Cornellius

Considering the filmmakers' choice of a social problem to exploit, Somali Pirates, I believe this movie is simply a better version of The Purge. Why is a group of men hijacking a ship, a scenario that's quite limited in scope and mundane, suddenly so important? Because it's Somalia, an Anarchic country, that's invading in the movie. It's powerful because people hate anarchy. The ship's isolation is synonymous for the isolation of there being no authorities to help you survive the violence of the common person. In the trailer, you see Tom Hanks looking into the face of the armed man who claims he's the new captain from now on, and it's as if he's looking in the devil's eyes. The movie makes it look like he's consternated because of the danger or the ruthlessness of (oh no) hijacking a boat. He's really just looking into the eyes of anarchy. I haven't seen Captain Phillips yet, but I'm sure I'm right about what the movie says. I suspect it's a vile movie. If anyone has seen the film, could you please tell me your analsis?

You feel isolated because your relationship with your deep, passionate, rational and wonderful son is incomplete. Because you're not yet free to connect. You've discovered FDR, and that's really something, I'm telling ya. I'm sure things will only get better if you don't shoot the messenger by pretending you're the victim here. I'm sorry but don't give us that. And don't give your son or yourself that. Hang on to the truth. Stefan has a ton of podcasts that would be great for you and could permanently change your life for the better. He's got a series on philosophical parenting which I've partly listened to. But parenting, libertarianism, philosophy... it's a whole world, it's incredibly vast and full of opportunity for growth. You can search for particular topics like childhood, procrastination, negotiation, love, happiness. Libertarianism applies to the family.

Well I'm 19 and I have no experience with children, so I only speak theoretically. I don't believe tempetantums come out of nowhere, first of all. If that's some use to you, Stefan's daughter not even once went into a tamtampamtrum. First and foremost, those outbursts mirror the screams of a baby. They are new needs expressed in the old, non-verbal way. Your child is now at an age where he can understand stuff, which means he wants to understand why he can't leave, and even more important, whether it's reasonable that he can't leave. I assume he feels like he feels cut off and that's because he wants to negociate with you. I've noticed that he was throwing a tempatrenteam before you even started forcing him to stay. I think that can only happen because of a lack of curiosity on your part. I mean he wants to follow you out of the car because you're his mom, but he knows what happens when he refuses to, so it's a like a resentful half-existence. Naturally, when we feel blue, bored out of our skulls, dead, we just want to feel alive somehow. Tempeapoeenms probably fall into that category of behavior that's like shaking you up to get through to you. So as Stefan says, prevention is better than cure, and in your case, it's really a matter of empathizing with your child's needs. I believe it's really an amazing way to go that makes things not only easier, but fundamentally enjoyable. I am sorry to see a certain deficience of empathy in some of these tricky situations; I bet there's a lot of things on your mind sometimes and it can be overwhelming but it is primordial to make sure that your son doesn't "inherit" the kind of anxious, non-verbal and primitive behavior that kind of slip through when you went out for lunch with him. He's got to experience openness and cooperation instead of being subjected to a bitter buildup of tension and control as the solution to the situation. It's probably not Stefan-level philosophical problem-solving but I hope it helps somewhat. Best wishes.

I can't find my way out of my shell. I want to know where the edge is. I'm asleep. I don't want to be dragged out of bed. I want someone with one foot in reality to wake me up.

I'm thinking about that movie The Truman Show. The man growing up inside a telereality show dome world, controlled by castrating parents, a manufactured aquaphobia that makes him unable to leave the island city, and a cocoon-like dead end lifestyle, and gradually swallowing the red pill. You see Truman played by Jim Carrey go down the rabbit hole, and at the end of the movie, get over adversity and reach the edge of the dome by boat. As he's deciding whether to leave through the out door, the show creator speaks to him on mic. He says to Truman that there isn't any more truth out there than there is in the dome world. But also, he talks about the "hope" he brings to everyone on Earth who watches the show, which is really an exploitive parental feeling. How he just cannot leave. And when he decides to leave, you can just hear him inside his head going "one truth is that I don't want to be here anymore". The creator dies inside, and everyone on Earth either cheers, or says whatever, what else is on tv? Just to say that all this fantasy, all this coercion, in the end it's popcorn to appease someone in the short term.

It was my pleasure writing the post!

