ThatAtheistPlace

I don't think it's the porn, Canuck. I really think that it's more the obfuscation that he's addicted to or just used to. It's like, evoking her anger at catching him is the "release" if you will, not the porn itself. Speaks of serious mommy issues, but I agree, Canuck. Be firm in what you know. Whenever someone wants you to be confused, Zava... that's so much worse than them just getting caught in a lie. So yeh, stay firm and get him to counseling. If he's unwilling or still in denial, ruuunnnn! He will only make you start to question your sanity and intentions.

Wow, Neo.... did you read her post at all???

I know that you'd prefer responses from men, but I would just like to say that you are doing absolutely everything right. For some reason, I felt that if I were in the situation, my initial thought would be to have some porn on when he comes home and see what his true reactions are to your watching it. But, it sounds like this is way deeper than just letting him know you're cool with it. Instead, it may be beneficial to ask him what his parents thought about sex, masturbation and porn. It's like he's so used to telling his mom, "I was just scratching my thigh!" ... "I'm just holding those magazines for the neighbors!" etc... It's a pattern that he's continuing today with you, perhaps? It may not be that he is a pathological liar all around, or something that extreme, but parents can treat sexuality in such a cruel, obtuse way. I can't imagine that he's learned how to be open and honest about his. Just my 2 cents.

I really liked this. It shows that people can come to their own understanding of RTR in different ways, I think. http://www.upworthy.com/a-4-year-old-girl-asked-a-lesbian-if-shes-a-boy-she-responded-the-awesomest-way-possible

My objective is to point out the hypocrisy of it. Also, it would depend on whether or not you consider a fetus a "life". (I do, but I respect women's rights to do what they choose with their bodies.)

Public schools and the government subsidizing the corn and beef industries. Also, the government basing nutrition guidelines on what the subsidized dairy and beef industries, who they have allotted a monopoly, dictate.

First of all, his monotony was driving me crazy after 5 seconds. Secondly, even if this is just an unbiased objective look at environmental, health, and economic factors in a series of video observations.... what insurance does this affect??? And why, out of all fast food, junk food, and even McDonald's food, would he single out one sandwich? Look out for my new video, ya'll: How video games, consoles, makers, players, systems, stores, companies, and industries are evil. GTAV has violence and raises your cortisol levels by eleventy hundred%. Health: D GTAV uses 187,000 pounds of plastic over the span of a millennia. Environment: D GTAV sold 30 million copies so far. Economy: B. Overall score? D+ For more videos on how things are evil check out housingappraisals.org

Hi there! I love O-town.

Boy do I understand!!! My grandfather was a very prominent preacher and civil rights advocate. He and my grandmother were extraordinary human beings. Kind, generous, and loving. But somehow, my mom is fucking insane and so is her brother. So.... for a long time I've wondered what the disconnect was. I actually think it is because her parents were so popular that there was a large amount of unintentional neglect at home. I'm still reconciling a lot of it because my grandfather was also a decorated marine in WW2 and we all know what that entails. Unfortunately, he suffers from Alzheimer's and dementia and my grandmother passed away about 20 years ago. I think my mom is still so caught up in the fact that he was a good man, by everyone else's standards that she can't fathom that he wasn't a good father, so I don't get any useful insight into her upbringing aside from what she tells me and what I can gather from the climate of that era. For your particular situation, I would just leave it. He's already set to reap the consequences of the life he lead, good and bad. I assume his children support him through his aging and that he has a general feeling that he is going to heaven or whatever, but the entire life that he could have had if he wasn't mired in fantasy, can never be known to him. It's not as bad as my grandfather's sentence, of essentially reliving the war and my grandmother's death every day, but that just means that his punishments manifest in ways that we couldn't even imagine. Given that, you can talk to him about whatever you want, but I'd leave it alone. I wouldn't go out of my way to visit him or contact him, but if he e-mails you and you don't like it, ask him to stop or just send it to the trash. If you have to be around him, just listen and maybe ask about his upbringing. You can still learn a lot and you won't have to worry about trying to change him. Hope that helps!!

