ParaSait

The line lies at the question: Can it be avoided without retaliatory force? Can it be avoided by simply saying "no"? In that case, it's aesthetics. The reason why it's aesthetics and not ethics is because if nothing is inflicted, there is no internal inconsistency to be found if you universalize the behavior. (remember, ethics must be universal)

How about this: Metaphysics is the philosophy of the axioms of existence.

*Raises hand* Fleming here. Are you Flemish or Wallonian?

I think probably you may just feel out of place in a society where everyone else carelessly spends way too much...

Music doesn't create emotions. A song can't make you feel sad if you're not already sad about something inside. So I see music as a way to help us connect to our own existing emotions better. And it's hard to recover from any trauma if you're disconnected from your emotions.

I also dumped windows very recently! Using Mint 17 and loving it thus far.

The semantic confusion around the word "anarchism" is rather frustrating. There are 2 kinds of "anarchism". There's the word, which has a fixed definition, and there's the long-running movement. The literal, objective meaning of the word doesn't evolve, but the movement has. The word means the advocacy of a stateless society, but the movement rather represents an opposition against any kind of hierarchical association, and is traditionally communist in nature. Voluntaryism is the opposition against any kind of coercive, unfree association. Voluntary associations can be hierarchical, as hierarchy isn't inherently coercive. Voluntaryism entails "word"-anarchism, since the state is inherently coercive. The confusion is when meanwhile, the "movement"-anarchists get bitchy because voluntaryists call themselves anarchists. I think it's better to refer to ourselves as voluntaryists, for 2 reasons: it's more precise ("word"-anarchism is only a part of voluntaryism), and also, especially when a discussion involves "movement"-anarchists, it really helps to make a clear distinction. EDIT: of course, you can expect the "movement"-anarchists to keep bitching about our use of their word regardless, because I suppose that that's an incredibly convenient red herring to utilize)

Yea, the whiteboard idea is great. We can also use a text document on google docs if that turns out to be too messy (you can share and multiplayer edit those in the same way)

No problems here. Tested it on both firefox and chrome.

I'd be up for it! Haven't read the book before.

I had a strong emotional kneejerk reaction to this at first. But I have only taken a brief look in the books thus far and they seem to advocate for consensual child-on-child sexual and bodily exploration. I'm certainly not against this. This should not be an issue in my opinion.

There are no stupid questions when it comes to UPB, it can be quite challenging to understand! I would say that a child is intellectually vulnerable. Their knowledge about themselves and the world as well as their rational faculties are not developed enough yet to give them full responsibility for their actions. If a person is genuinely not aware about something, you can't hold him responsible for it. If I present to you two buttons, and I tell you that button A kills a kitten and button B releases it from its cage, but the truth is that the functions of the buttons really work the other way around, you cannot be held responsible for the murder of a kitten by pressing button B. The one responsible would be me, because I lied to you about it. Similarly, if a stranger in a van offers a kid a candy and tells him or her that he has much more candy at his home and it's going to be great, the child isn't responsible for choosing to enter the van. You can't expect the child to figure out that he's really lying. Now, teaching a child religion is essentially lying. You talk about a big reward and a big punishment for behaving or not behaving according to a certain set of rules, and tell them that it's not you but God who's inflicting it upon them, and you present it to the child as an objective truth. You cannot reasonably expect the child to have a capability of skepticism that an adult mind has. This makes it a threat of violence, and thus immoral. A rather subtle one, because the responsibility for the threat is delegated to a god, and the coercion is well-hidden since the child "chooses" to obey or disobey him.

I find it amusing when people quibble over whether he was real or not. What does it matter? Would it make Christianity any less bullshit if he did?

"I know that I know nothing." That's one of my favourite quotes, from Socrates. The wiser you become, the better you realize how complex things really are. Also, philosophy is kind of like an "arch-discipline" where you question all the fundamental things, and people really come up with various, wildly differing answers to those questions. Of course that all tends to be very confusing. It's just so easy to get lost. Really, just keep going, you're not doing something wrong or anything. This is simply the kind of "pain" that is experienced when your wisdom is growing.

Perhaps it's because of empathy for the kitten's attachment to you? You know that it strongly needs connection to a caregiver, and it bothers you that it's probably afraid when left alone.

