tiepolo

'At the moment we live 740 miles apart, so we meet maybe 3 times a year.' I think this bit is quite important. You're not in a position to date, and if you're not even sexually attracted to her then I don't see the point of changing your relationship from whatever it currently is.

I seem to be continually drawn to arguments and controversy in online political forums and the like. This has got to the point where it both takes up too much of my time, and where I risk damaging my reputation, losing friends and alienating people (since I hold certain heretical views). Also, losing sleep and gaining wrinkles. I would quite like to wean myself from this bad habit and wonder if anyone has any suggestions. I would imagine there is an emotional reason for the compulsion beyond the rational (or rationalised) justification of refuting error and spreading awareness etc. One gets off on having a righteous rant. However you can take a thing too far. Something Stefan said on his recent video 'The Bomb in the Brain' gave me pause, along the lines of that people who had experienced trauma sometimes find a need to put themselves back into stressful situations. (Online arguing, and also reading of upsetting articles, etc. do cause me stress, so why don't I avoid this and concentrate on more practical things, more positive things, and things that affect me more directly? My childhood was fairly miserable, since my parents often argued,my father had issues with alcoholism, and I was bullied at school. I have a bad feeling that my ability to kick arse in debates may be compensating for feelings of powerlessness in my early and personal life.

Meanwhile note the callous disregard for the feelings of the facially tattooed community...

These definitions don't seem very scientific, and they don't exactly justify the hysteria around 'the evil of racism'. Stefan has also said 'it's can't be racist if it's true') It is actually the case that blacks, on average, have a lower IQ. (This doesn't mean always, obviously, and we all know how wise and clever Thomas Sowell is). It is also true that blacks tend to be more extroverted and impulsive, to be more highly sexed, to have fewer inhibitions and be less anxious than caucasians and mongoloids, hence the 'coolness' reputation. There are more than plausible environmental/evolutionary explanations for these things. See: http://penta3.ufrgs.br/educacao/teoricos/MIND/SITE_PESSOAL/texto_aleatorio/arquivo1-33.htm I don't think a space alien making dispassionate studies of the different manifestations of humanity on planet earth would have a problem recognising such 'racist' realities. It is mostly social taboos and political ideologies that motivate resistance, it seems to me. And fear of an irrational but terribly damaging label that the egalitarian Left in particular deploy as a means of psychological terrorism.

Your wife wants to invite some of your friends over? She wanted to throw you a birthday party? What a bitch! Seems to me the problem is more that you have an anxiety about socialising and about bringing people home, which may owe to the fact that you couldn't bring people back when you were a kid for obvious reasons. Birthdays probably bring back miserable childhood memories, too so that probably wouldn't help. Seems to me your wife's gesture was perfectly well meant and she could be forgiven for being a bit nonplussed and frustrated when you reacted as though she has proposed sacrificing the dog to Yog Sothoth. Your wife is not your mother, and you don't want to start confusing their personalities in your head, since that does your wife an injustice and could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. if your wife was the narcissistic party she, I suspect, would be more likely to be trying to drive your friends away rather than to bring them in.

Doesn't even make sense, either, since it ignores the fact that most whites never had slaves, some whites were worse off than slaves, and some blacks actually owned slaves. Still, never let the truth get in the way of promoting profitable white guilt... Also, Red Indians of the five 'civilised tribes' also owned black slaves, so should they turn in their reserves? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3Qo5kp5QeU

That comment is too pedantic.

Mature makes some sense as a synonym for qualities like 'rational' and 'patient' etc. But it would be better to use more precise terminology.

What to do about voting? Does it imply support for statism? Would it be a good thing to vote for a party like UKIP in the Euro elections since they declare themselves 'classical liberals', and want to withdraw from the EU and ideally dismantle the whole edifice of the EU? Or is this missing the point?

I don't think it has any value, doesn't make much sense in that context, anyway.

Quite an obvious displays of projection, there (as well as wielding of Occam's butterknife) since I am not the one refusing to take the evidence at face value or making complicating excuses to avoid the most obvious conclusion. That the black subjects of interracial adoption faced stigma is an unproven presumption. That social stigma could lower IQ is also an unproven presumption- in fact it is contradicted by at least one example that I can think of. There was a stigma around being a Jew, in Europe, for over a thousand year, but Jews hardly lag behind in the IQ stakes. Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than white gentiles. This environment 'theory' also doesn't accord with the evident fact that blacks tend to do worse the further away from whites they are found, far from being held down by white discrimination or stigmatization. Anyway the only legal discrimination in the part of the world in question is all about giving blacks advantages over whites ('affirmative action', as they call it.) Millions of tax-payer dollars, moreover, have been poured into closing the achievement gap, to no avail. Students in Detroit, which is mostly black and therefore where white social discrimination can't be blamed for anything) have more spent on them than in most of the rest of the US (according to one of Stefan's presentations) but still perform worst than most. The only way to eradicate racial inequality would be to eradicate racial difference, as some globalist demagogues and Leftist fanatics have sought to promote. I can't see what advantage there would be in that from a white perspective, since mixing with blacks would seem to be dysgenic in IQ terms (mixed race children tend to show an IQ intermediate between the norms for their parents' races). http://rense.com/general77/racedif.htm There is also the matter of aesthetics. The loss from the world of blue eyes and rosy cheeks, for example, would be something to lament. Not a price worth paying for 'equality', which is a cult for losers.

