"People are not evil if they don't understand the non-aggression principle... People are in a state of nature, they're in a state of neutrality, they're in a state of propagandized infancy. They do not have moral responsibility until they've come across better information... This is why people are so hostile, sometimes, to philosophical arguments: because it creates an ethical choice in them that they did not have before."

#1. What is truth? #2. What is virtue? #3. What is government? #4. What is law? #5. What is money?

"If you get rid of the government, then the costs of violence are imposed directly upon the person who wants to use the violence." - "Intellectualism is a defence against inflicted falsehoods as a child." - "People get that morality has been used to control them as children, and as soon as they try to treat morality as morality and make it universal to their society as a whole, they're attacked as immoral, as uncaring, as brutish and wrong... It's crazy. People's brains are fried... they have been crippled, mentally." -- How many fingers, Winston?

'Babies as young as eight months old prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated, a new study led by a University of British Columbia psychologist finds. “We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than previously thought,” says lead author Prof. Kiley Hamlin, UBC Dept of Psychology, who co-authored the study with colleagues from Yale University and Temple University. “This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades,” says Hamlin. “Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger and prefer to see antisocial behavior regulated.'

"Within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality: We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel, and we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. We don't need God or Government telling us what to do. It's all inside of us."

'#Erudite vs. lulz: Being erudite on the internet and actually arguing is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded. Wait, why's that? Well, the Interwebs basically allow us to constantly invoke the Pyrrhonian argument of dispute. This is because a shitload of knowledge is just a few mouseclicks away nowadays. Especially if we take the following rules: #11. All your carefully picked arguments can easily be ignored; #12. Anything you say can and will be used against you; #13. Anything you say can be turned into something else... Like Nietzsche, Anonymous realizes (or used to realize, when it still had a green face) that when you pinpoint the place in an argument that makes us laugh uncontrollably you've pinpointed a place in the argument that is very, very flawed. You've shown that the argument is ridiculous (“laughable”). The best part about all of this is that humour is a lot more universally accessible than ... a reasonable argument is.'

'Are they trolls, griefers, hackers, vigilantes, activists - or all of the above? A closer look at Anonymous with journalist Julian Dibbell.' -- Anon: "We are not your personal army." == Universal morality

'Anonymous works via message boards in which nobody posts under a name. That means that in general whether something happens or not is dependent on whether the basic call being issued is appealing or not. In general if anonymous is after you it is because you are just annoying enough to make going after you a priority for the world hacking community. This is why it is impossible to stop or discredit. Quoting a spokesman for anonymous has exactly as much value as asking a random person on the street. Anonymous is anonymous – that means that no one directs it and nobody speaks for it. What ideals it has are those held by the mass of humanity – these truths that we all hold to be self evident. This is also why one can’t really call anonymous “hated.” Without names there is no identity – so tactics aimed at identities fall flat. Anonymous is immune to ad-hominem attacks. The only real alternative is to try and modify your behaviour or come up with a good argument against anonymous action.'

"Women are raised as slaves. They have to oppose everyone's emotions: you can't feel too much of this, you can't feel too much of that. The constant desire of the slave is to oppose any strong emotions, to monitor the master's moods and to head off trouble before it comes, to manipulate and to reframe slavery as morality. And this slave morality is so common in women. The only morality is don't confront because a slave can't confront anyone. Slaves have to make forgiveness a virtue. Why? Because all a slave can do is forgive. A slave has to swallow all insults and if a slave is struck, they must slink away, beaten. And so what is a slave going to do? The slave is either going to fight or redefine all of the subjugation and insults and battering and humiliation and contempt they experience into virtue. If women are slaves, we're ALL slaves. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. If women make slavery and the effects of slavery a virtue, then we shall never be free."

"I refuse to create a set of standards for women that is less than would apply to men. Because that would be to say that men have the strength to achieve virtue but women do not. And women do. But the degree to which we excuse women's vices and violence and corruption and control and abuse and verbal attacks – the degree to which we excuse that is the degree to which we damn women; it is the degree to which we say: you are beyond help; you cannot be helped; you poor women, you don't know what you're doing, you're not strong enough to be moral so we have to make up all these excuses for you because we think you're just that pathetic. Well, I don't think women are pathetic. I think women are incredibly strong; I think men are incredibly strong. I think that when you lower standards for people, you debilitate them, you weaken them, you destroy their moral fibre, you undermine their upright natures. So I won't accept any lower standards for women because that is the worst cruelty of all."

