Magnus

This is sad and disgusting. The government creates these day prisons, which instantly become gladiator academies and instruments of degradation and forced compliance. Then they pretend to be surprised when conflict occurs. The people in this video need to get their heads around an important concept -- "bullying" is a feature of government schools, not a bug. It's like prison rape or getting shivved in the yard -- the camp administrators DO NOT WANT these acts of aggression to go away. The owners of that sort of plantation use and actively promote a manageable level of inmate-on-inmate violence, as a tool for controlling the population.

It's the sort of language one uses to protect oneself (however minimally such protection may be) from the threatened attacks of the state and its court system. This clause is a prohibition against things like child pornography and death threats (and, I suppose, bootleg copies of The Avengers, which the FBI treats roughly as seriously as terrorism). If someone does these things, and the perpetrator can't be found, the State's thugs will try to make themselves appear to be useful (and not the worse-than-useless parasites they are) by blaming anyone and everyone within a 10-foot radius of the perpetrator. This "don't break any laws" language, therefore, is a shield against their habitual knee-jerk reaction of blaming the website host for the acts of the individual commenter.

I like "voluntarist," but one does encounter numbskull Progressives and the like who still manage to cock up the meaning of such a simple idea. They will say things like, "The choices that people make in their lives aren't really voluntary." These idiots seem to believe that every decision we make are only voluntary when they're free from any and all pressure, even when that pressure is applied by reality, or physics. Like the fact that choosing to paint daffodils all day doesn't generate enough income to pay for a 3-bedroom house, two SUVs and three kids in private school. So, these fools believe, choosing to give up the dream of being an amateur daffodil painter in order to sell widgets isn't really "voluntary." You can change the word to anything you like, but using the best magic word to describe it isn't going to persuade people who don't want to be persuaded. They refuse to accept the idea that "voluntary" means "non-retaliation" -- that if you choose to do or not do something, no one attacks you. It doesn't mean "free from all negative consequences." In other words, the "voluntary" means "the NAP."

That's a difficult task, since the majority of people are not only ignorant of the economics of the early 20th century food processing industry (a specialized field if ever there was one), but more importantly, they lack the logical reasoning skills to examine such a topic, or even know they should develop such skills in the first place BEFORE forming an opinion about it. So, my recommendation is to begin at the beginning, and start with the argument for using reason and evidence as the proper mode of thought. When one does so, the first inescapable conclusion is that novels are not data. It was written as fiction, and openly admitted to have been written to circumvent reason and evidence. It's a propagandistic novel. Until people admit and understand that, no amount of rational argumentation is going to penetrate.

I agree. But compared to the back-of-house operation that occupies most of the government's attention (i.e., the banking cartel for whom the U.S. government works), the War on Drugs is small potatoes. Drug laws are, however, useful to them for cowing, frightening and otherwise (literally) beating the populace. No doubt about it.

Then you're not talking with people who can separate fact from (literal) fiction. If their minds are stuck in a mode of perpetual fantasy and storytelling, why would you assume they would be receptive to (or persuaded by) a well-organized, well-cited stack of facts?

It was a novel.

A few problems -- First, there's the deception of using self-serving definitions. What this video characterizes as "stability" period is what Austrians characterize as a "malinvestment" period. No one disputes the existence of booms. The point of economics is to understand the mechanisms in booms, and in busts, and trace the causative factors. Thus, second, the video ignores the fact that correlation is not causation. The periods of contracting economies are also the times when people return to hard money, because of its safety. In most boom times, credit gets over-extended, largely because it is artificially under-priced, and is thus over-used. There is no evidence (or logical argumentation) presented in the video that the use of hard money causes economic decline, as opposed to being a safety measure that people rely on in reaction to the decline. Third, credit exists in a commodity money system. That whole section on using someone's promise to pay as credit elsewhere is a straw man. The use of a commodity money system merely refers to the fact that it relies on some currency as the ultimate backing of notes and other forms of credit, not to the elimination of credit entirely.

Those Bezmenov videos are a real eye-opener. I especially remember when he said that the majority of the KGB budget was devoted to "ideological subversion" -- media, propaganda, etc. His department was far larger than one for the secret police, prisons, spies and other knee-breakers. It illustrates very well how the state's efforts at mental enslavement, through bad ideas and religiosity, is its main purpose and function. Without it, a population could simply never be controlled.

