Livemike

"We negotiate. Our child wants something, so the negotiation begins. “I’ll buy that if you behave” is echoed in the aisles of stores all across America. " So right from the start she doesn't know the difference between negotiations and protection racketeering. This is not a good start. Yeah you don't have to negotiate about things you should get for free, like some peace while you're shopping. That's doesn't mean you get to dictate everything. "We clean his room. Sometimes we just can’t take it anymore. His room looks like a bomb hit it. Dirty clothes, wet towels, unmade bed — shit everywhere... Yet, he is still allowed to go to all of his planned activities and play dates. He’s still allowed to watch TV for a couple of hours and have friends over." Yeah unless it's a smell/health issue, why do you care? He's still a free human being who should be allowed to do things he likes if they don't hurt others. If it is a genuine simply refuse to do him favors like giving him a lift until it's clean. Clearly the trying to bully him approach isn't working why not try negotia... oh right, you're not good at that. "We carry the backpack. Yes, it’s heavy. I know. Sometimes stuff is heavy. She has homework to do. When we pick up our kid and proceed to carry everything out to the car for her, we are doing too much." Taking bets, who thinks this woman got men to carry the heavy stuff all her life. "I do not remember ever being asked what I wanted for dinner... I remember being served only four meal variations: chicken, meatloaf, spaghetti, and this really disgusting pork chops and red rice creation that I loathed. " Wow, so did your mom not communicate with you well enough to know you "loathed" that "really disgusting " meal, your words, or did she delibately do something that made you feel bad over 900 times? Moms and governments, the ideal jobs for when asking for or responding to feedback is just too much effort. "His plans trump ours. “Sorry we can’t go, Bobby has a game.” This is okay — most of the time. Of course we want to go to the game. But other times, the game (and Bobby) must take a back seat to our life. Bobby will do just fine getting a ride." This bits reasonable, the point of children's sports shouldn't be to please their parents anyway, and yes there are sometimes more important things going on. Then again if you want them to sit through your boring dinner with whoever you want to impress some tit for tat might not go astray. "We fail to give them chores or responsibilities. If the kid isn’t setting the table, clearing the table, loading a dishwasher, raking leaves, or taking the dog out, then the kid should be paying rent." Again this is reasonable, the house doesn't keep itself and if it's not unreasonable to expect a kid to help out. "We make excuses for bad behavior or grades. We all seem to make this mistake. Bad behavior is bad behavior. “She’s tired and hungry” is a terrible excuse." Well it is if she actually controls her sleep times and food. Yeah making excuses for bad behavior is bad, but not finding out why it happened in the first place is worse. "We argue with the teacher and the coach. It’s important to stick up for our kids, but only after our kids have advocated for themselves." Umm... why? Whether or not your kids advocate for themselves shouldn't affect whether or not you stick up for them. Whether they are actually in the right does. " When a teacher remarks that our child has less than diligent work habits, believe her. " Wow, just believe her. Don't bother to assess facts or ask for evidence, let alone get the other side of the story. Just let someone with an obvious conflict of interest tell you something and believe it. If you ever need to get out of jury duty I'll be there. But OK let's say we believe her, why should a kid develop good work habits about something "Attention is good. Involved parents are wonderful. But, it’s how attentive and involved we are that does the damage. When we let our kids negotiate, we are doing it wrong. " So you should be involved, but only in a way that doesn't grant them agency, then get surprised when they're not fired up about doing what we want them to do. "All kids need to learn to eat pork chops with chunky red rice and canned green beans once in a while. It builds character." No it breeds submission to mindless garbage that could have been avoided if you had the slightest empathy.

Yeah there was no history of violence against children in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade, all those children who were taken in wars and sold for centuries before that trade raised peacefully as were those that enslaved them. Because lots of peacefully parented societies have generations of slave-taking warfare.

