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Grames

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Everything posted by Grames

  1. Back then one knew the neighbors a whole lot better than one does today.
  2. Do not kill. There is no obligation to rescue. Make a judgement. For me, no.
  3. Grames

    Anarchy

    Inalienable. Rights can be violated and need defending. Inalienable does not mean invincible or inviolable. The "crime against society" rationale is not the correct derivation for the need of a government. The correct derivation is a delegation of the right of self defense. Nothing but the right of self defense, the same thing that protects you against violent criminals. Policemen almost always show up after the fact and the justice system can only prevent repeat crimes by the same people while they are jailed. Self defense is an inefficient response to a coordinated assault by a criminal gang or invading army. Except the winner of this debate gets to be God when the fighting is over, which is temptation enough to start the fight for the irrational, or the foolhardy, or the ambitious, or the ruthless. Are you saying objective standards cause corruption? How does that happen? It is as likely that the entire government become corrupt as the entire population. In principle no system can protect you if all your neighbors are corrupt. Anarchy won't protect you if even one of your neighbors is corrupt. The people will freely choose to establish a government. We have historical precedent here in the American federation days before the present constitution was ratified. One advocates war to avoid impending losses, not to make a profit.
  4. So am I! Glad tidings all around, for everyone! So lets tie this up. At a policy level, if you don't fight the system then yes. (Greenspan syndrome.) At a low level, simply no. She was in error, so wrong but not immoral. Since we now know about the 'Dagny error' can anyone ever again make this error and avoid being immoral? No, unless they are in same position as Dagny philosophically, never having heard of Objectivism.
  5. Knowing sucks. Christian allegory of the end of the world, nobody sees it coming except the crazy ignored prophet girl, nobody could do anything about it anyway. Nicholas Cage has yet another role where he solves riddles, but here this is merely an excuse to travel to the sites of disasters which he finds he cannot prevent but which are spectacular to witness. Angels are aliens, or maybe vice versa. If you want to reinforce your sense of the futility of life and its struggles, this will do the trick. Director Alex Proyas had done Dark City, The Crow and I, Robot but this is a turkey.
  6. It is not my position it is Dagny's, and by extension the author's. Since the argument is Atlas Shrugged itself, and more explicitly the Journals, I didn't feel the need to recapitulate it until several posters expressed the same mistaken viewpoint. Familiarity with the subject matter is assumed until demonstrated otherwise. I must admit you are correct here. Dagny makes a terrible error, but it isn't the sanction of the victim because she never internalizes the enemy's moral system or accepts unearned guilt. Nevertheless, her continued labors do materially support the corrupt schemes of the statists. Dagny makes a different error but with the same result. Because her problem is not the sanction of the victim but her indulgence in a kind of naive vitality, she preserves her moral innocence in a way that sets her apart from the other strikers and makes her unique and uniquely valuable in Galt's mind. Her continued self-imposed martyrdom while she refused to join the strike was no virtue. This is how she can be both the worst and the best simultaneously. It is not a contradiction but only a paradox, because the best and worst are found in the same person at the same time but in two different respects.
  7. How terribly disappointing that I must explain Atlas Shrugged to my fellow students-in-Objectivism. As a literary construction, if the author makes the initiator of the strike fall in love with the last person to join the strike, look for a reason linking the love and the reason she was the last. Remember always that this is all by design, every word. Dagny is guilty of the sanction of the victim, and she is the chief perpetrator of it. From the Journals of Ayn Rand The magnitude of her error is in direct proportion to her own personal virtue: Dagny of all the strikers demonstrates the greatest strength and most courage by enduring her burden the longest.
  8. She didn't struggle against the destruction of reason, she struggled against the destruction of her railroad. She accomplished nothing. Of all the people John Galt eventually collected in Galt's Gulch she was the worst.
  9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Lindauer How Susan Lindauer Was Caught Susan Lindauer's Mission To Baghdad The story you linked to is an interview with Susan Lindauer. The source to be judged here is Susan Lindauer, not that New Zealand paper.
