Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Nicky

Regulars
  • Posts

    3835
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    195

Everything posted by Nicky

  1. No, that's a contradiction of terms. The Constitution, if followed, does not allow for a dictatorship. The Nazis are advocating for establishing a dictatorship by whatever means necessary. They are openly Nazis. Have you ever heard of a Nazi who follows the US Constitution? Only thing that's not happening is that individual Nazis coming into the US are not walking up to the first LEO they see to tell him they're here to commit specific illegal acts. They are smart enough (or well trained enough) to only speak about their ideology and plans in general terms. And that is recognized as free speech in American law: you can say that you believe in the most heinous acts imaginable. You can be a member of NAMBLA (that's an organization that believes sex with per-pubescent children is moral). You can say killing cops is justified and commendable, and applaud when it happens. Etc., etc. It's all protected speech. And the Nazis take full advantage of all these precedents, and go as far as the law allows. (this is not some far fetched, theoretical scenario, btw. ... American neo-Nazis do all this already; only thing they can't do is bring in their buddies from around the globe, because the Feds have the power to deny pretty much anybody, for any reason, permission to work or settle in the US...or even so much as visit, if they're from a country that requires a visa for entry).
  2. Just to get ahead of this: the hypothetical Nazis in my example have not expressed any desire to illicitly participate in the government of the US...or to break any other laws on the books. They haven't expressed the contrary, either (presumably, they were never even questioned about it, since entry is free as long as you can prove your identity and have no criminal history, it's not like they would make you pinky swear that you won't break any laws in the future when you cross the border). And some of them will start using guerrilla tactics to intimidate everyone they hate and everyone who opposes them as soon as they enter the country, but, for all we know, any one individual Nazi could simply be planning to live in peace, earn their citizenship legally, and then vote for the next Hitler, also perfectly legally. There's no proof that any specific Nazi entering the country is planning to abuse the system, and their sponsors are not expressly encouraging them to do so.
  3. To me, it FEELS LIKE you think expressing a preference for a government system that doesn't involve periodical free elections to establish who runs the government (i.e. expressing a preference for a military dictatorship, a socialist revolution, a fascist totalitarian state, or for that matter a state of anarchy) constitutes sedition. I say feel like, because you haven't even come close to accurately describing what is and what isn't sedition.
  4. That wasn't the question. That was just a statement of fact: that's what US law says. Being a Nazi (with everything that implies, as described in my post above) is not a crime in the United States. So, with that fact in mind, do you want to answer the question: should it be a right to organize the mass migration of ideological Nazis, who's stated goal is to create a fascist, national socialist government, and then achieve racial harmony by having the government murder all non-whites, into the US? Again: holding and expressing such beliefs is the constitutionally guaranteed right of Americans. That's not what my question is. My question is, should it also be the right of would be immigrants, or should there be a double standard?
  5. Okay, so just to confirm that I'm reading your answer correctly: immigration to a country for the purpose of fundamentally changing its form of government to totalitarianism is a right. In any numbers, even if it's organized and taking place in mass. Correct?
  6. The stated purpose of the organization is EXACTLY what I said. Nothing less, nothing more. They will not say they intend to do anything else except help people who share their stated beliefs enter the US, and then organize to take power. There's no mention of how. They also do not tell the people they are helping whether to behave peacefully or violently. They leave it up to them. So, is this a right, or not?
  7. I said "eventual Final Solution". Under US law, the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio Espousing Nazi ideology (which is centered on racial harmony, clearly only achievable by killing all non-Aryans), is protected speech. So what exactly is the problem? Being a Nazi is not a crime in the US. Why shouldn't, then, Nazis be free to settle in the US in great numbers?
  8. Here's a question, might be relevant to the thread: let's say someone formed the International Nazi Party in South America. This movement then started recruiting like minded, white South Americans, putting them on buses, and bringing them up into the US, for the stated purpose of spreading national socialism in America (this includes promoting antisemitic laws, government imposed segregation and overall fascist control of society, an eventual takeover of America's military might and a global Final Solution). Is this within their rights? Why or why not? Note: the reason why someone would want to do this is because of the First Amendment. The US is the only country where you could, in theory at least, promote national socialism on a significant scale. Anywhere else, you would eventually get shut down by a new law that simply bans your activities. But you would need an "open border" Amendment, similar to the First, because if you started doing this now, the feds would just shut the operation down at the border, before all the neo-nazis could flood in and take advantage of the First Amendment...and they would have the support of about 99% of the populace, in doing so.
