vahleeb

Hi Wontstandforit, I can only tell you this much. You are, because of your young age, at a great disadvantage when debating on this board. I know you are not trying to be annoying but you sometimes come across as that and it's not your fault, but it just comes from the fact that you are facing a significant deficit of knowledge when you come to the table. I don't want to pull on you the old parenting crap of "when you've lived as long as I have", but at 14 there just hasn't been enough time to amass any kind of knowledge or to develop any sort of sound reasoning skills or debating skills. At my own 14, I was so indoctrinated that I used to pray along with my entire class before some more significant tests. The country I live in has mandated public education and part of the course had been (at least since I was 11) Religion (it meant Cristian Orthodox indoctrination, which is the majority religion in my country). Also I remember that time as just being a kid and just toying with the idea of critical thinking for only a year at most. I also couldn't help but cringe when you mentioned that you were going to take the debating points back to your priest and the reason for that is because there is exactly the same gap in knowledge and skill between you and him as there is between you and the people that have debated you thus far. If you're really interested in a step-by-step debunking of the whole religion thing, I would like to point you to the following (very old) FDR podcast episode FDR29. And if you could give the following a go afterwards as well: FDR277. As far as lack of purpose from the atheist perspective of life, I don't think you should worry about that, yet. You can't understand it because you don't yet see things from the atheist perspective. Most of us didn't have the privilege of being brought up in an atheist environment and we had to go through this transformation and we did do it at a great personal cost to most of us. My advice to you is to not be so bent on deciding who you are at such an early age but to absorb as much as you can from everyone. The next 4-7 years are going be a rollercoaster of hormones and emotions that will make you feel like your own life and your own identity has been put through the spin cycle of a mad washer and dryer. Questions like "is there a god" or "how should i live my life" should probably be explored again at the end of that period. I think if you value knowledge over everything else you will succeed in the end.

Hi guys, I don't know what you know about Eurovision and I'm not gonna have you suffer my lecturing you on what it is and why it is, but in the national competition I came across a song that really moved me for obvious (to FDR listeners) reasons, so I just wanted to share it with you just in case you'll get out of it at least some of the emotions it gave me. Here's the live rendition from the semi-finals (a few days ago): Ovidiu Anton - „Moment of silence” | Semifinala Eurovision România 2016 (YouTube link). Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with this guy, nor am I sharing this to generate any sort of publicity.

There was only one thing that went through my mind when I first saw the photos (1st square), and it was: "Oh my God, there are two children!!!... and no dad!!!!". The amount of brainwashing that out of control feminism has inflicted on the world is absolutely mind blowing. And just around the corner, we're gonna get more of it as soon as the candidates for the US presidency shake out.

Hi Nightspirit, I'm really sorry to hear that the original issue which was presented as a hypothetical is actually a very real issue and with much more serious implications than I could first perceive from the hypothetical. I can only empathise with the amount of anguish that this situation must be causing you. I will try to address the heart of the matter and I hope that you will excuse the clinical approach. A child is akin to an 18-25 year investment, and that analogy doesn't even deal with the fact that you and your partner are ultimately and solely responsible for creating this life. This is obviously a choice that is made that much more difficult because of your biological clock ticking away. I don't know how old you are (your profile didn't help) but I can only assume that if you went through the traditional steps (marriage first and then thinking of children) that the threshold that you have subconsciously set for yourself for having a child might not be that far into the future. What disturbs me most about the way you posed the question is that you framed it in a binary base (you and your husband) and from the language you have used to further describe the situation you seem mostly preoccupied with the two of you. The reason it disturbs me is that it conveys to me the message that you have not yet looked at the situation through the eyes of your child. Because the real question about this situation that you should be asking is "should I expose my child in his or her formative years to this man whom even now I can refer to as dishonest ?". You are your own proof and the fact that you still have doubts, and can still refer to him as "dishonest" should tell you that there is at least a part of yourself that hasn't dealt with the situation, because, you yourself have chosen him - faults and all - and if he tricked you (I am going by the rationale that him keeping those secrets and you not knowing about them made you believe that he was an honest man) it means that there is a way past your defences that you haven't yet realised and that is actually why you are still having trouble with the whole situation. I would say, if I had to guess, that you feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. The inevitability of passing time and the attachment to the years you have invested in the relationship which you want to save (the going to therapy) but the way that you haven't explored and that I think you should probably try and explore with a close friend or a therapist is to ask yourself what happened and what were the choices that put you here in the first place. The correct approach to the situation is that you are making a human being and you are one of their parents. Just because the moment of conception hasn't yet happened, it doesn't mean your parenting duties haven't started. They start, the second you decide you want to have children.

