dsayers

You're assuming that there was a Jesus and that the stories told about him were passed off as if true. Even if that's the case, he supported an ideology that said kill non-believers. This is in line with killing non-believers so much so that it's the same words.

Stef doesn't earn credit for having stamina or honor. He earns credit for making the choice. You didn't mention what it is exactly that you can't keep up with. But I wanted to point this out so that you will know that if you don't meet a goal you set for yourself, it's not because of stamina or honor, but because you made a choice. Either you chose to set a goal you couldn't achieve or you chose not to achieve an attainable goal. For what it's worth, I'm sort of on a hiatus myself. Mine's more of a pause in between study sessions to not get burned out and to evaluate what I've just learned.

I had tears of joy in my eyes as I typed it. It's actually my answer to your question as to why congratulate... There are parents out there that treat their children like shit and think they're doing well by them. There are parents out there that treat their children like shit, are exposed to the truth, and double down. Parents who treat their children like shit NEED to be an authoritarian and saying, "We fucked up," directly undermines one's own credibility as an authoritarian. You were faced with a decision where doing the right thing came at great personal risk and cost and you chose it anyways. As a child of parents who wouldn't, it means a lot to me that you can, so I thank you. Put another way, yes you're now providing what should've been there from the start. The fact that it wasn't there before means it's even harder to do now. I think it's a good thing that the recognition makes you uncomfortable. It would indicate that you truly do own your former actions. It's good to hold onto that, but it's also good to allow yourself to be appreciated for it. I was really happy to read about your son being able to come to you with things most children couldn't.

Mu (invalid question). If Stef consistently speaks of violence not being a valid way of achieving goals, nobody could fight a war in his name. You're asking what would happen if unicorns and leprechauns lived together.

At the age of ten, you wanted to die a soldier's death. This is a stolen childhood. You cannot escape your past, so I understand the benefit in rationalizing it. I too used to redefine my "adversity" as if it was strength of character. But strength of character requires honesty above all and it's not honest to say, "It's okay that that guy stole my car because otherwise I wouldn't have walked to work and met my future wife that gave me a ride as a result." The measure of morality is if it violates the property rights of others, not if they survive the violation of their property rights. How do you know? Wouldn't "never damaged" be better than "damaged and repaired"? And if they were wrong and what was right was available to them, what then? Ignorance isn't an excuse. When you go to buy a laptop, you do your research. Why would how to raise another human being be less important than tech that sits on your shelf half the time? You're saying that it doesn't matter how you treat your children so long as they survive it.

Maybe I'm projecting. If my father figured out that he could gather ammo to use against me by refreshing the post history of X on site Y, it would become part of his daily routine.

Life expectancy is a very complex number. To refer to it as if its an indication of level of coercion in a "health care system" is naive. It ignores factors such as living in one system and seeking care in another. You have called the US a capitalist health care when it's been coercive for over half a century and in the last decade, has taken direct steps towards nationalized socialism (nazism). If any system was truly capitalist, competition and consequences would make it self-correcting, efficient, and conducive to innovation.

Even if they did, it wouldn't be because school was an option that wasn't being utilized in the moment. I think a case could be made that being blown up would be easier on them than having to be imprisoned for 12 years, have no skills, have to become indebted the rest of their lives just to compete with coercive regulations and hurdles of entry, etc. The latter involves a lot of suffering AND feeding the state involuntarily.

Well, the condition doesn't require any empirical evidence, which is why the diagnosis itself is bogus. That's another topic altogether though. We sound as if we're in similar situations with two major differences. When I first moved back home, I was pretty much bankrupt and virtually unemployable. Rent was never part of the equation even though once I was gainfully employed, I pretty much insisted upon it, but they refused. Anyways, I don't know where you are geographically, but where I'm at, if I could afford $800 a month, I wouldn't have to live under anybody specific's roof. That said, if you had agreed to $800/mo, to not honor that while living there would be theft and therefor immoral. I'm really sorry you're living in a place where you're not even allowed to be a person. It sounds like you've repaired yourself enough that it doesn't effect you too much, which is good. I'm there too. However, the reason I tolerate is because of the way it aides my ability to save money. It doesn't sound like this would be the case for you. Have you looked into what just having your own shitty apartment would cost you? Again, I don't know where you're at, but I'll bet you could find one and after utilities, be paying less than $800/mo. So you'd be saving money and the abuse. Is that helpful at all?

NVDA stands for non-visual desktop access. It is an open source screen reader designed to assist the visually impaired with using a computer. With it, Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin can read books aloud. I don't know if these softwares are available on Linux or not, but I would assume so. I noticed that the 2nd edition of Ayn Rand's book is listed as edited in part by Leonard Peikoff. I also see that Leonard Peikoff has written his own book called Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. This book IS available as an audiobook and a quick glance suggests it's structured similarly. Would this be a sufficient substitute?

Doesn't the word "generalization" denotatively concede that it does not apply to all instances? On a side note, I just wanted to encourage those who refer to schooling as education and that which is coercive as "public" to be more precise with their language. If only for the purpose of not assisting those trying to conceal evil with language.

Length I don't mind. Does the series translate well enough as audio only or is the white board necessary? I've got Kindle for PC with Accessibility Plugin. I've got NVDA. I can get the computer to read it aloud to me. BUT 1) If Kindle loses focus, it stops reading. 2) It will only read what's on screen and then stops. 3) I can speed up the rate at which it reads to unintelligible, but cannot reconstitute it in post without it sounding over sythesized to hell. I looked into software that could convert AZW to MP3. No such luck. I did find an online service claiming to be free and able to do it. However it requires an email address. Didn't feel right and given that nobody else offers such a service or software, I don't believe it's legit. The problem is that if I get the book, there's no telling when I'll actually make the time to read it. Whereas with audio, I'll make use of it multiple times, not unlike Stef's An Intro To Philosophy.

