Frosty

But that's not true, because there was production of content prior to there being donations, and there's many other examples of people who make content on places such as youtube and do not take donations or payments. IQ does tend to go with earnings, so what? Is this an attempt at some kind of insult? I'm an IT Director who earns very well thank you, I choose not to donate because I don't feel like there's an obligation to, this content is put online for free, it's not gated behind a paywall, donations are entirely optional and while that remains the case I probably won't pay for content. If they require money to continue working they have many options to place adverts on youtube, paywall content, etc.

The free rider problem is an issue with services which when provisioned everyone benefits from, for example radio is a public service that once broadcast anyone can listen to for free. However this board doesn't fit that description, it's reasonably trivial to make a forum on the internet private such that only members who provide value back in some prior agreed way are allowed to have access, thus it's a choice to keep it public which means the content is provided for free, there's no moral or legal obligation to provide any specific value in return, just as there's no such obligation for consuming the show on youtube. You should also consider that people taking the time to post content on the board are actually contributing value, it's just not financial. If you believe that ostracization is something you should support then morality starts at home, you have the ability to hide/block posts, so there's nothing to stop you from doing so, if you like.

The difference is quite simple, it all comes down to consent. You consent to enter into a voluntary agreement to buy land, rent land/property or similar. With the state there is no consent, they extract taxes with force or the threat of force. When force is applied by one party there can be no meaningful consent. Having the ability to leave a certain geographic reason doesn't make what the state is doing any less immoral, and in many cases state imposed laws about travelling internationally is just another layer of force applied to stop people from escaping. Countries such as the USA will actually tax you even if you move and work abroad permanently, and the process for revoking your citizenship is lengthy and increasingly expensive and in some cases possibly prohibitively expensive.

I think the difference is that men can be labeled creepy for simply showing interest in a woman who doesn't have any interest or desire for the man, where as the same action by a desirable man would be seen as cute/funny/quirky. However for a woman to be creepy in the eyes of a man she needs to be behaving in a very specific way, such as in a threatening or overbearing way. Maybe the feeling of being creeped out is some evolved response to predators/threats and given mens greater ability to both dominate and defend themselves the threat needs to be more credible to trigger this feeling.

I'd argue that lying alone isn't grounds for being unethical, however lying in order to advance a personal benefit and the expense of someone else (AKA Fraud) I would argue is in violation of the NAP. I think you could make a reasonable argument of fraud if you misrepresented your position to a partner in order to continue to get sex and/or intimacy from them, if they reasonably expected a long term monogamous relationship in return. And while lying alone can't constitute unethical behaviour, certainly wouldn't call it a virtuous trait so you have to consider how that makes you appear to your friends/peers. Ultimately, talk to her, be honest, be open and straight forward with what you want, don't mince your words, make sure she understands and if you're both happy staying in the relationship then great, continue to see her as long as you're both happy, absolutely nothing wrong with that, other than potential wasted opportunity cost for seeking a long term partner.

Nope. Mostly through choice though, generally as a MGTOW I don't trust others or the system we find ourselves in, and the qualities a rational person would look for in an honest and reliable partner exist in fairly low quantities which makes that particular rat race simply not worth it.

It should be noted that when Lykourgos says that no one was able to give a coherent account of objective morality or UPB, what he really means is that no one gave an account he considers coherent, whether those actual accounts are coherent or not isn't solely arbitrated by him.

If there's significant demand for something in an anarchocapitalist society then it would almost certainly be provided. If women demand some kind of insurance related to having kids then I'm sure that would be provided. The big difference though is that they would have to pay for that directly rather than socializing the costs across an entire population. Also if it's any kind of insurance type scheme where many people are pooled together and security is dished out as and when it's needed then your own individual choices and behaviours would affect what sort of premium you'd pay on your insurance. So for example if you're insuring against the man leaving the mother and child then you'd expect to see many different factors go into what kind of premium you pay, if you have priors for spousal abuse or other factors that increase the risk of separation then you'd expect to pay more. The great thing about the free market is that it makes people pay for their bad choices and bad behaviour, whereas with government you get a safety net at the expense of other people, there's no incentive for anyone to actually make good choices.

