Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

aequalsa

Regulars
  • Posts

    2171
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    24

Everything posted by aequalsa

  1. Not 97% of the science community; 97% of climate scientists. When you open the discussion up to meteorologist for example, it's 64%. "The science community" at large was around 70-80% last I heard.
  2. Based on your description, I think that this is more of a psychological(or perhaps physiological)issue than a philosophical one. The only potential area where philosophy might play a part is with regard to your relationship. I assume that you realize that being asexual puts you in a pretty extreme minority and that most people, including your boyfriend it seems, punctuate that intimacy you crave with sexual acts. I don't mean to accuse you of any sort of intentional dishonesty, but I think that fairness requires that you be extremely upfront about the fact that he will never have his needs for intimacy met. If you are clear about that and he accepts it, than all is well and good, but my guess is that either you have not been as clear as is necessary or he has not accepted it as true and permanent since he keeps trying even after two years. I can't conjecture as to the details but I can't imagine how there is not, at the least some level of serious evasion on his part.
  3. Polymer clay can be got at a hobby store
  4. I'm not sure what you want to do with it, but one option might be polymer clay. It's PVC based so its a little plastic-y but it might be fine for practice. Otherwise you might look into joining a pottery club if there is one available. They'll usually fire stuff for you for a reasonable price.
  5. "Spoken like a true white, straight, middle-class, college educated male." ... In delegitimizing my thoughts through gratuitous over-generalization you have committed the same error that your statement inherently implies that I continuously make.
  6. Sorry to intrude, I'm not a teenager by any stretch, but this comment stood out to me. A few years after I graduated HS I went back to my school to visit a few teachers and ran into my former American history teacher in the hall. He saw that I was carrying one of her books and said "Ayn Rand? You're actually reading that fascist bitch?" I replied, "Fascist? Not sure I see how she's a fascist. What did you read of hers that seemed fascist?" He grumbled,"I think I read part of anthem once." Stuck out in my mind. Must be a public school teacher thing.
  7. I agree with JASKN's response to you and would also agree with IAMMETA's assessment of aesthetics as applied to people, but would clarify that accidental features can be values as much as any chosen virtues. A women who is 6' tall and who enjoys the feeling of femininity, might properly value a lover's 6'6" height. It would be a mistake for her to disregard his other more volitionally based characteristics, but not to take into consideration both types of values. I would go still further and include non-volitional characteristics in other relationships than romantic. In business and elsewhere it is easy to come up with any number of examples where some people are preferable for reasons other than their chosen values. I might hire a large, strong dumb man over a small, intelligent woman for certain types of jobs. Particularly those that require a lot of heavy lifting. In judging people for a particular purpose it is worthwhile to consider as many essential facts as possible and the unchosen can still be essential to one's purpose. So for me, purpose determines value, and my purpose in a romantic relationship includes(but is not limited to)enjoying a woman's body. The sensorial experience of enjoyment includes how she looks, in addition to how she feels, smells, and sounds.
  8. I reduced your comment to absurdity but just to make the point that there must exist some level of attraction. Different people, properly, draw that line at different levels...or hair colors...or races for that matter. You might draw the line at female with a bmi of 23. Someone else might draw the line at blond females with a bmi of 22 who have disproportionately long thigh to calf ratios. The only time when I think a strong argument could be made against these physical standards would be if the standards were so precise that the precluded any realistic possibility of being fulfilled, in which case the overly high standards exist as some kind of defense mechanism to protect the individual from a relationship which they couldn't handle. In this case, because the op's standards are based on real women he has dated, this circumstance would seem inapplicable.
  9. We really don't. Not romantically, at least, if there isn't some attraction there to begin with.
  10. "ANYONE" includes morbidly obese, 84 year old men. Not necessarily a problem but if your a straight 23 year old male, his integrity might not be enough to get you to the alter...I'm just sayin'. I agree with Sophia and IAMMETA, in that attraction is the first hurdle of a romantic relationship. There is some baseline of attraction that simply must be met before the whole Virtue-as-beauty-enhancement thing comes into any effect at all. This isn't to say that the virtues are not as important, just that they aren't really relevant in this context until attraction exists. Regarding the OP, I'm a little doubtful that you could change your feelings about her. If you had said that you are not as attracted as you would like to be, that would be one thing, but your description sounds like she's not even close to your line. The only things that occur to me would be if she were to change her diet and exercise habits to become closer(close enough) to your ideal or if there were some behaviorally conditioned notions that you have internalized, like the porn habit mentioned by a previous poster. The first assumes that a) she'd be willing to change her life dramatically and b ) that was enough to satisfy you. The second assumes that you have some strongly affective, negative habits which she is worth trading them for.
  11. I am responding to the question based on the assumption that they desire to sleep with animals apart from any unusual justifiers. Theoretically someone could pay you a million bucks to hump a goat and if you did you would be able to afford treatment for your dying wife, I wouldn't hold it against you in the same way. Outside of some rather ridiculous context like that, however, I can't think of any good reasoning that could lead to bestiality. That was my point. Maybe I wasn't clear. For someone to desire most of these unusual things it is necessary that something is wrong with their reasoning and values. I view this sort of behavior is an indication of something incorrect, which is to say, unhealthy, which is to say anti-life and therefore bad in the person.
  12. I just threw up in my mouth a little...Ok...I'm ok now... I think this is not a question answered by asking "why not," as much as by asking "why." An animal is clearly not necessary for sexual release since even without the ability to find a willing human partner everyone is capable of accomplishing the release themselves. So with sexual release removed, the question that remains is what other benefit(s) could possibly be received from bestiality that could not be achieved in some other way. For example, what twisted psychological state would be necessary to derive pleasure from such an inequitable and non-consensual relationship? You could ask the same question about pedophiles. In short, look for the essential differentia and then ask yourself what could lead to the state of affairs. For my part, I can't think of any moral qualities that could lead to any of those things.
  13. Do you remember where he said that, or at least the general context? I'm not a jung scholar by any stretch, but I'm wondering if it was tied in with his concepts of the "collective unconscious." If so, it's based on blind speculation about what amounts to a racial memory, primarily, and doesn't leave much to refute.
  14. aequalsa

