Frosty

Again you're talking about "access" to a "device" which is just not what is occurring here, a device creates a message which propagates out, there's no sense in which you're accessing someone's device you're simply measuring the propagation of a wave. When I say a public place I'm constructing a hypothetical scenario with specific properties that eliminate other possible forms of aggression to try and narrow this down to the core discussion which is the question that should privacy as a concept in its own right be something that we consider immoral to violate, regardless of the mechanics of how its violated. Put another way if we only consider violation of privacy immoral because the NAP is being ignored, then if you adhere to the NAP but are still able to learn some private information then that should not be seen as immoral? The public conversation was an analogy for wireless communication, the 2 are closely analogous and it helps clear up confusion with regards to "accessing devices", you no more access someone else's router by reading radio waves than your ear accesses someone's mouth when they talk and create sound waves. Maybe we should just drop the router case for the moment and focus on something that has less technical ambiguity otherwise we'll get distracted with details, we can come back to that when we have found some common ground. Lets just focus on conversation between people in a public place. Is it immoral for me to knowingly interpret airwaves (sound) of 2 people having a discussion they both want to remain private? Let's assume no violence is taking place, no fraud or manipulation, no trespassing. If this scenario is immoral how can we construct the argument from first principles such as the NAP?

I agree with the analogous example of sound waves, I made the same kind of analogy in one of my prior posts. Lets assume for a moment that I concede that you can own electromagnetic waves, which I'm not really convinced you can, that is to say a specific configuration (certain frequencies and certain encoding of data sent across that frequency). Does that not just have the same issues of ownership as digital property that can be copied without altering or destroying the original? I see these as the same class of problems, I find it hard to see how this can be construed as aggression in any sense of the word. In the analogy if reading radio waves was indeed in breach of the NAP then surely so would eavesdropping on a conversation (where no other violations of the NAP were taking place, such as fraud, trespassing, etc)? So if you and a friend have a conversation in a public place and you don't see me behind you and I hear what you're saying, is that essentially in violation of the NAP? The analogy seems good enough, again you could say that by making a sound so loud that you ruptured eardrums and damaged hearing that you'd own the consequence of that action, so is the same true for owning the airwave you produce when you communicate? It's tricky. @Agalloch, I'm not bias towards loss being required for something to be immoral, we're talking about a very specific circumstance where we've ruled out other interpretations of the NAP such as physical violence, coercion and fraud which would otherwise be the basis for immorality without the need for loss. I think we all have the same gut feeling that violation of privacy ought to be considered immoral, I'm just trying to derive that clearly and concisely from the NAP, and when we investigate the route of ownship of the transmission medium such as airwaves or electromagnetic waves in these specific examples, we encounter practical problems of ownership. I think you'd have to concede that if reading electromagnetic waves that "belong" to someone else and you don't have permission to read is immoral, that the same is true for sound waves in a conversation. I just can't make that leap to overhearing a conversation between 2 people who are talking in a public place as immoral and that seems to be the logical conclusion of this line of thinking. Maybe it's a violation of the NAP in some other sense, I'm open to all arguments.

That's an interesting summary, I do think it matters if someone is attempting to protect something because it directly infers intent of the message, although less so in the case of encryption because in the vast majority of cases people do not understand the schemes that protect them or even that they are being protected. I think where I primarily disagree with this is that reading a copy of a transmission medium as theft, it has the same problem as copy protection, there's no way to apply theft to this in a meaningful way, at least with regards to the legal definitions. Digital media has been available to copy (duplicate) which precludes it from being theft, something that is commonly misunderstood with copyright unfortunately. This is one step even further removed from the copy protection example, because you don't even access a device or system to copy this, you simply read the data from the radio waves, it's something that all wireless cards are already doing because they need to inspect the data header to determine if the data packet is address to them or not. I'm struggling with the idea of ownership of messages, I'm not sure that's a valid idea. Maybe the ownership of something physical like a letter or parcel, or even an electronic device, but not a specific configuration of electromagnetic waves.

