Danimal archive, part 4

Civilization depends on elevating some people above others and having the vast majority of people know their place. It takes a lot of beatings to drive this lesson home.

What would happen if all the people from the poorest part of your city decided they should go to the richest part of the city and move into the nice homes there? When that happens from time to time, it's called "insurrection" and is incredibly destructive. Think of the looting that took place in Baghdad and New Orleans when social order temporarily broke down in response to man-made and natural disaster, respectively.

In the real world, in contrast to cartoon world, most criminals are not very nerdy. That's why they prefer to use muscle power rather than brain power to commit crimes, e.g., smashing car windows rather than writing algorithms to crack military-strength encryption schemes.

Stupid criminals usually aren't as entertaining as highly competent criminals, so TV and movies feature an unrealistic proportion of the latter. Criminologists have known for a long time that prison populations post lower average IQ test scores than the general population. The problem of crime has more to do with our irrational obsession with privacy than anything else, along with the high but steadily declining cost of surveillance.

If you call me a cripple, I'll go with the joke, because it doesn't threaten me. A kook regards all threats to his security as credible because they are credible---he is inherently insecure. He knows he is inferior. Since he cannot stop being inferior, his only option is to lash back any way he can.

One of the scarier aspects of the AIDS crisis is where it is not occurring: in the strict Muslim countries. It's hard to have faith in humanity when the only thing that can cause (many) people to behave somewhat rationally is convincing them to believe in a bunch of fairy tales about Imaginary Friend(s).

That [sociobiology has helped to perpetuate oppression] seems most unlikely, because most people know nothing about sociobiology, and most who do learn something about it immediately object to it emotionally.

People who post traceable articles to Usenet, as I do, have almost certainly disqualified themselves from ever running for public office. I don't think I've ever seen anyone post in reasonable volume without at some point writing something offensive to someone. A Usenet archive would be a gold mine to a political consultant looking for dirt on an election opponent.

This raises the question of how any normal human with a normal sample of opinions on controversial topics could ever sanitize his or her speech sufficiently to remain electable, if all that speech were to have been recorded and made easily searchable.

I suspect that as online discussion becomes more popular, especially among most of the people who are literate enough to qualify for public office, a whole generation of younger people are coming up who will someday have to create a different standard for electability, given that virtually all of them will be on record as having said something honest at some point.

Most of us have many needs which require us to obtain the cooperation of other people. The willingness of other people to give us what we want from them depends on our ability to give them what they want. Since people are tough customers most of us will fail to get everything we want from others.

Because we are so dependent on others, we appear to have evolved an internal emotional guage (call it "self-esteem" if you like) which constantly tries to keep us informed of our value to others. If our value to others is slipping, our anxiety level increases, and this is Nature's way of trying to prod us to do something to increase our value to others, lest we threaten our ability to get others to meet our needs.

The big fat lie of modern times is to pretend that low self-esteem is itself a problem, and if you can just persuade people to pretend they are worth a lot to other people, all their problems will magically go away.

That's like claiming if your car runs out of gasoline, you can keep on driving if you duct-tape the fuel guage needle so it points to "Full."

So are you planning to sever your spinal cord? If you don't, then you are saying (by your actions, not by your rationalizations) that you don't believe your prospects for happiness are as good if you are crippled.

I saw a punk strolling around with a jacket that read, "What are you staring at, fucker?" I read that, and thought I should go tell him, "Your purple, orange, and green mohawk."

We are not destroying the biosphere today in an attempt to liberate outselves from it. We are destroying it because we are stupid. A person does not dive off a skyscraper and attempt to invent the parachute on the way down. Similarly, we do not liberate ourselves from the biosphere by destroying it. Destroying the biosphere is not part of any formal plan; it's an epiphenomenon of human greed and shortsightedness.

Feminists can reduce everyone's power, including their own, by attempting political "solutions" to "problems" that do not result from any political cause. For example, if feminists seek to equalize outcomes rather than opportunities, they will find themselves doing battle with diversity. 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. This is not to say maximizing wealth is or should be everyone's overriding goal, but almost every individual wants more wealth for himself or herself (in keeping with item 1 above). So even though I just said that no single, absolute moral standard defines everyone's interests, it would be difficult to argue that a policy that decreases everyone's power is in anyone's interest.

Computers can get a billion times better, but hardly anything else does. Therefore it makes sense to substitute computers for other things wherever possible (e.g., telecommuting instead of physical commuting, or building a computer-driven robot to separate garbage for recycling instead of mining for more resources to make new garbage). Whatever the computer is doing today will keep getting better and better, following the same price/performance curve that computing as a whole follows. Many other things will improve only slowly, remain stagnant, or get worse. It's important to bet on the right horses.

There is absolutely no lack of agreement that Stephen Jay Gould is more intelligent than any person meeting the clinical definition of idiocy. You, I, and everybody else could spend time with Gould and the idiot and conclude within a few minutes which person is more intelligent.

Thus you are completely wrong when you say there is no agreed-upon definition of intelligence. Rather you are arguing that there is no agreed-upon definition of intelligence that can distinguish between fine shades of intelligence, or compare intelligences in different areas.

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

I have never met a woman whose mate-selection criteria are less shallow than mine.

Women have well-documented shallow preferences for things like height, dick size, income, whether a man drives a car and what kind of car he drives, and so on. Often a woman's decision to reject a man hinges on something as preposterously shallow as the kind of clothes he is wearing! There are plenty of women who will fuck a guy they would otherwise ignore if he happens to be a member of successful musical group. And on and on it goes.

An attraction is "shallow" if it hinges on just a few readily-observable traits of a person and ignores vastly more aspects of who a person is.

Every adult has had decades to figure out how his or her body works. There is no mystery to you about what you have to do to gain 100 pounds of fat on your body. Do you really want other people to think you aren't smart enough to figure out how your own body works?

100 years ago virtually all white people everywhere in the world were unapologetically racist. The United States would not even exist in anything like its present borders if this had not been true.

Today for some utterly illogical reason we have this rule that it's OK to make jokes about the size of a man's dick but not about the color of his skin. Moral evolution proceeds by a very strange path.

Maybe someday in the distant future people will get the idea that there is something wrong with violently slaughtering 40,000 Americans every year with motor vehicles. We have been fighting the equivalent of an entire Vietnam conflict with each other on our highways every 18 months for as long as everybody reading this has been alive. Even so, it is amazingly difficult to find anybody who thinks this is a problem, let alone a moral quandary.

I don't claim to understand this. But I do laugh at people who think the moral high ground represents anything other than the most rapidly moving piece of real estate in the world.

I would say if a person is able to imagine being his or her own worst enemy, his or her life must be going pretty darned well.

There's a lot to learn from the Dale Carnegie example of the dog that never works a day in its life and yet gets a free ride and loads of affection. The dog is better at this than most people because the dog appears to have no ego, and it doesn't wait for the human to make the first affectionate gesture.

I don't consider the term "coward" to be a pejorative. Usually "coward" is a code word for someone who refuses to take a stupid risk for someone else's benefit.

