Kevin Beal

The truth about voting ("Keep the fucking candy" @ 5:53) By the way, I am pretty good at finding FDR content. I've heard nearly every podcast and I have mad search skills, so I am game to help anyone find something from any show.

This is awesome. I think it's a great approach to the situation and a great approach to working through the ambivalence. I sometimes step inside the shoes of the people who work service jobs of one kind or another as I'm in contact with them, and while I can see how one might not be as fulfilled as they would being a philosopher, and while it might not fulfill you much in the long term, it is kind of a cool job in a way to help other people in such simple ways. It's not like it provides no value, it provides immediate and observable value for people and it makes people's day. I like that you mentioned Jeffrey Tucker too, since he is like the master of getting perspective on situations like these from an economics point of view. He has a great bit where he talks about negotiating with a guy at Taco Bell and how much goes on that people take completely for granted. The fact that he could provide a decent meal (I like Taco Bell) for such a low price and how only like a hundred years ago, so many people's meals were like literally bread and butter and water. And when I was job hunting a few years back, I would apply at fast food joints and I couldn't for the life of me get any of those jobs. And that's really humbling. People who can find work at all impress me, haha. I don't think poorly of anyone who works hard at anything they do, ... unless it's evil I guess, haha. Thanks for posting Joel!

Also, I totally forgot about this awesome video by GirlWritesWhat about this very topic:

I don't think that there were nearly this many women who feel like the friend-zoner does until recently. At least I had never heard the perspective until recently. I wonder if this has anything to do with the growing number of men who are MGTOW or otherwise feeling a lot less willing to jump through hoops for female companionship. The whole idea that feminism (for example) is being increasingly ridiculed, that there is a whole sub-culture who has no interest in dating, reddit groups pointing out all the double standards around men and women in dating. If it is true that some groups of women are finding it increasingly difficult to get away with shitty behavior, it might explain the, frankly hostile, reaction of some women who do the friend zoning. This is not to say that every friend zoned guy is completely innocent and exploited, I'm just talking about the friend zone that we see most of the time. And hell, maybe guys are getting some secondary gain I'm not aware of. I don't know.

Thank you for posting! Could you speak more to lowering your standards for the sake of a romantic relationship? I can certainly relate and probably other people can too. Like what went through your mind when you were considering dating this gal?

Do people not realize when someone who's a friend is romantically interested? To me it seems entirely obvious. There are often bits in comedies that highlight how obvious it is (like the video above which is fucking hilarious). Either a person doesn't realize and should accept after realizing how obvious it was that it's something they should look at in themselves, or they do know and they are stringing them along. Notice in the comic strip how the guy never actually said she was obligated in any way to date him. He expressed disappointment and frustration. Like omg, what an asshole! haha. I'm irritated by how lots of women (and men to a lesser extent) pretend not to know. Lot's of guys want to take the route of being friends first to get to know her and because they don't have to face rejection so quickly, and then they move forward from there. And it works, often, which is why guys do it. And it seems hard to believe that women don't automatically suspect that when a guy is becoming friendly. And the guy said straight up explicitly that he wanted to go on a real date with her. He was clear and honest about his intentions.

Sure. These complex emotions require reference to principle or complex abstract reasoning. They are considered complex emotions that even some humans lack (sociopathy for example). We don't feel contempt for mistakes, accidents or honestly repentant people. Rather it is an acknowledgment of the immorality or base corruption that a person knowingly acts out. Angst is an overwhelm about a person's entire life, a discomfort projected far into the future. I have stewarded many pets, including dogs, cats and birds. I completely and totally accept that animals are conscious creatures with a very wide range of subjective and even emotional experiences. There are animals that can count and understand shapes as concepts and learn from simple observation and all of that amazing stuff. I don't know what your subjective experience of consciousness is like and you're human. I'm not likely to ever know what animals experience beyond the expressiveness of their body language and tone. However, there are things that we can do that are completely self evidently simple and obvious, that animals cannot learn no matter how much we try to teach it. Cats do not understand pointing. They don't get that our extended finger is meant to bring attention to the thing it is directed at. A dog hit often enough with a broom attacks the broom as if it were the attacker. These things do not require language to communicate or learn. I'm inclined to think that the composition of the brain and it's infinite variety, even if they all produce consciousness, create very different conscious states. Even between men and women's brains in humans, women have a larger Corpus Callosum and a higher percentage of white matter. Their neurons are packed tighter together allowing for quicker passing of electrical and chemical signals. Men have larger brains (even after controlling for proportionate size) and have both hemispheres working separately, not communicating together as readily. At the risk of sounding misogynistic, this may explain why there is an apparently greater potential for analytical and artistic thinking in men. I don't know what it's like to have a woman's brain and maybe it's more similar in psychology than I'm suggesting, but the idea that psychology is not affected much or at all by brain composition seems to me (a layman) to be absolutely insane. And that difference in brains is nothing compared to the difference between our brains and the brain of a chimpanzee, which again is light years different than a cat's brain. The idea that we all got the same emotional apparatus would be profoundly counterintuitive, to put it mildly. The scientific debate around intelligence and emotionality in animals is not nearly over, and my research is just the result of some articles, documentaries and anecdotal experience. I could find myself eating my words, but I'm going to say that animals do not experience complex emotions, if any emotions at all (depending obviously on what animal we're talking about) for the reason I stated above: they require complex reasoning.

