simply
ignored him. Kinsey went on to assert that incest can be satisfying
and enriching and that children are upset by adult sexual advances
solely because of the prudishness of parents and legal authorities.
The authors also allege that in his research Kinsey employed a group
of nine sex offenders to manually and orally stimulate to orgasm
several hundred infants and children. 6
7. The fact is that in many cases imported labor costs more money than
domestic labor when the cost of transporting the workers is included
in the calculation. For example, Indian workers were chosen over
local Africans to build a railroad in East Africa. Similarly, Chinese
workers were chosen over colonial Malayans. In both cases, the total
cost of using imported workers was greater, but the cost per unit of
work was lower because the imported workers produced more. In these and
many other cases, the principal reason for choosing foreign over domestic
labor is that the foreign workers are “more diligent, reliable,
skilled, or careful.” 7
8. This notion is also mistaken. Slavery is thousands of years old, predating
Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity. It was practiced by the
Venetians, Greeks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians, among
others. Native American tribes enslaved one another long before the
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