It would be a deterrent, assuming people are rational actors. But the field of economics (mostly bullshit anyway) is starting to realize that people don't always act in their own best interest. People like shitty food, so they will make room in their budget to get it.
This is even before considering the addictions to fat, salt, and sugar many people have.
I almost don't remember what you mean ;) Regarding overpopulation, I'm not quite sure how to approach it. It's a complex subject. I suppose I'll start with energy consumption.
http://www.cosmosmith.com/images/
The amount of energy humans consume per capita is excessively high, in comparison to survival needs. Food is often transported for hundreds or thousands of miles before consumption. Industrial subsidies keep afloat incredibly inefficient methods and transactions, which all ultimately serve to shuffle and concentrate wealth into the middlemen. All the while, most countries look at population control as inhumane, as if making progeny were a right. The graph above indicates that if our population isn't sustainable now, it will certainly be soon.
1. Reread my argument. You did not respond to it.
2. "Do with it what you will." Uh, okay. It's completely ridiculous, unless you have some way to back it up.
3. On the scale we're consuming our resources, we're far less like a predator and more like a parasite that kills its host. That would be legitimate, if there were any other hosts.
1. The idea that you can only find sufficient protein in meat is propaganda, courtesy of the meat industry. Read about the China Study for more on that, and on dairy.
2. The world would be overrun? What, chickens are going to organize and march on our capitols? Explain to me exactly what you mean by that.
3. "If they can do it, why not us?" They eat meat to survive. We eat meat because we like it, not because we need it. Humans are extremely overpopulated thanks to medicine and other lifespan-increasing advances. If we want to stay overpopulated, we need to consume less.
Please. Bullshit is entertainment done in the style of a documentary. And their research is far from reliable. I like the show, but that is not evidence.
Also, points for your first sentence. Laughable, like if I were to say, "I would disprove you thoroughly, but I know that will only make you more stubborn."
Forgot to mention they're right on about Gandhi, though, if a bit unforgiving. The guy is suddenly a hack because he's not flawless?
1. Livelihood? Who has the right to bring more children into a world that already has starving ones? I know legislating moral choice isn't moral, but I'd like to see you establish that it's a right to have biological children.
2. That's not proof, it's a gross simplification of an issue that could fill books, and it shows little knowledge of ecology. Other than that, very interesting site, and thanks for posting it.
Constitutional Monarchy is a form of government. It has little bearing on economic structure. X|
And "You see only two?" Do a little bit of research before you post, it doesn't take more than a few minutes. The responses you get on your arguments will reflect the amount of effort you put into them. If you write more like this one, all you're gonna get are flippant responses from assholes like me :P
Took the words right out of my mouth. I hope the bellicose attitudes of most of the people I run into are the products of a cultural tendency; At least that offers some avenue of escape from recurring intellectual impasses. But it's good to hear that someone gets it. I used to spend a good amount of time on this site, and I've mostly given up.
the needy get their needs from the greedy either way. Socialism says "just give the needy their needs" while Capitalism says "make them work for it".
All people have a fair chance, huh? They get what they work for? And if they don't, they're just lazy?
Just-World Fallacy.
I don't really understand your contempt for economists (or rather, economists). Are you saying members of the profession are universally untrustworthy and majorly biased?
Something to read:
http://www.huffingtonpost.
Maybe you read about these studies and forgot? But if your statement is based just on your opinion, you're quite perceptive. In any case, research supports you:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/
"Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline."
Peak oil has nothing to do with markets. It's about diminishing returns in extracting it (less oil, more energy required). If you want to read a bit about it, check out "The Party's Over." I'm too hung over to find the full title :[
I would also say that the Senate is currently unfairly biased toward rural America, as less populace = greater direct representation.
The Senate was intended to be structurally biased towards minorities (rural pops), whereas the House was conversely created to be the voice of the majority and urban populations.
An article from this week's San Antonio Current, a most badass local newspaper. It gives a pretty compelling theory of why girls seem to go for bad boys, and it fits both modes of my experience.
I wrote to you last year regarding my own personal problems involving women upon entering my senior year. Now a proud high-school graduate, I can say your advice helped to make my last year one not completely lacking female promiscuity. That said, I’m writing you with a new question, seeing as you were very helpful last time.
