J-William

Just remember Cecil the next time you are talking to anyone who says "how will endangered species be protected without a government?" I can't imagine that anyone who doesn't want to be an international pariah will do anything like that ever again.

Don't worry about what they mean, it's much more important how her actions make you feel, and I'm guessin you wouldn't post about it here if they made you feel good. How are you doing? Thanks for the post, you triggered a very interesting realization for me. I deFOOed last year and didn't realize til reading your post that my parents hadn't asked me about how I was doing. They complained about how my mother wasn't happy that I didn't want much to do with them. That comment had stuck with me since a discussion we'd had back in 2011.

The right doesn't have any real strong philosophical objection to bigger government... But the bigger question is where was the right during the 20th century? The world was being turned into one socialist hellhole after another and the strongest voice against it was a little russian lady should come as no surprise that article was written by professors from schools of "education"... Not only the school with the lowest standards, but also the school turning out the teachers filling the children's heads full of socialist rot.... it's the circle of un-life.

Oh my god! Could you please just not beat this dead horse over and over. I get it the government is evil and lies to everyone... Somehow the government faking a moon landing is worse that faking the Tonkin gulf incident which initiated a war that got millions of Vietnamese killed? Or the lies that got the US involved in WW1 or WWII? I don't think so.

They are very open and honest about thinking raising kids is drudgery and that they prefer to spend time with and have sex with other people... They're not very honest about calling what they do a "relationship" or "love".

I think women should be able to cheat all they want and live with the consequences... Let's see how far this ideology gets without the support of gun carrying men in silly outfits.

Sorry I was overstating the case... I took you to be claiming that it was necessary. You clearly weren't and gestures and mouth movements can be helpful, but they aren't necessary. I have no doubt that gestures and facial expressions lend a large portion to making speech comprehensible, just watch a dude trying to buy something in a language he doesn't speak.

If there's any truth to this claim I have not come across it in my eight years as an ESL teacher or many hours of reading on the topic of language acquisition. So no, it's not true... I'll even add that I have learned most of my Chinese through listening to mp3s and reading.

libertarian socialist certainly is a socialist... Google only stays relevant as long as it delivers the search results people want. I they start delivering garbage people can and will go somewhere else. Google's business is built on selling advertising near the top of their search results, if your search placement has gotten worse then you can pay for better placement. Also if it's immoral for something to move down in the search results does that mean it's immoral for other things to move up? I mean Twitter didn't exist several years ago, and since then they've destroyed the search results of other sites with the word "twitter". It's utterly ridiculous :-P

I think you're on the right track with not engaging. you have no power over the lives of your siblings and your parents do. If you were to make them understand your reasons for breaking from your parents you would be causing them lots of problems. On the other side of the equation they are not likely to believe the stories told by your parentsfor very long. If your parents spend the next few years beating the drum about what a bad guy you were they will be making an image in the minds of your siblings of a really cool guy who defied the will of the parents. They'll think you're James Dean or something. :-) If they say nothing then it's not like your siblings will forget you, someday they will come be curious why you're not around. On the lack of power... you can't do much to make their life better. If you tell the truth it's like saying "hey you're really stuck in prison for the next decade, Enjoy!" You can't win the propaganda war, the other side has the power of food and shelter, you have words.

No doubt there's 10,000,000 harmful dangerous things the US government is doing that are being ignored. We will find out in a few months or years when there's a new war or the dollar collapses entirely...

nice ressurected thread. How's that language learning going? I'm going to go ahead and call everyone here wrong and run away without offering solutions :-D actually I just want to offer arguments against everything and then run away without giving aswers... so first off, I agree with Tyler. You can zip your mouth and never speak a word and still learn a language. That's because a language is entirely constructed by other people and practicing saying it helps you become a speaker as much as repeating "e=mc^2" helps make you a physicist. I also disagree with Tyler. Turning on the radio or TV in a foreign language doesn't do much good because you aren't going to understand anything. We don't turn on our radio voice to talk to children, we simplify and make things easier to understand. An adult can relate to abstract concepts better than a child but that won't help with making input from TV or radio more comprehensible. listening to years of advanced physics lessons will make a complete layman very bored and won't make him a physicist. Oh and the thing I have to say for vocabulary studying with things like Anki SRS, If you used that method to memorize all 50 states and their capitols, would that make you better able to speak english? I can imagine the conversation... "Albany!" "what did you say?" "Austin, Texas" "oh, have you been to Austin?" "Sacramento!!!" Now that I'm done telling you that it's impossible and you're going to fail... How can you learn a language? Well you need interesting comprehensible input. How do you get that in a foreign language? Kid's book can provide comprehensible input, but often fail to be interesting to an adult. Teachers can, and textbooks can, but usually they provide very little comprehensible input and almost certainly fail to provide anythin interesting. But there is hope! The internet provides many avenues for one to meet native speakers who can provide interesting comprehensible input. Some are tutors or regular people that you can meet online or through an app... You can talk with them via skype or chat via text... There are many ways to get started... even if it's just a class at a local community college, you can at least ask the teacher to spend time chatting with you in the target laguage, even if the class is focussed mostly on traditional grammar and vocab drilling.

