Aidan OGain

I'm not an atheist, but I support your rights to be one. Call me an ally. Be excellent to each other:)

Not sure if you've seen "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show", but that's gotta be in the top ten of worst shows. Let's Do the Mario! Swing your arms from side to side Come on it's time to go. Do the Mario! Take one step and then again. Come on it's time to go. Do the Mario!

Good, I'm glad you'd like to see it. Women are perfectly able to defend themselves. They don't need me. But I just enjoy doing it. As for the male dominated country, yeah. But I get less guff from feminists.

I answered. I get freedom. I get less judgement. I get a sense of helping someone else at the cost of myself. To quote Babylon 5, "the third requirement for sentient life is the ability to sacrifice oneself for a cause, a friend, a loved one. It's the ability to deny our animal biology and make a choice for ourselves." I get to defend and support the women in my life. As far as manly codes, it's a good one. I don't care if they don't need the help. I do it because I believe that women have something very special to contribute to our world. I do it because I want to see what new worlds they will make.

With feminists I can be who I want to be and it doesn't come at as high a cost. You seem to think every girl is a cheater.

You can judge me all you want, man. It's irrelevant to my life. Statistics are like classical physics. The life of a person is like quantum physics. What applies in classical physics does not apply on the quantum scale. What appears to apply to broad populations does not apply to an individual's experience. Point is you don't know me well enough to make that call. As for feminism, it's fantastic for guys like me. Guys who like MLP. Guys who believe in kindness teamwork and cooperation. If you're doing well with the classic alpha scene, that's good for you. But what's good for you comes at a cost to the vast majority of non-alpha males along with women in general. It's tyrannical to expect 90% of society to hold up so few. You should be allowed to be who you are, but that doesn't mean others can't be who they are too. If that's really who you are and what you believe in than I have every right to rebel against you, King George III. But I don't believe that's who you really are. You're on an MLP chat board, after all. (Apologies if that's a bit blunt of me, but since you've been so blunt with me then I figure you can take it without offense)

I've heard that before. there are lots of models for relationship patterns. And that may be one strategy, but there are others. My grandfather cheated on my grandmother and had a child. People tell my mother that there is a woman in town who is just like her. Apparently my grandfather one day decided to contact his other child. She told him he wasn't her father. The father who raised her, who taught her everything she knows, who loves her and supports her is her father. She told him he was just a donor of genetic material. Granted, that was very much in character for how my mother would have reacted. But I don't buy into that worldview simply because I am not that guy. It requires me to distrust women and live in competition with everyone around me. I don't like to compete like that. That worldview costs too much of my soul to adopt. But everyone's got their thing. Luckily, humanity is diverse. There's something for everyone.

Eh, maybe. I used to think that. It's kind of natural to assume a guy who is with a girl I like is an a-hole. But I get your point. You're talking about "alpha male" behavior. I agree that it can be attractive, but it's not attractive to every woman. And if you're not genuinely "alpha", women don't like you to pretend. Women have brains adapted to spot pretenders. Certain traits make for good investment in the hazard of reproduction. Some of that is being "alpha", some of that is being able to contribute to her children in time and resources. A large part of that is being reliably helpful. Pretending is basically the opposite of that. Being yourself is a journey of discovery. You have to work hard to discover who you are and to refine that. That part of "being yourself" is left unexplained. But it's essential. As dweeby as I am, I'm off the market. And I didn't need to act alpha to do it. But I will say without getting into the story of it that I'm married because I was true to myself. Good point. I might argue that the best parts of race and gender are the non-inheritable cultural aspects. With gender there is more definite biological hard-wiring going on, true. And with race, it seems to be a part of honoring your parents and ancestors. If we can all mind our own ancestors and let each other express our genders free of harassment, then sure. But large collective bodies ought to be careful how they treat such group identifiers. In the 20th c, it was used by the state to terrible effect. And there's a long history before then of unjust treatment.

