Wow, this is awfully neat.  I feel like I'm in the future already

Although it would be naive to believe any politician seeks to grant himself less power (just a moment's thought would make this sound unusual; if you could pay yourself a salary from the blue yonder, why would you ever want to pay yourself less?), it is no less true that right-right-wingers will often claim that big government is the issue and we must (inadvertently) hand the state more power so the state will have the power to grant itself less power.

You see, it's not deception, they're just trying to improve your perceptions by proselytizing an improved, alternative reality to your own.

What do you mean "no longer"?  Your only purpose here is to promote anonymint, so you obviously have a vested interest in distrusting your competitor Bitcoin, and have done so from the moment you joined this site.

It's all downhill from here, friends.

Dropbox isn't really comparable to Mega, unless I'm missing something and Mega does sync files between all my computers automatically.

Perhaps someone could design an app that simplifies the BTC experience, where you and your friends have profiles with a selection of addresses to send money to.  I don't see why it couldn't work, I only see that it hasn't yet been done.

God is only as powerful as His followers are willing to do His bidding.

But anyway, I like to think myself an atheist.  There are many ways to worship God but I think I'm better off without.

How do you plan on getting around the electoral college?  Since, y'know, Americans don't actually vote anyway, they just recommend.

Max Keiser was all like "my bitcoins are awesome" and I was all like "what's a bitcoin?"

So I guess you could say RT

SHIT all those votes down the drain.

Cubby looks pretty good...

Look at it another way:

No wealth falls from the sky; to pay for public schools, the public is taxed; ergo, public schools are entirely paid for by the public.  If public schools are paid for through taxing the public, and no extra money is being injected into schools without the help of the public, then this means that schools are being paid for with private funds.

Remember, the state is not magical, and does not generate wealth; the state has but two functions: get money, then allocate money.  So if the state collects money, then places that money in schools, it should follow that people are entirely capable of paying for schools voluntarily, as they are already paying for schools involuntarily.  A public school is no more expensive than a private school, except when regulation is enforced.

Of course, when I say bigger problems, I refer to the major divide where few entities suck up the wealth like a magnet, thus leading to an effect making the rich richer and the poor poorer, but, beside all that...

School is kind of a non-essential nowadays since people no longer need human beings to teach them, we've had libraries and now the Internet for a while now; if a person wants to learn, they'll of course do it, but if they do not, now we're faced with an important question: is it moral to force a person to learn in the way we want them to?

You're not missing out on too much but I would recommend playing VI through IX, those were the absolute best in the series before it devolved into fashionable girly men.  But of course, if you're not really into RPGs at all I could understand, they just happen to really attract me

If we can afford to pay for public schools through taxation, it should follow that we can afford them without; otherwise, we have a much deeper problem than not being able to afford schools without the aid of the wealthy.

Yeah, Peter is very rough around the edges, but his intentions are good--however, we know exactly where those can lead.  I think Stefan did a fairly decent job here sorting through the word salad, but I'm still confused as to Peter's actual intents; it seems he's chiefly concerned with having a sustainable planet, but this can devolve just as PETA's mission devolved, where the ultimate way to conserve X is to eliminate Y, usually people.  Though I do believe a sustainable and healthy world is an incredible priority, I also find that being able to enjoy that world in freedom to be important as well.  This seems to be the two philosopher's disconnects; Peter advocates the RBE without paying much attention to the state, or treating it like a non-issue, while Stefan advocates anarchism without paying much attention to corporations, or treating that as a non-issue; of course, the two concepts are inseparable, and whenever you have one central source of power, you'll have other major powers flock to it; corporations thrive through the state, the state extends power through corporations, and there's nothing any individual can do to keep the two from doing the horizontal monster mash in bed together.

So it seems their intentions are aligned but they're both missing the valid points of the other; Peter is correct to say that we should push for a better, sustainable planet, and would be agreeable if he would admit that it must be done voluntarily, for there is a huge difference between arriving here with the state and without, as the state only acts in its own interest, which is often against what's best for everyone; Stefan is correct to say that fiercely maintaining one's personal liberties through voluntaryism would solve a lot of problems in our world, but doesn't seem to admit that major corporations can't exist in their current form without subsidies from the state, nor acknowledges the damage they're causing and how the public must pay for it; in other words, public losses private gains.

So, hopefully they'll return for another round and come to agree with one another, but as far as I could see in that video, they were mostly just butting heads.  Peter could also bare to be a little friendlier

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who wishes for this.

