tiepolo

Ok then, opposite.

Wow... If ever Stefan Molyneux and his show had a direct antithesis, it would be the first three minutes of this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXNQaHWbQ-c For the sake of balance...

A necessary evil is one that prevents a greater evil. Having a state and a standing army is a lesser evil than being invaded by someone else's army, for example. This doesn't strike me as overly complicated.

I am presently coming down as a minarchist/ libertarian nationalist, since I think a free society needs some national core, some focus of identity, some infrastructure, a legal system, and national defence. I think a minimal state might be a necessary evil. I also see a nation state, territorially speaking, as the common property of its citizens, and believe in national homelands. It seems to me only a minority of people are cut out for being individualists or for choosing their own tribe rather than their native one. The optimum political system should reflect this reality. I would be happy in principle to set aside some land and some settlements for the purist anarchists to show me they can make their ideas work, and I would wish them well. But until they produced any results to point to, I would keep my borders closed.

If non existence were preferable, most people would kill themselves, doctors would be scorned and murderers held in high regard. It would be easy to decide to leave the world. That also suggests that suffering is not the predominate experience that life presents. I don't think you can have any preference for a pre-life state, as capacity to prefer assumes being alive and somewhat sentient. You need a living individual or a living society to have a preference for anything. As I say, morality also requires intelligent creatures to be around to be moral. The cause of preserving and advancing morality must be moral in and of itself. That makes having children a virtuous act and arguably a moral duty, especially for healthy, intelligent and moral people.

Races are as real as breeds of dog, or as naturally occurring subspecies in other species. Domestic dogs, with all their breeds are just one of the 39 subspecies of wolf that have been categorised (which can all interbreed if they come into contact, just as human races can). The idea that there are not human races, and distinct groups within races, is absurd. No one would mistake the photo below for pygmy in a group of Caucasians!... Environments breed for different traits the same way artificial selection does, and cultural, sexual selection also has similar consequences. All this is so obvious that it shows the prevalence of ideological subversion and egalitarian propaganda that it needs to be stated. Fractional slacker has aptly identified what a slippery thing the concept of 'racism' has become, and how it makes people try to countermand the evidence of their own eyes. Avoiding the taint of 'racism' also necessitates a lot of magical thinking, as though principles of animal breeding and Darwinian evolution do not apply to human populations. Anti-Racism used to mean not mistreating people on the basis of their race, and any decent person would probably get behind that. Now, though, the cultural Marxists have made it a thought-crime even to acknowledge measurable racial differences, physical or cognitive (the latter being a matter of averages, which should not prejudge individuals). The different performances of different groups, viewed though the prism of race-denying ideologies, have to be ascribed to 'oppression' or 'white privilege', (a thing which strangely doesn't seem to hold back East Asians in the classroom or blacks in certain sporting events). I think the truth is obvious to anyone who really thinks about it objectively, and who utilises Occam's razor. But most refuse to acknowledge it, due to social considerations, and fear of stigmatising labels. Noticing difference (and not blaming whites for the shortcomings of non-whites) has become associated with 'racism'. Denying difference has become associated with virtue and 'enlightenment' and 'progresssiveness' etc. So it boils down to whether one is more interested in pursuing the truth wherever it leads or in social acceptance in a PC society.

How is asking questions and inviting the investigation of an historical event leading to its forgetting and the possibility of a repeat (supposing it happened)? What is the case for preventing free inquiry into the matter, or the expression of honest doubts? Also why does everyone know (or think they know) how many Jews perished during that period, but not off-hand how many Polish gentiles, for example?

That would be a poor defence in a murder trial...

American fracking companies have apparently been very reticent to tell the public, or even doctors, what chemicals they have pumped into the earth, making the treatment of people with poisoning symptoms difficult. I find this monstrous, personally. The leaking of methane into water supplies, and the phenomenon of bubbly, flammable tap water has also been associated with this industry. The best suggestion I have heard is to make underground gas the collective property of the people who live above it, so that the community can decide what to do with it and take a share of the profits as well as the environmental consequences, if they agree to it going ahead.

I thought a 'truth about fracking' (as in shale gas) might be a good topic for a video, since it's a controversial issue, with different parties and national governments taking very different lines on it.

