dsayers

But that's like saying that a church is proof that God exists. It only proves that some people are willing to behave as if he exists. I did some traveling across the country twice in recent times. As I passed over these so called borders, all that changed was who was willing to threaten me for what with perceived legitimacy. It's a scam.

Gah! Too many labels! Different people see different things in different labels. Let's just talk about reality. First of all, there's no such thing as minarchy. Statism is statism. For a convincing argument for this, search YouTube for Larken Rose vs Mark Skousen Debate in Anarchapulco. Secondly, nothing can both be objective AND call for government. They are mutually exclusive ideas because humans objectively do not exist in different, opposing moral categories, which government is predicated on. Similarly, there's no such thing as a voluntarily funded government. Voluntary and government are mutually exclusive, not unlike rape and love-making. Pants don't nourish you. So what? This does nothing to devalue pants as nourishment is not their purpose. Anarchy means no rulers. I can't think of anything that "defends" individual rights that is not predicated on the acceptance that humans exist in the same moral category (anarchy). When you deal with reality, you get rid of the obfuscations.

That was my first thought too. Like, aren't all nations virtual since nations don't exist?

I am so sorry to hear this! I can sympathize. About two weeks into Kindergarten, I remember all these adults treating me like I was an alien. I was then put in a room with a very cold woman and submitted to testing. At which point it was determined that I was just short of being a genius (I'm told I was walking and talking at 9 months and multiplying and dividing at age 3). This was very isolating as it set me apart from what would have been my peers. The district eventually put together a special gifted and talented program that shipped several students in the district to a particular elementary school (not mine) for one day a week. This was isolating on multiple fronts. Then in junior high, there was a proper gifted and talented track. But because of all the isolation and my resultant shyness, combined with the fact that we were poor living in a preppy suburb, I was an outcast among them also. More isolation The sad part about it all is that outsiders look at this stuff and praise the school district for such measures. My interpretation is that it is a veiled confession that lumping children by AGE is a flawed premise, even if lumping them against their will was a valid precursor for real education. I'm somewhat embarrassed that I recognize that contradiction; I'd hate for those schools to take credit for my intellectual capabilities! Meanwhile, I got awful behavioral ratings throughout my schooling because I absorbed the information so quickly, it was dull as hell sitting around waiting for it to get explained and re-explained to everybody else. There actually came a point in elementary school where they lumped me in with the "retards" and behavioral outcasts. There was no curriculum there. Just heightened domination and will-breaking. Fuck government schools! /rant

I'm not so sure. Especially in such a public, interconnected place, social and familial ostracism is very reliable catch-all. This is why you don't largely see people engaging in pro-slavery talk except for shock value: They understand that slavery is largely seen as "bad." Whereas you HAVE to support your troops!!1!

If you're going to engage in any behavior that requires a recharge afterwards, be sure it's self-edifying. Don't expend your precious resources for naught. I recommend recharging by watching Stef's Bomb in the Brain series. You can't change the minds of people without first understanding WHY they hold the conclusions that they do. If it's not based on logic, reason, and evidence, then those things will not convince them otherwise. In fact, to challenge their beliefs and fail to change them will actually strengthen them.

I won't pretend to be able to answer the titular question for you. However, I wanted to push back on these quotes here as I find them to be competing claims. Beautiful is not a quality. Intelligence is only as useful as what it's being applied to. Having potential and squandering it would actually make that intellect a strike against her in my book. How caring is it to attempt suicide? Can she truly "get you" if she tries to hurt you in this fashion? This is dicknapping and the highest order of manipulation. Did you two talk about it afterwards? Was she triggered? Do you personally want children at some point? Would future you want for you to have tried to reform what you have or cut your losses for his sake?

How did America go from statism to statism?! How does one go from B to C when reciting the alphabet? How did you go from a fertilized egg to a multi-trillion celled organism? How did the boat at the beginning of Titanic go from unsinkable to sunk? Strawman. No. In fact you implied that it was hassle free. Somehow, you experience no cognitive dissonance when telling somebody that in order to ESCAPE a bully, they must first APPROACH that bully to get their permission. If I vote that your wallet is mine, what does this mean? Nothing. I would need the fictitious power of the State for my vote to mean anything. You're basically saying that you could talk an entity into killing itself when as you pointed out, its track record is to do nothing less than take the people at their word and amass as much power (the opposite of killing itself) as possible. PERCEIVED LEGITIMACY is the lifeblood of the State. You ADD TO THIS when you vote. You detract from this when you step out of that mental prison and understand that you ARE free and that you can NOT overpower the perceived legitimate State with force and need to instead whittle away that perceived legitimacy in part by convincing others to NOT vote.

