Armitage

Well, the OP wasn't an argument either. It was repeating me the Economy 101, which is always a mistake. In the atheist community there is an opinion, that ridiculous things need to be ridiculed as an appropriate response. I think sometimes sarcasm is a necessary defense against intellectually offensive things. And explaining the basics of Economy 101 to me is intellectually offensive. We all here know Economy 101, the point is understanding the Economy 2.0. I don't promote the Economy 2.0 because I wouldn't understand Economy 101, but because Economy 2.0 provides a higher standard of living and more free time for more people and elimination of the most serious global problems. The problem is, it requires a new way of thinking, a new language of thought. I have passed exams of Economy 101 at a Community College and then at a think-tank-like private college. It was a part of my Bachelor's exams as well. There I also passed exams of Austrian economy under a dean who is an enthusiastic Libertarian and taught a few subjects like Law & Economy, which I attended all and had a great time of it. I can jump through all the hoops of traditional thinking. So explaining Economy 101 to me is a big mistake.

Just great. People who know they've been just proven wrong and can't admit it, give negative reputation. Or if you don't understand, well, as I said elsewhere, I'm pretty sure it goes deep, it goes down to the level of a language that we use to think about economy, the very way of thinking. And that is very personal. I sense an attitude here like at a primary school "I don't understand this, I don't care, I'm not interested, I don't want it, go away." Well, this is not a school, acting like adults is possible.

You've got a chaos in categories. Peter never meant a violent army. He took the organizational aspect of an army as an evidence that non-market economy is possible. After all, army is good at supplying the soldiers with clothes, food, ammo, housing and spare parts, soldiers don't have time for trading, they fight. Then he in his mind replaced fighting enemies with fighting scarcity. Then he replaced the soldiers with robots and guns with automated lines and replaced the intel on enemy with market demand signals produced by the people themselves. This he all did in his mind in a few quick steps that you don't notice unless you know his style of thinking. I see how he thinks, because I have read Bellamy's Looking Backward, which is a model of the industrial army fighting scarcity and win freebie hours, which Fresco has as one of his sources. There can be no dictatorship, because there is no centralization, except centralized design of all mass-produced stuff. TVP will end up as a free kit of mass-produceable architecture and infrastructure jigsaw puzzle, which will be accommodated to local geographical, populational and climate specifics.All that people need to do is to help with a global survey, mass-produce the Ikea city parts, assemble them on spot (may involve scrapping some old trashy cities), move in and hook the city to the internet. Then they need to go to school and learn how to use this new city properly, RTFM, how to find out what to do, where's the toilets and how schools work in there. The first generation of cities might resemble a glorified college campus and this is what it will really be. Every city is a college city. Everything is a big provisional set of Ikea architecture (and everything else) gone open-source. Really, it sounds kind of boring when I put it like that. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a man a 3D printer and a computer, he'll download open-source models and do whatever the hell he wants and he won't bother you anymore. If you think taking away a part of your income (taxes) is violence, then what about time? Time is money. There are things that take away a part of our time - like cooking, washing, drying and ironing clothes and other kinds of housework, all that is a crime against freedom of time. All these people, mostly women, have to do that every day on their own. This is something that a city automated facilities should do, technically it's no problem. TVP means industrialized housewifery, as B. F. Skinner would put it.

Don't take Peter literally. He's an intuitive thinker, makes a lot of leaps of intuition and he uses metaphors. If human army can have its economy without market, then we can have a machine army economy without market. The whole RBE is about the concept of MACHINES following orders. Not people. If Peter ever thought of a real army, then he'd have to believe in a human labor and he wouldn't talk of automating everything. Which is not the case, therefore, machine army it is.

The idea of Peter Joseph the military dictator makes about as much sense as if he'd be a secret Nazi because he made a movie with a German name. Surely you don't think that Peter enjoys war, obedience or killing? Military is an organization and the process of organization is one of basic principles in nature. Military does efficiently whatever it is used for, as one organism. The only thing that can stand against a military is another military, nothing else is powerful and fast enough. The military has to have an internal economy and this economy of war supply does not use prices to distribute and allocate the stuff. Stop inventing cheap accusations like utopias and dictators when someone thinks of a system. Answers that explain everything, explain nothing. The rule of a thumb to understand Peter Joseph is NOT thinking that he is a totalitarian egomaniacal power-hungry militant idiot. If you keep hearing egomaniacal militant idiocy in his words, it's in your head and you need to think again about what he actually meant. Some education would help greatly. You interpreted it right! What do you think about sociology, by the way?

Soon! That's what people do when they stray from the one true God's path, the money! Evil people burn money! Only sacred magic papers can carry economic information.

