Harrison Danneskjold

Not if they legitimately won the vote, which is how that question was phrased in the debate. If I lost a race against Stalin himself because most Americans voted for him then I'd concede without any gimmicks or delays whatsoever. A president is not a monarch; he is not the ultimate political authority in our system; the people are. If the people vote against me then that's that; nothing else is relevant. Granted, if I was handing power over to Stalin I'd promptly flee the country - but as a private citizen. Now, all of this is assuming that the election was legitimate, and I haven't forgotten the questions that had been raised about it at that time. But such questions are (just like Trump's estimation of his opponent and absolutely everything else) totally irrelevant to the underlying principle here. A president does not have the right to contravene the will of the people, nor even to drag his feet about enacting that will. He is our servant; not the other way around. Trump did have the right to scrutinize that election and ensure its legitimacy. Having done that (and failing to really prove much of anything) he should've promptly stepped down. I actually do agree that Biden's gang is full of evil operators who're working against the interests of the American people. That's the choice we made, though. We can't flip the whole Monopoly board over just because this round went badly - which is precisely what Trump would've been doing if he hadn't conceded. And that's precisely it. The right wing cooks (such as the QAnon people) aren't the ones who're trying to shut down civilized conversations.

This happened to be my own personal theme song when I wrote those same musings. Either that or this. I'm not precisely sure.

Yes. Absolutely; yes. Which internal organs can I pawn off for it and how soon?

Sun Tzu, in the Art of War, spoke at great length about the importance of deception. To paraphrase, he said 'if you know your self and your enemy then you need not fear losing one battle, even if you fight a thousand. If you know your self but not your enemy then the battle is only half-won. If you know neither your self nor your enemy then your destruction is already assured.' Of all the lessons he taught in that book the importance of deception was by far the one he spoke the most about. The practical utility of this lesson is not lost on America's modern armed forces, for whom this book is required reading. The amount of time, effort and money we've spent on gathering accurate intelligence on our enemies while simultaneously feeding them falsehoods, in previous decades, is now a matter of public record (as is its efficacy). Ayn Rand made it clear that, while honesty is usually a virtue (under any normal circumstances) it ceases to be one when dealing with a certain type of person. In Atlas Shrugged Dagny Taggart finds herself telling lies easily at a certain point (when she knows that the truth would directly lead to the death of her soul mate) and this comparatively brief period of dishonesty culminates in her shooting a man at point-blank range. The parallels between this situation and that of a war are obvious. Last summer I was keeping a journal of my daily musings. Here is one excerpt: I don't have one specific question here. There seems to be some sort of ethical (perhaps even metaphysical) link between deception and warfare which I noted one year ago and haven't thought about since. I'd be interested in hearing any additional thoughts or insights you see.

On further reflection I'd like to apologize for attempting to pick that nit. Essentially since the most recent presidential debates I've been trying to draw a moral equivalence between the far right and the far left, because of how deeply horrific I found Trump's flat refusal to promise to concede if he truly lost. That was still horrific and I'm still not going to sing any of his praises whatsoever, but Trump is not the entire right wing; there's an important difference between even among his most insane devotees (and there are many of them I would personally term insane) and the far left wing of this country. The right wing still tolerates dissent and open discourse. Considering the answer I myself gave to the OP (that the Statue of Liberty should not shrug so long as open discourse is possible) I have been very wrongheaded to gloss over this difference. Donald Trump himself remains a bad person whom I do not like. But I shouldn't have tried to invent some way to disagree with your wholly uncontroversial post.

Not so long as we're able to argue for her long-overdue restoration. I cannot tell how far away that point is from the present (and I have been trying) but we're not there yet. When we get there I'll make sure to let you know where all the best spots are down by my river. Also, I don't think "dark lord of the Republican empire" is too much at all. Ayn Rand opposed Ronald Reagan (in her own words) because of his embrace of the religious right, which she thought would destroy anything which had been good about the Republicans before that. As a millennial it's not easy for me to picture what the Republicans were before Reagan but in my own lifetime the hardcore mysticism has been one of their main vices (and by far the thing I personally find most annoying about them). Trump seems to have actually countered that specific trend to some extent. He never pretended to be too religious, and in his wake that issue seems to be dying out among his sycophants. But I too am waiting for the other shoe to drop, in terms of what exactly replaces it. I agree with Yaron Brook that Trump may well have already destroyed any good there was in the right wing of this country. And I think your characterization is basically correct. My river is the Rum River, though. Its name currently doesn't align too well with reality, but maybe we can do something about that! Newcomers must bring their own supplies, of course.

