Face time or screen time

So, technology isolates and disconnects us from our fellow man, right?

Well, I'm not sure.

I just got email and internet unlimited data plan on my phone and am curious to see what it will do. Will I no longer to sit in front of my computer since I can do all my reading on the go? Or will I ignore everyone around me when out and about to check realclearpolitics.com?

On another note, netflix just introduced streaming movies for the Mac on xbox. I never will go to a movie rental store again, or buy a DVD again. Pretty amazing stuff, I think. Score one for isolation.

Finally, to decrease driver solitude and save gas money, the iphone will introduce an iphone app to match drivers and riders.

So...does face time matter now more or less now that environments are fungible?

I got served

So, promoting women to be more sluttier and condemning Islam, I thought I found a good target in opposing Roissy's post



Thought Experiments

December 24, 2008 by roissy

Thought Experiment #1

All else equal, which girl is more likely to get pumped and dumped?:

a. an “adventurous” girl who played musical chairs with the mouths of five guys in a bar one night and banged a local emo rocker in the coatroom an hour after they met.

b. a virgin.

Thought Experiment #2

A normal, emotionally stable man with a good job has been on one date with a girl he likes. She is into him. He didn’t close, but feels confident it will happen soon. One night, in his favorite bar, one of the bartenders (a guy known to be plugged into the local social scene), unaware that the man has been on one date with the girl in this story, tells the man he saw the girl making out with a random dude a couple weeks before their first date, and that a few months ago she banged one of the other bartenders.

Would this man be

a. more likely

b. less likely

to arrange an inspired, creative second date with her? to pay for her drink on the second date? to see her for longer than three months after they’ve started screwing?



So my take is simple. Hey, let women be as slutty as they want. If you want to condemn someone, condemn meat eaters, condemn people who buy SUVs. Condemn Muslims, condemn religious fanatics who push religion. Condemn corrupt wall street goons. But slutty women? Come on.

Anyway, so this was my response:

Look Roissy, I know that you are FACTUALLY correct in saying that men will treat sluts and prudish women differently. That’s a law of human nature.

BUT, this is not to say that there remains a MORAL DOUBLE STANDARD in the world.

In the Islamic world, it’s ok for men to have multiple wives, while women who cheat on their husbands are pariahs in society.

Islam is a brutal religion. It pains me to see this blog extolling the same morality that Islam preaches.

We all know what evo psych says about human sexual behavior. Just try not to push it into the moral realm.


Eh. His response:



roissy

john smith:
"That’s a law of human nature."

would a person be happier if he lived more in accordance with human nature, or less?

"BUT, this is not to say that there remains a MORAL DOUBLE STANDARD in the world."

reasoned morality is an emergent outgrowth of human nature, and as a second order phenomenon, it fluctuates more wildly, which is why you can observe wide disparities in how one culture treats its sluts compared to another culture. naturally, is != ought, and human nature shouldn’t dictate to us how we conduct our lives, but it’s also true that the more removed our morality is from our relatively immutable evolved natures, the less happy we’ll feel and the more likely we’ll wind up screwing ourselves in the biggest market that matters — the sexual market.

"In the Islamic world, it’s ok for men to have multiple wives, while women who cheat on their husbands are pariahs in society."

double standards are a consequence of human nature. no one said life was fair.

"Islam is a brutal religion. It pains me to see this blog extolling the same morality that Islam preaches."

ugh, dude. you’re putting words in my blog. please don’t pull a chic. one of her is enough. one, polygamy would be a disaster for the west, which i’ve written about here. two, i obviously don’t advocate stoning adulterous women like the more regressive strains of islam. i do say that the male impulse to avoid committing to slutty girls is hardwired and serves a useful purpose — that of protecting men from becoming financially enslaved cockolds. since this impulse has ostensibly been with us for millions of years, it stands to reason that a morality which takes into account the greater danger of female infidelity and promiscuity and attempts to mitigate its expression will benefit a cooperative western-style society more than a morality that gives free rein to women to slut it up without consequence.
of course, the more women are shamed into being sexually chaste, the less fly-by-night nookie guys like me will haul home, but i never claimed that the good of the individual and the good of the whole were perfectly compatible.

"Just try not to push it into the moral realm."

you cannot sever morality from human nature. morality is just a highly evolved mechanism for maximizing the odds of your gene’s survival and replication through the strategy of reciprocal altruism and kin favoritism.




Anyway, slutty girls are still welcome. How many terrorists come from sexually liberal societies v. sexually repressive societies?


******

Update. Check out the comments section to see a debate between Roissy and some black chick. HBD meets seduction school-fascinating.

