dsayers

In your home, you can create whatever rules you like for whatever reason you like. As long as people are free to decline entering your home, this is not problematic.

I'm even more lost now. So if I say that I own my car, you hear that I don't need a mechanic? When you're taxed in the name of the State, do you tell them they can't do that because they didn't produce your DNA? Here, you even say "my point." How do you know the point is yours? A parent's obligation is chosen. Not murder is a negative obligation, which CAN be ethical. I don't get your last question. Do they consistently want to act unconsistently? In what way is "theft, assault, rape, and murder are the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights" false? In what way can that objective claim be credited to me, personally? If I never existed, that objective claim would have the same truth value. It is clear to me that you don't understand what you're talking about. Value is subjective and cannot be universalized. Theft is wrong because it is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights. In the bike thief scenario, the right is given to the owner of the bike by the thief. The thief is using his body, asserting that property rights are valid. The bike's owner used their body to produce value to others, which allowed him to come to own the bike in the first place. Since the thief asserts that property rights are valid, he is voluntarily creating a debt to the bike owner in the amount of the value of the bike, plus whatever time and effort needs to be invested in order to reclaim the bike. Any attempt to prevent or reverse the theft is the settling of that debt. No, the consistency of matter and energy (the world we're born into) tells us that something cannot be itself and the opposite of itself simultaneously. This would be true without humans even existing. I don't understand your first point here. Being able to identify a shoelace as a shoelace doesn't tell you whether a shoe should have buckles or velcro instead. So what? Murder is internally inconsistent. The perpetrator is claiming that they have a right to their life at the same time their victim does not have a right to theirs. The benefactor of a charitable action agrees to it. In what way is a lie binding upon others? "All the food in your house is poisonous." Does this prevent you from eating the food in your house?

First of all, government is a concept. You're talking about the behaviors of people. If everybody understood that government is an unethical proposition, any attempt to "re-form" it would be met with the resistance of everybody. It would be almost impossible. Also, I'm not sure what benefit such a conclusion would have. You don't NOT fight the cancer just because after it's gone, it could come back.

I hear you. It's absolutely horrifying when you think about it. He is so dependent on win-lose interactions that he chalks a person's death up as a "win" for him because Carlin disagreed with him about something he has no proof of. That was the man whom I was exposed to during my formative years. It's infuriating considering I lost over 3 decades of my life due to this destructive behavior.

Even if we accept the initial premise, the espoused conclusion is false. If people are inherently aggressive (initial premise), then creating an imaginary second moral category of superhuman powers/responsibilities would decrease peace and order, not increase them. I think this is the easiest point to make to statists who are looking for a utilitarian explanation for their position. It's the consider our homogeny approach. If all people are bad, then bad people would have more power with a State. If most people are bad, they would use the power of the State to subjugate the remainder. If most people are good, the bad people would gravitate towards State power. If everybody is good, there is no benefit from the State. Though just as you say, the moral argument trumps the utilitarian ones since utility is subjective and nature is objective.

Ethnicity and such not being chosen is not a revelation at this point, eh? I was born and have lived in and among "the west" and it's general ideologies all my life. If "the west has a tradition of separation of church and state" as an example is generally true, and I did not agree or live that value, would the statement suddenly become false? It's a generality. Generalities aren't accepted to be absolutely true and/or apply to everybody fitting that demographic. This too should not be a revelation at this point I don't think.

He also said "I was a Catholic... until I reached the age of reason." Hearing this was the first real dissent I had heard with regards to my own religious programming, which precipitated my eventual acceptance that there is no deity. I was once given a Carlin quote a day desktop calendar as a xmas gift. One day's quote said something like "Religion; The last resort of a man who has no arguments" or something to that effect. It annoyed me dad to such an extent that years later, when Carlin died, he had a smug sense of satisfaction, and said something like "I guess now he gets to find out he was wrong." Carlin was a smart man even if he got a lot of stuff wrong too. It's because of the intelligence in the 2nd half of his comedy career that soured me to low-brow comedy (including much of his earlier work, ironically).