You would care [about how much your boyfriend makes] if your boyfriend quit his job, gave away all his money, and started spending his days at homeless shelters or under bridges. You would also care, but in a different way, if your boyfriend began telling you stories of breakthrough successes, rapid promotions, and (large but unspecified) pay raises on his job.

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.

From a man's point of view, anybody who would date someone she would not enjoy sex with is not a "regular person." A man simply has no way to relate to such whacked-out behavior. If a man had that habit he would seem like a total nutcase to other men. And that's just for starters. Hanging out with a woman is almost never an experience a man could mistake for being anything like hanging out with another man.

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.

I don't know what's funnier, the bullshit men tell desperately insecure women or the apparent eagerness of desperately insecure women to swallow it while first misinterpreting it as necessary to turn it into something other than the utter repudiation of their sexual inferiority that it is.

How do you expect men to treat women as equals when women have such weak, vulnerable egos that they can't even stand up to being rated? Men rate each other all the time in every way that admits some sort of measurement: how much money they can earn, how much weight they can lift, their life accomplishments, how attractive their wives/girlfriends are, etc. And unlike women, guys don't freak out when they become aware that other people (including women) are constantly rating them.

In other words, men act as though they are generally more humble than women are. Men sustain fewer illusions about where they stand. Only a person with an ego the size of the Titanic could get exercised at the prospect of being evaluated by other people.

Is there any question whatsoever about why most of the people who run the world are men?

When a woman says "No" to a man's request to have sex, do you think she might really want to have sex and just be afraid of appearing too slutty to him? Or if he is not conventionally attractive, do you think she might be turning him down solely to avoid ridicule from other women?

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? For example, Catherine Zeta-Jones' current squeeze is Michael Douglas, a notorious womanizer old enough to be her father. You can bet that a lot of tears have been shed by the women he stepped on in his relentless drive to the top of the pile.

Part of women's personalities is that they usually say a lot of very unkind things about men who go a long time without using any women as rungs. The obvious lesson for men is: the longer you go without sex, the more women will despise you. So while you're waiting for the woman you want, don't give her any reason to think you are a loser. The odds that any woman you use and dump will kill you are pretty low. Low enough to make it worth the risk if you really do want that highly attractive woman.

The last thing the public wants is to be revoltingly reminded of the sexual appetites of the sexually repulsive.

Blaming your victims for making themselves feel miserable is a nice touch.

If you call market pricing a "tautology" does that persuade anybody who owns a ten million dollar home to sell it to you for five dollars? You can invent all the pejorative labels you want to deny the reality of market behavior, and this will not change your market value.

One consequence of currently ongoing human genome research will be the cataloging of all genes responsible for human diversity. That will make the near future of mainstream science interesting, to say the least.

There's already protest building among dwarves, who are alarmed that in utero genetic screening and selective abortion might eliminate their kind from future generations. (Actually I don't think that's totally likely. There will probably be enough religious nuts and pro-lifers to maintain the supply of defectives. Newsweek magazine had an article about parents demanding---and getting---heroic and expensive tax- and insurance-subsidized medical procedures to sustain the lives of their anencephalic babies for a couple of years longer than the rapid death that would have followed birth in a state of nature.)

I'm not altogether certain why a dwarf would want to wish his fate on another person but apparently some do. Is it a misery loves company kind of thing?

It's only safe to "be yourself" when you are alone. Accordingly, by teaching your children to "be themselves," you are teaching them the habits of solitude. If they are comfortable being loners, that's cool, but not everyone considers it ideal to live as a recluse.

I should point out that computers should steadily increase our ability to "be ourselves," by increasing the scope for customizing our own personal environments and reducing our need to interact so much with other humans. Perhaps someday each of us can live in our own largely self-sufficient virtual reality, surrounded by artificial companions who not only tolerate our endless quirks and eccentricities, but actively encourage them.

This is why men do better in cutthroat environments such as business. A woman is used to having the people around her expressing great concern about her every little emotional whim. In an environment where the relevant issue is some outside objective, such as building better products at lower cost, the woman will perceive the whole environment to be hostile to her in a personal way, because the issue is no longer how she feels. Men, in contrast, have an advantage in environments where their emotions are irrelevant because we have been trained from childhood to function without much emotional support.

1. I am not saying no women are reality-directed. 2. I am not saying all men are reality-directed.

But I am saying that society is much less tolerant of men who deny reality. For example, can you imagine a group of mostly men starting a newsgroup called alt.support.fat-acceptance? Men understand almost instinctively that there is no chance they could get away with anything as preposterous as that. Then again, men founded all the great religions, so recall item (2) above.

Sociobiology doesn't tell women anything particularly constructive. "Be young and look fertile" isn't really about things a woman can control. The fashion magazines have been preaching the same lessons for years. On the other hand, sociobiology tells men something potentially useful, namely, that knocking oneself out to achieve high social status is actually as useful for a man as it seems to be despite the strenous and near-universal denials.

Name one basic scientific discovery known to humans in 1892, which has not been disproved, and which has never increased human power.

When any member of the HiveMind holds forth on the evils of generalizing, (s)he sacrifices his/her individuality on the altar of standard liberal boilerplate. In a most entertaining way, I might add.

It's important to note that I agree with most of the reality-based factual content you use to rip the loser guys. By no means am I telling you to go easy on them. Loser guys need you to give them a bracing dose of reality. But if you choose to go after them with glee then you have abandoned any claim to the moral high ground. You invite others to point out your own glaring departures from reality.

The fat acceptance crowd follows much the same trajectory as loser guys, except I'm pretty sure there are more fat people who manage to lose weight and keep it off than there are loser guys who manage to turn into winner guys. At least there is a proven formula for dropping ballast: eat less and/or exercise more. Do you have any proven solution for the loser guys? Or is "Shut up and know your place" the best you can offer?

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.

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?

There are organisms that feed on the shit of other organisms. (Example: dung beetles.) For these shit-eating organisms to arise spontaneously fully formed in all their wide diversity, the supporting environment must have also arose fully-formed and ready for them. That means God must have seeded the Garden of Eden with enough pre-made shit to keep the various shit-eating organisms happy until the other animals could digest their first meals and get the shit production going.

Ergo, God created shit.

In a similar way, God must have initially created some organisms already infested by parasites. Otherwise where did the tapeworms, roundworms, etc. come from? If God did not create them already infecting their hosts (which would be essential if God created life "fully formed" "in all its wide diversity"), then they must have evolved sometime after the creation.

I guess the problem is that we have all formed, through our life experiences, an iron-clad association between "loser" and "bitterness," and therefore anybody who talks like a loser and denies being bitter seems to have no credibility.

Physical pressure is very clear-cut and objective; if someone physically overpowers me, then obviously I have totally lost control of my ability to assert my will. But "emotional pressure"?

A woman who dresses up in clothing designed to change the emotional state of the male viewer is emotionally pressuring him to react. Since we expect adults to be capable of overriding their emotional impulses, we grant him no quarter if he overreacts. I see no reason to feel any more sympathy for an adult who lets another adult "emotionally pressure" him or her into having sex.

The degree to which your beliefs affect you depends on lots of things, including how much your actions are really in accord with your beliefs.

