Danimal archive, part 1

Think about it –— if running out of economically recoverable petroleum will stimulate humans to invent something better, then why not cut off the supply of petroleum right now and get on with it? Why delay the coming future explosion in creativity and wealth generation?

Imagine if someone started spamming your holodeck. You'd have an army of Agent Smiths in there, not trying to kill you, but all trying to sell you junk.

If you're really brave, buy a box of delicious doughnuts and offer them to some women. See how many women eagerly take a doughnut. Then offer your body to the same women. Notice the drop in eagerness.

You'd think when people get a Divine Revelation, they'd get it right on the first take. Presumably God is at least as good at what he does as Ray "One Take" Charles.

The history of science provides many examples where research was necessary to quantify intuition, and at times overturn it.

The whole history of technology is to introduce more and more artificiality into the world. That is, to create more barriers and make them more obvious. People learn through experience that the safety rules are conservative, and costly. The person who learns through experience to push the limits usually gets a reward (higher productivity, less effort, more excitement, etc.)

Magnetism and gravity are examples of how inanimate matter can exert forces and produce effects at a distance, sometimes a very great distance. Most people don't get hugely hung up on those forces and effects. We see how the forces consistently associate with certain kinds of matter, so we consider them to be properties of matter. We can similarly view consciousness as a property of the right kinds of matter in the right arrangements. Just as not all rocks are powerful magnets, so too neither do all arrangements of molecules give rise to consciousness. If you think there is something magical about consciousness, then there must be something magical about magnetism too. Indeed, if you find some primitive people who have never handled magnets before, they would probably think you handed them some magic stones. The real question is why consciousness should find itself so amazing. If a magnet could think, would it be astounded at its magnetism?

Note how [the author] now contradicts himself. First he says pacifists can only appease their enemies or allow their enemies to kill them. Then he says pacifists have the ability to undermine their local government's power to use force. But if pacifists oppose their own government, their own government has now become their enemy. So which is it? Do pacifists have real power, or not?

If you live in a rich neighborhood you probably don't have to worry about your rich neighbors stealing your lawn mower. But they might engineer a hostile takeover of your business.

For some reason food vendors have never seemed to understand they could double food consumption by persuading the average person to take up an endurance sport like bicycling.

You could save the library money if you had a portable computer you could bring in that would copy materials so you did not have to check them out. But that would be "stealing." It's an odd definition of "stealing" that reduces the library's costs.

It's weird how athletes can still command attention decades after they have become irrelevant. If they were really good in their youth, later adulation is almost obligatory. I wonder how many of the women now in the Maxim Hot 100 will be relevant in any way 30 years from now?

Is it purely coincidental that in English, women sometimes describe an unattractive man as "creepy"? Some of the literal meaning of "creepy" might really apply if women tend to evaluate men according to how they move.

Humans destroy nature because nature generally sucks –— we don't want to be cold in winter, too hot in summer, hungry, prone to early death, hunted by larger predators, parasitized by smaller pests, and so on. All those natural things suck –— literally in the case of some of the smaller pests.

Speech enables human hunters working in groups to coordinate their actions much better than any other type of animal. The result is that men armed with nothing more than sticks and chipped stones were able to kill 10-ton mammoths in North America. Incidentally, this is why the Jurassic Park movies were silly. If men with stone age weapons could exterminate herds of 10-ton mammoths, modern men with firearms would be more than a match for a 7-ton T. Rex.

It's interesting how all religious people are able to understand the problems inherent in believing in things for which there is no evidence when they consider the unsupported supernatural claims of the innumerable religions other than the one they believe. I wonder why religious people exempt their own fairy tales from the same rigorous scrutiny? Some of the best debunking ever is by religious people debunking rival religions. Which is odd considering their own vulnerability to the same thing.

You own an automobile. That means you are more conformist than I am. Our opinions on other subjects pale into insignificance by comparison with that highly significant life choice. There are lots of people who have no idea what I think about any number of issues, but they react immediately (and usually negatively) to my decision to live car-free, because that decision has a huge and unavoidable practical impact.

Do you know the Darwinian purpose of your tendency to laugh at clueless displays of romantic failure? I.e., do you know why Pepe Le Pew is funny?

If a guy had a personality like a woman, most other guys would not be friends with him. If it wasn't for the pull of sexual attraction, men and women probably would not have much to do with each other.

What's the largest number of sentences you can write before you contradict yourself?

Most women would probably not enjoy marrying a millionaire as much as they might think, because most women are not frugal enough themselves to get along with someone as frugal as the typical millionaire.

A lot of what human brains have to do is cope with chaos that doesn't absolutely have to be there. There are ways to build stuff to make things more orderly and thus more friendly to computers. The world is a mess in part because humans, like horses, can "step over" obstacles in the way.

The old woman may have a memory of being sexually desirable (when she was young); the short man doesn't even have that.

Privileged people can afford to be generous in certain ways. But in other ways they can be quite harsh. What do you think would happen if the fat cousin would fall in love with one of your "nice" supermodel material men? Fat cousin would probably have her heart ripped into tiny pieces and she would weep enough tears to fill several empty KFC buckets and Krispy Kreme boxes.

Women get a free pass on having to get rejected, and men get a free pass on having to be bothered. Neither sex fully understands the scale of the particular problem they do not personally suffer from.

The less attractive a man is to women, the more likely he is to get rejected by a woman when he expresses interest in her directly. Because rejection is unpleasant for the man, he tries to avoid it by expressing his interest indirectly. The man's logical fallacy is to associate rejection with approaching women directly. In fact, women are not rejecting his directness, they are rejecting him. If he tries to cozy up to women indirectly, he does not increase his chances of success. He merely creeps women out and further trains them to associate furtive methods of approach with undesirable men.

A physically attractive woman (that is, a woman who is physically attractive TO MEN) enjoys huge social, material, and psychological benefits from her attractiveness. Simply put, being beautiful tends to feel good, and being ugly tends to feel bad. That is why any sane person would react with horror to the threat of a disfiguring accident or disease. Aging is a chronic disfiguring disease. It's also, at the moment, incurable.

There are whole books written about the ways men "dump" women. See: "Men Who Cannot Love" –— damn, that is a great title for a book. I like the way it puts all the blame on men for the fact that hardly any women look good enough to be Victoria's Secret Lingerie Models. In case that was too subtle, I would bet most of the men who "cannot love" haven't been tested yet on eager Victoria's Secret Lingerie Models.

Can you guess why you don't hear too many women commentators ripping hard into men for dodging the draft? Most women are smart enough not to say things that might call attention to their historical freeloading. Similarly you don't hear too many welfare recipients decrying wealthy people who cheat on their taxes.

If you believe God makes a habit of changing his RULES, how long do you think the current set is good for?

When people obtain faster transportation, they rearrange their lives so they have to travel farther to do what they were doing before. There is no time savings. For example, when freeways go in they approximately double the average driving speed compared to secondary roads. People respond by sprawling out the suburbs about twice as far as they were before. Everybody still ends up driving an hour to work. Until, of course, traffic increases and traffic jams double or triple the driving time. Or the weather goes bad and there is economic paralysis until the snow melts and lets people resume their 50 mile commutes.

In 100 years the average consumer might be able to purchase entertainment products that make his pretend life about as interesting as Tom Cruise's real life is today. I.e., the entertainment industry might be able to provide a convincing simulation of what it's like to be worth $300,000,000 in the year 2001 and have SMV=10.

Suppose we pass a law which takes one penny away from every adult and splits the take among 1,000 lucky individuals. Obviously those 1,000 individuals have a huge incentive –— and the resources –— to lobby hard to keep the gravy train rolling. But among the rest of electorate, who is going to get worked up about losing one penny? Who is going to defend a diffuse interest?

In general, women are more eager to get married than men are. Therefore a man's best chance for extracting concessions occurs before he agrees to marry a woman. That's when he should drive a hard bargain.

Is it an "advantage" for cockroaches to colonize your house? Do the cockroaches think in those terms? No. Rather, whatever does the best job of making more copies of itself is what ends up existing.

Not every fat acceptor is fat –— yet. A modern industrial society is the ultimate fat-inducing environment. We have a huge excess of tasty, high-calorie convenience foods, along with labor-saving devices and motorized transportation which eliminate almost all need for personal exertion. Almost everybody who doesn't make staying lean a lifelong priority and take simple specific actions to stay lean is going to put on excess weight as they get older, if they aren't already fat as kids. I.e., in the modern environment with its tremendous bias towards making people fat, it is not enough for most people to remain neutral or "accepting" on the issue.

In practice there is no difference. Whenever some real-world decision comes up where if God exists, you would do 'A' and if God does not exist you would do 'B' the agnostic and the atheist will choose 'B'. And of course there are millions of such real-world decisions we must make, given that thousands of religions are each telling us to do thousands of things. For example, neither the agnostic nor the atheist will bow to Mecca five times per day according to the command in the Koran.

Criminals, of all people, are the most determined privacy fanatics.

You seem familiar with some of the hazards of alcohol. Note that you did not learn these things from the alcohol lobby. Please keep that in mind while assessing the claims of the pro-drug lobby.

It is horrible when Saudi Arabia beheads an adulterous woman but compare the rate of HIV infections in Saudi Arabia with that of the (evidently) sexually laissez-faire Botswana (where 45% (!!!!!!!) of pregnant women test positive for HIV now). Islam might take over the Third World by default, after AIDS kills everyone else.

Is having to wear a polyester leisure suit a problem? In a culture that thinks polyester leisure suits are hot, no. In a culture which despises them, yes. Look at how the status of unmarried moms has changed in our own culture. Once upon a time unwed motherhood was scandalous; today it's no big deal. While it's still harmful to the kids, it's not nearly the problem for the moms that it used to be. Actually, it's probably less harmful to the kids than it was back when "bastard" meant something.

Actually I've found that slender attractive women enjoy a good fat joke as much as any other attractive person. For example, there's a gym in my town called "Fitworks." I was talking to some cute woman about it and I mentioned that I thought it would be cool to start a gym called "Fatworks," where to get in you had to weigh at least 300 pounds. I began describing what the gym would look like and this woman was laughing so hard she was almost crying.

Most men fail to impress most women very much, but most women do eventually get deeply attached to a few men, and given the typical woman's reluctance to share her man with other women, the net result is that most men eventually do experience having some woman deeply attached to them.

In 10,000 years will there still be a United States government to stop people from strip-mining Yellowstone National Park? That's not how I bet.

During a famine would you expect people with "a metabolic problem" to maintain or even gain weight while similarly deprived people waste away and drop dead all around them?

Why do intravenous drug users need to share hypodermic needles anyway? If they can obtain drugs like heroin, which is not exactly freely available, why can't they get enough hypodermic needles so they don't need to share? You are talking about people who are the acknowledged experts in obtaining contraband.

Fortunately for the universe, it appears that robot replicators cannot come into being as the result of a mindless evolutionary process such as the one that created us. Robot replicators can only result from a technological civilization. The fact that replicators are not at this moment chewing up the Earth and turning it into a giant artifact strongly suggests that no other technological civilization in our galaxy has existed long enough for its replicator wave to have spread here.

There are various zero-sum conflicts of interest in which one side is well ahead in the public relations competition.

I can understand wanting to watch. What I can't understand is caring who wins. People in Chicago actually cried because a baseball team lost. I could see crying because I don't get to have sex with the cheerleaders. But they don't have cheerleaders in baseball games, I think. So what's to cry about?

The car distorts your ability to understand a place. A place stops being a place and instead becomes a component of your automobile trip. To understand what I'm saying, don't get in any automobiles for the next year. If you do that, I guarantee every aspect of your life will be different. Even if you do "the same things" without a car, they won't be "the same things." You will experience them differently.

How many courteous felons do you know?

What marriage is no longer applies when a marriage ends.

I grew up in the church, and I can tell you Ross Jeffries has nothing on the Speed Seducers who stand behind pulpits. Some of those guys are masters at Speed Seducing thousands of people at once. SS is about putting people in the emotional state of your choice by describing the emotion to them phrased in questions. Have you ever been to a religious revival? This is emotional manipulation elevated to high art.

A CD contains just a long list of numbers. However, when decoded by the proper equipment, the numbers specify a pattern of vibrations in the air which trigger particular neural discharges in your brain and voila! Emotions. As technology improves, the range of emotions which can be artificially induced on demand will increase. Conceivably, sufficiently advanced technology could induce any emotions we want. It's hard for most people to picture this until they experience the working demo, much as it would be hard to explain to a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon jungle all the emotions you experience from a piece of plastic.

Nobody thinks twice about buying an education to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, psychologist, computer scientist, you name it. In every field of human endeavor the value of education is undebatable. Everybody knows you can learn to be a doctor faster by studying under other doctors than by trying to figure medicine out by trial and error. But when it comes to improving one's interpersonal relationships, I guess instinct is all we need, right?

You cannot seriously believe that Feminist Neo-Puritanism is going to remain safely confined to academia. Today the Commander-In-Chief can get in trouble for boffing the wrong chick. It's probably only a matter of time before even the entertainment industry has to start worrying about this. Society can tolerate a lot of contradictions, but what is wrong for college profs and the President will eventually be wrong for men in many other areas. If some lawyer can enrich her/himself on the strength of your sexual behavior, that is what (s)he will do.

It's interesting that even the victims of generalization can't help but generalize.

If sex is not "supposed" to be about power, why do a disproportionate number of women prefer to have sex with the most powerful men they can find? Why is a man's social status the number one mate-selection criterion for most women?

We've got kids who think it's funny to write viruses that shut down millions of e-mail systems. Wait until they can build robots that crawl around and eat things. Do you think an advanced civilization is going to consist uniformly of conscientious responsible eagle scouts? It's going to have individuals who like to fuck shit up. It's going to have the robotic equivalent of SPAM.

Is it possible to think of a gangster without thinking of his automobile?

If you hate someone enough, it can actually look like a good deal to hurt yourself if you can simultaneously hurt the person you hate even more. Terrorists make this choice in a dramatic way, and ordinary people do it in subtle ways.

If Ph.D. holders do not, on average, understand the world around them better than high school dropouts, why do Ph.D. holders earn, on average, about four times as much money per year?

Is the realm beyond stupid where we find someone who calls unconditional love life's greatest adventure while threatening men with legal action for not measuring up to her conditions for love?

Laws do not exist to place official blessing on things that everyone agrees upon anyway, but to compromise between groups with sharply differing interests.

It is also true that almost everybody gets hysterical when (s)he senses that (s)he is being evaluated in much the same way (s)he evaluates others. For example, there are many women who don't even blink as they almost subconsciously dismiss all short men from consideration, while becoming highly offended when men reject them for being 25 pounds overweight. Most women immediately understand the latter requirement to be "superficial," while in contrast it is rather difficult to get it through to a woman that rejecting a man on the basis of his height is equally "superficial."

Before you get married, your partner is on his/her best behavior. Once you're locked into the steel cage together, you're going to find out what (s)he's really like. And a lot of it isn't going to be pretty. You can take every problem you're seeing now and multiply it by ten, and throw in a stack of new problems that you don't have any clue about yet. Therefore, if you see some problem that already looks serious to you, then you would be out of your mind to marry this person.

If the USA were 100% self-sufficient in energy, how big would our military establishment be? Would it be exactly the same size as it is today? Somehow I doubt that.

Why are there so many fat women in every church I have seen? Either God really loves fat women, or lots of fat women really love God. Someone should invent a doughnut-shaped God. That would really get the fat women going. There is no God but the Doughnut God, and Krispy-Kreme is His prophet.

Lawyers profit by fomenting conflict. For every lawyer earning big bucks by egging a woman on to screw her husband out of his wealth, there's another lawyer earning equally big bucks attempting to "defend" the husband's interests. After the case, the "opposing" lawyers will share a beer, a round of golf, and a big laugh at the vulnerability of their marks. But as bad as the divorce industry is, it's still up to the woman to pull the trigger. Women who exploit their legal right to rob men against their will deserve no more respect than any other kind of thief.

It's incredibly infantile, but grown adults do decide whether to be happy or sad based on pictures coming out of a television.

An ideologue is like a farmer. The farmer relies on nature to have produced most of the necessary ingredients: fertile soil, good weather, etc. The farmer merely clears away some native vegetation and plants seeds. The farmer cannot start a farm on top of a glacier, or in a scorching desert filled with mountainous sand dunes. The farmer must find an environment that accepts him.

How many movies can you name that portray no sexual or romantic themes and do not give disproportionate screen time to unusually attractive people and which made a significant amount of money?

I hold no other opinion than this: I am unable to refute the findings of mainstream science.

If high-risk people pay the same premiums as low-risk people, it's not "insurance" –— it's "welfare." That is, a system of transfer payments from low-risk people to high-risk people. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

It would be interesting to do a study on men who need Viagra to have sex with their partners. How many of those same men are able to wank off to porn (whatever variety they like, but most likely it would feature women from the most physically attractive 1%) without chemical assistance?

To a cargo cultist, an arrangement of coconuts and driftwood is similar to an aircraft.

Big Blue depended on humans, to be sure. But Kasparov also depends on computers and other modern technology. If Kasparov did not live in a very advanced society, he probably wouldn't be able to dedicate his entire life to playing a useless game. You don't see too many chess champions coming from Afghanistan.

The nature of reality is peculiar in that it's very easy to victimize some random person, but often very difficult to track down one particular person who did some thing. This relates to the Arrow of Time and all that. Some processes go easily in one direction (such as shattering a glass bottle) but are orders of magnitude more difficult to push in the reverse direction. If you film a bottle shattering and play the film backward, the backward version equally obeys the laws of physics but would be virtually impossible to make happen in real life.

You've probably heard of instances of the stereotypical pairing between very short men and very obese women. The least desirable members of each sex end up having to settle for each other.

Just before I flush a turd down, I say to my turd, "You are unique and special. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

Generally when women play Chick Eye for the Loser Guy they are telling the Loser Guy how to remake himself so he will, allegedly, appeal to some other, unspecified women. A woman's advice for the Loser Guy is never about what the Loser Guy would have to do to turn on the woman handing out the advice.

It's pretty clear from people's behavior that TV has a massively attenuating effect on sexual attraction. Consider this: few people would spend more than a few dollars to watch any person on television, whereas in real life men are willing to risk HALF THEIR NET WORTH to get with women. From that I conclude (and feel free to challenge my conclusion if you think I am missing something) television does not capture most of what people find attractive about each other.

Most men find it easier to get along with other men, so if personality were all that mattered, most women wouldn't even be in the game. Therefore I wouldn't put a lot of stock in personality when it comes to attracting men. It matters, but not as much as looks.

One could argue that prostitutes come closer to loving unconditionally than most people. A prostitute only conditions her (physical) love on a monetary payment, which is within the means of many people.

Women like industrious men, provided the industriousness isn't entirely directed away from activities that can generate resources necessary to feed a woman's expensive offspring.

Stay out of the Humanities, which tend to be a waste of time if your goal is to make money after you leave academia. Most of the "hard leftist psycho bitches" tend to be older and less physically attractive, anyway. It takes years for a woman to develop into a truly hardened feminist, simply because most of the feminist ideas are not entirely intuitive. Women who are young and cute are usually going to exercise their sexual market power. You will probably not find any larger concentration of women who are young, intelligent, and attractive than in a major university.

I think it's hilarious how women are so eager to stick the shiv in each other, while they blame everything on men.

It's illegal in the U.S. to have sex in a public place. So yes, just about every sexually active person leads a double life here.

That's one formula for leadership success: figure out what people are feeling but don't know how to articulate, and articulate it for them. When they realize, emotionally, that your words capture their feelings, they will become your servants.

An infantry platoon carries enough firepower to level a house. I doubt that a T. Rex would make much headway against a soldier with an M-60 machine gun and a full ammo belt. The T. Rex is too big to exploit stealth, and probably wouldn't have the instincts to try.

If a singer gets up in front of an audience, what can he sing about? There aren't a lot of safe options. Most ideas have a fairly narrow appeal. Some topics, like political protest songs, tend to date quickly if they are specific enough to mean anything. The lyrics to the Schoolhouse Rock songbook appeal to a pretty limited demographic. Etc. But everybody can relate to the problems associated with reproduction.

Try this experiment sometime: be a man, and take an attractive young woman on a walk through a ghetto on a warm day.

The fact that so many men so naturally enjoy blowing stuff up strongly suggests this kind of behavior consistently helped reproductive success more than it hurt.

This raises the obvious question: if the husband's money becomes "their" money (meaning she gets to do as she pleases with it) why does the wife's vagina not become "their" vagina, for the husband to use whenever he likes?

I can assure you, if the nation was just now experiencing its first defense attorneys, no doubt "defense attorney" would be a dangerous occupation.

There aren't too many businesses that would be as lenient as the average university when it comes to tolerating individuality. That's one reason that smart people tend to linger in academia for embarrassingly long periods: because in academia there is simply less bullshit than there is in business by almost any measure.

Even in the general sense of aesthetic appeal, it is possible to love things while finding them ugly. For example, suppose you have a sentimental attachment to your house, but due to neglect your house has fallen into disrepair. You could certainly say the peeling paint, the rotting boards, the decaying roof, and the dangling gutters make the house look "ugly." Your sentimental attachment to your house would remain, and your impulse would be to REPAIR your house. You would want to RESTORE your house to its PROPER condition.

I'm pleasing Halle Berry right now by staying out of her life. Presumably if I were somehow in Halle Berry's life I would need a lot more than Viagra to please her. I'm thinking deca-millionaire personal worth, an Extreme Makeover exceeding currently available medical technology, and extensive psychological programming to give me a pleasant personality.

I think rock stars mostly feign the angst crap to prevent their submissive fans from realizing how good rock stars have it, and staging a revolt. Occasionally there is a Cobain who really is insane enough to feel unhappy when he has the best deal available.

As far as what a woman "deserves" if she chooses to eat her way to 280 pounds at a height of 5'7" –— she "deserves" whatever sort of man she can attract at that size.

When you shovel bullshit at us, try to keep the texture somewhat consistent. Don't go mixing it up with dogshit.

How about this definition: you are shallow if you give a shit about anybody else's definition of "shallow." Because if you do, you are wasting your precious psychic energy trying to please people who absolutely do not care about your personal well-being. Clever readers will note the paradox in the above definition.

If you don't try to spread your memes, your memes are already in danger.

If I had to guess, a person with pre-existing practical insight would benefit even more from higher education than would a person who went in without a clue. In most of life, advantages tend to combine synergistically.

Women determine which men are attractive. If women decide they don't find promiscuous men attractive, then men who want to attract women will have to exercise self-control in that area. So far it's not really obvious that women are asserting that particular preference along a unified front. It seems pretty clear that the most attractive men score the most chicks and this doesn't seem to threaten their attractiveness too much. Men determine which women are attractive. The vast majority of men find seriously overweight women seriously unattractive. A woman who wants to equip herself to fulfill her urges to seduce the most desirable men may need to control her urges to indulge in sloth and gluttony (if she feels such urges).

The medical tribe is increasing its ability to fight disease about 1,000 times faster than diseases are evolving new ways to attack us. Microbes have a 3.5 billion year head start but we're gaining on them.

This is the formula that always applies everywhere in life when people disagree: might makes right, where "might" comes in various units: votes, lawyers, guns, money, influence, beauty, intelligence –— all the usual carrots and sticks. Raising the smokescreen of absolute morality is simply another persuasive tool enabling some people to gain power over other people.

Would it be fun to be rich if you had to live in a public housing project surrounded by thousands of envious welfare slobs? To properly enjoy being rich, you have to move to a rich neighborhood where you can get away from most of the poor people.

The nature of probability is not mysterious. If you hide 5 marbles under 10 boxes and let someone turn over boxes until he finds a marble, he'll have to turn over fewer boxes on average than if you hide 1 marble under one of 50 boxes. If he has a limited amount of time to turn over boxes, his odds of finding a marble at all will be better when the ratio of marbles to boxes is high.

Violent criminals come disproportionately from the poor classes. (Of course poor criminals target mostly poor victims, because they are handy, but (a) this is because the rich have run away, and (b) a "slopover" effect insures poor criminals will target rich victims more often than rich criminals will target poor victims, since the proportion of rich criminals is so much lower.)

If someone is out hiking in an attempt to get close to nature, and he breaks his leg, will he tell the rescue helicopter to go away because he wants to lie there and let nature take its course? No. His attempt to get close to nature will end as soon as nature becomes nasty. "Natural" childbirth is when there is no possibility of reaching a hospital in time to prevent disaster in the event of something going wrong. I don't think any sane woman would choose that.

I have yet to meet a person with an I.Q. of, say, 140 or higher, who seemed stupider to me than a person with an I.Q. of, say, 100 or lower. In every case that I can recall, when I had to deal with a person who had solid objective indicators of intelligence, that person was a bright person.

One working definition of "evil" would be "capable of inflicting pain on others and enjoying it." Another more demanding definition would be "eager to make others less happy than one is potentially capable of making them."

There is also some objective evidence that people who take Prozac may be more valuable to society than they were before taking Prozac, while the results of taking coke and heroin are often the opposite.

Until you produce some evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the Tokeman's hypothesis: the vast majority of men are largely indifferent to a woman's wealth when deciding how attractive she is. If a woman who looked like Cameron Diaz were flipping burgers for minimum wage or even living on food stamps, tons of guys would be hitting on her regardless of what "class" they were from.

Now this is a truly interesting concept. The man behaves like a walking wallet and this manipulates the woman into treating him like one. Gee, does this also apply to con artists who bilk elderly people out of their life savings?

From what I have read on the subject (and observed during my university days in the company of many foreign students), the average immigrant to the U.S.A. gains weight over a several-year period, with the result that eventually immigrant groups become as fat as the people already here. After all, "we are a nation of immigrants." If we are on average bunch of fat slobs now, that spells potential trouble for future immigrants. In light of this, it may be that a lean American woman is a much better bet than a lean Russian woman, because the American woman has already proven her genetic and disciplinary worth in the environment most destructive to feminine beauty. The Russian woman is an unknown quantity; you don't know what's going to happen to her in the land of automobility and Big Macs.

If you see someone who chooses to shove food into his/her face and pork up to 300 pounds of hideous blubber, you already know a whole bunch of things about that person which will clearly differ from a person who chooses to work out hard six times per week and control his/her eating. But don't take my word for it, just try dating two women –—the first an aerobics instructor with a perfectly honed body, and the second a corpulent, bloated couch potato. (Without loss of generality, the same experiment works if we reverse the genders.) You cannot fail to detect an enormous number of behavioral and personality differences between these two women that will impact your relationships with them. When you look at these women's bodies, part of what you are seeing is the difference between their life values. The aerobics instructor cares more about the opinions of others. She is willing to forego the immediate pleasures of sloth and gluttony so she can give you more pleasure in the long run by looking the way you (statistically, probably) want her to look. The obese woman, on the other hand, cares less about your pleasure than about *HER* pleasure. Instead of catering to your preference, she is primarily interested in catering to her own needs. She will either be in denial about your preference or actively campaigning to change it for her benefit –— indicating that she has a fundamental problem grasping and coping with reality. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that these profound differences in outlook will isolate themselves just to the areas of diet and exercise. There are many areas of life where a person's impulsiveness and tendency to discount the future influence the choices they will make.

