2bits

If you aren't a progressive, you just hate progress.

This thread came back from the dead, but I'm not against taking a swing at a zombie. It's worse than that for McDonalds franchises, which run a much lower profit margin. Almost all the wage increases have to be covered by higher prices, losing them even more customers. It's entirely possible (situation dependent of course) that there is no price which raises revenue enough to cover the wage increases. This is when the restaurant closes and everyone loses their jobs.

I provide quotes in the other thread that prove Stefan's comments were not limited to the caller's least-bad options. I could go line by line gathering more "non-arguments" that apply equally to the caller's children and anyone elses' children. This is a positive thread, rather than critical like the other, so I'll bow out and let you have the last word. I'll just say that Stefan has earned trust with me (even after the Frozen magic-is-insanity stuff ), but no one will ever accuse me of being a Stefbot. Not that you are a Stefbot yourself.

[nm]

Justin K, there are many good arguments against numerology already and they are easy to find. Google "numerology debunked". Even the top hit is a good start. It's an age old superstition, so we've had ages to compile its fallacies. People are bad at intuiting probabilities, so it's not surprising that they are mystified by an "impossible" set of coincidences. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities/

I don't think Stefan wants people to convert in the abstract. This call was just one data point (albeit very recent!), with many to the contrary. However, extolling the perils of secularism and virtues of religion, while describing in great detail the benefits the caller's children would have by staying in the Mormon church (even if they could get out)... That's all but overt encouragement, and certainly discourages all deconversions.

Stefan preferred "religion" or "subsets of more gentle Christianity" but yes, he did. I appreciate you, Michael, but this is annoying. We listened to the same show, and Stefan spent an hour justifying the series of comments he made around 27:04: "Where would you go? Let's say that you could get your whole family out of the group. And the question is well then what? Where do you go? Where do you find the sustenance that religion provides? The structure, the depth." Stefan then says he had more conversations about philosophy in church than he ever did at school. More conversations about values, principals, and ideas sitting in a pew than he did sitting in a coffee shop. These were general comments not limited to the caller's least-bad options. Stefan didn't say the sentence "Convert your children to religion so they don't grow up to be secular, state-loving, free-love divorcees" but there are quotes later in the show that sum to that position. I'm sorry if this comes across as hostile, but I also feel some frustration. Maybe this was just a series of rambling thoughts that went in the wrong direction, or maybe a huge misunderstanding. I know Stefan values honest feedback.

I'll be the contrarian. Like others, I was also moved by the emotional situation of the caller. However, Stefan went off the reservation with a train of thought that leads to this logical conclusion: We should raise our children in religion for utilitarian reasons. He's not wrong because of a conclusion I dislike. Go where the evidence leads. Instead, there were a series of incomplete and cherry picked data, logical fallacies, and overall emotional bias that led to what I consider a false conclusion. I wouldn't be surprised if either Stefan expresses regret later, or announces the results of this reverse psych experiment. I want to go on and dissect it sentence by sentence. I feel that strongly about it. However, these days I'm not much for internet, lengthy, typed, forum back-forth. My daughters are asking me to play before bed now. This is the best avenue for immediate feedback to the show. I will probably email the show and see if I can challenge Stefan directly. Update: I found a more appropriate thread for my comment here: https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/43536-an-atheist-apologizes-to-christians-call-in-show-march-4th-2015/

You can't steal your own private property by the definition of 'theft'. You must first argue that someone else has a greater claim to the property, which makes your question a bit nonsensical. Then you can say there is theft of others' property. It is absolutely false that the lower classes must work for rich masters. That would be slavery, which can only exist through force with the sanction of government. The "lower classes" absolutely have options. They can start a service business, many of which require little or no startup capital... oh wait, that can only happen if the government regulations, licensing, and taxation can be satisfied. Without the moral hazzard of government support, they are more likely to be forward looking and save some small amount of capital. This greatly opens their options as well. The fact is, the only reason the "poor" work for the "rich" is that they offer the "poor" their best option at the time. In a real free economy, the vast majority will earn what they are worth. If you want to earn more, invest more capital in yourself and become more valuable. Any deviation from this reflects inefficiency that will be corrected by the market. If you earn too much, your employer is at a competitive disadvantage. If you earn too little, you are free to leave and work somewhere else. Good intentions to help the poor are fine, but the ends don't justify the means. Taking money earned by some and giving it to others who have earned less is real theft. The best possible argument is that the theft is justified (just like "war" justifies murder), but then we must ignore the costs of the market distortions that redistribution causes. If you give stolen goods to the poor, are they better off? Immediately, sure, just like freshly printed money makes first-recipients richer. You pay the costs later. From both fiscal and moral standpoints, it just doesn't work.

