Kevin Beal

I can't speak for Hannibal, but I'm sure he would agree that we are animals. I would say though that we are very different from all other animals in a way that (I think) is especially unique. For example, dogs can think about how they are going to chase a squirrel and then go do it, but (as far as I know) they lack the ability to reflect on themselves thinking about how they are going to chase that squirrel. I believe the same is true for non-human primates as well, although I'm certainly no expert. Crows are even more intelligent than chimpanzees in some regards, like their ability to recognize patterns that may as well be logical deduction. Humans are also the only animals that have a true language, that unlike dancing bees, hooting owls and mimicking parakeets, humans can actually invent new uses of a language and create new ones in order to communicate something (even programming languages). We also have philosophy, science, ethics and all other kinds of relatively abstract capacities. We do of course share 99% of the same DNA as chimpanzees and are built of almost entirely the same biological systems. We respond in many of the same ways to different things that other animals do albeit in a more sophisticated manner. We can be territorial, lustful, raging, violent etc and those things aren't necessarily bad or lesser or unimportant, but we are a whole other kind of animal. I obviously don't think that we are all gods children made in his image, or whatever other mystical explanation people had in ancient times, but I think that their intuition that we are fundamentally different was right. Our morality, free will and superior consciousness are awesome. Maybe it's my human bias, but I think that if there is such a thing as a superior species, it is humans. Would you not agree?

Ribuck posted the following video in another thread and I've become fascinated by this guy devouring everything he has on youtube. Maybe this could be an interview?

What I would hope from a debate like this is taking these ideas into the real world and applying them consistently, seeing how it goes. Peter is no dummy. The fact that he had such a difficult time addressing anything directly and instead had to rely on adjectives to "make his point", is (in part) a testament to the power of these ideas. It's not like Peter is going to say "you know what, you are totally right, this Zeitgeist movement thing will never work". If he can't rebut the arguments, then he can't rebut the arguments. What more could you hope for? (Other than for him to be less of a jerk in debate)

I'm so sorry man That's some really tough stuff. Especially when you can't communicate it. It's overwhelming and isolating and it sucks. Despite that, I thought you expressed yourself here very well. I can't help but empathize / sympathize. What do you think would happen if you said what you were thinking to your mother when she asked you? Why do you think you didn't say anything? Why instead did you go numb? Just as a practical bit of advice, you don't want to share a therapist with your mother if you aren't willing to do some sort of group therapy together as well. This is something that applies to friends, family members, lovers, whoever, it's just generally a bad idea. It makes it hard to establish trust, always wondering what the other is saying, wondering if anything could have slipped or come through in some response the therapist gives the other person, questions of loyalty and that sort of thing. I would strongly suggest doing therapy though. If I had the choice between therapy and college, I would choose therapy hands down. I might even take my father's (whom I have no relationship with) money to do it if he was going to pay for it. Therapy is my largest expense at the moment and it's well worth it if you can find a good one. I could have a place of my own if I weren't paying for therapy, but instead I choose to rent a room from an acquaintance of mine even though I crave privacy. It's so important. I was unemployed when I started. I was doing odd jobs, and doing therapy actually helped me land my current gig (Stef's job interview tips helped a lot too). I say this to put a little bit of pressure on you to not put barriers in between yourself and therapy. You gotta take care of yourself. Again, I'm really sorry man. It's a terrible situation.

