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necrovore

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  1. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Selfish Christians Citing Ayn Rand   
    The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct?
    The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith.
    The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality.
    These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith.
    If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings).
    Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians.
    --
    There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct.
    Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too.
    Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons.
    But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?
  2. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from EC in Selfish Christians Citing Ayn Rand   
    The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct?
    The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith.
    The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality.
    These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith.
    If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings).
    Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians.
    --
    There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct.
    Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too.
    Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons.
    But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?
  3. Like
    necrovore reacted to Reidy in Reblogged:'Machiavellian' Triumphs and Traps   
    #3, The gentle push, is a technique Peter Keating used in order to get rid of a rival. He even lined up a client for his rival.
  4. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    I do not advocate any of these things.
    I think there's a confusion here between what the forum as a whole does (e.g., through moderation) versus what its individual participants do.
    Part of this is the recognition that every individual participating here has the right to make their own judgment about which arguments are rational and why, as well as which arguments are worth responding to and which not. (And on the other hand, if they make invalid arguments, their arguments will be judged accordingly.)
    I don't think such individual judgment should be usurped by the forum itself such as by banning arguments, which amounts to deciding that the participants shouldn't be allowed to see them or, possibly, that they shouldn't be allowed to make them.
    I am aware that the resources of this (or any) forum are privately owned and that the owner can decide how they can be used. However, the amount of these resources for any single post is pretty small (and I'm sure the owners would like them kept small). Providing a public forum is not in fact a moral sanction upon everything people say there, just like giving away sheets of blank paper is not a moral sanction on whatever people happen to write or print on them. Nor can anyone who posts here claim (with any honesty) that their post, merely by virtue of not having been banned, is in agreement with the owners, or with Objectivism, or is any kind of award-winning great achievement.
    Further, when the forum owners and moderators decide to exercise judgment about which posts are correct, then they are implicitly asking the participants to cede their right to make their own judgments. That becomes a cost for the participants, just as much as if you were asked to give up other rights you might have. They then have to consider whether it's worth it.
    Maybe I helped precipitate this confusion by saying that the forum should conform to the Objectivist epistemology, but the role of the forum in the Objectivist epistemology is not to think for the participants but to make sure the participants are not blocked from thinking for themselves. Once one has decided to offer a forum, this becomes a negative obligation -- not a demand for more resources. (It is in fact banning stuff that requires more resources, because somebody has to make the decisions about what to ban, and those have to be checked for accuracy, etc.; this is why big companies like Facebook end up needing large censorship moderation departments where people look at posts all day, or else they need AIs to make those decisions automatically. It is why larger magazines need editorial departments to pore over manuscripts. It is why the East German Stasi needed so many people to monitor phone calls.)
    Being open is a large part of what offering a forum is. That is the value it offers. It should be allowed to offer it.
  5. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    There can be options in concept formation; the Japanese color 青い covers blue and also blue-green and maybe green in some contexts, and there are probably other examples where concepts in different languages overlap but don't coincide.
    If this sort of overlap can happen between languages, it can also be possible between people who share the same language but perhaps aren't using a dictionary or aren't using the same dictionary. This doesn't mean that either one is non-objective, just as the difference in colors between English and Japanese doesn't indicate that either language is non-objective. The result of the difference is a lack of precision but not necessarily accuracy. Obviously, with differences in the units, the accuracy is slightly less, just like a translator might have to determine whether to translate 青い as "blue" or "green" in a particular context.
    It's easier to be precise and to agree with things like the "meter" which can be measured easily than with things like the exact line of demarcation where a forum becomes something more like a magazine.
    One could ask, what is the essential characteristic of a forum?
    I was thinking of "openness" as an essential characteristic, and the reason I think it's essential is that a "forum" that isn't open is useless, not just to me but to everyone else; that's what makes openness essential.
    This is not to say that "magazines" are invalid. There may be certain people whose opinions I care enough about that I might want them accurately represented. I might subscribe to their magazines. But it is telling that Leonard Peikoff, for example, hosted a Q&A, where he would answer questions, and he could pick and choose which questions he wanted to answer, and the answers were unambiguously his as opposed to what someone else thought he might say. It was a Q&A, not a "forum." He didn't host a "forum," invite people to post, and then ban opinions he disagreed with.
    Also, Peikoff had already built his reputation, so people were interested in what he, in particular, had to say. What if you come up with a new idea? Where do you put it? Assuming you are not famous. Nobody approves of your idea yet because nobody knows what it is. Do you want to take a chance that you will get banned because people disapprove of it? Is it fair that you should have to take that chance? And what if you want to find new ideas that might have been come up with by other people, who aren't themselves famous enough to create their own forums? Where do you go to look for them? How can you find someone who runs a forum that allows new ideas, given that the forum owner has to take the risk that the new ideas might be wrong and that he has therefore sponsored wrong ideas?
