Refuting Nathaniel Branden's 6 Pillars of Self-Esteem

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

47 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

These people really live their cosmic heroism.

L,

What on earth is stopping you from participating in such cosmic heroism?

Have you become so decadent by capitalistic temptations that you no longer have the moral courage to face up to so simple a challenge that you must rationalize to keep your comforts?

Behold, man!

Greatness awaits you!

Take that first step....

Go for it...

Just severing your tubes so you can get all the pussy you want without fear of child support (or those pesky condomns) is not the sacrifice demanded by the peaks of shining moral light. True greatness of soul is calling you.

Do you reject your very destiny?

Michael

 

(btw - What are the stickers I earn at getglue(dot)com good for? Just curious...  )

[Lightyearsaway]

27 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

What on earth is stopping you from participating in such cosmic heroism?

Don't believe in it, unfortunately

 

27 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Just severing your tubes so you can get all the pussy you want without fear of child support (or those pesky condomns) is not the sacrifice demanded by the peaks of shining moral light.

haha, well I never said that the moral virtuosity attainable by a vasectomy was insufficient - or devoid of side benefits ;)

15 football fields of saved wildlife per child, that's some serious morality though

p.s. what stickers? is that spam or something?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

19 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

p.s. what stickers? is that spam or something?

Do you get a commission?

   

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

26 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

Don't believe in it, unfortunately

L,

This is so awesome.

You want this for others--for the entire human race--and gush about it, but don't believe in it.

Man.

I'm impressed.

Michael

[Lightyearsaway]

9 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

L,

This is so awesome.

You want this for others--for the entire human race--and gush about it, but don't believe in it.

Man.

I'm impressed.

Michael

well, I'd want it for myself too - I believe cosmic heroism provides maximum happiness. Unfortunately, I just don't believe we're cosmically more important than a cockroach or a cucumber. 

 

[merjet]

13 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

 Unfortunately, I just don't believe we're cosmically more important than a cockroach or a cucumber. 

Cockroaches and cucumbers don't prattle. Unfortunately, you do

[SteveWolfer]

Lightyearsaway said, "... I just don't believe we're cosmically more important than a cockroach or a cucumber. "

I'm glad he was speaking for himself. 

Me?  I believe that Lightyearsaway is more important than a cockroach... I not sure about the cucumber.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Lightyearsaway said:

Don't believe in it, unfortunately

 

29 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

well, I'd want it for myself too - I believe cosmic heroism provides maximum happiness

L,

I just keep getting more and more impressed.

Is this a new form of English?

Like I said above, the greatness of the Kalahari Bushman is waiting for you with open arms.

Cosmic happiness, dude.

Why are you wasting your time on a capitalistic trifle like the Internet?

Oh my God... this is so awesome...

I do so stand in awe.

 

Michael

[KorbenDallas]

 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

17 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

I believe that Lightyearsaway is more important than a cockroach... I not sure about the cucumber.

Steve,

The dirty little secret is to be the most awesome cockroach among the cockroaches, or the most awesome cucumber among the cucumbers.

It's all about being the big toad among the knot and leading them to the bliss of stagnant waters.

I admit, I stand humbled before such wisdom and profundity.

Sing hallelujah to the unbearable lightness of collective cucumberness.

May you commune in cosmic joy with your inner Kalahari Bushman.

Michael

[Lightyearsaway]

19 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

a capitalistic trifle like the Internet

Slight correction unrelated to the main theme of the thread: The internet was originally developed in the state sector, at places like MIT and the Pentagon. Nothing to do with capitalism, especially as idealized by "free market libertarians" 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

16 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

The internet was originally developed in the state sector, at places like MIT and the Pentagon. Nothing to do with capitalism, especially as idealized by "free market libertarians" 

L,

Everybody knows that. Who cares where it started?

You are not using the part of the Internet devoted to academia or DARPA. Hell, I doubt you've ever contacted CERN for anything.

Nope. You are here. You are on YouTube. No doubt other places.

You are using the capitalistic development of the Internet. And you seem to be soaking it all up real good.

Happy as a pig in a poke.

(With those severed tubes, ever think about dating sites? Maybe PUA stuff?)

Cosmic bliss and all...