That's a pretty big red flag for me when you say that parents do the best they can in general. I don't think there's enough here for me to be too sure, but the flattery thing seems a tad suspicious to me as well. I don't know how long you've been going, but if you trust her then you should be (like Wesley suggested) as honest as you possibly can with her about your experience. Relying on memory, especially when there was some fog going on can lead to a lot of frustration and a desire to withdraw when being even more honest may be the thing to do. I would suggest focusing on your experience in the moment, your thoughts and feelings. Those you can be certain of and cannot (reasonably) be rejected. And while doing so take notice of whether or not you fog and make sure to interrupt and let her know if you do. Don't let things get too far in the fog without checking in. There are lots of reasons to be critical of bad parents. Some that are simple moral reasons like: "it's not okay to make your child feel alone in this world", and then there are reasons that are kind of ancient, hard to look directly at, foggy kinds of reasons that may offer you some very important insights. Those are precisely the kinds of insights you want to gain in therapy around these issues. I don't know you, right, but I'm fairly sure you're plenty smart compared to most folk and have some pretty good moral clarity. What would be shitty is if there were something in between you and your therapist that prevents you from exploring those murkier moral realities that (perhaps) you lived and suffered thanks to abusive and/or negligent parents (to whatever degree). Like (for example) the suspicion that she will reject what you have to say with something like "parents do the best they can" or that you feel she may minimize something that is for you very powerful. Talking about that kind of thing is going to make those topics more approachable and productive (and save you money!) by getting all those potential barriers out of the way. That is assuming she is a good therapist who can help you with what you need to work on. Being honest and talking about those things is a great way to weed out bad therapists too. Either way you win. And it's totally awesome you are doing therapy! Seriously, thank you for doing that. This stuff is so so important.

When you mentioned the Guardian episode, I too felt a little anxiety. Maybe there is something I'm missing. There are two things (that I'm conscious of) behind my last post, which are a podcast where Stef talks about the importance of conflict like when there was a co-worker he had that was overtly aggressive and very irrational, who he provoked into showing that at a meeting resulting in that guy getting fired (as he should have been earlier). I'll post the link later if I can find it. The second thing is my own desire for conflict, which is coming up more and more with very interesting (at least for me) insights I've gotten in therapy about it. I don't think it's because I like conflict for it's own sake, but rather because there are a lot of people out there who should be challenged, but never are, and that I don't have to risk gaslighting myself over it, they just simply are wrong. I've had mixed results, and I'm not certain what exactly healthy is, but it's incredibly interesting to me and I'm obsessed with trying to figure it out. Literally obsessed...

I'm not sure that I agree with this. Surely there is something to this idea that we should not feed the trolls and that assholes are just going to escalate when their sophistry is pointed out, but even in those cases there are exceptions to why you shouldn't engage, and in the case of Peter, he is going to just make himself look worse and worse. I don't believe the same is true for Stef who (at least in my estimation) appeared very thoughtful and reasonable in every interaction he's had with the Zeitgeist movement. I think that there are ways that are healthy and advantageous to engage bullies like Peter and I think Stef's doing a wonderful job of it. I would actually appreciate another response from Stef, maybe something as a continuation of how people like Peter operate and to avoid debate (kinda like you were saying) with them. Peter is not some troll on the boards. He has a far reaching influence over a crap load of people. His ideas are actually corrosive and it's nice that he's undoing that for himself by being such an mean-spirited sophist in his video responses. I personally would like him to continue along that trend until his really ugly personality is plain to see for enough people that will see it for what it is. Many things brought up are cases where either Peter is right or Stef is right, and if Peter starts looking like a sophist to thinking people, then that means more eyes and ears in this part of the internet. And that's a wonderful thing. I must also confess that I do feed the trolls, and have never really taken "do not feed the trolls" to heart. So you can take everything I say with a shaker of salt.

The people could be acting against their own well-being, but the act itself necessarily implies that they believe they will benefit. We could come up with some scenarios where one person was sleep walking (sleep trading?) or that he was forced to trade with a gun at his back or that the person was simply wrong that it would be beneficial. But it's the actual action itself that we are looking at. It's a praxeological fact. Human Action by Mises is actually an incredibly interesting read (or listen, it's free online). We could ask if it's immoral to murder a guy (obviously being against his will), and after you say yes, then reveal that the guy was running at you with a chainsaw or something. The context doesn't actually matter for the basic truth that it's immoral to murder people to be true. It's implied necessarily by the act itself (given a rational theory of ethics).

Saints be praised! I'm from North Kiltown! Do you know Angus McLeod?