"I think it is something so respectful of women to say that they are subject to the same moral laws as men. If we excuse women from the just and universal application of moral laws, are we not then saying that they are a different and weaker species, a different and weaker gender? If we excuse female violence by portraying them in the role of victims – then we insult ALL women; we insult all women who ARE moral. So we really do have to avoid this notion that women are the gentler sex, and the weaker sex, and they need to be protected, and they need to be saved from themselves, and they need to be excused, and they need to be managed. Women DO NOT need to be managed. Women are subject to all the same moral laws as men, and they are EQUALLY as powerful a moral agent as men. Whatever men are capable of morally, whatever men are responsible for morally – women are capable of morally and responsible for morally."

'...I would still have the human decency NOT to try and publicly mitigate that guilt by conversion to shame because I know that if I succeed then it becomes okay for someone else. How I deal with guilt has an effect on how someone else will. -- What infuriates you is the idea that anyone or anything has control over us. You don't like to be told they aren't allowed to do something. "As long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I should be allowed..." You want complete freedom – which you will use to conform to very ordinary standards of living that you impose on yourself. ...the very thing that allows you to exist in a world of complete freedom are those internal controls and not the social controls – laws and shames – that you think bind you. Shame will never be enough – when your identity is "strong" enough nothing shames you... The laws will never be stronger than you. -- I am not trying to stop progress or technology, I'm telling you to be careful with your lives.'

'One of the most powerful debating techniques is to assume that your opponent’s premises are true, and then prove that they lead to absurd consequences. Thus, the argument which states that certain people may use violence on behalf of others – through taxation and welfare – can be easily countered by saying that, if it is the right thing to do, then everyone should be encouraged to do it. -- One fundamental truth of human nature is that if people think that something is moral, they will bear almost any burden to support it. Women send their sons to war. Wives kiss their husbands goodbye. Children are proud of their father’s murders. As it is with war, so it is with state power. If people believe that the state helps the poor, or heals the sick, or educates the ignorant, they will bear any burden to support it. They may grumble at their levels of taxation, but will soldier on regardless. So if the argument from economic efficiency does not work, what can?' -- The Argument From Morality

"Uncorking the volcano."

'The primary social evil of our time is lack of respect for self-ownership rights. Self-ownership is rendered meaningless if the right to own private property is not also respected. The unique relationship between a person and "his" body — his direct and immediate control over the body, and the fact that, at least in some sense, a body is a given person and vice versa ... is what constitutes the objective link sufficient to give that person better title to his body than any third party claimant, even his parents... Any outsider who claims another's body cannot deny this objective link and its special status, since the outsider also necessarily presupposes this in his own case. This is so because in seeking dominion over the other, in asserting ownership over the other's body, he has to presuppose his own ownership of his body, which demonstrates he does place a certain significance on this link, at the same time that he disregards the significance of the other's link to his own body.'

'Yeah, it might not actually be the fault of the kids...' -- How many fingers, Winston?

'"Argumentation ethics" is a defense of libertarian rights. Hoppe asserts that argumentation, or discourse, is by its nature a conflict-free way of interacting and requires individual control of resources [the body]; thus, he argues, certain norms are presupposed as true by anyone engaging in genuine discourse. These norms include the libertarian principle of non-aggression, which itself implies libertarian rights. Therefore, no one can argumentatively deny libertarian rights without self-contradiction. Kinsella's "estoppel" theory draws on Hoppe. Kinsella argues that an aggressor cannot coherently object to being punished for the act of aggression, by the victim or the victim's agents or heirs, i.e. he is "estopped" from withholding consent, because by committing aggression he commits himself to the proposition that the use of force is legitimate, and therefore, his withholding consent based on his right not to be physically harmed contradicts his aggressive legitimation of force.'

“Everyone wants to leap over the personal. Philosophy starts with self-knowledge.”

'...the two researchers – Professor Dan Ariely of Duke and Michael I. Norton of the Harvard Business School – did not ask the pertinent question, namely, "Would you prefer a fairer, more egalitarian, society if it meant that your liberty to use your life, time, labor and resources would be severely curtailed by the government as it undertakes making people equal?" But this question wasn't asked and accordingly the conclusion the researchers reached is completely useless.' -- Other people are not your property. Agree [ ] / Disagree [ ]

'An introduction to the power and practicality of philosophy - from the host of Freedomain Radio, the most popular philosophy show on the Internet.'

'The first thing to recognize about self-defense is that although it describes the use of violence, it remains fundamentally different from the initiation of force, in that it is reactive, rather than proactive violence. Since self-defense is a universal standard, it is not restricted to a single individual – i.e. the individual being attacked – but extends to everyone, thus permitting third-party defense such as security guards and courageous bystanders. (It also validates the highly useful proposition that it is preferable for a skilled third party to take out my appendix rather than forcing me to do it myself.) Since self-defense is a reactive action, it can be universalized, since it is merely the shadow of the action of the initiation of force – where the initiation of force is not present, neither will self-defense be present. Any reasonable moralist would far prefer the non-initiation of force to self-defense, just as any sane person prefers not getting sick to getting cured.'

