Danimal archive, part 5

If you don't want your children to be bullied, make sure they have the traits necessary to land up near the top of the social hierarchy for children. For boys, the keys to social dominance are size, strength, and athletic prowess. For girls, the keys are being pretty and fashionable.

Parents who lack the genes for these traits are simply dooming their children to the same fate the parents endured a generation earlier.

Later in life, intellectual traits can pay off for men, at least economically, and on a broader scale. Only a tiny minority of athletic boys will make it as professional athletes, whereas almost all the nerd boys can get decent jobs if they are willing to do the necessary work. Of course the distant future potential payoff is no comfort to the effete nerd boys while they are getting beaten up and terrorized by the dominant jocks.

If you think bullying is bad, then stop patronizing spectator sports. Jocks get away with bullying because of their exalted status. They are exalted because sports fans exalt them.

People who enjoy going to stadiums and cheering on their sports heroes are feeding the monster which torments their genetically disadvantaged offspring.

Consider, who can afford those stadium box seats which keep the overpaid athletes in business? Generally, the stadium box seats are bought by the grown-up nerds who have succeeded in business. Now they are paying financial tribute to the same kinds of guys who once made their lives hell.

The legions of lesser athlete boys who didn't make it to the pros are at home watching the game on TV, in their wife-beater tank tops, yelling at their biatches to fetch more chips and beer.

It takes billions of dollars, mountains of literature, millions of human professionals, monumental architecture, mass gatherings, and the relentless repetition of religious ritual to inculcate faith on a broad scale, i.e., to train masses of people to reject logic and accept some particular belief system with no conclusive proof while rejecting infinitely many alternative belief systems equally unsupported by facts. (If people were logical, they would refrain from forming beliefs about things for which the evidence is inconclusive. I.e., until you know something, you admit you don't know it. For example, a logical person would not believe his favorite team will score some exact number of points in some game yet to be played. Instead he waits for the team to play, and then he sees what the score turns out to be.)

That is why, if you want to wipe out a religion, you begin by wiping out its organization. After just a few generations, a systematically oppressed religion can be eradicated like an infectious disease after a comprehensive vaccination program.

Not too many people take Zeus and Odin seriously today, not because the arguments for Zeus and Odin have become any less persuasive, nor because the emotional payoff from worshipping those gods is any less than it ever was, but because hardly anybody happens to be earning a living by promoting the worship of Zeus or Odin just now.

That is, there is no organized religion hawking Zeus or Odin, and thus there is no faith in them.

Once Christianity took hold in Europe, it set about burning all the priests who taught people to worship Zeus, Odin, etc. Against that successful systematic attack on their organized religions, Zeus and Odin didn't stand a chance. Christianity had a competitive edge against the polytheistic religions it replaced, because polytheism allows for new gods to be added, such as the Christian gods, but once the Christian memes snuck in they set about eliminating the earlier inclusive polytheistic memes. Much like the way Hitler won a democratic election, and then set about dismantling democracy.

No organized religion means eventually no faith. Today, most Christian nations have liberalized, and would allow people to worship Zeus and Odin again, but amazingly nobody seems to be interested. It's like exterminating all the dodo birds and then saying, "OK dodo birds, you can come back now, we won't shoot you."

What a woman wears has very little impact on how attractive she is. That doesn't stop unattractive women from repeatedly trying to become the first exception.

The misconception probably arises because it is possible for a highly attractive woman to dress in such a way as to make herself seem less attractive (although probably not unattractive). By changing her clothes, she might seem to become dramatically more attractive, and this gives unattractive women the wrong idea.

It's sort of like chaining a one-ton weight to a marathon runner, effectively crippling him. Take the weight off, and he can run a marathon. That doesn't mean taking a one-ton weight off an unfit person means he can run a marathon too.

The clothes that display an attractive woman's beauty to maximum street-legal effect (for example, a clingy sheer short dress, or a thong bikini) will only make an unattractive woman look that much more unsightly. Like putting lipstick on a pig.

Sometimes I wonder if women can even see the difference between a genuinely attractive woman, and an average schlumpy middle-aged woman who has a nice smile. It seems women rate another woman as "gorgeous" if they can find one thing they like about her, whereas men reserve the term for a woman they can't find one thing not to like about.

If you like the kitchen in a house that is falling down elsewhere, does that make the house "way gorgeous"? If you don't plan to live there, maybe you can see the beauty in the kitchen and ignore the problems around it. But someone who has to live there will find it harder to ignore the flaws.

This is one reason why a guy should be leery about letting a woman hook him up with another woman for a blind date. It's like having your dog sniff some road kill to determine whether it's safe for you to eat. Your dog might be more open-minded about what constitutes edibility.

It seems to me the problem is that as soon as a person begins creating wealth, the first thing they want to do is move far away from persons who are not creating as much wealth.

Educated people are statistically far less likely to shoot you or otherwise reduce your lifespan. When I disagree with an educated person, I can always get some kind of traction. Remember, ignorance is always curable; stupidity is not. In any case, when people become rich enough to live wherever they want, they almost invariably move to neighborhoods where the average education level is well above the overall average.

Can a lawyer practice law without ever engaging in any sort of intellectual dishonesty while on the clock? That seems most unlikely, because in every court case the opposing sides easily obtain lawyers willing to argue their opposing cases even though all the lawyers have access to the same evidence. Amazing that the same evidence produces different conclusions as necessary.

If we regard a wife's duties as a service worthy of pay, why does the pay rate increase in proportion to the husband's income? Is her service actually increasing in value? To anyone outside the divorce industry? Are you saying the wife of a rich man provides a product that is actually worth more than what the wife of a poor man provides?

Incidentally, there is a good evolutionary explanation for negative emotional reaction people typically have when they are able to notice fellow humans committing acts of hypocrisy.

The idea that view-changing must be somehow reciprocal suggests it carries some sort of cost. What is this cost? Do we not all wish to hold the most accurate possible beliefs? We should thank a person who corrects us on something.

What are the two most characterizing human traits? Age and sex. If you know someone's age and sex, you already know a lot about them. You know if someone is 5 years old and female, they are a lot different in a lot of obvious ways from someone who is 60 years old and male.

How could anyone begin to function in society if he did not stereotype people by age and sex? You cannot treat children exactly like adults, and you cannot treat male humans exactly like female humans.

Suppose you are walking down a sidewalk at night in a rough part of town. Nobody else is around, until you notice someone is walking a dozen paces behind you. Will you feel exactly the same emotions if the stranger is a five-year-old girl as you would if the stranger is a poorly-groomed 200-pound creepy-looking man?

Ah yes, the kind of guy who buys his wife a chain saw and a wall-mounted urinal for her birthday. And who doesn't assume she conforms to gender stereotypes such as menstruating.

Here's one gender stereotype you can take to the bank: every woman claims she doesn't want to be gender-stereotyped! (Some of the same women who object to stereotyping simultaneously lobby for increased spending on women's medical problems. I.e., they want the medical establishment to stereotype more and stop carrying on as if men and women are the same.) Even as she spends much of her free time shopping at stores whose entire business depends on their ability to accurately gender-stereotype their customers.

Anyway, we say men want sex more than women, because with men, fewer things get in the way. A man is not like a woman who is constantly looking for reasons not to feel aroused. He is not going to get distracted if the sheets and pillowcases on her bed don't match. And so on. With a woman, any number of irrelevant details can derail the whole process.

Suppose you compared two eaters. One will eat anything you put before him. The other is fussy, insists on having particular foods prepared according to precise instructions, and refuses to eat anything else. Who has the stronger desire to eat? Who knows? We can't see into their brains. Maybe the fussy eater wants to eat his special foods just as much as the un-fussy eater eats whatever. But in practice, the un-fussy eater will probably want to eat in a far wider range of contexts, so the commonsense conclusion would be that effectively he has a stronger desire to eat.

Women want to amplify the trends in a man's life. If his life is good, women want to make it better. If his life is bad, women want to make it worse.

If you abandon a kid, at least you are giving the kid a harsh yet practical lesson in how the world works. If on the other hand you stuff the kid's head full of gender-neutral pronoun reality-denying propaganda, you're setting the kid up for a lifetime of shattered expectations and mental anguish. Unless the kid is smart enough to unlearn what you taught him, and fast.

I know it's a revolutionary concept to imagine that if a man gets paid for the work he does then his paycheck is rightfully his. But that's how the world worked before the advent of socialism.

The followers of various religions have been slaughtering each other for thousands of years. Sometimes their conflicts involve territorial competition, but in many cases they kill each other solely for their beliefs. This indicates that whatever they base their various beliefs on is not something which they can convey effectively through rational discourse.

This is fascinating when you consider the large number of ways in which people from various cultures are able to get along, and instantly abandon longstanding traditions when they learn of better ideas.

India's Hindus and Pakistan's Moslems may consider each other infidels but they have adopted the same weapons, military tactics, and hundreds of other elements of their everyday lives. That is, despite their wildly divergent religious views both sides are able to agree on what works best in most other areas.

Which is to say people are not utterly irrational. Given irrefutable evidence that something works better than something else (for example, an AK-47 is a better weapon than a spear), they accept the evidence, no matter how many thousands of years of hallowed tradition they must junk in a heartbeat.

The fact that religious fanatics can never settle their religious disputes indicates that none of them can produce the same quality of evidence for their beliefs. Which is to say none of them can prove their religious beliefs are better than anyone else's beliefs the way an AK-47 is better than a spear, or a bottle of antibiotic pills is better than a witch doctor's chants.

I find it puzzling when people describe Jennifer Lopez' butt as "big." Anybody who thinks that butt is big hasn't stood in a grocery checkout behind people who buy $200 worth of groceries with food stamps.

A million dollars sounds like a lot, and it is, but it's only enough for a conservatively-invested young man to retire on if he maintains a modest consumption level for the next five or more decades. The young millionaire still has to work, so the impact on his life is not that spectacular.

Having ten million dollars puts him in a distinctly different class. Now he can retire, even at a young age, and with conservative investments maintain a pretty substantial annual consumption level for decades. I.e., he no longer needs to work, and he can still deplete the world's natural resources at several times the rate of the average first-world wage earner. But he might still work, and still feel he needs to work.

For a billionaire to "work" in the normal sense of the word is almost an absurdity. If he does have a job, it will probably consist mostly of letting his army of underlings compete against each other to impress him. Certainly, the billionaire would never have to do any sort of work he did not find interesting. Even with Mike Tyson's help, he would have trouble spending his annual return on investment, even if his whole portfolio consists of Treasury bonds.

Wealthy people are just generally cooler to hang around with than poor people. Wealthy people can afford to live anywhere, so where do they live? Around other wealthy people.

I don't have to write that I want millions of chickens to be brutally murdered. I can buy all the dead chickens I want at the grocery. When advocating a policy that requires violence for its implementation, it is rarely necessary to advocate the violence. Once people agree to implement the policy, the necessary violence will be forthcoming.

In an important sense, a man like Donald Trump is highly "submissive," because he constantly analyzes what customers want and then he labors to give them what they want. But Donald Trump also makes very sure he gets paid for his labors. In that sense he is not submissive. Donald Trump is also not submissive to any employee who does not produce.

I read some article about some teenaged girl from England who is being hailed as the vocal successor to Aretha Franklin. People who heard this girl sing in clubs in the southern U.S. are "astounded" that she can deliver soul classics with such "emotion" even though she "hasn't had the same life experiences."

People are so stupid. They seem to think if the air vibrates in particular patterns, particular emotions must be going on somewhere outside their own heads. A paper cone with an electromagnetic voice coil can create the same vibrations, and it does not experience any emotions to do it. As far as we know. Some people are skilled enough to fake the behaviors other people do when they feel particular emotions.

Before I began reading soc.singles I wasn't fully convinced that sociobiology was as solid a theory as it is.

The more unapproachable women become to discourage unwelcome intrusions, the more they will select against polite men. It is ironic that a woman's natural response to being bothered by "jerks" increases her chances of ending up with one.