Anyway I've attempted to convince my parents to consider Bitcoin but they haven't really looked into it, so I figure I've done my part; they'll come around to it on their own if they're really interested, since they're aware of what it is now.

I see your point on the #1 taboo, but either way, neither is desirable.  Certainly, if death was coming anyway, we wouldn't see it and attempt to get it over with; after all, we don't know what happens when we die, so we may as well enjoy what we got in case of the worst scenario, being, no afterlife.

If you're a masochist, you want pain; this doesn't mean that you want to inflict pain unto others (unless the other person is a masochist, then it's mutually beneficial.)  So this is actually two stances on morality; your right to receive pain if desired (or more broadly, your right to your own body), and your right to inflict pain.  It is moral to want for pain, since it would be immoral to deny someone of violence at their own volition (e.g. "I don't want to be denied the pain I desire, thus I do not want to deny others the pain they desire"); it is immoral to inflict pain upon a person who does want it (e.g. "I do not desire pain, ergo I will not inflict others with pain.")  The key point here is, if it's involuntary, it's immoral; there is no voluntary sex that is rape, there is no voluntary exchange of goods that is theft, there is no voluntary pain that is abuse, etc.

Of course, I say "It is immoral" with the implication that this is my stance on it; since I don't want pain inflicted on me, I find it immoral, but if someone else wants pain, more power to them.

A less obvious stance of morality would be whether to take one's shoes off before they enter a sacred place.  An even less clear stance is whether abortion is moral.


Hey Loozik; I hate formatting quotes so I'll number the responses in order:

1. Yes, I found the other one

2. Where to apply math may be subjective, but the actual practice of math is not; there is no emotion inside of me which will take two or more numbers and formulate a new number.  Likewise, there is no correct or incorrect answer to "Is it okay to kill one person to save three?", because it's an opinion.  "I think not" being the good-or-bad subjection, "provably so" being the right-or-wrong objection.

If you're correct about morality not requiring a human being, surely computers are capable of these same distinctions, yet there is no computer (at least not yet) which can give you a correct answer to "Is it okay to kill one person to save three?", because even if it did, you would be incapable of discerning whether it's correct or incorrect--I say this because, though you may say it's correct, and I may say it's incorrect, neither of us can prove this as an undeniable fact, unlike whether 3 + 4 is 7; similarly, however, a computer is absolutely wonderful at the math, because there's no emotion involved with math, for math is unbiased and entirely disconnected from emotion (naturally anyway; I can imagine what an angry mathematician may look like) in its practice, and computers are great with problems that don't require empathy.

3. I don't quite understand; as far as I can tell, the practice of math doesn't need my feelings to work.  Now, whether I feel I can use math for this problem or that problem is totally up to me, but once I actually figure out how I'm going to use math, it is purely a game of numbers.

For example, I have a problem where I have one lover whose company I enjoy and another lover who is rich.  I can use math in my problem of morality (perhaps I will measure how much the first lover makes me happy vs. how much money makes me happy), but math will never output the statement "seeing two women at once is moral/immoral".  Math will only spit out objective, unbiased statements, whilst my own thoughts, or perhaps another's, will determine what is and is not good behavior; there was a point in time where slavery was moral.  This is truly frightening if morality is objective, for this means we must either accept that slavery is provably moral (as it was for a lot longer than it wasn't) or admit that we will never know what the true stance on slavery should be, as we got this one wrong for a very, very long time (and some might argue we're still getting it wrong.)

But again, I believe the simplest way to answer this question is to ask, "Do I want to be enslaved?"

If you could, can you give me an objective version of the last question?  And how might you answer it without taking your own feelings into consideration?

4. Morality cannot speak--again, this infers to "X said this and X is right for X is all knowing" or something similar; someone, somewhere, had an opinion and wrote it down somewhere, whether it's you or another authority.  Morality is something to be discussed and will never perfectly match every human being, else we would all agree on the same morals (though we generally do agree on many of them, we also don't agree on much.)  You're setting up a situation in which everyone must be Christianly, or hedonistic, or primitive etc., or else they're "incorrect", and we're faced again with the problem of figuring out which behaviors are correct (as opposed to desirable, a subjective concept) and which behaviors are incorrect (as opposed to undesirable.)  Morality did not exist before human beings, and ceases to exist without them (can a planet be moral?  Can the universe be moral?  Can a computer be moral?  Can the dirt be moral?)--ergo, morality is subject to the human experience.

