teh Mexigogue

I’m reading “The Blank Slate” by Steven Pinker. This guy is a professor of psychology at MIT and he wrote the book in order to refute the idea that should be obselete by now, but that some people still hold on to, that each person’s brain is like a blank slate and we need only to control experiences in order to shape personality and the mind. I got to one paragraph that dealt with exactly the same subject I wrote about on Friday (except his writing is better which makes me want to kick him in the nutz). First my paragraph:

I will further assert that when I speak about the operations of biological reductionism it is not my contention that people are acting with the conscious knowledge that they are acting for the propagation of the bloodline. When a man sees a woman with the optimal childbearing figure (waist 67% the measurement of the hips), he is not thinking “Hey, there is a woman with whom I can procreate with health and hormonal indicators which give a high likelihood of her ability to carry a child to term�, he is rather thinking “Ooooeeee, I want to tap that ass!� The proximate cause of his actions is what Freud termed The Pleasure Principle or, more precisely the idea that all human action is predicated on the goal of ultimate self interest (a corollary of the anti-altruism idea).

And now his:

None of this means that people literally strive to replicate their genes. If that’s how the mind worked, men would line up outside sperm banks and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples. It means only that inherited systems of learning, thinking, and feeling have a design that would have led, on average, to enhanced survival and reproduction in the environment in which our anscestors evolved. People enjoy eating, and in a world without junk food that led them to nourish themselves, even if the nutritional content of the food never entered their minds. People love sex and love children, and in a world without contraception, that was enough for the genes to take care of themselves.

Great book, it validates much of what I’ve already read in published studies but it also provides a more in depth analysis of the subject of the genetic component of the mind. I’m glad it’s a good book because I had to pay $33 in late fines to renew my library card. That kind of pissed me off because the only reason I lost my other book was because I’m hard-wired to have a bad memory but in the end it’s worth it because now I can read even more books.

Like Itchy running afoul of an Irishman, the monogamy ideal is in contravention of human nature. This is not just a guy talking smack in order to justify “the game”, this is an empirical and demonstrable fact based in biology and psychological grounds.

Let me begin by asserting that the monogamy ideal in general and marriage in particular do serve a useful purpose in human society. We are not, after all, dirty hippies operating on pure id without regard to social order. Marriage is a key element to family which is the building block upon which the societal structure is founded. Monogamy as such, however, is a goal which is almost impossible for the individual to realize because man’s very essense compels him to act otherwise (by “man” I don’t mean just males I mean bitches too).

I will further assert that when I speak about the operations of biological reductionism it is not my contention that people are acting with the conscious knowledge that they are acting for the propagation of the bloodline. When a man sees a woman with the optimal childbearing figure (waist 67% the measurement of the hips), he is not thinking “Hey, there is a woman with whom I can procreate with health and hormonal indicators which give a high likelihood of her ability to carry a child to term”, he is rather thinking “Ooooeeee, I want to tap that ass!” The proximate cause of his actions is what Freud termed The Pleasure Principle or, more precisely the idea that all human action is predicated on the goal of ultimate self interest (a corollary of the anti-altruism idea). People who seek pleasure in things that are less than biologically optimal are more likely to weed themselves out of the gene pool which is why so many of the things we enjoy tend to propogate our genes. This is where monogamy takes a hit.

Guys who bang a multitude of sluts are more likely to spread their genes into future generations than guys who are monogamous. Women who cheat on their less than optimal marital partners in order to have sex with a biologically superior guy are more likely to pass their genes through to further generations because if they actually get pregnant by the more physically fit/more intelligent dude (rather than their monobrow peasant spouse) the children produced will be of a better quality and therefore will be more likely to survive and breed successfully. These are facts that argue against monogamy in human nature. Ergo, The Game.

If you are inclined to feel sorry for the wife of the promiscuous guy or the deceived monobrow peasant in these examples you should know that they are running their own version of the game as well. If this sounds like the basis for blues and country songs the world over you are right. So biological reductionism gives us not only optimal instincts and bloodlines, it also gives us cool music to listen to when we’re shooting pool as well. Where social conventions would trip us up and cause us to behave non-optimally, biology helps nudge us back in the right direction.

