shirgall

There's no easy way to Like Karen and Dislike Cenk, though.

The other answer is that when the leaders themselves are threatened just as much as the soldiers are they become much more circumspect.

Remember the Brookings survey that determined that 8 percentage of the US population trust the Daily Show as a source of news, versus 5 percent for MSNBC? That's the world we live in.

Which is why I ask my parties to treat RPGs like Improv comedy. http://lookrobot.co.uk/2013/06/20/11-ways-to-be-a-better-roleplayer/

Oh yeah, you know it.

I could do 5th Ed or GURPS.

Because mental illness has a both real component and an imaginary component it's "complex" not "real".

Well, given that he was losing, name-calling was the tool he had.

I really liked this interview. Cenk made a few stupid comments, but for the most part this was interesting and informative. Admittedly he loses his cool at the end, but that's how he normally operates with guests he dislikes.

Not a need, just a desire.

I agree that people should understand proportionality of response, but I have not identified a hard and fast rule for it.

The circumstance the justifies the use of lethal force is immediate otherwise unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm to the innocent. There is no cause to kill someone unless by doing so you are preventing something that substantial. This is universal. Killing (or threatening to kill) to protect property is similar. Defend your livestock against rustlers. Defend your business against the mafia. Defend your savings that you've accumulated all your life. But it's not right to stab some kid for stealing a hubcap. (You can try to prevent it other ways, and if it escalates then things change.) At some point I should work up a philosophical basis for proportionality of response, too, but that looks like it would be a lot of work.

The comparison I'd attempt is that both gun ownership and vaccines make the entities that resist attacks more effective at killing, driving off, or deterring those attacks... but you might need fog lights to see the connection. Yeah, the article was tongue in cheek, but my public good comment was intended to crystallize the benefit.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/herd-immunity-applies-to-guns-as-well-as-vaccinations/ Wait! How is that a public good, you ask? Because when multiple parties benefit from something, that's a public good. Refresher on public goods available! Don't fall into the trap that public goods only can be provided by public entities.

My point is that you rejected all data, including personal narrative, out of hand, leaving you no way to verify anything except through the basic requirement that any critic [spend millions of dollars and break international laws to] make a bomb in front of you and set it off. That's an wonderfully convenient way to perpetuate a conspiracy meme and an absolute non-starter for a useful argument. I should have stuck to my guns and stayed out of this.

That pretty much means looking at histories or test data published by any scientist is worthless. Tidy little setup, that.

Yeah, easy test: state unequivocally "I do not consent to any search" and see how much that changes the current practice pervasive surveillance. Property rights are an explicit negative restriction on the scope of government, a concession given so that people won't rise up and eradicate their governors. They are also an expectation based on historical actions of the state in an area. "Rights" are not a useful concept in ancap society, and there is no state to restrict.

Yeah, but the concept of "violent felony" doesn't change very much, at least, and we can apply a LOT of pressure to tone it down on the non-violent ones. Problem is, it seems to take an incident to apply that pressure. Why is the Department of Agriculture buying rifles and body armor, for example?

Does it help this discussion for me to reveal my anecdotal piece: that after 12 years of marriage I consider sex with my wife validation that *I* am still worthy, and that I seek it out?

I think the point is that it makes sense to suppose what we do experience, and it makes no sense to suppose what we don't experience. The starting point has to be empiricism. Our assertion that philosophy has to be universal is also an assumption, but it enables a useful conversation nonetheless (lifeboat scenarios notwithstanding).

It's not a distraction but rather a sorting mechanism to make sure people that are "alike" correctly identity and mate with one another. It's not about pigskin, it's about eggs.

Basically that there were two types of entrepreneur in the late 19th century, true market-builders and political players. These two types conflicted (one benefits from a freer market, the other benefits from government-manipulated markets). The rise of progressivism and the denigration of the market entrepreneurs by labeling them as "Robber Barons" was caused by the political types doing everything they could to secure and grow their position.

Burton Folsom wrote on this. http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315

In large companies procurement of materials and services must be governed by a coherent strategy and measurement lest you "leave money on the table". When I worked for IBM there was the concept of "blue dollars" versus "green dollars" and a definite bias towards procuring, and selling, with other departments lest costs be realized in "real money". There was also a very real analysis of opportunity costs and selecting the most reasonable alternative. Yes, there are tax reasons, but also efficiency reasons.

The reason the show "The Walking Dead" is popular is not so much superhuman combat and survival skills it is the superhuman resilience of the characters to recover from continual disastrous events that come their way. Some are not so resilient. People eventually figure out that the Walking Dead are not the zombies, but the humans that merely go through the motions of survival hoping that things will magically turn out to be okay. The show is the latest incarnation of "eschatology" which is the study of Armageddon... the end of the world. The Christian version has within it final judgment of your deeds as well, and you may find yourself critically looking at what Rick and the rest are doing from your comfortable armchair in a similar vein, asking yourself, "Why does that bozo get to live but this favorite character have to die?" They express our own fear and rage against the arbitrariness of random events that lead to loss. I think the growth of these stories has a lot to do with our own dislike of the omnipotent and arbitrary state. Zombies at least can be seen and dealt with. The tax man cannot.