fatdogs12

I too am sad to hear you lost your job. I most certainly wish you the best in finding a new one. As far as a capitalist society and the lack of jobs however I think your statement is a bit inaccurate as far as employment goes. In a completely capitalist society people are constantly trying to increase how productive they are (companies I mean). To do this they need people, especially skilled and hard working people. As long as people need other productive people there will be jobs. In the United States Unemployment is pretty low at 5% and a lot of those people are in transition to getting another job. The only way for a country to have wealth is to produce a lot of goods. The only way to produce a lot of goods is to be efficient. This requires many technologies for each field of work. To accomplish this people need to be free to create new technologies all the time. That cannot be accomplished under Communism or Socialism simply because the government is for the most part the only innovator. The only people who are poor in the United States (other than rare exceptions) are those who don't want to put in the work required to be wealthy.

Well simply as a practical issue if we were to avoid all companies that were unethical in the same sense that google was here we would be in a real bind sometimes (simply because there are numerous companies in the same boat). I suppose on the surface it seems that it is unethical to support a company which is out for evil purposes. However I don't think that Google is out for evil in general. That's just my 2cents on the issue. I don't know the answer for sure, just what I have considered so far.

Why not go with capitalism then. Mostly everyone can make way more than thier needs and have plenty of money left over to work on thier abilities.

Maybe we can just make it illegal for other countries' citizens to burn our flag. Gives us an excuse to dump bombs on the Palestinians....

Oh that is simple, first I would hire a band of about 25 guys to go and smuggle some nuclear weapons out of Russia. Then pay them to go to all the Islamic countries and set the nukes to the "Gigantic Potato" setting and then: B :nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke:M. Okay sorry I couldn't help myself there. Well with all those billions I would first set up a huge advertising agency to constantly bombard the World citizens with Pro-Capitalist messages every chance they got. Second I would set up a strong lobby to constantly lobby Washington politicians to pass pro-capitalist laws. Third I would set up some sort of off shore organization to fund any groups worldwide that are fighting for freedom. Fourthly I would give Peikoff 20 million if he would write a "Objectivism for Dummies: That means YOU!" book. Then pay some else to dumb it down further. Then I would spend a billion dollars having images made, pictures painted, statues carved and casts made of myself so that when 10-25% of the world's countries go capitalist they will be able to let all the kids see who helped put that food in thier mouths for the rest of thier life, rather than some one time feeding that would have cost me millions, would have probably gotten into some rebel socialist army's hands and helped to kill him some years before. 24, Stock Trader

Umm I am guessing that all the other coins weigh the same or am I wrong?

What do you do if half the country wants to be movie stars and a quarter of them have the ability? It's possible that a person can go to college in the United States and thier major doesn't match what is needed in the market. That is completely posssible. The thing is in the United States people are responsible for making that decision themselves (maybe in China as well). There are many basic degree's in the United States that have a wide application. In the United States you are responsible for finding out what there is a demand for, then getting a degree on the basis of that. Going back to my girlfriend, she just went and got a simple 2 year business degree. Nothing special, it's not even from a great college. Just a simple community college. There is some degree of luck in her success but it's not based upon luck alone. Because she is very productive she can make that money. What she does is valuable and she is paid for it. She is far from the only exception. I know 3 people who came to the United States without hardly even a dollar and have become millionaires, one of them many times over. In the United States it's entirely possible for a person without a college degree at all or even high school to become a millionaire or even just make a decent living. I think it's not just hard for YOU to figure out how to central planning would work it's hard for anyone. And it's truely impossible for a small number of people in a government to know about everything that millions of people who specialize in a specific thing. I don't know why you say that you don't think a market economy works well. When I go to the store I can pick from Tens of thousands of items. If I want cups I have hundreds of cups to pick from, if I want bread I have a ton of varieties. Why doesn't a market economy work? Even the poor people in the United States are very rich compared to most socialist countries. In a company there is a planning by the owners of what to make, that's true. However those people are very specialized in what they do. They know thier markets well and they decide how to allocate money that they have. You cannot really consider a company a country because in a country there are two crucial differences. In a country where the people are working for the government they are motivated not by producing the best product but rather keeping thier jobs. Therefore you get products that are not as good. Secondly how on earth could a group of central planners in China lets say figure out what the markets are for different things? How can they be aware of what 1.2 billion people need? Even if you had one million central planners they would still be responsible for over a million people each. How on earth could they figure all that out plus they have to know all the intimiate details of all the industries. It's just not a humanly possible task. I don't know what you mean by that. Another thing I should mention though is innovation. If there are central planners planning the economy who innovates? Right now in the US anyone can innovate and therefore we are WAY more productive than otherwise. Any time you have an idea in the US you can put it into action! You can patent it and make money on it. Again it's a rare person in the United States that worked very hard, make intelligent decisions and is still poor. On occasion people do go bankrupt, I know a few myself. Some of them had a lot of money but for one reason or another lost it. Still because of America's productive capacity they were able to raise money, start a new company and make a lot of money again. I almost envy people who live in free/capitalistic countries myself.