You have described two sets of problems, one of which is complicating the other. The first is your career ambivalence. I relate to that, and empathize. It's the simpler problem, though. Blaming the "market fundamentals" of real estate, as your reason for avoiding that line of work, is a bullshit excuse. Now is the easiest time in history to make money. Yes, markets are damaged by government. But someone of your age and ability can earn a great living. Even now. If you were truly motivated, you could make a killing in real estate. Have you researched it? Talked to people who do it? Taken a seminar? Found a mentor? Apprentice with someone more experienced? Done a small low-risk project to gain experience and see if you like it? There are dozens of niches in the RE industry. Are you familiar with all of them? Even when RE prices are crashing, that means that it's time to snap up bargains. The problem is not the RE market. It's you, your lack of motivation. Which is a very real problem, and one I've had to confront in my own life. But you can't solve your problems until you diagnose them correctly. Or do something else entirely. But whatever you choose to do, I strongly suggest that you work for yourself. FDR people are too smart and talented to be employees forever. It can make sense to work for others (even for free sometimes), but only temporarily, in order to build experience and contacts and knowledge. Work toward owning your business. Take initiative. Keep an entrepreneurial attitude. Which leads to the second problem you've described-- your lack of trust and history of betrayals. You hinted at the problem originating with your parents, so I'll take that at face value. But no one gets "burned" as many times as you have, at your age, without there being something else going on. Have you considered the possibility that you're putting yourself in situations where people can take advantage of you? I'm a litigator, so I have people trying to screw and cheat me all the time. It's normal. It's a fact of life. There are shitty people everywhere. You have to be aware of this unavoidable reality and take precautions. Can you think of a reason you might be contributing to landing in situations where you are persistently betrayed? Only you know the answer.

It's an old rhetorical trick -- the Socialists redefined "coercion" right about the same time that they redefined "freedom," which means "freedom from aggression" or "freedom from coercion." The Socialists deliberately did this starting in the 1860s or 70s. By the time Franklin Roosevelt was president, he was able to openly (and with a straight face) say that freedom means "freedom from want" (ie, poverty). But notice that there are two reasons the original commenter's friend can be wrong. In addition to the equivocation about "coercion," his argument also equivocates about the term "beneficial" -- that even though each individual trade in a free market society benefits the parties involved (by definition), the fact that they are all trading beneficially does not mean that there's a benefit to society as a whole. This proposition focuses on what constitutes "benefit " which is different than the concern about what types of behavior constitute "voluntary" or "coercive."One response to this proposition, I believe, would be that there is no rational way to measure this mysterious concept of "benefit to society as a whole. " All benefit is psychological benefit. All value (which is the assessment of costs and benefits) is subjective.That's why I jokingly made an analogy to gonorrhea infections earlier. The only way for the "household" to have gonorrhea is for at least one individual in the household to have gonorrhea. There's no such thing as a gonorrhea infection in the household, except for that which infects an individual. The same is true for "benefit." As a result, there is no fallacy of composition, because all of the measurable, real "benefit" in a society consists of the benefit perceived by each individual.

What does "the market as a whole" mean? If every individual member of your household is free of gonorrhea, is it a fallacy of composition to say that your household "as a whole" is free of gonorrhea? My guess is that he's using the well-worn tactic of using the word "coercion" in two different ways -- one for individuals and another for this mysterious "society as a whole." In other words, he may be equivocating, in order to avoid the inescapable conclusion that a free-market is free of coercion, by definition.

The whole thing, like all television is mental poison. When you get away from TV for a good long period of time, it's startling how bizarre and manipulative it is, as a form of discourse. The point of this little Parable of the Awakened Former Housewife is aimed at electoral politics. The segment was designed to undermine the popular appeal (among suburban swing voters) of the Christian Right, by portraying them as darkly conspiratorial and creepy. That group is being targeted because they represent an opposition voting bloc to urban Progressives (i.e., socialists), who control the television industry. It's the same agenda as the previous segment on "the environment," only there it was written to portray the Labor/Green wing of the socialist voting bloc as feel-good, happy, benevolent do-gooders. It's garden-variety propaganda disguised as a news show, which is what TV is all about.

Exactly. The US government loses (not just wastes ... actually loses track of) more money in a day than this entire project cost. Remember the Big Dig. The Hubble telescope flaws. The Challenger explosion. The real estate bubble. War after war after war. You can't even count how much the U.S government wastes. But a few people run into a water rights and minimum lot size problem from the Chilean government, and that's supposed to prove that free markets can't work? Please. I really can't stand people like Uygur. If the U.S. government confined its activities to preventing murder, rapes and robberies, I probably wouldn't object to it as strongly as I do. But those goals, as worthy and laudable as they are, represent about 0.2% of what it spends its time (and our money) on.

Thanks. My usual go-to analogy is slavery, since everyone has seen that famous photo of the slave with the whip scars on his back. But the problem with it is that people hide behind the claim that slavery was abolished, so, you know -- problem solved. But employer-employee relationships are a normal part of everyone's daily life. Light hitting, for disciplinary purposes, of recalcitrant employees, who were supposedly too feeble-minded to be reasoned with, is EXACTLY how child-hitting is described and justified today. Another question I have for people is this: if hitting misbehaving children is acceptable, then why is it not acceptable to hit another person's child? Let's say you're at Starbucks and someone's child is clearly misbehaving in front of everyone, but the parent is out of arm's reach, and you have an opportunity for a clear shot. If you hit that child in this situation, the reaction would be OUTRAGE dialed up to 11, right? Why? It's not as though the parent accepts that the child has a right not to be hit. So, what's the parent's problem? The problem is that the real reason for hitting children isn't "discipline" at all, or teaching them about acceptable behavior, or any of that. The real reason they want to hit their children is to instill fear, as a method of control. When other people hit your children, the parent doesn't benefit from it. If anything, it would undermine the parent's control over the child. That's why they have such a visceral reaction to the idea of someone else hitting their child, even when they hit the same child regularly.

