Not all Christians are the same. You can generalize, fairly, about Christians on some theological belief stuff (one God, heaven, Jesus is savior, etc.) but outside of that, we're all different - human beings each shaped by various DNA, character, family, upbringing, history, peers and society.

As a parent of only one kid, I've been lucky because my daughter never threw tantrums, probably due to the lack of an antagonistic sibling. Watching this though makes me wonder what sort of parent(s) these kids have. Parents should shut that shit down quickly and decisively - children learn what is appropriate, socially, by observation and being corrected by adults; this really isn't good conflict resolution. Yeah, siblings will fight over stupid stuff, but this sort of behaviour, if not corrected, will also probably extend to school and lead to negative interactions with their peers.

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

"Starting as young children" is typical for professional racers.

In that regard, she is not advantaged (compared to her professional peers).

-scheherazade

Like saying humans have white skin, or blue eyes, or blond hair isn't dehumanizing to non Arians? If you make a blanket statement about who's human that leaves out a group, you dehumanize them, intentionally or not. Simple. Saying humans have five fingers on their hand dehumanized anyone who doesn't. Saying the sky is blue during sunset just makes you moronic.

No, you don't get to change or erase the meaning of words because you disagree with proven, peer reviewed, long standing science. Sorry. Brain scans show physical differences between genders that don't always correspond to sex, but do correspond to gender.

@newtboy

"Discriminating against people for their legal, culturally accepted, natural behavior makes the person doing the discriminating an asshole. "

Slavery also exists in nature, so it's natural, and once upon a time it was legal and culturally accepted. Discriminating against slave owners though, even back than, is contrary to your claim, quite noble.

"The space study with twins showed that in under a year their genes permanently diverged a full 7%"

You gotta be careful there exactly what is being measured, they did not find that fully 7% of his DNA changed and now was that different. Depending what you measure people also claim that human and chimp DNA only differs by less than 2%...


"Twins aren't genetically identical, even at birth. ...That makes twin studies a piss poor method of gene study."

If you read your own linked article it states:
Twins share the same genes but their environments become more different as they age. This unique aspect of twins makes them an excellent model for understanding how genes and the environment contribute to certain traits, especially complex behaviors and diseases.

If you bother to read the list of peer reviewed articles I linked, they are comparing mono-zygotic twins to di-zygotic twins. The very basic and largely accepted theory being that if a trait has a genetic component, 1000 twins split from the same zygote should share the trait more often than di-zygotic twins.

My argument though really doesn't care much though. I simply argue that beliefs, choices and behaviours are the result of free will and grounds to judge(discriminate) for and against those you deem good or bad, hurtful or harmful. Similarly, gender, race and ethnicity being things that are in zero way the result of free will and beyond the control of an individual and NOT grounds to judge(discriminate) for or against.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

9037 studies demonstrate that red meat causes cancer. I'm well aware that you can manipulate statistics, which is why there is an organisation called the World Cancer Research Fund. They've sifted through 500,000 studies and currently have identified 9037 legitimate studies. wcrf.org/int/research-we-fund/cancer-prevention-recommendations/animal-foods

You might not like vegans or Dr. Greger, but you cannot argue against over 9000 peer reviewed, and medical journal published studies, that are unrelated, done by non-vegans, and then filtered through by non-vegan scientists to assess the quality of the results.

EDIT: They say that more than 300g of red meat a week puts you in serious danger of developing cancer - that quite clearly means it is at least as dangerous as smoking.

You did say he didn't provide peer reviewed evidence, which was in there.

I'm calling the quora article non peer reviewed and off topic at best, and somewhat intentionally misleading, but not necessarily intentionally factually incorrect....but clearly written poorly and with bias. Many of the charts were unlabeled as to what country the stats are from, much less the data source, and the conclusions they drew were questionable.

The others, unavailable without paying...I'll read them if you pay. ;-)

Suicide is homicide, and counts since it's a crime. I had that argument with my brother about school killings last week.

I agree, that was horrible data (within 15%?!), and disingenuous to say "similar magnitude"...I wouldn't have said that, but I didn't write it. Still, the data is telling if imprecise.

It's impossible to be definitive about societal changes with so many factors involved, but the clear correlation is there if not proof of causation. Had they claimed certitude, you would know they're liars. The theory of psychohistory is far from complete, so predicting exactly what drives the actions of societies is still a guessing game at best..

Yes, if, as it seems, those other studies have to average the data over multiple years to make decades long slopes to make their point, but individual year data contradicts it, or intentionally not focus on firearm deaths and/or injuries when discussing efficacy of firearm laws, they're not being fully honest, outright liar might be a bit far....or not.

Comparing different cultures, especially Australia to Nz (or Canada to US) is often meaningless. When your culture doesn't produce a problem, legislation isn't needed to solve it. Talking about Canada to address the USA's gun problem is just time wasting, not useful. We aren't going to become them, so their solutions (not being violent nuts) won't work here. Nice if it would, but how do you legislate sanity into a culture?

You're kidding, right? You dismiss snopes which clearly you didn't read since you claimed he offered no peer reviewed data that was included there, but you link quora.com and snidely tell me to read twice?! Lol.

From quora.com "Quora is not a source of information or an editor of information. Quora is a forum, just like yahoo answers. So basically Quora is neither credible and neither not credible."

