David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity

Good for a brush up on Philosophy of Science, and more.

And why, pray tell, do you brand our esteemed mother tongue so?

Ah, Carcass, that would do it alright.

Bugger. I'll be keeping the volume down on the 'ol Napalm Death from now on.

Welcome on board! 8-)

You may be confusing this work with your upcoming biography, "HANLOVER: Uncensored Confessions of a Lounge Lizard".

In all seriousness (and I realize this is where I lose you), The Trial is sublime, particularly the second to last chapter with the priest, and the one with Block and the lawyer. Read it. Edify yourself. Stay away from your sister.

Franz Kafka - The Trial

A man is persecuted by pernicious forces beyond his control. Not sure what will happen in the end. Presumably the bureaucrats will execute him.

Anyway, fwiw, I don't think most of your posts are low quality; you do contribute good posts too, but more often than most posters I know, you have a tendency to get carried away with yourself.

This is the problem, responding to you just provokes more silliness. Anyhow, here's the PM you find so offensive.

Accusing me of bias may make yourself feel better but don't expect me to take it seriously. You've racked up more low quality and low class posts than almost any other poster I can think of (try searching for how many times you've used the word "fuck" in your posts or how many times you've personally insulted another poster) and I don't ever remember moderating you. — Baden

Using the word "fuck" is not against the rules. Using it as much as you have been recently though to refer to the sexual act along with "sluts"/"pussy"/"dong" etc in what is supposed to be a serious discussion is low class and does detract from the quality of your posts. To most people that would be obvious. Anything else?

(Oh, and you were "on notice" of being moderated. So what?)

The point is Agustino that it's not my moderation that's the problem, it's that someone should even think of moderating your posts that you object to and that provokes this hysterical reaction. But it won't change anything, attempts to play the martyr notwithstanding, you'll get treated the same as everyone else.

Well clearly a post which says global warming is happening because the Earth is getting closer to the Sun because of the Sun's gravity is bullshit - because it's just scientifically false. That post and the like of it should be deleted. — Agustino

No, that was another conversation in which I also moderated at your request.

But what does that have to do with my posts which you referenced? — Agustino

You seem to think you've been treated egregiously by me despite the fact that not only have I not moderated any of your posts, I have moderated others on your request. It's pretty simple, this sort of thing:

Well let's see... you go do your casual sex and being socially integrated until your instrument rots and falls off, your wife divorces you because you can't hold your dong in your pants and she's disappointed that you didn't wait for her - you know. That sounds like a great life am I right? That's certainly a brilliant path to take. Or wait - your wife won't divorce you, because you won't even get to marry that kind of woman. You'll marry some slut who fucks left and right, just like you. And when she cheats with your brother - ehhh not a big deal - just some casual sex." — Agustino

is low quality. If anything where I was remiss was not getting rid of it.

Yawn. I'd hate to think what kind of reaction I'd get if I actually did moderate one of your 2,700 posts. And yet you have no problem asking me to moderate others. Remember this conversation from a couple of days ago:

--------------

Hi Baden,

Happy New Year! I was wondering what's the moderating policy on the forums regarding religious evangelism? I see no action taken against all sorts of evangelists like [redacted] or [redacted], and it seems to me they are concerned with promoting some sort of pseudo-philosophy. Thanks!

Best Regards,
Agustino

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Happy New Year, Agustino,

As it says in the guidelines, evangelists are not welcome here, but like everything else the moderation decisions will depend on the extent and level of the offense. I'll take a look at these members in a moment to see what should be done. Also, it would be helpful if you could report specific posts using the flag button. They'll then be put in a moderation queue..

All the best,

Baden

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Baden:

Follow up: Having looked at these posters, I see your point regarding evangelism. I've PMed [redacted] and deleted one of [redacted] discussions.

--------------

Agustino:

Okay, thanks! :)

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Shameful of me to persecute you like that. :-|

What my readings in philosophy have taught me, meaning where I'm coming from, is that unfulfilled wants and desires cause suffering and anguish, which in turn lead to other undesirable emotions. I don't think there's much controversy over that. — Question

Yes, but if sex is available it would be a fulfilled natural desire like eating and sleeping. And if it's not available, there's no need to make any effort to deny it to yourself.

