JamesP

NAWALT. Of course. Let's see. How would the meme have been received if you made a joke about females being raped? There are certainly some species where the males don't exactly court the female when it comes to mating. Joke that the females were asking for it or even that they wanted it because they were dressed provocatively… And then hire a bodyguard detachment in case one of them thinks you deserve to die. For a joke.

You can already use the resources of the board to connect with anyone. Even if the ratio is skewed, having a dating portal does allow romantic potentials to find each other unambiguously. I don't know if it'll get done but the idea has been thrown around from time to time. It's an interesting idea.

People who start sentences with throwaway filler like "lol" and "um" don't often strike me as making good arguments or having much beyond ad hominems in their repertoire. "Um" isn't an argument. It's insane that this would even have to be said. And, dang, can I just say… you are engaging with people who approve of you being labeled as a rapist, and that rather unjustly. That can't be good for you. People who make or approve of false accusations are thoroughly toxic.

I appreciated all of Lians's post but I wanted to draw specific attention to this. If you see something purporting to be critical, please do a little legwork first, especially if the criticism takes the form of moral accusations.

I can understand the motivation for this request, though I don't think we will implement it here. A mutual ignore initiated by one user is inherently fragile. What happens if the other person removes you from the ignore? What happens if you remove that person from ignore? In the meantime, please do keep in mind that having discussions that would suffer from being interrupted is not wise in the main chat. Unless we had private chat rooms (which currently do not exist, unfortunately), you cannot control who comes into the chat. I would recommend taking such chats private, which means taking them offsite if they involve more than 1 other person. You can use most IM programs to set up a multi-user text chat (Skype, for example--and while you're in Skype, you may as well improve the quality and have a voice chat! ), and there are plenty of websites which can serve this function for you as well. If somebody is dropping into the chat and being disruptive and/or abusive, please do file a report. As the introduction message to the chat says, "Empathy is required to participate in the chat." People can go anywhere on the Internet to be unempathetic. Not here.

If a Shoutcast app is available on your phone, you can install that and search for the "Freedomain Radio" channel, too.

It can take quite a lot of resources to attempt to fill the void where your soul should be.

The podcast will also play via the Download link on an iOS device. The mobile version does not (currently) have an embedded player. Kev, feeling frisky? If you give me the code for a mobile MP3 player, I can try to work it into that template. If the code that is on the main pages would work, then I'll try adapting that to the mobile version. The mobile version of the board needs a bit more lovin'...

I don't have my Myers-Briggs score on my profile I was into it for a few years, about a decade ago. Maybe there is a proper use for it, but my experience of it leaves me kind of lukewarm. There is a great temptation to think that you have the answer as to why a particular relationship is or isn't working. I tried to use this to make sense of my father... and this did not work. I said, "OK, here's my type, and maybe because we are in such conflict, maybe he's my opposite, so I'll try approaching things from his perspective..." and it just did not work. What I was missing was that my father had treated me terribly when I was a child and continued to treat me terribly as an adult. I think personality type (or temperament or whatever) is quite secondary to what people actually do in the world. Also, I am pretty sure that the score I received was very much a function of the trauma I was carrying around. This is just my opinion, but I think you do yourself a disservice to plant a label on yourself and carry it around proudly, especially if it is a war wound that you're not admitting is a war wound. Does that make sense?

Given that I've written this down several times, here it is in a pinned/locked thread so that people can find it easily. Reputation System

There seems to be occasional confusion and consternation regarding the reputation system on the boards. Here is an overview. One of the things that Stef has talked about on the show is the importance of a good reputation. A good reputation takes a long time to build up, while it can take just one serious mistake to cause that to collapse. When we moved the board to the current software, I decided to enable the reputation system for both positive and negative votes. All donators have the ability to rate posts up or down, to the tune of 5 votes each day. The main motivation behind the reputation system is to take some of the pressure of managing the community off of the admins. As of the time of this writing, we only have 2 active admins, and no moderation staff. Considering that we have a board community of several thousand users, with a hundred or more users active most of the time, that is quite impressive. The community is also made up of some high quality people and is thus quite good at self-policing. The reputation system helps quite a bit with this, as a negative reputation number indicates that it might not be worth engaging with that person. If a user's reputation gets low enough, their posts will be auto-hidden. These posts are easily made visible, but it is a considerable time-saver for many users, who can tell whether a thread is really worth their time. As the reputation system has a mechanism for negative consequences, there are complaints about it. However, there has not been an instance where a negative reputation was not deserved. Another thing I have noticed about these complaints is that they are almost exactly the same complaints that we had prior to this system. Prior to this system, we could either hide posts (which users could not then choose to see), or ban a user outright. We were told that we were unfairly censoring people, that there needed to be more transparency, that we were removing people who did nothing but disagree... Not all people who dislike this system are experiencing direct negative impacts, but the complaints, oh, the complaints... they are the same. They come up with all kinds of theories as to why they are being downvoted. They blame the system, they blame the admins, they believe that they are being targeted by somebody with a vendetta... they say that the system needs to be discarded, that it needs to be changed, it MUST be changed "if you are for freedom"... Sigh. I cannot recall anyone who has made these complaints ever taking a step back and asking themselves if this is a consequence of their actions. I have never seen anyone ask for my reasons or opinions on why this system is in place--at least, not without throwing in some accusations around integrity. All I have seen is a retreading of the same old complaints. It is also worth mentioning that the reputation system makes it much more transparent why a user might be disinvited from the boards. You can easily go back to see the content of their posts, with the added information of just how negatively rated a particular post might have been. All of this tells me that these complaints really have nothing to do with us. After all, they are choosing to make the posts which win them negative votes. Then, they choose to escalate and double down on those behaviors, which after some time wins their posts being hidden. If you find that you are sliding into negative reputation territory, I invite you to take a few steps back from the forum and ask yourself what is going on. This is an opportunity for growth, and one that you may not encounter again. Philosophy is the love of knowledge, and the most essential knowledge is self-knowledge.

