Natalia

I never thought much about it. Rejecting astrology was like rejecting religion to me; I was a child and saw that it wasn’t based on scientific or rational grounds.

I never argued that that had any bearing on the morality. I just pointed out how that's an important difference between the state and private property, making the situation you proposed outlandish. And as I said, I think in my first post in this thread, private property isn't inherently acquired through force, unlike state control over a territory. I think you agree with me and are just misunderstanding.

I addressed your question, which was “What difference does it make to the individual that governments own all land or that other people own all land?” I believe I mentioned some of the differences in morality and outcome. How would ownership, i.e. property, be immoral? Yes, but that’s partially a choice. Young people in USA don’t have savings, because they are drowned in tens of thousands of dollars in student debt to pay a usually worthless degree. People are also marrying later or not at all, and that can make home acquisition seem not worth the hassle. The prices have gone up too, of course. You know more about that than I do. The point is that it’s not because all home owners in the world decided or would ever decide to group together and swear not to ever sell their land to anybody, as would be required in labmath's quite outlandish scenarios. http://fortune.com/2015/08/18/young-people-can-afford-homes-they-just-dont-want-to-be-homeowners/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/millennials-forever-renters/412165/

That's why it’s good that they inform you those percentages. It is also important to always be at least a little skeptical of those types of personality categorizations—I don’t think something like that could ever be 100% accurate, by its very nature. I did find their advice spot on and useful, but that could be just me. The Big Five is a better way to measure personality, although there's no classification as with the MBTI. I may make a thread about it later. I was researching some statistics about MBTI types, and I found some correlations between them and income as well. Interestingly, the correlation is almost the reverse as that between MBTI types and "giftedness." http://www.truity.com/sites/default/files/PersonalityType-CareerAchievementStudy.pdf

Seems like nitpicking to me. As I said, residences are bought and sold very frequently. A house typically stays with one owner for more or less ten years, people have several reasons to want another house in different stages of life, it seems outlandish to me a situation in which people would be stuck to owning only one piece of land their whole lives. Do you have any reason to believe that's likely?

I would be interested to see if anyone else here addresses this; I honestly don’t know much about that. And nearly halved the income, since they can just both work full time. One person having two part time jobs would be a better example, but they’d still be coerced into paying taxes. Taxes are also embedded in everything you buy, as you know. Buying your house costs money, sure, but it’s not at all the same thing as paying rent to a landlord, mainly because the house is now your property. There are benefits of renting instead of buying a house, but that’s not really relevant here. Not something one does to himself, like buying a house. Now, I’m not really sure of what your point is; if I’m not mistaken, you’ve argued that both rent and taxes are voluntary, and that they aren’t. I’m just a little girl and a novice to this board, so if there’s anything wrong with my premises or reasoning, I’d appreciate anyone to point out. I don’t see how nations and private property can be compared like that. Firstly, as I’m pointing out for the third time ITT, people can avoid paying rent by simply buying their land, but they can’t avoid paying taxes by buying a country. They can try to create a stateless society, which is kind of the point of this whole board, but that’s not something an individual can do to himself, like buying a house; most of us live in democracies, in which individual will is subjugated by the collective, what, as dsayers often says, is comparable to gang rape. Private property of land is fluid, people are often buying and selling land. That doesn’t happen with countries. Rulers change but they’re all influenced by special interests and the will of the mob, and that fundamentally doesn’t change in a democracy. Countries can cease to exist, merge or separate, but that’s very different from market transactions. Countries also have widely different reasons for wanting ownership of their land than individuals or companies do, if you think about it. Any questions?

I haven't created such a category. AFAIK it has never been moral to kill a mentally handicapped person. If it was, well, you’d have a hard time trying to define the exact severity of mental illness that would make it moral to kill someone. But again, you have to understand that embryos have the same essence as a fully grown human being. The very same essence. They’re just in different stages of development.

That's called buying your home. Or living with your parents or with a friend. If you live with a roommate you can halve your rent. Now explain to me how I can do the same with taxes. I answered that in my first post in this thread and less verbosely in my paragraph above.

