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According to Plato, known existents are actually shadows or copies of pure Ideas located in the Hyperuranion. Likewise, in a materialist framework, mental "existents" (percepts) are mere shadows or copies of pure Things located in the Physical™ world. The idea is that mind-stuff is unable to produce matter, because of the Law of Identity: mind-stuff has an identity that is toto genere different from the identity of matter. On the other hand, matter can easily produce mind-stuff because.. it just can, okay? Peikoff is constantly oscillating between different meanings of the word "consciousness", according to what is convenient for his purposes. At the beginning of the quoted part, he takes "consciousness" to mean passive awareness of objects; he then shifts to a broader meaning which encompasses volitional aspects, like fantasizing/desiring that the food disappears. It doesn't seem to occur to Peikoff that, as per the Law of Identity, even if a mind was able to productively create the entirety of the contents of consciousness, the creative process itself would not be "free", but constrained by certain laws. I'm free to draw a line in my mind, but I'm not free to do so without making use of point and space. The laws of geometry are the necessary "stage" for freely drawing the line, which is to say: the mind produces not just one kind of representation (drawing the line) but also the representation of the lawful backdrop (point and space). Metaphysics is not as simple as trying to make food disappear. Here is the original claim: And this cannot be stressed enough. Man can err, yet at the same time be completely convinced that he is merely "following reality". Try to challenge his assertions, and you're met with replies such as "Well.. is 2+2=4?!", implying that, since he was merely following "reality", his conclusion was pristine and perfect. The only "authority" is intellectual honesty when dealing with reality.

G.K. Chesterton is mostly right. 'I stated later that objectivism [sic] posits goals “that are not even desirable: commitment to the maintenance of a full intellectual focus, to the constant expansion of one’s understanding and knowledge, and to never permitting oneself contradictions. If any individual were truly as devoted to these goals as the objectivists [sic] urge him to be, he would be compulsively rational­­ and therefore inhuman and irrational.' -Albert Ellis, Is Objectivism a Religion?

"Myth No. 4: Trade and open markets create "a race to the bottom." That's how Jon Stewart decries globalization on his show, saying, "Globalization allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations!" ---- That problem child, "globalization", would be fine and dandy when governments are barred from entry, economy and state kept strictly apart . Individuals (and companies) deal and trade with others, wherever and whenever they see opportunities and at their own risk. As it is, the large corporates operate "hand-in-glove" with their Gvt which in turn makes deals with foreign gvts. That is then, corporate-globalization, backed, and given entree by, the power of states. Corporatocracy plus statism. (which gives spurious credibilty to socialists who claim capitalism = imperialism ("/neocolonialism") As good a place for this essay by Jeffrey Tucker https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force? Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed. Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit. Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount? At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

My Ethical Theory and Rand’s Perception of mind-independent existence is fundamental to human consciousness, though not the whole of what is fundamental in human consciousness. “Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. No one understanding the statement “Existence exists,” whether uttered, signed, or written, has such an occasion of consciousness without co-referential history and ongoing context of his or her language and intellectual community. The reader is not without the writer, and the thinker addresses a standing audience of others, however unspecified, as well as self. Co-reference precedes the one-word stage of language acquisition, and ever after the acquisition of language, the standing suitability for co-reference attends every thought that something is the case. Co-referential potential of thought, and the mutual recognition of intentional being that requires, is a condition of one’s existence as a thinker in language. Indeed, pronominal other person is in and with oneself as existence is in and with oneself. In one’s conscious and subconscious existence is resonance with existence in general, resonance with living existence, and special of the latter, resonance with other person. “Existence exists” is registration of existing among other existents. Further, the act of grasping the statement “Existence exists,” I observe, implies performance of and grasp of acts, not only acts of consciousness, but acts of living body. There are no acts of and grasps of consciousness without acts of and intentional grasps with one’s living body. There is no grasp of the externality of existence to subject without grasps of externality to one’s body. If one observes one’s consciousness, one is acquainted with one’s living body and one’s actions with it. Moreover, one knows in any episodes of post-linguistic observational consciousness others of one’s acting and conscious kind. Then too, one had always (in a practical sense of always) known Mother or other caregiver. “Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. There is normativity in that most basic metaphysical frame (mine, not Rand’s). We are given, dedicated to grasping reality in awareness concerted with other and in coordinated acts with other. This is automatic animal engineering-performance-norm of operation. We are given, already loving truth, truth-getting, act, self, and other. With later education, we learn that life ends, that it requires maintenance, and in our human case, that it requires production and education and social cooperative conventions. We learn that those means to life require a waking state and adequate sleep. Going beyond the original grasp of life in breath and cry and suckle, learning more of life and its requirements requires some focused effort. The plenty and exuberance of human life of today required individual creativity, initiative, and freedom coordinated at the large social scale by moral- and rights-constraints on treatments of others. Human moral life arises in the milieu of learned character of life, all within and ever with the basic frame “Existence exists, we live.” In learning life beyond the basic knowing, we can grasp the concept of “alternative” mined by Ayn Rand: Only with advent of the ends-getting organized matter that is life do alternatives enter nature. I observe, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I wrote in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born. In moral life, we elect to keep life going, including to keep going life known in the basic frame. Once we have the developed powers, we elect to keep thinking, coordinating, creating, and producing. The moral virtue of truth-telling is rooted in the basic frame, constantly at hand. Life known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves. Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves. The preceding is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence. Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions. That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism. To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course. I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running. Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous. The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or in seeking specialized skills from others. Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story. Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway. Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives. Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self. Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending. The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue. One failing to have it is in human failure, including moral failure. Although my account builds on a social nature of human individuals running deeper than social nature as characterized by Rand, I land in much agreement with Rand on general characterization of life as self-generated and self-maintaining action and as teleological action (even for vegetative actions such as gravitropic plant roots) and with life as the phenomenon among existents with which such things as function, needs, alternatives, problems, and solutions enter the world at all. All of those features are in stark contrast to inanimate matter in our ordinary experience and as in our modern science. In the case of human selves and lives, all of those glories are reached in coordination with others, living or long deceased, and humans have greater choice than other animals in shaping longer arcs in their lives. As with Rand's ethics, Rationality remains the overarching human virtue, although, into my reasons for that there is not only the instrumental value of rationality (solo and in cooperation) for successful continuation of life, but the inherent value of rationality to human self and life, including joint participation of rationality in lives and selves. Rationality is inherently self-directed, so independence in a social environment (in thought and in making a life) remains a virtue, as with Rand. Creativity and productivity and integrity and benevolence and voluntary association are also part and parcel of my broadened notion of rational human nature. There is an additional distinctive feature in Rand's general characterization of life I'd like address: Life is an end in itself. I endorse that characterization also, although what constitutes individual human life is deeper in its connections to others, than in Rand's characterization of it, and that is so, even though in maturity choice is a factor in which relationships are instituted. Rand had the circumstance that life is an end in itself in a beautiful dual role in her ethics. (i) Directed to one's general moral conduct in all circumstances, it has one rightly treating oneself as an end in itself; self-interest is the ultimate criterion for any decisions or actions. (ii) Directed to one's conduct towards others, Rand adds that they too are ends in themselves and that conformance to individual rights correctly has each treated as an end in himself and makes possible each continuing self-direction all together in coordination. The second (ii) is correct within my system. The first (i) is not, because self-interest (or other-interest) are inadequate moral criteria stemming from inadequate understanding of human nature. Life known in my basic metaphysical frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specifications. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves. Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves. Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending. The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue.

