punk

Well there's "Parsifal" where the hero is a hero precisely because he is chaste, a man of faith, and stupid (i.e. the Christian crusader ideal). Also the first two operas of the "Ring of the Nibelungen" had a strong anti-capitalist bent where the dwarf is a stand-in for the exploitative business classes, and is characterized by greed (and traditionally he is played up as a Jewish stereotype), and the hero represents a liberating of the common folk from the thrall. The first two operas of the Ring we conceived in the climate of the 1848 revolutions. He apparently didn't know where to go from their and the last two are more straightforward fantasy.

Musically, this may be true, but you have to ignore the content of his librettos.

Well any penalty for negligence should be comparable to, say, a firefighter quitting in the middle of a large fire, or a surgeon quitting in the middle of a surgery.

Certainly. The amount of training required to perform some military roles requires some expectation of a long term commitment. But this is a civil rather than criminal matter.

The military should be considered a job like any other. If the guy wants to leave, he should be able to quit. If you can't get enough people to join the military to do what it is doing, then what it is doing isn't in keeping with what the population wants.

Don't make too much of "order" and "disorder" as these aren't really physical concepts. The point of the Second Law is that things tend to go to the more likely state. Imagine a jar containing a gas. All the gas being in the jar is a highly unlikely state (physically), so when you open the jar the gas escapes going to physically much more likely states. Or, to look at things in reverse, if you have a gas filling a room and a jar, how likely is it that the gas will spontaneously find itself entirely within the jar? That is to say that the presence of all the gas in the jar is very unlikely (and also "ordered" so ordered basically is a variation on the notion "unlikely", and any "unlikely" state is an "ordered" one). In some sense the universe is rather like a gas escaping a jar.

In the early universe, the whole of the matter-energy in the universe was concentrated in a very small area. Now the whole universe is much more spread out. Physically this is actually a less ordered state.

For most all of human history people have been having sex in front of their children. I mean, what are you going to do when you live in some sort of one room dwelling with family? In the US the colonists and settlers were having sex in front of their children. The fact that this is even an issue has to do with the degree of affluence enjoyed by American society, where houses are large enough that people can expect privacy. This shouldn't be an issue.

I don't think the Mullahs engage in quite the degree of torture that SAVAK under the Shah practiced, if that is what you are asking.

What on Earth are you talking about? But let us recap the part of your post I can make sense of: 1. There was a pre-Islamic Persian culture which we have next to no evidence of. 2. There is a post-Islamic Persian culture which we have plenty of evidence of. The most I can get out of what you are saying is that somehow you know that the pre-Islamic culture was superior to the post-Islamic culture even though we have no evidence of the former, and plenty of evidence of the latter. How does that work exactly?

I think it would be hard to make the claim that, even in Alexander's day, China was not "worth conquering". No, Alexander had to stop because of mutiny in the ranks. Not because he'd conquered everything "worth conquering". The fact is people wanted to go home.

I'd argue that it is largely a relative decline. When you look at the Islamic world, you are looking at what was typical for the human race for most of its civilized history. The West has just produced a rather stellar change in things. For example, we admire Athens, but if you look at how Athenians treated their women, it was actually as bad as the worst stereotypes of the Islamic world, if not worse. Athenian women were veiled, they lived in special parts of the house, and they didn't go out unescorted. Of course, Athens did have rather independent prostitutes, but that was the choice for women: either veiled domestic slave,or prostitute.

I think the core of Zen is at odds with objectivism. A big point of Zen is to set aside all our emotional and romantic associations with things, and view them just as they are. So even if you had a pen that belonged to Abraham Lincoln, you'd just see it as a pen, and not look at it with the attitude "Hey! This is LINCOLN's PEN!", or if you had a car, you'd view it as a means of transportation, and not get all caught up in image, style, and flair. Rand's brand of Romanticism has a view to finding and enacting the "heroic" in the world. Zen would say the heroic is just a figment of our mind, and that it is in our best interest to get past that.

It's all good. Tell me this though. Have you listened to the whole of "Also Sprach Zarathustra", or just the Einleitung (i.e. the famous piece from 2001)? I found most of the rest quite dull, you?

That's Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra".

So you are saying that it is true in as far as pre-Islamic Persian culture vanished. Of course there is a perfectly good and vibrant post-Islamic Persian culture. Neither is more Persian than the other. Of course I guess we could say that Christianity caused Anglo-Saxon culture to vanish.

I suspect "The Fountainhead" was introduced mainly for its title. That is viewers were supposed to view the events of the episode as a "fountainhead" from which other things will emerge.

This statement is just incredibly ignorant. Did the author even bother pop open a book here? C'mon; Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafiz. Those are three of the world's greatest poets right there and they all wrote in some variety of Persian after the Muslim context. Quite a bit of what is called "Islamic culture" is of Iranian origin.

Well that's German romantic poetry for you. But remember, this is the pantheism of Spinoza's "Ethics", which was popular in German Romantic circles. I believe Peikoff said something about that he would have been a Spinozist if he hadn't found Rand.

I know this is a bit off topic, but... Does anyone else find this tendency to construct parallel and separate media for liberals and conservatives a bit troubling. I means sure everyone should be free to do what they want. But the basic idea that "These are conservative facts integrated into a conservative world view and these are liberal facts integrated into a liberal world view", is intellectually troubling. I mean facts are facts, and the real world is rarely as clean as ideologies would have it, and there should be disagreements and discussions on things.

What ever happened to old standbys like chess and go?

No, quite a few subjects are taught in rote form. Biology, chemistry, and physics allow for in class demonstrations and experiments. Astronomy ends up being pretty rote, but you could look through a telescope if you had one. Evolution just doesn't invite nice tidy demonstrations or experiments. I think we agree though, that if the students learned the scientific methodology and missed the rote facts, they'd have learned more than those that memorized the facts but never got the methodology?

Unfortunately evolution tends to be taught rather dogmatically. That is as facts to memorize. The beauty of science is that it teaches inductive evidence-based reasoning which helps a person in areas well beyond science. The reduction of the science curriculum at the lower school level to memorization of dogmas does a disservice to students. This is not to be confused with learning a science at the university level where there is just so much material to learn that you have to (at least initially) take most of it on faith. At least the ID idiots have forced biology to bring its evidence based reasoning back into the public perception of biology. I wonder if tossing out evolution altogether and getting students to do comparative anatomy on some animals wouldn't be a better science education.

I dunno, I've met some pretty irrational and passionate atheists before.... Oh come on. No country is 100% anything, except on official government records.

Oh come on, this is entirely reasonable, unless one is saying there are no atheists with Middle Eastern names. Not everyone of Arab-descent is Muslim. While it might be very likely the person is Muslim, a good reporter should get the facts before reporting anything. The point is, it isn't beyond the realm of reason that an atheist Arab-descended cabbie got angry at two Christians in his cab.