I agree with @AParanoidEmu, you have a good chance of upping this number. I'd get a copy of the school's statistic on the $72,500 to back it up at the negotiating table. I'd counter offer with higher than $72,500 myself.

If you have higher than average GPA or if you had internships involved in AE, definitely go higher than the average!

If the average of $72,500 is OK with you, you can let yourself be negotiated down to that or even to $70K if that's acceptable to you (I don't know why it would be).

Also know what amount you will walk from (walk from the negotiation entire with a "Sorry, but buh-bye, no deal"). There is always such a level - personally I'd put the walk-away threshold at $72,500 but I'm a risk-thriving person, always had internships and high GPA in school, etc.

Other tips - sorry, yet another Wall of Text:

All negotiations have a similar structure and set of rules. Basically you have a "game" played with each side having a turn with 3 options:

• Stay in the game, accept offered bid, game ends
  
• Stay in the game, make counter-bid (including a null-bid, same-as-last-time), game continues
  
• Get out of the game (walk away), game ends
  
  This is bootstrapped by a opening bid made by one of the two sides. The game iterates until the game ends. BTW ALL economic transactions and romantic/sexual relationships are also negotiations exactly the same as this. Something to think about if you aren't getting laid regularly or if you are in a bad relationship.
  
  All you have to do is know what you are willing to accept, counter or walk from. These are determined by stakes (pay, benefits, commitments, etc.) and resource levels (your time to play the game and money opportunity cost of playing). You should always enter any negotiation knowing what these thresholds are ahead of time.
  
  You can determine the thresholds based on
  
  

1. comparables (what others that are "comparable" are paid) - like how houses are initially bid, or
   
   
2. your own financial needs (cost-based pricing, your cash flow costs and obligations) which usually "leaves money on the table" in their favor
   
   
3. your intuition and opinion of what you are worth and what you think they will accept ("what the market will bear" which is not "provable" except empirically but is just as reasonable as anything for a negotiation - you have to be brave enough to be able to "walk" based on your intuition/opinion about this) - this is actually the maximizing solution and also the one that requires the most knowledge/research and risk.
   
   The party offering money (aka Buyer) should always low-ball their initial offer and counter-offers. The party offering non-money (aka Seller) should always high-ball their initial offer and counter-offers. This has to do with the fungibility of money over pretty much all else - it's bias in the power relationship.
   
   It also is the only way for both parties to find the deal "intuitively/emotionally acceptable"; go in the "wrong direction" and "non-monotonic counter-offer progression" and there will be "sour grapes" on one side even after the deal is closed which will often cause problems down the road.
   
   Also related to this: the point is not to close the negotiation quickly. This actually both signals, and is in fact an indication of, a side's situational/negotiation weakness. Aka "Blood in the water". You have time (unless you don't) so having several iterations of the above game is a good thing.
   
   In other words, your 1st counter offer should be obviously unacceptable with the expectation it will be rejected and trigger a counter-offer but not a "walk away" on their side: above the Buyer's "Reasonable Zone" but below the Buyer's "Insult Zone" in the Buyer's "Credible Zone" (see PDF below). The "Insult Zone" is where a side is jarred to the point where they realize they are wasting their time playing the game and should walk away (quit).
   
   And the $66K should be obviously unacceptable to you - nearly in if not in your "Insult Zone". I'd say $80K is still in the Buyer's Credible Zone, possibly in the high Reasonable Zone. I'd guess the $66k is actually the Buyer's "Top Line" offer.
   
   So you iterate with their offer to your counter offer (and assuming they reject $80K):
   
   ---
   
   "So you won't do $80K. What can you offer that is better than $66K. BTW, the recent historic salaries of MSAE graduates from my school has averaged $72,500."
   
   lay a print-out of the schools statistics on the table
   
   "I've had internships between terms which means I have more experience that your average graduate. I also have a very good, above average GPA."
   
   lay your resume on the table
   
   "So I while my $80K number is quite fair IMO, what can you do instead?"
   
   And they counter-counter-offer with a new number (the game continues, now with them having the idea that your "Bottom Line" is closer to $72,500) or they "null" counter offer ("we can't go above $66K"). Again, what is your "walk away" threshold? I'd definitely walk at this point unless there are significant non-money things they can counter with, but that's me.
   
   So consider asking/proposing for things that aren't cash money to pad you initial or counter offers (especially if they null offer below your walk away threshold). This could include benefits or it could be vacations or sabbaticals or trade/academic conference trips or perks a nice window office and an equipment budget.
   
   "OK so you can't go above $66K. I really liked the folks I interviewed with and it seems like a good work environment, but I can't accept that salary. Maybe there are other benefits you can offer to make up for the gap in your salary offer. "
   
   This is a not subtle dig (and quite intentional, but nicely framed) which they should pick up on and put them on the defensive, at least in their minds. They want to be liked because you just said you liked them BUT - you put the BUT in their mouths based on what they said/offered which says they are not reciprocating with your liking them. You may pick up on it in body language. Being put on the defense will cause them to agree to things they may not normally agree or plan to; that's a good thing. Just get it in writing.
   
   "You normally offer 2 weeks of vacation per year after a 6 month probation period: how about we nullify the probation completely and you give me 4 week of vacation per year immediately. That works out to $2640 extra per year effectively."
   
   That bumps you up to $68,640 right there. Their objection will be that the "salary curve doesn't allow that" to which you can say "So let's make a new position, title and salary curve then" which BTW I've had done for me in the past!! It is possible but it requires imagination and authority on their part - another possible "walk away criteria". I used 50 weeks because that's when you'd normally be working for them productively with 2 weeks vacation. But before they can answer...
   
   "There are 3 professional conferences I'd like to regularly attend. If you guaranteed my annual attendance with hotel, transportation and meals for myself and my wife/SO, that would be another $6K per year. I'd be willing to pick up the expenses for my wife other than the hotel, transportation and meals, of course."
   
   Obviously you need to be prepared for all of this with your own numbers. It's like studying for an exam you'd actually like to pass, right? Did you notice the sleight-of-hand on getting your wife/SO covered? Of course the "extra expense" both quite reasonable and costing you nothing but it only seems fair to include the other things for her since she is affected by their offer gap also and they need to make up the gap in their offer somehow.
   
   "And to really do my job here well, I'd really need to have the new Acme Boundary-layer Characterization System 5000 in my lab and plenty of computing power to drive the analysis. If you could provide that I have one of those, say, within the next 2-3 months, and give me a $200K/year capital budget, I could ignore the remaining difference in salary from what I think is perfectly reason and acceptable as an industry norm."
   
   Get this in writing also. And the benefit to them is that they get to keep the Acme 5000 and any capital anyway and it help them with a productivity issue. So it doesn't actually cost them and might be nearly a sunk cost anyway. But it will make your work life so much easier and more pleasant.
   
   ---
   
   There are so many negotiation tricks I'm using above I can't really gory detail them here. Get a copy of Cohen and Caldini, read them, think about this situation in the context of these books. Also look at this negotiation PDF, especially the "7 secret weapons" (from Caldini IIRC).
   
   Get these non-money things in writing as part of closing the deal. Ideally in the final offer letter or in a written employment agreement your write for them yourself if they won't write it in or they wiggle with "we can handle this later".
   
   If they throw out the idea of a formal written agreement to the extras then minimally write a "letter/memorandum of understanding" that says the same basic thing and certified mail it to them. If you have a friend who's a lawyer, ask him/her to send it to the company for you on firm letterhead.
   
   A MOU/LOU of understanding isn't as strong as a contract but it does have significant legal standing so you can at least use it as a negotiating tool later on if you need to - particularly if they go back on the agreed terms and you need to bitch-slap them to get them back on track.
   

I've read and studied under Lisa Diamond. The research they're referring to is likely the Sexual Fluidity of Women. Basically the study shows that women can form emotional and sexual relationships across the gender spectrum throughout their lives. However, it also shows that during those times they express specific identities, or often shed all identities. So, it's not that you could take a lesbian and turn her straight, that is unless you were going for the long troll and waited 50 years and maybe she might have a shift in sexual orientation.

This isn't the first time that this study has been misrepresented. The AFA really likes to tout this study as some proof that you choose to be gay. The difference between the AFA and Paul Clement is that Paul Clement is educated enough to actually understand the study.

You are less likely to die by violence today than at any point in human history.

There's a chapter in Nurture Shock about why kids lie and what can be done about it. The authors suggest that the typical strategies to promote truth-telling backfire.

This part struck me as maybe related to what's going on for you:

>Lying also becomes a way to increase a child's power and sense of control -- by manipulating friends with teasing, by bragging to assert his status, and by learning that he can fool his parents.

>Thrown into elementary school, many kids begin lying to their peers as a coping mechanism: it's a way to vent frustration or get attention. They might be attempting to compensate, feeling that they're slipping behind their peers. Any sudden spate of lying or dramatic increase in lying is a sign that something has changed in that child's life, in a way that troubles him: 'Lying is a symptom -- often of a bigger problem behavior,' explained Talwar. 'It's a strategy to keep themselves afloat,' (82-83).

The lying about mundane stuff strikes me as your daughter trying to assert some control in her life.

So what do?

You know the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf? And you know the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree? There were studies done to see which would prevent/reduce lies. It's the cherry tree story.

>The shepard boy ends up suffering the ultimate punishment [he gets eaten by the wolf for his lying], but that lies get punished is not news to children. When asked if lies are always wrong, 92% of five year olds say yes. And when asked why lies are wrong, most say the problem with lying is that you get in trouble for it. In that sense, young kids process the risk of lying by considering only their own self-protection. It takes years for the children to understand lying on a more sophisticated moral ground. It isn't until age eleven that the majority demonstrate awareness of its harm to others; at that point, 48% say the problem with lying is that it destroys trust, and 22% say it carries guilt. Even then, a third still say the problem with lying is being punished.

[...]

>Increasing the threat of punishment for lying only makes children hyperaware of the potential personal cost. It distracts the child from learning how his lies impact others.

Even if you say, "I won't be upset if you lied, just tell me the truth," the child is still wary. They don't trust your promise and want to get back in your good graces. They don't want to make themselves happy, they want to make you happy.

So you say, "I will not be upset with you if you [did whatever], and if you tell the truth I will be really happy," (86).

It's both immunity from the lie and a clear route back to your good graces. This is why the cherry tree story works better than the wolf one at reducing lying. Little George Washington receive both immunity and praise for telling the truth.

Finally, you should try avoiding putting your daughter in no-win situations. "Did you brush your teeth?" You know she didn't. "Did you leave the bread out?" You know she did. The only way out of this is for her to lie to you (in her mind at least). The book describes this as testing the child's honesty unnecessarily.

So in those situations, rather than test her honesty, just tell her again to brush her teeth or put the bread away. Essentially, you're not giving her the chance to lie.

Then you're going to have to address the avoiding toothbrushing and the leaving the bread open. But at least she won't be lying about it.

TL;DR: Stop setting her up to lie to you. Don't ask questions you know the answer to. You know she didn't brush her teeth. Don't bother asking. She's lying to avoid punishment and to get back in your good graces because she wants to please you/mom/dad/whoever.

The book cited as evidence is by that well-known titan in the field of psychology, Anonymous Conservative:

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933

It's published by Federalist Publications of MacClenny, FL. That publishing house does not appear to have published any other works.

Hilariously, this anonymously self-published 'science' book has been cited by blogger John Press in a screed about how the left hates science.

I am obsessed. Here is my current collection:

Most of these you can find on thepiratebay / etc, but I own a hard copy of all of these except for The Mystery Method, which I read probably 5 times before I found Magic Bullets (actually don't own that either, just the pdf). I'll add to this list if I think of more.

Must Reads:

Magic Bullets - Savoy ==>> [Torrent] it's expensive!

• This book is so excellent. It's like a PUA encyclopedia. It walks you through the process, and cites every major text along the way.. none of this "my way works best" crap, but not afraid to make judgments either. For pickup books that employ some form of the M3 Model (however loosely.. which I think means: everyone except Ross Jeffries), this is the authoritative text. If you have an approach that is proven, important, and credible, then it is probably cited in this book.
  
  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert Cialdini
  
  
• I got this book because it is #1 on this list. Turns out, it is the modern version of Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People (see review below).. only this time, it's by someone who knows a thing or two about applied psychology (which either didn't exist back then, or was too under-developed to matter). This guy freaking went undercover as a used car salesman, working with fundraisers, etc. Interestingly enough, I bought this book in the same order as The Game, and in chapter 1 Strauss mentions reading Cialdini's book to prepare for a trip to Belgrade with Mystery, which was his formal introduction into the PUA community.
  
  The Art of Seduction - Robert Greene
  
  
• I'm not done with this one yet, but I will say this: if you have a conscience, don't read this. It really is a fascinating study of seduction, but it does focus on seduction as a tool to victimize people.. That said, unlike your typical pick-up type book which does not bother to categorize gamers' personality types, this book categorizes different "types" of seducers. This is extremely helpful because you can figure out what type of seducer fits you best, and what things you need to focus on to improve your game.
  
  How to Win Friends & Influence People - Dale Carnegie
  
  
• This book has sold over 15 million copies. It was originally written in 1937, but has been revised once or twice since it became the best selling self-help type book of all time, which it probably still is. He walks you through the basic principles of how to motivate people.. what works, what doesn't.. etc. Fun, easy, captivating read. It looks thick, but I think I unintentionally read it cover to cover in one sitting the first time I read it in college.. so it's a quick read.
  
  
  Should reads:
  
  The Game - Neil Strauss
  
  
• I think this is one of the best selling pick-up type books. I liked reading it, but it was less of a tutorial book and more of an autobiography.. it does get the job done though. It also is a very entertaining read, and if you doubt that PUA stuff actually works, this will prove to you otherwise because Strauss was a very timid and ugly mofo, but he fucked Jenna Jameson.
  
  The Mystery Method : How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed - Mystery, Chris Odom, Neil Strauss
  
  
• This introduced me into the world of PUA my senior year of college when I inadvertently stumbled upon a torrent of it (I was probably looking for something to jerk off to. How poetic). I downloaded it just to skim through it skeptically, but this book eventually introduced me to a whole new world. This is an excellent staple / beginner's text, even though I now recommend Magic Bullets because it is so much more objective and inclusive of alternate styles and approaches along the way.
  
  How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed - Ross Jeffries
  
  
• Not done with this yet, but Ross Jeffries is a freak (not meant to be insulting to him). I have no doubt that his methods are effective, but they are very different. And he really seems a bit evil, as opposed to merely mischievous like most other PUAs are. I haven't decided how incompatible, if not just different, his methods are with the Mystery / Strauss crowd.. but then again, I have never field tested any of his methods myself.
  
  Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation - Charna Halpern, Del Close, Kim Johnson
  
  
• A close friend of mine who studied improv in New York lent me this, and I forgot about it until recently -- but it is a very short but brilliant book about comedy. I'm listening now to David DeAngelo's Cock Comedy series, and I realized that almost everything he's saying is straight out of this little text. It's not really something essential for pick-up, which is why I wouldn't put it in Must Reads, but it is excellent nonetheless.
  
  
  Meh, they're alright:
  
  The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction - Mystery, Neil Strauss
  
  
• You can definitely get some good stuff out of this book, but the whole thing comes across as an excuse for Mystery to brag about how awesome he is. He seriously spends an entire chapter (maybe more) telling a story about him bragging to other PUAs. He does deserve it though, the man is the single most influential PUA ever, if not the most successful in the field.
  
  Rules of the Game - Neil Strauss
  
  
• This is one of those books that you read once a day for 30 days, and write down statements of intent right in the book like "it is my goal to lose my virginity before my next birthday in 3 months." Probably good for beginners, but I skimmed through this after having been gaming in the field for several months.
  
  Haven't read yet:
  
  What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People - Joe Navarro, Marvin Karlins
  
  
• This looks really good.
  
  NLP: The New Technology of Achievement - NLP Comprehensive
  
  Easy Mind-Reading Tricks - Robert Mandelberg, Ferruccio Sardella
  
  Palm Reading for Beginners: Find Your Future in the Palm of Your Hand (For Beginners (Llewellyn's)) - Richard Webster
  
  There are also some good videos out there (links are to torrents. these are all several hundred $$):
  
  
  Excellent Videos
  
  The Annihilation Method - Neil Strauss
  
  
• I met a guy who said he was looking around his apartment for things to sell so he could afford the $375 this costs. apparently he didn't think to check thepiratebay ;)
  
  Mystery and Style
  
  
• The videos of Mystery in here are just excellent. It's very interesting to see Mystery actually interacting with other people (not in a set), since he is the god of pick-up.
  
  Decent Videos
  
  Psychic Influence - Ross Jeffries
  
  
• This is interesting.. I'm not much of a Jeffries guy though, mostly because he's the most oddball of the group, and I haven't studied his material enough.

Texts and Reference Books

Days in the Lives of Social Workers

DSM-5

Child Development, Third Edition: A Practitioner's Guide

Racial and Ethnic Groups

Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording

Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond

[Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life]
(https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Feelings-Harbinger-Self-Help-Workbook/dp/1608822087/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3ZW7PRW5TK2PB0MDR9R3)

Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model

[The Clinical Assessment Workbook: Balancing Strengths and Differential Diagnosis]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534578438/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_38?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ARCO1HGQTQFT8)

Helping Abused and Traumatized Children

Essential Research Methods for Social Work

Navigating Human Service Organizations

Privilege: A Reader

Play Therapy with Children in Crisis

The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives

The School Counseling and School Social Work Treatment Planner

Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood

Deviant Behavior

Social Work with Older Adults

The Aging Networks: A Guide to Programs and Services

[Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society: Bridging Research and Practice]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415884810/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change

Ethnicity and Family Therapy

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Perspectives on Development and the Life Course

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Generalist Social Work Practice: An Empowering Approach

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents

DBT Skills Manual

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets

Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need

Novels

[A People’s History of the United States]
(https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511070674&sr=1-1&keywords=howard+zinn&dpID=51pps1C9%252BGL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)


The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tuesdays with Morrie

The Death Class <- This one is based off of a course I took at my undergrad university

The Quiet Room

Girl, Interrupted

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Flowers for Algernon

Of Mice and Men

A Child Called It

Go Ask Alice

Under the Udala Trees

Prozac Nation

It's Kind of a Funny Story

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Bell Jar

The Outsiders

To Kill a Mockingbird

How to Judge a Book Without Even Reading It

Do you think librarians read all those books they buy?? Heck no. Yes, collection development librarians rely heavily on library review journals, but you can pretty successfully judge a book before you even read the intro. And how!

1. Try a Little Intellectual Snobbery

Basically with this you need to try to smell out the people who are saying “I’m not a historian but…” when they start their books. Who wrote this thing and why? Is this a historian going for tenure, is this maybe a historian trying to write more popular history, is this a historian at the end of their life putting out a magnum opus, is this a journalist? Who published it, academic press or regular press? Does this person have Something to Prove with this history book?

Now, I’m a little leery of recommending this method first, because I’ve seen some pretty shitty books published by big academic houses from heavily degreed people, and I’ve seen some very nice historical work put out by tiny publishers you’ve never heard of or self-published, and written by people who just decided to write a book because they cared deeply about the history of something that few others cared about. Good work absolutely stands on its own merits, and independent scholars are important animals in the academic ecosystem. But there is a correlation here, and not necessarily a causation, between academics working with academic publishing houses and the production of rigorous history, and you can lean on it a little.

2. Give it the Vulcan Citations Pinch

Flip to the back of the book. Where does the actual book stop and the endmatter start? Basically the more endmatter the better. You want maybe a good solid half centimeter of paper between your fingers, preferably more. If you start seeing appendices in addition to citations and index that’s very good.

3. Scope-to-Cred Ratio

This one’s hard to quantify but basically, the more modest the book’s scope the more modest of arguments and credentials the author needs to pull it off. So a book about say the importance of paperback books for soldiers in WWII, this is a pretty modest scope, and it’s not making any very bold claims, there’s no real reason to be suspicious about the arguments made in this book, although it’s absolutely a popular history work. A book trying to explain the history of everything, get suspicious.

4. Read the Intro

Okay after the first three bits you’ve decided this book has merited your attention enough to open the thing. The intro to a book should give you the outline of the major argument and you can decide whether the argument passes a basic smell test of not being total bullshit. If you find the argument compelling and you want to see how they are going to argue it in the knitty gritty, it’s time to commit to checking out/buying the book and seeing what’s up. (Intros are usually available for new books on Google Books or Amazon previews.)

4b. Read the Acknowledgments

You can tell a lot about a person from their acknowledgments section. I’ve seen books where the author specifically thanked the ILL staff of their local library. They should ideally be thanking an archives or two if it’s a modern history book, because that means they’ve done Real Research.

5. Have a Good Idea of How One Does History

This one takes a little time investment, but having a basic idea of what makes a good historical argument and what makes a bad one will serve you well for judging any history book, from any topic. Maybe just spend some time on the logical fallacies section of Wikipedia. Just knowing to run away when you hear someone start yammering about glorious progress or indulging in extended hero-worship will serve you remarkably well in the history section at Barnes and Noble.

6. Nothing Wrong with Reading a Bad Book

Okay, so you did all this pre-judgement and you still managed to read a real turd. Ah well. You always can learn a lot from something done poorly. They’re a certain grim joy in hating a bad book, especially if you get to feel smarter than an author, so just treat yourself to a really firm critical dismissal of the work. Maybe leave a real stinker of a review here on a Saturday or /r/badhistory.

I'll prepare for the downvotes, but if you check out the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) it explains why late merging is good and is actually what traffic engineers plan for. I know it's not a popular opinion, but I found it a fascinating read (the whole book, not just the merging part) and highly recommend it.

> Could she be clinically depressed or bipolar at 17 months?

No. You're not describing symptoms of either.

I have a cousin whose daughter sounds EXACTLY like yours. She's never content, always screaming/crying/fussing. She's developmentally delayed (I'm not saying yours is) as she isn't really talking at all at 2.5 years old.

Have you spoken to your pediatrician about these concerns? Have you requested an evaluation to determine if it's something medically concerning?

Edit: I also highly recommend The Whole Brain Child, it talks about how to parent by catering towards your kid's brain development level.

My anecdotal experience contradicts this. I live in Berkeley, near the Oakland border. I see the little black dolls being just as coveted and fought over as any other, by my child and others.

One of the chapters in Nuture Shock had to do with racial education. The studies they discuss had a surprising result: because race makes many white parents uncomfortable, they simply do not discuss it. Children note the absence, and they fill it in with imaginings of their own.

Part of the recommended strategy, which I follow with my child, is simply to compliment the looks of black people. You occasionally note differences with a light touch, but you don't avoid discussing them out of fear or discomfort. "Lisa looks so pretty today: look, she has a butterfly clip in her hair."

Wait a sec. From the article:

> The survey included two statements to measure sexism: "On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do" and "On the whole, men make better business executives than women do."

From a purely scientific perspective, isn't this a biasing assumption. What if, on the whole (i.e., statistically speaking), men are better at these things. I'm not saying they are, but there are certainly equality-based theories and frameworks that make this entirely plausible. For example, Roy Baumeister's research (and book Is There Anything Good About Men demonstrates how men have a wider variance in many innate drivers (motivations, perhaps capabilities though not necessary), and provides the evolutionary math to show why this could be the case. Men are more at the top and bottom, and innately driven by different strategic goals than women (statistically speaking), such as higher risk and return activities and competition in larger social structures than collaboration in smaller ones. (Again, with good evolutionary explanation and data to back it up.) The research shows how the different strategies address trade-offs given the nature of our different behaviours that maximize reproductive success, and hence every "better than" for one sex has a corresponding "better than" in the other.

Without judging that work, just supposing it could be true would invalidate that these above questions as being sexist. Making decisions on who to hire or work with based on it would be sexist, as a statistical trend doesn't make all cases true. But that's not what it says.

I call scientific foul on this one.

Here are some excellent books on narcissistic parenting and its upshots (all available on amazon.com, etc):

Nina Brown's Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

Eleanor Payson's The Wizard of Oz and other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family

Lindsay Gibson's Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

Elan Golomb's Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in the Struggle for Self

Susan Forward's Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life (a bit long in tooth now, but still useful) and Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Kimberlee Roth & Frieda Friedman's Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds & Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

(I've read -- actually deeply studied, using each as a workbook -- all of them, and feel comfortable recommending them.

Further, the dynamics of growing up in such families are strikingly similar to what happens in cults. If one is conditioned, socialized, habituated and normalized to a particular form of abuse (before one can recognize the abuse as such) in childhood, it is often the case that one will grow up to seek intimates who are likely to repeat the same form of traumatization to which they were normalized as children. In my case, I took my unconscious -- and unprocessed -- abuse into a series of cult and other co-dependent workplace and relationship situations. If one understands what happens in cults, one often gets a very clear picture of what happened in their own families of origin with narcissistic parents.

Okay, there can be a lot of misinformation around clinical diagnoses of mental illnesses, so I'm gonna try to clear up a few things.

First off, sociopathy and psychopathy aren't actually psychiatric terms. They are more colloquial words traditionally associated with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).

Now, personality disorders are very hard to diagnose, because there are just so many categories, but these categories aren't always all that different. A psychiatrist can choose to diagnose someone with ASPD, with avoidant personality disorder, with narcissistic personality disorder, with borderline personality disorder, or with schizotypal personality disorder. And though the DSM-5 has fairly specific characteristics for each disorder, an actual real patient might display characteristics of two or more of those disorders. And if that wasn't enough, the DSM-5 now offers Personality Disorder NOS (not otherwise specified) as a category, for when diagnosing someone with a specific disorder is just so difficult.

Now that we got out of the way, let's look at ASPD specifically, shall we? There are several criteria that should be met to diagnose ASPD.

First, significant impairments in personality functioning manifest by (skewed identity OR skewed self-direction) AND (lack of empathy OR lack of intimacy).

Second, pathological personality traits in the following domains: manipulativeness, deceitfulness, callousness, hostility, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and risk taking.

Third, the impairments in personality functioning and personality trait expression should be relatively stable across time and consistent across different situations.

Fourth the impairments in personality functioning and the individual's personality trait expression are not better understood as normative for the individual's development stage or socio-cultural environment.

Fifth, the impairments in personality functioning and the individual‟s
personality trait expression are not solely due to the direct
physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse,
medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., severe head
trauma).

And finally, the individual should be at least 18 years old.

So there you have it. That's ASPD.

Main source

Secondary source

Best source

TL;DR: armchair diagnoses based on a single behavior are useless.

Interesting...ever read The God Virus? :D

His book The Better Angels of Our Nature changed my life, and my entire outlook on the world. I've given away 4-5 copies since then, and I encourage everyone to read it. I also loved The Blank Slate. About to start his new book, Enlightenment Now.

If you´re interested, Roy Baumeister (social psychologist) wrote a book about "how societies flourish by exploiting men". I thought it was a pretty interesting read because it highlights the other side of the coin in the ongoing debate about discrimination against women.

Basically, Baumeister says that men are overrepresented in at the upper end of the societal hierarchy, but also (and perhaps even more) at the lower end. He argues that our society heavily relies on prototypically male competetiveness and a stream of expendable individuals who are willing to take risks to ensure constant growth. You can find the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

US vs European police killings is examined and explained very convincingly by Steven Pinker, who is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist. His theory is covered in his book written for us non-scientists, The Better Angels of our Nature - Why violence has declined.

(For the scientists, the book is full of proper references.)

He is very interested in what works to drop murder, crime, genocide and war death rates overall. The book covers pre-history and ancient history right up to the present day. The issue is somewhat complex and multi-faceted so I won't try and explain it.

One strand is that when people trust their governments to administer justice more, and people take justice into their own hands less, violence and murder rates drop. Then of course, what leads to people trusting their governments more is examined.

I have to warn Christians that one of the historical documents that Steven Pinker uses to look at the difference at the rate of violence in the present compared to the rate of violence in the past is the Old Testament. He looks at it from a social science point of view, cataloging from a purely modern viewpoint as to what constitutes a crime according to modern morals and law.

I must say that Pinker challenges both progressive and conservative worldviews. He is strictly trying to get at the facts, and the facts of what leads to long-term dropping violences rates.

I love reading and hearing about model cities. Here's some other media if you like this sort of stuff.

[Book]

One of the most engrossing biographies I've ever read, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is the story of a power hungry paperclip maximizer but instead of prioritizing paperclips over everything, Moses prioritizes wildly expensive highways. His fall, around the late 60s, lead to renewed interest in public transit and a counter-revolution articulated in Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Seeing Like a State A condemnation on the central planners infatuation with the top-down and observable over the bottom-up and functional.

[Article]

Reports of the death of China's vacant cities may be [greatly exaggerated.](
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/china-s-manhattan-sheds-ghost-town-image-as-towers-begin-to-fill)

Seeing Like A State: Book Review A fun review of the book mentioned above.

[Podcast]

Every city planner has a plan until they get doused with a squatter's bucket of piss.

For those further interested in charter cities, see recently-ousted world bank chief economist Paul Romer's conversation on charter cities.

On Usonia, Flank Lloyd Wright's stab at an affordable model US town.

Not sure why you got downvoted... this has certainly been established.

At this very moment? I just ask because happiness is an emotion. A temporary state like the rest of the emotions (except for the severely depressed). The idea that one could live in some permanent state of happiness is a relatively new one and has been highly exploited by the self help industrial complex. It's a fucking joke. It's also used as a means of control. Not happy - there MUST be something wrong with you. Try, pills, new diet, pop psychology books, counselling, yoga, gym membership, watch lots of Oprah, go to a Tony Robbins performance, watch 87 TED Talks, a new car-house-soda-detergent-more-more more-buy-buy-buy your way to happiness. It's a fucking treadmill. Why not take the same tack but swap out the emotion? "How silly are you?" "How playful are you?" "How bored are you?" "How whatever are you?". Would you expect to be in a permanent or even near permanent state of one of those emotions? No so why happiness? The idea of happiness/always positive has been used to control the gullible and bleed them financially. I'll tell you one thing scientifically- evoloution don't give two fucks about happiness. Surviving and breeding/pass the genes.

.........

Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America


"In this utterly original debunking, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worst of all, to the business community, where the refusal to consider negative outcomes--like mortgage defaults--contributed directly to the current economic disaster. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of positive thinking: personal self-blame and national denial. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best--poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage."


https://www.amazon.ca/Bright-sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850

......

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich
Jenni Murray salutes a long-overdue demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to all our problems



https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/10/smile-or-die-barbara-ehrenreich

.......

Anyone who is superpositivehappy at this point is either totally ignorant retard or a sadomasochist on the global scale. OR like me they just don't give a shit most of the time and see humans for the tragic absurdity they are. I know I am ranting, but what can I say? It make me happy:) If anyone ain't happy about it all I can say is FUCK YA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sY9X7IcZl8

Here's a book written ten years ago about the same subject.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

It's important to note that this is still the most peaceful century in the history of humanity when you take into account the larger population. Yes, more people died, but we also had way more people. It's still the tiniest proportion of people getting killed. And by a very large margin.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243

I'm going to type out a paragraph from Julia Serrano's extremely smart book Whipping Girl and let you see if any of it sounds familiar:

"When I hit puberty, my newly found attraction to women spilled into my dreams of becoming a girl. For me, sexuality became a strange combination of jealousy, self-loathing, and lust. Because when you isolate an impressionable transgender teen and bombard her with billboard ads baring bikini-clad women and boys' locker roomn trash talk about this girl's tits and that girl's ass, then she will learn to turn her gender identity into a fetish."

One book that really resonated with me and my own experiences was Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. There's a lot of stuff that critiques feminism and talks about how masculinity and femininity are treated in society, but for you the most interesting parts will probably be her personal anecdotes. The most important thing you can take away from it is that everyone has a radically different experience.

When did your character realize they were transgender? When and how did they transition? How supportive or hostile was their environment, and how did they feel about themselves? Keep in mind that being transgender affects so many parts of your life, but in the end it is only one part of you. Trans people are people, just like everyone else, and we come in all different types and flavors. We can be introverts or extroverts, kind or cruel, insightful or oblivious, artists or accountants, saints or sinners. Figure out who your character is, who the playwright has written her as and how you are interpreting her, and then figure out how being a transwoman has shaped and influenced her. And after you've done that, I would go to your trans friends and ask if your interpretation has any unrealistic or offensive stereotypes. I can't imagine them being upset if you're sincere and coming from a place of respect. And if you don't feel comfortable, you can always ask reddit.

A really detailed analysis of the most common 4-digit pin numbers. More than 10 percent of all passwords are 1234.

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This four-square graph plants Slatestarcodex in the realm of “insightful/serious” and places Reddit at “boring/trolling.” So, where does that place a subreddit devoted to SSC, then?

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At the recommendation of several people in this sub, I bought James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State and wow, it is indeed fantastic.

A good review by J Bradford Delong here

Some highlights for me so far:

• At about 1500, just six names were the first names of 90 percent of all English men. Can you name those six names that comprised 90 percent of all Englishmen’s names? Answer
  
  
• In the 1700s and 1800s, houses in England, Scotland, and France were built with fewer and fewer windows. Why? Answer
  
  
• The Spanish colonial government of the Philippines insisted the citizens have last names. Thus [the edict] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A1logo_alfab%C3%A9tico_de_apellidos) went out and chaos ensued. Strangely, in some towns, nearly everyone in the village had their new last names start with the same letter! Why? Answer
  
  -----
  
  
  I haven't made up my mind as to whether this post about "egregores" is profoundly insightful or silly or something else.
  
