Well now I've both read the book and saw the movie, and I can tell you that's the complete opposite: Mars is portrayed as the perfect alien environment, strikingly beautiful yet extremely deadly, uncaring about its human inhabitants.
The struggle of Watney is exactly this, surviving with only your wits and a few scraps of human technology, but doing so without ever losing humor and optimism (this is the reason I personally love it).
Humanity, in The Martian, is yearned, a safe heaven to return to. Literary speaking, the point of catharsis is the return inside the human community.
For the first time since Verne, real-life science has advanced so much that mundane sci-fi has gotten actually interesting. What's not to love about that?
You need to get off the internet and start interacting with normal people who don't advocate state-sanctioned massacres of any kind. You can find extreme enough opinions of any colour on the internet if you try hard enough. That doesn't mean any significant number of people hold them, it means there are billions of people online and someone went out of their way to find the most rhetorically useful targets.
Mixed-race parenting and absent or disengaged fathers seem to act as secondary causes in both Rodger's and Mercer's alienation
And you have evidence of this because...?
This post just went from -10 to 0 in about 3 minutes. I'm calling bullshit (again) on your trolling and vote-gaming.
EDIT: A further 7 upwards to +7 in another 5 minutes after I originally posted that. Seriously?
EDIT 2: A downvote? Really?
I've noticed that women freak out when I say that we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage.
Not just women.
Do you feel motivated to channel your frustrations through a gun? If your answer is yes, you need to deal with bigger problems than your celibacy. If your answer is no, you are actually in the majority of the incel population, and you need to stop inventing causal connections where there are none.
Edit: wording.
As a woman, I do find men who think that upon encountering one, they should 'deal with her' (not even sexually) rather creepy... Perhaps you could imagine this totally counterfactual world where you simply have no obligation to 'deal' with anyone based on a binary characteristic?
As to virgin motherhood, strictly speaking only mating is 'missing', the rest is right there (since the blind god of evolution has prepared females to give healthy offspring if raped, pair-bonding and courtship cannot be necessary). Dunno how much emotional maturi
I think you're overestimating the importance of sex in human relationships. I'm willing to bet that someone with no sexual history can do a good enough job of raising a baby and a child, especially if they were well nurtured themselves. I'm concerned about how they'd do with an adolescent who's interested in sex.
More generally, I believe that people who have a hard time getting started on sexual/romantic relationships have parents who didn't have a good relationship.
As for social change, I don't think forbidding IVF for virgins isn't going to solve anythi...
I don’t know of anyone else who shares my point of view, and especially not professional sexologists.
You may need to update your beliefs based on that evidence. Admittedly, your personal history has a strong effect on your recommendations for society, but (and I'm sorry that there's no delicate way to say this) your case is not the average.
sexual relationships starting at an appropriate age
You keep using that term, like it's analogous to the essential time window in childhood for language acquisition, but adults are much more flexible.
...male busines
Actually we have empirical evidence that women's premarital sexual adventures damage their ability to form stable marriages:
http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/08/defining-slut.html
When our allegedly unenlightened ancestors shamed sluts, shunned bastard kids and married their daughters off as young virgins, it turns out that they knew their business after all.
BTW, I find it curious that at least some of us consider paleonutrition a guide towards a modern healthy diet, but then turn around and call paleocognition bad names like "cognitive biases."
we have empirical evidence
No, we have only some correlations where obvious third factors (e.g. IQ) are involved. If you want to take this approach, just being black strongly "damages ... ability to form stable marriages".
It seems that "correlation != causation" hasn't been repeated enough X-/
P.S. Not to mention that "stable marriages" doesn't look like a terminal goal to me. If that's all you want, just forbid divorce.
Roosh has posted essays about the classical literature he has read and thought about, which shows an openness to a philosophical view of life. That can overlap with spiritual thinking to some extent.
Brave New World, Chapter 17:
ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"
"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."
"Well …" The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shado...
I have a casual interest in religious conversion as an empirical psychological phenomenon. The philosopher William James makes the case for studying religious experience empirically in one of his books published over a century ago - The Varieties of Religious Experience - so the idea has circulated for quite a while.
I think we might have an example of an internet figure undergoing an Augustinian sort of spiritual crisis documented online, namely the pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh. Roosh has posted and said lately that he doesn't enjoy his sexual conquests a...
What Does the Future Hold for Kim Suozzi's Cryogenically Frozen Brain?
http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/what-does-future-hold-kim-suozzis-cryogenically-frozen-brain
Oh, I forgot to add to the post below another source of my science-fictional view of sexual relationships: Robert Ettinger's nonfiction book Man Into Superman, which I read at the impressionable age of 14 in 1974. Scroll down to page 68, "Transsex and Supersex":
http://www.cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/ManIntoSuperman.pdf
... Do you ever talk about anything else other than your lack of sexual success? Alright, granted – I saw a few posts from you on cryonics. What would it take to steer you towards posting more of that and less of this? It's largely off-topic for LW, off-putting as well, and irrelevant to anyone who is not you. I get that it's something that concerns you deeply, but seriously, try getting advice on that one on a specialised forum.
