themadkat

As I explained in conversation with Jackethan a few days ago, I think that not only is there a continuum of sexual preferences (i.e. straight to bisexual to gay) but also a continuum of flexibility in preference, i.e. are you willing to be "heteroflexible" or do you lose wood at the first mention of men touching? You might think bisexual people would be the most flexible but that might not be necessarily the case - for example, if a bisexual person is attracted only to androgynous people, male or female, but not to others, I would not consider them very flexible.

Yes, this.

I agree with you...that said, I think there is a value in taking a beating in your life, at least once. It shows you that it's not the end of the world, and thereafter there's no reason to fear it.

You may be fortunate to have a good doctor, which is fantastic. I have had both good doctors and bad doctors. Generally speaking I would say that the American medical system is pretty good at treating infectious diseases, serious injuries, and emergency life-threatening conditions. It is piss-poor when it comes to chronic illnesses and chronic physical injuries that are slow to heal (unless you get yourself a good physical therapist with a background in rehabilitating athletes), and bad with natural life transitions such as aging and pregnancy, again unless there is a mega-emergency-problem.

Well then you should definitely NOT buy the book.

That's weird. I've always, how should I say this, "worked" just fine, and my fellow and I have some great times in bed. But I never considered myself emotionally intelligent before. General intelligence sure, no question, but I always think of myself as someone who's smart about everything BUT people, who generally mystify me, and I don't consider myself particularly empathetic which I thought was part of EI. On the other hand, I have almost too much empathy for the people I care about so maybe that's why, it's just a matter of the person's value to me.

Obviously there are some problems with the values that Boy Scouts espouse as an organization. However, I do not believe that they are sufficiently bad to deny yourself the considerable achievement that becoming an Eagle Scout represents. Being an Eagle Scout means that you have met certain objective criteria and possess some important skills that you should be proud of. I don't think you have to embrace all that an organization represents in order to attain personal achievement through it, any more than I agree with my university's mission statement because I got a diploma from them.

Well, the only good thing I can say is, if you make it to the end you start to see the change in him because he recognizes how miserable and empty he's going to be if he doesn't do something to change his situation. So even though the whole thing is about the guy's depravity, it does have a happy ending in the sense that he pulls out of his tailspin by his own effort. This story resonates with me somewhat because I'm an Ivy-Leaguer too, and even though Princeton of the early 80s was not Dartmouth of the mid 00s, there are still a lot of similarities between the scenes. I knew a lot of the elitist pricks he describes in his story, meritless aristocrats, and I knew some of the people like him too who had no sense of what they were doing and rushed blindly forward for achievement and affirmation. My background is roughly similar to his, small town girl from PA instead of MN like him, and I was not allowed into the "secret club" either. I could have ended up like him, except for whatever reason when I was fairly young I realized that adults didn't know anything either so there was no sense in pleasing them, and I started doing things more or less purely for the purpose of achieving my own ends. I was able to make it all about me, and he missed the train on that one. Frankly, sometimes parents make these situations work. My parents, fortunately, were pretty mellow and were content to let me be pretty self-directed, but I know my mom especially did pressure me once or twice to take on some extracurriculars or volunteer or something and I basically told her "that's just not what I want to do, I'm not interested and I won't force it." But I basically spent eight continuous years in elite private schools (high school then Dartmouth) so the things this guy saw around him are very familiar to me.

This guy might as well be Peter Keating, except that at least in retrospect he sees his depravity for what it actually is. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/kirn

Putting dictionary definitions aside, why do YOU think it is in someone's rational self-interest to hurt, use, or deceive others? If you can't answer this question your critique of Rand's concept of selfishness is going to fall flat.

Oh, ok, I see what you're saying. But don't you think there are some individuals that just really won't care that much about sex and romance, and don't need them in order to have full and complete lives? That's what I mean by optional values. I don't know, but I can imagine how for a particular person there are just other values they would rather pursue much more. I personally am not one of those people - I've been happily paired for eight years now, and never had anyone but him. For me, this has been a great value. But I still think that sex and romance can be an optional value for a particular person when they simply don't value it that highly compared to other things, like perhaps an all-consuming career, a hobby or job requiring constant travel, etc.

