The last comment about 'be a nice guy' is interesting.

I was listening to Joe Rogan Experience, and they mentioned something about how the genesis of the 'woman hater' is actually the forever-friend-zoned-nice-guy who gets so fed up with being 'taken for granted'/'shot down' that his niceness turns into hatred

It made sense to me. Essentially, the woman hater is what becomes of a boring nice guy who lacked the patience/endurance to wait for women his age to make their way through all the exciting unreliable men before being satiated (or just getting too old to fetch the interesting men's attention) and finally settling for the nice guy that was boringly always available.



And I get it. It plays into the human natural value system, where things that are scarce are more valuable.

The ahole is fleeting. You can't always have him, and if you do you can't hold him, so he has an element of scarcity, which creates value.

The nice guy will reliably stick around if you go with him, so he is less scarce, so he is less valuable. The lower value in turn makes him more likely to be single and always available, further reducing his scarcity, and further devaluing him, and further increasing his chances of being single. A feedback loop.

I suppose that there is also a 3rd path - the element of nice guys that just stop giving a crap before turning into haters, which makes them more scarce, which actually finally gets them attention, and they stop being single.

(And a 4th path - nice guy finds 'a girl who wants a nice guy from the start'. In my observation this isn't the typical case.)



Cases like this (forever alone nice guy, not specifically Mr Van Driver) are when I think 'arrangement' web sites create a good solution. The guys get to not be lonely anymore, and the women gets taken care of. Kind of plays into the nice guy natural instinct, too.

Amusingly, 'arrangement' may be a better fit for the forever-alone nice guys than 'waiting it out'.
In both cases (waiting vs arrangement) the women are mainly after stability/support.
The older women 'nice guy' matches with by 'waiting it out' would not have picked 'nice guy' if they still had the looks to keep pulling exciting men.
So, if you're gonna be with someone because they want you for support, why not just go with a younger woman and be up front about the situation. If it doesn't work out, either party can walk away. No messy divorce. Seems like a safer and more practical option.

(Not picking on older women, just observing that : as people get older, the single scene becomes more and more 'leftovers' that are 'left over for a good reason'. The odds of finding anyone worth while diminish with time, because the highest quality individuals get retained first. Wait long enough, and you're left with over the hill jaded pragmatists who once may have had looks but now have nothing left to offer. At which point, both 'arrangement' and 'being single' are legitimately better options.)



Regarding Mr. Van Guy specifically, I'm not sure if he had a chance. He had some social anxiety that made him unable to talk to people. So he was likely not gonna get a partner naturally, and was unlikely to succeed among professional peers well enough to get the financial security necessary to be some sugar daddy.

So, yeah, dude was likely a romantic dead end. Possibly even the same mental (brain developmental?) issues that made him unable to talk to people also made him susceptible to getting the sort of crazy tilted that allowed him to run people over. The dude could have actually been fated (circumstantially) to end up in tragedy. Just speculating, wouldn't shock me.

-scheherazade

I must say I believe, and hope I'm right, that the crowd that sees this and says that looks great is a lot smaller than you believe.

Controversy might be more numerous around the anti-war crowd citing Abu-Ghraib as proof the Iraq war in it's entirety was wrong and evil. There are a lot of people who observe that Saddam did much worse, for much longer, and as standard desirable practice of governance, myself included. I dare say the number of people believing that greatly outnumber the pro-torture crowd.

Still important for America to hold itself more accountable on this. Am I not wrong but most of those involved who even were charged mostly got off with dishonorable discharges?

@newtboy:
Gender, nope, you can totally choose that now.

If we must play semantics, sex then. Human beings are born with either a penis or vagina. Same as humans are born with 5 fingers and toes. In extremely rare circumstances humans sometimes have more or less fingers and toes than that, but we aren't being hateful towards those individuals by generally observing that humans have five fingers and toes. Similarly, hermaphroditus happens too, but saying humans are born with either a penis or vagina isn't a hateful statement against people.

As for gender being something different than sex, if you define it that way, than gender is nothing but a set of social expectations. Who cares what social norms and expectations people are or aren't drawn to and abide by?

Race, many people change their racial identity. My DNA and my skin colour don't change no matter how loudly I protest and how many like minded people I get to affirm me.

Ethnicity, people pass as ethnic groups they weren't born into Not looking like your ancestors enough to pass as someone else still doesn't change your parentage. Nobody passing me on the street is liable to be able to identify my Mennonite heritage, but neither can I cease having been born into that cultural heritage.

Quick poll of the mostly left leaning sift.

