Spenc

I don't really know what you mean by this. Can you give me an example of something of consequence you shouldn't talk about openly? An example of why misunderstanding and lack of empathy occur? How do you know that your 'temporary thoughts' aren't valid or worthy of discussion? If you make inaccurate, irrational temporary judgments, isn't it important to understand WHY you are doing so, what your partner might be doing to set off this irrationality in you? It seems like the type of thing that could be overcome through investigation. And it's great she considers you honest, but of course, that is only applicable to the degree which she is honest. If you're not relating to that, then great! Like I said, I'm just offering a different perspective than what I was seeing most of the other people post, to make sure you had a wider set of ideas to consider which might apply to you. Well, it's not like these things are just on the surface: they say that 9/10ths of communication is non-verbal, for example. Obviously, you know this to be the case, given that you are posting about your subconscious providing information to you via a dream, which your conscious mind is struggling to interpret! SO did she really not pick up on the fact that you were facing periods of depressive symptoms and feelings of low self-worth? That's a bit strange, right? If you're her boyfriend, you would think she would have a pretty good connection with you and recognize when you're feeling mentally unwell. Or she did notice subconsciously, and ignored it consciously. In either case, that seems like evidence to me that warrants doubt of her own claims of "great self-knowledge". I'm glad to hear your depressive and self-esteem issues are infrequent instead of constant! That's a welcome clarification. Sorry man, I don't know. Maybe your lack of self-knowledge comes from your low self-esteem? Chicken or egg? Who knows? You would need to speak to a therapist to untangle that knot, not me. Well, it was you who said you "love" your girlfriend but "haven't fallen in love" with her. SO why don't you present your definitions of love and falling in love? Don't let me impose my definitions on you. I could just be totally misunderstanding what you meant when you said that.... My post may not be very relevant to you. It was just one perspective that I felt was not presented and was worthy of consideration, because it would apply to some people in some cases, with some of the same limited circumstances that you outlined in the post. Are your questions possibly reasonable to me? Of course. Basically, your post whittles down to: "I don't think this hypothesis applies to me", would you agree? That is totally reasonable!! I'm no therapist, I have very limited information about you and your girlfriend. If you meant the questions in the original post, about your girlfriend being superior, your dad being inferior, perhaps finding your dad, etc....Those are all also worthy for your consideration, and the other posts made by others had some good stuff as well. I just saw that they were all skewed toward the theory that your girlfriend is some beacon of light (which she may very well be), and I saw something in the dream that could question that theory and wanted to bring that to your attention as well so that you would be able to consider different perspectives.

You mention some important details that indicate you are far from deep self-knowledge. So you love her, but are not fallen-in-love with her, which of course you cannot if you cannot have self-knowledge, self-esteem and a rational love of yourself. This isn't an analysis of your dream, but I would point out that relationships can kind of lock a person in to their current self, in a way. Oftentimes, if you first meet and get along with someone at a point of low self-knowledge, then as you improve yourself you risk the relationship because it presents the possibility or likelihood of the two people growing apart. So it often becomes comfortable for people to stop growing in order to serve the needs of the relationship, which people are often co-dependent on for self-worth. The fact that your girlfriend is interested in you while you display symptoms of depression and lacking of self-worth says soemthing about her own self-esteem as well. Women generally have keen eyes to spot these things and reject the men who portray these traits, and beyond that, seek out the exact opposite traits instead. So I wouldn't assume this dream means that your girlfriend is some beacon of love and virtue that your subconscious wants you to fall madly in love with. That may be the case--I'm just going off what little information you have provided plus my own personal experience--but I hope you'll equally consider the opposite as well. The "I'm not good enough" stuff might be that you are not good enough for yourself--meaning, you have a conviction that self-knowledge is fundamental to your ultimate happiness but that you are still well short of achieving that level of love and accomplishment within yourself. And while you try to simultaneously have a relationship and find love for another person, when you've not yet achieved it for yourself, you are skipping a step and then the relationship becomes a pathway that leads you away from the necessary steps that you have now skipped and left long behind. Again, this only one of many possible messages that may or may apply to your situation. I hope you have a relationship wherein you can discuss these topics openly with your SO, as I'm sure that would be really enlightening for you to have conversations like this with her

