Imogen

I am surprised by the use of the word "grope" in reference to that episode. I have been groped and witnessedothers being groped, and it certainly wasn't at all like what that security agent was doing. Like others, I do not in any way agree with forced physical contact without evidence and reason to warrant it, but that agent was gentle and considerate in her movements and touch of that child (within the context of the faulty premise that empowered her, that is). The child did not seem distressed to me at all. She seemed like she took the whole thing in stride, but with diligent observation as if it were all new to her but didn't hurt, so she allowed it and remained aware. She watched her mother go through first, so she already knew the outcome. There's nothing in the video to suggest that she was scared. And I would not conflate that type of touching with groping. Why must people insist on using hyperbole in situations like this? It just renders previously useful words useless and the ante is upped for words whose definitions depend on relative degree for their meanings to be communicated. If that's now groping, then I grope my five children throughout each day, every day, and what I previously communicated as having been groped has now become violent molestation or some other inflated decription. Sigh. That said, for now, I will not fly because of this. I will drive until I run out of land, but unless and until security measures are employed by competent people who have the skill and ability to recognise that I am not a terrorist threat without touching my body, I won't be traveling by air. Unless I must in order to gain something more valuable to me than my protest against this particular expression of the tyranny that I otherwise endure every other day by the gov't and its agents. I am planning a trip (international relocation- I don't know if I can go by ship, or if the security measures are any different, actually) in five years- herein lies the more valuable personal gain mentioned above. I hope there is some improvement in this situation.

This is one of those times when a parent must look deeply at the efficacy of his/her communication skills, because if your child doesn't trust your judgment, and also hasn't enough life experience to make his own good judgment, you have failed. Shriek, wave your arms, chase him as far as you can, then go inside to obtain bandaging material, and grab your phone on your way back outside. Learn the lesson. Stop lying to your kids about your continuously unproven skills as a medium. Don't tell them they'll get hurt when it's not absolutely true. Don't promise them injuries they don't get doing things that aren't actually dangerous. Let them use their bodies the way they want to from infancy (using good judgment and lots of care of course), and they'll know their actual limitations. Then they won't dart into traffic on their bikes at break-neck speed. They would have learned the precursory lessons long before they could ride a bike, if you had not hindered their progress with hysterical precautionaries until that point. Discipline is all about communicating reality. Otherwise, it's creating an illusion that a child will fight against because the evidence of reality is continuously available to inquiring minds; children are nothing if not that. They will discover that you have not been honest with them, but have been infesting them with your own irrational fears, presented as facts. If that child doesn't die from darting across the street, and you have told him a million times that he will, who is the one grasping reality? Parenting from fear is a lose-lose situation. Be honest. Even with children. ESPECIALLY with children.

ZSorenson, I agree with you. The paragraph you quoted from my post was an obviously failed attempt at irony. Sorry. I think the underlying premise is what catches people in irrational-rational behaviour. What I mean is that while a drug addict behaves rationally according to the premise (stemming from his desire for bliss through drug-induced highs), clearly the premise itself is faulty, so both the desire and the following behaviour are irrational, but taken without a proper foundation (for instance the value of his life and time, effort, etc...), the behaviour is a perfectly rational response to the premise. I think that many (even most) people labour rationally under these false pretenses. To someone with properly formed, rational premises, though, it is clear that their premises are false, their behaviours are rational only if their premises are true, but because their premises are not, the behaviour and thoughts are all irrational. It is very difficult to convince most people to look at their premises, though. Most people just act according to an arbitrary code of conduct handed down by someone else and then behave accordingly- seeming rational to everyone else who is doing the same, but examined wholistically, their whole perspective is flawed from the outset, and thereby irrational. This is why it's like fighting the weather. The reasons behind why people do things are so arbitrary as to appear random, but of course, as with the weather, there is always a reason behind it, but because I cannot control or influence either, I am left in the rain/reign of illegitimate premises. So, I do what I can to increase my circle of influence as big as my own abilities allow (which is admittedly quite small presently), and act rationally according to my own examined premises. For the most part, that is already so challenging that I really cannot even much consider what the rest of the people in this world are doing, except for entertainment. I can't really take their actions seriously; I just don't have the time. I aim to recognise obstacles and avoid them. That's the best I can do. But I understand your pain. I do.