I got an idea. It might be good to clarify the term "economy" or "economics". There are economics that I consider economics and Stefan and everybody else apparently doesn't. Systems are subject to the laws of economy and there are many systems all around, non-monetary systems. Processes in these systems are their inner economy, but it is obviously not a market economy. They might be the oxygen/CO2 cycle in an organism, trash recycling in a home, supply chain in an army, life support in a NASA space shuttle and so on. Such systems have some kind of circulation, even several kinds of circulation. There is no currency in these systems, no prices, no competition and yet they work most efficiently. Therefore, I consider them real, working examples of resource-based economy. RBE is proven, the evidence is all around and within us. So much for the "show me evidence" argument. Of course, there is no clear distinction in RBE between a circulation of resources and actual technical processes of applying these resources, whatever the particular technology turns out to be. There is no market, because there's no point in it. Resources are released where available and assimilated where needed, in a needed amount. Allocating information is transmitted via nerve impulses, hormones, computer signals, or just by our memories, when managing the household. However, I think Stefan calls economy economy only when it uses money, prices and competition. This is why he was unable to recognize my argument.

A computer doesn't decide anything. It just can process incoming clicks of demand faster and more efficiently than the market economy processes incoming pieces of green paper, but principle is the same. Of course, clicks are unlimited, but TVP has other ways of making sure Earth does not turn into a today's All you can eat restaurant. The show is of the 1st December and I don't know yet when it comes out.

Criticism is not ad hominem nor degradation. Criticism is a feedback, a gift, as managers and marketing people say. If someone feels degraded, then there is probably something right about it. I personally have no problem with criticism, the thing that gets my goat is a sloppy criticism based on underestimation. I mean, people let Stefan criticize their upbringing. Stefan asks his daughter to provide feedback and this feedback may be negative. So what dafuq have you problem with? Don't you find disagreement more fun than agreement? I have not yet figured out how to back it up. Most people here share Stefan's language and in this language there are no words for what I need to tell you. The words you use don't have the right combination of meanings. They're compatible with the rest of your language, but not with mine. The sounds may be the same, but the meanings are different. For example, Stefan used the word "child" with a legal definition, a couple of highly problematic meanings under one concept. I can not see such a thing in RBE, because laws and rights do not empirically exist. Each individual is capable in each area according to his or her capability, whatever it turns out to be empirically regardless of age. Nobody is an universal adult, universal professor or universal expert. Rights are just special instructions we give ourselves to compensate for a badly designed environment, so are laws. So was the Rosetta stone. What you could do is to learn my "language", learn how I think. My thinking isn't wrong, it's just different. It's just as internally logical as Stefan's, but it is way more flexible. I'm not fixated at money, I see money as an instrument that combines the element of information and built-in limitation, both of which can be implemented in a better way that will not enslave humanity.