My main message was pointing out that principles, not "tips" are what will work. If you're always getting sick, do you want to have a big pack of cough drops in the cupboard or would you rather have information on how to stay healthy and avoid catching cold? Probably you'd like a pack of cough drops in your cupboard as insurance, but you'd rather have good habits of diet, exercise, hygiene, etc. to keep yourself healthy in teh first place, right? Make use of the Philosophical Parenting podcast series for sure, Stef explores these concepts in great detail in there. You said it may sound like you are making excuses for yourself. I do not believe that. I think everyone reading your story has great empathy and sympathy for you and would not characterize your mistakes that way. However......at the end of your post you say you don't think you can stay up past 1:00am to have a conversation with Stef that will provide you with essential guidance and insight on how to build and repair the bonds you have with your family......Dude, I'm sorry but "it's really late" is an excuse! (Also, for your consideration, there is a weekend call-in as well as the mid-week show, so it doesn't even have to be a weeknight.) The language you use is really interesting to me, and this is one reason I think you really need to have a conversation with Stef if you can since he is much better than me at parsing out these little details. But I'll give you my two cents worth now....You make the implication that having to focus on your past mistakes makes you feel demotivated and destroys your will to proceed, and that once that happens you will fall back into depression or repeat your past struggles to some degree. Ignore your feelings on this for a moment and follow me on a logical argument against this. You are basically saying that you want to move forward without focusing too much on your history, right? Objectively, does it not make more sense that in order to make a successful plan in moving forward, having the deepest possible knowledge of your self and your history would be the best course of action? It kind of works like the common phrase, "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it". I will also point out that you had stated that your obesity was forced on you by your injury circumstances. You also pointed out elsewhere that you are working on getting into better health now, which will require "a lifestyle change when it comes to food". These are contradicting statements right? On the one hand you were forced to be overweight because of your condition, on the other hand you freely admit to unhealthy eating habits. I'm bringing this up because it is a window into the way your mind works. When you talk about the past, you give an external causation, when you're talking about the future you're talking about taking responsibility for yourself. And when it comes to bonding with your kids, this isn't going to work in my opinion. You need to be able to present yourself as fully responsible for your choices and actions, because credibility and authority are established by past experience not promises of future actions. Please understand I wish you the best of luck!

You're welcome. I forgot that the book draft is for gold donators, which I was in the past. Gold is anyone who has donated $126+ in the past 365 days. So you are now a bronze donator. Let's assume you've paid $60 then in the past year, so if you cancelled your subscription and just made a lump-sum donation of $70, you would then qualify for gold materials...... In general, I think this is kind of a sneaky way to go about it, but it is within the 'rules'. I think if you just sent a message to Michael (user MMD) and explained your situation and how your money is tight, he would likely just send you the file. I don't want to speak for Mike or Stef, but that seems to be the way they operate to help people (especially parents of young children) get the necessary materials to help themselves. One other thing I would encourage you to pay attention to in the call-in show from about a week ago with the couple that had a son prone to tantrums: The father was stay-at-home dad, and Stef discovered that the dad was nearby, around, proximate, adjacent to his son, but he wasn't really engaged with the son. When you're physically present, but emotionally not connecting, it's a kind of torture to the child's psyche. You described being depressed and in bed for a year. So I'm thinking that you weren't connecting very well with your daughter at all as she was so young and even if your son could walk and get access to your bedroom, I'm thinking you weren't very connected to him either. Kids that age cannot empathize with crippling depression, so all they knew was that you were around but you weren't making yourself available. I know as an older brother and an uncle how anxious young children are about adults choosing rest over play. I used to work nights and then sleep in until 9-10:00, and of course young kids are like roosters, they get up at the crack of dawn. So my younger brother and my niece used to literally wait 2-3 hours for me to get up and they would try to sneak in to check if I was awake, they would beg my mom or sister to let them go in and wake me up. I usually was woken up about a half-dozen times int he morning between the time the kids were up and the time my mom finally let them burst in and wake me, just because that's how anxious they were to get me up to play with them. So when you say you spend a year in bed in a depression, I can't even imagine how much anxiety that would put on children. And it would probably have pushed them to give up at some point. I would highly suggest you contact Mike and call in to the show and get some advice from Stef on how you can communicate to your children why you were disconnected from them for so long, and how to establish new bonds and solid credibility with the kids. One other thing.....you said you didn't think your son would remember being hit a few times when he was young. That's not really the point. If a child is physcally abused during the foundational brain-mapping stages of development, that abuse is going to have effects that are going to carry forward whether or not an actual memory persists. Think of it like city planning. First they clear and grade the land, then they mark out the roadways, drainage and sewage/utility ways. So if you've made an error when you're clearing away the road and drainage ways, that is affecting where the lots are going to be sectioned off and the houses built. It doesn't matter whether or not you remember the mistake. it is going to show up forever after the homes are built. Like one section of houses are going to have smaller lawns while the other side has larger, or easements are going to be significantly larger than usual, or whatever the case may be. The only way to correct this is to spot the mistake, make adjustments that cost significant time and money, and start over in that area. So in terms of your credibility with your son, this is why I raise this issue moreso than the few instances of physical abuse. Your son and daughter have developed their personalities on the foundation of dad having little connection and credibility with them. This is manifesting itself presumably in their tantrums. You're kind of finding the mistake in the easements after the houses are already built.You need to dig up all those misplaced utilities and move them to a proper location and then reconnect them into the houses. I hope my metaphor isn't too strained........

