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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.

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?

I think you might be right. It's the kind of response you get when you ask chatgpt what it thinks the best movie is. When you do, it answers like a politician, trying to satisfy everyone.

Taking positions about a war always amounts to supporting the killing of someone. "Free Palestine!" is not taking positions about a war, because: "Free Palestine!" means suppressing an occupation, The current war is the one between Gaza government and Israel. During this war no occupation took place. Therefore "Free Palestine!" does not mean taking positions about a war. Your comment tries to whitewash SpookyKitty's "Free Palestine!" call, which is a call for murder, a call for genocide, more precisely. There exist, however, also a legitimate call "Free Palestine!".

@Boydstun I think you have implicitly identified (yet another) false dichotomy, a "you" - "us" dichotomy as the foundation for the "good". I do not claim that you explicitly hold this as part of your philosophy, only that my understanding of it, points in this direction. Polarized concepts such as "the one" and "the group" dominate the discussion of ethics. On the one hand selfishness, on the other collectivism (or a sort of arithmetical utilitarianism). When pushed to recognize the issues with such a choice, the response is often a sort of "through one approach ... the concern of the other is answered" and we thus have the claims of "other people being a value to a selfish person" as well as "the individual plays a pivotal role in the collective", and that although both benefit, really seeing only through one lens has importance or primacy. But the stark sense of a binary and forced choice is kept. The concept of the good traditionally is either based on the good for "You" or for "Us". I find in your writings a different nexus for the good, neither wholly in "you" or "us" but in the recognition that the ultimate good IS in both, and that (perhaps ironically for you) NO sacrifice need be made from either to the other. Ironically also Rand touched on an economic version of this in the trader principle and the concept of building wealth, i.e. a win-win between atomistic agents... but this did not carry over to any direct win-win relationship between an individual and society or others. What I am hearing is that You (and We) can go forward recognizing that every moral choice (by groups and individuals) can be aimed at the flourishing of both, and that the responsibility being centred around each individual and society at large, not only is the "one" and the "many" protected in every sense, so too is the "one" and the "many" responsible for the other. The relationship of the "You" and the "Us" flourishes as a result of both individuals and society flourishing. [I note, this does not negate the alternative of life versus death, without individuals a society dies and without society, others, loved ones the individual cannot flourish. Also, implies no sacrifice of any individual and no sacrificing of the group or others. As such, predation on any one or the many is immoral.] It seems that in every moral consideration, it cannot be just about me or just about others, and so it can never not be about me or not be about others.

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

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.

The conflicts over national ownership of land seem to be the most likely cause for World War Three, as opposed to ownership of intellectual property, or unattached property. Land seems to be the most incendiary issue. I have not seen people be willing to die over the right to speak a language, or have they? There are multiple conflicts that can be reduced to a conflict over land, that seem to be painted as conflict over ideology or identity. There is the Ukraine War over sections of Ukraine that one side claims to be theirs. There are the Malvina islands that Argentina and the UK have an issue over. There is the Israel-Palestinian issue. There is the China-Taiwan issue. Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. The Kurdish lands in Iraq and Turkey. And then the China South China Sea and its islands. And many more. Within a nation, when there is conflict over real estate boundaries, you have a court system, deeds, etc. But in an anarchist model, which is the case on the national level, there are no inherent indicators that determine who owns what. The land is not the color of the people or no label stamped on it by God. You have the Israelis being up a multi-century of history. Similarly, Putin brings up the historical relationship. China also claims that Taiwan simply belongs to China, as it always has. There is the idea of the rise of civilizations in history that form a physical boundary And there is also the non-historical idea of "might is right" or balance of power, this land belongs to the one who can keep it by force, i.e. defend its possession. Was the American Revolution, an ideology? Or another example of might is right? On one hand, we cringe at the idea of "might is right" and are proponents of "rights" that go beyond it. But there seems to be an element of potential force and "the will of the inhabitants" included in world opinion about ownership. Gibraltar is not given back to Spain because the population has voted not to join. Crimea separated from Ukraine via vote. Is a vote the final arbiter? Should a country that forms on an island in the ocean declare its ownership of that island by a vote? Meaning without a major power backing it? Or should it be done based on a certain principle? Mixing labor with the land. Antarctica is not inhabited but there is an agreement in place by the powers that be. Is that the proper model? I have seen a disagreement between Yaron and Leonard regarding immigration which seems to be around what entity owns the land that they can cross.

I was using the politician quoting merely as one public token. Another political token of the culture knowing something of Rand would be Obama's reference to "the virtue of selfishness" and his reliance on the public's widespread rejection of such a thing. A Sunday school teacher warding the students away from reading Rand would be a token of her becoming mainstream; I just don't have a public example of it. Protestantism is mainstream without having a politics. There is nothing inherent in Objectivism to take institution of its political philosophy as a necessary condition for rating the philosophy mainstreamed. Philosophy need not be primarily a tool for political aspirations. Aristotle was not championed by the founders of this country, I should say. Objectivism, by the way, is not going to have its Politics comprehensively applied in American culture. What is taken for just under the law changes here, but it is not going to land on Objectivist Politics, entirely coinciding. Not ever, while we are a democratic republic, and when we are not, we are no longer America. One can be successful and happy without the dream of perfect justice being taken for a real possibility. One might continue to march for it only by loving justice, all the same, I imagine.

It is fairly simple. Within a nation, it is determined by the laws of the nation (allowing for jurisdictional subdivisions, for example in the US, ownership of land is mainly governed by state law). A Dutch guy can own property in North Dakota or Peru, and any limits on what he can do with the land are determined by what entity has jurisdiction over the land. The US does not “own” the US (nor does Turkey “own” Turkey), those governments have jurisdicion over their territory. However, the US (government) does own certain pieces of land in the US, just as individuals can own land. In addition, the feds “hold in trust” a larger chunk of land, for example most of Washington state (bastards!). On occasion, there are disputes between nations, for example the NW corner of Kenya known as Ilemi being the border with South Sudan is indeterminate. There is a rock between New Brunswick and Maine which is disputed. Jammu and Kashmir is a famous example. Again, these are not ownership disputes, they are jurisdiction disputes. Hatay province of Turkey is technically in dispute (Syria claims jurisdiction), but it is in fact in Turkey and not Syria, and there are very many people who own property there – under Turkish law. Syria’s claim is more window dressing and they have not pursued the matter in court (the usual way to solve these problems). The other way is to go to war, as in the Indo-Pakistani war, the Ogaden war, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Again, these are not questions of real estate ownership, they are disputes of national jurisdiction. Land ownership remains stable under changing jurisdiction (modulo change in property laws following a change in jurisdiction).

Multinational alliances would need to be in place and acted on for a world war. War between individual nation states usually involve territorial expansion/control as a result or most likely intention regardless rhetoric used by regimes to instigate populations.