Dear Stefan, I know that your birthday is passed, but I still want to send you this message as a general expression of my most infinite thanks. I tend to forget to be good. But during such a moment as tonight, I am realizing the extent to which your philosophy has changed my life, and allowed me to feel in the slightest bit alive in the heat of my young adulthood. I am debating somebody about the state on the site Debates.org, and composing my second argument at the moment. With the pressure of needing to make my case against the state, I ended up initiating myself to the true rediscovery of the world that surrounds me. For months, I have never understood anything. Now, I get it, and I am blown away by the world's madness. I see that there are people who are so warped that no longer human. They're 99,99% dead. But the desire for truth and virtue gives me hope for my own possible future. I have never seen through this lens. I could have never seen the things I see now without the spark of Freedomainradio. If I died tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, Stefan, I would die happy, because my soul finally knows that there was a time when Oceania wasn't at war with Eastasia. You have saved my life.

I believe that if we all publicize Freedomainradio.com, anarchism, true freedom and real world issues that are imminent and important, we can seriously affect the Western world's awareness in an exponential way. I think it would be worthwhile to spread informative signs around town wherever we can for example. That would supplement informing our families and Facebook friends through statuses. Maybe such efforts would be next to pointless, but I know that my passionate progression to Anarcho-Capitalism began somewhere, and it wasn't a poster with links or a video like The story of your enslavement, which would have accelerated things for me. Any thoughts or suggestions?

I UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS A LARGE ISSUE, AND I CAN'T EXPECT SOMEONE TO COME ALONG AND ILLUMINATE MY PATH. MY MAIN INTENT WAS TO GET MY LIFE SITUATION OUT THERE AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS. I came here with an enthusiasm in anarchism and personal freedom, but I won't even pretend anymore like I'm ready to look at the big picture of society and wisdom, or like I'm some nobleman. I was always hoping that I would be magically saved, because the mental health professionals I'm seeing weekly are truly unable to help a human soul get better. For what it's worth, here I am, laying it all on the table, with much shame and embarrassment. My ideas are sane, but my brain is insane, and I want to change, turn the tides. End up with my love for what is beautiful, what is good. I'm a 3 year old child in a 19 year old body. I can't adapt, I'm emotionally unstable (for example unable to escape the rage I have against my family and evil people) to the point where I'm probably BPD. Maybe most of my emotional troubles stem from that such a disorder, but it's not all there is to it. Somehow, my parents messed me up. I have heard so many theories and tips on how to look at childhood psychologically and gone through so much catarsis that I don't know what to do anymore. I am just confused, helpless. But really, what does my dysfunctional day to day life look like? I'm unable to work, so I waste time at home managing my anxieties with pointless passtimes and half-baked attempts to heal myself emotionally. But for the past 8 months I've been living alone in this apartment, everything came down a steady decline, except for my self-knowledge and knowledge about the world, which went up in part because of freedomainradio. It's just a correlation, but maybe I've neurotically used some of my obsessive intellectual pursuits and ponderings as a defense mechanism against the need for concrete actions? I don't think that the process started very consciously. It's a mess here. Literally. Clothes on the floor, trash everywhere, dirty dishes cluttering the kitchen (a pound of butter just melted on top of my microwave in the heat yesterday; just one of the problems that my carelessness produces), etc. I'm moving closer to acting rationally, but as my soul is purer, I'm more anxious. The blankness of life is terrifying, OVERWHELMING. I can't stand the feeling of being bound to something, COMPELLED to provide effort. Even for my dreams. Even my dreams bring me anxiety. I get anxious whenever I think about working. I suppose that's generally what it means to not be functional. I'm increasingly unable to bring myself to do anything. Can't pick myself up. I have come to understand that I need a new start and that empirically speaking, the chances of succeeding on my own are slim. It's a sort of self-destruction and it's nearing its end. The constraints of reality are getting closer and closer. I don't want Nihilism, but it's what I get. Sometimes I get disoriented, like I don't know anything, and I don't know how to think. There's a word for it. Insanity. The only solace left is in immediate stimulation. Video games. New music and movies. Escapism. Eating, in a normal sense. Sleeping. SELF-ERASURE IS ALMOST ALL I CAN BEAR. Somewhere, there just has to be a way to reorient myself in the direction of life instead of death... rationally, consciously... So there's the topo of all that's dark at the moment. It does me good emotionally to just look it in the face. I know, it's a very acute kind of unhealthiness. Also, I would like to apologise to the world for the transgression of UPB I have committed when I slapped my father... for those who are aware of that sunday show episode... yeah that's me.

A picture of the "dear leader" posing with his "dear" people with their petrified faces sending out the clearest of messages.It must be spread. The pic: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=610184759029432&set=a.328070093907568.69301.199077356806843&type=1&theater

Thank you Michael. Carry on.