I don't think UBP necessarily promotes maximal utility, in a free society people are free to make bad choices and suffer the consequences, freedom comes with inherent risk as you become responsible for the consequences of your actions. So in that sense UPB it's not utilitarian. And certainly if you wanted to maximize your own utility at the expense of others UPB is a barrier to doing that, and that's the crux of why utilitarianism is an inconsistent moral position, because people have conflicting desires and so there is no maximal utility, often utility for one person is at the expense of another. Incidentally the issue of freedom coming with inherent risk seems to be the issue that some (I'd argue a lot) of lefties/statists have with freedom, that some people simply aren't capable of handling it and so they need a nanny state. I got into a debate about plane regulations with someone and they insisted the only way we could regulate air travel safety is if we had a government. I suggested that private safety auditing is perfectly possible, he argued that airliners wouldn't use it and just be unsafe, to which I responded that if the public has a demand for safe air travel they'll pick an airliner which is audited and if there's a demand for it the free market would provide. His response was predictable, "but what about people who don't have time/effort/knowledge to check?", to which I replied that those people who incur higher risk flying unreliable airlines and that's the fundamental disagreement, that he thought that was a problem where as I was fine to let people make their own choices and incur the consequences of their actions. It's no wonder that UPB is so unattractive to some people, with world views like that. Just given me an idea for a new thread actually, stand by.

Stuxnet attacked hardware which explicitly opened itself up to software control, which is to say that the malware didn't or couldn't modify hardware that wasn't already explicitly built to allow such modification. I believe the core idea is that software can be limited by the hardware it runs on and some changes are only possible by first modifying the hardware. In fact I believe this only serves to prove Coltaines point, there was a time when hardware couldn't monitor or control environmental systems and as such software had no such ability to reach into those hardware system. But as we've moved towards things like SCADA systems there is an ever increasing threat from software and network access to physical systems. That is to say what the software is capable of doing now is inherently being changed by the underlying change in hardware. The analogy does break down somewhat when you consider that humans and other living beings are evolving via the process of evolution and that constant revisions are being made to hardware, and you're right some of those modifications get influence from culture and ideologies. It's the issue of hopping between the idea of static computer and an evolving system I guess.

I posted his prior video in another thread, the video this is a follow up to, and I got voted down, not sure why.

I don't agree with the premise that cheating necessarily requires intent to do harm. Look at some definitions and this doesn't really come up, in fact i'd argue more or less the opposite, it's in the favour of people who cheat not to do harm because causing harm increases the chances of you being caught, cheaters want to continue cheating to their benefit. However it should be acknowledged that there are obviously people who cheat for their own gain and some people who cheat to hurt others, that is an important distinction. I find this particularly interesting: This seems like a deferral of responsibility, it ignores the fact that you get to spend time with your partner and get to judge their virtues (or lack of them) and make a decision about them being a virtuous person before you enter a committed relationship with them. I think that's most uncomfortable truth about the whole cheating situation, I think the most upsetting thing after a breakup due to infidelity is that you were stupid enough to trust someone who's capable of hurting you. One thing I've been trying to do more and more is take responsibility for my choices, I don't like deferring blame to others, sure people do bad things but as smart people who like philosophy and rationality we ought to be able to classify these kinds of people and mitigate the effects of their bad behavior.

I've always been fascinated with the Randian story of the elites leaving to start their own society free of the weight of the parasites, it was especially striking for me in Bioshock the game long before I knew the stories it was based on. I find it funny that of everyone capable of making it off the planet the elites obviously stand a much better chance, it'd be like saying to the parasite classes that you just need to get out from under the elites...those who you tax to pay for all your stuff...makes no sense to me. Parasites want hosts to leech off, why would they want to leave?

Trying to think around utilitarianism with regards to this question is proving tricky. I guess the question of "why" comes down to appealing to those things that individuals value. So there's lots of utilitarian reasons such as moral behaviour decreases social friction and increases social trust which both lower the cost of living and increase quality of life. There's also the argument that if you're naturally/bioloigically empathetic then immoral behaviour would be in essence hurting yourself, since you mirror the pain of others. However not everyone has empathy. I think the best answer I have that's not concerning utility is that behaving morally is to behave in a rational, consistent and coherent way, we know from UPB that immoral rules are those which aren't logically coherent, we can't have a rule that says it's good to hurt someone because the term hurt has negative connotations and the rule doesn't make sense. But this would only be a reason why to be moral if people valued logic and reason in the first place, some people do not. Further more if people don't value logic and reason to begin with, then what logical argument are you going to use to convince them? I don't think there's any concrete answer to that question, it seems to depend what people value.

