The Real Reason Why The Jedi Can’t Have Sex
At first glance, this question seems kind of simple right?
The reason why Jedi’s aren’t allowed to love let alone have sex is that if you love someone by definition, you will fear losing them.
And this is no good because…
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering-Yoda
I mean we don’t have to look very far to see this in action. Just look at Anakin Skywalker, the main subject of all the Star Wars films. He was destroyed by his fear. He was supposed to bring balance to the force, but he met a girl, and from there it didn’t quite go the way of a romcom.
We saw other Jedi’s being tempted in such a way and resisting this temptation like my boy Obi Won in the Clone Wars.
The Jedi are meant to be stoic figures that suppress and refrain from engaging their basic urges. Otherwise, they would soon be slaughtering a temple full of younglings. Or, you know, just leaving the Jedi order like a normal person would.
That’s just a thought there Anakin.
I always found this reason to be logical, but I also feel it’s incomplete. So allow me to present my alternative and much more thorough reason as to why the Jedi aren’t allowed to fornicate.
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The first thing we need to understand is that the force is both a religion and a physical entity that can be quantified via the use of midichlorians. I, like most Star Wars faithful, am not a fan of these midichlorians. But they exist and prove my point, so we’re going to talk about them.
Midichlorians for those who don’t know can measure one’s connection to the force, or how strong the force is with someone. They act as a sort of cells within a body that I postulate are genetically transferable, just like a normal gene. So if your parents are tall, you’re likely to be tall. If they’re strong in the force, you’re likely to be strong in the force.
We know this because of the lineage of Skywalker family. It is not a coincidence that the greatest force wielder in history is the father of the greatest Jedi of all time and the grandfather of Kylo Ren. Remember, being a Jedi is supposed to be next to impossible. There are 10,000 Jedi before order 66. Which means out of an entire universe only 10,000 people have the midichlorians high enough to be in the Jedi order which was already being kind of lax with their selection. For reference, late basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women. So I don’t need to start doing hypothesis tests to show that being the son of a force user is going to give you a greater connection to the force.
This can also be further found in evidence when you examine the Sith species. For those with an actual life who don’t need to know this: the Sith were first a species of red looking humans who had a greater than average propensity for being force sensitive. Which means that the ability to be force sensitive is not just randomly distributed across species. But can be localized, kind of like a gene.
If we want to extend this and look at the non-canon extended universe, we need not look further than the Star Killer, Galen Marek. The son of two Jedi Knights, he was so powerful that Vader confused him for a full grown Jedi when he was a child. Again, I know this isn’t cannon because Lucas Arts would have one heck of a time trying to explain away how Galen was able to force control an entire Star Destroyer with the force.
And if we keep going down the rabbit hole that is the EU we’ll notice that the entire Skywalker family are all adept force users leader to an exciting conclusion.
The Jedi aren’t dumb. At the beginning, they would have been able to put two and two together and realize that if two force sensitive people have kids their kid would be ultra powerful. This lead them to a moral quagmire which plagues every Jedi that has ever walked this earth.
This question, is of course, if we should seek more power to do more good.
The Jedi’s could have embraced this way of living in their greater battle against the Sith. Selective breeding would have allowed them to far outmatch their adversaries and bring balance to the force thousands of years before an old man had to be thrown into a pit.
This would not come without repercussions, however.
First of all, this would distort the purpose of the Jedi. The Jedi are not here to become more powerful. Because if they were, they would go to the dark side, where power is attained much quicker and by far less force sensitive people.
In addition to this, this new type of recruitment would not just corrupt the Jedi morally. But would force them to become the evil they pledged to fight against.
For instance, let’s just say that after generations of selective breeding a Jedi as strong as the OG Skywalker arrises. This “Jedi” will have kids, and like their father/mother, they would be strong in the force ad infinitum. This “Jedi” family quickly becomes the most powerful in all the order and slowly turn it into a kingdom.
