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Banning thread: Epop

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18:33 / 09.04.07

And, at the end of the day, it's a question of proof.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

It's what now?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

18:35 / 09.04.07

(really, seriously, the best damn argument against evolution is "why are there gay monkeys?" - *nobody* in evolutionary biology has a handle on it, and on the surface it makes a mockery of everything we understand about reproductive selection.)

This is not true at all. Sexual behaviour has a great variety of secondary "uses" beyond the mere spreading of seed. Thsi it wel-known and acknowledged by any right-thinking biologist. It simply makes no sense to say that the theory of evolution is undermined by the existance of gay monkeys anymore than it is undermined by any other form of social behaviour not immediately resulting in someone getting knocked up.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

18:39 / 09.04.07

Mordant, I'm not saying that evolution is wrong. But gay mammals is really problematic. In general, in the wild, those animals are not reproducing as effectively as "straight" ones as far as I can tell from what I've read, and certainly for gay male humans, reproduction is much less frequent.

That's a real puzzle? A combinations of genes which prevents itself being passed on and yet we find configurations which produce similar results everywhere we look in the animal kingdom?

Something *weird* is going on there. It's a really major puzzle, and when somebody solves it, I believe we're going to learn something profound about nature.

18:43 / 09.04.07

I'm going to accept your invitation as you have not accepted mine and see if I can meet you half way on this Epop.

2> Men have a strong tendency to geek out into absolutely pointless activities like building model railways, in a way that far fewer women do.

this statement is problematic for me because it is laden with value judgments and assumptions. Bad science, no applause.

Let me dissect it a bit.

Instead of saying:

This wiki article (provided link) mentions there are more male ham radio operators then female ones. What cultural or biological influence or (possibly research technique) is creating this apparent disparity?

You are saying more males are doing a time wasting (value judgment) activity than females without giving me any third party information or framing the enquiry to be open to possible outcomes. Rather you are taking your opinion men do more pointless activities then women and finding an example you think fits this.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

18:46 / 09.04.07

XK - common sense is generally an acceptable form of reasoning. Where common sense is wrong, studies and hard data are useful tools.

If you were linking to *contrary evidence* to the observation that "men geek out on weird little hobbies more than women" that would be useful.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:46 / 09.04.07

And, at the end of the day, it's a question of proof.

Well, quite. For example, as in "what proof is there for your contention that women have orgasms when they are being raped, whereas they do not have orgasms if they are having sex as a result of emotional rather than physical coercion"? The only logical way that I can see your status as somebody who has been to the Abyss, ascended to the higher echelons of magic, changed the world and so on being relevant to that question is if you have as a result of your magical practice actually become infallible - that is, you do not actually need to have evidence for something before proposing it, because by definition anything you believe is true.

If this is the case, then obviously it very much changes the game. If not, then I am not sure why work in biometrics, for example, should qualify one to talk about women's sexual response.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

18:47 / 09.04.07

As a protocol for that exchange here's the format I'm suggesting. I make three or four statements about my work, and somebody with long history here of my choosing is disclosed evidence of those claims.

They come back with a "yes, this is true" or a "no, this is not."

If it's "yes, this is true" nobody hounds them for details - enquiries to me personally, and, yes, I'll start reading PMs.

Me, I'm betting it's Grant Morrison who goes into bat for Epop, being as GM seems to be the only poster who's mates with him. However, I'd find it very hard to trust GM on this, given that he is, as Epop pointed out, yesterday's man.

If, as Haus has suggested, Epop is an avatar of the Divine Spirit, I must admit my surprise that he's going to reveal himself through an-as-yet-unamed poster to a mid-traffic messageboard, although I suppose the gnomic 'yes, this is true' judgement will have a certain Metatron quality.

It should not be *UNUSUAL* for a magician to stand up and say "I changed the fucking world" or, even better, "I am changing the fucking world **RIGHT NOW**."