I'm aware of this problem, it's actually partly why I'm more inclined to liken it to a combination of both a biological issue and a mental one. My mother suffers extreme anxiety which is getting worse with time, it actually seems to run in our family although I have no idea if that's genetic or purely behavioral, both me and my brother have/had a lot of anxiety although we function in society really well. She's gotten so bad that she's got this constant sense of foreboding that there's something wrong with the world and that she just can't explain to anyone, she thinks the banks will collapse and there will be rioting in the street, so she stocks up on food and whatnot. I see accounts from people with phantom limb syndrome or other BID issues and what they describe again is of a similar nature, they can't describe accurately describe it but they have a overwhelming powerful feeling that nags them that their arm doesn't belong to them, and it really cripples their ability to be happy because it just constantly bothers them. I see these as mental issues (just my opinion) because there's no clear source of these feelings, the fact that you can't describe it accurately seems to suggest that it may be in the same kind of sense of unease that other mental issues have but manifest in different ways. One way I look at it is, if you could hypotehtically give someone a drug which alters their brain state and just creates a feeling of foreboding or unease/unrest then that might manifest in different ways in different people due to preexisting biases or issues, for example it might result in a sort of "the sky is falling" kind of way like it does with my mother, and with another person it might be that a part of their body isn't right somehow, be that their limbs are wrong or their sex is wrong, etc. I guess I'm just not convinced that it's biology alone, while trans people show different brain scans showing a clear biological difference we've been quick to jump to the conclusion that all people with this difference are trans people who are to some degree are unhappy, we need a really big control group of scans of people who don't consider themself trans to see if these brain differences exist in the population, again my gut tells me that if you took a tomboy girl and did the same kind of scan you'd likely see brain structure more like a man than a woman, we already know about things like testosterone in women causing male like behaviour but it not being directly linked to any kind of unease or unhappieness. What I'm trying to say is that it could be entirely possible there's people with brain differences and hormonal imbalances out there who display traits of the opposite gender but who do not have gender dysphoria and so we'd have good reason to decouple the feeling of the need to change with the biological differences and say that it's a combination of both the physical differences together with mental. This is why I find the case of tomboys and other women who clearly are different from other women because they have a very strong tendency to work with systems and do STEM subjects and things like that, I meet them from time to time and it's not just those things that are different they very clearly have a male brain in some sense and they know they do they normally admit this, the case of Lindsay was a good example, i'd be very interested to see a brain scan there and see if it's similar to what we see with trans people. Again this is mostly just my speculation, it's not something I believe with any strong conviction, I'm not really trying to argue a case or change anyones minds It's just kind of the logical next step that I'd take if I say had funding to investigate the issue further. It seems inconceivable to me that nurture alone that creates very strong personality and gender differences in some people who also do not have gender dysphoria and in some cases we do have evidence for things like testosterone exposure are the cause. But these things aren't coupled with gender identity issues, it's possible for a woman to behave very strongly like a man because of biological issues yet be perfectly happy and we need to explain that. I need to find a better source for that, it was brought up in a Norwegian documentary called Hjernevask (means brainwash) which you can find online with English subs and I would highly recommend to anyone interested in gender issues. It tackled many of the gender studies and theories coming out of the Nordic gender institute which turned out to be a huge amount of unscientific nonsense driven by ideology. To contend a lot of the modern bad idea they reference a lot of science studies one of them is with Simon Baron-Cohen which is to with testosterone exposure during foetal development casing difference in brain structure and leading to some of what we consider more masculine traits, it happens in both males and females.