Go into the Go listen to this podcast, the final caller, https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/49261-podcast-fdr3597-out-of-control-call-in-show-february-15th-2017/ There is also a podcast series, "Philosophical Parenting" on iTunes and http://feeds.feedburner.com/PhilosophicalParenting One interesting part of the call-in show I linked to above, was that the parents were yelling at and in front of the kids and then apologizing for the behaviour. Then they would go back to acting out in anger again later. So if you find yourself apologizing and then reverting back to your negative behaviour, you're telling your son that it's okay to act out in anger in the moment and then demand forgiveness later with apologies that may or may not be genuine. (The apology might be a continuation of acting out in the emotions of the moment--anger leads to a tantrum, and contentment leads to a genuine apology--which partly just reinforces the principle that enables the tantrum. Or the apology may be disingenuous, he's just mimicking the same phase that you do after you act out in anger.) One key thing you should always be attentive to in the call: the caller is talking about handling situations, and Stef is always redirecting the conversation away from in-the-moment problems and towards establishing principles and negotiations. Remember that when you're in the moment of a problem, it's usually too late for philosophy. It's important to work on your philosophy and apply it before problems arise, so that you and your wife and children have the philosophical tools already embedded in your relationship and agreed upon. I would say you should definitely start listening to the Philosophical Parenting series right away. Secondly, listen to the call-in that I linked above that is very relevant to your situation. Third, have a look at a draft of a Peaceful Parenting book Stef has been working on Best of luck in your journey

Richmond HIll checking in

If you're building a house, you don't need the whole house to be finished before you can reasonably move in. If you haven't gotten around to putting in all the drywall and floors, it may not be the best house to live in but it is a livable home nonetheless. A girl could conceivably have a baby at around 12-13 years old, but we can see that as she matures into a woman through her teens, her hips will widen and her breasts will grow, etc. The body doesn't require full maturation in order to become pregnant. If you're rehabbing a broken bone or muscle/ligament tear, do you wait until it is fully healed to begin walking on it again? Probably not. You integrate your rehab with the final stages of the healing, and the two functions work together to strengthen your muscle

