Think Free

Here's a libertarian meme picture I created based on one of Stef's podcasts. If anyone has any original meme pictures they've created, I think it would be fun to post them here.

I thought this was a very good discussion, even though I think Peter (Schiff) and Stefan were talking past each other a little bit. It seems clear to me that Peter doesn't have a very good understanding of Bitcoin, but I think he has a very good understanding of economics and is right on the money (no pun intended) when he claims that Bitcoins are currently inflated and will likely see a sort of implosion. However, this does not preclude Bitcoins from becoming a real good functional currency. I think Stefan is right on that point. People just shouldn't get in on the hopes of getting rich quick. In fact, maybe they shouldn't get in right now at all, or for small amounts based on an ideological commitment to Bitcoin.

I wasn't exactly sure what sub-forum to put this in, but this seemed like a decent one. http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-we-fightand-can-we-stop/309525/

Is there a Wikipedia-acceptable source that claims Stefan is a philosopher? Even one that describes him as a self-described philosopher? If not, I wouldn't bother with it. Wikipedia is what it is. It has its strengths and its limitations, but we shouldn't take its limitations too personally.

This is false. The earth killed most humans for millenia. The reason it stopped is because humans got control of their environment. Most of the places people live today would be unlivable if it weren't for humans changing their environment. Humans keep themselves alive through innovation. You are confusing rights with laws. Rights (true rights) are an objective feature of reality, and are basically mean "things a rational person cannot ever be rationally expected to irrevocably surrender." These things are life, liberty, and the fruit of one's labor because to surrender any one of these things is to surrender everything else. Actually, there is at least one "damn good" definition of human, but this is a red herring. The fact is, even without any clear definition, there is actually no kind of thing known to man that isn't either clearly human or clearly not-human. There are examples of humans where we wonder whether they have lost their humanity, through, for example, brain death. But humans remain remarkably distinct from every other known thing. The economic calculation problem isn't solved in families--it's ignored, and rightly so. There's a cost even to solving the economic calculation problem, and on small enough scales, the cost exceeds the value. So families do okay without it and every attempt to ignore it on a large scale has failed miserably. But in a peaceful family, all the fundamental rights of the free-market are still in place, which is the most important thing. Teach a man to fish and you can charge him more than you can for a fish. Some people will pay for the fish, some for the teaching, depending on what they think they need. Right, just as women have the right to control access to their bodies by giving them to the more attractive men only, people have the right to control the fruits of their labor by trading them only in the most competitive trades. Clicking "I want this" isn't the same as expressing demand. Some people want some things more than other people. Some people want things so they can provide services to others while others just want to consume them. Price conveys this information. Price, furthermore, let's the consumer know how many resources they're consuming with each product they might want. Price allows people to be moderate in their consumption.Regarding statistical calculations, if anything can be manufactured immediately and delivered with the click of a button, statistics aren't necessary. Statistics are only necessary if you have to predict demand (impossible) or make decisions for people (tyrannical). And what exactly are these statistical calculations anyway? Of course not all needs are equal. But the idea that the production of golden cars is somehow competing with food production or something is ridiculous. The reasons people are starving are well known, and it has nothing to do with the production of fantastic luxury goods. Einstein didn't have anything to say about me. However, if you're trying to convince me that human stupidity is infinite, you are doing a very good job.I wonder when it would become profitable, according to free market, to invent computers and cure black plague. The only way to find out when the free-market will do something is to let it do it. History suggests that if people had been free from the beginning, we would be centuries ahead in technology. Why can't people just click on web application what they want ordered and delivered? Provided that all the articles are produced by automated lines which can speed up or slow down depending on the rate of demand. Now it's your turn to answer the question, what happens if everyone, all at once, decide they want a golden car? Yeah, but in both cases the chicken is equally in exile and homeless. People looking for a job are equally in exile and homeless as people fleeing for their lives from the government??? I'm not even going to honor this with a list of very real and important differences. It shouldn't take you more than a few seconds to think of them yourself if you should choose to think for yourself. You can't have it both ways. You can't know that their environment drives them to commit crimes without knowing how their environment drives them to commit crimes. Regardless, how crimes are dealt with is not a fundamental part of free-market theory, so none of this matters. When people are truly free will see how they deal with criminals.