Not so good, absolutely not peer reviewed, but I read it anyway....and I note it repeatedly misleadingly shows OVERALL homicide rates, not the topic (firearm homicides), except at the very end to claim looking at just firearm homicide rates when discussing firearm laws and their efficacy is dumb because murder is murder, and to try to pretend the trend hadn't reversed and shot up for years before the law change at the fastest rate on the chart, and reversed sharply again shortly afterwards, instead claiming a relatively steady decline (I guess hoping we won't look closely at the graph).
Looking at just firearm homicide rates seems to tell a different story.

The other two you mentioned weren't linked, so I bothered to search out the first to find it's behind pay walls, so unavailable...not wasting my time twice. I'll have to assume they're the same caliber.
You claim you personally produced some peer reviewed studies, what about them? You must have them available for free where they were reviewed and published, no? So far, you aren't convincing.

Snopes included excerpts from at least two peer reviewed studies directly on topic that seem to contradict your contention....why dismiss it offhand?

In a peer-reviewed paper published by American Law and Economics Review in 2012, researchers Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University found that in the decade following the NFA, firearm homicides (both suicides and intentional killings) in Australia had dropped significantly:

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test[ed] whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise [somewhere between 35% and 50%].

Similarly, Dr. David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found in 2011 that the NFA had been “incredibly successful in terms of lives saved”:

For Australia, the NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.

The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings, as well as firearm suicide. In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4). In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33)

Additional evidence strongly suggests that the buyback causally reduced firearm deaths. First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.

Are you calling them liars?

No. While we're both wrong about their primary purpose (which after looking it up on their website is education and training people in firearms use), their other purpose is (from their about page):

"as a major political force and as America's foremost defender of Second Amendment rights"

https://home.nra.org/about-the-nra/

"Downvote for lying".

Oh really? Lol.

I've produced peer reviewed research supporting my views. StukaFox produced none.

There are opposing research papers of course (it is a contentious issue). But it takes a very short sighted person to produce a limited set of ABS data (lol, 2 years) and a Snopes article to declare that I'm wrong. Keep in mind I mentioned in my first comment that there were studies on this topic.

Thanks StukaFox, you managed to produce no peer reviewed papers but have claimed some sort of research victory because you got some answers from Google. Nice. I'd hire you as a researcher for sure.

So I mentioned the Australian and New Zealand legislation. Lets see if there is a peer reviewed paper that examines this.

McPhedran, Samara; Baker, Jeanine (2011). "Mass shootings in Australia and New Zealand: A descriptive study of incidence". Justice Policy Journal.

New Zealand didn't enact Australia's draconian laws. You can buy an AR15 there with high capacity magazines. They also haven't had a mass shooting in 20 years. The peer reviewed paper examines this and comes to the conclusion I stated above.

I see you have some ABS data. Nice. I use the ABS all the time.

Oh wait. You took only the last two years of data for a data set that spans over 40 years. Bad form mate. Lets see if the rate of firearms related homicide was reducing at a similar rate before the legislation changes using a much larger time period.

Lucky for me someone else already did this to make my day easier. They used Australian Institute of Criminology (the official government source) data over a 30 year period. It shows the rate did not change with the legislation change in 1997.

Nice examination of the issue on Quora

Are there peer reviewed papers which come to the same conclusion? Yes.

Lee, Wang-Sheng; Suardi, Sandy (2010). "The Australian Firearms Buyback and Its Effect on Gun Deaths". Contemporary Economic Policy. 28 (1): 65–79

Jeanine Baker, Samara McPhedran; Gun Laws and Sudden Death: Did the Australian Firearms Legislation of 1996 Make a Difference?, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 47, Issue 3, 1 May 2007, Pages 455–469

Chicago? I wasn't going to mention it. I'm not American. I am Australian.

Conclusion: go wipe the egg off of your face.

Edit: forgot to answer your question.

"What conclusions can we draw from this? "

We can conclude that for a short period of time the homicide by firearm rate went up. Just as it goes up and down for any short period of time in most countries. This does not negate the TREND, which in the USA has been downward year on year for the last 25 years. The rate of firearm ownership has increased over the same 25 year period.

"...if I didn't have my friends at church, knowing they are going through the same thing as I am. I'd feel so alone. I'd feel like I'd give up." And so the trap is set, peer pressure to stay in the church and not open their minds and hearts to other options.

This is so far beyond creepy... I mean I get the pledge to stay a virgin until you are married. If that's your wish, then go with it, but this is carrying that well beyond what is reasonable. I'm almost cool with the idea of trying to get the father's approval, though that shouldn't be an absolute, as the girl isn't the father's property. She still should have the right to choose on her own... This is one of the things I don't get about these sort of movements, removal of choice, the key thing that God set up for us, when you force that choice, then you remove it from the person and say God is too weak to convict the person of the wrong choice. It is partly why I moved from Republican to Libertarian because I couldn't deal with the idea of telling people how to live their life, as it made God seem weak, as if He couldn't convict them.

I'd like to hope that even at the height of my evangelical life that I would have found this too creepy. Even when I was in Promise Keepers and traveling great distances to Promise Keepers meetings, and to see Benny Hinn and other evangelical preachers. I fear sometimes I would probably find it creepy but would be willing to dismiss it too easily...

Where's the purity balls for moms and sons? Of course, the woman has no authority in these types of homes.

The first time it was presented it was in the American Statistician a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering statistics. The other two* they don't say where they were published. She published it in what...Parade Magazine. Is there really any surprise the one read by a large portion of the general public got push back opposed to the other, A PEER REVIEWED SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL.

(edit) *Journal of Economics Perspectives and Bridge Today

Was she getting some push back solely because she was a women? It's possible, but i can't see it based on this video or the linked article. Not that i wouldn't be surprised though. There are always some in the population with biases against different groups of people. Women being one of them.