Danimal archive, part 8

If [marital rape] were at all common, and if it were inflicting serious emotional damage on women, I would expect women to respond through the simple strategy of avoidance.

For example, when I walk around my neighborhood after dark, I rarely see women walking around alone. In contrast, I see tons of women walking around alone during the day.

Women have presumably learned to associate walking around alone after dark with an elevated risk of rape, so they avoid it.

In contrast, I have never heard of a woman being in any way reluctant to get married for fear of being raped by the man she wants to marry. If anything, women are usually more eager to get married than men.

If marriage constituted more than a hypothetical risk of getting raped, I would expect women to learn to avoid it as women have learned to avoid walking around alone at night, or at least show some reluctance to get married, as women often show reluctance to put themselves into positions of vulnerability with men they just met or men they have gotten to know and decided they don't want to have sex with.

If the United States decided not to pay for Iraqi oil, now that we have conquered Iraq, would you still enjoy driving? It would be funny if instead of handing out another tax cut, President Bush gave every American 1000 free gallons of Iraqi gasoline. The oil companies wouldn't let him, of course, but if such audacity were politically feasible I would laugh at all the anti-war demonstrators driving cars to protest rallies to denounce the Iraqi oil giveaway.

Life only seems more expensive today because there are so many more cool and useful things to buy.

If you buy an old house, as I have, you may spend a lot of time marveling at the lack of closet space. What, did people in the past not have stuff? It's amazing to think that my house, which seems a bit cramped to me, and I live alone, has been home to generations of complete families!

On those occasions when I ride the bus, often mine is the only white face on board. I look out the window and see lots of white faces whizzing by in their single-passenger gaswasters.

I would imagine many of them would also hypocritically denounce the explicit espousal of racist ideologies. With racism, you don't say it, you just do it.

Face it, movies are eye candy trash. If people want intellectual stimulation they read books. There's nothing funnier than a pseudo-intellectual trying to get pompous about "film."

Rock stars live in true whining heaven. They can whine incessantly (check out Bono whining about Third World debt---he thinks starving Africans who borrowed wealth from other nations should not have to pay it back; in the meantime, the RIAA sues 12-year-old honor students if they download Bono's recordings) while still scoring an endless parade of high-quality chicks.

I wonder---does Bono think starving Africans have a right to steal his music? Or should they only be free to steal from banks?

A whole musical genre---the blues---showcases life failure. "Singing the blues" is figuratively what sexually worthless nerds do on Usenet, except it doesn't fly with women as unembellished prose.

It's easy to understand why we don't abort teenagers: they can convincingly explain that they don't approve. Since teenaged and young adult males are the most violent citizens in every society, they are the last people you want to seriously piss off. Infants haven't gained that ability yet, but most people don't want to kill their infants. So it seems reasonable for the majority to make that illegal for everybody.

The vast majority of women do, however, want to control their own bodies. Fetuses can't talk, vote, fight back, or convincingly argue that they suffer, so it's hard not to rule in favor of women. Pro-lifers more than anyone have proven that might makes right, given their violence and intimidation tactics. In society, the people with the power where it counts make all the rules.

What I don't get is why pro-lifers draw the line at conception. Why not draw it even earlier, say when a fertile man looks at a fertile woman with lust in his heart?

When a fertile man and a fertile woman fail to have sex, or if they have sex with contraceptive methods, they are depriving some potential human of the right to life. Just because we don't know which sperm could get to which egg first doesn't make any difference. Currently science is unable to predict what kind of a human will result from a fertilized egg anyway. So whether one of the man's sperm has gotten to the egg yet doesn't make any difference that we can detect. The only thing that matters is whether that man and woman produce every child that they can. If they refrain from having unprotected sex when the woman could get pregnant, they are murdering unconceived humans!!!!

Pro-lifers would do well to learn from the example of Onan, whom the Lord slew for refusing to impregnate the widow of his dead brother. Presumably the Lord would have slain Onan if he had made her get an abortion instead.

Of course I hesitate to argue as I am doing here for fear of encouraging xtians to have even more children and raising them to believe in Noah's Flood.

Learn some state control. And while you're brushing up on Logic 101, try to figure out where cargo cults go wrong.

It's interesting how despite all the so-called diversity in our society there is enough uniformity in the preferences of physically attractive women to almost completely exclude some men from having any shot at all.

If you think it's so easy to find men who rate women in the opposite order of attractiveness compared to the way most men rank them, by all means please give us some examples.

If there were such men, they must be howling with disgust when they watch television which features a statistically improbable concentration of women selected for their high attractiveness rankings to most men.

Imagine how men would react if they were watching a football game, and the camera cut to the cheerleading squad which featured women hand-picked for their ugliness.

Why, men might react in much the same way women did when they saw the Fat Bastard bedroom scene in "The Spy Who Shagged Me." When I saw that movie, the women in the audience groaned loudly with disgust at that scene. I did not hear any women squealing with lust.

Could you easily find a woman who rates Fat Bastard an "8"?