    If people have to censor ideas that they disagree with, people must have been grossly immoral for publishing Ayn Rand's books and ideas, since after all those people could not have agreed with the ideas already, since they were new. (Or else they were taking a chance on being immoral, sort of like shooting off a gun in random directions and being lucky enough not to have hit anyone. Which is also immoral. But anyway...)
    A personal attack is an ad hominem, it's a fallacy. But the reason for banning personal attacks is not because they're ad hominem: the fact that they're ad hominem is what allows us to get away with banning personal attacks, because we know we're not accidentally banning any legitimate ideas.
    The reason for the ban is because personal attacks tend to turn away the contributors who are attacked, and thus renders the whole forum useless to them, and less useful to others who might have wanted to read those contributions, or other contributions which might have never gotten made.
    I don't know if I want to try to run an open forum, because people might join and then demand that I suppress other people's views based on arbitrary criteria. Or if I didn't have time to moderate it myself, I'd have to trust someone else, and then they might start banning people for disagreeing with their views, and they might do a lot of damage before I stop them.
    I wouldn't want to run a forum where I banned people for disagreeing with me, either. What if I ban someone on an incorrect basis? It would ruin the forum for everyone and destroy its value.
    Wikipedia used to be great, until a cabal of editors formed who decided to take it upon themselves to rid Wikipedia of views they thought didn't have sufficient "notoriety" (because it was embarrassing to them that some articles about popular TV shows were longer than articles about important historical events -- so all they did was go around deleting articles because they lacked "notoriety"). This mostly happened on the English-speaking Wikipedia. Later, another cabal took over, this one consisting of leftists (or maybe it was the same cabal), with the idea of suppressing anything critical of leftism. As a result, Wikipedia has become less valuable and less useful, unless you are a leftist. (You can still use it if you are looking for an idea a leftist wouldn't disagree with.)
    That could happen here, too. The site might end up supporting, not Objectivism per se, but a particular flavor of it, and it could easily be the wrong flavor or a distortion, and no one would be able to say anything about it if it were. It would become an echo chamber.
    I suppose this is a problem of the culture at large, that people no longer tolerate views they disagree with, and that they wish to silence those views rather than engaging them in debate (and they can't accept the idea of just leaving their opponents alone, either; they have to silence them). The silencing of people is the main thing I am objecting to here; if there is some error in my definitions of "forum" and "magazine" then that error is not essential to my objection.
    Maybe this tendency to reject opposing views is a product of the current educational system (because I suspect that a lot of the people calling for this are younger than I am and it certainly aligns well with the leftists who are taking over the culture at large).
    Maybe it's also a problem that people don't want to see views they disagree with, so they hope some moderator will step in and ban those views before they have to see them. That sounds like the "safe spaces" that are being promoted in schools and universities, too, and it's the exact opposite of "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion," which at least requires that you know what those facts and opinions are.
  6. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    I should add something: this whole topic about what to allow on this forum is essentially philosophical and, more specifically, epistemological.
    If this is an Objectivist forum then it should practice the Objectivist epistemology.
    An essential feature of the Objectivist epistemology is the rejection of evasion. Objectivism requires the integration of all facts. It does not countenance the propping up of false abstractions through the suppression of counter-examples or counter-arguments. It rebuts false arguments, by identifying them as false (or in some cases arbitrary or irrelevant), but it does not evade or suppress them.
    Rebuttal should not be hard. OPAR shows that it's possible to use abstractions to group arguments and rebut them all in a single blow, e.g., by identifying an argument as "Primacy of Consciousness."
    Banning people from the forum because of their arguments is evasion of those arguments, pure and simple. (But it is proper to ban things which are not arguments, such as spam or harassment etc.)
    The people who run this forum are free to run it however they want, just like they are free to evade in their own minds if they want. But when they start burning heretics, they aren't acting like Objectivists anymore. (Further, such action incorrectly suggests that Objectivism is no different from any other philosophy or religion).
  7. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from whYNOT in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point.
    If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not literally a "forum." It's a book.
    (My biggest concern is that no one would read it, which is one reason why I like having access to open forums.)
    (Maybe this is more like a continuum than an either-or thing.)
    I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Rand said somewhere (perhaps in "What Can One Do?") that as long as free speech exists, the right ideas have a chance.
    I will agree with @Boydstun that there are a lot of choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. But the thing about a forum is precisely that it does not constitute an exercise of one's own speech -- it constitutes giving others an opportunity to speak, which is a different thing (and can be valuable too, including to the giver of the opportunity).
    Of course when you provide that opportunity it's pretty much true by definition that you give up control over what those others are going to say. You are signing up for surprises. Some of them may be pleasant, some not. The pleasant ones are what make it worthwhile.
    (But also, a person may run or participate in an open forum because he wants to test his own thinking and ideas by being exposed to those of others.)
    Peikoff writes that lies are "impotent" because the underlying reality is still there and will be discovered. This is why people who live by lies end up having to resort to force (because the lies alone are never enough). It's also why a free society can afford to have free speech. So in that sense there shouldn't be any harm in allowing people to speak their minds. (I'm excluding stuff like harassment that would render the forum useless). The truth will come out eventually.
