The AIDS epidemic continues to worsen steadily. From a public health perspective, a sexbot is like a more effective condom: an artificial device a man sticks his penis into to stop the spread of disease, but unlike a conventional condom, a sexbot would actually feel good. I expect the AIDS industry to promote sexbots once they become good enough to start replacing real sex. AIDS advocates agitate to distribute clean needles to drug addicts. How would sexbots seem worse?

Every cute girl I know has at least one hideous obese female friend who would be handy for discouraging aspiring Romeos.

The idea seems to be that you want to deny the fundamental reality that most people can form relationships of comparable quality with any one of millions of other people. Circumstances determine who you end up with, but to imagine there is anything “unique” or “special” about that person denies the simple fact that everybody is replaceable. Besides, the average man has to approach dozens of women to find one who will relate to him. He gets rejected by 24 women, and then he spends the rest of his life trying to convince the 25th woman she is “special.”

What was John Lennon’s net worth? I’m guessing he had more to imagine there than I do, since I’m probably a lot closer to “no possessions” right now than he was when he wrote this silly song.

Putting on weight is a slippery slope. Someone who gains and then tolerates 20 pounds of excess fat has the personal habits and mental outlook in place to gain another 20. And so on. If anything, gaining the next 20 is easier. Being fat is depressing, and the depressed fat person turns to tasty foods for enjoyment, which leads to more fat, more depression, and more compensatory recreational eating. It does look absurd when you see the final result, but the process of self-destruction through self-indulgence takes a long time and proceeds in small, easily-rationalizable increments. Specifically, in mouthfuls. Everybody has to eat anyway, so there’s nothing shocking about eating a little more each day.

Every time you step on the gas pedal, you are shouting “Go Bush!”

Nobody can do everything they please and still function in society, except for the occasional despot. The process of growing up involves years of having beaten into us an understanding of many things we cannot do lest we offend someone else. Once we get used to stifling ourselves, it gets to be a habit and then we can start to think we are being ourselves at that point. And yet every normal human behaves differently when other people are watching vs. how he or she behaves when nobody is watching.

I wonder why, in the debate about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, those who believe other technological species exist are called “optimists.” Given the huge difficulty most humans have getting along with most members of their own species, only a pessimistic human could imagine there are even weirder and more troubling beings out there somewhere who will challenge even more of our cherished beliefs, perhaps with disturbing new facts. Just as intolerant people plonk individuals, and sometimes even entire races or genders or political parties, I can imagine if space aliens ever do appear, lots of people will want to plonk all of them.

I don’t know anybody who appears to have any trouble accepting himself or herself. “I am my own worst critic” is always the biggest lie.

People who can’t even list 5% of what governments do think they know who should be the next President. Amazing.

There aren’t many sure things in life. But almost any woman in the top 1% of appearance can certainly get a man in the top 20% of income (at least) if she wants.

Disposability is the basis for evolution. Everybody will be replaced. If you like being a human as opposed to a monkey, then you approve of that process.

It’s peculiar that professional sports are all about crushing your competitors, on the level of the individual athletes, and allowing talent and hard work to reap all the rewards, but collectively the team owners keep changing their own rules to prevent any one team owner from crushing the rest.

A person’s sexual orientation contributes more to the content of his/her character than the person’s political views. I know lots of Republicans who don’t make a spectacle of their political views the way a cross-dresser makes a spectacle of his orientation. You could get to know some Republicans very well and never guess how they are going to vote. But you immediately know something is abnormal when you meet a cross-dresser. The cross-dresser not only has some particular orientation, but wants to make everyone aware of it.

Young people cannot really imagine the horror of growing old. But they can plainly see there are virtually no sexually attractive old people.

Five decades of work is plenty of time for any non-stupid person to accumulate sufficient wealth to see him through life’s end-game. All the old fart needs are (a) a stable society to prevent younger, stronger people from looting his wealth outright, and (b) the personal discipline to have saved at least 20% of his disposable income each year.

Note: it is exceedingly rare for large groups of people to consider euthanasia for people they find sexually attractive.

Why do you think old people constantly reminisce? Because their lives generally suck now by comparison to their much better memories of youth.

Recall those Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock with their idealistic hopes of founding a Puritan colony full of dour people doing their Puritan things. Today their young descendents are wearing nipple rings and downloading porn over the Internet.

If a man is highly attractive to women, it’s likely he’s doing pretty well in some “other” areas, because women look for men with a visible knack for outcompeting and dominating other men. A beautiful woman could be stupid or whatever and feel insecure about that. Or she could market her stupidity like Jessica Simpson. Jessica is (or maybe her handlers are) at least smart enough to know that during her few short years of maximum sexual market value, something that would be a crippling flaw for a normal person simply makes her more intriguing thanks to her good looks.

Being attractive means having options. People who can afford to vacation anywhere find it difficult to vacation in the same place every year. People who can afford 500 cable channels find it difficult to watch one channel exclusively. People who can eat in many restaurants find it difficult to eat the same food for every meal. That’s a different flavor of “difficult” than being unable to afford even one of those desirable things. Personally, I think having a lasting relationship career is more important than having a lasting relationship. It’s like being employed. Job-hopping is no worse than working one job for 40 years. The paychecks are steady either way. Both are better than chronic unemployment.

Marketers tap into our essential hubris, our overriding self-absorbed belief that we truly deserve the best of everything. Marketers attempt to hijack our raging self-love by selling us the idea that to buy their products is how we love ourselves. “Because I’m worth it” makes a much better advertising slogan than “Because I’m a piece of shit.”

It’s true that people who happen to be in the top 1% of looks are rarely in the top 1% of much else. But not much else matters so much, so easily, so automatically, or so universally.

As long as the Randi Prize goes unclaimed, all the various religions have nothing but empty words, and some gullible followers who believe them.

The odds are strongly against you and I having completely opposite preference orderings. And there is a good sociobiological reason for that: having preferences that drastically cut against the norm makes your offspring less likely to reproduce. Over time, there must have been selection against really oddball preferences in our ancestral lines.

In any case, can you post the URLs of some photos of women you consider more attractive than Playboy models? If the Playboy models are not the penultimate in female perfection for you, what women are? I’m genuinely curious.

I read some survey that said 80% of women fail to reach orgasm regularly with their partners. I guess most men are lazy, and most women are not very assertive. Or maybe most women don’t care if they have orgasms. Of course if you look at 80% of women it’s pretty clear why most men wouldn’t feel like making much effort.

When I see people wasting time on Usenet, I suspect they are not like the guy in “The Bachelor.”

If modern science were completely wrong, it probably wouldn’t work as well as it does.

If you have some method of divination which consistently predicts the future with results better than chance, by all means go pick up your million bucks. It would be criminal for you to deprive the rest of humanity of your breakthrough discovery. That’s one reason why the Randi Prize is a safe challenge. If anybody can win the prize, the exposure alone would revolutionize all of human understanding and yield huge benefits.

Few people can correctly maintain the distinction between (a) what happened, and (b) their belief about what happened.

In general, the more people understand nature, the less natural they want to be.

In any case, if you know so much more about men than Hugh Hefner knows, are you making more money than Hef by selling your alternative magazine featuring photographs of average women?

For example, if I never read the news in print or watched televised news, I might not know the U.S. is fighting a war in Iraq. There has been no visible impact on my everyday life that I can think of apart from the news reports. My daily routine and the choices available to me seem to be exactly the same as during peacetime, and nobody from my immediate social circle is serving just now. The government has not imposed rationing. Every time I get on my bicycle, the roads are just as choked with gaswasters as they ever were. I see no indication that anyone around me is making any sort of wartime sacrifice. People like to read the news and get all emotionally aroused about politics, but when you turn off the news and go about your daily routines, how often are you personally affected by any concrete manifestations of all that political stuff?

Faith is an extremely destructive mental habit because it can blind you to real empirical insight—things you can never imagine, but can only observe by learning. A person who is stuck in a blind alley and refuses to back out cannot be a good inventor unless his first guess is extremely lucky.

The fact that McDonalds fills thousands of job openings does not indicate all those applicants consider burger-flipping to be the ideal job. Instead it probably indicates the applicants lack the skills to obtain jobs with higher pay and higher status. And I would guess a lot of burger-flippers certainly do care that they can’t get better jobs. A better way to estimate the desirability of menial jobs is to count the number of people who turn down high-status jobs in medicine, law, engineering, professional sports, entertainment, etc. to take menial jobs like flipping burgers.

In my everyday observation of ordinary men and the women they date, it appears almost every straight man selects a woman who is close to being the most conventionally attractive woman he can get. I don’t see patterns like this: a man dating a succession of women who are, say, “6’s” and then finally marrying a woman who is a “2.” Instead he probably marries a “6.” Odds are he would rather have a 7, 8, 9, or a 10. But he can’t attract one strongly enough to get good treatment from her, and his dating track record demonstrates this.

There is also a wide range of political opinion within the Republican party. There are Republicans who oppose the war in Iraq, Republicans who favor a woman’s right to abort her fetuses if she wants, Republicans who are openly gay, Republicans who are atheists, Republicans who are Muslims, and Republicans who are black. There might even be Republicans who recognize the best possible strategy to make America safer is to increase the gasoline tax, although I have yet to meet one. And yet despite all that variety of opinion within the Republican party you know there is something distinctly different between a vote for Bush and a vote for Kerry.

More often than not, sex is easy for (young) women to obtain and difficult for (most) men to obtain, starting from square zero. Thus it is staggeringly obvious that regardless of who wants sex “more” in some abstract sense, most men want sex with (young) women way more than most young women want sex with most men. Sure, once a woman finds a man who meets her 300 specific requirements, and she feels comfortable in their relationship, her sex drive might lumber out of dormancy and amount to something, but she reaches that state with so few men that in most of her encounters with men it’s as if she doesn’t have a sex drive at all (that they will ever detect).

By the time a woman is 70, odds are that hardly any men will want sex with her. If all the women in the world looked that bad, most men would not appear to want sex very much.

“Yankee guy” subjugated “Dixie guy” and told him to stop owning black people. Of course only the wealthy minority of Dixie guys actually owned slaves. Most of the Johnny Rebs died fighting for something they couldn’t even afford. What tools. It sucks to find yourself on the wrong side of history.

Of course every religion tries to cook up arguments about why their religion is special, but these arguments don’t work very well when all sides get to have their say. Most religions do best when they can quarantine their marks away from competing religions. Any time there is a sustained religious dialogue, the result is typically war. Because neither religion can prove it is right and the other religion is wrong. But they have to believe that or else there is no religion. A few people have tried in their mush-head way to claim all religions are equally true and valid, but that doesn’t hold water as long as rival religions keep murdering each other’s followers.

If women wanted sex as much as men do, the AIDS epidemic would be ripping through heterosexuals in the United States as fast as it ripped through gay men in the United States.

If you want to experience horrendous emotional and psychological damage, try working as a technical support representative for any small software company. At least in the sex industry you are selling a product that works, and satisfying the customer in many cases.