Is the reality that man chooses and perversely desires to be irrational not a confirmation of his irrationality? And given that while human beings have the capacity for reason and rational, virtuous action, but choose not to engage this capacity in favour of electing or tacitly accepting the whimsical direction of another or others, how can one conclude anything other than that it is the nature of man to deny his nature in the absence of immediate, perilous survival requirements? Obviously (to those who reason with excellence)there is nothing but peril in being enslaved, but without an overt threat to one's immediate survival, few people act rationally and use reason as their m.o. Most actually prefer to be enslaved! They actually believe that security and freedom are dichotomous, presumably because they think themselves incapable of even something so base as protecting their own bodies from physical attack. If they cannot even imagine being victorious in such a base circumstance, then upon what can they presume their ability to provide food, shelter, and cool bicycles for their children, if not through the regulation-enforced distribution of the wealth of other (presumed more capable) people? It's as if, having become complacent from lack of real-time survival urgency, people descend into a pit of hedonistic infantile bliss-seeking. How else could socialism even take hold? I was watching a program about a tribe of hunter-gatherers and the anthropologist said that the root of sharing what one has with others is in the act of a hunter presenting his tribe with the kill and everyone partaking of the results of his labour. My immediate thought was that this is an absurd presumption: clearly in a hunter-gatherer society, those who hunt do so with the implicit acceptance of the labour-equity between their occupation and that of the gatherers, who, incidentally seemed to actually have more to do, given that they reared the young children and also built the shelters, made receptacles for storing goods, produced clothing and ornamentation, and also gathered roots, leaves, fruit, and insects for the tribe. This is trading! Not giving away one's wealth. Anyway, it would mean death for such people to be completely unable to act rationally, to be completely self-denying. They just don't have the luxury of being so shamefully inept. Yes humans are capable of better. But if they band together to collectively act like lemmings or meercats, then the reality that we are capable of so much more is just a fantastical idea to these hoards of drowning idiots and communists. Eventually, the absurdity of this will come to its obvious conclusion, but it won't likely be during my lifetime, so my concern is how to retain my personal freedom and live the way that suits me. I mean, these people are everywhere!!! It's like fighting the weather.

Etsy is a strange beast. I have often wondered why some people bother to sell there at all, given that they couldn't be accounting for both materials and their time with such low prices. Certainly they have every right to do this, but it is a matter of time before they cannot continue; likely when their spouses stop supporting their crafting. I would never use Etsy for market analysis. There has been some mainstream criticism of Etsy's crowd being made up of mostly middle-class housewives who are not doing anything but paying for more materials to do more crafting. Not a good business plan, in my opinion. There are a lot more people doing real business through Etsy, now though. Here's one. I don't know anything about ebay other than that I avoid it because it's a pain in the a$$. Then again, I'm giving my perspective as a consumer and not a retail business owner/operator, so I'm certainly not qualified to give anything other than my opinion. Oh, and by Canadian standards, Ontario is "south", given that it contains the southernmost part of the country. I'm between the 61st and 62nd parallel, roughly inline with Anchorage, Alaska. There's only one road in, through treacherous mountain passes, so we pay dearly for anything coming up here. Despite that, the province from which most products like yours are sold, is British Columbia (lots of back-to-the-land-ers with hipster attitudes, lol), and the prices I pay are for products from there. Ontario's a mixed bag, but there, and here also, people are willing to pay for good quality and assurance of it. Your target consumer is already prepared to pay more than drugstore prices, so I think you can charge significantly more. If you snazz it up to give everything an exclusive boutique flair, which would cost minimally more for you, you could go really far, I think. I know that any of my friends, myself included, would be suspicious of your products being as clean and healthy as you've described, just because the prices seem way too low for what you've offered.

I checked out your stuff. It looks great. I wonder, though, about your prices; I could buy your stuff at your prices and then sell it for double-- here, anyway. For instance, your 6" beeswax candles sell here for $12-$14. Anything larger is proportionately higher priced. And I would expect to pay $8-$9 for those lip balms. I live in the far north though, and I know that most Americans would have heart attacks from sticker shock up here, but even still, you could definitely sell higher. I used to make all my own stuff, but have in the last two years, been buying it because I want to spend my time doing other things. I pay $13 for a 350ml bottle of shampoo, $7 for a bar of soap, and other similar prices for other items. Your prices are what I would pay for nasty, noxious chemical-laden so-called body-care products and paraffin, synthetically scented candles. I only buy completely natural, organic, no-synthetics products, after a bout with breast tumours in 1998. I have had no recurrence. Maybe you should market to Canada: you'd make a much higher profit here, if your current prices reflect the American market's prices for similar products. ETA: It would be really nice to have much larger images of your products on your website, too. Viewers would be able to see the textures of the open products and the packaging, which are both high selling-points for your products and also important to you, as expressed in your narrative.

Lakeside, I was also looking forward to your reply to Bluecherry's post. I think it was well reasoned with lots of room for discussion. I wanted to write to your latest post, "but what about..." but Bluecherry covered all of the questions I had, so there is no point in reiterating what has already very competently been expressed. Please do reply. If you find it worthwhile to post about your child-rearing methods, surely you would find it worthwhile to make rational sense of them in discussion. Otherwise, you have done what you've accused us of, namely that you have "exalted [...] methods that produce questionable results," rendering your participation in this otherwise rational discussion about child-rearing little more effective than you tossing a beer bottle into a crowd.

