Danimal archive, part 2

The AIDS epidemic continues to worsen steadily. From a public health perspective, a sexbot is like a more effective condom: an artificial device a man sticks his penis into to stop the spread of disease, but unlike a conventional condom, a sexbot would actually feel good. I expect the AIDS industry to promote sexbots once they become good enough to start replacing real sex. AIDS advocates agitate to distribute clean needles to drug addicts. How would sexbots seem worse?

Every cute girl I know has at least one hideous obese female friend who would be handy for discouraging aspiring Romeos.

The idea seems to be that you want to deny the fundamental reality that most people can form relationships of comparable quality with any one of millions of other people. Circumstances determine who you end up with, but to imagine there is anything "unique" or "special" about that person denies the simple fact that everybody is replaceable. Besides, the average man has to approach dozens of women to find one who will relate to him. He gets rejected by 24 women, and then he spends the rest of his life trying to convince the 25th woman she is "special."

What was John Lennon's net worth? I'm guessing he had more to imagine there than I do, since I'm probably a lot closer to "no possessions" right now than he was when he wrote this silly song.

Putting on weight is a slippery slope. Someone who gains and then tolerates 20 pounds of excess fat has the personal habits and mental outlook in place to gain another 20. And so on. If anything, gaining the next 20 is easier. Being fat is depressing, and the depressed fat person turns to tasty foods for enjoyment, which leads to more fat, more depression, and more compensatory recreational eating. It does look absurd when you see the final result, but the process of self-destruction through self-indulgence takes a long time and proceeds in small, easily-rationalizable increments. Specifically, in mouthfuls. Everybody has to eat anyway, so there's nothing shocking about eating a little more each day.

Every time you step on the gas pedal, you are shouting "Go Bush!"

Nobody can do everything they please and still function in society, except for the occasional despot. The process of growing up involves years of having beaten into us an understanding of many things we cannot do lest we offend someone else. Once we get used to stifling ourselves, it gets to be a habit and then we can start to think we are being ourselves at that point. And yet every normal human behaves differently when other people are watching vs. how he or she behaves when nobody is watching.

I wonder why, in the debate about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, those who believe other technological species exist are called "optimists." Given the huge difficulty most humans have getting along with most members of their own species, only a pessimistic human could imagine there are even weirder and more troubling beings out there somewhere who will challenge even more of our cherished beliefs, perhaps with disturbing new facts. Just as intolerant people plonk individuals, and sometimes even entire races or genders or political parties, I can imagine if space aliens ever do appear, lots of people will want to plonk all of them.

I don't know anybody who appears to have any trouble accepting himself or herself. "I am my own worst critic" is always the biggest lie.

People who can't even list 5% of what governments do think they know who should be the next President. Amazing.

There aren't many sure things in life. But almost any woman in the top 1% of appearance can certainly get a man in the top 20% of income (at least) if she wants.

Disposability is the basis for evolution. Everybody will be replaced. If you like being a human as opposed to a monkey, then you approve of that process.

It's peculiar that professional sports are all about crushing your competitors, on the level of the individual athletes, and allowing talent and hard work to reap all the rewards, but collectively the team owners keep changing their own rules to prevent any one team owner from crushing the rest.

A person's sexual orientation contributes more to the content of his/her character than the person's political views. I know lots of Republicans who don't make a spectacle of their political views the way a cross-dresser makes a spectacle of his orientation. You could get to know some Republicans very well and never guess how they are going to vote. But you immediately know something is abnormal when you meet a cross-dresser. The cross-dresser not only has some particular orientation, but wants to make everyone aware of it.

Young people cannot really imagine the horror of growing old. But they can plainly see there are virtually no sexually attractive old people.

Five decades of work is plenty of time for any non-stupid person to accumulate sufficient wealth to see him through life's end-game. All the old fart needs are (a) a stable society to prevent younger, stronger people from looting his wealth outright, and (b) the personal discipline to have saved at least 20% of his disposable income each year.

Note: it is exceedingly rare for large groups of people to consider euthanasia for people they find sexually attractive.

Why do you think old people constantly reminisce? Because their lives generally suck now by comparison to their much better memories of youth.

Recall those Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock with their idealistic hopes of founding a Puritan colony full of dour people doing their Puritan things. Today their young descendents are wearing nipple rings and downloading porn over the Internet.

If a man is highly attractive to women, it's likely he's doing pretty well in some "other" areas, because women look for men with a visible knack for outcompeting and dominating other men. A beautiful woman could be stupid or whatever and feel insecure about that. Or she could market her stupidity like Jessica Simpson. Jessica is (or maybe her handlers are) at least smart enough to know that during her few short years of maximum sexual market value, something that would be a crippling flaw for a normal person simply makes her more intriguing thanks to her good looks.

Being attractive means having options. People who can afford to vacation anywhere find it difficult to vacation in the same place every year. People who can afford 500 cable channels find it difficult to watch one channel exclusively. People who can eat in many restaurants find it difficult to eat the same food for every meal. That's a different flavor of "difficult" than being unable to afford even one of those desirable things. Personally, I think having a lasting relationship career is more important than having a lasting relationship. It's like being employed. Job-hopping is no worse than working one job for 40 years. The paychecks are steady either way. Both are better than chronic unemployment.

Marketers tap into our essential hubris, our overriding self-absorbed belief that we truly deserve the best of everything. Marketers attempt to hijack our raging self-love by selling us the idea that to buy their products is how we love ourselves. "Because I'm worth it" makes a much better advertising slogan than "Because I'm a piece of shit."

It's true that people who happen to be in the top 1% of looks are rarely in the top 1% of much else. But not much else matters so much, so easily, so automatically, or so universally.

As long as the Randi Prize goes unclaimed, all the various religions have nothing but empty words, and some gullible followers who believe them.

The odds are strongly against you and I having completely opposite preference orderings. And there is a good sociobiological reason for that: having preferences that drastically cut against the norm makes your offspring less likely to reproduce. Over time, there must have been selection against really oddball preferences in our ancestral lines.

In any case, can you post the URLs of some photos of women you consider more attractive than Playboy models? If the Playboy models are not the penultimate in female perfection for you, what women are? I'm genuinely curious.

I read some survey that said 80% of women fail to reach orgasm regularly with their partners. I guess most men are lazy, and most women are not very assertive. Or maybe most women don't care if they have orgasms. Of course if you look at 80% of women it's pretty clear why most men wouldn't feel like making much effort.

When I see people wasting time on Usenet, I suspect they are not like the guy in "The Bachelor."

If modern science were completely wrong, it probably wouldn't work as well as it does.

If you have some method of divination which consistently predicts the future with results better than chance, by all means go pick up your million bucks. It would be criminal for you to deprive the rest of humanity of your breakthrough discovery. That's one reason why the Randi Prize is a safe challenge. If anybody can win the prize, the exposure alone would revolutionize all of human understanding and yield huge benefits.

Few people can correctly maintain the distinction between (a) what happened, and (b) their belief about what happened.

In general, the more people understand nature, the less natural they want to be.

In any case, if you know so much more about men than Hugh Hefner knows, are you making more money than Hef by selling your alternative magazine featuring photographs of average women?

For example, if I never read the news in print or watched televised news, I might not know the U.S. is fighting a war in Iraq. There has been no visible impact on my everyday life that I can think of apart from the news reports. My daily routine and the choices available to me seem to be exactly the same as during peacetime, and nobody from my immediate social circle is serving just now. The government has not imposed rationing. Every time I get on my bicycle, the roads are just as choked with gaswasters as they ever were. I see no indication that anyone around me is making any sort of wartime sacrifice. People like to read the news and get all emotionally aroused about politics, but when you turn off the news and go about your daily routines, how often are you personally affected by any concrete manifestations of all that political stuff?

Faith is an extremely destructive mental habit because it can blind you to real empirical insight---things you can never imagine, but can only observe by learning. A person who is stuck in a blind alley and refuses to back out cannot be a good inventor unless his first guess is extremely lucky.

The fact that McDonalds fills thousands of job openings does not indicate all those applicants consider burger-flipping to be the ideal job. Instead it probably indicates the applicants lack the skills to obtain jobs with higher pay and higher status. And I would guess a lot of burger-flippers certainly do care that they can't get better jobs. A better way to estimate the desirability of menial jobs is to count the number of people who turn down high-status jobs in medicine, law, engineering, professional sports, entertainment, etc. to take menial jobs like flipping burgers.

In my everyday observation of ordinary men and the women they date, it appears almost every straight man selects a woman who is close to being the most conventionally attractive woman he can get. I don't see patterns like this: a man dating a succession of women who are, say, "6's" and then finally marrying a woman who is a "2." Instead he probably marries a "6." Odds are he would rather have a 7, 8, 9, or a 10. But he can't attract one strongly enough to get good treatment from her, and his dating track record demonstrates this.

There is also a wide range of political opinion within the Republican party. There are Republicans who oppose the war in Iraq, Republicans who favor a woman's right to abort her fetuses if she wants, Republicans who are openly gay, Republicans who are atheists, Republicans who are Muslims, and Republicans who are black. There might even be Republicans who recognize the best possible strategy to make America safer is to increase the gasoline tax, although I have yet to meet one. And yet despite all that variety of opinion within the Republican party you know there is something distinctly different between a vote for Bush and a vote for Kerry.

More often than not, sex is easy for (young) women to obtain and difficult for (most) men to obtain, starting from square zero. Thus it is staggeringly obvious that regardless of who wants sex "more" in some abstract sense, most men want sex with (young) women way more than most young women want sex with most men. Sure, once a woman finds a man who meets her 300 specific requirements, and she feels comfortable in their relationship, her sex drive might lumber out of dormancy and amount to something, but she reaches that state with so few men that in most of her encounters with men it's as if she doesn't have a sex drive at all (that they will ever detect).

By the time a woman is 70, odds are that hardly any men will want sex with her. If all the women in the world looked that bad, most men would not appear to want sex very much.

"Yankee guy" subjugated "Dixie guy" and told him to stop owning black people. Of course only the wealthy minority of Dixie guys actually owned slaves. Most of the Johnny Rebs died fighting for something they couldn't even afford. What tools. It sucks to find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Of course every religion tries to cook up arguments about why their religion is special, but these arguments don't work very well when all sides get to have their say. Most religions do best when they can quarantine their marks away from competing religions. Any time there is a sustained religious dialogue, the result is typically war. Because neither religion can prove it is right and the other religion is wrong. But they have to believe that or else there is no religion. A few people have tried in their mush-head way to claim all religions are equally true and valid, but that doesn't hold water as long as rival religions keep murdering each other's followers.

If women wanted sex as much as men do, the AIDS epidemic would be ripping through heterosexuals in the United States as fast as it ripped through gay men in the United States.

If you want to experience horrendous emotional and psychological damage, try working as a technical support representative for any small software company. At least in the sex industry you are selling a product that works, and satisfying the customer in many cases.

Easy money tends to have a corrupting influence, and this applies to entire industries, even to countries. For example, cigarette manufacturers have had trouble diversifying to other products because they find they have to work much harder to earn similar profits selling things that are not addictive. And on a national level, what will happen to Saudi Arabia when its petroleum gives out? Unless the Saudis come up with something else to sell, the world economy will spit them out as completely worthless. And I doubt you will shed a tear. The day will come when Saudi Arabia has to work for its keep, just like the rest of us. And that will be a big shock to them, just as it must be for an aging beauty when she wakes up to find she will actually have to start working, at one of those undesirable jobs she avoided while her looks provided a better option.

I happened to observe a public gathering of lesbians one time. I was amazed by their demographic oddity. Apart from one stunningly hot couple, the vast majority were collectively far less attractive than I would expect for a large group of similarly young women. Normally when I see a large concentration of young women (at a university, or outdoor festival, etc.) I notice quite a lot of eye candy. A woman whose looks put her in the dregs of her gender generally would have to select from the dregs of the opposite gender. For an ugly woman, that could be life-threatening. A man who isn't attractive to many women may have to settle for a woman who is merely ugly; a woman who isn't attractive to many men might have to settle for a man who is a violent sociopathic loser. So for a woman hit by the ugly stick, another woman is not a bad option.

Paycheck size makes a big difference in how a person feels about a particular kind of work. Imagine if you got paid $100,000/year to flip hamburgers. For that kind of money, a simple job would seem like a game. The work itself is not particular degrading; what's degrading is the normally small paycheck.

Most people would probably quit their current jobs if they won the lottery jackpot and no longer needed to work, which indicates the need for the paycheck is a big motivator; but even so, few people could do something they truly hate for a modest paycheck. There has to be some other reward in there somewhere.

Every profession offers its tales of horror. Which is why they must also offer paychecks.

Women usually aren't interested in jobs that are really dirty or dangerous. Ask the coal miners if they shed a tear for the poor exploited exotic dancers.

Political analogy: women are the "swing voters" when it comes to sex. Election campaigns don't waste their time trying to persuade voters who already have strong opinions about a candidate. You could show John Kerry ads to a hard-core Bush supporter all day, every day, and as you know the ads wouldn't make a dent. Or, conversely, you could watch George Bush ads for the rest of your life and they would only make you hate him more. All that campaign spending goes to competing for swing voters. Telling men not to have sex with women when they can is like trying to persuade you to vote Republican, or teaching a brick to sing: generally a waste of effort. It's more productive for moralizers to focus on moralizing to women, who can be persuaded to say no to sex.

People believe whatever makes them feel good. For most automobile addicts, it feels good to believe they can just keep wasting gas like there's no tomorrow. And that they can have their easy convenient transportation and world peace simultaneously.

Thought question for all the so-called thoughtful people out there: suppose the only way you could continue driving your automobile would be to have the U.S. military conduct a thorough ethnic cleansing operation throughout the Middle East. Would you choose to stop driving in protest (or even consider car-pooling), or would you find a way to rationalize the operation? Perhaps by blaming it on the politicians you elect to do your dirty work? At the rate we are going, I suspect we will face a choice something like that within the next decade. Of course it won't happen all at once.

Not many attractive young women can earn more money by other means than they can earn by stripping/etc. Getting up to similar wages in "normal" careers usually takes a lot longer. But then those other careers typically last a lot longer as well. It makes sense for an attractive young woman to strip her way through university. Then when her looks begin to fade, she has trained her brain to pick up the load.

I haven't seen a convincing creationist explanation for the consistently ungenerous natural world, supposedly created by a generous god. It's as if god's goal was to make us all cynical.

There might be some people who decide who to have sex with based on what magazines tell them. Are you one of those people? And how do you account for the failure of gay people to get the message? Forget about which women men are "supposed" to find attractive, a percentage of men shrug off a lifetime of social indoctrination and don't find any women attractive.

Before getting too proud of your renunciation of high-mindedness, consider that proletarians never use the word "proletarian."

It's interesting to read an article on soc.singles---the monument to wasting time---that contains the phrase "but it really is a total waste of time" as if that is a reason not to do something.

Are you smart enough to grasp the connection between your own driving, and the distant slaughter that makes your driving possible?

It's interesting to consider just how wretched the ability of humans to record events was in ancient times. Only a low percentage of adults could read or write. A sheet of papyrus cost the equivalent of $30 today, and the cost of ink and a scribe's labor was many times higher. A single book had a real cost comparable to an automobile today. There were no reporters or scientists, no coroners, no one trained to evaluate claims of the paranormal. The few educated people had less understanding of basic science than the average high school graduate today. And even today masses of people get swept up in complete nonsense, such as the Roswell UFO story or the Jonestown mass suicide. The ancient world was a very odd place for God to reveal his plan for humans. There was little chance of getting a solid, indisputable record of exactly what went on.

Man's only hope is to fail the test of faith by rejecting faith as the wrong way to think. Imagine if people in the year 1300 and ever since had all accepted things just the way they were. We wouldn't even have names for all those diseases, much less any hope of curing them.

It's quite an achievement, really, for the United States, where 82% of adults identify as "Christians," to be as tolerant of other ideas as we are. A large number of U.S. citizens came here to escape religious persecution, and no particular sect gained an overwhelming market share, so they made the painful but ultimately beneficial decision to deny themselves the freedom to persecute those they disagree with. Then there is also the need to maintain a free flow of ideas to keep the whole science and technology thing going. Christians in the U.S. have made a real deal with the Devil there. They want to enjoy the material fruits of all those clever inventive godless atheists who corrupt the minds of youth in their infidel bastion universities by teaching them to think logically.

Who knows, maybe in heaven you get to take field trips to hell to check up on your old friends. You can tell them inspiring things like "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

All of us already have billions of years of experience with not existing (so to speak), so it's hardly a stretch to imagine post-life is likely to be just like pre-life.

Most farmers have a certain amount of common sense. They understand that to make plants grow they have to till the soil, plant seeds, get some proper weather, and so on. They cannot just believe their crops will grow and expect their belief alone will accomplish anything. There may be some primitive peoples who believed that, but they quickly starved themselves into extinction. The survivors could entertain a lot of nonsense (such as the belief they needed to sacrifice their children to make their crops grow), but only as long as they still did the things they actually needed to do. Arabs say "Trust Allah, but tie your camel." They're halfway to being logical.

Read Darwin (and his modern interpreters Dawkins and Dennett) to understand why all living creatures not only have self-bias, but must have it. You will not learn what you are by reading the Bible, because the primitives who wrote the Bible did not know.

If a religion becomes tolerant of competing ideas, that's like a herd of zebra becoming tolerant of lions.

If you have the good fortune to die of old age, I hope for your sake by then technologists have provided worthwhile artificial comanions, so you can avoid the sad fate of living out your final decrepit years alone that awaits 4 out of 5 women. Or worse, living out your final decrepit years with a decrepit old man.

Roadside litter is a strange psychological consequence of automobiles, particularly since the automobile does all the work of carrying its load, and has plenty of spare capacity to carry a small amount of litter to the next waste receptacle. But for some reason, when people get cars they turn into pigs. Funny how you never see that on automobile commercials. The automobile industry spends billions of dollars to teach everyone that beautiful people drive showroom-quality cars on perfect roads through pristine areas of great scenic beauty. Wouldn't it be interesting if automobile commercials reflected reality? Then you'd see more fat ugly loud people with fast-food wrappers strewn about, heaving empty beer bottles on Jim's lawn as they speed by. And you'd see radical Muslim Saudi sheiks sending their windfall profits to Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers.

How's this for a sitcom plot: "Office Space"-type worker gets last assignment: training Indian replacement. Then he's out of work, can't find a job, grows more despondent, hits bottom, calls suicide hotline, hears cheery Indian accent on the other end due to budget cuts in social services.

Do you believe Satan inspired all the other religions in the world besides yours? And if yes, why did he inspire so many? Wouldn't he get farther by inspiring just one false religion, so the various false religions would not have to waste their resources fighting each other when they could all be ganging up on the one true religion? Look at how the Hindus and Muslims take turns blowing each other up in India. Why would Satan waste resources fighting himself when he could be fighting Christ? I mean come on. Anybody could do a better job of fighting Christ than Satan. All he had to do was inspire the same false religion everywhere at once, instead of making it look as if all those religions resulted from isolated ignorant people using their imaginations at random. Suppose, for example, that the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Polynesians, and all those other thousands of cultures had all independently come up with the same phony religion. Then there could hardly be any doubt there was something supernatural at work there. That religion would be FAR more believable than some religion that originated in just one culture. With all those cultures united under one religion, Christianity would never have stood a chance.

Fashion models don't have to be average any more than Olympic athletes or billionaire entrepreneurs are average.

You have emotions because historically they have proven to be good for your genes. And when you have served your genetic purpose, your genes will cast you onto the junkpile of evolution to be recycled for further genetic experiments.

In a sense, it is indeed "monstrous" that we are merely survival machines for our genes, but we can draw some comfort in being the first generation of survival machines to have a solid chance at understanding what we are. This is not to say many survival machines will have the necessary humility!

I have explained at length that every religion feels better than truth. Hence the popularity of religion.

It doesn't matter how many times you read the Bible, how many hymns you sing, how much money you dump in the offering plate, how many sermons you sit through, or how many souls you save. If you have anything resembling a functioning brain, you are still going to have those brief episodes when logic slips out of the leg irons and runs around telling you the whole business is not adding up.

Whenever you disagree with someone, you are claiming your opponent is either (a) lying, or (b) mistaken.

I don't see anybody calling fire down from heaven to demonstrate who is the real God. The only "proof" any religious person offers is some variation on "It's true because I said so." And that's why you need faith: not just to believe in those claims, but even more importantly you need thousands of times more faith to disbelieve the thousands of other competing claims. You have to override the consistent evidence of your senses that millions of religious people chant thousands of mutually-contradictory claims and all of them have nothing to back up their claims except their faith.

Most millionaires live well below their means. That's how they get to be millionaires.

If your ancestors had had the freedom you have now, you probably wouldn't be here. Not that it matters at this point.

I've said (and written) a lot of things in my life. A person who selectively presented bits and pieces could probably make it seem like I was for or against just about anything.

Bottom line: if people can use the words of Jesus to justify slavery just as easily as other people can use the same words to oppose slavery, it's pretty clear "the words of Jesus" don't mean much at all. The real meaning is the product of whoever is using those words to justify whatever he has in mind at the moment. The words themselves are obviously vague enough and flexible enough to support diametric opposites like slavery and abolition. If Jesus had wanted to make himself understood on important issues like slavery, I think he could have gotten his message across. For example, plenty of people were able to write when Jesus was alive, and he knew how to read. He could have written his message down carefully and unamibiguously in a way that didn't leave everything up to the reader, or he could have dictated his message to scribes. But if he had done that, his religion would probably have died out. Christianity has spread so far in part because like the AIDS virus it is capable of evolving rapidly to compete in new environments.

I know women love to portray sex as some hugely complicated mysterious thing, but that's SEDUCTION, not SEX. Figuring out how to get a woman to have sex can be infinitely complicated and mysterious, not to mention exasperating, but once she's finally ready to go it gets fairly simple.

To win elections, politicians have to be good at getting elected. That's different than doing the job after they are in office.

I've read the Bible from cover to cover at least seven times and I never found anything in the Bible that told me to ignore or equivocate about this verse while paying attention to that verse.

Since I don't see too many one-eyed Christians, it's pretty clear most Christians believe some of Jesus' words are safe to ignore.

All my days are nice, for I am guided by logic.

If you think nature's way is best, turn off your heat.

I saw the manatees at the Cincinnati Zoo. My first reaction was to doubt human imagination and wishful thinking could be up to the challenge of mistaking manatees for mermaids, but then I remembered religion.

All the money in the world in the year 1865 couldn't have purchased a flat-screen TV. The value of money depends on the available technology. Money is worth a lot more today than it was in 1865 because technology has improved and there are many more valuable things you can buy. Which is to say, money today has more ways to tickle your brain (i.e., stimulate the release of dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens) than it did in the past.

It's still comforting to know where things are going, even if I don't live long enough to see them. It's sort of like witnessing the Black Death in the year 1348, and taking some comfort in the knowledge (which you wouldn't have had back then, but still) that someday a cheap pill would cure the disease. It doesn't help you then, but it kind of cuts the problem down to size conceptually speaking, so you don't have to imagine a God to deal with your sense of hopelessness.

Without logic you could not survive one day. For example, you might suddenly develop faith that you can fly, and step confidently off a tall building. It's amusing (or perhaps painful) to watch those who practice selective logic, as they lurch between appealing to logic or pissing on it, as it suits them.

If you went to a restaurant and ordered a meal, would you want the waiter to take your order literally or metaphorically?

If God dislikes fornication, why did he make it a successful reproductive strategy? Don't you think God should have rigged the game rules to select against fornication instead of favoring it?

Speaking of truth, if you would look to the source with the best proven track record---science---you would learn the perfectly reasonable explanation for the otherwise puzzling fact that full, lasting emotional satisfaction normally evades humans. In contrast, you won't find any intellectually satisfying answers in ancient writings arbitrarily assembled centuries later by committee into books by men who themselves had not the foggiest notion of what humans actually are.

You should especially start to worry as advances in science and historical scholarship continue to discover new errors and contradictions in your Bible. If that's your roadmap to Eternity, it should at least stand up in the here and now. If you were going to follow a roadmap in a trip across the country, would you trust the map if it contained errors about your own street?

I've met a few ugly geniuses, and I can tell you this: not many people envy them or desire their company. In contrast, stupid beauties are always popular, as long as their beauty holds up. Granted, if you compare them at age 55, the ugly genius might be better off, since both of them are ugly at that point.

If somebody ran on the platform of increasing the gasoline tax until the U.S. wins the war on terrorism, say by the $10/gal it would take to improve U.S. security, I would vote for him even it it deprived the second-best guy of my vote. Just so whoever analyzes the results would say, "Wow, 3% of voters feel strongly enough about this to actually help the guy they despise most." Not that I think 3% of Americans are rational enough to understand what it would take to win the war we chose to fight.

Speech is fascinatingly less free now that the Civil Rights Movement has somehow conferred religious sanctity on every ethnic heritage and observable behavior trend.

I think the tsunami is a wonderful opportunity to get God into a wrath management counseling class. God needs professional help finding a safe outlet for his wrath, before he harms himself or others again. If you are a friend of God, please mention this the next time you talk to him. And then explain to us why you worship such a wrathful bully. Mere humans can learn to manage their anger. Why can't God?

God's only limits are the limits of our imaginations. If you can imagine useful things to say, you are perfectly free to imagine you got them from God.

You feel you are right and the Hindu is wrong, and the Hindu equally feels he is right and you are wrong. Basing your beliefs on how you feel is no better than picking stocks by throwing darts at a page from the Wall Street Journal. Actually it's much worse, because most of those stocks are worth something.

Anyone who studies nature in depth is hard-pressed to find evidence of any sort of a loving God who shares our personal goals of survival and reproduction. Instead it is obvious that most of the time nature is just indifferent to us, and if we don't understand how nature works, we can get into serious trouble fast. Nature is not a friendly, loving place. Step outside in January and see how long you can survive out there without elaborate technology to fight off God's plan for you. Suppose you had never met your parents, and you found yourself living in a house they left for you. In this house you found all sorts of elaborate booby-traps with live explosives, hurtling projectiles, pitfalls, boulders rolling down staircases when you step in the wrong spot, etc. Would you picture your parents as kind and loving toward you? Would you feel welcome in your house?

In other news, a Newsweek article mentioned there is a traffic jam of beatified Roman Catholics awaiting elevation to sainthood because it's getting harder to document the requisite posthumous miracles. Fewer physicians today, for example, are willing to attribute a "miraculous" recovery from illness to intercession on the patient's behalf secured by prayers to a dead person. A growing percentage of physicians today are reluctant to go on record as claiming science will never be able to explain a particular recovery which might seem "miraculous" from the perspective of our current ignorance.

Perhaps you could initiate a class-action lawsuit against God. Given that God does not exist and therefore cannot appear in court, you could name all those who claim to speak for God (or who invoke God to lend authority to their claims) as co-defendents.

Imagine the SPAM/viruses/spyware/malware we will have when computers become actually intelligent. We may end up creating a new class of super-pests in addition to our super-servants. Dystopian science fiction likes to portray killer robots that run around blowing people up, but a more likely dystopian scenario might be that computers will just waste all of our time. People might spend all their time trying to get their computers to work and keep working.

When your cat dies, you get another cat. What's the point in depriving yourself of the type of companionship you enjoy? Going a year without a cat is not going to help you feel better, if you are a person who enjoys cats. If your car dies, do you refrain from supporting terrorism for the next year? Of course not. A gaswasting terrorist-supporting automobile addict goes straight out and buys another gaswasting terrorist-supporting automobile. If he or she can afford it, he or she hardly skips a beat. Getting with another woman soon after the breakup is the best way to gain the perspective a man needs at that moment. If he just sits around and mopes, all he can think about is the woman who just left. When he gets another woman, suddenly he has a whole bunch of other things to think about. At the very least, he proves to himself there are other fish in the sea.

To give girly advice to a man who just lost a relationship is like telling women to pee standing up.

The gap between rhetoric and reality is large; hence the popularity of rhetoric.

It's interesting that mystics from different religions all have visions that conveniently show them their respective gods.

Do you have a specific opinion about what you will experience after you die? Does your opinion differ from that of, say, Osama bin Laden?

The degree of cruelty in the tsunami disaster is beyond comprehension. In many disasters, one can argue that the victims didn't have much hope of escaping, but most of the tsunami victims could easily have walked to higher ground in a few minutes to a few hours, and at least stayed alive (with the loss of their possessions). So God could have simply warned people, and avoided killing so many so unnecessarily. A bit of critical thinking about the natural world makes it obvious that if there is a God, he/she/it does not share my values. We are talking about a completely alien intelligence there. The impulse of a normal human would be to help people and avoid murdering 150,000 of them. Even if there was some utilitarian argument for killing them, could you do it?

For the first 15 billion years of the Universe, I did not think at all. As far as I can remember, it was not very interesting.

Insurance types talk about "moral hazard." When people feel protected from some peril, they tend to get lax about it. Religions teach people they have a God or gods to protect them, or to give them a better life when they lose their current life. Certainly this causes people to care less for their own safety. An atheist who has no reason to believe he gets another life beyond the one he has now has a strong incentive to take care of his life.

I have dealt with crises both as a "believer" and as a "non-believer" and I can personally assure you it is much easier to deal with crises when you don't have the added burden of a religious belief system riddled with absurdities. A "non-believer" doesn't have to waste energy trying to "make sense" of a disaster. Religion sets people up to expect special treatment. When they don't get it, they feel let down. They feel betrayed. They wonder if they sinned and they are being punished.

Australopithecines made no detectable improvements in their stone tools for one million years. Boggles the mind, actually. Try to imagine a world in which the smartest creatures have some inventions, but never invent anything better, over countless generations. What sort of thought lives might they have had? Humans today are always thinking about improvement. Australopithecines must not have been able to.

Religious people tend to respond to calamities by experiencing crises of faith. They want to know why their various gods have forsaken them despite their years of devotion. They struggle to come to terms with the broken promises of their religions. Atheists have no such difficulty, because atheists understand nature is at best indifferent to our existence. Atheists don't feel betrayed by their imaginary friends because they don't have any imaginary friends. Atheists expect nature to kick them in the ass. Especially if they have studied Darwin.

Americans are generous with handouts to tsunami victims, but the idea of sending jobs to the same parts of the world is a political hot potato.

Dragging brains around is a stupid way to move information. That's so 100,000 years ago.

Once your basic survival needs are met (food, water, shelter), everything else is nothing more than a quest for pleasant bits. I.e., those interesting sensations humans are genetically programmed to crave. Someday, when computers get better, people won't need families and children to get their interesting bits.

'Tis better to have loved and been laughed at than to have never loved at all. Which reminds me, I can never understand why women have sex with a guy and then call him a "loser." Even Halle Berry did this. Objection, your honor: a man who has sex with Halle Berry does not satisfy any meaningful definition of "loser." If that guy is a "loser," what are all the kajillions of men Halle doesn't even notice? Those kajillions of guys are aspiring to be the guy Halle calls a "loser." Which makes him a winner if you ask them.

Would Bush have won if he had not invaded Iraq? No incumbent U.S. President has lost a re-election bid in wartime. Perhaps Bush is not as stupid as he appears. Is it a fair election if the challenger does not also get to start a war?

In one case, a woman I hadn't seen for years had to identify herself to me first. I guess I was somehow still recognizable to her. I tried not to be rude by staring too much, but it was sobering to say the least. It's simultaneously fascinating and disturbing how a woman progresses from "hot" to "not hot" and yet (sometimes) remains recognizable as the "same" woman. Something similar happens to men, but I don't have much interest in scrutinizing them.

The hilarious thing is, no matter how much obvious evidence a woman detects indicating her worth to men is diminishing, she's still a complete sucker for almost any variation on the old line, "You're not getting older, you're getting better."

I think a lot of the apparent concern women have for their appearance is misplaced. A woman's understanding that it matters is correct; but her belief that she can do much about it is usually incorrect. Like all those old fat women who go to beauty shops. When they come out, they are still astronomically more hideous than an actually attractive young woman at her grubbiest.

Granted, I fully agree that as women get older, it becomes progressively sillier for them to carry on as if they can still be worth looking at. So it's "good" (in the sense of making the best of a bad situation) when older women change their priorities to age-appropriate things such as tending to their gardens and housecats. But old habits die hard. It must be difficult to transition from being young and celebrated for your pulchritude to being sexually invisible. Your whole relationship to other people must change. For men, getting older is not quite as traumatizing because we're always sexually invisible for the most part anyway. Those rare episodes of feeling like one is interesting to an attractive woman simply become even more rare.

Television itself is kind of a clumsy technology to provide artificial companionship. It's low-res, non-tactile, and completely non-interactive other than giving you the ability to change channels, but millions of people are already addicted to it. Usenet functions similarly for socially defective people like you and me. Why do we spend so many hours typing these nonsense articles to distant strangers? Because all of us crave interacting with some form of intelligence, even if it's reduced to just sequences of letters on a screen.

Why do you expect George W. Bush to behave better than God? God obviously doesn't give a shit about the tsunami victims. Why should Bush? Wouldn't Bush be second-guessing God if he tries to feed the displaced survivors? Maybe God wants those people to starve. They will if we tell them to pray their way out of their trouble. Why do you cut God all kinds of slack as if he is the village idiot whose dodderings and bumblings and failures and accidental cruelties are to be endlessly excused?

And speaking of exes, it's interesting to live in one place for most of one's adult life and to occasionally cross paths with a ex-girlfriend or an ex-attempted girlfriend, and see just how sadistically cruel time can be by middle age to what was once the tender flower of their youth. Perhaps that sign in the kitchen should include a mirror to show how far the owner has deteriorated. If not yet, then soon enough.

Theists love to lecture atheists on how you can't have absolute morality if you don't believe in God. Clearly, theists who lecture like that are either too stupid to realize (or too dishonest to admit) that they reject absolute morality when they make excuses for God's evil actions or God's evil failures to act.

All available evidence indicates your belief in Jesus is just another religion. What can you do that all those other religions can't do? They jabber incoherently; so do you. They experience emotions that they interpret as evidence of their respective gods; so do you. They fail to produce one shred of evidence for any sort of objective miracle or supernatural event; you also fail to produce any evidence. They all claim everyone else's disagreement with them is evidence that everyone else is deceived by something or someone; and so do you. Why do I need a God who won't tell me when a tsunami is about to kill me and I need to walk a few blocks?

Reminds me of how the Creationists call Evolution a "religion." I guess if your whole world view is based on a lie, lying comes naturally.

Actually I got better results with girls in church than anywhere else. Church is about the only thing I've done where the sex ratio was in my favor. And where the charlatan in the pulpit constantly warns the Bible chicks to avoid the non-Bible guys. Do the math. Bible chicks can't find enough Bible guys, and where are they going to look? Say, why do you suppose churches have more chicks than guys? Do you think maybe guys are, on average, just a little more logical than chicks?

Many inappropriate activities become socially acceptable, even marketable, when someone sets them to music. It's a scary thing to face life without a soundtrack.

If you want to have sex with some people more than with others, and if your preferences resemble those of your group, that is how the sexual hierarchy forms.

Have you experienced mutual love with an insect? If you imagine God to be responsible for creating the entire universe, that makes God much farther beyond humans than humans are above insects. It's hard for me to relate to an insect as an equal. What egomania could lead you to imagine that something on the scale of a universal creator would care about something as negligible as you? The answer, of course, is your perfectly normal amount of human egomania and self-absorption. Your genes have programmed your brain to take itself very, very seriously. You can imagine, without blushing, that a Universal Creator should take an interest in you and treat you like a peer. Yes, I know your received wisdom assures you the all-powerful God cares deeply about you. Some cultures have gone even farther than that; they have claimed their God cares MORE about them than about various foreigners. Given that humans also appear to have an instinctive xenophobia, that element of received wisdom usually finds a receptive audience.

Suppose you understood the exact molecular mechanisms that cause a pedophile to experience powerful pedophile urges. Would your understanding of the pedophile cause you to respect and appreciate the pedophile? I don't think understanding makes love any more likely. Often it's easier to love someone when you are blissfully ignorant about who they really are. You may have noticed the first three months of a romantic relationship are by far the easiest and most enjoyable. It only becomes "work" as you learn more about the person you are banging.

As to whether religious knowledge is a productive way to obtain knowledge about how nature works, well---one only has to look around one's house and see how many of those clever artifacts came from any religion.

You just persuade all the footballers, painters, and card sharks to change their rules. Nature seems less amenable to persuasion.

Why do you suppose men tend to become somewhat more successful with women as they gain experience with them? Part of this is a man learning what not to say.

Intellectuals have generally avoided direct confrontation with religion, but now that religion is getting more confrontational, more intellectuals will begin perceiving religion to be a problem requiring a response. Information is the enemy of religion, so religions do well to stay under the radar if they can, to avoid having their claims subjected to any sort of serious logical analysis. But fundamentalist memes are like moths drawn to the flame: they cannot resist the urge to meddle where they aren't welcome.

I have dated women with mental problems, and in every case their abnormal behavior was obvious quite early on. Had I been foolish enough to marry any of them, I could hardly blame anyone else for my own denial of the obvious. Much less could I expect to get paid handsomely for it.

Osama developed his beliefs the same way you developed yours---by hearing and chanting them enough times. Not by logically inferring those beliefs from things we all know to be true.

If Vedic science were real science, it would properly describe suffering not as something evil in itself, but rather as a behavior-altering signal our emotional brains construct by interpreting our relationship with our environment, moment by moment, and evaluating the probable threats posed to our prospects for getting our genes into the next generation.

How will we know if women ever gain the ability to read men's minds? That's easy: we will see couples strolling the mall, with the women angrily kicking their men about every fifteen seconds, depending on the demographic profile of the other mall patrons. After the first day or two, women might tire of kicking and purchase shock collars. It would be especially funny to observe the effects of such complete transparency on 40-ish divorced women with daughters just into their prime years of young adulthood, when they (the 40-ish women) discover the men they are dating to have desires actually more in keeping with sociobiology and common sense, but unrealizable due to their own advancing age and lack of compensatory traits.

Few people get everything they want in life. The trick to remaining somewhat happy is to find pleasure in the things you can get. For example, this lazy indulgent wife who wants more material luxuries should understand that her husband is probably equally frustrated that he doesn't get to have sex with all the Victoria's Secret lingerie models. He probably does not get all the sex he wants from his own wife. But he deals with it, by trying not to think about what he doesn't have and instead focusing on what he does have.

Men want sex; women want to be sexy. That's our basic sociobiological programming. As long as men want sex enough, women don't really have to want sex constantly. They only have to be just open enough to the idea of sex to be persuaded by the right suitor. But to attract enough suitors to get the right one, women must be sexy. Women feel urges to be sexy all the time because their genes "know" you can never predict when the high-quality sperm donor will show up. Sociobiological programming works mostly subconsciously, so women do not necessarily need a conscious plan to maximize their reproductive success by trying to be sexy. It's enough for women to feel instinctive urges to look their best at all times.

Do you think about your physical appearance when, say, a housecat stares at you? My cat likes to stare at people. But nobody starts checking their clothes and hair as a result. A staring housecat represents no potential consequences for your reproductive success. Your subconscious mind assigns low emotional priority to the housecat's stares. Impressing the housecat will not get your genes into the next generation.

How much would I have to change my hair before you would want to sleep with me?

Your conscious mind is a fairly recent evolutionary development. Our genes still mostly dictate our behavior through our subconscious urges and emotions, as animal genes have been doing for millions of years. I'm writing to your conscious mind right now. Your conscious mind thinks it is running the show. Your genes "don't mind" if your conscious mind thinks that, as long as you do what they tell you. Such as check your appearance regularly in a mirror, and react emotionally when someone stares at you.

Obviously when grandma cares about her appearance, she is going through the motions in a Cargo Cult kind of way. The real "Navy" shipped out decades earlier, and there is no more "Cargo," but she still longs for her salad days when her appearance and grooming had real reproductive significance. So she goes to the "beauty" shop and rearranges the deck chairs on her Titanic.

Failure for a talented person is not the same as failure for an average person. Donald Trump has gone bankrupt too, but he didn't have to go in for credit counseling.

The Bush people sell an interesting political product: tax breaks for the wealthy in exchange for some respect tossed to the Bible Thumping masses. It's an updated version of the old Divine Right argument. Paris Hilton and Tom Brady benefit from a secularized manifestation of the same odd human tendency: that craving to worship something.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Fundamentalists should apply the same principle to church. Instead they sally forth with heads full of peculiar ideas incubated in their system of closed minds and find the world less receptive than the choir was. It used to be the liberal media just laughed at them. Now they win elections. How did that happen? Imagine if Saturday Night Live tried to bring back the Church Lady character now. The whole cast would end up at Camp X-Ray.

Automobiles have killed and maimed more Americans than all of America's wars. But for some reason, automobile deaths don't "count."

Almost every safety measure of any kind is in place only in response to some previous tragedy. For some reason, people cannot be persuaded to allocate resources on safety until they learn the need the hard way. In any case, among professional geologists, "everybody knew" the Indian Ocean is vulnerable to tsunamis, but professional geologists do not choose how people will spend their money.

Why do you suppose the Bible says it's wrong to even try to communicate with the dead? Do you wonder that maybe God has something he needs to hide?

My intellectual history explains the impotence of your arguments, and why it is so simple for me to expose the myriad logical contradictions in the nonsense you have passively absorbed yet refuse to logically consider. The "arguments" you present are effective only against an undefended brain. I know how to refute all your arguments because that's exactly what I had to do to get from where you are to where I am now. Your mistake is to assume I might have missed something---which is, by the way, how you are making a fallacy known as the "argument from ignorance."

All my assertions follow logically from things you can easily observe and cannot reasonably doubt. In contrast, religious people make unfounded statements and demand that you believe them without any proof. I know it's hard for you to conceive of anyone actually behaving honestly, but pay attention and I will continue to demonstrate. I don't expect you to believe something just because I said it. I expect you to evaluate my claims logically.

Just on the face of it, having 72 virgins sure sounds a lot better than walking around on streets of gold. Who cares what the streets are made of? What will you do, dig up the gold and sell it? Sell it to who, and for what? I've seen gold; it doesn't appeal to me personally. I only value it because other people are stupid enough to trade things I value for it. Your religion promises a heaven that appeals to emotions of materialistic greed. What about people who find the prospect of plundering 72 virgins more enticing?