Are you disagreeing that sex and romance are optional values? Or just saying that the reasoning behind "sex is only for procreation" is necessarily flawed, no matter what the person's context? I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. Certainly in my case the statement is reversed...I'm all about gettin' a piece but most affirmatively NOT trying to procreate, in fact I'm actively avoiding it.

Well, being that sex and romance are optional values, I guess there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you have other values in your life that you achieve that bring you long-term happiness. Some of the rest of us are quite content in our horndog ways, but I suppose like anything else sexual desire varies greatly from person to person.

It's interesting that you raise that point. In fact, your description of how children react applies to animals too. If you physically punish an animal, especially severely, it will not associate the suffering with its supposed wrong, it will associate that suffering with you. This has limited usefulness, but it won't be long before the animal either turns on you or suffers other behavioral problems. Much more effective is any negative stimulus associated with the incorrect behavior that can't be traced back to you, such as if you shoot your cat with a water gun from around a corner where it can't see you if it starts trying to pee in the corner. If harsh punishment isn't even good for training animals, why in the world should it be good for children? I'm not going to discard corporal punishment entirely, especially for a quick swat on a non-delicate part of the body for a very young child who is about to endanger himself. But a spank on a youngster is one thing. A full-blown beating, especially on a middling or older child, is absolutely terrible and I wouldn't blame a child for reacting badly to it. There has to be another way to get your point across. If we expect children to grow up into adults that live by reason and not force, how are we ever going to convey that lesson if we demonstrate that we ourselves must resort to force? I remember one time that my father slapped me across the face. I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I was either a teenager or very nearly one. He hit my cheek, and physically it didn't hurt very badly. My father's not very physically intimidating, and as an older teen I could have probably taken him down, although I doubt I ever had or have it in me to try. But that wasn't the point. I started crying, simply because I was so shocked and hurt that he struck me - in a word, heartbroken, especially because that was not how I was used to being treated and because my father and I were very close at that point. The physical pain was negligible, but the emotional pain was awful. I emphasize how bad it was because the physical act itself was not anything special, just a slap. But I would have rather undergone a group beating by a bunch of kids my own age than have Dad hit me like that. To this day I don't have any recollection of what we were fighting about or why he hit me. So much for the lesson.

So people who don't want children should never have sex? Ridiculous. Sex has the potential, at its best, to be a cohesive force between two loving individuals second to none. The incredible bonding experience of giving your body to someone freely, as a gift, while at the same time taking theirs all for your own and mastering it, knowing you are responsible for their every move, reaction, and sensation, is inimitable. I know this is not what sex is like for everyone, or how everyone views their sexual experience, but I'm suggesting that it is possible to a loving couple and, I assert, only to a loving couple. No conversation, gesture, or other act of love, no matter how expansive, can quite compare to that one thing. Moreover, people are meant to have sex. It actually improves your physical condition to have more sex (assuming you are not being put at increased risk of infection). Masturbation helps to a degree but it is not a total substitute. What do you think about sex acts that do not carry the possibility of reproduction at all? Do you think they are wrong? Or just somehow unsatisfying (on which point I will disagree with you)?

What did Dr. Spock do? I mean first of all, who is he, and secondly, what was his error?

The population wasn't low at all until after contact. In fact many areas were quite densely populated, most especially the Southeast, the Northeast, and the Pacific Coast. Losing 90+% of your population in the space of a few hundred years (even hundreds of miles from anywhere white people showed up) would tend to disrupt anyone's society, I would think.

Your logic has one fatal flaw (probably more, but I'm just focusing on one). You are making the mistake of equating getting healthcare with getting insurance. In a free system the average (and even the below average) person would easily be able to afford routine procedures and care without insurance playing any role, which is as it should be. The solution is to have insurance packages with less coverage, not more. As more and more people pay for medical procedures a la carte like one would buy any other service, supply and demand will equal out and prices will drop drastically. The true purpose of health insurance is to cover catastrophic injury, and a fairly bare-bones insurance package would be dirt cheap in a free society. Therefore you would not have to worry about going bankrupt from being run over by a bus. Also, a free system would eliminate the so-called "gold plating" of medical care, another reason it is so expensive. Imagine if the next time you had an infection, you could just go to CVS, get diagnosed by a nurse or some other comparable medical technician, and pick up your antibiotic on the spot. A doctor wouldn't even have to factor into the equation. Competition from alternative healthcare sources as I have just described would force doctors to lower their prices to market levels. It is true that people with more money will be able to afford more and/or better care, but how is that different from anything else in the market? In a free system even extremely poor people would be able to afford the most basic care and drugs.

