tasmlab

I applaud your willingness to chirp up and it is probably a good thing overall for people to publicly highlight abuse. Just reading your description, though, this sounds pretty routine unless it was particularly more violent than you describe. Toddlers ages 1.5 to about five or so have the 'terrible twos', meaning they can grow really frustrated with instructions. As a parent, you find yourself trying to take the knife away from the two year old and the kid will freak out no matter how nicely you remove said knife. It resembles a hostile situation, but isn't. Same with putting a kid in a stroller to navigate a parking lot or busy street area. You often have to insist that the child be strapped in for its safety - the kid screams and it looks hostile, but is necessary. Obviously if hitting or yelling or insulting during the interaction, I'd be worried. But what you write seems like regular safety/terrible two stuff. The interaction would be different if the child was in latency. We had to do this yesterday with my two year old. We're walking along a roadside, she doesn't want to ride in the stroller, she won't hold hands and she's persistently walking into the street. Into the stroller she goes in full resistance, strapped in. Live baby > frustrated baby.

Hi Phillip It's perfectly natural to think their might be control in the universe (some outcomes of nature look so elegant that they looked designed at first look). This would be trusting your sensual perception.* "Everything" can't quite be explained logically and rationally, we're still working on it, morality still is a WIP, and there is externalities and luck associated with achieving goals, so it's not just blaming yourself. So, you've come to the same list of unknowns and un-solved-fors that plague everybody, but then you've arbitralily made a nice cover-all solution by believing in a God. Lacking these answers, don't you think it would be more satisfying to throw your hands up in the air and say you don't know instead of claiming an absolute knowledge? Why do you need know everything? And, you don't need to give up thinking about this now. You don't have to claim failure in your thoughts and then just quit. (It sounds like I'm making a case for agnosticism, but I'm not) * I don't beleive in a designer

I like all three posts are pretty good! I think the original premise might have some marginal utility in talking to an R or D who didn't succeed in electing whom they voted for, especially when they are complaining about the outcome. It's like "Well you agreed that it was a 'winner-take-all' situation and that you might have someone in charge who you don't want making rules for you." and get them to begin nitpicking democracy instead of holding it as some supreme and awesome virtue.

Classmates.com just digitized my 1985 high school yearbook and published it for the world. It made me think of how rare documentation on the mundanity of the average nim-noe was just a few decades ago. Now, hundreds of millions of individuals are posting like this, sharing anything from personal photos to breakfast updates on Facebook, and have their locations tracked via GPS perpetually, no matter how unimportant/uninteresting etc. If we think of phases of KEEPING historical record, we can probably chunk some very general periods: 2,000ish BC and earlier: Pre-history 2,000 BC - to 1700's: History is kept by a few literate gate keepers who write books 1700s to 2000: History is recorded by journalists who keep a fairly exaustive record of anything meritting news, even if it is the results of a small-town pie eating contest 2000 - ? : Mass digitization of the individual, where all events almost regardless of mundanity, regardless of any societal relevence, regardless of how important or unimportant the subject, is captured forever. And we are here to see it! Perhaps my great great grandchildren will look back at when we lived pre-2000 and ponder: "To think, people back then only had journalistic history to ignore. Now we ignore it all!"

I sort of think about this when I here well-deserved liberal outrage at the Westbrook type church people who actually are angry enough in their beleifs to hold "god hate fags' signs at parades and such. If you think about the level of multi-generational mental abuse they had to go through to become like that, both from their domineering pastors and insistent parents, you can almost feel sorry for them.

The original function of a "bank" was to safely store deposited commodity money and I think most people still think of it as something like that to some extent. Safety deposit box vendors are now the true "banks". Once banks started trading their deposit notes as money and risking insolvency by overprinting deposit notes and lending they, became risky investment vehicles. I would contend that credit, interest and lending are still pretty critical bank functions. The idea of CD seems like a legit way to do both conservative lending and perhaps even fractional reserve. The bank explicitly makes a contract with the depositor that their money isn't available for a certain term (three years) in return for agreed upon interest payments.