Easy money tends to have a corrupting influence, and this applies to entire industries, even to countries. For example, cigarette manufacturers have had trouble diversifying to other products because they find they have to work much harder to earn similar profits selling things that are not addictive. And on a national level, what will happen to Saudi Arabia when its petroleum gives out? Unless the Saudis come up with something else to sell, the world economy will spit them out as completely worthless. And I doubt you will shed a tear. The day will come when Saudi Arabia has to work for its keep, just like the rest of us. And that will be a big shock to them, just as it must be for an aging beauty when she wakes up to find she will actually have to start working, at one of those undesirable jobs she avoided while her looks provided a better option.

I happened to observe a public gathering of lesbians one time. I was amazed by their demographic oddity. Apart from one stunningly hot couple, the vast majority were collectively far less attractive than I would expect for a large group of similarly young women. Normally when I see a large concentration of young women (at a university, or outdoor festival, etc.) I notice quite a lot of eye candy. A woman whose looks put her in the dregs of her gender generally would have to select from the dregs of the opposite gender. For an ugly woman, that could be life-threatening. A man who isn’t attractive to many women may have to settle for a woman who is merely ugly; a woman who isn’t attractive to many men might have to settle for a man who is a violent sociopathic loser. So for a woman hit by the ugly stick, another woman is not a bad option.

Paycheck size makes a big difference in how a person feels about a particular kind of work. Imagine if you got paid $100,000/year to flip hamburgers. For that kind of money, a simple job would seem like a game. The work itself is not particular degrading; what’s degrading is the normally small paycheck.

Most people would probably quit their current jobs if they won the lottery jackpot and no longer needed to work, which indicates the need for the paycheck is a big motivator; but even so, few people could do something they truly hate for a modest paycheck. There has to be some other reward in there somewhere.

Every profession offers its tales of horror. Which is why they must also offer paychecks.

Women usually aren’t interested in jobs that are really dirty or dangerous. Ask the coal miners if they shed a tear for the poor exploited exotic dancers.

Political analogy: women are the “swing voters” when it comes to sex. Election campaigns don’t waste their time trying to persuade voters who already have strong opinions about a candidate. You could show John Kerry ads to a hard-core Bush supporter all day, every day, and as you know the ads wouldn’t make a dent. Or, conversely, you could watch George Bush ads for the rest of your life and they would only make you hate him more. All that campaign spending goes to competing for swing voters. Telling men not to have sex with women when they can is like trying to persuade you to vote Republican, or teaching a brick to sing: generally a waste of effort. It’s more productive for moralizers to focus on moralizing to women, who can be persuaded to say no to sex.

People believe whatever makes them feel good. For most automobile addicts, it feels good to believe they can just keep wasting gas like there’s no tomorrow. And that they can have their easy convenient transportation and world peace simultaneously.

Thought question for all the so-called thoughtful people out there: suppose the only way you could continue driving your automobile would be to have the U.S. military conduct a thorough ethnic cleansing operation throughout the Middle East. Would you choose to stop driving in protest (or even consider car-pooling), or would you find a way to rationalize the operation? Perhaps by blaming it on the politicians you elect to do your dirty work? At the rate we are going, I suspect we will face a choice something like that within the next decade. Of course it won’t happen all at once.

Not many attractive young women can earn more money by other means than they can earn by stripping/etc. Getting up to similar wages in “normal” careers usually takes a lot longer. But then those other careers typically last a lot longer as well. It makes sense for an attractive young woman to strip her way through university. Then when her looks begin to fade, she has trained her brain to pick up the load.

I haven’t seen a convincing creationist explanation for the consistently ungenerous natural world, supposedly created by a generous god. It’s as if god’s goal was to make us all cynical.

There might be some people who decide who to have sex with based on what magazines tell them. Are you one of those people? And how do you account for the failure of gay people to get the message? Forget about which women men are “supposed” to find attractive, a percentage of men shrug off a lifetime of social indoctrination and don’t find any women attractive.

Before getting too proud of your renunciation of high-mindedness, consider that proletarians never use the word “proletarian.”

It’s interesting to read an article on soc.singles—the monument to wasting time—that contains the phrase “but it really is a total waste of time” as if that is a reason not to do something.

Are you smart enough to grasp the connection between your own driving, and the distant slaughter that makes your driving possible?

It’s interesting to consider just how wretched the ability of humans to record events was in ancient times. Only a low percentage of adults could read or write. A sheet of papyrus cost the equivalent of $30 today, and the cost of ink and a scribe’s labor was many times higher. A single book had a real cost comparable to an automobile today. There were no reporters or scientists, no coroners, no one trained to evaluate claims of the paranormal. The few educated people had less understanding of basic science than the average high school graduate today. And even today masses of people get swept up in complete nonsense, such as the Roswell UFO story or the Jonestown mass suicide. The ancient world was a very odd place for God to reveal his plan for humans. There was little chance of getting a solid, indisputable record of exactly what went on.

Man’s only hope is to fail the test of faith by rejecting faith as the wrong way to think. Imagine if people in the year 1300 and ever since had all accepted things just the way they were. We wouldn’t even have names for all those diseases, much less any hope of curing them.

It’s quite an achievement, really, for the United States, where 82% of adults identify as “Christians,” to be as tolerant of other ideas as we are. A large number of U.S. citizens came here to escape religious persecution, and no particular sect gained an overwhelming market share, so they made the painful but ultimately beneficial decision to deny themselves the freedom to persecute those they disagree with. Then there is also the need to maintain a free flow of ideas to keep the whole science and technology thing going. Christians in the U.S. have made a real deal with the Devil there. They want to enjoy the material fruits of all those clever inventive godless atheists who corrupt the minds of youth in their infidel bastion universities by teaching them to think logically.

Who knows, maybe in heaven you get to take field trips to hell to check up on your old friends. You can tell them inspiring things like “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

All of us already have billions of years of experience with not existing (so to speak), so it’s hardly a stretch to imagine post-life is likely to be just like pre-life.

Most farmers have a certain amount of common sense. They understand that to make plants grow they have to till the soil, plant seeds, get some proper weather, and so on. They cannot just believe their crops will grow and expect their belief alone will accomplish anything. There may be some primitive peoples who believed that, but they quickly starved themselves into extinction. The survivors could entertain a lot of nonsense (such as the belief they needed to sacrifice their children to make their crops grow), but only as long as they still did the things they actually needed to do. Arabs say “Trust Allah, but tie your camel.” They’re halfway to being logical.

Read Darwin (and his modern interpreters Dawkins and Dennett) to understand why all living creatures not only have self-bias, but must have it. You will not learn what you are by reading the Bible, because the primitives who wrote the Bible did not know.

If a religion becomes tolerant of competing ideas, that’s like a herd of zebra becoming tolerant of lions.

If you have the good fortune to die of old age, I hope for your sake by then technologists have provided worthwhile artificial comanions, so you can avoid the sad fate of living out your final decrepit years alone that awaits 4 out of 5 women. Or worse, living out your final decrepit years with a decrepit old man.

Roadside litter is a strange psychological consequence of automobiles, particularly since the automobile does all the work of carrying its load, and has plenty of spare capacity to carry a small amount of litter to the next waste receptacle. But for some reason, when people get cars they turn into pigs. Funny how you never see that on automobile commercials. The automobile industry spends billions of dollars to teach everyone that beautiful people drive showroom-quality cars on perfect roads through pristine areas of great scenic beauty. Wouldn’t it be interesting if automobile commercials reflected reality? Then you’d see more fat ugly loud people with fast-food wrappers strewn about, heaving empty beer bottles on Jim’s lawn as they speed by. And you’d see radical Muslim Saudi sheiks sending their windfall profits to Iraq to kill U.S. soldiers.

How’s this for a sitcom plot: “Office Space”-type worker gets last assignment: training Indian replacement. Then he’s out of work, can’t find a job, grows more despondent, hits bottom, calls suicide hotline, hears cheery Indian accent on the other end due to budget cuts in social services.

Do you believe Satan inspired all the other religions in the world besides yours? And if yes, why did he inspire so many? Wouldn’t he get farther by inspiring just one false religion, so the various false religions would not have to waste their resources fighting each other when they could all be ganging up on the one true religion? Look at how the Hindus and Muslims take turns blowing each other up in India. Why would Satan waste resources fighting himself when he could be fighting Christ? I mean come on. Anybody could do a better job of fighting Christ than Satan. All he had to do was inspire the same false religion everywhere at once, instead of making it look as if all those religions resulted from isolated ignorant people using their imaginations at random. Suppose, for example, that the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Polynesians, and all those other thousands of cultures had all independently come up with the same phony religion. Then there could hardly be any doubt there was something supernatural at work there. That religion would be FAR more believable than some religion that originated in just one culture. With all those cultures united under one religion, Christianity would never have stood a chance.

Fashion models don’t have to be average any more than Olympic athletes or billionaire entrepreneurs are average.

You have emotions because historically they have proven to be good for your genes. And when you have served your genetic purpose, your genes will cast you onto the junkpile of evolution to be recycled for further genetic experiments.

In a sense, it is indeed “monstrous” that we are merely survival machines for our genes, but we can draw some comfort in being the first generation of survival machines to have a solid chance at understanding what we are. This is not to say many survival machines will have the necessary humility!

I have explained at length that every religion feels better than truth. Hence the popularity of religion.

It doesn’t matter how many times you read the Bible, how many hymns you sing, how much money you dump in the offering plate, how many sermons you sit through, or how many souls you save. If you have anything resembling a functioning brain, you are still going to have those brief episodes when logic slips out of the leg irons and runs around telling you the whole business is not adding up.

Whenever you disagree with someone, you are claiming your opponent is either (a) lying, or (b) mistaken.

I don’t see anybody calling fire down from heaven to demonstrate who is the real God. The only “proof” any religious person offers is some variation on “It’s true because I said so.” And that’s why you need faith: not just to believe in those claims, but even more importantly you need thousands of times more faith to disbelieve the thousands of other competing claims. You have to override the consistent evidence of your senses that millions of religious people chant thousands of mutually-contradictory claims and all of them have nothing to back up their claims except their faith.

Most millionaires live well below their means. That’s how they get to be millionaires.

If your ancestors had had the freedom you have now, you probably wouldn’t be here. Not that it matters at this point.

I’ve said (and written) a lot of things in my life. A person who selectively presented bits and pieces could probably make it seem like I was for or against just about anything.

Bottom line: if people can use the words of Jesus to justify slavery just as easily as other people can use the same words to oppose slavery, it’s pretty clear “the words of Jesus” don’t mean much at all. The real meaning is the product of whoever is using those words to justify whatever he has in mind at the moment. The words themselves are obviously vague enough and flexible enough to support diametric opposites like slavery and abolition. If Jesus had wanted to make himself understood on important issues like slavery, I think he could have gotten his message across. For example, plenty of people were able to write when Jesus was alive, and he knew how to read. He could have written his message down carefully and unamibiguously in a way that didn’t leave everything up to the reader, or he could have dictated his message to scribes. But if he had done that, his religion would probably have died out. Christianity has spread so far in part because like the AIDS virus it is capable of evolving rapidly to compete in new environments.

