Mike Fleming

He's saying he's depressed because he's thinking determinism is a depressing thought. I thought that too, until I began to think about it for awhile. That's what I'm saying. In the same way I would say to a religious person who has realised God doesn't exist and thinks it's depressing. If he just thinks it through, he won't be so depressed, because in reality, nothing has changed. Free will was never there just as God was never there and in fact, he now has a more accurate map of reality which helps greatly in the journey through life.. Where did I say people who are abused necessarily become violent? People can break the cycle by learning about cause-and--effect and how actions have consequences. Believing in some mystical free will short-circuits this somewhat imo. We have these phrases from the past like "you reap what you sow" and "the wheel always turns" for reasons. I think free will is just another form of religion and believers in it tend to talk the same way defenders of religion do. Re-defining it or taking people round in circles. For various reasons, the abuse stuff that Stef talks about is not yet widely disseminated. Kind of like how the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun was not widely disseminated amongst the population at one point in time. And for similar reasons. Stef is edging ever closer to determinism and will, one day, I believe say that he was wrong about free will. Although, again, that's just my opinion.

It has never been a requirement for a majority or even a large amount of the population to be required to make significant social changes and I don't believe this will be the case for anarchy either. Just a motivated, irate minority. It's always useful to do the numbers in a situation like this so lets do them for America. The population is 300 million to round it off to the nearest hundred million. Now, let's say you can convince one in every 20 people to be an anarchist. So that's 15 million people or 5% of the population. Now let's say you could convince, say, a 1/3 of them to stand up together and not pay their taxes regardless of what the government does. That's 5 million people. What is the government going to do? Well, it's going to start making an example of them, but if they all stand solidly there is no way they are going to get them all processed through the justice system, much less put them all in jail. Think about this and what it would lead to in society... Majority of people are not required. They will just follow along with what is easiest. And if the easiest thing is not paying their taxes, then that is what they will do, if they can stand behind a whole lot of committed people. We just need to get to a certain place and a certain number of committed people and the rest will follow along. Without taxes, government collapses, and people set up free market services to replace government ones. Anarchy with no violence on our part required.

You say this like it is a bad thing. But what this says is that the customer (the party paying) gets the benefit. Any service is compelled by free market forces to best service it's customers. Which is how it should be.

"Life" is just energy and matter interacting in a certain way, to be more precise. We humans have thought we are special and that our world is special, the centre of the universe, from the beginning. Our world is not special and neither are we. "Life" is just an abstract term to describe self-replicating machines composed of what we term "organic matter". It feels special, but it really isn't. It probably won't be long before self-replication occurs in more non-carbon based matter. When you realise all these terms like "life" and "organism" and "organic" are just labels, they lose their specialness when you look at the actual mechanics.

It's exactly like the Soviet Union and Cuba. They were basically frozen in time. Government gets it's hands on an industry, regulates it and stops it from innovating and it freezes at that point in time.

I heard a video from awhile back where someone asked Chomsky about the Fed and money-printing and such and he basically just regurgitated the government line on that we need the Fed to help stimulate the economy. It really was almost parrotted straight from what we hear on the mainstream news. The general impression I had was that he had no idea but didn't want to seem clueless on the subject. He probably would have been better off saying it was something about which he didn't have enough knowledge to comment though. Chomsky is obviously extremely intelligent, but my general impression is that he has little patience for, and little knowledge of economics. Being smart doesn't mean you are an expert on everything. It's probably also to do with the fact that mainstream economics is largely nonsense and mostly just an excuse for state interference in the economy. He probably never came across the Austrians or probably sees them as a right-wing Republican Tea Party thing and disregards them on that basis. Just speculating....