  10. The positive right to the product of your labor does not and cannot be derived from negative rights. All rights derive from the same source, your own life. In combination with the fact that you are a material being with material desires, your right to your own life gives you the right to gain and dispose of material values. Negative rights are derivative from positive rights to act. What use is right to smoke marijuana if you don't have the right to possess marijuana? Of what use is a right to not wear a seat belt if I don't have a right to own a car? The idea that your life ends at the furthest extent of your fingertips is perhaps a philosophy appropriate for an animal, but not for human beings. Property is an extension of a person's mind and body, and therefore of a person's life. Rights are absolute or they are not rights. The inability to think in principle is the pragmatist mentality and is really what you are up against here. Despite the appearance that you are having an argument about ethics and politics, it is in fact a clash over epistemology.
  11. TC? What happened to Taggart Transcontinental? When you get finished writing your version of Atlas Shrugged I would be interested in reading it. An Atlas Shrugged wherein John Galt has nothing to teach Dagny plays havoc with several plot points.
  12. Here is a philosophical analysis of the causes of political correctness from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels. Political correctness is inevitable, and acts as a indicator of the depth of philosophical rot in a culture. As long as PC is increasing, you know things must get worse before they can get better.
  13. What is a 'regulatory' agency? The EPA is an example of a regulatory agency. The USPTO and that agency that sold land under the Homestead Act (Bureau of Land Management?) are in the business of defining property rights, which is 'regularizing' function. There is something essentially different about the two kinds of enterprises. The EPA violates rights, the USPTO and BLM defend rights. I don't see a moral distinction between laws and regulations, both can be proper or improper. The legal distinction is simply one of origination.
  14. Stolen concept. Ownership cannot apply to self, who is doing the owning? Self is logically prior to owning anything. So their concession on ownership of self is meaningless and so-called 'left-libertarians' don't believe in ownership at all.
  15. Wanted to note the curious similarity here to God and Moses damning the tribes of Isreal to wander the desert for forty years because they erected a false idol of a golden calf to worship. It is curious because Objectivism is not a religion and has no mystic appeals to authority, and yet the similarity remains because the epistemological issue is the same. There is only one way to the truth and any other way is necesssarily false. There already exists a visual and auditory symbol designating the concept of the philosophical system of Ayn Rand: Objectivism. Making another would be redundant. If Objectivism is just too long and ungainly for some uses, then I would suggest some kind of graphic design playing on the 'O'. Steal from Obama, it would be poetic justice.
  16. "Later in life" referring to age at which professors gain tenure. That would not be your age, sonny. (edit- er maybe I'm wrong, your photo doesn't make you look 36. At what age to people get tenure?)
  17. I think it is better they never go out of copyright, and the funds generated act like a billion dollar endowment subsidizing Objectivists scholars, speakers and events.
  18. Under this reasoning, the very idea of a policeman as a third party that can intervene when he has not been personally threatened would not be valid. The whole idea of a police force and of an army is to regularize the use of force when it is justified. So long as the use of force is justified, it can be delegated to specialists. The retaliatory use of force is best left to third parties because it is more likely to be controlled objectively and professionally. The alternative would be a long running feud or riot between two neighborhoods, which would be even more disruptive of daily life than a rocket attack. The police or army wield the right of self-defense properly delegated to them by other citizens.
  19. The difference between being beaten up and beaten to death is quite a difference. On topic, the difference between having an old man say mean words to you (excommunication) and being strangled by your own father is pretty steep.
  20. No, its an instance of regarding the entity, a shoe, separately from the entity, water. A unit is an instance of a concept, so the idea of a unit has no meaning to a mentality that cannot conceptualize. It is also very important that concepts serve the purpose of unit reduction, so fixing a concept in memory with a word is indispensable to the process. Dogs do not think in words. Why don't you try reading the whole book before asking questions? Read it several times, like I had to do.
  21. I support Geert Wilders' attempt to expose Islam for what it is. His necessarily rationalistic way of trying to use Dutch law against hate speech makes him vulnerable to that same law. But it is the law that is ultimately wrong not Wilders. The Koran is explicitly violent in that old shool, Old Testament way that characterized christianity before and during the Reformation. Furthermore, it has specific doctrines about how to organize society that makes it inherently political and irreconcilable with political freedom.
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