Ken Cotton

Of course they would dsayers. Just because there is structural violence doesn't mean there aren't other forms of violence. No side has all the answers. I justify my actions by the will to power. Not all men are created equal. Those who are willing to rise to the occasion and lead should do so. Those who follow will reap the benefits of doing so, and those who do not will perish. Once you remove the problematic elements of society, the remaining people will follow voluntary. If I can lead 100 people to glory and prosperity at the cost of a handful of dissenting individuals why wouldn't I? Why should our public streets and parks be cluttered by homeless people leaving disease ridden syringes laying around? People who operate such facilities do so by their own free will. There cannot be a leader without the will of the people. They will only show up to build, maintain, and administrate those facilities because they believe in the cause.

The process of joining this site, using my identity, and being consistent in my beliefs across mediums would make this pretty dedicated trolling. Which it isn't. This is just who I am and what I think.

Animals and plants don't have property rights because...? Animals feel pain. Humans are animals. If you invade an area that a group of animals have been living in for a long time and kill them, how are you not initiating force against them? Are you allowed to torture animals? If animals don't have property rights, does that mean they don't have any other rights either? Animals are able to vocalize and signify their domain to each other in a variety of ways. Different kinds of animals stake claims for areas that are respected or contested by other animals. Your assertion that animals don't have property rights is a complete refusal and willful ignorance of the proven fact that animals claim territory.

Powder I apologize for making you uncomfortable. That is not my intention.

My primary solution is work camps. I've outlined in my blog a basic concept. The idea would be housing, food, basic amenities. Each person in the camp would be paid a net amount per month into a holding account that would be accessible once they finished their term. Terms would range from say 1-5 years as an example. The weak, unruly, or insane would die. I justify these deaths as a necessary reality, and look to the fact that many homeless people will die as a result of the elements or drug use anyway. Whether they die on the streets neglected by society or in a work camp is of little real difference in my opinion. After having worked in the camp ( say a mill type operation ) they will have learned a routine. They will be more physically fit and skilled. They will also enter the "real world" with a modest holding, enough to cover basic rent and such until they find a job. By this point they would be wholly unaccustomed to the idea of lazing about, so finding a job would be pretty easy as long as the job market has availability. As a nationalist my principle concern is developing the domestic population, so immigration and economic reform would ensure many openings. Structural violence is just violence that occurs within or as a result of a structure. The free market, like everything else, has a structure. It is made of matter and operates with the same basic physics as everything else that exists. Even chaos and randomness have a discernable underlying structure. These things wouldn't be able to exist outside of the physical realities of the universe, and so saying they lack any structure is wrong. My assertion of course leads to the conclusion that all violence is structural violence. If you're out in the wilderness and you're eaten by a bear, in a literal sense that's structural violence because you've been subjected to violence within the framework of animal survival, mass, gravity, etc etc. You wouldn't be able to bleed out from a bear mauling you if there weren't some sort of persistent structure that made your blood leave your body. However, just for common conversation, PJ/we separate "structural violence" from routine violence in general. Structural violence in this context refers specifically to violence as the result of artificial constructs or structures. The free market is an artificial construct if you look at the free market as something like a swap meet or bazaar. The free market is more like "survival of the fittest" if you view it as something more abstract, like just constant competition. Even just the basic collection of ideas exhibits structural violence. Good ideas and the truth eat bad ideas and falsehoods. Bad ideas die and good ideas survive. It's less visceral and scary to people because ideas don't tend to jettison blood everywhere and scream when they die, but the result of extinction or death is the same. If you have a bulk of knowledge that is true it puts structural violence on those ideas that are untrue. Structural violence isn't a bad thing, it's just a reality. The successful hard working people of the world are going to succeed and the lazy failures are going to fail. That's life.

lol? She's just a patriarch. They've been doing that forever, they were just smart enough to realize that reducing the male population is a logistical nightmare. Instead what you do is standardize or impress uniformity on the male population. This removes the male threat. If you're an alpha male what you want is a pack of beta males. You don't go and kill them all because that is just stupid. What you do is remove their choice of mates and capacity to contest your leadership.

Couldn't you use the effects of solitary confinement to come to the same conclusion?

