EC

The right to not have coersive force of any type initiated against them.

It is in you interest to uphold other's rights and support a government that does the same so that your rights have a better chance of being upheld also.

Yeah AqAd getting ready to post here any minute!

It's still immoral because of property rights. And is in your self-interest to uphold property rights at all times, even if some ad hoc loophole was created just for you.

Yes. Only allow people to vote who pass a relatively high level of intelliegience and basic civics test.

It's contextual. It would be immoral an animal, but not illegal (in a proper society) to torture an animal on a whim. But if you had a purpose (I don't know, say, see how it reacts to stress) it would be perfectly moral to "torture it". Of course, in the moral case, if you had injured it during the torture experiment to a degree in which it won't recover properly, you should kill it like you would a lame horse.

Thanks. I'll play around with it a little more when I get home and maybe give them a call.

Is it morally improper even to type the word nigger. Why the star in the word. Don't discuss a subject if don't have the balls to write it correctly.

The same thing has been happening to me to for about 3 weeks now. That's why I haven't been posting much. I am on a barrowed computer right now. At home I use msntv to get online and that's what I have the problem with. I've tried everything, clearing cookies, wiping the things little hard drive (many times). Help! I don't know what else to do and this is my favorite webesite. GC did you change anything about three weeks ago (when I first sent you a PM complaining about this problem) that you could possibly undue?

A cool groundhog that never see's his shadow 'cuz he wheres shades. Welcome piz!

Since an Objectivist must be an atheist, there is no such thing as a "Catholic Objectivist".

Yeah well I still 2Pac and Eminem, although I hate when Em disses Bush in his music, he's been hanging out on the left coast too much lately.

Why do you think that is the proper conception of the non-initiation of force principle during war? However, if I understand your second sentence, then it wouldn't be incorrect to say that the atomic bombings were initiated force; that is to say, they were retaliatory. Oakes can answer for himself, but the atomic bombing of Heroshima and Nagasaki were retalitory force. Also if we were to nuke say Iran, right now, that would also be retalitory force because we have been both implicitly and explicitly warned by them that they are our enemy.

jrs-- Is your purpose here in denying the reality of stolen concept to attempt to obliterate its meaning so that you can try and convince Objectivists that an actual "infinity" actually exists? That question is rhetorical, and the answer is yes. What you need to is come to grips with reality and a reality-based epistemology and quit wasting our time trying to convince people here and on THE FORUM of rationalistic nonsense. You just don't want to believe that what you wasted years of your life and a lot of money at your "modern" university majoring in mathematical "logic" was all for naught. But in a contest between rationalistic nonsense and reality, reality wins.

Let's make this as simple as possible. Say one person wants to die for whatever reason, and it's irrelevent whether he's sane or insane, why can't morally and legally pay someone to kill himself. To say that he can't is a fundamental violation of a persons right to do with his life (including take it or have it taken) as he so chooses, and is therefore a direct violation of all rights. I for one would love to see people fight to the death. Anyone ever saw the old Runningman movie?

Most Objectivists, myself included, usually are.

Yeah, myself for the most part.

Where do people keep getting this stupid domatism question from? Objectivism is by far the most individualistic and therefore undogmatic philosophy known to man. All I can say is if certain people find the philosophy dogmatic they don't at all understand the philosophy. To be an Objectivist one must agree with all that Ayn Rand ever officially labelled Objectivsm. But this in NO WAY implies dogmatism; it implies that the reader and eventually the person calling oneself "Objectivist" has thought through and rationally considered and accepted what was written. He doesn't just read it and take it on "faith", he reads it, considers it carefully, studies its logical structure, its premises, its conclusions, and only AFTER much rational thought decides objectivelyand rationally that is TRUE and GOOD. How and in what way does that process imply dogmatism?

In a roundabout way you are decribing exactly how the libertarians lack a solid philosophic base and why there ideas either can never work consistently or are wrong.

You are mixing in very abstract concepts such as evil in with less abstract concepts. Concepts are formed in a hierarchy starting with the directly percievable, a chair, a table, etc. then preceeding from there to things like furniture, etc.

He wasn't saying here that corporations, at present, aren't taxed, but that they should NOT be taxed.

How would mitochondrial DNA mutate if it wasn't part of a life form first? And if you want to call it some "primary" form of life, it would still be a form of life.

Metaphysics and philosophy in general are the prerequisites to forming scientific theories. Philosophy comes first then science. For instance, no scietific theory can violate the Law of Identity, a thing is what it is, nor can it violate causality. If a theory violate one of those two, and some poor interpretations of QM do (especially those involving wave-function collapse) then they can simply be rejected as wrong in the sense that their predictions can NOT exist in reality. Another example whould be that a physical singularity can NOT exist. I think he just used the phrase inadvertently. Reality is all there is. I think you might have misinterpretd him here. But regardless, the consciousness as such is beyond our grasp, at the present time, in the sense of how it arises from brain funtions. Just a caution, don't think that consciousness is just workings of the brain, it is an "emergent" quality of the brain, but it is NOT the brain. Nor does that imply anything supernatural. Consciousness has an identity, and it is what it is. They can't.

Very good essay! I think I'm starting to come around on this abortion issue. One criticism though, I've never in my life been religous nor have I ever been swayed by any religous arguments but I have always been "pro-life", so I have always found it very strange to say the least when people of a pro-choice persuasion always try and negate religous arguments when attacking the "pro-life" position. I would have countered with some of the same things CF said in his post which have nothing to do with religion. The point being I almost think the religous version of the "pro-life" stance should just be ignored for the nonsense it is while writing a pro-choice essay, and only the rational arguments for the pro-life side should be addressed. That said, I've reread some of Peikoff's essay's on the subject and now yours and I now accept that under certain circumstances abortion can be justified as it is never right for the government to dictate a persons life, but (Butt-monkey ) I still find late-term abortions to be disgusting and immoral and I would hope any woman would think through what actually happens before they have one.

I recommend you all check out my comments in the Atheist thread in regards to space and it being finite instead of me rewriting the entire thread here. Also check out Alex's essay that I linked to in that thread; it explains why the Universe is both finite and unbounded, which properly negates the need to posit the existence of an "infinite" universe when all the terms are defined correctly. Space amd time are relational concepts that only exist between existents. The universe is eternal, it has always existed and will continue to do so, eternally. What we call the "big bang" event was just the universe undergoing a phase transition. The universe is neither expanding nor contracting, because that whole concept is absurd. It is staying exactly where it is and where it has always been, eternally. And don't take the previous comment to imply that Objectivism in some way rejects GR, because it does not. The non-Euclidean geometry described by GR's field equations simply decribes the way matter propagates in relation to other matter, energy, pressure, etc., it doesn't actually decribe the real curvature of a "spacetime". But instead decribes the curvature of the paths matter traverses. Also Objectivism does not reject QM, which would be rediculous, but instead rejects the faulty interpretations that lead to contradictions of the law of identity, or denies causality and deterministic behaviour, etc. Leonard Little's Theory of Elementary Waves is fully consistent with Objectivism and every experiment that has ever been conducted to empirically test QM.