Moriartis

Wow, yeah, that's a great point. People would take it a lot more seriously if they didn't know it was coming from North Korea.

Seeing quotes like this is such a scary reminder of how much of a fundamentalist religion statism is. The fact that the left-wing is so blindly unaware of how evil their government is is just astonishing. I can no longer believe that Presidents actually believe anything they say. He of all people knows how little the government represents it's people. For him to make statements liks this is proof positive that he's nothing more than a big-time snake handler selling people a lie for his own benefit. It sickens my stomach to know that millions of people hear these words and are inspired by them. Being unplugged from the matrix sucks.

I've only watched the first 5 or so minutes of it(I'm at work, so I can't really get too into it at the moment), but so far, from what I've seen it it's pretty damn accurate. The "our eternal leader" stuff is pretty hilarious, but otherwise it pretty much hits the nail on the head. It's pretty sad when another countries propaganda doesn't even have to lie in order to be effective.

Conspiracy theories are now the litmus test I use to determine whether or not I care about someone's opinion. If someone outright rejects conspiracy theories because they are "conspiracy theories" without hearing the evidence first, I'm not wasting my time talking to them. Thanks for bringing the article to my attention, very interesting and terrifying stuff.

Yeah, there are so many things about this article that irritate me. I'll list some. I'm forced to assume that the author of this article is very anti-gun. His use of the "assault weapon" ban example, which logically should ban the vast majority of guns because it's a vaguely defined propaganda term is immediately suspect. It's also not a fallacy to say that a populace that only has access to revolvers and basic rifles with small magazines would be unable to defend themselves against a government with access to apache helicopters and M4 assault rifles. The author not getting this concept is not a logical fallacy. Pepin, your point about his own use of weasel words and the nirvana fallacy was awesome. Very nicely put. I had the same thoughts when reading the article. As far as the meme he uses for the example of the nirvana fallacy, perhaps someone can explain to me how that's a fallacy. Saying that gun laws have prevented shooting sprees is an unfalsifiable claim. Saying that the people who have committed shooting sprees are people who ignore laws is not only not a fallacy, it's obviously true(unless I missed something and suddenly shooting sprees were legalized). Granted, there are better ways of arguing this point, but the author seems to overlook massive fallacies if he doesn't agree with their conclusions. Very irritating.

@Super Adventurer. Yeah, it is a rather freeing feeling knowing I can bash whatever and I don't have to try to defend the indefensible. The problem is, you have to connect with the audience in order for it to work. So, in addition to attacking their sacred cows you have to do it in a way that they won't react to with anger and resentment while still making them uncomfortable. It's a difficult balance to find, for sure. @Ribuck. Thanks so much for the link. I'm definitely going to read up on that. I don't know if I would consider my new form of comedy to be "conservative", but perhaps that's because my mindset on liberal vs. conservative is still Democrat vs. Republican, and as we all know, Republicans aren't really conservative. @Morse Code Stutters. Yeah, I had issues with Chrisitianity as soon as I encountered it, so it was never a danger to me. I regard this as proof that if you raise a child without indoctrination, they won't gravitate towards dangerous cults. Tragically, this was not the case with statism, but I'm now free of that mentality as well. As far as my father goes, I've never really had a good relationship with him. There was always tension between us because he tried really hard to push ideas of "manliness" on me when I was young and after he left he became guilt ridden over abandoning me. In everything that happened with my family, I was the one person who you absolutely could not pin any blame on, what with my being 9 years old at the time. He still blames my mother and my sister for what went down. He thinks my mother turned me against him, which is the exact opposite of the truth. My mother and sister went through great lengths to try to get me to talk to him more often and take more time to get to know him. I've had quite a few arguments with my sister about it. She didn't think that it was right that I didn't really talk to him and I never understood why she gave him the time of day. I never really had much desire to get to know him. I came to the conclusion that he was a broken man years ago. He apparently had quite a tramautizing childhood that he's never really dealt with. He lost both of his parents to alcoholism and had to deal with the dysfunction in the family that persisted up until then and the abandonment that came after. He never talks about his childhood and I think his kids were a chance for him to control things and make them less chaotic than his childhood was. Because of this he was obsessed with controlling my sister and when my sister became her own person and he didn't have control over her anymore, he kind of lost his mind about it. Similarly, with me, when I first contradicted him about something I knew about that he didn't(Weird Al Yankovic music, of all things), his automatic response was to sucker punch me in the chest. I could tell it was an automated response. The idea of my having my own opinion and coming to my own conclusions was too much for him. This, combined with his "relationship" with my sister and my sisters two kids has shown me that he doesn't deal well with children who can form their own opinions. He has control issues. All of the free thinking that came about from my family was a direct result of the person my mother is. I've never really felt that blood is thicker than water and hearing Stef talk about defooing was just an affirmation of what I already knew to be true. I essentially defooed from my father a long time ago. I don't feel any loss for not having him in my life. There is a saying that goes "hurt people hurt people". Meaning people who are hurt will hurt others. My dad is the perfect example of that. Having him in my life wouldn't be a positive thing. My sister is now largely of the same opinion. The difference with her is that she wanted her two sons to have an adult male in their lives to look up to(both of the fathers were scumbags). Because of that she has gone through great lengths to patch things up with him and tries to include him in their lives. Naturally, it largely fails. My father, being the intellectual coward that he is, is unable to form genuine attachments with anyone. His relationships, so far as I can tell, are largely social mystiques and acquiantances that he only knows through his new wife, who ironically and predictably has complete control over him. He is kind of my own fascinating case study is psychological dysfunction.

