thebeardslastcall

What's scarier, being ostracized here or that this is the type of place that would ostracize you? I wonder if for some people they come here thinking it will be their last refuge and then when they don't fit in or they feel they don't fit in that they are left with a bit of despair, fear, and feeling a bit distraught at the implications for themselves and for philosophy. With the possibility they are making inaccurate deductions that lead them to thinking worse of the situation than the situation truly warrants. Also take note of how many people listen to the show in comparison to the relatively minor number of people who participate on the forums. Just because you don't find what you're looking for here doesn't mean there aren't others in your same boat that you would get along with. It just means it's a little harder to find and connect with them.

If it's not evil or immoral then why are you afraid of sharing what it is you did? If you dislike what they did then I presume there are others here whom you wish to connect with? While simultaneously suggesting without such action as this post leads to these people might join the group of ostracizers based on second hand information? Flipping the coin, if you were on the receiving end of this unstated action how do you think you would have reacted? Do you think FDR members are going to hop on the ostracize bandwagon so easily despite our tendencies to being outside the mainstream in thinking and behaviors? Reputation systems are everywhere in a sense, but what changes are the dynamics of how ones reputation is measured and how the reputation is dispersed and handled among individuals among the group. Do you feel you're being judged unfairly or wish to make any case as to why people are judging you by poor metrics? I wonder at what point two people are beyond measuring each other's morality and they can move beyond such metrics to have an open and honest relationship where they aren't afraid of being measured and found wanting. When can we stop being afraid of social judgement and believing in ourselves having sufficient morality and value to not have to worry about that and simply be comfortable with ourselves that we don't fear ostracism because those who ostracize us are not the people we want to associate with anyways. People who think they won't measure up to standards are naturally quite fearful of there being any kind of standards that might measure them lacking. Standards are a scary thing when you're used to being rejected or found wanting. Best thing I can recommend is make an honest evaluation of yourself and raise yourself up morally and integrity wise that you no longer fear any measuring sticks. Be humble where appropriate and strong and moral to the best of your ability so you can feel comfortable that you're a decent person. If you're at your best then you need not worry about such things. Be great and let the social die fall as they may. Don't let a stumble keep you down, but also be happy when you're in a place with standards that doesn't let immorality go free of justice and consequence. The only scarier thing than a place with standards is a place with no standards.

Podcast file has the wrong number (3166 instead of 3167). Thanks.

It's a descriptive terminology set. It's used within the context and with the baseline of humanity, when talking about people, who tend to be far more K than most animals due to biological constraints. Do you wish to challenge the validity of the descriptions and the traits they are displaying or suggesting or to challenge what can be deduced from those traits, behaviors, or suggestions? If someone is being falsely described you can falsify that by pointing out the error. If a deduction is invalid you can also falsify that by showing the logical flaws in their deduction. Politicians are thieves and liars. Thieves love it when others work hard and provide them with more to steal while also creating an environment where they can more easily get away with stealing. Hypocrites don't practice what they preach. So you can say someone talks like and promotes one behavior ®, while living another way (K), and you haven't disproven the theory, but have just shown that someone is a hypocrite. Someone also may be playing the game handed to them while promoting changes to the game to help fix the situation if they don't like how they have to play to survive. Also of note with the R/K theory is the unrealistic or unstable behaviors in practicing one while effectively in the other environment type, which is unstable and crashes the system. Rabbits behaving like rabbits and Wolves behaving like wolves can create a stable situation. But if they act against their environment and roles it becomes unstable and they may face extinction or excess turmoil. Humans are taking on both of these roles, which creates a sort of inner species warfare, but it's got the extra element that the 'grass' the R humans feed on isn't some massive and free resource, but is produced by the K humans. It's the odd situation of a reversal of direction of predation. This reversal and dishonesty is what makes it unstable and what makes it so ugly and immoral. Imagine if the foxes were making the grass and needed the grass to eat and didn't eat the rabbits. This is the corollary situation, where the grass isn't unlimited, but is made, limited, and needed by the foxes, and the rabbits have lost their predator, but they're acting like none of those things are true. They're eating their seed crop, other's seed crop, and pretending it doesn't matter. They're acting like rabbits when they aren't. That's the main point of the R/K comparison I think, to point out that people are acting like an R species when they're a K species.