    Even posting the truth here isn't necessarily going to end the discussion, though, because people have to see that truth for themselves, and they have to see it in reality, not just in the forum. Discussions end when there is nothing more to add.
    My concern is that the calls to exercise more editorial control are actually rooted in the idea that lies are not impotent, that lies have to be censored because they'll "mislead" people.
    This is rooted in the primacy of consciousness, but not in the usual way: most people familiar with Objectivism know better than to think that lies "create reality." We all know that I can lie and say I have a gold bar, but the lie doesn't create the gold bar.
    But there is a "second order" version of the "primacy of consciousness," if you want to call it that -- the notion that if false ideas spread around, people will believe them, and then act on them, and then this will give rise to oppressive governments and cultures. So well-meaning people then conclude that the spread of the false ideas has to be stopped.
    False ideas need to be refuted; that's the only way to really stop them.
    The possibility that people will believe bad ideas called "free will" and is metaphysically given, and there's nothing we can actually do about that. We can try to put the right ideas out there, and also try to explain why the wrong ideas are wrong.
    Trying to fight the metaphysically given is why it's a second-order version of the primacy of consciousness. We can't stop people from thinking bad thoughts. If refutation is not enough then the human species is doomed anyway.
    I think that setting up forum rules to ban the discussion of certain ideas only serves to create the impression that Objectivism cannot withstand those ideas, which is not true. Further, the ideas are not "gone," they just go to other forums. Merely hiding the arguments we disagree with doesn't help; it can even amount to self-deception.
    I will admit that sometimes people raise the same tired old objections to Objectivism over and over. In that case it should be sufficient to refer to them to places where the objections have already been answered. However, it is possible that the answer to the tired old objection was somehow incomplete and so another question may need to be answered.
    There are also people out there who would expect you to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4, and they won't accept anything you say, so that they are either trolling or their reasoning is irreparably defective. In that case, just stop. There is nothing you can do. (Why get all upset about it?)
    The correct thing to do, the only thing we really can do, about the evil in society, is try to patiently explain why having an oppressive culture is a bad idea, and how to make a better one -- which is sort of what Objectivism is about in the first place.
    --
    There is a second concern, too. The forum owners may say that they don't want their resources to be used to promote bad ideas.
    The thing is, when the forum is open, and somebody posts a bad idea, it doesn't count as a "promotion" in the same way it would if it had been approved by editors. This is because people know that the forum is open and that just about anything can be posted.
    If everybody wins an award, the award is not very meaningful, and that's an instance of the same principle.
  8. Confused
    necrovore got a reaction from AlexL in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    If you exercise editorial control, it ceases to be a "forum" at all, and becomes a "magazine" or a "journal." That's my point.
    If I write a book I can control everything in the book. But it's not literally a "forum." It's a book.
    (My biggest concern is that no one would read it, which is one reason why I like having access to open forums.)
    (Maybe this is more like a continuum than an either-or thing.)
    I can't find the exact quote, but I believe Rand said somewhere (perhaps in "What Can One Do?") that as long as free speech exists, the right ideas have a chance.
    I will agree with @Boydstun that there are a lot of choices as to how to exercise one's free speech. But the thing about a forum is precisely that it does not constitute an exercise of one's own speech -- it constitutes giving others an opportunity to speak, which is a different thing (and can be valuable too, including to the giver of the opportunity).
    Of course when you provide that opportunity it's pretty much true by definition that you give up control over what those others are going to say. You are signing up for surprises. Some of them may be pleasant, some not. The pleasant ones are what make it worthwhile.
    (But also, a person may run or participate in an open forum because he wants to test his own thinking and ideas by being exposed to those of others.)
    Peikoff writes that lies are "impotent" because the underlying reality is still there and will be discovered. This is why people who live by lies end up having to resort to force (because the lies alone are never enough). It's also why a free society can afford to have free speech. So in that sense there shouldn't be any harm in allowing people to speak their minds. (I'm excluding stuff like harassment that would render the forum useless). The truth will come out eventually.
    Even posting the truth here isn't necessarily going to end the discussion, though, because people have to see that truth for themselves, and they have to see it in reality, not just in the forum. Discussions end when there is nothing more to add.
    My concern is that the calls to exercise more editorial control are actually rooted in the idea that lies are not impotent, that lies have to be censored because they'll "mislead" people.
    This is rooted in the primacy of consciousness, but not in the usual way: most people familiar with Objectivism know better than to think that lies "create reality." We all know that I can lie and say I have a gold bar, but the lie doesn't create the gold bar.
    But there is a "second order" version of the "primacy of consciousness," if you want to call it that -- the notion that if false ideas spread around, people will believe them, and then act on them, and then this will give rise to oppressive governments and cultures. So well-meaning people then conclude that the spread of the false ideas has to be stopped.
    False ideas need to be refuted; that's the only way to really stop them.
    The possibility that people will believe bad ideas called "free will" and is metaphysically given, and there's nothing we can actually do about that. We can try to put the right ideas out there, and also try to explain why the wrong ideas are wrong.
