Mykeru, what a Cnut, eh? Discuss.

[Badger3k]

SKEPTIC MELTDOWNS




http://storify.com/Sc00ter/crazy

is Carrie trying to be funny in her rape avoidance tips? http://storify.com/Sc00ter/carrie-poppy ... idancetips

[Za-zen]

Crazy Carrie does rape jokes, who da thunk it.

[Phil_Giordana_FCD]

Crazy Carrie does rape jokes, who da thunk it.

Nononono. Everybody knows rape jokes are never funny!

[didymos]

Crazy Carrie does rape jokes, who da thunk it.

Nononono. Everybody knows rape jokes are never funny!

Well, those certainly weren't. :bjarte:

[Za-zen]

why did the chicken cross the road...... to get raped :bjarte:

knock knock... who's there.... the grim raper :bjarte:

[Southern]

I've been wandering the icy streets of Tromso wondering why Christianity took off in Scandinavia. They already had awesome gods and were a warrior race. What was the incentive?

Well, at least their gods not being holy anymore inspired two of my favorite games ever: Valkyrie Profile and Ragnarok Online. So in the end, it was all for the greater good.

Oh, and also Matantei Loki Ragnarok, one of the strangest animes I ever watched, where the main character is an atheist Miko that is fascinated about "occult misteries"... while being surrounded by the Norse gods all trapped in mundane identities, and Loki has a detective agency.

On the other hand, Yahwe and Christ are too boring to be featured in anything but Sunday school shlock.

[Brive1987]

Ok. Yawn. Becky does her new patreon only pre SGU video.



This time she is:

A) "glam" - a certain someone has no doubt read her the riot act about brand.
B) seemingly under the influence of some form of substance. Even for Becky she was, well spaced out.

In an insight she admits to getting a particularly daft idea nixed by "her producer" - otherwise known as "boyfriend". So yes, she is on a stage managed leash.

Motes of interest:

She is obviously running out of steam. Her next patreon video will be the same as her last popsci article which, coincidently, is also what she is talking about on SGU. Topic? I couldn't get through the stoner haze, but I suspect she was trying to find the word "pyramids"

Also she bags the forthcoming lead SGU topic - Edge Magazine annual essay exercise. Apparently it is "boring" and "stupid". I'm sure SNovella would be impressed given it's his current Neurologica blog post and clearly something he inserted into SGU.

She also cunningly tries to spin doing 30min prep for science and fiction, just before recording, as a clever strategy rather than her typical token bullshit.

All in all could she sound more bored of SGU?

In other news we get a beer update, she's getting her hair cut and dyed and, oh yes, she will be a talking head for an un-named TV show. Yea gods. In her comments she shows some clarity by admitting to being scared by the prospect of, presumably, public ridicule.

[TedDahlberg]

I've been wandering the icy streets of Tromso wondering why Christianity took off in Scandinavia. They already had awesome gods and were a warrior race. What was the incentive?

Well, at least their gods not being holy anymore inspired two of my favorite games ever: Valkyrie Profile and Ragnarok Online. So in the end, it was all for the greater good.

Oh, and also Matantei Loki Ragnarok, one of the strangest animes I ever watched, where the main character is an atheist Miko that is fascinated about "occult misteries"... while being surrounded by the Norse gods all trapped in mundane identities, and Loki has a detective agency.

On the other hand, Yahwe and Christ are too boring to be featured in anything but Sunday school shlock.

Hey asshole, stop culturally appropriating our gods and Japanese culture at the same time! I'm a shaking ball of rage right now, and that's really not attractive in someone as fat as me.


On a serious note (well, relatively), is Matantei Loki Ragnarok worth watching? It seems interesting.

[AnonymousCowherd]

No hugs for you unicorn rainbow cat, but cyber tugs are always available whether you want them or not.

You couldn't even find the time to fat-shame my avatar? Misogynist!

Just be glad he didn't fart-shame it.

[Gefan]

Just caught up with the discussion on the disgraceful state of affairs where womyn have to cut their hair short in order to strike back against The Patriarchy (TM)...

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/P-EE4Qgtccw/maxresdefault.jpg

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/imag ... 4BQV-s16OQ

Hey... wait a minute...

[AnonymousCowherd]

Sort of the problem with Marxism that was highlighted by that quote I provided of E.O. Wilson – his view, as a biologist who had spent a great amount of time studing ants and other social animals and insects, was that Marxism was a “wonderful theory, [but was applied to the] wrong species” – humans instead of ants – and that it was starting off from some erroneous premises about the nature of human nature. And the results have kind of proved him right.

But it also highlights the rather problematic fact that great swaths of sociology, of SJL-speak, seem to be undergirded by that same highly questionable Marxism and sociology. But that book of Pinker's - The Blank Slate - lays out that argument in far more detail and depth than I can manage if you wanted some of that background.