Hello Thomas, I would like to start by pointing out you have a good argument. That being said, the fundamental difference that you are missing between a state and a landlord (or the owner of any private property) is the method of acquisition of said property. A landlord does not initiate force in order to acquire his property; the state, by nature, does. A landlord would also most likely be willing to sell his property for enough money, while there is no such thing as becoming a billionaire to buy Rhode Island and make it your own country separated from the USA, for example. States have different motives to wish to keep their territory than a person or company does. Rent is voluntary, inasmuch as you have the option to acquire land peacefully and not have to pay taxes, but you do not have the option to acquire a country and not pay taxes. Keep in mind also that positive rights cannot exist concomitant with the NAP.

Welcome to the board, Robc! If you really want an accurate assessment I would suggest taking the WAIS test in person (not online). Psychologists can offer such tests, I believe. I have failed to find a reliable WAIS test online. There are a couple of Raven's, but some give untrustworthy results, some no results at all (and only how many questions you got right), some are too short, some ask you to pay for results (which might not be that reliable). Raven's also only measures spatial intelligence. The best Raven's I found was this one:http://www.iqtest.dk/main.swfbut you can get 85 by just picking the same option in all questions, and the maximum score is 145, so not that good. Stanford-Binet is old is for children, and I couldn't find a free one either.

I have always been pretty skeptic of personality tests and other ways to categorize people and attempt to predict future behavior based on such categorization (especially astrology); however, I have found MBTI to be quite on-spot and interesting for those pursuing self-knowledge, at least compared to other personality tests. MBTI personality types also seem to be correlated with giftedness. Having taken the test multiple times throughout the years, I have always gotten either INTP or INTJ (mostly INTP); however, I often do find myself acting as the website’s description of an ENTP (as the very fact that I engage in arguments in this forum evinces); that may be due to the claim I’ve read that introverts have different facets of their personality that arise in different situations, while extroverts tend to be extrovert everywhere. I apologize for not being able to remember exactly where I read that, you can disregard my claim. In this thread: share your results from https://www.16personalities.com and discuss your thoughts on the test, your results and its implications.

There are problems with what you say here apart from what others pointed out. One more FDR listener and one new member to this forum are usually a net gain to FDR. On YouTube, as you probably know, views, likes and shares help videos find their way to the front page or suggestions bar of other people. On forums, seeing an active board encourages people to join it, and the board would be less active if "free-riders" are ostracized. If everyone ostracized those who do not donate, that could just result in many of them simply quitting the forum eventually, instead of instantly donating, what could achieve the opposite of your intentions.

It's not as if women can't be creepy. For example, I myself have rightfully been called creepy and a harasser for keeping sending messages to my ex when he didn't want to talk to me in the past. Both he and a female mutual friend of ours independently used those epithets. I think it's more about the "creepiness" of women being different than the "creepiness" of men. To quote from this very interesting article, This Reddit thread also shows many situations in which women have done "creepy" things, most of them with romantic partners. And there's this video, that rendered a meme a few years ago. Wouldn't you consider her creepy?

Certainly, “unrealistic beauty standards” do influence anorexia. However, that does not mean they are the problem. Mental disorders have a high comorbidity with one another. Anorexia can be seen just as a symptom of underlying mental problems as arthritis, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s, for example, can be seen as symptoms of aging. Were anorexic people in a society in which chubbiness is praised, they’d do anything to become obese.

That is true to a degree. Laughing at all the jokes of a man we’re interested in is a core part of the courtship process, as is reacting overtly positively to most of what he does. It’s to express interest. There are limits, however, as when rationality overcomes feelings. And a “mate worthy” man can be considered creepy and a “mate-unworthy” man can indeed be sweet. I also believe it works the other way around. Being physically attractive makes everybody act better towards you. In general, attractive people of both sexes get more positive feedback with whatever they do, and I believe that’s especially true for attractive women. That’s not always something positive, since it can deprive them of willingness to improve.

Nice bait, I chuckled. How is this thread even here? Should be locked or deleted, IMHO.

