themadkat

If he is now her ex I don't see why he needs to know. If he wants to be close friends or perhaps get back together with him then it is dishonest for her to say nothing because she would be trying to earn his affection under false pretenses.

That's a pretty big change. If I'm not mistaken, ESTP is the "I am charming, witty, popular, and want to experience all things!" type. I can see changing one letter or two, but if people can go almost completely the opposite direction this may not be a "type" at all but rather a chosen form of expression which can be changed fairly easily with a level of self-awareness. I've taken this test a few times and in a few different forms, and the strength of my preferences does change on occasion but I'm pretty much always near 100% of the N part of the scale. Meyers-Briggs folks say that 85% of the population has some form of S personality type, i.e., most of the world is made up of *S*J or *S*P people. This can be very frustrating for us conceptual folks. Certainly people of any personality type can be great achievers but the other day when I was thinking about it and about why I always seem to be butting heads with S types a phrase from Rand popped into my head - "concrete bound". Is a strong S preference any indication of being concrete-bound in the way Rand described? And if these personality types are in fact fairly malleable, would we see more people leaning toward the N side of the scale if they had to be more conceptual to get by? Just my random musings.

Well, that's a tricky thing, there. Children can be and many certainly are aware of the physical pleasure that can arise from the stimulation of certain bits, and many children have figured out enough to be able to masturbate to orgasm far before puberty (I don't know, I'm not sure if this works for boys, but for girls it certainly does). On the other hand, if we are going to count sexuality not as the mere desire to have pleasurable sensations from where your swimsuit goes, but as a reaction and response for feelings to another, then I would agree that sexuality does not develop until around puberty. Simply wanting to touch yourself and feel good does not necessarily connect you to a desire for others or even having any clue what to do with those others you would desire. That definitely comes later. For some folks, by this definition, sexuality doesn't even really develop until they are nearly 20, if you're a late bloomer.

Regrettably, considering I went to one of these schools myself, I'm going to have to put the plug in for tribalism. That is not to say I have anything against my school or the education I got there - I love my school and I got a great education. However, as is obvious to everyone here, you get out of school what you put into it. I was interested in knowledge for it's own sake, loved learning, took classes that excited me and that I could be engaged in, and had definite career goals in mind, with milestones I needed to achieve each year. (I'm not trying to make myself sound like some kind of super-student here, just listing the reasons I believe I was able to get more out of college. I also skipped certain readings entirely, joined a coed fraternity, and played an inordinate amount of video games.) My rationale for my claim mostly has to do with observations of the people I went to school with. Many of those were technically bright, in some respect, but weren't really anything special when it came to being a scholar. Instead, they had a lot of money and a name, partied all the time, squeaked by with Bs (one thing about these top-tier institutions, it can be terribly hard to excel but not really that difficult to get average grades with minimum effort), and knew they had a position waiting for them in Daddy's company after they left. There was even one fraternity who basically said something along the lines of, "If you join this house and you want a job in a Fortune 500 company, it's yours." And they can deliver on that promise, because of networking. Obviously a total moron is going to have some limits on what job he could have in that Fortune 500 company, but the point is he shouldn't be there in the first place, but he can be simply because he joined a house. Armies of popped-collar "sweet dudes" who are not particularly remarkable or able are already made guys with their lives delivered to them on a silver platter, largely without effort, simply because of who they are and what they have. And the Ivy Leagues are just part of it. It's like a phase of a secret handshake. It should be no wonder that the state of American business today is so poor, with companies making terrible decisions and once-profitable enterprises being looted from the inside. It's because these dopes are working there. Worst part is, my school was probably the most undergraduate-focused in the whole Ivy League; most of the others get their academic prestige from their graduate programs, with TAs teaching undergrads no different than if it was a major state university. It's all about branding. Hate to say it but I saw too many of these lamers as my contemporaries to put as much stock into my degree as I'd like. One more thing - these schools are guilty of major grade inflation. However, it's very major-dependent. Some departments inflate their grades like mad especially in certain subjects (hello English, Government, etc.) Of course the departments I was involved with, Biology and Philosophy, did no such thing.

