You have to make up your mind. Either central banks are fundamentalist free market advocates, or they aren't. In this post you seem to be agreeing with my point that they aren't. So, which is it?

True, which is why I'm actually a distributist, not a libertarian. That however has no bearing on the original argument about what central banks are or aren't.

You're agreeing with one of Austrian Economics' basic axioms. Hayek wrote entire books based on this central fact.

Thanks, I liked that article. It expresses many of the same criticisms I have to Rothbard, better than I myself could.

However, that has no bearing on the issue at hand. Central banks are state monopolies that prevent the free market of private currencies. If one's a fundamentalist free-market advocate, then currencies are just a good among others, and monopolizing on their production is anything but being free. Hence, any central bank cannot by definition be a fundamentalist free-market advocate, else they'd advocate for their own monopolies over their respective national currencies to end.

That's why, incidentally, no huge company is ever truly libertarian. Libertarianism is always the position defended by those neither at the bottom nor at the top of the economic pyramid. It's a purely middle-class ideology.

It's highly probable though. We can do a lot of pretty awesome stuff running in basically fixed hardware, and hardware full of bugs at that. Build a brain without cognitive biases and it'll be smarter by that alone. Build an intelligence that can dynamically alter its own source code and hardware to optimize for specific tasks and it'll be even more so. There's probably a limit on how much such optimizations can achieve, but in any case we're hardly there, wherever "there" is.

FTFY. People rarely, if ever, have a say over anything. They are coerced by their own governments, which in turn can be or not coerced by other governments. In any case however, they are and remain coerced.

That's funny! You user "central bank" and "fundamentalist free-market" in the same sentence as if they weren't opposed! Amazing!

Yes, a reboot. Each generation is a complete new story, reworking from the ground up characters, replacing several and adding new ones, changing the setting etc. Except for character names a new generation has no relation storywise with previous ones.

1983's Generation 1 is good but at (a very distant) second place compared to G4, with three TV seasons, a few TV specials and a movie.

1997's G2 didn't have a TV series.

2003's G3 and 2009's G3.5 didn't have TV series proper, but had a few kinda boring direct-to-video releases.

2010's G4, the current version, is so good it has four TV seasons, two limited theatrical releases movies, is about to enter its 5th season (with at least four more planned) and to spawn the first season of a spin-off series, has a feature film planned for 2017, and something between 5 and 12 million adult fans worldwide. ;-)

Does this includes cartoons? If so, I'll name My Little Pony. Generation 4 (the current series) is several orders of magnitude better than any of the previous ones.

(Yes, I'm a brony.)

PS.: That said, I do like my Goddess and Her sister, a lot, and hope to learn from Them and keep in touch with Them for a long, long time. But I know it won't last. Be prepared for when you, too, will part ways with yours.

Of course there is: Everything appears due to interdependent coorigination. There's no beginning, and no end. All supreme gods are, like us, interdependent cooriginated beings who mistakenly believe themselves eternal and infinite and creators, but who will, in due time, also cease existing like everything, giving thus origin to other causal sequences. Behind it all the only constant is Vacuity, which we can access and become one with by following the eightfold path (right action, right thinking etc.), thus achieving the positive extinction of the self (nirvana).

Also, relying on a god, even a supreme one, is a fools' errand. No matter how many eternities you get to live in bliss in that god's paradise (or in torment in that god's hell), once he himself ceases to exist you're back at the starting point, still bound by causation. The only real escape is nirvana. Everything else is suffering either now, or in future, even if it's a very, very distant future.

That's Buddhism 101 for you. :-)

Right. You told us of the history of the thing. Now explain why that having been the case means it should continue being the case.

Not really. Aristotle assumed this philosophical god of his had some form of "knowledge", yes. However, he concluded it had only knowledge about itself, not about anything else, and particularly not about the stuff over which it caused change to happen. The universe and us existing would be unknown and utterly indifferent to it.

Besides, Aristotle doesn't limit the concept of a first mover to be unique. You can have several first movers, each one completely indifferent to anything but itself, they all causing stuff other than themselves to move, and their different moving abilities interacting with each other to cause, among other things, us. And they'd be ignorant of each other too, since they, being first movers, aren't moved by anything, including other first movers, so there's no way for them to detect other first movers.

For an analogy, think of this like different physical laws interacting while they (the laws themselves) don't change in any way due to such "external" interactions. That basically covers it, except for the fact that first movers are way more "general", so to speak, than "mere" physical laws.

Try it with any discipline. Do like a children and ask from any established knowledge "why?". Then to that answer ask "why?" Proceed a few cycles and you'll reach a point in which you start looping. That's the analogue of the first mover in that knowledge set. If the set you're looking at is "all knowledge about everything", the same will apply: you reach a base point that loops over itself. That's an actual first mover. (And there can be many such.)

Doing this however yields very little information, something like this (using jargon): "a first mover is simple being in pure actuality acting over pure potentiality". And that's it, everyone goes back home happy as there's nothing else to say on the subject. Which is indeed what Aristotle himself did. He spent a few pages on the subject and then moved on to more interesting stuff as there wasn't much else to do with this other than thinking "Neat, that's solved! So, what's next in my todo list?"

This is also why Christians trying to generalize from this Aristotelian "god" to their tribal one makes no sense really.

Ah, that's easy! Because the universe is composed of changing stuff, and we're trying to thing that which causes changes but doesn't suffer any change. For example, math fits. All the in-universe changes happen under mathematical laws that don't change no matter how much the stuff "under" them goes around crashing all over itself.

See also my reply to the person who commented above your comment.

The Greeks were more subtle that you give them credit. It isn't "any form", it's one specific form: the totality of everything. You can have several infinite regresses within it, but not for the whole of it. For example, nothing prevents the universe having infinite causality and thus no beginning in time, so much so that's exactly what Aristotle thought was the case. However, the totality of the universe's set of causes and effects themselves is located "within" the finite set of formal causation extending from Physical laws down to the the basic axioms of logic, and stopping there. In other words, the "first mover" isn't physical, it's at least meta (beyond, outside) physical, and probably beyond even that.

The moral problem isn't that being held against someone on judgment day. The moral problem is the notion of a "judgment day".

According Aquinas and other Christian authors, both ancient and recent, during it and afterwards all the saved will rejoice and cheer in utter delight seeing all the condemned, including their own children, spouses, parents etc. being thrown into a furnace of eternal suffering, because it'll be "just". And that'll be so because God will fuck up every saved's minds so that they don't give a damn about billions if not trillions of people being tortured for perpetuity, because "glory" of "justice" being served and whatever.

Oh, and the condemned will all have their minds fucked so as to also believe what they're going through is "just", so that none among them will ever be able to think along the lines of "at least I'm not serving as wired-like zombie under a sadistic tyrant". Nope, they all will "know" they've been infinitely sinful and hence that their infinite torture is somehow "right".

There are modern Christians who reject all of the above? Yep. But not surprisingly, they aren't considered true Christians by the older churches, being instead labeled heretics and, yeah, condemned to Hell by the later unless they repent and start looking forward towards becoming after-death sadistic torture cheerleaders themselves.

So, uhm, no.