Hello from Minnesota

[Moralm]

There was a Freedomain Radio call-in show that happened not too long ago where Stefan and Mike were discussing the fact that it is very rare that they hear from someone who was originally disgusted by the show, but who was subsequently convinced by Stefan’s arguments. I am one of those rare exceptions.

 

My first major experience with Libertarianism came when a friend introduced me to Ron Paul towards the end of 2007. I proceeded to read Ron Paul’s books and Peter Schiff’s books, as well as accessing a lot of materials from the Mises Institute and other similar resources. The topic of Anarchism came up when Murray Rothbard was brought up in the Mises Institute materials, but I found the topic of Anarchism to be so outlandish that I wouldn’t even listen to the arguments. I imagined that such a scenario would turn into a war of all against all and that all of the beautiful things about the world such as art and music would no longer exist in a world without government.

 

I eventually started going to a weekly liberty meetup in 2011 or so and I found out that one of the people going to these meetings was an anarchist (little did I know that others in the group were, too). I reacted like the average minarchist would and asked him why he was going to a liberty meetup when Anarchism has nothing to do with Libertarianism. I was completely shocked by finding out that he was an Anarchist considering the fact that the things he was saying were well thought out. I started looking into the arguments for Anarchism and, despite having some of the regular objections (What about the roads!?), I was starting to budge from my rigid minarchism.  This same Anarchist decided one day to send everyone at the weekly meetups an email that had a link to Stefan’s “Ron Paul: A Shape of Things to Come” video and I didn’t enjoy the video at all. Although the Anarchism didn’t really bother me any longer, the two big reactive thoughts that I had while watching were “How can we change things if we aren’t involved in politics?! He wants to undermine Ron Paul and Ron is our best shot!” and “How on earth will we ever change politics by raising children peacefully?! He couldn’t have possibly thought this idea through!”.  I watched about ten minutes of this video and was done with it and Stefan for a long time. I, however, did not stop researching Anarchism. The next time I came across Stefan was when watching Adam Kokesh and, if memory serves me correctly, I turned off the video as soon as Stefan appeared. I eventually made my way to researching Voluntaryism and eventually became a Voluntaryist in June of 2011. It was about a month after this that I saw a link to Stefan’s “You live in a deathocracy” video on an acquaintance’s facebook. Seeing as how I was a Voluntaryist at that point and didn’t take political action seriously any longer, I gave the video a watch and enjoyed it immensely. I started watching a ton of Stefan videos that very same night and really liked the fact that Stefan was able to include humor into nearly everything and also loved how he boiled issues down to their very essence rather than making a series of consequentialist arguments as I was accustomed to hearing.

 

The crux of the impact Freedomain Radio had on my life though was the discussions on interpersonal relationships. The biggest example I would say is Real-Time relationships. The idea of giving feedback on emotions during a discussion really opened things up for me in with resolving conflicts. This in itself was a much bigger change for me than the jump to Voluntaryism.

 

I am eager to join the Freedomain Radio community. I am a bit intimidated by how much intelligence I am seeing here   I'm not used to a forum where people use reason and empiricism to debate. It is certainly something special!

 

Thanks for reading!

[Mister Hugz]

Wow! I enjoyed reading your intro. I am glad to hear you kept exploring yourself and opening yourself up to these ideas, especially the RTR. In my opinion that relentless self exploratory spirit will help you when the going gets tough emotionally. Thanks 

 

welcome!

[ALinTokyo]

Welcome to the boards! I am not a heavy poster here but I am fellow Minnesotan, or "one of us" as we like to say. I am currently living in Japan but I know how rare it is to connect to people of like minds so I'm glad you found your way here through a long journey. I look forward to future interactions with you and everyone else here!