LancierDombre

I believe I've seen at least one where they show a diagram of the actual penetration. Part of r-selection is the early sexualization of children or the early exposure of children to sexual themes and imagery. According to the r/K theory proposed in "The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics" exposing children to sexual imagery too early in life would probably signal an r-selected environment. That part of the theory might be false - I certainly can't prove it at this point - but I have that in the back of my mind. I'm not going to deny that the idea of explaining the mechanics of intercourse to a 5-year-old makes me feel kind of icky. When they start getting around 10 or 11, I'm more comfortable with the idea. That's probably just because that's when I found out. I suppose if they ask you have a good point. The only other alternatives would be to lie or refuse to answer the question at that point. I just wouldn't volunteer more than that to a 5-year-old unless I was pressed for more details. You know, now that you actually have me thinking about it, I realized something. I watched so many "stranger danger" type videos as a young kid - drilling into my head that if anyone touched me where my bathing suit covered up they were a bad person who needed to be reported on - that the idea that I'd have to do it myself at some point in the future frightened me. I actually remember thinking through how I was going to have to explain to my future wife that I'd need to touch her there in order for us to have children. It all seemed very dreadful to me at the time.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the average 5-year-old, but showing the actual mechanics of genitalia and sexual intercourse to a kid that young just strikes me as being potentially traumatizing. It certainly makes me feel uncomfortable to think about it. It just feels somewhat r-selected. I know this is not a solid empirically basis but I do remember the first time I was told about how the mechanics of these things actually work, and even though I was about 10 it still really shocked and disturbed me. I wasn't completely naive either, I knew it involved some type of touching between adult males and females but I still felt a little disgusted when I learned the whole truth. I can only imagine that it would be worse for a 5-year-old. I can't help but think that if a 5-year-old were to ask where babies come from, saying something like, "adult women grow them in their bellies with the help of adult men", would probably be enough for that age. I could be wrong though.

I am not a parent yet, and I'm not sure that this technically falls under "Peaceful Parenting" but it certainly has to do with parenting and I've been giving this a lot of thought lately for some reason. What is the best way to teach a kid about sex or to explain where babies come from? I think there are some general principles and objectives that we can agree to from the start: You shouldn't lie about it no matter what their age (e.g. no talk of storks) However, you shouldn't get into details that aren't age appropriate either (e.g. showing college level anatomy books to 5-year-olds) You should aim to impress upon the kid that this is serious business and not to be taken lightly. Sex can ruin lives and emotionally destroy yourself or others when abused. At the same time they shouldn't be left with that puritanical guilt thing (like I was to some extent). By the time the kid is in their late teens they should understand the basics of sexual market value theory. Both male and female teens should be taught about what quality men and quality women ACTUALLY want in a partner. They should be made aware of the different types of sexual predation that can be practiced by both men an women. Most importantly, your child should feel comfortable coming to you with any questions or issues that come up. Does anybody have any disagreements, amendments, or critiques of this so far? I'm still working on these ideas so I'd appreciate your feedback.

Awesome, I will share this!

What values do they have in common? They both like sex? What values has she been acting out in her own life that have led her to a place where she is a single mother with a 3-year-old at the age of 40? Granted, I don't know this woman but just that fact alone tells me that she hasn't taken family or the best interests of her kid that seriously.

I think it his highly probable that he doesn't view himself as having enough self-worth to say no to that type of relationship. His judgement is also probably being corrupted by access to easy sex. Has he had any serious relationships with women in his age range? A 28-year old dating at 40-year old single mom! Somewhere in the back of his mind he's got to know that he's selling himself short and he doesn't want to confront it. He's probably afraid that if he says no to this he'll never get laid again - a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand as it were. ;-) I frankly don't know that there is anything specific that you could say but it might be productive to start asking annoying questions that he's probably hiding from. Things like: Do you want kids of your own some day? What is it that you love about her? Then challenge him on his answers like Stef does. If he were to say, "I love how intelligent and kind she is", that would be a red flag that he hasn't thought this through. How intelligent and empathetic is it to become a single mom to begin with - you can find the data about that on the podcast - or to wait until 37 to have a kid? It suggests poor planning and a lack of foresight on her part. This will cause conflict of course but if you actually care about this guy's well being you need to confront him on this woman's apparent corruption and his own corruption that is driving him to seek it out. I knew a woman who got married to a man while she was pregnant with another man's child. Both parties knew that the baby wasn't his but she got in trouble and she had this beta orbiter who had been trying to get some for years and he offered to marry her in lieu of the actual father. She ended up miscarrying and they eventually got divorced. I remember listening to this story mystified about her explanation as to why they got divorced. In her mind it was because, "he just didn't take good care of me", which translates to he wasn't spending enough money on her. I found her way of putting it really amusing because: how much was she taking care of her beta boy? I'm sure this poor guy who she married knew he was selling himself short and not acting with integrity and I'd bet he was being cheap with her out of resentment. As a result he had to go through a divorce and all that that entails. The point of the story is that if your friend's relationship with this woman continues, I bet that in the long run he's going to resent her and sabotage things.

