Men, like women, are simply human, and therefore confused about what they want. They want it all, even if their desires are mutually contradictory. They want a sex demon in bed who becomes a prim and proper lady on command. They want someone independent who can think for herself, but who will also cook for you every day. They want the aliveness and freshness of an uninhibited woman and yet they also want proper decorum and don't want to participate in embarrassing situations which would become natural when spending much time together with a very spontaneous and uninhibited woman. Is this madness? Of course it is. We are crazy. All of us. We want all the best qualities of both the sane and the insane minds. We want safety and freedom. Etc.

I basically agree with everything you said. All the talk we hear along the lines of "she was asking for it" is complete garbage, no doubt about it. But at the same time, it's idiotic to deny the fact that our society is quite lopsided and asymmetric with regard to sexuality. We, as a society, generally don't have the same expectations of women as we do of men, just as you have noted. For example, a woman is expected to look good, but a man is not (not to the same high standard anyway). A chest is seen as mundane and boring in a man, but intimate, sexy and alluring in a woman. It's crazy to try to pretend this isn't happening. And sometimes this lopsidedness hurts women and sometimes it hurts men too. We are silly creatures and we often make life harder than it needs to be.

Men's clothes generally (not always) have a different function from women's. Men's clothes are not sexualized, they tend not to hug body lines, they don't reveal much skin, if any, etc. The aesthetic purpose of men's clothes is to communicate status to other men. It's non-sexual. It says, "Look at my expensive and exclusive suit." And in a community which values such displays, this raises status.

Women's clothes often (not always) hug body curves, expose the female anatomy much more so than men's, often expose significant areas of skin and also often close to places conventionally considered "intimate." Women's clothing of this sort is aimed to communicate sexiness to men. It's not meant toward other women. And it's not meant to communicate status. Just sexiness. If you notice, a woman of high status, like the queen, will generally wear conservative clothing which is similar to men's in that it hides the body's shape, doesn't expose much skin, etc.

Is this retarded? Yes it is. Is our society dumb for falling to this? Sure it is. Do women's shape or skin have to be always sexualized? No they do not, but we often do because we are idiots and it's a habit that doesn't go away easily.

LOL, anonalpha.

Ad hominem is not an insult. It's a (invalid) form of argumentation. The form of ad hominem looks like this:

"Because the speaker's character is flawed, the speaker's argument is invalid."

The second form looks like this:

"Because the speaker's character is impeccable, the speaker's argument must be valid."

Calling someone names, or disrespecting someone is not ad hominem.

I suggest you visit duckduckgo.com and search for "physicalism." Here's the entry from Standford:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Get a clue. As for "eternal" you are simply hopeless. That's a word even a child should understand. You shouldn't be confused about it and you shouldn't require a trip to the search engine for this. How did you get it so wrong? I know how. You don't care about anything I say. You just want to push your scientific claptrap at any cost.

Sorry friend, but you are simply ignorant. When I talked about metaphysics, you started to talk about some nonsense like planet orbits and such. It's obvious you are way over your head in this discussion. You don't know what physicalism is about and you aren't intellectually prepared to have a productive discussion on this topic.

Then I talked about eternalism, and you started talking about dinosaurs. So once again, the same thing happened as with physicalism. You don't really comprehend what the word "eternal" means. You seem to think it means slightly longer into the past. You can't seem to comprehend what infinity means. So you bring shame to science by talking in this way. You validate and confirm my complaints with this sort of ignorant behavior.

Personal experience. Philosophical analysis of phenomena. There are truths that exist beyond convention. Science cannot discover such truths because the demand for verifiability is a demand for the maintenance of and participation in convention. If that's all you want, then that's fine. For example, I know what tea tastes like. That knowledge is a very valid knowledge for me. It's not scientific. There is no way to verify scientifically it for anyone. It's not less true simply because it's not scientific. In fact, most truths in life are non-scientific.

The claims of science that are verifiable are of this sort "if you do this, this happens, and if you do that, that happens as a result." Those are the things you can verify. What you cannot verify is the physicalist metaphysics that are tacitcly accepted as true by most scientists. Also what you cannot verify is that the cause effect relationship is eternal, or otherwise underpinned by an eternal rule or law. So while you can verify that if you do this, this happens today and perhaps reasonably next year, can you verify that it's what eternally happens? No, of course not. Science may well be a study of local phenomena rather than universal phenomena. And by local I mean restricted by time and not only by space.

Science is very useful in its domain. It has a pragmatic purpose. The problem with science is when its claims are stretched beyond this domain. So, universalism is not something science can claim. It's an assumption that scientists often make, sure. Science studies here and now, but it can't study what happens trillions of light years away from here or whatever is beyond the light cone (except from our viewpoint, which may not be a valid viewpoint for such study), and nor can it study the conditions that will be present in this space 100 trillion years in the future. So science doesn't give the kind of eternalistic answers that religions attempt to give. And science often tries to sneak its physicalist metaphysics through the back door, without analysis.