*vomit* Trying to pass off lazy selfishness as benevolence is appalling. How do you empower people by stealing from them? If she thinks education is so important, why is she studying law? What is she doing for "the movement" exactly? Clearly it's not research because if she claims that "education needs to be affordable for people from all walks of life," she should be looking into WHY it's so expensive in the first place. Because when you find that it's State power, then it seems odd to appeal to State power (or choose to bathe in it by studying law) for a solution. It's like trumpeting that all bipedals deserve to be able to walk, then turning to the guy who broke your legs to ask him to steal from your neighbor and buy you a pair of crutches. Does she not get that artificially rigging the game to make somebody part of a "protected class" is the opposite of empowering them? For those who haven't yet checked out Stef's recent chat with Bill Whittle called the Death of Political Correctness, I recommend it. They talk about this entitlement and willingness to follow people who are loud rather than people who are correct.

Could you elaborate? Because your question as is doesn't make sense to me. If you and I decide to trade X for Y, then we are the ones deciding if the exchange is just. As long as we're both free to decline, the exchange is voluntary, and what others might think in terms of whether it's just or not is irrelevant.

I would hold off on the explanation. Explanation would be for your benefit and if you want to make it up to her, you have to subjugate yourself to her satisfaction. Perhaps let her know that you've learned how what you've done to her is harmful and that you want to make it up to her. How does she feel? Does she understand that the way you treated her was wrong?

By broken, do you man "we'll drug you since you won't conform"? Symbolism, like any short hand, suffers from being imprecise. It can mean different things to different people. How many people use the symbol "NAP" without having fleshed out the rationale that leads to that conclusion? If two people have a firm grasp and are in agreement of what a symbol means, then it can be a tool of efficiency in communication between them. The problem here in the context of media is that ideas are being broadcast to untold numbers of people. In order to be understood uniformly, you'd need to communicate in the simplest, most precise fashion possible. However, communicating ideas isn't what the mainstream media is for. It's for REINFORCING ideas. Which symbols are fantastic for since this shortcut past precision is beneficial.

Not sure what the point of this question is, but since DNA is not a voluntary behavior, a person cannot be morally responsible anymore than a dog is for chewing up a shoe. Thinking was not the end, but rather the means for for disproving morality is subjective by proving self-ownership which, when universalized, created an external, objective standard, refuting your claim that "moral authority" is internal. Ironically, you're referring to an unchosen positive obligation, which is unethical. You cannot derive an ought from an is without an if. IF you wish to act with consistency, THEN you ought not steal, assault, rape, or murder. A scale cannot tell you what things OUGHT to weigh, just what they do weight. Morality doesn't tell you how you OUGHT to behave, it just identifies what those behaviors are. If you take my bike and I take it back, we've engaged in mechanically identical behaviors, demonstrating competing claims. Morality can serve as an objective arbiter here to help all of us identify who is in the right. You tell me. Can "theft is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights" be ascertained outside of a single consciousness? Yes. So no, it is not the product of "human subjectivity." By the by, it's a red flag for me when people try to personalize rather than address the arguments. How did you arrive at the conclusion that murder is morally identical to charity? As for lying, that's not a behavior that's binding upon others, so there is no moral consideration. Hypocritically, you were accusing me of just making stuff up while here, you are putting forth your preferences as if binding upon others.

Need to define terms. What is meant by cheating? Does it mean to violate the rules in an environment of competition? If so, then how could this be described as the optimal strategy? I'll give an example. I used to work at a gas station. The rules were you give us money, we give you gas (and candy bars, newspapers, etc). If you took the gas and didn't give us the money, we took down your license plate, called the police, then you had to give us the money anyways, as well as give more money to the city, as well as have a mark on your criminal record. Theft is pretty good at precluding you from many jobs. Compared to just following the rules and paying for the gas, this would be the antithesis of optimal.

Considering this was very likely the present-day parent's experience when they were the child, it might even be effective to ask them how terrified they were when their care-givers treated them in that way. However, I think this strategy of intervention works better among strangers. As the neighbor, were you to get involved at all, could have very real consequences for yourself. Which brings up another thought: Why not "get in" with all your neighbors? If he had a relationship with this neighbor already, he would've been better poised to solve this peacefully. Forgive my over-simplification, but I have experience with this myself. Once upon a time, I was living in an apartment complex. I saw a man and a woman moving into the unit below me as I was about to have a pizza delivered. I thought about ordering a 2nd and sharing with them to welcome them. I was out of work at the time, so I didn't. Didn't even introduce myself. Well they started hanging out with another guy in the complex who had a real problem with the fact that I carried a gun. As a result, the new couple began to file noise complaints against me despite me having very sensitive hearing and always doing EVERYTHING as quietly as possible (bending down to drop something into an empty trash can for example). We might not've been best of friends, but they probably wouldn't have leveled bogus complaints against the nice guy that got them a pizza and welcomed them to their new home.