Let’s take a moment to ponder the implications of this, given our knowledge of monarchies. What ends up happening when one ruling family is in power for multiple generations inbreeding starts to occur. This means that recessive genes are more likely to come to light (for more about genes) which can be slightly problematic. We all know what happened in Game of Thrones when a mad king takes the thrown. But what if that king also so happened to be the strongest Jedi alive? The results would be nothing short of horrifying. In addition to this, a ruling family will do everything in order to maintain their power. This could mean that they would sense force sensitive users and kill them before they come to power.
It is worth noting, that in Star Wars the force is a sentient entity that tries to correct itself. For instance, the reason why Sidious seduces Anakin instead of killing him is because he knew that if he killed Anakin the force would just replace him with another.
Therefore to avoid the bastardization of the light side of the force, the Jedi’s they took a page out of religion. Agree/disagree with this if you want, but many a person has shown that religion is used to control behavior. At best you can think of it as don’t eat pork because at the time pork is dangerous to eat because we don’t have fridges. And at worst to control the poor as Napoleon put it “from keeping the poor from murdering the rich.”
In the Star Wars universe, the Jedi’s took a page out of Nietzsche’s book and made not having romantic interest as an act of goodness. They spread this idea that loving or showing any emotion of any sort is dangerous. Which is why Anakin said (one of the worst lines in movie history) “from my point of view the Jedi are evil.”
(Which If you think about it. They kind of take children whether it is voluntary of involuntary from their parents, indoctrinate in dogmatic practices, give them weird titles and make them dress funny. So in other words a cult).
But in any case, we’ve seen many an example of a Jedi having a romantic interest and it being completely okay. Luke Skywalker comes to mind as well as Kanan Jarrus.
Things will get more interesting when “The Last Jedi” comes out in December because we’ll figure out if Luke had kids.
Why Men Are Dogs Written By Me (a Dog) And More Fun Things About Evolution
Before I start this undoubtedly humorous and informative (you can tell I have a…) article, I just need to explain to you guys a couple of biology concepts before I can proceed to the greater point of this.
The first thing I’d like to talk about is evolution. Evolution is this fun little thing that everyone dogmatically believes in (including me) without really understanding it. Which if you ask me is just as bad as the dude who thinks a god created everything because his pastor told him. But that’s a topic for another time.
One of the great things about evolution unlike other ground breaking theories is that we can observe its rigorous logic in our current day to day life. We don’t need to stretch our mind trying to understand how time moves slower around heavier objects like my boy Albert E. We just need to look around and ask why animals (which includes us soz) act the way they do.
So the first thing I would like to do before is talk to you about evolution and precisely the mechanism through which evolution takes place, which is, of course, natural selection. There are a lot of misunderstandings or misnomers as to how natural selection actually works so let me try to make your understanding of this concept as rigorous as possible.
For example, let’s look at the relationship that parents have with their kids. Parents will always love their children more than their kids love them. Here is a video of Ryan Reynolds saying how much he loves his kids. And if Ryan Reynolds says it, it must be true!
This not by chance. Parents who didn’t love their kids had a harder time spreading their genes throughout the gene pool because their children would die. Furthermore, even if these children of neglect were to grow up and foster their own offspring, they would also be biologically pre-disposed to neglect their own children leading them in turn to have fewer kids ad infinitum. So the reason we love our kids (I say our even though I am 19 and as far as I know don’t have any children) is because the people who didn’t love their kids couldn’t raise enough children (because they didn’t care about them as much) in order for it to become the norm.
Therefore, being a better parent is favored in the gene pool. Using the logic above we can easily conclude that genes which are favored in the gene pool are more likely to be passed on making them more common today.
Another thing we need to understand is that humans (barring a catastrophic change in society) are probably not going to evolve past our current stage. This is because evolution doesn’t just happen. It happens because biological pressures kill most of the population and the ones who survive repopulate with their new and improved genes. This isn’t going to happen barring an unmitigated catastrophe. If anything we’re likely to go the other way and devolve because we’ve been alleviating these biological pressures.
Allow me to illustrate this using my own life because I have no shame and I’m a very good example of human devolution. I have a gene which delays the age at which my body would start producing its own Human Growth Hormone (HGH). So I had to stick a needle in the right side of my butt every day for the better part of 3 years while taking pure steroids for a year whilst at the same time undergoing experimental treatment which involved me taking oestrogen boosting pills to allow me to take this treatment for longer. If that sounds like it sucks, it’s because it did. But on the bright side I looked like this:
Those steroid induced abs were worth it.