I agree, this seems to be an argument of families and religion more than the state. It is prevalent in the schools, but moreso in a manner that says, "You in no way reached our high expectations, now join the military, wallow in shame and guilt, or generally stay on this hamster will of reward for compliance." whereas, I think that parents and religion genuinely delude themselves into the magical thinking of "work hard, believe it, achieve it." It is sad, for sure.

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I guess not wanting to have kids can be genetic like not liking your same sex, but ultimately, amongst friends I know who choose not to have children, it's due to the idea of "bringing a child into this horrible world", or "I don't feel like I would be the perfect parent", or "I waited too long, so why try now?". I have even heard people say that it's selfish to have children. I beg to differ. To voluntarily give up so much time, attention and resources isn't selfish (unless you're doing so specifically for a return). I absolutely can not wait to have children! (In the figurative sense....) I just can't wait to meet them.

done

I have first hand experience working in the "offices" of a public school system and I'll tell you right now, Stefan is dead on. The people that make the real decisions about children are absolutely batshit crazy. They are almost all religious, and they like to believe that what they're doing is right and good. They make a ton of decisions on a daily basis that affect kids without once talking to the children directly. I would have to start a whole new thread, or write a novel, about how fucked up it is; but to address your arguments specifically, FireShield... You may have enjoyed your classes and your teacher and found it to be a wonderful place, but ultimately, the kids in your very same classroom that did not find it to be so great, still had no choice but to be there. Could those same children have disagreed with their parents or their teachers about anything? No. No matter how nice a teacher is, they are complicit in forcing those students, and parents that do not want their children in schools, to be there. And while they're there, do you really think that they will say anything bad about the system that pays them? The types of propaganda that roll around in schools is staggering! Everything from respect violent authority figures, like police and resource officers, to praise teachers because they "deserve" our admiration, to the prevalence of ROTC programs (I'll include a pic I made about that...) I apologize that these thoughts aren't well formed, but I agree with Rex, you're nit-picking on things because you don't want to accept the fact that by your teacher teaching you the various political parties, that it makes you, as a nubile young man take the word of an authority figure that political parties are relevant at all. You say your Physics teacher was a millionaire? I'm 1000% sure he lied to you, or is misrepresenting himself knowing what you think he means by that. There's nothing redeemable about public schools, and had you not said the pledge, you very well would have received the scorn, weird looks, and "he's better than us" sneers by your teacher and peers. I think, as libertarian/anarcho-capitalists, we have a habit of thinking that an action we took, that didn't meet our goals, still helped to move our objectives forward in some way, (for instance, the Ron Paul people thinking that even though he didn't get into office, that more people were turned onto Libertarianism... which is fallacious, but I digress)... I think you need to look at your schooling in the way a correct application of that argument is intended: If you had been taught by someone genuinely interested in your learning, and did not have to sit through boring physics classes and things that were never going to be of use to you, you could have finished school years earlier, could have started your life sooner, could have found and stoked your passions in life without objection, could have been contributing back to society as a whole, could have developed friendships with people of your choosing, not just who you happen to sit next to in school... The lost potential that exists because of all public schools is what is so sad, to me, about your blind praise of one.

Their parents must have sucked.

I went to TEDcharlotte earlier this year and had to choke back so much !! EVERY single person was like "Just believe in yourself, have a vision, and you will achieve it!". Nothing was creative. Nothing was even an "idea". I was so disappointed. Ethan, that's awful.

I'm with Kawlinz. I've never heard of that. I think the child support system as a whole is the devil. If it's anything like that, where a man is legally obligated to pay a woman funds without any conditions or considerations for the child, then I say nay nay.

I totally agree with you both! Ruben, I put the book down feeling like he'd effectively shown that he had to tell a lie to cope with his reality, but that his cognizance of that poked holes in his earlier religious assertions. And yet, the movie.... ah, the movie.... I totally walked away feeling like they uplifted religion and mythology as a perfectly acceptable salve. SPOOOOILER ALERT Did anyone else feel some sort of way about the Tiger not looking back or acknowledging Pi? Once you find out it was a story, I wondered why he would have added that piece in there, but then once you realize that the tiger was him. The side of him that saw his mom get killed and in turn killed someone. I love this story because I still ponder it. It'd be a good one for a Stef book review, if he hasn't done one.