The definition of "principle" A principle is a conclusion. A framework is a methodology, or: You can show a methodology to be false, but there is a difference, and it's important to be precise, especially if what immediately follows is an equivocation between UPB as a "principle" and UPB as a framework.

I Should Watch TV - David Byrne & St Vincent http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a2oEsZoZYQ

The url shouldn't look like that... It's got a double forward slash after feed, also it's missing the .cdn subdomain. This may be a little faster: http://cdn.media.freedomainradio.com/feed/against_the_gods/FDR_Book_against_the_gods.mp3

I drink kombucha about once a week and yogurt more often than that, but primarily it's a mixture called Vitamineral Green. I'll check out that video when I have some more time

Does it strike anybody else as interesting that there are a disproportionately large number of programmers on this message board? The fact that people can ask programming questions and get answers from several different people is kinda weird, right?

To be clear, he doesn't say you need to take a bunch of supplements to be healthy, but he definitely does a lot of experimentation. That's what's so interesting to me. To be able to quantify things that aren't easily quantifiable. I got myself a biofeedback machine to measure my stress levels and it's very interesting and counterintuitive. I changed the way that I physically respond to stress because of it. He also makes the case for a sodium and saturated fat heavy diet which I thought was totally bad for you, but actually it turns out that more people are recommending that and the original research that said that sodium and saturated fats were bad were flawed. He is definitely trying to market himself, because that's what he does for a living. He's a life coach for business executives. It may turn out that he's full of it, and I'm trying to empirically verify some of these things in my own life to see for myself. It's only been a short while, but so far so good. If I die of a heart attack or something, then I'll try and warn yall.

I'm not a C++ guy, but it doesn't make sense to me why you would typecast your main() function to be an integer when it needs to be a string. May be an encoding issue, and you need to cleanse your output in some way? Also, what's with all the "fuck you"s?

Excellent question! In the Coma Test section, probably the primary reason it's used is to demonstrate the principle of capacity as you described it. One of the necessary prerequisites for a person to be held morally responsible is that they had a choice in how they acted. Morality is objective, but optional unlike our "choice" to be held down by gravity. The coma test ties this concept of capacity (or "avoidability" as it's put in the book) in with opposite moral categories. It confirms our intuition that people in a coma cannot be immoral (nor can they be virtuous), but it also demonstrates the irrationality of unchosen positive obligations. Thou shalt take some action by threat of violence leads to some pretty impractical things as I'm sure you'd imagine. What it ends up looking like is the hostage situation you described. As far as a your question "how can a person in a coma be used as a proof of anything," it would seem to me the question boils down to "if a man cannot be responsible morally for his actions (or lack thereof), then how can a moral argument with him as the moral actor be evaluated?" UPB in general only requires universality and logical consistency. Moral arguments specifically (according to UPB) are to be judged like this: The man in the coma then is being evaluated here (like a rock) and by definition cannot be acting immorally (or virtuously). In the same way a mammal is warm blooded, gives live birth etc, and according to that standard a lizard is not a mammal. I actually think that the coma test is a very good and helpful test, and I think it's so helpful for exactly the concerns that you (and Trane) expressed. Because people do make moral arguments that try and hold people who have no choice like they are morally responsible. Children who "disobey" made out to be bad, taxpayers who omit sources of income made out to be thieves. If we are going to be holding people responsible, then they damn well have some choice in their actions. And I think the coma test demonstrates this beautifully. Hope that helps!