Am I reading this correctly that you're talking about person X lowering person Y's performance? Can you make a rational case for X being more responsible for Y's behaviors than Y is? This is assuming that X and Y are co-workers, not boss and subordinate.

The way I look at it: It takes intelligence to learn from your experiences. It takes wisdom to learn from the experiences of others. Wisdom is usually just intelligence tempered with time. I was there once myself. I have a tattoo of the word TORMENTED and another of a succubus swooping down and carving the word VICTIM into me. I once embraced if not delighted in my victimhood status at the hands of women. So you're not the first, or at all alone. Not that it's a gender thing; this story just as much applies to many adult children regarding their parents as well. I was stunned when I read the "wanted to make sure you weren't being brainwashed." Most of the things FDR produces is for the purpose of shattering institutionalized brainwashing. If she was afraid you were being brainwashed by rationality, couldn't she just use rationality to disprove something you had been "tricked into believing"?

The parent-child and slave-master are the only human relationship configurations where leaving is realistically not an option. I think before you can ask if once can use self-defense against emotional or psychological violence, you'd have to ask if there's such a thing as emotional or psychological violence. Personally, I define violence as the initiation of the use of force. However, most people I've spoken with define violence as physical force (regardless of moral consideration). I think in order for something non-physical to be considered aggression, it would have to be in the form of a credible threat. Can you think of a different example? Part of the reason why my most established abuser is somebody I would describe as sophisticated is that he's very good at doing things like stating opinion as fact, using verbal assertion to try and override reality, etc. While he's certainly capable of credible threats with his words and his body language, when not enraged, he's very good at overplaying his will without it actually qualifying as aggression. So my bias would incentivize me to agree that "aggression is not just physical." Yet I think that in order for something non-physical to be aggression, it would have to be a credible threat. I'm open to the possibility that this isn't accurate of course.

In what way did you screw up the relationship? If you can't answer that question, it probably will stay with you. How/why did you do whatever you did? That too will be helpful in being able to move on. You'll have to process the experiences honestly.

If you should happen to witness something like this, you can intervene to provide a contrary example for the child. If this is happening right next door, regularly, record it and call the police. Not CPS. They can refer it to CPS. The child needs something more immediate. While it's very difficult advice to give, it might even be better for the child if you can make multiple recordings. Establish the frequency and severity. THEN call the police. Make copies for them. Make copies and take it to the local prosecuting attorney. Make copies and present them to CPS. Attend the next city council meeting and provide them with a copy if the police won't do anything. Send copies to the mayor's office. Let each entity know that you're alerting the other entities, which will motivate them to take action to save face even if they wouldn't have otherwise.

There is no such dilemma. Every offspring is a mutant compared to its progenitors. Thus the chicken had to come first.

He claimed to be the son of a deity. He asserted "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," asserting both an earthly and heavenly leader.

Why does life violate that law? Things that are alive can repair and reproduce, the opposite of disorder. Are you suggesting life doesn't exist?

Impossible. In order to come to this conclusion, a person would have to think, making use of their brain, confirming self-ownership. It is inescapable. Morality simply refers to the internal consistency of BEHAVIORS, which are by definition external.

No, the assumption was that the universe was created. What you refer to as an assumption on my part is holding the person to this assumption. Saying that 100% of empirical evidence that consciousness is an emergent property of matter is a baseless claim is itself a baseless claim. My refutation was of "God exists," the claim of a singular deity. You're telling me my premise was not my premise. What evidence? Lot of bluster and question begging. Not a good first impression.

"I don't apply morality to gang rape. It was democratically decided through a majority vote and if you're the minority, you just have to deal with it or leave." Reality isn't democratic. That video I linked did a fantastic job of explaining that you cannot give something to somebody else that you do not have. If she does not have the right to take money from her neighbors, she cannot give that right (by voting) to other people.