That’s an interesting question. A rational being holds that knowledge derives exclusively from reason, but Rand’s concept of reason include sense perception, as well as conceptualization and logic. Perception is non-volitional. A person may be for example physically incapable of hearing a sound above 12Khz in which case there is no question of “choosing to hear”. Or, you may hear but disregard, which is a volitional act. Reason acts on two things, the chosen and the un-chosen, the latter being direct sense perception. Reason is a human faculty, an ability that is part of the mind residing in the brain. Dogs and worms don’t have it, they have something else, even though they have sense perception. Concept formation is 100% volitional. I take that to be so self-evident that it needs no further discussion, but if you disagree, we can pursue that topic. Although logic is vastly more compact than concept formation, I would not claim that it is hard-wired into the human brain, I would claim that it is learned and volitional. Certainly one must choose to apply logic to sensations in deriving knowledge. As you presumably see, 2/3 of reason is volitional, therefore volitionality is a concomitant of rationality. I am satisfied with this as an answer to the question about man on Earth, but it would also be reasonable to ask about imaginary science fiction beings, such as Vulcans. Would we actually integrate other kinds of consciousness into the concept “rational”, if the content of their “faculty of reason” were hard-wired and non-volitional, and if all processing of sense data is automatic (not just bare sensation, but also concept formation and all other aspects of cognition). After all, we historically generalized the concepts “speech”, “arms” and “the press” to accommodate new existents. ChatBot very weakly directs our attention to other imaginable kinds of consciousness, ones where logic is built in and obligatory. Could any living being have a fixed and automatic conceptual faculty? I say no, that by definition, a cognitive system with a fixed and automatic set of concepts is not a conceptual system, it is in fact a fancy form of dog cognition, a closed list of mental groupings.

"Is" comes first, and irreducible. The sequence: metaphysics and epistemology, then the ethics logically following (by necessity), was the unique feat AR performed in her essay. Often - the metaphysics, the general nature of life and specifically man's life and nature, gets left behind or taken for granted. I believe the full justification of rational egoism is weakened. Tad, I thank you for your response. But could you quote my post to alert me? In this forum, by some mutual consent or orders from high, it seems I have been excluded ("canceled"?) from debate.

First a small correction, this is not a debate, it is a position statement. I am not satisfied with the definition of science as being the nature of a subject for a couple of reasons. First, it is based on what turns out to be a problematic concept, namely “a subject”. Second, the bar is set too low, at “study the nature of…”. There is one subject, and the possibility of selective focus thereunder – the universe. The action of studying is not what defines science, science is defined in terms of a goal, which is to gain conceptual knowledge of the subject. “Studying” is one way of talking about the actions that are part of science, but however you define science, it should be in terms of the ultimate goal, and not the means of reaching the goal. I also disagree with the statement that truth is impervious to denunciations or false praise. Why? Because truth is the grasping of the relationship between a proposition and reality, and a consciousness must choose to grasp that relation. Denunciations impede truth, i.e. the grasping of reality. Now, reality is not affected by denunciations and ignorance, and does not depend on there being any consciousness. One view of science is the social majority view: “scientist” is defined according to the criteria set by the majority of scientists. I won’t bother to discuss this since it is patently circular. The second is via analogy and ostensive definition, classically by pointing to chemists and physicists, and saying “and those who are similar”. The third, and I would say best approach, is via integration and differentiation – what specific actions do you want too include, and what do you want to exclude? Some classic problem cases are: mathematics, history, psychology, engineering. Social Justice Warriors and literary critics purport to be seeking the truth, but I would not call them scientists. A very large proportion (probably a majority) of actual scientists do not purport to be seeking the truth, thay are ___ (some other expression, for example “developing a model”, “contributing to knowledge”). In fact, I do not find it useful to focus on criteria for applying the label “scientist”, instead, I would focus on two things. First, the truth of a particular claim. Second, the reasons for accepting the claim. A scientist worth his salt should be not just able to discover a true proposition, they should be able to show that it is true, and superior to alternative propositions.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. In "Analyzing the Hamas Sympathizers," Peter Schwartz explains how altruism -- the idea that we owe relief to the needy regardless of why they are needy -- fuels the unjust and puzzling sympathy for Hamas we are seeing today. Schwartz ends his piece with a quote from someone who has been undeterred by Palestinian barbarism from Day 1:A New York Times article quotes an Atlanta schoolteacher's Facebook message, shortly after October 7, in which she explains her unqualified 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." This is the consistent implementation of the "tyranny of need." But there is no reason to accept another's need as a moral claim against you. The only valid moral imperative here is the imperative of justice -- the justice of supporting the innocent and condemning the guilty. And the only way to prevent suffering by the innocent is for Israel to do whatever is necessary to destroy Hamas and for Gaza (and the rest of the Palestinians) to be ruled by a government that recognizes the rights of its own citizens and of its neighbors. [link in original]Incidentally, tyranny of need Schwartz describes, explains many other aspects of the decades-old conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians," as well as other unjust policies that people accept because they confuse altruism with benevolence. 2. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney argues that, while it may be tempting (or even sometimes helpful) to call failure by another name, it is much more powerful to acknowledge it and put it into a broader perspective:At one point, Jean Moroney suggests finding humor in failure. One might find this image helpful in remembering to do that. (Image by Mick Haupt, via Unsplash, license.)ometimes, thinking of a failure as a setback is counterproductive. If you review the setback and see no new information revealed, you are likely to conclude "the plan should have worked!" or "I just didn't try hard enough!" Then you will be tempted to just try the same approach, unchanged. They say insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. This is the moment when you really need the word "failure." Your plan FAILED! This is REAL! This is new information! Your plan is a plan that leads to FAILURE! Fully accepting this fact, including the implication that your plan has a fatal flaw in it, is critical to your eventual success. You need to see that you must have made a mistake somewhere. That's what gets you to step back and look for where you made a mistake.Notice that last sentence: The goal, or some part of it, or something very like it is probably still salvageable. Moroney later explores when a failure is significant, and suggests an approach to goal-setting that can inoculate against some of the more unpleasant conclusions and emotions that many people wrongly associate with failure. 3. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn calls for an end to the anti-freedom "equity" agenda:Canada is a clear illustration. Under the current government since 2015 economic freedom has declined. Investment has been fleeing the country, weakening the dollar, and increasing inflation. Consequently, productivity and economic growth have stagnated and job growth has stalled, keeping wages low and prices high. Not only investments but skilled workers are leaving Canada, most of them for the United Sates, where salaries are much higher (46% higher in the technology sector, according to a recent survey) and taxes lower. Those departing increasingly include recent immigrants disillusioned by the high cost of living, limited job opportunities, and comparatively low salaries. [links omitted]The fact that people are (currently) fleeing Canada for the United States does not, of course, mean that the same folly will work here. 4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger asks questions about a few "Unnoticed Contradictions," among them:We constantly hear that man can know nothing for certain, that truth is relative to the individual, that observations are "theory-laden" so cannot claim to be objective, that no scientific claim can be proved true, that we can say only it hasn't been refuted by the data so far. At the same time and from the same people, we hear that catastrophic climate change is beyond doubt, that those who question it are "deniers" who should be kicked out of any position of consequence. How does the same mind hold, "Nothing is certain" and "Climate catastrophe is certain"?The obviousness of such questions, along with the fact that most will probably not have seen them raised anywhere else should alarm anyone. -- CAVLink to Original

KyaryPamyu, thank you for these good objections an angles. The dark paintings of Ivan Albright may have been triggered by what he witnessed in WWI. We don't really know. In connection with your hypothetical suffering person, I naturally thought of the actual artist Nietzsche. He suffered so horribly physically all the years he was producing Daybreak, Gay Science, Zarathustra, and beyond, yet his works seem more like motion upward beyond his daily suffering. I'd conclude at least that one's condition and life course does not necessarily settle what from the creator will be important to communicate.

