EC

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology.
Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective.
This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary?
So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil.
To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite.

Schwartz says in part:Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on.

I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone.

Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed.

If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice.

By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent.

They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway.

-- CAVLink to Original

Jon needs to be immediately banned.  I did it once and it needs to be permanent.  He is extremely evil,  anti-intellectual and is against all that is good in the world.  He is explicitly one of the most evil people alive.

I understand that there are a million details, but the point is that the principle of allowing a totalitarian dictatorship that is the principle creator of virtually all terrorism in the world to exist and continue its actions against anyone at any time, let alone semi-free nations like Israel and our nation, regardless of how it can be "defended against" is appeasement of evil and is why it ( 😉 proof of hacking domestic terrorism as I type this out,  but don't derail) this has continued to occur and will continue to occur and get exponentially worse. Especially, a rights violating terrorist dictatorship like Iran potentially possessing nukes.  Peikoff wrote after 9/11 that "states" that support terrorism need to be ended,  we didn't do and things keep getting worse and will continue getting exponentially worse as a function of time.  Ending totalitarian dictatorships that are the source of terrorism, mass death, and evil,  while enslaving their own population while attempting to enslave and/or destroy the entire world is the only moral action especially when they start explicitly attacking semi-free free nations and/or threatening their existence not to mention the existence of the world itself. 

This. And whoever put a laughing emoji to Gus’s post needs a ban as a laughing supporter of evil. 

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse.

I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information.

The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late.

At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most military significance at present: Iran doesn't have the nuclear capability it has been trying to develop.

This attack could have been far worse, and harder to deal with if that had not been the case. And after this weekend there is no doubt that this scenario must be averted, in the minimal form of the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

Ideally, the West also does whatever it can to topple the murderous, theocratic regime behind the attack and decades of terrorism and proxy conflicts. See also "End States That Sponsor Terrorism," by Leonard Peikoff.

As became apparent during the podcast, the need to end Iran's nuclear capability is a point many in Israel seem to grasp, as the following, quote of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, tweeted by Open Source Intel would indicate:That army of useful idiots -- the ninnies who are worrying about "escalation" -- are ignoring what happened on October 7 and over this weekend: Iran has already escalated unprovoked twice, and is going to escalate again, anyway. Its threats of doing worse if Israel retaliates are superflous and should be ignored, because these theocrats plan atrocities, genocide, and tyranny regardless of what we do.

This is war. We should fight it on our own terms.

This attack on Israel is a proxy attack on the West by dogs that smell fear. Let's snuff out these animals while they are still weak.

-- CAVLink to Original

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. According to New ideal, the Ayn Rand Institute is promoting a booklet titled Finding Morality and Happiness Without God, and quotes author Onkar Ghate:Mentioning happiness in the title should intrigue the more active-minded: Thanks to religion, most people associate fear and guilt with morality, and are reluctant if not afraid to think about this life-and-death topic.

We can blame the all-encompassing cultural stranglehold of religion for the fact that, while the true purpose of morality should be a huge sales advantage for Objectivism in the marketplace of ideas, it will cause suspicion for most.

I think the exeception I noted above will more than offset the current disadvantage, since those who will be intrigued will inlcude some future intellectuals.

2. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn advocates the free market as the solution the medical care crisis caused by Canada's government-run system.

She outlines what this might look like in part:It is worth noting why Woiceshyn goes into such detail: The lack of truly private systems worldwide makes "envisioning how such a system would work ... difficult."

3. At Thinking Directions, Jean Moroney addresses an interesting question that I'd put as What is the difference between a habit and an internal (psychological or mental) context?This is an important distinction: bad habits and unhelpful contexts make desirable self-directed action harder, but because they have different causes, combating or replacing them requires different approaches, which Moroney discusses throughout.

4. At Value for Value, Harry Binswanger considers the common claim that the United States is a "representative democracy."

The most interesting part of the piece to me was the following:Picking one term from those available is ubiquitous today, and explains lots of what is wrong with the current political discourse. And that means not just that practically everyone falls into it on at least some issues, but it can be easy for those who don't to forget or be unaware that that is what often happens. This can affect how best to argue for a good position.

The rest of the piece is highly instructive, both for its demonstration of the correct method of approaching the question and for its answer.

