Xtort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia - some basic info on this topic I have been using the skills I learned in Stefan's introduction to philosophy series to test myself against our greatest opponents, communists, for years. One thing I have noticed with all flavors of communism is that they love to present Catalonia as an example of communism actually working. It was never presented as an actual argument, so I never bothered to look into it, until recently. To hear a communist describe Catalonia, it was a peaceful idyllic place where equality was the norm and the wants and needs of society were done away with. This near utopia lasted a few short years until those dastardly fascists came and tore it all down. The reality, as I have recently learned, is far different. Communists did as communists always do. They killed anyone that opposed them, and of course anyone to the right of Karl Marx was a fascist enemy. They were particularly brutal with the church, perhaps more so than the capitalists they sent into hiding. The people they didn't call, they forced into labor camps and while they were more humane by far than the concentration camps of Germany, it was still forced labor as a punishment for not being a communist. My knowledge on the topic is cursory at best, but I would love an in-depth piece done on this by Stefan. Partly because it is interesting, and partly because for communists this is the go-to for proving the potential of communism.

I constantly hear comments from statists about how unpopular anarchism is, and libertarianism in general. They will often point out that most of the world is statist, and if anarchism is so great, why are we so small in numbers? There are a number of obvious errors in this reasoning, mostly stemming from the involuntary nature of the state, but this still resonated with me. Aside from the existence of the state itself, political movements and fads seem gain ground very quickly. Wikipedia calls this the bandwagon effect, which basically means that when a politician brings up a topic, everyone starts talking about it, and very quickly it becomes a popular topic. How to reach these sorts of people? We drone on and on to each other, enlightening one or two people at a time, while the state can cause these huge waves in public opinion almost without even trying. How to counter that? That's when it hit me that we see this same phenomenon outside of the state as well, in marketing. Especially in music, fads are created very quickly and they fade out almost as quickly. We call these groups one-hit wonders. The song is tolerable, maybe even catchy, so we go out and buy the CD and find the rest of the content to be garbage. Sooner or later rather than being catchy, the song becomes redundant and in the end, it's painful to hear, so it goes away. Obviously we understand that the state doesn't fade away. The public gets sold on a one hit wonder, some political fad, and then we all have to live with its repetition for the rest of our lives, passing it along to our progeny until the end of time. So that's my metaphor for the state going forward. It's a one hit wonder that you have to listen to for the rest of your life.

Okay, so I'm going to give some background so it's clear why I'm sharing this. My wife is asian, and along with that comes a culture that is very keen on corporal punishment. I put my foot down on spanking and it's been great, but she can't kick the habit of yelling, bullying, etc. My son is 9 years old and while she is not often in that state of mind, she does occasionally use bullying as what she considers a tool for teaching and discipline, at least when I'm not around. Anyway, he doesn't experience anything like that from me, ever. I've never threatened him or raised my voice to him or made him feel threatened. I don't know what happened yesterday, but I came home from work and was working on something that required a lot of my attention, and there was a lot going around in the background. So I shouted 'BE QUIET!' without really thinking about it. Nothing really happened at first. He ran into his room and got a book, and ran back out to sit on the couch near where I was working. I was wrapping up what I was doing and wasn't really paying attention. I hear my wife say 'what's wrong?' to him, and that's when I realized he was crying. Not just crying, but he was red faced, ready to start squalling, tears just pouring down his face. I immediately knew why, it was because I had shouted and he'd never experienced me shouting at him before, and the reason I'm pointing this out is because he does not act this way when my wife shouts at him. With her, he is defiant. He stands up for himself, and what he thinks is right. However, coming from me....I completely devastated him. I don't think I've ever felt like such a horrible person in my entire life. He and I have an amazing bond. He trusts me, he values my opinion, and what I think of him means everything to him. He always asks what I think about things before he makes up his mind. For example, he's decided to start investing his allowance instead of simply saving it and he's now coming to the gym with me instead of playing video games. If I ever feel his behavior needs correction I simply tell him what I think and why I think it, and 9 times out of 10 that's enough. So what I'm getting at here is that this is, I think, the sort of natural bond parents and children should have. When you resort to hitting, bullying, aggression, even 'mildly' as so many people I know put it, what you're doing is taking this fragile bond and stomping on it. I still feel absolutely horrible for what I did though to him it's already water under the bridge. So I hope some of you find some value in this. It's kind of a unique perspective in that we can see a very stark contrast in his reaction to myself and my wife when confronted with the same behavior based entirely on our past relationships with him. Posting this was inspired by this video: For what it's worth, I've noticed similar behaviors in my friends' children. The families we know that are big on corporal punishment have the most difficult (and I have to say, obnoxious) children.