It’s worth noting that I have this deficiency and my kid will probably have it. So if you took me and put me at the time were humans were still hunter gatherers I probably would have ended up dead rather early on the count that I was 4 foot 8 till I was 13. This would therefore mean I wouldn’t be able to pass my HGH deprived genes on the next generation implying that it would have been able to stay in the gene pool.
Therefore, nowadays given the wonders of modern medicine we are able to save people that would have otherwise died and therefore not pass on their genes.
This doesn’t mean that I (and people of my ilk) shouldn’t be allowed to pass on their genes. Because I hate to break it to you, but if we resorted back to our hunter-gatherer days only about the top 1% of physically gifted humans would survive.
By this point in the article you’re probably wondering this has to do with dogs and the answer is coming shortly but here is a picture of my dog Simba (short for Symbiosis that’s a bio joke).
We’re always reminded that guys act the same way as dogs frolicking about, humping everything they come across. Which to be fair does sound a lot like my dog. Most people are perplexed by this but if we are using similar reasoning as my Ryan Reynolds example above we’ll understand why this is the case.
To make this as simple as possible let’s imagine a world populated by two guys and a much larger population of women. Guy A is a sexual deviant who, like Simba in his younger more rambunctious days would hump a lot of things. Guy B, on the other hand, has a lower propensity to hump.
If we leave these guys on this utopian planet and come back in 30 years, we’re intuitively going to expect Guy A to have more kids than Guy B. Therefore his genetics which includes his sexual drive are going to be in turn passed on to their children. So if we come back let’s say 1000 years in the future, and this planet hasn’t destroyed itself in a nuclear holocaust. We would notice that practically the entire population of earth was a direct descendent of person A and not person B. This is because Guy A had more kids than Guy B and Guy A’s kids had more kids than guy B’s kids so if you wait long enough guy B’s genes would have been nearly extinct.
So if we take this analogy and apply it to our life. The reason why most guys have a high libido is that having a high libido was/is favored in the gene pool, therefore, most guys are direct descendants of the sexual deviants.
This isn’t to excuse this behaviour because unlike all beasts humans can have an urge and not act on it. More importantly our actions are predominated by culture almost as much as it is by our genetics. This is due to the fact that humans unlike dogs have the ability to spread memes. I don’t mean the Facebook kind but the Richard Dawkins kind. For example, biologists can determine the sexual promiscuity of animals by comparing their testicle size to their body mass. So for example chimpanzees use sex for this currencies so (pardon the phraseology) have big balls when compared to their weight. Gorillas on the other hand are strictly monogamous so (pardon the phraseology) have little balls. Humans, on the other hand, fall somewhere in the middle, skewing more towards gorillas. However, people are observed as being strictly monogamous in most part of the world. But in others, we notice that polygamy flourishes.
How can this be the case if we start with the same species?
This is because each culture has different memes which influence our sexuality. This raises a particular set of implications that I would like to investigate here when it comes to homosexuality.
(This should go without saying because it’s 2017, but nothing is wrong with being a homosexual).
There is a lot of debate on how homosexuality arises and if culture has any impact on it or if it’s purely genetic. I very much doubt that there is a single “gay” gene which prompts people to become homosexuals. It is more likely that there are a series of genes that when combined prompts people to invert their sexual preferences. Because if we use our Ryan Reynolds logic we should see that people with the homosexual gene are less likely to have kids due to the fact that they are less sexually interested in the other sex. Also if homosexuality was a result of just one gene we would expect families where the gene to be a homosexual like the gene to not produce enough HGH would be more apparent in some families than others.
The other thing I find interesting is that more people identify as LGBTQ than ever before. For the sake of brevity, I will just talk about the LGB side. If more people identify as LGB now this is because of one of two things. Either more people are conformable coming forward. Meaning that some were practicing homosexuals in private but did not tell surveys such. Or we are more socially accepting of it and therefore more likely to bring out latent homosexuals as active (to be clarified on soon). We know it’s one of these two things because human evolution doesn’t just change over night, therefore, our natural dispositions should remain constant.
