Richard Robertson

Looking at AlterNet.org’s stories and advertisements, they seem highly one-sided to the left, and expect to profit from an unusually idiotic and/or gullible audience’s clicks. Sorry for the harsh judgment here, but I’m especially worried that this is the kind of “news org” that encourages people to vote for Democrats who won’t have a chance in…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Most meat eaters either do not know or care that the pigs and cows in the slaughter house are on a par with their cats and dogs.

Two delicious words come two mind: Milk, and Bacon.

I feel like a virtual babe in the philosophical woods here, so let me get a couple of naive observations/questions out of the way. (Tongue in cheek.)

Is all sophistry specious?

Is it wrong to like the initials “UC” in this conversation because it fits so well with “UC Berkeley”?

Now, I hate name-calling, but calling one elitist here doesn’t…[Read more]

Haha, thanks, more fun than Tom Waits’ version imo!

Ran into an interesting recent German documentary on North Korea.

North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world, but its leader Kim Jong Un has still found the money he needs to finance a nuclear weapons program, despite the country’s fundamental poverty and international economic sanctions.

This documentary looks at how, and…

[Read more]

Mike I second your thoughts, mostly. Ran into this while looking for a gift idea:

Or maybe a Jesus soap-on-a-rope.

Unseen wrote:
One disheartening aspect of the many worlds theory seems to be that in addition to this world, there’s also one where I’m a mass murderer.

So what, specifically, could have originally caused that kind of split? Just one subatomic particle in your body or brain that underwent a quantum field collapse? And the theory is that a who…[Read more]

Bill wrote:
I would contend that any corresponding feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts are not necessarily innate.

[and]

I’m not so sure that the feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts is necessarily a naturally occurring one

I don’t think we have any large disagreement here. On looking for flaws in what I wrote, I see where I could have written i…[Read more]

Bill wrote:
I’m not so sure that the feelings of shoulds and shouldn’ts is necessarily a naturally occurring one – at least not when it comes to sexual pleasure.

I think in general, behavior that members of a species conduct between each other has to be more than just a learned behavior, although young members growing up do learn quite a bit of…[Read more]

@Davis, good point. Some of the worst human atrocities, like during and after war, expanded the victor’s gene pool. One study claims that one man in 200 on earth has descended from Genghis Khan.

While looking for more recent studies, I ran across a couple more interesting ones discovering a significant loss of diversity of Y chromosomes, likely…[Read more]

Davis wrote:
it has numerous other benefits than simple procreation

It’s now about people (and say, bonobos) enhancing their social connections to each other via sexual pleasure, as crude as that will sound to many people still naturally feeling their strong shoulds and shouldn’ts. I would bet that some day it will even be provable scientifically…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
I don’t understand why evolution would select for sexual fluidity.

I think most people, by nature, take their own inclinations/orientations for granted, unless prejudiced early on by culture. Not just for granted in fact, but as a primal essence of their self, when given the opportunity to be their genuine self. Growing up, I…[Read more]

What is the natural variation in any species wrt sexual “preference”. At some point, even in humans, there must be a core natural preference to behave heterosexually, just for the sake of continuing the species. Any deviation from the heterosexual norm is due to either some natural variation or pathology–and in fact some “pathologies” may…[Read more]