Kevin Beal

It's ironic that this statement includes spelling and grammatical errors

Not well enough to make games though, much less one of this size.

I've been looking and I can't find anywhere that Hoppe says that he supports direct democracy. It's stated repeatedly that he's an anarchist, and the two are mutually exclusive for obvious reasons. Also, since we're sharing videos, here's the truth about voting video I referred to:

You could donate time rather than money. That's very much appreciated. Thankfully, I have enough spare change to throw FDR some shekels, but I wanted to donate more than money, so I donated some time developing the FDRPodcasts site with JamesP and Mikey Mike. I know a great guy who finds people who are interested in movie reviews and directs them to Stef's movie reviews, or people interested in psychology / relationship topics to Stef's videos on that stuff. I know another great guy who takes 2 minute segments of shows and adds funny pictures and graphics to get the attention of people who are turned off at the idea of watching a 30 minute video to get them hooked on the good stuff coming back for more. You can find do a lot of things to help out that don't require you give FDR money. But also, FDR definitely needs money. "Stefan doesn't want everyone to donate" is obviously false. The show needs money to grow and get better equipment, hire more people, and reach everyone in the world. Wouldn't it be like the most awesome thing ever to see FDR become a kind of huge broadcasting force for good in the world? - translators - graphic artists - copy editors - web developers - who knows what Think big people!

I'd really love a second opinion (not yours). I've pointed out countless contradictions in myself and others and maybe I'm just daft, but I cannot even begin to see how this is a contradiction. A contradiction is holding mutually exclusive propositions to be true simultaneously. "I didn't say voting rights were a bad thing" was true. I hadn't said that at the time. And then upon reflection, I decided that I would advance that position as my own, hence "yes, it's bad". ...and I didn't say I changed my mind, either. Am I really just so retarded that I can't see what you're saying? Please somebody else let me know. Am I crazy?

I didn't do something, then decided to do it later is not what a contradiction is. You told me that I said that women shouldn't be able to vote. And I never did say that. I chose later to say that nobody should be able to vote. And I'm curious, where do Hoppe and Stef say that they support direct democracy? I don't know where, but I believe Stef has said that he explicitly does not support direct democracy (talking about ancient Greece).

It's been added and will be pushed to production with the next update.

I didn't say that giving people voting "rights" was a bad thing. But I will say it now. Yes, it's a bad terrible thing. Nobody should be allowed to directly influence where the guns of the state are pointed (incl. white men). Voting isn't exactly evil, but it's definitely not a positive thing. (see "Truth About Voting") I don't think I live in a democracy. It's an oligarchy. I have very specific criticisms of democracies that have nothing to do with my own personal experience. Hans Hermann Hoppe wrote the book Democracy: the God That Failed, and he rips democracies a new one. You can also find him talking on the Mises.org YouTube channel about this. You put those words in my mouth. Naughty naughty. You just assumed that these things were positive things without doing anything at all to support this and then took offense when I disagreed. That's bigotry. You are projecting your own bigotry onto me. You didn't even attempt to consider what I was actually arguing.

That's all you needed to say. I'm a misogynist. It's established.

This is exactly what I thought you meant. I didn't know the terms "single failure points" or "organizational theory", but you weren't unclear about how you believed that socialism came in and made feminism bad when it was originally good. Unless there's something else you didn't mention, I think I understand what you are saying perfectly. I'm very familiar with how people believe that first wave feminism was great and noble and then became toxic later in the 60's / 70's. And everything that I've learned about it flies right in the face of this belief. I've worked with companies who were bought and their whole way of doing business was changed, even when most of the employees stuck around and kept doing the jobs they signed up for. Taking over the management and operations changed things significantly. And some of these companies failed because the company who bought it wanted it to (and sometimes because the parent company was retarded). Feminism is not an organization. Many of the goals of the suffragettes weren't moral goals. A big complaint was that mothers were bored to tears after their children moved out of the house. And there were a lot of women who were against women's suffrage. Women who weren't broken psychologically to love the patriarchy in their Stockholm Syndrome. Very eloquent women who argued that it's a proper division of responsibilities. I don't think that should be enforced by the guns of the state, obviously, but it started out that only very particular men could vote before it was opened up to men generally and then black men. All it is and ever was is a way of buying political influence. "Oh you want to vote? You can vote for me then!" And I don't know what you mean by "existential right" or "free democratic society". I absolutely abhor democracy (see "Democracy - The God that Failed") and there are no such things as "rights" (see The Deadly Superstition of Human Rights).

