J. D. Stembal

An alternative to the word crazy is irrational. It's in the title of the show, so it is applicable is this discussion. It is simpler to define since crazy is clearly a pejorative.

The law enforcement union in California is clearly trying to prevent independent journalism of police activities.

I know I am capable of it. I don't know how you become good at empathy. You either have it or you don't. You use it or you don't. I convinced my father to stop his wife from beating my nine year old brother with a belt. It took some painful soul searching to feel my brother's fear as my fear. This was the only way for me to muster the courage to stand up to my father. Empathy is not simply wearing someone's shoes for a time. It's experiencing the same feelings as your loved ones because they are part of you. You have posed a curious question so I will turn it back at you. Would you consider me to be "good at empathy" from reading my posts in this thread?

This is what really infuriates me. When trying to discuss the imbalances of state endorsed feminism, the casual feminist, which really should call himself a humanist, will say "No, feminism is about equality for everyone. The examples that you are citing are just crazy people on the internet." It's a casual dismissal of academic feminism as a threat. The more radical elements don't have a connection to the real world since they hide behind hash tags, forums, and media movements like "Ban Bossy". Feminists aren't willing to hold other feminists accountable for the damage their ideology causes. Yet, when a troubled individual like Elliot Rodger kills some people, he's somehow linked through the mainstream media to the men's rights movement. I've never heard about a case where an out-spoken men's rights activist has acted in a violent manner. Instead of solidarity, we have bloggers like Zaron Burnett III writing to men so we understand that rape is solely our fault and we need to act now to remedy this misery for women. I've written a response to his A Gentleman's Guide to Rape Culture. I'll link to it in this tread when I get it up.

Do you understand how the female "unwind" method of communication lacks empathy for the other participants? Why is the man typically expected to use empathy with a woman when the man's feelings are not any of her concern? This perspective asks us to accept that men are unfeeling machines who can do a better job using empathy and that women are ruled by their emotions and cannot help it. I don't agree with this view. Men, indeed, have many emotions, if only we were allowed to express them in conversation. Also, women have the ability to control their emotions, and use empathy even if they are in "unwind" mode. To argue that they do not is to promote the infantilization of women. Empathy is universal. Both women and men need this tool in the conversational tool belt. I have never tried to solve problems for a woman unless she specifically desires help with a solution. I understand that sometimes people talk just to vent, but when is it appropriate for the man to expect the same empathetic treatment in return?

You've hit the feminist right on the head. If you try to propose that feminism is not about equality to a feminist, you'll get a lot of resistance. Most people, men and women, don't even really know the first thing about feminist ideology. It's quite likely that they've never read anything about feminism or done any research. All the feminist understands is that feminism is about equality so it must be great. This is why not many people besides MRAs bemoan shenanigans such as #killallmen, and when you point it out to them, they rationalize by saying "That's not feminism," or "Not all feminism is like that."

How does it take any more effort for a man to listen or ask question than it does for a woman to do the same? In my experience, women are easily the more fickle communicators. If she listens to a man speak more than twenty words in row, she is already losing interest - leaving the room, trying to wrestle control of the conversation back, or talking with somebody else, preferably another woman. In practice, the ideal conversation for a woman is to be the one talking, while the man sits on his hands holding eye contact, and periodically says "Uh, huh," "Exactly," or "Yes." If men try to deviate from this format to actually express their thoughts, beliefs or emotions, women start to feel threatened and insecure, desiring to flee to another conversation. I want to reiterate that this is just my personal experience and NAWALT is obviously a given. Biologically, we have grossly different communication styles that are often incompatible. The woman's desire for connection that Alison Armstrong describes is usually a one way street. Listen to her, sympathize with her, make her feel secure, but all bets are off if you are expecting her to reciprocate these behaviors for the man. Sharing my experience here probably says a lot about what kinds of women with which I have chosen to associate, but even amiable, easy-going women have these defensive tendencies. Very few women are taking an active interest in what men have to offer in the conversation.

Please define bad cholesterol. Also, how much fat is too much? I've read that 60 to 80% of your caloric intake should be dietary fat, which includes monounsaturated, saturated, and polyunsaturated varieties. I operate under the philosophy that you should eat what you are. Humans are mainly comprised of water, fats, cholesterols, and proteins so it follows that this is what we should be consuming the majority of the time since they represent the building blocks of our body. Simply saying that too much fat can lead to negative health effects is a pretty vague statement. To which negative health side effect are you referring? Are the trans fats the only kind of bad fat? What is a trans fat exactly? Chris Kresser demonstrates here that naturally occuring trans fats may, in fact, be healthy enough to prevent cancer: http://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy

Bro, Thank you for taking the time and consideration to respond to me. Yours truly, Dude

Absolutely, you need to educate yourself on the local applicable laws, but state law shouldn't be an end run on a valid contract. You can also choose to live in a state that doesn't commonly overturn living contracts. There are other ways to circumvent these laws, the easiest of which is my third point: Choose a woman who doesn't want to rip you off at any cost and the rest of these steps are elementary.

