dsayers

I didn't read beyond this appeal to insecurity. Maybe your energies could be better spent looking into why you think this passes for an argument, is a valid way to communicate with another human being, and how valid your position must not be if it requires you to approach communicating it by not approaching it at all.

I would recommend New Rules of Lifting: Supercharged. Never underestimate the mind-body connection. Also, I learned more from it than I did throughout all twelve years of government schooling. I've been applying it for three and a half months now and the results have been amazing.

A person rejecting the validity of 2+2=4 has no bearing on its truth value. The fact that if you understand your actions, you are responsible for them doesn't require acknowledgement from others. Citing things that lack the capacity for reason and therefore the capability to acknowledge wouldn't support your claim even if it were true. How did you arrive at this conclusion? You might want to define your terms. You continue to ask about exists and concepts, but it's unclear if we have the same understanding of what these terms mean. To me, exists means is comprised of matter and energy. So while "true" doesn't exist, this doesn't mean it is an invalid concept. Whether or not it's subjective or objective is dependent on what it is referring to. If "I care about X" is true, true would be subjective because what it is describing isn't objectively verifiable. Meanwhile, if "I demonstrated that I care about X by contributing to it by way of Y and Z" is true, true would be objective because my having done Y and Z are objectively verifiable.

Why go to such elaborate measures? Help people to understand that people cannot live in different, opposing moral categories and you've defeated the State in their lives. This reframes ideas such as tax evasion to theft evasion. People are saying no to the State (including deliberately engaging in black/grey markets for example) more and more every day. Secondly, stored value is a technological advance for humanity. Consider your software for table analogy. In order for this to work, a number of variables have to align. Person A has to have the ability to write the software person B wants at the exact same time that person B has the ability to provide a table, both people have to have met, have these desires at the same time, and both consider both items to be identical in value. Finally, with things like Bitcoin, people have already started doing exactly what you're calling for. Which is in observation of my first two points. What do you think about this?

I like your post, algernon. I'm also glad that you brought focus to the word support. It's another one of the things I've been thinking alot about lately. It's another one of those words that have been bastardized. Kind of like how taxation is supposedly fair and righteous, even to people who grasp that theft is not. Most people, when they use the word support, mean that they agree with or worse, follow. The former is passive, while the other unthinking. Whereas support sounds calculated and active. I digress. 1) This does not address the topic of propaganda. 2) Why are my efforts to encourage my brothers and sisters to think and/or live consistently in accordance with their stated goals important to you? (tu quoque) 3) You poison the well when you say anarchist and libertarian. Political voting is incompatible with both of these ideas, so it matters not if people who would engage in political voting would/could otherwise be described with these labels. 4) Voting is a decision, not voting is the origin. Therefore, the burden of proof lies with those who would deliberately deviate from the origin. They would need to make the case. I've even been so kind as to offer, in several places, multiple null hypotheses. Such as demonstrating that somebody else can own me, that a vote makes a difference, that who sits on the throne impacts our lives relative to other throne-sitters, that validating the throne encroaches freedom, and that pretending something that is imaginary is real does not suggest that it is real. I have yet to see anybody tackle any of these. I have yet to see them even try

@Gavitor: You don't own me. This means your vote is imaginary. So you can't give it away. Pretending it's real (participating) does not resist your enslavement, it plays along with it. Pretending it's real is accepting that it is real in action. Pretending it's real doesn't hinder those that need you to believe it's real... You could literally go down your post and plug this in and it refutes every challenge you've offered.

