Dalrymple reviews the poor sexual choices of an underclass woman, Tina Nash, who lived a very nice lifestyle on aid to her neglected absolutely fatherless children. She was into horseback riding, possessed disc-jockey equipment costing $3,200 had a car, had a 42-inch plasma television in her living room while her children could watch a second TV in their bedroom.
Two conclusions are obvious from his review: Poverty is not caused by lack of money, you can be poor while having a host of luxuries at taxpayer expense, and that this woman should never have been allowed to make her own sexual choices. She should have been forced to sleep with one man, that man able and willing to support her and her children, forbidden to sleep with any other, and subject to corporal punishment if she failed to sleep with her owner, or slept with some other man.
I know some high IQ high income upperclass women whose emotional maturity is no better than that of Tina Nash, and who made a pile of choices equally bad, but somehow avoided similar consequences – such as pregnancy and violence resulting in lasting injury. Since they demonstrably had the ability to think about the future, I suppose they should have been given a limited choice of men willing and able to support them and their children, and having made their choice once and forever, thereafter forced to sleep with and only with their husbands. And some women, like Tina Nash and her mother, cannot be trusted with even that much choice.
There are a great many people who just are not capable of making the choices needed to navigate the modern world, most of them female or black. They should be under the control of someone else.
I know a high IQ high socioeconomic status woman who from age eleven to age thirty slept with a parade of low lifes, some them as or more dangerous as anyone Tina Nash slept with. Then getting older, when being a total slut starts to look disgusting rather than alluring, cleaned up her act, revirginated, started pursuing nice guys with good careers ahead of them, married a nice high IQ engineer with a good future ahead of him, and proceeded to pump out lots of lovely children. But what she was from preteen to the age when the clicking of her biological clock started to get ominous was disgusting and should not have been permitted. The marriage seems happy enough, but really, should he have to have a wife that has been reamed by a long parade of dicks bigger than his dick, wielded by men who are, as women measure manliness, much more manly than he is?
I see another high IQ high socioeconomic status woman who at age thirty failed to clean up her act, slowly transitioned from alluring slut to disgusting slut, and is now transitioning to cat lady.
I know lots of high IQ career women who, when they see their children growing up, when the years that were most important to spend with their children have passed, then lean back from their jobs to spend time with their children.
Women just do not make good choices, and need to have their choices restrained and controlled by fathers and husbands. Females grow up faster than males, but they stop growing up at age eighteen. Women are never adults and should never be treated like adults or allowed to make adult choices, though when the hormones drop in menopause, they stop acting so crazy.
Interestingly, in mattress girl’s porn video, the male playing the rapist or abusive lover has his face blurred out, but mattress girl’s face is fully visible. Yet the man playing the abusive lover is a well known professional porn actor, who is presumably drawing pay for this role. He is an actor. No one is likely to confuse him with his role, for he has played so many roles, usually undignified roles with fat chicks. He cannot be embarrassed being seen putting his dick into a slut’s asshole. Is he embarrassed to be seen putting his dick into crazy?
[…] Into Darkness […]
Do you believe in God? Jesus? The Bible? I am a married Christian woman. My husband reads your blog. He and I see eye to eye on many differences between men and women, for which I am grateful. I don’t have to pretend to be masculine and he doesn’t have to pretend to be feminine. Unfortunately much of American marriages are backwards relationships, which produce backwards offspring, regardless if divorce becomes an option.
I do not see how you can equate children to women. God created man, male and female, in His image, but created each with unique abilities and responsibilities to their race. A man was created to be the overseer of God’s creations, including woman. That makes men responsible for women, however, the responsibility is given to each man according to his relationship to said woman. A woman is subject only to her husband after her father gives him the reigns (not a whip). Children are subject to both their mother and father because they need both their parents’ uniqueness’ to be properly raised. A woman needs only her husband’s godly love, wisdom, and other male unique attributes to be the virtuous woman God intended her to be.
So, to speak of a woman as though she is child like is quite absurd. She is, or at least should be, far above a child. If you are drawing the connection based on her need to be protected and loved as a child does, I can see that, but even these needs are different according to position/title.
God made no mistake. Woman was created with a weakness, when utilized in the correct environment, is actually a great strength within the family unit. She is sensitive to being programmed to suit the needs of her counterpart (husband). She is gullible to her man’s words, and desires her husband’s love, respect, attention, praise and adoration. Therefore, a woman should marry young and only allow herself her husband as the guide in her life. After all, she was created specifically to be a help meet to a man, her husband.
As per your views on a female’s sexual behavior, you sound like you are a woman hater with a grudge. You declare a woman needs to be “controlled” yet decide she is to be a horrible person when she is promiscuous. Seems to me that because woman was never intended to be alone, but always under the responsibility of a man, her father should be called out for what he is: A loser who selfishly dropped the ball on training up his daughter to be a good wife. Whether the girl’s mother was in the picture matters not, because it is ultimately the man in charge and if he chose an incorrect wife or for whatever reason she just was not part of the child’s life, daddy should have made it priority to find a suitable motherly replacement. Either way, to blame a woman for her natural weaknesses is ridiculous. God seemingly wanted to make us easier to program for male gain.
The women who have actually conquered themselves, become opposite of what God designed them to be, are called liberal feminists. They seem to be more chaste than the God fearing willy-nilly women more so to eliminate being programmed.
Though much of your blog is intelligent and honest, your distaste for women is quite apparent, which leads me to question your intentions, orientation, and reasoning. Brain washing the American men who read your blog into believing women are second glass, filthy whores is not very wise. Speaking truth as to the downfall of a woman’s chastity is good, but trying to convince men that their wife is so close to being the “evil one” could help wreck a marriage because he will begin to treat her like the enemy when she is by nature designed to be his partner. It all throws him off track from programming his wife to be the wife he needs her to be. Again, your words lead me to question your motives. Are you attempting to destroy marriages like the pro gays do?
God requires me to submit to my husband’s protection, guidance, love, and commands because if I don’t I will naturally fall for any man’s ways. And if my husband does not submit to God’s protection, guidance,love, and commands he will fall for any man’s ways.
No. See my famous observation about Leprechauns. I do however believe that the bible contains much ancient wisdom on how men should live and how social institutions should function that is now neglected and denied.
History and tradition tell us that women need be controlled. Observed behavior of feral women is, for the most party, pretty bad. In a well functioning society such behavior should result in severe disapproval and punishment.
I have compassion for you, Jim. You speak of women as though they are in a much lower class than men and you do so with disdain.
Some woman, or women must have did a number on you.
Men and women are not equal, they can never be because each was created for their specific purpose, which is impossible for the other to adequately and successfully perform. Women are emotionally more susceptible to influence and men are physically more susceptible to influence. Different. Science. Nothing wrong here.
The need of being controlled by man that you speak of regarding a woman is also a necessity for man to be controlled by a woman. Just as both need to eat food and drink beverage to survive, the same is true for both sexes if they are to be productive people. You cannot, however, control (influence) both in the same ways because they were not created the same. A man needs a healthy physical relationship to keep him grounded (from being feral) and a woman needs a healthy emotional relationship to keep her grounded (from being feral).
Because a ship cannot function properly with two head captains, the same is true in a marriage. The woman must allow her more capably designed husband to head their relationship. He must protect her and provide for her and mold & groom her to be all he needs from another person. Her obedience and respect towards him are tools he needs to be the best man he can be.
Your disregard for women’s position and lack of respect for their abilities leads me to conclude that you have never experienced such pleasurable and gratifying relationship attributes from a woman. For this I feel sorry for you. It’s not too late for you, though. Rid your mind and heart of the Godless ideology in your life, turn to God and he will grant you the wisdom you lack. From there you may venture onto a new road of enlightenment and turn your bitter, grumpy heart towards a content and happy place.
Although you and I do not agree on my worth and purpose, nor your worth and purpose, we do agree on non equality facts throughout the board. I just might follow your blog for that reason. You have great knowledge on such topics as race and social classes.
I will pray for you, that you will come to know God and for Him to give you the wisdom He can only grant. And I don’t much care if me praying for you offends you. I’m going to do it anyway.
At a very young age I slept with the girl who became my wife. I was the first man she ever slept with, she was the third girl I had ever slept with. Eventually I married her and had two children with her, and despite my infidelities, we remain together to this day. She has been a good wife, a good woman, and a good mother. I have always been the boss of the family. Our marriage has been traditional and successful. However, I have observed a large number of women cheating on their husbands, and frequently leaving their husbands, usually with disastrous consequences for themselves and their children. I have also observed various women, among them all my female relatives save two, sleeping with men that they most certainly should not have slept with, looking for gang bangs, etc. It has been obvious to me that my wife only made the right decision by luck, and that had she lost her virginity to anyone else, probably would have wound up following the same depraved, foolish, and frequently damaging path that most women follow, that she engaged in right conduct due to her decision to submit to right authority. But most women choose to submit to wrong authority, generally the worst that they can find.
How many men have you slept with other than your husband? Well, I don’t expect you to answer that truthfully, because your husband would know that all of them were manlier than him, as women measure manliness.
I believe that once we gave women the vote in the US we had pretty much sealed our fate. The first generation or so still looked to the men in their lives for cues on how to vote, but as the culture became more liberal and pushed women to make their own decisions they became the perfect population to manipulate for demography. Women in my own life whom I love dearly and have had many hard life experiences and in there own way gained wisdom from them are still driven to illogical views stemming from there more emotional reactions. While I would never say that all men are more reasonable or logical than women, in general populations of men tend to act more responsibly in the long term than populations of women.
In addition to their generally less long term outlook, the effect of physical beauty is another thing to consider in women’s psyche. No matter what progressive liberals will say or do, a young woman’s greatest asset for social value is her physical attractiveness (other factors play into attractiveness but the physical is the common base level for all). A very attractive girl in her prime years will have the greatest social value in any social network even compared to a normal looking male who has made great accomplishments. Where as a man starts off with low social value but through work and self discipline can accrue greater social worth, a female with good looks simply receives great social value at a relatively young age with almost no effort. However, there is a cruel twist of fate at play here. An attractive women who has passed her prime will find her social value greatly diminishing as her looks fade. Some one who was simply lavished with attention for being what she is will find all that taken away from her often without having achieved anything else to give her social value. If she was a responsible wife and mother she could ease into the role of a family matriarch, but other less fortunate women find themselves alone and constantly trying to chase the last bits of youthful attractiveness they can conjure up. To be frank, this must be a complete mind-f#$k for these women and it is no wonder that so many single middle aged women become crazy, cynical or even vindictive.
Well, those of us who would like to see women behave and especially dress more modestly would certainly be mitigating the impact of such mind-screwing, but the Politically Correct Inquisition of the Cathedral makes sure to keep such “dangerous” thinking away from impressionable young Feminist minds – not to risk damaging their blossoming ability of denying moral culpabilty in any form it might take…
The Cathedral wants its temple prostitutes, and woe to any who would oppose their temporal might! 😉
A.J.P.
“The first generation or so still looked to the men in their lives for cues on how to vote, but as the culture became more liberal and pushed women to make their own decisions they became the perfect population to manipulate for demography.â€
Patently false. Women had been granted the right to vote by individual states in the late 1800’s by alpha males and were making up their own minds regarding the best candidate for political office.
“a young woman’s greatest asset for social value is her physical attractiveness…â€
Actually, from a Christian point of view, it’s her piety. God is not about looks per se.
“A very attractive girl in her prime years will have the greatest social value in any social network even compared to a normal looking male who has made great accomplishments.â€â€¨
Those great accomplishments is what triggers a woman’s amygdala and subsequent pursuit of a man worthy to procreate with.
“An attractive women who has passed her prime will find her social value greatly diminishing as her looks fade.â€
An attractive woman and a good-looking man. Please be accurate, considering the majority of American men are overweight.
Unfortunately not. Women generally spend their hottest years fucking thugs. High socioeconomic status high IQ women generally spend their youth fucking guys who live by folding sweaters, petty crime, and off their numerous high socioeconomic status high IQ girlfriends.
When their looks start to go, then they start looking for a nice guy with a good job. After they marry him, half the time they promptly divorce him, and spend their brief remaining sexual attractiveness fucking thugs who live by folding sweaters, petty crime, and off the child support money of their numerous girlfriends.
“Women generally spend their hottest years fucking thugs.”
Corrected for accuracy–Some women tend to fuck thugs in their prime years.
“After they marry him, half the time they promptly divorce him, and spend their brief remaining sexual attractiveness fucking thug”
You’ve been reading too many cuckold stories. Makes your eyes bleed.
“Your rationalizations resemble those of the victorian movement to “rescueâ€
fallen women.”
No, my rationalization is that men, as the supposedly more moral sex, are decidedly more likely to act on their urges of depravity rather than embrace the word of the Lord as the means to curb that urge.
“Women like to have sex, and if allowed, will prefer to have sex with men who successfully engage in anti social behavior.”
Corrected for accuracy –> Men and women like to have sex, and if allowed, will prefer to have sex with men and women who successfully engage in anti-social behavior. Both men and women are equally prone to sin.
“Women need to be subject to the authority of men who are able and willing to prevent them from doing what they are naturally inclined to do.”:
Actually, men are more naturally inclined to do whatever it takes to bed women who refuse their advances.
“Male desirability fades much more slowly than female desirability.”
The number one attribute women look for in a man is his looks. The more good looking a man is, the more likely he will procure hotties. Given than more men than women are overweight or obese, and given that more men than women fail to exercise more than twice a week, men are prone to fall off the map when it comes to women noticing them. Unless, of course, that man has money. A lot of money. Then some women will get the tingles based on the fact that the man who knows they don’t have the looks will pay for her efforts.
The proposition that women are the more moral sex just is not true. Women’s sexual urges during their hottest years are substantially stronger than men’s sexual urges. Men are polygynous but women are hypergamous, and hypergamy leads to worse behavior than polygyny. Men are up for casual sex, while women are not, but what makes hypergamy extremely bad is that it is not casual.
Your theory leads to the conclusion that the marital contract has to be enforced on men, but not women. Been tried, does not work.
Observe the female reaction to celebrity
“The proposition that women are the more moral sex just is not true.”
‘Tis true. Women are able to go for longer periods of time without intercourse and are able to simply say no to sex despite guys using game.
“Women’s sexual urges during their hottest years are substantially stronger than men’s sexual urges.”
You don’t know anything about the libido of young men, do you?
Hypergamy: They are able to say no to me and you and their husbands. If, however, a celebrity smiles at them …
Observed behavior of Christians is otherwise.
Your rationalizations resemble those of the victorian movement to “rescue” fallen women – which was in practice to enable women to fall in the hope that they could have sex with them.
Women like to have sex, and if allowed, will prefer to have sex with men who successfully engage in anti social behavior (or even unsuccessfully engage in anti social behavior, notice the enthusiasm for prison boyfriends) The solution is to not allow them. Women need to be subject to the authority of men who are able and willing to prevent them from doing what they are naturally inclined to do.
Male desirability fades much more slowly than female desirability. Further, male looks are only a small part of his social status and desirability, while female looks are ninety percent of her social status, and all of her desirability.
Yes because a woman’s personality doesn’t count at all. With an attitude like that, it’s no surprise that the women you encounter are slutty bitches (at least if your descriptions are accurate)!
>Then getting older, when being a total slut starts to look disgusting rather than alluring, cleaned up her act, revirginated, started pursuing nice guys with good careers ahead of them, married a nice high IQ engineer with a good future ahead of him, and proceeded to pump out lots of lovely children. But what she was from preteen to the age where the clicking of her biological clock started to get ominous was disgusting and should not have been permitted. The marriage seems happy enough, but really, should he have to have a wife that has been reamed by a long parade of dicks bigger than his dick, wielded by men who are, as women measure manliness, much more manly than he is?
The obsession with and desire to dictate people’s private sexual behavior, whom they sleep with and whom they should be allowed to marry and so forth, is a deeply progressive trait.
This woman and her husband didn’t ask you for your input or advice, but you dedicate considerable bandwidth to how you would optimize their sexual behavior and marriage.
Let me guess-this is all necessary in order that children are not raised fatherless and engage in antisocial behavior? “Think of the children” is also a standard prog trope. Not to mention that this is fundamentally a utilitarian argument.
>I see another high IQ woman who at age thirty failed to clean up her act, slowly transitioned from alluring slut to disgusting slut, and is now transitioning to cat lady.
Good. Out of the gene pool.
>I know lots of high IQ career women who, when they see their children growing up, when the years that were most important to spend with their children have passed, then lean back from their jobs to spend time with their children.
But this is between them and their children, and is not your problem.
>Women just do not make good choices, and need to have their choices restrained and controlled by fathers and husbands.
The vast majority of men do not make good choices either. Who restrains and controls them? We got to this point through an extended series of very poor choices made by husbands and fathers. And many of the most influential choices were made by high IQ, elite husbands and fathers-the foundations, for instance, were constituted by the absolute cream of American society in terms of IQ and work ethic, who merely wished to use that IQ and work ethic to improve the lives of the rest of their society-exactly as you do.
The only difference between you and Carnegie or Rockefeller is that you lack their resources and talent for making things happen.
I will begin by asking your definition of progressive belief.
Also, I will add that a philosophy of left or rightism does not dictate which subject a person will address but how that person will react to an infinite number of problems.
I have nothing to say about utilitarian arguments and I think Jim’s protestation against it is sophomoric but inconsequential.
Speaking on father I will say that data correlates strongly with an absence of fathers and antisocial behavior. If civilization is to sustain itself it must constrain the natural inclinations of the people within the civilization or it will cease to exist. Civilization can only maintain so much of antisocial behavior before its ubiquitous adoption renders that civilization defunct
The crime the children will commit is my problem. The welfare they live under is my problems. Actions have consequences. They do not exist in a vacuum.
Women’s suffrage was passed to garner votes. It was shortsighted in nature and falls within the problems of democracy.
It is not to state that men make wise choices or that intelligent men will not blunder but it is a matter of degrees. The general lack of faculty among humans forces us to choose the lesser evil. Especially when that lesser evil also aligns with the relatively submissive nature of woman and the dominant nature of man. By degrees of course.
I would assume that nearly all human beings who ever lived lack their talent of industry.
I was hoping you’d mention Ford. He was a great love of der juden.
“It was shortsighted in nature and falls within the problems of democracy.”
To the contrary, it was brilliant strategy on the part of dominant males to maintain their authority in society.
Together at last! Neosocialists and libertarians will make such a handsome couple – don’t you think? Their children, however, will be awful and perhaps better off being culled with a lead pipe! Who do you take after, B? Your mom or your Dad?
HAR HAR HAR!
How predictable these phony intellectuals are! Any effort to impose personal responsibility on them is seen as an attack on their rights and freedoms! Keep your icky morals and ethics to yourselves!!!
B,
You’re right on the Progressive need to control personal lives.
However for a variety of reasons and with our various lunacies as policy we must do something Sir – and we will or perish.
Our government and elites hate Americans. Nothing can be done but out.
Currently the Progressives mandate sexual promiscuity and transgressive behavior, which are pushed in the schools as the new religion. This is the same faction that 100 years ago outlawed homosexuality and then pursued them, now it pursues with Puritan vigor any who do not bless the new sacrament of gay marriage et al.
These are all symptoms of course and not the cause, the cause is madmen have power, and these madmen have a deep hatred of most of America and most Americans. The madmen are a melange of various Jacobin strains from within America’s various communities as well as foreign adventurers [mostly now Latin Americans on the make against their rich but weak neighbor] and these adventurers and their money are quite welcome in the DC—NYC corridor.
The problem in America is her government and elites hate Americans intensely. It’s the intensity of the guilty and the hatred driven by covetousness. This is a very rich land. We Americans are actually going through a repeat of what happened to the Indians.
What we will hopefully do to survive is some version of Sparta, because in our men of Valor police and military are the only honest and not pervasively corrupt institutions.
Sparta was in high and Elite driven decadence before Lycurgus, that’s what drove his reforms.
