Where?

We can look up this word anywhere:


Another way of putting it: to exist is to have physical, material matter; to be subject to the senses.  What really exists are those things with matter.  Reality is all that which we experience with the five senses; reality is the space wherein things exist.  Anything which does not have physical matter exist as ideas, of which do exist, inside your brain, which is itself matter.  Ideas are physical matter, but what those ideas represent are not; in the same way, a DVD has matter, but the action-packed car scene the DVD streams does not, the images are representations of those things, i.e. the cars do not really exist except when they were filmed in reality.  The film beyond that is similar to your brain; the film exists, but what the film represents does not.

Spirits are defined as incorporeal i.e. without physical material, which as defined prior, must exist as ideas.  A spiritual being, then, is defined as an incorporeal corporeal object; in other words a paradox, it doesn't play ball with the rules we've defined for reality: it must either be corporeal i.e. being i.e. pertaining to reality, or incorporeal i.e. spiritual i.e. existing as an idea.  So when you die, you appear as a corpse to everyone else, but since your brain can no longer function to understand any idea, you become as nothing.  Therefore, the afterlife is arational: it is beyond our comprehension because we cannot experience it.  In other words, if it does exist, we'll never know, as it necessitates being unable to comprehend it to experience it, and since we cannot experience anything when we're dead, it's the same as it not existing.

With this in mind, remember that you have one life, no eternal afterparty and no mulligans, so get busy living

Great to hear it man, your designs are some of my favs

Thank you


Nice to see you're still around Eddie   I saw your thread hadn't been bumped since November, thought you stopped working.

Thank you kindly

Sorry guys!  I neglected to check this thread for a little while


Thanks so much!


It depends on the subject matter; I charge roughly $10 per working hour, so really simple stuff is relatively inexpensive and really intricate works such as book covers can run up to $100.  The average painting will typically be around $45, but I give my clients a concrete estimate of what the painting will cost from the start so there are no surprises.  I do all my work digitally but you're free to have the original .psd file for printing purposes.


Thank you for your kind words.  Dog Soup was actually commissioned by Matthew N. Wright, who was unfortunately banned some time ago.  He'd given me a whole BTC out of charity so I insisted I paint something for him in return  The idea of there being a dog in a soup bowl was possibly a funny on his part considering he lived in SK at the time of this.  For personal art, I usually do sketches of my own character designs; I have aspirations to become a video game artist and so spend much of my free time doing mock concept art.  I have a very ambivalent view on art for art's sake, so it's rare to catch me doing any sort of art that doesn't serve some ulterior purpose, if not for my own improvement.  But I believe I tend for "darker" themes when left to my own devices, i.e. Nightmare Before Christmas sort of designs or demons and such


I've always wanted to do something like this, I certainly do love to teach.  I'll see about recording my paintings for you guys.  The tools I use are: a Wacom Intuos4L with old drivers because the new ones are messed up (), and Photoshop CS6 with a small set of custom brushes I've made tailored for drawing and painting.  I use an image size of A4 when painting and shrink down to post on the nets.  I'll update the thread with a video whenever I get the chance

If an individual wanted to work for a wage, would he still count as a slave?  It would seem the most innate property we own is ourselves and our time i.e. how we determine the usage of our bodies, so wage slavery sounds like an oxymoron at first glance; it must be assumed that there is a coercive element forcing people to work at a job, but I don't believe businesses directly influence individuals to work for them; rather, government plays the key role in stopping individuals from deciding they will not work for a wage which becomes a non-issue within anarchism.

I'm also uncertain about the rules of land; let's say a man owns a farm on a piece of public land (assuming all land is public here), but another man wants to build a park where the farm is.  Since the land is public, the public decides whether the farm or the park will be there.  This means, if the park is decided upon, the farmer must pack his things and do something else.  This necessitates a violation of the man's person and time, which is similar to the concept of wage slavery wherein the individual does not have control over his person or time.  How might this problem be resolved in a consistent fashion within the socialist system, so as to limit or stop this slavery to the majority?

How would the redistribution of wealth occur in the anarchist society?  I imagine the cronies who profit from the government being there will no longer have a monopoly over anything and thus will not be able to enforce unfavorable conditions upon other businesses, thereby allowing the wage slave greater opportunity to be his own man.  Also, I would think most anarchists see a constitution as unnecessary; if it were rewritten, who would enforce it?  We could say we the people would enforce it but then, without a central coercive element to do so, it would be awfully difficult to orchestrate; it seems it would be more efficient instead to agree not to violate each other's property i.e. bodies and time, than to define a central set of guidelines to follow which anyone can break from and define their own; I think most would agree at least to the aforementioned rule without the need for enforcement, as the enforcer necessitates it violate this rule itself, i.e. minarchism.

Sorry if I'm being annoying   I don't interact with very many liberty-minded socialists and I'm interested in the PoV differences between this, capitalism and communism.

Examples?

Amen!

All property, or just land?

I agree with you here; the common misconception about anarchism is that there can be no order and it's essentially Fallout 3 IRL   However, the reason I ask you, is that the term "socialist" is usually associated with various economic practices such as public ownership and such.  Are you in agreement with those?

What's the separating quality between this and other forms of anarchism?