Nope, my high school had a whole 2 history teachers that only taught that one class, all day. You seem to be having a really hard time believing me.

Yes, I'm talking even about high school. Once I hit high school the only history I learned in school was the founding of the country and the Civil War. That was it. This was in Colorado suburbs. I graduated in 2000. To be fair, most of the people I've talked to have had similar experiences with their history classes.

Sorry, I should've been more specific about Bill Hicks. I'm not tying to imply he was a hard core libertarian, but there is definitely a lot of libertarian philosophy in his comedy. To be fair, though, saying we should all help each other isn't anti-Libertarian at all. Libertarianism isn't anti charity, it's just anti forced charity. I don't recall him advocating for forced charity, but I'm far from an expert on his works so maybe he did. And yes, my history classes did not include Watergate. I was dead serious when I said that the most recent thing they covered in any depth was The Civil War. They briefly touched on MLK and WW2, but only watered down versions of those two topics. The history I was taught was almost entirely focused on the founding of the country.

Yeah, the problem with comedy is that it in general has to be written for the lowest common denominator. The moment my views on politics/philosophy changed I no longer had as positive an outlook on my potential comedy career. When things like public school and statist brainwashing are commonplace, it makes it very difficult to get ideas through to people in wity snippets that only take a couple of seconds. It's FAR easier to write comedy that doesn't have to be explained before they'll get the punchline. This is why liberal comedy is everywhere. It's very easy to get it through to people. To be fair, there are libertarian comedians that are pretty damn good. Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope, Joe Rogan, to name a few. The problem is that being Libertarian makes you far less marketable in Hollywood, so they will always be less well known.

I'm not trying to imply that I couldn't or didn't take anything positive away from public school. I went there for 12 years. It would be absurd to think you don't get something positive out of it. My point is not that I didn't get anything out of it, but rather that it does far more harm than good. I also believe that the basics are a lot easier to learn than people tend to think they are. So the only good that public education does can be done better elsewhere. The rest of public education is entirely indoctrination, by design. To me, real education is what you take away for life. A passion for learning. All of things that stuck with me are things like my passion for philosophy, which had nothing to do with schooling, because I never even had the option to take a philosophy class. Basic skills like reading and writing that could have come from somewhere else are hardly worth all the statist brainwashing. It's curious to me that your public schooling didn't have that kind of thing in common with mine. You are the first person I've come across that doesn't have stories about saluting flags, pledging allegiance and being taught whitewashed versions of history. Where/when did you go to public school?