>The problem in America is her government and elites hate Americans intensely.
The problem in America is that her people have the government they so badly want and deserve.
>What we will hopefully do to survive is some version of Sparta
Infanticidal homosexuals? Doesn’t the US already have that? If you think that increasing their lethality would make us all better off, I’m not sure.
> because in our men of Valor police and military are the only honest and not pervasively corrupt institutions.
The military is quite pervasively corrupt. To be an officer, you have to lie constantly. To be an NCO, you have to countenance the lies and echo them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/02/18/lying-in-the-military-is-common-army-war-college-study-says/
I don’t have any direct experience with the police except cursory traffic stops, so can’t really speak authoritatively on their honesty or corruption. Based on face reading and my friends’ feedback, I suspect they’re worse off than the military.
B,
Israel is Sparta. Ask your Helots.
In fact I think it’s a model of going forward here, so that’s not an insult.
There was more to Sparta than homosexuality and infanticide eugenics.
As far as lying in the American military; certain reports will usually if not always meet a certain 90% threshold of readiness. Other than that no, and there’s no culture of corruption. There is official culture but I suspect [am certain] that Official Culture is also parroted by Israeli Army Officers.
Don’t mistake obedience for beliefs, never mind corruption.
I define corruption the old fashioned way – stealing, extortion and so on.
The closest thing to corruption the military has is Official Culture, say on all men are presumed rapists and so on. As we must bow to Official Culture or replace it with all the implications of replacement, Official Culture nods are considered the easier bargain.
As far as American Police I’ve served with many and no they’re not corrupt. You can head to any country in the neighborhood and see the difference. Police also have obedience and Official Prog Culture to nod to, but the American police aren’t institutionally corrupt.
Israel is not Sparta. We don’t have any helots. Most of our farming and factory labor is done by Jews.
If you meet a guy who tells you he’s a gay babykiller, probably you’re not going to care much about his redeeming qualities.
Of course the Israeli army has an official culture, but since most officers up to CPT are doing their initial hitch, and telling people to go fuck themselves is a tradition here, it’s muted.
It’s not about pencilwhipping range scores. It’s about, for instance, sending up endless reports about how the Iraqi Army guys you work with are coming right along and doing fine, and the bad guys you’re hitting are serious, JAM battalion commanders and what not, even though your intel is a bunch of lies you pay some camel rapist to tell you. And needless to say anyone who doesn’t go along with the program is a turd in the punchbowl and will be punished.
American corruption isn’t stealing and bribery. It is, e.g., going along with all of the above for 20 years, then retiring as an O6 or E9, drawing a pension and making mid-six figures with Northrop Grumman or CACI, or low six figures with a cushy fed job. Or, you can always be the turd in the punchbowl and not put your name on lies, and get railroaded.
“The obsession with and desire to dictate people’s private sexual behavior, whom they sleep with and whom they should be allowed to marry and so forth, is a deeply progressive trait.”
I tried to suggest something like this as well. Jim seems to take issues case-by-case, instead of under one umbrella reasoned and rationalized through X.
It would be interesting to see more umbrella work. Though fly by your pants theorizing is fun too.
[…] Source: Jim […]
>The obsession with and desire to dictate people’s private sexual behavior, whom they sleep with and whom they should be allowed to marry and so forth, is a deeply progressive trait.
Amazing how far you’ve fallen from the law of Moses.
Jim is not basing his recommendations on the Law of Moses. He doesn’t believe there’s a god, or that there is any sort of objective higher moral existence.
Jim is basing his formal argument on the greater social utility, and perhaps on his concern for this woman and her kids.
His actual argument is, like that of any other progressive, based on the desire to impose his will on others.
We’re living in the year 2015. A call to build a better social order on rational principles to protect people from their own choices, for the greater good-haven’t we eaten in that restaurant before? Didn’t the food taste like shit every other time?
Let me guess-this time, our scientific rationality is more scientific and more rational?
My personal opinion, informed by the Law of Moses (and not by prurient desire to delve into people’s sexual behavior and control that behavior) is that charity can’t be coerced, and that healthy people do not deserve charity. They should work. If they can convince others to support them as charity cases, fine. If not, they can sell themselves into slavery.
If they can’t support their children and can’t convince someone else to raise them as charity cases, they should sell the children into slavery. The children will be better off than they will be in state custody (gladiator school) or in a professional foster home (pedophile circus). Problem solved.
This woman was enabled in her choices by state support, both for her and for her hyperviolent mating drone (who in a normal society would be spending his life working menial labor with all the money surplus to his basic food and clothing going to reparations to his first victim-and if lacking the discipline to work, would be sold into lifelong slavery for reparations.)
Staring at your high-IQ female acquaintance and her husband, speculating on the girth and length of peni she’s encountered, and demanding there be a law to protect her husband from having to marry, live with and have children with such a woman not only doesn’t address the problem-acting on this line of thought introduces far worse problems.
>My personal opinion, informed by the Law of Moses (and not by prurient desire to delve into people’s sexual behavior and control that behavior) is that charity can’t be coerced, and that healthy people do not deserve charity. They should work. If they can convince others to support them as charity cases, fine. If not, they can sell themselves into slavery
Based on your principles then incest is fine? Sexual behavior is important because the children who spring from the allowed behavior are the future. Thus all arising societies enforce sexual rules while declining ones don’t. I can see what end of the cycle you’re on.
>Staring at your high-IQ female acquaintance and her husband, speculating on the girth and length of peni she’s encountered, and demanding there be a law to protect her husband from having to marry, live with and have children with such a woman not only doesn’t address the problem-acting on this line of thought introduces far worse problems.
Almost every society in history has locked the women up or greatly restricted their ability to fuck around primary through ownership and custody. The ones that didn’t, tend to die off. It’s not something new or unusual, it’s a natural law that’s been around since the dawn of civilization.
>We’re living in the year 2015. A call to build a better social order on rational principles to protect people from their own choices, for the greater good-haven’t we eaten in that restaurant before? Didn’t the food taste like shit every other time?
Protect them from themselves? I took the call as one to shape their behavior to protect us from them and their off spring. A close friend’s mother was a sexual liberated women. And while all her kids were raised in a 2 parent home, her daughter started making meth babies at 16 thanks to the teaching and behavior of her mother. My friend’s mother is now raising these kids who are already a burden on everyone around them.
The costs and inefficiencies created from having too many shitty people is much greater than the costs of enforcing good behavior.
>Based on your principles then incest is fine?
Based on my principles incest is not fine because G-d said it’s forbidden. Based on your principles, if you were to be sure that incestuous relationships did not produce children, would incest be fine? If not, why not?
>Sexual behavior is important because the children who spring from the allowed behavior are the future.
No, Whitney. Sexual behavior is important because sex, like food, is an essential drive, and either we control it or it controls us. When it controls us, we become idolaters, and as a result wipe ourselves out.
>I took the call as one to shape their behavior to protect us from them and their off spring…The costs and inefficiencies created from having too many shitty people is much greater than the costs of enforcing good behavior.
As I said, this is fundamentally a utilitarian, thus Progressive, point of view. The Fabians and the founders of the Foundations would wholeheartedly agree. Yet they are how we got here.
I don’t think my point is really sinking in at all here.
>>Based on your principles, if you were to be sure that incestuous relationships did not produce children, would incest be fine? If not, why not?
Contracept incest is wrong because unclean. Harm aversion does not exhaust the moral sense. Most people know this automatically through introspection (though some work diligently to pretend to unlearn it.) In those rare cases where people genuinely can not see through introspection, they can see through observation. The taboo against incest is long and wide. People who can genuinely neither see by introspection or observation are morally blind, and a poor source of moral guidance.
That the taboo against incest is found in every culture for which we have evidence tells us that taking an interest in other people’s private sexual misbehavior is natural and normal, not an invention of progressives.
>Contracept incest is wrong because unclean.
Unclean? What is this “unclean” thing, in scientific terms? Can you measure it?
>That the taboo against incest is found in every culture for which we have evidence
Bullshit. Egyptians during the Greco-Roman period practiced sibling marriage on a widespread basis. The Greeks practiced marriage between half-siblings. Hawaiian royal families did as well. Not to mention that half the Indoeuropean foundation mythologies have incest running rampant.
>tells us that taking an interest in other people’s private sexual misbehavior is natural and normal, not an invention of progressives.
Many natural and normal things are completely incompatible with civilization. What is a defining trait of progressives is the idea that society ought to be redesigned and run on rational principles for the greater good. This is basically scientism, or socialism in its original meaning.
For the dim-I am not advocating incest-in our belief system, incest is punishable by death. But not because sage philosopher-kings deemed this to be useful.
You are playing stupid, as you so often do. Obviously incest is unclean, and any religion of social order that denies this has something terribly wrong with it.
>>Contracept incest is wrong because unclean.
>Unclean? What is this “unclean†thing, in scientific terms? Can you measure it?
Look around.
>>That the taboo against incest is found in every culture for which we have evidence
>Bullshit. Egyptians during the Greco-Roman period practiced sibling marriage on a widespread basis. The Greeks practiced marriage between half-siblings. Hawaiian royal families did as well. Not to mention that half the Indoeuropean foundation mythologies have incest running rampant.
Roman Egypt is the one and only instance where a counter-example could be made against the incest taboo because it was public, celebrated and common. It also corresponds to a period of decline in Egypt. And even there, the taboo against mother-son incest was strictly observed.
> What is a defining trait of progressives is the idea that society ought to be redesigned and run on rational principles for the greater good.
Controlling female sexuality is not new. Are you arguing that we should be irrational or ignore the consequences of other people’s actions?
based on your principles, if I wrote God on your door in some crazy serif font with a swastika in the middle of the o, would you be unable to paint over it, or would you just be unable to paint over it for a day if I did it Friday evening?
>Obviously incest is unclean, and any religion of social order that denies this has something terribly wrong with it.
Well, that’s not much of a rationalist argument. Again, in rationalist, materialist terms (you don’t believe in anything else, right,) why is incest unclean?
>Look around.
Looked around. Didn’t see any incest. Had I seen some incest, it is unclear to me why objectively, relations between a man and his stepmother, or a man, a woman and that woman’s daughter would be unclean. Which one is objectively more unclean? Again, in my system, they are both prohibited and that’s that, but what ground dom you have to stand on?
>>That the taboo against incest is found in every culture for which we have evidence
>Roman Egypt is the one and only instance where a counter-example could be made against the incest taboo because it was public, celebrated and common. It also corresponds to a period of decline in Egypt. And even there, the taboo against mother-son incest was strictly observed.
First, in pre-Roman Pharaonic Egypt there was lots of sibling marriage, as was the case in Hawaii. Second, the Greeks allowed marriage between half-siblings, as apparently did Mesopotamia (Avraham and Sarah were half-siblings.) Third, what is the point of your statement that in Egypt there was a taboo between mother-son incest? OK, but apparently no taboo against sibling incest, so is sibling incest less unclean, objectively?
> Controlling female sexuality is not new. Are you arguing that we should be irrational or ignore the consequences of other people’s actions?
Controlling female sexuality successfully happens in societies where the woman answers to her man who answers to G-d. In these societies, the man’s behavior is even stronger controlled socially than that of the woman in many ways-there is an extensive net of obligations he has to meet. But in your model, there is no god, or any sort of framework beyond the rational control of society for the greater good.
>based on your principles, if I wrote God on your door in some crazy serif font with a swastika in the middle of the o, would you be unable to paint over it, or would you just be unable to paint over it for a day if I did it Friday evening?
Wait, in this hypothetical you’ve untied yourself from the railroad tracks? First of all, I want my $8 back.
Whenever I try to explain rationalism and materialism to you, you tell me I am wrong, and rationalism and materialism is not what I say it is, but instead is something completely stupid that makes no sense whatever.
Why is human feces dirty? There is a perfectly good rational and materialist answer to that, with which you are probably familiar, and incest is dirty for very similar reasons. If you can follow the reasoning in the one case, you can follow the reasoning in the other case, except, of course, you selectively and obstinately play stupid.
Human feces is dirty because contact with it and ingestion of it can kill you.
Except that’s not really true, because we see little kids and apes playing with it, and Chinese farmers spreading nightsoil, and it doesn’t kill them. We also see cecovory in rabbits, and they seem to be doing fine.
We have a built-in disgust reaction to feces-but we don’t have such a reaction to incest. Especially not half-sibling incest, aunt-nephew or uncle-niece incest.
Furthermore, if you ran an experiment where you had a highly incestuous society, after a few generations, all the recessive genes with the highly deleterious effects would be washed out.
So, no, from a rationalist and materialist viewpoint, this really holds no water.
To be precise, we have a built in disgust reaction to sexual contact between people who had a lot of contact with each other before the age of six or eight – which usually though not always includes uncles and nieces – it certainly includes my nieces. This is evolution’s best stab at prohibiting sex between closely related people. If you are in the same family unit at an early age, incest as far as evolution knows. It reliably stops brother sister sex, mother child sex, reliably stops father daughter sex if dad is involved in the family, which these days he usually is not, fairly reliably stops uncle niece sex in those cases where brothers and sisters stay in contact.
Understanding the reason for this disgust reaction, we attempt to channel it it ways that give effect to its purpose.
When one says “X is dirty” one says “one should have and encourage the natural disgust reaction to X”.
>why is incest unclean?
The sky is blue. The grass is green. And incest is unclean.
>what is the point of your statement that in Egypt there was a taboo between mother-son incest?
Mother-son incest is incest. The incest taboo is universal. Taking an interest in the private sexual misbehavior of others is not something new with progressives.
no, _you_ pay _me_ $8 to paint your door. stop trying to jew me.
>To be precise, we have a built in disgust reaction to sexual contact between people who had a lot of contact with each other before the age of six or eight
Given the degenerate stories I’ve heard, this reaction is not so well developed in everyone. Given that most people have historically lived in small tribes and married their cousins, and that many of them were betrothed at a young age, it would not intuitively make sense that this would be a universal reaction, or one difficult to suppress-for instance, we have a built in reaction to feces, but everyone wipes their kids’ asses like it was no big deal.
>This is evolution’s best stab at prohibiting sex between closely related people.
Again, I doubt it. This is a just-so story. If you wanted to prohibit sex between closely related people, you’d be better off doing it through scent (we’re quite good at distinguishing individuals by scent.)
>If you are in the same family unit at an early age, incest as far as evolution knows. It reliably stops brother sister sex, mother child sex, reliably stops father daughter sex if dad is involved in the family, which these days he usually is not, fairly reliably stops uncle niece sex in those cases where brothers and sisters stay in contact.
Doubtful. Most molestation, as far as I know, is done by someone in the list of relationships you listed.
>Understanding the reason for this disgust reaction, we attempt to channel it it ways that give effect to its purpose.
This is a bullshit just-so story, developed to put a rational basis on something that’s part of your cultural baggage.
>When one says “X is dirty†one says “one should have and encourage the natural disgust reaction to Xâ€.
Is/ought.
There are many, many things to which we have a natural averse reaction, yet we choose, through training and conditioning, to accustom ourselves to them, for cultural reasons. You are retconning a justification for why this particular thing is bad. But it’s not something that you’d come up with from first principles, and we see that the most advanced civilization on earth for several millennia operated against this taboo, and nothing particularly bad happened to their elites as a result.
Like infanticide, we are so culturally conditioned to despise it that we assume there is some rational, materialistic reason. But in fact, we see that there were plenty of groups that did not see such a reason, and that they would explain to you that infanticide or incest has plenty of rational pros going for it, and it’s just a question of how you weigh those vs the cons.
>The sky is blue. The grass is green. And incest is unclean.
Well, I agree that it is unclean because G-d so decided. But what’s your rationale?
>Mother-son incest is incest. The incest taboo is universal.
So the incest taboo against relations with your sibling or aunt is not. And certainly the taboo against sleeping with your father’s widow is not.
>Taking an interest in the private sexual misbehavior of others is not something new with progressives.
Taking such an interest to serve what is supposed to be the rationally derived social good IS one of their defining traits.
>no, _you_ pay _me_ $8 to paint your door.
Can’t pay a goy to work on Shabbat, sorry. How did you get loose from the tracks, anyway-break the rope with your hindclaws?
You don’t know shit.
And are not capable of responding to evidence.
No it is not. That is a a progressive talking point, but they get their numbers by classifying the guys who drop in overnight to have sex with a mom who recently divorced her husband and take her child support money as “fathers”, and describing the ensuing molestation as occurring “in the family home” – after dad has been booted out and a rapidly changing succession of strangers invited in.
Molestation by actual brothers, fathers, uncles that actually grew up with the children, molestation in intact biological families, is so rare as to be difficult to distinguish from zero.
Things being despised by God, and also being unhealthy for society in the general sense, often overlap. They are not mutually exclusive.
As a statement, it can be said that “All Traditional ways of society and government are superior to Modern ways of society and government, the reason being that Traditional ways more accurately reflect a divine vision for mankind (to varying degrees of course), and so will be conducive for societal stability and health.”
For instance, God forbids adultery. Because of this we know that adultery is immoral, but we also know it is generally bad for societies as a practice because it leads to illegitimate children with nobody to take care of them. So, it is a justifiable interest for the state (i.e religious authorities within the state) to make adultery a crime.
Sex is a powerful force, and it has the power to create or to destroy. It has always had some taboo and policing surrounding it, much more so than what we eat. This is healthy and normal. Today what we have is sexual anarchy under the Progressive Modernists who make a living smashing taboos.
Bringing dildos in for 6 year olds in school? Fine! Sodomy on parade. Great! Girls dressing like sluts then crying rape if someone gets too close? Damn the patriarchy and its oppression!
If you render certain aspects of sex illegal, they do not cease to exist, but they do cease to be apparent. They are not in the street, they are not in the popular consciousness, they are not in the media. People’s peculiar sexual habits are confined to closed doors with only people who they can intimately trust. This in turn prevents a ‘stacking effect’ of freaks encouraging ever more freakish behavior from their fellow freaks. It serves to isolate people sexually, and pushes them to accept a sexual ethic that is not only conducive to the survival of the state because it is exclusive, but is also spiritually healthy.
This isn’t about going into people’s bedrooms. It is about crafting a practically and spiritually healthy sexual economy in the macro. If God gives a moral command, the reason you follow that command is a value judgment of what ought and ought not be done. If a religious authority gives a social command, the reason you follow that command is because it is in the interests of the society that this authority represents. BOTH of these things overlap with each other, in fact, I would argue that without each other, they are considerably weaker as stand-alone influencers on people’s behavior. They belong together.
>the most advanced civilization on earth for several millennia operated against this [incest] taboo,
No, it didn’t. Evidence for sibling marriage in Egypt that was public, common, and persistent doesn’t exist until the Roman era, a period of decline. Before that, it was uncommon.
“In 1954 Jaroslav Cerny published an important study examining 358 documents (stelae) yielding 490 marriages listing the names of the mothers and fathers of both parties involved. His study revealed a complete lack of evidence for the practice in the Old Kingdom (i.e. up until 2100 BCE), but he managed to find two “practically certain†cases of incestuous marriages between commoners from the Middle Kingdom, and one “certain†case from the 22nd Dynasty.â€
http://cnersundergraduatejournal.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/incest_in_ancient_egypt_revised_.pdf
Nor is there any evidence that sibling marriage was public, common, and persistent in ancient Greece, or Hawaii, or any other places you could mention.
>and nothing particularly bad happened to their elites as a result
So much for inbreeding depression! (Maybe there’s a case for hereditary monarchy after all.)
Keep in mind that evidence of sibling marriage among the generals and priests of Egypt is slim to none, and that the pharaohs kept large harems of unrelated consorts.
>Well, I agree that [incest] is unclean because G-d so decided. But what’s your rationale?
We don’t need a rationale for why incest is unclean any more than we need a rationale for why the sky is blue.
