Mister Mister

All good, some more obvious than not. Lol about cable TV

sorry I haven't followed Alex a while, but when did he become a war-hawk?

Yes I agree with your definitions Dave and Alan. A capitalist is one who directs his resources towards producing more resources, or getting more value out of those resources...ehh, you guys said it better. So in this sense, would you say a gun is a consumption good, unless you are the government, in which it is a capital good?

The philosopher/poet Wilhelm von Goethe came up with a means of evaluating art based on 3 questions: What was the artist trying to do? How well did they do it? Was it worth doing? Still somewhat subjective, but I think it helps to give clarity, especially because "good" is too vague.. For example with regards to modern art such as splatter paintings a la Jackson Pollack, we can identify that the artist is trying to point out that there is no focus, and maybe they did this well, but disagree that it was worth doing. In other words, their technique may be good, but their motivations bad, or vice versa.

great way to make more terrorists

Yes maybe, in general I think it's difficult to apply morality the further back in history you go, but what I'm saying is, the funny thing is, that this is used by people who want to welcome the Syrian refugees.

Yes, and there's also Common Law Marriage, where if a man and a woman live together for a certain number of years, they are considered married.

the funny thing about that argument, is it seems to imply that the Natives should have kept the immigrant/refugee white people out.

My layman's understanding, is that, historically American conservatism was very similar to what we would think of as libertarian minarchism, a la Ron Paul. In some ways, it was a reaction against people like Woodrow Wilson or F.D. Roosevelt, who expanded both social programs and escalated wars. Someone like Barry Goldwater, who ran against Johnson, would be a good example. But there was a point at which, a bunch of former socialists (for some reason I feel the need to mention that most of them were Jews), particularly Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol of PNAC, and I might mention Christopher Hitchens as well, convinced many old-school conservatives that while small government is a nice idea, it was really important to beef up the military to 1) fight communism and 2) protect Israel. Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk both wrote strong arguments against this position if you're curious about that. After communism it has turned to terrorism of course. I guess the idea once upon a time was, that once the West had defeated communism, then the military would shrink or something like that. Anyway, this has unfortunately become the mainstream of the Republican Party. Anyone who suggests that maybe we don't need this mammoth military force, and to have stations all over the planet, and interventions in all these different countries, is treated the same way as a Democrat who questions welfare or affirmative action or public unions. They also haven't been very good on restraining domestic spending, so basically they are national socialist, totalitarian fascist war-hawks, who call themselves conservative. The only thing vaguely conservative about them is that they claim to want to use all this government force to protect conservative values, i.e. outlaw gay marriage to protect the family (with no mention of family court or the welfare state), spread democracy and free markets in the Middle East (with bombs), or GW Bush's "we had to abandon free market principles to save the free market). I hope that clears things up. Basically it's hard to make sense of, because these people are insane.

Individualism, as I am referring to it, is to see human beings as individuals, having unique experiences and preferences, not as clay to mold as you desire, based on what culture defines as good and bad. Rand called it when she said "Man is a end, not a means to someone else's end". I don't believe you need to teach children to fit into roles, these roles have evolved naturally and will continue to do so without coercion being necessary. What you are talking about is the trend to a kind of narcisstic delusion, where certain individual's feelings and preferences are not seen for what they are, but as trumping reality itself. Obviously this can't apply to everyone, as people have conflicting feelings and preferences, so it becomes a war over which group's feelings have primacy as we are seeing. This has nothing to do with individualism as I am describing. My main point of contention, was with regards to calling boys names, shaming and/or neglecting them, and coddling girls. Both these parenting styles are harmful and unnecessary.