  9. Just curious: what's your background? Have you worked for or managed a large business before?
  10. I used to believe in God, and study the Bible, when I was very young. I don't look at it as "lost time" at all. In fact, those were some of the most intellectually productive years of my life. I didn't just read the Bible, I also read Dostoevsky and several other Christian authors, but it was all connected to my faith, and it was all very much productive and worthwhile. I highly recommend crazy ol' Fyodor. Every single thing he ever wrote is genius. Insane (or maybe just insanely pessimistic) on some level, but he cuts to the essence of things on every other level. So does Nietzsche (who is very much Christian, and a fundamentalist at that, in his critique of the Church, though he's nowhere near as sophisticated as Dostoevsky). So does most of the Bible, as do some other religious texts. There's a lot you can learn from religion, when you're really young. You can even learn some stuff from it when you're old. The main things wrong about the Bible are the (occasional) altruism and the supernatural God part. Most of everything else makes quite a bit of sense, and is well worth studying. When you study the Bible, you're studying thousands upon thousands of years worth of human experience. And even the supernatural God part can just be interpreted as a metaphor for reality, and you're fine (well, it's more complex than that, it involves the context of knowledge people had before science was a thing, but there's no reason to get into that here). Thing is, this is all off topic. The thread is about the loss of a literal God. There's no loss there, because there's no literal God.
  11. That sounds like your social anxiety, not anything caused by other people's shortcomings. That's one of many things a therapist will likely point out to you: it's not other people's job to alleviate your stress, it's your job to function in stressful situations. Everybody feels anxiety, and it's perfectly normal. Anxiety is only bad if you let it paralyze you. If you are able to act despite feeling anxiety, it can actually help you (it can make you more focused than if you were entirely relaxed and comfortable with a given situation). Obviously, there are degrees, and everyone needs to figure out what their threshold is for tolerating stress, but, in my opinion at least, a stress free life (never facing situations that make you anxious) is even worse than too much stress. You can always dial it back, if it gets too much. Getting into a habit of always seeking psychological comfort, on the other hand, is passive, isolating, and hard to snap out of. So it's better to push yourself, find out what your limit is, and then stay within your limits, than to shut yourself away from the world.
  12. Yes. Seek two or three therapists. And then settle on the one who insists on honesty the most, and catches you in lies and equivocations most often. That's who's gonna help you engage in the honest, painful self evaluation required for healing.
  13. Regarding fasting, I don't know if this was mentioned yet, but the longest medically observed and documented period of fasting (on NO CALORIE INTAKE, water and vitamin supplements alone) was 382 days. In that time, the 27 year old grotesquely obese patient lost 125 kg. More from the study:
  14. Don't Google "ice cream", google the toxic and addictive ingredient in ice cream: sugar. The dosage where sugar is chronically toxic depends on each individual, but the normal western diet should put you well above that dosage. On average, Americans eat 30 kg of sugar per year. That's 85 grams/day. It (added sugar) starts being toxic at a fraction of that. If you buy processed food, from the store, and do not actively avoid foods that have sugar in them, you are exposing yourself to toxic levels of sugar, and are at significant risk for all those illnesses you listed. Doesn't matter how "healthy" you think your diet is. You cannot have a healthy lifestyle if you live in the West and you don't actively, religiously avoid food products that have sugar added to them. Well that depends. If you define a dessert as a small dish that's meant to excite a person's taste buds, at the end of a meal, then sure. There's nothing unhealthy about that, whatsoever. But if you define dessert as a delivery device for an addictive, toxic substance, meant to feed that addiction, then nope. And no, it's not likely that you are able to control that addiction, by keeping your sugar intake just below toxic levels each day. That's not how addiction works. A few strawberries (50 g, let's say), with 4 g of natural sugar in it, fits into the former category. A medium sized strawberry flavored soda, on the other hand, is not a dessert, it's the delivery device your 40 grams of sugar (well above toxic levels) comes in. You haven't ordered it for the amazing flavor (or you would've had the strawberries), you ordered it because you crave the toxic doses of sugar you're addicted to. It's not meant to appeal to your taste buds. You would have to shove over a pound of strawberries down, to get the sugar hit you can gulp down in a minute, with a medium sized soda. That's why strawberries won't get you addicted (they can still make you somewhat unhealthy, especially if you mix them in with fruits and vegetables that have even higher levels of sugar, and decide to live on that, but they won't get you addicted to sugar, because they're not efficient enough delivery devices.). Soda on the other hand unavoidably will get you addicted. Doesn't matter how "little" you drink. So will fruit juice, btw., especially orange juice...the sugar is "natural", but it's the same substance, and in similar doses, as in soda. So will solid sweets with extreme sugar content, like regular chocolate (anything below 80% dark), most ice cream (you can make ice cream without sugar, of course, but that's not what people eat), cookies, even things you might not consider "sweets" can have a lot of added sugar, that's masked with spicy, salty, vinegar or herb flavors. All fast food has sugar poured in the batter, breading, crust, burger, sauce, "salad", etc. by the bucketful. People don't eat desserts and fast food for the taste (these days, with the rise of processed sweets) any more than they drink beer or wine for it. That's an evasion. The taste serves to make the toxin bearable to the taste buds, as they seek a high. P.S. Chronic toxicity means that something is toxic if you consume it regularly. If you eat a pound of sugar in a sitting, the only effect will be temporary nausea. But if you eat 100g/day for 10 years, you're going to look and feel awful by the end of the 10 years, and will have increased your odds of an early death significantly. A good comparison would be to smoking. It's unclear that it compares favorably to smoking, actually. Could very well be worse, we just don't know for sure yet (because it's been studied far less, and because it's so much harder to reliably find test subjects who never consumed toxic levels of sugar, than it is to find non-smokers, to serve as the control).