Churches used to preach that people who divorce and remarry are living in sin. What church preaches that today? Churches cannot define as "sin" anything which most of their members do. Because, obviously, churches depend on offerings for their income. They can only preach seriously against the sins of people who don't put money in the plate.

Wealthy conservative Muslim Saudi terrorism financiers are far from dead, thanks to stupid gaswasting Americans who are even now driving up petroleum prices to one record high after another. There is more money for terrorism than ever before. And thanks to the Bush administration's ham-fisted efforts to make war on terrorism, terrorism's cause has never been more popular.

For a dead horse it gallops pretty well.

The only thing dead is your willingness to face reality.

Social skills will decline markedly after the advent of sex robots, much like the way electronic calculators degraded arithmetic skills. Because sex robots will finally allow men to be themselves. This will make men even less desirable to real women than they are already, driving men to seek solace with sex robots even more. The cycle will be vicious and I can't wait for it to start.

The mistake in reasoning you are making is typical of all technological naysayers. People often cope with an unsolvable problem by convincing themselves that somehow there is some purpose or need for the problem. Like it builds character or something. But when technology eliminates a problem, people soon forget about all the past headgames people had to play to cope with the problem. And nobody misses the supposed "benefits" of the problem they once dreamed up excuses for.

Most businesses try to be somewhat dishonest about what they want. How many commercials do you see where any company says they only care about you to the extent that you have money to spend?

Look at all the stupid "image" advertising where some company drones on about all the gee-whiz stuff it is working on. At no point do they say "We're only in it for the money." You'd think some of these companies were running a charity, judging from those deceptive ads. They only talk about the benefits of their products, not the number of hours you would have to slave away working to buy those products.

When does a company come right out and admit that if you have no money, you aren't worth shit to them? The ads never say, "Hey impoverished unemployed people! Slice lengthwise! Ha ha ha ha!"

When you go to a restaurant or a store and a service person seems friendly, do you think that person genuinely likes you?

If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

I once had dinner at a restaurant where I was greeted by a stunningly attractive hostess. In real life, no woman stranger that stunningly attractive has ever walked up and initiated a conversation with me, as far as I can recall. If that ever did happen, I would suspect something was not authentic.

For a relationship to be authentic, neither party can have a hidden agenda.

Same-sex friendships between straight people can approach this level of authenticity, because neither person wants sex or money from the other. You can pretty much be yourself without any problem. Ever notice how same sex friends can be any combination of ugly or beautiful? The hottest women I have known all had ugly fatass women friends, but they never had sexual relationships with guys having such low SMV.

Any relationship involving sex or money (or both, as in the case of hookers) is likely to involve some degree of subterfuge from one or both parties. That's because most people don't want to feel as if they are being judged on their monetary or sexual worth, even when they are being judged.

For many women, sex without love would be too problematic. They might feel some urges to have the sex, but they feel other conflicting urges that would take the fun out of it.

It's like the way a man who enjoys hunting might be able to enjoy some aspects of hunting children, because after all that would be much like hunting down a deer and shooting it, but shooting a child would trigger many other emotions in most hunters that would override the pleasure of hunting down and shooting the child. Most hunters would not be able to view shooting a child as being anything like shooting a deer, even though to a Martian the two actions might look the same.

Most present-day women would not be able to compete with future sexbots any more than most present-day women could compete with Halle Berry, if Halle Berry were throwing herself at you. Because that's what sexbots will be like: staggeringly attractive and impossibly receptive to average men. Sexbots will treat the average man as if he were as attractive as he thinks he is.

Some women might, however, choose to coexist with sexbots, just as some European women as they get older tolerate their husbands taking up with younger mistresses. The aging wife gets to keep her status and her stable home. She has all the trappings of marriage, but she no longer functions as her husband's sexual outlet.

Since women tend to complain about men being too horny, it's win-win. Hubby can fuck his sexbots all he wants, and wifey doesn't have to worry about another (real) woman stealing hubby away and trying to monopolize his resources. The wife is happy, the home is stable for the kids, and the husband is getting all the great sex he wants.

Besides, the sexbots can do all the housework while they aren't fucking hubby, freeing up more of wifey's time to watch the soaps and get fatter.

Sexbots will be even harder to regulate because the enabling
technology will be too valuable in general to ban. Who wouldn't want to have domestic robots, if they were reasonably cheap and worked well?

Look at how the Internet has overwhelmed opponents of pornography. Back in the 1970's, the conservatives who ruled some towns were able to wipe out pornographic bookstores and theaters. Depending on what town you lived in, pornography might have been hard to come by.

Today, the Internet brings every imaginable form of pornography to every home. The Internet is too valuable for too many things to just ban, and we can't even regulate spam that nobody wants, much less a product such as porn for which enormous demand exists.

Governments can only hope to outlaw things which are not massively popular with large majorities. For example, governments have sometimes outlawed sodomy between faggots, because faggots are usually a small minority unless they have concentrated into a particular geographic area. Attempts to outlaw alcohol have been less successful in countries where alcohol has been legal for generations and a lot of people have developed urges to get drunk. It's not feasible to throw everybody in jail.

