Chris.S

Update:

Finally finished school! 4 years of torture, but it paid off yesterday when I got a really good employment offer from a great company that I've been trying to get into since Oct. 2011. Feels fantastic! I'll be doing construction management for a construction services company. They work in mining, metals, energy and infrastructure, which is a big change from my ideas of 3 years ago, but I think that's the best area to be in for a long while. And I've taken a lot of inspiration from Alex Epstein and the CIP, so eventually I'll try and do some writing work in that area as well.

So pumped for this. I don't think I would be here either without having picked up Atlas Shrugged one fateful day in March 2008. Amazing what a rational philosophy can do for a person.

Also want to throw a shout out to all the really great folks who regularly post and moderate this forum who provided a nice venue for working out thoughts and ideas, and coming at issues from different angles. Y'all are great. Thank you.

Oh yeah and my lady went full on capitalist a long time ago!

Depends on that family's values, no? They just achieved the first step of a huge commitment that they may have been planning for awhile (or maybe not). Becoming pregnant is a product of the couple's love and shared sense of life - and if one isn't proud of what one produces or is, then I'd say there's a problem.

That sometimes pregnancy doesn't require much effort is the wrong way to think of being prideful of it or anything else. Depends on the people: for some people, math is hard and might take extra effort, and so solving a hard calculus problem or passing a test is something to take pride in. For myself, holding things in my right hand is hard and achieving certain fitness goals takes extra effort, so when I found something that helps me hold things in my hand, I'm now achieving those goals that others find very easy. Or take my enrolling in karate: I'm now a karateka and am proud of that because I've always wanted to practice that martial art. It wasn't hard to do, but I did it and put in a lot of effort.

So I think your facebook friend is being overly pessimistic about it, and thinking in terms of achievements diminishing in value because many other people can also achieve them. I can hit a 3 point NBA shot, but that doesn't diminish the value of an NBA player's ability to do it, or anyone else's. It's the implicit comparison to collective ability that's the fallacy there.

In that part, since clearly a woman can say, "No, I do not consent" I took him to mean she could not give "every evidence" that she wanted to have sex with a man, then say she does not consent and still be moral or honest. In other words, in that case she is not a victim of fraud where he tricked her into his bedroom, but rather a perpetrator of fraud, herself, who communicated one message to a man very clearly with the intention of pretending to be misunderstood in order that she can accuse him of rape later, as has been known to happen to celebrities on occasion.

Again, I think he chose a poor way to phrase it, but holding the question in mind and his whole(somewhat convoluted)answer, I think this interpretation makes more sense, since it is connected to the original question. Otherwise, throwing in a, "oh by the way, it's ok to rape some bitches" has very little connection to whether or not a man who pretends to love a woman to sleep with her has committed fraud which is on par with rape.

Incidentally, his answer was that a man who used fraud to get a woman to sleep with him was morally equivalent to a rapist so I have to think that someone who did commit rape would also be a rapist in his mind.

This entire thread is a farce. CheckingPremises.org is a farce. Equating people who misapply principles held in common with world-historical villians is a farce.

Without going into too much detail, my wife and I have had huge success with the "paleo" lifestyle. I've dropped 30lbs and am leaner and more defined than I ever was in my very active high school physique, and my wife is nearing 20lbs off with the goal of losing 40 more by August. We never get the afternoon lulls or that "I'm-so-hungry-I-feel-sick" feeling and feel overall way better than we did before starting it. We definitely have an improved sense of life and are better able to enjoy it.

I started it after Diana Hsieh had a lot of success with it, and I've been reading everything I can about the topic from various sites since then. I tend to think that if you want to be in "optimal" health, then you should eat the types of food we ate throughout our evolution. If you want to break it down to morality, that depends on context: some food is better than no food when one is starving. Cheap food is better than expensive food when one is on a tight budget. Then there are factors for taste, allergies, location, access and season. Now that I really understand how food affects my body, I choose not to eat all the foods I used to eat that contributed to my weight gain. However, if I know my next class is really boring and I'll fall asleep, I'll cram a couple donuts for a 3hr sugar rush. Or at the theatre I'll get M&M's and a pop, or a brownie for dessert, because I love the taste of all of those things and they're treats rather than staples. Also: hamburgers. Delicious.

We're also having a ton of fun cooking and experimenting with real foods. Once you get off the only-sugar-tastes-good train, there's a whole world of delicious foods that get ignored by everyone that you probably don't even know or think you'd enjoy.

Right. So they should be in Washington, protesting the source of the corruption: power over the economy and business through use of force.

Corporations certainly aren't blameless and some definitely contribute money and favours in order to get unfair advantages, but with the ability of Washington and other governments to decimate whole industries with a few pen strokes, is it any wonder they want to get in on the corruption to protect themselves?

Think about it: if the OWS folk get their way, governments would have even more power and corruption would be worse. The middle and lower class would be worse off in terms of freedom and wealth, meanwhile rich people will still afford to buy off local, state and federal lackeys for favours. Take away that power, and all business can do is try and convince you of the benefits of their products and services. Banks would be far more conservative and make fewer risky loans and investments. No business would be able to legislate against other market actors.

A child is not a tree on your property to prune as you please. Just because your parents chopped your branch and you like it doesn't give you the right to chop your sons branch for any reason other than a real danger to his health.

I was raised Catholic and my wife Islamic, but both of us are saner now than to try and harm any future children for the sake of aesthetics, or tradition, or cleanliness, and I think doing so nowadays means the parents have thrown all thought in the garbage along with the foreskin.

iflyboats, are you related to Peter Schiff? You look like you and he could be identical twins.

JayR assuming the incident with the 14 year old boy did in fact occur I would not be surprised in the least. That is not an excuse or any sort of equivocation it is just a fact of war. Saying "war is hell" is really easy but understanding what that means is another thing all together.

Ever talk to a Vet, I mean get right down into their most vivid and disturbing memories? About how they would get hungry on the battlefield because of the smell of burning human flesh, or about how some of them went through firefights with huge hard on’s in spite of (because of actually) their fear? Ever talk about how when a human body has been very close to the site of a large explosion when the bones have been pulverized by the shock wave that picking up your friend is like picking up a flesh coloured bag of jello with bits and chunks of other stuff inside of it?

The brutal fact is that war is barbarity in its purest form.

One commander I know, the first kill that his troops made in Afghanistan was dragged kilometres back to their strongpoint so that everyone in the company could see a real live dead body. Call it cruel, call it abusing the dead but he swore he's do it again because from that act he was able to gauge how his men would react when the time came for them to be on the trigger. He also discovered which of them he could task with picking up the body parts of children after an IED attack and which, if he tasked them, would probably not be of use to anyone for some time later.

I’m the one who isn’t making any excuses. You want these men, when confronted with what is to most civilized human beings the most terrifying and disturbing events and actions to behave like you do sitting in front of your playstation playing Call Of Duty. Well that just isn’t going to happen.

We are not about to start nailing babies to telephone poles like the Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia were fond of doing. We western soldiers are for the most part the most professional soldiers in history. We do our best, but there are times when manipulating some dead scumbags jawbone to make him say “Allah sucks big hairy donkey dicks” is the best thing for you, your sanity and the sanity of the troops around you, Geneva convention, regulations and everyday run of the mill civility be damned.