To be sure people can behave monogamous if they so choose just as a hungry person can turn down a double olive burger with cheese. But let us not confuse that with that person actually being a better person than the one who acts true to his own nature. What is my point today? Oh yes, it is this. When a point guard is left open at the top of the key he’s supposed to take the shot. This isn’t even a question of morality, it just is.

Obey your thirst. Sprite!

Back in the 1990s I had this Marvin Gaye tape playing and I was singing along to his “You’re All I Need to Get By” duet with Diana Ross. I got to one part and Natalai stopped me. “Wait, what did he just say right there? What’s the line?”

I was kind of surprised but I answered “like an eagle protects his nest.”

“Ohhh. Haha!” she says. “I always wondered what he said there but I couldn’t figure it out. When that song first came out I thought he said ‘like a nigga from Texas.’ I was like what’s so special about a nigga from Texas?”

I will point out here that Natalai is a black chick and therefore she allowed to toss the n word around. Just so you guys don’t get mad. I thought more about the line and I could see how she could get it mixed up. Phoentically it is:

lik a nee gul pru tek siz nest

lik a ni gu frum tek siz (?)

Sometimes when we hear or see something incorrectly it is due to prior experience which colors our expectations. Being that the n word was rarely heard in my household as a child I wouldn’t have expected to hear that from Marvin Gaye. Natalai may have heard that word more since she was probably around more black people than me and that word might have been used more liberally in those circles. Anyway the idea what Marvin would make reference to an n word from Texas as being somehow a special case or the penultimate in something or other struck us both as kind of funny so we laughed.

That was a rather benign misunderstanding but there are other associations in race issues that are not quite so funny and laughable. One involves a recent Guy in the UNLV Jacket post where he ran into another black dude who argued that black people need to unite behind the black agenda. UNLV tried to tell him that black people are not one giant monolithic group with identical agendas but this dude would hear nothing of it. His philosophy was clearly based upon some racial collective atavistic bullshit that you would like to think had died right along with the Jim Crow laws. Unfortunately it has not.

I used to believe that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had been unfairly smeared by its opponents with charges of communist influence. I know now that those charges were not false. The nature of the collectivist (communist) movement is that they seek the disenfranchised (that means people who don’t own a McDonalds), people who feel they are the victims of the current political system. They don’t seek the correction and redress of these wrongs, they seek to exploit them in order to incite class warfare. It is for that reason that the civil rights movement, which began as a struggle for equal protection under the law (the proper vehicle to insure individual rights), was hijacked and turned into a collectivist movement that rears its head in racial politics to this day. Take, for example, the case of a Jewish democrat running for office in a primarly black district in Brooklyn. Charles Barron, a black New York City Councilman, had this to say about the matter:

“People keep saying David has the right to run. Well, we should be talking about group rights, not individual rights.”

Ok dumbass, groups don’t HAVE rights beyond those that belong to the individuals who are voluntarily a part of that group. Every individual has the right to free speech and the right to own property, etc. A group of 100 people have those individual rights 100 times. A single person has the right to bargain for the terms of his employment (this is how you reach mutual consent). 100 people, if they voluntarily delegate this power to a representative, have given this representative the right to bargain for them. But groups don’t have some mystical new rights the individuals don’t have in the first place. That concept is completely GAY.

Anyway the struggle for equal rights began as a struggle for equal individual rights. If a white guy has the right to vote, to sue in a court of law, to marry, to own property, whatever, then a racial minority individual should rightly have these options too. THAT is equal rights and THAT is equal protection under the law. The idea that people of a certain color should all fall into line behind one agenda is not equal rights, it’s racism in its purest form. The idea that the government owes duties to certain groups of people but not to others is racist too. Believe that, learn it, love it, and LIVE it. Or I’m gonna go off on you. . . like an n-word from Texas!

Behavioral psychology, that’s my new thing. I like reading about studies they do to try and figure out why people do the things they do, how the mind works, what differences and commonalities there are in the thought processes of different individuals. It has been my hypothesis that personality is so closely related to differences in people’s brains (think everyone having computers with variant specifications) that different personality types experience the world in profoundly different ways. Some of this is genetic, some tied to hormonal exposure in the womb, and some is due to the way in which we are raised.