...that value of self-mastery. — Question

I don't necessarily accept that "self-mastery" is the right phrase here. I associate self-mastery with the elimination of negative behaviours and the cultivation of positive ones. Sex is certainly not a negative behaviour on a biological level. It's actually beneficial for health as we've more or less agreed. Then on a social and emotional level, some types of sex may be good, some bad, and it's quite possible to avoid the bad and pursue the good. Finally, on an intellectual level sex is more or less irrelevant either way. Given that, I would refer to the long-term self-denial of sex more as self-mortification than self-mastery just as denying yourself junk food might be referred to as self-mastery while denying yourself the required amount of calories a day -even if the food is healthy- would be self-mortification.

I hope to have clarified where my position is coming from, rather from some neuroticism or other psychobabble some might assume. — Question

Hand-waving isn't an argument. We have drives and they have psychological effects and it doesn't take much psychobabble to work out that denying natural drives may cause physical and psychological harm. Having said that, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you find celibacy works for you, then it works, and no amount of psychological theorizing can make it wrong.

Glad you're happy. Anyway, that's enough meta for now. Let's get back to the matter at hand.

How about you or BC or Hanover actually even start addressing any of my arguments? — Agustino

We tried and within a couple of posts you descended into a potty-mouthed rant. I guess you need a few more trips to Mount Athos before you can figure out why that's a bad thing.

Because I am drawn to Goodness. — Agustino

Yes, because goodness is telling people they worship at the altar of pussy and using the word "fuck" a lot. No one is falling for your bullshit, Agustino. All you've done in this discussion is distract from a potentially sensible debate with Question and I'm not going to let you continue to get away with that.

Studies showing the opposite: — Agustino

Are you blatantly lying here or have you not even read through your own links? These are not "studies showing the opposite". Your first paper is about women. I specifically said I was talking about men

What I have claimed is either true or false i.e. it's either true or false that long-term abstinence/celibacy is -on the whole for males*- physically and psychologically unhealthy. — Baden

(And all it finds anyway is that "Periodic, voluntary sexual abstinence was associated with positive health behaviours"). The second reference is a letter from a 21 year old woman (again) to the editor preceded by the disclaimer "The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of the National Medical Association". The third is a minor criticism of the methodology of a study that showed some benefits of sex (so what?) And the final one is about teen abstinence, which in general I think is a good idea, but which finds laughably "Current scientific evidence shows that teens who abstain from sexual activity are less likely to have children out-of-wedlock." :-|

In other words, despite obvious efforts you've turned up precisely nothing on the benefits of long term celibacy in adult men, which is the focus of my discussion with Question.

You give me a call when you even speak with a monk, much less live for awhile with them. — Agustino

There you go again. Having lived in a Buddhist country for almost 10 years, I've had plenty of contact with monks. Anyway, it's getting boring correcting your ignorant comments about me. Stick to the argument.

Higher dimensional beings communicate exclusively in emoticons. The twist being that these emoticons are actually real people in various emotional states frozen in time by these beings. It's almost inevitable that at some time or another each one of us has played a part in one of their great works of literature. Or, possibly just a gas bill. Hard to know.

I wish I had someone to hold hands with...boo hoo! :'( — The Great Whatever

Not to worry, TGW, there's someone for everybody. (L)

Why is it those people who do not have sex are viewed with prestige in the form of self-mastery? Isn't it kind of a testament to one's will and commitment that they can overcome this natural urge? — Question

And forgive the following bit of analysis, but this seems to me to be the nub of it. Ultimately what you want is prestige (i.e. social power) - your goal is to elevate your social self, which is natural enough, but you are frustrated by a society that considers sex as both normal and desirable. You then berate this society for not conforming to a version where your "self-mastery" would put you at the top. But why do you want to be at the top? Why do you want to be morally superior? This is where the neuroticism comes in in my view; prestige and social power are normally desired not simply as ends in themselves but, whether we are conscious of it or not, as furthering the biological end of sex. All other things being equal, those with prestige are more attractive to the opposite sex than those without it, and that's generally the underlying reason for seeking it. That's the way it works with our fellow apes and whether we like it or not that's the way it works at a basic level in human societies. Celibacy taken on as a badge of honour, so to speak, represents a short circuit of this process.

Forgive me for romanticizing the matter; but, I find people who can overcome their desires as morally superior to those who can not or chose not to. — Question

Context, context. The highway to morality is not so clearly sign-posted. The person who overcomes their desire for violence is sometimes a hero and sometimes a coward. And the person who overcomes their desire for sex is sometimes prudent and sometimes a prude.

