Cuffy_Meigs

I have heard Stefan and others say on numerous occasions that democratic government has never succeeded in a country whose average IQ is below 90. India therefore seems to provide clear evidence that this is false. Have I misunderstood?

Thanks RoseCodex, your reply was a good one, as usual. I haven't found the Decline of Literacy book yet but I'll keep looking. I suspect the truth may be that the most basic literacy skills have indeed improved but functional literacy and the ability for deep, rational thought have not. As you intimated, no politician nowadays could attempt to put across complex ideas without being derided from all sides. Very rarely one or two have tried it and become laughing stocks. Today there are few more heinous crimes than being "elitist" (i.e. intelligent).

"UK literacy rates have barely improved since 1870". "Government education programs in the US have had almost no effect on literacy rates" I have heard several libertarians, including Stef make such claims but I can find very little evidence to support them. What are these sorts of claims based on - census data? From what I have discovered so far, it may be claimed that government intervention in education had very little effect on the TREND for improved literacy; the data contains no sudden pick-up. It is also possible to compare modern functional literacy (ability to engage in complex written communication) with the most basic ability to write your own name on a marriage certificate 150 years ago, but this is hardly a fair comparison. As sombody who advocates the separation of state and education, I want to be able to shout these claims from the rooftops - but only if they are true. Can anybody shed some light on where the supporting data comes from?

Thanks, another good video. Yours, that is, not Harris's! To speak approvingly of a person's experience and qualifications per se, without reference to either their character or behaviour during the time they acquired it is absurd. Hey Sam - I found a really qualified, highly experienced nanny. Oh by the way she's a recidivist child killer...is that important?

As long as you are open about it with all concerned then reading the Bible together and discussing it in an intelligent manner may do some good. I certainly don't mean you have to be complicit in bringing her up as a Catholic, but you may be the only person in the child's life who can discuss moral issues without the usual BS.

I like that. An elegant and succinct definition of a "law". I shall add that to my anarchist's lexicon!

Your experiences don't surprise me. I live in North London with some of the worst hospitals imaginable. I have kept remarkably healthy so far but the experiences I have had with relations were all characterised by incompetence on a massive scale and an appalling lack of concern (to put it kindly). My advice, for what it is worth, is to take control and if you are infirm then you must get someone you trust to watch out for you. When my father-in-law went into hospital I lost count of how many times they'd have killed him. We ended up sleeping on the floor of his ward, refusing to leave and daring them to call the police. In adjacent beds patients were lying in their own faeces, ringing their help buzzers with nobody responding. If you can just wait for the end of your shift then it becomes somebody else's problem. Despite this any criticism of our glorious health service is met with much the same response you'd get by suggesting we behead the Queen. It has become an article of religious (and particularly socialist) faith that the NHS is the "envy of the world".

I too voted Leave. Nationalism does not sit comfortably with me but I cannot deny I am feeling at least a little proud! The aftermath promises to be interesting. Can we look forward to a spiteful, scorched earth policy to dissuade other countries from doing the same? Will we get Frexit, Nexit etc.? Will the Champagne Socialists and SJWs process the fact that the very people they believe they are helping - viz the working class - voted in their droves to get the hell out? Meanwhile those they profess to hate, namely George Soros, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and David Cameron are very angry? A second Scottish Independence referendum seems likely. Time will tell.

In addition to the above, keeping your own children away from toxic environments and helping them find good ones helps to address your questions regarding happiness. This applies to school, home and elsewhere. An example of each from my own life. When my son was 8 he was scouted by a professional football club and commenced regular training and matches several times a week. Although it was a lot of hassle having to constantly drive him to training and matches, it seemed great at first. It gave him status among his friends and confirmed he was good at something. But before long he hated it. Stress was heaped onto the children and aggression, bullying, humiliation and even spitting were tolerated if not actively approved of. The response of most other parents was to tell their kids to 'man-up' and punch back harder. I regret not withdrawing him earlier. After that I took him to the local cricket club and what a contrast. Child friendly, family friendly and he pays attention because he wants to learn. He's 11 now, playing at a high level and is respected by both his team mates and himself. Instead of aggression and nastiness, kudos is to be had from helping the weaker players or reassuring anyone who blunders in a match that it was 'just bad luck' and not to worry. I made my own commitment by becoming a qualified children's cricket coach despite never having done anything like that before. If sport isn't the answer then surely every child has something they can do well and be passionate about. If you want them to thrive, help them find it.

