Spenc

As an example, assessing the legal structures in place that affect economic opportunity. Quantitative measures will tell us the degree of economic activity, whereas I find it more meaningful to assess the degree of opportunity and freedom to take economic action. A statist will measure and project the quantitative effects of a tax increase and might determine a positive effect will be realized. An anarchist would make a qualitative determination that the tax increase is an economic harm in spite of any potential "economic growth" projected.

I'm curious if you could offer a null hypothesis that would invalidate this claim over the course of the next 4 or 8 years (or even maybe beyond, like a 20 year generational period of time). In other words, what is the minimum standard of evidence over the course of, let's just say, the next 4 years that would cause you to rescind your claim that "Trump is a step in the right direction"?

I don't think this is very productive. Your post begs the question: is it the role of the government to grow the economy? Are Is growing the economy the same as improving the state of the economy? Is it fruitful to grow the economy by driving profits and job growth that are inherently unsustainable as evidenced by the fact they are not driven by market conditions outside of government "pump priming"? And so on, and so on.... I think only statists have use for particular quantitative methods of measuring "economic growth", anarchists have more use use for qualitative methods of measuring economic conditions

Stef is a full-time stay-at-home dad. At least he used to be when his daughter was very young, and he has since talked much much less about his fatherhood in the show and so maybe there is some change to the dynamic at home. However, I would suspect he's not available for touring

In the words of Lionel Hutz, "We've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are types of evidence." I'm not even saying that he didn't swing, let's just say for fun, 250,000 votes. Maybe FDR did, it isn't implausible I'm just getting sick of people spouting faux facts that are wild conjecture without basis in regards to how successful the new direction of the show has been. Firstly, I checked the two most relevant videos about Trump. The first has over, 900,000 views, only 22,000 votes and the votes are closer to 80-85% thumbs-up. In the next video, 159,000 views, only a third as many votes and again far from 99% that you touted as his average. So right off the bat I call into question the veracity of using views as evidence when the viewers aren't even voting in large part, and the votes aren't tipped as favorable as his general average. Secondly, we don't know the source of the viewers. e.g. YouTube will direct people to common video types. So if you have David Bowie's Golden Years in your head and hit it up on Youtube, it's going to give you a bunch of other Bowie songs you might want to hear as well. And it will throw in some QUeen or other similarly-categorized music videos as well. SO if someone is already a Trump supporter, and views Stef's video because he is in a positive feedback loop or wants to bolster his arguments against non-Trumpers or whatever else, then Stef didn't swing that vote. The vote is correlated to the view but not caused by it. SImilarly, if the guy is a fan of Milo and watches Stef interview with Milo, he isn't watching for Stef he is watching for Milo and Milo is the one who you would more reasonably attribute the vote to. Third, do we know that all these people are American who are watching the videos. I'm not American and a lot of callers in recent months have been calling from Europe to talk about the migrant crisis over there, as one example of how the show reaches far outside the US> (Stef isn't American himself, in fact. He lives in an opposite suburb of my neck of the woods). I could spend more time drawing objections to your suppositions, but I'm not going to bother. I'm just trying to make the point that we do not know what effect the show has had. We do not know what effects might have been had if the show had maintained its course from 2014 instead of turning political and pro-Trump. There's no reason to make conjectures about either case. You can like the show and state your reasons without making shit up. And if the detractors start saying, "Hundreds of thousands of children beaten and circumcised by unpeaceful parents in 2016 because FDR was too busy on political issues instead of personal," then you can call bullshit on those people for making assumptions.

what evidence do you have that Stef swung "hundreds of thousands" of votes?

