If it were actually this bad, people would be mass emigrating to other countries. This is what happens in other countries that are actual cesspools instead of imaginary cesspools. Where do they come? America, yup. If they can get it. Funny enough, it's a pain in the ass to do it legally.

Don't factor your son's draft registration into your decision-making. There is absolutely no will in Washington to reinstate the draft, and to do so after so many decades without it would be political suicide. And even if that changes somehow before he ages out of eligibility, a dual-citizen raised and living abroad wouldn't have much trouble getting a deferment (which goes double if we're at war with Belgium or Sweden).

Geography certainly has had a huge effect on societal development: the Hawaiian islands' warm (year-round) climate, fertile volcanic soil, and remote location free from competition from outside cultures (until Captain Cook) enabled their culture to develop this way, no doubt.

However, the point is that we can look at societies like this, especially isolated ones, and see that human behavior does not have to conform to a certain pattern seen in other (typically western) societies, and instead we can see some extremely different dynamics. This proves that what we think of as "natural" may not be natural at all, just a product of our geography and society.

I'm not even going to bother looking at some bullshit from the Christian Broadcasting Network. You're talking about a business run by a man who's a con artist, blames 9/11 on gay people, and uses his riches (from all those tithes he insists people owe to him) to finance business interests in Africa with the likes of Robert Mugabe. You're a fool if you think anything to do with him has any veracity at all.

a) Go back far enough in time, and the Hawaiians "stole" it from someone.

This is quite likely false. All the available evidence points towards Polynesians being the first settlers on the various Pacific islands. Unless you want to argue that they stole it from whatever native land animals lived there (boars? I don't think Hawaii ever had a lot of fauna).

That article says the autopilot was disconnected and "[The investigation] will help us to understand whether there was a problem with the Airbus or in the training received by flight crew in manual aircraft handling at high altitude."

In other words they don't know what happened, but at the time of the near stall the plane was no longer under the control of the auto pilot. BTW if a plane suddenly finds itself overspeeding, climbing to lose speed is the right thing to do.

Can you cite one please?

Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.

Not quite. It's "yes" because most people would be unable to get over their fear of flying in an entirely autonomous plane, not because we need heroic pilots to override the computer when things go wrong.

Consider that about half of all aviation accidents are traced to pilot error. The percentage of crashes caused by autopilot error is zero.

I have to disagree about women fighting over the alpha males. Not all women are that attractive, so in a free-for-all society, the most desirable people of both sexes are probably going to want to spend their time with each other. Why would the alpha males want to run around banging every homely chick who asks? So those women will be forced to start looking at alternatives unless they want to be celibate.

It is also an excellent way to enforce the equality that is so important to large ant like societies. To sustain a large ant like society we need ways to turn individuals into cogs, I would hazard that marriage does this.

Well given that monogamous marriage has mostly failed these days for various reasons, do you have any thoughts about how future society needs to develop?

I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.

I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.

Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.

Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.

It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.

the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.

The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.

But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.

I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.

The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.

You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?

I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.

The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.

I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.

That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.

I do agree we have a population problem at present, but it's because we don't use our resources well and we don't manage ourselves well; we still have to coexist with our natural environment, and we're screwing that up badly. We should be able to develop the knowledge and technology to coexist better with the environment, and later perhaps build our own habitats (including in space) instead of taxing the natural one here so badly, but for now we're acting like it's 1500 even though our population is far, far larger and our technologies far more polluting.

That's because you have a secure future. The people who buy lottery tickets...don't. A couple of bucks to buy some hope in a grey life? That's what they're buying. Why not?

But let's all remember it's socially acceptable to shit all over less-intelligent human beings, in fact to deny their humanity altogether. Because what else do we say about people who buy lottery tickets, or shop at Wal-Mart?