Some of my pals and all have taken to calling it ManBearPig flu. I just bought some Vitamin D (which I ought to have anyway) and left it at that.

Thieves deserve to be shot? I'm not so sure about that. I think only those who would cause others bodily harm deserve to die. Now, obviously, thieves deserve to be PUNISHED, but there are degrees of punishment for a reason.

Generally speaking, Zip, I agree with you. In physical confrontations shit happens and sometimes people have freak injuries and die (just like sometimes people walk away unharmed from things when they had no business doing so, realistically). The results of that confrontation are squarely the responsibility of the one who made that confrontation necessary. All I'm saying is there's got to be a sense of, as you say, stopping the beating when he stops moving, or not shooting a guy in the back. Something like a home invasion, I would have a lot more leniency...someone is in your home and you don't know what they're going to do. What I'm thinking off is more along the lines of a guy picking your pocket and running away in a crowded street - we can't have people just pulling out their pistols and opening fire on this guy. In that situation, I'd start running after the jerk and make a holy racket about it, hoping someone up the sidewalk would have the basic benevolence to stick their foot out in front of him. At the very least, there'd be tons of witnesses. I swear one of the best defenses you have in a public place is to make a bloody racket.

I agree that, unfortunately, police action is usually post-hoc. That said, I do not think the use of deadly force is justified to take down a fleeing thief. No court in the land would assign the death penalty for someone making off with your PS3. Deadly force is totally justified if it is a question of your personal safety, but I just don't see how it can be right to maim or kill someone who is not placing others in immediate danger. Not only that, there is a good chance innocent, uninvolved people near all this commotion could be hurt in the process, which is totally unjustifiable. That said, if I saw someone making off with my property, I wouldn't shoot him in the back, but I would certainly pursue. And if I caught up with him at the very least a beating is in order. Once he was subdued, I'd call the cops on him.

I really feel like the initial poster misses the point entirely about where Oist ethics comes from. First of all, you take a very mercenary view of "value". A rational man seeks to earn values or, better still, create new ones, not simply "acquire" values floating out there in the ether. Your moral stance sounds more like that of a bureaucrat who seeks to control and "delegate" values generated by others without giving anything of yourself. You can't get something for nothing. When you fail to respect the individual rights of others, you fail to recognize that many of the values you seek are generated by those others, and that it requires them acting in their rational self interest for them to be able to create those values. When you harm others you destroy traders and indicate that you, yourself, do not seek to act as a trader. More fundamentally you are not attacking the idea of honesty at all. You are attacking the idea of living on principle. Instead you are advocating a sort of utilitarian calculation of what is in your "interest" (and how do you know this?) for any given situation, which requires you to do a great deal of mental gymnastics for every given situation. Living on principle is not only much more practical but is the only way to achieve what is truly in your long-term self-interest. You seem to think it is in your interest to obtain the unearned...it is not. Your ability to earn values is continuous and depends on fundamental traits about you. Your ability to stumble upon the unearned has nearly everything to do with luck, unless you make a habit of it in which case you are waging a war on reality.

Obviously, as bullies persist. I think it's the hockey penalty principle in action...the ref always sees the guy who throws the SECOND punch. Also, many if not most bullies operate by verbal intimidation alone. I don't think it progresses to physical violence as much, especially with girls.

Dangerous is definitely not an "essential" trait of pits...my neighbors' annoyingly loud but stupefyingly friendly dogs are a good example. I'm sure they could be aggressive if they saw my neighbor or her young son being attacked, but other than that their primary concern is how to get as much love and attention as they can, as well as be able to investigate the next "shiny". Frankly the best thing that could happen to the pit bull line (which as I understand it is not even a true breed) is for it to lose its "dangerous" reputation so that people would no longer want to use them in that way, and then they would be outbred with more docile breeds if aggression continued to be a problem. Any badly-bred animal can be dangerous or just an unhealthy liability to its owner. Every cat I've ever owned has been crossbred "alley cats" and they always live past fifteen years or so.