I think the same thing that motivates the average man to go after the average woman. Loneliness, desire for intimacy, desire for sex. I like that Stefan tends to back men who are going their own way as a rational choice, and I like that he see's there are good women out there, but the whole rational philosophy thing is a lonely game because I'd argue that the good men interested in this kind of thing out weigh the good women. Bottom line is that not everyone can have a good partner it's just not mathematically possible, as a global strategy for men to work on themselves to make themselves attractive to good women, all you face is ever increasing expectations and goals as you're pitted against other men doing the same. So people settle rather than being lonely, I see it all the time around me with friends. It seems like we discuss in the FDR community how to find good people and what to look for, but what I don't see is people discussing the bigger picture that until we can raise most people are rational and interested in philosophy and self improvement there's a limited supply of good these people and some people are forced to either settle or go without and human biology tells us most people will settle. I consider myself lucky that I'm a stoic person who can handle living alone and without contact from the other sex, I do have friends who pretty much fall apart without another half and that has to be an awful burden, especially if you're the guy who ends up with the older women who are divorced and struggling to raise children alone.

Nope, I'm done. Your constant assertions that people aren't backing their claims is just false. What you mean is that you disagree with the logic or the reasoning and you aren't convinced the case has been made, and that's not the same as people having not backed their claims. I've addressed all of your objections and you simply act as if your own reasoning is completely infallible. Your attempts to control the conversation through sophistry such as claiming that others are unwilling or unable to resolve objections because you deem that to be so isn't debating honestly, your manipulation of the conversation to paint me as someone who is "storming off" because of an inability or unwillingness to support my position is simply untrue, I've explicitly stated that I don't believe you're being honest in the conversation and so further interaction is pointless. I could in theory behave the same way, and just reject everything you say and say I remain unconvinced and hence you've not supported your position, but that would get us no where. We've seen people like you come through these forums before and it's not surprising checking your account to see you have a negative rep. If you want to drop the infallible logic spiel and stop pretending to be the ultimate arbiter, and argue honestly and actually give other people the benefit of the doubt that the position they're arguing is being done so honestly, then you might actually get a positive response. If you're just here to defend your position to the death and don't have an open mind then I have no interest in discussing this further. It's just my subjective experience but you're one of the most annoying people to have a debate with on this forum and while these debates are voluntary the quality of the discussion matters. If you can be mature enough to admit that your reasoning could be wrong and that the validity of my position doesn't depend solely on your judgement any more than the validity of your position depends on my judgement, then we actually might have a path to continue the discussion and see if we can resolve where we disagree. I'm not going to continue a discussion where you've put yourself in the position of sole arbiter and by default I must be wrong if you don't agree with my reasoning, as far as I'm concerned that's nothing short of trolling.

I get confused at the numbers advantage part, by advantage they mean here that men are actually less in number thus lowering supply and increasing value. As you would expect the frequency of sex would increase for women to secure their men in a market where they have a disadvantage, and generally need to please their men with longer sex with more foreplay. I think modern men like foreplay just as much as women, you're right that there is an old trope that men kind of don't know what they're doing but I think that is something that's rapidly changing, men can get easy access to understand biology with the internet, porn has widened the average persons understanding of sex. You can literally just google sex education and watch hours and hours of informative and educational youtube videos covering all aspects of sex, the anatomy and how to please each other. There's loads of negative stereotypes and memes about men that circulate in society that just aren't true, a lot of them result from people (normally women) shaming men loudly in order to get men to act in ways which benefit the women. For example take dead beat dads, turns out most men pay their child support but you actually flip the stats around to women having to pay men who have custody and you finder a greater percentage of women who don't pay, yet there's no "dead beat mom" meme in society. One things I've learned from the mens rights movement sphere and MGTOW is that mens depiction in media and entertainment tends to be pretty awful, the kind of bumbling dad figure who is essentially useless and is constantly propped up by the intelligent and sassy wife. All part of a wider narrative that straight (normally white) males are kind of histories punching bag, that you can more or less represent them arbitrarily negatively and we just take it. In a balanced sexual relationship men are just as much the receivers of foreplay as women are and so it makes sense that they'd want long and satisfying sessions of diverse sexual activity. I know that I do.

