Mister Mister

what does it mean men and women are intellectually equal?

initiating violence interferes with goals...unless it doesn't.

In a case like this, there is an issue of proof. You are framing the story as if we are omniscient, and know that a crime has been committed. But in reality, all we would know is that she went home with him, then she accused him, which puts the society and the court system in a difficult position. To me, this is the key to the issue. Feminists want to suspend due process when a woman has accused a man of a sexual crime against her. This is an appeal to the biological drive to protect women and dispose of men. But it is an abandonment of liberal, rational, principles when it comes to law and crime and punishment. This is why, in the past, there were strict rules about how men and women should behave. It is why some people have put the responsibility on women not to sexually provoke large groups of men, and incapacitate herself with alcohol. It is why, in general, we think a woman ought to develop a secure, trusting relationship with a man before putting herself in a sexual situation with him. This isn't misogynistic, it is simply realistic. The courts should only be able to throw a human being in a cage based on proof of a crime, and that's just in a free society. In our fucked up statist society, you certainly can't rely on the police and courts to come rescue you. So take responsibility for what you can control - your own behavior. This is something men inherently understand and how we have lived for most of history.

don't remember, I heard it years ago but the idea always stuck with me

yes, the sad thing is that this kind of shaming only works on nice guys who have empathy for women, guaranteeing that a disproportionate amount of men who make advances towards women are overly aggressive, creepy, etc... fulfilling the prophecy

"Most people think children are broken adults that need to be fixed, but the truth is that most adults are broken children."

Three statists are in a jail cell. Two of them claim the third as "public property", then vote on who gets to rape him first. Fair?

People who are voting for Bernie think he can make the US like Sweden and Norway and Finland and Iceland, which they presume to be the best places in the world, due to their quasi-socialist policies.

Yes, I went to a school district, with a lot of black kids, was threatened and intimidated and called "white-boy" and "cracker" and "snowflake" more times than I can count. I also remember a number of times when teachers or administrators were clearly holding black kids to a double-standard of lowered expectations in these kinds of conflicts. You mean these people?

The US government is in 20 trillion dollars of debt and counting. Unfunded liabilities exceed another 100 trillion. Nearly all Western democracies have similar out of control debts. Unpayable debts are a problem in general with lending money, and the interest rates tend to reflect this risk. It is not a problem particular to anarchy, and is clearly a far worse problem in Statism, where debts can be left to future generations.

why are the police going after food vendors? stay safe out there.

Most of your questions are addressed very well in the Truth about Crime presentation. Have you watched it? Yes to some extent that is true. Although, the propensity for violence and fraud is demonstrated to be more common among lower IQ peoples, there is the rare case of the high IQ sociopath, who are certainly the most dangerous people there are. You bring up a good point that governments steal more than private criminals. You mentioned police civil asset forfeiture, but far outweighing this of course is taxation, deficit spending, and central banking. In this way, a tiny amount of mostly white men can steal more than millions of black men. All this is worth pointing out. But it's also a distraction from the issue at hand. Blacks are not doing well in America because of A) Corporal Punishment B) Welfare and Father Absence C) The race-baiting narrative which blames all black dysfunctions on racism and privilege. If you want to help, these are the areas, in my opinion, that have to be talked about.

You don't want to change because you don't want to become like your parents? Can you unpack this for me?

Great stuff as always Kevin. I would add that, for the majority of people, gender dysphoria, or gender identity disorder is a kind of a "phase" that kids go through, and by the time they are 18, they have outgrown it and are usually homosexuals. However, it is becoming more and more common to give these kids hormone therapy to minimize the effects of puberty, potentially having lasting impacts on their brain and body. People who transition have a huge rate of suicide, around 50% I believe, though obviously we don't know how much of this is internal psychological issues, vs. external issues of social alienation and so forth. But nevertheless, people are potentially dooming these kids to a miserable life of freakishness, when in fact the majority of them could probably go on to live a completely normal and happy life as a gay person. As Kevin said, the PC hysteria around the real medical and scientific uncertainty in this area is really harmful, and when it harms children who don't have all the information or reasoning ability, it's really contemptible. As far as being born in the wrong body, I agree with neeel. There are people who think they are Napoleon, people who think they are dead, people who think they are missing an arm. We recognize these people as mentally ill and don't indulge their fantasies. Again, we can't say for sure if GID fits in this kind of mental illness, but it is at least open to inquiry. I would also say, it's really a weird kind of double-think as far as the queer theorists go. On the one hand, they're saying, "just because I was born with a vagina doesn't mean I have to look and act a certain way"...ok fine, I mostly agree. But on the other hand, they're saying a man can get a perm, wear lipstick and high heels, get a boob job, and he's now a woman...do you see the disconnect?

becoming like whom?