  15. I recently read a book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. It really helped me make peace with this ever present contradiction between supposed workplace rules and what people actually do, as a rule (not sure how to phrase this exactly...maybe "what people actually do as if they were following a different rule book"?), at work. Because it's not chaos: people aren't acting unpredictably, or unilaterally, when they're ignoring the official rules. They are just following a different set of rules: one that's not written down. But they're all following the same unwritten rules, it's not like one person follows one set, another one another set. You should just read the book, it's really good (the first half is dedicated to individual habits, the second to organizational ones), but I will try to sum it up briefly. It says something along the lines of: organizations, just like people, are guided by habits, not by rules. For instance, you acknowledge that Objectivist principles are rational, and should be followed...but you can't just flip a switch and follow them, you must consciously and constantly work to develop habits that make it easier to act the right way. Same is true for organizations, except developing good habits is even harder, because there are different people, with different values and personalities, involved. I would argue (based on personal experience) that the ONLY way to get people to follow the rules and do so with enthusiasm and good intentions (as opposed to begrudgingly, which produces worse results than not bothering with rules at all) is if the rules are created by EVERYONE in the organization, from the lowliest intern to the top boss, working together and agreeing to them. In other words, you can't impose a set of rules from the top down, and expect your business to stay productive if you're tyrannical about enforcing them. People will simply hate you for it, and work against you. Not just "irrational" people. Everyone. The notion of top down rules one's inferiors just follow unquestioningly goes against basic principles of productive human interaction. That leaves managers with two options: 1. In an ideal situation, with an organization that's small enough, or with a branch of an organization that has enough autonomy, the person in charge of the place does what I suggest above: talks to everyone regularly, asks everyone's opinion on what the rules should be, and finally gets everyone to agree on a reasonable, minimum necessary set of rules people are willing to follow. And, of course, the rules are updated regularly. 2. The second options is what usually happens: a set of rules gets handed down, and promptly ignored. Doesn't mean that anarchy follows. Far from it: as the rules start being ignored, people come up with their own replacement rules fairly quickly. There are conflicts at first (in the process of these rules being formed), but conflict is unpleasant, and people quickly reach compromises meant to avoid conflict, and those settlements end up guiding their actions from that point on. And smart middle managers aren't just aware of these organizational habits, they know how to make slight modifications as needed, to keep things functioning smoothly, and with minimal conflict. They're essentially doing what's described in point 1., but not explicitly (because they don't have the power to do it explicitly). My advice is, figure out these hidden rules quickly, and follow them. When you asked your coworker about the hidden rule concerning eating, for instance, they were beyond forthcoming and honest with you. People usually are, because they love these rules (they love them because THEY made them, and they made them to make work life easier and more productive), and they want to help newcomers understand and follow them to. And once you prove that you understand the system, and are willing to work within it, you can start to influence it as well, and bend it to your will. You have to be willing to start small conflicts, to gain any territory, but people will respect you for it (conflicts shouldn't be shouting matches, they should be calm, brief, rare but well timed expressions of dissatisfaction with someone's actions). And none of this is irrational. It's not ideal, but it's not irrational. It's the second best solution to the problem, when the first one (explicit cooperation to reach the same result) isn't an option. P.S. Don't mistake this with an absence of principles, or dishonesty. Again: in a functional organization that functions in spite of the written rules rather than because of them, people are honest about the unwritten rules. They are honest about their scope (they're not official rules you can be written up for breaking, they are enforced by your co-workers, through social pressure). They are well intentioned about their purpose, and, finally, the rules DO NOT contradict basic human principles like honesty, property rights, etc. If you are not honest, if you do not have the business' best interest in mind, if you steal, etc., these unwritten rules will get you ostracized and even fired more surely than any written rules. And don't think that the above description only fits fast food chains that hire minimum wage workers. I've seen the same habit driven work environment