"Sex object" is a significantly higher status than "human being." Most people who recognize you as a "sex object" will treat you with vastly more respect, care, and consideration than will most people who see you merely as a human being. The same goes for "success object."

Losers hate winners –— and there are a lot more losers.

The nicer a man is to a woman, the more he convinces her that she can string him along as long as she likes and he will always be there faithfully waiting for her to deliver the goods. Someday. While I have no doubt that being nice to some degree is better than being totally belligerent, there does indeed seem to be such a thing as being "too" nice.

Averages matter more than anything else. For example, the average Russian makes about 10% what the average American makes. If this was the only fact you had available about the two countries where would you choose to start over if you had to decide now? Life is all about making decisions based on insufficient data. That is why our ancestors evolved such amazing capacities to generalize pretty well.

It's pretty easy to teach girls not to want to fuck every halfway attractive man they see. It's a lot more difficult to teach boys the converse lesson. That's why all successful campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy target girls first.

Cultures marked by fanatical religious devotion are rarely at the forefront of intellectual and scientific progress. It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of people who are driving human progress are irreligious, only mildly religious, or highly skilled at compartmentalizing their religious beliefs to activities they pursue only when off the clock. If it were solely up to religion, we'd be living at the neolithic level right now, imagining the earth was flat and fixed at the center of a rather small universe.

The average American woman probably earns substantially more money than the average Russian man. She also holds the enormously valuable bargaining chip of a ticket to life in America. If an American woman cannot figure out how to translate her utterly dominant bargaining position into a marriage that gives her at least an equal status with the severely disadvantaged Russian man, then she is an inept negotiator. After all, look at the way businesses treat immigrants: they usually stick them in the shittiest jobs, and immigrants accept this as the price of getting their foot in the door over here.

I have yet to hear a woman complain about the great slight shown to her sex when only men were permitted to storm ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 and be chopped to pieces in their thousands by the German machine guns. Of course I wasn't there either so I can't claim to have made any sacrifice. But if the draft got reinstated and we had another long-running cannon-fodder war we'd probably find out real quickly just how serious women are about seeking equality.

While we are on the subject of materialism and the nature of femininity, here's an interesting experiment I recommend to any man who can afford to spend $500 without experiencing pain. Meet a woman who claims not to be materialist. (Whether she believes her claim doesn't matter.) Accompany her to the clothing store of her choice, let her select $500 worth of outfits she likes, and buy them for her. ($500 is a reasonable number for a typical middle-class woman. From what I gather, it is somewhat rare for most women to have experienced this from the men they date. If she is so wealthy that $500 is meaningless to her, this experiment might not work.) See if she appears to enjoy this more than she enjoys having sex with you. The working definition of "nymphomaniac" is: a woman who enjoys making love more than she enjoys shopping with someone else's money.

I suppose it would the Imaginary People who make off with all those copies of Playboy and Penthouse and the S.I. Swimsuit Issue.

What would you do if all the stay-at-home mothers in your neighborhood knocked on your door and demanded that you hand over, say, half your salary to them? See, it's easy to mumble vaguely about how a woman "is penalized economically" for staying home with the kids, but the only remedy for that is to coerce working people to pay for something that provides them no direct benefit. That's because children are, inherently, an economic penalty in a modern industrial society. People who choose to produce economic penalties deserve to be economically penalized.

Find any person who scores 120 points lower than you do on a standardized test of intelligence. That person will almost certainly require partial or total custodial care. Why? Because that person has opinions and beliefs that are life-threateningly less accurate than your beliefs in many areas that matter. Like your beliefs about what you should not do with a metal fork and an electric outlet, or about the behaviors that are appropriate when you are standing on a sidewalk and a speeding bus is about to pass by the curb.

Cloning reduces the rate at which the nature of the human species changes. Cloning preserves particular human genomes much longer than they have ever survived in the past. Cloning literally stops the clock on evolution, for a while. Until now the human species has been changing at random. Visit a freak show to see Nature's wisdom. The standard we need to exceed is not high.

If porcupines were the only animals available as pets, pet owners would be less happy.

When a beautiful woman walks into a room, men obviously react to her. When someone carries a baby into a room, most men will be indifferent to the baby as long as it doesn't create a disturbance. It's pretty clear that most men are more interested in scoring women than making babies. Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women before he died. Apparently he left no children. Or at least no women seem to have come forward with child-support claims against his estate.

Check out the cleaning products at the grocery, and see how many have "DO NOT EAT" on their labels.

Grizzlies will occasionally charge into a caribou herd to see if any animals aren't able to run away as fast as the others.

The temperate regions don't have as much diversity because the advance and retreat of ice sheets has caused dramatic environmental changes on fairly short geologic time scales. That's part of why Europeans were able to imagine the plausibility of the Flood myth in the Bible –— they could picture some guy carrying breeding pairs from the several hundred species they knew about on a boat. After the first European naturalists began sending back specimens from the tropics, the feasibility of keeping all of them alive on one wooden boat for 40 days became harder to accept. It sometimes requires whole teams of trained naturalists to reintroduce ONE species into an otherwise functioning ecosystem. The idea that you could just open the door of the boat and let all those animals scamper off to repopulate a completely devastated planet –— obviously this proves you can get some people to swallow just about anything.

Go visit your local ghetto. Notice how the people who are doing everything "wrong" are out-reproducing you. They aren't winning the Darwin Award, you are. According to your Darwin Award values, all those teenaged ghetto girls pushing welfare babies around in shopping carts as they shop with food stamps are kicking the crap out of you. Before you invoke Darwin you should be aware of exactly what you are invoking.

"They" don't hand out Darwin awards to gay men, to people who get surgically sterilized, to men who can't attract any actually fertile women, or to men who fall (or stay) in love with old women. Do you think an old man who doesn't take a young mistress but remains faithful to his now-barren wife demonstrates "stupidity"? What if she was already barren when he married her? Is he "stupid" if he refuses to cheat on her?

It's funny when yet another gaswaster thinks he's a nonconformist. You're obviously watching far too many car commercials.

Welcome to soc.singles, Dave, where people will tell you being fat is not a behavioral choice, and then turn around and tell all the "nice guys" who want to know why the "jerks" get all the women to shut up and quit whining and to stop making some improper behavioral choice that causes them to fail with women, or even to stop wanting to succeed with women. In other words, remember this handy rule that will carry you far in life: 1. Your debate opponents always have complete free will, the ability to reprogram their every desire to your liking, and total responsibility to accept the consequences of their actions. 2. You have none of the above.

Since every pendulum swings and then swings back, it is quite reasonable to expect that at some future time most people will look back on purple hair and laugh. A person who disses it now is as likely to be ahead of his time as behind it.

A woman taking contraceptive drugs is trying to turn herself into something like a sex robot, but the drugs can only do part of it.

But face it: there is no priest, preacher, minister, prelate, cardinal, shaman, monk, holy man, guru, astrologer, theologian, or spirit guide whose belief system results in anything so complex, elegant, and valuable as a computer monitor. So we have several thousand religions and philosophies, none of whom can produce anything like the monitor, and one belief system which can.

There is no doubt that many mentally ill persons benefit from platonic and romantic relationships just as healthy people do. There is similarly no doubt that almost everyone would benefit from a vacation on a tropical island. Unfortunately, society lacks the resources (money and tropical islands) to provide a nice vacation to everyone who needs one. If you need a vacation badly and just can't afford it, or convince someone else to give you one, then that's too bad.

The sexual market becomes fairly efficient when people start trading money for sex directly. The better a woman looks, and the more sexual stimulation she provides, the more she can charge. A given woman can charge men more money for actual sex than she can charge for merely letting them view her. But if a woman is really hot, she can make enough money as a model that she doesn't need to do anything more. With regard to a woman who only gets $100 for sex, in the U.S.A., I would bet you are using a very generous definition of the term "quality."

The marriage contract is a legal document. The entire basis of the legal profession is power and conflict. Love may certainly motivate a person to sign a legal document. But that does not make it any more difficult for your partner to use it against you. I believe it is quite healthy to propagate stories of the potential negative consequences of marriage. For example, how many abused wives knew in advance the warning signs that indicate a given man is likely to end up beating his wife? Similarly, how many young, infatuated men are aware of the financial goring they can take at the hands of a good divorce lawyer?

Why would I want a relationship that feels like "work"?

Before the invention of numbers, the above statement might have led even a smart person to believe that since every group has some good members and some bad members, then every group is equal. After the invention of numbers, smart people learned to count up the good members and bad members in each group, and they discovered that a group with 99% bad members was almost always a lot worse than a group with 99% good members. For example, there are good and bad serial killers, but the number of good ones is so small that you will not lose much by steering clear of the whole lot.

For telecommuting to become a true mass phenomenon, the average person would need to have writing ability comparable to a professional writer.

If women want money, and you want women, and you can make money, then everybody makes out. Why make life more complicated than it has to be? Of course the woman who really wants money will say she loves you (if you happen to have the money), and she may actually believe she loves you, and if you are smart you will keep your doubts to yourself and enjoy the pleasure she gives you.

Observe your man around a friendly dog sometime. He talks to the dog, pets it, and strokes it. Then observe your man around your breasts. Notice any similarities?

Here are some additional examples of our astounding tolerance toward rudeness among members of "our own group(s)": 1. There are millions of (often younger) women who destroy the happy homes of (often older) women by seducing (or agreeing to be seduced by) their husbands. The economic, social, and psychological damage inflicted by these predacious women on other women is easily in the same league as that inflicted by any other oppressor group, and yet we observe a remarkable lack of any sort of organized protest by women against the women who victimize them. 2. The greatest hazard to the young black male in the U.S.A. is not the white racist, but other young black males. The same population that voices only token objections to the ongoing slaughter within its ranks erupts in rioting when one of its members becomes the victim of less serious violence at the hands of men it perceives as outsiders. 3. Millions of incompetent drivers endanger everyone else, but it is very difficult to build political support for more stringent driver testing.

When adolescent males try out for the football team or spend hours plunking away on their guitars, are they pursuing some true athletic ambition or following their muse? Maybe. But all it takes is one look at the Hot Babes throwing themselves at the football stars and the rock stars to put a young man's priorities into crystal-clear focus.

Women spend much of their waking lives laughing at men. If a man would find a woman's laughter threatening, he's obviously a wimp she can safely discard. On the other hand, if he can divert her ridicule away from himself by feeding her jokes, this is analogous to preventing a hungry crocodile from biting one's leg by tossing it fresh chickens periodically.

Show me a person who is 100% logically consistent, and I'll show you a person who does not exist.

For example, I had a friend who was 100 pounds overweight and who smoked two packs a day; two years later, he had lost the weight, quit smoking, and was doing interesting things like bicycling from the Ohio River to Lake Erie in one day (200+ miles) and lowering the record at our time trial course. Obviously, this man was quite exceptional; but it's very good for his sake that he did not pay much heed to all those "I can't help the way I am" testimonials one hears so often these days. In my years of observing the effects of diet and exercise, I've only known one person who was able to stay fat while training really hard. And I'm pretty sure that person would have reached ideal weight if he had made some simple changes to his diet.

Churches are fundamentally social clubs. The primary function of a social club is to bring people together so they can meet, converse, and engage in interesting activities together. When the people coming together in this way include people who find each other attractive, romantic/sexual relationships inevitably start. Of course this creates a lot of problems, especially for churches that are traditional/fundamentalist and strict about prohibiting sex outside of marriage. It is deliciously ironic that the very institution that most strenuously advocates sexual abstinence for teenagers actually provides some of the better opportunities for teenagers to have their first sexual experiences (in the form of youth group activities, trips, and especially retreats/camps) or to form the relationships that lead to those first experiences.

Everybody I have ever met is an expert snow driver. Just ask them: "I know how to drive in the snow. The problem is all those OTHER DRIVERS who have NO IDEA how to drive in the snow." All my life I've been hearing about these bad snow drivers, but I've never met one. I've never figured out how most people can be bad snow drivers at the same time everybody is an expert snow driver. So fine, all the sniggler women say they don't care whether a man is bald or hairy. I guess that settles it. All those bald guys jerking off on Saturday night are probably just making up their problems.

There are two basic ways to acquire wealth. The first way is to take it from someone else who creates it, and the second way is to create it yourself. One of the failings of the free market is that it rewards both methods equally. Similarly, popular perceptions of wealthy people also fail to distinguishing clearly between the two methods (which is inseparable from the behavior of the free market –— both phenomena result from the failure of consumers to have complete information).

Since the invention of counting, and later statistics, it has become possible to consider the notion of quantity and its impact on our prospects. If 20% of women prefer A, and 80% of women prefer B, it is clear that (all other things being equal) a man with B is going to have better "luck" with women than a man with A.

The problem was that the Native Americans had no previous history of these diseases, so everyone in an entire village would get sick at the same time. This was in the days before all the comforts of modern life (central heating, grocery stores, plumbing). If you've ever caught a bad cold on a camping trip, you have some idea how miserable it can be to get sick under primitive conditions. In an isolated village people must hunt and forage every day for basic necessities. If everyone becomes incapacitated for a week with a prostrating fever, there is no one left to hunt and dress the game, gather firewood, draw water, and care for the sick. After a few days the food and water are gone, and nobody has the strength to get any more. This leads to a spiral of exaggerated mortality, in which many villagers die who would otherwise be able to recover their illness if only they had minimal care. (We often hear people worrying about the vulnerabilities of a modern society, but the fact is that primitive societies are far more vulnerable to a variety of disturbances.)

If you're going to harangue us with your ancient superstitions, at least try to tighten up your internal consistency a bit. Yes, I know that's difficult if you are trying to follow the biblical, a book whose authors were innocent of the notions of logic.

When you see third-party publishers churning out shelves-full of books and magazines about a piece of software, you know that software has inadequate documentation. If the software vendor will not document its product, it should at least license the third-party documentation and integrate some kind of index into the software. It would be nice to have an easy way to discover what every author has written about some particular error message or obscure feature of a program.

Having said all that, I think the "happiest" people probably do not spend much time thinking about whether they are happy. They probably spend most of their lives actively engaged in goal-seeking behavior, thinking outwardly about what they are trying to accomplish, rather than idling away their time with New Age navel-gazing.

There is some very peculiar dynamic at work between gay men and their straight women friends. A dynamic that I have not figured out. The converse dynamic between straight men and lesbian women is not so stereotypically common. Therefore I leveled the playing field by suggesting the interaction between gay men and lesbian women would tell us something about the interaction between groups of people who have complete mutual sexual disinterest.

I am sure the slow impala being overtaken by the lions would, if it were conscious, "know" that it "should" be OK to be an impala that can't run very fast, but here are these hungry lions coming along who have a decidedly different point of view.

If we interpret "feminist psychologist" in the (possibly caricatured) sense of a psychologist whose approach revolves around a central hatred for maleness, it seems unlikely that her patient will derive much insight for functioning well in a world that happens to contain a lot of males.

I'm sure Dodi Fayed had a great "personality." Who wouldn't, after enjoying a life filled with travel, excitement, piles of money, and gorgeous women? If he ran out of interesting things to say, he could just fly somewhere interesting. Or talk about a few of the zillion interesting things his money enabled him to do. If he had worked his whole life as a janitor and lived in a shack, it is unlikely he would have developed an equally interesting personality. Funny how that works.

I hate living in a world where almost everything is screwed up almost all the time, and by god, in the little corner of the world where I call the shots, things are not going to be that screwed up.

Here's a tip. Go down to your local welfare office. Look at all the fat, hideous, dull-witted women there. Not all of them will fit that description, but you will find plenty who do. Now walk down the line and start inviting them to a nice dinner that you will pay for. I bet you will get a date long before you get 350 rejections. Whether you consider this a step forward is up to you.

A woman at the gym was complaining to me a few weeks ago about a man who asked her out "inappropriately." As far as I could tell, his main offenses were being too old, and bald. Her exact words: "He didn't even have any hair!" conveyed with the same tonality one might have reserved for: "He threw feces at me!"

Self-confidence only becomes an issue when you are under the gun to make a certain result happen by a certain time. But if you just try things and see what happens, there is no pressure. You're taking a physics class –— how did physics get invented? A bunch of smart people just tried things. They didn't pressure themselves to get a certain outcome from their experiments. In fact, some of the greatest advances in physics resulted from experiments that did not "work."

Can anyone live in an industrial society, utter the "Animals don't drink milk" argument, and not realize how absurd they are?

From what I hear of recreational drugs, some are reputed to yield more pleasure than sex. But when I look at a picture of drug paraphernalia, I get no urges to take those drugs. In fact, I have no interest in them whatsoever. The same is not true of my reaction to seeing beautiful women. Years before I had any idea of how enjoyable sex was going to be, my desires for women were even stronger than they are now.

In life we make decisions based on benefits and costs. The cost of buckling a safety belt is approximately zero. The benefit, in the event of an unlikely accident, could be the highest benefit imaginable: saving the only life I will ever have. So I accept the cost of buckling the safety belt. Even if it bothers somebody else. The cost of a prenuptial agreement is similarly low. That is, if you and your partner are rational, there is virtually no cost to creating a prenuptial agreement beyond the legal fees. Thus there is no real reason not to have one. There may be legal costs for enforcing the agreement, but if you have to enforce the agreement, that means you would have lost far more without the agreement.

If you know exactly what a person is going to do, you can trust the person to do that. When you say a predictable person cannot be trusted, you are strictly wrong.

It's interesting to stop and reflect for a minute on why this sentence: "If I don't get laid soon, someone is going to get hurt" is amusing, if not even rather titillating, when a woman says it. Imagine a man writing something like this on soc.singles. How might people react to it? I think such a sentence would be far less amusing, and even alarming, if it came from a man. Why is that? Clearly there is a very large asymmetry in the way people generally react to expressions of sexual hunger coming from women vs. men. Why does this asymmetry exist? One explanation, and probably the simplest explanation, is that men want sex, on average, more than women, and are sometimes willing to do things in pursuit of it that are socially unacceptable to varying degrees. This is consistent with the overall picture of men generally pursuing sexual opportunities and women generally needing to ration them, and society as a whole needing to confront this problem and help women ration their scarce sexual supply.

If we try to decouple internal mental states from external behavior, then we are trying to play tennis without a net. It becomes impossible to make any meaningful claim about the mental state of any person besides oneself. In other words, every person besides oneself becomes utterly UNKNOWABLE. Of course, one may ask why one needs to "know" anybody else. The reason is simple: each of us has an enormous interest in predicting the future behavior of the people who have an enormous influence over our own personal well-being. So really, any claims we make about another person's internal mental states are simply a means to the end that matters: trying to figure out what a person is going to do next.

There is a limit to how much you can expect to rip off other people without paying for it. Eventually the victims might figure out a way to hit you back. Yes, this is a much more complex picture than the Stallone/Schwarzenegger/Eastwood "Make My Day" fantasy which fits in much better with ignoring one's external costs, but this is the world you live in.

Women can afford to make these kinds of "preposterous" statements for the same reason a company will put a "No Help Wanted" sign on the front door: to screen out people who aren't really motivated. A woman who is in demand and knows it has the luxury of being able to dismiss whole categories of men she might meet. (I suggest waiting 20 years or so and see how persnickety some of these women are then, after their sexual market values have declined to somewhere around where yours probably is right now. When a woman finds herself no longer besieged by a constant stream of men, then...what a coincidence, she becomes much more flexible about the places where she will consider meeting men.)

If a friend invites me to do something that will cost money, I would never assume that my friend was offering to pay my way. If a woman who might have a romantic interest in me asks me out, why would I treat her with less respect than I treat my friends?

Common sense suggests that a group of people will consider one of its members "successful" if that member succeeds at doing something the members of the group regard as both difficult and rewarding. (If it's not rewarding, then the person who does it looks silly; if it's not difficult, then nobody regards the person who does it as "succeeding" at anything. "Success" requires the very real possibility of failure.)

I didn't say Joe Asshole didn't (eventually) take "no" for an answer. (I didn't call him "Joe Rapist", you see.) But our friend Joe certainly bothered a lot of women. He didn't respect their "right" to "public privacy". Joe invaded the privacy of 19 women, and his reward is sex with the 20th. Mr. Courtesy respected the privacy of all 20, and his reward is a date with Rosie Palm. If you think this is not close to a Universal Rule, try being a man for a few years. Haven't you bothered to listen to any of the things men complain about on the NET? You say I don't listen to women, but you will turn around and ignore the classic complaint that "the jerks get all the girls"?

Why, I'm sure we can all name a few women who have married "down", i.e., to men who have lower lifetime earning potential. Let me think...hmmm...err...Well, no examples spring to mind immediately... Of course, I've read about this happening.

Did you know that a person's age is their single most significant characteristic? Secondly is their sex. You can get a surprisingly good handle on who somebody is with a surprisingly short list of characteristics. Of course, you will still have some surprises. But society wouldn't work if people were all drastically different, and they didn't fit into identifiable "types" to some degree. But if you tell me a person's age, sex, cultural persuasion, education, profession, income, what they do in their spare time (hobbies/vices), height, weight, overall appearance, and a few tidbits about their personality, I will pretty much have them figured. It's not that tough to do, folks, in fact anyone who can't do this is socially retarded.

Most relationships don't work out. An incredible number of things have to line up in just the right way for a relationship to remain worthwhile for a long time. Considerably fewer things need to line up to make infatuation possible for a while.

Every person's debt to society is far greater than they can repay. Just start writing books, and see how long it takes to fill a library. Try inventing things, and see how long it takes to create science and industry. But a massive debt is no reason to throw up one's hands and start sponging. Rather, it should motivate everyone to pitch in. Why, then, should I respect someone who doesn't want to pitch in? Why should I respect a system that penalizes work?

The utility of approximate weather prediction is so high that it has motivated a level of international cooperation higher than any other human need. Even during the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were freely sharing weather data with each other for mutual benefit. (Having more data about the weather in other countries right now improves any country's ability to predict its own weather. Weather data for a given area has the curious property of holding its value longer for other people than it does for the people living in that area. This creates an overwhelming incentive to trade weather data quickly.)

The weird thing is that I personally do not mind eating essentially the same foods every day, whereas a lot of women who seem to have lifetime commitment to one man as their ultimate goal would never dream of limiting themselves that way to particular foods.

Suppose an otherwise identical clone of yourself had been raised to believe cows are sacred. If you and your clone got into a debate about whether cows are sacred, who would win? Assuming you don't believe cows are sacred, how solid a case can you make?

Bicycling is not necessarily "strenuous". You're sitting down, after all. If you use low gears, pedal slowly, and don't climb any hills, it's easier than walking. I know this, because sometimes I ride my bike to places when I'm too tired to walk there.

People have a stereotype of nerdy men who are highly educated but physically inconsequential. That's easy enough to correct by developing the weightlifting habit. It's a wonder there are men smart enough to earn Ph.D.s who don't get this.

Note to women with the capacity to think: your best chances for obtaining commitment are with men who have few alternatives. Look for a man who isn't very attractive to women. If you marry an alpha male, get used to sharing. On the bright side, probably no woman reading this article is at much risk of marrying an alpha male.

Lots of long-term couples complain about being "too tired" to have sex, but few people are ever "too tired" to have sex with a new partner.

I would interpret the difference in terms of consensuality. When you like the man and what he's feeling it's "sexual attraction," and when you don't like the man it's "sexual objectification."

Safety always limits. However, death is considerably more limiting.

The Sex Rationing Cartel is an emergent phenomenon, much like the seemingly coordinated behavior of a school of fish or a traffic jam on the highway. Each individual fish or driver simply reacts to the local conditions and does what comes naturally. There is no Master Plan, no Global Conspiracy, no Supreme Leader, nor any sort of deliberate collusion among all individuals in the group. Yet if you step back from the individual and observe the entire group, the group seems to behave as though every individual is deliberately working to achieve some specific outcome.

When amateurs go up against mainstream science the amateurs always lose. If you can show me a counterexample from within the past 50 years I'd like to hear about it.

You are surrounded by thousands of artificial items which would not exist if scientists had a serious problem understanding the world.

Hypothesis: a woman learns not to advertise her sexual hunger for one simple reason: doing so will attract far more takers than she cares to deal with. This is consistent with women having a lower overall sexual hunger than men.

If two people choose (for whatever reason) to marry despite a massive SMV mismatch, then the odds are that their relationship will play out according to the principles that govern such relationships. Namely, the person with high SMV will treat the person with low SMV like crap, and the person with low SMV will have a strong incentive to stick around and endure it.

Whenever the concept of God floats around, the concept of finance is soon to follow.

As far as 'usefulness' goes, how is radio astronomy useful? Is there anything I can learn about a quasar that is as useful to me as knowing that a person with an IQ of 150 is likely to be a better computer programmer than a person with an IQ of 75?

Visit any hospital where the terminally ill are dying and see how many of them are as objectively beautiful as the romantic leads in major motion pictures of the past century.

Humans have not had sufficient exposure to tobacco for their mating preferences to have adapted genetically to any impact tobacco has on reproductive fitness. That is, tobacco has not been changing differential reproductive success long enough to have changed the genetic makeup of the human population yet. However, depending on the social perception of tobacco that prevails in a particular time and place, tobacco may function as a cue indicating status or lack of status. This would let tobacco "piggy back" on genes that might code for an attraction to status.

Can you name one geologist who has located a valuable deposit of petroleum or minerals by applying a scientific model of Noah's Flood?

Have you noticed that theists more often than not try to impede progress? Oh, we mustn't point telescopes at the planets and see how they move. We mustn't dig up these old bones and see where we came from. If man were meant to fly he'd have wings. The horseless carriage is the devil's tool because it lets unmarried men and women escape from the monitoring eyes of their chaperones. We mustn't do research on fetal tissue and figure out how to avoid dying. Whenever science is finding useful new knowledge you will find theists attempting to stop science from entering the forbidden zone.

I can't claim to have been blown away by the intellectual capacity of any welfare recipient I have met to date. Have you?

Consider the following scenario: a young woman goes out to a bar with her boyfriend. She goes off to talk to her girlfriends. When she comes back, her boyfriend is talking to another woman who is obviously trying to flirt with him. If the other woman is 50 or older, the young woman will probably laugh. As will her boyfriend. If the other woman is 21, the young woman will probably react quite differently. Her boyfriend will probably react quite differently too, in his own way.