    Trying to fight the metaphysically given is why it's a second-order version of the primacy of consciousness. We can't stop people from thinking bad thoughts. If refutation is not enough then the human species is doomed anyway.
    I think that setting up forum rules to ban the discussion of certain ideas only serves to create the impression that Objectivism cannot withstand those ideas, which is not true. Further, the ideas are not "gone," they just go to other forums. Merely hiding the arguments we disagree with doesn't help; it can even amount to self-deception.
    I will admit that sometimes people raise the same tired old objections to Objectivism over and over. In that case it should be sufficient to refer to them to places where the objections have already been answered. However, it is possible that the answer to the tired old objection was somehow incomplete and so another question may need to be answered.
    There are also people out there who would expect you to "prove" that 2 + 2 = 4, and they won't accept anything you say, so that they are either trolling or their reasoning is irreparably defective. In that case, just stop. There is nothing you can do. (Why get all upset about it?)
    The correct thing to do, the only thing we really can do, about the evil in society, is try to patiently explain why having an oppressive culture is a bad idea, and how to make a better one -- which is sort of what Objectivism is about in the first place.
    --
    There is a second concern, too. The forum owners may say that they don't want their resources to be used to promote bad ideas.
    The thing is, when the forum is open, and somebody posts a bad idea, it doesn't count as a "promotion" in the same way it would if it had been approved by editors. This is because people know that the forum is open and that just about anything can be posted.
    If everybody wins an award, the award is not very meaningful, and that's an instance of the same principle.
  9. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Closing of the topic "Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny"   
    It seems like some of the most controversial threads of late have been on point; the main question is always how to discover what the facts are. This can get into questions of what sources you trust, and under what conditions you trust them.
    Objectivism obviously reaches different conclusions depending on what facts you put into it; if Objectivism were impervious to facts, it would be arbitrary!
    It's proper to reject claims of fact when they clash with lots and lots of well-founded abstractions, though, the way perpetual-motion machines clash with the known laws of physics.
    It's also proper to identify situations where a fact really doesn't make any difference, like whether Abraham Lincoln ever dyed his hair.
    It should be possible to integrate everything without contradiction. So I think part of having an active mind is to read a lot and see if you can integrate what you are reading with what you know. (This includes identification of claims as falsehoods or as arbitrary, where appropriate).
    Writing some of your conclusions and seeing how people answer can be valuable and thought-provoking as well.
    My inclination was to think it would not have done any harm. For myself, I figured I had said my piece, and had nothing further to say.
    So as far as I was concerned the thread was already dead and it was time for me to move on to some other topic.
    I suppose there could be "vampire" threads that could refuse to die and suck the lifeblood out of the rest of the forum... such a thread would need a stake through its heart... but was this thread really one of them?
    (Probably the worst thing is unneeded repetition. I don't like reading the same thing over and over, and I don't like saying the same thing over and over, either...)
    Often people leave not because of the forum itself but because they have a "life event" such as a new job, a marriage, birth of a child, or a funeral. Life events are why I left and came back, and not because of anything wrong with the board itself. Right now I have time to participate but other times I have just been too busy. If the administrator of a board has such a life event, the board itself may come to an end.
    This sort of thing is not the fault of the content.
    People can also leave because they are no longer interested in the topic, or because they find the forum "unfriendly." Moderation can help with keeping things on-topic and civilized.
    That sounds a lot like "guilt by association."
    Lots of, e.g., Metallica fans, don't necessarily like each other.
    A forum is not like a magazine where the content can be completely controlled (for quality or anything else). It is proper to remove spam, and stuff that is off-topic could probably also be removed. But you'd know it was off-topic because nobody who is interested in this board in particular would be interested in it.
  10. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    The "mainstream narrative" is subject to the same standards as any other "narrative" -- and sometimes fails them, especially lately.
    I still think it's psychologizing.
    On the other hand there are cranks, quacks, and crackpots out there, and the only way to identify them is that their claims clash with reality.
    If you have a proper hierarchy of knowledge then you can use abstractions you have already proved to identify false claims. However, this only works to the extent that your abstractions are solid all the way down. Lots of people reason as if their beliefs have been "proved" when those beliefs are not true at all.
    In a mixed economy, it's easy to imagine that corrupt people could work their way up to the top. These days I'm not so sure it's even necessary to imagine, because you can look at the people at the top and see that they are corrupt.
    However, it is possible to have a medical industry without corruption, and I think such an industry would accept the existence of viruses on the basis of the scientific evidence.
    Well it's a good thing we have people like you here to point this stuff out
    But really, it does not seem that @monart is claiming to speak on behalf of Ayn Rand or Objectivism on these matters, and also, as long as it is an open forum, we don't have to worry too much about falsehoods going uncontested.
    Besides, people shouldn't believe everything they read, anyway.
  11. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    I wrote that in jest; it's an exaggeration. However, it's a known propaganda technique to discredit the truth by associating it with various crank theories, so that when people encounter the truth, they will think that it's just another crank theory.