Even with the context I still don't agree there was any merit to his point. Autism is a very serious disorder and the sooner it is treated, intensively mind you, the better a chance that kid has. Beating around the bush doesn't ever help the kid. One of my friends used to babysit a lot of different children in the area. One of the boys was pretty obviously autistic and his parents were in total denial that anything was wrong with him. He must have been around 5 by this point and that's getting a little late to start therapy. My own family was in denial about the ways my sister was different for a long time, even though she ceased developing normally around the age of 18 months. It took an outsider to say, "Hey, you know, your kid is not maturing the way she should, you might have her evaluated." Granted this outsider was a knowledgeable family friend, I'm not suggesting any random interloper go along and say, "Hey, your bratty kid has autism!" (Although for what it's worth, my sister wasn't bratty at all when she showed her first symptoms. If anything she was withdrawn.) It is a lot easier to deny that anything is going on with your kid than face a very hard reality. To this day there is some level of denial in some of our close family members, especially in the older generation, and this unspoken assumption that she should just "be ok". I'm not autistic myself, but I do have some of the odd sensory issues that occasionally accompany autism, such as certain noises causing physical pain or disorientation, and let me tell you that if your sensory input just doesn't work the same way as everyone else's, you can't just up and "be ok". There are some very unfortunate autistic kids out there who will be in excruciating pain from a touch. The fact is that a lot of what makes the barrier between autistic folks and the rest of us so high is that we are operating from very different sensory contexts. I'm not sure why some people are so eager to explain away Savage's comments just because he is a conservative talk show host. Wrong is wrong and stupid is stupid, and it doesn't matter whose mouth it is coming from.

I will be the first to agree that too many kids today are diagnosed as sick or abnormal when they are no such thing. We have excessively narrowed the definition of what "normal" child behavior is. And I am very opposed to putting a child on medication in any but the most dire circumstances. That said, autism is very real. My sister has it and it has been extremely difficult to grow up with that kind of disability in the house. I love my sister very much and she is a great person but it is heartbreaking to see what could have been were she cognitively normal. She is perfectly intelligent, even above average in some respects, but her different ways of interpreting and processing information and her total lack of social ability hold her back so much and make it doubtful whether she can actually live a normal life on her own. She is in the difficult predicament of the high-functioning autistic: intelligent and quick to learn in some respects but with significant impairments in others. Autism is nothing to make light of and Savage is an idiot. I don't think he should be fired or taken off the air or anything like that...the best strategy for dealing with things like this is to confront the person directly with facts and prove that they are full of crap. This could be done through any major media outlet or even more virally through blogs, etc.

Thanks SN, I checked out that thread. It makes a bit more sense where people are coming from now. I have to say I disagree with the way farmers markets were characterized by those who would discredit them, but granted my experience with farmers' markets is rural, not urban, and it has been the case that I am looking the person who grew my food in the eye and shaking his hand. I do not doubt that farmers' markets in the city may be a yuppie affectation and I will take care once I move to a new location to make sure the people at the farmers' market are actually, well, farmers. Well, I wouldn't know about that, simply because I hate cheese LOL But I'd love to have some yogurt made from raw milk. Or some butter. I can think of few foods that butter doesn't improve.