Boys grow up accustomed to losing because we play so many zero-sum games for amusement.

Your beauty and the high demand for beautiful women virtually guarantee that any man you get has even less regard for fat women and old women than I do. Of course he will have the good sense not to mention that around you. You will have pre-selected your man for a general absence of low-status attitude or anything that could be remotely construed as such, such as excessive honesty.

But do you comprehend the full implications of Darwin's Dangerous idea? Real Creationists do. That is why they don't let the nose of the camel into their tent.

If you want to insult old women, you don't have to hide behind anybody else. Insult a few old women and you'll find that they don't have any power. But note: I don't advocate insulting old women gratuitously. Only do it when they temporarily forget their place. As long as they know their place you should treat them with the kindness normal people accord to anyone who knows their place.

Open-mindedness is not some binary property which people either have or do not have. Instead, every person's beliefs are like a complex mosaic, with some tiles cemented down hard while others are loose and others in between. But even a firmly-cemented tile can be pried loose with the proper tool.

Of course like all good stalkers that's probably not what you called it.

Engineering is all about figuring out the real world and then exploiting it.

If it's all makeup and lighting and wardrobe as you say, why do they hire Halle Berry instead of you?

The advertising industry is real. One of my friends, a marketing type, assured me that when ad-driven companies stop advertising, their markets start decaying with an alarmingly short half-life. It's easy for geeks to forget this because we work in a demand-driven industry (i.e., customers screaming for software that actually works) such that if we can somehow figure out how to build it they will generally buy it. But many industries crank out products for which there is no real need, and their lavish expenditures on advertising basically underwrite all of sports and TV.

This is the part that confuses me. If I am an "ignorant jerk," why do you care if I call you a "loser?" Your behavior is consistent with the hypothesis that men with my preferences are actually making your real life less pleasant somehow, and that seems inconsistent with your numerous assertions of your wonderfully satisfying romantic life.

Anyway, without resorting to the Alpha Male theory, please explain why Wilt Chamberlain can screw 20,000 more women in his lifetime than you and I can.

The most obnoxious self-righteous person of all is the person who actually is better than you. A self-righteous person who is actually inferior is merely amusing. To inspire true murderous rage the self-righteous person's example must be irrefutable. And, of course, the person being shown up must reject any possibility of improving himself.

Can you identify a religion which does not require its followers to do at least one stupid thing?

The monitor is an exceedingly improbable artifact with exceedingly improbable behavior. Its pedigree is a matter of recent historical record. Its existence demands an explanation. The unprecedented abilities of its inventors demand an explanation. A person who rejects the scientific explanation is left with a chain of stupefyingly improbable coincidences. I guess I can believe this might not bother a sufficiently shallow person. I fail to see how it would not bother you.

Inventing a microscope does not expand our senses into the nonphysical.

"Road rage." That's getting mad at other people who are doing the same things you are doing.

If humans could easily read each other's thoughts, I'm not sure if civilization could survive.

It's not like Hitler invented anti-semitism any more than Dwight D. Eisenhower invented suburbs. So, to answer your question, if you were living in a country where the government was committing or fostering violence in a way that the majority of your neighbors approved of, you probably would not do jack shit to oppose it. Because, if you were rational, you would quickly understand that opposing it would harm you while having a negligible impact on the thing you oppose.

Since even the most religious person I know rejects all but just one of the thousands of competing religions it's pretty clear that to be religious means throwing out any pretense to logical consistency right from the get-go. One must arbitrarily select one religion (eeny meeny miney moe) and thereafter stop one's ears to the appeals of the rest. Even a "religious" person agrees with the atheist on 99.95% of the world's religions.

Look at the typical superhighway during a workday morning. The millions of tons of metal roaring to and fro belong mostly to average working people. It takes a LOT of wealth to put all that metal out there. If the wealthy 1% controlled most of the wealth, everybody else would be walking to work.

A key milestone will have been reached when it becomes possible for people to exist indefinitely with no direct human contact while never experiencing any psychological damage. In other words, when the artificial experience becomes as interesting and satisfying as real interaction with real people.

Also, beware of the "Initial Optimism Effect" (particularly when the Beer Goggle Enhancement Factor is active). A man typically overestimates a woman's attractiveness when he first sees her. Then as he spends more time with her, sobers up, gets more time to scrutinize her, and sees more of her, he may have to revise that initial estimate a bit, and it never revises upward. It's not much different than buying a house and progressively discovering more problems with it as you live there. A clever home seller might even cover up some problem areas. Gee, might an older woman resort to the same trick? It can sometimes work during a first meeting, but eventually everything gets exposed.

Tribal cultures have continued, without significant change, for thousands of years. In a tribal culture you can be confident that most of the unsolved problems you faced as a child will still be unsolved when you expire. Only when some humans managed to struggle partially free from tribalism was it even possible to imagine that difficult problems admit solutions. Before humans had any hope of understanding problems like cancer, warfare, or space travel, a few of them first had to question and then discard most of their 'received' knowledge and let reality be their teacher. If you are serious about empowering women to pursue your stated six goals, you have to promote scientific thinking among women. To the extent that women are wasting their time with pre-scientific backward-looking horseshit, they are not going to be creating the new knowledge they need to tackle the tough problems. To the extent that women are focusing on their own feelings, their own gender, and their own historical oppression, they will not be looking outward toward the object realities that are the only available source of the new knowledge we so desperately need.

Do we want to heat up gigantic buildings, or just heat the bodies that are in them? Do we want to illuminate our surroundings, or just enable ourselves to see? (The two are not equivalent, since only the barest fraction of reflected light actually reaches our retinae.) Do we want to move vehicles, or occupants? Do we want to move people, or the information in their brains/nervous systems? Do we want to decorate the house, or do we want pleasant patterns of light to reach our eyes? Do we want to build libraries full of books, or do we want access to the information in them? Often, when we discover what we are really trying to do (as opposed to what we find ourselves actually doing) we see room for orders-of-magnitude in efficiency gains.

Most professional societies have a clearly delineated philosophy of their members' "obligation to society." However, this is a misleading term designed to sell the public a notion of an altruistic, responsible profession. In reality, the profession eventually comes to understand that the excesses of a few of its members endanger the status and income of the entire profession. So the members collectively establish and police standards of conduct. They sell this to the public as though they are doing society a great big favor out of the goodness of their hearts. In reality, the members of the profession act mostly out of self-interest. Unless we are jaded beyond hope, can't we cling to our belief that good behavior is good business? (At least where the glare of publicity exposes all.)

The simplest way for you to find out whether your S.O. is pretending is to gain 100 pounds of fat and stop having sex with him altogether. Then you will discover his true beliefs about your inner beauty.

One highly effective way of eliminating prejudice against fat people would be to make everybody fat. You don't have to be a very smart fat person to figure that out. To an oppressed fat person, the army of quasi-fat people who are struggling to hold the line must appear as tempting a target for fat acceptance recruiting as a tractor-trailer full of cheezy poofs.

The most attractive women I have dated got hit on by men at least once per week and in some cases at least once per day. If your girlfriend does not get hit on at least this much, without making any effort to get hit on, then unquestionably you are a beta male.

The human female pelvis had to widen to make room for the head of the fetus during birth. As the hominid brain enlarged in response to selective pressure, the hominid females whose pelvic structures lagged behind the brain growth curve ended up dying unspeakably gruesome deaths. So today when we admire the graceful curve of a woman's hips, we are looking at the result of a creative process that makes Hitler look like an amateur at the cruelty game.

Clearly the people who are failing need preaching.

Understanding the principle of diversity gives one a chuckle at the current politically correct use of the word by group rightists (neo-tribalists). Calling attention to diversity is not a wise strategy for someone promoting an inclusive philosophy, because the notion of diversity is inherently divisive. Diversity is, by definition, the opposite of equality. Celebrating diversity means celebrating the facts (1) that life is unfair, and (2) that it is impossible to guarantee equal success for everyone in any endeavor that matters.

How many people saw "The Pianist"? How many of them took up piano as a result? Learning to play the piano is safer and more feasible than trying to beat up people twice your size and strength.

It's easy to explain spirituality as an exaptation of the tribal instinct of social animals. To see this, get a dog. Or go to a football game and notice how hard it is to remain quietly seated when the other 50,000 fans jump up and shout after a big play.

Why do you think men buy boats? Because they just want to drive around in boats by themselves?

There are plenty of scientists who adhere to every sort of religious nonsense belief, but they manage to do their work as scientists according to the rules of science without trying to invoke their religions to explain things while they are on the clock. It's like accepting the rules of football while you are playing football. You don't have to "believe" in football. When the game is over, you operate under different rules.

I'd like to hear your theory to explain why every major religion, when left entirely to itself, treats women like livestock.

The average straight man cares about a woman's opinion if he finds her attractive. That's what he is genetically programmed to do. If the attractive woman's opinion of him is sufficiently favorable, then he has an opportunity to pump sperm into her. On a text-based medium such as Usenet, this vital piece of information is missing. Therefore we men have no easy way to weight the opinions of the various posters we read who purport to be women. This gives a man the freedom to picture a woman opponent as hideously unattractive if he wishes, thereby discounting the importance of her opinion.

Consider that less than 1 in 5 U.S. adults hold college degrees. Of your ten closest adult friends, how many hold college degrees? If your friends are representative, you would expect only one or two to hold college degrees.

Women who get romantic lead roles in the most commercially successful films typically have BMIs in the range of 18 to 20 inclusive.

When you type at your computer you may think you are typing to a person who cannot even see. You infer this from the unpredictable pattern of characters your computer displays in response to your typing. It's hard to believe a 2003-vintage computer could come up with all that stuff on its own. Or maybe a 1999-vintage computer if you are slow about upgrading as I am.

I'm not even sure I would call them "man-hating feminists." They obviously hate some behaviors of some men, but it is not clear they hate "men" in some collective or complete sense. There is a big difference between (a) "hating" something and (b) being angry at not getting what you want from that something.

The photographs accurately simulate the most important component of a man's sexual arousal: the sight of a beautiful, apparently receptive woman. The lack of any odor proves conclusively that men do not need to smell any pheromones from women to get HIGHLY aroused. In other words, if women produce pheromones, they are OBVIOUSLY not necessary for arousing men sexually.

Intelligent people tend to be more critical, because they have a better ability to spot mistakes and faults. For that reason, few people are comfortable with partners who are significantly more intelligent than themselves.

Romance is as realistic as a desert flower. During its brief existence it is as real as anything else, but the brief desert flowering after an occasional rain doesn't reflect what the desert is usually like.

If they are "his" kids then why does mommy have the legal right to kill them?

A woman who suffers from thinning hair will almost never just accept it the way so many balding men (like your buddy Crash) do. She will cover it up with scarves or wigs or seek treatment. Hair loss to a woman is simply unacceptable. (Which is remarkable considering how many women seem content to become fat hogs. I wish women would bring their looks obsessions more into line with reality. Having hair is not more important than not having excess blubber. Halle Berry with a shaved head would kick the fat ass of Rosie O'Donnell with the world's best hairdo.)

Carrying food is one of the limiting factors in soldier effectiveness. If there is a way for soldiers to carry much less food while completing the same duties, that would make them better soldiers. Soldiers have difficulty "cheating" on their "diets." They have to live for weeks on the food they can carry at the start of a patrol. The military has standard formulas to calculate food requirements. There aren't any soldiers with magic metabolisms who can function on drastically less food. Certainly there is none of this nonsense we read from obese people who claim to be running marathons on 500 kcal/day.

Genetic engineering will make it very hard for anybody to be a star, because as soon as some trait gets identified as having star value, millions of people will soon have it. When every woman could look like Halle Berry, would the real Halle Berry be able to earn millions of dollars by smiling at the camera and saying a few lines? Probably not. A woman's beauty would still be valuable for making her boyfriend happy but she wouldn't be admired by millions for it, when every woman on every block looks equally good.

To an average American adult, 1800 kcal/day would hardly feel like eating.

For example, most women have completely rejected the notion of waiting until marriage before putting out. Why have women rejected some traditions while clinging to others? [Rhetorical.]

What outside event can the brain directly sense? My brain floats in a bath of fluid, but I do not feel wet. My homunculus does not feel as if he is drowning. I don't feel all gushy and slimy inside.

Why do you think men buy [luxury] boats? Because they just want to drive around in boats by themselves?

I never got near the real Studio 54 or even the local knockoff in my town, but I did see the movie. And the movie didn't focus very much on the people who got stuck outside. Few people would buy tickets to watch movies about them.

A person can take courses on creative writing. It sounds as if you could teach courses on creative reading.

Smartism is one of the most insidious forms of prejudice. Smart people can sometimes feel sorry for stupid people, but only at a great distance. When a smart person has to tolerate a stupid person at close quarters for much time, that smartist disdain always comes out.

That's how competition always works. As soon as some method proves it can increase competitiveness, it raises the bar for all competitors. Like steroids in sports. If the opponent is taking drugs and kicking your ass, you have to take them too. Or if the equipment gets better. All the players need the better equipment.

I wonder why mothers who are getting generous child support payments do not share their winnings with less fortunate mothers? Evidently the women who won the competition for wealthy men aren't interested in seeing the side of the women they defeated.

I think women distribute their sexual favors far less equitably than an employer distributes paychecks.

Women like exercise classes where they can follow a leader and the group stays in one spot so everybody works at her own level and there is no objective way to measure performance.

It's so easy to become a Christian –— all one needs to do is exercise one's imagination –— that there is no real barrier to entry for any sort of scoundrel, villain, or wretch.

Most of us guys don't need to spend $10,000 to see women running away from us.

By listening to various men discuss their experiences with the same woman I had to conclude that either (a) men lie a lot, or (b) the same woman does not behave the same way with every man.

If we understood how to manipulate atoms, we could make diamonds as cheap as graphite. But we aren't that smart yet, so we rely on the rare natural accidents of volcanic pipes to have made a few diamonds for us, and then some humans kill other humans to get those diamonds. It's pathetic, really. All the intelligence humans apply to killing other humans to get diamonds would be better spent figuring out how to make the same diamonds out of readily-available carbon.

Weight is an attribute, but it is more like hair length than ethnicity. People may decide, within fairly wide limits, how much to weigh. It may take a bit more effort than getting a haircut, of course, when excess food is available and the glutton must decide not to eat so much of it. Some choices are easier for some people to make, but that is also true of the rapist. I suspect the serial rapist who keeps raping despite repeated punishments is like the chronic glutton who cannot resist those gluttonous urges despite outside pressure from society and repeated attempts to eat less.

Why do you refer to God as "he"? Does your God have a penis? Or did ancient patriarchal cultures create God in their own image?

Why does society require rapists to control their urges while fat people are free to ravage doughnuts? Obviously, because doughnuts lack the ability to complain.

Everybody disrespects someone. We live in a finite world in which diverse people with conflicting interests compete for various kinds of insufficient resources. More plainly: no matter who you are, someone poses a real threat to your interests. You aren't going to respect that person any more than you respect a mosquito that is trying to suck your blood.

Did men who owned property "give" equal rights to men who did not own property? I don't think the men who owned property really had a choice. They had to "give" landless men equal rights to avoid creating a much larger problem for themselves.

You prove every time you post that being stupid is not difficult.

Thinking about food does not make a person fat any more than thinking about sex makes a person pregnant.

Once computers can talk, computers will talk dirty.

I remember once marveling at a woman who actually said "I love music" while she kept punching through radio stations trying to find some music she didn't hate. But then again most "heterosexuals" do not desire sex with most members of the opposite sex. To a first approximation, most people find nobody else attractive.

All major religions got to be major by being ruthlessly intolerant of competing belief systems. Whenever any single religion gains a 99% market share in a given geographic area, watch out. Then that religion no longer has to pretend to be nice.

If a man gets paid more money than a woman for the same job, does he feel any sense of injustice? If he did, he could just hand the woman some of his paycheck to balance things out. But this never happens. If a man gets a promotion over a woman, he takes it.

A few guys with boxcutter knives were able to generate $100 billion in damage. A few sentences of your ignorance can do similar violence to the truth.

To convince people to repress other people, one must first convince them to reject logic. Rejecting logic is, of course, religion's stock in trade. So religion is a useful tool of repression.

A woman always considers a man's attempts to meet women inappropriate unless she thinks he is hot. From a woman's point of view, a man she finds unattractive should know his place –— otherwise he can fuck off and die.

Does every woman who dates a man who shaves his face harbor pedophile tendencies deep down in her depraved innermost being? Quite clearly yes. Incidentally, after women won the right to vote in the U.S., no more U.S. Presidents displayed facial hair.

The implicit message of Charlie's Angels is: if you want to look cool, don't be fat.

I've seen this so many times it gets to be boringly predictable. Every attractive young single woman always has her retinue of male nice guy "friends" who hang around and try to spend time with her. The woman herself will always deny that they have any sexual interest in her whatsoever, which is a combination of (a) her tendency to project her lack of attraction for them, and (b) their care to avoid ever making a clear play for sex with her lest she freak out and banish them from her presence. Since the woman herself isn't about to flush the pretenders out of their ghillie suits by offering them sex, we have to consider other clues, such as the mysterious failure of her nice guy "friends" to cultivate similar friendships with the hot chick's lonely 300-pound best friend Griselda.

There may be nothing wrong with a helicopter, but a helicopter cannot fly to the Moon.

Competent people use criticism to get even better.

Science has been the only generally successful method of discovering how reality works. By their fruits you will know them. Look at all the worthwhile objects in your house. How many are products of science, and how many are products of religion? Do you mow your lawn with a lawnmower, or with prayer?

Exposure to cold does not cause "colds"; viruses do. This gets proven time and again at the South Pole. Scientists who winter over at the Pole spend about six months cut off from the outside world. During this time they generally do not catch colds. Then when the sunlight returns and the first supply airplane arrives with a crew change, POW! Almost everybody at the base catches a cold. The airplane delivers a load of replacement personnel, supplies, and VIRUSES.

Your mistake is to cling to your silly belief that a communication has one and only one meaning, and that you and you alone determine that meaning.

Virtually every idea gets explored in science fiction, except what actually happens.

The R.I.A.A. defends the rights of rappers everywhere to advocate gunning down police officers, but by god if the kids want to listen to it they have to pay whatever price the music industry demands. I wonder, what is the maximum possible amount of irony? The R.I.A.A. earns a profit (indirectly) through the sale of records advocating every sort of disrespect for the law and establishment rules, but as soon as teenagers start disrespecting R.I.A.A. establishment rules, the music industry runs whining to the cops. At least when real criminals break the law, they have the self-respect not to call the cops when someone commits a crime on them.

She was once a young woman. She had her fun, now the party's over. If she's looking for pity from all the men she rejected when she was young and hot, now there's a laugher. Now she gets to experience what she put them through.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

When an ad agency makes a compelling commercial, are they encouraging people to buy the product or steal it? The answer is they are doing both. The more desirable a product is, the more likely people are to steal it if they can. When you have something people desire, you have to be aware of when you are creating easy opportunities for them to steal it. If you go to a gravel pit, you won't see as much security as you see at a jewelry store catering to the high-end market.

In practice, every successful religion is intolerant of all competing ideas. Religious minorities can pretend to be nice, if they have to, but once a religion gains a sufficient market share in any particular area, it will persecute anybody in that area who doesn't accept that religion. History proves that locally dominant religions never choose to restrain themselves. They must be restrained by outside force. The idea that people should tolerate others who believe differently is not a religious idea.

People want to be rich because being rich is better. But if you are rich you have to be careful about where you flaunt your wealth. Generally rich people want to live around other rich people, so they don't have to worry about enraging the poor. It would make sense to have bars that only let in sexy people. Then all the sexy people could flaunt it without having to worry about getting raped by the ugly.

If men imagine they are something they are not, then the problem is that their imagination has lost its anchor with reality. They have given in to religious thinking.

The purpose of putting clothes on attractive women is to make them look less than their best. It's like putting a throttle and brakes on a car to slow it down. You cannot drive a car at full throttle all the time. That's only possible on a race track closed to traffic with high banked curves and a good surface. The idea of "looking your best" means to look as good as you can in light of the rules that exist to strictly limit how much of your good looks you can display. It also means looking your best to the people you want to arouse sexually, while limiting the ability of others to see your best.

What do you think about the paternity studies that have found in large samples of ordinary people that up to 30% of children born to married women were not sired by the married women's lawful husbands?

Basically, we say a person has "inner beauty" when that person is unfailingly nice to us.

Have you ever behaved in a bar the way [Jodie] Foster's character behaved in The Accused? If not, why not?

Imagine the horror of living in an ancient society where nothing ever improved, and every person had to play by the same crappy game rules as his or her grandparents. No wonder every ancient society invented religions to give its people false hope.

Occasionally someone does attempt to found a truly innocuous religion, but usually they don't get very far. They last about as long as an animal on the African savanna that assumes all the other animals are nice. Most of the major religions have intolerant fundamentalist sects which are growing at the expense of their more liberal factions. This reflects the basic reality that most people are naturally intolerant.

If you don't ration a scarce commodity with price, then you have to ration it with bureaucrats, lawyers, and police.

As long as the ugliest 10% of men will settle for the ugliest 10% of women, ugly genes will sustain their percentage in the next generation.

What does the computer do when you misspell a keyword in a computer language? Generally the computer will not tolerate such sloppiness. One would think programmers, of all people, would have an instinctive grasp of the need for precise writing, but oddly this does not seem to be the case. Many programmers seem lost when they have to write in a human language and they cannot rely on a compiler to catch many of their mistakes.

I read an article in Science News about some craftsmen in New Guinea who still make stone tools. They can flake a stone into an effective knife whereas a beginner would just shatter the stone into some useless irregular fragments. The craftsmen require years to develop such skills. But despite their amazing skills, their final product is inferior to a cheap steel knife that a relatively unskilled worker can make in a suitably equipped factory.

How many people actually think their own sexual preferences came from someone else?

The degree to which I like one woman has no bearing on the degree to which I like other women. I find a few women likeable in many ways, whereas other women get on my nerves. Just because some other woman bothered me doesn't mean I have trouble telling when the next woman doesn't. It's difficult if not impossible to determine how much another person likes every member of some large class of people you mostly haven't met (e.g., ALL women). In contrast, it's usually fairly clear when another person doesn't like YOU.

The Spanish were slightly more open-minded than the Native Americans. The Spanish were open-minded enough to have adopted the wheel, gunpowder, iron, slightly more efficient systems of civil and military administration, navigation, cartography, etc. Their greater open-mindedness made their culture so powerful that a Spanish Conquistador with a couple of hundred men and horses, stranded in a completely alien land hopelessly beyond any chance of resupply from home, was able to run roughshod over a native culture that boasted a standing army of 100,000 men.

Draw those error bars. Make them wider. Wider!

English is a nasty language full of pitfalls and exceptions. Due to its difficulty it acts as a sort of IQ test, immediately announcing each writer's ability to master the sort of difficult, noisy, irregular tasks that are so common in business.

It doesn't matter whether a claim is positive or negative, it only matters whether a claim is testable. There are plenty of testable negative claims.

The straightforward way to test your hypothesis –— that the rapist desires "power" rather than "sex" –— would be to arrange some scenario wherein a rapist stalks a potential victim only to discover that she is more than willing to give him all the sex he wants. If the rapist abandons the willing partner and continues his search for unwilling partners he can overpower, that would support the hypothesis that the rapist is more interested in overpowering the unwilling than he is interested in having sex. I don't know whether anybody has tried to construct such an experiment (obviously it would pose difficulties) but I did read an article about date rape once in which women reported that their date-rapists first asked them nicely for sex and only resorted to force after the women said "No." Under that scenario it seems reasonable to suppose that the men would have been satisfied with consensual sex, and only resorted to rape when they couldn't get consensual sex with the women they found attractive.

Stripperbots will be even more economically devastating to human strippers than jukeboxes were devastating to house pianists.

And let's try common sense one last time. You know that any woman with any looks at all can find a willing man to have sex with just about anywhere that men exist. How can men and women want sex with each other equally, yet for women finding a sex partner is orders of magnitude easier than for men? There is no way to make sense of that, which is why you aren't making sense.

50 years ago if you knew how to program a computer your skills did not multiply into very much power because computers were so expensive and because society had not even begun rearranging itself to make the computer's job more convenient. Today if you know how to program a computer you can write your own ticket. 50 years from now you would be god.

The jobs that are currently easy to do on a computer are the jobs that aren't going to be worth very much in the very near future. The real opportunities are always somewhere in the gray area between the receding jungle of ignorance ahead of us and the relentlessly advancing lava flow of automation just behind us. Get too far ahead, and you die in the jungle. Stay in one place, and you get burned in the lava.

Unlike the 300 pound woman, however, the Ph.D. holder understands which side reality is on. It's pretty rare to meet people who are willing to spend money to lose their Ph.D.s.

Every smart kid learned in school how dangerous it is to be smarter than everybody else. I find it amazing that most of the smart people who post here seem to have internalized this lesson so completely they don't realize it's an act.

Remember what Jackie said about fat people? They can't control what they eat, so it's no surprise they have trouble controlling what they post. Fat people + trolls: a marriage made in heaven.

I saw some TV show about a couple that knowingly brought a pair of conjoined twins to term. They found out about the defect with ultrasound early in the pregnancy but because of their headcase Christian religion they believed it would be sinful not to enable their children to experience life as sideshow freaks. It's hard for me to imagine a more monstrous form of cruelty, right up there with Dr. Mengele. Suppose someone kidnapped you and performed grotesque surgery leaving you with sickening deformities. If they caught the perp there wouldn't be a punishment too great. And yet the average woman can inflict the same fate on her offspring and nobody cares. Not even the taxpayers who often end up paying for the freaks.

To many people, particularly those of the uglo-intellectual persuasion, "love" is a kind of get-out-of-low-SMV card. If you can get someone to love you, then it doesn't matter how fat, old, ugly, deranged, or otherwise undesirable you are –— or become. You're magically exempted from the inconvenience of having to compete in the sexual market. I.e., love is to low-SMV people what the six-gun was to the cowboy: the Great Equalizer.

Imagine talking to Britney Spears through an unbreakable glass window. You can't touch her, but she is determined to do everything in her power to get you off from there. And I mean everything. If Britney gets boring then she'll call Halle Berry to join her. When the porn industry takes the final step –— building graceful gynecomorphic robots superficially indistinguishable from the world's most beautiful women by look and feel –— but definitely distinguishable by their totally receptive behavior and complete lack of all risks of disease, pregnancy, theft, backtalk, etc. –— the average woman is going to be facing competition that will make hubby's 30 GB of porno files today look like nothing.