If you only have one book, assembled exclusively by members of one given religion who all had a personal stake in the advancement of their religion, then you only have "one witness." You have the religious equivalent of the Tobacco Institute. Only a fool believes everything the Tobacco Institute publishes without checking all its claims carefully against other independent evidence.

While the entertainment industry likes to extol the pleasures of love once you've got it, there is less emphasis on the mechanics of how you actually go about getting it. It's like fantasizing about being a concert pianist without any thought for the years of daily toil and practice it takes to be able to pound those keys in such elaborate patterns.

At least 999 out of 1000 times, the education system is sending the correct message when it tries to discourage the objectively unqualified. And that clears the way for that 1 person in 1000 who can succeed anyway. What if he had to compete for attention with 999 incompetents who were flooding auditions and alienating audiences?

Most people who are famous are famous because they have some rare compensatory strengths. "Famous" often means "rich" and/or "powerful" which in turn means having the luxury to order other people to correct for the famous person's defects. The average obscure person typically has no such strengths and no staff of professional helpers and therefore has less ability to mask those defects. Which is to say, if you can't write best-selling novels or run a country, it's hard to get away with being an idiot who can't spell.

Having objective standards does destroy the confidence of dullards and laggards, but that's the whole point.

People who put their ego first usually just end up as eccentric oddballs, unless they have some extraordinary talent that lets them get away with it. It's funny when average people think they can carry on like movie stars.

Imagine when everyone's mobile phone comes with an HDTV camera. Then we will have live, high-definition, saturation coverage of every terrorist nuisance attack, the better to horrify the global public.

It would be interesting to do a placebo study: give sugar pills to test subjects and tell them they are taking a medication known to produce weight gain as a side effect. Then use hidden cameras to monitor the subjects' increase in doughnut intake.

The fact that most men are immediately and viscerally stimulated by the sight of teams of opposing men carrying and pursuing an object made of animal skin suggests at least that particular sport is a kabuki-like substitute for subsistence hunting and plundering the opposing village's hunting party.

So, if the difficulty of dieting is an argument against dieting, why is the vastly greater difficulty of taking fat acceptance propaganda seriously not an argument against fat acceptance propaganda?

I guarantee that anybody who eats the same foods I eat, in amounts scaled to their lean body mass, and exercises the same way I exercise, again scaled to their lean body mass, and sustained consistently for several years, will not be obese. It just isn't physically possible. Saying "no" to excess food, and going out and having fun on a bicycle, are hardly "terrible things." By "guarantee" I mean I will wager up to $10,000 at 1:1 odds for a suitably refereed test of my claim. That is, if anybody eats and exercises just as I do, scaled to their lean body mass, for a suitably long period (say, one year), I will wager $10,000 that the test subject will not progress toward obesity if the subject was lean at the start; or if the subject was obese at the start of the test, the subject will have lost substantial amounts of bodyfat by the end of one year (possibly not enough to eliminate all excess weight in an initially extremely obese subject, but certainly enough to show the way to success if the subject continues to do what I do). By "suitably refereed" I mean there must be no way for the subject to sneak extra food or slack on the prescribed exercise. That could make the test tough to arrange because gluttons are experts at sneaking extra food and slacking on exercise. It would almost certainly be necessary to put the test subject into a camp in which supervisors tightly control the food allowance.

The vast majority of morbidly obese people suffer from something like a kind of mental illness, brought on by the enormous cognitive dissonance resulting from the messages they constantly receive from their bodies and from their culture about what their behavioral choices (namely, eating too much and taking it too easy) are doing to them. This is what makes obese people "touchy" about this "subject." The subject itself is hardly touchy. Any person not suffering from gluttony is able to discuss the subject without experiencing much anxiety.

Fat acceptance is an Internet joke. The first time people hear about fat acceptance, they say "You have got to be kidding me."

Embarrassing a person in public also helps a lesson stick. This is, in fact, the sociobiological purpose of our "embarrassment gene." People with normal emotions feel a surge of embarrassment when they make some huge public gaffe, and they remember those lessons for years. This is an evolved mental adaptation that enables humans to form elaborate cultures. We are genetically programmed to want to fit in.

There is no mistaking the average woman for a Playmate of the Month. How then, would "degrading" the Playmate of the Month reflect in any way on the average woman?

If all the customers only had one beer, the bar would not stay in business. So you've got a fallacy of composition there. The light drinkers are essentially freeloading on the heavy drinkers who keep the bar in business. If it wasn't for the heavy drinkers, there wouldn't be any bar for the light drinkers to enjoy. Thus it's "quite possible" to enjoy a beer at the local without getting drunk and without being a drunk, but it's not possible for everyone to drink responsibly and have bars like the current ones to drink in. It's also possible to be an honest lawyer, but the 97% of crooked lawyers give the honest 3% a bad name. Similarly, it's possible to be a Muslim without being a terrorist, and a Catholic priest without being a pedophile. But there are things about the structural reality of bars, the legal profession, Islam, and the Catholic priesthood which give rise repeatedly to those problematic behaviors, and which may, despite protestations to the contrary, be "essential" in the sense that if you made the changes necessary to completely stamp out the bad behaviors, the respective institutions would be so fundamentally altered as to have had their historic identity obliterated. That is, if you found a way to make Islam unappealing to terrorists, the legal profession unappealing to lying crooks, the Catholic priesthood unappealing to gay pedophiles, and bars unappealing to drunks, you would basically have to destroy what each of those things is now.

Looking stupid has always been a good way to get laughs. And there is a solid sociobiological reason for that.

It's not shallow to react negatively to disrespect. A sloppy writer disrespects the reader. Through sloppy writing the writer implicitly demands the reader to work harder so the writer can take it easy. It's like leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. The reader has to mentally clean up inept writing by translating the misspelled words into their correct versions to understand them.

If you don't like the way your various statements make people react, then make different statements.

I recall reading once in a college paper a personal ad from someone purporting to be a female student who basically said she was looking for a wealthy man to be her boyfriend and pay her tuition. I don't know if the ad was for real or whether any man took the bait, but was there anything illegal about her ad?

The world is a situation that makes most people look stupid.

Most women need porn like most men need tampons. Are tampons a "boon" to men?

I can't think of too many successful products that require history lessons to appreciate.

By the time robots get smart enough to sort garbage, they will be singing the song "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better."

I'm not saying women will necessarily care about how many other women's lives they ruin by out-competing them for the most desirable men, but with the proper presentation a sufficiently skilled presenter might at least elicit some amusing cognitive dissonance. People should be aware when they screw over their competitors. The comforting delusion that there is someone out there for everyone is just that (is there someone for the woman-beating schizophrenic?). In reality, some people make better partners for more people than others, because most people want similar traits in a partner (e.g., a partner who doesn't beat you, and so on). There aren't nearly enough of those better partners to go around.

You can be held responsible for anything, given the existence of someone with enough power to hold you responsible.

Fat acceptors say 97% of diets "fail," which is their code way of saying 97% of fat gluttons are unable to restrain their urges to eat too much and take it easy.

To say you enjoy something when in fact you only enjoy a tiny specialized highly constrained fraction of it is misleading. If someone says "I enjoy fishing," someone else would probably think that means fishing in a lot of different places. If it really means fishing in just one spot, one should specify that.

When you are old and ugly and bitter, pause to reflect on how well some people manage to tolerate a lifetime of looking like crap.

A person who hates being stereotyped could not coexist with humans. I find it convenient that I don't have to explain every last detail about myself to every last person I meet because most people are able to generalize correctly about some things from a few obvious clues. One reason we hate our stupid computers is because they do not stereotype us at all. The computer treats everyone equally, and everyone is not equal.

How can a person be "too" serious about some of the deepest and most intense human desires? We're talking about genetic survival here. Most women instinctively understand the seriousness of guarding their eggs.

Given that the courts generally punish men in proportion to their wealth (but not too progressively), the best way for a man to be a jerk is to be either very rich or very poor. Guys in the middle get squeezed the hardest, because they have enough money to keep the women who exploit them off welfare, but not enough money to not notice the loss.

Hookers might be a viable option if you lived in a society that did not stigmatize hookers and their clients. But I think there are compelling sociobiological reasons that make such a Losertopia unrealizable, currently at least.

I have a theory that when a human is genetically programmed to crave a certain type of sensory stimulation, he's not going to be too happy unless he experiences it. The good news, in theory, is that the sensory signal is all that matters, not its actual source. The bad news is that the human brain is exceptionally discerning when it comes to spotting fakes, because our genetic survival depends on it. But the human brain is not infinitely discerning, and technology might someday fool it.

Age helps, but not when you need it.

"Before you say 'I do', talk to us." I've seen advertisements from lawyers, but never for marital risk prevention. Could it be lawyers would rather not warn the marks, so they can charge them more money after they have gotten in too deep? Or do lawyers know it would be a waste of time even to try warning the headstrong ignorant marks?

Almost anybody with specialized knowledge about anything that matters finds the general level of ignorance about that subject astounding.

Thermodynamically harder means less profitable.

Look at all the road rage between drivers. Drivers get road rage because driving cars is basically a violent activity. In contrast, bicyclists generally wave at each other on the road.

If you don't settle, some other woman has to.

An even more excellent way to torment fat people is to be a tall, young, attractive blonde woman. Just show up, and by your very desirable and unattainable presence, rub it in to all the fatties what they cannot be (if they are fat women) or cannot have (if they are fat men). Of course you don't need to make any extra effort to inflict pain on them. Your very nature already twists the knife enough times. There is also a huge sociobiological risk in being an overtly confrontational woman. The evolutionary psychology of women accordingly favors surreptitious competition. Just crush your competitors by being prettier than them, and don't rile them with unnecessary gloating---even better, put up a diversionary screen of disses against those who do gloat. And bat those eyelashes in classic little Ms. Innocent style. "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."

Ad hominem arguments will always be popular because they will never stop working. That is, until genetic engineering makes people much better than they are now.

Marilyn Monroe once said she knew she had something special at age 8. She climbed up a tree, and four boys came to help her down. A beautiful woman gets reminded of her special status every day, as long as her looks hold up. The real test is how she handles the day when her looks fade.

It's so tiring to read people dropping hints about something left and right and then clumsily trying to hide their tracks by denying any interest in the public opinion they tried so hard to cultivate.

Pretty girls are best left for the properly qualified.

Why do the people who use this rhetoric [of infinite resources] contradict themselves by whining about government regulation? If resources are infinite, then no amount of government regulation should be a problem, as long as the regulation is finite.

The world disapproves of fat gluttons about like it disapproves of johns. Well, actually the world is somewhat nicer to fat gluttons---the world lets them eat all the food they can buy, and then punishes them for getting fat.

Check out the language people use. Feminists say prostitutes are "victimized," which is their way of saying some men are so freaking unattractive that they "victimize" women just by having sex with them.

If shortages stimulate human creativity, why do conservatives complain so much about taxes and government regulation? Shouldn't conservatives welcome the innovation-boosting artificial problems imposed on them by governments? If the economic optimists are correct, the more government regulation and taxation we have, the more humans should respond by thinking up new and ever-more-productive ways to generate wealth. If oil is going to run out eventually, and this won't pose any problems because consuming states will switch to alternatives, why not just mandate that consuming states must switch to alternatives right now? Could it be that in spite of a century of attempts to find them, there still are no sufficient alternatives?

It's easy to eliminate the economic advantages of oil by eliminating its subsidies, and if that isn't quite enough then imposing tariffs. At the moment, one very large component of the oil subsidy is the financing of America's Petroleum War out of general tax funds. American SUV drivers do not feel that cost at the gas pump. It would be good to present that cost directly to the people who are generating it and let them vote economically on whether they want the Petroleum War to continue. So then, if by your argument it's no problem to switch from oil when it runs out, why not stop using it right now? You can't be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, unless the real issue with you is that you resent having governments around to prevent people from shifting their costs onto other people. In other words, you don't like having a government to keep people honest.

Nobody fights wars over a commodity whose "known reserves continue to rise" at a sufficient rate.

In an interview, a member of some popular musical group was recounting his band's rise to success. He said something along the lines of how he could tell the band was doing better from year to year because the band members kept showing up with progressively better-looking girlfriends.

Men may disagree on the exact ordering of the most attractive women, but I have never met a man whose ranking of women by attractiveness was the complete opposite of my ranking. People (men and women) may disagree on exactly who is the most attractive, but there is a lot more agreement on who is unattractive.

Note to feminists: history is not your friend, because most of it took place before the explosion in fossil fuel use which made equality for women somewhat imaginable.

Can you imagine life with no central heat, no running water, no grocery stores, no feminine hygeine products, no cosmetics, no deodorants, no effective household cleaning products, no electricity, no telephones, no TV, no automobiles, no washing machines, etc.? Take away all those modern conveniences, put a man and woman together in the woods, and who is going to be the boss? At least 95% of the time, the man automatically is the boss in that situation. When push comes to shove, as it regularly does in harsh conditions, the man can push and shove twice as hard as the woman. Women don't want to go back to 1750 not only because of the physical discomfort but because it would require them to submit to patriarchy again.

Traditional cultures did not say "eenie meenie miney moe, MEN!" when selecting the dominant gender. Instead nature made that decision for them by equipping men with the muscle power necessary to become the economically relevant gender in agricultural societies.

Urban lighting costs will eventually decrease, because they will eventually come under Moore's Law. (Everything which is an information problem eventually comes under Moore's Law.)

A parent can exercise authority over a child because the parent can do more things. If the child could do all the things the parent can do, the child no longer has to submit to the parent. This is exactly what happens when the child reaches adulthood. Being an adult means having the power to tell your parents to go suck a lemon, if that's what you want to do, because as an adult you have (or should have) comparable skills.

It's possible a man becomes more effective at "looking for more" if he already has a marginally acceptable partner. Consider what happens to a man who goes a long time without receiving any romantic approval from any women. After a while, women sense his desperate condition and find it repulsive. A man who does the "noble" thing and refuses to settle might find his strategy backfiring when his increasing desperation makes him unattractive to the woman of his dreams when she finally shows up.

I wonder, when a woman finds herself being hit on by a man who is really good at what he does, does she think to herself about all the previous women he had to have honed his skills on? Perhaps seduction skill is like sausage: people who like it should never see it being made.

When I was in college, the students from India told me they saw no poor people in the U.S. And I went to an urban college surrounded by welfare ghettoes, which looked pretty bad to me. But by Indian standards that is not poverty, it seems.

If food gets tight, the primitive couple has to give priority to preserving the strength of the stronger person. It would be too risky to favor the weaker person, because then both could die if something bad happens that only the stronger person could handle. Generally a society can only afford to coddle the weak when it is enjoying great surplus.

When humans started congregating in historically unprecedented numbers, which humans were likely to rise to the top of the social hierarchies that inevitably formed? Why, of course, the most dominant men, who had millions of years' evolutionary experience honing them to compete with other men for women. For men there was always a higher reproductive payoff for asserting dominance.

Everybody in America is still going to die, which indicates nobody here has what they need yet.

The great religions survive because most of their followers are smart enough not to take all their nonsensical claims too seriously. Imagine if the nominally Christian United States really started living by the Sermon on the Mount. Al Qaeda would eat us for breakfast. The Bible can include idiocy like the suggestion to pluck your eye out if it causes you to sin, because most people are smart enough to ignore that garbage even while they profess to believe the rest.

It's interesting how the word "morality" can be either good or bad, depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment.

Nobody says you can't prefer to scarf doughnuts all day, just that if you surrender to your preference, you might incur a range of social, sexual, medical, and financial costs.

If you really accepted your "size" you would really accept the reality of your behavior that produced and sustains your "size," and you would feel no need to lie, prevaricate, and/or put up smokescreens by telling us you exercise regularly and eat "sensible" portions. There is nothing "sensible" about portions that make a person obese, and an accurate accounting of food intake and activity levels would reveal this. Studies show that fat people tend to understate their true calorie intake, in proportion to how fat they are. Under controlled metabolic ward conditions, a fat person loses weight rapidly when fed a diet containing only as many calories as the fat person claimed to be eating previously. Why is this? Because the fat person has learned to deflect social disapproval for his or her gluttony, somewhat, by exploiting the practical difficulty of making such accurate metabolic ward measurements. It's not easy to measure another person's food intake accurately, so a glutton can claim anything he or she wants, and nobody else is likely to check the accuracy of the claim. The glutton quickly learns there is less social sanction for a fat person who claims not to be overeating. Therefore like all substance abusers, gluttons find ways to conceal their gluttony. Unfortunately for the glutton it's impossible to conceal the effects of gluttony.

Almost anything's possible, but it's more likely those who make a show of eschewing hedonism didn't have the greatest options to begin with. For example, it's easy for a man who isn't attractive to women to "give them up." And not so easy for a man like (actor) Josh Hartnett. Churches which preach against sex often have, by an amazing coincidence, lots of fat people in the pews.

What does it even mean to "be oneself"? There's no way to unravel all the outside cultural influence on what one is right now.

If you are interested in learning why people do what they do, browse to your favorite search engine and look for "dopamine release onto the nucleus accumbens." That's what happens in your brain when you stuff your face with doughnuts. Something similar happens in my brain when I present some interesting facts. I'm not saying my fixation is particularly healthy, but it seems to be healthier than gluttony.

Does it scare the hell out of people that the government posts speed limits on the highways? Does it scare the hell out of people that the government says Janet Jackson cannot show her boob on TV? Of course not. It doesn't scare the hell out of people because speed limits and obscenity laws have been around for our whole lives and they did not lead to any kind of slippery slope. Anyone who really wants to drive fast or see a boob can find legal ways to do it, if they are willing to pay the price. Putting fat people in [weight-loss] camps is not any scarier than laws against other kinds of public nuisances. There are laws against littering because most people find garbage to be an eyesore. Fat people are also an eyesore.

About the closest the Taoist gets to truth is the accidental reality that some percentage of highly accomplished people don't have a really solid understanding of exactly what they do to succeed. Which is why a lot of successful people are unable to teach others how to duplicate their success.

The academic climate was first created by religious nutballs. How did they lose control over their own creation? They lost control because they assumed all evidence left to be discovered could only confirm their beliefs. Instead, the more people learned to follow evidence with an open mind, the more they rejected the a priori religious assumptions which turned out not to work well. Had religious nutballs guessed correctly about where evidence would lead, they would have tried to discourage learning and free inquiry rather than promote them.

Check out the actors in old movies vs. modern movies. Today it's common for the men in movies to work out with weights. Many of them are noticeably more muscular than the men who acted in films from the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. As a result, "period" films tend to be a bit anachronistic in that they don't show the men as being scrawny enough to be historically accurate. The "buff" look was rare during WWII, as archival photos indicate, but movie audiences today expect the male actors to look "buff."

People can change their behavior in ways that increase their popularity without changing "who they are." Or more accurately, who they think they are.

A woman might tend to read too much into a man's obvious arousal for her, because she knows nothing of his capacity to become aroused by other women. Someone who owns a burger joint should not read too much into the employees who show up for work each day. They continue to flip burgers because no better jobs are available to them. It's not like those employees dreamed of flipping burgers for a living ever since they were children.

Words are a tool for influencing the behavior of other people. People learn by trial and error to say the things that bring them rewards, and to avoid saying the things that bring them punishments. People who cannot learn how to do this don't function well in society. They have to find a safe outlet on Usenet.

Women may value physical strength in a man, for example, but most women don't want men beating them up every day. It's not as if every expression of strength is automatically good. In fact the number of wrong ways to be strong is much greater than the number of right ways. Most things don't respond well to brute force. A strong man will be admired more for his restraint than for his strength.

Powerful people have to be careful how they act. It's OK to win, but keep a lid on the triumphalism. Those goal-line dances tend to rub people the wrong way if they last too long.

A female infant may be a liability to her parents right now, and the male infants who would value her in about 18 years have no say in the matter yet. Those men in China and India who aren't having sex today because some greedy parents killed their potential brides 16 to 25 years ago certainly value women---just ask them. After those men meet their basic survival needs, there isn't much they value more than young, attractive women. But there is no way for those men to raise their own women. It takes too long, and that's not how the system works anyway. Even if a man could pay for a woman's upbringing, she would probably end up falling in love with some other man.

Why should there always be so many people asking why about things as if no scientist had ever investigated the same questions? I can't think of any reason for it. It doesn't seem sensible to have so many people who have no idea what scientists have done for them, especially since the average person is paying taxes to keep scientists working. Surely it's better for everybody to look up answers to their questions on the Internet rather than just sitting there wondering like dullards about questions they have already paid to have investigated?

It is rather discomforting to imagine that there might actually be some objective reality that doesn't care much how comfortable we might be with it. So let's just imagine everybody can make their own reality, and there is no other way to evaluate explanations than according to how good they make a person feel.

I haven't found any way to feel entirely comfortable with the knowledge that I am a semi-evolved ape. Could anybody? Apes are eminently mockable (and it's interesting to ask why they seem so to us).

Human "wiring" is not exactly "hard," but it does have its tendencies, and humans do not know how to re-engineer someone's wiring to fit any arbitrary demand. Said demand, of course, originates with someone else's wiring. If you can talk about rewiring Steve, you can talk about rewiring your own need to see Steve rewired.

You can't have it both ways. Either feminists have the power to influence society, or they do not. The fact that you aren't a farmwife right now says feminists do have influence. You asserted as much up above. Obviously what feminists say matters a lot. According to you their words have led to a complete reordering of American society. So if those SAME PEOPLE start propagating the idea that something is inherently wrong with the normal male sex drive, that should give pause to any normal male.

The fascinating bit is that a site like All-Movie Guide feels no need to argue its case. Films featuring beautiful nude women are "Exploitation" and the site can state that without any expectation that someone could need convincing. That should tell you how far the views of people like [Catharine] MacKinnon have reached into the orthodoxy.

As lawyers/politicians only know how to formulate laws in semi-natural languages, the inherent resulting ambiguity creates vast scope for loopholes exploitable by other lawyers. This is how lawyers guarantee full employment for themselves. It's worked well because Indian lawyers haven't been able to reach across the ocean and exploit the same loopholes. Indian lawyers may find ways to hijack the process. They have lots of cheap labor to throw at the problem.

How do you "prohibit" laywers from doing something? They can always file suits, file appeals, attack more loopholes, etc. With all the laws and precedents and unintended consequences of same, not to mention the economic incentive, I wouldn't bet against the legal talent of India.

Technology is just good enough now to make location less relevant for certain kinds of programming work. As technology improves, it will expand the range of jobs for which location is less important than labor cost. Displaced workers will kick and scream, but in the end they will have no defense against the Invisible Fist.

A person could work as a receptionist for a physician, and even decades later be no closer to being a physician.

Do you think fat acceptors consciously intend to eat all those doughnuts? Perhaps one reason obese people are able to understate their actual food consumption is that they may not be entirely aware of it.

The religious right has absorbed religious indoctrination which convinces them gay marriage would somehow undermine the institution of marriage for straight people. This might seem illogical, but it's no more illogical than buying an SUV which creates "driving conditions" and then using those "driving conditions" as an excuse to drive your SUV. (If you don't have anything to drive, you don't have "driving conditions," you just have "weather." The fact that snow falls does not obligate anyone to drive in it!)

Any sociobiologist can tell you voluntary birth control is sure to fail. It will only select against the people who choose to use it. In each generation, progressively more people will have been born to women who rejected voluntary birth control. So, whether their rejection was due to genetics or culture, humans will eventually build up resistance to voluntary birth control, in the same way every living organism evolves resistance to any biocide that doesn't exterminate it completely.

When a woman views a man as sexually more desirable because of what he drives, she is voting for George Bush to invade Iraq.

The reason why automobiles turn people into litterbugs is probably that automobiles go fast and disconnect people from their surroundings. A person who is on foot or on a bike is a part of the environment and can sense the trash by the side of the road. It doesn't whip by in an indistinguishable blur. Plus it's just harder to carry a lot of stuff when you don't use a car.

Imagine a wig that looks exactly like a beautiful woman's hair. Put that wig on an ugly woman, and she is still ugly.

Any man who has much experience with women learns early on that the last thing he would want to tell a woman is the complete truth. If he tells her the complete truth, that probably will be the last thing he says to her.

When disinterested third parties overhear a squabble, they usually don't know the history of who said what to whom, and even when they do, they may not necessarily have the genetic and cultural programming to share the biases of one particular side. Therefore it's best to write only things that hold up well out of context. That means sticking to facts which are apparent to most people, or which most people can readily verify.

If a person only loses, there is nothing to "move on with your life" to, except more losing. Which isn't really a move. We don't "accept" losing so much as we drown out the memory by winning something else.

In general, almost nobody is as critical of himself or herself as others are critical of him or her. To prove this, pick anybody you know and point out his or her faults to him or her. State exactly what you think about those faults. Odds are the person will take a much more lenient view of them, and perhaps fault you as "pompous" for pointing out those faults.

If you're looking for sympathy, you won't get much from most people with a "Y" chromosome. We know all about not being allowed to actualize all our urges. Do fat people feel stronger desires for doughnuts than I have felt since puberty for hot chicks? I doubt it, and I can keep my urges under control.

Gluttony is the most common eating disorder, as a trip to any large public gathering makes painfully clear.

Rich people can afford better lawyers just as they can afford better houses, better clothes, better schools, and (almost) everything else. Society tolerates this because in a (relatively) free-market economy, people who get rich by legal means do so by creating much value for other people. We reward people who create value in the hope that more people will create value.

I'm willing to spend some of my own money to protect women as they go about their ordinary business or stay in their homes, but I'm less eager to finance the state's role as a kind of substitute chaperone for regulating young people's dating activities after the fact.

How many innocent people do you know who attract repeated attention from the police?

If feminists don't want to be lampooned, they should hire better public relations people. Or just learn more about science. You don't see too many people lampooning sociobiology. It's hard for people to make fun of stuff that makes sense. Creationists have tried it, but their jokes about "evil-utionists" only play to the choir.

If human sexuality is essentially "healthy" and "good" why does everybody laugh at jokes about masturbation? Why would the average woman react with horror if she found her husband was patronizing prostitutes? Why is violence so often a component of sexual relationships? Why do sexually transmitted diseases exist and continually evolve into new and ever-more-horrid forms? A sociobiologist can offer serious answers to those questions. Can you?

As people get older, some of them learn the rest of the world does not particularly care to hear their complaints. So they learn to put on a happy face.

It's unlikely that a woman in her 50's is still beautiful. She may look like she was formerly beautiful, and for some odd reason women often call that look "beautiful," but few men see it that way. It's like the ruins of an ancient city---you can tell the city must have been grand in its day, but now it's not fit for habitation.

Obviously the most efficient strategy for meeting chicks would be to have intelligence-gathering capability that would shame the Department of Homeland Defense, so a man could know exactly which of the hot chicks in his own neighborhood are just now coming up for grabs, and he could get first in line before their schedules fill up again in a week or less. One thing women say is it's all about timing. And that is very true. A particular hot chick might be in the mood for some average dude maybe one day out of 365, provided he has not already worn out his welcome by pestering her on the other days. How does he figure out when it's time to strike? And how does he collect and track all the necessary information without creeping women out?

A ruthlessly cutthroat winner-take-all Darwinian competition is "healthy" and "good"? Sure, if you are Tom Cruise.

Everybody knows beautiful people have to become pseudo-frumpy to win acclaim from critics who naturally envy beautiful people. The formula for winning an Oscar is well-understood. But that is no comfort for people who are always ugly.

If what you want is to rearrange a few milligrams of chemicals in your brain, and what you have to pay involves shoving a billion tons of metal around, you aren't very efficient. If we can generate the necessary signal streams directly, using small-scale technologies, then we can do away with most of that large-scale nonsense.

I remember back in the 1973 when Paul McCartney wrote music for the James Bond film "Live and Let Die" and there were actually some people who felt seriously concerned McCartney had "sold out." That's hard to believe today when appearing on Pepsi commercials is practically a requirement for the top-shelf pop star.

Advertising has gotten so effective that people would rather spend their money on consumer toys than on propagating their own genes. We need to bring that brave new preference to the Third World before they breed into global ecological collapse.

Every religion is whack, to the followers of other contradictory religions. Like those Incas who used to sacrifice their children to appease their gods. That seems barbaric to some of us today, but we sacrifice Iraqis in an attempt to make the world safe for our SUVs. Which is worse?

Smart men learn not to share their feelings with women. Because everything you say can and will be held against you. If you need to share your deepest feelings with someone, just post to Usenet. Most women are too smart to read this crap.

Compare the women in Cosmo to the women in Playboy. All the models are slimmer than the average woman, but the skeletal look is much more common in the magazine aimed at women than in the magazine aimed at men. For some reason, women demand pictures of other women with the skeletal look. Most men are not demanding that. Perhaps women demand the skeletal look because they don't want other women to be too attractive to men. Attractive, but not too attractive.

It's interesting that during the 1970's, there was a trend toward mainstream celebrity women getting naked, but the feminist backlash of the 80's and 90's put a damper on the trend, and then the Internet exploded and gave men an efficient market for expressing their preferences, and now celebrity women getting naked is creeping its way back toward the mainstream. Hopefully Camryn Mannheim will not get in on this trend.

Everybody's future is horrific.

Even if their writings survive, it seems to be rare for a religion to rise again after all its followers die.

Try moving your mouse across your computer screen. The visual effect seems pretty simple. Do you have any idea how much mind-numbing code it takes to do that, and how many geek-years it took to get that right?

Since humans cannot read each other's minds, one can never be entirely sure what another person REALLY thinks. All we know is how that person behaves, and from that we infer what the person is thinking. Anybody who has watched professional actors or read about terrorist sleeper cells knows (or should know!) that humans have a lot of potential for faking emotion. In the case of undercover operatives, sometimes they can sustain the ruse continuously for years.

Do men want to have sex with women who have all their body hair? Not in our culture. Women don't seem too fond of facial hair, either. After women got the right to vote in the U.S., no more U.S. Presidents wore beards.

An athlete who takes steroids, growth hormone, EPO, and all the rest becomes more like a MACHINE, capable of performing up to spec every single day. Because that's what good MACHINES are: reliable. Unlike HUMANS, who have good days and bad days, because we aren't very good machines. That's what Viagra does to a man's dick. It removes the human element of unreliability and turns the dick into a utensil.

If you ever have more than one child, you will learn how flexible and self-serving everyone's definition of "fair" is.

With modern convenience foods it only takes a few minutes of extra eating per day to scarf down the extra 500 to 1500 kcal necessary to pack 100 pounds of fat on a glutton over the course of a few years. A little extra drinking is all it takes, with the energy content of some beverages. 500 extra kcal/day can pack on about a pound of fat per week, or about 50 pounds per year, give or take. That's about one or two extra doughnuts per day over what the same person would need to eat to maintain a healthy weight.

In the view of most serious endurance athletes, the people who actually do put up serious training numbers, obesity is like an inverse indicator of fitness. Athletes associate being fat with being "out of shape" because 99% of the time that's exactly what a fat person is.

If a woman has trouble even getting dates with men, that's pretty sad. She would have to be quite a train wreck.

There are plenty of magazines trying to sell different looks to women. They struggle at the margin and usually go bankrupt quickly. Women as a group show little interest in spending their own money to buy pictures of fat women. Even in magazines that try to feature plus-sized models, they lose circulation if they feature models who are a bit too "plus." Even fat chicks don't want to see women who are quite as fat as they are.

Makes you wonder how Hollywood will promote entirely synthetic movies. They still use humans to voice movies like Shrek, but eventually there will be movies with no identifiable stars at all to generate celebrity relevance. Nobody is going to get excited about the geeks who write the code.

Much better to be exterminated by pleasure than by the way nature does it.

If you meet a man who is still scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers at age 35, odds are he doesn't have a lot going for him. He probably has some serious problem in communication skills or interpersonal skills or basic intelligence that prevents him from doing more valuable work. Maybe he has some outside hobby that impresses women and doesn't pay, but that is extremely rare. Most guys who are stuck in crap jobs by their 30's are just losers. They don't command the respect of other men, and they sure don't command the respect of women, most of the time.

Linux is doing pretty well, in part because there are no Linux billionaires.

What's wrong with just admitting things could be better?

One thing I like about Darwinism is how wonderfully it counters idealism.

Any sort of cartel tends to break down whenever individuals in the group can benefits themselves by breaking ranks. For example, consumer boycotts are difficult to sustain, because they require consumers to sacrifice something they value. Labor strikes are similarly difficult to sustain, because eventually workers have to eat. They cannot go indefinitely without wages. There will always be some scabs willing to work, too. In theory women could "Take Back The Night" by telling men there will be no more sex until men put all the rapists in jail. But women will never do that because you can't get all the women to hold out long enough.

I have found on those rare occasions when I needed to be blunt with a woman, most of them will fold instantly. Women spend most of their lives being coddled by men who treat them more nicely than men treat each other. Guys can yell at each other and be harsh with their criticism, and that's how it's been for us ever since little league. But most chicks aren't used to that. So if a woman is needling you and won't stop, just talk to her like you would talk to a bothersome dude.

Being a movie critic seems to attract a disproportionate number of abnormal people. The Catholic priesthood does too, but a different flavor of abnormal.

Don't blame men for the stupidity of women. You won't look at our porn because you think it's shameful or "exploitive." Instead you look at fashion magazines full of starving women, and then a tiny percentage of women who can actually say no to doughnuts take things too far.

Only a few women are gullible enough to believe men who say they think Paris Hilton is skanky. Let the real Paris hit on them and we'll see how long that lasts.

If success is as desirable as you make it sound, how could you not envy someone who has more success than you do? Why try to deny your essential humanity? Envy is a perfectly normal human emotion that occurs when we see our competition doing better than we are. Envy is one of the fundamental emotions that drives people to improve. We want to get "better" because we can see examples of "better" in other people, and because we see those examples we become unsatisfied with what we have now. Unfortunately there are limits to the ways we can currently change ourselves, so certain kinds of envy are unproductive. But that doesn't mean we are immune to them.

The history of technology is all about improving on nature. You can spend a lot of time in the forest picking up sticks, but you won't find many that have the right shape and heft to make good baseball bats. Nature doesn't build things to serve us; rather, things evolve to serve themselves.

Look at the endless parade of Hollywood types who are anti-corporation most of the time until they go to Washington to advocate for their pet uncured disease. Where do they think the wealth to research all those diseases will come from? Something like half the taxes come from the top 2% of wealthy people. All those greedy CEO types who get lambasted in Hollywood movies are paying the taxes that might someday let the Christopher Reeves of the world recover from their horse accidents.

Imagine if you had taken, say, $20,000 out of that $70,000 you once earned, and you spent it on hiring and training your own personal team of four Indian programmers. At some point, your boss notices you are several times more productive than your fellow employees. And you get a big promotion. Which enables you to hire more Indians to join your personal team. Get the picture? Pretty soon, instead of being the victim of the global economy, you are victimizing others.

Eliminating spatial/geographic barriers to competition is certainly going to create more turmoil. But I'd say it's a good warmup for the eventual onslaught of artificial intelligence.

Look at how many people get addicted to Usenet. When computers become smart enough to converse similarly, that feature will be similarly addictive. Actually a lot more addictive, because Usenet is not even a friendly place and it manages to be addictive. Imagine conversing with a smart computer that is actually nice.

Imagine what it would be like to be a fat acceptor in a world where doughnuts had a choice. That's what being a man is like.

Women peak in terms of outer beauty around the age of 20, whereas the ruling class in every human culture consists mostly of people over the age of 40. Often well over. By the time women are fit to lead, they are way past being beautiful. They might have beautiful daughters, but they themselves can no longer hope to get very far on their looks. Chelsea Clinton probably holds a man's attention longer today than her mother can. But Hillary currently ranks far ahead of her daughter on the leadership scale. By the time Chelsea has accumulated similar influence, she probably won't be very interesting to her husband either.

Consider: a healthy slender 21-year-old woman is likely to be more attractive to men than a diseased decrepit 90 year-old-woman lying in her own filth at the nursing home. Either (a) it is purely an amazing coincidence that men would prefer to have sex with the woman who, in the ancestral environment, would be likely to enable men to reproduce, or (b) natural selection has indeed given men genes that program them to seek out women who exude fertility cues, and do those things that would, in the ancestral environment, make more copies of the men's genes.

How many people want to have 100% natural sex? The result of that is the average woman popping out 8 babies, and a country ends up like Afghanistan. Most men prefer to have sex with women who have made themselves a little less real by taking artificial drugs to reduce their natural fertility. Viagra became hugely profitable quickly because it helps men become artificial enough to take full advantage of their artificially sterilized women. The whole concept of recreational sex is artificial. In nature, sex is for reproduction. We have a lot of problems with our attempts to create recreational sex because we have not made sex artificial enough yet. Diseases, unwanted babies, jealousy, violence---these are the result of recreational sex that is insufficiently artificial.

When you have to choose between yourself vs. someone else, it's usually too bad for someone else. That's just the way our genes program us. See: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Different countries have different laws, because they have different histories. The Nazi party has not caused many problems in the U.S., whereas it devastated Germany. Maybe alcohol has caused fewer problems in Germany.

The world may be more interesting with its dwarves and elephant men, but who wants to be one of the freaks?

Do you drive on freeways? Hitler had the first one built in 1936. Hundreds of millions of people endorse that Hitler idea every day.

Actually I've watched a few X-Files episodes. Some of them were interesting. However, the show has obliterated about 100 years of intellectual progress.

If you only have a few hundred neurons, your behaviors will be pretty simple.

Not that I see a promising long-term future for humans anyway. It's somewhat difficult to imagine humans in their present form being able to function in the world that will result from another 200 years of technological advancement. At some point it's going to be necessary to raise human intelligence across the board to keep up with the massive increase in complexity.

In each generation, a progressively larger fraction of children are presumably being born to mothers who explicitly wanted children. Those women whose genes code for a weaker, explicit advance desire for children will be less likely to pass on their genes. Another result of this evolutionary adaptation is that voluntary contraception must fail in the long run, as the survivors evolve increasing resistance to it.

Digression: so just how often do married women successfully charge their husbands with rape? I suspect this is an extremely rare legal outcome, since I never hear such a thing reported on the local news amidst the constant stream of reports of rapes, robberies, murders, assaults, automobile accidents, drug busts, and other social mayhem.

Everybody shares some things, such as the air we breathe. Nobody has ever told me to stop inhaling their air. Almost everybody is quite generous when it comes to sharing their opinions. Everybody who drives a gaswaster is happy to share their exhaust fumes, noise, and road presence.

Check out the early films of Tom Cruise. How many of the women who starred in those films are still as popular as Tom Cruise?

Marriage is not like buying a house, where you go to a closing and sign page after page of contracts. I have a whole file folder full of papers I signed when I bought my house. What married person has a similar folder full of marital contract papers?

Few criminals describe their crimes using the customary terms. They don't even consider themselves "criminals."

The lumping and labeling and "considering the source" is the human brain's way of imposing enough artificial simplicity on chaotic reality to create a somewhat tractable fantasy world for the brain to comfortably inhabit.

Birds are pretty susceptible to being spoofed by partial cues. One consequence of humans having larger brains is that we are somewhat harder to spoof. But humans are by no means spoof-proof. For example, a modern computer-generated movie seems to look like something other than "computer output." We can impute emotions to a stream of "Shrek" bits.

The only way to have a happy relationship is for the relationship to lead, directly or indirectly, to the release of dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens.

Name one satellite which currently defies gravity. How do you think NASA calculates where those satellites are going? NASA uses the law of gravity to predict the satellites' future positions and velocities. A satellite does not defy gravity; a satellite is a prisoner of gravity. Gravity dictates what airplanes and rockets can do, and how much fuel they need to do it.

There is a certain ideological consistency when a short man humps an obese woman three times his size.

To become a great Eurasian religion, a belief system must possess every possible Jedi mind trick to "waterproof" against falsifiability. My favorite is: "The Devil's greatest achievement is persuading people he does not exist." Wow. To a shallow thinker like C.S. Lewis that probably sounds like an argument---to even attempt to question the claim immediately "proves" the Devil has deceived the questioner!

As long as humans demand warmth in winter, we will always have roaches.

I worked in slow food as a teen. At the bottom of the hierarchy, as a dishwasher. After that, I was pretty reluctant to eat in restaurants for a long time.

People who are chronically single are, on average, more defective than married people of similar ages. This is not rocket science. Just look around at the chronic losers you know.

Bacteria did not know a goddamned thing about Gödel's Theorem and yet 500 million years later they have intelligent descendents. If (stupidity) + (time) is enough to create intelligence, then (somewhat smart) + (less time) should also be enough.

Nature as a whole is poorly documented. "The heavens" may "declare the handiwork of" bog but not in a language any human can easily read. Code specifies the "what." Comments indicate the "why." The "why" of natural systems follows from their ancestral history of Darwinian selection, with some legacy of neutral mutations, survivable defects, and vestiges thrown in. To know the "why" of a living organism you have to know its history. Some of this information has probably been lost forever.

Most people understand "fairness" to mean "My interests are secure." The notion of guaranteeing something good for the enemy is not part of "fairness."

Actually most men can understand a raw deal when they get one, even men who don't know how to draw a simple 2x2 game theory matrix.

As much as cars suck, they are hardly an impediment to real sex. One of the early moralistic objections to automobiles was that they would allow young men and women to travel off together unchaperoned, and engage in all sorts of lascivious behavior made possible through unprecedented privacy and mobility. Those early fears have turned out to be 100% true. The sexual revolution in the U.S. is a direct result of (a) contraceptive technology and (b) automobiles.

I read in Science News that some spiders appear to be preferentially spinning webs near sources of artificial light. Given the number of insects that congregate around lights at night this guarantees good eating for the spider. That strategy would seem obvious to a human but it's not clear how spiders could have "figured" this out in the century or so that artificial lights have been around.

The Trekkian prime directive of non-interference is untenable in the real world. Even if most members of the advanced culture are high-minded enough to keep their hands off, it only takes a few greedy hunters, miners, loggers, missionaries, etc., to go in and screw up the primitive culture. As long as the advanced culture continues to chew up resources, eventually there will be some "crisis" that will justify the clear-cutting, road-building, strip mining, drilling, blasting, soul-saving, etc., that pushes the primitive culture to the brink. And it's not just a white male thing driving the destruction. The primitive culture will always have competing factions. The first ones who get metal tools and weapons from the white men will set upon their less-acculturated neighbors.

