Harrison Danneskjold

Dirt on My Boots by Jon Pardi

I don't support keeping ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE locked under house arrest for any reason.
The point I am trying to make about peanut butter is that it is irrelevant as an example because people know it contains peanuts and can avoid it.
 

That's pretty self sacrificial, because you're making a decision based on something besides what is for your own good, your self-interest. If you were forced, you would have no option, but since you aren't forced, getting a vaccine could be for any reason you want. If you say that is a good idea to get a vaccine, so you get one, but also say that vaccines in this case should not be mandatory, you are being perfectly consistent. 
 

The photos that supposedly show earlobes connected to cheek actually have the relevant area in shadow, so you can't tell whether the earlobes are connected or not.
 
 
 

Earlobes connected to cheek:


Hanging earlobes not connected to cheek:

My bad, I got mixed up on who said what. I think the message got lost in translation across posts. 
I still think what you said amounts to claiming that the only actual copies that could exist are perfect replications, in which case copying is impossible, in which case any alleged copy is actually a new creative act. The result is exactly what the anti-IP position is trying to say. Yes, with music, a new interpretation or rendition of a classical composition will be a unique creative act. I agree with you there. But there is also a degree in which the music really is being replicated and reproduced.
Gotcha, I think your formulation here makes more sense about the actual question at stake. 

What are you talking about ?
 
The point was that it is irrationally to kill someone for not properly wearing a mask given what all the data on the lethality of Covid reveals.
What aspect of public health or sanitation was the judge defending in that case? 

Public vs. private in this context means means healthcare delivered by an entity that is subject to liability. Once it is public or universal or owned by everyone, the responsibility can be evaded more easily vs. an entity that you have a contract with.

https://courses.aynrand.org/works/patents-and-copyrights/
Would you care to walk us through the article and point out where you imagine she digresses from the process of reason, step by step?

Maybe this is the root of the problem, in these discussions. Because copyright and patent infringement is widely talked about in social media as “theft” or “piracy”, people quite reasonably identify an important difference between theft and infringement – deprivation. A common retort is “but you are depriving them of their livelihood!”. I think instead the attention should be in what the fundamental claim of patent and copyright law is, it is a claim that a particular expression can be property.
When a person trespasses on my tangible property, there is no theft (permanent deprivation). The discussion should look at the similarity between trespass to land or chattels, and trespass of intellectual property. I think the parallelism (identified by Rand) between claiming and maintaining a claim to lands and goods qua property that were not previously owned because the person recognizes their value applies equally to the concrete expression of an idea, and that’s where the discussion should be focused.

 
The automatic output of a computer program is not protected by copyright law, only the creative – non-mechanical – creation of a human is protected by copyright. That’s a legal point, not a philosophical – I’d say that the law has it right. You don’t even need an AI, you just need to know what the vocabulary of music is (♯, ♪, A etc) and the most elementary system of rules about meaningful sequences of those letters, and you can easily generate all possible “pieces of music”, up to length n (the set is unbounded).

 

Obviously it is possible to overdo concern with safety.  It would be ridiculous to equip buses with lifeboats in case they get caught in a flood.  The question is where and how to draw the line.
 

In episode #18 of HBTV, Binswanger quotes Rand as having said "I am in favor of colonialism". This does not come as a shock to me, considering the public arguments that she put forth as to why it was morally just for the colonists to settle in America or for Jewish populations to settle in Palestine. If you're not familiar with her argumentation, she essentially argued that the British colonists and the Jewish settlers represented a beachhead of civilization and progress in places where backwardness and stagnation ran rampant. In the episode, Binswanger himself mentions India under British rule and argues that they benefitted a great deal in terms of Western technology while also conceding that moral wrongs were undoubtedly committed. 
Rand's statements on colonialism would be decried as reprehensible in today's ugly culture of nihilism where America (and the West as a whole) is supposed to get down on their knees and apologize to everyone on the globe for any perceived injustice. The reason why I wanted to make this thread is because I've found that Objectivists themselves tend to get squeamish on the subject. It's as if it is this elephant in the room which admirers of Rand's philosophy all need to dance around so as to not cast any light on it because it's perceived as an embarrassment. I do wonder if young Objectivists are more prone to feeling uneasy or dismissive in regards to Rand's views on colonialism than those who've been around for decades. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't doubt that's the case. 
What do you think? Let's discuss it. 
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sRXW58FZ_g&t=1483s 24:09 
 