For example, a person who believes God can do miracles will live a long time if he doesn't deliberately put himself in a position where God has to come through. If I believe God will protect me from harm if I walk blindfolded across a crowded superhighway, I will be OK as long as I merely believe it and don't test my belief by putting on a blindfold and walking across a crowded superhighway. That is, as long as my actions remain in accord with reality then I am OK no matter what I think I believe.

A person can profess to be perfectly free from any sort of prejudice and as long as he works hard enough to avoid having to live in a public housing project his life will probably be pretty good.

If you believe humans are smarter than chimpanzees for genetic reasons then you have to believe natural selection had to be able to "see" the genetic contribution to hominid intelligence. That is, to make humans enormously smarter than chimpanzees natural selection had to reward the smartest hominids in each generation with disproportionate reproductive success. There could have been some backsliding here and there but the overall trend had to favor the smarter hominids.

Somehow.

I'm sure hominids in every generation argued endlessly about who was really the smartest and about whether it really mattered but at the end of the day (or eon) the smarter ones won the reproductive game. Otherwise we would be as stupid as chimpanzees today.

For natural selection to work on a trait, a species must be diverse with respect to that trait. If humans have a greater average genetic capacity to develop intelligence today than chimpanzees do, then natural selection had to be pushing that capacity up by steadily culling off the bottom chunks of the real intelligence bell curve.

All the punks I see associate with other punks, and they build group identity with their unusual uniforms. This is no different than any other form of tribal dress. Punks dress the way they do to send messages to other punks. "We are different from everyone else, but we are like each other." Punks dress to please a sub-culture instead of the main culture.

Punk dress actually conform to a more rigorous dress code than the main culture does. Besides, most punks are young, and young people are more sensitive to peer reactions than old people are. That is why punks put so much effort into conforming with a strict dress code, anyway, whereas older people often couldn't be bothered. (Unless a paycheck were at stake, of course.)

To my mind, nothing can be more cold and sterile than ignorance. Self-knowledge and self-understanding are warm and alive. If am not afraid of myself, and I am not afraid to know myself. I don't have to be ignorant to have a good time. I guess I'm pretty weird.

Of course, Nice Guys (TM) will climb all over each other to deny many of the common-sense things I say, but the simple fact is that my statement here is perfectly consistent with a typical man's goal structure.

How is trying to change a person's opinion about sex different than trying to change any other opinion they might have?

All social progress occurs when some visionaries begin to comprehend and publicize the relationship between certain human behaviors and their bad effects. For example, public sanitation led to a great reduction in plagues that formerly swept through medieval cities. I am sure that many delicate egos took affront to suggestions that their bodily wastes could spread disease, and that they should pay for technology to clean things up, or suffer the inconvenience of having to find a toilet before relieving themselves.

The disproportionate success of men in almost every competitive field is consistent with the hypothesis that men do a better job of confronting reality than women, on average.

But of course the distribution of success for both men and women is extremely wide, and that is consistent with the hypothesis that individuals vary much more widely in their success at confronting (and adapting to) reality (or adapting reality to themselves).

Implicit in the above is the assumption that an accurate perception of reality is essential to success in any competitive field. All my experience to date supports this assumption. It is quite difficult to have an incorrect belief about something that matters and still be able to out-compete someone else who has a more accurate belief about that same thing.

One of the more fascinating ironies is that while no woman wants to think she is replaceable she would resent being with any man who thought more about his previous woman than her. I.e., she expects to replace all of a man's previous women as a matter of course.

Most women actually have little idea of how men think, at least in my experience. When I explain how men think to a woman she is usually somewhat taken aback, and then upon reflection she goes back to her experiences with men and understands that everything I'm telling her is true.

Do you want to be treated just like a man? Or do you expect preferential treatment, because you are a woman? It's possible you are not consciously aware of the preferential treatment women get, because that's all you've known for your whole life.

I have yet to meet a woman who wants to be treated just like a man. This becomes very clear on Usenet, where people get reduced to just words on a screen, and women have to function largely without the automatic advantage they enjoy in real life, and see what happens when their ideas get judged on logical merit.

Women don't approve when low-status men try to behave as if they are high-status men. It's all about keeping low-status men in their place.

If God designed marriage, why do women get ugly so quickly? Human sexuality looks more like something that evolved, because rather than being "perfect" it is only "just good enough." In particular, we see that women have a few brief years of youth and beauty during which they can hook men into long-term commitments on what is essentially a false promise.

A government which does not govern, i.e. interfere in people's lives, might as well disband.

If my experience is a guide, it seems every woman views marriage as the purpose of dating, and after dating a man for some time (say, a year) she expects their dating relationship to progress automatically to marriage, as if that is the natural order of things. If she doesn't want to marry a man, she either does not date him in the first place, or breaks up with him quickly after a short dabble with dating him.

I can't imagine what sort of a loser a man would have to be to beg a woman to marry him.

Most often, when a man has sex with a woman, he wants to, whereas a woman might be having sex with a man for other reasons, such as to earn a wedding ring and work on her divorce theft nest egg. Whenever a woman appears to be having sex, the question arises of whether she really wants to, or whether she is somehow being coerced into having sex. This question does not arise when a man appears to be having sex with something resembling an attractive woman, because of course he wants it.

Women do have some capacity to like sex, but only under incredibly precise conditions which rarely occur in everyday life, when their long tiresome lists of exacting requirements have been perfectly met in every detail. Men, in contrast, have the capacity to enjoy sex even in suboptimal conditions, such as getting a blowjob behind the convenience-store dumpster, as long as the chick is hot.

Who would you say owes more of his success to drugs:

1. Lance Armstrong
2. Barry Bonds

The irony, of course, is that Lance Armstrong wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for the chemotherapy drugs that helped save his life. Drugs that cure cancer: good. Drugs that make you stronger: bad.

If a woman's breasts have nothing to do with a man's opinion about her, especially a TV actress who was pre-selected for having a physical appearance that elicits sexual interest from the vast majority of non-gay men, then a man who can honestly say her breasts have nothing do with his opinion of her probably is gay. "Nothing" is a pretty strong word, you see. Nothing means zero, zip, nada, not even one teeny tiny itsy bitsy smidge lurking just under one's conscious perception.

So you are saying it would be better for slender people to act as codependent enablers to obese slothful gluttons?

Do you think people should refrain from telling alcoholics they have a drinking problem? Should we just encourage the alcoholics to keep drinking, lest we hurt their delicate little feelings?

You don't seem to understand how societies form and continue. Groups of people always pressure their members to conform to their group norms. This is the only way you can have identifiable cultures. If everybody just did whatever they felt like doing, the result would be chaos.

It's been a long time since I heard a woman complain about being hit on too much. Ah, the joys of middle age.

The hottest women tend to have the largest wardrobes. They spend lavish amounts of money and time to further enhance their appearance. They read fashion magazines, they stay up to the minute on trends and styles, etc. They are more fashion-conscious than ugly women.

The hottest woman I ever dated had a closet almost as big as my bedroom, loaded with clothes. Enough clothes for five women to be well-dressed.