The earth doesn't have property rights because the earth isn't human. If you take away the product of a man's labor, he's going to stop laboring. Earth isn't going to keep producing fossil fuels and stop if we keep taking them. If you're using non-violent parenting, all the things you list are negotiated and are paid for. A marriage traditionally is, among other things, a contractual agreement. Oh! I finally am beginning to understand the reasoning behind RBE. I see that RBE is really just people (at their own expense) going around helping mafia victims drowning in the ocean. And here I thought the RBE was about dealing with normal and realistic situations. That idea, never made much sense to me because, under normal circumstances, there's nothing unreasonable about asking people who consume more expensive resources to contribute more of their effort toward acquiring those resources. As already stated the free market is free of coercion from other people. To imply that threats of getting your prices undercut is some kind of coercion is like implying that the threat of other men wooing and marrying women is some kind of coercion. Instead of the dating market, I think we should have a giant computer that uses "science" to assign everyone a mate that then has to have sex with you. This way, nobody will have to voluntarily choose to try and be attractive or desirable. That would be a real tragedy. If everyone in the free market system wants a car made of gold, the market will determine the price and the people that can afford it and want it badly enough will pay for it. "...but, yes, my wants are infinite." 'Nuff said. As the free-market produces wealth all automation becomes profitable eventually government simultaneously suppresses wealth production while making automation profitable early (by making labor unnaturally unprofitable), causing inefficient automation techniques to be adopted early, further reducing wealth creation and putting people out of jobs (which again, reduces wealth creation). It's a perfectly reasonable question. What are "demand signals"? Consumption =/= demand. The free-market price of something is the best clue we have of the demand for it.. In the statist case, the chicken is lucky if the government doesn't catch him and kill/incarcerate him. In the free-market case, he's free to cross the road. Of course, the laws of reality apply in all cases (RBE, excepted, of course). Stefan's daughter is a criminal? She's stealing and committing violent acts against other people???

Stefan, I think "The U.S. Constitution is a Warning Label" is a powerful meme that you should capitalize on. You should do a podcast on just that topic. On how the Constitution has no power beyond individual people's willingness to act on its warnings. I can see the T-shirt now: The Constitution is nothing more than A Warning Label Heed the Warning

This email feels like an attack. By making broad, vague accusations, you prevent them from being able to take responsibility. I agree with Bardford26 that it would be better to mention specific behaviors and how they make you feel. Don't list everything that annoys you--just the stuff that keeps you from even wanting to see them. Describe what kind of changes, environment, behavior, or activities would make you want to see them. Also, and this isn't necessarily advice for the email, make sure that you take responsibility for getting what you want. It kind of sounds in this email like you have an ideal for what family should be like, but that you blame the rest of your family for not implementing your personal ideal. But, in reality, you have the power to negotiate what your relationships are like, and what you've negotiated is all you really have the right to expect from them. Relationaly, if you have something to offer them that they want, find out what they have that you want, just like you would in your other relationships.

The system where you can downvote posts only, without comment, and the total accrues to the users account and makes his posts get hidden. That's the system, and it has limitations, a few of which I just mentioned. EDIT: These are, of course, not a fact of life but a fact of the current system, which could be changed, but shouldn't necessarily.

Personally, I've received one downvote and one upvote, to my knowledge, so this is not about how votes make me feel. (It's the lack of upvotes that hurts my feelings .) Rather, I see other people getting downvoted so I have to click on all their posts to read them, and I wonder if votes are being used in a constructive manner. There are two ways to handle the problem, of course. One is to change the system and the other is to change the culture of voting. However, changing the culture of voting won't overcome the limitations in the system itself. It's possible that the system, as designed, just isn't very useful.

One option should be "This is BS." But selecting that option should only make it looks like they've received a downvote to the person voting. Nobody should be told about this hidden feature.

I don't think Stefan's original philosophical work is likely to have a big impact on the thinking of future well-known philosophical thinkers. (But what do I know?) But I do think he is a great philosopher and one of the best philosophers in the best and most important sense: that is, he not only lives his life in accordance with his careful philosophical thinking, but he also does a very good job of encouraging others to also do so, and to help them become true philosophers (lovers of knowledge and reason). And I think it's important to recognize that that is probably more important than original contributions to philosophical thought.

Based on how the rep system works, I would have assumed that negative votes were for things like spam. Instead, it seems like people get downvoted a lot simply for (stubbornly and irrationally) arguing for unpopular views. But people who stubbornly and irrationally argue for popular views don't get downvotes. So it seems like, in effect, it's a way of censoring unpopular views. Here's a thought on a way that might work well: Users and posts receive upvotes and downvotes individually. This way users don't get long-term consequences for making unpopular posts. For individual up and downvotes, the vote has to be accompanied with a comment, and it shows up on the users profile. The individuals overall personal up/downvotes all also displayed next to their name. Only really low votes on a post hide it. The user's personal up and downvotes don't hide any of their posts. EDIT: Another less radical system would be to limit the downvotes people can give to be equal to the number of upvotes they've given. This would probably just encourage upvote inflating, but it might encourage people to try thinking about what posts are good and make them a little more sparing with their limited downvotes.

