Think Free

Stefan did a video a while back talking about how ineffective government oversight of the financial sector was. I remember, in particular, he had great facts about how much porn the regulators who were supposed to be watching the banks were downloading and watching (when they should have been watching the banks). I tried to find the video, but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone know what it's called?

This article is a powerful indictment of non-monogamy and its role in the creation of ISIS from the perspective of genetic selection (which the author mislabels "evolutionary theory"). Warning: There is a lot of discussion of extreme violence, especially rape. http://quillette.com/2016/01/07/original-sin-the-sexual-motivation-of-religious-extremists/

Stef says Trump is for small government at the end of his recent Omnibus video. Also calls him a genius. RCali, I would actually appreciate it if you could point out the shows where Stef critiques him more. I certainly don't watch everything Stef puts out.

Can someone explain to me why Stefan is so positive about Donald Trump? I honestly don't get it. Stefan says Donald Trump is for small government, but very little that I've heard from Trump suggests that. I mean, he has even donated to Hilary Clinton's campaign in the past. From where I stand, Trump looks like an unprincipled man running on a platform that, while somewhat more in touch with the sentiments of the American people, is no more principled than the desires of the American public at large, who are largely responsible for getting us into this mess. What am I missing? (Is Stefan really just a Russian operative sent to destabilize US politics?) P.S. That last question is (mostly) just a joke.

Stefan should do a short "Welcome to Europe" video for Syrian refugees in which he explains the basics of how European prosperity is based on liberal principles and how they have the choice to participate in that freedom or destroy it by supporting statism. It would be great if it could be translated in to Syrian Arabic. I would be willing to make a special donation toward the cost of having it dubbed.

