The Gaming Den

MUD Creator Richard Bartle on Virtual Worlds - Best interview with him in a long while.

Bad Astronomy looks at more head-hurty 'facts'. - I've linked to stuff like this before, but it usually gets the thread locked 'cause someone brings up something else.

-Crissa

Two nice posts.

Second Life sucks

Virtual Vincent van Gogh
[flash=425,350,false,#000000]http://www.youtube.com/v/LxVDVggLqsA[/flash]

Very nice.I am not a huge Don McLean fan,but Vincent
is always well received.

Saladin, The Animated Series

Whatever that was, Rob, it crashed my browser o-o

Stupid badly coded Flash apps.

-Crissa

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1185145053[/unixtime]]Whatever that was, Rob, it crashed my browser o-o

Stupid badly coded Flash apps.

-Crissa

Worked flawlessly on mine.

Basically it's an anti-American cartoon veiled as an anti-Christian cartoon veiled as a pro-Islam cartoon veiled as a pro-heroic main character cartoon made in Malaysia. The trailer is pretty cool.

A New Eugenics

...The argument that Progressives and Liberals are pro-eugenics...

Yes, another head-hurty link.

-Crissa

Most human societies practice eugenics and don't even realize it.

-Prison is a form of eugenics (IF the penal system works correctly). You take violent criminals isolate them for a time (effectively denying reproductive opportunities) and release them IF they show signs that they can adapt to a non-criminal lifestyle. This system (in theory) punishes repeat offenders more fully, presumably making criminality a genetic disadvantage.

-Veterans who survive war are given a variety of social bonuses. Again, in theory this could result in a higher net output of babies from veteran fathers than non-veteran fathers, although there are probably some good reasons to doubt this.

- People who are studious/hard workers TEND to make more money, allowing larger families.

- Legalized abortion is essentially a passive eugenics program.

Now, in none of these examples do we have some Nazi-looking guy going around taking measurements and conducting tests. But all of the above social policies reward some genotypes preferentially. I call this the "self-domesticating tendency". As time has gone by, humans on the whole have become much more docile. (I think.)

See now the problem is your examples are examples of FAILING at eugenics

1) We lock up men, not women, and we do not lock them up for their entire span of the years in which they can father children, not even perhaps during the years they are most likely to do so. And its not like a man needs to be out for long to do so.

2) Our veterans are not WELL supported, they also are not conferred the hero worship status that could get them more sex. They also often suffer social integration problems and serious fertility harming health issues.

3) The more educated and wealthy you are the LESS children you are likely to have. Especially if you are a woman, but that is apparently the general trend.

4) The richer classes are more able to afford and more likely to want to have abortions than the "undesirable" lower classes.

The goal of Eugenics is to work against natural selection, and to force people to use an individually sub-optimal strategy.

As is to happens, just about everything rapanui has referenced has been shown to be used by people to persue individually optimal strategies.

For example, number and sex of children is just as predictable for humans based on income as it is for deer based on space, dominance, and food supply.

wrote:The goal of Eugenics is to work against natural selection,

That is incorrect. Especially from the famed Nazi adoption of those values.

The goal of eugenics was to remove impediments to natural selection, or at least what they percieved to be natural selection, and to maybe even give it a helping hand.

Their attitude toward disease for instance. Bring it on, let it kill the weak, don't coddle them with expensive health care, it will just make the Nazi Supermen of the next generation weaker. Not to say they didn't have actual health care, but that was the idealogy of the whole eugenics thing.

Also, whats with the deer remark, I have never heard of a study of modern populations that found anything other than a drop in number of children with increase in wealth and education.

I mean its a famous trend toward declining population growth in developed western nations, our local white Australia advocates are in a total fit over how we need to breed more in order to avoid being swamped by all those poor brown and asian people and their higher reproduction rate.

Oh, that horrible low population growth! How evil it is to have the number of children you can support and endow with your social benefits rather than a random number more children until they or you begin to die off due to lack of proper care, time, nutrition.

I'm sure lower income people would love to have less children (assuming their religion allows for it), but that costs money up-front rather than just being saddled with cost you cannot avoid, like children.