"The shape of political authority in society mirrors that of the family. When you have better families you end up with better governments. When you have non-authoritarian, pacificist parenting with respect for the self-ownership of children, you will inevitably end up with a free society. If you want to change society, you have to change people's early childhood experiences. Objective morality, property rights and self-ownership all fall counter to just about everybody's experience of their family and certainly against their experience of church and school. So we're fighting a real uphill battle, it's one that we'll win, but it's going to take a long time."

"It is functionally impossible for a human being to argue for a system that defines his current activities as evil. This is the astounding power of morality in the world. People resist the definitions of virtue so much because once the definitions of virtue change, behaviour must inevitably change. Definitions are like gravity wells for people's behaviour. People struggle only to accept or reject definitions, once those definitions are accepted or rejected, behaviour flows inexorably from those definitions. The definitions are the first dominoes that go down in the endless causal chain of human action. The definitions of virtue are what control the entire world. This is one of the reasons why governments are so eager to press money and unjust privilege into your hand. Because they know that once you accept the money, you will begin the ex post facto rationalizations to justify why accepting the money is a good thing."

Gisted 2/2 -- It is the truth-telling slave who extends the universalization of ethics to the masters – and thus exposing them as morally evil – who is the greatest threat to every other slave because of their past horror and humiliation of having been enslaved to evil through their desire to be good, of having that which is the best of you turned into service of that which is the worst in humanity: lust for power, domination, theft, murder, war, debt. They react with the hair-trigger psychological defenses called slave-extending-morality-to-masters-will-get-us-all-killed! People can't easily process the universalization of morality, so all they can do is get mad at it. They have to create exceptions to universal morality because that's what we've all been programmed to do throughout the violence of history. So how do we change this? We have to reveal the negative consequences for immoral actions. We have to replace statism with voluntaryism. WE have to replace violence with ostracism.

Gisted 1/2 -- It is the rulers of mankind who most understand the moral nature of mankind. The ruling class is ALL of those who gain the majority of their income through violence. The ruling class is not about rich vs poor. A rich entrepreneur is in the slave class. A low-paid government worker is in the ruling class. The ruling class is about which side of the gun are you on. It's about violence vs voluntaryism. -- Morality is the most effective slave owning device that there is. You simply can't own people more effectively than inculcating morality within them. It is the slave's desire for virtue that enslaves them and makes them a slave to evil – and this is fundamentally humiliating. The masters will teach you that their 'morality' is universal and their 'ethics' are absolute, and then with zero comment or admission of any exception, they will act in the opposite manner. And if you bring this hypocrisy up, YOU will be attacked by your fellow slaves.

"So the elders say, “Only good little boys can see the apple!” That’s why they layer in this moral dimension. ...by getting the person to believe that if they can’t see the invisible apple they’re bad, well then you torture them and you set them up with this lifelong quest to see an invisible apple which they just frickin’ well can’t do! You’ve put them into this mode of a dog chasing its own tail for the rest of its life and that person is then going to pose absolutely zero threat to the power structures that exist in the world, because he’s going to be so consumed with his own inability to see this invisible apple that he’s not going to raise any sort of basic or sensible questions to those in power. ...you’re fundamentally, absolutely, and completely helpless, because how are you going to question the morality of those in power with reference to logic and facts and our common humanity, when at the very beginning of things, you swallowed this invisible apple and called it tasty?"

'...how the myth of redemptive violence structures the standard comic or cartoon: An indestructible good guy is unalterably opposed to an irreformable and equally indestructible bad guy. Nothing can kill the good guy... Nothing finally destroys the bad guy or prevents his reappearance... Children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project out onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness or lust, and then vicariously enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, allowing ample time for indulging the shadow side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestablish a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero ...[with whom] one's personal well-being is tied inextricably...'

'How false concepts obscure real violence.' -- "Like all [2+2=5], she wants to divide violence into 'good violence' and 'bad violence'."

'Rothbard described the axiom as such: "No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory."'

'Some important clarifications about Universally Preferable Behavior, my core theory of ethics.'

"Reason = Virtue = Happiness" -- 'An animated introduction to Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, from Freedomain Radio.' -- The entire book is available for free at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/free#UPB

"The problem is that people believe the wrong things. We claim to be moralists but our enemies understand the principle of universality and ethical theories so much better than we do... The enemies of freedom and rationality know that human beings are run by ethics – that's why they take them when they're children and put them in state schools and churches. They take those children and they mold them into slaves based on 'ethical' commandments that they cannot escape. And we who believe in ethics, don't believe that humans are ethical?? Isn't that astounding! We believe in ethics and we doubt the desires of people to be ethical?? Statists and collectivists claim *not* to believe in ethics but control the entire planet by accepting that human beings want to be good – and corrupting that desire to be good which is innate to our natures."