Ah yes. I read Pinker as you linked and thought it was very good.

Wilson may be right about Marxism as practical politics, even if the economic crtique hardly applies to ants. But that doesn't mean the SJW ramblings have anything to do with actual Marxism. Someone quoted Hitchens saying that, just to be in the debate back in the day, you had to have read (and inwardly digested, as my maths teacher used to say) all manner of things, but there is little evidence that the SJWs have read anything more than each others blogs/twitter stream.

For one thing, if Marxism is about anything it's about class struggle and that is the very thing usually missing from all of this SJW blather. Back when there still were serious Marxists, they thought of most feminists and the proto-SJW types as, at best, fellow travellers and at worst, useful idiots. In the end, they even got the "useful" part wrong.

[AnonymousCowherd]

One can only hope that someday feminists will realize that women freely choosing to work easier jobs that pay less is not oppression.

And notice they're able to do so because they're subsidised from male earnings, to the extent that despite earning less they're able to spend more than we do. Men have to earn more, because we have an unofficial woman tax to pay. And as the gap gets smaller, we get more and more books and articles in the media by women about men not living up to their responsibilities, being obsolete, experiencing "failure to launch" and so on.

If women workers really are "cheaper" to hire, wouldn't industry hire more of them than the "over-priced" males?

O right, patriarchy. I forgot.

[Scented Nectar]

"Dear Heina Dadabhoy":
[youtube]8mRP7d_Ki14[/youtube]

[Southern]

If that's the stupidest thing people say about pits this year, I'll be happy.

You say this in January? Dear me.

http://i.imgur.com/RulLzq9.jpg

Though, in fairness, by "attack" she might have meant "criticise my dress sense".

To be fair with the potential buyer, a pitbull is a guard dog and may attack a stranger to "protect" the house even if it's wearing a cute bowtie and smiling to its owner. Hell, we have a pinscher (the smallest of the guard dogs), and while he looks like he can't do any harm because of his size, he used to attack people visiting us if we didn't go along the visit and shooed the dog to fuck off. Of course a pinscher "attacking" an adult is mostly harmless, so whatever.

Guard dogs are nice and all, but they have to be well trained if you don't wan't accidents to happend. The bigger the dog, the messier the accident could potentially be, so the owner must act responsible and understand when people are kinda scared of. I mean, if an idiot started waving a gun around, would you not flinch and go for cover even if he assures you the weapon is unloaded? A pitbull may not be a gun, but it can hurt someone, too.

[Southern]

Hey asshole, stop culturally appropriating our gods and Japanese culture at the same time! I'm a shaking ball of rage right now, and that's really not attractive in someone as fat as me.


On a serious note (well, relatively), is Matantei Loki Ragnarok worth watching? It seems interesting.

Hey, the Japanese did it, not me. You should appropriate the Yankee culture and Slap a Jap to get your revenge! I heard it is (or was) very popular among Americans.

About Matantei Loki Ragnarok, it's a bit silly sometimes, but I liked it. Not many action scenes, though.

[debaser71]

Is that really fair? Surely that is because women tend to be around kids more than men are. I was under the impression that if you look at single parent families the men are, on average, far more abusive to their children than the women are.

Yeah - I wouldn't question the reality of the stat but I think there's obvs some reasons for the way it is skewed.

As I recall, child abuse is much more likely to happen when the father is not present in the life of the child. Male perps are more often that not, likely to have no genetic relationship to the child.

*shrug*

This kind of thing is pretty common in the animal kingdom so I am really not surprised to see humans practise it.

I think women abuse children more often because of two reasons (other than more women take care of children). 1) the child was inside the woman...it's almost part of her. And 2) grown men are physically scary and intimidating. Men can often just use their loud deep authoritative voices in a way women can not.

If it matters, parenting is my live atm. I am a stay at home dad. (yeah yeah, most people know this already).

[SemoKeryVerry9]

http://slymepit.com/staticimgs/spam.jpg

[didymos]

To be fair with the potential buyer, a pitbull is a guard dog and may attack a stranger to "protect" the house even if it's wearing a cute bowtie and smiling to its owner.

That's a risk with any breed, not just those designated as "guard dogs". Dogs are territorial, period. Also, pit bulls were actually bred for fighting, not guarding. The "pit" refers to the arena in which the dogs were made to fight bears, bulls, and, eventually, other dogs when bloodsports were forced underground.

[didymos]

Also, that's what the "bull" in "bulldog" refers to: bull-baiting.

[SemoKeryVerry9]

http://slymepit.com/staticimgs/spam.jpg

[deLurch]

Ah a French spammer made it through our illustrious leader's spam defenses. That is unique.