This is part of one of the reasons that the almost unqualified revulsion of leftists and milquetoast Republicans towards Donald Trump is so fascinating. Except for immigration, he actually seems to be fairly moderate in terms of his policy instincts. I haven't identified a clear philosophical position that he's trying to adhere to at least. On paper, it almost seems like he'd be their kind of guy but they hate him! Conversely, I'm surprised that I'm as favorably disposed to him as I am but... I can't help it, I kind of like the guy. It could just be that he pisses off the right people, it could be his unapologetic alpha-male-protector swagger, it could just be that he's helped to give me the courage to speak out about my thoughts on Islam and illegal immigration but whatever it is, I'm glad he's in the race and doing well.

I can't say that I completely dislike them all - though some are better than others to be sure. There was another non-minority white male in that staff meeting who seemed somewhat skeptical. Perhaps I should reach out and form a support group. Like Stef has said, white males are the only group in society that aren't allowed to act in their own collective self interest... perhaps I should challenge that. As for why I'm working with these people, it's a large company, I'm not in a position to control hiring, and the pay and health plan are pretty good.

I'm sorry if this sounds whinny but I'm losing sleep over this. I'm a computer engineer and there are a lot of things that I like about my job, but every so often I get subjected to a big dose of SJW propaganda coming down from management and it's really starting to get on my nerves. Today in a staff meeting my manager was encouraging the team to attend "micro-inequity" training. He was telling us all about how his daughter was told by her adviser in college that she should drop out of the engineering program - she wanted to be a lawyer - and how discriminatory it was that they advised her to join another program instead of "helping her succeed". It was a very uncomfortable thing to listen to because it sounded so much like special pleading and I knew some of the arguments he was making were BS or had major holes in them at least. Don't get me wrong by the way, this is a relatively new manager for me and there are a lot of things I like about him. He's the first manager I've had that seems to actually care about developing his employees and helping them to reach their career goals. It was just painful to sit through that and watch the women get riled up about how something needs to be done. It's funny how no one cares about making a working environment feel unsafe for a white man. I'm so angry right now that I can't sleep. To a large degree, I'm angry at myself. I'm angry that I was too afraid to argue about this in the staff meeting. It seems strategically rational. It's unlikely that I would convince anyone and I would probably just make enemies at work. Maybe I should just quit and find another job, but there are a lot of good reasons to stay at my current company. Maybe I'm a coward but I don't see much sense in making myself a martyr over this, and it feels awful. This must be what selling your soul feels like. Does anyone here have any thoughts or words of wisdom? Thank you.

I don't know. I've pointed out that there is no such thing as a free lunch before, and just got the smug response, "but there is such a thing as a lunch you don't have to pay for".​​

I'm looking forward to it :-)

Great presentation! Very informative. I have a question about the data on the average IQ of Indians and other south Asians. That is data taken from their home countries right? That means that it isn't necessarily representative of the Indians who actually immigrate to the US. The reason why I bring this up is that there are a lot of Indian engineers that I work with and have gone to school with. I was under the impression that one has to have a high IQ to succeed in engineering. Do we know the average IQ of Indian immigrants to the US or does that data not exist? Thanks.

What can we do as individuals to fix this? Talk about it, like you're doing. Put a mirror in society's face and make everyone confront their own misandry, gynocentrism, and hypocrasy on these issues. It may not turn back the tide, but spreading sound thinking on why men's education is important - arguably more so than women's education - will lay the intellectual groundwork for a return to sanity when this feminist society collapses. Promoting male friendly spaces in education is also important. Maybe we need to start looking into sending our sons to all male schools where possible.

Hi, I've been listening and donating to FDR for a while now. I'm a computer engineer, I live in Massachusetts, I'm originally from the mid west, and have gotten really interested in Philosophy recently. I came here through a circuitous route. I've had libertarian impulses for a while, ever since reading The Law as a teenager, though I dabbled in center-leftism during my first two years in college. The Ron Paul campaign in 2007 changed all of that. I began to learn all about libertarianism, philosophy, and critical thinking. I hung around Mises.org for a while. I didn't know about FDR until it was mentioned by a roommate a few years ago in a discussion about spanking. I was skeptical about some things at first - still am to some extent - but the more I thought about the arguments and looked at the evidence that Stef put forward the more sense they began to make sense. Anyway, I think it's the most incredible program I've ever listened to in terms of the breadth and intellectual integrity of the content. I've been looking to make some new friends who can understand me when I talk about these things. If anyone is in Massachusetts, feel free to drop a line.