    This is similar to the way that if a group wants to peacefully protest something, you could plant some violent people in amongst the protesters, so that the whole group can then be blamed for the violence.
    I remember seeing a lot of news in the mainstream media about "anti-vaxxers," starting maybe a year or so before Covid-19 appeared. This news was about people who objected to the requirement that their children, in order to be enrolled in school, have to be vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, etc., and usually it was stated that their objections were religious in nature, or based on the (disproved I think) notion that vaccines cause autism, and so it was based on crackpottery. I remember at the time being puzzled about why their stories were being "pushed" so much by the news media. Of course, once Covid-19 came out, it became obvious: news about the "anti-vaxxers" had been spread deliberately, in advance, so that when the Covid-19 "vaccine" was introduced on short notice, anybody who objected to it, even doctors, even if their objections were scientifically legitimate, could be declared to just be more "anti-vaxxers," i.e., cranks who could be ignored.
    When you have populations of millions of people, it is often possible to find cranks rather than having to create them. (I am inclined to think that Mr. Eckert is probably a crank, if he objects to the whole science of virology... I do remember a writer republished on Zero Hedge claiming that "there is no such thing as a virus," but I don't know if that's him, but it is a crank thing to say.) So it's unlikely that Mr. Eckert is actually a CDC or FDA "plant" put there for the purpose of discrediting others. It could be that people at the CDC and FDA are deliberately trying to give him more prominence than he deserves, deliberately promoting him to make people think he's is somehow typical of the "alternatives" to themselves, in order to get people to discredit all alternatives to the CDC and FDA.
    (I also remember in one of Ayn Rand's essays, she pointed out how "The John Birch Society" was lumped in with some other things it didn't belong with, and that is an example of the same sort of technique at work.)
    It is because of the use of propaganda techniques like this that you have to think when reading alternative media, but this kind of propaganda is also why you have to read the alternative media in the first place.
  12. Thanks
    necrovore reacted to whYNOT in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    Monart, here's a link to Brownstone Institute and their many articles
    https://brownstone.org/
    the gold standard for all things pandemic, good science, optimal health and freedom-orientated, fronted by the heroic Jeffrey Tucker ("Liberty or Lockdown?"). They have been my bright reference point
  13. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from monart in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    In defense of Dr. Kammerer I would say that knowledge is hierarchical.
    It's much easier to prove the existence of Covid-19 if you can count on, say, a science of virology, which has, over a period of decades, developed techniques to identify the existence of various viruses.
    If Mr. Eckert acknowledges the validity of virology and merely disputes the particular virus or family of viruses, then the proof is probably easy, for a competent virologist.
    It becomes much harder if Mr. Eckert disputes the validity of the whole science of virology, because then Dr. Kammerer would have to prove that before getting to the part about Covid-19.
    Virology itself rests on other discoveries, and if Mr. Eckert disputes those, too, then Dr. Kammerer could be in for a very long slog.
    The same kind of thing happens when trying to prove evolution to Christians.
  14. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    Actually it wouldn't surprise me at all if this Mr. Eckert were secretly working for the CDC or the FDA or something.
  15. Thanks
    necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Reblogged:Will Independents Save the GOP From Itself?   
    It's completely improper to consider such a thing to be "evidence."
    It's like saying Johnny Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd is "evidence" that he cut someone's throat.
    Some rap music has lyrics that convey certain attitudes toward women, which would probably not look good if those rappers were accused of rape, but I think it's improper to consider those lyrics as "evidence" that the rappers committed rape. It's entirely arguable that the rappers say that stuff, not because it's true, but because they think it sells more records.
    It seems even more improper that such statements should be used against Trump, but similar statements made by his accuser (and cited in the William Brooks piece), which would tend to reduce her credibility, didn't seem to be considered.
  16. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Reblogged:Will Independents Save the GOP From Itself?   
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/cultural-marxism-and-the-corruption-of-common-law-5587345?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge
  17. Like
    necrovore reacted to DavidOdden in My New Book, Inspired by Ayn Rand, The Enemies of Excellence by George Wilson Adams   
    I am compelled to insert a few technical corrections regarding universal grammar and Chomskian linguistics, which has been invoked here. First, Chomsky has held 1,900 different positions, often 7 at the same time. He is famous for saying “this is implicit in my earlier work”. Boiling away various temporary ornamentations of his, his theory has two aspects: a theory of the “faculty”, and a theory of the substance. Categories like noun, verb, vowel, nasal, quantifier are “things”, the substance, which he has claimed that are in a genetically endowed list of things that we know at birth. Those are the “innate concepts”. Over the years, the size of that list was waxed and waned, right now it is very small and for many practitioners (such as myself) it is null. Then there is the “faculty” aspect, the ability to do things. There too we find a range of views, one being that there is a list of things that you can and cannot do in language, and one that claims that there is little to nothing pre-specified.
