JMeganSnow

Wasn't there a news story recently about an independent construct of this kind that ran into trouble and tried calling for Britain to send police, only Britain refused because, hey, if you're a sovereign extraterritoriality, then you gotta handle your own problems? Micro-states of this nature are generally a pipe dream.

There's nothing wrong with a little playful coquetry in a courtship. You've given no specifics, just a blanket condemnation. Personally, I think that if someone is confessing "deep", "serious" feelings for you on the third date, you should probably drop them for being too crazy to fuck. If, instead, they're talking about playing "hard to get" with someone you've been exclusive with for two years when she indicates that she'd like to set a date, yeah, that's different. I'd actually find it quite creepy if a guy I'd been seeing for a short time returned all my phone calls/emails instantly and went on and on about how "seriously" he takes the relationship. In general, when people tell guys to play "hard to get", what they actually mean in practice is "don't be a stalker", and I've certainly seen a number of guys who need specific game-sounding instructions on how to do this.

Human nature is perfectable--in individual cases, by the person themselves. Not for the population at-large and not via some kind of outside imposition. However, it may indeed be reasonable to expect that an Objectivist society would have very few prisons because long-term imprisonment might not be the best way of dealing with most criminals. It is an enormous expense and doesn't seem to have much of an effect on recidivism. I think that *all* crimes attended by violence (and not just the occasional first-degree murder) should merit execution--perhaps commuted to life imprisonment *only for a first offense*. There goes perhaps a large proportion of murderers, rapists, serial killers, etc. I also think that crimes against other prison inmates or guards should be treated as a second offense, so if they prove unfit for any human company, their sentence should be enforced in full. As for non-violent crimes, there are probably better ways to deal with the vast majority of these than imprisonment, with fines and the official publishing of the person's activities topping the list. After all, if you want to prevent Bernie Madoff (or similar) from having another opportunity to defraud, all you really need to do is to publicly announce the extent of his fraudulent activities. This can be much more humiliating and a better preventive measure than a couple of boring months in a cell. Imprisonment should be for those who have demonstrated that they're not fit to live among the general citizenry but have not conclusively demonstrated that they're too dangerous for human company. There's no real way to predict what proportion of the population this may be, but I expect it's quite small.

Dr. Peikoff actually talks about this in one of his podcasts, and I more or less agree with him. Someone can be a valuable sexual partner (a source of values for you and also the kind of person you wish to express those values with), without you being completely in love with them. I also think that it's necessary to learn about sex and your own sexuality/enjoyment/desires as well as those of your proposed partner before you can go all out and say, "I'm romantically in love with this person", and the ultimate way to do this, of course, is to give it a try. I don't believe in Platonic love, and I think that when people say "I'm so in love with this person" but they don't have an actual relationship with that person (and they certainly haven't had sex), what they mean is "I'm infatuated with this person". You have to bring the relationship into actual expression and then you can determine whether it's full romantic love or something else valuable but not the Full Monty. That's not to say you should have sex with just anyone on the off chance that it might be valuable to you. You should be reasonably sure going in (as sure as you can be about a volitional person's character) that you're going to derive value and satisfaction from the experience. You just don't have to know beforehand whether it'll be Ultimate Value or not, because, well, you really can't.

Objectivist style = the style that suits the rational purposes of an Objectivist. Wear the clothes that you think best reflect the type of person you are and the goals you have and the expenditure you can afford.

Outsourcing is not quite the same as private operation. With outsourcing, the contractees still work for the government. With full private operation, you'd have an entire prison industry which would wind up being competitive, and there are problems involved with the various private prisons properly respecting the rights of the prisoners. Prisoners shouldn't be treated like an asset up for bid. No, but they'd be deciding what conditions and organization the prisoners live under. There's a huge difference between living in a prison where the guards are strict but largely impersonal, and one where the guards are constantly getting in your face and trying to incite some kind of reaction so they can react with violence to this suggestion of "disobedience". There's a big difference between living in a small but private cell and living in an enormous cattle-pen with three hundred other prisoners where food is tossed down twice a day for you to fight and scrabble over it. There's a difference between prisons that force inmates to work and those that don't. And if the government is going to set a list of standards and regulations appropriate for the protection of the rights of prisoners (which they do have), then you do not have a *private* industry any more. I think that, due to the situation, the potentials for abuse, confusion, misalignment of priorities, etc. That it would be better for the government to maintain direct control over all prison facilities, and for all prison workers to be government employees, either directly or as contractors.

There shouldn't be any such body. If several countries see the need to convene such a court, it should either be under the auspices of a treaty organization such as NATO, or they should form a delegation to address the specific issue.

