DaisyAnarchist

Hello everyone, It is a pleasure to be here I am a timid college student majoring in a rather incidesive realm of study, liberal arts. I spend a fair amount of free time educating myself on the side via watching Stefan's podcasts and finding resources on anything and everything related to voluntarism. I bring up my timidness here as a disclaimer, and because I believe this trait to be a psychological consequence statist principles. I am going to put myself on a line in this introduction. So it's going to be kind of dramatic, lenthgy and primarily about my own obstacles, but it relates to why I'm here now. The first video of Stefan's that really resonated with me and helped me along the path from minarchism to anarchism was whichever one(s) discussing the absense of fathers and the patriarchal role of the government. He stated that government has essentially become the self-imposed surrogate father. I relate to this on a personal level, my father stopped talking to me for 10 years after my tenth birthday. His best reason amounts to, "I'm just not good at keeping in contact with people." I lived with my grandparents in Florida after my parents' divorce and was raised by a single, emotionally rigid mother who placed me from one "caregiver" to the next until forcing me to go to public school. She, like many single mothers, had the incentive to go into the work force to "support" me and could collect on a tax return for her status every time March rolled around. I was an only child pampered with endless toys. I can't remember the first few babysitters that well, but much of my childhood was spent in a daycare. There were a few instances where I was beat up by other kids, and no repurcussions occured for the kids. The original daycare owner watched it happen and did nothing. There were also a number of instances where I was placed in "time out" for doing nothing wrong. I was climbing on a wheel in the playground, just as another girl was climbing on it but from the side, and she fell off. The teacher took that as me pushing the girl off, even though the girl never accused me of it and the teacher had no proof. The mother of the second owner of the daycare worked there as well, and was the most aggressive and loud woman I've known. She would literally drag children across the room and shove them against the wall for minor disobedient behavior. I got yelled at by her and others for not going to sleep during nap time, and eventually learned to stop resisting and pretend that I was sleeping. In the entirety of my stay at that daycare, I never fell asleep during nap time :b The gist of my public school experience consisted of me trying too hard to live up to other people's expectations of intelligence. In primary school I did not apply myself. Teachers bored me. I often stared off beyond them, into worlds beyond them. And then was made to feel like an idiot when they started giving me tests. Almost failed second grade. Ran into tempermental teachers that snapped at me for no justifiable reasons. Eventually became very submissive and "academic." My mother and grandmother were both extremely confrontational women. My mother critizes my grandmother for verbally abusing my grandfather, yet my mother did the same thing to him, and I have a more vivid memory of that. I think the only person my mother doesn't act confrontational towards is me. I feel like we have a very disjointed relationship, now that I've really examined how much of a "mom" she was to me. It's really strange. She was absent for a large portion of my childhood, having no qualms about placing me in various institutions that treated me like crap, yet when I began to make friends and ask to spend time with them at their house, I got lectured on stranger danger. What the actual fuck? Going to her for permission to spend time with friends outside of school was often more trouble than it was worth, and I felt I was being held back from creating intimate, healthy relationships with people. She created a lot of dependency between us. She watched quite a few documentaries and programs of children being whisked away by strangers. They usually ended up dead or extremely traumatized when found so many years later. My mom would say, "this is why I'm hesitant to just let you stay at a friend's house. You never know what could happen." She really had me believing that shit. Sure, I suppose there's a potential for that to happen, but why does that have to translate to being afraid of anyone new, unelss they work at a school/daycare? I now have a rather difficult time just meeting and getting to know someone new. School and the relationships I had only deteriorated over time. By the time I entered 11th grade, I was suffering from panic attacks. Daily. I have a persistant suspicion that I was touched inappropriately at a young age but was too young to remember/blocked it out, due to odd childhood behaviors and my sexual awareness at a strikingly young age. It doesn't help that I was placed in the care of people other than my own relatives for my entire childhood. I think the odds increase with that. I used to be a statist... the schools eventually got to me, compelling me to believe in all these necessary statist programs. Something in me knew it was all wrong, but that something was beaten down to lower level of conciousness. My journey to anarcho-capitalism/voluntarism began with Ron Paul. I was looking for a genuine and peaceful approach to foreign policy. At the time, I could find no one else that would provide it. It was actually a friend that I met through facebook that helped me to make the final philosophical leap to acceptance of anarcho capitalism. He was the one who suggested watching Stefan's videos. The videos have helped enormously. I also watched a lot of learnliberty.org videos and have just begun to sink my teeth into the writings of people like Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, etc. Everything makes sense, now that I am able to put all of this into perspective. I feel an immense gratitude to people like Stefan, who actively put out the message about the racket that is government rule. I come to this forum hoping to meet fellow voluntarists and have discussions. I look forward to getting to know you all. I don't expect anyone to thoroughly read this, but if anyone does take the time to, thank you.

Nice thread. I'm satisfied by thornyd's response to the topic question, but one thing I can add is that utilitarianism is not a legitimate criticism of Kant's categorical imperative or Molyneux's UPB theory. Utilitarianism is not a legitimate theory of right and wrong, for that matter. What happens to individual rights when we become more concerned with the happiness (whatever that means) of a larger group of people? I think the answer is obvious, and this is why utilitarianism exposes itself to greater criticism.