J. D. Stembal

It might be helpful to check a dictionary when establishing definitions. You are confusing the Latin word arcus with the Greek word arkhos. The former is the root for arch, also meaning structure, archway, bridge. The latter is the root for the suffix you see in anarchy, which means no government or no rulers. To be precise, the capitalist theory allows free trade to be possible. You have cause and effect backward in the above statement. What's wrong with anarchy? What is it about the word that causes it to be "loaded"? It seems appropriate and accurate to me.

The crony capitalism strawman is strong in the Statists. Most people won't recognize a distinction between a free market of trade and the monstrous corporations of the day. I envision a 21st Century online market place (think eBay powered by BitCoin) as the precursor for a completely unregulated forum for commerce. People still shop in stores for Pete's sake.

From reading your post, I would say that you are the "best man" for the job of Best Man. If you are asked to speak at the wedding, you will have a lot of thoughtful blessings to say. Talk about the couple, not the institution of marriage, which in my opinion, is very much tainted by the state. Looking back at my friends who got married soon after college, I would say that most of them chose poorly. I've never been eager to settle down and have children because my own childhood was so desolate. Also, like my friends in college, I would have made a terrible choice for a marriage partner back then, and would assuredly be divorced or miserable by now.

The best food bank you could support is your own. Canned food, while usually processed and full of preservatives, lasts well past the date on the side of the can. It would behoove everyone to take an extra room in the house or use the basement and fill some shelves full of canned food - the more calories, the better. Mason jars are also a great way to store homemade foods. If and when people become truly needy, you'll be able to help yourself and others with a helpful stockpile of food. Keeping clean water jugs is also a must. Thanks for the insights.

Weapons versus teachers is false dichotomy, is it not? How about we send them nothing unless it involves a legitimate trade? If Muslims want to be freer, let them use the internet to find philosophy like the rest of humanity does. I just started listening to Molyneux's reading of DeMause's The Origins of War in Child Abuse and the first chapter discusses how Islamic suicide bombers are hand-picked and groomed by their mothers to kill themselves for the glory of Allah. If anything, we should be sending them better mothers.

Thanks for the input, Rose. I've heard of victim-blaming before, but rape-enabling threw me off. It is counter-intuitive to say that being able to disable an attacker with your bare hands is enabling rape. It prevents or deters the crime from happening. I'm fully supportive of firearm rights because they also clearly prevent crimes, directly and through a halo effect. I have noticed, however, that women generally have an irrational fear or suspicion of firearms. Even if they claim to be pro-gun, they wouldn't think of owning or carrying one. I took my ex-girlfriend to the range a couple times, and she was very good at it. Her accuracy is much better than mine. I told her that we should go shopping around for a piece for her to carry and she made a bunch of excuses about money and time. Apparently, she had enough time and money to research about solar panels to get a government subsidized ten year lease for installing them on the roof. I only know one woman who owns a handgun, but she doesn't carry it. It's just a range recreation tool for her right now.

...except for the 80-90% of parents that strike children regularly in North America. Cracked suggests that it isn't socially acceptable to hit women just as it isn't socially acceptable to hit children fully ignoring the majority of physical abuse against children is perpetrated legally by women. If anything, it is a justification for hitting women if you subscribe to the most popular theories surrounding justice (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth).

This makes me think of Stefan saying how the internet was key for him spreading philosophy to the world. I guess the door swings both ways.