3. What evidence do you really have that this is a freedom movement instead of just any other populist movement? I'm glad that FDR has gained new listeners/viewers but it was not done with the message of personal and political freedom that the show was established around. Trump isn't spreading a message of personal and political freedom in any sense other than vague platitudes about deregulation, markets, blah blah blah.... One thing that has stuck with me from the shows about the Untruth About Donald Trump: Stef has talked about how intelligent Trump was that he had people listening to talk radio and tracking the issues people were invested in for over a year. So when Trump comes out and makes his statements about issues, I don't know where his platform came from. Unlike Ron Paul, who had 30+ years of voting record in the House, and who went out and spoke his own message to anyone who was willing to listen, Trump has no record to give his campaign promises credibility and no record of really speaking about core principles that have shaped his positions. And in addition to this, Trump has gone on talking about deep space exploration. I'm always wary of a politician who is the 'conservative, free market' candidate and has a boondoggle attached to his platform. That is not a candidate grounded in principles.

That's why I had asked, "How did these revelations unfold?" I would generally say that in any topic you yourself are familiar with, if you're going to take the person seriously then they should be able to offer a unique thought of their own, a unique source of information/perspective, or at least a solid breakdown of another's unique thoughts and perspectives. I've always been kind of anti-spanking. But when I was 20, if a girlfriend asked me about it, I wouldn't be able to expound on the issue to any depth and wouldn't consider myself to have been 'compatible' with an FDR listening 20-year old woman. The lack of compatibility would be rooted in my inability to offer a unique perspective or any foundational argumetns that shaped my position.

My position has been all along that while I agree that Trump was the best alternative of the available candidates, there was no need for FDR to get involved with it. Even if we accept that western civilization was on the line, and the word needed to get out, the level of interest this show gave to Trump was silly. Stefan has a unique set of skills for helping people achieve personal freedom, and when he strayed from that role in his shows, it left a void that nobody else was able to fill. On the other hand, in achieving a political goal, Stefan generally offered better analogies and more interesting analysis than the typical alt-right hosts, but his talents were generally not needed to this capacity. But let's assume that I'm wrong and Stef literally helped tip the balance toward a Trump presidency. In which case, this show has a powerful reach! Which would indicate to me that in the next 12 months, these callers to the shows who were talking about their religion, their conservatism, their Republicanism, their statism, their nationalism, etc. etc. etc. will mostly all be drawn toward anarchism and atheism, and pursuit of personal freedom. After all the reach of this show is so powerful, the strength of Stef's arguments are so powerful, the cause of preserving western civilization in order that we could reach out to these people was worthwhile. RIght? If not, I wonder how many parents spanked and circumsized their children in the past year who could have otherwise been reached through FDR had the show not strayed into the political realm full-force.

That's great customer service!

You listed a bunch of things you have in common with this guy in describing how you felt the two of you were compatible..... How did these revelations unfold? The pro-Trump, alt-right stuff doesn't matter because it's current and topical. The non-religiou sisn't really relevant because it would come up in any new relationship. Specifically, how did the issues of 5 children, married in mid-20s, no circumcisions, no spanking, etc. all come up in conversation? These aren't common everyday topics that people get into even as a relationship begins to blossom, particularly among 20-year olds. Which means someone was steering the conversation. And since you are a) the female, and b) the FDR listener, i'm throwing darts here in hypothesizing that it was you directing the flow of conversational traffic. Now, when we couple that hypothesis with the latest revelation that he is going back to his ex and ignored his prior statements. And further to that, that he relies primarily on online dating to forge relationships with women, assuming he was truthful in that respect. And further to that, that he still claims to love you! I'm going to present my Grand Unified Theory that this guy is just a drifter who floats on the water and the currents and tides carry him along.