Not usually. You get a statist politician either way even if it happens to be enough to get a different person in office, because the 'alternative' person isn't fundamentally different in a way that matters.

Well I see two different aspects or styles, one productive, one not productive, to what people do when talking. You could say one is philosophy and the other is based on a philosophy, but not quite philosophy anymore. The unproductive style is asking how the roads will be built in a free society, asking how dispute resolution organizations will work, and other such questions of fine tuning the later applications once freedom is had. These are the equivalent of designing the roads in the city that you want to be a part of on land, while the boat is sinking and you'll never get there wasting your time talking about just that stuff and which makes the issue worse as it distracts from the sinking boat. The other approach is talking about the gun in the room and making people uncomfortable with the truth. Getting people to accept that while they may be enjoying a nice meal and having a good time now the boat is taking on water and sinking and you're the one pointing out that it's wrong to keep shooting holes in the hull and that the boat is going to sink. This is more productive in that it gets people to acknowledge the problem and to deal with the morality of the situation and to reject what is fundamentally keeping them down. Once people accept a proper philosophy of how to arrive at truth and how to judge morality and how to be moral then all the later problems aren't really a problem, because they've accepted a common method of how to resolve issues peacefully. That's what we need to promote, peaceful, sane, and moral evaluation of a situation and ways of how to resolve issues based on these methods and principles without resorting to violence. Thus constrained the worse and present problem is solved and it merely becomes a question of efficiency, which is another important problem to solve, but a huge step up and beyond the core problem we face now. We need to forget efficiency and general functionality questions and focus on the current problem of morality, sanity, and acceptance of the current systemic immoralities. That's our job, to be the person that accepts some vitriol and hate for spreading these truths and telling people they're immoral if they willingly ignore moral responsibility. People are evil because they think there is a fundamental difference between intentional and unintentional evil and thus they fight awareness and hide from knowledge, steeping themselves in moral ignorance, because then they can pretend they're moral and they think so long as they can pretend they're moral that they are in fact moral, but this is quite wrong. It isn't just the thought or intention that counts if the thought or intention is willingly ignorant then they've accepted evil is okay so long as they're not sure. This is one of the big ways evil proliferates, people are willing to be immoral so long as they can pretend they aren't being immoral. They know social judgement is the dangerous bit of stealing from someone and so long as they can evade social judgement they're fine stealing and being violent. That's why evil hates philosophers, because we point it out, remove evil's camouflage, and force people to give it up or accept it and receive the lash back of social awareness of their evil. This is also why people tend to pretend to be dumb and hate smart people, because smart people can see the hypocrisy and when they acknowledge it or accept it and still behave like them the behavior scares the crap out of them, because they aren't playing the pretend game. People are steeped in reliance on people playing the pretend game to provide cover for them playing it as well. The more people that are playing the pretend game the more brush cover there is for evil to hide under and the easier it is for people to just go along to get along without sanity checks. Religion is the proliferation of a specific group of pretenders. Short version: Focus on pointing out pretenders and immorality and burn the brush to the ground that evil lurks under and de-camouflage evil wherever it lurks within people and remind people that they're morally culpable even if they're playing 'good'. They say "I'm good, I know I'm good" you say "wrong, and here's why...".

2. Why wouldn't you just compensate yourself with the item instead of the cash that you were going to spend on the item. Pay yourself $200 less and give yourself the item instead. Seems cleaner. If it's your stuff (100% owner, meaning no shared stock ownership or what not), so it's yours and you just have to take the hit from not selling it to someone else for a profit. Just a way of getting the item at bulk price through your company and you don't make as much money for yourself by not selling it. Employee discounts are pretty common even for non-owners. They just don't do at a loss, but at cost, for obvious reasons. Why is it obvious that selling things at a loss is illegal? Are you sure that it's even truly illegal to do that? Companies sell items 'at a loss' all the time when the alternative is not being able to sell them at all. They drastically mark items down and get what they can for them before they lose even more value. Not always what is done, but that's pretty common practice as well. Of course some companies would rather destroy their product then sell for a reduced price merely because of brand and other issues that come from selling at a lower price (that's a bit more complicated).

