lemur

This harkens back to the post about a whole culture of handwalking developing to please women so that they'll go to bed with you. I think you hit the nail on the head with people repressing and even pro-actively conditioning their behavior to please others. They do so to solicit favorable treatment or other social perks. You could call it the great butt-kissing orgy of liberal relativism. This is why the religion of Islam is so suspect from the perspective of secular liberalism, I think. "Islam" means "submission to God," which implies not submitting to worldly/social authority. So if you think it is God's will for you to whistle at work, even if your colleagues don't like it, you do it because that is the right thing to do in your best judgment. There are other paths to independent decision-making besides citing "the will of God," but the point is that for some reason secular liberalism manages to promote social-submission over independent judgment and I'm not sure why that is exactly. Why hasn't secular liberalism resulted in greater individual independence and freedom from devoting oneself primarily to pleasing others? Why don't free westerners develop a sense of values beyond catering to what other people want, are willing to pay you to do, etc.? Why isn't their higher (secular) judgment?

All you are saying is that liberalism is accepting of personal choice where (self)repression is concerned - but the issue remains of what the source of repression is, if not religion. I think numerous replies in this thread have covered various bases for various repressive logics. Interestingly, I don't see any of these non-religious rationales for repression being challenged or fought the way that religion is. It is as if there is simply a cultural movement to replace religious repression with secular forms of repression - but this begs the question of "why call it liberalism?" If the goal is not to liberate people except for the purpose of being free to repress themselves, why not welcome religion as just another means of self-repression? It is practically impossible to combine work with full-time childcare, except maybe for a tiny handful of professions. Economics still tends to favor couples where one partner works full-time and the other parents full-time. Also, informal social traditions/culture tend to favor couples where it is the man that works full-time and the woman who stays home with the kids. Men who are full-time parents probably understand female sexual-caution better than men who work full-time, I would guess. After all, when you have to spend a lot of time alone and waiting for babies to wake up or kids to finish school, you actually have loads of sexual possibilities; but you also have to consider the consequences of marital infidelity, pregnancy, disease, social reputation, and your own sense of self-control. So it is my impression that women have become stewards of their own sexual control (as well as that of men), because they are the ones put in the position of taking responsibility for the consequences of sexual permissiveness. Men are just kept busy working all the time, which gives them the peculiar ability to fantasize about unrealistic sex without any consequences except pleasure and orgasm. Clearly I am generalizing here, and if anything I have made controversial statements repeatedly in this thread for the sake of stimulating free discussion. I think this is necessary because I think the sociological imagination regarding sex and sexuality is subject to the same repressive censorship as sex itself.

Would it be equally legitimate for a man to restrict his emotional availability to after sex as it would be for a woman to limit her sexual availability to after emotional availability is established? Should conditionality and quid-pro-quo play any role in sexual relationships generally? Should people just have sex when they want sex and have emotional intimacy when they want that and share income when they want to do that without there being any exchanges among different desires/needs? And could people ever be so neutral to want sex only for sex, emotional intimacy only for emotional intimacy, etc. - or are people always going to naturally withhold one thing until they get something else that they want?

I believe there are currently bicycle headlights that are powered by a magnetic dynamo in the wheel hub that requires no physical friction between parts. I have thought about the value of a bike headlight whose batteries charge up by sunlight during daytime riding but a no-friction dynamo really eliminates the need for charging because the amount of extra pedaling effort required to run the light is not noticeable, imo. Now if the system wasn't so expensive . . .

Does the energy level of the molecular bond determine the amount of energy needed to break it (i.e. break the molecule into constituent fragments)?

Good post - and do you notice that part of male supremacy is claiming that men are more productive than women, and that men are economically dominant? Yet, traditionally male economic dominance and productivity was done in the service of providing for women and children, so in fact men were extracting productive labor from themselves and each other in exchange for sex and family. That is funny. Now compare this with a culture of strict religious control, such as some Islamic society maybe (I don't know enough about details from personal experience to specify). If women are strictly forbidden from adultery or divorce, what basis do they have to choose sex partners? If they cannot choose, then what basis do men have to compete? If rape was not forbidden within marriage, as it wasn't until recently, men wouldn't have to insist on sex regardless of consent, but there would be no basis for men to submit to their wife's conditions to have sex unless he legitimately believed she had a headache and it was not a "headache" caused by the fact that she was unsatisfied with his work performance. Now, since I am sounding like a tremendous sexist at this moment, consider if women could get honesty and emotional intimacy from their husband without him averting contact by saying he had a hard day at work and is not in the mood for deep conversation. My point is that all these games of conditional-acceptance to manipulate each other could be eliminated if people were strong enough to walk away from sex or other relationship desires when attaining satisfaction would require lowering oneself to subservience.