The big question that determines the economic effect on Britain of the Brexit is how big a bitch the EU will be towards it. If the EU decides to be calm, rational and to arrange the trade deal that will most benefit it's remaining members then Brexit won't cause major harm to Britain or the EU. If they attempt to punish Britain for it's desire to leave them both Europe and England will be significantly harmed. The greater the degree of malice and spite the greater the harm. So EU leaders, will they be calm and sane, basically reasonable but a little bitchy, basically bitchy but with some reason or sugar-in-your-ex's-tank spiteful?

If race was a social construct then it should be impossible to tell whether a given skeleton is an Australian Aboriginal by it's bone structure or it's DNA. It is possible to do both. Nobody is denying that there are thousands of years of population separation between different ethnic groups, with little or no interbreeding during that time. Basic genetics would say that in that time different genes would be promoted in the different environments and even without that effect some genes would be more common in some populations by sheer chance. The fact that different genes have become more common in some populations than in others is literally as plain as the nose on your face. Of course it is possible that only genes that make surface cosmetic changes or no changes at all are the only ones being promoted. Except that right off the top of my head I can name at least 2 types of genes (lactose tolerance and sickle-cell anemia) that were promoted in some races but not in others. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/ Note that people have the same race according to genetic clusters as they do according to self-indentified race/ethnicity.

God gets the most BASIC moral fact wrong. Morality is about what choices you should make and nothing else. Therefore it is impossible t be born immoral or to have your immorality removed by another's act. That attributing of moral value to things other than consensual acts* is the root of all evil. * That is where the thing is consented to by the actor whose morality we're evaluating. Obviously if you don't consent to something the acts of those who impose it on you can still be morally significant.

Which would you prefer, making a product for $5 and selling it for $6 or making a product for $10 and selling it for $13? Businesses want to produce the product with the greatest surplus of price over cost, not that with the lowest cost.

The whole ediface of the State, the guns, the fraud, the prisons, it's not for money or even power. It's for justification. Nothing is done except to justify that which is done. Now partly this is because without the justification some fear (rightly in many cases) that they will be torn apart. Mostly it's because how people are seen is literally the most important thing in some people's lives.

Mr. Ali called it like he saw it. He refused to be a slave or to toe the State's line. Although he knew that he could get a cushy rear eschalon job he denied the state his sanction for it's vicious war, and for that his career was crippled. He inspired millions. Oh yeah and I think he was some sort of athlete as well.

Donnadogsoth, on 13 May 2016 - 10:38 AM, said: > The claim that something as complex as the Universe came into being out of nothing, for no reason, is in the running. No it's not. Nobody claimed that. But even if they did it would still be less extraordinary than a being that could make the universe come into existance. > Saying that me being a sentient, sapient being is less extraordinary than me being an automaton is so because of your paradigm. A > primitive tribesman might say that you denying rocks and trees sentience is more extraordinary than believing the obvious truth that > everything is ensouled. Except that of course we see no evidence that rocks have souls. >I think you need something more than gauging extraordinariness in order to decide on a paradigm, because the paradigm is what > decides the gauge. I have something to guage extraordinariness, it's called reason and evidence.

"I have listened to quite a few hours if Chomsky's lectures and interviews and I still have no idea whether he is is fundamentally against the initiation of violence/force, or whether he thinks that it is a legitimate tool in some situations, or what those situations would be, or what the criteria would be for determining when force is appropriate." Then you do have a pretty good idea whether he is is fundamentally against the initiation of violence/force. Because if he was fundamentally against the use of force it wouldn't take that long to tell.

Then she does not seem to be very open to self-knowledge and doing what it takes to have a healthy relationship.

Then why isn't the woman bound by the results? She can have an abortion, meaning she doesn't have to deal with the results of her actions. He on the other hand has to deal with the results of her actions especially considering the pill works to an extremely high level of reliability.

I can establish that you do things that sentient beings do. While it's possible that you're actually a robot with a set of responses preprogrammed by a time traveler, a brain scan should reveal the truth. Even if I can't scan your brain saying that you're a time-traveler-constructed robot is the more extraordinary claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence while the reverse does not, it being less extraordinary. There is no more extraordinary claim than an omnipotent being.