Look, when people say that spanking "works," what they mean is that it produces well-adjusted, high functioning adults. "I was spanked, and I turned out fine," is what "works" means here. If you are going to redefine what "works" means by talking about the parents' unconscious impulses, or by some foggy notion of obedience (which is rather in dispute), then you are no longer talking about the same thing that pro-spankers are talking about. What I'm wondering is why you are pursuing the conclusion that spanking "works" for some definition of "works" that nobody uses.

If somebody uses a word that is unambiguously derogatory and then attempts to back off to the scientific definition when challenged, they are manipulative and dishonest. You don't go around calling a fetus a "parasite" without the intent of getting a rise out of people. You're throwing a bomb into the conversation, hoping for an emotional reaction.

#EndFathersDay #EndMothersDay #EndVeteransDay #EndMemorialDay #EndAllDaysWhichDoNotDiscriminateJerks

"The three most important words in a relationship are not, 'I love you,' but, 'Tell me more.'"

I'm pretty sure that there would be some sort of mass transit option in free society cities of the future; if you live and work and play in a large city most of the time, you may not want to deal with the expense and maintenance of owning a car. Businesses would likely pony up for a rail or bus system that brought customers to their door from further away that was safe, fast, and had the convenience of not having to negotiate parking in a busy section of town. In the present, governments take the desire for mass transit and pervert it into the monstrosities you see in many cities, and use it to curry favors and all that crazy government bullshit.

It seems like the world of lifeboat scenarios is populated largely by jerks. Only one pharmacist has this drug? He would not sell you the drug on a payment plan? Can this guy borrow no money, ever? Where is his family? Where is his wife's family? What about his community? Can the pharmacist reasonably expect to suffer no consequences from refusing to negotiate with a man whose wife is dying? Will this guy with the dying wife even be credible? There are way too many questions raised by this scenario for it to reasonably be expected to shed light on real life morality. It reveals far more about the person asking than any answers it may wring out of the unwary.

I echo what's been expressed thus far as well. Please don't self-attack, and don't self-attack for the fact that you were self-attacking! Also, it's true, we are working on our histories as we strive to reach out. What's important is that commitment to honesty, courage, and integrity. You showed some serious courage coming out to the meetup, man! That you didn't notice the connection between your alcohol use and suicide is important information for you to have. I didn't know about the alcohol or else I might have said something in the moment (if I had made that connection then--I only realized it much, much later). If you're just starting out, as you are, it's so important to start carving out some space for yourself. It's very easy to continue on in the old habits... and the longer you pace in that rut, the harder it is to get out.

This is incorrect. Asking, "Why spend more time on this?" is not spending time on the name of the forum, but asking you why you are so motivated to make several multi-paragraph posts on something that, frankly, very few people will ever care about. Further, you're claiming to not be reacting emotionally but have spent some considerable time writing posts which include insults to Mike and myself, which is fairly indicative of some emotional reactivity going on. My unsolicited advice: take a break and figure out what's going on. Or, let's have a call on the call-in about it. Either way, please stop posting in this thread, at least for a little while.

dsayers, nothing more was behind what I asked, though Mike put it much clearer. Why spend any more time on the name of the forum?

The category is now called "Men's Issues, Feminism and Gender." What's the problem with this?

Can you give any examples where this is not working as expected?

I think this topic is different. Health/diet theories flare up on the boards from time to time, but it's never really been a main topic in the show, as far as I'm aware. Intellectual property was a topic until (I think) Stef became convinced that it was an invalid concept. I'm not sure what happened with Psychohistory, exactly, but part of it is that the work that Stef was originally going to do regarding the origins of war is being done very well by DeMause and his group. I think that men's rights and feminism are different, in that they have very personal impacts on people in ways that those other topics you cited do not. I'm not sure it's all that important, and I would vote for keeping it as-is. My main reason is that the phrase "Gender Issues" has been coopted by feminists. I don't think it's unphilosophical to have "Men's Rights" in the category title, especially for newer members of the board who may not even be aware that it's a thing. [Edit] And then after writing that, I see that the name was changed anyway, which I think is just fine

"Equal privileges requires equal responsibility. Discuss the emergence of the men's rights movement and gender issues here!"

Oh, but politics and the family are inextricably related.