 

Michael

[SteveWolfer]

4 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

Slight correction unrelated to the main theme of the thread: The internet was originally developed in the state sector, at places like MIT and the Pentagon. Nothing to do with capitalism, especially as idealized by "free market libertarians" 

You are talking about "ARPANET" which is to the Internet what an early bicycle is to a modern passenger car.  ARPANET was based upon circuit switching ideas developed in the private sector.  The packet switching it did (TCP then TCP/IP) was a brilliant invention but it wasn't "the internet."   While government and academia were in charge, it grew slowly and in a very limited number of directions.  ARPANET was totally discontinued in 1990.  During it's time, the network never grew much beyond a few hundred computers and it was illegal to use for non-government business.  I'm not knocking ARPANET because it was the start of something that, once free enterprise got hold of it, has become a stunning human accomplishment. 

It was the inventiveness of free minds backed by the risk of private capital that caused the resulting technical explosion.  From 1995 to 2005 it grew 100 fold!  With every keystroke, you are a recipient of the benevolent generosity of capitalism.  Be polite.  Say, "Thank you."

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, SteveWolfer said:

 

1 hour ago, Lightyearsaway said:

Slight correction unrelated to the main theme of the thread: The internet was originally developed in the state sector, at places like MIT and the Pentagon. Nothing to do with capitalism, especially as idealized by "free market libertarians" 

You are talking about "ARPANET..."

Steve,

This is an aside, but I love this shit. ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) was the early version of DARPA, a Department of Defense agency. The reason they came up with ARPANET was an answer to the question of what to do if a nuclear attack took out the central command of the US government. It was to connect all the different defense and federal government centers in the USA for data transfer, not just voice, so they could keep coordinating in the loss of a central command.

CERN (a nuclear research thing) in Switzerland is where Tim Berners-Lee came up with a code (HTML) and program to run it (browser) that was easy to adopt by others. He wanted to connect with different research centers and universities to share info. He called people who used his system the World Wide Web and they ran it on the ARPANET backbone and routers and communication protocols in the early days (which had expanded from strictly military to include science research).

I first learned about this when I started studying Internet marketing. I read a book back then that gave a very good layman's overview of this history: Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era by John Cassidy (this is an expose book about the dot com IPO bubble that burst).

I just got The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen. I've only skimmed it, so I can't comment on it yet. But the reason I got it wasn't for Internet history. It was because I have made a mini-hobby of tracking down DARPA's research into the neuroscience of storytelling--read how to weaponize story--and this is not about propaganda. I became familiar with two authors I like very much from this search, Kendall Haven (Story Smart) and Paul Zak (The Moral Molecule). Both of these guys actively participated in DARPA's storytelling research program and their stuff rocks. Really, really rocks.

How's that for a tangent?  

Michael

[Lightyearsaway]

49 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

You are talking about "ARPANET" which is to the Internet what an early bicycle is to a modern passenger car.  ARPANET was based upon circuit switching ideas developed in the private sector.  The packet switching it did (TCP then TCP/IP) was a brilliant invention but it wasn't "the internet."   While government and academia were in charge, it grew slowly and in a very limited number of directions.  ARPANET was totally discontinued in 1990.  During it's time, the network never grew much beyond a few hundred computers and it was illegal to use for non-government business.  I'm not knocking ARPANET because it was the start of something that, once free enterprise got hold of it, has become a stunning human accomplishment. 

It was the inventiveness of free minds backed by the risk of private capital that caused the resulting technical explosion.  From 1995 to 2005 it grew 100 fold!  With every keystroke, you are a recipient of the benevolent generosity of capitalism.  Be polite.  Say, "Thank you."

The internet took decades of government investment and loss in R & D to develop. No capitalist would have taken that loss. Capitalism, without a massive government, would have never developed the internet. it was mostly based on military technology.

[SteveWolfer]

1 hour ago, Lightyearsaway said:

2 minutes ago, Lightyearsaway said:

The internet took decades of government investment and loss in R & D to develop. No capitalist would have taken that loss. Capitalism, without a massive government, would have never developed the internet. it was mostly based on military technology.

Government can't  invest one penny without first taking it away from the people that earned it.  Government's lack of efficiency in all that they do says more about the decades than anything else.  The portion of DARPA's budget that was devoted to the ARPANET was minor and just one project among a great many (like Star Wars - SDI, space travel, missile defense, etc.)

Capitalism is constantly invested at far higher levels, and they take real risks - with their own money, not money confiscated from others.  Capitalism without a massive government would have developed the internet sooner.  I'm always surprised that there are still people who think that taking massive amounts of money away from productive people, giving it to politicians and bureaucrats will make an improvement over what we would have had without that massive pile of politicians and bureaucrats (and their cronies and special interests).

You, who have believe in a cosmic importance of cockroaches and cucumbers over humans, and who seeks the extinction of human beings are in favor of lots and lots of humans... as long as they politicians and bureaucrats.  Why am I not surprised.