Generally pornographic films are among the most realistic films made because their budgets are too low for much in the way of special effects.

Uncoolness means really making up your own rules. "Cool" means conforming in most ways while pushing the envelope very slightly here and there. Get too far ahead or behind the curve, though, and you become uncool.

Picture a teenager in the 1950's with piercings and tattoos. What is "cool" today would have been disastrously uncool then. Or picture a 1950's teenager instantly transported to 1998.

That is why nobody with any intelligence and the slightest historical perspective can take "cool" too seriously. "Cool" is another word for being very afraid of your tribe, which consists of a group of people living in mortal fear of each other and in utter ignorance of any cultures outside their own in spacetime, with each one competing with everybody else to see who can get closer to the group average than any other member of the group.

Of course both men and women focus primarily on the subset of people they find most attractive when speaking about "women" or "men" respectively. For example, women can be snotty and rude toward a majority of men, but they still view themselves as being polite because in their minds the men they are snotty and rude toward don't even qualify as "men," but are instead "creeps" or "jerks" or some other subhuman category one can safely ignore. Of course women tend to underestimate the amount of effort the average man must expend to attract the average woman, because the vast majority of women are not particularly interested in the average man and thus he isn't even on their radar screens.

When I want to insult someone I will leave no doubt. But even then, the insult will be ineffective until the person I am attempting to insult cooperates with me and agrees to be insulted. For some odd reason, this is one of the easiest types of cooperation to obtain from another person.

It seems pretty clear that women tend to ration sex, and men tend to ration commitment, as a general rule (and of course there will be plenty of individual exceptions). Men and women both have their agendas, and each side has plenty of members who use every tool at their disposal to weasel what they want out of the other.

I don't see any real harm in this. It makes life interesting. Hell, even talking about this stuff keeps thousands of people glued to fluff newsgroups like soc.singles. The only real tragedy is that nobody explains all of this to teenagers. Not that they would listen, but every cohort of wide-eyed youth has to learn the same painful lessons in the most persuasive, yet inefficient, way.

Money is a way to keep score. The game is creating things other people value. If it sickens you that the youth of today are trying to play this game well, then I guess you don't like what other people value. Hey, it's your life and your choice. Just don't complain too much if you come down with some fatal disease for which no cure is available because society couldn't afford to find one.

There is an awful lot more to reality than the emotions we imagine strangers to be having. I mean, every once in a while some other person pops onto the radar screen with an idea that really could benefit oneself. A person who cannot evaluate ideas on any other basis than how those ideas make him/her feel is, quite simply, an intellectual cripple, forever doomed to limp through life with nothing more than whatever preconceptions and unexamined assumptions (s)he's dragging along now.

PC purity demands that we chant the mantra that true beauty comes from within. Which is another way of saying all people can be equally beautiful, or that people get to decide how beautiful they themselves are to other people. Which is another way of being incredibly and aggressively pompous. The implication is that you get to choose other people's thoughts.

When men make the mistake of thinking they can do this to women, and they act on this mistake, we call them "rapists" and throw them in jail. That is an extreme example of invalidating someone else's right to have and exercise a preference. It's funny how women understand perfectly their sacred right to exercise preferences, and yet just about every sexually disenfranchised group seems to have some sneaky agenda to invalidate other people's sexual preferences.

It may be unfair that people judge the person inhabiting the wreck to have a character defect or to be less worthy in some way. After all, it may be that the person living in the hideously ugly piece of property is really the most honorable, upstanding, disciplined, hard-working person on the block, but is just temporarily down on his/her luck.

However, that's not the way you bet. Our life experiences have taught us that if we find ourselves on a block where every house looks like the abortion I described above, we are in a shitty neighborhood that almost certainly contains a disproportionate number of shitty characters. The kinds of people that you probably don't want for your friends if you have a choice. And certainly the kind of people you don't trust after the sun sets. For starters, you know the people who live on that block do not give a shit about your opinions.

Now, it may be unfair that many people have much the same emotional reaction to an extremely obese person that they do to a seriously rundown piece of real estate. But many people most certainly do have this reaction. You are unlikely to change that fact by preaching.

There's no doubt I assume a lot when I write my articles. I assume most people smart enough to get their hands on a computer are smart enough to understand the difference between "eating" and "overeating." I also assume my faithful readers stayed awake long enough in high school to be able to solve word problems like this: 1. "If a Big Mac contains X calories, how many calories does half a Big Mac contain?" Until I began posting to soc.singles, I had no idea the previous sentence could constitute a trick question.

Your genes make it hard for you to lose fat. My genes make it virtually impossible for me to find fat women attractive. I can't think of any reason to override my genes in this area, even if I could.

Definition of "intellectual achievement:" getting a fat person to understand that "anorexic" does not equal "ideally attractive."

Another result is that omniscience plus a very small ability to apply forces to objects is effectively equivalent to omnipotence. For example, if all you could do is speak, but you knew exactly what to say to make anybody do anything you wanted, you would only have to be able to speak to a few people initially to take over the entire world eventually.

It's an interesting experiment to throw some ambiguity out there and observe what various people do with it.

"It can't happen here"---that's what all the victims of major genocides said. Otherwise they would have done everything in their power to get the hell out or arm themselves or ingratiate themselves or otherwise make themselves impractically expensive targets. This is one case in which skepticism has worked against millions of people. Successful people tend to spend most of their time in polite company, so they forget the intensity of hatred that lesser humans can muster.

Obviously the historical odds of dying in a genocide are low compared to all causes of death. But when genocides happen they are spectacular. Just like plane crashes are news because they kill so many people at once, even though many times more total people die in car crashes.

Of more interest are the more subtle ways losers strike back: crime, labor union featherbedding, progressive taxation, transfer payments, the entire equalist movement, etc. You cannot tell me these are all insignificant factors in your life.

The essence of market-drivenness is to grasp, on a visceral level, that the opinions of other people matter more than our own opinions in particular contexts. The businessperson sums this up with: "The customer is always right." I.e., if the customer doesn't like the product, the appropriate response is to fix whatever the customer doesn't like about the product. A businessperson who instead invests her resources into trying to make herself feel good about the faulty product just the way it is, and trying to convince herself that the customer is full of crap, will lose the competition against another businessperson who caters to the customer instead of putting his own ego first. This is the Iron Law of markets.

Scissors beats paper. Rock beats scissors. Sex cards beat everything.

Getting through high school without generating undue complaints from one's peers and without attracting too much official attention is a lot like the special olympics: a remarkably low hurdle. So while I'm not especially proud of my gold medal, I'd be embarrassed if I had gotten cut in the prelims.

In the ancestral environment there were no automobiles. And yet women appear to have evolved a noticeable preference for men who drive cars. How could they have done that during the millions of years of car-free evolution? We have to resort to indirect explanation, such as by hypothesizing that in our current automobile-addicted culture, a man must have a car to demonstrate conformance to the expectations of society. It appears that a majority of women get put off quickly by men who are true nonconformists (as opposed to whatever currently passes for fashionable nonconformism---it's OK for a man to break a certain sharply limited set of rules in strictly choreographed ways; the man who conforms most completely to the current majority concept of allowable nonconformism earns the accolade of "cool").

Most people who are depressed or divorced are actively trying to do something constructive to better themselves. I don't think many of them are advocating depression or divorce to other people who are currently resisting urges to give in to depression or divorce. Fat acceptors, on the other hand, are attempting to glorify their failures, to change other people's preferences, to suppress scientific findings, and to undermine the efforts of people who are susceptible to weight gain but who are currently controlling their weight.

Divorced people are more worthy of sympathy because (a) divorce is something that can happen to you rather than always a choice you make, and (b) divorce is not usually as socially/sexually/medically damaging as obesity. Furthermore, divorced people don't seem to be advocating the same sorts of ridiculous social and economic accommodations for their failures that fat acceptors are demanding.

Most social reforms have the goal of reducing diversity. For example, prisons exist to discourage people from behaving in diverse ways. Education and social welfare exist primarily in the hopes of raising the underclass to the middle class, thereby eliminating more undesirable diversity.

Chicks dig guys who dis other guys. This is another example of alien behavior. As far as I can tell, a man does not revise his estimate of a woman's attractiveness upward when she maligns other women. That's because men do not have the "gatekeeper" mentality when it comes to "protecting" our "precious" sexual resources. Thus we do not instinctively feel like rewarding women who help us defend against other women.

How many gay men do you know who worry about date rape? According to feminists they should. Why don't they?

[Define 'reality':] Understanding why the movie "This Is Spinal Tap" is funny.

I prefer to attack people who appear to have the greatest ability to defend themselves, as well as the greatest ability to recruit others to fight for them. In the state of nature, predators always attack the weakest available victim. This is the essential difference between predation and sport.

Do all artsy types have similar difficulty making sense of reality?

Consider: if rape was an experience utterly unlike sex in every way imaginable, it would be difficult for a man such as yourself to trigger a rape flashback in a woman merely by having sex with her. You would be as likely to trigger a flashback to a lecture she had heard as a child or her favorite teddy bear or something equally irrelevant and nonsexual.

Ask your male friends this question: "Would you go out on a date with any woman you did not want to have sex with?" The men I have asked responded "Hell no!" and looked at me like I just asked a really stupid question. Because I did. Men and women are, on average, incredibly different in this regard and it is vitally important for men to remain aware of this difference and to treat women differently than they (the men) would like to be treated on a date.

Poor people are statistically more likely to poison themselves, shoot themselves and each other, die in accidents, become obese, die from AIDS, smoke cigarettes, and get seriously debilitated from drug abuse. In a correctly functioning market economy, poverty correlates (not 1.0, but much better than 0.0) with stupidity, and stupidity correlates with pointless risk-taking. Sure, stupid risk-taking occurs at all intelligence levels but not often enough at the highest intelligence levels to sustain a stereotype of smart people habitually taking stupid risks.

I think I read somewhere that something like 3% of advanced degree holders in the U.S.A. smoke cigarettes, while 40% of high-school dropouts smoke cigarettes. The population average is something like 20% now, I think. My numbers are probably off a little but the approximately ten-to-one higher prevalence of smoking among stupid people is pretty obvious from a glance around many places where lots of people work. As you go down the pay and talent scale, the frequency of smoking rises. Cigarette companies know who their customers are, and their advertising reflects this. Tobacco companies specifically target consumers who are below average in education and intelligence.

This is, incidentally, the basis for some very effective anti-tobacco advertising campaigns. If you can make people correctly associate cigarette smoking with low intelligence you can often embarrass even stupid people enough to inhibit their desire to smoke. Even though stupid people can't help being stupid, they still don't want to look stupid.

The capitalist countries are liberal democracies, which makes them vulnerable to invasion by burgeoning third-world hordes armed with human rights. As populations rise and conditions worsen in third-world countries, the number of people desperate to do anything to get into the capitalist countries will increase. With CNN cameras showing the vultures waiting for the starving children to die, do you think the dwindling numbers of rich capitalists will become emotionally hardened enough to require third-worlders to reap the consequences of their foolish overbreeding?

The more immigrants who make it in, the more votes and political power they have to open the door even wider to further immigration. The long term result of the third world outbreeding the first world could well be the return of fascism. Once upon a time when the world was less crowded, the capitalist countries built military forces to fight each other for territories. In the future, the primary job of capitalist militaries will probably be to defend their borders against the ever-increasing majority of desperate poor people from other lands.

In any case, discrimination based on nationality is hypocritical in any equalist society. The political momentum is clearly in favor of equalism, which means the growth in third world population and poverty will eventually end up right here. There is no consistent legal argument possible to justify condemning a person to starve in a third-world hellhole when we simultaneously grant innumerable rights to people who happen to be citizens.

The Cognitive Elite puts up a struggle, of course, allocating some of its massive resources to preserve various bits of esoteric culture it deems important. Eventually, however, the Cognitive Elite will conquer the world by figuring out strong genetic engineering and allowing market forces to eradicate stupidity. I have said before that if the average person was as intelligent as the most intelligent people alive today, the world would be a dramatically different place. That world will eventually appear. I don't know that it will be "better" in every way but I do know that it is inevitable.

