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Grames

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Everything posted by Grames

  1. My criticisms here all to be taken as "what a missed opportunity" rather than a condemnation of a failure. The answers given were adequate as far as they went, but were not as "vigorous" or as complete as Ayn Rand would have given. I will start another thread for discussion of the perfectability issue. (I have listened to all 3 hours now and have been unable to find Yaron Brooks further comments on perfectability. Have you got a time reference?) Overall this was a successful appearance and Liddy was a sympathetic and gracious host. Liddy raised the possibility of further appearances in the future and I hope they take him up on it.
  2. Land isn't owned unless it is owned by someone in particular, someone identifiable. Otherwise, the land is abandoned and subject to squatter's settlement and use. Squatter's rights or adverse possession can result in new ownership if no one comes forward with a valid claim and evicts the squatters. A valid claim can't be one run off your laser printer, it had better already be public knowledge. The intro paragraph from Wikipedia:
  3. He didn't combat the premise behind the question, the dissmissal of reason and Objectivism as hopeless utopianism, and worse, something that has already been tried before and failed. And the point about perfectability is exactly the idea that unites the bloodiest ideologies of history. It is not so technical that people can't understand it or are uninterested in it. This is the theme of the movie Serenity and the character Mal gives a little speech about it. That the perfectability of man was brought up by a random caller on a nationally syndicated radio show refutes that idea that this is a mere technicality that should be left for another day.
  4. ARI's response to the caller Jane (hour 2, at 6:05) on Rousseau, the goddless French Revolution and the Bolshevik takeover in Russia as examples of what excess devotion to reason can do was lame. Their response to this attack on reason was the assertion that the American founding fathers based their philosophy of government on Locke and Enlightenment thought and not religion. A better response would be to attack the French and Russian revolutionaries as not reasonable. Jane also stated that the French and Bolsheik revolutions were dedicated to the proposition of the perfectability of man through reason, while the American founding fathers believed in the perfectability of man by rebirth of the spirit through Jesus Christ. This would have been a great opportunity to distinguish Objectivism from all of the failures of rationalism and religion by pointing out the Objectivism does not believe in the perfectability of man. "Perfect" and "perfectability" as ideas are examples of platonic idealism and are an attempt to marry the finite, fallible, volitional consciousness of man to some version of the infinite, infallible and automatic. Every such attempt must end in tyranny and dictatorship.
  5. Yes, laws and government objectively distinguish lawful transactions from theft and fraud. The Constitution also gives congress the power to "fix the standard of weights and measures" which helps makes objective measurement possible. The principle of objectivity applied to deeds of land ownership requires that the names on deeds be public knowledge. There is an office of the local government established for that purpose. Anyone can go there and look up who owns a plot of land. This office also plays a role in preventing fraud in that one can research who has a right to make a sale before committing to the traansaction.
  6. I agree. I would just add the following: To say that existence is identity is a metaphysical statement, meaning it applies universally. From this perspective, saying that existence is identity is a law would be redundant because there is no exception to existence, no possibility of the law being broken. When we refer to the law of identity we refer to the same idea as above, "existence is identity", but from an epistemological perspective. Epistemology is necessary guidance for a finite, fallible and volitional conciousness. A law in epistemology has no exceptions, a property that mirrors the universality of the metaphysical statement it came from. We can break this law, but only by accepting a contradiction somewhere. So you were correct, the law of identity is more complex than "existence is identity". The added element is the context of consciousness.
  7. Try answering this question: What special meaning, if any, does adding the phrase "the law" bring to the concept of identity?
  8. You don't. 'True motivation' is kantian idealism in the form of knowledge which is somehow gained by an infallible means. It is impossible. If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like duck, then goddam it call it a duck. If we learn more later, great. Until then we have to rely on what we know now. In this case lying, acting, pretense and deception are also acts of consciousness. So it is hard to go wrong in the way you postulate. Someone or something is not conscious, but it is going take action to deceive us? The reverse case of something possessing consciousness but pretending to be inert is not just plausible it actually happens all the time as a tactic used by predators in nature. But the possibility of being fooled in a particular case doesn't make knowledge in general impossible, it just re-emphasizes again that all observation is by particular finite means. More observation and expanded limits of knowledge is the only remedy.
  9. What do mean, IF? Every election is not just a contest of who can get out the vote, it is also a contest of who can commit the most election fraud and get away with it. There are 3 voting precincts in Minnesota trying their damnest to get Al Franken elected senator by mysteriously producing hundreds of Franken votes many days after the voting stopped, and the recount hasn't even started yet. Most big cities have voter fraud organized by ACORN. Politics is civil war by other means.
  10. Grames

    Choosing life

    I think this is the way to phrase it, so that it parallels the other axioms: It is axiomatic that life is the standard of value.
  11. Grames