LMAO @ blow dart. Good stuff, mate. You know, I'd never have recognized the picture if he hadn't owned it.

The reason I mentioned the bear and disease is to encourage you to look not at the rebellion, but what you're rebelling against. You mentioned "preconceived notions that were ingrained" but not WHO did the ingraining? If you found out your car got stolen, you'd be upset at the situation if you didn't know who did it. If you knew who did it, you could direct your anger towards an individual and work towards restitution. If it was somebody you trusted there would be more to process than just your car getting stolen. Your intro only talked about your childhood getting stolen. It made no mention of who stole it even though it was somebody you knew, trusted, and in fact were dependent upon. If this doesn't make you angry, I would consider it important to figure out why. And a downright emergency if you have children of your own or else you risk making the same excuses for yourself as you've made for others.

The entertainment is in the delivery. It doesn't alter that what they choose to talk about and what stance they choose to take on it are meant to influence. In this regard, it makes them worse as the entertainment component disarms critical thought even more than just being called news.

Welcome. I am happy that you were able to overcome some of your indoctrination and are eager to learn more. Let's start with the most important lesson of all, shall we? Surely you mean rebellious nurture. Unless you're referring to a bear's willingness to eat you or your susceptibility to infection, there's nothing natural to rebel against. At least none listed in your introduction. All I read about was conclusions that were inflicted upon you. I wanted to point this out because I agree with you that education is a solution, even to problems we do not realize are problems. In your very first sentence, you owned something that didn't belong to you. You didn't think that drugs and Russians were evil. These were conclusions inflicted upon you by people that didn't care whether the conclusions were valid and didn't care about you enough to instead teach you how to arrive at conclusions on your own. They used you to reinforce their own invalid conclusions by getting you to repeat it. Why does this distinction matter? Two reasons. For one, you mentioned (and avatar suggests) children. If you don't comprehend the cycle of violence, you will not be able to break out of it. The second being the strong military tone of your back story. Modern human conflict is a direct result of government schooling made to break the will of the innocent, which is a direct result of abuse in the home. Both directly in taking the initiative to break the will of the innocent and indirectly by handing you off to people that would do this too. The idea that people are fundamentally different at all, let alone to polar opposites (can rule vs must be ruled) is crazy. The conclusion of anarchy is the most consistent and sustainable. I wouldn't call that crazy even if it is the minority understanding. It's the minority understanding precisely because of the cycle of violence and breaking the wills of the innocent mentioned above. What do you think about this?

Ignoring the one reply you did get probably won't incentivize others to invest their time. Unless of course you're not actually ignoring it and just don't have anything to say in response to it. At which point you have to extend the same possibility to others for consistency's sake.

How does withholding information lead to reaching an understanding? Couldn't providing one answer (either side) help the other person to understand the nature of the lack of understanding? Wouldn't this lead to a response better tailored for the specifics of the discussion? Note that the final question could be phrased as a statement that would provoke response. I did that to challenge the idea that question and answer are of differing usefulness or even identity.

This was the part that stood out to me above all. Her being bored is not the same thing as you being boring. It could be, but there's no guarantee. Also, your use of "perceived boredom" and "her delusion." If she experienced what she describes as boredom, that's her experience. It seemed as if you were trying to discredit her experience. For example, in the beginning there, you didn't say "she was perceived to be happy to talk." It could be that she's misusing a term or that her experience has nothing to do with what's happening in the moment and is the result of unresolved trauma. In the moment though, if she's expressing her experience, take it for what it is and explore it together. I realize that this can be problematic if discussing her feelings is simultaneously what brings about the disconnect and is the solution for identifying the cause of the disconnect. That's something you can talk about later. Not trying to make it sound simple. It seems like you're doing an excellent job of asserting yourself AND being empathetic of her at a time when it might be difficult to do both. I just wanted to point out that you might be dismissing her experience based on a conclusion you've arrived at by yourself.

Emanuel, I know the put on the spot tactic all too well. I was gutted to hear about what happened to you. How did your mother find out about the post? Will she not also find out about this one? How could they say your father was a good man AND paralyzed your mother? How could they say there's nothing your mother could do because of your father if she in fact chose that man? I am in a similar situation as you. I really need to get out of where I am, but am afraid of making it on my own. I've done it before, but economic times have changed dramatically. You're younger and this is to your advantage. I relied on my family and who knew who to get my first half dozen jobs. It prevented me from developing interview skills or even understand that I needed to be able to be hired based on my merit. Don't fall into the same trap I did if you can avoid it. By this I mean try and get employment elsewhere. The difficulty you're facing is that you're dependent on her both for your place to live and your income. That's not going to be an easy situation to escape.

How does violating a contract with one's wife or violating the property of their children equate with "good capitalist" and "understand free market principles"? For that matter, where was "good person" ever even talked about? Just as in your drug thread, you're confusing objective definitions and subjective descriptions.

Competition and consequences are what make a free market self-correcting.

Is it just me, or is this an acknowledgement that we're not talking about moral agents and continuing as if the acknowledgement wasn't made and is in fact the opposite of the truth?

This seems like a restating of your initial post. Which would require ignoring that it was pointed out that nobody says that it doesn't EFFECT others, that good or bad decision has no bearing on the moral component you bring up, and that the only measure for morality is whether it violates the property rights of others. Is it that the input you're ignoring was faulty in some manner? If so, I think addressing that would be more productive than simply re-stating what the input refuted. Or is it that the input didn't conform to your input? Put another way, are you more interested in the truth or your position being true?

Why improve the service you provide when you can just threaten the lives of your customers? I guess we're supposed to ignore the portrayal of the imprisonment that makes escape possible and desirable.