yagami

What made me think of this topic was realizing how much of a waste time most of school is these days. I mean kids are "taught" ( and I use that word loosely) Music, art, history, PE, and I would even go as far as to say science. These subjects I feel shouldn't be taught in school because they are branches off of the basic 4 skills needed to do anything. Reading, writing, math and logic. If we spent more time focusing on just those 4 skills kids would graduate school many years earlier and be able to begin pursuing their dreams earlier. I mean think of the amount of kids that are "taught" about history, art and science and actually end up doing something in that field when they are an adult. Then there are even fewer people who make money in those fields (expect maybe science). Seems like a huge investment with very few kids getting any benefit. Lol sorry wasn't trying to trick people into this post or anything. Im not entirely sure children need self knowledge. It seems something like self knowledge is only useful to those that put up emotional barriers to reality to survive traumatic childhoods. If you have a happy life with no trauma then what purpose does self knowledge hold? Knowing biological drivers I wouldn't say is the same as self knowledge which I think all children should know (when appropriate).

Thanksgiving is coming up and me and my (BIO)dad always have long drawn out debates about government. So of course I have been thinking about a lot of the arguments I've been exposed to over the past year through Steph and started thinking about school and history. You know they always say if you dont know your history you are doomed to repeat it. Knowing what I know now I actually dont believe that is true. What seems to be most important is knowing how to think not what pitfalls to avoid that other people have experienced. At the same time something like government is so dangerous I would think it is important to teach children the danger that could come from having someone rule over you. It doesn't seem like a bad idea to teach children that wild bears can be dangerous. And if we accept that then what is the difference between teaching what would seem to be a conclusion that a bear is dangerous and the government is dangerous? I dont know what do you guy/gals think? Do you think history is an entirely useless waste of time in school or does history have a place somewhere?

The way I see this problem is would you be morally obligated to pay back the mafia if you entered into a contract with them. This is also assuming that you didn't know they were the mafia before you entered into a contract with them. I would say yes you are still morally obligated to do so. The contract you entered into was voluntary. I am sure at the time of you entering into the contract with them you knew that there were times when the government used your money to do things you did not agree with. Things like starting wars taxes ect. So you may not have known the extent of bad things that could happen when you payed the government but when dealing with philosophy there isn't much room for looking at things in terms of degrees. We dont say something is moral or immoral based off of a scale of negative consequences. Now that you know that everything the government does is evil that doesn't release you from your obligation. Besides the contract does not state that when you pay back the money the money will be used for anything in particular. You made that assumption and now want to run away from those consequences. Even if those consequences are not only bared by you alone you are still morally bond to fulfill your obligation. Non-principled people will look at this and say you are doing the right thing practically. You are bringing the evil of the government closer to its end. But those who believe in principles first will say you are acting immorally. (in my opinion)

That's not pretty rude. He hasn't said anything rude to anyone here and that seems pretty uncalled for. He could simply have his view points and has come here to hear a different argument which is more than what most people would do. Imagine you taking your beliefs to a different forum and they said I've been trying to figure out if he's a troll or a psychopath.

Im not referring to that call specifically im more talking about all I've learned from philosophy. My call was this one: By the way the singing I thought was horrible. As far as your question about the hearing stuff that is best answered by a doctor. Cant offer anything philosophical about it. I would much rather have philosophy over my hearing though.

To answer the question in the title philosophical all the way. But I wouldn't know the benefits of being philosophical before making that call before hand. XD

Lets start with your first point. Freedom is not the cause of continued violations of your property rights. If the government is bound by law to not act it is the government that enacted those laws through the democratic process. This is not a result of unchecked freedom at all. Im not sure if you have read Stephs book called practical anarchy but he explains one likely way violations of property rights will be dealt with in a free society. I'll give it a short summary. Basically if you violate someone property rights you will either pay in some appropriate way or you would suffer a credit score hit. This isn't the traditional credit score where it only deals with finance this credit score will handle everything ( or it is very possible that there will be multiple credit scores for multiple things). So there may be a credit score for how often you violate or fulfill contracts or how often if at all you assault people. People who have a low credit score will be unable to function in society because it is in everyone interest to not be assaulted or stolen from ect. So you wont be able to buy groceries buy a car buy property and so on and so forth. This is what unchecked freedom looks like. Saying that the clearly unfree society is somehow looks anything like what we have now I think is incorrect. On your second point I dont think anonymity turns people into bad people. In fact im sure it doesn't. Anonymity makes people feel more comfortable being who they really are. So many of us are not allowed to be ourselves because of our childhoods. When we are allowed to be ourselves without consequence then you see the true state of people in society. Getting rid of anonymity is attempting to fix the symptom not the disease. If you want people to not act negatively when given anonymity then we need to prevent bad childhoods. That is the real problem.