I saw this on Facebook. A woman's first-hand account of how freedom was lost in Austria under the Nazis. Sounds eerily familiar. “I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history. If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching. “We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls. She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers. “Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.” No so. Hitler is welcomed to Austria “In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs. “My mother was a Christian woman and believed in helping people in need. Every day we cooked a big kettle of soup and baked bread to feed those poor, hungry people – about 30 daily.’ “We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. “Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. “Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. “We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed. “After the election, German officials were appointed, and, like a miracle, we suddenly had law and order. Three or four weeks later, everyone was employed. The government made sure that a lot of work was created through the Public Work Service. “Hitler decided we should have equal rights for women. Before this, it was a custom that married Austrian women did not work outside the home. An able-bodied husband would be looked down on if he couldn’t support his family. Many women in the teaching profession were elated that they could retain the jobs they previously had been required to give up for marriage. “Then we lost religious education for kids “Our education was nationalized. I attended a very good public school.. The population was predominantly Catholic, so we had religion in our schools. The day we elected Hitler (March 13, 1938), I walked into my schoolroom to find the crucifix replaced by Hitler’s picture hanging next to a Nazi flag. Our teacher, a very devout woman, stood up and told the class we wouldn’t pray or have religion anymore. Instead, we sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles,’ and had physical education. “Sunday became National Youth Day with compulsory attendance. Parents were not pleased about the sudden change in curriculum. They were told that if they did not send us, they would receive a stiff letter of warning the first time. The second time they would be fined the equivalent of $300, and the third time they would be subject to jail.” And then things got worse. “The first two hours consisted of political indoctrination. The rest of the day we had sports. As time went along, we loved it. Oh, we had so much fun and got our sports equipment free. “We would go home and gleefully tell our parents about the wonderful time we had. “My mother was very unhappy,” remembers Kitty. “When the next term started, she took me out of public school and put me in a convent. I told her she couldn’t do that and she told me that someday when I grew up, I would be grateful. There was a very good curriculum, but hardly any fun – no sports, and no political indoctrination. “I hated it at first but felt I could tolerate it. Every once in a while, on holidays, I went home. I would go back to my old friends and ask what was going on and what they were doing. “Their loose lifestyle was very alarming to me. They lived without religion. By that time, unwed mothers were glorified for having a baby for Hitler. “It seemed strange to me that our society changed so suddenly. As time went along, I realized what a great deed my mother did so that I wasn’t exposed to that kind of humanistic philosophy. “In 1939, the war started, and a food bank was established. All food was rationed and could only be purchased using food stamps. At the same time, a full-employment law was passed which meant if you didn’t work, you didn’t get a ration card, and, if you didn’t have a card, you starved to death. “Women who stayed home to raise their families didn’t have any marketable skills and often had to take jobs more suited for men. “Soon after this, the draft was implemented. “It was compulsory for young people, male and female, to give one year to the labor corps,” remembers Kitty. “During the day, the girls worked on the farms, and at night they returned to their barracks for military training just like the boys. “They were trained to be anti-aircraft gunners and participated in the signal corps. After the labor corps, they were not discharged but were used in the front lines. “When I go back to Austria to visit my family and friends, most of these women are emotional cripples because they just were not equipped to handle the horrors of combat. “Three months before I turned 18, I was severely injured in an air raid attack. I nearly had a leg amputated, so I was spared having to go into the labor corps and into military service. “When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the government immediately established child care centers. “You could take your children ages four weeks old to school age and leave them there around-the-clock, seven days a week, under the total care of the government. “The state raised a whole generation of children. There were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about equal rights. We knew we had been had. “Before Hitler, we had very good medical care. Many American doctors trained at the University of Vienna.. “After Hitler, health care was socialized, free for everyone. Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. “When the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. “If you needed elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine. Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors left Austria and emigrated to other countries. “As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80 percent of our income. Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government to establish a household. We had big programs for families. “All day care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing. “We had another agency designed to monitor business. My brother-in-law owned a restaurant that had square tables. “Government officials told him he had to replace them with round tables because people might bump themselves on the corners. Then they said he had to have additional bathroom facilities. It was just a small dairy business with a snack bar. He couldn’t meet all the demands. “Soon, he went out of business. If the government owned the large businesses and not many small ones existed, it could be in control. “We had consumer protection, too “We were told how to shop and what to buy. Free enterprise was essentially abolished. We had a planning agency specially designed for farmers. The agents would go to the farms, count the livestock, and then tell the farmers what to produce, and how to produce it. “In 1944, I was a student teacher in a small village in the Alps. The villagers were surrounded by mountain passes which, in the winter, were closed off with snow, causing people to be isolated. “So people intermarried and offspring were sometimes retarded. When I arrived, I was told there were 15 mentally retarded adults, but they were all useful and did good manual work. “I knew one, named Vincent, very well. He was a janitor of the school. One day I looked out the window and saw Vincent and others getting into a van. “I asked my superior where they were going. She said to an institution where the State Health Department would teach them a trade, and to read and write. The families were required to sign papers with a little clause that they could not visit for 6 months. “They were told visits would interfere with the program and might cause homesickness. “As time passed, letters started to dribble back saying these people died a natural, merciful death. The villagers were not fooled. We suspected what was happening. Those people left in excellent physical health and all died within 6 months. We called this euthanasia. “Next came gun registration. People were getting injured by guns. Hitler said that the real way to catch criminals (we still had a few) was by matching serial numbers on guns. Most citizens were law-abiding and dutifully marched to the police station to register their firearms. Not long afterwards, the police said that it was best for everyone to turn in their guns. The authorities already knew who had them, so it was futile not to comply voluntarily. “No more freedom of speech. Anyone who said something against the government was taken away. We knew many people who were arrested, not only Jews, but also priests and ministers who spoke up. “Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.” “This is my eyewitness account. “It’s true. Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity. “America is truly is the greatest country in the world. “Don’t let freedom slip away. “After America, there is no place to go.” Kitty Werthmann

So there's this documentary series coming out, and for the next few days you can view it online for free. It's basic thing is that it's pro-alternative medicine treatments for cancer and against the pharmaceutical industry in general. However, I've watched the first half of the first (two hour long) episode, and there's some interesting tidbits on government involvement in the creation of the current medical industry. I thought some others here might find it kind of interesting. https://go.thetruthaboutcancer.com/?