"If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit." Catchy phrases beat long-winded details when the goal is to sway a mob. The average person doesn't get very far into the details of whatever believe system he/she swallows. You can tell this by asking him or her to explain what he/she believes and why. The vast majority of people cannot provide anything resembling a coherent, comprehensive, and rational defense of their beliefs. At best they can parrot a few arguments they heard in church, school, on the street, or wherever, but these tepid jabs virtually never amount to a serious analysis of alternative points of view. And yet even though they know they can't explain what they believe, they stay locked in to their beliefs anyway.

The Islamic fundamentalists have a perfectly rational fear of the West. There is no doubt that Western pop culture (sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, porn, liberty, individualism, political correctness, etc.) would mow through traditional Islamic cultures like a hot knife through butter if the mullahs lost their local monopoly on information. Islamic fundamentalism is a belief system that probably can't tolerate peaceful coexistence with anything else. To see this, try not looking at any women for a year, then go to a beach when the coeds are on spring break. Chronically depriving people of a stimulus makes them more sensitive to that stimulus. The fact that Islamic guys don't get to look at porn or even see any hot chicks walking around (all the women have to wear obscuring veils) makes them extremely vulnerable targets for the Western sex industry.

I remember this other guy I went bicycling with. We were riding through Kentucky near his house, so he suggested we stop in for some refreshment. He was a doctor, and I remember being impressed by his house...but not HALF as much as I was impressed by his wife. I'd guess this guy told his female patients it was OK for them to be 20 pounds too heavy too, but when it came down to selecting the woman he wanted to look at every day...surprise! He picked one who would be considered highly attractive by >95% of men.

Face it, the Longitudinal Study of Youth happened. Kids took tests, grew up, and did things. People kept track of the results. You can argue about what the results mean but you can't pretend they didn't happen.

Like it or not, all that wonderful technology you profess to love is mostly the product of the top fraction of 1% of the world's most intellectually capable people. If you believe technology is essential to keep the good times rolling (and I hope you agree with me that it most definitely is), then you have a vital interest in looking at possible ways to increase the proportion of humans who are capable of creating more of it. But don't worry, I won't expect you to grasp this point, if you actually believe freedom and population can increase simultaneously without limit.

Will humans go back to obeying the laws of Malthus? Economists, who know nothing of biology, reflexively say "No." Biologists, who know nothing of economics, reflexively say "Yes."

If science were as arbitrary an enterprise as you seem to believe, then it would be much easier to make a career in science than it actually is. We would also have far more diversity of opinion among scientists than we actually do. Questions about things like the mass of the electron or the descent of humans from ape-like ancestors would never get fully settled. For example, physics could splinter into different schools, each with its own opinion about the mass of the electron, and each equally capable of productive discovery.

Women find power and status attractive; men do not. That is why (actress) Sharon Stone can say in an interview that she would like to have an affair with Bill Clinton, and no comparable male actor will express similar desires for Janet Reno.

In any case, when you are speaking with a man one-on-one, you are not very likely to get perfect objectivity out of him, even if you are explicitly trying to get him to be objective. If he thinks he has the possibility of having sex with you, then you can kiss any shred of objectivity goodbye. He may not be smart enough to tailor his presentation to conform with your desires, but he is probably smart enough to avoid the most obvious mistakes. There is even the possibility that he has internalized society's message that he is somehow abnormal to have the same feelings as most other men. The most effective way for him to deceive you is for him to deceive himself first.

It only takes one generation to disprove Lamarckism.

And let me ask you this: are you suggesting that my words have greater power to do harm than the underlying reality that makes my words true?

No argument there, but let's keep in mind that very few Pierce Brosnan lookalikes are going to be scrubbing toilets. There is so much pervasive social preference for beautiful people that they generally do not get stuck for long in undesirable jobs. Ask yourself how often you have seen any really attractive janitors.

Actually, the most successful people are the most realistic. They are able to look at any situation and understand quickly what really matters. This immediately puts them into conflict with 99% of the rest of the population, because most people are dolts who cannot understand reality. Thus every leader has to apply force at some level to close the reality gap that his or her underling dolts cannot close for themselves. This is where the "macho" attitude comes from. There are certain things that have to happen if the organization is going to meet its goals, and the people at the top tend to understand these things sooner than anybody else.

In a society of true equals, the present institution of marriage would be about as relevant as a riverboat stranded in a desert.

I've had women ask me, in all apparent honesty, "What does Cindy Crawford have that I don't?" Even though a question like that tends to elicit snickers, not to mention snappy answers such as "Better-looking men to answer her questions," I can certainly relate to it because even though I know Brad Pitt is more attractive to women than I am (by a wide margin) I can only look at him and say "Huh?" That is, if I woke up one day and discovered that women were now saying I am more attractive than Brad Pitt I would have no reason to argue.

Recently in the discussions of rape here, several people claimed the rapist is "at fault" for the rape. While I generally agree, I wonder how the same people can ignore the rapist's difficulty with impulse control while excusing morbidly obese slobs for having exactly the same problem.

If women want sex just as much as men do, how did women ever come up with the notion of "date-rape"? From a man's point of view the notion of being "raped" by someone he finds sexually attractive enough to date is absurdly comical. That is, if a man complains about asking a woman out on a date and then getting "raped" by her, he will get laughed out of the room. A man isn't going to get scarred for life if a woman he dates gets a little frisky. That women have the capacity to view sex on a date in some sort of negative way indicates that their entire attitude on the subject is utterly alien to the way men operate. Men continually try to think of ways to increase their chances of having sex with the women they date, whereas women think of ways to enlist the judicial system to reduce the amount of sex they must endure.

Some lies are indefinitely sustainable. Truth does not automatically win, as every religion proves by its continued survival. Ideas do not win by being true, but by being efficient at making more copies of themselves. It takes work to have an idea, and some ideas take more work than others. Since people are lazy, any idea that requires very little work has a built-in advantage regardless of whether it is true.

It's difficult to believe that a cold, sterile hunk of metal like a car could beat out a warm, living, magnificent animal like a horse, but the car did.

Beauty does not necessitate mindlessness. But speaking of mindlessness, how mindless does a person have to be to succumb to the self-imposed deformity you obliquely refer to with the phrase "weight is gained"? You want to talk about mindless, check out a fat person.

Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Depending on which part of the elephant you grab or stand under your perception of the elephant could be completely different. To a man who is attractive to women, women are sugar and spice and everything nice. To a man who is unattractive to women, they are cold bitches. Both perceptions correspond accurately to the treatment the respective men get.

Christianity can take no more credit for its contemporary state of grudging tolerance than a circus lion can take credit for becoming tame. When Christianity was the only game in town (at least in Europe), it was no more tolerant of dissent than Islam is today. Critical thinking in medieval Europe was just as dangerous as it is in parts of Yemen now. However, after taking heavy casualties the critical thinkers eventually attracted enough followers (both full-time like me, and part-time like you) to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages.

If your brain is unable to conceive much of God why are you cocksure about your concept of God being more accurate than the Muslim's concept of God? I'm also surprised to see you promoting a purely material concept of mind. Don't you claim that some part of you owes nothing to the matter of your brain and will persist after your brain's destruction? If so then how are your powers of conception limited by your brain?

Note that in most secular societies, religious fanatics learn to compartmentalize their fanaticism. They apply the rudiments of critical thinking when they are on the clock, using their brains to solve problems rather than wasting time on prayer or divination.

Fretting over labels is a sign of weakness. If feminists actually can make men look like a lower form of life simply by relabeling them, then men must actually be a lower form of life. To understand how this works, try to think of a new word for winning the lottery jackpot which will cause people to abhor winning the lottery jackpot.

Men have to learn at an early age not to trust their own wishful thinking. If we did, we'd be grabbing at every beautiful woman we see, reasoning thus: "Wow, if I want her so much, she must want me, right?" Men have an easier time grasping the unreliability of subjective reasoning because we receive overwhelming evidence from the environment that our subjective feelings are usually completely out of whack with reality.

If critical thinking ever becomes popular, nobody will know which way to vote. Let's see, do I vote for the taliban types who believe an immortal human soul springs into existence at conception, or do I vote for the equalists who want to punish white men for all the world's pain?

If you are a man, you've always known you are perfect and the rest of the world is completely screwed up. If Halle Berry were to knock on my door and tell me she is madly in love with me and she thinks I am the most desirable hunk of male flesh on the planet, I would think to myself "It's about time somebody else figured that out."

As soon as it became necessary to sustain a priestly class, the priests had an obvious incentive to evolve their religions in directions that insured the priestly class would prosper.

Think of tobacco as Tonto's Revenge.

When you reach middle age you will directly understand why almost all of the ruling class consists of people older than 40. To get serious power you have to pursue it seriously, but even if you make no special effort, a measure of authority tends to accrue automatically to just about any smart person who gets old.

Once I was riding my bicycle and a flying bird defecated on my head. What are the odds that that particular bird would have landed its dropping on my head without even trying? If I were a prescientific idiot, I might have taken the bird's droppings to be an omen, as you appear to be taking the Universe as some kind of an omen.

"It is written ..." "It is revealed ..." The passive voice is great for making something sound bigger than the invention of shepherds.

If your point is that survival is not too hard for a large fraction of people living in advanced countries, ask yourself how things got to be so easy. Our easy life is the product of our large brains, which themselves are the product of our ancestors' need to survive.

Freedom is a conserved quantity. The total amount of freedom in a society does not change; the only question is how a society allocates freedom to individuals. We tend to think of societies as "not free" when a few individuals monopolize most of the freedom, but in reality those dominant few are the most free individuals alive. A dictator like Saddam Hussein can kill his political enemies if they annoy him; he can have his thugs pick up any woman he finds attractive and bring her back to the palace where he can rape her all he likes. Saddam Hussein enjoys a level of freedom no American can imagine.

To a man, seeing a wrinkled aging beauty is something like seeing a cargo cult's re-enactment of an airport. There are some similarities to the real thing, but enough differences to be disturbing.

I don't think most people are ever really ready to settle down. We just want our partners to settle down.

In my experience, the most important ingredient in a woman's response is the degree to which she finds her partner attractive. But if she finds him attractive enough to fuck, even if only occasionally, that's usually enough to work with. One has to keep in mind the survey statistic that only 20% of women allegedly reach orgasm regularly with their partners. Bringing most women to orgasm is like getting good sounds out of a violin –— there are a lot more ways that don't work than ways that work.

Have you ever shopped for groceries in a slum? I lived in a slum for 11 years. When I went to the grocery store, I was one of the few patrons who paid in cash. Most of the other shoppers were obese women pushing carts (occasionally, two carts for one monstrously obese shopper) piled high with immense quantities of fairly expensive junk foods and convenience foods, fatty foods, frozen foods, etc.

Perhaps part of Reese's box-office appeal is that she doesn't alienate women moviegoers by being too hot. So she's a solid choice for a chick flick. She's cute enough to be believable in romantic chick flick roles, but not so sexy that women (her major customers) want to hate her. I'm guessing we won't see Reese playing a Bond Girl any time soon. In another ten years she might make a good Miss Moneypenny.

People differ in their value to other people. I don't feel contempt for worthless people who know their place. The problem starts when someone who is worthless begins loudly asserting that he or she has worth to me.

Religious charlatans routinely get caught perpetrating frauds, which is hardly surprising because religious charlatans directly profit from their frauds. For example, when Mayan priests learned enough astronomy to be able to predict solar eclipses a few days in advance (not all that difficult if you can chart the positions of the Moon and Sun relative to the background stars with some accuracy), they used their knowledge to boost their status by staging ceremonies for the ignorant masses. The priests would gather everybody around, announce that the Sun would darken, and it was up to them restore the Sun. They would chant and do their religious things, the Sun would darken, the people would be terrified, than the priests' prayers would "be heard" and the Sun would brighten again. After that the masses would be even more willing to hand the fruits of their labor over to the priests. What an excellent racket! Tony Soprano should be so lucky.

In Jesus' day there were no cameras, no newspapers, no modern communication. Books were handwritten and extremely expensive. Most people could neither write nor read. Most news traveled by word of mouth, and slowly. Nobody had anything close to a modern scientific training; it would have been child's play for a sleight-of-hand artist to dupe the masses and earn a decent living as a miracle-worker, especially if he employed the convenient escape hatch of blaming all his failures to produce miracles on the unbelief of the audience.

Astronauts require billions of dollars worth of equipment to keep the hostile environment safely outside. When all the equipment works, astronauts are not exposed to any more environmental hostility than people experience on an amusement park ride. The whole point of all that equipment is to try to insure that astronauts never experience most of what outer space is all about.

There are many environments less pleasant than a spacecraft. A private citizen paid $20,000,000 to take a ride into orbit. How many private citizens would pay money for the privilege of sitting in the middle of a municipal dump?

While your list of skeptics proven wrong is impressive, it is also misleading. Most crazy ideas throughout history failed. By reporting only the successes and not the failures you are prevaricating. Also, many of the skeptics were perfectly correct at the time. The early computers, airplanes, etc., were a joke. Only after massive amounts of development did some of these products improve enough to find wider application. What we think of as a "computer" today is very different than what Ken Olsen thought of as a "computer" in the 1970's. There's no way the average person would want a 1970's-vintage computer in his home. Only museums want such pieces of junk.

The problem with obesity is that important people generally don't like it. Therefore when an unimportant person expresses disapproval, it reminds the obese person of the opinions of people who matter.

I wish you anti-SMV types could argue consistently. On the one hand, you accuse magazines like Playboy of "airbrushing," and on the other hand you cite Renee Russo as "evidence" that "old women" are "attractive."

There are plenty of unknown young actresses who look better than Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock right now. Just watch a show like "Are You Hot?" and imagine Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock standing on the same stage. Looks are important for an actress but they aren't everything. For a lucky few, once they become famous enough they can hang on until their looks degrade to the Jamie Lee Curtis stage. At some point the films have to become so fake that it's hard to keep the charade going, for example when the actress has to show up at a premier.

I've always wondered why most people have to be annoying. Why shouldn't everyone else be as appealing to me as, say, Halle Berry is? Even without monkeying with the sex ratio, up to half the population could be that interesting. Why aren't they?

But I did read somewhere that men who rape are also much less likely to masturbate than normal men. If that is true, it's something for a woman to think about the next time she mocks a man whose best option for sex at the moment is himself. If a sufficient number of women ridicule a man for being a loser it's possible that could tip him over the edge. Look at how easy it is to drive some people into hysterics by mocking them online.

I've never met a woman who convinced me she understood what sexual hunger is like for a lot of young men.

For a woman. Does it occur to you that your surplus of possibilities and choices can only exist if a corresponding number of men have a shortfall of possibilities and choices? Learn something about how markets work. If the market is great for farmers, it is terrible for people who buy food from farmers. If the average woman has many more sexual opportunities than she cares to pursue, that means the average man is having many of his desires for sex frustrated. Therefore he is putting all those opportunities out there for multiple women who aren't taking them. His poverty creates their environment of plenty. If the numbers of men and women are comparable, how can such an imbalance exist? Simple: men want sex more than women want sex.

I admit I envy the future generation of young men who will be the first to face the rigors of puberty in an environment where sex of the highest imaginable quality will be cheap, ubiquitous, and as safe as watching television. Those lucky guys will roll their eyes when old farts like me tell them how we had to walk two miles in the snow just to hear a woman say "No," in a day when people could actually catch diseases from sex, produce children when they didn't want them, or go to jail for having sex. Today it is almost impossible for the average person to imagine life without indoor plumbing. But once upon a time people had to work very hard at lifting water from a well and dragging it back to their house. Someday sex for men will be as simple as getting water from a faucet. And that will change every aspect of society.

Evolution sucks, because sperm is cheap and eggs are costly. That's why I suggest we build sex robots. Let everyone act out whatever silly sociobiological urges they feel, in a safe way which affects no other human.

Anyway, it's good for kids to learn sooner rather than later what love is all about: the competition for the highest-quality genes with which to pair your own. Kids should understand why most of them are ugly: because their parents are losers who settled.

Actually politeness and consideration demonstrate insecurity. A person who is perfectly secure is usually a scoundrel, because he or she knows s/he can get away with it. Suppose you had billions of dollars, immunity to any sort of prosecution, and millions of devoted fans willing to kill for you no matter what you did. After a few years of living by those game rules how nice would you be? A person whose position is totally secure doesn't have to suck up to anybody. And from what we can observe, people who live such lives of privilege tend to give privilege its bad name.

You have to figure that the average man is probably about as far from what the average woman really wants as the average woman is as far from a Playboy centerfold model.

I also understand that admitting one has a problem is the first step to solving it, or failing that at least being somewhat logically consistent. Jackie, don't you find it interesting how rarely an obese person actually admits eating too much? It's always "I tried dieting and it didn't work." That would be like an alcoholic trying to address the many problems in his life without any reference to the fact that he's drunk all the time. The obese person denies overeating. The person of average attractiveness denies having to settle. It's weird.

If you aren't familiar with C.S. Lewis, he was a colleague of Tolkien who wrote "The Chronicles of Narnia" as well as a number of philosophical works that earned him the title: "The Thinking Man's Christian." Lewis pointed out that in every culture he knew about, not one permitted every man to pursue his every sexual impulse. Lewis went on to puzzle over how the Bible contains a moral code that is so at odds with the impulses that most men have, namely, to have sex with very large numbers of women. Sociobiology does not tell us that most men have these impulses. Rather, this has been common knowledge throughout recorded history. Sociobiology is simply another attempt to make sense of observations like this. Lewis simply threw up his hands when faced with the seeming contradiction between the Laws of God and the men He created. Instead of nothing, sociobiology offers something: a simple and logical explanation for these bizarrely impractical impulses that follows easily from an understanding of the different constraints on reproductive fitness men and women operate under.

Similarly, if we are going to have a debate about sociobiology or any other field, it would help if everybody at least had some idea of what the field is about. So far, we seem to have two groups of people: 1. People who have read at least an introductory book on the subject, and think the field has much to offer. 2. People who have not even read an introductory book on the subject, and think the field is bunk. I'm still waiting for someone in a group 3 to materialize: 3. People who have read at least an introductory book on the subject, and who can articulate some specific objection to at least one claim of the field.

I think men tend to be more realistic than women because a man's attractiveness to women is almost always primarily about what he does. A man quickly learns that if he takes no specific action to cater to what women want, they usually don't want him. Even guys who are successful with women strike out enough times to understand there are things that work and things that don't work. Every man understands the attractiveness advantage of things like transportation toys (cars, boats, airplanes, etc.) that women tend to like. Every man is aware of high school loser geeks who started successful rock acts and then had a virtually limitless supply of gorgeous young women hurling their bodies at them. Every man learns that his chances of scoring with a woman often hinge on whether he can simply say the right things at the right times and in the right tone of voice. In contrast, a woman who happens to be born beautiful might not understand why men are falling all over her. She might just think this is what men do no matter what. She'll know better when she's 70.

There is a principle on Usenet that there is no observation about reality which cannot be transformed into evidence of the defective character of the observer. For example, if I say "Cinderblocks are often gray" someone will counter by observing that I seem strangely fixated on cinderblocks and no doubt this indicates I suffer from a complex neurosis that perhaps isn't yet recognized as official illness but does come in quite handy for relieving anyone of the need to consider the color of cinderblocks seriously.

Not everyone associates emotionally with his ideas. A person who is "proud" of being right and "embarrassed" at being wrong has not even taken the first step toward rationality. All ideas are subject to revision in the face of new, conflicting evidence or superior, conflicting arguments. If you can point out any place where someone presented evidence that contradicted one of my statements, and I ignored their evidence and continued to persist in an objectively incorrect belief, then you will have made yourself useful to me.

I'm sure there cannot be too many "women's studies" programs that put much stock in Occam's Razor.

The literature on sociobiology takes pains to distinguish between "is" and "ought to." I found this somewhat condescending, because it seemed to me only an idiot could could fail to understand the distinction between describing the way things are (the "is") vs. advocating that things should be a certain way (the "ought to"). You do not seem like an idiot to me. So why can't you grasp the difference between "is" and "ought to?" I don't rely on sociobiology to "justify" any aspect of my behavior, because I don't need to justify my behavior. I am not asking for your permission or even for your approval. Instead I use what I have learned of sociobiology to make the confusing world around and within me slightly less confusing. I then assume, perhaps unjustifiably, that other people also desire to become less confused. When they don't, I enjoy twitting them.

I also "rely" on sociobiology to explain your behavior. Why do you lust after commitment? Why do you yearn to monopolize a man who does not want to be monopolized? Why do you want him to slash his chances for genetic survival to benefit your own? Your urges make perfect sense in light of the mating strategies that best served your female ancestors. The difference between you and me is that you want men to behave in a way that suits your genetic programming, and you appeal to some kind of implicit morality to justify the changes you want to mandate, while I understand there is no possible way women are ever going to behave in a way that suits my genetic programming! I don't know how many ways I have to phrase this to get the point across: my sexual urges DO NOT work to my advantage, and if I could change them, I would. But I can't, so the best I can do is try to cope with them. Sociobiology does not advance my cause, it simply describes my predicament.

It's possible that sociobiology can replace Protestantism, once men generally come to terms with the truth they cannot change: hard-working, highly successful men have a much better shot at the hottest babes (i.e., the women that men drool over most copiously). Of course men have always known this, but until they understand how deeply-rooted this female preference really is, it's possible for many men to waste their time denying or resenting it, instead of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. That is, if men can make the mistake of imagining that the female preference for male success is some kind of an arbitrary social construct women learned by watching TV, then men might imagine they can change the preferences of women by complaining about them. Or that they should defy these preferences.

It's too bad there's no real way to convey to beautiful young women just how great they have it at the moment. If there were a way to temporarily fast-forward them up to middle age and let them experience just how bad things could be for a while, they'd return to their youthful state, forget about complaining, and get down to the serious business of being the center of attention. Carpe diem, baybee!!!! One of the most profound cruelties of evolution is that beauty is largely wasted on young women. They usually don't seriously start to value men until they have gotten too old to be seriously valuable to men. Clearly this is one area where intelligent design could beat the socks off the blind watchmaker. Try to imagine a world in which beautiful young women desired sex with average men as intensely and enthusiastically as their mothers do. (I have to stop. Thinking this way is too painful.)

As long as sperm is cheap and eggs are precious, there's no way everyone can be simultaneously happy.

The short answer is: human children are extremely expensive, and in the ancestral environment it must have been very difficult for a woman to survive with young children if her man abandoned her. Therefore it makes perfect sense for a woman to insist on clear indications of commitment from a man before she gives him "the goods." The particulars of these commitment-indicators are subject to cultural evolution, so while women probably do not have genes that code for mental organs that lust after diamonds, they very probably have genes that code for mental organs that detect and demand some degree of commitment from a man before he seems to be attractive. Giving an expensive gift is one test of a man's future behavior. No matter how nice he is today, he could change tomorrow. However, you would still have the diamond.

There's nothing boring about success. Try it sometime and see.

People have been believing lies since the Third Reich and long before. If I start accusing you of beating your girlfriend long enough, people will eventually believe you beat your girlfriend. Most people don't remember the details and the subtleties. All they remember is that someone was accused of something. That's why we have libel laws –— because libel works.

An ecosystem has many niches. In any case, anybody who reasons tends to be my natural ally.

From what I have seen in my business experience, I am becoming more convinced all the time that you cannot manage what you do not know. I see this when I observe technical types attempting to work with marketing types. Every time the marketing type tells the technical type to do something that is obvious bullshit to anybody who understands the technology, the two of them have to waste time and burn up political capital. Whenever the boss has to receive lessons from the subordinate his/her ability to govern erodes.

I don't really fantasize about marrying and having kids with any women. That is not to say that I'm totally opposed to the idea, just that I don't feel the need to fantasize about it. I mean, that's kind of weird. If I think about getting married, I think about having sex. The sex is what matters, not the compromises I had to accept to get sex. I mean, what else am I going to think about? What my wife is going to look like in 20 years and fifty more pounds in a housecoat and curlers screaming at me to fix the washing machine, while my hypothetical surly adolescent children tell me I'm un-whatever-the-word-for-cool-is-then? Bleah. I'd rather fantasize about having my fingernails pulled out with pliers.

It's the natural desire of men everywhere to have sex with as many young, fertile women as possible while preventing other men from doing the same thing. There is also the desire of women to sustain their market value by keeping sex scarce. Whenever people have goals as conflicting as that, it's necessary for some kind of market allocation to resolve their relative importance. In many cultures the solution seems to include some kind of machinery to limit the kinds of public sexual displays women can make. Then there's the problem that historically it was socially costly to permit rampant lasciviousness. Only rich, modern societies can afford so much erosion in family stability and even rich cultures cannot cohere if everybody goes completely wild. In cultures that live closer to the edge of survival, you just cannot have too many people doing this. Also, historically most of our ancestors lived in small villages with little mobility and long memories. Mass sexual adventurism has only become feasible since the dawn of modern contraception, and the experience of AIDS and other STDs should persuade us that we really don't have the technology to make it workable on a large scale yet.

Let's say you are out for a hike and you stumble across a field where someone is growing marijuana. The "proprietor" sees you. What do you think he will do? Will he react in the same way he'd react if you discovered he was growing, say, soybeans?

So far, my critics have only convinced me of one thing: that they understand nothing about sociobiology. None of them have even read one simple introductory book, and they continue to write things that they would not write if they had (not necessarily because they would agree with the book, but because they would be aware of the arguments they would have to defeat to defend their points of view). How does anything they say even begin to constitute a "debate"?

Everybody will die sooner or later. By choosing to be fat a person usually chooses "sooner." Your mileage may vary, but it probably won't. Next time you see a TV documentary about centenarians, notice that not one of them is significantly overweight. Once in a while you will see one who smoked for most of his or her life, however.

Since Nikki Dial isn't standing in most of her finest work (presumably; I don't think I've seen any) the length of her legs is less relevant. I read somewhere that the highest-paid prostitutes are also rather short because (not surprisingly) most of the johns are short men, and short men prefer even shorter women. I wonder what is the average height of men who buy Nikki Dial films?

To me it's just so amazing that women actually feel more like fucking a guy when he puts down other guys. Even though I've read a few things about sociobiology I don't think I will ever feel less amazed by it no matter how many thousands of times people prove its major claims with their unwitting actions. Apparently the logistics of Female Choice are challenging enough that women come equipped with the genetic programming necessary to reward men who assist them in the difficult task of quarantining unfit men. Women themselves lack sufficient power to impose sexual inequality on men, so they have to enlist the help of men to pull this off.

