J. D. Stembal

What a great question Robin asked! I will pose a slightly different question. Are you motivated to apologize so that you can forgive yourself? I recalled a woman I dated seven years ago, and I couldn't sleep because of it. I contacted her and she replied saying that there was no need for me to apologize to her. I simply needed to forgive myself for my actions.

To whom are you referring? I can cite at least two experts who find Savory's research convincing. I enjoy his perspective because he is willing to admit his past mistakes, and offer insight from the mistakes. Additionally, he outlines how voluntarism is preferable to government interference in agriculture, and that public opinion within communities should guide policy and not the edicts of embedded institutions. Here's another insightful presentation by Savory. From the wiki page you offered as evidence on the Holocene: The beginning of the Holocene was also marked by the end of the last ice age. The Quaternary extinction event brought down megafauna like the mammoth and the mastodon, but humans weren't their only natural predators. You are giving humans too much credit as the ultimate arbiters of evolution while we are running around with spears, hunting large game to survive. Why aren't you holding the sabre-tooth tiger responsible as well? What about proto-humans?

Actually, there is. It's animal husbandry.

Suicide is not a violation of the NAP, so yes, they should be encouraged to voluntarily end their human existence if that is their wish.

It is important to remember that the claim married people live longer is a description of correlation, not causation. Single people often pursue marriage because they are in poor health and want subsidized health care. My ex-girlfriend married her ex-spouse over a dental plan, for example. It stands to reason that actually pursuing a healthier lifestyle would correlate much more strongly with living longer than marrying. I would be interested in knowing which studies Stefan cites to claim that married people have better health outcomes to see if the study didn't cheat the data by lumping divorcees and widowers in with the singles. Divorced men, in particular, are in a high risk group for suicide. Considering how many marriages end in divorce, and how many marriages are ended by the woman because of dissatisfaction, I anticipate that men who never marry will live much longer than men who do.

There is actually a lot of information on forming legal contracts for non-standard family arrangements, in particular. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of help out there for straight people who desire to have relationships where the gun of the state isn't pointed directly at their gonads. In the future, men may have to pretend that they are gay to have kids safely.

The link is dead.

I realized that I had been very angry with my parents my whole life, but I internalized this anger onto myself. Specifically, I was on track to drink myself to death. Quitting drinking (after listening to Asshole Proximity Disorder) certainly helped me gain clarity. It also sent my friends packing, one by one. For him to stop self-attacking, he will have to first question his parents' involvement in his current predicament. From how you describe it, he cannot hold his parents accountable for their actions. He's got an ACE score of three at the minimum. You wrote that you are both going to therapy. Has his family been discussed? Has yours? It is a relief to know he's not being abusive of your daughter.

Perhaps if I try hard enough, I can asexually reproduce like a single-celled organism. The sheer amount of energy my mind and body requires in an attempt to universalize this notion is making me ravenously hungry. Excuse me while I chow down on three pounds of pork spare ribs, then flog myself pregnant. Do it for Les!

The situation is not impossible. You can do whatever you want to do. I have great sympathy for what you and your boyfriend went through. He is probably suffering from having hypercritical and abusive parents. I did everything the wrong way growing up, including walking, according to my parents. You have to allow him to get angry at his parents for what they did to him. He won't change until he addresses it. He may act his alter egos out on your child. Please keep this in mind, and watch out for it.

This is why I explained that anyone can take their own blood glucose readings. I do it. I know the glycemic index is based on a tabulated average. For example, 55 mg/dL is my FBS, at last sampling. If I eat a frozen pizza, which is essentially entirely wheat and cheese, two hours later my reading is 84 mg/dL. This particular pizza was 1250 calories, mostly carbs. Normally, my body metabolizes fuel through nutritional ketosis, which I monitor with urine test strips, so my two hour glucose reading after eating carbohydrate is a lot lower than most. Diabetics or people with pre-diabetic conditions would have much higher readings because their skeletal muscles and liver are more insulin resistant than mine. In the case of type-2 diabetics, they will have to continue insulin shots to sustain this diet. Of course, we don't know exactly what all the ancient cultures ate (or which were our specific ancestors), but it is safe to say that before the agricultural revolution, humans hunted wild game. The Plains Indians ate buffalo. Okinawans fished and ate wild pigs. Atkins, Paleo, Low Carb, etc. are different variations on the same nutritional concept, which is the practical emulation of the diet of a typical hunter-gatherer. People will follow what achieves the best health results for them. That's the hallmark of following empirical data and science. Rest assured, however, that no one is becoming progressively unhealthy by any health metric while following a low-carb health regime. As a bonus, low carbers avoid glyphosate exposure. Unless you are really hardcore... so what? I am hardcore about health. All Americans should be hardcore about it since we have to bail out the poisoned and suffering masses thanks to ACA.