I am currently donating $5 a month to FDR via PayPal. I would like to update my monthly donation, but not to $10, which is the next donation level up available via PayPal. Is there an easy way to donate extra money on a monthly basis that's less than $5?

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer

This site also has libertarian comics, though of the story kind: http://www.bigheadpress.com/eft?page=1

Yes. I don't know exactly what Stefan would say, but given the above statistic, which he himself quotes, it would seem hypocritical, ie. not universally consistent, to a) want a stable marriage, and b) have sex with a woman you're not committed to marrying. I'm sure it can be more complicated than that, though.

Not to mention deaths involving alcohol, but nobody's calling for a war on alcohol. (Already been tried, didn't work out either.) I agree with you. I just think Stef could be pointing this out. (And maybe he is. I don't watch everything he posts.)

It seems that the value of Bitcoin was greatly inflated by the shenanigans that took place at MTGox. The price is probably still recovering. See this article: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/report-mtgox-fraud-led-to-1200-bitcoin-price/ While I am certainly no financial genius and nobody can know the future of finances with any certainty anyway, my personal recommendation is that nobody should buy Bitcoins at this point as a financial investment. While I believe cryptocurrency has huge potential to be the currency of the future, Bitcoin has a couple problems from a financial investment standpoint, as I see it: a) We don't know if Bitcoin will become the defacto cryptocurrency of the future or if it will be superseded by something else and fall off into irrelevance. It's too early to tell. b) I agree with Peter Schiff that, at this point, Bitcoin's value is primarily being driven by speculation, which would mean it's in a bubble and the value is likely to continue to decline. Hopefully in the future, more and more Bitcoins will will be owned and traded because of their utility, but for now it's mostly speculation. However, I would recommend buying and spending Bitcoins for ideological reasons, to drive it's acceptance and usage, and hopefully push it from the realm of "get rich quick investment scheme" into the realm of actually used currency. Also, I would recommend buying Bitcoin as part of a strategy to protect yourself from possible hyperinflation of the dollar (or other fiat currency). I wouldn't recommend more than a few Bitcoin for this purpose, because it's entirely possible that if the dollar hyperinflates demand for Bitcoin will evaporate (or it could skyrocket). The idea would be that if your fiat currency suddenly hyper-inflates, you'll want some kind of easily liquidatable asset that you can sell piecemeal when you need it to cover living expenses so that you are not forced to sell off other (hopefully still valuable) assets like real-estate just to get some cash. I hope that makes sense.

I'd be really interested to see Stef's take on this. http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/-sp-boko-haram-attacks-nigeria-baga-ignored-media

Here's the Altantic Monthly article on the college: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/ They plan to reject all government aid because of the distortive effect it has on education. Their whole system of teaching is (they claim) innovative, based on research instead of what's been done for the last 500 years. Also interesting, while a U.S. college, they plan to have mostly non-U.S. students, eventually. If I were a libertarian thinking about where I would go to college, this one seems to have some potential. Thoughts? EDIT: That article also links to this article which catalogs many of the problems the U.S. government is creating for college education. Most of it probably won't surprise you, but it's good to have a nice source like that. http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-law-school-scam/375069/

Crazy people, and to a lesser extent communists (and continental philosophers in general), and academics.

Freedom is necessary but not sufficient for the best society. Many of the pretenses used to take away freedom are not necessarily going to magically solve themselves when people have freedom, instead, people will have to work hard in their freedom to solve problems like sickness, environmental problems, helping the unfortunate, etc. As David Deutsche says, every solution reveals new problems.

"Harry Potter, for instance, is the story of a violent and psychotic young boy who ends up in a mental institution called Hogwarts and surrenders to his delusions of grandeur. Ditto Star Wars."Love it.

Some articles that I thought had good points on the Elliot Rodger shooting: The extremely high correlation between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings: http://libertycrier.com/nearly-every-mass-shooting-last-20-years-shares-one-thing-common-weapons/ This one highlights the importance of real empathy in combating mass shootings: http://markmanson.net/school-shootings The author of the last one seems to be the author of a kind of counter-PUA book, which I thought was an interesting idea.