I have long praised a happy result of the free market: It discourages racism. Two memorable examples I have brought up here include commercial desegregation in Houston (when segregation was called "bad for business") and the universal reach of the Sears catalog across the South. Both of these show capitalism blunting the force of segregation, or helping end it outright. Notably, thanks to a recent John Stossel article, we can now add a historic example of capitalism actively resisting Jim Crow due to the power of self-interest:Image by Unknown Photographer, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain."It's often forgotten that owners of buses, railways, streetcars in the American South didn't really segregate systematically until the late 19th century," says [economist Johan] Norberg [, author of Capitalist Manifesto]. "It was probably not because they were less racist than others in the South, but they were capitalists. They wanted money, they wanted clients, and they didn't want to engage in some sort of costly and brutal policing business in segregating buses." Even when segregation was mandated, some streetcar companies refused to comply. For several years after Jim Crow laws passed, black customers sat wherever they wanted. Norberg adds, "Those owners of public transport, they fought those discriminatory laws because they imposed a terrible cost….They tried to bypass them secretly and fight them in courts. They were often fined. Some were threatened with imprisonment." The streetcar company in Mobile, Alabama, only obeyed Jim Crow laws after their conductors began to get arrested and fined. [bold added]Notice that capitalism, the system that respects individual rights, strongly penalizes racism, because it is antithetical to a person's actual self-interest: It took the active abuse of government, in the form of fines and imprisonment, to fully implement the costly folly of treating customers badly, or forfeiting them altogether. I have not myself read Norberg's book, but on this evidence, it appears to be worth consideration by any serious advocate of capitalism or racial equality. -- CAVLink to Original

Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite. Schwartz says in part:Certainly, a growing anti-Semitism is at work. But the more fundamental explanation is the one provided by a schoolteacher in Atlanta, as reported in the Nov. 5 NY Times ("Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race"). She posted the following message on Facebook, defending her unequivocal backing of the Palestinians against Israel: "The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die." She is stating the essence of a moral code that is accepted by virtually everyone today: the code of altruism. According to that code, need is the ultimate standard of morality. If others are in need, nothing else matters -- you have a duty to satisfy their needs.Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on. I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone. Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"The left would say, Don't believe your lying eyes or mind about this evil man. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, license.)The Western left's blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel's actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East's fate, while the rest of them -- Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran -- are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel's vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says 'white' people are powerful and 'brown' people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too. The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its 'Zionist' oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran's crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself... [bold added]The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed. If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice. By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent. They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway. -- CAVLink to Original

About a year ago, Florida enacted a draconian anti-immigration measure that, as I put it, "conscript many otherwise productive Floridians for border patrol duty." Predictably, this is now damaging its economy:About a year ago, Florida Governor and then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis passed one of the toughest crackdowns on immigration in the country. SB1718 punishes employers who use undocumented labor and forbids undocumented people from having a driver's license. Many local Florida businesses say the new law has led to workers leaving the state, hurting their bottom line. "A lot of people are scared," says [fruit farmer Fidel] Sanchez. "A lot of people went north and never came back."The article notes that this artificially-induced labor shortage is not just increasing produce prices: It's poised to damage the state's economy to the tune of $12.6 billion in added costs. The NPR piece correctly advocates immigration reform, but I have noted before that this should also include citizenship reform, as, in the long run, abolition of the welfare state. As I said of that last, years ago:Were the educational and medical sectors privately run, we would not attract or encourage freeloaders, and non-citizens who used these facilities would be paying customers. Who could complain about that?Conservatives like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump are eroding America's proud and prosperous history as a destination for hard-working and enterprising people from around the world. Instead, they could be making it easier for people to get here and stay here, and for those of us already here to keep our own money, while also benefiting from the chance to trade with the world's best workers and customers. -- CAV P.S. On the subject of immigration reform, I highly recommend the talk embedded below. Link to Original

Print my whole statement. No, nevermind. I'll not bother with you further.

Monart, let me respond to these last two secondary posts of yours together in this note. On the Rand question, I don't have an answer either way, at least not thinking of it as what a definite deceased person would think. Our loved ones in life are continually surprising us and delighting us with some amount of unpredictability in their thought and expressions. Our experience of that part of them is part of our loss when they die. I'll allow as at least a slight possibility that Rand would agree with me as you posed. However, if she did, and if she wanted to say that her philosophy had not changed in any of its essentials by this change, that might take quite some tall argumentation. On your second post, there has been some deliberate public not-mention of Boydstun perhaps, but I think that can be for all the reasons you mentioned at the same time. Also, for the reason of not advertising alternatives or extensions (notably, as mere extension, my 2004 "Universals and Measurement") that were not worked through and published with the imprimatur of their own organization. Three professional Objectivist philosophers have very possibly picked up original ideas of mine (published in the 1990's, also the 2004) and incorporated them in their written presentations without giving any credit: Gotthelf – my idea of independent causal chains in connection with physics and free will; Binswanger – introducing into his expositions the Moh's hardness scale for exemplification of ordinal measurement in the physical realm (re Rand's theory of concepts) and gravitropisms in some plant roots for best contrast of gravity pulling a stone into rolling down a hill (re teleology of vegetative life); and Rheins – mention that the law of identity does not strictly imply uniqueness of outcomes from same initial conditions in physics (which, he neglects to mention, Rand and Peikoff had always supposed it did). All of these presentations tried to pass off these tidbits and outlooks as part of Rand's thought, which they most certainly were not, and which in the ordinal measurement topic, she flatly contradicted. But as you suggest, on to our own frontier. The flowering of online forums and of FB has allowed us to get our thought before more eyes and minds for these several years and perhaps will be here for future minds beyond our lifetimes. Minds communicating with minds is the core. All record of it is erased by thermodynamics eventually, just as all record that humans ever existed. What mattered was only while life was.

Ooops! Resonant, not Radiant. Maybe praise from MP was close in my head. Or maybe it was some sort of Freudian slip (when you say one thing, but mean your mother).

Productivity itself is context-laden, and in fact it is you who are taking it out of context. Something that causes a loss is not productive, it is counter-productive. False. There is no such thing as excessive pride. Arrogance is false pride, it's a pretense, because it doesn't have the reality to back it up. False. Emotional repression is false rationality, it's a pretense that consists of evading one's emotions. False. A workaholic lifestyle is a pretense, not an excess, and it does not lead to productivity.

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

These Hours of Radiant Existence* This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy. The ten short chapters in this monograph are: I. Existence II. Other III. Divisions of Existence IV. Entities V. Passage VI. Situation VII. Character VIII. Science and Mathematics IX. Logic X. Mortal Life and Value ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology. Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective. This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary? So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil. To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse. I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information. The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late. At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most military significance at present: Iran doesn't have the nuclear capability it has been trying to develop. This attack could have been far worse, and harder to deal with if that had not been the case. And after this weekend there is no doubt that this scenario must be averted, in the minimal form of the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Ideally, the West also does whatever it can to topple the murderous, theocratic regime behind the attack and decades of terrorism and proxy conflicts. See also "End States That Sponsor Terrorism," by Leonard Peikoff. As became apparent during the podcast, the need to end Iran's nuclear capability is a point many in Israel seem to grasp, as the following, quote of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, tweeted by Open Source Intel would indicate:Some points regarding the overnight Iranian missile attack on Israel:Contrary to what pundits are saying, this wasn't designed merely as "bells and whistles" with no damage. When you shoot 350 flying objects timed to hit Israel at the same moment, when you use three fundamentally different weapon types -- cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and UAVs, you're looking to penetrate Israel's defenses and kill Israelis.The US administration is telling us: "This is a victory, you've already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action." No, it's NOT a victory. Yes, it's a remarkable success of Israel's air defense systems, but it's not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you've NOT won. You don't win wars just by intercepting your enemy's hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.It's incorrect to say "nobody got hurt". There's a 7 year-old Israeli-Arab girl called Amina Elhasuny fighting for her life. That's who coward Khamenei hit. The Islamic Republic of Iran made a big mistake. For the past 30 years it's been wreaking havoc on the region -- through its proxies. A terror-octopus whose head is Tehran, and its tentacles are in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza. How convenient. The Mullahs send others to conduct horrendous terror attacks, and die for them. Other people's blood. Israel's strategic mistake for the past 30 years was to play along this strategy. We always fought the Octopus' arms, but hardly exacted a price from its Iranian head. This should change now: Hezbollah or Hamas shoots a rocket at Israel? Tehran pays a price. The enemy is the Iranian REGIME, not the wonderful Iranian people. The Iranian regime reminds me of the Soviet regime in 1985: corrupt to the core, old, incompetent, despised by its own people, and destined to collapse. The sooner the better. The West can accelerate the regime's inevitable collapse with a set of soft and clever actions, short of military force. Remember, USSR collapsed without any need for a direct American attack. Let's do this. Israel is fighting everybody's war. In Gaza, Lebanon and Tehran. We're considered "the small satan" by radical Islam. America is the big one. I'll be clear: if these crazy fanatic Islamic terrorists get away with murder by hiding among civilians, this method will be adopted by terrorists worldwide. We're not asking anyone to fight for us. We'll do the job. But we do expect our allies to have our back, especially when it's tough -- and now it's tough. Be on the right side and help us defeat these horrible and savage regimes.That army of useful idiots -- the ninnies who are worrying about "escalation" -- are ignoring what happened on October 7 and over this weekend: Iran has already escalated unprovoked twice, and is going to escalate again, anyway. Its threats of doing worse if Israel retaliates are superflous and should be ignored, because these theocrats plan atrocities, genocide, and tyranny regardless of what we do. This is war. We should fight it on our own terms. This attack on Israel is a proxy attack on the West by dogs that smell fear. Let's snuff out these animals while they are still weak. -- CAVLink to Original