It makes absolutely no difference whether suffering is the statistical norm or not. Suppose that everyone on Earth was happy, except for one unfortunate fellow who suffered from fibromyalgia. What would that individual think if someone showed him the following quote? "Pain, suffering, failure do not have metaphysical significance—they do not reveal the nature of reality. Ayn Rand’s heroes, accordingly, refuse to take pain seriously, i.e., metaphysically." (Leonard Peikoff, The Philosophy of Objectivism lecture series, Lecture 8 ) I suspect he would not care, even in the slightest, about pain's "metaphysical significance", because his own daily fare is nothing but chronic widespread pain, constant fatigue, headaches, abdominal cramps and depression. I am of the opinion that it's up to individuals to determine the "proper" subjects for their contemplation. The fibromyalgia patient would have every right in the world to create or contemplate artworks that are focused exclusively on life's negatives. This is a very rich topic. Consider, for example, Schenk's Anguish (1878): If we only take the sheep into consideration, then perhaps this painting is tragic without any positive foil or contrast. But if we also factor in the crows, the painting seems to illustrate something deeper about Nature, namely that the tragedy of some individuals often coincides with the fortune of others. Whether man is king over creation or not, he is still product of Nature and lives in its bosom. Even if no humans are present in this painting, we cannot help but draw some metaphysical import from it. Now, consider Hebbel's Schlafen, Schlafen: To sleep, to sleep and only sleep And never wake and have no dreams! The bitter woes that made me weep but half-remembered fading gleams. So I, when echoes of life’s fullness Reverberate down where I lie, Deeper infold myself in stillness, Tighter shut the weary eye. (Translated by Sean Thompson) I'd argue that this poem's subject of contemplation is sleep's ability to "release" us from life's tribulations. Is that a "positive"? Yes, but only by the standard of the poem's own gloomy worldview. If a particular artist's worldview is geared toward a "positive" outlook, then of course he should only deal with negatives "as a means of stressing the positive". But for everyone else, that principle is invalid are irrelevant.

So I'm not sure how many in this forum has seen this update. There might be some evidence that suggests that conciousness is created by something called microtubules. At the same time the study shows that the brain uses Quantum Effects that as far as we know are indetermined. This does not prove that we have free will, but it ties a theory between Quantum Mechanics and Metaphysics. Hope this could be interesting for more people here. Here's a video:

