JamesP

In the listener calls, it comes down to choice and responsibility. I think all of us have heard that continual drumbeat that society puts out: "parents aren't to blame," or "they did the best they could." Stef's approach (and I think this is right) is that he does not want to abandon responsibility. If he gives up the responsibility for his bad choices, he cannot justly claim responsibility for his good choices. It's a UPB thing. So, if he takes responsibility for his bad and his good choices, he has the credibility to hold others responsible for their choices. When a caller with a bad history comes on the show, their sense of responsibility is often extremely distorted, if not completely smashed. Skipping over the responsibility of the caller's parents to the caller to his grandparents' responsibilities would not be helpful, and may well even be harmful.

Can you clarify your criticism? What do you mean by "not cut people enough slack"? Could you define what that means, give examples of it, and what specifically needs to be corrected?

I used a gaming headset (now no longer in production) when I was helping with the Sunday show. The microphone is only part of the equation, however. A quiet, controlled environment is probably the most important component. Having a connection with adequate bandwidth is essential as well.

Any wiki is a product of majority rule... I would not presume neutrality on the part of the maintainers.

That was weird. I fixed the content but the fact that somebody was able to create a post that resulted in that kind of error concerns me. Thanks for letting us know!

The question to ask is, why doesn't this little boy trust his father's judgment? It's because his father has terrible judgment, as evidenced by him not having chosen a person he could have stayed in a relationship with to raise his son, and by the withdrawal of necessities from his boy as punishment.

Why is fairness important?

So I think I understand that there is a problem, though I don't think your suggestion will fix it. I will be looking at this today, maybe I can make the chat less laggy.

Ha! That is almost the opposite of what was intended. I was digging around in the settings just now, and it looks like there isn't a setting to allow you to change your vote, but that might just be a template thing. That may be easy, or it may be very painful. I'll put it on the list

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that the individuals who are interested in not acting out are going to be affected by negative reputation in a positive manner, while those who don't care about a negative reputation will press forward without taking a step back to examine their behavior. In this way, negative reputation has the desired effect: people who are interested in a positive rep will take steps to maintain it, while people who don't care about their reputation will eventually find themselves ostracized. Do you have any instances of people who have been crowd-modded down unfairly? I can look into it. Regarding adding reasons to the reputation system, it's been suggested before but I haven't had the chance to look into it. I'm not sure what it would add, especially since the person who posted can always ask for feedback on why they got downvoted. Regarding changing the votes to not be anonymous (who voted what is stored, so the data is all there), I don't see any particular problem with that, though I am ambivalent about whether that should be made 100% open. That said, eBay feedback is non-anonymous--it would actually be counter-productive for eBay feedback to be anonymous. Perhaps the same can be said here.

I didn't have any issues with it that I could tell.

Obama has announced a new federal program: Universal Relationship Care. You will be able to keep your current partner if you like him or her. You won't have to change relationship providers. Did you know that over 45 million taxpayers go without relationships every year, and a further 60 million are dissatisfied but feel trapped in the current system? And let's not forget about the children. Most children in this nation of ours go for years without adequate relationship care. You can keep your relationships, nobody will force you to change them. Your costs won't go up. We will make sure that people who suffer from chronic moral deficiencies have an equal chance at relationships. Nobody should be denied a relationship. No Relationship Management Organization will be allowed to discriminate against pre-existing conditions such as dishonesty; infidelity; criminal behavior; physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; or halitosis. Please tell your partner to apply for grandfather status–a little pun–and your premiums will not increase.

Not sure what Peter Joseph or structural violence have to do with this. The violence against future generations that I'm referring to is that they will be taxed in order to pay the debts, and the tax burden is expected to increase due to this as well. Deferred violence isn't peace.