Well as I said, it's not a well defined term, actually the computer type of hacker such as one that only exists in the digital space is a much newer and more specific use of a much older and more general term that started out in MIT. I don't really want to get distracted with this point though because it's not really relevant to the topic, I'll just clarify by saying I consider myself a hacker in the more classical sense of clever playfulness, only some subset of what I tinker with is electronic or digital. Let me be more precise to clear up some confusion. The reason I didn't describe specific physical actions because that's going to be beyond most peoples understanding and is more likely add confusion rather than remove it, I don't believe it's necessary to discuss what is going on in terms of electromagnetic waves in order to investigate the issue of the principles privacy in a more general philosophical context. But I'm more than happy to discuss the lower level interactions and why I believe that they don't violate the NAP, something I go into later in this post. My restriction to Wi-fi only was not arbitrary, I've discussed and acknowledged that many different types of snooping require violation of the NAP to be achieved, however I've made an observation that in some circumstances there appears to be no clear violation of the NAP. This is open to interpretation and I'm happy to discuss if that really is the case or not but after quite a lot of thought my honest opinion is that there is no violation of the NAP in these cases. Now, if this really is the case (note, I say if) and my gut feeling is that invasion of privacy is immoral, then is there any other principles that we can infer this immorality from, or framed another way how does privacy factor into something like universally preferable behaviour (UPB)? Could it simply be that violations of privacy in some circumstances simply aren't immoral? I should note that I've not made up my mind either way, the point of bringing this up was to discuss it with others and see other peoples arguments on it as a way to investigate the issue. But let me get more technical and set a more specific example in order to clear up some of your concerns. I'll give you a real world example that anyone with a few bucks can do. We take a laptop with a wireless network card that is able to run in promiscuous mode. The normal operations of wireless cards is to read all traffic they're capable of reading, inspecting the header of the data packet to see who the packet is addressed to and then discarding any that are not addressed to itself and forwarding any that are addressed to itself on to the networking stack so the operating system can handle that data. Cards running in promiscuous mode simply read all packets irrelevant of their address and forward all of them onto the OS. In this example we take the laptop and we listen in a physical area that contains some number of access points and clients who connect and send data to that access point. We then let our wireless device simply "listen" to and record messages sent back and forth. Wireless communications for those who are less familiar with how electromagnetic waves work are closely analogous to regular human to human speech. The wi-fi cards are analogous to the mouth and ears of a person which are able to transmit messages and receive them. Voice messages transmitted are in the form of air pressure waves which propagate outwards and everyone who is close by can hear, this is how wireless communication is done with computers but instead using electromagnetic waves, every active wi-fi card is listening to the electromagnetic spectrum and listening for all messages that fit the wi-fi standard. I'd argue that because of the passive nature of capturing traffic that doesn't require interaction with the communicating parties, there is simply no sense in which you're acting in aggression. You wouldn't say that by being close enough to hear someone talking that you're accessing their mouth with your ears, we understand that eavesdropping like this couldn't possibly be construed as aggression. You can potentially be trespassing while you eavesdrop or you can fraudulently appear to be someone you're not while you eavesdrop, but neither of these are prerequisites for the principle of eavesdropping. Certainly the concerns of ISPs do not come into play in the circumstance I'm talking about, you're not connected to an ISP or sending data through an ISP nor do you have any agreement with the target access point or client, data that goes between the client and AP may not even be forwarded onto the internet. To my surprise the more I think about it the more I'm certain that this conclusion is true. You can negotiate privacy with someone before you reveal information to them however in a more broad technical sense if you want to transmit publicly so anyone can receive the message, then your only expectation of privacy can be to the degree you're able to obfuscate the message so it's unreadable, which is what encryption is for. If you rely on an encryption standard that is weak to being broken that is surely your own fault when others are able to decrypt it? For example if me and you agree in secret to somehow modify the meaning of regular English and we have a conversation in a room full of other people, we can reasonably expect that no one will be able to decipher what we're saying unless they know the rules by which we modified the meaning of words. However if someone who is listening puts in sufficient effort to break this code and discover the original meaning we cannot say this person acted with aggression towards either party. If they go on to use the real message to intimidate, threaten, coerce or alike then obviously that is aggression but the act of simply learning it may not be. The conclusion seems oddly unintuitive especially given the states laws to protect encryption, that is to say breaking encrypted radio messages is not legal in many places. Could it be in these circumstances that expecting an inherent right to privacy is really just a statist invention and that with something like universally preferable behaviour as a moral system there's no such moral principle that guides this behaviour? Obviously if you create a circumstance where it's impossible to violate privacy without also violating the NAP, such as having a conversation inside private property where no one can hear or see then you, then you can reasonably expect privacy. But this is only through circumstance you're boot strapping privacy from an unrelated moral principle (the NAP) by communicating in specific ways that are conducive to secrecy. I think it's an interesting topic, I'd love to hear more opinions on the matter.

Thanks, oh and the Lindsay Leigh Bentley article was something someone posted prior in the thread, I was just re-posting it for reference, I think her attitude is much more healthy, you can express traits from the opposite gender but you don't need to label it anything and you certainly don't need to use a label to narrow down your choices of lifestyle, this desire to have everyone else see you as the other gender and actively acknowledge it and accept it seems to be something a more troubled mind seeks, a lot of the transgender people who try to transition also often have a wealth of other mental issues which partly adds to their suicide rate.