At the risk of sounding asinine, the ire of people can be mitigated. I'll use our real world treatment of the environment as an example. We have destroyed many animal habitats with various justifications. There are a few people who are concerned with that kind of thing, but most people are easily placated. Even without the direct intervention of the state and all that, I think you'd be hard pressed to get people to agree to having less kids or expanding their property because it would kill some squirrels and birds in the forest. People eat those animals traditionally, to say nothing of cutting down trees to build houses. It's entirely possible for another race to view humans in a similar light. That's why we don't really have domesticated crocodiles. Their brains just aren't designed the way that mammal brains are. With crocodiles its been established that the most you can get from them as an owner is reinforcing the idea that you're the least appealing form of food, not that you aren't food. Now, can a crocodile develop the capacity for tool use? Is it possible for alien lifeforms to evolve tool use and inventiveness without developing complex empathy, let alone empathy for outside groups? We're pretty much the mascot for empathy and even we have an extensive history of genocide and xenophobia.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying he should be concise all the time. There is a time and a place for his particular style though, and the fancy rhetoric and constant objection can drag material out well beyond its necessary length. I've seen some of his shorter videos and speaking appearances and they were fine. I've also listened to literal hours of his material in the background, and found it mostly interesting. There are points I agree and disagree with. I'm just lamenting that when you're trying to argue over a specific point, his common way of talking can make finding that specific area of a podcast difficult. Instead, I decided to skim through the book using the Table of Contents. Most of the material there makes sense in a vacuum for intellectually driven minds. I think that Stefan fails to recognize or appreciate the fact that human beings always exist in a state of duality. Logically a lot of what he says makes perfect sense, but people aren't nearly that logical. It's a good thing to, because if we were we wouldn't have as much of the collectivism that has allowed us to succeed as a race. Let's zoom back from the current geopolitical establishment and pretend that we instantly dissolved all states and borders. In the absence of citizenship, the next key identifier for most people is interests. Your interests will generally determine your choice of friends and colleagues. Removing that layer, the next key identifier for human beings is extended family, and past that, immediate family. Families are a persistent human reality in the face of logical nihilism. Is there any perfectly intellectual reason that you should care about your family more than another family? Does it really matter logically at all if your genetic legacy fails? Is the extinction of the human race meaningful in any way? If you put these questions up against the rigors of math and logic you'll find yourself having to default to illogical or subjective justifications. This is part of the duality of the human condition. We are knowing animals. We know that viewed objectively there is little valid reason for our continued existence, but as animals, we have a fundamental and persistent drive to exist. Hitler often spoke about vermin, Jews, and eternal struggle. People used to ask him why such lowly creatures ( in their opinion ) continued to exist, and he'd explain that it was nature. Why do drug addicts with practically no future aside from pain and misery continue to live? While do people who are terminally ill continue to live? Why will someone who is on death row still fight you if you try to kill them? The survival instinct is as strong or stronger than any abstract human thought or logical assertion. Our animal nature is the foundation upon which our greater minds rest. We cannot have the sparkling heights of ivory tower thought without the gritty foundation. When the state is removed, people will fall back to their corporations. When the corporations are removed, people will fall back to their families. History has shown us the power of great and influential families. From the native american tribes to the monarchs of Europe, even to present day Walmart heirs. Families could be considered the first corporation. People working together, often headed by an individual ( patriarch/matriarch ) identified by something like a common name. Even in the absence of the name, they are linked by common genetics. This family will continue to grow, and if successful, it will absorb and merge with other families. These are colonies upon colonies of glorified bacteria. Your every cell working together to make a nation that is you. You working with your partner to create a family. Your family works with another family to create a clan or tribe. Your tribes merge until you form a nation. Your nations merge until you form an empire. You are bacteria in a petri dish. The world is the dish. The superior elements of the human race will rise to the eternal struggle and take over the world. They will find balance with the world, or they will grow out of control until they kill themselves off. Humanity is wonderful and beautiful and vapid and disgusting. The duality of humanity is woven into the fiber of our being, it is inescapable. The state is a house. A red state, a blue state, a red house, a blue house. It is an artificial construct designed to hold a nation. It has fences as any home might have a fence. It has decorations as any home might have decorations. It has rules and leaders as any household has rules and leaders. The nation will arise organically from human interaction no matter which rules are or aren't written down, which currencies do and do not exist. Resources will always exist in one form or another, and competition and pursuit of those resources will always exist. Whether a man subjects himself and others to pain and death for money, for beauty, for honor, for knowledge, that drive will always exist. That drive will exist as your thirst for truth exists. Escaping this is the holy grail of transhumanists, not of humans. To be able to shed your skin and dismiss the physical, intellectually juvenile trappings of family and carnal need. To ascend as a being of pure thought that explores the universe with a disregard for physical considerations is inhuman. You may choose that path if you'd like, but you should know that there is no room for hesitation. You must choose to be human or inhuman. Dissolution of the state and attempts to mitigate the need for violence are only temporary fixes to a much deeper seated problem. The problem has never been the state, which can be voluntary agreed to and established - the problem has always been people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence Seens to be a pretty solid way of looking at it. I'd say something like a drunk driver counts as violence. The person is aware that drinking and driving is wrong and increases danger/accounts for many deaths. They actively choose to pursue their own self interests at the expense of society. They've intentionally put themselves behind the wheel of a vehicle with a disregard for human life. The same thing applies for the other examples where people use their positions of power/influence or the cover of anonymity to do things they know will harm others for their personal benefit. You could classify accidents as being generally nonviolent. If your brakes failed on your car and it rolled into the street and caused an accident I think it's safe to say that could be considered negligent, but a non-violent mistake on someone's part. In order for an action to be violent then, there has to be some level of intent and the use of power involved.