  
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  Subjects are surprisingly bad at judging their own proficiency in recognizing faces
  
  -----
  
  
  The medieval oaks of Blenheim
  
  Bonus: Why so many English taverns are called “The Royal Oak"
  
  -----
  
  Study: Human changes, especially fire suppression, have had greater impact on Eastern forest than climate change.
  
  -----
  
  Study: Student evaluations are poor measures of teaching effectiveness.
  
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  "Baby Hands May Belong to Lizards"
  
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  Noam Chomsky's new book on language is drawing skepticism.
  
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  A crash course on black science fiction
  
  ----
  
  I know that Scott is a fan of the Civilization PC strategy series, as am I. Here’s [a good article on Sid Meiers] (http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/3/4/11158134/the-man-who-made-a-million-empires), the man behind the Civilization series.
  
  
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  George Martin died last week. [Does he deserve more credit than being just the so-called “fifth Beatle”?] (http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/colby-cosh-dont-call-george-martin-the-fifth-beatle-he-might-have-been-more-than-that)
  
  
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  The people who cannot stop making puns. There’s another name for folks who cannot resist puns…
  
  
  ----
  
  This is a long quiz about music preferences. It starts out a bit bland but it gets interesting.
  
  
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  This 10-part series about destroyed items of cultural significance is good albeit depressing.
  
  
  -----
  
  Milton Friedman’s thermostat.
  
  >It’s not even a very complicated idea. You can explain the gist of it using words and simple examples.
  
  >But it's a really really important idea. Both theoretically important, and practically important.
  
  >So why does such an important idea need to keep on being reinvented? Why are (almost all) economists unaware of this idea?
  
  >It's not as though Milton Friedman were some no-name economist that everybody ignored. Every economist is very aware of lots of Milton Friedman's other ideas. Those other ideas are taught to all economics students. Why not this idea?
  
  
  -----
  
  The mysterious iconography of the 2000-year-old Portland Vase, the best known piece of Roman cameo glass.
  
  -----
  
  
  The time that existentialist Jean Paul Sartre wrote a French-language film version of Arthur's Miller The Crucible.
  
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  In the 1850s, along the banks of the Delaware there was a floating church.
  
  
  Article
  
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  European buildings on the (literal) edge.
  
  
  -----
  
  1910. Nine kings sitting for a photo. No word as to whether they were given rings of power.
  
  -----
  
  
  An impressive work-in-progress: a taxonomy of space opera cliches
  
  
  
  -----
  
  Don’t trust the pretty people. Short version and long.
  
  
  -----
  
  
  Moloch! Moloch!
  
  
  
  Moloch! Moloch!
  
  
  -----
  
  
  What professions are most attractive on Tinder?
  
  
  -----
  
  Oklahoma now has more <3.0 earthquakes than California.
  
  
  I have a prediction that a fracking-induced earthquake is going to cause a major lawsuit in the next five years.
  
  
  
  
  -----
  
  Tips for doing a PhD efficiently.
  
  
  
  -----
  
  This historical homerun hitters gif is mesmerizing and reinforces to me what an phenomenon Babe Ruth was.
  
  
  -----
  
  Washington Post had a fun quiz that tries to determine your marital status, age, and income by the apps you have on your phone. The quiz thought I was much younger than I am, so I am kindly disposed towards it.
  
  
  -----
  The story of Saint Wilgefortis, the bearded lady saint, is all sorts of fascinating. Experts surmise that crucified images of Jesus depicted in a tunic that, through various corrupted and crude reproductions, eventually made Christ look like a bearded woman in a dress. Mystified believers then came up with a story to explain this figure:
  
  >According to the narrative of the legend, sometimes set in Portugal, a teen-aged noblewoman named Wilgefortis had been promised in marriage by her father to a pagan king. To thwart the unwanted wedding, she had taken a vow of virginity, and prayed that she would be made repulsive. In answer to her prayers she sprouted a beard, which ended the engagement. In anger, Wilgefortis's father had her crucified.
  
  
  
  
  ----
  
  A very detailed graphic exploring the question: why is my TV bill so high?
  
  
  
  -----
  
  A good post exploring unpaid parking tickets in NYC by diplomats to the United Nations. The post also explains why the number of unpaid tickets by diplomats plunged dramatically in 2003.
  
  
  -----
  May 16 is the 50-year anniversary of Pet Sounds, which for my money is the best pop music album of all time. Good retrospective interview with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson here.
  
  
  Listen to the album.
  
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  Why upscale retailers are hiding their cash registers from customers.
  
  
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  “Why Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is Actually Way Better Than The 2016 Deadpool“. Heh.
  
  
  
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  The design evolution of soda cans since 1948 Neat.
  
  
  
  

I'm glad this was interesting! Foucault was pretty aware of religion and what was in the Bible, hence why my account is a bit inaccurate for the sake of simplicity. But Christianity actually plays a pretty prominent role in most of his books. In Sexuality, for example, he is especially interested in the "confession" and how it transforms from a religious idea to an everyday one. I'm not sure what my personal thoughts are on Foucault and whether or not I agree. But if you wanna give him a fair shake I recommend reading one of his books, maybe Discipline and Punishment, because my summary doesn't do him justice.

I'm an outsider to the field also (an enthusiast), but so was Foucault. And I'm doing research in an entirely unrelated field. That said, Foucault has been applied to many other fields. Some are obvious: Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, etc. But, here are a few examples of fairly recent books that either use him directly or gently draw on him:

The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics by Tania Murray Li: an interesting in-depth study on Indonesia

Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy by Vanessa Fong: another study focusing on a particular state, this type how China's One-Child Policy shapes children and families. She probably draws more on Bourdieu than Foucault, but both are in there.

Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Ferguson: for those in the education field, Ferguson analyzes how schools are part of the system creating and reinforcing the idea of the Black, male criminal. Note, it's not that schools perpetuate stereotypes, nor that school policies are discriminatory because of the image black males have in American society. She argues that schools CREATE this identity, straight from Foucault.

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott: This one is pretty well known (relative to the others) and it's a pretty fun read. He doesn't draw exclusively on Foucault, but it is a big part.

I am all for them. Also from various things i have read they are safer also. Since they force the drivers to actually pay attention and not just stop at the red light, shut off brain and wait for the green until they gas it.

As long as they dont implement something like this Magic Roundabout

Heres a couple other links you may find interesting

• Roundabouts: Reducing Traffic Frustration
  
• Why we drive the way we do

>According to a recent study released by NAVTEQ, the average U.S. driver that uses a GPS system with real-time traffic updates is able to cut nearly 4 days off of their annual commute as well as decrease their carbon footprint by over 21%.

Navteq is shilling their products and the blog author parrots their marketing press release. Nice research and value-add. Submission downmodded.

Now for the real issue.

The "study" conveniently ignores what happens when everybody starts using the service.

Their findings depend on the edge that drivers using a GPS with real time traffic updates get over the regular drivers. Once the percentage of GPS users, it is obvious that the current data is meaningless as that edge decreases in size.

Will it be better if everybody used them? Depends...

If GPS systems give everybody the same advice, they are obviously worthless.

Attempting to design GPS systems that are smart enough to try to balance the load by giving different people different advice has its own challenges. How do you decide who do you send where? How do you adjust when people ignore the advice they got and drive somewhere else? How real-time is the "real-time" data? (Hint - absolutely not real time, and a few minutes make a huge difference in traffic).

Look, we could go on and on, but let me point out two things:

A) The blog entry submitted is worthless.

B) If you want to understand traffic, please read this book. It will not answer all those questions, but it will help you appreciate the complexity of the problem.

To be fair, I would hesitate to answer anything about Jung, as my area of expertise is renaissance/early modern alchemy. So I could tackle Paracelsus, but not Jung.

That, of course, does not stop me from wanting to buy this facsimile of his Red Book.

An excellent book which discusses this is the classic Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The author talks about several examples of how huge groups of people witnessing a crime have failed to help or call the police. The conclusion wasn't that the human race is evil; rather, as Prodigal_Daughter points out, nobody feels that it is their place to help (or everyone assumes that somebody else has already helped). Interesting topic.

That said, I'm not sure how much this principal applies to this story.

It depends on what types of things you're interested in!

Over time, you'll come to know certain people who research in different areas and you can go to their personal webpages and access their Curriculum Vitae. Through that, you can find all the work they've done and many times they link to PDF copies of their papers.

But psychology is a very broad field. Here are some suggestions I can come up with:

For dealings with moral political psychology (the psychology of how people on the right and people on the left feel about moral decisions - includes religions and other aspects to our deeply-rooted conceptions of 'self'), see Jonathan Haidt - He just wrote a new book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

For dealings with the extent and limits of human rationality, I'd suggest Daniel Kahneman. He also just wrote a new book called Thinking Fast and Slow.

Stuffisnice suggested William James. James' Principles of Psychology is remarkable and very fun to read. It's quite dated both in science and in language, but his writing is impeccable.


In fact, James didn't just do psychology. He did philosophy as well. His later philosophy was at odds with the picture provided by most mainstream psychology that takes the brain as the source of our mental experience. These philosophical aspects have recently been brought into the empirical realm in the branch of Ecological psychology. This is my personal preference for psychology reading as I feel it is much more willing to ask harder questions than traditional psychology; it is willing to do away with assumptions and premises that are generally taken for granted.

This ecological framework deals more with perception and the role of the animal's action in perception. Instead of the traditional way of looking at perception (cells react to stimuli in the environment, feed this encoded stimuli into the brain, the brain processes things and makes sense of them, recreating a picture of the world through its activity, and finally sending out directions to the body to move), the ecological perspective focuses more on how the animal perceives the world directly and does not require internal processing to make sense of the world. It's much cleaner and much simpler. The brain is still crucial for the lived experience, but it is not the whole story.

For readings in ecological psychology, I would recommend Ed Reed's Encountering the World and Eleanor Gibson's An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development.

After you get your bearings, then you can get into some really deep stuff that tries to synthesize biology, psychology, and the essence of human/animal experience (phenomenology). For that, Evan Thompson is my go to guy. His work is heavily philosophical and is sometimes overly dense, but you may find it interesting.

PM me if you have any questions!

That is nonsense, of course intoxicants can turn non-rapists into rapists. Your social behaviour is determined by your prefrontal cortex. Interfere with it and your behaviour changes. And there are enough intoxicants that do to different degrees. Even brain tumors can "change who you are" drastically and f.i. turn peaceful people into uncontrollable, aggressive people.

Alcohol is known to lower repression and increase agressive behaviour for many people, i.e. people that are able to control themselves subconsciously to not hurt other people may lose this ability if intoxicated.

http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa38.htm

I can really recommend this book about the brain: http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-The-Secret-Lives-Brain/dp/0307389928
It is easy to read and very, very informative.

Read it knowing that you're not learning how to make friends or become influential. There's a reason we don't walk around saying that you've won a new friend.

This is a book about how to manipulate people. I mean hell, the guy changed his name from "Carnagey" to "Carnegie" to ride the coattails of Andrew Carnegie. His tips largely include feigning interest in people, pretending to have similar interests in order to be seen in their favor, and thinking "positively" despite how you actually feel.

I'm not trying to say the content isn't valuable in situations where being liked will get you ahead, just that if you follow the rules verbatim for your daily life you're potentially following the path to become a somewhat vapid person without a very strong sense of self.

After reading his book, do yourself a favor and read Bright-Sided.

Take one hour everyday to expand your mind, properly.

Besides the usual books a history/political science student will read, a few really got my attention. On my bookshelf, I currently have:

• Samuel Huntington's [Clash of Civilisations] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations).
  
  
• [Man, the State, and War] (http://books.google.ca/books/about/Man_the_State_and_War.html?id=qUsb210ml48C) by Ken Waltz.
  
  
• [Anything by Thomas Schelling.] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Schelling#The_Strategy_of_Conflict_.281960.29)
  
  
• [Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed] (http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institution/dp/0300078153/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239289997&sr=1-1) by James Scott.
  
  
• [The Tragedy of Great Power Politics] (http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics/dp/039332396X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239290228&sr=1-1) by John J. Mearsheimer
  
  
• I have a lot of respect for Michael Ignatieff, the academic. I particularly enjoyed [The Lesser Evil:
  Political Ethics in an Age of Terror.] (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7578.html)
  
  
• [The Return of Martin Guerre] (http://books.google.ca/books?id=5f46_hWsJAkC&redir_esc=y) by Nathalie Zemon Davis was an interesting read.
  
  
• Finally, I'm a big fan of [War on the Rocks] (http://warontherocks.com/) (Lawrence Freedman recently wrote one of the [better analyses] (http://warontherocks.com/2014/03/ukraine-and-the-art-of-crisis-management/) of the Ukraine-Crimea situation), and the [Canadian International Council.] (http://opencanada.org/)
  

I love how your proposed solution to urban poverty in Brazil starts with "literally bulldoze all of their homes."

Yeah. That'll work.

That sort of toxicity has permeated pretty much all discourse in the US. Everything about politics, race, sex, sexuality and equality. Much of it comes from alienation, much from lack of exposure to other viewpoints. The end result is that people tend to use inflammatory language to denigrate opponents. I could write a long essay about this sort of issue, and folks have written whole books on the subject.

A lot of the issue is lack of empathy for "the other side". If they aren't human, then it doesn't matter how they get treated/killed. This is one of the first things done in warfare - dehumanize the enemy. You can see it when the media has such intense coverage about beheadings in Syria or the riots in Ferguson - the intent of the media is to make the audience feel that those people are rabid animals who have to be put down. No coverage of how they got there, why the folks do what they do, nothing about their families - just horrible coverage to inflame the audience to support overwhelming and crushing violence against them.

> actually addressing the issues and engaging in good-faith discussions

To begin with, not everyone agrees that X is a problem, let alone that it should be "fixed". Or even that it is a bad thing. You can see that in the political debates over global warming.

Some books on having intelligent conversations (in no particular order) include:
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole. Helps identify BS in conversation/debates.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Explains how different people come to different political philosophies based on their values.
How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable. The author has written a number of books with "gentle art of verbal self defense" in the title. Most are about how to identify verbal attacks and to side-step them.
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. Gives lots of examples of bad rhetoric.
Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren. How to have a discussion with a fundamentalist without losing your mind. In German, I think I should do a translation of the book.

The formal subject of making arguments to convince others used to be called rhetoric. And it has been taught since the days of Plato and Aristotle.

Your observations are bang on, the extreme conservative values they hold are self defeating in the face of today's progressive societies. I'll get back to this.

The how: they're intentionally manipulated by people with an agenda who seek power. Either political power or physical dominance by force. They feel safe in their group because of the hive-switch. Jonathan Haidt goes into this pretty heavily in his book The Righteous Mind.

As for helping, you have to talk with them. I know it's easier said than done. I myself get nervous and intimidated when I come across someone with that mentality. They're scary. But they're also people. They sleep, snore, eat, laugh. They had a first kiss and experienced deaths in their families. See, I'm being empathetic. It's what allows me to understand other's viewpoints and put things into perspective. It's also what they lack. But that doesn't mean it can't be learned.

So the societies thing: imagine for a minute that the alt-right magically gets their demands: all "immigrants" leave North America and head back to their mother land. Also, no outsourcing of labor. This is the part when they rub their fingers in delight right? I mean, look at all the land with natural resources they're left with! Look at the potential. Well, let's just say the economy will collapse. It may be obvious but: major companies will have lost their talent, also their customer base. The labor force will have to be massively redistributed, new skills learned (which is already a big challenge for fixed-mindset people, whom from my observation are predisposed to being alt-right) to get essential services back in working order, Trade with other countries will suffer (for obvious reasons) so the nation will have to be self reliant. In the meantime progress WILL CONTINUE in other countries and will outpace this regressive, uncooperative and undiplomatic nation.

Seriously just writing this feels ridiculous. Okay, let's back track. "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change. And they sure as hell better be okay with being second class citizens. This here is not a meritocracy."

And there's that detail about the First Nations. Yeah the First Nations. When they demand all immigrants vacate, they don't include themselves. Is it really a matter of sovereignty or who came here first? Because... never mind. For arguments sake, let's say it's instead a matter of contribution to the making of modern society. Nation building if you will. Europeans came to this land on the premise of commerce. The Canadian fur trade. But these Europeans had associates in this business. Where the natives not contributors to the fur trade? Did they not help these newcomers with food, warmth, information? By the way this is completely ignoring their already existing society and way of life which, had someone asked them at the time, they might have said something along the lines of "Let the immigrants stay but they'll be living by our rules, values and beliefs. I like my way of life, it suits me good and I sure as hell don't see a reason to change." Probably.

I'll leave you with a fantastic book that will hopefully illuminate this topic better than I ever could: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics Check out Jonathan Haidt's TED Talks for a glimpse on what he covers in the book. The real bombshell I took away from his book is that: conservatism isn't exclusive to any one nation and it exhibits itself similarly across the globe. The real tragedy is that conservative groups hate each other when they belong to different nations, despite how much they have in common as far as the values they hold dear.

You're ready for this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

MRIs show the brains of trans people being vastly more similar to those of the gender they identify with. Gender dysphoria is a recognized disorder where a person's assigned sex doesn't match up with the gender they identify with. The largest psychiatric organization in the world, the APA (I shouldn't have to say this, but the combined knowledge, study, and experience of thousands of psychiatrists world wide just might surpass the cursory research you've done on the internet), states that Gender Dysphoria is not in itself a mental disorder or mental illness.

The standard treatment recognized by the aforementioned APA is... (wait for it) Sex reassignment therapy and surgery! This treatment has an 80% rate of improving the severeness of gender dysphoria, and consistently increases quality of life at very much statistically significant rates.

All this information can be found in the Universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses, the DSM-5, which is available on amazon, used, for $35! What an incredible value! Actual, real knowledge in the area of which you speak, just for thirty five bucks? Of course, buying new helps support more, real research, but even so, sounds like a hell of a deal to me.

All of this is completely besides the point that it really just does not fucking matter what people want to be recognized as and called. It makes practically no difference on your quality of life, but you have the opportunity to just be fucking nice to someone. I'm going to take a wild guess and say you aren't a professional athlete on any level whatsoever, and that even this transwoman in this shitty article makes no difference to you. Maybe cut her some slack, yeah?

Let's even continue with your metaphor: you seem to think that human beings are comparable to motorcycles, but I just sorta think humans are just people. Because of your mindset, can I buy you for money and ride you 3 seasons out of the year (assuming I have the right jacket and gloves and shit)?

You are whatever you want to be. Gay, straight, bisexual. It doesn't matter. Don't pigeonhole yourself with labels or identifications. Realize you're in a transitional period in your life. So take your time. Don't rush your identification. This is an excellent opportunity to think about yourself with out being a total narcisis. Just be yourself and do what you feel is right for you.

Don't feel stupid about missing red flags. I was with a women once who started to explore her feelings at 55 years old. (She was a total fire cracker in bed by the way. Sooooo hot.)

If you want to explore your homosexuality then do that. If you meet an awesome chick, ask her out. Enjoy yourself. Have fun. Conversely, if you meet an awesome dude, go for it. The point of life is to be happy not live up to other peoples bullshit standards.

Listen, this is your life. You need to work your ass off to do what makes you happy. And so what if its taken you a little longer then others? I took me 24 years to try a Big Mac. Once I finally tried it, it blew my fucking mind, it was so good. Moral of the story, it's easy to miss obvious things sometimes.

Read books. Here's a good starting point.

http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321058655&sr=1-4

Basically, this means you are a total bad ass for being brave enough to do something that you feel is right for you. You're taking a risk and I for one commend you.

Good luck and my the force be with you.

Don't be afraid! My girlfriend of three years is actually going through this same issue herself--we've decided to expand the rules of our open relationship as a result. I highly recommend you read this book. It's all about how women may find themselves desiring different things at different stages in their lives and in varying circumstances. Most of all, don't feel like you're all alone--I think this is a more common predicament than the lesbian community is willing to admit, and no one should be ostracized for it.

The author of this book takes similar approach: The God Virus, Darrel W. Ray. So do I, religions are the scourge of humanity, a purveyor of ignorance and intolerance.

Whipping Girl should be required reading.

I agree the focus has been on women because they're the ones making less. You may enjoy the book Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy Baumeister, who details the ways in which the average Joe has contributed to society.

> And is it really wrong that men are expected to do more dangerous/physically demanding tasks?

Personally? No; men are naturally stronger.

For the sake of an equitable society? Many would say yes.

Read as much as you have to to do well in the class, and never stop reading because you disagree. Only stop reading because you are bored/unimpressed.

You should absolutely read "Seeing Like a State". The author is an anarchist, though he doesn't believe anarcho-capitalism is a valid form of anarchism. Despite his dislike for ancaps, his book is valuable to us. He dismantles the state down to the very essence that leads it to act in the overbearing and destructive way that it does.

https://smile.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153

Proven scientifically: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

Jung's Red Book is the closest I can think of. There's a fascinating obsession with it among some people. If you pay out, let me know what it's like.

Once you're done with that, read Is there anything good about men? by the psychologist Roy Baumeister. It covers her story along with many others, and explains the differences in evolutionary terms. Brilliant stuff up there with the most insightful stuff JP has to say. Here's a short essay he did on the same topic as a sample-

https://psy.fsu.edu/~baumeisterticelab/goodaboutmen.htm

Here's a worthwhile section to excerpt, in anticipation of those who may feel inclined to write off the writer as some right-wing conservative:

>Let me conclude by returning to the theme I led with: in this highly-polarized political moment, it is generally assumed that if someone is pushing back against a popular left-leaning narrative, or espousing an inconvenient view for the left, then they are de facto aligned with the right, intentionally or not. Beauchamp’s rebuttal attempt provides a great example of this fundamentalist thinking: highlighting systemic political bias or threats to free speech on campus will help the right – regardless of one’s intentions –and so, apparently, we should not talk about these issues (except, perhaps, to deny they are a big deal).
>
>I am deeply familiar with this “logic”: as a Muslim scholar who, until recently, worked exclusively on national security and foreign policy issues, it was regularly *suggested* to me that criticism of the “War on Terror” – especially by “people like me” — provided cover or ammunition for al-Qaeda, ISIS and their sympathizers. In the view of these critics (mostly on the right), I was aiding and abetting “the enemy,” intentionally or not.
>
>There was even an article published in the National Security Law Journal which argued that I, and academics like me (by which the author seemed to mean: Muslim, left-leaning, and politically “radical”) should be viewed as enemies of the state — and could legitimately be targeted by national security and law enforcement agencies. This article was eventually retracted, and its author forced to resign from his position at West Point (as described in the Washington Post here). But suffice it to say, I *get* the kind of narrative Beauchamp is trying to spin here, and I reject it whole-cloth.
>
>I challenge U.S. national security and foreign policy precisely to render it more effective, efficient and beneficent – because I actually have “skin in the game” with regards to how the military is deployed. I relentlessly criticize bad research on Trump and his supporters because it is important for the opposition to be clear-eyed and level-headed about why he won – to help ensure it does not happen again. A similar type of motivation undergirds my critique of Beauchamp and Yglesias:
>
>It does not help the left or academics to respond to distortions and exaggerations on the right by denying that there is any significant problem. It is especially damaging for “wonks” or academics to dress up these kinds of political narratives (essentially, propaganda) as social research – even more so if this “research” suffers from glaring errors or shortcomings like the essays criticized here.
>
>Such a strategy is self-defeating because it is the left, those in humanities and social sciences, those from historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups, and those who seek to give voice to these perspectives or to help these populations, who stand to lose the most if the credibility of social research is further eroded due to perceived partisanship.
>
>....
>
>I get why many on the left, especially at elite universities and media outlets, would rather just say “nothing to see here,” than to confront these realities. But it will not do, for all of us to simply close ranks and insist “there is no problem, we will make no changes.” Because there is a problem — and change is coming to institutions of higher learning, one way or another.

There are roughly a million things wrong with this, I don't even know where to start.

• Obviously this thing is ripe for abuse by just about anyone. Did you piss of your neighbor because your lawn isn't mowed to their standards? Be ready to be flagged.
  
  
• Encouraging people to fuck about with their cellphones while driving can't reasonably be said to be endorsing safe driving practices.
  
  
• What DMV is ever going to even accept this information? And if they do, what are they going to do with it? It's not like they could ticket somebody.
  
  
• What police department is going to respond to this? Same issue as above.
  
  
• The article hints towards this issue - insurance companies are heavily regulated in regards to how they set their rates. There have been court battles all over the country fighting insurance companies utilizing credit scores as a factor in individual driver policy rates. This thing will send consumer protection groups through the roof.
  
  
• There almost certainly won't be enough users of this app to chance a single driver from ever being tagged twice, leaving absolutely no room for a statistically significant analysis of individual driver behavior.
  
  
• Voice recognition is laughably bad on even the best devices. How is this thing going to get the tagged plates right - every time?
  
  This exact sort of solution to driver behavior modification has been suggested (and implemented) before. In Tom Vanderbuilt's book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), this type of solution is discussed in brief. Here's an excerpt:
  
  > What if there was an eBay-like system of "reputation management" for traffic? This idea was raised in a provocative paper by Lior J. Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago. "A modern, urban freeway is a lot like eBay, without reputation scores," he wrote. "Most drivers on the freeway are reasonably skilled and willing to cooperate conditionally with fellow drivers, but there is a sizeable minority that imposes substantial costs on other drivers, in the form of accidents, delays, stress, incivility, and rising insurance premiums." 15
  
  > Inspired by the HOW'S MY DRIVING stickers used by commercial fleets, the idea is that drivers, when witnessing an act of dangerous or illegal driving, could phone a call center and lodge a complaint, using mandatory identification numbers posted on every driver's bumper or license plate. Calls could also be made to reward good drivers. An account would be kept and, at the end of each month, drivers would receive a "bill" tallying the positive or negative comments called in. Drivers exceeding a certain threshold could be punished in some way, such as by higher insurance premiums or a suspension of their license. Strahilevitz argues that this system would be more effective than sporadic law enforcement, which can monitor only a fraction of the traffic stream. The police are usually limited to issuing tickets based on obvious violations (like speeding) and are essentially powerless to do anything about the more subtle rude and dangerous moments we encounter—how often have you wished in vain for a police car to be there to catch someone doing something dangerous, like tailgating or texting on their BlackBerry? It would help insurance companies more effectively set rates, not to mention giving frustrated drivers a safer and more useful outlet to express their disapproval, and gain a sense of justice—than by responding in kind with acts of aggressive driving.
  
  > But what about false or biased feedback? What if your next-door neighbor who's mad at you for your barking dog phones in a report saying you were acting crazy on the turnpike? As Strahilevitz points out, eBay-style software can sniff out suspicious activity—"outliers" like one negative comment among many positives, or repeated negative comments from the same person. What about privacy concerns? Well, that's exactly the point: People are free to terrorize others on the road because their identity is largely protected. The road is not a private place, and speeding is not a private act. As Strahilevitz argues, "We should protect privacy if, and only if, doing so promotes social welfare."
  
  > Less ambitious and official versions of this have been tried. 16 The Web site Platewire.com , which was begun, in the words of its founder, "to make people more accountable for their actions on the roadways in one forum or another," gives drivers a place to lodge complaints about bad drivers, along with the offenders' license plate numbers; posts chastise "Too Busy Brushing Her Hair" in California and "Audi A-hole" in New Jersey. Much less frequently, users give kudos to good drivers.
  
  > However noble the effort, the shortcomings of such sites are obvious. For one, Platewire, at the time of this writing, has a bit over sixty thousand members, representing only a minuscule fraction of the driving public. Platewire complaints are falling on few ears. For another, given the sheer randomness of driving, the chances are remote that I would ever come across the owner of New Jersey license plate VR347N—more remote even than the chance that they're reading this book—and, moreover, I'm unlikely to remember that they were the one a Platewire member had tagged for "reading the newspaper" while driving! Lastly, Platewire lacks real consequences beyond the anonymous shame of a small, disparate number of readers.

I've got a book recommendation that covers your question in detail:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

The short answer (at least this evolutionary psychologist who has data to back it up) is that liberals are more concerned about harm, and conservatives are more concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Liberals being more concerned about harm explains why they're more opposed to guns. Conservatives being more concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity explains why they're more religious.

I don't really fully agree with everything in the book, but it's a decent place to start to understand the differences of values between the two.

Peterson is missing the elephant in the room, IMO. The real enemy is not neo-marxism, it is neo-calvinism. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this to some extent, and I think it is culturally in America's collective blindspot. Here I am defining neocalvinism as the idea that "work will set you free," or similarly "work will get you to heaven." JBP pushes this as "sort yourself out."

Notice that JBP never talks about Wilhelm Reich or his ideas. Adam Curtis covered this issue in the century of the self. Reich wrote a book The Mass Psychology of Fascism which, in a nutshell, talks about how fascism/authoritarianism is a fear-driven attack on sexuality. Notice how in US politics, since the cultural/sexual changes in America driven by them damn librul hippies on the left, the right has gone increasingly more insane, fanatical, disconnected from reality, authoritarian, and violent.

JBP's solutions to psychological troubles are usually about establishing more order through willful action and understanding. This is one version of "work will set you free." Notice the nazis had "arbeit macht frei" (the same phrase in German) at the gates of Auschwitz. Thanks to folks like Peter Levine,Lowen,Perls,etc., the psychotherapy world is now understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of the phrase "lose your mind and come to your senses." JBP once stated that catharsis does not heal old wounds, coming to understand what happened is what heals. That is the basis for his self authoring suite. The problem there is that the catharsis piece is necessary, as that brings memory fragments from the hippocampus into consciousness in the frontal cortex. See Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score.

The point of all this is that JBP seems to be politically and ideologically on the right, as are his followers. Notice how he attracts Trump supporters, far right types, nazis, etc. He disowns the nazis but doesn't seem to try to understand why this happens. The nature of his work is repressive of vulnerability, of existential terror of mortality, of sexuality and spontaneity.

Notice how the right believes so much in rugged individualism, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," "I'm not responsible for my fellow americans because everyone should be personally responsible for themselves." Humans don't work that way, humans are social, our nervous systems respond to other people's pain whether we are conscious of that or blocking it, we need social contact. "Sorting oneself out" requires a positive relationship with another person (see Carl Rogers, object-relations theory, Allen Schore, etc) yet JBP and his followers seem to think they can think their way out of this by themselves, and that any particular "truth" is more important than getting along with others. Using "the truth" as a cudgel to attack/berate others is a particular pattern that Freud would have recognized, and seems common among JBP and his followers.

For those that would like to read more of the same thing from a professional writer please read

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

http://www.amazon.com/Bait-Switch-Futile-Pursuit-American/dp/0805081240

Which describes in exacting detail his exact situation.

And for those that think his attitude is the problem please read.

Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850

And then go fuck yourself.

Not doing summaries/reviews, cause it's late and I'm tired. On request, I suppose. Mostly books, with a couple docs and a few blogs.


Less theory, more personal experiences:

• Stone Butch Blues (fiction)
  
• S/He
  
• 3 to Infinity: Beyond Two Genders
  
• Gender Failure
  
• Neutrois Nonsense
  
• Asexy Sex
  
• (a)sexual
  
  Actually Theory:
  
  
• Not Your Mom's Trans 101
  
• My (new) Gender Workbook
  
• You and Your Gender Identity (The author also has some videos)
  
• Any of the videos or articles Zinnia Jones does
  
• As Nature Made Him
  
• Whipping Girl
  
• Queer Theory: An Introduction
  
• Gender Outlaw
  
• Gender Outlaws (same author, different books)
  
• Transgender Warriors
  
• Sexing the Body
  
  And a couple links I make it a point to share whenever I can:
  
  
• Trans 101 (for trans people
  
• there are some things I need to tell you

Hitting is not good for kids or pets. It is how many were raised, so most people default to what they know, but that doesn't mean we can't learn better ways. There are many books on dogs and kids that can explain better why corporeal punishment is detrimental in the long run (Nurture Shock is a good one on kids, and others have listed good dog books).

Generally, dogs and young kids don't get the concept of the correlation between what they did and the punishment (it just makes them hand-shy), and kids that are old enough to get the concept are old enough to discipline in other ways.

I'm sorry for your pain. And pain is a part of life. There's no way around it. That said, I'd recommend a couple of books to help you explore your feelings:

Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268

Living Two Lives: Married to a Man & In Love with a Woman https://www.amazon.com/Living-Two-Lives-Married-Woman/dp/1461177464/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=lving+two+lives&qid=1570996899&s=books&sr=1-1-spell

Tell me more about this book. Is it the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders written by the American Psychiatric Association? If so, a lot of people would have their guns taken away for no good reason. For one example, I can't think of any good reason to take someone's gun that has an eating disorder. I think that u/lowdiver asks a valid question.

The Marxist explanation is the simplest I think: They wish to control (and regulate) the means of production. Specifically the means of production of more hosts for the god virus.

Also, by making something that all humans can't help to avoid a sin... they ensure that sin is committed, guilt and furtherance of their control over them through that guilt.

These two together I believe form powerful reasoning.

I'll add that in the case of women, virginity is valued because traditionally, especially in the time period the bible was written, they were considered property. Therefore... in an awful way a product that has been opened and used is less valuable than one that is still in the packaging. There is of course the old, more practical consideration that a woman who isn't a virgin may be bearing another man's children, thus her husband would expend resources raising children that weren't his and didn't advance his line.

I mean there are so many things at work here it is ridiculous. Original intent is one thing, but over time it gained other advantages. Still, you have to notice that the burden and pressure on women is much greater than men, it's about controlling women.