This was my initial thought too. But think of it this way. The universe didn't suddenly become deterministic the moment you realised it was deterministic. It has been your entire life and you didn't feel empty and depressed before you realised it, so there's no reason to think it afterward. The universe hasn't changed. When you think about it and realise the deterministic nature of the universe, you quickly realise that the concept of free will has no meaning at all. Not in this universe, nor would it in any conceivable universe. A universe with free will would be random and chaotic and things wouldn't make sense. The reason we can make sense of violent people for example is because of deterministic theories. . I myself, am much happier to live in this deterministic world, where we have a chance to solve the problem of human violence, than in a world where people had free will and you wouldn't be able to solve the problem of violence because people have free will and are not bound by previous decisions and experiences. We will almost certainly never have enough information to accurately predict, for example, what you are going to buy for lunch in a week's time, but we can solve problems to do with people's general behaviour. Determinism is really a wonderful concept when you come to grips with it. It also removes the last bit of "specialness" that humans hang on to, but doesn't detract from life at all. How could it? It has been that way all along. It's like losing God. He was never there in the first place. And the reality is, it helps you gain a good grasp on your own life and your experiences and motivations that brought you to where you are. The other benefit, is that you see through superstition much more easily because there is no magic, no free will. And so, you can just understand things as the result of physical processes and toss out nonsense which doesn't make sense in that regard.

How about "So just by being born I now have to accept what a small group of people say and obey everything they say? And pay them whatever they want?" Social contract, in regards to common law, is fine, because common law basically treats everyone as equals. Everybody has the same rights and you can't violate someone's else's rights and they can't violate yours. ie. no theft allowed equals no taxation allowed. That's not government. People in government have special rights above and beyond the rest of society and can (and do) change the rules arbitrarily. As Stef has pointed out, this makes society effectively lawless. It's all about the strong (in this case the well-connected and often well off) abusing the rest. There is no Social Contract in today's society. Just a gang telling everybody what they can and can't do.

This comes from another thread but was not related to the thread topic so I'm moving it here. Original conversation here http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38889-anyone-thankful-for-fdr-for-helping-them-discover-the-zeitgeist-movement/ First of all I want to address your claims about taxation being required for redistribution of resources within society. Decades ago, there was nowhere near the level of taxation we have today, either in percentage or overall terms. As resources have become abundant and society overall has become wealthier, taxation has increased proportionately. Yet people everywhere, even the poor, are better off than ever. Not only that, but if you look at how taxation is used you can see it is incredibly inefficient at best and completely destructive at worst (wars). The free market has been shown to be far more efficient at allocating scarce resources and achieves much more of a wealth effect throughout society. Are you a statist? Are you in favour of taxation? Now as to the more complex issue. Humans are autonomous agents within the system. We are not cogs in a machine, we are not physically connected to each other. I mentioned this before, but there are limitations on the amount of information that we can gather. Therefore, there are practical limitations on what can be determined. Knowing this we have to, in my opinion, take the only way out and say that each human being has a certain degree of responsibility for their actions. Now we, as human beings, don't currently have access to all the information we need to. People who have been abused and had their brain chemistry altered as a result are not consciously aware of this, unless they are informed. They will quite often feel confused and sometimes wonder why they behave in certain ways. It was certainly true for me to a certain extent. So we need to make people aware of the information, and then, then they become fully responsible for their actions, as a deterministic machine, from that point forward. Because they now have the required information that they need to make changes. You will never have enough information to be able to perfectly predict people's behaviour. It just isn't possible. So you can say we need to take into account influences on people, and I certainly agree, and I think this is a big part of Stef's show. But you'll never have perfect information, or even close to perfect information. And so this is why I don't look at the structure as a whole. I think we need to focus, much like Stef's show does, on individuals and this will then become society as a whole. A bottom-up approach. And this is why I don't think much of "structural violence". Can I ask, are you a determinist? And if so, what is your view on it regarding responsibility for ones actions?