Well I haven't read your post, but I'll just give a brief reply going by the title: If your child turns out in a way that is opposed (insane in a sane society) to society around it, then it will remain confined to its original property and will not be able to integrate with society. If the child turns out sane (and the parent is insane, but failed to teach the kid insane or bad ideas) then the kid will leave the parent and integrate with the rest of sane society. Will a free society take your kid for being insane? Well, only defensively in the way I picture it. Defensively for the society, not necessarily for the sake of the kid. As they've not the right the interfere if there is no violence exuding from the situation. The likelihood tends to be however that if a parent is being raised violently then the child will also become violent and it will not remain contained and thus people will be acting defensively if they interfere and will not simply be taking the child, but defending themselves in a way that may separate parent from child. But if the parent and child are both acting violently in an uncontained fashion then they're already separated in a fashion and any further physical separation is merely to stop the violently reactive situation that occurs from continued proximity and influence. So insane religious people will be able to be insane to the degree that they can contain it and that their neighbors are willing to tolerate it. How long will you continue your insanity when you're surrounded by rational people who will not trade with you? I suspect not long, because the only reason so many people are acting religious is because they're surrounded by the insanity. People are religious because they're just swaying with the wind and when the wind blows towards rationality people will abandon religion in increasing amounts and having your children taken from you won't be the issue but being increasingly isolated in a rational world that would cause your child to voluntarily leave you is the most likely outcome. If you're thinking it's wrong to have a child taken from a parent at what point do you think it's wrong for a parent to physically prevent a child from leaving who wants to leave to escape a violent or insane parent when outside society is willing to have them? If you're a good parent and the child very much wants to stay then a free society would leave them be because it would be violent to take them away against their will. But this is looking at a free society. What's scary is that you put this fear into the prospect of a free society when children are already being taken from parents in the current (Christian centric) society. What's to stop my children from being taken from me in a Christian society when I'm not teaching them Christianity or making them drink the statist coolade? People who advocate a free society have a better track record here and the current heavily Christian and statist society is stealing kids and separating them from parents en masse. You're standing on a mound of cut off heads and aren't acknowledging them. How about we focus on ending the kidnapping that is currently happening or do you feel the current society is just somehow and your kids are currently 'safe'?

For clarity, is it libertarian or Libertarian (political libertarian, minarchist) ? Downloaded it, will have a listen when I get a chance, thanks.

Somebody's kid died, we should just level it all by ending the human race! (/sarcasm) These people are mad bastards spreading evil insanity. I'd hate to live in their idea of a fair and level world. Hell. Or really living in their world isn't possible, only death is. "I took a bat to the skaters kneecaps, it's only fair, she would have beaten me!" They don't even have a baseline. They're calling what should be the proper baseline the 'unfair' position, telling people they should feel bad for meeting the proper standard because someone else didn't. It's just pure R victim mentality and sore loser garbage talk. This is why we need freedom of association, to expel this insanity. Government and forced association promotes this insanity and it's eating us alive like a virus.

Score!

Yeah. If the OP is looking for rational ethics then whether or not it's "God's work", whatever made up definition that has, has no place in the conversation frankly. If you're looking for 'religious ethics', that is, made up ethical standards which aren't really ethics, but social standards in a religious group, then you've come to the wrong place I think. So which is it? If you want false religious ethics I'm sure there is some religious person who can manipulate the text in a satisfactory way. Religious people are all about looking to deceive themselves with false ethics, they just need something that 'sounds good', which is enough to enable them to pretend what they're doing has a legitimate basis. Faith is pretending to believe in god and religious ethics is pretending to be good and finding someone who can manipulate the words of the bible (or whatever texts) to satisfy their particularly needed obfuscation and level of deprivation of truth and meaning from words.

