Jagsfan82

This is about everything I could ever imagine to say about the topic. There are lots of ways the transgender community want to justify the whole process, but its not a good process, and its far more damaging in the long run to go through the process than it is to go through the pain of fixing the underlying issues because the whole process is a lie. The reality is there is no such thing as transgender. The reality is if the person is unhappy before, they will be unhappy after. I understand the argument that these people feel they have been assigned the wrong gender at birth, or however fucked up way you want to use language to say their brain genuinely feels like a woman when their body is a man (or the other way around), but the bottom line is it doesn't matter. That sucks that it happened to you, whether it was genetic from the moment of conception or epigenetic or completely environmental based... but it really doesn't matter. The bottom line is that person is stuck with being that way. If they don't have the ability to adapt and be happy in the body they were given, they certainly won't be happy after going through the lie of trying to change genders. Telling them they can, and should, is not healthy and doesn't support what most people want others to feel, which is owning, accepting, and "being proud" of who you are.

I didn't read this whole exchange because lets face it, it was really long, but let me add some thoughts on your way out. They aren't in any order necessarily. As a matter of fact its just a bunch of rambling. But I recommend first and foremost "Economics in one Lesson" 1. There is always a loser, half the people are rich, half the people are poor. This is very confusing to me. If there are 100 people in the world, and 50 of them are working while the other 50 are poor. There are 50 unique skill sets in the world. That leaves 2 people per skill set. 1 wins, and 1 loses. 1 person is able to sell his labor for a decent living, while the other has nothing. How does that situation stay? Wouldn't the other person say, "Well half of something is better than nothing, so I will make the same product for less". This would escalate to the point where they would come together, form a monopoly, and both be rich until they are making more money than other skill sets, in which case one of the winners from the other 50 skill sets comes over to take part of their profits, leaving all those profits to the "loser". It seems you are ignoring the idea that in a truly free society all profits diminish to nominal levels due to competition. Obviously there are ebbs and flows of profits and losses, but in the long run there can be no half rich half poor because the poor will have every motivation in the world to close the gap and either offer the same product for less, a better product for the same, or a inferior product for an inferior price. 2. 1/2 the population produces enough products for everyone? This is very confusing but I am going to try to address the point as you INTEND it to be interpreted not necessarily how you say it, because as someone addressed, why would half the people produce enough products for everyone unless forced, and if they are doing it, then whats the problem? Doesn't everyone have what they need? More on this later actually... But what I believe you are getting out is a limited demand for labor compared to a mass supply of labor, leaving people out of jobs. My problem with this is there is no way to predict what the demand is going to be for products. There will always be areas in peoples lives to offer them more value than they are getting. Your theory is acting like there are a bunch of fixed resource pools that consumers take from and producers produce to with no change in supply or demand in each of them. There are always new products that change the dynamics of where money flows to. The telephone company giants of 20 years ago give way to the cell phone companies of today. Demand for education goes up and down. The service industry in general has been increasing year after year. I guess my point is something along the lines that there is no way to say how many goods are services are needed, and even if there was, that amount is always changing, and even if it wasn't, the free market would never reach an equilibrium where the "losers" are stuck in poverty and the "winners" are making money. They would either realize there isn't a big gap in the quality of labor, or figure out a way to make the lower quality of labor more efficient through automation, training, whatever. 3. Who cares about fairness... honestly. Someone else tried touching on this earlier I believe, but fairness is really not an important subject to discuss when talking about trying to raise the quality of life for humanity. This is what drives me insane about all the wealth gap talk. How much money people are making is meaningless. What we really care about are the real things that each person is trying to obtain. Can the poorest of people afford a house, clothes, food, access to basic health care, access to education, and some sort of moderate quality of life that allows for some relaxation and entertainment time. If they have all of this, who the fuck cares how much money they make? If they don't have it, then clearly half the people aren't really producing enough products for everyone cause there's still a massive market for cheap yet effective food, clothing, shelter, whatever and a massive segment of the labor pool that could be used to fill that need. You mentioned the undercutting prices thing could be a never ending cycle, but thats just not true. As an entrepreneur I simply won't get into the field if I can't get a certain return on my money. There comes a point where no matter how cheap my labor is, which allows me to sell my product for really low prices, I still won't choose to do it if I can't get a certain return on my investment. Its certainly possible that technology may later on make an item more profitable to sell at a lower price, but then you have new industries with new jobs to take on the displaced workers. 4. The losers are opportunity for the winners to capitalize on In your scenario, all of the losers represent an opportunity for entrepreneurs to capitalize on. They are, according to your own admission, hard working people who just lost out to better competition. If that's the case, its an opportunity for me to create a model that capitalizes on their skill set to make a profit. The fact that they are currently living in poverty represents great bargaining power for me to get them to start cheap. Without governments in the way to create barriers to entry, I have nothing to worry about. Bottom line is real capitalism without coercion forces the opposite of what you say will happen. Wherever profits exist, competition will increase. If no one has the skills to compete in that sector, they can look to make some other area more efficient that will free up cash. They can also create new ideas to eat into that market. If the guy down the street has a monopoly on bowling and there's no way to compete with him, there are hundreds and hundreds of different forms of entertainment that might draw people away from bowling and into some other form of entertainment. Jesus thats more of a mess than I thought it was gonna be. I hope you got anything out of that at all.