Not really. A black hole does not suck, no more than the original stellar body that spawned it. Gravity remains the same, only perhaps the gradient gets steeper when something gets near, but this is felt as tidal / shearing forces. But when I watched a document on black holes, it was mainly about gravitational lensing. Massive objects like black hole warp space around it so much, that the light never touches it directly, it goes perpendicularly around it. (also, it never gets away from the inside) So if I should imagine how a black hole looks like, imagine a bedsheet with stars and galaxies and put a ball under the bedsheet. What you'll see is a normal stellar background. At one point the galaxies might appear a bit stretched, but you don't actually see the warping thing. They may be just some weird galaxies. A lone black hole is perfectly self-contained (save for quantum evaporation). If you stood at the surface of event horizon and looked around, you might see the back of your head. It's a self-contained, seamless, very inconspicuous object. The best masked elephant in the room you can possibly imagine. That is something that struck me as a perfect visual metaphor for a psychological blind spot. I often think visually and pattern-wise and I often use patterns from nature, physics, technology and so on. It helps me to compress the idea so it's easy to remember and easy to combine with other ideas already stored, thus easy to get new ideas and inspiration. The problem is, I have to translate it to people. From my experience, a psychological blind spot is absolutely invisible to the person who has it. The blind spot is so massive, that it wraps around seamlessly all the light of consciousness we throw in its way, yet its center of mass controls everything. When we are near it, its gravitas takes over all other matters, it takes over our worldview. Yet the light still travels in a "straight" line and we do not notice the curvature. Not unless some real and very great problems with relationships and other people turn us to the most terrifying doubt of all - the doubt of ourselves. We never really doubt ourselves, because the blind spot is self-contained, in that area we do not have any concepts or mental instruments to prove ourselves wrong. We have an answer or category for everything and so nothing can ever surprise us. So we are totally fine, who is not fine, is the crowd of other people around who are getting still greater and greater assholes, the more OK we are. The blind spot is our ego and the ego is a master of disguise and it's totally self-centered, like a black hole. Seeing through the blind spot can be one of the most difficult experiences in our life. It can cause a serious depression - but not dealing with it can cause a depression without meaning. I think knowing why is better, but it's still rough. Big blind spots are usually found in people with great potential. But great men have great flaws. Only they have a hard time seeing the flaws, if something is so big that you can't imagine it, you can't see it. As I said, it bends all thought and attention around itself. I'd say less focused and overall more balanced personalities with attention distributed into many various areas do not have this problem. I'd say Stefan's problem is the usual problem of rightists vs. leftists, only on greater scale. Ideology, or language, or paradigm is an instrument. But it is an instrument that is a part of us. And we just don't have enough capacity, brain power or attention or whatever to do two things at once. We usually can't be both good at inventing, creating paradigms and at using them. Even if we are good at these, we typically can't do these things at the same time. Some people seem to me more inclined to invent new ideas and some rather prefer to use them in practice. I'd say Stefan is the latter person, because he is very conservative. I mean, he still believes in money! He believes in wood pulp or metal tokens with numbers on them for doing primitive computations. That is as if the city of Liverpool would believe in doing accounting by strategically allocating shovelfuls of coal below the deck of Titanic. Digital money make the shoveling around a bit faster, but then it's a simulated virtual reality coal in a 3D modelled ship, but it's even more silly because of that. I mean, I listened to Stefan as he described the mechanics of crime insurance in the future. All these contracts, payments, policies, agencies, probabilities, negotiations and ratings, I mean, that was ridiculous. I would not wish to inflict bureaucracy and money on people and I'd oppose this plan on many grounds, including aesthetic. If we want to get rid of governments, we need to do it intelligently. Seeing Libertarians praise bitcoin is like seeing a gypsy from Ukraine make a campfire on a kitchen stove. This is not an intelligent use of science and technology. It is only efficient in using it as least as possible, to change the society and our way of life as least as possible. Stefan is focusing all his attention on how to use this system in practice and while he's doing that, he is neurologically unable to examine it. He identifies with it, the ideology is using him, wears him like a mask. The thing that we identify with is looking through our eyes and we can not look into our eyes, we are our eyes. So it is with language, with paradigm, with ideology. I think that ultimately any ideology is a degradation of a human being and that human beings are above all ideologies. A philosopher should be above all ideologes. Any ideology is just a partial and temporarily useful thus dangerous reflection of reality. A philosopher should be a herder and if necessary, a butcher of ideologies. To be a subject of ideology is degrading for human beings who reach Stefan's potential and I do not like to see Stefan so degraded at these particular moments, when market is the topic. I have my problems, but I took an enormous effort to get to know them. So I know very well how do problems look like. How do I know my vision is true? Because the jerks and idiots around vanished. I can understand why people are what they are, why do they think as they think. There are some people who are genuinely lacking insight into some areas, and lack insight into their lacking insight, and I understand that too, been there, done that.

I was feeling like my time is running out and there is so much to explain, so much to make him understand... so yeah. I just felt I don't have time to put it nicely, wrap the bad news in a nice package. And, what is the difference between what Stefan does, digging deep in people's subconscious? He makes people doubt themselves, he's just better at it People cry at his show. Nothing wrong with that, these people need it and ask for it. need it, only I'm ha hard case, been there, done that, but I have the impertinence to say, Stefan needs something like that as well. What surprised me, was how personally he took everything. I mean, I'd be happy to go online and have someone tell me what they think of me, that would give me lots of useful information about me and themselves. Especially after they study my material for several months. I'd pay for that kind of attention, if I had any money to spare. This is what you do now, I suppose. But Stef felt... insulted? I mean, I listened to Stefan for months and that gives me a solid idea of what's wrong with him. He's one of these people who have so little wrong with them, who are so useful that one feels if the last vestige of imperfection would be at least made visible to them...Just one little nudge in the right direction... That's how God must feel I didn't put forward an actual argument, because that was not the thing to do. Stefan has everything figured out. His worldview is completely self-contained sphere of perfect logic. Whatever he thinks of is logical within the concepts he uses and whatever I think of will not be logical within these concepts. He designed his own language to do that, to make himself always right and other people always potentially wrong. Nothing wrong with that, because Stef is mostly right and other people are mostly wrong. The problem is, he's not aware of that and so he won't be able to update his language. He will have problems moving on and communicating with other, different people who are also mostly right, just like him. His worldview has no failsafe, no escape route. It is not falsifiable and what is not falsifiable, is not self-correcting. Without any built-in self-correcting mechanism, people feel more and more right and more out of touch with reality, whatever it is. It is not a big flaw now, but maybe in several years. What the heck, I'd need to be locked with Stef in one prison cell for a month to get my point across. As for my parents, I don't think I have a good idea of how insecure parents look like. I was too insecure to question them. After all, my livelihood depended on them. All I know that my mom was a bad case of "job parenting", apparently. My parents told me how great parents they are and how other parents are bad and how lucky I am, and I believed them. I knew kids who had a cat o' nine tails hanging in the kitchen. Christian families all around us, we were the only non-Christian family, so I thought we're the island of civilization

