Canoe_Captain

Hi dsayers, thank you for your great post and feedback. Disclaimer: I did not spent enough time on philosophy to derive my arguments from proven principles like Stefan, my arguments are really weak since they are based on hunches and feelings. So I give you my amateurish reply as good as I can: On my parent's childhood: I usually talk like three times a year with my mother about the things they did wrong as parents. I did not yet ask my parents what happened in their childhoods. My mother had strict parents and her father died when she was 18 years old. She also had to go to church ca. 3 times a week and she did not force me or my brother to go to church. I am still semi-dependent on financial support from my father and I am afraid asking questions about his childhood might somehow anger him. I know that as a child he did not have much time for himself because he always had to help on the farm as a child, except when he was at school. So going to a state school was probably seen by him as a positive door opener to step up the ladder from farmer's son to medical doctor. He also was separated from a good friend at the age of ca. 5 years. The family of the friend immigrated to Canada, and they still are pen pals after ca. 60 years. On abuse by my parents: [*]One time my father started screaming at full volume at my mother, when she was cradling me as a baby and I shrug together in shock. So I probably was a stressed out as a fetus and baby.[ [*]I was beaten with the open hand to the cheek when I had beaten or somehow made my little brother cry from age 3 to age 12. (I apologized to my brother and I am sorry for attacking my little brother. I have still to fully understand why I let my anger out on him.) [*]Getting an unprofessional, butchered, circumcision when 6 years old for so called medical reasons. Based on my research the circumcision was not medically necessary, so I blame my circumcision on a statist healthcare system and my parents skipping due diligence. [*]Being beaten by my father for a bad grade over the knee with open hand on the buttocks for ca. 30 seconds when I was ca. 14 years old. This happened only one time but I decided to myself in that moment to consider my father as an adversary from now on. [*]Being accused by mother to try to willingly play my parents off against each other for my own benefit when I was ca. 14 years old “You always knew how to make us argue!” [*]My father put me often down verbally when I got bad grades and I was afraid of getting physically hurt because of bad grades. On Jesus: With regards to Jesus I am in a transition of feelings towards Jesus: [*]Ca. 2011 I was a clear supporter of Jesus: "Yes, I am a Christian." [*]In 2015 I am probably going to say: Jesus is just a historic person who founded a religion and had really destructive influence with his teachings (ca. 2015) So I am sometimes a slow person, and I try to not force my feelings, I know that there are many facts that put Jesus in a critical light, but I have just started to open up to those facts. I felt more or less comfortable with being a Jesus supporter, but I understand it is fogging my own rational thinking ability and that of my possible future children so I am slowly fading out my positive feelings for Jesus. So my belief in 2011 was, that god may or may not exist. I thought "son of god" was more of a title given to Jesus, since his contemporaries thought Jesus is as enlightened as god. Yes self-erasure is not a good template. Do your refer to dying at the cross? I thought of that as a positive example of having such a strong belief in his teachings, that he was ready to make his stance towards the powerful oppressors instead of renouncing. But maybe I had those suicide fantasy also because of this Jesus example? That would probably mean that it was not such a good example after all. So I currently view Jesus' teachings like ethics from the Stone Age: I do not judge a Stone Age hammer by the same standards of 21st century hammers. I do use a 21st century hammer if I need one. But I go to a museum to look at the Stone Age hammer and think: this was a valuable hammer and whoever invented it, probably advanced the technological evolution. So currently I think of Jesus as a more or less boring topic of my past. He was crazy to think of himself as son of god, but he spoke his thoughts, when the majority just obeyed the rulers. As far as I know he taught his peers: [*]to be peaceful (although not always being peaceful himself) [*]to be honest [*]to respect children [*]to respect women [*]to respect poor people [*]to voluntarily share [*]to respect that prostitutes deserve dignity [*]to first judge yourself before you judge others It seems to me that pacifism could be considered a Stone Age version of the non-aggression principle. The right for self-defense is missing of course. I guess Stefan Molyneux disagrees at this point, but, I think it is possible that without the existence of Jesus, Anarcho-Capitalism would have been developed ca. 100 years later. (I write this down to tell you about my feelings, I do not have as much knowledge of history as Stefan). I have no more an opinion of Noah than of Superman, I consider those fictional characters that do not really interest me. I include "the one god" in my list of fictional character as well, though that is still tough for me. On Utilitarianism: I do not like Utilitarianism anymore because it embodies the thought of: "It is possible to know what is best for everybody." ("One must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings." John Stuart Mills) So a practicing Utilitarian has to be convinced to be all-knowing or at least be really smart to be able to act as an Utilitarian. My supposition is that if a Utilitarian believes to really know what is best for everybody, he has no scruple to force his/her opinion onto others. It seems to me the inventor of Utilitarianism was inspired by the idea of an all-knowing god. I kind of see a false notion of being really smart/ all-knowing in the legislation of the current German state: "we extort taxes to encourage you to invest in green energy" "we extort taxes to encourage you to insulate your homes" "we extort taxes to encourage you to stop smoking" "we steal 10 Billion USD a year from you for state TV/radio to inform you about important intellectual information" I assume that at least part of the legislators base their actions on utilitarian ethics. So purely following utilitarian ethics seems misguided to me. If a utilitarian follows the non-aggression-principle I am okay with it. It makes me happy to help my fellow human beings to flourish as well, but I do not claim that I am sure that my actions actually help them. @dsayers: I understand that my explanation is no contradiction to what you wrote. I just wanted to explain my thoughts in more detail.