Accurate. Stef has talked about this to some extent, but the connection between the parent-child relationship in households that use violence and what "we" as a society accept in our governments is striking. Society in a general sense, much more so 100 years ago than today, accepts hitting children for the reasons you mention. It identifies the person in power who has control and instills fear among those without power. This is the household environment many of us, hopefully less and less of us, grew up in. The "because I said so" argument is widely used and generally accepted. Translate this into government, and its almost identical. Citizens have to listen to what the government says despite if they agree or disagree with it because they somehow think they are in a position of authority over us. Their use of violence as a form of punishment for breaking the rules is accepted. I strongly believe common child rearing practices and our household environments are the main reason people accept this. My head hurts and i'm sure thats horribly written but thats ok.

This is the best way to put it. Any possible response they can give you applies to the disciplining coworkers / spouses. Theres the "kids don't listen to logic". Ya, cause women ALWAYS listen to logic. "Kids aren't smart enough to understand without it". OH OKAY, so if I think a fellow adult is too stupid to understand why they shouldn't do something, I can just beat them.. great! "It teaches them to follow directions and be respectful". Ya, cause men have NEVER used that excuse when hitting women. And that also applies directly to Managers / employees.One of the most common problems I have with this issue when speaking to people is the thought that suspensions or even jail time does anything to solve the problem. The argument that a year long suspension of either of these players is going to prevent even one person from repeating the action is optimistic at best. To argue that it would have some sort of meaningful impact is completely naive and/or insane.

I can't wait to see the media and public reaction to Adrian Peterson disciplining his child with a switch.The same people that want to throw Ray Rice in jail are going to be defending Adrian Peterson. Its gonna be a gold mine for point out logical inconsistencies, and fall right into what Stefan has always talked about. In the future we will look at parents hitting their kids with the same disdain that people look at men hitting their wives.And the thing is, often it should be with MORE disdain.

This all goes back to having a certain level of interpretation for what the appropriate force is. If a stubborn person absolutely refuses to leave your house and you have no means to hire a security person what is the reasonable thing. Say this one person is now a group of 20 peaceful people, other than the fact they aren't respecting your property rights? Say the person who took your chocolate bar repeatedly came back to take the chocolate bar you repeatedly removed from him through "just enough force".How much of your resources are you obligated to commit to that. How much force are you allowed to use? -----For me the solution may be in informing the person who infringes upon your rights the consequences of their actions and why you have a right to those actions. He would then have a right to dispute your claims of property to which you would need to provide proof or hire an arbitrator of some kind. So for someone who insisted on staying inside of your home, you could explain that he is causing undue stress and strain on your family and making us use a certain amount of resources that could otherwise be used on other things that impact the wellbeing of not just me, but other people. If you refuse to respect my property I am going to have to use whatever force necessary to do so.If the person then chooses to ignore your request after it has been agreed upon by one or multiple third parties that he is in fact infringing upon your property rights, then he is voluntarily accepting the use of force on him, and any actions he takes that requires additional force will have been brought on by himself.I think we have to establish a couple things before we accept this viewpoint. One, the act of infringing upon the property rights of another person IS an act of force. Responding to that act with force would not be the same as initiating force. This is when we have entered into the gray area of morality, where we can't really tell people a universal rule to apply here. It has to be deduced from logic and universal thinking. It would be universally preferable for people to, if possible, warn the person before responding to them with the use of force. Applied universally, not doing so could justify people killing over petty theft and minor trespassing. When possible, it would be universally logical to require a third party assessment of the situation before any force could be used against that person that would require permanent damage to that persons property, most importantly of course their body. This is essentially what we call due process in our current legal system.