This is a presumptuous claim to make. — Question

What's presumptuous is what Agustino is doing, which is posting through his usual prejudicial filter. What I have claimed is either true or false i.e. it's either true or false that long-term abstinence/celibacy is -on the whole for males*- physically and psychologically unhealthy.

There's not a lot of research on the physical and psychological effects of celibacy out there, but here's an article that references several studies about the benefits of sex:

An extract:

"In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare persons of comparable circumstances, age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. Other studies (some rigorous, some less so) purport to show that having sex even a few times a week has an associative or causal relationship with the following:

- Improved sense of smell: After sex, production of the hormone prolactin surges. This in turn causes stem cells in the brain to develop new neurons in the brain’s olfactory bulb, its smell center.

- Reduced risk of heart disease: In a 2001 follow-on to the Queens University study mentioned above, researchers focused on cardiovascular health. Their finding? That by having sex three or more times a week, men reduced their risk of heart attack or stroke by half
...
- Reduced depression: Such was the implication of a 2002 study of 293 women. American psychologist Gordon Gallup Gordon Gallup reported that sexually active participants whose male partners did not use condoms were less subject to depression than those whose partners did. One theory of causality: Prostoglandin, a hormone found only in semen, may be absorbed in the female genital tract, thus modulating female hormones.
...
- Pain-relief: Immediately before orgasm, levels of the hormone oxytocin surge to five times their normal level. This in turn releases endorphins, which alleviate the pain of everything from headache to arthritis to even migraine. In women, sex also prompts production of estrogen, which can reduce the pain of PMS.

- Less-frequent colds and flu: Wilkes University in Pennsylvania says individuals who have sex once or twice a week show 30% higher levels of an antibody called immunoglobulin A, which is known to boost the immune system...."

And coming at it from the other side here's the view of an ex-monk on celibacy:

An extract:

"We sanitize eating and defecating, but you can’t do that with sex. We dance around it with courtship rituals and legal agreements, but the act itself reduces us to our animal nature. For those who need to maintain the illusion of being a rational, chosen species, that’s problematic.

Civilization’s most crucial virtue may be non-violence, but celibacy is its toughest. The enemy is within, never really vanquished — and it doesn’t end there. The sex drive is built in to our animal body, but there’s also the mammalian drive for intimacy. We need to connect, to trust and to love. It often scares us.

Which moves some people to thwart those drives. It’s certainly a sacrifice — but is it healthy, and where on earth does purity come into it? If celibacy is pure, then sex must be dirty. Catholicism supposedly sanctifies it within marriage, but that’s just a way of buying off the laity; the priesthood remains de facto superior. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, mostly consider celibacy unnatural.

Asian religions place it in even higher regard. For Buddhists and Hindus celibacy not just a source of moral purity but also of meditative prowess. In the tantric traditions, to lose semen is to squander spiritual energy. Women, of course, are hardly in a position to retain their semen, but that’s of no matter in misogynistic cultures.

For the first time, celibacy is under general attack because it’s become public knowledge that many ‘celibates’ aren’t avoiding sex at all. Some are evil and duplicitous about it, but many are basically decent people unable to master their own drives and tortured by guilt. Add to that the burden of having to be paragons of virtue, and you can only imagine the toxicity they exude. The communities in which they operate have built-in safeguards against discovery that are only somewhat less effective in these days of total exposure. They continue to encourage denial and spread deceit.
...
Whether the target is one person or a whole complicit community, you never hear anyone within these traditions suggesting that celibacy is a sick idea, that spiritual teachers and leaders need to experience intimate relationships. Sometimes intimacy goes wrong and sometimes it’s a celebration of life, but what do celibates know of this? Those who promote abstinence for ulterior motives, as I did, who spin it as a source of purity or of power, shove a part of themselves into the shadows and then claim to pursue the light. They think they’re sublimely qualified to lead sexually whole people on their quest for the purpose of life"

Why is it preferable than, for example, to abstain from it until the long-term relationship? — Agustino

Nothing I've said would preclude that. Whether its preferable or not depends on the context. When I was referring to "full top-down intellectual control" to repress the sex drive I was referring primarily to the type of repression that occurs in those who have chosen celibacy as a way of life.


(*This part is important. As I said before celibacy may be healthy for some males, but they would be the exceptions.)