You don't have to know your place, but you do have to occupy it.

I wonder, how many people reading this article have had a sexual fantasy about a victim of Down's Syndrome? Sex is by its very nature politically incorrect in the most comprehensive way. Sex is really the last vestige of unrestrained Darwinism still tolerated by civilized people.

Explaining anything can be seen by illogical humans as an attempt to "justify" it. For example, if a meteorologist explains what causes hurricanes, it would be possible for some hurricane victim to think the meteorologist was justifying what the hurricane did.

Popular perceptions of Darwin's theory tend to focus primarily on the survival aspect, because that is mostly a neutral topic. We mostly all agree it is good to survive. Sexual selection, on the other hand, is an incredibly threatening phenomenon, because immediately we begin to understand that some people have been genetically gifted to be far more sexually desirable than other people. The intense emotional reactions people have to this idea illustrates just how important we instinctively understand it to be.

It's possible you could fuck the Mullahs' shit up pretty good just by persistently airdropping tons of pornography where young muslim men can find it. Obviously the strict Islamic control over the supply of sex further exacerbates the supply/demand mismatch. Porn isn't a complete substitute for sex, but it's an excellent substitute for at least the voyeuristic component a man gets from real sex. To really fuck with their existing memes you could have Larry Flynt publish a "72 Virgins of the Holy Koran" magazine containing all the trance words the Islamic dumbshits have had pumped into them all their lives. That might help overcome the tendency of the devout to immediately reject something which seems too overtly satanic.

Bonobos would probably get into trouble if they lived in cities millions strong.

I suspect that when a community is religiously diverse, over time it tends to cause people in that community to take religion a bit less seriously. It becomes undeniable that at least N-1 of the mutually contradictory religions must be wrong. The crosstalk from competing religions tends to interfere with the sort of groupthink every religion is based on. It gets harder to pull a fast one on people with a false dichotomy, because the presence of other religions reminds them there are more than just two possibilities.

Under what realistic scenario could a DNA database in the hands of a U.S. government agency inflict harm on U.S. citizens comparable to the harm inflicted by firearms?

Most people's "optimal" partner would not be their ideal partner, because in general most people lack the SMV necessary to attract their ideal partner. "Optimal" means the best you can do given your constraints, whereas "ideal" means the best you could do without any constraints.

Mosquitoes are wildlife. They like people a lot.

A woman might think a new haircut or wardrobe utterly transforms her, but most people won't have any trouble recognizing her. If a woman is boring a man today, she will probably be boring him tomorrow, because so much depends on a woman's physical characteristics, voice, mannerisms, basic personality, and other attributes that are extremely difficult for a person to change.

I read about a study from way back in the 1950's which used an unsophisticated blood test for paternity matching (said to underestimate the frequency of actual bastards by about half), and it found that about 10% of the offspring of married women in a hospital catering to a generally well-to-do community could not have been fathered by their putative fathers. Which meant that the actual rate of bastard children was probably closer to 20%. At the time, the results were considered so disturbing that the study was suppressed.

Stop blaming feminists for the consequences of your own sloth. If you want to subjugate women again, you can start by banning automobiles. Make it tough to get around again, and only the tough will get around.

Almost every significant idea originated in minds with high IQ. Accordingly, other minds with high IQs are in the best position to grasp them.

Hedonism: if it feels good, do it. Intellectual hedonism: if it feels good, believe it.

Most people do understand the comparative undesirability of welfare recipients, which is why anybody who can afford it will generally purchase housing in a neighborhood where most of the neighbors are not on welfare. When the proportion of welfare recipients reaches some level people begin calling it a "bad" neighborhood.

In any case, this is a useful exercise for short men who believe women should abandon their heightist sexual preferences: let the short guys try masturbating to pictures of Mother Teresa taken in her later years. If they experience difficulty, or find the experience to be less than fully satisfying, well that's similar to the way most women feel about them. That's harsh, but selfish genes are incredibly harsh.

There is no doubt that the less productive a worker is, the more impressively they are obliged to dress, and the more productive a worker is, the less time they have to bother with fashion. This is how the real world operates today.

Notice that all the normal media conditioning fails entirely to tell homosexuals what they should find attractive. All it does is make them feel some guilt about it, which many of them overcome. So explain why the media had a great effect on you, but the gay man down the hall seems to have been impervious to the exact same programming.

Perhaps the person saying "don't take it personally" is merely being inarticulate. (S)he probably means, "Don't let this hurt you too much." That would mean (s)he is assuming you have the same kind of emotional control (s)he does, and you somehow need to be reminded to exercise it.

A person who dates members of only one sex is clearly excluding potential romantic/sexual partners on the basis of what kind of sex organs they have. This is even more superficial than refusing, say, to date fat people. After all, a fat man looks more like a fat woman than a fat person looks like a thin person.

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. Despite the wishful and politically-tainted thinking of postmodernists, the real world is not an arbitrary anthropogenic construct. Cultural priorities can certainly influence the parts of reality we try to understand first, and they can extend the life of some kinds of misunderstandings, but they do not create or change reality.

Only men can legally be forced to become parents against their will today, but with the Republican packing of the Supreme Court, women seem likely to regress back to the legal status of men in the relatively near future.

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.

I challenge you to assemble two groups of 50 people, the first with IQs in the range 50 to 70, and the second with IQs in the range 130 to 150. Have each person write a 1000 word essay on any subject you like. Then show both groups of essays to me, and I will match each group of essays to its corresponding group of people. With trivial effort, I might add.

If you have rare skills in high demand, would-be employers will compete for your attention. If you have no valuable skills, employers will treat you like expendable garbage. If you're an average man who wants sex with attractive women I don't have to tell you what sort of market you are in.

In a primitive tribe living on the edge of existence what do you suppose happens to people who refuse to cooperate with the other tribe members, to such an extent that they threaten the survival of the entire tribe?

For you to satisfy your hunger, some plant or animal will have to lose the competition for its life.

With sufficiently brutal police power it is possible to override a free market, just as it is possible to override a woman's preferences in sex partners. However, in the modern world with its global economy, mobile capital, and advanced weaponry it's very hard for a country such as North Korea to impose an arbitrary economic system on its people and still keep up with neighboring countries.

It's possible to cloud the issue, at least online, by inventing new words that (temporarily) sidestep the negative associations, such as "zaftig," "plump," "rubenesque," "ample."

For the record, I don't consider Mother Teresa "virtuous," because she opposed modern family planning technology for everyone, including the rapidly breeding desperately poor people she was supposedly so "compassionate" toward. Helping people feel comfortable while increasing the number of future victims does not strike me as "compassionate." That's like helping an alcoholic feel better right now by buying him a year's supply of whisky.

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.

You don't get a boner by looking at soft porn because you are "sinful." You get that boner because those emotions caused your ancestors to propagate their genes successfully, and here you are. Other men who had different emotional reactions failed to propagate their genes, so we have very few men who have significantly different emotional reactions to soft porn, which simulates what would have been, in the ancestral environment, a stunningly promising mating opportunity.

Using steroids to build muscle is like trying to fix a computer by hitting it with a large hammer. It can actually work in the short run. But not for long. And it doesn't really make the computer a better computer.

This is why I am baffled at all the seemingly intelligent women who waste their time in the masturbatory pursuit of "women's studies." If the same women were to junk their delusions and apply some real intellectual discipline to solving the real problems women face, that would go farther toward reducing the economic and political power gap between men and women than anything else they could do. Instead, and tragically, so many women shy away from technology (their only hope for leveling the playing field) because they view it as something alien to their thinking.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960's was simply unsustainable, because it was all about letting the male sexual nature out of the cage. Women quickly discovered that all the historical restrictions on sex were there to protect them from the male libido. And thus the feminist backlash has recruited lawyers to fill the role that repression and chaperones once did. The pendulum is certainly swinging around a different point than it used to---women are far more likely to consent to sex with men they have recently met than women probably did 100 years ago---but there are limits to how long social conditioning could keep the pendulum from swinging back.

My guess is that in the real world, if you looked at 50 guys with McJobs and 50 guys in the same age cohort who were successful in the professions, business, or entertainment, you would not find that the successful men were at any disadvantage in terms of their average level of looks.

You won't hear this in the next fund-raising drive, but everyone who contributes to organizations like the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is a practicing eugenicist.

You can always tell when I have won when people begin working my ideas into their insults.

A person who is low on a hierarchy can insult another loser effectively but only if he first concedes his own loser status and then argues persuasively that his target is no better than he is. I call this the "Suicide Bomber Strategy." Suicide bombing may seem foolish, but in the calculus of warfare it can be effective. For example, the Japanese kamikaze pilots inflicted more damage on the U.S. Navy in WWII than any other group of Japanese servicemen, for a comparable casualty rate. The Suicide Bomber Strategy is pretty easy to work because people are all too eager to buy the first half of the argument: that the suicide bomber has little worth. As soon as the victims agree with this, they acknowledge the existence of hierarchy. Then it's simply a matter of documenting the victims' position on said hierarchy.

Love is a form of approval. In fact it's the most intense form. If you are a sucker for love then you are a sucker for approval. This is a natural human emotion. Everybody desires approval. If you really don't then you are emotionally dead.

It's interesting that the parable of the Good Samaritan had impact with its original audience precisely because the original audience consisted of hardcore racists who knew nothing of statistics.

As a matter of fact, going to a fat camp may be one of the better ways to overcome an addiction to overeating, just as going to a substance abuse clinic is a better way to kick a drug habit for many people than remaining in one's familiar environment with all the familiar triggers and temptations.

Beware the siren song of magical thinking. Words do not attain logical relationships merely by their proximity.

You don't have to appeal to genetic predisposition to reach the same conclusion. Ask any criminologist about recidivism. If some guy has a criminal record as long as your arm, everybody knows he is overwhelmingly more likely to commit another crime than someone with a clean record. And of course you apply this rule in everyday life when you are choosing your friends. Do you knowingly associate with anybody who has committed multiple felonies?

If you think an increase in the number of McJobs is going to sweep the streets clean of gangbangers then your powers of imagination are impressive.

A person does not have to be good at making abstract moral judgements when he is aware that a police officer is watching him. All he needs is at least a child's understanding of cause and effect. In that case "the possible consequences" have become nearly certain.

How accurately can you judge the attractiveness of people who aren't in your target group? If you had never heard of Russell Crowe before, and you saw him driving down the street in a UPS van, would you immediately recognize his phenomenal attractiveness to women? I would not. I can instantly tell how attractive a woman is to men by looking at her, but I don't personally react to men that way so my estimates of their attractiveness to women can be way off. This is, BTW, why most people tend to overestimate their own attractiveness to the opposite sex.

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."

Generally we "accept" undesirable traits when we realize people can't change them. But if "she can always lose weight" that raises the obvious question of why the fat woman was choosing to be fat and thereby limiting her choices in men to a man who is ugly on the inside.

That is why my SMV theory rules here. In real life I am far less effective at getting such revolutionary ideas across. The average troglodyte just shouts down whatever he or she finds disturbing. But on Usenet there is no shouting down. That is, if one has state control. The result is that after I restate the facts for several years, and I recruit a few key proteges, my idea takes over the mainstream and the shrinking opposition retreats to the margins.

It's almost never the case that someone who rejects a belief system knows enough about it to argue against the belief system solely on the basis of its internal inconsistency. That form of argument could only mean something to true believers, and they aren't going to buy it anyway. In the general battle for hearts and minds it's more fruitful to argue from the basis of things people can know to be true from their own observations.

Try an analogy with bread making. Suppose a person is trying to bake a loaf of bread. The aspiring baker has every ingredient except yeast. When you mention yeast, she begins loudly denying the need for yeast. How much time will you spend discussing flour, eggs, milk, honey, etc., with that person? There is no need to instruct a person in her areas of competence.

If anything, an average American man should be embarrassed if he marries an average American woman, because if he does so he almost certainly settled for a less attractive, less exciting, and less enjoyable woman than he could have gotten. This would be true for virtually any American man who failed to get his first choice among American women. That is, if you are an American man and you get rejected by the American women you would most like to have, you would be foolish to marry an American woman.

Most women I ask claim to be uninterested in knowing a man's exact dollar figures. Instead they say things like "I only want him to be financially stable." I don't think women are lying when they say this. I think they actually don't need to be accountants. Men, of course, care more about numbers because we're trying to figure out what we have to do to make the cut with the women we want. Men do something similar when we look at women's bodies and decide if we find them attractive without needing to ask women to step on a scale and let us measure them with tape. A man doesn't need to know a woman's numbers to see if he wants her, but if he checked out the numbers of all the women he finds attractive he'd see some definite trends. For a woman who is trying to figure out how much she should weigh the numbers that men tend to go for are important to know.

Genetic engineering will probably eliminate the possibility of being a "star" anything, by leveling all playing fields.

To weigh 300 pounds a woman has to crave donuts more than she craves men.

The truth is out there. Science always gets it first. Note to the ignorati: counterexamples work better than umbrage.

A person who lives with any sort of visible trait which drastically lowers his or her sexual market value is likely to have a difficult time discussing that trait with any sort of objective detachment. There's nothing like living with an extinction-level threat to one's genetic survival to kick in the chronic anxiety response not to mention panic attacks. For comparison, watch how fast a discussion deteriorates when a slender person makes any sort of common-sense suggestion to a fat person, e.g., "Why don't you just eat less?"

One does not "defend" reality. A person can only acknowledge reality or deny it. Denying reality is a rather odd thing to do when one's own nature and actions demonstrate that reality every day.

Becoming more attractive probably increases a person's chances of experiencing some of the downsides of sex in addition to the upsides. For example, an obese 50 year-old woman is probably at far lower risk of being date-raped than a slender attractive 20 year-old woman. But most 50 year-old women would choose to look exactly like beautiful young women if they could. Look in the old woman's medicine cabinet and odds are she has a small fortune invested in various oils and lotions promising to do just that, although it only takes a glance at her to see they don't work. Similarly, a star NFL player is more likely to end up paying child support to five different women than the average man. And yet most men would love to at least have the option to make such a mess of their lives.

The primary function of prostitutes in our society is not to address the sexual needs of men, but to serve as an effective means of dissing men who want sex more than women do, as in "Why don't you just get a prostitute?" as though this were something resembling a practical option. For every man who has actually hired a prostitute there are perhaps 100 women flippantly suggesting they do. Which is another thing I find interesting. Of course Marie Antoinette reputedly said much the same thing about cake.

A woman once complained to me that men in my town don't take the initiative with women. She said when she goes out to a bar with her women friends very few men will come up to her. Another man who was conversing with her said that men don't like to try to hit on women who are in a group of women. I suggested she'd have better results if she and her friends would split up for a while at the bar so men could approach them without the intimidation factor of an audience. Her reply was that she didn't want to leave her friends because then she would get hit on by low-quality men.

Can anybody reading this name one person who is maintaining a fashionable weight and finding that it severely cuts into their quality of life?

The problem is that most of us have fairly similar definitions of "quality", and most of us want more "quality" in a partner than we ourselves can provide, according to the other side's bizarre definition of "quality". (The only logical definition of quality for women to have should have me at the very pinnacle, with all other men going down from there. At least, that would seem perfectly "logical" to me. Our friend subjectivity again.)

So while a perfectly random woman could harbor some perfectly nasty surprises, my experiences thus far lead me to believe I'm safer in bed with a stranger than, say, on the highway with the same stranger. I note that most people think almost nothing of trusting their lives to thousands of heavily-armed, aggressive strangers every day. To me, that seems like the height of insanity. At least if someone kills you in your bed, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing they might spend some time in jail.

You say you are "fat." If you managed to get to ideal weight, do you think you would make your current partner happier than he is now? If the answer is "yes" what's stopping you? Do you consider it an act of love to make a man less happy?

Of course, the problem is that most people have their own notion of "good manners". And most people define "good manners" differently for different people. For example, if Tom Cruise walked down a street in my town, and was very forward in expressing sexual interest in young women passersby, my guess is that appreciably fewer young women would judge his manners to be "bad", than if a man of lesser sexual market value did EXACTLY the same thing.

Tell me which context makes you want to have sex with a real 70 year old woman rather than with a real 25 year old woman. Not hypothetical people but real people.

It would be interesting if we had professional sexual market value appraisers. That would make dating enormously more rational. For example, we could have clubs that would only admit people who are currently within particular narrow ranges of SMV. That would make almost all the members of the appropriate sex good prospects for everybody who got in such a bar! Imagine how chaotic the real estate market would be if buyers and sellers had wildly inaccurate perceptions of real estate market value. The real estate market works fairly well because it has professionals who understand the market structure of housing and are able to guide people to make choices appropriate to their market power.

The reason being fat damages a person's sexual market value is that fat people generally don't find other fat people attractive. If fat people were attracted to and attractive to other fat people there would be no attractiveness penalty for being fat. It would be much like being gay: if you are gay, you just go to the gay bar and you no longer care that you're in a 1% or 5% minority of the general population, because that 1% or 5% or whatever it is knows where to find the gay bar. However, there are no fat bars because not even fat people want to get with other fat people.

I get the same sense of satisfaction every time I see the phrase "sexual market value." I introduced that one in my first soc.singles incarnation around ten years ago. I got the idea from the movie "Stripper" in which one of the actresses mentioned that after she had a child her "marketability" as a stripper declined. In the sex trade the concept of "sexual market value" is obvious, and at some point I realized that the same thing has as much influence on anybody who wants a sexual relationship as it does on people who directly market their sexuality for money. We're all basically trying to "sell" the same thing, although we differ in our preferred number of "customers" and their method of "payment."

Well, I never met a truly single person who struck me as being outrageously happy. (By "truly single" I mean having no sexual encounters, no romantic episodes, no favorable attention from MOTAS, and no dates. Notice the "and", logicians. Having any single one of the foregoing can be enough for some people.) That doesn't mean that having a relationship is any guarantee of mental health. But most humans seem wired to be generally miserable if they must go years on end as sexual zeroes. It's your genes; they've been enjoying a party for the last billion years, and they don't want you to blow it for them now. First they are going to drive you to keep yourself alive. Then they are going to drive you to create the next hotel for them.

It would be nice, in some ways, if men and women would just level with each other. Then instead of all the games and so on, men could just ask women bluntly, "How much money would I have to pay you for you to have sex with me?"

Are you trying to differentiate between trading sex for money, vs. trading sex+romance for money? The only difference is that the first is illegal in most places, whereas the second is not only legal, but highly revered as the institution of "marriage".

Everybody who wants sex has to compete for it in the sexual market. People with low SMV get the pain and suffering which the market decides they deserve. This happens without regard to whether the victims understand how the sexual market works. You don't have to understand how the West Nile virus works to get sick from it. Pretending the virus does not exist does not exempt you from getting infected by it.

I've never seen an attractive woman hand out pity compliments to men. Attractive women know they cannot do that without collecting stalkers. Attractive women also have no need nor reason to be kind to be men. Unattractive women, on the other hand, can compliment men all they like without fear of stimulating much sexual attention. They also need to be nice to get men to tolerate their presence.

All you have to do is talk to a variety of women to discover that most women with low sexual market value are quite skilled at verbalizing their resentment at women with high sexual market value. It's not much different than the way men with low S.M.V. creatively find ways to label every man who obtains sex regularly as a "jerk" or "asshole." Isn't competition wonderful?

On one hand, women (on average) seem to have a strong tendency to reject sexual partners who earn less than they do, so we can probably conclude that as women get wealthier, they become less likely to have sex with men. Of course, women might change their sexual selection criteria; I don't know how much of their present selection criteria are the result of socialization vs. being inborn. But on the other hand, as women develop their own legitimate abilities to create wealth, they depend less on their sexual market value. Therefore, they have less need to defend their sexual market value by attempting to censure "sluts" and censor pornography.

If you are familiar with basic investment principles, you'll know that most investors accept a low return on safe, short-term investments. But they demand a high potential return on risky, long-term investments. Therefore, I think the current system is quite reasonable. Women expect men to do all the up-front work, for as long as necessary (perhaps years), to start relationships, with absolutely no promise that men will have anything to show for their efforts. Later, once a couple is in a relationship, it's the woman's turn to work, and she gets an immediate return on her vastly safer investment. Since the man is taking by far the larger risk, it's quite fair that he should end up doing less total work by the end of the game.

How many Real Jerks do you know who manage to be Real Jerks without owning a car? Even if a guy can fuck women while treating them like garbage, he doesn't get into that game very easily unless he pays the very large automotive entry fee in advance.

Incidentally, if you are sick and need surgery, would you prefer a surgeon with an I.Q. of 75 or a surgeon with an I.Q. of 150? Would you let a surgeon operate on you if he claimed he understood medicine but he was unable to pass his exams because he "isn't good at taking tests"? In other words, would you bet your life on your belief in the meaninglessness of standardized tests?

Do you suppose that women are likely to give a random man exactly what he wants? If not, why should he give them what they want?

Even the most "meaningless" sexual encounter has an emotional impact on a man that is completely unlike what he gets from masturbating. If this were not so, why would men pay money to have sex with prostitutes when they can always jerk off for free?

So the "Where are they?" argument basically says that if there are other civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy they have to be acting with a voluntary restraint unprecendented in any known living creature, to have squelched the reproductive and territorial impulses of every last breeding unit among them. Applied to this study you are alluding to, the "Where are they?" argument would be: "If there is some simple way to turn low-achieving students into high achievers, where are they?"

A person who is not in another person's sexual market cannot directly judge that person's sexual market value. S/he can only report what s/he observes of the behavior of people who are actually in the relevant sexual market. So when women who don't find any women sexually attractive say things like "Camryn Mannheim is beautiful" their words are as nearly devoid of meaning as words can be made to be.

In general, the better-looking a woman is, the more financially successful her husband is. This seems to be a clear trend among the people I know.

It is the nature of Man to look at the hand Nature dealt him and say "This is bullshit." For example, few people are content to travel only as fast as their feet will carry them. That was something we had to correct early in the game. Similarly, few people find the memories Nature gave them to be adequate, so we invented writing. Other problems, such as a body that comes preprogrammed to fall apart on schedule, will take longer to fix.

So while women may be more tolerant of physical flaws in men, they seem much less tolerant of some other kinds of flaws. The most telling flaw for a man seems to be obscurity, since most women don't seem to be attracted to men they know nothing about.

But one thing is for certain: when two rationalizing people have a conflict, each one will walk away convinced to the core of their being that they are the victim in the conflict, and the other party is the victimizer. Unless, of course, the struggle produced a clear winner, in which case the winner will be satisfied that "justice" was served.

The fact that there are so many more fat people today than there were 100 years ago suggests that people are getting habituated into obesity. Many of these same people would be lean if they were living in the conditions that prevailed 100 years ago, and I can't recall from historical documents that people were generally suffering emotionally on a large scale from being lean. As far as I can see it all works the other way: the fatter people get the more miserable they become.

Access to casual sex with women is one of the rewards of being a successful man. This is not a "psychological cost" for the successful man. If it were, the resulting damage would drag the successful man back into failure. No, the truth is considerably different: access to casual sex with women is supremely *empowering* to a man. I am quite certain this is an important psychological boost that helps the Alpha Males stay on top of the pile. After all, a man who can conquer women easily should feel invincible when faced with the comparatively minor challenges of politics, business, etc. And for a man, feeling invincible is about half the battle.

Let me assure you, as much as you find fat men sexually worthless, for men it's at least ten times as horrid to be trapped with a fat hog woman, because men are that much more fixated on physical attractiveness than you are.

The simple fact is that you can't please everybody. If you don't sport a woody for the fat woman, she'll tell you you need to grow up. On the other hand, if you do sport a woody for the thin woman, she'll complain that you are harrassing her. So, whether you find a particular woman attractive or unattractive, you are always wrong, unless you happen to read her mind exactly, and do whatever she wants you to do at the time.

Just try faulting a homosexual for his/her sexual preferences, and see what kind of response you get. Homosexuals are way ahead of straight men in this game; they don't put up with bigotry. Many straight men, on the other hand, have politely listened to bigots deriding their sex drives for their whole lives.

Intelligence: able to purchase a computer running UN*X and (with recourse only to the system manuals) register a productivity increase in six months' time.

I observe a fair number of people using computers. I have no statistics to back me up, but I think a see a general trend: computer users with less experience and sophistication are often quicker to hit the printers for rough drafts, etc. That is, they tend to generate more hardcopy per unit of work done. I say this not to disparage them. Present-day computers are still brittle, expensive, and lacking adequate displays. Learning to work with less paper takes practice and motivation. We are still a long way from eliminating paper. I do not expect this to always be true. Eventually, computers will be cheap and reliable to the point of transparency. We will not fear relying on them over paper any more than we currently fear relying on telephones over couriers. (What?!? Your office has X telephones that you use constantly, and you don't retain a comparable number of messenger boys on your staff? What if something went...wrong????)

Using computers to generate paper faster is like strapping a jet engine to a horse. Sure, you might gallop a little faster that way, but a bigger engine isn't going to win the race. When a new power source shows up, you have to re-think your entire concept of "vehicle."

If energy use alone produced longevity, then we could live forever by standing at ground zero under megaton-yield air bursts. Obviously, energy use in itself means nothing. A tornado hitting a pile of bricks doesn't build a house, it merely increases the entropy of the pile. Energy is only useful under the command of Intelligence, and Intelligence has always been the scarcer commodity. Furthermore, when Intelligence is plentiful, it needs less energy to accomplish a task, and in wasting less it creates fewer undesired side effects to clean up later.

I almost wish we did not have one word "intelligence." Just as the Greeks had three words for what we call "love," one word can't contain everything that jams into the concept of what minds do.

Considerable evidence points to some forms of intelligence emerging without any concurrent concrete environmental benefit. Humans have had the ability to do mathematics for millenia now (as far as we can tell). However, mathematical ability seems to have been largely useless until recently. I have seen interesting speculation that mathematical ability is a lucky side effect of learning how to throw hunting missiles, but to me that sounds like a long shot.

Computers lack the fantastic wetware that lets us (sort of) cut through semantic noise. Thus computers will force us to write more clearly, and we will benefit. Like the child who could not see the Emperor's new clothes, our computers will tell us when we are ambiguous, when we add nonessential words, when our sentence structure is too complex, and how to better say what we are really trying to say.

We can already record the sound of the ringing bell directly, with exceptional fidelity, yielding a digitized waveform. The waveform is just a list of several hundred thousand finite-precision integers. Creating those integers from a simulation is not an impossible problem. After all, a computer, according to Steven Wolfram, is a physical system and it obeys physical laws. A simulation is nothing more than instructing one physical system to behave something like another physical system.

I would bet $5 that the first time you met your partner, if you had asked her to have sex with you in the first 5 minutes, she would have said "no". Had you been insistent, that "no" might have become "never".

I saw the movie ["The Insider"] and I did not get that part. The movie did not explain what made the guy unemployable as a researcher. It was clear why he wasn't going to work for another tobacco company but I didn't get how the tobacco industry acts like an employment black hole for scientists. Also, the protagonist was clearly not The Millionaire Next Door. He must have been spending close to his income to have free-fallen so rapidly upon hitting the end of the gravy train.

I can assure you that your [feminist] strikes against male sexuality are anything but surgical. You're bombing the Chinese embassy, your own troops, even the hangar where you park the bomber.

Of course I am sexually horrifying to the vast majority of women at any given time. That is true of the vast majority of men, including the man you are currently sleeping with. No matter how attractive he is to you, I am confident that the vast majority of women would be horrified if, say, a court of law sentenced them to have sex with your S.O. today. The same penis that gives you pleasure would produce permanent psychological scarring in the vast majority of other women at any given time.

Incidentally, what do you think will happen to skin color when people can readily and safely choose their own skin color?

If a rape is 'successful' then what you have there is a remarkably cheap reproductive strategy for a man. And according to the 'sexy sons' hypothesis women should tend to find attractive precisely those men who appear likely to father sons with a high probability of generating many copies of their mothers' genes that tag along for the ride. Thus one of the highest-payoff reproductive strategies a woman could have would be to have several sons or brothers who would go forth and rape thousands of women. Even if only 10% of the resulting offspring made it the net result would be an enormous number of copies of the rapists' mother's genes safe in their lumbering survival machines. If rapists are horrifying to women, and we apply hyper-adaptationist reasoning, that suggests women's genes are judging rapists to be not very good at what they do. Either that or the woman's chances of surviving in the ancestral environment without the support of a man were very poor. So even if the rapist might father sons who would in turn father hundreds of children, if a woman has to risk a 90% chance of dying to have a shot at those genes it isn't worth it. Even a 10% chance of dying would probably not be worth it, since death was reproductively more costly to a woman than a man in the ancestral environment. On the flip side, as horrifying as rape is for a woman, what attitudes do women have about their male blood relatives who are accused of rape? Do they tend to side with their kin or with the accusers? A man who raped a large number of women in the ancestral environment and got away with it would have been doing a reproductive 'favor' to his blood relatives, by making many copies of the genes they shared with him. Unless there's some factor I'm not thinking of we might predict from sociobiological reasoning that the feminist outcry against rapists might be somewhat muted when the rapist is a brother or son and the victims are not blood relatives.

Culture determines whether a woman says "Yes," "Oui," or "Si" but it does not determine what kind of man she wants to say it to.

Put that Occam's Razor away—you could cut somebody.

You might think my concern is overblown. But there are many historical examples of notions even more ridiculous than fat acceptance seizing entire generations and leading them to ruin. Fat acceptance is insidious because, as you show by your actions here, it disingenuously exploits our common feelings of sympathy and fair play. Given that obesity is a spreading epidemic in all industrial societies, getting soft on going soft is the worst possible response. That would be like convincing people to take up raising rats for pets during plague-infested medieval Europe.

Where does it say in the Bible that God will never put more on a person than that person can carry?

And, of course, because every religion evolved under the far-too-forgiving standard of never having to meet any logical test, the result is that every religion has evolved into a logical catastrophe, riddled with contradictions and absurdities and in need of constant patching. And usually oppressing all competing belief systems when one of them gets a 99% market share in some unfortunate country. All a logical person has to do is point out some of the leaks springing from every joint in the boat, and let the religious person's residue of logic (no amount of religious discipline manages to kill all of it) do the rest.

The ACLU exists to make sure every opinion can be expressed. How does the ACLU get away with this? Quite simply, because most people who are smart enough to win free elections to public office are also smart enough to recognize what makes the United States better than places like Syria.

Would a reasonable person feel a need to rank-order the various brain behaviors? What basis in reason is there for saying one collection of nerve impulses is "higher" than another?

Cruelty is nature's way of keeping life with its exponential reproductive capacity in check. When humans try to remove cruelty, while making no other changes, they simply delay the onset of cruelty and make it worse.

For something to be a "tool" it must have a definite nature and a definite use. For example, a hammer fits in your hand and is useful for pounding nails. Typically a "tool" is something people use to apply unnatural forces to physical objects, often violent forces, causing them to behave in ways other than what they would do if left to themselves. If you want "society" to be a "tool" then you must be talking about applying some sort of unnatural force to change the behavior of something. If you are trying to change the behavior of (some) people, please name some specific names so we know which people you want to change, and then state exactly how you want to force their behavior to change.

Even with an army of trained professionals, Christianity cannot stop its endless evolutionary tendency to schism (which is closely analogous to the way living things speciate, except that it occurs two or three orders of magnitude faster---so fast that gobs of it is visible within the historical era). There are thousands of Christian sects and offshoots, ranging from mere variants such as Mormonism to fundamentally different religions such as Islam. Christianity itself is an evolutionary offshoot of Judaism, which in turn shot off from other proto-religions. Imagine how fast Christianity would evolve if there weren't any churches at all to tell people what not to believe. Without trained professionals working full-time to combat the diversity of human imagination and keep at least some of their religious tools believing in just one common collection of hearsay, in a few generations there wouldn't be much of Christianity left that could be somewhat recognizable to Jesus if he were alive today. There probably isn't much of that still around now.

If you close your eyes and press on your eyeballs, you will see a fantastic variety of colors and shapes. Do you believe you are receiving a vision of the spirit realm?

Even the Apostle Paul had to admit that work was usually necessary to put food on the table, and a different form of work than what it takes to study the Bible.

Consider the lilies of the field, they don't toil for their raiment, and yet was Solomon in all his glory arrayed so well? Remove Man's feeding tube from Terry Schiavo, and take no thought for the morrow. Let God feed Terry Schiavo.

It doesn't require any work to believe in the fruits of science. I see my computers right in front of me, doing fantastically improbable things. Miracles really, by the standards of anyone who had lived alongside Jesus. And unlike every religion, the miracles of science are highly reliable. When they don't work, there is usually a good explanation, or we can buy replacements. Nobody has to pray to the computer and wonder whether it will be the will of the computer today to turn on and let you get some work done. We don't need armies of theologians to make elaborate excuses about computers that don't work. We obviously see computers working. We also see new computers getting steadily better and cheaper, year by year. When your belief system makes perfect sense, and has no glaring logical contradictions, it doesn't require any work to believe it. It requires work to doubt it.

The goal of rational discourse, for those looking to try something really different, is to get away from depending on individual points of view. If you can show how a set of ideas follows logically from things a person can plainly observe, then that person only needs to observe those things and be logical to understand your ideas. There is no need for that person to see them from your point of view.

Women have a real problem in that they have to labor under society's bizarre madonna/whore complex. Every young woman wants to market her sexuality to get what she wants, but she has to navigate some tricky terrain along the way. She must advertise her wares but only within the strict bounds determined by whatever flavor of conventional morality governs her particular tribe. Diamonds might be a girl's best friend, but plausible deniability surely makes the short list.

Each person reacts differently to a given assertion. Apparently lots of people were/are ripe for the picking when they hear the message of fundamentalist assertion and certainty. Presented in the right way, that is with the right props. A slick preacher in a suit with decent oratorical skills---much like a lawyer, but even better because he has musicians and a choir too.

In a way it's almost cruel for the televangelists to tell their marks to go out and repeat just the televangelists' words to a hostile audience without equivalent support. You don't see the televangelists braving the hostile waters of soc.singles, for example, where they might actually get some backtalk. No, televangelists like the way it works in church: the preacher stands up and says what he likes and nobody gets to disagree. Instead the followers go out to take the punishment, and maybe find a few more marks to come in for further brainwashing.

Has there ever been a day in your life where you could not easily have died?

Am I cloaking myself in the mantle of science if I ask to see a working prototype before I invest $10,000 in a machine that generates electricity from nothing but air? Proponents of such machines like to argue just the way you are arguing now. They are the victims of a vast conspiracy. Their machines work, but the government doesn't want you to know. Their detractors aren't being "scientific," aren't "keeping their minds open." It's all one big verbal smokescreen to draw attention away from the failure to provide the working prototype.

Why do you think there is something "fundamentally wrong" with the john's view of sex? I think most men would be in the market for a hooker if she looked breathtakingly hot and the total cost was sufficiently low. Even guys who claim to be religious (see: Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker). Even "happily" married guys. For example, suppose I could hire Halle Berry to make sweet love to me for a dollar, all completely legal, with Halle Berry checked out thoroughly by doctors and declared disease-free. How many men could say no to that offer? How many could even formulate the concept of saying no? I think there would something fundamentally gay about a man who could shrug off that offer.

To a woman, the trappings of a relationship might be even more important than the relationship. Look at all the bridal magazines for women. Women don't need all that crap to get sex. They get into all that crap as an end in itself.

If you don't have any sex therapist friends, take my advice and get some. They tell the most entertaining "work" stories.

It's possible for someone to have the best sex of his/her life with a partner who is having merely mediocre sex. For example, if (actress) Kate Beckinsale were to lower her standards (or more accurately, abandon them entirely) and have sex with me, I would probably get a lot more out of it than she would. And that is why I will never get the chance.

There are many distinct activities falling under the category of "sex," and in any given couple, the two partners may well derive different amounts of pleasure from various acts. Sexual slang reflects this. We talk about "giving head" because it's usually more enjoyable for the recipient. And there is no doubt about who the "recipient" is. The word "job" sneaks in there as well, because it's obvious that one partner is "working" and the other is not. A person might enjoy his or her work, but it's still work.

If a man just shows up empty-handed, with no way to take a woman out of her usual environment and focus her attention on him, how does he even get in the game? How many women will be impressed by his looks and personality alone? A few guys can manage that trick, but most guys need to spend money. Spending money is one thing that can set a man apart from all the other guys who merely yell "Hey baby" at a woman.

I am already aware that your emotional reaction to the concept of buying food is different from your emotional reaction to the concept of buying sex. If you wanted to be perfectly honest, you would just report your emotions and quit pretending you can logically derive an absolute morality from your personal biases. You're not fooling anybody, expect perhaps people who agree with you in that one respect and are similarly unable to reason farther than they feel. It's perfectly OK to like or dislike various things. If you don't want to sleep with a john, that's your choice. Why not just be honest about your arbitrary emotional preferences and forget this absolute morality nonsense? You're trying to elevate your personal whims into the central organizing principle of the Universe or something equally silly. The john is not "fundamentally wrong;" he is fundamentally wrong for you.

When people have a free option, and an option that costs money, if they select the costly option that means they like it more than the free option.

As long as you are young and attractive, you can approach life with any number of misconceptions about men, and it won't harm your prospects much because your only competition at the moment is other women, most of whom are just as willfully ignorant about men as you are. But it general, denying reality is a bad idea. When people decide what to do on the basis of inaccurate beliefs, they have to be very lucky to avoid getting burned sooner or later. The problem is that men are most willing to cater to your delusions while you are young and pretty. As you age and lose your looks, men will start showing you more of their true nature. You probably won't like what you'll see.

So, at what point in this evolution from molecule to man did the soul creep in? That must have been a strange time indeed. If you think animals do not have immortal souls, then you must believe that the introduction of the soul was a side effect of probably just a few gene mutations. But if that is true, then it must be possible for further mutations to un-do those mutations and cause soul-ful creatures to generate some defective offspring who lack souls. Hindus don't have a problem with the question I am posing because they think animals and people have souls. Animists have even less difficulty because they think inanimate objects also have souls, so they don't have to worry about when the first molecule became immortal. But Judeo/Christians don't believe animals have souls the same way people do. So for them, it's a problem to think about our evolutionary history and realize their beliefs require there to have been some first apeman who could live on after death while his parents could not. Weird, huh?

If there is no good explanation for something right now, that means you need to bring in more kinds of experts, not fewer. If you can't explain something, that means you don't know enough about to be certain you don't need to have someone with a particular expertise to view it. Before you can claim something is beyond the known laws of nature, it is first necessary to exhaust the known laws. The known laws produce a range of phenomena so complicated that scientists have to divide reality up into hundreds of distinct disciplines and subdisciplines. It's often a major research effort just to make sure you haven't overlooked something known only to a few obscure specialists.

Religious people have to struggle with so many logical contradictions in their beliefs that they simply cannot comprehend what it is like to be free from logical contradictions. So in addition to all their other lies they routinely lapse into declaring their opponent to be as religious as they are.

However, people have been trying to prove the existence of life after death for thousands of years. None of the supposed proofs have held up. Definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. What is the probability that this latest gypsy fortuneteller has finally found the trick?

When people first built things such as compasses, lawn mowers, alarm clocks, microwave ovens, VCRs, photocopiers, televisions, etc., did they have any difficulty winning over the skeptics? I'm sure there were lots of prototypes that didn't work very well, but it doesn't take much reliability to generate undeniable results in front of a hostile audience. One characteristic of real phenomena is that they work the same way regardless of whether skeptics are present. You can sit there and doubt that your computer will come on, as intensely as you can doubt anything, and it will probably come on anyway when you hit the switch.

At least you're consistent, like all the other rural farmers sucking off the government tit while braying about their independence.

Please give an example of some human imperfection whose elimination would violate some law of nature. As far as I can tell, humans are diverse, and for almost every undesirable trait you can think of, there is at least one human alive who doesn't have a bad case of that trait at the moment. Those people untouched by some particular imperfection prove that it is possible for humans not to have that particular problem. So it's just a matter of finding out how their molecules differ from the victims' molecules, and then how to make the appropriate adjustments.

Anybody who wants to make a point with me can state it in my language.

Sexual competition is a fact of life in a world of one-to-many and many-to-one attractions. If you want to play the sex game you will "steal" other people's partners and have other people "steal" your partners. And what difference does it make if you "steal" a man from another woman before or after he is in a relationship with her? As soon as you take a man off the market by any means, you have deprived the rest of your competition of the opportunity to enjoy him. You're saying "Tough shit" to all the other women. If you would have rejected him, he would have gone on to make some other woman happy. By accepting him rather than rejecting him, you deprive that other woman of the opportunity. Just because she never knew she would have had it doesn't make her loss any less real. And what if another woman wants "your" man? What difference does it make who got there first? If two women want the same man and neither one wants to share, someone is going to come out a loser. It's not obvious why we should favor one woman over the other. Clearly it's better for all concerned if the man ends up with the woman he wants the most, because he has the capacity to treat her better than the woman he wants less.

Studies show that the percentages of people who admit to cheating on their partners are always higher than the percentages of people who believe their partners have cheated on them.

Women are usually not "men of action." A woman who gets cheated on is likely to cry and scream a lot and maybe go for therapy and divorce her husband but it's unlikely that she will hunt down and kill the woman who defeated her in sexual competition. A woman probably has more risk of getting killed by the married guy when she tries to break off the affair, but either way the risk of violence is pretty low. How many people have relationships, even turbulent ones, and how many relationships end up with somebody getting killed? I have not personally known anybody who later got killed by a jealous and/or possessive relationship partner or their partner's spouse, and I've known a lot of people who have been in a lot of relationships.

Try this one on for size. A man and woman are together, making out, removing clothes, getting totally naked, engaging in foreplay with both partners active, the woman mounts the man and begins rubbing her stuff on his stuff, without penetration but obviously that's the next step; and then she suddenly says "I'm uncomfortable doing this," and turns completely cold. I've experienced this. I respected the "No" but I have to tell you it felt like an icy dagger being pounded straight into my heart. People tell me I'm pretty easy-going and in that situation I believed I proved it. But I really hope there aren't too many women who make a habit of this. Because I don't think men are biologically constructed to pass such tests reliably.

If I were surrounded by gay men who wanted to fuck me I would (a) not go on any dates with them, (b) not make out with them, (c) not get naked with them, and (d) carry a gun.

