Kevin Beal

Yay! They stole a shitload of resources from the supermarket. That's not going to have any terrible consequences for the poor. Communism in Spain? That should work out just fine. Thank you BBC! Owww! My eyes are stuck in the back of my head...

433 – Battling Addictions http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_433_Battling_Addictions.mp3 1230 – Overeating, Willpower, Addiction, Family - Convo http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1230_Overeating_Willpower_Addiction_Family_Convo.mp3 1591 – The Biology, Morality and Politics of Addiction - Dr Gabor Mate - The Freedomain Radio Interview http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1591_dr_gabor_mate_interview.mp3 1920 – Addiction, Binging, Lazing - A Listener Conversation http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1920_addiction_binging_lazing_convo.mp3

Seasonal affect "disorder" is often used to describe this (apparently common) phenomena. My personal perspective on it is that it's the time when family is obligated to spend time with each other. What this meant in my family was a lot of soft put downs, active indifference, painfully dull conversation, one-upmanship, passive aggression and a big ol' serving of avoidance plopped on top.

Hi Chaz! Welcome to the boards! How'd you discover the show? How was the transition from christianity? I hear it's a really difficult one.

So this guy was watching rapes go by without doing anything?! What an unbelievable asshole! ...or did I misunderstand? The camera work is pretty great though, and he's a good lookin' guy. Add some soft rhymes and it no longer matters if what he's saying makes any sense at all. The best protectors of women against sexual assaults are the men women are married to. And since this is heavily documented and available to anyone who cares to look, why doesn't this guy prescribe marriage to women? Where is the hip poem telling women to stop abusing children?

Here is an awesome video from a call in show about taking an active role in finding worthwhile relationships

I think that commitment is just about the only thing that will work. It's so tempting to come up with justifications for having another drink or another bag of chips. Commitment helps fight against procrastination, lack of motivation and instant gratification. Stef has an awesome bit about this in a recent call in show: http://youtu.be/z3RbCxnOOMc?t=47m20s

It may also be worthwhile to start gaming groups in the community. There are a lot of people (myself included) who would enjoy getting together with people in the community to play some kind of game online. Social skills are important to develop. We all want to be able to market ourselves, for all kinds of reasons, and getting together to get good feedback, show our battle scars, develop a greater sense of what it means to be a philosopher in a world of sophists. s'all good stuff. Ideally, a community of philosophers should be the strongest of all communities. There's a whole lot that we could do. There is reason for hope.

I'm not sure having no friends says anything about you necessarily. I've had multiple times in my life where I had no friends. Most of my life in fact. That is people who care about you and you care about them, built enough trust to offer and highly value criticism, get together to do fun things etc. It could be that you aren't in an environment where you can attract other virtuous people. It could mean you aren't jumping at enough opportunities. It could mean that you are sabotaging yourself. It could mean you are in a transition phase getting corrupt people out of your life and not finding that your existing relationships survive that. In any event there are things you can do. One thing that I think is important is that there really is something to this idea that most people are sheep, conformists and have no interest in true friendship. Most people only relate on the level of their false selves most of the time, and to stand committed to honesty is like holding a grenade that could blow up whatever exists of the relationship. (Often for the better). So the fact that you don't have friends doesn't necessarily reflect badly on you. A guy in the middle of a die hard nazi, "kill all jews" kind of community, not having friends is actually a good sign. The problem I see sometimes is a kind of fatalism that says that people unable to meet me where I am, and that sucks because it's both depressing and untrue. People are very capable of making virtuous true self decisions, they just choose often not to. Sometimes people just need to see somebody else do it first before they try it. That was true for me prior to philosophy and self knowledge. By being our honest vulnerable true selves with people we show them that's it's possible. The people who respond negatively are doing you a favor by letting you know that they aren't interested. It's being a good salesman: find a no as quickly as you can. Good people are very interested in courageous things like that and will be attracted to you and good things grow out of that. Being a beacon of virtue. *add And you can always make connections with people in the community, and if they aren't local you can skype it up.

Right. Yea, that part really bothered me too. Dayna is apparently so crazy and yet she continues to expose her children to her, and in privacy no less. There were some things that didn't add up for me either.

I'm sure there is a book out there, but I wonder if you might already have the answer somewhere inside you. What did you want to do for a living when you were growing up? Is there anything that you wanted to do but thought would be too difficult to learn or out of your reach? Are there people you envy in the work they do? I was unemployed when I started doing work on myself and I asked myself the same question. Best case scenario, what would I love doing? I had done beginner website design in high school and I really liked it and when I remembered that I realized just how badly I wanted to do it. I was under qualified for all the job postings that I saw, but I knew that I would like doing it if I could get a job in that field, so I practiced day and night in order to get my skills and experience up. I talked to and listened to people who had done what I wanted to do. I ended up applying for a position I still wasn't qualified for, but had learned a lot about job interviewing skills and I impressed them enough that they created a position for me elsewhere. Now I do web programming, building large online software projects and I love the crap out of it. I saw something that I wanted really badly and I committed to putting one foot in front of the other until I got there (with a little luck).