To clarify my own position, I pretty much go along with @Bitter Crank's analysis, which I see as compatible with my own view that the best sex is to be a had in a loving committed relationship because there is more integration of the social/emotional and biological levels than with casual non-committed sex. The latter, however, I see as preferable (as long as both partners are aware of the circumstances and consensual) to pretending to have full top-down intellectual control of the sexual drive and repressing it for whatever religious or ideological reason (preferable for a normal male at least - as mentioned earlier). I would consider that to be something like the intellectual level of the self being hijacked by the social level and making war on the biological level. As BC pointed out, not good.

EDIT: (And what would also not be good in this scheme of things would be to let the biological level (in the form of the sex drive) hijack the intellect and make war on the social level (as in the selfish sex-obsessed individual who manipulates others to get what he wants). A balance is necessary).

Keep going. Get it all out of your system...

More gobbledygook. You're making a real fool out of yourself here. But go on...

Good luck with your neurosis then... — Agustino

Rather mine than yours, methinks.

"Neurosis" and "society" are a combo package. In order to construct society we have to limit our individual drives, urges, aspirations, and appetites. Limiting natural drives, urges, aspirations, and appetites produces neuroses. "Limit" isn't the same as "blocking", however. It's a fair tradeoff. Society makes all kinds of things possible, and we have more or less learned to live with the resulting neuroses.

"Living with neuroses" is about as close to perfect psychological health as we are going to gt. — Bitter Crank

That's a fair way to put it.

Bare assertion. Either read and try to understand my posts sans prejudice, and respond with an actual argument or stop wasting both of our time.

This is gobbledygook. You're arguing against your image of some rampant sex-crazed progressive. Read my posts again and try to respond to the substance with a minimum of charity.

And you are obsessed with people being obsessed with sex. At least you must be to draw that conclusion from what I wrote. Also, nothing in what I wrote suggests I have to "explain" monks or celibates as if their existence contradicts anything I've said.

What you're saying is basically something along the lines of saying "I'm not thinking about sex!".

But, why do I need commercials and online advertisements peddling me the same old in regards to sex if one does not want it? — Question

I'm not saying that. If you want a simple summary of my last post it's this: "At some level the desire for sex is always there. You can't think it into oblivion". Society to an extent reflects the need for sex but also sublimates physical desire through pumping us full of media that have nothing to do with sex or any other physical needs because society has its own goals and desires. It is its own form of life and primarily serves itself (complicating matters, it's both within and without us). Similarly, our intellects have their own goals, desires and needs and our biological selves have their own goals, desires and needs. Yet we're all stuck together in the human subject. We can either recognize that and accommodate the different levels of ourselves or deny it and tear ourselves apart.

A neurosis would consist in an intellect thinking it can reverse engineer the biology of the human animal in which it resides into something that meets its metaphysical standards. Or one which fails to recognize the influence of the social/emotional level sandwiched between its intellectual and animal selves.

The subject is an unhappy mixture of conflicting levels of reality. And most unhappy in my view is the subject that identifies wholly with one level of reality and denies the needs and desires of the others. Some kind of integration/compromise is key.

So can I. What do you think I was doing while writing the poem? :P

Getting back to the OP. No, I don't think sex is "idolized" in the west. Sex, like violence, is repressed in every human society, some more so than others. I also think that unless you are biologically abnormal (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way) denying yourself sex (as a man at least) is bound to lead to neurosis.

Any sex is better than none,
If you can't have love, least have some fun!
Lest you end up -fate worse than death-
Spending your nights on TPF!

Interestingly, when I typed "members of congress iq" into both Bing and Google, this piece of bullshit was the first result for both. I may have to adjust my thinking about "post truth". (If this sort of stuff is misleading our relatively intelligent members what hope for the population at large!)

This may be a fake news story. — m-theory

I presumed it was satirical. Bitter Crank's inconsistency aside, 98-101 is an average IQ.

Be nice if you'd do the same for the laws of spelling and grammar. Or should we clean that up for you too, your humble majesty?

It has nothing to do with humility. We're going to take hits either way, but without the software allowing us to easily have a publicly viewable junk area where deleted posts go, it's just not an issue. However, if anyone wants to query why a post of theirs was deleted, just PM me and I'll check it out for you. Also, everyone has the option of starting a feedback discussion where they can openly contest any moderating decision and have their deleted post viewed there if they so wish.

Should I laugh or cry? Ah...this :-!

Six pages of this and no-one's mentioned Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard.

Thank you for this does of sanity, Carbon.

Thanks, honeybum.