"It is not theft if you receive something in return." This was refuted in 1976 by a reggae band*, so we can assume that the author has no points worthy of note. * "Well he looked down at my silver chain He said I'll give you one dollar I said you've got to be jokin' man It was a present from me mother He said I like it I want it I'll take it off your hands And you'll be sorry you crossed me You'd better understand that you're alone A long way from home." 10 Cc - Dreadlock Holiday

For a hypothesis to be falsiable there has to be something that can't happen if it's true, or something that must happen if it's true. With God you can't have that. No matter what test you apply either or any result could happen if God wanted it to happen. Now you might think that this would allow God to be demonstrable if he wanted to be. But any test for God would in fact be a test for a being with at least a certain amount of power and/or knowledge. There might be a being with that amount of power and knowledge who isn't God. Even if you were to ask God to make mile high letters of fire spelling "Yahweh is the one true God" in the sky, what would that prove? At best that a being or beings who can do exists and he/they wants you to believe in your God. That doesn't prove he is that God or that that God exists. God will always be unfalsifable, by design. Mr. Diety did a good video on this.

"He seems particularly hateful of his eldest boy who has just turned 7." That would be the kid who put into his partner when he was 19-20? Yeah pretty sure that wasn't deliberate, particularly if he had a bad father himself. So I'm guessing he resents the kid for killing off whatever dreams he had. Did he only become abusive after he lost full-time work or was it before that? If the latter then I'd be wary of any improvement that comes after he claims it's about financial stress.

Yeah I gave up after "All the scientists who are saying spanking fucks you up were spanked, and presumably they're of right mind enough to be scientists" A) We don't know what proportion of scientists investigating spanking were spanked, we can't even GUESS that number. B) Being a scientist does not require you to be in top mental health shape. C) Even if it did that would not mean that spanking wasn't bad, it would just mean it wasn't so bad it's impossible to be a scientists after it. Which we already knew. One sentence 3 logical fallacies.