Nope, you're right, and I think you'll find that Barbelith is a safe space for such pronouncements if they are supported by verifiable truth. This shouldn't be too hard to conjure up, surely? A link or two to news articles about the refugee, low income housing etc. stuff? A link or two to the agencies you're working with? It sounds like important work, and many people here would I'm sure like to know more about it.

So, ball's in your court really. Leave the gay monkeys alone for a moment, and put some links up. 'Cause right now, you looking a bit like Al Gore did when he claimed to have invented the internet.

Oh shit. You ARE Al Gore. Sorry, Mr. Vice President, for ever doubting the existence of Manbearpig.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

18:49 / 09.04.07

Oh, yeah, and I make value judgments all the time. I think that the value-neural, everything-is-as-good-as-everything-else academic culture we've seen grow up in the past few decades is a pernicious weed of the mind and deserves to be uprooted everywhere it is found.

You *judge* my choice to reason in terms of biology and gender, etc. You have an implicit value frame that says that "everybody is equal" is good, and "people are really different and those differences often cluster around gender" is bad.

Etc. The right wing critique of political correctness gets a lot of things right (but is still associated with a bullshit ideology.)

Judgment again. I think that political correctness suppresses useful human facilities sometimes.

18:49 / 09.04.07

Ah, commonsense been invoked. XK, time to back down, you're just going to make yourself look foolish - this guy's just brought out the big guns.

*

18:52 / 09.04.07

common sense is generally an acceptable form of reasoning. Where common sense is wrong, studies and hard data are useful tools.

No. No it's not. It's a generally acceptable form of guidance to keep people from running into buildings, but it is not an acceptable form of reasoning because it is not reasoning. It is reflexive judgments, based on not much of note.

Common sense is a useful tool when the situation calls for a snap decision and any basis for making the decision is better than none. Advancing an argument on a message board that values hard data is not such a situation.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:53 / 09.04.07

Common sense and political correctness, to be exact, Boboss.

18:55 / 09.04.07

Look folks, political correctness and a lack of commonsense is damaging our ability to think, reason and engage.

Tru actual facts. Backed up with no data, natch.

18:55 / 09.04.07

I was getting there, Haus.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

18:55 / 09.04.07

Fable. So, there's the question of protocol design again.

My suggested protocol: I write something stating three or so things I've done in terms too general to identify me, but still with enough detail to generally indicate my abilities.

I disclose much more data - enabling independent verification - to somebody on Barbelith you know, who agrees not to reveal my identity.

They say "yes" or "no" to the question of "are these claims true?" and they do not answer any more questions - all other questions go to me.

Having somebody vouch for me in this way means that I can establish my credentials without having to reveal my identity.

Zero-knowledge proof, basically.

Does that work for you? If not, what would?

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

18:57 / 09.04.07

Unless I'm much mistaken, you guys are bitching about my non-posting of height stats of black people and asians... hello? :-)

18:58 / 09.04.07

Offtopic, but, no gay monkeys? NO GAY MONKEYS?

NOOO GAAAAY MOONKEEYS?

Did you learn biology from the "Phelp's Dictionary of Non-Fag Primates?". Theres a ton of non-het behaviour in primates. Do I have to hit you around the head with a bonobo?

Or I could reference Erwin and Maple (1976) with the bumming rhesus monkeys. Or the lesbian macaques. Or maybe I could just send you to the Google Scholar search for "homosexual primates"?

This isn't rocket science chaps. The information is just a URL away.

19:00 / 09.04.07

Can't we all agree to collectively use the "ignore' function on him? Repeatedly. Until Tom shows up and shows him the door?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:00 / 09.04.07

Damn.

You couldn't make it up.

I couldn't actually give less of a shit, though. I am beyond ALL of you and only read Barbelith for a laugh, because Dr Who lies, and you humans AREN'T "amazing" at all, you're pathetic stupid sheeple and the only reason it's even amusing is just because GM's hair is growing too thin to tweak now, and I have to spend my days doing SOMETHING.

I totally whupped GM's ass at Chaoswingball last week, though. He'll tell you different, but he LIES.