I luckily can afford twice weekly sessions (up from once a week and before that biweekly) and I've found it definitely worth the money and time. Q: What point would you say you're not going often enough to get benefit? A: I don't believe there is such a thing. Anything is better than nothing. As long as you are able to establish trust and you are able to talk about the things you want to work on. In this case, I would be doing a lot more homework and getting feedback on the work you're doing outside of therapy, like Slavik said. Q: At what point would u be going too often to where you're wasting money? A: I don't really know. Some people go 3 or 4 times a week and find it worthwhile. Woody Allen has been doing something like that for most of his life. Even if you have nothing to talk about right away, there's still things that pop up. I've had this happen multiple times where what came up was a pretty powerful experience for me. I think as you get more into it you will get an increasingly better sense of what works for you personally. It seems you are already developing that sense based on the question. Ultimately, I think the best determiner is how much you end up paying. Things are worth what people are willing to pay, right?

Can you tell me what you are hoping to accomplish with this?

and do they do it in public? No? Well, that's very interesting.

(This is me speaking as a layman with a strong interest in these subjects) It's my understanding that these parts of the brain work like different muscles. If you injure a muscle in your left leg you are likely to compensate with muscles in your right leg. It doesn't mean that you can't use your left leg necessarily. People who have been abused are plenty capable of reason, have free will etc, it's more that they are quicker to rely on their reactive defenses. These defenses are more familiar, we know how to do them, and there is often some limited success (even if it is short lived or at a significant cost). Sometimes it is great for that person. A person who is a prison guard (for example) benefits from full blown or selective sociopathy, receives benefits from his dysfunctions. Depending on the level of damage, you can do physical therapy on your left leg so that you no longer compensate with your right leg and as a result your mobility improves. This won't work with a completely atrophied leg, but to have completely atrophied frontal cortices is not what happens to victims of abuse AFAIK. It doesn't help that most people relate to each other on the level of their false selves, that there are positive incentives for dysfunction and that doing self work can be enormously painful. When you work with repressed material in your own psyche and you "realize" what you already knew, it's hard to see how you could ever have not seen it. It could be argued that we know what people know because of how they act. Actions speak louder than words as the saying goes. The kinds of behaviors that people do that indicate at least some level of culpability are that they avoid those topics, they use justifications that contradict other things they profess, they hold other people to higher standards than they hold themselves, etc. In any event, even if we had no way whatsoever of telling what level of knowledge someone had over their own actions, we can at least all agree that if they are holding you to a moral rule, then they are themselves also bound by it. Another argument that Stef makes is that with the internet "I did the best with the knowledge I had" no longer is a reasonable excuse. It takes a hundredth of a second to get google results on the effects of spanking, or circumcision, or humiliation on children. And the science on these things is very clear and has been for a while. I hope that makes some kind of sense. This is also an issue I struggle with.

I'm sorry man. That sucks. You could report them to the landlord, right? Confronting them directly sounds like it could be more pain than it's worth. As far as the woman you already confronted goes, I don't know that you should engage her anymore. It sounds like she is not going to accept any responsibility no matter what you say. And you run the risk of retriggering that anxiety or making it worse. If she is just relentless and decides to treat you with contempt, you could provoke her somehow into doing something that is a clearer violation of the apartment rules and get her kicked out. Not really sure what you should do. I've never had to deal with that one before. Do you bump into these people often? Or is it pretty rare you have to see them?

Right, I think the argument from effect isn't totally bogus in every instance. My beef is with this particular approach of being compassionate toward people who are either abusers or serving to protect abusers, partly out of painful personal experience with it. I've started being more assertive in my conversations with the people in my life (and online too) and I've been much happier because of it. I'm not invested in the outcome as much and the reactions people have to it are very interesting and diverse. I've taken this compassionate, listening approach for years at a time with different people while expressing my concerns and had some minor successes, but they are usually short lived and it's a crushing experience. I served a similar role in my childhood: the peacekeeper, always with the hope that the changes would be lasting. They never were. It's incredibly difficult to affect people to the point that they modify their behavior. The only thing I've seen work is a commitment to principled living. I do use the argument from effect sometimes (even within this exchange) so I'd be a hypocrite to dismiss it entirely. I, personally am not interested in this approach. That's why I dislike NVC so much (possibly out of ignorance I'll admit). So that's where I'm coming from. add* And the big temptation is to think to yourself that you weren't this or that enough and you never know why the failure to affect someone happened. I hate that.

