Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[tzor]

Well, in one friend's defense she does try very hard. This might be another generalization that I don't have the proper sampling to make, but it seems that women just aren't capable of even understanding rejection. Or understanding the concept of doing everything your partner wants and being told no for everything you want, or even the feeling of never having been offered sex even once in your life without begging for it for weeks on end.

"Begging for it for weeks on end." Thanks Count. I have finally realized what I've been doing wrong all these years. I never even thought of the long term begging part.

[sabs]

Not to be a dick, but really, if you have to beg for sex from someone you're supposedly in a relationship with. She's just not that into you.

[PoliteNewb]

Not to be a dick, but really, if you have to beg for sex from someone you're supposedly in a relationship with. She's just not that into you.

Or she's not that into sex. Those can be different things.

Not only do people have radically different sex drives, but those sex drives change over time and with circumstance. When my wife and I first got together, he were doing it every day and twice on sundays. Over the course of 4 pregnancies, her sex drive went up and down like a roller coaster, due to hormonal and general life changes. We're done having kids and things have mostly evened out, but we still don't have sex as often as we used to. I don't believe my wife loves me any less...she's just less into sex than she used to be.

For that matter, people also have radically different ideas of what constitutes a relationship. For some people, sex is incredibly important...for others, it is a nice perk that goes along with being with someone you care deeply about. All these different definitions and expectations are why communication is the most important damn thing in a relationship. If you are not doing more talking than anything else, your relationship probably needs work.

All that said...you shouldn't beg for sex. Not only should you not have to, it does not encourage the other person to have sexual feelings about you, because begging isn't appealing or attractive. I feel begging for just about anything to be undignified, and something to be avoided if you want to keep your self-respect.

Doesn't mean you shouldn't make your desires and needs clear, but you just have to do it the right way.

[DSMatticus]

You might want to take a... firm position on asserting your needs.

That was awful, I apologize. But more seriously, I'm going to guess that's part of the problem. Something about the way you're approaching the issue may be a bit of a turn-off. Combined with a bad run of women. Or a run of bad women, may be a more accurate description. Though, it does take two to tango - maybe it's something you're doing, or maybe you just keep picking really, really awful women.

I doubt you mean begging in the most literal sense of the word, but still, that theme of action is probably not the best way to get things happening. There's a spectrum from 'needy' to 'pushy.' You don't want to be at either extreme of that spectrum.

[Maj]

I recommend that, instead of going to Sweden, go to Russia. I've never encountered more sexually aggressive women in my life.

Um... He wants to get laid, not married.

Different people have different sex drives. Some people consider sex once a week to be torturously rare, and some people consider sex once a month to be torturously often.

These people should not be in sexual relationships with each other.

Agreed. I start getting grumpy if it's been more than three or four days.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

A few clarifications:

I don't mean "beg" in the literal sense. The last girlfriend I had, I asked, got told no, then didn't bring it up. She later told me she didn't know how bad it bothered me. If I ask once or twice a week and get told no every time for a month, I feel like I'm begging. And yes, it makes me feel like a starving mongrel begging a cruel, unfeeling master for some gristle to gnaw on. I have decided at this point I'd rather never have sex again if I am truly that unattractive.

Sabs: Great point. I made the same one last page, hence the statement "I might really just be that unattractive". You're not being a dick, you're just repeating something I said and trying to claim it as your own opinion.

To all: Also, I am not going to Sweden to get laid. My father is swimming in the world transplant games and has invited me along for the ride. I am going to support my father, to get away from retail hell for a week, and relax in a foreign country. If it happens, it happens. But I'm not really going to seek it out despite the fact it's really going to disappoint my father if I don't. (My father is the very image of the alpha male and has always seemed like he was inwardly disappointed that his oldest son was a social pariah.)

Maj: I don't have reason to disbelieve you at all so please don't take this the wrong way, but every woman I've been with had told me the exact same thing, that after 3-4 days they get cranky. And every time I get excited, and every time I'm let down. (The girl who sexed me twice in 8 months? She told me to keep condoms in the car because she needs it multiple times a day. That correlates inversely to what actually happened, I think).