When I found my family, it's going to be a RBE. Me and my spouse will communicate and allocate resources by talking, not by putting price tags on items at home. I'll call that a RBE and you will eat your hat

Oh, I'm interested in the truth. But what I discovered is, first we have to make sure our language is the same. Then we can talk about truth, not before. Truth deserves some precautions. With Stefan, we had different languages. Nobody said a lie, we just didn't work out a communication protocol. As for you, please tell me very literally and in detail what you think my problem is and I'll tell you how much you've got right. I have admitted and repented many sins over the years, so I have to ask which ones do you mean. Also, what do you want to accomplish by that, what behavior would you like to see from me. Would it work even if you tell me that in advance? Right now what I see can not be distinguished from Christians claiming I had a bad childhood, therefore I hate God. Because God is obviously a parental figure. But even if I loved God, that has nothing to do with my economic thinking. I blacklisted you, because I doubt your ability to communicate and think objectively. I'd say you are too wrapped up in your own definitions to even imagine other people might have different definitions and that it might be a problem. Yes, I was talking at Stefan, because I knew I was going to be nervous that I wrote down a text. Please, read the OP. Ideology is language. There are phenomena, which languages can not describe or describe differently, yet they are logical within the language itself. So mere internal logic is never enough. Stefan made up a language in which he makes a perfect sense to himself. Does that make him right about everything? Does that prevent other people from having different languages? There is the objective reality, but different languages show us different logical problems to figure out. What I have is a different language. Language does not translate to physical resources. It is only as good as the resources we have. So what is stopping me, is the lack of resources. "Nobody is stopping me" is bullshit. If I owned NASA or half of Silicon Valley, then you'd have a point. Last time I heard, worlds were made of resources and there were people in these worlds. And I don't know how to make worlds or resources. That's like God saying to scientists, "It's nice you figured out how to create a man of dirt, but go find your own dirt!" As I said, If I owned NASA or half of Silicon Valley, then you'd have a point. But seriously, this is what we agreed on with Stefan. If someone told Stefan, go and create this magical ancap world, he'd say, I already created it! In my family, there's no coercion, no government, we treat each other as customers and it works so well. This is exactly what I would say. On the family level, ancap and RBE are exactly the same! Does that mean that Stefan's family will extend over all other families in the world and everyone will be as happy as him? If ancap is a one-family system, why can't they coexist, ancap inside family, government outside family? Why change the world?

The problem is, when we are in our blind spot, for a moment we become imbeciles without noticing. Yeah, I failed spectacularly. I was also nervous as hell and my hands were shaking and I think my reptile brain was taking over. That's the deal, you get one chance to talk with a person, to bridge the fundamental differences in worldview, you get one shot, that's it.By definition, one can not show a blind spot. If audience uses the same language as Stefan, then they can't see the blind spot either. So my goal was to find out things by direct interaction with Stefan. And I think I did - we use a different language! And we don't notice, because the sounds are the same! I think that's a good enough result for the first try.But what about you? You said you know that Stefan has some blind spots. So you noticed. And you surely noticed Stefan's conviction, "if it's logical, it's the truth!" I could swear this is what he was saying at one point. Crazy, huh? Stefan is closed-minded, because he is too much satisfied with his internal logic, he thinks it is the end of argument. "I am logical within the language I invented myself, therefore I am objectively correct!" How do you respond to that? Yes, logic IS a necessary condition, that hopefully goes without saying. But it's not the only condition. Another condition is the shared meanings - shared language. My language can allow some possibilities that your language can't. I can't prove that to you, unless you learn the language first. So right now you are not really motivated to learn the language. And learning the language does not magically give you more resources - like energy, technology and so on, which you could use to prove that the language is better. The problem we have is, we use the same sounds, but their meaning is different and that creates the illusion we use the same language, while we really don't. I believe to be a philosopher means to be able to distill the meanings from words. See that a word is not an essence, it is combined of meanings that can be combined in a very different way under the same or different sound. And a different combination may open us many more possibilities of thinking and doing which we did not have under a different language. Provided that we have the resources, which I don't. I think this point was way too subtle and I totally failed in putting it across to Stefan. I don't know either! I'm still at the stage of finding out where the problem is. The purpose is to fail and find out where's the failure. Experimental attitude, man! I'm learning so much. I half-expected expected Stefan to be his usual understanding, patient and compassionate self, as he was later in the show, but looks like he doesn't turn that engine on when market is the topic. Now that I see that language is the problem, I can direct my efforts to the hows and whys of language. How languages spread and compete in a population. How to tell people the best that we're using another language. I admit I've been neglecting this topic a lot, until now I did not understand how much is the language limiting. I thought languages are only when the sound is different. But if we use different networks of meaning without noticing, woah, I didn't see that one coming. So overall, I hope this failure was as productive for you as it was for me. What further experimental applications of this knowledge do you suggest?

