andrew21594

I don't know where you guys live, but here in the UK I have only met one other person who openly supports Trump. Literally (and I mean 'literally', not 'figuratively) every single point made against Trump by people I know can be found in a Buzzfeed article. My close group of friends are all anti-Trump, but they're reasonable people who don't react aggressively to my views. My brother, who I look up to a lot, yelled at me for an hour when I questioned the validity of some of the claims made against Trump. My boss has publicly described himself as "very left-wing", and considers anyone supporting Leave or Trump to be an idiot. Naturally, I keep my views private at work. Oh, the irony - I'm being oppressed by my left-wing boss. I like to think that I helped to start the fire by voting to leave the EU. I am 22 years old and, of the 36% of 18-24 year-olds who voted in the referendum, only 24% voted to leave. The sad thing is that the vast majority of my leave-voting friends despise Trump. The Conservative association at my alma mater put a poll on its private Facebook page, to ask who the members supported, and the votes were split something like Hillary 44 - Johnson 23 - Trump 6. Their Brexit poll was 41 Remain - Leave 28.

At 1:18:09, Stef talks a bit about the Milgram experiment. 1:18:25 "Not all men - a significant proportion of men - refused to obey and apply this lethal force in the simulated - although they didn't know it was simulated - environment but, in many of the studies, all the women complied with those in authority, and again the biological reasons for this..." Could you please provide a source for this? My own brief research so far has only found statements that the men and women were EQUALLY compliant.

I've heard this two or three times in the last few months, when people discuss soldiers and morality. It goes something like this: Person A: (some point about how evil the actions of soldiers are) Person B: They were just doing their job. Person A: That's no excuse; they chose to take that job, they chose to join the army. Person B: If they didn't join the army, the government would start drafting people. Two responses come to my mind. 1) If the government was so desperate for soldiers that they had to recruit by force, then (you'd expect them to also be running low on police) they wouldn't have the manpower to force people to be conscripted. I'm not happy with this response, because I don't think they'd need a particularly large amount of manpower. I mean, in the UK there are about 240 non-police and non-army people to every one police or army person. They are hugely outnumbered, but the widespread belief in the righteousness/necessity of the state gives them the incredible amount of power required for people to submit to the government. No other gang facing those odds would manage to get anyone to do anything. 2) Justifying joining the army by saying that it's to prevent conscription does not justify the evil done after having joined. A soldier can avoid doing evil either by refusing orders or by turning their gun against the people giving the orders. While the point is, in my opinion, valid and while it does include the words "joining the army", it avoids the question of whether the government would start drafting people. I think that a lot of people would reject the point due to emotional reaction, and they would still believe that drafting would come into play. What do you think? What would you say to Person B? "If they didn't join the army, the government would start drafting people."

It is painfully clear. The father has an emotionally-abusive relationship with his child, and in all these videos the father is portrayed as a hero and/or a good father. I can't stand it.

The actions of the state are immoral. However, it is not necessarily immoral to work for the state. Let's say that the state expects to do X evil per year. If there is a job advertised by the state, then someone will get the job and the state should succeed in doing X evil that year. That someone then has to be exactly as productive as the employer expects them to be. If they are more productive, then the state will do X + x evil (where x is the unexpected contribution) that year. If they are less productive, then they will be replaced by someone who might be more productive than expected and, again, the state will do X + x evil that year. Alternatively, that someone could work their way up the ladder and fight the state from a position of power within the state, Ron Swanson style. If someone creates a job within the state, then they require the state to mug even more money from the people and they contribute +x evil that year. So if you work exactly as well as you are expected to or if you work your way up the ladder with the intention of fighting it from the top, then it is not wrong to work for the state. However, I don't think I could bring myself to do it. I'd feel too sick, especially if I was hands-on stealing/kidnapping/assaulting/killing for the state. This is just a comment. Any thoughts on what I said?

I don't think that pollution is necessarily aggression. One of the requirements for something to qualify as aggression is that it has to act on somebody's property (bodily or non-bodily). Then it is important to consider whether the air, water and other stuff being polluted is anybody's property. If you have your own private container of water or of air, then it could be aggression for somebody to pollute it; it is your property. If somebody pollutes the air or water that belongs to nobody, then nobody's property is being acted upon so it couldn't be aggression.

