dsayers

What about a man who swallows a bomb and then enters a crowd? The decision to swallow the bomb is his to make. Unless he follows it with a decision to not allow that decision to harm another, he's initiating the use of force. Because the explosion will have an impact on an area that exceeds his body. Or how about somebody who smokes right next to somebody who doesn't wish to breath smoke? Does the decision being in regards to their own body change the fact that it inhibits another's ability to breathe (live)? We're talking about creating a person. The decision to keep lasts 9 months and with ~15 years of dependence. This mean the decision could directly lead to the torture of another human being for a decade and a half. Just because the human being doesn't exist at the time of the decision, I don't think this is enough to avoid the creation of a positive obligation. @quickstine: I don't think we could fully transition into a moral world without the consideration of morality such as here. While we're talking about this, some people are talking about who to tax and how much as if that is a moral consideration. @square4: I think whether a parent creates a positive obligation needs to be resolved before what it looks like or what comes after it can be considered.

That's the only way I know how to do it too. Maybe that's one of those things that is other people devaluing me through me. I feel I'm able to provide an academic connection with others, but am still underdeveloped in terms of empathy. I have the foundation for it based on what I understand are the requisite and building blocks for it. But they were suppressed by others for decades and I've only been actively sifting through it all for about a year. I try to study my writing interactions with others very carefully and it seems I have a hard time conveying much warmth. Thank you for the feedback. It's been a part of our culture (read: falsehood) for so long that part of a woman's virtue is how she looks. I can't help but wonder if half the discrepancy between male/female orators is self-consciousness and the other half wanting to not expose themselves to all the creeps that either try to exploit this or are being scumbags while cowardly hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. One of my favorite aspect of people who talk to the camera for YouTube is that it actively fights back against our culture's obsession with the beautiful people. Beauty is enjoyable to look at, but the videos I watch on YouTube (usually just listen to audio) are for the message. If the message is beautiful, it doesn't matter what the courier looks like. Check out Julie Borowski's videos sometime if you get the chance. Regardless of what any individual might say about her age and looks, she goes to ridiculous lengths to get people talking. It's just a damn shame that she always stops one step short of the truth in order to appeal to a larger audience. The main point here is if you're doing it for yourself, enjoy it and to hell with people who spew vitriol to recreate the unresolved trauma of their past.

There was no discussion. You made the claim of sinister action and I pointed out that it is an unavoidable side effect and then asked why if it is unavoidable, would you focus on somebody who is instilling reason and negotiation than the 80-90% that instill aggression and coercion. Which you did not answer. $10 gets you off my ignore list since all I ever see you do is engage in sophistry.

Sounds like he already has problems. For instance, how could he attract and tolerate somebody who appears to be more interested in the state as her man than him? More importantly, how are you friends with somebody who could attract or tolerate such a person? You can control your life.

Could you provide a frame of reference?

This is exactly what I was thinking. I have more to add though. Tell me if you think this is a logical, ethical explanation or just me trying to connect dots that "feels like" they should be connected. If a person trips and breaks their leg, they did not choose this but it is the reality of their situation. They will go through the effort and expense of setting their leg in order to avoid the predictable outcome of a life with only one useful leg. If a person gets sick by contracting some bacteria, they did not choose this but it is the reality of the situation. They will go through the effort and expense to treat the disease in order to avoid the predictable outcome of death. While it might sound callous to compare a rape victim getting pregnant to contracting a disease, the effects are very similar. The woman will have to eat a lot more than she normally would since her body will divert nutrition to the fetus and the process of birth without medical assistance has historically been a lethal coin toss. In terms of survival and protection of herself, the decision to continue gestation is not a passive one. To me, the question then becomes whether or not this is an eventuality of the coercion of the rape and therefor the mother isn't morally responsible. Or if because the decision to gestate directly effects another person, she is morally responsible. If person A holds a gun to person B's head and says, "Hurt person C or I will kill you," we understand that person B's injuring person C in the moment accrues to person A. If person B later chooses to hurt person D of their own volition, person B is now morally responsible. Similarly, once the rape is over and the rapist and victim are no longer together, the victim is no longer under the coercion of another. Therefor I would argue that the decision to gestate or not, while an unfortunate result of coercion, is one that is the victim's to make. One that would have significant health risks to her and therefor could not be considered passive.

Pretty lame appeal to emotion. You whip your kid, you take away their choice to be peaceful. You negotiate with them, you take away their choice to be sociopaths. There's nothing you can do in front of a blank slate that mimics that will not take choices out of the equation. So how about focusing on people that violate morality while doing this rather than those who are upholding it by doing this? $10 says you don't answer the question directly.