Wouldn't it be just as effective to create a private registry with their own list of physicians that ensures accurate reporting? I.e. you could sign up for this registry and get an appointment with an assigned doctor's office. You go in for your examination and the results are uploaded to the registry (similar to medical examinations for insurance purposes). You could control who gets access to your data. If you meet a person you want to have sex with, you can exchange registry access-codes and check each others STDs. If your new partner would not provide you access or didn't have the service, you could abstain from having sex with them, no? It's not like you have to have an obligatory registry for everyone. Those who fail to register simply get stigmatized as having unknown STDs. It's the same principle as not hiring anyone who refuses to submit to drug-testing. Orwellian perhaps, but what's more Orwellian is how few people care that it is Orwellian.

ventilation would be my first thought. second thought is drainage if it's below sea level.

Is there any logical relationship between a static magnetic field and one that occurs because an electrical field is moving?

Yes, I think religion tends to regulate sexuality from a pro-marriage (and procreation) interest. Even if procreation isn't the purpose, it still makes sense to protect people from promiscuity that could end up jeopardizing their eligibility in the eyes of potential marriage-partners. If nothing else, there is often social wisdom behind religious rules and mythologies. Plus, most religions I know promote long-term happiness over short-term pleasure, which is clearly a factor in sexual-control, even beyond impressing potential suitors with your (relative) chastity. Does this mean that secular and religious sexual-conservatives have a potential to join forces and that sexual liberation may begin to fade as an unachievable fantasy?

My point exactly. I'm divided on this part. On the one hand, I understand the irritation when people come up with ridiculous theories that have been elaborated ad tedium without checking the basic foundations for validity. On the other, since I am no expert, I sometimes like to play with ideas that probably seem just as naive to experts with knowledge that would inform my ideas if I had it. So I think there is a balance between lowering one's head and restricting oneself to passive learning and allowing one's creative juices to flow and postulate thoughts that might turn out to be idiotic, but will generate educative discussion in their critical reception. What doesn't help this process is when either orthodox-science dogmatism or crackpot dogmatism blocks the exchange of constructive critical discussion. Citation isn't necessarily dogmatic. It can be, but that is when people cite things axiomatically as if to say, "because s/he said so." Citation is a valuable part of scientific discourse when you need to refer to an idea or information that you read somewhere so that you're not plagiarizing, or because it simply saves effort to mention something without explaining it on the chance that the reader is familiar with the cited text. Dogmatism comes into play when people refuse to subject cited text/authors to critical questioning or attack others to defend the validity of those cited texts/authors without being willing to have a constructive discussion about any shortcomings along with the strengths.

Good post and it turns over yet another stone in the mystery: i.e. has secularization shifted sexual control (both the burden and the determinant power) more to women away from men? I.e. did men used to control (restrict) themselves and women more sexually, thus giving them more say over when and how sex DID occur? Now that culture has shifted to the common belief that men are universally poised for sex at the tiniest beckon of female receptivity, women would gain both more power and more responsibility for controlling (restricting and allowing) sex, wouldn't they? Obviously there are numerous reasons for women not to accept any and all sexual advances, regardless of their religiosity. However, even if they would renounce the promiscuity-taboo, take on male-jealousy and aggression fearlessly head-on, and figure out ways of conquering all possible health-risks associated with sex, I still think there would be limiting factors. The main ones that would survive, I think, would be those associated with aesthetics - both physical appearance and various forms of social status/class/identity but more importantly behavioral conditions for how their partners should think and act. I simply can't see women accepting any and all forms of male behavior as "sweet liberation" and rewarding all men equally for being all they can be in whatever way they feel like. So if the west isn't going to liberate people from all possible forms of sexual-conditional social control, why criticize religion?