People who exploit you don't want other people exploiting you because it means less time and resources for them. Also, what's up with the thread title? Blacklisted?

I'm worried you might be a little too lax on the bible studying. 10 hours a day? That's it?!

I really don't think that ignoring her is necessarily going to lead to less revictimization. The fight or flight happened at the doorbell, before he even knew who it was. And on confrontation he felt better. And she could just as easily have hollered and gotten the attention of your neighbors and got other people involved who you might feel an urge to justify yourself with. Or she could have just kept showing up and spread it out longer. I mean she knows you're there and she spent 2.5 hours driving to get there. She's not likely to just settle with "oh, I guess he's just not going to answer" and then leave, right? And I'm very sorry OP about the abuse. It sounds like there was some pure sadism there, and that's just completely awful

I just wanted to bring to your attention the concept of colored coins in the bitcoin platform. Bitcoins can actually be backed by gold or silver or any other commodity, however you decide to do it. It's an already established thing with a large support community and you don't have to invest in a crazy amount of infrastructure. What you could do under this model is supply people who want to do colored coin transactions with this gold and silver monitoring service, and even potentially scripts that run to measure the current value of the gold or silver and have all kinds of flags or terms that regulate these transactions based on that (or almost anything else you decide). I think that this is actually pretty damn exciting stuff and provides an enormous number of opportunities to thinkers and entrepreneurs such as yourself. Consider it

Just concerning the free rider part, is that I didn't donate for the first 3 years of listening regularly to the show. It seems perfectly valid and worthwhile to me to save your money so that you can move out. Very sorry about your father. It's your decision, obviously, but It seems to me that getting some space from an unrepentant past abuser is going to be just about the best use of your resources.

What would success in this conversation look like? (I'm genuinely curious, it's not a leading question.)

You have? Like sorrow, contempt and angst and these complex emotions? Where? I'd love to see it. And I don't know that animals are completely incapable. I'm simply reporting what I've heard and makes sense to me. I could be wrong, of course. If you can show me angst in animals, then it certainly would poke a pretty big hole in what I said.

Well it's the capacity for principled reasoning, isn't it? The measuring of a prefered state against some ideal. This reasoning is thought to only be possible thanks to language giving us a meta cognition. A dog may think to itself "I'm going to go chase that cat", but AFAIK it's only humans who reflect on themselves behaving in particular ways, as if outside of themselves. That's why we can threaten a person with future punishments, but can only inflict fear on an animal in the moment. Animals very likely do not experience angst, for example. It seems to me to be the case that animals can't reasonably be held responsible for murdering other animals, and us killing another animal isn't murder, but neither does that make it neutral. I think it would fall somewhere within the realm of aesthetics. Which is why we might resent someone who tortures frogs, but shooting the guy in the leg to help the frog escape would be seen as,... extreme let's say, haha.

Having a cut diamond presupposes another diamond cut enough to cut that diamond. Having an egg presupposes a chicken, but a grown chicken cannot have existed without being hatched from an egg. Having two things rely on each other is not logically erroneous. A circular argument describes propositions whose premises are used to support a conclusion and the justification for those premises is the conclusion itself. These are two different things. And that's if we accept your premise that violence is needed to stop violence (which I don't).