To be perfectly clear (and all jokes aside) I don't hold QAnon to be much better than I'd guess that you do. When I first heard about it (via the main stream media) I was inclined to think it wasn't as bad as they were saying, as a simple matter of taking their biases into account. I still haven't forgotten all of the blatant lies they've tried to sell me so very recently. When I started seriously probing their ideas (via my landlord) I revised my estimation of QAnon to being roughly as looney as the MSM said they were, but doubtlessly nowhere near as dangerous. Having read some of what @Jon Letendre linked to here has not improved that opinion. I'm not sure if you're subtly trying to make sure that my most recent joke was, in fact, a joke. Many of your posts do tend to fly right over my head in precisely the way that this one has. But I do know who L Ron Hubbard was and I hope that any comparison was meant with just as much earnestness as that of my previous post. PS: If any comparison was even meant at all. IDK; your posts always gallop a ways away from whatever you were responding to, and sometimes I can also follow (and those times never fail to amuse) but sometimes not, and this is one of the latter ones.

I mean, if I was (hypothetically speaking) would I tell you?

Dirt on My Boots by Jon Pardi

You aren't aware of the Star Trek Q?!?!! Shame! Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow; dishonor on your whole family! Go watch some more Star Trek: The Next Generation immediately! Thank you for stating that under absolutely no circumstances are your opinions open to revision; that simplifies things a whole lot. Some stellar Objectivist Epistemology huh? Indeed. From what I gathered from the linked website (you seem to have read far more of it than I, but still, I did read some) the posts are about as vague as you might expect from your local medium. The FoxHunt is on! Great; what is that and what precisely do you mean? We Can Not Be Stopped! Cool; who are you and what can you not be stopped from doing? I'm sensing a dead loved one whose name starts with a "G" over here! They're the sort of claims that can't easily be proven or disproven. Not a great epistemic look. This is gonna be an awkward question... Now that Joe Biden is officially our real president (as awful as he truly is) ... What do you now think of that prediction?

No!

You're not really trying to brag about the Jewish Space Laser lady now, are you? You - ... You do realize how insane the rest of her belief system is, don't you? I really don't think that's a member the Q movement should be bragging about. If she came out tomorrow and endorsed Ayn Rand I'd be mortified, because - well, Jewish Space Lasers. Unfortunately, in general I would tend to agree with that. One of the reasons I'm so frequently tone-policing my peers here (indeed, a large part of the reason why I'm reviving this old thread) is in the attempt, in my own small way, to combat that regrettable tendency. But when you are bragging about your own agreement with the Jewish Space Laser Lady I really can't avoid the conclusion that perhaps your own mind is a bit too open.

To be fair, I think he simply found his identity as an Objectivist under assault and wished to buttress that. It seemed to be less about his overall credibility and more about whether or not he truly is "one of us". And I think we should try to be fair, here. I don't think he'll end up changing my mind, but if we don't at least attempt to leave that possibility open then we can't ask him for the same courtesy, can we? I also wanted to mention that V for Vendetta a great movie which everyone should see at least once. Your political ideas could use some work but I've got to respect the aesthetic taste. That being said ... You say that as if it's a good thing. Treason is an extremely serious accusation which shouldn't be thrown around flippantly, yet which Trump seems to use in roughly the same way in which the far left abuses the term "racist". This really is a bug and not a feature.

To clarify on my last point (now that I have a moment to truly focus on it): What you're talking about is essentially giving each president veto power over the votes of each and every citizen if they happen to elect a "traitor". This is not a smart suggestion. Google defines treason as the "act of betraying one's own country, attempting to overthrow its government or assassinate its sovereign". Now, if we were to stick to this definition (which would apply equally to Antifa and the 1/6 mob) then perhaps such veto power wouldn't be such an issue - only this doesn't seem to be the definition you're working with. Are Creepy Uncle Joe's links to the CCP (not to mention all the alleged sexual misadventures) bad? Totally. And they ought to be fully investigated and perhaps he should be impeached, depending on the results of such investigations - but they don't amount to treason. And whatever we the people ultimately decide to do with Creepy Uncle Joe should not involve his predecessor in any capacity whatsoever. Do you really not see what sort of conflict of interest we'd be setting up by asking each reigning president to accept or veto his successor - particularly when it involves his own reelection? That would practically be begging somebody to just declare "I am the electorate!" And God help us all when we'd get what you're wishing for. That's what I call dangerous.