The later argument catches a lot of flack politically because when not reasoned out correctly is plain and blatant stupidity used to subvert people’s natural rights and freedoms. As we established before however, culture has a very real effect on sexuality and should by extension have the same effect on a portion of the LBG community. For instance, we had cultures such as the Roman empire where homosexuality was normalised (as long as you’re not the one being penetrated but that’s a story for another time). The notion that just because homosexuality arises entirely independent of culture is somewhat discredits the movement is nonsensical at best and completely devoid of thought at worse.
Some members of the LBG community will be LGB no matter what situation they are put in and no matter what point throughout history. But in cultures where the idea is never even heard of let alone, taboo will make it very hard to become LBG independently. If anything I feel the fact that culture plays a role in homosexuality gives it more credence because it adheres to the same laws that heterosexual people do.
One more time for the people it’s 2017, but nothing is wrong with being a homosexual.
Let’s finish this post up by going back to my boy guy A and guy B. After reading all that I wrote about them you may be wondering that if they imply that women, as well as men, will have this same sexual urge that men have “to frolic about.” The answer is no because the sexual evolution of males and females are different because the payoffs for each gender is different (more on that soon). This means there are some sexual discrepancies between males and females, but THEY DO NOT MATTER IN THE AGGREGATE. I will say this one more time males and females have different biological tendencies, but they do not matter in the aggregate.
To better understand this, we need to use a little bit of game theory that I will dull down to the absolute minimum.
I think we can all agree that after the baby is conceived women have to put in more work to turn that fetus into a child. They have to carry it around, eat for it, be physically impaired by it to a certain extent and they have to birth it. This costs a lot of energy points which means that unless it’s absolutely crucial, natural selection will not favor this in the gene pool. On the other hand, the guy who did said insemination can leave as soon as he finished ejaculating and never show up again. In both of these cases, the genes from both parties will be passed on despite the asymmetry in energy expenditure.
To avoid this, evolution started favoring women who were coyer. Meaning that women will not just sleep with men willy nilly before the age of condoms. This is because by “playing hard to get” women are more likely to keep the suitors who are likely to stay thereby reducing the asymmetry.
Again it is worth reminding you that women didn’t evolve to be more coy just like that. Women became more coy because the women who weren’t coy died and therefore their genes weren’t passed on.
However, these discrepancies still exist in the population seeing that men have longer lasting libido’s and are genetically pre-disposed (as mentioned earlier) to be semi-promiscuous.
Bonus content the human penis:
The reason why I chose the human penis as my bonus is two-fold. The first reason is like I said earlier I had HGH deficiencies which meant I only started to hit puberty at 14 and by hit puberty, I mean start puberty. When I was 9-10 my loser friends who shan’t be named claimed that their penises at 9 or 10 years old were 20cm and 25cm respectively.
Let that sink in for a second.
Me knowing nothing and having nothing to compare those measures to besides porn thought this was the norm. So until I was about 16 and was in the 10th grade I basically looked up literally everything to know about penises and I need to share my knowledge with the world. The second reason I chose penises is because their evolution was influenced my a plethora of things.
It’s important and hilarious to note that humans have by far the biggest penis among primates. Without getting into the details of semen displacement theory (I know sorry) a longer penis is more likely to inseminate women making larger penises more successful in the gene pool and therefore more prominent. Furthermore, penis’s act as a signalling mechanism for females. Meaning that a woman who sees a guy with a big penis is more likely to think that the man is better off overall making them more likely to reproduce and spread this gene.
However, there are evolutionary pressures which push the penis size back down otherwise, the average length of penises would constantly be growing. This is because on the upper bound women are less likely to sleep with men on the count that there is only so much space between her vagina and her cervix.
Batman Is a Superhero Shut Up Wesley
Back in my youth, I used to get into passionate arguments with my friend Wesley about a multitude of topics. We were both fairly skilled at the art of argument (I more so of course), so we had some nice battles. However, as much I hate to admit it when it came to the thing that was nearest and dearest to my heart (Batman) Wesley managed to argue circles around me. He had the audacity, the unmitigated gall, the intrepidity, the valorousness and [insert another word I found using a thesaurus] to question whether or not Batman is a superhero.