It cracks me up when attractive young women allocate 20% of their waking energy to making themselves as sexually appealing to men as possible, and then they complain when their efforts succeed.

But what can we expect? Attractive women are, after all, young. Their brains have not matured yet. They don't think very well. Typically their complaints stop after age 30 or so. That's old enough for their looks to have started slipping a bit. Just enough to let them see into their future, to grasp the impending horror.

The notion that relationships must be fatal to be successful is silly. Humans enjoy variety in every sort of entertainment, from food to music to travel to companionship to sex.

Do you think Donald Trump is less happy with his third wife (model Melania Knauss) than he would be if he had stayed with his first wife, who is at least 20 years older? I think Donald Trump is far better off than he would be if his first marriage had been "successful."

Divorce for alpha males is an artifact of western society with is fictional ideal of monogamy. In many other cultures, high-status men are free to accumulate as many wives as they can afford. I'm not saying either system is necessarily better or worse, just that powerful men like Donald Trump are going to keep taking young wives, one way or another.

Relationship "failure" is a problem for unattractive people, because they might need a long time to find the next person with whom they can develop some sort of mutual attraction. In other words, dating is not very fun if you aren't hot. Unattractive people get stood up, jerked around, and generally mistreated, ignored, or disrespected by almost everyone they find attractive. Especially anyone they find highly attractive. The only way for an unattractive person to get any sort of decent treatment is to settle for some similarly unattractive person. Yuck.

In contrast, dating is probably a lot of fun if you are Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt probably has no difficulty finding highly attractive women who are thrilled to go out with him. That's very different than the solid wall of disinterest an obese man would probably get from women in that league.

Being obese might not entirely destroy a man's attractiveness to women, but it reduces the number of women who can find him attractive. That means he probably has to approach more women and absorb more rejections to find a woman who finds him attractive.

If the obese man only finds some percentage of women attractive, his chances of finding mutual attraction might be very low indeed.

For example, suppose a man is attractive to 20% of women, and 20% of women find him attractive. If there is no correlation between his attraction for women and their attraction for him, he can find mutual attraction with (1/5)*(1/5) or 1 in 25 women.

Then suppose the same man becomes obese. Now he might be attractive to only 5% of women. If so, then unless he relaxes his own requirements, he can find mutual attraction with only 1 in 100 women.

Given that most men find rejection after rejection hard to take, a man has some maximum amount of rejection he can endure before he simply gives up on pursuing women. If becoming obese pushes his rejection rate up beyond what he has the psychological strength to withstand, he might become unable to find a woman with whom he can experience mutual attraction, because women expect men to do essentially all the initial work and assume all the risks of rejection. That is, if a man gives up on pursuing women, women for the most part will simply ignore him.

For unattractive people, 'love' actually is grim. It's like when quadriplegics discuss walking.

Men pay attention to physically attractive women long before they know anything about their personalities. Furthermore, men are more willing to give attractive women the benefit of the doubt. An attractive woman with the "same" personality as a fat woman will seem to have a better personality, because her good looks bias the perceptions of men.

And if a slender attractive woman should somehow believe she is not slender and attractive, there will be a steady parade of men attempting to convince her otherwise.

Sure, you can imagine all the hypothetical scenarios you want. In some circumstances, a fat woman might do better than an improbably defective slender woman; but when it comes to attracting men, particularly the dominant successful men women desire most, a slender woman has to be incredibly defective to match the fat woman's level of defectiveness.

People in general respond immediately to other people, strangers included, based on how they look. Someone who looks good will, therefore, live in a different world from someone who looks bad. The good-looking person will find others to be generally friendly and receptive; the bad-looking person will find others to be generally stand-offish and uninterested, especially others who happen to look good.

Over time, the physically attractive person will tend to develop a generally more positive attitude about things. Especially when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex. I guarantee that every attractive woman knows she's "got it," regardless of how much thunder-stealing she might do by talking about her real or imagined minor attractiveness defects.

If you manage to socialize a bit with some attractive people, you will see this. Attractive people don't sit around complaining as much about why there aren't any worthwhile men/women. In their world, there are plenty of worthwhile people from whom to choose.

In most areas of human endeavor, people who are successful at something tend to have better attitudes about it than people who are unsuccessful. Because sex/romance/relationships are mostly about physical attraction, anyone who is physically attractive has a huge head start, and is likely to enjoy the whole process more because he or she will typically have greater success than someone who is physically unattractive.

A person's "confidence" simply reflects the feedback he or she has consistently received from the environment.

The dark humorist must take care to blaspheme from a safe distance. Theists tend to get violent when mocked, responding with things like Inquisitions and terror attacks when you wound their delicate feelings. You may doubt the wrath of God, but there is no doubting the wrath of the Godly.

I read in an article in Newsweek that the going rate for a prostitute in South Africa is $1 if you wear a condom, and $3 if you don't. The billion poorest people in the world have a per capita income of about $1/day. If it were possible for scientists to invent the transporter technology of Star Trek, one possible application would be allowing millions of First-World loserguys to visit Third-World brothels. The way it works now, the travel cost is prohibitive. The sex when you get there is practically free, but getting there is expensive. Hopefully such transporter technology will not be invented before the cure for AIDS.

Of the four things we have discussed so far: sex, religion, politics, and engineering, only engineering has any sort of rigorous standards. Thus it tends to be less destructive than the other three, and when an engineering disaster does occur, there is an inquiry and usually the standards are then strengthened. In sex, religion, and politics, people keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. Also, it's difficult for idiots to become engineers, but idiots qualify for religion, politics, and sex.

Today the police do not have trouble to read the bad guy's criminal record, so why should I?

Also, see my other articles on this subject. There will be much social pressure to disclose your criminal record, once people get the ability to do something useful for their own safety with the info. The criminal will not have to disclose anything, but then lots of people will point cameras at him/her.

Remember, everybody knows everybody in the USA by something like 6 levels of acquaintance. It will be hard for a person to have a violent criminal record and keep that private. I predict that we will see a huge demand to know if the guy who got off the bus behind you has a criminal record or not.

In fact, every single woman I have discussed this system with thought that would be a very nice power to have. I expect women will purchase this system in droves; heck, they might even invent it. 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.

All motorists consider themselves superior to bicyclists, otherwise they would be bicyclists. How else can we account for the fact that motorists can justify endangering, intimidating, and poisoning the bicyclists who are using the same roads they do? The motorist is saying the benefit to his/her own comfort and convenience outweighs the harm to the bicyclist, which I call a clear claim to superiority. (What do you call it?)

Bicyclists did not start this fight, and they rarely fight back. Start with the obvious: count the number of bicyclists who get killed by motorists every year, and then count the number of motorists who get killed by bicyclists every year. Then look at anything else you like: resource consumption, noise generation, road space consumption, parking space consumption, etc.

If we adopt as our measure of "superiority" the ability to kill people who get in one's way, to consume scarce resources, and to damage the environment, then motorists are superior to bicyclists.

If, on the other hand, we measure "superiority" by the willingness to accept personal inconvenience and danger to avoid harming others, then bicyclists are superior to motorists.