Everybody gets the blues once in a while. A few moments from Ayn Rand's life, as recounted by Nathaniel Branden in Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989): By the fall of 1958, it was apparent that Ayn was sinking into a deep and tenacious depression. Not the sales of her novel or the torrent of fan mail or any of the interesting people we were meeting seemed to cheer her for more than a few hours or evoke in her any desire to write again. The thought of another project—any other project—exhausted her. Every day, she sat long hours at her desk playing solitaire, the game becoming a metaphor for her sense of her position in the world. She did not read. She left her correspondence largely unanswered. Her body ached with numerous tension pains. She had written a novel about a man who stops the motor of the world; now it was as if her motor had stopped. She saw herself as trapped in a swamp of mediocrity, malice, and cowardice. She had found admirers but no champions. . . I thought she was experiencing a delayed letdown after thirteen years of high emotional intensity while writing Atlas full-time. Ordinary living could hardly compete. In many of our discussions, from the summer of 1958 and for the next two years, she would begin to cry while describing her perception of the world and her own place in it, and she confided that she cried almost every day. This struck me as shockingly out of character, and I realized that I had underestimated the depth of Ayn’s struggle, with which I felt enormous and painful empathy. We had long conversations on the telephone every day. I visited her two or three evenings a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barbara, so we could discuss how we might better interpret the events that were such blows to Ayn’s ambition, energy, and enthusiasm. These sessions typically lasted until five or six in the morning. Her suffering was devastating to watch. [...] Ayn’s depression persisted relentlessly. “I’m ashamed of myself for crying so much,” Ayn said one evening. “The Collective would be shocked if they knew. You don’t tell them, do you?” I told her I did not. “Galt would handle all this differently. Somehow, he would be more untouched by it. More realistic. But I don’t know how or in what way. I would hate for him to see me like this. I would feel unworthy, as if I had let him down.” I was used to hearing her discuss Galt as if he were a real person; all of us did that. I said, “I look at it differently. If I were knocked down and hurt badly by something that had happened to me, so that I was crying a lot or devastated or whatever, I think I would say, ‘All right, look at me. I’m in a bad way. So what? In a little while, I’ll pick myself up again. Meanwhile, this is reality. Why pretend it isn’t?’ ” She chuckled unhappily. “You’re quoting my own philosophy back to me. Only, for once, I can’t seem to apply it.” (ch. 11) Her view of depression, if accurately told, was interesting: When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression had a biological basis, she answered angrily, “I can tell you what causes depression. I can tell you about rational depression, and I can tell you about irrational depression. The second is mostly self-pity, and in neither case does biology enter into it.” I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, given that she had never studied the field. She shrugged bitterly and snapped, “Because I know how to think.” (ch. 15) I suppose she would have scoffed at Schopenhauer's claim:

These Hours of Resonant Existence

Lots of material about the debate or, more broadly, about the issues between them: albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Search (bing.com) albert ellis nathaniel branden debate - Google Search

It's possible, today in the US-C of A, to live healthily to a hundred or more. I, myself, have a healthy-hundred as my goal. At 74, I'm as fit mentally and physically, overall, as the usual 64 or younger (even with the poor start of my malnourished childhood in the poverty of Maoist China). Whatever one's age or condition, one could live more healthily and longer. See "The Five Doctors" and the Comment following it. The key to a healthy self and a longer life is to be healthy every day in every way for the rest of your life. A healthy self is integral to the continual betterment of one's life-long self-knowledge and self-realization. Could this help you to "tie in [your] selfish subjective experience/relation to . . . objective reality"?

Monart, By we in this context, I mean only the combination self and other. On day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know there are other humans, things like oneself, with inner life. Although, at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind (and we have only begun to develop powers of memory.) I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. (We begin to use the personal pronouns "I, me" at age two.) But as adults or near-adults, we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, an element that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by adulthood, we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the objective prize we are joined with by other. I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence, and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny "Existence is Identity" lands in contradiction, and is therefore false. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams or perceptual illusions, being derivative with respect to the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called success consciousness that type of consciousness Rand took for fundamental. Rand’s “corollary axiom” with “Existence exists,” you recall, runs this way: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (Rand 1957, 1015). The counterpart in my system: ‘Existence exists, we live’. The act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Rand erred in omitting express, elementary knowing of aliveness of self and others in elementary knowing of consciousness. Rand did not omit altogether elementary knowing of aliveness in elementary knowing of consciousness in her mature philosophy, although that elementary nexus is not highlighted. Some sort of impossibility of mind without life is affirmed later in the speech when Rand writes of the alternative “your mind or your life” that “neither is possible to man without the other” (1957, 1022). Then too, when something she wrote in Galt’s speech “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible” (1013) is joined with something else in the speech “A rational process is a moral process” (1017), it could be inferred that, at least in higher, rational consciousness, its aliveness is implicit in its episodes and this fact is reflectively accessible within such consciousness. Also, in oral exchange years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: “It’s a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That’s what the concept means” (ITOE App. 252).

Jon needs to be immediately banned. I did it once and it needs to be permanent. He is extremely evil, anti-intellectual and is against all that is good in the world. He is explicitly one of the most evil people alive.

This. And whoever put a laughing emoji to Gus’s post needs a ban as a laughing supporter of evil.

I understand that there are a million details, but the point is that the principle of allowing a totalitarian dictatorship that is the principle creator of virtually all terrorism in the world to exist and continue its actions against anyone at any time, let alone semi-free nations like Israel and our nation, regardless of how it can be "defended against" is appeasement of evil and is why it ( 😉 proof of hacking domestic terrorism as I type this out, but don't derail) this has continued to occur and will continue to occur and get exponentially worse. Especially, a rights violating terrorist dictatorship like Iran potentially possessing nukes. Peikoff wrote after 9/11 that "states" that support terrorism need to be ended, we didn't do and things keep getting worse and will continue getting exponentially worse as a function of time. Ending totalitarian dictatorships that are the source of terrorism, mass death, and evil, while enslaving their own population while attempting to enslave and/or destroy the entire world is the only moral action especially when they start explicitly attacking semi-free free nations and/or threatening their existence not to mention the existence of the world itself.

Ayn Rand lived long enough to discover and present an immense system of thought as that guide you seek. If Stephen lives to a hundred, he may write a magnum opus to also help you further along.

This is brilliant, innovative, and inspiring. It stimulates wonder and reads like metaphysical poetry. I'm fully engaged and in resonance with it as I marvel at it.

For a brilliant, innovative synopsis of all Existence, see the new These Hours of Resonant Existence by Stephen Boydstun. It reads like metaphysical poetry.

