Brook Warren

What I believe is better for consumers it to prevent the creation of institutions that enjoy a monopoly on initiating violence against people to prevent them from carrying out voluntary transactions. Especially when such institutions, being able to arrogate power to themselves, tend to never function in a manner consistent with the pretense they were sold to the public under. Are you starting from the concept of a stateless society and then trying to determine how to create something akin to patent law? Or are you talking about what could replace patent law now in the existing state controlled society? If you mean in a stateless society, you would have to make a rock solid case and present it all over the place and get people to agree to it. It would probably come down to getting business owners to agree with shunning people who violate it. If you mean in a state controlled society, all you're doing is holding a gun and asking other people to come up with better solutions that you get to agree with, if they want you to put the gun down or aim it elsewhere.

So basically what I understand from the original post is this simple question: "If I invent something that is easily copied, how can I prevent copying and/or guarantee I will exclusively enjoy the profits." My question really is, why do you feel entitled to the profit? And for how long do you believe you should be entitled to profit? Otherwise, whatever arbitrary level of violently coerced intellectual property protection is what you get to enjoy. I would never feel ok about inventing something that is simple to copy (or not simple) and somehow forging a monopoly on that idea. It's kind of revolting to me honestly.

I'm not too sure he would win debating slavery even on pragmatism. Even on the grounds of pragmatism, you could debate in return that slavery is inefficient due to the historically subsidized security costs required by slavery. When that subsidy is removed, so is the profit. In fact, I've argued this before and people tend to immediately have no idea what I'm talking about, and absolutely no knowledge whatsoever on the costs of enforcing slavery - and thus their argument utterly collapses as they clearly have no idea what they are talking about. I try to indicate to them that this should be a bit of an eye opener that they were willing to jump onto an ideology and justify it with invalid philosophy, all due to ignorance and the inability to self identify that ignorance. Basically to argue it from pragmatism requires picking the collective that you believe deserves the benefits - i.e. granting a collective special privileges. The slaves don't benefit from it so clearly one collective is being picked over another. The argument must be surrounding why the slaves deserve to be slaves. Even the slave owners in the US understood this. It's why they spouted all that nonsense about slaves being live stock with lesser intellect, etc; they were trying to justify the atrocity and convert something that is right in your damn face unethical into something that is ethical. So even they knew ethics was important and were forced to navigate by their own conscience. Can you even think of any arguments that are supposedly "pragmatic" and don't just arbitrarily choose one collective over another? To my understanding, no definition of pragmatism grants an exemption from ethics, and the writers addressing it didn't claim otherwise. Please correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't encountered or been able to find otherwise. When you present an ethical argument to people and they refute it based on pragmatism, I think it's pretty clear what their true goals are. I think they are indicating quite clearly that they understand the ethical contradiction and need bullshit to continue with their desired behavior unhindered. They're not really trying to change you or defeat you in any way in the discussion; they're really just trying to protect their own minds from the horror of their immorality. Unless they're sociopaths. And in that case they're just trying to avoid the consequences. It's tragic that these people trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance by redefining their evil behavior as pragmatic behavior, are really just trying to emulate sociopaths.

What word would you use to call someone who lacks any belief in the existence of deities? My understanding is that this is the most general definition of the word atheist. To assign any further general meaning to the word atheist is invalid and fallacious. So, to say that atheism is a kind of faith, is invalid. The word faith in regards to religion means something specific. The most general application of it is belief in the existence of a deity or deities. Does anyone disagree with that? To say that atheism is a kind of faith in the sense that the word faith applies to religion, is completely invalid. To say atheism is a kind of faith, because the definitions of faith include something that applies to religion and something that absolutely does not apply to religion but does apply to atheism, is deception. You might as well say, "Ripping is certainly not a watering, but it is a kind of tearing." Unless a person is willing to admit that he doesn't know what the word atheism means, the only thing I see left is this: The point of making a statement like "atheism is a kind of faith" is to try and equate the religious believer and the nonbeliever; the blindly convinced and the unconvinced; people who accept and people who do not accept. This is utterly intellectually corrupt. But it is a kind of admittance that the person is wrong in the first place, and it's as if as long as everyone is wrong, then somehow everything is ok - so follows the self protecting and validating claim that everyone is wrong. Basically, I'm making the claim that when a person says: "Atheism is certainly not a religion, but it's a kind of faith." What they are really saying is: "Atheism is certainly not a religion, but it's a kind of religion." Hear is an analogy for the most general definition of atheism: If a sealed cardboard box is placed before people, and shaking it doesn't make any sound, and the exact cardboard used to create it is used to make another box, and both are weighed and shown to have the exact same weight... and scanning or whatever else, basically any amount of attempts made to detect that something is in the box fails to detect anything, and then there is a group who claims: 1) "I believe that box contains gahd." And another group claims: 2) "I see no evidence that that box contains something called gahd. In fact, I see no reason why you even thought of claiming that it did." Group 1 is exercising blind faith. Group 2 is unconvinced in Group 1's claims. You could call Group 1 boxgahdists, and group 2 aboxgahdists. And then someone would show up and say: "Well aboxgahdism is just another religion. They have faith that god doesn't exist in the box." Even if an aboxgahdist says, "I'm pretty confident that there is not only nothing called "gahd" in that box, but given that there is absolutely no evidence at all for something called "gahd" to exist, then I am pretty much certain that it doesn't exist. In fact, if it is so undetectable how could the even be describing this object? Thus I'm even perfectly safe in saying that what they are describing doesn't exist because they have no way to know what a true description of it could possible be." Then the aboxgahdist is still not religious. So maybe my little scenario is a little weird, but let's upgrade it to the Christian scenario: God is a him. God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. God is undetectable. Event though god is undetectable, someone at least at some point detected him in some way. The descriptions and behaviors of god closely follow bad fathers and bad authority as demonstrated all throughout history. God has characteristics that have somehow been communicated to believers, and these characteristics contrast from religion to religion. It's not the expression of a religion to say that there's no reason to believe in Christianity. Sure, I agree that it is a belief to be convinced in a proven premise and then exercising logical deduction from that premise. But belief and religious belief don't mean the same thing, just as faith and religious faith don't mean the same thing, just as "convinced about the validity of a theory," and "blind belief in a deity" do not mean the same thing. Possibly most importantly: evidence and "lack of evidence" don't mean the same thing. The important thing is that believing "logical deduction from a proven premise "is valid is in direct contrast of what is required to accept religious belief. Religious belief is founded on the lack of need for logical deduction from a proven premise. In fact, religious belief guarantees that you must attack things you are convinced about in your own head, and even verbally to others. In other words, things you believe must be purged and denied because your religions says you must. Not because of arguments, or evidence, or logic. Whether you have derived something from logical conclusions or you have witnessed something out in the world, it must be purged and denied if your religions says so. So to the religious believer, faith outranks conviction, evidence, and reality. Please don't equate atheists and theists. Thanks.