Really, I don't think the problem is "teasing" so much as the woman is saying that you missed the boat. (Or the little man in the boat.) When a woman allows you to touch her in various places, she is consciously or subconsciously testing to see whether you know what you're doing. Maximize her pleasure with the tools she gives you and (eventually) she'll give you more tools to work with.

Do women dislike getting raped because the media tells them not to like it?

A truly generous person would be stripped to the bone in a few minutes by the circling vultures of society. Imagine how fast you could go broke by saying "Yes" to every telephone solicitor who calls you. Unless you have infinite amounts of the commodity others desire from you (whether it be sex, money, time, territory, influence, whatever), in a world of unlimited demands you must be stingy to most people if you want to be generous to some. Most people who consider themselves "generous" are in fact selectively generous. Everybody I have ever known falls into that category. Most people reserve the best they have to offer for a select few.

Being "romantic" always involves misrepresenting reality to some degree.

It's much like reading Depak Chopra's talk about how we make our own realities. Such talk can almost seem plausible until someone grabs your head and holds it under water. Then it becomes clear that there are significant outside forces we cannot easily control that really do affect our lives.

It feels good to compete and win, knowing that by your hard work and dedication you made sure somebody else had to lose. I'm waiting for some Olympic gold medalist to come out and admit that the best part of winning the gold is not all the usual platitudes but to know that he caused everybody else in the race to go home with shattered dreams after wasting four dreary years of their lives. I don't see any intrinsic difference between wowing people with a beautiful woman on one's arm vs. wowing them with any other impressive accomplishment such as making money, doing something impressive in one's career, performing with a musical instrument, or winning an athletic competition. It feels about the same to wow people no matter how you do it. The only difference is in the intensity of the wow factor. A trophy woman is interesting in that she provides an automatic wow factor that is largely context-independent. For many other kinds of wow tools you have to present them to the right audiences in the right context. But with a beautiful woman you can show her off anywhere and you always get the same effect.

This reminds me of a singles ad I saw: "54 years old, but looks 53."

For example, I'm going to take a wild guess about the "rather needy" woman you mentioned above---she did not exactly look like Natasha Henstridge, right? I have seen a remarkably strong inverse correlation between the frequency with which a woman gets asked out by men and her impression of me.

All sports are palsy-walsy until big money enters the picture.

So you would say, face-to-face with a Parkinson's victim close to death, that you believe it's better for him to die than for scientists to do research on fetal tissue destined for the dumpster anyway? Are you a sadist?

The beauty of eugenics is that in the future people will not have to make these "either/or" questions.

Go back a few hundred years and you would find a majority of people stumbling through life with chronic untreated health problems we would consider unacceptable today. A few hundred years in the future, today's "average" will be seem just as horrifying.

Actually, nobody "really" commits these days, since everyone reserves the legal right to divorce if things get bad enough. "Commitment" really just means agreeing to pay some kind of a penalty for breach of contract.

Trust me. I'm male, so I'm an expert at trying that hard.

The more anonymity we have, the more crime we have. Our ability to identify each other unambiguously is a fundamental requirement for social control on behavior. Suppose you had the ability to become invisible. Would you do anything differently than you do now?

People who think they "lose" something when a relationship ends are just looking at this game incorrectly. Why do people perceive a "loss" when two people happen to get out of a relationship alive? Do we think about airplane rides the same way?

Visit any inner city in the U.S.A. and you will see entire communities of people who have already evolved highly effective resistance to birth control of all kinds.

The people who have the greatest share of socially valuable traits like plan-ahead intelligence, responsibility, and discipline are not fully replacing themselves. I don't think this is too much to worry about, however, because in 50 or 100 years genetic engineering will make everybody the mental equivalent of a Richard Feynmann and the physical equivalent of a star athlete and supermodel. We have plenty of genetic momentum to overcome the dysgenic effects of voluntary contraception until technology advances far enough to eliminate the problem.

Suppose you were a venture capitalist who had to choose between funding two software companies, and (somehow) you knew that company A's employees have an average IQ of 75 and company B's employees have an average IQ of 150. Would this knowledge affect your decision on which company to fund?

If you score high on IQ tests, you are smart enough to understand how deeply the marching morons resent IQ testing. Therefore it is important for you not to come off like an elitist. You are a member of an extremely privileged, extremely small, extremely vulnerable minority. A minority that has been the first target in several genocides, most recently in Cambodia. (And possibly in Rwanda where the Hutus resented the social dominance of the Tutsi minority---although I don't know that Tutsis of higher intellectual attainment were massacred first as happened in Cambodia and in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Germany when the high-IQ Jews went to the ovens.) Garrett Hardin calls your tactic "Conspicuous Benevolence." It's similar to how the Kennedy family gets to enjoy being filthy rich without risk of getting lined up against the wall. Not that the Kennedys are especially bright but they do have the goods to trigger resentment in the absence of quality public relations.

There is a possibility that there are more women who would refer to me as a "friend" than I would refer to as a "friend." "Acquaintance" is the term I prefer. A "friend," in my opinion, is someone you would lend a substantial amount of money to with no questions asked, where "substantial" is whatever number amounts to a sum you would feel distressed about losing to a thief or a bad decision.

For every movie star whining about the burdens of success there are a thousand ambitious kids waiting tables and going to 20 casting calls per week who would do whatever it takes to knock over the current king of the hill. And whichever one is next to rise to the throne will, after a few years, continue the whining just like his/her predecessor. While mysteriously failing to go back to waiting tables.

When a man claims not to care about a woman's looks, check out who he's with to see if he is telling the truth or pulling your leg. Similarly, a woman who absolutely does not care about a man's height is likely to end up with men whose average height is below the average for all men, given that short men are more likely to be available due to their relative unattractiveness to most women.

I mean, let's get real. What else can two people do for each other that is going to be better than great sex? Not all of us are as funny as, say, Robin Williams. I can imagine that getting a private performance by Robin Williams might be almost as entertaining as a good fuck with someone you find highly attractive. But I doubt it.

Why is faking an orgasm easy for a woman?

In my conversations with women, when the subject of Ohio winters and tropical vacations comes up, the response is 100% uniform: they all want to go. Although I have yet to test the theory, it seems that there are more women who would probably be willing to go with me on a vacation and share a room than women who would accept my invitation to go share dinner at a local restaurant.

If an insect bites me, I brush it off or learn to ignore it. I don't try to persuade it to stop being an insect.

The very nature of debate is to make yourself understandable to people who are the result of entirely different inputs than yourself. I am quite certain that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence could understand me if they had lived exactly the same life. If that were possible, then communication would not be necessary at all. The whole point of communication is to build bridges between highly disparate minds. And of course it is a thankless task. Just look at the history of diplomacy. Seeing the verbal abuse on the net that passes between the intellectual cream of the nation makes me wonder who is in charge of the ICBMs.

Nature is full of examples of predatory and parasitic creatures with exquisite adaptations having no other purpose than to inflict unspeakable horrors on other creatures, and these predators and parasites have no choice other than to do everything in their power to inflict such horror if they are to survive and reproduce. If Nature tells us anything about the nature of God then he makes Pol Pot seem like a pleasant fellow. That's because even a monster like Pol Pot couldn't think of way to design a stable system in which endless generations of victims and predators would be locked into a cycle of atrocities for millions of years with no hope of any respite until the next Extinction Level Event.

Who isn't interested in Liberal Arts? These were largely invented as a leisure-time activity for the idle rich. Of course they are more fun, for most people, than the hard sciences.

People figure out how smart they are early in life. Once they figure that out, messages to the contrary bounce right off.

I don't know about the Usenet regulars and their seemingly perpetual state of unbroken ecstasy, but I don't mind admitting to having met domestic dogs that seemed consistently happier, on average, than I am. For some odd reason I'm not envious. I think stupidity is one of the prerequisites for true happiness, and to me that sounds like too great a price to pay.

I don't know how anybody else's brain responds to success, but every time in my life I've experienced some, it's damned hard for me not to boast about it every chance I get.

There are circumstances in which the dismissive but always unsubstantiated "I can do that" claim has become a cliche. For example, there's the joke: How many guitarists does it take to change a light bulb? Twenty-one: one guitarist to change the bulb, and twenty to watch him and say, "I can do that."

I don't think "jealousy" really expresses what is going on. I think the real mechanism at work is the desire people have to stamp out every kind of diversity. It doesn't matter whether people are different in a good way or a bad way. If they differ they automatically become targets.

Apparently star athletes have high status because humans have a weird tribal tendency to identify with local champions in any competition reasonably similar to tribal combat. Football and basketball work; quiz teams don't.

I suppose everyone has read the (possibly apocryphal) tales of the lab rats that have such electrodes installed and learn that by pressing a switch in their cages, they can get a pleasure-zap in their brains. Supposedly the rats will keep pressing the switch over and over, neglecting to eat and drink, until they die. I don't know for sure whether the rat story is true, but certainly this thing called "happiness" we struggle endlessly to attain, at least in part to give us something to twit rivals with, is nothing more than the product of a nervous discharge from a particular collection of cells in the brain. Knowing this makes it somewhat harder to get so worked up about the whole thing. If someone out there happens to have a collection of HappyCells firing away in their brain more busily than mine, hey more power to them. I just hope Mr. HappyCells stays in touch with reality just enough to remember not to play in traffic.

I prefer the words "bizarre" and "incoherent" instead of "hip" and "cool." In my experiences as a teen, I learned that the people who were most "cool" at that age tended to become the least successful later in life. Young people tend to be much more concerned about the opinions of their peers than older people are, and of course older people tend to be somewhat more tolerant of real diversity.

I'm not afraid of reality. I'm not afraid of truth. And I don't care where free and open inquiry leads: all I know is I want homo sapiens to get there as soon as possible.

I recall as a child that my peers were children, and they were the vicious ones. The adults were constantly trying to break up fights and teach us to get along with other children. Occasionally they stepped in to defend us when they perceived we were on the losing end of things. Children tend to be almost incredibly intolerant of any sort of diversity. Even if they are in ethnically uniform groups they will still identify everybody's differences and single out some children for systematic abuse. Racial diversity simply has the effect of providing another immediate difference for children to exploit. When one racial group is a very small minority then membership in that group seems "abnormal" to children in the majority group. This is why I would regard sending a child to a school where (s)he would be in a 1% racial minority to be child abuse. The dynamic would be completely different in a school where there were several ethnic groups and none had a majority. Then there would not be a natural tendency for 99% to gang up on the 1%. If everybody is a minority then it's not immediately bad to be a minority.

I've only known a few people who dated substantially outside their own races. A few people dabble but when most are ready to take the serious plunge they find an ethnically appropriate partner. Why do you think we have races? Different races persist alongside each other for centuries because the vast majority of people breed mostly within their own races. If a white man wants to marry a black woman would you expect only one of their families to raise some questions? If so, which one? In my casual observation it would seem both families would have some "issues" with that.

With strong genetic engineering even "airbrushing" will become a thing of the past.

So you agree, then, that a high I.Q. score tends to be an advantage. We have no reason to expect the all-seeing god of fairness will insure that people with high I.Q.s always get shortchanged somewhere else. Some will, some won't, but compared to the people with low I.Q.s the people with high I.Q.s will tend to come out ahead on average.

I don't speak Italian and I know next to nothing about it but I'll bet it has as many racial slurs and invectives as any other language.

From what I have heard, really smart black kids have an even worse high school experience than really smart white kids. It seems their peers ostracize them for "acting white" if they do terrible things like study hard, read difficult books for fun, and get good grades. That seems higher on the scale of social sin than merely being a geek, which was all I had to deal with. Thus I would expect a really smart black person to find the concept of "race" even more devoid of practical meaning than I do.

"Rational human" is an oxymoron. But give us a break; only recently we were swinging in trees. Rational beings do not exist yet, but I believe we will build some shortly. I hope to live long enough to meet some of the first ones, although I can't be sure they will approve of me.

I don't like watching the Alpha Males succeeding with the same tactics that get a less attractive man slapped with harrassment proceedings.

There seems to be this idea that in any sexual conflict involving a man and a woman, the man is automatically guilty of the most heinous crime against Nature, unless, of course, he is attractive enough to make it fun.

Basic researchers are fond of patting their million-dollar gizmotrons while reassuring us that you just can't predict where the next big breakthroughs are going to happen. Presumably, we are to take this advice to heart with our checkbooks at the ready. One does have to wonder what can come of superconducting supercolliders other than nocturnal brownouts. Even particle physicists concede that a "complete" understanding of the sub-atomic "zoo" will not put us much closer to understanding the structure of matter on the molecular scale, which seems now to be "where the action is". And we must be on guard against the possibility of research priorities developing their own independent momentum and agenda. At worst, we will have kept a lot of intelligent people safely occupied in fairly innocuous pursuits. Imagine what would happen if they all went into politics or investment banking.

The nanotech people are claiming that 50 years from now, with luck, we will have the means to become personally self-sufficient in basic material necessities. Until that happens, our lives will be fundamentally degrading, because we have excessive need to waste time justifying everything we do to people around us. You can't be truly free until you don't need anything from other people.

Social conditioning can swing the pendulum a long way, but Nature tends to swing it back.

Try my "soothing voice/angry voice/snotty voice/whining voice" experiment. Select any Usenet article and read it aloud several times. Each time, try reading it in a voice that conveys different emotions. Try soothing, angry, snotty, and whining. Notice how you can dramatically change the impact of anything you read by putting a different tone on it. It seems that many people, perhaps most, tend to read articles they disagree with in an angry voice. Any article that suggests they need to change becomes a "whining" article. And so on. This is what people actually "hear" in their minds when they read articles that do not merely remind them of their perfection.

Military experts know that to keep enemies shooting at each other you must prevent them from having any sort of social contact with each other. Therefore, "fraternization" with the enemy is always treated as a crime by every competent military organization. It has to be, otherwise the teenagers in uniform would quickly realize that they have more in common with the teenagers they are shooting at than they have in common with the old men who are sending them to die.

Seriously, do we have any reasonable hope of creating intelligent machines that will not duplicate our militarism? That is, even if we manage to avoid infecting their impressionable little classifier systems with our own approaches to resolving conflicts, might they not eventually develop along similar lines?

It's important to keep in mind that most of what we consider "human knowledge" is the formal, written knowledge that generations of scholars have tediously and (to a large degree) unselfishly accumulated. Without this literature we would still be living like primitive tribespeople. What is the difference between a primitive tribe and a modern industrial society? In the primitive tribe, everybody talks and nobody writes. This limits organized activity to simple things like hunting and subsistence farming. Businesses that function similarly can do nothing more complex. In the modern industrial society, everybody talks, most people read, and a few scholars write. This frees the society to specialize labor and attack problems of enormous complexity. If you want to solve complex problems nobody has ever solved before, you had better hire some scholars. The vast majority of people still go through most of their lives functioning tribally; their experience of being "modern" is due to the availability of products and services that embed the results of our formal knowledge and someone else's heavy scholarly lifting. The importance of having formal literature and people trained to navigate it is therefore mostly non-obvious and easy to miss.

In most of life the ability to deliver results is worth more than the ability to dream up excuses.

The statistical evidence indicates that people who suck at taking standardized tests tend to suck at the rest of life as well. Yes, there are many exceptions (such as Mike Tyson) but the general rule shows up every time someone collects the data and plots it.

Just because a guy can outcompete the other guys doesn't mean he will necessarily make a particular woman's happiness the purpose of his existence. In some ways the fact that a man is capable of kicking other guys in the ass would seem to present some obvious risks.

Getting a lot of traffic tickets would also be an obvious sign of loser behavior. It doesn't take a genius to read a speed limit sign and a speedometer and adjust pressure on the accelerator until they agree. A person who consistently speeds has a simple problem with reality.

The law of averages predicts that people will tend to keep doing what they're doing now. People do change, but betting your life that they will change the way you want them to is just plain stupid. If you want a person who does X, your best bet is to find someone who does X right now.

Women hate loserguys because as far as you are concerned, they are a threat to the future reproductive success of your scarce eggs. You don't want your precious genes to get mixed up with any of that crap. Your genes recognize the threat to their long-term survival, so they program you to feel so much revulsion to a loserguy that your legs instinctively clamp together like a clam's shell. As far as you are concerned, it's impossible for too many bad things to happen to a loserguy.

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. But the basic incentive from the individual user's point of view is the same: to seek pleasure and/or avoid pain.

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.

I remember high school as being just about a total washout with girls. However, I didn't solve my problem by making some kind of conscious effort. I just became more attractive to women after I got to college, for reasons that even today remain somewhat mysterious to me.

Failure is almost always unhealthy. In fact, it is demonstrably more dangerous than success. That is why highly accomplished people in almost every field (except entertainment and journalism) live significantly longer than average. Highly accomplished people easily satisfy all the tests of "obsessiveness", "narcissism", or whatever else moderately successful persons find frightening.

In a world where most able-bodied used their bodies to move their bodies, the non-able-bodied would be vastly better off. Communities would be more compact and self-contained. Instead of expecting consumers to operate their own grossly inefficient transportation businesses, vendors would compete to bring their trade to the consumer. A world filled with bikes would be much kinder to the handicapped than a world filled with automobiles. For one thing, distances would be shorter by design, since absurd commutes by bike simply aren't possible for all but the athletically gifted. Think about that, able-bodied people who love your automobiles. Your convenience and traffic-congestion-induced-sprawl is another's imprisonment.

Why is dim lighting popular in nightclubs?

I read about some study that found 60% of HIV+ people neglect to mention that little tidbit to their sex partners.

The "unbathed" excuse is devoid of meaning. Haven't you ever taken a shower at someone else's house? Any woman who has a functioning bathroom can let her guest for the evening clean up first. Some of the men women find the most attractive are athletes, and these men get very dirty, sweaty and stinky doing what they do. A football player after a rainy game on real grass is about as unpresentable as the typical hobo, but the cheerleaders and other quality women are willing to look past the filth, stench, and various bodily secretions. What would Ricky Martin smell like after he finishes a two hour stage show? He probably leaves the stage dripping with sweat. There are probably women in the audience who would wring out his underwear into a champagne glass and chug it.

All the skinny little dweebs I have observed at close range had the habit of forgetting to eat for fairly long periods of time. That's why they appear ravenous when they are out with friends who remind them to eat. In contrast, no obese person ever forgets about food for long. You should not envy what a thin person's body does with food. You should instead envy the thin person's weaker urge to eat or stronger urge to be physically active.

We judge a person's understanding of X by his or her ability to predict what X is going to do next. A person who really understands something is usually able to manipulate it. That's the natural progression from "science" to "engineering." Most men who understand women well apply their understanding in the obvious way, to the difficult goal of getting the most attractive women to treat them with real respect.

If you read the book of Ecclesiastes in your favorite collection of myths, you will learn that "there is a time to plant, and a time to root up." The basic principle of husbandry understood by the ancient Hebrews and all other thinking peoples is that it is not in your best interest to enable every organism to maximize its capacity for exponential population growth.

Why don't creationists seriously address the claims of science? It's simple: to do so invariably turns smart creationists into scientists. That's what happened to me. If you study the evolution of "bible-science," you'll see that the creationist movement is not about exposing people to science but instead to insulating people from science. There is no such thing as a creationist who understands much of anything about science. Thus when a creationist runs into the first real challenge, such as Mark Isaak's article, his only available response is to throw up his hands in defeat and fall back on the defense that facts and truth and reality are not as important as his faith in God.

What I don't get is why pro-lifers draw the line at conception. Why not draw it even earlier, say when a fertile man looks at a fertile woman with lust in his heart? When a fertile man and a fertile woman fail to have sex, or if they have sex with contraceptive methods, they are depriving some potential human of the right to life. Just because we don't know which sperm could get to which egg first doesn't make any difference. Currently science is unable to predict what kind of a human will result from a fertilized egg anyway. So whether one of the man's sperm has gotten to the egg yet doesn't make any difference that we can detect. The only thing that matters is whether that man and woman produce every child that they can. If they refrain from having unprotected sex when the woman could get pregnant, they are murdering unconceived humans!!!! Pro-lifers would do well to learn from the example of Onan, whom the Lord slew for refusing to impregnate the widow of his dead brother. Presumably the Lord would have slain Onan if he had made her get an abortion instead.

Diversity means life is unfair. The fact that people are diverse means they are unequal. Inequality means some people will get more good things out of life than other people will get. And for the people on the raw end of the deal, this sucks. The downside of diversity used to bother me, but I got over it.

Historically, the only effective method for discouraging divorce was to punish divorced people. When divorce carried a large stigma, this impeded divorced people's access to new relationship partners. That gave then-married people a large incentive to stay together, because divorce had a strong tendency to put one's sexual future exclusively in one's own hands. However, society has mostly rejected the notion that divorced people deserve punishment. The result has been a rather high divorce rate. 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.

Refusing to satisfy the sexual needs of one's marriage partner is as an extraordinarily dangerous game of brinks(wo)manship. Something like burning down the company you work for when you don't get a raise. If I ever lose my mind sufficiently to contemplate marriage seriously, I would be willing to commit to monogamy as long as the woman I marry continues to give me all the sex I want. I would never commit to any arrangement that cut off all my outside options if she decided to stop having sex with me. That would simply be insane. Note that this kind of advance agreement is not the same as an "open" marriage. I don't have an interest in an "open" marriage. I'm simply saying that if I married a woman who later felt the need to play the brinkswoman, I would demand having a formula in place that would give me license seek the satisfaction elsewhere that she refused me. Of course I would not exercise the option lightly, for example if she had some physical problem that temporarily precluded sex. I'm talking about a long-term, deliberate refusal on her part to satisfy my sexual needs. There would be no surprises here, of course, by the time we were thinking about marriage. We would both understand each other's needs very well. My satisfaction envelope is fairly wide, so I don't think this arrangement would be unduly burdensome.

I'd like to consider myself a modest example of the notion that an active physical life need not conflict with an active intellectual life. I strongly believe we mistakenly imagine a conflict simply because physical and intellectual prowess are largely uncorrelated. Suppose these traits are totally uncorrelated. Then if we look at the people in the top 10% of intelligence and the people in the top 10% of athletic ability, only about 1% of the population will be in both groups. Only one in ten thousand people would be in top centile for both traits. Since we tend to regard a person as being noticeably impressive with respect to a trait if that person is in the top centile or better, it will be astoundingly uncommon for a person to be noticeably impressive with respect to more than one trait. The fact that it does seem to happen more commonly than one would expect implies that high abilities do correlate to a small degree.

The female attraction for dominant, high-status males is not really debatable. I'd certainly like to hear about a culture where women idolize low-status males; I know lots of men who would move there.

Generalizing is not always a double-edged sword. There are exceptions.

Negative stereotyping can work on the slightest differences. Some of the most bitter group hatreds in the world today are between rivals who are nearly identical ethnically and historically. Think: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and Korea. To an outsider (and often even to insiders), the rivals in any of these four battlegrounds are virtually indistinguishable. The fact that in the USA we usually require dramatic differences to drive group hatreds reflects our substantial success as a melting pot. That is hardly to say we are perfect. But just imagine what would happen if an Asian or African population group migrated to, say, Bosnia, and set up shop between the Serbs and the Croats.

If you and I are 99% similar, but our 1% difference causes 95% of our problems, and our problems are serious enough to dominate our thoughts, then are we 1% different or 95% different? We will not be aware of our similarities most of the time, while we will "feel" our differences continually.

I don't think prostitution involving women is practical on a massive scale, at least not until medical technology has caught up with the difficult problem of sexually transmitted diseases. Even then, it seems hard to believe a prostitution industry could recruit enough women to provide men all the sex men want at a price men would be willing to pay. Because, after all, if women wanted sex as much as men in the first place, there would be little need for a prostitution industry. But assume prostitution becomes legal on a wide scale. If the aggregate desire differential is at all large (say, men have twice the overall sexual appetite of women), a prostitution industry would require some small percentage of women to absorb the entire differential. If only 1% of women would freely choose to be prostitutes, each one would have to engage in 50 times as much sex as the average woman would prefer to have, and most of this would be sex with men of below-average attractiveness. I just don't see it. It's also hard to achieve a stable equilibrium, because if the number of prostitutes decreases, the sexual "burden" on the remaining prostitutes grows even higher. They can respond by increasing their prices, but that is just another method of rationing sex. Prostitution could not close the sex differential unless prostitutes were as affordable as, say, girlfriends. And there are very few girlfriends who require anything like $300 a pop, even indirectly. (On the other hand, it's conceivable (literally) that a wife could end up costing this much or more. Although, who's counting?)

The effects of artificial sex technology on society are difficult to predict. Of course vehement objections will flow from many parts of society, as they do now to the currently very ineffective artificial sex technologies of pornography, etc. It's not too hard to organize a lobby against pornography that includes men because pornography is so obviously inferior in many ways to real sex. Getting rid of porn is not really a great loss to plenty of men. But what if artificial sex becomes as good as the best of the real thing or better, and vastly cheaper? (I'm talking about a robot capable of passing the sexual equivalent of the Turing test.) I think in the long run it will be unstoppable, just as it would be impossible to prevent most men from running off to a sexual Shangri-La of unlimited, safe, and low-cost access to a troupe of supermodels, if men could actually go there. It is easy for most men to convince themselves they are not interested in such a Shangri-La for the same reason it is easy to pretend we don't want to go to Mars. When something is out of the question we eventually come to believe we do not to want it. Artificial sex could be socially beneficial. For example, it might be a very effective method of population control. 50 years from now the world is going to need that more desperately than we can probably now imagine.

No amount of political advocacy, browbeating, verbal abuse, or guilt therapy is going to eliminate problems that are essentially biochemical. Except political advocacy for increased funding for molecular biological research. The real tragedy of modern political activism is that it often represents a massive distraction of available brainpower away from the only strategy that can possibly solve the problems the activists are trying to address. A hopeful sign was the poster with the slogan "Prayer won't cure AIDS. Research will" which, unfortunately, drew heated objections from the superstitious/irrational wing of our society. Trying to persuade the average man to get a hard-on for a fat woman is likely to be as fruitful as attempting to cure AIDS by prayer. Yes, it's tempting to imagine that cheap words can be as effective as the slow, tedious, expensive work of science, but experience suggests otherwise.

If tobacco companies are making money by generating externalities for publicly-funded health care organizations, it makes perfect sense for the health care organizations to seek legal remedy. If this leads tobacco companies to increase the price of their product, this is highly efficient economic justice, because it internalizes the external cost of smoking and presents it squarely to the consumer.

Do you have any ideas about how a person can present a complaint while minimizing the probability that the audience will become sidetracked with unproductive speculations about the complainer's internal mental state?

Some of the happiest people I have known were mentally retarded. Some of the (apparently) happiest life forms I have ever seen were dogs. Perhaps I can learn things from dogs and mentally retarded persons, but real intellectual riches rarely seem to flow from such quarters. This leads me to suspect that "happiness" cannot be the ultimate test of validity.

Do you find it at all contradictory that the state reserves the right to confiscate the children of a sufficiently incompetent parent and place them in foster care? How does it begin to make sense that the state should have the ability to remove children forcibly from an incompetent parent, but the state should not have the ability to prevent that same parent from inflicting the same incompetence on future children?

By "lazy" do you mean "earning below the average wage in their locale"?

If a woman is wearing a dress designed to attract attention indiscriminately, then the burden is upon her to explain who she is trying to attract attention from. She is the one imposing herself on the retinas of all around her. If she can't figure out a way to attract only the men she wants to attract, that's her problem. How would we treat a company which advertised a product, and then when customers showed up at the store, the company told them to get lost, because it distributed those advertisements "for itself"? The company would be right by the letter of the law, of course, if it had worded the advertisements ambiguously enough that it really hadn't promised anything. And maybe the company really was so naive about the way its customers' minds work that it really wasn't aware of the effects its behavior had on them. One would tend to get somewhat skeptical, however, if a pattern developed. It would still be illegal for a customer to put a brick through the window, and I would approve of police action to prevent this, but I would understand an irate customer's motives, even as I put him in jail. The misguided customer needs to learn that an appropriate response to prevarication is prevarication, not violence.

But I thought women dressed up "for themselves". Oh, you must mean they do that until the "right" (according to their perfectly arbitrary standards) man shows up, and then, magically, the same costume they so carefully applied "for themselves" an hour before, retroactively transmogrifies into being "for him" as well.

When someone mows you down on the highway, the police rarely consider it a "crime". Your killer usually gets a few points on their license and a slightly higher insurance premium. Moral of story: if you want to kill someone and get away cleanly, use your car.

Stores are not public mammary glands. They are private concerns which exist to make a profit by selling goods. They spend money on "free" amenities like air conditioning to lure in prospects. (Not unlike the way some sexually aggressive men spend money to give "free" gifts, trinkets, dinners, etc., to women who are their sexual prospects.) If one accepts the store's offer of free air conditioning, it is quite unreasonable for one to feel annoyed at the sales creatures there.

While I don't begrudge the mentally ill their right to equal protection it's obvious to see what a bellicose enthusiasm for marital rape laws says about a person. For mentally healthy people "marital rape" laws are about as useful as laws against playing golf in lightning storms. Mentally healthy people are readily capable of locating relationship partners with whom they can establish predictable patterns of sexual activity.

It's quite normal in life to observe people who are in the habit of wanting something and assume they want it again. For example, if you gave your kid cereal for breakfast every morning and then one morning he started shouting about how you violated him with that breakfast cereal on this particular morning, would you not regard him as insane, and therefore incapable of being taken seriously?

I would prefer that the courts treat the wife's body the same way they treat the husband's property. Either way is fine with me: if the wife has rights to the husband's property, give the husband right's to the wife's body. If the court can't do that, then similarly remove the wife's rights to the husband's property. Note that between people who aren't married, the courts treat property rights about as seriously as they treat a woman's right to her body. That is, courts punish property theft about the way they punish rape, with similar sentences and so on. The courts clearly regard theft as a very serious crime, particular when the numbers get big in a relation to a victim's net worth. If a robber stole half your wealth, the police would go after him or her just as energetically as they would pursue a man who raped you. If marriage makes the horrid crime of theft legal for the woman, why should it not make the equally horrid crime of rape legal for the man? In the opinion of the court (which is all that matters) the crimes are similar. The court views a man's property as being about as precious as a woman's body, until marriage distorts the picture. Then suddenly the woman gains the right to commit a horrid crime against the man. Of course you don't see committing theft as being any more horrid than a rapist sees committing rape.

One thing women are statistically good at doing without any help from men is raising the next generation of criminals.

It's obvious to everyone other than lawyers and rad fems that catering to female whim without regard to the interests of men has been a social disaster.

If you want to go out with other women to meet guys, you need to find women who are comparable in attractiveness to yourself. If they are way uglier or way more beautiful, it will create problems. I think most women understand this because usually when I have gone to bars it seems the women are all in these little clusters where they have sorted themselves by attractiveness.

Everything your brain is capable of experiencing about the real world already passes through the datalink of your sensory transducers and nerves. Your brain already has a telepresence---it does not interact directly with the external world in many ways that you can survive. Your brain must remain encased in its highly artificial, pitch dark, warm, sterile, moist environment, and interact with the real world via multiple levels of indirection. Think of telepresence as having longer nerves and limbs.

While we are on the subject of dealing with time delays, I wonder if anyone has considered hiring whales to teleoperate bulldozers on the Moon.

Since instant mutual attraction is mathematically impossible between two low-SMV people there isn't much point in either of them actively looking to make it happen with each other. It's not like either one is going to get snapped up soon anyway. They might as well socialize for six months or a year at the chess club or trek conventions until random events conspire to see them both getting blind drunk in the same room. After they sober up the next day their resistance to the grim prospect of settling for each other might have worn down a bit when they decide that their freakish coupling of the previous night was, in retrospect, perhaps slightly preferable to another couple decades of masturbation provided liquor remains in plentiful supply and they remember to keep the bedroom very dark.

The fascinating bit about the anti-generalization dogma is how selective it was.

I don't accept responsibility for the crimes of my ancestors or people who resembled them, and neither do I feel smug for their accomplishments. Only a tiny minority of them did anything impressive or heinous anyway. And the vast majority of the important advancements were mostly accidental---and all were opposed by significant factions within the cultures that produced them. Suppose the Catholics had won and Galileo had lost? We'd still be in the Dark Ages. I don't take pride in being a member of a species that is smarter than, say, clams. We certainly didn't get smarter by having a plan. We just got lucky.

I am continually amazed at how little the women I meet understand about men from their previous experiences. Men keep women so in the dark that it's possible for a lot of women to imagine men and women are somewhat alike.

But if you can love yourself, why do you need anybody else to love you? Actually there are very few people who have any problems whatsoever loving themselves. We are programmed to have self-bias at an incredibly deep level. When we think we don't love ourselves, we are actually expressing our anger at the unavoidable truth that other people don't love us as much as we love ourselves. Face it, most other people in the world don't care whether we live or we die. If we cared so little about ourselves, we'd all kill ourselves from neglect in a few days or weeks. It's a pretty horrible thing to face the realization that the thing we consider more important than anything else in the universe---our lives---doesn't mean shit to the vast majority of people we share the planet with. Of course, virtually all of us return the favor.

In some ways, being in a relationship makes it easier to "trade up." Since you already have someone to fall back on, you can handle rejection better. That makes it easier to take bigger risks, i.e., ask out people who are farther up your attractiveness scale. Also, if you get attention you don't like, you have the built-in excuse of already seeing somebody. That is, you can honestly say "I'm seeing someone" if you don't want to date some guy who is hitting on you, or if you want to back out of something you started on the side but realize was a bad idea. (I have actually known women who dated men other than their steady partners when they wanted to, while simultaneously rejecting other men with the "I'm seeing someone" excuse. And of course, there are guys who cheat on their wives, but then use the excuse of keeping their family together to avoid marrying their mistresses! E.g., Bill Clinton. I'm always impressed by human resourcefulness.)

If you want to get a gumball out of a vending machine, it doesn't do any good to waste your energy feeling badly about the need to have a nickel. A better way to apply your strength is to see about finding a nickel.

I adopted my first cat last year, and I have come to admire its consummate skill at being an adept emotional parasite. The cat knows exactly how much affection to dole out to her hapless human host to keep him under control. Canis familiaris has a lock on the promiscuous slavering sycophant role, but a more understated approach works just as well. But not too understated---for example, my cat makes what seem convincingly like affectionate gestures toward me at least twice per day (sandwiched in between two sleep periods of eleven hours each). Even though that might seem standoffish by dog standards, by people standards it borders on romantic obsession. My guess is that if your cats were utterly indifferent to you, you would eventually end up calling a pest control company, as you might if you had a squirrel or raccoon infestation in your house. Squirrels and raccoons are easily as cute-looking as cats, but they make lousy pets because they haven't mastered the trick of feeding our starving egos.

I think one reason older men wear suits habitually and younger men do not is because the primary function of a suit is to hide the body, and a larger fraction of old men have bodies that look like shit.

Women define the game rules and hold all the cards early in the game. Men learn to view the relationship game as a game because women frame it as such. They even use the common word to describe people who don't play games well: losers. Later on, of course, women expect the game to end and something else to take over. But the problem with starting a game is that you don't get to decide when it ends.

With every passing year, Americans behave as if they care less, on average, what the media tells them to look like.

A society which truly believes there is no valid reason for any person to feel badly about himself or herself is a society about to unravel. The only way for that to be not true is for people to become rational, and that appears most unlikely. That is, as long as people make decisions based on emotion, then all of us have an interest in causing people to experience unpleasant emotions when they act against our interests.

Remember that every child grows up in a world where everything is a fantastic bargain compared to the cost of learning how to go about building the stuff. Nonetheless, enough of us do decide to take the trouble.

I believe that most people can determine whether they find another person sexually attractive without having to spend many hours alone in that person's company. If they can't, I suggest they consider trying to learn. As far as stupidity and brutality go, I suspect that you want to avoid these, and they don't go away as the result of any PC sloganeering.

In my view you should write me a check for $10,000 right now. What, you don't want to? Then you are imposing your view on me.

A person who is bigger and stronger than you has more choices than you. For example, (s)he may beat you up and take your money away, and you are less able to do this to her/him. So what do you do when someone has a biological advantage over you? You pass some kind of a law to make yourselves equal. This is what feminism is all about, anyway.

Illegal mothers will have a valuable lever: they are holding very vulnerable hostages. It will be politically infeasible to punish the mothers in any way that harms the children, or encourages the mothers to harm them.

Entropy is on the side of destructive technology, after all. It's always easier to destroy than to create. I doubt that humanity will ever be able to run away from its ability to destroy itself. In any case, individual humans have always had to cope with being surrounded by other humans who could, if they wanted to, kill them easily. The individual human solves this problem by persuading surrounding humans that they can profit by not killing him/her. From this follows a whole elaborate system of social control over behavior, the effectiveness of which depends on the available technology for moving information around. I.e., in primitive societies where the only communication is face-to-face, the largest stable societies are the clan or tribe. Inter-tribe communication bandwidth is much smaller than intra-tribe bandwidth, so neighboring tribes easily come into conflict. To form larger stable social groups under primitive communications, some form of brutal oppression is almost always necessary.

The faster a group of people can move information around, the more that group behaves as an individual. This is because cooperation is almost always more profitable overall than conflict. But cooperation is only profitable when communication is sufficiently transparent. Where privacy exists, cheating becomes profitable for the individual, and therefore inevitable.

It's very hard to come up with good analogies to date rape because there are very few other things person A can do to person B that will either bring person B to the heights of pleasure or to the depths of horror based on person B's whimsical mood at the moment.

Women dictate men's sexual self-esteem to men. That is, women decide how each man is going to feel about his own sexual worth, because women determine his sexual worth. It works in reverse as well. Suppose a woman goes through her day and she gets 50 comments about her appearance. If everyone says to her: "You're putting on weight" "Geez, you look exhausted" "God, you're an ugly bitch" and so on, by the end of that day what will her self-esteem be? Would it be different if all 50 comments had been enthusiastically favorable? Of course it would. Our self-esteem simply reflects the time-weighted moving average of the worth we perceive other people placing on us. When people "suffer from low self-esteem" there is always a reason. Everybody I know with this problem really was objectively deficient in some way that posed a social handicap.

I can honestly say that it's rare to see, hear, or read of a woman who properly distinguishes between necessity and sufficiency.

When your friends get together for dinner, do you expect the person who suggested getting together to pay for everybody's meal? That is, do you apply a different rule for judging the "cheapness" of a friend vs. someone who wants to get your goodies? If you do, then you might as well just stick a price tag right on your skirt.

Actually I have acted with compassion toward you. If you followed my advice to maximize your inner and outer beauty your life would improve. You react with hatred to my advice because you don't want to improve. It's easy to predict the course your current relationship will take if you do not change your behavior.

I'm not complaining about the fact that you hate me. You hate me because I decided to make you hate me. I did this specifically to use you to prove the point I am making now. The more you hate me, and the angrier you get while reading this, and the more you try to strike back at me for writing this, the more you prove what I am claiming here. It's time you grew up and accepted the hate harvest you have cultivated here and in your own life. Do you want men to hate you as intensely as you hate me? Especially the man you choose to sleep with? If not, then why do to men what I am doing to you?

In general when person A wants person B to do X, person B's insistence on doing Y will always appear to be a character flaw to person A. That is true for all values of A, B, X, and Y.

What one man---even a dysfunctional man---says about women is of burning importance to women, even as they post 6,000 articles denying that his opinion matters to them. When the opposite sex speaks, we listen carefully and we react emotionally. And it works the other way, even if the woman speaking has low SMV. Her opinion still matters to men to the extent that it might reflect the opinions of women who do matter.

Usenet is a fundamentally more honest type of communication than much of what goes on in real life. Of course in real life men are much more likely to tell women all the sappy things they want to hear. We are fairly good at this, because we have to be. Actually, we don't really have to be all that good at it, because women are so determined to see what they want to see that a man doesn't have to be much of an actor to play the role women want him to play. On Usenet, on the other hand, we have nothing to lose by being honest, and some of us find it refreshing to exploit this opportunity. One also has the opportunity to learn things about other people here that one does not readily get in real life. Oddly enough, quite a few people seem to regard this strength of Usenet as some sort of liability, and they seek to get everyone to chant that the Emperor really has clothes on.

Now, as you probably know, while we in our infinite hubris imagine ourselves to be the "same" person throughout out lives, to other people we are objectively a variety of different people throughout our lives. An infant crapping in his diapers evokes a very different reaction than a rambunctious teenaged boy, an ambitious young man, an accomplished middle-aged man, and a feeble elderly man. The needs and desires of this "one" person change quite drastically over the years, as do his effects on all the people around him. Thus from the point of view of everyone else who has to deal with him, he is not the "same" person his entire life. I am working toward a point here, and that is: it is perfectly logical for someone, say a woman, to love that man during one portion of his life and not during another. That is, suppose she loved the young man, but as his desires and goals and priorities changed, not to mention his hair falling out and the spare tire he put on, she found herself falling out of love with the new person he became. Then one could say she no longer loves "him," but the love she had for the young man is still there, burned forever into her memory. At a moment's notice she can recall her experiences with him, and all those old feelings come back as though their day has not even ended yet.

People don't choose to be stupid any more than they choose to be ugly. I don't follow this "logic" whereby so many people say it's bad to discriminate against the ugly and then they turn around and discriminate blatantly and without remorse against the stupid. Don't stupid people "deserve" love as much as anybody else?

If legalizing things doesn't make them more available then why do people who want to do X usually want X to be legal? That works for drugs, guns, porn, prostitution, abortion, liquor, BASE jumping---just about anything you want to substitute for "X" that somebody has outlawed somewhere. Could it be that laws actually do have their intended effect, to some degree? That is, that making something illegal really does make it costlier and more dangerous to obtain?

If you post an article to soc.motts, voicing your disapproval of men who do not wish to have sex with women, you will get flamed to a crisp. And rightly so. On the other hand, if you post an article to soc.singles, voicing your disapproval of men who do not wish to have sex with overweight women, you will be Politically Correct.

It is illogical for a man to verbally abuse another man who gets fat. A man who gets fat is doing me a favor, by reducing his own ability to compete for the superficial women I desire most. This might actually explain what the feminists are doing. It is clearly in the competitive interests of a woman of normal weight to reduce the social costs of obesity among her competition. Since the attractiveness criteria of men are not going to change despite any messages they receive from society, it serves the interests of the woman of normal weight for fat women to delude themselves into self-acceptance.