https://steemit.com/anarchism/@dsayers/propaganda-and-political-voting When my father got hitched to my mother, he married into a stereotypical redneck family. Drunk, violent, family beaters mostly. He inflicted the conclusion upon me that drunks try to get other people to drink with them. Though he didn't share his methodology with me, I think he was right. Humans are a social species. It is comforting to know we are not alone in our addictions, our underlying abusive pasts, the dysfunctional world we live in... and our delusions. Humans are universality machines. Even in the womb, we find ourselves in an unfamiliar place, with the biological imperative to survive, thrive, and multiply. It is paramount then that we be able to accurately identify items in our environment. Mistake a grizzly bear for a teddy bear and chances are your lack of discernment will not survive natural selection. Part of this is learning the ways in which our environments are static. Everybody fell down when learning to walk. Imagine instead that we lived in a world where gravity could fluctuate. Things that we take for granted such as balance might not be possible to master. Because of the consistency of gravity, that is one less thing our senses do not have to account for while providing for our survival moving forward. Occam's Razor declares that the explanation that requires the least amount of assumptions is usually the more accurate explanation. While not a proof, this tends to bear out. Since I've learned to process the trauma of my past and start to think rationally, I've often found it's easy to see through the obfuscation by looking for the contradictions and double-standards. This is something that plagues so many people because almost all of it is inflicted on children as early as possible, in an attempt to override their natural scrutiny and drive for universalization of ideas. Ever wonder why you've never seen a bumper sticker that asserts that 2+2=4? Such a thing is not necessary because we learn this is true from a very early age. Imagine there was somebody who needed for you to believe that 2+2=5. Simply claiming as much would not be sufficient. They would need a great deal of propaganda to successfully convince anybody of such a thing, let alone large swaths of the population. Propaganda that is rooted in ideas such as improving your life or avoiding harm. We've all seen bumper stickers that say things like "Jesus saves" or "Support Our Troops." Again, while not a proof, the amount of times such things need to be repeated suggests they are not accurate and/or cannot survive without being repeated ad infinitum. Consider political voting now. It is neither normal nor rational for people to wander about, wondering how they can go about achieving their goals with a ruler interfering and telling them what to do. Yet if you look around, you will even find people on the other side of the globe thinking about United States political candidates. There is much propaganda abound, such as "Vote or Die!" and "If you don't vote, you're voting..." or my least favorite: "I'm voting for X to avoid Y." The sheer scale by which this is repeated should be enough to give anybody pause. "Why is it so important to other people that voting be engaged in and legitimized?" I often wonder. I expect it is because as social creatures, we do not want to feel alone in our delusions. It's easier to sacrifice a child to the volcano when all your neighbors pretend it's okay too. For if you were to protest, you might me the next person tossed into your demise. Nobody who intends to vote or would tell you to vote has any reason to suspect that by doing so, they will be making any changes in their own life. In fact, I would argue they spend so much time and energy on such things for the express purpose of avoiding taking on the responsibility to apply their energies to things they actually have control over, such as improving themselves.

What do you mean by "generally accepted"? Patents are strictly fictitious. If you have an idea or a process, you own that. However, the moment you release it, it is no longer yours. If I'm not mistaken, this is the fundamental pitfall in the idea of intellectual property. What do you mean by "demand"? Taco Bell doesn't demand that I pay X for Y. They inform me that X is what they charge for Y. I am free to oblige, negotiate for a different price, or refuse. I started to get particularly lost here. Why do you ask? Ideal compared to what? Ethics/morality is predicated on property rights, not the other way around.

This was all covered in the article.

This is the problem with viewing people as teams, whether it's the local school football team, nations, etc: Is that you risk missing the bad that comes from your team and the good that comes from the other. One of the things I enjoy about my tribe being rational thinkers is that usually, they will challenge me when I'm wrong and are open and appreciative of being challenged when they're wrong. It doesn't matter how much good somebody has done. You don't own me. "Had to" is an absurdity in that it's just not possible to have to. The test for sociopathy does not include age. Whether one person is a sociopath or not has no bearing on the validity of self-ownership. You don't own me and Trump can't own me. Why are the pro-voters not addressing this point I wonder?

The claim your input was attempting refute was "History is full of empirical evidence that a psychopath pretending to own hundreds of millions of people does nothing to help anybody." This statement is either true or false. Whether it is true or false is not at all impacted by what I think. Whether it is true or false is not at all impacted by pointing out that two words which were never claimed to mean the same thing do not mean the same thing. You are deflecting and I suspect it is because you want to refute what was said to support your prejudice that political voting is productive, but are unable to do so by addressing the claim directly.

In keeping with the Bomb in the Brain series' call to understand WHY people believe what they believe, take a step back, look at each post in this thread, and ask "does this make any effort to address the topic at hand?" Then see if you can spot the correlation between these posts

What I think is irrelevant. People do not exist in different, opposing moral categories is true. Subjugating people is not helping them is true. The only thing you can achieve with violence that you cannot achieve without violence is true.