-- CAVLink to Original

A further question should have been addressed. Which is worse, mandating display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, or public schools? I say the greater evil is public schools, not the Ten Commandments. The particular law is limited to governmental schools including schools receiving funding by the state, and therefore does not impose any religious requirements on purely private schools.
In the original bill, there was a simple commandment to display the document which was only directed at public schools. I surmise that there was some discussion of whether this law would pass higher judicial review, which resulted in two economic hooks, the expansion where it includes schools receiving state funds, and the limitation that no school is compelled to spend its funds to purchase a display. I believe that the economic burden argument would have ultimately doomed the earlier version in the courts, whereas the current law encourages the good citizens of Louisiana to donate displays, in case some school has in mind using the economic burden as a justification for non-compliance.
In comparing evils, it is hard to choose between Hitler, Stalin or Mao, but seemingly easy to choose between any or all of those three vs. Kant (did Kant actually kill anyone?). Yet I would deem Kant to be the greater evil, in that the harm caused by his philosophy includes all of the above mass murderers, plus public schools. Public schools are likewise a broader and less-obvious evil compared to allowing or requiring expressions of religion in “public spaces”. To effectively argue against such a law, you have to address and overcome the First Amendment rights of The Religious (which are abridged by prohibiting religious expressions in public spaces). The expressive rights of the many cannot be be sacrificed for the sake of the contrary expressive rights of the few (very few in Louisiana). Appeal to separation of church and state is a cheap and weak argument though probably the only one that stands a chance w.r.t. judicial review. The proper moral argument is, simply, directed at the evil concept of public schools.
I see tadmjones made this identification also, while I was laboring over my screed.

I second that.

"Publish" it here in a new thread, they seem to be unable or not willing to block your access to this site.

Over at The Bulwark is an instructive article titled "From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central" that follows the inevitable downward arc of a group of dissident intellectuals whose only unifying characteristic was that they had been ostracized from or chose not to participate in the leftist intellectual establishment.

The article credits Bari Weiss's 2018 reservations about the group with being "prescient." Cathy Young quotes Weiss: "Could the intellectual wildness that made this alliance of heretics worth paying attention to become its undoing?"

This is so prescient that it is practically a rhetorical question: As with atheism or any other mere rejection of an orthodoxy, being against something leaves wide open what one stands for.

There is nothing inherently wrong with stating opposition to an orthodoxy. Sometimes, all one has the time or energy or public visibility to do is to make it known that one does not support some horrible idea or trend.

But since this leaves open the question of why one opposes something, doing so as part of a group makes it look like one might agree with what other members of the group do believe. Doing so beyond a very specific issue is a big mistake, as the better members of this group learned over time:The piece reads like an up-to-date What Not to Do companion to Ayn Rand's 1972 Essay, "What Can One Do?", in which she cautioned against forming alliances with people whose stand on an issue might cause them to pass as fellow travelers, but who really aren't allies:When discussing compromise, Rand warned:The essay illustrates this in spades, and on multiple levels, from Sam Harris's having to distance himself from anti-vaxxers to individuals being tempted, often successfully, to sell out to keep the large audiences of kooks they ended up with by associating with this group. Young calls this last "audience capture."

It is not enough to oppose an evil like "wokeness." One must do so for the right reasons, articulate those reasons, and offer a positive alternative. Joining forces with anyone who does not also do those things will ultimately backfire.

-- CAVLink to Original

"Myth No. 4: Trade and open markets create "a race to the bottom."
That's how Jon Stewart decries globalization on his show, saying, "Globalization allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations!"
----
That problem child, "globalization", would be fine and dandy when governments are barred from entry, economy and state kept strictly apart . Individuals (and companies) deal and trade with others, wherever and whenever they see opportunities and at their own risk. As it is, the large corporates operate "hand-in-glove" with their Gvt which in turn makes deals with foreign gvts. That is then, corporate-globalization, backed, and given entree by, the power of states.
Corporatocracy plus statism.
(which gives spurious credibilty to socialists who claim capitalism = imperialism ("/neocolonialism")
As good a place for this essay by Jeffrey Tucker
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/
 

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force?
Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed.
Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit.
Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount?
At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential.
Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter.
A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

What specific help do you seek? A bodyguard? Money? More belief in and publicity for your plight? I sympathize with you in your condition and will help in ways that I can.
I'm also mindful of, and defend myself where I can, against the dangers from communists, socialist, fascists, anarchists, welfare-statists, environmentalists, . . . from Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, Jews, even most atheists, . . . and from numerous other overt and covert enemies of Objectivism, who use the government or form secret organizations to further their agendas and stop those who oppose them. I'm on guard with you against them all. So, you may be outnumbered, but you're not alone.