It is possible to have trade secrets without the "inevitable disclosure" idea. If you work for a company, learn its trade secrets, and then deliberately disclose them to a competitor, that is properly illegal. But it's another thing if the employer can say that the trade secrets are things that have become habits for you, so that, regardless even of your own desire in the matter, you would inevitably disclose them, if you worked for a competitor -- and then uses that as a basis for preventing you from changing jobs.
So if you are a "star player" for a company then maybe some personal habit of yours, such as your handwriting, or your typing style, or your method of composing music or flipping omelets, if the job involved such a thing -- might become a "trade secret" of the company, which they then own (not you). So you can never leave, unless you change careers entirely, or retire, or die.
Objectivism (as far as I know) does not support the notion of signing yourself into slavery. But such a thing used to be possible, because your freedom could be regarded as a "property," separate from yourself, which would originally belong to you but could be signed away. "Inevitable disclosure" hearkens back to that sort of idea, because it creates a situation where an aspect of you can become the property of someone else; thus, as I said, the intellect of one person becomes the property of another.
Sometimes I sense this notion that "if you disagree with these ideas then you probably think it's okay to rob banks" or something, but that is not the case. What I disagree with is more like the sort of thing like when Hank Rearden was blackmailed into signing over the patent to Rearden Metal. That kind of thing happens not just to the Hank Reardens of the world but to lots of people, all the time, in a corrupt system, and further, the system will be developed in such a way as to make that sort of expropriation easier to commit and harder to resist, to make it look like it's just laws and contracts operating as they should, to make it look like the sort of people who think that sort of expropriation is going on under a cloak of "legality," probably oppose patents and contracts, and think it's okay to rob banks.

That statement is way to broad. I assume you are saying that government should not preemptively intervene in a decision that should be left between each and their doctor, or their judgement. Because a policy of non intervention is part of a political philosophy too.
The fact that it is right or wrong to give a vaccine to children should not be coerced by any government. Some will argue that at some point (in the emergency) it would be right to use that kind of force. But the "at what point" is not objectively clarified. Or maybe similar to "the age of consent", it will be determined by vote.

I'm sorry should have quoted , I was referring to Harrison's specific reasoning about the jabs. He said he wasn't taking one because freedom.

I don’t think it is rational to consider politics in making a choice about your health and possible medical interventions.

Wrong philosophy of science will create junk science but I will not go on that tangent for now.
The issue of visiblility or the pleasure of visisiblity is for "you to see who I am".
The invisible are alone. Lying all their life. Never being seen. And in some sense never seeing.
Certainly not being able to see what could have been.
The pleasure or maybe the necessity of "being loved" is "who I really am" being accepted and appreciated, rather
the made up person or projection that others see.
In this case, honesty is the only path to ultimate fulfillment.
It is also a great risk because "some" will see who you a really and reject or try to harm you. In many situations being an Objectivist is seen as being evil. But that is who I am. (By Objectivist I mean Rand's over all ideas are the closest to what I see as true)
A major pleasure in life is in fact "playing" with others, i.e. having fun interacting. Add to it productive work
emanating from that activity, and it becomes very fulfilling activity.

Check your motives!!! "Not because you owe it to anyone????". Boy, how magnanimous. The underlying argument is IN FACT, "you owe it to the public".
"Makes you better off" is being used in a collective sense, meaning your type would be better off. Really, maybe an 89 year old person would agree with you that his age collective would be better off. Harrison should be the final arbiter of what makes him better off. The argument you are putting forth can be considered both a utilitarian and an altruistic one.
As a pedantic point, connection to a sewer is not necessarily a public issue as it can be done privately too. I suspect you are making a case for "objective value". The problem is that you are ending up making a case that "you" should do it even if you don't believe it is best for you and that is where it has the altruistic basis. Although, maybe Harrison is too stupid to make such judgments. Therefore, we need the philosopher kings to force him to do what is right.
If you start with making the case that "I wish you had done it, it would make me safer", that would be more rationally self interested and you might be able to build on that. Changing the wording of "public good" to "urban hygiene" to "expert opinion" works in other forums but shouldn't work here.

It think it tends to encourage a false dichotomy to claim that honestly (in the context of communication and not introspection) is something you either do for yourself or for the sake of others.  This has been a sort of cultural and social undercurrent when pondering truth telling to others.
It's very similar to the false dichotomy introduced in economics which asserts every transaction has a winner and a loser... that commerce is predation.  We already know this is an incorrect assessment of commerce, and that wealth can be created (for both) according to a trader principle.
Applying a transactional trader principle view to honesty in communicative contexts, helps to dissolve the false dichotomy.  Mutual benefit can be built on voluntary intercourse.  No one has to lose, and in fact you can choose when to transact and with whom. 

Looks like you didn't bother to read the rest of the paragraph, so there's nothing really more to say. The point of vaccines is not "not dying" but "not getting sick". And "not getting sick" has added value in the same way that your toilet leads to the sewer rather than the street. 
 

Yeah.  The "public" does not have any health.  I don't value the "public good" either.

I don't believe it is a false dichotomy.  Lying is obviously bad for both the liar and their victim, and both aspects are likely to factor into the reasons why it's usually bad.  The question of which reason is primary, though, is important; there are derivative implications which will differ between the different possible answers.
Can you elaborate on why you think otherwise?
 