It's been a long time since I took the test, but I know I wasn't a Rational. I think I was an Idealist. When I was a kid I wanted to be a wise man and I really valued Truth and Compassion. I was vehemently pacifist and what turned me away from politics and towards anarchism was my study of secret government policy in the Middle East/South America/Latin America/Africa. I wasn't into libertarianism until I found out that Ron Paul, a Libertarian(whatever that was) was the only guy calling out the government on it's war crimes. I started paying attention to him and his supporters, which is when the rest of my Marxism was shattered into bits. So that being said I fully understand what you're getting at. You have to find the thing that really matters to them and approach it from that perspective if you want to get any progress. For me it was being a peacenik. For some it's fiscal policy. For some it's Corporatism. it's always going to be different.

Actually, yes, my education was pretty horrific. I had already taught myself to read and use basic math using Garfiend books before I ever attended school. Most of my education regarding the basics was something I explored on my own without any help/guidance from anyone at school. When the time came to approach these subjects in school, I flew through my classes. I was reading Jurassic Park when I was in elementary school and was considered to have a post high school literacy level. My mother was fascinated by science and I had that instilled in me long before public school could get it's clutches into me. Most likely the only reason I have a brain left at all today. As far as the rest of it, my public school education was the most indoctrinating, white washed version of American history imaginable. It was the one class that I had to take EVERY semester, no matter what. I was taught that Columbus discovered America and with no mentions of his crimes. I was taught that the wars with the Indians were unfortunate, but there was never any mentioning of atrocities that were really commited against them. No talk of burning down their homes while they slept. No talk of their women and children being raped and killed while the men were out hunting, only to return to see their loved one butchered. Most talk of the indians was relegated to talk of Thanksgiving, which is the equivalent of telling people that Hitler gave Jews free showers and then conveniently leaving out the rest of the details and then claiming that you are being honest with them. I was never taught a single thing about anything more recent than the Civil War. The Civil War was the furthest my American history courses ever got to, and even that was shrouded in nonsense about it being fought over slavery. The only exception to this was the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King Jr, in which the government was treated as the cure to the symptom of a backwards populace that needed to be forced to act right(ironic considering that the FBI was most likely involved in his assassination). The only thing I learned about Hitler was that he was a bad man killing Jews and we stepped in and saved the world, my wonderful government. Everything I ever learned in history classes was entirely propagandised. I had to salute the flag, pledge allegiance, sing anthems. I was taught all sorts of nonsense about how wonderful Democracy is and how important it was to vote. I took place in a mock election when Ross Perot was running for office when I was in the 4th grade. 4th grade. How could that possibly be seen as anything other than indoctrination? Every mentioning of the founding fathers and our system of government was laden with polished, worship-esque rhetoric of how noble and awesome it all was. My entire education wasn't about how to think, it was about what to think. Furthermore, there was a growing Marxist sentiment in everything. Even when we were covering works like Animal Farm, Farenheit 451 or Robin Hood, where the bad guy is undeniably the government and the works are clearly intended as criticism of power structures and not money or greed, the emphasis was always on how bad other governments were and on how great and free I was in comparison. The "bad guy" was always greed, and not violence and coercion. My entire education taught me that freedom was something my government gave me. It taught me that "the rich" were the bad guys, not the government. The government were always seen as the protector of the people from the corrupt. This continues all over the national diaologue today. Soldiers "fight for my freedom" and police "protect me from bad guys". Delusional. I cannot remember a single criticism of my government being taught in class. I never learned about Japanese internment, Watergate, playing both sides of various wars, nothing. I would love to say that I'm blowing it out of proportion or maybe exaggerating, but I'm dead serious. I was taught hardcore Marxist rhetoric about using the government to "protect myself" from the evil that is humanity and nothing about using my humanity to protect myself from the evil that is government. Later in life I learned about the Prussian model of education. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system Stated explicitly on the wiki page is the fact that our system of public education was specifically set up to indoctrinate children to be obedient to power and to worship the power structure. This of course is exactly opposite of libertarian thinking and it was the intended goal of the Prussian system and one of the main reasons it was brought to America. I realize that if you're just coming across that information, it sounds like crazy conspiracy theory stuff, but it's important to remember that back then(1818-20ish) propaganda was not seen as a bad thing. "Propaganda" didn't become a dirty word until after the years of Hitler when the American government was doing their best to really tarnish the name of Germany during/after the war. So my criticisms of public education and blaming it for the dismal condition of libertarian philosophy in the mainstream is not just a kooky opinion. It comes from trying to understand how the system functions. I think it's a pretty solid hypothesis.

