cynicist

I'll give you a hint. It starts with an M and rhymes with 'brother'.

What an asshole. I want to be clear that if I were in the same group when that happened I might respond as you did. You can't expect to always be above that sort of thing with histories like we have, that's why it's so toxic to be around people like that. They trigger us. That is a beautiful impulse that I happen to share, I think you just need to find higher quality people who are more deserving of your energy.

Right. You think that if you don't continue to argue and 'defend the truth' then the other person 'wins' by default. I know from experience it is pretty frustrating and often I would respond even if I didn't particularly enjoy it. It comes from a desire to control/change how the outcome is perceived by others, which is fundamentally manipulative and somewhat disrespectful to their intelligence. I get the feeling of anxiety, but if you are making solid logical arguments and the other person is simply misrepresenting you, then wouldn't logical/intelligent people be able to identify that? And if you are trying to change the minds of idiots who are moved more by who can deliver a smackdown better, or who has the better presentation, then you automatically lose anyway when you have to resort to their level of discourse. This clearly has more to do with how others in the group perceive you. I think if you can feel free to call people out when they are 'misunderstanding' your argument and end it when you perceive manipulation on their part, that will go a long way to relieving your frustration and showing a positive example for other anarchists. I have to ask though, how is this a group of statists mixed with anarchists?

Sorry for not responding sooner, but I actually agree with you. I find that my beliefs come about the same way you described: I have certain values (truth being chief among them), experiences, thoughts, etc, and my beliefs are derived from them and are fluid in exactly the same way. As my thinking and experience are updated, so are my beliefs. Even when you might say something like, "He is choosing to believe in god rather than accepting the truth", what you actually mean is that he is avoiding certain knowledge and his belief in god is a consequence of that avoidance. I could be wrong but this is how I see it currently.

Yeah absolutely. I think it's an interesting idea in it's own right I just don't want you to confuse it for UPB.

Well thanks for doing it anyway, it helps us understand what is going on. At first I was going to suggest laying down standards and sticking to them, but it seems like you are having trouble doing that yourself so telling her isn't going to help. So let me ask you, who else in your life has demonstrated that they are unreliable, domineering, undermining, and that you have had trouble maintaining standards with while also being very concerned about their opinion of you. Oh and is a female. Figuring out why you allow this to continue is the best way to solve it in my opinion.

Many people confuse UPB for a system of ethics but fundamentally it is a rational method for evaluating moral arguments. It is true that consistency and rationality when dealing with others will lead to better psychological health but proving that is not the aim of UPB.

Another chill tune.

You continue engaging because you imagine some negative outcome if you do not. (you've already established that you knew the outcome of the argument itself, so it can't be because you think you are convincing them) What would happen if you chose not to participate from the beginning?

I don't know the answer to the original question, but Stefan made a recent video where he compared people who were interested in philosophy and abused as children to rubber bands/diamonds, making the point that people in high pressure environments either break or achieve more than the average. I think people who truly live by principles are either the products of good parenting (very rare in today's society) or those who have overcome significant obstacles in their life. I'm not sure that someone who had a mildly abusive upbringing would feel the same desire to pursue truth that many here do. I know for myself it felt like finding an oasis after being lost in the desert for years. I scored a 5 on the ACE.

This whole story sounds strange, I think we're missing a few key details. What is this 'letter' about? What kind of messages are you sending? Why is this important to you?

I have a theory, based on a similar impulse that I used to act on in these forums as well as on youtube. (I've long since dropped the group of 'friends' I used to debate with) What happens if you walk away?

UPB does not tell anyone to do anything.

Replace the word 'mysticism' with 'believing in fantasy' and you have your answer Doubt is good. If you aren't certain of something then there is an opportunity to learn. It could be that you have this viewpoint due to your history, but having rational arguments that disprove the ideas can help you make that determination. (if you reject the arguments based on emotion instead of a flaw, then you will know ) Since most of your questions seem to be around the nature of knowledge (How do we know what we know, aka Epistemology), I have to recommend Stefan's excellent Introduction to Philosophy Series. It's quite long but worth the watch. I'd recommend at least the first 9 videos in your situation, but the morality and politics videos are useful too if you are uncertain about the arguments there.

If someone can't get past a label to understand the ideas, why would I spend time trying to convince them?

Which is why they must create new terms or redefine existing ones, such as 'structural violence', to justify the violence they are advocating as a kind of self-defense. It's not much different from statism really.