If you can buy one robot that can build more robots, that will change the whole notion of wealth.

Traditionally, wealth has been something humans have had to work to obtain and then work to protect. "Money doesn't grow on trees" is a saying that reflects this reality.

But if you can own a robot that can build more robots, and they can do many valuable things, then you have a form of wealth that automatically increases much as the grass in your yard grows all by itself.

Not even human slavery worked that well, because slaveowners had to constantly work to control their slaves, who were genetically programmed to rebel.

The nagging and the in-laws might not be such a problem after sexbots. For starters, the husband is likely to be a whole lot happier most of the time, so minor annoyances won't bother him as much. If you got to fuck Halle Berry this morning, would you get as angry if someone then cut you off in traffic? If the husband is happy, maybe his wife won't nag as much. His mood influences hers.

The in-laws won't be as much of a problem either because the male in-laws will be preoccupied with sexbots of their own, therefore they will have less time on their hands to spend meddling in the lives of their relatives. At family gatherings, the men will gather around to trade sexbot programs, while the women will gather to complain about the men's sexbots. Or may women will play with their catbots and be happy, while their Oprah-bots listen to them talk about their problems and simulate interest.

It's easy to pass laws, but not as easy to enforce them. Enforcement resources indicate a society's true expression of priority.

I never hear any seriously attractive woman making that complaint [that men are not ready to marry]. Usually such complaints come from women reaching their late 30's who are beginning to realize their launch window is squeezing shut. And they are never seriously attractive (not many women are, though).

I hear women complaining more about attention from men they don't want. But then I make a habit of listening more to attractive women who have that problem.

Artificial wombs won't be happening for a long time. How do I know this? Because even tiny amounts of chemical impurities can cause disastrous developmental defects in a developing embryo. It's going to take a while for science to produce an artificial environment with exactly the right chemical composition. By the time scientists have gotten that far, children will no longer be necessary because scientists will be able to indefinitely repair adults. Only a few children will be necessary to replace the occasional human who gets utterly destroyed by burning, or lost at sea, or is in some other way unrecoverable.

Why would anybody want kids when people become basically immortal and have intelligent robots for all the companionship they need? You think wives are a hassle, try children.

Currently I think a big part of the reason for people to think about putting up with the hassles of children is that we all know we are programmed to deteriorate with age and then die.

Most young adults who have no reason yet to believe they are mortal don't mind delaying childbearing. Often they end up getting stuck with kids as an unintended consequence of their urge to have sex.

Robots should be useful for making recycling a whole lot more practical. Today the biggest impediment to recycling is the difficulty of sorting garbage. It's incredibly tedious, dirty work and people don't want to do it. But robots would be happy to sort out garbage every day.

People throw away enough material every day to support entire industries for free, if only we could sort it all out. It's actually cheaper to dig up rocks and smelt them down to metals today because that doesn't require as much intelligence. But as intelligence gets cheaper, it will become more practical to exploit the thermodynamically more available processed materials that make up garbage.

If you are having trouble comprehending what 'beta' means in this context, here is a working definition: A 'beta' is a man who runs around decrying any sort of social discrimination against himself. By this working definition, an 'alpha' male would be a man who does not see himself as being the victim of some vast conspiracy.

Examples of these sorts of 'beta' males are well-represented in some of the groups in the interesting crosspost list of this message:

alt.support.short --- the 'short man's syndrome' with all that entails
soc.men --- victims of the vast feminazi conspiracy
alt.support.shyness --- I'm not as familiar with these folks, so I don't know if they blame their problems on anybody else
soc.singles --- an alarmingly diverse group of social castoffs
alt.support.tall --- I'm not too familiar with this group's contributions to the intellectual heritage of humankind

Of course other people may use the terms 'alpha' and 'beta' to mean other things in other contexts.

If you find yourself confused by some term I use in the future, please ask for clarification before you conclude you are reading something "preposterous." You may, of course, persist in that conclusion anyway, but at least be sure you know what you are attempting to mock.

The goal of the sociobiologist is to determine the reasons for such dominance wherever it occurs.

Everybody is free to like or dislike the reasons, as they see fit, just as we are all free to like or dislike the law of gravity.

Truth is distinct from an individual's emotional reaction to truth. Learning to be aware of that distinction is an important step toward intellectual maturity. Granted, it's more difficult to get past one's emotional reaction to truth when one is getting the raw end of it.

Before hoping to duplicate the success of black people at overcoming their particular oppression one would do well to consider the price black people had to pay to earn such sympathy as they have earned.

The Jewish example also makes it abundantly clear that society doesn't hand out its sympathy cheaply. Six million Jews had to die to make the Zionist dream a reality. Subsequent events show how quickly the sympathy supply can run out.

As far as I can tell, there is no sympathy whatsoever for men who have trouble scoring chicks, only heaps of derision.