Why? The point of the manipulation (and of business, period) is to stymy competition and affect supply and demand. Free markets don't allow for pseudo-interference and coercion by violence to these things, so the resources devoted to those efforts would have to be more creative in the face of other companies doing the exact same things. What would you be afraid of them doing when they're actually forced to be put in check by the uncertainty of what others are doing to take their customers?

Those statements seem to just be assertions without proof. We don't live in a closed economy and resources are not limited to currency. The subsidy aspect seems correct, but even in a free society where protections aren't given out by a government from taxpayers, but also the UCC isn't upheld, Apple may be in a better position to utilize cheaper labor while assisting the poorer locations that they do business with. If you're smart enough to flourish in THIS environment, I would be amazed at what Apple could do if it didn't have to spend a large amount of their time and efforts on the regulations that are on them today.

I too am so sorry to hear you and your significant other are having troubles! I have an observation, that I hope may be helpful. My thoughts when reading your post were that things were surmised so very neatly. It was like, "I'm having problems A, B and C and I'm looking for solutions accordingly." Not that you can extrapolate an initial impression across an entire relationship, but as a very logic-minded person I tend to approach my issues in that same 1, 2, 3 manner. BUT, as a woman, I also appreciate when my problems and emotions can just be my problems and emotions. To clarify, I don't think that it's so "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", where guys want to solve things and women just want you to listen. I've come to understand from listening to FDR that it's more about allowing your loved one the space to experience their emotions without also having to manage yours. For instance, hypothetically, if I'm upset that I feel I am always cleaning up after you, and I try to express that to you, it may be that you immediately interject your own anxieties about my unhappiness into the mix. You may become very apologetic, or angry that this is a minor issue to you, or if the presentation of your problem is any indication, you might start trying to come up with a schedule for when you both clean and a chart for which responsibilities are whom's. The reality is that your girlfriend might have difficulty understanding just why your attempt to alleviate her anxieties causes her more anxiety, but it's probably due to the fact that even when you are trying to be helpful, that's just you trying to manage your own anxieties and not fully allowing her to investigate her own. Instead of reacting to problems that she presents, really try to encourage her to flesh out the problems herself. Ask her questions. Really try to understand where the differences are between what you feel is a common sense solution and what it is that she's actually experiencing. I hope I'm not sounding too confusing, but man... once I got this stuff, my whole relationship has changed and I hope that it can do the same for you. Even in the scenario of cleaning, if you allow her to really investigate her own emotions, you may find that her father made her clean by doling out orders without asking wether she wanted to do dishes or not, and your very attempts to try and mandate solutions, bring back those same feelings of inferiority and helplessness.... I don't know. But you never know until you get your own feelings out of the way so that she's not busy making you feel better or right or helpful, and let her dig. Oddly enough... I'm doing the same thing to you, that you may be doing to her. That hasn't escaped me, I promise. If none of this is fitting for you, please let me know so I can ask more questions, as well. This just sounds like a pretty urgent situation, so I'm hoping this gives you some immediate "ammo", if you will. I'm about to pick up the Real Time Relationships book, because what I'm telling you are just things I've gathered from the podcasts about RTR that I've actually tried, so I can't wait to dig deeper into that. I just listened to podcast 951 (click here) which hit this nail squarely on the head. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and I do hope that it offers you some insight and assistance through this matter!

Why all the anti-talk around a phone? It's. a. phone. Although sweatshops and things of that nature certainly exist, I agree with 3Bobs, you have to ask yourself just how bad things were that someone would voluntarily work in poor conditions. Governments try to "expose" these wrongs as a capitalist inevitability just to make it seem like they are needed to keep the free market in check. It took further-developed countries having an industrial period before advancing. Forcing places to shut down, that people are clamoring to work in, doesn't entice other companies to come in and create competitive working environments and wages. Ilo, your level of empathy for another's situation is naturally lessened the less you've walked in that person't shoes.

I'll have to find this article, but a friend of mine reads this political magazine that is aimed toward politicians. One of the articles was about a need for enhancements in education because, although Americans are dumbed down to a manageable level, the military and some government institutions are faltering because of a lack of intelligent stock. In other words, they made us dumb enough to control, but too stupid to sustain a proper military. Makes sense.

I liked it.