My faith in the political process died with the Ron Paul presidential campaign. I might rouse myself to cast of vote for something or other if there is something interesting or relevant going on at the state or local level. I live in Massachussetts, which is too late in the primary season to make much of a difference and is guaranteed to go blue in the general election. There's usually a ballot inititive or two that are of interest but for the most part it's an exercise in futility.

I'm not sure if this is quite the right board for this discussion but I'm sure the moderators can move it if they feel it belongs elsewhere. I don't normally give a damn about the Kennedy family - they're quite literally a crime family. However, I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday and an interesting story about Patrick Kennedy came up. Apparently he's published a memoire in which he talks about his struggle with addiction. What is creating a stir though is that he talks about his entire family's problem with alcoholism, and he apparently didn't get their permission to publish any of those stories. I'll see if I can find a link to the audio but if it exists online I haven't found it yet. "So what?", you may ask. "That's too bad, I wish him well, but I'm sick of hearing about the Kennedys" That's where my thoughts were going at first too, but the discussion really got under my skin. It went a little something like this: Woman Host: "It was wrong of Patrick to release these stories without getting the permission of his family, especially in such gruesome detail. He talks about his parents being too drunk to get out of bed in the morning and having to hide his mother from guests so that they wouldn't find out she was drunk in the middle of the day." Man Host: "But I think it's justifiable if telling these stories help people who have gone through similar experiences." Woman Host: "But she's his mother" Repeat... Caller: "You have to remember Ted Kennedy is from an older generation in which you didn't talk about those sorts of problems..." blah, blah, blah... I haven't read this memoire, so all I have to go on is what was discussed during the time in which I was listening to this program, but if the stuff about his parents being shit-faced drunk in the middle of the day is true... I think that's crossing into abuse territory at that point and it annoyed me that it was never acknowledged. Sure, Patrick might not have gotten his mother's permission to share those horrific sounding stories. Did she ask him if he wanted to play hide your drunk mother? So what do you think? Do you think this was a way of Patrick getting back at his abusers or what?

Stef, like myself and most other people I think, has a tendency to want to play with a new "toy" as much as we can when we first get it. I think we will eventually see the prevalence of r/K selection talk taper down a bit as its novelty wears off. I think that's part of what makes the show so interesting, that he's willing to play around with new ideas and test their limits. It's also why he's so easy to quote mine too but that's another story. ;-) Hm... I've been meaning to try calling into the show for some time now but I haven't been able to think of a topic. Perhaps it would be worth challenging Stef on the over use of r/K selection theory. I expect that Stef will start being a bit more moderate on this within a few months anyway but perhaps if I or someone else were to call in to challenge the over use of r/K it would hasten that process along.

We've gotten a bit too gung ho in viewing everything through the lens of r/K selection. I actually read the book that Stef is drawing from just before he came out with the gene wars series. If I recall, one of the points that is made early on is that r/K is more of a group and ideological description than something that you can cleanly classify individuals with. Conservatives pursue policies that advantage K-selection, liberals pursue policies that advantage r-selection, but an individual in either camp will probably exhibit a mix of both types of behavior depending on biological characteristics, socialization, and the specifics of the situation they find themselves it. In other words, the "average" conservative is K-selected in the same way that the "average" human has one testicle and one ovary. This is because it is in one's genetic self-interest to be flexible. (i.e. "It is not the strongest or the smartest that survive, but the most adaptable" - Paraphrasing of Charles Darwin) From a purely biological perspective, it makes sense for a K-selected male to inseminate females other than his 'wife' provided that the costs are relatively low. Of course, humans make decisions for reasons other than a naïve interpretation of genetic self-interest but none the less, the impulse will exist. A rich and powerful man may potentially profit genetically from infidelity, especially if his wife is not going to be bearing him any additional children for whatever reason. The key to setting up a K-selected society is to make the potential costs of dabbling in r-selected behavior prohibitively expensive. I don't know that much about Arnold's specific situation but I would bet that "the prisoner's dilemma" from game theory is a much more illuminating framework for analyzing Arnold's infedelity than r/K selection theory. I'm of course open to counterarguments on this though.