"Adolf" had a traumatic childhood which caused him to, in adult life, have a resting happiness level far below that of a mentally healthy person. He has an almost incessant urge to escape his state of mind. He tried some psychoactive drugs and they temporarily elevated his happiness level to a comfortable level. He uses soft drugs to increase his time-average happiness level at a moderate frequency. He inhales cannabis smoke about once every two weeks and takes an MDMA tablet every three or four months. The cannabis is not mixed with tobacco and the MDMA is pure, as determined by the results of a drug-testing kit. If you had been friends with Adolf for two years, would you want him to stop? Would you actually confront him to ask him to stop? In my opinion, the drug use is detrimental to his health in the long run. However, the short-term effects are remarkably positive. He has been almost continuously happy, more calm, less prone to bursts of anger and much, much more empathetic with others. All drugs have their dangers, and dependencies can make people do horrible things to other people. Is it up to us whether Adolf benefits in the long term or in the short term? If we ask him to stop, would we be overshadowing his childhood trauma?

Thanks for your responses. Replies to a few of you: ^I just get distressed when it happens. I don't get upset, but I definitely have an uncomfortable physiological response. If I'm at all happy on a day when it happens, my happiness gets killed for the next couple of hours or maybe for the rest of the day. If other people learned, I wouldn't care. If anything, I'd expect them to feel sorry for me because, as a bigger guy, I couldn't defend myself to the morally maximum extent without it blowing up into something big. ^ They don't get involved. They're taken aback by it but they stay out of it because I do my best to keep my composure in front of her and the others interpret that as me not suffering much. ^ Partly because I feel pathetic being the victim to a smaller, physically weaker person and being rescued by the police would make me feel even more pathetic. Partly because I think she would tell them that she was the victim and she was doing it all in self-defence. However, if I do what you recommend then I reckon she wouldn't get away with that. Thank you. Also partly because this becoming a police matter might cause me even more stress and hurt my performance at university. And partly because I'm unsure about the moral justification for using the state. My plan now is to record what she does to me. I will try to build a case against her and use it to discourage her. If that doesn't work, then I'll give in and contact the police. In the mean time, I will try to embarrass her in a legal way while making sure that people know what she is doing to me. I will also say "Smile for the nanny cam" if I'm ever alone with her and I get a hint of hostility from her. I will not avoid being alone with her because I want to be able to go about my business in the house without having to change it to fit around her. Again, thanks to all of you.

If anything, these proposals make the employees LESS valuable to the employer since the employees can now spend less time working (no need to hurry back to work if you can stay away and keep having the Benjamins rolling in). Since the employee is now less valuable, it is in the employer's incentive to pay them less for the whole year. So yes, people are going to get a lower wage (and/or less in the way of employment benefits eg. dental care, free parking). Although the administrative costs would be small, they would still be non-zero. Regardless of whether people are better off, anything "mandatory" is an instruction enforced by whatever threat is necessary. Since these proposals have to do with illness, there is no element of violence and so the mandatory proposals are clearly morally wrong. The concept of sick pay doesn't have to make sense. It just has to suit the popular opinion and be enforced.

If your circumstances require you to have regular contact (eg. a few times a week) with someone who threatens you with physical violence and who actually uses physical violence against you, how should you deal with them? My situation: - I am a student living in a house with 23 other people. - I can't afford to move house and I don't want to leave my friends in the house. - One person in my house threatens me with physical violence (and actually uses physical violence) if I do something that annoys them. I don't intentionally annoy them and none of the things I do puts anyone in danger (eg. setting things on fire) or gives anyone any difficulty (eg. blasting music at 2am). - The violence that is threatened would cause serious bodily harm, but the violence that is actually used does not. - This person shows no remorse and, during and after the use or threat of violence, shows no playfulness(i.e. it's not just a joke - not that that would make it okay). - This person is female and I am male. She is about 30cm shorter than I am and she must weigh about 20kg less than I do. So not many people are genuinely sympathetic towards me as the victim. - Police involvement is out of the question. So how should you mentally deal with someone like this, and how should you deal with them when you're in contact with them?