Hi Rose Codex, you are changing Nick's example. In his example it was allowed to do drugs within the tower and banned all around. That presuposes two different DROs. In this case, the second DRO is enforcing a prohibitve, which can only incurr costs that are economically inefficient. There is a difference between negative incetives and prohibition. Negative incentives means people are still free to do whatever they want, they just have to pay more. And the extra pay is actually the increased cost of the risk the DRO is taking with regards to their long-term health, nothing more. Now to answer your own question: you could use social and economic pressure on your friend, although it would seem to me dangerously toeing the line with an intiation of force. I say this because you are judging another person with regards to actions that only would affect himself (in a free society consumption of drugs would be free from the associated drug-related crime that we see in the statist universe simply because the price of drugs would go back down to that of aspirin or that of vegetables), and that doesn't seem to me to pass the universality test with regards to morals. Ultimately, I think the rule of thumb is that your friend still has to have the choice of doing what he wants despite of your pressure. If however, through your pressure, you actively remove part of his choice (apply real restriction), then I think the initiation of force line has been crossed.

Hi Nick. It would be economically inefficient for DROs to support any kind of restriction to freedom. Because restrictions need to be enforced and the costs of enforcing are not economically viable. Therefore, the anti-drugs landowners would have to set up their own inefficient DRO and subsidize its continued existence. This DRO is highly unlikely to get any sort of reciprocity with other DROs because of its economically inefficient principles. Therefore it's even more unlikely that they can form the pressure on the road owner to the point where he/she wilts. My point is that you are already starting out with a lifeboat scenario, but when you actually try and apply it to a "free society" its probability becomes smaller and smaller. And in the end, if all you claim does happen, then the tower dwellers have two options: 1. Move away from the "crazy" people. 2. Get their drugs delivered by air, while they wait for the inevitable collapse of the "community" surrounding them.

Lionblue, let me try and adress the original problem as well as provide you with a brief explanation of why I think the discussion went out of control so fast. In your original post you purposefully ask for a Randian explanation to this moral conundrum that you believe to have found by following the letter of her philosophy. I will have to point out, that at some point a fellow boardsman is telling you the answer is in your original post (there's a bolded out piece in a quote), but you don't accept this answer and I understand why. But what I put forth to you is that most people here have moved past the Randian philosophy and cannot argue with you in the confines of that framework. The reason for it is that most people here believe that morality and ethics must be universal and Rand's morality and ethics do not pass this test. It's very likely that this is the exact point you are trying to make, but have just framed it in a way that doesn't convey this message. I suggest that, perhaps, if you want to remain within the confines of Randian philosophy then to take the question to a board that is filled with members who subscribe to her philosphy to the letter. This is not, and the effect is that you are asking a question in chinese, getting an aswer in japonese and then both sides get frustrated over the lack of communication. I'd like to make it clear, though, that I am not advocating for discarding all of the Randian philosophy out of hand. She has given us the best and most recent tools (Steph excluded) for exposing the evil of socialism and for me, personally, her novels were a stepping stone on the path to freedom.

Hi there, mishochu. I can't claim to be an expert about this but I have been going through this transformation for about 16 months now, so I am a little past the stage you're in and I can tell you that it does get easier with time. I think that algernon is right, and some of the restlessness and despair that you're feeling is that you're going though some pretty traumatic psychological events (realising you own mortality, your own futility when it comes to the world at large, the nature of the zombie fest that we walk through every day) and you need to spend some time looking within yourself and coming to terms with all of that. Basically, I'd say that if you feel unease it's because something in your internal make up is still incompatible with the information that your new perspective of the world is feeding you. What it was for me that opened up the way to "inner peace" was the realization that all the expectations I had for myself, for my own life, for the world at large, were not built from first principles but rather induced into me by the same world that I was now calling corrupt so I had to let them go. This is much trickier than you might think, because inherently we all start out believing that we're somehow "entitled" to the good life, to the happy ending, to "our place under the sun" but that's all just external propaganda that has been seeded into our brain far before we were capabale to defend against it. The truth is that what is just is and wishing for it to be different not only isn't worth a damn, but it ends up costing you.

Hello, from Bucharest, Romania. I really wonder how many of us romanians are lost among the members of this board.