[Gumby]

Ah a French spammer made it through our illustrious leader's spam defenses. That is unique.

Looks like Lsuoma and I caught it at the same time. He brought out the spam can and i banned le motherfuquer :grin:

[welch]

I've heard of many past rape victims who hate SJW feminists, and they claim that the hysterical overreaction to rape can harm the road to recovery for actual survivors of rape. By both constantly talking about rape (trivializing the meaning of the word by associating it with lesser crimes and even some activities which are not crimes) while maintaining a hysterical, hilarious over-reaction to the impact of the crime on the victim, the SJWs make rape out to be both incredibly common and WORSE THAN DEATH OMG UR GONNA GET RAEPED RIGHT NAO WITHOUT FEMINISM AND U CAN NEVAR HEAL!

Whereas many men and women who have been raped got over it and moved on with their lives. It's empowering to be told that what happened to you, while bad and not your fault, is something you can move past. You cannot move past murder. Because you're fucking dead.

That's why I will never see eye-to-eye with feminists who claim that rape is equal to or worse than murder.

Is death, objectively, the absolute *worst* thing that can happen to a person? Theoretically, all manner of suffering can simply be 'moved past'. Yet, people still commit suicide to be free of suffering. People still go to war rather than lose their freedom to a foreign power (even though in many cases their lives will be preserved if they simply surrender). Why do people risk death in order to escape subjugation?

http://getcfit.files.wordpress.com/2012 ... plate2.jpg

Freedom isn't just a state of having personal liberty. It's also about being free from suffering. And for some - rape, disability, and so on, is a lot worse than death. Death = freedom.

Suicide, assisted or otherwise is your choice. You make that choice, you carry that choice out.

Murder is someone else choosing for you, without your knowledge or consent. The difference is not small.

[welch]

why did the chicken cross the road...... to get raped :bjarte:

knock knock... who's there.... the grim raper :bjarte:

It's not rape if you yell "SURPRISE" first.

[Lsuoma]

Ah a French spammer made it through our illustrious leader's spam defenses. That is unique.

Looks like Lsuoma and I caught it at the same time. He brought out the spam can and i banned le motherfuquer :grin:

I got an iffy feeling about Mr Spammy when I approved the account, but unless there's primary faciae evidence against new users, I always let 'em through

[Lsuoma]

Looks like Lsuoma and I caught it at the same time. He brought out the spam can and i banned le motherfuquer :grin:

I got an iffy feeling about Mr Spammy when I approved the account, but unless there's primary faciae evidence against new users, I always let 'em through

Fucking autocomplete.

[ROBOKiTTY]

I got an iffy feeling about Mr Spammy when I approved the account, but unless there's primary faciae evidence against new users, I always let 'em through

Are you using Stop Forum Spam? It's very helpful in diagnosing spam accounts.

[Ape+lust]

Ok. Yawn. Becky does her new patreon only pre SGU video...

In other news... she's getting her hair cut and dyed

Ms Sloshpotts, allow me to suggest:

http://imgur.com/AXV4YKQ.jpg

It's just so you. The old tried-and-true worked great too:

http://imgur.com/0xX0Nk5.jpg

[Clarence]

I think you gals and guys are missing what is so bad about rape:
It is the ultimate form of control over sex.
And protecting people from it (or claiming to) gives the Powers That Be all sorts of power over sex.

And power over sex is very important, possibly the most important thing going. And based on history, possibly the most important power that Rulers have ever had: the ability (often within limits like religion, the other great controlling force) to legally, and often socially shape the sexual zeitgeist.
It provides the tool of SHAME - which, in increasingly socially and politically fragmented western societies is a very useful tool to have to bend others to your will socially in a way that is largely impossible anymore in many western societies if you don't have a direct economic handle on your targeted person or group.

Anyway, from a personal perspective I'm sure it often feels like (hey, I've never been raped but are guessing) that he or she that can rape you or does rape you has the ultimate control over your sexuality.

[Casual Nemesis]

Pandemic Legion lost 59 Titans in Eve Online last night. That's HOLY SHIT! news to a former Eve Online player.

Wow. I haven't played in years, but I remember what a huge deal it was when the first titan went down. 59 is crazy.

[ianfc]

oh non, gumby a une banhammer

[Clarence]

Lest anyone misunderstand my argument:
A. I consider death or permanent maiming to be 'worse' than Rape.
Yes, one can recover from rape and SJW's should be encouraging both reporting (instead of scaring victims about how futile that is) and healing. Well, we all know THAT will never happen.
But I think the reason that Rape gets such an emotional boost to where some people regard it as the worst crime ever is because it implies ultimate lack of choice about sex. Today due to abortion and BC there's less chance (much less) of an unwanted child resulting from this loss of control. But still plenty of risk of disease. And when a male gets raped there is often a social stigma (weak man can't protect himself from sexual coercion! What a PUSSY! What a girl! What a whiner!) that male survivors have an even more difficult time reporting it.