-Crissa

I'm reminded of a science fiction short story where they passed a TSTL law. (Too stupid to live.) The death penalty was assigned for people committing really stupid crimes. (Like trying to rob a bank by handing the teller a deposit slip with all your personal information - your bank account - on it.)

The result was that with all the stupid criminals dead only the intelligent ones remained and so it was near impossible to catch criminals anymore.

tzor at [unixtime wrote:1186147986[/unixtime]]

The result was that with all the stupid criminals dead only the intelligent ones remained and so it was near impossible to catch criminals anymore.

Eh. The smart criminals rarely get caught now. I'm not sure that's much of a change.

Time for some really far out movies

Balls of Fury. Secret societies, a world tournament, ruthless villains. All this in a movie about ping pong.

Remember a porn clip in Kazaa with two Chinese martial artists fucking on top of some trees yelling technique names like Oral Attack? It's a small part of an actual movie, Chinese Torture Chamber Story

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1186119752[/unixtime]]I'm sure lower income people would love to have less children (assuming their religion allows for it), but that costs money up-front rather than just being saddled with cost you cannot avoid, like children.

-Crissa

If they want less children, then perhaps they should fuck less often. *shrug*

Zherog at [unixtime wrote:1186426158[/unixtime]]

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1186119752[/unixtime]]I'm sure lower income people would love to have less children (assuming their religion allows for it), but that costs money up-front rather than just being saddled with cost you cannot avoid, like children.

-Crissa

If they want less children, then perhaps they should fuck less often. *shrug*

Is a damn condom's cost meaningful at all in the U.S.A.?

I have no idea what rubbers cost - I haven't bought them in almost 20 years. But yes - a rubber is a fine choice for those who can afford them. But for those who can't, my suggestion works perfectly well...

Crissa wrote:I'm sure lower income people would love to have less children (assuming their religion allows for it), but that costs money up-front rather than just being saddled with cost you cannot avoid, like children.

Planned Parenthood in my state (I don't know about anywhere else) has a great program that pays for contraception ranging from an easy IUD to pills every month. It also covers any and all exams relating to said contraception. I'd mention that they have condoms, but I can't speak for the quality (never used them).

Assuming, of course, Planned Parenthood is legal or safe in your state. It's not an institution, it can be torn down...

...And has been, repeatedly. Torn down, bombed, protested, harassed, assaulted, besieged...

It hardly reaches a minority of the population. Planned Parenthood in most states has a meaninglessly small affect because of rumors and assaults like those that Tzor was taught.

If Tzor can be done in by that sort of spin, what defenses does the average person?

-Crissa

PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1186118339[/unixtime]]
Also, whats with the deer remark, I have never heard of a study of modern populations that found anything other than a drop in number of children with increase in wealth and education.

I mean its a famous trend toward declining population growth in developed western nations, our local white Australia advocates are in a total fit over how we need to breed more in order to avoid being swamped by all those poor brown and asian people and their higher reproduction rate.

[counturl=89]Here is a good explanation[/counturl] from a professor who taught an evolutionary biology class I was in a year or so ago. I like his rhetorical style; it almost reminds me of Frank's.

[TGFBS]
Gratuitous insult deleted.

That was completely unnecessary. Don't do it again.
[/TGFBS]

That article looks suspiciously like it includes a fair amount of intellectual slight of hand.

He never actually presents any numbers or studies in favour of his position.

He procedes to declare that the comparison of poor to wealthy nations is invalid and just cannot be done, as if we can't measure or even tell the difference between wealth and poverty.

He admits that decreases in mortality and increases in health cause very closely matching following decreases in fertility, presumably within the same nation, but does so in a manner that tries not to place any emphasis on that fact and also fails to note that erm, yeah those ARE increases in wealth followed by decreases in fertility (duh).

He is making a very good point, that fertility figures are used to push racist agendas, then fails to debunk a damn thing while pretending he has turned over the whole "myth".

His article is all the more underwhelmingly unimpressive because he fails to also make the point that fertility studies are ALSO used frequently to attack feminism and that there are notable ties, or at least claims to such, between the wealth and education of females specifically and birth rates.