He's not trying; he's going full tilt. And yet, he thinks that teleology is false. That's a rather odd thing: he claims that something untrue is, in fact, true. It's quite unintelligible, from an Objectivist framework, why someone would ever want to do that. But temporarily switching to Mainländer's standpoint might remove some of that unintelligibility. I suspect that most people (but by no means all of them) would simply yawn if someone told them that atoms tend towards stability. This is because human beings are not computer chips; they are teleological beings, whose constitution is specialized toward value-based frameworks: "want", "avoid", "like", "dislike", "seek", "fight". Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable." It's probably safe to assume that many listeners would find themselves involuntarily drawn to this story - even if they never cared about atoms before. Now, consider the following: The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; (*) Here, it's quite obvious for all readers that the poet is not actually claiming that the earth is thirsty. Notice, however, that the poem is true all the same. Give some water to your plants, and you will observe that the earth is, truly: very, very thirsty. So thirsty! Equipped with this new standpoint, here is Mainländer - the philosopher whose metaphysics is teleological - lambasting someone who took teleology to be literally true: "You teach a teleology that cannot be thought of as more comprehensive and terrible. You assume millions and billions of miracles every minute, and you, cruel romantic, want to throw us back into the dark Middle Ages, i.e., forge us into the dreadful chains of the physico-theological proof of the existence of God. You philosophize as if Kant were yet to be born, as if we are not fortunate enough to possess the second part of his Critique of Judgment. Do you wish to be a serious man of science, an honest researcher of nature? Do you not know that absolute teleology is the grave of all natural science?" - Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Vol. II., p. 570) And now we can revisit Mainländer's claim that the function of the world is to destroy all useful energy. Does the world really pursue that goal, or in fact, any goal? Probably not. Does everything unwittingly contribute to entropy, as if the world pursued its own demise? Yes. The judgement is true, just as the earth is, in fact, thirsty. Long before I discovered Objectivism or Kant, I was spontaneously creating regulative explanations of the world for myself. At no time did I believe those explanations to be factual; their factuality was beside the point. They satisfied my soul -much more than any dry descriptions of facts. Briefly put, a regulative judgement does not merely communicate facts; it makes those facts sink deep into your skin. It can turn something like entropy into a worldview that makes people be at peace with tension and chaos, and more mindful of what's worth pursuing and what isn't. And that's one way philosophy can contribute to human happiness.

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time. By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. According to New ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute is promoting a booklet titled Finding Morality and Happiness Without God, and quotes author Onkar Ghate:The basic reason religion remains such an esteemed aspect of American society is that it is considered important, even indispensable, to morality. The strongest form this idea takes is that morality depends on religion -- that without God, the distinction between good and evil loses meaning, and anything goes.Mentioning happiness in the title should intrigue the more active-minded: Thanks to religion, most people associate fear and guilt with morality, and are reluctant if not afraid to think about this life-and-death topic. We can blame the all-encompassing cultural stranglehold of religion for the fact that, while the true purpose of morality should be a huge sales advantage for Objectivism in the marketplace of ideas, it will cause suspicion for most. I think the exeception I noted above will more than offset the current disadvantage, since those who will be intrigued will inlcude some future intellectuals. 2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn advocates the free market as the solution the medical care crisis caused by Canada's government-run system. She outlines what this might look like in part:The very small percentage of people who could not afford to pay for health care or insurance would depend on private charity, and the quality of care would be protected, not only through competition and rights-protecting laws, but by private third-party licensing/certification. Healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, and others) benefit from private health care because competition among providers would enable them to negotiate fair compensation and working conditions, which in turn would attract more professionals to health care and eliminate staff shortages and burnout. The private healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics, professional practices) and medical insurance companies benefit by profiting from the quality and competitive pricing of their services.It is worth noting why Woiceshyn goes into such detail: The lack of truly private systems worldwide makes "envisioning how such a system would work ... difficult." 3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney addresses an interesting question that I'd put as What is the difference between a habit and an internal (psychological or mental) context?Image by Ping Lee, via Unsplash, license.Thanks to the influence of behaviorism, the term "habit" is commonly used to subsume a wide range of repeatable or regular behavior, regardless of the cause of such behavior. The problem with this is that different repeatable, regular behavior can have fundamentally different causes. Psychological concepts need to be defined in terms of fundamentals, i.e., by means of root causes, not superficial similarities. For this reason, I limit the term "habit" to automatized perceptual motor skills, i.e., physical actions that happen automatically in response to awareness of a particular kind of environment, unless you intervene to stop them.This is an important distinction: bad habits and unhelpful contexts make desirable self-directed action harder, but because they have different causes, combating or replacing them requires different approaches, which Moroney discusses throughout. 4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger considers the common claim that the United States is a "representative democracy." The most interesting part of the piece to me was the following:[Confusion on this issue is] because one needs to use the right method of concept formation. The right method allows one to validate one's concepts, rather than merely picking one term from those available.Picking one term from those available is ubiquitous today, and explains lots of what is wrong with the current political discourse. And that means not just that practically everyone falls into it on at least some issues, but it can be easy for those who don't to forget or be unaware that that is what often happens. This can affect how best to argue for a good position. The rest of the piece is highly instructive, both for its demonstration of the correct method of approaching the question and for its answer. -- CAVLink to Original

There is no ambiguity here: only living organisms can act in favor of a certain outcome, as against an alternative outcome. Further, being alive is the precondition of pursuing any outcomes in the first place, so no alternative is more fundamental than being alive or not. However, following this up with "matter is indestructible" is a non sequitur. Suppose that the quantity of matter gradually decreased, but very slowly. Or, suppose that half of matter is indestructible and the other half will eventually vanish. I reckon that, even in cases like these, it would still be absolutely true that only living beings are presented with alternatives. The part about the indestructibility of matter is completely irrelevant to her point. As a consequence, it can potentially confuse everyone, not just uncharitable readers. Although any deficiencies in the presentation do not diminish the value of the insight. I'm not familiar with Nozick, but I can speak from personal experience. In my case, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure arises when I get a specific impression: the impression that external reality is in perfect harmony with my own needs. So intoxicating is this feeling that, even if the aesthetic object is considered "stimulating," (erotic art, technological gadgets etc.) my natural appetites are instantly tranquilized and my mind is immobilized into a state of bliss. My interest in Friedrich Schelling's idealist philosophy is, in part, a response to the fact that he also traced aesthetic pleasure to the cognition of a harmony between the "I" and "not-I". This harmony could also be described as an organic unity between me and the world. Whether atoms partake in some grand teleological movement, I do not claim to know. The scare quotes are there because atoms are not conscious. In this context, I can make one observation: the gulf between many philosophies is, in principle, unbridgeable - because they define things very differently. Some examples: For Objectivists, to be "conscious" means to have first-person subjective experience of the external world. By contrast, in Advaita Vedanta, "consciousness" simply means "dynamic resposiveness to something external"; as a consequence, this definition encompasses atoms, plants reacting to stimuli, qualia-based awareness and the like. In Objectivism, to be "alive" involves pursuing certain things and fleeing from others. For Mainländer, "life" simply means that a chemical compound persists unless it encounters a situation that will break it down. Microbes are not more alive than sulfur; both represent different paradigms or plays on the same universal theme (persistence). According to Objectivism, free will means to regulate one's focus, to choose to think (and perhaps to be able to act "out of character"). Schopenhauer would quip that Objectivists merely think that their position is "free will", because they define things incorrectly; perhaps he'd say that Objectivists uphold some variety of compatibilism. In no other case is the "apples to oranges" saying truer than when comparing philosophies. "Altruism cannot be bad - how can helping other people be bad?" Every Objectivist must have heard this at least once, before proceeding to explain that helping others is not the same as being altruistic, so on and so forth. Experiences like this have thought me that whenever a philosopher seems to not see something blatantly obvious, he in fact does, and with gusto. If the above was a reference to Mainländer, he'd say that inspecting the parts of the locomotive without knowing what a locomotive does will always yield only partial knowledge. The function of the Universe is to destroy all useful energy. The thirst for life is the most effective means toward this goal. Or so he says. I also do not see Objectivism as an "optimistic" philosophy. Optimism is, plainly put, crude idiocy that is incompatible with reason or with a reality-oriented philosophy. Voltaire's response to Pope expressed this better than anyone.