Well, I just don't have enough details about your history or what all else in order to tie in the alcohol and everything else. And even if I had the compete knowledge of your history, I'm still not a therapist and am only a few years into tying philosophy to self-knowledge. So I'm just giving you a) thoughts that are provoked in me by your language and b) philosophical connections between the limited information I have accumulated from your posts. So just keep that in mind; I'm just a guy on the Internet. Anyways.....So, as I said before, your choice of drinking alcohol seems to be an apparent choice of self-erasure, right? So it didn't seem odd to me that you would then dream about your friend who had previously been your only outlet to experience and share your true self with. That is the main connection that stood out to me, whether it is true to your experience is for you to determine. I just want to mention here that I had a pretty strong connection tied together and I've tried to type it out into a paragraph or two that makes sense in writing, and for whatever reason it becomes very foggy for me. I delete or cut away what I have typed and take a moment to re-connect the dots in my head and the connection strikes me again! Then I go to type it out and it becomes foggy again. This has happened a few times now, so I'm not sure what to make of it. But I'll leave this here which was important to my understanding of how the dream you had might connect your experience: One of the things I wanted to look up and mention, but forgot: the way you describe the dream as starting out as an observer of you and your friend. Then when you perceive a situation that requires action and responsibility, you suddenly emerge into an active role in your dream and take over your body. I meant to ask if you were aware of what these types of transitions are believed to represent in dreams, but forgot to bring that up. Also, I wanted to look it up for my own curiosity. But I feel like there might be something there to do with self-erasure/observer and self-knowledge/actor. So I think this is pretty crucial to understanding the dream, why did you start in third persona and emerge to first person? Here's a cursory search of "Dreaming in third person": Mostly just links to ask-and-answer sites and web forums, so not the best of results on google to find answers from. Here's one of the best I saw.... So, if we focus on the "disassociated feeling in life" aspect of that answer, it would mirror your self-erasure by alcohol use that preceded your dream. Transitioning to first person might represent your desire to take action in your life. Sorry I can't be of more help with this, but dream analysis has a lot of woowoo attached to it and it's a tough slog to find good answers with 10 minutes of free time and some googling. I would highly recommend you work to get that call with Stef though. I was listening to some older episode lately and he did quite a few dream analyses, one of which he talked about how he views different representations by how we travel in a dream or whether we are on land, sea or air. Stef seems to have a lot insights about the form of the dream, so he would likely have a helpful perspective. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you messed up the set-up with Mike to get a call into the show.....You can explain that or not as you see fit. But it's not like you're approaching a strange woman and you only have one chance to make a first impression or you've blown your chance. If you've made a mistake, I'm sure you can correct it with assistance and sympathy for your situation from Michael and Stefan.

So your parents in the first dream feel like you got what you deserved. You presented your job as the gateway to freedom from your family when you mentioned it initially. You get fired in the dream (I was originally hung up on the word 'fired' in the dream and the connection to 'firing' your gun off, but perhaps the emphasis was backwards) and that means that no job, no savings, no way out. And your parents are disinterested in your trip to the ER and in the dream they think you got justly served when you're fired. In the second dream, your friend who tells you that you'll be all alone if you pursue your lifestyle, leaves you to face the world alone. You decide in the dream that you have to charge into the woods alone. So you know that this friend represents people who you need to leave behind in order to move forward. You make the choice to do so in the dream because you seek to do the right thing. Furthermore, you seek to assist and ensure the well-being of all the people in the parking lot area. They reject your intentions and instead offer anger and scorn back to you. You're thinking there's another chance to get a connection with your parents, or at least there's a flickering hope. The other word that stood out to me from the beginning with your dreams, was the "holes" in the parking lots. It connected to the common phrase "poke a hole" as in to debunk a theory, like Stefan's recent video "poked holes" in Milo's statement on his controversy. So, when you're applying philosophy you're poking holes in society and family and relationships around you, and you want to point these holes out and help people become philosophical but they just resent and scorn you for poking holes. The other thing that seems relevant is that nobody seems to have been hurt by the rifle shots, so as this mob swarms around you in anger, the prudent thing for you to do would be to get the hell out of there before they attack. It's kind of like what you said to Matthew....why are you worrying about some bullet from a year ago when I should be addressing my situation at home? Well, in the dream, why are you worrying about those holes in the walls and cars instead of worrying about yourself as you're being swarmed?