We want children to support anarchy, not the state, which includes libertarians.

It's pretty easy to avoid all of this non-sense. 1) Don't get legally married; write your own contract if necessary. 2) Don't sign a certificate of birth for any children you have together. 3) Any woman who isn't cool with the first two points probably doesn't have your best interests in mind. If you love and trust each other, you will support your family and children because it is the right thing to do, not because feminists, single moms, and politicians say so. Now the state is (almost) entirely out of your life, and your children will thank you.

I know a girl who got hit by a cop car running a light. She was found to be at fault for not yielding to an emergency vehicle. She wasn't arrested as far as I know, but a ticket and hike in insurance rates are a foregone conclusion. The moral of the story is that police incidents are usually not found to be the fault of the police.

What is the Libertarian Party but another form of government? They will be just as easily corrupted if they achieve political power. Your marijuana example is terribly off point because it has nothing to do with transitioning toward a free, voluntary society. Do you realize that the only reason states, like Colorado, are legalizing it for recreational use is because they projected it to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue? You need an official state license to sell it, and there many other restrictions. If this is an example of transitioning to a free society, as you contend, it is an extremely heavy-handed bureaucratic means to an end. In fact, it is moving is the opposite direction of freedom. We want to move away from supporting corruption in the state, not give them more fuel for the fire. It might smell like freedom to you, but recreational pot actually increases state coercion. You should have used the example of moving toward a free society with regard to marijuana (and other illicit substances) by mentioning Silk Road, and how it got nuked by the federal government. Is it any wonder? With regard to your second point, don't put words into my mouth. We need to fix society, because how else can that be accomplished without a government, voters, and the bullshit political circus? There is no society; it is simple as abstract noun that can mean anything anyone wants it to mean. Voluntarism cannot exist there. We need to start dismantling the state interference within our daily lives first. Push the state out at all costs, and create a voluntary life, and like-minded people will join you. That's how freedom grows.

"It would be kinda cool to have a viable Libertarian Party..." Really? The nature of government is to grow itself through special interest. As soon as the Libertarians rose to power, they would be no better than the Democrats or Republics or the Green Party. In order to get there and stay there, they would have to bribe their way with more and more handouts for affiliated interests. Verily, this would be the only way they could ever be elected. Look at Adam Kokesh pledging to run for president in 2020 on the campaign platform of totally abolishing the federal government. There is no way in hell he will ever get one electoral vote, because he's sending the message that he wants to dissolve the political lobbyist system from the inside. This is the same reason you will never have more than a handful of Libertarians on the federal level, and even then they will need the support of a larger party (Republicans) to get there. For the record, I also do not believe that anarchism is unattainable or utopian. It exists everywhere you look within small pockets of voluntarism. Have you ever heard the expression, "There isn't a law against it yet?"

IBM partnered last year with Boston Police to catalog the identities of concert goers using their Smart Surveillance System and Intelligent Video Analytics. http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/18/boston-pd-tested-facial-recognition-software-by-recording-every-face-at-local-music-festivals/ This is some extremely scary authoritarian shit right here.

I would focus on the drugging, bullying (your brother likely learned it from them), and accusations of laziness. Your room mate's suicide is tough situation. I can tell that you were close. Do you blame yourself in any way for his death? I think it's telling that you wouldn't share this tragic event with your employer. It might stem from a fear of sharing your troubles with your parents. Do they have a history of using your emotional weaknesses against you? The story about your room mate and finding a job after college is telling, but that is not what this is really about. These are just symptoms of the original problem. I'm so very sorry about the lengthy medication that was probably pushed onto you and your parents by teachers to get you to learn the way they wanted you to learn. As a teen, I was put on Prozac shortly, then Zoloft, and later a very terrible drug called Accutane for acne. If my parents had decided that one of them stay home full time, downsizing our potential expansion for more children in the family (my parents got pregnant a second time but miscarried), I probably wouldn't have been such a sad kid on depression meds. If they had not fed me copious amounts of dairy throughout my childhood, I wouldn't have had the acne. There is a proven correlation between cow milk consumption and skin problems like acne. Pharmaceuticals are literally band aids for symptoms of larger problems that are 100% preventable. If you were allowed to learn in an environment that was better suited to your needs, rather than being forced through medication to be receptive to learning the way the teachers wanted you to learn, you wouldn't feel so robbed in your adulthood. The letter from your mother reminds me of what my father said to me, "Oh, don't you remember all the good times we had like when we went on vacation?" Of course, I remember them. Leaving me virtually fatherless (and mostly motherless) for the first decade of my life is not really a fair trade for a few awesome family summer road trips.

Careful, Cobra! The more convincingly you argue that eating meat is not actually bad for you, but necessary for optimal health, the more likely they are to pull out the big Lefty guns of environmentalism, and animal cruelty. Richard, seriously, discontinue feeding your kid a vegan diet. It's child abuse. There is nothing about veganism that aligns you or your family with non-violence in reality or philosophically. I'm not judging you, just telling you the harsh truth that denying your body the nutrients it needs will devastate the health of you and your children.