Belief in a personal god has declined in the West, yet incest has not increased. Nor is incest rampant among those godless Chinese. If you think G-d’s will is the only thing between you and having sex with your niece or daughter, you’re not giving yourself (or those around you) enough credit.
>No, it didn’t. Evidence for sibling marriage in Egypt that was public, common, and persistent doesn’t exist until the Roman era, a period of decline. Before that, it was uncommon.
http://www.egyptorigins.org/marprac2.htm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1251731/King-Tutankhamuns-incestuous-family-revealed.html
Seems pretty common to me.
>Nor is there any evidence that sibling marriage was public, common, and persistent in ancient Greece,
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/Elpinice.html
https://books.google.co.il/books?id=dKnFZa4LNjQC&lpg=PA100&ots=y4qMz1NPyI&dq=ancient%20greece%20incestuous%20marriage&pg=PA100#v=onepage&q=ancient%20greece%20incestuous%20marriage&f=false
>or Hawaii
https://transatlantica.revues.org/525
>or any other places you could mention.
http://www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/rt03/deformities.pdf
>So much for inbreeding depression!
Inbreeding depression, like hybrid vigor, is a temporary effect, going away after a couple of generations as deleterious recessive genes are bred out.
>We don’t need a rationale for why incest is unclean
You’d better get one, if you want to keep it from happening.
>any more than we need a rationale for why the sky is blue.
You need a rationale for an ought. You don’t need a rationale for an is.
>Belief in a personal god has declined in the West, yet incest has not increased.
I recommend you get a couple of beers into any urban social worker with a few years’ experience, and ask them about the matter.
>If you think G-d’s will is the only thing between you and having sex with your niece or daughter, you’re not giving yourself (or those around you) enough credit.
I give humans very, very little credit, and for good reason.
B. Your ignorance is matched only by your certainty. Look up the westermarck effect.
But, of course, even if you do look it up, you will reinterpret the sources to say the opposite of what they say.
>Molestation by actual brothers, fathers, uncles that actually grew up with the children, molestation in intact biological families, is so rare as to be difficult to distinguish from zero.
I’d like some sources, maybe backed up by some anecdotal evidence. I know you have trouble with sources usually, but you seem very certain on this one. So I’m sure you have some, right?
Funny how social science is a fraud unless it serves your purpose. I know about the Westermarck Effect. I have doubts for several reasons:
1) This is not a very good system for avoiding mating with genetically close individuals. A more logical and foolproof system would be olfactory.
2) We don’t see such a system, either in humans or in animals. In animals, we see that they are quite willing to inbreed; in humans, we see genetic sexual attraction.
3) If WE was a strong and universal inhibitor, we would not have the need for explicit religious incest prohibitions, just as we don’t have explicit prohibitions on coprophagy.
4) I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from people working with degenerates about ghetto dwellers mating with siblings.
5) Evo Psych Journal says that the two studies demonstrating WE (Israel and China) are wrong, and points out the obvious: that WE can only account for sibling incest aversion, but not for all the other types of incest: http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP05202222.pdf
Yet strangely, when I described it, you did not recognize what I was describing. You lie like a rug.
Open your eyes. You can see the Westermarck Effect in everyday life.
Hence such phrases as “Like kissing your sister”. When Roissy tells men to act as if unimpressed by a woman’s beauty he tells them to “act like she is your bratty little sister”.
Do you think Roissy is saying “act like there is a religious taboo on having sex with her”?
Occupant:
>>Evidence for sibling marriage in Egypt that was public, common, and persistent doesn’t exist until the Roman era, a period of decline. Before that, it was uncommon.
B:
>http://www.egyptorigins.org/marprac2.htm
>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1251731/King-Tutankhamuns-incestuous-family-revealed.html
>Seems pretty common to me.
Down is up. Right is left. And uncommon is common.
One family does not a society make. But you know this already.
Occupant:
>>Nor is there any evidence that sibling marriage was public, common, and persistent in ancient Greece,
B:
>http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Bios/Elpinice.html
>https://books.google.co.il/books?id=dKnFZa4LNjQC&lpg=PA100&ots=y4qMz1NPyI&dq=ancient%20greece%20incestuous%20marriage&pg=PA100#v=onepage&q=ancient%20greece%20incestuous%20marriage&f=false
Source says sibling marriage in Ancient Greece was legal, not common.
Occupant:
>>or Hawaii
B:
>https://transatlantica.revues.org/525
Source says incest in Hawaii was practiced by one family, not common.
Occupant:
>>or any other places you could mention.
B:
>http://www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/rt03/deformities.pdf
Source says incest among Maya was practiced by one family, not common.
B:
>Inbreeding depression, like hybrid vigor, is a temporary effect, going away after a couple of generations as deleterious recessive genes are bred out.
First cousin marriage has been widespread in Pakistan for some time now. Has not bred out the deleterious recessive genes after a few generations.
B:
>You need a rationale for an ought.
No, you don’t.
Occupant:
>>Belief in a personal god has declined in the West, yet incest has not increased.
B:
>I recommend you get a couple of beers into any urban social worker with a few years’ experience, and ask them about the matter.
From an article, of all places, about the epidemic of “incestâ€:
“Incest is a subject that makes people recoil. The word alone causes many to squirm, and it’s telling that of all of the individual and groups of perpetrators who’ve made national headlines to date, virtually none have been related to their victims.â€
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/america-has-an-incest-problem/272459/
Occupant:
B:
Occupant:
Now you are experiencing the classic B method of argument. His sources supposedly say whatever he wishes that they had said, applying the Talmudic method to all texts.
If you attempt to argue with him that the sources plainly say “Not X”, while he says they say “X”, he will take the ransom note approach on the sources, stitching together fragments out of context.
If you again quote the bits missing from his ransom note, he will again post his ransom note. There is no end to it but to call him a liar and move on.
B is absolutely correct regarding lethal deleterious mutations going away during inbreeding depression-induced purifying selection. This indeed should happen after 1 to several generations (exponential decay here), via die-off (potentially massive die-off) of non-viable/defective progeny, assuming high, preferably maximal birthrate. However, non-lethal, mildly deleterious effects may persist and, in fact, become fixated within the incest-practicing population, especially considering the relaxation of selection due to modern society’s amenities and mutual assistance of its members.
To give an exaggerated but real example: the historian Nicholas Reeves, in his “Akhenaten: Egypt’s False Prophet” refers to a credible hypothesis that Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) was a sufferer of Marfan syndrom — the Egyptian dynasties tended to become highly inbred over time [Tangentially, it was also known that he, essentially, raped his own young daughter (although, per Jim, it is not rape, as he was the “owner”).] Despite most likely being blind (or mostly blind) and somewhat physically deformed, Amenhotep had quite a few wives and concubines, as well as a pretty high number of offspring with them.
Inbreeding depression can be overcome with a very high birthrate, which would allow for production of variable genotypes, including better-fit ones. Of course, with an exceedingly high initial genetic load and a poor populace, producing a sufficient number of offspring is problematic, hence inbreeding is *bad* for most folks on the bottom of the economic ladder. Also, for a ruling dynasty practicing primogeniture or any such static principle of inheritance, inbreeding is a *bad* situation long-term, because the locus on maximization of birthrate is not on the most fit genotype, but is actually random. Let’s also not discount the fact that as history moved closer towards Enlightenment and modern times, primogeniture-practicing Euro kings did not reproduce that much, with the ensuing negative consequences (see King Charles II of Spain as a striking example of what can happen).
But again, inbreeding *can* be overcome with high (better even, very high) birthrate: http://www.nature.com/news/inbred-royals-show-traces-of-natural-selection-1.12837
*Realistically* speaking, because very high reproduction (I am not talking about just birthrate here!) was historically hard-to-impossible to attain for most populace (Malthusian constraints, after all!), and because oftentimes a marriage was not merely for procreative, but also for diplomatic/political purposes, marrying one’s cousin/niece was usually a far, *far* better idea. Hence, the cultural norms of disgust with inbreeding: but again, this is all due to Malthusian constraints experienced by 99.9+% of the populations. This continues to this day due to sheer cultural intertia*.
Inbreeding was a (non-publicized/non-paraded) luxury of the very elite, and historical cultural norms can attest to this fact. Given my arguments above, however, the disgust may as malleable as human’s disgust with feces: you can still wipe your kid’s ass, no problem.
*There is also the caveat that, because of natural mutation rate, a new deleterious mutation always gets introduced into not just a population, but an individual (about a couple per individual for a lifetime). And although purifying selection *still* takes care of it, provided a high birthrate, there is an argument to be made against two *full siblings* procreating, as this severely increases the chance that *one* deleterious mutation will go homozygous for a large chunk of progeny of that grandparent’s children. So, if that family’s birthrate plunges suddenly due to external circumstances, and the mutation is a really bad one, the whole lineage is imperiled, even if the birthrate plunges for only a couple generations or so. This would make breeding with full siblings on a sustained basis, although an easier pattern to evolve, a likely fragile pattern in the evolutionary sense. ( This is possibly why a species *may* evolve a *natural disgust* against mating with own full siblings.) But anyway, although an important one, that’s still a caveat.
Change:
B is absolutely correct regarding lethal deleterious mutations going away during inbreeding depression-induced purifying selection.
To:
B is absolutely correct regarding lethal deleterious mutations going away during inbreeding. This happens via depression-induced purifying selection.
>Yet strangely, when I described it, you did not recognize what I was describing.
Who says? I’ve known about WE for years, generally been agnostic.
>Hence such phrases as “Like kissing your sisterâ€.
You’re assuming your conclusion here, as usual. You and I both notice that people in our society are generally repelled by incest. You say it’s genes, I say it’s culture. You attempt to prove it’s genes by pointing out that people in our society are generally repelled by incest.
>One family does not a society make. But you know this already.
When it’s a clan of hilbilly mutants in the backwoods? Sure. When it’s the royal family in the most hieararchical society in history? I’m afraid it does.
>Source says sibling marriage in Ancient Greece was legal, not common.
Generally, you don’t need a law to deal with wildly unusual situations.
>Source says incest in Hawaii was practiced by one family, not common.
Yeah-the royal family. In a monarchy.
>Source says incest among Maya was practiced by one family, not common.
Yes, the royal family, in a monarchy.
>First cousin marriage has been widespread in Pakistan for some time now. Has not bred out the deleterious recessive genes after a few generations.
Eli said everything below; I’ll only add that on one hand, the Pakistani system is not a closed one, meaning that they acquire wives from the outside all the time, and they marry first cousins, not siblings, so lethal deleterious recessive genes wouldn’t be bred out very efficiently. On the other hand, I suspect that many of those genes bring benefits to heterozygous carriers, like sickle cell and malaria/tsetse resistance, and so evolutionarily you’d probably want to keep them, especially if they’re not lethal to homozygous carriers but merely unpleasant.
>No, you don’t.
You ought to.
But there is nothing in our culture that teaches people to be repelled by incest.
Further, we observe that when, due to broken families, the Westmarck effect is rendered null, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, do jump into bed with each other.
Further, there is no prohibition in our society against marrying or having sex with stepsisters or step children, but such marriages and liaisons only happen when the blended families were blended at ages too old for the Westmarck effect.
>But there is nothing in our culture that teaches people to be repelled by incest.
Our culture, meaning, your culture, was very recently Christian (in a very lackadaisical way,) and there is massive cultural inertia.
>Further, we observe that when, due to broken families, the Westmarck effect is rendered null, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, do jump into bed with each other.
Whether a family is broken or not has nothing to do with WE, unless the children lived apart. Are you going to address anything the Evo Psych journal says, or just ignore it like you do any source that contradicts you?
>Further, there is no prohibition in our society against marrying or having sex with stepsisters or step children, but such marriages and liaisons only happen when the blended families were blended at ages too old for the Westmarck effect.
There is such a prohibition in Judaism. The US until quite recently was a society whose operating values were Judeochristian.
Standard incest story is that the father was expelled very shortly after the child’s birth. Mother was too busy fucking around to do much parenting, so early teen girl goes looking for dad, join up as father and daughter, and discover total lack of inhibition against incest. Plus we get a few cases of children being sent off to separate adoptions shortly after birth, and subsequently meeting, and engaging in brother sister incest.
Obviously westermarck effect, not cultural forces.
You cannot see what is front of your nose because you have this crazy belief system that no one would behave righteously except God tells them to.
>Standard incest story is that the father was expelled very shortly after the child’s birth.
Standard incest story looks like this: https://www.google.co.il/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=boy+arrested+for+rape+of+sister
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/four-of-six-homeschooled-brothers-plead-guilty-to-molesting-their-sister-while-anti-school-parents-did-nothing/
http://accesswdun.com/article/2005/3/150386
http://www.worldwideweirdnews.com/2014/02/w8942.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boy-13-admits-sexually-abusing-5694921
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292275/Boy-11-mother-arrested-raped-6-year-old-sister-mother-failed-report-alleged-assault.html
Where is the Westermarck Effect?
>You cannot see what is front of your nose because you have this crazy belief system that no one would behave righteously except God tells them to.
It’s pretty obvious that without an objectively existing, supreme G-d, righteousness is completely subjective (except as determined by cultural inertia.) And indeed, we see cultures where the idea that G-d is some made up fairy tale takes currency very quickly start acting in more and more degenerate ways. At first you are not allowed to condemn degenerate behavior, since there is no more objective righteousness except insofar as it can be demonstrated to be useful, and then degenerate behavior becomes praiseworthy and praising it becomes mandatory.
Your first link is to a broken family.
In broken families, it is common for children to be split up, to be temporarily taken away by child protective services, etc.
There is no strong reason to suppose that the rapist spent much time with his sister (or cousin, as the case may be, it is far from clear how the rapist is related to the rapee, and I doubt the mother or the daughter actually knows.)
>B is absolutely correct regarding lethal deleterious mutations going away during inbreeding. This happens via depression-induced purifying selection.
I don’t deny purging selection happens. I just doubt it happens in a couple generations.
Presumably the rate of purge would be faster via parent-offspring mating than by cousin-cousin mating. Does Falconer or Hamilton have an equation for this?
Looks like we have a kernel of inborn disgust at incest, and that the kernel is larger in some than in others. This kernel can be enlarged or diminished but not extinguished by social pressure.
As it happens, populations with expansive incest aversion have been more prosperous and creative than populations with narrow incest aversion. In Nigeria, for example, the Igbo prohibit cousin marriage while the Hausa practice it. The Igbo have better socioeconomic outcomes.
>Amenhotep had quite a few wives and concubines, as well as a pretty high number of offspring with them.
Yes. The pharaohs were fond of boinking their consorts, which would make sense if screwing your sister were an unfortunate royal necessity.
>Given my arguments above, however, the disgust may as malleable as human’s disgust with feces: you can still wipe your kid’s ass, no problem.
Rare is the parent who cheerfully does Diaper Duty without complaint or bragging. It’s disgusting.
Occupant:
>>One family does not a society make. But you know this already.
B:
>When it’s a clan of hilbilly mutants in the backwoods? Sure. When it’s the royal family in the most hieararchical society in history? I’m afraid it does.
That’s like arguing that wearing ermine in England was common because royalty. It only makes sense for values of “common†that mean uncommon.
>I don’t deny purging selection happens. I just doubt it happens in a couple generations.
You’re missing the point. The original assertion was that incest is wrong because it would kill the society in which it was practiced. All I’m saying is that it would not, and that the effect of stacking deleterious recessive genes would be offset by the effect of advantageous recessive genes.
>Yes. The pharaohs were fond of boinking their consorts, which would make sense if screwing your sister were an unfortunate royal necessity.
I am not sure that royal harems really require an extensive rationalization. “Yeah, the pharaoh only had a harem to get the image of their naked sisters out of their heads!”
>Rare is the parent who cheerfully does Diaper Duty without complaint or bragging. It’s disgusting.
It’s mildly gross. Very quickly you get used to it. Most normal parents joke and play with their kids while changing them. Older kids change their younger siblings, and it’s no big deal. And lots of people take care of their aged parents, or work as nurses.
>That’s like arguing that wearing ermine in England was common because royalty. It only makes sense for values of “common†that mean uncommon.
I mean “common” as in “encountered by most people in a society and treated as appropriate/not a sickening aberration.” If you were to argue that fur is inherently disgusting to humans, yes, pictures of Brit aristos wearing ermine would be relevant.
>The original assertion was that incest is wrong because it would kill the society in which it was practiced.
The original assertion was that incest is wrong because unclean. It also happens to be a poor recipe for social success. Strong and wide incest taboos are better than weak and narrow ones. Compare Igbo withYoruba, or Yoruba with Hausa.
>[Diaper Duty] is mildly gross.
Mild or otherwise, gross is gross.
>I mean “common†as in “encountered by most people in a society and treated as appropriate/not a sickening aberration.â€
Even in pre-Roman Egypt, incest was rare.
“lethal deleterious mutations going away during inbreeding depression-induced purifying selection” etc.
“non-lethal, mildly deleterious effects may persist and, in fact, become fixated”
Persistence of the long tail of mildly deleterious stuff is a problem (related to the broader information theory issue below). I think the problem is considerably bigger than that, though.
B seems wrong in a curiously blind way for someone who is impressed by the long term success of Jewishness. A hundred generations of Jewish success against a thousand rivals can impress B, OK, it impresses me too. But then it seems unreasonably inconsistent to ignore millions of generations of evolutionary success against millions of rivals in favor of a just-so story based on a ridiculously crude model of what’s important in genetics and evolution. A few generations of inbreeding will eliminate lethal recessives, yay. And then the population …. will … succeed … uh … no, there’s an enormous gap there, and a moment’s consideration of reality should remind you that there must be one or more very important things in that gap, even if you don’t know enough about genetics and evolution to immediately guess what’s up. Plants and ants, in particular, are literally in your face with their expensive strategies for buying outbreeding (flowers and flights of winged mating substrains). Their global history, measured in geological eras, proclaims the importance of outbreeding at least thousands of times more strongly than Jewish history proclaims the virtues of rabbinical interpretation compared to various modern rationalization for setting policy in service of status games.
One important problem with the absurdly oversimplified lethal-recessives-end-of-story model can be seen semiquantitatively in another simple model. Near-perfect inbreeding would eliminate lethal recessives quickly …. and … uh … give you a breeding population of order 1. (It doesn’t need to be all that close to 1; much less than a hundred, say. Though the closer you get to 1, the harder it bites.) With such a small population, even if we wave away the long tail of nonlethal bad mutations you inherited at the outset, you will get creamed over the medium run by the information theoretical limitations on correcting new mutations as they accumulate. The model in (free, online, generally quite good) Mackay’s _Information Theory, Information Theory, and Learning_ Ch. 19 “Why Have Sex?” suffices to illustrate this. The story is more complicated with moderate levels of outbreeding, but rather as the simple 100% tax endpoint correctly establishes the basic nature of the Laffer curve, the super-high-inbreeding simple endpoint correctly establishes the basic nature of the curve on this genetic phenomenon.
Population resistance to coevolving parasites is another benefit from outbreeding, and it’s probably a very big one. That said, I don’t know a good way to quantify it, and also: my impression is that while it is a important effect in biological reality, it tends to be oversold even beyond that in service of ideological agendas. (There is a hand-waving connection with ecological biodiversity agendas, with anti-native immigration ideas of diversity, and with anti-Asian academic ideas of diversity; there also seems to be a connection to a biological wing of the great anti-Whig-history political agenda, trying to talk down the tendency for evolution to improve things. For all the real importance of this anti-parasite effect, a good fraction of the writing about that I’ve seen seems more like cant in support of such political agendas rather than clear-eyed investigation of what’s going on.)
Large effective populations also give advantages in evolutionary speed, but I don’t know any simple models that faithfully capture this effect, and there are counterconsiderations like how certain kinds of useful radical changes can be harder to drift into in a large population. So while I believe this is a huge win for outbreeding (basically by keeping the effective population high) in the medium to long run, I have to wave my hands and appeal to qualitative patterns like how species from Australia and smaller Pacific islands strongly tend to be roflpwned when exposed to competition from Eurasian or American species with larger effective populations.