Gisted -- Ethics is the theory; virtue is the practice. The challenge of philosophy is that the vast majority of ethical decisions we need to make are not universally preferable but are aesthetically preferable – and these are the tough gray area virtues like honesty, integrity, courage and so on. The reason these virtues are tough is because they are conditional and not absolute. UPB trumps APA every time. And so if a murderer is asking you for the location of a loved one, you cannot honestly tell them because that would be to value honesty (APA) more than a human life (UPB). An ethical life requires a very strong degree of self-knowledge and a very good relationship with your unconscious because the unconscious can process vast amounts of information in real-time. You need to have trust within your self and a comfort with instantaneous instinct and feelings of ambivalence because if you try to think through with your conscious every possible result of APA actions, you will fail.

"When we're comfortable with something – morally – we call it by its proper name." -- "You cannot frighten people out of their fantasies because they're only in those fantasies because they're frightened already – they are frightened of the society they live in so they create all these words to pretend that its not what it is."

'...no one is made a morally better individual by way of being beaten or threatened to be beaten to do what is morally right. How could they, since moral goodness, if it amounts to anything intelligible at all, must involve the agent's free choice. ...nearly everything in human life can be made to appear utterly complicated so that people can be intimidated into thinking they have no way to tell right from wrong about it. To be civilized is to deploy not coercive force in how one acts toward others but rational persuasion, often indeed patient and prolonged rational persuasion. Some will say, "Well all this preference of coercion is simply the natural hunger for power in human nature," but that surely can't be right since millions have no such hunger at all, quite the contrary. What millions and millions have yearned for and are yearning for is peaceful, civilized interaction with others but with a fraction – albeit influential faction – choosing the shortcut of coercive force.'

'It's deep, hidden, and essential to see.' -- "Those who do not learn their personal history are doomed to repeat it."

'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The reason that scientists do not need a government is that scientists have an objective methodology for resolving disputes: the scientific method. The reason that language does not need a central authority to guide its evolution is that it relies on the “free market” of accumulated individual preferences for style and utility. The reason that modern morality – and morality throughout history – has always had to rely first on the bullying of children, and then on the threatening of adults, is that it is a manipulative lie masquerading as a virtuous truth. The truth is that we need morality; the lie is that gods or governments can rationally define or justly enforce it. My goal in this book is to define a methodology for validating moral theories that is objective, consistent, clear, rational, empirical – and true. -- ...the primary danger to human beings is not the individual criminal, but irrational and exploitive moral theories.'

'APPENDIX D: EVERY UPB DEBATE I’VE EVER HAD… UPB Sceptic: UPB is invalid. Me: How do you know? UPB Sceptic: It's not proven! Me: So “proof” is UPB? UPB Sceptic: No, nothing is UPB. Me: Isn't the statement "nothing is UPB" UPB? UPB Sceptic: No, that's not what I'm saying at all! I'm saying that UPB is invalid! Me: Why? UPB Sceptic: Because it's false! Me: So presenting true arguments is UPB? UPB Sceptic: No! Me: So there's nothing wrong with false arguments? UPB Sceptic: No. Me: Then why are you opposing a false argument? UPB Sceptic: Oh, it's just my personal preference. I just dislike falsehood. Me: So you're arguing for a merely personal preference? UPB Sceptic: Sure! Me: So why should your personal preference take precedence over mine? I like UPB, you don't – and why bother debating personal preferences at all? UPB Sceptic: Oh - because UPB is invalid! Me: Why is it invalid? UPB Sceptic: Because it's self-contradictory! Me: So consistency is UPB? UPB Sceptic: No!'

Gisted -- Because we have not harmed those who are helpless and dependent and subject to our power. And because we have not discharged our negative feelings—in the moment—onto others. The deferral of gratification is fundamental to the development of ethics and foundational to self-esteem because restraining yourself from hurting others means you've placed value on your future self. We have an innate sense of injustice and virtue: we are being abused but we do not discharge that abuse onto others because we sense happiness means not abusing which means that unhappiness is abuse and that if we want to be happy we have to do the opposite of that which is making both us and our abusers unhappy—in the present. Empathy is philosophy; empathy is empirical: I have feelings and I don't like being hurt, others have feelings and they won't like it if I hurt them. If you have harmed others you have done so because you have rejected the fundamental evidence that other people are just like you.