This sounds like a right mindset. I remember quite a few years ago now that STef would talk about setting expectations and making agreements with his daughter. So if you want to take your kid to the park, he needs you to get him there because he doesn't know the way, can't walk or ride or drive himself, etc. So it starts off as a negotiation: MOM: Hey, would you like to go to the park to play later? KID: "Yes" MOM: "Okay, I have a busy afternoon because I have laundry and grocery shopping and then making dinner. Can we go for one hour after lunch and then come back home so I can do the things I need to?" So from here, you've established agreement of terms. Let's say you get there, 50 minutes has passed and you notify him that he has 10 minutes left and he gets upset. Once that time elapses, he is very upset and doesn't want to leave. MOM: Well, you agreed that you would play for one hour and then come home with me KID: No, i want to stay longer MOM: Well, when I agreed to bring you, I kept my promise and I brought you. You wouldn't like it if I promised to bring you and then when it was time for us to leave the house I said "No, I want to stay home longer". If you don't keep your agreements, maybe then I won't want to make any more with you, and we won't be able to come to the park anymore. Now we're dealing with a break in the agreement by reminding the kid that he's not the only one with the autonomy to change his mind and renege on a deal and that it could just as easily happen to him. that's why its important to only make deals with people who earn credibility and that's why having credibility is important, which he can only earn by keeping his end of the deals he makes. Another element Stef had talked about was the importance of post-activity breakdown. Like, you pick your kid up from his friend's house and you're in the car together riding home. You want to break down the activities and experiences that he had during his time with his friend. Having a fun conversation where the kid can talk about the fun experiences and tell stories, or insightful conversations like if your kid notices that the friend's parents act very differently than you do, he will be curious about why that family doesn't hug each other or why the parents watch tv in another room all evening and leave the kids alone to play without attentiona nd interest of the parents. People like telling stories and reliving their good times, which is why high school reunions and Bruce Springsteen hits (Glory Days) are prominent things in this society. Kids want to understand the world around them and will genenrate questions that they will enjoy discussing possible answers to. So by having this period of reflection and sharing, you're not dragging the kid away from something fun in order to go home, you're drawing the kid into a fun bonding activity. He would be more willing to leave with that incentive added on

i have a few issues with the perceived direction of the show: 1. FDR/Stef is like a particular artist or tradesman with an unrivaled talent in a particular niche of importance to many. I think it's fine to do shows about Trump and the surrounding issues of demographics and media and feminism and so on.... However, when Stef leaves the realm of the "personal freedom" philosophy he was at the forefront of, theres nobody there to fill the void in the same manner and the whole movement behind that stalls in many ways. Stef could easily just do his show on personal freedom and then do the weekly episodes about current events and such and point to people like mike cernovich and others he is consistently doing interviews with and sharing ideas with. To put it in simple perspective, Stef didn't do a lot of economic/finance stuff in general before, but he would have Peter Schiff on once in awhile to talk econ and the world of the investment markets, and listeners would be able to be exposed to these issues and then branch out to Peter Schiff's work from there and find their way into those topics. 2. I'm not convinced it's having a real effect in terms of bringing people to the philosophical, instead it often seems like FDR is giving way on philosophy and catering to the right wing. For example, think of how many newer callers to the show have had statements like, "Stef, listening to your show opened my eyes and red-pilled me...." and how many of those callers went on to describe themselves as "conservatives" and right wingers and Trump supporters. So what truth and reason exactly has Stef opened their eyes to? Trump is for a metric shit-tonne of government action in our lives, and this is what they are red-pilled to??? If Stef is such a powerful communicator, and in many ways he is, why the fuck can't the show be about principles and lead people to the beacon light of those ideas? Why instead is the light being placed in Trump's lighthouse and guiding people there? It would seem to me the hope is that once the election is over, these Trump/alt-right people maintain their FDR subscriptions and listen to more shows and the content begins to ease back to the realm of personal freedom and also political freedom (which the alt-right/conservatives/Trump are NOT on board with at present). I'm not sure that there is much evidence to support any hypothesis that says these people will stick around and then have their minds changed by reason as teh show shifts gears a bit. It seems more like the show is shifting its message to cater to an audience susceptible to particular populist viewpoints, and that a portion of the audience is happy to lap up content that conforms to what they are seeking. And why are these people good candidates to be reasoned with? 3. The practical impacts of FDR. If Stef needs to adjust his show because we are at a precipice and he can make the arguments to tip the balance in favour of Trump and away from the evil incumbents, then I'm pretty annoyed to have such a dramatic difference in treatment between ROn Paul twice and Trump now. Stef lambasted ROn Paul for voting for the border fence in early volumes of the show, and now Trump is saving western civilization?!? Ron Paul, who is a legitimate libertarian on principle to like the 90th percentile was treated reasonably fair at the time on the show. But Trump who really doesn't adhere to any [libertarian] principles, but takes hard-line dogmatic stances, gets raised up repeatedly and with asinine arguments (most recently int he video/podcast to libertarians: "hey libertarians, you say you hate the mainstream media and they are all lined up against Trump, well THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS MY FRIEND" [paraphrasing the first part]). In the same video/podcast he says, to paraphrase, "if you denigrate the police force, they will lose public support and have diminished resolve to do their jobs in the inner cities. The blood of the dead children is on your hands!" I'm sorry, but what? The actions of the murderers and gangsters is my responsibility? The actions of the police is my responsibility? Because of words I say, arguments I make?