I know women love to portray sex as some hugely complicated mysterious thing, but that’s SEDUCTION, not SEX. Figuring out how to get a woman to have sex can be infinitely complicated and mysterious, not to mention exasperating, but once she’s finally ready to go it gets fairly simple.

To win elections, politicians have to be good at getting elected. That’s different than doing the job after they are in office.

I’ve read the Bible from cover to cover at least seven times and I never found anything in the Bible that told me to ignore or equivocate about this verse while paying attention to that verse.

Since I don’t see too many one-eyed Christians, it’s pretty clear most Christians believe some of Jesus’ words are safe to ignore.

All my days are nice, for I am guided by logic.

If you think nature’s way is best, turn off your heat.

I saw the manatees at the Cincinnati Zoo. My first reaction was to doubt human imagination and wishful thinking could be up to the challenge of mistaking manatees for mermaids, but then I remembered religion.

All the money in the world in the year 1865 couldn’t have purchased a flat-screen TV. The value of money depends on the available technology. Money is worth a lot more today than it was in 1865 because technology has improved and there are many more valuable things you can buy. Which is to say, money today has more ways to tickle your brain (i.e., stimulate the release of dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens) than it did in the past.

It’s still comforting to know where things are going, even if I don’t live long enough to see them. It’s sort of like witnessing the Black Death in the year 1348, and taking some comfort in the knowledge (which you wouldn’t have had back then, but still) that someday a cheap pill would cure the disease. It doesn’t help you then, but it kind of cuts the problem down to size conceptually speaking, so you don’t have to imagine a God to deal with your sense of hopelessness.

Without logic you could not survive one day. For example, you might suddenly develop faith that you can fly, and step confidently off a tall building. It’s amusing (or perhaps painful) to watch those who practice selective logic, as they lurch between appealing to logic or pissing on it, as it suits them.

If you went to a restaurant and ordered a meal, would you want the waiter to take your order literally or metaphorically?

If God dislikes fornication, why did he make it a successful reproductive strategy? Don’t you think God should have rigged the game rules to select against fornication instead of favoring it?

Speaking of truth, if you would look to the source with the best proven track record—science—you would learn the perfectly reasonable explanation for the otherwise puzzling fact that full, lasting emotional satisfaction normally evades humans. In contrast, you won’t find any intellectually satisfying answers in ancient writings arbitrarily assembled centuries later by committee into books by men who themselves had not the foggiest notion of what humans actually are.

You should especially start to worry as advances in science and historical scholarship continue to discover new errors and contradictions in your Bible. If that’s your roadmap to Eternity, it should at least stand up in the here and now. If you were going to follow a roadmap in a trip across the country, would you trust the map if it contained errors about your own street?

I’ve met a few ugly geniuses, and I can tell you this: not many people envy them or desire their company. In contrast, stupid beauties are always popular, as long as their beauty holds up. Granted, if you compare them at age 55, the ugly genius might be better off, since both of them are ugly at that point.

If somebody ran on the platform of increasing the gasoline tax until the U.S. wins the war on terrorism, say by the $10/gal it would take to improve U.S. security, I would vote for him even it it deprived the second-best guy of my vote. Just so whoever analyzes the results would say, “Wow, 3% of voters feel strongly enough about this to actually help the guy they despise most.” Not that I think 3% of Americans are rational enough to understand what it would take to win the war we chose to fight.

Speech is fascinatingly less free now that the Civil Rights Movement has somehow conferred religious sanctity on every ethnic heritage and observable behavior trend.

I think the tsunami is a wonderful opportunity to get God into a wrath management counseling class. God needs professional help finding a safe outlet for his wrath, before he harms himself or others again. If you are a friend of God, please mention this the next time you talk to him. And then explain to us why you worship such a wrathful bully. Mere humans can learn to manage their anger. Why can’t God?

God’s only limits are the limits of our imaginations. If you can imagine useful things to say, you are perfectly free to imagine you got them from God.

You feel you are right and the Hindu is wrong, and the Hindu equally feels he is right and you are wrong. Basing your beliefs on how you feel is no better than picking stocks by throwing darts at a page from the Wall Street Journal. Actually it’s much worse, because most of those stocks are worth something.

Anyone who studies nature in depth is hard-pressed to find evidence of any sort of a loving God who shares our personal goals of survival and reproduction. Instead it is obvious that most of the time nature is just indifferent to us, and if we don’t understand how nature works, we can get into serious trouble fast. Nature is not a friendly, loving place. Step outside in January and see how long you can survive out there without elaborate technology to fight off God’s plan for you. Suppose you had never met your parents, and you found yourself living in a house they left for you. In this house you found all sorts of elaborate booby-traps with live explosives, hurtling projectiles, pitfalls, boulders rolling down staircases when you step in the wrong spot, etc. Would you picture your parents as kind and loving toward you? Would you feel welcome in your house?

In other news, a Newsweek article mentioned there is a traffic jam of beatified Roman Catholics awaiting elevation to sainthood because it’s getting harder to document the requisite posthumous miracles. Fewer physicians today, for example, are willing to attribute a “miraculous” recovery from illness to intercession on the patient’s behalf secured by prayers to a dead person. A growing percentage of physicians today are reluctant to go on record as claiming science will never be able to explain a particular recovery which might seem “miraculous” from the perspective of our current ignorance.

Perhaps you could initiate a class-action lawsuit against God. Given that God does not exist and therefore cannot appear in court, you could name all those who claim to speak for God (or who invoke God to lend authority to their claims) as co-defendents.

Imagine the SPAM/viruses/spyware/malware we will have when computers become actually intelligent. We may end up creating a new class of super-pests in addition to our super-servants. Dystopian science fiction likes to portray killer robots that run around blowing people up, but a more likely dystopian scenario might be that computers will just waste all of our time. People might spend all their time trying to get their computers to work and keep working.

When your cat dies, you get another cat. What’s the point in depriving yourself of the type of companionship you enjoy? Going a year without a cat is not going to help you feel better, if you are a person who enjoys cats. If your car dies, do you refrain from supporting terrorism for the next year? Of course not. A gaswasting terrorist-supporting automobile addict goes straight out and buys another gaswasting terrorist-supporting automobile. If he or she can afford it, he or she hardly skips a beat. Getting with another woman soon after the breakup is the best way to gain the perspective a man needs at that moment. If he just sits around and mopes, all he can think about is the woman who just left. When he gets another woman, suddenly he has a whole bunch of other things to think about. At the very least, he proves to himself there are other fish in the sea.

To give girly advice to a man who just lost a relationship is like telling women to pee standing up.

The gap between rhetoric and reality is large; hence the popularity of rhetoric.

It’s interesting that mystics from different religions all have visions that conveniently show them their respective gods.

Do you have a specific opinion about what you will experience after you die? Does your opinion differ from that of, say, Osama bin Laden?

The degree of cruelty in the tsunami disaster is beyond comprehension. In many disasters, one can argue that the victims didn’t have much hope of escaping, but most of the tsunami victims could easily have walked to higher ground in a few minutes to a few hours, and at least stayed alive (with the loss of their possessions). So God could have simply warned people, and avoided killing so many so unnecessarily. A bit of critical thinking about the natural world makes it obvious that if there is a God, he/she/it does not share my values. We are talking about a completely alien intelligence there. The impulse of a normal human would be to help people and avoid murdering 150,000 of them. Even if there was some utilitarian argument for killing them, could you do it?

For the first 15 billion years of the Universe, I did not think at all. As far as I can remember, it was not very interesting.

Insurance types talk about “moral hazard.” When people feel protected from some peril, they tend to get lax about it. Religions teach people they have a God or gods to protect them, or to give them a better life when they lose their current life. Certainly this causes people to care less for their own safety. An atheist who has no reason to believe he gets another life beyond the one he has now has a strong incentive to take care of his life.

I have dealt with crises both as a “believer” and as a “non-believer” and I can personally assure you it is much easier to deal with crises when you don’t have the added burden of a religious belief system riddled with absurdities. A “non-believer” doesn’t have to waste energy trying to “make sense” of a disaster. Religion sets people up to expect special treatment. When they don’t get it, they feel let down. They feel betrayed. They wonder if they sinned and they are being punished.

Australopithecines made no detectable improvements in their stone tools for one million years. Boggles the mind, actually. Try to imagine a world in which the smartest creatures have some inventions, but never invent anything better, over countless generations. What sort of thought lives might they have had? Humans today are always thinking about improvement. Australopithecines must not have been able to.

Religious people tend to respond to calamities by experiencing crises of faith. They want to know why their various gods have forsaken them despite their years of devotion. They struggle to come to terms with the broken promises of their religions. Atheists have no such difficulty, because atheists understand nature is at best indifferent to our existence. Atheists don’t feel betrayed by their imaginary friends because they don’t have any imaginary friends. Atheists expect nature to kick them in the ass. Especially if they have studied Darwin.

Americans are generous with handouts to tsunami victims, but the idea of sending jobs to the same parts of the world is a political hot potato.

Dragging brains around is a stupid way to move information. That’s so 100,000 years ago.

Once your basic survival needs are met (food, water, shelter), everything else is nothing more than a quest for pleasant bits. I.e., those interesting sensations humans are genetically programmed to crave. Someday, when computers get better, people won’t need families and children to get their interesting bits.

‘Tis better to have loved and been laughed at than to have never loved at all. Which reminds me, I can never understand why women have sex with a guy and then call him a “loser.” Even Halle Berry did this. Objection, your honor: a man who has sex with Halle Berry does not satisfy any meaningful definition of “loser.” If that guy is a “loser,” what are all the kajillions of men Halle doesn’t even notice? Those kajillions of guys are aspiring to be the guy Halle calls a “loser.” Which makes him a winner if you ask them.

Would Bush have won if he had not invaded Iraq? No incumbent U.S. President has lost a re-election bid in wartime. Perhaps Bush is not as stupid as he appears. Is it a fair election if the challenger does not also get to start a war?

In one case, a woman I hadn’t seen for years had to identify herself to me first. I guess I was somehow still recognizable to her. I tried not to be rude by staring too much, but it was sobering to say the least. It’s simultaneously fascinating and disturbing how a woman progresses from “hot” to “not hot” and yet (sometimes) remains recognizable as the “same” woman. Something similar happens to men, but I don’t have much interest in scrutinizing them.

The hilarious thing is, no matter how much obvious evidence a woman detects indicating her worth to men is diminishing, she’s still a complete sucker for almost any variation on the old line, “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.”

I think a lot of the apparent concern women have for their appearance is misplaced. A woman’s understanding that it matters is correct; but her belief that she can do much about it is usually incorrect. Like all those old fat women who go to beauty shops. When they come out, they are still astronomically more hideous than an actually attractive young woman at her grubbiest.