On hidden metaphors: "The true self, the self of honesty, integrity, purity, honor and dignity – is like the soul in the Christian mythology, you cannot kill it off – it's always buried down there under the rubble of accumulated moral corruption and evil – and it still reaches out to try to help other people, to warn other people – and this stuff is all very obvious once you look for the signs about what people are actually trying to tell you..." -- On moral relativists: Moral relativism is simply a defense mechanism to obscure the moral nature of the true self. Moral absolutism is innate to our nature. Moral relativists feel bullied by their own sense of absolute morality that they have consistently violated, and so to manage their intense feelings of corruption, they project their innate moral absolutism into you – you become their bully – and they try to undermine your certainty and optimism about morality. Don't talk to these people; you have to shield yourself from their cynicism.

'...the research team equivocated between morality and altruism. There are numerous moral systems, ethical positions, that have been advanced throughout human history and it is simply misleading to assume that being moral must necessarily mean being altruistic. Indeed, there is something quite misanthropic about such an assumption--why would it be commendable for people to work to benefit others while neglecting themselves? Who will then take care of them? They are more likely to understand what they need and want and so attending to these matters would probably be more efficient than imposing one's idea of what others need and want on these others. But let that go for now. What Bloom and Wynn present us in their findings calls to mind, once again, the quip that is associated with the poet W. H. Auden, namely, "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know."'

"The family is a mythology: these people had sex, they gave birth to you, they housed you when you were growing up – and that's it. There's nothing that you owe them. If you don't find pleasure in them, there's nothing that you have to give them – at all, whatsoever, ever." If enough people ditch bad families then 'the family' will become better. "If it begins to be understood by society as a whole and by parents in particular, that if you don't treat your children well, then they're not going to stick around – imagine what a blow that would be to corruption and malevolence in the world. If adult children continue to support their parents even if they don't like them, then the corruption that's at the root of society will spread. All relationships should be voluntary for mutual advantage. The only way to overthrow the State is to overthrow the tyrannies we have within our own lives because that sends the message to all the bad people that they do not get to interact with moral people."

'Answers to the objection "but they did the best they could!"' -- "You can't just wish away your entire vulnerability and emotional life as child and think that you're going to have this wonderful, emotionally-rich, loving, passionate, exciting adult life – you're not. If you strikeout the first 20 years of your experience for the sake of some mantra that lets you avoid emotional and social discomfort – you're simply erasing your self. This is why the freedom movement isn't getting anywhere – because we're not looking at ourselves; we're not looking at the family. We say we're all about truth and honesty and we're very hostile to the State and abuses of authority but we won't look at what we've directly experienced in our own lives as children. You really want to deal with that pain before you start mucking around with big abstract topics like the State. You have to make sure you're not projecting your emotions and avoiding dealing with your family by getting angry at the government."

Gisted -- You can't be free in a political sense until you've dealt with your family. There's no greater power disparity in the world than that between a parent and a child. Children are complete slaves of their parents – even if the parents are 'nice'. If you want to understand why people can't understand the corruption of the State it's because they can't see the corruption of the family. The State is an affect of the family. The State merely cashes in on the corruption of parenting. Everybody has this enormous blindness to the evil done to children. If we don't retrospectively empathize with ourselves as children, we're not going to be able empathize with others and we're not going to have open and loving natures. -- (Part 2): When your parents refuse to respond to your questions about morality you quickly understand that 'morality' was inflicted upon you just to get conformity. Parents want you to continue to hang-out because it's implicit forgiveness for what occurred in the past.

'The opposite of tyranny is curiosity. The opposite of ignorance is curiosity. The opposite of manipulation is curiosity. The opposite of immaturity is curiosity, because to be curious is to be wise. The reason that we are not curious is that we already know the answers, and we do not like them. We can choose not to eat, but we cannot erase our body’s need for food. We can choose to jump off a cliff, but we cannot choose to defy gravity. We can pretend that lies are true, and that vices are virtues, but we cannot turn lies into truth, or vices into virtues. We cannot erase the truth within ourselves; we can only suppress and distort it. Fundamentally, philosophy is not invention, but excavation; not exploration, but archaeology. The lies we believe today are the lives we will live tomorrow.'

'Voluntaryism, or voluntarism is a philosophy that opposes aggressive force or coercion. Most voluntaryists regard much of what government does as aggressively coercive, and call for its abolishment, but, unlike a number of anarchist philosophies, voluntaryists support strong property rights which they regard as a natural law (self-ownership) that is compatible with non-coercion. The goal of voluntaryism is the supplantation of the state by a voluntary order, in which political authority is reverted to the individual, and association among people occurs only by mutual consent. Voluntaryists believe voluntaryism itself should be the means to achieve this goal, rather than forceful action. Voluntaryism does not argue for the specific form that voluntary arrangements will take, only that force be abandoned so that individuals in society may flourish.'

