Viewing profile — Helmet

You seem to contradict yourself. For example, you say: > While I like many aspects of the being part of a religion, what I like is completely viable without the religious aspect. H…

And the Congress needs to reign in the Courts' legislative activism.

Are we could allow local communities to govern themselves and decide what should and shouldn’t be legal when it comes to this stuff? Federalism and all that. There are good argumen…

Well, you know, the Protestant notion of predestination is something quite interesting. I think that it's very pure in a sense, in that it strips away the sort of material or "tran…

I taught myself Calculus through differential equations using “Paul’s Math Notes”: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu Incredible resource, he walks through every problem step by step, …

Well, not within some strict confines, but there is academic work that looks at society as a sort of "social organism" that exhibits many of the traits that you might ascribe to "l…

Fair enough - I think that you make a good point. I think the overall political climate is fueling this, but you're right, it does degrade the value of this site.

While I do agree with you that these are all potential causes, I would appreciate any citations or sources. There is an interesting report from the Brookings Instituion that goes i…

I've been both sexually harassed at work and groped by strangers when out on the town (by a woman) - but yeah, I agree with your larger point. I think it's certainly more prevalent…

Do we? How do you draw that conclusion from the data? Personality disorders seem to be fairly resistant to treatment/therapy, and certainly more than 1% of the population has issue…

Yeah, but given current exchange rates £70k is ~$100k. ~100k is nothing to sneeze at...

Not at all - I abhor racism, sexism, and homophobia. My point has more to do with our general indulgence in materialism, offensive and gaudy cultural products (such as music that i…

Absolutely every single part of it? Have you stepped outside, or spoken to anyone in the country that isn't a part of the coastal bourgeoisie?

No, but it's important that we control and police language and shove PC culture into your head at absolutely any opportunity and just grind and grind and grind away at any artifact…

The deceleration in healthcare costs preceded the ACA, and can mostly be attributed to a slowdown in economic growth (1,2,3). 1 . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25092842 2. ht…

Maybe because it's a ridiculously vague and abstruse question that presupposes a set of ideas that libertarianism, or any political philosophy for that matter, never set out to dir…

>They're all paid for by taxes. Thanks for the reminder; and to think that I've spent a lifetime just assuming that public infrastructure grew out of the ground, like grass. Look, …

>This is the success sequence stuff? Look it's just not very true. Almost the entirety of various 'success sequence' poverty figures can be explained by one thing: maintaining full…

> Eluding taxes is super-unethical. Debatable - some of us hold taxation to be tantamount to theft, so we believe in the exact opposite. I'm not here to debate or change your mind …

> Now now relax. We can have a sensible discussion without condescension. > You're in a thread about class and you're saying that class distinctions are good......You don't think t…

> Move up to the next one? Yes > Class mobility is a fallacy This is patently false. Social mobility is entirely possible, although it has gotten harder since the 1980's, but that …

Class distinction and hierarchy are precisely the sort of social mechanisms that convince people that there exists alternatives to certain modes of living (class aspiration).

I've known many "low-class" wealthy people. Likewise, I've met some incredible snobby, "upper-class" people who were not very wealthy, mainly intellectuals and artists.

> There is a moral failing in our country where the pursuit of money is seen as the objective optimal thing to do. But it's very reasonable to look at how money changes people, and…