Gold from Saletan

Check this out from Saletan


Few genes are known to be decisive in determining life outcomes. Nutrition, training, and other genes matter. But the evidence that this gene significantly influences athletic ability is strong.

Now look at the frequency of the R and X variants in different populations. According to data published seven years ago in Human Molecular Genetics, the relative frequency of the X allele is 0.52 in Asians, 0.42 in whites, 0.27 in African-Americans, and 0.16 in Africans. If you break out the data further, the frequency of the XX genotype is 0.25 in Asians, 0.20 in European whites, 0.13 in African-Americans, and 0.01 in African Bantu. Conversely, the frequency of RR (the genotype for speed and power) is 0.25 in Asians, 0.36 in European whites, 0.60 in African-Americans, and 0.81 in African Bantu. Among Asians, you can expect to find one RR for every XX. Among whites, you can expect nearly two RRs for every XX. Among African-Americans, you can expect more than four RRs for every XX.


Is the order really so shocking, or just another confirmation of the Rushton scale.



I've had my share of arguments with people who deny that race is biologically meaningful. Many of them are dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal, not just in the sense of moral worth or treating each person on his merits, but literally, in the sense that no genetically based difference can be admitted in average ability between populations. That kind of egalitarian literalism—I call it liberal creationism—becomes harder and harder to sustain in the face of evidence such as the data on ACTN3.



Oh, it's sweet.

I just returned from traveling in a third world country with little prospects for the future, and the primary reason is that their people have too low IQ to develop meaningful industries that don't rely on natural resources or low salaries.

The Attack

I´m late, but how much else is there to say? Islam is a brutal, barbaric religion that justifies killing teenage girls in cold blood.


I´m just thankful that Thomas Friedman wrote this gem in the nytimes


On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?


After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.

...


And here is the key;


But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.”


I hope this causes waves. Islam should be questioned with the same force that Christianity is constantly in the US.

Perhaps I´m one of the few who voted for Obama in the hope that his election would discredit the rhetoric of Al-Qaeda. Maybe I was to idealistic.

What?

Thank God Obama won and we didn't have this stupidity and brutality on display to the world.

It's time to rethink Thanksgiving. It seems odd that we celebrate our good luck by slaughtering innocent animals for food inefficiently, thereby exacerbating third world starvation. Remember, in the exact second you eat your turkey a child is dying right now of starvation.

It's an IQ issue, but until the world can come to grips with the racial roots of intelligence gaps, we can do what we can to lower meat consumption and aid the most vulnerable people in the world.


My general point hasn't changed in over a year:

After all, if we can torture and kill animals because they are stupid and can't defend themselves, why can't white civilization do it to stupider Black people?


People, THIS IS THE HBD crux of the issue. I'll keep pounding it and pounding it until people see the connection between race and animal rights.

I'm kinda hoping that when people like Half Sigma, Will Saletan, Ray Kurzweil, Larry Summers, and maybe even Steve Sailer (minus his white supremacist hick contigent) can come together to start figuring out a new policy for a new party.

Analysts v. Technology

So the Global Forecast by American intelligence experts is out.

And I was just checking out the singularity timeline.

Let's see some contrasts:


By 2025, it predicted, “the U.S. will find itself as one of a number of important actors on the world stage,” playing “a prominent role in global events” but not a decisive one as in the past.

The report said the global shift from West to East in terms of wealth and economic power “is without precedent in modern history.” Of a projected population increase of 1.2 billion worldwide by 2025, Western countries would account for only 3 percent, it said.


Nothing that we haven't seen before.

But, take a look at technology changes:



A $1,000 (in 1999 dollars) unit of computation has the computing capacity of approximately 1,000 human brains.
Permanent or removable implants (similar to contact lenses) for the eyes as well as cochlear implants are now used to provide input and output between the human user and the worldwide computing network.

...

There is almost no human employment in production, agriculture, or transportation. Basic life needs are available for the vast majority of the human race.
There is a growing discussion about the legal rights of computers and what constitutes being “human.”
Although computers routinely pass apparently valid forms of the Turing Test, controversy persists about whether or not machine intelligence equals human intelligence in all of its diversity.
Machines claim to be conscious. These claims are largely accepted.



At this point do you think that people will care whether China or the US is more powerful? Is an all powerful AI going to have a nationality?

Complexities of American Democracy

So previously I wrote about how the genius of the American political system and its recent comeback could be a catalyst for the singularity.

But let's examine a difficult issue in the African American experience.

- Civil Rights and Multiculturalism

So the election of Barack Obama was a great step forward for African Americans. But on November 4, in one of the most liberal states in the country, voters decided to ban gay marriage.

Now personally, I think the issue is just so far down on the list of important issues (given our current problems w/ the economy, partisanship, terrorism, Russia, immigration, education, etc) of the day.