Ok first thing he mentions is racist police, which is no part of the market or capitalism. So already he's including things that have nothing to do with capitalism on capitalism. Second thing he mentions is "the democratic process" which is very much a government monopoly. You can't set up competing elections. Third thing is "species after species is driven to extinction as the rich lay waste to ". Ok so this is the first thing that isn't a complete government monopoly that he's mentioned, but even here non-market forces, especially government have a large role in most extinctions, many of which aren't the result of "the rich" doing anything. Poor people kill things and destroy habitat too. "mercilessly exploit women in sweatshops" First of all I love how he focuses on the women rather than say, men dying by the thousands in the mining industry in the third world, many of whom would give their right ball to work in a sweatshop. But he comes afoul of Price's Law Of Poverty Reduction. If someone is offering the poor a deal that makes them better off and you want to criticize that deal, either have a better deal or shut the fuck up. Of course these sweatshops are in places where historically capitalism has been weak, but he ignores this. "and bomb countless populations into oblivion" Again a government monopoly. "profit is the bottom line, it comes before everything" Well no. Not even to the people making the profit does it come before everything. If they had a choice between making a profit and not getting lethal cancer the chances are pretty good they'd choose not getting cancer. Most businessmen could probably make more profit if they completely ignored their family and socialised only in business circles or where they could gain some sort of profitable connection. In general they don't do that. Even then profit is only important to those who make it, and perhaps their dependants. Everyone else doesn't give a damn, except that they know without profit entrepeneurs will stop dealing with them. It's no more true to say that capitalism is obssessed with profit than it is to say it's obsessed with wages or rent, since more people earn those than profit. "profit matters more than protecting our environment" Well that depends on how much profit and how much environment protection we're talking about. Nobody thinks profit enough to buy a used Corrolla is worth that pouring lethal levels of lead and cadmium into every river in the USA. Nobody thinks that sacrificing enough wealth to send every child in the USA to university is a good idea if it saves the Western Spotted Mosquito. Everyone is between these two extremes, which means that saying "profit matters more than protecting our environment" without mentioning any specific level of either is meaningless. "profit matters more than acting in an ethical way" He doesn't define this, but it's said over footage of a factory pig farm so I'm assuming he's talking about treating animals right. But here's the thing, it's not profit that is put ahead of animal welfare, not really, it's wages. If workers insisted on buying only meat from humanely kept animals then there would be no profit in factory farming. Workers don't do that because they care more about high real wages than they do about animal welfare. In fact in all cases consumers, who are mostly workers, decide what ethics they consider acceptable for firms selling to them. They decide ethics not entrepeneurs, although entrepeneurs may override their preferences and be more "ethical" (by their own standards) at the cost of their own profit. "profit matters more than the health of the general public" Well that depends on how much profit and how much health we're talking about. Nobody thinks profit enough to buy a used Corrolla is worth that pouring everyone dying by age 40. Nobody thinks that sacrificing enough wealth to send every child in the USA to university is a good idea if it stops one case of cancer . Everyone is between these two extremes, which means that saying "profit matters more than protecting the health of he general public " without mentioning any specific level of either is meaningless. Yes that paragraph was a copy and paste of the environment one, because the points are exactly equivalent. Then there's the real Marxism (this guy is not a "left libertarian" he's a hardcore commie. He introduces the idea of "economic reproduction" the idea that capitalists will pay enough so that workers won't starve, because they need the workers to live to work the means of production. He says that having workers is most important, more than having a market, showing that he's totally ignorant of economics. His reasoning is typical of "class" thinking, regarding people as members of a class that are concerned with advancing the interests of that class rather than their own. Consider a capitalist that employs 100,000 people in an economy of 100M workers. Suppose wages make up 50% of his expenses and that if he paid 10% higher wages he could stop 10% of his workers starving to death per year. So increasing the wages would cost 5% of total costs and mean that population would increase 0.1%. So it would do almost nothing to increase the labor supply for the capitalist and send costs up a crippling amount. Of course this is irrelevant because what limits the number of workers employed by a capitalist is not the total amount,but he amount that can't find better work elsewhere. Opportunity cost, not cost to maintain the worker is what is important. Of course Marxist theory depends on the "iron law of wages" that says if wages go up, more workers survive, increasing labor supply and thus lowering wages. This however depends on the adjustment being pretty much instant and large enough to overwhelm the higher wages. Sure if workers have more money they are more children, but those children don't become workers for years. In the meantime they demand more goods, so there is MORE demand for labor, meaning more demand for labor. Addditionally workers won't put all their resources to having more children, they'll purchase other luxuries as well*. So feeding and providing necessitites to the new workers won't consume the entire surplus of wages above necessitiy. "they're interested in keeping you healthy enough to work but no healthier" As though there was a level of health "good enough to work" but beyond which you aren't any healthier. "from a catalyst point of view any investment into the health and well-being of the population" Note that employers don't get to decide how much gets invested in that. "the condition of being economically exploited has a negative effect on health and well-being" And yet health massively improved when capitalism came in. The poster doesn't provide any evidence of economic "exploitation" being bad for anyone. I'm going to pause here as he starts on the supposed pyschological effects of the market. I have a feeling that will deserve a post of it's own. * economically having children is a luxury, since they cost resources and you don't have to have them.