Opinion is subjective, and truth is objective. Can you have the opinion that 2+2=4 or that rocks fall down? It's an opinion exactly because you don't know it's true, and if it was true it's not really your opinion.Also, truths are consistent with each other. If you have two beliefs that are inconsistent, one or both is false, but for certain they can't both be true.

What if it is? You seem disturbed by the possibility, but I would like to understand more about why that is. It might very well be the case that we have genetic traits that lend to statist society (I would argue we do, to varying degrees), but that doesn't threaten the objective determination that statism is immoral today by thinking humans who know better. It doesn't give any moral foundation to modern statists. Is this the fear?Natural selection considers only individual fitness, and by extension the fitness of communities that aid individuals, in a particular environment. Sometimes that means the strongest male kills all competing males for dominance. It has nothing to do with what 'ought' to be or what's fair or what's moral. As thinking people, with knowledge and insight and moral responsibility our ancestors never had, we can and 'ought' to overcome our basest drives to be more than animals.

I was going to reply to your post point-by-point, but I need to stop. Suffice to say, except for the sentence above, the rest sounds a little too irrational and fuzzy for my taste.

State-enforced professional licenses are a fabrication of Satan! Amen!?

I like a lot of your points. I should reiterate what I said to TheRobin. We can define "exist" anyway you like, but there are consequences to how we define the things that "exist". If I took your position and said that thoughts and information exist, we would need to be careful and consistent during a conversation about thoughts and information that we did not ascribe any physical or energetic traits to those things (thoughts exist, I think of god, god exists). It leaves a lot of opening for rhetorical slight-of-hand or logical slip, and I suspect that's why most people in FDR seem to prefer the mass/energy usage of "exist". It keeps a clear divide between the "real" and "abstract". However, to say information doesn't exist is not the same as saying there is no information. We would need an existential word for things that need to be described, but which do not have mass or energy. I think that semantic gap is fueling this thread. Your comments about oxygen and subatomic particles are good, but I can counter by saying "oxygen" is just a shorthand description for that particular arrangement of protons, neutron, and electrons in orbitals. Oxygen still represents matter and energy, even if we can reduce the definition of 'oxygen' to child components which have mass and energy themselves. My usage of "presence" and "absence" goes to the point I made above about not having an existential word for abstractions like thoughts and information. Mass/energy and information can both be present or absent, so these terms are for things irrespective of whether they exist. Yes, I'm invoking a thought experiment to add or remove a thing. If it can be added to a system without changing the mass or energy of the system, it's being created from nothing. That violates the Conservation laws, and I conclude it does not exist. The converse applies if the system mass/energy does change. It doesn't necessarily need to be a "magic" mechanic at all. For example, to test whether a chair exists, we can magically place a chair in a room (the room being the closed system). Or, a group of craftsman can bring in wood and tools, make the chair, and then leave. Either way, we have an empty room before, and a room with a chair after. Mass must have been added to the room for this to happen, and the chair exists. Only things that exist can transform. Things that do not exist merely appear and disappear. I'm going to move away from a thought as an example of information, since the wet chemistry of a brain leaves the closed system difficult to define. Are a collection of wooden blocks, made into the shape of the word "thought", acceptable? If so, imagine them in a room. We can move the blocks around to make different words, or even no words, and the energy and mass of the room before/after will have not changed. The only thing that's changed is the information encoded by the blocks. Or we can destroy the word "thought" and create the word "elephant". This is not a transformation since the latter is not a requirement of the former. All the while, the room/system energy is unchanged, and the words themselves do not exist in matter/energy. Only the blocks do.

Hey, give me credit for saying our odds are infinitely better.

