~Rosemary~

Obama will almost certainly win. McCain has gotten some votes because of Joe the Plumber, but not enough to make up the difference. The fiscal conservatives have mostly abandoned him because of his support of the bailout, and Obama has gotten much of the rural vote, which McCain would need to win. Sarah Palin got some votes for him initially, but now that the shock of him picking a woman has worn off, people are actually looking at her insane positions.

Changing yourself solely for the sake of others betrays yourself. If you decide that there is a valid reason for changing yourself that would make you happier, than you should certainly change. However your happiness should never depend on the approval of others.

No matter who gets elected, the present is going to suck, so it's not a choice to sacrifice the present. Maybe if Obama gets elected, the economic failures will just get blamed on whatever capitalism is left, but if McCain gets elected, there is an even greater likely hood of that happening. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but I don't think that the majority of Americans have so completely abandoned the free market. When Carter's economic policies failed, Reagan was elected. The political situation now is totally different, but I'm still somewhat hopeful. After all, there were a lot of people against the bailout, though mostly for the wrong reasons.

No. Doctors don't have a general responsibility to treat patients. They offer a service. If someone finds that service valuable enough to warrant however much the doctor charges, they enter into a contract with the doctor. The doctor's ethical responsibility only starts once that contract is in place. It depends on the situation. If treating the person did not require a great expenditure of resources, it would be in the hospital's best interest to treat, since the likelihood of being payed would be high compared to the cost of treating. However, if it was a very expensive procedure and their was really no way of knowing the economic status of the guy, I don't see how the hospital would have an ethical responsible to treat the person. A related question: if a hospital did save an unconscious person, would he have a legal responsibility to pay them, if he was able to do so? I don't see how, since he never agreed to enter into a contract with the hospital (though paying would definitely be the moral thing to do.)

That doesn't really make sense. Libertarians never get elected and receive basically no media attention. Had he stayed Republican, he might not have gotten elected again, but he would have had a better chance of getting political power than he has now. I just don't see how becoming a Libertarian would further his career, unless he is really stupid, which could be the case.

Your genes determine what proteins you are capable of synthesizing. Proteins are responsible for most of what happens in the cell, including cell reproduction. Cancer is caused by mutations during reproduction, ergo having too little/much of certain proteins would predispose people to cancer. Same with metabolism. I don't enough about the biology of addiction to know if the same logic would apply to alcoholism. However, in most cases it is simply a predisposition. Someone with a cancer-causing gene can take action to prevent cancer. People are not born equal, but that does not contradict free will (unless you think that everyone is born with the same intelligence, ability, etc.) There definitely is a tendency for people to overstate the role of genetics in determining their lives. As for determining truth from fiction, I think hard science is the way to go.

As others have said, McCain and Obama are almost identical. I think that an Obama administration would, most likely, cause slightly faster economic decline than a McCain administration. Similarly, McCain has a slightly better chance of improving foreign policy than Obama. However, McCain, though not nearly as bad as many Christian conservatives, would continue to inject religion into government with faith-based initiatives and the like, and he'll continue to sacrifice individual liberty in the name of "national security." He also has a decent chance of overturning Roe v. Wade, considering the current balance of the supreme court. They're both horrible choices, but I would rather have Obama as president. I do think that McCain would be a little bit better for the country, but not significantly enough for me to want to risk having abortion declared illegal.

Does anyone know why Barr claims to have changed his mind about civil liberties? When he was in congress, he did try to decrease government spending, but he was ridiculously socially conservative and apparently even ran on a family values platform. As a Representative, he was incredibly pro-life, and I haven't seen anything about him changing his mind about abortion. Does anyone know his current stance?

The main problem I have with the whole situation is that the woman is being forced to perform an action unnecessary for her wellbeing simply because of the irresponsibility of another group. She didn't cause the kids to throw the football into her yard, and she shouldn't have to go out of her way to fix a situation she didn't cause. In this case, the inconvenience to her would be quite minor, but that's irrelevant. You can't just draw a line and say that at some arbitrary point, the need of one owner necessitates action from another (the action being solely for the benefit of the former person.) That would be fundamentally altruistic.

