Freedom is to practice ethics.

So, let's compare:


First, let's understand what rights are.  A right exists between two or more people who agree a specified behavior should be shared equally.  If I say, "Hawker, I want the right to free speech," I must then say, "I will also allow you free speech if you promise not to impede mine."  You say, "Okay that sounds reasonable," and thus, a right is born.  As more people recognize these rights we share and decide they, too, would like these rights, so these rights spread and become a societal norm; the majority, then, has power over the minority, who would say "I don't want the right to free speech"; since most of us like this right, we typically make up the majority and overrule what they want.

Now, let's take emigration, for example.  The state, in a hypothetical situation, has decided that nobody can emigrate or immigrate due to terrorist threats; all borders are regulated shut and everyone is on a temporary no-fly list, except for certain important members of the state.  Despite individuals agreeing that there is a right to emigrate, they had this right artificially removed by an external source of power.  The fundamental purpose of a right has been tarnished; we can no longer call this a right, though we commonly believed it to be before; we must now call this as it is properly identified, a privilege.  You had the privilege to emigrate, and it was taken away.  Ergo, if the state controls the borders, and can decide, without individual approval, to close those borders, you do not have the right to emigrate, you are privileged to.  This applies today to no-fly lists; if it's possible to have your right to flight taken away, you never had a right to flight to begin with, you had a privilege to use the airlines.  A right which can be taken away is a privilege.

With this distinction in mind, we can name many privileges which are egregiously referred to as rights; the privilege to free speech, until the state needs you silenced; the privilege to bear arms, until the state needs you disarmed; the privilege to emigrate, until the state needs you to stay put; the privilege to occupation, until the state needs you in the military.  We can go on and on, but the basic idea is there; if you can call these rights, I can call a swine handsome.

Anyway, because we cannot practice this philosophy on our own, we must succumb to the whims of whomever does have this freedom, i.e. the republic in the case of America, our politicians.  If they say, "Killing this nation's soldiers and civilians and stealing their oil is right", or in our case, if a single man in a suit says it's okay, then it is okay.  Do you object to murder?  Too bad; you have no privilege to practice ethics, and whether or not you believe killing is wrong, you will be paying for it.  Do you object to theft?  Too bad; you have no privilege to decide if you'll be stolen from or not.  Do you object to threats?  Too bad; you will be threatened if you fail to comply.  Because these decisions on ethics can only be made by the state, you are crippled to make decisions on what is right and what isn't.  You have no right to be a human being under these standards, as you are stripped of your right to be virtuous; you have only the privilege of being a citizen, and you are as vicious as the men who represent you.

So what is freedom?  Simply put, freedom is to have rights, including the right to grant them, or not.

I played this game in super-fast mode (on private/fun servers) for the length of a highschool summer as various characters.

It's addictive; it isn't fun, in fact it is very dull and uninteresting.  It's a time sink, and if you're paying for it, a cash sink.  If you're going to play, play with a close friend.  You will be bored incredibly otherwise.  With this in mind, you can do anything with that close friend and have about the same amount of fun.  And if you're going to play, use the private servers first; they're not as good, but it's a good indication as to whether you can put up with it for long.  It is literally designed by people whose positions are explicitly to ensure you remain addicted to the game, i.e. manipulation.  There's a lot of stuff that will keep you hooked, especially in skill building and leveling up and items which you want to use but can't because you need the levels, but the mechanics of the game aren't much more than click on appropriate monster relative to your level, errand-running (go here fetch that, and kill this get X amount of item are the majority of the quests you'll run into), repeat until you're max level and raided enough for top tier armor, whatever the top is now, and then start over.  The only appeal is the social appeal and that can be found anywhere nowadays; it was a niche back when MMOs weren't popular, but nowadays its age really shows.

There's a new game I've been playing lately named Path of Exile; it's a Diablo clone, and it's free (sustained primarily with microtransactions for vanity junk, similar to TF2.)  I would recommend that over WoW if you're looking for a point-and-click action-RPG experience; it's more challenging, it's multiplayer, and you don't have to deal with a bunch of fat supremacist neckbeards (not saying all WoW players are like that, just an unusually concentrated amount.)

Because it's focused primarily not on the best price, but on the best speed; decisions are measured in how fast your emergency can be turned into a non-emergency, and spares no time for you, or the person who will not be footing your bill but calling for you, to decide the best price for the best value.  The hospital which is closest always takes precedence over the hospital which provides the best service for the best price; it's not a free market problem once an emergency is involved, because you cannot act rationally while on the verge of dying.