That certainly resonates with me. I agree understanding self is much harder. I too have always liked the speck in the eye analogy. And even before I had the self-knowledge to be fully open and process it, I've always invited my friends to challenge me on my imperfections. I started doing that after the first time I hurt somebody I never wanted to. Filled me with all kinds of self-second guessing. The reason I asked is because I wasn't sure how much YOU valued self-knowledge. There were a few things in your intro that suggested you might not be being honest with yourself. Or it could just be a difficulty in precisely communicating it. I first did a double take when you described yourself as logical for ditching one religion and taking up another. That's the sort of thing I mean. I can elaborate if you're interested. I just didn't want to jump in if it's nothing something you're particularly interested in.

No. Saying "God" refers only to a concept. The ability to describe something is not proof of its existence.

This made me smile. Primarily because when you asked that question, and I asked for clarification, this is exactly what my answer would be if somebody asked me the same thing. As a result of my childhood abuse, I'm very cerebral and left-brained. Expressing myself in a way that's personable and interesting doesn't come naturally for me. Is this how you experience it? Unfortunately, this means I don't know how much help I can offer. It's natural for people to gravitate towards like minded people in general. Almost all do it for confirmation bias, so it's hard to break that threshold. At least when the people that FDR attracts do it, it's for the purpose of evading the poison, not just back-patting of each other. I think the reason I said that specific part of your most recent writing was particularly valuable to me was because it sort of broke this mold. The writing itself would mostly appeal to people who already understood the concepts, but that part in particular told them something they might not understand or grasp. It's like trying to explain to a capital L Libertarian that armed rebellion isn't going to bring about the change we need even though we need change and being armed in and of itself isn't problematic. I could tell you the various ways I personally use this in my scribbles here on FDR (like the armed rebellion thing). I don't know how it would look in your writings or on the topic of self-reliance though. I can't speak for others, but I can say a couple thoughts I have on this. The questions at the end thing is a component that most articles lack. I think one reason why YouTube is such a popular means of communication (even compared to competitors such as Vimeo) is because of the comments section that allow the "reader" to talk back and/or strike up a conversation on the subject matter. This alone could be more useful than just an article that contains the exact same text. My other thought on the matter is a personal one. A buddy of mine recently asked me if I'd be interested in consuming a book for the sake of discussions we have. I told him I would if it was available as an audio book. Similarly, the last book I chose to read on my own, I went to great lengths to try and efficiently convert it to audio. I'm an audible learner for one. Secondly, it's just plain convenient to be able to toss it onto a CD and into the car for example. For that matter, it can be helpful from an author's point of view because it means you can provide longer content without losing your audience's interest. Just one: The more important something is to humanity, the more important it is that it is treated as important. I was just thinking about this the other day. Imagine it's 1,000 yrs from now and people are studying Stefan Molyneux the way people study Plato today. If steps aren't taken in the present to categorize, summarize, etc, this can be extremely difficult. The man has thousands of hours of spoken content! With the internet, it's entirely possible that what you're writing will be a part of human knowledge for eternity. So if you feel motivated to organize the information, I would say go for it.

No, it denotes a righteous ownership. If I agree to work for a guy at the rate of $10/hr, for every hour of work I perform for him, I earn $10. It's not a reward, it's the satisfaction of the conditional positive obligation he voluntarily created as a result of the condition being met. The law of gravity imposes a restriction on freedom. That doesn't mean we can discard it as useless to us or deny it as factual. The fact that it restricts freedom evenly and consistently alters how we make decisions. Saying "restriction of freedom" disproves that property rights follows self-ownership is like saying that restriction of freedom invalidates that gravity is an effect of mass. "I want to keep the Earth, I just want to be able to fly also." I noticed that your most recent post said nothing about well-being other than a quote that stated "as defined above" despite me making the clarification twice. I'm not even sure what's being argued about at this point, but for you to ignore these points while continuing a debate that was started because of what those points refers to, this seems deception in my opinion.

Tenko, I think the more important question is: Why do YOU NEED God to exist? In order for religion to be valid, you have to accept a number of claims that do not conform to reality as we know it: 1) Consciousness can exist without matter and energy. 2) Only one consciousness exists without matter and energy. 3) The consciousness that YOU were taught about can exist without matter and energy. 4) He intervenes. Point 2 is particularly problematic because only one of anything existing is nearly a statistic impossibility. Point 4 is the clincher. If he intervenes, then no belief is necessary. If he doesn't, then it's just as Wuzz pointed out: The difference would be meaningless. So can God exists? It seems impossible due to reasons of internal inconsistency.

You might be right. Something to keep in mind though is that Stef was speaking of a generality and he did this accurately. One occurrence isn't a disproof of a generality. Maybe Bitcoin will lose value every time a country bans it because it's not a tangible thing. Maybe they'll go up because they're not a tangible thing. Nobody's banned numbers or algorithms before. I think it's too soon to speak in absolutes one way or the other.