"Majority rule" is typically misinterpreted, imo, as implying that a dictator elected by a majority may legitimately exercise authoritarian control over the individuals of a "free republic." If this were the case, it would defeat the idea of "free republic" in the first place. Majority-elected representative government is part of a democratic package of checks and balances. Specifically, one of the things theorists of democracy wished to prevent was rule by a minority/elite. Since a government is always necessarily a minority/elite, majoritarian elections are supposed to hold that elite/minority accountable to the majority. The alternative, having only a decentralized government of self-governing people would allow organic authoritarianism to build up without any central government to check it. Likewise, if central government would not have any popular accountability, that elite/minority could abuse its power to oppress the people at large (e.g. apartheid South Africa is the most recognizable 20th century example). But "majority rule" is consistently strawmanned both by opponents of democracy as well as those who want to abuse democracy to levy "the tyranny of the majority" over minorities and individuals. The most notable historical examples are Hitler being elected by majority referendum and the invocation of popular sovereignty to expand slaving by the Kansas-Nebraska act prior to the US civil war. Both examples clearly show how majority-rule can undermine democracy and freedom when it is abused to create policies of oppression instead of being used to check authoritarian power of a minority/elite.

All I was trying to point out is that dogma/faith is an attitude/approach toward knowledge by the knower, regardless of what kind of knowledge it is or what its basis may be. In religion, it is slightly more apparent that good philosophies get transmuted into mindless dogmatism in the form of chants and rituals, but it is a little harder to see when science goes from being an open critical discourse that subjects received knowledge to empirical testing to being an orthodox body/bodies of knowledge whose questioning is resisted and fought by its keepers/guardians. Obviously the issue isn't whether knowledge is true or not. If someone questions or rejects faith in gravity, it will continue to be true. The issue is that if proponents of, say, geocentrism or assumptions about a flat Earth would have been successful in maintaining dogmatic recapitulation of their presumed truths, science would not have progressed beyond them. To me, dogma is just a holding pattern that any knowledge can fall into when it hasn't been successfully challenged for a while. Scientific critique is what gets it out of that holding pattern, even when the knowledge that has been dogmatized it itself derived from scientific work.

That's what I was getting at too, i.e. that social-control including sexual control goes beyond religion. But then why so much criticism of religion and relatively little or no attention to non-religious cultures of repression? What makes religion problematic for modern secularism but not other forms of social control?

It is common for people to assume that if dogma/faith is based on valid science, this means it is not really dogma/faith. That's a false assumption. It is like saying that worshipping Einstein and refusing to question anything he said is not authoritarian devotion because Einstein was a scientist with proven validity. Dogma and faith are attitudes and practices of followers, not a fundamental quality of the knowledge/ideology itself. If people take a stance of resisting questioning and critical thinking, this results in dogmatic behavior even if the thing they're not questioning is valid science. The best test for validity is when valid knowledge is questioned or replaced by an alternative theory and then evidence leads you back to the original knowledge/theory without having to defend that theory/knowledge against alternatives in the first place, as is common in dogmatism. edit: sorry, just realized that I replied to a many-months-old post. Oh well, I guess I'll leave it rather than erase it.

If you did composting within the greenhouse, wouldn't that generate some CO2? I don't know how much it would be, but it would be handy to have your compost in there when and where you need it anyway. . . but probably the posts about soda are the most relevant - put a sign on your greenhouse that says "burping area" and have lots of parties:)

Considering that so many people are concerned about various forms of religious-rooted oppression occurring in secular life through government, I have begun to wonder why there is not universal liberation among secular people. For example, secular people often criticize sexual prudishness and attribute religious restrictions on sexuality to pre-modern and/or irrational superstitions - but what would then account for relative sexual inhibitions among secular people who seemingly hold no form of religiosity or other anti-sexual superstitions? Why don't such people have casual sex with anyone they come in contact with, for example, if they're reasonably sure they can prevent disease, violence, etc.? Why don't they unabashedly discuss their sexual behavior and desires without inhibition or shame? In short, why would sexual inhibition continue once religious taboos are no longer observed? Is there something about sexual repression that goes beyond religion?