Yes, but that is PC waffle. It is regime flavour. The data is what it is. Children adopted by adoptive parents of other races still end up, by the time they are teenagers, with an IQ around the average for their biological race. If you won't accept the results of adoption studies as evidence against the culture/environment argument then that amounts to special pleading and goalpost-moving. What would you consider incontrovertible evidence? Interracial adoption in a society of blind people?

I don't see why there would be no shaming in a free society. Society implies some agreed, communal standards, and shaming is a conventional and effective way of maintaining such standards. What about freedom to shame? It is right and proper that certain antisocial and disruptive behaviours are shamed, adultery for instance. Shaming or shunning are not initiation of force.

I can't think of anything. Could create problems to have young kids better steeped in philosophical notions than the parents and the other adults bringing them up. So whether it is best to start with the kids is debatable...

Martin Willett's great vid exposing the double standards and engineered guilt around The 'R word':

Degrees are worthless in the design world. Everything is based on your portfolio, especially if you are freelancing.

A parasite is an organism that lives on a different organism. A parasite surely has to be a different species from its host, in biological terms, otherwise definitions are being distorted. The purpose of all organisms in nature is reproduction, and so the young of a species in any state can hardly be termed parasites on that species.The parents exist for the young, if anything, not vice versa.

There is no reason why an unwanted pregnancy should have disastrous consequences. Measures could be put in place to facilitate rapid adoption by couples who can't have children. Indeed individual eggs or sperm have no direct potential so that argument would not seem to be valid. An individual's life and specificness begin with conception. It is not just that a foetus could grow into a mature human being, it almost certainly would if not subjected to external violence. This cannot be said of mere eggs and sperm. A newborn infant cannot survive without external assitance, but to kill a newborn infant would still be deemed murder, or criminal neglect if that were the case... As for ability to complain, you can't protest against being smothered in your sleep, but that doesn't legitimise killing sleeping people- somnicide.... (is that word?) Apparently only around 1 % of the abortions that are performed are on women who were the victims of rape. I could imagine the psychological damage of abortion guilt being worse in the long term than the trauma of being raped, so I don't see even that as much of an argument. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/13/us/rape-and-incest-just-1-of-all-abortions.html

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, for one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study#Results

The matter of self ownership in relation to abortion has me somewhat conflicted. Does a woman own every cell within her body, entitling her to go though with abortions? Does a woman's bodily sovereignty extend to the occupant of her uterus? That notion would imply, would it not, that abortions at the latest stage would be justified by this principle. On the other hand, can the individual's self-ownership be pushed back to the point of conception? Along with the argument of potential rights, this would make abortion a gross violation of the unborn individual's rights. At what point does self-ownership kick in? I was always offended by the idea that children are the property, rather than merely in the custody of their parents, hence the Bible has circumcision being carried out as proof of the father's faith. Apart from the cruelty, the presumption to own the infant as symbolised by the act in a religious context raises my heckles. If a newborn has self-ownership in trust, as it were, then why not the foetus?

Well, the not negligible differences in IQ and in crime rates may be worth bearing in mind, for a start, should you come to be dealing with large numbers rather than individuals.

Tyson seems to be referring to natural rather than moral philosophy as the thing science has superseded.

I've never heard the word before but the concept seems to make sense. Kids are very good at giving their toys characters and imaginary lives, to the extent that they might feel guilty for shoving them up in the attic even when they grow out of them. Authors of stories also need to imagine personalities for the characters they create. No reason why the god character shouldn't become real in people's minds either, with a predictable judgment on various actions... The idea of tulpas, if verified, might also go some way to explaining historical cases of 'demonic possession', and such like. That's by your definition of an artificial second consciousness created in the individual's mind, with the presumed capacity to take over completely. The eastern mystical notion of a tulpa seems to imply a physical manifestation created by the mind, which sounds rather more supernatural in nature. Obviously this is more questionable, as thought cannot create actual matter, although whether actual manifestation or mere hallucination is involved appears to be a matter of ambiguity.

The phrase 'gay parents' is an oxymoron and a biological impossibility, since you don't get babies from buggery or cunnilingus, however much fun you might have trying. This is a fact that seems to be being widely overlooked.

Bald is not a hair colour...