You can define "superiority" any way you like. If you are bothered by somebody else's definition, then debate it. If you are bothered by your own definition, then that's your problem---don't blame someone else for your own cognitive dissonance.

Some people might think you are presenting Bill Gates as a reason to drop out of college, and Bill himself does not present himself that way, either in his writing or hiring decisions.

I think Pamela [Anderson]'s implants are a little too obvious, and therefore a bit strange, because I have never seen a real pair of breasts up close that had such a clear outline of the implant bag across the top. Nonetheless, millions of people vote with their dollars that Pamela Anderson is a remarkably attractive woman, and this is the only reason those 15 guys you asked had ever heard of her. If not for the fact that most men think Pamela Anderson is attractive, you would not even be able to ask your friends what they think about her.

Quick: can you think of any other women who are famous primarily for their appearance, and who are not physically attractive? Of course there are women who are physically unattractive and famous for other things (examples: Madeleine Albright, Janet Reno, shall I go on or is everyone hurling yet?), but is there one woman who trades primarily on her looks without having good looks? I cannot think of one.

Instead of asking these guys what they think about Pamela Anderson, why don't you invite them over to watch Barb Wire, and see whether they are paying attention during Pamela's all-too-brief scenes of partial nudity. For example, during the opening credits Pamela's character is "working" as an exotic dancer. The camera work is actually quite clever, in that her costume seems to be falling off her breasts the whole time, exposing almost all of her surgeon's handiwork, but her nipples only become visible for a few frames right at the end of the sequence. In any case, I would be very surprised if all 15 of your guys would nod off with boredom during this scene. I certainly did not.

Does it not occur you to you that the men you date are not entirely stupid? Drooling about Pamela Anderson (who is unattainable to all but a handful of men) is very unlikely to score points with any other woman, and certainly not with the average woman who is likely to compare herself unfavorably. In fact most women tend to react quite negatively to this kind of thing, so most men learn to tone it down. A man has nothing to gain, and potentially much to lose, by elaborating about his hard-on for Pamela Anderson in the company of a "real" woman.

However, I have noticed that most women seem to feel no inhibitions against expressing their attraction for Sean Connery, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Nicholas Cage, etc. even when they are with a man who might feel jealous. Self-bias is an interesting thing.

I've read about rats which had electrodes implanted in the "pleasure centers" in their brains. The kindly experimenters provided the rats a panel in their cage they could push to receive a stimulus to their pleasure centers. Whereupon the rats proceeded to keep pushing the panel to the exclusion of all other activities (like eating and drinking) until they dropped dead.

This leads me to suspect that if a person was as happy as he could be, he would not be long for this Earth. We are machines with physical constraints, not abstractions. We have organs that provide us with a carefully controlled amount of happiness to prod us toward behaviors that were, in the ancestral environment, likely to help us survive and reproduce. Too much happiness is a bad thing to have in a dangerous environment. Your genes do not want you to feel blissfully happy and utterly at peace with your world when a hungry tiger is chasing you. If you are doing the "wrong" thing from the standpoint of the long-term survival of your genes, then your genes do not "want" you to be happy. The genes which do the best job of causing people to have emotions that match their environment most appropriately will become more numerous in succeeding generations. Our genes' "goal" is to make more copies of themselves, not to make their survival machines as happy as possible. Actually, our genes do not "care" whether we are happy or miserable, as long as we do the "right" thing (i.e., survive and reproduce). So we have mental organs that produce both positive and negative emotional incentives for us to pursue survival-oriented behaviors.

Incidentally, when I was young (22) I dated a substantially older (39) woman, and she was the first person to tell me there was nothing wrong with finding another person attractive on a purely physical level. After that, I stopped apologizing for who I am, and my life improved.

You seem to imply that a physically attractive woman has a higher probability of having undesirable personality traits. In my experience this simply isn't true. There is nothing to suggest that attractive women are more difficult to get along with than unattractive women. While I will not go as far as to say "women are all alike," I will say that in my experience the similarities vastly outweigh the differences insofar as how women relate to men. Women of a given age, I.Q., educational level, and cultural background rarely do anything that will really surprise you after you have gotten to know a few of them. 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.

If you selected random samples of highly attractive and unattractive women, you would probably find that the most attractive women had the fewest undesirable personality traits. In fact, it would be difficult for the opposite to occur, when we consider the massive bias almost everybody has in favor of beautiful people. Beautiful people tend to live more pleasant and enjoyable lives, on average, and their mental outlooks tend to reflect this.

Do you understand what the word "totally" means? Or are you using it in the airhead valley girl sense?

From the practical standpoint of maintaining a relationship, of course more than sexual attraction is necessary. But you do not seem to understand that for many of us, that "more than" part rarely seems to be a problem. That is, most of the time it's just as easy (or difficult, depending on one's outlook) for a man to get along with a beautiful woman as with an ugly woman. In all these hypothetical arguments, people seem to imply that physical beauty must go hand-in-hand with horrid personality flaws. But this just does not square with my experience. I'm having trouble remembering the last time I was in the market for a relationship, and I felt that I had to reject a woman I found highly physically attractive because she had some overriding personality flaw.

Oh, actually I can remember one now. This was at least 10 years ago, and the woman in question was actually quite pleasant and enjoyable to be around, but she told me that she had some sort of mental illness that causes its victims to cut their bodies. I don't recall the exact name of this syndrome, but evidently it is a recognized condition. She showed me some wicked self-inflicted scars on her thighs as proof. Then she described her fantasy of vivisecting a penis, and she wanted to know if I had ever wanted to slice open a woman's breast. Believe me, this is an unsettling topic of conversation to have pop up in bed. Right about then I started thinking that in her case, being gorgeous wasn't quite going to cut it (pardon the phrase).

So I will agree that, occasionally, physical beauty isn't enough. But in general, if you meet someone who lives in a given community, has a particular level of education, and so on, you probably aren't going to have a whole lot of surprises. Our genes, culture, and chosen subculture(s) do a very good job of stamping out (or at least pre-selecting away) most of our individuality, with the result that most people can get along pretty darned well with a big fraction of the other people in their culture. Most people like to do most of the same things: go to movies, dine out, take vacations, etc. And where people differ, such as in things like choosing to smoke, it is pretty easy to find groups of people who are more likely to have the traits you want.

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."

For example, pick up any inaminate object, such as a brick, and try to insult it. Be creative. Knock yourself out. You can keep trying until you collapse from exhaustion and you will fail to disturb the emotional equilibrium of the brick in any way. This simple experiment demonstrates that only one entity has the power to determine what constitutes an "insult" and it is not the person doing the insulting.

I get etymological to demonstrate that people do not have to be ruled by words. "He insulted me!" often represents the speaker's sincere belief that the insulter did something that matters. I'm saying it does not matter much more than the insultee decides that it matters. Since it matters so little there is no reason to endorse it by calling attention to it.

It is possible to build a computer capable of simulating the operation of one neuron. Connect this to a hundred billion similar computers and you have an arbitrarily accurate simulation of a brain.

Nobody knows exactly how to hook them up or how to initialize the state of each one but the example shows that in principle the job of simulating a brain doesn't require any more knowledge than how to simulate one neuron and how all the neurons in the brain connect.