A friend of mind showed me an entry from an article online which offered an explanation for why many women are attracted to the jerk rather than the nice guy:
“It’s not because women like jerks. Women prefer polite over rude, and attentive over distracted. The problem is the way nice guys present these positive characteristics. In order to appear friendly and romantic, these ‘nice guys’ think they have to turn off their sexuality. They hide their desires in order not to offend, presenting an androgynous, asexual persona. The first impression they give is one of emasculation, weakness, and lack of desire. At best, they confuse the woman as to whether they even find her attractive. That’s what jerks offer women that nice guys don’t: They’re not afraid to be sexual.”
Upon reading this, it immediately made sense, and seemed to be the plausible truth, but from what I’ve learned through experience when it comes to being sexual with women, one of two things happen. Either the women become disgusted and creeped out, labeling you a pervert, or they are fairly amused, but then never take you seriously, especially when it comes to romantic engagement.
Now, I also started to think that maybe It was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t “doing it right” in some way.
So, even though I know you don’t have some master formula for how to balance your sexuality in conversation with women, I was wondering what your opinion on the whole theory is, and if any, what basic rules could you offer to anyone debating the mechanics to such an approach.
— A Charlie Brown Who Still Has Some Balls
Dear Charlie With Balls,
I am delighted to hear that my advice helped you get a little action during your senior year. Well done! I think you will definitely enjoy college. Now I will share with you the precise master formula for scoring chicks. It is an ancient Chinese secret passed down from gay man to gay man over the centuries. You can also read it on the back of a Calgon box: Women (excluding most lesbians) want dick, you just have to sell it.
Just kidding. Kind of.
If I had to pick one mostly universal attribute of non-threatening appeal, it would be “charming.” It is gentlemanly, yet has an undercurrent of sex appeal. I agree that a guy can overcompensate with the graciousness and end up appearing uninterested or even asexual, but graciousness can also be a key ingredient in “irresistible.” Just employ a balance, as you mentioned. Make sure the lady knows you are interested, but treat her with respect. This is what we call flirting. You have to learn how to read women and respond accordingly. Use your past experiences to help guide you. Never be crass with a woman until you know she’s a freak and likes that. You don’t know she likes it till she says she does or you’ve already done it, and even then make sure she said she likes it before you whisper nasty nothings in her ear.
Until you know a woman you’re interested in well enough to be totally forward, make your advances direct yet not trashy. You are trying to have an intimate date, not pick up a hooker. Be physical, but not gropey. If you grab her tit the first time you give her a kiss, she is going to slap your ass and call you a perve. Unless she’s totally easy and then she’ll slap your actual ass and call you naughty.
Movies are another awesome way to get ideas. Mostly ideas you shouldn’t try because in real life there is no script for the woman to follow. But knowing what not to do is more helpful than suggestions for what to do in this type of situation. Learn from others and fiction, and make up the rest on your way.
Much charm and luck,
Your Uncle Mat
O hey, wut's dis:
http://digg.com/politics/
Read the headline, and first comment below.
Hey, CD. Someone flagged this entry, and I'm going to keep reposting it until I get a goddamn notification as to why. It's bad enough that users don't get notified when an argument is removed.
Ann Coulter Quotes:
"Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave....We should require passports to fly domestically. Passports can be forged, but they can also be checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males."
"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."
"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"
The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"
To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."
"Women like Pamela Harriman and Patricia Duff are basically Anna Nicole Smith from the waist down. Let's just call it for what it is. They're whores."
Juan Gonzales is "Cuba's answer to Joey Buttafuoco," a "miscreant," "sperm-donor," and a "poor man's Hugh Hefner."
On Princess Diana's death: "Her children knew she's sleeping with all these men. That just seems to me, it's the definition of 'not a good mother.' ... Is everyone just saying here that it's okay to ostentatiously have premarital sex in front of your children?"
"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote."
"I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote."
"If you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country."
"It's enough [to be impeached] for the president to be a pervert."
"Clinton is in love with the erect penis."
"Originally, I was the only female with long blonde hair. Now, they all have long blonde hair."
"I am emboldened by my looks to say things Republican men wouldn't."
"Anorexics never have boyfriends. ... That's one way to know you don't have anorexia, if you have a boyfriend."
"The thing I like about Bush is I think he hates liberals."