Do we subdivide species into races? We certainly don't call them that. Plants are called "varietals", for example. Animals, if they're domesticated and engineered through artificial selection are called "breeds". I feel uneasy placing people into "Breeds". Varietals sounds nice, also hybridization among varietals causes more robust plants. That I guess I approve of. Inbreeding should be avoided. If race is a scientifically valid concept, why are not all living things divided by race? With other living things, scientifically speeking, we stop at the species level. Humanity is one species. Birds are a whole class of species.

I worry because of what this classification system has been used for in the past. It hasn't been... savory. Is there any purpose to it besides its own existence? Culture is different. That is something that should be valued. But anyone can learn and participate in any culture. Race seems too tribal to me.

Every one's different. So if you're genuine, there's one who'll find what you're about attractive. Likely more than one. Genuine people are a rarity. Fair enough. I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification. But those "pure metals" can't be refined out of the human alloy. Racial purity has no meaning, so why even bother with an irrelevant and inaccurate labeling system? Dividing up the human race in this way serves no purpose.

The experiments are possible thanks to brain mapping, MRI and PET scans. There are physical differences, but still variation. People never conform 100%. Look at the percentages of men and women in prison. Either women aren't as criminal minded, or they're a lot better at getting away with it. Not saying no women vomit crimes. But as a statistic, less do. Technology is a great equalizer on the battlefield. So if women want to fight, we should let them. The draft is not anyone's idea of a good time. But if the people who want to fight do, there's less of a need for a draft.

I think it's good to focus on the positive. Imagine what we can become. But we also need to make sure we've learned sufficiently from our past. Knowing what we don't want is important, too. We have great power over our world. With great power comes the ability for serious mistakes. We need to be careful. But you're right. Imagine what amazing things we could one day do.

They are genetic. The Y chromosome doesn't carry as much information as the X. With less information there are less ways to correct for errors in the code. That's why men are more susceptible to genetic disorders. The toy preferences are based off of the structure of our brains. Even if you never model the girl behavior or even actively suppress it, girls will still be girls deep down. You can't teach it out of them. But that's not saying all girls are the same. There's a lot of diversity in brain structures. Our species diversifies and experiments a lot in its biology. Red and blue exist on a color continuum. It's useful for our eyes to distinguish them, but there is no absolute boundary where one stops and the other begins. We can subdivide the colors ad-infinitum. What we call red and blue is more based off of the structure of our trichromatic color vision and the way our brains process information than on any scientific reality. I grant that geographical boundaries create eventual speciation. If we sent a colony to Mars and we never went back and it lived for 100,000 generations, we might be two distinct species that could not interbreed. Dogs are still wolves by species. That's why they can interbreed. Wolf: Canis Lupus. Dog: Canis Lupus Familiaris. Had humanity not built sailing ships and airplanes, we might have speciated. But technology has eliminated those boundaries, which were permeable still in the ancient past. We even have Neanderthal and Davidovan DNA. We're all very mixed up. Nowhere more so than in the Americas today. I'm a conglomeration of just about every European imaginable. And I'm married to an American from China, who likely has Mongol, Turkic, and Jurchen ancestors in addition to Chinese. Most Russians have some Mongol blood. They're not Asian, and not quite European. Trying to sort out any pure race is going to be nightmarishly difficult. So it's easier to say there's only one race of human regardless of diversity. There is only one photon regardless of wavelength or amplitude. What practical purpose does identifying race provide?

Well, that's the formula for the area inside a circle, but I get your meaning: The sum of all points from a given point x at constant distance y on a 2 dimensional Euclidean plane. Still, this kind of perfection can only exist in the realm of ideas and can only be approximated in its construction in our universe. I know you didn't mean "the best shape", but people frequently confuse the notion of ideal perfection with the notion of an inappropriate objective standard to which everything must be measured against and judged based on how closely it conforms. I just wanted to explicitly state they're not the same. Actually if you examine any atom you'll find it's not where it's supposed to be. Atoms are individually nowhere with only the probability of being at location x. Things as we know them only exist in aggregate, the sum of all prbabilitites. But look closely enough and none of it exists in a way that we would recognize.