Suppose you are starving and you see someone with a large supply of food. Suppose this person will not give you any food, but he will be polite to you. While politeness is great, if you are starving you want some food, not politeness. You would be happier if the person gave you food and was rude to you. Only once you had filled your stomach would you start to concern yourself with the politeness issue. If you lived in a whole city filled with people basking in a surplus of food but NONE of them would share any food with you, you would naturally come to resent all of those people. Their politeness would seem like a twist of the knife.

People who live in crummy houses often desire better houses, even though they already have houses. There are degrees to everything.

I am a person. Therefore, I am more important than money. In particular, I am more important than YOUR money. I want your money. Are you going to send it all to me? If not, why not?

A hurricane's energy doesn't "go to waste". It is part of a system called "weather", which turns out to be useful to a few people, like farmers.

If her co-workers can easily pick up the slack left by her absence, then what was she contributing while present? Similar things happen when unions go on strike, and a skeleton force of non-union employees manages to keep the plant running at full steam. Kind of makes you wonder what the union employees do with their time.

If women are getting paid less than men, and they are creating equal value, then a golden opportunity is obvious: start a company and staff it exclusively with women. Your profits will be higher by whatever margin your competitors are over-paying their male employees.

I personally have never met a person who wanted to give me anything they considered to have significant value in exchange for nothing. Have you? If not, then why "ought" they do this? We don't get uncomfortable with the idea that we should exchange something comparable in return for consuming physical goods and services. Why should we expect that love is going to exist in some sort of socialist-emotional dreamland? A person's love, time, attention, and support are not free; why "ought" we regard them as being worthless?

The brakes in your car cannot make all your problems disappear either but I advise you against disconnecting them. Incidentally, has money solved all your problems? If not, why not give all your money away?

This is the problem with binary logic. If we posit only two states: perfection and imperfection, and we consider all forms of imperfection to be equivalent, then we disqualify all imperfect people from passing judgment on any other imperfect people. Since the set of perfect people is empty, social progress then depends on every individual's desire for self-improvement. This will lead to very slow progress, if any.

C. S. Lewis is a case study in what happens when a smart guy takes a vow of irrationality.

When N comparable religions are busy fighting each other, they cannot focus their efforts on fighting the truth. Since in the long run science is the enemy of every religion, it's in the interest of every religion to keep science safely chained to a stake.

Imagine a tribe of humans living in, say, Ohio without any source of artificial heat. They could do it, but it would be tough. Imagine if some proto-religion had taken a hard stand against artificial heat. The hominid craving for warmth would have wounded that religion soon after the discovery of fire. The invention of thermostats would have done it in. The above scenario may seem hard to imagine, but many religions have drawn analogous lines in the sand against sex, and this will almost certainly pit them against sexbots. When sexbots become as good as I think they can be, those religions will lose. Drawing lines in the sand against sex has worked so far because for most people at any given time, really good sex is pretty much out of reach. Holiness is a good option when sin presents logistical problems.

What is "reality" about having 25 hot-looking women in one room? That never happens all by itself in reality. To get such a concentration of hot women and only hot women, someone must pre-select them in a totally artificial way. In any realistic gathering of women, they vary a lot in appearance. I read somewhere that 11,000 women sent in applications for the latest edition of The Bachelor, allowing the producers of the show to select an incredibly unrealistic sample of women. To make a genuine "reality" show the producers would have to go out on the street and take the first 25 women at random.

When I meet an attractive woman, I like to ask her what's the longest amount of time she has gone as an adult with no man to date. If she's really attractive, the answer is usually something like "a week" or less. And she has to think about it for a few minutes to remember her last dry spell. Often, if a woman looks good, she doesn't have any dry spells at all. She goes from one man directly to the next man and so on until she decides to settle down. Advising a man to pursue only women who aren't dating anybody is like advising him to pursue only unattractive women, unless he has some godlike ability to find out the relationship statuses of hundreds of attractive women so he can zero in on the few who are coming up for grabs this week.

I can't recall seeing in real life a whole lot of concern displayed by men for the impressions of women they consider wholly unsuitable for sex.

As far as I have been able to observe, when a woman says she doesn't want to have "any men in her life" that's her nice way of saying she doesn't want the man she is talking to in her life.

If you looked around a forest floor for sticks that would work well as baseball bats, you wouldn't find many. What separates humans from animals is our tendency to improve on nature in so many ways.

Feel free to list all your principles and count the number that you actually invented. Consider that someone else invented almost every word you are able to think.

Here's a useful quote from the Zen of logic: The logic which must be self-endorsed is not the true logic.

There is a reason why wealthy people must spend some of their wealth to protect the rest. In a way we are probably spoiled by our cultural success in stamping out most crime. In some primitive societies, the productive people probably spend much of their energy fighting off rivals who want their stuff. In contrast, our enforcement methods have evolved enough to fool us into thinking we have some magical, automatic, and inviolable entitlement to our stuff. But that is not how nature works. In nature, the bigger predator follows the smaller predator around and drives the smaller predator off its kills.

When you inflict pain on people it is common for them to strike back with what they have available. It's like how the Iraqis respond to America's super-weapons by using impolite methods of warfare, such as sending out children to retrieve weapons from downed fighters, shooting from behind human shields, using hospitals/mosques/schools as military bases, etc. You can't expect the enemy to let you beat him fair and square. As soon as the rules go against him, he will toss out the rules.

If everybody were like me, we wouldn't be fighting the endless petroleum war, because we'd be consuming only about 10% as much petroleum as we are consuming now. When I see all those hordes of people out driving as if they believe in the spontaneous generation of gasoline, I know that most people are very different than me.

Notice that almost no successful people have read a lot of self-help books. The first habit of highly successful people is that they didn't need that book.

I realize that the random course of evolution is unlikely to have bequeathed me with anything really special.

If a movie studio published reviews of its own movies would you expect those reviews to be accurate? Or would they be more along the lines of briefings from the Iraqi Information Minister?

Sexual harassment lawsuits are punishment for the crime of being unattractive. A man who is attractive to a woman need not worry about being punished for the crime of being unattractive to her.

The casino is the very embodiment of the principle that if you flash money around, you are tempting people to steal it. If any casino was as lax about security as Jodie Foster's character in "The Accused", it would be stripped bare by thieves in less than a day.

The men I know who have obese partners complain about the fact that their partners are obese, although most are fairly guarded about making such complaints. They are, after all, embarrassed about the disgusting condition of their partners and the pathetic picture they present for acquiescing to it.

Generally the label "asshole" is a code word meaning "any competitor who outperforms me."

I'm 99.999% certain you cannot produce a strategy for returning the divorce rate to historical levels without also restoring the historical divorce stigma. Simply making all marriages better does not help, because that also makes all re-marriages equally more enticing.

In every mammalian species displaying sexual dimorphism, i.e., a difference in size between the sexes, the larger, stronger males reproduce more successfully than less competitive males. (For example, among walruses, only about 5% of the males have sex with the females. The successful male walruses are bigger, stronger, and more ruthless than the competing males. Such strategies are feasible primarily because the female walruses assume essentially all of the burden of rearing their pups.) The fact that men are, on average, larger and stronger than women strongly suggests that, at some time in the past, a minority of men were responsible for fathering a majority of the children. We see strong remnants of these tendencies today, for example, the fact that Wilt Chamberlain can find 20,000 women who volunteer to have sex with him, and the fact that he wants to comply, a phenomenon that should boggle the mind of any normally obscure man.

Ask your insurance agent how her company can continue to make a profit, despite the fact that it is FLATLY unable to predict whose house will burn down, or who will have an auto accident, and so on. If your insurance agent is not able to answer coherently, then read an introductory statistics text. I won't repeat all that stuff here.

The really odd part is that smart people of any color would even identify with the marching morons who superficially resemble them. I have always found that I have much more in common with highly intelligent blacks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, Koreans, etc. than I do with persons of average intelligence even if they happen to be people the Census Bureau calls my own.

Actually the most telling non-response has come from the Hive. Which, judging from the photos on the personal home pages I have seen, doesn't exactly look like America.

If your employer beat you, would you leave? If your husband beat you, would you leave? A lot of people are stupider about relationships involving sex and money than they are about relationships merely involving money, and I think that is a problem.

Another important fact you failed to mention is that a studious black child risks being ostracized by his or her peers for "acting white." This racist taunt is interesting for several reasons. First, it's technically incorrect. White kids who study hard tend to be unpopular too, at least until they get old enough to do an IPO. Second, if we overlook their misperception about the social reality for white children, why do black children imagine there is something wrong with emulating the behavior of people who are, on average, more successful than they are? Where did they develop the idea that failure is good?

Discovering who you really are is not always pleasant.

Look at the faces of motorists in heavy traffic, and you tell me who is having fun.

So if it is possible to TURN OFF most women by a specific technique, does that not suggest the possibility of other techniques which might have the opposite effect? Technically, I have not proved this conjecture, and if I claimed it as a consequence of the premise I would be guilty of a non-sequitur, but it's still a catchy idea, yes?

When adolescent males try out for the football team or spend hours plunking away on their guitars, are they pursuing some true athletic ambition or following their muse? Maybe. But all it takes is one look at the Hot Babes throwing themselves at the football stars and the rock stars to put a young man's priorities into crystal-clear focus.

The docs who stick plastic in women's chests never go off-message. They relentlessly emphasize that they are merely helping women to improve their self-esteem, body image, etc. They make it sound like a boob job is simply a masturbatory exercise, and the plainly predictable effects it will have on men never even enter the picture. But whether women are dumb enough to swallow the self-esteem crap or understand what they are doing, the effect is the same: a boob job tends to increase a woman's sexual power over men, making it easier for her to attract and retain the man she wants and bend him a bit further to her will. (Note: I see nothing wrong with this. After all, becoming the victim of a woman's sexual power is the most enjoyable thing I have ever done. I'm actually somewhat jealous that women can obtain a measurable amount of sexual power for so trivial an investment. While breast implants carry some risk, they are safe compared to joining the NFL or becoming a rock star.)

The average person allocates his/her resources overwhelmingly in favor of him/herself. This is consistent with caring about him/herself more than about other people. The degree of such preferential care is proportionate to where the money goes. I do not consider this a "bad" thing. It does not make much sense to label universal behaviors as "bad." I don't expect anybody else to treat me better than they treat themselves. In fact, I would be concerned about such a person's sanity.

However, I am pretty sure that racehorse breeders do respect genetics a wee bit more than you do.

I understand that voodoo curses actually do work on some Haitians. It fascinates me that there are people in the world who permit other people to tell them how to feel.

Once I remember looking for summer work back in high school. I went to a factory of some sort near where I lived, and the sign said "No Help Wanted". So I looked elsewhere. Later, one of my friends told me he got a job at the factory. I said, "How did you do that? They had a sign up..." He cut me off with a laugh: "Nah, they just put up that sign to screen out anybody who isn't serious about getting a job." If I had only known then what I know now. I would have yelled at my friend, "Hey! Don't you understand that "NO MEANS NO'?" (Insert :-) for the differently humored.) Anyway, the factory had fewer jobs available than the number of applicants, so over time, the management there decided that its default answer would be "NO". A combination of demographics and the peculiarities of male heterosexuality insures that a subset of young women will be similarly oversubscribed by eager male suitors. So they respond the same way, by developing the same default answer. If they screen out a few Nice Guys who might actually provide them with good relationships, so what? There are plenty more men who are willing to work to get past the first line of defense.

Well, the computer you are using could explode at any minute, too, but you post anyway.

If a man says "No" to his wife's financial demands, she currently has the right to use the courts to beat him out of his money. If he refuses to comply, the state will use whatever violence it needs to force him to submit, against his will. Not all women exploit this right, of course, just as not all men would beat their wives into having sex if they could do so legally.

Don't expect your audience to edit the hate out of your writing for you.

Let's try a thought problem. Suppose there are two people, one of whom (A) flies into hysterics upon hearing someone else say the word "Glizmphl" and (B) one who does not. You send both of them out to do a job. Person A comes back distraught and injured after getting upset with someone who said "Glizmphl" and picking a fight, while person B ignored all the "Glizmphl"-sayers and simply went about getting the job done. Which person is more likely to succeed in an environment where a few people say "Glizmphl"? Which person is more likely to become a slave to the emotional manipulation of others? Which person is more likely to reinforce all the hatreds that motivate "Glizmphl"-sayers to use the word in the first place? Looking at it from evolutionary theory, person B is better-adapted to his environment than person A.

It's funny when men get rejected! Let's all laugh at them! Enjoy their pain! Ridicule their defects! Mock their low social status! Lynch them if possible! Feels good, doesn't it? It's always nice to have some group of people you can picture as being inferior. If you ever find yourself wondering what motivates racists, look inside your own mind for the answer.

I guess you know the sociobiological reason why average people have a natural tendency to laugh at retards and must be intensely socialized to overcome that.

Wilt Chamberlain's basketball accomplishments, impressive as they are, don't impress me as much as his brutal honesty does. Wilt deserves to be remembered for articulating the difficult truths about both his behavior and the true nature of women. The weird thing that makes me wonder is this: why do most women react to only 0.0001% of men the way most men react to about 10% of women? I.e., by feeling intense immediate urges to have irresponsible sex with them, under highly suboptimal conditions if necessary? Of course I know the sociobiological explanation but it's still weird. It's almost like most women are walking around with this Inner Slut who remains dormant almost all the time, but who wakes up and takes command on those rare occasions when a Super-Alpha-Male wanders by in need of a cum-dumpster.

The rules are only vague for unattractive people.

The women in the audience (and the camera kept cutting to their faces, providing momentary respite from the featured horror) responded to this lament with a sincere-sounding "Ohhhh..." of pity and looks of concern. I could only imagine how fast that pity would evaporate if Sally were to bring on some total loser geek bitterboy who would complain about how he couldn't get laid. It would be interesting to see how many microseconds it would take for the women in the audience to shift from a sympathetic "there but for the grace of Darwin go I" to a sense of total revulsion and a rousing rendition of blame-the-victim analogous to what I was feeling for the Jabbas, once they came face-to-face with a deadly threat to their own long-term gene survival. I didn't watch the show long enough so I don't know whether Sally got around to asking any of these large ladies how much they eat. From what I have read about the super-obese, to reach such leviathan proportions requires ingesting prodigious amounts of food. The question I always have is, who is bringing this food to these people who cannot even get out of bed? And who is carting off the wastes? Imagine it was your job to fetch the food for a bedridden monster who eats like a family of 10 and is unable to reach the toilet.

If you leave Usenet I will concede that you are an alpha male and I am not.

If women rewarded men for being honest, men would be honest. But most women do not particularly care to hear an honest man saying things like: "Hello, I noticed your breasts from across the room, in fact, I'm still noticing them, and I'm wondering if they would like to meet me." Instead it is necessary for a man to go through a fairly elaborate "game" (I think of it more as a "dance") before a woman is going to enjoy his appreciation for her body parts.

If science were fully intuitive, it would not exist as a separate discipline, and all the religions would have gotten their cosmology right.

Did you know that 4 out of 5 men die married, and 4 out of 5 women die single and alone? There is a perfectly valid reason why every woman dreads growing old alone. It's a very difficult fate for women to avoid given their habits of outliving men by 8 years on average and becoming almost completely unattractive to men near life's end.

The liquor industry has invested large sums to make sure Society learns something from Prohibition, i.e., that it "didn't work". However, if Prohibition in fact had made the liquor industry more profitable, then the liquor industry should have been its biggest proponent. Since the liquor industry has spent a lot of money trying to convince us that Prohibition was not a Good Thing, we must conclude that Prohibition was decidedly not a Good Thing for the liquor industry. Therefore, Prohibition must have been a SUCCESS, i.e., it reduced the total amount of money available to the liquor industry (both its legal and illegal factions –— remember, illegal distillers never went away).

I don't think any of the 20 largest cities in the USA has, or will ever have, an "adequate" highway system, regardless of how ambitious they are at putting through more roads. Good reasons exist for this, not the least of which is that major highways are unpleasant to be around, and will thus draw lots of NIMBY. This forces the Highwaymen to route their roads through comparatively undeveloped areas, when then encourages developers to build farther away from everything, which generates more trips, leading to more congestion, more highways, etc.

I'm not knocking the Bible, I think it's an extraordinarily fascinating book, with human drama and character development to rival anything ever written. In fact, the only problem with the Bible is that people don't read it, even people who call it their guide, a problem resulting from the Bible containing plenty of things to offend and challenge everyone.

I think this was pretty clear to most of us when we were 5 years old. Why try to make it more complicated than that?

IQ correlates well with subjective estimates of intelligence, as evidenced by the fact that you have never met a person who cannot score above 75 on an IQ test who had what you consider to be an impressive intellect. I would even bet you have never been genuinely impressed by the intellect of any person who scores no higher than 100. But please, tell us: what was the IQ of the person with the lowest IQ who you considered to be your intellectual peer?

A less dramatic example is how the various parts of the Bible treat money. Depending on which parts you choose to ignore, you could believe: 1. God wants you to be poor! 2. God wants you to be rich! or... 1. Lending money at interest is a sin. 2. Lending money at interest is so smart, God reserves a special reward for people who do so.

Similarly, if Christianity is a viable, active meme complex, it CANNOT HELP but evolve. And there is only one direction in which things evolve: in the direction of becoming more efficient at creating copies of themselves. I.e., over time, as Christianity competes with other belief systems (for example, an exceptionally virulent meme-complex called Islam), it must emphasize more and more the catchier ideas of its founder, as well as the catchier ideas it has accumulated over time, while de-emphasizing and discarding the ideas that hamper its spread. The fact that the Bible contains so much ambiguity is not a bug, it's a feature. If any Christian sect were to rewrite the Bible to its own narrow liking, the result would be an attenuated mind-virus. The Bible is too complex for anybody but a theologian expert to grasp in toto, so the comprehensive ideological buffet it offers permits each person to find his own "flava."

The losing player in a chess match may not understand how he got beaten but he can understand that he got beaten. On Usenet no parallel exists. The smartest person who has ever existed (or perhaps the smartest person who could potentially exist) would not necessarily be able to convince everyone here of his brilliance.

A 42 year-old male math teacher who dates a 23 year-old woman will get lots of practice at sharing.

Leanne calls me a racist. But she hasn't chosen to live for 10+ years in a 95% black neighborhood as I have. For some reason I find it odd that every time a white person accuses another white person of racism, it turns out that the accuser lives in an apartheid community.

Incidentally, it is even easier to argue for the existence of homophobia genes than for homosexuality genes. Given that homosexuality is a vastly more sensible alternative than heterosexuality (considering the massive cost of raising offspring), it is possible that homophobia genes are as adaptive as genes for heterosexuality. That is, given that homosexuality genes have been producing a stable pool of homosexuals in every generation, homophobia genes may get a foothold by "protecting" heterosexuals who lack the homosexuality genes from falling into homosexuality. In other words, if heterosexuals are going to do something as dangerous and expensive as have children, they can probably benefit from both positive (toward MOTOS) and negative (away from MOTSS) motivations.

The question is, what price does the objectively unattractive man have to pay as he pursues enormous numbers of sexy women to find that one statistical outlier who will have him? The answer is probably: a rather high price. He must find a way to become so emotionally dead that he is not bothered by receiving endlessly unfavorable evaluations from the many women he must hit on before he finds the exception. One way to do this is to cultivate a certain lack of respect for women. If you truly do not respect an entire class of people, you will not be as bothered by their rejections of you. This is why the jerks get the girls.

Suppose I sent a letter to several hundred charitable organizations that said: "Hello, I have $10,000 to contribute to one worthwhile, charitable cause. I will donate this money this year. Here is my address and my phone number. Please call me or write me, and tell me why your charity deserves my money more than all the others." Then suppose I ignored all the initial replies and only paid attention to the organizations that hit me up more than twice. Of these, I selected the few that were the most persistent, and I finally gave my money to the most aggressive, in-your-face charity. Soon I would discover that this charity spends 95% of its contributions on fund-raising. I would then call up one of the "nice" charities and tell them my sob story about how I gave my big contribution to the "jerk" charity.

Do you get off on the knowledge that their genetically inferior traits will be culled from the gene pool by the collective eugenic efforts of all women?

Presumably you've heard about the study where two actors played a criminal defendant in simulated courtroom cases that were identical in all respects except that one actor was extremely handsome and the other was extremely ugly. The experimenters arranged the script so the evidence was inconclusive and the jury basically had to vote on whether they believed the defendant's testimony. When shown one of the two tapes, without being told about the other tape, experimental subjects who saw the tape with the ugly guy were twice as likely to vote the defendant guilty as were subjects who saw the tape with the handsome guy.

It's interesting that most fat acceptors are women. For those who aren't aware, fat acceptors categorically deny responsibility for their obesity. They say diets don't work; they say they would get fat even if they ate only 600 calories per day. They believe resistance is futile. Most men who are obese readily admit they are lazy gluttons. That's because most men get involved in sports at some point in their lives so they understand what happens to their bodies when they exercise hard and eat right. They understand that their bodies broadcast the consequences of their choices in life. The are aware of the relationship between what you put in and what you get out.

The myth of the lone hero is usually just that. For millions of years humans have evolved in the direction of individual physical helplessness. We don't have large teeth, horns, tusks, claws, or other weapons or defenses for fighting that many animals have. Put a man with no weapons up against a wild animal of comparable size and the man almost invariably loses. Imagine any man trying to stop a mountain lion of equal weight with his bare hands. Fuggedaboudit. Even a 20 pound raccoon can mess up a human badly.

Look at how a dog manages to get free meals without doing anything objectively useful. The dog makes friends by LIKING PEOPLE. You don't have to like everybody, and of course you won't, but be aware there is a big cost for each enemy you choose to make by expressing your dislikes.

Having 1,000,000 times more intelligence inside one's head might not make a person 1,000,000 times more "intelligent". It might make one as doddering and ineffective as any corporation or government with 1,000,000 employees. Sure, a large organization can accomplish more, in many important cases, than one individual can. But the large organization is manifestly NOT 1,000,000 times "smarter" in every way. In some instances, the individual is clearly superior, not being bound by the need to expend vast energies at mediating internal conflicts. No organization can focus its entire intellectual capacity on one problem. An upper limit may exist, in fact, on how much intelligence can be focused on one thing at one time, due to the ecological notions I waved around above.

Moses said the test of whether a prophet speaks for god is whether the prophet is able to predict the future. Given that scientists are currently better able to predict the future than anybody else, they are more qualified to speak for god than any religious professional.

I'm tired of hearing religious people hypocritically attempting to distance themselves from organized religion. As I have conclusively demonstrated, without organized religion there is no way you would have the philosophy that you have. And if you do not ally yourself with an organized religion, or found a new one, your beliefs will die with you.

What is "a good work ethic"? Is it likely to be more common among (a) college graduates or (b) high school dropouts?

It is possible, on the other hand, to lie still during surgery. This violates no physical law of any kind. In fact, anaesthetized patients do this routinely. Lying still during surgery is a possible action that virtually no fully conscious patients can choose.

Deluding a fat person into feeling accepted and legitimized might undermine his/her incentive to eat less and exercise more. This is why the fat acceptance crowd makes Jackie the Tokeman look like a saint! They are actively destroying the lives of fat people who might otherwise take the brave and admirable steps necessary to solve their problem. This is not much different than persuading alcoholics to keep right on drinking. My god, it's cruelty on an almost genocidal scale.

I lived in a semi-slum for over a decade. Now I live in an upscale neighborhood (by local standards, anyway). When I go to the grocery store I see a tremendous contrast in the women. In the semi-slum, it was fairly unusual to see an attractive woman among the dozens of women shopping for groceries. In the semi-upscale neighborhood, going to the grocery store is a reliable source of visual entertainment. Attractive women shop there at all hours. I believe I am discounting for the greater resources the upscale women have to lavish on their makeup, clothing, and accessories. While this accounts for some of the difference, it doesn't account for all of it. It is reasonable to attribute the presence of so many attractive women to some combination of (1) their higher earning power, and (2) their greater ability to attract men with higher earning power. Possibly some of them move to the upscale neighborhood before they can really afford it, at least in part to position themselves where upscale men are more likely to meet them.

What women want are men who win competitions that matter to massive numbers of people. For example, the competition to land roles in a major movie like Fight Club. This is necessary because otherwise any loserguy could spoof a woman's desire for a winner simply by concocting some meaningless sport he can win. To truly be a winner the competitors must not be able to subvert the rules or inflate the number of openings at the top. Real winners have to get past large numbers of highly motivated competitors giving it their best shot. For competition to be meaningful it can't be the Special Olympics.

Warning: if your I.Q. is less than 130, skip this article. If you don't know your I.Q. and you are reading from AOL or WebTV, you may safely assume your I.Q. is less than 130.

Normally it doesn't make sense to give away something valuable and then call the takers "stupid."

If you think a man's susceptibility to arousal is some sort of personality defect, then you are either ignorant about the nature of men or you don't like men.

It's simply a fact that the person most likely to drive a man out of his house is not some criminal or dictator, but that pretty woman who just caught his eye. A robber armed with a gun might get you for a few hundred dollars. A robber armed with a vagina can make off with half your wealth.

The tendency of disinterested third parties to ridicule victims is a defensive strategy to combat the tendency of cheaters to play the victim card as a way of extorting resources from the village.

There is no need to deny your attraction to a man's social status, if you actually experience such an attraction. I make no apologies for my attraction to a woman with impressive body parts. No man of intelligence will fault a woman for being comparably superficial.

Most men would prefer a Catherine Zeta-Jones who just "lies there" over some fat porker who has every sexual skill in the book. That's because even without doing anything other than just looking good and feeling good an attractive woman can blow men away.

The loss of social status for being a "slut" is almost entirely the loss of social status in the community of women. This is highly consistent with the hypothesis that women want sex less than men do. In fact, the only people I know who have seriously used the word "slut" were women. A woman who displays the same level of sexual desire that men do is obviously abnormal to most women; hence her loss of status in the community of women. A woman who is willing to be a "slut" does not lose status in the community of men; rather, she becomes quite popular, even well-paid.

If someone is incapable of telling "right" from "wrong" then punishment is mandatory. That someone has no inner moral compass to guide his behavior. The only thing that remains is the recognition of lethal force. If a person knows to stay out of the way of speeding buses, and if he knows not to pick up a steak knife and plunge it into his own abdomen, he is capable of knowing to avoid other behaviors that will bring punishment swiftly and severely.

I call this difficulty "Intellectual Hedonism," which is the need to believe only those things that bring pleasure to the believer.

Most people do not argue from objective facts. Instead they argue from emotion. For example, the fat acceptance argument runs basically like this: "I am fat. I like myself. Therefore everybody else should like me too. Since I want them to like me they must actually like me. Therefore being fat does not reduce my sexual market value. Q.E.D."

Female circumcision is an excellent test case for the moral relativist. On the one hand, he doesn't want to earn a "Tsk, tsk" from fellow intelligentsia by foolishly succumbing to cultural judgmentalism. But on the other hand there's this screaming girl.

