dsayers

I understand the point made. Though to be fair, a guilty plea doesn't actually mean guilt. We have no way of knowing what kind of interrogation "tactics" or threats were made against him.

Eek! You just glossed over the fact that you accused Stef of something that is not true. You're also making a claim that contradicts your initial response to the idea:

That is such a horrifying story. One I don't understand. When I was being taught to drive, I was cautioned to never aim for things like bags and other seemingly harmless objects because of their unseen contents. Just a couple weeks ago I went and helped a friend who punctured a tire after a major pothole. Drove 5 miles before she realized the damage required attention. I don't get how anybody could have a bump like that and not stop to survey the damage. "Thought it was a rock" is not a good enough explanation because cars aren't made to drive over rocks that would make that kind of a bump at any kind of speed. Assuming the story about the boyfriend is true, he definitely needs to be held accountable for his coverup. I'm not sure how him sitting in a hole for 13 months is going to help the parents of the children killed, who will actually be subsidizing the food he'll be fed while in there in order to keep him alive. Not saying he shouldn't be kept alive, just commenting on how this contrast could ever pass as justice even to a non-thinker.

You didn't answer my questions. I can only speak for myself if that's what you mean. Being a forum devoted to philosophy, and your thread having 144 views as I post this, I would certainly be corrected if I was speaking falsehoods. Talk about a 10 year old choosing how to die is not one to be taken lightly. One other person posted to try and help you identify the source of state power. Which I also tried to help you with when you spoke of statist mentality. To him, you backpedaled and said "lighten up" while telling others to embrace and coddle, which is a universality fail. Your quote here is basically saying "tell me what I want to hear or I'm leaving." A consistent theme throughout this thread.

Stefan Molyneux perpetually invites every person in the world to call him and publicly discuss anything they want.

One of the first things I said to you was that any excuses you make for others, you will make for yourself. Here, you speak of "believed was best" while your efforts here reject even suggestions of better. Put the two together and we see that your children will not be exposed to what's best, but what you believe is best, which is unwavering and therefore cannot be the best. To demonstrate, I will point out numerous thinking errors I see: This indicates that you are not actually interested in learning, but rather only interested in learning that which conforms to your predeterminations. It is a back door which you did not avail yourself of up front, which demonstrates that any behavior you engaged it that looked to be discussion was merely theater. It's convenient because it provides you with the opportunity to summarily reject everything ANYBODY could say. This is in contrast to your initial display of trying to discuss the points that were brought up, despite "hav[ing] nothing to go on but a paragraph or two." Ignorance WAS the choice. "Everybody else owned slaves" does not make slavery a moral act. When I first mentioned seeking knowledge, you spoke of technology. When I mentioned the library, you changed to ignorance being widespread. This means that technology wasn't actually a measure you accepted, but one you provided just the same as you believed it staved off a challenge to your predetermination. This is more confirmation bias. Did they die? Did they know they were going to die? Under what circumstances would you say that "didn't have 10 years" and "chose to have children" are compatible? For that matter, how can you with a straight face say that they didn't have 10 years to learn how to raise a child peacefully, but they did have 10 years to program a child to die by the command of a stranger? People that reject self-knowledge prior to considering it cannot be described as seeking to develop their self-ownership. The encouragement to be honest about themselves and their environment IS fostering them. You think that at this point, we're in a place that can be described as "before getting started"? Do you not see that this is in stark contradiction to your initial attitude of "There aint nuthin' like gettin' spanked right out the box"? And for the record, the very first thing that I personally did WAS embrace you. Because you spoke as if the truth was important to you and that is worthy of embrace. I can't speak for others, but I personally do not feel that rejection and manipulation of the truth is worthy of embrace. Right and protecting your abusers in your own mind IS the statist mentality. Look, dude, we were both damaged. So of course I sympathize. The problem is that now you are aware of what damage is and how it can distort your perceptions. This means that now you are responsible for it.