Which is why the problem is primarily solved before there is an issue; the free market applies to everything except this one moment, where you and your saviors are paired by non-market values.  If there is a man who will say "No, I'd rather spend another 20 minutes in this ambulance than spend an extra bit of cash at this place", assuming he can still speak and think clearly, I'd like to meet him for I'm positive he's an interesting fellow.

Though I do agree, I am tired of hearing about emergency services justifying taxation and central law.

Take notes, folks; this is precisely the logic used for history's first empires.

You cannot ban account selling because you cannot know which accounts are being sold.  The only thing this petition would provide is an illusion, which exacerbates the problem, because the public would have no clue that it even occurs.

This website is not in a vacuum; honestly, the Internet's a big place, believe me.

And of all the evil the state accomplishes, who do they fear?  Certainly not God.

Wake up
Wake up again
Wake up a third time, groggy
Breakfast
Paint for clients
Paint for fun
Lunch
Worry about religion and politics
Think about writing book
Work on completely separate book
Worry in bed
Dinner
Netflix
Continue painting for clients
Worry about funds
Think about moving to another nation
Late night gaming
Sleep
Wake up
Worry about sleep
Sleep

Let's try this from the top:

Who wrote the Bible?

There's a big difference between people following a leader and people belonging to a ruler; difference being, whether or not you can stop following him once he decides to jump off a cliff.

People make their own rules; even this forum has its own special set of rules, and no higher authority had to invent them; they were picked because they've been practiced before and seem to work.  Some people use higher authorities to back their made-up rules with force; this is why God and the state exist.  This occurs when a set of rules aren't best for everyone, and the most powerful individual decides he doesn't care what's best for everyone, only what's best for him (which is nearly always.)  It works out well with people who don't know any better, not so much with everyone else.

Here's a place where the free market doesn't apply for the free market requires rational actors; there's nothing rational about getting hurt, passing out, and waking up in a hospital with a bill.

Here's some solutions, anyway:

Emergency centers close enough to each other that they must compete; you can then, if requiring further treatment, figure out the hospital of your choosing at your leisure.

Refusal to use any hospital for non-emergencies which does not offer competitive prices for emergencies; this pressures the hospital to offer better prices or sell off to whomever is.

Pre-determined prices paid in advance, mixed in a large pool of other people's advanced payments, to marginalize the cost of varying emergency service costs (i.e. insurance.)

Stop being careless about your health so you won't have to worry about it.

And of course, all of the above.

People create laws.  God and the state are inventions of people to objectify justice.  There's a small group of people who are pointing out that justice is subjective, but nobody really listens to them.

Only thing people need to know about this thread.

You already know:


What's left to say?  Your cup's full.

Such as this one?  If it's not useful to you, pay no attention to it.

Sometimes you just need a break from reality; then you can go back to being stressed.  Of course it cannot cure your stress; only you can solve that problem by facing the problem causing the stress.

There's nothing wrong with having faith; I was very faithful growing up, attending church and praying into my adult years.  However, after so long, I felt there was something more to life that I wasn't seeing; faith wasn't cutting it for me, so I started to delve into my own questioning of the world.  It's a long process; every day I'm finding out new things, and realizing things I used to believe in were very unlikely to be true, and I can't say I've come to the conclusions I have today without years of thought.  We all have faith, I believe, at certain times of our life, but ultimately I view faith as a crutch; I do not believe there are unanswerable questions, and if we dig deep enough, I've found that we can always form a rational conclusion as to what occurs in the world around us, so we can no longer have to rely on faith, we can prove to people that our beliefs are the truth.

This inevitably, however, removed my belief in God and I can safely say my code of ethics are my own, so although I can view the teachings of J. Christ, I don't necessarily believe he was the end-all to the philosophy; I believe we shouldn't work towards being like him, but to become better, so that improvements can be made in this world and the immoral people of this world can be brought to justice.  This can only happen if we refuse to accept faith, for there are people who have taken advantage of this faith for as long as we've had it, and use the rational method (as I explained earlier) which, when used successfully, cannot be exploited.  We both know that there are people in this world who use faith as an excuse or feel that faith is the only thing required in life, but I feel you and I are wiser than that.