If you force feed yourself a large pizza, the first piece always tastes better than the last. This is no accident. Hormones like leptin and ghrelin do indeed affect appetite, but I find it very interesting that no where in the article you linked is insulin mentioned. Insulin is the hormone that tells the cells in your body, including the adipose tissues, to take up blood sugar (glucose) from the blood stream. Insulin literally directs the construction and expansion of fat tissue. The reason why a chronically obese person constantly feels hungry is because her body cannot access the energy (stored as triglycerides) in her adipose tissue due to insulin resistance. Muscles and other cells tend to become insulin resistant before the adipose tissue. The more insulin resistant tissues get, the more insulin your pancreas has to secrete to manage the blood sugar. The unfortunate biochemical side effect of chronically high insulin levels is that the triglycerides become locked into the fat and cannot be accessed for fuel by the other cells in the body. This is why extremely fat people suffer from near constant hunger and lethargy, and are usually also diabetic. Your adipose tissue is meant to provide a steady stream of fuel to act as an energy buffer to get you between meals that may come few and far between. When the blood stream is cranked with constant streams of glucose from dietary carbohydrate, the body never has a chance to expend the fat energy buffer, and continues to add to it. Eventually, the pancreas wears out and cannot keep up the high insulin levels and the kidneys start excreting excess glucose in your urine. Welcome to adult onset or Type 2 diabetes. Doctors recommending gastric surgery is just ghastly. This is Medieval torture, not science. A much simpler and less cruel solution would be to lower the patient's intake of carbohydrates with a higher glycemic index (sugar, HFCS, potatoes, white rice, pastas, wheat, rice or corn flour). I guess that I consume roughly 60 grams of carbohydrate a day from full-fat yogurt, leafy 5% carbohydrate vegetables, dried coconut and nuts - all ultra low glycemic foods. I sometimes drink a homemade soft drink called kombucha tea which has less than 20g of sugar per bottle. If adult obesity patients can knock their intake down to 100g of carbs per day, they will see significant weight loss because the body can start accessing more of the fuel stored in the adipose tissues due to lower insulin levels. Look at the 2010 USDA dietary guidelines. http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/dietaryguidelines2010.pdf The federal government recommends 170g of carbs solely from grains for a two thousand calorie per day diet. Most people routinely eat more than two thousand calories per day, including myself. It's no wonder why Americans are sick and getting sicker. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer's are all scientifically linked to metabolic syndrome (described above), which is a hormone disorder caused by eating too many carbohydrates. Follow the government recommendations and we will need the Affordable Care Act to save our collective fat asses from our own folly. What does all this have to do with feminism, you ask? It has been argued by Stefan Molyneux that feminism was co-opted long ago into a government program, which has the force of the political activism and voters behind it. With the passage of the ACA, which went into effect this year, and the last forty years of government funded research, inconclusive nutritional studies and false health propaganda, it isn't too difficult to connect the two. Obesity is the new government program. The obese are the new underclass while the rest of us enjoy our thin privilege.

Engaging with people about philosophy on Facebook is almost totally pointless. At best, you or they will give up and block the other. If it's an unknown troll, and not a friend, it's best to not respond at all.

I've often heard sexuality described as a spectrum rather than a polarity. Not everyone desires having sexual relations with just the one gender, but we tend to favor one or the other when pair bonding. I have been attracted to both men and women, but I am clearly more strongly attracted to the opposite gender. I have a personal obstacle applying moral philosophy to sexuality because sexual preference is subjective. To make an allusion to musical aesthetics, "I like Jazz, and you like Rock and Roll." While it is unclear whether we can shape our own sexual preferences (is it biological determinism, environment or both?), we have the right to pursue that which makes us happy regardless of philosophy as long as it doesn't violate the non-aggression principle. Political correctness doesn't have much philosophic value because language gymnastics are primarily designed to confuse people and obfuscate reasoning. Philosophy plays the game by the rules by providing clear reasons and definitions for using particular words.

I fully intend on watching the entire video at some point, but I'm a little thrown off by the title, "Singing the Masculinity Blues." I get a strong reaction to painting masculine issues as a malaise or a funk out of which we can simply will ourselves. Feminism is nothing less than an ideological assault against us. Rose, Can you elaborate the self-defense equals rape-enabling perspective? I've never heard that one before. In college, I took a Judo class with an instructor who also taught a female focused self-defense class, and there were a number of female students in the class I was taking. The instructor was a man and I recall he made fun of the girls on his other class for not taking self-defense training very seriously. I'm not sure why someone would take a self-defense class and not take it seriously, but he seemed to think that was the case.

Tyler, thank you for sharing your feelings. I appreciate it. One thing you said in your original post struck an emotional chord in me. You said that you were hit by your step-father several times but only remember the reason for one of the instances. Why are we compelled to think that there is a justification for the abuse? There is no reason to hit a child at all! Children generally say that they were spanked because they were bad, but if you probe deeper, you'll find that they don't often recall what behavior the punishment was meant to deter. In your case, your step-father seemed to be looking for a reason to hit you because he wanted to hit you. I was hit (spanked bare bottom) regularly by my father, but I don't remember why. I was very accident prone and self-destructive as a child, possibly my way of acting out to gain sympathy or attention. Most of my better memories were of being alone, playing by myself. One of the most vivid instances of abuse occurred when I was a teenager. My father and mother and I were eating dinner and talking, and I spoke to my mom. My dad unexpectedly backhanded me in the temple. I fell out of my chair to the floor and almost lost consciousness. I don't remember what I said to her. I wish I could remember because it must have been pretty important to be silenced so ruthlessly. I've despised my father for most of my adult life and I don't trust my mother because she never stuck up for me, and still doesn't. I still have trouble sharing my feelings with them. We don't talk very often. I laid out my feelings to them last spring, but I got plausible denials and non-apologies from my dad, and practically nothing out of my mother. She's an unfeeling machine with an ever-present beer bottle in her hand. I had a lot of teenage fantasies about hurting my father but he was stronger than me and very intimidating. He has four inches and about fifty pounds on me. I used to get in the middle of fights between him and my mother, but I couldn't stop them. I spent a couple years on anti-depressants and going to counselling, but there was no interest in dealing with the family issues, just medicating me so I would act normally. I'm so sorry that this happened to you. I don't wish this kind of abusive treatment on anyone.