This is a post-call feedback. The call helped me to determine where's the problem. I have noticed that Stefan insists on logic very much. Nothing wrong with that. But what if two different people use logic correctly, but come to different results? How's that possible? I think Stefan does not realize that logic is not the same as input and output of the logic. And whatever is the logic, we can manipulate the output by manipulating input. The input of logic is the real world, which we share. So how can we manipulate input? By creating concepts and categories of things, about which we think and which we leave undefined and unthinkable. We can create a category which connects together concepts into one, and this mix will give us any output we want, even if our logic is flawless. The way we define and combine our concepts is very subjective and very,very tricky. Stef for example defined a category of a "child" for me, as "someone who has no rights and no duties". An existence of such a combination of concepts is very problematic. (doubly problematic from someone who talked about how children in 8 years are totally independent in some societies) The concept of rights is in itself problematic, because they do not exist objectively, they exist only within a given society. And if I propose a different society, then all the rights, duties, sins and virtues will change - some will cease to exist, some will change beyond recognition. And there's no point in enumerating them, because they are just outer signs of a society which produced them. It is more useful to understand the input, than trying to divine input from the output. You can not understand someone else's output if you keep using your own input, even if you both use the same logic. We may have all the same logical engine, but if we feed it a different mix of concepts, we end up with totally different results. And what is that mix of concepts? Each is a word, which together comprise a LANGUAGE. If you know more languages than one, you know that some words contain a mix of meanings that in other language they don't. In my language most vocational nouns have a male gender. Like in French, some things have a male gender (even if non-living), some have female gender and some neutral. French does not have the neutral, it is even more sexist. English is comparatively neutral. So an English speaksperson may think Czechs are sexists and the French are even worse. And Czechs think that it is inconvenient, because you don't know what gender that person has, if someone is a babysitter or a babysitteress, which is a useful information. So the first thing we need to know, that we use a different language. The sounds are the same, but each has multiple meanings and they are differently mixed. So however impeccable our logic is, we will come to different results. This is a serious problem. I realized that we can't just talk to each other. We have a different language, so whatever we say will be misunderstood. We have to realize that there are different languages even if the sounds are the same and even if the logic is the same. That is a serious problem, almost like realizing there are aliens living alongside us. That is a problem for anyone who think that just being logical is enough. Logic is a great achievement today - look at all these Christians. But logical people with different language are almost as useless as illogical people with the same language. If the sounds are different, you'll just realize, "I don't understand the guy, he's got a different laguage." But if the sounds are the same, but concepts aren't, you will think the guy is "illogical, bad at grammar, childish..." Do we ever choose the language? No, we don't. Vast majority of people do not think about languages or underlying concepts. What multitude of meanings can be hidden under one concept - "the heathen"? We do not shop for languages, because we can't know what good is it until we learn it. It's a take it or leave it. Logic is useless here, because you don't have the input info about how good a language it is. People mostly learn languages because of relationships. You need to have a relationship with a person in order to want to learn his or her language, because that helps you to have a better relationship. Imagine, I tell you about a language which is beautiful - a simple, logical, yet rich and colourful, very easy to combine, very intuitive yet logical, has only few grammar rules, does not marginalize people... And you tell me, so if this language is so great, then go talking it and you will out-compete those who talk in the old language! Obviously, this is nonsense. This is not how languages spread. A language is only as good as its access to people, to information, new books, films, science... If you talk a perfect language but few people around the world talk that way, you're as good as mute. And you're even worse off, if you use the same sounds, people will think you're crazy or illogical. So trying to out-compete another language is a Catch 22 situation. Stefan's suggestion "go try it if it's good and you will out-compete everyone" is as good as "fuck off". Language does not make people richer or more successful. That's the question of resources, energy, technology... We can only compare languages and their success if their content is equal. Not if one has all the content and the other has little content. That is not a fair comparison. I think I nailed the problem. Comment, please.