In the preceding post, I should have included: Rand, A. 1958 [2000]. Lectures on Fiction Writing. In The Art of Fiction. T. Boeckmann, editor. Penguin. Rand specified a function of art beyond its beckon of experience and contemplation for its own sake. Art has integral place in the realm of life functions (cf. Greater Hippias 295c–e on the fine). In its selective re-creations of reality, according to Rand, art isolates and integrates aspects of reality to yield a new concrete that can serve certain functions for the human psyche (1965a, 16). The highest goal Rand had in her novels was the portrayal of ideal men. The experience of meeting those characters in the stories is an end in itself. She aimed for a story offering an experience worth living through for its own sake, and she aimed for protagonists to be a pleasure to contemplate for their own sake (Rand 1963, 37). That kind of contemplation, in all art, serves a human need, the need for moments sensing as complete the life-long struggle for achievement of values (41). Notice that the concept of contemplation here is broad enough to include rapture, esthetic rapture (cf. Crowther 2007, 35–36). There is that Randian integration in the esthetic experience of art. However, there are other kinds of contemplation of art for its own sake besides that one, I should say, important and lovely as that one is. American Heritage Dictionary defines art as “the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty; specifically, the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium.” The types after the semicolon are the specific types most typically meant when the term is used in the general sense of art preceding the semicolon. This dictionary has nine other senses in which art is used, but the one quoted here is the one pertinent to this discussion. On Rand’s definition, art is “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments” (1965a, 16). I am not persuaded that all art under the dictionary definition I just quoted nor that all of what should be grouped under art is captured by Rand’s theoretical explanatory definition. Her definition holds for a major subclass of art. We are able to sense the feelings indicated in a great variety of created illusions, or re-creations of reality. One would expect the same for artists, and some artists might have considerable success in expressing a sense of life not their own. It is only a slight modification, a slight broadening of Rand’s definition to say art is a selective re-creation of reality according to metaphysical value-judgments, therewith leaving in suspension how much they are favored by the artist, if at all. Rand observed that “every religion has a mythology—a dramatized concretization of its moral code embodied in the figures of men who are its ultimate product” (1965a, 16). Such characters and their associated deeds and ordeals, when visualized in a drawing or painting or sculpture, I should say and likely Rand would say, do not bring a moral sense of life to the artwork by their iconographical status. The means of sense of life, including moral sense of life, in a work of art are from other elements in the work, not iconography. In Rand’s “For the New Intellectual” (1960), she had conceived of human consciousness as preserving some continuity and as demanding “a certain degree of integration, whether a man seeks it or not” (18). Philosophy should formulate “an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe” (22). “Man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not” (18). Rand saw art as addressing a related need for integration. “Art is a concretization of metaphysics” (Rand 1965a, 16). It provides the power to summon in a full, perceptually conscious focus, a condensation of the chains of abstract concepts forming man’s “fundamental view of himself and of his relationships to reality” (16). Rand elaborated further what she meant by a sense of life. It is a person’s “generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences” (1966a, 17). This generalized feeling she took to be the result of a subconscious integration summing the history of one’s psychological activities, one’s reactions and conclusions. This conception of sense of life is an extension of her earlier notion that human consciousness preserves willy-nilly some continuity and demands a certain degree of integration (1961, 18). Rand found metaphysical, cognitive, and evaluative linkages in art. Her final characterization of their assembly was under her concept of a metaphysical value-judgment. Rand’s explications of sense of life and metaphysical value-judgments are in terms of metaphysics that bears on human life and the role and character of values in it. She said that a sense of life sums up one’s view of man’s relationship to existence. That suggests that when she said this subconsciously integrated appraisal that is sense of life includes appraisal of the nature of reality, she was confining the metaphysical appraisal to implications for moral, human life. That would include some notion of the intelligibility or lack thereof in existence in general and in living existence in particular. It is, I think, overly restrictive to confine the metaphysical in art to man’s relationship to reality, that is, to Rand’s metaphysical value-judgments. That said, Rand’s house of metaphysical value-judgments itself need not be so restrictive as one might first think from her list of metaphysical value-questions. For example, to ask whether the universe is intelligible is also to ask whether existence is one and interconnected within itself and whether a negative judgment on that question-couple leaves existence intelligible and, if so, differently so than were existence truly one and highly interconnected. This would seem to be an expansion of Rand’s list of questions, remaining within her conception, because the judgments the question and its subsidiaries invite are metaphysical and bear on basic human purposes. Rand’s compact definition of art is intended to cover arts literary and visual (and more). When she says these works are re-creations of reality, one needs to remember two things implicit in that conception: imagination and stylization. An artist stylizes reality in his re-creations. In that, re-creations are his (his/her) integration of facts and his metaphysical evaluations, and these are set concrete in his selection of theme and subject, brushstroke and word, and indeed in all his craft with elements of the medium (Rand 1966a, 35; 1971, 1011–12). I should stress that one might concur with Rand’s definition of art, yet one might disagree with Rand’s analysis of various artworks within that framework. In her 1963, Rand characterized misery, disease, disaster, and evil as negatives in human existence and “not proper subjects of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth re-creating only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves” (38). Within Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, one sees people who have already died, people in despair, and people with hope, waving to get the attention of a very distant ship. This painting fits squarely within what Rand described as having a subject containing negatives of human existence, yet also a positive in contrast, and worthy of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. When it comes to the great negatives in life, I have some reservations concerning Rand’s idea that negatives are unworthy as whole subjects of a work of art. Sometimes there is widespread common background of the beholders, who know the subject is from a larger story with its road to a positive; such would be a painting showing only that the dead Jesus is being taken down from the cross. War scenes as subjects of artworks, containing no positive aspects in the subject, may have viewers who know some history from which the scene is taken and some evaluation of that history, possibly positive. On the other hand, a war scene—say, a massacre—as subject of a painting, might be effective in inducing the horribleness of such an event to a viewer and nothing more than that horror. I would not want to contemplate that painting so much that I put it on the living room wall opposite me just now, in place of the triptych of Monet’s water lilies spanning that wall. However, the well-executed massacre painting might be worth my contemplation in a memorial museum of the event or in an art museum, where one passes from one feeling of life to another. Rand was aiming for what has been called a “‘wrapper definition’ that attempts to cover the entire extension of a concept,” rather than only “an evaluative characterization of what the best forms of art aspire to be like” (Stroud 2011, 5). Rand took up the challenge of showing literary and nonliterary art-forms to be distinctive and explicable under a definition, her definition of art, which is, we recall: “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” In the course of her examinations of various art-forms, we learn more about what she means by re-creation of reality in the way of art. For poetry without story or characterization—say, Rossetti’s Silent Noon—Rand does not take up the challenge of articulating how such poetry differs from so-called mood studies, thence, with that difference, how such poetry is art. The poem Silent Noon has a scene and an event. (The idea microcosm comes quickly to mind; see Bissell 1997; 2004.) In this poem, existence and human act are told of. They are re-creations of reality and the basic draw of the consciousness aroused in the readers. Imagined perceptions and induced feelings are aroused by what is said in the poem and how it is said, all well integrated. I don’t have an example of what Rand was calling literary mood studies, so I don’t know how it might differ from this sort of poem. Do such mood studies concretize a theme, but without re-creation of reality, without any showing of existence and purpose driving consciousness? This much is clear by Rand and satisfactory by me: an artistic selective re-creation is a re-integration, and for all art, not only literary, there will be a theme. For arts not literary, the theme will not be so fully expressed in words as in the medium, but it is there and is the large integrator. @123Me, Rand thought that Romantic art is the main source of a moral sense of life in the child and adolescent. “Please note that art is not his only source of morality, but of a moral sense of life. This requires careful differentiation. // A ‘sense of life’ is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics—an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man’s nature and the nature of reality, summing up one’s view of man’s relationship to existence. Morality is an abstract, conceptual code of values and principles.” (Rand 1965b, 10) Having moral content was not a requirement in Rand’s view for something to be art. A Rothko would fall short in whatever are the ways “mood studies” would fall short, under Rand’s theory, I suggest. In “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand wrote that art fulfills a need for end-in-itself concretization of metaphysical value-judgments. That is consonant with her idea, stated earlier in “The Goal of My Writing,” that the function of art is to supply moments of sensing as complete the life-long struggle for achievement of values. In the later essay “Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand was not broadening her view of what is “the” function of art; she was only articulating more of the means by which it fulfills that function (see also Rand 1966a, 34, 36–37, and 1971, 1009). In Rand’s view, there are other enjoyments in art besides fulfillment of that function, but no other function (1966a, 39). About psycho-epistemology: Rand and her circle had been using the term to refer to an individual’s characteristic method of awareness. Is the time scope of his outlook brief or long? Is his concern only with what is physically present? Does he recoil into his emotions in the face of his physical life and need for action? How far does he integrate his perceptions into conceptions? Is his thinking a means of perceiving reality or justifying escape from reality? (Rand 1960, 14, 19, 21). Art performs the psycho-epistemological function, in Rand’s view, of converting metaphysical abstractions “into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man’s direct perception” (1965a). Rand held art to be a need of human consciousness. As an adult, I produced only one sort of artistic creation, and that was composition of poetry. From that, I accede, at least in the realm of those creations, that I have a sense of life and that it is singular. This seems correct, even though I wrote quite a variety of poems. I’ll try to add an example at the end of this post. (The painting, so suited to the poem, is detail of a Bierstadt.) I would be hard put, however, to state what is that sense of life. Importance is the concept Rand took to be key in formation of a sense of life. She then restricted importance to a fundamental view of human nature. A sense of life becomes an emotional summation reflecting answers on basic questions of human nature read as applying to oneself. Such questions would be whether the universe is knowable, whether man has the power of choice, and whether man can achieve his goals (Rand 1966b, 19). In development of one’s sense of life in childhood and adolescence, Rand was thinking of more particular forms or ramifications of those broad questions in application to oneself. Later the broad questions themselves can be formulated and generalized to human kind, not only oneself. Importance as Rand’s criterion of esthetic abstraction is a salient criterion in such abstraction, but the broader criteria of significance and meaningfulness also sort the esthetic from the purely cognitive and normative types of abstraction. To two overly narrow restrictions in Rand’s esthetics—function of art and criterion of esthetic abstraction—I should add a third. Rand’s range of philosophical issues going into the makeup of all the facets of one’s sense of life might well be too limited. The fundamental importance-questions whose emotional answers are vested in a sense of life were the same as Rand had listed the previous year in spelling out what are metaphysical value-judgments. Those questions had been: “Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil?” (1965a, 16) That last question would seem at first blush to be a normative question, rather than a metaphysical one. I suggest, however, that it is a question for (i) the metaphysics of life and value in general, to which, as metaphysical fact, man is no alien and (ii) for the metaphysics of mind joining (i) (see also Peikoff 1991, 189–93).

