Mister Mister

Is it possible that genetic material is exchanged beyond the physical limits of a planet?

Everyone is afraid of death to some degree. Have you ever felt this fear? If so, you can share that with him, and how you've dealt with it. Assure him that it is natural to some degree, every living thing fears death, but nevertheless the drama of life goes on. From what you've told me, maybe what he really fears is dying with significant regrets. In this case, channel this fear into living a more full, courageous, happy life. Leave all the chips on the table so to speak. Being dead is not such a horrible thing, it is the absence of being, the closest we can experience is a deep, deep, dreamless sleep, or possibly meditation. What is really horrible is being dead inside while still alive. To quote a rather cheesy line from a kind of silly movie, "Every man dies. But not every man truly lives."

Aggression is not "male". It only seems that way because Male competitiveness and physicality is often mistaken for aggression, and Female aggression is unseen or minimized.

Is it possible that we're asking the wrong question? That evolution is a continuous process without a beginning? Galaxies take on a certain form because that form is stable, and it's possible that they reproduce. The same could be true of stars and planets, atoms and molecules. I realize that may sound far-fetched, just something I have pondered from time to time.

One important thing to realize about the Democratic Party, is that people who are dependent on the government either through employment or welfare tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. They also get a HUGE amount of money from Unions, most of whom collect mandatory dues from members who are required by law to be part of that union in order to do a certain kind of business. Also public school and university teachers and the media are overwhelmingly Democrat. So they don't really rely on "arguments" so much as bribe voters with stolen money, and propagandizing children. Another point I would make is that as much as they pick on the Right, sometimes justly so, for being "anti-science", they are "anti-economics", which has far more destructive political consequences. Republicans on the other hand, appeal more to the entrepreneurial classes, who are fooled into believing that taxes and regulations will be cut back. They also play on religious delusions - so the churches do for them what the public schools do for the Democrats, although the State is not directly involved in churches in the same way. Most people vote based on their own short-term self interest, and to serve their delusions about God or the Collective. To find a real philosophical argument amongst all this pandering and self-serving is pretty rare.

The objectification of men is not primarily sexual - men are objectified for their utility rather than their fertility. Karen Straughan talks about this. While a nude woman is more appealing to most men, a nude man is not as appealing as one in a uniform demonstrating high status.

Sorry to be annoying, but there is a common pattern of people starting threads on these boards with several paragraphs of life history. Most people are not going to read all that, and it probably isn't necessary to really offer advice or clarity on the subject. It would be more helpful for people if you open with a particular issue or question, and let the details fill in as they are needed.

Well the flaws in this case are not physical violence but more yelling, emotional manipulation and so on.

Anyone have experience with trying to connect with parents who admit guilt over shortcomings as parents?

Not exactly the way I would characterize it, but certainly I can sympathize with having a controlling mother who was prone to hysterical reactions towards any mess or damage to her house.

As far as I can tell, most children who are not severely neglected or abused are pretty happy to be alive.

I appreciate the feedback, and I agree that proper firearm use could be an important part of a some kid's education. What is a realistic time-frame for this? In other words, at what ages is it reasonable to introduce various aspects of guns and shooting? With the parents in question, he is a 4 year-old, and there's no way these people will ever teach him to use a gun. My question was more specifically about whether it is sensible to teach a kid not to shoot at people, even in play, or is this part of the general hysteria around boys playing "rough"? Btw, he is allowed to rough-house.

I think I worked with that guy at a summer camp 8 years ago

I think it's important to note that most sex in the animal kingdom is what we might term "rough". Most mammals engage in some sort of male competition, the female selects the winner, and he mounts her doggy style, humps away hard and fast, ejaculates, and dismounts. Having sex facing one another, kissing, touching, foreplay, emphasis of female orgasms, are all uniquely human as far as I know. The tradition of sexual tantra from the East is all about slowing and prolonging the experience, which they would say "transmutes" the base animal energies into higher spiritual ones or something like that. I can say that in my experience, going more slowly makes it better for both parties, and that you feel the orgasm in your brain and whole body, rather than just your balls. To be honest, I think rough sex is preferred for both genders who don't understand the nuances of human sexuality. So doing it hard and fast is easier for them to have an orgasm, but not necessarily the best. Also of course it is easier to have rough sex than slow passionate sex with someone you don't care about.