My youngest daughter turned two last week, and I gotta tell you that sometime it is hard to reason with them. She's taken to biting her brother to the point where he bleeds. We separate them, tell her in a very serious tone that it was wrong, and have her sit by herself for a few minutes. She knows she's wrong and cries with guilt, but it wasn't an automatic stop by any means. Is my serious tone yelling? Is giving her a time out abuse? I'm certainly expressing power and she has a pretty important lesson to learn here. The biting to the point of scarring has been the biggest and most challenging thing. If she throws her dinner on the floor or something we're all pretty calm. I'm more questions than answers.

I'm giving a kind of indirect answer, but if you see how easily merchants take both Mastercard and Visa (and Diners, Am Ex, Discover) it would seem pretty simple. Just imagine that Mastercard and Visa were also banks issuing their own currency. They wouldn't have any problem with the conversions. In fact, when you travel abroad, almost everyone recommends just paying with Mastercard instead of converting to local cash. All of the merchants take it and the currency conversions happen automatically. I bought a rug at a shop in the Casbah in Tangiers, Morocco where the building was essentially was made out of clay with dirt floors and the clerks wore no shoes - almost felt like I was in the bronze age - and they took my Am Ex no problem, despite the currency in my USD bank acount needing to be transferred into Moroccon Dinhar's or Euros. It was seamless, just like buying something here. Same with the restaurant. I've had this experience in GB, Italy, France, and Spain even before the Euro. I'd pay for a hotel room in Venice and the bill would be like two million Lira, pay with the card, and my account was charged $79 USD. I was impressed. As for a vendor not accepting certain currency, they would be foolish not too unless the currency was untrusted or the transaction costs were too high, just like some places don't take Am Ex. Then you as a consumer would just have the invonvience of going to bank to exchange, or more likely, get in your car and go to another merchant who does take the currency. The most dicey situation, IMO, of competing currencies would be if there were private ones competing against government fiat currency that was rapidly inflating. The government workers would get paid in it as well as the old age pensioners (SS) and the welfare folk. Everyone would need it to pay taxes with. But then everything else would probably transact in the private currency (provided it had real value). Once a store owner sold enough merchandise to cover his tax bill, he'd probably stop accepting the government currency for that period. The government-paid might be kind of screwed as they go to vendor to vendor looking for someone who hasn't saved up their taxes yet. And then may have to pay a premium for their goods. (Forgive me, armchair conjecture. But this is the internet :-)

I don't know if this is part of it, but there was a certain level of <i>confidence</i> in the ideas that was important. There was no risk in telling my family I was part of the program, but lots of argueing if I came out on the Atheist side. So there was a cost to talking about it, and that couldn't be done without a lot of certainty. This now seems trite, but it didn't at the time. Oddly, people have more violent reactions to me saying I'm a libertarian over an anarchist. The former most people think is some sort of weapons-grade republican. Now they just think I'm nuts. :-)

I read "Audacity of Hope" back in 2007 thinking that a 300 page book would be a good format for him to explain how he makes decisions or what his views on, say, politics were. Absolutely nothing! He starts the book right out with something like "this isn't a book about a list of policies I advocate for..." and then he basically holds true to that promise. I have a progressive friend who very strongly believes a realativist POV (i.e., one where you take each situation and look at it without any pre-concieved mental rules, principles, process, etc) is the preferred and smart way. He especially rejects the aspect of libertarianism that is 'dogmatic' in his words i.e., there should be a firm set of principles that should be applied to decisions. In his view, the former is 'thoughtful' and the later is 'thoughtless'. As an aside, I also tried to read McCain's book at the time but it was unreadable. The first eight pages is a just a list of questions an airplane pilot might be thinking. I think both books were engineered to not provide any information. I read them knowing I'd be in a lot of dinner party type conversations with a lot of election talk.

I digress, but look at the word "protestant". It's really protest-ant, as in one who protests. Probably coined when Henry VIII and crew were prostesting against the Catholic church. I've never noticed that.

There is a fairly important sacrement in Catholic and Protestant churches called "Confirmation" where you confirm your beleif. My mother mis-sold me on the concept. She said it was "when I get to choose to believe in God myself." After I finished, I announced that I wasn't going to Church anymore, since I was able to make the choice on my own, I would choose "no". She quickly corrected me: "No, it's when you choose to believe in god."