There is a lot of confusion amongst people about why their governments do the things they do. Why they lie, misrepresent themselves and everything else. I always shared this confusion. It was when I put the idea of a government in the framework of an extortion racket, that things started to coalesce in my mind. It still wasn't adequate though, and I began to think of cults. Cults are really just a particularly pernicious form of extortion racket. If you think about this in the context of the globe, you will see many countries where it is obvious to everyone that the government is just an extortion racket. But the really successful governments of the world, those of the West like America, Canada, Australia etc, are as successful as they are because they have been able to enact a form of more sophisticated cult brainwashing upon their followers. Rather than being mere extortion rackets, they have been able to convince their followers that they are desperately needed and they can't live without them, just as the cult leader convinces his followers that they need him. Some of the ways it then becomes obvious is in things like censorship. Cult leaders will always want to censor the information their members have access to. This can be done in subtle and non-subtle ways such as directly censoring the internet or enacting a soft form of censorship on the mass media in general. The NSA. Just as the cult leaders want to restrict access to themselves they want every single bit of information they can get on their followers in order to more effectively manipulate them. The government is constantly more invasive and more intrusive because it is the central means of control over the populace. Fear. Keep your followers scared. Keep them scared of the outside world, beyond the borders of the cult. Always keep them in state of fear by creating threats in their minds. The communists. The terrorists. The drug dealers. The illegal immigrants. Global warming. etc Have songs and chants which glorify the cult. The national anthem for example. Flags and colours which evoke memories of the colours and symbols used by neighbourhood gangs. Just like neighbourhood gangs also they will occasionally have disagreements which explode into a war that have nothing to do with the populace and their daily lives. Of course religion has almost always been directly associated with the State. The members of the state even today in many places are called Ministers. Controlling the education of the children, just as cults do. Thinking of the state as a cult just brings a lot of clarity to it's behaviour. When everyone seemed to jump in uproar against the NSA, it just seemed, to me, that this was no surprise. It entirely fit into the profile of the state that I had in my mind.

I was watching Quill18 play Octodad with his wife here. Looked kind of fun, though his tagline was that it would test his relationship.

Not necessarily. I knew the moral truth of the state before I came to be an anarchist. I just couldn't drop the idea of the minimal state initially. I acknowledged it as an evil, but called it a necessary evil. I had to explore the ideas and mechanics of anarchy, specifically in my case how law and order would work, before I was able to let go of the "necessary evil" idea. I think there are broadly 2 type of people who come to anarchy. Those who accept the moral arguments pretty much straight away and those who need a little information and reassurance that things can work without the state. I was in the second category. State brainwashing goes deep for many of us.

But if he has the money to develop apartment complexes on all the land he owns then it must be because he thinks they will be profitable. ie. useful to people. Otherwise it's just a massive waste of money. Why would anyone in a free society, where you can't forceably extract money from people via taxation, do that? So this guy wants to build a bunch of apartment complexes for people to live in. Meanwhile people are building homes for themselves on other land and the guy then has a bunch of empty apartments. He can't just grab every acre of land, protect it, and construct on it at the same time. This would be an incredible risk. It's like taking your life savings and buying up lottery tickets. Why would someone do that? If there was a huge demand for rental apartments it would be a good idea. Otherwise...

Whether something is original or not can be very subjective. Was Coke an original idea? Sort of. But then the idea of a drink is not an original idea and Coke is just another type of drink so from one perspective it is and another it isn't. All new ideas are derived from previous knowledge in one way or another. It's like the phrase "we are all standing on the shoulders of giants". Or another one, "there's nothing new under the sun".

The entire attitude towards land would be completely different in a free society to what you currently experience. Currently the state lays claim to vast tracts of land and nobody is allowed to use it unless they pay the state for the right to do what they want on it. Even then they don't really own it. Most land is just rented from the government, but the government claims that you own it, making the current land ownership system basically one huge lie. When you understand that the government is basically a criminal extortion racket, it's not really a surprise. In a free society, there is no central ownership of land. That sounds a bit freaky at first but you need to think it through. I don't know exactly what will emerge, whether you will have some form of decentralized version, but all land, when it is being used, has a maintenance cost. People won't be able to lay claim to vast tracts of unused land unless they have men with guns patrolling it. Those men with guns will have a cost associated with them and if the land itself is not returning anything, then the situation becomes economically unviable very quickly. When you consider the situation you realise it's only economically viable for people to maintain the land that they are actively making use of. The land that they own has to return regular profits for them, or in the case of a house, they are happy to swallow the maintenance costs, including security costs, because, well, everybody wants somewhere to put their stuff and sleep at night. People grabbing all the land? it won't happen because the maintenance costs will be prohibitive. Unlike in our current society where forced taxation pays the costs of stopping people from using land.