Robert Campbell, an academic psychologist who used to be active on the O-web, wrote about the Skinner / Chomsky wars. One of his points was that Rand was unduly pessimistic, thinking that behaviorism was the leading position as of the early 70s. He also said that Skinner wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity for a lay audience because he was by then a has-been, no longer taken seriously in his field. (One might say the same of John Kenneth Galbraith.) Ayn Rand and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology (clemson.edu)

Should the fundamental principles of a philosophy be modified based on scientific evidence? Well, it depends on what you think the difference is between philosophy and science. Rand took a position on that question, one which I agree with but which does not exactly match how scientists and philosophers usually divided up the universe. Simply put, any claim which is not validatable based just on ordinary observation of the world and logic is not a proper philosophical proposition. For which reason, science is 99% irrelevant to philosophical argumentation. Needless to say, being the foundation for all science, scientific practice often fails at a principle which it has taken to be axiomatic, that scientific claims must be well-defined and falsifiable. Proceduralism has substantially subdued reasoning in many sciences: rather than conducting experiments with instruments that are unquestionably reliable, they are conducted with instruments that are widely used, at least in a narrowly-defined domain. The 1% exception is reserved for when philosophy mistakenly oversteps its bounds, by relying on something other than ordinary observation and logic. This misapplication of philosophy led to the postulation of celestial spheres, which is a factual falsehood. A factually-ignorant philosopher might then posit a principle of reasoning that in the mind, one first conceives of the actor then one conceives of their action, because in English we say “Cows moo”. The scientific error is ignorance of languages where verbs precede subjects. A brief moment of ordinary observation and reasoning will tell you that the order of words in English is not fixed, there is substantial variation, and no evidence that such variation reflects changing world view. In my opinion, “scientific insight” is way too low a bar even for science. If there is undeniable scientific proof of some claim, and if that claim contradicts Objectivism in some way, then there is room to discuss whether Objectivism is in fact false. So far, there are no even mildly plausible candidates for such counterexample status.

The new guy’s syntax and complimentarianism feels chat bot-y.

Do you not see the irony? "If we force ourselves to stay within a stringent orthodoxy without adapting to new knowledge, we end up unable to make any scientific insights. Rather, since Objectivism is that which is true, everything grounded in reason and observable reality must be Objectivism." Objectivity is the master framework, not Objectivism. At least, so long as you accept that realism is true. Objectivism does not have a monopoly on philosophical realism. It just has a particular theory of objectivity that you think is true.

“Implicit knowledge” is a form of mysticism, based on a premise of a magical automatic reason machine in the human mind. Only a very small amount of one’s knowledge is automatic, namely if you sense something, you have that concrete perceptual knowledge of an event for instance that you cut yourself or that the phone rang. You do not automatically gain high level conceptual knowledge explaining the causal relationship between the sharp object slicing your skin and the sensation that follows, even though that knowledge is “implicit” in cutting yourself. Knowledge must be chosen, it is not handed to you by a brain homunculus. One of the small set of things that are legitimate automatic knowledge – things that you sense and that you register the fact of sensing – is basic words in your language. All people who speak English know that there is a word pronounced “person” because they have experienced it. Most people do not know that there is a word pronounced “zymurgy” because they have never experienced it. Most people probably know that there exists a word pronounced “existence”, and most people likely have an arbitrary incorrect definition of the word. Having a concept means having the unification of units subsumed under the label “person” or “existence”. One has the potential to explicitly validate the concept of existence through experience, but the potential and the actual are not the same. If you haven’t validated the concept, the concept isn’t validated. There may be some confusion over the proper limits on "implicit" knowledge, which relates to a person supplying actual knowledge that is not explicitly stated. If I tell you that you can use my hammer, I probably don't explicitly say that you have to return it in a short time, than you cannot destroy it, that you cannot hit me with it – these are implicit facts about what I say or would have said. This is what "context" is about. You don't have to explicitly state everything when you are communicating with someone, you don't have to announce your definition of "hammer", and so on. You may assume that your interlocutor shares with you a concept of "existence", or "rights", but as we know, the number of people who correctly grasp the concepts of "rights" is way smaller than the set of people who wield the word.

Over at Astral Codex Ten, whose author is a mental health professional, is a very interesting description of the unintended consequences of a seemingly benign government regulation. Let's first consider the intent:Image by joandcindy, via Wikimedia Commons, license.Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you're depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you're anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge. Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten. So far, so good. Who would want to deprive an anxious or depressed person of such an unintrusive and simple aid as having a pet around while they navigate their lives en route to recovery? I will not beat up the author for failing to ask the following question: What is the best way to help people who actually need emotional support animals? He simply goes with the flow on this one: Like practically everyone else these days, he assumes that the government should decide who gets an emotional support animal. Period. In every single circumstance it might come up. The American regulatory state has been omnipresent for so long that very few people can even imagine any other way to tackle a problem like this. For most people, the only tool to solve a problem where the needs and desires of different people conflict is to enact a new government regulation. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The hammer here looks reasonable enough: To get your pet into places that might no want it there, all you need is a letter to the effect that you need an emotional support animal from a mental health professional. But who wields the hammer? Or: What sort of unintended consequences follow?But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone's permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules. I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody's ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever. [bold added, link omitted]The problem is named in plain sight within a sample letter from a mill that people who want to carry pets around everywhere can use to get a letter:[NAME OF TENANT] is my patient, and has been under my care since [DATE]. I am intimately familiar with his/her history and with the functional limitations imposed by his/her disability. He/She meets the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.The three laws named at the end violate the property rights and right to contract of landlords, employers, and businessmen who may not wish to deal with pets brought onto their property by random members of the general public. That is their first sin, and why they shouldn't be on the books in the first place. A side effect of these laws is that they greatly increase the number of "service animals" people might wish to bring with them to the point that there is a cottage industry of people willing to help people get away with whatever they want -- people with legitimate needs for service animals and people with good reasons not to have pets on their property alike be damned. Now, we are far from a time when such laws can get repealed, but let's indulge the fantasy and consider how we might solve the problem of, say, a business that wants to accommodate customers who really do need a service animal. Make them, if the owner produces a magical scrap of paper isn't the answer. Businesses would be free to employ any of the following means from the below non-exhaustive list:Personal judgement by a proprietor on a case-by-case basis;Consulting a mental health professional of its own choosing whenever the matter comes up;Accepting a certificate from an authority of its own choosing as to the safety and suitability of the animal.Just as there are non-governmental standards bodies for engineers, or for dog breeders, there can be for service animal certification. These private-enterprise solutions work because they protect the ability of the people who use them to make a living in a free market. That is, they align self-interest with quality through the metric of honest profit -- which is surely how, over thousands of years, people have worked out which breeds of dog are best suited to help the blind, and how to train them. In other words, rather than a cottage industry of con men, we'd have a legitimate industry of people helping make (actual) service animals work well for as many people as possible. A private certification system would work, because businesses would be free to work with those who don't, say, foist snakes on their customers (as happens now) -- or even simply refuse to do business with people who bring animals to their place of business. The kind of charlatans who operate now would go out of business, and there would be a proper incentive for psychologists whose patients want a letter to give an honest appraisal or a real referral. As it is now, on top of the widespread violations of rights we have now, observe that some of the people who need these animals can't have them, and some who just want to bring an animal with them everywhere they go get to do this. -- CAVLink to Original