So now, five years later, I come back to this argument stronger and wiser and finally ready to defend the honor of my beloved Batman.
The crux of Wesley’s blasphemous argument is that Batman cannot be a superhero because he is not super. To be super, one must defy human limits like Superman or get a magic ring like the Green Lanterns. But here is the problem with that line of thinking, Wesley defines the word superhero to fit his paradigm and not using the actual denotation of the term.
Which is a problem because contrary to popular belief words mean very specific things so we can’t bastardize the definition of a word to fit our world view (which should come as a surprise to many). So I took the liberty of looking up the word for you guys.
At first glance you guys are probably on Wesley’s side right now because to be a superhero one must have superhuman powers and Batman doesn’t have any superhuman powers right Zein?
Wrong voice in my head, Batman has superhuman powers, and I’m going to tell you why. In the definition of the word superhero, the operative prefix super and the word superhuman are defined like this.
I would argue that compared to an average person Batman shows exceptional ability or powers. He’s the only person who’s managed to dodge Darkside’s Omega beams (they’re very fast), he’s one of the few beings in the universe who bested Superman, and he’s the greatest fighter (in my opinion) in the DC universe. To be a superhero one must be super and to be super one must be significantly better than the average man in certain respects which I feel fairly safe in claiming Batman does.
The word Wesley is looking for is supra from the Latin word supra (creative) meaning above. See Batman is not above human he can’t run near the speed of light or punch dimensions together, so he is by no means a suprahero. But he is the best goddam superhero the world has ever seen.
Batman is the real Superman, and I don’t mean in the Speeding Bullets comic where Superman was raised by the Waynes. I mean that Batman is the true Übermensch and that Superman is actually not super at all. This is because of course if you take any loser Kryptonian and put him on earth he’d be the GOAT. So calling Clark Kent a superman is like calling a Bugatti a super skateboard. We should call Kal-El perfectly average Kryptonian if we want to be pedantic.
Also, Wesley I apologise for putting you on blast like this but the people had to know the truth.
Time To Talk About Practice
“We talking bout practice man, how silly is that?”-Allen Iverson
Yes, Allen, we’re talking about practice because practice is important and I exist to talk about the unimportant important stuff.
So the point of this post is to help answer the age old question:
Am I good because I was born this way (word to Lady Gaga) or am I good because I worked hard?
Both, in an abstract way, are pretty messed up if you think about it.
The first layer of reasoning in the case of pure natural talent. You’re good at something that you didn’t have to work that hard at. More importantly, you’re better at something than someone who’s worked more than you, sometimes by a significant margin. This just highlights the blatant inequities of the world. But if you want to dig a little bit deeper you may think to yourself:
“What if I’m the person who has to work harder?”
What if you picked the proverbial short straw and your limits are forever limited by what you can’t control.
Yikes.
By this point, the hard work ethos may sound more attractive to you because you put your blood sweat and tears.
Or, as Winston Churchill would say “[your] blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Which doesn’t sound as nice but you do you, Winston.
So let’s say for some reason or another your prefer thinking that your success is a result of your hard work, such is your predilection. Let me tell you why that’s messed up.
This line of thinking means you are not special in any way shape or form and the only reason you have said success is due to something that is easily duplicable by somebody else with the sole caveat that they actually have to try.
Yikes 2.0.
I’m going to break this post down into a series of thoughts which are loosely correlated. Which is a new format for me so let’s see how this goes.
Thought #1:
There is an interesting dichotomy when it comes to practice.
Practicing suffers heavily from diminishing marginal returns of time. Meaning that the more you spend working on a particular skill, the less output you get per extra hour work.
For instance, Steph Curry practicing his 3 point shot for [insert insane amount here] means that he’s not developing his skill anymore, it’s as good as its ever going to be, but he practices just to maintain his ability not to add to it.
One the other hand, when you go to the gym your first year leads to the most “maximum gainz” and this decreased as the years fade.