One of the most constructive things I have ever done in my social life, is learning the difference between a friend and an acquaintance, if you get what I mean.

But... isn't martial arts basically just hitting people?!

Makes sense! Thanks for clearing it up. Yes and no. I'm currently helping a girl to get out of an abusive relationship with her "boyfriend", and he's brainwashed her pretty bad. I just wanted to be fully clear on this moral question in case she pulls the "it's my problem, he's doing it for my own good" card...

The thread's title may seem absurd and a contradiction in terms (and it may as well BE contradictory too, I don't know for sure -- that's why I'm asking). This is fairly simple question, but may have a complicated answer. So imagine, for instance, if I said to you "If tomorrow I try to leave the house, do not allow me to do it under any circumstances, even if I beg and plead you at that time to let me leave. Use force if necessary!", would it be moral or immoral for you to keep me in the house by force the next day? Is it still a violation of the NAP to keep me in the house by force, or can the consensual agreement override the principle arbitrarily? Now there could be various good reasons for me to ask something like this. I could be schizophrenic. I could be on shrooms. I could have some sort of addiction. Any kind of insane state of mind. So, in case the answer is "it depends", then is it legitimate for you to do this if A) I'm insane, B) I'm actually sane. (thinking about it, version B is probably self-defeating, because I may necessarily need to be insane to ask something like that in first place ) Your thoughts?

Sure thing. I don't really know anything that is specifically related to the origin of this personality trait. I'll just write down a bunch of general facts about me and my history here while I'm at it. Maybe I'll refer back to this post at later points, too. Please do ask specific questions! ACE score Well, my ace score would be 3, but with two other questions that I'm unsure about. Were your parents ever separated or divorced? Yes, and they were very impulsive about marriage. My mom cheated on dad because she felt he was sexually unsatisfying, my dad was very uninterested in mom as well, and they divorced around when I was 10 I think. Was your mother or stepmother often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? Yes, absolutely, her father was incredibly aggressive to his children and he did all of those things. Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide? Yes, my mom is always depressed and complaining about herself and about how cruel the world always is to her. She has cut her arms when I was very young, but she didn't tell me about it until I was much older. Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever... touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? Sort of. When I was 12 I had a pedo music teacher in school who... had a crush on me. He made quite a few sexual gestures to me. It was very awkward, but didn't particularly bother me otherwise. Did you often or very often feel that... your family didn't look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other? Sort of. Mom's side of the family claims to be close to each other but they're really always arguing and making trouble. It's pretty terrible and isolating to me (because whatever contact I make with my family carries a risk of stirring a large hornet's nest). Relationships The relationship with my mother is emotionally incestuous (since very early on). She keeps claiming that I'm the only one she can hang on to when she's feeling depressed, and I keep needing to "manage" her. These days I am trying to get rid of that poisonous relationship, and try to re-establish a more healthy one. As for how that's working out: she's very resistant. Whenever I try to have any sort of serious talk, I get a barrage of defense mechanisms, and she says I have been influenced by others (as if that's inherently bad...), I'm not the same anymore, she can't connect to me anymore, I'm too ice cold rational and don't care about others' feelings, I'm too intelligent for her,... all absolute nonsense obviously. The relationship with my sister is absolutely terrible! She always feels better when I'm not there (even though I just sit quietly on a desk behind a wall). Ideally, she just wants only mom for her own, but she must still leave her alone, all she really wants from her is being a host for her material parasitism. She will nag and sigh and bully until she gets something. She is incredibly socially anxious and agoraphobic. She is usually the scapegoat of all trouble in the family, which is not really justified, but she is a horrible to everyone around her regardless. She's always been a major source of stress to me. Before 12 I had absolutely no friends nor any interest in them, I didn't have almost any social skills whatsoever, I could barely even recognize facial expressions, but I could connect to people if they expressed themselves very explicitly verbal. I was extremely introverted. Nowadays I have a select few very good friends on the internet that I can always talk to. I have never had girlfriends or boyfriends or had even the slightest bit of interest in them. Love occurred a few times during puberty, but it felt like a horrible, mind-numbing disease that I wanted to get rid of. I consider myself to be aromantic and asexual. Miscellaneous I have asperger's syndrome. I feel like I'm an alien on the wrong planet, and I often feel very "opposite" from other people. I am extremely introverted and I prefer to be left alone. I strongly prefer living at night when everything is quiet and everyone has gone to sleep. I have always felt very concerned and reflecting about morality. I have always been an atheist even though I was raised religiously in school. Starting from around 12 I created my own sort of philosophies. It started somewhat mystical, a karma-like thing, then I also made metaphysical theories (this was all before I knew about the discipline of philosophy), I later became socialistic, then nihilistic (this was during a major depression in my life), then became objectivist/libertarian/voluntarist (the depression was over and I felt energetic and positive again). Regardless, dark and nihilistic fiction still deeply touches me.