I am continuing my plans to get in better physical shape and improve my financial situation. I have dropped a grand total of 30 pounds this year (I'm actually 10 pounds lighter than I was when Broadzilla left), and the goal is to lose 25 more by January (which will lease me lighter than what I was before getting together with my first wife), and which will put me 20 pounds from my medically determined ideal weight. They always say the best revenge is living well, despite being frustrated emotionally I feel better than I have in almost a decade.

[Maj]

I don't have reason to disbelieve you at all so please don't take this the wrong way, but every woman I've been with had told me the exact same thing, that after 3-4 days they get cranky.

That's fine. Unlike them, I actually have sex 3-4 times a week. Ess doesn't like me when I'm cranky.

[sabs]

I'm sure he's complaining about his hardship

[Neeeek]

A few clarifications:

I don't mean "beg" in the literal sense. The last girlfriend I had, I asked, got told no, then didn't bring it up. She later told me she didn't know how bad it bothered me. If I ask once or twice a week and get told no every time for a month, I feel like I'm begging. And yes, it makes me feel like a starving mongrel begging a cruel, unfeeling master for some gristle to gnaw on. I have decided at this point I'd rather never have sex again if I am truly that unattractive.

Hmm. Some advise: If you want to have sex, press the issue. If she's really in a bad state of mind (which happens) she'll be pissed at you(hold her and apologize and you should be oka). If not, you can ask "why?". If you are in a relationship that involves sex, declining actually requires a reason. The default is that sex is expected, not the other way around.

[Prak]

So, for a change of topic,

what is the determining factor that creates situations like, say, the state of the Roman Empire, techonologically and such, versus Pre-colonization Americas. Or, to put it more simply, why do I live in a house, protected by a an army that involves aircraft and nuclear warheads when Jimbob in South Africa lives in a stick hut and has only ever seen guns when the Nigerian drug cartels came to rape his sister?

[Maxus]

Because in third-world countries, you're living in D&D land.

There may be a balance of power, but it's seriously "What the fuck are you going to do to stop us?"

Every so often some normal-ish person decides they're not going to put up with this shit.

But not enough to cause real systematic change.

The developed-world's policy towards less-developed nations, all the way up to, oh, twenty or thirty years ago didn't help matters, either.

A 'determining factor'? There isn't any just one.

[Prak]

Because in third-world countries, you're living in D&D land.

There may be a balance of power, but it's seriously "What the fuck are you going to do to stop us?"

Every so often some normal-ish person decides they're not going to put up with this shit.

But not enough to cause real systematic change.

The developed-world's policy towards less-developed nations, all the way up to, oh, twenty or thirty years ago didn't help matters, either.

A 'determining factor'? There isn't any just one.

Sorry, I meant development wise. To put it another way, probably a better way, why did the roman empire have metal weapons and armour, aquaducts, cement, and fucking indoor plumbing, when the natives of the americas were still beating on each other with rocks when the europeans came over roughly 9-10 hundred years later?

[Blasted]

Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is what you want to read up on. Specifically the interactions with history and anthropology.

My personal take is that competition drives innovation, which is enabled by resources. But there are academics out there who spend their entire working lives debating this and too many different options.

[Prak]

Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is what you want to read up on. Specifically the interactions with history and anthropology.

My personal take is that competition drives innovation, which is enabled by resources. But there are academics out there who spend their entire working lives debating this and too many different options.

While I'll check the link out later, as it's getting onto 3:30 am and I want to have more than a couple hours between waking up and going to work later, I kinda figured it was basically resources, but I honestly have no clue.

[Parthenon]

Divine influence. The americas and africa had a few messengers from god but a very long time ago so their technological and mental development is bad, but europe and the middle east has had more and been affected much more by these messengers so they are much more advanced.


Nah, just trolling.

[DSMatticus]

My personal take is that competition drives innovation, which is enabled by resources. But there are academics out there who spend their entire working lives debating this and too many different options.

