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Friday, February 8, 2008

Reader Mail #32

I liked this post on Overcoming Bias.

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance."
-- Edward Flaherty

This is ironic, considering that Edward Flaherty is one of the more egregious pro-Federal Reserve trolls posting on the Internet.



I liked this post on Check Your Premises. It is about the role of corporations in an anarchist society.

The problem is that corporations receive massive government subsidies. In a stateless society, these subsidies will be gone. Another point is the "limited liability" protection that the State grants to corporations.

There's nothing intrinsically evil about a group of people getting together and pretending they're a corporation. The problem is the massive government subsidies provided to corporations, backed up by state violence.



I liked this post on Bill Rempel. The town where he lives is fighting to avoid incorporation. This would mean the beginning of local taxes, i.e. a tax hike. This battle is fought nearly every year. Eventually, it will be lost. Governments, once created, don't voluntarily eliminate themselves.



Kevin Carson has left a new comment on your post "More Disease Thoughts":

You might consider taking several grams daily of Omega-3s, specifically fish oil caps (and cut way down on Omega-6s, while you're at it). Omega-3s are essential to mental functioning and balance, and Omega-3 intake went down at the same time as the ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 acids went way, WAY up in the processed American diet. I believe more than one study has shown that violence and behavioral problems in prison decrease dramatically when inmates are given Omega-3 supplements. A trace mineral supplement might also be good, since American soil has been stripped of micronutrients.


I've been looking into supplements. I wonder if it really is a dietary problem and not a mental illness.

Anyway, after a week of withdrawal from the anti-psychotic drugs, I'm mostly myself again.

gilliganscorner has left a new comment on your post "The Remnant":

This is a club that I fit into - I understand all of your points above and agree with every one of them.

I wish our club wasn't so small, but it is.

And yes, you do write well and to the point. That's why I read your blog.


I think it's important to enable members of "The Remnant" to think and communicate effectively.

CK has left a new comment on your post "The Remnant":

It's ALLODIAL
not Alloidal.
http://www.suijuris.net/forum/land-ownership/160-allodial-title-land-patents-ownerships-highest-proof-i.html

Oops. I keep spelling that wrong.

JEK has left a new comment on your post "The Remnant":

Sounds like "Atlas Shrugged"


Sometimes, I think that "Atlas Shrugged" is nonfiction. It includes Zero Point Energy generators. Agorism is like refusing to work and support the looters.

By E-Mail, someone wrote:

ABC News Just Discussed Skyrocketing Gold Prices

...there was no explanation of "why" of course, but they turned it into a piece about how people are out prospecting again.


The reason is, of course, the devaluation of the dollar. However, prospecting for gold is not the solution. As the dollar is devalued, the price of gold AND the cost of mining gold should rise at approximately the same rate. On the other hand, wages tend to rise slower than inflation, so inflation makes gold mining more attractive.

In the present, I thought that most gold was mined as a by-product of other types of mining, such as copper mining.

Kyle has left a new comment on your post "The Remnant":

well, I'm not religious, but I like the reference. I understand things, and they make me very angry.

The point of "The Remnant" is not the religious reference. It's that there's always going to be a core group of people who understand the difference between what is right and what is wrong. They are the people who always try to do the best, given the circumstances, even when they may be punished for doing the right thing.

I'm still very weak from my illness. I'm mostly publishing queued up drafts, rather than writing new content.

Ismail has left a new comment on your post "The Remnant":

"Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being something strange, so give glad tidings to the strangers."

The Qur’an, "If only there had been, in the generations preceding you, people having wisdom, prohibiting others from evil in the earth; except a few of those whom we have saved from among them." (Hud 116).

This verse speaks of the few people on earth, the "strangers", who prohibit mankind from evil. These are the same people the Prophet (peace be upon him) spoke about when he said, "Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being something strange, so give glad tidings [ar. Tooba. This is a tree in Paradise. So the Prophet (peace be upon him) is giving the good news of Paradise to these strangers.] to the strangers." It was asked, "Who are those strangers, O Messenger of Allah?" He replied, "Those that correct the people when they become corrupt." [Reported by Abu Amr al-Dani, from the hadith of ibn Masoud.