Granted, I fully agree that as women get older, it becomes progressively sillier for them to carry on as if they can still be worth looking at. So it’s “good” (in the sense of making the best of a bad situation) when older women change their priorities to age-appropriate things such as tending to their gardens and housecats. But old habits die hard. It must be difficult to transition from being young and celebrated for your pulchritude to being sexually invisible. Your whole relationship to other people must change. For men, getting older is not quite as traumatizing because we’re always sexually invisible for the most part anyway. Those rare episodes of feeling like one is interesting to an attractive woman simply become even more rare.

Television itself is kind of a clumsy technology to provide artificial companionship. It’s low-res, non-tactile, and completely non-interactive other than giving you the ability to change channels, but millions of people are already addicted to it. Usenet functions similarly for socially defective people like you and me. Why do we spend so many hours typing these nonsense articles to distant strangers? Because all of us crave interacting with some form of intelligence, even if it’s reduced to just sequences of letters on a screen.

Why do you expect George W. Bush to behave better than God? God obviously doesn’t give a shit about the tsunami victims. Why should Bush? Wouldn’t Bush be second-guessing God if he tries to feed the displaced survivors? Maybe God wants those people to starve. They will if we tell them to pray their way out of their trouble. Why do you cut God all kinds of slack as if he is the village idiot whose dodderings and bumblings and failures and accidental cruelties are to be endlessly excused?

And speaking of exes, it’s interesting to live in one place for most of one’s adult life and to occasionally cross paths with a ex-girlfriend or an ex-attempted girlfriend, and see just how sadistically cruel time can be by middle age to what was once the tender flower of their youth. Perhaps that sign in the kitchen should include a mirror to show how far the owner has deteriorated. If not yet, then soon enough.

Theists love to lecture atheists on how you can’t have absolute morality if you don’t believe in God. Clearly, theists who lecture like that are either too stupid to realize (or too dishonest to admit) that they reject absolute morality when they make excuses for God’s evil actions or God’s evil failures to act.

All available evidence indicates your belief in Jesus is just another religion. What can you do that all those other religions can’t do? They jabber incoherently; so do you. They experience emotions that they interpret as evidence of their respective gods; so do you. They fail to produce one shred of evidence for any sort of objective miracle or supernatural event; you also fail to produce any evidence. They all claim everyone else’s disagreement with them is evidence that everyone else is deceived by something or someone; and so do you. Why do I need a God who won’t tell me when a tsunami is about to kill me and I need to walk a few blocks?

Reminds me of how the Creationists call Evolution a “religion.” I guess if your whole world view is based on a lie, lying comes naturally.

Actually I got better results with girls in church than anywhere else. Church is about the only thing I’ve done where the sex ratio was in my favor. And where the charlatan in the pulpit constantly warns the Bible chicks to avoid the non-Bible guys. Do the math. Bible chicks can’t find enough Bible guys, and where are they going to look? Say, why do you suppose churches have more chicks than guys? Do you think maybe guys are, on average, just a little more logical than chicks?

Many inappropriate activities become socially acceptable, even marketable, when someone sets them to music. It’s a scary thing to face life without a soundtrack.

If you want to have sex with some people more than with others, and if your preferences resemble those of your group, that is how the sexual hierarchy forms.

Have you experienced mutual love with an insect? If you imagine God to be responsible for creating the entire universe, that makes God much farther beyond humans than humans are above insects. It’s hard for me to relate to an insect as an equal. What egomania could lead you to imagine that something on the scale of a universal creator would care about something as negligible as you? The answer, of course, is your perfectly normal amount of human egomania and self-absorption. Your genes have programmed your brain to take itself very, very seriously. You can imagine, without blushing, that a Universal Creator should take an interest in you and treat you like a peer. Yes, I know your received wisdom assures you the all-powerful God cares deeply about you. Some cultures have gone even farther than that; they have claimed their God cares MORE about them than about various foreigners. Given that humans also appear to have an instinctive xenophobia, that element of received wisdom usually finds a receptive audience.

Suppose you understood the exact molecular mechanisms that cause a pedophile to experience powerful pedophile urges. Would your understanding of the pedophile cause you to respect and appreciate the pedophile? I don’t think understanding makes love any more likely. Often it’s easier to love someone when you are blissfully ignorant about who they really are. You may have noticed the first three months of a romantic relationship are by far the easiest and most enjoyable. It only becomes “work” as you learn more about the person you are banging.

As to whether religious knowledge is a productive way to obtain knowledge about how nature works, well—one only has to look around one’s house and see how many of those clever artifacts came from any religion.

You just persuade all the footballers, painters, and card sharks to change their rules. Nature seems less amenable to persuasion.

Why do you suppose men tend to become somewhat more successful with women as they gain experience with them? Part of this is a man learning what not to say.

Intellectuals have generally avoided direct confrontation with religion, but now that religion is getting more confrontational, more intellectuals will begin perceiving religion to be a problem requiring a response. Information is the enemy of religion, so religions do well to stay under the radar if they can, to avoid having their claims subjected to any sort of serious logical analysis. But fundamentalist memes are like moths drawn to the flame: they cannot resist the urge to meddle where they aren’t welcome.

I have dated women with mental problems, and in every case their abnormal behavior was obvious quite early on. Had I been foolish enough to marry any of them, I could hardly blame anyone else for my own denial of the obvious. Much less could I expect to get paid handsomely for it.

Osama developed his beliefs the same way you developed yours—by hearing and chanting them enough times. Not by logically inferring those beliefs from things we all know to be true.

If Vedic science were real science, it would properly describe suffering not as something evil in itself, but rather as a behavior-altering signal our emotional brains construct by interpreting our relationship with our environment, moment by moment, and evaluating the probable threats posed to our prospects for getting our genes into the next generation.

How will we know if women ever gain the ability to read men’s minds? That’s easy: we will see couples strolling the mall, with the women angrily kicking their men about every fifteen seconds, depending on the demographic profile of the other mall patrons. After the first day or two, women might tire of kicking and purchase shock collars. It would be especially funny to observe the effects of such complete transparency on 40-ish divorced women with daughters just into their prime years of young adulthood, when they (the 40-ish women) discover the men they are dating to have desires actually more in keeping with sociobiology and common sense, but unrealizable due to their own advancing age and lack of compensatory traits.

Few people get everything they want in life. The trick to remaining somewhat happy is to find pleasure in the things you can get. For example, this lazy indulgent wife who wants more material luxuries should understand that her husband is probably equally frustrated that he doesn’t get to have sex with all the Victoria’s Secret lingerie models. He probably does not get all the sex he wants from his own wife. But he deals with it, by trying not to think about what he doesn’t have and instead focusing on what he does have.

Men want sex; women want to be sexy. That’s our basic sociobiological programming. As long as men want sex enough, women don’t really have to want sex constantly. They only have to be just open enough to the idea of sex to be persuaded by the right suitor. But to attract enough suitors to get the right one, women must be sexy. Women feel urges to be sexy all the time because their genes “know” you can never predict when the high-quality sperm donor will show up. Sociobiological programming works mostly subconsciously, so women do not necessarily need a conscious plan to maximize their reproductive success by trying to be sexy. It’s enough for women to feel instinctive urges to look their best at all times.

Do you think about your physical appearance when, say, a housecat stares at you? My cat likes to stare at people. But nobody starts checking their clothes and hair as a result. A staring housecat represents no potential consequences for your reproductive success. Your subconscious mind assigns low emotional priority to the housecat’s stares. Impressing the housecat will not get your genes into the next generation.

How much would I have to change my hair before you would want to sleep with me?

Your conscious mind is a fairly recent evolutionary development. Our genes still mostly dictate our behavior through our subconscious urges and emotions, as animal genes have been doing for millions of years. I’m writing to your conscious mind right now. Your conscious mind thinks it is running the show. Your genes “don’t mind” if your conscious mind thinks that, as long as you do what they tell you. Such as check your appearance regularly in a mirror, and react emotionally when someone stares at you.

Obviously when grandma cares about her appearance, she is going through the motions in a Cargo Cult kind of way. The real “Navy” shipped out decades earlier, and there is no more “Cargo,” but she still longs for her salad days when her appearance and grooming had real reproductive significance. So she goes to the “beauty” shop and rearranges the deck chairs on her Titanic.

Failure for a talented person is not the same as failure for an average person. Donald Trump has gone bankrupt too, but he didn’t have to go in for credit counseling.

The Bush people sell an interesting political product: tax breaks for the wealthy in exchange for some respect tossed to the Bible Thumping masses. It’s an updated version of the old Divine Right argument. Paris Hilton and Tom Brady benefit from a secularized manifestation of the same odd human tendency: that craving to worship something.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Fundamentalists should apply the same principle to church. Instead they sally forth with heads full of peculiar ideas incubated in their system of closed minds and find the world less receptive than the choir was. It used to be the liberal media just laughed at them. Now they win elections. How did that happen? Imagine if Saturday Night Live tried to bring back the Church Lady character now. The whole cast would end up at Camp X-Ray.

Automobiles have killed and maimed more Americans than all of America’s wars. But for some reason, automobile deaths don’t “count.”

Almost every safety measure of any kind is in place only in response to some previous tragedy. For some reason, people cannot be persuaded to allocate resources on safety until they learn the need the hard way. In any case, among professional geologists, “everybody knew” the Indian Ocean is vulnerable to tsunamis, but professional geologists do not choose how people will spend their money.

Why do you suppose the Bible says it’s wrong to even try to communicate with the dead? Do you wonder that maybe God has something he needs to hide?

My intellectual history explains the impotence of your arguments, and why it is so simple for me to expose the myriad logical contradictions in the nonsense you have passively absorbed yet refuse to logically consider. The “arguments” you present are effective only against an undefended brain. I know how to refute all your arguments because that’s exactly what I had to do to get from where you are to where I am now. Your mistake is to assume I might have missed something—which is, by the way, how you are making a fallacy known as the “argument from ignorance.”

All my assertions follow logically from things you can easily observe and cannot reasonably doubt. In contrast, religious people make unfounded statements and demand that you believe them without any proof. I know it’s hard for you to conceive of anyone actually behaving honestly, but pay attention and I will continue to demonstrate. I don’t expect you to believe something just because I said it. I expect you to evaluate my claims logically.

Just on the face of it, having 72 virgins sure sounds a lot better than walking around on streets of gold. Who cares what the streets are made of? What will you do, dig up the gold and sell it? Sell it to who, and for what? I’ve seen gold; it doesn’t appeal to me personally. I only value it because other people are stupid enough to trade things I value for it. Your religion promises a heaven that appeals to emotions of materialistic greed. What about people who find the prospect of plundering 72 virgins more enticing?

If you only have one book, assembled exclusively by members of one given religion who all had a personal stake in the advancement of their religion, then you only have “one witness.” You have the religious equivalent of the Tobacco Institute. Only a fool believes everything the Tobacco Institute publishes without checking all its claims carefully against other independent evidence.

While the entertainment industry likes to extol the pleasures of love once you’ve got it, there is less emphasis on the mechanics of how you actually go about getting it. It’s like fantasizing about being a concert pianist without any thought for the years of daily toil and practice it takes to be able to pound those keys in such elaborate patterns.