To feel pity and guilt for my parents paralyses me. I just feel powerless. I love the idea of extending more empathy for myself. And thank you everyone for your kind answers. It does me good.

They didn't ask me to be their therapist or to help them grow. I was easier to enslave. My parents kind of projected their worst frustrations and sadness onto me, esp. when they had a pretext to punish me, so I felt like a criminal, like their murderer. I especially felt like I had to be supportive of them, even at a young age... They were so impotent I had to make their job easier by raising myself and giving them love.

Sorry. These are awful events, but of course it's wonderful that you're coming out with it. I can quite relate to your nighttime issues. I've been tortured by what my parents have done to me and been unable to move on. I use my blog for that exact purpose of clearing my mind and replacing the old thoughts with prettier thoughts. Sometimes, there just isn't someone in the room with us and well we have progress to make. Don't forget to reorient yourself, sort out your priorities. When our mind is blank, unconscious, it is filled by impulses.

So, I have all that pity for parents. I'm not sure what to do with it. So, I have learned that my parents were immoral, and exploded in anger and melancholy for their controlling dictatorship imposed to my sister and I. In that process, I leaned them full force that they are immoral. My words resonated, they knew they had to suppress the truth I was bringing to them, reject me, ignore me, paralyse me, just to sort of keep going. My sister recently had to move out of my father's house because of the tensions that there were, and now my parents have lost the children they were resting upon to sustain their personal image. The two of us just up and left. Now, as they're putting the blame on us and trying desperately to paralyse us, get a final hold on us, all that's left is their miserable selves. They don't know any better than that old life. Now their respective relationships will start to decrepit. Their guilt will begin to become a reality. They will realize that no one really loves them for who they are, because they are nobodies. I'm afraid that my mother might lose her job if she gets too stressed out. I'm afraid my father commits suicide. These are just fears. My parents were so unstable, esp. my mother, that I never know what to expect. I hate them, but I pity them. My fears are not based in the reality of my parents being able to pull themselves together, but maybe one day things will start to go downhill for them. Should I intervene so that they can find their true selves and be on their way to living with integrity? Am I responsible to help anyone who's in a bad place?

Thank you infinitely for saying so, and reading my autobiography. It means a lot to me. I hope I'm lucky enough in the future.

I am sorry that you had to go through such concentrated anguish. I would have fainted. People of all ages getting together in spouting with pride some of the most despicable and selfish plans on Earth...I understand why you were torn. You felt the fear of being in a room full of crazy people and the anger of standing up for the millions of children that were being conspired against on that room. And you had great retraint too, not to fall into the trap of bringing yourself down to their level. I realize that the situation was hopeless; you weren't going to change a group of people on your own.

You know on the possibility, these kind of cults are like oligarchies but without the force. You've got one or few individuals at the top who descend from Buddha or something, and their pawns. If they're smart, the sacred ones can use these religions to ensnare people into a warped vaccuum of docility that they can't leave because they don't know anything else (even though I am aware that there are lots of authoritarian Busshist families, which is unsurprising). The fruit of this labor is a secure, self-glorifying position where you get to enjoy the sight of people circling aimlessly around something that of your creation. That sounds like a motivating pursuit for theistic narcissists.

I have started a blog about depression last summer called Breaking free from the dark (breakingfreeftd.blogspot.com). There's a lot of insight in there, and a heck of a lot of content by now, so I've indentified a post category, "meaningful", which is linked on the sidebar. Out of most of the depression blogs I have sorted through and come back to, I can frankly say that Breakingfftd is a more intellectual one, and it's a shame to see that most people with depression tend to separate it completely from their lives, and treat as a dog the aspects of themselves that impede on their routines. Most people just aren't motivated for self-knowledge, so they just thrudge along I guess. I personally try to stop living for pragmatic reasons, and I heavily wish that people would as well, in the name of conscious living! So, I would love it if you would check it out and post a comment or two! Thanks for reading.

Freud has excellent theory about fetishes. http://fr.scribd.com/doc/31127300/Freud-Fetishism-1927e