But to be a good pickup artist today you must be conversant with the nonsense women want to believe, as well as the words to use and avoid. The pickup artist probably has to be an expert in feminism because he must distract from a larger quantity of objective evidence about his tastes. He is going after attractive women who have been getting attention all their lives because of their looks, and who are thereby primed to see through all the weaker varieties of men's lies.

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.

Of course, it's not surprising to see the man who constantly invents accusations of racism acting like a racist. That's much like the voluble homophobe who eventually gets outed as a closet homosexual himself.

I recall once when I was a kid when someone I knew received a visit from phone company representatives after they detected non-AT&T equipment in use at a private residence. For a sneak preview of what life would be like under an unfettered Microsoft, compare the copy-protected MS Audio File format to MP3.

You don't need police to protect you from the fact that a kid's family is poor. Someone else's poverty is not, in itself, a threat to your safety. You need police protection because the kid has adopted the same behavior patterns that created his community's poverty in the first place.

The race card is essentially an exercise in public relations. It only works to the degree that you can present yourself as not manifesting the evil you portray in your oppressors. Hint: if you want sympathy you have to be the person getting hit by the baton, not the person swinging it.

Ever write a software program that sold over 100,000 copies? Try it, and you'll understand why you can't hire anybody to do it for you on a teacher's salary.

Education doesn't teach you rules, it gives you the tools to go into a situation and discern the rules that apply there. Of course I am talking about education that is somehow reality-based, such as in engineering or the sciences.

The diversity of belief is much higher than many people realize, given that most of us do not have close dealings with many varieties of people who differ substantially from ourselves. This reminds me of a quote whose source I can't recall: "How did Reagan get elected? Everybody I know voted Democrat."

It's also important to remember that before 1859 or so, most of the smartest people in history were Creationists. (For example, Isaac Newton was not stupid.) This proves that even a smart person is likely to make this particularly seductive mistake if (s)he is also ignorant of the evidence. Given that years of specialized study are necessary to properly appreciate the evidence for biological evolution and the antiquity of the Earth, it is not suprising that the 700 Club finds a receptive audience for its anti-intellectual message today.

It's trivially easy for a man to get women to "like" him. All he has to do is be nice, give them sincere-sounding compliments, refrain from coming on sexually too strongly, express concern for things women are concerned about while keeping quiet about his own concerns, deny that his attraction for women is primarily due to their physical appearance, and above all express an appropriate hostility for men he perceives women do not like. Being gay also helps.

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.

It's interesting how a particular person categorizes some behaviors as immutable and others as mutable depending on his or her pre-existing biases. That is, if you like something, you argue that it cannot be helped; and if you don't like something, you argue that (other) people should stop doing it.

Even religious fanatics are able to compartmentalize. Consider the Muslim terrorists who believe after they blow up their suicide bombs, they will wake up in paradise with 72 beautiful virgin girls to enjoy deflowering. They can believe all that nonsense, to the point of killing themselves, and yet the same culture has no problem recognizing the AK-47 is a pretty good weapon. They don't reject the AK-47, even though it came from the atheist USSR.

Islam could not have gotten as large as it has if it required its followers to believe the traditional Islamic weapons of sword and spear are superior to automatic firearms. The successful religions have to be careful about how much nonsense with everyday practical impact they require their dupes to believe. The nonsense they promote has to be of a sort that isn't immediately falsifiable, which means they will be open to obvious technological improvements.

But there is a larger, indirect impact that comes from the general disrespect religion fosters for knowledge and free inquiry. The whole Islamic world is somewhat backward like Christian Europe was in the Middle Ages. It would be hard for someone like a young Bill Gates to succeed in, say, Iran, even if he did not directly challenge the religious orthodoxy. As soon as someone used Bill's invention to put up pictures of naked women, he'd be in trouble.

Suppose God is nice and lets all the aborted babies into heaven. Wouldn't it then be an act of mercy to abort a baby? Because if we allow babies to be born, grow up, and learn to think on their own, some appreciable fraction of them will consider the lack of evidence for your beliefs and reject them. Particularly if the Devil curses them with high IQs.

Thus you must agree that abortion doctors perform a priceless ministry for millions of people, who would otherwise be born, sin, reject Christ, and go to hell for everlasting torment.

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.

Nothing says "I care" like "Pay to the order of: [your name]."

The irony is that if any national government could resist the urge to meddle with agricultural markets, the result would be one of the most classically free markets attainable, with thousands of independent producers having almost no ability to set prices.

In contrast, many other important industries are oligopolies in which a handful of large producers have significant power to set prices and stimulate demand with modern advertising technology.

Moral of story: with free markets, you have to take the bad with the good. Most people look at the bad and say "screw that."

For a loser not to become bitter is an enormous challenge. Most people are not born knowing how to roll with a serious punch, and few punches are more serious than chronic failure at satisfying one of our most relentless urges.

Suppose a person chooses to step off a cliff. Does the person want to hit the ground? The only action the person took was to take one step. However, most people understand that choosing to step off a cliff is equivalent to choosing to take a fall, because it is not possible for a human to stand on air alone.

Indulging in sloth and gluttony works the same way. A person who chooses to eat more calories than he expends is choosing to be fat.

Just today, in fact, I mentioned NAAFA to someone, who thought I was joking. "Is there really a National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance? You're kidding, right?"

The advice "you will find someone if you don't look" applies only to people who are naturally sociable and attractive enough to generate sexual interest without making a special effort. That would be about 50% of young women and about 5% of men. For the rest of us, our chances strongly depend on what specific actions we take to increase our exposure and increase the number of potential mates we meet.

The number of annual accidents is accurately predictable based on choices people make. This enables insurance companies to turn a profit. You can't try to pull another statistical flim-flam to mask your cognitive dissonance again.

Based on the number of miles people choose to drive, we can predict within about 5% accuracy how many thousands will be violently slaughtered each year. There is nothing "accidental" about things we can predict quite accurately for large groups. The "accident" is in predicting exactly who is going to fill this year's quota of victims.

If you think fat acceptors commit murder by encouraging other people to get fat, what do you do when you encourage men to drive cars?

At least the fat acceptors are not inciting people to murder other people. Instead they merely encourage other people to commit suicide.

If you'd ever like to take a shot at growing up, a good place to start would be to realize that people who are completely different than you are capable of experiencing just as much pain as you have, even when the pain results from reasons that cannot apply to you and which you cannot understand.

When you flog someone to keep him in his place, then deny that you have hurt him, you are the moral equivalent of slaveholders. The only practical difference is that at the moment your evil is held partially in check by your lack of power.

I don't understand how you're going to integrate women into a group of 19-year-old men without it turning into some kind of fuck fest.

Actually I've heard stories about just that kind of thing happening at places like the Olympic training camp. It's OK if you're just training for the Olympics, because men and women generally don't compete together. But my god, imagine combining romantic insanity with a life-and-death need for teamwork. Suppose you're lying wounded on the battlefield and the only available medic is the ex-girlfriend you just dumped.

You could level the racial playing field by giving oppressed races enough advantages to make up for the oppression. But I don't think the black man's biggest problem today is the white man. Just look at the body count.

Filled out a life insurance application lately? In addition to your height and weight, the insurance company wants to know how many speeding tickets you have had. You've used the statistical wisdom of insurance companies to beat up the fat acceptors. Same argument works on the speeding acceptors.

It's always interesting to talk to a performance car nut about insurance companies. The barrage of evil conspiracy theories that results is hard to tell apart from a fat acceptor weighing in on the medical industry.

What I like are how really famous chicks will, in all apparent seriousness, sincerely defend the artistic merit of whatever plot device the director presented as the rationale for getting them naked.

Why doesn't one of these women just come out and say, "Because I'm beautiful men enjoy watching me take my clothes off and are willing to spend money to see it"? Why does everybody need to come up with some other reason, however implausible, for something that is really very basic and simple?

Why do Asians in Los Angeles seem to have more in common with Asians in New York than either group has in common with Jews who live a few blocks away? One would think it should be easier for cultural memes to move a few blocks than to cross continents or oceans.

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?

Speaking of movies---I rented "Men Seeking Women" starring Will Ferrell and a bunch of unknowns. The opening scenes included one of the most frightening things I've ever seen in any movie. The film is a comedy but it managed to be scarier than "Scream 2" for a couple of minutes. Can anybody guess what struck terror into the heart of D'Animal?

I refer to the scene where the camera shows the view of one of the characters wandering through a bar as he scopes the various women. He sees various women who meet his gaze and each one's facial expression falls in obvious disapproval as she sees him and looks away with studied indifference. The camera work conveys the impression that the women are showing disgust for the the viewer. I have seen very few movies that portrayed this in its full, real-life force. This reaction was coming from women characters who knew nothing about the protagonist except what they could take in with a momentary glance.

In my observation this appears to be the way most women behave toward most men most of the time. The appeal of movies is that they let us see attractive women strangers reliably behaving the way we want them to behave: meeting the gaze of the camera and smiling receptively. I.e., movies let the average man experience a little of what it must be like to be a rock star or a sports star. A world where no attractive women strangers behaved receptively, ever, would be a nightmare for any unattached heterosexual man to inhabit.

In my observation there appear to be more white women who look something like Cindy Crawford than there are black women who look something like Halle Berry.

The fact that so many black men clearly welcome the chance to date white women while the opposite pairing (white man/black woman) is perhaps ten times less common suggests that my view is not entirely idiosyncratic.

Every man has his own idea of what constitutes "beautiful." I find that the fashion industry isn't too far away from my idea once we correct for its odd fixation with extreme height and thinness.

The film industry is much closer. Just about every film with a woman in a romantic lead role manages to feature an actress I would happily do in a heartbeat in the astronomically remote event that such a woman would have anything to do with me. This includes "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." (A significant exception was "Harold and Maude.")

If a woman has useful skills that I value then I will certainly see her in terms of those skills. For example, if a woman can sing well then she has a skill that is currently of potential value to me. However, when I pass random strangers on the street it is difficult for me to assess their skills and so on. I can, however, tell with a glance whether a woman is attractive.

Thus if I go out of my way to meet a woman I don't already know, the odds are probably 99% that I'm acting on a sexual attraction I have for her.

I don't remember the last time I went significantly out of my way to meet a man I did not know, or a woman I was not attracted to.

What does everybody else reading this do? Do you accost random strangers you pass in everyday life and ask them to be your friend?

In my observation, most friendships form because circumstances or common interests more or less throw people together. For example, if I keep seeing the same people in the weight room time after time, eventually we become acquainted and invite each other to parties and so on. Becoming friends is actually easier than trying not to get to know the people you see regularly.

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 lesson to everyone out there is quite simple: follow the three-date rule. If you are attracted to someone and that someone has not demonstrated unambiguous affection to you by the third date (by whatever you use to define "affection"), then forget that person and move on. Your odds of success with the next random individual are probably higher than they are with someone who has demonstrated the capacity to resist your charms after spending three whole dates with you.

In my experiences with women, in every case where a woman ended up really liking me "in that way" her interest was always plainly apparent by the third date. That doesn't necessarily mean sex occurred by then (although often it did), but if it didn't, the woman always left no doubt that we were definitely on course (and not just with her words).

In contrast, on the few occasions that I have made the mistake of continuing to date women who showed little or no affection by the third date, I ended up getting totally jerked around until I either got fed up and left, or until such a woman found some other guy she did like enough to shag on the third date.

There may be some women out there who develop attraction for men slowly, but if there are, I haven't met any in 20 years of dating. I would bet that even a woman who thinks she is in the "slow attraction" category has probably had sex by the third date with at least one man before, and enjoyed it.

Every choice a person makes matters to some extent. It tells you something about who they are, or at least who they were, and consequences of that choice may influence your relationship with that person.