At least 999 out of 1000 times, the education system is sending the correct message when it tries to discourage the objectively unqualified. And that clears the way for that 1 person in 1000 who can succeed anyway. What if he had to compete for attention with 999 incompetents who were flooding auditions and alienating audiences?

Most people who are famous are famous because they have some rare compensatory strengths. “Famous” often means “rich” and/or “powerful” which in turn means having the luxury to order other people to correct for the famous person’s defects. The average obscure person typically has no such strengths and no staff of professional helpers and therefore has less ability to mask those defects. Which is to say, if you can’t write best-selling novels or run a country, it’s hard to get away with being an idiot who can’t spell.

Having objective standards does destroy the confidence of dullards and laggards, but that’s the whole point.

People who put their ego first usually just end up as eccentric oddballs, unless they have some extraordinary talent that lets them get away with it. It’s funny when average people think they can carry on like movie stars.

Imagine when everyone’s mobile phone comes with an HDTV camera. Then we will have live, high-definition, saturation coverage of every terrorist nuisance attack, the better to horrify the global public.

It would be interesting to do a placebo study: give sugar pills to test subjects and tell them they are taking a medication known to produce weight gain as a side effect. Then use hidden cameras to monitor the subjects’ increase in doughnut intake.

The fact that most men are immediately and viscerally stimulated by the sight of teams of opposing men carrying and pursuing an object made of animal skin suggests at least that particular sport is a kabuki-like substitute for subsistence hunting and plundering the opposing village’s hunting party.

So, if the difficulty of dieting is an argument against dieting, why is the vastly greater difficulty of taking fat acceptance propaganda seriously not an argument against fat acceptance propaganda?

I guarantee that anybody who eats the same foods I eat, in amounts scaled to their lean body mass, and exercises the same way I exercise, again scaled to their lean body mass, and sustained consistently for several years, will not be obese. It just isn’t physically possible. Saying “no” to excess food, and going out and having fun on a bicycle, are hardly “terrible things.” By “guarantee” I mean I will wager up to $10,000 at 1:1 odds for a suitably refereed test of my claim. That is, if anybody eats and exercises just as I do, scaled to their lean body mass, for a suitably long period (say, one year), I will wager $10,000 that the test subject will not progress toward obesity if the subject was lean at the start; or if the subject was obese at the start of the test, the subject will have lost substantial amounts of bodyfat by the end of one year (possibly not enough to eliminate all excess weight in an initially extremely obese subject, but certainly enough to show the way to success if the subject continues to do what I do). By “suitably refereed” I mean there must be no way for the subject to sneak extra food or slack on the prescribed exercise. That could make the test tough to arrange because gluttons are experts at sneaking extra food and slacking on exercise. It would almost certainly be necessary to put the test subject into a camp in which supervisors tightly control the food allowance.

The vast majority of morbidly obese people suffer from something like a kind of mental illness, brought on by the enormous cognitive dissonance resulting from the messages they constantly receive from their bodies and from their culture about what their behavioral choices (namely, eating too much and taking it too easy) are doing to them. This is what makes obese people “touchy” about this “subject.” The subject itself is hardly touchy. Any person not suffering from gluttony is able to discuss the subject without experiencing much anxiety.

Fat acceptance is an Internet joke. The first time people hear about fat acceptance, they say “You have got to be kidding me.”

Embarrassing a person in public also helps a lesson stick. This is, in fact, the sociobiological purpose of our “embarrassment gene.” People with normal emotions feel a surge of embarrassment when they make some huge public gaffe, and they remember those lessons for years. This is an evolved mental adaptation that enables humans to form elaborate cultures. We are genetically programmed to want to fit in.

There is no mistaking the average woman for a Playmate of the Month. How then, would “degrading” the Playmate of the Month reflect in any way on the average woman?

If all the customers only had one beer, the bar would not stay in business. So you’ve got a fallacy of composition there. The light drinkers are essentially freeloading on the heavy drinkers who keep the bar in business. If it wasn’t for the heavy drinkers, there wouldn’t be any bar for the light drinkers to enjoy. Thus it’s “quite possible” to enjoy a beer at the local without getting drunk and without being a drunk, but it’s not possible for everyone to drink responsibly and have bars like the current ones to drink in. It’s also possible to be an honest lawyer, but the 97% of crooked lawyers give the honest 3% a bad name. Similarly, it’s possible to be a Muslim without being a terrorist, and a Catholic priest without being a pedophile. But there are things about the structural reality of bars, the legal profession, Islam, and the Catholic priesthood which give rise repeatedly to those problematic behaviors, and which may, despite protestations to the contrary, be “essential” in the sense that if you made the changes necessary to completely stamp out the bad behaviors, the respective institutions would be so fundamentally altered as to have had their historic identity obliterated. That is, if you found a way to make Islam unappealing to terrorists, the legal profession unappealing to lying crooks, the Catholic priesthood unappealing to gay pedophiles, and bars unappealing to drunks, you would basically have to destroy what each of those things is now.

Looking stupid has always been a good way to get laughs. And there is a solid sociobiological reason for that.

It’s not shallow to react negatively to disrespect. A sloppy writer disrespects the reader. Through sloppy writing the writer implicitly demands the reader to work harder so the writer can take it easy. It’s like leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. The reader has to mentally clean up inept writing by translating the misspelled words into their correct versions to understand them.

If you don’t like the way your various statements make people react, then make different statements.

I recall reading once in a college paper a personal ad from someone purporting to be a female student who basically said she was looking for a wealthy man to be her boyfriend and pay her tuition. I don’t know if the ad was for real or whether any man took the bait, but was there anything illegal about her ad?

The world is a situation that makes most people look stupid.

Most women need porn like most men need tampons. Are tampons a “boon” to men?

I can’t think of too many successful products that require history lessons to appreciate.

By the time robots get smart enough to sort garbage, they will be singing the song “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

I’m not saying women will necessarily care about how many other women’s lives they ruin by out-competing them for the most desirable men, but with the proper presentation a sufficiently skilled presenter might at least elicit some amusing cognitive dissonance. People should be aware when they screw over their competitors. The comforting delusion that there is someone out there for everyone is just that (is there someone for the woman-beating schizophrenic?). In reality, some people make better partners for more people than others, because most people want similar traits in a partner (e.g., a partner who doesn’t beat you, and so on). There aren’t nearly enough of those better partners to go around.

You can be held responsible for anything, given the existence of someone with enough power to hold you responsible.

Fat acceptors say 97% of diets “fail,” which is their code way of saying 97% of fat gluttons are unable to restrain their urges to eat too much and take it easy.

To say you enjoy something when in fact you only enjoy a tiny specialized highly constrained fraction of it is misleading. If someone says “I enjoy fishing,” someone else would probably think that means fishing in a lot of different places. If it really means fishing in just one spot, one should specify that.

When you are old and ugly and bitter, pause to reflect on how well some people manage to tolerate a lifetime of looking like crap.

A person who hates being stereotyped could not coexist with humans. I find it convenient that I don’t have to explain every last detail about myself to every last person I meet because most people are able to generalize correctly about some things from a few obvious clues. One reason we hate our stupid computers is because they do not stereotype us at all. The computer treats everyone equally, and everyone is not equal.

How can a person be “too” serious about some of the deepest and most intense human desires? We’re talking about genetic survival here. Most women instinctively understand the seriousness of guarding their eggs.

Given that the courts generally punish men in proportion to their wealth (but not too progressively), the best way for a man to be a jerk is to be either very rich or very poor. Guys in the middle get squeezed the hardest, because they have enough money to keep the women who exploit them off welfare, but not enough money to not notice the loss.

Hookers might be a viable option if you lived in a society that did not stigmatize hookers and their clients. But I think there are compelling sociobiological reasons that make such a Losertopia unrealizable, currently at least.

I have a theory that when a human is genetically programmed to crave a certain type of sensory stimulation, he’s not going to be too happy unless he experiences it. The good news, in theory, is that the sensory signal is all that matters, not its actual source. The bad news is that the human brain is exceptionally discerning when it comes to spotting fakes, because our genetic survival depends on it. But the human brain is not infinitely discerning, and technology might someday fool it.

Age helps, but not when you need it.

“Before you say ‘I do’, talk to us.” I’ve seen advertisements from lawyers, but never for marital risk prevention. Could it be lawyers would rather not warn the marks, so they can charge them more money after they have gotten in too deep? Or do lawyers know it would be a waste of time even to try warning the headstrong ignorant marks?

Almost anybody with specialized knowledge about anything that matters finds the general level of ignorance about that subject astounding.

Thermodynamically harder means less profitable.

Look at all the road rage between drivers. Drivers get road rage because driving cars is basically a violent activity. In contrast, bicyclists generally wave at each other on the road.

If you don’t settle, some other woman has to.

An even more excellent way to torment fat people is to be a tall, young, attractive blonde woman. Just show up, and by your very desirable and unattainable presence, rub it in to all the fatties what they cannot be (if they are fat women) or cannot have (if they are fat men). Of course you don’t need to make any extra effort to inflict pain on them. Your very nature already twists the knife enough times. There is also a huge sociobiological risk in being an overtly confrontational woman. The evolutionary psychology of women accordingly favors surreptitious competition. Just crush your competitors by being prettier than them, and don’t rile them with unnecessary gloating—even better, put up a diversionary screen of disses against those who do gloat. And bat those eyelashes in classic little Ms. Innocent style. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

Ad hominem arguments will always be popular because they will never stop working. That is, until genetic engineering makes people much better than they are now.

Marilyn Monroe once said she knew she had something special at age 8. She climbed up a tree, and four boys came to help her down. A beautiful woman gets reminded of her special status every day, as long as her looks hold up. The real test is how she handles the day when her looks fade.

It’s so tiring to read people dropping hints about something left and right and then clumsily trying to hide their tracks by denying any interest in the public opinion they tried so hard to cultivate.

Pretty girls are best left for the properly qualified.

Why do the people who use this rhetoric [of infinite resources] contradict themselves by whining about government regulation? If resources are infinite, then no amount of government regulation should be a problem, as long as the regulation is finite.

The world disapproves of fat gluttons about like it disapproves of johns. Well, actually the world is somewhat nicer to fat gluttons—the world lets them eat all the food they can buy, and then punishes them for getting fat.

Check out the language people use. Feminists say prostitutes are “victimized,” which is their way of saying some men are so freaking unattractive that they “victimize” women just by having sex with them.

If shortages stimulate human creativity, why do conservatives complain so much about taxes and government regulation? Shouldn’t conservatives welcome the innovation-boosting artificial problems imposed on them by governments? If the economic optimists are correct, the more government regulation and taxation we have, the more humans should respond by thinking up new and ever-more-productive ways to generate wealth. If oil is going to run out eventually, and this won’t pose any problems because consuming states will switch to alternatives, why not just mandate that consuming states must switch to alternatives right now? Could it be that in spite of a century of attempts to find them, there still are no sufficient alternatives?