If you want an in-depth explanation I would suggest the great book "The God Virus" by Darrel Ray. He also has a podcast called secular sexuality, but that's more about exploring sexual behavior(s) than explaining the religious effect on it. If you don't want to buy it, check it out from a library, it really is enlightening when you examine religion in the way he does. (And in fact is one of my top book recommendations for atheist literature after "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great")

https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519/

Relevant

Babies are resilient. Don't get too worked up on making sure everything is perfect. When your baby is an infant, make sure you are taking care of yourselves; a frazzled, sleep-deprived parent isn't what your baby need.

As your child grows, don't over-protect them and don't do for them what they can do for themselves. Sure they'll get a few bumps along the way but they will grow into a much more confident and secure person.

DO NOT, I repeat, do not read the book "What to Expect in Your First Year". We got that one, as well as "What to Expect When You're Expecting" as gifts. They should be called: "What Are All The Extremely Unlikely, Horrible Things That Could Possibly Go Wrong"

On the other hand, I highly recommend: NurtureShock. It is not specifically about infants but it does have a chapter that discusses the latest research on the downside of the "Baby Einstein" type videos. Also, it is full of advice for every stage of development from baby through adolescence. Sure wish I had it 10 years ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Diagnostic-Statistical-Manual-Mental-Disorders/dp/0890425558

https://www.amazon.com/Diagnostic-Statistical-Manual-Mental-Disorders/dp/0890425558

This one.

The biggest sorrow in my life is also that the one place in my life where I feel worse about about myself is home. I very rarely get comments or feel deliberate guilt-inspiring comments, but the real pain comes from not being able to share my life with them. Sure, I do some things on the weekends that they would think is absolutely crazy, but people on the outside are always telling me that my parents must be so proud and that I have great core values. It's only when I go home do I feel that I AM LESS THAN I SHOULD BE. What a terrible way to make your own children feel, especially when they are already feeling very alone in the world after leaving the church. You're not alone though. Mormons enjoy feeling like big fish in a little pond, which is why leaving is so scary. Sure, the ocean my be more scary, but its full of endless possibilities compared to, let's say, the great Salt Lake

I recommend reading The God Virus for a better understanding of the cultural effects of not only Mormonism, but religion in general. Read the reviews and you will see what I mean.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-religion-infects-culture/dp/0970950519

I was 27.

At that point both my parents were gone and all of my grandparents were gone and I didn't have anyone left to protect me from her and her flying monkeys. I finally put her on speaker, surreptitiously, so that my friend could hear the stuff she was saying. His response was that's fucked. From there I started looking for resources on how to deal with her. I found two books Children of the Self Absorbed by Nina Brown and Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. That's the first time I saw the word abuse used to describe what she was doing. I knew from about 6 that there was something wrong with her and I lived with all of her shit without ever understanding what was going on.

Legible in this context means 'able to be brought under the control the state'. This has the full definition and theoretical model in which it plays a role. It also has a few examples you're looking for. Well sort of, you're definition of a state is wrong. But that's not relevant, I can still provide an example: the Berbers

> it would be that I don't trust a woman's brothers and/or father to be all that good at supporting her right to bodily autonomy

I think this is the right critique for you, as a feminist.

The cultures we are talking about here don't see individuals as the fundamental unit of society. They see families in that role. (You could actually think about the metaphor "head of the family" as suggesting the family as an organic body and whole, in fact).

Now, on the one hand, I think that means you're probably missing the mark about men sympathizing with each other, because a person thinking of themselves as a man, with class solidarity with other men, requires a kind of individualist notion about identity that is, in my experience, absolutely alien to people for whom the family is the fundamental unit. They're not a man - they're a father, say. It's their daughter, not a woman. Those are the identities.

If you're sharply committed to Enlightenment notions about individual rights and autonomy, this notion of family and familial obligation and duty are incompatible.

I do think the original observations about the steelmanning of honor culture, above, though, do get at something really crucial in this broader conversation.

Honor culture largely operates at a very local, individually adjudicated level. It's hyper sensitive to the particularities and nuances of individual contexts and relationships and histories. In this sense, it's of a piece with much of the kinds of local, pre-rational social organization that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State discusses as exactly the kind of rules that are invisible to states, that centralizing states try to sweep away.

And a lot of the infractions (especially sexual harassment) we're talking about here also operate at very, very local levels, with innuendo and ambiguity and uncertain norms and expectations and he-said-she-said situations cropping up. And it's all very fluid and uncertain. Whatever its other flaws, the localness and particularness of honor culture is operating at the same general social level as these infractions.

It seems like all these discussions about getting the state involved about harassment flounder on these issues. No one can really say very clearly what behavior is or is not line crossing, because it's so sensitive to the woman, and her culture, and her history, and her expectations, and how she responds. It's so sensitive to the shared history of the individuals interacting, and how they read each other, too. And meanwhile, the state is very dumb, and very, very powerful. We have a lot of rules to bind the state's hands because it's so powerful and so dumb, such a blunt instrument. A lot of people have complained about the way "innocent until proven guilty" is such an incredibly high bar when it comes to questions of sexual misconduct that it just functionally let's almost all abusers get off the hook unless they are astonishingly egregious. But there's good reason for that - state power has to be used very, very judiciously.

And because women are all so very different from each other, with so many different traditions and cultures and temperaments and expectations and preferences, and because these matters are of the most intimate nature, it's not clear that the quest for more explicit and easily understood and enforced universal rules of the sort that Enlightenment states prefer will ever be completed.

Of course, honor culture historically has also been incredibly violent, and has a nasty habit of spiraling off into Hatfield-McCoy types of vendettas as punishment is met by retaliation is met by retaliation is met by...

Given all that, I think this is why, in the past, as a kind of middle ground, the centralized state didn't play much of a role in these questions, and instead people often navigated their love lifes by participating in voluntary organizations like churches (that don't have access to the monopoly on force that states have) that could make much, much greater and more invasive demands on them and could also filter bad actors out, and that could also rely more heavily on local knowledge and context for adjudicating conflict and setting norms. By being voluntary, people who were unhappy with them could leave. Also by being voluntary, they could make much deeper demands of their members to live up to pro-social ideals, solving a bunch of coordination problems. And, by claiming a kind of communal authority for dispute resolution, they could prevent escalation to violence, a la honor culture.

But none of that is compatible with more atomization, and a focus on loose ties and individual rights, with people freed from those kinds of invasive voluntary communities. It's not compatible with people moving all the time, and not wanting to lock themselves into a smaller, bordered communities.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institution/dp/0300078153

Has anyone read this and is it good?

!ping READING

If I was going to provide someone with a list of books that best expressed my current thinking on the Political Economy these would be my top ones:

1. The Law - While over a century old this books stands as the perfect intro to the ideas of Classical Liberalism. When you understand the core message of this book you understand why people oppose so many aspects of government action.
   
2. Seeing Like A State - The idea that society can be rebuilt from the top down is well demolished in this dense but important read. The concept of Legibility was a game changer for my brain.
   
3. Stubborn Attachments - This books presents a compelling philosophical argument for the importance of economic growth. It's hard to overstate how important getting the balance of economic growth vs other considerations actually is.
   
4. The Breakdown of Nations - A classic text on why the trend toward "bigger" isn't a good thing. While various nits can be picked with this book I think its general thesis is holding up well in our increasingly bifurcated age.
   
5. The Joy of Freedom - Lots of books, many objectively better, could have gone here but this book was my personal pivot point which sent me away from Socialism and towards capitalism. This introduction to "Libertarian Capitalism" is a bit dated now but it was powerful.
   
   There are, of course many more books that could go on this list. But the above list is a good sampling of my personal philosophy of political economy. It is not meant as a list of books to change your mind but simply as a list of books that are descriptive of my current belief that we should be orientated towards high (sustainable) economic growth & more decentralization.
   
   Some honorable mentions:
   
   As a self proclaimed "Libertarian Crunchy Con" I have to add The Quest for Community & Crunchy Cons
   
   The book The Fourth Economy fundamentally changed my professional direction in life.
   
   Anti-Fragile was another book full of mind blowing ideas and shifted my approach to many things.
   
   The End of Jobs is a great combination of The Fourth Economy & Anti-Fragile (among other concepts) into a more real-world useful set of ideas.
   
   Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful reminder that it is not Capitalism per se that is important but the transformational power of markets that need be unleashed.
   
   You will note that I left out pure economic books, this was on purpose. There are tons of good intro to econ type books and any non-trained economist should read a bunch from a bunch of different perspectives. With that said I am currently working my way through the book Choice and if it stays as good as it has started that will probably get added to my core list.
   
   So many more I could I list like The Left, The Right, & The State or The Problem of Political Authority and on it goes...
   I am still looking for a "manifesto" of sorts for the broad movement towards decentralization (I have a few possibilities on my 'to read list') so if you know of any that might fit that description let me know.

I don't think "knuckleheads" is the right word when our natural need to divide ourselves into fiercely competitive non-family groups is something that makes us uniquely human and successful at accomplishing grand things. Source: this book.

Thanks for the encouragement. I did self-post here a while back on the differences between liberals and conservatives, and received some interesting responses, but the post as a whole was down-voted.

Since then Jonathon Haidt's book on the subject has been published, so I may post again, comparing and contrasting my position against his.

There's a book called about neuroscience called Incognito that has a few chapters on all the crazy stuff your brain does to turn visual input into useful information. Highly recommended for anyone wishing to learn more about how their own brain works.

Just a few things that come to mind:

Self-Awareness> There are a lot of ways to work on this and most of them are worth trying. An effective goal might be to find some things that work for awhile, and prepare yourself to seek out other options when those don’t offer the same effectiveness. I’m pretty sure that when we dedicate the time to it, we provide ourselves with information that empowers us to make the decisions that bring about our idea of success.

Expectations> Most of us don’t want to fail. A lot of us feel like if we don’t meet the expectations that we’ve set for ourselves then we’re failures. This often causes some of us to avoid things that we feel we won’t “succeed” at. Hey, I’m not saying we shouldn’t set high goals for ourselves... but when we don't meet our expectations, maybe we could slowly get better at treating ourselves with the kind of love and encouragement that we would extend to our most loved of loved ones when they "fail."

Exercise> God damn it I hate exercise. I wore a button in fifth grade that said: I’m too out of shape to exercise. I’m thirty-nine now and I’ve still never had a consistent workout regimen. For a lot of us, this shit is probably harder than everything else we’ll consider in this thread. But there’s plenty of evidence to show that when the rest of our body is functioning at a more optimal level that we have more tools to work with, and that our tools are more effective. I hate exercise.

Group Discussion> Last year I attended an intensive outpatient group therapy program. This was my first experience with group therapy and I freaking love that shit. I learned that the gems to mine from this experience have very little to do with whoever is leading the group or which organization is providing the facility... as long as you feel like everyone is given the opportunity to share without reproach. Empathy is what it’s all about. The more courageous you are about sharing your struggles, the more empowered your fellow group members will be to do the same. When empathy is flowing freely most people are able to recognize some of their own cognitive distortions, AND help others find their own. Not every group is going to function well, but I think it’s well worth the effort to find on that does. You might start with looking into a DBSA group near you. My advice would be to look for one with 10-15 attendees. If you've got insurance that will cover it, you might check into an Intensive Outpatient Group Therapy program offered by a local hospital.

Books> These are just a few that have offered me some help—and a few that I just acquired but haven’t read yet.

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy



Also, this is me patting you on the back lovingly and then turning it into a hug:



Did you feel it?



Disclaimer: I’m currently doing pretty poorly at all of these things.

I read a lot of Campbell and I just started reading Jung. Jung makes Campbell seem like ginger beer. A lot of Jung's stuff is way thicker, a lot more difficult and the footnotes are almost as long as the text itself.

The Red Book is a real mindjob. That's what I'm on right now.

Me either, its hard to find. Here are some sample illustrations and here are some editorial reviews for those that might not be familiar. I don't own a copy myself but I'll likely get it in my next batch of books from Amazon and ready myself for some psychonautics.

Thank you for initiating a bibliography! My fav is
Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents.

I was able to break away from my parents after having a breakthrough from reading this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

You might find this book, or any about Narcissistic parents helpful:

Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572245611/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bn6.zbY6HGKJS

I was reading one of the NPD books, and in it there was the suggestion to write down any experiences you could remember that you felt abused. I spent half a day doing that, bawling my eyes out. A few days later, I "somehow" managed to get a cold, I was sick for almost 2 weeks.

So, yeah, I can see what you're saying and you're right! I don't remember being told this, but I had the distinct impression that getting sick when I was a child was considered a sign of weakness. Lord knows nMom was never sick. I was rarely sick as a child that I can remember. At some point, I think I realised that she wasn't going to care, or take care of me, wasn't going to take the day off of work (this was the 70's when there weren't things like personal days or flex time) to look after me, so I think I just gave up, there wasn't any point to being sick. Also, unless I literally coughed out a lung, I was going to school, so there's that.

Oof, that's a tough one. I really like Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin and Whipping Girl by Julia Serano.

Yep, I always recommend her book, Whipping Girl, to tons of people.

What helps for me is understanding why they believe what they believe. In most (but not all) cases, the religious are as much victim as perpetrator, and that's the nature of how religion as a system works.

Before I go further, I'd like to recommend a couple of books. I don't know about you, but I'm not an avid non-fiction reader so take it as granted that these books aren't your average dull non-fiction. I would recommend at least checking them out.

The first book has the benefit of being available freely online, as the retired professor that wrote it wanted it to be generally accessible. The book is "The Authoritarians" and it is possibly one of the best books for understanding a lot of the most frustrating aspects of religious behavior. If you are like me, you'll particularly enjoy his role-playing simulations of world leaders that mix authoritarian and non-authoritarian people to different degrees. There's a whole lot of parallels we can draw from those results to what is happening in the world today. Professor Altemeyer purposefully has made the book easy to read for non-psychologists, and it's not a long read.

The second book is a bit heftier but I think is valuable for putting things in perspective as it deals extensively with historical trends and I think helps people like me be hopeful for our future. The book is "Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". The author Steven Pinker doesn't pull punches regarding religion, but he does show very convincingly that a lot of what atheists typically blame on religion in terms of violence actually rests on human nature itself. He also convincingly shows that things are so very much better than the used to be. Most of us have no idea just how horrifyingly callous the past was, and this understanding of human progression often takes a bit of the edge off the rage I do feel about modern trends. Things could be so much worse, and they were.

With that out of the way, I think it's also useful to understand how humans learn. There are multiple models for human learning, but many people that deal with this agree that the Bayesian model of learning is a large component. In the Bayesian model people evaluate new information based on how well it conforms to previously accepted information. In the Bayesian nomenclature, these previously accepted pieces of information are called "priors". Things that agree with priors are more likely to be accepted and things that contradict priors are more likely to be rejected. The upshot being that all humans are innately biased to believe things that confirm what they think they know, and disbelieve things that contradict what they know. Understanding the nature of evaluating your assumptions is in fact a large part of the training that underscores experimental research and it's necessary because of that Bayesian bias.

Where this is relevant to religion is in childhood indoctrination. Children have no priors. Thus children usually acquire their "base" priors from trusted caregivers. Often people notice that children will accept absurd claims uncritically, and we tend to think of this as gullibility. However that's not quite correct in the sense that we use the term with adults. An adult should have a world view that does recognize and reject absurd claims, however a child literally cannot know better as they have no understanding of what makes a claim absurd or not.

Thus children indoctrinated into a religion can have their entire system for accepting claims corrupted by religious systems that ensures that they will reject claims that contradict those faulty religious ones. Obviously efficacy in indoctrination depends on both the environment around that indoctrination and the individual in question, but most people that are very religious are that way because they were trained from the very start of their ability to reason to reason poorly.

Because I know this, I don't typically feel religious people I debate with are stupid, even if what they are arguing seems ridiculously stupid. I understand that they have had their ability to reason sabotaged, and that doesn't effect any innate intelligence they may have, but rather forces that intelligence to work against itself.

I still think religion is a horrible thing, and I still think many religious people should be thwarted from many religiously motivated actions that will cause harm, but I usually don't think they're a pack of morons bent on evil (even if it seems that they are acting that way). There are exceptions of course, and there are some evil motherfuckers out there that know they are evil and cover that evil with a thin veneer of religiousness to appear legitimate, but they tend to be a minority.

Julia Serano goes into this at length in her book Whipping Girl. She talks about how femininity is widely regarded as weak and inferior to masculinity in our society, and instead of pushing back against that misogynistic and patriarchy-driven mode of thinking, TERFs fully buy in and try to engage with the patriarchy by shedding their femininity and taking on as many masculine traits as possible (short of FtM transition usually). TERFs are sellouts and not true feminists, because they are driven by an internalized (but externally imposed) hatred and disgust for their own femininity. It's kind of sad on the one hand, but also obnoxious as fuck to those of us who think that is complete bullshit and want to live lives where we're true to ourselves.

Never. Violence has been observed in every human society throughout history, and the few societies still extant that live in hunter-gatherer conditions tend to be more violent than modern societies.

To turn you question on its head: we actually probably live in the safest period ever for avoiding humanity's violence against other one another. There's a really excellent book about this phenomenon: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker.

The idea that before government and civilization, humanity lived in peace and harmony (Rousseau's "state of nature") is appealing, but is several eras out of date and is out step with what we now know about prehistoric history and observable primitive societies.

This book has been waiting for you.

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

Congrats! Here are my tips . . . (Cut and pasted from another post.)

1. Stay positive - your attitude/outlook can really make a difference :)
   
   
2. Watch (don't read/or read after watching) The Happiest Baby on the Block film (see below.)
   
   
3. I see you are a reader - I felt like after reading the below books and listening to my parent friends' experiences, I was prepared for almost everything pregnancy and the first couple years of parenthood threw at me (I learn best from reading, and this was just my personal method that worked for me in making confident and informed decisions, or figuring out where to go for more research) - I know a lot of people don't learn best this way/get frustrated trying to implement something really specific if it doesn't work for their baby, rather than just taking pieces of everything they've heard/read about and adapting it to work for them.)
   
   These helped me make better decisions because they presented me with many options to try for trial and error, or good jumping off points for further research. I have honestly never had a "what do I do now?!" parenting moment because I have read so much that I have back up plans in my pocket if the first thing I try doesn't work. I have also never had any of the struggles with my son that a lot of people have around sleeping, eating, behavior, etc. and while I know some of that is because we have a healthy kid, I truly believe a lot of it comes from being an informed parent who explores all the options and tries the ones that have the most evidence for working well in combination with what feels right for me and my family.
   
   I tried to just list the neutral/middle of the road books that are fun and/or give enough indepth information on most sides of an issue to be a great jumping off point for exploring particular parenting styles, options, etc.
   
   In no particular order:
   
   

• Bringing up Bebe - Tells the parenting story of an American expat. living in Paris, and how she observed different parenting techniques between American and French families, and how that plays out in children's behavior. It is a fun "experience" story and I think it lends some interesting insights.
  
  
• Pregnancy, childbirth, and the newborn - I think this is the most informative, neutral, pregnancy book out there. It really tries to present all sides of any issues. I can't recommend this book enough. From here, you could explore the options that best fit your needs (e.g. natural birth, etc.)
  
  
• Taking Charge of Your Fertility - Look into this if you find you are having trouble conceiving, or if you want to conceive right away. Really great tips on monitoring the body to pinpoint the most fertile times and stay healthy before becoming pregnant.
  
  
• The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding - This is published by Le Leche League and really has everything you need to know about breastfeeding, pumping, etc. After baby is born, kellymom.com is a good resource for quickly referring to for breastfeeding questions later, but seriously don't skip this book - it is great!
  
  
• Dr. Spock's Baby and Childcare - Really comprehensive and probably the most widely read book about every aspect of child health and development (and also a lot of what to expect as parents.)
  
  
• NurtureShock - by far the most interesting book I've ever read in my life. Basically sums up research on child development to illuminate how many parents and educators ignore research based evidence on what works well for raising children. If you read nothing else in this book, at least read the sleep chapter!
  
  
• What's Going on in There? - This book was written by a neuroscientist after becoming a mom about brain development from pregnancy through about age 5. It has some of the same research as NurtureShock but goes way more in depth. I found it fascinating, but warning, I could see how it could scare some people with how much detail it goes into (like how many people feel that "What to Expect When Expecting" is scary.)
  
  
• Happiest Baby on the Block - There is a book, but really you can/should just watch the DVD. It has 5 very specific techniques for calming a fussy baby. Here are some recent reddit comments about it. Someday I will buy Dr. Karp a drink - love that man!
  
  
• The Wholesome Baby Food Guide - this book is based on a website which has some of the same information, but the book goes way more in depth about how to introduce food, with particular steps, to set baby up for a lifetime of good (non picky) eating habits.
  
  
• A variety of sleep books, so you can decide which method you might be comfortable with (I believe the Baby Whisperer and Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child are pretty middle of the road, but you can look into bedsharing (The Dr. Sear's books) or the other end (Babywise) as discussed in other comments already here, etc. - these last two links I am letting my personal bias show - sorry, but I just think it is good to know all sides of an issue.)
  
  
• Huffington Post Parents section often has "experience" articles, and browsing subs like this can help with that too.
  
  
• A lot of people love the Bill Cosby Fatherhood book too, but my husband and I haven't read it, so I can't say for sure what is in it, but I imagine it is "experiences" based
  
  
• The Wonder Weeks - describes when and how babies reach developmental milestones, what to expect from those, and how to help your baby with them.

One of the chapters in Nurtureshock.

>I don’t regret having one, just extremely ashamed of being sexual and communicating it to girls and also showing it to the world. Attracting girls’ attention and whatnot isn’t very hard but progressing things to dating, holding hands and eventually sex is impossible. I can’t even call them or message them on Facebook or Whatsapp because I just feel like an idiot for doing so. Making a move in clubs and bars is also difficult although I once got close to leaving with a girl but she didn't want to. I got made fun of a lot growing up for not having a girlfriend and this made me feel like i do not deserve one. It doesn't matter if I've got the green light to go ahead I just feel really ashamed do it. Even something like looking at a fit girl wearing a short skirt makes me feel bad for checking her out and that I shouldn’t be doing it.


I know what you mean. I've been there myself, but even when I was there I was entirely self-aware of my shame and I was skeptical of the validity of my emotional reactions; I realized they were ingrained. Being aware of your emotional reactions allows you to be emotionally proactive. Your sex-negative problem is mostly an emotional issue, and not much else, right? I've been there. I wouldn't doubt that you are also decent looking and have both latent and actualized social skills. Most intelligent introverts have a lot of potential to be who they want to be because they know themselves more deeply than others. You must use your introverted nature to your advantage and recognize the differences in others and yourself. In all honesty, there are an infinite number of unwritten rules; everyone's abstract/emotional logic is different. Many of them are foundational and predictable, however; including yours and mine. Like anything else, being emotionally predictable is not a black/white issue. It is a grey area, and you have to balance your reliability with creativity.


Being made fun of for not having a girlfriend is just as sexist as being made fun of for not having a boyfriend; gender equal too. Were you ever shamed for not having a boyfriend? It's clearly a matter of groupthink and extroverted style; not for everyone. Dating relationships, for extroverts especially, are often attention-getting and showy. They wear their relationships like trophies won. Usually introverts prefer a more private relationship because they have less social desire and are often shamed because of it. Introverts are “themselves” more often in private. Extroverts are “themselves” more often in public. There is no shame deserved either way, regardless of popular opinion. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses, and you should try to introject some of the traits that you enjoy in others; regardless of type. That is how you become balanced.


>I’m receiving counselling from a pastor who advocates the whole “no sex before marriage” thing and believes that people should only date to get married and sex is only for making kids which is stupid IMO because I do not plan on getting married anytime soon.


Counseling from a Catholic pastor? Watch out, that is one of the most notorious sex-negative societies out there. They own the abstinence-only charade while they parade horribles. Marriage is not the answer to anything; it is an institution of the state. Anything else attached is sentimental.


If you haven't already, I recommend doing an in-depth study of animal sexual behaviors; especially the most intelligent animals. All animals have sex for pleasure, but some animals are only driven to have sex at certain times of the year; humans are on a 24/7 system.


>I’ve tried the no fap route and gotten very high days counts but that hasn’t really helped me at all.


Sexual frustration doesn't help anyone. If you are mindful, then you can use your libido to further your goals, but it is not an all-cure.


>Got any sources to help overcome sex-negative perspectives? I’m interested in recreational sex not baby making sex.


Absolutely. I recommend starting with actual sex science and learning about male and female psychology and neurology. Then work your way into reading about sex culture. You should also study developmental psychology as you will probably need the clinical context in order to objectively self-evaluate your childhood influences; it is necessary for self-therapy. The best therapy will always be self-therapy; no one will ever know you better than yourself.


Evolutionary Science and Morals Philosophy:

The Selfish Gene

The Moral Landscape

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do?


Sex Psychology, Science, and Neurology:

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

The Female Brain

The Male Brain

Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love

What Do Women Want

Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)

Sex: The world's favorite pastime fully revealed


Behavioral Psychology and Abstract Economics:

How Pleasure Works

Freakonomics

Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking

Thinking Fast And Slow

We Are All Weird


Developmental Psychology:

Nurture Shock

Hauntings: Dispelling The Ghosts That Run Our Lives


Empathy Building:


Half The Sky

The House On Mango Street

Me Before You

The Fault In Our Stars

Also check out James Hollis' Understanding The Psychology of Men lecture if you can find it.



Movies: XXY, Tom Boy, Dogtooth, Shame, Secretary, Nymphomaniac, Juno, Beautiful Creatures, and The Man From Earth.



All of these things are related, but it is up to you to make the connections; pick and choose which material suits your interests best. These are the things that came to mind first, and they have all influenced my perspectives.

One of the best books regarding debunking popular parenting myths:

Nurture Shock, by Bronson and Merryman
http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303248620&sr=8-1

It highlights the importance of effort vs. talent, and much more. One of my favs is stressing that the brain is like a muscle, regularly working it strengthens intelligence. Kids need to work on being smart~

Awesome book for any parent.

There's a good chapter in NurtureShock about that. It mostly tells you what you already know about the adverse effects of praise, but also goes a bit into keeping an eye out for and rewarding effort.

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents


The second has an unfortunate title to share with a parent but it’s really good insight into emotional development.

I want to encourage you and say your CPTSD won’t affecting your parenting and you providing her with love and security is enough, but I also don’t want to delude you into a false sense of security. To answer your question as to how I do it: Firstly, I put in a massive amount of effort everyday to keep myself grounded and mindful and conscious of how I’m acting/reacting towards my child. On top of that, I never let myself slip into depressive states. On top of that, I have learned to manage and control all of my triggers so that my emotional states never negatively affect my child.


One major element of CPTSD is that it is an attachment disorder. This attachment disorder WILL affect your ability to provide a consistent sense of safety and security to your little one unless you learn how to manage and counteract those insecurities. Another element of CPTSD is that it causes you to develop a distrust/distaste for humans, and a desire to avoid human interaction. This will be absolutely detrimental to your child as he/she ages. All children rely on their parents to provide them with safe, healthy and consistent family and friends. It’s a very tiring and very difficult job, but it creates a ‘safety net’ of security on which your child can lean. How you interact with and value others will turn into how your child interacts with and values others. You will have to spend lots of time around other moms, letting your child play with their child. It’s a strain on you emotionally and mentally, but it’s necessary for healthy child development.


The best advice I can give you as a fellow parent with CPTSD is to start searching for a trauma psychologist and get an appointment scheduled ASAP. Of course anyone can recover from CPTSD without the aid of a psychologist, but when you add a child to the mix, quality and speed of recovery becomes a very important factor. Getting a psychologist to help you process your trauma and learn newer and better ways to do things will save you a lot of time and heartache. A psychologist will also teach you the importance of obtaining and maintaining friendships, and how to better manage all the triggers that parenting will bring up for you.

In the meantime, here is a short list of my all-time favorite parenting books. I’ve read probably hundreds of parenting books at this point: most are bad, a few are great. These are the best, most knowledgeable books I’ve found for ‘people like us’, at least in my opinion:

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering our Children

ParentSpeak: What's Wrong with How We Talk to Our Children--and What to Say Instead

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind


Feel free to PM me anytime :)

Eh, women have more fluid sexual attraction than men do -- much more fluid. See this book.

The expression of this fluidity depends on environmental factors (culture, social, etc.). Today, lesbian pairings are "chic". Hollywood and the related supermodel world are peppered with it now, from Cara DeLevingne to Amber Heard to Kristen Stewart to countless others. For a hot young woman to have a GF is now not only accepted but celebrated in the media culture. So when that is the context -- lots of celebrity women who are quite attractive being in lesbian relationships, or going back and forth between being with men and women -- it provides a context where that underlying sexual fluidity in most women, which was always there, expresses itself more freely and openly. That's what we're seeing today.

Note that this is quite independent of how women identify themselves. Only a very small number of women self-identify as exclusively lesbian (it's a smaller percentage of women than the percentage of men who say they are exclusively gay). Not very many more women identify as bisexual, probably because they define bisexual in a way that excludes them, regardless of their behavior. So you can have women who have hooked up with a number of women sexually saying that they are not bisexual, or even women who have been in a relationship with a woman before as GF/GF saying they are not bisexual -- which really only means that they are defining bisexual as being something much more limited than the standard definition of someone who is attracted to some degree to both sexes. So, as with everything else, you can't really go by what they are saying (in terms of whether they say they are bisexual), but look at what they are doing (have they hooked up with (beyond 1-2 times experimentation), or dated, other women) to see what is really going on.

So, bottom line, yes all (not literally all, but most) women are bisexual in potential to some degree -- some more than others, but most have at least some latent attraction to other women, whether they have acted on it or not. The current environment strongly, strongly encourages women to act on this, because it celebrates GF/GF relationships among admired, hot, young celebrity women. So in that context you're going to see more of it going on. I think the rise of porn has an influence, too (when women watch porn, lots of them are watching lesbian porn), but that influence is much smaller than seeing many hot young female celebs hooking up with other hot young female celebs. Herd culture and all that.

I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK HIGHLY ENOUGH https://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268

> At some point in this line of reasoning, I crossed the threshold of atheist heresy

You're very vague about what exactly happened.

I belong to a group of atheists, and we have sponsored Darrel W. Ray, the author of "God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture" to come speak to us.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-The-Religion-Infects/dp/0970950519

But, I note what is called an overgeneralization fallacy in your story.

"that atheists reserve exclusively unto themselves the right of defining god. They insist upon using literal interpretations of lore, myth, and legend to form a god that is really nothing more than a straw man, "

Now, yes, atheists do use the conventional definition of what God is when describing themselves. But, then, if you wish to go around remaking definitions to suit yourself, you're going to run in to a lot of shampoo. In fact, if you scarecrow the cider, comets metal detector loop nursery. Most of use use conventional tears when describing salmon to avoid tower and confusion when communicating to crash.

we've known this for quite some time. Check out this book! it's fantastic

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519

Listen to the book Traffic, it will change how you think about how the roads we use are built. Also, I'm an audiobook listener so I suppose you could read it too. http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

I'm reading a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do right now that I think you may find fascinating. It's incredible so far and really touches on some interesting ideas.

The author of this article wrote an excellent book that goes in depth on these stories and others called Incognito. The whole book examines our limited ability to process perceptions and was a thoroughly engaging and heady read.

> But what is happening when I am given two choices, and I struggle to make a decision

But you didn't choose to be given the two choices.

There's an unimaginably long causal stream of events leading to your choice which was never under your control, so at the very least it seems that even if we could call that free will, it's not nearly as significant/powerful an ability as we normally think.

In the criminal examples, even if a stereotypical "bad guy" can be said conclusively to have "chosen" an antisocial action, they didn't choose the genetics or environmental effects that lead their brain to prefer the antisocial option.

EDIT: In my mind, I think the Free Will Debate, is pretty similar to the God Debate. To quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson "If that's how you wanna invoke your evidence for god, then god is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance, thats getting smaller, smaller and smaller as time goes moves on." Similarly, it would seem that almost every single finding in the fields of neuroscience and psychology and psychiatry have gone to show just how little we're in control of our own actions. To just observe the general trend, we seem to be accumulating an abundance of evidence to support one side of this argument, and the other side has to continue to point to the "ever receding" dark corner of ignorance in the room to try to support their side. David Eagleman has a chapter in his book Incognito about this where he talks about the "dethronement of man" as a general trend in scientific discovery.

I've read some of them. Those that I read are indeed good.

However, in the context of deciding to be better, I'd recommend to drop Pinker's "Blank Slate". It's a good book, but it's mostly about an academic and political debate. If you already accept that genes affect the mind, there's a better way to spend your time.

I'd also recommend to replace Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" with "The invisible Gorilla" by Charbis and Simmons. The latter book covers a similar ground to the first two, but it does so with less personal anecdotes.

I'd also recommend to replace the books from Oliver Sacks with Eagleman's "Incognito. The Secret Lives of the Brain." Eagleman is also funny, he covers similar ground, but his book is a bit more systematic.

If you're done with the surface level stuff and have all the basics covered, pretty much all of Jung's important work is in the collected works (there's also The Red Book, but that's probably not a good starting point).

There really is no "recommended reading order" for Jung. The CW Wiki page has the release dates for each book, but a few of his books were revised multiple times (there were four editions of Symbols of Transformation, for example), so I don't really know how much of a good barometer that's gonna be. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious and Psychological Types are popular, not terribly difficult, pretty good starting points for the CW. Aside from a few of more notoriously difficult books like Aion and the works on alchemy (vol 12-14), you can pretty much move on to anything else after that.