I think this is pretty specious. We wouldn't tell blacks in the early 20th century to forget about racism and focus on irrational thinking generally since it's the deeper issue at play. Also, I don't understand how you can point to marxism as the reason feminism is toxic. Certainly it plays a role, and I'm aware of the major influence marxism had on second wave feminism, but people have this strange belief that the first feminists were great and wonderful and virtuous and it was only hijacked later and became bad. I think that's a bunch of boloney. If marxists came onto the boards here and started influencing discourse enough to ruin the foundational ethics talked about on the show, that would speak to a deeper problem. Why would that appeal to virtuous people fighting for a truly righteous moral cause? It wouldn't. It's not the name "marxism" that is so repulsive, but what it actually stands for. People who actually aligned themselves with whatever truly righteous cause people think first wave feminists adhered to would not be interested in something as repugnant as marxism. First wave feminism only came about after enough labor saving devices were available that it allowed for enough leisure time to reflect on such issues. That is to say women had enough leisure time. Men were still busy making these labor saving devices for women and dying in horrific working conditions. And what kind of a person looks at that situation and says "you know what we should focus on? Working toward the benefit of women!"? The vast majority of human existence has been spent barely surviving. This life of excess people in the west enjoy is very new. What did they really lack? They couldn't vote. Good! Fuck voting. They could and did go to university and develop their careers. They had to put up with social disapproval for stepping out of their assumed roles. And so did men. The idea that a society could be so out of balance in favor of one sex over the other doesn't make any sense to me. That would be completely unsustainable. Women raise boys, after all. Feminism is deeper than marxism. Marxism is just great for pushing propaganda. It's symbiotic, not subversive.

What Wesley said

I don't think that I would characterize it that way. The way I understood it is to be aware of how you relate to your own goals. Do they seem imposed from the outside, like you're not really living your own life, but following some script? Then you aren't going to feel very motivated to do it. Rather it's better to establish for yourself what it is your values are and create goals which are in line with your values. This doesn't necessarily mean that it will feel organic and natural, or that you won't feel anxiety. You should feel anxiety about going beyond your comfort zone. Finding a way of creating goals that feel your own and not arbitrary (e.x. "this other person did it, so I will too") can be tricky, but it's important, because your life is important, you are important. You're worth staying in dialog with yourself about this and figuring it out. Don't settle.

Not currently, but that's a very good idea. I'll add it to the list.

You can sort by podcast number or by title alphabetically. By default it sorts by upload date in descending order, but you can change that simply by clicking the column headings. My concern about making autoplay move upwards is that it's counterintuitive and not like iTunes or other players that have that feature. If there is another solution that you think is preferable, I'm all ears. I'd like it to be as user-friendly as possible. User experience is my primary goal with the interface design.

Measuring the success of schools of therapy is tricky due to what they call "allegiance bias" which is exactly what it sounds like. A far better predictor of success in therapy is the actual therapeutic relationship, healthy boundaries, feelings of alliance and allegiance between client and therapist, things that allow for the client to feel safe working on things instead of working against themselves. This video is relevant too and goes into some depth what success means and generally what the benefits of therapy are:

Hiya SueBee! I've seen you around the chat. How'd you come across the show? You said that you aren't as familiar with philosophy and economics – does that mean that you are somewhat familiar with the relationship, psychology and gender topics?