So you said: But actually he hasn't confused them at all as I'll demonstrate later. First, the quote you took issue with: (Emphasis mine) Here's the problem with the coma test as you describe it: You didn't actually demonstrate any errors Stef made at the point you said this, but ignoring that, you are conflating positive obligations and virtue. Stef does not say that if giving to charity is a virtue, then a man in a coma is immoral. Before quoting what he actually said, here are the moral categories he defines just before Virtue and it's Opposite and the Coma Test: The opposite of good is evil, virtue vice, personally positive personally negative, etc. And here's what he actually said: What he is describing is a moral absolute (positive obligation) (the good). Another way of putting it is that it is enforceable through violence that people ought give to charity. I don't believe that he defined the word "opposite" in the book, but google defines it as "diametrically different; of a contrary kind," which is perfectly consistent with "giving to charity" vs "not giving or unable to give to charity". The trickiness with negations is more to do with virtues as defined above which is precisely why you cannot enforce virtues violently. It is actually consistent to say that positive obligations are invalid and have the moral good described in "thou shalt nots" (or "negations"). Your assertion that this is an "obvious" error, may be because you don't get it. And to that point, here is Stef (in the same Coma Test section) making the same distinction you do: So when you portray this like it's some egregious monumental error, you just sound to me like almost everyone who criticizes UPB, thus my canned response.

Very interesting. I've added probiotics to my diet in the last year or so and it's had a noticeable effect on my mood. I didn't do it for mental health, but I can see how it would be beneficial. Interesting article

UPB doesn't require a definition for "human". UPB applies to anything that has the capacity for deliberate moral actions. Humans just so happen to be our only known example of that. If we learned tomorrow that chinchillas can evaluate moral propositions, then we ought start holding them responsible for their crimes Sorry, I haven't read every post in this thread, but has somebody commented on the fact that Tadas is assuming we are human in order to debate the issue? He wouldn't (for example) bring this up with some hamsters, right?

She was physically attractive for sure. A global planetary loving goddess? Probably not. So, why aren't you treating me like a global planetary loving god?

Hi Josh! Welcome to the boards! Was the journey toward voluntaryism a long one? Were you previously a minimal state kind of guy or like a full blown statist?

Those damn dirty republicans! Always trying to ruin the economy and exploit small businesses >

Hi EllieChu! Thanks for posting I have known lots of different kinds of people. Men who identified as women and were also sexually attracted to women. He may be considered a lesbian in that context. I know that people have different gender identities and sexual orientations and that neither is a pathology, but is actually as natural as my own maleness and heterosexuality. I have a female feminine lesbian sister is getting married soon. I have nothing negative to say about women who identify as men or men who identify as women or any of the many gradations between the two. When I say "feminine" and "masculine" I mean the way it's classically been defined, that they describe nouns rather than people's identities. And there are two more in fact: "undetermined" and "neuter". So a hen is feminine and a bull is masculine. A book is neuter (having no gender) and a dog is "undetermined" (since the gender cannot be determined from the noun alone). More on that here. Forgive me for being a little personal, but I've heard that gender is a social construct my whole life and many times my attraction to masculinity was even portrayed as pathological since I love competition and rough housing. I was made out to be shallow and superficial for liking stereotypically male things like explosions and video games and cheesy action flicks. Sentiments like the kind you are expressing, sentiments I relate to as "feminist" are as familiar to me as public school is. For as long as I have been trying to discover how I relate to myself as a man (since my teens) I have been told that men and women are too much alike to be talked about in "opposing" (complimentary) terms. This resistance has been very noticeable to me and it only makes me more curious about what these differences are. "What don't they want me to know?" In my exploration of the topic I've found strong evidence for inherent gender differences and strong arguments against inherent gender differences. (And by that I mean psychological differences). What is incontrovertible though is that men and women's brains are constructed quite differently. The corpus collosum (for instance) is larger in women allowing for easier communication between the hemispheres. Even our eyes are different (link earlier in thread). It would make no sense to me that the brain would be different and yet the psychology was the same. But even if we accept that the gender roles are mostly artificial, it almost doesn't really matter to me as they are so ubiquitous that they may as well be genetically rooted. Let's just assume for a second (just humor me) that talking about men and women as qualitatively different is not going to lead to unjust discriminations. What are the gender roles that you consider healthy and positive? There are things that I consider feminine that I think are totally vital and awesome, and there are things I consider masculine that I deeply appreciate and revel. How about you? Wouldn't you agree? *ADD So to be honest, I am using "masculine" / "feminine" in two different ways here. First as a descriptor of nouns and second as a person's sex. Forgive the conflation.

Hey! Me too!