I am very much down on organized religion. So by no means would I defend religion overall. Most religion is crazy but for reasons that have very little to do with science. Religion is simply incoherent. It has no internal consistency and it has all kinds of purely logical and moral flaws that have nothing to do with science. But science is also flawed. Science often presents itself as the only valid way of knowing something, and that's simply not true.

Great post. I'd like to respond to some of your thoughts:

The truly wealthy are only a tiny tiny minority of the population. All property claims function only by mutual consent of the public. So the wealthy, by themselves, are not really in a position to prevent a wealth tax from being instituted and collected. They need at least some amount of public support. They don't need anything close to unanimous support, but they at least need the support of say 10-20% of the population. They at least need an agreeable pool of people to hire mercenaries from, mercenaries who will defend their property by force from the disagreeing population. If no one at all is willing to defend the property of the wealthy, then the "wealthy" person is just one frail and fallible human being and is effectively powerless.

So the public consent is a huge deal. If the public consent is widely withdrawn on moral grounds, then the amount of friction and struggle needed to maintain enormous wealth is going to skyrocket.

This situation is similar to a thief fleeing the country. Yes, the thief may take a big hoard of gold with her, but she also takes all the thieving activities with her as well. It's a short-term loss and a long-term gain. As long as the country has sane, pragmatic and aware trade policies for dealing with other nations, there is no easy way for externally located super-wealthy to exploit people inside the nation who isn't consenting to exploitation.

As long as people believe in themselves (which is a big if), they don't need the nanny-type super-wealthy to hand out jobs. Jobs exists purely as function of demand. If there is demand, there are jobs. The super-wealthy do not create jobs. Instead demand creates jobs and the super-wealthy position themselves as intermediaries between demand for goods and services and job creation. In computer network security terms, the super-wealthy is a man-in-the-middle attack on job creation. They interpose themselves between demand and job creation. But they don't interpose themselves purely by their own power. They do so with our willing, grudging, brainwashed, or apathetic consent.

True. But this isn't a real impediment. For example, we all know that going 120 miles per hour is dangerous on highways not purposefully designed for such speed. At the same time we also know that going 20 miles per hour is too slow. But where would we draw the line? Well, in reality it's not a problem. We draw an arbitrary line somewhere in a reasonable spot. Not everyone is going to agree. Not everyone will think it's perfect. But in these matters perfection is not necessary. You draw the line anywhere within reason and people will work with it. So does everyone agree that 75 miles per hour is the right number for the speed limit? Of course not. But it's within reason so for most people it's not something worth arguing about.

Another example of this is age of consent for sexual intercourse. Obviously 5 year olds cannot give meaningful consent. And 25 year olds certainly can. But where would you draw the line? It seems like one of those "impossible" problems, but in reality it's very easy. In reality it actually doesn't matter that much. Be it 16 or 18 years of age, you just plop down some number which is somewhat arbitrary but also within reason, and people work with it.

The point is that a system doesn't have to be perfect in order to be workable. So, as another example, stopping every single crook is not a requirement for the police force. If we thought that one crook escaping justice implied total failure, we'd never bother with policing to begin with. But we don't think that way. We accept less than perfect systems as long as they have a positive overall effect. And the same is true here. We don't have to catch every single tax evader. We don't have to make sure we collect every last penny of what is owed. As long as taxes are collected within a reasonable ballpark, it's OK and it's a workable system.

As a final note, I personally wouldn't want to tax all personal holdings universally. I propose to only tax wealth beyond a certain fairly large amount. This way, if you manage to accumulate say 10 million dollars of wealth, let it be tax-free. You can keep it, pass it to your descendants, and basically do more or less what you want with it. Once you get beyond 10 million dollars, wealth taxes begin to gradually grow. I'm just throwing a 10 million figure out there as a starting point. It's not something definite. What I am trying to say is that I am not against some people being wealthy. Nor am I against all wealth inequality. I realize people aren't equal in all respects and we shouldn't force them to be completely equal. But I also realize that an extreme wealth inequality is immoral and corrosive to society and it has to be dealt with one way or another.

So if my blinds are shut, I must be guilty? Can't I just enjoy privacy anymore?

Ugh... most of the games on your list are terrible from my point of view. And even the non-terrible games are lukewarm rather than hot. Again, just my opinion. I certainly agree with those who say there is practically nothing worth playing on Wii.

Instead of "explained by" I think you mean "matched with" or "correlated with."

Now there's a web page written by a douchebag full of hot air. Chromium is open source and distributing your version of the same software with a few changes is not a "rip-off", it's part of the freedom that the open source programmers enjoy. And for this exercise of freedom he decided to sic patent trolls on the Iron's dev? I hope that's not for real.