    My Way

    I've been loving that song for over 20 years. I try now to only play it for myself on special occasions.
  15. I'm looking for the "like" button...
  16. A child would(and is) held to the same demands of memory, going from virtually no language capacity to full fluency by the age of 4 with nearly 6000 words in their vocabulary. You would be hard pressed to find any adult who could achieve the same in even twice that time frame. Most people retain their accents(mispronunciations) decades into full immersion in another language. It's not a question of more or less efficient. The child's brain is functionally different from an adults in they way it acquires information. The adult brain is shaped through experience to do a number of great and different things, but language acquisition, outside of those they were surrounded by before the age of 5, isn't one of them. I can explain the science to you but you'd be better off reading a book or some articles on early childhood neural development. Your simply mistaken in your views.
  17. Welcome to objectivism.....online.net
  18. Are you talking about the lack of bipartisanship idea, or the put his jack boots on the neck of private industry idea, because I see acceptance of the two on national television as implications of two distinct things.
  19. I'm pretty sure I haven't ever seen calls from anyone for the president to act like a dictator and put his boot on the neck of industry. Do you have a particular example in mind?
  20. The only, possibly, innate response that I am aware of is an infant's response to high contrast. They seem to take an interest in black and white contrasted paper before one month of age. As soon as they can see at all, those objects will draw their attention. Anything beyond that is probably just association. Possibly early nearly immutable association, but still learned. Green grass and trees, blue skies and water, etc. A cross cultural study comparing response to colors between peoples in varied climates might be interesting. Comparing emotional responses people, particularity children, in yellow/brown deserts, snowy tundras, and lush forests might yield interesting results, but I am not aware of any. My guess is that they would get emotional comfort from color schemes that were familiar to them so it would vary by culture/climate.
  21. This points at something essential that I thought was missing from OP's initial definition. The key trade off for the potential for returns is risk, so I would probably describe it as "purchasing a potential gain with a potential loss," and then define an investment as "good" or "bad" with other descriptors. The original post seems more like a specific sort of investment. "reasonably predictable appreciation" for example is not what I would consider essential to the concept, investment, per se. That might more accurately be described as "a sensible, low risk investment" That's my 2 cents...investment.
  22. That's what Rosetta attempts to avoid for that very reason. As an adult it is nearly impossible to not do that initially though because we are already biased by our primary language. This is why I was saying that children have an advantage. Their lack of bias and full, need-based submersion allows them to achieve a fluency in 2-3 years that adult could barely achieve in 5 and many times, not at all. This is especially true with pronunciation.
  23. I think we are using two different concepts of what it means to "learn" a word word. An adult could probably learn the meaning of 1-2 words an hour, more or less, but I am doubtful that a 35 year old could learn the meanings of 2 words in all their contexts with perfect pronunciation that could not be differentiated by a native speaker and maintain permanent near perfect recall of that meaning for the remainder of their lives. It is an extremely different activity.
  24. Might be realistic soon if Peter Thiel has anything to say about it. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle5901235.ece
  25. Learning language, initially, is a subconscious process, which makes the first superior to learning second languages. Language literally defines the way we think about things so going after a second language is a little backwards. To acquire a second language, say Spanish, we think about each new word or phrase as a sort of synonym for English. Trabajo means "I work," and "I work," means that actual thing that you do at your job every day. This translation process essentially forces a subconscious activity(speaking) to be conscious. This necessarily causes a loss of efficiency because the signals have to go so much further, neurologically speaking. With Ayn Rand as an example, it is clear that she had an excellent conceptual mastery of the language but was still unable to speak fluently with proper pronunciation. So she was using a Russian mind to understand an English language rather than having an English mind. In early child hood the axons(pathways) between cells is myelinating(a fatty insulation that speeds transmission on a route). This effectually means that parts of the brain are "assigned" activities, and sections that are not used are either utilized by some other part or disconnected from the rest of the brain altogether which causes these clumps to atrophy. Both, actually. The brain increases efficiency at certain activities(the activities the child performs) and loses much of the ability to form newer ones. A child born blind, for example might have their hearing input utilize parts of the visual cortex allowing for more precise differentiation of sounds. I don't know of any off the top of my head. Generally a child has a 200 word vocabulary by the age of 2 and uses two word sentences. This blossoms to 6000 words by the age of 4 with basically full fluency in pronunciation and syntax. By 12 they are typically speaking with error rates at below .1% using 15-20lk words. I would guess that with age the amount of time to learn that much and the error rate would continually increase. With friends that I have that have emigrated to the US it is easy to see a marked difference between siblings depending on the age of each upon arrival, in their pronunciation.
×
×
  • Create New...