Childhood Creativity

Somebody once told me
The world was macaroni
So, I took a bite out of a tree

It tasted kind of funny
So, I spate it at a monkey
And the monkey just stared at me.

Then Darth Vader
Threw his light saber
And missed me be metre
And hit Justin Bieber
Who said, 'Baby, baby, baby Oooohhh!"

My seven year old son picked this song up at school and taught me. By taught me, I mean repeated it over and over until I couldn't get it out of my head. It's a thoroughly annoying little ditty. I only hope that it stays with you, dear reader. If you do not get any enjoyment, enlightenment or perspective from my blog, at least you get a stupid song stuck in your head. If you don't have any children, this just gives you a tiny taste of the warfare they wage on your mind.

I do have a serious point. Songwriting such as this is ingrained in human behaviour. It is as natural as language itself - I believe it is the one of the most important instincts in the development of human intelligence and language.

When I was seven, we had many of our own little songs like this. However, I don't remember anything like this one. Here's why, it's a take off on a late-90's song by Smash Mouth called All-Star. Children have taken the basic lyrics and twisted them around using current pop-culture icons. The Justin Beiber part could have been added to an older rhyme - I just googled it and found many You Tube versions going back to 2009.

Who knows how many versions are going viral around school yards right now or what new creations will catch on and get spread around in the future. I just find it fascinating how people constantly twist the language and pop culture into all of these new forms. Modern technology lets us document it and spread it quicker, but this has been since the dawn of man. My sons still sings the old Jingle Bells, Batman Smells parody every Christmas that used to get punished by detention in my old school days.

Is it evidence of a rational, creative mind or genetic determinism at work?

BTW, here is the original song, All-Star by ska-rock band Smash Mouth:
http://www.slack-time.com/music-video-3228-Smash-Mouth-All-Star

I kind of like it.

Edited, March 16, 2013.

The Destruction of Female Through Sport

Back in 2010, I blogged about transgendered people and sport. I have no idea what has become of Lana Lawless. A cursory google search showed only outdated links.

The issue has come up again now that female male Fallon Fox has admitted to fighting in MMA in the women's division. I commented at AVFM and GLPIGGY.

My argument is that Hormone Replacement Treatment (HRT) amounts to doping. Although estrogen is not considered performance enhancing, it is in the same category as testosterone which is definitely performance enhancing. Paul Elam states in his response, "without the estrogen the individual would not have qualified to compete, it would make sense to me that this is a form of doping."  I agree.

Taken to its logical end, the argument that a man should be able to compete with women if he undergoes gender reassignment (GR) and HRT means that the reverse should also be true. This is why, in my comments at both places, I posed the question: when will women be allowed to dope with testosterone in order to "fairly" compete with men in men's only divisions?

I don't think that this idea quite sunk in with readers yet.  This is the inevitable conclusion of this gender defining nonsense. If gender is only a construct and we consider someone who undergoes HRT and GR to be identical in every way to a naturally born member of the chosen sex, then a woman should have the right to compete with men and use PED's (testosterone) to level the playing field. In the Liberal, post-modern mindset, giving women this advantage would only be fair since without it, women are excluded.

I'm taking this line of thought to its inevitable conclusion. It starts as allowing only male females (women who have been given GR to become men) into male sports division. But eventually, more and more women will want to compete and will start altering their bodies to become more male-like. If they can take that advantage in order to compete, some will. The flood gates will open and soon you'll have divisions filled with men competing against steroid-pumping females and nobody will be able to say one word or even construct an argument within their own mind because they won't understand how wrong it is.


Secondary Point:
The Science Whore is in full view in this issue. Fox uses the argument that "Doctors" have stated that using HRT negates all advantage of being born a man. I'm assuming that "Doctors" means her own pro-Gender-Reassignment doctors. This appeal to authority is pathetic. "Doctors" are not scientist. The opinion of two doctors is not substantive evidence any more than the opinion of 2 out of 3 dentists means that one toothpaste is better than another.

Define Rational Mind

I haven't had time to post anything recently. So, in light of the recent long discussion about moral free agency over at AVFM, in which I argued with Steve Moxon (who seriously out classes me in the academic department, but I will not agree to his statements about free will and rationality), I am going to post a question/challenge to anyone who happens by.

Can anyone provide a definition of a rational mind? What could possibly be capable of producing a rational mind? Would a rational mind be capable of performing anything of its own volition or would it only be capable of thinking if challenged by outside forces - less rational minds?

Steve Moxon states that evolution could not possibly produce a rational mind. It begs the question, indeed. For, evolution has produced the only mind of any kind that we are aware of.  So, is it even possible for a rational mind to exist? To answer this question, first the term must be defined.

Please send any links or publications that you might think help to answer this question.

CDSH

Conscious Agency Discussed Tonight on AVFM Radio

I noticed that AVFM radio is going to be talking about moral agency on tonight's show.

