cliveandrews

Here's the passage: "Rand wrote the story [Anthem] to illustrate a philosophy she had come to, one that emphasized reason, individualism, and enlightened self-interest. Later she named it objectivism; today she would be called a libertarian."

I realize that. But given the intensity of Rand's desire not to be associated with libertarianism , it seems at least mildly sinister that Greenspan would even risk creating the appearance that the term is synonymous with Objectivism. Would any of you be inclined to write something like that?

In his book, while dicussing his relationship with Ayn Rand, he writes that "today, she would be called a libertarian." Knowing full well Rand's views on libertarianism, I'm slightly horrified to see the he would commit such an egregious error and knowingly misrepresent someone whom he supposedly respects. Any guesses on why he would do that?

Spend any amount of time around monkeys are you will rapidly figure out they they are utterly insane wild animals with nothing even approaching a sense of morality, would steal the balls out of your scrotum if they knew how. Most humans don't even have a sense of morality, let alone fucking monkeys.

How are Objectivists treated in the academic arenta? I know nothing about academic philosophy, but I would infer that Objectivists might have a hard time getting along with others in the feild, or even face persecution from their peers. Thoughts?

Total contempt and disgust.

Grames is correct. There are two positions in nature: dominance and submission. Timid, weak, submissive males get NO respect in life. The child needs to fight back even if he loses.

Is it wrong that I hate liberals more than conservatives?

Well, I said "in general." Infectious diseases being a major exception. There has never been a cure for any major chronic illness that I am aware of, apart from a some kinds of cancers.

They're about as close to a cure as Obama is to laissez-faire capitalism. In general, medicine does't cure diseases, it manages/palliates them. The government-abusing pharmaceutical cartel has suppressed the emergence of bioengineering and regenerative medicine.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as HGH-related arthritis? Mine is degenerative arthritis, aka osteoarthritis, except I have it throughout my entire body.

Not autoimmune

Wanted to be either a doctor or an exercise physiologist. There are other careers that I would also like, but they all require me to go back to school, which is not realistic. The joints in my hands are deteriorating and it will eventually becom impossible for me to write or type.

I’m 26 years old and afflicted with a freak case of arthritis which has almost totally destroyed my life. As of now, the disease is still in its relatively early stages, and is not yet terribly painful or debilitating, but it is steadily worsening and the prognosis is grim. I expect a steep decline into morbidity from here; my condition will continue deteriorating and I will eventually become severely disabled and live in permanent, intractable pain. I’m facing a level of functional impairment that will eventually make it impossible to have anything resembling a normal life and may very well make it impossible even to survive. My lifespan will be reduced by decades as a result of enforced inactivity. Of course, I don’t know long it will take, but if it gets as much worse over the next three years as it has gotten over the last three, I will be a very unhappy motherfucker in 2012. I shudder to think about where I will be in 10-15 years. The disease did not emerge out of the blue. Instead, it was caused by my own actions, in conjunction with some bad medical advice I received from an incompetent podiatrist, in a heartbreaking series of events that occurred in 2006. I’m not going to go into the details, but I’ll say that I didn’t do anything that was blatantly abusive. It seemed like the correct course of action to take based upon the bad information that I had at the time. There was no way I could have known that this would happen. Nevertheless, the awareness of how it happened, and that it was totally needless and avoidable, is a major source of psychological anguish. I can’t accept what happened because it’s unacceptable. I have lived on the brink of suicide for the three years that have elapsed in the wake of the catastrophe. Although I’ve adjusted to my condition somewhat, and gotten used to it, I have still not been able to accept the terms of my continued existence. There are deep contextual and psychological details relating to how this affects me, and an exhaustive post would be required to explain them, but suffice to say that this particular disease is utterly incompatible with my personality and is probably the single worst thing that could have happened to me as an individual. It is the perfect antithesis of my values and represents the exact opposite of what I want in life. It’s my own personal hell. I carry on my day-to-day existence but am profoundly unhappy. I no longer have any purpose other than to keep my morality intact. I try to keep going, but the progressive worsening of my condition, the economic clusterfuck, and the behavior of my shit family are destroying my morale. I’ll never be able to do the things I want, never be able to have the careers I want, never be able to become wealthy. Arthritis appears to be a permanent barrier to happiness; the world I want cannot be won. I fantasize constantly about what I would do if I was healthy, but when I try to apply the same energy to thinking about the things that I can still do, I come up blank, just get disgusted and depressed. The situation is just pure shit. If I want to continue to live, I have to resign to tolerate circumstances which I find fundamentally unacceptable, which leaves me with the options of either living in misery or not living at all. Right now I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I feel like I’m losing the battle to stay alive. I don’t want to die, for fuck's sake... death fucking blows. But my reality is so bad- not just the physical illness, but the awareness of how this happened, and that it didn’t have to be like this- I have a hard time choosing between life and death. I guess my reason for posting this is that I’m hoping someone will have something useful or encouraging to offer. Anything honest and objective would be appreciated.