I agree with dsayers that the race metaphor is unhelpful. I think Ludwig von Mises' idea that transactions are based on the removal of unease is a good one. So you pay your taxes not because you are greedy but because it removes the unease you would feel from breaking the law. You buy an ice cream because it alleviates the unease you feel on a hot day at the beach watching other people eat them...etc. From the seller's perspective, you perform the transaction to avoid the unease of possessing something (the product) which you value less than the money from selling it. Once competition or demand reduces the profit you can make beyond a certain point, this unease vanishes so you stop selling.

I agree with most of the replies already posted but if you want to read more then I recommend Ayn Rand's "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". It's not as daunting as its title suggests and deals with concepts and how they are formed. It's worth reading and she takes a good swipe at nihilists, relativists and subjectivists in the process.

100% from me. I deleted my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts two years ago and I don't miss them. I upgraded to FDR where the conversations are far more intelligent.

How many Muslim immigrants is Vatican City taking this year?

I don't much care for flags either but my impression is that the left in the UK has been uniquely successful in engendering shame and fear in displaying the national flag. If you tell people often enough that it is imperialist and racist then eventually reality changes to match the claim. The queen still gets away with it but otherwise it is mostly seen adorning the far right or drunken soccer fans. Much the same is true of our patron saint. Nowadays few businesses or organisations would dare to be associated with St George's Day and prefer a St Patrick's day promotion in its place. (I suppose St Patrick was at least supposed to be from England!).

"Health & Safety" long since diverged from health or safety...

Perhaps the most egregious is "racism", which has now become no more than an infantile squeal of anguish.

The latest opinion poll I saw reports that there is a significant majority in favour of remaining in but once you account for the fact that many of those people don't care enough to vote, it is almost level. The voting blocs seem to be as I expected, viz. those whose income comes from government want to stay in while those whose income largely goes to government want to leave. I find that when I inquire about people's knowledge of the EU, those with even the foggiest notion are invariably anti-EU. In this respect it is a bit like religion - if you want to understand the Bible, ask an atheist. I suspected there may also be a gender split but the polls say not. With the resources of almost an entire continent supporting the Remain campaign, I fear the results will make for depressing reading and will no doubt be grasped as a mandate for ever more government madness.

I'm not quite sure what you are getting at but I'll have a go. The wavelength of light is tiny compared with the dimensions of the retina so an image can be resolved there with a distinct right, left, top and bottom. The wavelength of sound is a few billion times longer so an equivalent "retina" would have to be correspondingly large. Hearing therefore employs an eardrum instead which integrates the overall waveform and sends a composite signal via hammer, anvil, cochlea...etc. to the brain. Such directionality as we have with hearing is, I believe, done by comparing the relative intensity and arrival time at one ear compared with the other, using high level processing in the brain.

If I may call on one of Stef's podcasts, University attendance has some potential drawbacks: Loss of earnings, crippling debt, Marxist professors, bottomless left-wing hatred, brutal political correctness, lousy lecturers, "education inflation", a meaningless degree at the end and a possible bogus rape claim. So why go? Two reasons I can think of. Either you want a career where there is no choice, such as medicine or law; or the above list does not deter you in the slightest. That, I believe is the reason University attendance has a gender imbalance. The response from government is easy to predict. First off: "Something must be done!", followed by: <take your pick of idiotic, destructive, coercive policy>.

Does anybody know whether they were "right-wing" before they dared support Donald Trump or was that alone considered sufficient for the tag to be applied? I tried Googling but am none the wiser for it.

Isn't there an infinite regress here? Everybody ends up being the property of some long dead "Eve", in the absence of some arbitrary ruling about how ownership passes on.

Harm is done to the child throughout the process. One assumes that during the capture of the images, considerable harm was done and that remains the case even if the images are immediately destroyed. However there is surely further damage done by distributing the images and in general the more widespread the distribution the greater the harm. Paying for and possessing the images both incentivises their creation and increases the harm done to the child. I suggest that paying for such images falls into the same moral category as hiring a hitman. Whether that makes you morally culpable has been the topic of much heated discussion on this forum and it seems there is little agreement.

This is often stated by opponents of the EU (of which I am one) however I believe if you read the founding treaty (Treaty of Rome) it is clear that there was never any intention to restrict the EEC (as it was called then) to be just an economic union. Even a glance down the table of contents screams political union.

I first encountered the word in Karl Popper's philosophy. My recollection is that he used the term to mean the presentation of ideas with all the outward signs of science - such as graphs, statistics, journal publication, maybe even peer review - but with no scientific rigour and no sign of the scientific method being involved. Given how prevalent this sort of stuff is, I think it is really rather a good word

I too enjoy Pat Condell's verbal onslaughts. In a world where nearly everybody is terrified of giving (gasp!) offence or deals in mealy-mouthed compromise, it is most refreshing to hear outright polemic from somebody who believes what he says. Love him or loathe him, he is a brave man.