[ROBOKiTTY]

For what it's worth, I guard my low-traffic forum with the Q&A captcha plugin with two alternating questions.

1) Who is the Ovarloardâ„¢? --> standard question

2) Which of the following is not a real country? Britland, lolstraya, Iceland, Poland, Switzerland, Fakeland. --> backup question for those who have not yet seen the light

I haven't had to deal with spam or any manual intervention over the years (except occasionally when I tinkered with and broke the formula).

[another lurker]

I think you gals and guys are missing what is so bad about rape:
It is the ultimate form of control over sex.
And protecting people from it (or claiming to) gives the Powers That Be all sorts of power over sex.

And power over sex is very important, possibly the most important thing going. And based on history, possibly the most important power that Rulers have ever had: the ability (often within limits like religion, the other great controlling force) to legally, and often socially shape the sexual zeitgeist.
It provides the tool of SHAME - which, in increasingly socially and politically fragmented western societies is a very useful tool to have to bend others to your will socially in a way that is largely impossible anymore in many western societies if you don't have a direct economic handle on your targeted person or group.

Anyway, from a personal perspective I'm sure it often feels like (hey, I've never been raped but are guessing) that he or she that can rape you or does rape you has the ultimate control over your sexuality.

I have been wanting to read Darrel Ray's book, Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

He talks about shame based religions, such as Islam, and guilt based, such as Catholicism.

This book shows how religion uses our sexual nature against us to control us and perpetuate religion. It outlines the psychological strategies religions use to bind us to a specific religion using techniques like guilt, shame, fear of death and promise of an afterlife. Religion would have you believe sexual restriction is for your good and happiness, but the evidence shows it is largely for the benefit of the religion, without regard to human happiness. How did human culture exist for thousands of years before Yahweh, Jesus and Allah came along? If religion is so important to sexual control, how do so-called “primitive” cultures exist happily for thousands of years without Christianity, Islam or Hinduism to guide them?
Sex and God shows how sexual restrictions are used by all the major religions and why it works so well, especially in subjugating women and children.

http://www.atheismresource.com/2012/sex ... darrel-ray

[ROBOKiTTY]

Hjoomins just need to be socialized to be more like bonobos.

[John D]

If that's the stupidest thing people say about pits this year, I'll be happy.

You say this in January? Dear me.

http://i.imgur.com/RulLzq9.jpg

Though, in fairness, by "attack" she might have meant "criticise my dress sense".

To be fair with the potential buyer, a pitbull is a guard dog and may attack a stranger to "protect" the house even if it's wearing a cute bowtie and smiling to its owner. Hell, we have a pinscher (the smallest of the guard dogs), and while he looks like he can't do any harm because of his size, he used to attack people visiting us if we didn't go along the visit and shooed the dog to fuck off. Of course a pinscher "attacking" an adult is mostly harmless, so whatever.

Guard dogs are nice and all, but they have to be well trained if you don't wan't accidents to happend. The bigger the dog, the messier the accident could potentially be, so the owner must act responsible and understand when people are kinda scared of. I mean, if an idiot started waving a gun around, would you not flinch and go for cover even if he assures you the weapon is unloaded? A pitbull may not be a gun, but it can hurt someone, too.

I officially hate pit bulls. I would never go into a yard with one. My friend used to be a letter carrier till she was severely injured by a pit bull. She was delivering a package. The owner was so happy to get his package he opened the door and the dog bolted out. She cried "Oh! Don't bite me!" Her exclamation didn't help. The dog bit into her calf so hard the holes went right through her leg. Her calf will not heal well. Every time she walks for an extended period she has internal bleeding. She had to retire early from the National Guard and the Post Office. The guy didn't even want to cover her medical bills (which was just a deductible). She had to sue the fucker.

[another lurker]

In the SJW religion, male sexuality is something that men must be ashamed of.

[Phil_Giordana_FCD]

I officially hate pit bulls. I would never go into a yard with one. My friend used to be a letter carrier till she was severely injured by a pit bull. She was delivering a package. The owner was so happy to get his package he opened the door and the dog bolted out. She cried "Oh! Don't bite me!" Her exclamation didn't help. The dog bit into her calf so hard the holes went right through her leg. Her calf will not heal well. Every time she walks for an extended period she has internal bleeding. She had to retire early from the National Guard and the Post Office. The guy didn't even want to cover her medical bills (which was just a deductible). She had to sue the fucker.

Sorry, but your friend had a very stupid reaction to start with. I'll let the dog experts explain in depth...