If the child takes off his seat belt, stop the vehicle and don't drive it again until everyone is safely buckled and the situation is satisfactory to the driver. The same goes for screaming, throwing objects, kicking the driver's seat and spitting. It isn't very complicated. Would you drive with an unbuckled adult in your vehicle? What if he was screaming at you? What if in the car ahead, you saw an unbuckled adult screaming at the driver, or the driver turned toward the back, screaming at the passengers? Would you continue to drive at such close proximity? When I'm in a vehicle, I expect everyone to be buckled and not screaming. If I'm driving, I stop whenever something or someone causes my situation to be unsafe. I have stopped for each of my children a few times, once for each sort of infraction they chose (because yes, mummie stops for screaming and kicking the back of her seat). I have stopped more than once for my partner when he wasn't buckled: his body flying around in the van would likely kill any one of the rest of us in a collision. We have stopped the vehicle several times for each child at around the 18 month and 2 1/2 yr stages. Then, we don't need to do so anymore. In my experience, a five, six, or seven year old who causes unsafe conditions in a moving vehicle has either not been adequately instructed or has issues beyond the scope of healthy impulse management. I have had no issues at all with my children beyond that 2 1/2 yr mark, in the vehicle. I stop for crying babies, too, because I am emotionally distraught by their continued crying. I meet their needs, and we move on. Of course this happens within the context of a family in which each individual truly values his time for the sake of productivity, and even our two yr old has chastised a sibling for taking his time from him through misbehaviour in the vehicle. My children have a healthy appreciation for the reality that time wasted is not regained, that time spent waiting for unsafe behaviour is time they cannot spend drawing dragons and building cities with blocks, or practicing sword-fighting. If children do not value their time, then it stands to reason that they will not care that they are wasting it. My solution to all of the problems in this thread is to deliberately lay a foundation of reasoned values and then live accordingly, virtuously. Children are eager to learn. Hitting them or taking away so-called privileges only regresses the issue, and shows up the holes in one's parenting (barring very unusual circumstances and of course accounting for genuinely new circumstances to the child). Parenting is enormously inefficient and inconvenient. The best-case-scenario is usually to take the time necessary to provide foundational information and conclusions for children to use in their own re-invention of the wheel. If you don't have the time or inclination to do this, you will find yourself having to teach lessons that could have been more easily learned and internalised when they first emerged as issues, rather then later on when an uneducated child can do more damage to himself and/or others. It is also imperative that a parent's expectations accord with the abilities of the child. Discipline is about guidance, not punishment. A child who does not have the ability to take responsibility for his own actions fully, should not be punished, even when behaving in a way that draws attention to his inability to take full responsibility (like pulling off a seatbelt), but the parent who neglected to guide the child in the first place- foundationally- should be (or better yet: take the cue!). Parenting should be proactive, not reactive. Some people object to the obvious intensity of engagement that this would require. Well, this is why most people shouldn't have children until or unless this undertaking is within their scope of abilities. Parenting isn't automatic. I filled in at a daycare once, for a friend, and was completely shocked at how unengaged the children were. I spent the day with ten children from 18 months to 5 yrs old in my charge and it was like a vacation. At the time, I had four children, and it would have taken two weeks for that group of ten children to receive what my four do in a day, at the rate of the program and the rate of inquiry of those cow-eyed children. Imagine my stunned silence when the other workers (who between the three of them, handled only five children)commented at how talkative and curious the children were with me. Then they asked how much harder it was for me to care for so many kids. I couldn't help but blurt out that it was like a vacation for me. Then my friend asked if I would stay on, and bring my children, too. I think I lost my usual composure and exclaimed with a bit too much emphasis, "No, thanks." If you send your child to daycare or school, trying to do this will be a bit like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up a hill. Schooling enforces enormous wasting of one's time and lack of productivity, so trying to explain that doing the wrong/inappropriate thing uses up time that a child could be spending doing something enjoyable and productive, is likely to fall on deaf, or anti-productivity-conditioned ears. In this case, the child is likely to think, "But who cares? I'll just do it tomorrow." This is how school works: the continuous rolling over into tomorrow what could/should/would have been accomplished today, followed by repetition to bring back to mind what was forgotten because it was neglected in the first place.