I have read about 80 pages from Foucault's Discipline and Punishment from the curriculum. He basically says, that the penal system has no merits at all. People just added to it some elements of the times and moods and projected their ideals into it. Do you know the metaphor of "stone soup"? That's how Foucault thinks. This penal system grew out of many needs few of which had anything to do with making the criminals better people. Eventually the 19th century created a whole social class of criminals who were useful to perpetuate a greater police control over the society, work as snitches in jails and so on. Surprisingly, the police originally did virtually everything, it had set prices of goods on market, it enforced public morality, gave out health advice, supported child music concerts at schools and so on. Only gradually the police specialized on repression. It would be so easy to employ scientific method in prisons and find out which method has the least recidivists. If criminals were treated more like sick or injured people, there would be less crimes. And this is what they are, after all. Our society weighs heavily on people and some of them won't withstand the pressure and will break. Politicians should apologize to all inmates for getting them into jail. For more literature, I suggest Resist Not Evil by Clarence Darrow. He deals with the state violence and the nature of crime. (he was the famous lawyer of 1925 Scopes monkey trial, but the book is later) Hear hear, brother. Beware of people who speak in side notes. And someone shoot me when I start speaking like a journal. It's terrifying to meet such people. It's terrifying to write a thesis under them, knowing that I know jack-shit and they can pull their academic rank on me any time they please. Knowing, that I haven't read a couple hundred books I should have read according to them. Yet, I'd want to communicate, I just don't want to show the depths of my ignorance. I want to show the depths of my philosophy and creative intuition, which is, as I understand it, ubiquitous in young people and not very tolerated below the doctorate degree.

I just hope I get the hour right. My time zone is GMT+1, so 10 AM EDT should be 4 PM here. Checked multiple times, I just hope there's no trick with daylight saving time. Looks like Stefan will have a talk with my another favorite guy, Seth Andrews from The Thinking Atheist show. Which gave me an idea...Seth is the most friendly atheist I know of and he really has a way with people. So I prepared some notes and I tried to keep them as friendly and positive as I can. The notes are a long rant, but it should be a good rant, in case words get stuck in my throat, I never called in on any show.

Half the books I've read were about bad things that wouldn't happen in a sane and stable society with a reasonably high economic bottom, or where top is the bottom.But nevermind, I'm almost ashamed to point out that googling this stuff up is very easy. Here, money and stress correlation, down to the stress hormone measurement. The sumup can be read here. It is true that poverty and crime do not correlate directly, but that's because of many other factors. Most notably inflation. But stress does correlate. When there is nothing to steal, people sit at home and stress out themselves and their families. Or they sit in America's ubiquitous jails, much to the same effect. Clarence Darrow, the famous lawyer of the Scopes monkey trial in 1920's wrote a book on the causes of violence and crime, called Resist Not Evil. It is one of the source books of The Venus Project. This is maybe too subtle evidence, but I have been taught by my Libertarian schoolmaster that the so-called "Wild West" towns had an extremely low crime rate, without army and police. Elsewhere, I have read that the worst year, the worst town of the "Wild West" had 3 people killed. It is obvious that if people see the potential of feedback in the system - the potential to improve their situation by honest means, they will do so. The American dream is a modest dream. The problem with capitalism is, it never seems to stay modest, it rewards the immodest and produces the poor. It is a simple principle positive feedback, resulting in resonance - rich getting richer, poor getting poorer. Historically it never got too bad, not as bad as Communists hoped, the exploiting class learned that they need the workers, especially skilled workers. But today? Today they can replace the workers with machines. Production goes up, but purchasing power goes down and so does the ability to sell the production to people who make up the bulk of society. The system is just not geared to support the American dream.

This topic is extremely complex. It's about the society. For example, sociology was called the most difficult, most advanced science. Right from its beginnings by A. Comte. Not because it is that good or exact, not at all, but because it takes data from all the other sciences that came before or after. We are used to understanding things. Yet we are people who take 30 years realizing that donkeys can't talk. So understanding is often an illusion. Understanding is not something you copy into your brain like data. It is a journey to undertake and the journey changes your physical brain structure. You become a bit different person. How can we explain ourselves to people who did not yet go on the journey? It's nearly impossible. When asked to explain, our mind gets flooded with images from the journey and whole society. We can not possibly express it all, but we know we have a superior understanding of how society really works and why, better than some nice but vaguely metaphysical principle, such as non-aggression principle. One rule of a thumb I learned, it is vital to engage in person. People in person think differently than on the internet. They are much more attentive and serious. Another rule of thumb is, make an allowance for what you haven't said yet. Complex integrated system like economy do not make sense unless you present them as a whole. A partial presentation will be obviously "wrong". And on the internet people usually have memory and attention span of a goldfish, so any presentation is partial to them. This can be avoided by a movie, but a movie is usually not tailored on out-groups. Such a movie must refer to basics of daily living. Such books are B. F. Skinner's Walden Two or Bellamy's Looking Backward. What more can I say? One lovely thing Fresco said about people like me, men and women of the future do not avoid disagreement, they like it, they seek it out. Disagreement is a kind of refreshing variety. People who like this kind of refreshment are best suited to solve complex social problems. If you do not pry into alternate systems and solutions, you can not really know your own system, because you only see it from the in-group's point of view. A Christian has no idea what is Christianity about - just like it took humanity about 10,000 years to discover the nature of air they breathe. An ex-christian knows it better, from the inside and outside. An ex-Christian historian, comparative religions student, sociologist and philosopher in one person knows it better still. Now, replace Christianity with whatever is yours. Now, try to explain that to a member of the in-group, who knows nothing else. Got it? Now, try to not appear arrogant or smartass or not get any negative point for disagreeing with local authorities. Now, try to avoid sarcasm.