Islam is against taxation, against the State, against Usury, against fractional reserve banking. Islam is the future.

I don't understand why I keep attracting pro-Islam comments. Christianity is a slave religion, and Islam is a derivative of Christianity. Any religion that says "You will be rewarded in the afterlife for your suffering now" is intrinsically a slave religion. Anyone who claims to know what happens after you die is either lying or a fool.

Some bits of Islam, such as the ban on fractional reserve banking, are 100% correct. Like all religions, it has to be a careful mixture of truth and lies in order to be believable.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's nothing intrinsically evil about a group of people getting together and pretending they're a corporation. The problem is the massive government subsidies provided to corporations, backed up by state violence.

---

I don't like the concept of a corporation. I can't remember if you said it before, or I thought of it myself, but it seems to me that a corporation behaves like a psychopath because of the limited liability aspect of it. If the people in charge of the corporation were held personally liable for decisions that caused harm to others, those said people would not behave as to cause harm to others.

In other words, a corporation invites a moral hazard. If an amoral person thinks they can get away with something, knowing that a judge will not likely pierce the corporate veil, they will likely perpetrate harm.

Anonymous said...

I am a Muslim who finds your views interesting, nothing to worry about as to why you keep getting pro-Islam people on this board.

Islam is not a slave religion. 'suffering' is a fact of life, we get old, we lose loved ones, we get ill, we get hurt, we get divorced, we feel lonely etc. To say that this is just random with no reason to it is nihilistic.

What happens after death? Basically you appear in existence from nothing, you construct and identity...an 'I' if you are sane and have a 'normal' unbringing...you live for a while and then you die.

The atheistic assumption that you appear by chance, live by chance and die by chance...is foolish. You are contingent and you are sustained by the non-contigent. The non contingent created and manifested you, to be its mirror. When you sleep dreams are similar to a life that is unlike your waking life. Sometimes dreams are so vivid it is difficult to know if you are not really living it until you wakeup...death is a state when your soul will be something you either like or hate..if you had a clear conscience in life, your soul will be clear and happy. If you were envious, angry, arrogant these staind will cause you pain and suffering.

You can consider me a fool for believing this stuff, to each their own.

I fail to see how if there is no life after death, no God or anything else how it cannot lead to nihilism and genocide. There is no difference in killing lots of people just because one feels like it. Stalin is a good example, Bush (a fake Christian) and Blair are other more recent examples.

Kevin Carson said...

While we're on the subject of nutritional supplements, lithium orotate is also worth checking out. It is far more biodeliverable than the lithium carbonate MDs prescribe (and so you can take maybe one-twentieth the amount of elemental lithium), and without the bad side-effects. Although it promotes production of serotonin, unlike SSRIs it doesn't interfere with your body's normal feedback loop, so there's no danger of all the mania and homicidal/suicidal tendencies that go with serotonin syndrome.

I've battled chronic depression for several years. Drastically cutting back the dosage of metoprolol I was taking for blood pressure solved most of the problem, but I started taking lithium orotate (an OTC trace mineral supplement you can buy in most healthfood stores or probably from Amazon) and noticed a significant improvement in my mood in the past several weeks.

I mentioned earlier that the sort of food coming out of America's corporate agribusiness system has drastically increased the ratios of Omega-6 to Omega-3 oils, which has a terrible effect on brain chemistry. I failed to mention that mineral depletion by agribusiness has also had a similar effect on the amount of trace lithium in the soil, and therefore the standard American diet is much lower in natural levels of lithium over the past several decades.

Kevin Carson said...

BTW, Ismail: I was struck by how Thomistic your argument from contingency sounds. But I know so little about the history of Scholastic philosophy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Aquinas got it secondhand from the natural theology of Avicenna or some other Islamic Aristotelian.

Charles Johnson (Rad Geek) said...

Kevin,

You're right about the origins of St. Thomas's Third Way. In On the Power of God, a work dated after the Summa contra Gentiles but before the Summa Theologica, he explicitly attributes the argument to Ibn Sina, with developments added by Ibn Rushd. (In fact, all of the arguments used in the Five Ways are explicitly attributed to other philosophers at some point or another in St. Thomas's work.)

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