When you are in a system of coercion, it's not so simple to just act on principle. I don't believe Stef has ever said "we should close the borders". He doesn't see it as his role to endorse political candidates or advocate for certain policies. Stef often confuses libertarians by arguing from "inside the matrix", for example on this issue, the Eric Gardner situation, Beau Bergdahl, and so on. This is a very important perspective I've realized. If a government claims that it's power over you is for your own benefit, or some national interest, then it's important to point out where it fails. For example, the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal isn't that important to me in the larger context of things, but considering that she also has defended NSA spying and is vying for the highest office in the land, it is very relevant. In the same way, with regards to immigration - if we're not going to have a country, that's great! Let's get rid of the Income Tax and stop enforcing all the other BS laws, and we can flourish, under a Confederation of States. But if we are going to have a country, which claims to take taxes from everyone for some greater good, but then allows millions and millions of people to come use a system they haven't paid into, that is a recipe for disaster. Most libertarians want to look at it as a single issue, thinking "obviously restrictions on immigration are the initiation of force, so there should be no restrictions on immigration", but what they are missing is that a free society WOULD place restrictions on immigration, which are being over-ridden by the welfare state. So most libertarians say "well fine, but let's just focus on getting rid of the welfare state instead of immigration", which sounds fine and dandy, but people have been trying to do that to no avail for the last 60 years, and with each generation more entrenched it gets harder. So there is no easy answer to this issue, but we just have to get to a point where we can talk about it seriously, and get past the fear of the curse of "racist". I hope that makes some sense

.For me, debt comes in late in the conversation Me: Government is immoral Statist: Governments do some immoral things sometimes, but also can do many good things. Me: But everything they do is funded through taxation, which is theft. Statist: Taxation is not theft!!! You consume services paid for with taxation, and vote on how the money is appropriated. Me: Even if that is true, a great deal of government spending is financed by debt, which is a promise to tax future generations who haven't voted on anything. Statist: Money is all illusory anyway. Don't you want there to be schools and roads? Do you hate the poor and sick and old or what? At this point, as dsayers points out, you can tell they are just manipulating and have no principles. In rare cases, however, people are actually curious, and might say something like "I never though of it that way. Tell me more..." <== Keep these people close. The clinch for the debt argument is not that hard. A father's debts do not pass onto his children. No government would generally enforce such a contract, and people would find it abhorrent if they did, and people were consuming things that their children would have to pay for. So how can this be okay for millions of people collectively? No, it is not everyone owing everyone else, it is future generations, owing a portion of their labor to bankers who loan money to the government. Consider that a great deal of public debt is owned by Central Banks, who just typed the money into their bank account to begin with, and you really see the truth - it is just modern financial slavery, of free-range human livestock. This old video of Stef's cuts to the heart of it.

Hi Joel. That's a very interesting and provocative introduction. Will you tell us a little more about your background? Welcome.

Sorry I don't follow. You seemed to be implying that AE is invalid or at least incomplete, because it is limited in it's ability to predict future prices. I am saying this does not make it invalid. It is better to admit your ignorance than to be certain and wrong. And again, I have to ask, why is it important or necessary to be able to predict future prices.

That's because "equlibrium" price changes based on factors which are impossible to predict. But Austrian economists can and have make predictions, from the failure of the welfare state, to the failure of the war on drugs, to the financial crisis in 2008. Their humility in admitting the limits of human knowledge in the area of economics, is what makes the field so valuable, and proves why central planning can't work. Your criticism doesn't say anything about validity of Austrian econ vs. other theories. If a bunch of voodoo priests claims to predict the weather down to every detail by reading chicken entrails, always making excuses when they are wrong, then along comes the meteorologist who actually understands how the weather works, but admits that his ability to predict the weather is limited...saying "my issue with meteorology is its poor predictive ability" doesn't mean anything. Why is it important to you to predict future prices anyway? And if you could, it seems to me the market would adapt to your capacity to predict and then your method wouldn't work anymore.

Are you wrong about what?

Sorry I don't understand the question. In the absence of a State, you can incentivize things through economic rewards and ostracism. The same way we incentivize restaurants to have good service, and for people not to say "nigger", even though there are no laws for or against these things. DOes that make sense? Sorry, I realize, my language was not that clear. I don't have to incentivize women to do anything. Most of them have a biological instinct to reproduce. To be clear, what I meant was not that we would incentivize people to have kids, but that IF they choose to have kids, they would be incentivized by the society to do so in the circumstances that are best for the children. This would be done most likely through a combination of social forces, as I described, and financial rewards, through a DRO or some other kind of insurance. In the same way that not smoking and exercising gives you better health outcomes, and would decrease your health insurance fees, not hitting your kids or leaving them in daycare, gives the kids better outcomes and the cost of insurance would reflect that. But the other point I was making, was that, healthy, stable, peaceful, voluntary families, are the foundation of a healthy, stable, peaceful, voluntary society. It happens from the bottom up, not the other way around. So I think you kind of have it backwards...

Maybe change is only dangerous to a part of you, that you haven't gotten to know yet. Who is this part and why is it afraid or resistant to change?

Hi and welcome Complicated social issues like this are hard to "prove", but there are a couple things that come to mind. One is the prevalence, in the early part of the century up until the 1960s, of so-called Friendly Societies, like the Rotary Club, the Masons, the Oddfellows, and so on, that served many of the functions that the welfare state has come to, charity, healthcare, and so on. Such institutions have all but disappeared or vastly diminished in the last 50 years. Also, not exactly within the scope of your question, but there are significant studies which have shown that, as a result of multiculturalism, there is a breakdown in community in the sense that people don't talk to their neighbors, and so on. I agree with Anuojat, the way you say your friend "demanded" proof sounds more hostile and dismissive than genuinely curious, which is not a good sign.

Thomasio can I ask what is your experience in the free market?