Anyone have any good resources on this? It seems to me the two are very closely linked. The first governments spawned out of the priesthood literally, and it is only very recently that governments were not supposedly ordained by some kind of god. Governments have the symbology, the chanting, the appeals to a higher power. Just looking for some concrete sources to back me up if I'm correct....it almost seems to me as if statism literally is a religion.

It's a double edged sword. Employees are slaves in the same sense the capitalists that own the company are slaves. If I spend my time building and developing a factory and then no one works there, I've just wasted a lot of time and effort for nothing. Their demand that I pay them a wage is just another kind of slavery, or at the very least extortion. Honestly anyone that whines about wage slavery while refusing to work for free is a hypocrite.

Here is Craig going over some common objections to the KCA. One of the things he says, is that when reasoning a priori, your premise has to either be true....or be 'more plausible' than it's negation. Is that true, or is it just something he's made up? I thought when creating a syllogism, the premise has to be true, period.

Most of the time yeah, she was.

This just occurred to me and I wanted to share some thoughts I've had. Growing up, I had a very peaceful childhood. My parents never, ever hit...this was a one time occurrence definitely. I come from a very strict german family but hitting was just never on the table except this once. Coincidentally, despite coming from a broken home and being raised by a mentally ill mother (bi-polar), I turned out pretty well. Never got into trouble, never had a problem with conflicts, etc, which is basically the opposite of how things generally turn out for people with my upbringing. I attribute that to my parents and their unofficial policy of non violence. Anyway, this is how my memory goes. I was in the first grade, so I was very young, and I had just mastered reading and writing the word 'van'. I was absolutely stoked about my accomplishment; I had been terrified of even going to the first grade because I was worried I was not up to the daunting task of learning to read and write. And I did it. I don't think I've ever been more pleased with myself. When I got home, I was absolutely sure that my mother, who loves me, would want to share in my joy. So I took out a pen, went to our coffee table, and etched 'van' into the wood. Over and over and over. To me, the coffee table was an irrelevant and inconsequential thing, what better use for it than to bear remembrance of this incredible and amazing achievement of mine? I was absolutely sure she'd be overjoyed. She wasn't. She was very, very angry, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why. She was convinced that I had done this out of either malice or boredom. Why would she think that? I understood her point of view right away, I had put scratches into something without permission. But why would she assume I'd done this to be mean? I did not have a habit of destroying anyone's property but my own, I knew better than that. She heard my side of the story and disregarded it completely, I think because she was so angry. And that was when the hitting began. It wasn't severe at all and even as angry as she was, she didn't want to do it, I could tell. But she did it, and I do not recall the pain of it at all. What I remember about this incident is the profound sense of betrayal in having this person that is supposed to love me completely disregard what I was saying to her and then hit me. Over the years, it's something I've never forgotten, the memory to this day is vivid. I can remember exactly what that coffee table looked like, I can remember the discussions we had and I can remember that feeling that I would never trust her again. My mother is deceased now, but later in my life I confronted her about this in a positive way. When I was nearing the end of my high school years I brought it up with her, and I explained to her that I really was being honest. I just wanted her to be proud of me for being able to write a three letter word, that's all. She immediately got defensive, and told me once again that I was lieing. As if it even mattered at that point. She still valued her sense of having done nothing wrong over my sense of betrayal, and she betrayed me again. This is, to me, how powerful aggression is, and why it's such a bad idea to use against children. Children are not dogs, hitting them doesn't tell them " don't do this". It tells them "this is how little I really think of you".

I just realized how badly I butchered 'anthropologist' in the title...

That's a good point. I guess you could view it as the true form of socialism according to socialists (the federation) fighting the common image of socialism (the borg). Or the way I would describe it, the socialist utopia fantasy fighting against reality.

I think he's a left wing anarchist. Which is my way of saying he may be a raging hypocrite, but he nails it here. Edit: When I say he nails it, I mean in making a case for anarchy. I whip this out often when people give that 'when has there ever been an anarchy' line, especially when they use that hobbesian BS about how people will go mad max if there's no government to provide courts and law. People that want evidence and an authoritative source....this is a Yale professor with years of research in the field of human behavior.