The very first comment on the show page by Steve Moxon said this:

It’s well-known through famous experiments that we do not have ‘conscious agency’: experiments reveal that we are conscious of decisions we make a considerable time (by brain-processing standards) after the neural processes that in fact produce them.
 

I blogged about this idea, championed by Sam Harris, awhile back.

I made this comment (quickly typed right before my sons' bath time, so slightly editted here - good night kids):

I'm tired of hearing that we do not have 'conscious agency' or free will. I think Sam Harris is the champion of this belief and the designer of the experiments your thinking of. 

While it may be true that thoughts arise deep inside of us at a sub-conscious level. But, you must understand that these thoughts and feelings are in response to stimuli (external and internal). As they develop into coherent thoughts, they become the mind's assessments of reality. Each separate thought is a assessment of reality within the mind and as the conscious thinker becomes more aware of them he can choose amongst the myriad of these competing assessments which ones are most relevant to his situation. You can't pass them off as simple animal urges translated into language. They are complex analyses, the likes of which only humans are capable. There is no other thought process like it in the universe that we know of (unless you believe in a god). 

Each person is socialized and culturalized to understand human interaction and each person (agent) chooses how they like to interact and be interacted with. This lets the person decide how to behave in order to appear like the person they want to be seen as.

The REALITY of free will is demonstrated in your ability to be who you are. Who you are is a human being with the capability of consciously choosing which feelings to act upon and which to ignore.

Academics have tried to remove this sense of free will from their audience in order to appear more intelligent and to give more power to their own ideas. When the audience members allow academics to take their moral agency and free will away, their minds become easier to control and academics gain more power over people.

I credit Greg Swann at www.selfadoration.com for re-enforcing and solidify this idea in my mind. The thoughts on academics are definitely his. For more on this, I recommend reading his marvelous, concise book Man Alive: A Survival Guide For Your Mind(pdf). It's a short read and I found it highly inspirational.

Swann insists that you should not let supposed thought leaders, like journalists, teachers and politicians take you're moral agency away. They'll do this by training you to think like them and convincing you that you don't have the power to question what you're teaching. Within academia, there are enough people willing to surrender their own power to the thought leaders that any single individual truly does not matter. If you, as a student, refuse to accept the leader's power, you can just be thrown aside and some other willing participant in the fraud will come forward.

I truly believe that feminism is both a result of and a perveyor of this phenomenon. It spreads by insisting that everyone take up its tenants without question. Each person, once indoctrinated, begins to spread the ideas with plenty of armour against contradictory evidence in the form or religious belief.

Whenever I think of this subject, I think of the old Spirit of the West Song.

I'm hoping to tune into the radio show tonight.

Using Science as a Whore - How to Increase School Resources

This CBC article showed up on my Google News Search. Toronto District School board published a study showing that its students are worried about the future and losing sleep over it.

Toronto public high school students are more worried about their future than their relationships or family matters
 

...More worried about the future than they are about their relationships and families? I'm not sure if I should be more alarmed about the ranking of the level of worry on these subjects or whether they are worried about them at all.

This was the first time the board surveyed its students on mental health issues.
"What our research showed us is that there's certainly a gap in the area of mental health and we need to focus more of our resources in the area of mental health," Schwartz-Maltz told the Canadian Press.
"These surveys drive programming in our schools, they give us a snapshot of the way our kids are feeling and they drive what we do."

Read: We need more resources to fund more staff to provide more programs to "help" young people.

The TDSB is trying to inflate its importance, just like every single government body. When a study like this is performed, the actual results are at the same time irrelevant and predetermined.

The questions are tilted to favour the desired outcome - 'Are YOU concerned about YOUR future?' As far as I'm concerned, the more youth that answer, yes, to that question the better. Frankly, kids need to be concerned and, in this economy, you'd be nuts not to be concerned unless you're filthy rich. It's a perfect example of a leading question. When you hear the question, it immediately puts worry into your mind and you start to ask questions about your future. The wacky thing is, the psychologists who phrase the question know this perfectly well. They know what confirmation bias is. They study, negativity bias and framing affect in school - many probably wrote final papers on the subjects. They understand that double-blind studies should be used to ensure their own biases don't affect the science. I'm tempted to blame this on the Dunning-Kruger affect, but, it seems more likely that they use their vast knowledge of the human psyche to ensure the results match their desired outcome.

The numbers, inflated as they are, make no difference to the study's conclusion. Someone thought it would be a good idea to put more psychologists, social workers and other programs in school, or some such measure. If there isn't a problem, they need to find one and make sure that it is the school board's problem to fix. So, they performed a study on their students to support this desire. How many students need to be concerned about their future to justify spending X million dollars on better mental health support? One is not related to the other, so the whole exercise is meaningless.

The sad part is, they're talking about taking dollars that could be spent on music, sports, arts and other educational programs so that schools can do more about mental health issues. Why not have a school system focused on school issues, and health departments focus on health issues?

Once again, science whores are trotted out to the public to give the illusion that we're thinking about important issues, when we're really trying to increase funding from taxes to hire more social workers. The full colourfully graphed report is here.