    My position is that language is one aspect of the faculty of reason (which is itself an aspect of general cognition), so as far as I am concerned, the language faculty is not characterized with any substantive limits. However, language and reasoning still have a nature. It is the ability to structure words and form concepts that are part of human nature, and language is the essential tool for forming concepts and expressing propositions. The problem with radical tabula rasa theory is that you cannot learn a language or a fact with a completely blank brain, thus the conceptual faculty cannot itself be learned (how would a child know to learn “concepts” as opposed to storing every sense-image that they encountered; how would a child learn the principle of conceptual economy rather that the principle of maximal precision?).
    A faculty is a built-in ability to create a cognitive structure based on sensory input, and language (general, not a specific language) is the most obvious instance of a faculty. When you learn a language, you do not memorize all of the words and sentences of the language, you learn a small set of atoms, and a set of rules for building larger labels (whole words and sentences). Those rules have a definite nature, which in fact mirrors the hierarchical nature of knowledge plus some knowledge of what a rule does (for instance, unifies two concepts into one, or positions one thing after another). There is a kind of “negative knowledge” to the effect that prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence do not play a role in grammar, which is not directly stated as such (i.e. no rule computes with a word is in a prime-numbered position, or even an odd-numbered position), instead it simply follows from the fact that that mechanism is not part of the faculty of language, which is universally available to all humans and happens automatically upon exposure to language, unlike the ability to sing on key or compute prime numbers which takes conscious training.
    In discussing “Chomskian linguistics”, you have to carefully distinguish Noam Chomsky’s current idiosyncratic beliefs and behaviors, from the theories of those whose interest is the mental mechanism that enables humans to have language. Extreme-nativist Chomsky (P&P theory) is fully incompatible with the Objectivist epistemology, but even Chomsky no longer believes in that, and his linguistic views are much closer to mine, which are, of course, based on Objectivism.
  18. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from George Adams CPA MBA in My New Book, Inspired by Ayn Rand, The Enemies of Excellence by George Wilson Adams   
    p.s. @George Adams CPA MBA I did not see a Table of Contents for your book. Is there one publicly available? I like to have a vague idea what's in a book when I'm considering a purchase.
  19. Haha
    necrovore got a reaction from AlexL in Remembering the CG Computer-Generated Pandemic Tyranny   
    It's likely the government is covering something up, but I think it's outlandish to conclude that the virus doesn't exist. More likely it does, but the reason the government knows it exists, is something like, certain people created it in a lab. The government doesn't want that fact to get out. They want to deny responsibility. So what you get is, "The virus exists, but we can't tell you how we know that."
    I suppose some people think that if they make up some crazy story, they can pressure the government into disproving it by revealing the truth. That doesn't work.
  20. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from tadmjones in Reblogged:Will Independents Save the GOP From Itself?   
    I don't think it's OK. It's evasion, pure and simple.
    Among some people familiar with Objectivism this evasion sometimes takes the form of "don't look in the closet, because anything you see in there is arbitrary and has to be dismissed from rational consideration."
    When the mainstream media is very biased and refuses to report facts that don't support their point of view, one has no choice but to look for those facts in alternative media. It's difficult to dig through alternative news sources where facts that you can't find anywhere else are intermingled with articles about the Second Coming of Jesus and who knows what else. The alternative press consists of "rags"; it consists of scruffy rebels with small budgets; all they have is whatever facts they can find to report on. If they find important facts, they try to get them out, and usually have to square off against official and unofficial censorship in order to do it. But then they'll sometimes reach very wrong conclusions with those facts, and this is because many of their abstract principles are not reality-based, and are neither mainstream nor Objectivist. The facts they report are never the ones that poke the holes in their own mistaken principles, but they are, nevertheless, facts, and often poke holes in establishment principles.
    What you have to do to find out the truth amounts to "rag-picking." You have to go through the "rags" anyway. Their facts are often undisputed, but their principles may be wrong. Keep the facts, discard the Jesus. And of course discard the antisemitism and the UFO aliens.
    The thing to understand about "alternative facts" is that they are not alternatives to facts; they are facts that the establishment doesn't want anyone to know and would prefer everyone to ignore.
    Maybe some people haven't learned to distinguish between statements of fact (which can, in principle, be verified, or wrong) and statements of opinion (which rest on abstractions, and those abstractions might be true, false, or arbitrary). Or perhaps they know how to make the distinction but find it to be a lot of effort. Or maybe they think that, since the rag-writers' principles are wrong, their facts have to be wrong, too. It's much easier to go along with the mainstream press where everything is neatly packaged for you and you don't have to think about it.
    And then there are people who have become part of the "aristocracy" in some way or other, and they guard their positions jealously, and they need to be seen looking down their noses at certain facts because those facts are socially unacceptable among the aristocracy. (The aristocracy seems to include the legal profession, which has become an aristocracy itself, and has developed its own principles and traditions which are older than Objectivism, some of which are probably incorrect in light of it, and will be difficult to make correct.)
    There is one more important thing.
    Most people understand deductive logic and reasoning, so they start with certain principles and then plug in the facts and deduce downward from there. Deduction has been well-understood since ancient Greece, and it's also easy to write a deductive argument on a piece of paper and check it for correctness.