My mother has an extensive antique collection, and my father still owns the same high-fidelity stereo he purchased in the Seventies, albeit boxed up in the basement. I would have loved to have had a family photo hanging on the wall, but we weren't that into each other. My perception of that time in my childhood is that I was an unwanted and ungrateful son who would rather be elsewhere. I was not as valuable as an antique or as entertaining as a stereo system.

There's nature, and then there is government propaganda. I wonder which is stronger. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/01/babies-dont-suffer-working-mothers My mother returned to work when I was eight weeks old.

The neo-Malthusian case has always been very weak. Paul Erlich painted a bleak picture of a suffering future by predicting that the death rate would catch up with the birth rate in order to bring the population of the Earth into balance. We are coming up on 50 years since he postulated this, and it has not happened yet. Life expectancies are poised to drop in the next generation, but for reasons Ehrlich could not have known exactly. He speculated that the poor would starve to death in the zero-sum game of the free market, which is technically happening slowly, but due to metabolic disease (obesity) and not a lack of food. Ehrlich ignored the built-in price discovery mechanism of the free market, which would communicate to families how many children they could effectively raise. The Malthusians equate us to dumb beasts, like deer, which without a natural predator will reproduce until there is no more food left. Catholics and the poor of developing nations are the oft cited examples of dumb beasts in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Forced reproduction, while still very unlikely, is more likely than forced sterilizations. A dip in birth rates is a lagging indicator of reckless central banking policies, as I stated in my previous post. Yesterday's solutions are today's problems, and the government welcomes more problems with open arms. Fewer children means less human collateral to finance the national debt. At some point, if the dollar isn't allowed to crash, we will be encouraged to breed for our country because there are not enough able-bodied Americans working to feed and clothe the poor. Not having a child will be considered indulgent, sinful or selfish. There may even be legal or financial ramifications for not breeding. How else will the Federal Reserve keep this dead currency going?

In case you were in doubt about the reproductive rights of men, here's the answer.

One of the most important reasons men and women are having pets instead of kids is because of the debt slave system imposed by the Federal Reserve and command economy, and that pets are significantly cheaper than kids. Wall Street gets all the attention, legislation and the bail outs, but people have more and more money stolen from them each year. Thus, they are having less children unless having a child will generate welfare monies. The longer the Mandrake Machine of central banking distorts the productivity of the economy, and devalues the saving capacity of families, the more this trend will continue until no one but welfare recipients have children. Only a government default on the national debt can save us at this point. I don't think you can manufacture a philosophic proof for whether having children is moral or not. It's a biologic imperative for life. That being said, the decision to have children should be voluntary, and not coerced. If we continue down this totalitarian path to a socialist paradise, we may eventually see legally forced reproduction.

Ideologically, I don't think America is really all that different except for the private gun ownership. France has the advantage of not being very obese, so the country doesn't need the universal healthcare it has.