Only if you lose. No one goes into war intending to lose. If every side that ever lost a war knew the costs ahead of time they would never have committed to it. It is the double or nothing possibility of winning big that makes wars of conquest appealing. Everything in life is chance and struggle from the smallest cell to the biggest game animal. It is best to live in the moment and its visceral nature. Yesterday and tomorrow are always an eternity away.

It's hard to explain. You absorb a number of subtle cues and then deconstruct them to establish a basic recurring framework. It works on individuals and on groups that share similar characteristics. Judging by trends you can then seamlessly change the way you speak or your ideas to suit any environment. I feel as though based off what I've seen here and basic things I've read from Libertarians I could easily slip into the role. However, you learn a lot less as a passive observer. By asking the right questions or putting yourself in the right circumstances you learn a lot more. There are some barriers present here, but I feel as though if I tried I could easily get past them. At this point in time, I feel as though I can make a reasonable appeal to people who are preoccupied with personal liberty and freedom.

As I've explained before, I joined to learn about the ideas at play here. I think that some of them are more valid than others. I opine on different topics the same that anyone else might. I am interested in learning and selectively applying the things I learn.

I've already explained how. You spend X amount of resources to secure the unclaimed resources, plus your opponent's resource. If you have 10$ and your opponent has 10$, and you buy a sword for 5$ and he buys a hoe for 5$, now you can kill him and have a hoe, a sword, and 10$.

I'm willing to look at the material, but one of Stefan's flaws is the fact that he is not very concise. There is bound to be a lot of completely irrelevant material in there that I don't want to waste my time on. I'm happy to learn things about Libertarians, but I'm not an adherent to a specific vision of it. I have listened to some Stefan, some Alex Jones. I'm interested in getting the basic Libertarian 101 ideas.

A person is capable of buoying their own dignity and self-worth if they are strong, but there are many homeless people who lack that ability. The majority tend to turn to drugs and form addictions to those drugs. Drug addiction stems from two main areas, physical dependency and deficiences in self worth. Drug addiction and homelessness are very closely linked together with the majority of homeless people being addicted to drugs. If you are effectively homeless ( this includes couch surfing, temporary residence with family, etc ) and you're performing oral sex on the street corner to satisfy a drug habit, you aren't leading a dignified existence. If you're homeless and you can't afford food so you're rummaging through garbage cans to eat scraps or get bottles, you aren't leading a dignified existence. If you're committing crimes like theft or drug trafficking, you aren't leading a very dignified existence. When the vast majority of society prefers to ignore the fact that you exist and considers you to be a nuisance, you aren't leading a dignified existence. I've lived in and around poverty for most of my life. I know the poor and homeless very well. I know what it feels like to wear hand-me-downs or dirty clothes to school and be regarded as scum for it. I know personally the feeling of being reviled by the strong and successful for being akin to vermin. I know it and I've overcome it, and in having done so aspire to give the willing and able the tools to overcome it. I do not tolerate weakness and failure, and will not afford the homeless free housing. I seek only to deliver the crucible that will create from the dredges of society those who deserve to ascend. Structural violence is real. The need to give the poor opportunity is real. What matters is that we deliver a sustainable, equally real system that separates the wheat from the chaff.