    However, there is also an inductive side to reasoning, and this is not as well understood -- but almost all of the arguments for Objectivism are inductive in nature. Induction is the only way to come up with new principles. Induction is why Ayn Rand wrote novels and essays and not just syllogisms. Induction is like figure-and-ground to deduction; whereas deduction requires examples, induction requires for its proof an absence of counter-examples. So it is reasonable, as part of an inductive argument, to show that you have really looked for counter-examples, everywhere, systematically, and not found any. This is also how you prove Newton's Laws. This is why evasion is a fallacy that you don't much hear about outside of Objectivism. Evasion is almost completely inapplicable to deduction. Evasion "works" to prop up incorrect abstractions by suppressing the facts that would disprove them. The arbitrary, in turn, is just a larger example of evasion; it ensures the necessary absence of counter-examples by suppressing all of reality. The arbitrary is that which is impervious to evidence. You can't identify something as arbitrary unless you can identify at least the type of evidence that it would be impervious to; it's even better if you can identify the evidence itself.
    But that requires reading those "rags"...
  21. Thanks
    necrovore reacted to Boydstun in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand   
    This post is an hommage to Leonard Peikoff (b. 1933) for his contributions to the philosophy Objectivism. His biggest contribution of written work is his book OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. His second most important written contribution is his essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” (ASD). This was published in THE OBJECTIVIST, a journal edited by Rand (d.1982) and N. Branden, in five installments from May to September of 1967. Peikoff was 33. (Those were the nominal dates of those issues of the journal; at times the journal was behind its target dates for publication.) ADS followed immediately Rand’s series “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” in that journal. Three years before ASD, Peikoff had completed his PhD dissertation THE STATUS OF THE LAW OF CONTRADICTION IN CLASSIC LOGICAL ONTOLOGISM at NYU.
    The only substantial supplement to Rand’s theory of concepts since ADS (and two papers by David Kelley in psychology of abstraction in the 80's) is my paper “Universals and Measurement” (2004), which addresses magnitude structure all the world must have if Rand’s model of concept structure is indeed applicable to all term-concepts. https://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php... I hope soon to complete an amplification and recasting of an issue raised within ASD: necessities in truths.
    I’d like here to recount my own personal sequence of events concerning Rand and Peikoff. I had been given THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED by a cousin-in-law S. Swift at Christmas 1966. I was a freshman in college. On the first page, the invitation page of ATLAS, beginning “What Moves the World?” Swift had written “Read The Fountainhead first.” On the title page for Part I of ATLAS, he had written “Let your actions be guided by rational choice", which was really good orientation I needed at that time. He had underlined the opening line of that novel. I carefully read them in the summer and fall of 1967. I was in a private mental hospital that summer I read THE FOUNTAINHEAD, and my doctor kept encouraging me to finish it. It saved my life, and thereafter I never again required psychiatric care.
    After those novels, I began reading Rand’s nonfiction books that were out at the time, and I read THE OBJECTIVIST, which was at my University library. Peikoff’s ASD introduced me to the Analytic-Synthetic distinction, and over my many years, I have studied its appearances in the history of philosophy and another distinction by that name in the history of mathematics.
    In second semester of my freshman year, I had my first course in philosophy, which was mainly an argued layout of all that is, by a Thomist professor, who was superb. He had been trained at the University of Cologne after WWII. But I did not learn of the A-S thread in philosophy until I read Peikoff’s essay on it. I continued to take philosophy courses in college—I minored in it—concluding in my final semester spring 1971 with a seminar on THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, under another superb professor, who was from India and who had been trained at the University of Gottingen. I pursued graduate studies three times in my life, once in physics, twice in philosophy. I had to withdraw for various reasons in all cases, but learned enormously from those studies. I am an independent and inveterate scholar.
    I had seen Ayn Rand on the Johnny Carson show at the home of my friend Swift. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... I did not see or hear Peikoff speak until about 1974, when I took a recorded lecture course of his on the history of modern philosophy. https://www.youtube.com/playlist... Very good. During that decade, I was working my way through Fredrick Copleston’s A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. Completed. I took Peikoff’s 1976 recorded lecture course THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVISM when it was presented in Evanston, north of Chicago. That greatly renewed my enthusiasm for the philosophy as one of much width and depth.
    I read Peikoff’s THE OMINOUS PARALLELS when it came out in 1982. Five years later, Peikoff published his intellectual memoir “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand” in THE OBJECTIVIST FORUM. I wrote him a letter thanking him for sharing that and telling him how eagerly I was looking forward to his book on Objectivism, stemming from his 1976 lectures, that he had been working on for some time. And how important I thought it was. He thanked me.
    In 1991 the book was issued—OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND. It is very fine, accessible to the general educated public, and indeed it proved very important to setting out the philosophy of Ayn Rand in a systematic and comprehensive way, as the philosophy had been developed by the end of her life. That book put Rand’s thought as a comprehensive philosophy more decisively pinned on the map of philosophy. Life accomplishment “as difficult as it is rare.”