You don't seem to understand that among just about all animals where the males compete with each other, they compete for females. Among the various species the competition is incredibly diverse. Depending on the species, males may compete on the basis of strength; fighting ability; plumage; decorating skills (e.g., bowerbirds); singing ability (songbirds); food-gathering prowess; ability to inflate throat pouches (frigatebirds); etc.

Humans have the most flexible behavior of any animal, so human males are able to invent new ways to compete. Whatever the chicks go for is what we do.

If women clearly discriminate against short men, then of course taller men will pick up on that and pile on. That's how competition works: when you get an advantage, you press it.

Biologists don't look for the freakiest individual animal; they focus first on average behavior for a species. Besides, in a state of nature the freaky ones get eaten first. Only in soft human cultures can defectives really start to accumulate.

I've noticed the same weird principle on soc.singles: the more a man needs a virtual woman, the more threatened he is by the very concept. Why is that? [Rhetorical.]

It seems to me that when organized religions teach people to reject logic and believe whatever they are told, you can just as easily tell them to strap on explosives and blow themselves up in crowds of infidels as you can tell them to dedicate their lives to washing the feet of lepers.

The key ingredient is to get people to reject logic, as organized religions must do to get people to believe in their one specific brand of supernatural nonsense not only without any shred of proof, but also without any shred of proof that their brand of supernatural nonsense is one smidge better than the twenty thousand competing brands of supernatural nonsense that people have invented so far.

$1 is "like" $1 million in some ways, and very different in other ways. Few people would consider $1 and $1 million to be "the same." Both are quantities of money, but the difference in degree is important.

You may have noticed that when men scoff at the sexbot idea, they are usually just skeptical that good-enough sex robots could be built, not that they wouldn't find them attractive enough if they could be built.

It's more interesting if we give losers a lot of conflicting advice. Their evolutionary fate is to suffer.

More precisely, I understand there is no conclusive evidence for the contrary belief called "vitalism."

That is, the claim I wrote above [that a a person is just a particular arrangement of molecules] is consistent with all the known evidence.

If you have any conclusive evidence for vitalism, please present it. And then collect your Nobel prize.

The lack of any conclusive evidence for vitalism is rather telling, because (a) vitalism was originally the dominant view, and (b) scientists did not abandon it without a fight. Vitalism has certainly had more than a fair opportunity to demonstrate its worth as an idea.

Whatever women like about men they are able to detect in a few minutes of the most superficial social interaction. Women are not mind-readers, so they must be observing plainly obvious indicators.

A woman can see a man she has never met before, exchange a few sentences with him, and just from that decide whether she wants to date him. She cannot be basing her decision on anything too complicated.

If there was a technology that allowed you to read the criminal's mind, the same technology in the criminal's control would allow him to read some victims' minds, possibly creating a super-criminal. When cars were invented, they helped police fight crime, and they helped criminals commit more crimes.

I had to wonder, though, why did Star Trek Nemesis show the Trekkies driving around in the dune buggy? Why didn't they just beam around the planet?

A vague generality is analogous to a leaky boat with no engine and no sail. It sits on the bottom of the ocean and goes nowhere.

A specific example is like a boat that actually floats. It may not go fast, but at least it's not sitting on the bottom.

Every woman should work in sales sometime, in some business where the customers have high sales resistance, so she can better understand whatever man she eventually ends up marrying had to endure to meet her.

Someone should market a doughnut called the "Johnny Depp." But women are already too fat, on average.

Most women agree with the position that being forced to have sex is always bad, even with a partner they find basically attractive. That's because women have a different sociobiological programming than men do. Eggs are precious, and sperm is cheap. To a man, unloading sperm is something he needs to do daily anyway. As long as he can unload it into something he finds physically attractive, it's cool.

A woman's sociobiological imperative is to strictly ration access to her eggs. So a woman has a whole bunch of complex emotions which impel her toward that goal, and men do not naturally relate to such emotions.

Men can certainly understand the notion of feeling sexually violated, for example by people we find sexually repulsive (such as other men, or obese women, etc.). But if a man finds a woman attractive enough to be having sex with lately, he's not likely to feel violated if she pressures him to have sex with her again. As long as the man gets hard, he's basically "into it."

Thus the idea of "marital rape" doesn't make much sense to a man. But I know enough about sociobiology to logically appreciate how serious the problem could be for a woman.

How many of the "anti-consumerist" women inherited great wealth, or were able to earn great wealth, and then gave it all away?

The "lefty" types I know are not against consuming wealth, they just want to consume the wealth of others.

An online example is Nilo, who scolds wealthy women for wearing designer clothes sewn in third world sweatshops, while Nilo herself is seemingly oblivious to her own lavish existence made possible by the Canadian government spending half a million dollars of taxpayer money to cure her cancer.

Enjoying a luxury of that scale at taxpayer expense is what I call hyper-consumerism.