For example, I have dated a few women who told me (truthfully or not, I'll never know) that they thought I was the best in some way or another among the men they had been involved with. But I have found that a woman who has "been with" a lot of men tends not to say such things. Like it or not, people have memories and they will tend to compare their current relationship partners against all their previous partners. The more partners someone has had previously, the harder it's going to be for the next one to stand out. Even worse, it may be that a person builds up a notion of the ideal partner by combining all their favorite traits of their previous partners. This ideal partner tends to be impossibly better than any human alive.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you are in any way insecure in your own sense of worth and you're looking to your main squeeze for validation, you're a lot less likely to get it from someone who has been with your competitors in battalion strength.

Of course you've got the knowledge that she isn't with those other guys now. So in that sense you have beaten all of them. For now, anyway.

The real purpose of professional sports is to give any two randomly selected men an instant way to exclude any randomly selected woman from their conversation.

Given that everyone is self-biased, most of us will strongly resist anybody else's attempts to browbeat us into changing for their benefit. One common defense against such attempts is to label them "whining." Presumably this defense is common because it works.

Where do financially successful fat women take their vacations? Let's imagine there exists a country called Fatopia where men lust and drool after fat women, the fatter the better, and thin women are despised social outcasts. Let's say that any fat woman from North America can buy a ticket to Fatopia, check into the hotel, squeeze into her size 28 swimsuit, waddle out onto the beach, and find herself suddenly attracting the local men exactly the same way that a conventional supermodel/porn star/centerfold/actress-type woman does in unenlightened North America.

How many fat women would choose to vacation in Fatopia? I'm sure not every fat woman would enjoy the experience of being as sexually attractive as a supermodel for a week or two, but I have to believe enough of them would to put Fatopia on every travel agent's map.

So my question is, where is Fatopia?

In another thread I mentioned that when religious people make claims of the miraculous, the miracles become more astounding as the alleged incidents become farther away in space and time. The same rule applies to the Fatopia of myth and legend, I suspect.

Rightly or wrongly, people have expectations for other people. A man in his 30's who has no sexual experience is going to seem weird to most women, because he is. This is in keeping with my theory that women are more forgiving of a lack of objective accomplishments in young men, but as men get older, women expect men to have hit various milestones by approximate ages.

One ruthless but workable strategy is for the male virgin to begin by pursuing a woman who is not too attractive and not highly discriminating, yet who has plenty of experience and patience. A good candidate might be an older woman who finds she doesn't create quite the ruckus with men that she did in her younger days, now that she's put on a few wrinkles and pounds, and who is willing to settle even for Mr. Virgin. Then, after Mr. Virgin learns the ropes with his instructor, he can dissolve that relationship and go after bigger game.

The above strategy could certainly seem disturbing in many ways, but Mr. Virgin has little choice if he wants to go after women with higher sexual market value who expect him to know what he's doing. I'm assuming, of course, that Mr. Virgin does not have access to legal sex training. I have heard of sex therapists who employ "surrogates" (euphemism for "prostitutes") and this would be one option for Mr. Virgin to get the training he needs without hurting much other than his wallet, assuming he doesn't contract some wretched disease.

In every real situation, a person has particular needs that other people are more or less capable of meeting. A person's ability to meet the need you have in a real situation is that person's "worth" to you in that situation. For example, if I am trying to make money in the software industry by hiring programmers and documenters, then a person who has those skills is worth more to me than a person who lacks them. Or if I am fighting a war and I need soldiers, then healthy persons of recruiting age are worth more to me than small children and the elderly or infirm. Or if I want to get laid, then people I find sexually attractive are worth more to me than people I do not find sexually attractive. Or if I am setting up a political democracy, then every person is worth one vote (in theory; in practice, some people will have enormously more political influence than others).

Now consider that everybody has a finite life span and a set of needs they are going to try to meet. That means most people are probably going to be dominated by those needs, and hence the context-dependent worths of other people are the definitions that will matter most of the time.

A notion of worth devoid of any real-world context has no meaning that I can imagine, except possibly as a sneaky method for squeezing a free lunch out of others through guilt-motivation.

One final note: it is useful to recognize a basic right of every person to continue existing if (s)he wants to. In societies where people simply kill off other people when it becomes convenient to do so, a danger exists of people diverting too much energy into killing other people or avoiding being killed. This is one of the problems that plagued our tribal ancestors, who, from all indications, probably wasted enormous resources on endless tribal wars.

So, for example, while, say, a homeless person may have no particular worth to me, it's quite possible the homeless person is contributing something of value to his peers or someone else (such as the person who gets off on helping the needy). Even the person who seems to be completely worthless to everyone still represents some kind of potential worth. For example, when science invents drugs that can cure various debilitating mental illnesses and defects, it will become possible to expand the pool of the most culturally valuable people quite rapidly by upgrading the currently low-worth persons.

I'm well aware that this all sounds harsh, taboo, and politically incorrect, but I'm simply making explicit the subconscious reasoning everybody lives their life by. If fat people feel put upon, it's because other people are valuing the worth of fat people as being lower in a majority of real-world contexts. Simply railing against this tendency isn't going to change anything. If fat people want to be worth more, then they have to find a way to become worth more to other people. In other words, instead of telling other people what to value, why not ask other people what they value and then try to figure out how to give it to them?

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.

Most people are about 50 times more sensitive to the abuse they get than the abuse they send. It's amusing to watch the results of that asymmetry play out endlessly on soc.singles.

Why are you unable to control your eating without the aid of behavior-changing drugs? You have asserted your superiority to me many times, and yet you cannot master this simple aspect of life discipline without a chemical crutch. Why is that?

Men in general do not even have a concept of being victims of sexual harrassment by women, since men in general are rarely disturbed by the possibility of sex with most women they find even vaguely attractive. When a man writes about a topic which for him is as inherently absurd as "sexual harrassment", he is obviously satirizing.

I have never seen a person who reacts to other people as though it were impossible to predict anything about a stranger's behavior from readily apparent cues. That is, until now it seemed to me that everybody I know behaves as though they believe (perhaps subconsciously) that a science of psychology is possible, at least in principle.

Having an algorithmic approach is a huge advantage even if the algorithm itself provides no intrinsic advantage. Why? Because the guy with no algorithm whatsoever doesn't know where to start, so he usually doesn't do anything at all.

What is the net cost of your religious habit? Add up all the money you put in the plate, all the time you spend on religious activities, and all the stress you endure trying to explain why you believe things which contradict the available evidence. One cost you probably cannot estimate is the critical life opportunities you may miss because you believe your time is not as short as it actually is. Cultures marked by fanatical religious devotion are rarely at the forefront of intellectual and scientific progress. It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of people who are driving human progress are irreligious, only mildly religious, or highly skilled at compartmentalizing their religious beliefs to activities they pursue only when off the clock. If it were solely up to religion, we'd be living at the neolithic level right now, imagining the earth was flat and fixed at the center of a rather small universe.

One thing I have noticed about hugging women is that it causes their breasts to press deliciously against my chest. I learned this useful fact back in my religious days when I was struggling under the same indoctrination that hobbles you. I attended churches that did a lot of hugging. I discovered that even though everybody was a child of God, some children of God were much more enjoyable to hug than others. So when the time came to start hugging, it paid to have positioned oneself correctly in the crowd.

A man is more likely to admit that being fat is a bad thing even if he doesn't feel motivated to lose weight. A good analogy is between weight for women and wealth for a man. If a man doesn't earn much money and someone advises him to earn more if he wants to do better with women, that is not as likely to trigger an emotional crisis as when one advises an overweight woman to lose weight if she wants to do better with men. Most men readily concede that they would do better with women if they had the bucks; their only question is how to get the bucks with the least effort and risk.

If she's a woman, she looks good, and she's cooperative, she'd have to work pretty hard not to be a good lay. The rules aren't the same for men.

With freedom comes danger. We could always go back to the old days of no sex outside marriages, strict chaperoning, arranged marriages, put the women in veils, etc. I would guess very few women get raped in Kabul, Afghanistan under Muslim law. (But I might be wrong.) But somehow I like the dangers of living in America better.

What do you think about laws that make it easier for children to have adults thrown into jail, or make it easier for someone who doesn't like you or who may be mentally unstable to accuse you of child abuse? What if people started changing the definition of "child abuse" to make what you consider normal behavior to be actionable?

Since kids aren't all that smart, they aren't smart enough to develop a doctrine of "childism" to start rewriting the laws to their advantage. But if they did I bet they'd start alarming a lot of adults.

Genetic engineering is far more feasible than moral engineering. With the former all you have to control are molecules. Almost everybody wants to become more attractive, so once that technology is available it will sweep aside objections before the religious whack jobs can come up with effective memes to counteract it.

In contrast, opponents of prostitution have had thousands of years to refine their tactics. Prostitution is a sufficiently mixed bag to make it an easy target for moralists. The constituency served by prostitution---loser males---has never been able to attain the privileged status of a designated victim group.

Rather than waste time on a futile attempt to optimize a mess into slightly less of a mess, I would rather advocate engineering the mess away entirely.

A woman of any sort hitting on me is an event so rare that if it did happen, I probably could not process what is going on, as if the sun suddenly turned bright green one day and began blinking. "Surreal" is a better description than "appalling" for something so dumbfoundingly far outside a person's normal experience.

Astrophysicists currently have the luxury of allowing for the possibility of an effective God while they are on the clock. Geologists, biologists, and paleontologists do not. That is, everything observable within the normal scope of these latter scientific disciplines fails to violate any known laws of science. Astrophysicists ask question such as where did the laws of science come from, and obviously those kinds of questions lead to one of the last habitats potentially safe for god.

Interestingly, throughout history people who believed in god always located him somewhere inaccessible. You couldn't say "God lives just over that mountain range" because someone could go there and check. So the ancients tended to put God up in the sky. Once humans got there, the god habitat shrunk substantially. Today god is confined to a fraction of its former range, possibly inhabiting only the tiny remnant of preserved pristine territory representing the Universe 15 billion years ago. Go that far back in time and you sort of enter "God National Park," the last place you might still find god in a world of encroaching superhighways, strip malls, and suburban sprawl.

Of course when scientists are off the clock they can partake in whatever comforting but meaningless ritual and chanting they like. And many do.

Perhaps the bigger a society is the more coercive it must be. Hopefully the coercers are wearing suits rather than fatigues and carrying briefcases rather than AK-47s, but it's coercion all the same.

The long-term historical trend has been for science to reduce the natural habitat of god pretty much continuously. That is, as scientific knowledge has expanded, the need to invoke "god" to explain things has diminished in lockstep. And so has the political muscle of people who purport to speak for "god." (In Afghanistan a Monica Lewinsky would be beheaded; in the USA she'll be a multi-millionaire before she's 30 as her reward for sucking off the President.)

This process has been going on for several thousand years and has accelerated significantly in the last century and a half. Indeed, "god" is not so much a way to explain things now as but another phenomenon to be explained by science. E.g., why do humans have spiritual sensations? Questions like these may yield to detailed rational explanation before everybody reading this has died. (The sociobiological explanation is obvious: our "spiritual sense" is probably an effect or a side effect of the mental organs humans evolved to support tribal behavior. Given that virtually every tribal culture revolves around some sort of shared religious belief the connection is plainly evident. Of course it remains to explicate the genes responsible and how they code for the mental organs that make humans susceptible to religious delusions. But it is clear that these delusions were part of something essential for maintaining the cohesiveness of tribal groups under harsh conditions, where it was sometimes beneficial for the tribe if individual members would accept mortal risks.)

The trend of science chipping steadily away at god is not obvious to much of the unwashed masses because only a few people have done the work necessary to keep up with the tribe of intellectuals. And of course because history is not a popular subject. But even among the marching morons who do not understand the reasons for their moral breakdown, the diminishing authority of ecclesia is visible within one human lifespan.

I doubt the computer-addled among us know the historical definition of "icon."

If you shipped a pocket calculator back to the ancient Greeks, no doubt they'd consider it magical at first. But if you put a team of minds like Aristotle and Plato to work on it for a few decades, I bet they'd have a lot of it figured out. If you also shipped back a few shelves of books on science and engineering with the calculator, within a few generations the ancient Greeks would probably modernize as fast as Japan did.

In fact this very phenomenon is repeating itself all the time today as primitive third-world cultures modernize. You can take a medieval country like turn-of-the-century Kuwait and turn it into a fairly modern country with a hundred years and a few hundred billion dollars in oil money.

Thus I would replace Clarke's statement with: "Given sufficient study time and/or documentation, no technology is disguisable as magic."

Virtually all of technological progress to date has been due to engineering the electronic force. This includes: electricity, electronics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, combustion, biology, etc.---almost everything except nuclear power. The other fundamental forces of nature (strong and weak nuclear, gravity) do not lend themselves to as-convenient engineering because the particles that constitute them do not come in easily manageable positive and negative versions.

Thus one cannot compare the changes in the world from, say, 1600 A.D. and the present and blithely conclude we will someday have time travel, anti-gravity, faster-than-light travel, and all the other things that make Star Trek interesting. (Except for the computers on Star Trek, which are remarkably conservative predictions compared to everything else.) While obviously the world of made things today is much more complex than the one in 1600 A.D. virtually all the progress has been due to monkeying with the electronic force. And there are real limits to the kinds of things you can accomplish with just this force. But at the same time there are plenty of cool things left to do with it.

You said you love men. Now we see that what you really mean is that you love perhaps the top 1% of alpha males. While there is absolutely nothing surprising or wrong with that, it is not what most people understand a claim "to love men" to mean.

The automobile is the engine of apartheid in the United States. It enables people to segregate themselves by social and racial categories, and to avoid virtually all face-to-face interaction with people who differ from themselves. The daily automobile lemming migration from white suburbs through black urban cores to the central business districts is exactly what I mean by "avoiding" those black urban cores.

Hiding in your car from the brothuhs doesn't exactly qualify you to claim the same moral high ground as Nelson Mandela.

One thing you don't see in Nature are significant modifications to body plans. For example, all the vertebrates are variations on the same four-legged plan. There is no vertebrate with six legs. Some vertebrates have lost or greatly reduced one or both pairs of limbs (e.g., snakes, kiwis, whales, etc.) or modified one or both pairs for some radically new purpose (e.g., bats). This simply means that changes in some direction are genetically "easier" than changes in other directions. Incidentally, homology is also one of the great evidences for evolution. A creative God would not have been constrained to use just one basic body plan for all the vertebrates. Why did God feel a need to keep reusing the same limb structure to get a bat wing, a human arm, and a horse foreleg?

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.

Only one person can declare whether you are being "too obsessive": YOU. The only exception occurs when you gum up your own life so badly that you need somebody else's help; then they can decide where you made your mistake.

Otherwise, we just have another bunch of people trying to tell everyone else what they should like. This has been going on since the beginning of time in various guises.

"Nice guys" who complain about women wanting men with muscles can certainly complain all they like. Complaining about hardships is a necessary method of coping with stress. That is a lot less work than going to the gym and busting ass for 10 years. However, if the same "Nice guys" turn around and lust after the centerfold babes in Penthouse, then they are just being silly and unrealistic. They shouldn't be complaining about what the most expensive women desire; rather, they should be complaining that they are saddled with this unrealizable lust for them.

That is one reason why I have emphasized going on physically demanding dates. Anybody can put on a show when they are well-rested and in a fairly artificial setting. However, people lose their ability to put on an act when they get very tired and stressed. That is one reason I like to take a woman for a ride on my tandem. Pretense has a way of evaporating after a few hours of pedaling a bicycle in cold rain. I want to see how she acts after she gets exhausted and uncomfortable. And I want her to see how I act in the same state. I hope no woman would want to bet her life on me without first seeing me at my worst.

Free clue: a man who has to date women twice his age is not a winner.

Most men have shitty choices in women, but they can buy any kind of porn they want. It's all too easy to see the choice they make when they actually have a choice.

Anything which can constitute an accurate standard must inevitably, on average, expose losers for what they are. For example, if we give people IQ tests, we find that the people who score in the bottom 10% tend to be the same people who settle into the bottom 10% of the economy. But of course that can't be their fault, it must be the fault of patriarchy. Or something. Anyway the logical response is to tax the rich.

I've known a few low-IQ losers in my life. Any time I think I have problems, I think of them.

The only way for the rich to protect their interests is to pay to protect them. Either you buy off the people trying to rob you, or you pay for prisons, or you hire a goon squad. Concentrations of wealth are like concentrations of solutes in a solution: thermodynamically unstable. To maintain a wealth gradient requires active expenditure of some kind of energy.

A woman who isn't getting her daily affirmations of commitment from her beloved (even if feigned) will tend to question his commitment, and she is not entirely irrational to do this. If she has already subconsciously decided he's not committing to her according to her preferred schedule, she may set up rhetorical traps such as the preposterous question Tom related above, which the man is sure to "fail," giving the woman the plausible cover she needs to act on her desire to play a little brinkswomanship.

She may not necessarily want out of the relationship. A possibly better outcome is for the man to sense he's losing her and to beg her to stay, preferably while asking her to marry him and conceding everything else she might want.

Women have to do this because our modern dating customs (in which premarital sex is de rigeur) amount to throwing away the woman's main bargaining chip. When women are giving in to sex after two months of dating or less (usually much less), the only bargaining chip they have left is the threat of cutting off the freebies. But when freebies are available elsewhere this threat isn't too scary for the man.

I don't know where women get the idea that a relationship will naturally progress from the woman giving the man cheap sex to the man agreeing to pay up after a year or so.

Actually I only made that mistake once, when I was 18 or 19. I was seeing a girl who was at the time cuter than any woman I'll ever have again at this point in my relentless decline to aging-sack-of-shithood (and yes at the time I had no fucking idea), but she had a girlfriend who was cuter still. At some point I let slip my impression of girl #2 and next thing you know I was in the market for my next girlfriend.

When girls are in high school, do they ever take a course in which they have their physical appearance evaluated according to objective standards and learn how their place in the sexual market is likely to influence the attitudes of their relationship partners toward them? Hell no. Instead, every girl grows up clinging to the illusion that she's entitled to her own Prince Charming who will be utterly smitten with love and devotion to her and only her.

The problem behaviors most people associate with children are the result of lazy parents who lack the energy necessary to exhaust their children. Mostly the problem is that people have automobiles. If "famblies" had to walk ten miles to reach the mall, the kids would be quite sober by the time they arrived.

Groundhog Day was cleverly self-referential, because what Bill Murray's character was able to do was very similar in its ultimate effects to what moviemakers do. Moviemakers have the power to think through an entire fantasy scenario in advance, and then control every detail of it as it unfolds, thereby conferring (if they wish) seemingly godlike powers on whichever character they choose to bless.

Or they can amuse themselves by jerking the audience around with contrived surprise endings. When you watch a movie, you see what a human mind can do when it knows what comes next.

The proper way to worship these Divine Rabbits is to tithe 10% of your income to me, the Divine Rabbit Prophet.

-- the Danimal

P.S. Lame as it sounds, millions of people have been bilked with the same line (just change a few names).

Do you think an automobile can drive without fuel? That's analogous to believing humans have a life after death apart from their physical bodies.

History is full of fools who drew lines in the sand just beyond what science was able to explain at the time, and concluded God must exist. Fortunately for religions, few people know enough about history to object to the constant moving of the goalposts. The latest example of goalpost-moving is called "Intelligent Design." OK, so maybe the Earth is a bit older than 6000 years.

A good deal of physical travel occurs primarily to move information around inside human brains. Obviously the most efficient way to reduce this stupid waste is to figure out how to move the information directly. Instead of dragging millions of bodies back and forth every day to put human brains into physical proximity with work, shopping, and other human brains, we should build technology to extend our nervous systems. Current technology obviously does not cut it yet, because for most real-life problems the average person still gets better information and is more effective by physically traveling somewhere.

To a woman, everything that happens to her is important. To a man, only important stuff is important.

How can a man be credible there if he has to ask a woman out? Obviously he will only ask out women he already finds attractive. That would be like going to a store, buying a product, and then pretending like you didn't really want to buy it. Who would that fool?

For a man to feign disinterest, he would have to do it before asking a woman out on a date. But how is that feasible? In "cold" approaches, a man might have only one opportunity to get a date with a woman he might never see again. If a man plays hard to get in the least against the standard operating procedure of women which is to wait passively until men approach them, the result is deadlock and nothing happens. In other words, the whole system requires a man to act as if he is very interested in a woman before he knows anything about her as a person. And it works because the man is in fact very interested in any woman he finds visually attractive, provided she is just a bit friendly in addition to looking good.

I've actually heard guys say the best part about being married is that they don't have to meet women now. Women who want to strengthen the institution of marriage should therefore be total bitches from hell with every man who hits on them. Make hitting on women so painful that even marriage seems better by comparison.

I'm wondering what it would take to make me feel luckier than, say, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, for starters. The way those guys get paid $20 million for a few hours of "work" pretty much exceeds any luck I have experienced so far, not to mention the objective attractiveness of the women those guys get to bang whenever they want.

It's surprising that anyone could be unaware of the "swing vote" principle. A small group of swing voters can control an election, if the main voting blocs are balanced. Similarly, one trivial issue can cause a woman to accept or reject a man, if his other positive and negative attributes balance out.

Obviously if a woman really likes a guy, or really dislikes a guy, she doesn't care whether he buys her dinner. But if her decision is close, it could hinge on some minor factor like a dinner. The fact that men buy so many dinners for women suggests it does matter quite often.

Iraq is not like Somalia---a country with Muslims who hate us, but no oil---that the U.S. can simply abandon after the shooting starts.

It might help if Democrats had some answer to the problems Bush has presided over. But neither party is willing to admit what the real problem is (Social Carwinism) let alone propose any plan to address it. Instead we have a bunch of automobile addicts mindlessly destroying everything, while bickering with each other about minor details of the destructive process.

Next time you are waiting in line to pay for your groceries, pick up a few magazines targeted at young women. I'm pretty sure these magazines influence the way young women dress quite a bit more than any Dennis Prager editorial. And certainly quite a bit more than the writings of any group of scholars at a women's studies department.

Women, like men, compete in a sexual market. Women compete with other women for the attention of men. Most types of competition have rules to keep things from getting totally out of hand (even in warfare, there are some things like chemical weapons that just aren't cricket).

In the old days, before there was photography and the whole industrial infrastructure for recruiting modeling talent and distributing the product, women only had to compete against the other women who were in physical proximity. It was easy then to enforce modesty standards, because a lot of pressure could be focused on any woman who ventured into public wearing too little. Therefore women did not have to show a lot of skin to get male attention. The competition had trouble raising the bar very high.

Today it's much harder to impose modesty standards. It was easy to pressure individual women in real life, who are comparatively weak and vulnerable. But how do you pressure a photograph? A woman only has to pose once for a camera, and then industry can propagate her photo far and wide to anyone who wants to see it.

Technology has therefore undermined the pre-existing game rules, little by little. Now the wide availability of photographs and moving images of stunningly attractive women in all sorts of provocative poses has raised the competitive bar for all women, and gradually redefined what is considered acceptable.

Women themselves complain about having to compete against the "unrealistically" attractive women in modern media. Women feel this pressure because it is real. A woman must do more now to attract male attention than a woman had to do in the year 1800.

A wealthy man has to pay more in child support than a poor man. Why is that? Because it's not about how much it costs to raise a child

A majority of women want a minority of men, and a majority of men want a minority of women, so the number of "really compatible" couples is probably just a minority of the couples that must be formed. The desirable few pair off first, and then the rejects must make do with the leftovers.

I don't think you can always point to any random person and be sure you could find some other person such that the two of them would each think they got the best possible partner.

I think most people end up with a partner who is pretty close to being the best-matched partner they can get, in the context of the sexual market. It's like how the housing market works: most people end up with about as much house as they can afford. Lots of people have to live in dumps.