Not really in my opinion. The beginning of life on Earth is still essentially unknown. It could have started here, or it could have been seeded from space. Could have been microbes on an asteroid. Who knows? You can't say you believe one or the other because there's no reason to. It's an unknown. All life on Earth is related and we are descended from common ancestors that go all the way back to microbes. The whole Chariots of the Gods thing just doesn't make any sense when you really think about it. And the belief in that kind of thing seems very similar to religious beliefs to me. I thought Stef read and dealt with the situation very well.

The whole thing can be disregarded on this section alone. Quality of the spirit before they were born? Superstitious nonsense. My guess would be this is a very religious person trying to justify hierarchical authoritarian structures as many religious people do. He needs to take out all the God and religious references and replace it with hard facts and figures with references to the actual research. Until then, it shouldn't be taken seriously at all.

What exactly would the obligation entail? To feed it? To clothe it? If we just went by a few basics like this the child would really not receive much care at all. In a free society, and this society, a person or couple can put their baby up for adoption pretty much immediately if they wish. And i think this is better for children in general than trying to put an obligation on to the head of every parent whether they like it or not. I think these perceived obligations have led to a lot of bad families in the here and now. Let those who want to be parents be parents and those who don't, not be parents. It's better for society as a whole that parents treat their children better of course, but I don't think that can be forced in any way, which is what obligations are to some degree. I think it just has to come about by people wanting to be good parents and being given the necessary tools to be able to parent well. Those who don't want to parent the child they have created don't have any obligation to. Maybe that seems a bit cold, but my observation is that society has no desire to see babies abandoned and so has created things like adoption, orphanages, etc to prevent this. And this is, broadly, how things would continue to work in a free society.

Thanks. Was it only the one time? For me, I did it multiple times over many years. After further thought on it I think it was a feeling of powerlessness that I felt. That it wasn't fair that I could be beaten down and there was nothing I could do against my attackers (my parents). Then I saw the weaker helpless person and my mind clicked into gear and I thought I could get him and it would make me feel better. I don't think it ever did end up making me feel better though. I think that's why the incidents, from memory, were widely separated. I needed time to forget that it didn't do any good. God, it sounds so sadistic reading it, but that was the reality. These days the behaviour of my parents and extended family just disgust me. They are all children who never wanted to grow up. Just trying to put some thoughts down to maybe help get some community understanding into what I believe is not an uncommon situation, giving the older brother perspective.

Science without one shred of evidence is not science. It's just trying to theorise about how someone's fantasy might have been able to work in practice. Even if your theory is scientifically sound, it sounds absurd to me but what do I know I'm not a scientist, but even if it is scientifically sound it doesn't prove a single thing. Any more than people who try to work out the science in Star Wars or Star Trek. Yeah, it's interesting for people interested in those stories, but it doesn't make the stories true. For that you need evidence.

You need to change 99.9% to 100% in your first paragraph. Then derive your conclusions from that fact and they will be very different to what you are currently positing. It is as ridiculous to search for God as it is to search for unicorns. Both concepts have come entirely out of the minds of men and never had any basis in fact.