The term hacker isn't well defined, I tend to use the broad definition that someone such as Richard Stallman would use, which is playful cleverness, much of the hacking I do is technical and related to computers and digital systems, but certainly not all of it is. The specific case here is digital communications where information is communicated with some expectation of privacy via the use of encryption or similar methods but through technical weaknesses can be discovered. All encryption can be broken with sufficient hardware and time. I've specifically addressed the issue of privacy in this context because it presents an uncommon set of circumstances where privacy can be invaded in what I believe to be a way that does not constitute explicitly immoral actions at least as far as the NAP is concerned. Simply stating that it's often the case that invasions of privacy require immoral actions is not a good argument in this case. ISPs don't really factor in to the circumstance I'm talking about, the ISP has a contract between themselves and the person who has an expectation of privacy, a 3rd party listening in has no such agreement or contract with the ISP or the "target" with which to break and often the ISP is not involved in any kind of meaningful way anyhow, the service you're snooping on might be self provisioned. I did acknowledge that laws clearly state a lot of this is illegal already, however they also state that you go to prison if you don't pay your taxes but in a libertarian/anachist society these would be seen as immoral, hence my investigation into how laws for such actions could be morally and philosophically justified. Yeah you can completely passively capture and crack all wireless data from all common wifi standards as well as GSM cellular data, again completely passively, there are active attacks you can do but for the sake of avoiding nitpicking details I'm trying to eliminate technical details by simply discussing classes of attack where there can be no reasonable sense of aggression involved in revealing communication. It's really to get to the heart of the problem which is tying the concept of privacy inherently back to first principles. In the case of picking up a parcel claiming to be someone else we have an analogy that's just not sufficiently nuanced for a couple of reasons. First of all wireless data can be copied and isn't stolen in the same way that it denies the original message from existing or being correctly delivered. Also the data in wireless transmission is just broadcast out to a specific address, all network cards read that data, and do in order to determine the address its intended for, except normally if its not addressed to you then it's simply ignored, in promiscuous mode the card just captures all the data irrelevant of address. It requires no handshaking or negotiation with the sender and so there is no confirmation of identity of the recipient and so it cannot be analogous to fraud. In something like a MITM (man in the middle) attack where you advertise to targets that you're a specific identity/address which you in reality aren't, to explicitly have them send data to you, that is a reasonably analogy for fraud. These are called active attacks since they require active interaction with target systems, passive attacks that I'm discussing don't meet these same criteria.

The problem with MGTOW is that it's not precisely defined which makes deeper discussion on the issue without devolving into squabbling somewhat tricky. When I came to MGTOW some 3-4 years ago I took to observing what the community most had in common and tried to consider a general expression of these traits. I think that it's fairly accurate to say that it's about maintaining male sovereignty (the ability to self govern) by minimizing your exposure to institutions and systems which are toxic to you, for example systems that significant increase your financial or legal liabilities, marriage is the typical example and is increasingly becoming agreed upon in the MGTOW community that it's simply not reasonable to be married and claim you're maintaining the ability to self govern when you've signed over a huge number of rights to the state and your partner, giving someone the ability to take you for 50% of your assets at their whim is simply not a good method of maintaining your ability to self govern. Whether you agree with that or not, it's certainly true to say that MGTOW is a spectrum and people go their own way to vastly different degrees, some tried to codify this with MGTOW "levels" which is a bit cringe worthy, never the less based on how you weight your preferences you can justify going your own way to whatever degree you're happy with, some men maintain LTRs and cohabitate, these people would certainly be seen as less of a MGTOW than someone who abstains from all intimate relationships with women, and in turn these would be seen as less of a MGTOW to those who simply go galt and drop off the grid, often known as ghosting, where you're not even paying taxes etc. I would say that men with a marriage and kids is not MGTOW to any meaningful degree, at this point you're on the fringe of range of behaviour expressed by MGTOWs, very few MGTOWs would agree that this is behaviour indicative of going your own way and there's a HUGE amount of discussion among the community about why that is.

All wireless communication can be collected without active interference, it just radio waves that anyone can read. When it comes to physical networks it's very similar except you need to have some kind of physical connection to the network somewhere, typically this data is routed through several pieces of equipment between people and it may travel through networks you don't own and who can easily read the traffic without modifying it, that doesn't infringe on anyone's property. Essentially you can think of this not as telling their PC to send you data but simply listening to the network and pretending you have every possible address (this is called promiscuous mode for anyone interested, network cards in promiscuous mode never reject traffic they always read traffic even if it's not addressed to them), and I don't believe you can exclusively own an address or address space in that manner. There seems to be a class of problems where the gut says that this is immoral and that the golden rule would be enough to say that ideally we don't breach each others privacy, but I'm struggling to really work that back to first principles, I'm not a fan of the "you're a dick" kind of rule that Stefan has talked about before, we can all kind of casually agree that it's a dickish thing to do but that's not very philosophical, I'm not convinced there's a way to stretch the definition of aggression to something that's completely passive in nature Oh certainly there's many laws that cover this stuff, but as most of us probably agree, a lot of our laws do not track from first principles and in a libertarian or anarchist society may not exist unless we can find good philosophical reasons to back them. I suppose a voluntary society could enact laws that we can't reason from first principles are immoral or bad but hold those values anyway, seems like a slippery slope though. I think it's an important part of hacking and, there's a lot of moral grey areas that hackers face, even just with respect to current laws which struggle to keep up with the fast paced technology world, but also if you're deriving your morality somewhat objectively from universal first principles like the NAP then that seems to leave an even wider scope for allowable actions. I tend to err on the side of caution and most of my work is solidly in the realm of white hat hacking (hacking system that I either own or have explicit permission to hack) as I'm breaking into doing this as a career, but a lot of these attacks are very abstract quite frankly what we think of classically communicating like say sending a letter to someone which is protected against snooping largely because we can adequately seal letters and consider them property seems to fall apart with digital communications protected with with cryptography.

