WasatchMan

Do you think it would be acceptable for your employer to punish employees in this manner? If not, what would make it more acceptable to do it to little kids who can't leave the relationship?

I think you just have your filter on to only hear the negative facts because I am pretty sure they all address positive aspects. The series may tend to slant negative, but that is because the entire premise of the series is to point out inconsistencies in the societal narrative of highly regarded people. "The truth about..." is intended to almost exactly mean what you say they should rename it to ("some facts about...the mainstream media don't report"), but their name actually has some style and branding to it.

put this into the "How to get Audited by the IRS" file...

The law of non-contradiction happens to be a constitent logical construct. Logic exists without people, and therefore is not forced on anyone. It is either accepted or not. Reality will sort out those who choose not to accept logic.

To me, this video is a better demonstration of how subjectivism and relativism is a desire to escape reality, and how holding these ideas are destructive to life.

I think you are missing an important part of the equation to the the economic calculation problem, and that is failure and success. The reason why communism and robot mommy overlords fail at economic calculations is because they are insulated from failure and success. They are receiving no feedback. In a free market, no matter how big your business was, you would not be insulated from failure or success. So if "big" ended up being a problem in a free market, "big" would cease to exist.

One thing that is important to this discussion is the difference between monopolies and coercive monopolies. This is because a monopoly isn't bad as such. No one has the automatic right to compete with other businesses by the virtue of their desire to compete. Also, not every market has room for more than one provider. Monopolies are only bad when they are implemented and maintained through force. This is also why anti-trust is immoral because it does not distinguish monopoly through merit from monopoly through force. So for something like DeBeers, it could be a monopoly just through savoy business practices. It could be that it was so good at selling diamonds that no one could compete with it for a long time, and there is nothing wrong with that. I am not sure about the DeBeers specifics, but one would have to demonstrate it was 1. a monopoly 2. a coercive monopoly 3. a coercive monopoly without using the states monopoly on coercion in order to demonstrate that it is a free market coercive monopoly.

Bad philosophy is the best answer. People throughout history axiomatically assumed that organizations with a monopoly on the use of force (aka "the state") are required for civilized society. As free markets pump in excess resources into the economy, the state uses its monopoly to steal the resources and get bigger and bigger and more and more tyrannical. How we stop this cycle is to convince people that the state is not required, and introduce them to philosophy that is true.

You may want to review some of Mises work on monopolies, which is also discussed at length in Ayn Rand's book: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. "A “coercive monopoly” is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from competition, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant. The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry—the barring of all competing producers from a given field. This can be accomplished only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies, or franchises. Without government assistance, it is impossible for a would-be monopolist to set and maintain his prices and production policies independent of the rest of the economy. For if he attempted to set his prices and production at a level that would yield profits to new entrants significantly above those available in other fields, competitors would be sure to invade his industry." Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

I have argued that people fighting for gay marriage as equality would have been like black people during the civil rights era only fighting for equality for African Americans but no other races. People who want equality for gays should be fighting for the abolition of the state marriage privilege, not fighting to join it.

Not much worse than the false dichotomy statists hold: "If the state doesn't exist, objective laws and obligations cannot exist. Objective laws and obligations do exist. Therefore the state needs to exist."

"Number" is an abstract concept. Is infinity a number? Is the fraction 1/0 a number? Is the square root of -4 a number? I don't know. It would seem to be how you define "number" and how you define "infinity". The one thing that definitely can be said is that imaginary numbers, complex numbers, matrices, infinity, etc are all useful mathematical concepts for dealing with numerical relationships, and therefore the concept "infinity" would be meaningless without the concept "number", and "numbers" do go on forever and therefore you cannot have the concept "number" without the concept "infinity". In other words, you can't have one without the other, so what comes first? The chicken or the egg?

Who needs pistols when you can kill your retreating soldiers with industrial firing squads at the back of the line? Retreat starts at 2:05

I agree with Daniel, capitalism is a moral stance not a pragmatic one (it just happens to be the most practical as well).

As long as 1. the job would exist in a free society and/or 2. is not immoral in and of it self, earning a living funded by the state is not immoral. They are the ones that have brought guns into the equation, not you. We live in a statist society where almost all industries are heavily influenced by the state, and we are all forced to pay taxes to the state. If you let them keep you from careers that you want to peruse just because they captured it, you would only be letting them win twice. The only caveat would be that if somehow the industry you were in began to de-regulate, you could not fight against the de-regulation in any way.

Actually, reality is what compels you to produce what you consume.

It is empathy mixed with social etiquette mixed with the requirements of dialogue between two people to have one person respond to what the other person says.

Pollution can be aggression if and when it can be demonstrated as aggression. Like anything else, if someone wants to claim they are being victimized by someones actions they have to have evidence of quantifiable damage, and that the damage was caused by the person they are accusing. If I blow air towards someone across the room, they could say I changed the atmosphere around them and therefore polluted their breathing space. However they would have no way of quantifying any damage caused by me. Same would go for me driving a car fueled by oil. It would be pretty hard to quantify any damages I caused you by driving my car. However, If I started an oil refinery in my back yard, and the smoke plume filled your house to the point you had to leave your house in order to survive, you would have the quantifiable damage of the loss of use of your property. Furthermore it is important to remember the NAP is built on other principles and is not itself a first principle. I find a lot of people throw out these other principles and act like the NAP is an axiom in and of it self. One of the principles building the NAP framework is the law of non-contradiction. This is one of the behavioral proofs of the NAP because it shows you cannot claim the ability to initiate force against people but not want force initiated against you at the same time. Remembering this, we can throw out any of these arguments from self hating humans that want to argue that the act of living is itself an act of aggression, because the NAP is a behavioral principle for living people and not a law of nature.

"You cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into" - Stefan Molyneux

This whole topic is about religion, and being proud of it. That is the context. This isn't a scientific theory presented by someone that happens to be religious.

I agree teaching objective philosophy would be the best, but remember the audience. My only point in the going into the historic origins of bible stories was to keep with the context of a "bible study class" while also eroding the supernatural origins premise a lot of Christians have about the bible.

While I don't see any moral issues with this (even though you are in a way defrauding people, you are defrauding people who have already admitted they don't care about truth or reality and are subjecting kids to ideas like hell) I would say to be careful with this. People may get pretty mad if they find out an atheist has been teaching them or their children about Christianity. With that aside, I would say one subtle "tactic" would be to take a historic perspective of the bible stories and trace the origins of the stories before they were incorporated into the bible. If done right, you will get them questioning some of their preconceived notions of the bible (like it being written by god) without even having to go there your self.

I think that is a pretty good flow chart. I am not sure you can flow from pacifism to anarcho-capitalism though. I think pacifism is pretty much a dead end or would go straight to "magic/communal sharing".

Well when you dress like the pope, I guess you get pretty sensitive to being insulted for religious insanity.

So that person thinks a guy in a coma is being immoral?