So here we are for the first Q and A for 2018.

Um, there's 514 questions lined up.

I don't think I'm gonna get to all of them.

So it's being a busy time since the last time I get a Q and A.

Some of you probably know about the Wind Lindsay Shepherd affair at Wilfred Laurier University, where a teaching assistant was brought in front of a tribunal because she had the temerity to play a video where I was discussing Bill See 16 on a public television show that's been quite the national in interview national scandal, I would say.

And so I made a bit of a video about that today, which I haven't launched yet contains a message to junior high and high school students.

I'm recommending to them that they well, I guess you'll have to watch the video.

Um, I didn't mean to make it a cliffhanger like that, but then soon as I said that, I thought better of it and thought, Maybe I'll just wait.

But anyways, let's take a look here.

Steve A.

Has the first question.

How can we know the difference between unhealthy repression and healthy self restraint of sexuality.

Well, I would say no part of what constitutes ethics.

Let's say, First of all, let's start.

Let's think about ethics to begin with.

So what's the point of conducting your life ethically and the answer that isn't so that you follow the proper rules?

Precisely.

The the answer to that is so that you balance your life so that it says productive and meaningful as it can possibly be.

And that would be productive and meaningful for you with any luck.

But also for people around you that would even be better and and for you now and next week and into the future.

So it's sort of a variation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant's moral dictum, which was act such that your action becomes a moral universal.

Something like that.

Although I think that it's it's better phrased across time and across people like that.

Um, so when you're thinking about an ethic that has to do with any fundamental motivation, like sexuality, you have to think about it in the context of the rest of your life.

The question is whether or not But what did I say?

what what I read at one point that I really liked with regards to sexuality.

Who's in control?

That's the issue.

Is that you?

Or is it the sexuality that's in control?

Is Have you integrated your sexual life into the rest of your life so that the whole thing makes a harmonious balance?

And are you in charge?

Or is it in charge, so to speak?

Because if you're not in charge with that harmonious balance, then things are going toe waiver wildly out of control, and you're going to find yourself in dreadful trouble.

That happens whenever any given drive or me really any given value predominates to the exclusion of all else.

Now it seems to me that sexuality is best handled within the confines of a relationship.

That's the classic ethical solution to the problem.

It's because sexuality brings with it a tremendous amount of responsibility.

Now people don't like to think that, especially people who I would say are low in conscientiousness.

Let's say are high and impulsivity.

It's easy for people to believe in What would you call it?

Casual sex, which is not something that I think exists because I don't think you can divorce sex from its sociological or political or economic or psychological consequences.

And I would say the endless scandals that have plagued the United States in particular in the last year with regards to sexual behavior are proof positive that there's no such thing as casual sex.

I think the reason for that is that the consequences of sex are too dramatic.

It's not just pregnancy and disease, let's say which are both, um, as dramatic as consequences can be in life, but also the fact that there's no disentangling sexual behavior from emotional behavior.

Or maybe you could say, even worse.

If you try to disentangle your sexual behavior from your emotional behavior, then I think what happens is that you end up cold and cynical.

I mean, if you're, let's say, if your ah cereal, if you're us, if you have a lot of one night stands and a lot of casual partners, then first of all, there's not much discrimination between one partner and the other.

And so in some sense you're in a loop and just repeating the same act over and over.

But you can't.

There's nothing deep about it.

There's nothing that that enables you to establish a relationship with another person, and I think that that's a I think that you corrupt your soul in that way and that you hurt yourself across time.

And, of course you're going to hurt other people as well.

So I'm not a big admirer of the casual sex idea.

I think it's a demented adolescence fantasy.

Fundamentally, it just doesn't work out in the real world Now, healthy self restraint well with regard to sexuality it's the same with everything else is that there's there's the necessity to forgo immediate gratification for the purpose of medium to long term thriving.

Let's say so.

If your sexuality is integrated in an ethic that encompasses the rest of your life, and if it serves that ethic, then I would say it's properly restrained.

If it's unhealthy, only repressed.

Well, then you're angry and bitter and resentful and cursing the opposite sex or perhaps the same sex.

If you happen to be gay for failing to recognize your particular form of sexual, what would you call attractiveness?

I think resentment and anger are good indication that there's something wrong with the manner in which your sexuality is restraint so I hope hopefully that's a decent answer, Trav MOOCs says.

Why are dragons in Western culture?

Brinker's of death and destruction that must be slain while in the East the importance of good fortune to be revered?

Well, that's a great question.

By the way, the Dragon the Dragon, already defined the dragon at some point partly from a book I read a while back on dragons as a tree cat, snake bird.

The idea in the book was that the dragon was a imagistic representation of the class of all predators.

Which means also might be why dragons also breathe fire, because fire was undoubtedly a common destructive agent in our evolutionary past.

But the dragon is the most primordial simp symbol of that which lurks beyond which is known.

In fact, it's even more primordial than that, because it even is that which lurks beyond what is unknown in some sense.

Remember Don Rumsfeld?

Unknowns, unknown unknowns?

Well, that's basically the dragon.

There's some unknowns that pop up that you could master right away, and you could kind of think of those as known unknowns.

But unknown unknowns are those things that pop up that you don't know now you didn't even you have no idea whatsoever that they even existed Anyways.