There are two aspects of this story that jump out as especially revolting -- 1. The widespread belief that the problem with Adrian Peterson is not that he hits people, or that he hits children, but that he hits his children too hard; and 2. Despite the fact that untold millions of children are hit and injured and killed all the time, this one instance matters because some guy, who makes a living playing a juvenile game running around on the grass in short pants, might miss some game time. I have had some success getting through to people by asking -- if hitting children is considered to be "discipline," what if it were an employer disciplining an employee? A husband disciplining his wife? Hitting them was once considered to be acceptable forms of discipline about 1-2 generations ago, and still is in lots of places.

I'm representing a young man who's been arrested and accused of disorderly conduct. He's somewhat argumentative, rough, semi-literate, and has a history of fights and other misdemeanors. I found out today that the "crime" in question consists of him interposing his body between a father and that man's 2 year-old son, who was strapped in a car seat in a parked car. My client was exiting a grocery store, saw the man yelling and hitting the child. He intervened, and told the abuser that he'd have to go through him to hit the boy again. In the fascist county where this occurred, that's considered to be a crime. He was arrested, cuffed, hog-tied, put in a squad car and THEN pepper-sprayed.

I did commercial litigation for about 10 years, and saw this sort of thing happen more than once. The challenge with large-scale real estate development is that it needs to reach a kind of critical mass of buy-ins, or else the entire project goes bankrupt. You see this a lot with high-rise condos, especially. There were so many developments in Florida that never reached a profitable level of occupancy, and so much investor-money that went missing, even the Florida legislature noticed and passed a statute mandating the way that developers had to hold and use the residents' deposit money. I've met a lot of these half-assed real estate guys ... it has always amazed me how sloppy they can be before the whole operation collapses. Although there's always more to the story than any one person's perspective, the description from the employee of Johnson's business practices is very familiar to me. Salesmen should never be in charge. But they end up in charge, a lot of times, because their role in the overall enterprise (especially at the beginning) is so critically important that they hold a lot of sway. But these projects also need a manager -- a pedantic, administrative personality who enjoys the details and the formalities. It's great to have someone who can sell ice to an Eskimo, but you also need someone to mind the till. This doesn't read like a scam. It reads like a case of project mismanagement. It sucks that this will be used to discredit AnCap, even though the guy running it wasn't exactly a devoted contributor to the movement.

What should end is the government-designed, government-managed road system, which is the location of 100 deaths per day. Which few seem to even notice. If the soft-serve machines at McDonald's kept exploding and killing people, everyone would say that McDonald's is liable for setting up the dangerous condition, as the premises owner. But 35,000 people die every year on the State's roads, which they own, design and control, and almost no one bats an eye.

Starbucks excludes me from their goods and services if I opt out of paying for them. They do not threaten me with punishment if and when I do so. I find this to be an ideal arrangement. Whenever I have such a relationship with an organization, I would not call that a 'state' or a 'government.'

I find the facts that Adam Kokesh presented to be somewhat interesting and persuasive. i'm continually amazed at how skilled the people in the movie business are at creating a false reality. It comes so naturally to them. That said, I don't understand Adam's approach to his program. He's presenting as though he's an old school news show on TV. He's a good public speaker, but his format is stiff, and not very modern, so it's somewhat off-putting. And his "only I see the truth" theme does more to harm his credibility than bolster it. He's be more appealing, I think, if he said something like "I believe this death was an auto-erotic accident" and dropped the alarmist tone.

I expect the media to cover this story as accurately as they did the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin incident. That said, the police have been increasingly militarized, especially since 9/11. The idea that police are civilians, with no more authority to use force than any other person does, is an idea that has essentially died. The whole thing is such a dysfunctional set of responses to issues of authority. Taking to the streets to "protest" is meaningless, at best, and is for many of the "protesters" just a cover for looting. There is literally nothing good that could possibly come out of any "protest" over a murder committed by a cop.

The modern state does not need taxes to be paid. They create all the money, through their banking cartel. The purpose of taxation is to remove money from our hands, so that we don't drive up prices too quickly and cause general alarm. Until we have free-market money, we're just serfs on their plantation. They will always be able to buy an army with their fake money, which they create at will, as long as it is considered currency. For example, it was currency debasement that ended just about every empire, Rome most notably. They debased it so much that they could not pay the soldiers to maintain the frontier, which allowed the Germanic tribes to invade. The modern state is not possible without central banking, as it is euphemistically called.

The name of the game is propaganda (or, to use the more modern term, marketing).Rational argumentation is a grand achievement of the human species, but it doesn't move the mass of humanity to action.Propaganda is a highly-developed set of skills. It depends on appealing to a person's identity, his sense of self, the way he WANTS to be seen by others. It's based on system of pre-existing symbols and associations.It's completely non-rational. But these techniques can be used for good purposes just as easily as they can for promoting fascism. I suggest putting effort into encouraging the people in our community to develop skills in media, production, advertising, marketing and related fields.

The monkey has a fantastic media agent.