It’s easy to eliminate the economic advantages of oil by eliminating its subsidies, and if that isn’t quite enough then imposing tariffs. At the moment, one very large component of the oil subsidy is the financing of America’s Petroleum War out of general tax funds. American SUV drivers do not feel that cost at the gas pump. It would be good to present that cost directly to the people who are generating it and let them vote economically on whether they want the Petroleum War to continue. So then, if by your argument it’s no problem to switch from oil when it runs out, why not stop using it right now? You can’t be optimistic and pessimistic at the same time, unless the real issue with you is that you resent having governments around to prevent people from shifting their costs onto other people. In other words, you don’t like having a government to keep people honest.

Nobody fights wars over a commodity whose “known reserves continue to rise” at a sufficient rate.

In an interview, a member of some popular musical group was recounting his band’s rise to success. He said something along the lines of how he could tell the band was doing better from year to year because the band members kept showing up with progressively better-looking girlfriends.

Men may disagree on the exact ordering of the most attractive women, but I have never met a man whose ranking of women by attractiveness was the complete opposite of my ranking. People (men and women) may disagree on exactly who is the most attractive, but there is a lot more agreement on who is unattractive.

Note to feminists: history is not your friend, because most of it took place before the explosion in fossil fuel use which made equality for women somewhat imaginable.

Can you imagine life with no central heat, no running water, no grocery stores, no feminine hygeine products, no cosmetics, no deodorants, no effective household cleaning products, no electricity, no telephones, no TV, no automobiles, no washing machines, etc.? Take away all those modern conveniences, put a man and woman together in the woods, and who is going to be the boss? At least 95% of the time, the man automatically is the boss in that situation. When push comes to shove, as it regularly does in harsh conditions, the man can push and shove twice as hard as the woman. Women don’t want to go back to 1750 not only because of the physical discomfort but because it would require them to submit to patriarchy again.

Traditional cultures did not say “eenie meenie miney moe, MEN!” when selecting the dominant gender. Instead nature made that decision for them by equipping men with the muscle power necessary to become the economically relevant gender in agricultural societies.

Urban lighting costs will eventually decrease, because they will eventually come under Moore’s Law. (Everything which is an information problem eventually comes under Moore’s Law.)

A parent can exercise authority over a child because the parent can do more things. If the child could do all the things the parent can do, the child no longer has to submit to the parent. This is exactly what happens when the child reaches adulthood. Being an adult means having the power to tell your parents to go suck a lemon, if that’s what you want to do, because as an adult you have (or should have) comparable skills.

It’s possible a man becomes more effective at “looking for more” if he already has a marginally acceptable partner. Consider what happens to a man who goes a long time without receiving any romantic approval from any women. After a while, women sense his desperate condition and find it repulsive. A man who does the “noble” thing and refuses to settle might find his strategy backfiring when his increasing desperation makes him unattractive to the woman of his dreams when she finally shows up.

I wonder, when a woman finds herself being hit on by a man who is really good at what he does, does she think to herself about all the previous women he had to have honed his skills on? Perhaps seduction skill is like sausage: people who like it should never see it being made.

When I was in college, the students from India told me they saw no poor people in the U.S. And I went to an urban college surrounded by welfare ghettoes, which looked pretty bad to me. But by Indian standards that is not poverty, it seems.

If food gets tight, the primitive couple has to give priority to preserving the strength of the stronger person. It would be too risky to favor the weaker person, because then both could die if something bad happens that only the stronger person could handle. Generally a society can only afford to coddle the weak when it is enjoying great surplus.

When humans started congregating in historically unprecedented numbers, which humans were likely to rise to the top of the social hierarchies that inevitably formed? Why, of course, the most dominant men, who had millions of years’ evolutionary experience honing them to compete with other men for women. For men there was always a higher reproductive payoff for asserting dominance.

Everybody in America is still going to die, which indicates nobody here has what they need yet.

The great religions survive because most of their followers are smart enough not to take all their nonsensical claims too seriously. Imagine if the nominally Christian United States really started living by the Sermon on the Mount. Al Qaeda would eat us for breakfast. The Bible can include idiocy like the suggestion to pluck your eye out if it causes you to sin, because most people are smart enough to ignore that garbage even while they profess to believe the rest.

It’s interesting how the word “morality” can be either good or bad, depending on the rhetorical needs of the moment.

Nobody says you can’t prefer to scarf doughnuts all day, just that if you surrender to your preference, you might incur a range of social, sexual, medical, and financial costs.

If you really accepted your “size” you would really accept the reality of your behavior that produced and sustains your “size,” and you would feel no need to lie, prevaricate, and/or put up smokescreens by telling us you exercise regularly and eat “sensible” portions. There is nothing “sensible” about portions that make a person obese, and an accurate accounting of food intake and activity levels would reveal this. Studies show that fat people tend to understate their true calorie intake, in proportion to how fat they are. Under controlled metabolic ward conditions, a fat person loses weight rapidly when fed a diet containing only as many calories as the fat person claimed to be eating previously. Why is this? Because the fat person has learned to deflect social disapproval for his or her gluttony, somewhat, by exploiting the practical difficulty of making such accurate metabolic ward measurements. It’s not easy to measure another person’s food intake accurately, so a glutton can claim anything he or she wants, and nobody else is likely to check the accuracy of the claim. The glutton quickly learns there is less social sanction for a fat person who claims not to be overeating. Therefore like all substance abusers, gluttons find ways to conceal their gluttony. Unfortunately for the glutton it’s impossible to conceal the effects of gluttony.

Almost anything’s possible, but it’s more likely those who make a show of eschewing hedonism didn’t have the greatest options to begin with. For example, it’s easy for a man who isn’t attractive to women to “give them up.” And not so easy for a man like (actor) Josh Hartnett. Churches which preach against sex often have, by an amazing coincidence, lots of fat people in the pews.

What does it even mean to “be oneself”? There’s no way to unravel all the outside cultural influence on what one is right now.

If you are interested in learning why people do what they do, browse to your favorite search engine and look for “dopamine release onto the nucleus accumbens.” That’s what happens in your brain when you stuff your face with doughnuts. Something similar happens in my brain when I present some interesting facts. I’m not saying my fixation is particularly healthy, but it seems to be healthier than gluttony.

Does it scare the hell out of people that the government posts speed limits on the highways? Does it scare the hell out of people that the government says Janet Jackson cannot show her boob on TV? Of course not. It doesn’t scare the hell out of people because speed limits and obscenity laws have been around for our whole lives and they did not lead to any kind of slippery slope. Anyone who really wants to drive fast or see a boob can find legal ways to do it, if they are willing to pay the price. Putting fat people in [weight-loss] camps is not any scarier than laws against other kinds of public nuisances. There are laws against littering because most people find garbage to be an eyesore. Fat people are also an eyesore.

About the closest the Taoist gets to truth is the accidental reality that some percentage of highly accomplished people don’t have a really solid understanding of exactly what they do to succeed. Which is why a lot of successful people are unable to teach others how to duplicate their success.

The academic climate was first created by religious nutballs. How did they lose control over their own creation? They lost control because they assumed all evidence left to be discovered could only confirm their beliefs. Instead, the more people learned to follow evidence with an open mind, the more they rejected the a priori religious assumptions which turned out not to work well. Had religious nutballs guessed correctly about where evidence would lead, they would have tried to discourage learning and free inquiry rather than promote them.

Check out the actors in old movies vs. modern movies. Today it’s common for the men in movies to work out with weights. Many of them are noticeably more muscular than the men who acted in films from the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. As a result, “period” films tend to be a bit anachronistic in that they don’t show the men as being scrawny enough to be historically accurate. The “buff” look was rare during WWII, as archival photos indicate, but movie audiences today expect the male actors to look “buff.”

People can change their behavior in ways that increase their popularity without changing “who they are.” Or more accurately, who they think they are.

A woman might tend to read too much into a man’s obvious arousal for her, because she knows nothing of his capacity to become aroused by other women. Someone who owns a burger joint should not read too much into the employees who show up for work each day. They continue to flip burgers because no better jobs are available to them. It’s not like those employees dreamed of flipping burgers for a living ever since they were children.

Words are a tool for influencing the behavior of other people. People learn by trial and error to say the things that bring them rewards, and to avoid saying the things that bring them punishments. People who cannot learn how to do this don’t function well in society. They have to find a safe outlet on Usenet.

Women may value physical strength in a man, for example, but most women don’t want men beating them up every day. It’s not as if every expression of strength is automatically good. In fact the number of wrong ways to be strong is much greater than the number of right ways. Most things don’t respond well to brute force. A strong man will be admired more for his restraint than for his strength.

Powerful people have to be careful how they act. It’s OK to win, but keep a lid on the triumphalism. Those goal-line dances tend to rub people the wrong way if they last too long.

A female infant may be a liability to her parents right now, and the male infants who would value her in about 18 years have no say in the matter yet. Those men in China and India who aren’t having sex today because some greedy parents killed their potential brides 16 to 25 years ago certainly value women—just ask them. After those men meet their basic survival needs, there isn’t much they value more than young, attractive women. But there is no way for those men to raise their own women. It takes too long, and that’s not how the system works anyway. Even if a man could pay for a woman’s upbringing, she would probably end up falling in love with some other man.

Why should there always be so many people asking why about things as if no scientist had ever investigated the same questions? I can’t think of any reason for it. It doesn’t seem sensible to have so many people who have no idea what scientists have done for them, especially since the average person is paying taxes to keep scientists working. Surely it’s better for everybody to look up answers to their questions on the Internet rather than just sitting there wondering like dullards about questions they have already paid to have investigated?

It is rather discomforting to imagine that there might actually be some objective reality that doesn’t care much how comfortable we might be with it. So let’s just imagine everybody can make their own reality, and there is no other way to evaluate explanations than according to how good they make a person feel.

I haven’t found any way to feel entirely comfortable with the knowledge that I am a semi-evolved ape. Could anybody? Apes are eminently mockable (and it’s interesting to ask why they seem so to us).

Human “wiring” is not exactly “hard,” but it does have its tendencies, and humans do not know how to re-engineer someone’s wiring to fit any arbitrary demand. Said demand, of course, originates with someone else’s wiring. If you can talk about rewiring Steve, you can talk about rewiring your own need to see Steve rewired.

You can’t have it both ways. Either feminists have the power to influence society, or they do not. The fact that you aren’t a farmwife right now says feminists do have influence. You asserted as much up above. Obviously what feminists say matters a lot. According to you their words have led to a complete reordering of American society. So if those SAME PEOPLE start propagating the idea that something is inherently wrong with the normal male sex drive, that should give pause to any normal male.

The fascinating bit is that a site like All-Movie Guide feels no need to argue its case. Films featuring beautiful nude women are “Exploitation” and the site can state that without any expectation that someone could need convincing. That should tell you how far the views of people like [Catharine] MacKinnon have reached into the orthodoxy.