Hi Jester! I'm no expert, but I did a lot of interviewing a few years back. I think that in positions where you might not have exactly the right experience, your inclination to focus on more well rounded skills like being a fast learner is totally the right thing to do. The fact that you did so many different things at the previous job says a lot about you in terms of flexibility and being able to pick up valuable skills. It certainly impresses me. I'm sorry I don't have much feedback, but I can point you to the FDR content that I found really helpful in my interviews: 536 – Job Interviewing http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_536_Job_Interviewing.mp3 1042 – Job Interview Skills Part 2 http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1042_Job_Interview_Part_Two_Convo.mp3 1471 – Preparing for a Job Interview http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1471_job_interview_preparation.mp3 Good luck!

Hi LooseBrick! Welcome to the boards There is nothing in the forum guidelines against talking about your traumatic childhood, so long as you don't defend abuse. And I'm very sorry that you were burdened with something so terrible as a horrific childhood. No person should ever have to experience that I do not represent anyone but myself, but I'm sure people here would be very sympathetic and may even have some great perspectives, and relevant experience, but nobody here (save for a couple people) is actually trained in this area, so I would hesitate to use the forums as any kind of replacement for actual psychotherapy. Which I can't recommend highly enough (it's been enormously valuable to me, personally). I don't want to discourage you, I just wanted to make that point clear because I think it's important. But please, feel free to share whatever you are comfortable with and think would be helpful for you to talk about. As for an actual section, I guess the closest would be the "self knowledge" sub-forum.

Also, I don't mean to be harsh, but that's one of those things that really gets under my skin. So, if I was unnecessarily harsh, my apologies. I think it's an important one though.

First off, I reject the premise that your phrasing should make anyone feel better about the situation. Surely "I couldn't control myself" is the excuse parents have for themselves. I suggest the child's perspective. And for a child, a parent who is out of control can be even worse. I just looked "willpower fatigue" up and it doesn't say that people lose control or are powerless. That's not at all what I took away from it. And I refuse to offer people platitudes. People need to know the truth regardless of whether or not it makes them comfortable or uncomfortable. The only reason I can imagine doing so would be to allay my own fears about the subject, which would be at expense of the truth and at the expense of his genuine experience (or a failure of my imagination). I don't know you, maybe you're a great person and if we knew each other we'd have great conversations and bla bla bla, but what you said is actually kinda messed up. I'm sure you have the experience of just trying to be helpful and / or supportive, but that's not actually how you do that here. In fact it's just the opposite. The more you minimize and excuse fucked up behavior, the more you enable yourself to do those same things. Never excuse anyone of shitty behavior without a really good reason. You and your children pay the price for that later on. What's wrong with "Oh my god, that's awful, I'm very sorry, please go on"?

I think you are right, and ironically these same people who are really big on the illuminati and NWO are pretty quick to say that they are the ones who are the cold hard realists. At least, I did when I was really big into that stuff. It seems weird to me that the easier thing to accept would be the illuminati than anarchism. That really says something about people's perception of anarchism, haha.

There is a funny video of like 3 billion unanswered questions from lost. That might give you some sense of how big of teases the story writers were. http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6099973/unanswered-lost-questions

I saw every episode. I thought the first couple seasons were pretty good, but everything else I watched so that my questions would get answered. But they never were. I bitterly do not recommend the series.

Vicarious self defense is justified by UPB and squared with the NAP by pointing out that it is self defense. Being that we will be able to make nanobots that make humans live forever, invulnerable to disease, re-grow limbs etc. There would naturally be a strong defensive element already. As far as offense, those same scientists could likely create a nanobot swarm that eats evil alien flesh and shoot canisters of this gas at their troops, which they would have to have if they wanted to preserve our resources. Otherwise they could just bomb the shit out of us or blow us up death star style and we'd be fucked, but that would just make them the most sadistic assholes in the universe, and would not make much sense as to why they'd come here at all. One of these days aliens! One of these days, POW! photon torpedo right to the kisser. (Which ironically is on your alien butts.) I don't know what we do, but people in the future are going to be a lot smarter than we are, probably. I trust they'd have some solution.

Haha, yes. Thank you. (It starts around 15mins) Also, I could be completely mistaken and I apologize if I am, but WhoDanny, wasn't it you that said (or at least implied) that any ethical theory that said that a man walking by refusing to save a drowning child isn't evil must be false? This video dsayers linked actually goes into that as well (see YAD principle).