Even Mother Teresa, often considered anti-consumerist because she refused to allow the sisters in her order to use washing machines to wash their clothes, was not really anti-consumerist because she staunchly opposed any form of effective birth-control technology. Which is to say Mother Teresa, to the extent that her opposition to birth control was effective, helped to breed armies of voracious consumers.

Almost any two guys can easily find plenty of things to talk about, whereas it's often difficult for a man to come up with even one thing he really cares about that a woman also cares about.

For example, I was talking to a woman who was talking to the wife of a guy I've ridden bikes with. The wife was telling a story about how her husband ordered some lights for his bicycle, and when they arrived, he immediately unpacked them and took them into his dark basement so he could try them out and see how bright they were.

Now, that is EXACTLY what I have done when I have bought similar lights! But neither the man's wife nor the other woman could comprehend this behavior.

There is, believe it or not, a Web site for "flashaholics"---men who collect flashlights! I am not kidding, unless the site is some sort of hoax. But I don't think it is a hoax, because I found it to contain lots of useful data about various kinds of portable lights and batteries.

Not too surprisingly, such people as visit the site and post articles about their flashlight collections are almost all men.

To a man who collects flashlights, a woman who shares his passion would seem to have a great personality. But who ever heard of a woman with a passion for flashlights?

You could pretty much repeat that for just about everything I find interesting. If I want to talk to someone about those things, I pretty much have to talk to a man. Sometimes it's difficult to believe women and men are members of the same species.

Most of the time jealousy is not "destructive" from your genes' point of view. Humans quite obviously evolved emotions of jealousy in response to certain kinds of events that consistently posed a threat to their gene survival in previous generations.

A housewife does not want her husband maximizing his own reproductive potential by pumping sperm into younger women, because that threatens her lock on his resources.

Similarly, a man does not want to end up investing his resources in copies of some other man's genes. But of course that's all indirect, because the same men who feel sexually jealous when their wives screw around might be open to adopting kids.

Spot the emotional illogic: adopting kids does not freak out men as much as seeing other men pump sperm into their wives, even though the impact on the man's resources and genetic survival is similar. I guess adoption between unrelated people was not all that common in the ancestral environment, so humans never needed to evolve genetic defenses against it.

The divorce rate suggests I am not unusually picky. As does the popularity of porn.

Cars did not become successful by exactly duplicating the experience of riding horses. Instead cars became successful by being better, in most situations, at delivering the kind of mobility people really wanted, with fewer unwanted side effects.

I already posted some examples of things women do to make themselves more artificial and thus more attractive to men. Obviously men are not perfectly happy with the average perfectly natural woman. She needs to be modified. ("Gentlemen, we can rebuild her. We can make her better than she was before. More beautiful. More sexually insatiable. More loyal. More stacked.")

You seem to think that double-standards all favor the men. I disagree. A man who has a reputation for never getting laid faces a real problem with women. This may be as bad for him as for a woman who is called a "slut" or a "spinster". Men who wish to avoid this fate get the message "try harder, be more aggressive."

Also, I think women are at least as responsible for the "slut" idea as men are. The only times in real life where I heard this label bandied about in a serious way were when women were using it to describe other women. The feeling I got was that sexually-loose women were some sort of threat to the sex-rationing cartel. I.e., if an appreciable number of women were to start having easy sex with men, then this would somehow devalue the sex that the other women were able to withhold.

Suppose that we had technological advances that reduced the peripheral cost of sex to zero: absolute cures for all sexually-transmitted diseases, and cheap, 100% safe and reliable contraception. Suppose further that women achieved economic equality with men. Then women would have no logical reason to ration sex. Would they still want to anyway?

My guess is they would, because the fundamental reason for this is not logical. (If it were logical, we would see women preferring alternative sex acts that avoided the costs of coitus, and in my experience women rarely do that---it's all or nothing most of the time.)

Or imagine a scenario in which a man and a woman meet, go on a date, and have a pleasant evening. Near the conclusion, one of them asks the other one for a hand job.

How often would the guy turn down such a request from the woman? How often would the woman turn down such a request from the man?

It is almost inconceivable to me that I would find a woman attractive enough to date and yet inconsiderately refuse her request for a hand job. In contrast, it is almost standard operating procedure for a woman to turn down at least the first few overtures from the man. Granted, most women don't make it too hard for the guy but it's not exactly like women pride themselves on customer service.

I'm not complaining, just pointing out the rather obvious differences.

If God is a God of Law why does he choose to violate his own Laws so dramatically?

It's obviously in a date-rapist's interest to persuade women to think they should feel free to take all sorts of risks with men they barely know. The best world from the date-rapist's point of view is one in which every woman is convinced to the core of her being that no woman ever "deserves" to be raped regardless of what she does or what signals she sends.

Of course, from the woman's point of view, the best world is one in which every man is convinced to the core of his being that no woman ever "deserves" to be raped.

The interesting irony is that if a woman believes her own propaganda and behaves as though she never deserves to be raped, she increases her chances of being raped by someone who thinks differently. We live in a world where people hardly ever get what they think they "deserve." (For example, every worker believes (s)he deserves a raise.)

So, naturally, the aspiring date-rapist has much to gain by fostering the view among women that they not only have the right to endanger themselves in every way possible but that they should exercise this right at every opportunity, and anybody who advises women to be cautious is to be hooted down, dissed, and cast into outer darkness.

My advice to women, which I'm sure will be ignored, is to watch out for men who dis men who advise you not to do dangerous things such as go home with men after a date when you don't want to fuck them. The men who are trying to provoke your rebellious natures just might possibly be the men who hope to take advantage of the dumb choices rebellious people tend to make.

The interesting thing about "victimhood" is that often it's not obvious, a priori, who should prevail in any conflict of interest. For example, if two children are fighting over a rag doll, someone just stumbling in on the squabble might have trouble deciding who is the "victim" in the exchange. Both children will be screaming that the doll belongs to them, and the other child took it away "wrongfully". The obvious answer is to whip out the broadsword and say, "Divide the doll in two, and give half to each child..."

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

Generally, deciding who should win in a particular conflict becomes a larger-scale conflict. For example, consider the abortion debate. Whichever side has the most votes, guns, dollars, or whatever scores points, will get to define what is "right". And the losers will see themselves as basically getting screwed over.

Neither individuals nor the societies they constitute ever treat human life as a quantity with infinite value. Western societies do tend to place a higher value on human life than do many poorer societies where birth rates and death rates are high. For example, I saw a photograph of "human road kill" on a Nigerian highway. It seems that in Nigeria it is not unhead of for speeding trucks on the highway to run down pedestrians without stopping, and passing traffic continues to run over the victims until their remains are pounded flat. Nobody pursues the killers or bothers to clean up the mess.

I have observed Christians at close range and while you would probably agree with me that they harbor some illusions it turns out that on a practical level they make most of their everyday decisions in keeping with the same common sense everybody else who survives uses. For example, even Christians who believe God heals the sick will, in most cases, not hesitate to give the Almighty a helping hand in the form of modern medicine in case the necessary miracle is slow in coming.

Bedbugs are tropical insects, so a simple way to rid your house of them is to live around 40 degrees north and turn your heat off in winter. Little is more pathetic than people who want to live like reptiles basking in artificial heat no matter what the season and then whine about all the tropical insect pests their heat attracts.

If a liberal is rich there is clearly a limit to his liberality.

But given that rich people are a distinct minority (something like the top 2% of Americans hold some enormous fraction of the total wealth) they have to be liberal. Otherwise the envious masses would revolt, and line the rich minority up against the wall.

How is one rich guy with money going to persuade 50, 100, or 500 less wealthy people to let him keep his money?

One way to buy time is for the rich person to champion a variety of charitable causes. Convince the poor people you care deeply about their problems, and they'll tolerate you.

Notice how highly paid professional athletes tend to get so involved with charity work---making appearances, contributing nontrivial amounts of their own money. It's not enough for the multi-millionaire athlete to be paying half his income in taxes; he must also be seen as "helping" the "community" or else the public may resent his success (not to mention the N children he fathers with N women).

The sporting press is awash in liberal themes these days: the "underrepresentation" of African-American head coaches in professional football (nobody seems to object to the astounding overrepresentation of African-American players); the terrible injustice of private golf clubs refusing to accept women as members (funny, it's not a problem if Lady Victory Fitness Centers exclude men); and of course the whole business of women's sports, the greatest affirmative action program in existence (a woman can win a gold medal at the Olympics despite a performance that might not even qualify her for the men's event---but despite her inferior performance she wins the same medal as the men's winner).

Women from all races want to bang rich, successful guys. I find it merely curious (and a good reason to build sex robots, so average guys can enjoy the same pleasures as rich guys). Latest example: did you catch Howard Stern's interview on (US TV show) 60 Minutes? They showed a picture of Howard's ex-wife (divorced a few years ago after 20 years of marriage), and then they interviewed Howard and his new fashion-model girlfriend. Who, I should say, exemplifies the Aryan ideal of beauty in spades (to mix metaphors a bit).

If the world's most beautiful women want to be gold-diggers, that's their right. It doesn't "humiliate" me. It merely establishes what I would have to obtain (namely, wealth and fame) if I wanted to bang some of those women. The actual women, that is. Technology may provide an easier alternative. And a more intellectually satisfying alternative too.

It's interesting to consider which gender's ideal can be realized first with technology. It should be a lot easier for technology to simulate Howard Stern's girlfriend (for the satisfaction of men) than for technology to simulate Howard Stern (for the satisfaction of women). With Howard Stern, the salient feature is the success, and the relative status. If every man had a $500 million satellite radio contract, they would all be merely average again in the eyes of women. (Consider that the average US working stiff is fantastically wealthy in Medieval terms, but modern US women have simply raised their materialistic requirements commensurately.)

With Howard Stern's girlfriend, the salient features are absolute: her looks and her receptive behavior. If every woman looked similarly good, and behaved as adoringly toward the average working stiff, they would still look good. (A man can test this hypothesis by viewing photographs of thousands of attractive women. Even after massive, pervasive exposure, they still look good. In fact, pornography can be understood as an attempt by men to democratize the experience of enjoying beautiful women. So far, technology hasn't been up to the task---actual beautiful women are still better---but technology will keep improving.)

I think it is technologically possible for all men to be satisfied, but satisfying all women would be much harder, because satisfaction for women depends more on out-competing other women for some tiny percentage of men who are judged to be the most successful by the criteria du jour. That is, maximum satisfaction for a woman is not just a function of what she has, but of what she can prevent other women from having. That is what the stereotypical female lust to monopolize successful men represents. It's not necessarily a woman's conscious plan to thwart her competitors, but her emotional brain is wired up to drive her to do exactly that.

True, a man might derive some pleasure by twitting loserguys with his trophy woman, but I think most guys would be happy to lose that small pleasure in exchange for not having to deal with any more competition. Consider: when men look at porn, they rarely try to prevent other men from looking at more copies of it. The fact that simulacra are copyable means we can make the pie bigger. A lot bigger.

Liberal churches tend to self-destruct over time because once they let a little logic in the door, eventually they undermine their reason for existing.

It's possible for something to be enjoyable while not being worth the cost. A dinner at a restaurant might be delicious, but if you have to lose a leg to get it, it might be difficult to properly enjoy the taste.

By the first time I had "sex" (depending on how you define it, since I took things in stages) I had already endured years of frustration and humiliation of an intensity that I don't think I can properly put into words. My first reaction to sex was along the lines of, "Wow, that was fun, but I'm going to need A WHOLE LOT MORE OF THAT to make up for what I went through to get here."

Little did I know that getting older would cause the game rules to change but the hassle was just beginning.

I'm still trying to figure out whether sex is worth it. And so far I have been pretty darned lucky: no divorce theft, no incurable diseases, no child support, nothing involving cops or lawyers, etc. Just your usual run of the mill innumerable rejections, heartbreak, breaking a few hearts, never quite getting what I really want, always knowing that every woman will get ugly if I stay with her long enough, etc. But even though I have avoided serious complications, I've still had to deal with the mindfuck of knowing the serious complications could strike AT ANY TIME.

However, I cannot choose to avoid a very large component of the cost, because I seem to have been genetically programmed to be miserable when I see beautiful women and can't attract them. One of the few benefits of getting older, for me anyway, seems to be the gradual lessening of that particular kind of mental torment. When I was younger it was a daily grind. Now I can actually go for days without feeling as if I will die if I don't impress some particular beauty.

I don't think an average man can pursue women effectively if he is primarily thinking about how good sex will feel when he gets it. That just isn't the right mindset when a man has to chat up dozens of women before he finds one with whom sex is a reasonable possibility. A man has to somehow dissociate himself from the ultimate goal until it actually becomes attainable. The man's practical motivation to hit on women cannot be the hope of sex, which might be weeks, months, or years away, but the threat of how miserable he will become if he takes no action whatsoever now to get something going months down the road. It's bad for a man to wait until he really needs sex before trying to get it.

In other words, to avoid the risk of repelling women by coming off as too desperate, a man has to start hitting on women well before he actually becomes desperate.

I always measure everything I might do against whatever I would do otherwise. For example, before I turn on the TV I measure that against leaving the TV off, perhaps subconsciously. There's more than one channel, so I compare all the shows and I pick the one I like best.

Before I mowed the lawn tonight, I compared that against letting the grass keep growing. Given all the rain in the forecast, I might not get another good chance to mow until the grass is a foot high and mowing becomes more difficult. So I mowed.

There is often more than one woman around. Obviously when I evaluate one woman I'm going to compare her to the rest. This is easiest to do when they are standing around together, as women often do.

If women don't want to be compared, why do they insist on being seen right next to other women? That makes it impossible not to compare them.

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

Nothing the guy's wife is likely to change about herself will shake up his everyday reality as much as getting a new partner will.

Politics is always the work of a relatively few people. Even in the U.S., the actual policies are never as polarized as the rhetoric. If you never watched or read the news, it would be hard for most people to tell whether the Republicans or the Democrats controlled the government. When the government changes, the news certainly changes, but unless you are one of the tiny minority of people who actually fight in a war or want to have a gay wedding or whatever, there is hardly any impact on your everyday life.

That's why so many Americans don't vote. Because it really doesn't make any noticeable difference for them. Taxes might go up or down a few percent; big deal. The weather has a bigger impact than that. Most of the important issues here have been settled for a long time.

Black men who are employed also get the shaft by having an average life expectancy of 64 years, which means on average they don't live long enough to see any of their social security tax payments, given that the retirement age is 65 years.

Instead white women, who live an average of 78 years, hit the jackpot with social security.

Are feminists calling for an overhaul of social security tax rates and retirement ages to reflect demographic reality?

A man who truly does not care what others think would agree with his critics instead of opposing them. He would let others form their opinions instead of trying to shape those opinions for them.