The evangelical christian belief that homosexuality is immoral isn't going to disappear, it's being listed in both old and new testaments as sinful makes that a lock. However, that's no different than the Judaic list of foods that are sinful to eat, which orthodox Jews still observe.

So the question is, if the evangelical christian position is simply that homosexuality isn't "Kosher", no different than the Jewish belief that eating pork isn't "Kosher", is that an agreeable live and let live position?

Precisely why a team of two horses should be used. The horse got too close to the side, and because the cart sticks out further to the sides, it hit the bank and tipped.
A two-horse system wouldn't get as close to the edge and the tires wouldn't have hit the side.

Also, at that speed, it looked like the horse was spooked, and running FROM the cart, which on it's current wheels was rolling too fast and easily.

...Not that I'm an expert, I've been around horses, but mainly this is only my observation

some *quality cox there. Love me some thermodynamics. Gives me an opportunity to bust out one of my favourite science quotes:

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

Entropy is, somewhat perversely, information.
*related=https://videosift.com/video/What-is-NOT-Random

"You cannot get more scientific than reading from the actual study".

Actually, you can.

For a start, that's an article, not a study. http://www.bmj.com/bmj/section-pdf/187734?path=/bmj/346/7893/Observations.full.pdf

Second, even when something IS a study, if you cherry pick parts of it you can easily mislead people.

Now, I don't really have a problem with the facts outlined in this video, other than that I know Greger is attempting to use them to convince people NOT to get proper treatment of cancer.

Agreed, it was extraordinary.

The movie is flawed, I can see why it didn't do well, waaaay too long. My biggest gripe is that we never get an insight into what K is thinking, we're just observing him the whole time. Overall I enjoyed it, but have to wait awhile before slogging through it again at 3 hours.

In a way Scahill is like a less educated\refined version of Noam Chomsky. He does good investigative work, and dedicates enormous energy into exposing and spotlighting the bad things that America does. That has a place, but without a similarly harsh and critical light being cast on America's targets/enemies it becomes propaganda.

Jeremy says he wouldn't work with Charles Manson to oppose trump, fair enough. What about kind of working with Stalin to defeat Hitler? Say, at least agreeing not to attack Stalin while you both deal with Hitler?

The world is incredibly complicated and the singular and lone focus on American mistakes paints a deceptive picture. Pointing out the problems with America's war in Iraq, like torture and Quantanamo and declaring these as so immoral we needn't even look at Saddam's past is propaganda. Saddam waged two campaigns of genocide against his own people. When America saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib, they shut it down and attempted to punish those responsible. When Saddam's brother used chemical weapons to exterminate Kurdish civilians Saddam commended him for it. Guantanamo is bad, but it doesn't mean we should fail to acknowledge the concentration camps that Saddam operated during his genocide of the Kurds. It doesn't mean it's unfair to observe that conditions in Saddam's prisons across the country were far more cruel during his entire reign.

There's a nuanced place here that Scahill and Chomsky and pundits like them just fail to acknowledge and encourages inaction at times were the lesser evil may well be for America to do something, even if aborting Gadafi's genocide doesn't make Libya a paradise after.

Thanks! Perfectly observed and oh so badly danced -- which is part of its charm, of course

Yes, there's no doubt about their situation, but from what I've observed, "terrible" is more for "star wars xmas special" or "the room" type of terrible...

I'll grant you that it probably doesn't discriminate based on sexuality (although I don't know enough about being a young gay man to claim that with certainty).

As for gender, I think females tend to be less affected by the "fucking stupid" aspect, but that's just an observation.

Fascinating. They've lived there for an unknown hundreds of years. And are hostile to any outsiders. One estimate was 40 people live on the island? What about inbreeding? It looks like a fair number of children in the videos.

I think we should parachute some cameras in. Park some drones in some trees for observation. (kidding...but not kidding)

It doesn't really explain WHY they would believe such things outside they saw lots of YouTube videos. What would cause a person to reject known science that is over 2,000 years old, which was based on super simple observations? I've seen some people blame the Bible, but you'd really have to stretch things to get to the Bible saying it was flat (it makes reference to the four corners, but that's it), unlike using the Bible to claim the universe is 6,000 years old, and the Earth being the center of the universe, both of which it supports directly. So at least, in this case, we can't blame the Bible, though I'd be interested in how many of these people believe the universe is 6,000 years old and the center of the universe, as I'd expect a high correlation. Even rejecting human-caused climate change makes more sense than accepting the flat earth. It just so far beyond stupid to accept it that I can't wrap my head around it.