Just wanted to share some thoughts I've had recently. At work I decided to play to my sense of nostalgia and run the entire 7 seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on my phone through netflix, to listen to while I work. As a child I loved sci fi and I loved star trek, it was probably a huge influence on my leaning towards socialism for most of my life but at the time it just seemed awesome that there are these guys that live in this high tech utopia that don't even care about money anymore because it just doesn't matter. Anyway watching/listening to the show again, I couldn't help but notice what an outrageous propaganda machine this was. The only capitalists in the universe are the ferenghi (sp), aside from being hideously ugly they are completely untrustworthy and completely driven by (gasp) evil profits! The federation is willing to tolerate their dimwitted and short sighted shenanigans with more than a little condescension. What struck me as interesting is that even in this utopian fantasy world where everyone works for everyone out of nothing more than brotherly love, they still could not overcome basic economic realities. Sometimes things would need to be done, more than the staff could handle. What to do? Everything is done at the behest of the central command, when and how they say it must be done. You're willing to pay more to have your work prioritized? Too bad, they don't care about money, you just have to wait - indefinitely. In one episode they need some complex part for the station, and they need it in two days, but starfleet command cannot get it to them in less than 3 weeks. Luckily the ferenghi are there to teach them how to move up the ranks by schmoozing the quartermaster, bribing him for favors. In fact every time there was a plot hole involving them needing something they didn't have, it was the dirty capitalists that were used to fill in the gaps. An odious necessity, yet even in an imaginary world they could not come up with a means of exchange from within the federation to anyone outside of it since they had no concept of money or value. This made me think of a debate I listened to a while back between a libertarian and a representative of the venus project. TVP seems to have a typical MO, all they really want to talk about is all the amazing things that can be done with technology if freely implemented. This will, apparently, solve the calculation problem according to them. Listening to them talk about a world where you will wake up every day and do whatever it is you want to do and have all your needs provided for by some kind of super-abundance machine is a nice idea. It reminds me of the star trek dream. But it doesn't answer the question, how will you know who should get what, and how much? Which brings me to socialism/communism. I have been doing some reading on history and some research, and it made me realize something. This is the exact same dream socialists have always peddled out. The original socialists are called 'Utopian socialists' because they claimed socialism would turn the oceans to lemonade we could all drink, and food would simply fall from the sky onto the plates of anyone that wanted it. They didn't really have any rational means of explaining how this is supposed to come to pass, it was almost literally a religion. All Marx did was take this lunacy and put it into a scientific sounding format. And the dream was achieved for a short time, in Russia, during a 4 year period called 'wartime communism'. Trotsky brought in true socialism, the only example that I know of, and all forms of exchange between individuals were prohibited. The result was not a beautiful utopia, the result was people forming into gangs roving the countryside in search of food because they were starving to death. I don't really have a point here, I just wanted to share my thoughts. I keep seeing debates with these neo communist types and it seems like those of us on the austrian side have gotten used to being the under dog. Every debate I find aside from Stefan's with peter joseph, the austrians seem afraid to call them out on this BS. The truth of the matter is, this is nothing new. It's the same dream being used to sell the same lie and it will lead to the same result it always has.

Statist: "In murray rothbard's book on ethics he says people shouldn't be legally required to feed their children! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?!?" Me: "Here's some pictures of some kids in the middle east that got bombs dropped on them thanks to your tax dollars and your support. How do you worry about feeding children when you're busy killing them?" Statist: "............................Well the military.....errr........problem of the commons..............the roads! WHAT ABOUT THE ROADSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?" Statist: "In murray rothbard's book on ethics he says people shouldn't be legally required to feed their children! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?!?" Me: "Here's some pictures of some kids in the middle east that got bombs dropped on them thanks to your tax dollars and your support. How do you worry about feeding children when you're busy killing them?" Statist: "............................Well the military.....errr........problem of the commons..............the roads! WHAT ABOUT THE ROADSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?"