It is my view that personality is more deterministic than the product of experience and that if you took someone like Richard Simmons when he was born and shot him back through time to be raised alongside Ghengis Khan he would be mostly the same person he is now. Oh, he would be a barbarian, to be sure, but he would be the fruitiest and most annoyingly demonstrative barbarian in the troop (come on, let’s plunder the gold and rape the chubby out of shape whores! One and a two and a wooooo!).

If the deterministic theory is right then it means that rather than trying to change people in an ill-fated attempt at streamlining human beings we should seek to find things that fit appropriate personality types. Like if someone is accused of being too emotionally aloof and unfeeling then that person would make a good emergency room doctor who won’t freak out just because some kid comes in with his hand cut off. Put the maternalistic feeler types in the recovery room. What was that that Sun Tzu said about using square rocks to build a fortress and using the round ones to roll downhill at your enemies?

Anyway inherent personality is my contention and I will test my idea by reading up on studies that have been done on behavioral psychology. If the evidence goes against my hypothesis I will discard it and develop a new one. But anyhoo, time to get my reading on.

Here is an article that says that introverts and extraverts have quantifiable differences in the locus of brainwave activity. The long and short of it is that this supports the idea that personality traits are largely not voluntarily chosen but are are inherent and, in the case of introversion/extraversion, the differences are even observable in brainwave activity. With this understanding it should be evident that you cannot change an introvert into an extravert (or vice versa) and that at best you will be influencing someone to temporarily act against their nature (like taking a gay guy to a carpet-munching contest). At worst you’re going to piss off and alienate the subject of your intervention. So extraverts, please realize that different is not necessarily bad and that if some guy is sitting by himself at a bar it might be because he wants to and if some girl is at home drawing pictures rather than getting her hurr did in preparation for the sock hop that might be perfectly healthy as well.

We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the claussroom, blah blah blah. HEY! EXTRAVERTS! LEAVE US INTROVERTS ALONE!!!

(it does not have quite the ring to it as the original Pink Floyd version but you all get the picture. goddamn bricks in the wall!)

My daughter said to me “The pastor was teaching us altrusim.  He told us that before we do something we shouldn’t think about how it will benefit us, we should think about benefitting others.  I don’t believe in that.”

“Right” says I.  “The operating premise behind that is that everyone on the planet is worthy of the product of your efforts with the exception of one person and that is you.  What kind of premise is that that you are the only person low enough and unworthy enough that you don’t deserve the product of your own effort? That is a philosophy of self-hate.  They tell you that selfishness is bad but what do you know is the true nature of selfishness?”

“It’s good as long as you don’t go to extremes.”

“That’s a misunderstanding because if you believe that then you’re still accepting the premise that selfishness is bad, you’re only saying that there is an acceptable level of bad, but that’s not a correct understanding.  Let me give you an example:  If you’re a teenager who wants money so you mow someone’s lawn for $10 is that good or bad?”

“It’s good.”

“Right.  You just benefitted yourself and you just benefitted that other person because he got the opportunity to trade $10 to free up some time for himself.  Your selfishness caused you to make a mutually beneficial deal.  Now what if you’re EXTREMELY selfish so you mow 20 lawns for $200.  Whose rights did you violate then?”

“No one’s.”

“Correct.  So you see then that selfishness, even in the extreme, is not bad.  It just means you work harder and you are creating more value.  The irony is that in seeking to benefit yourself you also created value for 20 other people.  The money you earn is a representation of that value.  Now if you earn $200 there is sure to be somebody who will say to you ‘Since you have all that money you should share it.’  If you don’t share it are you violating that person’s rights?”

“No.”

“So you see selfishness isn’t immoral at all.  The one thing that crosses people up is that when they challenge the premise that selfishness is good they will almost always give an example involving dishonesty.  Their example will involve stealing or cheating in some form.  Those actions are bad, not because they are selfish, but because they are dishonest and therefore they’re irrational .  Stealing and cheating are irrational because those actions interfere with the ability to trade by mutual consent which is the very thing that facilitates the creation of value in the first place.  If we live in a society where stealing is rampant then there is no guarantee that you will be able to benefit from the product of your own work because someone will just snatch it.  Dishonesty destroys the motivation to create value.  Since it destroys the very thing it seeks, it is irrational.