What's the character of an unknown unknown?

What part of it's terrifying?

Because it can.

It can.

It can do you in right, but part of it's also positive, because anything that's truly unknown brings it with it.

A tremendous amount of new possibility.

That's why Dragon's Hoard Golder, why they also horde princesses or guard princesses.

Hard, I would say, is the right word.

So I don't think the dragon in the West is a fully negative symbol because the dragon has gold associated with it or virgins.

And the reason for that is that the hero who confronts the dragon gets the Virgin, and that hasn't changed.

That's that's a story is oldest time, and I don't think it'll ever change.

As long as there are human beings now, why the Chinese put stress on the positive side and the West put stress on the negative side is difficult to say, I might say, because the Chinese got organized so early, I have a sneaking suspicion that it was easier for them to see a little bit of chaos.

Is something positive, something necessary and positive as a counterbalance to the tremendous organization weight of their state.

Um, that's the best best answer that I've been able to formulate.

Um, so so, anyways, the dragon is a very complex and ambivalent symbol.

It it combines everything into one symbol, positive and negative, and then you could stress the positive where you could stress the negative.

You could also say to some degree that whether a dragon is positive or negative depends to some degree on the manner in which you approach it.

Because the psychological reality is that Dragon's approached voluntarily well, small are most likely to be positive.

And that's a really good thing to know in your life.

It's a good reason.

It's a good rule of thumb to help you stop avoiding things that you shouldn't avoid so that they don't grow and magnified beyond your capacity to deal with them.

You often mention disciplining Children so they behave.

What is your advice for making them behave without resorting to corporal punishment?

Well, first of all, it depends on what you mean by corporal punishment.

Timeout could be regarded this corporal punishment.

It also depends very much on the age of the child, Um, let's say a two year old.

Well, in my new book, by the way, I have a chapter in there called Don't let your Children do anything that makes you dislike them.

And the reason that I wrote a chapter about that is because people who let their Children do things that make them dislike thumb end up disliking them.

And because there's a huge power differential, generally speaking, between adults and Children.

If you end up disliking your Children because they're not behaving well, they're behaving disgracefully, say, or there or there, challenging your position in the authority hierarchy to regularly something you won't put up with.

By the way, even if you think you will, it's necessary to get your disciplinary routine straight.

So the first thing I would say is figure out what the rules are.

There shouldn't be too many for two year olds.

Basically, they have to know what no means, and they also have to learn as they approach three, not to kick hit bite or steel.

Essentially now it's easy to train a two year old, but no means you can actually start with a child.

That's only 13 months old.

A child that can cry.

Let's say that or that can crawl.

Let's say that you have a child.

It's starting to crawl and wants to explore the house.

So the first thing you do if you have any sense, is try to get rid of most things that the child could cause a tremendous amount of trouble with two to the things or to the child, so that it's reasonably safe.

Um, and then the child is gonna want to want to crawl around and get into everything.

And so, But maybe there are things you don't want him or her to get into.

Like maybe there is a uh oh, what would we say?

Maybe there's Ah, tablecloth.

And on top of the table cloth, there's a plant.

Or maybe there's some plants on the floor.

And when the child is crawling and goes off to do something that he or she shouldn't, you could just grab his leg and you know gently but firmly and say no.

And the child will keep trying to move forward because they're stubborn little blinders, and you can continue to say no.

And if you persist with saying no then the child will eventually give up and sort of go limp.

Now, now and often the child will cry when you do that.

And, of course, that might make you feel guilty.

But what that means is that you've effectively brought the behavior to a halt.

And if you do that 10 times, you gotta watch your child.

And don't stop them from exploring things that they need to explore.

And you want to use this sort of thing with judiciously, you can grab them by the leg and say, No, no, no, and wait until they give up.

Usually they'll cry, and then you can let them go.

And then soon after you do that about 10 times soon, then if you just say no with the same tone of voice, the child will generally what happens.

The child will immediately cry and then stop.

And then, after about 10 repeats of know without having the lake grab, then no, we'll just produce stopping of the behavior.

And that's unbelievably useful because as soon as your train your child to understand what no means, then they really have free rein of the house in some sense, with relative minimal supervision from you.

First of all, they can learn what things they're not supposed to get into.

And it's amazing how fast Children can learn that on how fast they can generalize to the class of things that they shouldn't get into.

Like you don't have to teach them every single thing they can generalize very rapidly.

That's not much different than thinking, but also once they are capable of understanding what no means, you have an extremely potent means of helping them regulate their behavior with a minimum of intervention.

So that's unbelievably useful.

So now let's say you have a two year old who's pretty contentious, and two year olds are pretty contentious, some of them in particular because about 5% of two year olds most of them are male, are quite aggressive by temperament.

And those are the ones that, if you put with other two year olds, will frequently kick, hit, bite or steal.

Not all kids are like that, but some are.

Most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're about four.

Now let's say you have an et tu.

They also start to experiment with saying no back and also with misbehaving, although they can do that even younger than that.

So if you have a two year old who's particularly rambunctious and who decides he isn't going to listen to you, we use he in this example because it's boys that are more likely to misbehave and not I not.

Listen, you can.

You can pick them up and you know, by the arms.

Now you got to get your attitude right, because you don't want to be stupid.