What I think I meant was actually something along the lines of- Epop, the stuff about your method of expressing yourself is not beside the point. It IS the point. It's a text-based medium. As has been said here many times, on Barbelith you ARE your words. You're not "challenging" people, fuck, you're not even "offending" people. You're "pissing" them the fuck "off". Why is that? If it's on purpose, then, y'know, don't let the door hit your illuminated ass on the way out. If it's not, then perhaps you could work on your communication skills.

19:01 / 09.04.07

A URL away maybe, but Epop's dealing in bigger things. Truths unsullied by filthy verifiabllity. Stuff like that.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

19:02 / 09.04.07

That's a real puzzle? A combinations of genes which prevents itself being passed on and yet we find configurations which produce similar results everywhere we look in the animal kingdom?

It's not a puzzle. For a start, whilst gay behaviour is (so I understand) pretty much universal across the higher life-forms, few individual animals are exclusively gay. Sex acts evidently perform a social function, perhaps creating greater cohesiveness between unrelated individuls and promoting co-operation. This could clearly have the knock-on effect of creating a genetic advantage just as other forms of social behaviour do, by winning allies who can help with things like finding food, fighting off predators and rivals, and caring for young. This benefits not only the gay animal but potentialy could benefit all its relatives.

It is no more a "puzzle" than the white tail of a deer which is raised to warn of an approaching predator, or the thumping behaviour we see in rabbits under the same circs. Sure, the individual bunneh might be made more vulnerable by a genetic predisposition to pausing and warning its rabbity collegues of the approaching threat, but as a whole its relatives are going to benefit and the gene will be passed on.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:02 / 09.04.07

Um... Epop, I can kind of see the validity to your suggestion, but can I ask you just ONE QUESTION...

If you're not willing to talk about your magic, then why are you posting in a forum where people, y'know, talk about their, like, magic, and stuff?

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

19:03 / 09.04.07

Princess Swashbuckling, I can only assume that you didn't read what I said. Anywhere in the thread.

All the way through, I've pointed at gay mammals as a remarkably odd piece of biology and one which is extremely instructive in showing us the limits of what we understand, an well as allowing us to reason more accurately about human homosexuality.

Not sure where you got the idea that I was a gay monkey denier.

19:03 / 09.04.07

XK - common sense is generally an acceptable form of reasoning. Where common sense is wrong, studies and hard data are useful tools.

If you were linking to *contrary evidence* to the observation that "men geek out on weird little hobbies more than women" that would be useful.

As we all come from divergent background assumptions of common sense vary. I for one think it is common sense to address people's concerns with my behavior, especially when many people keep pointing out the same set of problems. You obviously do not share that view point.

Therefore as we don't all have the same 'common sense' third party data is standard.

hey here's an article exploring numbers of women in computer science classes, I wonder why you didn't post something like this?

oh and what if I then posted something like this that had a cultural angle?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

19:04 / 09.04.07

Oh dear sweet Gods I'm doing it again, why am I having this conversation? PUB.

19:04 / 09.04.07

I value my neural. Don't you? Don't most folks? Neural is good, especially if it's yours.

As far as 'value-neutral' goes, I don't think anyone so far has invoked that. Most of us are just suggesting you not devalorize unnecessarily or rudely. If males and females all throughout the world's biological history get raped, as you posit, how is it explicable that only women have the genetic fear-of-rape you wrote so eloquently of? That's not neutralizing values, it's valorizing something unnecessarily, while degraded something else, still unnecessarily.

All your binaries are belong to us. Anyone can recognize when they start to get skewed too heavily, because the scales tip. If you're going to pull a big con, you have to have at least some respect for the ringers you're bringing in. If you're being honest and on the level, recognize yourself when the scales are tipping undue, and adjust.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

19:06 / 09.04.07

Epop, perhaps it's time to withdraw from the cut and thrust of debate and just relax. After all, it apparently did wonders for Al Gore

Alternately, you could back up your claims to greatness with some verifiabe proof, which is more than your suggested protocol allows for.