“Plus if you lie then people won’t believe you anymore” my daughter pointed out.

“Exactly.  If you’re a thief and a liar then you are setting yourself up as the enemy of the very people you seek to benefit from.  They will either beat the living hell out of you or put you in jail and that is because you are violating their rights.  So stealing and lying are irrational forms of selfishness.”

“Ok, I’m 13 and I get it.  Why are there so many adults who don’t get it?”

“Because the world is full of retarded people and stupid unworkable ideas.  The only answer is to ensmarten everybody so that those other ideas will be allowed to die from disuse.  You see, in a world of rationality, EVERY rational person would benefit and that would be great.  The ethics of altruism, however, requires the presence of victims.  If you are an altruist then you require helpless people that you can help in order to give you some measure of value.  If everybody were happy and successful the altruist would go mad from the unscratchable itch, from the urge for the presence of victims to help.  If there were no victims the altruist would create them.”

“Nice speech, but we didn’t really say all this yesterday did we? You’re embelleshing for the sake of the blog aren’t you?”

“Yes” says I, “but we did say the first part, the first eight paragraphs really happened.”

“Yes they did, but the rest of this is entirely made up.”

“Yep.  Hey look, the meat blimp crashed! Let’s go hack up some animals!”

Heff:  Yaaaay! Hamburgers!!!!

I’m a scientist. Check this out!

The Mexijew has tagged me for a meme.  First a word about who he is and how I came to be associated with him.  When I first decided to attempt blogging I was known as Meximuslim@aol.com.  I was curious at the time if there was such a thing as a Mexijew.  I googled it and lo and behold, the Mexijew blog appeared before my eyes.

I sent this guy an email and we ended up linking each others blogs.  I decided on calling mine “Mexigogue” because I was moving away from religious dogma and thought that demagogue was a better descriptive word for what I was trying to do (see the original etymology of the word, not the modern definition).  Anyway here, without further ado, is the meme thing:

Four jobs I’ve had

1. Civilian worker, Mess Hall, Goodfellow Air Force Base, San Angelo, TX (1986)
2. Westside Deli Pizzaria (1987-1988)
3. Bellhop, Holiday Inn South Lansing (1990-1991)
4. Taxi Driver (1992)

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. The Exorcist
2. Othello (the one with Lawrence Fishburne)
3. Rocky III
4. The Others

Four paces I have lived

1. San Angelo, TX
2. Lansing, MI
3. Camp Pendleton, CA
4. Leroy’s

Four TV shows I love to watch

1. Southpark
2. Mysteries of the Bible
3. Drake & Josh (SHUT UP!)
4. Forensic something  or other

Four places I have been on vacation

1. New Orleans
2. Las Vegas
3. Dallas
4. Holt (ok, technically it wasn’t a vacation it was a cookout and I accidently showed up a week early)

Four of my favourite dishes

1. shredded beef tacos
2. a bunch of bullshit I can’t pronounce from India
3. Ethiopian spicy beef stew
4. roast lamb with ground cumin, corriander, cardamon, and olive oil

Four websites I visit daily

1. The Everlasting Phelps
2. Guy in a UNLV Jacket
3. HMT
4. tubgirl cnn.com

Four places I’d rather be right now

1. The Russ Martin Show
2. The British Open
3. Lebanon in a bulletproof cube with a laptop and Mountain Dew Code Red
4. Kim’s funeral

I’m not tagging anyone for this but feel free to act like you’ve been tagged if you want to do a meme.

1980:  You didn’t really draw that picture of Batman.  You might have traced it.  Who really drew it?

1988:  Your ASVAB scores were too good.  I hate to ask you this but did you cheat?

1994:  Nice editorial in the Lansing State Journal.  Who helped you with it?

2006:  “This sounds just like you submitting to your mental superior, Phelps” - Citizen Quasar

Hey Quasar, you really need to get the sand out of your vagina.  I judge all ideas on whether or not they make sense, NOT on the person stating the ideas.  In rationality there is no room for personality cults.  If a statement makes sense I’m going to accept it, I don’t care if it comes from Hitler or even from Hillary Clinton (haha, on that second one).  Similarly I won’t accept an idea that does not make sense to me, no matter who that idea comes from. 