Kyary, The context in Galt’s Speech in which Rand says “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms“ (1957, 1012) is one in which she is setting out a notion of alternatives as something presented only to living things. The fundamentality goes to location of that alternative among all the alternatives an organism might come into. (For much living process, these alternatives are not presented as choices before the organism; choice is not essential to alternatives in the conception she is trying to get into the reader’s head in this stretch.) The sentence immediately following the one you have quoted in isolation shows that Rand is contrasting inanimate matter to animate matter and that an essential to their difference is that animate matter has to pursue a specific course of action among alternatives having differential import for it’s continuation as animate matter. The emergence of the various forms of inanimate matter such as a tornado and the conditions that make such an inanimate formation possible are irrelevant in the context surrounding the sentence you quoted. To take the sentence from its context and give it a different context is to change the topic (in which, in the new context, the sentence would state an absurdity). That is cheap and is indeed beyond an absence of charitable reading. It is any-straw-for-derision-will-do. There are serious flaws in the philosophy, I’m sure, as any philosophy, waiting for serious, patient mining. Rand once remarked: “It is not fools I seek to address.” And indeed she did find not-fools who comprehended, for example, the conception of alternative she was articulating in this stretch of Galt’s Speech and who need for their suite of errors in Rand’s philosophy things genuinely in the philosophy. The point you bannered as you bannered it is not. The sentence you quoted is part of Rand’s argument to the momentous conclusion that value (and function and need and problem and so forth) arises only in the situation and process that is life. One way to topple this account of value would be to pose an alternative account and argue for the latter’s superiority in truth. One notable attempt along that line is the one of Robert Nozick in his Philosophical Explanations (1981). He points to the occasions of “organic unity” (which he as defined) in the world ranging from nature to art. He argues that the objective dimension of value is organic unity. I do not find this plausible. More plausible is that life is the basic and fullest occasion of organic unity and that all other occasions of organic unity are derivative of organic unity in life or are merely analogical. I don’t think the schemes of Empedocles, Schopenhauer, Mainländer, or Nietzsche (in his late imputation of will to power to even the inanimate world) have such plausibility (in our own era) as Nozick’s proposal. And his is wrong, Rand’s right, in my assessment. You talked of atoms wanting to become stabler, and you put want in scare quotes. That is a promising sign. A harmonic oscillator, classical or quantum, will tend to spend most of its time in its lowest energy state. That is cool, but there is nothing teleological about it and no need to understand it as teleological (and no need to take such a purported end-seeking as explanation for the teleological character of living things). Ditto, as I mentioned before, for the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of mechanics with their extremum principles. I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death. The Objectivist idea of a human-benevolent universe is not a naturalized mimicry of the idea of a benevolent God. It is not a postulate. It is only the proposition, with evidence, that humans with their power of reason fit superbly in the struggle for life and for wide, flexible grasp of reality, which has enabled ever more serviceability of nature for humans. It is the suitability to living and knowing of the character John Galt as described by Rand in the opening to Part III of her 1957 novel, which has affinity with Aristotle’s opening to Metaphysics. At times Rand displayed in her novels and declared in her nonfiction a sense of optimism (though pessimism about the future culture of Russia, taking its past as prologue). Rand’s optimism was not so far as Leibniz or the poet Alexander Pope. Rand’s optimism has some basis in the power and community of human reason, but I don’t see that optimism as strictly implied by the benevolent-universe idea. And in rejecting that optimism, one need not embrace the profound pessimism argued by Schopenhauer or Mainländer.

A further question should have been addressed. Which is worse, mandating display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, or public schools? I say the greater evil is public schools, not the Ten Commandments. The particular law is limited to governmental schools including schools receiving funding by the state, and therefore does not impose any religious requirements on purely private schools. In the original bill, there was a simple commandment to display the document which was only directed at public schools. I surmise that there was some discussion of whether this law would pass higher judicial review, which resulted in two economic hooks, the expansion where it includes schools receiving state funds, and the limitation that no school is compelled to spend its funds to purchase a display. I believe that the economic burden argument would have ultimately doomed the earlier version in the courts, whereas the current law encourages the good citizens of Louisiana to donate displays, in case some school has in mind using the economic burden as a justification for non-compliance. In comparing evils, it is hard to choose between Hitler, Stalin or Mao, but seemingly easy to choose between any or all of those three vs. Kant (did Kant actually kill anyone?). Yet I would deem Kant to be the greater evil, in that the harm caused by his philosophy includes all of the above mass murderers, plus public schools. Public schools are likewise a broader and less-obvious evil compared to allowing or requiring expressions of religion in “public spaces”. To effectively argue against such a law, you have to address and overcome the First Amendment rights of The Religious (which are abridged by prohibiting religious expressions in public spaces). The expressive rights of the many cannot be be sacrificed for the sake of the contrary expressive rights of the few (very few in Louisiana). Appeal to separation of church and state is a cheap and weak argument though probably the only one that stands a chance w.r.t. judicial review. The proper moral argument is, simply, directed at the evil concept of public schools. I see tadmjones made this identification also, while I was laboring over my screed.

While I would agree with the principle of avoiding theocracy, religious schools should not be disallowed in law. The solution is to do away with government supported schools. But Christianity is very foundational to Louisiana, Catholicism in particular as in their 'counties' are 'parishes'.

I second that. "Publish" it here in a new thread, they seem to be unable or not willing to block your access to this site.

Boydstun is not smearing you. The problem is in your head. Urgently go out and seek psychiatric help.

Over at The Bulwark is an instructive article titled "From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central" that follows the inevitable downward arc of a group of dissident intellectuals whose only unifying characteristic was that they had been ostracized from or chose not to participate in the leftist intellectual establishment. The article credits Bari Weiss's 2018 reservations about the group with being "prescient." Cathy Young quotes Weiss: "Could the intellectual wildness that made this alliance of heretics worth paying attention to become its undoing?" This is so prescient that it is practically a rhetorical question: As with atheism or any other mere rejection of an orthodoxy, being against something leaves wide open what one stands for. There is nothing inherently wrong with stating opposition to an orthodoxy. Sometimes, all one has the time or energy or public visibility to do is to make it known that one does not support some horrible idea or trend. But since this leaves open the question of why one opposes something, doing so as part of a group makes it look like one might agree with what other members of the group do believe. Doing so beyond a very specific issue is a big mistake, as the better members of this group learned over time:Sam Harris found himself having to distance himself from anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. (Image by Cmichel67, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)Not all of the IDW-associated figures featured in Weiss's article have veered crankward. American Enterprise Institute senior fellow emeritus Christina Hoff Sommers remains eminently sensible (and an anti-Trump centrist). Two others, Sam Harris and Claire Lehmann, have openly broken with and criticized the IDW. Harris -- a philosopher, neuroscientist, prominent atheist, and author -- said in November 2020 that he was disassociating himself from the IDW label over other IDW figures' embrace of Trump's election-fraud claims and other conspiracy theories, noting that some of them were "sounding fairly bonkers." Harris has made even sharper criticisms since then, especially over the anti-vaccine rhetoric. Lehmann, who founded the online magazine Quillette as a hub for heterodoxy in 2015 and was featured as the "voice" of the IDW in Politico in late 2018, first clashed with some fellow Dark Webbers over her willingness to publish articles, including one by me, criticizing certain aspects of the IDW -- such as a tendency toward its own brand of groupthink and tribalism -- as well as some of its members, such as Dave Rubin. (It turned out Lehmann meant it when she told Politico she didn't want Quillette to be an echo chamber.) More recently, Lehmann has talked about the IDW's fracturing over COVID-19, conspiracy theories, the war in Ukraine, and other issues. [bold added, links removed]The piece reads like an up-to-date What Not to Do companion to Ayn Rand's 1972 Essay, "What Can One Do?", in which she cautioned against forming alliances with people whose stand on an issue might cause them to pass as fellow travelers, but who really aren't allies:... Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." By "ideological" (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the "libertarian" hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. (For a discussion of the reasons, see "The Anatomy of Compromise" in my book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree. In such cases, no one may attempt to ascribe his views to the entire membership, or to use the group to serve some hidden ideological purpose (and this has to be watched very, very vigilantly). [bold and link on "compromise" added]When discussing compromise, Rand warned:The three rules listed below are by no means exhaustive; they are merely the first leads to the understanding of a vast subject. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side. The essay illustrates this in spades, and on multiple levels, from Sam Harris's having to distance himself from anti-vaxxers to individuals being tempted, often successfully, to sell out to keep the large audiences of kooks they ended up with by associating with this group. Young calls this last "audience capture." It is not enough to oppose an evil like "wokeness." One must do so for the right reasons, articulate those reasons, and offer a positive alternative. Joining forces with anyone who does not also do those things will ultimately backfire. -- CAVLink to Original

The Bulwark is rubbish if this is indicative of their views!