Yes, I get what you are saying, although I don't know why have to say the "altar of absolute individualism", that sounds like a caricature of what I said. What I'm saying is that you consider the individual needs of the child. At the same time, we can be honest with them about the roles of men and women, not defined by social constructs, but by the constraints of reality, both biological and economic. This is important especially if they want to have kids one day. But really the best way to teach this I think is not explicitly through instruction, but implicitly through example; if they see their parents as a happy couple, engaged in the joys of family life, they are likely to want to emulate that one day. One of the reasons I think that so many young people view marriage and child-rearing with such contempt, is they think the silent misery of their parents is an inevitability, rather than a sign of their own parents' shortcomings. As for boy-centric or girl-centric upbringings, I dont know if that's the case or not. I've talked about this a lot with other FDR members, especially those who have kids, and there are mixed feelings about it. But what we were talking about before, coddling emotions in girls, or shaming them in boys, is abusive and not good for anybody. I feel like maybe you are caught in a little bit of a false dichotomy here. You can be firm with a child, while not allowing him to emotionally manipulate you or be overly soft. You can also be sensitive to a child, while not coddling him/her.

I don't think that answers his question. When you talk about people like that, especially children, in this context, you are referring to people as a means not an ends. Of course this is how most people see children, what Stef described in a recent call-in show as a vessel to transfer culture from one generation to the next, not as an individual with thoughts and feelings and needs and so on. This still gets to the question as to how much of what we think of as "gender" is biological and how much is social. Fundamentally I'm not sure that it matters from a parenting standpoint. The two extremes you are talking about, are verbal abuse, and a kind of pathological coddling, which in the extremes create brutes and narcissists. As I mentioned before, this is done to produce cattle who will serve their role in the culture, rather than what is really best for the child's health and happiness. Where you are coming from I think, is a perspective common in both religion and statism, which is that the needs and desires of the individual is somehow at odds with the "society". Rather than "playing to his type", I think you ought to treat boys and girls as sovereign individuals, and respond to their particular needs and preferences. At the same time, as a society we should recognize the general differences between the sexes, while acknowledging and tolerating the exceptions. I think if we have clear and consistent rational values, these things will sort themselves out. Men will distinguish between risk-taking for what they truly believe in, and being sacrificial pawns to false gods. Women will distinguish between expressing real distress, and faking victimhood to manipulate others. Does that make sense?

It's hard to say how much of this is biological and how much is emotional. But I think you're asking the wrong question. It's natural for people to cry when they are upset or overwhelmed - it's not that people encourage this more in girls, but that they discourage it more in boys. I've heard of several studies that show a woman will respond to a crying girl 3 or 4 times faster than a crying boy. Later they may hear things like "don't be so sensitive", "man up", "you pussy", etc....So through neglect, shame, and so on, boys learn early on that crying won't earn them sympathy or positive attention, and they don't use this as a strategy anymore. The biological aspect of it is also significant. Men have more of a tendency/capacity to compartmentalize thoughts and feelings than women. In other words, if there is a crisis, men tend to be able to put aside their fear and anxiety, and deal with the problem at hand, whereas women tend to look for emotional validation. This can be seen as a knock on women, but it is not - women need the support of the community for their children to survive, and men are more disposable, and tend to look for solutions in the moment, and process their emotions later.

That's interesting, I think I follow but can you elaborate?

Great! I think that's very healthy Certainly the God Jehovah described in the Old Testament fits the definition of terrorist, from the flood to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the murder of Job's family and so on. Though there are some Christian sects which reject the Old Testament entirely and follow only the teachings of Jesus. However, my understanding is that Jesus has a concept of thought-crime, and introduced the concept of hell as well. All this said, I think we're casting too wide a net here. Yes I think it is wrong to threaten children with Hell, and the influence of Christianity on young men's willingness to "serve" in the military is a real concern, but it's not the same as radical Islamic terrorist Jihad.