[John D]

I officially hate pit bulls. I would never go into a yard with one. My friend used to be a letter carrier till she was severely injured by a pit bull. She was delivering a package. The owner was so happy to get his package he opened the door and the dog bolted out. She cried "Oh! Don't bite me!" Her exclamation didn't help. The dog bit into her calf so hard the holes went right through her leg. Her calf will not heal well. Every time she walks for an extended period she has internal bleeding. She had to retire early from the National Guard and the Post Office. The guy didn't even want to cover her medical bills (which was just a deductible). She had to sue the fucker.

Sorry, but your friend had a very stupid reaction to start with. I'll let the dog experts explain in depth...

Oh sorry.... I am sure it was her fault. I will let her know.
[youtube]34TBMkRJZKk[/youtube]
If I were king of the world I would put people in prison if they lost control of their deadly animals. What can I say.... this sounds very reasonable to me. If your dog bolts out of the door and maims someone three things should happen... 1) the owner is guilty of assault with intent to kill, 2) the dog is destroyed, 3) the owner can never own another dog.

It is not my responsibility to know how to behave so your fucking killer dog will not bite me! That is like asking me to learn how to dodge your car if you drive at me. Of course, it is wise for me to learn about dogs.... but it is not my fault if I get bit.

[John D]

Also Phil.... how exactly was my friend acting stupidly? She owns three dogs herself. She was doing her job by delivering a package. She could tell she was about to get bit. Was she supposed to deliver a fucking Chuck Norris deadly kick to the monster's head? Perhaps she should have launched herself it the air like a Power Ranger. You really are not making any sense.

[welch]

I officially hate pit bulls. I would never go into a yard with one. My friend used to be a letter carrier till she was severely injured by a pit bull. She was delivering a package. The owner was so happy to get his package he opened the door and the dog bolted out. She cried "Oh! Don't bite me!" Her exclamation didn't help. The dog bit into her calf so hard the holes went right through her leg. Her calf will not heal well. Every time she walks for an extended period she has internal bleeding. She had to retire early from the National Guard and the Post Office. The guy didn't even want to cover her medical bills (which was just a deductible). She had to sue the fucker.

Sorry, but your friend had a very stupid reaction to start with. I'll let the dog experts explain in depth...

Given it's a second hand recounting of something that happened long ago, I think it's safe to say that there's not enough information to judge anything.

Human memory and all.

[AndrewV69]

And that breeds generation after generation of sexually frustrated individuals, mostly male. From them, and perhaps with a few greedy bastids amongst the reproductively successful ones, we get rapists and others who try to cheat 'the system'. Now, even though by now I probably sound like a thoroughgoing rape apologist, I still say that rape is a bad thing because it causes pain and suffering. I'm simply unconvinced that treating rape as one of the worst fates that could befall anyone is a good idea. I have some ideas on how we might make things better, some of which I've mentioned in the past, but a problem of this magnitude is something hjoomin societies need to come together and work out collectively, cultural taboos be damned.

Any thoughts on the traditional rape comitted by the victors in a war? Note that this is still going on today.

[Really?]

And that breeds generation after generation of sexually frustrated individuals, mostly male. From them, and perhaps with a few greedy bastids amongst the reproductively successful ones, we get rapists and others who try to cheat 'the system'. Now, even though by now I probably sound like a thoroughgoing rape apologist, I still say that rape is a bad thing because it causes pain and suffering. I'm simply unconvinced that treating rape as one of the worst fates that could befall anyone is a good idea. I have some ideas on how we might make things better, some of which I've mentioned in the past, but a problem of this magnitude is something hjoomin societies need to come together and work out collectively, cultural taboos be damned.

Any thoughts on the traditional rape comitted by the victors in a war? Note that this is still going on today.

What can you do? God not only awards the women to the victors, but pretty much orders them to have sex with the women.

But seriously, this wouldn't be a problem if we would just change the traditional arrangement of having men fight the war while the men stay at home not getting shot at.

[Pitchguest]

Rather a pug than a pitbull, I say. Pitbulls can be viscious bastards. Pugs are just, well...

http://www.weblo.com/asset_images/large ... e43cc0.jpg

D'aaawwww!

[Matt Cavanaugh]

I officially hate pit bulls. I would never go into a yard with one. My friend used to be a letter carrier till she was severely injured by a pit bull. She was delivering a package. The owner was so happy to get his package he opened the door and the dog bolted out. She cried "Oh! Don't bite me!" Her exclamation didn't help. The dog bit into her calf so hard the holes went right through her leg. Her calf will not heal well. Every time she walks for an extended period she has internal bleeding. She had to retire early from the National Guard and the Post Office. The guy didn't even want to cover her medical bills (which was just a deductible). She had to sue the fucker.

Sorry, but your friend had a very stupid reaction to start with. I'll let the dog experts explain in depth...