Daybreak J – Grüß Gott, Izzy! I – Good Morning, Joey! J – Kaffee? I – Danke! The garden in this light is something else. J – You in that easy satin robe are something else. I – But that our reach exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?* J – Annie said the sun comes up tomorrow. That was only a metaphor for the human lot, of course. But literally, how would she know the sun would come up again? I – An invariant run. But Melancholia, you know. J – And you? I – Spin of the earth is long as earth, but for arrival of external torque. Radiation out sun is long as its fusion. Shade of earth by a celestial body is not in prospect tomorrow. J – May I kiss you? I – So many days have not yet broken.* *R. Browning, Rig Veda

Garden Light J – Welcome to my after-garden, Izzy! I’ve gotten daffodil bulbs to add, but I’m savoring summer a few minutes more. Admiring the brown of my feet, before boots. I – How can I help? J – Use the digger to make fifty holes in this part, six inches deep and about eight inches apart. Do not tumble down the hill. I – What are you going to do? J – Attend to your every position. Then issue your next instruction. I – There are other wonders of the world. Why do your bare feet on a step-stone today feel cooler than your feet on the soil? After all, we know perfectly well the stone and soil are in thermal equilibrium. They have the same temperature. J – You are very educational. And when you speak of such things, I imagine all the more positions, bed and floor. I – Spring eternal? J – Whichever comes first: either as long as it takes or as long as it takes. By the way, I do know how the stone and soil heat-thing works. Awaken to me. I – Speak the science of the stone and soil paradox. J – We have skin receptors responsive to rate of heat flow into or out of the body when contacting materials with a different temperature than body temperature. Flow rate is slower into or from insulators such as air. And the dry soil is more insulating than the stone. So heat from my feet flows at a higher rate into stone than into the dry soil. Useful in philosophy? Stone floor? With rug? I – I raise an eyelid. Let’s do the bulbs, Joey. J – Tomorrow is another day.

Ayn Rand’s novella ANTHEM, published in 1938 and revised in a 1946 edition, is set in a fictitious collectivist community, one smaller and simpler than Kira’s historical setting in WE THE LIVING. Rand’s ANTHEM is presented as a journal kept by her protagonist whose name is Equality 7-2521. He records that he dares to choose, in the secrecy of his own mind, work he hopes to do when leaving the Home of the Students. He loves the Science of Things. He hopes he will be selected to be a scholar, but the authorities appoint him to be a street sweeper. The technology of his isolated community is very primitive in comparison to an earlier lost civilization (ours). His people have candles, but not electricity. He discovers a subway tunnel from the ancient civilization, and he begins to experiment with electricity in secret at night. In his own community, each refers to himself as “we”. Of his secret work at night, he thinks: “We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it” (1946, 23). In his love of the science of things, he is similar to Kira, and to Howard Roark and to John Galt, the principal protagonists of Rand’s later fiction. He is similar to Kira also in her “wanting to learn a work I like only because I like it,” and he is similar to her in standing against society made collectivist. Comes a moment to Equality 7-2521: “This moment is a sacrament which calls us and dedicates our body to the service of some unknown duty we shall know. Old laws are dead. Old tablets have been broken [by me]. A clean, unwritten slate is now lying before our hands [my hands]. Our fingers are to write” (1938, 125–26). The talk of breaking old tablets is an echo of Nietzsche’s “On Old and New Tablets” (Z III). However, the moral principles Equality 7-2521 would replace are the ones he had known in his one and only society, not the ones of wider world and history. He is not on the brink of writing principles entirely different from ones known in the ancient times, the times of the reader. His task of moral philosophy is not the task of the God of Moses nor the task of radical and continual transvaluation and self-overcoming that Zarathustra gives to human creators. Rand wrote ANTHEM (1938) in the summer of 1937. In her manuscript for ANTHEM, she continually tries to suit ideas of Nietzsche to her story, then scratches them out (Milgram 2005; Mayhew 2005). Naturally, I wonder if she was not also, in some of those same strokes of the pen, writing down ideas of Nietzsche that she had seen attractive as truth, or at least promising as truth, then rejecting them as inadequate to her own grasp of the truth. Writing one’s ideas down and reading them helps one think better. Near the end of the fable ANTHEM, our true searcher Equality 7-2521 announces: “And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men have come into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. “This god, this one word: ‘I’.” (1946, 90) In his community of origin, Equality 7-2521 had wanted to know the meaning of things, the meaning of existence. He had wanted to know the secrets of nature, and he had come to suspect there is some important secret of human existence unknown to all. After fleeing his collectivist society, he becomes alone the live-long day. He comes upon an uninhabited fine house and learns from its books many wonders of the advanced science of the ancient civilization. He discovers the word “I”. That is, he discovers that word and attains the concept “I” distinctly and firmly set. He no longer writes “we” or “we alone” or “we alone only” in his journal to refer to himself. A new chapter begins. He writes: “I am. I think. I will” (1946, 86). With this fundamental discovery, Equality 7-2521 has become a Prometheus, whose name he takes for his own. He continues: “What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer. “I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.” (1946, 86) There is one word “which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. / The sacred word: EGO” (1946, 98). That last quotation is the close of the story. At the time this story was written (1937), there were no atomic weapons, no nuclear arsenals, and I think it was an ordinary assumption among people not Christian that human kind would continue effectively forever on the earth. Consider too that ANTHEM is a poetic work, and in poetic expression, as in dreams, conjured images condense multiple associations. In the case of poetic expression, the suggested associations are set up by the wider text. To write that the word “ego” and that which it names cannot be eradicated from the earth might be playing on multiple meanings of “earth”. One meaning is the third planet from the sun; another is the dwelling place of mortal men, as distinct from mythological realms of immortal beings; another is the collection of human inhabitants on the planet. Rand’s uses of “earth” with talk of ego in ANTHEM can rightly carry those three meanings simultaneously. I think the most salient of these meanings in Rand’s use here is the second one. She is not only making a statement about the endurance of ego among all possible societies (the third meaning). She is most saliently making a statement about ego in relation to all the earth, to all the abode of human existence. At the core of ANTHEM, her manifesto of individualism, Rand sets a foundational sequence of thoughts: “I am. I think. I will.” Although Rand lists “will” as third in her 1938 foundational sequence, third in sequence of philosophical reflection; she awards “I will” some preeminence over “I am,” which she characterizes as self of truth, and over “I think,” which she characterizes as protector of self (1938, 128–29). Of words, “only three are holy: ‘I will it’” (129). Further: “Where I go, there does my will go before me. My will, which chooses, and orders, and creates. My will, the master which knows no masters. . . . My will, which is the thin flame, still and holy, in the shrine of my body, my body which is but the shrine of my will.” (129) This opposes 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, which would have the body of a righteous individual be temple of the Holy Spirit and would deny self-ownership of one’s body, which has been bought by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Prometheus’ line “Where I go, there does my will go before me” says I go only where I will, but expresses it in echo and in substitution of various King James biblical passages saying God is with one and goes before one to subvert threats or create lights in one’s path. Moses says to Joshua: “And the Lord, he IT IS that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee” (Deut. 31:8). Additional parallels (anti-parallels) between ANTHEM and the Bible are observed in Simental 2013, 100–105. I do not think that the preeminence of “will” in Rand 1938 is a tuning to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. It looks to be, rather, a bannering of liberty. In her 1946 edit of ANTHEM, Rand posed ego as stay of the earth not because ego is earth’s heart, spirit, and glory, but because ego is the earth’s heart, meaning, and glory. In ATLAS SHRUGGED, Rand would leave off all talk of man or ego as stay, heart, or meaning of the earth. But in her 1946 rendition of ANTHEM, “meaning” opens a new possible interpretation of its closing line. Without a meaning maker, there is not meaning in the world. It is similar to the situation with truth and fact. Without holders of truth, there is fact in the world, but truth is absent. This is actually more than a parallel. Meaning could be taken as a blend of truth and value. With no holders of truth or value in the world, meaning is absent from the world. With no truth, value, or meaning in the world, the world as human abode does not exist. That angle suggests an enhancement to the sense of “earth” as the human abode in the original proclamation. Ego brings heart and spirit to the character of the human abode. Ego brings spirit-life. Ego brings into the world what preciousness, what value, there is in the world. Without spirit-life that comes with human being, the world as human abode does not exist. Earth in the sense of the dwelling place of mortal man is not the only sense of “earth” suggested in Rand’s statement that “ego” is “the word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the spirit [or meaning] and the glory.” Rand drew a picture in ANTHEM, and again in FOUNTAINHEAD, in which individual human being in his or her desiring, thinking, willing self is the final end of the earth in all its components, in all its minerals, seas, and forms of life. This teleological order of things is not portrayed as being there with the earth devoid of man, but as there with man upon the earth, making it his own. Beyond that, the further suggestion that the earth in the plain full sense depends on human ego is a discomfiting line of thought and one to be deflected. That problematic further suggestion in the closing line of ANTHEM points to an inadequacy of Rand’s philosophical foundation put forth in that work. However adequate for the internal context of that fiction, that foundation is inadequate to full philosophy for human life in the actual world, ours today, fully real. “I am” is not necessary to all fact even though it is necessary to all truth. A foundational philosophy aiming to uphold realism and objectivity must take its most basic truths from most basic facts, and “I am” does not fit that bill. “Existence exists,” Rand’s axiom for her mature philosophy (1957), is the better base and necessity. Early Rand and her Kira stood solidly for objectivity, which is attacked in the Red student speech. Rand’s protagonist in ANTHEM is given these lines: “All things come to my judgment, and I weigh all things, and I seal upon them my ‘Yes’ or my ‘No’. Thus is truth born. Such is the root of all Truth and the leaf, such is the fount of all Truth and the ocean, such is the base of all Truth and the summit. I am the beginning of all Truth. I am its end.” (1938, 128) This sounds subjectivist, like the ancient God-sayings it echoes and would replace. It might seem that Rand was climbing down, between 1936 and 1938, into the Nietzschean cavern of subjectivity or at least was stepping down into the Kantian ravine. I think, rather, she is only affirming in this passage that all judgment of truth is individual and that all truth we render from the world is for our own final value. Those lines in ANTHEM (in 1938; excised in ’46) are preceded by these: “It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world.” Something is seen, and with the subject, it is rendered beautiful. Something is heard, and with the subject, it is rendered song of existence. Something is given, and with its recognition, it is rendered truth. Rand does not create a superhuman for the meaning of the earth. Does her Prometheus create a meaning of the earth? His namesake does not invent fire. Rand’s protagonist unlocks a type of human that finds the meaning of human existence; not in super-terrestrial personages and their affairs, but in complete human individuals on earth. “I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!” (1946, 87). ANTHEM does not teach humans to create (or to beget) the meaning of the earth, but to discover it. “This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give . . . . We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky” (1946, 84). I really do not see Rand setting up some sort of Fichtean or Nietzschean perspective on the relation of ego and world. She is saying that whatever goals there are in inanimate and animate earth, they reach their final end in their crowning glory: the individual human knower of joy and living; the individual judge of truth; the individual will free over his or her ends; in a word “ego”. Notice that at this stage of Rand’s development only sentient living processes, specifically, human ones, can be ends not for the sake of something else. And these final ends are human, not superhuman. In actual development, we begin to use the personal pronouns “I, me” at age two. Knowing one’s proper name and knowing how to use first-person pronouns does not yet include realization of the deep fact “I am an I” or “I am me” or, as Dolf Kohnstamm 2007 puts it, “I am I”. At age two one can construct scenarios with dolls or other figures representing individual persons. One can make up dialogues, not only participate in them. The ability to converse with oneself as if between two characters is a plausible step necessary for coming to the insight “I am I”, where the first “I” is self as patient, actor, and controller, and the second “I” is self as in contrast to any other self (Kohnstamm 2007, 164, 174). Thinking “I am I” importantly includes thinking the identity of those two characters. Rand’s Prometheus accomplishes the same recognition as part of the thought expressed by his newly found word “I” whose meaning is explicated as his unique and uniquely possessed body, shrine of his unique spirit, and explicated by his triplet “I am, I think, I will.” It will be recalled that Equality 7-2521 had been seeking some word and concept that had been excised from his society. People there are missing the personal pronouns “I” and “me” and the possessives “my” and “mine.” Each refers to himself or herself by proper name or as “we” and refers to another individual by proper name or as “they” (or as ”you” taken as plural). The discovery of “I” by Equality 7-2521 is an episode of exhilarating liberation and profound fulfillment, though also overwhelming sorrow for mankind in its state of not knowing “I”. Given the spontaneous, untutored character of the “I am I” episodes in real persons displayed in Kohnstamm’s book, one might wonder whether the absence of the pronoun “I” in the fictional society that was Equality 7-2521’s cradle is really possible. Probably not, though it is a neat ploy to Rand’s purpose of showing the importance, the preciousness of man the individual, as against the collective. For thoughts of Kohnstamm on “I am I” in a couple of actual collectivist societies, see his pages 175–80. Equality 7-2521’s native society is without mirrors. Were we to bring one into their village, they would soon comprehend themselves in it, just as Equality 7-2521 does later in the story, seeing his face in water, and just as each of us did before age two. Earliest comprehension of mirrors and one’s body in them does not entail the comprehension “I am I” (Kohnstamm 2007, chap. 4). Similarly it is in the journey of Equality 7-2521. He has not yet roundly and profoundly grasped “I” and “I am I” when first seeing his reflected face. Equality and his fellows had been trained to deflect awareness from the self and direct attention to the group by saying “we” where we should say “I”. Forbidding the word “I” with its meaning attained in the understanding “I am I” would be idle without currents of the forbidden within subjects under the law. Such currents are on show to the reader in the person of Equality 7-2521. I suggest, however, actually, “we” in the indoctrinated sense of a joint singular life and will and thought of the collective can only have meaning to one who has gotten “I am I.” The author of the fictional adventure knew the reader would come equipped with that grasp. References Kohnstamm, D. 2007. I AM I - SUDDEN FLASHES OF SELF-AWARENESS IN CHILDHOOD. Athena. Mayhew, R. 2005. ANTHEM: ’38 & ’46. In Mayhew, ed., 2005. Mayhew, R., editor, 2005. ESSAYS ON AYN RAND’S Anthem. Lexington. Milgram, S. 2005. ANTHEM in Manuscript: Finding the Words. In Mayhew, ed., 2005. Rand, A. 1938. ANTHEM. Cassell. ——. 1946. ANTHEM. Pamphleteers. Simental, M.J. 2013. The Gospel According to Ayn Rand. THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES 13(2):96-106. In this photo are the lights in Colorado Springs and Pueblo and in the mountains---a bit of our human world lost in the world inherited by Rand's Equality 7-2521. One very beautiful aspect of Rand's story I did not touch on was the love story developed all along the way. There is also a very important philosophical point in this work---a viewpoint carried forward into Rand's mature philosophy---I did not mention. I think that particular stance of hers a profound mistake. I'll try to return to this thread and address that error after the fundamental paper for my own Rand-related philosophy has been published this summer, which framework includes the fix of this error.