    (This photo is Peikoff and Rand early in their association.)

     

  22. Thanks
    necrovore got a reaction from EC in Rand and Kant Being Friends   
    Objectivism is rooted in practicality; that's why Objectivists have little to say about things like idealism.
    Philosophy, according to Objectivism, is supposed to be a tool that you can use to understand the world and live in it.
    Politics as a branch of philosophy is practical to the extent that it deals with creating and maintaining a civilization fit to live in, but there are plenty of other practical concerns that Objectivism helps with that have nothing to do with politics.
    This is why, as far as I remember, the heroes and heroines in Rand's fiction (such as John Galt, Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, etc.) were always concerned with doing real physical things instead of just sitting around contemplating ideas.
  23. Thanks
    necrovore got a reaction from EC in Rand and Kant Being Friends   
    Something further needs to be said about this.
    I think a lot of young people, including young Objectivists (and myself when I was younger), have big dreams about what they want to do with their lives, like wanting to produce and sell products and services of various kinds, wanting to be a John Galt, or a Dagny Taggart, or a Hank Rearden, but in their own fields -- and then they run into a bureaucracy (or "political class") that doesn't want to give them the freedom to do that, places big pointless obstacles in their paths, and regards them as "potential criminals" just for being independent thinkers. Then these young people find that most people are indifferent to their situation, or are even on the side of the bureaucrats. (They may also find supporters who are sadly powerless...) Young people who know Objectivism know there is no good reason for this situation to exist, but it seems that persuasion might be possible, because freedom of the press still exists. As a result, they find themselves "drafted" into politics, at least as a hobby, even though neither politics nor philosophy was their original choice. Meanwhile they end up in their second or third (or twelfth) choice of career because it's the only one they're allowed into, and they have bills to pay. Very few people, Objectivist or otherwise, can provide for themselves as professional intellectuals or advocates of freedom.
    In a free country one wouldn't have to worry about politics.
    In a mixed economy, the political side of philosophy may be more "practical" than one's preferred choice of career, but if so, this is because the bureaucracy has made it more practical. So this is a characteristic of the mixed economy, not so much of Objectivism or its advocates. (And don't worry, it will disappear either when the country becomes mostly free or when it becomes mostly totalitarian; in the latter case there is no freedom of speech anymore.)
  24. Haha
    necrovore got a reaction from Jon Letendre in Reblogged:Blog Roundup   
    I never knew that a one-person invasion would be sufficient to dispense with immigration.
  25. Like
    necrovore got a reaction from AlexL in Reblogged:Blog Roundup   
    Yes, we objectively have a border crisis. So does Europe.
    Ours is of course our own fault: first, we shouldn't be giving welfare to illegal immigrants. Second, we should be enforcing the laws, including in the cities, and not, e.g., allowing people to shoplift "as long as it's less than $900." These two policies alone attract the wrong sort of people.
    Third, we do need adequate border police as well. What we are facing is an invasion, and the only reason the invaders aren't armed is because they don't need to be.
    Fourth, however, legal immigration is absurdly difficult because of the bureaucracy, and that needs to be corrected, because discouraging legal immigration (and legal employment and trade, etc.) encourages illegal immigration (and employment and trade, etc.), and this creates organized crime in much the same way that alcohol prohibition did. (When you're engaging in illegal activity, you can't call the cops, so you call the mafia instead; they play the role of "cops" and "judges" between people engaging in the illegal activity -- but disputes become a matter of "might makes right" and there's no rule of law. Unfortunately the present régime seems to be supporting the organized crime rather than supporting the repeal of the Prohibition, but that is just another example of how the Left would rather use force than reason. The Left is much like a mafia, themselves.)
    There are some people who think that culture has to be enforced and that the government should enforce it. Such a belief amounts to using "culture" as a license to initiate force. It should be noted not only that we don't have the "separation of state and culture" that we should have, but that the immigrants typically don't have it either, and so they will want to enforce their culture, and currently there is no principled opposition to this, there is only "might makes right," or, our culture versus their culture. The invasion of a hostile culture is much more of a problem in Europe than in the US (because in Europe the invaders are more hostile, bringing Islam and the desire for an Islamic state), but it is a problem even in the US -- and it's easy to see again why the Left aligns with it, because they want to annihilate the good parts of Western culture, and immigrants who seek to enforce their own culture give the Left another way to do that.
    The correct solution, however, is not to "enforce our culture, or let them enforce theirs." We need a proper separation of state and culture (as part of a rights-respecting government), which means no enforcement, either public or private, of any culture at all, which means that peaceful immigrants could live here, but invaders could not hope to colonize our country by force. If we did have such a separation, the good parts of Western culture would survive, because they are aligned with reality itself and do not need enforcement. The separation, like any protection of rights, would not properly be subject to vote, but a government would still have to take care that it does not have so many immigrants that they become able to overthrow it completely (or infiltrate and subvert it). It would make sense to require that immigrants seeking citizenship support the separation of state and culture, to the extent such a requirement is even possible, but such a requirement would only make sense if we supported it ourselves.
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