Hi, PheePhyPhoPhum. I don't disagree with anything you said, but I just had to reply to this image you posted. If you feel there is an inconsistency in protesting abortion and not protesting war, I would just like to point out some statistics: If you total all the high estimates of death due to all wars worldwide since 1973 (including all the deaths in the Vietnam war) on Wikipedia you get 16.4 million. (These figures include the deaths of civilians from diseases, famine, etc., as well as deaths of soldiers in battle and massacres and genocide.) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll ) In contrast, "From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions occurred [in the United States]." ( http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html ) "An estimated 44 million abortions are performed globally each year, with slightly under half of those performed unsafely." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion ) I am not saying that one should protest abortion and not war, but it seems to me that if your objective is to save lives, there's nothing inconsistent about focusing on abortion.

@STer, it has become completely clear to me that you either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge what's going on in this argument. I believe I have rationally answered all of your points and that you have been unable to answer mine. I believe a competent third party reading this discussion would either acknowledge that I am correct, or provide new facts or arguments that you have not provided. Therefore, this will be my last post responding to you on this subject unless either a third party adds something new to our argument or you reveal a better understanding of what's going on. All my comments below are in support of the claim, "You don't understand our argument." I made the following claim, "Unless your position is that either states are necessary for the famine-preventing measures to exist, or that states are a necessary and unavoidable result of those famine prevention measures, it doesn't matter." Your rational options are to either: a) agree with me, b) provide an argument for why the above statement is false, c) prove a necessary connection between the famine-preventing measures and states." Rather than do any of the above, you have continually and repeatedly made vague claims (ie. do not establish necessity) about the relationship between various things, which I have dismissed as irrelevant because they do not meet the criteria of the above uncontested claim. (Here is a partial list of your claims: "The development of the state is not just tangentially related to agriculture and storage." "It [(the state)] emerged directly from them as part of the very same movement." "The reason states emerged isn't just tangentially involving famine-reduction, but directly rooted in famine-reduction strategies." "These guards and administrators would be the analogy of what the state developed out of." "...the rise of civilization and the rise of cities/states went hand in hand..." "[Quoting Wikipedia:] The emergence of civilization is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, a slow cumulative process occurring independently over many locations between 10,000 and 3,000 BCE, culminating in the relatively rapid process of state formation..." "They [(Wikipedia)] are saying not only do they [(civilization and cities/states)] go together in time but one was the direct outgrowth of the other." "...the state arose directly from civilization..." "So what I am saying is 'hand in hand', in this case, turns out to reflect more than just correlation. City/states emerged as a direct result of civilization.") I am not "disagreeing with something else," "misquoting" you, or making a "next move." I am doing the same thing over and over again, which is point out that none of your claims address my claim and therefore are not relevant. I respond to your irrelevant claims because you seem to think they are counterarguments. I don't have to take a position on your claims because they are irrelevant, as I repeatedly explain. As far as "responding to things [you] didn't say," I already explained that if I was misinterpreting the point of your claims, then they are still irrelevant. Here's the dilemma that you're in. Either your claims are irrelevant because: 1. They don't establish any connection at all between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," which is what our whole disagreement was about. 2. They establish a connection between "agriculture, villages, settlement, food storage, or famine avoidance" and "state," but it is not a necessary connection. or 3. Both of the above. Why you should insist that you have been making error 1 instead of (or in addition to) error 2 is beyond me, but you can excuse me for (in good faith) assuming you were only making the second error by extending your claims to be less irrelevant to our disagreement. That's why I "refuse to retract when [you] point that out, and then just start saying [your] comments are irrelevant." Because if my characterization of your statements is not correct, that just makes them less relevant than I was already saying they were. And my reply, as always, was that "direct outgrowth" doesn't establish a necessary connection any more than "goes hand in hand" does. The rest is, "this claim is irrelevant." I guess you didn't know the rest. And pointing out the irrelevance of your claim to your position is completely legitimate. Are you conceding that your claims are irrelevant? If not, my claim that your claims are irrelevant is relevant and needs to be rebutted. Not at all, my analogy was an attempt to clarify my explanation of why your claim wasn't relevant. You have to show that your analogy is better, not simply assert that it is, which is what you have done in every case where I brought up an analogy. Before I let it slide because in those cases I thought that, while your version of the analogy wasn't relevantly different than my analogy, it was more closely analogous to what you had said (in irrelevant ways). However, in this last case, your analogy was not only not relevantly more accurate, it was (and as I will show below, still is) actually disanalogous to the situation. The whole point of my analogy was that your claim, "a problem in one place may be caused by factors in multiple other places. A country's problem may be caused by governments in multiple other places, not only its own..." while being true, doesn't contradict my claim which was that "looking at one country in isolation does pretty much tell the whole story of famine if the government is so heavily taxing farmers that they barely produce more than they can eat. Sure, there can be other mitigating or encouraging factors, but the government crushing agriculture (and the economy more broadly) is the most important thing you need to know about the cause of the famine." Yes, sometimes there's more to the story, but in this case there isn't. Since my analogy was a response to the logic you seem to think I missed, I think it is pretty clear that it was you that missed the logic of my point, not vis-versa. You were arguing against my argument against "structural violence." That's why "structural violence" is important to our argument. If you don't understand "structural violence" enough to understand my argument, that would explain a lot. It would have been better if you had added the following disclaimer to your original disagreement: "I don't know what 'structural violence' means so I don't understand your argument, but I am going to disagree with it anyway." So let's look at this new analogy of yours. We've established that "brakes not working" = "government violence." So according to your analogy, you are claiming that we do not know if violent government is even present in those countries now, let alone whether it was present before the famine. This is clearly false--just look at the countries in question now and before the famines. According to your own analogy, you are claiming that it is possible that the famine started to occur first and then oppression of the economy came afterward. This is, again, just false. Maybe you want to claim that, while clearly there was strong state violence, we don't know that it caused the famine. But how can taxing farmers so that they have no incentive to produce more food than the bare minimum they need in a country with extreme poverty not lead to famine? (We don't even need to mention that the extreme poverty is also the result of government violence.) So, I say that in the case of these African famines the country's own government is almost completely to blame for the famine, and your response is, "In some cases, a country's own government may not be the original cause of the famine. In other cases, the country's own government is problematic, but still not the original cause of the problem, just a part of the problem. In others, the country's own government may be almost completely to blame for the famine." So either you're conceding my claim or you're simply disagreeing with my claim without providing a counter-example.