Well, science fiction itself is futuristic and sex is a popular topic. It's not clear that futuristic portrayals of sex in SF need to be explained, any more than futuristic portrayals of eating/food, travel, politics or society.
I don't understand how the karma system here works. One my posts below, about the usefulness of prostitutes for learning how to get into sexual relationships through dating regular women, dropped off for awhile with a -4 karma. Then I just checked, and it has a +4 karma. Where did the 8 karma points come from?
This has happened to some of my posts before. Do I have some fans I don't know about who just happen to show up in a short interval to upvote my controversial posts?
From the Foreword to Brave New World:
...Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time. As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he needs cannon fodder and fam
KEN HAYWORTH’S PERSONAL RESPONSE TO MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW ARTICLE
http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-response-to-mit-technology-review-article
If I had sexual learning experiences only from prostitutes, and I had nothing else to go on, should I have asked this woman how much money she wanted to come with me to my room in Laughlin's hotel for sex
That would likely be perceived as highly inappropriate and carries with it the chance of you getting banned from that convention in the future.
So how should I answer questions about my sexual history in a medical context?
"No."
Or if there are looking to be a lot of questions, you can head them off with "no, I'm a virgin".
Men without families have always been considered expendable. The whole concept of army is built around that. I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying it's old as history.
The new thing is that "having sex" has been completely divorced from "having a family", so now some stigma (less) is associated with not having a family, and some stigma (more) is associated with not having sex. It makes sense this way, because being unable to attract someone implies being unable to start a family. Again, I'm describing here, not making a moral judgem...
Even more so, because the male nurse might assume I'm gay otherwise.
I've noticed some little-studied cognitive biases here, because sexually experienced people tend to force ready-made "explanations" on male incels that make them comfortable, instead of trying to study and understand incel as its own phenomenon. The canned explanations lead to bad conclusions and useless advice for men like me. How would seeing a prostitute teach me how to get into sexual relationships? Men who get their sexual experience exclusively from prostitutes can remain ...
Otherwise she might assume that I had gone to prison for 30 years or something ridiculous like that
the male nurse might assume I'm gay otherwise
What you need from the nurse is her set of skills. Her personal opinion of you is irrelevant to doing her job. I understand that we may see health professionals as higher-status than us, but they're actually doing us a service. You don't need to feel intimidated by an unspoken imagined condemnation.
Don't rant to strangers about how incel you are. If you do, don't be surprised if some of those strangers try to offer you comfort.
I doubt very much that your context was medically relevant. She behaved inappropriately and of course you should change providers if you can and prefer to, but there was no reason to do anything but answer "no" to her questions in the first place, especially if the alternative involved phrases like "close the deal".
I don't know of any Bronies with cryonics arrangements.
Yet som there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that Golden Key
That ope's the Palace of Eternity.
(John Milton, Comus, lines 12-14)
May Kim find that Golden Key some day.
The article discusses the Brain Preservation Foundation. The BPF has responded here:
A COURAGEOUS STORY OF BRAIN PRESERVATION, “DYING YOUNG” BY AMY HARMON, THE NEW YORK TIMES.
Probably the biggest cryonics story of the year. In the print edition of The New York Times, it appeared on the front page, above the fold.
A Dying Young Woman's Hope in Cryonics and a Future, by Amy Harmon
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html
You can also watch a short documentary about Miss Suozzi here:
http://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000003897597/kim-suozzis-last-wishes.html
A friend of mine attributes the refugee crisis in the Levantine countries to a severe drought caused by "climate change."
Does "climate change" mysteriously stop at Israel's borders? I haven't heard of any political breakdown or mass emigration from that country.
I do not know if emigration can be attributed to climate change or not, but I do that that Israel produces very large quanties of fresh water by desalination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel
Neighboring countries may not be able to afford this.
The cemeteries of the world show where the hard boundary of objective truth lies.
Not sure about the sexbots, but I predict that in my lifetime (ie maybe another 40 years) knowing how to drive will become about as relevant for most people as knowing how to ride a horse.
I do think it's still a bit too soon to be thinking about buying a driverless car though.
Well this certainly lives up to the discussion thread title. This is an ill posed question because it selectively carves out a very specific definition of human value for obviously ideological reasons. Why is capital the definitive measure of contributions to the human race? What about the wheel (Mesopotamians), what about fire (Africans - geographically, probably no one knows the taxonomy but certainly not northern Eurasians). What about geometry? Or perhaps something fairly important called numbers. Are those not knowledge?
Eventually I guess you could just wirehead everyone to experience perfect blissful ecstasy for all eternity.