When you look at a map, you are looking at military history.

If you have been an evolutionist in the 1860's (shortly after Darwin's first publication) you would have experienced endless ridicule and every form of personal attack from people who had no facts to support their views and a clear sense that their treasured delusions were under mortal threat from emerging objective evidence. Today the remnants of the opposition to Darwin huddle for protection in their little enclaves but if you happened to be a guest on the 700 Club their highly-trained tricksters will eat you for lunch. At least in the perception of the audience.

An essential part of being a good lay is being a lay. If a woman does not want to fuck me then she is not, from my perspective, a good lay. In fact she is provably inferior to every sex partner I have had.

Read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. Along with all the books about evolution near to it on the library shelves. Then you will understand perfectly why people are selfish.

Of course it's possible –— in fact probable –— that Clarice simultaneously hates men and loves them. Look at the way she contradicts herself about once per article or so. The woman has about as much internal mental consistency as an economics convention.

Quote any belief I have articulated which contradicts the findings of mainstream science.

My theory: grief is the brain's mechanism for dismantling the internal model of another entity it builds up as we "get to know" someone. Once that other entity disappears, suddenly we are left with a complex brain structure that no longer has anything to do and must be removed.

There is no real mystery among criminologists about who commits the vast bulk of crime. It's the minority of young men who have records a mile long. Most of them started off as bullies in elementary school and followed the predictable career track. Only about one out of ten crimes get solved, but most criminals eventually do get caught. If you want to create a world in which women get to do things like walk around alone after dark in their own neighborhoods, then one obvious strategy is to figure out who the criminals are and lock them up during their crime-prone years.

What happens to a dog if every human it sees kicks it? That is not how you get a happy dog.

I suspect the reason bitterboys attract such derision is that you know subconsciously why they are bitter. If you had met them in real life before they developed the bitterness you'd have done your part to help them form it. I can't blame you for this. It's not your fault that most women have similar tastes, and you are powerless to reprogram your desires for anybody else's benefit. While handing out pity fucks won't earn you sainthood or a Nobel prize, it might actually be one of the more socially constructive humanitarian gestures a woman can make. But like most really good ideas this one isn't going to take off.

There is a common misperception that "genetic" carries with it some ultimate, immutable finality. But that is only a problem today, and only for individuals who currently exist.

I think I read that the U.S. government's largest single budget item is to pay interest on the national debt. This now exceeds military spending. If you hold less than your per capita share of T-bills then you are paying a significant chunk of real money out of every paycheck to the lucky people who hold more than their per capita share. Eventually most people will figure out that a small percentage of people are holding most of the debt, and we can give everybody a massive tax cut simply by canceling the debt, and if necessary rounding up those people and shooting them. That is why it's very dangerous to have the debt concentrated into too few hands. If you happen to be one of those too few hands, anyway.

Nations with high literacy rates utterly dominate nations with low literacy rates in the Darwinian arenas of international trade and politics. The loser nations complain that "the system" "is rigged" against them. However, they grasp only a subset of the actual rigging. All of reality is in fact rigged against them.

The old testament makes it pretty clear that God is against people looking upon the nakedness of people they aren't married to. And yet there actually are plenty of medical professionals who claim to believe the Bible.

In the near term (25–50 years) I predict a cognitive-class warfare erupting between smart people who enjoy most of the benefits of Moore's Law and stupid people who are disproportionately its victims. At some point genetic engineering might cure stupidity, but that will probably only buy us a little time as Moore's Law races onward. (I'm assuming that the smartest existing humans represent the best we are likely to do with genetic engineering in the next 100 years.)

Which came first? The deficiency or the bitterness? This is as hard to unravel as the question about the chicken and the egg. There's no question that women are acutely sensitive to the slightest hint that a man is a loser, and then they "pile on" to erase any shadow of a doubt. And not only women, of course. Men are even quicker to kick the loser, the better to enhance their own statuses thereby. This dynamic plays over and over on soc.singles. It's fascinating to watch. People are like chickens: put a bunch of them in a room, and they quickly sort themselves into a pecking order.

I think being a short man is even worse than being an ugly woman. At least if a woman is ugly, nobody is going to tell her she isn't attracting men because she has an attitude problem. Well, maybe people will tell her this, but it will be less believable to her. It will be as plain as day that men have an obvious preference for women with particular physical attributes. That women could have the comparably blatant selection criterion of stature for men deserves publicity equal to any of Naomi Wolf's whinings.

If you visit Cincinnati, I will take you to the fitness club where I work out. There you can examine the aerobics babes, rank them according to your concept of superficial attractiveness (which might differ slightly from mine, but probably not by much), notice that the vast majority of the most attractive women are married, and ask them how much money their husbands earn and/or have. Then you can compare those answers to the average income/assets in this city and draw your own conclusion.

While the smartest individual on the planet may indeed be illiterate and lack a college education, anybody with much experience with diversity knows that a random selection of 100 college graduates are going to be smarter than 100 illiterate people from the same culture. This has important practical consequences for things like managing a profitable company. Give me 100 literate college graduates, and I will happily compete with your company of 100 illiterate pre-collegiates.

If there were an institution that rewarded the top male competitor the same pay as the top female competitor, and the top man ranked below the top five hundred women, feminists would rightfully decry this as unacceptably sexist. And yet this is exactly the inverse of our segregated world of sports. Feminists claim that the top woman in a sport deserves the same rewards as the top man, while the top woman typically ranks dozens to hundreds of places below the top man in any sport with objective criteria (e.g., stopwatches and measuring tapes).

Nazi Germany was arguably the best thing that has ever happened to science.

If you tell me a person's age, sex, cultural persuasion, education, profession, income, what they do in their spare time (hobbies/vices), height, weight, overall appearance, and a few tidbits about their personality, I will pretty much have them figured. It's not that tough to do, folks, in fact anyone who can't do this is socially retarded. If you can walk into a room full of strangers and get an interesting conversation going with someone in a few minutes, then you have the categorizing skills I am talking about. Of course, you don't know everything about a person just like that, but you should be able to tell whether you want to.

A few articles ago I said that buying oil from megalomaniacs enables them to create mayhem later, and that this is a real cost of importing oil. We may think of oil at $10/bbl as "cheap", but it comes with a little bonus –— the likes of Hussein, Gaddafi, et al. I think it would be fair to tax oil consumers at the net present value of the probable future misbehavior of those who receive our petrodollars. What do you think? Of course, we can't predict the future exactly, but it's silly to encourage consumers to create their future enemies. [Note: this was written 1991-09-25]

I suspect "grown sick of the...debate" is a euphemism for "could not refute any of your points". I certainly have never known a person to "grow sick" of a debate they still believed they could win.

Theft is where you take away something that belongs to someone, and then they no longer have it. Every civilization has had this concept for all of recorded history; the notion of "intellectual property" has been invented only lately. It makes some sense to feel guilty about breaking laws that have been fundamental to every major society in the last 5,000 years; it is just silly to feel guilty about breaking laws that are still evolving.

Incidentally, the Inuit has 200 words for "snow", and the American has the same number for "money". The quickest way to judge a woman's life priorities is to ask her to state all the synonyms for "money" she can think of.

Every time I mention that driving an automobile probably threatens one's neighbors' lives more than anything else the average person does, the immediate response from drivers tends toward self-justification: "Well, my car hasn't killed anyone (yet), so therefore my driving is not a threat to anybody." Never mind that the state governments and the insurance industry happen to disagree quite strongly, with considerable statistical theory to support their arguments. The simple fact is that you almost never see a car buff honestly confronting the risk they subject others to.

Sociopaths have a great time in a society which assumes everybody will cooperate, and women have been selectively breeding sociopaths for millions of years.

Occasionally, a woman posts an article saying: "Wow, I tried asking a man out and I got turned down. I was devastated! How on earth do you men cope with this on a routine basis?" The answer is simple: to stay sane in the face of multiple rejections, an aggressive person must cultivate an emotional distance from MOTAS. This doesn't mean men have to "objectify" women in some blatant sense. But it does mean men need to see individual women as replaceable, otherwise the blow of a particular rejection would be too much to bear.

In this sense, pornography becomes a sort of advertisement for the Female Sex Rationing Cartel, in that it trains men to see women as potentially attainable, and thus worth continuing to take emotional risks for.

However, everyone who takes steroids makes some choices for everyone else. For example, steroid abuse has turned bodybuilding into something between a freak show and laughingstock for the mainstream population. Whether this is good or bad depends on a person's view. However, a person who busts ass for 10 years to build some muscle the hard way has to put up with popular perceptions that all well-built people must be doing drugs. That is a choice the steroid users have made for me. Because of steroid users, the burden of proof is on ME to demonstrate that I have not taken steroids.

Men pretty much ran the show the way they wanted since the dawn of history. If they had an opportunity to make things better for themselves, they usually just went ahead and did it. If men didn't think up feminism when they had all history to do so, that probably tells you something about how good it may be for men.

I personally know people who claim to be non-violent, who would never deliberately harm someone in "real life", but if you happen to get in front of them while they are breaking the speed limit on the highway, well, that's just too bad.

Private industry so far votes unanimously in favor of unmanned space development. Socialist space programs (the only ones that have put people in space so far) may be able to generate more political support for manned missions, allowing them to sidestep economic reality. If voters and politicians desire to spend money a certain way, then that is the way the Socialist space programs will spend it.

The trick is to act in such a way as to appear not to be acting. This is the fundamental social skill. Most of us are so good at this we don't even realize we are doing it –— which is, in fact, often a necessary condition!

I'd much rather have the nuke plant in the kitchen than be forced to drive. Or worse, to be forced to drive on roads where the average citizen is also forced to drive.

Population growth is a symptom of poverty. Space colonization is an option only for the rich. The rich do not have population problems. Therefore, space colonization is almost certainly nonsense for the people who need it.

Once I was talking to a friend, who grew up on a farm, about crime in the city. He told me I was a crime victim. I asked him what he was talking about, since I had never been robbed or mugged or whatever at the time. He said, "You have to lock your doors. Where I grew up, nobody locked their doors." I thought about that for a while, and I realized he had a point.

It's really hard to build a computer that can read human handwriting but very easy to build a barcode reader. The key is not always adapting computers to the sloppiness of people but sometimes it makes more sense to clean up some of the sloppiness of people.

The Mars Society doesn't have the capacity to do anything about getting to Mars much less enabling anybody to survive when they get there. The fact that they have no test colonies in abandoned mines, on ice caps, or under the ocean proves this.

The people who are considered most physically attractive in their own culture are generally considered attractive by people in other cultures. This is even true in the few remaining cultures where modern media have not yet had much influence. And where does modern media get its influence, anyway? Do we think babies are cute because Walt Disney cartoons contain characters with facial features that resemble infants? People have considered baby humans and baby mammals from many species cute for (in all probability) millions of years. Does anybody believe we needed modern media to teach us this?

Even religions have a hard time selling something that is 100% bullshit from top to bottom. There is always some element of truth buried in there.

To me it's just so amazing that women actually feel more like fucking a guy when he puts down other guys. Even though I've read a few things about sociobiology I don't think I will ever feel less amazed by it no matter how many thousands of times people prove its major claims with their unwitting actions. Apparently the logistics of Female Choice are challenging enough that women come equipped with the genetic programming necessary to reward men who assist them in the difficult task of quarantining unfit men. Women themselves lack sufficient power to impose sexual inequality on men, so they have to enlist the help of men to pull this off.

But here is a constructive possibility. You know what men want when they approach you. Obviously, they aren't going to waste their time on strategies they know won't work. So get all the women in the USA to agree to refrain from having sex with men who approach them or otherwise notice them in public places. Say instead that women will henceforth only have sex with men they meet at organized parties, or through the personals, or whatever, and outline the procedure whereby men can gain entrance to these channels. If women will hold the line, men will get the message, and in a few months I guarantee men will stop trying to meet women in public places.

Words do not harm you; the only problem is how you react to them. And you can control your reaction to them. Or, maybe, you can't. And maybe, a man who looks at your body can't control his reaction to your "aggressive" photons. Are you still unable to recognize the fundamental symmetry here? You say that sound waves coming from a man cause you to have an emotional reaction you can't control. However, you object to him having an emotional reaction to the photons that bounce off your body. You reserve the right to have an uncontrolled emotional reaction to his purely informational act, yet you won't grant him the same right.

Try reading the soc.support.fat-acceptance FAQ sometime. I wonder how anybody who could take that document seriously would be able to function in the real world, much less survive adolescence.

Students who need a lot of tutoring aren't going to grow up to be leaders of society, most of the time. The leaders of society have to master the skill of learning on their own. I don't know if that skill can be taught, but if it can be taught it doesn't seem to be.

There's no problem figuring out what women want. Just see what kind of men the most desirable women fuck. Since men pay so much attention to desirable women anyway this is easy.

After Dawkins it's hard to comprehend that we still have religion. But after reading Ringer and Jeffries it's not hard to comprehend at all.

I remember an interesting story from my years of misspent youth (misspent in the sense that I labored under the delusions and mind-virii that currently hold you in thrall). There was a married couple at some church I was attending. They went to the pastor and elders and said "God is speaking to us to leave this church and go to another church." The pastor and elders consulted, and came back with "God is speaking to us that you should stay at our church." Observations like that made me the man I am today.

Imagine how popular mountain climbing would be if the mountain ran away from 19 of every 20 expeditions. At least when you pay $65,000 for a spot on a guided Everest climb, you are guaranteed of at least getting to base camp. You will get on the mountain. The mountain is not going to run away. It will be there when you arrive, ready and waiting. The mountain treats everybody identically. It does not throw avalanches at the ugly climbers and send good weather to the handsome climbers. It doesn't kill some people JUST BECAUSE.

Nobody at the RIAA seems to grasp that its own moralistic posturing to control youthful rebellion today when kids copy a few MP3 files is likely to sound just as quaint and naïve by the year 2050. Perhaps some of those morally bankrupt music "thieves" will rise to positions of power someday. I savor the delicious irony of seeing an industry built on the business model of selling youthful rebellion being brought down in the end by the very monster it created and fed. The recording industry made billions by encouraging kids to rebel against authority, and once again some animals became more equal than others.

Something "matters" when it determines how you spend time, money, or some other valuable resource.

Look at how athletes train for a competition. If they wanted a real challenge, they wouldn't train for it. They would enter totally out of shape and get clobbered. Trying to run a marathon with no training would turn it into a death march. That would be a real challenge. Instead, the athlete trains systematically so he works his way up to the event and never takes on more than a tiny increment of challenge at one time. The event itself will almost be an afterthought if he trained correctly. The guy who sets the world record probably isn't being challenged at the time any more than a less-capable individual who takes twice as long to finish but tries hard.

Most movie directors try not to be really offensive. That's why they don't really kill horses any more when filming cavalry charges. They also take pains not to ridicule any designated victim groups too hard.

Porn is like TV: a prepackaged script you can't participate in. The missing ingredient: humans want to be acknowledged. Porn is like Usenet where nobody replies to your articles, except the women look lots better of course.

Read blues lyrics sometime. A lot of those guys sound as pathetic as you, but instead of sneering at them the public occasionally buys millions of their records, proving again that what you say is far less important than how you say it.

You have to keep in mind that women live their whole lives knowing they are inferior to men in most ways that matter: economically, politically, physically, and above all historically. Discover Magazine printed a list of the 500 most important people in history; three were women. So when women figure out that they have one way to strike back at men, you can't blame them for exploiting it. They figure out pretty quickly that even though men control most of the world, women control the supply of sex. It doesn't matter that 98% of Fortune 500 executives are men, when it comes down to just you and a woman who has something you want.

Unless you want to plead insanity, you are deeply interested in whatever topic motivates you to debate someone in 500 articles.

The fact that people jump off buildings is not a blow to the theory of gravitation. People can choose to do whatever they want. After they choose, the laws of nature determine what happens next.

Religious people are only tolerant when minority status gives them no choice. The fundamentalist sects have been increasing in number at the expense of moderates in most of the great religions.

Logical positivism is the working assumption of science: that the world consists of elementary particles, the forces by which they interact, and nothing else. Far from "fading out by the 1920s" logical positivism has instead gone from strength to strength, steadily increasing its domain and utility at the expense of superstition.

When it comes to understanding reality, science is the only game in town, and no barrage of smug sniggering pejorative labels from you is going to change that. All that's left for religion is to fight a rearguard action against the ever-expanding reach of logical positivism at the fringes of religion's rapidly receding conceptual domain. The progress of science is probably one of the reasons for the resurgence of fundamentalism. Watered-down namby-pamby religion is the first to go as science undermines more and more of the basis for religion. Only fanatical irrationalism continues to have a fighting chance.

What is it about internal combustion vehicles that brings out the inner murderer in so many?

You see, John, most people are basically polite. The result of general politeness is our current epidemic of obesity. Politeness is clearly not working. It's time to try something else. If everybody told every fat slob they see exactly what they think about slothful gluttony the fat slobs would start getting the message. Instead, if you keep quiet, the fat slobs think you're OK with it.

It's better to be smart than strong. A blind man in a street fight will always lose to a man who can see, even if the blind man is twice as strong.

Welcome aboard! The game you are playing is great fun. Just be aware that you are not holding a rifle, but a hand grenade --- not the best weapon choice for close quarters.

That's the beauty of SMV theory. It's not 100.00000000% airtight, but real exceptions to its predictions are so vanishingly rare that you can broadcast its commonsense conclusions to large numbers of people without fear of anybody coming back with a verifiable anecdote that turns your hunch on its head.

We live in an instant-gratification modern society. People are used to flipping on the television and seeing the end results of massive personal efforts. We watch the Olympic sprinter run for 10 seconds of glory, but we don't see his thousands of hours of grueling training over the last 10 years. We gulp down a $100 million dollar movie in a couple of hours but we don't see the army of people laboring over every pixel for the past year. We watch the concert pianist tear through a difficult piece but we don't see that she practiced every day since childhood, painstakingly breaking down every one of those musical phrases into exercises and doing each one thousands of times.

Celibacy is quite easy for some people to arrange. For example, all the average man has to do is stop hitting on women.

If someone claims to have less than a billion dollars "by choice" it will usually become clear that that person is completely full of shit. The number of people who think they can do X is usually a lot higher than the number of people who actually can.

Most women don't become ruthless golddiggers until they reach the end-stage of commitment and file for divorce. In the initial stages of a relationship (which are, BTW, the most fun) a man doesn't actually have to transfer significant resources to women; he merely has to demonstrate (within the bounds of taste) that he has resources. Of course if he calls excessive attention to his wealth that usually won't do. Women don't want a man to go flashing his money all around, because obviously that makes it harder for women to pretend they don't care about it. No, a man needs to casually work his resource display into the act without calling attention to it. There's no need for him to emphasize his wealth, after all, because women are genetically programmed to pick up even the most subtle indicators of where he ranks. If he behaves as though he is completely unaware of how his wealth affects women, women can simply enjoy that effect without the guilt of having to be aware of it themselves.

A woman isn't going to overlook a man's material status any more than a man is going to overlook a woman's tits.

Yeah, and so? There's a multi-billion dollar porn industry operating on the principle that sexually attractive women can excite men who know nothing about them. In fact many of these women are probably more exciting that way.

The irony, of course, is that 98% of technology was the work of men, and yet technology benefits women disproportionately.

Stumbling in on eldersex would be more traumatizing than waking up during surgery.

There's a good question. Brock writes as though he is unfamiliar with Darwin's theory. Virtually every trait we have that evolved as a result of selection required the horrible deaths of many individuals who happened to lack the trait, to clear the way for the offspring of individuals who had the trait. The richness and wonder of life –— surely a "good thing" by any rational measure –— owes its existence to a creative system of unimaginable cruelty.

I have to laugh, of course, because the liberal intelligentsia have traditionally mocked Western Imperialists who imagined themselves to be culturally superior to the various brown, yellow, black, and red peoples of the world. Whenever the traditional Western values types would decry some barbarous practice in a backward land the enlightened crue would tsk tsk smugly at such ignorant cultural imperialism. If it takes the Taliban blowing up priceless 1000 year old Buddhas and enslaving women to get the cultural relativist crowd to come out for standards then in the greater scheme of things those might be acceptable losses.

Today's American women would go into shock if they had to live in the America of just 100 years ago, let alone a medieval society such as Afghanistan.

This is typical mass-market porn boilerplate. Penthouse is selling men a fantasy, implying that any man who learns to walk or bend his knees a certain way is going to turn on the Penthouse Pet of the month. It's a lot more interesting to read nonsense that allows every man to imagine he has a shot than to read the grim truth about what the Penthouse Pet of the month really wants: a man who is tall, handsome, symmetrical, athletic, rich, successful, famous, healthy, within five years of her age*, dominant, muscular and not fat, and with a full head of hair. A description which eliminates about 99% of men right away. (*Some allowances for older men are possible, of course, with commensurate boosts in fame and/or wealth.)

Musical prodigies exist today. Why don't you ask a few of them how they are faring?

It's automatically funny when a person complains about the low SMV of his or her relationship partner. The sexual market insures that most people pair off with partners having similar sexual market value. If the partner you have represents about the best partner you can attract, then mocking your partner's flaws essentially amounts to mocking your own flaws. And if your partner is not the best partner you can attract, you are mocking your own ability to choose the best partner from your available options.

I've heard a lot of things, but I have yet to hear of any obese women breaking the hearts of slender, attractive women by stealing their boyfriends. If anyone has an anecdote to share, I'd like to hear it. Are there any slender, attractive women out there who have ever been humiliated by an obese woman?

It's also normal for women who are young enough to look good to be quite confused and insecure about the main source of their value to men. (Of course a woman has every reason to be insecure about a rapidly depreciating asset.) In a similar way, young men tend to be hostile to women who are too obviously golddiggers. Older men tend to be more accepting of the materialistic tendencies of women because older men understand that this is just the way things work. You have to pay to play.

In general, "average" sucks. The average person can't even write 25 sentences without at least one grammatical error. Don't believe me? Read some customer e-mail. Almost everything worthwhile comes from people who represent the exceptional talent in their respective fields. For an average person to do much of anything worthwhile, he or she must be told what to do (directly, or indirectly through books, training, and customs) by his or her betters.

Hanging around really old people (and I mean even older than Brock –— yes, it's possible) probably makes being old look really bad to you. Trust me, it's far worse than you can imagine.

If you want to impugn SMV theory you could start by ceasing to obey it.

Before you select a partner, your SMV determines the people you can potentially select as partners. Once you have selected a partner, your SMV continues to matter: to the extent that your partner has normal preferences, your SMV strongly influences how well your partner treats you. Anything you do which damages your SMV is likely to damage your relationship. Anything you do which boosts your SMV is likely to strengthen your relationship, unless of course you boost your SMV so much that you become able to attract other women with higher SMV than your wife. About the only way that can happen is when a formerly obscure man attains celebrity, so for the majority of men it's not an issue. Of course on the flip side your wife could squander her SMV by indulging in gluttony or she could lose it unintentionally by happening to suffer damage from aging faster than you do.

Most women are willing to settle for a man who is less than stunningly handsome, but almost no woman will settle for a man who is shorter than three inches shorter than herself. If he's six inches shorter it probably wouldn't matter if he were the last man on Earth.

Obviously the sex trade needs government regulation similar to what the poultry industry gets. If a meat-packing plant is putting out diseased product, we rely on our taxes to pay meat inspectors to catch it and protect the meat-buying public. If meat were outlawed (which would happen if the PETA nutcases get what they want), imagine what that would do to the quality.

As the medical and actuarial sciences continue to improve, insurance companies steadily reduce the component of uncertainty. This allows them to reduce the unjust flow of wealth from people at low risk to people at high risk. As time goes on, insurance companies keep getting better at predicting the actual risks each person faces, and then they are able to charge each person premiums that reflect that person's actual risk.

If a DNA test tells you that you are likely to need a $50,000 procedure ten years from now, then you have ten years in which to decide what you find most important: buying CDs, movie tickets, dining out, driving a car, going on vacation, etc., or being able to live longer than ten years. How you choose to spend your money indicates what you value. If a person cares so little about his own life that he can't set aside $50,000 in ten years, why should I think his life is more valuable than he thinks it is? What's in it for me?

Armed revolts are done by young men. Young men, are, of course, one of the healthiest groups in society, and therefore the least likely to bear resentment against healthy neighbors who refuse to subsidize their illnesses.

As science advances, the degree of uncertainty in life steadily declines (although it started off so large that there's plenty left). Every new discovery is like flipping on the lights in yet another room in a large hotel. As the lights go on, they expose more and more people who had their hands in someone else's pockets under the cover of darkness.

Anybody can impress a young child. That doesn't take much. That's the special Olympics of impressing. If you can count to 100 or play Jingle Bells you can impress a child. And when it comes to a child who is utterly dependent on the parent for his basic survival – suffice it to say the kid has every reason not to provide much in the way of constructive criticism, even if the kid did have any way to guess what sexually mature men find most attractive. It takes even less to impress a pet: just feed it regularly and refrain from kicking it.

A pound of muscle is many times harder to gain than a pound of fat. To gain fat you just eat more and do less. Any moron can do that, and many do.

Learn not to go on dates until you want men to touch you. Millions of men take millions of women out on dates and put their hands on them without specifically asking the control tower for landing clearance. Typically a man touches a woman on the arm or shoulder and notes her reaction. If she recoils in horror, he finds another woman to date. If she responds favorably, he touches her more.

It's interesting that one can easily get away with having all the standards one likes as long as one is careful never to let on. You have to be pretty clever, however, to stay in character whenever some overweight old woman decides to test your equalist inclusiveness credentials. But think about it. Can any good thing come from telling everybody in brutally honest detail exactly why you aren't attracted to all the people you find unattractive?

Does anybody know the net worth of the wealthiest person ever executed for murder in the United States?

Prisons turn a profit in China.

Look at the way surburban sprawl proceeds. First the government puts in the superhighway through a sparsely populated area. Then private industry starts building strip malls at every interchange. Developers put up tract housing along the freeway. And soon you have a sprawling unplanned community of obese automobile addicts. But the government always has to put in the unmetered transportation infrastructure first. Private industry cannot take that gamble because (a) it's too uncertain; (b) the payback time is too long; and (c) you can't stop the competition from taking a free ride.

That fact that hardly anybody can name more than the first guy to step on the Moon indicates that there was nothing to gain after the first guy did it.

One thing you can always count on with power: the people who have it are always less aware of their power than are the people they exercise power over.