I'm glad you seemed to have answered your own question there... Just for reference... I'm having a hard time keeping track of all the fake things... Nukes are fake Moon landing Iss Isis 9/11 ... Gosh, what else is fake?

Not really a punishment... But also I think you're on the right track with your question. My daughter is very young and she does not have money to pay for anything. So should I punish her? I think not. That doesn't mean I won't do anything, I would talk to her about breaking it and work out some way for her to make up for what she broke, whether that's doing a little work around the house so she can "pay" for what she broke, or maybe if it's another kid we can give that kid one of our toys to make them happy. This way she will learn that you need to work to repair harm that you've done and she won't learn that if she does something "bad" that I will get angry and punish her. That sort of thing will make her keep secrets. I want her to come to me and ask "I've done something bad, how can I make it better?" Because that's how adults should handle their problems. punishment is all about the person in power making the powerless person behave in the manner they dictate. If you're child is in a punishment paradigm they will seek to avoid punishment instead of seeking your help to do the right thing.

I thought it was a joke... I mean dead people usually only attend their own funeral. On the main topic. If you're choices are honoring or fondly remembering the dead person or placating/pleasing people. I'm not sure there's a winning hand to play if the dead person was a jerk. Honoring a jerk is decidedly poor form and playing along with people who want to pretend this person wasn't a jerk and would rather not hear your actual opinion of the person is self-erasure. So all in all, I don't see it as a win-win.

Thanks for the educational post. I feel like I learned something even if the original article is rank nonsense. I wonder about our capacity to forget the basic lessons of the past that are the basis for modern civilization. That would be the real atlas shrugged... People who know how to smelt steel and make things just say "eff you" and go galt... Then people who think the earth is flat and computers grow on trees would have a lot of luck.

Wow, I see here nothing but the approach... It screams out that I shouldn't bother listening to your argument.

I have the most severe doubts that the time you spend in political action could really have large benefits.

I've been very fortunate recently to work at a company where I can use some of the skills I've built up in pursuing my hobbies. Our company has a song that they've been using for years that gets on everyone's nerves. This afternoon I made a new replacement. It was easy because I've been doing audio/music production for years as a hobby. I've also developed an app for our company because I'm good with computers and have wanted to learn programming for many years. These aren't projects they asked for, but I am given time to pursue them and the results are appreciated. I am also better at our main job than my colleagues... But they don't care because my being good isn't bad for them, and I'm always willing to help out.

Seems like a lonely existence for unpleasant people.

I feel you on that. As a piano player I feel like I'm always playing the same things when I improvise. I kinda wonder if even the very best musicians feel that way because the more you know the more you understand exactly where a particular phrase comes from... On the other hand I've heard enough stoned or drunk idiots in "jam bands" playing randomly because they don't really know anything about what they're doing. They probably should be aware they're playing the same stuff over and over, but they aren't.

Yeah, doing what you can to help the world can really take philosophy from an abstract bugbear to something useful and exciting.

I agree, could be a very interesting conversation if you call in. I've experienced both sides, it's really hard to draw on personal experience to make generalizations about a group. I've had compelling philosophical discussions with atheists and religious. And to some extent religious people in the us have been some of the strongest opponents of Marxism. Then on the other hand Kant was interested in reconciling reason and religion, and led the way to Marxism. And a lot of Christianity isn't philosophically opposed to communism in a sense.

Wow, working at a startup is a terrible way to have time for your kids. Of course if you don't spend time on your startup it can fail immediately. If you don't spend time with your kids they will seem perfectly normal because they're just like the kids next door whose parents are running a startup.

Cribbing some facts or even taking the whole video would be fine :-PI'm pretty sure he's cool with you doing anything you can think of to spread the message of peaceful parenting