What about private communication between 2 people, for example a facebook chat message or a phone call, something you reasonably expect to be private because there's technology to encrypt that communication, but people can passively sniff network traffic and break the encryption. Just for clarity when I say passive collection I mean collection that is done without modifying or "touching" the original message, any breaking of security technology is done through brute force or abusing weaknesses in the technology, not through trickery or interaction with the people doing the communicating. I'm struggling to see the "aggression" part in the collection only part, obviously the use of private information to bribe or coerce someone is morally wrong and an obvious violation of the NAP.

I agreed with the sentiment that anarchists are basically 50 to 100 years ahead of our time, the world at large simply isn't well educated enough to accept and understand the arguments for anarchism and libertarianism, this is why being a libertarian is so frustrating because you know we'll never get it in our lifetime and you know that it's a huge amount of effort to educate and raise the consciousness of billions of people about peace and the NAP.

I'm interested to hear opinions and arguments on the issue of privacy and how it relates to the Non Aggression Principle. More specifically I'm interested in the issues of modern day privacy with digital communications and private digital information that can be copied or replicated as opposed to taken or stolen like a more traditional message that relies on physical media to be communicated. I'm a hacker and I'm aware of different techniques that can be used to passively capture and break encrypted messages between devices/people that don't rely on force, coercion, manipulation, lying, threatening or even any kind of interaction with the people communicating. Hackers tend to end up with skill sets which allow them to do things that the state makes illegal (although often perform themselves) but it also opens up somewhat of a moral grey area for me as a libertarian and how this relates to an objective morality based world view. Can passive collection of private information alone be a violation of the NAP? What about if you learn something private about someone but you never do anything with that information, it simply remains in your head as a memory, you never replicate, leak or otherwise use that information to harm the other person. If not the NAP are there any other universal moral principles that passive invasion of privacy would violate?

The video explained that he took the difference out of his own wage, so their ability to remain competitive in the market has not gone down, in fact they will be a bit more competitive because they'll attract more talent interested in positions at the company and having a bigger pool of talent to pick from gives you a better shot at getting workers who add more value to your business, staff turnover is likely to be less as well which means less wasted money on hiring and whatnot.

I've always taken issue with this for 2 reasons. Millions of people are dependent on the state and so even if you could somehow collapse the voting system and bring in some form of anarchy that would lead to millions of people needlessly suffering, a gentle ramp down of government control is almost certainly a better exit from the violence of the state to wean people off their dependency. 2nd, it seems completely impractical and maybe impossible to go from a current democratic voting system to an anarchist society in any other way than slowly voting out control of the state. I personally voted for UKIP in the UK, they're not exactly a hardcore libertarian party but they do have way more right wing and libertarian leanings than the other parties and if we can vote them in for a few terms and prove that a freer society is better off, that sets a good example for future change, it's gradual thing that has a realistic chance to lower the control and violence slowly over time. If I had the option to throw a magical switch and just remove the state, I wouldn't, I think that would do more harm than good in the short run and there's a better way of handling it. You can interpret that as "supporting the violence of the state" if you like but it's plausible that no other method of actually achieving a libertarian/anarchist society will work and if that's the case then the people who voted out the control in a slow and controlled way are going to be the ones who really helped put an end to the violence.