Of course this simulation would require more computer power than exists in the world today, which is why people are trying to find shortcuts.

There was one instance in my life where I went from one long-term relationship straight into another with no gap. (Normally I have gaps, in part because of my sentimental refusal to cheat. Unlike a woman who can accumulate standing offers "innocently" even while she's in a relationship, I must actively pursue new opportunities and I perhaps foolishly do not do that when I am already involved.) I recall myself being a little dizzy from having to adapt to all the changes quickly, but I don't recall grieving one tiny little bit.

This leads me to believe (for me, anyway) the biggest problem of ending a relationship is getting used to being alone again at the same time I must grapple with the difficult and degrading task of finding another relationship partner.

I have also started relationships with women who dumped men they were already with to be with me. I.e., the women I have been involved with had fewer "gaps" than I do. Even while observing these women at close range and listening to lengthy emotional status reports from them I was generally unable to detect that they were grieving over the previous partners they had dumped.

My guess would be, however, that if you were sufficiently productive to survive on Mars, your incentive to do so would be negligible. You could for less expense just stay where you are and build an accurate simulation of whatever sensory experience you could obtain by dragging your ass all the way to Mars. Going to Mars would only make sense if you discovered that the Earth was going to explode in the near future.

I think a better and more useful invention would be the Eye of God. That is my name for a small computer that can look at any natural object, human artifact, or person, and instantly tell you everything about that object, artifact, or person that is available in the public domain. With the Eye of God you would be virtually unstoppable. It would essentially make you an instant expert on everything. Of course to be useful the Eye would have to know how to filter the information based on your goals at the moment.

Study the careers of Gene Simmons, Dennis Rodman, and Larry Flynt. However, without considerable luck or natural talent it would be difficult to equal the success of any of them while satisfying the condition: "with as little effort as possible."

Society orders you to drive a car, and you submissively comply, despite the fact that your submissive compliance contributes to the largest single cause of violent death and suffering throughout U.S. history, outranking even warfare. Forget about simulated electric shocks, this is the real thing. You watch the commercials and absorb the relentless programming from pop culture and all your peers and march like an obediant lemming down to your dealer with checkbook open, eager to start your engine and take your place in the war of all against all.

When I hear women complaining about other women, they sound much like men complaining about women. Men are more likely to tolerate abuse because they are in a vastly weaker bargaining position given the large imbalance between male and female aggregate sexual desire.

If I am attracted enough to go on more than one or two dates with a woman then you can be 100% sure that I would enjoy having sex with her. Granted, if she has some unseen deformity or behavioral abnormality that would render sex unpleasant or dangerous then I might be lusting after something that isn't really there. But in general my motivation to date women absolutely is to have sex with them. Particularly if I have already had sex with them and continue to date them.

I don't know if this is funny or "thinking with my dick" but there you have it.

And I have yet to meet a man who convinced me, face-to-face, that he thinks much differently. Of course the vast majority of women are clueless about men to some degree. What else is new.

Some men also swear that penis size does not matter to women. I don't believe their wishful thinking either. If you told a guy with a 5" dick that size does not matter, to make him feel better and to keep his dick working, he'd probably believe you. Why? Because he would desperately want to believe you. The same thing goes for telling a woman "You're not getting older, you're getting better." The vast majority of women will believe a man who tells them this even if they realistically know most men cannot possibly feel the same way and act the way they do.

Actually, gluttony is a mental disorder, a kind of mental illness. Gluttons cannot control their urges to eat too much, much like some Catholic priests cannot (by themselves) control their urges to molest altar boys.

One practical difference is that food cannot protest, and the effects of gluttony are so obvious that not even the Catholic church could cover them up.

The lady who spilled coffee on her lap by driving away from McDonalds with the coffee cup held between her legs was legally entitled to a large cash settlement from McDonalds. But McDonalds doesn't just hand out money without a fight. You can't walk up to the counter, say "I spilled your coffee on my lap," and expect the clerk to hand over a million dollars. Instead you have to find a lawyer who will fight McDonalds in exchange for a sizable percentage of the settlement.

Unlike you, I make no comment on the "morality" of this system. I simply point out its nature. We have a system in which lawyers get paid more if the cases they take happen to become more contentious (either by themselves, or with a little push from the lawyers).

I.e., lawyers are in the enviable position of getting paid to play "Let's you and him fight."

If you want us to believe that lawyers who profit from the destruction of marriages somehow manage to never, ever, in any way encourage the phenomenon that puts money in their pockets, nor do lawyers ever do anything to increase the level of conflict and thus legal fees during a divorce, then you are asking us to believe lawyers have somehow managed to overcome their human nature.

Divorce lawyers get paid to help people get divorced. The more bitter and contentious the divorce, the more legal work required, and the more money the lawyers make.

How could lawyers not respond by doing what they get paid to do? They get paid to help marriages fail, and to fail as unpleasantly as possible.

For example, when a divorce lawyer advises a client, does the divorce lawyer advise the client to seek more, or less, from the spouse?

First you deride Bush for being propped up by others, and having a familiar name. Then along comes Arnold, whose surname "Schwarzenegger" was hardly familiar until Arnold made it so, and it's hard to accuse Arnold of being propped up by someone else. The guy is about as close to being self-made as anyone gets. He came to America as a teenager, barely speaking English, and with not a lot of money. He worked as a bricklayer while training for bodybuilding competitions. Soon he was starting mail-order businesses, investing in real estate, breaking into acting, and later into politics. Arnold is pretty much the anti-Bush when it comes to personal accomplishments and having the humble background.

I guess it's too bad for the Democratic party that the Presidential election was 2004 rather than 2005. What a difference a year makes. Note to liberals: three more years! Ha ha ha ha ha ha. But look on the bright side. After three more years of Dubya, the nation should be ready for two terms of the next Bill Clinton.

The two-party system remains stable thanks to the way both parties get to take turns being incompetent, thereby continually driving swing voters to the opposing team.

Liberals have only themselves to blame for living in their Potemkin village of political correctness, relentlessly losing touch with how absurd their message became to Joe Six-Pack.

Bush has something special that takes him beyond what his apparent ineptitude would seem to limit him to. Whether you like Bush or not, especially if you don't like him, you might as well face facts. If Bush was as inept as he seems, he wouldn't be able to vex his opponents so. There are lots of inept right-wingers who never amount to shit.

Bush is clearly not one of those. He has amounted to enough to change the course of U.S. politics for a while.

Calling one's political opponent incompetent is an obviously self-falsifying argument. If the opponent was truly incompetent, you wouldn't have to oppose him. You'd just stand back and let him self-destruct.

The government is like an elephant. Once you get it pointed in the right direction, it can plow through trees and thickets. But if you expect the elephant to dance, forget it.

Dumbshit American gaswasters should learn what their gasoline addiction is paying for in the countries that still have some of the world's dwindling petroleum resources left.

In Saudi Arabia, health care is completely free for all citizens. So is education, at any level. If you are a Saudi Arabian citizen, you get an all-expenses-paid education up to any level you qualify for. And not just in Saudi schools, but in any university you can get admitted to.