What reason and evidence specifically do they not listen to? Are you talking about parenting stuff or sociopolitical stuff? What are some particulars in direct relation to how they raise your niece? Try to keep socio-political matters separate from lifestyle/child-rearing issues. In terms of your niece, she's at prime brain-mapping age, the socio-political stuff can be put on the back burner for a few years, at least in terms of trying to discuss issues with your family. Keep in mind, they are in a shitty situation, so it would harm their self-image a great deal to accept reason and take a proper long view of themselves. As Stef would say, childhood issues crop up in new ways when the traumatized child becomes a parent himself. And they have low self-esteem, lack of integrity, and a peer group that enables and supports these shortcomings. When you introduce reason to them, they are going to be left with 1000 questions, few answers, and a severely diminished support group, so of course they have an innate aversion to philosophy.

Back in the days when the call-in show was a group chat, and there were several regulars who had conversations with Stef, there was a good discussion between the two about how they were not friends and the nature of friendship. I can't recall all of it, but I remember that Stef and Greg agreed that they could not be considered "friends" at that point because Stef had taken somewhat of a mentoring role toward Greg, and therefore, they were on unequal footing in the relationship. I found it very interesting. It's kind of like a university professor who has a keen student that he mentors, and 20 years in the future they become friends in the course of their semi-annual meetings/conversations. But when they were in the mentor-protege relationship, even with weekly or more regular contact, they would not be considered friends. And of course, we would think of these as being very meaningful and productive relationships, in many ways even better than typical friendships....

quite frankly, i would use the privacy settings to hide my boss from the post. to be more frank, i wouldn't be friending my boss on facebook. i would like the company page and that would be the furthest i go. it's a fine article, I don't think you're to-the-point enough to really get through to anyone though. You say it's part of a series of posts ou are preparing, so maybe in sequence they will do the trick. However, don't expect people to actually put in the time and effort to read even this one post, let alone 5 or 6.

Well, in terms of us as children, our parents defy our agency by basically stringing us along and forcing us to go wherever they go whether we like it or not. So not only are they spending their free time chatting about how it rained more than usual the past week, they are dragging you along to witness it, which is kind of like cuckoldry in the way it might cause negativity on the children. 1. You're being forced into an undesirable situation. 2. You have to witness the boring small talk which you implicitly understand your parents find more important than your enjoyment, interest and stimulation. 3. It presents a consequent conflict within you: the behavior your parents model is what is preferred/expected while simultaneously you find it tedious and perhaps have resentment toward it as a result of being subjected to it in lieu of your preferences.