I'm coming back to this thread after doing some research and some more thinking, I've also read the thread up to date. One thing that I still can't get my head around is this idea of feeling like you're in the wrong body (that is to say you feel like a female but you have a male body, or vice versa), how is this something you can have a strong conviction about when it's impossible to experience what it's like to be both male and female. As a man I can only speculate what it might feel like to be a woman, I cannot with a strong conviction assert what it is like. Obviously a lot of this comes from behavioural traits, which is where the horrible world of gender comes in, I really dislike these ideas because I don't find they helpful. Masculine traits are just traits which we observe most males exhibit which most females do not, feminine traits are ones which most females exhibit and most males do not, most importantly these things are just observed aggregate behaviours across society, with genetic diversity and mutations we observe plenty behaviour which crosses this gender divide, some women are tomboys for example and are generally pretty happy about behaving like a boy/man while acknowledging they're biologically a female and that these 2 things can coexist without issue (to the extent that they're not shamed or bullied by others for their behaviour). This is where my problem with gender is, I think it's fine labelling common behaviours as masculine or feminine when we observe those things to be the case, we do this with language all the time because it's a helpful short cut for describing, the problem is when people use it prescriptively such as parents encouraging or discouraging behaviour based on some mythical gender, that's just wrong and borderline violation of the NAP in my opinion. This post was particularly enlightening to be honest - http://lindsayleighbentley.com/2014/06/30/i-am-ryland-the-story-of-a-male-identifying-little-girl-who-didnt-transition/ So gender isn't a complete picture, the desire to act in a certain way alone isn't enough to suggest being the wrong sex, you have to have some motivation or feeling of unease, this has to be an active belief that something is wrong which leads to a desire to fix the problem. I've read up a bit about xenomelia AKA foreign limb syndrome, I've heard of these kind of mental illnesses before, there's a really interesting chap called Vilayanur Ramachandran who does work in this field and does public talks and lectures on many of the fascinating mental disorders that exist, in the case of xenomelia it's a type of body identity disorder where patients feel like their limbs do not belong to them. I've been reading some of the opinions of Milo Yiannopoulos and I think I agree with him that this kind of transexualism where you feel a desire to alter your body with operations and hormones should be considered a more of a mental disorder, similar to how people who want to chop off their arms due to xenomelia are. It turns out that John Hopkins University that pioneered the sex change operation has stopped doing them now, the suicide rates of people who have transitioned shoot up dramatically to something like 20x that of healthy people, especially much later after transitioning, studies followed post ops over 10+ years, the transition simply doesn't address the underlying psychological issues. This makes sense to me because coming back to this idea of males who act feminine and females who act masculine, plenty of males and females do this happily and just go about their lives without ever feeling an urge or need to change. This underlying persistent nagging feeling that something is wrong seems like the root of the problem when it comes to unhappiness in trans people, and it's psychological in nature. There is good evidence that the brains of trans people look more closely like that of the opposite sex and it seems likely that this is directly linked to different behaviour, biological realities change behaviour for example the preference of females to be more interested in people and males more in systems turns out to be closely related to testosterone, even in new borns with no social influence baby girls will prefer to stare at faces and will do for longer, males are the opposite and tend to prefer to stare at objects and systems for longer. This gets reflected in preferences in later life, women who were measured to have more testosterone exposure as a foetus are more likely to go into STEM fields. But again I don't think that's enough alone to make someone be unhappy, plenty of women who have obviously more male orientated brains are happy with their life and don't feel any need to change their body. I'd be interested to see a study that does a wide range of brain scans across some trans and non-trans and compares them to see if it's only trans people who are observed to have similarities to the brain of the opposite sex, or if there's an occurrence of that in the general population who do not consider them self trans. My gut tells me that there'd probably be some not-insignificant portion of the population like this. I'd also be interested to know if there's any trans people who feel like they're in the wrong body or whatever variation of that makes sense to you, but express gender traits of your natural sex. For example are you a man who feels like you are really a woman but maintains fairly masculine traits? After all, some non-trans women display masculine traits. I'm interested to what degree these 2 issues are separated because the more I think about it the more it seems likely that a feeling of unease and unhappiness that something is wrong could be a more general mental issue and biological realities like a brain which is a bit more like the opposite sex are simply catalysts for how that feeling of unease manifests, could the people with xenomelia have a very similar problem but it just manifests with their limbs instead of gender? Some things to ponder.

You don't even need to research this really, you know that businesses are handing out equal wages under equal circumstances because it's a free market. It's simply not possible for businesses on aggregate to sustain a bias in a free market like this, eventually that bias will be ironed out, all that is required is a bit of economics 101.