Intuition and feelings are a key to get to the truth about YOURSELF, not the universe at large. The difference is falsifiability. The importance of logic isn't that it somehow tells you de facto what is true - there are many things which we don't know, and may never know that logic and empiricism are not able to magically illuminate - but the real usefulness of logic is that it tells you what ISN'T true. Philosophy is like a sandblaster, which scrubs away the tenuous, the grit and grime, all but the most solid of substances. So yes, you can point to instances where feelings and intuition have pointed to the truth, just like you can point to instances where a person guessed a coin flip 5 times in a row, or where a horoscope was very accurate. But you can also point to many instances where feelings obscure the truth. people FEEL that their tribe is right and superior to all other tribes, people FEEL that the Earth is flat, people FEEL that the military and police protect them, people FEEL that the welfare state is moral and necessary. One person might feel that the earth is at the center of the universe, another person feels the earth and planets go round the sun. So how do we negotiate this difference? This is why we need philosophy

My feeling is, that it's true there are great mysteries at the heart of the universe, creation, space, time, matter, energy, cause, effect, and so on. And personally I don't think that science yet has a consistent or coherent cosmology. And I'm fine with this uncertainty. The problem is, that sometimes religious people will try to jump on this rational uncertainty, and insert their false religious certainty, which has no basis whatsoever. If anything, I think it's just a cover for the anxiety some people feel about being uncertain. Sometimes this false certainty is mirrored by atheists, with regards to things that are yet unproven, or unproveable, such as the Big Bang, string theory, dark matter etc. That's kind of another issue, but I think it's important that we be secure about what we know for certain and what we don't, and not try to respond to religious, irrational uncertainty, with pseudo-scientific, irrational uncertainty. So in the case of this argument from the OP, yes it's true that there are problems with our understanding of the "First Cause" of the universe, but calling that "God" doesn't solve the problem. Unless they can clearly define a God which isn't self-contradictory, and demonstrate how this God solves the problem in question. It would be like if we have a math problem, and you are asked to solve for "x", and you answer "x" = "y". I ask, well, what is "y", and you say "y" = "x", or "we can't comprehend it". Doesn't fundamentally answer anything. And my guess is they are using this to justify certain archaic religious beliefs or practices, which are most likely predatory or parasitic. I might ask them, "how does knowing this change your life?" and go from there. This is known as "God of the gaps", where people insert God into any gaps in scientific knowledge, such as the missing link between apes and humans, abiogenesis, planetary formation, etc.

Not sure I totally agree with this analysis. It is not simply a "lack" of development of their minds, but a deliberate and systematic brutalizing and propagandizing of the human mind's innate skepticism and autonomy, that is necessary to produce a person who will murder and terrorize others so long as they are following orders. This particular process of breaking children is integral to what many people consider a "Christian upbringing", and does lead to violence. Certainly it's not consistent with the message of the New Testament, but I don't care about the scriptures so much as the actual culture. In the same way, it is not specifically anything in the Quran that is concerning about Islam, but the culture in the Muslim world which largely doesn't accept things like the freedom of speech, due process, womens' rights, separation of church and state, and so on.

I don't see any problem with comparing one religion to another. Just because we have criticisms of all religion doesn't mean there aren't major cultural differences that make it preferable to live in one culture or another. In the same way, we can prefer the government of Canada to the government of North Korea even though we object to the idea of government in principle. Last I checked, people don't have to worry about being murdered because they make funny cartoons about Jesus or Buddha or Krishna

Christianity doesn't say anything, it's a concept. If you mean the Bible, then there are plenty of justifications for war, particularly in the Old Testament. But I take your point. Nonetheless, why did the Christian upbringing that most of the Republican voters and the soldiers, not protect them intellectually against the lies and manipulations of Bush? Either there is something wrong with the foundational belief system of Christianity, or maybe these people are not "real Christians" in your eyes?

utopian, is it fair to say, that what you mean is that, in situations where there is conflict or the potential for conflict, if you don't escalate and try to dominate, intimidate, manipulate, etc...you feel weak and powerless?

A Neocon whose violence was supported by most American Christians

What would you do to those who refuse?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

I totally sympathize with the helplessness and confusion, babypuke. We can all speculate on what we would do if we were King, but that's all it is, speculation and wishful thinking. At this point I think all that can be done is to point out that there are legitimate concerns to have over this number of people from these cultures coming into Western countries on the public dime, and that raising these concerns doesn't make you a Nazi.