I do understand that you don't mean me specifically, so please do not allow my first person response make you think otherwise. This is where self-knowledge comes in. I understand what an emotional block is and how it can influence acceptance. Just as in the example I gave if you said that gravity caused objects to be attracted, you'd be more accurately describing the real world whether I accept it or not. It wouldn't matter if we both believed we were describing the real world if what we were arguing was incompatible with one another. The real world is that objective 3rd party you spoke of. If I made a claim that something was shaped like a sphere and a pyramid simultaneously, you wouldn't need evidence as the claim is self-contradictory. This was the point I was making: Determinism (and nihilism) self-detonates in that you reject it the moment you claim to accept it. The problem is that the word believe suggests that it is up to us. I accept darwinism because amid competing claims, it most accurately describes the real world. Compare that sentence to the one you offered. The sentence I used is more precise. It tells you I accept that: 1) The real world is objective. 2) The real world is consistent. 3) As such, I do not have the power to create truth. 4) My interpretation of my senses could conflict with the real world. 5) In the event that they do, my interpretation must give way. 6) "Most accurately describes the real world" is the measurement of truth. In other words, the sentence I provided was more precise and provided a lot more information than use of the word believe could.

This is why I was careful to point out that the man was living his values. She doesn't need to see the behavior itself if she understands that the value of coercion is dangerous to her children. Also, desperately dependent on what exactly? When I spoke of risk of consequences, I was referring to in the moment. The man would not poke a full grown person who is capable of evading because they could either punch him in the face or flee and call the police. He instead chose to poke the two of you because he was bigger than you, you could not escape, and you were dependent upon him. The very things that would require a higher moral standard he used as an excuse to hold a lower moral standard. This isn't helpful. It is a lot easier for me to talk to you about abstract items than it would be for me to talk about abuses I've leveled upon others in the past. Because the former doesn't require me to examine myself or be honest about ME. Furthermore, is somebody abuses you or facilitates abuse of you, demonstrates that they are "an intelligent [person] capable of discussing almost anything," but will not discuss their abuse of you or take responsibility for their actions, then they are in fact REvictimizing you. This is very important to understand. Since my father plays this card fairly regularly, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is your mother speaking through you. Look, an apple doesn't stop being an apple when you set it next to a banana. Not even if you were to toss it into an entire crate of bananas. We're not talking about the good things that she has done. We're talking about her choosing men that are dangerous to her children. She could cure cancer tomorrow and it wouldn't change the fact that she exposed you to somebody that could assault you. Which is a good enough segue into the last point I wanted to make. You're talking about degree of abuse when what is more important is the presence of abuse. If we were comparing stories, then degree might be a useful point of data. However, in the discussion of whether or not your mother is morally responsible, what matters is whether there was abuse or not. Whether she owns the abuse or not. If she was exposed to an abuse level of 90 and dials it down to 10 with her own children, she doesn't get points for that. Because either the dialing down was incidental or she understood the importance of eliminating it and stopped before doing so.

Why not? Something can be both honest and entertaining. I understand that the Daily Show specifically tries to hide behind whichever categorization is most comfortable in the moment, but this doesn't preclude the possibility to be both comedic AND accurate.

This was the first point I wanted to talk about and what I wanted to say about it, the rest of your post continued to make the same mistake. Who is to say? The real world. Logic and rationality come from the consistency of matter. There is no winning. If I say gravity causes objects to be repelled and you say that gravity causes objects to be attracted, you've more accurately described the real world. I don't need to accept this for it to be true. This sort of brings it all home. Truth is not a belief. If you believe something, then it is incumbent upon you to seek its proof or disproof. Once you do, it is no longer a belief. In other words, "believe" is the brief beginning of a very incomplete story. As such, even before I began to study philosophy, I understood the word believe to indicate that which is NOT true. We don't say, "I believe that 2+2=4" because it does. I'm not a big label guy since I think generalities and over-simplifications are imprecise. That said, if you were a determinist, then you wouldn't be trying to influence the positions of others since you believe their courses are uninfluenceable. This one, very simple contradiction is all that is needed to be able to say that philosophy "beats" determinism. A more precise way to phrase it would be to say disprove. Accuracy is the only component that could be described as competing. Just as you wouldn't say that in the context of 2+2, 4 beats 5.