I'd buy more into the idea of freetime leads to innovation. When people stop having to spend every waking hour trying to feed themself, they have time for ideas.

Europe is probably one of the best regions for creating a standing society. Good agricultural land, easily domesticated animals. And that abundance of food leads to people who can take roles that are completely not food-related. And that means you get people developing techniques that advance society. And then it's just a matter of luck and the technological snowball. It's really just a huge collection of fortuituous social circumstances. Rome had freaking steam engines, and never cared or tried to do anything with them because the idea of needing labor was ridiculous - they had a huge supply of slaves from their conquests. Labor was cheap.

[ETortoise]

Why did Rome have metal and aqueducts while the Aztecs beat each other with rocks?

For that you should read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jarred Diamond. It's a massive tome of geographic determinism that basically credits the shape of the Eurasian continent and the types of animals and plants found there with the 'rise' of the West. While he claims the book explains the rise of Western Europe his thesis, being based on the continent of Eurasia, applies just as well to China and doesn't explain why the Opium wars were so lopsided.

David Landes argues in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations that the fall of the Roman Empire was necessary for Europe's rise. The divided nation states were engaged in a competition that prevented the suppression of innovation. Landes also implies that Europeans are inherently culturally better so take him with a few grains of salt.

For my money, it was the competition that supported Europe's hegemony. The technological snowball is not a given. Most of the inventions that led to the modern world came from China but were not developed there the way they were in Europe (for a variety of reasons). Zheng He's treasure fleets put Colombus's expedition to shame in the size and number of the ships as well as technological and logistical superiority (Zheng He brought dedicated water tankers). However a change in the balance of power at court caused all oceangoing shipbuilding to be banned. Innovation can be destabilizing to a traditional society and politically centralized areas can safely discourage it. That is until the people who haven't been discouraging it show up on the doorstep with steamships and rifled cannon.

I just took a class on this question so I could go on (and on and on).

[tzor]

So, for a change of topic,

what is the determining factor that creates situations like, say, the state of the Roman Empire, techonologically and such, versus Pre-colonization Americas. Or, to put it more simply, why do I live in a house, protected by a an army that involves aircraft and nuclear warheads when Jimbob in South Africa lives in a stick hut and has only ever seen guns when the Nigerian drug cartels came to rape his sister?

There has been an argument that temperate climate drives technology. When the climate is the same old day after day you get used to it. When the weather changes over times, and sometimes drastically, you start to get the idea of wanting to change it.

Europe is one of those areas where things do change. (Note the Roman Empire is a different case - run by an army that pushed engineering in order to be effective. When they needed salt they built roads; when they needed water they built viaducts.) But you can see this example in a small way in terms of air conditioning. There are many places in the United States where it gets very hot during the day. But it was not Florida, nor South Carolina that developed modern air conditioning but New York. Only a few hot weeks in a year were enough to piss off New Yorkers, everyone else was used to that crap.

[Maj]

Thank you, ETortoise! GGS is brilliant, and it goes down relatively smoothly, too, though it's been a while since I read it.

Personally, I believe there's an important culturophilosophical component required: entitlement... Not the Veruca Salt sort of entitlement, but the sort of entitlement that gives people the confidence to attempt debate and reason with authority figures or those who might traditionally be considered "better" (parents, elders, experts, etc).

The environment required to "grow" entitlement includes stuff like free speech and free knowledge, so that's part of it - people need those things to create and innovate. But there also needs to be a culture of appreciation for those things.

There has been an argument that temperate climate drives technology. When the climate is the same old day after day you get used to it. When the weather changes over times, and sometimes drastically, you start to get the idea of wanting to change it.

Personally, I think that viewpoint is exceptionally short-sighted and completely wrong. Looking across history, the most technologically exceptional civilizations tended to be in warm places first - Egypt, Mesopotamia, SE Asia, Central America... Yes, there were great civilizations in cooler climes, but innovation wasn't necessarily born there. And across history, Europe, especially northern Europe, didn't really rise until the Renaissance. The Dark Ages ended because the Europeans ripped off a lot of stuff from the Islamic Empire, which ripped off a lot of stuff from India and China, and piled that on top of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia.