I'm in Toledo. I actually had traveled to Dayton with a couple buddies of mine when we went to take the class portion of the Concealed Handgun License application process. I'm glad I traveled out of the way to do so as the instructor I chose was very helpful. You could even say he saved my life in a way.

Exactly. This is only partially true. There were deficiencies, but they were inflicted upon you. I noticed that while you were contemplating your peers, you weren't contemplating your parents. The isolation you describe serves no evolutionary purpose. It would however benefit abusive parents. You won't have the power to address this until you properly identify where it came from and have a proportionate emotional experience regarding that.

Enter the internet. As Jeffrey Tucker has point out, we are living in a Jetson's world and the internet has allowed us to subvert all the gatekeepers of yore.

Not only is this a false trichotomy, but it's false across the board. You can NOT move, without their permission, paying their fees, filling out their forms, or doing so in a way they okay. You can NOT overthrow it by force because they have greater technology and perceived legitimacy. You can NOT change it through votes! This has been pointed out so many times already. The perceived legitimacy is the lynch pin. If you can convince people that humans cannot exist in different, opposing moral categories, that taxation is theft, that VOTING ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING (which is NOT doing nothing as you continue to claim), they are seen as nothing more than the annoying mosquitos that they are. If the enforcer class rejected the proposition that they are immune from morality, we'd have a revolution TODAY without a drop of blood shed. What's the view like from this mental prison you so desperately insist on staying within? Must be breathtaking.

Careful not to conflate science with coercively funded research, which many call science. Peer review suggests that reality is up to us, which is false. The scientific method requires that a finding be repeatable, due to the observed consistency of matter and energy. This is the closest to "peer review" that would be philosophically sound, but could not be accurately described as peer reviewed. "Verified" would be a more accurate term.

Because arguing denotes a potential for changing the understanding of the person being argued with/towards. Because NOT arguing with a brick wall denotes that the person arguing can choose whether to argue it or not.

Suppose all of this is true. None of this is predicated on believing a fairy tale. If you imagine you are satiated and therefore do not eat, you will die. Being able to accurately identify the world around you is paramount to survival. "Do what I say for no reason other than I said so or I will set you on fire forever," is neither moral nor universifiable. Assertion. Even if it were true, what a person's values are do not matter so long as they are not stealing from, assaulting, raping, or murdering other moral actors. Atheism is accepting that there is no deity. No (lack of) values logically follows. So even if what you said was true, it would be incidental. I would argue that understanding that our limits are the other people that are actually around us instead of perceived threats from the bogeyman would lead to a more peaceful society. You cannot derive an ought from an is. Your methodology is flawed. All you need to look at to know how helpful it's NOT is that it is almost exclusively perpetuated by being inflicted upon children who lack the mental fortitude (or perhaps just the freedom of survival) to reject it.

Or better yet, to accept what is true regardless of what they THINK is right. Poisoning the well. Being politically aware beyond the fact that humans do not exist in different, opposing moral categories is a waste of resources.

It's a performative contradiction. Determinists do not try to convince brick walls or even dolphins. Just humans.

I'm no expert, so by no means am I saying that I'm right. That said, I am motivated to provide a great deal of push back on this article. I think that for a TRAUMATIZED child, experiencing APPREHENSION towards meeting new people would follow. Yet if you leave a child free to roam, they will wander off. Because--and I think this point is antithetical to the article's position--children are curious and as new lifeforms in this established world, are trying to learn about their world, indeed for survival's sake. This assertion seems poorly thought out. The only way a total stranger will have influence over a child greater than their caregivers is if the one they have with their caregivers is actually THAT BAD. This is why it seems to me as if the article is describing traumatized children instead of human nature. This is true, but does nothing to normalize shyness. "This is safe" will always win out over "this is untested" in terms of ANY living creature's preferences. Untested might kill us! Safe has been vetted. This is why robbery victims feel so violated for example. Pity the article didn't use "upset when separated" to segue into speaking out against daycare and government schools. Humans are social creatures. Social outwardness serves an evolutionary purpose. A healthy experience with their parents is all a baby needs to accept that humans are likely trustworthy. Shyness is a prejudice and would indicate prior trauma at the hands of human beings.