So I posted a rant on facebook about how violence is not surprising given the contradictions we send to our children about how the initiation of force is a rule we are supposed to follow in all situations, except for some cases like punishment and motivation. Spanking a child for hitting another child for example. I made the point that when we make exceptions to rules we allow for the interpretation of the spirit behind those exceptions and the invention of other exceptions. The most recent shooting was justified by the shooter as something the people deserved.I got a counter from my fellow libertarian (not sure if he is full anarchist or not..) that rules can be relevant and have exceptions and humans are capable of moral exceptions without compromising the spirit of the rule. Violence in teh defense of life or liberty is justified according to him.I then countered with violence not being equal to the initiation of force. I then said creating exceptions to the absolute rule that the initiation of force is wrong results in things like genocides, communism, and crusades that kill hundreds of millions of people.NOW HERE IS WHERE IT GETS A LITTLE TRICKY He then asked about property rights. He claimed that I have to include an exception to the initiation of force if I want to also claim the validity of property rights. The argument is that property rights don't exist if one cannot defend his property. An example he used was someone who decided to live in your house and shit on your floors.I countered with an argument that by him being there he was initiating force on you by disturbing how you would normally have lived on your own property. But even then we run into a problem. Lets say using only the minimum amount of force to remove them from the property was allowed. Lets say I am really weak and the person who wants to peacefully stand there is very strong. I can't do anything in my power to move him. I start to wack him with a stick telling him to leave. He stays. I get to the point where anything i do further is putting his life in danger. Is this okay? Am I allowed to shoot him and drag his dead body off my property?My argument is that this would be such a rare event that you can just take an insurance claim and move on with your life. But I continued to get countered with if I don't believe in defense of property rights, I don't believe in property rights.So the question is at what point is ignoring the property rights of others the initiation of force, assuming they do so peacefully? Is there really an exception to the initiation of force? How much force am I allowed to use to take back a snickers bar that was stolen from me, for example. How do we determine the right amount of force? I really do not want to have any exceptions to the initiation of force rule. It really leads to things like killing people for snickers bars or shooting people for walking across your land to get to the other side.Any explanations?

I read that this loosening of nu neutrality would in turn grant the FCC much more regulation power over the internet. I'm much more worried about that than ISPs charging for use of their infrastructure...

You don't seem to be holding yourself to the same standards you are holding me to. #1 was echoing your point. Forcing obligations onto others.#2 I quite literally meant a third party person who was trying to murder someone. I did not mean to ask a question about the ethics of that person. I certainly shouldn't have phrased the rest of the point as I did. I meant to imply as you said that we wouldn't consider that a violation of the NAP.#3 I say this because a person who is committing suicide feels some sort of mental or physical pain. If a person bleeding out in pain from wounds was going to kill themselves and someone prevented that act without helping the victim relieve his pain or certainty of death, would you consider that act moral? I would say by preventing the suicide you have placed the obligation on yourself.

I would parrot the main points already mentioned.1. Suicide always (ok not always...) leaves people negatively impacted by ending your life. Any ways they could be positively impacted could also be achieved through other means than suicide. 2. I think stef kinda touched on this type of argument in the last call in show. Preventing suicide although maybe in the truest sense of the term could be a violation of NAP, ultimately no sane person could say its really an act of aggression. If someone else was performing the act of killing that person and you stopped it, you wouldn't say your act of aggression on the other person was greater than the act of aggression from the murderer. Ultimately you are left with a net loss in aggression. What this means is no rational person is going to honestly fault you or complain that you prevented suicide of a person... in most cases. Surely if that person was in extended pain or had a terminal illness or what have you the line gets fuzzy, but I don't think your issue would be people justifying suicide in their death bed. 3. Someone committing suicide often times is caused by them being mentally 'sick'. There is a little bit of common sense needed in that their temporary choice is probably one even themselves won't agree with at a later time. It would probably be immoral to stop someone from suicide and then not make any effort to provide them help to get better mentally.

Thanks Kevin

I've got about 6 hours of driving tomorrow. I've listened to introduction to philosophy and bomb in the brain series and I think the first three about a stateless society Any recommenations?

Ya that was a troll response cause it seemed worth it. Figured it would hit the spot.

That was because it was lots of stuff and I just figured I would clarify I was responding to you. I actually did donate, I just haven't really linked it to my account yet cause I have no need for a shiny sticker letting everyone know I donated. My donations are limited though anyway as every penny I have possession of was given to me, taken by force, or part of my debt. Lol.. i was half joking half playing devils advocate to keep everyone on their toesBut I forgot we have rep points on this thing =[

WOAH EVERYONE CALM DOWN IT WAS A JOKEEDIT: Thanks for the counter arguments anyhow. Always good to hear how others would argue the point.