"How the market makes us sick" First thing he mentions is a government monopoly industry that has no market competition. Second thing he mentions is the "democratic system" which is also a government monopoly that has no market competition and which is highly rigged to restrict even the entry of candidates within it. Ok so I'm going to bet that he mentions 2 more problematic government monopolies before he mentions the first more free market (but still heavily government controlled) industry. I'll post this before watching more than 23 seconds of it. Ok I was wrong, overexploitation of wildlife isn't a government monopoly, although government contributes to it significantly. But to continue "mercilessly exploit women in sweatshops" notice how that mostly happens in areas where te market has been weakest and government control strongest? And what is wrong with "exploiting" women? If he thinks that they could be better employed elsewhere then by all means he can hire them for better wages. "and bomb countless " And we're back to government monopolies again. "profit matters more than protecting our environment" To who? He's just making things up here. And what does that even mean? Some degree of profit certainly matters more than some degree of protecting our environment because we're not insane. We're not ready to impoverish the entire world to save the Western Spotted Mosquito. We're also not prepared to poison every single river with lethal levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and multiple other heavy metals for profit sufficient to buy a used Corrolla. Everyone is between these two extremes, so saying "profit matters more" depends entirely on where on that spectrum we already are. "profit matters more than behaving in an ethical way" To who and defined how? "profit even matters more than the health of the general public" Again that depends entirely on how much of the health of the general public and how much profit. Nobody is prepared to sacrifice the GDP of Australia to prevent one case of cancer, nobody is prepared to doom everyone to a 40 year lifespan so that someone can have a jetski. This argument is flawed in exactly the same way as the environment argument. "For the capitalist class the health of the public only matters" Classes don't have opinions only people do. And what would it matter what the capitalist class thinks? In a free market they don't get to decide what is acceptable. "and most importantly they need a workforce to operate the means of production" That is not more important than a market for their products. That's a minor point but it shows the complete economic ignorance of the poster. "Capitalists do have an economic interest in paying their workers a wage, but only just enough so that they can stay alive and go to work each day" And here we see the result of class thinking, the idea that people act as members of a class, considering class interests rather than individual ones. While of course capitalists would like capitalists _in general_ to pay enough so that workers can survive and ideally produce lots of children they in particular don't really benefit from doing so. Imagine a society of 100 M people, 95 million of them wage workers. Suppose one really large employer employed 500K people. Suppose wages were 50% of total costs. Increasing their wages by 10% so that they don't starve to death at a rate of say 10% a year would cost 5% of your costs but increase the market by only 0.5%, making it a massive loser for you, if a winner for the capitalist class as a whole. Of course this assumes that people will work for you at wages that mean 10% of them starve to death in any given year. This in turn assumes that nobody will hire them at higher wages than that. But why would the rate of wages that stop you starving be the amount someone is prepared to pay for your labor? This would only be true if increasing wages instantly increased the amount of people available to labor, thus lowering wages back to subsistance level. But there is no reason to believe that increasing wages will increase population in anything like those numbers, even before birth control. Even if it did it would not be instantaneous. People would get higher wages, have children and get them to work usually a minimum of a decade later. So you have at least a decade of people having higher wages but no resultant increase in labor to compete. "make sure they aren't so dissatified with their wages that they want to start a revolution etc." Wages aren't what starts revolutions. Staggeringly poor wages have coexisted with stable regimes, relatively high ones with revolutions. Cuba was pretty rich by Latin American standards before Castro. America was relatively rich (and relatively untaxed) before it's revolution. In any case no individual capitalist will think it his job to pay his workers not to revolt. More class "thinking".

As capital investment goes up wages as a proportion of total expenses go down. Therefore wage increases affect profits less compared to not getting the full value out of the capital. So hiring the best workers is more important, as is just hiring more of them to hasten the parts of the production process that weren't automated. Remember also that it's _real_ (price adjusted) wages that matter. So capital investment that increases supplies of goods makes them cheaper, meaning that real wages go up, even if money wages don't. For instance suppose you worked on a machine costing $1m, that depreachiates 10% or it's original value each year and interest rates are 5%. The costs for using that machine are therefore $150K each year. Suppose a worker could get $250K worth of production out of the machine and he can be hired for 50K a year. That leaves $50K a year profit for the business owner. Now suppose another worker is prepared to work harder, work through the shift so he doesn't have to take coffee breaks etc. and he can boost production by 5%. That means that he's worth employing as long as he doesn't want more than $62,500, so assume you pay him something like $56K. Now imagine you buy a machine that's twice as costly and twice as productive. You put the good work onto that machine and he realises that he is making you a lot more money. If he wants less than $75K it's still worth employing him, because he gives you that much extra profit. The more a business depends on processes that use a lot of labor the less they're prepared to pay for that labor. When the process depends on less labor and more capital they don't care as much.