I fundamentally disagree with the premise; I agree that the free market can sometimes fuck up, but this is because the free market is composed of people and there can be no descriptor of people which does not involve "prone to error".  However, I believe the point that must be made before proceeding is this: that people freely associating together are prone to error, whilst people involuntarily associating aren't, ergo a central authority over monetary policy can produce more desirable outcomes than without.  I don't see the difference; a man does not become more intelligent or wise when he has the opportunity to force another to follow his deed, in fact he often becomes less so, as every tyrant has shown.

Anyway, until it's shown that a central authority is not actually made up of people but rather, some other conscious matter that is not prone to error, then I must insist that the idea of a central authority over anything cannot produce any better outcomes than individuals acting in their own best interests.  Before bothering to consider whether a marriage between a decentralized digital currency and policy makers is possible, we should first ask whether it's necessary.  Assuming what I said prior is true, that a man vs. a man in a hat makes no difference in his ability to make error, then it can be asserted that it's unnecessary.  This is not to say economists are unnecessary; rather, they should focus on accuracy and wise recommendations so people can steer their own lives properly, rather than putting everyone on the same ship and steering it themselves.

A government is the last thing that would know anything about peace, love or democracy, so it's no wonder they need so many people to explain it to them.

There can never be a society without poor people because people have the capacity to choose their professions, and if people choose to take on a profession that will make them poor, such as writing, activism, or attempting to be the next Buddha, then we have no right to stop them.

Assuming everyone in a given society wants to be wealthy from their work, then yes, it is absolutely possible for there to exist a society without the poor.  Ignoring people who choose not to be wealthy, and focusing only on those who want to be wealthy but are prevented, we only have to look at what stops them from becoming so.  Off the top of my head, these reasons come to mind:

1. Inability to begin a business, thereby creating work to be done
2. Inability to work under agreed conditions between himself and another, whether he is the employer or employee
3. Inability to keep the wealth he has generated to spend where he deems appropriate

Remember that wealth is not distributed, but created; wealth is additive, not divided.

So, what happens when a man realizes there is a need he can provide for in his community?
1. Not enough money to pay his government for the right to do so.  Not enough money to beat the local state-granted monopoly's prices.  Not enough money to pay for employees who are more expensive than they're worth.

So, what happens when a man realizes he must work to earn enough to begin his business?
2. Regulation makes him too expensive to hire for entry-level positions; not only does this stop him from generating wealth, it stops little businesses from forming all together, including his.  He doesn't have enough savings to work on his skill set so he can be worth the amount his government makes him to be, so he gets stuck in a rut.  Finally, after living impoverished for some time, he develops enough talent to be worth hiring.

So, what happens once, or if, he finally finds work?
3. The wealth he generates is siphoned out by the business which needs to pay off the government, including various regulatory costs and taxes, and must pay for the unfair favors other businesses are getting via lobbying, as well as siphoned directly by government itself for egalitarian purposes such as welfare and subsidies.  The man, ultimately, is not left with enough money to even dream of competing with the major businesses of the area, and only makes enough for subsistence.

Thus, we see, the reason why any given society has so many poor people, is due to their wealth generated being swallowed up by the hydra of big government and big business.

To answer the question: it's only possible if people can get over their superstitions and begin to practice secular rationalism.  Until then, no, every society must have poor people for the state to farm.

Isn't this contradictory?  If you have to ask for independence, you're really not serious about independence.  To be independent is to be sovereign; to ask permission to be independent implies you're submitting to a higher authority.  So of course they voted no; they were stating the obvious.

This issue is madness; I honestly think there are more important things we should be worried about in this world than what CEO of whatever browser thinks about this or that.  Gay activists aren't fighting for marriage equality, they're fighting for marriage rights, and for this I feel no allegiance toward their cause; they don't care about having the ability to decide whether they'll marry same sex or opposite sex, they care about having permission from government to do so.  They have no quarrel with democracy otherwise, which makes them hypocrites, which makes their cause inevitably pointless as there can never be a majority vote on gay rights because there will never be a majority of gays in this world (assuming heterosexual/homosexual ratios remain as they are), there can only be a majority vote of agreeing not to use democracy against gays which makes democracy a pointless exercise in this respect as this vote occurs only in the minds and hearts of individuals.  You would think the LGBT crowd would understand this better than anyone but, nobody ever said politics was a rational sport.

Anyway, I think this will blow over and be forgotten by most people within a month.  Chik-fil-a is still around, after all.

War is never necessary, unless we're talking about defense.  But that's not the point; point is, whether or not war is necessary, the amount of war you have has a direct relationship with how much control governments have.  Socialist nations are the most war-like; less so, the oligarchical nations who can inflate their money supply; war gets really hard to start and prolong when you have a small republic (which is why in America, for example, Lincoln had to ignore the constitution and become as a dictator to get his way); and war stops completely once government no longer has a monopoly over the military force, which then gets left in the hands of individuals like you and me who don't want war to happen, but want to be defended if another nation goes to war with us.

Reason being, in every passing case, government has less wealth to work with for war, and can make less money from doing so.  When it gets to the point that individuals have to fund war, they can never pay for it individually as sociopaths encompass a few percentage points of the total population and empathetic individuals make up a huge proportion, which means war would not be profitable unless it were subsidized.  Since war is not profitable anymore without everyone to "pitch in", war does not occur.

We're going to democracy our way into oblivion at this rate.