Consider that your first act as starship captain would have to be ripping out the holodeck computers and incinerating them in the ship's reactor core. There is no way a galaxy class starship could possibly operate with a human crew and a functioning holodeck. You wouldn't even be able to get out of space dock what with the entire crew in there having endless orgies or rock star fantasies or winning the Superbowl and screwing every NFL cheerleader or being John Malkovich or whatever.

If the standard of acceptable risk-to-benefit ratio is the automobile, then it's hard for me to think of a reason to fear getting executed for a crime I didn't do. The odds of that happening are so low they aren't worth thinking about. The risk of getting executed improperly is apparently higher for people who aren't contributing much to society and who already have a long record of confrontations with the law. But the risk of most bad things are higher for such unproductive people. It is but window dressing to magnanimously spare them the tiny probability of getting executed accidentally while ignoring the underlying problem that increases their risk of death and pain from many other possible causes.

The stigma of mental illness did not result from ignorance about mental illness. The stigma of mental illness resulted from detailed knowledge about the harm mentally ill people can do to the people who make the mistake of loving them.

Suppose you could not meet men directly, but you had to explain to someone else (your "agent"), in words, exactly what you want in a man (but with no specific man you can name). Then your agent would go out and find a man who fits your description. Would you be confident your agent would select the same man you would select? Would you be willing to waive your veto rights in advance and go with your agent's first choice no matter what?

Aaron, here's a military history question for you. How recently was the United States still war-gaming against England?

It's too bad Mexico does not have a one child policy.

It's funny that one of the most gender-repressive branches of Christianity today – the Roman Catholic Church – has an all-male priesthood which by some accounts may contain a large proportion of faggots. Men who feel no sexual desires for women don't even need to pretend to respect them.

If Jesus didn't want his followers to treat women like livestock, he could have said so in one of his sermons or parables. It's not like the guy had any trouble voicing an opinion. And that's an issue he would have had to speak to, since he lived in a society in which subjugation of women was standard operating procedure. When you want to promote a revolutionary new concept, you have to speak up. You can't expect people to magically interpret your silence on an issue to mean you want them to abandon their longstanding traditions.

The previous Star Wars movie presented an interesting trade-off. On the one hand, Jar Jar Binks and that stupid kid actor were pretty irritating. On the other hand, we got to enjoy watching George Lucas sticking the shiv in his stupid fans. Few things are more entertaining than the impotent rage of faithful tools who feel betrayed even as they are helpless to stop themselves from continuing to pay tribute. Jar Jar Binks was the first Star Wars character to stimulate hate mail from the Star Wars cult. Way to go George Lucas! He gave his fans the finger and still soaked them for $400 million.

I simply mention doughnuts because most people find it much easier to become gluttonous with doughnuts than with, say, plain raw carrots. A doughnut can deliver 500 calories in a few delicious gulps. To get the same calories from plain raw carrots you'd be chomping away for quite a while, and the rather unpleasant taste and all the chewing would make eating all those carrots not much fun.

Does becoming violent make other people think you are beautiful? Someone should tell the writers at Cosmopolitan so they can include this in their next beauty tips article.

Humans are predator-apes, and in nature predators automatically attack the weakest available prey. Trolling is a bloodless simulation of hunting which provides a measure of relief for predator-apes who need an outlet for their hunting impulse which would otherwise be frustrated by the constraints of civilized society. Of course when small children persecute weak blind adults a similar instinct is at work. Children have a certain purity about them; they are closer to the animal state, not having had it beaten out of them yet through the long and arduous process of socialization.

As to why men would want to go out with any particular woman when there are other women around, one must remember that very few men can attract every woman. Most men have to make a highly constrained choice among their very limited opportunities. To determine a man's real preference look at the women he rejects. If he is simply unable to attract certain kinds of women you can't assume he finds them less attractive than the women he can attract.

What makes you think European domination is a bad thing? Every non-European country which has modernized has done so by studying European methods of prosperity and imitating them, right down to the business clothing fashion (an irrelevant detail but if a country gets that right they might get the important things right too). What better way is there to study Europeans than to have some of them actually living in your country?

What do you think the fat wife thinks about when she goes back home and replays in her mind every one of the little leering looks she saw her fat husband sneaking at your hot tight sexy body when he thought nobody was watching him? Note: I think it's a bad idea for you to spend time with married couples when you are far more attractive than the married woman.

I've seen your picture. You are infinitely hotter than any obese woman, including his wife, could possibly be. I bet he'd give up a year of sex with his fat hog wife just to have five minutes to feel up your boobs and ass. (Speaking for myself, I'd give up a year of Usenet.) Odds are he carried away the images of your sexy body seared into his brain, and he's drawing on those images to see him through unsatisfactory sex with his repulsive wife.

Back in the 1850's there were a lot of white people who commented on how joyous and carefree a lot of the slaves in the South appeared to be. But none of them were volunteering to be slaves themselves. I.e., the free people were condescending to the slaves just as you are condescending to your fat slob friends. How happy would you be with that obese man as your husband? Would you enjoy making love to a blubberous mass like that every night? Do you imagine it's much different for the wife? Have you ever had a sexual fantasy about an obese man?

If average women as they exist today were the last word in male satisfaction there wouldn't be a bazillion-dollar porn industry building products that try to close the gap.

On a tangential note, if people are going to believe in things for which no evidence exists, why don't they believe something constructive? For example, why doesn't someone start a religion which brainwashes women to believe that they can get rid of their cellulite by performing oral sex on men?

"Never" is quite a claim about something which violates no laws of nature and is easy to extrapolate from current trends.

Sex robots might someday be that cheap. A realdoll costs about $5000. If it lasts for 10 years and you bang it 500 times per year that's $1/bang. Adding intelligence to the realdoll won't increase the price very much because you're going to get intelligence for free anyway as computers continue to get better. Adding mobility would increase the price, but it's hard to say by how much. On the other hand, a mobile robot would good for lots of things other than sex. For example: cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, guarding your property, etc.

If it was up to me there wouldn't be any downhills. I hate them. They are little more than a dangerous waste of time. You get training benefit from riding on the flats and even more from climbing. On downhills you mostly rest while taking huge risks. Of course it can be a thrill to reach such high speeds on light equipment. I once saw 58 MPH on my tandem speedometer. To comprehend what speed really is, try going 58 MPH on a bicycle. It feels like the end of the world, compared to going 58 in a car which is a non-event. Of course if you crash at 58 MPH on a bike it probably will be the end of your world. And it doesn't take much. Just have rabbit run into your front wheel, or hit a patch of gravel in a turn. Or have a cement truck backing out of someone's driveway behind some tall bushes.

If I was certain I would crash my bike today then I'd skip today's ride. The only reason anybody "takes" a risk is because they believe it won't happen.

I'm great in so many ways it's difficult even for me to keep track of them all.

Getting traumatized by watching the video of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center is analogous to a man getting a boner by looking at a video of Playboy's Miss June 2002. You're not seeing the ACTUAL real thing and yet even a fairly low-resolution two-dimensional video recording can deliver a powerful emotional wallop. Take what TV can do and boost it by 100 times and that's how good fembots could someday be.

The notion of karma involves cause and effect relationships that transcend physical reality. For example, the idea that a person can recover memories of a past life---how is this possible? For this to happen, a signal carrying information must leave the brain of one person and transmit energy and/or material into the brain of another person who appears years later. While we can imagine ways to set this up, there must be some intermediate storage method to bridge the gap, during which something preserves the signal against entropic decay and then later retransmits it on to the new brain. And at each transcription step there must be energy conversions or material exchanges taking place.

Everybody wants to be a winner, but nobody can be a winner without forcing somebody else to be a loser. Even if you find a way to lift all the losers up to the level of the winners, then you deprive the former winners of the pleasure of being better than everybody else.

We figured out how to price real estate even though everybody wants a slightly different kind of house. Even though preferences vary all over the place it's still possible to say one house is "worth" more than another and we can even put numbers on it. That's really cool when you think about it.

That new young actor in The Patriot. How many guys are good-looking enough to get an audience of women screaming? Not many. In contrast I see maybe one or two women who are highly attractive to men every time I go to the grocery store. For a man to make it on looks alone he has to be in maybe the top 0.05%, whereas a woman in just the top 5% is pretty much on easy street.

Incidentally, dumbass, are you aware that "money" is a completely made-up concept too? You can't derive the unit of $1 from any fundamental physical principles. That's why inflation and deflation are possible –money has NO INTRINSIC MEANING of its own so its value can go up or down at any time, unlike physical reality units like kilograms, volts, or watts. Money is only worth whatever people collectively agree it is worth at any given time, and even then no two people agree exactly. Money is simply an accounting trick we use to enable markets to work more efficiently than if people had to barter directly for everything.

The sexual market works like a barter system, which means society has not taken the time to work out a value-rating system as effective as money is in other markets such as for used cars and real estate. You can look up the blue book price of any used car or hire an appraiser to tell you how much any house is worth. That doesn't mean every house or used car is worth exactly the same amount to everybody. But it does tell you what you can expect to pay.

Jet's mistake was assuming that my being an asshole made it impossible for me to be right about anything. That is to say she allowed emotion rather than reason to be her guide. Which is an odd thing for someone who lives in the city that more than any other confirms Hitler guessed right about superhighways in 1936 when he ordered the first one built. If 98% of Americans agree with Hitler on superhighways, it seems being evil does not disqualify a person from coming up with the occasional popular idea. (Since most people are more evil than they are willing to admit to themselves, it's not altogether surprising when they embrace the idea of a genocidal maniac.)

Do you really think a guy who gets away with hitting Pamela Anderson isn't good at getting away with it? "Rocker" Tommy Lee is clearly a world-class abuser, probably a master at psychological manipulation and eliciting sympathy and knowing how to get a woman to sincerely believe it was all her fault and give him just one more chance. He gets to hit a woman 99.9999% of men couldn't even get one date with; he must have power over women the average man can't even start to imagine.

A beautiful woman does not want to fuck most of the thousands of mediocre guys who want to fuck her. If every last one of those guys had to hear it from her the hard way, the beautiful woman would never be able to get anything else done. To keep things reasonably sane there has to be some screening process that keeps most of the hopeless guys out of her hair. It's called knowing their place.

People go to restaurants to eat. People go to Usenet to discuss things. Posting an article to soc.singles constitutes a request for comment. A public request. If you don't understand this, read the FAQ a few more times.

It's hard to have a stable free society with super-rich people living right next to the desperately poor. The inferior never take well to having constant reminders of their inferiority. The super-rich have to move away to their gated communities where they bid up real estate prices to exclude the poor, and pay a small army of guards and doormen and cops and welfare caseworkers to keep the envious scum somewhat in check, or at least try to confine their robberies, rapes, riots, murders, and child abuse to their own rat-infested slums. In third-world shitholes where the desperately poor make up most of the population and there is no middle class, the rich can only survive by being ruthless warlords, and/or by enslaving the masses to some headcase religion that trains them to let their betters do their thinking for them. The same goes for huge differences in SMV. Putting the super-ugly in close proximity with the super-beautiful is sure to create a conflict you can't fully resolve just by scolding the ugly and telling them to learn their place. Unless shaming the inferior into squelching their hate is our modern form of headcase religion.

Invoking Godwin here is not proper. Putting the European Jews into concentration camps did not save millions of lives. Whereas we know to a mathematical certainty that allowing HIV+ people to roam freely condemns millions of currently uninfected people to gruesome deaths in the near future.

The nature of most humans is to expend the minimum energy necessary to reach a goal. No rational American man is going to go all the way to Russia to get a woman if he can get an American woman of equal quality in his own neighborhood, any more than he goes to Mongolia to shop for groceries. In my city there are a few dozen grocery stores. I don't know anybody who drives or walks any farther than necessary to get the price and selection they want. The only reason to bypass the nearest grocery and head farther out to the super-dooperstore is to get a better deal. And people who go to the super-dooperstores ALWAYS pick the most convenient one.

Once upon a time I mentioned that to me, Mel Gibson doesn't really look significantly better than the average UPS guy. While I can sort of see how Mel Gibson looks similar to other men I know women to go apeshit over, looking at Mel doesn't do anything for me, any more than looking at the UPS guy does anything for me. And let's not even talk about Patrick Stewart---I can't even intellectually picture him as being attractive to women. Unless women had expressed their opinions to me, and I had believed them, it would never in a million years occur to me that women would have any reason to react differently to these men. When you look at Camryn Mannheim and then look at Denise Richards, you probably don't want to have sex with either one of those women, and as far as you can see they're both just women. Whoop de doo. But don't think your undifferentiating non-response to these women in any way tells you what men feel when they see them.

If you believe fat women are attractive to men why did you take diet drugs?

If you think money can't buy you love, why do you advise me to spend $20K – $35K+ on an automobile?

I'm pretty sure that if every fat person had to face constant ridicule and torment from every person (s)he encountered everywhere in life it would take at most a week or two before all of them were seriously trying to get their overeating under control. But the social pressure would be even more effective if it were present every time a fat person wanted to eat. As evidence recall that fat people often try to conceal their overeating and lie about it. If such concealment became impossible (for example, if everybody had to eat in public dining rooms with their peers and nobody was allowed to carry food back home) then we would probably begin to see the fat porkers suddenly discovering discipline they didn't know they had. The degree of polite dishonesty in our society is such that most revolting people don't really know how revolting they are.

Adolescents brutally mock the uncool. If you can persuade the trendsetters to view smoking as uncool there will be very little smoking among teenagers. The problem with mocking the fat is that the mockery is indirect. Mocking a person for being fat is like mocking a smoker for having lung cancer. By the time the symptom of the stupid behavior has appeared it's too late. The person behaving stupidly can always plausibly deny that the stupid behavior caused the stupid result. If you want to encourage the right behavior you must mock the wrong behavior right when it starts. Mocking the results after a few years or decades is not going to be as productive. You need a chorus of jeering people to mock smokers and overeaters when they are smoking or overeating. There must be no escape. Then behavior will change.

People can certainly learn to overcome the excesses of racism such as slavery and in the area of recreational sexual preference but even most liberal-minded people will demonstrate some instinctive discomfort when it comes down to the actual prospect of producing children of "very" mixed race. A woman I know by first name only recently complained to me that her parents raised her to be liberal-minded but surprised her by forgetting all their platitudes after she brought home her new ethnically inappropriate boyfriend.

It does not escape me that losers are losers because they are losing. A loser cannot help but notice that someone or something has to define the game rules, and it's always worth investigating whether the rules are subject to change. For example, I've wondered plenty of times whether I need to become a sports star or a rock star to have the same degree of power over high-SMV women. It would be nice if I had a simple way to circumvent the preference structure that the vast majority of women enforce. But if there is a way for large numbers of men to cheat, high-SMV women would have to find some new and more effective way to discriminate, because the demand for their sex vastly exceeds the amount of sex they care to provide. It usually turns out that the game rules are not quite as arbitrary as they seem at first glance. That's the important lesson from sociobiology.

Technology is largely orthogonal to culture. It's possible to be a Creationist or a Flat Earther or someone who believes The X Files or even a Fat Acceptor and write decent software or do just about anything else in industry that can be done by following specific procedures, as long as you follow the right instructions while you're on the clock.

I think it would be as difficult for me to learn to get an erection by looking at a morbidly obese woman as it would be for a woman to learn to enjoy getting raped.

Remember, "beatnik" is just one transposition away from "betanik."

If women are so offended by the "shallowness" of men, why do they spend billions of hours and dollars per year in endless beauty rituals catering (more or less directly) to the very thing they find offensive? Women seem to take even a kind of pleasure in putting on makeup and fancy clothes. I do not hear them cursing the shallowness of men as they primp before the mirror. I strongly doubt that this is 100% the result of social conditioning, since there has never been a human culture where a majority of the women were unconcerned with their physical appearance and took no pleasure in embellishing it.

What do you think the lowlife losers who need help from Habitat for Humanity are going to do in the houses you help build? Read Chaucer and listen to Mozart?

What percentage of drug dealers end up in jail eventually? I'd guess the percentage is very high. People who break the law for a living typically have numerous conflicts with the justice system. A drug dealer cannot avoid building up numerous contacts with other drug dealers and drug users. Many of them will get arrested, and eventually one of them will flip. The more people who know a secret the sooner it gets out, so the more successful a drug dealer is the sooner the government will learn about him.

The only effective defense against Nazi Germany in 1940 was geography. The British Expeditionary Force collapsed in France as fast as the French Army. Had it not been for ~30 km of English Channel, the Wehrmacht would have rolled through the United Kingdom in a matter of weeks. Never in the course of history had so many owed so much to such a little patch of ocean.

I am interested in one thing: the facts. I don't care whose agenda the facts end up supporting. I just want the facts. That's why I present the facts no matter which way they fall. You, on the other hand, wish to distort the facts to support your preconceived agenda. An example is when you attempted to speciously associate the shorter life expectancies of the 19th century with the lower rate of obesity at the time.

Pull your head out of your normative dream world and get with the positive real world. In the real world you can't change much of anything except your own behavior. For some reason retards think everything that happens requires their approval first. That is only true in a sense that is so abstract as to be utterly meaningless. Not even the closest elections in history come down to one vote.

How long would the historical 3% long-term annual growth rate in the demand for energy have to continue before anthropogenic waste heat exceeds the heat reaching the Earth from the Sun?

Laughter is the typical human response to novelty. But if an idea works better than what's available, people get over the novelty pretty fast.

Also consider the cost of getting rid of the problem. A Usenet addict can stop posting at any time and have no lasting repercussions. In contrast, an obese person who decides to stop overeating could take months or years to get down to ideal weight.

A "diet" is not a temporary thing. You would not say to a heroin addict, "After you get through this rehab you can go back to shooting up." To lose weight and keep it off requires a permanent adjustment in your average daily calorie balance: either you permanently eat less or your permanently become more active, or both, compared to the eating and activity habits that previously made you obese. A "diet" can "end" in the sense that once you have reached your target weight your calorie intake should rise to match your calorie expenditure. But if you resume the gluttony that was necessary to make you obese in the first place, you will become obese once again.

We can't DIRECTLY experience the pleasure and pain we cause other people. But we can infer what we do to them from how they react to us. It requires considerable intelligence to make the connection between eating or not eating 500 extra kcal per day and how well we are able to attract and satisfy a lover. Or simply live out our natural lifespan. People who aren't that intelligent will confuse the basic issues of how much they eat and how active they are with nonsense about whether they "love themselves" or "hate themselves."

The fat people I've observed at close range were always eating. I saw the bedroom of a fat relative and it looked like the scene with Fat Bastard: dirty food dishes and empty food wrappers strewn about everywhere. Yuck. Go to any grocery store and observe the carts of the fat slobs at the checkout line. That alone doesn't tell you how fast they're going to scarf all that food but typically you'll see that the fatter the shopper, the higher the cart is piled with all sorts of calorie-dense foods. Especially convenience foods that can be eaten rapidly.

The farther back in time you go, the more wrong people were about everything. What's your point? Are you suggesting science has made no progress since the year 1700? If so, why are people in advanced countries living twice as long now?

Commonly held opinions are an important constituent of reality.

If one man gets 10 women, so does the pool guy.

There are women who look like men, and men who look like women. There are people who have both male and female sex organs. There are men who have larger breasts than some women have. There are women who are completely flat-chested. Do these oddities invalidate the concept of gender?

Anyway, the male fixation on penis size probably stems from: 1. When men were boys, their penises were very small. 2. When men were boys, they were very low on the ox-goring hierarchy. 3. Therefore, men associate having small dicks with getting dicked around by everyone else (especially their moms).

For example, Idi Amin, during his heyday, was a lot freer than I have ever been or ever will be. Idi Amin had the power to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people on a whim, and get away with it. So if the goal of the women's movement was to secure greater rights and freedoms for women, then these would necessarily have had to come at the expense of at least some of the people who were enjoying greater rights and freedoms than women at the time.

The personals would probably be a good bet if you don't care much about a person's physical appearance, but you have some strange requirement which prevents you from becoming attracted to any of the average-looking people you see all the time in Real Life. Or, on the other hand, if you are willing to sift through a lot of people. If you're not meeting anyone at all now, you might as well post an ad; you have little to lose. Just don't get your hopes up.

The oldest virgins I know are male. Hard to say if they're playing hard to get, though.

I would really like to see any large, productive enterprise fitting the "female" profile of communication for very long. I don't think it is possible, even if the enterprise employed only women. Either they would start behaving like men, or the enterprise would collapse under the weight of the inevitable freeloading.

Actually, movies are much worse than you say. For example, Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon II clearly did not understand that "No means no"! Most guys would get slapped with a harassment charge if they tried to pull stunts like Mel did with Ms. Haagen-Dasz.

When division of labor is necessary, marginal existence virtually eliminates the possibility of democracy and individual freedom. Except for the privileged few! This seems to me like the clear picture in most human cultures. Individual freedom is inversely proportional to the degree which people depend on each other. If the survival of the colony requires Joe Bob to report to work on time, every day, and not goof off, then the community will do whatever is necessary to keep Joe Bob in line. Whether Joe Bob likes his job or not.

I don't know about Herman, but I can accomplish many more useful things while waiting for public transportation than I can while being dead. Therefore, I would be much more willing to "lose" a year riding the bus than by agreeing to die a year earlier. And, of course, I can accomplish more useful things while waiting for public transportation than I can while driving a car. Attempts to salvage wasted driving time (cellular phones, etc.) invariably compromise safety by distracting the operator.

Even if people had perfect photographic recall, they might still have a tremendously difficult time answering such questions as: "How many photographs in the London Times during the past 4 years showed Prince Charles without his wife?"

With all due respect, I have to say, "bullshit". Think back to when you were 13 years old and looking at your first Playboy centerfold. Did you have any inkling about women's materialism when you were noticing that strange action in your shorts?

If I don't jump off the Empire State Building, no doubt I probably lose out on some good things. It would probably be exciting to see 100 floors zooming by. Most people, when selecting a course of action, think about bad things as well as good things.

What makes you think Jessica is gorgeous and voluptuous? My guess is if a real person looked exactly like the cartoon Jessica, she (?) would not be very successful at doing much more than scaring the kids at Disneyland. Remember, Jessica is a caricature of those human traits nancy b. calls "gorgeous" and "voluptuous". The cartoon Jessica is not "gorgeous" and "voluptuous".

Also, I have never noticed my life being degraded by a any bureaucrat to the same degree that automobiles do every time I step outside. An average bureaucrat probably does more damage behind a wheel than behind a desk. If the average driver was as innocuous as the average bureaucrat hard at "work", I'd have little to complain about. If I could have 10% more bureaucrats for 50% fewer automobile-miles, I'd call that a hell of a bargain.

The most amazing thing about absolute morality is not that it exists, but that it is so rarely fatal. Something must be very wrong with a natural world that tolerates, even rewards, such sloppy thinking.

The correct response to a woman who is yelling at you to rape her is to explain to her that her yelling this renders you incapable of raping her. The best you can do for her is merely have sex. She might as well be yelling at God to create a rock too heavy for God to lift.

I could die the next time I step outside. I could also die if I point a loaded gun at my head and pull the trigger. However, most people who point loaded guns at their heads and pull the trigger don't look too pretty afterwards, whereas I have stepped outside thousands of times and I'm still ticking. So while I have complete sympathy for anyone who gets raped, decisions about where scarce resources go always have to take into account what the risks are for the typical person. Since public citations of any risk are generally calls to some sort of political action, the actual nature of that risk becomes very important, you see. I have heard strident claims that a woman's appearance, dress, and behavior have NOTHING to do with her probability of getting raped. However, I have not seen one statistic supporting this claim, or the converse claim (that her appearance, dress, and behavior do have something to do with it).

The liquor industry has invested large sums to make sure Society learns something from Prohibition, i.e., that it "didn't work". However, if Prohibition in fact had made the liquor industry more profitable, then the liquor industry should have been its biggest proponent. Since the liquor industry has spent a lot of money trying to convince us that Prohibition was not a Good Thing, we must conclude that Prohibition was decidedly not a Good Thing for the liquor industry. Therefore, Prohibition must have been a SUCCESS, i.e., it reduced the total amount of money available to the liquor industry (both its legal and illegal factions – remember, illegal distillers never went away).

Call me cynical if you like, but I wonder what things would be like if 90% of the world was gay and 10% was straight. Would gays cheerfully tolerate straights and treat them with respect equal to that which they treated each other?

I don't know what "rights" are. To me, they sound like inventions. Nature seems to teach that rights accrue to those who are strong enough to take them. And that is the picture we see around us every day. If people don't like something, they try to escape it or prevent it. If two groups don't agree on what they like, and they can't find a compromise, then the stronger group gets its way at the cost of the weaker.

OK Bob, you WIN. And I LOSE! I concede that Life is Not a Competition!!!

I get asked out by women I don't know about as often as I get offered free money by random strangers. Any time a person behaves toward me in some way that is very unlike what I am used to, of course I am suspicious. That doesn't mean I would object to the behavior if it were sincere. It just means that my experience suggests I should guard against possible insincerity. Once I have verified the offer, then I will consider it on its own merits. If I get similar offers every day, then obviously I have little reason to dread them.

You could solve this problem by offering substantial cash payments to poor people who agree to be sterilized. For a man, you could offer a small sum, since one unsterilized man could still get all the women on the block pregnant anyway. For a woman, you could offer a substantial lump sum, say up to several years of child support welfare payments, pro-rated according to her years of remaining fertile career. This program would show a MASSIVE return on investment in a few years. And it would not involve coercion of any kind. How many poor people would be happy to be sterilized for, say, $2000 for a man, and $25,000 for a woman? If the woman did not go on to have the usual 2–6 kids typical of a welfare family, the payback time would be pretty brief. Heck, if she has any male children, they would stand a good chance of joining the prison population at some point. Incarcerating a person costs more than $25,000 per year.

That's right! Date rapists obviously have MORE SELF-ESTEEM than anybody! They believe that sex with them must be the greatest experience anybody else could ever have. They have so completely de-coupled their self-esteem from external reality that when somebody says "no" they don't even hear it.

I fall down while biking about as often as I fall down while walking, and I don't see any reason to fall down more often. If you walk long enough on a large enough variety of surfaces, eventually you will lose your step and fall. But it should be such a rare event that you don't really think too much about getting better at doing it.

The telephone network has many critical exchanges whose failure can paralyze communications for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of customers. Thanks to the general reliability of the phone system, these failures are rare. But they do occur, and the well-known result is bedlam and severe economic losses. If telephones suddenly disappeared, we would not simply "write a lot more letters." Rather, our entire financial and industrial systems would collapse within days if not hours, authorities would be unable to maintain order, and starvation would set into large cities within weeks.

I'm not knocking the Bible, I think it's an extraordinarily fascinating book, with human drama and character development to rival anything ever written. In fact, the only problem with the Bible is that people don't read it, even people who call it their guide, a problem resulting from the Bible containing plenty of things to offend and challenge everyone.