Arbitrage can only be considered wrong in an unfree market whereby the seller isn't allowed to freely sell or not sell to whomever they desire, that is they are forced by the government to sell to people that they don't want to sell to, thus they may be forced to sell to a manipulative purchaser instead of a wider customer base who help the seller more by using and spreading the product in a more desirable fashion and may form a more reliable customer base than a single 'exploitive' customer who would reduce the 'good vibes' the seller wishes to create around their product by selling it for a reasonable price (as opposed to a heavily marked up price by someone in the arbitrage business). The market is full of 'middle men' when it comes to selling items. They operate stores and naturally mark up the prices of the product so they can make enough profit to sustain the business. I see no issue with taking on the risk of buying an item to resell it so long as it was freely sold to the person or people performing arbitrage. If the product is worth more why didn't the original person want to sell it for more? That's a fair question and where the middle person comes into the equation providing some potential value. On another note I don't believe you're doing God's work either, but that's just because I'm an atheist and don't think anyone is doing God's work.

When you're immune to social insanity I'd expect rationality to do better. I would see this as not a problem or knock on atheism, but a knock on theism for being more about social manipulation, which autistics are immune to, than it is about rationality. Why would an autistic person be less rational than the average person who is susceptible to social manipulations? And yes, abused people, having seen the pain of violent and irrational ways, tend to want peace and rationality a bit more if they don't become a victim of it. The implication of the OP is that atheism is the result of a mental deficiency, but I see no such case made. That would be like suggesting the autistic savant who is super good at math should have their math invalidated, cause they've got a problem. Seems like a pretty flawed argument if that's what someone is going for. Also it makes no actual real arguments against atheism, but merely means to make it seem dumb by association with a 'negative condition', which is more manipulative bullshit frankly. Edit: Also your title calls every atheist autistic, which is a baseless accusation by a mere correlation. Saying something is a form of something else because of a correlation doesn't make sense and is just an unintelligent mocking of a group that doesn't make sense. Are civil engineering doctorates awarded a form of mozzarella cheese consumption? They're correlated too. When you're surrounded by idiots then a lack of socializing is a mark of sanity and intelligence. Two provocative and negative posts against atheism, just trolling?

Yeah. If you start by insulting them you don't really deserve to get a serious reply. It's like "I think you're an idiot, now take what I just said seriously and say something non-idiotic, but I don't think you will". If someone came onto these forums and opened like that they'd get lots of down ratings I'm pretty sure. You got what you asked for I think. If you want a serious reply you need to presume there might be a receptive and decent person present otherwise what's the point except to stroke your own ego? Spreading philosophy starts with basic decency. We should carry the manners we expect people to have here wherever we go if we want to present a good image and have a chance of being well received. If we go around acting indecent and snarky we're just going to fuel the flames of dislike of ourselves and make it that much easier for them to write off all the ideas they associate with us. Philosophy in practice is meant to break tribalism for rationalism, not fuel tribalism.

So if I pop out a few kids and drop them off on people's doors because I'm poor they're cool with accepting their claimed moral duty of taking care of my kids even if it means they can no longer afford having any of their own or can no longer afford any of the previous amenities and 'luxuries' they previously were able to afford? Do they also think it's perfectly moral to castrate or 'neuter' people in some manner to prevent them from having kids without state permission? These people have no moral standing, they just say grassland is out there and it's just the evil people blocking access to it preventing them from their heaven on Earth with infinite resources to support every human possible with 'basic rights'. Apparently theft is a basic right to these people. Basic mentality is something like "I'm not winning, so nobody should win, winning is unfair, so I'll turn everyone into a loser like me and that will be better for all except for those evil winners". Have you asked any of them to actually say something useful and explain whatever it is they're talking about. For example "truncated reference", can they explain what they mean? Or by "unusual concept of morality" do they mean they prefer thievery to be considered moral and normal or that they should want to sacrifice having their own kids to support another person's whom they don't know or like? Perhaps just ask what they mean by calling everything free, when clearly someone has to pay. "In what way is this free?" "If I buy my kid dinner was that free?" "Is calling something free a truncated frame of reference when it requires only looking at it from the child's perspective and ignoring the source?" "At what point should we stop forcing one person to take care of another person who is unwilling or unable to take care of themselves?"