But apparently African Americans believed that while they greatly expanded civil rights in one dimension, they want to drastically retract it for another group, homosexuals. 70% of African Americans voted for the ban on gay marriage in 4 states.

This is a disturbing development, and points to the fragility of coalitions that attempt to address social change. Christian Lander, of stuff white people like always makes fun of white people for being multicultural and tolerant. However, these liberals are often dangerously oblivious to the human rights abuses that are present in these minority societies.

Wikipedia's article on Multiculturalism addresses this point:


Skeptics of the ideology often debate whether the multicultural ideal of benignly co-existing cultures that interrelate and influence one another, and yet remain distinct, is sustainable, paradoxical or even desirable when housed by a single nation — one that, in the case of some European nations, would previously have been synonymous with a distinctive cultural identity of its own.

The liberal-feminist critique is related to the liberal and libertarian critique, since it is concerned with what happens inside the cultural groups. In her 1999 essay, later expanded into an anthology, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" the feminist and political theorist Susan Okin argues that a concern for the preservation of cultural diversity should not overshadow the discriminatory nature of gender roles in many traditional minority cultures, that, at the very least, "culture" should not be used as an excuse for rolling back the women's rights movement.

...


In the Netherlands, the haven of weed and prostitution, the Dutch are alarmed at the specter of Islamic influence threatening their freedoms.


In 1999, the legal philosopher Paul Cliteur attacked multiculturalism in his book The Philosophy of Human Rights.[86] Cliteur rejects all political correctness on the issue: Western culture, the Rechtsstaat (rule of law), and human rights are superior to non-Western culture and values. They are the product of the Enlightenment. Cliteur sees non-Western cultures not as merely different but as anachronistic. He sees multiculturalism primarily as an unacceptable ideology of cultural relativism, which would lead to acceptance of barbaric practices, including those brought to the Western World by immigrants. Cliteur lists infanticide, torture, slavery, oppression of women, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, gangs, female genital cutting, discrimination by immigrants, suttee, and the death penalty. Cliteur compares multiculturalism to the moral acceptance of Auschwitz, Stalin, Pol Pot and the Ku Klux Klan.
...
The most prominent figure in the post-Fortuyn debate of the issue was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her first criticisms of multiculturalism paralleled those of the early liberal-feminist critics in the United States — the emphasis on group identity and group rights diminished individual liberty for those within the minorities, and especially for women. As time went on, her criticism was increasingly directed at Islam itself, and its incompatibility with democracy and Western culture. By 2004 she was the most prominent critic of Islam in Europe. When she scripted a short film on Islamic oppression of women, featuring texts from the Quran on the naked bodies of women, its director Theo van Gogh was assassinated by an Islamist. Threatened with death and heavily guarded, she spent most of her time in the United States, and moved to Washington in 2006 to work for the American Enterprise Institute. In 2006 she also expressed support for the Eurabia thesis — that Europe is being fully Islamised —, and that its non-Muslim inhabitants will be reduced to dhimmitude.[92] In a speech for CORE in January 2007, she declared that Western culture was overwhelmingly superior:

... my dream is that those lucky enough to be born into a culture of "ladies first" will let go of the myth that all cultures are equal. Human beings are equal; cultures are not.[93]



So yeah. Not all cultures have equal respect for human rights, and the most fascinating thing is that supposedly "oppressed" cultures have done as much oppressing of their own.

It's not too hard to look at animal rights abuses in Latin America, genocide in Africa, oppression of women in South Asia, and the abuse of religious minorities in the Islamic world, smackdown of Tibet and Falun Gong in China, and the trafficking of women in southeast Asia before we see the hollowness of the rhetoric that the United States is hindering human rights efforts.

And that is why many conservatives are skeptical of international institutions such as the UN, where the human rights committee was run by Sudan. They recognize that there is something wonderful about American political culture that shouldn't be diluted by submitting our sovereignty to the whims of nations that don't have the same level of rights tolerance as us.

This undermines the charge that white oppression is responsible for the lower state of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups.

Instead, it lends credence to the idea that groups themselves are responsible for their sorry state, not the white man or the west.

So back to the election. It proved two things:

1) The most powerful nation on earth, often blamed for the ills of the third world, happens to be the most moral, just, and free nation in the world. The narrative of the United States as an oppressive imperial power dampening the hopes of minorities everywhere has been thoroughly undermined. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Karl Marx, take a hike.

2) The advancement of minority interests does NOT necessarily advance the interests of other oppressed groups. Often, we will see that a larger amount of black, Hispanic, or Islamic influence in a culture will actually harm homosexual interests.

Watch out.