    Choosing life

    "Axiomatic value". I like that. Every argument about values proceeds on the premise that one must be alive in order to act, even the argument that there are no values and every act is valid. I wonder if anyone here has a further comment on the linked essay?
  12. When the opponent is George McGovern, yes. Nixon's election and reelction was a popular rebellion and refutation of the entire '60s counter-culture. A little spying never hurt anyone. Don't you for one second think that the Democrats haven't gotten away with much worse. The entire 1960 presidential election was stolen, Nixon should have been president then. Nixon learned then to fight fire with fire. All over the world politics is blood sport. Be grateful the American version is as genteel as it is.
  13. In this film we have two people on a quest for vengeance meet and ally. Their respective targets meet to do business near the end of the film, which is when our heroes attack. The rest of the movie is setup for this resolution. Much of the conflict in the film isn't between the heroes and the villians, but between the heroes and various obstacles created by their own friends and allies. Neglect of the villians and the implausible motivations that are given to the villians diminishes the hero-villain conflict and the whole movie. Action scenes did have a choppy quality from too much cutting. There is a one-on-one fight between Bond and a bad guy in a hotel room that is chopped up like crazy. After Matt Damon's long single cut fight scenes in the Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy definitively showed how such scenes should be shot this relapse in technique is hugely disappointing. Even so, compared to most of the other crap out there it was a still a pretty good movie.
  14. I don't understand how the beautiful Ukranian-Russian actress Olga Kurylenko is supposed to be a Bolivian. They could just as plausibly put her in Kenya and pass her off as an Obama relative. This casting decision makes no sense.
  15. The bank has a lien on your car until you complete the last payment, so they do effectively own it. If the banks needs to convert this asset to cash, they can sell the loan and the lien to another bank. They do not have to repossess your car to sell it. Reselling mortgage loans and liens on over-valued property is precisely the root cause of the current credit bubble.
  16. Failure to communicate. There is no difference in principle between operating at 49% reserve or operating at 51% reserve.
  17. What is missing in this scenario is any place for the concept of collateral. Banks have collateral in exchange for their loans. IF the collateral is priced correctly, then the bank can always assure that it controls assets greater than or equal to the value of all of its issued notes, at whatever fraction it may be operating. The hazard of FRB is the monetizing of assets that are not actually gold, because the value of assets changes over time while the mass and density of a specified quantity of gold does not.
  18. The lists are not as interesting as the proposed standard that these things are meeting to merit deeming them "Wonders of the World". I would propose that size (or alternately scale for distributed projects) and importance (as measured by the number of people affected) be vital to any "Wonder" project. And by what possible standard is something as trivial as a race car become a Wonder? Does it go faster than the speed of light? Is it a perpetual motion machine?
  19. First, by not loaning out the amounts held in demand deposits and checking accounts. As long as all withdrawal and redemption requests can be met and no one shows up to demand the cash that is on loan (because that cash came from term deposits such as multi-year CDs) then there is no problem. Second, by securing collateral equal to the value of the loan which the bank gains control of should a loan default. There is no difference in principle between loaning out more money than it has in reserve or loaning out less money than it has in reserve. What matters is the quality of the individual loans and the value of their collateral.
  20. I was just listening to Peikoff in the audio course "Induction in Physics and Philosophy" and he said there that every child's first experience with causation is personal causation, in which he is participating in the cause and effect relationship by being the cause of various things moving around. Retaining this level of understanding when older will lead to animism as the first theology.
  21. No, he said the bank steals from everyone who holds one of the bank's notes when it inflates, not from the third parties or the entire nation.
  22. Zedic. Apparently you have read Rand's article "The Ethics of Emergencies" because that is where she says that you ought to help people in an emergency. One the other hand there are a lot of other things you haven't understood yet, because the way you keep rephrasing what should be an uncontroversial position is drawing a lot of fire. In response, you haven't yielded an inch. The thread is going nowhere. When I learned Objectivism, it was on my own and consisted of at least one complete read through of everything she published during her life. When I started reading debates about Objectivist principles on usenet and the web I was sharpening my understanding, not gaining it for the first time. Jumping into the middle of a debate before completing an initial survey of the literature is not conducive to learning because one is too busy "not losing" to understand the new point of view. Give Rand a chance. She was a far better writer than anyone in this thread, including me.
  23. It is easy to be generous when you are rich, and to expect generosity when the individuals of the culture that you live in are rich. But that wealth is not to be taken for granted. It might seem paradoxical but when society is ordered such that people do routinely "get their panties in a bunch" about who pays the bills that society is better able to engage in real generosity. I read an newspaper article several years ago that described the kindliness and generosity of individual africans, especially when it came to loyally taking care of their family members. But that very attitude enabled the nepotism, cronyism, incompetence and corruption of all the post-colonial governments in africa. It turns out that justice is not an optional virtue.
  24. Anybody who has been following the news knows that the Treasury is shotgunning money around to good banks and bad because if it only invested in bad banks then everyone would know which are the bad banks. (That is the Treasury's theory and idea of an 'efficient market' not mine.) This is a "mandatory volunteer" program. At least the gov't actually stands a chance of getting this money back.
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