Symbols of Transformation is also a key text, it's the book that pretty much laid the groundwork for all of Jung's thought after he separated from Freud. It is not an easy read but if you understand SoT you've got a solid grip on Jung and can probably handle the rest of the CW. And all that aside, it's an extremely rewarding text.

Depends on the theoretical models he’s interested in. Here’s my favorite Jungian gift:
The Red Book
It’s something I would never have bought myself because of the cost, but am glad to have it for its historical significance.

To unequivocally debunk the feminist myth would take an entire book, which would require years to research. You're going to have to be very neutral and balanced and as fact-orientated as possible, which most mrm stuff imo falls short of. "Positive discrimination" and false accusations are what feminists WANT you to complain about - not that they're not valid complaints, but things like the gender empathy/victimhood gap, men's lives being valued less, maternal superiority, male moral inferiority etc. which fit into traditionalism and can be put forward as the other side of the coin are much better imo.

Janice Fiamengo's youtube series "The Fiamengo File" (Season 1, Season 2) is a much watch (she's also coincidentally an English proffessor). Her video : "what's wrong with women's studies" is also very good (this lecture was protested, had fire alarms pulled etc.).

Christina Hoff Sommers' channel "The Factual Feminist" is also very good. These videos (1, 2 by Karen Straughan are good, but her other stuff tends to be more sensationalist.

As for books, Warren Farrell's "The myth of male power" and Roy Baumeister's "Is there anything good about men" are essential reading. This paper (on sexual repression) also by Roy Baumeister is also extremely important.

This article touches on a lot about the childcare/domestic vs workplace spheres, also this one on maternal gatekeeping - which you could could add domestic gatekeeping in aswell - basically that a lot of women still see the traditionally female realm as "theirs" (despite wanting into the traditional male realm) and although they probably say they want equality, in reality they want a helpmate rather than a full equal, taking on a managerial/directorial role to which a lot of men might react to by dragging their heels (not that some guys aren't genuinely selfish) - things like fathers looking after their kids being described as "babysitting" tie into this. Of course guys in these situations have very little preparation for this because feminism has resulted in a situation where for decades egalitarian roles have been pushed with a positive encouraging message for women and girls and a negative shaming message for men and boys, as a gain in power for women and girls and a loss in power for men and boys. It has also resulted in tons of messages of traditionally "masculine" things being reconciled with positive/aspirational feminine social value, while the reverse has not been the case remotely near as much (I've only ever seen housework being portrayed as compatible with positive/aspirational masculine value once - in movie Don Jon).

I'd write you a second post about gender roles (and the context they need to be looked at within) throughout history and in the developing world, but there's a lot and I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow morning!

Seeing Like a State by James C Scott

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt writes that when trying to come to an idea, we first decide how we feel about an issue based solely on intuition, then spend the rest of the time trying to rationalize it. This article is just that. It's saying "There are some things I want to use from the OT and some that I don't; I'm going to come up with a way of categorizing the OT's statements such that the ones I like neatly fall into separate categories from the ones I dislike." This isn't necessarily a deliberate act, but rather occurs at the subconscious level, but the result is "How can I defend the concept that homosexuality is a sin and still eat shellfish? Oh, here's how."

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-C-G-Jung/dp/0393065677

A book by Julia Serano

Man, you've called me ignorant a few times now. I've got the statisticians on my side, at least.

> allied health, for the craptastic nothingness...

Craptastic, maybe. Unglamorous, certainly. But "nothingness" I gotta take issue with. Real human needs you're fulfilling there. Somehow it reminds me of the Buddhist saying: "Before Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After Enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Or the 21st century equivalents thereof :-)

> I wondered why, over the decades, no one ever called or sought me out to see how I'm doing. I realize that what I considered "significantly intimate" was actually not much of anything to others....

Welcome to my world. Except I finally found the right therapist when I was about 25.

My friend whose mother was a pathological narcissist highly recommends this book, btw.

I remember running into someone who was in my program in university (the first time), after 20 years or so. He confessed to me that he used to be fascinated to watch me in class and in the common rooms, and he said it was amazing how the others mostly found me invisible and inaudible. He said it was obvious to him that I was desperate to simply be part of the group, but I just had no idea how. So I asked him why he didn't try to help or even say anything to me at the time and he replied, sadly: "It's only obvious to me now. Back then I just thought you were a freak."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393065677/ref=s9_simz_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=062E4NHMZD4YKQ7PCAF8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

looks amazing, just have to persuade my wife that we need it

"Brain Rules for Babies" by John Medina may be of interest to you. I haven't read "Expecting Better," but based on the blurb it seems the two books have similar goals: providing peer-reviewed information and avoiding the propagation of myths.


At the beginning of my pregnancy, I worried I wasn't doing enough to optimize fetal development. There's so much information to be found on pregnancy and child care, I kept wondering, "Which advice should I follow? What helps and what hinders?" It was overwhelming! I'm a FTM, and I've never been around babies, so I was clueless. The pregnancy chapter in "Brain Rules" really simplified it for me: take care of yourself physically and mentally and let the fetus do it's thing. The book continues to cover relationships, brain development, emotional development, and moral development with similar clarity.


I have a few other books such as "What to Expect the First Year" but I just keep them around for reference, haven't actually read all the way through them. Other books I've considered buying are "Mind in the Making" and "NurtureShock."

This is a very complicated question and IMO we can't possibly begin to make a valid sweeping generalization in this regard due to, among other things, the myriad religions and religious practices of the world and the plethora of psychiatric and cognitive pathologies, many of which we are still studying, that afflict a person. With that being said, my shot-in-the-dark guess, with no data to support it, is that no, religious belief or practice does not always associate with a mental disorder. Humans are naturally inquisitive creatures and are very observant. There is so much of the world that the large majority of us observe but cannot, for whatever reason, understand. Religion can be a tool utilized to fill those gaps in knowledge. Whether or not you agree with its efficacy in this manner is another discussion.

My understanding of r/K selection theory (from Ecology) is that it's been jettisoned and superseded by better insights. I don't think there are experts in the relevant field today that use it or take it to be the most rigorous instrument of analysis.

It's mostly used by people like Molyneux or Anonymous Conservative in favor of their own personal theories about the political differences between liberal and conservative. Interesting, but I don't lend much credence to it.

You get that that's an incredibly good thing, right?

Humans are becoming less brutal and more civilized. Go back a few hundred years and ISIS wouldn't be considered particularly brutal, let alone the most brutal government in the world by a wide margin.

You should read this book.

Yep baloney. They have it set up so either way they can claim " the end is near!" Governments proclaim we are in the most peaceful period in human history? The end must be close!

Reports of more and more wars? This means the end is near too! It's just more doublethink.

By the way statistically we are living in the most peaceful, non violent time period in human history, see the Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker.

Check out Nurture Shock, whose first chapter goes into this in quite a bit of detail. More good stuff about raising kids to be found throughout.

>it's just that pink princesses who need the approval of men and overbearing female family members to have any self-worth...

No kidding!

I do think some of this is developmental (for ex., the chapter in Nurtureshock on race has some really interesting stuff on how social science research shows kids gravitate to very clear-cut 'us vs them' groups at around your daughter's age). I was discussing the 'princess' thing with some friends who have girls older than mine, and they say their twins & their friends all went through the phase for a couple of years before elementary school, then after awhile all decided the princess stuff was awful and switched to black clothing and tomboy activities (also both phases). So there's at least some reason to think that some parts of this will resolve with time as she matures.

No question, though, that the underlying girls vs boys ideology is disturbing. You can't do anything about your co-parent's living situation or family dynamic, but you can promote your own positive view of a 'girl power' agenda that doesn't put down boys. Maybe you could take the 'girl power' thing and run with it in a direction that fits your values? The site "A Mighty Girl" has reviewed & suggested a lot of toys, books, etc., to promote some positive and more empowered ways of being a girl than simply "I love princesses / boys steal girl power." For starters, you could start working some of that stuff into the book/toy collection you have for your daughter.

I don't have any boy book suggestions, but one book I really enjoyed was The Emotional Life of a Toddler (http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Life-Toddler-Alicia-Lieberman/dp/0028740173) Sorry, can't do fancy pants links.

I also really enjoyed NurtureShock (http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130/ref=sr_1_56?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369239257&sr=1-56&keywords=science+of+child+development)

Neither of these are parenting books, but really helpful in how you think about parenting and your child.

I couldn’t finish the book. I stopped reading when they recommended locking a 5-yr old in their room during a tantrum, and gave a detailed explanation on how to wedge a blanket just right if you don’t have a lock on the door.

One of the authors, Foster Cline, was a big proponent of attachment therapy, a controversial therapeutic technique that killed a few kids back in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Personally, I think Love and Logic is dangerous, and if I hear of a parent using their techniques, I would suggest alternative books.

I like Peaceful Parent, Happy Kid, How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and The Whole Brain Child..

A couple of thoughts:

1. Quit telling her that she's doing a good job. Tell her instead "you're working hard at that." For a gifted toddler, their vision of what they want will never ever be as good as they can create. You want her to learn that it's about the process, not the product. You really want to avoid praising her for being "smart" (and having others do the same) when she starts school. Read Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset: https://www.mindsetworks.com/parents/default\
   
2. Figure out YOUR boundaries and then when you set them, be firm. Smart kids who can win arguments with you as toddlers NEED clear boundaries that you enforce no matter how hard they tantrum. Like typical 2-5 year olds, they're trying to figure out how the world works. If it works differently on different days or differently if they tantrum vs. not, then they are very unsettled and the unknown makes the world a scary place. I recommend Mary Sheedy Kurcinka's book: Kids, Parents, and Power Struggles. Stanley Greenspan's The Challenging Child also helped me a lot.
   
   1. If dad says no story until something is tidied away and she says "mum can read the book," then your reply is "You need to tidy that away before anyone reads to you." Let the ensuing tantrum happen (see below).
      
   2. For the light example, I'd say "you're right, that one doesn't hurt. What's the difference? Can you always tell the difference? That's why we have to be careful." Not everyone bit of her "defiance" is true defiance. She's trying to figure out the boundaries of her world. She's two and so she's still very very literal. (When my son was two, I told him that all cars had exhaust pipes. He had to check each car we saw for the next week.)
      
3. Give up trying to avoid distress. Instead focus on helping her cope with her distress. I, too, have a super bright, emotionally intense daughter who's now beyond early childhood. She feels deeply, she's easily frustrated, and she has experienced more negative emotions than many other children. I don't want her to feel less, because that's part of who she is. She feels passionately about social justice and is now finally in a position to begin to work with organizations to effect this change.
   
4. Teach your daughter (a) that negative emotions can be withstood and (b) they are not the end of the world. You have to figure out what helps her when she's in distress. For one of my kids, I needed to back off and leave him alone because ANYTHING I did overstimulated him. When he calmed down on his own, we could cuddle and talk. For another, I need to be there to help her calm down (even now as a teen). I would lay down with her on the bed and hum very softly while she sobbed. For helping kids recognize emotions and deal with them, I recommend Dan Siegel's work: The Whole Brain Child and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen by Faber and Mazlish.

How about The Explosive Child by Ross Greene? Focuses on the Collaborative Problem Solving approach (see also www.thinkkids.org), which views temper tantrums as a delay in the development of emotion regulation skills and works on building those skills. Jed Baker's No More Meltdowns is another great option with some similar ideas.

For general parenting -- including dealing with tantrums -- I love How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Faber and Mazlish. Dawson and Guare's Smart But Scattered helps with executive functioning skills-development of all types (emotional regulation is an executive function; others include things like organization and planning).

Oh, and I haven't made it all the way through it yet, but The Whole Brain Child has some good ideas on how to talk about distress tolerance with kids, e.g., "surfing the emotional waves."

Good question! Lisa Diamond is a feminist who addresses this issue in her book Sexual Fluidity.

>Not everyone responds well to graphic images and videos, satirical, passive agressive criticism, or being called out and having their beliefs challenged.

So don't do any of those things. Unless the person is already open to the idea of veganism, those are recipes for disaster.

>How do you effectively change people or plant the seed in their minds

This is the book you want. And if you have somebody who is willing to have a conversation with you, something like this book might be pretty good (it's mostly for therapists helping people deal with addictions and stuff, but that's still relevant). One good video I saw recently, that clearly uses a lot of these tactics, is this vegan street interview.

You can probably do some googling for blogs and articles on the psychology of persuasion and behavior change.

EDIT: You can't expect to just show people the truth and have them immediately change their thinking. This is a quote from a book about climate change, but it's definitely relevant here:

>Ironically, one of the best proofs that information does not change people's attitudes is that science communicators continue to ignore the extensive research evidence that shows that information does not change people's attitudes.

This is the spiritual successor to "How to Win Friends and Influence People":

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165

It is written more from the perspective of "here is what people do to try to influence you unfairly and what you can do about it".

James Randi, master of such topics.
http://www.amazon.com/Flim-Flam-Psychics-Unicorns-Other-Delusions/dp/0879751983/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

Not about the topics, but on how people get scammed into them.
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165

I would imagine that is very frustrating, and I am sorry I contributed to that frustration.

It's just that I, myself, deal with my own mental health issues and have been combating it for years---Pure O OCD, PTSD, severe Major Depressive Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder, and a Nonspecific Personality Disorder, according to my last in-patient stay at a unit, and it's taken me out of college, out of work, out of my apartment, out from nearly all my relationships---and so when I see a comment such as yours (which truth be told is confusingly put so as to be misconstrued as a complete dismissal of Mental Health and Illness as a legitimate problem or concept) I take it personally---just another person judging me by what they do not understand.

I've seen Schizophrenics, laughing hysterically into a pillow and then attacking a fellow schizophrenic 90 year old black man for calling him a 'Racist ass Smurf', Mania, addicts of all sorts, PTSD episodes----the man bashing doors screaming, punching walls, resulting in the unit being shut down, everyone in their rooms, and that person having to be subdued. He was fine the next morning---calm, collected---although, his knuckles and forehead were fresh with thick and long scabs. He was an ex-gangster, coming to terms with the crimes he had to commit.

The previous night he 'experienced' murder.

I also research and write about Mental Health and Illness since it impacts me so. And I understand you have your own take, and studied it in undergrad 25 years ago, but believe me, what was taught a quarter century ago is vastly different than what is taught now.

This Amazon link is for the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V-- the 5th edition, published in 2013. I highly recommend for you (if you haven't already) go buy it or check it out at a library or find a pdf of it somewhere (or excerpts of it) and see how disparate the 25 year old, 1994, DSM IV (and the DSM IV-TR update from 2000) is from our current understanding of Mental Health and Illness in the 2013 DSM V.

And even then, that one is 6 years old and is in need of an update.

Anywho, if I may offer an alternative to your approach at giving your takes on Mental Health (or really any subject, really): do not presume an authority over the subject matter but instead present it as your own personal take while allowing the room and welcoming the possibilities of further understanding the subject from its responses; since, just like you say, 'You don't who I am. I could know nothing, or be sharing a really different and valuable perspective', so in that line of thinking, it's reasonable to assume you don't know them either and you might learn something too.

I would love to have the latest DSM -5 but it's out of my price range. http://www.amazon.com/Diagnostic-Statistical-Manual-Disorders-Edition/dp/0890425558/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=KRZ1Q5XAEPJU&coliid=I4A6VJ4057AWK

Ever read The God Virus by Darrel Ray?

He explains the guilt cycle from a psychological perspective in detail.

1. Make something that every animal does into a taboo, encode it into the religious virus's DNA.
   
2. When followers do it anyways (fornication, masturbation, you name it...), compel them to come to the church for repentance.
   
3. Tell followers they'll be absolved, this time, for the low-low price of 10%.
   
4. Followers repent, fork over the tithe, priest waves his dead chicken of absolution, induces wave of dopamine euphoria as guilt is washed away, for a while...
   
5. Lather, rinse, repeat once a week.
   
6. PROFIT!!!

The Evolutionary Psychology of Politics by Anonymous Conservative:
https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486499121&sr=1-1&keywords=the+evolutionary+psychology+behind+politics

It is a great introduction to some of the science behind why conservatives and liberals are so completely different in the head from one another. It addresses both nature and nurture, evolution and culture. It is very insightful as to how and why liberals and conservatives tick.

steve pinker: the better angels of our nature

After reading The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, I have been touting the gospel of Steven Pinker in church at every opportunity. A fantastic meta study of the reduction of violence, and commentary on how much better things are now than ever before.

> These operatives invariably prey on the useful idiots, those naive idealists who bind themselves to a cause and are oblivious to the evil they serve, or to those simply greedy for money and a little power.

A group of Eastern European scientists secretly developed a scientific theory about pathocracy. They found that individuals with personality disorders like psychopathy occupy positions of power and influence.

After a short time these sociopaths and psychopaths dominate the agenda and corrupt the system from within. The result is a totalitarian system in which the government is turned against its own people.

Andrzej Łobaczewski was the only survivior of these group. He came to the U.S. and wrote a very important book called Political Ponerology.

Evil Machiavellian men in positions of power need their thugs and stooges to do their dirty work.

That's correct. I'm reading an anthropology book about violence.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

It talks about this, only it refers to something it dubs 'the leviathan'–which is a third party of authority (i.e., the police and the government)–and how poor communities that do not trust 'the leviathan' to resolve their issues are forced to resort to 'street justice'. And, at that point, if 'street justice' isn't respected, what's left?

'Disrespecting' someone is taken as a direct affront and a challenge.

Police racism has been a pretty major part of American culture, and it's only been addressed relatively recently. So, you have a couple generations of black adults who grew up accustomed to a lifestyle where the police aren't trustworthy and are probably racist. It's not hard to see how this kind of thing can happen.

Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature writes in great detail how the world keeps getting more and more peaceful since the enlightenment.

see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

First off I did not want to chime in with my point of view. Should really be doing other stuff and wanted to keep my non-meditation opinions separate from this account. Please don't take this the wrong way but the fact that a certain post here has several downvotes instead of replies countering what was stated saddens me. I think the fact that two of those were reported as "rude, vulgar, or offensive" says a lot about those who are downvoting.


I agree (and I think it is evident) that there is lot of suffering in the world. One of my main goals in life is to help alleviate some of that suffering and this is something I have thought about as well. However in my humble opinion I think one of the main problems is what psychiatrist and author Andrzej Lobaczewski calls a Pathocracy or "a system of government wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people.” which in my opinion is what the US government is and has been for a while. In his book Political Ponerology the author researches the causes of harm and oppression and why humanity seems to be stuck in it. The book has been reviewed favorably by Philip Zimbardo (from the famous Stanford Prison experiment - if you are not familiar with this and are also interested in reducing suffering in the world I highly suggest you read about it as it is very enlightening). Here is a nice review of the book Political Ponerology BTW, in case anyone is interested.


With regards to the role meditation plays I agree with the quote provided by Shinzen that it does allow one to avoid burn-out, bum-out, and freak-out. On the other hand just because someone is spiritually enlightened does not mean that they are moral or have the best interest of others in mind (not referring to Shinzen btw). Also, as I think Culadasa himself has stated, it would be wise to deal with one's anger towards suffering before doing something about it so as to not distort one's actions (I forget what exactly he said about this and what his arguments were). Or at least being conscious of how such anger distorts one's actions.


I am not here to debate either and so will try to refrain from doing so but did want to say that my personal preference is capitalism as well. To prove my point that it is the system that allows people like Trump in power that is actually more dangerous than those who have large amounts of money (such as Trump) or the capitalist system as a whole please consider this: was Trump as threatening before getting into power? I suspect most people would say that he was not and the would admit he is more of a threat now that he is in power proving that the political system is far more dangerous than capitalism as a whole. Just to be clear I am not implying that Hillary would have been a better option as I do not consider myself either a Democrat or a Republican.


I expect this post to be downvoted as well...


Please feel free to chime and tell me that I'm wrong and why (or to agree) or to PM me :-)

I don't think it's real, but Steven Pinker has written two books with basically the same message:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Enlightenment Now

I guess the bar I'm setting for not being awful is a fair bit lower. E.g. I think most people, at least in modern society, won't kill (or torture or rip off) someone just because they could probably get away with it.

Then again, I don't discount the effect of having accountability via a mostly working criminal justice system. Groups that have been mostly immune to accountability, like some bankers, CIA interrogators, cops, gang members in neighborhoods with "no snitching" codes, have been some of the worst.

Steven Pinker wrote a book on a related topic that might help you be more optimistic:
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Nicht /u/sandmaninasylum , aber das absolute Standardwerk ist Whipping Girl von Julia Serano.

"If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.

With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress."

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

"Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society."

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

> One thing that won't be mentioned in that book: women do not need to continually prove that they are women because their status as a woman cannot be stripped-away very easily and it simply isn't demanded of them.

Summa Genderratica

> A female needs to undergo a process of biological maturation in order to perform the feminine contribution to society, however this process is essentially automatic and is basically assumed to occur over time, with mensturation serving as a clear biological indicator of fitness to perform the task.

> With males, things are more tenuous. Proficiency or even ability to perform the male function, let alone perform it well, is not biologically guaranteed. Additionally, there is no single clear “he’s ready” indicator delivered by male biology.

> Whilst females “grow into” being women, males do not automatically grow into being “real men.” A young female just becomes a woman automatically, due to the innate properties of her biology. Her mensturation evidences her maturation. Her womanhood simply is. She is assumed to be gender-compliant and thus socially contributive by default.

> A young male has to demonstrate, through action, the ability to perform masculine tasks successfully. A young male must prove he has “grown up” and become a “real man.” Males are not assumed to be gender-compliant (and thus socially contributive) by default; by himself he is just another mouth to be fed by the work of “real men.” A man must validate his manhood by action, otherwise he is not a real man but rather a “boy” (i.e. immature, not-an-adult male).

> A gender-compliant person of either sex is seen as valuable to society (since they are acting in ways which conform to survivability-oriented norms). However, females are assumed to either be (or will be) gender-compliant; naturally infertile women are the exception rather than the rule and thus the assumption is that any given female is (or will be) capable of bearing children due to their biology.
As such, females are ascribed an innate value simply for being female. Females are seen as inherently cherishable because they are the incubators of the future.

> Males lack this. Their gender-compliance is not seen as an inevitable feature of their biological maturation but rather an ideal to live up to. Males neither are nor will become “real men” by default. As such, they have no innate value. The value of a man is exclusively contingent on the consequences of his agency and by himself, he is ultimately disposable.

Roy Baumeister - Is there anything good about being a man?

> In one episode [of The Apprentice], two members of one team were shown arguing about a difficult aspect of the upcoming task. Somebody had to take on the responsibility for doing what could be an unpromising chore that was needed for the team but carried some risk and unpleasantness. The argument became heated, as each person thought the other should do it. The woman goaded the man with the phrase “C’mon, be a man!”

> Indignant, he shot back, “You be a woman!” Immediately and almost shouting, she replied “I am a woman!” and went on to say more things. The man sat there in silence, unable to think of what else to say.

> We can understand his confusion. He did not know why he had abruptly lost that argument. She had said something to him, and he had said essentially the same thing back to her, but his reply had somehow failed utterly. He probably thought that in this age of gender equality and fair treatment for all and so forth, “Be a man” and “Be a woman” would be equal, parallel things to say. Yet they weren’t. She was a woman already, and she knew it, and he did too, and she did not have to prove it. But once his manhood was questioned, he would have to do more to prove it than simply say “I am a man!” in a loud voice.

There is a much longer book in which the author (Roy Baumeister) covers these topics more in-depth.

Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men

Other good reads which are related include The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley, and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

About 80% of women who ever lived but only about 40% of men who ever lived have a living descendant today. From this book.

What I really want to get at is the fact that "government" is not an all-or-nothing deal. There are many actions and interactions that are heavily influenced by the superstition of "government", and there are plenty more that are relatively untouched by that superstition. When you look at a map created by someone who believes in nation-states, it will look like it's all-government, but that image is an illusion that is part-and-parcel of the superstition. By talking about "the territory controlled by governments", you're still seeing like a state.

Once you start seeing "government" as a mental phenomenon rather than a geographical phenomenon, the false reality of the nation-state map fades away. You start seeing things in terms of Jeffrey Tuckerisms, where the simple act of pouring milk into your cereal bowl is a beautiful act of anarchy, despite it happening within a region painted all one color on the map.

If you find this interesting you might wanna check out a great book on this subject. The book is called Traffic and it provides some very interesting insight into the way that people drive.

Studies have actually shown that waiting to merge until the last minute optimizes usage of the road. Leaving the lane empty for a quarter mile before it ends is just wasted asphalt. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

That said, I generally merge early since it is considered polite.

do you move in between lanes trying to get in the good lane? do you let people merge into your lane without trying to block them? do you only go in the left lane while passing, allowing traffic to move?

do you even know the ways to make a road efficient? read up on the science/math of traffic. you'll be amazed. i was guilty of a lot of bad road ideas until i read this: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

adding another lane does little to improving traffic flow. more people just decide to use the freeways instead of other methods. you know why they can drive so fast on the autobahn? you need a license, and you get it taken away if you do something inefficient.

Some people (most people) will believe whatever makes them feel comfortable no matter what evidence they are presented with.

Here is a good book on the subject

To add onto this, something you might find interesting is the work of scholar Jonathan Haidt.

In essence, Haidt argues that human morality is rooted in evolutionary biology. Haidt defines Six moral foundations that are universally understood by humans. These foundations, such as who deserves care or harm, what defines fairness or cheating, and the right to liberty or need for oppression, are essentially biological roots for what we define as "rights." In essence, these are "natural rights."

As you point out, social construction is important and can determine the rules for these rights within society. However, saying that rights are entirely socially constructed is not necessarily true. As Haidt's research shows, several notions of human rights are innate and each human is born with an implicit understanding of them.

I'm gonna post the most interesting two paragraphs of this essay, which basically blame Kennedy and his technocrats for ruining the whole political belief in liberalism after his expirament failed so miserably: data on the Vietnam war and new ways to better kill people.

That oversimplifies it, but Kennedy did try it. (My source here is an article from the Roosevelt Institute:

The economic problems of the 1960s, Kennedy said, are “subtle challenges for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided.” (Kennedy said this in 1962)

I'm gonna post the most interesting two paragraphs of this essay, which basically blame Kennedy and his technocrats for ruining the whole political belief in liberalism after his experiment failed so miserably:

​

Liberalism was discredited in part because of the Kennedy men’s faith in experts and their conviction that the choices were technical, not political. In the most narrow reading of the 1962 speech, JFK was embracing the view, held briefly by the American followers of John Maynard Keynes, though not Keynes himself, that “the practical management of a modern economy” involved “fine-tuning” fiscal and monetary policy, which would keep it on a steady path of growth. Keynesian fine-tuning failed dramatically, especially in the 1970s, leaving liberals essentially without economic tools and vulnerable to the alternative of supply-side economics. Excess faith in expertise is also held responsible for the Vietnam War (“The Best and the Brightest” were technocrats who could ask every question except whether the basic idea made sense) and failures of the community-based anti-poverty programs of the Johnson era. Above all, as critics of liberalism both sympathetic and hostile have argued ever since the late 1960s (most recently, Jonathan Haidt), the ideology of expertise-not-ideology put liberals far out of touch with the real stuff of life – morality, ethnicity, family, fear, tribal instincts. And to some extent it’s true – a classic example is the idea of overcoming residential segregation through more aggressive desegregation of schools, that is, busing – which surely created more conflict and racial antagonism than it resolved, and not solely because of racism.

But 50 years is a long, long time (check this video clip of Kennedy’s speech if you want a sense of how far away that era seems), and liberals have been apologizing for and backing off of their faith in dispassionate expertise for most of it while the contempt for expertise developed by the populist right has continued to build. When populist politicians like Sarah Palin denounce “elites,” we act mystified that she doesn’t seem to mean the very rich. But the idea that the real elites are technocratic experts empowered by government is now very old – so old that it’s not true. One of the first things conservatives have done consistently when they gain power is to cut the legs out from under any kind of independent source of evaluation – eliminating the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995, ending any independent analysis of the distributional effects of tax cuts in the Bush administration, challenging scientific consensus on climate change, and most recently, attempting to eliminate funding for the American Community Survey and the National Science Foundation’s social science research program.

Here's the full essay. It's not long.

> The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html?pagewanted=all

For the book being reviewed: http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

i love that story he/she made, and have read almost all of the source material he/she cited! I liked the fact that the story was almost entirely free of speculation of society/culture (beyond augmented employers wanting augmented employees). By sticking to the philosophical quandary itself, it was very believable and understandable as a "how we get there" story. To know more about human "consciousness" and what we call free will, I'd suggest reading Incognito, by David Eagleman.

Another quote about the singularity I enjoy is by Justin B. Rye:

>"As I see it, the main problem in designing a plausible 23rd century these days isn't lack of grandeur, it's the imminence of changes so fundamental and unpredictable they're likely to make the dramas of 2298 as unintelligible to us as the Microsoft Anti-Trust Suit would be to Joan of Arc."

And just to keep away the near-religious fervor that begins to brew up inside of my optimistic brain, i tend to either imagine scenarios of how the Singularity could be a bad thing (I love drawing and writing), and watch Bruce Sterling's "Your Future as a Black Hole".

Remember to keep your cautiously optimistic wits about you on this subject!

Sorry. That's a really shitty attitude from your brother.

I just read a really good book called Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. It outlines how positive thinking is just as much a delusion as negative thinking. Neither one is rooted in reality. The non-stop message that "you're only having problems because your attitude is problematic" is rooted in a very old post-Calvinistic belief called New Thought (in short, physical reality could be influenced by thinking). These days there's SO much buy-in to the positivity movement, that people actually refuse to believe that some problems require more than just a "fresh new outlook". The denial is staggering. It's everywhere.

The point is, positive thinking like he's promoting is stupid because it ignores reality. The way that you escape depression is not with positive thinking, but rather a realistic approach. Take account of all the things that are good in your life, AND all the things that are not so good. Work on changing the things you can, and work on accepting the things you can't. Place a bigger emphasis on making plans and following through, rather than this inwards-facing "this doesn't feel right, my outlook must be at fault" approach. And above all, avoid the temptation to label yourself "success" or "failure" based on how you feel.

Depression is a real bitch. And people who have this "silver-lining" approach have obviously never had it. There are no benefits. There's no gain. And recognizing that is crucial, because once you accept that fact, you realize the only direction is up. That's not to say what you feel is unimportant, it is. Just be sure to recognize the difference between "this is what I feel" and "this is reality". Your brother lives on one side of the delusional spectrum. Your depression usually makes it really easy fall on the opposite end of that spectrum. Critically examine what you feel, ask yourself which parts are real, which parts aren't, and what you can realistically do to address it. Ask yourself which steps you can take to make life easier. To make it more survivable. Maybe that just means finding someone to talk to about it who's capable of showing a little empathy. And when the next wave of depression hits (as it usually does), try to ride the wave knowing it's just a feeling, and that this time you've got the tools and the preparation needed to realistically deal with it.

You, my friend, need to read Brightsided. This whole "positive thinking" movement and "faked happiness" thing is complete bullshit. You need to get to the root of your problems and issues and get the help that you truly need.

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324511128&sr=8-1

Positive thinking is basically deluding yourself and hiding away from your problems.

I am sick of the focus on positivity everywhere. I have rich jerks tell me how "negative' I am while I'm the one standing at the food pantry and with severe health problems. America is going down the tubes with the glad handers and be positive crap. Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850

My family would abuse me and then call me negative for being depressed. I have almost ended up on the streets and lost everything and my health so I am sick of the jerks, who always tell me youre not positive enough.

I am happier and more positive being away from those idiots.

I also have decided too I am not going to let anyone tell me what to feel anymore.

Is it just me, or does he bear a distinct resemblance to Gonzo from the Muppets?

In all seriousness, on the topic of self-help and the whole BS "positivity" movement, I highly recommend the book "Bright-Sided" by Barbara Ehrenreich: https://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850

Here's an excellent taste of her perspective, also amusingly illustrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

> but that doesn't justify unconscious bias.

Thank you, I get so tired of people justifying base instinctual behavior and "reactions". Personal and social evolution is about awareness of unconscious biases and trying to resist falling into them. The studies on attractiveness are nauseating - the reddit meme of

1. be atttractive
   
2. don't be unattractive
   is borne out.
   
   As a "professional" I try to fight any urge to relate a person's appearance or demeanor to their competence. I remind my teams of the same.
   The book "Brightsided" points out another level of this problem:
   http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850
   
   I try to remind people, we are not hiring into a social club or interviewing for 'positive', enthusiastic people who will fit our corporate culture well. We are looking for people who are good at their job - tie wearing white guy, tattooed hipster chick, whatever. If a person wants to let her ass/boobs/piercings hang out at work, great. If she wants to take a break and 'hoop' in front of a bunch of male coworkers, great. If she is a programmer she should be judged on the quality of code she checks in and the ideas she brings during discussions. Judging "professional attire" is a slippery slope to judging people based on their looks and attractiveness and/or personality - maybe we won't get past that for mate selection (as evidenced by some of the okcupid studies among others) but we damn well should try as hard as we can for non-mating activities if we want to claim to be an enlightened society.
   
   LinkedIn is a step backwards in recruiting and hiring, photos were against the law for good reason (and we understand that better now).
   
   I never understood how tech people, who are supposed to be logical and were often shunned and bullied for being "different" have fallen into the irrational world of 'professional attire'. For Christ sake, we should all start wearing bowler hats again, because that was really professional attire. argh!

Here's an Amazon link for those interested. Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Also check your public library because they probably have it. I am not exaggerating when I say this book completely changed the way I see the world and our particular moment in history. It's strange because it's all right in front of us but I hadn't had the right lens or vocabulary to see or discuss it.