Let me say I empathize. I am 19 years old since the 13th. I have suffered from a feeling of blandness throughout my life, a feeling of emptiness, like nothing is worth living. Much of my life has been spent indoors, doing ridiculously long sessions of internets, trying to numb the fact that everybody in my age range and my older sister seemed to be doing three times as well as me. I internalized a lot of my emotions, which developed into a sort of Nihilism. At some point, I had openly become allergic to SMILING.During my teenage years, and up to now, the interest in pleasure and life in general have been peeling themselves off one at a time. Less and less self-maintenance, less and less amibitions, quitting college, quitting a job, quitting a med, quitting this and that. In my apartment, I stopped tidying up as I went on month by month. I can honestly say I have hit rock bottom. From the "normal" kind of life I have been going through to now, pleasure seems to have dipped. I spend entire days online, and from an external standpoint, my family has just assumed that I've destroyed myself. In that pit, I am finding that I don't play video games very much anymore. I don't watch any tv series. I don't see very many friends, or think about what I can become. However, this past week, I got into drawing after months of idleness. I am finding out how much it sucked to be drawing for pragmatic reasons. I started dipping into philosophy, and I am more confused than ever, now that the Socratic deep has showed me its true depth. I go out for runs, focusing on the journey when in the past, I was paranoid of the people. I only play a few video games, with the intent of mastering them.Looking back, I was never really happy. I was living in the dumb pleasure of hoping that I feel forever soothed. Now I'm learning happiness. Pleasure doesn't mean anything, but it is a great friend that helps me make up for my biological needs. It is comfort that matters, to know where I'm going.

Interesting. Until what point is it wise to be tolerant? Well, tolerance sure stands as a value when it comes to opinions and beliefs of others. OF COURSE, the value of tolerance doesn't stand when it comes to everything else, because sometimes you need to get in the way of someone's violent self-interest imperialism. I doubt that that is really a paradox, because when trying to stop someone from misleading someone else, therefore being intolerant in a general defense way, you are still upholding the principle of tolerance by preventing somebody from attacking someone else in their beliefs. You haven't come up to someone to impose your teachings to them, you simply saw someone doing so, and intervened.