You are correct that the problem is on the surface of the tomato, not anything inside. However, once a bacterium is well-established, it can form something called a "biofilm" whereby the individual cells sort of glom together in a goo and protect the deeper layers of bacteria from environmental stressors. This could explain why a tainted tomato may not be rendered safe even by washing (of course, many of these tomatoes ended up in restaurants...you may be giving the restaurants too much credit if you assume they wash all the produce). Also, at the risk of being indelicate, not all shit is created equal. Cow dung, for example, does not contain salmonella. I'm not sure what does but I've heard about Pam's assertion that we are getting contaminated produce from Mexico, and this seems feasible to me. Human waste is some of the nastier waste there is. You don't want it anywhere near your food, that's for sure. Depending on what they have been eating, crap from herbivores is usually not so bad and, in fact, is a great natural fertilizer (i.e. horse dung). Someone brought up the risks of unpasteurized juice with the Odwalla scare a few years back. I think that although everyone should understand what it means to drink unpasteurized beverages and the risks involved there are still rational reasons for doing so. I have had unpasteurized apple cider from local farms on many occasions and it is delicious. There is no comparison to the pasteurized stuff. It's also much better for you in terms of nutrients (pasteurization, and really any process that subjects produce to extremely high temperatures, destroys most of the stuff in the food that makes it good for you in the first place). To make unpasteurized food viable though you need to start with higher quality food in the first place and that is why it is not viable in most mainstream commercial distribution. But really, given the choice of drinking safe raw milk and the pasteurized, homogenized stuff from the store, there's no comparison. The raw stuff is so much better.

Do you have any evidence to support this? A link or something? This is news to me.

Your post reminds me of an interesting conversation a friend of mine had with her father. Both are ethnically Jewish, but while her father is an observant Jew who says he does not believe in God, my friend believes in God in a spiritual sense but is not observant of the Jewish religion or traditions. It actually sounds to me like some Jews consider observing the traditions and going through the motions more important than any actual belief in God. It's a strange thing.

I'm not sure I follow you here, Thomas. What does a dominant vs. a submissive role have to do with the terms "husband" and "wife"? What about marriages (or relationships in general) where neither partner is dominant over the other? Why does someone have to be "the man" and someone have to be "the woman?" This is where I suspect much of the confusion arises, this assumption that even a marriage between a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman will (and should!) have a particular structure, regardless of the nature of the individual man and woman. For the record, I am a woman, and if I get married it will be to a man. We're engaged as it is. But if calling him my "husband" someday implies that he's in some sort of metaphysically dominant role over me, I'd just as soon call him my spouse, which as far as I know is just as accurate a descriptor.

Yes, and therein lies the rub. First you have to figure out which feminists you're talking about. I like to call myself the "feminist that feminists love to hate". That's because I am a feminist but also have these pesky views about an "atomistic conception" of the individual, the supremacy of reason, and the total rejection of group rights. To me, feminism is "the outrageous suggestion that women are people". And it is about helping women, but helping them because they're valuable individuals, not because they're women per se, on the presumption that larger society often overlooks the talents of women (a presumption which, in my experience, I have often found to be true). But in my Women's Studies classes, for instance, some of the students must have thought me a terror LOL

That's because most cubicle office work completely sucks. Office Space is a pretty accurate representation - you're a peon sitting in a box with too many bosses who may or may not have a clue and you may or may not be generating any real value, but even if you are generating real value it may get destroyed at the next level on the ladder by some moron's poor decision making. Also your schedule is managed to the minute, you can't hardly get up and walk around, you don't see sunlight, you watch your body get soft and lumpy and lame over time, it just completely takes everything out of you, and for what? Nothing you ever get to see or touch or be proud of. P.S. I have less than a month left at my job.

Not too worried about it. I'm only 23. I think after I achieve some more of my major goals (which I will) it may help things. One problem is that I have a characteristic of my personality I call "spiteful", but I'm using it in the biological sense of the term, not the common usage. Spiteful interactions are the opposite of mutualistic interactions. Mutualistic interactions result in benefit to both parties (+ actor,+ recipient) whereas spiteful interactions involve loss to both parties (- actor, - recipient). I do have this tendency within me, where I will act to destroy something knowing full well it only harms me in the process but not caring, because I hate that thing/person so much (there was always something to cause this first, such as the person wronging me somehow). But the other day I heard someone who used to be close to me more or less admit that one reason she made some poor decisions was to prove to me she could despite my warnings, like "nyah nyah can't stop me", and I realized just how destructive "spite" in the biological sense can be to value. Reality always gets ya in the end, I suppose.