Given it's a second hand recounting of something that happened long ago, I think it's safe to say that there's not enough information to judge anything.

Human memory and all.

But, Carrie Poppy corroborated it!

[Pitchguest]

They can also be VICIOUS bastards. But viscious, too, I suppose if they're drooling enough to fill a small lake.

[Tigzy]

Rather a pug than a pitbull, I say. Pitbulls can be viscious bastards. Pugs are just, well...

http://www.weblo.com/asset_images/large ... e43cc0.jpg

D'aaawwww!

D'aaawwww!

https://twitter.com/MelodyHensley/statu ... 34/photo/1

[free thoughtpolice]

I've heard of many past rape victims who hate SJW feminists, and they claim that the hysterical overreaction to rape can harm the road to recovery for actual survivors of rape. By both constantly talking about rape (trivializing the meaning of the word by associating it with lesser crimes and even some activities which are not crimes) while maintaining a hysterical, hilarious over-reaction to the impact of the crime on the victim, the SJWs make rape out to be both incredibly common and WORSE THAN DEATH OMG UR GONNA GET RAEPED RIGHT NAO WITHOUT FEMINISM AND U CAN NEVAR HEAL!

Whereas many men and women who have been raped got over it and moved on with their lives. It's empowering to be told that what happened to you, while bad and not your fault, is something you can move past. You cannot move past murder. Because you're fucking dead.

That's why I will never see eye-to-eye with feminists who claim that rape is equal to or worse than murder.

Is death, objectively, the absolute *worst* thing that can happen to a person? Theoretically, all manner of suffering can simply be 'moved past'. Yet, people still commit suicide to be free of suffering. People still go to war rather than lose their freedom to a foreign power (even though in many cases their lives will be preserved if they simply surrender). Why do people risk death in order to escape subjugation?

http://getcfit.files.wordpress.com/2012 ... plate2.jpg

Freedom isn't just a state of having personal liberty. It's also about being free from suffering. And for some - rape, disability, and so on, is a lot worse than death. Death = freedom.

Don't(or didn't) they make those plate in prison?

[windy]

Seems to me that if push-comes-to-shove, as seems to be the direction things are developing in, and Muslims insist on attempting to impose their “Islamic values” on the rest of the society, values that Warraq rather convincingly demonstrates are antithetical to the principles of democracy, then they should be or will be given the choice between repudiating those values – as happened in Spain some 600 years ago – or being declared “persona non grata” and being deported forthwith.

I have to admit that I wasn't aware that Spain was a democracy during the expulsion of the Moors.

[Dick Strawkins]

Every few years a scientific paper is published with implications so important (if confirmed and extended by subsequent research) that it is immediately obvious that the author is going to get a nobel prize.
One such paper came out today in Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 12968.html
http://i.imgur.com/2Wr97fM.jpg

Here's the BBC article on it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25967136

It involves a discovery by a Japanese researcher, Haroko Obukata, that a simple physical treatment (the brief introduction of cells to an acid environment) causes adult cells to become pluripotent (having the ability to differentiate into multiple cell types.)
The other pit scientists might have some ideas on this but it will be fascinating if this turns out to be correct since it has implications for both stem cell research (which will benefit from an easy supply of personalized stem cells) and cancer research - since cancer can in one way be thought of as adult cells reverting to an imperfect pluripotent state.

[welch]

Kids, stay in school!

[youtube]STHpMUYeznQ[/youtube]

[Steersman]

Seems to me that if push-comes-to-shove, as seems to be the direction things are developing in, and Muslims insist on attempting to impose their “Islamic values” on the rest of the society, values that Warraq rather convincingly demonstrates are antithetical to the principles of democracy, then they should be or will be given the choice between repudiating those values – as happened in Spain some 600 years ago – or being declared “persona non grata” and being deported forthwith.

I have to admit that I wasn't aware that Spain was a democracy during the expulsion of the Moors.

Learn something new every day I always say.

But actually what I was alluding to – if imperfectly and obscurely – was the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. While that is, no doubt, a rather “blunt instrument” of social and political policy, and has been used in rather egregious ways – rather much like war itself, that hardly means that that is necessarily always the case. You might be interested in the Wikipedia article on deportations which notes:

All countries reserve the right of deportation of foreigners, even those who are longtime residents. In general, foreigners who have committed serious crimes, entered the country illegally, overstayed their visa, or otherwise lost their legal status to remain in the country may be administratively removed or deported.....

For example, in the 1930s during the Great Depression, more stringent enforcement of immigration laws were ordered by the executive branch of the U.S. government, which led to the expulsion of up to 2 million Mexican nationals from the United States. In 1954, the executive branch of the U.S. government implemented Operation Wetback, a program created in response to public hysteria about immigration and immigrants from Mexico. Operation Wetback led to the deportation of nearly 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States.