Totally a fair point... I was not at all clear what I meant by "government." In this context, I just meant "a body of people which provide governance," not the current institution we see today. I think you could argue that the word "government" is really just a euphemism for "violent, coercive authority," not a voluntary interaction to the mutual benefit of interested parties. And, really, we do have "voluntary governments" today, to an extent, if you consider HOAs and the like. I have heard lots of stories (so, all hearsay, but it fits the "poor parenting" theory) which indicate that HOAs attract the power-hungry, the petty, and the vindictive... but that is a further extension on people's experiences of authority and their unresolved projections on others. Does that make sense? I wouldn't consider trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities forced to be paid by future generations a net reduction in violence. I also don't think you can say that an institution committed to using violence really ever gets "more peaceful." I think they instead use bribes and threats to a greater extent, which only makes it seem more peaceful. There is always the spectre of escalation just over the horizon. Cancer doesn't transition into healthy tissue. Evil doesn't transition into good. You have to kill it in order for health and goodness to flourish.

Government itself isn't even the problem. If people wanted to submit themselves to a central authority, that's fine, as long as they do not wish to inflict their preferences on everybody else through the point of a gun. So, in that way, a peaceful government is possible. But trying to directly bring about a peaceful government is putting the cart well before the horse. You can try for it, but you're almost certainly going to fail, and you will almost certainly not be able to escape the violent governments of the current era. It's the initiation of violence that's the problem, not the hierarchy. The greater the power disparity, the easier it is to abuse that power. But you can have a disparity of power without it being abusive, and that is what makes peaceful parenting possible. Peaceful government would be an effect of millions of factors entirely out of your control. Peaceful parenting is something you can control right now with your very own words and hands.

Can you speak to any specific times of day when you notice this more than others?

Did you listen to those conversations in full? If you did, you would know that Stef recommends therapy. Nowhere (to the best of my knowledge) does he stop at "your parents are to blame." Why do you think you decided to introduce yourself to this community this way?

If in the days prior to the understanding of disease and viruses, you had suggested that perhaps there are things too tiny to be seen that cause certain diseases, you would do well to be greeted with skepticism if you had no way to verify this. However, a particle that is too small to be seen is not contradictory to what we know of the world. It may be difficult to comprehend, but it is not inherently contradictory. The theory of God is self-contradictory. There is no point in suspending belief about this entity.The concept of God is not even wrong. It is a no-thing. It lacks existence. Reality is not contradictory. Things that exist in reality inherit this troublesome attribute.

To steal their fire is to believe that maniacs can be reasoned with.

I originally said "Taxes are a fire which consumes your livelihood. This fire is wielded by maniacs." I thought it was pretty clear that I was referring to those actually wielding the fire, which would be government and especially politicians. Sorry if this was confusing. There is a different kind of crazy in the world, though, undeniably so, which is the belief that it is possible to reason with maniacs. This belief is very dangerous and must be abandoned if the world is to be free. It enables the maniacs to do what they do, and such belief is unbecoming of rational thinkers. I'd be happy to hear how most people in the world do not exhibit this particular belief. Whether it's "off putting" has no bearing on its truth value.

No, this is not about free will. It's about whether it is rational to attempt to reason with them, which is what writing down agreements on pieces of paper comes down to. Believing that the right agreement will keep the maniac in line is itself a crazy belief. Don't fall for it!

Taxes are a fire which consumes your livelihood. This fire is wielded by maniacs. Seeking to control the fire is seeking to control the maniacs. We need fewer maniacs. Writing restrictions on pieces of paper hasn't worked–the maniacs continue to spread their destruction. Those pieces of paper are just fuel to their fire.

I would like to hear more from the OP about his thought process, what exactly he was trying to accomplish... and also, what's up with all the "fuck you" stuff? I mean... sure, there are technical people here, but this is first and foremost a philosophy board. Self-knowledge is a central theme. You (the OP) could have cleaned up the swearing before posting, but didn't. What was that about?

The return type of main() is correct in C++ land, but the logic of this programming snippet escapes me. You have odd placements of cin.get() and an infinite loop in omg(). You might be seeing "Chinese characters" because the encoding of the output file is not something your text reader is expecting. I do find myself wondering what in the world this program is meant to accomplish.

UPB does require some attention to detail. Tadas missed a pretty important detail about the definition of a human being, and that rather aggressively.