[SteveWolfer]

Michael... "How's that for a tangent?"

That's cool.  I attended the first really big Internet conference in San Francisco, about 1990.  And I fell in love with the promise of what was to come.  After that I made a living for many years coding HTML with Notepad, connecting to SQL servers and blowing away the old form-driven business processes.

The discussions with Lightyearsaway are really only interesting for how consistently they are as wrong as the intellect could imagine.  He presented a view of self-esteem that isn't from the self but a social construct conveyed by some social mechanism.  He touts Chomsky for epistemology and politics.  He seems fond of socialism which is the height of both immorality and inefficiency.  And then a moral construct that puts cockroaches and cucumbers up there on a level with humans.  What can someone say after all of that? 

That the conversation should veer off into the history of the internet was a strange tangent, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that it can veer off into the neuroscience of story-telling.  Is that anything like some of the theories in NLP?  (Strangely enough NLP is said to owe at least a small debt to Chomsky's transformational grammar.)  There are several psychological theories built around the story-telling both as an explanation of human motivations and as therapeutic techniques.

[anthony]

4 hours ago, Lightyearsaway said:

Unless you explain how, you'll just be stating so by fiat or wishful assumptions; under the vaguely articulated pretense of some unstated inconsistency.  It is a common bad habit I see in many forums by those too focused on winning instead of honesty dealing with arguments involving various complexities.

The more dimensions, complexities or subtleties an argument or position has, the easier it is for someone to willfully misrepresent it - especially with what Reinhold Niebuhr called ''emotionally potent oversimplifications".

I'm learning to stay away from explaining the patently obvious to anyone, therefore I decline . I've had only some success out of forum trying to 'teach' an occasional adult to trust in his/her senses and in what he knows, that he exists in reality and has a fundamental nature. This is not that complex nor oversimplified, it is self-evident, inter-connected stuff - from being self-aware, to realising one's autonomy and free will, from youth - things one can only 'know' (have induced) for oneself. Then comes man's life as the standard of value and so, one's critical self-value in order to find and make values. You read the best in the field of self esteem in Nathaniel Branden and heard several others here, all reality-based and reality-of-man-based, while you've promoted one 'authority' after another, who wouldn't know what's real and valuable if it bit them on their bums, so what can I hope to achieve? I suggest though you not lock onto any notion that I and others argue dishonestly, intent on "winning" at all costs with you.

[merjet]

4 hours ago, Lightyearsaway said:

It is a common bad habit I see in many forums by those too focused on winning instead of honesty dealing with arguments involving various complexities.

The more dimensions, complexities or subtleties an argument or position has, the easier it is for someone to willfully misrepresent it - especially with what Reinhold Niebuhr called ''emotionally potent oversimplifications".

The pot calls the kettle black.  

Brief History of the Internet, the co-authors including some of the key people involved in the early years. 

Internet History 1962 to 1992

Quote

Lightyearsaway: "The internet was originally developed in the state sector, at places like MIT and the Pentagon."   

MIT is not "in the state sector." 
   

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

43 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

What can someone say after all of that?

Steve,

You still don't get it?

This guy talked about what was "cosmically more important." Don't you know what that means?

He knows the intent of the cosmos. He knows what the cosmos finds important and what it finds trivial.

Dayaamm!

No human being has ever known that before. 

I swear to God, this guy's a badass. Just when I think I've seen it all, he comes out with a more impressive pontification. How will we ever catch up? Woe is us... woe is us...

And you know how I know all this?

He said so. He said "cosmically more important" and he was talking about you and me. He was talking about all of us.

He said it right here on the Internet. So it has to be true.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

I'm learning to stay away from explaining the patently obvious to anyone...

Tony,

As you should.

But you misunderstand this guy if you think he's about ideas. He's a friggin' hambone.

He wants attention, not thinking.

That's what all the ick factor statements and contrarian paradoxes are about. A carnival sideshow. The bearded lady and the two-headed dog. Anything and everything, just so we look at him and talk about him.

I'm talking about him right now and that puts him in heaven. In cosmic joy. Light years away.

I've produced enough pop singers to see that almost from the beginning.

Too bad that is a hole that is never filled, a craving that is never satiated, sometimes a sting that is never soothed. An unscratchable itch. An addiction. But that's the pain of the hambone.

I bet there's a good kid underneath all that bullshit.

But, man, does he try too hard...