Two, you say that you don’t need people to agree with you about your conspiracy theories.  Then you proceed to get all bent out of shape when other people’s tin foil hat readings don’t jibe with yours.  What the fuck is that about? Speculation is just that.  We’re all allowed to have different viewpoints and it shouldn’t hurt any blog person’s ego if one of us thinks we didn’t land on the moon or if another one of us thinks that HIV does not cause AIDS. 

Freedom of speech implies freedom of thought.  So why do YOU get so defensive/insecure if we don’t fall in line with your thinking? My guess is that in addition to being paranoid and schizotypal (the GOOD personality disorders), you also have borderline personality disorder (the bad one).  And that’s why you don’t get along with like-minded people and you even get kicked off the list of other Randroids.  I suspect this type of thing is a recurring cycle with you.  Am I right?

Also, you claim that I’m using collectivist afraid-of-the-group mentality to get you into line.  First I must assume that since you seem to think that Phelps is the magical Jew pulling the strings behind the scenes that you think it’s really HIM trying to keep you in line.  Second I will ask why in the hell do you think anyone needs your approval and/or obedience?

Truth is an objective reality, it is not subject to a collective number of votes, therefore there is no need to gather sheep! I will tell you like I tell my daughter, use your mind and if something I say does not make sense to you then feel free to disregard it.  Your mind is your own so do with it as you will, even if you want to use it on conspiracy theories.  I, for one, will only spend just so much time on those as I need to save some of my tin foil for my baked potatoes.

p.s.  You live in Oklahoma. . .  ON PURPOSE!!! HAHA!

Citizen Quasar has stated that he thinks 25,000 Americans are being deliberately abandoned by the US government so bad things can happen to them which will be a pretext for greater US involvement in the region. Phelps has argued that this is not the case. Similar claims have been made by others about the US government allowing Pearl Harbor to be attacked to spark off WWII. Where do I stand in the midst of these claims? How Machivellian and duplicitious is the US government? I will answer!

Do I think the government is capable of shady dealings, deliberate deceptions, fraud, and hoax? Absolutely. I said from the get-go that the dirty bomb claims against Jose Padilla might be bullshit and lo and behold when he was finally charged the allegations had nothing to do with a dirty bomb. So I don’t blindly trust the government (this one or anyone else’s) and I’m liable to believe that we engage in deception to obtain some tactical advantage. But the main premise behind Occam’s Razor is that the simplest solution is usually the right one. We should keep that in mind.

So who shot President Kennedy? Although (as in the murder of J.R.) there were billions of people with motive including (but not limited to) the Mafia and the Cubans, as far as we can tell the assasination was carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald working alone. Sure there is a tiny chance there was a little person on the grassy knoll that none of the scores of people saw. But the most likely reason nobody saw a shooter at that spot was because there was not one there. I went there. I looked at the grassy knoll and I saw how great a shot that would allow. I also looked at the book depository building and my conclusion is either way it was a nice shot.

Second: did the US actually put people on the moon? No. They did take some nice pictures of Nevada. Nice try guys!

Did the US deliberately allow Pearl Harbor to be attacked? I don’t think so. I think the attack was just a real ballsy move that no one actually expected.

Was AIDS created by American scientists in order to wipe out the black population? No. That’s what malt liquor and menthol cigarettes are for. AIDS was a simian disease that spread, not coincidentally, at the same time and places that health workers were operating in Africa to administer polio shots in the 1950s. My determination: dirty needles helped those workers unwittingly to spread what had been small local disease. So not only did Jonas Salk kill my good friend polio, it’s also likely that he’s responsible for giving us AIDS. Thanks a lot asshole!

Did Kobe get Shaq kicked off the Lakers. You bet. I hate that guy.

Did O.J. do it or did the LAPD plant evidence in order to set him up? Yes and yes. But I still like him because he made 2,003 yards in 332 carries and it’s not like he killed the two most important people in the world. What, are we running short on ex-wives and waiters or something? Give the man a pass, he’s an NFL Hall of Famer for crying out loud!

That’s all for now. Any more conspiracy theories?