I was listening to the Contagiousness of Crazy show where the guy who was the older brother was describing how he bullied his younger siblings and how Stef was asking him about it and was trying to understand it. I guess Stef being a younger sibling does make it harder for him to understand. I'll try to provide some insights. First my background. I bullied my younger brother. He was 3 years younger than me. What would happen is that I would verbally tease him, try and make him feel bad and angry so that he would then throw the first punch. I would then use my superior strength to beat him and if and when my parents asked what had happened I always used the "he started it" excuse because he always threw the first punch. Why did I do it? God, it's really hard to decipher it looking back. It was almost just like it was instinct to me. My mother verbally abused me and made me feel bad and uncomfortable just for being me and it was like I was trained to do the same. I don't think I was thinking, I just did it. But there was also the other aspect where I would be his friend as well to keep him close so I could attack him whenever I felt the urge. Another aspect is I would feel protective toward him. Other people couldn't attack him, only me. The interesting thing was around the age of 16 or so, I started to realise how wrong it all was. The defining moment for me was when I started to tease a daughter of my parent's friends who was a few years younger than me and she started crying and her parent's were comforting her and I was horrified at the sight of what I'd done. An interesting thing that I remember looking back on that incident is that my mother did not chastise me for it. I just don't remember thinking about it as a kid but once I matured I started to think about it and I didn't like it at all. The short version of what happened next is that it was only a year or so later I fell into depression and had virtually a mental breakdown and, well, my late teens/early 20's were not a good time for me because I was trying to establish a new identity, someone I could respect, but was surrounded on all sides by assholes. There didn't seem to be anyone I could look to to be a model for good behaviour and I remember how frustrating it was for me. It was years later that I started to come across people who I could respect but I was just stumbling aimlessly through life until then and didn't start to like myself until around 30. What did I feel when I went to bully my brother? I can't remember feeling anything at all. Well, just that it seemed like a fun thing to do maybe. I think I was unconsciously thinking that I could get him and then I would feel dominant. That he was someone I had control over. When I felt bad about myself it was kind of a way to assuage it. I think also that the physical violence would get my adrenaline going, kind of like a junkie looking for a fix. I wanted to fight and I wanted someone I knew I could beat. But I couldn't just go hit him because then I would be the one at fault and the one who would be in trouble. He had to hit first, hence the verbal abuse. Whether that's any help at all to try and understand it I don't know. There was never a sense of camaraderie amongst us because basically I was the favoured child of my mother and my brother has told me how he resented that. That drives a wedge between brothers. The happy ending is that my brother and I are now quite close. We haven't fought since around when I was 16 and we have helped each other out many times over the years and see each other regularly and enjoy each other's company.

I was much like this too. I would just go from one addiction to another, though I never did drugs or alcohol, partly because I don't like the idea of them and partly because I was worried that I might like them and get addicted. Glad to hear you have escaped the military. Hope your experiences in it weren't too traumatic for you. And of course that you have escaped the religious cults that run rampant in this world, including statism.

If God might exist, then why not might Gods exist? The idea is simply a human fantasy. The chances that what we have made up in our fantasy actually conforms to the truth is so infinitesimally small you can just as well say it doesn't exist. Just as someone else pointed out it's like saying the planet Krypton "might" exist. Or a teacup floating around the Earth "might" exist. Or leprechauns. And on and on. We say these things don't exist for shorthand. We don't have absolute proof, but when was the last time a fantasy story made up by humans turned out to be true? And if you look at astronomy and cosmology and physics it paints a completely different picture regarding the creation of planets and stars than the bible. There is no reason to believe that there is a creator of the universe and in fact current evidence suggests, without yet being totally conclusive, that there is no creator or creators. So you have almost overwhelming evidence pointing toward no creator and fantasy stories telling you that there is definitely a creator. That's an easy decision for me. There is no Loch Ness Monster and there is no God.

I think that the question was asked and, from the responses, is reasonably well-known in libertarian circles is the important thing. OK, so these guys didn't like it and don't think it will help. That's fine. They can continue doing their thing and Stef and others will do theirs. We've already had Walter Block so it's not a huge surprise. And tbh, I don't think their opinion on this matter really matters all that much. It's already taking off, it's not like these guys are going to stop the idea.