'Since free men and women may not be forced to stop doing the wrong thing unless it involves violating other people's rights, there are limits to what may be done to them. Sadly this point is often overlooked by even the most earnest reformers who want to make others good. It cannot be done and may not be tried with violence, coercively. Human goodness must come from the heart, as it were, voluntarily. Otherwise it isn't really goodness. -- ...you can restrict those with who you will do business, provided these are fully disclosed... Many institutions operate this way already. ...if you did make an announcement, such as "No blacks or women or 7 feet tall people served here," you would alienate a great many potential customers and so it is not likely that anyone with a modicum of rationality will try to do business that way. Still, one could. And that is what freedom means, among other things, that you can be an ass so long as you do it peacefully.'

Gisted -- 'Morality' is a form of a magick because without morality there's no self-attack, and if you can't get your slaves to self-attack for disobedience then the costs of human ownership and control are really high. The immoral, the amoral, and the evil all understand that if you can train people in 'virtue' when they're young, then you own them for life because people so desperately want to be good. It's all the 'moralists', the 'virtuous', and so-called 'good' people who say that morality doesn't work and who try to come up with every single possible exception to a virtuous rule in order to paralyze real virtue. But the evil people know morality *does* work because they've successfully indoctrinated children using the argument from morality (that obedience to the State is virtuous, that the State protects, that the State helps the poor, etc) and ensured that people can never escape from the noose of 'morality' or the invisible fence of slave-on-slave attack.

"Do you support the use of violence against me? -- This is the true nature of heroism. This is the heroism that you can achieve now, today, this very moment. All moral souls oppose evil. And there is only one fundamental way to fight evil: expose it. -- Do you support the use of violence against me?"

'Do you believe that it is moral and just for one person to be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another? And, if that person does not peaceably submit to being so used, do you believe that there should be the initiation of some kind of force against him? Neither question is complex and can be answered by either a yes or no. For me the answer is no to both questions but I bet that your average college professor, politician or minister would not give a simple yes or no response. They would be evasive and probably say that it all depends. -- Unfortunately, there is no way out of our immoral quagmire. The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral. People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. [O]nce legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient.' -- What profit a man...?

Comment: Bruce: "Statutes, ordinances, and regulations are not law. They are treated as law by public administrators, but administrators are not allowed to impose them on the people but by consent of the party to whom they are applied. That's why they question you, to get your approval. However, even if the governed does not consent, administrators use the administrative process (color of due process) to pass judgment upon the person (fiction of law) in a straw man proceeding. They convict the fiction (straw man), notice you of the conviction, and then see how you will react, again to get your tacit approval of their judgment, and to get you to join yourself to the debt obligation of the fiction. -- Attorney code of ethics require attorneys to: in all things not create the appearance of impropriety. Negate the double negatives and you have the directive: In all things an attorney shall create the appearance of propriety. The word propriety means property. Slick, aren't they!"

'In his book For a New Liberty, Rothbard says "if you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts, simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place" (p. 57). The reason Rothbard sees the state as a criminal band is simple: "[t]he right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to 'own' his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference" (For a New Liberty pp. 33–4). Thus, for Rothbard, no one may claim the right to aggress against the property, especially the body, of another person. It is that simple. -- The Rothbardian perspective is distinctive because he refuses to interpret the actions of states as belonging to a special class of human action. Rothbard holds all people to the same standard of conduct, whereas others give the actions of states special moral considerations.'

'Tax resistance may be morally defended on grounds nearly identical to resisting any kind of aggression against oneself. If one is accosted on some city street and threatened, one has the right to defend oneself. The right of self-defense is derivable from the basic right one has to one's life, one that rests on one's nature as a human being as a moral agent. If one carries on in one's life peacefully and is nonetheless attacked, one is justified – has the right to – resist. This also holds if the attack is aimed at confiscating one's resources, even if one misuse these – wastefulness may not be criminalized in a free society unless it involves dumping, imposing it on others, as in pollution. Taxation, which is extortion, has no place, any more than serfdom, in a just legal order so whether it's ethically justified to dodge or avoid it should not pose an insurmountably difficult moral problem.'

But surely not! Surely no "law-abiding" member of the public would accept they are entitled to steal the property of others! Would they? -- 'Well, let's see: Suppose a person makes the judicious insight that some people don't have as much money as other people, and it would be nice if they had more money than they do. To remedy this problem they propose that a group of kind-hearted benefactors create an agency whose job is to forcibly take other people's money without their permission (i.e., steal it), and give some of it to those they deem to be "in need." The group would use the rest of the funds to stir up the recipients' sense of entitlement to this stolen money, fund propaganda that tells the world what a great job their agency is doing, and gradually build a nice, profitable little business empire for the staff in charge, who make out like bandits — earning far beyond what they could in other jobs, all the while being lauded for their "public service."'

