Ogg

For me, WoW isn't really about the items, it's about progression. There's no better feeling than when, after hours of effort, wipes, frustration, and strategies modified on the fly between attempts, everything comes together, everyone is on top of their game, and the boss mob goes down for the first time for my guild. It's a feeling of triumph that's hard to match in other forms of recreation.

It's one thing to believe that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of abscence and think that unicorns may exist, and quite another to think that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of abscence and buy unicorn repellant.

World of Warcraft Mal'Ganis Horde Warrior: Daneskjold (I am aware of the spelling...) (Formerly Ogg of Bonechewer, transfered) Rogue: Carnegie Bonechewer Horde Mage: Epimetheus Smoulderthorn Alliance Paladin: Kottos

I recently obtained an album from an electronica artist called zerO One. Listening to it, I was struck both by how precise and well coordinated the music was, and by the seemingly quite positive sense of life displayed by zerO One, especially in the songs(?) "Nothing to Fight About", "Seek Not Outside Yourself", and "I Like That". I did some investigating, found the site for the artist. I'm no expert, but if you like techno/electronica, you'll probably like this guy's work. There are some sample clips on the site. Just thought that this guy's music is rational enough to be worth mentioning here.

I think a better comparison, Melchior, than the soup and salad one is this: Most philosophies are piles of gravel. Some are made all one type of gravel, some have different peices of gravel of different types. The better ones are piles of rocks, much fewer peices and much bigger peices than the piles of gravel. Each of these rocks or peices of rock are separate ideas that are parts of the philosophy and connected to other ideas that are part of that particular peice of rock or gravel. These philosophies you can examine by taking a particular peice of rock, examining the ideas that are connected under the principle the rock represents, and what that rock represents isn't dependent on any of the other peices of rock that make up a particular philosophy. Many people examine many philosophies, and take bits and peices of each to make their own philosphy at their leisure. You've combined Buddhist ethics with Libertarian politics and a few peices of sand and gravel from various modern philosophies, though you may not realize it completely. Objectivism is a marble statue. Every part of it depends on every other part. There are arms and legs that branch off, but everything is connected to, and cannot be separated from, the core. You can't take peices of Objectivism. You can't combine it with other philosophies. It is complete in itself, and trying to combine it with anything else nullifies every part of it. You can examine the grain, and how each part connects, but you cannot examine each bit in a vacuum. It must be examined in the context of the overall work. That's a quality of Objectivism that is very rare these days: Completeness. There are rough edges to be smoothed out, but the overall work is an integrated whole.

It's chosing the least evil, since if you vote for Galt, it may be the case that you're electing Toohey. Voting for Galt is choosing evil as surely as voting for Stadler or Toohey, since voting for Galt means you're contributing to either Toohey or Stadler getting elected, since there's no way that Galt will be elected even with the votes of everyone who would support him.

As an practical of Inspector's principle, imagine that polls taken the day before the election for mayor of your city show Ellsworth Toohey with 49% of the voters' support, Robert Stadler with 49% of the voters' support, and John Galt with 2% of the voters' support. It would be in your best interest to vote for Stadler instead of Galt, so that Toohey would not get in. Galt is obviously better than either of the other contenders, but it might not be best to vote for him.

Greetings Melchior, this is Pvynex. You'll find that if you want a debate, there's a "Criticism of Objectivism" subforum in the Miscellaneous subforum of this board. I will warn you though, they're a lot better at it than I am (Much more practice). If this is the same Melchior as the one from that other forum, then I'm the one who made him aware of the egoistic principles of Objectivism during a couple of debates on that forum. The debate stopped when he said that he found the moral goodness of altruism to be "Self-evident". How does one challenge that? I'm glad he came here. I'd suggest to you, Melchior, that you find out about Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology before trying to challenge Objectivist ethics. Ethics are, after all, based in those subjects, and without them ethics has no meaning. If you have a disagreement with Objectivist ethics, the disagreement is probably rooted in metaphysics or epistemology.

Anthem was the first Ayn Rand book I read, and interestingly I read it for a project in English 2 Pre-AP as well (Though not everyone read the same book; in fact no two people could chose the same author). I remember my reaction to it: Disgust at the thought of collectivist government, and a feeling of dignity and pride reading the chapter after Equality discovers I. I don't think any of the ones who wrote those letters got anything like that out of it. Reading those, I can't help but wonder how they missed the obvious. It's like they interpreted Ayn Rand from collectivist, irrationalist, and egalitarian viewpoints . I can't help but wonder whether Haley Ringe even finished reading the novel. I don't know if any of it got through to them. It's rather sad, really. I can only hope they simply didn't publish the letters from the ones who even remotely got it. I know Anthem changed my life, and I think that it could do it for others, especially at that age, but it might have been wasted on that class.

No such luck DavidOdden.

The conditional connective does not imply causality by any means. It merely says that when the first connective is true the second connective is also true. This has nothing to do with cause and effect; each may be caused by a third event or by separate events that merely work out in such a way that the conditional is true. It is the case that A->(Bv~B ) but that does not mean that the arbitrary A caused that tautology (Bv~B ) to be true, it merely means that whenever A is true (Bv~B ) is also true. In terms of your question, if A being true causes B to be true and B is only true when A is true (I don't know of any connectives for that) then it would be the case that ~B would imply ~A, which again does not mean ~B caused ~A, merely that when ~B is true so is ~A. So it is certainly not the case that we can say that ~B causes ~A in this case. You have a very skewed understanding of causality, and formal logic.

The date doesn't matter. Even pennies created now will be passed though dozens of hands in dozens of transactions before they become too worn to use again. The 1 cent 'value' of a penny has no relation to its impact on the economy, unless put in terms of the velocity of money in the economy as a whole, although the number of times a penny is used in its lifetime may be decreasing. I don't know all the facts involved. I also don't know the number of pennies currently in circulation. But I do know that those facts would need to be taken into consideration, and the fact that it costs more to make a penny than what it is 'worth' is completely immaterial without that context.

This annoys me, because the assumption that people seem to make is that making a penny is somehow a waste. This is not the correct conclusion to draw. If a penny were used only once in its lifetime, that would indeed be a bit of a waste, but picking a random penny off my desk yeilds a date of 1982. Since 1982, how many times do you think this penny has changed hands? How many transactions has it facilitated? Probably dozens. That penny has not registered as one cent in our total spending, but as several. But even if it was wasteful, it does nothing to solve the underlying problem. Even if the penny were eliminated, and everything was rounded to 5 cents one way or the other, inflation would, in short order, make the creation of the nickel cost more than 5 cents! I recently read an article by Leonard Peikoff on Ayn Rand's thought process; she thought not in terms of concretes but rather in terms of principles. It is quite obvious that lawmakers today (As well as most of the population) do not think in terms of principles. They do not think 'The creation of a penny is wasteful. Why?', they think 'The creation of a penny is wasteful. Let's scrap it!' Ignoring, of course, the reasons why it's wasteful, and ignoring the possibility of this situation again in the future. Do not treat the symptoms, eliminate the cause. Why was the making of a penny not wasteful before now? Why did that change? Inflation is the root cause (Just as it is the cause of many other woes that those of perceptual consciousness cannot seem to imagine a cause for). Even if the government had any right to the functions of the Treasury Department, I would be sickened by the lack of thought that goes into its workings.

I got d'Anconia.

It's impossible because it's impossible to conceptualize the contents of an empty mind, which at some point some mind would have had to be. Something would have had to make the concepts at some point, and if you didn't have any sort of external world, this would not be possible, therefore there would have to be contact with the external world at some point in developing concepts in the first place.