All courtesy of dumbshit American gaswasters. The same benefactors the Saudi government trains its citizens to hate. When people hate Americans, Americans reward them by throwing record amounts of money at them.

The education system is hurting because it is attempting to educate average people, who aren't really educable. Smart kids have never had difficulty becoming educated, whenever they felt like it. The problem is, we don't know what makes some kids good students, any more than we know what makes some kids good athletes, good musicians, or good criminals.

In the old days, when only a select few could go to school, people looked at the success of the select few and imagined that model could be extended to everybody.

So far, results have always been mixed, at best.

Nobody knows how to turn all kids into champion athletes, and nobody knows how to turn all kids into smart, knowledgeable adults. These things still come down mostly to talent. A smart kid doesn't need much in the way of good teachers. He or she mostly needs access to a good library.

People see the President on TV and they think the President knows them and cares about their needs. Every bit as much as those people care about their own needs.

In much the same way, people imagine God and think God knows them and cares about their needs.

Faith in George W. Bush is slightly more realistic, because we know he exists, at the very least, and we are pretty sure he cares about something.

The future is easy to predict: at first, everyone will say "Never again!" and work to raise the levees. But the city and the levees will continue sinking. Making the levees higher makes them heavier, which ironically causes the levees to sink even faster into the marshy ground on which they rest. The work of raising the levees must never cease, like the guy who keeps painting the Golden Gate bridge (when he "finishes," he starts over at the other end, which is by then ready for repainting).

After a few decades pass, if New Orleans is "lucky" enough to avoid further storm hits, complacency and denial will set in again. The city and its levees will continue sinking, and other priorities will compete for funds. Maintaining the will to spend continuously to raise the sinking levees will grow increasingly difficult. Eventually the city will become vulnerable to flooding once again. The next time the damage will be worse, because the city will be even farther below sea level. And the sea level will be a little higher thanks to Global Warming, a problem we certainly can scold President Bush for not confronting vigorously enough. Not that there's anything Bush could do to stop it, but the years of denial didn't help.

For example, look at all the stupid dipshits who are complaining about the higher prices of gasoline. None of them are smart enough to understand the information about reality the economy is trying to communicate to them through those prices. Basically, the world is running out of petroleum, and yet stupid gaswasters continue to burn the remaining petroleum faster and faster, with bigger SUVs, houses ever farther out in exurbia, longer commutes, etc. Stupid gaswasters think gasoline should always be cheap, even as it grows scarcer.

That's not how reality works. When increasing demand chases decreasing supply, prices tend to rise. The economy is trying to teach people something about reality. But most people prefer to live in denial. They expect their Government to magically rewrite the game rules and make reality go away.

In another sense, life is more than fair. Consider how many atoms the Universe contains; then consider what a tiny fraction of them get to become part of a conscious entity.

On average, the best an atom can hope for is to be part of a rock, or a star, or a nebula. Billions of years of completely unfeeling nothingness.

The atoms in your body have gotten a momentary reprieve. For a vanishing instant of cosmological time, they get to be part of a machine that can conceive of atoms.

If we think it is better to be a thinking being than, say, a brick, then our momentarily exalted status as conscious agglomerations of atoms is incredibly unfair---to all the merely dead ones.

One could argue that the curtains do more to dress up the dump than the home that already looks good. Nonetheless, it's better to improve something that is already beautiful another 1% than to improve a pile of shit as much as 10%.

"Beauty" products invariably look better on a woman who is already beautiful, even if they improve her looks by only a tiny fraction. Because the improvement occurs in the region of beauty that matters.

It's like raising the IQ of a severely retarded person by 10 points. That won't have any noticeable impact. In contrast, if you could raise the IQ of a genius by another 10 points that would be huge.

When you ask a child what he wants to be when he grows up, he never says he wants to flip burgers. Similarly, when men fantasize about what sort of woman they would like to have, she's probably not obese.

When people have to use computers to communicate with other people, in a stilted unnatural way, it tends to put people on edge. Check back in 30 years or so when computers get smart enough to make people feel good.

Sitting alone in a room and typing on a keyboard is not as enjoyable as, say, giving dictation to a bright-eyed, enthusiastic secretary who looks exactly like Angelina Jolie. And who is smart enough to suggest alternate wordings when the dictation comes off as unduly harsh. Someday computers will provide user interfaces at least that emotionally engaging.

Osama bin Laden is just as sure about what he believes as you are about what you believe. Since you know Osama bin Laden's faith does not prove anything, how do you know you aren't making a similar mistake?

Everything you could point to as "evidence," Osama bin Laden has something similar: the overwhelming emotional sensation of correctness; millions of fellow believers (how could all the people you know and trust be wrong?); a vast organized religion, steeped in tradition and authority; ancient sacred texts commanding allegiance down through the centuries; anecdotes of miracles; etc.

Had you been raised in, say, Saudi Arabia, you would be just as sure about the truth of Islam as you are sure about the truth of Christ.

Anybody can believe what they were raised to believed. That's no accomplishment. But to be raised to believe in something which doesn't stand up to logic, and to see the problems with it, and have the courage to face those problems instead of fleeing from them (indeed, it takes more courage to question one's received wisdom than to face a volley from Yankee muskets)---now that's something special.

Eventually humans will have robot grief counselors, and human grief counselors will buy robot grief counselors to console them about their loss of employment and status. It would be interesting to be grief-counseled by the very cause of your grief.

Isaac Newton said if he saw far, it's because he stood on the shoulders of giants. We can't all be Isaac Newton, and giants are hard to come by, so on Usenet we have to stand on the shoulders of midgets.

While predicting the future is difficult, to say the least, I suspect that at some point advancing technology will take the wind out of fundamentalist Islam's sails. Islam, like all the major religions, evolved in an environment of primitive technology. In primitive conditions, many wants go chronically unmet---for example, the average man cannot have 72 virgin girls to call his own. To deal with frustration, humans exercise their imaginations to dream up religions which assure them all their frustration is for a good reason.

Once technology removes many of the most annoying frustrations from human experience, religion is no longer necessary. It will persist for some time, of course, due to simple human inertia. But once technology solves a problem, and clearly solves it better than some useless religious ritual, people tend to abandon the useless religious ritual.

For example, it's now less common for farming people to sacrifice their children to placate the weather gods. Scientists cannot predict the weather far enough in advance to help farmers much, but scientists have explained enough about the weather to convince most farmers that sacrificing your children doesn't have much impact. Butterfly effects notwithstanding.

Modern transportation technology has made travel much easier, safer, and faster than it used to be. In ancient times, people used to daydream about having the ability to move around quickly, and not too surprisingly this is a common feature of religious myth: stories about people being magically transported long distances in short times. But today, you don't see too many religious people expecting their gods to teleport them instantly around the planet. Technology has relieved the gods of that burden.

Information is the enemy of religion. For Jihadis to learn robot hacking, they have to open up their culture on a broad scale to the full range of foreign ideas. Over time, that dilutes the ideological dominance of the local religion.

We are at a curious time in history, when we have just enough technology to allow religious dullards to be dangerous, but not quite enough technology to eliminate the need for religion.