Large effective breeding populations should strongly tend to give advantages in adapting to shocks (an Ice Age, a potato famine, whatever). Here I don’t even have the Pacific examples to appeal to, but it’s well-supported qualitative good sense, analogous to how it’s important to make your projectile or boat elongated and pointy and smooth even if you don’t fully understand the Navier-Stokes equations.
Incidentally, none of this means that inbreeding can never be useful in artificial breeding programs. (Similarly, if you are doing artificial simulated annealing, messing with the annealing schedule so you have periods of very low temperature can be helpful, even though the main point of simulated annealing is what happens at moderate to high temperatures.) But as far as I know, and as far as I can see from the considerations above, constant inbreeding is a very bad idea even for artificial selection unless you have goals other than competitive fitness. (A relatively common alternative goal: for many biology experiments a highly homogenous population is important simply to reduce variation, much more important than whether the animals are competitive with the ancestral wild strain, so they use inbred strains of lab animals. This is in fact common enough to totally screw up my web searches for “rodent outbreeding” dammit.)
In big-brained animals mating behavior is complicated and involves various amounts of deception (and bluffing and threat and hiding and so forth), and we seldom have anything as simple and conspicuous as flowers or winged mating-specialized substrains to smack us in the face with how blindly we are ignoring the importance of outbreeding. And many biologists can be more interested in covert agendas than reporting on nature. (I grew up in the 1970s being earnestly fed a lot of crap about things like peaceful animals and 100% monogamous animals, and lived through the transition to cheap video and cheap DNA testing.) DNA testing in particular can give us data on outbreeding directly, and as far as I can tell, it tends to be consistent with the evolutionary just-so arguments above: what’s evolutionarily important enough for plants and ants to pay for loudly and proudly is evolutionarily important enough to be achieved somehow at the end of all the big-brained sneaky signalling/countersignalling/deception mating games even if human observers aren’t clear on all the sneakiness steps and antispoofing techniques involved. (Similarly, getting a species to mate in captivity can be surprisingly hard even when humans haven’t figured out why yet. The dance tends to be tricky and complicated.)
I wanted results on DNA relatedness data in wild populations, and failing “rodent outbreeding” as explained above, I tried “wolf outbreeding” and such, turning up http://wolfology1.tripod.com/id76.htm and www3.nd.edu/~earchie/documents/1543inbreeding.pdf and http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/3/575.full . It looks as though whether or not the specific Westermarck effect mechanism is correctly teased out of the mating dance (not something I am confident of, given the complexity of mating behavior, the size of human brains, the difficulty of experimenting on humans, and the high level of insane degeneracy in grant-controlled social “science”) there is every reason to expect humans to be putting a significant priority on incest avoidance in their mating dance, because humans are big mammals too.
(Incidentally, contracept incest seems doubly contrived to get an unclear answer from considerations like this. Not does the introduction of modern tech defeat our natural intuitions, like autoclaved feces, there is an unrelated controversy/taboo involved, that over contracept sex of any kind. So it’s like stirring up an argument about feces which were autoclaved in violation of a taboo on autoclaving things on the Sabbath.)
Humans have been engaged in nonreproductive sex for a very long time, probably long enough that it is part of the environment of evolutionary adaption, for evolution runs mighty fast in sexual characteristics. The telos of nonreproductive sex is bonding to form a family to raise children – hence no point in doing it with close kin, close kin already being family. So no reason for evolution to handle non reproductive incest differently from reproductive incest.
“The original assertion was that incest is wrong because it would kill the society in which it was practiced. All I’m saying is that it would not”
You, at least as much as the people you are arguing against, seem to be the one is pushing the extreme version that you choose to argue against into the discussion. (Not in the words “would kill the society”, which I can’t find above, but in things like “Human feces … can kill you. Except that’s not really true…” and “When [sexuality] controls us, we become idolaters, and as a result wipe ourselves out.”) It’s not the usual problem of weasely strawmanning, because “feces … can kill you” in particular was directly prompted by Jim’s rhetorical question “why” about feces: he forced you to choose something to clarify his argument before responding to it, and your chosen clarification is not ridiculous. But I don’t think your chosen clarification is optimal. Typically in evolution by natural selection, biological or cultural, it is more useful to say something like “would reduce fitness” or “would significantly reduce fitness”; “would kill” versus “would not kill” is a false dichotomy.
Plenty of expensive behaviors that have actually arisen in history (including colorful examples like foot binding and cannibalism) have had serious fitness costs even when they didn’t outright kill a society; generally it is useful to be able to think about the actual effects of things which actually arise in history without having to shoehorn them into false dichotomies.
In the long run, cannibalism in particular is messed up enough that it can easily kill most of the society before there is enough feedback to guess that it is the problem: any parasite that spreads that way without causing prompt symptoms is a bullet that is hard to dodge. So cannibalism is a large risk for a very small nutritional benefit, a risk that grows even larger if the society does otherwise-useful things like living in larger groups or experimenting with eating new foods. But the ordinary lifespan of societies does not seem to be long enough for even this to be a clear “kills the society” issue, merely (!) a “seriously reduces fitness, possibly to the point of outright killing the society” issue.
Incidentally, you’re correct that rabbits and various other species get away with risks with feces, but that seems to be a tradeoff that only works for some lifecycles and population patterns, because it’s also pretty common for animals to avoid feces, and even some of the exceptions that test the rule (such as primates reportedly hassling others by throwing feces at them) only seem to make sense as complex elaborations of an preexisting simple aversion to feces.
William-thanks for bringing up the intellectual tone of the discussion.
It is impossible to have an objective measurement of whether something increases or reduces a society’s fitness. A society which admirably deals with one set of challenges can completely fail at dealing with another set. It’s impossible to know in advance what challenges will emerge and when.
Flowers and insects do well. But we see that other strategies can also be viable. For instance, the naked mole rat is completely incestuous. There are many more species of flowering plants and insects than there are practicing naked mole rat-type incestuous eusociality, but that is no predictor of future performance-there used to be many more dinosaur species than there were mammalian ones, and so on.
You might say that an r-type strategy benefits from massive outbreeding, because the goal is to create as many combinations as possible for unforeseen challenges, and a K-type strategy benefits from inbreeding. But humans are really different from other animals. Social fitness is something we discover empirically, and mostly through a competitor society showing up. And it’s hard to rationally derive whether a certain behavior increases social fitness or decreases it, except in hindsight. Aztec cannibalism and human sacrifice gave the Aztecs a fitness edge vs. their competitors in Mesoamerica, and made them lose catastrophically to the Spanish.
So how do we know if something ultimately increases social fitness or not? Only if it kills off the host society. Only in hindsight.
So I don’t really see rational materialistic analysis as being of any use in forecasting what morals a society should have. Any Aztec in 1492 would rationally explain that his society’s features were very adaptive. Ditto any American in 1950. And then it turns out that the same moral features that increase fitness in the short run prove lethal in the long run, and there’s absolutely no forecasting when that short run will turn to the long run (unless you’re a Martin Armstrong fan.)
@William Newman:
William, thank you for your contribution and comments on my argument of fixation of mildly deleterious effects in a strongly inbreeding-yet-cooperating & nursing population. There are some good points expressed in your reply, and I will touch on them in my next reply, to follow right after this one.
I am also grateful for your links, especially Mackay’s book — a great resource from a computation/engineering/math expert!
Firstly, for my main disagreement: the “Why Have Sex” chapter of MacKay’s book specifically elaborates on why sexual reproduction is better than asexual (e.g. parthenogenesis, apomixis) — i.e. where there is only one organism in question, no gametes and no fertilization involved in the process. He brings forth a superb argument, but it is further constrained in power, as it pertains to a *single* *monoploid* organism. FYI, multicellular organisms like that (e.g. drone bees, ants, and excluding *cancer*, of course) rarely exist in nature and, from what I’ve learned so far, they *never* asexually reproduce (sure, leukemia cancer reproduces asexually, but the number of progeny cell goes exponential, as expected!), /precisely/ because of MacKay’s argument.
Hence:
1) The derived tolerable mutation rate for asexual reproduction (eq. 19.17) is applicable only for 1 individual asexually reproducing (parthenogenesis, vegetative reproduction (e.g. apomixis, cutting), budding) in the haploid/monoploid system, where you, indeed, can have an effective population size of 1. So to reiterate, this argument is not germane to our inbreeding-focused discussion. If you think it through a bit more, you may find yourself agreeing.
2) Not only am I *not* backing away from my pro-inbreeding (potentially, strong inbreeding among the elites) stance, I, upon further thought, would like to elucidate further on why it’s advantageous, in fact, *more advantageous* than outbreeding — that is, assuming a stable culture/environment of high, to very-high birthrate of fit individuals. This I will do in a later post, because this one’s too long already.
Notice how I mentioned “cooperative & nursing” together with “inbreeding.” The former are what’s lowering the bar for fitness requirement, hence allowing mildly deleterious mutations to persist to, potentially, fixation. Do I propose that humans no longer be cooperative/nursers? No, the solution, the saving grace, lies with technology (and, yes, mostly sane human culture). As I’ve said, bioinformatics can allow us to sift through the genome to detect bad mutations, a process that will get easier the more inbred human populations become. (Why? This is a bit too long to discuss, but I may delve into it, if you request). Of course, for genuine de novo mutations it will be much harder to ascertain whether they are good or bad, but that’s the reality with *any* breeding pattern, whether outbreeding or inbreeding.
And once we find the culprit bad mutations (and they’re never *too* bad, as these get bred out very quickly, almost automatically), humans, in future, can prevent them from happening by a combination of PGD and, possibly further in time, genetic engineering.
@William Newman: Answering your other arguments:
For your argument regarding (co-)evolution of parasites. You are correct, there is always a possibility of some tricky parasite, whether microbe, worm, or even something as exotic as transmissible cancer, to evolve to target a particular genetic architecture. That is not a huge issue for 2 reasons: first, there will be many, many human populations to target (that’s what inbreeding does, if done over millennia). Secondly, and more importantly, the progress of technology: bioinformatics and molecular engineering will be such that I am not at all concerned about it. Same as with GMO scares. In fact, I’m feeling optimistic enough to point you to this: http://www.esf.edu/chestnut/.
For your argument regarding environmental shocks: as before, two objections: 1) many human populationS, each with their own specific traits (some will be Jew-Einsteins, some will be Jew-von-Neumanns, some Jew-B’s, some from the Ebonics-Dancer caste, some from GCochran’s lineage, etc, etc. — and I’m half-jesting here). 2) technology (American pine, fusion power, refuges). Oh, and 3) the Earth will die in a few hundred million years anyway — because of Sun becoming a red giant, the Ultimate Shock. We might as well evolve to escape the Earth or find a way to make it into a planet-sized spaceship.
Progress is slowing, and, in the west, reversing. Looks to me we have a dark age coming up.
@William Newman and @B:
Before I proceed, let me modify my reference to leukemia cancer in a previous post. It seems I used “haploid” in reference to it. However, the ploidy of cancer is undetermined/variable, but since mitosis (asexual reproduction) is applicable, and cancers do form cell colonies / “organisms” that grow/multiply, MacKay’s discussion on tolerable mutation rate vs sexual/asexual repro is very much pertinent to explain the need for cancers to multiply so fast, especially considering that their genomes are huge, being derived from somatic cells. (Normal somatic cells they feature various intrinsic and extrinsic DNA cell/repair/kill mechanisms, to keep a check on mutation. Either way, mutation of cells’ DNA and, especially, mitochondria’s is the main driver for senescence and eventual death. MacKay is still pertinent here, if we look at ourselves in the context of our own body being an *asexually* reproducing descendant cell colony of the original zygote cell that grew inside mother’s uterus. See Nick Land for lots of more info.)
As promised, I’ll try to briefly explain why an elite-inbreeding population pump is better than a generally outbreeding population. Firstly, let me point you to this paper:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Reinhard.Buerger/bb_dom.pdf
Feel free to read it, but for purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on Figure 1, page 7, and ignore the green colored lines (as they pertain to evolution of dominance itself) other than for purposes of illustration. Let’s break it into 4 major classes of dominance-based mutation patterns. In the context of inbreeding, let’s discuss single-allele mutations:
Class A-black. In the paper’s figure, what’s actually illustrated in black ink is: “Incomplete/partial dominance.” Applies to both beneficial (left-to-right direction) and deleterious (the other direction) mutations. Homozygote superiority with partial heterozygote advantage/disadvantage (for beneficial vs detrimental mutations) is the most *common* case for most traits of an organism such as human’s. And, as it happens, it is best suited for inbreeding.
In inbreeding, a beneficial/non-harmful de novo mutation has a much better chance to escalate to fixation. This is obvious from looking at the graph, as one of the grandchildren (at best) has a great chance of becoming homozygous for it. A simple thought experiment to illustrate: if man A has fitness non-decreasing/increasing mutation (making him heterozygous on that locus) and reproduces with wild-type woman B, bearing children C, D, E, F. Assume C and E are likewise heterozygous on that locus. If C, a boy, mates with E, a girl, and they have 4 children, one of these will be homozygous on that mutation, getting its full fitness advantage. (Obviously, I’m eagerly over-simplifying here, because dealing with probabilities is actually a game of large numbers).
[+3 for inbreeding vs outbreeding, and this is the biggest one ]
In case of deleterious de novo mutation of partial dominance type, the organism that features it will have immediate, phenotypically visible reduced fitness, whether heterozygously or homozygously, and the chance of that allele going to fixation, (and even if it does, persist) is about the same as that happening in a generally outcrossing population, discounting cultural aspects of support/promotion within a closely knit, inbred community.
[-0.1 for inbreeding, being super-conservative, if we take away the discount above, and presume that humans will consciously decide to not take advantage of technology immediately, to detect and correct said deleterious mutation, and that outbreeding would do a better job at stopping it, whenever the phenotype gets revealed, debatable]
Case A-green: what’s illustrated in green dotted ink is “beneficial/deleterious underdominant mutation” (eventually deleterious, if we go left-to-right; eventually beneficial, if we go right-to-left).
This is where inbreeding is definitely better, because it allows both good and bad mutations to escalate much faster, via quick homozygous appearance, hence revealing itself sooner. Benefits will be visible in a couple / several generations. Ill effects, too — which would either allow to select quickly against or, better, use technology to prevent it. For a generally outbreeding deme, it may keep spreading around the general population like eggs of a bad parasite, ready to “hatch” (i.e. go to fixation) for any unlucky individual homozygous, to only then be discovered and selected against (also, given lack of distinguishable genetic architecture, technology will have a hard time pinpointing the mutation in a generally outbreeding deme, but this is a separate topic!)
[+2 for inbreeding]
Class B (here we ignore the green color, as it was already covered in class green-A). Let’s focus on black ink. This class is a sub-class of “overdominance” type but, in practice, it only applies to “possibly beneficial” (beneficial in context, I will explain below) mutations.
Heterozygote-only superiority is definitely more *rare* in practice, but it does happen. We have examples like sickle cell type adaptations. Technically, we can break this class of mutations further into 3 sub-classes for when this heterozygously-beneficial mutation goes to homozygous state: 1) homozygote mutant is less fit than heterozygote *but* is above the original baseline (not explicitly illustrated, but imagine seeing the “AA” part in the diagram a bit higher than “aa”); 2) homozygote mutant is same as baseline (see diagram); 3) homozygote mutant is less fit than baseline(imagine “AA” is lower than “aa”).
Sub-class #3: Sickle-cell anemia is in the third subclass. [In fact, to digress, it’s so bad, the homozygotes don’t fare well at all (vs a baseline individual) even when they get infected w/malaria, which is what the original sickle-cell mutation supposed to protect against in its heterozygote version.]
I don’t know of examples of sub-class #1. It’s kind of interesting, because it means that the mutation is an objectively beneficial one, since it improves fitness over the baseline, and it’d be a good idea to bring it to fixation. Inbreeding allows this to happen much quicker than when generally outbreeding, as the latter needs to rely on sufficient spread in the population to start producing cases of fixation. [+1 for inbreeding]
For the other sub-classes (#2 and #3), overdominance with contextually beneficial mutations relies on balancing selection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection), which definitely makes it the trickiest situation to replicate for inbreeding, as genomes tend to go to fixation in inbreeding. In a shallow sense, outbreeding is more advantageous. An inbred population that does not feature the mutation can theoretically (though rare in practice) be completely wiped out due to a single-type event — for humans, typically, an infectious disease (see the story of Native Americans). Here, however, there are good news for inbreeding: although still a topic of active research, I dare you to find even one (!) case of overdominance-reliant potentially beneficial mutation that is pertinent to humans living in developed world, with modern medicine and good sanitary conditions. And if there actually is (*extremely* doubtful!) something out there like it, that’s still pertinent to us, modern Westerners and future race(s) of advanced humanity, there is nothing that:
a) advanced technology; and
b) smart-people via said technology can’t do to solve/protect themselves against it, especially if it involves things “solvable” by some silly single-/double- allele mutation.
[-1 for inbreeding. Yes, albeit outbreeding is more advantageous here, I only take away one point, and even then cringingly, since, firstly, these are relatively rare cases; and secondly, I don’t care about archaic adaptations supported by archaic modes of selection, given that technology is the only practical way forward for humanity — see my Ultimate Shock remark]
Class C. In the paper’s figure, part C, with black ink (ignore green), this is class named “heterozygote inferiority as initial condition.” It can actually be broken into three sub-classes: “Underdominance with a better-than-original homozygous mutant ” (if you imagine “AA” to be above “aa”) + “Underdominance with same-as-original homozygous mutant” (see diagram) + “Overdominance with worse than original homozygous mutant” (imagine “AA” to be below “aa”).
The first class is the quirkest: initially, in the heterozygote, the mutation lowered fitness (hopefully, not lethally, because then it won’t have a chance to get to fixation). However, the individual who gets it fixated homozygously (if we assume either that the two ill heterozygous parents can actually get to breed / we use the magic of technology), gets more than a lucky break — they get an advantage over the baseline population. I doubt that generally outbreeding populations get to be more likely to assist said parents in breeding. Hence, inbreeding is, possibly, slightly better for this class.
[+0.1 for inbreeding, as I doubt such situations can arise much, no matter how interesting]
The next, second class: since this mutation does not achieve anything useful and is clearly bad for heterozygote, it’s clearly recessive. I don’t see any difference in selection between inbreeding vs outbreeding demes.
[0 for inbreeding]
The last class: I have a great example of this: Huntington’s disease. Once the un-lucky individual gets the mutation — whether heterozygously or homozygously, he/she is screwed: it is an objectively bad mutation, and alas, it always prevails due to overdominance of this allele. Both inbreeding and outbreeding demes would select against it equally.
[0 for inbreeding: no advantage either way]
Class D: “neutral mutation.” This case is illustrated in C via green dotted ink. In case of neutral mutation, if it gets fixated in a deme, it gets called “drift” — and there are tons of mentions of it in literature. Outbreeding is having tough time getting those.
[+0 .0001 for inbreeding, since it’s still useful as family/clan/population marker ]
A beneficial mutation has a high probability of escalating to fixation without inbreeding. Without inbreeding, a harmful mutation has near zero chance to escalate to fixation.
But with inbreeding, we get Muller’s ratchet. A harmful mutation has a significant chance to escalate to fixation, and there are enormously more harmful mutations than beneficial
Conclusion: strict inbreeding mostly wins. Unless humans get thrown back to anti-sanitary, random, animalistic-like conditions of the past, where bare exposure to capricious environment of nature made balancing selection was a very important part of overall selection, inbreeding definitely outperforms outbreeding.
This becomes even more true when you add repro/genetic tech into mix.
Btw, if you’d like to humor yourselves even more than you are already (tough, I know), check out this exchange:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/12/24/robin-hanson/adapted-aliens
I think this “aliens” discussion is very applicable to humans, to.