You can only give people the right to vote once. After that, the recipients of your gift must actively preserve their right to vote.

It's like cleaning up a street bum. How long will he stay clean? Only as long as he wants to make the effort. Nobody is going to follow the bum around and keep cleaning him up.

I expect sexbots to vastly reduce the incidence of whatever percentage of rapes are motivated primarily by sexual desire, by the time sexbots evolve far enough to provide sexual satisfaction comparable to what the highest-quality women can provide.

When sexbots can do that, the first statistical casualties will probably be (a) prostitution and (b) a very high percentage of what are called "date rapes." The incidence of stalking will probably also decline, as sexbots will vastly increase the opportunity cost to a man who pursues unreceptive women.

The tiny minority of rapists who also like to kill their victims might be difficult to satisfy with sexbots (or snuffbots). But this might depend to some degree on what causes a man to develop a desire to kill women. For a man to kill women hardly makes sociobiological sense, since a man needs women to maximize his reproductive opportunities. Thus a sociobiologist would not expect the desire to kill women to be typical in a population of men.

If it turns out that (some) rapist/murderers are angry after years of being rejected by women, sexbots might reduce their chances of getting into such a pathetic state.

High-quality affordable sexbots are likely to turn soc.men into a happy newsgroup.

1. A kook endorses himself habitually while rarely or never earning anybody else's endorsement.

2. A kook shows no sign of understanding the first part of the definition, even afterbeing told repeatedly.

Rape is not illegal solely because it traumatizes women, but because women as a class generally do not get any benefits from rape. It's as if 50% of the population was driving cars and running over the other 50%. If that were the case, it would be possible to get some political traction against cars, because it takes an "us vs. them" mentality to get a political movement going.

There is never one "relationship" per se. There are two individuals who each perceive their idea of the relationship they have with the other. Thus there are actually two relationships whenever any two people are relating to each other. One person's relationship might be "dying" while the other person's relationship might be going strong. Anybody who has ever been stunned by a partner suddenly dumping them knows what I'm talking about.

I remember one woman telling me about one of her former boyfriends who wanted sex with her several times per day, which I found impressive because while the woman looked pretty good, I didn't think she looked quite that good. He never forced himself on her, but she found it disturbing when he would go into the other room and jerk off to porn after she rejected some of his advances.

From my point of view her attitude was unfair. When she didn't want to meet his sexual needs, how could she resent him jerking off to porn? That would be like refusing to mow the lawn and then resenting one's partner if she went ahead and mowed it herself. The lawn needs to get mowed.

When you eat food at a restaurant, does the food taste any worse if your server is visibly having a bad shift? Then there are the illegal immigrants you don't see, toiling away in the back with the dirty dishes. Does consigning the dishwashers to a filthy, unpleasant job make the food taste any worse? You might feel sorry for the poor slobs, if they ever cross your mind, but the food tastes good to you because your brain is programmed to respond to the objective qualities of the food, not the larger context of what you have to do to get the food. And let's not even mention how good animals can taste after we kill them for food and cook them.

Obviously sex is better in many ways when one's partner is into it, but rape wouldn't be a problem if a woman's enthusiasm was strictly necessary for a man's ability to enjoy having sex with her.

In fact, quite the opposite appears to be true. A very large percentage of men appear to have the ability to enjoy sex with women they find physically attractive even if those women have to be coerced. This becomes evident in the mass rapes that are so common in wartime. Looting also becomes more common when social control breaks down and people are freer to express their true thieving natures.

As far as I can tell, marital rape is primarily relevant for Usenet trolling.

Consider other common risks: getting cancer, having a traffic accident, losing a job, getting divorced, getting cheated on by a lover, having a child or close friend die. For any one of these risks, many people reading these newsgroups could describe them firsthand.

We even hear occasionally from women who have been raped or men who have been accused of raping women.

But we have never, to my knowledge, heard from any married man accused of raping his wife, nor from any married woman who accused her husband of raping her, while they were married.

I can only conclude that getting married virtually eliminates one's partner from the pool of potential rapists or false rape accusers.

Evidently it's more common for a married man to be falsely accused of molesting his children, for example when his wife seeks to gain leverage during a divorce. Apparently there's a lot more legal traction to be had by accusing a man of molesting his children.

The reason for that is obvious: we know that children are not in the habit of asking for sex with their father, whereas many wives do indeed ask for sex with their husbands. That means a lot more evidence must be available to establish that a husband really did rape his wife.

People get weird when you dump them. If you get married, it's probably best not to dump your spouse. If you want out, it would be better to arrange things so your spouse has opportunities to fall in love with someone else, so your spouse thinks breaking up is his/her idea.

Just as it's a generally bad idea to use force to get sex from your spouse, it's a generally bad idea to use force to dump your spouse. The clever way to manipulate other people is to get them to do what you want them to do while thinking it's their idea.

The fact that one couldn't hire Halle Berry to seduce the stalker is, I submit, pretty much why he is a stalker.