A bigger (literally) national tragedy is the inability of so many women to suppress their gluttonous urges. The fact that women are capable of suppressing their sexuality indicates they must not have much of a sex drive. Certainly nothing on the scale of their gluttony drive.

97% of diets "fail." That is, even when gluttons are highly motivated to eat less, their gluttonous urges overwhelm them anyway. Imagine if 97% of women who tried to suppress their sexuality "failed." That would be pretty cool.

Some products are more desirable than other products. If you want the product, they don't have to hawk it. They just sit back and wait for you to call and order.

Get a lot of telemarketing calls from plumbers? Probably not. If your toilet explodes and water is flooding out of your bathroom, you don't wait for the plumber to call you. You call the plumber. Plumbers don't need to sell themselves; the exploding toilets do that.

Your physical attractiveness apart from your weight would be difficult to adjust (cosmetic surgery is expensive and takes time to recover from) but to lose weight all you have to do is record everything you eat in a month and then reduce it all proportionately by one third. No need for fancy diets or other gimmicks. Should be effortless for any man with a bit of state control.

What exactly are those common beliefs? If you are referring to people who call themselves "Christians," they appear to be a diverse group. Some of them believe homosexuality is always wrong; others sanction homosexual unions. Some of them believe women should not wear makeup; others not only put on makeup but some even go so far as to pose nude for pornographic magazines. Some of them believe eating pork is a sin; others believe it's OK. Some believe lending money at interest is a sin; others run banks. Some believe interracial marriage is a sin; others miscegenate happily. When I was a kid growing up in church, I listened to preachers saying rock and roll music was the Devil's work. Now I know musicians who play rock music in church, and a whole contemporary Christian music industry rolls in mammon. Some Christians pray to Mary as if she now has Godlike omnipresence; others consider Mary just a woman. Some Christians believe war is always wrong; others worship a God of war. Ditto for capital punishment, abortion, fornication, masturbation, recreational drugs, smoking, drinking, swearing, gluttony, etc.

Do you grasp the problem? If you are "tolerant," you will tolerate an intolerant idea. Which means you basically agree that its claims are as good as yours. Whereupon the intolerant idea claims that your ideas are wrong. You are tolerant, so you must agree. Therefore, your idea loses.

When a religion gains a 99% majority in any given culture, it gets to demonstrate the true meaning of intolerance. For example, the Catholic Church of several hundred years ago burned scientists at the stake for the crime of observing the motion of planets.

In some of the Muslim nations, 99% religious majorities still exist so the climate for intolerance is especially vibrant there. Women get their fingers amputated for the sin of painting their nails and so on.

This is the natural consequence of elevating imagination to fact. Since imagination has no defense in logic it falls back to violence whenever it can get away with it.

Most people immediately dismiss overtly racist propaganda because racists tend to draw incorrect conclusions from statistical distributions, in the opposite way that liberals draw wrong conclusions. (Namely: racists conclude that if one person in a group has a problem, all of them do; liberals conclude that if one person in a group does not have a problem, none of them do, or more precisely that if anyone dares to point out that some of them do, that critic must think all of them do.)

If God really exists, he should be all-powerful enough to put on a convincing demo. I'm just a mortal, and I can demo stuff.

Scoring cures, or at least mitigates, a lot of hangups. If you don't believe me, see what happens to a man if he gets no sex for the next ten years. He might end up dressing in strange robes, talking in Latin, and sodomizing altar boys.

Consider this: what do men dream about when they sleep? Being married to old women? I doubt that is common.

As a woman, of course, you are worried about the next forty or fifty years because you know by then you will be almost completely worthless to men. If you haven't somehow chained a man to yourself by some method that doesn't rely on him still finding you sexually attractive, finding a man to chain up will become increasingly difficult.

Some men do sort of have an interest in getting married, but usually this is because they find picking up hot young chicks to be very difficult.

It's like signing a long-term contract to work in fast food. If fast-food joints tried to lock up their help with long-term contracts, a person would probably only do that after giving up all hope of being able to hop to better jobs as they become available.

The real Philistines had their art; their tribal name became a slur because the Hebrews who wrote the Bible made them the object of racist smears---the better to justify their genocide campaign against the Philistines. It's ironic that the German intelligentsia who copied the slur "philistine" from its Jewish originators later went on to exterminate most of the central European Jewry.

Few pre-Darwinian ideas survived the Darwinian upgrade without substantial rework. That's one reason why Darwin ranks among the top three scientists of all time: he changed almost everything.

Most of what feminists do to harm men works from a toolkit similar to what Schopenhauer uses: lots of big words and deliberate misdirection. For example, play down the direct confrontation with men stuff, and attach the ideological payload to generally-held values such as "the good of the child." Then create legal precedents that hold up even in the absence of children, etc. That gets you a lot farther than some meaningless hyperbole about all men being "rapists." What can feminists expect to do, arrest and try all men? The working definition of a major crime must always restrict it to a minority of people. Most people have to be out of jail so they can pay the taxes to feed the people who are in jail.

I would be interested to read an objective definition of the term: great painting. Presumably a great painting would be recognizably great to a completely alien intelligence, so long as it had mastered "objectivity of mind." Given the absence of alien intelligence in our reality, there is a similar absence of perspective with concepts such as "objectivity of mind." Forgive me for suspecting "objectivity of mind" is a fancy way of saying "agrees with the author."

In any case, let me try to bridge the Mars/Venus gap for you. Do you know how women always complain about how they can't get their men to talk about their feelings? Well, I'm a pretty honest guy, so I made that mistake early on and learned from it. When a woman says to a man, "Please talk about your feelings," she is really saying "Please talk about my feelings." Because no woman in her right mind could possibly like a lot of the feelings men have all the time. For example, a completely honest man would have to say something like this:

"Well, my strongest feeling today was when I was waiting in line at the bank, and in front of me was the nicest looking female backside in a short skirt I've seen since I don't remember when. It was all I could do to keep from laying my trembling hands on those flawless cheeks. I was momentarily consumed with a smoldering desire to [interesting details omitted to preserve the Family Values of this newsgroup]. Tonight when we make love [ed. note: yeah, sure] that image is going to burn in my mind."

Now, a woman who really has an interest in sharing a man's feelings will take that fantasy and run with it. (Turning around and wiggling her backside at him, she coos: "...Ohhh...you mean like this...?" Various textile objects go rapidly airborne. Frantic bout of animalistic behavior quickly ensues, helping both to clear their minds for a pleasant evening of intellectual conversation.) But the average woman would probably be horrified. Which means she has no interest in his feelings. Instead, she wants him to have the same feelings she is having. Nothing wrong with that, except it isn't possible.

It's important to keep in mind that staying home is not exactly a huge sacrifice for the women whose husbands are wealthy enough to pay for it. I've talked to divorced women who did the stay-at-home thing for many years and are now back into the dog-eat-dog slugfest most of us call a career. I haven't found one who says the career is easier and more rewarding overall. (I would be interested in hearing from any women who think it is.)

In a very real sense, at least some women who "sacrifice" their careers to stay home and raise a family are pursuing what is for them an easier and more enjoyable way of life. This does not devalue their contributions, but they must take some responsibility for the increased economic risk they are assuming by abandoning their careers in the era of easy divorce. In a sense, a woman who has been working in the home for 20 years has already been substantially "paid" for her contributions, in the form of a more pleasant life than she would otherwise have had.

I don't want to sound like the stereotypical soc.men whiner. I know that women are capable of accepting responsibility. I once dated a woman who was in the process of divorcing her husband, and her lawyer was urging her to go for the jugular. She asked me what I thought about it, and I suggested she compare her current employment (which she complained about frequently) to her 16 years of stay-at-home motherhood (which she described in glowing terms) and tell me if she could really say, with a straight face, that she had gotten such a raw deal that she was now personally entitled to a big chunk of her ex-husband's money. I don't know how influential I was, but she actually did not put him through the ringer that she could have. As a result, her divorce went quite smoothly, the custody arrangements worked out well, etc.

Come to think of it, I've never heard anybody provide a very satisfying definition of "love". Sure, lots of people can say lots of things about something they call "love", but a definition??? That's beyond the current state-of-art just now.

Remember, what can be defined can be engineered. And what can be engineered can be manufactured. And what can be manufactured can be sold. And what can be sold can be undersold. And what can be undersold can be given away illegally to minors in brazen promotional schemes. And what can be...can also find its way into attics. And what can find its way into attics tends to accumulate ferociously in older neighborhoods.

You with money is not the same person as you without money. If you don't believe me, just give me all your money right now and I'll keep it away from you for some time. Then you can report back to us about your experiences without money and how this changed you and your relationship to the world completely.

You can get almost anyone to do almost anything for enough money. The reason most of us don't believe this is that we don't have "enough money" to prove it.

Money is only a tool. And like any tool, it's only as good as the tool-user. But some women might really like your tool. Anyway, I have never had a relationship with a woman who would have objected to me having more money. But I have had women turn me down because I didn't have enough money at the time. And I have certainly dated women who were willing to look at my earning potential more than what I happened to have at the time.

I react to overweight women about the same way I react to men. I can like them and enjoy their company immensely, but they just don't do anything for me sexually. And I am pretty sure that no (straight) man would consider this an insult.

Note that merely working does not produce a paycheck. If you go out in your back yard and dig holes all day, nobody is likely to pay you. To earn a paycheck you have to produce something of value to somebody else besides yourself and then you must refrain from consuming all of that value.

If you wipe the snot off your own kid's face, you "consume" the pleasure of having a kid with a temporarily snot-free face. Once the kid's face gets snotty again, that value is gone, flushed away to oblivion by the second law of thermodynamics.

If you want to accumulate wealth, you must either build something durable or give your temporary value to someone else in exchange for their durable asset. For example, if someone else's kid has a snotty nose, you might strike a deal where you wipe that kid's snot and the parent pays you for your work. Once the kid gets snotty again, the value you created is gone, but the parent consumes that loss and you get to keep the more-durable money.

The noncash contributions people make to their own families produce value they consume themselves. There's no residual value from that work to distribute if they decide to break the family up, unless they can sell their kids into slavery or something. All the work you expended is either destroyed or represented by your kids. Since you can't legally sell your kids, you can't easily recover value from them. Instead you gain the psychic satisfaction of having raised viable kids. But that's only valuable to you; you can't sell that satisfaction to anybody else. It's like having a hobby that nobody else cares about. You do it for your own satisfaction and nobody else is going to pay you to do it.

Most virtuosos required many years of study and practice to develop advanced sight-reading skills.

It's funny that now there are computer programs that can convert scanned-in sheet music to MIDI files instantly. It takes a human player years of effort to learn to do what any computer with a scanner and a sound card can do in a few seconds.

It's funny when computers trivialize human achievements and that kid goes ha haaaw. Of course even trivialized human achievements can still be fun and useful for impressing chicks. When computers start getting all the chicks is when it stops being funny.

Stupid people have higher death rates than smart people. To some degree this reduces the dysgenic impact of the welfare state. However, the welfare state is a transient phenomenon. It only exists in the brief historical window between the accumulation of enough wealth to make welfare possible and the eventual emergence of strong genetic engineering and/or artificial intelligence which will kick evolution into high gear.

The other argument against a purely genetic cause of homosexuality is the specific nature of the difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. As I mentioned above, most aspects of a gay person's sexuality work the same way as for a straight person of the same sex. Straight men emphasize youthful, physically attractive partners. So do gay men. Straight men tend to be promiscuous given the opportunity and tend to be less driven to commit than women are. Ditto for gay men. It's as though only the target selector got switched. Since a typical gene tends to code for ten or more proteins and can influence dozens of parts of the body, if genetic mutations were affecting one aspect of sexuality at such a high rate (1% to 10% of the population depending on whose biased estimate you believe), we'd expect to see other aspects of sexuality getting disturbed at similar rates, and probably in association. And yet we don't. You don't see 5% of men desiring partners with the wrong waist:hip ratio, another 5% of men with an abnormal preference for elderly partners, 5% of men being obsessed with commitment, 5% of men lusting after unusually tall partners, 5% having little response to visual stimulation, and so on. Sexual preference on the whole is not nearly as diverse as it should be if homosexuality were due solely to genes and the variation in these genes was typical of variation in other sex-related genes. And given that homosexuality is one of the bigger reproductive hits an organism can take, we'd expect even more genetic diversity among the less costly variations. What's the reproductive cost of lusting preferentially after ugly partners? They can still work. And yet that mutation seems rarer than homosexuality.