We are going through a phase. We'll get over it.

[tzor]

I still think Egyt is a good example of "temperate" - not in terms of temperature but in terms of water. The flooding of the nile produced a significant variation in the life of the average egyptian from seasons of abundance to seasons of harshness. Conditions were constantly changing and in a predictable way, allowing for the people to consider "saving" the good times through various times and keeping the times of plenty (the flooding times) from making things worse.

Given that, there are two major things to consider. The first is that technolgy is the persuit of what works. Mezzo-America was stuck for a very long period in the stone age, not because it didn't want to advance, but because obsidian technology was vastly superior to metal technology. (Obsidian scapels are still equal or better than the finest surgical steel blades we can design. A vareity of trees in the region had wood stronger than steel gurders and were used for supports on structures - a good thing as they never bothered to invent the Roman arch.)

One important note, (that I think everyone will complain to be about) but I think in Europe it was really necessary for the rise of Christian monastic communities dedicated to the persuit of science. People love for the glories of the past but, to the Greek philosophers, science was literally "beneath" them. This led them to some wonderful scientific notions that wer flat out wrong as wrong could be. (Some of these notions were embraced for a very long while when Europe embraced Greek "science" in the Renissance.) The Romans didn't give a crap for science, they were engineers first, and foremost.

Note that it's not the specifics that are important, but the notion of a community dedicated to observation and writing down that observation (the keystone for the scientific method). This would eventually lead to the age of enlightenment, whcih generally turned against a lot of these communities, but the formation of the communities to the formation of the universities in Europe is due in part to various monastic/friar communities.

[Username17]

I'm a proponent of the school that says shit is really exceptionally random. Humanity existed for a hundred thousand years before anyone made beer and settled down to form a city. Europe was the worst place on Earth for a thousand years before it got off its ass and started conquering the damn world.

The scientific method is amazing and pushes things in a recognizably forward direction at an amazing pace. But before Ibn al-Haytham, things went forward and backward pretty much randomly. Knowledge was found, knowledge was lost again. People burned books, people who knew stuff died and took their specialty capabilities with them, and so on. The Antikythera mechanism happened, but a few generations later no one knew how to build one or even that such devices were possible.

Central America didn't ever develop iron working or even bronze. But that's basically random. In a pre-science society, such developments are by no means predestined. Civilization in Eurasia went fifteen thousand years without bronze or iron, so what's an extra six thousand years in the Americas?

-Username17

[Koumei]

so what's an extra six thousand years in the Americas?

Fuel for modern-day idiots who think country-of-birth/race/bloodline means fucking anything in this day and age. Then again, they'll take anything as an excuse.

[Prak]

I asked my co-worker who apparently has several degrees in history this question earlier as I was closing at work and he said it basically came down to resources. Europe had lots of surface deposits of copper and few napable materials, while the Americas were the opposite, with many napable materials and few surface deposits of copper and iron. Thus, the Americas were more able to make many, many stone tools, while the Europeans basically had to say "shit, we need to find a way to work this metal."

Though the question was driven by Civilizations, a ready comparison is that Europe is Civilizations with copper and iron just lying around for any scout stoned out of his mind to stumble across, where as the Americas are Minecraft where you punch a tree, make a ridiculously weak pick, mine some rock, make a couple dozen stronger picks and start heading down looking for coal and iron. Once you get a few blocks of iron ore, you smelt it and build your first iron tool, dick around at a faster rate, until your iron tool breaks and you cry for a moment when you realize that stone is actually superior unless you want to mine diamonds, red dust, or gold, which all together are too rare for you to really give a shit about unless you're dead set on making a solid gold cock, which is about all you can do, because gold is shit for anything other than ornamentation.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

What's the best way to get rid of hives? I had an allergic reaction to a laundry detergent and I have been itchy since. I have since re-cleaned all the affected clothing, but I still itch. Diphenhydramine turns me into a zombie and doesn't really do much to stop me from itching.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Carefully remove the afflicted region with a sharp knife.