@jim: you have your reasons, but I think you’re way too pessimistic. Civilization is experiencing a snag, true. However, life will find a way, and I’m very hopeful it will be 1) one that can survive past the Ultimate Shock; 2) will have something living of *me* there. One of the precursors to achieve it is to evolve the capacity take “evolution” by its figurative horns, and make it into a tool, like with many other things humanity (who are in the image of God, remember?) has already done.
Slight correction:
Not Nick Land, but Nick Lane:
http://www.nick-lane.net/
Also, when I was referring to mutation patterns, it’s not 4 classes but, rather, 5 big classes. And 2 + 2 + 3 +3 + 1 = 11 actual classes altogether.
A beneficial mutation has a high probability of escalating to fixation without inbreeding. Without inbreeding, a harmful mutation has near zero chance to escalate to fixation.
But with inbreeding, we get Muller’s ratchet. A harmful mutation has a significant chance to escalate to fixation, and there are enormously more harmful mutations than beneficial
Let’s perform a thought experiment. Suppose we start with a clean sheet, i.e. no bad mutations in 2 individuals who are brother and sister. Suppose each now has a different deleterious mutation. Further, suppose the procreate and have 20 kids.
Per Prof. James Fry, most bad mutations are partially recessive (But even for the other dominance modes, I’ve laboriously outlined them above, and the logic will still apply, with caveats). Hence, the children (suppose there are 15 such children) with any of these 2 mutations will reveal themselves in phenotype, even as heterozygotes, and whether combined or individual bad alleles.
Because the brother (husband) and sister (wife), are judicious kings and queen, they prohibit their defective progeny from further procreation. The rest of the kids have the same healthy phenotypes.
Notice, I assumed 3 things:
1) Low mutational load in parents / mostly clean slate.
2) The breeding pair has the luxury of having and providing for a huge lot of surviving progeny.
3) Decision-makers/selector(s) are judicious and have the ability to inspect phenotype.
Now, from practical standpoint. A set of imbecilic criminals somewhere in the backwoods of Australia may not fulfill those assumptions: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2521752/Children-incest-cult-living-deformed-mute-Australian-valley.html
But if you don’t believe me, an anonymous poster who has tried to provide ample logical argument, please believe this argument:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=5WDXAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-5WDXAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1
The problem is that there are apt to be a large number of deleterious mutations of small effect. These will escape phenotype inspection, and many of them will run to fixation.
@jim
Addendum:
I should have put quotes around your and my old statements, to clarify that I am responding to your comment to me.
Also, for point #3 above, I’d like to add “will to act properly on their wise decision”
2) Good mutations go to fixation faster in inbreeding:
For slightly beneficial mutation (where the carrier has no superpowers), assuming no spiky initial barriers (like being tossed into fire as a baby) average-case scenario in a *maximally outbreeding* non-growing population is O(sqrt(N)) generations, where N is the size of the deme, assuming a Fisherian wave.
For that same mutation with same assumptions, but as applied to *maximally inbreeding* population on a generational basis (mating sibling with sibling), the average case is O(1) generations after first appearance.
From a practical standpoint: those initial spiky barriers are not a figment of my imagination. An inbred society tends to be geographically more co-localized, which exposes it to natural-type disaster or macro violence events, but on the other hand allows the members to assist each other much more effectively (and ardently). In outbred society, such cohesion is much harder to come by, exposing the individual to more randomness, which is a bigger vulnerability to alleles spread when it’s only possessed by a handful of individuals (eg 1 nuclear family). Unlike the paragraph above, this point is debatable, but I’m putting it here for completeness.
Another, no-longer small addition here:
From a political/cultural standpoint, a state (and, especially, a church) may not be interested in tight clans forming, as such tend to run counter to its interest of “nation building” by allowing for collection of way too much power in the hands of tribal elders. Hence, the prohibition and general discouragement of breeding within clans as somehow “unnatural” and even “disgusting” — such prohibition became especially prominent in the time of Catholic church, a descendant of the Roman Empire
National/imperial, intra-political concerns, however, are totally different from inbreeding’s viability as a natural phenomenon. Indications are, that given that purifying selection is acting one way or another, outbreeding within a *non-growing* population at best simply *delays* the onset of said selection by masking a negative mutation in a *heterozygous* fashion, but not truly erasing it. At some point, in said non-growing population, two heterozygous individuals with same mutation will meet and, with approx. 1/4 probability, their offspring will be homozygous for the trait’s locus, with the ensuing selection still acting mercilessly to eliminate him/her…
Also, on the flip side: a beneficial mutation has a much better chance of going towards fixation in a clan/inbred group! These fitness-increasing mutations can affect such important traits. Even more importantly, some traits are polygenic: that is, you need to have a series of mutations on particular alleles in order to get them. In other words, they are *nonadditive*. If you outcross said individual with someone from the general population (who has wild-type genes on these loci), instead of his/her clan, what you most likely get is with probability of more than .5 the beneficial trait will not get passed. That is one reason why BGI, the company, is having such a hard time tracing the genes responsible for IQ: lots of intelligence genes are polygenic and non-additive: they come from specific genetic architectures, and it’s *really* hard to generalize. (In other words, it’s not too crazy to say that the smartness of an Ashkenazi Jew may be different from the smartness of an Iyer Brahmin’s!).
Ah, evolution: it seems there is no escape from your brutality!
But maybe there *actually* is, or at least on some level: for example, indeed, in Pakistani tribes there are negative (but, say, non-immediately-lethal) mutations. Anyone unlucky to get them in homozygous fashion will suffer in their life, for most, if not whole of its duration. I concur that this is a problem. But now, given the modern age of bioinformatics (to determine mutation) and the coming age of genetic engineering (to change mutation), society might have a solution via technology!
As Razib Khan recently quoted from the bible on his blog post on CRISPR:
“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
(That’s assuming, of course, that whatever the West has achieved will continue to develop, a fact we may never be too certain of, alas. Curiously, according to my research so far, only in Judaism, not in Christianity or Islam, is a man not only permitted, but also *encouraged* to self-modify and improve, including genetically! http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/cloning.html)
Change in 2nd paragraph above:
masking a negative mutation in a homozygous fashion
into:
masking a negative mutation in a *heterozygous* fashion
And change from “bible” into “Bible”
@William, @B:
OK, for anyone of you who cares about correct science, it looks like I should not have not been posting so late at night: I undercounted the dominance-based mutation pattern classes by 2.
Class A-green needs to be corrected, although it still contains 2 sub-classes.
Then 2 sub-classes need to be added.
Otherwise, everything I wrote yesterday is still correct, together with the conclusion: inbreeding works, it’s usually better, and can be made even more awesome.
Anyway, I’m too lazy to type right now, but I did some googling. Check out:
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/18/6805.full
See figure 2. Specifically, the 12 plots showing horizontal and diagonal lines that illustrate the aa->aA->AA transition. They refer to these as “modes of gene action” instead of my “dominance-based mutation patterns”.
Also, albeit somewhat trivial, they left out the 13th “mode”/class, which is what I termed “neutral mutation” and should be denoted by two back-to-back horizontal lines.
@jim: Let me address your objections.
Firstly, the earlier ones:
1) Inbreeding != Muller’s Ratchet. Muller’s Ratchet applies to asexual reproduction (think mitosis, for eukaryotes), but not *sexual* repro (think meiosis).
The beauty of meiosis is that there is a re-shuffling of genes between two sets of chromosomes, in a diploid cell, which produces two haploid cells that *each* have a random mix of alleles.
Depending on the organism/colony, these 2 cells can go on to either: a) merge with each other (IMPORTANT: this is *still* sexual reproduction), as in plant selfing; b) merge with haploid cells from other organisms/colonies to form a diploid cell (zygote); 3) (very rarely) go on their separate way, each forming their own organism, as in male bees.
Again — all of the above processes are sex, hence are not subject to Muller’s ratchet.
What is subject to Muller’s ratchet? Answer: cell/organisms that divide/reproduce via mitosis: which includes: budding, seeds/spores, fragmentation and mitosis itself (which is eukaryotic form of fission).
Would you like a great example of Muller’s ratchet? The cells in our body, i.e. us! We’re all spiraling towards death by senescence, due to accumulating mutation in our somatic cells and the mitochondria within them. This is because all our tissues get proliferated by asexual fission (mitosis), and the mitochondria within them also are replicated by fission (not mitosis itself though, since a mitochondrion is, essentially a domesticated bacterium, not a eukaryot). Tangentially, this fact suggests that human individuals are merely vehicles of life, while life itself is something far more unitary and greater.
Am I saying that mutational meltdown is impossible in inbreeding? No, not at all — with enough initial mutational load and limited procreation (especially, if also allowing misfit individual to go on further breeding), it’s both very likely and there are great examples. All I’m saying is that mutational meltdown is explicitly the outcome of Muller’s ratchet, and the latter applies *only* to asexual procreation.
2) Good mutations go to fixation faster in inbreeding:
For slightly beneficial mutation (where the carrier has no superpowers), assuming no spiky initial barriers (like being tossed into fire as a baby) average-case scenario in a *maximally outbreeding* non-growing population is O(sqrt(N)) generations, where N is the size of the deme, assuming a Fisherian wave.
For that same mutation with same assumptions, but as applied to *maximally inbreeding* population on a generational basis (mating sibling with sibling), the average case is O(1) generations after first appearance.
From a practical standpoint: those initial spiky barriers are not a figment of my imagination. An inbred society tends to be geographically more co-localized, which exposes it to natural-type disaster or macro violence events, but on the other hand allows the members to assist each other much more effectively (and ardently). In outbred society, such cohesion is much harder to come by, exposing the individual to more randomness, which is a bigger vulnerability to alleles spread when it’s only possessed by a handful of individuals (eg 1 nuclear family). Unlike the paragraph above, this point is debatable, but I’m putting it here for completeness.
3) Your final point on *mildly* deleterious mutations going to fixation much more fast: you are *right*. I said this exact thing from the very beginning, in a post on this very thread!
This point is, actually, the contrapositive of the above point, “good mutations go to fixation faster in inbreeding.”
So, why I’m still confident that inbreeding wins *longterm*? Because there is still ongoing *selection* present, that’s why. More concretely, if the breeders established strong criteria on phenotype, then even fixated mildly deleterious mutations can be overcome by newly arising *compensating* beneficial mutations, if a regime of strict selection is strictly observed in each generation (like as it was done by Helen Dean King, though she mostly selected for viability traits). Again, assuming strict selection among a fecund line!
OK, let me cut to the chase: do I think that all populations/families need to practice very close inbreeding? No. No, because most demes are not strongly growing and can’t afford the luxury of selection based. In fact, for a shrinking deme under distress (i.e. a population that mostly cares about surviving and nourishing the already-born progeny as opposed to selection), the undisputably best idea is maximal outbreeding, because it maximizes the shuffling out of any mutational load. I think that moderate inbreeding however, i.e. sometimes first, mostly second cousin marriage, is very much a viable proposition for most populations.
Sibling marriage? Only for the strongly reproducing elite! In fact, it is a sane idea for a modern-day absolute monarchical family (though those no longer exist) to require women from the common folk to serve as surrogate mothers for all of the king and queens zygots, thus maximizing reproduction and subsequent *selection* within the royal bloodline. But I don’t think either monarchs or, for that matter, sanity rule the modern world today.
Slight correction for 2): since we’re assuming (artificially) maximized outbreeding, The statement regarding Fisherian spread does not apply.
For 3): change “luxury of selection based” into “luxury of selection based on phenotypes established at progeny’s maturation”
So our hypothetical king executes or sterilizes all progeny that fail to measure up.
That would work. Hard to implement.
That’s going way too extreme — although not much beats the succession strategy of Ottoman sultans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_former_Ottoman_throne). They absolutely don’t need to be killed or sterilized. If they are objective mentally unstable or too defective, they can be put into an isolation/contained. Otherwise, they are the breeding stock of the whole nation!
Since there is only 1 king/1 queen possible, and their bloodline is explicitly hyper-eugenic, the rest of the contenders are prime marriage material. They are to be married strategically with the best of society, to, on one hand, maintain the Royal House’s connection with the people of their nation and, on the other, improve the national stock.
The Royal House is to be a population pump for the whole of nation. This idea is partly inspired by evolution of English entreneurship and smarts (via Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms) and the history of evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence.
But you are right in 1 thing: it will not happen in the US (if at all) until well after it completely degenerates. At which point it may no longer be the sovereign “United States.”
You royal house starts out with few or no harmful recessives. That would work, would give us true kings rather than sham kings, but how do we get few or no harmful recessives, given that the genome is six gigabytes of largely unintelligible code.
How do we get our hyper eugenic individuals?
Only a small part of the genome codes for proteins. Most of the conserved genome codes for RNA that then edits RNA, information that exists to process information, and some of this, probably quite a lot of this, is legacy code that goes all the way back to RNA world and we really have not got a clue.
There is another problem. A supersmart individual has trouble communicating with lesser individuals. A man among chimps becomes food, not the leader.
Hyper eugenic royalty will be hyper smart. Will need to be surrounded by less smart flunkies, who are in turn surrounded by less smart flunkies, all the way down to the non nobles.
To be politically stable, your hyper eugenic king is going to need a eugenic nobility.
Given an aristocracy that actually is the best people, that is going to work. But not obvious how to get there.
» not much beats the succession strategy of Ottoman sultans
In the end, they sat around fucking their harem slaves, getting whiter and whiter, imprisoning and executing their entire families anyway, while the business of government was carried on. The only reason the Ottomans held on for so long was that the English didn’t want Constantinople to fall to the Russians, but wanted to hand it over to their Greek protectorate.
The problem set in when they stopped executing their brothers. Pretty soon the place was run by harem girls.
>How do we get our hyper eugenic individuals?
Again: by maximizing the fecundity of the inbreeding line and following a *strict* regime of selection regarding who gets to continue the line.
The initial results of the process will be quite disheartening, due to inbreeding depression. Also, because > 80% of human genome is expressed in the brain (http://www.newswise.com/articles/allen-institute-for-brain-science-announces-first-comprehensive-gene-map-of-the-human-brain) any deleterious mutation undergoing fixation will more likely affect intelligence, hence making the rate of imbecile production in the first few generations of the inbreeding to skyrocket.
Again: disheartening, but nothing that strict selection from among abundant progeny cannot fix, especially as run longterm.
Helen D King had her first improvement at 7th, decent stabilization at around 10-12 generations of inbreeding, getting to a major stability and improvement after the 20th.
If we’re breeding in that same fashion + selecting for IQ, it will take *at least* 150 years to see encouraging results, and at least 400 years for great results. There are no institutions in secular America right now oriented at these kinds of multi-generational timescales (just look at the abysmal attention to fusion research, despite its ramifications). Maybe in Israel. Maybe even in China (see BGI, nuclear plant buildup, etc) and North Korea. But definitely not in today’s secular America.
That means your political system has to survive ten generations of imbecile kings. Might be difficult.
The Spanish empire suffered inbreeding depression and low fecundity. The Ottoman empire had very high fecundity and strict selection, but outbred.
>That means your political system has to survive ten generations of imbecile kings. Might be difficult.
Absolutely! Hence, not today, not in our generations. There is no people on Earth today with: a) the right type of cohesion/culture and b) the right type of *institutions*, including one for population selection, within that culture; c) the right type of technology. Although you don’t need very advanced tech, you still need some, mainly to be able to enforce reasonable, quick-reacting control, to help to preserve said culture and institutions long-term, as well as to expand protect your society from the worst of negative externalities/shocks. Like I said: maybe in the future of either Israel or China, not in today’s US.
Also, I concur with you on Spanish and the Ottoman monarchical lines: each degenerated in their own way.
I’ve got to give it to the Spaniards: for the sheer physical ugliness of the specimen they produced. It really was low-fecund inbreeding that extinguished their line.
Ottomans were amazingly brutal, including within their own “family.” They later got progressively softer, which possibly was the equivalent of a death sentence for their ultimate status as ruling royalty. Outbreeding was not the direct cause of that. It was mainly their desire to fit in and look presentable to the other, enlightened kings of the West. My take is that their institution was genetically effective at keeping the “right” traits because it was set up to be ruthless from the get go. Once they removed said ruthlessness, the cornerstone of their “selection institution” completely collapsed.
Actually, I was somewhat pessimizing the timescale for selection — at least when it comes to the “final” fruit of it. Helen D King saw huge stability and good quality around 16th generation of her rats.
A human generation is about 25 y.o. You don’t want to breed humans too soon, until most of their traits get unmasked (possibly, excluding longevity). However, I have some ideas on how to effectively alve a generation time within a good inbreeding program, achieving same results. We, humans, can be wittier than that, however: if we adopt the strategy of:
0) Pick a highly smart, physically healthy, and good-character person from a good family, declare him a King and have him marry his sister.
1) [again!] maximize the progeny production from the pair;
2) check every 3-5 years the quality of said progeny, individual by individual
3) collect sperm and ova from top-performer(s) of the line as soon as they mature, which is typically 11-16 y.o. — and flash-freeze the gametes.
4) Pick up to 3 top-performing males and up to 3 top-performing females and form up to 270 zygots (30 children per each possible pair, 3*3=9 pairs) from early-age category and have a healthy volunteer surrogates from general population carry them into full gestation and birth.
5) Wait a few more years to verify who among the “top-performers” from item #3 is actually *the* top performer, according to the more advanced metrics to be used for a person older than 25. NOTE: we may need to think carefully about the relative priority of the actual traits under selection — their priorities may also vary from generation-to-generation, although — if so — very slightly, to make selection consistent and fast-convergent.
6) If male top-performer from #5 is sufficiently different from the one from #3 (and same goes for female), pick him as the King-in-waiting. Otherwise, stick to the choice made in #3.
7) Go to step #2 and repeat for the (up to 270) pool.
Some of the 270 individuals may not make the cut to even be released into the general-society breeding pool (i.e. be defective). However, some who are not the very top performers, may nonetheless be of high-quality, especially as this process gets progressed over 16 generations or so.
If you do as I proposed, the generational time for this eugenic process will be shortened to, essentially, about 15 years. Hence, 15yr*6=90 to 100 years for average recovery from inbreeding depression.
15yr * 16 = only 250 years for true quality homozygously fixed traits. This will be a civilization scale achievement, to boast about!
This is a program of huge scale — timewise. On an instantaneous basis, albeit it is not cheap for sure, it’s not too expensive either. Assuming that the individuals bred live about 90 years old, you have 6 generations of 270 people living concurrently, which is 6*270, i.e. less than 1700 individuals in the Royal House. Considering the fact that most of them will go back into general breeding pool after approx 16th generation, it’s not a wasted expense, but a general investment into the nation’s human capital. If the returns after 16th-20th generation start to become clear, we may want to increase the number of zygots from 270 per generation to 1000 or even more, depending on political etc concerns.
But I don’t think that even if done on a private, concealed basis, the much more short, aggressive target 90-100 years is achievable today without ultimately getting exposed with an ensuing huge scandal/shutdown notice/imprisonment from a government, whatever geo-locale it might be in. You also need to be a very rich person to run it effectively, and be able to have only a few trusted people to help you. Especially difficult, because it will not be possible to finish within 1 benefactor’s lifetime, but will require a line of at least 3 to 4 generations of dedicated, fanatical and *rich* relatives/descendants willing to invest your-their money into this long-running, hush-hush type of enterprise.
I think you do raise a good point here, B. It is a very odd set of circumstances that the reactionary finds himself today. I think it is similar to current problem with conservatives. Their M.O. is to preserve tradition and culture and yet they have been completely ineffective because preservation of something malign is not a virtue. Likewise, the call for a better world may be something that the reactionary shares with the progressive but it is a difference of timeline. The progressives seek to push forward to greater equality (insanity) while the reactionary seeks the opposite to move backward a hundred years or more. Neither should expect paradise but progressives do.
Seeing the passing of ages as a cosmic cycle is very useful for seeing the Reactionary cause as not a desire to move backwards, but to advance to the inevitable rebirth of a state analogous to a previous age.