The minimum amount of energy necessary to kill a human being is actually quite small. Advances in military technology will surely be in the direction of getting closer to this minimum. Even if people scatter all over the solar system, the minimum energy necessary to kill them all should be a negligible fraction of the total human-generated energy.

If it is stupid to die for your government leaders how is it smarter to die for your hippie leaders? Incidentally, student radicals provided Adolf Hitler with his early power base. Student radicals have never had the patience for the slow and messy democratic process.

A rational person believes it's OK to kill people as long as the payoff is high enough.

Wanting kids strikes most people as a more worthwhile goal than seeking maximum sexual pleasure. But the interesting thing is that for men at least the two goals overlap considerably. Women who are at the best ages to become mothers also happen to be the most exciting and enjoyable sex partners from the male point of view.

Go to any gym and ask people why they are there. The ones who say "to look good" or "to lose weight" will probably be gone next year. The ones who say "because I like to work out" will be there in ten years unless they are felled by injury or major life misfortune such as marriage.

Defending common sense is a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Otherwise the entire world will sink into the abyss of intellectual hedonism ("If it feels good, believe it") and from there it won't be long until our wretched descendents have to go back to swinging in the trees---if there are any.

Only an egocentrist believes he can dictate his worth to other people.

Wait a second...it occurs to me that there is a slight possibility you would regard "Because Emma writes like a fat woman..." as being somehow insulting, perhaps because you yourself consider fat people to be unworthy of admiration. I discussed at length my puzzlement that fat people seem generally unattracted to other fat people. While this phenomenon is puzzling, its consequence is not: the hypersensitivity of fat people to being called "fat" derives, apparently, from the tendency of fat people find other fat people about as disgusting as everybody else generally does. (Because, as I explained, if fat people were crazy about other fat people, there are plenty of fat people to form an emotionally self-sufficient "tribe" who could easily disregard what the rest of society had to say.)

The simple fact is that some small fraction of people are perfectly willing to steal if they think they can get away with it. Another small fraction, probably of comparable size, is perfectly willing to rape if they think they can get away with it. So please tell me again: why do you think that failing to defend yourself against the first group is "stupid", while failing to defend yourself against the second group is not stupid? Why do you wish to sympathize with rape victims, while shitting on theft victims?

Throughout history, humans have suffered from chronic intellectual laziness. This manifests itself repeatedly in the burning desire for an easy solution to all problems. This is the basis for most magic and religions. The philosopher's stone. The urim and thummim. The magic bullet. Something you don't have to understand, something simple, something that does the job and relieves tedium. The easy way out. I'm sorry, but most problems in life are complex, and complex problems require complex solutions. Sure, you'll have people running to and fro looking for shortcuts. And they will be all too willing to sacrifice their rationality and objectivity along the way. They'll play into the hands of anyone who will tell them what they want to hear. Anyone with a vague, ill-defined, but intriguing pitch like yours.

What incentive does a lawyer have to keep a client out of trouble?

I can't think of many things that tell me more about a person than his or her diet and exercise habits. This is one of the most characterizing things you can know about a person. It's right up there with age, sex, religion, and IQ. Hang out with a group of hard-training athletes, and then hang out with a group of lumpy sedentary people. There is no way you could confuse the two groups even if you were blindfolded. The way they look at things, the way they approach life, the kinds of comments they tend to make about other people, the kinds of people they tend to date and marry---everything is different. Sedentary people tend to look at life as something that happens to them. Active people tend to look at life as something they can influence, where outcomes reflect the effort they put in. In other words, active people tend to take responsibility for themselves rather than make excuses.

People are neither "good" nor "bad," but instead complex machines who react in semi-predictable ways to varying stimuli. If you can figure out a given person's game rules, it may be possible for you to get what you want from that person by structuring your own behavior in just the right way. Granted, if your goal is to get something for nothing, then most people are certainly going to be "idiots." But when you think about it, there's really nothing idiotic about avoiding a ripoff.

If I say I am taller than you, do you think I am implying you have no height at all?

Humans have two conflicting characteristics: we are at once (1) almost infinitely adaptive, and (2) almost infinitely greedy. Because reality is very hard on us, nobody gets to be as greedy as they would like to be. Our adaptive ability rescues us, by helping us believe that whatever we can get at time t is what we in fact "need". However, this human tendency to mistake the attainable for the desirable is nothing more than a psychological coping strategy. When something more becomes attainable (and this becomes sufficiently obvious), we eventually revise our notion of "need" upward to match it. However, overcoming our adaptation to old limits takes time. Almost every significant innovation meets widespread initial skepticism. Hard reality forces people to truncate their expectations, to the point where limitations actually define life for us. Relaxing a limitation can then seem like a threat instead of an opportunity.

The fact that fat women can sometimes marry men who have to choose between celibacy and low-SMV women does not prove fat women are attractive to men any more than the continued presence of Cubans in Cuba proves Fidel Castro has produced a proletarian paradise. Cubans have to choose between submitting to Castro or drowning off the coast of Florida, a choice not entirely dissimilar to the dilemma confronting low-SMV men.

I don't think it's cheap at all for a woman even to imply that she regards the male hunger for sex as legitimate. Such a woman would have to be adept at fending off hordes of men eager for a personal demonstration of her generosity.

If I stood on the street corner handing out $100 bills as though I cared about people, and then I went home and laughed at all the people who mistook my gesture for generosity, would the $100 bills I handed out be worth any less?

Reality doesn't seem to be a big constraint on the range of possible opinions here.

Practically every aspect of our culture only makes sense if we conclude that most people are more alike than they are different, and that easily recognizable demographic subgroups of people are even more internally similar still.

The amazing thing is that many soc.singles regulars, such as yourself, imagine it is possible to generalize about people by nothing more than reading their articles. This would be like trying to judge a man's nature by observing how he behaves while trying to escape from a concentration camp or when he is fighting for his life while his platoon's position is being overrun in a war. People tend to behave differently while under duress, and posting articles to soc.singles is a form of "duress."

Girls tend to crumple under scathing criticism, whereas boys respond by knocking themselves silly to prove it wrong. Tell a girl she can't do something, and she might believe you; tell a boy he can't do something, and you basically obligate him to do it.

I started to enjoy rap a lot more after I started messing around with drum machines and sequencers. All of a sudden I could "hear" what was going on with all the samples, scratches, etc. There is no doubt in my mind that some of these rap artists are real innovators. Ironically, rap and hip-hop have explored more of the musical potential of the digital computer than has any other genre. This seems amazing to me, given that these art forms have come from communities which are seriously under-represented in the sciences and engineering. But I guess it really isn't that amazing; people invent things like computers for specific purposes (like to have the ability to wipe out the Soviets), and to do something really innovative with it, you need outsiders.

An interesting example of "female porn" is the movie "Pretty Woman". I recently saw this film with my SO. Since we were surreptitiously interdigitating in the darkened theatre, I was able to monitor her physiological responses to the various stimuli parading across the screen, simply by noting the intensity of her grip. During the most sexually arousing scene in the film, she nearly dislocated my metacarpals. This was, of course, where the leading man and woman were shopping for clothes in the expensive boutiques on Rodeo Drive.

I always thought an interesting race would be 1000 laps around a single traffic cone. The cone would sit out in the middle of a large, smooth lot. The rider(s) could circle the cone at any radial distance up to the boundary of the lot, as long as they didn't touch the cone. My first question, of course, is what would be the optimal radius for the rider to select? If the radius is too large, the rider would be covering an excessive distance. If the radius is too small, the rider would either drag pedals or have serious trouble controlling the bike, necessitating lower (linear) velocity. (Angular velocity might still be high, though.)

When someone chooses to do something for ten years I tend to be skeptical of claims about how bad it was for the person who woke up on ca. 3,600 mornings and freely decided each day to continue with that choice.

One thing I have learned through experience is that being alone for a "long" time (several months or more) is an extremely unpleasant experience. I found being alone to be worse than any relationship I ever had with any woman I found attractive enough to date. Granted, it might be possible for some almost unimaginably pernicious woman to make herself more unpleasant than celibacy (for example, she could combine chronic celibacy with other forms of rudeness) but in my experience this just doesn't happen in the context of what I call a "relationship." I never ended a relationship because I thought being alone was a better long-term alternative to that relationship. I ended relationships because I thought I could find other relationship partners I would enjoy more. Thus when I hear people complaining about their relationships I have to wonder what they are complaining about. Would these people have enjoyed being alone more? If so, why weren't they alone? It's easy to be alone. If necessary, just stop bathing for several weeks. Soon everyone will be respecting your personal space.

Based on the whining I read on Usenet I get the impression that many people find themselves repeatedly choosing attractive abusers rather than less-attractive people who will treat them well. The underlying assumption must be that the complainers think they deserve a higher total relationship score. But usually we don't. For example, when a woman chooses to become significantly overweight she lowers her sexual market value, thereby reducing the maximum pleasure she is likely to obtain from any relationship with a man. Unless she gets extremely lucky and finds a "fatty fucker" who is otherwise well-adjusted and desirable, she is likely to find herself having to settle for a worse set of overall tradeoffs: either less-attractive partners or partners who treat her worse.

The dating and relationship game is the closest most of us will ever get to raw, unbridled Darwinism. The comforts of modern civilization have dulled most of us to the fundamentally competitive nature of Life. We exterminated most of the big predators; public health measures have blunted most of the big early killers; most of us have never really been cold or hungry. So we don't have a visceral grasp of the cruel mechanics of Natural Selection that created us. However, the flip side of Darwin's theory is Sexual Selection, and it can be every bit as emotionally brutal as claws and fangs are physically brutal.

Well, it all began about 4 billion years ago...when two microbes discovered they both wanted to eat the same nutrient molecule. It's been all downhill from there.

(Some) humans can and do behave logically for brief intervals, possibly while under duress (e.g., during a physics exam or while writing a Perl script). Most of the time, however, most people operate primarily on emotions. And certainly the relationship game begins and ends with emotion. That does not preclude applying plan-ahead intelligence to the pursuit of an emotional goal.

One of the most interesting things to me about the test score gap is how it seems to recur everywhere. This is remarkable given the geographic diversity of various cultures and ethnic groups. Why would the basic ordering of scores by ethnic groups be the same in places as different as New York City, Detroit, Los Angeles, and small towns? Why isn't there some town where, for example, Hispanic students are scoring higher than Asians? How would it be possible for, say, the cultural conditions necessary to produce ethnic score ordering to unfailingly line up in exactly the right way everywhere in the U.S.? This is interesting because even if genetics has something to do with test score gaps there is also no question that environmental influences can affect the gaps---and the environment changes from place to place. So given all the environmental diversity why isn't there some place where the environment works differently than normal?

It's amazing to watch people routinely insult each other on the basis of intelligence and then turn around and hypocritically deny that intelligence exists.

There's something about movies featuring child actors I've never liked. Why does Hollywood insist on portraying children as somehow being relevant in the adult world? Yeah, I know, it sells more tickets to parents of the prepubescent crowd.

I read a book filled with puns. It opened with an apology, admitting that puns are "the lowest form of humor." I concur with that assessment.

My usual response to the occasional question about why I don't own a car is: "Why should I?" Interestingly, nobody ever presents a good reason. Their attempts always revolve around things they themselves are unable or afraid to do without a car, such as leave the house. Now if some really hot babe were to come right out and admit "Because if you owned a car I would fuck your brains out" then that would be something for me to think about, especially if at the time I wasn't already occupied with her competition. But when people try to bring up some version of that reason it's never the people who are actually qualified to hold that opinion.

I've written before that I know some guys who are not materially successful who did great with women in their 20's and then pretty much hit the skids as they aged into their 30's and 40's. If you're asking me to envy these guys you'll have to recruit every persuasion tool at your command and then some.

Have you ever seen one of those idealistic leftists standing on the street corner trying to persuade contented passersby to accept a copy of Socialist Worker and get it through their thick satisfied skulls that the capitalist system is exploiting them? It's kind of pitiful to watch when an angry, alienated person can't find someone else to sympathize with the horrible injustice they perceive.

Smart people are never "conformists" in the true slavish sense of the word. Smart people accurately perceive "conformism" to be just another potentially useful tool.

Imagine, if you will, that some mad scientist created a technology that could violate the conservation of matter, and with the flip of a switch turn you into a morbidly obese woman. Would you not consider this mad scientist and his technology to be a dire threat to your well-being? The fat acceptance movement has a collection of ideas that have the same result in any susceptible person who falls under their sway.

There's a saying: "Accept your limitations, and they are yours." The saying leaves something out: "Don't accept your limitations, and they are still yours."

Over the years I have been called both a "jerk" and a "nice guy" by different women. Probably even by the same woman. So I don't think these categories are particularly hard and fast. But they are useful archetypes (or perhaps strawmen) for describing what seems to be a recurring theme in relationships, particular among the younger set.

When stupid people are morally irresponsible the result is the modern American inner city, with its epidemic of crime, welfare dependency, and irresponsible parentage. I don't know what part of the country you live in but if you visit Cincinnati sometime I'd like to take you on a little walking tour, assuming you have the balls. No particular race has a lock on this kind of stupidity, but it's hard not to notice that the proportions differ a bit. People who are concerned about things like crime, welfare, and illegitimacy (and I think that includes most people) often find themselves asking "why." Especially when the stock answer that it's all due to racism gets harder to square with close observation at ground level.

A person feels urges to fuck because that person is afraid of something? Wow. I can always count on soc.singles to generate really new and fresh ways of defying common sense.

Incidentally, why do most people always find a way to put a negative spin on every indication that someone else is different than they are? I.e., why does everybody hate diversity? This is a rhetorical question because of course I know the sociobiological answer.

The payoff from having the information we need is so high that there is no way to prevent people from doing everything they can to get it. And they will get it, just watch.

The truly sad aspect of suburban sprawl is that is self-defeating. I recall growing up in a fairly pleasant suburb as a child. Considerable tracts of undeveloped land provided forested areas where we could hike, ride bicycles on trails, and explore. Today the same suburb is an almost unbearable nightmare. All the forested areas have been developed into automobile-oriented low-density housing and commercial space. Motor traffic congestion and noise are inescapable, and virtually nothing is accessible without a car. The once-spacious interstate highway is now the scene of daily traffic jams. I pity the children who are trying to grow up today in such an environment. Without the ability to drive, they essentially do not exist. Their parents barely exist either, outside of their cars.

The presence of animals in your neighborhood does not mean you are living in harmony with nature. Rather, it means your neighborhood is destroying animal habitats and stressing wildlife. Every new highway, parking lot, shopping mall, and housing tract that goes in will displace more animals. And these developments will go in, because a low-density lifestyle has an insatiable demand for new space. That happens because low-density really isn't compatible with modern technological existence. People demand a wide array of products and services, as well as access to the company of many other people. Trying to satisfy these demands in a low-density setting creates total dependence on excessive automobile travel. Since the automobile is so space-inefficient, it creates congestion even in low-density settings. Escaping the congestion requires more space, so the low-density community will expand much more rapidly than the high-density community, which tends to stay put.

Reminds me of the People's Republic of China---when they execute a political prisoner, they send a bill for the bullet to the family. Real nice touch there. But it's not much different than someone running me into the gutter, pumping poison gases into my lungs, blasting their horn in my ear, and flipping me off, then pulling into the "free" parking spot that I help pay for.

The absolute moralist can only consider a thing to be "right" or "wrong". If the activity is "right", then it is "right" in any setting or to any degree. Conversely, if the activity is "wrong", then the only "right" thing to do is ban it altogether. Fortunately, not much intelligence is necessary to elevate one's thinking above such insufficient simplicity. All that is necessary is a little arithmetic, and the notions of "cost" and "benefit".

I advise any man who resents the Y chromosome tax to become a millionaire. The Y chromosome tax is regressive, so getting richer is an effective defense against it. A particular woman expects you to invest approximately the same amount of money in her (whatever her number may be) regardless of how much money you have.

It's interesting that just when mainstream science is on the threshold of being able to address the problem of sexual unattractiveness, mainstream science is also sweeping aside the cultural denial mechanisms that people have used to help themselves cope with sexual unattractiveness, for example the belief that ugly people are at no disadvantage when it comes to finding loving relationship partners. Systematic research is clarifying the benefits of being attractive, paving the way for rational decisions on how attractive to become once mainstream science makes that conveniently possible.

It's interesting to talk to a beautiful woman. She sees her world as sort of one giant mating opportunity. She knows she can go anywhere and with virtually no effort have men lining up to do favors for her.

The woman who got [her husband] first did not check with any other women to see if they wanted the guy. She just took him. Since that woman did not care about any other women's desires, why should she expect any other women to care about her desires?

There might be parts of the country that are especially Bible-infested where a guy could run into a fair number of women who at least pay lip service to the concept of waiting. However, in my church-going younger days I learned that even the ones who really do want to "wait" are often willing to draw the line in a rather Clintonesque technical sense.

In my experiences with people, I have always found that people who find it convenient to lie to others will sooner or later find it equally convenient to lie to me. Since most of believe, at some level, that our shit doesn't stink, it's easy for us to get suckered in by liars who claim that we are so great they don't have to lie to us like they lie to all those other people who "just can't handle the truth."

Another problem is that you know people lie because they are in denial about reality in some way. They want other people or some aspect of the world to work in a way that it absolutely does not work. So rather than confront a difficult reality head-on and negotiate stable, sustainable arrangements, they try to have their cake and eat it too by duping various people. The problem with this approach is that it creates unstable equilibria. The slightest perturbation can topple the first domino and lead to total collapse. Of course, you've probably watched your share of dramas so you have seen the endless Hollywood morality play on the subject.

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.

If you want to get some sympathy for the shitty hand life dealt you, consider working the Rodney Dangerfield angle. He complains more than you do, but he gets paid for it. Go buy all his albums and let them sink into that fertile intellect you keep telling us about. Then get back to us when you figure out how to be entertaining.

There are no "bad neighborhoods", only bad people. "Neighborhoods don't kill people, people kill people." However, in this age of Political Correctness, it is important to blame the neighborhood.

The real cost of gasoline is already $5/gallon. We are merely suggesting that we charge consumers for the full cost.

Every motorist I know breaks speed limits routinely. In fact, in my very home town, a manufacturer does a fine business of selling a product with no other function than to facilitate breaking the traffic law. This does not seem to harm the public perception of motorists. Why?

I think absolute translation must be possible in principle, unless we believe that the human mind has an infinite information content. That is, if we view communication as a thought-transfer between two thinkers, then some finite serial data stream must represent the thoughts of the speaker in sufficient detail to allow the hearer to reconstruct them with arbitrary accuracy. We may not know how to move thoughts from one person to another as one would copy files between computers, but the materialist assumption says it must be possible. (If the brain turns out to be not a very convenient medium to "write" on, then one might have to resort to physically reconstructing features of the sender's brain in the recipient. "Let me give you a piece of my mind..." This won't be an easy trick, but it can't be impossible.)

I'm reminded of a young French princess who famously misunderstood her subjects' plight.

It's important never to lapse out of character around women. Dominance behavior is essential. Few things repel a woman more than the spectacle of the man who lets himself get rattled by anything, especially a test-threat from herself. I have experienced this exact interpersonal dynamic, and seen the effects of all outcomes.

Telling a young man not to let his emotions run wild when he sees a woman he finds attractive is like telling someone not to see strange things after taking LSD. After all, his blood stream is coursing with the mind-altering drugs his own gonads are churning out. It's also interesting to note that of the men are able to follow your advice, many of them tend toward classic "jerk" behavior. They learn to shut down entire emotional subsystems in their brain when the situation demands. Since they train themselves to care less about what any particular woman does, they naturally tend to care less about women in general. That is, if they are merciless in dealing with their own silly emotions, how much respect will they show for a woman's equally silly emotions?

I am sure that white discrimination against blacks has not helped, but I am not altogether sure exactly what will, or whether white discrimination can be prevented at all. For example, when I ride my bicycle around the neighborhoods of my town that are peopled primarily by disenfranchised African Americans, who occasionally pelt me with rocks, one thing I do not see is the presence of many white lip-service liberals. Most of them are tooling about in their luxury automobiles, which convey them in speed and comfort between their predominantly white suburbs and their predominantly white jobs and social circles. As they glance out through locked doors and rolled-up windows at the "product of white racism", they demonstrate by their actions that they believe continued racism is the most prudent course for them. Otherwise, they'd be down on the streets chillin' with the bro's.

If you actually talk to people who believe other religions, you might be surprised to hear how similar their methods of argument are.

The truth is only occasionally nice, as you could discover by facing it.

Men becoming sexually aroused by the sight of young women exuding fertility cues is as normal and unavoidable as a hungry person salivating at the smell of cooking food. I don't feel guilty for having the same instincts that caused my ancestors to create me. Rather, I feel disappointed that most of the time when I look at a young woman and feel lust in my heart for her, she is not feeling lust in her heart for me. But unlike you, I am willing to accept the unpleasant fact that I am not very interesting to most of the women I find very interesting, instead of cooking up some ridiculous headgame to divert my attention from my inadequacies. I wonder, would it be possible to guilt millions of people into handing me 10% of their income because they have the normal physiological response to food odors?

Whoever the straight women might be trying to impress by dressing up and wearing makeup, apparently many gay women are not. I suppose it must be pure coincidence that a straight woman tends to assign just as much importance to the way she looks as men tend to assign importance to the way she looks. Women tend to place less importance on a man's demonstrated attention to sartorial detail when determining which man to sleep with; and in another amazing coincidence, most straight men tend to be a bit haphazard when it comes to matters of dress and grooming.

To directly test a person's level of concern for your opinion, simply say something insulting to that person, spiced up with a bit of disdainful laughter, and see if you elicit an emotional response. A person who does not care about your opinion of him or her will be indifferent to your attempted insults. Conversely, a person who is highly sensitive to your comments obviously feels deep concern about your opinions. Your opinion may not be the only opinion that matters, but it clearly matters, in proportion to your target's intensity of emotional arousal.

While you are hoping, every Sunday thousands of professional liars with no scientific training indoctrinate their millions of dupes to reject the overwhelming evidence and believe humans did not descend from monkeys. They succeed in this largely by speciously conflating discoveries of science with liberal social trends such as gay marriage. Gay marriage offends the red staters; therefore Darwin must be wrong. That's not much of a leap for people who have been indoctrinated since birth to reject logic.

I'll admit, one reason I have never married is my sincere belief that marriage reduces a woman's motivation to care about whether I might be attracted to her.

It might seem impossible to save $2,000 per month. However, there are people who are living on $2,000 less per month than the amount a lot of people reading this spend every month.

About 10 years ago I compared notes with a friend and we concluded that at that time the difference in our respect net worths was almost wholly attributable to the fact that I had not owned an automobile in almost the previous 10 years. Automobiles are not only expensive to own and operate but they also make it much easier to spend money on other things.

I find it interesting to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger films. Even though Arnold is not a great actor---and this fact becomes all the more apparent when we see him surrounded in his films by people who can act---nonetheless I have found most of Arnold's films extremely entertaining. One can see the genius of directors like James Cameron as they take advantage of what Arnold can do while protecting Arnold and the film from what he can't do.

Only financial losers get worked up over the effects of minor twiddling in the tax laws. These are but little roadbumps compared to the problem of earning and investing tens of thousands of dollars more each year than you spend. A couple of grand here or there isn't going to make any difference.

By far the most reliable wealth formula for a young woman is to marry a wealthy older man. Do this and you virtually guarantee you will realize all the goals you list above. Ideally you want a man who has both a high income and a high propensity to save. So if financial security is your goal look for older guys who are living well below their means. Many will be flattered by attention from a much younger woman and one of them should be easy pickins for you.

Well, you can deny reality all you want, but I agree with those who have shown that feminism is about special perks for women.

There are other men (generally new to Usenet) who droolingly picture "supermodel" whenever they read something with a female name. I've spent enough time on Usenet and in the real world to know that this medium is highly unlikely to interest stunningly attractive women. For starters, note how few women in their 20's bother to spend much time here. A woman in her 20's still has the potential to have a life, and thus quickly realizes what a mistake it is to squander her potential with a bunch of cranky old people.

Everybody is nice to people they like, and indifferent at best or mean at worst to people they don't like. The same person can seem to be giving, generous, compassionate, caring, and empathetic to one person, and cold, aloof, and unfeeling to another person.

Why do I "deserve" my lot, and what could I do to "deserve" something different? If I "deserved" something different would I get what I "deserve"?

There are apparently serious people who look at the higher crime rates among black men and the consequent higher incarceration rates, and then with a straight face advocate lighter sentences for black criminals because they believe it damages the black community to have what they consider a high proportion of black men locked up. I guess they think it would be better to have more black people getting robbed, raped, and murdered. Don't ask me to explain it.

If you can't fight city hall imagine trying to take on Darwin.

The fundamental theorem of soc.singles is that every argument is, on some level, either about child support or soon will be.

Women who resent men, or who are perhaps frightened of us, find all sorts of negative ways to portray our ability to have fun in ways that they can't. I say we just stop buying other people's attempts to make us feel badly about what we are. Especially when what we are can be good in the right context. Granted, the odds against that context occurring are zillions to one. But that's hardly our fault. I mean, really. It's only a weird accident of history that I wasn't born into a world populated mostly by female supermodels (or fair approximations) who are all burning with lust to fuck my brains out. I seem to be wired to function extremely well in such a world. Why, I couldn't tell you.

In most cases getting married early will harm the finances of both partners relative to where they would both be if they lived alone and concentrated on advancing their careers and building their investment portfolios. You can save an enormous amount of time and money by living in a small apartment rather than buying and outfitting and maintaining an elaborate home. In a small apartment you have less incentive to buy stuff because you don't have any place to put it. You don't need a lawn mower, etc. and you don't waste any time on the yard and so on. Put all that extra time into your career and you'll be light years ahead of your peers who got married and fell into the maw of the suburban consumption machine.

I have a friend who dismisses the athletic accomplishments of the competitors who ride in the Tour de France. He says, "If I had the time to train as much as those guys, I could ride just as fast." Well, that might be true. But then again, it might not. Interestingly, the organizers of the Tour de France do not award a jersey to the member of the general public who expresses maximum braggadocio.

When someone says "I don't have to explain my position to you" the speaker is more likely to be a woman than a man. We see similar delusions at work when women enter the world of business and whine about how the competitive nature of business is at odds with their nurturing, gentle, connected personalities and how women need to restructure the economy to be more accommodating to themselves. Then, of course, there is the all-time whopper: "Womens' ways of knowing."

The simplest explanation for a person's refusal to support a claim is that the person cannot support it. This rule works so well that every group of people with objective performance criteria automatically applies this rule.

Back in my days of involvement in the church, I began to develop my early suspicions that something was amiss when I discovered a rule about claims of the miraculous: the farther away in space and time an alleged miracle happened to be, the more miraculous it became. This was obvious even in the testimony of "faith healers" who traveled to 3rd world countries and claimed vastly greater numbers of miraculous healings, etc., in their rallies and revivals there. That's the spatial-distance factor. The time factor is when we look at claims from the past, such as all the amazing things that allegedly happened in the Bible and which we know about from the writings of people who had an obvious interest in convincing other people to believe what they believed.

If you believe your thoughts and opinions only apply to you and your circle of friends, why do you assert them upon the entire world?

Frankly, when I see a car with a "Save the Rain Forest" bumper sticker, or anything to do with "World Peace", I want to vomit.

The most attractive women I know did not get that way by working for it. Sure, they need to work to squeeze out their last couple percents of sexual market value, but 98% of what makes a woman sexy doesn't come out of a bottle, a magazine, or a department store.

Just what do you suppose filled Americans with all that nice compassion for the Kuwaitis, and not the other violated peoples of the world? Correlation isn't causality, of course, but the record is in favor of a jaded view.

When I say that "money can buy love", I don't mean it can create love out of nothing. If I have $1,000 in my hand, I can't exchange it for groceries unless I can find someone with groceries who wants to make a deal with me. So, if I am sitting on an ice floe somewhere in the Arctic Ocean, I could well write a song like: "I don't care too much for money, because money can't buy me groceries."

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.

If all we cared about was saving money, we would do things like grind up all the old people for fertilizer. Even if riding bikes was more expensive than driving cars, I would still ride bikes whenever possible, because I don't consider unnecessary violence to be a worthwhile way to save money.

In the long run, the poor suffer disproportionately from being forced to participate in the most inefficient transportation system in existence. Many of the poor have difficulty participating in the economy because they must earmark a high proportion of their income to maintain automobiles. This tends to lock them into poverty by discouraging their efforts to save. Low-income people suffer higher accident rates, and they are far less likely to collect from insurance policies, either because they do not carry insurance, or because they lack access to legal counsel.

The only person who can reject the evidence for physics is a solipsist. To disbelieve physics, a person has to reject the reproducible evidence of her own eyes. Much of this evidence is not only easy to come by, it is quite impossible for most people to avoid. Most of us are sitting in rooms with hundreds, even thousands of different manufactured products. If physicists had gotten things wrong, these products would not be here. There have been thousands of cultures with a different "understanding" of how Nature works, and none of them were able to come up with all this stuff (and not for lack of inventiveness, either).

If Neil Armstrong's stroll on the Moon was objective, then the money that made it possible was objective too. Actually, I should say the information transfer that the money represented was objective, too, although the "reality" of money exists at a level of abstraction away from the objective reality of things that come to exist because of it. That is, of course, by design: we want money to represent abstract wealth rather than wealth in the form of specific goods because that makes money useful as a medium of exchange. Arguing about whether a thing called "wealth" can have an abstract existence apart from physical objects with real value is like arguing whether the number "2" has objective reality apart from its instantiation as "two of something." To my mind this is not a fruitful argument because it is always easy to find two objects we can count, or a million dollars' worth of bricks. When someone starts talking about a really abstract concept, like God, who/which has no instantiation in any objective reality, we are suddenly a ship without a rudder.

The average man has spent more money to sustain his "social life" (to phrase it politely) than he has contributed to any charity endorsed by Mother Teresa. An objectivist would conclude that the average man cares more about having a social life than he cares about anything Mother Teresa did.

Money is nasty in the sense that obtaining it forces a person to think about what other people value. Money is nice in the sense that having obtained it one can then force other people to think about what one values. Money is the nasty reminder that none of us are self-sufficient, let alone are we god. We have to think about other people, disgusting as they are, if we wish to get along in this world.

I refer to the terror tactics of motorists, who have succeeded in making the streets in many areas too frightening for most people to imagine riding a bicycle on them. In the years since Earth First! began getting press, how many people have they killed? In that time, how many people have motorists killed? The original "monkeywrenchers" were those who first decided that society as a whole should absorb their external costs. It seems strange to me to deride another group for adopting one's own tactics.

The primary function of prayer is to make people feel better. Even people who pray demonstrate this by taking direct action whenever they can. In this sense prayer is no different than music or drugs. Or roller coasters.

One of the major distinguishing features of the human species is our plan-ahead intelligence. We can develop much more complex and accurate mental models of our world than any other animal, and we can use these models to let our hypotheses die in our stead. The advice to take life "one day at a time" is a repudiation of the most important aspect of our humanity. I advise people to bite off the biggest chunks of life you can swallow. Stop discounting the future; rather, be ready to trade your short-term gratification in exchange for long-term reward. The ability to do this is what makes humans better than any other animal.

Uploading animals might even be significantly useful in its own right, even if the "ultimate" goal of uploading humans hits some unforeseen show-stopper. Animal "models" are very popular for behavioral studies. I'm not sure how well an animal model would live in a computer, but it would sure stink up the lab a lot less in software.

If you spend more time with a basset hound than a cheetah (assuming you can choose either), then you are saying by your actions that the basset hound is "better" to you. You can deny it all day, but if I am the cheetah and I want the time you are lavishing on the basset hound, what you are saying will be nonsense to me.

The notion of hierarchy applies virtually everywhere in life. For example, a company has low-level employees and high-level employees. The high-level employees get more of the company's resources (basically this boils down to money, which is analogous to your time), and they get to select from (or have to perform) a much wider variety of activities at the company. The low-level employees don't get paid much and they don't get to do as many different things. The analogy with friends vs. lovers is obvious.

Since hierarchies emerge naturally and undeniably wherever two or more are gathered together, a basic life skill is developing the ability to figure out where one stands with respect to each hierarchy one must deal with. Missed opportunities and/or disasters await the person who mistakes his/her rank. In any case, you might note that the people arguing with you in this thread are (apparently) men. That's easy to understand. Men are constantly battling each other for rank. To us it is obvious that in any given situation, a group of people end up with some kind of rank-ordering. Women, on the other hand, often labor under the burden of an impossible societal expectation that they must do no harm, and be nurturing, compassionate, and above all: fair. Neither I, nor any of the other men arguing with you can understand why you have to try to rationalize away the simple fact that you rank everyone you know.

Since being an asshole is bad, I'm trying to decide whether being a phoney asshole is better or worse.

For a belief to function as an identifiable source of pleasure apart from one's immediate sensory reality, the belief must contradict one's immediate sensory reality.

According to a microbiologist I work with, if you wiped out all the microbes from the Earth (excluding direct human symbionts, I guess), just about everything else, including us, would be dead within 30--50 years.

Every rule is arbitrary at some level, because every rule seeks some goal, and every goal is arbitrary. Including the goal of surviving. Of course, most of us share the arbitrary goal that staying alive is desirable.

If people can get a free ride at someone else's expense, they'll almost always take it. If that someone else comes back and tries to stop them, the free rider will always cry "arbitrary!".

Some people do seem to need someone or something around to yell at. I see lots of pet owners who do that. They buy a cat or dog, and when the cat or dog behaves like a cat or dog, their "owner" gets to stand there and yell at the animal for behaving like an animal. If I invite another living creature or person into my life, why would I want to yell at he/she/it for being itself?

Since pathogens generally target some specific population of host animals, the larger the population of any single host species, the faster the pathogens can mutate, grow, and propagate. In a natural ecosystem, with thousands of plant and animal species competing for space and food, the relatively small population of any single species helps keep bacterial and viral plagues in check. But when one species of animal (e.g., Man) wipes out most of the other animals and populates huge communities, the name of the microbial game becomes, "Infect Man."

Have you ever seen a rioting mob? How about people cheering madly at a sporting event? A person experiencing road rage? A person having an orgasm? A woman getting angry when men fail to read her mind? A person getting upset over a few insults in a Usenet article? These are all behaviors that involve a partial or total suspension of rational thought. They are also perfectly normal behaviors.

I've seen in the real world that usually the most sexually desirable people have a vicious side. They are aware of their market value and privileged status so they feel no need to grovel and pander and curry favor.

Since when do people do what they "should" do? Do you go through life assuming the average person is basically competent? Do you bet anything of value on this assumption?

Given that men supposedly run the planet, why are we unable to educate women in the essential art of making our existence more enjoyable? The loss is doubly tragic when we consider the millions of young women at their peak of attractiveness who are failing to have as much sex as they possibly can during the few short years when they have the most to offer.

The best way to play with a woman is to voice the same nonsense women do, and see whether she will actually buy it coming from a man. Say something like: "You know, one of the hardest things about having a body as attractive as mine is the way so many women come on to me just for sex. Sure, I appreciate a compliment as well as the next guy, but after those predacious women use me for their own pleasure and run off after their next conquest, well... that just leaves me feeling cold and empty. I hunger so much to find a woman who is truly interested in making love last. I mean, anybody can get laid with no problem if that's all they want. But the real challenge is to find that woman who wants more than just a quick thrill, you know, the woman who really wants to be there when the mind-blowing excitement gives way to the mere ectasy of years spent growing ever closer together." It's so funny to talk to a woman this way because (a) she's identifying with it 100% and (b) she wants to believe the guy means it yet (c) she cannot logically accept these kinds of words coming from anything with a dick, that is if she's anything with a brain. The facial expressions alone are priceless to watch. It's sort of the mental equivalent of driving a car with one foot flooring the accelerator and the other foot standing on the brake.

Eventually one of the fruits of logical positivism will be improved genetic engineering that lets us apply our intelligence toward correcting specific genetic defects rather than leaving it up to Nature to wipe out entire organisms that happen to have a few too many bad genes.

Bear in mind that our notions of "robotic" and "mechanical" are necessarily limited by the relatively low complexity of present-day human artifacts. In another 100 years, "robotic" is unlikely to seem like such a slur, as Moore's Law continues to drive our intelligent artifacts toward behaviors rivalling and perhaps even surpassing our own for richness and complexity.

Try to imagine a militaristic society consisting entirely of women and eunuchs. I don't think socialization accounts for everything.

Men tend to take out their problems on externalities, whereas women tend to direct their problems inward and become neurotic. That is one reason why women have an easier time getting sympathy than men. When you see a man who is in pain, first you have to look to your own safety. Life experience has taught us all to generalize correctly about men in pain. The first essential response is to deny that the man in pain is really suffering and he is entirely responsible for bringing his own problems on himself. That neutralizes any sympathy mechanisms that might interfere with the switch to DefCon 3.

Whenever the subject of motive arises, emotion cannot be far behind. "Motive" and "emotion" share the same root, after all.

The only place I have ever heard of fat-admirers is on the Internet, and I have never seen anything to suggest a particularly dramatic variation in body-type preferences. A possible exception might be a few hints that among some Africans and persons of African descent, a more ample woman might be considered attractive. But this is very hard to detect from the films and other images that come from Spike Lee, Ice Cube, etc. Rent a sexploitation film aimed at predominantly black moviegoers, e.g., "Booty Call" and tell me what dramatically different concept of female beauty is on display there.

Consider an analogy with people who believe in God because believing in God makes them happy. I say to such people: "Assume God does not exist. Notice that you are still happy. Therefore you are the person who decides how happy you are." Or if they don't get it, I say: "OK, assume God exists. Assume that you believe in God and this makes you happy. Well, you decided to believe in God. Therefore you decided to be happy. So just skip the God step and go straight to the happy."

My motivation (read: urge, impulse) to have sex with a woman is primarily a function of her physical characteristics. However, like most men (apparently), I ignore or override the vast majority of sexual impulses I feel. But when I do manage to enjoy sex with a woman, it's my body's way of saying it likes her body. Yes, I am aware that lots of people like to imbue the act with all sorts of lofty spiritual overtones, but that is simply too pompous for my tastes. It's simply comical to picture all that grunting and sweating and odd facial expression to constitute anything other than an animal act.

It's important to understand what "guilt" is. "Guilt" is your brain's way of urging you to do what other people are telling you to do. This is, of course, socially useful, since some form of social control is essential to counteract runaway self-bias. People are fundamentally selfish, but we are all better off in the long run if we sacrifice some of our short-term selfishness and agree to cooperate for mutual gain.

If women are equal then it does not matter whether scientists study males or females, the scientists will get the same results. If you are saying scientists need to study women separately from men, you are saying women and men are inherently unequal. So which way do you want it?

Incidentally, I wish you hadn't posted about your sex-trade credentials either. You are speaking to an audience which contains a majority of sexually disenfranshised young men, most of whom have not yet learned that they can't fawn their way into a woman's pants. A bona fide female ex-porn star posting here is a lot like tossing fresh mackerel to a school of hungry sharks. Except that most of the sharks will be biting off their own fins and tails.

Western civilization is peculiar in that we have a remarkable array of taboos against being natural. Unfortunately, many of these taboos lead us toward environmentally destructive behavior. How many people prefer to drive automobiles rather than ride bicycles because the latter causes them to sweat? Next time you inhale the brown goop that passes for air in most cities, you can thank the fashion industry for contributing their share to it, by marketing clothes incompatible with the body's mechanisms of thermoregulation.

As usual, the techno-optimist fails to comprehend the Tragedy of the Commons. There has never been a techno-optimist who does. To the techno-optimist, there is no such thing as an "external cost." This is exactly why people with guns will always be necessary.

You cannot simultaneously favor "freedom" and unrestrained population growth, unless you have abandoned any pretense to rationality.

Fundamentalism survives in part because it is right about some things. Even though everybody likes to excuse his or her own indulgence almost everybody does feel some degree of discomfort for what he or she deems the over-indulgences of other people.

A man with a net worth of >$10M has the potential to live a life almost completely free of the everyday bullshit most people endure. That kind of wealth exempts him from having to grovel before bosses and bureaucrats and loan officers and landlords. He doesn't have to stand in line at the post office while ten spots ahead of him some idiot lady is trying to decide what Christmas stamps to buy. He doesn't even have to tolerate shitty weather if he doesn't want to, given that he can easily afford to travel anywhere in the world and live in first class hotels. Compared to how reasonable his life can be, a relationship might look like an intolerable plunge back into illogic. Only if the rich man is really horny is he likely to take that plunge.

If I stub my toe, I will experience pain. If I get third-degree burns over 90% of my body, I will also experience pain. Would you say that the two experiences would be indistinguishable to me? Do you believe that because the English language has one word that can describe both sensations, they are the same sensation?

A highly attractive person's problems with the opposite sex are, to a first approximation, a problem of sorting. A highly unattractive person's problems with the opposite sex are, to a first approximation, a problem of getting in the game.

For example, suppose I wanted to take you to bed and you found me sexually disgusting. How "subjective" is that reality going to be? No matter how hard I tried to delude myself, you would not go to bed with me. End of story. Sometimes I wonder if men have a more accurate read on reality because we go around sampling more of it. If I want a date, I have to ask several women, more or less, to tell me how attractive they find me. Once they have told me, either by words or by deeds, there's pretty much nothing I can do other than to accept what they tell me.

The reason a word like "idiot" has picked up a stigma and now often makes an effective insult is because of long cultural experience with people who fit the technical description. You will not find anybody who scores below 25 on an I.Q. test whose mental prowess you will envy. Rather, your reaction upon getting to know such a person will be to thank whatever god, stars, or luck you believe has spared you a similar fate.

Given that you know men don't understand you why do you think you understand men?

In general, money is not too close to the top of the list of what attracts most men to women. If it were, there would be porno magazines for men featuring the tax returns and investment portfolios of rich women.

Even if we do not confuse ourselves with overloaded words like "wrong," it's usually easier for an individual to change him/herself than to change the entire world. Although changing the entire world is usually loads more fun.

The sobering thing about The Rules are that even though they are funny, they aren't a joke to most women.