Objective and subjective actually describe different things depending on the context, and are important for determining things like verifiability and other things to do with philosophy and the scientific method. Since this is a forum about philosophy, that is the approach I will be taking in addressing this topic. Whether or not something is objective means that it is something philosophy can do something with. Something that only is the way it is because you experienced it that way, or is your subjective preference for one thing over another is not something philosophy is concerned with, unless we are talking about epistemic truth claims (having to do with knowledge). The exception to that rule being things which are physical facts or ontological objective (having to do with physical instances). Philosophy is about having logically consistent, universal and potentially moral propositions concerning the world that we live in. Whether or not you prefer the Beatles over the Rolling Stones is of no concern to philosophy. There is no requirement or benefit in universalizing this preference. In other words: it is not objectively true that the Beatles are better than the Rolling Stones. This is epistemically subjective. You know that you prefer them, but it is based entirely on your own subjective conscious experience rather than a priori or empirical facts about the world that make it so. The importance of discerning objective vs subjective is to know whether or not philosophy is applicable. Should you decide to join the peace corp or continue building up your career? I don't know. There are objective facts worth considering, like the pay or the location, but ultimately the dilemma is a subjective matter with no objective answer. Knowing that means you know the very minimum about addressing the issue. It goes even deeper than that though in how you approach issues. Having a preference for vanilla over chocolate is not subjective in the same sense as the value of your pen over my five dollars. The first is subjective in an epistemic sense since it deals with your knowledge of your own desires. The second is subjective regarding the actual objects themselves. There is no objective value scale regarding the pen or the five dollars. Mises proved this logically a hundred years ago (read "Human Action", seriously, amazing read). Neither are things objective in the same sense. It is objectively true that paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but not in the same sense that 2 + 2 equals 4, or that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C. The first example is ontological (to do with physical instances) and the second is epistemic (to do with knowledge). You can also make the distinction that the first is empirical and the second a priori. The reason this is important is when you are equivocating between these different senses of the words "objective" and "subjective". We can say nothing philosophically about the subjectivity of your preference for sharp cheddar over medium cheddar, but we can comment on the subjective values people place on objects that they trade. This is the entire basis for the science of economics, in fact. It is an epistemically objective science concerning the ontologically subjective values that people place on goods and services. The way in which the value of goods (for example) are subjective, is in that they are valued the way they are depending entirely on human experience (people's desires, beliefs and perceptions concerning those goods). You cannot measure that value except insofar as you see the effects of that value. You can see the people's valuation of bitcoin relative to the dollar because of the way that they use bitcoin. Economics looks at the effects of that valuation, rather than the psychological experience of valuing a thing over another. It's important to be able to point out these distinctions because it can stop progress if you get it wrong. People for the longest time said that we cannot study consciousness (cognitive science) because it's subjective. They were equivocating between subjective in the epistemic and ontological senses. Another way that this equivocation shows up is in artificial intelligence research where people are developing simulations of intelligence, pattern recognition, reading an environment vs acting within it, programming with environmental context in consideration, etc. The result of this research is said to be true intelligence designed programmatically. This is not true though. It is a simulation of true intelligence. By definition, a simulation is not the same as the thing it is simulating. People are passionately and vehemently wed to the idea that it is the same thing, though, or that it might as well be. This has deeper consequences than you'd think. Other ways this shows up is in free will vs determinism, or epiphenomenalism in the philosophy of mind. It has enormously wide reaching consequences in philosophy. Getting this wrong means you get a lot of things wrong down the line.

The stool is 9 feet!? I'm really happy to hear it's working out for you.

You are perfectly within your right to dismiss people's gods entirely and without argument or counter evidence. But if you do, I would personally shy away from arguments from probability. You can say the probability is infinitesimally small and it won't matter a teeny bit to believers. You might as well be saying their god does exist. The only rational atheist position is the strong atheist position: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1boMRKWDj1I

Have you heard these podcasts? FDR232 Justice http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_232_Justice.mp3 FDR1553 Restitution http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1553_restitution.mp3

Non-fiction books that I think are important The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd DeMause The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller On Truth: The Tyranny of Illusion by Stef-dawg Real-Time Relationships: The Logic of Love also by Stef Dawg Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World by John Searle Blink by Malcolm Gladwell What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us by Danielle Crittenden Breaking from Your Parents by Daniel Mackler

My two new favorite bands The Broods and CHVRCHES

Try this one: FDR232 Justice http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/232/justice http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_232_Justice.mp3

Alice Miller wrote about this: