Sal Limones

My only problem with all this is the fact that we are using human-intelligence as the standard by which to measure the worthiness of any other animal's intellect. Like, the more similar they are to us, the better they are. Seems kinda arrogant.

Agreed!

Yeah, the second article definitely does, I dislike the thresher analogy and I don't agree with all of the article, but I like the list at the end that shows how a joke about rape can be funny as opposed to mean and harmful. These are just things I linked that coincidentally are both about Tosh, which we are not talking about, and about oppressive humor in general, which is what we're talking about and can easily be divorced from Certain Current Events. I don't want to talk about it because I don't think her heckling was cool at all, but his comeback was just terrible, so pretty much everyone sucks and bleh to that whole thing. I think that everyone absolutely has the right to tell someone else to shut up, even though it is rude. I also think people should be able to tell shitty psychopathic jokes, even though it is rude. I don't think that the joke teller has more of a right to talk than the shutter-upper, if the shutter-upper can't escape the joke teller's joke telling. The first one to infringe on rights is the joke teller, if the joke is mean-spirited. If the joke is so bad that it's being seen as an aggression, it is absolutely reasonable to respond to it as one. No, of course there's no hard definition for what's funny. I just cannot fathom a straight up racist/sexist joke being funny, only if they're more about sexism/racism. But I'm sure there's people who can. Eh.

Well I certainly don't think a government entity should be on hand to stop people from telling awful jokes. I've been saying that people shouldn't tell those jokes, because it is a bad thing to do, and yes, hopefully if they do they will learn to stop doing it when they make people sad or get slapped in the face. I also don't think people should go around pulling tigers' tails because it's a pretty awful thing to do in and of itself and hurts the tiger and also the tiger will kill you, but certainly people have the right to do that I guess. When you say 'I don't think he should be stopped' do you mean that there shouldn't be like a government-sponsored censure of his jokes, or that nobody should complain or tell him his jokes are bad? Because I totally agree with the first one, but I am also very much on board with people telling him to stop telling jokes that he steals and then tells badly. :I There's a difference between a good-natured joke and bullying, and intent has less to do with it than effect does. If you hug someone too hard because you love them so much, and you accidentally break their rib, you ease off. And maybe you hug people more gently in the future, so as to prevent more injuries. You shouldn't be stopped from hugging people, but you really should stop hugging people so hard. If you don't because you really just don't feel like it and people should just learn to put their arms up for defense, well that's pretty horrible. The last sentence of the article I quoted summarizes it pretty well: "Your job as a comedian is to take us through pain, transcend pain, transform pain." Not just point out pain, or say that your pain is funny to me. The list at the end of this article is good: http://jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke

Move in with the girlfriend before he does.

Um, yes. "Why do you hate freedom" is, I thought, a pretty common jokey thing Pointing out that someone is wrong is not inherently uncivil, though? Especially when "and here's why" comes right after. Nobody's going "well, you're wrong, and stupid, good luck being a stupid wronghead." I don't see how "well this thing you just said is wrong, and here's some stuff supporting my argument" is not a perfectly reasonable avenue of discussion. Ignorance is not malicious. Not knowing a thing doesn't make you stupid, it just makes you uninformed. I don't remember if anyone used the actual word ignorance but I'm pretty sure those of us arguing with your view just read some of the things you said as so callous that we were trying to understand whether it was because you didn't know it hurt people, or because you thought it really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, or because you sincerely thought that people should just learn to not feel hurt, or what. See also my post to you earlier in this thread, where I'm still wondering if maybe your definition of offense is different from mine. And see, now that you've said this: it makes sense. This whole time, you were talking about jokes that are actually funny, whereas I think some of us were thinking more along the lines of "hurr women amirite?? get back in the kitchen." This is why I (and maybe others) was asking you for specific examples, because what you were saying didn't make sense with what I knew about sexist/racist/etc jokes. Which is that they're not funny. Here's a relevant quote from an article I just read concerning the whole messy Daniel Tosh incident (let's not talk about that, btw): So yeah basically it's like how Dave Chapelle is a good comedian (funny, insightful, subversive jokes ABOUT racism) and Carlos Mencia is a bad comedian (racist jokes playing off of but not necessarily criticizing existing racial stereotypes). Right? Or am I still completely off the mark here? PS: In the interest of full disclosure-- I hate Carlos Mencia for various reasons but don't really feel THAT strongly about calling him a racist. Just a bad comedian.

Wait the only insult I saw was "shit at communicating". I don't think it's true that once we have said "feminism good, racism bad" there is nothing else to do but nod thoughtfully and fiddle your thumbs. If this were the case, neither sexism nor racism would be so problematic today. There's plenty to be discussed, like what exactly constitutes racism/sexism/whatever, roots of the problems, how widespread and/or harmful these things are, how they manifest in different people's lives, what can be done about it on a personal or institutional level, etc etc etc. Why do you hate facts. And freedom.

Oh darn sorry.

It's a jumpable hurdle to YOU, because there isn't much of an institution built around bullying skinny white nerds (or whatever you were bullied for in school, unless it was some kind of disability in which case disregard this post) beyond high school UNLESS it is combined with homophobia. So good for you, Twig! Good on you for figuring out a way to not be bothered by things! However, telling other people that they, also, have the power to not be bothered by words is kind of a myopic and arrogant thing to say, because you're completely disregarding the fact that the discrimination those words represent shows itself in LOTS OF WAYS in their everyday life. Not just people saying things to them. The words part are just the warning, or the icing on the cake, or the punctuation for emphasis. And you cannot safely just ignore them always, because if, say, you're at a bar, and you're black, and people start calling you things, they are eventually going to break a bottle on your head or something unless you leave and leave fast. In this situation, you would not be able to just calmly drink your beer and revel in your word-depowering wizardry. And often, you really don't know when a situation is going to escalate. Or maybe it just happens so much that after a while it really becomes unignorable. Maybe you're seeing everyone else's experience through the prism of your own experience, and applying the same standards to them. You seem to have a different concept of what "being offended" means that sounds a lot more voluntary than I think it is, and I would like to hear you explain it further, because it might just be a semantic argument, but I guess you've left the thread?

Amazon has the cloud and you can choose to store your musics there, I believe. And it provides a handy player for you to listen to what you have in the cloud.

Wow, I really disagree with that guy. What is "only a word" to you can be a bringer of fear and terrible memories/associations to someone else who is actually affected by the discrimination that word represents. Choosing to do an action like suck a black cock is really not the same as being discriminated against through no fault of your own.

What it is is the best thing

Yeah, one could be really close to homophobia or racism by virtue of being a victim of one or both of them, which is the case for most of homosexual and non-white people.

Korax, I'm wearing a swan dress and being the prettiest cowboy. I've been playing it all weekend and I think I'm pretty close to the end! Pretty fun game overall except for the mine. Shame about all the typos and misspellings though, I can't help but cringe at them every time.

Ok well good! Also sorry for missing the 1 in your name. TP2K1.

I know, I was talking to TP2K. I was expressing my hope that his posting a piece by something as disreputable as the Daily Mail was not a "this is what you sound like" kind of thing. This is interesting, buuuuut I have some pretty big objections in terms of actual observability with a lot of these... like the whole thing about boobs being attractive because they're a front-butt. What. No. I've heard that before and I've heard it refuted but augh I don't want to do scholarly searches anymore you guys

I hope you're not saying that those of us arguing that men=promiscuous and women=choosy is not a biological imperative are just as bad as the Daily Mail. I'm pretty sure no one here is really saying that being gay is a choice. It's probably just a matter of phrasing, I think we're talking about the performance of sexuality. Sexuality is not chosen; that is, whether you like men, women, both, none, or whatever. What IS a matter of choice is the performance thereof. One can choose to perform their sexual preference by being demure, or obscene, or use gloryholes, or have one-night-stands with strangers. This has nothing to do with your biological preference for a gender; these behaviors are inextricably, inevitably influenced by your social context as well as your natural libido. This is what we are talking about. The behavior of both men and women, be they gay or straight, has a heck of a lot to do with how they are brought up and what the world around them tells them about what sex should be. Electroshock "therapy" that seeks to un-gay people just traumatizes them away from the performance of their preferences in a Pavlovian way. It is not at all healthy and it does not do away with the gay, it just Clockwork Oranges it all up. Here's two things you said that I'd like to go back to: No, in most cases we cannot in fact separate the "real" self, whatever that is, from the self influenced by society. Even if you belong to a counterculture, you are still very much influenced by that aspect of it, which is still society. Can you please address everything I've said about the influence of your parents, peers and religion being far more pervasive than that? Gay people aren't outside society just because they have it tough. They are still part of it, they still need jobs, and to interact with straight people, and to not get beaten up in the street for holding hands. They can't just go "suck it, straights!" and do whatever they feel like (what I said about San Francisco was a joke, btw, about a place in the world where homosexuality is the dominant behavior.) Women can't just go "fuck you, construction workers!" and do whatever they feel like, either. Ideally, we all SHOULD be able to as long as no one gets hurt, but this is not the case at all. And this has nothing to do with biology. You can use your gay friend's stories to say that this particular small subset of gay males in his experience behaves a certain way. You can use your limited sample size of women who tell you their sexual history or reservations to determine that these particular women behave in a certain way. What you cannot do is say "based on my experience, and on this completely non-biological, fully sociological study, men are biologically this way and women are biologically this way." Especially when the experience of other people contradicts yours. It is simply not universal evidence, and you are focusing, again, on the performance of sexuality rather than sexuality itself. One very much cannot take a theory about the behavior of cavemen, which is a perfectly unobservable thing (unlike quantifiable structural differences in a species's changing physical characteristics), and say that because it would be better for evolution if they behaved a certain way then they must have done so and it must be in our nature. BDSM has no evolutionary purpose. Foot fetishes have no evolutionary purpose. Homosexuality has no evolutionary purpose (unless that study you linked to that was referenced in the Huffington Post is right), even, and there it all is. It's also ignoring the fact that we are still an evolving species, and that the selective pressures we face now are really really different from what Homo erectus had going on. We are not selecting for the same things anymore and haven't been for thousands of years. I already linked a bunch of scientific studies for you and in fact this all began with me posting a scientific study, but you keep invalidating my points by bringing it all back to cavemen. Who are dead. Very very dead. I descend from Aztecs and Spaniards, man, and while I structurally look like them, I sure don't behave like them. Also you ignored my bit about colonialism and major religions and how they're all pretty sex-negative and

Wow, how? Like, using him/his subjects as an example of unhealthy sexuality? Or saying that Kinsey discovered that??

Sure! It is generally used in the context of asexuality, since asexuals have no sexual preference (or rather prefer not to have sex at all) but sometimes fall in love with only one gender, or both. http://en.wikipedia....nal_orientation This is... somewhat related, if horrible in its improper use of "their": http://www.tandfonli...0/J082v11n01_10 There isn't much in the way of scholarly articles about it outside of asexuality, but basically "bisexual heteroromantic" describes a person who finds both men and women sexually attractive, to varying degrees, but only really falls in love with the opposite gender. You also have bisexual homoromantics, and bisexual biromantics. These terms are not necessarily interchangeable with "bi-curious," which implies a satiable amount of curiosity as opposed to an ongoing thing, but the first can mean the same thing as "heteroflexible."

Goodness how did we get here. Another thing to add to this discussion: sexuality isn't binary, it is fluid. COMPLETELY straight and COMPLETELY gay are not the only two options, in animals as well as humans. A bisexual man who leans towards straight in a homophobic society or "encouragingly straight" society will most probably exclusively date women. There is also such a thing as bisexual but hetero-romantic, when one is sexually attracted to both sexes but can only have actual romantic relationships with the opposite sex. Sexuality has been discovered but it hasn't been explored very much. The G-spot got actually physically discovered REALLY recently, for example, back in April. Hysteria was still a 'condition' until about 1920. Alfred Kinsey did a whole bunch of research in 1947 but it was so loose with its science rules that the data was deemed much too compromised and it is now referenced mostly in unscholarly ways. My point is that extreme fringe behaviors may not actually be that 'fringe', even if they are extreme by the standards we are taught by our gay/straight cis mainstream society. Yes homosexuals are a very small percentage of the population (what the exact percentage is would be nearly impossible to find out, particularly in Muslim countries), but you cannot discount them as deviations from what evolution has made us; they are not going to ever be natural-selected out. Same with women who love sex / are promiscuous; maybe you just don't know they're there, because very few go around announcing it, but I reeeaally think they're way more numerous than homosexuals.

I'd rather let someone with a better grasp of history do it, but in very broad strokes: if the Aztecs hadn't been taken over by Catholics, or ancient Greece by Rome and subsequently the Roman religion substituted by Christianity, and Muslims hadn't done their thing, etc, then the majority of the world would not be ruled by conventions of decency dictated by these three major religions. Perhaps we'd still have human sacrifices in Tenochtitlán, Southern Europe would be rampant with buggery, and homosexuality would not be illegal in Muslim areas. Colonialist people have been imposing their beliefs and conventions on their conquered peoples for thousands of years, and after a while that tends to homogenize things to an extent.

