The whole concept of 'white privilege' as it is used by most millennials is nothing but a tool to manipulate people.

The people I've known who go on and on about privilege are disgusting. They have the ULTIMATE privilege - being born in a 1st world nation. And then they have another major privilege - being able to access a university education. But they want things to be given to them for free, and they want to have control every one elses speech and thought.

They are not actually interested in empathy or fairness or self improvement.

That these folks are quitting politics, and that green party people are speaking out against them is great news. I have nothing against Muslims. But I do have something against the many sexist muslims who are not willing to adapt to western culture. If they won't adapt to simple things like treating women with respect, what other regressive ideology are they clinging to?

This is by far the most interesting election process I've ever seen my whole life. I never imagined that people like Trump and Bernie would make it as far as they have. I mean, we may very well end up with Trump as the next president; and we might have someone like Bernie in 4 or 8 years. It's amazing to watch this unfold.

I was shocked to read that over 100 people tried to commit suicide and only 1 succeeded. I'm pretty sure that if I really wanted to kill myself I would be successful. I'd start by doing lots of research on different methods and their success rates, then I'd use several high quality methods simultaneously. (Note: I am definitely not thinking of killing myself.)


So I looked at stats online and saw that some researchers report a 3-5% success rate for attempted suicides, in general.

Why is that number so low?

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

Absolutely! And now we have a generation of liberal millennials who have turned their kids into signposts for their 'liberal virtues', encouraging their child to declare themselves trans, and then parading them on social media to prove to the world how 'progressive' they are. Let the kids be themselves!!

Yes. When a chameleon changes color it is not 'undergoing evolution' in that moment. But the chameleons _ability_ to immediately change color was brought about via evolution.



Yes, no skeptical person believes in evolution solely on the basis of all of these "might have" speculations. We believe in evolution because of a massive body of evidence from over a dozen different fields. These 'might haves' are being discussed mostly because there are some closed minded people who ignorantly, illogically insist that evolution is impossible because *they* personally can't imagine how so called 'intermediate structures' might be useful. (I put that in quotes because they are 'intermediate' only from the point of view of assuming the final result was the ultimate purpose. Actually, what we call 'intermediate' was, at the time, the full structure. It wouldn't have existed if it wasn't somehow beneficial on its own.)

We do not know, with absolutely certainty, exactly which kinds of pressures caused each kind of structure to come into existence - but we do not need to. If you watch someone walk down the street, do you need to have precise knowledge of exactly where each of his footsteps landed, in order to believe that he did in fact walk down the street?

We talk about these hypothetical advantages for 'intermediate' structures in part to show that the "I can't imagine it, therefore it can't be" people are not being logical.



Yes. We have these different qualities because different groups were subject to different kinds of selective pressure, and we developed different qualities. This is easy to imagine, given the different amounts of sunlight that reaches different parts of the planet.

(Sorry to be pedantic, but some people might argue about whether 'evolution' is technically happening because homo sapiens have not branched off into two separate groups, which then change far enough over time and become two separate species. BUT these changes in our skin over thousands of years do illustrate the same mechanisms by which evolution, in the larger sense, occurs).



Yes, yes, all of these are advantages that evolution has brought to the species in question.



That's understandable. To make matters worse, we don't have every detail nailed down perfectly correct, and as we improve our understanding and change our models, evolution-deniers cry "See! The evolutionists were wrong!"

Some people would rather cling to one story that never changes - even it is wrong - rather than allow their outlook to change over time as they gain new information.

Ug, I know right? When I was a teenager I spent years enthusiastically and critically studying this topic to the absolute best of my ability, and I was _still_ 'learning' grotesquely over-simplified (and therefore, necessarily, somewhat wrong) presentations of evolution. Even many science 'textbooks' completely misrepresent evolution. I was an evolution skeptic for years because so many 'science educators' actually got evolution _wrong_.

This was before the internet. These days, a person can just start with wikipedia and get a much better education much faster!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

To answer your question:

I would not say that the picture you mention depicts 'evolution'. That picture depicts a few selected species from our ancestry, to give a very basic idea of what has happened. Evolution is the process by which this happened. Its like asking if the following pictures depict 'economics'



I do claim that its a fact that our great-great-great-great......great-great-grandparents were non-human primates, and also a fact that if you go back far enough our lineage includes fish-like creatures. But this claim is neither necessary nor sufficient for evolution to be true.

You present this as if there was equal evidence for both sides, when this is not the case. Why do you so quickly jump to this conclusion, when you could instead have chosen to do a little research? Is it because you favor this conclusion? Is it possible that your favoring of this conclusion may bias you against actively learning more on the topic?


It turns out that several people interacted with him in his final weeks, and their stories are mutually consistent. Only _one_ person is the outlier who makes unlikely claims, without any evidence or any corroboration.

Of course, it doesn't matter what one person happened to believe at the time that they died. What _does_ matter is what processes we all use to arrive at our beliefs. Some processes favor arriving at more accurate beliefs, and other processes prevent us from arriving at accurate beliefs.

OMG we found it! Proof that evolution is wrong!

Great post!

The problem with evolution education is that it takes years of study to properly understand evolution and the massive body of supportive evidence. Most people who are biased against evolution are not going to put the work in that is needed to really understand the issues. Most people who preach against evolution don't know what they are talking about.

(1) What is true or not true doesn't depend on the opinions of one person.

(2) There's no evidence that he recanted. From a pro-creationist website:


https://www.icr.org/article/2834/

So you are not really a Manturkey?

The best part about this is all the unintentional comedy these folks are delivering on twitter!

http://twitter.com/search?q=phlwpc17

(If I had a nickel for every time someone mis-used the word "unsafe"...)

Yeah, afaik, its just this one tiny group. I doubt they have even 100,000 followers in the US; meanwhile I think there are over 10,000,000 atheists in the US.

I just want to better understand his thought process. We may have more in common than he thinks.

To me, the biggest evil occurs when politicians and such try to control us by trying to force us to choose between one of two sides on an issue (and painting one side as hate-worthy, so we must choose the other). Maybe there is a third or fourth side to consider. This kind of manipulation occurs in _every_ area of politics. Neither the left or the right is above it.

Yeah, so much about these kinds of pro-trans agendas just seem to undermine their own goals. I think we've all already gotten past a lot of gender stereotypes the past few decades, and kids are more allowed to grow up to be themselves _without_ asking them to choose a gender.

But now they want kids to choose a gender - which necessarily relies on and reinforces gender stereotypes.

I think these people are promoting sexism without even realizing it.

That's an interesting point of view.

What do you see as 'the problem' exactly? I mean, I can see several, so I'm not sure which you might mean.

And how am I adding to it?

I agree, its just a fact of reality that you can't change DNA; and then again, DNA is DNA. DNA doesn't wholly determine how we feel, nor how people see us, and certainly not how we feel about how people see us.

If you are anti-trans activism, well I'd have to agree that today's trans activists don't really seem interested in reality.

I don't have any trust in the judgement of the PC crowd who were the most vocal supporters of this, and I wonder/worry about where the PC and SJW mindset is taking this country... but for this _specific_ change:

I like the idea of replacing a slave-owner with a freer of slaves!

People should be able to do what they want. If an XY-chromosomes person wants to wear a dress, so what. If an XX-chromosomes person wants to grow facial hair - who cares?

If people want to freak out about their gender designation, I think we should give them the courtesy, to their face, of addressing them how they liked to be called (just like we ought to do with nicknames).


But so much of the trans agenda seems like huge steps backwards to me. I'm very interested in seeing how this plays out over the next couple decades.