I'm not going to forage through 9 hours of material because you're too lazy to write out an answer. I don't expect you to have read or heard every single bit of statist material ever produced.

Well, something can easily become profitable after the initial first step and investing issues are taken care of. The biggest obstacle to a new business or product is getting people to invest. If you can just force people to invest, you have a lot more room for failure. If you need to subsidize your own failures personally it's a lot harder. The space program was also under attack countless times politically simply because it was deemed unprofitable. It may be that interstellar travel is almost statistically impossible and that we're confined to our solar system. Only time will tell for that one. Now that state funded programs have dumped billions of dollars into resolving most of the issues ( as well as many human lives ) its certainly a lot easier and profitable for independent business to get on board and utilize that technology. I'm arguing that it isn't really profitable as far as peaceful applications are concerned. There are uses for rocket technology, satellites, and aerodynamic advances in general obviously. However, many aspects of our space programs are entirely driven by scientific pursuits and don't necessarily have a good economic result. We might learn about the composition of the moon or a comet without ever really developing an economic use for that knowledge. That would essentially be the practice of finding the most expensive trivia answers in human history. What is the moon made of? Sure we know, but, was knowing really worth the billions of dollars it cost to find out? This shouldn't be mixed up with conquest. Conquest while considered abhorent by modern standards is not necessarily inefficent or economically unviable. *If there are 100 units of resource at 50/50 or 40/20/40 and you spend 10 of your units developing advanced weapons technology, you might be able to secure the other 50 or 60. This would be a gamble of course, because it's entirely possible that your investment fails and your occupation/conquest is stopped. If you are an alien race that doesn't really care about other races ( as we've seen displayed among humans over subspecies differences like color ) it's entirely reasonable to think you might commit acts of planetary genocide. This could be considered completely reasonable in profitable in the same sense that we overrun and develop the natural habitats of many different kinds of animals. *This situation is meant to reflect say two equal warring states for 50/50, or say two equal states that come across a new unclaimed resource, for the 40/20/40 example.

Those are baseless assumptions. Human beings achieved space flight essentially because of advances in rocket technology that resulted from a desire to kill each other with rockets more effectively. Prior to the rich history of ranged warfare, something like rocket travel would be immensely unprofitable. In fact, the only reason the space program has lived as long as it has and done what it has is because states have used FIAT currencies to completely ignore traditional costs. If we were working within the confines of a free market with a finite money supply space travel would never become affordable enough or enticing enough to be pursued. You're also making the mistake of assuming that any alien race we encounter is going to be human like. For all we know, one day we might encounter space squids or space bugs. Science fiction is full of different ideas and thoughts about what creatures could exist in the universe. It doesn't apply to agnosticism, but for all we know the first alien lifeform we encounter could be an extremely destructive virus that rips through human beings and makes us extinct.

Game Theory is essentially the study of strategy. It's kind of like a science. You guys would probably actually like it a lot because it applies logic to human behavior and then builds structures to explain why people make certain decisions and possible outcomes. It actually applies pretty strongly to markets and economies.

No. People are still going to get harshly dumped or lose their parents to car accidents or accidentally catch their parents having sex when they're like 4. There will be enough incidental reasons for therapy to be around.

Sure. All systems have pros and cons. All systems have exploitable weaknesses. We can try and make lasting change, but invariably the success or failure of a system is in the hands of the people alive in that moment. In their personal and communal interactions with others. The state might be the answer for some, but not for others.