You're missing the point. Votes don't matter. They just change the rules and/or sometimes steal elections. It's a farce to keep otherwise good people occupied at NOT solving the REAL issue, which is that they're enslaved in their own minds.

Put another way, in order for a government to declare war without, they must first declare war within. Prior to the so-called Patriot Act for example, many of the things in the PA had been shot down as un-Constitutional. So let's declare a war on terror and then people will let us do such things anyways because we've made them afraid to live without it.

Ah, so your mind is closed because you're dealing with something from the past instead of what's being said in the present. Thanks for sharing. BTW, this is not an argument. When you stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, and yell "la la la la la," the fingers in your ears are literally the walls of the prison you are in. Deflection, assertion, and poisoning the well. You haven't been making any arguments in this entire exchange. Just scare tactics and satire. I've put forth many arguments. X != -X is an argument from first principles, which you have yet to address despite it being put forth what? Like five times? If you don't like the way somebody reacts to you just repeating yourself over and over again, you could always just not do that. Finally, ad hominem - directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining. At no point in time have I NOT addressed your position. Try again.

I disagree. Sure it's possible she lied, perhaps even that she forgot. But there's not a chance that you overreacted. You're talking about a time when you were smaller than her and dependent upon her for your survival. Assaulting you was essentially a death threat at the biological level. Unless you unleashed a nuke just to eliminate her specifically, I don't think anything you did could've been described as an overreaction to being issued a death threat by somebody with an enormous power disparity over you. I think this is deceptive language for the purpose of protecting your abusers. More accurate would be "I have been programmed to erase myself for the comfort of my abusers." So what? Are rape victims not actually victims because some people actually get murdered? NO. What was done to you was awful not because you win the most-mistreated-human contest, but because it was awful. "My parents are killing me, but overall did a pretty good job." Doesn't that strike you as contradictory? How do you know? What evidence do you have that they did a pretty good job? If they never assaulted anybody else, isn't that proof that they did a really shitty job?

*the illusion of choice There's a reason you continue to disregard and not yield to this refutation. Here, "system" is obfuscation. It's my problem if I go into a Taco Bell and take a bunch of napkins in that the price of my burritos will rise accordingly. However, if I don't vote for Taco Bell, I'm not allowing Burger King to impact their market share. Unless of course I actually use that vote to vote for Burger King. Because--get this--inaction doesn't equal action! :O I also noticed that you continue to conflate not voting with "doing nothing." And you continue to speak as if dismantling the mafia from within is the only solution. These are mental prisons. Which is ironic because breaking out of that mental prison is all that it takes. And what I do in lieu of voting is try to free as many slaves within their own minds. A tedious undertaking to be sure because you run into the occasional slave *holds up a mirror for you* who INSISTS they should not be free.

Better your stuff be taken and your life be threatened by "your team"?! But why? Without any reason provided, you're just saying that you believe what you believe because you want to believe it. Which is fine. However, you claim was objective and absolute, so whimsy isn't sufficient. Why? What would that prove? Who formed the standard of one word? Did you know that Google is a verb? It didn't used to be. What language is that word? Seems universal. If "Schadenfreude" is so useful and language X doesn't have an equivalent, then you can just use it and define it. You don't need an entire other language to do so. And this still does nothing to substantiate your initial claim. Deja vu is French yet just about everybody who speaks English knows what it is because English simply assimilated it. This is classic supply and demand. You are aware that languages are "alive" and evolve, right? That's why there's such a thing as dialects and slang. The PURPOSE of language is what matters. Getting an idea from my consciousness to yours. If I succeed, it matters little HOW I did so.

So you are free to choose to disregard the point the analogy was meant to illustrate, but would that be helpful? If the car is running and in gear, it WILL "drive itself," at which point, you can chase it down, hope in, and drive. That wasn't the point though.