So, out of curiosity, 8 months can be a long time....what has happened with the friend and the girl for whom he abandoned philosophy? Is he welcome back into your life if the relationship dissolves and he seeks philosophical answers for his mistakes? How patient were you with him between the time he started neglecting philosophy and the time you ultimately called off the friendship? Saying you purchased vodka to deal with your [stress/anxiety/however you want to term it] isn't really an answer. I mean, it was already kind of implied. I meant by asking why you bought booze: how did drinking alcohol come to seem like a viable solution to you? You're partial to living a philosophical life, so I think in order to respect your intelligence I have to conclude that you knew better. Is that fair? You describe this friend as being there for you during a time of particular growth and stress in your life, and really the ONLY person there for you at that time. You purchased vodka in order to deal [with stress of your circumstances]. Instead of opening up yourself to a friend to deal with your problems, you turned to a substance to erase yourself in order to deal. Also in your dream, you were with your friend until trouble started, then you ran into the problem area and left him behind, at least that's the way I interpreted it. My initial reaction to your first post was that you were sabotaging yourself from moving out. Or you are self-harming in order to seek closure with your parents. Like, if you're struggling in your relationship with your parents and then you move out, the chances are you will eventually just not even see or speak to them anymore. You might be seeking closure by harming yourself and testing their reaction and commitment to you. Again, that was just the first thing that jumped into my mind.....

Maybe tell us more about this friend that was in your dream...When were you friends? Were you true friends, as in having important conversations, or just a guy you did sports and video games with? How satisfied with your life were you at that point in time? How was your relationship with your parents at the time? Did he have a particular role in helping you through a tough time or anything? Why aren't you friends anymore? Also, why did you decide to purchase and drink strong alcohol when you're not a drinker? I'm assuming vodka, rum, or something of that nature that is 40% alcohol and can get a non-drinker pissed on just a few ounces..... Also, for what purpose do you own a gun? Safety, hunting, tradition, sport shooting? Is it common with your family/men to own and shoot guns? When did you learn? Who taught you? Who do you shoot with? etc....

What are you defending Milo against here? I'm not quite clear on that. It seems like you're defending him against being "cast out" of "the movement", is that correct? You're not defending him over what he said, but you're defending his position as a valuable member of "the movement"? Am I right in this? Which standards in particular are you suggesting that 1) we hold; and 2) we ought not to stick to in this situation? I'm just trying to understand because the opening post is all over the map, and this thread is all over the place..... I think for starters a better title would have helped, like "Why Milo should remain welcome in the alt-right" or something

As I said, I'm not that familiar with him. So I'm not aware of anything he's really contributed to building arguments against the left's myths that you mentioned. Has he contributed ideas that have advanced the movement against the left? Or is his contribution that he is a good speaker or good at getting positive coverage? What is it that he does that actually has an impact? My problem specifically int his case with Milo is that I believe young gay teens are very vulnerable. A lot of them don't know who they can trust or turn to for support and guidance. Then there's this charismatic gay public figure like Milo openly saying that relationships with older men are beneficial for people in their circumstance. It's disgusting and because of Milo's charisma they may look up to him and trust his judgment as an experienced homosexual who faced their situations in his own past. ANd because of the vulnerability and secrecy of the young people facing these situations, they may unable or unwilling to participate in the free market of ideas and get better guidance. So I don't think this makes Milo a bad guy. I don't want to see him raked over the coals for having emotional scars resulting from his abuses in his childhood. (First, the molestation by a trusted guardian-in-kind. Second, the evident issues with his relationship with his parents that a trusted community member could just swoop in and recognize Milo as prey) But more importantly, he is now an adult and is subject to the respect of being responsible for his own self-knowledge and mental health, and for having his statements tested by the free market of ideas. And he needs to be exposed and rebutted because I care 1000000000000% more about the young vulnerable teenagers than I do about Milo.

1 & 4. I know very little about Milo and have only heard him on FDR a couple times and I think Tom Woods SHow once. He never said anything in those few shows that made me really perk up and care. Also, I'm not a gamer and don't give a shit about gamergate, and barely have any recollection of what it was about. I'm curious, what am I missing? Why do you love and admire him? 2. Dude, what? Anyone who is radically for free speech will inherently reveal themselves to endorse pederasty or other such vises? What the literal fuck are you talking about? 3. He literally said that older men being sexually involved with teenage boys is quite a valuable bond for the young boys to usher them into manhood. Do I think he's in support of child molesting? No, in the sense that I think he is emotionally damaged from his own history and fails to define these behaviours as child molestation. Yes, in the sense that I disagree with his definition of child molestation and he is in fact suggesting it is beneficial, particularly for gay males.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azC1nm85btY This is the interview where he made the comments in question http://www.newslogue.com/debate/349 This is the article I read which referenced it and dealt with his facebook response. I was pretty out of the loop on the whole issue and didn't read much about it, and have little interest in listening to the full interview or searching for the segment to hear his comments in full context.