I seem to have a related but different problem - I find the source of my emotions after introspection but often really don't like the answer. I've come to realize over time that I'm running up against some sense-of-life issues and that more than else, I believe that to be the source of difficulty in integrating my disparate sides.

We weren't arguing the relevance of me not liking Viacom. The only reason I mention it is because when they get in a scrape I have a sort of feeling of "chickens coming home to roost". We could get into this in detail but I won't. The point that I was making is that Kane is misinterpreting (he still is a few posts down) the meaning of my words. He did not look at context and tone and acted as if I were saying something factually when I was actually using dry sarcasm.

Methinks you missed the tone of my post...I'll give you a big freakin' hint. I don't like Viacom.

But if Viacom targeted the end-users instead of Google they wouldn't be able to recover huge damages as well as hamstringing one of their competitors in the digital content market. You've gotta understand, Viacom doesn't really give a damn about property rights one way or another, as far as I'm concerned. They are out to get the biggest pound of flesh they can, and the property rights argument is just the vehicle through which they are trying to achieve this aim. If they could do it another way, they would.

Strange...one of my good friends in the computer industry said EULAs are basically unenforceable. However, since this discussion took place a while ago I do not remember his exact rationale. My friend is a programmer so he is the one creating the content that he does not believe is protected, I suppose. Again I'm not sure since the discussion is fuzzy but I believed his disagreement was not EULAs as a concept but the particular formulation of EULAs as they are now. One problem I see personally is that the way EULAs are currently formulated they are just about impossible for the average end user to understand. I know that I am very much to the sharp end of the spectrum and I still have difficulty figuring out what the hell EULAs are trying to say. Most of the time I don't even read them. I make the (hopefully safe) assumption that if I am using the software or whatever within the normal scope of what the developer intended I am extremely unlikely to violate the EULA.

Hey Kevin, I know this process can be frustrating. When I was taking my 8 or so philosophy classes in college, I actually had a pretty good experience with the professors. Even when they clearly didn't agree with me, they heard me out and engaged my views in a constructive manner, which is what I would expect in an academic setting. It was some of the other students that really drove me up a wall. I'll always remember the guy from my philosophy of science class who was like "everything in the universe is reducible to particle physics and initial conditions therefore hard determinism." Aargh. He seemed a nice enough guy otherwise but I just couldn't stand it every time he opened his mouth in class. It sounds like your instructor is operating from a background of moral intuitionism, a school of thought which holds that the basis of morality is our common intuitions about what is right and wrong, i.e., just about everyone feels bad when you maliciously hurt someone, so clearly this is wrong. The easy argument against that is, though, "well, what if I genuinely don't feel these 'common moral intuitions' that you speak of? Why should I be moral? It really doesn't bother me to take things, blow stuff up, etc." And they really have no answer for that. Eventually they retreat to some kind of a position that more or less says, "There's something wrong with you if you don't feel this way," which is a line of thought I feel has no place in a philosophical conversation. I remember a lecture I attended a couple months ago where Harry Frankfurt (a very notable philosopher out of Princeton, for those who don't know) came to my college and I was so excited to hear him speak. But I was disappointed, because even though I agreed with his basic point, he was defending it so poorly that it really left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a moment at the end of the lecture that really struck me. Someone in the audience brought up 9/11 and how we could know the hijackers were wrong in what they did, if they were just following a different morality. At least Harry Frankfurt did not totally give up the ghost and say "well we can't say they were wrong", but even though he clearly believed they were wrong and that those actions were evil, he was powerless to defend that assertion in any meaningful way. It was so bad that I actually walked up to the student after the lecture was over and said, "Forgive me for being presumptuous, but yes, they were wrong, yes, it was evil, and yes, we can know that." And the guy said, "OK, but how?" And I said, "Because morality is objective. It is based upon the nature of reality and of humans and it is known through reason." And unfortunately I didn't have much time after that so that was really the end of it, but unfortunately the guy didn't seem to get it anyway. In my experience (admittedly mostly with college students), most people really do care about what is moral and what is not. They may say morality is subjective but they are clearly uncomfortable with the consequences of that assertion, as they have a genuine desire to stand against that which they consider evil. From what I can tell of most college students, they accept moral relativism only because they are smart enough not to want to believe in fairy tales and truly believe they have no other option if they want to reject a divine-command type morality (which the vast majority do reject). These people are DYING to hear a rational defense of morality, one that really sticks. Obviously you will always have those who want to evade reality and obtain the unearned, and there's really no talking to those folks. But I don't honestly believe most people are like that, at least when they are younger.