That was enough. It's Bright-sided.

Thanks! It's solved.

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-C-G-Jung/dp/0393065677

$117 now!! LOL = I must be dreaming!

Sorry to hear this.

So in essence, you want:

1. To separate yourself and your mother from your father as soon as possible
   
2. To have minimum, ideally zero, contact with your father as long as possible
   
3. To take care of yourself and your mother as soon as you are able to
   
   Like what a lot of people had mention, you should check out AWAM, and that could help solve your first two problems. The third is tricky, but I think AWAM would have enough cases similar to yours, that they would have the right advice for you.
   
   Just a question, I understand that you have no car, but are you and your mother able to leave the house? Just wondering if you're locked up and unable to leave the house.
   
   The first three problems are technical problems, but there's also a fourth, longer term, problem that you should be aware about: living in a such a toxic environment brings subtle but powerful changes to the victims, especially to growing teenagers such as yourself. Do check out r/raisedbynarcissists. It's a subreddit for people who have toxic parents and perhaps you can learn more about your situation. You can also read Children of the Self-Absorbed by Nina Brown. Although it's written for adults that have not-so-abusive-but-still-toxic parents, I think this book will still be helpful to you. It shed light to the kind of parents I have, and provided steps that I can take to help me grow as a person. It's not a great book, but it was a necessary one. If you want the book, just let me know and I can send you a digital copy.
   
   For a sixteen year old, you have shown guts. But sometimes it's difficult to deal with this alone. I know I'm just an internet stranger, but if you ever need someone to talk to, about anything, just shoot me a message. You can keep your anonymity too obviously.
   
   Take care.

Just wanted to reach out and say you're not alone. I've been in the same situation since what feels like early childhood. Even once the fog lifted and I escaped my family of origin, I was still trapped in the same behavioral patterns I'd been taught, and so still attracting narcs; looking back at past friendships has been equally eye-opening and appalling. Working hard on myself atm via therapy and education to figure out how to stop this pattern - it's gotten easier, but I think it will always be a work in progress. Two things which helped the most so far:

1. Learning not to ignore my own gut feelings telling me that something's off, and this person's actions don't match whatever they're claiming about themselves. Being rbn, we're taught literally from birth to doubt ourselves and accept manipulative and even abusive behavior and mindsets as if they were normal - and all so that our nparents' delusions could always be reinforced, and their behavior always excused; so their ego is always gratified, and they're never held accountable for their own actions. (For a lot of us, in fact, we were taught to believe their behavior was our fault, and their problems were our job to fix even as children, so we learned to always blame ourselves instead of placing the responsibility where it belonged.) But those gut feelings exist for a very good reason - even if we can't put the why of them into words, or even quite make sense of them to ourselves just yet, your gut is your most valuable early warning system. Respect it; it's trying to help. It's always a signal for us to step back, think critically, and ask some difficult questions.
   
   and
   
   
2. I had to learn to stop automatically blaming myself for being "so stupid" or "so spineless" or even "deserving" poor treatment; this is related to the above in re: accepting responsibility for others' behavior. Yes, we do need to be more assertive in protecting our boundaries - but everyone is solely accountable for their own choices, including narcs: you can't "make" anyone abuse you. That was always their own decision, it was never okay no matter what "reason" they gave, and we shouldn't accept the blame for their actions or feel guilty for "letting them" hurt us.
   
   There have been a lot of resources I've found which have also helped me immensely, so at the risk of being spammy, here are some links:
   
   Out of the Fog: https://outofthefog.website/ (understanding the common behaviors in abusive personality disorders and staying sane despite them)
   
   Issendai's Down the Rabbithole: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/ (understanding the dynamic of abusive parents and adult children, and why escaping them is not only justified but often the only way to heal)
   
   Pete Walker: http://pete-walker.com/pdf/flashbackManagement.pdf (the symptoms of C-PTSD and strategies for managing them)
   
   The Karpman Drama Triangle: https://lindagraham-mft.net/triangle-victim-rescuer-persecutor-get/ (the dynamics of the abuse cycle and how it often determines the 'role' we play in it)
   
   and two books:
   
   Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear: https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198
   
   Nina W. Brown's Children of the Self-Absorbed: https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611
   
   As for the situation you outline here with this 'friend' and their texts? This is absolutely an attempt to manipulate you into feeling guilty, and so 'obligate' you to placate them - thereby feeding their ego. It's gross and inexcusable behavior, and I'm sorry it's a thing you were even exposed to, let alone have to deal with.
   
   Here's the good news, though: you don't owe this person anything. Literally nothing. They can shriek their entitled bullshit to the sky until they're blue in the face, and cry their little hearts out over what a victim they think they are for the rest of their lives, and it will change absolutely nothing about the fact that you are not responsible for fixing either their life or their emotions. Period, full stop, end of - and anyone who genuinely valued you as a person and any friendship you've built wouldn't try to treat it like some kind of leverage in order to force you to behave in a way that suits them. Normal, healthy humans don't view relationships as transactional, and they don't treat other people like vending machines, video game NPCs, or any other object that only exists to serve their needs and is obligated to give them whatever they want as long as they press certain buttons. Love is not ownership. Respect is not currency.
   
   So just keep doing what you're doing. Ignore them. Once they see that they're not getting the attention and soothing they're demanding, they'll move on to another source of supply - because that's all they've ever cared about in the first place. While you, knowing what they really are, can sever ties completely and spend your time with (not on - and certainly not for) people who aren't so broken that they believe they're entitled to abuse others in order to make themselves feel "loved enough".
   
   All best wishes to you. Stay strong. You deserve a life free from abuse, and filled with all the love, health, and happiness which should have always been yours. Hugs if you want them, and much <3.

Perhaps this will help?

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

Apparently there are two?

I empathize with you as another daughter of a narcissist, who failed spectacularly out of therapy while refusing all accountability. (My mother, not me, I spent many years in therapy learning appropriate emotional coping strategies.)

These books, along with writing quite a bit of my story, were critical in my recovery:

Children of the Self Absorbed

Will I Ever Be Good Enough?


I highly recommend writing your life story, btw. After all the gas lighting abusers do, it is so validating to write and reread life from your own perspective.

And honestly - if you want therapy, try it! But don't feel like you have to limit yourself to one kind of therapy (talk) to recover. Many people find art, music, dance, yoga, and other activities of personal expression to be healing as well. Good luck on your taper!

As the child of a borderline, the book stop walking on eggshells and a counselor reeeally helped me. No doubt you’ve experienced enough drama to know you are tough as nails, and not the one at fault! Growing up is hard enough. But you have a parent who has an untreated and unmanaged mental illness that even grown adults would walk away from. Of course he’ll project and call you crazy, that’s because projection is a form of his denial. Unfortunately if you attempt to control your image, and stop their smear campaign, they’ll be sure to manipulate enough that it seems to prove their point. Give it up, and keep your head up. You prove who you are by your actions and demeanor and they lose ammunition. Anyone worth their salt will see though it, and those who cannot are not people worthy of your time. At your age some people won’t get that it’s like growing up in an emotional warzone and really unless someone else experienced a similar nightmare, they aren’t going to understand the zero respect for boundaries and repeated abuse, neglect and emotional manipulation you endure. The moment you leave an abuser is when they act out, in attempt to regain control, but the boundary you placed by removing yourself from their attempts to incite a response deserves major applause! It’s the biggest step towards reclaiming your right to live that you could ever take, and know that there are many adults who still haven’t decided to take that leap due to overwhelming shame or fear of worse outcomes, or out of a repeated desire to please the parent and receive love. You don’t have to fix anyone to receive love, and you don’t have to walk on eggshells, or jump through hoops to receive love. You just accept love, and place boundaries with those who cross over your own. The children of narcissists and borderlines will also experiences disenfranchised grief. Connecting with a good counselor to help with coming through PTSD and learning how to establish boundaries, and know you have worth is pivotal to living a happy and healthy life as an adult. It saved my life! I chose at 15 to live with a woman and help clean her house/babysit her child to stay away from my toxic mother, so I could focus on passing school. Family and friends really didn’t get why, but guess what? That’s because they don’t know that it isn’t just regular teenager/parent tribulations and angst. You are not nuts, you’re exhausted for understandable reasons.

This book may really help.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572245611?tag=s7621-20

Or these too
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-powerful-books-that-can-teach-you-how-deal-with-narcissists.html

Have you been reading any self help books to help you while waiting for therapy? I found the following immensely helpful but I have to admit that I had to be exercising (usually hiking) while listening to the audiobooks to work out the feelings of all the trauma and old wounds it brought up. But the release was extremely cathartic and the validation of the authors is also healing. If you read, make sure you are in a quiet, calm and safe place. If you listen, a long walk will ease reflection.

https://www.amazon.com/Will-Ever-Good-Enough-Narcissistic/dp/1439129436

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

Self-sabotage is deeply imbedded in our self-esteem, caused by the years of abuse and neglect of our emotional wellbeing. Ergo we don't deserve happiness. Utterly illogical, isn't it?

My self-sabotage comes in waves, sometimes overwhelming and other times just quietly lapping. It's worse when I have experienced a trigger or a stressor, and I have to work really hard to self-care. Mindful meditation, exercise and nutritious food help me.

Try to be kind to yourself and reach out whenever you need to. We're all here to heal.

I have a shelf full, but here are some winners for BPD:

Toxic Parents

Mothers Who Can't Love
Emotionally Absent Mother

Will I Ever Be Good Enough

Drama of the Gifted Child

Children of the Self-Absorbed

Well there really isn't much else that can help... There might be some self help books, which you could send, but it's a bit specific what's needed and you're one step away from the person needing the help, so there's some distortion of course.

Something like this might be it

Or else this

Or else (a little less severe) this

Again, I'm jumping a bit to conclusions here and using the most likely scenarios, which could be horrible off the mark. And it assumes your friend wants to help themselves, which isn't a given either. Some people enjoy being miserable.

> On the other hand, to me he sounded completely inhuman.

As I wrote in another post a few hours ago, my perception of Zuckerberg is that he is a genuine psychopath. For anyone interested in understanding such individuals, I would recommend the book Political Ponerology, which is an attempt to scientifically understand major deliberately malevolent figures in industry and geopolitics.

I believe, and have for some time now, that contemporary Western society in virtually every respect is governed by these people, and has largely been designed by them, for their own benefit. They are adept at exploiting flaws and weaknesses in the nature of the non-psychopathic majority, for the sake of their own aggrandisement.

I think Zuckerberg and others like him need to be treated compassionately, because it does need to be understood that they are afflicted with a genuine neurological disorder. The infrastructure which the brain requires for the expression of empathy and compassion, in their case is quite simply not there, and as a result they do not have the ability to comprehend those emotions in others, or their evolutionary importance.

They first and foremost need to be removed from their positions of influence, but after that I would advocate extensive hormonal and/or pharmacological therapy with permanent incarceration, in a secure but humane environment.

> I was and remain unabashedly anti-Facebook (the commoditization of both human privacy and attention strikes me as absolutely Orwellian)

I agree, but given the superficiality, narcissism, and insistence on instant gratification of the majority of the population these days, communicating with family without the use of such media, is regrettably difficult.

I remember a time when the Internet was not used by more than around 10% of the population; and truthfully I wish we could go back to that situation, both for the sake of said 90%, and my own. My mother is a 70+ year old woman, and while I do not wish to be unkind to her, she lacks both the technical familiarity and the basic intelligence to be able to effectively use the Internet; and it is at times a source of frustration for me that she continues to try. As long as technically illiterate people want to use the Internet, but also do not want to educate themselves regarding its' use, the services of people like Mark Zuckerberg will tragically always be in demand, in one form or another. In a world of toddlers, the manager of the day care center is king.

?? do you spend a lot of time contributing to this sub? what conspiracies are you interested in then?

I'm skeptical you so concerned about what's happening to this sub? regulars here are used to being discredited attacked, bullied, etc.

recommended reading

https://www.amazon.ca/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

Well, the second isn't, it is sourced (see left hand side of page).

Both are taken from the first chapter or two from the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407796183&sr=8-1&keywords=better+angels+of+our+nature

Feel free to pick up a copy, check out the first 1 or 2 chapters or so. It goes into great length laying out the methodology of how the data was collected, as well as the primary sources.

> It wouldn't be viable contradict because we don't know when this instinct became a thing.

We actually have a reasonable idea of when social instincts evolved. Somewhat early in the evolutionary history of social mammals-- well before human-like species.

> Also I don't know there I said that was the only instinct humans care about. History shows growth and thriving because like us, early humans must have decided it was better for them to work together than to work alone.

This doesn't seem likely if you imply humans had to evolve sufficient intelligence to learn that it was better to work together than alone. We know that kind of advanced intelligence arrived very late on the primate scene. So why didn't early primates kill each other and go extinct long before homo sapiens evolved? Early social mammals had to get along without virtue of intelligence or complex governing or policing hierarchies, or no social mammals could have evolved.

The solution I think can be arrived at quite simply. Consider a mother's love for her child, the earliest form of mammal caring for live young. This kind of truly altruistic love does not seem accounted for in your view of human nature. But at the same time, there can't be anything magical about a mother's love if we subscribe to a naturalistic view. It has to be, ultimately, neurotransmitters, biological hard-wiring, vast complexity fine-tuned by eons of failure. And if a mother's love can evolve, then evolution is free to build on the same neurological and biological mechanisms to create other forms of love: pair bonding, family bonding, group bonding, tribe bonding.

Human nature, in an evolutionarily informed view then, can be seen to have intrinsic capacity for love for children, love for spouse, love for family, love for group, love for tribe, love for nation hardwired in by millions of years of social mammal evolution. Love = altruism. That has to be the main reason human society has thrived and the reason why we seem to continually grow less violent over time (see Pinker).

(This shouldn't be taken to argue that humanity is not doomed by its own efforts. It can be argued convincingly that super-intelligent AI represents a significant future threat to humanity. But in that scenario, failure to understand and properly design moral behavior in AI would be at fault, not active malice.)

The bad news is that we already have a UN (and before the UN there was something called the League of Nations that existed between WWI and WWII) and such things don't guarantee that there will be no wars.

But the good news is that there are a lot fewer wars today than in any previous era in history, and both wars and the chances of being killed by violence keep going down over recent centuries. (It's hard to summarize too much in one post, but there's a good book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that charts a lot of this progress and explores reasons for the shift.)

Most of us prefer modernity to feudalism thank you very much.

read this book...

Attribution to the decline of violence isn't really strongly linked to capitalism, but it is linked to intra-national trade. There are also many, many other non-economic factors that contribute to the decline in violence. The humanitarian revolution, public education, the rights revolution, and other movements are purely social, and not economic in nature. A good book to read would be http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

And I'll be honest with you; I was wary of transgender rights and issues when it was first being talked about. I found I didn't have enough information about trans folk. So...I looked for stories.

May I suggest some books that helped me to understand?

https://www.amazon.com/Shes-Not-There-Life-Genders/dp/0385346972

https://janetmock.com/redefiningrealness/

https://www.amazon.com/Whipping-Girl-Transsexual-Scapegoating-Femininity/dp/1580056229

Its difficult to diagnose over the internet. Try reading this book, they have multiple quizes in it
http://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

to help figure it out.

its patriarchal bullshit. homosexuality is a "threat" to straight, male dominated society - not a real threat, just a perceived threat. the statistics for intimate partner violence, rape, abuse, as well as suicide for bisexual women are almost as high as for transgender women - which is astonishing when you think about it. discounting transgender women, bisexual women rate the highest in these categories. because of this, bisexual women are only tolerated insofar as they amuse and please the whims of straight men.

the rates for these issue for bisexual men are the highest in their category. at least according to a presentation i recently saw on bisexual health (geared towards health care workers). admittedly, it was a couple years old and did not include statistics for transgender people, so i cannot say that bisexual men are statistically treated worse then transgender men, and i haven't looked for more information at the moment.

there was a great section in julia serrano's book Whipping Girl where she described patriarchal reaction to femininity, a thing she called Effemimania. which is basically the contempt and controls put on feminine people in a patriarchal society. in effemimania, abuse is heaped disproportionately on trans women because of their perceived threat to masculinity and "traditional" gender roles. i feel like bisexuals fall into this because we challenge what they believe are "traditional" sexual mores.

Transition is different for everyone. Many of the things you listed are optional.

> I guess I just don't want to be seen as a fraud or a freak. I just want to be me...

One thing some people find useful is the button test. Where there's a hypothetical button that would change you female (or whatever variation you want to be - gender fluid, etc.) with no strings attached.

Another thing I'd highly recommend (to anyone really) is reading a book called Whipping Girl which delves deeply into the psychology of...I'm just going to quote the description as I'm too tired to explain, but basically will help you understand what femininity means to you and how society has shaped it.

> In the updated second edition of Whipping Girl, Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist, shares her powerful experiences and observations—both pre- and post-transition—to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.

I'd personally suggest reading Whipping GirlWhipping Girl for a surface level understanding on top of taking to trans girls. There's a few details in your post that suggest you have the right idea, but definitely do need some more research - like how you used "Male to Female" as a noun, when it's an adjective (which can be slightly offensive). Also, many trans woman prefer not to identify with / as male at all, so you'd be hard pressed to find someone who calls themselves even a MtF woman in real life. I'll PM you my email for if you want to chat more!

I’m not OP, but this book was hugely important to my healing: here

Make sure you have a therapist you trust before you read it, because it is going to bring up a lot of stuff that you’ll want to have professional help unpacking.

Esoteric religions/philosophies/whatever believe the human spirit has a divinity of some form or fashion that can ascend or transmute themselves into communing with ordinarily invisible parts of the cosmos. However, to do so, requires symbols and paradoxes and lots of mediating initiations to prepare the mind to see that stuff.

Part of what distinguishes 'esoteric' stuff from 'mystic' stuff is that esotericism is modern - it is invented during Late Antiquity and its formative years are the Renaissance. Most esotericists claim their traditions have roots in much older and mostly forgotten traditions. Most of these claims are baseless. In fact, I've never seen one that isn't at least willful distortion, except maybe for those offshoots of Kaballah. The other distinguishing feature is that mysticism may use symbols to access the divine, while esotericism finds it absolutely necessary.

For example, Tibetan Buddhism and Zen are highly symbolic and believe the human can achieve the divine, but they don't hold that initiation is necessary at all, and generally agree you can be born enlightened, or that non-Buddhists can be enlightened. Kaballah is very close to being esoteric, but it isn't, because there's some debate over whether true communion with god is actually achievable, and they also hold that Kaballah itself isn't necessary but rather useful.

I wouldn't belabor this distinction if it wasn't rather important. Western mystic and esoteric sect make many claims about foreign religions without any solid evidence, and it is key to examine them closely, because there are historians and analysts in that field who will debunk half or more of those claims.

Antoine Faivre is the foremost scholar in studying esoteric religions, he's not a bad place to get an understanding of the trend. If you're looking for an intellectual 'in,' I find Carl Jung's work more accessible than most. Aleister Crowley's Thelemic writings aren't bad either. The trick is to assume you're not supposed to understand half the things going on until the third time you read it, and then it's less frustrating.

First, I have to ask, what is the significance of potatoes and oatmeal?

Now for suggestions:
If she has a mac or a light colored laptop you could get her one of these

I don't know what a child life specialist is, but this book was awesome

This book looks cool

A wallet/coin purse with her favorite disney character

Yep. Racism gets perpetuated by the idea that race is bad to talk about... read Nurture Shock last week, and this was one of the points they reviewed in the study of children and their attitudes.

Could it have been Nurtureshock? It's not exactly a parenting book, but uses scientific data to show how a lot of what we thought about raising kids is wrong (most notably, why we shouldn't praise kids) and it's really good. Definitely a must-read for someone who's looking for data instead of anecdote.

NurtureShock covers this well (think Freakonomics or Tipping Point for raising kids). They even tackle the black Santa thing in Chapter Three: Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race

Most black kids don't even believe in black Santa.

http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130

NurtureShock is great for the overall picture of raising a kid to adulthood. Pretty scientific and very thoughtful.

Oooh this sounds like a great strategy! Have you read Whole Brain Child if not I highly suggest it.

What a great question! I am really fascinated by the field of infant/early childhood mental health and social-emotional learning in general. It's a fascinating topic that is also somewhat in the early stages. There is much that we need to learn, but also much that we do know, as well.

Priority number one in promoting positive mental health, particularly with children with speech delay and other developmental challenges, is enabling the child to feel safe and calm. There is something called neuroception, which is a person's physiological ability to detect a threat to their system. This term was coined by Dr. Stephen Porges and he has a wealth of information on the subject that you can find at his website if you are interested. Whatever you can do to teach the child how to regulate themselves to a place of feeling calm, at ease, and relaxed is paramount to anything else. For it is in this state that a child is most ready to learn (both academically and also ready to receive instruction or discipline from caregivers). Children and adults are much more receptive to all that we have to offer them when in a state of calm and safety. This allows the pre-frontal cortex (the most advanced part of our brain that regulates higher level thinking, verbal processing, and many other functions) to be fully engaged and receptive. If there is any sense of threat or danger to a child, this portion of the brain goes completely off-line and is rendered useless as the amygdala and limbic system (fight, flight, or freeze response) takes over. There is an incredibly useful explanation of this that you can actually use to teach the child greater awareness of their own brain and how it works. You can find it here.
It is an incredible tool in teaching positive mental health and teaches children how to notice their own physiological responses to events in their daily lives, which leads to greater self-awareness and regulation of their own mental state.

Once you have taught this hand-model of the brain to the child, you can then use it as a way of warning them when their "lid is about to flip" and then provide them with strategies for calming themselves down. You could offer a visual wheel of choice that gives the child options of what to do when they are feeling stressed, angry, etc. This is something you can develop alongside the child and elicit ideas from them when they are calm and relaxed with you. Making it visual will be particularly important and useful to a child with speech delay as they are limited in their ability to verbally express their feelings which can lead to more behavior.

If you are not able to prevent the behavioral issues, then allow the behavior to happen while being present with them and ready to comfort them when they are finished. Be ready to help them calm themselves down by modeling calmness yourself, deep breathing, etc. So much of promoting positive mental health in our children is about cultivating our own positive mental health for ourselves and then modeling that to our child. If we have the reserves to maintain a sense of calm in the midst of stress, then the child will feel the space and freedom to do the same.

I hope that addresses at least some of what you are after. I would appreciate it if you could follow up with some clarifying questions, if not, so that I can better assist you. But before I finish, I wanted to direct you to some really great resources on the topic. There are two great books by Dr. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne-Bryson Ph.D. The first is The Whole-Brain Child which does a great job of explaining, more in-depth, the concepts that I have discussed here. I know you will find it valuable and useful. The second is No-Drama Discipline. This takes the theory of The Whole Brain Child and applies it to discipline, offering practical and useful strategies for use with kids. The third is a book by Dr. Mona Delahooke and is called Social and Emotional Development in Early Intervention. This is a fantastic book, but is also geared toward professionals in early intervention programs. I still believe that you will find a lot of useful ideas and concepts in there, though. Also, be sure to check out Dr. Mona Delahooke's blog for excellent articles addressing these issues. There is a wealth of resource there.

I wish you well as you explore further on the topic. Please let me know if I can clarify anything or provided further resources. All the best to you!

Warmly,
Jeff

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946885320/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_apa_i_7gk1Db2J6PWPQ (funny/satire)


https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553386697/ref=cm_sw_r_wa_apa_i_uik1DbA38N3HV (actually helpful parenting advice)

Not really sure if this will come off as condescending but here are some books for general parenting or parenting kids with behavioral issues. For any folks out there looking for resources.


The Connected Child
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Child-healing-adoptive-family/dp/0071475001
Mainly focuses on attachment, or lack there of, for adoptive parents but some of the info is good for parents with children who have behavioral issues caused by attachment issues. Does have some religious aspects but also creates space for non-religious folks as well.

The Whole Brian Child
https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-Strategies-Developing/dp/0553386697 great general parenting book.

No Drama Discipline
https://www.amazon.com/No-Drama-Discipline-Whole-Brain-Nurture-Developing/dp/034554806X help me understand what’s happening in my kids brain in misbehaving and tactics for working through various issues.

These really helped me feel empowered and informed as a parent. Every time we do well with the stuff we feel like the best parents in the world. Hope this helps anyone out there that might need it.

Edit: links and formatting. I suck at it and I’m on mobile so...
2: a word

So far, it sounds like you're doing it RIGHT. It's important that you don't push her to do anything she's not comfortable with- where coming out is concerned, more is not necessarily better. She may need years of careful acclimation before she accepts the fact that she's queer, and reaches a point where she's okay with it. In the meantime, it may be true that even the thought of being inches away from another queer woman will drive her wild with confusing want and gut-churning terror.

I would recommend that you offer her resources to fuel her own, independent research, like the chat rooms she's already joining. Maybe some magazines she can read when the kids are asleep, or books of adorable coming-out stories. Make it clear that you support her exploring, or not exploring, these parts of herself. You're already doing a good job of not imposing your own agenda, so I say keep it up. (heh.)

When I realized I was queer, I burned two whole months of my life in the "HQ" section of my uni library, reading all the les/bi/an books I could find. I recommend the following to you and/or your lady. Also, my fedora's off to you, as you're clearly one upstanding fellow.

Coming-out stories to warm even the most closeted of hearts

Bisexuals narrate their lives

Studies show women's sexuality is more fluid, anyway

Hell yeah bisexual erotica

More where that came from

Basically what /u/ForkUK said. Like you'd almost never here a guy say, "I met this girl and it was love at first sight. She was just so confident and funny." Anyway there's a good book on the topic called: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire

The existence of sexual fluidity isn't just anecdotal. It's been studied for years.

The groundbreaking work on it was Sexual Fluidity by Lisa M. Diamond. At the time, she was focusing on female sexual fluidity, but later research found male sexual fluidity to be a thing, as well.

I would also recommend this book, as I found it very interesting: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. Personally I don't agree that all women are sexually fluid, though many women do experience changes or fluctuations in their sexual orientation so it's worth learning more.

I myself have experienced shifts in my orientation over time, as I used to crush on men more but these days find I am mostly attracted to women. I've also found the "types" of people I crushed on shifted as I got older. I've always been a bit bi but have moved a lot closer to the homoflexible end of the spectrum.

>In case you haven't noticed, "Developmental Psychology" is not Amazon.com. She published the results in Developmental Psychology, which is a peer reviewed journals published by the APA.

In case YOU haven't bothered to read your own link:

http://karenbooth.goodnewsmag.org/do-homosexuals-change/

Quote:

>Her research since the mid-90s has primarily focused on the “fluidity” of women’s sexual behavior, attractions (orientation) and identity labeling; and when she published her findings in 2009 the shock waves were felt almost immediately throughout the LGBT community.

Click on that "published her findings" link. Where does it take you? Oh right, Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674032268?pc_redir=T1

I can't believe I have to keep telling you this, but AMAZON.COM IS NOT A SCIENCE JOURNAL! IT IS A RETAIL SITE!

Writing a book and selling it on Amazon.com does not count as "peer reviewed and published in a science journal".

What a joke.

>I already gave you the Jones and Yarhouse reference, complete with page numbers in the peer reviewed journal and issue.

Why have you failed to link it?

Is this what you're talking about?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21961446

If so, where is the actual paper? That's an abstract. What was the methodology? What controls were put in place? How were participants selected? What was the hypothesis? What is the null hypothesis? Where is the statistical data? Why is the sample size so small?

>So, given I pointing toward two peer reviewed, scientific studies published by journals, and you call that credible, what is the problem?

The problem is that you don't understand what peer review is, you think Amazon.com is a science journal, and you have no concept of what credibility is.

>It's like you're just trying to troll me or something

Are you trolling? Seriously, the Amazon.com thing is a strong red flag for trolling.

I usually recommend going after the soft underbelly and moving up from there...

1. Something on the history of the bible and religion itself. Bring out the skeletons they don't discuss in bible study.
   
2. Something on the contradictions, and different interpretations of the bible. Add to the pile of bones.
   
3. Scientific theories... a good one is this book. It's not anti-religious, but goes into good detail about how we know what we know in science.
   
4. If you want something to make her feel better... if she's not scientific in nature I doubt that just "reality" will help, in which case I recommend Buddhism (without the reincarnation). It's religiousy enough for those that need it, but without a lot of the BS.
   
   Other interesting books...:
   
   (abridged) http://books.google.com/books?id=VNgBZR4bxG0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Golden+Bough&source=gbs_similarbooks_s&cad=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165 (you'll want to read this too actually).
   
   

Influence by Cialdini is a classic. When I read it, it blew my mind how "PR" marketing is not at all what I thought it was.

This is like sales 101. That tactic and others are covered in depth in this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165

Perhaps Influence by Cialdini would be useful. You can use influence for good or evil, but it helps to know all the mechanics.

Also, Leading Teams, by Richard Hackman (awful professor, but a good book), talks a lot about issues specific to leadership roles, but not necessarily software.

After reading Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, I like to substitute the term "salesperson" with "compliance professional".

Influence will explain to you hte human motivations behind everything we do. It's full of "A-ha!" moments.

Brain soap

A copy of the DSM 5 (if they don't already have it)

Freudian slip sticky notes

A famous/important psychology book like one of these

Psychology Today magazine subscription

American Psychological Association membership

1. The most expensive thing on my list is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5(TM)).
   
2. I've always been fascinated with psychology, and might take this direction with my career. It makes interesting reading material, even if I don't end up being a psychologist, exactly. I love getting into people's minds and learning to understand them, as well as myself. Psychology is one way to do it, and the only concrete way that's worked for me so far.
   
3. I might have to get this item anyway, if it's required somewhere along the line. It would be a shame, though, if I didn't get one in fifteen years and didn't keep up with it till the sixth edition. Anyway.
   
   "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds!

The only thing I would recommend is current textbooks. Books aimed at layman people are easier to digest but aren't exactly accurate.

Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology is pretty good. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition lists out exactly what criteria is to be considered, and specifies categories.

they must have updated it because it was out 30 years ago. hmmm about the same size and weight as the DSM, also updated. The Yam book is not exactly specific to recording. Much of it is PA- live sound, yah? Probably be better off reading the Ableton manual (?) - unless you want to know how to do room coverage and aim line arrays.

Thank you for providing context. I offer my sympathies with what you are going thru.

If I can make a suggestion. Read this book "The God Virus"

It is one explanation of why religious people behave the way they do and offers some suggestions in how to communicate with them. I don't know if it'll help with your wife, but you may get an insight on the rest of your community. Reading unapproved books is a threat to the community and therefore shunned and aggressively persecuted.

On the plus side, now all your fears are of the earthly variety :).

Do you still go to church?

There's a book called the God Virus or something. Check it out. It really goes into how religion as a whole propagates abd spreads very much like a common virus. Interesting read.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-The-Religion-Infects/dp/0970950519

> or on something else.

Maybe a virus is infecting his brain.

As others are saying, don't let yourself get drawn in. You shouldn't be expected to have the answers to life and the universe.

It takes a long time to become familiar enough with all the fine points to be able to debate well. And some people will never debate well. And that's okay.

For your own general use, though, here are three books which have helped me a great deal. They are especially good for atheist/questioning newbies and are easy, quick reads:

The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives And Culture

The Born Again Skeptic's Guide To The Bible

Does God Get Diarrhea?: Flushing 4,000 Years Of Lies, Myths, And Fairy Tales Down The Toilet This one is rude and crude. Just a heads up.

(edit: added a book)

Just last week, author Darrel W. Ray was a guest on The Atheist Experience. There was a caller describing how a close friend was quite secular but still identified herself as Christian because she was afraid of death.

Ray argued, that the reason it is so hard to come to terms with reality (i.e. there is most likely no afterlife) for religious people is that they have been "infected" with the "God virus" (in reference to his book) at an age (5-7) when they hadn't developed reason and couldn't look critically at the claims made by their parents/pastors.

I assume, you are in a similar position. That tiny idea has been implanted at a very basic level of your mind, therefore it so hard to shake it off. But you need to realize that the things that make you comfortable and the things that are true are not necessarily the same.

Realize that you, and everyone you know, will die. Accept it. And then start really living.

I actually picked up this book recently that entertains that very idea throughout and it's better than I thought.

The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture by Darrel Ray

https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519

I’ve not read it, but Peter Boghossian endorses it in A Manual for Creating Atheists.

This may or may not help your current arguments, but understanding the psychology behind why liberal progressives and conservatives have completely different realities is very valuable to know.
The best way to do this is read:
"The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982947933/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_OcREub1XRVQYC

Here is the mobile version of your link

Adam Smith wrote a book called Theory of Moral Sentiments that described human nature in a way that would be familiar to many socialists. We are altruistic, compassionate, cooperative, and loving. Humans don't act like homo economicus in our daily lives. All of this is complementary to and compatible with Smith's description of man as a self-interested being, which most people are familiar with because of his much more famous book, Wealth of Nations. These aspects of human nature are, in fact, what make capitalism work so well.

Good books on the subject:

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts. This book is brand new and excellent.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

I agree with you.

We have better angels in our nature.

LOL, no, its a good book but there are many better recommendations.

For example, if you wanted to understand the tools of state/religious oppression and its consequences in modern context I may recommend; Why Nations fail

Or if you desired to have greater understanding of the consequences of inventing money; Debt, the first 5000 years

Or if you felt that religion was cool but the idea of God was wrong you could read; Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

Or if you wanted to read about the decline of world wide violence; The Better Angels of our Nature

For more on this : Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Oh Jesus on a stick.