Been listening as far back as I can remember, even on my dads 45 records in the early-mid 80s. My 5 years older brother was a huge fan and could sing a lot like Freddie Mercury. Brian May was probably the biggest influence on my guitar playing.

I value what Nathan said, but that is not my position on being prepared. I'm waiting until I feel prepared before attempting to schedule a show. Here are some of the things I'm doing: I came to the conclusion that people should spend a lot of time being able to answer this question: "How was your childhood?" Instead of answering it with "uhm" or "what do you mean?" or "can you be specific?" and then saying something that they completely contradict for the next 45 minutes as Stefan helps them become aware. And I believe people who can't answer that question with an obviously indicated amount of self discovery and effort behind it, probably aren't quite as balanced or mentally healthy as they could be. So I started writing a document that details my childhood and the time leading out of my childhood. It covers all of the people that had an impact on my life. It covers all of the major categories I've thought up that I feel I should have thought about: Relationships with individual family members Fights Spankings Intimate Relationships Sexuality Injury Public School Close Friends Religion Politics Medical Conditions Near Death Experiences Playing Sports Substance abuse My thoughts on my own hypervigilance My problem with barking dogs. My problem with people slamming doors. And some other things. In one day I wrote 11953 words in that document. I don't know how long it will get, possibly twice the size it is now; I've covered most of the serious stuff. I'm considering trying to clean it up and condense it down to something more concise and less of a thought flow... and then possible sharing it in the private forum. Once I'm finished with my document, I'm going to talk to all of the main people that I wrote about in it and discuss all of the things with them that I am convinced need to be discussed. I've read RTR and NVC and feel I can put these concepts to practice. RTR is what opened me to being ok with my buried feelings about my family. Or put another way: it's ok to hate your father and mother. Not because it said it was ok. Instead, it just helped me realize how I actually felt, and once I realized it, of course it was ok to feel that way. NVC on the other hand is what gave me some language tactics to communicate with them. Especially my mother. The first productive conversation I had with my mother in about, well, ever, happened after I spent about a month reading and practicing NVC. Then I'm going to start seeing a therapist and work with them to identify the things I should be focused on with my mental health. Then I'm going to consider calling into the show, if I feel I need to. At the very least, spend a lot of time on these questions: 1) How is your relationship with your mother? 2) How is your relationship with you father? Or at the very least, your primary care givers or whoever replaced these roles, or whoever had the most significant impacts in your childhood. I recommend writing your thoughts down about these questions, and talking to someone else about them if you can. Writing my thoughts about these questions was extremely helpful for a lot of reasons, such as being able to go back to read over and detect where I had gone into a passive voice, where the people form the past start basically speaking for me in their defense, and it really helped me think through the details and ramifications of things that I obviously haven't dealt with. That really just scratches the surface of why it's useful.

I've seen 0 evidence that a god exists. The descriptions of the gods of modern religions are contradictory, and thus describe something that can't exist. As far as being certain that something that is contradictory exists, I'm 100%. If something turned out to exist, then I would have to go back and determine where I was wrong in thinking it was contradictory. Then there is the emotional argument to believe in a god, which I don't entertain because I don't see the positive side to believing in a god. All of the claims of a positive side that I've examined turned out to be negative instead. So why should I even be entertaining the concept that a god exist? No one has offered any reason to pursue this concept really other than saying believe this. That isn't how you get people to believe in things. You show them testable phenomena and/or use logic. Neither are available or have been offered, ever. If I can immediately see flaws in someones logic about entertaining the existence of gods, then it wasn't really a logical argument. So what it really comes down to is, how certain am I that entertaining the concept that a god exists is pointless? And how certain am I that I'm able to make logical conclusions? The answer to that is: potato