First of all there are two problems here. Lets say you have a Socialist government just the way you suggest. What if they put you in a job based on societies need that you don't like? What if you want to just work a low paying job and live in a not very good place just because you want to use all your free time to paint or do some other creative activity? If society puts you in a job you don't want that is force. To me that would be really bad, wouldn't you hate that? In the United States your options are totally open. If you don't like working a low grade job you can in just 2 years get a college degree that will allow you to a ton of other things. My girlfriend is a good example, she came to the United States from India when she was 22, she was completely alone and spoke very little english. Yet dispite that she was able to get 3 jobs and go to college at the same time. After college she got out and just worked 1 job for rougly 12 dollars an hour. Through hard work she has been promoted time and time again to the point where she makes over 85,000usd with bonuses a year. Now she has a lifestyle that would simply be impossible under even the most ideal socialist society. Do you know why? Because a socialist society can not ever reach the productive capacity that a capitalistic one can. The reason is because of things like central planning. If you think about central planning, just taking farms for instance. How can a central planner tell hundreds of thousands of farmers what they should plant, what plants will work well on thier soil, what new technology could make them more efficient? In a capitalistic society the farmer is driven by his desire to profit so what does he do? He seeks out the most productive farming techniques he can. Therefore more food is produced every time someone finds a more efficent way to do things. A socialist society has no reason to try to become more efficent other than the ruling party being kicked out. Even then it's not possible. How would you know how many people should work on new farming techniques? How would you even know it's nessasary? With a capitalistic society everything takes care of itself. In the 1960's the United States produced 66% of the world's goods!!! That's 66%! And guess what? We only had 6% of the world's population at that time. No kidding, that is how much more productive the United States is than ever other country. If you took the productive capacity of EVERY OTHER COUNTRY on earth back in the 1960's, (which would be 94% of the earth's population) you would still not equal the productive capacity of just the few 6% of capitalists. As a result the United States is rich and it's a great place to live. There is oppotunity for anyone who wants to work hard and think properly!

In a capitalistic society a person is not forced to work. People choose to work rather than not have any money or anything. That is just the choice between life or death though, that is reality that is forcing you to choose not any social system.

youtube.com more fun plus free, don't think selling it would be legal. Though I'm not sure youtubing it would be either.

It is relevant. I'm saying that a four year old could pick up a weapon like a hand gun and fire at people. He could also do this not realizing the morality of it. He doesn't have to kill or even hit anyone for it to be a valid question. I don't see what you can find implausible about that. Unlikely or rare? Yes definitely but it's possible and therefore valid I think. Either way the essence of his hypothetical was clear so I don't see what the problem is. All he was asking is if it would be moral to shoot someone who was shooting at people even if that person didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

I don't think that the example is inane. He may have made a mistake in calling talking about a child with an automatic weapon as opposed to a semi-automatic one but the example is still valid. What if a 4 year old comes out with a gun and starts shooting? is it moral to kill him? There has been multiple children under 6 years old that I have heard of in the last few years that have shot off hand guns either at people or hitting/killing them. I think that makes the example pretty reasonable. Also there is actually one hand gun that is fully automatic, it's called a Glock 18 . I agree I really dislike examples that are unrealistic or impossible but I don't think this one should be filed under that category.

I was thinking: Since terrorists arn't scared to die maybe we ought to alter our tactics. I was thinking maybe we take them and feed them nothing but pork. Just pork all the time. Bacon for breakfast and porkchops for dinner. Maybe some kind of pork drink too, that might work. If that doesn't work maybe we could create like a ham gun or something. Fire ham at terrorists. IEH, Improvised Explosive Ham. Ahh well. One thing I was actually thinking of was getting them addicted to crack or meth or something. I mean force it on them in the beginning but once they get addicted maybe they will pony up the info on where thier friends. I'm sure I'm not the first to think about this, wonder if it's been tried and what the effects have been.

Really? So if you were to witness everyone in your family brutally tortured and murdered excert for your mom (who would go on to love you very much) that would be more traumatic than your mom emotionally abandoning you? My mom died when I was 11 but I wouldn't call that the worst trauma that I had as a child. So all acts of violence in adulthood are directly related to childhood experiance huh? I suppose that would mean that in all of human history not a single person who didn't have a bad childhood was ever "abusive" nor "violent". This of course would include all alcoholics and drug users too. No one EVER had a healthy childhood and then got hooked on drugs and abused someone...... Lots of unsubstantiated and as Hal said dubious claims here.

To answer your question as to why some people are attracted to minors specifically I think for a lot of them it's the idea of doing something they "shouldn't do". I personally think that, that is where a lot of the attraction comes from coupled with the idea of having sexual relations with someone who is not knowing what sex really is, etc. It's my opinion that the majority of the time the attraction is not simply a physical one. Though the reasons are more than likely subconcious they are usually derived from thier system of values. (ie. doing something you morally shouldn't. I don't mean "morally" in the objectivist sense but rather the sense that is normally assumed).