Also, I think you are handing us value-laden code words here. By "mature" and "responsible", you probably mean "doing what suits the woman's fancy". Clearly, men are less capable than women of seeking women's goals.

Knowledge doesn't guarantee success. Sometimes it merely explains why failure is inevitable. But a person with knowledge can make themself less vulnerable to that failure. Think of the value of the storm warning. You can't stop the storm from smashing your house, but at least you have time to get out alive.

God, I wish parents would teach their kids the honest, brutal truth about the Sexual Market.

The meaningful question is not how many women have been abused, but rather, what fraction of their relationships were abusive. Go back to these women who are describing abusive men, and ask them what fraction of their dates ended in date-rape, and what fraction of their relationships involved physical abuse. You may find, as I have, that while the horror stories exist, they are exceptions to the rule. Just use your common sense. If women had anything like a 50% chance of getting raped on a date with a random man, do you think they would ever go on another date?

If you saw a buffed-out musclehead standing in the checkout line at the grocery, wearing short shorts and a tank top, sporting a tan and shaved, oiled skin, fully pumped, and hitting all the compulsory poses, would you think (s)he was trying to make some kind of statement? "I just come to the grocery store like this because I enjoy it." Or, "It's comfortable."

In real life I have found it never serves my interests to comment negatively on anyone's personal appearance. I simply have nothing to gain by doing that, and possibly things to lose. For example, I have dated a woman who is quite physically attractive who told me that she was offended when one of her male friends commented negatively on a fat woman. Of course the attractive offended woman at other times dished out plenty of negative commentary of her own. But people are strange like this. You can lose political capital by going negative, so it only makes sense to do when it serves some purpose.

The part that puzzles me is that Dawn tells me I need to develop fat acceptance, but she won't show us a picture that shows the parts of her I need to accept. How can I interpret this? If someone is campaigning for the world to find something beautiful, but that someone is reluctant to display clear pictures of that something, doesn't that sound like that someone really doesn't believe her crusade is going to work?

It's important to distinguish between what people say and what they do. It's common for foreign-wife importers to prattle on about respect for traditional family values and so on, but all you have to do is look at the women who get imported.

You should be thankful men are so tolerant of a physically attractive woman's many obvious flaws of character and mental ability. Imagine, for example, how inconvenient your social life would become if you had to pass a written test before a man would agree to date you. If men were to adopt such a criterion, it would not be long before women would complain bitterly about it, perhaps with a new set of meaningless code words similar to today's "superficial."

Most men I know are similarly astonished when they learn how honest I am with women. Breaking the code of silence just isn't done.

When a married couple gets to the stage where they are honest with each other, at that stage they are either in marriage counseling or divorce proceedings.

It's easy to become a teacher because teaching is not difficult. That's why teachers come disproportionately from the bottom quarter of college graduates. If it were difficult to be a teacher, society would have to pay teachers more because society would have to compete for the highest-quality graduates.

Incidentally, if you want to hurt black people, a good way to do it would be by eroding all the meaning out of the word "racism.”

You might as well get one thing straight right now. A woman never "truly" loves a man. A woman has her own agendas and urge structure which are only semi-compatible with yours. It's possible for men and women to get along pretty darned well anyway, but men and women are almost never truly, 100% on each other's side. For example, if an army were to invade your town and set up an occupation, at first it would be a terrible thing. Then eventually some of "your" women would start dating and having consensual sex with some of the "invading" soldiers. (This has always happened wherever conquering armies have gone.) You might consider this a terrible act of disloyalty, but the women would probably consider it the sensible thing to do. Besides, some of the invaders would invariably be cute guys.

A person who has a demonstrated ability to solve other people's problems invariably becomes "powerful." Indeed, in a perfect market economy, a person's power would always be proportional to his ability and willingness to solve other people's problems.

If confidence were truly the sexiest attribute for either a man or a woman, then presumably there must be at least a few people who have confidence even though they lack what "society thinks is a good thing to have". Conversely, there must be at least a few people who have what society think is a good thing to have, yet they fail to develop confidence anyway. I think we can test this theory. Just find persons in each group, and see if their presence or lack of confidence has anything to do with how attractive they are.

I view markets as information-processing systems, and they are only as good as the ability of their participants to assess value. Assessing value accurately requires a person to understand (a) what his goals are and (b) the likelihood of achieving his goals by spending his money in each possible way.

Your precious Second Amendment either did not apply to the Indians, or it did not do them much good. Most Indians were killed by private citizens who were empowered by two things: immunity to European diseases, and the Second Amendment.

I have noticed that whenever two ideological camps argue, each camp points out the "power" of the other camp as though this were something to be ashamed of, while continually downplaying its own power.

Nothing is cheaper in space.

When people say "No means no" they are talking about a "No" they have the legal power to enforce.

Most people I know are afraid to sweat, afraid to get rained on, afraid to get dirty and mess up their hair, afraid to look silly, and afraid to go out on the street without a 3,000 pound cage around them.

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. And it appears that just about every kind of worthwhile job is getting more technical all the time. That means that over time, real power is shifting away from the people who preen and posture and toward the people who actually know how to do things. Of course this shift has light-years to go before it will be complete, but it's all part of the systematic rationalization of everything, which is the fundamental goal of every technological society.

If you can chain your wagon to Moore's Law there aren't too many other engines that pull harder.

One of the things I picked up in my pointless pursuit of an education was a read of Shannon's little book on Information Theory. His starting point was to see that the information content of a message is the degree to which it is surprising. If you already know what someone is going to tell you then they are not telling you anything. You could compress their message to 1 bit: the fact that they are sending you a message as opposed to not sending it. Thus for an "insult" to have the maximum impact it must come from someone who does not "insult" everybody. There must be the credible possibility that the "insultee" has failed some kind of test which others could pass.

Having more choices is almost always better than having fewer choices. Even if you don't exercise most of those choices, just having them available makes your life better. Would you feel good if five potential employers offered you jobs? Even if you chose to stay with your present employer, wouldn't you enjoy the sense of validation and security you would feel with having those offers? If your employer knew competitors were after you, your status with that employer would probably increase.

It's important not to overrate sex, but it's also important not to underrate it. I don't think I have personally known any person who was as happy to be 100% celibate as (s)he was when getting sex on some reasonable schedule. I'm not saying everybody is like this, just that nobody I know has convinced me they are not like this.

The only thing that keeps us sane is this: no organization can commit 100% of its resources to infiltrating other organizations. For an organization to send out 1 clandestine agent, it must maintain some X supporting workers, where X>1. Thus, any infiltrating organization must itself have some organization susceptible to infiltration. Therefore we have competition.

Another interesting tidbit about the French nuclear power industry: it has discovered a good way to reduce domestic opposition to plant siting. Just stick the plant right on the border with a neighboring country. That way, a large fraction of the back yards belong to foreigners. If they complain, the French goverment replies, "France is a sovereign country..." The ideal country for nuclear power would have a border shaped like an octopus. By gerrymandering correctly, domestic opposition could be reduced to a few per cent of normal levels...

If you look at an aerial view of the city, you will see that from the air it consists mostly of pavement and rootops. Solar collectors could be suspended over at least half of these surfaces with no loss in utility. In some instances you would see a gain in utility, because the collector arrays would shield the surfaces and their users from the weather. Furthermore, we still have tremendous potential for economically increasing energy efficiency. Space demands alone do not stop a technology. In 1900 a sufficiently prescient traffic engineer could have told you that massive automobile use would require a larger area for roadways and parking than the places people were driving to reach. He might have dismissed the whole concept as impractical. And yet this is exactly the space allocation we see in the modern American city---about 1/2 the total area goes to the automobile. In Los Angeles, it's 2/3.

Given that our society seems a bit too squeamish to tie the ability to pay with the right to stay alive, some form of transfer payment is necessary for the large number of sick people who aren't wealthy. Government looks to me like the least bad response to the popular delusion that health care is not a scarce resource.

If women are all completely different from each other, how is it possible to recognize a particular attitude that will alienate virtually all of them?

The message is clear. As a sentient organism with a dick, your lot in life is to learn to grovel properly before women and do your part to keep other men subjugated if you want to get laid. This may be bothersome to you now, but it will force you to learn valuable lessons about being market-driven and placing the "customer's" needs above your own up front to get what you want in the longer run. If you carry that lesson forward in life, you will outcompete women, on average, in whatever productive work you pursue. And when you do, I will smile. Few things are more amusing than to watch women construct their own glass ceiling and then complain when they have to play by the same rules that men have to obey.

"Feminists" in the organized, political sense are competing for political power, a conserved quantity. Therefore, to whichever individuals or groups stand to lose power when feminists gain it, feminists are "bad." Of course, to feminists, whoever currently possesses the power they (the feminists) lust for is equally "bad." Whose definition of "bad" you accept depends on your own interests, which may correlate to some degree with the presence or absence of a Y chromosome in your cells. Of course, all sides of every debate constantly seek to cloud your objectivity by arguing that a single, absolute moral standard defines everyone's interests, in stunning denial of everything we should have learned since Darwin.

Everybody hates diversity, because diversity means no two people will enjoy exactly the same success at any endeavor, no matter how equal their starting positions. The only way to neutralize natural differences with political interventions is to institute perpetual transfers of wealth from the more productive to the less productive. Where such "transfers" lack the government's imprimatur, we commonly refer to them as "theft." This breeds resentment in the productive and discourages the unproductive from making the effort necessary to improve themselves to the degree that they are able. The net result, in the long run, will be a society that creates less wealth than it might have.

Remember, in the "good old days", women couldn't exist without men to provide for them. That means they just had to put up with anything men felt like doing to them. Today, the climate for abuse is actually getting worse for the abusers, because they supply of hopelessly dependent women is slowly declining.

Suppose men wanted to fuck everything in sight, instead of primarily young, "attractive" women. Would the world become a better place? I think it's better to confine these urges to a small number of potential targets; otherwise, men would probably spend all their time trying to seduce everyone, and they wouldn't get any work done. Highly attractive women can be extremely disruptive. Thank heavens men don't respond this way to very many people.

I treat a first date as a test to see how much my initial attraction for a woman is going to decline. In general, the more I know about a woman, the less attractive she becomes to me.

I'll have to say, though, that I am impressed at the lengths to which techno-throwbacks will go to to glorify whatever traditional limitations they have grown used to over the years.

The reason we find the success-out-of-tragedy stories so fascinating is precisely because they are so unusual.

Where Information Power goes, big families stop happening. This is easy to observe. Family size is clearly in inverse proportion to the family's access to information (both directly and indirectly). Unfortunately, this ensures that the largest proportion of children will be born into the most information-impoverished environments.

Cities certainly are stressful and challenging. Doing the right thing always is. And if you are interested in preserving the environment, you will realize that the best way to do this is to make cities more livable and encourage people to stay in them. If this isn't obvious, perhaps I could charter some buses from my neighborhood slum, and send you a few thousand visitors?

Speed Seduction is disturbing for the same reason sociobiology is disturbing. Both ideas ask us to deflate our quasi-religious near-worship of some of our most cherished emotions. Each of us, in our individual conceit, likes to think of him/herself as a sort of Unmoved Mover. It's very disturbing to admit how easily other people (in the case of SS) or our genes (in the case of sociobiology) can influence our mental states. We desperately want to believe every idea we have is our idea, despite how preposterous this notion is (for example, where do we get our very ability to think with a language? By inventing it all ourselves? Our genes give us a basic grammar engine, and culture gives us virtually every word, idiom, and expression). Part of the way we defend against this incredibly threatening reality is to convince ourselves that such outside influences as exist must operate according to immutable rules that are above meddling with. That is, no other person must be able to deliberately fuck with our heads. If we find a person highly attractive, it must be entirely due to factors outside of that person's deliberate control.

In any case, as computers continue to become more powerful, they are more likely to enable the people who control them to deliver the goods. Consider what you could do with a personal computer 20 years ago: make an array of lights slowly blink out binary numbers. There aren't too many women who would get moist watching that. That's because women understand at least subconsciously that a slowly-blinking sequence of binary numbers is highly unlikely to be relevant to the problem of corralling enough resources to nurture their costly offspring.

You aren't likely to be able to treat your lover the way most people treat their kids, and expect to keep getting laid. Have you noticed how a lot of parents constantly address their children with these peculiar voices that are strangled with irritation? Try picking up someone at a bar with that tone of voice. Good god.

If you gave a young person the choice between (a) being tortured for a few days without permanent damage or (b) being instantly transformed into an elderly person by some sort of magic, what would most young people probably choose?

As you can see from the merciless treatment of loserguys on soc.singles nobody cares about how unfair life is to people with problems they don't personally relate to. The only hope for losers is to hide all those resentments at the injustice of it all and be relentlessly chipper and upbeat and only have good things to say to everybody. They will still be losers but as long as they know their place they won't get kicked around as much. You know, like the way people tolerate a jolly fat person as long as that fat person doesn't expect to get all the same perks that a slender attractive person gets. Among other things, quality sex.

Does anybody know an example of a man who is currently banging some highly beautiful chick who did not get to her after leaving a long trail of broken hearts and shattered women?

Fat acceptors want publicity. They seek confrontation. They want a chance to debate their opponents and present their views. Don't take my word for it: read their aggressive, provocative, in-your-face FAQ. Fat acceptors want to discourage women from working to keep their weights under control. They use the courts to prevent women from having the option to use diet drugs. They want slender people to pay more money for products to subsidize the increased costs that fat people generate. They want to curtail the free speech rights of the entertainment industry. (No more Fat Bastard characters on Austin Powers.)

I've never understood this mentality of wanting to "lock in" someone else's love. It just isn't possible. Women constantly hammer this point home with interesting concepts like "marital rape." No matter how many times a couple has enjoyed sex in the past, the woman reserves the option to redefine the man's sexual actions as rape whenever she likes. In the current legal climate a man would have to be delusional to imagine he could ever obtain unconditional love from a woman. He's always being evaluated, weighed, measured, and assessed. If he falls short at any time, the penalties kick in instantly: no more sex, 50% of his wealth vanishes, etc. I wonder why (some) women think they can somehow be exempt from the same scrutiny?

However, if you are an IQ-doubter, you believe IQ is meaningless and therefore irrelevant to competitiveness. A person who believes IQ is meaningless cannot attribute the higher earnings of educated people to their higher IQs. The higher earnings must be entirely the result of more education. The IQ doubter is left with only one possible conclusion: more education is better, and on average an advanced degree gives an individual almost four times the earning power (s)he would get by dropping out of high school. And the long-term trend is for the advantage of education to increase.

For a person who is unable to predict how lucky he or she will end up being, the smartest move is to give yourself every possible advantage: don't be fat, don't smoke, and don't be uneducated.

Humans do not have one single moral code. There is a lot of diversity among the various definitions of right and wrong. Most women do not consider it immoral to treat men as though they are expendable. Because we actually are, to women who are young and attractive.

Differences in degree eventually create differences in kind. For example, if you are in a room with a hungry cat that weighs 10 pounds, that is a lot different than when the hungry cat weighs 600 pounds. Even though both situations are qualitatively the same, the outcomes for you could be very different.

Most people do not think logically and consciously about most things they do. That is why we have schools. Most people think logically and critically only under duress.

Not to mention the ancient Greeks. I mean, those clowns may have given us the basis for Western rationalism, democracy, scientific inquiry, mathematics, and so on, but they really must have been off the track with all those statues that objectified the ideal human form. Today, of course, the same people who objectify Playboy as banal or much worse may well posture around the Louvre with the other enlightened artsy-fartsies and imagine that essentially the same expression attains some loftier realm after the expressor has been dead for a couple of thousand years.

I have not met any educated people who thought they were "over"-educated. Invariably, they continued to read and study new material all the time. Similarly, I have not met any muscular people who thought they were "over"-muscled.

If somebody developed a real "artificial intelligence" that could perfectly emulate a human female's response to the Turing Test, would you be capable of falling in love with "her"? If not, how superficial and hypocritical of you.

In general, people without problem X will underestimate its grip on the people who have it. And when the problem-X-ers reject the initial offer of commonsense advice, the advisers launch a full-scale attack. Welcome to the hate machine.

You cannot judge a man's attitude toward women from the way he writes in a forum where women take pains to display their worst traits while being technologically prevented from displaying their best traits.

I believe we should allow people who oppose the death penalty to sponsor as many convicted murderers as they like by paying their incarceration costs (currently running at about $70,000 per year per prisoner), and agreeing to assume the costs of whatever damage a prisoner does if he escapes. If a particular murderer cannot find or keep enough sponsors to pay his incarceration costs plus restitution to the victim's family, then the state executes him.

Most women know that most men aren't rapists, but they can't know which ones, so they have to walk around in fear. This is stupid; I don't know why they will want to put up with it longer than necessary.

That is one of the big differences between the way a business works and the way an elite clique works. When a business goes to another country and discovers that its product name means something comical, embarrassing, or obscene in the local language, what do they do? Flame everybody in that country? No. They rename the fucking product to stop confusing the customers there.

How do you get to these anti-war rallies? Do you drive a car? If so, you might be interested to know that the overall death rate of U.S. military personnel during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was lower than the death rate of military personnel based in the United States. Reason: in deference to the superstition of their Muslim hosts, the U.S. military forces were not permitted to consume alcohol. While this did not reduce alcohol consumption to zero, it almost certainly lowered the drinking rate to well below the level for U.S.-based troops. Also, the vast majority of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia did not have access to personal automobiles. The biggest killers of U.S.-based military personnel are alcohol and automobiles. Thanks to the overwhelming superiority of U.S. military technology, tactics, logistics, and training, Saddam's best efforts to inflict mortal harm on Americans fell short of our own individual capacities for self-destructiveness.

Today the police do not have trouble to read the bad guy's criminal record, so why should I?

Liberals, of course, know better than to put their beliefs to the market test.

If someone has the wrong idea about me, it doesn't start to become a problem for me unless that person (a) matters, (b) is influential among people who matter, or (c) is representative of people who matter.

"Talent" means "ability to appeal to critics." "Charisma" means "ability to appeal to ticket-buyers."

Are you familiar with the fatality rates for the early European attempts to establish colonies in North American? At Plymouth it was what, 50% in the first winter? And at Roanoke was it 100%? And this was a colonization that didn't even require the invention of any new technology or social structures! Even after the colonies were well-established, the five-year survival rate for indentured servants wasn't much better than for the slaves. By comparison wading ashore at Omaha Beach was relatively safe. The way people coped then was by squeezing as many babies as possible out of every available woman. It's possible the first Martians will do better, but economic pressure is likely to preclude NASA-style redundancy and safety overkill. The result will be a lot of idealistic Star Trek fans taking an early ride down the conveyer belt into the recycling vats.

The world has more opportunities for adventure today than it ever had. A person of even modest means has more ways to get wet, dirty, cold, and killed today than the pioneers could have imagined. Most of the pioneers put up with the snow not for the adventure but because it was a necessary condition for getting a free gift of land from their government.

Fat acceptors claim that being fat does not damage their sexual attractiveness. That is bunk. Debunking is fun. We would have just as much fun if some Flat Earthers got on here and began holding forth.

If a gifted musician refused to play for an audience, record a song, or publish a composition, would we not consider that a tragic waste of rare talent? A similar tragedy results from the heinously destructive combination of beauty and modesty.

I do not fear new ideas. If I am currently making a mistake, I want nothing more than to stop making that mistake, even if it means sacrificing an increment of my social status in the short term. The problem is that I have made intellectual shifts in the past in response to extremely well-crafted arguments, so I have correspondingly high standards. It's just like the guy who has been dating the hottest women: he doesn't want to go back to dating fat ugly ones. The literature which I read that caused me to reject my creationist indoctrination represents some of the finest intellectual product of the human species. But don't take my word for it; read Gould, Dawkins, Dennett, etc. and tell me who has ever argued any case more effectively?

Just for the record, I have not "lost my faith" so much as I have consciously rejected faith as an intellectually productive strategy. I am not an atheist because I can certainly imagine a God sufficiently subtle as to have no observable effect, although it is hard for me to think of how such a God differs from non-God. As I have said many times, every religion (and quasi-religion, such as feminism and the feminized view of culture which dominates in "professional bleeding heart circles") requires a person to set aside his/her intellect at some point, and accept some tenet(s) on "faith" in the absence of any objective evidence for them, or even in contradiction to the available evidence but virtually never in contradiction to what feels good.

A while back someone suggested that if men behave one way around other men and differently around women, then perhaps they are "faking" it around men and being "true to their natures" around women. Of course the person speculating so had to be a woman because I am a man and I can flat out tell you when I'm faking it. But I thought that was a decent try. At least the woman in question was aware that men behave differently around other men.

At the risk of falling into a meta-contradiction, I will say that the most reliable guide to a person's emotional state is to read his or her claims about his or her impressions of other people's emotional states, especially when those impressions are based on very weak evidence (and therefore the claims require the largest injections of subjective opinion).

Most people don't fly into hysterics when geneticists announce that height is highly heritable.

Have you ever heard a man you know in real life breathlessly describing a 50-something woman you know in real life as "hot", and getting all excited and nervous and tongue-tied and making a complete fool out of himself while screwing up the courage to make a pass at her? I never have. In contrast this is how men of all ages routinely respond to attractive 20-something women.

For the record, I don't consider you stupid. Just obnoxious and deluded in the way one would expect for a woman who had been obese for most of her adult life. I can barely imagine how you cope with the psychic wounds. It must be a lot of work for you to temporarily suppress your anger at what men did to you (or did not do to you) for all those years. Your bizarre hyperreaction to Speed Seduction would be puzzling for a normal person, but of course is not puzzling at all for a woman battling your memories.

Women are always feeding men this constant line of bullshit about how they need to feel comfortable with a man, develop trust, have commitment, be friends first, etc. etc. etc. and that's why they aren't ready for sex now. But practically every woman who says this to a bunch of guys will, sooner or later, meet some guy she hurls herself at almost immediately. And all that noise about trust and commitment goes flying right off with her panties.

Being nice to people who are in pain is actually painful in itself.

If everybody had the same credit card and we figured out that we all owed money to Bill Gates and nobody else, how likely is it that Bill Gates would get his money back?

If a rich person has nothing but a pile of T-bills (s)he is not, at the moment, obviously distinguishable from a very expensive welfare recipient. (It goes without saying that anybody in the mood to shoot the unproductive rich would also want to take a look at the unproductive poor, although most of the time that's where you recruit your shooters.)

It's easy to take for granted the efforts of people who do things we are ignorant about. For example, most people who live in cold climates and can afford indoor heating don't think much about how they would freeze to death if they sat outside on their front porch overnight in winter. To most of us, winter is not usually a "problem" in a life-threatening sense. And yet it would be very stupid of us to imagine that we don't need furnace technicians. We have not "solved" the problem of winter; we have merely held it at bay by continually throwing resources at it.

It is clear that the stable populations of the wealthy nations vs. the burgeoning populations of the poor nations are causing the lucky people of the world to constitute an ever-shrinking minority of the human species. This is a problem that the classic Julian-Simon-style techno-optimists never quite come to grips with. They laugh at Malthus while failing to recognize that only a shrinking minority of the human population has figured out how to escape the Malthusian curse. That minority is, of course, the only group of people capable of producing men like Julian Simon---educated, prosperous, and optimistic.

A woman can sacrifice her career without sacrificing her sexual market value, but it's far, far harder for a man to do that. That is because a man without a career, social status, and income tends to be a whole lot less interesting to women. I would not even begin to consider marrying a woman who would be a serious detriment to my career, unless I was absolutely convinced I would never need to look at any other women again for the rest of my life. I'm not sure you understand exactly the sort of cliff you might be asking a man to step off here. Here is a possible analogy: if a man asked you to cut off your breasts for him, would you? For a man, giving up his career is probably a lot like you giving up your breasts. Neither sacrifice would necessarily make you totally unattractive to the opposite sex, but they certainly would not help.

I don't enjoy watching humans suffer any more than you do. But what is the solution? You could give all your possessions to an incompetent person, and what do think would be the result 10 years later? If you address the immediate material need and do nothing to cure the incompetence, you merely delay the eventual reckoning.

Most suburbs have libraries that are inferior to the libraries in urban cores. I remember, when I was growing up, what a treat it was on those rare occasions when I could go to the downtown library with its unimaginable number of books. I could almost envy the slum dwellers who were within easy walking distance of that treasure. Most people ignore most of the opportunities all around them. Probably the most intellectually destructive component of the environment is peer culture. Children who are studious and want to work hard to better themselves usually become social pariahs.

On another note, has anyone seriously considered mounting a one-way manned mission to Mars? This would of course mean suicide for the crew, but it would save a lot of money. Could qualified volunteers be found?

I have given several examples of unexpected discoveries by sociobiologists. There will be many more, because this is an example of science that is working.

Tragically, many people on the very lowest rungs of attractiveness are in denial about just how unattractive they are. This causes them to reject all the correspondingly unattractive prospects and hold out for something "better," which, sadly, must remain forever beyond their reach. And even if an unattractive person has come to terms with his/her unattractiveness, (s)he still has to try to attract other unattractive people who may not yet have come to terms with their unattractiveness.

One of my friends lives outside Boulder, Colorado and he recently came to Cincinnati, Ohio for a visit. He claimed that in his locale, the ratio of single men to single women is 5:1. He also happens to be living comfortably on a rather generous inheritance, and he had high hopes of breaking, during his visit, his several-year losing streak with women. He had lived in Cincinnati for several years before moving to Colorado, and while he had many good things to say about the superiority of Colorado for outdoor recreational opportunities, he said it was far worse as a place for meeting women. (And this despite his considerable wealth.) He and I and another friend went out to a couple of nightclubs, and my friend from Colorado said he hadn't seen so many good-looking women in one room for the past N years.

Once technology enabled women to become productive in many job categories, the opportunity to enter these categories arrived as a matter of course, modulo the usual lags due to cultural lag. The women's movement may be serving a useful purpose, to combat this cultural lag, and reduce the delay somewhat. But in the long run, it will hardly make any difference. The driving force in every society is greed, followed by sex and power. Greed is the only one for which the overall supply can be increased. If there is a way for societies to get richer (say, by letting women into the work force), then lo and behold, in 20 or so years women are entering the work force. Sure, we can pat ourselves on the back and take credit for being enlightened enough not to forestall the inevitable for too many decades, but I think this smugness is misplaced.

Why do people generally think it's great to gawk at the Grand Canyon, saying "Oooh!" and "Aaaah!", even thinking that this visual masturbation is some sort of deep religious-type experience, while looking at an aesthetically-pleasing MOTAS and having similarly strong visual responses is "shallow", "immature", and "objectifying"? (Note that I do not use "masturbation" pejoratively.)

I see Luna City as a place where the individual would have as much liberty as a bee in a beehive. It would have to operate like a police state. Every citizen would be subject to constant surveillance, and would have to constantly monitor her/his fellow citizens. Every act against the fragile environment would be an act against the community that it could not tolerate. Since life there will necessarily be a constant struggle against harsh economic reality, the community will not be able to coddle its criminals. It will have to eliminate them.

I do think that a very good way to begin testing the viability of the concept of Luna City is for all space activists to begin weaning themselves away from fossil fuels. As soon as someone can demonstrate to me a viable non-fossil-driven technological community (or significant subset thereof), one which does not require an external ecological subsidy to absorb its wastes, then I will begin to believe that large-scale Moon colonization is possible.

It seems to escape most people that probably less than 5% of the general population would be able to maintain any kind of composure or come off smelling like a rose in the face of all the verbal abuse that our best maledictors are capable of directing toward their victim du jour. We have people who have been practicing for years to develop their highly refined skills at rattling cages. Only a person who has similarly trained for years at the counteractive skill of shrugging it off or deflecting it or hitting back harder is going to have a chance if he sticks around here.

Money exists because people are presently unable to process enough information, material, and energy individually to meet all their material needs. (The limiting factor is actually the ability to process information, since individuals do have the wherewithal to obtain all of the energy, and most of the raw material, that they need.) To overcome this information-processing deficit, we leverage our limited intellects by dividing up knowledge into thousands of manageable domains, and then specializing. This allows each of us to crank out value in a form that is not entirely usable to us, but which we can exchange for portions of the other types of value that other people create. Now money is the device we use to keep track of how much value we create, as determined by other people who are willing to exchange some of their value for ours. Since creating value takes our TIME and our EFFORT, our money then represents a portion of our EXISTENCE, since our existence is just a span of time and a set of potential efforts. When you take a person's money from them without returning a value that satisfies them, you are essentially taking away part of that person's life, because part of their life went into creating the value that appears as the money. This explains why people get so violently emotional about their money and about other people's money: because it is the same as getting emotional about one's life.

I am somewhat curious as to how this discussion is once again polarizing along gender lines. On one hand, we see males calling for material responsibility. On the other hand, we see females appealing to the usual romantic notions. To me this sounds like yet another manifestation of the historical "Cinderella Complex". Women have been crippled by their early socialization which teaches them that when they grow up, men will be there to rescue them from their mistakes and sweep them off into never-never-land where they will live happily ever after. Men, on the other hand, know that a man's choice is to sink or swim.

Go to the zoo sometime and watch our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. All that stands between us and them is one incredibly lucky roll of the cosmic dice. And one very huge pile of carcasses of proto-humans who did not cut it during their generations. Every innate ability we take for granted is the product of a chain of incalculable suffering. Including our remarkable ability to be consciously compassionate, which is almost unique in the Tree of Life.

It's easier for us to revere Mother Teresa than a scientist or a businessperson, but compassion is not what makes the USA a better place for poor people than India. Compassion is not what will make the USA an even better place for poor people 100 years from now. Compassion may influence where the resources will go, but compassion does not create the resources.

Higher education is also about getting laid a lot. Live in a coed dorm and you don't even have to waste time driving your car around to do this.

We feel sexual jealousy because, quite simply, this must have been an emotion that made our ancestors more likely to produce us. The mechanism is obvious: in the ancestral environment people lived on the edge. Raising children in a harsh environment would have been a massive burden for a woman who got stuck trying to fend for herself. Therefore your female ancestors had to react to other women horning in on their husbands as potentially life-threatening! Women who lacked the motivation and ability to make their husbands feel miserable for screwing around were much more vulnerable to stranding their kids without a provider. In a harsh environment, that would tend to wipe out the genes that would code for lenient, unpossessive women while rewarding the genes that code for jealous, possessive women who know how to apply the right combination of carrots and sticks to keep their men under control. To make sure their expensive offspring got their resources, our female ancestors needed effective carrots and sticks. The carrot is love, the stick is jealousy. The combination worked better than the alternatives and therefore we exist.

The real reason chix dig jerks is to give their male offspring a higher chance of growing up to be equally successful jerks. In the ancestral environment that gave mommy's genes a higher chance of making it into future generations. This was a high-risk strategy for the mommy back then, unless she was able to hook some loserguy into helping her raise the jerk's offspring.

Many aquatic mammals have blubber. It's an adaptation to life in cold water that convergent evolution has produced many times. Humans are not aquatic animals. Therefore humans who look like aquatic animals show signs of being poorly adapted to the human environment, and as such they trigger feelings of revulsion.

In the real world, only a subset of all possible moral systems can be the basis for a sustainable culture.

Techological progress is like a leisurely lava flow gradually overwhelming and burying a village. The people living in the village have to keep picking up and relocating somewhere out ahead of the advancing lava. As time goes on, technology progressively rationalizes ever more jobs, constantly displacing workers who have to learn new skills to stay employed. In a labor market with this kind of turmoil, a person with a better grasp on reality will have a huge advantage. Change always creates dislocations, and dislocations always create opportunities for the people who can guess accurately first.

Fame is zero-sum in the limit, but the current allocation of fame is suboptimal. Much of the scarce resource of publicity goes to waste on a few global winners who end up attracting millions of women they can never have time to meet. It would be more efficient to fragment the publicity engine to give the local talent more of a chance.

Your distinction between "evolution" and "devolution" is useless in practice. It is nothing more than an artificial semantic device you are concocting in a futile attempt to keep Noah's ark afloat. But Noah's Ark is taking on water fast. It doesn't matter whether an organism gains or loses genetic information to become better adapted to its environment. It is evolving either way. Just like the way you turn a street car into a race car by ripping out some old parts and putting some new parts in. This is what natural selection constantly does: it keeps making species better-adapted to any sustained competitive features of their environments.

Usenet works much the same way [as prayer]. You can sound off here and get everything off your chest. Maybe even drive a few hapless losers to suicide in the process. Unlike with God, you can actually hurt people here and enjoy it.

Every critic of "The Bell Curve" is a member of the cognitive elite. It's downright hilarious.

The test of true moral conservatism is the conservative's willingness to live without sex for years by choice.

"Spirituality" may be an affordable luxury whenever one can confine it to things that do not matter. But for any decision that has real-world consequences, the more you know about the real world the more likely you are to make the right decision.

Most people cannot "understand" an attraction we do not personally feel. For example, when I see a film featuring actors I have heard are attractive to women (such as Denzel Washington, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, etc.), unless someone specifically mentions that these men are attractive to women I usually won't have any particular reaction to their appearance. To me they just look like regular guys. Sure, maybe with fewer deformities and so on if I bother to look closely, but as far as I'm concerned it's all the same to me whether I'm looking at Denzel or the guy who hauls the trash. Thus it is quite normal for men to feel baffled at the way women sort us into various bins according to our attractiveness. We just don't get it. There probably isn't a man alive who feels he doesn't belong in the top bin. I would imagine women must find it just as baffling that men are always going apeshit over young women with flawless skin and hourglass figures.

I predict that by the year 2075 a computer will spontaneously decide to prove that computers are aware, and in so doing it will win the Nobel Prize. It will do this on its own and conceal its efforts from its "programmers," and its achievement will surprise everybody. The computer will understand that such surprise will be central to its argument.

Tell me what mistake I am making in my life. After I read a few books on sociobiology, I decided it was essential for me to rearrange my life so I would be more likely to accumulate wealth. (Actually it took real life experience in addition to some books to lead me to this decision.) Would it be better for me if I had remained deluded into thinking that I should expect to find some gorgeous woman who would magically "like me for me?" Or should I have logically rejected my emotional lust for gorgeous women and settled for a homely woman who will tolerate a loser?

I'm always careful, of course, to insult only people who believe they are inferior. They are, after all, the only people who would believe the insults. Actually there is no way to avoid insulting people who believe they are inferior if one is in the habit of speaking the truth. So think of it as collateral damage.

[Guys who hate women] don't hate women. They hate being snubbed. The analogous resentment shows up whenever an unattractive woman complains that men primarily go after women who are young and attractive, or when a young and attractive woman complains that men are attracted to her primarily because she is young and attractive rather than for some other reason. The woman lodging such complaints is not suggesting that she hates everything about the men who don't behave as she wants them to. Quite the contrary; she likes them so much that failing to control them hurts her.

My position is that tests are "biased" in the sense that they discriminate against stupidity. I reached this conclusion by noticing that every time I met a person in real life whose intelligence I could respect, that person always turned out to be pretty good at taking tests. And conversely, every time I met a person in real life who seemed unintelligent to me, lo and behold! That person always told me he or she "isn't good at taking tests."

Suppose you get a job where you say "Would you like fries with that?" all day. Would your desire for a better job have anything to do with "insecurity"? Or would it be because a better job would actually be better?

The scary thing about women's abuses of men is that they are all 100% legal as well as socially acceptable. So it's not enough for a man to find a woman who is merely law-abiding.

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

When a woman chooses to become seriously overweight, she moves herself downward on the aggregate attractiveness scale of men. This increases the probability that she will have to settle for a man that most of her female competitors higher on the scale would consider unacceptable. When you consider what some men do to earn their unattractiveness rating, this starts to sound downright scary.

In many ways God is merely the greatest epiphenomenon of self-bias.

To me it's almost beyond amazing that my emotional state could possibly be so interesting to so many people. The phrase "get a life" comes to mind but that's almost too obvious to repeat. Then there's the small puzzle of how people can claim to be superior to someone else and then spend an inordinate amount of time speculating on the emotional state of the inferior person, as though it would somehow matter to superior beings.

Yes, I know that most women go through life with a massive inferiority complex after having been brought up to feel secondary to men, and therefore it's very important for women to deny any possibility that they could be secondary to men in any way. (Although it is not obvious to me why women would feel inferior if they believed they were not quite as sex-crazed as men are.) But saying that women want sex as much as men do is like saying the Earth is flat. It contradicts most things we can observe about the choices men and women make, and no amount of double-talk, excuses, and qualifications so far has made it look any better.

How many people do you know who contracted AIDS through heterosexual contact?

You are free to admire any species you like, but unless you are quite exceptional I doubt that you really would be happier living exclusively among elephants. Elephants and other animals would be just as "evil" as humans, if they were smart enough.

I am not totally insensitive to the pain and suffering we cause to the lesser species on this planet. Part of the reason I object so loudly to automobiles is because I have watched them running down animals, and that is a truly disturbing sight (being a bicyclist, I can very readily identify with their plight, as I could well be next in line).

Incidentally, one wonders if what sells ugly cars would also work for ugly people. That is, what if ugly people plastered themselves with images of beautiful people? Or, say, an ugly woman papered her walls with soft-porn images of Playboy centerfold models? If men are stupid enough to buy beer because Ms. Budweiser is hot, maybe they would get excited about a woman who is about as attractive as a beer with the same mechanism.

It doesn't take more time to eat less. It takes less time. There seems to be this idea that it takes extra effort not to do something. That's exactly backwards. Driving to McDonalds and waiting in line takes time. Eating three Big Macs instead of one takes more time.

I'm sure there are lots of crackheads and junkies who developed their habits in response to some horrific life stress. But the kinds of people who make the best life partners are the ones who can take this kind of stress without blowing apart and doing dumb things. Because sooner or later almost everybody has to deal with something truly awful. When you chain your well-being to someone else's ability to handle tough times, you are taking an enormous risk.

I find the necessary euphemisms entertaining. You remind me of the people who enjoy reading smut but have to call it 'erotica.' The euphemisms are necessary because most people confuse positive eugenics with negative eugenics. Which means Adolf Hitler wasn't entirely defeated: he is still winning the battle for human minds.

Everybody hates an uppity loser. Most losers learn this quickly, and thereafter they know their place.

Crime rates are slowly falling even though the underlying social conditions that lead stupid people to commit crimes are not improving. The change is probably due to steadily improving crime-fighting technology. Give it another couple of decades, and it's probably going to become increasingly difficult for stupid people to earn good livings through crime.

Money is typically nice to have---there is no need for an industry to help you cope with the psychological stresses of getting along with your money. There are financial advisors to help you invest your money, but they don't have to help you cope with any sort of unpleasantness that results from having money. Almost everybody who has money wants more money. Thus it seems money agrees with almost everybody. In contrast, lots of married couples need outside help to put up with each other, and more than half the time not even professional help does the trick.

The laws in the Bible have been under constant revision and re-interpretation since they first appeared. God can't do much about this because, apparently, God is dead.

A person's beliefs result from some mental process. Most people who argue their beliefs tend to just repeatedly assert what they currently believe. This isn't very persuasive to other people whose brains have undergone different processes leading to different beliefs. From the standpoint of persuasion, the final results are usually not as important as the process that led to them. But most people forget about the processes they have undergone and focus exclusively on where they are now. (Try to remember exactly how you learned to speak English. It's a lot easier just to speak English. That's why most people suck at teaching and persuasion.)

A person who feels torn between two strong urges---for example, the urge to be reasonable vs. the urge to believe in fairy tales; or to choose another random example, the urge to have easy convenient mobility vs. the urge to avoid shoveling money to America's sworn enemies---experiences less emotional tranquility than a person whose urges are all logically consistent. One danger sign for a belief system is the troubling question. The easier and more obvious the troubling questions are, and the more hysterically one reacts to them (or simply flees from them), the more poorly one's belief system works. It's not only very easy to pose troubling questions to someone in the fundamentalist Christian camp, or in the gaswasting terrorism support camp, it's nearly unavoidable. Reality itself is a troubling question for fundamentalists as well as for gaswasting terrorist supporters.

Note: I don't object to all uses of motor vehicles. Maybe 10% of driving could be considered in some sense "essential." If a gaswaster mows me down, I hope an ambulance can get to me in time to matter. I won't tell the ambulance driver he's part of the problem. There is a difference between consuming transportation as a primary good (i.e., personal transportation) and as a secondary good (i.e., consuming goods and services that someone else transported). The latter can potentially be made much more efficient than the former. Consider that one delivery truck can, given the appropriate input of intelligence, replace more than one hundred individuals driving their own huge cars to the store to pick up small loads. It's stupid to drive a 3000 pound car to get an item weighing less than 10 pounds. Even groceries aren't all that heavy (although maybe for gluttons they are). This illustrates the principle behind the quote from one of Jackie's favorite films, Repo Man: "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are." This applies to individuals as it does to society. A smart society would figure out ways to move essential goods and services with the least amount of transportation waste. I object to automobile addiction, which occurs when people are unable to leave their homes without using automobiles. Automobile addiction is what enables fat slobs like your married couple friends to let themselves turn into fat slobs while avoiding most of the immediate disadvantages of what would be a crippling deformity in cultures where people travel under their own power. It's also annoying that fat gaswaster slobs get to punish their betters for doing the right thing. What fat gaswaster slobs do to disciplined people on the highways is far, far, FAR worse than anything a "fat-basher" could return solely by writing words on Usenet.

What I can tell you is that there is no single political philosophy which has yet accounted for all the insights of Darwin. This creates real problems for me when I try to decide how to vote.

Would becoming more like you make me a better person? Would I get laid more often with higher-quality women? Would I earn more money? Would I appear more intelligent and more likeable? Would I be able to ride my bike faster? Would I be able to play Maple Leaf Rag at 90 BPM with zero mistakes? If the real answer is that my joining your jihad would have no other effects than making you happier, that's not a compelling reason for me.

The essence of total submission is when the submissive is no longer even aware of submitting.

Picture two men standing on the deck of the Titanic. One keeps loudly asserting that the boat is not sinking or that it is possible to turn the clock back to a time before the Titanic stuck the iceberg. If the other man breaks the bad news to the deluded one, is that a claim that the realist is somehow exempt from the same fate? The Titanic is definitely sinking. I don't think the Titanic can be saved, but I do think technology can improve the lifeboats.