With a million grueling and difficult miles to go and no guarantee of success you want to know what we'll do when peace and rationality are the norm and pervasive in society? When we've slowly and painfully gone through the process of building up our legs into full functionality, when we're out of physical and mental therapy were will we go? I don't know, but it will be a much earned run of joy and maybe that's all that matters.

The welfare system pays you to keep less than ~$2000 in cash assets (of the places they measure). So of course many these days tend to have small amounts in their bank accounts because they're punished for having more money in savings by receiving less welfare. The US welfare system promotes poverty and bad spending habits because it frequently amounts to a situation of spend it or lose it. Promoting bad behaviors is the government's business after all.

As if the kidnapper doesn't know which you prefer. They're not asking for you to tell them which you prefer, they're asking for you to submit and play along with their evil game and to legitimize them. What does the kidnapper do if you say nothing, default to the known non-preferred possibility or stand there and wait? It's a hostage situation except that you don't have to vote and don't have to interact with the villain directly at the 'voting time', but you can tell the thieves your preference when they come to steal your stuff and they'll ignore you and possibly kill you. There's a relevant disconnect and gap there between the voting booth and the point at which you're directly stolen from. Also with voting they don't care what you vote for, they ask you would you like the lamp or to have your leg cut off, you answer the lamp, and then they cut off your leg anyways. Given how many examples and evidence we have that they don't care what you say and generally know your preference or don't care about your preference and that you give them some legitimization by voting and it takes time and effort on your part, how can you argue for telling them the lamp when you're most likely much better off not driving to go ask for the lamp over your leg, but instead using that time in a far more productive fashion working to undo the authority of the state and resist the tyranny? Promoting evil is a form of evil. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you aren't responsible for your words. You may not be the one committing a violent act, but if you support and cheer it on I don't consider that an amoral, but an immoral action. I'm not going to treat it in the same way I would treat the actual murderer, but if you knew your words encouraged and may have been the difference in relevant action as may be the case with an ignorant student then I'd hold you to a higher standard of responsibility for the action if the student was put under your responsibility to command a vehicle they weren't qualified to control alone yet. If the student knew they were doing something wrong then they'd hold more responsibility for sure ,but I wouldn't say you're necessarily free of responsibility depending on the situation and were it a free society I would have plenty of reason to ostracize you and to promote the ostracism of you for being a less moral agent, while the murderer as in the first example would likely warrant direct physical action or restraint. I may not have reason to kill or directly harm you for cheering on rape and I respect free speech, but I also respect free association and would take measures to dissociate with people who encourage vile behaviors regardless of whether or not they're the ones doing them directly or with or without direct responsibility.

It's like the often used evil villain plot of making the 'good guy' choose between two shitty options or force a choice and tries to put as much of the agency and moral responsibility on the guy making the choice even though it's a choice made under duress and neither is desired and it's the bad guy doing the evil things and executing upon the choice. Whole situation is based on neither not being an option. Given how little individual votes matter why do people spend their time on it instead of promoting or working against the established evil? Making one vote is less effective than swaying a single vote. It's an ugly situation for sure, another reason why government democracy is sinister as it inevitably becomes a true civil war. Edit: (No Country for Old Men slight end movie spoiler)

How is it the initiation of force to stand next to a murderer and cheer them on and give them tips on how to get away with the murder? Question isn't about direct violence, but the morality of supporting immorality through voting. Helping evil is evil.