There's sort of two aspects to this. One is personal financial planning and the other is sticking it to man. Neither have a really significant effect, especially if someone is making an average American salary. And probably not worth the hassle. This said, withholdings are AWEFUL. They obfuscate what people pay and all of the nonsense itemizing on your payslip is BS too. When you run your own business you don't line item SS, Fica, Medi-stuff, etc., you just write one big dumb check to the US Treasury four times a year (or just once, if you are like me). It all goes into the same pot. If everyone had to write a check for their taxes each month for the whole sum and mail it in, people - even lefties - would be wholesale bullshit with paying taxes. People's moral views of government would just totally contort I bet because the expense is nauseating. But withholdings make it all seem to disappear. Terrible!

Like +1 on your post Nathanm As far as changing the minds of other citizenry, I think anarchists need to look like the sanest people around. I'm not sure all of AK's ideas accomplish that.

I have my own music dillema as I compose and release some very violent music with some very subversive themes and some language that is outright obscene (my last album): http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/tasmlab09 I now wonder what will happen when my own delightful three children find it!

I have three corporations and my tax return is typically over 100 pages long. I have really minimal withholdings and always have a big bill at year's end (I underpaid a little over $75K this year to fed and state, really feels shitty getting the bill, particularly with my worldview). You'll probably just get some nasty mail which is scary at first. The letters are pretty stark, like they come from the past and there is usually intimidating language. They told me last year that I couldn't claim I was married even though I am. I had to spend an hour on the phone with them, where they are just human, to correct the mistake. You may be able to invest the money and be better off than withholdings. They will penalize you at somepoint if your tax bill is 10% off of your withholdings. The penalties aren't much and they don't take affect until the second year you commit the violations. All in all, I'd say roll the dice and see what happens. You might find it not worth the extra mail and fees and such.

I think the overall lesson would be to not pursue someone simply because they are beautiful. I wouldn't recommend purposefully avoiding beauty - maybe your philosopher girlfriend will have had the misfortune of being born with good looks. If beauty is their only feature and you can figure that out pretty quickly, then you can avoid that individual. Defacto attraction will make a person seem beautiful, so how will you know if you are just pursuing a beauty or if you found somebody who really floats yer boat? As an older person (42!) I very seriously wouldn't limit your relationship pool to girls who embrace philosophy. First, you are probably young which means everybody you would pursue still has a lot of mental growth ahead of them i.e., a lot to figure out. Indeed, this applies to people of all ages, but especially the young. And, there's only maybe 1 or 2 such girls on the planet. And, this is a hobby. My wife doesn't spend hours listening to FDR podcasts and reading Rothbard, she's got her own interests and we both share our interests with each other but don't feel like we both have to have the identical use of free time. You want to find somebody who is nice to you, at least intellectually curious even if largely ignorant of philosophy, and virtuous. That's my opinion.

Despite being forced to go to church every Sunday until I turned 18 and left the home, I was pretty sure God didn't exist. And then in my early twenties became very convinced and vocal about my atheism, going so far as trying to convince others and such. At the time, at 22, it felt like making the decision to be atheist was a major intellectual achievement. But now 20 years later, it seems kind of 'duh'. Like "Yea, the sky is blue, ice cream taste good, ice is cold, fire is hot, God doesn't exist." It's not really a big achievement to see something so obviously and plainly true. And it shouldn't be. So will this happen with my conversion to anarchism? It took me a long time to put it together and I had quite a bit of help from the likes of Rand, Rothbard, Stef and others. Is it a major intellectual achievement? Or in 10 years will I look back and think "ice is cold, fire is hot, the state shouldn't exist, blah blah"? I guess it is a question of pride and growth. My kids feel a lot of pride when they do something, like first get dressed by themselves. And then later as they age, it's just getting dressed.

Kind of a digression, but I always wonder why so many people, many who don't invest the mental resources to even pick out which reality show they will choose to watch, fancy themselves knowledgeable about the formation of the universe and the creation of man et al. I saw a 16 year old with a creationist bumper sticker on her car, and I knew that she didn't think about much of anything in the world (e.g., never mulled about science or philosophy or economics or ethics or a technical discipline or aethetics, whatever. Just probably thought about clothes), but why does she feel it necessary to have an opinion on the formation of the world?