Thank you for sharing. To suddenly be handicapped can be a very difficult transition. There was two points I wanted to make. The first one, which I hope is obvious, is that if person A attacks person B over drain plugs, it's not at all about the drain plugs. Which leads to my second point... Your stepfather was living his values. For example, if a man doesn't view rape as an option, he will not rape a woman even if she rejects him. In order for your stepfather to physically assault (yes, forcefully poking somebody is assault, especially given the size disparity) either of you, assault has to be a possibility in his values. If he did not assault people his size who could evade him, then you know that it's not that what happened to your mother changed him or pushed him over the edge. He was simply living his values in a set of circumstances where he understood there was little risk of consequences. If you accept that the man was living his values, then yes, your mother was responsible for bringing him into your lives. Which would be consistent given that she chose to have children with a man she divorced not long after having children. I'm not saying she's a bad person, just that her values didn't place the safety of her children as high as they should've been with either of those men. There's a lot of people out there that have children as if it's something they can just wing or it's something we don't need to study as if it's innate. But for as long as we've been able to communicate and write stuff down, we've had the potential to do just about everything BETTER whether it's innate or not. If I were in your shoes, I'd have a really hard time deciding what to do with these points. I don't think being handicapped that she gets a pass. On the other hand, she's experienced a great deal of suffering. However, this doesn't diminish her responsibility, or how much YOU need for her to own this and hopefully make up for it. I hope others are able to come up with some good advice in this regard. The best I could come up with is to confront her on these points for your own sake. Managing her suffering is not your responsibility I hope this is helpful. I really feel for you and for the difficulty of the situation that you are in and that your mother is in.

The Initech page should have a Swingline banner ad on it

I smile literally every single time people address issues with voluntary solutions. Thanks for sharing that. And kudos to you for modeling assertiveness in such a way that your son was able to handle that so well.

Police do every day in every city. The fact that you (and they) use the word American is exactly the problem. "The enemy" aren't people because they're not "Americans" is the mindset. Then all you have to do to override the American limitation is point at somebody and say "terrorist" and their life is ruined, if not ended immediately. Torture is okay, indefinite detention is okay, acting without investigating is okay, killing without trial is okay. None of this is precise and all of it has margins of error up to 98%!! Going back to police, it's enough to say, "That guy has a burned out tail light!" Things got even worse once we put tazers into their hands since they're "non-lethal." The nazis didn't do Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Fallujah. That was done by the US. The same US that claimed to be at odds with Syrian chemical weapons while rending part of the planet uninhabitable by anything that desires to be genetically recognizable as a human. The same US that detonated over 300 nuclear bombs within Earth's atmosphere. Besides, what difference does better or worse make? It's all immoral and it all leads to the extermination of millions of HUMAN BEINGS. I try to avoid anecdotal evidence whenever possible, but one of my best friends and certainly the most influential person in my life over the last decade was in the military. He's also one of the most gentle people I've ever met. So to be clear, I'm not talking about the character of the individual, even though it certainly is tainted by the actual point of contention: the enforcer class.

You are ignoring that words like bad, good, and "well-being" are vague and subjective. Property rights are objective. Let me ask you this: Do you accept self-ownership? I ask because "well-being" violates self-ownership. Your use of it after me making this point suggests clinging to a predetermination.