This leads to an interesting implication, which is that over a period of time the performance gap. Which was previously formed because of practice will slowly be eroded with time.
But this is somewhat mitigated by the compounding effect. Which is a fancy way of saying that, the more you practice over time the effect of training over an nth number of years will lead to an insane amount of gainz.
Thought #2:
The myth of the 10,000 rule is something that isn’t going to go away anytime soon. I mean why should it? It tells you that the only difference between you and your aspirations is work.
But I never understood two things about this theory:
-Firstly, wouldn’t this then imply that the reason you aren’t as good or great as you’d like to be is due to your inaction?
-Secondly, the 10,000 hours or the 10^4 hours rule was first brought into the public’s consciousness in the book Outliers. In said book, this theory came with one of the biggest disclaimers I’ve ever seen. Which went along the lines “if you have a necessary baseline of talent and then put 10,000 of work in then you’d become exceptional”. This rule is meant to be the difference when comparing Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, not you and the athlete you see on TV.
Thought #3:
If you look at any current Olympic record or any physical/mental record now and compare it with those of yesteryear one would jump to the conclusion that we’ve evolved to a higher form of being.
One of my favorite examples of this, which kind of get’s blown out of proportion in a motivational sense, is Roger Bannister and the 4-minute mile. Before him running said mile the consensus du jour was that it was not physically possible for a person of the human race to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But nowadays good high school athletes run this, and it’s not a big deal.
One of the primary hypothesis as to why things like this happen is because of things such as better shoes, surfaces and what not, but also because we got better at learning/teaching how to run and we also know more about the human physique thereby making us acutely aware on how to boost performance.
Although that accounts for the differential in results across generations that shouldn’t matter with people living in the same moment of history. This is if we make (what I consider) to be a fair assumption by stating most of the people within a generation have access to relatively equal resources.
If we take the assumptions I just made as true this would imply that although the average level of talent is being raised every year, the distribution of talent remains unaltered. Meaning that the best individuals who work the hardest will still be better than the average but both are increasing every year, but the differential remains the same.
But if we take an average athlete today and send him back 100 years we’d consider him of the same ilk as Hercules and Thor.
Thought #4:
A lot of what we know about practice shouldn’t be applied to sports for a plethora of different reasons. But for the sake of word count, I’m going to talk about two of them.
A lot of the literature which has to do with practice focuses on the infinite malleability of the brain and how deliberate practice (more on that later) is what allows you to be great at certain things. But what sometimes gets overlooked in sports is the idea that although our minds can make us do great things, there is a finite physical limit of what we can do. This is especially prevalent when it comes to explosive sports where success is directly correlated with how fast you can run, how high you can jump, so on and so forth.
A prime example of this phenomenon would be track and field. You can be taught since birth how to run but unless you have the physical tools necessary there is a very hard limit as to how much you can excel in said sport no matter how hard you practice. So in sports, like this talent is by far and away the number one determinant of success.
Also, if you think about it, when you are younger the differential in skill between two people playing a sport is negligible as compared to the differential in athleticism. So at a younger age, those who are more physically developed are more likely to get playing time and practice time creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thought #5:
A lot has made of deliberate practice which is a very specific way one would seek to improve.
An example of deliberate practice would be trying to improve one’s free throw stroke by first practicing keeping one’s elbow tucked, then the extension of one’s arm, then the backspin of the ball, and then the arc of the shot. As you can probably tell this type of practice is incredibly tedious and grueling.
But hey it works! You can overcome the talent barrier with this form of practice!
A lot of successful runners, swimmers, whatever and whatever use this, whether they know it or not, and they credit this with being the difference in their careers.
But deliberate practice, unlike other forms of practice, is not widely used or known. Therefore it’s very much within the realm of possibility that the reason why people are successful is because they use deliberate practice, or more precisely because other’s are not using deliberate practice.
This is further confounded if you think about it through the prism of game theory. The reason why deliberate practice is so successful is because not many people use it. Therefore if it were to become a social norm, it would be less successful, and the talent gap is still very much present.
Anywho,
Hope you guys learned a thing or two
Shami out
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