Those are what we call outliers. Mass conflict, and violence, has been decreasing. ISIS is small potatos; it might seem otherwise due to the political and religions impact. Their actions might barely qualify as a small genocide, in a historical perspective.

I assumed I was talking to someone as informed as I am. I see now that is not the case. So, for starters you should go read that book.

And others think the decline was caused by the availability of abortion, or by the decline of the drug cartels and still others point to a downward trend in violence in all of western civilization that's been apparently going on for centuries.

>And you might say morality comes from reason and someone else says its from revelation.

There are excellent reasons to think that reason and not religion is the source of morality. Namely the fact that we have made enormous moral progress, especially in the secular West, which went through The Enlghtenment.

Hard for me to sum up all of this in one reddit comment, so instead I'll direct you to this short TED talk by the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein and her husband, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker:

The Long reach of Reason

You should also check out the books, The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker (again) and The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer.

If you want to see where revelation gets you then perhaps you could read some articles about ISIS, or read about the history of Christianity in the centuries before The Enlightenment. Not pretty.

Humans aren't the only intelligent life on this planet. We share that distinction with some species of whales and dolphins (which are as smart or smarter) and some other primates (which are perhaps not as smart but still "intelligent" in my mind) and possibly even some parrots (very smart). In none of these cases do we have an example of a species destroying itself.

Granted, we've got just a handful of species to draw conclusions from. But it's a small sample size with no examples to demonstrate your thesis.

On humans specifically - we've had the capacity to wipe ourselves out for over half a century and haven't done it yet. And decade over decade, the odds of that happening seem less, not more. If it's our nature to destroy ourselves, we're bad at it.

And in fact the long arc of history is that humans have gotten less violent, fought fewer, and become better at cooperation (aka, economics). You mention Darwinism, but this is actually what evolution would predict. Cooperation is the better survival strategy for all involved, and over time it's the societies that were more insular and more war-like that have fell in the dustbin of history. (See: [The Better Angels of Our Nature](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1491518243/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1491518243&linkCode=as2&tag=musingofthegr-20&linkId=N2J6U5BTXNOCEFA7">The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=musingofthegr-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1491518243)).

It's also flawed to think that all intelligent life will have followed the same evolutionary path as us. Others could have evolved under different evolutionary pressures leading them to be instinctually cooperative - hive minds or collective intelligence, for example. Or AI - it's not unreasonable to think that robots will explore the galaxy rather than biological humans (since we're not really evolved to survive in space), but there's no reason to think an artifical intelligence would have any propensity for destroying itself.

There are plenty of other potential answers to the Fermi paradox that don't assume self annihilation. My personal belief is simply that we don't have the technology to detect other civilizations, nor the technology to make ourselves known. Our radio signals are undetectable after a few light years, and the same is likely for any other radio based civilization. My gut says we'll start to find signs of extra-solar civilization once we have the technology to physically visit other stars, and not sooner.

About time this got to the front page of TRP. OP, you'll want to read the book too. I put it off for a long time because I thought it's just a longer version of the speech, but boy was I wrong.

>He didn't publish this elsewhere, did he?

Actually (I only found this out a few months ago and I've cited that speech for years) the speech was actually about his book of the same name! I don't have my paws on it yet, but you can find it on amazon

Except we've already covered this and it can't be selection bias when it is a mixed group who are all undertaking the tests for varying reasons, including those that are court-ordered. Enough tests have been run (millions) to be statistically significant and representative of the general public, as well.

Did you know that the current population of humans is descended from twice many women as men? DNA analysis has proven that. Fun fact, that.

Here is a great essay on where gender roles come from, how the males ones are constricting, and why female roles were relaxed first:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

And here is a book where the author expanded on the original essay:
http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

The speaker wrote a whole book about this later. And here it is:

http://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

https://www.academia.edu/38034640/The_Privileged_Sex_-_Create_Space_Independent_-_Martin_van_Creveld

"The Privileged Sex" by Martin van Creveld is a great read about men's issues.

EDIT: I haven't personally read this one, but a lot of people seem to say "Is There Anything Good About Men" by Roy Baumeister is a good book on the topic as well. https://www.amazon.com/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X

I agree that The Myth of Male Power is basically the MRM bible - read it first. However, my favorite book - by far - is Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Also, if you have a young boy I suggest Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men for it's medical advice.

Its just shit from a different bull, in that the movement displays quite a lot of cult like traits. The claims it makes about religion are made up and mostly false. The claims it makes about the history of astrology are made up and mostly false. The claims it makes about the international monitory system are ... you guessed it made up and mostly false.

The Venus Project itself is a bad Idea, which will cause quite a lot of suffering and misery if it every gets off the ground, which thankfully seems unlikely. Its manifesto is riddled with internal inconsistencies and downright invalid assumptions. It falls under the banner of High Modernism, which is very well critiqued here.

If you're interested in this, try to find the chapter of Seeing like a State about the development of the metric system-- before the metric system, most people used measurements like "how far you can walk in a day" "how much grain it takes to make a loaf of bread" or "how much land one man can plow in a week." These measurements, naturally, varied depending on terrain and other factors, and were not helpful once large-scale governments existed. But knowing that it's "five kilometers (as the crow flies)" to the nearest town is not helpful if you're a guy with a cart on a winding path in the middle of the alps.

Also, that book is amazing in general. Great stuff about urban planning, the history of Paris, early standardization of agriculture, etc. Very interesting.

considering that none of those books appears to be about organization, management, or institutions, it seems I was right. It is perfectly possible to know a lot about policy without knowing about organizations, the field is criminally neglected in political science. Neustadt is the best example of this, a perennial favorite of undergrad political science, he utterly ignores institutional issues in his magnum opus on presidential leadership. he calls FDR a great leader of men, but ignores the fact that a far larger share of those men than any president since owed their jobs either to him personally or to programs identified with him, and the effect that had on their behavior, that he presided over institutions he was creating, not those created long ago by others.

I commend your reading, but it has little to do with the topics we're discussing. try reading this or this then getting back to me. the first is written by someone on the moderate right the second someone fairly far left. both are massively respected scholars.

> The action to document basic informations about every citizen is essential in my mind in order to properly manage the country

What about the countries where this information isn't kept (e.g. the UK, or most other common law countries)? Are they not properly managed?

It's certainly true that governments tend to want to create these sorts of databases, but that doesn't mean they're essential. Seeing Like A State even makes a compelling argument that such schemes tend to be largely detrimental as they always require squeezing a complex reality into an over-simplified structure.

Yes, that would be amazing! But, the whole problem is that any kind of "certification" of such people is bound to fail in two ways: it will end up certifying inauthentic people, and it will end up failing to certify authentic people. This is because the "eyes of the State" cannot see the crucial factor which is Dao but can only see aspects which can be lineared/imaged ("thou shalt not worship graven images" = "the Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao"). In other words, false positives and false negatives in the certification process—which is already the problem we have, prevasively, with people certiified as psychiatrists and therapists.

The thing about regalia is that it really doesn't matter which mythic figure you dress up as—as I mentioned, a "mythic human" figure such as Wizard or Alchemist is really your best bet for reaching someone in a psychotic mode. The reason is that real trick not dressing up as a mythic figure, but dressing down to prevent the accumulation of projected archetypes upon one's person by the psychotic individual. In other words, authenticity or appearing as a unique, mundane individual is the key to being able to reach someone trapped in an altered state. The donning of cold-blooded attire like white lab coats, business suits, or scrubs only serves to evoke the archetypes of the medical establishment: the alienating/ed psychiatrist, the sadistic surgeon, or Nurse Ratched. The real trick is appearing to the suffering individual as a self-actualized human—this is whom the psychotic naturally trust, and you can't fake that. Furthermore, those attempting to be authentic individuals must not use this power to support a system of imprisonment and abuse of the psychologically disenfranchised—this is why you don't see many authentic people (dressed as themselves) in psychiatric institutions. The best ones usually simply refuse to participate. And the even bester ones sometimes go "into the Death Star" to do their best on the inside—and these are the ones who can most benefit from the thought of Regalia.

"Dressing as yourself" simply means not letting the uniform get you down. A few personal touches—a necklace, or a ring, or an eyebrow piercing—can undo the whole attire and subvert the uniform to the eyes of the psychotic person. This is because, ironically, it is our donning of impersonal, eternal symbols which marks us as unique individuals. More precisely, it is our mastery of the dialogue between us and these numinous symbols in our attire which identify us as such. The doctor who wears nothing but a lab coat, button-up shirt, black pants and shoes is owned by his uniform; but add an earring (for a man) or a non-cliche tattoo and you have someone who has subtly subverted the bland authority of the costume. Of course, these touches must be unique and authentic, freely-chosen—if perhaps inherently, slightly exaggerated—expressions of the individual. Thus, the best costume is not costume but the choosing of one's own attire, with an eye to its evocation of subtle intensities. In other words, regalia is in good taste.

I remember two pieces of regalia which flagged their owners as solid and concrete individuals despite their placement within an inhuman system: one nurse I met had a very interesting belt buckle—and was the only person who really listened to me for the whole month I was imprisoned. In another instance, a psychiatrist wore a stethoscope, which seemed somewhat humorous to me since, as a psychiatrist, he probably didn't really need it—and he ended up also being the most humanizing individual I met in the circumstances. Even the props of the medical establishment can be used as reassuring regalia, if détourned into a disruptive context.

Thus, the signal which is being sent is real a collusion with the subversion of the oppressive institution which is, for the imprisoned psychotic, everywhere present. A marker of distinction which separates out the surface of the individual from the oppressive monotony of fascist engagement which is the flatness of the surface imposed in his surroundings. This is why you do not see programs of regalia in psychotherapy: their very presence subverts or critiques the uniform, and the institution of a program of "official" regalia would also make it invalid as an individual form of expression.

This is why I don't think a certification of regalia-approved practioners would be very helpful: it is not very different from a certification of "authentic individuals" and this is not something that can be judged accurately by an institution or systematic process: only, perhaps, by other authentic individuals or those in a mode of perception particularly sensitive to inauthenticity (psychosis).

Thus, the ability to don regalia is a marker of a true shaman: the ability to, with the same costume, both banish and evoke the numinous archetypes which might be attracted to the surface of that individual. To say, "I am more" and "I am merely human" in the same gesture—this is what reassures people in the belly of the beast, and what instantly confirms you are on their side. In the way that Sophia is said to follow you to the deepest dungeon and then, lifting her metal helmet, suddenly appear and help you out, it is the people who take on this mythic role who must, to fulfill that role, most clearly assert their individual will to help and their rejection of the alterior intentions which have brought them to your presence.

This might also be relevant: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

This book Traffic by Vanderbilt is the best non fiction book I read last year. Just if you are interested in the how and why traffic works the way it does.

That is precisely why. This book focuses, in part, on Sweden's traffic changeover.

Read Traffic: Why we drive the way we do. The dude just might convince you to become a late merger; it's better for the whole system if we all just merge late.

The late merge that you talk about actually isn't so bad. At least, according to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

I suggest this book. Your commend about being "offended" above is key to the answer. Conservatives tend to value loyalty much more highly than liberals, which means that comments that may be true in the abstract become offensive in the concrete.

Anyway...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

tl;dr Great post, OP! Everyone, no matter what "side" you might or might not be on, check out Jonathan Haidt's work on moral foundations, either in his book The Righteous Mind, or via his websites or TED talks.

Not going to read all the comments; just skimmed over a selection. My thoughts? First, I really like what OP posted. I think his assessments of each side are relatively accurate, and I agree that (not only with this issue, but with any issue, whether it's political or not, whether it's a "moral issue" or not) it's always a good idea to understand what someone who disagrees with you believes, to understand how they view the situation, and to understand why they view it that way.

The primary hurdle, though, is that people generally do not arrive at positions on political issues (especially if they're seen as "moral issues") by a nice, sound, rational, logical process of starting with data and axioms and reasoning their way to a nice, sound conclusion. This fact is something that has driven me nuts for most of my 50 years. Fortunately, last year I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Read it. Seriuosly. Everyone on this subreddit, everyone who wants to discuss political issues, must read it. (Or, at the very least, watch Haidt's TED talks.) But the gist of his argument, as relevant to this post/this issue, goes like this:

• There is a set of "moral foundations" that we humans developed along the way, presumably via evolution and the societies we created as early humans. (Although there's nothing wrong with believing that we instead received those moral foundations from God or someone/thing similar.)
  
• These moral foundations don't work at the rational level; they work at the subconscious level, at the emotional level, at the "gut" level.
  
• Typically, we think we're using reason and logic and data to come to our political or other opinions. However, what we're really doing is deciding on the position based on our emotional/subconscious/"gut" set of moral foundations, and then afterwards using reason and logic (and careful selection of which data to include and which to ignore) to explain, ex post facto, why we came to that decision. (Haidt suggests that our emotional/subconscious/"gut" reasoning is like an elephant, and our reason is like one who is riding on the elephant, and pretending to guide and direct the elephant. In fact, the elephant goes where it damn well pleases, and so the rider is instead left to explain why the elephant turned left here or turned right there; the rider isn't in control of the elephant, the rider is essentially the elephant's PR representative.)
  
• There are 6 moral foundations. People who self-identify as "conservative" tend to rely on all six roughly equally: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation. People who self-identify as "liberal", however, tend to rely only on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations.
  
• And just to confuse things, self-identified liberals and conservatives often see and use the Fairness/cheating moral foundation differently. For example, a liberal might say "It's not fair to make it difficult for wannabe immigrants from Latin America to enter the US legally, and it's not fair to persecute and prosecute them once they're here," while a conservative might say "It's not fair for illegal immigrants to sneak in to the US when so many others follow the law and do it legally."
  
  Anyhow. Not just on this issue, but on any issue, examining it from the point of view of the moral foundations is a very good way to understand those who disagree with you. If you want to learn more, go to either or both of Haidt's websites moralfoundations.org -- which talks about moral foundations theory -- and yourmorals.org -- which has a number of tests you can take to understand your own moral foundations.

> morality isn’t real


Morality is very real in the sense that it is a defining part of how we structure our society and decide how to interact with others. For a review of the moral psychology research and a fantastic summary of the implications of morality on our social interactions and institutional configurations, check out the book The Righteous Mind.

More to the point, if this is the stance that you choose to take, then expect to never have this conversation end. You’re having a different discussion than the people with whom I assume you disagree.

Interesting.

He mentions Jonathan Haight in the talk. I highly recommend his book The Righteous Mind. It goes into great detail about how and why people believe and defend their beliefs as they do. It is a fantastic book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307377903?pc_redir=1397219270&robot_redir=1

Your brain edits FAR more out than just minute vibrations. It essentially builds a customized representation of what is 'out there'. The image you 'see' isn't the photons of light entering your eye - those are just the triggers that set off the neural pathways running to the visual centers of your brain. Those centers do an enormous amount of processing and eventually settle on an 'image' in the conscious areas of the cortex that you perceive as reality, even though it isn't really.

For an interesting read, grab a copy of Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain by neuroscientist David Eagleman. It's a real eye opener.

I'm not sure what you are asking. But it sounds like you want some books you could write an essay on. Information based, not fiction. Does that rule out philosophy?

Here's a couple i really like:

The Law by Frederic Bastiat

https://mises.org/books/thelaw.pdf

I used that book as a reference for almost every paper I wrote in college, along with the constitution. Especially when the topic was should such and such be legal, or should we pass a law to do X.

The second is Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman.

http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-The-Secret-Lives-Brain/dp/0307389928

Its very eye opening. It really changed the way I viewed free will and the brain. I'm a lot less judgmental after reading this book. It involves how the brain works, and how we make choices. It really focuses on examples where brain process go wrong due to illness or disease. It would be the non fiction book i'd write an essay on if someone made me write an essay.

I highly recommend David Eagleman's book: Incognito; the secret lives of the brain.

it explores the differences between our conscious mind and the unconscious.

You are. God, didn't you read Incognito?

Incognito by David Eagleman

To suggest further reading, Dr Brian Eagleman, the Director of the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine, studies this issue explicitly. His recent book Incognito has a chapter on neuroscience and law, in which he discusses how many crimes can be an extension of mental illness and our concept of justice evolves with our understanding of brain function. It's a good read.

Everyone should read his book Incognito. It's really amazing.

Excellent point. To me, aside from raw nationalism, a huge factor in this dynamic is that people are taught to put happy spins on things.

Author Barbara Ehrenreich covers this dynamic in an amazingly thorough way in her book "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America".

Unless it's something of depth, I feel the same way. Unpopular opinion incoming ...

Since the overwhelming and loud opinion in the dominant fandom culture has been successful in dictating that one is only allowed to praise a fic (and its author) without providing any kind of non-positive feedback (neutral, negative, or even just thought provoking), many readers (at least the ones I know and converse with, which are most of my friends) don't feel the need to provide any feedback anymore. That is why we don't bother with more that a click of a kudo anymore. It has become very disingenuous.

Before people jump all over me about these words (as people usually do), I highly recommend reading Bright-sided, for some interesting takes on the negative and unforeseen outcomes of forced positivity on a community.

No, but I did read an interesting book that would likely be a critique of The Secret's ideology, Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Not anything heavy, but she brings up a lot of good points that we see in our everyday corporate-generated pop culture.

I think giving a fuck is the main source of pain, no matter if things are good or bad. When things are bad, people agnonise over it to an extreme degree which just entrenches the problems. When things are good, people become fearful and defensive because they're scared that things will go bad, which leads people to agonise over their life in the same way as when things are bad. I think the main problem is that people experience life and cling to it too intensely. Not giving a fuck is standing back and having a healthy objective perspective.

Western society constantly shoves the idea of positive thinking down everyones throat, if things are bad you just gotta contort your attitudes to fit a fake ideal, and if things are good you gotta keep that positive steam train running full tilt, no matter if you're headed for a cliff. Positive Thinking is exactly the kind of delusional bullshit that Not Giving a Fuck is supposed to resolve. This subreddit is getting hijacked by well meaning people who don't really understand that.

A thorough debunking of the Positive Thinking mind virus: Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung 9.4 lbs

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Philemon-C-Jung/dp/0393065677

A lot of good points and excellently argued.

You may be right as regards the timeline here. Like I said, although I poke my head in every now and then, I do not follow Peterson as closely as I used to, so exactly when he realized he would have the kind of public support he has garnered, I am not in a great position to say. I take too your point about Peterson being in a somewhat sheltered academic post and I think that explains a great deal. When I see Peterson post random dregs from academic journals on Twitter with the caption "Look out biologists! They're coming for you next!" I often wonder 'what in the world is this guy on about?' I think a good corollary to the axiom 'to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,' is 'to a man confronted with nails everyday, it starts to look like a pretty good idea to keep a hammer handy.' Perhaps if I was a more or less permanent fixture in the machine of academia, I would begin to feel a similar kind of overwhelm in response to the type of moral confusion of which college campuses seem uniquely capable of producing these days.

As far as the Alexander quote, I'm not sure how you wouldn't define someone feeling that 'their very right to exist is being challenged' as an activation of the underdog archetype. In fact, from an adaptive standpoint (in case you couldn't tell from my glowing recommendation of Stevens, I subscribe to the biological paradigm of the archetypes), I would argue that this is exactly what the underdog archetype was evolved for. In the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, consider what happens to the individual that underestimates his enemy (i.e. assumes overdog status), and then to the individual that overestimates his enemy (i.e. assumes underdog status). And the adaptive advantages of assuming underdog status aren't restricted to the individual. If you want to whip up an irrational, violent mob, the standard way to begin is by convincing them that they are under attack from a bigger, stronger enemy. There is clearly some utility in feeling that one's 'very right to exist is being challenged,' as well as some dangers to not being conscious of the processes taking place. If I think a lion is challenging my very right to exist, its good to be aware of my handicap. If I think that a Professor that refuses to call me Ze or Zir is challenging my right to exist, it is the same archetype, maladaptively projected. One gets the same feeling that they are under attack but they are profoundly confused as to how dire the objective situation really is. (Or, put bluntly: they are unconscious).

Similarly, I have to also disagree with your assertion that "Nobody vocal is ever motivated by fear of their fellow man." The fear may be unconscious, but as far as I'm concerned, where there is aggression, there is unconscious fear, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.

EDIT: Re-reading your comment, that remark about Alexander being a 'creative writing visionary type' jumped out at me and reminded me of another 'creative writing visionary type' that I happen to have learned an awful lot from. I guess I'm giving away my username here but I'm assuming you already had that one figured out ;)

Carl Jung's RED BOOK is not a traditional magic book but it is definitely supplemental to any magical library.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Red-Book-Philemon-Jung/dp/0393065677

I liked them, they reminded me of https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Philemon-C-Jung/dp/0393065677

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Stumbled upon this while reviewing old HN bookmarks. It seems Roy F. Baumeister wrote a book on the subject since then.

Some previous discussions on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589346

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634955

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/21/11/2047/1147770/Genetic-Evidence-for-Unequal-Effective-Population
^ This is the basis for most of the interpretations. Twice as many women reproduce as men.

https://www.amazon.ca/There-Anything-Good-About-Men/dp/019537410X
An interpretation of Wilders stats

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-evolving-father/201311/non-dads-or-childless-men
An interpretation of Australian's differential between childless men (13%) and childless women (10%).

and
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf
Look at tables on page 17 and 18. Which indicate a greater amount of sexually inexperienced men by 40 compared to their female counterparts.

You're free to interpret that data as you wish however. If a percentage of men are sexually inactive for whatever reason, and a lesser percentage of women are not: those women are having sex with someone. To the point that even if every woman only slept with one person in her life that X amount of men would have to sleep with more than 1 partner for this to be possible.

Ultimately you have some men for whatever reason having more partners than others as is evident by the % of men who at the very least have no partners. This is interesting for instance because North America is a female majority continent. If sex distribution was uniform it would be expected for more women to lack sex due to a lack of partners.

Just a comment on EP (much agree with the rest btw). EP is a very solid science, with two big caveats:

• it's incredibly easy to misuse by beginners. Just say "yeah, people are like that because in our ancestral environment..." and fill in the blanks with whatever sounds about right. There are ways to make it hard science, but you won't find them in casual discussions.
  
  
• for humans, EP actually works on two completely unrelated levels. There is the genetic component, which is why everybody thinks about when talking about evolution. And there is the cultural, memetic component, which can be studied with much of the same framework, is a lot more fast moving and (like you say) a lot more relevant to our discussions.
  
  You may want to read this btw. It's not about EP, but I have a feeling you'll like it.
  
  
  
  
  

SnapShots: 1, 2, 3 ^[?]

^^ttumblrbots ^^will ^^be ^^shutting ^^down ^^in ^^around ^^a ^^month ^^from ^^now.

Sex

The Way of Men – Jack Donovan***
Sperm Wars – Robin Baker
Sex at Dawn – Christopher Ryan
Why Men Rule – Steven Goldberg
The Manipulated Man – Esther Vilar
Is There Anything Good About Men? – Roy Baumeister
Demonic Males – Dale Peterson
The Essential Difference – Simon Baron-Cohen
The Mating Mind – Geoffrey Miller
The Red Queen – Matt Ridley

****

Government

Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers – Tom Wolfe
Public Choice: An Introduction – Iain McLean
On Government Employment – Foseti (blog post)
Yes, Minister – TV Show

****

​

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1 and Volume 2. A classic, but still surprisingly readable and insightful.

Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0 (2014). What we know about the limitations of human rationality, and the implications for politics. I'd also recommend Heath's Economics Without Illusions, which discusses common economic fallacies, half on the right and half on the left. Heath has an amazing ability to explain concepts clearly.

Edit: One more, James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). Gives examples of large-scale political initiatives which failed, and explained why. An important reminder of the need for humility. Review by Brad DeLong.

Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed introduces a number of these essential concepts and goes a little into the background, and really finds the edges of the thing by finding those cases where they fall apart completely. I also think that it has the right overall tone to not repulse someone with an anarchic bent. There are better surveys from an academic perspective, but legibility is important.

You're starting to have the insights of Seeing Like a State, which is a fascinating book.

Peter Joseph is wrong for a number of reasons, and we can predict with a good degree of certainty that his system would fail in practice, if implemented. The techno-utopian society that forms the dreamscape of the RBE crowd is just a rehash of mid-20th century modernism which gave us the likes of Brasilia. The best book disproving modernism is Seeing Like a State:

> The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. And in discussing these planning disasters, he identifies four conditions common to them all: the state's attempt to impose administrative order on nature and society; a high-modernist ideology that believes scientific intervention can improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale innovations; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.

What annoys me, though, is the number of ideologues rehashing Peter Joseph's arguments word for word without adding a single meaningful thought or contribution to them.

I got this from this anarchist book. I'm not an anarchist, but the guy did make a lot of interesting and true points. For example: police are heavily fetishized in our society - from the typical TV shows and movie heroes we watch to what we think police do vs. what they actually do. Police are basically armed bureaucrats but are only able to intervene in things they actually have information on, which isn't much. If you drive through town with your license plate not on you'll certainly get that rectified by police. If you beat your wife, though, probably not so much. Same as if you engage in any real consensual activity.

Yep. Traffic capacity is there to be used. If your lane is ending, don't merge 1/4 mile before the lane ends, that's just unused roadway.

Read this!

Super late to the party, but this is very interesting. If you're still checking this, could you talk about the book Traffic? It's the most interesting book I've read in recent memory.

Correct -- and many other things people don't realize. Someone actually wrote a book about it. Traffic: Why we drive the way we do.

Traffic moves faster if everyone goes up to the point of merging and alternates one car form each lane into the reduced space.

Amazon Link.

sometimes, although last night i was being kept awake thinking about how wrong this book is. it makes me so angry.

I recommend this book for those interested in the subject.

If that's something you want to do, I highly recommend reading some recent work on moral psychology first if you haven't.

The Righteous Mind and Moral Tribes are good places to start.

The bottom line is there isn't one morality we all agree on, but we all have multi-faceted moral tastes, and some of them are different from person to person, based on a number of genetic and environmental/cultural factors.

Don't choose a side. If you say to yourself "I am an X" your brain will find itself completely compelled to irrationally defend X, wasting precious brain cycles that could be better spent on other things.

Read a book on moral psychology if you want to give up political tribalism. Here are some suggestions:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Tribes-Emotion-Reason-Between/dp/1594202605

Please don't cheapen that word "consensus" with frivolous usage. The origins of religion is a highly contentious topic, and those who study it are absolutely not in full agreement with each other. You are trying to prop up your arguments with the authority of science while denigrating my intelligence. You don't convince people by arguing that way; you only satisfy your urge to crush an opponent.

Here's where we agree, and where you think we disagree:

1. Religion is a natural phenomenon.
   
2. Religion has been a part of human behaviour for tens of thousands of years.
   
   There. Half your post wasn't necessary, Mr./Ms. Read-More-Carefully.
   
   Where we disagree:
   You think religion... "exists because people believe the immaterial intentional entities (minds without bodies, gods.)" In a related concept, you indicate that we naturally ascribe agency to the natural world.
   
   Just so this is abundantly clear: I was arguing that gods are not required for religion. You misread Buddhism is but one example. "Most" Buddhists isn't "all" Buddhists, and "involves" is a far cry from "being the central element of the religion that defines its existence." Many totemic religions from tribal societies also lack gods. You end up having to redefine "gods" to "any supernatural agent" just to get this idea to work.
   
   But let's focus on the idea that it's natural for us to impose agency to things in the natural world, and this leading to the formation of religion. This also is not done in every religion. When it is done, it isn't relevant to every aspect of the religion in question. Even among Christianity, a great deal of worship is devoted to the saints, who were entirely human. Ditto with ancestor worship in Taoism.
   
   We have also seen the rise of new religions, and we know for a fact this idea of ascribing agency to the natural world was not involved in the creation of many of them: Scientology, or the various cults that are centred around extra terrestrials, or people from the future, or not eating (seriously!)
   
   Finally, it doesn't explain why we have the ability to feel transcendence; that feeling we get when our individuality melts away and we "give ourselves" to something greater. Where does that come from? How does that evolve?
   
   But for the sake of completeness, you would likely need to hear an alternative, so here is where I'm coming from. I ascribe to Emile Durkheim's theory of religion. He's a classic sociologist, and formally founded the field of sociology itself.
   
   Just to provide the brief gist:
   
   His definition of religion: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."
   
   The faithful believe in a force that is outside of themselves, and greater than themselves that enters into them usually during moments of collective ritual, giving them the feeling of transcendence. All religions have this force. It is often called a "god," though other terms are used (mana, ch'i, etc.) This force is the "energy," if you will, of the society of the faithful. In other words, god and society... are one and the same. Society is exterior to the individual, and greater than him. If you denigrate this symbol of their society, you are denigrating the society itself, and they will react accordingly. The morals preached by the religion are the morals that the society unifies under. They hold rituals to reinforce this collective bond, and that is really its purpose. Some things are made sacred (objects, values, people), and the community collects around those things, which become a sort of emblem. Rationality will serve the purpose of the community's religion. And, as I initially stated in my first post, the religion of the day will change as the needs of the society changes. Sometimes the religion itself alters, and other times it is simply abandoned for another one.
   
   We see religious behaviour in cruder moments all the time. The feeling of transcendence occurs among soldiers that fight and die together. They often describe their individuality melting away and becoming "whole" with their brothers in arms. They create a small system of morals and beliefs that are specific just to them. And they even sometimes have rituals.
   
   The same religious behaviour can be seen in revolutionaries who rationalize their oppressors as the ultimate evil. Or in nationalistic patriotism (why does a flag make someone cry? Why does it matter what the founding fathers thought?). Or college fraternities with their initiations and pledges. Or the obsession with all things natural and organic, and neo druidism, and Gwenyth Paltrow getting people to stick odd things up their vaginas. Or Trump supports who see Donald Trump as their saviour from the evils that plague them.
   
   We have evolved the innate ability to unite under an emblem and operate as a cohesive whole. That is religion, and no other animal seems to have it. It's the evolutionary trick that made us the dominant species on earth. It's utter shit for finding the truth of things, but it massively serves the purpose of our survival.
   
   Now, if you want religion to just go away so we can have a purely secular society based on reason, then what you want to believe is that religion is just some kind of fluke originally made to explain the world (and it clearly does a poor job of that). I admire that cause, but I doubt it's viability, and I certainly doubt the premise that's justifying it. Or perhaps I'm just making assumptions about your point of view. A purely rational society is one that I think a lot of skeptics dream of, and you are in this subreddit.
   
   Further reading, if you're interested: Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of Religious LIfe." Also, Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion."

I've found The Righteous Mind is a good book to help understand where people on various sides of the political spectrum (conservative, liberal, and libertarian) are coming from and how their values differ from each other.

Sounds like you could use some enlightening reading

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is a great book that makes pretty much your exact argument. Highly recommend it for people who want to better understand the origins of morality.

Before you challenge your father, or anyone on this, read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion There are multiple ways of perceiving morality, probably hardwired into the primate mind, liberal western values emerges only from the most cerebral of these moral systems. I can't speak for the more basic ones nearly as well as the author, I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand conservatives better.

If you have not read Incognito or Subliminal, I highly recommend them. Gives some great insight into the subconscious mind. One of the books talks a bit about early work by Freud on how he was right and wrong about his research.

Yes, I've worked with both and understand the black box problem well.

> upload your neural information into a silicone based robot and you’ll still be the same person.

I strongly disagree with this. IMO the singularity folks overvalue the contents of thought and undervalue the physicality of consciousness.

Consider something like phantom limb syndrome. It has a profound impact on one's experience, and that's just with an appendage.

Now ask, what if the phantom limb is not a limb but is actually a part of the brain that you're not even aware of? You might feel like something is not quite right. But is that the "real" you? What is the self? The content of your thoughts, or the more abstract feeling of experience? How do you know if your thoughts are authentic?

I actually experienced something like that a few years ago and it was very disturbing. For about three weeks I felt as if part of my consciousness had switched off. I could still navigate the world and express myself verbally, but I couldn't help but feel like it wasn't the "real" me. I told people that I felt like a piece of me was missing, but I couldn't pinpoint it. It was kind of like the feeling of a missing tooth. Your tongue is drawn to the hole. It made me seriously doubt my executive function.

Eventually it went away but I never figured out why.

Now look at schizophrenics. They don't think they're insane. They perceive a world that you and I don't perceive, and in their minds they are 100% exercising free will. That's why it's so difficult to get them to take their medication -- it makes them feel less authentic.

A more common experience is lifelong depressives who find a treatment that works. Many of them describe the medicated self as "the real me." Really? All that neurological activity doesn't feel real, but 50 mg of Zoloft snaps it into place?

Oliver Sachs has documented even more bizarre neurological conditions. Combine that with the "competitive selves" theory outlined in Incognito and it really leads me to question how much "I" am in control.

These two pathologies have been documented and defined along with many others. But there are potentially infinite pathologies that have not yet been defined. How do you know that you're not suffering from some form of psychosis? One that makes you feel like you exercise free will?

On a therapeutic level, you might want to check out voice dialogue. (I'm not suggesting you need therapy, it's just an interesting view of behavior.) In going through it myself I discovered over a dozen distinct voices in my head, which my therapist said is common. The more I untangle those voices, the less I believe in free will.

This is also mentioned in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman that is a really interesting and short read that you can get here

I really liked Incognito by David Eagleman. It is similar in style to Freakonomics and does a great job of simplifying the science and applying it to things we do every day.

> No, that's just the choice you made.