Children can handle a lot of fantasy - after all, they create fantasy on purpose, by play. Play is not play, it is mimicking adult behavior. Children know very well they're not doing things for real, after all, they're not big. However, as OP says, a time spent by fantasy fun is a time missing from the reality fun. A time spent in unreality could count as a brain damage. Child brains are developing to adapt to anything they see and do. If they grow up adapted to live in fantasy worlds, they will have a brain badly adapted to live in a real world, not wired to solve problems, delay gratification, overcome frustration, foresee dangers and most importantly, have critical thinking. I believe this is the basis for ADHD, children who spent too much time in front of TV, watching literally insane TV programs have damaged brain, frantically high-keyed in a way that real life does not work. And as it probably happens the most on the East coast of US, the ADHD rates grow the closer they are to the East coast. Every 30 to 7 minutes there is an interruption of advertising. TV wires the developing brain in a way that shatters the ability to focus for a longer period. If that's not brain damage, I don't know what is. Childhood has to be fun. But parents think that fun is by definition useless, so childhood has to be useless, or it's not fun. And if there's any time to be useless, let it be in childhood. That's how they think. This is of course not necessarily true, but it requires some self-education and good learning materials to have fun in an intelligent way. And of course take children to Camp Quest, a secular camp that is a lot of fun and teaches critical thinking, and of course there's no mention of religion. If you spent your life watching Christian monopoly on child, youth and foreign language camps, you can appreciate Camp Quest. However, I'd make allowance for science fiction books! Although I got to sci-fi fairly late, I think it gives me a great understanding of experimental sociology, the most important topics, impact of new technology on society, dealing with alien or stranger cultures, love of science, immunity to religion, liberal view of women, and so on. Comics are not sci-fi. Superheroes are idiots in spandex who beat up people suffering from social pathology, but never change the system that produces them. (Batman has at least some idea of the evils of capitalism, but offers no solutions) I also greatly appreciate Jacque Fresco's insight into parenting. He has the same opinion as the OP. He talks a lot how he taught his children problem-solving and how he could communicate with them when they were just a few months old. Fresco was great with children and it's good to see I don't admire him for nothing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY59pccu2DA That reminds me. Is there a way to learn child psychology or get an experience with children? I'm a guy, but white as a chalk and college-educated, spotlessly clean criminal record, but I don't think there's an opportunity in our society to study children directly or indirectly. I don't have any young relatives and TV shows I've seen employ too much artistic license and stories. I have read some sociological studies, but they were just a text. We all agree that parenting is a great act of philosophy. Also a saint's trial of patience. Let's say I wonder if I can stand up to the challenge. I wonder what kind of a parent I'd make. frankly, I haven't seen a real live child for more than 15 years and I wonder if there's a way to prepare.

Your response is so affectionate! It looks like the many languages don't cause you nearly as much trouble as I thought. My language is Czech. And I'm not much into boyfriends, girlfriends are my thing. But actually, it would come natural to me, if I married an English-speaking woman. That would solve many problems. I've never been very social, not good with social context. So I'd love to marry someone who is a stranger as well, the strangeness would be right on the table where we can embrace it. I want to be a legitimate stranger.I think English is a wonderful thing to have in common with someone, if nothing else. Well, not understanding is certainly a problem. But what if they do understand? Doesn't it feel impolite to you speaking to someone in a different but similar language? After all, if you're a part of one family then isn't using different languages driving the family apart? Or do you have so good relationships, that you don't notice who's speaking what?