In the quest for self-knowledge, there are often things I come across that always seemed very insignificant, a bit silly in fact, but could actually be surprisingly important cues to a great underlying truth. I have this personality trait that causes me to have empathy for the most ridiculous things. One way in which this has always manifested is that I would never hurt a fly, literally. As disgusting as it may seem to you: since pretty early childhood on, I have trained this skill of catching flies that are in the house and then letting them fly away from my hand outside. Flies, spiders, bugs and insects, you name it, I just catch them or take them by the paw and put them outside. There is another trait, and I had never before made the connection between this and the other one, that causes me to have empathy for things that aren't even alive. Usually toys, but they might not even be toys, just simply objects, whether I have a particular emotional connection to them or not. Whenever I see dolls, puppets, things that have a face of some kind, I get this sort of concern for it. I keep hoping that it won't be left alone, or get damaged, or anything like that. When I was a child and my family moved, I felt sad about our house because I thought he was going to feel lonely forever. I have been fixing damaged old dolls that I found in boxes so that they're healthy and happy again. My own childhood toys are all still perfectly intact. To give the most recent example, my mom bought a cute kitchen clock which is like a chick in an egg, and it pops out and makes a sound when the timer runs out. I swear, I look at it, and I keep thinking about these horrible scenarios, "what if it popped out and fell off the furnace hood and broke? Or even worse, what if it fell into the boiling food?! I would be heartbroken!" I have tried to analyze these feelings of mine, try to reduce the required properties of objects for this to the absolute minimum, and have concluded that in most cases, all it would need is a face with eyes on it. A third trait that I have, which may or may not be related, is that I'm very concerned about my future self, for no particular reason. I keep imagining these scenarios of me embarrassing, hurting, accidentally killing myself. What if I went out at some point in the future and tripped over a loose tile? What if I got run over by a car and it would change my family and friends' lives forever? And so on, and so forth... Needless to say, I always think twice and secure my safe zone before doing anything, really. Man, I'm feeling really shy about writing this all down. I think it's pretty silly. I know that it's moral and important to have empathy for yourself and for other conscious beings, but isn't this just absurd? Is this okay? Why do I have this? What things could have caused this? I would find it very interesting to know. Thanks!

There would be a big market for fleshlights, I imagine.

I'm very sorry about your dog. I know that losing someone who's dear to is always painful - even if it's "only" a pet. That being said, I remember nothing in objectivism that says consciousness is separate from the physical universe. What's your source on that? All aspects of consciousness are an effect of the brain, and only the brain, which is of course an entirely physical object. There is no such thing as a soul. I'm sorry to break it to you if your view on this gives you some comfort about the loss of your dog. But this is what I think is the rational view.

Hi! I would like to present to you my refutation of anarchism. I think I have a very sound and strong argument here, so please don't ignore it and tell me what you think. As always, let's start with the definitions. Anarchism is the view that society is better off without rulers. My argument is very simple. Without rulers, how are we going to measure things? I think you people completely dismiss the importance of that. So much important aspects of our society, including but not limited to mathematics, architecture, and even male bragging rights are completely dependent on the ability to accurately measure things! If we can't have rulers, then what are we going to use? Are we going to estimate the length of things simply on our whim? How do you think this is going to happen without inaccuracies (or in the case of male bragging rights: optimistic bias), without the objective measurements that a ruler can provide to us? I think it's absolutely ridiculous... however, any counterarguments are appreciated! Thanks.

Love it! Ridicule is the first sign that an idea is dying.