These people should pick up an Intro to Psychology textbook before they start spewing garbage like this. Or even read the Wikipedia entry for agoraphobia.

KarenX wrote:

Shack says that he's never heard of anyone with psychological problems who has had good parents,

Then again, FDRers say that they've never heard of anyone PERIOD who has had good parents.

Well if their philosophy professors are any good, they'll just be forced to either confront the blatant inadequacy of Stefan's philosophical views or find a new line of study in light of the inexcusable corruption of the philosophical mainstream. Either way, Stefan's ideas aren't getting into any upper level philosophy classrooms intact.

Well philosophy students are almost necessarily bad philosophers. I don't think that FDR's nonsense is much worse than a lot of the other terribly indefensible philosophies that people carry around their necks.

Danny's definitely right about these ideas not being able to sustain a full degree program. But I think it's more likely that most of these people will eventually find new majors or drop out of college entirely. Stefan's biggest fan base is among disaffected adolescents. How many of these people are actually going to complete a degree in philosophy? Most people change their majors anyway.

Brand new defoo here. She is a beautiful young student, and seems to have everything going for her. She defoo'd 4 days ago, at the inspiration of her "2 new best friends" from FDR, and something she read on one of their websites. She read RTR, and went from there. She is excited and thrilled about defooing at this point, although she says, "I am struggling to believe that I can live independently. And sometimes I even miss the parents I never had." Is this logical?

http://freedomainradio.com/board/forums/t/20498.aspx

Something else interesting about this. I once saw a friend (FDRer) trying to "convert" a non-FDRer via facebook chatting. When he did this, he had another FDRer come on and help him....so they worked as a pair. I wonder if this is one of their suggested ways of working? This is how they worked the day that I was observing (though it was not successful), and this is how they worked with this new convert mentioned in my above post.

so what did you do after high school? did university never appeal to you? did you start working immediately? travel? build a gigantic ship made out of stuffed animals? what did you do?

Well, here's my biography-in-brief:

I had a job writing software during high school, and I kept that for a little while after I graduated. Then I spent a year at university thinking I would study computer science. I didn't have the necessary attention span for classes, though, and did relatively poorly. So I left, and went back to the software company.

I then moved to Boston, briefly, and became a garbage collector until I re-enrolled in university for another attempt. That lasted just over a year until I failed out for all the same reasons. From there I became a bus driver for awhile until I got engaged. My wife and I moved back to Boston so that she could start a masters program, and I worked as a janitor.

Then I thought I should really go back to college, so I re-enrolled. But before classes began I was convinced into taking a consulting job with a web development firm here in Boston, and have been doing that for about three years now.

I think, in all that time, I never took a class that was higher than 200 level.

It can be difficult to even get interviews without a bachelor's degree, which was one of the reasons I continually went back. Otherwise I doubt I would have taken the aforementioned jobs. The position that I have now is one that I got by taking a very short-term job for the company when it needed to hire someone quickly. After I did some work for them, they realized that I was worth keeping around, but it would have been hard to convince them of that with just a resume.

Despite spending a more than two years in college, I never really progressed past the standard first-year courses. So I have taken my share of philosophy, calculus, psychology, biology, english lit., economics, etc. classes, but I can't say how much time I actually spent in attendance, and I doubt I ever wrote a decent paper for any of them.

I think that my short time in university, like so many people's, was a sort of consumer good: I learned a lot of things in very shallow ways; I made friends; I became financially independent from my family; I moved into my first apartment; I met my wife. I wouldn't trade those experiences, and they definitely shaped my life in dramatic ways. But considering how much college tuition costs, it's hard for me to imagine that it was a productive investment of time and money.