International Law is a contradiction in terms. You can have international agreements, treaties, alliances, but no laws, because there's no super-government body that can create and enforce said "laws". If there were, it'd BE the government, and all the members wouldn't be (sovereign) nations, they'd be states or districts.

Personally, I don't think it even MATTERS if there is AGW or not, the only proper solution is to wait for the market to sort it out. Or, sort it out yourself and make gobs of money out of it. Oh, and not buy beachfront property.

Yeah, and if you ever want to BE a superior, you'd better make it YOUR job. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of your life being what you've made yourself: a clueless peon waiting for someone else to take the initiative, figure out the state of the business, and deliver your orders. So are your business associates, and you'll be in a lot better position to make decisions about your current and future involvement with them if you learn about them. Now, I'm not in favor of inane small talk per se, and it's been my experience that even people who seem to utter NOTHING other than inane small talk aren't often that keen on it themselves. Possibly silence makes them nervous. Possibly they feel it's their responsibility to be hospitable and keeping up the flow of chatter is their way of trying to entertain other people. Maybe they're just lonely and seeking SOME kind of connection with other people, no matter how banal. The trick is not to become good at or enjoy the small talk, it's to become the kind of good conversationalist who can connect ANY topic to their own experiences or things that they DO find interesting, and thus establish some common ground. So instead of going out of your way to chat about the weather if you REALLY JUST DON'T CARE, learn to see the connections between other people's blather and things you DO care about, then bring those into the conversation. Much more rewarding, and you'll get a reputation for being broad-minded and intelligent in the bargain. Er, assuming you are, and you have more than one interest to talk about. Otherwise you're just another species of bore.

And don't forget the Liger. In any case, proper respect for Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff (and anyone!) does not require you to agree with all their statements. I disagree with Ayn Rand on homosexuality and the whole "woman president" thing. I disagree with Dr. Peikoff on a number of topics. If Dr. Peikoff is going to be publicly rude while expressing what he thinks, I don't have any problem with people reacting as though he's behaving like a rude jerk, because, well, he is. Rudeness isn't in itself immorality. Like politeness, it's a type of behavior which has certain consequences. If he's fine with those consequences, that's his business. As for me, I wouldn't call anyone an Objectivist who doesn't stand 100% on their own judgment when it comes to applying principles to particular cases. I don't care WHO said WHAT. I use my OWN reason.

On the contrary, the correct price CAN be less than what it costs to operate the system in a particular form, in which case it shouldn't be built in the FIRST place. Anything set by the government is not a "price", it is a fee or a tax. Prices are set by the market.

Not to mention the (still somewhat far-out) research into delivering power wirelessly, via an antenna. There's also development into creating massive nuclear-powered "batteries" capable of providing power to a housing division for ten or more years. Or people can buy home generators and simply purchase FUEL instead of electricity. (Many people in my area do this because if the power goes out in a storm, their sump pump may shut off, resulting in a flooded basement.) The one-wire-per-house setup is a *market solution* that largely came about due to independent businesses being interested in efficiency. It was a bit wild and woolly when the country was first being electrified, with power companies running wires and setting up power stations all willy-nilly. The current setup would probably have kept evolving in all sorts of interesting new directions if the government hadn't stepped in and laid down a bunch of regulations. I doubt there's any "natural" monopoly out there that can't be shown is actually no such thing.

I think there's not much point in worrying about whether one's emotions, which one has no direct control over, are proper or improper, and focus on appropriate BEHAVIOR. Worrying about whether your emotional mechanism is being PC at any one moment is a good way to make yourself neurotic or even psychotic. The best part of this approach is that, by identifying and pursuing proper BEHAVIOR, your emotions will gradually line up with that behavior and boom, no more problem. That being said, I would find it incredibly crass to, say, hold a huge, loud, public party celebrating someone's execution, because this would be disrespectful toward people who may have a legitimate reason to value the executee and thus be upset over the death. Now, a private celebration? Dandy. Also, one should rightfully celebrate in reference to oneself, so it's not so much that you're ENJOYING the other person's suffering as you're ENJOYING your new freedom from a source of your OWN suffering, and NOBODY has the right to deprive you of THAT.

Slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but just because something is a logical fallacy that doesn't mean that it *can't* produce true statements, and it IS true that since government regulations follow precedent and the logical extension of previous legislation/regulation, once you make the statement that it's legitimate for the government to require this or ban that in the name of protecting SOMEBODY, sooner or later this will metastasize into the government attempting to wholesale protect EVERYBODY via ever-increasing regulation. What makes slippery slope a fallacy is considering a trend without reference to the underlying causes of that trend, so, if you use it you wind up with statements like "my puppy is twice as big this month as it was last month, at this rate in less than a century it will be larger than the known universe!", because you're totally ignoring what causes the puppy to increase in size and thus the causes that will also ultimately limit that growth. So, if you were to make a statement like "eventually the government will regulate every second of every day!" this would be false, because long before it reaches that stage the country would implode from sheer pressure of stupidity. But it's not wrong to say "if we open this door, we're going to get ever-more oppressive regulation until, boom, collapse".

Wait, what? You certainly CAN define something with reference to itself, and, in fact, many first-level concepts cannot be defined in any other way. And, in any case, this definition is NOT circular, merely subjective. However, concepts can legitimately be subjective, such as an oenophile being defined as "someone who loves wine". They self-select into that category. Heck, that's the primary differentiation between sex and gender--sex is a matter of physical record, you can't self-select it. Gender, on the other hand, is largely a psychological matter of self-selection. Now, it's conceptually legitimate to treat sex and gender as identical/interchangeable terms only referencing the physical attributes (although it's not PC to do so nowadays). It is also conceptually legitimate to differentiate between them, and this is extremely helpful when one wants to discuss, categorize, and deal with certain uncommon psychological states people can have. However, it is a total conceptual hash to try and treat sex and gender as identical/interchangeable terms referring strictly to psychological status. It is *necessary* to conceptualize the physical attributes while the psychological ones may be uncommon enough that it's NOT always necessary to differentiate them by a different concept. This attempt to hijack the physical term altogether should be rejected wholesale. No matter how hard a self-identified female who is not a physical female may try, they will never ovulate, menstruate, or become pregnant. Also, I'd like to point out that male/female isn't 100% universal sex-wise, because you can have people with, say, XXY chromasomes. What sex are they, exactly?

I was going to say, the entire nature of Zeno's paradox means you're treating mathematics as if they inform physics and not the other way around. Just because it's possible to do something mathematically doesn't mean it's possible to do it physically.

I also think that it's legitimate for the government to prohibit the private ownership/manufacture/sale of weapons that cannot be used in a manner other than to be a threat to mass numbers of people. You can defend yourself against a specific attack with a handgun or shotgun or even an assault rifle without (much) risk to innocent bystanders. You CANNOT defend yourself with a nuclear missile or a vial of anthrax in this fashion, and, in fact, YOU are now a legitimate threat to all those innocent bystanders who should rightly be able to defend themselves against YOU. So, it's legitimate for the government to prohibit private individuals from owning nuclear weapons and vials of anthrax, or, say, tanks and HE shells, etc. Maintaining a monopoly on the exercise of force does practically entail maintaining a certain degree of monopoly on the means for exercising that force. For, say, a militia full of gun-toting cultists to be a "legitimate" threat, they do have to at least declare their intention of violating other people's rights. Even if every single citizen in the entire country decides to buy a gun and join the Neighborhood Watch, this isn't a threat even though they could theoretically overpower the government if they decided to do so. Their goal is self-defense, not assault.

Ayn Rand wasn't objecting to the use of "the public" as a concept referring to something, she was objecting to using it as if the group concept were interchangeable with the concept of the individual members of the group, so that concepts that only properly apply to individuals (such as "interests" or "thoughts") were being applied, inappropriately, to the group concept. The public as such has no interests, needs, thoughts, or whatever. The individual people who *comprise* the public, do. This is an important distinction because any action will not have a universal effect on all the individual members of the public, so to speak of the public as if it were a single unit enjoying a single consequence is just flat-out incorrect. Anyway, family totally is a valid concept, and it's not based on genetic relationship (as some would wish) but on trust, interdependence, etc. It's also a necessary concept because it describes a closer relationship that is different in kind from, say, friendship or a business partnership or whatever. Nor is a family a "random" association of people--it is a selective association of people. Adult family members create, choose, and maintain the relationship. Granted, minor children don't choose their family association the way adults do, but their inclusion is by the choice of the adults involved so they're not random family members even though you may not know their personality and character in advance. Now, back to the idea of valuing family. Family associations exist to pursue specific goals, such as raising progeny, establishing a stable lifestyle, preserving and passing on capital, etc. If you're talking about family in the context that you value having children, bringing them up well, having a spouse, building a little "family corporation" that all contributes to, maintains, and enjoys major capital investments like a house, vehicles, maybe a business, whatever, then yes, it is perfectly rational to value family. If you're talking about some kind of slavish devotion to people who happen to be legally or genetically related to you, then no, that's an invalid value.