So you're one of those religious types that don't accept evolution and scientific things like neuroscience, it sounds like. I didn't make the choice - I have never even as a child, accepted religion. Even when I was 3 and 4 years old. It just made no sense to me. That is how my brain is wired. There is no way for me to make myself believe. No way. Unless I tried to lie about it, which makes no sense, because your god/allah/shiva/kali/zeus would know it as they can read minds.

> You don't have to investigate literally every other mythology in order to negate it before accepting one as the truth, only the converse is required.

OK, so I'll go with Mithra, I guess. Good enough.

>If in the 80 odd years you are probably given to live on average and you didn't devote any time to investigating a threat as serious as "hell," then that's your fault, not that of any notion of predestination.


Oh, don't get me wrong. I've investigated way more than 95% of the entire human population, for sure.

It is not my fault. It is the way my brain is wired. I know my brain better than you. I've lived with it for a long time. But I think you need to read up on neurology. I wish more people would do that, rather than read their "holy" books. Try to read some books on neurology - try. Although they would probably fry your mind.

David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

I know that you will never be able to accept what the books write, or what I write. It would mess up your most basic beliefs. But I'll just give you those books, just in case you are brave. Remember, they are doing science, not beliefs. Science.

Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-The-Secret-Lives-Brain/dp/0307389928

"Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman is more neuroscience-focused but overlaps a lot with core psychology. Really great read. https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman/dp/0307389928

Incognito is beginner friendly and will leave you wanting more.

How Emotions are Made, The Brain: The story of you, Incognito. Also maybe Gene.

Just go to email share on the amazon page and it will give you a condensed link.

example - http://amzn.com/0307389928

VS

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307389928/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d5_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0Q60AXN4Z57GGYHPJ7GD&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846

Happy to share.

If you find this stuff interesting, I really do recommend the book I linked below. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain is a fascinating pop neuro book. Dr. Eagleman basically runs through a number of the different ways people have gotten fucked over by their brain causing them to do things outside of the control the average layperson would consider us to have. And unfortunately while he never flat out says we don't have Free Will, he does wrap it all up as a plea for Justice Reform and the need for a system that focuses on rehabilitation over punishment and compassionate isolation from society for those who can't be rehabilitated.

I think you're lost.

But while we're here I am going to recommend you read Bright-Sided so you can get a better, more well rounded idea of how the world works and what makes things happen and gets goals achieved. Spoiler alert: the whole "positive thinking" thing isn't it!

> So how come nobody ever told me "madeleine, you're incredibly fat. you're not shaped like a human being. what this means is that you will NEVER integrate into society, in terms of either love or work, because no one wants to look at you, touch you, or be around you"?

Social conditioning. People are taught, and a semi-strict code of enforcement occurs, to be ultra-positive and to not tell blunt truths -- even if they are true.

Barbara Ehrenreich went so far as to write a book about how this type of mindless positive-spin lying goes on in the US, "Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America". It's this same dynamic at work at a personal level.

You should read Bright Sided. It's an entire book about how corporate double think is undermining America.

Check out Carl Jung's Liber Novus, also known as the Red Book. What I believe you are experiencing is a state Jung termed active imagination.
It took practice for me to attain a similar realm/state, but it required disassociating myself from past and future and letting my imagination form a reality apart from emotion and desire.
There are beings (which I view as aspects of my subconscious psyche) that I can commune with in this state, and I have found it very useful.
I would interpret what happens to you in meditation as you entering a state of active imagination and your subconscious putting you through a necessary trial - or an experience that is a symbol of a trial you need to undergo.
The realms of mental experience are incredibly vast, however, and it may not be appropriate for me to project my experience onto your own in this manner.

$105.30

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-C-G-Jung/dp/0393065677/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I33X7KXKLCWHQZ&colid=DEEF5LZ4R56R

It's pretty pricey, but awesome: https://www.amazon.ca/Red-Book-Liber-Novus/dp/0393065677

Hey may be speaking about the "inner space" of the mind.

I've only made it through the introduction (100+ pages, so I'm not that bad) but this book has really set my mind aflame.

Being a Human can be very complicated.

Carl Jung's The Red Book? https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Philemon-C-Jung/dp/0393065677

Person, hands down. Doesn't mean that we don't play together. But I never want to be in the business of objectification. I want the full nine yards.

EVERYONE is a person. They have wants, desires, needs, and HUMANITY. The good, the bad, the exciting, the mundane, the hilarious, the fantastical, etc. I want it all.

Entertainment is temporary until the next, slightly more absurd thing comes along. I want to peer into someone's soul and see them for all that they are.

Which one is this one? https://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-Philemon-C-Jung/dp/0393065677

There are some images from the book on the Amazon page, albeit not many: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Book-Liber-Novus/dp/0393065677/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260581788&sr=8-1

I am a bibliophile and I would really like this book: Jung's Red Book, which is profiled here in the New York Times. It's a beautiful book, by all descriptions, a true work of art. It's a little beyond what I would spend on myself this season, so I thought it would qualify for this thread.

IIRC, your original points were something to the effect that it’s easier to ban guns than gas, and that the Kyoto attack wasn’t covered intensely because it wasn’t in America. I think other people pretty well addressed the ‘not in America’ part, referring to the wall to wall coverage Christchurch got because it served the Democrats’ gun ban agenda.

Anything can be banned. The question is how effective a ban could be. Alcohol, gambling, prostitution, recreational drugs and gay relationships have all been banned. How well did those work? By the way, gasoline is a lot harder to make and requires far more complex and expensive capital equipment to make than guns do. While gas might be practical to ban, at least for a while, most things that run on gas can be converted to run on alcohol, which is easy to make at home.

https://homemadeguns.wordpress.com/

Are you seriously arguing that Europe is an example of why mass slaughter is unlikely? Ever heard of Hitler? Stalin? The Armenian genocide? More recently, the wars in the Balkans?

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB16A.1.GIF

You certainly can run a country with an unarmed population, and if you’re in charge, that’s way easier than having peasants who can tell you to f*ck off.

The argument that the population can’t defeat the government has been addressed by a number of writers. The short version is:
The military is the people. In a rebellion, it would split like the population. In a rightist rebellion against a leftist government, two thirds of the predominantly conservative military will side with the rebels. In a left rebellion against a rightist government, about one military person in six would support the rebels. Defection or sabotage by one in six is more than enough to paralyze any military unit.

The military, in total, is about 1.3 million, including the Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and so on. About ten percent of the military can actually engage in combat, and nearly all of those are overseas. More than 100 million Americans have guns. Good luck suppressing even three million rebels spread over 3.8 million square miles, striking when they please and fading back into the population when they feel like it. There isn’t the remotest chance the military could suppress a rebellion of five percent of the population.

I get the feeling you’re fairly young. The political world hasn’t changed much at all for a very long time. It is, and always will be about power. The very recent experiments in democracy are only possible because power is diffused... in the form of privately owned guns.

A century is a very, very short piece of human history, and oppression and murder of people has been a constant for at least the past few thousand years of recorded history, and almost certainly much longer. Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

Anthropologists think 15% of people died violently through most of human existence. An American with no criminal record is very unlikely to be murdered.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

Five hundred years ago, anyone who could afford to buy horses and armor for half a dozen thugs could take anything you had, your wife, your kids, your property, your life, and those people routinely did. Freedom and safety have only existed for common people since the invention of portable firearms, because when the Lord of the fiefdom comes into your village to exercise his right of prima nocta now, you shoot him off his horse.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/historical-current-events/prima-nocta/

The problem with rules about who has guns is that the rich and powerful always make the rules.

As to a need for military grade guns for killing people... yes, that’s the point. America can’t have a Rwanda-style massacre because everyone is armed. A balance of arms is stability insurance.

You’re doing a decent job of presenting the standard anti-gun arguments, but I hope you think it through. If you’re a conservative or libertarian, would you be comfortable trusting your life to a leftist government, given how that’s played out around the world? If you’re a lefty, are you okay with Hitler’s cousin and best friend Trump having the power to wipe out leftists?
Armed commoners are your insurance against the truly massive violence governments can do, and that hostile groups can do to each other.

As someone in the same boat, I totally recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

So helpful oh my god.

Solid proof is hard to come by for a question this large and sociological, of course. Human interactions are more complex than physics can ever hope to be.

But there are actually a fair amount of explanations for the larger question of the overall drop in crime on a larger level - the consistent drop in the percentage of violent crimes for the human species.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" - Stephen Pinker

> We wouldn’t be much worse off, or much better... it’s a zero-sum game.

I don't think you know what a zero-sum game is. Something isn't a zero sum game just because you say it is, and you literally have no way to know what would happen without religion other than your gut instinct.

That said, it is provably true that the general human condition is not a zero-sum game, as it has been consistently improving over time. While I can't prove that trend would be accelerated without religion, I can't see any reason to doubt that it would.

There are a bunch of reasons why religiosity has been decreasing globally for the last several decades, and one the the big one is that people are better educated and have more free time to question what they have been taught all their lives. When all you have time to do is work and sleep, you don't have much time to think about the big questions.

And it is worth noting that the atheist community is overwhelmingly liberal. It isn't universally so, but the vast majority of atheists are liberals. I see no reason to doubt that that trend would also not continue as secularism grows.

> Yet all these atheist point the finger at religion as if humans don’t make it go.

Lol, wtf do you think we object to, the belief?

I can't speak for all atheists, but I personally have no problem with people believing WTF ever they want, and I would suspect that the vast majority of us more or less agree on that point. It is organized religion that is the problem. AKA the people leading the tribe.

Seriously, before objecting to "all these atheists", you really should try to understand what most of us believe.

> I don’t think the Civil War would have been averted if churches unanimously condemned it.

Are you psychic? Can you travel through dimensions and time? If not, what you "think" might have happened in some alternate history is absolutely irrelevant. What I know is that many churches supported slavery and that they absolutely pushed for a war to protect the institution.

What I can also say for absolute certainty, and I hope that you would agree, is that if the churches DID universally oppose slavery, averting the war would have been a lot more likely. But whether or not it would have actually been averted is unknowable, so speculating is absolutely pointless.

Your entire argument is an argument from personal incredulity: "I can't imagine that it would get better, therefore it won't get better."

But the thing is, reality could not care even a tiny bit less about what you think will happen. Your view of the likelihood of something being true has no bearing on whether or not it is true.

> Do you know any church going Christians who will argue for the return of slavery? Not likely... yet they have religion.

Yes, but that is because of secularism. The views on these issues have changed entirely due to secular movements.

> You could use religion to control people for good if you so desired.

Many churches do actually work to do good. They aren't all evil. You are just lumping all the churches together because it is convenient for your argument... Which is ironic given that you seem to want to argue that religion isn't a problem.

> But human nature won’t allow it.

Because you say so. Well, shit, when you make a compelling argument like that, how could I ever have doubted you!!!

[facepalm]

Edit: FWIW, I would strongly recommend you read The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. It provides pretty conclusive evidence against your "human nature" argument.

> The universe exploded out of foam for no "reason" at all,

Yes.

> a cluster of chemicals coagulated in a puddle,

Yes.

> billions of years of meaningless mutations

Guided toward survival in ever changing environments by natural selection.

> produce humans,

And numerous other more beautiful species. Some of these are more complex than our own. Humans aren't special. Did you know that compared to the human brain at about 3 pounds, the sperm whale brain is enormous at 17 pounds?

> and now the only Eternal Absolute Truths

There are none, so nope to the rest.

> are that thou shalt not be racist, sexist, homophobic, transgenderphobic, Islamophobic, or pro-life.

Nope. Most atheists start from a position of reason and rationality. So, most of us, but certainly not all, do agree with those. But, it's not a fucking commandment from on high as you worded it. It's more just a case of the golden rule that predates the Abrahamic religion by centuries.

> Moral Realism is established on the immutable pillars of evolution

Nope. Morality is something social species evolved long ago. Our morals are more complex, but often worse than those of other social species. It's just part of being a good member of society in any social setting where cooperation creates an advantage.

Since we happen to be quite large brained for our size, we sometimes think these things through a whole lot more than other animals. But, the result of that may be horrific. It may be the fucking bible that justified the crusades, the inquisitions, manifest destiny, the slave trade, and numerous other atrocities committed by the meanest species on the planet.

> and -- wait! This is all total bullshit.

Oh. Your strawman is bullshit? Wasn't that why you set up the strawman?

> Which scientific theory says we have rights?

None. Where in the Bible does it say we have rights? Compare the Ten horrific Commandments with the Bill of Rights. Which one gives rights and which takes them away?

The rights come from our evolution as a social species and from the ever improving moral zeitgeist of humanity that has created tremendous improvement over the crap from the sheepshaggers who wrote the Bible.

The term "God-given rights" is ludicrous. God gives nothing of the sort.

> Where does quantum mechanics or evo bio say anything about racism or social justice?

The golden rule is sure as hell not from the Abrahamic religion. As we gradually include ever more people in our "in-group" and ever fewer in the "out-group" our morality improves. That's why we don't believe in manifest destiny and regret the genocides it justified today despite it's grounding in Christianity.

So, where does this come from? Not from the Bible. If you don't stone homosexuals to death and do the same to most rape victims and force the remainder of the rape victims to marry their rapists, you're not getting your morals from Yahweh.

> Are you sure you believe that materialist gibberish?

Of course I don't believe your strawman. See my corrections above.

> If wiping out the tribe across the river benefits my tribe, what business is it of yours?

Yup. That view is strongly supported in the Torah. Deut 20:16. 1 Sam 15:3.

> It's no more or less objectively "wrong" than my preference for Chunky Monkey over Cherry Garcia.

Those both suck.

> If you don't like Nietzsche I recommend this dude. Consistency is a virtue. Nietzsche's whole mission was to demonstrate how atheism has serious implications for morality.

Atheism == no gods.

Anything else you attach to it is a strawman.

> And the new atheists ignore him. (He has single sentences more powerful and profound and beautiful than Hitchens' entire oeuvre.) When Dawkins talks about the "moral zeitgeist" it's like some absurd Civil War reenactment, like he's dressed up as someone with Objective Moral Authority.

You may not be aware of this but atheism is a non-prophet organization. None of these people speak for all atheists. There is no atheist Bible. There is no atheist code of ethics, positive or negative.

You lump us all together as if atheists share anything other than an agreement that the number of gods in the universe is zero. If you want to make points, why not ask me what I think instead of assuming I agree with the four horsemen.

> Your moral intuitions evolved for the same purposes as a giraffe's neck, mosquito's stinger, bat's echolocation, and zebra's stripes: as a means of spreading your ancestor's DNA.

Exactly so.

> If you want to maintain that your sense of "wrong" hones in on some Ultimate Reality "binding" on me, I look forward to your arguments.

I don't. I just maintain that my set of morals is a metric fuckton better than the crap in the Torah that is basically the same as Sharia law.

> You won't find them in science.

Science can tell us a lot about human morality. Neuroscience can tell us a tremendous amount about the locations of the brain that process morals but much research still needs to be done. Other scientific studies of morality can tell us about the default set of morals that humans are somewhat pre-wired for, assuming a properly functioning brain.

But, it can't tell us that it's good to assume we're all us. For that, we need to actually examine the fact that there are no subspecies of humans. We need to look at the fact that humans went through an evolutionary bottleneck around 70-80,000 years ago when there were only around 1,000 breeding pairs of humans on the entire planet (actually, the page to which I just linked suggests a higher number, mine was from memory, the estimates may have been updated since). This shows that we're all very closely related. There is no them. Once the out-group is removed and all people are included in the in-group, our morals get a whole lot better. Genocides stop. The tribal wars you're talking about stop.

Unfortunately, this is taking rather a long time to come about in our cultural evolution. We still have a lot of things that cause artificial divisions among humans that don't really exist at all. And, once we have these artificial made-up divisions of humans like race and sectarianism, then it becomes OK to kill Them. All such divisions are false and evil. I oppose them all.

We are all Us.

> Our moral intuitions are tools for finding mates, food, and shunning adversaries.

How so?

> A consistent skeptic would say the same thing about Reason. I rarely see consistent skeptics. I see atheists who are as puritanically fanatical about morality as any believer.

I have no idea what this means without specifics.

> Yes, the 7 Laws oppose Christianity. It's idolatry.

Minority opinion. How do you know? Is it the graven images of Catholicism? Does that apply even to subsects of Christianity that do not kneel before graven images?

> And Islam is a false religion (though not idolatrous). This is a better source than Wikipedia.

How can you tell? They say the same about Christianity and worse about Judaism. How do you tell which is right?

>> Theocracy is always always always bad.
>
> Depends on the theocracy.

No. It doesn't. Theocracy makes it illegal to think. Theocracy makes it illegal to speak one's mind. Theocracy creates prosecutable crimes with no victims. Theocracy punishes those who believe "false religions" while ignoring that the religion in charge has no more evidence than any other.

> See Plato & Nietzsche on the perils of mob rule democracy. Which scientific theory establishes any system of government?

Democracy is the worst form of government ... except for all the others. I'm not sure science says anything about forms of government. But, my personal opinion is that there is no such thing as a good totalitarian government or a good closed society.

These things are inherently opposed to thought, expression, science, and freedom.

All totalitarian governments, including Communism, are morally repugnant to me.

> I'm obligated to support candidates who understand that shedding innocent blood is wrong. Sometimes that's none of them.

And, what exactly would a Noahide do to a blasphemer? Exactly what punishment would you enact when you make blasphemy illegal?

Yes. Borderline Personality Disorder mother and a Narcissiric Personality Disorder (though this diagnosis is rarely given because narcissists rarely seek therapy unless they are forced to or suffer a flash of light live-changing usually traumatic experience where their narcissism no longer can protect their false dreamt-up reality using others as ‘narcissistic supply’)

My parents sandwiched me growing up with their V-spot BPD-NPD real-self dance when they inadvertently and advertenly activate each others’ false selfs and defense mechanism who are unable to procure true real romantic intimacy to support an authentic true-self loving household therefore inflicting role-reversal enmeshed narcissistic abuse onto their self-esteem identity/indivislity developing children.

https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-romantic-bpd-relationships-425217

https://www.amazon.com/Malignant-Self-Love-Narcissism-Sam-Vaknin/dp/8023833847

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7270096M/Search_For_The_Real_Self

Which is why hordes of internet schizoid-like Internet-type dudes are trying to resolve their fundamental core inability to expresss true genuine feelings of true intimacy with friends, relationships, others, etc. because of a ‘beta’ father and an ‘abusive’ mother in a dysfunctionla nuclesr family structure, if at all. And we live in an escapist dreamworld trying to live vicariously through Hollywood superheroes to imitate — or for the Asian community an idealized person to guide and relate to; the idealized Asian father figure to sooth and ameliorate our lack of identity, self-esteem development, and masculinity.

Luckily for me, my father was masculine so I have no problems standing on my own two feet with dudes of all backgrounds (hustlers, ex-cons, and blue-collar, nerds, etc.) but the romantic part is very difficult for me right now because of an emotionally toxic mother with no immediate female relatives to relate to as a child. This is why long-term insight-oriented psycho dynamic talk therapy is critical to address the identity issues and garner a stable self-image and develop healthy self-esteem building in a ‘safe-space’ private dedicated session with an if good objective psychoanalytic psychoanalyst/psychotherapist. But HMOs/insurance/self-pay don’t want to pay for this only to cheap out with superfiscal cognitive-behavioral “jussss change ur thoughts about the ordeal” approach, rather than bringing about unresolved unconscious intrapsychic conflicts from (early) childhoods that arrests our core identity development/self-esteem building (confidence) as individuals in this “I”-centered Westernsphere whereas conversely Confucianism culture of asserting direct confrontation of “I” or “you’re xyz” is vehemently disrespectful in the interpersonal culture of indirection.

...but Confucianism/Buddhism teaches us we must embrace suffering and self/sacrifice for a better successive generation tomorrow. Our immigrant parents bring this collectivism mindset but to navigate American life, we must assert ourselves as independent functioning individuals with self-stability and self-constancy of who we are. Simply said, the West values the individual irrespective of the family despite the aristocratic lineage rhetoric as Hollywood always admires a great rags-to-riches underdog movie. Whereas the Confucianism East desires to maintain peace, harmony, order and peaceful resistance of nonconfrontation.

However, the irony is that growing up in the Anglosphere we have to garner a dialetically diametrically opposed dualistic strategy of collectivist Confucianism at home and individualist identity in the non-Asian real-world. The village community doesn’t respect the individual because you’re deviating from the social norm and ingroup clique and their collectively shared self-esteem and group identity. Whereas the West cherishes the Johnny Appleseed wanderer, Lewis and Clark expeditions, the visionary dreamer for whatever xyz dreamt-up upotia. The East wants to maintain the Confucius scholar-beaurcrat hierarchy. Essentially, America’s narrative is to explore and find family and a sense of community as an individual leaving home, whereas the East wrt to China desires to maintain internal social stability our 5000 Han Chinese homogenous familial hierarchical family. And it is no mistake that the Asian-to-Asian connection is vehemently ingrained into our inner concious fabric through generations of solidarity until our ancestors lost out our internal familial peace where the Qing dynasty failed his people to the West/Japan with the Century of Humiliation.

Western religious history and narrative is one fraught with master-slave savior-savee god and his followers and competing interpretations of the biblical texts therefore causing seemingly intergenerationally perpetual Holy War conflicts, aggresive exploitation of religious enemies, and war to conquest others to occupy religious superiority and “englightrnment” to them through pillaging villages and indoctrinating the “superior” religion into others through newly erected religious institutions. ....Confucianism has none of that. Heck, Buddha respects his followers worshipping of other Gods. Though the other religions respect you for worshipping other Gods is of their own issue.

Additionally Confucianism culture teaches us to not seek for extraneous help for fear of looking weak (maintaining ‘perception amnagement’ just like we curate our happy social-media happy moment reel to manipulate a certain image in the shared 3rd digital/cyberspace dimensional realities) and keep family matters private as to not air-out dirty laundry in order to ‘save face’ and not being shame to the family name — as in defeat and loss of status. But the crux of the matter is that the family systems dynamic is vehemently unhealthy due to intergenerational trauma and familial tug-of-war narcissism, especially given that immigrant parents self-sacrifice to economically bust their butts but along cling onto their children for emotional security in this new foreign world as we try to forge our own narratives and identity. The more we grow to be American with individuality,the more it counteracts the intergenerational Confucianism familial planning in the name of maintaining the preservation the lineage successive dynastic ‘family name’. (Indians are in the extreme with arranged marriages) Luckily for me my parents despite their narcissism are open-minded cosmopolitan individuals and don’t mind me Americanizing and imposed any racial dating restrictions.

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment https://www.amazon.com/dp/0787908703/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_rA1-AbZS1J063

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents https://www.amazon.com/dp/1626251703/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_dB1-AbVQXAZTN

Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439129436/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NB1-AbN0P827E

Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents https://www.amazon.com/dp/1572245611/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_ND1-Ab94P47XX

Leviathan by Hobbes... here's a 10min video on his life and work

I could substitute the word "State" for Leviathan, but then you wouldn't ask this question. Hobbes explores the idea that the state functions like a giant scary monster that can can enforce peace through its overwhelming power.

If you'd like a more contemporary explanation, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a great book. Pinker points out that although Hobbes suppositions about primitive man might have been inaccurate his analysis as to the causes of violence and the role of government as a civilizing force are still relevant.

Ok I think we have a misunderstanding about what morality really is. To me having morals doesn't mean you do the right thing all the time. It means you have a code of right and wrong. When you make a decision you can pass it through this code and tell if it feels right or feels wrong. What you actually do though isn't constrained by this. There's always an interplay between doing what's right and doing what you think is best for you. So yes people will cheat to get ahead, have affairs, bully people. The important thing though is that they know it's wrong.

In fact, the majority of murders are actually done for moral reasons. What I mean is that the murderer has passed his action through his moral code and determined that they are justified in doing it. Usually this is because their moral code differs from societies moral code and they deem that since society won't punish the wrong doer they have to punish them. This usually involves people who take loyalty very seriously. Like the gangsters who say snitches get stitches. They aren't just killing in self interest, they also feel a very strong moral obligation to punish disloyal members. There's nothing strictly strange about this, group loyalty is one of our strong moral intuitions. A large part of our modern western society involves trying culture us away from this tendency so that we don't end up committing genocides and stuff.

Likewise infidelity provokes moral murder. Husbands and wives with an unusually high regard for loyalty can find the disloyalty of their partners morally unacceptable and since the government won't punish them they have to do it. This is why so many murders like this have the dumbfounding end result of the murderer turning themselves in and proudly confessing, saying things like "and I'd do it again".

This is interesting because it strikingly illustrates where our societies morals have shifted away from the built in innate morals we are inclined towards. I mean all the abrahamic religions for instance say adultery is punishable by death. Punishment for infidelity is extremely common through history and across cultures and when we remove those laws people find it hard to not take the law into their own hands.


> I don't understand your evidence that apes have anywhere near the sense of morality we have. Sure, they teach their kids how to use tools from generation to generation but they also partake in murdering each other and rape. So they aren't paragons of morality in the animal world.

So I'm not saying they have anywhere near the level of "morality" that we do. Just that they have a sense of morality. It's not an all or nothing thing. Also, it's humorous that you would point to murdering and rape and say that means they're not moral. If that's so then discussion over, we're not moral either.

So like I said a lot of bad stuff is done for moral reason but there's a lot of bad stuff done for selfish reasons. There's an interplay in evolution of social species between cooperating and benefiting everyone and not cooperating to benefit yourself. This is what's going on in apes and in us. We rape because it benefits us (the more we rape the more children we have and children is everything) but we punish rape because it's bad for the community. Or in other words it's bad when everyone does it, it's good when I do it.

> I'm curious about your hypothetical island metaphor with 200 people. You seem to believe they would all get along and form a religion out of that morality. I feel like you're ignoring the likely possibility that 100 may form one religion, and the other 100 form another. So, what happens to morality then? What if they are at war?

Yeah I think I answered this above but to be clear, of course all that will happen because they are people but they will still form a moral code that they judge everyone on. Their fights will likely be of a moral character. Arguing as to whether it's ok to marry that widow or not and who get's to decide who marries who, who raises the orphans etc.

Ok, this has been so much writing so if you've gotten this far thank you but I wouldn't blame you if you flamed out half way through I just want to end with some very very strong book recommendations:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. - by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker

If you don't want to read either of those books at least just search for videos of presentations that they did on those books. It will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from.

Yes... psychopathy and sociopathy were formerly thought to be different mental problems, due to the violent expression of the illness (called psychopathy). Now its official name is "anti-social personality disorder".

A look at Ayn Rand's life outside her work leads me to surmise that she was in fact a sociopath, and her writings were intended to spread her total lack of empathy and morality into people not born as sociopaths. The illness, if it's even appropriate to call it such (as it has no cure), reveals itself almost as soon as a child can express themselves. Torturing or killing small animals in unusual ways (like combining frogs and bottle rockets) is a common theme.

Sociopaths have no moral sense. They are innately devoid of empathy. Conscience is the moral obligation that comes from feeling connected to or empathy for other living things. Like all people, sociopaths have a variety of interests and ambitions. Lazy sociopaths will seek to coast through life, engaging in activities that bring them pleasure while putting in the least possible effort. They will manipulate those around them in order to achieve these ends (a common theme). Violent sociopaths are quite dangerous... they do not see people as humans, they see them as objects and tools (another common theme). They will torture and kill people just for the thrill of it, without any remorse, all the while blaming the victim. Ambitious sociopaths are by far the most dangerous. They are a natural fit for the cutthroat business world. They will use positions of authority and a false persona to escape suspicion and personal damage. They will use their talents for lying in order to advance themselves (another common theme). Normal people have a negative reaction when they say something that they know is false... and that's a giveaway for the fact that they're lying. Sociopaths never display such giveaways.

Think of Herman Cain. His habitual sexual assaults and the ease with which he lies are indicators of sociopathy. Think of Newt Gingrich. The emotionally detached way he spoke of his first wife (as an object) - "not pretty enough to be the wife of the president" - is an indicator of sociopathy.

Depending on the study, sociopaths make up 1-4% of the population. You've met several already. Megalomania (narcissistic personality disorder) and borderline personality disorder have some shared symptoms, but the people who have these disorders retain empathy and moral sense... even if their perspectives are twisted. Retaining these traits allows treatment for these disorders. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are incapable of remorse and unable to see the error of their ways.

There are actually several books on the subject of politicians and sociopathy, like Political Ponerology and America's Sociopathic Leadership. Links are to Amazon.

Even with a disturbing rate of psychopathy in our political and economic leadership, there are many more who are normal folks who have completely bought into Ayn Rand's heartless and greedy philosophies. Ron Paul, for example. Who do you think he named his son after?

It's going to take more than changing and screening our leadership, however. Materialism and consumerism run directly against human happiness, empathy, and environmentalism... and too many Americans have accepted the materialistic worldview through incessant corporate messaging campaigns.

archonemis: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link

Psychopaths and sociopaths are the same.

Both are recent terms and clinicians describe both with identical terminology.

There's something also very much worth considering: the people who implement and conduct the plans of the psychopaths are normal people. You and everyone you know use U.S. Dollars; these are tools of the psychopaths. This isn't to say you can't have you own money system. And it's not even that you're bad for using the U.S. Dollar. The point is illustrative. The psychopaths have systems that they expect us to follow and we dutifully follow. There is a relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated that needs to be examined.

Especially in the political arena.

http://youtu.be/DU7LKAsjt4k

http://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

Psychopaths and sociopaths are the same.

Both are recent terms and clinicians describe both with identical terminology.

There's something also very much worth considering: the people who implement and conduct the plans of the psychopaths are normal people. You and everyone you know use U.S. Dollars; these are tools of the psychopaths. This isn't to say you can't have you own money system. And it's not even that you're bad for using the U.S. Dollar. The point is illustrative. The psychopaths have systems that they expect us to follow and we dutifully follow. There is a relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated that needs to be examined.

Especially in the political arena.

http://youtu.be/DU7LKAsjt4k

http://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

I'm amazed no one has mentioned this yet, but Julia Serano's books (The Whipping Girl and Excluded) both discuss this in great detail with a focus on anti-trans and anti-bisexual discrimination in queer/feminist circles.

Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in this stuff.

> Mostly because it's not a word that people really use when talking about social behaviour.

This is just one article that I found when I Googled 'ingrained behaviour'.


My original point was that the hatred that the Israelis have for the Palestinians is pervasive in their society and kids are brought up hating the other. The hate is ingrained with them. The attitude of the soldiers at the shooting of an unarmed Palestinian isn't something that they just picked up from their army buddies within the last few months. This psychopathy is not innate, on that we agree. It has been driven into their heads for a long time that the Palestinians are animals. They act accordingly.

You should check out Political Ponerology for a bit more insight on the nature of psychopathy and how politics can make and use psychopaths.

It's just a teaser. I haven't read the whole book, to be honest, but soon will. You can check the amazon reviews here

This is a good place for asking questions for sure. I only meant that in this specific example if you want a direct answer then the person on YouTube would be a good option... and it's worth stating that if someone is putting videos of themselves on the internet with the express point of transgender topics going on then I have a feeling they wouldn't mind a friendly and respectful question like you're asking.

If you're interested in learning more about trans people I highly suggest this book, it's a quick read and very informative.

• Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity https://www.amazon.com/dp/1580056229

You take a mortal man

And put him in control

Watch him become a god

Watch peoples heads a 'roll

---------------

I can list way more stuff about the state of things in the US. This for example or this... and how about this? Whatever you do, do not talk to the police. The US conviction rate has risen up from 75% to 97% in 40 years.

You can pick up any country and find cases that 'prove' how unbroken the law is. Many countries have adopted more brutal laws in the name of protecting security. The Special Secrecy Law was partly influenced by the US. Japan has recently adopted the jury system. There will of course be differences due to cultural and systemic traits.

I recommend reading Political Ponerology for a glimpse of why politics work the way they do.

This article (it's from Quora, but it is a good read).

If you want something regarding psychopaths, narcissists, megalomaniacs, etc. in politics and power, Political Ponerology.

Reading it right now and it's so great, please go buy a copy

Citation needed.

The world is actually the best it has ever been. Lower violence, higher quality of life, less war and conflict, more time to focus towards self fulfillment instead of needing to worry about survival.

You should check out Better Angels of Our Nature.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

There are rumors that H.P. Lovecraft was an UFO abduction victim.

http://thex-fileslexicon.blogspot.com/2011/02/was-hp-lovecraft-alien-abductee.html

That's why the question arises are his stories really just pure fiction? His nightmares that inspired him weren't perhaps dreams ...

Do interdimensional demons dominate the earth? If that's too much for you, you should at least deal with the concept of psychopathy ...

Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes

https://www.amazon.de/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

Something isn't right here on earth !!!

Dark Shadows - Leviathan storyline:

>The Leviathans were a race of beings who ruled the Earth before mankind came into existence.
>
>Their forms were hideous and inhuman, although many Leviathans took human shape after they lost control of the planet. They longed to return to the Earth and reclaim it as their own. While the true appearance of the Leviathans was never actually shown on the television show, the clear implication was that the Leviathans resembled snakes. Their main symbol was the mythological Naga, a serpent with four heads.

It reminds me of David Icke and his reptilian aliens. Fakerina also seems very snake-like and reptilian to me. It's weird ...

Maybe Fakerina also wears Naga jewelry (ring or necklace)!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C4%81ga

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the nāga or Nagi are divine, semi-divine deities, or a semi-divine race of half-human half-serpent beings that reside in the netherworld (Patala) and can occasionally take human form.