5. & 6.  I believe ethics is like a collection of morals, so I don't see them as very different concepts:


But lets assume morality is objective and ethics is subjective; if this is true, we can easily, at this very moment, discern which branch of ethics is correct and which branch is not, since the only correct branch of ethics will contain every moral principle and shun every immoral principle.  So who, then, got it right?

Learn something new everyday! 

I've noticed a trend; the more powerful any central government is, the more lawlessness ensues.  I wish I was alive during any period of time when a nation had a very small government so I could say, beyond any doubt, that an increase of law and order occurs the less powerful a state is--all I'm seeing in my lifetime is a ton of crime happening beneath (and yet especially with, and within) these magnificently powerful states.  And then you have people begging for more.

Just going by the first post (I have no idea what this convo is about)

Morality is subjective, because only the individual can decide what is and is not moral; if we can define morality as "things I would like to happen to me and things I would not", then we can make a comprehensive list on the things people generally don't like to happen to them, but we can never make this list complete, universal truths, for without people, morality ceases to exist; certainly, the gravity of the planet will remain, for this is not subject to how I feel about gravity, and the creatures of this planet will continue on without my opinion on their existing.

Anyway, there are a few common stances on morality, which can be answered by asking a simple question: "Would I like it to happen to me?"  Otherwise known as the golden rule.

We'll begin with killing:  "Would I like to be killed?"  The answer, if you're still alive right now, is likely "no, I would not like to be killed."  Ergo, killing other human beings is immoral, and letting other human beings live is moral.  Killing, then, is the #1 taboo of human living, as it's the difference, as obvious as it seems, between being able to tell what is moral and not moral, or doing anything else for that matter, and being dead.  Since we cannot experience life while dead, remaining alive is the #1 priority, for being robbed, or being raped, won't matter if you're not around to experience it.  This is tied simply to how we feel about being dead; if there was a definite afterlife and it was far better than this dump, I would be going.  For the most part, I'd enjoy staying alive right now.

Is theft moral?  We ask ourselves: "Would I like to be robbed?"  I'll wager the vast majority of us will say, "no, I'd like to not be robbed."  Ergo, theft is immoral.

Is rape moral?  We ask ourselves: "Would I like to be raped?"  The answer is comical, of course, since the very definition of rape is "unwanted sex", and so rape is, by no exception, immoral.

But let us consider, now, the definition of objective:


Because morality is grounded entirely within human feeling, it can never, ever, be objective.  I cannot feel that 2 + 2 = 4; this is not a subjective statement, but cold fact.  If I felt 2 + 2 = 5, I would be told that I was incorrect, and rightfully so.  I can, however, feel sadness, or perhaps anger, but general displeasure all in all, when I am spat upon; I cannot base this on any fact in the universe besides how I felt about someone using their saliva to treat me as though I were less than human, for there is no "correct" or "incorrect" way to experience this.  This action means nothing without human beings to have an emotion about how this feels.  Of course, one person might be spit upon and enjoy it--some people enjoy far worse--but generally speaking, we don't like to be involuntarily spit upon; there is no fact involved, it is merely preference.  And of course, because we generally don't like being spat on, we could say spitting on people is immoral--of course, this is subject to personal preference.  Thus, to avoid being spat on, we do not spit on others.

If it so happened that people did enjoy being spat upon, it would generally be considered moral: this is the difference between a subjective statement, "Please spit on me I love this feeling", and an objective statement, "That dog is an eighty-foot flounder"; the first uses the subjective concepts of good and bad, while the second uses the objective concepts of right and wrong.

Morality is inseparable from emotion, and so morality must always, forever and ever, be subject, not object, and personal, not universal.  Though we can study ethics in an objective fashion, we cannot experience it while lacking emotion, for there is nothing in this world which you will have an opinion about that is not tied to how you feel.

---

I feel the need to make this very distinct, for there are people who continually mistake the #1 taboo of human existence as moral, because "God is the authority on the objective morality of the universe and God says it's okay to kill these heathens as long as it's in His name," or simply replace "God" with "the state" to get a more modern effect.  There is no universally recognized rule of morality, and the belief that this is so leads normally good-hearted people into positions of violence, such as "these unarmed civilians unrelated to my country are okay to kill because there's no law against it."  No; you are the only person on this planet who can decide what you consider as good and what you consider as bad, and the moment one agrees that initiating violence with the intent to kill is moral is the moment they lose their own humanity, for they have accepted the killing of others, and so bring death to themselves.

Gandhi, MLK Jr., JFK and his brother; it seems promoting peace, freedom and/or equality is frowned upon on this planet.  You shouldn't have anything to worry about, however, unless you become a major cultural icon.