everywhere I ever worked, and in every organization I ever came in contact with. The book also goes into the detailed functioning of organizations like ALCOA, the London Underground, a major East Coast hospital, etc. In a dysfunctional organization, of course, dishonesty, theft, and much, much worse becomes the "rule". Such organizations exist too, obviously. Just look at the history of the 20th century, examples abound. Functional organizations can't exist without freedom of association, and self interested, rational owners and managers. But you haven't posted anything to suggest this organization you worked for was dishonest, encouraged theft, etc. Having a bite to eat during your shift, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone who works there, is not theft. Who knows why that rule was written down (could be anything from regulation to some out of touch manager on a power trip)...point is, no one cares about it. If no one cares about a rule, it DOES NOT MATTER. IGNORE IT.
  16. There are many fasting methods. I am talking strictly about restricted eating, where you restrict your food intake to anywhere under 12 hours/day. And even in this case, you can have all the benefits of coffee and tea...during those hours when you're eating. It's just that you can't drink them instead of water (because you wanna be drinking some sort of fluid when you're not eating, and non-flavored water is the only thing that doesn't cause enzyme production (doesn't start that 12 hour stage of your metabolic cycle when digestion is optimal). And, again: the studies that show spectacular benefits from this kind of fasting were done in mice (in one study that comes to mind, it was mice that had their circadian rhythm messed with on purpose, to see if this is a good way to fix that problem so many people suffer from). Mice have much faster metabolism (they will eat far more often than large omnivores, if food is available), so a 14 hour fast for them could be far more impactful than it is for people. Unfortunately, there's just no way to empirically test this on humans for longevity, in a period shorter than a lifetime (which would be 100 years, if it actually works the way it does in mice). As for other types of fasts, you just have to try it. Coffee and tea WILL cause hunger, rather than satiate it, in my experience. So if I fast, I'm strictly on water, because I find it easier. But it might work differently for you. This is my subjective experience (and other people's subjective experience), not proven fact.
  17. Just because something works on mice (that's usually what things like this are tested on) doesn't mean it works the same on humans. But still, it's more likely to work, than a more arbitrary suggestion, that hasn't even been tested on mice. So yes, I do try to keep up with the latest studies, and adapt my lifestyle as much as possible. That said, some of the stuff (even the stuff on your list) is contradictory. Drinking coffee and tea instead of water for instance contradicts the version of intermittent fasting you describe (it's specifically called time restricted eating)...because coffee and tea are foods. So you're not fasting, your body has to process even black coffee and sugar-free tea the same way it would process a chunk of ham. Water's the only thing that goes through the body unprocessed. Restricting feeding to 10 hours/ 24 hours, in mice, had spectacular results. And this is acting on the metabolic cycle, which is shared between mammal species (carnivores, omnivores, herbivores, night creatures, day creatures, etc.). So it's probably one of the more worthwhile things to try. But you gotta be all in, you can't drink coffee or tea outside the 10-12 hours, it has to be water. It's explained why early in this video: Scientist on Joe Rogan explains time restricted eating I will make one more observation: once you get rid of the obviously bad foods (high sugar content for sure, many kinds of soy, for sure, low fat, pasteurized milk, for sure, certain vegetable oils, for sure, gluten with a high probability, processed meats ...I'm gonna say probably) the health effects most likely depend on the source of the food more than the kind of food you eat. Meat from animals raised on conventionally grown grain and soy (crops are treated with weed and pest killers, some carcinogenic), then heavily treated with antibiotics and dewormers (because it's the only way to keep animals alive when they're bunched together in a cage, living in their own feces and cannibalizing each other) ... isn't the same food as meat from animals raised to organic standards, out on pasture, being moved every day; which is all you need to do to keep them healthy, as a daily move breaks the parasite cycle. The source is just as important with vegetables and fruit, to the point where it's likely not worth it to make exotic stuff shipped in from afar part of your regular diet, simply because there's no way of knowing how it was grown, and what was used on it. [note on fruits: a lot of fruits have been bred for high sugar content...their wild variants contain maybe 10% of the sugar a modern fruit does; the main exceptions are berries and nuts (even strawberries, surprisingly), those have not been bred as intensively in the past 10,000 years, and therefor contain a lot less sugar]