Sorry I did and that's what I got.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ponerology
Main Entry: ponerology
Part of Speech: n
Definition: the study of evil within theology
Etymology: Greek poneros 'evil'

Besides that I got a book written by Dr. Andrew Lobaczewski: Political. Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil. http://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

And a stub of a wiki article that points to that author with only 2 references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponerology

I may have got it wrong but this may be also where a lot of the other confusion is coming from.

Wookiee

EDIT: sorry also as a rule I never trust wiki, have to check the references myself. Also got no hits on JSTOR or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, my two goto searches.

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

Sure, susans.org is a huge forum with allies and partners and trans people of all stripes.

This website is part of the Silvia Rivera project who is a rather well known leader in the community, since Stonewall, who died of cancer.
https://srlp.org/resources/trans-101/

There’s tons of trans vloggers you can go to. Most but not all have a 101 video, and/or talk about their experiences being trans. Here’s a list:
https://blog.feedspot.com/transgender_youtube_channels/

There’s a number of authors you may look into as well, here’s some books:
https://www.amazon.com/Whipping-Girl-Transsexual-Scapegoating-Femininity/dp/1580056229
https://www.amazon.com/Redefining-Realness-Path-Womanhood-Identity/dp/1476709130/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543615079&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=janet+mock&dpPl=1&dpID=5179e6QMxzL&ref=plSrch
https://www.amazon.com/Surpassing-Certainty-What-Twenties-Taught/dp/1501145797/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1543615079&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=janet+mock&dpPl=1&dpID=511ZZslW8TL&ref=plSrch
https://www.amazon.com/Transgender-History-second-Todays-Revolution/dp/158005689X/ref=pd_aw_sbs_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=158005689X&pd_rd_r=0ddc8e87-f4eb-11e8-8ad5-2179f688e965&pd_rd_w=dZYLz&pd_rd_wg=l40fZ&pf_rd_i=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=926ebe02-3236-40c6-ac63-01ad178f498a&pf_rd_r=7XK0K0TEGTZS8SNQ9YMP&pf_rd_s=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=7XK0K0TEGTZS8SNQ9YMP
https://www.amazon.com/Trans-Bodies-Selves-Transgender-Community/dp/0199325359/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_of_15?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0199325359&pd_rd_r=0ddc8e87-f4eb-11e8-8ad5-2179f688e965&pd_rd_w=mqDub&pd_rd_wg=l40fZ&pf_rd_i=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=57b46099-d750-4d74-83ee-63ad64b310a4&pf_rd_r=7XK0K0TEGTZS8SNQ9YMP&pf_rd_s=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=7T7APJ7MA85RWVJHJW5T
https://www.amazon.com/Shes-Not-There-Life-Genders/dp/0385346972/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_of_17?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0385346972&pd_rd_r=0ddc8e87-f4eb-11e8-8ad5-2179f688e965&pd_rd_w=mqDub&pd_rd_wg=l40fZ&pf_rd_i=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=57b46099-d750-4d74-83ee-63ad64b310a4&pf_rd_r=7XK0K0TEGTZS8SNQ9YMP&pf_rd_s=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=BNNAHM1QDG52M4D25XX2
https://www.amazon.com/Gender-Outlaw-Men-Women-Rest/dp/1101973242/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_of_20?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1101973242&pd_rd_r=0ddc8e87-f4eb-11e8-8ad5-2179f688e965&pd_rd_w=mqDub&pd_rd_wg=l40fZ&pf_rd_i=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=57b46099-d750-4d74-83ee-63ad64b310a4&pf_rd_r=7XK0K0TEGTZS8SNQ9YMP&pf_rd_s=mobile-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=WC57YE4ZTSS8XPR20CRY

>Your own experience is irrelevant when it based on nonsense.

My experience of gender dysphoria, as a trans person, is nonsense? Wut?

>That's ironic, we aren't making the sense we think we are? You haven't heard yourselves, clearly.

Says the one who gets in a tizzy at the mere mention of gender identity? I can call it 'subconscious sex' a la Julia Serano if you prefer?

>The point is, gender identity shouldn't be taught as a bunch of nonsense.

A subconscious sex differing from our sexes bodies is the reason we transition to lessen the gender dysphoria this causes. Without it, what motivation can be provided for gender re-assignment?

>Homophobic nonsense, usually.

Wut?

A person's subconscious sex is independent from their sexual orientation.

>Gender is regressive and I'm glad people are getting fed up of it being reinforced when sex is what matters.

The way society structures expectations around gender can certainly be regressive, as those same structures would be when applied to sex.

To me, your statement is as nonsensical as "democracy is regressive and I'm glad people are getting fed up of it being reinforced when politics is what matters."

>Most people literally couldn't care less what you identify as, it changes nothing. & The language matters as it is an attempt to validate it with terminology irrelevant to dysphoria.

Validate what?

Sorry it's not so clear but great that you're aware of things though. There certainly is a lot of information around these days to help.
A couple good books that I stumbled on:
https://www.amazon.com/Trapped-Mirror-Children-Narcissists-Struggle/dp/0688140718

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611

I found both of those at the local library too so might just do that. (There are others as well and probably mentioned on this reddit somewhere, but those are not a bad start)

Book Tip from my lower Link...

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Ponerology-Science-Adjusted-Purposes/dp/1897244258

I agree with rapunzel1111 - record if you can, and get used to keeping detailed notes regarding who said what. I have been to several counselors who didn't believe in narcissistic personality disorders (NPD) and proceeded to blame me for the issues in my relationship with Nrents. If you have the ability to select a counselor you want, look for ones that have experience with N-personalities, N-related disorders, or even do an initial meet-and-greet to discover if they have ever counseled anyone else who was victimized by a narcissist (this will also indicate whether or not they believe NPDs exist). Some counselors who are far away are open to Skype or phone sessions.

It's important to recognize that many health professionals don't want to weigh in too early, and many N victims can present issues of their own which may or may not be the same as the N. It's also the difference (at least in the US) between some counselors and actual mental health professionals - professionals (especially those employed by the government) can only make decisions based on behavior they have actually witnessed. We have gone through this with a family member who will act normal when a professional is present.

Anger is a natural reaction to many situations, so start by acknowledging it and allowing yourself to be angry (essentially self-validation). Say, "I'm angry about x. It's ok for me to be angry about x." Be angry, but try to move it in a positive direction by determining why you're angry and what can be done to alter/fix/avoid the same trigger in the future. It's also natural to go through periods of anger as you remember abusive things/actions/situations and process through them.

It's possible to become what you hate, so I would encourage you to not allow anger to simmer or grow into rage. If you haven't already, try journaling as well to help clear your head and ensure you are moving towards healing.

These books are good starting points to help you work through how to best love and forgive yourself while separating from toxic and/or Nrents:

Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life

Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

Sorry— forgot link. https://www.amazon.com/Children-Self-Absorbed-Grown-Ups-Getting-Narcissistic/dp/1572245611/ref=asc_df_1572245611/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312049124368&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=9958398960446952332&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9013531&hvtargid=pla-435121209069&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=61851652213&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312049124368&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=9958398960446952332&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9013531&hvtargid=pla-435121209069

You'll cycle through periods of grief as you process. That's normal. It's also a good time to learn to be nice to yourself.

Once I was out of easy reach (read: more than 50 miles) away from my Mother, she stopped calling/texting/emailing/sending birthday or anniversary cards and presents. She expected me to do all the emotional work to keep the relationship together. When I stopped doing that, it was shocking just how fast she acted like I didn't exist - but she's the first to say just how happy she is to hear from me when I call and just how much I mean to her (uh... sure).

For me, I found comfort in knowing that my parents loved me as much as they were probably able to. They couldn't/didn't love me enough to meet my needs, they are just people (meaning everyone's flawed in their own ways), and there's nothing I can do about that besides move on and look for love and support from other (normal and emotionally mature) people.

I got a LOT out of these books and maybe they will help you as you start to heal:

By Susan Forward

• Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You
  
  
• Mothers Who Can't Love
  
  
• Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life
  
  
  By Lindsay C. Gibson - Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
  
  By Nina W Brown - Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown Up's Guide to Getting OVer Narcissistic Parents

I'm only about half-way through it, but I think the book your looking for is The Red Book which was just recently released from the Jung family's swiss bank vault, after collecting dust for about half a century. This NYTime's article does a fantastic job of telling the very rich story of the book.

From what I have read so far, the archetypes are formed from the experiences outlined in this book [events that take place within the unconscious mind]; his dreams and "active imagination" sessions, which could be comparable to waking hallucinations. The bridge, I think, is that he found all the same symbols in his dreams/imagination sessions as in the many patients he analyzed himself - leading him to the formation of the archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious. I'm not yet at the point where I could articulate a valid tl;dr answer for you, and also keep in mind this is just my interpretation of the material, not "solid facts."

It's really something you have to read to understand, it's no easy task either, challenging and delightful.

Check out this book, if interested.

http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130

So far my highly recommended ones would be:

NurtureShock

Your Self-Confident Baby

Dear Parent: Caring for Infants With Respect

It's OK Not to Share and Other Renegade Rules for Raising Competent and Compassionate Kids (Currently reading this one now)

I tried reading The Baby Whisperer The Child Whisperer but couldn't get past the second chapter. It reads like an infomercial for the book and it was just awful.

The book Nurtureshock (http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324347141&sr=8-1) has a lot of fascinating studies about children and teens (including the one you mentioned about starting school later) that, as the description says, "upends a library's worth of conventional wisdom."

The study was done at the University of Texas in 2006. I do not have an internet link but they discuss it and others in Chapter 3 of this book: http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312430754&sr=8-1

This book is full of some awesome insights into parenting.

Whether or not you spank your children is not by itself going to determine if they are lazy, selfish, or defiant. Parenting (and children) are a lot more complicated then that. Children do need structure/discipline but there are many valid ways to implement that.

I read a book called Nurture Shock with a summary of research on different parenting issues. If I recall correctly it basically said that spanking/physical punishment is not shown to have long term negative effects in cultures where it is common. In cultures where it is uncommon spanking does have long term negative effects. So if you live in an area where spanking is uncommon don't spank as your child will end up wondering why his parents hit him when his friends parents would never hit his friends and this can cause negative long term effects. If that is normal to the child (everyone in your area uses this form of discipline) they will feel differently and be okay.

The bigger issue to me here though is that your boyfriend is very uncomfortable with it. If you are considering having a child with him it seems like a bad idea for you to use a form of punishment he considers abusive. Also, even more important then punishment is modeling the behavior you want your child to have. Your child is going to learn to do as you do more then you say. So you should be having a child with someone you consider to be a good example of how you would like that child to grow up.

While this is completely unrelated to what you asked for, I recommend this book to any logically-minded parents.

The second comment on the page is gold too.

'How Not to Achieve Freedom' is an entire book on libertarian infighting by Stef. Just sayin'.

I try to keep libertarian infighting to an minimum that I possibly can although I probably take more potshots than I should (although I try to be fair in the shots that I take).

Divorce rates by faith group according to the Barna report [1]:

All adults 33% 3792

Evangelical Christians: 26%

Non-evangelical born again Christians: 33%
Notional Christians: 33%
Associated with non Christian faith: 38%
Atheist or agnostic: 30%
All born again Christians : 32%
All non born again Christians: 33%

Protestant 34%
Catholic 28%

Upscale 22%
Downscale 39%

White 32% 2641
African-American 36%
Hispanic 31%
Asian 20%

Conservative 28%
Moderate 33%
Liberal 37%

Also

>In addition to finding that four out of every five adults (78%) have been married at least once, the Barna study revealed that an even higher proportion of born again Christians (84%) tie the knot. That eclipses the proportion among people aligned with non-Christian faiths (74%) and among atheists and agnostics (65%).

OK I generally agree with this video, even if I don't entirely agree with the methods.

According to this very weak study from a biased source, families who practice Natural Family Planning have a 5% divorce rate [2], substantially lower than the typical rate even among Conservatives.

If you want to lower your chances of divorce, be an Asian Catholic who is also conservative and doesn't use contraception. Are Asian Catholics who don't use contraception the most influential demographic in America? No not really.

It's funny that Stefan strongly criticizes the demographic with the lowest divorce rate while also saying that libertarians should move towards being the population with a low divorce rate that forms strong families, while simultaneously encouraging people to join the demographic with the lowest marriage rate (by far) with a moderately high divorce rate.

I think that not spanking children is preferable. However, many families that do practice spanking lack the sophistication, IQ, and cultural cachet to otherwise raise their children. It's like commanding innately incapable people of being smart enough to have high paying jobs. "You really should not be dumb, you person who is not capable of being intelligent." It's a nice sentiment but the people who need to hear the message the most aren't going to be the ones capable of acting on it.

Libertarians or anarcho-capitalists don't need to be THE strongest faction in the world to thrive and survive according to sets of rules that make us happy. We just have to be strong ENOUGH. We don't have to be 100% unified on every single issue that's conceivable. We just have to be unified sufficiently to reach a threshold that makes independence feasible. A lot of hopelessness arrives from setting goals that are unrealistic or too high or deferred too far into the future.

You're not going to convince 220m Indonesians to stop spanking their children. It's also not entirely clear to me that spanking has the same effects across all cultures in all contexts. This book, 'Nurtureshock,' sold a lot of copies and raised a substantial debate about it. [3] Science is a complicated back-and-forth of debate and experimentation. It's incredibly hard to divine ironclad moral norms based on isolated studies that make a naive connection between spanking and IQ.

[1]https://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released#.UgLq8pJJPXU
[2]http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/natural-family-planning-builds-a-culture-of-life/
[3]http://www.amazon.com/NurtureShock-New-Thinking-About-Children/dp/0446504130

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553386697/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_XuYyDb8CZ38YB

There's an excellent book by Dan Siegel and Tina Bryson called the Whole Brain Child that discusses youngster's brain development and how to help them learn to navigate big and challenging emotions. In the book, they suggest to let your child talk about traumas and put them in context. I can't remember if they discuss anything as big as suicide, but it may be worth checking out. They discourage parents from avoiding topics because that may unintentionally teach the child it's not ok to feel big emotions and create a whole different set or problems for later in life.

​

Here's a link to the book on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-Strategies-Developing/dp/0553386697/ref=sr_1_3?crid=NKHEH3NMWMIQ&keywords=the+whole+brain+child&qid=1566087190&s=gateway&sprefix=the+whole+%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-3

You might find the book "The Explosive Child" helpful in understanding your child's behavior. My son sounds very similar to your daughter (and honestly, much, much less of an explosive child than what the book is truly intended for). However, the premise of the book is that kids who explode like this are lacking in the skills of flexibility and adaptability and that helping them learn these skills is far preferable to punishing bad behavior that stems from a lacking skill.

My pediatrician also recommended the book, "The Whole-Brain Child", which helps explain some of the way children's brains functions. This book is especially useful because it explains why, during huge meltdowns, your child is really incapable of rational thought. You have to wait until the child is calm again before trying to address any of the challenges you're facing.

With that being said, I have noticed in particular that my son has a lot more frequent meltdowns when he is 1) tired or 2) hungry. Asking "are you hungry?" and offering him a snack sometimes snaps him right out of it.

Interacting with him/discussing his feelings/giving hugs during the meltdown seem to make it worse (contrary to my initial impulse which is to walk him through his feelings). This is really only possible AFTER the storm has been weathered. Isolating him, which is pretty much my least natural response, is what seems to work for him the best. We simply tell him he needs to stay in his room until he is calm and ready to talk about what's going on. He calms down MUCH faster by himself and half the time, he ends up falling asleep (and wakes up in a perfectly happy mood).

I came here to cautiously recommend therapy. My recommendation caused strain on our relationship. It turns out guys don't want you to send constant emails about every therapist within 20 miles who sees kids... If they go to therapy and you're privy to the info, read up on the diagnosis to see how you can help them thrive! I'd also spend less time parenting and more time reading up on step/parenting. Terrible twos often bleed into the threes. Reading was incredibly therapeutic for me.

Stepmonster - popular here, I'm a fan
Single Girl's Guide - never read, well reviewed
How To Talk So Kids Will Listen
The Whole-Brain Child
Subtle Art - best book ever

Thank you. I will look for it.

Is it this one or this one?

First I'd like to recommend this book. It made a huge difference in my relationships and understanding of my children.

Next, I am seeing a lot of posts about ADHD. Don't put a label on your child. You may need to seek professional help for her, and they may come up with a diagnosis, but until that time comes she's your little girl and you main job is to love her, not put a label on her. Also keep in mind, if you go looking for a diagnosis, you're likely to get one.

Third keep in mind teachers are people too. Some teachers will just "get" your little girl better than others. You may want to talk with other teachers your child has contact with (music, art, and physical education) are they having similar problems? If not you have two options. Leave her in the class she is in to teach her some life lessons on learning to deal with people you don't necessarily like, or roll the dice and have her moved to a new class and take your chances with a new teacher.

Lastly, you're doing better than you think.

I just asked this question in r/books and got back the recommendation of Undoing Gender by Judith Butler; reflections on gender and sexuality from Feminist Theory and Queer Theory. I haven't read it but I'm waiting to order it.

http://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Gender-Judith-Butler/dp/0415969239/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343950959&sr=8-1&keywords=undoing+gender

One I do like is Lisa Diamond's Sexual Fluidity, a longitudinal (10+ yrs) study focusing on bisexuality. She defines sexual identity as something in flux that changes and is molded over our lifetime.

http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343951135&sr=8-1&keywords=sexual+fluidity

Although it's a bit more specific than you're looking for, check out this book by Dr. Lisa Diamond:
http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268/

Dr. Diamond is a leading researcher in this area (she has several journal articles that might be on topic for you as well).

I have a bi bf and even he agrees, that its still cheating, no matter what the sex. If he were to hook up with men, it would still be cheating and I would be done with him. If I were to hook up with women, it would still be cheating. end of story. its cheating. get out of that relationship, she obviously isn't fully committed

edit: If she thinks that way then shes falling into the bisexual steriotype. I suggest this book to her sexual fluidity

Most men seem to know theyre gay very early in life. For women, some know very early in life, while others tend to move along a spectrum of sexuality from homosexuality to heterosexuality (or in the other direction) as their lives progress. There is a good book about women's sexuality called Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire. http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Fluidity-Understanding-Womens-Desire/dp/0674032268

On the same tack as You Can Negotiate Anything, I'd also recommend Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

I higher price does indeed result in higher demand: please see the opening example in Influence: The Sceience of Persuasion. It turns out, people are not rational actors as most economic theory insists. Social Psychology paints a much different story.

WOW! you are delusional. That wiki article you linked to says the same thing I just told you. Liberation theology basically says that things like poverty exist because people aren't following christian law (a lie). it promotes overthrowing governments in favor of a christian state. It want's only to "liberate" people right under christian controle. There is no actual liberation involved. It's literally sedition.

As far as the slavery thing goes, I'll through you an obvious bone. This was on r/atheism just today.

But you know what, fuck you kid. I'm not going to do your homework for you. go read a book, or just browse r/atheism

>How is it a key factor? Explain to me, specifically, using specific examples, especially explaining how it is more of a key factor than the ones I've listed. I fail to see your reasoning.

What do you want from me? a fucking research project and a thesis paper. Again, go read a book. Here is a good one for you. You can learn about persuasion, and you might be able to realize how, without Christianity, those economic forces you sited would not have the susceptible public, or the material for their propaganda.

Is this the right book?

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165

This this and this, if you ever want some more reading material.

"They", as you call them, are an example of what happens to people when they allow themselves to be manipulated. You might be too though. That's the business of politics in today's world... I highly suggest picking up a book on psychology and reading it (example), and start trying to count the bias in whatever news organization you subscribe to (they all do it, some more than others).

Lastly, when dealing with such people, don't argue, instead use something like the Socratic method to lightly point out that they're parroting words they know very little about.

In truth there is no single bright border line. But many psychologists use checklists of diagnostic criteria in books like The DSM. This makes it possible to categorize people with at least some consistency.

If a patient meets, for example, at least 5 of 7 listed criteria for a specific listed disorder, they are considered to have that disorder.

This is really sad. Never expected reactions like this. So this you people make of someone who's taking evening classes in college, while working a full time job, to help other people resolve their problems for a living. Why drives you people to make these things up? You've never even heard of of the DSM, you clearly have no idea. There is not a single case study of a person who has been depressed all of his or her life. How can you be so dumb to think someone could live that long? Words and meanings can be so difficult.

There are many people however who go in and out of depressions, it always goes away. If you ever feel safe enough to go talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist, it will be one of the first things they tell you. It is supposed to comfort you in the knowledge that it will pass. The work you do is to ensure you don't fall back in that hole. Luckily they don't make this stuff up, it's based on empirical research and NOT your imaginations or your personal, misinterpreted experiences.

Even daddy Google could teach you these basics, really sad to read such pettiness. For your convenience, here's a link to the latest edition of the DSM. Though I'm afraid it does fall out of the price range of the average teenager. And the words will be difficult and meaningful. https://www.amazon.com/Diagnostic-Statistical-Manual-Mental-Disorders/dp/0890425558

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0890425558/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487738831&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=dsm+5

Scroll all the way down to 'new and used'. Click, then click 'new'. All kinds of options starting in the 25 dollar range.

Intelligence is like HP, it has very little to do with which way the wheels are pointed. You can entertain a bunch of silly ideas without them affecting your world view (what if Chaney really is secretly an alien). These ideas are evaluated in a bubble you create in your head. The potential change in your worldview required to accept an idea and remain consistent is automatically measured without you thinking about it. If they get you young enough, the idea that god isn't there is just as nonsensical as aliens running the government... it can't be entertained seriously without threatening big and important parts of their world view.

check out The God Virus

Here is the author on Atheist Experience

Darrel W. Ray agrees also

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-religion-infects-culture/dp/0970950519/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313130751&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Personally I wouldn't bother telling them. It is unreasonable of you to expect cult members to be reasonable :)

If you can live your life away from them and only visit when you need to, then perhaps just do that. This book has some pretty good tips on dealing with religious family: https://www.amazon.co.uk/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519

you might read this......

https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519

I would start with the classic Some mistakes of Moses, by Robert Ingersoll.

There is a short book called Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God, by Armin Navabi, that is also a nice read.

One that I recently finished reading and enjoyed very much is The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, by Aron Ra. The book is not exactly about atheism; it's Aron's rebuttal to many creationist arguments, but Aron is a widely known atheist activist, and the book is very enjoyable.

I usually listen to The Thinking Atheist podcast, from Seth Andrews (a podcast I highly recommend, by the way). There are some book he suggested in his podcast that I haven't read yet, but which I included in my to-read list:

• A Manual for Creating Atheists, by Peter Boghossian.
  
• God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, by Dan Barker.
  
• [The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture] (https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486982921&sr=1-1&keywords=the+god+virus), by Darrel Ray.
  
• Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World, by Seth Andrews himself.

How about these:

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
  
  
• The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture
  
  They're not novels unfortunately but I want to at least give you something.
  
  EDIT: Here are two that I remember as being in novel format:
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Debris-A-Thought-Experiment/dp/0740747878/
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Religion-War-Scott-Adams/dp/0740747886/ (This sequel is the more relevant of the two, the first one is more like a big brain teaser on the concept of God)

[God Virus, The: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture](https://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-Religion-Infects-Culture/dp/0970950519 "")

I would suggest books written by ex-christians. Here are some that I have enjoyed:

[This] (http://astore.amazon.com/exchrisnetenc-20/detail/B00AM4UFSG)

[And this] (http://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393327655/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427226664&sr=1-1&keywords=the+end+of+faith)

[And this] (http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Sam-Harris/dp/0307278778/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=149ZKC19M7DB7MC831Q9)

[And this] (http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-The-Religion-Infects/dp/0970950519/ref=pd_rhf_se_s_cp_7_F6GR?ie=UTF8&refRID=0ZE3TFDAPY4Z6BD4RN71)

>I think the division is a natural consequence of biology and upbringing.

This book may prove interesting for you then, if you want to learn about it. Judging from the reviews it seems like the author did a (relatively) good job.

Yea, a bunch studying different things. This conclusion was teased out of a number of different areas of research.

Maybe start here:

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933

Are you an idiot or just a troll? The sources for my parts about genetics are in the videos' descriptions. You can easily find them. The videos about genetics are based around r/K genetic theory, which is a genetic topic that has been studied for many, many years. Hell, you could go on Amazon right now and order a major book on this topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933

I just wanted to provide you a more interesting presentation on the topic. The website I linked you to that analyses leftism provides many sources and even dozens of books on specific topics to do further research. The rest of my sources are historical and you can find many books on them. All you have done with this conversation is prove my point even further: leftists are irrational. Even a leftist like you, who tries to be rational, still falls victim to the symptoms of leftism. Leftists just double down when presented with facts that conflict with their viewpoints. The worst part of all is that they do not realize it. They are so smug with their ignorance and stupidity. It would be funny if it were not so dangerous to our society. Fortunately, the more time passes, the more people on the left will leave and go to the right. There is still hope, thankfully. I know that you have no legitimate counter-argument, so can you please, for the love of God, not respond back? All you are doing is wasting your time and, especially, mine. Goodbye (hopefully).

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Giver det her mening for dig?

https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933

>During his campaign, Quist's life has come into the public light, including his regular musical performances at an Idaho nudist resort with his daughter.

this book explains not just why these types of people go to nudist colonies, but why they fantasize about other people deaths.

Haven't read this but I plan to when I have the money. Heard its supposed to be a good one

• The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans

>The guys who build and run organizations do so with skills and personalities that are almost orthogonal to being alpha.

You sir are looking for r/K, the x axis to α/β on the evolutionary psychology plane.

Funny enough you'll not find a more perfect example of K psychology than a wolf in the winter.

> Pretty much have.

No.

>2 million people with an IQ above the 100 IQ average.

100 isn't that high, and the average is what is more important. The outliers should be trying to create an environment with incentives that drive up the average.

>Ah yes because all the great minds in the world see it as black and white. See you're actually a great example of why my faith in huwhite nationalism is so low.

Not an argument.

>Simple demographics.

You simply don't understand the left, like at all. Try reading this book. Enough with the rabbit horde nonsense.

>Exactly your adherence to arbitrary racial groups has an economic cost.

You are not smart enough to realize that there are two sides to this issue. Your desired inclusion has it's own externalities.

Have you seen this blog, and the book? Someone just posted an article from it here, and the book is linked at the very bottom of this page. Seems a bit related to your question.

http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/podesta-pizza-pedophiles-discomfiting-coincidences/

https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&redirect=true&ref_=as_li_tl&linkCode=sl1&tag=anonymoconser-20&linkId=4b0aafa7a6c5c7585bb0b019de949cfd

Human society is evolving to be less violent. See this. Decreated religiosity may be part of it. But there are plenty of other reasons Pinker covers in his book.

Some light reading:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/atrocities/243392473.html?listingId=-1&sclid=pla_google_rakuten.com&adid=29963&gclid=CKT13pfAvMICFQcxaQodNbMAjQ

Steven Pinker articulates that, specifically, the monopoly is on legitimate use of violence. In Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues (IMHO) effectively that Hobbe's Leviathon theory is essentially correct, and is the nature of a state.

The death toll and scale of WWII was the greatest in absolute numbers of any war in world history. It wasn't the largest relative to the size of world population, but it was up there. This article and accompanying video demonstrate that while perceptions of worldwide violence have increased since 1945, absolute and relative fatalities have decreased drastically.

My point is, while Western Europe and N. America won't have a decisive victory, neither will ISIS, because the whole conflict is actually very small in terms of numbers. We'll never have to worry about ISIS taking over the world; it's not possible.

More information here and here.

Indeed. But 383 would not be far off from last year's total of 328. Murder, and crime in general, has dropped precipitously in the last 25 years. (There's a ton of evidence and discussion of this in Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature)

1. So instead of addressing the problems with the regimes we're discussing, you launch into 'whataboutism' and divert the discussion to discuss America's supposed failings; and every example is more than 25 years old.
   
   
2. The supposed evil West: led the charge for the UN (the first int'l organization to give smaller/weaker countries a voice & way to influence global governance); helped institute the Geneva Conventions which have imposed limits on military force and protections for POWs; guaranteed human rights and protections to all; have presided over the most peaceful period ever; and global capitalism provides people an economic system that doesn't require them all to be murdered.
   
   The West isn't perfect, and often doesn't follow its own ideals, but it sure doesn't fall to the level of starving prisoners to death, assassinations, or tearing its own country apart. Assad's men fired the first shots, as I'm sure you recall.
   
   
3. I'm not sure you want to compare per capita civilian deaths between the US and Syria over the past decade, even. Especially when Assad targets civilians on purpose. I doubt even you would try to claim the US does the same, since you'd have to explain how it benefits us.

The Whole Brain Child

Unconditional Parenting

I understand your point, and it seems it stems from a place of love and from the need to protect children. Still please consider you might be wrong, there are plenty of non-violent and more effective actions to keep a child safe and educate him or her while at the same time not scarring their little mind and their future selves and propagate violence in society. if you beat your child, even a light spanking, YOU become the danger in their eyes, but at the same time you are necessary and loved, so this cause a deep conflict that will very likely bring to anxiety, trust issues and possibly depression. This has been proven over and over, a quick scholar google search will confirm all this. One good starting book can be this one: https://www.amazon.com/Whole-Brain-Child-Revolutionary-Strategies-Developing/dp/0553386697/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496839146&sr=8-1&keywords=whole+brain+child

it has.

extensively.

You might be right about the media, but this is bullshit:

> So long as people are police this will ALWAYS happen, no amount of protest or technology will change basic human corruption.

We know how to prevent "basic human corruption". It's fucking called accountability. The problem is getting a system in place that has some. But we won't even have a chance if most folks are oblivious to its necessity, ergo protests.

> Good people die every day in horrible unjust ways. That is never going to change.

Except it does.

You guys get suckered into the news too much. violent crime has decreased since 1994, but the reporting of violent crime has increased 1600%. If you are sheep you think crime is getting worse. Read a book Become educated.

Merging late is better for traffic flow. Stop driving with your ego.

Read some traffic theory. This is a good start: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307264785

You may want to check out a recent book analyzing moral undercurrents and how it relates to classic left v right dynamics. The Righteous Mind

I'm not overly sold on the framing he takes on the analysis but it is interesting none the less.

Weirdest or weirdest readable?

Weirdest book I know of is the Voynich Manuscript but I wouldn't exactly call it readable.

Weirdest book that's easily obtainable? Carl Jung's red book, kind of a dream diary.

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Book-C-G-Jung/dp/0393065677/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1302109230&sr=8-4

Rimends me of this

I agree that Stalin was a horrible human being, but the problems of the USSR go much further and much deeper than just that. Stalin didn't act alone, he had an entire State structure comprised of hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, journalists, police, soldiers, generals, party members and etc who went along for several reasons, and a civil society that didn't succeed in resisting the worst of his plans. Were all of these people just subjectively "evil" aswell? What factors of their daily lives made them go along with the bullshit?

That's because the problem was not just the evil will of Stalin himself, but the entire political-economic structure of the Soviet Union that gave him such power: What Lenin and Trotsky put in place was not a Socialist society where workers had genuine control over their conditions of labor and social surplus, but a State-Capitalist system where a centralized and hierarchical bureaucracy alienated those from the working classes and tried to brute-force a centralized industrialization with little care for human factors or for complex interdependencies they could not properly manage.

Even before Stalin got close to the highest position of power, there were already mass working class demonstrations, strikes and even insurrections against Bolshevik policies that were violently repressed by Trotsky, and a gradual elimination of Soviet democracy and working class freedom of assembly, unionization and speech. Much of the party bureaucracy could genuinely believe they were doing what was "right" and "necessary" when they were really asserting their own class dominance, as their perspective changed the moment they were put in a position of power over others. Even if Lenin didn't die so early or Trotsky or someone else took power instead of Stalin, the USSR would not have developed much differently.

The real question is, why did Lenin and Trotsky fail so bad at creating Socialism? The reasons are various, from the objective factors that weakened civil society's ability to resist domination and build something truly free (the international isolation of the USSR, the general lack of industrialization and infrastructure in Russia when compared to Western Europe, the enormous amount of enemies that declared war on and attempted to sabotage the USSR at once, the deeply entrenched hierarchies in Russian society, etc) aswell as many Leninist ideas and practices that were deeply flawed and failed to deal with those objective conditions in a way that meaningfully built Socialism (the support for a centralized "vanguard" party dictatorship, the High-Modernist ideology of planning and approach to industrialization, the disregard for direct worker control of production in favor of believing "planning" automatically establishes directly social labor, the maintenance of a standing army and police instead of an armed and self-organized working class, etc).

Omg, that's the stupidest thing I've read all day. Let me refer you to this book: Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312658850/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_ZFzLwbXHVB22Z

Negative/critical thinking is the foundation of human intelligence.

You are correct, I am a pretentious shit. Yet I still believe you are uninformed. Check out this article: https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e2d0577#.1kggaiivm

Out of belief in humanity I also used to think anything deemed worthy by academia was of value, but I was sorely mistaken. Check out The Tyranny of Experts and Seeing Like a State.

https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Experts-Economists-Dictators-Forgotten/dp/0465031250

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153

I do apologize for my aggressive approach, but I don't have the time or the energy to write elaborate essays on reddit anytime I disagree with someone in the name of civility. I do try to attack the idea rather than the person though :/

https://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Positive-Thinking-Undermining-America/dp/0312658850

This book, the source of all my information, is full of high quality peer-reviewed scientific studies: https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-Behind-Politics-Conservatism/dp/0982947933

In addition, you can get the book for free several times a year on Kindle just by signing up for it on the author's website. The blog is another good source of free information: https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/home-page/