I disagree for two reasons; one rational and one emotional. The rational reason is that we cannot change out there if we won't change in here first. If we reject egalitarianism and accept violence in spheres where we have influence, we cannot change anything. The emotional reason is that the stories of abuse are not only horrifyingly common, but they can get be downright brutal. I was just commenting on this last night. The things some abusers do because they think it's okay or they'll get away with it, we have to keep the important issues to the forefront. "Stop torturing human beings," is easy and the torturing of human beings will not stop without it. There is no structural violence

Not at all. You spoke of "rejecting moral rules based on well-being" which nobody claimed and wasn't what was being talked about. I don't even know what you're talking about here. Who said anything about a reward? Or freedom? Or relative weight? Maybe it would be more efficient if you made the case against property rights directly following self-ownership, which you claim to accept. Not only have you shifted from value to values, but you have made the claim that moral rules are invalid just because people can choose to ignore them. Does cotton candy suddenly NOT have less nutrients than wheat bread if somebody who could eat wheat bread eats cotton candy? There's no such thing as moral rules based on well-being. Moral rules include do not steal, assault, rape, or murder. That they can contribute to the well-being of any actors involved is incidental. They are not observed because of any effect on well-being, but because they are consistent with the real world. My original statement on "well-being" is in regards to the social convention of creating rules based on well-being. Bans on marijuana for example cite well-being, but violate self-ownership by dispensing with consent. We know it is not a moral rule because it is internally inconsistent.

Bitcoins have been worth hundreds of dollars for many months. Whether you believe it holds value or not, it does.

What are you trying to improve? Anything in particular?

Welcome to the boards. When your title says turned and this quote here: Do these mean you've broken out of military worship or the religion of statism altogether? Also, I was curious what your thoughts on the pursuit of self-knowledge is. Thanks for sharing.

Leaders is the problem. An actual solution cannot come about by way of a leader for philosophical reasons. As for electronic communications, nothing moves faster than light. And the internet is decentralized by its nature. That it can cut both ways is no reason to throw it, or any tool aside. "The revolution" can only happen in the mind. It requires people saying no to violence. Saying no to the offer of privilege. If a large portion of the enforcer class said, "No, I am not different from everybody else just because a psychopath tells me I am," it would end TODAY without a drop of blood being spilled. You know, the large target problem works both ways. People rail against the Fed when the only thing they can actually control is what's between their ears and their relationships with others. If those same people, instead of choosing a large psuedo-target, instead told their friends that they'll not share themselves with people who support violence, the change would occur almost overnight.

I've noticed that sometimes people confuse the beginning, middle, or end of a story (or chapter) with another part of it. In this case, I mean that doing something just to pass the time isn't a great way to end a story. There's nothing wrong with it as a beginning. Or in the case of somebody who is paralyzed by anxiety, it's a perfectly acceptable step forward. I think you should allow this for yourself, if only to get your mind off of the anxiety or its paralyzing effects from dwelling on it. A short circuit is when an electrical circuit returns to the source with no inline load. Nothing to "soak up" the electricity, to put it to use. In a way, you could think of the paralysis as a short circuit of not doing SOMETHING. Get a load in there to soak up the energy. Bad analogy, I confess. But in your case, it sounds as if the prejudice that doing something just to pass the time is bad is preventing you from doing anything. That's not good. The journaling, by whatever media, is not a bad idea. It takes time to produce and time to review. It's not wasted time either since it might help you connect dots that need connecting or that you don't even think are there. Sorry, I've got to stop now before I reach a bad analogy hat trick.

I was able to slim things down a bit as well as eliminate the also tagged box: board.freedomainradio.com##.ipsBox_container.removeDefault board.freedomainradio.com##.maintitle [EDIT] I've used this approach for Netflix too. A while back, they started including this billboard on the personalized page that did nothing for me except displace the stuff I was actually trying to get to. If anybody else uses Netflix on their PC, try this: movies.netflix.com###billboard

Compared to what? The transition I went through was from fitting into propaganda to fitting into the real world. The problem with fitting into propaganda is that same as trying to fit in with one's own told lie: You now have reality and the lie to keep track of. Only propaganda is a net of lies that block out the view of reality. So many lies to keep track of! I prefer fitting into the real world. It frees up large portions of my mind to focus on... well, reality! Welcome to FDR. I hope you enjoy your time spent fitting into reality too!

Tenko, quoting isn't proof. I make this same encouragement to people who promote ideas that I accept too. 2+2=4 because it does, not because some dead guy said so. If you want to discuss the truth of something, discuss the truth of something. "This piece of paper says so," is inconclusive since people could write whatever they wanted.

You're not even being consistent with yourself. Nobody made this claim and you said this in the context of explaining why religious texts being created to enslave others is improbable. Surely you understand that the existence of God and religion are two different things. If God intervenes, then no belief is necessary as we would have proof. If God does not intervene, then his existence is inconsequential. Religions (including statism) claim something to be true while discouraging any attempt to verify it. In this case, that God intervenes, but nevermind the lack of ability to substantiate this. You can't have both and this contradiction is precisely why I reject your claim that religion (including statism), like government, is a tool and therefor there is room for legitimate use.

Let us test that theory. 1) Gravity causes objects to be attracted. 2) Gravity causes objects to be repelled. Please utilize the behaviors you described to reconcile this contradiction.