First off I wanna say the post you just posted probably will get down voted and I'm against people doing that. If someone says something you disagree with that is not grounds for down voting someone. The down vote is to be used for people being abusive. You have gotten lots of down votes and I dont think they are called for. Second please point to the point in time that you have witness that you call "unchecked freedom". And please provide evidence or an explanation of how the freedom alone lead to a negative outcome. Thanks.

Force is not evil. The initiation of force and force itself are two completely different things. So lets make sure when you use the word force you are clear about which one you are referring to.

I gotta agree with what rainbow said. I personally felt a little insulted since I have called into the show before. And I dont think anyone think you have no empathy because you wouldn't be here. But I think it says something. What exactly I dont know im no therapist so I try not to diagnose people but it does make me uneasy.

I didn't find this very funny and not because the jokes were bad but because a lot of stuff people call into the show about are pretty screwed up. I've learned from watching the show that making light of these situations isn't very healthy. This would have been great if he made fun of Steph's corny jokes or baldness or whatever but I didn't find the all the childhood jokes very funny. Maybe I am just bias because my childhood was screwed up but I dont think I'm too far off from thinking objectively here.

I dont particularly see the problem with it. I think it's probably counter productive though but what do I know about making fans fall in love with your bans. If Steph had a pay model for the business of FDR I am certain I would pay for the shows but I dont think I would pay for the meet and greet.

I disagree. I dont think the US at the time had any enemies capable of actually making us want to go to war on their own. I think the enemies are created by us through our actions overseas and that if this was the governments doing they did a really crappy job of executing this. There are lots of engineers and scientist that have spent quite a lot of time picking apart all the inconsistencies in the official story. In the end it doesn't really matter to me. Im just going to spread the message of peaceful parenting and hope the world isn't over by the time our work here at fdr comes to light.

Yea you are correct. This will simply shift money around. People immediately effected by this will get a small boost in available income but when time for raises come they may get no raise or a smaller raise. And those that aren't employed yet ill get lower pay to compensate. I swear it's like people think the business is just gonna reduce it's profits in order to pay more to it's employees. Because you know they have too much profits anyway. What would a business possibly do with all that "extra" money. The ignorance of people.

That's pretty awesome. And you always have a home here if you want to talk to people. I for one have found that I dont have any real world friends anymore after listening to Steph but I do at least have fun talking to people on the forums here. Im not so sure you have heard what Steph has to say about the military and your role in perpetuating the system but you might want to either call in or at least start talking about it on the forums to get maybe a different perspective on that. I hate to have to jump on you with that in your intro post but in since you say you are up for enlistment soon you may not get a chance to hear the arguments before you have signed the papers. Anyway nice to meet you and good job spreading the message to those that are really hard for us civilians to reach.

The problem with the question is that you have assumed that people like the taxi cap enough to justify it's existence. I prefer the my grocery store to be designed with the theme of my favorite video game in mind but if im not willing to pay for it then it wont exist. So you cant just say people like the look of the taxi cab therefore the taxi's exist.That doesn't logically follow because if they really liked the look of taxis they would pay for it.

I dont want you to think im saying that I clinched the argument. Im just saying that people say morality is relative but they act like morality is objective. For me if people want to argue morality is relative then they need to first stop being a hypocrite before we can continue the conversation. But im not trying to say that that is some kind of proof. As I stated when I have children I will really have to study up on why morality is actually objective. But until then I am not going to argue either way really because I haven't taken the time to understand why morality is objective.

That's very true when I found out that my all this stuff had been happening under the surface I did feel like everyone had been lying to me about the true nature of the relationship. I felt like she was a very different person after I found that out. I bet if I never knew any of that stuff I would be much more sad. I've spoken to my sister and mother about it and we all feel the same way about her death and everyone mentioned the drama during the conversation. So I think that probably does play a key role here.