That's fair enough as your definition. I believe George Bernard Shaw called both Britain and America 'fascist' in the 1940s, by essentially that definition. But most would only class Germany and Italy and possibly Spain as the only fascist nations, by the commion historical understanding. Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto didn't say anything about privatizing profits. Social and economic policies of fascism seemed rather similar to those of Communism, actually, including nationalization of industries, and the introduction of a progressive income tax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto Notice the Facist manifesto also included the then radical notion of votes for women! And a minimum wage! It all seems very 'progressive' and Left-wing, in actuality, which belies the prevailing understanding. The only difference between Italian fascism and Communism is that Italian fascism recognised national ties and rejected international class struggle. Nowerdays 'Antifa' radicals, meanwhile, use the term 'fascist' against any vaguely conservative, nationalistic or patriotic group. That shows how silly this is! UKIP often get smeared as 'fascist', even though they are classical liberals and advocates of the free market. (When the National Union of Students says 'no platform for those promoting fascism', they are not talking about people defending the bank bail-outs!) Nazi Germany had more socialistic economic principles. Hitler said in 1927, concerning the Nazi party: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” Earlier, his work Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed much concern for the conditions of poor German workers, and disgust with the economic institutions that kept them in a debased state. Again, no evidence of wanting to subsidise profits and privatise costs! The Nazis do not meet the aforementioned definition of 'fascist'. Nazi Germany is the regime with which flingers of the term 'fascist' generally seek to smear those on the receiving end by association (even if there is no association and little ideological common ground). The term is also used to besmirch white nationalists and race-realists whatever economic policies they might favour, and however opposed they might be to subsidizing costs and privatising profits. So it seems 'fascist' is a word without any practical application, since there is inevitably more passion than understanding when the word is used.

It is not the abolition of the British state's jurisdiction over Scotland that is proposed, it is not 'independence' that is on offer but secession. Scotland is not an occupied land, any more than the rest of the UK is. I also think it's sad that the concepts of state and nation have become muddled up. Whether the Scots and English etc. belong to the same nation, as fellow Britons, is a different question than that about where political decisions should be made. To my mind this vote, coming before votes on Britain's future in the EU, is a bit like being given a vote to change cabins on a sinking ship. Alex Salmond is a pathetic creature who has no political vision or genuine nationalist sentiment (hence his crazy idea that Scotland can both be free and 'independent' and part of the EU). He just wants to be a big fish in a small pond. Personally I am conflicted because I quite like the idea of the Union, and think we are stronger together. Having been born in Scotland to English parents I feel more British than English. I am annoyed not to get a vote due to presently residing south of the border. That said I can see a silver lining if Scotland does go its own way, including the fact that the Labour Party will find it hard to win elections in England after such a split.

'Fascist' is one of those loaded terms which people are seldom willing to define, and therefore the people who use such a word are people I am seldom inclined to listen to. The only certainty is that if something is called 'fascist' it is very very bad and wicked in some dark and terrible way. Everyone seems to want to emotionally masturbate by imagining that they are making a stand against 'fascists'. The word may as well be substituted with 'demons' and 'demonic', for all the light it sheds on anything.

OK, then, another moon that we won't miss...

Humans have every right to prioritise what is good for humanity, and call it 'good'. If we lost the moon without great disasters befalling mankind then it would be no great loss compared to disasters befalling mankind! Killing a baby would be a worse act, in and of itself, than blowing up the moon.

There are some pretty rational explanations for in-group preference, in evolutionary terms...

If morality is universally preferable behaviour, then is it immoral not to have children? If no-one had children then the human species would become extinct, and with it would perish the only creatures with the intelligence to understand, formulate and enact morality. Support for morality would seem to entail a desire to keep morality in existence, and since universality is explicit in UPB, would that not suggest that having children is a moral duty?

The self-styled 'anti-racists' never define it, especially those who make a living out of it. They want to be like an inquisitor with an arbitrary power to say who is and is not a heretic.* They want people to be in fear of the denunciation, since it gives them power. So it seems to me. The original Marxists and Leninists also preferred to use smear words, slander and attack words rather than reason and logic in debate, in order to put their opponents on the defensive. If someone lobs an r-word bomb into a discussion, the person on the receiving end spends the rest of the time trying to prove they are not guilty of the vague charge rather than defending their corner. That is the intention, very often, hence the utility of the mantra, since the accuser then has to defend their definition of racism and show how it is not just a codeword for anti-white. Incidentally I would quite like to hear Stefan Molyneux's definition of 'racism', since he uses the r-word as though it has some validity. The nearest he has come, to my knowledge, is a negative definition, i.e. 'it can't be racist if it's true'. * Something similar applies to the word 'fascist', I've noticed, since people who fling that word never want to define it. It is a word designed to silence opponents, implying guilt by association.

I don't think much of that, since it conflates positive identity and appreciation of one's heritage with chauvinism and dismissiveness of other cultures.

Or you could just try to point out how what they say is actually wrong, using logic, reason and evidence... Just a thought...