Subspecies are defined by separate breeding populations that would interbreed if allowed to, destroying their genetic distinction. Usually this separation in breeding populations is enforce by geography. The only other factor I can think of that would enforce such a separation is direct human control of breeding. (Like how humans don't let purebred dogs just freely interbreed with other dogs.) Yes. A new member of a subspecies results only when two members of that subspecies breed with each other. When mixing of two different subspecies occurs, the result is not a member of either subspecies, since subspecies is defined by the two different populations being able to interbreed but being externally restricted from doing so. If mixing of subspecies were natural and common (as would have to be the case for psychopaths and other humans) then neither would be considered a subspecies. Here's an example, to help you understand. Many different subspecies of tiger exist. The subspecies are defined by naturally occurring wild populations that breed within their population but not with other tigers because geography prevents them from doing so. When different subspecies are brought together by humans they breed with each other and produce offspring that are not members of any subspecies because there's no naturally occurring isolated population that they are a part of. Does that make sense? Scientific questions are questions about objective reality. "Fundamentalness" of physical traits is not an objective feature of reality. Taxonomy is a relatively controversial "science," but at least most of the taxonomic ranks are short for objective claims. Like, as I've explained, "subspecies" is normally short for "would interbreed and produce fertile offspring but don't because of external factors preventing them from interbreeding." "Species" is short for, "do not normally interbreed, even when together." Etc. Can you give one example of subspecies categorization that is based only on "fundamentalness" of their traits? Can you give an example of two subspecies that live and breed together, but only give birth to members of either subspecies? A scientific answer would say, "Having discovered (not defined) psychopaths to be a separate subspecies, we can now infer the following objective physical claims about them that are universal to the category of subspecies." But, of course, the question of fundamentalness is a question of definition, not an objective fact to be discovered. Let me put it another way, what would categorizing psychopaths as a subspecies tell us about psychopaths that we didn't already know about them? Nothing, of course, because we'd have to define the concept of human subspecies in a non-objective manner (based on "fundamentalness") in such a way that psychopathy made it in.