For a test of intelligence to mean something, it must ask the subject to answer many questions or solve many problems. The percentage of correct answers is a measure (perhaps approximate) of the subject's "intelligence." A person who gets the right answer most of the time will occasionally get the wrong answer, and in those instances the "intelligent" person behaves the same as a "stupid" person. For this reason we should not speak of people as being "smart" or "stupid," but instead we should speak of the percentage of time a person spends being smart or stupid. Everybody does some stupid things and some smart things.

There are lots of men who will settle for large women if they can't attract any attractive women, but that's not the same as finding large women "attractive." It's like the way Mexican illegal immigrants will take almost any undesirable job, as long as it pays better than what they could make back home. Try reversing genders to overcome your gender bias. Does the fact that some women will settle for men who beat them mean we KNOW there are lots of women who find women-beaters attractive?

Score: vitalism 0, materialism 1.

Marriage is like taking a job where you start off as a rock star and continuously get demoted until you finally become a janitor. With no retirement plan. Of course life itself has the same effect on a man, sexually speaking, but marriage makes it official.

Interior design is probably more fun to study than, say, engineering. By some amazing coincidence a much higher proportion of male students are grinding through the ordeal of an engineering education while the fluffy subjects attract predominantly females.

As far as I can tell, most people like dogs better than they like most other people.

If you saw someone hitting his head with a hammer and complaining about the pain he is causing himself (and better yet, billing you for his treatment) would you be "arrogant" if you pointed out to the fool that his own actions are creating his problem?

The primary function of the ring is for the woman to show it off. Try this experiment the next time you meet a woman who is engaged. Ask her these questions: 1. "May I see your ring?" 2. "May I see your tits?" You'll probably get different reactions from the woman. That tells you the ring and the tits have different functions. The ring is there to impress any member of the general public who might be impressed by it. The tits are there to collect diamonds.

As soon as Tim McVeigh hit the first major target most of the militia nutjobs fled for the exits. The movement as such was only viable as long as it stayed safely in the realm of rhetoric and fantasy.

Do you remember what happened to Marie Antoinette when she said "Let them eat cake"?

People who advocate monetary generosity with someone else's money don't take kindly to someone else advocating sexual generosity with their sexuality. I'm simply asking for a little more sensitivity. How would you like a bunch of strangers talking about who they were going to assign you to fuck? That's how it feels to rich people when a bunch of strangers talk about what to do with the rich people's money.

Do you have any idea of the lifetime of practical experience Dobzhansky was talking about? Of course you don't. Darwin's theory is to biologists as the basic formulas of physics are to engineers. At this point in history a biologist who rejects Darwin's theory is like an engineer who rejects the conservation laws and tries to build a perpetual motion machine.

If someone is 100% certain they have THE ANSWER how could they keep quiet? Suppose you discovered a simple, cheap, safe, and effective cure for cancer. Odds are you'd waste no time proclaiming your discovery to everyone you could reach. If you couldn't get the word out you'd probably explode from trying to contain it. Instead, what do you write about most of the time? You drone on about your cats or spew hatred toward Brenda. This suggests that whatever spiritual knowledge you think you have, you are much less convinced of its value than you would be about the secret to curing cancer.

Suppose you saw someone riding a roller coaster every day and enjoying it. Then one day he claims that on that particular day he wasn't in the mood for a roller coaster ride but someone abducted him onto the roller coaster, and now he's psychologically scarred for life because he had to ride the roller coaster when he didn't want to. The reaction of most people would be: "WTF?" If you wouldn't see that complaint as strange, what do you see as strange?

It's interesting to look at the history of any sport with objective standards and see how far back in time you would have to go to break a world record yourself, or for one of your local talent types to break it.

In my observation, most women react with alarm when other people mistakenly take them to be the age peer of a significantly older woman. That's because women aren't stupid: they can look at an old woman and see exactly why looking like her would be a big problem.

There are a few OK middle-aged women, but hot? Let's get slightly real. If a man wants to remember what 'hot' is he only has to go check out a campus full of college girls on a warm day.

To see the logical conclusion of the path you are on, visit Kabul.

You don't have to buy a ticket to watch reality.

It's difficult for me to think of anything that impacts my quality of life more than the way the people around me treat me. What could scientists discover that would be more useful than a detailed knowledge of the rules that govern our interpersonal relationships?

How would you feel if you saw 90% of white people jumping up and down and high-fiving at seeing some white supremacist get off?

Do you expect men to care about women's feelings more than you care about men's feelings? If so, why?

Waaay back in my churchgoing day I recall listening to an obese woman in a Bible study saying beautiful people "face a lot more temptation" and therefore being ugly was good. Even then I knew what she was saying was simply another stupid instance of classic sour grapes. Much like yours.

If guys did not need muscles they would not have evolved them. The fact that men everywhere in the world, on average, have more muscle than women, on average, indicates that having more muscle is part of what makes a man a man. For this dimorphism to have come about there must have been some sustained selection pressure in favor of men having more muscle than women. That indicates muscular men have had a long-term advantage in the competition for women. There's nothing to suggest this advantage has gone away. Any man who works out with weights hard enough to make noticeable improvements in his physique quickly discovers that chicks tend to like it. Not as much as they like rock stars, but enough for men to notice.

Private industry will be uninterested in Mars until people have decided to go there for noneconomic reasons. That won't happen, in turn, until it becomes possible to build a device smaller than, say, an automobile that could dig up Mars dirt and build up an entire industrial infrastructure using only information from Earth and energy and material from Mars. But if you had a machine like that it would be cheaper to set up shop in, say, the Sahara desert. There wouldn't be any point in going to Mars until you had chewed up every inch of currently worthless real estate on Earth: deserts, ocean floors, ice caps, etc. In the old days migrations were always driven by something of value: precious metals, prime farmland, or the need to get rid of excess prisoners. What's the driver that motivates people to go to Mars?

Getting yourself sentenced to death in the United States and contracting AIDS have something important in common: you pretty much get to pick your odds of experiencing either catastrophe. It's not exactly as if white racists are going around forcing a disproportionate number of blacks to inject themselves with nonsterile needles, engage in promiscuous unprotected sex, or commit capital crimes. Even if racism is somehow a factor in motivating disproportionate numbers of black people to destroy themselves, it's still pretty much up to the victims to decide whether destroying themselves is an appropriate response to racism.

In my experience most people who have never participated on Usenet are much less able to make a point coherently and readably in e-mail than the average soc.singles poster. Usenet quoting and formatting conventions are not just pointless customs but an approach that actually works better than most alternatives. Another thing I notice about the average person is how fast they fall apart under the slightest criticism. It would be useful to require everyone who is going to work with a computer to spend a year or so participating in a snakepit like this. Beyond that, however, it simply becomes a waste of time, much like playing three million games of Solitaire to learn how to use the mouse.

Minimum wage laws prevent the market from sending the right message to the least-capable workers: that consumers want them to learn new skills.

Almost every technological advance involves reducing direct human involvement with the productive task, i.e., leveraging a unit of human intelligence to creating ever greater value. This usually means that even as we grow materially richer, we enjoy less human catering to our needs at a given cost.

One can be uncomfortable, even sickened, at what the thought of what homosexuals do with each other without hating them. The only necessary ingredient to keep one's personal tastes out of it is maturity. I admit that maturity is rare, but that does not mean it cannot exist. I do not like the taste of certain foods, nor the smell of certain chemicals. But I do not hate people who eat those foods or work around those chemicals. Only immature people hate other people who are different than them, even when those differences are disturbing.

While I agree that dreaming about cities in space is great fun, and probably harmless, I have to wonder about what life would be like in an enclosed, self-contained, and profoundly fragile environment. Face it kids, despite our fancy technologies, we're still in kindergarten when we try to operate civilizations. How many average people give a flying zark about anything other than their momentary convenience? How many people have determined that they can hold entire communities hostile by targeting some point of vulnerability? Even though the Earth is a very forgiving place, we are already growing increasingly vulnerable to disruption by small groups of sufficiently motivated and ruthless individuals. How much more if we were all living in a tank?

If you want to see how a person really wants to dress, see how they dress when they are staying home alone for the day, or pursuing some activity where they are quite certain nobody will see them. Anything beyond that they do to make an impression on other people. If a woman dolls herself up to the gills when she stays home sick with the flu, then I will believe her when she says she does not dress that way to attract some kind of attention.

To a good approximation, cheap objects serve me, and I serve expensive objects. I have to go considerably out of my way to purchase and maintain expensive objects. What a hassle. Consider the selling price of an object to be the extent to which the producer has failed (to reduce costs). I can never feel proud of having spent huge sums on anything. Rather, I feel like an idiot for not having found a more efficient way to gain the same benefit.

The probability of an action being illegal is equal to the probability of it being observed by (1) a law enforcement officer who is inclined to enforce it, or (2) a victim who successfully presses charges.

And I thought I was quick to make up my mind. Well, there was the one time one of my buddies told me he had something really hot that I just had to see. It was a checksum of a digitized photo of the footprint in clay of a young woman. I'll never forget how those four little hex digits hit me right between the eyes. I was smitten! With trembling hands I carefully back-calculated her phone number and rang her up. I was sweating with nervous anticipation as I tried to keep her on the phone long enough to get a clean voice sample for my spectrum analyzer (hey, my hunches are usually cool, but I didn't want to take chances). As the plots flashed up on my workstation, any remaining doubt vanished from my mind: this woman was hot.

It's a political fallacy that "everybody" loses when one group gains too much power. That's nonsense; the powerful group clearly wins, or else they would give up their power voluntarily.

The particular composition of the smoke in a smoke screen is not as important as its ability to obscure.

Actually humans don't have dominion over much of anything. We think we have dominion over some aspects of nature, but we are simply being driven to chop down forests and pave over fields by our own subservience to the natural law which produced us and our endless urges.

One could argue that anybody who is marketing women to men has a commercial incentive to portray women as being more attractive than they actually are. One could also argue that an unmarried girl who gets herself knocked up in a culture which frowns on such things has an even larger incentive to attribute her pregnancy to a supernatural event.

The only difference between the claims of the Bible and the claims of Marshall Applewhite is that the claims of the Bible have been repeated more times.

The vast majority of men agree that lingerie in large sizes is not sexy. Putting lingerie on a gluttonous woman is about as sexy to most men as putting lingerie on another man, or on a farm animal, would be. The resulting spectacle is not a turn-on but rather it is a source of mirth.

People generally suck. We can only tolerate them in carefully controlled doses. If people had attractive personalities, everybody would constantly want to socialize with everyone around them. Instead of chopping up a city block into individual lots and building walls and fences to cordon off our territory we'd pile into one small area and savor each other's continuous company. But in reality most people would rather watch television than invite their neighbors over for a conversation.

When will the livestock industry begin inducing thyroid problems in livestock to save on feed costs?

The mullahs need to tightly restrict the supply of sex. That's how they make the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife so appealing as a recruitment tool for suicide bombers. To the average American guy, 72 virgins sounds like a slow day on alt.sex.binaries.* He doesn't have to blow himself to bits to see that.

Every war contains a propaganda component. Pop culture is the West's most dangerous weapon. That's what the Islamic fundamentalists are fighting, anyway. It's funny, of course, that they have chosen to go about fighting in a way guaranteed to alienate their natural allies (the American far right). George Bush could easily have been their best friend.

But I'm pretty sure that if the welfare recipients I have known resemble the ones in your town, you would be hard-pressed to find 1000 of them you want as immediate neighbors, 100 you want as your circle of closest friends, or 10 you want as your employees.

If we really knew how the opposite sex thinks many of us would have shot ourselves by now.

Criticism from just one person no matter how harsh, logical, provable, or accurate is unlikely to have much of an impact. The accused can simply dismiss the critic as an isolated nutcase. If everybody said the world was flat and one guy knew the truth, he'd probably have a hard time getting his first convert. Once he had 90% the last 10% would be easy.

There seem to be a lot of people posting here who have no idea what average intelligence is like. The minimum standard of acceptability seems to be more along the lines of a Hawking or Feynman or something. Do most of you live in some sort of eugenic community where only smart people are allowed in? Jeez, for starters the average person can barely write a coherent sentence. This is like calling a woman "ugly" if she isn't as attractive as Elle MacPherson. There's a lot of room below Elle's level before women start looking bad.

But I long ago learned that one woman's endorsement of another woman's sexual market value is almost entirely devoid of meaning, especially if they are friends. If a woman likes another woman she will always find some way to describe her friend as "attractive" no matter what.

When you attempt to inflict psychic damage on men by rejecting them, the damage you inflict is proportional to your sexual market value. Thus when you swing this weapon, you invite people to comment on whether you are swinging a battle-axe or a banana. If you were highly attractive, your pronouncement of sexual disinterest would be devastatingly effective. Since you have made the mistake of being relatively honest about how unattractive you are, your pronouncement is instead devastatingly comical.

Being the President is not like being a rock star. For some reason we tolerate and even applaud Alpha Male behavior from icons of pop culture, but we expect the Most Powerful Man In The World (TM) to be a regular family man and spend millions of tax dollars to hound him into compliance, even at the cost of the occasional Constitutional Crisis.

My reading of the history of science fails to show many examples of people who lost by taking the side of mainstream science. Granted, if you happened to live in a culture controlled by Catholics or Communists, scientism could sometimes turn out to be an unhealthy habit (as in the episodes of Galileo and Lysenko, respectively). But in the modern USA where the fruits of science and technology are on display and being greedily consumed by the friends and enemies of science alike, the ignorati swing a much smaller club. Science has won the war, and the remaining battles are but mopping-up operations.

This is much the same strategy heterosexual men use to make sure gay men know their place. For every actual killing to enforce the status quo, there are millions of verbal assaults. This insures every gay man understands the dire consequences that await him if he attempts to express and act on his attractions toward straight men. As a result, most straight men can enjoy going through life largely unbothered by unwanted attention from gay men.

Men routinely mock each other in ways that would drive most women to tears; that's how we separate the men from the boys.

I guess it's hard to mobilize against mobility.

Recreational drugs are illegal and hang-gliding is legal, despite the fact that hang-gliding is a similarly suicidal hobby. Hang-gliding enthusiasts have managed to pursue their hobby without pissing off large numbers of nonparticipants. Probably because they aren't constantly trying to sell hang-gliders to other people's children.

If the war on drugs is a failure why do you want it to end? How can a failed campaign against drugs be a problem for anyone who wants to indulge? (I.e., you.) The constant whining about the war on drugs by drug users indicates that the war on drugs is reducing the amount of drugs they get to do. If the war was having no effect on drug users, they would be ignoring it.

To speak, you need a functioning vocal tract, and a functioning brain to direct its incredibly complex actions. To understand how stupefyingly complex the necessary mental computations are, consider that Hollywood still hires real actors to do the voices in otherwise animated feature films. It is far, far easier to synthesize all the graphics in a film like Shrek than to synthesize the voices. It's still cheaper to hire Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy, etc., to speak their parts than to duplicate what those actors can say with a computer. Modeling the vocal tract is the easy part. The hard part is sequencing all the actions of the vocal tract necessary to speak smoothly and convey emotion, i.e., what the brain does.

When you ask for a raise, do you want your boss to dismiss your request with "Hah! In Afghanistan the average wage is just $3 per day, you overpaid slacker." You don't care what they make in Afghanistan. You only care what you make. Humans aren't striving to be mediocre. We all want a better deal than the average person gets.

Try spending your whole life on an ice floe before you start lecturing these people. What else are you going to do for entertainment while you huddle shivering in your igloo for six months of darkness through the Arctic winter? No books, no TV, no Internet, no heat. All you've got in there is your family. Under those conditions how could a tradition of incest not develop?

If society rewarded young girls for masturbating in public that's what they'd be doing. As it is, young girls are happy to dress either like hookers or like nuns depending how society is reacting to them. There are societies where women cover up completely and other societies where they go completely naked, and every variation in between. A woman's sense of modesty appears to be almost entirely a social construct.

People say beauty isn't enough; money doesn't satisfy; and so on. However, while an ugly person rarely has the choice to become beautiful, a beautiful person can readily become ugly (all it takes is an X-acto knife, some lighter fluid, and a match). Similarly, most poor people cannot readily become rich, but any rich person can become poor simply by writing a sufficiently large check. Since we almost never see any beautiful person opting to become ugly, nor any rich person opting to become poor, it seems clear that while beauty and wealth aren't everything, they are damned well worth keeping according to the vast majority of people who have them.

If compatibility were centrally important everybody would be gay. I have more in common with the average man than I've ever had in common with any woman, and yet I feel no attraction for men whatsoever. To be around men I don't have to adjust any aspect of my behavior; to be around women I have to adjust everything.

Look at the flip side: suppose there is some man who is an axe-murdering serial killer. If the numbers of men and women are equal, then some woman has to settle for him or go without any man (or time-share the same man with another woman).

The Amazon rain forest is the greatest repository of invaluable and irreplaceable genetic and ecological information on the planet. But to a hungry Brazilian miner, logger, or farmer, most of that information is not usable, so he just destroys most of it to get the small part he knows how to exploit. Once again, the people who decide to keep their hands off are irrelevant to the fate of an area.

At no point have men been demanding unusually thin women to gaze at. The BMIs of the top selling female porn models have been pretty stable for decades.

Even in the worst housing project in the U.S. most people don't spend most of their time killing each other. After all, you can only kill someone once, and it doesn't take very long.

It's also worth noting that no tiger has ever tamed himself.

Do you think being perfectly honest with women is a smart strategy for a man?

But let me ask you this: even as irrational and anti-scientific as feminists are, how do you think they would react to the discovery of a very strong link between genetics and rape behavior, such that it would be possible to identify (some) boys who are virtually certain to grow up to be rapists?

Incidentally, what do you know that works better than science?

Of course, "subjective" is a concept as foreign to [Mark] as water is to a fish, and for exactly the same reason.

If you hadn't been told about death camps and so on you would have no idea such things were possible from anything in your personal experience. On the other hand, a short man with a small dick knows exactly what he's up against. From a very early age, and right up until he drops dead.

There are plenty of countries in the world that are dominated by religious ideas. In every case the more religious a country is, the more poor and backward it is. Afghanistan comes to mind.

There are almost infinitely many people who might have existed but do not. Do you miss any of them? Are you coping well with their nonexistence?

Which do you think required more intelligence to write: 1. The book of Genesis 2. The Origin of Species ?

I have no guess as to the SMV of Jesus Christ or even whether there was one unique historical individual who gave rise to the Jesus stories. King David, on the other hand, was able to live much like Russell Crowe does unofficially. And according to the Bible, King David with his 1000+ wives and concubines was a man after God's own heart.

Which animal is likely to fly farther? An eagle or a bear? Telling a bear not to fly doesn't inconvenience him much, but telling an eagle not to fly –— now that's asking for a lot.

You have other qualifications relevant to this discussion. Namely, since you are an attractive young woman, you are probably much more physically attractive to many middle-aged men than their middle-aged wives are. If you felt like giving it a serious try, you could probably wreck at least half the homes in a typical upper-middle-class suburb. However, most of those dumpy wives are safe from having to compete with the likes of you because most attractive young women do not go around aggressively pursuing middle-aged married men.

Note: it's funny how blonde women seem to outnumber blond men three to one.

Ever see Cindy Crawford when she was hosting a late night talk show? She looked a lot better than Rosie O'Donnell. Doesn't Rosie have access to all the same makeup and photo processing tricks? If so, why does Rosie look like a fat bag of shit on TV?

To say that everything is exactly as God wants it to be is to call God a sadist beyond imagination.

"Irrational" earned its pejorative label status by producing undesirable consequences in most instances where a decision had real-world consequences.

Have you ever seen a 300 pound woman you considered beautiful? Me neither. And yet some people here insist that we should start finding 300 pound women to be beautiful. Predictably a number of people point out that that is nonsense.

Once I was walking with an attractive young woman and she commented negatively on some other guy with large protuding belly (I don't think it was Brock). She said something like, "I can't understand why anybody would let himself go like that." So I asked her, "If he lost that gut would you make love to him?" She said, "No." I said, "That's why he lets himself go."

The tan is no more essential to Claudia's beauty than her hairstyle is. Those are merely refinements. Since the average person can emulate them, that's what the fashion industry markets. Unfortunately for the fashion industry's customers, as well as for the target demographic the customers are trying to stimulate, a tan and a nice hairdo do not turn the average woman into Claudia Schiffer.

If fat women are in demand and having fun why must they constantly assert that they are beautiful? They even make up bizarre code words such as "BBW" to assert this impression. A beautiful woman knows she's beautiful. If she forgets, she needs only to step outside and watch heads turn. She doesn't need to make up crazy code words to fabricate an impression that people have already formed on their own. What is your impression of a person's intelligence when that person constantly claims to have a high IQ?

Defectives typically play word games in an attempt to evade the stigma their defect generates. The mistake in their reasoning is to associate the stigma with a label, rather than with the underlying defect the label describes. People are not stupid enough to be fooled by word games for long. Invent a new word to describe something that most people find disgusting or inferior, and in due course they will learn to associate disgust or inferiority with that new word.

Almost everybody has lost a close friend or relative to car-nage or knows someone who has. The survivors have all spent time in traffic jams, and many have experienced the trauma of a collision. Throw in road rage, the endless struggle for parking, car theft, the criminal uses of cars, the weekly high-speed chases, the heavy weight of traffic policing, and it's pretty clear that driving a car is the most conflict-centered activity the average "nonviolent" person engages in.

I remember when I was in college and one of my classmates told a story about sleeping with some middle-aged woman he had met at a job. He said he went into it (heh) with high expectations because of her 20+ years of sexual experience, but to his surprise he discovered "it wasn't that good." He may not have realized it then but he was getting a sneak preview of his probable future, when as a middle aged man most of the sex available to him would not be "that good."

Which media cause the 6-month-old infants in studies of attractiveness standards to prefer dolls that adults judge to be physically attractive over dolls that adults judge to be ugly?

Fomenting disrespect for the law provides ideological cover for people who wish to break laws in ways that would work to your disadvantage. For example, a rapist might seize upon your refusal to obey drug laws as a handy excuse for his refusal to obey sex laws. Why should a rapist have any more respect for the law than you do? You have already declared by your actions that a law, in and of itself, carries no moral weight whatsoever, and anyone who feels a law is unfair may ignore it.

Anybody who can't cope with reality can get drunk off their ass, perfectly legally and at low cost. But that's not enough. It's never enough. You legalize one poison and the drug addicts demand another. And another. They can never get enough different ways to souse their brains. Anything to kill the unrelenting pain. It doesn't matter how many drugs you legalize. The gang-bangers will find another one they can do their drive-by shootings over. If drugs aren't the pretext, they'll shoot people for their shoes.

It's worth noting that destructive addictions to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, cigarettes, and gluttony are regressive phenomena. That is, their incidence increases as you go farther down the socioeconomic (and thus the IQ) scale. I read somewhere that less than 5% of physicians smoke cigarettes compared to around 50% of low-status blue-collar workers.

I don't have to convince men to find fat women ugly. Most already do. I don't have to convince men to find elderly women ugly. Most already do. Because I compete with men for the most desirable women, my chances of getting what I want would improve if I could persuade other men to change their preferences and go after women who are fat and/or old. But I know this is futile, so I don't even bother to try.

The tools can only show that men who marry voluntarily are superior, on average, to men who don't or can't. There's no evidence to support the claim that forcing men who don't marry to marry improves their lot, any more than there's evidence to support the claim that forcing welfare slobs to wear business suits makes them productive.

Have you ever read any of the racist quotes of Abraham Lincoln? For some reason they don't get a lot of publicity today.

The fact that not all markets are free suggests some people do better in markets that are not free.

Humans evolved a healthy fear of heights. If someone threatens to push you off a 50-foot ledge, you probably react with panic. As well you should. If you are driving down a road at a typical speed and you slam into something solid, the impact forces on your body will be comparable to taking a 50-foot dive off a ledge. But do people show the same respect for speed that they have for heights? No. To the evolutionist this is no surprise: for millions of years, our ancestors have been in danger of falling from heights, but we've only been able to move faster than 20 MPH for a little more than a century---not nearly enough time for fear of speed to evolve.

It's hard for me to imagine one airplane costing $1.3 billion. Even if it doesn't crash, eventually it's going to be sitting out in a "boneyard" in the Arizona desert. $1.3 billion dollars. That represents the value of the life's work of about 1000 productive people. If an enemy could shoot that airplane down, that's like wiping out 1000 productive lives.

If the Far Side mocked cancer victims, it would probably be less well received.

When a Hindu tells you cows are sacred and tells you not to wear leather shoes, what is your null hypothesis? Do you agree to stop wearing leather shoes until science has the final answer? When Islam tells you to bow to Mecca five times per day what's your null hypothesis?

Physically demanding heroic work is fast-paced and interesting. What technological heroes do is slow, boring as hell, frustrating, and almost universally disparaged –— even by educated people like suse who should know better. The macho guys who climb ladders into burning buildings get better chicks than the pasty geeks who design the ladder trucks.

The undeniable existence of black people and white people at every level of intelligence proves beyond doubt that whatever makes people "black" or "white" cannot be the same thing that makes people "smart" or "stupid."

And what exactly is a cancer victim "fighting"? Does the cancer victim identify each cancer cell and punch it? "Fighting" means to resist an opponent violently. In contrast, disease victims just lie there passively and take punishment from an abstract enemy they cannot see. The disease victim's immune system may be doing some real fighting but the victim cannot see, feel, or consciously direct it. When I have a cold I am not "fighting" it, I'm hosting it. All I can do is try to avoid some activities some people have said may aggravate a cold. I have to passively let the cold run its course.

Creationists seem to think that by chanting "Piltdown Man" long enough, they can discredit the theory of evolution by mutation and natural selection. Gould complains when creationists do this to him, yet he does exactly the same thing by writing a book that cites Abraham Lincoln's (!) views on intelligence.

Incidentally, I thought it was funny that in the aftermath of that "Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire" show, some news reports were questioning the wealth of the alleged millionaire because he lived in a modest home, did not drive a flashy car, etc. That's exactly the popular misconception "The Millionaire Next Door" dispels.

When a finding becomes sufficiently well-established to become part of mainstream science, faith is no longer necessary to believe it. Rather, faith becomes necessary to doubt it. Either that or you need complete ignorance of how the finding was established.

Laughter is one of the basic defense mechanisms of denial. For example, the next time you see a group of teenagers who are standing around smoking, walk up to them and explain the reality about the health effects of tobacco smoking.

After I read [Fat Acceptance FAQ] I had to wonder if the fat people who wrote it had tried running it by anybody outside their cult first. Initially I thought it was some kind of parody of political correctness. But all indications are that the authors were serious.