The related article on population transfers details the use of expulsion throughout history, including some quite recent cases, one of the more notable being what occurred in Greece and Turkey in 1923:

The League of Nations defined those to be mutually expelled as the "Muslim inhabitants of Greece" to Turkey and moving "the Christian Orthodox inhabitants of Turkey" to Greece. The plan met with fierce opposition in both countries and was condemned vigorously by a large number of countries. Undeterred, Fridtjof Nansen worked with both Greece and Turkey to gain their acceptance of the proposed population exchange. About 1.5 million Christians and half a million Muslims were moved from one side of the international border to the other.

If ethnic minorities are going to be at each other’s throats, if they “don’t play well with each other” or if they espouse values that are diametrically opposed - as seems rather clearly to be the case with Muslims and Christians or secularists in general - then it seems to be the better part of wisdom to separate the potential combatants, one way or another, and/or change immigration policies accordingly.

[Guest]

I have been wanting to read Darrel Ray's book, Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

He talks about shame based religions, such as Islam, and guilt based, such as Catholicism.

This book shows how religion uses our sexual nature against us to control us and perpetuate religion. It outlines the psychological strategies religions use to bind us to a specific religion using techniques like guilt, shame, fear of death and promise of an afterlife. Religion would have you believe sexual restriction is for your good and happiness, but the evidence shows it is largely for the benefit of the religion, without regard to human happiness. How did human culture exist for thousands of years before Yahweh, Jesus and Allah came along? If religion is so important to sexual control, how do so-called “primitive” cultures exist happily for thousands of years without Christianity, Islam or Hinduism to guide them?
Sex and God shows how sexual restrictions are used by all the major religions and why it works so well, especially in subjugating women and children.

http://www.atheismresource.com/2012/sex ... darrel-ray

The ironic thing here is that Darrel Ray seems to be in league with the SJW's. He's still friends with Dillahunty and that crowd and is still a speaker at Skepticon. I've had a few brief conversations with him on youtube where I asked him if he thought the Atheism+ movement has become just like a God Virus. He refused to acknowledge the similaraties which leads me to believe that he accepts their authoritarianism and sex shaming as legitamite.

[Matt Cavanaugh]

It appears my notes on domestic violence (proper term for what we're discusing: "Intimate Partner Violence" IPV) are lost or on the dead computer. I've been searching online, and found a lot of stuff, which I will compile. I believe this is partially what I based my earlier, rough stats on:

Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence

Results. Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3 ...), but not men (AOR=1.26 .... Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4 ...

There was at least one other study I'm tracking down that filled out this data.

Also see The Guardian

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09

The NIJ reports

The National Family Violence Survey (NFVS) found nearly equal rates of assault (11–12 percent) by an intimate partner among both men and women.

... NVAWS found that women are significantly more likely than men to report being victims of intimate partner violence ....

A 1996 National Violence Against Women study estimated

... approximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.

More to come as I analyze them. In the mean time, a bibliography of studies. (Possibly MRA-biased, can't tell yet.)

[Steersman]

Sort of the problem with Marxism that was highlighted by that quote I provided of E.O. Wilson – his view, as a biologist who had spent a great amount of time studing ants and other social animals and insects, was that Marxism was a “wonderful theory, [but was applied to the] wrong species” – humans instead of ants – and that it was starting off from some erroneous premises about the nature of human nature. And the results have kind of proved him right. ....

Ah yes. I read Pinker as you linked and thought it was very good.

<snip>
For one thing, if Marxism is about anything it's about class struggle and that is the very thing usually missing from all of this SJW blather. Back when there still were serious Marxists, they thought of most feminists and the proto-SJW types as, at best, fellow travellers and at worst, useful idiots. In the end, they even got the "useful" part wrong.

Maybe. But a rather diverse population that isn’t easily characterized and which likely encompasses any number of “exceptions to the rule” – for instance, I seem to recollect that both “Sarah Jones” and “IDoubtThat” – fairly frequent commenters or bloggers in the Freethought/Skepchick community – have identified as Marxists of one flavour or another.

As for the roots of the SJL in general, Pinker has some dozen passages on Marxism in his The Blank Slate, including these telling observations:

Marx and Engles did not explicitly embrace the doctrine of the Blank Slate in their writins, but they were adamant that human nature has no enduring properties. It consists only in the interactions of groups of people with their material environments in a historical period, and constantly changes as people change their environment and are simultaneously changed by it. The mind therefore has no innate structure but emerges from the dialectical processes of history and social interaction. .....

In a foreshadowing of Dukheim’s and Kroeber’s insistence that individual minds are not worthy of attention, Marx wrote:

Individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests.

[pgs 155-156]

“Teh Patriarchy” writ large.