'Have you never questioned why you are electing ‘ministers’? -- I discovered that the most intelligent men and women in the world are actually the most stupid, gullible and easily led – so is this in itself the true measure of intelligence? I also discovered that when we leave one be/lie/f system behind we crave for another to replace it, because we cannot truly live our lives without something to be/lie/ve in and that is where the receptacles such as alternate religions, politics or movements step in to fill the void, when in fact there is no void just one that we create because we cannot rely on the moral truth that resides within us all, for to do so we would have to turn our backs upon this world and all it has to offer. We enter the unknown which is the biggest and most powerful fear within us all; the fear of the unknown the place of no con/trol, a place the mind knows nothing of, far removed from the corporate worlds of religious and political make be/lie/ve.'

Against me. Do you support the use of violence against me?

'"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages." — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments pt i, ch iii (1759).' -- Mozart's 'Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor' inside.

Comment: JoeTFriday: 'The slave master's dream: Convince the slaves that it is the intangibles like the master's smile and the preacher's promise that constitute the real values in life. Now the state will take over where the slave master left off after being so rudely interrupted by Enlightenment thought. Get used to postmodern subjectivism as the ruling paradigm. There's a world of intangible wealth out there for your enjoyment. The state will use the TANGIBLE goods in your best interest, thank you very much.' -- Reply comment: vidyo555: 'RIGHT ON'

'The marketeer will often resist interference with the current distribution of property rights in a given society, whatever its origin; but the libertarian will be much more likely to favor potentially radical measures designed to rectify past injustices. In addition, the libertarian has no particular reason to endorse the marketeer’s moralizing about market conditions; and the libertarian who [holds] the libertarian ideal ... will surely want to emphasize that some economic conditions [authority/hierarchy/tradition/culture/conformity/etc] that do not involve the misuse of force are nonetheless objectionable because they minimize freedom and reduce people’s effective capacities for responsible action. The libertarian will sometimes find the marketeer a useful ally; but the libertarian should not, I think, want to be a marketeer except when being a marketeer does not involve accepting naïve beliefs about the origin or dynamics of actually existing markets.'

'Becoming alien makes you human - empathy, morality and aliens and falling to the guns of the ruling classes.'

'From crippled soldier to ten foot tall painted hippy - one of the greatest transformations in artistic history!'

'It is my strong belief, based on considerable experience with children, that we are born strong, secure, confident and empathetic. It takes a fierce effort to destroy the natural strength of children. [P]arents teach their children [...] nonsense. -- The moment you lie to someone, you become both their slave and their master. You are their slave, because you are terrified of being discovered—and you are their master, because you must control their perceptions. You must destroy their curiosity. You must respond to any approach to your falsehoods with irritation, condemnation and withdrawal. The energizing question ‘why’ becomes your implacable enemy. You must undermine their capacity to reason, to think for themselves. You must overcomplicate the world. And most of all—most of all—you must become the sworn enemy of all principles, even the most innocuous. The only ‘rules’ you can allow are base commandments, such as ‘respect your elders’, ‘love your country’ and so on.'

'The argument from morality is the most powerful tool in any freedom-lovers arsenal—but also the most personally costly, since it draws lines in relationships that can never be erased. The argument from morality can cost you friends, family, community—and so approach it with courage, and understand that, once you decide to use it, your life will never again be the same. Redefining "the good" is very, very hard. Throughout their lives, people make thousands of decisions based on certain moral principles—and it if turns out that those principles were wrong, then they will be forced to admit that their whole lives have been spent in the service of falsehood, or corruption, or evil—and that is more than most people can stomach. In order to preserve their illusions of goodness, they will fight any close examination of moral principles almost to the death!'

'The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The clueless are not capable of much compassion, unless they can very strongly identify with the person. ...the clueless and losers often externalize their moral sense, into some sort of collectively (and ritually) adopted code, thereby abdicating responsibility for the moral dimension of their actions entirely. You don’t have to think about the morality of what you do if you can just appeal to some code (religious texts are the main kind...). The morality that they defer to is always a codified communal version of the views of some charismatic sociopath, but it is the abdication of responsibility, as a group, by the clueless and losers, that amplifies the impact of both the Hitlers and Gandhis of the world.'

'The Sociopath's private morality is not, in their view, a matter for external democratic judgment. Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.'