It is precisely for the reason that human knowledge and intelligence work in a specific way that we need to rely on principles and not what the OP considers to be "evidence" to make decisions. It is a physical impossibility to gather the type of "evidence" the OP wants, and he's basically indulging in a variant of the black swan fallacy. (That being the fallacy that since you, personally, cannot go and examine every swan that has ever existed or will exist, you cannot ever know enough to formulate a statement such as "swans are white". It is a wholesale rejection of inductive reasoning as such.) Now, one does use what evidence one has in *forming* principles, and one also uses knowledge of one's particular situation and circumstances in order to *apply* those principles--the principles are not some kind of contextless floating absolute that must be adhered to regardless of circumstances or changes in the state of one's knowledge. If you try hard enough, it is always possible to come up with theoretical situations where a given principle doesn't apply, because the context is outside the scope of the principle. For instance, Objectivist ethical principles assume, first and foremost, that one is largely free to think, act, and suffer/enjoy the consequences of that action. When those circumstances don't apply for one reason or another, yes, some modification or even an outright scrapping of the principle may be necessary--in that narrow context, and only to the extent that it is necessary to regain one's liberty. It is not a wholesale excuse to drop all principles permanently. Some other notes: one does not properly arrive at a definition of one's "interests" based upon one what feels or expects to feel, because feelings are a *consequence*, not a primary. It is only appropriate to take emotions into account in matters of taste, i.e. matters of no moral significance. It is a matter of taste whether one prefers to pursue a productive career as a doctor, or one prefers to pursue a career as a sketch artist. It is not a matter of taste if one prefers to pursue a career as a con man, because this is not a productive activity. Since campaigning for socialism when one is generally free to choose to do otherwise is an immoral activity, your feelings about it (how fun/satisfying/whatever it may be) are immaterial. In the context of free action, it is *never* appropriate.

Loving a child is like loving your chosen career. It's not the same context as the love you have for your friends or romantic partner, although it has the same source--the things you love enhance your enjoyment of your life. Friends enhance your life when they are virtuous people, which is why Objectivists say that you love your friends for their virtues, but this doesn't mean that virtues = love. Love = value, it's just that the virtues of other adults ARE of value to you.

I would actually define evil (as opposed to immorality) as inflicting undeserved harm on others. Hurting yourself isn't evil, it's just stupid, but it's your right to do so if you decide that you want to or you're just too lazy to think about it. It can't be evil to do something that you have a RIGHT to do--evil is WRONG, not right. It would be evil, however, to attempt to escape the consequences of your immoral behavior because the only way to do this is to inflict undeserved harm on other people. I agree that malevolence is an attitude. A malevolent person is one who hates values and the good--someone who hates the good for being the good and WANTS to see harm come to other people. It has nothing to do with malevolent universe premise--some people who hold this premise are very benevolent in their actions but they think that they are ultimately doomed (a sucker) and perform benevolent actions from duty instead of understanding the connection between benevolence and their own life. I see examples of this attitude everywhere, from self-proclaimed "nice guys" who insist that "nice guys" always finish last and so forth, yet they persist in being a doormat despite the fact that it brings them only grief.

*eyeroll* Attraction is not an "evolutionary byproduct", nor is what is commonly seen as attractive the result of some tangled rationalization the type of which you've just mentioned. After all, before the "advent of modern medicine" it was considered attractive for a woman to tie herself into a corset so tightly that she had an 18 inch waist. Ultimately it comes down to your *personal* subconscious associations, which may be complex and you may not have consciously identified them. Perhaps it's been your experience that larger women have better personalities (or are more uninhibited, more easygoing, less neurotic about their bodies, whatever--may not even necessarily be true in the broad sense, just in your personal experience). Perhaps you are a private person and you don't like the stupid competitiveness that surrounds conventionally attractive women. Perhaps you just don't like being conventional and this comes out as a rejection of conventionally pretty women. The possibilities are endless, but unless this attraction is actually destructive of your life/values in some way I hardly think it could be called immoral.

It'd be spelled out in the franchise setup, Steve. That's why they put "not available in all areas" or similar legalese into their commercials advertising sales and deals, right? The degree of liability in a franchise/licensing setup is a bit more complex, in my mind, because there are many different ways to set this kind of relationship up. Some are looser, with the franchisee being basically independent and just sending a portion of their gross receipts up the chain for the privilege of using the commercial assets (name, logos, advertising, etc.) of the parent entity. Some are tighter, with joining the franchise meaning that you have to buy into an inventory system that's managed by the parent entity, so if you get defective stock that's an issue with the parent entity, not just with you. All of this needs to be spelled out in the franchise agreement just for the purpose of saving money if it ever DOES come to a lawsuit.