No. Specific *moral*/rational sanction. Are you for some reason at odds with the moral concept of not providing moral sanction to the explicitly evil? If so, are you suggesting that one should compromise or excuse evil, both of which are explicitly evil ideas. 

There is such a thing as "agreeing to disagree" but this requires both sides to give up the use of force.
Giving up force means that persuasion has to be used instead, which gives the long-term advantage to reality and reason.
Some people don't want reality and reason to win.
Others just don't want to wait; they think they have the advantage when it comes to force, so they seek to use it.

Why I've advocated a measure of distance between the longstanding allies to keep their friendship alive throughout unpredictable changes of administration.  Biden, Schumer et al  must accept that Israel is not "the 51st state" to do their bidding. The IDF must complete this last push into Rafah. (And for Israel to decide how to handle the aftermath, not the pressured and impossible (for now) 2-state solution that will guarantee unending conflict with the Palestinians who, common knowledge, will seize it as the path to the 'one-state' solution they wish for. .
Not another "prolonged war" with Israel as "proxy".
Let Israel finish the task, unimpeded- to ensure the US doesn't need to enter down the line. 
Analyst on Epoch TV:
"It is the position of the Biden Administration that wants to prevent Israel from winning, that is most likely to entangle America in this region".
 
https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/how-bidens-policies-are-prolonging-the-gaza-war-eugene-kontorovich-5613002?utm_source=NS_ATLNewsletter&src_src=NS_ATLNewsletter&utm_campaign=atl-2024-03-30&src_cmp=atl-2024-03-30&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAde0lbBkLyNPE7b0Knm1WH7l7wk9AJCYDvu4puebPx%2B%2Bc52sNbBYRuw%3D%3D?utm_source=ref_share&utm_campaign=copy

I'd venture in keeping with both NB and AR, that Rand's "the volitional consciousness" - which would draw blank stares from most free will-ers and determinists - is the core component and principle of free will, as recognized generally. From which Branden widens his scope for his psychological purposes.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism?
Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

I was fascinated by those sophomoronic experiments which were prevalent on Youtube about 10 years ago, supposedly discounting the freedom of will. Something involving the wired-up test subject reacting to lights on a screen and pressing a button, thus 'showing' that the relevant part of his brain responded a split second before he made his physical selection--i.e. his brain 'informed' him which button to press. i.e. no free will: His act was "determined".
What? As if the brain will not in every instance show activity prior to and during activities. As if the brain is pre-programmed deterministically to "cause" one's actions in any and all encounters outside the lab environment.
I recall the young host of the show was thrilled by these superficial findings. He concluded (consistently) that no free will means nothing you do can be held against you legally or morally by others, equally that you do not need to take yourself to task for some failing. A great relief for the amoral. More, the personal choices of undertaking effortful thinking and character building can be dispensed with. Then the individual mind will be under attack. The result, individualism will succumb to collectivism-tribalism-racism (major determining antecedent - "ancestral" - factors used often to claim power through past 'victimhood') and self-esteem and pride must suffer since one also cannot be responsible for one's accomplishments.
If no-free-will has arrived in the broader mainstream the world is heading for trouble, I thought. Sure enough - what we are seeing today. One can count on human nature to take the easy options. Free will demands far too much awareness and thinking work. While valuable in their own area, the neuroscientists (I refer to the popular Sam Harris, notably, who also, I gather, consistently eliminated "the mind" together with free will) have something to be responsible for bringing about this age of pronounced determinism/skepticism. (But who would expect proponents of determinism to take "responsibility" for anything they do? They had no other choice. Or was it due to your free will, Sam?). 

And to be more specific I have spent a lifetime becoming the ideal man,  I'm not going to hide from lunatics and criminals but have them all brought to justice and insure that this can never happen to another individual in at least the United States again at first and then the entire world.  Evil only has power via the sanction one gives it, and I will offer it no sanction and will defeat it and those involved in this mass Evil, not hide from lunatic criminals. 

Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath,  not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.

The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct?
The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith.
The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality.
These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith.
If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings).
Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians.
--
There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct.
Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too.
Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons.
But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?

Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath,  not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.

I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details.
The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.