I am not a parent, but I wanted to throw my two cents in anyways. Self-knowledge is self-love. It leads to choosing better partners. Virtuous people of integrity will experience a love that a child will only enhance. They will discuss it, and as much of the minutia as they can foresee at length so that none of the big stuff will come "out of nowhere." In other words, having a child together will amplify what's already there. A shaky relationship will be shaken apart. A strong relationship will grow stronger.

This is bias confirmation that would only lead to moving the goalposts. History is full of empirical evidence that a psychopath pretending to own hundreds of millions of people does nothing to help anybody. The information is already available.

My thanks to the people who are helping this to be a meaningful conversation. You kind of answered your own question Because they do not have such authority to give, the attempt to give it is purely imaginary. In order for a behavior to be immoral, it has to be binding upon another without their consent. The act of voting isn't binding upon anybody and therefore is amoral. Another point that would address your hired hitman scenario (assuming the hitman went through with it) is that person A can never be more responsible for person B's actions than person B is. With the caveat of course that where coercion is present, consent cannot be. For a more detailed explanation of this, here is the video that convinced me. Isn't the act of voting more than just condoning? isn't it granting authority, giving licence, delegating rights that the person voting does not have themselves? As you rightly pointed out, your vote has no influence on the behaviors of the politicians and the agents of the State. Whether the force will then be deployed or not is not up to the voter but to the politicians and the agents of the state... However couldn’t you argue that voting can be used to encourage someone to use force in order to defend you from whatever the alternative would be? I argued exactly this in the article and I think this answers your own question here. How is someone who votes agreeing to the implicit premise of voting that the winner of the vote has the legitimate power to rule? How is that someone accepting their enslavement rather than resisting it... In the current world we live in the state is commonly accepted and legitimized. I think we can agree, that If that wasn’t the case, there would be no voting. People would just stop this madness right away. So I think that voting is rather caused by this acceptance and not the other way around. Asking the State to solve the problem is not taking a step towards "getting rid of the State." There is nothing you can achieve with violence that you cannot achieve without violence except violence itself. You do more to get rid of the State by not voting on principle because you would be demonstrating your values with your behaviors. Having a different perspective is not synonymous with being unaware! This is a false dichotomy. And presumptive as I do not think anybody participating on these boards are unaware that FDR's position is that Muslims will destroy "Western Civilization" and that Trump can stop this (paraphrasing). Which does nothing to address the topic at hand, which is that political voting is antithetical to the acceptance of property rights.There appears to be a general lack of awareness as to what is on the line and the stakes of the next several months for the future of Western Civilization as a whole. "What is on the line and the stakes of the next several months" is unknowable. We DO know however the ways in which fiat currencies are debased, empires implode by declaring war on their own citizenry, etc. Meaning that even if your implication is accurate, the State either created that environment or has been powerless to stop it. If you ask me, the perpetual false flags, problems too big for people to have any power against without guns pointed at their heads, so give the State more power, stop and frisk, steal and kill whatever they feel like without consequence IS the destruction of any "civilization" worth preserving. The attacks being referenced are both tragic and problematic. The State is not a scalpel in the hands of a steady, caring individual. It is a nuclear bomb in the hands of a psychopath. We've see the way the so called war on terror has not stopped terror, has spread terror, and has been used as an excuse to kill innocent people the world over. People do not want terror so those who wish to utilize it have to fight against EVERYBODY who would stand in their way. The State only kills innocent people who could stand in their way, ties the hands of the rest of the people who could stand in their way (the State hates competition), and arms/trains the very people who need to be stopped. Pretending you have the power to hand over the ownership of all of your neighbors will not stop this. Political voting is antithetical to the acceptance of property rights.

Here is an article I've been meaning to write ever since I figured out how political voting cannot be considered self-defense.