He's saying a lack of belief in something is the default position. "I don't believe in Everest" -> shown lots of pictures and evidence for Everest, accepts Everest as real. The default position isn't saying it's there, it's saying you don't believe something is there until you have evidence to convince you it's there or likely there. The position isn't even really a belief generally so much as it is working on the probabilities. If you have a small amount of evidence and no contradictory evidence you accept it might be there. As positive evidence accumulates and negative evidence remains absent you increase your functional acceptance of a position. So the default position for Gods is to not believe in any. We only need reject Gods to the degree that we're told to believe in Gods to a greater degree than the evidence for that God (or any God) warrants. If you say atheists are anti-God it's generally to the degree that they've been asked to pretend to believe beyond what the evidence warrants they believe or accept. If they're actively working to reject Gods then they're generally just fighting back against this wave of demands for people to pretend to believe something they don't have sufficient reason to believe or accept to the degree that is being proposed, suggested, or demanded. Also gravity, as a sort of physics, is inherently and unequivocally accepted regardless of what you say, because while you can deny it with words you can't stop gravity from acting upon your body (being). This is separate from a merely subjective acceptance of something. Everest is there whether or not any particular individual accepts this or not just as someone accepting or saying they believe something exists doesn't make it actually exist. If a billion people say there is a magical unicorn on the mountain but can't present any credible evidence for it then accepting it is true is accepting a lie. Most people who tout a God don't have evidence for a God, they have a book and a mob. Being old doesn't make it true. Being widely claimed to be true doesn't make it true, it makes it a tribal (survival) based and enforced faith (pretending to believe) and delusion. The core of atheism is about an honest relationship with the truth of reality despite popular opinions and survival pressures that would sway one to accept or pretend something false or to a greater degree than they actually understand and to a greater degree than the evidence warrants. From how I've heard God defined I'm of the position that the belief in God is an acceptance of irrationality or falsity and evidence based positions impeding logic and morality and also that the notion of a supreme God is counter, not congruent, with free will. Do you believe logic, morality, or free will exists? Then, if correct, they exist. Now for step two, can these things exist without God? If you answer is no you believe God as a subset of your beliefs in those. If God doesn't exist, but those first three things do (or any of them), then they can and do exist independent of a God. You're arguing one thing as if it's two things. If you can't accept the possibility of those things without God then God is axiomatic with those things until you understand why those things have to be or don't have to be linked and dependent in that fashion. To disprove God to you those connections must first be severed, meaning you must accept they do not exist or accept that they are not dependent on a God or you by default believe in God. So what is the real basis for your belief in God and how do you and did you structure those dependencies? Is your position based on evidence or a gut feeling and intuition you can't share or consciously reason through? If it's dependent on the former than how can you claim to give evidence? If it's the latter then you can provide evidence. One thing of note that seems to boggle many theists is that the atheist doesn't accept the illusion of an answer. Meaning if the words you're presenting don't have actual meaning, but just sound like they do, then they're not going to convince any atheist, because they aren't really sharing anything beyond the dynamic by which one pretends to believe as opposed to actual evidence and reasoning. If you reject something that exists, like gravity, that self-corrects because splat. If you reject something that doesn't exist you only lose out to the degree that you are punished by the people for not believe. That is you aren't punished by a non-existent God, but by people, for not believing in God. If you accept something as true that doesn't exist how does that self-correct? That is much tougher and doesn't have the same self-correcting forces and thus religions become widespread and are only selected against to the degree that they impede survival and they can gain survival benefits by creating a tribal structure based on a shared lie. Regardless of how good or bad your sports team is there tends to be social benefits to aligning with a team. Atheists are slowly chipping away at the social and tribal benefits which is why there are more and more people able to profess a non-theist position. So you accept you've defined him as necessarily existent. Atheists don't accept that axiom. Why do accept a posit as a fact? Many have posited the opposite, but you reject that notion, do you know why?

I was quoting you, but then talking to the OP in regards to what you'd said and what it made me think about, sorry if that wasn't clear.

That adds another negative to the example I didn't think of at first. You're choosing to say the glass is empty instead of full and that fits into their narrative of the atheist perspective being a bleak and empty viewpoint that leaves us all without anything to drink and dying of thirst. That the glass being empty is a bleak viewpoint that leads to death. Why did you choose to have the default position empty instead of full and can you reverse it and still have it work to your satisfaction? I think the atheist position should not only be the default and apparent position, but the positive and preferred one. The idea of God to me is the bleak and negative view, but that's not how theists see it because they still think their position is the full glass and atheists is the empty glass. So not a metaphor I would choose to use as you originally put it.

The religious person can't see the glass. They say the book says it's full so it must be full and anyone that tries to find the glass and look at it must be evil and trying to fool people into believing the glass isn't full, when the book clearly says it's full. If you show them an empty glass they'll say that's the wrong glass and you're just trying to trick people. Religious people aren't rational. With all that said, however, it's a nice counterview to try to frame the situation more favorably.