The reason why we generally enjoy horror films is that they help externalize the trauma we have suffered as a child, and experience in the world around us. If you are engaging your amygdala with entertainment that you know is not real, you are reliving the horror of childhood without confronting it directly. News media outlets achieve high ratings through similar inflammatory methods of presenting violent images, stories, and language. One of my favorite movies is a suspense/horror film, but in general, I've never liked the excessive blood or gore found in the B-horror film and Troma film subcultures. As a child, I was extremely terrified of the dark and slept with the light on until I was six or seven. Even as an adult, I will sometimes fall asleep more successfully reading with the light turned on. I know where my fear of blood comes from, but I'm still drawing a blank on the fear of the dark.

Rather than calling truth relative, say that truth is continually sharpened or refined based on empirical observations. This is how we can have disparate mathematical models for defining physics existing side by side. I'm not well versed in math or physics, so I can't intelligently comment on the specifics of your post. One question pops into my mind, though. What does all this have to do with philosophy, seeing that this post is in the philosophy sub forum rather than the science sub forum? I am having trouble imagining how we can take the abstractions that you've presented here and connect them to our personal or social lives in a philosophic manner.

Coulter was getting close to making an important point about legalizing marijuana, but the short segment had to cover a myriad of topics. I am all for ending the War on Self-Medicating Americans, but paying a 40% mafia protection overhead to smoke legal weed in Colorado isn't my idea of the best strategy for promoting freedom and liberty. If I were interested in breaking my sobriety, I would buy from a more traditional drug trader so as to screw the state out of the unearned spoils of war.

It might be too late since we replied to it. Flag down a moderator. I don't think it was a bad post, just a terrible start to a worthless article, which I still haven't finished reading. Imagine if a writer wrote the same article replacing white with non-white. It would be an interesting thought experiment to see the reaction to such an article. Edit: I read the whole article (skimmed it, really) and my nerves are a bit frazzled. I couldn't resist signing up for Medium and posting a reply. Double edit: Oh, Gack! Look at this nonsense Professor Cohen hyperlinked in the aforementioned article - http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism/all

Let's consider another perplexing matter. Why were you at Whole Foods?

I stopped reading after the opening paragraph.

How twisted is feminism! This woman is a single mother who loves her dog and resents her son so much she hits him? Does she club her boy with a rolled up newspaper? Are you kidding me? I want to vomit on this woman.

Why are you engaging with Muggles on social media? What do you get out of it?

Dogs are often replacement children so that couples can have a baby and they don't have to learn how to negotiate with children. I've met more than a few couples in their late twenties or early thirties who live together and own a dog that they take everywhere with them. Maybe it's because Colorado is dog friendly overall, but there is a tangible trend away from having human babies. Infertility could be playing a part in all this, but I doubt it has a significant impact. Have you ever heard, "My husband and I tried to conceive, but we couldn't so we got a dog instead"? The upshot of all this is we are making fewer tax cattle because dogs can't hold jobs. The article is heartbreaking. I don't want to comment specifically on it.

I will cut my losses (no pun intended). It's enough just knowing I was cut to feel the pain I experienced as an infant. I don't want to relive it at all. However, I would be curious to hear the customer feedback among FDR members.

Practically every boy in the United States is sexually abused legally with parental consent, in so far that circumcision is occurring. If your genitals were mutilated, as mine were, your brain knows full well how much that hurt no matter if you subconsciously buried the pain or not. I don't know how we can argue that this is not sexual abuse (aside from the fact that it is a legal procedure to perform on an infant), but I'd be willing to hear an argument against it. Later, in adulthood, not having a copious amount of foreskin on the penis sometimes causes me a lot of pain during intercourse. There have been more than a couple times where I've had to stop intercourse because of pain or loss of sensation, and my surgery was not botched in any way. I agree that psychological abuse is the most dangerous of the three forms because it takes a toll every hour of every day, and not just when you're trying to make another penis. Thanks for posting the link to the article.

Kevin beat me to it. Anarchism is neutral on authority or hierarchies, as long as they are voluntary. Rulers act with coercion so they are in power with the involuntary support of their citizens. I like the term voluntarism because it evokes a genuine desire to action, like charity, neighborhood watch, and community programs. We are voluntary supporters of Free Domain Radio. I organised a public road trash clean up earlier this year, and one of my self-described Libertarian friends showed up. The whole time he was bitching about how I was supporting socialism. My response was that I was supporting voluntary action, not through coercion, so how could it possibly be socialist? He said that I wasn't paying anyone to clean up trash, including myself, so that I was supporting socialism. Taxes are being paid to clean up the trash, so we shouldn't have to spend any time worrying about it. I told him that that was the point. The trash should be cleaned up but it's not being cleaned up because it was public property. We are demonstrating how faulty the concept of socialism is by refuting it, not supporting it.