I saw this one a while back, and it strikes a chord with me because I really wanted a younger brother as a side kick. I'm going to take a stab at pointing out all the bad parenting in this video. 1. The two boys did nothing wrong. They were being creative, and are being punished for it. Mom and dad could have set up arts and crafts activities outside if they don't want paint in the house. 2. Dad is shaming them for no reason on the internet. I'm sure his intention for shooting the video was to show all his friends how cool of a dad he is, talking about timeouts. 3. He asks the boys if they need to be punished, and they tell him no. Then he punishes them anyway. Taking away the juice is one of the dirty tricks parents use to build a silent wall of mistrust between them and their kids. You learn to never tell your parents how you are feeling or what you enjoy for fear of them taking it away as a punishment. This has obvious consequences when the children are pubescent. 4. Dad cracks up half way through the video, but has to negate his true emotions in order to make the punishment stick. Obviously, he wouldn't be laughing if the children had actually done something wrong. 5. There is an unattended baby crying in the background while dad films the memento. 6. It's really sad to see how subdued these two boys are. They are very intimidated by their father. He strikes me as a reluctant disciplinarian where his female partner has relegated all the distasteful punishment business to him entirely.

Who is missing an opportunity, and for what? If you are convinced there are philosophically-minded, rational people over on Reddit, go find them and gather them up. You can even post your own material there and here. Stefan, Mike, and Stoyan are busy working on content relevant to the paying customers.

I gave you plus one for having the balls to bring up the topic. You make great points about the thanklessness of being born male, but I think this is the key (or close to it). We will not have a free society until women deem it so. According to Briffault's Law, the female of the species determines the conditions of the family, and when she derives no more benefit from the male, no more association takes place. Women have always controlled the family structure, and through it, the structure of society. We will always have to provide some benefit for a woman to decide to reproduce with us. If we manage to attract most men to philosophy, women will start to see reproducing with the philosophically-minded male as a benefit, perhaps because the alternative is so unattractive. Without welfare and divorce lawyers to fall back on, many women will change up their reproductive tactics out of necessity. Until such a time that the state isn't looking to emasculate men financially, we must make it as hard as possible on women to take advantage of men. Stay far away from legal marriage, and always have a contractual agreement for child rearing. Men are fertile much longer than women. We can afford to wait until retirement to raise children. My sister was born, for example, when my father was 58. Keep your sex organs and the rest of your body healthy, and you should be fertile until your 70s! In the mean time, more and more women will face the prospect of childlessness, which also starves the Leviathan of future taxpayers, thus weakening the yoke of the state.

There are seventeen woman not mentioned by name in this article who were not disciplined enough to use birth control, and it's the man that needs a vasectomy. We're gonna need a bigger facepalm.

What happened to Stefan's accent?

That seems like a reasonable goal to me, but we have many effective tools in the tool box already. One of the important tools is free and independent media. This is what allows us to spread the message of non-violence, peaceful parenting, and such. Using SM's proof of secular universal ethics to reach out to the religious is counterproductive. I don't want to make an argument with adjectives so let me elaborate. 1. Our goal is to work toward a free society. 2. This process cannot be achieved quickly because it requires raising future generations peacefully. 3. In order to raise a rational and peaceful generation, we teach our children logic, philosophy, ethics, and reason. 4. Raising a child in religion requires domination, manipulation, violence, and fantasy. (See my last reply for evidence, it was a bit of a TL;DR.) 5. Religion contradicts philosophy, especially where raising children is concerned. 6. Therefore, in a free and peaceful society, philosophy supplants religions by default. Religion will cease to exist outside of a textbook. The one redeeming value of religion, that SM has trotted out a lot in the past year, is that men, and especially women, are shamed into being less promiscuous, which results in better outcomes with raising children. Shaming children with the wrath of God or threat of damnation doesn't actually teach anything rational. With the facts in hand, we should be able to demonstrate virtues without resorting to the promotion of insanity. Who on Earth would trust people who lie and mutilate an infant's genitals?

The generation being born right now (Millennial + 15) will be the first generation since the Great Depression projected to see a decrease in average life expectancy. This is a consequence of the past forty years of government-run nutrition policy, and propaganda pushed through the media and public school. In the future, many hospitals will not exist because they are mainly an outgrowth of the state, which is rapidly going bankrupt. Medicine will be more focused on prevention, and medical advice will be dispensed via teleconferencing. To keep costs down, testing will be performed by the end user, and the results transmitted to health care professionals for analysis.

Guess what came to dinner tonight? Buffalo Heart Stew It is such a triumphant meal, I shot a video. Eat one bowl of this stew and you will feel strong enough to pull the ears off a Gundark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWhKBYl4t-Y