Here's a cover from another Anthem printing:

SL, There is a widespread good in people of wanting to know the truth. Aristotle thought that even ALL people desire to know (the truth). One widespread thing people want to know today, as thousands of years ago, is what becomes of one's inner self and that self of one's loved ones when we die. Is it really just the absolute end as it might appear from the successive states of the deceased body, or is there future life, perhaps one brighter or darker than the earthly life (and for some an opportunity to sell post-death prizes and penalties for power and money in earthly life)? Decline the fake insurance policy of Pascal's Wager. Prize the truth come what may. As for widespread desire for protection against dangers, the main danger is not from interpersonal conflicts, but from nature. Getting to the discoveries and developments that can rescue one or one's loved ones from this or that particular occasion of bodily catastrophic failure (mostly from disease or old-age cascades) is not helped by prayers and blaming death on human moral failings, but by rational investigations into nature. I mention this vast sort of danger due to Objectivist-types' widespread knee-jerk salience of dangers from interpersonal conflicts as first concern among dangers and politics as top aim. There are plenty of religious people with whom I form political alliances. More importantly, religious friends and family and I (I purely naturalist, atheist) love each other very much. Those are choices open based on common values, including the value of truth, even as one keeps straight what are one's differences on what is true and how to get it. Nietzsche became so popular in the culture of Germany in the 1890's and up to WWI that there were some theologians serving up bowls of unity between Nietzsche and Christian religion in Germany. When I was first in college ('66–'71), there was Christian Atheism of Altizer.* More recently and probably more durably, there is The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007).

Boydstun, I think in the spirit of your personally being “not purely egoist”, you might consider it important to sketch, if only in broad strokes, the bones or main structure of your ethics (which you deem are on a solid footing) in a sort of “introduction” which you might be able to expand upon if the finitude of life’s span permits, but which nonetheless represents the unwavering unshakeable base you have already formed, and upon which any remaining more detailed formulations and expositions are to be made. I propose a sort of ITBE (Introduction to Boystun’s Ethics) even if only in essay form, but possibly of any length or of any title, again in the spirit of how crucial the philosophy of ethics is and your being “not purely egoist”.