I see the source of our discord here. You seem to be of the opinion that children in the womb are intrinsically different from human beings you can see and interact with, while I see time as the sole difference. You say that embryos do not have the capacity to be sentient, but, well, technically, comatose people don’t have such capacity either. Once they’re sentient, they’re not comatose anymore, just like once embryos are sentient they’re not embryos anymore. Those words are dependent on time, they do not define an individual, rather merely a temporary stage in which it is. “Embryos are whole human beings, at the early stage of their maturation. The term 'embryo', similar to the terms 'infant' and 'adolescent', refers to a determinate and enduring organism at a particular stage of development.” To quote from the article you refused to read, “[T]o claim that a person can be sentient, become nonsentient, and then return to sentience is to assume there is some underlying personal unity to this individual that enables us to say that the person who has returned to sentience is the same person who was sentient prior to becoming nonsentient. But this would mean that sentience is not a necessary condition for personhood. (Neither is it a sufficient condition, for that matter, since nonhuman animals are sentient.) Consequently, it does not make sense to say that a person comes into existence when sentience arises, but it does make sense to say that a fully human entity is a person who has the natural inherent capacity to give rise to sentience. A presentient unborn human entity does have this capacity. Therefore, an ordinary unborn human entity is a person, and hence, fully human.” The word “one” merely implies personhood, and the personhood of the unborn is explained in the paragraph from the article I quoted above as well as several times in this post. http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Individual I was stressing the fact that children in the womb are individuals because some claimed they were part of their mother’s body like a foot, what is baloney. It was not to say that they’re individuals therefore you have moral obligations towards them — what makes you have moral obligations towards them is the fact that they’re people. The NAP applies to people, as far as I’m aware. If you do not consider a fetus or embryo a person, then:1. You have to define at which point personhood begins other than the beginning of the existence of the Homo sapiens individual, and such definition would be inherently arbitrary; 2. You’re basically saying that personhood is a stage of life like adolescence, and therefore cannot define an individual. Fetuses don’t kill each other in the womb. Dying =/= being killed. Except that they are, you have literally no say in that; they’re Homo sapiens; you were a fetus once and you’ve never not been a human being. As long as you existed you’ve been a human being, and you have existed since you were conceived. No it’s not. You don’t seem to understand a very simple fact: that humanhood begins with conception. Not after, much less before. It begins with existence, people don’t exist before they are conceived and what does not exist cannot have rights. But since you exist, since you were conceived, you’ve been just as human (Homo sapiens and thereby person) as you are right now. Children in the wombats not potential human beings, they are human beings. If you're still not convinced, consider the fact that science as a whole is 100% sure of that and I can pull a supporting scientific paper from a quick google search, but I can't seem to find any scientific reason not to consider human embryos as human… that's just plain ignorant. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672893/ The article explains why fetuses can be considered people and therefore receive the “one” pronoun and it approaches just the argument you gave here. You should have read it in its entirety. I can't help but think that not considering embryos as people is completely arbitrary and subjective, apart from implying that personhood is merely a stage in which an individual is and not something that can define it.