So you're a selfish asshole for not partaking of invasive surgery for the sake of somebody you don't even know, but he's in a position to say so despite not taking a few minutes to scrub some cleanser here and there as is his obligation? You're not very bad at French if you've never been exposed to French. It would be more accurate to say that your parents never modeled for you or taught you how to negotiate, nor it's importance. Anyways, any sort of physical communication is a demonstration of lack of ability of verbal communication. You put your blender in your room rather than explain to him the kitchen is the room it was made for. He slams a door rather than address his frustrations. Both of you are avoiding verbal communication with these actions. Not criticizing you; It's understandable to not invite the wrath of another, especially over little things. It's probably way too late, but for future's sake, I'll tell you one thought that popped into my head about the blender. I would've made a couple shakes with it, handed him one, and said, "I can only make these for us if the blender's in the kitchen." It's a mutually beneficial gesture, it allows you to be both outgoing and assertive, and incentivizes him to not try and diminish you or your portion of your shared space. Once upon a time, I was living on my own in an apartment complex. Right about the time I was going to order some pizza, I noticed that some new tenants were moving in below me (8 units per building, so kind of cozy). I had considered ordering some extra as sort of a welcome gesture. In the end, I chose not to because I was kind of ripe and wasn't up for cleaning up just to meet the new neighbors. I wasn't accustomed to socializing with strangers. Anyways, they ended up befriending an arrogant asshole who lived across the hall from me. He REALLY didn't like the fact that I owned a gun, complained to the management, and it led to them not charging my CC on file, then evicting me for non-payment. These people stood outside the doorway and talked very loudly quite often. I once heard them talking about my techno music, which surprised me since I've always kept my music low because I have very sensitive ears. As I look back, I can't help but think that a 10 minute shower and $10 pizza might've made that entire progression look very different. I'm not blaming myself for the nefarious actions of others in either of our stories. Just pointing out different, proactive ways of bridging the gap between people. Don't mean to play the hindsight game as it's an unfair one. Thought I'd mention it since it sounds like such a thing would be helpful for you too.

It is unclear to me how it came to pass that you were living with people you didn't know or like. It also is unclear as to how a place with four people could come to pass that one could legitimately walk up to another and say you need to clean the bathroom. Is there a schedule? Do you guys take turns?

Sorry, but just as with my last post, I think that's wishful thinking. They don't have to declare war on "their own people" (ugh) if "their own people" actively participate in the theft of themselves and legitimize the thief. What future presidents? Do you not see the wholesale grab for the throne, everything it COULD embody, and the support of every person in a position formerly (and erroneously) called a check or balance? I think the soldiers of today are colder than Nazis. If for no other reason that they have the lessons of the Nazis to draw on. Also, nazism is nationalized socialism, which is precisely what everybody is cheering for in the US. We could have a revolution TODAY without a drop of blood being spilled if the enforcer class said, "No, morality doesn't apply differently to you or me even if you entice me with spoils and an artificial privileged class."

I wasn't trying to help you. My every post was made for your children's sake. The fact that I have to help you to help them is just a bonus. All of them... except your father. How can you rebel if you do not know how to identify what it is you're rebelling against? How can you erode something you don't understand how it comes to be?

College is only a failure if you think its goal is education. The purpose of SCHOOLING in general is to break an individual and replace their will with the agenda(s) of your choosing.

That's not helpful as it is subjective. Like in your stabbing in the eye vs stabbing in the eye, good and bad aren't relevant. Consent is. A person can choose to not consent to being stabbed in the eye even if the net benefit would be "good." A person can choose to consent to being stabbed in the eye even if the net benefit would be "bad." In order to know if the act is moral, immoral, or amoral, you have to look at whether or not property rights are being violated. Or in the case of amoral, if property rights are not part of the equation, such as keeping a horse captive and using him as transportation.

I think we have empirical evidence to support this NOT being plausible. A couple states recently said that marijuana was legal and people in the federal government threw a fit. Obama is the next Caesar. Playing by the rules on a smaller scale will have no effect on somebody that doesn't acknowledge the rules.

http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38735-statist-video-propaganda-equating-public-school-with-freedom/

I once read a story about ostracism working. Girl A loses cellphone. Girl B finds phone. Girl A calls phone and asks for it to be returned. Girl B refuses. Girl A publicizes events. Girl B is spammed by people from the internet shaming her. Girl B returns phone. I was talking with a buddy of mine and wanted to share this story with him despite it being kind of a weak argument for ostracism as a solution to isolated immorality in a free society. I figured if I could find an article with the specifics, it would help the argument. Google thief shame return and be prepared to be blown away at how much people are already using this tool to combat theft! And this is without any formal effort to track such things for the sake of "the public good."

Moral claims are objective and therefor can be (dis)proven by way of empirical evidence. Logic is a way to interpret the empirical evidence, which I believe was what WorBlux was saying in the first place.