Sometimes.  Egoism certainly does because it claims that there is a necessary relation between morality and human flourishing, which in turn would depend on human nature.  There are, however, other ethical systems (deontological ones come to mind) which really have nothing to do with human nature at all.  Whether human beings are good or bad at following a list of concrete rules, or how this affects their mental health; none of that really enters into it.
But I'm pretty sure both of our moral codes depend on human nature, at least, so that's fair enough.
That's true.  And in those times where I believed it genuinely served my own self-interest to lie (since I was talking to an evil person) I didn't feel any guilt over it.
It took me a long time to puzzle out that my own sincerity was being used to hurt me and that I was in a situation where that was no longer a virtue.  On a gut level it still seemed wrong to lie, even though I conceptually knew that I'd be punished for telling the truth.  But once I arrived at the conclusion that under those conditions it was morally right for me to lie I didn't feel any guilt for it - although even then I was irritated and a little bit resentful about the necessity of having to do so.
Well, I'm not a Chimpanzee expert.  I do think they engage in highly coordinated behaviors, such as wars and hunting.  If a group of Chimpanzees track down an individual from another troop and several of them hold them down while another one rips his genitals off, I'm not sure what it'd mean to say that they didn't share any goals; did some of them have the burning personal desire to do nothing more than hold him down while the other wanted nothing more than to rip his balls off, and they just happened to accomplish these separate and individual goals simultaneously?
Anyway.  I'm not a Chimpanzee expert, but as a dad I'm really not sure how well that tracks with child development, either.
 
Doesn't the most infamously antisocial period of a child's development (the Great and Terrible Two's) occur roughly just after they learn how to properly communicate?

It's related to the idea of clear and present danger. The fundamental question of when is a threat actionable.
The final calculation takes into account the ROI. 
At what point is it cheapest to win the battle?
How much would it hurt if we defended ourselves and how?
Is there a better way?
etc.
I am arguing that just because I or you see a threat it does not make it actionable.
Passports means forced vaccination in addition to the issue of an attack on privacy.
A potential to spread germs cannot be construed as aggression. Otherwise you are guilty of it when you breathe.
Based on that, I would add that it is not justification for governmentally forced vaccination for many reasons. . The most important is the issue of liberty meaning the right to flourish. Implied in the right to flourish is your hopes and your choices, your autonomy and your freedom to act rationally. Without it, you, in a sense don't exist. You don't have a right to exist. Eventually you will have to shut up and do as you are told ... or else.
As I said, I am vaccinated. To reiterate, my fear is that with the idea of a person introducing "unnecessary risk" as aggression, liberty at it's core is under threat.

It takes awhile for a child to graduate from the level of 'this object, that object' to the realization that 'this is my perception of this object and that object'. He learns that people in his environment do not see, hear etc. the same things as he does, so he needs to distinguish between different minds, of which one of them is 'his'. This is why self-consciousness is inseparable from the discovery of consciousness itself. Galt's argument is probably in this line, that consciousness of consciousness (self-consciousness) depends on perceiving a world of objects and people first.
Pure self-consciousness, in the context of Yoga, is a physiological state achieved by entering a very low metabolic state, where the five senses and the thinking faculties (citta) are temporarily suspended. It's like dreamless sleep, except the meditator maintains awareness in the midst of it. The goal is to shift the attention toward the subtler, quieter levels of the mind, which normally go unnoticed because the attention is too engrossed in objects, thoughts and feelings to notice what's underneath them: the sense of observer-hood, of being a witness to such and such object, thought and feeling. 
The meditator's argument is that self-consciousness is always 'on', underneath every object of experience, from babyhood to old age. This includes underneath the dreaming state and even (!) underneath dreamless sleep; a sign of enlightenment is said to be when the Yogi becomes aware during sleep, and realizes that even unconsciousness is, paradoxically, an object presenting itself to consciousness. 
Rand's philosophy does not mention or discuss the idea that sense perception might be influenced by unconsciously performed mental acts. This is a consequence of her theory that every concept, without exception, is derived from the conscious level, including the concepts used in arguing for a pre-conscious activity. Yoga is an interesting challenge to this theory, because it's based on bringing the unnoticed, unconscious levels of the mind into conscious awareness. Experienced Yogis claim to directly perceive the mechanism by which the mind generates the phenomenal world, and have meticulously documented it.

I certainly don't want the statement to be false, and I'm in no way arguing against it. I'm much more comfortable with Rand's position than the idealist lunacy alternatives. However, I'm not clear on why it would be impossible for a consciousness to be aware only of itself. And I don't want to just acdept her position out of desire to be comfortable. I want to accept it because it is unavoidably true. Could people please clarify?