Edited: fixed messy double post Well, my intention with my posts was to set definitions straight, although I did conclude each one with a paragraph letting it clear that I’m not pro-life. A fetus is not a part of a woman’s body, but it is indeed inside of it, I think that’s what you mean — it’s an organism inside another organism — and that’s why I’m indecisive about my instance on abortion in the first place: because of the property rights. I see that you seem to only apply morality to currently moral agents. That’s an even narrower cohort than sentient humans, what I see as problematic. The fact that coma and sleep are temporary doesn’t mean that people are sentient in them. They're not. That's pretty much what differentiates people in vigilance from people in sleep or coma: sentience. And being a child in the womb is just as temporary as both of those. See: http://www.equip.org/article/attainment-of-sentience-is-sentience-a-dividing-line-for-life/ I like how the article ends: “[W]hat makes it morally right to kill plants and to pull the plug on the respirator-dependent brain dead, who were sentient ‘in the past,’ is that their deaths cannot deprive them of their natural inherent capacity to function as persons, since they do not possess such a capacity.” I used the word individual as it is often used in biology, but later I acknowledged that the word "organism" is more appropriate to what I was trying to convey. As dsayers, you seem to think that we should only be expected to act morally towards those who are currently moral agents, what I dissent. If you hold that opinion, you have to come to terms with the fact that according to it, severely mentally ill people, people on coma and even asleep people should not have the rights that come with personhood. Otherwise, what would it be that those people have that children in the womb do not possess, that I or the article I linked have not yet addressed? That sounds like appeal to emotion to me. From a scientific standpoint, it’s not up to discussion that human embryos are… human. Yes, they have those characteristics, but that's why humans are chordates. And I mean, it’s not as if an organism can change its species throughout its lifetime. Honestly, I’m laughing so much right now; you basically said embryos aren't human because they don’t look human. I was merely pointing out your fallacious slippery slope, not "ridiculing" anything. Comparing bestiality to homosexuality, as I’ve seen several conservatists doing, is just as fallacious as comparing gametes to organisms/individuals. I used to argue like that too. But just so you know, that's ad naturam.

Excuse me, I may have not sounded clear enough in my post, but what I meant is that children in the womb have their own genetic material different from their mother’s. Every cell in your body except for gametes has exactly the same genetic material as the other cells. Furthermore, your cells make up tissues that make up organs that make up systems that make up one organism. Now a fetus isn’t a part of this — it’s not a tissue or organ in its mother’s body — it’s an organism inside an organism. The only fundamental difference between a zygote and a grown up adult is time. I don’t see how pregnancy is by nature detrimental to the mother, unless that by “detrimental” you mean “uncomfortable.” And the fact that children in the womb are not parasites is not up to discussion, as I pointed out. In fact, there are several ways in which pregnancy is actually good for women's health. Going incessantly through cycles of estradiol and progesterone for decades is not only stressful but an evolutionary novel phenomenon that has a key role in the dramatic increase of breast and ovarian cancers in contemporary times; throughout most of human history and before it, females had a much later menarche and as soon as they had it, they stayed pregnant and breastfeeding for decades. Breast and ovarian cancer rates are significantly higher in women with few or no children. In the end, the question regarding the morality of abortion is at its core the question of whether we should regard the discomfort of an individual as more important than the life of another. I do not attempt to answer such question in my present posts. There are libertarian arguments for both positions, and I’m still brooding over the matter.

So according to you, people on coma, since they are not sentient, can be killed without violating the NAP? As far as I understand it, the NAP doesn’t apply to either life or senescence, but rather to human beings, since it’s about interpersonal relationships. If it applied to senescence… (This is out of scale, of course. I’m just illustrating the overlaps.) “If we grant homosexuals the right to marry, why should we stop there? Why shouldn’t we allow people to marry children and animals too?” I recognize that there’a a problem with saying that a fertilized egg is a “potential life,” but that’s because it’s already a life. What people mean by saying that is that it’s a potentially sentient being (just like someone on coma, by the way.) As I pointed out in my last post, humans are individuals in themselves since conception. The slippery slope you mentioned makes no sense at all. A spermatozoon is a gamete, not a biological individual, and whether it is inside or outside a man’s body doesn’t change that it’s not an individual. A fertilized egg, on the other hand, is forsooth an individual in itself. I’m not pro-life, I’m indecisive about this issue, but it’s necessary to use biologically correct definitions and be logically consistent.