'Orwell's essays remind us that better than our best intentions is our inescapable nature, our shared ordinariness, which will always have the potential to redeem us all if only we will embrace it. -- One of Orwell’s most appealing tendencies as a critic is that he never presumes to improve our tastes. He dispenses with aesthetic appreciation in favor of sociological questions, and he rarely seeks to justify his own preferences. He is pleased to come across as the common man’s representative, delivering common sense to a snob intelligentsia whose contrarian posturing has left it twisted it up with “humbug.” Appreciating avant-garde art, championing utopian crusades, sneering at plebian entertainments: these are available only to a pampered leisure class. Orwell instead romanticizes an emotional Spartanism that’s open to everyone.'

'People are not aware that there exist a category of people, people we sometimes call 'almost human', who look like us, who work with us, who are found in every race, every culture, speaking every language, but who are lacking conscience... -- What separates us from the psychopath is our conscience, and our conscience must become the voice of truth. We need to learn how to say no to the manipulations. That means we need to learn the ways we are manipulated and refuse to do the dance. ...the psychopathic manipulations are designed to make psychopaths of us all. ...true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths. ...identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play.'

'"Sandbox" sometimes challenges traditional narrative, but it always puts something new in its place. ...[it] transforms predetermined narrative into dynamic, responsive narrative. ...the sandbox game distinguished itself by making the responses more significant and meaningful. -- ...a common challenge in sandbox design: player commitment to open story. ...that game design is so fun in itself that, if properly packaged, it can well be reinterpreted as gameplay itself. -- Sandbox play is essentially amoral/non-moral, in the sense that real action is often governed by the hypothetical: "What happens if I run this guy over?" ...until GTAIV, the PC personality was something of a narrative problem; the hero was a bi-polar thug for whom nothing was truly out of character. Such a character is not terribly interesting... With GTAIV, however the scarred warrior turned ironical and embittered anarchist justifies much better the peculiar range of action of a GTA hero.'

'John Locke (1632–1704), was another prominent Western philosopher who conceptualized rights as natural and inalienable. He said that man's natural rights are life, liberty, and property. According to Locke there are three natural rights: #Life – everyone is entitled to live once they are created. #Liberty – everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first right. #Estate – everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't conflict with the first two rights.' – The social contract is a contract between a being or beings of power and their people or followers. The King makes the laws to protect the 3 natural rights. The people agree on the laws, but they have to follow them. The people can be prosecuted and/or killed if they break these laws. If the King does not follow these rules, he can be overthrown.'

'We live in an age of moral nihilism. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse. Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, has really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.” The manipulative character has superb organizational skills and the inability to have authentic human experiences. He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism. “It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned Adorno, “because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.”' -- Anti-Empathy, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Sound like anyone you know?

"Why we think it's OK to cheat and steal (sometimes). Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp." -- People will cheat moreso for tokens/money-subsitutes than for money itself. And, birds of a feather cheat together.

"Without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough." -- "incentives often backfire" -- (Shame about the Obamarisms. Apologies but it has to be pointed out in light of the current 'perverse incentive' stimulus plans.)

'Whether programmed to have sex, or designed to refuse it, the problem these fictional bots face is a lack of control over their own desires. You can't really be said to consent to sex if you're never given the option to choose between "yes" and "no." So if a robot has been programmed to respond to human sexual arousal with more sexual arousal of its own, is he actually consenting? Or is he just going through the motions of pleasure and desire, wishing that he could control his own responses enough to choose whom he had sex with, and when? Questions like these, raised in science fiction or speculative science writing like Levy's, are inevitably really questions about ourselves. Unless you aren't bothered by having sex with a slave or a brainwashed victim, having relationships with robots will probably be just as complicated as having them with humans.'

"Psychologists know that torture causes, among other horrid things, lasting mental-health problems. But 24's frantically violent fairy tales are typical of what passes for mass-cultural debate about torture. We're not encouraged to think about what happens next, so we don't. It is a massive failure of the public imagination. Which is why we need more torture in videogames."

"I'm not a monster; I'm just ahead of the curve."

"History has demonstrated repeatedly that paper money has been a permanent instrument of default and reducing the wealth of the Muslims. In addition, Islamic Law does not permit the use of a promise of payment as a medium of exchange. The following are a list of some UK contacts and other sources who both buy and sell Islamic Gold Dinars (IGD) and Islamic Silver Dirhams (ISD) for Zakat and other purposes...."

*Takes moral drug before deciding if moral drug is moral.*

"Something quite interesting happens in the first few minutes of Ninja Gaiden II: The dead people don't vanish."

"I think if you look at even the least participatory art forms there's the notion of vicariousness. When you see Goodfellas you sort of walk out feeling like you're in that world. And videogames just take that further, because you have more participation"

"Games are the perfect philosophical métier, because they're both supremely meaningless and meaningful -- they're "just" entertainment, yet they plunge such deep existential hooks into us that we'll argue over them until the sun explodes."