Today I went and bought a Digital camera because I wanted to keep track of my physical progress in bodybuilding (of which there isn't much yet). However when I got it home and started playing with it I realized that it had a video capture feature which lasts nearly 25 minutes. On top of it the quality of the video is surprisingly good. Cool! So I got to thinking that I would create a video blog for my bodybuilding where people can watch me try a lot of different things and see if I got anywhere with it. Then I thought of an even better idea. I noticed that on sites like YouTube and Google Video there is a real lack of anything useful, most of it is just poor entertainment (in my experiance) so I thought, why not create useful educational videos which are based on a lot of Ayn Rand's ideas? I think that would really be fantastic, I mean personally I would have loved to seen such a thing when I was first getting into Objectivism especially if it was interesting. Heck I'd love to see that now! My idea to make video's that are appealing on thier own, or rather to as broad a base of people as possible. So instead of creating something like "Introduction to Objectivist Metaphysics and Epistemology" I would much more likely create something like "Learn how to think properly" or something to that effect. The people who would actually be interested in the former is quite small and more than likely won't be interested in introductory info anyway, whereas there is a fair amount of people who might be interested in learning to think properly or "learning to use logic". The other thing is that I'm not really planning on harping on the issues of Objectivism or laying them out like: existance exists, indentity, causuality, etc. I'm more or less going to try to create some value for the people who might see it. Create interesting situations that they could consider and then show them how thinking will be useful and how not thinking properly can/does hurt. I most certainly will get to those issues and put all of them in order but I think I have to (1) get people interested (2) get people to follow it logically. So in essence my plan is to make a useful lessen and then at the end point people towards Ayn Rand if they want to learn more. So in essence what I would like to know from anyone who wishes to comment on it is: 1) What do you think of this idea? Good or Bad and Why? 2) What everday topics do you think Objectivism can help with that might make a good lesson? 3) Since my first lesson will be about learning how to think properly what important points do you think I should be sure to bring up? (other than existance exists, existance has identity and causuality). 4) What do you think a good title would be for that lesson? "How to think properly", "How logic works"? I'm open to anything so please do tell. Thanks for any and all advice. You don't need to worry about holding back, I'm gonna do it pretty much regardless so might as well help me go in the right direction :-)

Geez I didn't know that. China on Human Rights... Very disturbing

When was the word f*** used to mean love? I checked a few dictionaries and I didn't find even an outdated use for that word with that meaning. To my knowledge it was never widely used that way. What are you baseing that on? Did I accuse you of arguing against Objectivist principles? I don't recall doing it. First of all I agree with your on the last point. If am talking to non-Objectivists then I won't use Objectivist concepts as they aren't likely to be familiar with them. Most of the concepts people use out there valid ones and I have wondered many times why Ayn Rand choose to create new definitions for words already in use. Selfish is a good example as self-interest is more like what Ayn Rand meant.

You just contridicted your own definition. Before you sex is vaginal penetration withe the penis. Now it is anal penetration to?

I remember when I saw that episode, it is just funny on so many levels.

Best definition of it I have heard so far.

Heck no, it's thier responsibility to have thier stuff working right to begin with. If they don't remedy it sooner that is thier fault.

Again Microsoft is being immorally attacked for providing a better value than before. Firefox is already equiped with a Google search box, is that unfair to Microsoft? I don't know I am just disgusted with this at this point. Microsoft has been fined hugely by the EU and it seems now Google is willing to try to violate Microsoft's rights in order to take more market share. The ironic thing is that Google's motto is "Do no evil"..... They failed on this one. Here is the link: Google's Complaint

I think that this person was thinking in the context of a proper sexual relationship. Meaning that is what a proper sexual relationship should be. While I agree, it seems to me that proper or "Rational" sex as he put it would be a more abstract subcategory of sex. As David pointed out my definition was not exact either because it would include a few things that were not sexual activities.

Today in the live chat room I had a 45 minute argument which I said that people could have sex without it being a celebration of values and the other person said it was impossible. By "sex" I meant any type of act which uses the sexual organs of human beings. But we argued for that entire time because he said sex stood for: "the mutual celebration of values between two or more human animals". So basically we disagreed because we used different meanings for our concepts. However if his definition is correct what would we use to mean sex by my definition above. I think most certainly most people use sex by the first definition rather than the second. I mean if a doctor or a new girlfriend asked when was the first time you had sex I can't imagine them meaning the second definition. It seems to me that the second definition would create conceptual chaos because now instead of saying "I had sex with Jane last night" I would have to say "I had intercourse with jane and we also did this act and this other act". After checking the dictionary the first definition seems closer and the second doesn't seem right. Also if the 1st is right then was would be the word for the second definition? "Make love" is what occured to me but I was told that is was different (though I don't see the distinction) from sex (his version of sex that is). So what do you think is the proper definition and why?