Hello. I'm watching Stefan's video How to meet a nice girl. Lots of good advice in it. I especially like the point how we have to know ourselves in order to tell what kind of girl do we look for. However, I think the problem is, that knowing ourselves internally is not the same thing as knowing ourselves externally. All social interaction (except the net) happens externally. We can have nice emotions on the inside, but we need a way to express them outside. We can be happy inside but really unhappy at outside relations and events. The trick to be attractive is to be happy, but also to know how to show it, so others are attracted. We introspective types may know how we tick. But we can be so submerged in ourselves that it goes far beyond mere self-centeredness, it's self-submersion so that other people become unreal and the self is lost out of sight. The internal self is an ocean for the fish of our daily consciousness and the external self is totally unrealized. How do we look from the outside, is not something we are used to seeing. Only if someone did make a film about ourselves. But that would be like when someone records our voice and we think, "How comes I still have any friends?" Well, I suppose that must be so with the whole external persona. Of course, emotions are the key. Emotions, emotions, emotions. No relationship happens without emotions. Intellect's way of engagement is lie one-off lightning discharge, it's not a steady cohesive social field, metaphorically speaking. It doesn't bond. Trouble is, we intellectual people tend to have emotions as the intellect - a strike of lightning and nothing in between. That needs fixing too and I'm workign on it. But another problem is the external display of emotion. How can we become aware of our persona EXTERNALLY, EMOTIONALLY PUBLICALLY? By interaction. All awareness is developed by interaction. But how? All interaction needs other people. And there must be something to begin, some kind of framework. Without it, we are like locked out of our own house. I hope Stefan's video makes it more clear, because this is probably not intelligible, unless you're dealing with the same problem. Good luck and may god* have mercy upon us. *) The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster

Ah! The light! I can see it now! All hail to the market! Marketable skills are the only true skills! Marketable profession is the only profession! Survival is the goal. Not thriving, not leisure, not sustainability, not the elimination of labor. Any idiot can hold a plow or a wrench and we are supposed to be these idiots, because market says so. Market says, thou shalt not create self-repairing plumbing, automatic hydroponic farms, or cars that do not break down, because they only contain about 40 moving parts. Thou shalt provide livelihood to mechanics and plumbers. Labor is the only way to survive, because it provides this dominating medium of exchange, the money. All hail to the money. Now, if you haven't noticed my weapon-grade sarcasm, I shall read from the great philosopher's book, subtly corrected so that it's even wiser.

I totally agree! Overlooking the global and societal inter-dependence of living and non-living things is the greatest fault of "market philosophers". (if that isn't an oxymoron) Almost everything we have comes from someone else or somewhere else, taken or inherited. What do you think, are we even able to explain it to people who don't see, don't understand? What I saw so far, words and text are inadequate for that. But maybe paintings can do the job. What do you think about this painter? https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pawel-Kuczynski/222849284410325?ref=ts&fref=ts For me being left-wing means to be aware of the underdog side of the world, either by belonging there, or understanding it. The intellectual ability to observe global society and to draw parallels between the obviously working and the obviously not working, one because of the other. Artists like Kuczynski make the job easier because they draw one right next to the other. So we realize, that freedom to fail economically is no freedom. Freedom to work or to learn what we do not want is no freedom. Anarcho-capitalists are people who don't believe in free elections and political campaigns, yet they believe in free market and advertising campaigns. Communists forced people to full employment with police and prisons. Capitalists let poverty do the job, they just open the factory door, people are free to come in and work. Or they just hire some Communists

You can call it freedom from hunger, weather, disease and ignorance. It's the stuff from Universal declaration of human rights. The problem is, effectively this freedom is denied from us, if we don't have money. It is a very effective form of coercion. There is no person doing the coercion, but nonetheless, people will do their best to earn money to get this freedom, even if it means working 18 hours a day a low pay difficult and dangerous job. These are universal human rights, because without them we don't really deal with an autonomous human, capable of making right or wrong decisions, there is no right or wrong when the basic rights are involved, there is only survival. Without them a person is incapable of making a free decision at a job market. Thus a job market or market in general that violates these basic rights is not free at all. Today there is a great inflation of the need for work. If we work only to have basic rights and needs (the UN declaration is not obligatory for governments, it's just an agreement on definition), then we do not work voluntarily. What if people had basic needs provided, would they completely stop working? Not at all, most would still work, but voluntarily. If we trust people to do right market decisions, to use weapons, cars and voting ballots, we should trust them with unconditional providing of basic needs, trust them if they choose to work. If a dentist sees that a society needs a dentist, that a neighbor has a toothache, a dentist will not refuse service just because he already has food and housing provided. Yes, fewer people would work, but the purpose of capitalism and market is not total employment, that is what Communism wants. Don't be like Communists, who saw in total employment the solution of all problems and forced thinkers and artists to build bridges with bare hands. Total employment yes, but total employment of automated, networked machines! Do not presume that everyone has to be like the market is willing to pay for. Market is only an aggregate demand of the average society and the most extraordinary and innovative people have the greatest problem to find someone intelligent enough to pay for what they create. They must bend, conform and compromise with the market... Do not let the average decide what the above average should do, in order to live. If each has provided the basic needs, then we do intrude upon each other with our wallet votes.