  18. No, none of what you are describing contradicts tabula rasa. I'm currently reading (almost finished) a book called "The power of habit" (I recommend it, because it doesn't just spout advice, it describes the cutting edge science and studies that back up the advice), which goes into detail about how habits are formed, which parts of the brain light up or go dim when they take over, and how we can consciously determine or affect these subconscious, semi-automatic habits. These are not fully automatic reactions, they can be created, bypassed or altered through conscious mental effort. I'm also not talking about physiological reactions like PMS, or a reaction to illness. That doesn't contradict Oism either. But Oism makes the claim that, in human beings, emotions can only be caused by values, and that old "instincts" are entirely defunct. And that's being contradicted by some very convincing voices these days...they're not looking to contradict Objectivism, just trying to figure out human psychology, and they are making a convincing case that parts of the brain are left over from before humans became rational, and are doing their own thing, sometimes in spite of our rational mind. That is the key here: they're not just controlling physiological functions the rational mind has nothing to do with, and occasionally reminding the conscious mind about these physiological problems. They're recognizing outside events that DO NOT PHYSICALLY AFFECT US, and reacting in a prescribed manner, in a muted version of the way the primitive, non-rational ancestor's brain used to react to them before we developed a rational ability.
  19. Sure. But that's not the issue. The issue is, the brain (it is claimed, I'm happy to name the people who make the claim, but I assume you're aware) reacts automatically to something being perceived (perceived automatically... this part Oism agrees with). The effect of that reaction (the mood) isn't knowledge. But what about the cause? If event X is automatically, and entirely independently of anything a person learned in their life, is causing reaction Y, isn't the ability of the primitive mind to recognize event X, and KNOW that this is the time to react in manner Y, "knowledge"? It is the brain acting on information (information that is innate, it's not information gained through perception + integration). I mean sure, it's not knowledge the way Rand defines it...because her definition of knowledge assumes tabula rasa ("Knowledge is a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation"...ItOE). But there's a lot of of editorializing in that. The actual definition should just be "knowledge is a mental grasp of a fact of reality". Perceptual, innate, however it came about. I would also like to remind you of this claim in Objectivism: " man’s values and emotions are determined by his fundamental view of life". ("Philosophy: Who needs it?", via the AR Lexicon). So okay, moods are not knowledge, they're emotions. But are they determined solely by knowledge as defined by Ayn Rand, or can you get into a mood because a primitive part of your brain has the ability to automatically react to something in the outside world that invariably causes it to release a mood altering chemical? No matter what you do, think, value, etc.?
  20. If parts of the brain react independently from the conscious mind (to produce mood altering chemicals, automatically, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, because that's what they've been doing for the past 250 million years), how is that a blank slate?
  21. I'll keep this simple, to start out with. Could it be that parts of the human brain are remnants of evolution (vestigial, like the appendix, the tailbone on an embryo, pseudo genes, etc.), and that they produce chemicals (such as serotonin) in reaction to outside stimuli, that affect our state of mind, entirely independent of our conscious mind (our values and knowledge)? (what I'm getting at is that this notion is fairly widely accepted in Psychology, and it does not gel with "tabula rasa"...that's the subject I'm ultimately hoping to revisit)
  22. Most tech executives, including Google's CEO, live in the US. Which means the US Congress has the authority to stop this. They can make aiding and abetting repression abroad illegal. And, frankly, they should. There's already a precedent for it: the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes involvement in corruption abroad a federal crime. This is way more serious than giving a bribe to some bureaucrat. This app could very easily end up facilitating torture and murder.
  23. Farmers are traders. Everyone who produces something to sell is a trader.
  24. Not a bad point there, Miss Rand. Indeed, the nationalism vs. internationalism question is superficial and artificial. Nationalism has no virtues, nor does socialism, nor does internationalism per se. Only capitalism does, and international agreements only have virtue to the extent that they facilitate individuals' freedom to trade and move between states. P.S. You really should be more careful about the ghost of a dead individualist philosopher taking over you fingers and posting corrections to your collectivist book review, Grames. It's hurting the cause.
×
×
  • Create New...