What is the basis for a popular majority in these situations? I understand it is some form of Islamic fundamentalism but is there also ethnicity/tribalism as a defining factor? In other words, are the coming regimes going to be simply religious or religious-socialist (where "socialist" refers to "social solidarity among members of a group/race" as it did in "national socialism"). I guess what I'm asking is if popular majoritarianism could lead to a form of democratic republic within the confines of strict Islamic behavioral restrictions or whether there is also likely to be social-controls along the lines of race/ethnicity and class/status that threaten to resist freedom even beyond that of Islamic morality.

I've never thought about it subtractively like that, but that essentially captures the reason I am interested in an affirmative existence for space. I.e. I don't see how physics can deal with things that don't exist as some form of matter/energy/force. Time seems to exist as regularities of motion, which is the result of energy being expressed in similar ways in separate mechanical systems (clocks). Space seems thus to exist as the ability for things to be non-convergent and to be in motion relative to each other. The potential for separateness and relative-motion among multiple particles/object seems, imo, to be dependent on the ability for some fields to penetrate and inhabit others. E.g. if electrons couldn't penetrate the electrostatic field of the protons and move around within that field, there would be no space within the atom, right? Likewise, if electrostatic matter couldn't penetrate and inhabit gravitation, matter would be trapped outside all gravity-wells (wherever that would be). So not only does there seem to be "no outside" to these fields, as you said, but the one seems to be able to inhabit the other relatively sustainably because of differences in force-strength. I.e. what would it be like if atoms were so densely packed together that their gravity was equivalent to the electrostatic force binding the electrons to their nuclei? How would they move relative to each other any more freely than they move relative to their nuclei? So, if you were to go on collapsing forces to the point of convergence between not only gravity and electrostatic strength, but also weak and strong nuclear, in what sense would "space" exist? Wouldn't all particles be bound together as a single nucleus? And would that nucleus have "volume?" How could it if it didn't exist relative to another particles or atoms? And how could other particles or atoms exist relative to it if there was no electrostatic force weaker than nuclear force or gravitational force weaker than the other forces? Still, I wonder if there could be another force weaker than gravity that contains gravity fields in a way that allows them to separate from each other with something else in-between. I would have no idea how to empirically observe such a force.

If you say that "democracy isn't the best solution," what basis do you have for arguing that the resulting authoritarian dictatorship shouldn't be one that oppresses you instead of someone else? If your point is that some authoritarianism is needed to protect freedom, that is true and is clearly expressed in the cooperation between the courts and the executive branch in multi-branch government of checks and balances. In fact, the fundamental difference between authoritarian governance and democracy is, imo, the view that power gets checked and balanced by multiple powers in a democratic republic whereas in an authoritarian government there is an expectation of central power having a monopoly with total submission by all subjects to the sovereign, however that sovereignty may be institutionalized. So the goal of democratic power would be to check and balance majoritarianism, not use it as a basis for totalitarian domination. This is sometimes done by allowing the majority to elect representatives who are then publicly subject to criticism by the media and each other, which can provide popular minorities with ideological ammunition and other tactics of resistance against majority ideologies. The problem is that this tactic can spill over into obstructionism when people don't attain a sufficient sense of legitimacy of voice to assert constructive opinions in discourse instead of continuing to react to and resist others. In fact, I would say there is a whole cult of resistance that develops in democracy simply because people get so good at reacting against power that they come to fear the criticism they would be hit with if they themselves embraced an affirmative approach to exercising power. Then this becomes yet another impetus toward authoritarianism as everyone wants to be a critic and precious few or no one can rise above the intimidation of critique, sarcasm, and humiliation to express sincere ideas about how to move forward.

Good question and good points. This is a question that I have been studying intently. Islam literally means "submission" but in this case to God. Christianity also has the message of submitting to God's will over human authority, in the form of the holy spirit. Both generally imply that "worldly authority" is a distraction from the "higher authority" of truth, purity, goodness, higher love, etc. People debate what all these things mean, but if you take an honestly reflective attitude, I find it is possible to understand the difference between submitting to worldly pleasures and seeking to transcend them in favor of higher goals. You mention a number of aesthetic pleasures that are not directly related to sexual attraction to women. Are you familiar with the story of how Lucifer supposedly fell from grace as God's leading angel? I'm not mentioning this to preach theology. It is just interesting to note that in this mythology, Satan became inamoured with his own beauty as God's greatest helper and thereby came to view himself as deserving worship separately from God, hence the idea of opposition to God as evil/sin. I think the logic of this makes some sense. Aesthetic beauty tends to make people elite or exclusive toward others whom they deem less beautiful or unworthy - or they deem themselves worthy of worship because of their own status. I.e. it becomes more about egoism and less about creating goodness for others and oneself. It makes me wonder if there isn't a connection between the high level of egoism in the west and the obsession with beauty and aesthetics, not only in women but in so many other aspects of materiality. Do you see any truth in this?