I'm still wondering why, as I said upthread somebody who is, by his own account, a crazy powerful magician, and a serious mover and shaker in fields as various as low cost housing, environmental lobbying, refugee work and putting the breaks on the surveillance society is spending this much time and energy posting this kind of thing on Barbelith

What does this say about him? What does this say about us?

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

19:09 / 09.04.07

Mordant, I'd agree with you that the current consensus amounts to "it's gotta be good for something" but, at this time, I'm unaware of any work that definitively explains what is going on in a way which sheds real illumination.

If it's a social cohesion function, then we'd expect it to be more prevalent in species where social factors have major impacts, for example. And not to exist at all in more solitary species. I'm not bang up to date on recent developments, but I'm unaware that we've seen those kinds of patterns.

Hypotheses based on concepts like "group selection" which is essentially what you are invoking *tend* to be used in evolutionary biology when people aren't really sure what's going on. It's an appeal to "it's gotta work or we wouldn't be seeing it."

The other hypothesis is that it's just something like the giraffe's neck nerve that goes 30 feet because it's on the wrong side of a bone - that some other incredibly hard to change facet of the system winds up producing gay people, and in fact, it's a quirk of gene expression or hormone regulation in utero or whatever.

I do not think I'd be doing the science a disservice to say that nobody really knows and existing models do not yet seem like full explanations.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

19:16 / 09.04.07

Fable, as I said, I got to where I am partly by doing magic. Magic matters, a lot.

And, you know, the magical world is a bit of a wasteland. The contact I've had with Golden Dawn groups leaves me with profound doubts about their praxis. The OTO is something of a joke in many places, and the best people I've seen from that lineage get most of their stuff from yoga and meditation. Wicca... well, you know where I'm going on that. And so on.

Not a lot going on. Really interesting things were happening around the edges of the hipster chaos stuff coming off the edges of The Invisibles, which BiaS has fanned the flames of with this Ultraculture rag. And there's always TOPY which continues to be a resilient old beast...

Magic is pretty important.

19:17 / 09.04.07

I do not think I'd be doing the science a disservice to say that nobody really knows and existing models do not yet seem like full explanations.

Let's pause and reflect here.

This is why your statements about gender roles and behavior are being met with discomfort.

Can you please apply your above statement to gender roles? That would do very nicely thanks.

*

19:17 / 09.04.07

If it's a social cohesion function, then we'd expect it to be more prevalent in species where social factors have major impacts, for example. And not to exist at all in more solitary species. I'm not bang up to date on recent developments, but I'm unaware that we've seen those kinds of patterns.

Evolution's Rainbow

If you're not up to date with the literature, don't bother trying to teach the course.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:20 / 09.04.07

Lab people will probably hate me for this, but...

Epop, why don't you try the socio-evolutionary stuff in the Laboratory? You could at least get your terminology straight there, before trying to apply it to your magical work, without being shot from both sides for being "too A for B, and too B for A"?

*

19:22 / 09.04.07

More like "too Z for A-Y," but it's a generous suggestion.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:22 / 09.04.07

Unless I'm much mistaken, you guys are bitching

Is there bitching? "Bitch" is an interesting choice of verb there, I think.

I don't recall being very interested in black people and Chinese people (not Asians - you've changed your field). I am interested in where you get the vision that allowed you to determine, as far as you can see, that women orgasm during rape both frequently enough for it to be an encoded biological function and more frequently than during sex instigated through emotional rather than physical coercion. I have suggested that the vision that has provided you with this data may be divine in origin. Am I warm?

19:28 / 09.04.07

I do not think I'd be doing the science a disservice to say that nobody really knows and existing models do not yet seem like full explanations.

Full Stop. Epop. This is why your views on gender roles are unacceptable. They leave no room for further research.

Epop Bastart the Justified, I

19:29 / 09.04.07

many ravishing idperfections - gee, thanks for sharing. And the conclusion is... they have hard data? Really good models for the prevalence of homosexuality across different kinds of mammalian species?

Always learning, always learning...

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