Almost all of the women I've been with was prior to self-knowledge. In every single one of those relationships, I was obsessed with my partners' pasts and that I wasn't the only one. Near as I can tell, my obsession had two main roots. The first being that I was focusing outwardly in an attempt to avoid focusing on myself (don't like for Miss Right, BE Mister Right). The second being because I was a narcissist in keeping with my original programming. It was an affront to me that they could "do such a thing to me" even though we hadn't met, and it's a very unrealistic expectation to begin with. In the one virtuous relationship I've been in since self-knowledge, I was NOT obsessed with my partner's past. I WAS angry with every last person who had abused her and/or groomed her for such abuse. I was empathetic towards the suffering she had endured. I was very pleased that it hadn't manifested by way of STDs or pregnancies. We were able to share some very passionate love-making. This was after we had processed some of our own sexual histories together as well. I remember it was particularly meaningful to her that we were abused, but (not counting my circumcision) none of it led to being permanently robbed of enjoying such things in healthy ways. I wouldn't dare try to universalize my own experience or project it onto you. I just thought I'd share my observations in hopes that maybe you can see some of yourself or your partner in there.

How do you know? Somebody said so is not a valid methodology for determining what is true.

Somebody has told you to calm down... what next? Here is an article I've written in an attempt to deconstruct what it means to be told to calm down.

Word. Two of the most satisfying love-making sessions I've been in literally involved no negotiation. One of them followed a disagreement we were having. She was so grateful of the insight I provided (and that I wasn't trying to satisfy my preferences, push her out of the conversation, or inflict a conclusion) that she lunged at me and just took me. Greatest night of our lives. The other time, the only words spoken in advance were "Are we not going to shower now?" That time, I took her. I'll never forget that look on her face afterwards. But like I said before, there was a reasonable expectation of consent. I'm sure if either of us had resisted, the other would've yielded.

I didn't get that he was equating things, but rather taking a proposition to its logical conclusion. It's hyperbole and I find it to be very effective myself, including here.

It's a difficult question. I was once a Christian, but not by choice. I personally do not have any problem having a discussion with somebody about religion, trying to figure out how/why they hold the conclusions that they do. It kind of ties in with my first post; If they're a rational thinker, then it wouldn't be very hard to help them over that hump. Or if they're not, it wouldn't take much to learn this about them. I think the real complication comes in the form of if they ARE a rational thinker. Once they begin to reject religiosity, their entire world will change. They'll have to spend that much more internal resources on reconciling things they previously "knew" to reality. The relationships they had will all be challenged. Even the ones who don't find religiosity to be a requisite would view such a thing as a drastic life shift, possibly indicative of being brainwashed. Which you would get the credit for in the event that something goes "wrong." Say for example your theoretical partner accepts reason, her existing support network gets fickle on her, then she backslides for comforts sake. She'd think the worst of you. I'm strong enough to handle all of that. Still, I don't know if I'd want to for myself. I've lived a life full of complications and do not wish to invite more. On the other hand, if you found the right one, such burdens would seem seem lighter than a feather. I wish you the best either way, brother.

It's a trap. 1) The State doesn't solve problems. So you don't need a surrogate for something that isn't there. 2) The only thing you can achieve with violence that you cannot achieve without violence is violence itself. So if the problem has a solution, you don't need the State to achieve it. 3) Theft, assault, rape, and murder are either immoral or they are not. Whether you can solve ONE problem doesn't change this. 4) Nobody is great at everything. The "best" solutions to problems are going to come from people having discussions together. Discussions that cannot happen while there is a State that will initiate the use of force against anybody that tries to compete with it. 5) How will we address _____ in a free society has already been established elsewhere. See point 4, combined with the internet. If they were genuinely curious, they would consult the sum of human consciousness (the internet). Asking you is just an excuse to ignore the reality that they are responsible for their own actions, humans cannot exist in different, opposing moral categories, and governments are predicated on immoral behavior. I'm sure there's more points to be made. The bottom line is it's a trap. They are merely draining you of your time and resources, miring you down in minutia that ultimately doesn't matter. People just want to live their lives and such an evil would hamper that. Meaning there are more people who would be morally opposed to "sex trafficking" than would try to effect it. Network strength would be the answer to almost all of the "bad people are about" scenarios.

Numerous people have pointed out to you that a single person or behavior is an instance. I have already defined universal as being true in all instances at all times. You're telling me I'm wrong by agreeing with my position. Perhaps YOU should define what universal means. Perhaps you should define what behavior means. To me, a behavior is anything externally observable that you voluntarily do with your body. So when you bathe yourself, you are not acting upon another, but you are engaging in a behavior. I've never heard a definition of behavior that requires another person. It is true that behaviors that are binding upon others are eligible for moral consideration. Is this what you meant to communicate?