I feel like I'm getting repeatedly strawmanned as eschewing any and all quantification and math because I'm making a case for qualitative modeling. 760 nm-red may be more accurate than "blood red," "fire engine red," or "apple red," but "760nm" only becomes meaningful to me when I compare it with something else that size. E.g. I find the chart comparing EM wavelengths to the size of common items and the amount of energy transmitted to be most helpful. I'm not sure why it matters that there are microwaves the size of a basketball, but it feels like there is some theoretical potential in knowing that. Am I saying it's accurate to mention the size of a basketball without specifying the diameter of the basketball in question? But does that matter in the context in which I am using it as a comparison? No. Can't you just say that it is waves that transmit energy in discreet amounts? When you say, "the electron orbitals are solutions to a differential equation," it sounds like you're just mixing physical description with logical processing." "Orbit" refers to a physical aspect of electron-motion, correct? "Solution to a differential equation" refers to equation-relations between observed-patterns. Since I don't understand that equation, allow me to use a simple one, I do understand to discuss the point: acceleration is change in speed over time, while speed is change in distance per unit time. The speed of a continuously accelerating object is described by the tangent line of the curve, which represents its acceleration. I believe the line can be derived from the curve using differential equations or some other form of calculus (I can't remember now). However, I do understand how one rate of change can be a rate of change of another rate of change; but I can also understand how constant speed can be associated with momentum and acceleration can be associated with force, in that momentum involves stabile inertia while force involves inertial resistance to an impulse that results in speed-change. So I find both methods of description useful, but I prefer the qualitative approach because 1)I'm not very good with math that uses numbers and greek letters and 2) I can directly relate to the experience of speed, acceleration, force, and inertia in various lived situations, whereas to do that with math I have to first convert the math into identifiable material experiences. It seems I have given the general impression that I want to somehow harass people and that I don't value the information they provide from their knowledge. That's not the case. I just don't see any problem with unapologetically expressing critical thoughts I have and/or asking question that might not be answerable by current science. I do this unapologetically because I don't see science as a game of respect and deference. I feel like people should just be able to say and ask what they want and if you don't know the answer or you're not interested in going in a certain discussion, you just say you don't know or that you don't find that issue interesting. Is that so difficult to do without offending each other and lapsing into rude comments and defensiveness? That sounds like a good ethic. I try to explicitly mention that I am not an expert when posting information that I think may be valuable but know that there are others who are more experienced. I don't think there's anything wrong with being an expert on some things and then switching gears to speculate a little about how it might be possible to answer a question that you're not sure of yet. It is possible to raise relevant issues that contribute to figuring out how to approach the question, and then have some other expert recognize the issue and post a conclusive response because they now get what the OP is getting at. There are lots of routes to arriving at valid knowledge and I don't think it's a problem to contribute to such routes as long as you are very explicit about what basis you have to say whatever it is you are saying.

Does this mean it's ok to hijack this thread now to discuss viagra? I've been wondering if it can be used to stimulate engorgement of other areas than genetalia.

Even if it is socially acceptable, is it fair to either the watcher-drooler or the person being watched and drooled over? If the shoe was on the other foot and a person you found unattractive,e.g. a chauvinistic gay man, was staring and drooling at you, would you feel comfortable with that? Would it bother you to think that he might be fantasizing about you and could end up approaching you to ask you out? If not, you're probably ok in staring and drooling at women, but if so, you might want to consider how attractive women feel when stared at and coveted by men they're not interested in. Do you think that it makes men less independent-minded if they are submissive toward feminine beauty? I've been wondering about the logic of women covering up in Islam and I think it has something to do with men not being diverted from "higher" purposes. Do you think men can combine appreciation of beauty with sober-mindedness in pursuing 'higher' matters?