I'm inclined to disagree. Words are a physical thing, when taken at their most basic form. If you punch someone, that's considered the initiation of force. What if you throw a flashbang grenade near them? You've disorientated them with light, sound, and displaced air. Even if there wasn't the air displacement, there'd be enough light and sound to temporarily damage them. I think that would be considered the initiation of force. If someone is perilously close to committing suicide, literally on a rooftop or something, and you tell them "Kill yourself no one loves you" I think it's fair to say you've initiated force. Whether big or little, you've affected them with a physical event ( your throat altered the air into soundwaves, which went into their ear as you directed them at them ) that had repercussions. Manipulation or puppeteering is impossible without strings. Asserting that the strings must be plainly understood like manhandling instead of subtle like conversation seems arbitrary.

I don't have a wife, but if I did, I'd want her to be proficient in self-defense. However, that's because I perceive a need for it. If I didn't, then I wouldn't. I'm completely willing to learn. If there are circumstances where you feel as though people who adhere to the NAP/UPB are able to use those kinds of weapons and technologies, explain them to me. Don't just blindly assert to me that they can use them. Explain to me how it logically follows that a NAP/UPB society can do something like weaponize ebola and then use it against an enemy state, killing millions of innocent civilians in the process. If you have an explanation I'm happy to read it. Don't just get frustrated and say I'm wrong without explaining yourself. How long would you say you carried a six shooter before you upgraded? Do you think that you maintained the technological edge during that period of time? Who is going to keep you updated on the threats? How will they keep you updated on the threats without violating the NAP/UPB? Are you allowed to just pay other people to violate the NAP/UPB for you? Why would people in the NAP/UPB society volunteer to be broken down into killing machines? Who in the NAP/UPB society would be qualified to train people to become killing machines? It seems like some people here just have trouble admitting the pros/cons of their system. ALL systems have pros and cons. Instead of trying to make excuses or beat around the bush, just admit them and work around them. One of the cons of a NAP/UPB society is that it has less of a capacity for violence on the whole. Pros/cons are objectively determined, not subjectively determined. Is the NAP/UPB society going to be as good at creating hardcore pornography that completely degrades and brutalizes women? I highly doubt it. Objectively, that's a con. That doesn't mean that subjectively for people that's a bad thing, it just means from an objective POV that's something the society is less adept at.

I thought it was clear, but I can be more specific. I think that his ideas of a computer-run society are socially acceptable if people enter it by consent. People tend to generally agree that free will is a good thing, even if it means choosing to have your decision making handled by someone else. The only problem there would be with the inevitable children of this computerized land. Just like with slavery, they wouldn't really have a choice but to be born into a state of bondage. There's no credible reason to think that the children would reach an age of majority with the ability to choose to opt-out of the society. That is one of the factors that makes the entire process inherently unethical, in terms of violating free will. I think he does have some good ideas, as far as automation and resource sharing is concerned. There's verses in the bible that talk about "common blessings" which I think are something we can recreate. The idea behind common blessings is that things like farms growing crops for evil people are the result of God establishing basic rules for the world that apply to everyone. I'm not saying that to assert that that's the case, I'm using the core idea as an example. In modern society, something like roads would probably equate to a "common blessing". People don't generally have to pay for roads directly in order to be able to use them, outside of highway or bridge tolls. We don't bar the extremely poor from riding their bicycles on the road even if they can't afford to pay taxes or choose not to by being perpetually unemployed. In this fashion, roads are a sort of "common blessing" in society. PJ seems to think that we can automate resource gathering and production to the point where people pretty much don't need to work anymore. If that's the case, then I think it's fine to buoy the lowest elements of society explicitly. This already happens to some degree, but I think that liberals/socialists are onto something about maintaining human dignity. The average homeless person eating out of garbage cans probably does better than a lot of mainstream people centuries ago, but the fact that they have to dig through garbage is pretty humiliating. It reflects poorly on a society when their weakest demographics are rooting around through trash like animals. Not that I personally think they need a free ride - I'm all for forcing these people into work camps. That's where the pros and cons of my outlook end up surfacing. What do you do with that class of people once you have vastly superior automatons to replace them? I think it's better to man up and own your ideology by executing people than it is to let them waste away swept under the rug. If you intend to kill people who aren't profitable, the least you can do is extend them the respect of doing it yourself instead of cowardly relying on the elements to do it for you.