An open question - is it problematic for children to play with toy guns or make-believe guns? I was with some friends who have kids last night, and I was playing with their 4-year-old son, when he made his hands into the shape of a gun, and I tried to dodge the bullets matrix style, but his mom stopped him and reminded him of their rule that "we don't play with guns" or something like that. I can certainly sympathize with this, as you don't necessarily want a kid to normalize shooting at someone, but I am also aware of the hysteria about this kind of thing, Christina Hoff Sommers details in "The War on Boys" how kids are suspended for this kind of play, which is really harmless. Just curious what people on this board think about it.

Nice blog post! - this is an important idea, one I have been mulling over for a while. I think there are a few points I would add to yours. The first problem is the definition of Capitalism and the conflict between two definitions of capitalism. The first is the supposed "ideal", which is a Legal framework based on Private Property, and the Economic System resulting from Free Trade. Obviously the first has never existed as an Absolute--the existence of the State violates Universal Property Rights--though it does exist in degrees, some societies allow for more ownership and trade than others of course. But because it has never existed as an Absolute, and is generally a word used to refer to real societies in history, many Leftists regard this as a religious belief. The second is a system of government which is run to the benefit of owners of capital, as opposed to "Socialism" which is run to benefit society. There is some basis for this. Aristotle opposed Democracy because he saw that it would lead to the poor voting away the property of the rich. James Madison, I think, or another one of the Founders wrote that the purpose of government is to protect the opulent minority from the ignorant masses. You make a good point in your blog that just because a certain condition has never existed in society doesn't mean it is not still a good idea, and is not possible. But I think Leftists have a point that we cannot use the same word that has been used to refer to real historical political/economic systems, to refer to some ideal that has never existed. That's why I think the word Voluntarism is so useful, it is very clear as to its meaning. It also emphasizes a major distinction between us and them, we see society more from the bottom up, rather than the top down. Therefore instead of looking at what laws the government enforces on millions of people from the top down, we can look at voluntarism as a condition of relationships. Now we are no longer dealing with the purely theoretical, as we can compare voluntary relationships to coercive and fraudulent ones. The second definition is of course what the Leftists will refer to, but what Libertarians often distinguish as Corporatism, Crony Capitalism, State Capitalism, Crapitalism, or Fascism. One important fact to point out to Marxists is that all of the so-called Capitalist societies meet most of the planks of the platform laid out in the Communist Manifesto, including a Central Bank, Centralized Public Schooling, and a Progressive Income Tax. You might talk about what effects these Socialist policies have, effects which are often blamed on the Market, especially the Financial Speculation encouraged by the Central Bank. Also I think this definition doesn't entirely describe what is going on. All owners of capital are not benefitted equally by the government. As you pointed out, they are often in competition with each other to use the government against one another. The owner of a missile factory may benefit from the government, but the owner of a marijuana plantation does not. A big disagreement is whether Free Trade leads to consolidations of Wealth which then corrupt the government, or whether corruption of the government leads to consolidations of Wealth. To me this is a pointless chicken-egg kind of argument. The important distinction to me is Wealth acquired through Voluntarism as opposed to Wealth acquired through Coercion. It's important to point out that the richest people in any given Society throughout history have acquired their Wealth through Coercion. It has merely evolved from Roving mobs of bandits, to Kings and Queens and Lords, to Central Bankers and Statist Corporations. Also that the only way people have ever emerged from poverty is by accumulating wealth through Voluntarism. The final point I would make is Stef's theory from "The Story of Your Enslavement", that we are only allowed relative economic freedom because it ultimately generates more tax revenue for governments. Lao Tsu in Ancient China argued that a Wise Ruler does not interfere with the affairs of the Common People, and this way they will do better. Adam Smith argued that if governments don't interfere as much in Trade, it will lead to more Wealth for the Nation. This is a really important point because it makes a strong and clear distinction between us Voluntarists and Traditionalist Minarchists. We are not harkening back to the Ideal of the Founders, but looking forward to a more rational and peaceful world, trying to extend the Voluntarism of private relations to all of Human Society. Just my thoughts, lemme know what you think.

You say "I'm angry" and "I feel it's a betrayal", which is understandable, but is there something Stef said specifically that you think is false? Do you feel differently after the follow-up show? Also can I ask, do you think it would make sense for the man in the call to break up his family over his loss of religious faith? I found it to be a very moving call, and I really felt deeply for the guy, and while surprised at what Stef said, I appreciated a lot of it. Actually one of my dearest friends in the world is a Christian and an Anarchist, I thought of him during this show. He has always been generous and thoughtful and far more willing to discuss the areas we disagree than most people.

