Lord of the Flies was written by a sad man who had problems with humanity. I didn't react that negatively when I first read it, but I also definitely soured with time.

Something interesting is that a real life lord of the Flies has happened. Spoiler: they don't kill each other, they delegated roles, took care of the injured, established food sources, keep a fire burning for more than a year, and eventually got rescued.

Human nature isn't merely brutish, pushing people to murder their neighbors because they just felt that way uwu, instead it's some combination of rational and tribal. We do good by our tribe, we want to be accepted by our tribe, and we often unfortunately define ourselves in opposition to others tribes, whether they be real tribes in prehistory or Xbox vs PS4. However, people don't murder people over their chosen console, they're rational enough to realize that's beyond stupid and meaningless. Children stuck on a island have enough rationality to realize half of them dying is less hands able to work on group projects, and that rationality transcends whatever base tribalism that might energe. The past 20000ish years of history has had people rationally define themselves in gradually bigger tribes, from village to city to religion to nation to supranational identities at different times and in different places. WW2 didn't solely happen because humans bad and tribal, it happened due to complicated ideological breakdowns of rationality (among other things of course, single causes don't result in world wars) that otherwise would've had the Germans and Japanese realize that prosocial cooperation with their hated groups would've had better outcomes for all.

Yeah it's 90% compassion and 10% argumentation. Seeing things from their perspective, seeing the aspects they like and not immediately placing those aspects into the good and bad buckets, but instead truly appreciating how those aspects work for them. Of course, then you need to figure out how to advance your position over theirs, but that exhaustingly starts in compassion.

Yeah it's incredibly difficult, that's why the majority of people never change their ideology past their early 20s when they first flirt with several. Add in the fact that you'll likely be socially ostracized from your old community if you ever do change your mind and the evolutionary pressure to be accepted over being logical, and it's quite frankly impressive anyone ever does.

Your summary is certainly not about removing LBTG rights, it's saying he agrees with the institutions of the United States. I find it interesting however that that's how you'd choose to summarize the quotes.

The part about removing LGBT rights is where he's saying that law is / should be god's will implemented and that god's will is marriage being purely between a man and a woman. He can say he loves all equally, but he shows that's not true when he classifies some people's marriages as being unworthy of legal recognition.

To some extent you probably get more generally intelligent from practicing IQ tests in the same way you might get more generally intelligent from stretching your mind in any way. However, the increase in IQ score you achieve after practicing for the IQ test is (just guesstimating because there's obviously no studies on this) >90% due to learning the patterns of IQ tests and <10% due to increased general intelligence as a result of studying.

To answer as to why IQ is helpful, it's useful for making conclusions about how different factors influence intelligence. It's more difficult to prevent lead from poisoning people's brains when you can't conclusively say how much it's poisoning. Supposing all the people with low IQ scores due to lead poisoning practiced for the test to make themselves feel better with a higher score, their studying would muddy the stats and make for weaker arguments on the side of those wishing to ban excessive lead. IQ is also relevant to certain diagnoses, such as for the diagnosis of ADHD where a deficiency in working memory and processing speed but not elsewhere supports a diagnosis.

In terms of whether IQ / intelligence is 100% genetic, obviously not, I don't think I said anything that could even suggest that. I'm not an expert so I'd appeal to this link for specific answers. Just skimming it seems to suggest anywhere from 50% to 80% heritability of IQ, although heritability as a concept is kinda unintuitive and hard to apply to everyday things.

Very generous and wrong. Any psychiatrist would tell you to not practice, and a when not practiced it's a very useful metric. We couldn't make as strong hypotheses about the effect environmental lead had on earlier generations without IQ tests. We couldn't measure the very interesting trend upwards in IQ scores over time regardless of lead, which implies anything from a structural problem with the test to a real improvement in intelligence in the general population since the test's invention. We couldn't quantify the genetic or environmental influences on intelligence without IQ either.

It's like saying a psychiatric test for depression is bad because you can practice to know the answers a depressed person would give.

Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don't say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone's tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I'm working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I'd propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn't have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.

Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn't force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside 'Movement,' nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.

And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South's tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.

Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can't just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.

Any rational capitalist (or more realistically, mixed market supporter) should agree that other systems are theoretically possible, and should probably even support small scale scientific tests of whatever people want to realistically propose.

This already happens with tests of UBI occurring all over and examples of coops existing in many places as well. UBI is too new to say but looks promising, and coops seem great in certain areas of the economy if properly supported but not optimal everywhere, as far as I'm aware.

However, if someone thinks their system can only work with absolutely everyone in society participating after a revolution where the sinners (whoever they are) are eliminated, they really ought to recalibrate their beliefs or join a militia if they're really serious.

^^^^^^^Coping and seething because he lost the argument 🙄

Other people have given good answers in terms of the structural and financial reasons, but if you want to see an alternative there's the example of this region of Italy where there's a substantial number and % of coops. I believe this is due to preferential taxes and subsidies by their government, although I haven't looked into it nearly enough to say anything conclusive.

Other people have given good answers in terms of the structural and financial reasons, but if you want to see an alternative there's the example of this region of Italy where there's a substantial number and % of coops. I believe this is due to preferential taxes and subsidies by their government, although I haven't looked into it nearly enough to say anything conclusive.

Nobody cares about Russian nuclear threats when Russia is still following all best practices in telling the world where their nukes are going and when. Either way, China doesn't support Russia using their nukes, so Russia won't in order to keep their support.

The truth is nobody besides the most hawkish wants Ukraine joining NATO right now, because that would grant them access to article 5 and thus boots on the ground from every other NATO state. Ukraine'll almost certainly be invited into NATO once either they regain Crimea + other occupied lands from Russia or if they renounce their claim to those territories.