Very well said. I see your point. I think this makes the case for peaceful parenting and the promotion of the non-agression principle and steps that must be taken if anarcho-capitalism is ever to see any mainstream acceptance.

Masonkiller I couldn't agree more with your post. After I defected from liberalism and started trying to point out logical inconsistencies to my liberal friends when they would post some pro-Obama nonsense on facebook I was attacked pretty visciously for it and it reminded me of several years beforehand when I would try to have conversations with Christians. There was just so much anger and weak rhetorical excuses to back points. I, of course, used to get the exact same way when I was a liberal. Liberals are trained to react emotionally to certain cues. If someone's viewpoint can be associated with some form of bigotry or selfishness, then you are conditioned to respond to it with vitriol and disgust even if their point doesn't actually have anything to do with bigorty and selfishness. It definitely goes back to projection. Any correct philosophy doesn't run away from facts and respond to curiosity or challenges to it's thinking with hatred and rage. This is the exact way I see Christians/Liberals/Conservatives respond to any differing views. If I had to theorize why this happens, I think it's a matter of degrees of frustration. As a voluntarist, I've already ripped apart and shredded every belief I've ever had, so challenges to those beliefs don't frustrate me that much. Dealing with someone who is being irrational is quite frustrating, but I'm so used to being relatively alone in my belief system that it's something I've come to accept in others, so the frustration turns into amazement and sometimes humor. Statism, on the other hand, is such an indefensible position that when someone comes up with a huge flaw in the ideology it must be incredibly frustrating to those who haven't done the research trying to refute the evidence. I see this all the time when point out to Obama voters that he's even more pro-war than Bush was. They instantly switch to anger because they have no way of refuting it. So I think in a sense you can use the time frame in which they switch to anger and vitriol as a measure of how flawed their ideology probably is.

As far as why libertarian ideas have not "caught on", I think the answer is actually pretty obvious. State institutions do not benefit from liberty. People who become imbedded with state institutions do not benefit from liberty. It is in the best interest of the state and anyone living off of it's crimes to encourage people to eschew and abhore liberty. The only thing I was really taught in 12 years of public school was to love "my country" and "democracy" and various other collectivist, anti-liberty nonsense. It stands to reason that these institutions being state institutions that happen to be teaching people to love the state is not a coincidence. The predations of the state have been grabbing children by the throat and indoctrinating them for 100 or so years in this country. With an ever-increasing state that has more and more influence with more and more people becoming dependent on it, it seems obvious, to me at least, that this trend of seeing liberty as chaos and slavery as order should be expected to continue under our current social conditions. Or to put it really simply: Public Education

STer, I completely agree that people have different values, but I don't think that justifies saying libertarian ideas are not "right". If anything, it shows how important it is that people have those liberties to begin with. If someone has a desire to be controlled or comforted or cared for, that is their prerogative and I would never take away their right to make that choice for themselves. The issue is when they try to force these preferences on others by creating systems that take away the right to choose for others. I think that is the libertarian position in a nutshell and It seems it's the only rationally consistent way to organize a society. In terms of how one goes about convincing someone that this is the morally correct view, I agree that approaching it from a "live and let live" perspective isn't going to be very convincing to some people, especially if their upbringing psychologically conditioned them to feel the opposite. I think the big difference is that the libertarian ideas are the ONLY ideas that are not actively forcing their opinions on others, which gives everyone the ability to make those decisions for themselves. It's just a matter of finding the best way to convince that person that this actually is better for everybody and morally correct. Obviously that argument will be different for each person. The important distinction is that theories on social organization are not merely "opinions" and "preferences", they can be tested. We can apply reason, logic and evidence to see if those theories bear fruit. The problem is, all of the theories that apply force and try to maintain order through coercion have all produced massive human rights violations, misery and economic devastation. Therefore it is very easy to conclude that the only morally, rationally consistent way to organize society is to not allow coercion to be socially accepted in the first place.