Many years ago, the only formal sales training program I ever participated in, the key element they proposed is product conviction. In terms of your first part about your personal life and relationships, you achieve friendships and relationships by selling yourself to others. Because you are professionally involved in providing services, where you have unique insight and talent to supply to your work, you are trying to sell yourself to potential customers. You mentioned that you are confident in your abilities as a web designer (although you hedge this a bit by saying "pretty good websites" instead of just saying 'good' or 'great'). You also create separation from your productivity. You can create a 'pretty good website' for your customer. Your customer's website will generate them more sales. I know I'm nitpicking at the prose of your post here, but I'm always thinking that the way we frame a sentence and the words we choose have significance. So I definitely want to draw to your attention how you kind of express limited conviction in yourself and accept limited responsibility for the benefits you provide your customers. It's YOU generating more sales, not "those websites". It's easy to say, 'yeah this company could benefit from a website'. But you have to believe that this company would benefit from YOU. Given that you are expressing concerns about your social skills, I'm wondering if you are a difficult person to deal with? Not like, rude or unpleasant, but maybe you don't like to return calls or you don't give lengthy thoughtful answers, or whatever else. Think about that caller from a couple weeks ago: the most inert caller ever, I think he was called int he show title. Speaking to him is just not pleasant, even if he is polite and reasonably intelligent and capable and so-on...... Is this how you think people experience building rapport or getting/giving feedback with you? (obviously to a much less significant degree than with the most inert caller)

I'm reminded of some older volumes of the FDR podcasts, when Stef would talk about his young daughter. He would talk about responding to her emotions and desires to instill in her a sense of control over her environment and positive effects from experiencing her emotions. I'm also wondering what it was like as a child for you to be visible in the household? Like in some families, if a child is hanging around the parent while s/he's busy with chores, they tell you to go play or go watch tv or whatever. Your presence just becomes an opportunity for your parents to send you off and reject your desire to be with them. Or maybe they even insist that you join in on a boring chore since you don't seem to have anything better to be doing. Even without anything like blatant abuse, being present and visible to your family can seem negative. Obviously, it's worse if you have sibling rivalries that escalate to violence or mental/emotional abuse, to the point where a child feels more secure hiding away in his or her room or somewhere else away from the others.

You take a postulate and move forward with the assumption it is true. Like in the scientific method, you hypothesize an outcome and then you model your experiment around the assumed validity of the hypothesis. People don't just pull the hypothesis out of thin air though, they have significant evidence in advance of reaching that stage. This isn't really relevant though because I don't want to nitpick on a word you used which was overall a reasonable synonym. I am not suggesting that crime isn't correlated to drug war policies. But there is a massive difference between the violent left and the general crime, violent or non-violent, that happens in a society with a drug war. You brought the topic up as a link between specifically the violent left, not general violence or crime.

Can you cite some examples or evidence of this? It's been 15 years snce I was in high school and I didn't do any literature in university other than Plato/Socrates so I'm not up to speed on what the kids are reading these days.....

For one, you're again thinking about the drug war after you confessed in another thread persistent drug use. So a drug user who points to the drug war as the root of all of society's ills? Second, postulating things means more than just pointing things out that may very well be correlated. It means having evidence to support the theory before postulating it, not the other way around. Thirdly, Correlation does not equal causation. Fourthly, I personally think that the drug war and the irrational violent left are both symptoms of a larger problem, not that one or the other is at the root. Again, I will repeat that silly laws or 'lack of respect for law' do not produce violence in people. Otherwise we would be concerned with the radical violent libertarians who have the most reason to disrespect the law, instead of the state-worshipping left. I'm not trying to be confrontational toward you, I just think you presented a thought with little to no evidence to support even correlation, let alone causation. You then asked for everyone else to provide input to hopefully verify your thought for you. And what stands out to me is that this is two posts in a row you've made where you framed the discussion against the drug war, even when it wasn't really relevant to the primary issue you're talking about. Finally, you specifically mentioned not wanting to call in to the show and speak to Stef because you are anxious about Stef delving deep into your personal life and that you would lose control and become too emotional. UI also asked you what type of content most brings you to the FDR community to which you responded self-knowledge above all else. And yet, your concerns on the board, as demonstrated by your posts, seem to be about drug policy. So I'm sensing that your lack of effort to make a valid hypothesis with actual evidence to support it is a red flag and that you're sending out signals to the FDR community to point out your emphasis on the drug war and start the process of digging into your actions and history. How much time do you spend in your life thinking about the drug war, police, potential consequences of your drug use? What benefits does drug use provide you? How could you achieve these same benefits by other means that would be legal or safer for you?