Colonialism. If Ancient Greece had taken over everything we'd all be very different people.

No, I said that all other species do inherit traits from both parents as well, same as human babies, because that is how genes work in general - based on the dominant or recessive nature of each gene and not based on the sex of the person that gene came from. If all other species inherited sex-specific traits only, it might prove that humans are indeed unique in the way their genes are inherited. In any case, wanting to determine or study human behavior or biology based on the biology/behavior of other animals is a flawed pursuit, so I'm going to drop this line of thought. We did not stop evolving at the Homo sapiens stage, and our reproductive concerns now are not the same ones that our earliest ancestors had. What about vegans and vegetarians who switch their diets for moral reasons, or Tibetans, or countries where siestas are common, or people who live in places with six months of day and six months of night, or Ancient Greece, or the super gay Etoro people (who, like a certain Mormon, still have to ugh have sex with women), or San Francisco?

Er? But it says "That both high and low degrees of paternal resemblance have ready explanations highlights one of the challenges in linking subtle human features to changes that played out over millions of years of evolution. "It's kind of hard to distinguish 'just-so' stories from things that are really a product of evolution," French says." Evolutionary psychology is mostly a whole bunch of speculation, and has come up with some really ridiculous stories, like "women like pink because in ancient times cavewomen picked berries." This is absurd for many reasons, among them the fact that not all berries are red, that not all red berries are edible, that a lot of women don't like pink, and that pink was considered a manly color until the 1940s. If an experiment is not reliably reproducible, then it is not science. Also what brkl said. I might not be understanding your argument? Is it that babies resemble their fathers and mothers specifically so the father will want to raise the baby? Because this does not account for how this is true across all species, even ones whose babies are raised only by the father, or only by the mother, or by a group of females, or not at all.

Oh, sorry! By the way you phrased it I thought you meant that babies look more like their fathers. Okay, but I still don't think that a baby looks like both parents because it needs care from both parents; it looks that way because that's how genetics work, and this is true in all animal species regardless of how they care or don't care for their offspring. That this makes dads not freak out seems to me a tidy retroactive explanation, an issue of causality verus coincidence. As for what the mom says, isn't that true of all collaborative projects unless one of the team members is kind of a jerk? Still what about adoption and marrying single moms and switched-at-birth babies? I don't think there's an inherent aversion to other people's babies, just to being cheated on and having one's trust betrayed, which is true for both genders in all monogamous situations, babies or not. MAYBE! A lot of assumptions about dinosaurs that made a lot of sense at the time have eventually been proven wrong. Like velociraptors: why were they covered in feathers?? They look ridiculous. They never would've been cast in Jurassic Park like that. This is true, but it is also a rational decision and not something instinctive that can't be ignored. With the advent of 99% effective birth control for both sexes, this isn't as much of a problem anymore. If by security you mean physical safety then I'm totally with you on that! But I think that's more basic self-preservation than tending toward monogamy. In a perfectly safe environment, this is not necessarily the case. Like, for example, if you have a lot of sexy trustworthy friends with no STDs and no one involved ever gets jealous. This is not an entirely hypothetical situation, as I know someone who is in it. I never said it was common, just that it isn't necessarily nonexistent, and that the opposite is not as common and depends on geographical location. For example, none of the gay bars here (I have gone to them) have a blowjob line. Neither do the lesbian ones, at least not before midnight when I leave like an old person who needs 8 hours of sleep. However, there ARE private, well-policed and well-regulated clubs where the famed lesbian clit-licking line does happen, as well as orgies, BDSM, and all kinds of things, with strangers of all genders. This is possible because of how well-policed the place is, and how respectful of consent all clubgoers are. (I have not gone to this one but my roommate, one of my best friends, and an acquaintance have. All three are girls.) This is all entirely speculative but yeah, I agree with that. However, this is not to say that one can't be mentally healthy and have good self-esteem and still enjoy lots of sex with lots of different people that are good at sex! Also, if a new partner is amenable and willing to learn, Good Sex can be achieved in 2 or 3 encounters, which I think still counts as "casual sex", if not "one night stand". Being promiscuous or desirous of sex with many partners does not mean you have lots of one-night-stands with strangers, just that you have sex with many partners.