Darkskyabove. Thanks for your reply. I'm glad you found the conversation useful. I wanted to jump in on something you said about dichotomies. I'm assuming with your reference to Atheism and a false dichotomy you are referring to other options, like Agnositicism. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that. I used to consider myself an Agnostic until I ran into Matt Dillahunty from "The Atheist Experience". It's a television show based out of Austin in which Theists can call in and talk with Atheists about God and what have you. Dillahunty makes the case on several occasions that Atheism and Agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. Knowledge and Belief are not the same thing. If someone asks me if I know whether or not there is a God and I say no, that makes me an Agnostic. That does not, however, having anything to do with Atheism, because knowledge is not necessary for belief. There are plenty of people who say that they believe in God and yet they do not know whether or not one actually exists. This would make them an Agnostic Theist. If you say that you know that there is no God, you would be classified a Gnostic Atheist. Think of it as the titles "Uncle" and "Leo". They regard different things and you can be both because they both are in regards to different topics. The problem of course is that most people you run into are not aware of this distinction and get fuzzy around monickers. I've had someone tell me that I'm not really an Atheist because I will not they were an Agnostic because they believed in a higher power. This confused the hell out of me, so I asked them what they meant by higher power and they said "you know... like mother nature... or something". So they are telling me that they actively believe in something, but they don't know what it is. Anyway, Dillahunty provides a pretty good standard for how he defines the terms that I think is really concrete and a good way of defining them. I would warn you to stay away from his "logic" on ethics though, he's a liberal Democrat and you're going to get a lot of fuzzy definitions on rights and he'll twist himself into a logic pretzel trying to justify his views. As to the rest of your post, I agree that giving them time to sleep on it really helps. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine the idea of taxation as extortion and was making the case for the universalization of the NAP in regards to supporting government and he was backing himself into a corner saying that if 90% of people want the other 10% dead than the other 10% should die. I brought up that this is a human rights violation and that if he really felt that way, what was his logical reasoning for being against the Nazi holocaust, because 10% of the populace being wiped out because the other 90% want them dead is virtually the same thing. His response was "well that's what ethics is for". I didn't really respond to that because he was getting pretty heated. That was where the conversation ended. A couple months later though, we had a really long conversation about politics and he was much more understanding and able to listen to what I had to say and actually went with me on it. I essentially changed his mind and he wasn't trying to backpedal to justify collectivist nonsense anymore. I was really surprised as I had almost written him off as to close minded and beyond saving. I don't know what it was about the situation that caused him to come around, but amazingly he did. Perhaps it was sitting with the ideas. Anyway, those are my two cents on what you said. Please keep us informed as to what you're up to and any successes you have. I look forward to hearing about it.

What bbeljefe said. The idea that because parenting is an involuntary relationship it must result in a state is flawed. It used to be extremely common for children to be sacrificed in religious rituals, this is no longer true for the vast majority of humanity(if it even still exists at all). How do you explain that? According to your train of reasoning, that should be set in stone as something we will never escape and will always be a part of our culture. How, after all, do you prevent parents from sacrificing their kids when the parents have all the power? The evidence, however, leads us to the exact opposite conclusion. Advances in peaceful parenting have brought about more intelligent parents that are even more peaceful that will undoubtedly result in more intelligent children and hence more peaceful parents. As bbeljefe said, this has been a phenomenon witnessed throughout human history. This cycle, it would seem, would inevitably have to result in a stateless society given enough time because the more intelligent a person is, the easier it is to see irrationality and emotional dysfunction in other individuals, particularly in regards to morality and "ethics", which is the basis for state justification. The hypothesis that peaceful parenting will result in the resolution of the state if given enough time is a pretty sound one given the evidence presented. I see no reason why the involuntary nature of a parent/child relationship is a guarantee of a statist society. One could argue that it is certainly a challenge to a stateless society and I would agree with that, but I think the case for it being Anarchy's achilles heel is rather far fetched.

Yeah, excellent quote. Noam Chomsky has always kind of confused me, because he's such a powerful voice on anarchism and pointing out the corruption of state power, but then doesn't seem to follow through with the philosophy and still buys into collectivist, centralized power bullshit. It's really puzzling.