You need to say something to your parents about the really troubling aspects. It will make them feel like shit, initially, but you will feel so much better by just airing out the dirty laundry a little. Trust me on this one. You said they've apologized for much of their bad parenting, but what does this mean exactly? In my experience, apologies are mostly used as a social obligation for forgiveness. I apologize so you must forgive me, so I can then forget about it. Have your parents attempted to work on themselves and improve their self knowledge in response to your criticisms? The damage to you is already done. You are the one who gets stuck with trying to fix it. If are getting no where with your parents despite talking to them frequently about your feelings, and they are still actively damaging you emotionally, I would start to think about removing them from your life. I told my dad recently that I tried to kill myself slowly with alcohol because of the loneliness I feel constantly from him not being a strong presence in my early childhood. I don't think I really got to know who he was until I was a teenager despite always living with him. He was out of the house or on the road for years. We both had a good cry about it, and he has been very receptive to everything I have said since then.

I registered to vote in Colorado last year to vote NO across the board on a handful of tax generating propositions, two of which were regarding sales and excise tax limits for the sale of recreational marijuana. Since giving up all drugs and alcohol, I don't have a personal stake in voting down taxes other than attempting to use voting to decrease government, or at least preventing it from increasing. (What a crazy justification for voting!) Both propositions succeeded by a wide margin, and starting January 1st of this year, Colorado generates nearly a 40% markup in taxes based on all licensed recreational pot sales. This constitutes a considerable largesse for those with cozy relationships with local government, namely anyone involved with the Department of Education: http://www.denverpost.com/marijuana/ci_26247743/pot-revenues-starting-help-select-schools-pricey-projects. Smokers unanimously support these taxes, stating that it's a small price to pay to legalize a common medicinal plant that never should have been illegal in the first place. This shows you how ridiculous it is when people cloak the very idea of freedom in the garb of progressive statism! A stiff sin tax for marijuana translates into even bigger government for every state that legalizes it. After the election, I promptly took my name off the voter registry. I feel dirty for betraying my anarchist principles to try to vote a few tax incentives down. It's definitely the last time I'll register to vote for any reason.

After a twenty year friendship, she isn't warning her about getting engaged to a stranger from Cuba? Yeah, there's something strange going on in their relationship. As a general rule, any person who claims to be passionately loyal to their friends is to be treated with a modicum of suspicion. What happens in practice is that they will cast off friends who question them. What they end up with is a bunch of "yes men" in their lives. This twenty year friendship will be a problem for you because they are probably committed to not ever questioning each other's decisions, which means you will become an enemy if you ever start to question or challenge her or her friend. Prepare to have her bail on you many more times in the future, if you choose to stay in the relationship.

You aren't the only one! There is long history of ketogenic diets being used to prevent disease. Back in the 1920s, before anyone knew what insulin was, specialists found that epilepsy could be successfully treated with high fat/low carb nutrition. Bob Atkins successfully treated what he categorized as hypoglycemia (the perpetual blood sugar crash you experience when you eat too much carbohydrate), starting his private practice in the 1960s, helping people heal with his modified VLC (very low carbohydrate) diet. Fast forward to today, the philosophy of Paleolithic nutrition is being used to treat multiple sclerosis, which was previously thought to be incurable. The real lesson here is that in order to maintain ketosis in your body, you cannot possibly avoid all meat or animal products. At the very least, in order to stay a vegetarian and be ketogenic, you still have to eat fish - pescetarianism, I believe it's called. The problem with this, or course, is that fishing has been widely corrupted by industrial agriculture (fish farming), too. I never buy anything that isn't "wild caught" but there is a huge price difference at the counter. I hope you saw my list of recommended reading earlier in the thread, Cobra. There might be a few titles there that will interest you. I'm very glad that you are feeling well and energetic. I wish my eyesight would improve, but after two years of ketosis, I'm not holding my breath waiting for it. The Christina Warinner TED presentation is a personal nemesis of mine. I've been trying to get one of my close friends off his quasi-vegetarian diet. Like many vegetarians who end up overweight and feel unhealthy, he will cheat from time to time and have hamburgers at a cookout, which allows him to get the fat his body craves. That video was responsible for him no longer taking any of my input seriously, and he completely ignored the empirical evidence that I dropped a quarter of my body weight by going keto.

Welp, we've had a hiccup. BTC fell to $309 today. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/08/18/1934242/a-bitcoin-flash-crash/

It might help to post a link or reference some of the questions. Rewinding back to that time in my life, I would be considered libertarian especially with regard to the legality of controlled substances, elimination of the legal drinking age, voting is pointless, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, etc. Then, when I went on to college, the environment became very state centric, and leftist (9/11 occurred during this time). For the record, I went to a public high school and a private (Lutheran) college, both in Illinois - quite an interesting juxtaposition, eh?

Can a man just be a man without a derogatory label? Alpha, beta, omega are all descriptors that pretend to categorize men and have meaning, but they don't actually succeed to describe any man accurately or reliably.