Someday employers won't have these stupid people problems any more, because robots will do all the work. Robots won't take work issues home because robots will never go home. They will work continuously until they break. Other robots will fix them, and they will go back to work.

When a woman gets cosmetic surgery, how does she justify it? The marketing and the rhetoric is always about helping a woman to feel better about herself. It's about improving her self image. As if she's simply trying to satisfy a narcissistic urge. It's never about increasing a woman's ability to give men boners. You and I know that's what it's really all about, ultimately, but that's not what a woman's emotional brain tells her. It's also not what we can freely admit without risking sanction.

If you go around telling people that what you primarily value about women is how they look, people will tend to associate that idea with you in particular, as if most other men do not think the same way.

The reason people are not perfectly honest and forthcoming about everything they feel is to allow others to form whatever impression about them they find most comforting.

For an example of how the emotional brain works, talk to a fat person about why she is fat. Studies have shown that fat people tend to under-report their actual eating, and the fatter they are, the greater the under-reporting. It's possible they actually believe they eat less than they really eat (that is, some of them might pass a lie-detector test when they under-report their eating). Read the NAAFA propaganda that dances all around the issue and basically denies that people are fat because they eat too much. Something as simple as "Eat too much, get fat" is seemingly impossible for people to grasp just as soon as they are emotionally threatened by the consequences.

Or look around at all the gaswasting terrorist supporters who drive around with stickers on their SUVs that say "Support Our Troops." Here they are driving up petroleum prices and pumping more money into fundamentalist Islamic radicals than they know what to do with, and yet the average gaswaster is so stupid that he or she feels it is legitimate to put a "Support Our Troops" on a machine that is killing our troops. In other words, it's hard to overestimate human stupidity.

How many women have you overheard saying, "That man finds me sexually worthless"? Typically a woman rationalizes away a man's lack of interest by saying he is commitment-phobic, or he is a man who "cannot love," or he's gay, or he "has issues," etc. How many women state the obvious: "I'm just not attractive to most men"?

The weird thing is that lots of women are well aware that they have physical flaws; a few women might even understand that they have personality flaws. But few women seem able to understand what a given level of flawed-ness translates into.

That book "He's Just Not That Into You" was like a great intellectual leap for women, as if many women did not even have the concept that a man might not want to have sex with them (or keep having sex with them). Women have been sold the huge lie that every woman is equally entitled to the same storybook relationship with her dream man. And women generally believe it because they don't hit on guys and get rejected hundreds of times.

Do you think anybody needs to write a book "Dude: Chicks Don't Dig You"? "Dudes" already know they don't get much love from most chicks.

Consider if the genders were reversed, and some fat bald old guy prances around in a Speedo. Only a very few guys can make the Speedo thing work, and most guys know about where they stand on this. But virtually all women think there is some point to all of them investing in lingerie. Ugly women don't get the same brutally honest feedback that undesirable men get, that it's not working.

In real life, you can tell within a few minutes (or within a few seconds) of meeting someone, about how attractive that person is. If a dating service provided the same quality of information you get about people in real life, it couldn't give unattractive people false hope and get them to keep paying money for a long time. That's the problem with every dating service: it has an economic incentive not to screen out the undesirables. In fact the less attractive a person is, the better he or she is for the dating service, because he or she stays active longer and pays more money. In contrast, the few attractive people who sign up quickly pair off and leave, and aren't good for much besides posing for endorsement advertisements.

A woman might acknowledge she has some attractiveness flaws, but does not believe they should affect the treatment she gets from men. She does not believe Victoria's Secret lingerie models deserve better relationships than she deserves simply because they look better. Even though the woman intellectually acknowledges that men care about how a woman looks, she doesn't translate that into any difference in how men should treat her.

Since men have experience trying to woo women in real life, most guys who aren't incredibly stupid figure out pretty quickly which women are completely out of their league. Men might hit on women out of their league anyway, but they know their chances of success are remote.

Women, on the other hand, almost never hit on men in real life. So they come to dating sites with almost no concept of how attractive they are to men in general. They assume that any man is just as likely as any other to find them attractive. Usually when a woman talks to a man in a courtship context, it's because he approached her, which means he wants to have sex with her. Women therefore get the potentially mistaken idea that all men want to have sex with them. If a woman is highly attractive, then it is true that a solid majority of men DO want to have sex with her. But the less attractive a woman is, the larger her error if she generalizes from the subset of men who have hit on her to the set of all men.

I think women are aware of their flaws and feel insecure about them while simultaneously expecting that their flaws should not matter to men.

For example, if you are in a relationship with a woman, and you do something she doesn't like, does she say, "Well, I guess I deserved that because I have cellulite." Most women don't think that way. They think they deserve to be treated the way a perfect woman deserves to be treated.

A woman might be aware that she has cellulite, but she doesn't think her cellulite should have any consequences apart from possibly being bothersome to her when she thinks about it.

Actually Americans aren't greedy. Look at how many hundreds of billions of dollars we are pumping into the terrorist-supporting Middle East oil barons whose openly stated goal is to destroy us. Generosity like that is rarely seen. How many other countries donate so much wealth to their sworn enemies?

I don't think characterizing people negatively "dehumanizes" them. Most people like animals more than they like other people. Humans, for the most part, aren't very likeable. Dehumanizing them to something like a well-liked animal would move them up a notch.

Saying bad things about people isn't really anything more than calling attention to their humanity.

Consider a dog. Treat it fairly well, i.e., offer food, and refrain from beating it too often, and it will slavishly devote itself to you. At worst it might shit on the carpet or bite the neighbor kid. Or perhaps infest your house with fleas and give you ringworm. But it won't disagree with your politics, disagree with your religion, or start wars. To dehumanize someone would be to render him inoffensive.

Here is a functional definition for "rich": when a person no longer has to do anything except what he or she finds interesting to do. Anyone who still takes orders he or she finds unpleasant or personally irrelevant or merely less than grippingly cool is not yet "rich."

It's hard to understand how the world functions with an average IQ of 100. It takes a lot of beer, gasoline, and television to keep the Marching Morons occupied.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that's the way you bet.

The ancient nobility routinely sent their subjects into battle to bleed and die for their noble causes. Every cause of the nobility was, by definition, noble.

Depending on the propaganda skills of the nobility, sometimes they convinced the people who bled and died for them that their "noble" causes were "good."

The fact that even today most people mindlessly associate "noble" with "good" testifies to the propaganda skills of the ancient nobility. They somehow managed to portray their entire class as the embodiment of virtue, they got everyone else to buy it, and this perception has become embedded in our very language.

If you want feedback, don't waste time asking for feedback. Just tell somebody he is wrong.

At a minimum, I would certainly have no sympathy for permitting women to maintain any of their historical advantages, if we are to erase their historical disadvantages. For example, if our next war (Coming Soon to an Oil Field Not-So-Near You) winds up killing and maiming and psychologically scarring a significantly larger number of men than women, then I will be less than sympathetic to women's complaints of "unequal treatment". Demanding equality is certainly a mixed bag, and if I am to grant equality, I will certainly try to make sure I grant all of it.