We only need to look at the core supporters for each. I would put Democrats with Education, Labor, Environment, Medicine (Medicare/Medicaid/single payer), starving grandmas and other dependent classes. Republicans are with Religion, Financial, Military, Senior citizens that are not starving grandmas. Each of these represents a current, developing, or potential monopoly by the government, leading to voter support and justification for ever expanding taxes to fund the circle-jerk. Example, Education is monopolized by legislative support for teachers unions, subsidized public schools, and subsidized student loans. Teachers, parents who rely on publics schools, and indebted students then reciprocate by supporting Dems and legislation authorizing theft to fund said efforts.

I agree. While I catch myself curiously looking into coverage of tragic events, I always try balance things out to keep perspective. To many people interpret the apparent imbalance of negative and positive in the news cycle as reflecting a decaying world. The truth is that violent crime has never been lower, and transportation has never been safer, for examples. You certainly wouldn't get that impression from watching the news.

Nothing after this point is consistent with what I wrote. I'm not sure if your are misunderstanding me, intentionally distorting my idea, or just proposing a new one. I'll just tackle one sentence. This point above is a misunderstanding of entropy. At least I gather that from 'energy in tiny amounts'. The pattern isn't energy itself. Rather it represent a small entropic energy of the system. If the thought was energy itself, the system's energy would drop a minuscule amount if we stopped thinking about elephants, for example. This is not the case, as it would require the destruction of energy which violates the Conservation law. Rather, with new thoughts, or losing thoughts, energy changes form and location in your brain between chemical, electrical, thermal, and entropic, but total system energy doesn't change.I bring us back to my definition of "exist": if the presence or absence of a thing does not affect the combined mass and energy of a system, it does not exist. Thoughts do not exist by this definition.

A thought is information. Information Theory can define information from there. I usually don't confine myself to the matter/energy definition of "exist", but that requires more tedious and precise definitions so we don't falsely attribute things like agency to things like concepts - "I think about god, thoughts exist, therefore god exists." EtcI wouldn't be averse to saying a thought exists, but someone else might misinterpret that, and the conversation goes off the rails.Yes, brains are different from person to person. I could imagine a calibration routine that would overcome this. Given an instrument of sufficient resolution, it's possible to map out a brain in such detail that we can identify memes. Unless we assume that neuroscience stops advancing at some point, I conjecture it's theoretically possible.

I see where you are coming from, but I disagree. Every time traffic slows down near an accident scene we see one of many indicators that, human goodness or no, people are interested in the misfortune of others. I don't believe it's fair to assume they are just 'programmed'. I do wish it were so, but it's probably not that easy. I will look for some studies I seem to recall on this topic. Might add something to the conversation.I don't believe it's been established that wanting bad news, or providing bad news, is immoral in the same way that it's immoral for a parent to abuse a child. News producers are not in a paternalistic relationship with the public where they need to present or withhold certain news for our own good. As free individuals, they can present the program of their choosing, and the viewing public is free to vote with their attention. The change you want comes from the bottom up, not the top down.

So much effort to type all that, so much conviction, yet so little truth. Kinda sad, really.

I have excellent news for you. Pascal's Wager is only that dire if we assume the binary proposition of vengeful-jealous-hell god exist, or vengeful-jealous-hell god not exist. The unbeliever's odds are infinitely better than that given a fuller set of possibilities.

More from Wikipedia: "The more specific meaning of the term commodity is applied to goods only. It is used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.[3] A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats its instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them." While not the convention, it would be easy to apply this definition to services and labor. Any labor that is independent of a specific worker's skills could be a commodity. Examples would include low/no skill jobs, and higher skill jobs where the duties were sufficiently consistent to allow some worker fungibility. The free market will treat labor costs like any other good/service and set the price accordingly. Denying commodity status to labor only justifies government wage controls. This is done ostensibly to preserve the value of human life and dignity, but what socialists always ignore is the hidden costs of lower employment and higher prices throughout the economy. Any text by an Austrian economist (Hyack, Rothbart, Mises) will have solid arguments against artificial price controls (goods/services/wages/etc). IMHO Rothbart's "Man, Economy, and State" is great for this topic.

Along a similar line, an anonimous government official said "There's plenty of people, it's just that prisons don't have them". /sarcasm

People in general will tell you they want positive stories if asked, but then turn right around and prioritize the most sexual and violent content. Producers and publishers have learned over decades from their consumers that if it bleeds, it leads. I'm not a psychologist, but I've heard of studies on this behavior. It's a complex behavior from what I understand.