Something that has been on my mind recently, even though I'm now essentially celibate my last sexual encounter(s) was with someone who wanted rougher sex and talked about it, although how rough things got were mild given a wide range of what humans are capable of, just mild hair pulling some choking, no striking or humiliation though. All consensual of course. My thoughts on this are scattered, I don't think that it's all from prior abuse but I do certainly think it can be triggered by it. There are women who I've talked with who have been through abuse and who consider their sexual desires to be in some way linked to abuse, in fact I read an op-ed piece by a woman admitting to these fantasies among others and having little doubt in her mind they're linked to prior abuse. There are also other women who just love the idea and claim no prior abuse (whether that's true or not is hard to say). What we do know is that when studied, women report high levels of rape fantasy (it being the most common fantasy) and being out of control or ravished, and vice versa for men where we tend to prefer to display dominance and do the ravishing. So even just at the level of fantasy there's definitely a dimorphic and seemingly natural occurrence of it in at least fantasy, whether you dabble with this in real life probably has more to do with your level of risk taking and ability to step outside of your comfort zone. I settled on what I think is a fair assessment that even if it is caused by prior abuse, that shouldn't be a problem if it remains consensual and both parties get something out of it, you can't really help what you enjoy and you shouldn't be ashamed of it. Separately there's the consideration for can this be a red flag for prior abuse, well possibly, but what matters here is what untreated abuse can do to peoples actions and mentality in a relationship, getting into a relationship with someone who has suffered abuse and never dealt with it could be dangerous, but it seems plausible to me you could deal with the abuse and be a healthy person but retain the sexual desires. I also think it's possible that abuse might be an introduction to sexual play which someone was too afraid try or unaware of as having positive stimuli (among the negative) and while the force was originally unwanted they may find future consensual sex play more fun. An analogy might be that you force me to eat a flavour of ice cream that I've never tried before, while the force is obviously immoral, if I enjoy the flavour, I might decide to go back and try that again in future. Does that mean I like that flavour because I was forced? No not really, it just means I discovered something positive through a negative experience. When it comes to not understanding why other people get off on it, it might party be to being sheltered from a wider range of human behaviour and lacking in experience and willingness to give that kind of sexual play a chance. It might also be if you're clinging to a sort of blue pill fairy-tale vision of women on a pedestal, if your view of women is that they're gentle petals then this will obviously be contradictory in your world view, in reality some women (and men, although less so) really get off to being thrown around the bedroom, being struck, chocked and it can be kind of hard to believe until you've experienced it first hand and she's getting more sexually excited as you get rougher. It may also be something you have to be introduced to slowly, it took me years of sexual exploration before any of this finally sat right with me, definitely becoming red pilled helped, it's just part of having a wider range of human experiences, pushing out of your comfort zone is something people tend to do slowly, if kids are into BDSM at like the age of 16 I'd be more worried for example. It's not exactly an unusual idea though, some people love horror movies, that's not exactly what you'd call a pleasant experience but it helps you broaden your perspective on the world. When I was young I used to be terrified of the movie gremlins which looks stupid now I've had a broader range of experiences with horror movies. Now I've kind of flipped over I actually kind of hope that if I ever break from being celibate that my next sexual partner is into rough play because that's something I've gone from being indifferent about to excited to actually try, only with someone who reciprocally enjoys it of course. *edit* One last edit in this ramble. I've read before that sexual stimulation, especially over stimulation can require more extreme stimuli in future, of everything I've read it seems like novelty in sex play and porn are common tricks to encourage arousal in people who are less aroused by more vanilla sex. I think that is probably what lead me to my current interests in this topic more than anything else. Arousal after all is a trick of biology to encourage reproduction, in civilized society we enjoy sex purely for stimulation alone so it makes sense we'd easily over stimulate our mechanism for arousal, no different to over stimulating our pallets with high sugar drinks and alike.

As a man I actually don't have the slightest problem with this. I would have a problem with feminist reactions to a female equivalent targeted at men however.

Haha, funny and fairly accurate I'd say.

Don't really agree with the video, at least I'd phrase it in a different way, I'd say that you have an emotional part of your brain and a logical/intellectual part. The emotional part is hardwired into our evolution where instinct and natural urges drove beneficial behaviour before we had much ability to reason etc, and the much younger rational part of the brain is the part that has become more necessary in modern society. I'd argue that women are more emotional thinkers on average and men are more logical thinkers, it comes from a historical necessity of men to solve problems in order to keep the tribe safe from threat and produce enough resources to provide for family. It's best that you construct a spear to fight a lion rather than get emotional. Like in the video it says women need connections to feel safe and secure, this is an emotional requirement and not a logical one, it's born out of being maternal and needing a connection with infants and children so they have a strong urge to bond. Obviously I'm not saying that women can't be logical, there are lots of great female thinkers, but i'd say the propensity for emotional reactions to trump logical ones is greater, and also the satisfaction and gratification of solving logical problems by formulating solutions is lesser than what men experience. Look at fields of engineering, construction, hard science, computer science, women are almost completely absent, where as fields for caring such as care worker, nurse, childcare etc, these are all female dominated fields. As a man emotional and fundamentally irrational thinking and behaviour frustrate me, it's the cause of a lot of problems and has little ability to resolve them. I reference this video a fair bit, it demonstrates the fundamental difference really well - For men it's about discovering the problem, working out how to fix the problem and then implementing the fix. Women seem far more interested in emotional sympathy for the problem to such an extent they'd rather have that than actually trying to correct the problem. I literally cannot understand and I'm sure will never understand this approach to life. I ask myself how on earth can women possibly get anything done in life with this attitude, then I remember that it's men that have built most of modern society. Obvious exceptions to ALL of this, I'm talking in generalities not absolutes.