The common trait of "gods" is their inherent unfalsifiability. The priests of Vulcan didn't have to worry about any skeptics climbing into an erupting volcano and reporting back that they didn't see any god in there.

In reality, everyone feels threatened by disagreement, especially about anything important. And nothing is more important to each of us than himself or herself.

Beauty and the Geek is all about sexual market value. Physically attractive women generally have a lot. Men who are geeks generally have little. Simply by examining the women who do end up with geeks, we can see, for the most part, that physically attractive women are too good for them. Someone could write a similarly funny show about homeless indigents trying to talk their way into a pricey gated community.

If we limit the discussion to mammals, female mammals of course have mammary glands (hence the name "mammals"), and generally use them to nurse their young, so most if not all female mammals continue to invest in their young after bearing them. Many young mammals have faces that look "cute" to humans, so all this makes for heart-warming nature films.

For some reason that aspect of mammal behavior is more reassuring for most humans to watch than the equally important feeding behaviors of predatory species. Humans may find the hunting behaviors of lions pretty gruesome to watch, for example, because lions often tackle larger herbivores that they cannot kill quickly.

I'm wondering how much "self-respect" a person can have while being in a relationship anyway. Every relationship requires compromises. The only way to fully respect oneself is to exclude everybody else.

A woman has the advantage that she doesn't have to "look around" to "find someone better." All she has to do is go out, and men will approach her, if she is attractive and she acts somewhat friendly. She maintains plausible deniability, because she's only talking to them.

What's a woman going to do, hold up a sign that says "Stay away from me, guys; I have a boyfriend"? I don't think so. She will talk to all sorts of guys, some of whom are hitting on her. If she likes one of them better than she likes her current boyfriend, she will probably trade up. She can rationalize her actions because she did not plan to go out and find someone else. She doesn't talk to men with the intent of doing anything besides just talk to them. She doesn't need to have ulterior motives, because the guys take care of that for her.

It's like going out to the mall with no intention of buying anything, but you happen to see something you like on sale.

Once computers gain the ability to communicate by understanding continuous speech and responding by speaking, one of the first excellent applications---perhaps a kind of "killer app"---will be software that enables computers to talk dirty.

Who cares about a billion years of evolution? We are free moral agents now.

After decades of careful study, I have learned that the better a woman looks, the more fun she is to fool around with. And if she doesn't look good, regardless of how well we get along otherwise, she isn't as much fun to fool around with.

Just guessing here, but I suspect you would quickly lose patience with someone whose learning rate is orders of magnitude slower than yours.

Conversely, you might find yourself constantly bewildered by someone who learns that much faster than you. He would constantly say or do incomprehensible things. Even if he were sufficiently patient to slow down to your level, and he always remained respectful to a fault, you might still feel he was patronizing you.

I've noticed something similar on group bicycle rides. If one member of the group is weaker than the others, that weakest rider tends to start feeling anxious if the rest of the group members are too obviously riding slower that they would be riding if they weren't waiting for the laggard. It's not fun to feel like you are the boat anchor holding others back.

If things are great, most people are "positive" and "upbeat." But if someone's dog dies, his employer goes out of business and lays him off, his house burns down, and his doctor tells him he has an inoperable brain tumor, odds are his positive upbeat attitude will take some hits, and he won't be generally enjoyable to be around.

Obviously your billion-year evolutionary history has resulted in your instinctive preference to mate with men who are enjoying good circustances. It would be foolish for you to select a man to mate with who is having a sustained run of bad luck. He is a poor bet because (a) his bad luck might be to some extent caused or aggravated by his genes, in which case your brain subconsciously does not want your offspring to share those genes; and (b) even if his genes are fine, his bad luck threatens his ability to provide resources for your offspring.

Side observation: a man tends to become more positive and upbeat when he is getting plenty of sex with beautiful women. Perhaps when men finally get smart enough to invent artificial companions who provide the same psychological benefits available only from beautiful women now, men will become generally more positive and upbeat and therefore more attractive to the women they at last no longer need. Heh.

If I could live for a thousand years, I probably would never meet a woman who was unique enough and secure enough to say, "I don't mind being lumped in with all the other women."

You should try being really different sometime. After a while you wouldn't mind being lumped in with others so much. Imagine trying to get through life as a person who really cannot blend in, even in the eyes of talented stereotypers. Suppose you are a woman who collects chain saws, is proud to let her leg hair grow thick and lush, spends her free time rebuilding automobile engines, and feels only disdain for all the girly-girl stuff. Wouldn't that be pretty freaking weird? (Side note #1: the fact that you know what "girly-girl stuff" is is yet more evidence of our pervasive gender stereotyping. A woman who resents gender stereotyping is like a fish who resents water. We swim in it, we breathe it, we cannot escape it. Side note #2: once upon a time I dated a woman who used to work on motorcycle engines and she never shaved her legs. But she still had a lot of feminine traits. Two in particular I recall fondly.)

Would you really want to be someone who could never be stereotyped? Be careful what you wish for.

One problem with nerds is that they are simply too honest for their own good. They are the opposite of dogs, who celebrate their owners every day, no matter how incompetent their owners actually are by human standards.

If you live beyond some particular age, it's a good bet you will never (again) be with a woman who is under the age of 25. Whatever that age may be for you, I don't know. Maybe you are already past it. Maybe you aren't. When the thought of meeting a young woman's parents seems particularly awkward, if not downright alarming, you are probably past that age.

Attaching different labels to a reality does not change it much. That's what makes politically correct speech so funny. A rose by any other name smells the same.

Maybe "let it go" is a nice way to say "shut up already."

If you live in one place long enough, you might find some women who ignored you when they were young and hot start to reconsider you after they lose their looks and find it harder to attract the same class of jerk. The whole situation is kind of a drag. As men, we like women primarily for their looks. But women age only a little better than computers. Except that unlike computers, the next generation isn't twice as good at the same price.

The author's [of "Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl"] misconception is to confuse cause and effect. Men do not love women because those women are bitches; rather, women can get away with being bitches if they have the physical attributes that make men want them. If a woman is hot enough to get men without being nice, why would she be nice? Why would anyone expect her to be nice? It's not like she was purpose-designed to maximize a man's pleasure (the way artificial companions will be). Evolution gave her a completely different agenda.

Being rude and inconsiderate and jerking people around is loads of fun if you can get away with it. Hence the popularity of Usenet. Imagine how much more fun it would be if you could inflict real pain.

I would say symmetry. For every hour the girlfriend spends with a male friend, the boyfriend should spend an hour with a female friend having the same relationship status (if any). For example, if the girlfriend has five male friends she sees every week, and none of them have girlfriends of their own, then to keep the playing field level and fair the boyfriend should see five female friends every week, with none of them having boyfriends of their own. Then instead of making the boyfriend simply trust the girlfriend's claims that "nothing is going on with them," he can smile and say "I believe you; nothing is going on with my female friends either."

Once I was dating a woman, and a woman friend I had not seen in years called and left a message on my answering machine, at which point the woman I was dating staged a crying fit. Even though she herself of course had her obligatory male friends. She saw my woman friend as a threat even though she expected me not to be threatened by her male friends.

It's always easier for people to rationalize their own extra-curricular friendships than for them to tolerate the extra-curricular friendships of their partners. That's how self-bias works. Few people find themselves emotionally devastated when they cheat on their partner. But let their partner cheat, and it's a different ball game.

Sexual "compatibility" is not a binary quantity, as if two people either are or are not sexually compatible. Almost anybody can have some form of sex with almost anybody else, as prison inmates occasionally discover. The question for most couples is not whether they are sexually compatible (if they find each other attractive before they have sex, they can probably make the sex thing work with each other to some degree), but how sexually compatible they are. Not whether it is good, but how good?

It's like the way a woman might compare two men based on their incomes. Both men have jobs, so they are "financially compatible" with her requirements; but if one guy makes $25K/yr and the other guy makes $500K/yr, the two men are in very different categories of income. She might be able to get along with the $25K guy, but maybe she would enjoy the $500K guy more.

How many women would wait until marriage before getting any accurate information about a man's income?

In my personal experiences with women, there was a remarkably solid inverse correlation between how long they wanted to wait and how much they liked me, as it became obvious months later.

In general, the longer a woman makes a man wait, the less she likes him, and the less she will like him over the long term. Particularly if she makes waiting look completely easy in the early going. That is, she waits not for some religious principle or whatever, but simply because she feels little desire for sex with him yet. I.e., the thought rarely crosses her mind and makes little impact when it does.

Look at it this way: suppose a woman (call her 'Jane') meets a man named 'Bob' and dates him exclusively for a year. They break up, and she meets a man named 'Joe' and also dates him for a year. Suppose Jane made Bob wait six months before having sex the first time; but with Joe, Jane was a nymphomaniac on their first date, unable to control her raging passions for him.

Who do you think Jane likes better? Who do you think Jane will be treating better after one year?

A Dr. Phil genius might listen to an Iraqi's problems (daily car bombings, mortars landing in the front yard, U.S. soldiers bashing in the front door looking for insurgents) and brilliantly suggest moving to another country.

Maybe a lot of Iraqis already thought of that, but found they lack the resources and/or connections to flee. Doing the obvious is not always easy. Collectively it may be impossible. It's like being in a race; to win, you need to move up to the front. But all the competitors cannot simultaneously move up. All those "toxic" partners the Dr. Phil types say to avoid, they have to get with somebody too. And they will. They aren't going to take a vow of celibacy for the good of the species.

Rarely do you see a man who chooses a woman who is vastly less physically attractive than the most physically attractive women he can attract, specifically so he can have a woman with some particular personality traits.

You know, like the way a company hires employees of every kind of physical appearance because they all have particular job skills. If men sought those less-visible personality traits, they would get with women of every kind of physical appearance.

But that's not how it usually works. You don't see the same guy dating, successively, a woman who is a '2', then a woman who is a '9', then a woman who is a '3' and so on. If he can attract a woman who is a '9', then he probably only dates women who are '8's and up.

For this to be true, it not only means most men are rating women according to very similar scales of desirability, but most women are rating men with similar consistency. You probably will never find a woman who looks like a '9' and yet has a thing for men who otherwise can only attract women who look like a '1'. No, it is overwhelmingly likely she only wants men who themselves can attract other women who are physically attractive like she is.

For example, a woman who looks like Katie Holmes wants a guy who looks like Tom Cruise, with a long thick wallet like Tom's, not some balding impoverished obese homeless midget with bad teeth. That is, there is a sexual market which emerges from the broadly similar preferences people have, and this market operates with an iron fist to punish those who fail to learn their place.

We even have sexual harassment laws and jails to punish unattractive people who have unduly high self-esteem and are particularly slow learners.

You don't seem to understand how the sexual market works. If a woman is sexy and she has a worthwhile personality, she gets taken off the market quickly, and she stays off. Some lucky guy locks her up and stays committed to her.

Therefore, at any given time, a sizable fraction of the sexy women who are back on the market are probably there for a reason. They have no problems attracting men, because their bodies look great and feel great, but some of them have personality flaws that keep wrecking their relationships and throwing them back onto the market.

In some cases, the really hot women who are still available by their late 20's have serious mental illnesses. While we can't generalize about every sort of mental illness, most of them make relationships difficult, to say the least. Mental illness did not earn its stigma for nothing.