Here is a graphical depiction of the audio levels of two FDR audiobooks to explain the problem: First of all: I am extremely grateful for getting the audiobooks for free but at least one of the FDR audiobooks has erratically changing changes in audio volume; the practical anarchy audiobook. I realize this is a minor problem, that most listeners of the audiobooks might not even consciously recognise and it does not impair their listening experience. But I guess for future productions it might be a thing to consider in my opinion, since it only takes ca. 5 minutes during production to fix the audio volume with a free software like Audacity. It is called: "normalizing the audio level". This is my problem: I am listening to the Practical Anarchy Audiobook on my android phone while driving with Google Maps Navigation activated. To be able to understand the audiobook I have to dial the volume of my headset to the maximum. When the Google Maps Navigation voice tells me to turn, the navigator's voice literally screams in my ears so that it hurts. Here is a short tutorial: http://thebest3d.com/audacity/tutorials/make-louder/audacity-tutorial-make-louder-more-volume-increased-amplitude.html Audiobooks with low audio volume:FDR_5_Practical_Anarchy_Audiobook_LOW_QUALITYFDR_1_AUDIOBOOK_On_Truth_The_Tyranny_of_Illusion Audiobooks with high (good) audio volume:FDR_Book_against_the_godsFDR_Book_the_handbook_human_ownershipUniversally Preferable Behaviour (UPB) If you send me high quality MP3s of the two audiobooks, I could normalize the two audiobooks for FDR myself and I could send the finished, normalized MP3s back to FDR.

Hello everybody, So far I listened to ca. 200 hours of FDR YouTube videos mostly from 2013, podcasts and audiobooks. I listen to ca. 2 hours of FDR a day. You can label me: An Ex-Catholic: As a kid I enjoyed the company of catholic kids because they were not bullying me like the kids at school. I never believed the bible to be more than a collection of anachronistic, fictionalized stories. Jesus might have had some good insights into ethics though. An Ex-Utilitarian: I tried to live my life in a way, so that it has the most utility for mankind. I did this from age 17 till 27. I probably was wrong since it is already difficult to know what is best for me and it would be presumptuous to assume I know what is of utility for mankind. An anarcho-capitalist: Since I listen to FDR. Before I was an advocate for a minimal state. My goal is to live a happy life and do my part in making the world a better place. I think self-knowledge and spreading the truth is a good way to do this.

In the "450 - Libertopia" video Stefan answers the question: "Why don't we just take over a piece of government land and set up our own country and prove that Libertopia [...] works?" I really enjoyed this video because I had this question in my own mind still unanswered. It was fun to take the original video and to summarize the content and look up any words and references I did not completely understand. In the end I changed some sentences and omitted some sentences to make it more accessible to people who did not yet watch any FDR content. Furthermore I split the video into four parts. This is the original video from Stefan: This is the playlist with my adaptation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DfGBrZZmw&list=PLqBvhDbKNanphP1xcAqVZFRFd8hRIBLnL I am looking forward to your feedback. Since this is my first YouTube video I probably have a lot to learn.

"Even though I was only nine when my parents pulled me out of the school system, I can still remember my mom being in tears when some of her friends told her she was crazy and that it was a stupid idea. Looking back I am thankful she didn't cave to peer pressure." (Logan LaPlante) Description: "When 13 year-old Logan LaPlante grows up, he wants to be happy and healthy. He discusses how hacking his education is helping him achieve this goal." The video has 3.9 million views on YouTube and the number of views really took off this month.

Stefan spent 20 minutes on a review of Lost (includes Spoilers). He calls it an epic of reason versus superstition. I understood that Stefan thinks that Lost is a good depiction of how the majority people see the world today and live their lives. I enioyed to watch the first two seasons. The latter seasons are less rational, with more magical things happening. I heard somewhere that the producers decided after the 2nd season to develop the story more to the likings of the core group that was watching it. Apparently this core group wanted less science and philosophy and more magic and god related topics.