I could never date a liberal. I'd smack her in the face. Seriously.

Why are you on disability?

I usually just start insulting my opponent. No point in even trying to communicte with most people.

The medical community is afflicted with a long list of extremely serious ideological problems which have cumulatively caused the quality of healthcare to deteriorate to the degree that doctors are now one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., with several hundred thousand people dying every year as a result of medical treatment. Doctors are handing drugs out like candy to pallate the symptoms of abusive lifestyle patterns while giving lip service to the paramount importance of diet and exercise, and most of them are just as fat and unhealthy as their patients anyway. Drug companies are lying about both the benefits and the dangers of their products. Psychiatrists are inventing one mental disorder after another and the rest of the medical community tolerates this utter pseudoscience. There is a trend toward anti-intellectuaism in general, argument from authority dominates medical dialogue, and many doctors are glarignly deficient in some of the most basic areas of physiological knowledge. If you have a musculosketal problem, especially a foot problem, you are more likely to be harmed than helped by the average doctor. Walk into any doctor's office and the fucking place is typically a walk-in billboard for drug companies with pens, clipboards, stationery, posters, cups, models, etc. all provided by drug companies, and it does very much influence their prescribing habits. The FDA is utterly corrupt, now advocates primarily for industry, and data manipulation is standard proceedure. Academic medicine is a sick joke where conflicts of interest are so rampant that any academic research can be called into question simply by virtue of the fact that almost all reserachers are also paid "advisors" to drug companies. They put mercury in our mouths, fluroride in our water, plastic wedges in our shoes, 900 kinds of prescription crack in our kids' brains, then insist that it's all safe with literally nothing in the way of convincing proof, then turn around and attack fish oil and glucosamine supplements for not having gone through 5 year FDA clinical trials. The whole medical establishment is fucked up to the core and you can never appreciate how serious the problems are until you've been harmed by them.

I was utterly irrational during the first 23 years of my life. Had an intellectual revolution at 24, inferred a large amount of Objectivism on my own, and when I discovered Rand's stuff at 25, I immediately realized it was true.

Democratic senator Mike Gravel joined the Libertarian party in 2008, and placed fourth in their shitty presidential convention despite having strong socialist leanings. What does that tell you about them? However, I do like most of the Ron Paul crowd, if you consider them libertarians.

We do not have high quality medical care in the U.S. We may have better medical care than other countries, but that is a relative statement - our health care is still quite poor by objective standards. The drug companies have used the government to distort medical knowledge and create an intellectual environemt which is favorable to their interests and which suppresses competing products and treatment philosophies. Things are so fucked up that it's not even safe to go to the doctor anymore.

If you think irrationalism is rampant in the business world you're going to be shocked at what you find in medicine. The vast majority of medical students and doctors are utterly incapable of allowing themselves to even consider the possibility that something they were taught in medical school could be wrong, that something published in the Journal of the American Medical Association could me wrong, or that FDA research could be tainted by conflicts of interest. Most of them would be utterly paralyzed by self-doubt if they even had the capacity to question the structure of authority that exists in medicine.

Update: the guy found out that we found out (one of his friends called his mom and told her). He proceeded to get hysterical and destroyed the evidence. Nothing to report now unfortunately.

I have occasionally been accused of arrogance for making true statements that others disagreed with or simply considered me unqualified to make. In each case the person's grievance was that I took a hard line on some issue that ran upstream against conventional views, or dismissed the opinion of someone who was supposed to be an expert on a particular subject, did not accept his education or other credentials as proof of his correctness. If that makes me arrogant, then arrogance is a good thing. But what I consider true arrogance is when someone assumes his own authority for the wrong reasons, such as when a person believes that everyone else should utterly surrender their minds to him and accept his views simply because he has an advanced degree in some field, or that he cannot be wrong simply because his views represent the prevailing ideolgoy of the day, the views accepted by members of whatever mainstream professional organization he belongs to. That's true arrogance to me, and that's a very bad thing. I find that it applies almost universally to physicians. So I guess my question is, what is the proper definition of arrogance, and is it a good or bad thing?

In my state, it's legal to have sex with a 16 year old girl, but if you watch a video of her having sex, then it's child pornography and you're a sexual predator?