As lawyers/politicians only know how to formulate laws in semi-natural languages, the inherent resulting ambiguity creates vast scope for loopholes exploitable by other lawyers. This is how lawyers guarantee full employment for themselves. It’s worked well because Indian lawyers haven’t been able to reach across the ocean and exploit the same loopholes. Indian lawyers may find ways to hijack the process. They have lots of cheap labor to throw at the problem.

How do you “prohibit” laywers from doing something? They can always file suits, file appeals, attack more loopholes, etc. With all the laws and precedents and unintended consequences of same, not to mention the economic incentive, I wouldn’t bet against the legal talent of India.

Technology is just good enough now to make location less relevant for certain kinds of programming work. As technology improves, it will expand the range of jobs for which location is less important than labor cost. Displaced workers will kick and scream, but in the end they will have no defense against the Invisible Fist.

A person could work as a receptionist for a physician, and even decades later be no closer to being a physician.

Do you think fat acceptors consciously intend to eat all those doughnuts? Perhaps one reason obese people are able to understate their actual food consumption is that they may not be entirely aware of it.

The religious right has absorbed religious indoctrination which convinces them gay marriage would somehow undermine the institution of marriage for straight people. This might seem illogical, but it’s no more illogical than buying an SUV which creates “driving conditions” and then using those “driving conditions” as an excuse to drive your SUV. (If you don’t have anything to drive, you don’t have “driving conditions,” you just have “weather.” The fact that snow falls does not obligate anyone to drive in it!)

Any sociobiologist can tell you voluntary birth control is sure to fail. It will only select against the people who choose to use it. In each generation, progressively more people will have been born to women who rejected voluntary birth control. So, whether their rejection was due to genetics or culture, humans will eventually build up resistance to voluntary birth control, in the same way every living organism evolves resistance to any biocide that doesn’t exterminate it completely.

When a woman views a man as sexually more desirable because of what he drives, she is voting for George Bush to invade Iraq.

The reason why automobiles turn people into litterbugs is probably that automobiles go fast and disconnect people from their surroundings. A person who is on foot or on a bike is a part of the environment and can sense the trash by the side of the road. It doesn’t whip by in an indistinguishable blur. Plus it’s just harder to carry a lot of stuff when you don’t use a car.

Imagine a wig that looks exactly like a beautiful woman’s hair. Put that wig on an ugly woman, and she is still ugly.

Any man who has much experience with women learns early on that the last thing he would want to tell a woman is the complete truth. If he tells her the complete truth, that probably will be the last thing he says to her.

When disinterested third parties overhear a squabble, they usually don’t know the history of who said what to whom, and even when they do, they may not necessarily have the genetic and cultural programming to share the biases of one particular side. Therefore it’s best to write only things that hold up well out of context. That means sticking to facts which are apparent to most people, or which most people can readily verify.

If a person only loses, there is nothing to “move on with your life” to, except more losing. Which isn’t really a move. We don’t “accept” losing so much as we drown out the memory by winning something else.

In general, almost nobody is as critical of himself or herself as others are critical of him or her. To prove this, pick anybody you know and point out his or her faults to him or her. State exactly what you think about those faults. Odds are the person will take a much more lenient view of them, and perhaps fault you as “pompous” for pointing out those faults.

If you’re looking for sympathy, you won’t get much from most people with a “Y” chromosome. We know all about not being allowed to actualize all our urges. Do fat people feel stronger desires for doughnuts than I have felt since puberty for hot chicks? I doubt it, and I can keep my urges under control.

Gluttony is the most common eating disorder, as a trip to any large public gathering makes painfully clear.

Rich people can afford better lawyers just as they can afford better houses, better clothes, better schools, and (almost) everything else. Society tolerates this because in a (relatively) free-market economy, people who get rich by legal means do so by creating much value for other people. We reward people who create value in the hope that more people will create value.

I’m willing to spend some of my own money to protect women as they go about their ordinary business or stay in their homes, but I’m less eager to finance the state’s role as a kind of substitute chaperone for regulating young people’s dating activities after the fact.

How many innocent people do you know who attract repeated attention from the police?

If feminists don’t want to be lampooned, they should hire better public relations people. Or just learn more about science. You don’t see too many people lampooning sociobiology. It’s hard for people to make fun of stuff that makes sense. Creationists have tried it, but their jokes about “evil-utionists” only play to the choir.

If human sexuality is essentially “healthy” and “good” why does everybody laugh at jokes about masturbation? Why would the average woman react with horror if she found her husband was patronizing prostitutes? Why is violence so often a component of sexual relationships? Why do sexually transmitted diseases exist and continually evolve into new and ever-more-horrid forms? A sociobiologist can offer serious answers to those questions. Can you?

As people get older, some of them learn the rest of the world does not particularly care to hear their complaints. So they learn to put on a happy face.

It’s unlikely that a woman in her 50’s is still beautiful. She may look like she was formerly beautiful, and for some odd reason women often call that look “beautiful,” but few men see it that way. It’s like the ruins of an ancient city—you can tell the city must have been grand in its day, but now it’s not fit for habitation.

Obviously the most efficient strategy for meeting chicks would be to have intelligence-gathering capability that would shame the Department of Homeland Defense, so a man could know exactly which of the hot chicks in his own neighborhood are just now coming up for grabs, and he could get first in line before their schedules fill up again in a week or less. One thing women say is it’s all about timing. And that is very true. A particular hot chick might be in the mood for some average dude maybe one day out of 365, provided he has not already worn out his welcome by pestering her on the other days. How does he figure out when it’s time to strike? And how does he collect and track all the necessary information without creeping women out?

A ruthlessly cutthroat winner-take-all Darwinian competition is “healthy” and “good”? Sure, if you are Tom Cruise.

Everybody knows beautiful people have to become pseudo-frumpy to win acclaim from critics who naturally envy beautiful people. The formula for winning an Oscar is well-understood. But that is no comfort for people who are always ugly.

If what you want is to rearrange a few milligrams of chemicals in your brain, and what you have to pay involves shoving a billion tons of metal around, you aren’t very efficient. If we can generate the necessary signal streams directly, using small-scale technologies, then we can do away with most of that large-scale nonsense.

I remember back in the 1973 when Paul McCartney wrote music for the James Bond film “Live and Let Die” and there were actually some people who felt seriously concerned McCartney had “sold out.” That’s hard to believe today when appearing on Pepsi commercials is practically a requirement for the top-shelf pop star.

Advertising has gotten so effective that people would rather spend their money on consumer toys than on propagating their own genes. We need to bring that brave new preference to the Third World before they breed into global ecological collapse.

Every religion is whack, to the followers of other contradictory religions. Like those Incas who used to sacrifice their children to appease their gods. That seems barbaric to some of us today, but we sacrifice Iraqis in an attempt to make the world safe for our SUVs. Which is worse?

Smart men learn not to share their feelings with women. Because everything you say can and will be held against you. If you need to share your deepest feelings with someone, just post to Usenet. Most women are too smart to read this crap.

Compare the women in Cosmo to the women in Playboy. All the models are slimmer than the average woman, but the skeletal look is much more common in the magazine aimed at women than in the magazine aimed at men. For some reason, women demand pictures of other women with the skeletal look. Most men are not demanding that. Perhaps women demand the skeletal look because they don’t want other women to be too attractive to men. Attractive, but not too attractive.

It’s interesting that during the 1970’s, there was a trend toward mainstream celebrity women getting naked, but the feminist backlash of the 80’s and 90’s put a damper on the trend, and then the Internet exploded and gave men an efficient market for expressing their preferences, and now celebrity women getting naked is creeping its way back toward the mainstream. Hopefully Camryn Mannheim will not get in on this trend.

Everybody’s future is horrific.

Even if their writings survive, it seems to be rare for a religion to rise again after all its followers die.

Try moving your mouse across your computer screen. The visual effect seems pretty simple. Do you have any idea how much mind-numbing code it takes to do that, and how many geek-years it took to get that right?

Since humans cannot read each other’s minds, one can never be entirely sure what another person REALLY thinks. All we know is how that person behaves, and from that we infer what the person is thinking. Anybody who has watched professional actors or read about terrorist sleeper cells knows (or should know!) that humans have a lot of potential for faking emotion. In the case of undercover operatives, sometimes they can sustain the ruse continuously for years.

Do men want to have sex with women who have all their body hair? Not in our culture. Women don’t seem too fond of facial hair, either. After women got the right to vote in the U.S., no more U.S. Presidents wore beards.

An athlete who takes steroids, growth hormone, EPO, and all the rest becomes more like a MACHINE, capable of performing up to spec every single day. Because that’s what good MACHINES are: reliable. Unlike HUMANS, who have good days and bad days, because we aren’t very good machines. That’s what Viagra does to a man’s dick. It removes the human element of unreliability and turns the dick into a utensil.

If you ever have more than one child, you will learn how flexible and self-serving everyone’s definition of “fair” is.

With modern convenience foods it only takes a few minutes of extra eating per day to scarf down the extra 500 to 1500 kcal necessary to pack 100 pounds of fat on a glutton over the course of a few years. A little extra drinking is all it takes, with the energy content of some beverages. 500 extra kcal/day can pack on about a pound of fat per week, or about 50 pounds per year, give or take. That’s about one or two extra doughnuts per day over what the same person would need to eat to maintain a healthy weight.

In the view of most serious endurance athletes, the people who actually do put up serious training numbers, obesity is like an inverse indicator of fitness. Athletes associate being fat with being “out of shape” because 99% of the time that’s exactly what a fat person is.

If a woman has trouble even getting dates with men, that’s pretty sad. She would have to be quite a train wreck.

There are plenty of magazines trying to sell different looks to women. They struggle at the margin and usually go bankrupt quickly. Women as a group show little interest in spending their own money to buy pictures of fat women. Even in magazines that try to feature plus-sized models, they lose circulation if they feature models who are a bit too “plus.” Even fat chicks don’t want to see women who are quite as fat as they are.

Makes you wonder how Hollywood will promote entirely synthetic movies. They still use humans to voice movies like Shrek, but eventually there will be movies with no identifiable stars at all to generate celebrity relevance. Nobody is going to get excited about the geeks who write the code.

Much better to be exterminated by pleasure than by the way nature does it.

If you meet a man who is still scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers at age 35, odds are he doesn’t have a lot going for him. He probably has some serious problem in communication skills or interpersonal skills or basic intelligence that prevents him from doing more valuable work. Maybe he has some outside hobby that impresses women and doesn’t pay, but that is extremely rare. Most guys who are stuck in crap jobs by their 30’s are just losers. They don’t command the respect of other men, and they sure don’t command the respect of women, most of the time.

Linux is doing pretty well, in part because there are no Linux billionaires.

What’s wrong with just admitting things could be better?

One thing I like about Darwinism is how wonderfully it counters idealism.

Any sort of cartel tends to break down whenever individuals in the group can benefits themselves by breaking ranks. For example, consumer boycotts are difficult to sustain, because they require consumers to sacrifice something they value. Labor strikes are similarly difficult to sustain, because eventually workers have to eat. They cannot go indefinitely without wages. There will always be some scabs willing to work, too. In theory women could “Take Back The Night” by telling men there will be no more sex until men put all the rapists in jail. But women will never do that because you can’t get all the women to hold out long enough.