Shall we stop hijacking scientific words and creating our own utterly arbitrary definitions of them? As someone else pointed out not long ago, life is defined as “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” As far as my humble self is aware, the only beings whose condition as life or not is mildly controversial are the viruses. The fact that zygotes, embryos and fetuses are life is not at all up to discussion. Calling them “just a blob of cells” or something similar is pure appeal to emotion. It’s sophistry. You are “just a blob of cells” too. And what else is not up to discussion is that humans have the genetic material of humans from conception. From a scientific standpoint — the one that matters here, the only non-arbitrary one — humans are humans from conception. Abortion is not at all like stepping on grass; grass won’t grow up to become a fully functioning person just like you and I. Parasitism is by definition a heterospecific ecological relationship which is harmful for the host and beneficiary for the parasite. Thus there are two ways in which it is wrong to call an unborn human a parasite; it is not harmful to its mother in the vast majority of the cases (and you can’t base your definitions on exceptions) and it is the same species as its mother. If you’re still not convinced, consider the following: the child and the mother have a common biological motive: to pass on the mother’s genetic material. A parasite and its host have, on the other hand, conflicting motives. A child in the womb increase its mother’s biological fitness, a parasite decreases it. Unborn humans aren’t parts of the body of their mothers either. They’re not her kidney or appendix or whatever. They can be compared to those in that they take her nutrients and other resources in the same way (thence in an innocuous manner), but they have their own genetic material and can reproduce in the future, and are therefore individuals in themselves. Now, when it comes to morality, trying to apply the NAP to abortion when taking in consideration all definitions above currently seems like trying to apply Newton’s laws to electrons to me, but I have indeed been thinking deeply about the subject for days. In case I ever reach a conclusion, I shall meticulously explain my reasoning on this forum.

As this paper (https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2014-carl.pdf) shows, economically and socially liberal beliefs are associated with higher verbal intelligence.

Thank you! I’ve been following the U.S. presidential elections of this year, so two months ago YouTube suggested me the video “The Untruth About Donald Trump.” I watched, and several other videos from Molyneux that interested me appeared in the suggestions. Since then I haven’t stopped listening during my free time on weekends. And I agree! The process of critical thinking itself is often more important than the conclusions one reaches, and that’s why I highly appreciate the philosophers that I do, although not fully agreeing with any of them. See you around!

This phenomenon has been startling me for a long time too. My Facebook girl friends are constantly sharing posts about how animals are better than people (especially kids, it seems). I had a talk with one of them and a couple of other friends about that a few months ago. As I and my ex-boyfriend had noted, the main reason for people’s affection towards cats and dogs must be their physical and even behavioral resemblance with human children, their pedomorphosis, which had been selected for in their domestication process and incites emotions of love and care. The other people, however, couldn’t seem to accept that fact, and denied that human babies inspired those same emotions that their pets do, what is similar to what I have heard from many, many other friends before — and that is evolutionarily wrong and worrying, I would say. Perhaps cats and dogs act as a supernormal stimulus for neotenic traits? That’s an hypothesis that crossed my mind, and albeit I am not overly confident about it, it would partially explain the preference some young women — especially feminists — express for having pets over having children. The other reasons for this preference must be, as the other posters said, that pets, unlike people, can’t hurt your feelings, can’t reject you, and don’t demand anything apart from food and love. They don’t require the long-term investment and process of self-discovery and improvement that human interaction does. They are an easier way to get the impression of attention and affection. Interestingly enough, as I noticed, this situation is nothing new — although I would argue that it got worse with time as the West was released from the moral fetters of Christianity and people started not to feel the need to have children or even a spouse. As I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book from Anne Brontë published in 1847, I stumbled upon this quote: “Mary, dear, that won’t excuse you in Mr. Markham’s eyes,’ said Eliza; ‘he hates cats, I daresay, as cordially as he does old maids—like all other gentlemen. Don’t you, Mr. Markham?’ ‘I believe it is natural for our unamiable sex to dislike the creatures,’ replied I; ‘for you ladies lavish so many caresses upon them.’ ‘Bless them—little darlings!’ cried she, in a sudden burst of enthusiasm, turning round and overwhelming her sister’s pet with a shower of kisses.”

I feel strongly about this issue… it’s just bad for everybody for men to suffer all this abuse. When reading the "manosphere," I see how so many otherwise smart men choose not to have female partners, or not to have anything to do with women for that matter, out of fear for what can happen. And indeed so much happens to them. And it indirectly affects me. It saddens me to see my country and other western countries getting more feminist each day… and I can’t do anything about it in a large scale.