Logically the "real" or "true" feminism should have nothing to say about porn because there's no issue of equality with regards to porn. However you often find in reality that feminists and a lot of women in general do have something against porn, and it's easy to understand why. Traditionally womens sexuality gave rise to an imbalance in sexual market value (SMV) which more often than not put women at the advantage in the realm of personal relationships, this is why traditionally men chase women and ask women out, and women pick from the plethora of offers they have from men. Porn diminishes this power for women by giving males alternate options for satisfactory sexual relief, it diminishes the amount of effort men are willing to go through to achieve sex, so it diminishes the value men represent to women as a utility or access to resources. It also diminishes capacity for women to punish men in relationships by withhold sex. There's a reason gay men are on average way more promiscuous than any other type of partner combination, neither person is using sex as a power play, both want it and enjoy it and engage in it as often as desired, it's not drip fed and artificially withheld under normal circumstances in order to maintain a power disparity. Even before porn was mainstream and free you could still see the female desire to regulate easy access to sexual relief by the way women slut shame other women, which has always traditionally been a female on female issue, men on average tend to admire women who are more relaxed when it come to sex and don't use it for manipulation, rather enjoy it as mutually beneficial shared experience. Women who give up sex easily devalue the sexual market value of all other women and this is unacceptable so it's only natural for women to attempt to shame and limit this behaviour.

Ah-hahahaha

Bad day to be a Brit, that's for sure Our leftist media has become so bad now, and so slowly over time that we just don't realise how bad it has become and how much it affects our thinking. The BBC which is funded through licence fees in the UK which almost everyone pays (anyone with a TV) which I thankfully am not a contributor, constantly pump out leftist sensational media, there's not a week goes by that we see the BBC reporting on how there's not enough women in Job X or not enough women in politics and that we should have equality, they back the SJW and are basically hard left. A friend showed me this website http://newsdiffs.org/diff/657896/657911/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-28939089 It highlights changes made to BBC articles as they're published and then edited, not just for SPAG but for content as well, you'll see comments regarding race being completely erased just moments after being published. Obviously prejudice is bad, but knowing the facts is paramount, if there's large scale abuse from a small segment of the foreign population then that's an issue and somewhere that resources need to be allocated to in order to drastically reduce the problem as fast as possible. This is why I've voted for UKIP in the EU election and will again in the general election, we need some serious fucking change in this country, they're the only party that has even remotely libertarian ethics.

That's cool, I'm sure there are a decent number of female AnarchoCaps across the globe, the problem is there's so few of you that the odds of you being close to one are slim, especially in areas not well known for libertarianism, it's growing in the UK but it's still a very young political movement. Setting ALL requirements to neutral and setting distance to max (to get the most hits) reveals zero results for women and hundreds or thousands for men, it's for this reason I don't think it's a case that libertarians wouldn't use a dating site, otherwise the men would have few hits as well. I think it's a problem of females and males having different interests and different biological drives. This isn't something specific to philosophy, libertarianism and AnarchoCapitalism, if you try and find women interested in any kind of typical male pursuit it becomes exceedingly hard, if I search my fairly long list of hobbies and interests on a dating site I get a similar lack of hits, yet running a test on men finds lots. There's an undoubted gender divide in interests and political/philosophical positions. Truth be told it puts you in a great position of value which means you have the upper hand in dating. Haha, that doesn't surprise me. I quite like Jeffries, he does make me laugh, there is a certain raw appeal to his observations between men and women and it's funny because it's so often true. I can be pretty opinionated and jaded when it comes to comparing the sexes these days, mostly because I've no longer got any reasonable expectation of finding anyone. Interesting question, who has been to libertarian meet ups? Anyone care to make a casual estimate of women vs men attendees?

The main problem that rational people have is that many of the things feminists claim contribute towards rape culture, simply have not been demonstrated. It's much the same argument that Anita Sarkeesian uses to back her video series, there is no actual evidence that tropes about damsels in distress actually cause men to treat women like damsels in distress. Feminists ideology is littered with the same disconnection from reality, the assertions that rape jokes contribute towards rape culture simply isn't backed with any kind of evidence, it's just how they feel at the time. The more honest feminists will actually be up front and complain that essentially it just hurts their feelings and they want it to stop, or put another way they prefer that humans moderate speech instead of having free speech. That's disgusting in and of itself, but at least it's not an outright lie or delusion. Lastly we're responsbile for our own actions, if I tell a rape joke to my friend and someone overhears us and that makes that person think (along with other social programming) that rape is OK and they rape somoene, I'm not responsible for that persons choice, it means that even if you could prove rape jokes contributed to rape culture the morality of disallowing freedom of speech is not so clear. You often see this with ideologues, not only do they want to police actions but they want to police thoughts and feelings too, many modern feminists want a world in which no one is allowed to offend anyone else, you see this across many feminist blogs and articles and it's where the really extremist views appear when they take this to it's "logical" conclusion that if a woman feels bad about someone looking at her it is called "stare rape".