I really like the design. It's awful that it's being built with stolen money, but at least it's not being wasted on unnecessary (and aesthetically unappealing) ornamentation.

Why you make such a distinction between biological and psychological altruism? I see psychological altruism as a subcategory of biological altruism; it's just a mechanism that results in biological "altruism". A conscious evaluation of the risks and potential benefits is unnecessary, since, in most organisms, it would be essentially automatic. In your first example with the primates, the helper was performing a low-cost task, and while it resulted in no direct benefit, in the long term performing such low-cost "altruistic" actions would be in the best interest of the primate, because of the likely reciprocity. Reciprocal altruism (which would not really altruism at all, since it ultimately benefits the "altruist") explains most of the small scale altruism within a community. The second example is slightly different because it is an example of kin selection. It is in the evolutionary best interest of organisms to help their relatives to the extent that increases the chances of their genes surviving. Again, this doesn't require a conscious decision. Semi-altruistic behavior towards related individuals is nearly always in the organism's genes best interest, so it has evolved to be automatic. Obviously some of these altruistic tendencies are present in humans, probably to an even greater degree than in other organisms. However, biological altruism is never truly altruistic, otherwise it would quickly die out. As humans, we have the ability to consciously to consider the situation and reject it if it is not in our best interest, thus making the "altruism" even less altruistic.

Isn't one of the tenants of Objectivism is that humans are fundamentally rational beings, since our rationality is our only method of survival (honest question, I'm not being sarcastic)? If man is fundamentally irrational, an Objectivist society could never even be formed, let alone maintained. But in a truly rational society, I don't see any reason why there would be a sudden mass conversion to irrationality. If the situation you describe were to arise, as long as the group were not to exert force on anyone, nothing would be done. A private group has the right to advocate whatever it wants. A church can tell its constituents not to buy from atheists, etc. As long as businesses not buying into the red ribbon system were free to attempt to sell their products, no rights are being violated. Some very good businesses could go out of business, however, in the long run, any system like that advocating irrationality would fail. Most of the people buying red ribbons, would be unprincipled and unproductive. The "socially minded people" would end up limiting themselves to the worst made supplies, driving more people away from the organization, eventually causing its dissolution.

Nearly all politicians, Republicans and Democrats, agree that not enough people have health insurance. The Democrats want to fully socialize the health care system; the Republicans want to keep it semi-socialized and provide tax incentives and the like to employers to "encourage" them to provide health insurance. They are assuming that health care is a right. The most simple rebuttal is that it is not a right, but a privilege limited to people able to pay for it. Really, the biggest problem with the health care system is that it is not free. The government provides health insurance for a variety of groups (just look at the mess that is Medicare/Medicaid!) and screws with basic market mechanisms like competition.

I didn't really see Taggart as the main antagonist. He was evil certainly, but I think he was, more than anything, a pawn of people like Ferris and Cuffy Meigs (I think that's his name.) He bought into the doctrine of altruism because he was already empty and altruism idealized that. While most of the Collectivists pretended until the end that they cared about the masses, Taggart acknowledged that he personally deserved to be taken care of. However, I don't remember anything indicating that he consciously realized it was evil, until the very end, when the realization turns him into a vegetable. I don't think there was any suggestion of hope for his redemption. In a way, he did learn from Dagny and Galt, but he had progressed to a point that he was completely incapable of dealing with reality. After his breakdown, I think he was truly dead, regardless of the physical status of his body.

From NPR: Because that would be terrible for the bank's self esteem.... Seriously though, wouldn't it help stabilize the market, to an extent at least, if people could see which banks were desperate to accept nationalization? In the short term it would probably lead to a few more collapses, but that's going to happen regardless; the nationalization would just expedite the process.