I have a friend who labels himself an anarcho-communist. He doesn't believe in private property and, one believer in a stateless society to another, asks me what would happen to all the private property if the state fell and a stateless society emerged. He asks that question because he thinks that, assuming private property can be legitimate, none of today's private property is legitimate because of government interfering with private property. The exchange of private property has, for as long as governments have existed, been interfered with by government; government has taxed and regulated private property and has indirectly affected the trade of private property through the effects of its policies (eg. government orders construction of highway -> people buy land next to highway to set up a motel). Over hundreds (eg. US) or thousands (eg. UK) of years, government has steered the exchange of private property in directions that it would not have gone without government interference. So private property today would not be owned by the same people if it weren't for the use of violence. Therefore, today's private property is all illegitimately owned. Question 1) "Therefore, today's private property is all illegitimately owned." - Do you agree? If yes, then Question 2) Once a stateless society emerges, who owns what? Do we abandon all current ownerships and collect private property in a giant free-for-all? Sorry, by "legitimate", I mean non-aggressively, morally sound etc., nothing to do with the law. Thanks, Andy

The Non-Aggression Principle presents a problem when applied to environmental pollution (damn, that's some alliteration there). Taking air pollution as an example, the idea is that if you pollute the air with cancer-causing particles and other people consume that air then you are exposing their bodies to danger without their consent, therefore you have committed an aggressive action. I think a lot of libertarians are familiar with this, and they either accept polluting acts as aggressive or they have an argument to say that it is okay. These arguments are normally along the lines of "If you don't like it, you can get out" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fZZqDJXOVg - South Park clip to demonstrate), which I hate to see coming from libertarians, or they say that your life is better and safer in a polluted world, which just disregards the NAP. There's an obvious alternative which is to say that the act of breathing is also pollution, because you reduce the oxygen content and increase the content of particles that cannot be used in respiration and of particles that your body has rejected because they are harmful. That of course makes breathing an act of pollution => aggressive, so I search with hope for an alternative. My response is to say that people have no ownership of the air being polluted, until they breathe the air in. Nothing can be owned until someone takes control of it (I'm talking about how the property rights over yet-unowned things are created, not about the philosophical origin of property rights in general). For example, you could not own some piece of wilderness just by looking at it; you would have to do something to that land (eg. build on it) in order to associate it with you for it to become someone's (your) property. You could not own an apple from a wild apple tree just by seeing it on the ground; you would have to take it in your hand for it to be yours. A body cannot be owned by anyone until the mind within it takes neurological control. Likewise, the air on the planet does not belong to anyone just by knowing that it is there; people need to collect the air in one way or another, breathing for example. It is not aggressive for Bob to pollute the air because Bill does not own that air until Bill breathes it in. Pollution is aggressive if it is done on something that is already owned. So, your thoughts on the whole problem and on my solution?

Thank you very much for your constructive responses. Because left unanswered, I would have to take every single person to have ever lived to be a victim of their parents' crimes and that's very difficult to handle. What I'm taking away from this is that the Non-Aggression Principle allows for reasonable expectation of consent if the person concerned is not able to explicitly give their consent.

Yes. I believed in God and in the power of prayer for a long time, so it was likely that at least one of them would be answered. Because I genuinely believed that prayer worked, a one-line prayer in my head would make me confident enough for my worries to go away. Nowadays, if I'm so worried about something that it keeps me up at night, I use prayer because in my experience it has consistently demonstrated its ability to make me less worried. When I believed, it made sense for me to be relieved after praying. I believed while my brain was developing, so I guess my brain is now hard-wired to respond in this way.

(I must emphasise that I am not asserting my opinion here; I am just asking a question. I know that a lot of you in the Peaceful Parenting topic are parents and this post is not intended to attack your moral integrities. This question has been troubling me for a while and these forums are probably among the best for handling the Non-Aggression Principle) Is it aggressive to give birth? My understanding of the word 'aggression' is that an action done by X against Y is aggressive if ALL of the following criteria are met: 1. X controls whether X does the action 2. The action takes control of Y's property (bodily or otherwise) 3. Y does not consent to the action 4. X and Y are and/or will be conscious (eg. it would not be aggressive to kill a plant but it would be aggressive to have intercourse with someone passed out drunk) Let's say that Anne is pregnant with a baby who we shall call Chris. Anne has two choices: to give birth to Chris or to abort Chris. Anne controls whether she gives birth; in the developed world, unless she is imprisoned and/or unconscious, she has the resources to go either way. (1) If Chris will be born and become conscious, then he will have ownership rights over his body and whether to live or not. Giving birth to Chris causes his body to become conscious. (2, 4) Prior to birth, and for a while after, Chris cannot consent to anything including his birth. (3) All four criteria for aggression are met, therefore it is aggressive for Anne to give birth to Chris. The only objection to this I have ever met (this was in the comments section on one of Stefan's videos) was that this action precedes the baby's consciousness and is therefore not aggressive. In that case, it is not aggressive to chop off someone's arm while they sleep (this is obviously aggressive). Please respond by telling me if I misunderstand 'aggression' and/or how this logic is faulty.