The vast majority of the fake sugars are neurotoxic and I would hardly recommend them. You're frankly better off with the real stuff, for what that's worth. The only exception I'm aware of is Splenda, which is spun down from real sugar instead of being a sweet-tasting salt like the others. So yeah, fake sugars are a no-go. I'm surprised no one's mentioned that another problem with sodas is not just the sugar-content per se, but the fact that it is delivered as high-fructose corn syrup which is flat awful for you. High-fructose corn syrup is not properly metabolized by your body and is much more likely to change your glucose sensitivity, increasing your risk of diabetes, than comparable amounts of regular sugar. Soda's about the worst thing you can drink. But I still drink the stuff. Tastes too damn good and I can't make myself drink water for some reason. I'm trying to change my habits, though. I can tell my health isn't that good. It's not a weight thing so much as me just feeling tired/crappy all the time. If I could do less than 12 oz of soda a day or even every other day I think I'll be all right.

That stuff is delicious. You can absolutely taste the difference. The main thing about Jones is that they only use cane sugar to sweeten, not corn syrup. And that makes it worlds better than regular soda. Frankly, although soda's not that great for you, it would be so much less bad for you if they just used cane sugar instead of corn syrup, even if the calories remained the same, because of how the one is metabolized much better than the other. Damn corn lobby. Freakin' corn syrup in everything.

I tend to judge it on an individual basis. I know many perfectly nice Christians, Jews, Pagans, etc. It seems to me that the more a person has given serious thought to these questions, even if many of the conclusions they arrive at are wrong, the more moral they seem to be because they do go through a process of moral deliberation before they make choices and tend to take more responsibility for the choices they do make. My $0.02

I struggled with some similar things in college. I had a couple friends, very intelligent young women mind you, who were Young Earth Creationists among other silly nonsense. Now, both of them were aware I was an Evolutionary Biology student and they did not question/bother me about it unless we were specifically discussing it, which sometimes we did. It was always a respectful discussion, as we were friends and were not out to hurt each other, but I did find myself getting frustrated when I felt like I was hitting what I like to call the "smooth glass wall" in their minds where my arguments just could not penetrate no matter what I said or how reasonable it was, because I was hitting up against the premises they had accepted unquestioningly. It gave me kind of a sick feeling because I knew how smart these girls were and it just disturbed me on a very deep level. Also one of the girls described to me one time how she felt this deep fellowship with every other Christian, even if she just met them, and that bothered me as well. How can you feel anything for someone you just met, essentially a stranger? You might be justified in feeling generally friendly, but I don't give people much slack at all until I know them fairly well. I just don't understand how some folk can practice such wholesale evasion.

Trying to find out who are the "real Objectivists" always struck me as something of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy anyway. Do what you do and be who you are. Live a joyful life where you work towards your values. Be committed to living by reason and trusting your own judgment first. Never betray your principles. Got all that? Super. Then what does it matter whether you qualify for a label?