I read your posts, but my post wasn't a response to your posts specifically as much as the video and the discussion in general. However, it is true that I don't think the video or your posts actually demonstrate the hypocrisy of caffeine users that condemn cocaine use, since they fail to fully compare the two drugs and instead make a superficial and largely irrelevant comparison. endostate's graph, in contrast is much more useful, since it compares two of the most important factors of a drug: dependency potential and ratio of active to lethal dosages. By those important metrics, you see that caffeine is, in fact, safer than cocaine in important ways. That doesn't prove that you should use caffeine or that you shouldn't use cocaine, but it does show that cocaine and caffeine are different in important ways, and that therefore one can approve of caffeine use and condemn cocaine use without necessarily being a hypocrite.

Nobody in my close family uses legal or illegal drugs with the exception that I, my wife, and my father drink a lot of coffee and a few others drink it occasionally. I have tried alcohol and tobacco but don't regularly purchase them because alcohol is mind-altering and tobacco is extremely addictive and somewhat unhealthy. I have a very few friends who got into the use of legal drugs (like tobacco and alcohol) and some illegal drugs. None of them are leading complete disasters of lives, but they're also all in the bottom 50% in terms successful lives, among my friends, if I were to try and estimate such a thing. All of them claim to have stopped doing drugs other than alcohol and tobacco. I have a number of more distant relatives who use alcohol and a few of them completely destroyed their lives (and other's lives) with their alcohol use. I have a few friend who are children of alcoholics. As you can see, my family culture is one that is fairly skeptical of drug use--even caffeine. When invited out for coffee, my grandfather used to say, "I don't do drugs." So that's where I'm coming from.

I admit, I don't get this discussion. It seems like the arguments being made for cocaine are consequentialist. There's one reason non-dangerous-to-others cocaine use should be legal and it has nothing to do with how much cocaine is like caffeine: appropriate cocaine use should be legal because it doesn't hurt anyone else. Of course, that doesn't mean people actually should use cocaine, and what's bothering me here is that it seems like some very poor arguments are being used to promote cocaine use: 1. The fact that people use caffeine doesn't recommend cocaine use. 2. The fact that caffeine can hurt your health does not recommend cocaine use. 3. The fact that people can be chemically or psychologically addicted to caffeine or caffeine-based-products does not recommend cocaine use. 4. The fact that if you squint and turn your head sideways cocaine looks kind of like caffeine does not recommend cocaine use. If you're going to seriously argue that cocaine use is a non-self-destructive behavior, you need to present all the facts about the effects and complications of cocaine, not make bad analogies to caffeine.

Why do people bother with cocaine, then? Wouldn't be easier to get some concentrated kind of caffeine or just drink a lot of coffee?

As MrCapitalism and Mike Flemming point out PUAs exist because Average Frustrated Chumps (AFCs) exist. It's appropriate and reasonable that AFCs be AFCs until they become AFHs (Average Frustrated Husbands), but the questions are why are they SO frustrated? and why does it take so long for them to become AFHs? I think the answers to those questions, respectively, are that they have the wrong objective (largely because they've been taught to have the wrong objective) and the system is screwed up (to which the wrong objectives of men is a contributing factor). What are the factors in society screwing up the system? Well, I can think many, but a few important ones are: The government and society's attack on men; the over-glorification of sex and over-sexualization of our society; the dissolution of the family and wider social structures; and inflated idealism and egos (among both men and women). Anyhow, we can see that PUAry is not even part of the solution to the problem even if it may help to reduce men's frustration in the moment. (Although I can concede that some of the information or material is potentially helpful to a well-balanced man with good judgement.) One thing that I think Stefan helpfully does, but needs to be done more, is placing some responsibility on single women as well, not to mention the society at large (by which I mean people like married men and women). EDIT: I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention the attack on women that is occurring in terms of undermining their sense of physical and personal attractiveness, as well as their value as people if they don't follow and accomplish certain life-paths. Certainly that screws with the system too--I mean these PUAs are often playing on their insecurity after all.

By all means, get off caffeine, but don't get on coke.