But I still think that it is quite reasonable to talk of society as an emergent structure that has some degree of autonomy and that can be dealt with as a single entity. However, when that shades over into a serious devaluing of the individual and its roots in genetics – as seems quite typical of SJ warriors, Marxists, and other authoritarians and fascists like various religions, particularly Islam and Christianity – then one might reasonably argue that the analogy and concept is being pushed to its breaking point.

[John Greg]

There has been a truckload of posting since these were posted, nonetheless:

rayshul said:

I think the picture it paints generally is fairly logical - both men and women are violent in relationships and to children, and that at the end of the day you don't gain anything by painting it as a situation that's specific to one gender (http://www.slymepit.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... 53#p158253).

Yes, and ...

Teh Welch said:

Like rape, it is neither exclusively a woman's nor a man's problem. It is a human problem.... (http://www.slymepit.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... 54#p158254)

Yes.

And, one of the major problems here, within the SJL and associated communities, is the basic fact that they are stubbornly ... nay nay, did I say stubbornly? Adamantly, unmalleabley, utterly udderly unmovabley crazy-glued to the black/white, us/them, absolutist is/isn't, right/wrong, 1/0 false dichtomy train. They, in a sense, represent digital thought processing at its finest.

....

I think. ?

(Master Welch can correct me on that.)

And, in my lower moments, when I see disaster and chthonic collapse roiling though hidden in every dusty corner, I see them as the frightening future.

When the world dies, and dies as it will not in a raging storm and tempestuous shout, but in a sad and lonely whimper, it will be these types of anti-social, anti-human dogmatic, isolationist, sociopathic morons and PeeZus/Lah-Den/Watson/Zvan (fungible, as you will) wannabees who will be at the root of the cause of collapse.

But that's what I foresee only in my lower moments.

[Pitchguest]

Every few years a scientific paper is published with implications so important (if confirmed and extended by subsequent research) that it is immediately obvious that the author is going to get a nobel prize.
One such paper came out today in Nature.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 12968.html
http://i.imgur.com/2Wr97fM.jpg

Here's the BBC article on it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25967136

It involves a discovery by a Japanese researcher, Haroko Obukata, that a simple physical treatment (the brief introduction of cells to an acid environment) causes adult cells to become pluripotent (having the ability to differentiate into multiple cell types.)
The other pit scientists might have some ideas on this but it will be fascinating if this turns out to be correct since it has implications for both stem cell research (which will benefit from an easy supply of personalized stem cells) and cancer research - since cancer can in one way be thought of as adult cells reverting to an imperfect pluripotent state.

That is amazing. She's definitely in line for a Nobel prize. If her research has the possibility to create the regenerative qualities in stem cells as stated in that video, then she's quite possibly one of the most important scientists of our time. There is the slight caveat that it has only worked on mice thus far, but I have hope. (And I have further hope that if the procedure is succesful -- and as revolutionary as they think -- that any treatment it provides will be offered no charge, or at least made cheap and for the countries where it precides well within the universal health care package.) I'm probably far too naive that any such potential discovery, in such magnitude, won't be taken advantage of by the vultures of industry, though.

[Badger3k]

Ed Brayton has a post up that has a bit of a howler:

What happens when a dullard like Sean Hannity, who is only capable of confidently repeating shallow talking points, falls into the hands of someone like Amanda Marcotte, who is actually capable of thinking clearly?

Not that Hannity is hard to destroy, but...come on! Although to be charitable, maybe Marcotte is capable of thinking clearly, she just refuses to do so in most occasions?

[deLurch]

The ironic thing here is that Darrel Ray seems to be in league with the SJW's. He's still friends with Dillahunty and that crowd and is still a speaker at Skepticon. I've had a few brief conversations with him on youtube where I asked him if he thought the Atheism+ movement has become just like a God Virus. He refused to acknowledge the similaraties which leads me to believe that he accepts their authoritarianism and sex shaming as legitamite.

So what? He is tainted because he is willing to speak at a free conference? Tainted because he doesn't sever ties and friendships with unapproved people? Tainted because he doesn't parrot the correct response to your inquiry? Therefore he has magically acquired positions you think he has as opposed to what he has already stated?

Sorry, but that is just plain sloppy. It's the kind of bullshit the SJWs pull that I particularly dislike. Judge him based on his own words & actions. Not based on who he is friends with. Not based on approved conferences. And not based on positions you have projected onto him.

[Pitchguest]

Rather a pug than a pitbull, I say. Pitbulls can be viscious bastards. Pugs are just, well...

http://www.weblo.com/asset_images/large ... e43cc0.jpg

D'aaawwww!

D'aaawwww!

https://twitter.com/MelodyHensley/statu ... 34/photo/1

I hope those dogs aren't of the male persuasion.