WasatchMan

I think the track is from Futurama and was dubbed into this anime?

Nationalism is a crap shoot, not philosophy. You could roll 7 or 11 and find yourself raking in western civilization with the principles set down by thinking men with logic and reason as their guiding light or you could roll snake eyes and get a Muslim theocracy with superstition and dogma to smight out the mind. Either way the methodology is wrong and therefore the principle is invalid.

This transgender bathroom thing is a ridiculous side show. If you are transgender and for all anyone else is concerned you are the opposite sex than what you were born as (i.e. nobody can tell the difference, externally), then use the bathroom people would identify you as. I have never been to a bathroom that checks chromosomes before allowing entry. As long as you don't start doing the helicopter with your penis in the middle of the women's restroom, you should be fine. However if you don't pass, just use the bathroom that you do pass for. Why would it matter to you? Instead of making a bunch of other people feel understandably uncomfortable, just go to bathroom people won't look twice at you in and then move on with your day - it really is that easy. On another note, if I was transgender, but still had my penis, I would not pass up the efficiency of a urinal to put my bare ass skin on a throne that hundreds of others have just to have the peace of mind that I walked into a door that had a stick figure with a dress on the front of it.

Valuing truth.

It is very wrong. The "Prime Directive" is a direct result of the PC culture of the time pushing multi-culturalism and the idea that "all cultures are equal" (except white ones). Even Star Trek writers couldn't consistently hold to the Prime Directive and had tons of stories where the Prime Directive was contradictory to saving life - and the heros had to make the decision to disobey it in order to do "the right thing".

I am in no way making a "not all" argument. I am making the argument that you don't throw out a philosophical idea because of other people have who claim to believe it also have other beliefs that contradict it. The philosophical ideas behind atheism have no intellectual content that would make you become a statist, and therefore just because more atheists happen to be statists there is no reason to say you are "wrong about atheism". You could say you are disappointed that people are so illogical, so broken (possibly due their upbringing in a religious and superstitious dominated culture) that they can claim atheism to be true and turn around and kiss the ring of the state, but this has no bearing on atheism the idea. Exactly, this is why if you study the arguments being made around this issue you will hear people repeatedly say that they are against third wave feminists. They talk about the actions of people who self identify as feminist, not feminism in general. I hear people who make careers out of tearing apart feminists say they agree with the dictionary definition of feminism. Also, feminism does have epistemological content that would lead someone towards gender supremacy because it focuses on a specific gender - atheism does not have this double standard, or internal contradiction, built into its definition. I don't know if you missed the point, but I am making an argument against the statism vs. religion false dichotomy that was presented. I hate the state. I hate Marixism. I hate religion. I am making the argument that they both are not true and it is up to people who do accept reason, logic, and have a dedication to truth to provide the better and correct path - philosophy. I say, do not put your hands on the scale for the side of religion or the side of the state, for both are anti-philosophical ideologies - put all your weight on the path of truth and reason for that is the only path that can unchain humanity. Thanks for those statistics. It is pretty hard for anyone to continue to claim that religion is anti-state, let alone some beacon of light fighting back the tide of the state from the dark meddling atheists who make up 3.1% of the demographic but if only they were gone the democratically represented state would just dissolve, after knowing this. Religion just uses the state in a different way. Without the state, religion would be the State.