I think this is a very complex topic, and would be a constant challenge to Law in a free society, subject to constant negotiation, unless/until technologies were developed that eliminated harmful pollution. Some people have suggested that pollution is just aesthetic, not subject to ethics at all, but I don't think this is true. I think there are two categories of pollution that Law would have to address in a Common Law Society. Pollution is not necessarily aggression but certainly some forms of pollution are aggression, and still others may not be done with malicious intent, but would create an obligation for the polluter to compensate property owners affected by the pollution. In the same way that Keying someone's car is aggression. Accidentally damaging someone's car is not necessarily aggression, but does necessitate compensation. In the same way, dumping waste chemicals in a river on your property, knowing that water might poison others, is absolutely aggression. Fertilizing crops and creating runoff that kills fish which other people rely upon, or clear-cutting forests which cause landslides which damage other peoples property, would create a legal obligation to make restitution to the injured parties. Would-be Polluters would have to make adjustments based on these kinds of rulings, and would likely buy insurance against these kinds of lawsuits, leading them to avoid these kinds of conflicts, or accept them as the costs of doing business. So I think there would be plenty of room for Environmental Science and Law in a Free Society, but in a more rational and productive capacity.

Let me offer a short answer without having given too much thought to it. There are many kinds of feminism - but mostly had to do with women wanting to renegotiate their place in family and society following changes in economics in the post war period - there was an unprecedented level of wealth, and technology had both created less work for women, meaning they had more free time, as well as creating less work traditionally done by men. This meant that a lot of the new work . Similarly, the Civil Rights Movement followed certain economic developments, blacks had achieved a degree of economic self-sufficiency and community that had never existed for them, and it was this that allowed them to organize and make legitimate complaints about the Status Quo. Modern feminism, like modern racialism, is fundamentally a Statist phenomenon very different from its origins - In the wake of the success of these movements, to undermine white supremacy and male supremacy being written in the law and socially accepted, radical Marxist elements of these groups found out that the only way to continue making a living being paid to talk about this stuff was to go into academia and government. The more classically liberal-minded people had essentially accomplished what they set out to do, so they moved on with their lives. But others were determined to milk sexism and racism which they still continue to do. The fact that this kind of radical feminism hasn't improved womens' lives will make no impact on these people, just as the fact that race policy has failed to help blacks will not stop those determined to . Because the real purpose of the feminism and racialism that survives to this day is to exploit the guilt and stigma of men and whites who have been convinced that they should feel guilty for being alive, and to pander to the sense of entitlement of women and blacks who have made bad choices and don't want to take responsibility for their own lives.

My take on it is this - certainly there are legitimate complaints that women can have towards society, and even more so in the past. We should listen to these complaints and address them based on standards of reason and justice. But what really needs to be opposed is the narrative that we live and always have lived in a patriarchy - defined as a system in which men have all the power and use that power for their own benefit at the expense of women. This assumes that: - men naturally want to exercise power over women - women have suffered more than men (how exactly would one measure this???). if this is the case, than the disproportionate attention and resources poured towards women - breast cancer funding vs. prostate cancer, concern about girls self-esteem while boys are drugged and have - violence, dysfunction, oppression, and abuse of power are male qualities - you hear this very often where if you mention any dysfunction in the society, a feminist will respond "yes but that's the patriarchy", "patriarchy hurts men too", etc... The importance of women's role in sculpting the values of the society as the primary caretakers of children, as well as the blatant sexism inherent in referring to violence and injustice as "patriarchy", and to peace and equality as "feminism" rather than humanism or egalitarianism is lost on them. -all male achievements have come at the expense of women, they are not earned fairly but stolen from women, thus making women as a class, an injured party entitled to restitution, and men as a class are a criminal party deserving of punishment. another way of saying it is that, since men's wealth and power and privilege comes at the expense of women, women's advancement must now come at the expense of men. Of course this comes down to a basic confusion over win-win vs. win-lose which is common on the left. But to me this is the biggest aspect of feminism that must be opposed because it comes hand in hand with ignoring or minimizing male victimhood, especially male children who have it really bad in so many ways. A more appropriate alternative narrative is outlined by Warren Farrell - that gender roles evolved in a certain way, in a more brutal environment, to ensure survival of the children. Women gave themselves up as breeders and men gave themselves up as resource acquisitors, for the sake of the survival of the children. Only when economic freedom allowed for more comfort, did women begin to think about what more they wanted out of life. Also significant is Stef's analysis that for most of history, most people have been like cattle to political power. Therefore, women were seen as primarily objects of fertility to produce more cattle, and men were seen as potential workers and warriors. In effect, the sexual roles that evolved out of our biology and the economic reality of the past, were used by those in power as a way to secure their hold over their human farms. When feminists talk about how standards of beauty are prescribed by the society, to some extent they are right, but not in the way they say. Standards of sexual value are not prescribed by men for the purpose of oppressing women, but by Rulers for the purpose of running human farms, certain roles have developed, and people have internalized them - therefore men pursue young, fertile women, and women pursue workers and/or warriors, both of which often come at the expense of potential love and long-term happiness.