Namaste

And who made that so easy? Monday, I noted the artificial-looking nature of the anti-"Zionist" protests that have been going on across college campuses, but had to admit I was in no position to speak about funding. Fortunately, Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian has taken a deeper look at who might be providing financial and other support for these criminal mobs. I like how the post starts by clearly stating why it is worth taking such a look:The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer -- particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.The post is about a six-minute read, clocking in at about 1,850 words, but it does a good job looking at the findings (or, in one case, coverings-up) of several journalistic outlets, ranging from left of center to right. Menton, a conservative, is even-handed, giving credit to one leftist outlet, while calling out another on this issue. Notably, he compares two accounts of the involvement of one Manolo de los Santos, whom I'd feel comfortable calling a professional agitator. He starts with an account from the conservative Tablet:"When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel, when the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism in our lifetime," De Los Santos said in January in front of a cheering crowd in a now-viral video. His remarks were so vicious that South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) denounced the speech as "Nazi rhetoric," and called for Goldman Sachs, whose philanthropy arm used to direct funds to TPF, to cut ties with the organization.And then he provides the following, from how the New York Times covers "the same events:"A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier. But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.Menton goes further to describe the efforts of the Times to paint the non-university-affiliated protesters as just plain folks who got wind of events and decided to join in. Some of that stuff -- "when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students' aid" -- would be funny if what the protesters were advocating weren't so obscene. While it is important to be aware of such goings-on, there is a bigger context to consider, as well: These contributions to a blatant attack on Western civiliation (with Israel and the Jews as a proxy) are chump change compared to the longstanding idological assault against it -- largely paid for by tax money and government student loan programs -- from much of academia. For that story, I refer you to the video embedded above, of Leonard Peikoff's 1983 Ford Hall Forum talk, "Assault from the Ivory Tower: The Professors' War Against America." From its opening:Intellectuals around the world generally take a certain pride, whether deserved or not, in their own countries' achievements and traditions. When they lash out at some group, it is not their nation, but some villain allegedly threatening it, such as the rich, the Jews, or the West. This pattern is true of Canada, from which I originally came, and it is true to my knowledge of England, France, Germany, Russia, China. But it is not true of America. One of the most striking things I observed when I first came here was the disapproval, the resentment, even the hatred of America, of the country as such and of most things American, which is displayed by American intellectuals; it is especially evident among professors in the humanities and social sciences, whom I came to know the best.Were it not for the anti-American, anti-Western ideas propagated by the universities and accepted by so many people today, pikers like De Los Santos would be penniless, isolated cranks at best. Instead, there are plenty of people who feel that he is worth funding or listening to. -- CAVLink to Original

By pointing out that any attempt to deny existence does presuppose existence. Everything in your question already accept existence. Your questions are not about existence, they are about some more advanced question of scientific method that not only assumes existence, it assumes identity and consciousness. We do not attempt to “derive” existence, existence simply is. We do attempt to understand the identity of things that exist. The concept “existence” is a high level concept, which at least some humans have, though we can have a tangential discussion of “implicit concepts” (which I am skeptical about) if you think all humans have this concept. Dogs don’t have concepts. Infants also have not developed the concept “existence”, instead they are developing their first-level concepts like “food”, “person”, “diaper” and so on. Like all concepts, the concepts are not “in” sense perception, they derive from sense perception, which is where we get primary concepts like “food”, “person”, “diaper”. Eventually we develop a hierarchical network of concepts with fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, yogurt, ice cream, ice cream cones, banana split and so forth. Most people are deluded into believing in a “multiverse”, whereas the universe is all that exists so whatever “universe 37” is, it is just an aspect of the universe. People usually don’t understand “existence”.

So you don't interact with Zionists?

😆 Israel is an ethno-supremacist genocidal apartheid regime formed by Zionist terrorist groups in the '40s. To call it "mostly free" is a blatant falsehood. France is "mostly free". Japan is "mostly free". Israel is complete and utter garbage by any rational metric, barely a step above a totalitarian state.

So where is this supposed lie by omission? The PLO did "terroristy" things so they cannot possibly be secular? You're literally just stringing loosely related factoids together hoping that they will somehow constitute a coherent argument. Oh, ok, so I see you're agreeing with the "Israel is hilariously and dangerously stupid"-theory. Argument over. "Herp-derp, you're dumb because look at all this unrelated garbage I posted." Maybe focus more on BASIC LOGIC before insulting other people's intelligence.

"Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge — that there is no substitute for this process, no escape from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations to privileged observers — and that there can be no such thing as a final “authority” in matters pertaining to human knowledge. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically — one’s own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second. The concept of objectivity contains the reason why the question “Who decides what is right or wrong?” is wrong. Nobody “decides.” Nature does not decide — it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is. When it comes to applying his knowledge, man decides what he chooses to do, according to what he has learned, remembering that the basic principle of rational action in all aspects of human existence, is: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” This means that man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality." “WHO IS THE FINAL AUTHORITY IN ETHICS?” The Objectivist Newsletter/, Feb. 1965, 7