1) Value is subjective, subjective things can't be measured/quantified --> hence the use of money as a way to measure/quantify value is illogical Value is subjective, but why does that make it unmeasurable? Are review sites for products or ratings for vendors illogical and meaningless? What about food preferences? Western food tops my list, with Asian and Mediterranean coming in after. Preferences themselves are ranked in our minds and the subjectivity of the results doesn't change that. Without some sort of lesser or greater value, what does preference actually mean? 2) Praxeology is built off of the notion that humans act to achieve goals (and use tools i.e. capital to help them achieve those goals). Economics should be (this is over simplified) thought of binarily as did you achieve or not achieve your goal(s), and not on a number line (i.e. how much profit/loss occurred) How do you measure how well you are meeting your goals without price? 3) Someone not having enough money to go to a hospital is disturbing I agree, let's allow hospitals to compete to provide cheaper care rather than artificially limiting how many hospitals can be built in a given area. 4) Without money people will be 100% internally motivated to work Without money, how do you measure what you are getting for the work you are putting in? How do you perform long term planning like deciding how much of a good you can have or the optimal time to get it? Without being able to answer those questions, I don't think most people would be motivated to work at all. 5) The only true 'currencies' are time & attention I can't remember the last time Amazon accepted my time and attention in exchange for their products. Maybe you could define currency first and then explain how the following fits that definition? 6) Without money copyright goes out the window (this assumes you find copyright undesirable) Copyright exists because of laws and violence. Instead of getting rid of something that many people find extremely useful and beneficial to their lives, let's focus on how bad the laws or use of violence are. 7) Also, what is your definition of money? The definitions I've heard of so far are: It depends on the context of the discussion, but people most commonly refer to money as a medium of exchange. (although all of those definitions can apply) 8) Also, I heard money was created to sustain military campaigns back in the old days. Is that true? This is false. Money was created to facilitate the ease of exchange of goods and services. Fiat currency (money backed by government decree) was created and is still used as a tool for financing large scale wars through the mechanisms known as inflation and debt. Attempts to do such a thing to money before fiat currency was invented had much more immediate negative results, and therefore were not practical. I tried to be concise but accurate, I hope my answers are useful.

How? The coin toss is something that is observable, thoughts and feelings are not. (the former is empirical, the latter can't be)

Lovely

I'm in a similar situation with my own brother, (1 year apart) only he does not acknowledge anything that occurred in our family. Yeah, the thing I realized is that it will never go away. How could it? The past is unchangeable. And despite how painful and shame-inducing it is, I think it is a good thing to live with ultimately, because it serves as a reminder that you will never do anything like that again. It's also why I'm certain that for people who have done worse, like your parents, change is impossible because coming to terms with what they've done would be horrific. I can't imagine trying to come back from abusing a baby... When I tried to talk to my brother about what happened when we were younger his response was, "It's no big deal, we were kids". I don't know your situation, but your brother may have forgiven you because to assign responsibility to you for your actions would lead to assigning responsibility to those who were in charge as well. That's the case in mine, where my brother views my mom as a hardworking saint who deserves better and has done nothing wrong. The best you can do is be relentlessly honest and help him where possible. Whether he wants to remain in the dark about your parents is his choice. (and going to therapy would be acknowledging that something was wrong and needs to be explored) You have my sympathies. (sidenote: it's nice to see your face )

I came in with certain expectations for this thread and ended up pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info

Quoting myself here from earlier in the thread, In other words, you can't prove to Fred what happened if you never showed him the result of the toss, but the result happened regardless.

I've recommended using a media player to play the stream multiple times, both so that it doesn't lag behind and so that you can refresh the page without losing audio, but I realize that not everyone knows how to do it so I thought I would make a short visual guide to help people set this up. The first step is to get the media player installed by going to http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. Once you have it installed... Open VLC, right click in the playlist area and choose 'Advanced Open...' Then click to the network tab, paste http://cast5.serverhostingcenter.com/tunein.php/freedomainradio/playlist.pls into the input box, and hit select. And that's it. The last thing I would do is drag and drop it from the playlist to the 'Media Library' so that it doesn't disappear if you use VLC for anything else. Now you don't have to worry about the browser getting in the way of listening to the show

So being able to communicate isn't required? What?

How do you verify someone's thoughts or feelings? It's safe to assume that you thought about responding to me before you made the actual response, but I have no way of actually proving what you were thinking. So you can't call them facts. And in computer programming an assertion is a true-false statement used to indicate an error, but we're not talking about mathematics or programming, are we? My mistake, I thought you were uncertain about how the distinction is useful. It sounds more like you just don't prefer to use the words, is that right? In that case don't use them. I think they remove ambiguity, and I find that helpful. They are useful when talking about truth because we know that one is verifiable and the other is not.