I just had a thought, inspired by a show Stef did recently about Art in a Free Society. As an artist and a fan of the arts, and a critic of much of what passes for art these days, I got to wondering, what are the effects of the State on art? For example, I know there are subsidies and grants for artists, and a lot of art comes from Universities which are State-funded. But what effect specifically does this have on the content of art? I also wonder about Intellectual Property and its effects. Just want to know if anyone has thought about this or has some insight.

What's the context of this? Is there more I can learn. Anyways I think it's pretty awful. I spent time with children in both India and Nepal, and I can tell you they are societies with far more contempt for children that we have here. Very different gender dynamics than we have as well. Women RULE households, and have only to raise their hand in threat of a hard smack on the head to win complicity from even a teenage boy. On the other hand, they are a lot harder working than women in the West, and seem to do most of the work in agriculture and construction, while it seems like a lot of the men just sit on their ass, smoke cigarettes, etc. Poor families will spend what little they have for education usually on the oldest son, who of course then has the obligation to help out the family should he turn out to be successful. Then of course you have serious issues with violence against women in these countries, gang-rapes, acid on the face, and so on...horrible stuff. So there are a lot valid complaints for women in these countries, but also a lot of criticisms of how they treat children. Nevertheless, this kind of propaganda doesn't really solve either of those problems. Lol, is checking your privilege anything like checking your balls for testicular cancer? WTF does it even mean? How do we know whether or not one has checked their privilege? As far as I can tell, what it really means is, constantly doubt yourself, deny your needs, and submit to the Marxist rule.

https://rosecodex.bandcamp.com/track/talking-bout-a-feeling Hey if anyone is interested, I would love for you to give a few minutes to listen to this song I wrote and give some feedback. The recording is not perfect, but I think you can hear the concept of the song which I think is pretty good. It has been significantly influenced by FDR, and is about music and emotional connection.

All you have to do to avoid exposing him to something inappropriate is to be honest with him and with yourself, and be curious about his experience. It would seem to me that exposure to hunting would come in steps. Wait for him to ask about it (he will, I guarantee). So it might go something like this - At a certain age, he will figure out that the meat he eats comes from an animal. Then he might figure out that it has to be cooked. Show him how you season and cook raw pieces of meat into what ends up on the table. He might express curiosity about the process of butchering the animal. Anyway, you can see where I am going. I am completely speculating, but just imagining what an appropriate, healthy process of introducing a kid to the reality of hunting, killing, butchering, and cooking an animal would look like. The important thing is that you are curious about his reaction. If it really bothers him, he might feel shame, and try to suppress his feelings to win your approval. Let him know it is okay to feel about it as he does. What was your introduction to hunting?

Of course Kendo, Boxing, or any other kind of combat sport is not a violation of NAP as long as it is voluntary. And I am sure there are things to learn from it. But I might ask why Kendo rather than another sport or physical activity that doesn't involve physically harming an opponent, and possibly being harmed? Your kid is likely to be interested in Kendo because you are, which is fine. But my approach would be to expose them to a variety of activities and see what they take to the most. Be curious. It might be dance, team sports, running, hiking, swimming, etc. But personally I would be very tentative about my kid participating in a violent sport like football, hockey, boxing, or kendo at a young age. Also, my understanding is that there are really two aspects to most martial arts. One is the training and "philosophy", the other is the competitive aspect. While there might be some value in the training, I am not sure that engaging in competitions involving physical combat is the healthiest exercise. What is your interest in it? Is there any history of violence in your life? So it's not an ethical issue, more of an aesthetic one as I see it. Stef addressed this issue some years ago and stirred up a lot of opposition about it, haha no surprise. His theory is that a serious and dedicated interest in martial arts is a symptom of continuously trying to relive and master a violent situation.