This topic along with abortion and other pregnancy related philosophical issues are tricky, I've never managed to resolve these issues with the NAP or UPB as to what sort of actions we should consider moral or immoral. And Stefan has touched on these issues on the youtube show but never went so far as to argue the position, to my knowledge he only argued the better alternatives and saved the discussion on the act of abortion itself for another video which never surfaced, that leads me to believe that he's also conflicted on this issue. If we're to agree that we own the affects of our actions and a man is partly responsible for producing a baby then surely he's a joint owner and should be able to have some say as to the fate of the child regarding various things that will affect the growth and health. It's messy and I've never read anyone's moral account on this topic that makes clear sense and is consistent, if anyone has any suggestions for material on this then I'd be interested to read it.

There's no doubt it's a cruel prank that caused obvious emotional upset and for that I have empathy for her. But pulling a knife...holy crap, that's just not acceptable at all. Possibly staged, who has a knife like that in their bedroom? Their interaction just doesn't seem that realistic to me.

I followed Nicoles comedy ever since she went viral with her dear fat people video (I'm fat btw) but found it edgy and funny while other people trashed her for being rude and the rest of it, I don't think there should be limits on comedy myself. Fast forward to this incident and it was the first I heard of Matt, his video seems to contain genuine pain and Nicole comes across as somewhat sociopathic. Another youtuber called GradeAunderA did a video showing inconsistencies in Nicoles story which is telling. My own experience with sociopathic (but non violent) women has left me with a good idea of what to look for in these women, she's superficially charming, uses her sexuality to manipulate, she's not terribly concerned with the feelings of others, her body language doesn't match what she's saying. There's little doubt in my mind that what Matt said is the truth, it takes a lot of balls to come out as a man and be open and vulnerable, but to do it online with a massive fanbase of millions of people is probably a sign of desperation, he obviously really needs to get that off his chest. Regarding one other posters comments on ratios of initiation of domestic abuse, simply google "domestic violence gender symmetry" you'll find a lot of published papers on this. It is indeed highly symmetric, women do hit and abuse and they have a greater incidence of using weapons as well. I'm always ranting about holding women accountable for the men they had, which I think is something we need to strongly enocurage, but it does need to be mirrored to men, we need to also be held accountable for picking crazy women, yes she's hot and probably slutty but did he fall for her because of her looks or because she's a virtuous person? Probably the former. Given her career and his fame online she probably saw him as an opportunity to slingshot to fame, and she knows that even during the negative attention of her viral "dear fat people" video she got hate but still grew rapidly in popularity and subscribers. I do feel for the guy though, it's hard to fathom by people who have empathy just how deviant sociopaths can be and how well they can mimic affection and love to get what they want. *edit* Worth also adding that she disabled comments on both her videos and disabled the ratings which were at last count almost exclusively negative.

I feel kind of similar to the topic of this thread, the truth is often depressing. My experience is that the addage "the red pill is a bitter pill to swallow" is accurate. The Manic Pixie Prostitute that Christopherscience posted made me laugh, I think the hyper stimulation of romance in modern storytelling makes life depressing by comparison. Maybe it's more obvious that a hyper violent action scene in entertainment isn't something you'd typically experience in real life but less obvious that these kind of love stories and female characters are just as unrealistic. Luckily the bitterness is something most overcome and what I lose in hope I gain back in intellectual stimulation, I enjoy the stimulation of discussion and new ideas and while that remains the case it's a good reason to stick with it. Besides you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, the best thing to do is learn how to make philosophy work for you rather than let the truth bury you, I do think it gives us much better agency to change things to our benefit.

Yeah, I'm getting the same thing, accusations of not defining things which I explicitly have done and can provide quotes of having done so, and no following apology or retraction or even acknowledgement. There is a lot of behavior that appears to be clutching at straws and the more I debate with him the more I get the feeling that we're simply going to regress backwards into more fundamental discussions and I don't have the time nor patience to expand the scope of this discussion to be about everything including all our fundamental presuppositions etc. I know the guy isn't stupid which is why it's frustrating when he brings up say the issue of consent with regards to peoples desires in our argument, this kind of side tracking under the guise of the argument not being complete unless we've taught him the entire English language is just frustrating to debate against and it fundamentally doesn't seem honest on his part. Especially when all the definitions I use are pulled straight from google, literally open google.com in a new tab and type define: <word> and I'm sticking to those common definitions and synonyms. He may just be a very dedicated troll and I'm now concerned that's the case so I'm wary about further engagement at this stage. The insistence of us being wrong unless we can describe this to him in a way he can understand and agree with is a standard we seem to have unwittingly accepted, obviously the validity of the NAP or UPB is not dependent on his understanding and agreement but he acts as if it is which I suggest is very telling about his motives. I think I'm done here.