I have found on those rare occasions when I needed to be blunt with a woman, most of them will fold instantly. Women spend most of their lives being coddled by men who treat them more nicely than men treat each other. Guys can yell at each other and be harsh with their criticism, and that’s how it’s been for us ever since little league. But most chicks aren’t used to that. So if a woman is needling you and won’t stop, just talk to her like you would talk to a bothersome dude.

Being a movie critic seems to attract a disproportionate number of abnormal people. The Catholic priesthood does too, but a different flavor of abnormal.

Don’t blame men for the stupidity of women. You won’t look at our porn because you think it’s shameful or “exploitive.” Instead you look at fashion magazines full of starving women, and then a tiny percentage of women who can actually say no to doughnuts take things too far.

Only a few women are gullible enough to believe men who say they think Paris Hilton is skanky. Let the real Paris hit on them and we’ll see how long that lasts.

If success is as desirable as you make it sound, how could you not envy someone who has more success than you do? Why try to deny your essential humanity? Envy is a perfectly normal human emotion that occurs when we see our competition doing better than we are. Envy is one of the fundamental emotions that drives people to improve. We want to get “better” because we can see examples of “better” in other people, and because we see those examples we become unsatisfied with what we have now. Unfortunately there are limits to the ways we can currently change ourselves, so certain kinds of envy are unproductive. But that doesn’t mean we are immune to them.

The history of technology is all about improving on nature. You can spend a lot of time in the forest picking up sticks, but you won’t find many that have the right shape and heft to make good baseball bats. Nature doesn’t build things to serve us; rather, things evolve to serve themselves.

Look at the endless parade of Hollywood types who are anti-corporation most of the time until they go to Washington to advocate for their pet uncured disease. Where do they think the wealth to research all those diseases will come from? Something like half the taxes come from the top 2% of wealthy people. All those greedy CEO types who get lambasted in Hollywood movies are paying the taxes that might someday let the Christopher Reeves of the world recover from their horse accidents.

Imagine if you had taken, say, $20,000 out of that $70,000 you once earned, and you spent it on hiring and training your own personal team of four Indian programmers. At some point, your boss notices you are several times more productive than your fellow employees. And you get a big promotion. Which enables you to hire more Indians to join your personal team. Get the picture? Pretty soon, instead of being the victim of the global economy, you are victimizing others.

Eliminating spatial/geographic barriers to competition is certainly going to create more turmoil. But I’d say it’s a good warmup for the eventual onslaught of artificial intelligence.

Look at how many people get addicted to Usenet. When computers become smart enough to converse similarly, that feature will be similarly addictive. Actually a lot more addictive, because Usenet is not even a friendly place and it manages to be addictive. Imagine conversing with a smart computer that is actually nice.

Imagine what it would be like to be a fat acceptor in a world where doughnuts had a choice. That’s what being a man is like.

Women peak in terms of outer beauty around the age of 20, whereas the ruling class in every human culture consists mostly of people over the age of 40. Often well over. By the time women are fit to lead, they are way past being beautiful. They might have beautiful daughters, but they themselves can no longer hope to get very far on their looks. Chelsea Clinton probably holds a man’s attention longer today than her mother can. But Hillary currently ranks far ahead of her daughter on the leadership scale. By the time Chelsea has accumulated similar influence, she probably won’t be very interesting to her husband either.

Consider: a healthy slender 21-year-old woman is likely to be more attractive to men than a diseased decrepit 90 year-old-woman lying in her own filth at the nursing home. Either (a) it is purely an amazing coincidence that men would prefer to have sex with the woman who, in the ancestral environment, would be likely to enable men to reproduce, or (b) natural selection has indeed given men genes that program them to seek out women who exude fertility cues, and do those things that would, in the ancestral environment, make more copies of the men’s genes.

How many people want to have 100% natural sex? The result of that is the average woman popping out 8 babies, and a country ends up like Afghanistan. Most men prefer to have sex with women who have made themselves a little less real by taking artificial drugs to reduce their natural fertility. Viagra became hugely profitable quickly because it helps men become artificial enough to take full advantage of their artificially sterilized women. The whole concept of recreational sex is artificial. In nature, sex is for reproduction. We have a lot of problems with our attempts to create recreational sex because we have not made sex artificial enough yet. Diseases, unwanted babies, jealousy, violence—these are the result of recreational sex that is insufficiently artificial.

When you have to choose between yourself vs. someone else, it’s usually too bad for someone else. That’s just the way our genes program us. See: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Different countries have different laws, because they have different histories. The Nazi party has not caused many problems in the U.S., whereas it devastated Germany. Maybe alcohol has caused fewer problems in Germany.

The world may be more interesting with its dwarves and elephant men, but who wants to be one of the freaks?

Do you drive on freeways? Hitler had the first one built in 1936. Hundreds of millions of people endorse that Hitler idea every day.

Actually I’ve watched a few X-Files episodes. Some of them were interesting. However, the show has obliterated about 100 years of intellectual progress.

If you only have a few hundred neurons, your behaviors will be pretty simple.

Not that I see a promising long-term future for humans anyway. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine humans in their present form being able to function in the world that will result from another 200 years of technological advancement. At some point it’s going to be necessary to raise human intelligence across the board to keep up with the massive increase in complexity.

In each generation, a progressively larger fraction of children are presumably being born to mothers who explicitly wanted children. Those women whose genes code for a weaker, explicit advance desire for children will be less likely to pass on their genes. Another result of this evolutionary adaptation is that voluntary contraception must fail in the long run, as the survivors evolve increasing resistance to it.

Digression: so just how often do married women successfully charge their husbands with rape? I suspect this is an extremely rare legal outcome, since I never hear such a thing reported on the local news amidst the constant stream of reports of rapes, robberies, murders, assaults, automobile accidents, drug busts, and other social mayhem.

Everybody shares some things, such as the air we breathe. Nobody has ever told me to stop inhaling their air. Almost everybody is quite generous when it comes to sharing their opinions. Everybody who drives a gaswaster is happy to share their exhaust fumes, noise, and road presence.

Check out the early films of Tom Cruise. How many of the women who starred in those films are still as popular as Tom Cruise?

Marriage is not like buying a house, where you go to a closing and sign page after page of contracts. I have a whole file folder full of papers I signed when I bought my house. What married person has a similar folder full of marital contract papers?

Few criminals describe their crimes using the customary terms. They don’t even consider themselves “criminals.”

The lumping and labeling and “considering the source” is the human brain’s way of imposing enough artificial simplicity on chaotic reality to create a somewhat tractable fantasy world for the brain to comfortably inhabit.

Birds are pretty susceptible to being spoofed by partial cues. One consequence of humans having larger brains is that we are somewhat harder to spoof. But humans are by no means spoof-proof. For example, a modern computer-generated movie seems to look like something other than “computer output.” We can impute emotions to a stream of “Shrek” bits.

The only way to have a happy relationship is for the relationship to lead, directly or indirectly, to the release of dopamine onto your nucleus accumbens.

Name one satellite which currently defies gravity. How do you think NASA calculates where those satellites are going? NASA uses the law of gravity to predict the satellites’ future positions and velocities. A satellite does not defy gravity; a satellite is a prisoner of gravity. Gravity dictates what airplanes and rockets can do, and how much fuel they need to do it.

There is a certain ideological consistency when a short man humps an obese woman three times his size.

To become a great Eurasian religion, a belief system must possess every possible Jedi mind trick to “waterproof” against falsifiability. My favorite is: “The Devil’s greatest achievement is persuading people he does not exist.” Wow. To a shallow thinker like C.S. Lewis that probably sounds like an argument—to even attempt to question the claim immediately “proves” the Devil has deceived the questioner!

As long as humans demand warmth in winter, we will always have roaches.

I worked in slow food as a teen. At the bottom of the hierarchy, as a dishwasher. After that, I was pretty reluctant to eat in restaurants for a long time.

People who are chronically single are, on average, more defective than married people of similar ages. This is not rocket science. Just look around at the chronic losers you know.

Bacteria did not know a goddamned thing about Gödel’s Theorem and yet 500 million years later they have intelligent descendents. If (stupidity) + (time) is enough to create intelligence, then (somewhat smart) + (less time) should also be enough.

Nature as a whole is poorly documented. “The heavens” may “declare the handiwork of” bog but not in a language any human can easily read. Code specifies the “what.” Comments indicate the “why.” The “why” of natural systems follows from their ancestral history of Darwinian selection, with some legacy of neutral mutations, survivable defects, and vestiges thrown in. To know the “why” of a living organism you have to know its history. Some of this information has probably been lost forever.

Most people understand “fairness” to mean “My interests are secure.” The notion of guaranteeing something good for the enemy is not part of “fairness.”

Actually most men can understand a raw deal when they get one, even men who don’t know how to draw a simple 2×2 game theory matrix.

As much as cars suck, they are hardly an impediment to real sex. One of the early moralistic objections to automobiles was that they would allow young men and women to travel off together unchaperoned, and engage in all sorts of lascivious behavior made possible through unprecedented privacy and mobility. Those early fears have turned out to be 100% true. The sexual revolution in the U.S. is a direct result of (a) contraceptive technology and (b) automobiles.

I read in Science News that some spiders appear to be preferentially spinning webs near sources of artificial light. Given the number of insects that congregate around lights at night this guarantees good eating for the spider. That strategy would seem obvious to a human but it’s not clear how spiders could have “figured” this out in the century or so that artificial lights have been around.

The Trekkian prime directive of non-interference is untenable in the real world. Even if most members of the advanced culture are high-minded enough to keep their hands off, it only takes a few greedy hunters, miners, loggers, missionaries, etc., to go in and screw up the primitive culture. As long as the advanced culture continues to chew up resources, eventually there will be some “crisis” that will justify the clear-cutting, road-building, strip mining, drilling, blasting, soul-saving, etc., that pushes the primitive culture to the brink. And it’s not just a white male thing driving the destruction. The primitive culture will always have competing factions. The first ones who get metal tools and weapons from the white men will set upon their less-acculturated neighbors.

You don’t have to know your place, but you do have to occupy it.

I wonder, how many people reading this article have had a sexual fantasy about a victim of Down’s Syndrome? Sex is by its very nature politically incorrect in the most comprehensive way. Sex is really the last vestige of unrestrained Darwinism still tolerated by civilized people.

Explaining anything can be seen by illogical humans as an attempt to “justify” it. For example, if a meteorologist explains what causes hurricanes, it would be possible for some hurricane victim to think the meteorologist was justifying what the hurricane did.

Popular perceptions of Darwin’s theory tend to focus primarily on the survival aspect, because that is mostly a neutral topic. We mostly all agree it is good to survive. Sexual selection, on the other hand, is an incredibly threatening phenomenon, because immediately we begin to understand that some people have been genetically gifted to be far more sexually desirable than other people. The intense emotional reactions people have to this idea illustrates jus