Michael

[Lightyearsaway]

1 hour ago, SteveWolfer said:

Government can't  invest one penny without first taking it away from the people that earned it.  Government's lack of efficiency in all that they do says more about the decades than anything else.  The portion of DARPA's budget that was devoted to the ARPANET was minor and just one project among a great many (like Star Wars - SDI, space travel, missile defense, etc.)

Capitalism is constantly invested at far higher levels, and they take real risks - with their own money, not money confiscated from others.  Capitalism without a massive government would have developed the internet sooner.  I'm always surprised that there are still people who think that taking massive amounts of money away from productive people, giving it to politicians and bureaucrats will make an improvement over what we would have had without that massive pile of politicians and bureaucrats (and their cronies and special interests).

You, who have believe in a cosmic importance of cockroaches and cucumbers over humans, and who seeks the extinction of human beings are in favor of lots and lots of humans... as long as they politicians and bureaucrats.  Why am I not surprised.

ARPANET was the founding technology of the internet. The fact that DARPA was a larger umbrella tells us nothing about the amount of capitalist investment (which was $0), so i don't know why you bring it up, as if it was relevant to your case. All the knowledge and technologies, coming from various agencies and universities, was inter-disciplinary  and was government funded, sometimes for decades. I repeat: a free market capitalist society would have never created the internet, as no capitalist would have invested without returns for that long.

As for the efficiency of capitalism, it has massive externalities that make it inefficient and even more ecocidal than other forms of industrialism. The species being brought to extinction have more value than humanity itself, so of course that an economic system that destroys more value than it produces cannot be efficient. And the idea of capitalism without government is only abstract. Government is, and has always been mainly a tool for capitalists to socialize risk and privatize profit, and protect or expand their stolen property through violence (police, military imperialism). The public can have some democratic say (more than they do in corporations, which are purely capitalist-run), but as my documentary shows, parties in elections are generally groups of capitalist investors who compete to control the state. Wage labor itself, generally entails money confiscated by virtue of a "work for a boss or else" social environment collectively imposed by capitalists, which allows them to exploit others and brainwash the masses into thinking that their activities are worth huge amounts of money. And thus their "risks"are always with other people's money. And of course, the risk of workers who risk life and limb is much greater, and yet they get paid less. Slave owners also took risks btw (their expensive slave could have gotten sick, died etc). That doesn't mean that the slave owner deserved profit. Some slaves could even buy their own freedom and become slave owners themselves. That social mobility didn't justify slavery. With more democratic governments, in which the public has some say to compete with capitalist control, some of that money confiscated by capitalists can be redistributed, achieving a fairer society. Of course, capitalists love to form unions (chambers of commerce) but hate when workers form unions, and use the power of the state to prevent it. A more fair arrangement, would be for people to earn money according to effort and sacrifice toward a socially useful task, to be determined in a participatory manner by worker and consumer councils. Anarchist catalonia in the 1930s, was probably the best model that one could follow within an industrial system, and the least bureaucratic. So-called libertarian capitalism is far more bureaucratic, even in theory. The word "libertarian" was always used for libertarian communism aka anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism or council communism. Some jokers in the US later stole the term "libertarian"and started using it in relation to capitalism. Just ridiculous. Capitalism needs a government and thus will always need government bureaucracies. Although corporations themselves form bureaucracies at least as bad as those of government. State capitalist societies like the US are far more efficient than more free market societies. And every country has tended to need a period of protectionism and government investment to build up their industry before they could compete in a more open market. 

But in any case, as i already said, all industrial systems, from soviet style communism, to western style capitalism, to even anarcho-syndicalism are illegitimate for a simple reason: they cause ecocide to different degrees. Only a massive reduction of population/production (which seems to be consistent only with preindustrial society) reduces ecocide enough to be worthy of contemplation. 

[KorbenDallas]

 

[SteveWolfer]

Quote

"Only a massive reduction of population/production (which seems to be consistent only with preindustrial society) reduces ecocide enough to be worthy of contemplation."

There we have the complete divorce of reason from reality.  Value without people or production.

 

Michael, your 'hambone' analysis was priceless.  :-)

And, as a matter of fact, for just a split instance I was transported outside myself and allowed to see the universe from the outside, and you were right.  He has found a way to speak for the cosmos as to what the order of importance is for all things.

[KorbenDallas]

20 minutes ago, SteveWolfer said:

And, as a matter of fact, for just a split instance I was transported outside myself and allowed to see the universe from the outside

Steve,

That might have been a glitch in the Matrix.  It happens from time to time.  There are several accounts on the Internet of people having them, so it must be true.