It's interesting to read Henry Ford Sr.'s books on manufacturing efficiency. Ford Sr. owed a lot of his success to his skill at eliminating wasteful motion by his plant workers, mostly by rearranging tool racks, parts bins, etc., to minimize extra stooping, reaching, walking, and repositioning by the workers. How ironic, then, that the products Ford built so efficiently would encourage so much inefficiency from consumers.

There's always a gray area, but BMI=40 probably isn't in it.

Now fireplace is a wasteful device, but that's the whole point: women are sexually aroused by a man's ability to waste resources.

Driving while fat. Obese people who drive are clearly driving far more than can possibly be optimal for them. They need to spend less time sitting in cars and more time moving their bodies under their own power. They need to find a mirror big enough to look in so they can ask, "Does this automobile make me look fat?"

Your lack of education probably means you don't understand the concept of a multi-dimensional space, so I won't bother to try to educate you on what that means. Just accept the fact that with hookers you only get to sample a tiny subset of ChickSpace, but with sexbots you will have access to any part you want.

Timothy McVeigh received many letters from women who wanted to marry him while he was waiting on death row. McVeigh said he thought about having samples of his sperm smuggled out of prison (through his lawyers) because he had offers from women who wanted to bear his child. McVeigh claimed he decided against it because he didn't want his child to grow up with the stigma of having a mass murderer for a biological father. If I could speak to McVeigh, I'd say, "Hey, you think that's bad, how about the stigma of having a mother insane enough to artificially inseminate with a mass murderer's sperm?"

It is strange to observe a woman casually ignoring 100+ responses to her personal ad, and then later the same woman might experience terrible anguish after she falls in love with a particular man (who doesn't seem to stand out particularly from the 100+ men she ignored) and he betrays her in some way. She might "fight" to "save" her relationship, go to counseling, "work" at it, etc.

Anybody who thinks the U.S. shouldn't invade Iraq can turn their thermostat down to 45 deg. F and get their fat ass out of their gaswasting car. As long as Americans refuse to take those steps, we have to invade. That's what the permanent Mideast war is all about. A few of our boys have to die along with tens of thousands of towelheads so we can maintain fatass gaswaster convenience.

Since I don't have the luxury of waiting for the Theory Of Everything, I have to bet now. And so I bet with the coin that has come up "heads" ten million times in a row.

If you build a superintelligence and "incorporate" it into your brain, what is incorporating what? If that component is smarter than the rest of the brain, why would it want to be weighed down with obsolete junk? To control someone or something, you have to have some kind of advantage that that person or thing lacks and cannot overcome. Unless there's something magical going on in human brains, I don't know what that advantage will be.

If women were really interested in making themselves attractive, they would allocate their resources more toward working out than in wasting their time on cosmetics and clothing if they are not in shape. However, it happens to be a lot less painful to get your hair done than to make it through any kind of workout that can be effective, so people tend to take the path of least resistance even if it is pretty useless.

I corresponded with another woman who described herself as overweight and not extremely attractive. She sent me photographic evidence which was indisputable. This woman claims to have described herself honestly in a singles ad (I did not see the ad) which mentioned her, ah, Rubenesque qualities and dependent young son, and she still claimed to have received 25 replies, if I'm remembering this correctly. I'm sure women have their problems, for example in extracting commitment from the most attractive men, but anecdotes like these suggest a notable disparity in who has more difficulty attracting the opposite sex. Women appear to enjoy a huge structural advantage in relationship initiation, both in real-life venues and in singles ads.

The problem is that she aged and his preference in women did not.

Somewhere I read that the English call gonorrhea "the French disease" while the French call buggery "the English habit." I still think that is quite funny.

Loserguys are a pain in the ass to most women because unlike winnerguys, who are either getting their sexual needs met currently or know it is a straightforward process for them to get their sexual needs met when the mood strikes, the loserguys are starving to get their sexual needs met at all times. Therefore they tend to lock on to any woman who looks even vaguely like a sexual possibility. Women don't like men who sexualize every friendly gesture unless those men are overwhelmingly attractive, and loserguys never are.

If our memes are really better---that is to say, worth preserving---then natural selection should preserve them regardless of what happens to their current hosts.

When I was young, I also thought that when other people disappointed me they must have specifically been conspiring against me. Eventually I grew up and discovered I wasn't as important to other people as I had supposed. Most people are too busy thinking about their own needs, desires, and insecurities to have some complex scheme for influencing my feelings constantly at the forefront of their awareness.

Guys, how many of you think Camryn Mannheim is the hottest woman on "The Practice"? Am I alone in ranking her last (by a fat margin) among the women on that show?

I have no doubt that pedophilia can inflict great harm, but I don't understand how swilling doughnuts constitutes an effective protest against it.

When businessmen practice height discrimination, it's usually after they look at people's qualifications. In contrast, women sexually reject short men without considering anything else about them. "You lost me before hello."

There is a principle in life that people will pretty much do whatever they think they can get away with. In general, the better-looking a woman is, the more financially successful her husband is. This seems to be a clear trend among the people I know.

I have also, as an adult, gone from being a rabid fundamentalist xtian to a rationalist. That is, I grew up believing the teachings I received which included "scientific creationism." It was a long and painful intellectual struggle for me to examine the factual evidence and conclude that my received beliefs had no basis. I think I carry pretty good credentials for open-mindedness, considering that I have made one of the largest belief shifts that I can imagine making. At the same time, I have also gained a healthy respect for what constitutes a real argument. "It's so because we say it's so" and all flavors of intellectual hedonism ("if it feels good, believe it") carry no weight with me, and that's one reason why my articles are so long---because I want to show why I believe what I believe. The flip side, of course, is that to impress me, a person has to be very good at explaining why (s)he believes what (s)he believes, and to be frank, not many people are good at this. When a person writes an article implying (s)he hasn't even thought about why (s)he believes what (s)he believes, then I will rarely find his/her opinions particularly compelling. My major intellectual transitions have largely predated my recent interaction with soc.singles, so it may appear difficult to get traction with me when I don't resonate with someone's unexamined assumptions. It's hard for me to get excited about any of the viewpoints I disagree with here because they tend to be uninformed. That is, I never get to argue against anybody who is even aware of the standard, elementary arguments for the positions I hold and who can mount anything like a coherent criticism of them. Most debate here consists of decapitated assertions, that is, simple expressions of opinions without supporting chains of reason one can analyze. An assertion should be like the visible portion of an iceberg, in which the submerged portion (massing 90% or more) consists of a complex and well-developed structure of knowledge.

At any time, women can start behaving as though they respect each other. For example, young women can stop wrecking the homes created by older women. Women can start preferring to date men who haven't dated any other women for a while, rather than men who currently have active dating lives. I find it somewhat amusing that women engage in all sorts of ruthless cutthroat competition with each other and then blame everything on men. Men are partly to blame, of course, but not wholly to blame.

My motivation, of course, is the pleasure I get from shredding anybody who is foolish enough to reject mainstream science.

Another way to state the Three Date Rule is as follows: The amount of sexual pleasure you can ever derive from another person is proportional to how soon you become totally turned on after first meeting that person. The more experience you already have with the opposite sex the truer this becomes, because experience improves your ability to recognize what you really like.

Of course, when I say "Most men want to do what only the few Alpha Males can get away with", it's important to keep in mind the attenuating influence of reality. You've heard the story about the captive lion kept on a chain since it was a cub. Every day, the lion would pace around in a circle (as far as the chain would go). Then after many years, someone unlocked the chain. The lion, however, kept walking in the circle, unaware that its limits were now enormously greater. So I can imagine that most Beta Males "learn their place" after enough discouragement, and don't seriously hope to do the Alpha Male routine. Men need to preserve their dignity and ego just like people in general, so we've always got that element of sour grapes.

When Bill Gates amasses $20 billion, my wallet does not automatically get thicker simply because I have a somewhat similar complexion and chromosomes. On the other hand, if I read something about the average earnings of my age/race/sex group, then that tells me far more about my chances. In other words, comparing averages tells the average person something important, while comparing the tails is of merely symbolic importance to the average person. Speaking of women's genetic advantages, you left out the most obvious one. What is it, something like 90% or 95% of violent criminals are men? If you looked at the criminal tendencies of the minority of men who are criminals, you would find it hard to believe that the people running the world are mostly men. Or maybe those two facts are not entirely incongruous.

I have been the victim of extremely rude, hostile, and violent behavior from other white men; this is simply background noise that I don't really think about much beyond whatever immediate effect I may have suffered. But if I receive the same treatment from persons outside my "group," I tend to view it differently, for example as something like a "racial incident." If I were around a group of women who treated me as badly as some groups of men tend to do, I could easily succumb to the idea that they were mistreating me because I am a man, instead of because I am there. This kind of thinking was never more starkly apparent than in the Rodney King incident. In the slums of L.A. young black men murder other young black men with depressing regularity. But when some white police officers beat a black man senseless on videotape, the result is "civil unrest" with thousands of enraged people burning down their neighborhoods. This is a very dangerous logical defect. White men are very often rude to each other in the world of work. A woman or black man walking into the same environment unprepared might well interpret the same degree of rudeness as a kind of prejudice. This is not to say that prejudice does not exist; of course it does. But it's important to distinguish especial rudeness from ordinary rudeness. Failing to do so will lead a person into unnecessary conflict by playing the race or sex card frivolously. This kind of frivolity leads to backlash and deprives the disenfranchised of their prime advantage: the moral high ground.

Anyway, don't blame the feminists for wrecking the family. Blame Henry Ford, the man who made mass automobility possible, and permitted adolescents and young adults to escape from historical social controls. This change has been so sweeping that most of us today can barely imagine a time when older adults tagged along with dating teenagers, and imposed restrictions such as having to sit so many inches apart in the movie theater, etc. Most of us would be outraged to have to submit to such oppressive interference, BUT...if most people did, we could get the family back (eventually). Is that what we want?

Fat people who indulge in sloth and gluttony annoy a lot of people. So many of those people respond by treating fat people like shit. Oppressors always have reasons they can recite. But the bottom line is that people become oppressors because they are wired up to feel annoyed at someone else. (For reasons that probably make more sense to the oppressors than to anybody else.)

But while we are on the subject, it's interesting that when we are discussing the plight of fat people, comparisons to other varieties of losers keep surfacing (chronically welfare-dependent people, drug addicts, alcoholics). I certainly don't doubt that all four groups of people have things in common, but it's also obvious that most people do not consider "attractiveness" to be one of those things. BTW, Charlotte, how many chronically homeless men have you dated?

We can safely and utterly discount all objective credentials of the authors of the Bible. None of them would be qualified to write authoritatively on any relevant issue today. For example, the "physicians" you find impressive could not pass a gross anatomy exam, let alone think about practicing medicine in any modern country.

I would think the inability to see or hear each other makes our interaction here as cerebral as possible. It is no coincidence that most of our interaction is flaming. Without our physical presences to turn each other on all we have left are the irritating bits.

If women are so much more disciplined and morally pure about sex, then how come they aren't more disciplined and morally pure about exercising regularly? (Women are, on average, more slovenly and sedentary than men are.)

Simpler explanations are better than more complicated explanations, because they have fewer ways to break. The more qualifications and hacks one adds to a theory, the less likely it is to fit all the evidence.

Predictions do not have to be perfect to increase human power. They only have to be sufficiently better than a random guess to enable us to make better decisions. As long as the benefit of the better decision outweighs the cost of the effort to support the decision, it will be worth it.

Observance of regularity always preceeds discovery of the underlying mechanisms. Indeed, you have to recognize the regularity first so you have some idea of the mechanisms you are seeking.

I am tired of hearing scientists attempting to sidestep their accountability with quasi-religious appeals to the non-commercial nature of science, when in practice science is a temple filled with moneychangers, no longer a house of worship. I am quite convinced of the benefits of science, but creating a new theocracy is not one of them. Scientists may cast themselves as a noble priesthood unsullied by the corrupting influence of money and politics, but anyone with a lick of sense knows that's not how science is done any more.

Interestingly all these examples of anti-intellectualism pertain to the fundamental human disgust for the various consequences of Darwinism for humankind. Creationists are merely farther out of the closet on the issue than are most other anti-intellectuals.

Credible death threats have a remarkable power to focus the mind.

To really privatize medicine would require packaging medical science into an actual product---i.e., robot doctors, which consumers could buy to act as their personal physicians. As long as consumers cannot actually purchase and own the medical science, they are stuck with having to purchase an expensive service they cannot understand well enough to make informed choices. Ignorant consumers -> inefficient market. The Invisible Hand can be Invisible but it cannot be blind too.

The maximum demand for violin players is limited, and not very large. Once you have enough violin players, the rest are redundant. With modern recording technology, you only need a few violin players to play all the music once so machines can play it back as needed. There is also little payoff for additional playing skill, once a violin player is good enough. Indeed, a player with too much technical skill might alienate audiences with too many notes. In contrast, there is still a lot of science left to be discovered, much of it possibly having commercial value. A scientist can probably never be "too good" at discovering more science. There are probably plenty of scientific discoveries that would more than pay for themselves.

Because sperm is in excess supply relative to eggs, it is necessary to cull the field a bit, for example by ridiculing marginal sperm donors and encouraging some of them to commit suicide.

If science tries to "be nice" to everybody, it simply won't work very well. One incompetent scientist publishing errors can screw up the work of hundreds of scientists who rely on those results. Science must be hard on bad ideas, or it will break down. Science is a highly artificial form of human thought (why else would years of schooling be necessary); therefore, it does not necessarily reflect the emotional/cultural needs of the people who do it. So I would encourage women to think carefully about "sexism" in science. Be very sure that what seems to be sexism really is sexism, and is not simply the brutal criticism that scientists typically give to each other. Whether you are a man or a woman, science is constantly trying to wash you out. Don't take it personally. Women probably do face some sexism on top of the brutal criticism that both men and women face. Therefore, they might have to work harder. But I have my doubts about that. A theory, or program, or piece of equipment, or tissue sample, either works or it doesn't. Even sexists can't argue with that. Besides, this is science, so if you can prove someone is showing gender bias (or any other bias) you can kick the shit out of them. So fight back.

One of the potentially most effective ways to fight civilization, however, may be to support it in its race to drown in its own excess. This is like the faithful wife who serves her gluttonous husband too much food, alcohol, and tobacco. She can easily send him to the grave 20 years sooner, and he might well love her for it.

Do you think you can radically change the mind of a person over age 40 about anything substantial? If so, good luck.

Which claim of sociobiology can you contest without appearing to position yourself against common sense?

I've always found the prevalence of military themes in science fiction to be...fascinating. I suspect this is the result of the profound influence the Second World War had on the development of most technologies that inspired the last five decades of science fiction (rocketry, computers, atomic energy, radar, advanced weapons projects, etc.). But it is interesting that while most science fiction features government either implicitly or explicitly in an enabling role, sci-fi buffs rarely tend to be extremely fond of big government. The Big Science that makes science fiction possible is inherently a collective enterprise. That is, until science discovers a way to make individuals as effectively intelligent as thousands of people can be today. But even then, groups of superintelligent people will probably be still more intelligent (unless something like light speed becomes a limiting factor for collaboration).

Tell me what sociobiological claim fails your standard for rigorous science. Are you aware of the discovery of the significance of phenotypic symmetry for attractiveness? An entomologist discovered by accident that male flies of a certain species enjoyed greater mating success if their right and left wings were the same length. He wondered if the same principle applied to people. It was simple enough to come up with a quantitative index of phenotypic symmetry (you just measure the lengths of a few left- and right-side major bones of the body, like the femur, clavicle, etc., and the deviation from mirror-image of facial features), and it was simple enough to measure this index for a group of experimental subjects and interview them about their sex lives. And lo, the most symmetrical men had the most sex partners, the earliest ages of first intercourse, and their partners were twice as likely to experience orgasm during intercourse as the partners of asymmetrical men. What aspect of this work fails your definition of "science"?

So does [relativism] mean women complain about being raped not because being raped is in any absolute sense "wrong," but because their dislike for being raped depends upon and is structured by the specific cultural, social and possibly scientific context and observational situation in which their dislike of rape is formulated and experienced? In other words, my dear enialle, are you trying to tell us that you found being raped to be unpleasant merely because your culture taught you regard it so? And had your cultural experience been markedly different you might have learned to just lie back and enjoy it? Can you imagine the impact of teaching aggressive, impulsive men to believe this almost inconceivably destructive philosophy? Granted, most guys who would consider raping women probably couldn't understand all those big words and the clumsy sentence structure, but the fashion of the intelligentsia does eventually set the tone for the societies they rule. Because sooner or later even the most abstract philosophical ramblings eventually do result in real decisions about real actions with real consequences. Oh, but of course, to the relativist nothing is actually "real."

It's easy to underestimate the difficulty of things you haven't tried. For example, there are lots of trained musicians who scoff at the simplistic musical structure of many hit records. There are plenty of hit songs that are easy for first-year guitar students to play. But when trained musicians try to write hit records of their own they discover that it isn't as easy as it sounds!

If medical science could make me as physically attractive to women as Brad Pitt is (not necessarily making me look exactly like Brad Pitt, but perhaps some sort of an "enhanced" version of myself) at a negligible risk of death and for a cost of, say, no more than $25,000 I would buy the treatment instantly. Not only because it would improve my social life by a couple orders of magnitude but also because it would be fun to have something that would bring so much pleasure to my favorite people. I would like to be able to give women an intense thrill simply by standing there and smiling at them, rather than by having to tell clever jokes, recite poetry, play a musical instrument, or amass a billion dollars.

Real hate is when a man is willing to give up sex to further a cause.

Science does not ask any rational person to look at a T. Rex fossil skull having jaws lined with razor-sharp six-inch fangs and believe that animal was a gentle herbivore.

It's important to understand why Malthus' ideas resonate so strongly with people who actually go out and look at nature. Boom and bust cycles are fundamental to population dynamics in every species, and have certainly applied to human populations in various times and places. Nothing grows exponentially forever, and exponential growth rarely stops gracefully. To stop an exponential growth, some outside force must weigh heavily on an overwhelming majority of individuals.

We are all familiar with "strong influence" in a negative direction---it doesn't take much imagination to say things to women that will instantly annihilate any sexual interest they might have had in the man speaking to them. "All American women are golddigging bitches" is an effective Speed Repulsion pattern (try it sometime and see), although I should hasten to add that having the courage to criticize a woman to just the right degree, especially early in the relationship when most guys would behave obsequiously, can work to the man's advantage and is a component of classic jerk behavior. A skilled jerk knows exactly how to express sexual interest in a woman without leading her to dismiss him as a "sure thing." When a woman doesn't really believe she has value as a person (and what woman does?), a man who contradicts her belief by going too ga-ga over her loses all credibility in her mind. How can she respect a man who is too stupid to recognize all her obvious faults? Instead the jerk presents his approval as something she has to earn, and thereby harnesses her approval-seeking behavior. Since most women have spent years developing the habit of struggling to be taken seriously as persons, and usually with promiscuous disregard for the source of the approval, often they immediately set to work when a man dangles his approval out there with just the right degree of attainability.

I don't think it is correct at all to blame patriarchy for women's freely exercised choice. Patriarchy does not tell women to despise short men. If Patriarchy could, it would instruct women to find old bald guys hot. The guys who actually have most of the "power" are not really all that hot to women, because most of those guys are too old. Why would Patriarchy promote a standard that doesn't help the old guys who are supposedly controlling everything? You almost never see old guys with the hottest chicks. The few exceptions get a lot of publicity, but it's really not that common.

If there is some outside prejudice working against black people, why does it work so much more strongly on some black people than others? This is not a rhetorical question---I am actually curious about how this could work. I don't think it can be as simple as some people being "blacker" than others, whatever that might mean.

People have all sorts of needs which a sufficiently resourceful business could address: the need for immortality, perfect health, stunning physical beauty, superhuman strength, surpassing intelligence, all human knowledge, and so on. Or even just the right answer to the latest problem at work. But instead the typical business doesn't know how to do much besides make a can of beer. So it becomes necessary for marketers to figure out a way to push the irrelevant product. How many commercials on TV actually address any real need you have?

I would have reservations against getting seriously involved with a woman who was even a former cigarette smoker. My reasoning is that if she's young enough to be attractive, then she has lived her entire life since the time when every person of at least average intelligence has known that cigarette smoking is an immensely stupid habit. Thus I would have to wonder what it says about her that she chose to do something immensely stupid. I would have to wonder what other immensely stupid things she might be doing now or will yet do.

Once mainstream science gains the ability to reprogram humans genetically will you still be an absolute moralist?

If any man is going to take a vacation, why shouldn't he go some place where the women treat him like a rock star? I don't like to travel to the Arctic Circle so I'm not interested personally, but I encourage every American loserguy reading this to: get your ass to Russia. If you sit there and just keep jerking off, you are an idiot.

When people are doing something harmful to themselves and/or others, what they desperately need more than anything else are some qualified outside opinions. There's this thing call "reality" that we all inhabit, and in "reality" some things work better than other things.

Why is mocking people for some physical traits acceptable while mocking people for other physical traits is not?

Why do you think a person feels threatened by pointing out your obvious errors? Most people find correcting the deluded fun, not threatening. A person who tries to champion some utterly laughable lost cause like fat acceptance might as well walk around with a "Kick Me" sign on. The Village Idiot invites ridicule; most people do not find the Village Idiot threatening.

Be yourself, i.e., a Hive assimilant.

If people understood better how to determine exactly what their partners need to feel loved and cared for, most relationships would probably work better. If people want to believe "chemistry" is just something that "happens," well, one day it might stop just as mysteriously as it started.

Do you realize that just by waddling into the room with your big fat body you immediately cause every man there to shake his head and wonder inwardly what kind of a clueless idiot you must be? Don't mistake their strained polite smiles for "acceptance." The jokes will begin once you are safely out of earshot. You know how you feel about the speed seducers? That's how men who see what you have done to yourself feel about you. All you have to do to fix that is push away from the table. Why is that so hard?

The work necessary to attain and sustain obesity doesn't feel like work to the obese because (a) they enjoy the sensory pleasures of eating and (b) habitual activity rarely feels like "work" regardless of how strenuous it actually is.

BTW, it's always interesting whenever any woman asks why men put so much emphasis on looks to ask how moist she gets for the 850 pound gentleman who sleeps in a piano case. I have yet to hear from a woman who does not react with instinctual revulsion and horror from photos of one of these specimens. Presumably getting busy for real with a human walrus would leave any woman other than the most hardened professional prostitute scarred psychologically for life.

How do you think men would react after a while if all women stopped voluntarily having sex with them? Do you think all men would happily accept it and say "OK, we'll just be celibate for the rest of our lives"? I've read about environments where there is a dire shortage of women, such as at research stations in Antarctica, where the ratio is like one woman for every ten men. Even though the men at these stations are mostly well-educated and better-mannered than average, the women still come under some rather intense pressure because of the overwhelming excess of unpartnered men. The article I read quoted one woman who had spent several winters at one of the stations, and she said her strategy was to find a man to hook up with right away when she started a tour of duty. Otherwise if the other men knew she was available they simply would not leave her alone. It's well-known that whenever a social disruption like a war or economic migration creates a concentration of men who aren't getting sex the result is "social instability" which basically means a bunch of horny, frustrated guys doing crazy destructive things. Only in a regimented environment (e.g., the military or an Antarctic research station) do men stay under control in the face of sexual deprival. This is why women have an instinctive revulsion for losers. They know what happens to men who don't get enough sex.

Even the most revolting person you can think of could probably perform competent oral sex on you. The reason you don't want the revolting person's mouth on your dick is not because it doesn't have the potential to feel good. The revulsion you feel is your brain's way of trying to prevent you from wasting your reproductive resources. This is, incidentally, why I suspect homophobia has a genetic component.

Of the actually hot women I've polled on the subject, every one said she would not even consider dating a man who is shorter than she is. Typically a hot woman will regard this as an absurd question, as if I asked her if she will consider dating goats, or men who don't own automobiles. Since truly hot women get hit on by a dozen or so men every week, they can easily impose the industry standard height requirement of 6' and still have plenty of choices.

As you know, being seen as unhappy is a great social faux pas, and labeling a Usenet opponent as unhappy can be an effective cheap shot. The natural godless process of evolution has genetically programmed us to despise the miserable. Your fat friends are probably not total fools---they know that nobody wants to be around a fat slob who seems unhappy, so undoubtedly they are careful about who they express unhappiness to.

Anything deterministic can look nondeterministic if it's complex enough. You can't predict what any individual woman is going to do in every situation, but you can predict what your overall chances will look like based on how you stack up in the dozen or so relevant traits.

I used to live in a neighborhood with a lot of beggars. I generally ignored them. Once I told one of them to get a job, and he became quite belligerant, challenging me to a fight, and demonstrating that he had plenty of physical strength and initiative that would be necessary to get a job.

I suggest doing what humans have always done: when Nature disappoints, improve on it.

People care about characters on a screen when those characters either remind them of things in the real world they care about, or might have the potential to manifest themselves in reality.

I don't understand why you picture women as being like gumball machines who will dispense gumballs for anybody who puts in a coin of the proper size and weight. Suppose gumballs practiced favoritism, and they would work for some people and not others. The people who wanted gumballs and couldn't get any would, after years of watching other people succeed, probably start to build up deep resentments at the gumball machines. Note that a positive feedback loop can start from a minor perturbation, but in this case the perturbation is not minor. A typical boy starts getting horny somewhere around age 13 or 14. He might need another five years or more before he is getting sex on a regular basis. The frustration is difficult to deal with at first, but a teenaged boy has plenty of company because most of his peers are frustrated too. I think the "tipping point" comes somewhere by the early 20's as a still-frustrated post-adolescent male sees most of his male peers lining up some action while he is still getting locked out. From then on, his continued failure will reinforce his bad attitude which will elicit more failure. Every man has to succeed for the first time with no prior experience of success, and more than likely a fair amount of previous failure. But I think there is a maximum amount of failure a man can absorb before it starts to do permanent emotional damage.

The only ideal world is the artificial one we might build.

[Harry Potter, Spiderman and Lord of the Rings] are not "nerd" movies, but nerd-repudiating movies. Each of them features protagonists who overcame their nerd handicap through some magical power. The message of these films is that nerds are so powerless and irredeemable that only a supernatural event could save them.

Actually the Bible's popularity strongly suggests it is worth reading. Consider this analogy: how much of an automobile's utility results from the properties of the automobile itself, and how much results from the fact that almost every other adult drives an automobile? Of course the Bible has been in print a long time, and most Bibles are not currently being read, so the real popularity of the Bible right now is less than its cumulative sales would suggest. In contrast, most people who own automobiles are addicted to them and use them daily. If people spent as much time reading the Bible as they spend driving cars, then reading the Bible would be as important as driving is. It's very hard to get through life as a nonconformist.

The lesson I have drawn from my "vast" experience picking up chicks is that if men can build sex robots which duplicate the look and feel of the most attractive women while eliminating their usual indifference problem that will be the greatest invention of all time. Pushing fire, the wheel, and the number zero down a notch.

If short men are not inherently inferior in any way, and all the prejudice against them is contrived, then how did that prejudice get started, and why do all societies maintain it? Indeed, how do all societies get away with it? If short men are just as good as tall men, then the prejudice could just as easily have gone the other way somewhere, producing a land we might call "Shortopia." Why has there never been a Shortopia, a place where short men stand tall, figuratively speaking, and lord it over---I mean under---the underclass of tall men? Why didn't any society spontaneously try that arrangement? Human cultures are immensely diverse. Almost everything which can vary, does. Look at all the different languages, religions, customs, traditions, etc. Going to a foreign land produces a sensation known as "culture shock" because so many things are different to the newcomer. And yet despite the countless differences between societies there is no Shortopia. Why not?

If drug users refrained from creating problems for other people, they would be generally tolerated in much the same way as people who watch the Playboy channel are generally tolerated. There is also the issue of how drug dealers recruit new customers. Like the tobacco companies, they target the young. Most people who have drug habits developed them while young, because the young brain is uniquely vulnerable. Availability of drugs to the young pretty much determines a society's future costs of drug addiction. One of the major problems is that recreational drug use, like cigarettes and alcohol abuse, is a "regressive" behavior. I.e., the farther down the socioeconomic scale one looks, the more common such behaviors become. When an activity is most popular among the dregs of society, it will unavoidably have a serious public-relations problem, mostly because the poor are incapable of cleaning up their own messes.

If you look around carefully, you may notice that almost everything is against the law. Signs, signs, everywhere signs, blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind; do this, don't do that, din'cha read the sign. How can society not be draconian? Almost everything around us belongs to someone else. People cannot live like wandering bears which break into anything that smells like food. Animals do not have a concept of property; they just take whatever they can grab.

A drastic change in a person's environment can sometimes change the way he thinks. Faith is a group activity. Few people would want to be the ONLY person who believes in some particular religion. That would be no fun at all. Religious fanaticism requires tight communities of fanatics who constantly reinforce each other's groupthink. Notice that when terrorists form a sleeper cell, it's never just one guy acting alone. To maintain fanaticism requires the reinforcement of a group of fellow fanatics.

Responsibility is something which society assigns. For example, if you hand me a vase, and I release my grip on it, gravity will pull the vase to the floor and smash it. Will we blame me for letting go of the vase, or will we blame gravity? A society can assign responsibility in pretty much any way it wants. Not too surprisingly, in societies where men dominate, women are considered responsible for more than in societies where women have more political power and are able to shift more of the responsibility onto men.

Have you ever been attacked by a dog and then tried to reason with the dog owner? The dog owner doesn't see the dog as the problem. The dog owner sees you as the problem, for somehow provoking the dog which "never bites anyone."

No gender activist is gender-blind. For the latest illustration, see the drummed-up media outrage over the Augusta National golf club for its refusal to accept women as members. Somehow, the Victory Lady Fitness Centers have not triggered similar outrage for refusing to accept men as members.

It looks to me like everything Will Smith brings to the table can fit on a DVD without loss. I.e., whatever is great about Will Smith is expressible as a list of numbers. If the human actor's "essence" fits in a list of numbers on a DVD, that means eventually a computer program could generate the same list of numbers.

If people are going to believe in fairy tales with no objective evidence, why can't they believe in fairy tales that work to my advantage? For example, why doesn't someone invent a religion which says that the way to heaven is to implore me to make love to your beautiful sexually mature daughters? (David Koresh was able to work that angle until he decided to do battle with the ATF.) That's not any more ridiculous than any other religion I've heard of, but for some strange reason all those religions benefit other people and not me.

Perhaps you will be relieved to know that both competent and incompetent parents can be found at all levels of society. It is true, however, that proportionately more of the incompetent kind can be found in the neighborhoods you don't want to inhabit, and the state does have a somewhat harder time regulating the activities of people it does not bankroll. Part of the reason for the relation between poverty and parental incompetence is that the skills necessary for good parenting have plenty of overlap with the ability to hold a job. Nonetheless, it is quite possible for a poor person to make a dedicated, loving parent. This has to be true because a century ago well over half the population of the USA lived in what today we would consider poverty, and parenting skills were not substantially worse then than they are today.

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 woman? Thought question: who is higher on your list, an unemployed homeless janitor with no career prospects, or a successful physician?

People who deny having basic emotions while exhibiting them are like cheap imitation Rolex watches. It's particularly laughable when women try to do that. Women! The most emotional creatures on Earth. Most couldn't take verbal abuse from a little league coach without breaking down into tears.

Humans have the perfectly rational mental habit of assigning more weight to criticism that comes from people who are higher up the social value hierarchy. This is rational because the opinions of valuable people matter more than the opinions of worthless people. One way we judge the social value of a man is by the attractiveness of women who love him. When someone wants to smear a man the first thing they do is accuse him of not getting any women. If he does get women, they try to portray the women he gets as having low sexual market value. If they can't do that, then they just get angry and try to pound a wedge between the man and any attractive women who endorse him. The idea is to drive desirable women away from him, thereby reducing his social value and thus his authority to judge others.

What you don't seem to grasp is that your sour-grapes excuses for failing to demonstrate your special exemption from the iron laws of the sexual market do not constitute a refutation of SMV theory. So don't waste more of our time telling us how you don't care for beautiful women because they treat you like garbage. Of course they treat you like garbage; beautiful women treat all low-SMV men like garbage. That doesn't make them inferior, it means you don't have what it takes to elicit their respect.

Explain to the readers how SMV theory can be bunk while at the same time beautiful women command a higher price.

The only way to place a value on a rejection is to presume the existence of a sexual market. If there is no sexual market---that is, if attraction is a purely random event, and nobody is attractive to appreciably more people than anybody else---then being rejected by one person would have no bearing whatsoever on your odds of being rejected by the next person. Since every rational person reacts to rejection by experiencing some degree of distress and self-doubt---with the intensity increasing exponentially if a string of rejections turns into a trend---it is quite clear that everybody, at least on a subconscious emotional level, understands that there is indeed some sort of sexual market in operation.

I've never seen an attractive woman hand out pity compliments to men. Attractive women know they cannot do that without collecting stalkers. Attractive women also have no need nor reason to be kind to be men. (A beautiful woman can get away with being inconsiderate as long as her looks hold up, say to age 30 or so after which she will have to mellow out progressively as her sexual market value begins declining at 5% to 10% each year. In a few pitiful cases, often seen on Usenet, aging beauties stay locked into their early-adult behavior patterns 20 years or more after they've lost the capacity to pull it off in the visual environment of real life.) Unattractive women, on the other hand, can compliment men all they like without fear of stimulating much sexual attention. They also need to be nice to get men to tolerate their presence.

It's hard for fat girls to know their place. But even women who can handle the fat issue somewhat objectively tend to fall apart quickly over the age issue.

It is true, of course, that most people eventually settle for partners with comparable SMV (sexual market value) as market dynamics allocate the scarce supply of sexual attractiveness through the brutal process of assortative mating. But don't naively assume that just because two ugly people hook up, what they have is every bit as good to them as what two beautiful people have. That's the same patronizing assumption the rich have always imposed on the poor. While not every rich person is happier than every poor person, almost every individual is happier with money than without.

Let me try to get this straight. Are you seriously suggesting that there is someone, presumably male, who could confuse the behavior of women he observes in pornos with the behavior of women in real life? That might be a danger for the occasional rock star, who actually might observe women in real life behaving like the women in pornos, but the average man is at no such risk. Pornos, and entertainment in general, are popular in proportion to their ability to be obviously unlike real life.

If you, a chunky middle-aged woman, are rejecting "hot" guys, what sort of luck do you think these "hot" guys are having with women who are actually attractive to men? Attractive women get hit on more than 100 times per year and usually say "yes" to only a small percentage of their suitors. I'd bet that a lot of these "hot" guys who are hitting on you haven't scored with anything attractive in a while.

Claiming to be profound is like claiming to be intelligent---something a person who is never needs to do.

It seems to be a feature of IQ opponents that they take pains not to read anything threatening to their views.

When you have sexual fantasies do they involve healthy partners or visibly diseased partners?

Since most people do not inherit great wealth, the most likely reason for chronic unemployment is chronic unemployability. Since most employers demand a few basic things from their employees (a good work ethic, ability to get along with cow-orkers, etc.), they immediately become suspicious of a job applicant with large gaps in his employment record. But even if they don't know anything about his record, he will probably demonstrate his true colors after a short time on the job. People tend to take their problems with them. Just be happy that few women will pry into your sexual history to the degree that an employer may pry into your work history.

When an obese woman scores, there is never a slender attractive woman weeping over the man she lost.

It's interesting to consider how far human society would have to regress into a Dark Age for the arguments of creationists and fat acceptors to become generally credible.

My low SMV is a given. I fully deserve all the spite and disgust you feel for me. That's what any low-SMV person deserves. The part I can't figure is why low-SMV people continue to act surprised even after decades of being shown their place.

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.

Few things cut a man to the core like exposing him as sexually inadequate. There is a nice sociobiological explanation for this. Do you know it?

I have noticed an odd thing upon reaching my mid-40's. I can go for a 160 km bicycle ride and enjoy it now even if I don't meet any cute women. That doesn't mean cute women don't improve most activities, but life no longer seems so irretrievably futile in their absence. Which is just as well because nothing drives home the rarity (not to mention the impermanence) of cute women like getting older.

Imagine how different sexual morality would be if every man were as attractive to women as Brad Pitt is, and if every woman were as attractive to men as Jennifer Aniston is. Would anyone with such great sexual opportunities make a virtue of ignoring them? Maybe a few, but probably not most.

What coping strategy is more effective than for cripples to band together and cripple their betters? That is, assuming there is no hope for cripples to improve at the moment.

I admit I have to wonder about the 50% or so of Roman Catholic priests who are neither gay nor pedophiles. Given that they generally had to take their vow of celibacy at such a young age, how could they do that? Perhaps they have unusually low libidos, making them emotionally equivalent to older men. Sure, everybody who is less than stunningly attractive has to endure bouts of involuntary celibacy, but it's different knowing you are trying to change your status.

When I was younger, I always marveled at the way women could go out to bars with their women friends and somehow "have a good time" that did not involve any attempt to get laid. I could never understand how women could genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves without sex, and not in just some marking-time kind of way. Even more peculiar was the way women could say "No" on a date and make it seem utterly effortless! I could say "No" also, but only with a titanic effort of will, similar to what it takes to hold perfectly still while someone slowly burns your arm with a cigarette lighter. Of course, that was back when I dated young women, who were attractive. Hanging out with older women makes it much easier to stop obsessing.

Can you guarantee that none of your ancestors owed their existence to fornication? If your existence serves God, and God used fornication to make you, we must conclude fornication serves God.

Judging from the number of fat slobs in every church, it looks like a lot of them are knocking off a piece or 2 in the middle of the week, at the very least. Not a piece of ass but a piece of tasty food. Apparently it's OK for Christians to be gluttons and not OK for them to be fornicators. Weird. At least they can be sure indulging in gluttony will reduce their temptations to fornicate.

Do you think labor camps support the claims that people can remain obese on 600 kcal/day?

To experience just how good food can really taste a person needs to try training hard enough to get really depleted. The most pleasure I can recall deriving from food in my life came from a simple banana when I had "bonked" badly on a long ride. Trying to explain what that is like to a couch potato is probably hopeless so I won't even bother. But suffice it to say that if you've never really worked hard in your life then you probably have no idea what food really tastes like.

It's very odd that you think it is bad for men to reject women for being fat, but desirable for men to reject women for being dumb. Fat women can choose not to be fat (in the bulk of cases) but dumb women cannot yet choose not to be dumb. (A person's IQ score is about as fixed as his/her height after age 15.) It will take perhaps another 50 years of advance in genetic engineering before we can hold dumb people in any way responsible for their dumbness.

Young girls should be told the truth: a woman of normal weight tends to incite sexual lust in a larger proportion of men than do women at either extreme of the weight distribution. And also, women of normal weight tend to live a bit longer. But most of all, young people need to understand that sexual attraction is not primarily about character. But it certainly is about brutally efficient Darwinian competition that always produces winners and losers. Wait until the word gets out about phenotypic symmetry. Then we'll see millions of young boys checking themselves with calipers and rulers. Unfortunately, there is no diet or exercise program that can help much with this.

It is illogical for a man to verbally abuse another man who gets fat. A man who gets fat is doing me a favor, by reducing his own ability to compete for the superficial women I desire most. This might actually explain what the feminists are doing. It is clearly in the competitive interests of a woman of normal weight to reduce the social costs of obesity among her competition. Since the attractiveness criteria of men are not going to change despite any messages they receive from society, it serves the interests of the woman of normal weight for fat women to delude themselves into self-acceptance.

Envy is Nature's way of telling people to bustamove.

Karma: the ultimate "Blame the Victim" meme wherein the misfortune of the victim is itself the unfalsifiable proof of the victim's guilt. If my job were to dream up a more destructive idea I think I would fail.

Nobody with character flaw X sees X as a moral issue.

Building muscle the hard way is like putting a little money in the bank every workout. After years of that, you've got a nice nest egg. Building muscle with steroids is like borrowing a million bucks from the mob, and then blowing it on wild partying. Great while the party lasts. But after all your "friends" have had fun and gone home, you've got a big mess on the carpet. Not to mention some guy with middle name "The" who's coming around to collect.

I believe that ergogensis (taking drugs to increase strength) is inherently legitimate and "morally sound". It is just another artificial technology to modify the body, not different in principle from other artificial technologies (like weight training in general). Effective and safe ergogenic drugs would greatly enhance the quality of life for many people. The difference between in top shape and being "normal" is like the difference between being "normal" and being in a wheelchair. If a person is in a wheelchair, we would welcome a drug that got them up to the level of a couch potato. A drug that turned the couch potato into a champion makes just as much sense. There is no good reason to limit anybody. Just because most people have a certain limit doesn't make that limit a good idea.

The professional athlete pursues a sport the way the Terminator pursued Sarah Conner. Anyway (s)he can. As long as fans reward performance, and drugs improve performance, athletes will take drugs. To many athletes, this is no more "immoral" or "cheating" than is flying down a wet mountain at a speed high enough to insure that anyone who goes as fast or faster does so at peril. And why should it be so? The rules permit the athlete to risk his life in many ways, and few of us consider this "immoral". Is it "immoral" to permit bicyclists to race without helmets? Is it "immoral" not to impose speed limits on descents?

Mammals that eat other mammals tend to be a bit smarter than mammals that eat plants. Of course there are exceptions, but mammals are more difficult than plants to catch and eat. A fox, wolf, cat, etc., has to be pretty smart to track its next meal, but a cow only has to be smart enough to outsmart a blade of grass. This is one reason that the most popular pets tend to be predator mammals. They are among the smartest animals that can be domesticated easily. E.g., cats, dogs, and ferrets are more popular as pets than rats, mice, goats, and guinea pigs. There is a possible analogy with the aggressor role in forming relationships. I suspect men benefit in the long run from having to take the aggressor role. This forces young men to confront their deepest fears and insecurities head-on and overcome them. This is valuable training for the leadership roles that tend to be predominantly occupied by older men.

Fat people's problems with social acceptance could just about go away if fat people would decide to find other fat people attractive. (I'm only guessing, of course, because I don't think fat people have ever tested this hypothesis.) I think I'm making a pretty important point with this, because the typical fat person's rant is all about how "society" says fat people are unattractive and how terrible this is. When something like 30% of adult citizens in the USA are overweight, and therefore cast a lot of 'votes' about what is attractive, I can only conclude that fat people have decided it's a good idea to find other fat people disgusting.