Stef references this a lot in his podcasts. I don't know which ones off the top of my head, but he makes the connection that belief in the state comes from being treated like a subject by parents and that when adults get older and feel they need a state it's merely a reflection of them trying to recreate the environment they grew up in. This is all paraphrasing and I could be taking things out of context/misquoting/missing some other point, but this is what I got from the podcasts on the subject. This is why so much of his podcasts focus on philosophical parenting; that's the only way to eliminate the state.

Ok, so I was a very amateur stand up comic a while back and I have recently switched to ancap philosophy and I want to gear my comedy towards it. What I would like to do is a brainstorming session on different philosophical points/ideas that are the core of voluntaryism. The way I write comedy is that I start with points I want to make and come up with funny/poignant analogies I can use to illustrate said points. Since I am much newer to the philosophy than I'm sure a lot of you are, I would greatly appreciate any sum ups you can do of major points in the philosophy. Also, I LOVE historical tidbits that illustrate/back up a point. I've done a great deal of research into the CIA/FBI(which is what freed me of my delusions) and I love comedy that educates with historical fact/looking at history outside the box, so if you have anything to add in that regard I would love it. I'll list some points off the top of my head. collectivism = bigotry and nonsense, i.e. racism states = lines drawn on maps, they have no real meaning countries = tax farms taxation = extortion/protection money negotiating contracts = voluntary socialism = violence and coercion laws = opinions backed with guns constitution = piece of paper government = mafia government = unaccountable democracy = pipe dream theory v. practice, the importance of history in forming opinions on social structures FBI = Nazi Gestapo CIA = Terrorist training camps Alright, that's all I've got for now. Please feel free to add your contributions.

Yeah, breaking down the philosophy into basic points and then bringing them together is a common tactic comics use to get points across, so I definitely think there's potential there. I think I need to do some spreadsheet/brainstorming to think of how I would go about doing that. I'll start a thread on it.

I agree that patience and humility are very important when trying to have a conversation with somebody on those topics. Without thoseit's hard to find any common ground and hence make any progress. I think that the hatred of money/markets comes from a number of places, including victimhood and an underdog syndrome. The left likes to think of itself as on a cross, martyred for being too good and compassionate for this world(like jesus, the king of socialism, is commonly depicted). Money to them is a representation of greed, selfishness and "the bottom line" that is preventing them from having a utopian society where the only thing that matters is compassion and brotherhood. I think this is strongly driven by local propaganda: news stories, movies, etc. Movies like "In Time", which literally depicts money as lifeforce: when it runs out, you die. They see the marketplace not as a meeting of equals in negotiation but as coercion from those who have versus those who do not. Even when they are the ones with the money, they see having to give up that money to exchange it for goods as coercion and being enslaved, so regardless of whether they are selling, buying or trading, to them it's a form of slavery. Regardless of who is the "haves" and who is the "have nots", they are ALWAYS the "have nots". It really is a life of seeing themselves as eternally oppressed. The noble underdog fighting against the tyranny of the greedy; very appealing to someone who wants life to be easy and wants to feel that they are virtuous for wanting that. I think ultimately it comes down to them viewing "wants" as "needs". Some examples of this I think are optional items in the marketplace. It is not at all necessary for me to own a cell phone. I WANT to own a cell phone because the cost of having one pales in comparison to how much better it makes my life to actually own one. But if you listen to the rhetoric of the left they seem to think that cell phone companies are murdering their customers with unfair prices and catches, all the while forgetting that you don't actually need to own a cell phone if you really think it's that expensive and isn't worth the price. Obviously they are fine with the price because they keep CHOOSING to pay it. The great irony is that they view things that they choose to pay for as some form of extortion while viewing taxation, which is entirely involuntary as something you have a choice in. I think this mentality is more common than guilt, although I'm not discounting that guilt is probably a factor too(more with some than others, I imagine). I agree completely that exposing the gun is a very explosive argument. My little rant on "outpeacing the peaceniks" is really in reference to that. You show them that their side of the political spectrum is FILLED with violence and coercion(both in practice and philosophically) in ways that they can't counter and at the very least you'll get them to see that they aren't as peace loving as they like to pretend they are.

Thanks, I really appreciate that. I'll be sure to post anything else I run into that I think has any value. I'm also going to try to write some comedy with ancap philosophy in mind. If I can come up with anything that isn't terrible I'll post it somewhere here on the forums.