As long as people in general vote they are saying that democracy can be expected to deliver results. This leads others to believe that people in general believe voting is an effective way to change society. Voting is relatively cost-free even in the US where they make it delibately incovenient. As long as people believe that people believe that voting is effective they are unlikely to use other means of resistance. This is because other forms of resistance rely on other people deciding to resist at the same time. Ask Irwin Shiff how effective a one-man tax refusal is. What is needed is something called a "Schelling point" something that people decide on without consulting each other. A natural point where resistance forms because people believe others will join in at that time and place. When people stop voting it indicates that they do not believe that voting is the way to create change. This means that they are open to the idea that other ways are the best way. As long as they keep voting they are saying that voting isn't worthless and therefore more expensive means of resistance aren't the only way to go. As long as they believe that, and believe others believe that, they are unlikely to engage in active resistance. That's because they implictly indicate that they have another option, that is cheaper and less risky. They will also believe others believe this. When people stop voting it indicates that they don't believe that voting is capable of needed reforms, or any reforms. That means they are more open to the idea of other means, and are more likely to engage in them. Since the voting figures are public it also means they know others are likely to engage in other resistance activities, and so they can be more confidence of gaining the critical mass needed for such actions to work. They also know that others know this creating a positive feedback loop. Legitimacy in the eyes of the people is what appears to keep the State in power, but in fact it's not. What keeps the State in power is the believe that the rest of the population thinks the State is legitimate. Imagine you were in Soviet Russia and you thought that you were the only one who thought that the State was a murderous parasitic leech on the throat of the Russian people. Would you say so or would you see it as a futile gesture of resistance, leading only to your death? Now imagine you thought 1% of the people agreed with you, would you speak out? How about 10%? Probably still no, but 50%, 75%? That's makes it a lot easier. Telling people you don't believe their lies is effective because it undercuts the primary myth that support the State, the myth of inevitablility. Not voting doesn't just send the message that you don't believe the State is good, it sends the message that you don't believe it's lies about being able to influence it. It tells the State, and everyone else, that you know the game is rigged and it's not worth your time. Which implies that you're looking for a new game, without the old players.

Is the BIG immoral? Of course. But then so are all the alternatives that will be forced on us if we don't have it. De facto there is no reason to believe the welfare state is going to end soon. So if you had to design the welfare state so as to be as harmless as possible, how would you design it? Well for a start, eliminate as many bad incentives as you can. One of these incentives is not to take low paying jobs as the loss of dole money is from 50-70% of the wage. Another is the incentive to take courses that aren't worthwhile because the cost of tuition and living while you learn is provided by government. That's not to say that all subsidized courses are bad or even not worth the cost for some people, bu others will enroll only because it's free and they can get student money. There is also the incentive to fake job searching, wasting the time of employers and employment agency personnel. Having more children is also encouraged. So the question is "Is BIG more immoral than what we would get without it?" and I have to say "No.". Sure BiG gives people unearned money, but most of the people that get it paid that much in taxes anyway. There are fewer resources wasted on determining eligibility. Temporary jobs aren't a problem, nor are jobs that might not pay much, but give marketable skills. If BIG goes only to adult citizens then both irresponsible childbearing and parasitic immigration are not encouraged. Really it's hard not to see this as a libertarian win if it happens, provided the old, even more corrupt system is swept away. That being said there's a chance they'll give us both, just to be total hypocrites.

Yes if they're a libertarian they're not a true scotsman.

Wait, is that really a super "hero"?