We were arguing the connection between agriculture and state. The connection between civilization and cities/states is only relevant if it is a connection between agriculture and states. It's not a straw man if I am correctly interpreting your argument. If you want to claim that you're making irrelevant arguments... well, there's not much point in that. But even if you amend what I said to be "between civilization and cities/states," it does almost nothing to diminish the force of my argument, which is based on the semantic emptiness and/or irrelevance of "goes hand in hand." ...and now we add "direct outgrowth." Unless this means a necessary result of agriculture... well, you know the rest. "Go hand in hand?" "Arose directly from?" Whatever those mean, my claim is that none of those connections, or the others you've made, make the comparison you've suggested anything other than a irrelevant comparison, as I've always claimed. This is pretty comic on a couple levels: 1. You just ignored my analogy and, without providing any justification, replaced it with your own (wrong, as demonstrated below) analogy that you think makes your case stronger... 2. But, in fact if, your analogy is correct then you've lost the debate because "breaks not working" is analogous to government violence, and in your analogy you've accepted that it is government violence that causes modern famine and not structural violence. You're (possibly correct) assertion that government violence is due to many international factors is irrelevant--unless you're making the laughable claim that dictators are forced by international structural violence into coercing their own people into starvation (while they sit fat and happy).

The problem with this line of questions is demonstrated in question 3. Question 3 is not a scientific question; it's a methodological question. And, as far as I am aware, it's not a question relevant to subspecies classification. Subspecies are usually populations that would interbreed if they were not geographically isolated from each other. It is not a question of "fundamental differences." Furthermore, classification of species and higher taxa are often controversial, let alone subspecies classification. In any case, the idea of a subspecies that is born from and gives birth to another subspecies seems pretty clearly ridiculous. So you're trying to position this as a scientific question, but it's really just a word game, which is mostly just of social, economic, and political significance. But that's not my point. My point is that it's not good science and it's bad philosophy. Can you give me a scientific answer to the question, "Why does it matter if psychopaths are a subspecies?"

First off, let me be clear that I am not saying you or anyone else is promoting eugenics. I am saying that the disaster of eugenics was based on the same kind of flawed thinking.I see that I shouldn't have asked you to research eugenics. Here's what you need to know: Claims of a "basic scientific observation of an existing difference" have come around before and the "scientific consensus" around this "scientific observation" was known as "eugenics." This "science" ultimately led to the holocaust, and when the world saw the horror of it, they quietly swept the "science" of eugenics under the rug of history. The "fact" of what some "researchers think" is not science in any desirable sense of the word. It is, however, "science" in the sense that eugenics was. The only morally valid way to make inferences about a person's morality or human nature is to base it on his or her own individual free actions and statements about him or herself. On the contrary, I think you are the one missing the irony here. You write, "But, in fact, it is those who dehumanize others and violate human rights that are being considered here." You're just looking for, in your own words "biological differences that drive them to" be "psychopaths," a.k.a. "the embodiment of materialism, the epitome of sensuality, of greed, of dishonesty, of selfishness, of heartlessness, and the lust for power." Well, if it's those people that we're talking about, I guess it's okay to characterize them as a subspecies of predators.

Yeah, "fuck you" was his "argument" of choice.

Just research eugenics.

Wow! I can't believe that you've fallen right back into the two mistakes that I just pointed out. The first are your vague and squirrely connections you make between agriculture and state, now joined by the phrase, "go hand in hand," whatever that means. If it's not logical necessity, it's not relevant, for the reasons I've already explained. Notice how stretched your connection is here: from agriculture to "civilization" to cities to city-states to states, all of which are tenuous connections (etymology, of course, means almost nothing). Notice that Wikipedia says it culminated in the development of the state, meaning that that was the last step. A last step doesn't have to be taken at all unless there's some sort of logical or causal necessity behind it. Second, you still seem to be thinking that I am arguing about whether states increased famines or not. I am not. I am literally astounded that we're still retreading this. Yes. That's what I'm saying. The amount of harvest in Nebraska has effects in Singapore because Singapore doesn't have an impoverished citizenry with nothing to provide the global market. Harvests in Nebraska mean almost nothing to people who can't afford to pay for the transportation of the food to where they live. If the countries in question had been allowed by their government to grow their agriculture and economies, shortfalls in Nebraskan harvests would just enrich those countries and Nebraskan surpluses would provide more food for those countries. I am talking about the efficient causes of modern famine here and you're saying, "Yeah, but we live in a global economy." It's like I'm saying, "The car crashed because the breaks stopped working," and you say, "But weather conditions effect driving."

This was the debate where I started watching and only watched for like 15 minutes before giving up because it seemed like TheAmazingAtheist came to the "debate" with no actual position and just some vague grumpy feelings.

Yeah, humans and politicians. But seriously, I am not saying you're supporting this, but this "subspecies" talk smacks of eugenics and other tactics of dehumanization that tend to precede human rights violations.