Here are my thoughts on Stefan's video "Why I Was Wrong About Atheism" ( ) 1. “For the most part atheism is an outgrowth of faith in the modern god called the state.” Atheism is only and specifically the idea that there is no god it gods, it has no intellectual or philosophical content that would lead one to anything else 2. He hasn't proven that the nihilism and leftism of the majority of atheists is a cause of atheism or atheism is a cause of the leftism or nihilism. This is a chicken and egg thing that is pretty complicated. Do more people come to leftism and nihilism because of atheism, or are more people atheism because of leftism and nihilism? 3. Stefan's claim that religious people don't force him to do anything but lefty socialists do. “They [Christians] don’t force me to do anything. On the other hand, the lefties, by constantly running to big daddy government to enforce their moral conscience on everyone else, regardless of consequences, regardless of ethics, regardless of voluntarism, regardless of the need to choose that what is essential to virtue, socialist by running to big daddy government, well the force me to do lots and lots of things. They take my money, they bury me in regulations, they involve my cash in foreign wars, they do lots of god awful things, and if I try to follow my own conscience and do what I think is best with my recourses, well they support cats in blue showing up with guns to drag me off to jail because I am not paying my taxes.” Christians are in favor of war and taxes. According to gallop, “Protestants and frequent churchgoers most supportive of Iraq War”. Not sure where this idea that Christians are antithetical to the state is coming from and is being taken as a given. Atheists are 3.1% of the American population and the Government is more than 99.9% operated by religious people. [post=http://tinypic.com/r/2woxi6b/9][/post] I don't know how we square that circle. Even if we accept Christians are not forcing adults to follow their ideas, and are just asking them to submit to God or go to hell (how pleasant of them), they are forcing and brainwashing helpless children, which is child abuse. http://youtu.be/Xb2dZqgGm50 3.1% of the US is atheist. On the other hand here is the percentages of people who are Christian 86% in 1990, 78.6% in 2001, 70.6% in 2014 therefore the dominant cultural force we are living today came from a Christian dominated culture. The drop to me indicates how the Information Age has destroyed the credibility if Christianity by shining light on 4. Throwing the baby (atheism) out with the bath water (leftist and nihilistic atheists). “We all seem to need an irrational authority to order us about and if we take away God, wushhh, into the power vacuum rushes the state.” Atheism is a new cultural phenomenon which has greatly expanded due to the Information Age. It is the rebellious teenager who has woken up one day and realized that his parents rules are authoritarian, abusive, and manipulative and decides that he is no longer subject to their rules. However, there is no other direction available to him to fill that void. He becomes the rebel without a cause. He finds his new rules in other lost teenagers, in the nihilistic programming of the media, in his leftist teacher who tells him everything is relative and there is no right or preferable values, well except altruism of course. The void left by his authoritarian parents is filled by chance and by whatever other ideological structure is already formed to step in. Christianity made up 86% of the US population in 1990, 78.6% in 2001, 70.6% in 2014 therefore the dominant cultural force we are living today came from a Christian dominated culture. The dramatic fall in Christianity to me indicates how the Information Age has destroyed the credibility of Christianity by shining light on its irrationality and dogma. However, as religion has disappeared from being the dominant cultural force, the only pre-packaged, ready to assimilate, ideology around to catch the rebels has been Marxism. Now we stumble across this teenager, what do we do? Do we cower in disgust at what the nihilist anti-intellectual culture and leftists teachers has filled him with and tell him to go back to his authoritarian abusive parents because at least he would have structure? Or do we teach him how to think? How to reason? How to rebuild a new structure on the solid foundation of philosophy? Stefan, we have to give these people who are leaving religion a new foundation, the right methodology of thinking - philosophy. Don't send people back to religion because you are disgusted with what the void of religion and what it has been filled with so far. Lets build the RIGHT structure, one built on reason, logic, consistent methodologies, and then fill this void as much as we can. Push back nihilism and leftism - demonstrate it to be the evil that it is. Do not retreat back to religious dogma and superstition as a form of structure. The change is going to happen regardless, and if we aren't there Marxism will continue to feed off of the rebels. You have made huge strides already to present a new way, a way of thinking, thoughtfulness, logic, philosophy, don’t give up now.

No, the argument being put forward in this thread is, we can only discover what "is" with specific methodologies. Nothing to do with desire or obligation. Example: If you want to know what the square root of 933 is you ought to use math. The ought is the goal of a being with cognition, which exists.

I never heard Stef say that Trump was a nobleman who can save the country. The argument I have heard was that Trump's personality, K selection, and backbone is essential right now to give the population their balls back and stop letting the leftists verbally abuse them. Critical feedback is not a strawman argument.

#ActLikeAMisandristGetNoManBucks

CNN gives the Trump stage rusher a platform, which will guarantee copy cats to try similar actions.

They are actually blaming Trump's rhetoric (his "racism", strength, etc.) for this. It is getting pretty insane how much narrative drives discourse and peoples reaction to things. The media creates a narrative through repeating things over and over and then they use that narrative in order to not have to make a case. So when this happens, instead of looking at the facts on the ground and how the violent protest would be unacceptable by any other group or against any other thing, all they do is bust out their narrative and the people are like "yeah this just Trump's racism and meanie aporoach to things."

I would think on a philosophy board, the proof underlying our methodology (UPB) is pretty basic, and does not need to be rehashed. I am not necessarily here to debate you or teach you, but wanted to provide you a place to further investigate your quandary, which is solved by the philosophical proof which underlines the FDR methodology. We already discussed that ethics don't apply during situations where force is involved. If someone is threatening to steal your stuff you don't owe them anything, especially the means to allow them to steal from you. Bogged down with obfuscation? Is that a fair way to discuss things? I was just pointing out that you are committing fraud against someone when you are lying to them over an implicit contract. Lying is not the initiation of force, necessarily (it can be though). So if you did actually go read about lying in UPB you would have found that the conclusion is that you cannot initiate force against someone for lying but it does "validate the illogic of the proposition "lying is good," and confirms that the act of lying to someone is worse than "being late," and better than "assault."