This is interesting from Wikipedia (which I know isn't the God-King of all human truth): "The Articles of Confederation, formally the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was an agreement among the 13 founding states that established the United States of America as a confederation of sovereign states and served as its first constitution.[1] Its drafting by the Continental Congress began in mid-1776, and an approved version was sent to the states for ratification in late 1777. The formal ratification by all 13 states was completed in early 1781. Even when not yet ratified, the Articles provided domestic and international legitimacy for the Continental Congress to direct the American Revolutionary War, conduct diplomacy with Europe and deal with territorial issues and Indian relations. Nevertheless, the weak government created by the Articles became a matter of concern for key nationalists. On March 4, 1789, the Articles were replaced with the U.S. Constitution.[2][3] The new Constitution provided for a much stronger national government with a chief executive (the president), courts, and taxing powers." If we take this as truth, the constitution was the establishment of a much more powerful central government. This speaks nothing to how the people were previously treated, used to monarchy, etc. We can assume that each of the 13 states could have all sorts of draconian government by themselves. I never meant to get ticky-tacky with history in my original post. I mostly felt a desire for the broad libertarian community to stop cheerleading the Constitution as somehow being a tool to limit government - I'm challenging this conventional thought because it actually sounds hazardous to liberty. It was - in a plain and naked way - the formal formation of the US government.

That's a nice analysis. I love the books and movies. Every faction except the Hobbits somewhat miserably seek power, be it Sauraman, Sauron and his army, the humans looking for a king, the rival human communities who hem and haw whether to aid each other, the elves in their kindom, the dwarves for their treasure and home, etc. The hobbits don't seek power but instead happiness. They like to eat and drink and smoke weed and dance and garden etc., So nobody every says out loud why Gandalf made the wholesale insane choice to task destroying the ultimate ring of power to a helpless, weak Frodo who didn't know how to fight or do much of anything. But it was because a hobbit was the only one who wouldn't value power over happiness - and even he was ultimately corrupted in the end! Stef does a nice bit about their being almost no commerce in the stories, as such with Star Trek and just about every sci fi/fantasy story ever.

I could expand the original notion that not just the constitution, but the idea of 'democracy' itself was about establishing power, not making it populist, just to appeal to a more fickle population who would be impressed with illusory controll over the ruling class.

I think in terms of UPB downloading probably fits into a category of APA. The one regarding rudeness in my opinion. There is no agreement between the producer and the downloader; even with McDonald's there is a tacit agreement that the toilet is for customers. You could even picture a situation where someone needs to download stuff for a moral reason... Aesthetically preferable behaviour is for situations that are not already a violation of greater preferability - like I am not precisely rude if I fail to pay my tax bill on time. Music and movie producers seem very happy to take advantage of this situation with the Internet being one such violation - is that rude as well? There maybe no agreement, but a content provider wants to be paid for their product of course. However, given the fact the product can be copied multiple times, payment is not particularly enforceable. It still remains an amoral situation of course. But like someone pointed out earlier if you told me that you had downloaded my cookery recipe for free and were sat in your garden with your wife enjoying a great meal, I would probably consider you as rude, yes. Which completely fits within the parameters of APA. APA goes a long way in explaining some peoples ambiguity around the topic of content sharing. But of course not everyone feels that way, which is why I was careful to point out it was my opinion. I have no idea what to make of this, without considering it as some bizarre strawman. I feel fairly certain that the general anonymity of the Internet and the distant relationship between some corporation owned by murderous GE in Hollywood and the low-income downloader makes this seem less rude. If you personalize it, the rudeness (or morality) becomes more apparent. If the downloader and the content originator were in the same room and were friends and had to talk about the act, I think both parties would find it rude.

Understood. But it was also a plan to unite the states under a Federal rule instead of having 13 soverigns, so in that sense, it was still amassing power. I guess my point wasn't to analyze its historical significance, but to critique the cheerleading we have for it today.

A handy, short list of rules is a pretty good idea for an organized religion. But they even goofed that up horribly too!