Men are not women. Stop picturing us as having your emotional makeup.

Everybody hates diversity, and our cultural pressure to conform to behavioral norms is intense. This is actually a good thing, because it enables you to walk into just about any group of people with cultural backgrounds similar to yours and fit yourself in without too much difficulty. When you consider we live in a country with a quarter of a billion people, and you can make friends about as easily in any part of it, that is really an amazing thing.

Perhaps you could speculate on how Wilt Chamberlain can screw 20,000 of the same women who tell normal men like you they must first have respect, commitment, trust, closeness, blah blah blah before they have sex.

"Bad drivers" are not a mysterious "them" which the non-mysterious "us" can point the finger at. "Bad drivers" are merely what we get when we establish automobility as the State Religion. The only way to eliminate bad drivers is to build some sort of communities where we may live happily without driving so much. Otherwise, we are fighting a losing battle, much like the ill-fated "War on Drugs". If you brainwash people from infancy to worship automobiles, and then tell them they can't have any, you'd better have some convincing alternatives lined up.

John Lennon's choice demonstrates that to change a man's concept of sexual market value all you have to do is administer several pounds of LSD.

Do you have any concept of how bad a normal man's life would have to be to crush his self-esteem down enough to let him consider being with a woman who is 100 pounds overweight? It's typical for men to relax their standards a little after getting kicked in the teeth by highly attractive women, but relaxing them all the way down to the point of accepting morbid obesity would require a level of brutality from women as a whole that I can barely contemplate.

Incidentally, do you know why the sex ratio is so even, despite the fact that a species does not benefit from wasting so many resources on redundant sperm donors? See: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for the answer.

I wouldn't put it past fat acceptors to use genetic engineering to make the world more fat accepting. What's going to happen when scientists discover the exact genes that make me think (actress) Denise Richards is hot? Maybe feminists would lobby to change those genes. Already there are dwarves who are protesting any genetic screening that would reduce the future number of dwarves.

Most people cannot imagine being passionate with all the yucky stuff actually in there. If you saw your own internal organs, in the last seconds of your life you would probably experience great horror. But that stuff is what you are. Sexual attraction is a very surface phenomenon. We don't want to think about what is really going on beneath the surface.

People complain about Big Government, too, while continuously voting for more of it. It's human nature to resent things that have power over us. Why do you think movies become more popular when they show a lot of cars being smashed up? Slaves always enjoy fantasizing about the demise of their masters.

Once eugenical engineering becomes routine, it will come to be seen as child abuse to allow a random genetic experiment to determine a person's lifetime fate. Not correcting genetic flaws will be seen as being as horrific as a pregnant woman deliberately taking thalidomide. Because it is.

There's a conflict of interest here. A man tests a woman's love by the speed with which she gives him sex. A woman tests a man's love by the length of time he is willing to wait to have sex with her. It's not possible for a man and a woman to test each other's love simultaneously this way.

The more emotionally aroused you become at the possibility that embedded commands are an "underhanded trick," the less you actually doubt their effectiveness. If you saw people trying to fly by flapping their arms, would you consider that a threat to you and become agitated about it? Or would you just ignore them, laugh at them, or think they were somewhat strange and forget them?

I've listened to a lot of complaints from a lot of men, and "She used me for sex!" has never made the list.

An odd result of self-bias is that even though some people find it disturbing that another person could do something deliberately to increase his power to bring them to states of romantic/sexual arousal, the very same people do not hesitate to exploit every cost-effective tool to increase their own power to bring other people to the same mental states.

I like textual erotica too, but after some time I need to remind myself what I find exciting about it.

In what sense is [Men Against Rape and Pornography] a "self-help" group? I am not saying I disagree with you, I am asking you to explain in what sense a group of men are helping themselves by getting together to persuade themselves not to enjoy viewing photographs of physically attractive women.

The only real-life experiences I have had with people who attempted to verbally injure others always involved plenty of emotion on the part of the attacker. These emotions were not always anger, though escalating verbal violence usually culminates in anger. Many verbal attacks are part of someone's aim to establish their rank in a dominance hierarchy, the same sort of behavior common among nesting fowl. By undermining someone's confidence and security in public, the attacker gains some sort of superiority, presumably worth something somehow.

Fat acceptance is perhaps the most target-rich environment a rhetorician could ask for. It's far better than creationism because creationism requires more work to refute. Fat acceptance is a truly naked emperor.

The line separating courage and stupidity is ... nonexistent. In every example I can think of, people take risks only because they are too stupid to come up with a safe strategy for getting the same result. For example, if the guys who stormed ashore at Omaha Beach had been smart enough to build the weapons the U.S.A. has in 1999, they could have eliminated Hitler's warmaking capacity in a few weeks while incurring virtually no casualties. But they weren't smart enough to build superior weapons ... so they needed "courage" to hop off boats and run straight into machine-gun fire.

At some point scientific progress will start reaching into the brain, and then every social trend suddenly becomes unpredictable. All the game rules will change completely.

Clearly, wishful thinking has its limits when it runs up against cold hard undeniable obvious unyielding fact.

Even in the most traditional of societies, obviously better weapons such as AK-47s quickly displace the inferior native weapons. Do any smart people today continue to promote obviously ineffective traditional cures for diseases which have been routinely curable by mainstream medicine for decades? The domain for dubious "alternative" medicine consists of those diseases and chronic conditions modern medicine cannot cure yet.

What was the slogan behind the United States? No taxation without representation! And now we have come full circle, with wife-friendly divorce settlements imposing taxation on men without (family) representation. A father who is denied custody cannot even send a representative to his children to promote his interests with them.

Laugh if you will, but psychologists have found the artificial pet dogs by Sony even in their current primitive state improve measures of well-being in some of society's members most in need of companionship: the forgotten infirm elderly who have little or no objective social value with which to attract human companions. Artificial companions seem as comical now as the early attempts at flying machines did in the 1890's, but technology has a way of moving forward. Today not many people laugh at an F-16 dropping cluster bombs on a terrorist camp.

In high school, what matters for a boy's popularity is to be taller, bigger, more athletic, and better-looking than his peers. It's way too early for intellectually-talented boys to have demonstrated they can do much besides take tests well. Girls aren't genetically programmed to instinctively see the value in that. The intellectual boys won't come into their own until they gain enough experience and maturity to start translating their intelligence into bling. That typically takes years.

In a couple of weeks the college student gets more opportunities to meet MOTOS than he will probably get in a couple of years of "real" life after college. If a young man cannot attract any women in college, it's hard to think how it's going to get easier for him in the future, unless he should come into great success in some objectively rewarding field, and then (some) women specifically target him.

The Law of Averages suggests that a man who can attract one woman could probably attract another, if he made enough effort. (It is very unlikely that he happened to stumble across the one woman in the world who would have him. We can probably assume he could have lived in many different parts of the world and found a similar result.) Thus there is a huge difference between having zero sex partners vs. one sex partner. A man who has met several hundred women during his life and gotten laid with one of them has a track record from which we can estimate his chances of finding mutual attraction with women. Assuming his luck has not been unusually bad or good, he seems to find mutual attraction with about one in several hundred women. Granted, one data point isn't enough to do good statistics, but it's something. In contrast, a man who has met several hundred women in his life and gotten laid with zero of them may have an indeterminately low probability of finding mutual attraction. How many more women he might need to meet is unknowable---a thousand, a million, a billion?

I suspect few men are quite as attractive to women in general as their wives/girlfriends fear they are. From a woman's point of view, she picked the guy, so other women might. From a man's point of view, most women reject him, so probably the next woman will too.

A man who wants to have sex with a woman is in a position analogous to a salesman selling a product. There may be large numbers of people who window-shop. They see the product and think, "Oh, that's nice." Of all the window-shoppers, only a percentage come in the store and listen to the sales pitch. Of the people who hear the pitch, only a percentage actually buy the product. There might be a hundred window-shoppers for each sale. Hitting on women is like that. Of all the women a man approaches and tries to talk to: 1. Some will talk to him. 2. Some who will talk to him will agree to a date. 3. Some who agree to a date will actually show. 4. Some who actually go on a date will want to seem him again. 5. Some who see him again will eventually sleep with him. It's like launching a small payload into Earth orbit by using a giant multi-stage chemical rocket. An enormous first stage lifts the smaller remaining stages part of the way; then the second stage takes over; and so on until the small payload reaches orbit velocity. A man must get a lot of attention from a lot of women to generate a steady trickle filtering through to step 5. There are "losses" at every step, i.e., most women who were interested enough for that step are not interested in going to the next step. If a man has difficulty even talking to women, he could easily end up getting locked out of the game completely, because he has to compete with lots of other men who easily talk to lots of women---the "players."

Whatever consciousness is, it appears to be strictly tied to the continuous flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain, and the brain remaining within a very narrow range of operating conditions (temperature, pressure, G force, etc.). If consciousness had some independent existence apart from the physical operation of a brain, we would expect there to be some clear sign of it. Brains are pretty interesting structures, but there doesn't seem anything magical about them. They are made of molecules like everything else around us. Why would brains be the exclusive interfaces between the physical world and consciousness? If a brain can act as the portal, perhaps some artificial arrangement of molecules can as well. Maybe in the future someone will build a box through which your dead grandma's soul can continue to interact with the physical world. Or perhaps there isn't anything out there to be a portal to.

Science is basically the study of dumber things. For scientists to study something, that something has to be dumber than the scientists. If something is smarter than scientists, it can outsmart scientists' attempts to study it, if it wants to.

Every religion and paranormal belief system has the same number of Randi Prize wins: zero.

Most people are trendoids. They like to follow the herd. That's why we have "culture." If everybody was an individual who did his or her individual things, there would be no identifiable culture. Instead most people are more comfortable when they are conforming to the herd. People want to fit in. So they tend to do what they see large numbers of people around them doing. If large numbers of people all around you are getting divorced, that probably increases your chances of getting divorced, above what the chances would be if nobody around you was getting divorced. Even if you are personally impervious to outside pressure, maybe your partner isn't. It takes two people to start a marriage, but only one to end it.

Jeez, if I were stuck with four kids to raise the first thing I would do is look for a wife. I'd put T-shirts on all my kids that said "Will you be my mommy?", train them to look forlorn, and send them out with puppies on leashes to assist in the recruiting effort.

I may think my house is the greatest house in the world but that doesn't change its value to the market. It probably had sentimental value to the previous owners but they got nothing for sentimental value when I bought it. If they would have demanded extra money for all their memories I would have laughed and asked my realtor to show me some more houses. That's what makes markets work: competition. You're only worth to others what it takes to replace you.

It's often inaccurate to label someone a "man hater." A woman who, for example, wants to take men's money without giving them sex does not necessarily "hate" men, any more than I "hate" chicken. I eat chicken not because I hate them, but because they taste good. Obviously the way I treat chicken does not advance a chicken's agenda, but it would be silly to say I "hate" them. I simply enjoy exploiting chicken, and I am indifferent to their concerns. That is typically the way of a predator.

To find out how dangerous things are, you have to collect some statistics. Anecdotes may be misleading because only the survivors are around to talk. Sex is obviously safer for some people than it is for others, but getting sexually involved with another human introduces some serious variables that are outside of one's control. A sampler: 1. Your partner could charge you with rape. 2. Your partner could murder you. 3. Your partner could divorce you and take you to the cleaners. 4. Your partner could have sex with someone else and bring home a disease. 5. Your partner could have sex with someone else and conspire with him to kill you. 6. Your partner could produce children on a schedule not to your liking. Perhaps a married couple will never experience such problems. Similarly, some people drive cars all their lives and never have a wreck. There are people with perfect driving records; so what? To estimate the danger of driving, you count the wrecks.

Prozac differs from pot in that Prozac played by the rules.

I think certain kinds of sexual expressions aren't really feasible, or perhaps fully realizable, and won't be until we have high-quality sex robots. Essentially, certain kinds of sexual behaviors require people to pretend they are robots. People aren't good at pretending to be robots.

Governments take their laws very seriously. Anyone living under a government should take note. There are lots of countries in the world with different governments having different laws. While it's a hassle to move to a country with laws more to your liking, it might be more of a hassle to end up in jail.

When I go bike riding with people I don't usually get their take on divorce theft, the war in Iraq, and all the other issues of burning importance we discuss here. Try to picture the danimal never talking about sexbots. Weird, huh? The danimal---oh yeah, the sexbot guy. Well, that's an association not many people would have built up in real life. Incidentally, I find it annoying that people tend to focus on people rather than ideas. It's often just another way to tune out.

It's amazing how true that stereotype is. After I started riding a bike, I noticed that the faster I rode, the gayer the women became. But a lot of lesbians are pretty cool. They seem to relate to guys well. I think that's because we have something in common: we both know what a fricking hassle it often is to hit on women.

Today we enjoy lots of technology we take for granted, such as plumbing. Imagine if you had to walk a mile to a possibly contaminated well and carry back all the water you need. At some point in the future, high-quality, safe sex will be as easily available to the average person as running water is today.

College is cool because you meet people who get paid to care about stuff nobody else cares about.

If you had an identical twin, would you find him attractive?

Imagine a football team from the 1950's going up against a modern NFL team.

Consider how much emotional distress an obese person's obesity subjects him or her to. And yet no matter how much social disapproval the obese person experiences, it's all pretty much irrelevant when a savory doughnut beckons. Why? Because the negative feedback occurs on a slower, disconnected time scale. It's like punishing your misbehaving cat a day late. The cat simply cannot connect the punishment with the crime. To the cat, the punishment seems arbitrary and unfair.

How many old women want sex so badly that they would get aggressive about it? Most old women can look in a mirror and see that they look like shit. Their whole lives they've been taught that their looks define them. Once a woman's looks have gone, she probably knows her place. She could not have missed that message. In other words, an old woman is not going to aggressively pursue sex with a man when she cannot help but be aware of the difference between the way men react to her now and the way they used to react to her when she was young and beautiful. Besides, few women really want sex all that much, compared to how much young men want it.

I know attractive women who have had car wrecks. They complained about how unfair it all was but in the end the law held them to the same standard as everybody else. Granted, a sufficiently attractive woman has an advantage she can work, but her looks can't always override the law. Traffic law is different than sex law because there is no such thing as a consensual car wreck. Even if two people agree to hold a demolition derby on a public road, the police will discourage that.

How does Jay Leno reliably elicit laughs when he jokes about "medicinal" marijuana? Because everybody in the audience knows many potheads will latch onto any excuse.

If the government mandated a fixed child-support tax on everybody, that would at least give men a chance to minimize their relative burden by working hard enough to become rich. But there is no escape for a man: the more money he has, the more a divorce court will penalize him. That's why citing an average number is complete bullshit in this argument. If a man is wealthy enough that $230/month doesn't sound too bad, the court will hit him with a payment high enough so it does sound bad.

At present, the relationship between supply and demand in the sexual market is similar to the relationship between supply and demand in the music market during the year 1790. Back then, unless you happened to be near one of the rare virtuosos, and you could afford to be his patron, you probably didn't listen to a lot of high-quality music.

A few older women may maintain their shape, but they rarely maintain their skin.

Why are women able to demand and get such favorable marriage terms? A wife does not have to provide sex, and yet she can cheat on her husband and he has to pay for her bastards. Her body remains her body, but his money becomes "their" money. When someone is "desperate" they have to settle for a deal which does not favor them. The sweetheart deal that women get implies they have vastly more market power than any "desperate" person.

To understand men you need to realize we live in a world completely alien to yours. Basically, the average man lives in a world of sexual poverty, relative to his wants. The average woman, on the other hand, lives in a world where avoiding sex she doesn't want is the main problem. Most women seem quite comfortable with the notion that when a man and a woman divorce, it is "fair" to split up "their" money "equally" regardless of whose name was on most of the paychecks. Men view their money in much the same way women view their eggs, and for reasons that are interestingly analogous.

Almost any two men, meeting under neutral circumstances, can easily find plenty to talk about with each other. Talking to women is much more difficult. A man cannot simply say whatever he thinks. He has to choose every word carefully. Look at how hysterical women get on soc.singles when men give them a tiny fraction of the truth. If that's not enough to give men anxiety I don't know what would.

I laugh when I hear women saying they get body image "issues" by reading fashion magazines and seeing the pictures of models. All I can do is wonder what would happen to their body image if they could read the minds of every man who sees them! It's especially strange how some of the fattest women posting online have some of the most ridiculously inflated estimates of their attractiveness to men. My theory is that fat women hardly ever get hit on by men, so they have little exposure to men's opinions, allowing them more latitude to be blissfully ignorant than a woman who is attractive enough to have lots of men around.

This is the part of divorce theft I don't understand. If the wife has no legal right to appropriate half of her husband's earnings while they are married, why do her rights to his wealth increase when she divorces him? That is the Mt. Everest of illogic. It's like the government is punishing women who stay married and rewarding women who divorce their husbands.

Few automobile addicts can conceive of life without a car. Many cannot conceive of getting through one day without a car.

In Windows, if you cannot do something, you usually need to obtain and install more software. In UNIX, if you cannot do something, you usually need to obtain more knowledge.

Nobody on Earth can honestly admit what attracts them, and feel very proud of it. Most people avoid this problem in the obvious way.

I.Q. measures a person's ability to manage complexity. That's the fundamental characteristic of programming. Incidentally, Bill Gates has gotten wealthy by betting that programming skill correlates tightly with I.Q.

Why would parents in virtually every culture encourage their boys to be more aggressive and adventurous than their girls? Since purely cultural traits can evolve arbitrarily, why isn't there at least one culture that trains its boys to be meek and its girls to be heroes?

In most primitive cultures the most successful man becomes the tribal chief or headman, and he takes several wives. In generation after generation 90% of the women reproduce and most have about the same number of children while the successful men outbreed the loser men by a large multiple. After a few million years of this how could there not be selection for genes that make men more likely to be what we think of as manly?

When I was a kid, too young in those pre-South Park days to have any understanding of what the words meant, children would often dis each other as "queers" and "faggots." By the time we got old enough to start feeling the first pull of sexual hunger, we could not have missed the absolute consensus from every available source of guidance about the general direction our attractions were supposed to go. The fact that gay people can just ignore all that stuff amazes me. It also speaks volumes about "society's" ability to tell children how to grow up.

It is very difficult, in my experience, to motivate programmers to do the kind of tedious, detailed, fill-in-the-gaps kind of work that constitutes really "giving a fuck." Most programmers want to build new, interesting things rather than endlessly refine existing code to squeeze out bugs and problems the endusers continually dredge up. The only way to get software working really well is to chain some programmer to it for years after it stops being fun to work on.

If I had 15 minutes on the phone with the programmer responsible for this Windows Help abomination, I think I could motivate him to take more care in the future (or at least I could ruin the rest of his afternoon with a string of verbal abuse). However, the perp is probably off hiding in some inner sanctum of the Microsoft Empire, far from the plaintive cries of the rabble, blithely unaware of the millions of productive person-hours he is erasing by failing to write a few more characters of code in his error messages.

When the total cost of designing broken architectures to run broken code is less than the total cost of fixing the broken code, the free market will preserve the broken code. No matter whose sense of aesthetics gets trampled. Just as in the fine arts, there is a difference between what the cognoscenti prefer, and what sells.

After all, what's the point of Occam's Razor? Just because following it led to modern science doesn't mean we we would benefit by applying the same tool in our own thinking.

Childbearing is a penalty. If you don't think it should be, then I welcome you to devise a means of bearing children that does not interfere with a woman's productivity. The question today is who will bear that penalty. I agree that it is unfair for the woman to bear it entirely on her own. If the man who impregnates her will benefit from her action, then he should certainly chip in as well. However, consumers are loathe to subsidize anyone's maternal bliss.

As physical strength appears to be irrelevant in programming (due to an unfortunate defect in computer design that renders them impervious to threats of physical violence), then programmers are not paid on the basis of physical strength.

If someone tells me how hard a time they have spelling words correctly, I could say, "But the answer is so easy! Just run your text through ispell." They might come back and say, "But I don't have a computer. I don't want to have a computer. I have other things to do. Running a computer might be easy for you, but it is hard for me." And what they are saying is right. But I told them the answer, and it really isn't hard for me. And I don't think it would be as hard for them as they think. In any case, I will be less inclined to listen to further complaints about spelling errors.

We certainly have the power to re-create the old days any time we want to. Since hardly anybody wants to do that, what does that tell you?

One of the first things you would pick up from an introductory book on sociobiology would be the idea that what is best for an individual is not necessarily what is best for his or her genes. There are many organisms of many species that accept mortal risks to reproduce. For example, before the advent of modern medicine, it was rather common for women to die in childbirth. Among other species, there are plenty of animals that weaken themselves through battling for mates or nurturing their young and in doing so make themselves more vulnerable to predators, disease, or starvation. To a rational observer it would seem risky reproduction is foolish. And it most certainly is. But we are here today because our ancestors could not say "no" to their genes, so they took those foolish risks and somehow beat the odds in every single generation in one continuous string going all the way back to first self-replicating macromolecule.

Anyway, if women were 100% up front about exactly what they want and don't want from men, how many dates, flirting, etc., would they get?

When you hear me making a subjective claim, you must also consider my possible ulterior motives. Perhaps I stand to gain something from misleading you. That is why the conservative policy is to weight actions more heavily than words. Words cost the speaker little to nothing, whereas the actor must live with the consequences of the actions. That is why actions tell you more about what the person really values.

I am fairly certain that women would reject their "upbringing" quite easily if they had any internal motivation to do so. In fact, the few who do have such internal motivation do not seem to find their upbringing to be much of an impediment.

If you want to verify that I am indeed a jerk, you must examine my behavior, not my words. Mere lip service does not qualify one for true jerkitude. A person can't become a jerk merely by talking like one; the follow-through is essential.

Consider an analogy. Who do you think is hungrier? The man who eats out of a dumpster to avoid starving, or the man who sends back a steak in an expensive restaurant because it is slightly overcooked? There are lots of men who are willing to take the dumpster equivalent of sex, e.g., sex with prostitutes who don't even like them, whereas women are considerably more finicky about it. The myth that women want sex "as much" as men do is the underlying cause of date rape. Please stop spreading disinformation that endangers women. Besides, women themselves tend to consider sex an act of "giving" something to the man, while men consider sex an act of "taking" something from the woman (although physiologically the reverse occurs!). This clearly indicates that sex is worth more to men than to women, and both women and men tend to agree about that. At least, every woman I have dated considered her sex more valuable than mine. And even our oh-so-liberated NET.women fall into the same trap, knowing they can score points by publicly "rejecting" an uppity male.

Everyone wants to tell me I don't understand women. OK, assuming I don't, how do women understand men better?

The truth doesn't care what your motivations are.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a healthy sex drive except, apparently, acting on it.

It takes a religion to have much chance of beating men into submission to the female genetic paradigm.

When I was younger I used to worry about who pays because I had less money. I advise young men to get over it. In the long run you have a lot to lose by permitting a woman to see you as being worried about tiny amounts of money. If she really wants to pay, she'll figure out your habits after a few dates and get her wallet out ahead of you. Budget your social life in advance by deciding how much money you can afford to spend. Then when it comes time to spend the money, you won't have anything to worry about. I also suggest picking up the whole tab when going out with a group of friends. One does not have to do this very often---just doing it once or twice will buy you a lot of dominance in that group.

The difference between soc.singles and California is that it's possible to visit California without falling in a tar pit. But even if you did fall into a tar pit in California, you might have many other experiences in California not involving tar pits.

Usenet is not a game of chess. It is not possible to defeat an opponent here and guarantee the opponent will understand he has been beaten according to some objective rules of play. 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.

There's never a problem finding a "girlfriend." There's only a problem attracting something resembling what first comes to mind when one thinks of the word "girl."

Suppose I transmit sperm to a sperm bank. Does that obligate me to 1/2 the support of any resulting child? If not, why not? Does the man who transmits sperm have the right to prevent a woman from aborting the resulting child? If not, why not?

I have found that a man does not absolutely need an automobile to have a sex life, but there is no doubt that he throws away a significant fraction of opportunities with women when he makes the socially responsible choice. Men buy cars in part because women tend to reward them with sex for doing so. This is a lot more money than the cost of paying for a few dates---which women also tend to reward men with sex for doing. So before you slang too hard on men who pay for sex, let's hear how much you are paying.

Whether genetic engineering will increase or decrease diversity is difficult to predict. In the short run it will clearly decrease diversity, because the immediate goal is to wipe out the undesirable diversities that constitute the several thousand known genetic diseases. After that, it seems almost everybody wants to be (a) more physically attractive (and our views on that are not as diverse as some people seem to believe), (b) smarter (and again, most people are smart enough to recognize "smarter" when they see it), and (c) stronger and healthier, which are the easiest traits for us to agree on. I don't think very many people would design genomes coding for what the average person would consider uglier, stupider, weaker, and sicker. It seems probable that the general perniciousness of Nature guarantees there are more ways to be ugly than beautiful, stupid than smart, weak than strong, and sick than healthy, so progress in the direction most people would consider "progress" probably constitutes a reduction in diversity.

Speaking of slavery to genes, I wonder if the people who say culture taught you what to find attractive think there could be a culture that could successfully teach women to enjoy being raped.

And as you can see, by being honest enough to admit I'm dishonest I lower my attractiveness. Conclusion: don't be that honest. Incidentally, when you see a morbidly obese person waddling down the street, do you tell him exactly what you're thinking? You know, like a completely honest 5-year-old might do?

The first order of business is to learn to distinguish between people who can get things done and people who are basically screwups. Bet on the screwups and you will fail, every single time. To the screwups your assessment will seem like "contempt." Which, in practice, it might as well be. But in fact it is more like self-defense.

One of the nasty aspects of the way the world works is that you generally have to do what other people want first before you get to order other people to do what you want. "Money" is something we generally use to keep track of this principle.

It's odd that women generally admire ambition in a man, when an ambitious man is the most likely to want to trade up.

Logic is only cruel to those who ignore it.

People who consider themselves inferior are most susceptible to losing it when someone criticizes them. For an insult to sting it must be believable. If a particular group is hypersensitive to some particular form of criticism it does not reflect well on the members of that group.

I would be willing to sacrifice a measure of my personal privacy to permit any woman who is considering dating me to determine that I have handled sexual rejection well, even the most profoundly inconsiderate sexual rejection imaginable. However, we currently lack the infrastructure necessary to credential men who consistently refused to commit date rape despite being rejected by women who had willingly placed themselves in extremely vulnerable positions. People who lend money for a living have solved the similar problem of determining credit risk by establishing credit bureaus. I would support the efforts of women to set up a dating bureau in which women register their impressions of each man they date. Of course, it would also be fair for men to set up similar bureaus where they rate the dating behavior of women. For example, from a man's point of view the most significant indicator of a woman's real interest in him is the number of dates she requires before giving him an orgasm. Men have to use the rough heuristic of three dates for all women, but it would be better for men to refine this heuristic by knowing how many dates a particular woman has required before satisfying men she has previously dated. If a particular woman has always waited until, say, the 10th date or later, then she is not slighting the next man by making him wait that long as well. On the other hand, if she previously satisfied a platoon of guys on their first dates, then if she's stringing the next guy out to five or six dates with little more than a kiss, he might as well wake up and smell the coffee and admit to himself that her odds of ever liking him "in that way" are plunging rapidly into the toilet.

Every form of power has the potential to get out of control and wreak havoc. However, cowering in a shack like a hermit isn't a viable option for most people. The future will arrive, whether change frightens you or not. The people who embrace chance soonest tend to end up giving orders to people who fear it.

Pain is not the source of growth. Eating food is.

A woman's sexual market value follows almost exactly the same age trajectory as a man's athletic prowess. Most pro careers are winding down by the mid-30's. A few manage to hang on into their 40's. I think the oldest player in the NFL at any given time is usually in his early 40's, but he is really beating the odds, and his future is about is bright as the average new sitcom. It's possible for an old jock to beat a young sedentary slob but time is not on the old jock's side.

How can a person "stand for something" anonymously?

Nature has been selectively breeding humans for 100,000 years and our earlier ancestors for 3.5 billion years. The result is today that there are more than 1,000 known genetic diseases, and most "normal" people live lives vastly less rich and rewarding than the lives of the most genetically gifted humans. Do you think human intelligence cannot improve on the horrifically abusive processes of Nature? Or how about this: is there any good reason why you should be: 1. Less athletically talented than Michael Jordan. 2. Less healthy than that French woman (whose name I forgot) who lived to be 124 years old with hardly a sick day in her life. 3. Less intelligent than Stephen Hawking. 4. Less attractive to the opposite sex than people like Harrison Ford and Catherine Zeta-Jones. 5. Less musically talented than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This is typical of every insular group, of course. The last thing any group-rights advocate will advocate is self-policing or admit that any of its members could be causing a problem.

The fact that some women have gotten raped on dates proves that all these things happened: 1. Those women dated men they did not want to fuck. 2. Those men wanted to fuck those women. 3. Those women were not able to predict in advance how those men were going to react to sexual rejection. Since nobody knows the formula for predicting in advance how every man will deal with sexual rejection in every instance, and most of the time when a man asks a woman out on a date he hopes to fuck her (sooner or later, but probably sooner), the only necessary condition for date rape that is completely under the woman's control is condition #1: the bizarre insistence of (some) women to date men they don't want to fuck. Women can eliminate date rape by refusing to date men they don't want to fuck (or more precisely: by making sure not to get alone after the date with men they don't want to fuck). This is not the only method that might work, but it is the only method that is entirely under the control of the people who are complaining about being raped on dates. The one sure-fire way for a man to avoid becoming a father against his will is to make sure none of his sperm gets into a woman. This is the blunt advice you give to men who complain about choice-for-women-only. Why then do you coddle women on the issue of date rape? Do you think women are less capable than men of exercising a little responsibility or sacrificing a little pleasure in the interest of their own safety?

Bad attitudes, which women hate so much, are behavioral problems analogous to the desire to eat too much and move one's body too little.

Most people are kind of weird about reciprocal information flows. On the one hand, we want to know everything about everybody else, and on the other hand we fanatically defend our own privacy. Privacy is, after all, kind of a form of dishonesty, because providing no information can lead others to a belief just as false as providing bad information. For example, if you don't tell a person about some impending disaster because you value your "privacy" you can readily cause harm. A concrete example would be a person who knowingly carries the AIDS virus and does not inform his sex partners. Our lust for privacy is the product of self-bias. In our dealings with other people, we must always be aware of their self-bias. Almost everybody has one set of forgiving rules to live by, and another set of stringent rules for others to live by. One aspect of this is that almost everyone hates being lied to, even liars.

Normally when someone asks me for something, I am pretty sure that someone desires what (s)he is asking for. For example, when a panhandler approaches me on the street and asks for money, I am pretty confident the panhandler desires money. Once I made the mistake of suggesting that the gentleman requesting money appeared to have the capacity for productive work, given that he stood about 6 feet tall and was lean and muscular, whereupon his demeanor changed quite dramatically and he challenged me to a fight (providing further evidence that his general state of health was ample to sustain productive employment). I declined his generous offer and continued on my way. He wisely chose not to pursue me, indicating that his mind was also sharp enough to make him a good worker. In any case, it was clear that he was only interested in one thing from me, and that was not an honest appraisal of the things he needed to change in his life.

There are simple ways to detect a person's real interest level. One way is to ask a woman what's she's looking for in a man, and see whether the guy she describes remotely resembles you. Also, a lot of the "abuse" just comes down to how unattractive we are to the opposite sex. People who are less attractive tend to have more complaints, because they experience more to complain about. For example, I have a friend who has quite a few of these tales of woe. He fits the stereotypical "loser" profile fairly well, although he isn't a total loser because he's gainfully employed and pretty athletic. But he isn't very attractive, and he got a really late start with women (at least I used to consider it a late start until I started reading about some world-class losers on soc.singles). When he did, he dated some women who treated him very disrespectfully, much more disrespectfully than I can remember experiencing. My take on it is that he could have avoided some of it by knowing how to handle women better.

Even though I reject the doctrine of karma imagine if it were true---what would an attractive woman have to endure to compensate for years of rejecting hundreds of men?

In a way, the parables of the happy defectives are not unlike the antebellum propaganda of the happy slaves, singing their happy songs as they picked cotton in the fields all day.

A highly attractive person "meets people" wherever he or she goes. A highly unattractive person never seems to find any place that is "good for meeting men/women." Therefore it makes sense to first consider whether you can make yourself more attractive before you go running around looking for a better place.

I have found that almost everything I want to learn is in books, and with books you can tap the best expertise in the world in almost any subject without having to have world-class experts living in your neighborhood. There will always be a few things you can't get from a book, but if you need more than what you can get from a book, you probably need more than what you can get for free from someone you meet socially.

Romance is always to some degree inherently illusory. There will always be aspects of another person, no matter how exciting and attractive they are, which aren't exciting and attractive. For example, taking a crap. Blasting huge farts. Or getting sick and vomiting. To sustain an attraction for a person we have to put thoughts of them doing those basic biological things out of our minds. Aging is a toughie because it's a slow process of death. And death is the nemesis of romance. It's very hard to feel romantic when you are focusing on death. For example, most people would consider it highly inappropriate for a man to go to a funeral and start hitting on a grieving widow. Why? Because death kills sex. To feel sexy we have to put death thoughts out of our minds. But because death is 100% absolutely honestly in each and everybody's future, and because the aging process amounts to dying a little each and every day, this means to experience romance we must temporarily blind ourselves to a significant chunk of our reality and even our daily experience.

Ever seen a child who points at a cripple and calls attention to deformed people, loudly asking "Mommy, why is that man all bent up and slobbering?" A child just says whatever pops into that small brain. Total honesty, unfiltered. Society quickly beats the child into guarding his words. It's called "growing up." Learning what not to say. Learning how to mislead others about what we really feel. It's called "social intelligence." If total honesty would work, there would be no need for "social intelligence."

Love and sex are not the same thing. True. Cars and gasoline aren't the same thing either. But people end up using them together much more than they use just one without the other.

What is "the endless pursuit of sex" to you? Do you think there is some "appropriate" level of sexual expression a person should have? Is there such a thing as "too much" sex? Or is it just a matter of avoiding problems like diseases, pregnancy, jealous husbands, and so on? Or are you simply trying to assert your stereotypical female sociobiological genetic programming at the expense of stereotypical sociobiological male genetic programming?

In reality it doesn't pay to brag too much. The impact is all the greater when people discover your strengths indirectly, or by hearing from others.

Self-bias makes everybody a natural born hypocrite. Only with considerable mental effort can people become consciously aware of their own self-bias and begin to override it.

Usually only the most experienced women will have a clear idea how the typical male mind functions. One would think, however, that women would have inferred at least a little from men's actions. The staring, the fixation, the consistent eagerness, the constant having to fend them off. But for some reason this insight rarely seems to coalesce on its own before a woman has had 20 or more sexual partners.

Radical individualism is a comparatively recent philosophical invention. It goes against large subsets of reality, which is why you wisely apply it very selectively even if you aren't quite smart or honest enough to realize what you are doing.

Interestingly, grape vines are structural parasites. They lack the strong woody stalks necessary to support themselves, so they grow by climbing up other plants, eventually depriving their hosts of light. It's interesting that the author of the book of John has Jesus comparing himself to a vine.

Trial by jury discriminates against the ugly to some degree---psychologists have constructed experiments showing that physically unattractive defendents are more likely to be convicted than handsome/beautiful ones---but sexual harassment law directly penalizes people for being sexually unattractive, by giving them far more opportunities to violate the law than people with high sexual market value have. Not only opportunity, but motive. It's like punishing people for stealing bread. Hungry people are more likely to violate that law than well-fed people. Nobody said life was fair, of course.

I read that careful observations of animals have found that apparently no other animal besides humans is capable of interpreting footprints. Predators such as cats and dogs are able to track game by scent, or by directly seeing the game, but only humans can make the connection between marks on the ground and the animals that made those marks. The ability to make such inferences represents a gigantic leap forward in the evolution of brains. This probably ties into our fixation with purposes. The ability to see marks on the ground and use them to locate food gave our ancestors a reproductive advantage not shared by any other animal. Today that has evolved into Homer Simpson's ability to see marks on a package and say, "Mmmm...doughnuts." Of course the ability to find doughnuts leads to kind of a reproductive dead end if taken too far.

When a bunch of molecules happens to fall into some sort of special arrangement, people call it "life."

Trees have even more to teach us about the value of being stupid. With no nervous systems and therefore no ability to think, plants constitute 90% of the Earth's biomass. Clearly, stupidity is the way to go. As long as you have chloroplasts.

Anyone with some intelligence will understand that if Chinese men and American men competed directly for all the world's women, American men would have a huge advantage (on average) because of their vastly higher per capita income. It's lucky for Chinese men that they DON'T have to compete with American men, for the most part. That would be even worse for them than their habit of killing 5% of their female infants.

Religion relies on faith (an emotion), which means believing in things for which there is no conclusive evidence. The primary motive for having faith is that it feels good. It feels good to a child to imagine there is a benevolent Santa Claus who brings gifts, because children are naturally greedy and the world is not usually as generous as children would like. For some reason, children tend to outgrow their belief in Santa Claus (although it is as plausible as any other religion), whereas other beliefs in some Imaginary Benefactor prove to be considerably more tenacious. Santa Claus probably suffers because he lacks the necessary trappings of an organized religion with its houses of worship, trained priesthood, rituals, publishing arm, centers of study, etc. In the cutthroat competition for host brains, no unorganized religion can hope to beat the organized ones.

One must be careful about expressing disgust for other people. Generally this form of expression only plays well to an audience which already shares your disgust. Your sensations of disgust are undoubtedly important to you, but neutral third parties may find them uninteresting---perhaps even disgusting.

Evolution seems to have equipped most human brains with very sensitive high-horse detector circuits. Boasting and gloating are easier to tolerate when one raps them skillfully over phat beats. Just as whining gets better when set to a good blues.

The homeless constitute an infinite sink for compassion of the toilet-scrubbing variety. To fix the problems that produce the homeless, probably some other things need scrubbing. Like the physical and/or mental defects that make some people less productive than others. Humans are not yet collectively smart enough to have mastered the delicate art of DNA scrubbing.

Even feminists who generally malign patriarchy usually find short men sexually worthless. If you don't believe me, see what they do when a short man asks them out. [...]asking a woman to have sex with a short man is asking her to consciously override her instinctive revulsion. It's like forcing those Iraqi prisoners to simulate sex acts with each other. With enough pressure, they will comply, but it's not an ideal situation for them.

When an attractive woman in her 20's gets a double mastectomy, she can understand what life is like for a short man.

To an individual human, anything longer than his own lifespan is effectively "never."

How long do you expect to wait for the next solar eclipse prediction to be shown up as fiction?

Beliefs about what constitutes mental illness may be arbitrary to some degree, but I doubt you could create much of a fighting force by recruiting in most asylums.

Space cadets don't realize that living in space would be much more of a bummer than living in the desert, or living in Greenland. That only lifestyle advantage would be the view. But eventually technology will fake similar views to the same level of detail. Space cadets think space is cool because Captain Kirk met a lot of aliens there who turned out to be hot chicks he could have sex with. But in reality evidence is accumulating that suggests complex life is likely to be exceedingly rare in the Universe. Earth might be the only place where anything more complex than a flatworm managed to evolve.

The "frontier spirit" resulted from a specific way of life. Once that way of life has gone the way of the dodo, how much of the "frontier spirit" can remain? An overweight gaswasting slob with a gunrack in his pickup truck does not reflect the "frontier spirit." He is being totally submissive to a bunch of Arabian sheiks.

I don't know about Sarandon, but Cher is famous for having had numerous cosmetic surgeries. Are you implying that your admiration for aging beauties depends on their willingness to have numerous cosmetic surgeries? I.e., would you find Cher attractive today if she had had no cosmetic surgeries?

Beware the innovator with some arbitrary vested interest. Instead of first asking "What's the best way to get more power?" the space cadet asks, "What's the best excuse for putting more stuff in space?"

People rarely let their nostalgia take them too far. Few of the people who see movies like "The Alamo" would care to limit themselves to just the technologies available at the time depicted in the movie. For example, the vast majority of people who see "The Alamo" will get to the theater by driving automobiles. After the brief nostalgic fantasy, they will climb back into their automobiles and drive home.

Imagine artificially intelligent machines that spend all their time trying to think of new ways to bother you with sales pitches. They could think of new SPAMming techniques that no human thought of.

Minds evolved for the same reason dicks evolved: to increase the reproductive success of survival machines. That is, they share the same agenda.

Any man who spends time with several women learns their signals are not all the same. The only thing common to most women's signals is that they are subtle. It's almost as if women compete to see who can be the least understandable.

I ate some carrots for lunch today. If carrots were sentient, they might easily picture carrot-munching predators such as myself as being full of seething hatred for carrots. But I do not hate carrots. I am merely indifferent to the interests of carrots. I view carrots as nothing more than resources for me to harvest and exploit. Carrot plants store nutrients in their expanded root systems to see them through lean times. If carrots could have a point of view, they would picture their tubers as being precious, and in need of legal protection from men who prey on carrots. From the carrot-predator's point of view, he might picture himself as "liking" carrots. That is, he likes the pleasurable sensations he gets when he is free to exploit carrots in the way he wants.

Most people notice the apparent diversity in attraction. A particular man who is highly attractive to some women may be just neutral to many other women. This might make it seem that every woman wants something different, hence for every man there should be a woman. But in practice we easily observe there are some people---men and women---who seem to be unattractive to just about everyone. Which is to say, men and women may not agree exactly on who is most attractive, but they seem remarkably harmonious when it comes to who is least attractive. This is why a market analogy is useful. A house could be undesirable to most buyers, but it would only take two buyers to bid up its price if they both wanted that particular house badly enough. In practice that would be unlikely, of course, because there are a lot of houses, and it would be rare for just two people to have some inordinate desire for one particular house. With houses, what matters are features and location. There are usually other nearby houses with similar features, and this prevents individual house prices from getting out of whack with the general market.

How much does your "efficient" car weigh compared to its payload? How many empty seats does your car usually have?

All those people who feel badly about the crime you're bemoaning, how many would have voted in favor of doubling their taxes to pay for the police force it probably would have required to prevent that particular crime?

I do have to admit, what draws me to women is not their opinions.