I'm on FDR because I love philosophy and psychology and I want to live with rationality. I am undergoing a lot of psychotherapy at the time of entering FDR. This biography was motivated by the great pleasure of writing to actual people; in other words, I wouldn't have done it on my own. Thank you for existing. My childhood was a tough patch, and my upbringing, for lack of a better word, messed me up in a unique and potent combination of ways. For the sake of their personal interest, my parents brought my sister and me, two years later, into the world. The first years were high on isolation and emptiness. My father left for months intermittently when I was a baby, for a job at the opposite side of the province of Québec I live in. And for most of my first four years, I was either dumped in daycare, or left home alone with a babysitter. Being an INTP according to the Myers-Briggs classification, I got into legos a lot. But that's all my life ended up amounting to, play. My social development didn't exist until the age of six, when I started to understand the notion of a friend... elementary school was alright. I was a smart and very different kid who had a talent in drawing. I had lots of interests, I loved cities and human ingenuity. The major downside was being betrayed by the few friends that I had when they found more stimulating, mature and popular kids to spend their time with. My sister was domineering, and my parents, incredibly humiliating from time to time. Their worst outbursts were at the slightest sight of disrespect or resentment on my part. My father could be incredibly menacing whenever I became individualistic. Once, I heard my mother on the phone complain out loud that I was changing, just like my sister. The issue was most of the time the fact that I didn't play outside enough. My mother could chase me around the house and spank me violently for no apparent reason. I was dragged to my room and isolated in there for indefinite periods of time, and ended up developping insomnia. I generated lots of pride from my marginality, but that can indicate exactly how my particularities were seen. They made me marginal. Different, for better or for worse. I was never accompanied through a process, never raised, never trained... just praised or humiliated. In fifth grade, my grades were dipping. My parents divorced in a ruthless and brutal manner. It kind of came by surprise. There was no regard for me and my sister. We had no say in the matter. I was confused. I could've been mad, but I was only briefly. One could say that my parents retained their authority over me post-divorce, but in fact, nothing really changed. Nothing existed between us, and nothing that was strong existed elsewhere in my life, so I was reduced to clinging to the bits of attention and the gifts that my parents would lend me. For the following years, I became an isolated boy. I started to stagnate. Spent my summers alone, doing absolutely nothing, while my sister squeezed all the value she could out of every week. I had no motivation. My friends became the rejects in school; of course, I became one. High School sort of completed my transformation into a bitter guy. It was five years of my life wasted. And through it all, there was confusion. I depended on my family for bonding, but that wasn't strong either. My mother became more hysterical post-divorce. She got put on the antidepressant Citalopram without my knowledge, and kept that. She was always volatile, stressed out, and most importantly, fake. Over the years, I developed a sort of repulsion of the smell of her house and the noise of her loud phone babbled that went on for 12 hours a week. Living in her basement ended up making me absolutely insane. My father started to advocate jovialism and contradictory ethics about working, getting out there and doing it, and scolding me for being depressed. The worse my mood got, the more enraged he would become. But I remained their docile little walking ornament, who had to be shaken from time to time arbitrarily just so that they could pat themselves on the back. Their post-divorce relationships kept getting unhealthier. A few years ago, my mother met a Cuban male on vacation and decided that she wanted to have a relationship with him, even though she didn't speak spanish even close to fluently. She spent months making him immigrate, and cried to me that she was tired of being lonely, and complained that nobody cared for her sick project. Part of the exhausting procedures was to marry him. She was already far within the procedures when she announced me that she was making a Cuban come to live at home. I seemed to depend on the people that my parents got with, as I was so afraid of loneliness. But the Cuban's presence was so unsettling and so disturbing that for a change, I was actually terrified from the thought that the man would be part of my life for the rest of my family life. A man who didn't speak French or English, a man who I had never accepted into my life. Luckily, and horrifyingly, he had a friend in Montreal who came to pick him up one afternoon when my mother was at work and I was at my father's place. My mother got mad for months afterwards and encouraged me to hate the living crap out of the man. I started college. I couldn't stand my mother anymore. I couldn't focus on my work, couldn't relax, because I had a sort of psychiological reaction to her simple presence. My father got with his third post-divorce girlfriend, a Narcissist. Eventually, I wanted to live every week at the house that they had moved in, just to be able to live. There was no regard to me. The two of them said that their relationship depended on me being away for two weeks every time. I had my room there, and the basement to myself, and I had to go live at my mom's. The girlfriend was lecturing me on how I needed to take care of my mother, and that was why she wanted me to live there two weeks as usual, but it's simpler than that. THE B*TCH HAD A SAY IN WETHER I COULD STAY AT MY FATHER'S HOUSE. Eventually, I understood that he just wanted to have his little idyllic ivory tower to live in. I'm still trying to understand his motives for the weird ways in which he started to alienate me and my sister. One night, I was panicking and asked him to help me not commit suicide and he screamed in my face and went into a false panic stroke himself. I still wonder why he did exactly that, because it was so irrational as usual, but I know the effect: it confused, repressed and alienated me. College went worse and worse. I did architecture, visual arts and humanities over two years, but I ended up quitting it. I went on the web a lot. I came across Libertarian and Right-Wing speakers on Youtube. I became a Nihilist for a while. I started a blog on depression and I started to see barely competent health professionals. I stopped working. In between, I clashed with all my family, more and more intensely. I started getting episodes of existential panics, feelings of being bound to eternal helplessness. I rebelled, became resentful. I got into enlightenment, but not rationality, so I ended up with anticonformity but no much sanity. I stopped studying, and moved into an apartment which my parents paid for, and got onto welfare in december of 2013. My life became calmer. I could finally go on the internet without being scolded about appearing lazy or irresponsible, which I was. I kept on exploring the rabbit hole further down. I gradually broke with my family, and traversed bits of undescribable meandering emptiness, in which I had an internet fixation, and could barely do any self-maintenance. My disorganization became worse and worse, but I became more and more rational. At the time of writing this, I am still undergoing this tumultuous and mentally challenging... reset stage. A month ago, I quarelled with parents on the phone very often, falling into the trap of lowering myself to their level by argumentating with them. This loss of hope in the future, this intense will to express myself turned into self-destructive actions. On day I tried to reason with my father, exposing his murderous negligence, which ended up with him brutalizing me with brutal humiliation and physical assault in an empty parking lot. The reality that my parents had been putting on a façade their whole lives, had no empathy and not even a shred of interest in truth was so baffling to me that I ended up slapping my father in his backyard. He immobilized me in a brutal way on the ground, screaming in my ear and twisting my arm for 10 minutes as a stranger was crushing my ankles. The policemen came and condescendingly interrogated me and took me away. I hold trauma from images of my father's murderous facial expression, his girlfriend's narcissistic smile, the immobilization and the policemen. Yes, a lot of things went down. I had suicidal thoughts, crying fits, panic attacks, you name it. At the time of redaction, the legal process of assault against me initiated by the sociopath who impregnated my mother is coming to court. I have decided that my family is better left ignored. particularly for the pleasure of knowing that no future personal contacts with them shall occur. It was living in my apartment that I discovered Freedomain Radio. I may have committed suicide without the buffet of truth that is the site, and I would like to thank Stefan Molyneux for his generosity and the purity of his soul. However, I don't want to turn this into a publicity. My story is to be continued, and left on a cliffhanger as I put it. It feels like a cliffhanger. During the better part of so much growth, and so much learning, so much is at stake at the moment, so much more than ever before in my life.