Over the weekend, I heard a podcaster speculating on reports that someone was paying people to stage pro-Hamas "protests," i.e., tresspass, squat on, and vandalize college campuses, while threatening Jews or counter-protesters. Given the overall looniness of this day and age, any headlines to that effect would remind me of Poe's Law:Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article.Only now, one often needs to replace the emoji with a reputable source and creationist with conspiracy theorist, while remembering that there are some bat-#$%& crazy things going on out there because nobody is calling out the nuts, bigots, or war-mongers for what they are even as they accuse civiilized people of exactly those things. Reputable news outlets are indeed reporting strong evidence of as much. From NBC News at the first link:New York City officials said that a significant number of people arrested this week at campus demonstrations were not affiliated with the schools. Nearly 30% of the people arrested at Columbia were unaffiliated with the university and 60% of the arrests at City College involved people who weren't affiliated with that school, the mayor said. And The Wall Street Journal, in a report titled "Activist [sic] Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests" adds:Image by jakerome, via Wikimedia Commons, license.In March, there was a "Resistance 101" training scheduled at Columbia with guest speakers including longtime activists with Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based group that celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The administration twice barred the event, citing some of the organizers' known support of terrorism and promotion of violence. Columbia students hosted the event virtually nonetheless, which prompted Columbia President Minouche Shafik to suspend several of them. ... Polat said student organizers at Columbia learned the discipline and planning needed to pull off an effective protest movement not only from their work with veteran demonstrators and outside groups, but from participating in Black Lives Matter marches or student labor organizing. Some tools they learned were practical, such as how to raise money via student fundraisers and donations from friends and supporters to buy tents for encampments.The links came from a post at the conservative Hot Air blog which asserts that these sources confirm not just that non-affiliated people are protesting, but that they are funded by George Soros. While the latter wouldn't surprise me, I see no proof of that particular allegation. (That said, I do not know nor have looked into whether Soros is a major funder of some of the groups giving aid and comfort to these non-student, non-faculty thugs.) -- CAV P.S. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, astroturfing is (or was) a smear that leftists used to dismiss any kind of campaign of protests or rallies they didn't like, on the grounds that they allegedly didn't have as much organic support from the public as they seem to. It's funny how that word hasn't come up yet, although, to be fair, many college students and faculty do support Hamas, thanks to the ideas that saturate college campuses: "Elite colleges are now reaping the consequences of promoting a pedagogy that trashed the postwar ideal of the liberal university." (HT: Yaron Brook)Link to Original

It's supposed to be the "primacy of existence," not the primacy of physical existence. The primacy of existence is a corollary of the law of identity. Things are what they are. Consciousness can perceive what things are but, aside from physical action, cannot affect what they are. But "things" are not just physical things. The primacy of existence also applies when consciousness perceives an idea or an emotion or another consciousness or any other non-physical thing. An idea, or an emotion, or another consciousness, is what it is, and you can try to discover its nature, but you cannot change its nature by will alone. Nothing is different on account of non-physicality. Also, the primacy of existence is also derived not only from the fact that physical objects have identity, but from the fact that consciousness has identity. Consciousness is a means of perceiving or understanding, it is a means of choosing whether to act and what action to perform, but it cannot, apart from action, change anything. Once an action is taken, the results also come from reality, from the nature of the entities involved, and are not controlled or determined by consciousness. It even applies when one is perceiving one's own consciousness, through introspection -- and although, with effort, you can change your habits or your ideas, there are certain things about the nature of your consciousness, of any consciousness, that cannot be changed.

That is what I meant. O'ism understood in that frame says reality is dualistic and assigns primacy to one pole. Not very parsimonious.

You're not responding to anyone's objections to your arguments or their questions about what it is what you actually think. Either start doing that or wrap it up. No one's interested in hearing you go off on wild tangents instead of engaging with what's actually being said to you. Just to preempt your response, this is still not addressing a point. @necrovore's point was pretty clear, and you are blowing it off with this low effort nonsense, opting to go on a paragraph-long tangent about "monism" in response to @EC, which isn't even answering the question he asked you. I'm fairly certain you're here to troll at this point.

Yes, it can. "Challenge reality's authority?" On the basis of what, exactly? It's only because of looking at reality (e.g., Copernicus and later Kepler looking at the motions of the planets) that people learned that the sun does not revolve around the Earth.

I'm chiding him because for days now he's been acting abusively towards other forum members and then crying foul about how he's actually being abused, all the while presenting non-arguments that could be resolved with a very short amount of reading and constantly shifting goalposts during conversation. He is an intellectually dishonest person that turns around and mocks people if they dare get annoyed with him. Excuse me if I chide. As for your question, I never once said that emotions are a product of memory or thought. I said that they are the result of a series of value judgements, which is true. The scope and intensity of your emotions, just like any other act of consciousness, is a product of the automatizing of the use of concepts, in this case, metaphysical value judgements that make-up your hierarchy of values. Once automatized, that hierarchy of values will inform further value judgements, which then are subconsciously automatized, and used to inform further value judgements etc. etc. etc. This is applicable for every act of consciousness as well, but they are absolutely distinct processes. I appreciate you being clever in how you phrased your question. I initially thought you were trotting out some tired non sequitur argument against consciousness, which I am glad to see was not the case.

If you're asking what Aristotle would say, he would say that you cannot look at a virtue in isolation, but in regard to an integration among them all. You could be "productive" in terms of an immediate product, but productivity must be analyzed in relation to all the other virtues. Each of your examples is an example of looking at virtues in isolation without regard to integrating them. The Golden mean is a way to find out what counts as virtue. Once you figure out what virtue is, then you ought to always be virtuous. So excessive pride by Aristotle's standards is not actually pride, but vanity. He doesn't say that the excess of any virtue is bad. There is a certain quality that is in excess, but is not the virtue in question. The quality is a kind of self regard, where vanity is the excess, humility the deficiency, and pride is the right amount of it. Vanity is pride in a superficial way, but it isn't actually pride. "In all the states of character we have mentioned, as in all other matters, there is a mark to which the man who has reason looks, and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly, and there is a standard which determines the mean states that we say are intermediate between excess and deficiency, because they are in accord with correct reason." Book 6, Chapter 1, Nichomachean ethics As much as you say that you spent a lot of time studying this, you make some elementary errors of reasoning, even misinterpretation of philosophers you use to support your positions. You aren't making substantial critiques, your positions are more like what I've heard people say when they haven't spent much time actually working out what Rand is right or wrong about. Or what people say when they have only been introduced to her recently.