One complicating factor is that many people who have problems are often pretty good at hiding them from a new partner for a few months. A deal that looks like a good deal at first might turn out to be something else, and it is difficult to know this ahead of time. Even a "stupid" person can fool a "smart" person when it comes to the smart person trying to read the stupid person's mind. Especially when the blood keeps draining out of the smart person's brain every time he looks at the stupid person's smokingly hot body.

The job market is pretty consistent from place to place. A person who can only flip burgers in one town probably can't do much better in another town. The burger-flipper does not have to apply for every job at every company in every town to figure out where he stands in the job market.

The sexual market is similarly consistent. If a guy can't get laid with lingerie models and pro sports cheerleaders in one town, his luck probably won't improve if he tries another town. A man can figure out his prospects pretty quickly just by reviewing his own history of successes and rejections from various types of women. For a given man, there will be some women who are simply too physically attractive for him. They are "out of his league."

If a woman is way out of a man's league, he doesn't even get one date with her. The serious problems start when a woman is only slightly out of a man's league. Then she might agree to date him, but she will probably treat him like garbage. And he will stick around for it because she's so hot. (It works the other way too, when a man who has nothing else better going picks up a woman who is slightly below his league to serve as his willing doormat.)

This is why men should build sex robots. Then there will be no limits on how attractive a man's partner(s) can be. A man will be able to buy a partner with any combination of physical appearance and personality traits, and still get good treatment from her.

The only limits will be the skill of the designers, and the production cost. And probably the irrational objections of the Bible Thumpers. Until they too get seduced by irresistably attractive ego-pumping sex robots.

I have yet to meet a human who underestimates his/her worth. For example, if your boss gave you a ridiculous raise, is there any number you would refuse as being too much?

Most guys who are not at the top of the attractiveness scale themselves can probably share stories about the beating they took while figuring out where they rank. Some men, of course, are still taking that beating.

Women learn where they stand through a gentler process. They don't have to be repeatedly humiliated by men who are out of their league. Those men generally ignore them (except when very drunk and otherwise unoccupied). Women, therefore, figure out where they stand according to the desirability of the men who hit on them while sober. A woman rarely has to directly confront the disdain she would trigger in a man who is out of her league, if she forced the issue the way men have to.

The mating habits of various species arise not according to what is good or bad for this or that subset of the species, but mostly according to how the species lives in its environment.

For example, grazing animals that live on grasslands usually form herds, because there is enough grass to sustain them, and on open plains there is more protection from predators in groups. Because these animals live in groups, the males can compete for females, and so the males tend to evolve weapons (horns, antlers, tusks) not so much for defense against predators, but to use in ritualized battles for dominance over rival males.

Animals that lack concentrated food supplies cannot live together in large numbers, so their mating habits are different. Basically, the occasional male and female who happen to run across each other more or less at random pretty much have to mate, because they might not get another chance for a long time. Thus the reproductive behavior of a species generally reflects how the species has to live.

Being given a chance and taking it are two different things. How many men are going to read enough sociobiology to understand the latest thinking on their situation, let alone formulate some sort of coherent plan based on their knowledge?

I'm not sure sociobiology in its current form is much more than a sort of dismal science. It doesn't tell you how to act so much as it explains how your situation is more or less hopeless. Basically sociobiology explains why we want certain things we either will never have, or will never again have after we reach some particular age.

To put it less abstractly, sociobiology provides a logically elegant explanation for (New England Patriots quarterback) Tom Brady's present popularity with the hottest-looking young women, but the theory says nothing about how a man disadvantaged by genetics and circumstance might become more like Tom Brady, or how we might increase the numbers of hot-looking women who appear to be young (or robots who convincingly simulate them) and who think schmoes like me are as hot as Tom Brady.

Conversely, sociobiology can help a woman understand the "why" behind what she already knows too well: when she is young and attractive, she is automatically popular with men everywhere she goes; then her looks deteriorate as she ages until she becomes sexually invisible to men like she remembers her grandmother being.

Sociobiology doesn't tell a woman how to avoid this horrible fate. It just delivers the bad news and provides no solutions. Sort of like a physician saying you have six months to live.

To transform a dismal science into a form of engineering requires a lot more work. When NASA finally landed payloads on the Moon, they used orbit equations that were by then a couple of centuries old. Science generally works with broad, tidy, overview-type descriptions, whereas technology requires slogging through a vast dirty mess of detail and getting all of it right enough to work.

Scientists can talk about the "beauty" of their equations and theories while keeping a straight face. Not too many technologists can describe what they must do to get something to work as "beautiful." Although the rise of "Big Science" during and after WWII blurred the distinction somewhat in some fields such as particle physics that became industrialized. They still like to maintain the romantic fiction of the lone genius by rewarding a Nobel prize to one guy, even though he had an army of assistants who did the real work and independently solved any number of subordinate but essential problems along the way.

I make my share of mistakes. I just find it amusing when someone includes the obligatory typo when declaring his superiority over some other group of people. This is so common on Usenet that I suspect some sort of cosmic principle is at work.

If I ever do feel the need to buttress my ego with explicit declarations of superiority on Usenet (as if this would somehow not be obvious enough from context), I will check carefully to make sure I am not contradicting my claim to superiority with some glaringly stupid error.

A man's "social ineptness" is caused by the fact that women will generally ignore a man completely until he takes the initiative to grab their attention somehow and engage them in conversation.

I have found that almost every woman seems to change completely when I start talking to her. She becomes human. Not always a friendly human, but something different than the kind of motorized statue that almost every woman acts like when I haven't said anything to her yet.

I suspect these "socially inept" males haven't figured out how to ignore the evidence of their senses, and believe instead that all the women they haven't talked to are really humans, rather than the motorized statues they seem to be. A "socially skilled" male knows how to butt in, so to speak, and force a woman to acknowledge his existence. It's basically a mild form of social aggression.

Probably the "socially inept" males get confused because they try to interpret women through male rules. When a man sees another man he doesn't know, there isn't usually that studied indifference. If you look at the guy, he'll look at you back, and it's obvious from his body language that he knows you exist and you could talk to him if you wanted to. He already acts as if he can distinguish you from the furniture. And, of course, there's never any question about what you can use as a conversation-starter. Obvious things like sports always work. Or you can talk about relevant items in the immediate surroundings, such as the interesting machines. But what does a woman stranger want to talk about?

For example, if you are in a gym, and one of the exercise machines has a loose part, you can point it out to some man you don't know, and it wouldn't be too surprising if he spontaneously helps you fix it. But if you point it out to some woman you don't know, it's like it doesn't even register with her, like you spoke to her in Mongolian or something. Or if you need a "spot" on some free weight exercise, asking a man generally gets you a "spot," whereas asking a woman usually gets you nothing or maybe a weird look. It's like women haven't decided yet that they really want to be part of human society.

For a man to really be "socially inept" he would have to be handicapped somehow in his ability to deal with other men. There aren't too many men like that. Almost every man can get on with other men. But dealing with women, in a romantic sense, is a whole other animal. I wouldn't say a man who can't do that is "socially" inept. Instead he lacks a particular specialized skill that goes way beyond what is necessary to just socialize with humans. He probably deals OK with old women, because he doesn't find them attractive, and they know they are no longer attractive, so they don't have the giant defensive attitude thing going at all times.

The other thing to consider is that most men are "socially inept" with most women at most times. Go to a gym, for example, and see how few of the dozens of men and women there are actually talking to each other.

The average man only breaks through with a small percentage of the women he sees. And often he needs some help from special circumstances, such as introductions by friends, or some situation that practically forces some women to talk to him.

It's not hard to imagine that for some men, their percentage of success is so small as to become zero for extended lengths of time. If you only have a real shot with maybe two or three women in a year, it would be pretty easy to miss all of those chances. The longer a man misses, the more confidence he loses, making him even more likely to miss what opportunities he might get in the future.

Women don't get into the same self-reinforcing cycle of failure, because as long as they look good, at least a few men will automatically hit on them no matter what their mental state might be.

The Moon is approximately the same color as a blackboard. It only looks bright in the night sky because it has no competition. If the Moon had the same albedo as, say, the planet Venus, you could read by its reflected light.

When I write, I imagine millions of people agreeing with me.

If courts really do justify divorce pillage on the basis of the woman's "opportunity cost," and we swallow the absurdity that the man experiences no similar opportunity cost for making the same choice to get married, how does the woman's "opportunity cost" increase with the wealth of her husband?

It's interesting to wonder what terrorists could do with robot technology. However, for terrorists to develop the necessary expertise, they would have to further expose themselves to the flow of modern ideas and information. The religious memes that enslave terrorists evolved in an environment of information poverty, in which one locally dominant religion easily became the only game in town. While these memes, once they have infested a brain, can often retain their grip in the face of exposure to modern ideas and information, it's no longer such a slam-dunk.

Right now the best entertainment technology is still comparatively weak. It doesn't satisfy like the best reality has to offer. So religions still have their place. They can still tickle a few feel-good sensors that modern entertainment technology hasn't fully reached (although movies like Star Wars come pretty close).

The Paris Hiltons of the world, who have access to pretty much the best reality has to offer, do not spend most of their free time watching TV yet.

Any time you'd like to demonstrate the power of positive fronting, feel free to publish the JPEGs of your date with Halle Berry.

Actually there is nobody alive who does not have to justify his or her continued existence. The quickest way to learn this is to stop working and run out of money.

The basic principle is yes, you do have to justify your existence, when your existence requires other people to go to work to support you. If everybody was just like you then approximately 99% of the Earth's population would be dead within three months if not three weeks. Therefore you do need to come up with some good reasons why most people should keep working hard every day while you relax and watch that basic life necessity cable TV.

I read one doctor who said (to women): "Look at the skin under your breasts. It's going to look that way when you're 90." The point being that normally this is one area of a woman's body which never sees the sun. Actually the doctor was being a bit optimistic. But he's on the right track. Just take your clothes off, look in a mirror, and compare the parts of your body that see the sun to the parts that don't. The difference in skin condition is probably obvious.

When Jackie calls people "fat fucks" he effectively insults them because they all agree, on some deep undeniable level, that being fat is bad. If you call someone a "handsome fuck" or a "filthy rich famous sexually desirable fuck" or an "inredibly clever fuck" it doesn't sound immediately like an insult, because everybody agrees, on some deep undeniable level, that being handsome, rich, famous, sexually desirable, and clever are all good. If someone tries to insult me by calling me a "handsome fuck" I might not even become aware of that person's intent.

I wonder if a white slaveholder would make up to his wife after an argument by taking her out to the slave quarters and taking turns whipping some unruly slave with her? By laughing at someone else's pain they could temporarily mask their own differences. In the old west there were probably couples who met while out to watch public hangings.

Our modern school systems are extremely efficient at identifying and promoting talent. There are very few high-achieving adult intellectuals who were not identified as showing promise from an early age. This is in contrast to the inability of schools a century ago to recognize the young Albert Einstein's talent.

As always, I welcome counterexamples. Does anybody know of a child who went from being in a class for retarded children to success as an adult in an intellectually demanding field?

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?

Do you expect to meet Jeffrey Dahmer in heaven, while hearing the tormented cried of Shastri Athavale in hell?

Dahmer accepted Jesus as his personal savior while in prison, shortly before he was murdered by a mentally-challenged fellow inmate. Devotees of bodybuilding might note Dahmer's assailant used a pull-down bar as his weapon. I know Miguel will find that fascinating if he did not already know it.

Shastri Athavale was the 1997 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion due to his 40 years of Mother-Teresa-like service to the poor, and teaching his fellow Hindus to serve the poor. But Shastri does not accept Jesus as his personal savior; he is a practicing Hindu. Is it important for God to send Shastri to burn in hell, lest he should boast?

Until I began reading Usenet, I had never heard of men who allegedly prefer obese women. As in, they have opportunities with slender women, and break their hearts by going for obese women instead.

Of course I knew about men who manage to have sex with obese women, and while their capacity to do that is impressive in a sense, the available evidence suggests most of them are settling because they can't do any better. Judging from the complaints they voice to their male peers, for example.