That's not my understanding. He shows how it's used to justify violations of the NAP as a demonstration of the principle. Part of the problem with the argument from effect is that there is no guarantee that the effect will happen, and often there is absolutely no reason to believe it would (like in the examples he gives in the podcast). Another problem is that when you focus on the desired effect, you end up more frustrated since you cannot control these things. Another problem I have with this approach is the goal "have someone listen to me" is not the same thing as them stopping hitting their children. I've seen many of Stef's detractors who vehemently disagree be strongly affected by his arguments such as people who have problems with defooing ending up establishing more boundaries in their personal relationships, or people who think he's too "extreme" in his views about spanking stopping spanking themselves. He is like Socrates' gadfly in that respect. It's a mistake to think that because you can have a calm conversation with someone and you get some sort of agreement out of them that they will change their behavior. If you've dealt much with addicts you know what I mean. The effect is nearly impossible to determine, especially in the moment. That's why this show focuses so much on principles rather than strategy (at least in that sense). I could make an argument from effect that says that not treating child abuse as the tragedy it is will only serve to normalize it for people. And that's another problem with the argument from effect. You can justify mutually exclusive things.

1645 – The Religion of the Argument from Effect http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1645_argument_from_effect_religion.mp3

I don't believe this is the case, at least for me. Frustration can reasonably be defined, I think, as the emotional response to having your expectations (esp. repeatedly) not match the reality of the situation. I get frustrated when I'm fighting a boss in a game and about to beat him when suddenly I jump slightly in the wrong direction and die as a result. I keep expecting that if I make compelling arguments that determinists are going to accept them, but instead what almost always happens is that they say something like "we just need to find more of the antecedent causal events (variables)" or some other non-falsifiable internally consistent thing along the vein of what nihilists do when they argue. I keep expecting them to be swayed by my reasoning, I think, because they appeal to rational arguments when they debate the issue (so it would be simply taking them at face value to do so), and also because I don't want to just say to myself that to be a determinist means you don't think rationally in this one area. I'm not satisfied with the fatalism in accepting that determinists simply won't be swayed. So it's actually the exact opposite of what you said, I think. At least that makes sense to me. Do you secretly wish determinism were true?

It could be better to have easy contact in that case if they are the type to show up at your work or your house when they cannot contact you otherwise. And that would suck...

Wow, I'm really sorry Melissa I'm not an expert in any way about this sort of stuff, and I don't know you or her well enough to say for sure, but it seems to me that if you want to let her know how you feel about this, but don't want to trigger her defenses, I think you should tell her something like what you've written above. That you are really concerned for her, are afraid of how she might take it, and that you think she is making a mistake. I am willing to bet that she will feel defensive about it, I probably would. But if you focus on communicating your message to her, the very real potential for the problems you are seeing, I think that's all you can really hope for. You cannot make the decision for her, or control what she thinks of course. So however brilliantly you do it, she may still decide to go. I think that the most compelling cases are the ones where you are as honest as conceivably possible, which may sound like a no brainer, but it's a hard thing for me to do much of the time. So, unless you have a diagnosis from a professional, I would avoid telling her that she has stockholm syndrome (and even then...). In fact, I would avoid conclusions as a general rule. She cannot deny your honest thoughts, feelings, concerns. She can only deny your conclusions about those feelings and concerns, if that makes any sense. I think that if you focus on what's honest over what's going to be (possibly) effective, then at the very least you can feel true to yourself in communicating all this to her. I could be wrong about all that, so if your gut tells you otherwise, it's probably for a good reason.

Stef has said a few times that he just acts like his life is public anyway. If people really wanted to they could find out who we all are. And with the NSA it appears they already do know who we all are. If somebody finds me online from my personal life, then it could make for some awkward conversations, but I kind of like awkward conversations nowadays, lol But I'm pretty open about my anarchistic tendencies with the people in my life so it's nothing too shocking.

I know what you mean, totally. It's really difficult for me to formulate a response, but I have a couple thoughts that could be helpful. The most helpful thing (as you suggested) is to de-normalize it and to help them see it by responding to it for the immorality that it was. Something you could say is "you know, I feel very uncomfortable saying this but I think it's important that I do. What happened to you is terrible and I'm so sorry" or something like that. I don't think it even necessarily needs to include "I'm so sorry that happened to you" as long as you are showing support to that part of themselves that knows it was abusive, the part they would hopefully connect with. I don't know that there is any one way to go about it.

It means that you need to have donated money to the show. The full breakdown of donation levels and associated badges is here. There are hundreds of premium podcasts for each donation level. Me being a philosopher king means I donated at the top tier and thus get access to all the premium content. *edit Not hundreds for each, but there are hundreds and each donation level has premium content. There are a couple hundred or so in total, I think.