Let's ask Oxford English: anti (preposition): opposed to : against virtue (noun): behavior showing high moral standards. value (noun): a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life. So, to be "anti-virtue" is to be "against or opposed to behavior showing high [rational] moral standards," and to be "anti-value" is to be "against or opposed to rational standards of behavior." Definitions seem pretty clear to me! You couldn't have worked that out on your own? Taking stuff out of context isn't so effective when you're talking to people who have actually read the material you're referencing, and even less so when the lexicon is free for anyone with an internet connection (so everyone reading your posts) to reference. I even own that lexicon in book form, so if I was orating this message over the phone from prison I'd still know you're full of shit. Absolutely neon-violet prose aside, implicit in all of this is obviously a rational formulation of morality and values, Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx were both "killers who assume[d] the right to stop you," and saying you should behave in a way that doesn't limit you in your pursuit of values/associate with people who limit you in that pursuit is indisputably a good idea. Also, it is absolutely true that "all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind" and you should feel nothing but regret and shame for ever calling yourself an "Objectivist" while not understanding what that means. The problem is not with Ayn Rand. The only problem here is that you, despite being a forum member for 17 years longer than I have, still never figured out that what is being created isn't strictly material. You can CREATE VALUE. If you are a rational, thinking person, then your PRODUCTIVE WORK IS PRODUCING (OR CREATING) SOMETHING THAT IS OF VALUE TO YOU, AND IN TURN YOU ARE CREATING THE VALUE WHICH OTHERS CONSUME. THIS REQUIRES INGENUITY AND CREATIVITY TO ACCOMPLISH. Excess paint-huffing leads to this post. "Excessive," according to Merriam-Webster, can be defined as: "exceeding what is usual, proper, necessary, or normal" What is "usual" or "necessary" doesn't matter when it comes to pride, so the only part of that definition we need to start off with is "exceeding what is proper." Surely you realize the "proper" amount of pride for someone to have is entirely context dependent. The difference between arrogance and pride is in how someone's pride in themselves scales with what they have to be proud of. Are you seriously suggesting that there is a set in stone amount of pride that it's okay for every human to have? Are you seriously saying that? If so, are you expecting me to take you seriously? Big ask. What is "excess rationality"? That leads to "emotional repression"? What? It leads to an understanding of your emotions and how to regulate them. What makes you feel a certain emotion is not pre-determined, it is the direct result of a value judgement that you have consciously made. For instance, it is not irrational to be upset by an action that contradicts a rationally formulated value judgement. Get it? Being a "workaholic," in the sense that you're using it, is to compulsively work to the point that it's to your detriment, i.e. harmful to your pursuit of value, i.e. to be counter-productive. Where that line sits is, again, entirely dependent on the person and where their priorities are, and there isn't one correct answer for what specific things in your personal life you should be valuing. That is a personal issue. What there is one correct answer for is the standard and ultimate value that you should be using to form those values in pursuit of. That being your life. If your work habits are harmful to your pursuit of life, then obviously you are acting irrationally and should change. Whether or not that is the case is dependent on your personal values. As an aside, all this makes your other thread very confusing to say the least. For someone who claims to have "spent hundreds of hours studying Objectivism," your objections to the philosophy are so unbelievably basic that I have absolutely no idea how you had an "entire philosophical framework" to "lose" in the first place. You are so unfamiliar with even the most basic things about the philosophy that I'm having to sit here and wrangle you like I'm talking to someone who's never even looked into any philosophy, much less Objectivism. In another thread you say to Objectivists: "you can't think for yourself?" I mean, did you ever? Did you ever make any connections between what you were reading and the world as you saw it? I certainly did and this is just a hobby to me. My life isn't dedicated to the study of philosophy; my passions lie elsewhere. How is it that someone who was as entrenched as you claim to have been, to the point where you are apparently having this earth-shattering realization, so clueless about the subject matter? Part of me doesn't even believe that you've read much of anything Ayn Rand wrote. Your aggressive behavior towards others also indicates that you're not arguing in good faith, but I'm perfectly willing to reciprocate that so whatever it's a moot point. What isn't, however, is that you are not at all knowledgeable about this philosophy, but you're very insistent that you've found major flaws with it. What a disgusting display of arrogance and stupidity. It does. It's ironic that you're complaining about "unclear definitions" when you're insisting that arrogance should be defined as having "excess pride" without even delineating the amount of pride it's apparently bad for people to exceed. The definition's that have been provided to you both make sense and are the contemporary definitions of the words we're using. Which I guess you address next: My 1989 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "retarded" as "slow or limited in intellectual, emotional, or academic development <a~child>."

I think he was being sarcastic. "Rational altruism" is a movement that Sam Bankman-Fraud Fried was involved with.

Earlier in the primary season Trumpists encouraged or aided Green crusader/anti-vax conspiracy nut RFK, Jr. -- first as a primary challenger to Joe Biden and then as an independent candidate for the Presidency. They did the latter because they saw him as doing more damage to Biden's prospects than to Trump's. I disputed that idea months ago, in part due to the kind of voter that finds appealing the likes of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump -- and historically, George Wallace and RFK, Sr. This morning, I ran across a piece at UnHerd that comments on what it calls "the growing RFK Jr. coalition." It comes from a far-left perspective -- given away by its assertion that the Kennedy's relatively sane position on Israel is a liability. Most interesting are its quotes from disenchanted Trump supporters:Steve, a musician, tells me that over the past three elections, he has moved from Bernie Sanders (until the DNC "rigged" the selection) in 2016 to Trump in 2020 to RFK Jr in 2024. "Kennedy talks about issues that the other two candidates totally ignore," he says. "This is Kennedy against the uni-party -- something I thought Trump did until he became President."Uh-oh. As a conservative said of Steve Bannon's earlier promotion of RFK, Jr., "Blame Bannon. His monster got out of the cage." Here's another one of those voters, as well as a Trump supporter who doesn't quite fit that mold:Anti-vax nuts have been popping up in conservative circles longer than lots of us would care to think. This photo comes from a Tea Party protest. (Image by Fibonacci Blue, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)Suzanne, another Bernie-Trump-RFK supporter, admires Kennedy for his commitment to prising the US out of "foreign misadventures". "He's not an America First-type like Trump," she says. "His positions are much more considered -- he doesn't want to withdraw us from the world, but merely thinks that we should not be funding all these wars abroad." Along with various other people I speak to there, Suzanne has particular ire for the man she voted for in 2016. "Trump talked a big game, but the debt blew up under him and he was the one that implemented all the Covid shutdowns ... I'll never forgive him for that." While RFK's views on Covid are well-documented, ranging from the credible to the crankish, it would be misleading to characterise all his supporters as militant anti-vaxxers. Many would rather emphasise the importance of medical freedom in general. "I was vaccinated but I was against the shutdowns and mandates," John Myers tells me. "But this isn't just a Covid thing -- it's about the right to choose what's best for you and not have the government tell me what to do."To borrow from the UnHerd piece, the reasons former Trump voters might defect to RFK, Jr. range from the credible to the crankish, but I think it is a real possibility that a second candidate positioning himself as outside the establishment is more dangerous to the other such candidate among voters most unhappy about that establishment. -- CAVLink to Original

"A deep sense of guilt whenever I could not identify a reason behind a desire, and a stifling of any natural ambition, natural pleasures of life, in the name of reason and not living irrationally. Whim worship, I feared it like the plague." I never felt that way when I was an Objectivist. You remind me of the evangelists who tell tall tales of the sins they committed and misery they suffered before they were "saved"—in your case, before you were no longer an Objectivist. "I'm anxious to discover other answers to life's questions. So here I am. I may have a lot of silly questions in the future. Bare with me." No. Bear with me. You are here to preach, starting with disingenuous questions.

It also occurs to me that the idea that it is irrational to entertain even the possibility of a supernatural being leads to censorship of the mind. This is the rational taking to an extreme.

I don't care. You shouldn't be allowed to moderate your own conversations. This whole site has gone to shit ever since guys like you have been given mod powers, because you don't understand the basic rules of having a conversation online. You're either a mod or a participant in a conversation, asshole. You can't be both. There are other mods on this forum. You're supposed to let them moderate, when you decide to participate in a thread.