“The obsession with and desire to dictate people’s private sexual behavior, whom they sleep with and whom they should be allowed to marry and so forth, is a deeply progressive trait.”
Progressive? Hardly. More like dictatorial.
“She should have been forced to sleep with one man, that man able and willing to support her and her children, forbidden to sleep with any other, and subject to corporal punishment if she failed to sleep with her owner, or slept with some other man.â€
[Laughs] I’m taking Jim’s statement as satire, since there mere implementation of your ideas into any society fits the definition of fascism. Otherwise, you will have to apply your “logic†to the acolytes of Roissy, who scheme to “pump and dump†women like Pez dispensers without any inkling of settling down and raising (white) children.
“There are a great many people who just are not capable of making the choices needed to navigate the modern world, most of them female or black. They should be under the control of someone else.â€â€¨â€¨
You will have to include cad males who lack any basic moral fiber when they continually fuck women without consequence.
During the early years of Australian settlement, women generally did not have families to restrain them – similar problem we see today with women taking holidays overseas. This led to lots of fatherless children. The Australian government dealt with female immorality as I have suggested. Women were forced to get married pronto to a pre approved male, one able and willing to support them and their children. If they failed to do so lickety spit, were simply assigned to some suitable male, theoretically as a servant, but it was understood that this was full service, that children would ensue. Seems to have worked out quite well.
Eggs are dear, sperm is cheap. Should we control that which is dear, or that which is cheap?
> mere implementation of your ideas into any society fits the definition of fascism
Fascism has a definition now? I thought it was a content-free slur.
>”They should be under the control of someone else.”
Can you please define “should”?
Do you mean it would be “better” for them, or for “society”, or for you, or for some particular God or religion or code of morals? If you mean some kind of natural law “should”, can you spell it out?
I guess you probably mean for the dominant male oligarchs?
The issue seems particularly touchy for the woman who’s made seemingly successful choices, filling her life with a care-free youth she looks back fondly on, and then the happy marriage and kids. If you are evaluating society’s well being, measured as any kind of sum over participants in society, why prioritize the husband over the previous amours? The husband may in fact have benefited from similar such attentions himself.
Bad men had her best, a good man had her worst. Result: substantially fewer men willing to work for a living or fight to defend their people. Her choices have large externalities. We find the whisper of alleged pollution from smokers or cars grounds for vast and draconian legislation and enforcement, but she is creating externalities vastly worse.
If you don’t answer the question, you don’t know what you are talking about.
Why did bad men have her best? My wife had lots of sex with “bad” men before I met her, but I had her best and I have the darlings to prove it.
And what’s bad and what’s best?
And you can’t possibly believe you’ve established that the result of her actions is that “substantially fewer men willing to work for a living or fight to defend their people.”
That’s completely ridiculous.
So far as I can see the only people inconvenienced by her actions are prudes like yourself who don’t think other guys should have a good time, and the inconvenience is purely mental anguish.
“Ya’ll are prudes!”, says the moral relativist…
I’m not a moral relativist. Nonetheless, I’d like to know what Jim’s talking about, more precisely.
It seems you can’t tell the difference between “moral relativism” and simple statements of fact:
“…that since birth control, women have shifted behavior to distinguish…â€
Observe how Roissy states the same fact. When he states it, makes a simple statement of fact. When you state it, very differently, the difference is moral relativism.
Jim, what the hell?
What is not a statement of fact about
“…that since birth control, women have shifted behavior to distinguish…â€
I am in no way a moral relativist. I understand what is moral and what is not. I am challenging to state what you think the answer is, and so far you have simply obfuscated. I think you are a moral relativist. For you morals are relative to your prejudices, which have nothing to do with rationality, although you are convinced they do. You make wild jumps from very little evidence, and while I read you because your jumps are intuitive and interesting, they are mostly simply deluded.
A shift in this behavior does not involve or affect only women. You select one fact, and ignore a closely connected fact, the externalities of the action. Any action becomes morally neutral if you ignore externalities, and you are making their actions morally neutral.
I repeatedly made my answer clear. If you don’t understand what I said, you are talking a different language to me, a language I do not understand.
Two further comments:
(1) Correction, I did not mean to say “I know what morality is”.
(2) I really don’t know what you guys are going on about about my morality, because I literally haven’t made any statements about my beliefs about morality at all. I have made some factual observations about the world, and asked some questions. Period.
You are touchy because you are realizing you don’t know the answer to the questions, which means you, quite literally, don’t know “what” you are talking about. A common problem of philosophers, but fatal nonetheless.
» My wife had lots of sex with “bad†men before I met her,
I think you put the scarequotes in the wrong place
I have no idea which word you think should have them?
You should realize I am asking Jim for his definition of bad and should.
I tell you, you do not listen.
either
» My “wife” had lots of sex with bad men before I met her
where she is incapable of reproducing, or
» My wife had lots of “sex” with bad men before I met her
where they were condom-using faggots, or
» My wife had “lots” of sex with bad men before I met her
where we consider once or twice to be a lot because we hate the idea of people hooking up for fun
My wife had lots of sex with bad men “before I met her”
No, none of those is what I wanted. I meant it on the “bad”.
I’m asking why they are “bad”. In what way. After all, I’ve enjoyed the same favors numerous times from numerous young women.
And no, she wasn’t capable of reproducing, because she was on the pill.
That’s the way women do it today, since you appear not to have figured it out.
See the excellent cartoons linked by Seamus which decisively answer all your questions.
Actually, not at all.
I am quite aware of how women act.
None of that seems relevant at all.
And you still haven’t said what you mean by “should”.
Also, you have consistently failed to recognize that since birth control, women have shifted behavior to distinguish reproduction from recreation.
They have consumed much of the benefit recreationally.
So have guys.
You want to turn back the clock, but in fact it isn’t clear that ludditism is the right idea.
Guys like CH, meanwhile, have totally missed the joys of fatherhood, which I feel quite keenly. They often justify their prowess in Darwinian terms while failing to recognize they are working hard to be candidates for a Darwin award, since they would be horrified to find birth control had somehow slipped up.
The men that maintain civilization have lost the benefit, so, civilization is no longer being maintained.
“…that since birth control, women have shifted behavior to distinguish…”
Plain, old, unvarnished moral relativism.
Looks like Nat Philosopher has never heard of the Marriage Strike and the “Herbivore Phenomenon.”
No, actually I know about all that.
I understand guys are getting hosed today, and I understand quite a bit about how and why. I actually believe there is quite a bit more organized malicious intent underlying it all than Jim seems to think about.
I still would like to understand what definition of “should” is intended.
>I have NEVER had a girlfriend bring up previous mates in conversation
Never even brought up an ex in conversation…that is indeed some tight game – some jedi mind control shit right there. How hard do you beat her?
Never laid a hand on a woman I was with. It’s a failure of character/a sign that you are picking women of wrecked character, which also reflects poorly on you. I don’t think that any of them had any doubt that if she stepped out of line, I’d drop her and move on to the next one.
Just never gave them any indication that I was interested in any of their previous mates. If they give a shit about what you think, they won’t bring up their exes. If they don’t give a shit what you think, you need to drop them, and step your game up for the next one.
If you’re ready to saddle up and ride out of town over a single slight (a sign of deep-seated insecurity) I’d say it’s you who has to work on your game. Thanks for the advice though, much appreciated.
Your reaction leads me to believe I may have unearthed some repressed…feelings. Good luck with that.
>If you’re ready to saddle up and ride out of town over a single slight (a sign of deep-seated insecurity) I’d say it’s you who has to work on your game.
There is a difference between burning dinner and bringing up sex with a superior man in order to shit test you, as you put it. A woman who loves and respects you does not, in my experience, do the latter. If she does, she doesn’t love you or respect you.
Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks.
“alpha” “fucks”
If you are in your 50’s and want to find a quality woman to wed and found a family with, she is going to have had considerable sex, or she is going to be somewhat weird.
“The ‘Practical Man’ is an Incurable Fool”
http://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2005/11/08/the-practical-man-is-an-incurable-fool/
I keep stating the Bob Problem:
“It doesn’t WORK.â€
I am afraid this can be misinterpreted into making me a Practical Man.
No way.
The Practical Manis a fool. He is a fool because he forgets the word YET.
The Practical Man in 1800 could have given you an endless number of reasons why the idea of sending pictures through the air with electricity would be an absurd idea, all based on his careful reading of The Latest News From Science.
First of all, he’d say, you would need several billion leyden jars, even the new improved ones..
The Practical Man, like the social science professor, is not not only wrong, he is incurably wrong.
If a social scientist didn’t have a PhD he would be committed to a mental institution. But with a PhD he can say things that are less rational than casual conversation in the ding-a-ling ward and get paid for it.
In history and science, the Practical Man is ALWAYS wrong. But he has a reputation as a Practical man, so everybody knows that the practical Manis always wrong — just as the social science professor is, and everybody reveres him more than they do a Holy Professor.
In the ding-a-ling ward, some people get better.
No professor will ever get better.
No Practical Man will ever get better.
Nat Philosopher, your analysis presumes that women are unaffected by sex and are essentially interchangeable semen receptacles.
However, the evidence suggests this is untrue. Divorce risk is substantially higher and marital happiness substantially lower for non-virgin brides: http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-divorce-risk.html
Speaking anecdotally I can tell you that there is no comparison between a relationship with a virgin and a non-virgin. The virgin is emotionally invested and attached to you while the non-virgin will pine away eternally for the superior male who took her virginity, and will let you know about this as a means to shit test you for the duration of your relationship.
Many men of course will accept this raw deal. But many also are willing to leave at the first sign of trouble. Thus massive penalties for divorce are needed to make relationships between whores and desperate men even function.
In view of the foregoing it is clear that female promiscuity is not very good for male morale and ultimately not very good for civilization.
what the fuck? You’re right, radio waves had to be discovered first.
Take your Chairman Bob Thought somewhere else you lobotomized faggot. Bob Whitaker is an extraordinary man, but he’s not actually in the business of being Yudkowski.
Actually, the re-printed essay was for N.P.
A.J.P.
>The virgin is emotionally invested and attached to you while the non-virgin will pine away eternally for the superior male who took her virginity, and will let you know about this as a means to shit test you for the duration of your relationship.
I have NEVER had a girlfriend bring up previous mates in conversation, or make any kind of implied comparison. And I dated some hos before I found religion. You need to step your game up.
Jim, I did not ignore the externalities. I discussed the externalities. I explicitly described what they are in my view.
You seem to think they are otherwise, but in this case you haven’t even given an anecdote to demonstrate it, just expressed your disapproval of her actions.
Then you seem to think that from an anecdote you can draw huge sweeping conclusions about society, morality, etc, and not only that with such 100% confidence that anybody who asks simple questions must be an adversary and a moron.
Anyway, you are still avoiding the question. Even if you could somehow demonstrate that by having sex before she was married the successful career woman and mother and wife had caused 30 beta boys to take off their socks and go on strike, you still haven’t addressed the question of in what sense that implies she “should” be the property of a man from birth,
which I’m pretty sure is what you are claiming.
Please consider in your answer the fact that there might be other externalities and positives and underlying causes you haven’t considered yet, or do you think you understand all the dynamics of society?
L.O.L., of course not “Jim”. It was done because it’s supposed to make the filth appear more artistic.
Best regards,
A.J.P.
The cock carousel combined with rampant hypergamy is the path of least resistance for western women today.
And who can we thank for that?
Up to the early nineties divorce was illegal in Ireland, out of wedlocks kids were frowned upon severely, so much so that when I was in primary school in the late eighties my schoolmate who sat beside me had the nickname “Gary the bastard” – such was the uncommonness of illegitimacy. Prominent homosexuals and Frankfurt school idea educated lawyers put an end to our backwardness. Now gradually the numbers of bastards in our towns and cities has increased and a coarsening of daily life and a stratification of good and bad families has ensued.
This year I have seen Irish idiots claim we should allow gay marriage here because – “The sky didnt fall in because we allowed divorce”. I have a feeling in the future when the West is some burning Brazil style hellhole – the usual idiots will just tell lies like “you see, the world didnt end when we allowed 100 Million refugees from the third world into the West”.
All so depressing.
“Posted in ‘crypto'”
Too tired for a witty remark.
I believe B has a strong case regarding the proggy nature of inflicting sexual control upon others.
> There are a great many people who just are not capable of making the choices needed to navigate the modern world, most of them female or black. They should be under the control of someone else.
The “someone else” mentioned here should be Gnon.
Withdraw governmental financial support, and let Gnon sort it out. If patriarchy and sexual control are most virtuous, then they will flourish. No need to take it upon ourselves, or beget anyone else a mandate, to enforce that.
It bears mentioning that many tribes who did not share the Christian ethic of chastity have flourished at various times. Thus the superiority of this value system is not a foregone conclusion…
“If patriarchy and sexual control are most virtuous, then they will flourish. No need to take it upon ourselves, or beget anyone else a mandate, to enforce that.”
You don’t understand Theonomy then, which states that All Laws Are Religious Laws.
If you are suggesting a patchwork, then O.K…..But don’t expect a sexually libertine society to last. They’ve all been out-competed by others that do traditionally “reign it in”. The only ones left are third-world (Hindu) or imitating societies (Japan, Korea).
That is the MRA fallacy.
Men will always protect women and children from the consequences of their choices. Therefore men have to restrain women and children from making certain choices.
A society of real equality, as MRAs seek, is not in our nature, because we are not equal.
Allowing women to make their own decisions and then face the consequences of those decisions would be as foolish and harmful as allowing children to make their own decisions and face the consequences of those decisions.
It is easy to spoil children by allowing them to make their own decisions, but no one is going to turn around and accept the conclusion that we should then let children face the consequences of their own decisions. And neither will anyone accept that women should have to face the consequences of their own decisions.
Whenever you try to argue that women should bear the consequences of their own decisions, it immediately becomes obvious that no one, least of all feminists, sees women as adults or as capable of being adults.
Also Jim, Since this to the engineer guy in your story.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7q_23uyIcsw/VPnDdgPwpAI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/0GNK4LLiEdc/s1600/Cartoon17.jpg
More here:
http://redpillcomics.blogspot.ie/
> mattress girl’s porn video
If Mattress Girl Sulkowicz is trying to show us she is not a crazy psycho with a rape fetish, she’s doing a poor job.
Any community polices the sexual conduct of its members. Try to have a housewife not care about the sexual gossip of her neighborhood.
Regulation will happen, whether you call it Moses’ Law, or Social Services. Moses Law, or Confucius or whatever fixed authority of course is better than any utility measure, as the latter can and will be fudged on the spot, while divine or sage authority is easier to enforce.
You want laws to be absolute, not subject to the interests of the enforcers.
>Try to have a housewife not care about the sexual gossip of her neighborhood.
Sure, but the same housewife will care about the economical gossip of her neighborhood-who bought what. You wouldn’t claim that as a basis for an all-encompassing system of economic regulation, even though it’s obvious that we are all affected by the economic decisions of others.
>You want laws to be absolute, not subject to the interests of the enforcers.
1) Some systems of absolute laws are manifestly objectively better than others. See: Aztecs vs. ancient Hebrews.
2) Before implementing a system of absolute law into practice, it is difficult to tell how bad it will be.
3) There is no way to get from where you stand (materialist rationalism) to a system of absolute laws.
0) Not all-encompassing, but people being envious and envy being potentially bad does call for some degree of economic regulation. Which all societies have had.
1) certainly
2) there’s history to help out. We’re getting better at it.
3) It’s called conversion. Works for you, works for everyone.
The one thing I’ve seen as far as history is concerned is that there is so much of it and it is so varied that in practice the vast majority of people just pick and choose and learn nothing. The Fabians and their ilk were much better educated than today’s NRxers, and they built the world we live in. And there is an infinite number of ways to screw up a system of absolute laws.
Conversion doesn’t work that way. When you have a 2 dimensional worldview where there is no supernatural, all absolute laws have to be dictated by and unambiguously derived from your interpretation of natural phenomena.
You don’t know what materialist rationalism is, and have turned hostile whenever I attempt to explain it.
I am not sure what you mean by “absolute” but Jewish law blows in the winds of progressivism and bends to the interests of rabbis, so does not seem very absolute.
>You don’t know what materialist rationalism is, and have turned hostile whenever I attempt to explain it
In the year 2015, we all know what materialist rationalism is. If you wish to explain that true Communism has never been tried and previous implementations were based on misunderstandings-be my guest.
I notice that as a whole, the rabbis are much better informed (having actually learned the sources,) more intellectually honest (respectful of sources and their original intent) and consistent than you and your kind.
Your rabbis I guess are awesome, but there’s plenty of reform rabbis, progressive rabbis, and plain lame rabbis out there. Which shows the system isn’t quite perfect.
Of course nothing is.
And anyway, worldviews change. Surely yours did.
The difference between reform and orthodox rabbis on matters pertaining to the overton window is, surprise surprise, somewhat less than the overton window.
And within my lifetime, the Overton window has moved leftwards by many, many, many times its width.
And on B’s reading of the Old Testament, the Old Testament also falls within the Overton Window.
As with everything else, it’s very difficult to discover something new.
The Talmud says that all of the troubles of the people of Israel are because of its rabbis.
The Gaon of Vilna said that the mixed multitude is reborn in every generation, and in our times it’s represented by the rabbis of Israel.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov talked a lot about demonic Torah scholars.
However, we know that the good endures, and the bad has no independent existence and thus disappears in smoke, despite how solid and overbearing it seems at the moment of its glory. As the Psalm says, when the wicked spring up, it is like grass, only to be cut down forever (incidentally, I think that this will be the case with MM and both his attackers and his mostly retarded NRx followers).
With possibly one exception, 200 years later, none of the demonic Torah scholars or mixed multitude of the time of Rebbe Nachman and the Vilna Gaon have any followers or works that are studied today, even though in their day, these two led a very difficult existence. As you say, worldviews change.
Overall, nothing is perfect, but as a corpus of scholars, the rabbis (taken through the ages) immediately struck me as thorough informed, honest and consistent. Especially compared with their modern critics (with whom I was acquainted before the rabbis.)
Assuming their reading of the scriptures resembles your own, I doubt it. The supposed meaning of the supposedly sacred text changes too fast, the text is tortured rather than treated as sacred, the recent position on open homosexuality being an egregious example.
Perhaps before enlightening Jews on the meaning of the Torah, you could start with easier material. Like Bunin.
Jim,
We could Failback to last known good config, which most people for every sensible [read as not intellectual] reasons would and indeed are already behind.
I mean the 1950s.
It worked and marvelously, except that it’s children weren’t prepared for the predation and Jacobin Munchhausen cult programming we call “education.”
That mistake won’t be repeated in many lifetimes if ever. The French never had another successful Leftist regime, nor are the Russians or Germans likely to have one ever. Some things you gotta learn the Hard Way.
PS – Protestants and Intellectuals can’t defend civilization – any civilization. Nor can we point to the former really building one with the possible exception of America. Anglicans and any sort of Establishment Church don’t really count as Protestant.
It worked because they were smashing whites, rather than the family. Feminism was put on the back burner for socialism and anti racism, and affirmative action jobs and promotions for women largely dried up, forcing them to get married and have kids.
But, during the 1950s, whites were ethnically cleansed out of many beautiful buildings and much highly desirable real estate.
The 1950s worked because, between first wave feminism and second wave feminism, there was a pause, where they stopped smashing the family, smashing marriage, and manufacturing fake jobs for women. While the Warren court proceeded to smash the law enforcement system.
[…] also has up Into Darkness. This is about the humane option of taking away choice from people who make bad […]
B: >Our religious Law on this, by the way, is: the act of homosexual penetration is forbidden and punishable by death if those who were doing it 1) were warned by two witnesses that what they were doing was punishable by death, 2) responded that they knew and didn’t care (as opposed to “I can’t stop because it feels too goodâ€, 3) the witnesses have to testify against them in a court which is empowered to issue the death penalty (we have no such court for now,) 4) the witnesses have to be the ones to put them to death.