i find it interesting when parents encourage certain qualities in their children because a lot of times they don't actually enable those qualities to come out or sometimes they restrict them to outside-the-family issues only. if you really think about it, were your parents teaching you to be assertive yourself, or were they just modeling assertiveness to the point that they were teaching you to acquiesce? the simplest way to delve into this would be to ask yourself if they encouraged obedience when presented with their assertiveness, or if they welcomed and encouraged negotiation if and when you asserted different preferences or needs. More to the point of how they normalized you to social pressures, you could ask yourself, what types of things might you say or do in public that would cause your parents embarrassment and what would the consequences be for that? for example, i can remember one time at the school for my sister's play, recital, concert, or whatever else that the show was over and my mom and i were sitting in the audience waiting for the kids from on stage to be released so my sister would rejoin us so we could leave. my mom was making small talk with the mother of a classmate of mine who had coincidentally been in my same class every single year of our schooling, probably about 5-6 years total at that point. i was bored as hell because it wasn't really my top choice for evening entertainment to begin with and now we're just twiddling thumbs waiting for my sister so we can leave. then they turn to me and ask me to verify if it's true that i had in fact been in the same class as the girl for all 5-6 years. instead of verifying by saying yes, I had no patience for the inane small talk and said, "who cares? let's get ready to go" my mom and the other mom both went red in the face and didn't know what to say. i think a nervous chuckle from both ended the silence and then my mom kinda went along with the "i guess we should find _sister_ so we can get home". and afterwards i was made to feel shamed and guilty for 'being rude'. sorry for the long example, but i recall it well and it strikes me as a good example of how parents assert a) their needs to accepted socially, and b) your duty to do the socially acceptable thing in order not to ruin it for them, or to be classified as rude, which is an inherent bad. and the example also reminds me how trivial the instances could be to cause embarrassment, which strikes a kid hard. who the fuck is this stranger my mom has nothing worthwhile to speak about that i need to be bored and censored from speaking my true feelings? why is her experience more important than mine? this memory helps me establish where the line my mom had drawn was, that i was not to cross. knowing where the line is, i can begin to evaluate it for what it represents about our relationship

did this take place in conversation with a caller who dyes his hair pink in order to shock or confuse people? I've heard this general statement in the show many times over the various volumes, but this one stands out best to me from what i think was the last year.

I'm a little uncomfortable with your terminology right off the bat. "Speaking the truth" is a strange thing to say as far as I'm concerned. I would take the approach of 'having conversations about matters of importance to me' which focuses on the exchange of ideas more than 'spreading the truth' which is more unilateral on your part, and quite frankly, more humble and sensible. And you mention at the top that you are new to spreading the truth. So that either means you've been working on uncovering truth for a long time but only recently started spreading it, or you're new to both. Those would be two very different problems. Can I ask how you were raised in terms of social pressures by your parents? e.g. were your parents the type to avoid conflict and go along to get along? Did your parents emphasize to you the importance of fitting in and avoiding social faux pas? These types of things could result in you overvaluing social harmony over integrity and truth, not intellectually but in your psyche. Finally, the tone of your post kind of infers that you are trying to discuss particularly controversial/red-button issues. For example, the last 6 months of FDR programming have been heavily focused on different matters of race to do with IQ, violence, etc. Is this the type of stuff you desire to speak about? I suppose you could just as easily be talking about lowering taxes though in terms of people wanting to shout you down and not even hear you out for a moment. In any case, if it is the former, I would say maybe you ought to start small and work your way up

is this the same one where she is dating a much older man, and Stefan asks a bit about him to figure out why she's attracted to him in the first place. And when she mentions that he is bald, Stef says, "So's he's a total 10 then?" or something like that?

Well, first you have to remember you are dealing with a self-reporting issue. You are saying it's more prevalent in women, which I find to be a little unlikely, based on the fact that women on dating sites are more open to self-report their affections for animals. But you're not looking at a critical review, you're reading an advertisement. The young ladies are advertising themselves to their consumer base: MEN! Just last night two of my buddies were discussing Tinder and one was giving the other tips on which photos play best, and he was talking about taking photos out at a club or on the golf course or wherever, with his friends. It's important that a man has other people in his photos because women are looking for men with social status. So consider that maybe the women have pretty sophisticated marketing skills, and men like pets as much or more than the women do.