It rather goes over my head, but I gather it has been observed in metaphysics that universal laws break down and seem not to apply at certain levels. Chaos theory relates to this, as do paradoxes. So the idea of the universal cannot really be applied to anything. At a certain point the laws of physics cease to apply. I think perhaps that UPB might break down at a certain level, in a similar fashion. It is good to push it as far as possible. An example would be limited state being, paradoxically, a prerequisite of liberty, in reality, because a free society would not be sustainable in the immediate term without some form of co-ordinated defence. You cannot devise a system assuming that everyone lives up to a minimal standard of virtue, rationality and honesty, moreover, so some standards cannot be applied universally. Self ownership makes sense if you say the mind is the owner and the body and actions the property. 'Ownership' in the latter instance seems to mean responsibility for the consequences. However again this assumes a minimal standard of capacity for reason and responsibility. A great proportion of the human species would fall below this standard, I suspect. Say someone was murdered by a mentally deranged 'care in the comunity' patient, this killing would be more the responsibility of the authorities who closed the mental asylums than of the disturbed individual who physically carried out the attack. it would be more moral to initiate force restraining the dangerous lunatic before he went around attacking members of the public. Personally, though I like UPB based morality up to a point, there comes a point after which utilitarian and consequential morality need to take over. If, for example, the consequences of not having some minimal form of state, and an army, involve being invaded by enemies who would impose a more intrusive form of state, then it would seem perfectly justified to make an exception to the UPB rule and to defer to consequentialism. Children cannot be seen as property by anyone who doesn't want to acknowledge themselves the property of their own parents. If one asserts one's autonomy as anadult individual then it would seem to imply a duty to grant such autonomy to one's children, and to bring them up in such a way as to allow them to cope with it when they come of age.

I think the r-word thing is wearing thin, especially because of the anti-white double standards that obviously prevail. White people have been held to a higher standard, ironically, by people who proclaim racial equality. Only whites are expected to be 'color-blind' as the Americans put it, except when it comes to advancing the interests of non-whites. Whites have had their decency and alturuism used as a weapon against them, and obliged to put up with some shoddy treatment in the name of 'anti-racism'. An ex girlfriend of mine once told me that she was denied a place in her university of choice (Birmingham, UK) because they had a 'diversity target' to meet. This means a race quota, and it means she was racially discriminated against for being white British in Britain. My dad once told me a similar story about the daughter of a friend of his who applied for a job with the police in Buckinghamshire, and who was turned away because they were looking to fill the vacancy with an ethnic minority candidate. She asked 'isn't that racist?' and the reply, apparently, was along the lines, of: 'no, but what you just said was, and you could be prosecuted'! This is outrageous! There is institutional racial discrimination in these institutions, but white people are the victims, contrary to the prevailing media narrative... I am sick of it, and also of nonsensical, euphemistic phrases like 'positive discrimination' (which the Americans have under the guise of 'Affirmative Action'. All positive discrimination involves negative discrimination. I am in favour of private operators being free to discriminate on whatever basis they please, in the name of freedom of association. Refusing to hire, accommodate or serve someone is not initiation of force, and there would naturally be social and economic consequences for the antisocial people who might choose to discriminate on irrational or arbitrary grounds. But anyway... Episodes like the two examples I gave incline me to lend credence to the slogan that has been doing the rounds, i.e. that 'anti-racism is just a code-word for anti-white'. A large percentage of the time that would seem to be the case, especially where those who argue against racial discrimination are so-smeared.

What do you mean by thinking and acting like a racist? That is too vague. You need to define what you are talking about. Stefan has observed that whites are more empathic, and this makes them easily exploited (the first liberals in an illiberal world.) He rightly decries the white-guilt swindle. (Some might call this 'racist', those who make a living from calling everything 'racist'). I can't find the broadcast I'm thinking about, but this one makes some similar points. (Briefly from about 4 minutes in and then again from about 9 minutes in). As for stateism, well, hmm. I'd like to believe you about the viability of an anarchic system. If I could grant you a large island to use setting up such an experimental society, then I would, and I would wish you all the best with the experiment. Meanwhile I will go with what is tried and tested, and advocate minimising what appears to be a necessary evil.

Your life is only your potential to continue living (this is the thing that is owned when one assert's one's right to live). When you murder someone you don't take the life they have already lived. Their life up to the moment of the murder is unaffected.

You will continue to live if permitted to occupy the same space and position in linear time without being killed by someone or something. You have the rest of your life in potential. If someone murders you, the wrong done is to strip you of this potential, they arrest your capacity to live on. If they smother you in your sleep then they deprive you of the potential right to wake up. The fact that you are not a conscious, sentient, moral being or a free agent capable of expressing preference, while in a state of sleep, doesn't lessen the crime, since the potential would exist for you to wake up and resume that state. Giving an embryo a right to be born is exactly the same in principle. Also, the potential right to take a driving test doesn't become less and less grey as the child nears the legal age. The potential right is constant, up until the point where it becomes an active right. The potential right a newborn baby has to take a driving test is no different from the potential right a fifteen year old has to do so. The sperm or eggs that men and women carry around in their testicles and ovaries don't have any potential to develop into anything unless coitus and fertilisation has taken place, so it makes sense to see fertilisation as the beginning point of potential rights and potential humanity generally. A pot of yellow paint and a pot of blue paint have no potential, individually, to become green. They have no green quality to them. Only if and when they are mixed together can any greenness come about.