Lol, I don't think I could if I tried. These were all requests, although admittedly, the unintentionally voodoo-like doll might be a bit scary... But I put jeans and a sweater on him to perk him up a little. My children are all enamoured of mythology. I had to disappoint them that I couldn't also make a hydra and a cerberus with the materials at my disposal. They have all sorts of cutesy stuffed toys that they turn into terrifying beasts, like a sweet beanie frog whose face they mash and tie up with elastics or string to make it into a cycloptic fire-venom-spewing monster. They spend hours rearranging the parts of their toys to make a whole nation of creepies while giggling and roaring intermittently together. Then I get the "show". They're like a group of cooperating Dr. Frankensteins. Pretty awesome.

I have some experience with this, having been raised by abusive addicts and the complete alternate reality-like world they live in. As an adult, it did take a lot of deliberate work to fix the remnant automatic negative thought patterns I had, but given my personality, I did so quickly and moved on. Even within that environment, though, I knew things weren't right and became a bane to my parents' self-delusion with my insistence on reality as it actually is. Perhaps that's attributable to my personality because lots of people in this situation just continue the behaviours of their parents throughout their lives. Interesting how both religion and addiction rely on similar faulty mechanisms to continue.

In what way is it possible for a government to act in a completely non-governmental, fully contractual role? Wouldn't that just be individuals doing business? At which point it is not government owning/operating any business/commercial enterprise, but individuals, right? Is it assumed that individuals who work within the government would be prohibited from personal pursuits toward profits and would therefore be forced (!!!) to pursue their interests through their governmental positions (which would be also unregulated)? I am asking sincerely because I cannot see how this hypothetical works. It seems like the 'can god create a rock he can't lift' question. Or, if daffodils weren't poisonous then we could eat them, but they are, so we don't, but if they weren't, we might or could because it would be okay in that scenario, but that couldn't happen because they actually are poisonous, ad nauseam. What am I missing? Again, I'm not being snarky.

That makes sense. So, it is likely that if a ten year old is reading that text, he's building on prior "knowledge" which accounts for the tone and rhetorical questions, in the text, that I find absurd. Sad.

Thanks for the positive responses. I have since made a kraken, (unintentionally voodoo-like) doll, a woolen leopard seal, and a sisal horse. I also received a request for custom orders (5!), but that will have to wait until later, when I can happily divide my time moreso than now, with home-educating my children and caring for my 3-month-old baby. It is a bit of a boost to know that my creations are potentially tradable, though.

To add, in a society where government does not interfere with the free activities of its people, there would no doubt continue to be private factions to whom men and women could enslave themselves to whatever end. Presently, we call them cults, and there are even now many from which to choose. If one thinks he is incapable of living a free life congruent with reason and benevolence and true personal/individual responsibility, and desires government by others, s/he would no doubt find it quite easy to join just such a group who could role-play this charade, in a free society. In other words, those who think that they need government in their affairs need never worry that there would be a shortage of supply where their demand evokes its presence. We would call that enterprise a 'niche'. And I would call its members 'hamsters', but that is likely beside the point.

My understanding on the subject is that the reason why government is restricted to only protective/retaliatory action is that personal responsibility via reason, and industry/trade are aspects of human nature that are contravened or worse, oppressed/destroyed by the individual being governed in his pursuits- in any way other than to stop him from coercing/forcing another individual and to protect him from the same against him, precisely so that he can continue living/acting freely. In order for a man to be responsible for his own actions, to freely act according to his inclination toward/need for self-preservation and enjoyment of his life, and to freely create/make and trade his skills and abilities leveraged through goods and services for himself and to others in exchange for theirs, he must be free to do so without his actions being directed or governed by any other man and certainly not an over-arching group of individuals making laws and legislation that limit his pursuits. To do so is antithetical to man's freedom, logically, reasonably, and obviously. If he enters into a contract that he later finds unsuitable, he is free to disengage from it according to the agreement, free to learn from his mistakes, to live out the consequences and to make his own reparations. Man does not require "protection" (a misappropriation of this concept when applied here) from the consequences of his choices (once he is beyond childhood, where protection is a valid concept as relates to consequences of ignorant/ill-informed/premature choices). This is why, as other posters have written, it is immoral for a man to vote to be governed in this way, even if he wants to be governed. Suggesting that he ought to be able to vote himself into such a situation is advocating hedonism, since in hedonism, the 'moral' or 'right' is determined by what feels good to him, and not what reason shows to be best for his life. A truly moral person strives to correct where his feelings do not line up with reason, and an immoral man does the opposite. Morally (as in aligned with man's nature), man requires freedom from coercion, and government by its nature is coercive, which is why it must be employed only to the services of the individual in the form of retaliatory protective action and the necessary caveats to its execution, such as judiciary systems for meting out (actual) crimes and punishments. This is why if 100% of a population voted for government over themselves (especially over something so essential as its individual needs for healthcare!), it would still be immoral, and the individuals voting would be acting according to hedonism, at best.