"The swing voters---I like to refer to them as the idiot voters because they don't have set philosophical principles. You're either a liberal or you're a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster."
"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism."
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."
"Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy."
"The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with 'unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass.' This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America."
"There are no good Democrats."
"FENN: Terrific. We're Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth's resources...
COULTER: Yes! Yes.
FENN: ... as fast as we possibly can.
COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians. "
"I love Texas Republicans! They're these beautiful women, they're so great-looking, they're completely loaded. They're dripping in this gorgeous jewelry, they're really funny and sarcastic and smart. Americans are so cool, and they're such parochial idiots here in New York."
[I know these Texan Republicans. I lol'd.]
"Cheney is my ideal man. Because he's solid. He's funny. He's very handsome. He was a football player. People don't think about him as the glamour type because he's a serious person, he wears glasses, he's lost his hair. But he's a very handsome man. And you cannot imagine him losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there's a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it's one of our little methods of social control. We're supposed to fly off the handle.
"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."
"If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."
"I was going to have a few comments about John Edwards but you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot."
"I'm more of a man than any liberal."
“Americans understand that Manhattan is the Soviet Union.”
"When you look at Pat Robertson’s positions, they are really quite moderate"
"[Anti-war Democrats are] desperately dying to provide aid and support to al-Qaeda."
"Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. "
"Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether. "
[Okay, that was pretty funny.]
"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed')."
[Yeah, we should all be nice and not preach violence, just like Ann Coulter.]
"These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever — and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA? This is truly a war in which we have absolutely no interest. "
"For six years, the Bush administration has kept America safe from another terrorist attack, allowing the Democrats to claim that the war on terrorism is a fraud, a "bumper sticker," a sneaky ploy by a power-mad president to create an apocryphal enemy so he could spy on innocent librarians in Wisconsin. And that's the view of the moderate Democrats. The rest of them think Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks."
"That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that's the Biblical view. "
"I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs. "
"They're [Democrats] always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let's do it. Let's repress them. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment."
"The man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents. "
"And why is it "homophobic" for Senate Republicans to look askance at sex in public bathrooms? Is the Times claiming that sodomy in public bathrooms is the essence of being gay? I thought gays just wanted to get married to one another and settle down in the suburbs so they could visit each other in the hospital. "
"In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner. One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population. "
"When we were fighting communism, OK, they had mass murderers and gulags, but they were white men and they were sane. Now we're up against absolutely insane savages."
"… as for catching Osama, it's irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan."
"Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back. "
"You don't want the Republicans in power, does that mean you want a dictatorship, gay boy?"
"And of course there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The greatest generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal. "
"We'll drive off the side of that bridge when we come to it, Senator Kennedy."
I collected a shit ton of these quotes, because it's endlessly amusing to read the words of this hermaphroditic comedy gold mine.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
While your argument is understandable, keep in mind that humans have an exceptional talent for self-deception. One of the main applications of this is cognitive dissonance, one effect of which is that we rationalize our actions with ostensible thought processes in accordance with our preferred self-image.
A cultural obsession with violence is credited as one of the causes for the decline of the Roman empire. We're currently the culture most inundated with violence, between the number of wars we launch, and the amount of it in our media. I think televising executions would be a drop in the bucket in terms of amount of violence, but it would up the ante in terms of intensity. I definitely see parallels with the Colisseum.
Brevity: Drug use is an integral part of civilized life. Animals use drugs. There are therapeutic uses to many illegal drugs; LSD therapy is the most effective treatment for alcoholism.
To answer the question, people fear and resent that which they do not understand. Instead of basing their stance on facts and science, they give in to ignorance and fear.
It's interesting, because these gender assignments really affect how they look at the items. In a language where boats are feminine, the speaker is more likely to describe them as graceful or beautiful. If boats are masculine in their language, they're more likely to call them powerful or something like that.
Linguistic Relativity FTW
What he's talking about is the polar realignment set to happen anytime soon. I forget if it's anywhere near 2012 or not, though. But yes, it happens periodically when the sun aligns directly with the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Basically all the chaos you can imagine from our planet starting to rotate a different way.
I was gonna post where I read this, but I guess they really are wacky sites. I thought I read it somewhere legitimate at first though :(