Alright, I'm going to riff this piece, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. The piece is enough of a joke, might as well joke about it. Except for Odd Thomas, and the ARI. lol Well obviously, Trump loves Russia and Rand was from Russia. Makes total sense to the fake news mindset. Whole, as in "all." Quite a wager considering that Trump agrees with Objectivism on quite a few key political goals... preserving the 2A, repealing regulations, repealing Obamacare, standing up to the Global Warming fraud, destroying radical Islam instead of making excuses for it, etc. So what does our prophetess have to say exactly, Mr. Ghate? She obviously didn't foresee the rise of the Internet. Except for Ron Paul, a far more intellectual and principled candidate than Trump, which the ARI opposed because... uh, why exactly? A limit which apparently led for her to vote for Nixon, a far worse candidate than Trump, over McGovern, a far better candidate than Hillary. and who channel a dead woman... oh wait, that's the ARI. Yes, the first candidate in 30 years to not thank God in his acceptance speech, and who says that he has "nothing to be forgiven for" is a "mystic." He might as well be a closet atheist who pays lip-service to religion because politics and votes. No, what's illuminating is your attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. You mean like government-sanctioned torture, or the Waco raid? That sort of justice? None of which are evident in Trump's decades of honest business dealings, Mr. Ghate would assert. If he had been a Madoff-like crook, surely evidence for it would have arisen by now. Apparently calling out fake news represents "disdain for the truth." Ah, Anderson Cooper, a bastion of journalistic integrity. Because he's not a liar. Apparently YouTube viewers don't count. Apparently respect for women involves denying one's own sexuality and the beauty of the female form. Ghate would have us equate spur-of-the-moment tweets with Trump's considered opinion. No, it's because none of the things you just mentioned were lies. Actually it captures basic marketing principles. The defenders of capitalism sure don't know much about how business works. Says the ARI, an organization which hired Carl Barney, former Scientology church owner and current college swindler, and takes his dirty money. Obviously they would assert that they only hired him because people can change. Well then, we had objective evidence that Trump no longer desired to be part of the swamp and only had to be in order to run his business effectively. Apparently concepts like slogans and the process for choosing them to reach mass appeal are alien to the ARI. No wonder there are so few objectivists. And apparently unless you constantly repeat those things, your own inherent goodness means nothing. "It's true because I want it to be true" actually perfectly captures the tone of this hit piece. I'd rather have a man who acts moral but never talks about it, than a man who never acts moral but preaches how moral he is. Fine people want to preserve their history for the sake of remembering, not tear it down for the sake of nothing. Not every person defending the confederate statue at that rally was a neo-Nazi. No other president actually stood up to North Korea and forced China to play nice. I'd call that quite an accomplishment. In addition to the hundreds of regulations that Trump has repealed. If Ghate and Brook had their way, Hillary would be president and these would still be on the books. Don't forget about Jesus and Buddha while you're making your fake list of people who Trump never said that he's better than. Or, you know, it was a joke. Yes, how dare he be loyal to America first instead of globalists. I guess that Trump's business achievements count for nothing. As opposed to the objective thing to do, which would be to hire men who would betray him. As it should be, given Comey's lack of fidelity to justice in the case of Clinton. What you're hearing is patriotism towards America, not tribalism. I know, it's hard to recognize for a member of an organization like the ARI that puts Israel above America. And Hillary apparently would've played no part in this drift. Political hucksters rely on strawmen, such as saying that Trump blamed "all" the country's problems on any particular group. By this logic we should never elect a county sheriff who pledges to crack down on criminals. That would be tribalism, apparently. You mean like Hillary calling half the country "deplorables?" Oh look, a nugget of truth! You're forgetting some qualifying adjectives. Illegal immigrants, dishonest journalists, globalist "free" traders, and corrupt elites. Trump opposed none of those things intrinsically. Sales should be soaring, but the ARI fails at marketing so they're not. With funny names like Floyd Ferris, Wesely Mouch, and Onkar Ghate. You mean like how Leonard Peikoff squandered Ayn Rand's intellectual heritage? That sort of progeny? I'd trust a snake oil salesman like Alex Jones before I'd trust Anderson Cooper or wherever Mr. Ghate gets his "news." And by letting in the entire Third World into America all at once. She also advocated that, apparently. America to Israel, America to globalists... just kidding, he doesn't say that. So this is what makes you happy? Writing baseless schlock about the president? What about the Convention of States? Oh wait, the ARI hates states' rights. I mean, I think that she would have said that too, but not in the way that you mean. After all that bloviating, this is the best you could come up with that Rand might have said?

This is the key point. I should have used the term individual rights to stay within the established jargon for Objectivist discourse on rights. And yes i do stress the "formal". Rights are a principle from Objectivist ethics. The concept of rights is most often used in a political and legal context, but it should not be forgotten that rights are an ethical principle. You say rights are primarily legal (perhaps because of usage?), I would say rights are essentially ethical because of the epistemological derivation and justification. I agree that rights are about action within a social context. "Social context" is not equivalent to "legal context". It is wrong to obtain values by lying, but not every lie can be made illegal. The reason for that is law ought to have strict requirements for objectivity. A man might maintain multiple girlfriends by lying, girlfriends who would not agree to be one of a harem if they knew of the others. A man may not maintain multiple wives by lying because there is an explicit legal agreement of monogamy in marriage. In the first example, who is a girlfriend or not and who is regarded as a girlfriend or not and even what it means to be a girlfriend are all subjective mental states of the participants. The law cannot sort out what should be done in this case because there are no objective facts to work with. The law can work in a case of multiple marriages because the status and obligations of the participants are objective. This is an example where ethics can say what is right based on rights but the law must remain silent. The range of situations and contexts which are amenable to legal rulings on rights is necessarily less than the range over which ethical judgements can be made based on rights. This is because of the more stringent requirement of objectivity for a legal context, and also because legal systems have jurisdictions, defined finite geographic regions of power and of citizenship. With respect to warrants, they are a procedural limitation on law enforcement actions with the goal of protecting rights. Warrants are not themselves rights in any ethical sense. It is necessarily valid that different procedures may apply to citizens and non-citizens if the idea of citizenship and jurisdiction means anything at all because in a reduction-to-concretes sense those differences are what it means to be a citizen or not.

There are 30 million people here illegally, probably more. Not even Crackpot Kim could hope to muster up such an army. While not every member of this "army" takes welfare, commits crimes, brings disease, or refuses to assimilate and learn English, a huge number of them (millions) do. Would you agree that criminals, welfare parasites, diseased people, and people who will not learn English do not belong in this country? Considering that in Mexico, the government runs ads on the streets encouraging people to come to America, I would consider that very good evidence of an invasion. Mexico does not enforce their side of the border, in fact they even offer legal assistance to people who are going through deportation procedures. The wall will help us determine who is a threat, and who is not. It will force them to only use the gates. Otherwise they'll just swim the Rio Grande or cross the desert and we have no idea who they are. Mexico is literally at war with cartels, and there is no way to stop the cartels from spreading here. Which they have. Individuals of this country, not individuals who are citizens of Mexico. If the proper role of government is to protect the rights of individuals of any country, why not invade Mexico and force their government to provide basic human rights to their citizens instead of being a narco-terrorist state? Because most of you listen to the so-called Ayn Rand Institute and its Ayatollahs, Brook and Peikoff, without thinking for yourself. Ayn Rand herself never advocated for unlimited Third World immigration. Why? Because it is not in America's national self-interest for its people to be overwhelmed and replaced by people from the Third World who Ayn Rand called "savages." I'll pimp HandyHandle's website here because he says it far better than I could... http://ariwatch.com/AynRandOnImmigration.htm

I voted for him just to prevent the socialist disaster that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been. His stances on the campaign trail and what he has actually done in office are incongruous in many respects. The Syria strike was a big disappointment, as are many of his appointees' neocon blustering against Russia. It is still too early to say what ultimate impact he will have, however his biggest accomplishment thus far is appointing Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Hillary would've given us another Ginsburg. Then you could've kissed goodbye to the Second Amendment. Trump has also stepped up border enforcement, and illegal crossings are down. The proper, objective role of government is to protect the homeland from invasion. You can't do that without border enforcement. We are being invaded by criminals, thugs, and welfare parasites and if the only legislative accomplishment that he gets done is building the wall, then it will be worth it.

His Twitter account suggests otherwise.