There's a response to this on lew rockwell already: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/has-obamacare-enriched-americans/

I don't even know where to begin.... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/04/obamacare-january-bea_n_4892267.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063 Glenn Beck once said Obamacare would mean "the end of prosperity in America forever." But so far, it turns out President Obama's 2010 health law is actually putting money in Americans' wallets. To be exact, President Obama's 2010 health law was responsible for about three-quarters of a surprising January rise in U.S. consumer spending and American income growth, according to calculations by the Wall Street Journal. While not exceptional, the gains were significant: a 0.4 percent rise in consumer spending ($45.2 billion) and a 0.3 percent rise in personal incomes (up $43.9 billion), according to new figures released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The growth came in spite of the expiration of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed and all that horrible winter weather. So what exactly did the Obamacare rollout do to cause such a rise? For one, it expanded the Medicaid program, a critical and highly controversial aspect of the law, by adding up to a $19 billion in benefits in January. On top of that, health care enrollees additionally received another near $15 billion in the form of tax credits as a result of the rollout, according to the BEA. Together the two changes have freed up many Americans to spend money that would have gone towards health care premiums on goods and services instead. The benefits of the Obamacare rollout thus far also appear to throw cold water on the idea that the law will hamper the economy -- especially when considering last January. Back then, both consumer spending and personal incomes had their worst month in years and fell by several percentage points after the battle in Congress over the so-called "fiscal cliff" ended with recession-era payroll tax cuts not being extended. Overall, that tax hike resulted in a $700 per worker tax increase on average, according to the Tax Policy Center. Who's killing the economy again?

I take this as evidence that government employees pass their sense of entitlement on to their children

Here's another, skip to 17 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5DFj3U06kg

My little guy was watching tv and this just happened to come on. I was shocked. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFdPEAyr32s Skip to about 7 minutes. Basically, there's some soda they all enjoy but it's been made illegal. So they get into the business of making and selling it themselves, partly to make money and partly because they just enjoy the stuff. Eventually a detective finds out they're the ones making it, and as he's shouting at them about busting them, they demand to know why it should be illegal? He says, well, because it's bad for you. The kids run through some of the arguments you generally hear against prohibition about free choice and not hurting anyone. Eventually they show the cop the error of his ways, and he breaks down in tears and apologizes. The cop is the typical abusive (as abusive as you'll see on a kids show) authoritarian type, very stereotypical. Anyone else shocked by this? Obviously nickelodeon isn't promoting anarchism intentionally. Maybe these concepts are just so intuitive they're difficult to avoid?

If you haven't already watched it, check out Stef's bomb in the brain series and you will see why it's basically impossible to change most people's minds. In fact by engaging with them you end up reinforcing their paradigms, even if you've shown their position to be absolutely false, factually. I will say from experience that if you get good at using parts of people's arguments to make them argue with themselves, it can be entertaining and sometimes the people listening in will respond positively. Every once in a while you find someone that hears these concepts for the first time and it's like flipping a switch. Rare, but it happens.

Stefan mentioned in one of his podcasts that a school decided to address bullying by eliminating rules entirely and see what happens, and the result was a drop in bullying entirely. I just wanted to share a similar experience I had. I took my son to the park where he quickly found some other kids to play with. One of them had brought a toy, a fairly large truck, and they were all taking turns with it. One of the children who was a little bigger than the others decided to start slamming it on the ground, taking it to the top of the slide and dropping it, etc. My son told him, the kid who owns that toy doesn't like that, stop it, you might break it. The disruptive child said okay that's fine, he stopped for a little while, and then he started up again. My son again tells him, look, you're going to break it, just stop. He agrees, play continues, but then the child does it again. At that point I'm ready to go talk to the boy's father, but my son finally put his foot down and basically said listen, if you don't cut it out, we're just not going to play with you anymore at all, this is your last warning. After that, the boy continued playing with the truck, but the disruptive behavior stopped completely. He even started getting along better with the other kids. This was years ago, my son was maybe 5 or 6 at most, but the memory has stuck with me.

I have to 2nd this. The majority of marxist arguments revolve around the idea that workers are not given full value for their labor. If you ask them how they determined the value of labor they tend to start stuttering.

The trouble Schiff ran into regarding environmentalism was in addressing an emotional topic (for Joe) by responding with pragmatism. When a person has worked themselves into a good emotional rant talking about numbers and efficiency is just going to push them further over the edge. You can hardly blame the guy, he runs an investing business so he has to think like that 99% of the time. A better tact in my experience is to at least start off talking about all the ways the government and the EPA protects polluters, the amount the government itself pollutes, etc. I believe one of the original founders of green peace actually wrote a book about how the environmental movement has been taken over by corporations and turned into a front for some very un-environmental practices.

Excellent, thank you Edit: Looks like Kagan starts off by conceding that god is needed for objective morality.

I found this talk to be very interesting, especially the part about spreading socialism by destroying social ethical systems to be replaced by the socialist state. It makes me think of the majority of atheists I've met here in the U.S.