What is the origin of the 4 qualifications?
Is it in the Torah or is this a later interpretation?
It is of course, a later interpretation. Much later.
Half of it is good Torah; the other half is loop-holing. For instance, witnesses to a confession should be sufficient; witnessing the actual act not needed. The warning isn’t needed; all citizens are expected to hear the entire law once every 7 years and a priori KNOW the act is wrong and punishable by death.
So, evidence of the act is sufficient for conviction; two witnesses without a confession, no witnesses needed with a confession. But conditions 3 and 4 are genuine Torah; witnesses have to testify before them in a court of competent jurisidiction, and the witnesses have to be the first to throw the stones at them, then the entire village must partake of the stone throwing, so every partakes in the administration of justice. No backsies.
To me condition #4 implies that putting homosexuals to death was intended as a chioce, and not an easy one.
I am curious how and when the other conditions made it into the law.
If later rabbis added other conditions in line with #4 to make this choice even more difficult – that tells me that rabbis do change the law in some ways. But I don’t think it supports the assertion that the law changes with the wind.
Old Testament not only commands that male homosexuals be killed, but emphasizes rather vehemently that they deserve to die. More vehemence about homosexuality than any other crime. Sure sounds like the death penalty was intended to be mandatory.
Clearly the original law was intended to suppress homosexuality and force it entirely out of sight. The loopholed law is intended to have no effect on homosexuality, to never be enforced.
>More vehemence about homosexuality than any other crime.
Any other crime? Really?
I am continually amazed at the depth of your knowledge.
>To me condition #4 implies that putting homosexuals to death was intended as a chioce, and not an easy one.
These conditions are operative for EVERY sin that brings the death penalty. Homosexuality is not exceptional in any way.
The two witnesses requirement is in the Torah, as is the court requirement. Ditto the requirement that the two witnesses have to put them to death (there are 3 other modes of death penalty besides stoning, btw.) The qualification that the witnesses have to warn them and they have to have heard and acknowledged the warning and kept doing what they were doing out of spite, as opposed to compunction is in the Talmud (which is the first place we get a comprehensive SOP on how the court system actually functioned as opposed to cursory mentions which assume everyone reading knew.) Ditto requirements like the witnesses have to be kosher (otherwise, how do you know they’re trustworthy?) and that if it turns out they were colluding/lying before you execute the accused, whatever was to be his punishment will be imposed on the witnesses.
A confession is not admissible as evidence in Torah law. We do not take the reports of interested witnesses as evidence, and nobody is more interested than the man himself.
Obviously, the idea that you don’t need a warning because everyone hears the Torah every 7 years is wrong, even if you leave aside the fact that how you actually perform the commandments is in most cases described cursorily in the Torah.
What if the guy was overseas/sick/at war when the relevant part was read? What if he forgot or got confused? If it’s something like Shabbat, what if he lost track of what day it was (say, he just woke up and is stupid from sleep), or forgot what constitutes prohibited labor exactly? What if he converted last year and hasn’t learned a particular detail yet (the Torah says the law is the same for converts as for born Jews)?
The Torah does not punish action done without knowledge/intent, and specifically says what you should do if you sin through forgetfulness, and it’s different than if you sin through intent.
Lot of special pleading going on here, B. Torah isn’t complicated. I once went through and reduced it down without the historys and genealogies. It took less than 20 pages. And if you take out the stuff about the offerings and feasts, closer to 5 pages.
Most people alive today haven’t read the Bible, yet they “know” that it condemns homosexuality. So your conditioning of “warning” people is a good case of loop-holing that negates the law.
The two witnesses don’t put them to death; they merely initiate the death. The community as a whole must participate in and take responsibility for the killing.
As for your statements that confessions aren’t allowed, or that the witnesses must be kosher; these statements aren’t consistent with Tanakh except in appropriate circumstances. Tanakh says the judges must “make diligent inquiry”. That means they use whatever procedures are appropriate for the time and place to get at the truth. So, witnesses must be qualified for veracity, but there were no hard and fast rules; so for some kinds of evidence, women, children, and foreigners would be acceptable.
Tanakh gives the judges “flexibility on the ground”, not to loop-hole away the law, but to close loopholes.
Really B, how many different ways are there to obey the mitvah “thou shalt not lie with a man the same way thou liest with a woman”? A hundred ways perhaps? I jest… even a child gets the idea right away.
We can’t tell, from the Written Torah, how things were actually done. We have only the Mishna and later sources. And they tell us that confessions are not admissible as evidence, and for good reason.
What does “thou shalt not lie with a man” mean, in actuality? The Talmud tells us, if I recall correctly, that penetration is liable for death. Other sexual acts not involving penetration are liable for lashes for rebelliousness (which are not in the Written Torah.)
How does stoning actually work as per the Talmud? They reasoned that the main thing is that the witnesses’ hands must be first on the executed, and that it didn’t matter whether he hit the stones or the stones hit him. So the way it is actually done is that the witnesses push him off a height sufficient to kill him but insufficient to mutilate his body. Then they drop a boulder on him (the boulder is of such a size that it takes both witnesses to lift.) If he is still alive, the public then stones him to death.
B:
>You need a rationale for an ought.
Occupant:
>>No, you don’t.
How does that work?
Could you give an example?
You can be immoral alone on a desert isle — lacking self-preserving virtues such as foresight and diligence, for instance. A rationale would be like whiskers on a bowling ball. Unnecessary.
Most moralizing most of the time is pre-rational, emotional. Even apes have a rudimentary moral sense.
There are moral monsters among us, and some are morally blind. Among the remainder, some posses a more accurate moral compass than others. In rare cases, you will find a happy coincidence of brilliance, experience, and moral clarity. From these sages we would do well to seek moral counsel. Fortunately, through writing, we can also access the time tested insights of dead sages. A rationale can help us navigate a dangerous world, as a stick helps the blind. A rationale can help people see the error of their ways, as a lamp cuts through the darkness. A rationale is useful, critical even, but not necessary.
An excellent summary.
>Most moralizing most of the time is pre-rational, emotional. Even apes have a rudimentary moral sense.
Yes, the Noble Savage is a very reactionary concept, propounded by Carlyle.
>Yes, the Noble Savage
You’ve been holding your own admirably against pretty much the entire thread, but this is eye-rollingly weak sophistry. What Occupant wrote has little to do with the Noble Savage; this is made perfectly clear by the paragraph immediately following your quoted snippet.
The idea that most moralizing comes from an inherent moral sense is basically the same as that of the Noble Savage.
If morals are mostly inborn, it stands to reason that the most moral people would be those least subject to civilizational conditioning, since most civilization consists of being trained to suppress and channel your natural and innate instincts and behaviors.
No it is not.
Noble Savage is the belief that all races are created equal, except, of course, that blacks are more equal than others.
And the belief that Haiti needed to ethnically cleansed of the people that made it wealthy and prosperous.
The noble savage doctrine was an argument for communism, communism supposedly being the original state of mankind, and an argument for abolishing slavery, since those enslaved were supposedly noble, rather than subhuman.
Good institutions are of course a large part, and large cause, of good conduct.
Declining civilizations, such as our own, generally have bad institutions, so the society overrules our healthy natural and instinctive intuitions, for example our inherent disgust at homosexuality and transexualism, our inherent rage at adultery and cuckoldry, our inherent admiration of honorable and protective violence, to our great harm.
To the extent that morality is learned, we are today taught very bad things.
>Noble Savage is the belief that all races are created equal, except, of course, that blacks are more equal than others.
No, it’s not. Originally it had nothing to do with racial equality or blacks. You’re an uneducated idiot.
By “originally” you mean Rousseau, who claimed that primitives were communists and that therefore we should be communists
Rousseau himself argued that actually existing primitives, which is to say, nonwhites, were our superiors, even though that was not his main point, being more interested in our primitive ancestors as he imagined them than actually existing primitives.
But for many of his fans and much of his movement it was his main point. Therefore slavery bad, massacring all the whites in Haiti good.
And in neither variant did it have anything to do with our ability to naturally intuit good and evil.
It is pretty obvious that you have not read Rousseau, and I have.
Since you’ve read Rousseau, please tell me where he uses the term Noble Savage.
Rousseau uses not the term but the idea – that the arts, sciences, and inequality make us bad. (Primitives, of course, supposedly are naturally good progressive left wingers, hence supposedly have no inequality)
His argument is thus entirely orthogonal to the argument that we learn morality from our society. He says we learn immorality from inequality.
While Rousseau himself was primarily a commie, rather than an anti colonialist, the noble savage idea has been primarily anti colonialist and anti slavery, as for example the play “Oroonoko”
(No doubt you will moronically complain that the term “noble savage” is not used in the play “Oroonoko” either.)
Anti colonialism, anti slavery, pro communism, they all hang together in a great stinking big pile and you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends.
Rousseau’s communism caused and was caused by anti slavery, racial equality, and anti colonialism, and the idea of the noble savage has always been about equality, especially racial equality, as in the play ‘Oroonoko”
>If morals are mostly inborn, it stands to reason that the most moral people would be those least subject to civilizational conditioning
No it doesn’t, and if you read Occupant’s comment this isn’t anywhere near what he said. He said that people vary a great deal in their moral sense, and that we can and should take advice from particularly moral, experienced, and intelligent sages, and that through writing we have access to dead sages whose thought has stood the test of time. This sounds awfully close to that “civilizational conditioning” that you somehow read him as opposing. It is nowhere near the Noble Savage idea.
So, as I said, the Noble Savage idea is that humans are innately good and possessed of an inborn moral sense.
It has nothing to do with Rousseau (predating him by over a century, being propounded by Shaftesbury and Lahontan and the name never being used by him), blacks (all those guys talked about Indians as an example of primitives in their natural states,) all races being created equal (except insofar as they all have an innate moral sense) or any of that other bullshit you mentioned.
The best example of the Noble Savage trope before Rousseau is “Oroonokoâ€, which is all about all races being created equal, except that blacks are more equal than others.
>Originally [the Noble Savage] had nothing to do with racial equality or blacks
Dryden was comparing Christians unfavorably to Spanish Muslims when he used the phrase, which is something you are prone to.
Being an egalitarian, when Anthony Ashley-Cooper articulated his doctrine of a moral sense, he neglected to see variation in it. Being an optimist, he neglected to see its dark side. Moral monsters are the dark side of a moral sense. Shane Jenkin is an example.
If the moral sense is like the visual sense, then it follows that some will be morally blind. If the moral sense is like the auditory sense, then it follows that some will be morally deaf. Tina Nash is deficient in both. When faced with a moral monster, she could not see. When told he was a psychopath, she could hear. Her moral blindness robed her of her eyes.
Assuming she is not from the Borderlands, before female emancipation, paternal approval would have been required before courting. Absent a father, a grandfather or uncle would do. This would have saved Tina a lot of grief, as her mother was apparently useless.
>Dryden was comparing Christians unfavorably to Spanish Muslims when he used the phrase, which is something you are prone to.
I doubt Dryden thought of the Spanish Muslims as black.
>Moral monsters are the dark side of a moral sense. Shane Jenkin is an example.
He is a sociopath, who is resistant to his society’s morality (actively so.) But the Aztecs routinely and publicly did things that would have made him sick, and nobody’s inbuilt moral sense rebelled!
>Assuming she is not from the Borderlands, before female emancipation, paternal approval would have been required before courting. Absent a father, a grandfather or uncle would do. This would have saved Tina a lot of grief, as her mother was apparently useless.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. I’ve been in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where paternal approval is key to the marriage process. The medics were sickened by the locals constantly bringing in their mutilated wives and kids. You know, slipped, fell in the fire (gasoline fire,) very clumsy. Paternal approval is only useful where the society has morals.
>But the Aztecs routinely and publicly did things that would have made [Jenkin the psychopath] sick, and nobody’s inbuilt moral sense rebelled!
With a tiny number of men and mounts, Cortez brought down the Aztec Empire. He did this with the ready assistance of rebellious, ample, and angry natives.
>Sorry, but this is nonsense. I’ve been in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where paternal approval is key to the marriage process.
You’re assuming that, without parental approval, conditions in Iraq could not be worse.
>With a tiny number of men and mounts, Cortez brought down the Aztec Empire. He did this with the ready assistance of rebellious, ample, and angry natives.
My bet is that if you asked those angry and rebellious natives about what they wanted to achieve, they’d say, to sacrifice the Aztecs, eat their flesh, wear their skins and the rest of it. And their inherent moral compass would agree!
And the Conquistadors’ moral compass had nothing to say about turning the natives into slaves and working them to death for money.
>You’re assuming that, without parental approval, conditions in Iraq could not be worse.
If we’re gonna assume contrafactuals, I’ll just propose that without parental approval, the Iraqis would have already invented faster than light travel, and that with parental approval, the Brits would be giving their daughters away to Pakistani terrorists.
If some slut choosing to mate with a psycho who gouged her eyes out goes to show the unreliability of female mating choice, why wouldn’t a bunch of Iraqi retards giving their daughters away to other retards who set them on fire go to show the unreliability of parental approval?
If you ask me what I think, institutions are only as good as the people who institute and constitute them. GIGO. Human garbage will be human garbage, regardless of who chooses its mates. What made the couple in this story garbage was the system which allowed her to live without working or begging and him to live by preying on others and leeching off his indigent mates (and also served him a steady diet of fictional torture porn).
We, which is to say Cortez, did ask them. In their reply, they refrained from mentioning cannibalism and human sacrifice. Possibly because they felt that Cortez would disapprove, but they refrained from mentioning it.
>My bet is that if you asked those angry and rebellious natives about what they wanted to achieve, they’d say, to sacrifice the Aztecs, eat their flesh, wear their skins and the rest of it.
You are moving the goalpost.
First you say there was no rebellion. When confronted with evidence of rebellion, you switch to asserting a counter factual. In fact, the flesh-eating skin-wearing human-sacrifice practices came to an abrupt end after the Aztec Empire collapsed.
>And the Conquistadors’ moral compass had nothing to say about turning the natives into slaves and working them to death for money.
De las Casas had something to say about it.
>If some slut choosing to mate with a psycho who gouged her eyes out goes to show the unreliability of female mating choice, why wouldn’t a bunch of Iraqi retards giving their daughters away to other retards who set them on fire go to show the unreliability of parental approval?
To say parental approval makes no difference, you would need to compare a case with parental approval to a similar case without. Iraq isn’t that.
A better comparison would be life in the British Borderlands where parental approval was sparce to life in the British Midlands where it wasn’t. The Midlands had less disfunction.
>If you ask me what I think, institutions are only as good as the people who institute and constitute them. GIGO. Human garbage will be human garbage
Were that the case, there would be no point in learning Torah. It would make no difference.
>We, which is to say Cortez, did ask them. In their reply, they refrained from mentioning cannibalism and human sacrifice. Possibly because they felt that Cortez would disapprove, but they refrained from mentioning it.
Given that every other Mesoamerican precolumbian civilization enjoyed human sacrifice, I suspect that the reason they refrained is not because of some inbuilt moral sense but precisely because they noticed Cortez would not approve.
All the mesoamerican civilizations were demon worshippers, but the Aztecs were the big enthusiasts for really large scale human sacrifice, really large scale cannibalism, and particularly horrifying conduct of their Gods. There are substantial degrees of evil.
>First you say there was no rebellion.
There was no rebellion by the Aztecs.
>n fact, the flesh-eating skin-wearing human-sacrifice practices came to an abrupt end after the Aztec Empire collapsed.
Well, yeah, the Conquistadors brought it to an end.
>De las Casas had something to say about it.
His outrage was an extreme minority opinion.
>To say parental approval makes no difference, you would need to compare a case with parental approval to a similar case without. Iraq isn’t that.
You will never have a controlled experiment.
>A better comparison would be life in the British Borderlands where parental approval was sparce to life in the British Midlands where it wasn’t. The Midlands had less disfunction.
Midlands, where there is law and order, always have less dysfunction than tribal borderlands. I.e., Waziristan vs. Punjab. It’s a stretch to bring parental approval into this.
>Were that the case, there would be no point in learning Torah. It would make no difference.
The Vilna Gaon says that Torah is like water. When you water fruit trees, you get good fruit. When you water weeds and thorns, you get big weeds and thorns.
All I can say for Torah is that if you decide that there is a G-d and He runs this world and is good, and that you wish to follow Him, the Torah gives you a path to cleave to Him. If you don’t agree with the premise, two things happen: first, out of cultural inertia, you will declare that the things you learned were good from your parents and society are Absolutely Good. Then, you will end up slowly shifting the goalposts to the point that Absolute Good is whatever is convenient for you and yours.
If you
Wrong subthread and posted early.
If you don’t agree with the foundational premise, then Torah gives a very powerful set of tools for self-service, evil and destruction. Like the GRA said, it’s water.
Occupant:
>>In fact, the flesh-eating skin-wearing human-sacrifice practices came to an abrupt end after the Aztec Empire collapsed.
B:
>Well, yeah, the Conquistadors brought it to an end.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And do you need to read Torah before you know the answer?
>The Vilna Gaon says that Torah is like water. When you water fruit trees, you get good fruit. When you water weeds and thorns, you get big weeds and thorns.
Compare the former East Germany with the former West Germany, then compare the Germanies before and after unification. Compare Maoist China with British Hong Kong, then compare them before and after Deng’s reforms. The East Germans and Mainland Chinese didn’t suddenly transform from human trash to human treasure. Institutions matter independent of the human substrate.
>You will never have a controlled experiment.
What kind of Carlyle fan or Torah student is opposed to paternal approval before marriage?
Quasi-experiments are quasi-.
Comparing the Midlands with the Borderlands controls for more of the confounding variables than comparing Britain (without paternal approval) to Iraq (with), as does comparing the Midlands now (without paternal approval) to the Midlands before female emancipation (with).
Aztecs could not rebel because they were riding the tiger. And at the first chance, the tiger did rebel – and slaughtered the Aztecs man woman and child.
Cortez’s plan was that he would take over the Aztec empire as a going concern, with him replacing the emperor, his men replacing the top of the aristocracy, Christian priests replacing the priests wearing human skins, and the gruesome temples flattened and replaced by churches. His allies would have none of it – “not a woman to bear sons to avenge her brothers, nor an old man to give council”
>Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And do you need to read Torah before you know the answer?
It’s a very good thing, because what they replaced it with was closer to Torah (and in fact they were acting in accordance with their flawed interpretation of Torah).
>Compare the former East Germany with the former West Germany, then compare the Germanies before and after unification. Compare Maoist China with British Hong Kong, then compare them before and after Deng’s reforms. The East Germans and Mainland Chinese didn’t suddenly transform from human trash to human treasure. Institutions matter independent of the human substrate.
Institutions matter, but the human substrate is key. Germans under Soviet-inspired Communism behaved drastically differently from Somalis.
>What kind of Carlyle fan or Torah student is opposed to paternal approval before marriage?
I am not opposed to parental approval before marriage. But as a custom, not as a law. The Talmud has the concept of boger or bogereth, an adult who is responsible for himself or herself.
In any case, you’re coming in on the middle of the conversation. The original assertion made by Jim was that women were, in the Torah, property, and married off without their consent. He bases these on cursory descriptions of two marriages, one made before the giving of the Torah, and assumes these descriptions are actually transcripts. I contend that the woman’s consent was always required, and bring as support the Mishna (which says so, but Jim thinks that they were influenced by the Gender Studies Department at Yavne State) and the first ketuboth (which provide that the woman is able to get a divorce on demand.)
>Comparing the Midlands with the Borderlands controls for more of the confounding variables than comparing Britain (without paternal approval) to Iraq (with), as does comparing the Midlands now (without paternal approval) to the Midlands before female emancipation (with).
I’ve lost track of what you’re trying to say. The Midlands were under rule of law. The Borderlands were in a state of constant, nonstop guerrilla warfare and raiding by the reivers on both sides. Of all the contributing factors (a porous border with ferocious clans on both sides,) you choose paternal approval to ascribe this to? Waziristan today resembles the Borderlands very closely, despite paternal consent. It also has a porous border with ferocious clans on both sides, and constant, nonstop guerrilla warfare.
Occupant:
>>Is [an end to flesh-eating, skin-wearing human sacrifice] is a good thing or a bad thing? And do you need to read Torah before you know the answer?
B:
>It’s a very good thing, because what they replaced it with was closer to Torah (and in fact they were acting in accordance with their flawed interpretation of Torah).
You didn’t really answer the second question. Let me rephrase:
Suppose I tied up my dog in the back yard and starved it to death through a combination of willful neglect and occasional beating. Would you need to consult a rabbi before you pass judgment?
B:
>Institutions matter, but the human substrate is key. Germans under Soviet-inspired Communism behaved drastically differently from Somalis.
Agreed. Both the quality of the institutions and the quality of the people matter.
B:
>I’ve lost track of what you’re trying to say.
I’m saying that requiring paternal approval before marriage is good practice.
>Suppose I tied up my dog in the back yard and starved it to death through a combination of willful neglect and occasional beating. Would you need to consult a rabbi before you pass judgment?
I wouldn’t need to-I know that tzar baalei hayim, causing suffering to animals needlessly, is forbidden by the Torah.
>I’m saying that requiring paternal approval before marriage is good practice.
I agree!
The question is the details.
I agree.
But this only tells us the rationalizations are driven by emotional impulses. But in order for such impulse to be translated into an “ought” it must be rationalized at some level.
oughts come first. Explanations come later, if ever.
I understand the word as implying an obligation. Something you do regardless, even in spite of your impulses.
Do you understand it differently?
If “ought” means something different, “obligation” will mean something different. You are using floating abstractions, abstractions unanchored to real events. Invent a concrete hypothetical of your own if you find my concrete hypothetical unclear.
Jim:
>Clearly the original law was intended to suppress homosexuality and force it entirely out of sight. The loopholed law is intended to have no effect on homosexuality, to never be enforced.
That would be true if the original law did not have loopholes. But it clearly does (condition #4).
To me it seems that God hates homosexuals but is also uneasy about Jews killing Jews. Hence the loopholes that in effect leave it up to communities whether or not to carry out the death sentence.
The death sentences would be so rare because the crime would be so rare.
1) Making it such a serious crime dramatically reduces the number of people who will risk doing it.
2) The crime is of a private nature and so even by the few who will engage, can be pretty easily concealed.
This truth is a landmine to the leftist claims of ‘homosexual persecution’ for hundreds of years. The fact is, this crime was rarely found out and so rarely punished, whether the penalty was death or imprisonment. The ‘persecution’ that homosexuals suffered through the centuries of both Jewish rule in old Israel, and then Christian rule in Christendom, consisted of…
‘not being able to be openly gay’
and that is about it. Oh, the humanity!
I agree. But I don’t see how you get from here to the notion that Jewish law is changing with the wind.
The wind these days being female emancipation and deviant sex.
And, lo and behold, Orthodox Jewish law these days is that you cannot “humiliate” someone who is openly homosexual, by excluding them and such.
Which is wrong. Such people should be excluded from civic life. We’ve seen what happens when they are not.
>And, lo and behold, Orthodox Jewish law these days is that you cannot “humiliate†someone who is openly homosexual, by excluding them and such.
That is not Orthodox Jewish law. That’s the opinion of a few rabbis. And in the letter, they do not claim that it is the law, or binding on anyone.
The prohibition on humiliating people is in the Talmud.
At what point does the opinion of a few Rabbis become Orthodox Jewish Law?
When no respectable Orthodox Jew dares openly disagree.
>At what point does the opinion of a few Rabbis become Orthodox Jewish Law?
>When no respectable Orthodox Jew dares openly disagree.
This is not how it works.
The Law is the Torah and the Talmud. The practical implementation of the law, the SOP, is generally speaking the Mishne Torah, the Shulchan Aruch, the Rema’s commentary on the Shulchan Aruch. There are also various “cheat sheet” compendia such as the Mishna Brurah, Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the Aruch Hashuchan, etc.
If there is an emergent situation that was not clearly covered by the above sources, or we do not know where to find the relevant law, we go to the rabbi of our choice, who tells us his opinion and where in the above sources he is getting it. So, for instance, if we get a dishwasher and wonder if we can wash dairy and meat utensils in it, we can go to Rav Moshe Feinstein or to Rav Ovadia Yosef, and each will give us his opinion, with sources, and those opinions may very well be different.
That is how it works. Observe that on issues that are political, such as female emancipation and homosexuality, the gap between Orthodox and Reform similar to the width of the Overton Window, both Reform and orthodox being within the Overton window.
A few rabbis interpret Jewish laws as requiring Jews to kiss the ass of those that are openly homosexual. And no rabbis dare to openly disagree.
And within my lifetime, the Overton window has move leftwards by many, many, times its width.
And by the way, their opinion will not be binding on those who have not committed themselves to follow it. Unless, of course, they open the Shulchan Aruch and it’s there in black and white, and there is no contradicting opinion to be found in the Mishne Torah or the Rema’s commentary, etc.
So if I go to them and say, “is it okay for me to have sexual relations with a man,” they will point out where it unambiguously says that it is forbidden, and that’s the law. If I go to them and say, “is it okay for me to go to a synagogue where the cantor has a rainbow flag on his Prius and can often be seen walking around holding hands with the guy he lives with,” they will give me an opinion, backed by sources, but it probably will not be the law-it will be their interpretation of how the law should apply to this situation. It will certainly not be binding on my neighbor who did not ask them and doesn’t see them as “his” rabbinical authorities.
Similarly, if I go to a plumber for advice, there will be laws (water doesn’t naturally flow up hill,) universal rules of thumb (install drain pipe with the slope of .25″/1′,) and individual opinions (one guy will prefer dope, the other nylon tape.) A plumber should know and clearly say which is which.
I seem to recall a short time ago you were telling me how Moses cannot speak for himself. Supposedly we need today’s Rabbis, who “sit in the seat of Moses”, to explain to us what he really meant.
>I seem to recall a short time ago you were telling me how Moses cannot speak for himself. Supposedly we need today’s Rabbis, who “sit in the seat of Mosesâ€, to explain to us what he really meant.
Yes. So, what is the problem?
Even in Moses’ day, despite everyone having gotten the Torah, and despite Moses being alive, there needed to be a hierarchy to explain to people how to apply it to emerging situations.
As I said, the Law is set, the function of rabbis is to know where the appropriate law is written and to formulate a cohesive and coherent opinion on how it should be applied. It is entirely possible for differing opinions to coexist for a very long time.
As an engineer (you keep telling us you’re an engineer,) surely you know the difference between the laws of physics, engineering standards, best practices and domain expertise?
As far as female emancipation goes – a milder version of your argument may well be true, I don’t know. But I don’t think you have proven your actual claim that Jewish women were property.
On the homosexuality opinion and the lack of outrage – much depends on the status of these rabbis.
If I told you that some bunch of crazies claiming to be authorities on mathematics posted somewhere that 2+2=5, with no one even noticing – I doubt you would conclude that mathematics is doomed.
Do we know if the rabbis in question are important enough for religious Jews to take notice?
B seemed to be taking notice – he sought to spin their position as pertaining to closeted homosexuals where their position is arguably defensible, rather than open homosexuals. I don’t suppose Moses went peeking through the tent doors. And no one seems willing to contradict them. There might well be a lot of furtive and silent disagreement, but I don’t see any Jews doing a Phil Robertson.
Depends on your definition of property. Clearly women in the old testament had no right to be consulted, did not give formal consent, to their marriages. The decision was their father’s. I suppose the father would often listen to his daughter, and his wife, and his sons. But he did not have to.
Where marriage is a contract between bride and groom, it involves a great big party with lots of witnesses. Where marriage is more like selling a cow, it is a formal handshake between the groom and the father of the bride in front of the nuclear family of the bride, or a handshake between the father of the groom and the father of the bride in front of the nuclear family of the bride. Old testament marriage was handshake between patriarchs.
And indeed, sons did not have the right to be consulted either. Like long suffering Isaac, they married who they were damn well told and got working on producing the grandchildren as directed, but obviously they had more de-facto agency than women had de-facto agency.
>B seemed to be taking notice – he sought to spin their position as pertaining to closeted homosexuals where their position is arguably defensible, rather than open homosexuals.
B took notice when you brought these rabbis’ statement to his notice. Until then, he had been unaware of it.
Death sentences were historically rare in general. A Sanhedrin that executed someone once in 7 years was considered cruel, and some say, once in 70 years. Eventually, they moved from Jerusalem to Yavne because people started increasingly bearing false witness in death penalty cases, and the Sanhedrin is only empowered to issue the death penalty when it is sitting in its place in Jerusalem.
I don’t know if anyone was ever executed for homosexuality. The sages said that there had never been an execution of a rebellious son, or an idolatrous city.
A lot of this stuff is there to tip the scales-people generally are not attracted to homosexuality except within the context of institutions that encourage or force it (prisons, British public schools, Spartan mess halls, etc.) A death penalty shows the seriousness of a sin and discourages the formation of institutions where that sin is encouraged/forced.
The histories of Josephus tell us plenty of stories of the religious authorities executing people over issues of power and religion. Presumably they would also execute people for ordinary crimes. During the war against the Romans, any attempt to surrender or run away was met by the death penalty.
B is taking Talmudic stories as more historically reliable than Joseph or the Tanakh. Based on conflicting sets of facts, I don’t see how we will ever convince him.
>The histories of Josephus tell us plenty of stories of the religious authorities executing people over issues of power and religion.
Can I have links to at least five? Preferably spread out over some time, not during a brief period of crisis.
>During the war against the Romans, any attempt to surrender or run away was met by the death penalty.
Yes. That’s why they call it a war. What is the relevance to the subject matter?
How do British Public Schools encourage homosexuality?
>How do British Public Schools encourage homosexuality?
Like prisons, British Public Schools are traditionally all male institutions. Therefore access to warm vajayjay is limited.
Traditionally, they were dens of buggery.
Where are these loopholes to be found in the old Testament?
Jim:
>One family does not a society make. But you know this already.
B:
>>When it’s a clan of hilbilly mutants in the backwoods? Sure. When it’s the royal family in the most hieararchical society in history? I’m afraid it does.
I think you have it backwards.
For royal families the pool of fit candidates is very very small. They may have to marry relatives due to the lack of options.
>For royal families the pool of fit candidates is very very small
This is a question of how you define “fit,” which in turn is a question of standards you set, which are in turn a function of moral values.
For instance, we don’t really see this sort of aristocratic snobbery in the monarchy of Judah and Israel.
The point I was making was that in Egypt, what the royal family did was good and right, by definition (though perhaps the people were not supposed to emulate.) It’s hard to make the argument that the Egyptian people thought incest was a vile abomination and that it made them want to vomit if the very peak of their extremely upward-focused society publicly engaged in incest. If the Pharaoh was a god on earth, then incest was godly.
So we specifically are given a general prohibition on acting like the Egyptians (After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their statutes.) Then we are given a long list of sexual aberrations which we are prohibited to do.
This would not be necessary if we had a solid built-in moral compass that made these behaviors naturally repugnant to us to a very significant degree. For instance, we don’t have an explicit prohibition on cannibalism.
I don’t know whether or not incestual marriage was common in Egypt. But what I do now is that royal families tend to be unusual in lots of different ways and do lots of things that most other families prefer not to do. And may very well be expected by their subjects to be weird in that respect.
That’s why I am not taking this as evidence that it was common.
All you are showing is that if natural aversion to incest does exist, it is not as strong as aversion to cannibalism. We may have strong feelings about doing it ourselves but not much care about others doing it. Especially if those others are expected to have unusual families.
>It’s hard to make the argument that the Egyptian people thought incest was a vile abomination and that it made them want to vomit if the very peak of their extremely upward-focused society publicly engaged in incest. If the Pharaoh was a god on earth, then incest was godly.
Until the Roman era, sibling marriage was legal, royally practiced, and divinely sanctioned. It was also rare. When you are free to do something and encouraged to do so yet refrain from doing it, that tells us something inside is restraining you.
That’s a bit of convoluted reasoning. How do we know that sibling marriage was rare in Egypt until the Roman era? Do we have records? The Torah says, don’t do like the Egyptians, and then gives a long list of incestuous relations. Those relations can’t have been THAT rare. When you say, “don’t act like X people, don’t do Y thing,” that only makes sense if Y thing was common among X people.
>How do we know that sibling marriage was rare in Egypt until the Roman era? Do we have records?
Yes. We know that sibling incest was rare until the Roman era. We have records. Look up-thread. Grep for “Jaroslav Cernyâ€
>Those relations can’t have been THAT rare. When you say, “don’t act like X people, don’t do Y thing,†that only makes sense if Y thing was common among X people.
Evidently the Jews of old we so repelled by rare instances of incest in Ancient Egypt that they banned it.
The Torah also says that Dwarves cannot be priests. Does that mean Dwarf-priests were a menace?
Using the Torah as an objective source of Egyptian moral quality is like using the Christian Church Fathers as an objective source on pagan morality. Or the American school system as an objective source on Communism, Fascism, Nazism and Imperial Japan.
It doesn’t say they can’t be priests.
It says that priests who are dwarves or otherwise disfigured can’t serve in the Sanctuary.
It means that there were dwarves around and that dwarfism was a naturally occurring condition frequent enough to comment and make rules on it. Unlike, for instance, conjoined twins.
[…] The story of Tina Nash and modern poverty. Jim comments. […]
Jim:
>If “ought†means something different, “obligation†will mean something different. You are using floating abstractions, abstractions unanchored to real events. Invent a concrete hypothetical of your own if you find my concrete hypothetical unclear.
Art:
If you mean the desert isle hypothetical – it is clear. Of course there are no “oughts” there. They are irrelevant.
But what we are discussing: when there is an “ought” – does it require a rationale?
The fact that in some environment neither A nor B exist does not tell us whether A requires B.
Of course their are oughts in desert island. For example, let us suppose our castaway has more fruit in some seasons than he can consume, and brews the excess into an alcoholic drink to preserve it. He ought to refrain from getting falling down drunk.
Oughts do not require us to understand the rationale, any more than riding a bicycle requires us to understand how to ride a bicycle, how we are able to ride a bicycle.
True but I don’t see how this is relevant to the moral context of our discussion.
Seems directly relevant to me. You are using words in a way with which I am unfamiliar, and which I think is unusual, weird, and strange, a private language. Try giving concrete examples, rather than floating abstractions disconnected from anything real.
In this context I understand “ought” as synonymous with a moral obligation. But then English isn’t my first language, so I may be mistaken.
Since you insist I will give an example:
Suppose I find myself in the company of a flaming homosexual. I am naturally repulsed but being a good progressive I say to myself that I ought to be inclusive.
But can we please finish with the isle example before jumping to another one, unless you think there is something wrong with it?
When you said: “He ought to refrain from getting falling down drunk” – did you intend it as an example of a moral decision (or impulse)?
Yes.
Jim, is there an option in this wordpress theme so I can switch to flat mode by date? Once I’m up to speed on a thread, I just want to read the new comments. Be nice to have that as an option instead of scrolling the whole thread.
I rather like threading by conversation – makes it easier to read other people’s conversations. Free content. Unfortunately there is no way for the user to alter the mode.
By default, threading goes flat after conversations go five deep. I don’t like this, but it discourages unending conversations.
Quick question Jim. Have you ever read Nietzsche?
Read him, concluded he was nuts.
Nietzsche was a bug chaser before it was cool.
That’s how you get to be a great philosopher, of course – being where the future of ideas is going.
Jim. In your moral/ethical system, where do the “oughts” come from? Obviously, incest is unhealthy. But lots of things are unhealthy. If everyone ate the optimal diet, exercised, had optimal sex, et cetera, then the average American would live 10 years longer.
As per David Hume, we cannot derive “oughts” from descriptions of reality.
Does each person have an inherent right to create their own values? That’s progressivism. Slavery and marriage interfere with women and slaves creating their own values, and making their own decisions.
God can’t create the values, because you don’t believe in him.
Hume also concluded that we cannot conclude that fire burns.
Right. I assume you believe in induction because it’s how your brain works. Me too. I believe in induction because I want to.
You’re not answering the question. “Ought” is not a factual question. So where do your “oughts” come from? B claims that his “oughts” come from G-d. Do your “oughts” come from yourself? A mixture of yourself and authority figures around you? What?
“Ought” is a factual question, when done right.
You’re not answering.
Where do your “oughts” come from? B says G-d. You don’t say G-d. If humans never existed, where would you fight an “ought”?
In practice, a child gets his “oughts” from his parents.
Oughts come from rational self interest and game theory.
Words mean what mothers teach small children they mean. “Evil” is defined by the fairy tale “Snow White”
The evil stepmother is evil because she seeks to harm Snow White for frivolous and crazy reasons, thus might well harm anyone. The prince is not evil when he horribly tortures the evil stepmother to death because he does so for sound and important reasons, thus unlikely to harm just anybody. So we have egoistic reasons to support the prince against the stepmother, and the word that expresses these egoistic reasons is “evil”, is that the stepmother is evil.
Aztec fairy tales were, presumably, quite different.
Most children get their oughts from their parents, but the process is not perfect. We also have a larger society, books and, yeah, some sort of moral sense with which we sense some kind of objectively existing morality to various degree.
In a sense, in that their world was ruled by demons. They still knew good and evil. They just expected evil to triumph.
In “Snow White” the Evil Stepmother is hostile to the viewpoint character, thus hostile to the child hearing the story. In Aztec legends, the demon gods are also hostile to the viewpoint character, in Aztec rituals, hostile to the congregation.
Progressive fairy tales worship non-literal demons. Marx and Pope Francis tell us that it is lovely and wonderful to destroy our wealth, families, et cetera.
Oughts come from people. God is a person, so he can be the source of “oughts”. Jim is a person, so he can be the source of “oughts”. But if no humans ever existed, where would be find “oughts”?
Game theory is not a person, and cannot be a source of “oughts”. Game theory can analyze how certain actions, and determine how efficient certain actions are. For example, trying to resolve the Prisoner’s Dilemma depends on the the idea that we “ought to minimize time spent in prison”.
>Oughts come from rational self interest and game theory.
Lots of people act against their rational self-interest. I.e. most progressives. Usually from a mixture of misleading information and social conditioning.
Why do oughts come from people? Because the world was formless before Aristotle said ‘this box makes a fine chair’? Okay, so I’ll define oughts for myself and judge others on how well they conform to what I think they ought to do.
And now comes the question of what do I think people ought to be doing?
Being equal, because family means no one gets left behind? Or being great, because greatness is cool? Or upholding values conducive to sustaining and extending the glory of the White race and Western civilization, a.k.a. humanity and human civilization?
I ought personally to antagonize Jews on the Internet while deferring to niggers more than average in real life, while awaiting Hitler’s reincarnation and the gassing of the six million, or maybe putting all the non-whites on a giant New Jerusalem spaceship and launching them to a black hole.
Now back to pointless category errors like game theory isn’t a person lol and other unscientific and underhanded moral posturing…
Hey Jim, I think Andrew Angling reads your blog
http://www.dailystormer.com/man-up-what-is-feminism/
B:
>But the Aztecs routinely and publicly did things that would have made him sick, and nobody’s inbuilt moral sense rebelled!
I think you again have it backwards.
My understanding they did those things precisely because it shocked their moral senses – to demonstrate their commitment. You don’t demonstrate commitment by doing something that is no big deal.
Exactly so. Aztec Gods were demons, and their worship expressed this thought, was intended to horrify.
Funny stuff.
“I see another high IQ high socioeconomic status woman who at age thirty failed to clean up her act, slowly transitioned from alluring slut to disgusting slut, and is now transitioning to cat lady.”