This is specifically what's dangerous about this form of thinking. The Electorate - c'est moi!

For what it's worth I'm quite happy he didn't listen to you. There are quite a few inferential leaps in there with not much reasoning shown between them. And even if the media does fear Q, that doesn't say anything whatsoever about its truth or falsity (as @dream_weaver alluded to in his comment about the "worldwide effects of Islam and Christianity"); maybe they just think your movement is a dangerous bunch of nut jobs. I don't know whether or not that's true, nor do I have to; it's just one of the numerous possibilities you leapt right past in order to reach your conclusion. And this actually contradicts many of the other claims you've made. You talk about the DC Swamp and nefarious forces within our own government. And I do sympathize with that characterization of things; I'm not one to defend the character of our Federal overlords. But if that's the current state of the system then the rank one has achieved within that system cannot function as a badge of honor. Either Q's clearance should lend him credibility OR Washington DC is a hive of scum and villainy. You cannot have both.

To an extent, I agree. The mainstream media certainly is trying to whitewash the far left (think "antifa is only an idea") while demonizing the far right. Putting that aside, though, it seems obvious that anyone of any political stripe who advocates for political violence is a bad person who knows they have no ideological arguments to offer (actually, that shouldn't even need to be specified, but just to be on the safe side). What might not be obvious is the possible utility there could be in underscoring the very fact that they have no coherent arguments (as evidenced by any appeal to intimidation) - particularly on a forum like this, where anonymity makes such intimidation impossible. I've bookmarked the thread @dream_weaver linked to about QAnon and plan to jump into that (and also start one about White Fragility) on my next day off. That's supposed to be Wednesday but we'll see if I actually get a day off this week or not. In any case, pointing out the evils of the far left is not actually a defense of the far right (which is the one nit I would pick here); it's a misapplication of Tu Quoque. Both are bad (not because of their "far-ness" but because they're wrong in potentially dangerous ways. Fortunately for us, there is a solution to the problem of being wrong.

Are QAnon belief systems so wide as to permit such a characterization of "Darkwing Donald"? Of that we are in perfect accord.

That is actually a bit abnormal. If I remember correctly (and I'm speaking purely off-the-cuff here on a cigarette break, so I may not be) I believe most people think primarily in auditory fashion, as a sort of "inner monologue". I know that's the way I do (although I almost always have an inner soundtrack playing as well). So congratulations - you're slightly abnormal! Maybe that's why you don't seem to be recognizing the secret passphrase ...

The hierarchical nature of concepts comes from the nature of conceptualization. In no version of "the pluriverse" could you start teaching an infant grammatical ideas about verbs and adverbs before they'd learned at least "walk", "run", and several other examples, at minimum.

I might point out, in addition to the fact that sunlight is the best disinfectant, the further fact that avoiding the discussion of a certain idea makes it look like you could not refute it in the open. In the case of QAnon I think this would be giving it far too much credit. I engage with members of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement (whose ideas I consider the very lowest of the low; far worse than any Communist or Nazi). A little less than a year ago I met a coworker who was actually racist towards Europeans, and would often ask me why white people did certain things or what sorts of thoughts went through the white mind. I took every opportunity I could to crack jokes about the goings-on in our biweekly White Male Meetings (the attendance of which is mandatory in order to retain your White Privilege - as I'm sure you already know) and after several months he's stopped asking that kind of question and seems to have stopped thinking such silly things, from what I can tell. Now we're drinking buddies. I know what QAnon people think because my landlord happens to be one of them. He genuinely believes that DisneyWorld is a trap for the abduction of children, who are then sacrificed to Satan in a chamber beneath the theme park, in order for the Democratic Satanists to retain their magical powers. I haven't told him yet that he's making Satanism out to be far cooler (and magic to be an awful lot more effective) than it ever was when I was into it. I know this is a bit of a ramble but I guess I'm mainly wondering what you're afraid of. PS: Maybe we should actually start a thread to discuss exactly what QAnon is and how much sense it makes. Lord knows there's been plenty of dissection of leftist ideas on this forum. PPS: By the way, QAnon supporters actually don't talk about the "restoration" or "reinstatement" of Trump - they believe there's a "dual presidency" right now because they never accepted that his reign ever ended.

Alright. I'm sorry for getting quite so snippy about it, then; I had assumed that you'd known about it. Suffice it to say that, far from there being occasional legitimate reasons for the odd person to keep their identity a secret here, it's actually a pretty good standard for basically everybody (except mad lads like myself and, apparently, you).