From what i can gather from sources, the prevalence rate for UTIs in boys is 1%, incidence rate is unknown, but substantially fewer than 20% of men will ever experience a UTI, and it would seem that incidence spikes in your 20s. This is based on cobbling a bunch of different statistics and dissemination together. And one important factor to remember, circumcision is elective, so it's not a zero-sum game at infancy, an adult male can go get a UTI anytime he wants in order to decrease his risk of developing a UTI. And again, if prevalence is highest in a man's 20s, this means an adult male has a lot of control over his own risk factors and it isn't imperative that a parent make the decision on his behalf in infancy. Again, only a 1% prevalence rate in boys! (3% for girls) But to me, this isn't even the issue at hand. I think the issue for me, as a prospective father, is that to circumcise my son would be to take ownership over his body in a way that would make me very uncomfortable and probably unable to rationalize it. I was not circumcised so I cannot really talk about it from the side of being the son who has lost fundamental ownership over my own body from birth, but I suspect that this is the root of dsayer's negative experience of the issue.

I would ask you to be more specific about which episodes you exposed them to first. Also, from a political, philosophical perspective, what are these friends of yours like? Like, if I have a buddy who isn't interested in philosophy and I tell him to listen to FDR starting with the first 5-10 episodes where Stefan goes into great detail about kind of rigorous philosophical discussion that seems irrelevant to many people, then I'm not being reasonable to expect them to like the show right off the hop. Maybe your friend is out of the loop about HiIlary Clinton's server/e-mail scandal and doesn't want to root around two dozen articles to figure out what is up, so you turn them on to the (if I remember right) 90-minute or so FDR episode as a simple primer on the subject. Maybe you have a gossipy trash-TV loving friend, find the episode of the woman who was married to a really attractive man who kept promising to get serious about a career but was loafing off and basically just being a trophy husband while she was paying the role of sugar mama. Or the episode more recently of the guy whose girlfriend was working to convince him that polyamory/polygamy is not just fine, but in fact superior to a standard pair bond family. If, on the other hand, they are sharing and liking posts on facebook about how Trump is pure evil and then you go and tell them they need to listen FDR episodes that argue in his favor, it's just not going to work. I personally find a lot of times that I cannot relate to Stef's passion and it turns me off a lot. Like, in the real world, you probably don't really experience true passion from other people very often, particularly about major things like taking ownership over your life and pursuing dreams, etc. People generally don't expose themselves and allow vulnerability with others, and a lot of the times you do see it it is either faked (like a salesman working his customers about a product he wants to sell) or it's not really important (Go HOME TEAM Go!). Furthermore, particularly for me I was raised without much passion around me, so I find it really difficult. When he's talking to a caller who wants to be a big music star about chasing his dreams, I just can't get into the discussion because it's so hard to relate, and it feels wrong to me in the sense that hearing someone genuinely be passionate comes across as like a car salesman or a politician or sports fan in my head. I can intellectually grasp the message without the emotional connection to the conversation. And it would be very off-putting for me if I hadn't had a prior attachment to the show through other types of calls and episodes that had touched me beforehand

One idea from the time I got interested in reading US history of the Founding Fathers and that era was that Benjamin Franklin had proposed no federal government employees could receive a salary for their 'service' in government. The general tone of the historical mention of this is that the other men greatly respected Franklin and so gave him the soap box to make his case and they humored him in a bit of debate but they all thought it was a ridiculous idea. I've thought about it in terms of the Iraq war veterans or IRS workers, etc. They are incentivized with being plucked out of poverty, traveling the world, making friends (bonding like brothers), free college and 5 years of salaried employ after graduation. And the cause is not even just or helpful to the standard american, in fact their work is quite detrimental. Imagine if instead of collecting a wage and pension and health care that they had to go in to some charity and interview with someone responsible for private funds who wants to ensure that they 'deserve' to be compensated for their so-called service! Or in the case of an IRS worker, who the hell would subscribe to a monthly Paypal contribution to the IRS Workers SUpport Fund, or some such charity?