There is a pretty good section in UPB about lying which has a grey fuzzy line between fraud. I wouldn't lie to a stranger asking for my credit card number, I would just tell them "hell NO!". I would say that not telling someone you are not interested in a long term relationship to maintain getting sex when you believe they think that it is moving to something long term is getting close to fraud. You are stealing their time and work by withholding information on an implicit contract. Also, please note that I said lying is "not ethical" not "lying is immoral".

As Stef has pointed out a lot (A LOT), ethics doesn't apply to situations where force is involved.

Lying is not ethical.

Fighting women having the right to vote is just hacking at one small branch growing out of the tree of tyranny. Governments used to not require anyone to vote in order to harvest their livestock. Since the birth of democracy women voting for the initiation of force developed as a tool that the rulers use in order to better optimize their yield. The root still is and forever will be the ability of some to initiate force against others. Hack off the branch of women's suffrage and another one will grow to take its place.

People can choose a lot of things. The point is that the system incentivizes employment-based health care, which introduces the pre existing conditions issue. Why do you think nobody brings it up for any other type of insurance? I am not saying either is right, I just think it is a distinction that is probably important to understand, and even more importantly it means that the analogy between health insurance and house insurance is not great because of the different systems in which insurance is administered, generally.

Note, just saw Stef made a similar argument in his and Mike's analysis of the debate.... Guess great minds do think alike.

I have always recognized the argument that covering pre-existing conditions in health care is analogous to trying to get home owner insurance once your house is on fire as true. Last night during the Republican debate, Trump made it clear that his health care plan would cover pre-existing conditions. This knocked my respect for the man down pretty hard. How could a man who is so successful not see how fundamentally flawed the concept was? This got me thinking about the issue more, and really thinking how people could support such an obvious fallacy. I always try to push back when my mind says "well people are just stupid" when trying to discover the root cause of an issue, because surprisingly, that is usually not the case. There are typically other factors that are not seen in the issue that are making people to push back against reality so much. What I came up with is this: Covering pre-existing conditions in health care is not analogous to getting home owner insurance when your house is burning down given one simple, but over looked, fact about the existing health insurance system. The fact is a very large portion (seems to be around 60%) of health care in the US is provided through employment-based health insurance, which fundamentally changes the pre-existing condition issue. When your health insurance is provided through, and tied to, your employer you have to remain employed with them in order to maintain your current coverage and risk management relationship. The minute (well actually several months after) you leave that job for a different opportunity, all of the money you have paid into that current risk management plan is gone. You have to restart a risk management relationship with a brand new entity that you have no history with. When you restart this relationship with a new entity it is understandable that they would want to know the risks you pose and price that risk accordingly, and they don't have the benefit of having years of payments coming in from you to help offset this risk. This leaves a lot of people with hard choices of either staying in a job they hate, or passing up an opportunity they would otherwise pursue, or to take on the risk not being able to receive health insurance due to their existing health conditions even though they have paid years into a health insurance plan. This is not how typical insurance systems work, and you can see why people would want, or even need, to have pre-existing conditions covered (given the current system). With your house, you have the option to maintain your insurance indefinitely no matter what happens with your employment. There are obviously people who would take advantage of pre-existing conditions and not pay anything into the system until they got sick which is the whole reason why ObamaCare has a mandate for everyone to pay in. Does this mean Trump is right about needing to cover pre-existing conditions? Probably not, but given the current situation, that we do have employer-based health insurance and live in a statist society where we are all chained together, covering pre-existing conditions and having a mandate is probably the most pragmatic position to hold. Trump isn't anything if he isn't a pragmatist, so I no longer find his position on this issue very surprising. However, what we need to do is end employment-based health insurance before we can have a reasonable conversation about this.

Land has no value until labor is added. Your labor creates the value and since you own your labor you own the value created by the labor.

Yup, here comes a super majority of leftist activist judges in the Supreme Court when they get their 5th lackey

If you were worried about someone going bankrupt that you are lending money to then all you would do is use some of the interest to take out bankruptcy insurance. Or you roll the dice, have a diverse portfolio, or put your money under your mattress, your choice really. What is not your choice is to pay strong men to collect money from people who had nothing to do with the deal, did not assume your risk, to help bailout your choices.

The Truth About Mormons: Dum Dum Dum Dum DUM