Or else Immortal Supermen(TM) would have progressed so far that they will enjoy wireheading as an occasional treat, like drinking a glass of some highly regarded wine with dinner.
Yeah, if you want to turn more and more adolescent boys into adult male virgins who lack the skills they need for living in a society full of self-directed women.
I do!
It's good for men who don't want love, but just want sex.
It's good for women, because it filters out the men who don't want love, but just want sex.
It's good for me, because it reduces the competition!
Most people do not have open-ended interests the way LWers do.
Marvin Minsky said something similar a few years ago, to the effect that most people don't have "real goals," unlike the scientists Minsky knows who tell him that they have personal lists of problems that they would like to solve, but the problems will take longer than their current life expectancies.
Mike Darwin also mentioned this as a problem in an essay he published in Cryonics magazine back in 1984:
http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8402.txt
Darwin thinks that the arrival of ...
Korzybski fits into a larger intellectual pattern since the Enlightenment, where smart people think that human affairs have gotten disordered somehow.The intellectual reformer believes he can diagnose the problem, find a solution by arguing from plausible first principles, and then get humanity back on a normative path. Just think of Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, etc.
Basically these intellectuals think teleologically, and they assume that humans should have instruction manuals that intellectuals can de...
You mention the Enlightenment, (although it's a strange Enlightenment that includes both Marx and Rand), so I guess that you are intending a contrast with neoreaction. But your template fits NRx just as well: things have gotten disordered somehow, the intellectual reformer believes etc. They disagree on why things have gotten disordered and on what the cure is.
For NRxers, it is because we have fallen away from the wisdom of the past when Men knew better. The cure is to re-establish the wisdom of the past, for Man Now to live as Man did Then.
For Korzybski,...
Steve Harris, M.D., beat you to it over 20 years ago:
Gregory Benford, Ph.D., the physicist and science fiction writer, talks about cryonics in a new video:
Obviously related: D.J. MacLennan's new book, Frozen to Life:
https://www.singularityweblog.com/cryonics-a-glass-state-time-travel/
Cryonics: A Glass-state Time Travel
by D.J. MacLennan on August 6, 2015 0 Comments
Frozen to Life
What if we gave people a way to escape absolute death at the end of their biologically-allotted lifespans? Wouldn’t many of them jump at it? Of course, and they do, and have been for some time now. Religionists believe that the metaverse (or whatever they wish to call the whole macro-everything, including all the ‘spiritual’ bits) ...
The social ones. I actually probably value this higher than 1. Explaining to my loved ones my decision, having to endure mockery and possibly quite strong reactions
You have to play a Long Game here, something I find increasingly easy to do as I have reached my 50's. I told my original "loved ones" - my mother, my father (divorced from the former), and my sister - about cryonics a quarter century ago. They all considered it weird, but then whatever problems that might have caused me tend to correct themselves with time. My father died last Octo...
If everyone outside of cryonics thinks of it as a rich man's indulgence, then why haven't adventuresses showed up? In the real world, cryonics acts like "female Kryptonite."
Eh, smart people can rationalize doing dumb things - Skepticism 101.
I would point to cryobiologist Greg Fahy, Ph.D., as a more relevant authority:
The cryonics movement needs more people with clinical medical backgrounds involved, but then it also needs people with practical business experience.
I will give you a business intelligence test. Look at just the home page of the website for this startup cryonics organization in Oregon, and tell me one obvious thing that it lacks - just on the home page:
The lottery model doesn't apply to cryonics because the individual cryonicist's choices in the here and now bear on the probability of success. Cryonicist Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D. in mathematics, wrote about this back in the 1980's.
Personality certainly plays a role in the early-peaking badass. But then an introverted person thrown into a lot of sticky situations that he has to figure out and survive through could wind up with a pretty impressive résumé, and in effect become a different kind of badass.
Focus on the goal more than the means:
I want to stay alive in good shape.
Life allows for experiences.
Experiences can lead to skills.
Accumulate enough skills, and you can become a futuristic badass like something out of science fiction, kind of like the character Rutger Hauer plays in Blade Runner, but really old and "ultramature," as Max More says, if you do it right: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. . . "
And then, some day, young people - I don't mean ones in their teens and twenties, but ones only a few centuries old af...
I don’t want to wake up a stranger in a strange world.
That already happens to everyone. We call it "birth."
If revived, I wouldn’t have any useful skills.
People make a living now with allegedly primitive skills. I live in rural Arizona, and I know guys who work as cowboys and ranch hands. One of them told me the other day that he had to round up and brand some steers.
The people who revive me might torture me.
Or try to rape you, like in the "reverse cryonics" time travel story Outlander. Claire seems to manage regardless.
...It
I haven't done anything to "abuse" the voting system, and you should retract your accusation because you have no evidence of that. I don't understand how my posts can gain so many upvotes in such a short time.