This is the first time a close family member has died for me. I grew up going over to my aunts house and I visited her often as an adult as well. Since listening to Steph I view family very differently now then I did before and I cant seem to bring any emotion out of me about this. I feel pretty empty about all this and I dont know why. I was treated well by her and she was always giving me advice (biblical mostly). She was the kindest old lady you would ever meet but I stopped seeing her recently. Apparently my mother and her had a falling out around January about finances. I didn't know that my mom was paying for her home and other expenses because she couldn't afford it. My aunt ran up a bunch of credit cards and had to refinance the house to pay off the debt and my mom was on the hook for that. I advised my mother to stop allowing my aunt to guilt her into feeling like she owed her for basically being the primary care giver for her growing up. My grandmother is just a terrible person in general so my aunt basically took care of my mom. After my mom stopped talking to my aunt I stopped as well. I didnt want to be involved in that drama and I felt like I would have to avoid the topic of what happened between them which I've never had to do before. I was always able to say anything to her. I feel like I should feel something about her death and I dont feel like the events that transpired are enough to completely erase any emotion I would have about her death. I dont know this is people dying thing is really new to me maybe it just hasn't hit me yet but I really feel like it will never hit. Have any of you experienced a lack of emotion like this around death?

Man I wish this stuff was around when I was a kid.

Stephan made a good point in one of his recent podcast about this. He said if you believe morality is subjective then start teaching children that you can murder steal rape ect and it shouldn't matter to you because morality is subjective. You wont find anyone that is willing to say they will teach children morality is subjective in that way. People give objective moral standards to children all the time. Hitting is wrong stealing is wrong lying is wrong. For me that pretty much seals the argument up right there. Fortunately I dont have children of my own to have to really understand exactly why morality is objective so I'll save the studying for when I do. XD

Im going to try to resist the temptation to blow up the contradiction of anarcho-communist and answer the questions. For the first question I would say who cares whether the property is legitimately owned or not. We are all prisoners and do what we must to survive. Once the government is gone we will have to pick up the pieces of what's left and move forward. I guess I just dont understand the importance of why legitimacy matters when it comes to moving from one type of society to another. Lets say the government owns 100% of the property and then we become a stateless society out of nowhere. Everyone will have to buy property from said government. Even if we say this is illegitimate what baring does that bring to bare on the real world? Should we give it back to the government? The people who originally owned the land are long since dead. So we can never legitimately give that back. As far as building computers and things like that it is impossible to tell who the property belongs to. We cant collectively own the government building because there is no way to tell if my dollars were taken and went to one building or the next. So the government selling the property to the highest bidder is the only option we really have the makes sense. Will the owner of the property be the legitimate owner? I would say yes only because no one can point to the individual it should belong to. Since you are speaking to a communist I would assume he would then say it belongs to the people collectively. To that I would say what happens when the generation that owns that property dies and the next generation takes over. Are we really going to say that we somehow collectively decided to pass this property to the next generation? It would be impossible to get a collective consensus on that. You also have to take into account how would anyone make any decisions regarding the property. Who will maintain the property and is this maintenance compulsory? There are so many ways why collective ownership of property wont work the only sensible answer would be to have individuals own the property which means selling the property. Hope that answers your question.

That's pretty horrible. I really feel sorry for people that consume this kind of garbage. Before I started listening to Steph these kind of things didn't really effect me that much. Now when I see stuff like this I get really sad that everyone thinks this kind of stuff is ok.

I don't want to give the impression that if you don't donate you are somehow a bad person or anything. And I don't want people to think that I have objectively think there is no one better at articulating the message. What im saying is if in your mind you have been convinced this is the best way then by not donating you are holding us all back. If you think there is a better way then you don't fall into the category of people im referring to. And yes those that cant donate monetarily because of constraints that is completely understandable. I don't make a lot of money but before I started donating I realized just how much crap I was buying that I didn't need. Stuff like going out to eat not cooking spending money on video games and other stuff. Every time I did it I couldn't help but think "this is money I could have donated to help spread the message but im wasting it on this thing I don't need." So that finally kept eating at me until the point where I just gave in and stopped spending money on things I didn't need and started donating. Im better off in so many ways. Not only do I feel better but I also cook just about everyday now and eat healthier. Another thing I noticed is that the time it takes me to get dressed leave the house go to the drive through bring the food back then eat is about the same amount of time it would take me to cook something. So I finally ran out of excuses and donated. I encourage everyone to really think about if you really are unable to donate or are you just making excuses for yourself. Im not saying you have to be a philo king like me but just give it some thought.

Clearly you would like to hurl insults rather than have a debate with me. Clearly I made an assumption that was unfounded which was my mistake but you go off and insult me because of it instead of correcting me and putting forth your argument. As much as I was enjoying this debate I will not be continuing with someone like you. In the future try to leave the none arguments out of your post and keep the insults to yourself.