Yes consent is important in morality because the same action done without consent (say sexual intercourse) is seen as immoral when consent isn't given (rape), and perfectly moral if not extremely desirable when consent is given. This isn't consent being used in two different ways, consent means the same thing in either case, we're just asking different questions regarding consent. In question one we're asking "if any single individual consents to an action", in question two we're asking "do all parties consent". Question two relies on question one, logically whether all parties consent is a factor of whether they consent as individuals, the meaning isn't suddenly being changed. I'm a bit confused as to whether or not you agree with this system, it sounds like you have issues with it, but I don't fully understand how that can be, surely you agree that something such as rape is bad, and that it's bad because consent isn't given and that obviously for it to be sex and not rape that both parties involved need to consent? That's just how our current laws work, but I'm not asking if you understand the laws, I'm asking if you think that's right by your own moral compass or however you reason your morality. I don't understand what you mean by special rules. Evil is just defined commonly as profound immorality and immorality is synonymous to what is bad and bad is "not such as to be hoped for or desired; unpleasant or unwelcome." Aggression by definition of the word is unwelcomed and so we can directly link the initiation of aggression directly with what is evil or immoral. I've been through that several times already, I'm still not sure where you either don't understand or disagree? Of course consent matters because consent is an indication of what is welcomed or not. I'm back to not really being sure where we disagree overall, you claim it's still a subjective system of morality but I'm not really sure what your objection is. What part of this system relies on someones feelings or opinion? Which part fails to be universally or objectively true? Whether an individual consents to a specific action is an objective fact. Whether all parties involved in a specific action all consent is objective fact. We can say objectively if an action taking/taken place is occurring consensually.

Good, yes, we're at the fundamental point on which we disagree, or at least reason differently. As I explained in my last post, whether an action is consensual or not is an objective fact of reality, and it requires that everyone involved/affected by that action consents to it taking place. Logically it would be an AND statement, an action is consensual if person A AND person B both consent, it's not consensual if either of the parties withhold consent. If A punches B and B doesn't consent to being punched then it's irrelevant what A wants, the action isn't consensual, therefore it's aggression, therefore bad/wrong/immoral. I did acknowledge that it's summarized as Desire = good/want, that was your simplified analysis of what I had said, and yes you're missing some nuance which I believe I've addressed already. But what it boils down to is the action has to be desired by the person/people that are on the receiving end of that action. For example, If A punches B it's obvious that the desires of some 3rd party involved in the interaction (person C) don't matter. And I'd hope it would be obvious to everyone that the desires of A alone aren't sufficient to judge the morality of this action, I'm not sure if you just don't understand that, or if you're deliberately being obtuse to try and nitpick holes in the argument and draw this out, or if you genuinely disagree and hold that morality is subjective and so as long as person A thinks its moral to punch person B that it's morally good? Could you maybe clarify your position here. No, sorry I suspect you're merely here to try and claim some victory based on a technicality such as the explanation not being verbose enough, rather than attempting to genuinely understand other peoples positions. This kind of almost autistic "i understand but you've got to write it all down again formally including all prior assumptions before I'll concede it's correct" is just a waste of our time. It strains credulity that you now don't understand my position and so either you agree with the reasoning in which case great, or you disagree and think either there's errors in the logic or assumptions in which case let's just discuss the point where we disagree and see if we can resolve the issue. Presumably you don't agree with this issue on consent? So for example you'd agree with the statement that it's OK to punch someone, as long as you consent to your own action, that what the victim desires is irrelevant?

I'm not completely sure, I used to accept it as a valid part of the NAP, but I've reasoned myself around in circles a few times and not really sure what my final conclusion is. I'd agree that fraud makes you a jerk though. I'm not so sure it can be reasoned as immoral. I accept the NAP is valid but I fail to see how fraud constitutes aggression. I take fraud to mean that a fraudulent transaction is one in which someone presented a transaction terms in a way which were dishonest. I get stuck on the issue of it surely being the responsibility of the people involved to check the validity of the claims the other person makes. The NAP has the nice quality that if someone doesn't consent to some action, for example someone taking your possessions, then by definition it's aggression (theft), but with consent given it's no longer aggression (giving, lending, whatever), the whole principle relies on this to maintain any kind of objectivity. What would it mean to consent to being defrauded?