God must first pass through man to reach the believer; without man, God speaks no word, and still to this day has not.  Therefore, all that God says is dependent on man being honest.  We know that man cannot be honest at all times.  Therefore, we cannot prove God's word to be God's word, we can only prove that it is man's word; ergo, God is only as omnipotent as we believe him to be.  This is just the logic I'm laying out for the believer   They can take it or discard it if they want.

I'm not saying the Bible is true or false; I'm saying it cannot be absolute, so God's word cannot be absolute.  We should not burn any books due to men lying for either those books are intentional lies (of which I love), or they are observable truths (such as the writing of many philosophers and scientists, which can be proven to be lies or not.)  If the individual cannot discern what is real and what is not on their own, they cannot trust any book asserted as truth, including religious texts, including political texts.  The beginning of this distrust, I believe, is by making obvious that books of absolute truth are only as honest as man, which is something any believer can relate with.

This is why anarchism cannot occur right now; it's often believed that anarchism is the result of failed government, but this is not true; totalitarianism is the result of failed government.  A people who can self-govern on a national level become anarchists; a people who become entirely dependent on the state become fascists.  Our slow drift into fascism in America is a result of people becoming progressively dependent, which is the exact opposite direction we want to head if it's good progress we're seeking; we want to be free and independent, not enslaved and dependent.

For anarchism to occur, we need a world of rational actors, fit with enough intelligence and maturity to handle themselves without a state, and doubly so to prevent the sociopath from rising to power, as he will always try no matter how far along we've come as a species; the state does not enable society, society enables the state, and enables it varying on how individualistic its citizenry is.  People who seek a small state are almost there, and as I'm sure you've seen, they're gradually becoming a majority; people who seek a huge state cannot trust even themselves, so it comes to no surprise that this is projected onto others.

The state will always occur in a society of irrational people, because they'll always be duped by the sociopaths into believing they cannot survive without it (in the same way we once believed God was necessary in life and the fear of not having him was too great to abandon; rational thinking disposed of this idea in a great many, and increasingly every day.)  Thus, the beginnings of anarchism, a fairly new idea when compared to the state and likewise relevant to the beginning of man's focus on rational thought, will be seen as a natural shift from the state so long as rational actors remain vigilant, and continue to train others in the rational method.  Though you and I can see why this is the preferable method of governance, it can often look like gibberish to others due to this effect.


This observation, albeit consistent with religion and politics, remains inconsistent in atheism; nobody is brainwashed into believing atheism, and most atheists become so on their own even with a religious upbringing.

If this is true, can we not assert that atheism is the product of rational thinking?  In other words, if you've never been exposed to another atheist and you can still come to the same conclusions, whilst, in comparison, the only way to become a Christian is through other Christians, then we can assert that atheism (weak atheism anyway) is the rational conclusion on the concept of religion.

Looking at this another way: I give you a logic tool.  You use this tool in thoughts about religion and come to a conclusion.

What are the chances that you've reproduced Hinduism?  What are the chances you've reproduced atheism?

This same line of thinking can be applied to morals and ethics; the more this tool spreads, the more uniform people are, for they always seek the best methods of interaction, not the "traditional" methods.  Thus, conclusions such as "do not aggress" become very popular in people with this logic tool, while conclusions like "might is right" die gradually with nobody to preach it.

As is common: mask the underlying intent, i.e. extend governmental control over private land and business via socialism, with a perceivably good intention, i.e. save the planet.

These actions are the sign of a desperate state; "act now before it's too late" sort of thing, which is a good move since the public's starting to realize what's happening here.  Throwing away the left/right debacle, it becomes very clear what's happening: we're coming a step closer to totalitarianism, increasing the state's control over our private lives (not that there was much left), and there's no way to stop it through the system; not even the president can be bothered to follow the system.

We'll soon have to come to the conclusion that a very serious change needs to be made, by us, or we'll veer onward over the cliff that is fascism; once we hit that point, there's no going back until total economic collapse, and there's no telling what a desperate nation will do at that point; America's shiny expensive army isn't there for show.

Yes, it's a great OS, and I want to use it, but my kind of work demands the Windows OS unfortunately   My graphics tablet requires proprietary drivers that are only currently emulated on Linux, so a lot of the features don't work.  The list of software is quite limited as well; it's getting better all the time, but as of right now, the best I can get is nowhere close, nor used professionally, as to what is available on Win/Mac.  That whole open source thing

Besides that, I can use Ubuntu very well for writing, browsing the web (and there's not a lot you can't do with a browser nowadays), playing around with C++ and stuff of that nature.  It's noticeably faster as well, especially Lubuntu.