This isn't the perception of the left though. Because a lot of them are doing drugs openly. They will rationalize that the government is there to protect other people from themselves, but not me because I'm smarter than those other people and I can handle drugs and use them properly. So it's definitely insulting, but not insulting to themselves, insulting and condescending towards everyone else who isn't like them. I also find this really interesting that this is now the second time you've framed a topic of current events around the drug war without much reason to do so...... Of course they aren't acting this way because of Milo or the alt-right or Trump or whatever else. You could put me in a room of nazis and I would be repulsed by them but I would not be violent. You could put me on the street during a riot and I would not get swept up in the mayhem and start rioting or becoming violent and destructive. I have no respect for "the rule of law" but I don't go out breaking laws, even unjust ones. You have to be primed toward destructive actions before you can find a rationalization for it. You could put 1000 rationalizations in front of me and I would not turn violent or destructive, but you could fashion the flimsiest, most contrived absurd rationalization to put in front of some of these people and they go batshit crazy without a second thought. It's not a drug war or a rule of law issue, it's the war at home that conditions them to believe they can find solutions or relief or whatever in these crazy actions

Proximity would be part of the body language. How close or distant someone is standing/sitting is an important factor in how people respond to you. Also, mirroring. That would maybe fall under posture, depending on how broadly you intended to apply that term.

Your explanation invalidates a theory I had. So that pretty much leaves me with nothing more to go on. This is why I originally stated that a call-in with Stef would be highly useful. He would surely be able to spot details that I am not able to and ask better questions. I would certainly encourage you to explore the theme of anger with your husband. It seemed that in every post you would reference how he would, could or does or did get angry and close down communication. That might be something you could ask him about, although it seems like he would be reluctant to discuss that topic. Like, "What types of things do you remember being angry about when you were a kid?" or in contrast to his current behavior, "What would your parents have done if you were this angry when you were a kid?". I'm not sure the best course of action when he is angry is to ask him to go and reflect on why he was reacting that way because as you say, he's returning with rationalizations to explain himself. I think it's more useful to keep him in the present in a more emotional state and try to root through the anger to the underlying issue. I found it interesting that you stated your husband did something that you used to nag him about all the time. Since your previous message you affirmed reading and liking RTR, surely you're aware of the section on nagging. It indicates that you have a perspective of your relationship that you believe you and your happiness do not provide enough value to your husband that he would voluntarily make tradeoffs to satisfy you. And nagging is not empathetic towards him. Nagging creates stress in the other person so that they can empathize with you and then they can relieve the stress by placating the nagger. But instead, the nagger can be empathetic towards their target and actually determine why this person doesn't want to do the thing that would please the nagger. Then there can be a negotiation toward a win-win.

I was asking more in terms of the type of topics: self-knowledge, politics, atheism, etc.. I was just curious. Would you state the truth if you heard some spit-chef creep was being falsely accused of insubordination? I suppose you would. But would you not also state the whole truth? ("He was not disrespecting you, boss, however he does regularly spit in the food which I think you might find more important to address") Why put yourself in the position of having to choose between concealing or lying? You make yourself carry the burden for this asshole? I think that ties into your original criticism: truth, but not the whole truth. Like, Jeff Sessions is a highly flawed person as a political figure in the eyes of a libertarian. To defend him without drawing any focus to the real issues he should be criticized over, seems like it's only half-truth. Especially with Jeff Sessions, who to my knowledge has never been discussed on FDR before. Whereas if Stef did an untruth about Ted Cruz to dispel mainstream media lies about him, at least there would be a load of content in the archives that cover his shortcomings. SO that would seem more like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Can I ask what brings you to this community? What content do you most value?